Someday a Mass Understanding of the Word, Normal

I don’t think you do understand. It’s not that ‘this is not normal’ as the columnists like to write, IT IS NORMAL, by normal I mean it is the sort of personal, social, and political examples of behaviors that have been bundled together to become normalized.

The old rich man in Wyoming who died in 2021 saw something in this kid Kirk because he agreed with what the kid said to him at the time and he liked what he’d seen; they had an agreement that both of them were RIGHT and SOMETHING needed to be done. And so the younger man asked for money and got it.

The president too must have agreed; that money is a very good thing. Lying however was his specialty because he is very good at lying and in getting tremendous numbers of people to believe his lies AND who give him money so he can continue the lies and profit from them at the same time, whether it be sloganeering, pretense, or downright falsehoods.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE LIE takes many forms: the ‘stolen election’, the J6 coup, the promise of retribution to enemies; it’s one lie, one falsehood after another, until the liar becomes the person who’s truly, deeply understood the other, providing a kind of security, warmth, that the person lied to comes to believe in.

No, nothing is ever normal. We must put our heads together, and do what? Pray? Hope for a serene future? Love our enemies? Perhaps a rainbow is on the way and we can hold hands and cross this mighty river together

ABNORMAL IS NOTHING NEW, it’s the same old thing probably since time began. Get used to it, invite it in for a drink, listen to it AND insist that you’re to be listened too as well.

 The old thinking replaces the new thinking that is replaced by the old thinking--the ‘replacement theory’, now au courant, is a weird kind of political action movement, a PAC funded by rich men and women who are accustomed to getting what they want.

MAGA for instance, and the predilection for ‘strong men’, the belief in the belief system that has been systemized to create a sense of normality.

All the nonsense, the garbage stirred up over and over and over so that it looks and smells like a rose, the language of the garbage itself has a voice.

The legendary hand-wringing of the LEFT; the success of the RIGHT in being successful with its constant rhetoric, its theme is often retribution; retribution most often administered as CONTROL, as knowing what you don’t know and being sure of its knowing, though its rhetoric may be preposterous, far more unreal, far more bombastic, far more incendiary.

I ask, what do LIBERALS admire about this country? What do CONSERVATIVES admire? What do each have in common? That they both believe in FREEDOM? Perhaps. Perhaps also it is because they both believe in their belief systems. This explains why liberalism is now understood as weak, and conservatism as strength. The Liberal may not know and not knowing is uncomfortable; the Conservative knows for sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Is anything NEW in the world other than artificiality, celebrity, the front pages of newspapers and magazines, the drumbeat of our escapist fare, the junk mail on our ever-present internet, ever brought to light? The half-truths, the lies begin to seem true to our ears. Our earbuds are underwater, so are our eyes.

There are many things I shouldn’t do that I do, and many things I do that I could but don’t do, and some things I do. Chekhov’s gun comes to mind--that is, if in the first act a gun is brought into a room there must be a reason for it, such as being fired for instance in the second act; that all factors must come into play in the course of the story being told. 

*’dictator’--Trump time in the USA. It’s likely I’ll have to live through it, taking my medicine, hoping to receive a medical exemption.

**Thanks to M. Geffen column in The New York Times,, 9/12/25, “Totalitarianism Can Be Terrifying. It Can Also Be Thrilling. He Taught Us Why,” and to the late Robert Jay Lipton who Gessen acknowledges.