Mid-week Monologue
Don't read this if your sense of humour is failing
SIDE EFFECTS
In a predominantly left-brain culture like our, words are king. Without them, the entire spectacle we call ‘life’ would collapse, leaving us whimpering in confusion and reduced to hand signals. The interesting thing is that even with words, we’re left whimpering in confusion and waving while drowning. I think of it as the Rorschach Effect, in which we look at ‘reality’ and interpret it in alarmingly different ways. Leading to our current State of Hate. As the late Queen once opined, ‘recollections may vary’. I rather miss her Majesty’s talent for understatement in the current climate of extremism. We don’t seem to be able to agree on anything anymore, except that things have gone from bad to downright horrible.
Especially lately, when certain people have deliberately and with malice aforethought, changed the meaning of certain words. For example, the word vaccine used to mean a specific kind of powerful antidote that primed your immune system forever against certain pathogens and protected you from being infected by carriers. Somehow, the new, much better genetic mRNA shots, which do none of these things, ended up being called ‘vaccines’ as well. A sleight of hand manoeuvre not noticed or even reported by our beloved MM.
Clearly, the people behind the metaphorical curtain still believe that definitions of words matter, which is why they went to all that trouble of simply changing it while nobody was looking. This I call the Humpty Dumpty Effect. We decide what words mean, you shut up, forget the previous definition or else, and basta. This trend is also apparent with other words, my favourite example being ‘progressive’. That used to mean everything good and worthy and carried the entire western agenda on its back. If it wasn’t ‘progressive’, that is bringing good, uplifting, fundamental change to all and sundry, then it just wasn’t important. We in the West were progressive nations united in democratic principles, a progressive culture with progressive ideas, and we believed fervently that our sexy new technologies would deliver ‘progress’ to all. Now it just means people and policies driven by the Woke Virus, who call everything they love ‘progressive’ and everything normal people love far right extremism. If you’re not instructing your friends in your preferred pronouns, still believe that there is an innate difference between men and women, and that western culture has something to offer aside from colonialism and oppressive patriarchy, OMG, you’ll never be welcomed into the ranks of the righteous. Clearly, we need a new word. Perhaps you have some contenders…
Being actually truly progressive has been impossible for the last decade, more’s the pity. This is the Silicon Valley Effect, and only Silicon Valley Bros and the warring elites still spout that stuff. The rest of us have moved on into the land of the Demented. Where most things appear to be either crazy, nuts, unbalanced or simply mad. This is the Biden Effect, of course.
Demented. It’s a great word and, typical of the elastic English language, it means two things: crazy, insane and all its 40 synonyms, as well as Someone suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Conflated, these two meanings truly sum up where the great hegemon, America, currently lives: In an old-age home where the minders are insane.
That’s pretty much all I have to offer today. It’s hot, I’m old, and frankly, slightly worse for wear. I know I’m not the only one feeling this way. One week to go, folks. Something or someone is going to blow the lid off the asylum.
We just have to hang in there…