The tricky mirage of the "new normal"

Why resisting this all-too-American tendency will make you stronger.

On the heels of Trump’s big speech to the Senate, how many of us have heard or read something like the following from one of his bow-chested supporters: “so what did you think of that?” or “how do you like him now?” or “pretty impressive, huh?!”  This is a mark of true desperation for his supporters and many of them are blind to it… let me explain how.

Cut the ropes and think freely

Any individual who can sincerely ask the question above is a person who suffers from the delusion-inducing meme of “the new normal.”  If you are unfamiliar with this phrase, here is how this phenomenon operates: no matter how shocking or strange something might be initially, if exposed to it long enough, we can be easily lulled into accepting it as routine.  This viral meme infects both liberals and conservatives; neither are immune to this.  Let me show you how to break out of this hypnotic mindset; you will revel in how good it feels to be self-aware.

For example… Hillary’s discourse markers were a distillation of hackneyed, regressivist thinking that, over time, metastasized into its own Frankenstein-ish persona of ultra politically-correct drivel.  This jargon warped her mind to the point where, if questioned as to whether a circle was round, she would be initially non-committal only to then ask what demographic she might be speaking to.  WTF! Right?  Her chameleon-esque word-play leads one to honestly speculate as to whether she is the intellectual equivalent of the Borg in Star Trek.  For several years now, this phenomenon has developed a life of its own, becoming our “new normal.”

Are you sufficiently self aware?

So it is with Trump; while his unorthodox “straight talk” was both shocking and refreshing precisely because our political discourse had been so empty for so long, his undisciplined, uncultivated and immature rhetoric gradually established a new low for our political discourse; and we are nowhere near the bottom yet.  


But wait!  Oddly, even among the most fervent of his supporters, there are still some who rightly cringe at some of the wild and indiscriminate statements that emerge from his puerile mind.  No matter; our nearly constant exposure to his Tweets makes it typical.  We expect it from him, or, more importantly, we don’t expect any more from him.  And viola, we gently slide into a “new normal.”

Now we come to the crux: if you were truly impressed with Trump’s speech then you have confused his ability to read from a teleprompter with who he has revealed himself to be. The “new normal” has hoodwinked you; subconsciously expecting the usual chaotic Trumpisms, you are now shocked that he can hold it together for more than 30 minutes and follow the script laid out for him.  Caught up in the wistful and wishful fantasy of wanting to believe that he is more, you grasp impetuously at the first sign that Trump can be anything other than a disordered, vindictive adolescent…  You proudly exclaim...

“You see! He is not completely unhinged!”

And therein you betray your hand and reveal what you really think.  Unfortunately, only someone who is either in denial or romantically wistful of Trump could produce a comment like this.  

Don’t be this person.  Find YOUR center and be unapologetic about it.  Go tell it on the mountain: the dualisms of “right and left,” “democrat and republican,” and “liberal and conservative” are bankrupt and need to be seen as the principal obstacle to any chance of having responsible and productive discourse.  

Abandon the sinking ship of inbred political polarization.  There is an ocean of ideas out there that don’t fit into these false categories.
Jump in... the “independent” water feels great.

Some Americans have a new fetish: ignorance… (a 2-part series)

Ignorance gone viral, the death of personal accountability, and the successive gradations of epistemic failure in our conversation.

Never before, it seems, have people worn their ignorance like a badge of honor as they do now in our social media ecosystem.  For many, it seems “cool” not to know something.  Like it was in high school, only the “sell-outs” study or research an issue.  Being willfully ignorant is today’s version of “sticking it to the man!”  It is as if knowing something about anything betrays your inner nerd.  Ignorance has taken on a persona of its own; there is a deeply narcissistic and prideful quality in its public manifestations.  

Choosing the right word is so 1990s… or should it be the 1890s?  In 2017, conversational immodesty is hip and edgy; the sexual currency of our conversations are word-gasms.  In the orgy of social media, people compete in order to see who can produce the most promiscuous, sluttish, and loose string of words possible.  Being true to the cause means that you don’t dare attempt to ‘make sense’; coherence, logic, and evidence is for losers, geeks, and goody-two-shoes.  

There can be no greater proof of our fetishism of ignorance than the rise of Donald Trump to the presidency.  While Hillary Clinton’s language was lifeless and nauseatingly predictable, perpetually cagey and utterly flavorless, Trump is the virtual porn-star of an orgy of ignorance and ADHD.  Hillary represented a style of speaking that had been in its death throes for a while.  The beautiful irony is this: while her stance was presented as a string of politically hypoallergenic talking-points, it became the anaphylactic equivalent of a speech-allergy millions of Americans had developed from overexposure to the politically-correct drivel that has been sweeping our nation.

When Trump speaks, it is like watching someone set knowledge on fire.  His language is a frenetic, mostly monosyllabic word-salad; the conceptual equivalent of a talking Frankenstein.  While Hillary’s speech symbolized a linguistic mausoleum of calcified PC-tropes, Trump’s language is an epistemological conflagration of civil discourse and droves of his supporters could not care any less.  The same orgiastic word-minions, for whom ignorance is their new family crest, are those who hear him as the voice of their anger, fear, and resentment; the very things that drove them to the polls to deliver Hillary her shocking defeat.  

Where does this go from here?  Stay tuned… part 2 coming to timeline near you soon.