Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow (About our Postmodern Tundra)

The Creosote of Manifest Nonsense

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

I do not want to use Orwellian-the-world newspeak, but rather Orwellian-the-author plainspeak. But in a world of froth, babble, fustian, agitprop, bubble, and vain repetition, what I am about to say might come across like being slapped in the face with a cold, dead halibut. Some might even go so far as to say that I am guilty of “hate speech.” But I said I was going to try to stay away from the jargon of Orwell, and so wish me better luck.

Look, lords who walk the earth. You bought the tickets. You paid for them. You bundled us all onto the trains. We rattled along for many days and nights, across great chasms on trestles built out of semiotic arbitrariness, soaked in the creosote of manifest nonsense. The trains finally stopped, and we were all forced off. And my argument, such as it is, is this: “well, here we are!”


In a world where gender trumps sex, how can we avoid the conclusion that gender trumps sexism? In a world where women have historically been oppressed, how can we avoid the conclusion that the “powers that be” have finally achieved their final solution, which is, the abolition of woman. You protest, but I reply with my argument/observation, which is, “well, here we are!” They have already destroyed women’s sports (because there is no fixed category called “a woman”), and so I make my observation. There must not be any such thing as misogyny either. Here we are.

The president recently taunted Mika for going around in public bleeding after a plastic surgery, and all the people you might expect pulled their skirts away and said, “Suh! Well, I neva!” You just don’t speak that way about a woman, quoth Dianne Feinstein. To which the president might reply, “Woman? What’s that?” Did the senator from California just assign pronouns to Mika? And we all know that to assign pronouns to people is the height of wickedness, worse even than making observations about plastic surgery. We know this because all the best college campuses, the places where our very smartest people are gathered, whip themselves into a meringue if you use the wrong pronoun. It must be a big deal.

So here we are, out on the postmodern tundra. I wonder if anything grows here. I wonder also, if something grew — would we be allowed to eat it? It might be bad for us. The surgeon general might say no, no, no, no, no, no.

I offer this as a mere suggestion, something for you guys to reflect on. We can’t be where you guys took us and also not be here.

And I also offer a final observation, for now. Back when we were being bundled onto the trains, certain pious souls tried to stop you — you called them the religious right, and a lot of other names. But if you had a marked distaste for the religious right, you are going to hate the godless right.