Deconstructing Deconstructionism

Finishing graduate school in 1977, it’s been forty-three years now since I was a full-time college student. School came easily to me, except for math, and I could work a full-time job.which kept me grounded in the real world. Most of my professors were classical liberals as opposed to doctrinaire liberals who became so common in the 1980s and after, and who predominate on today’s campuses. Back then, nobody had ever heard of “trigger warnings” or “safe spaces.”  Contrary ideas were welcomed, not condemned. 

Then along came French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida who had outsmarted themselves. Their deconstructionist and relativist ideas strongly flooded campuses across the western world. Objective reality was scorned in favor of perceived reality. The real world was whatever you wanted it to be, they thought. Nothing was real. Everything was socially constructed, they believed. You could have your own reality. There were no absolutes and the dictatorship of relativism ruled.

None of it influenced my formation and for that I’m grateful. Would it have if I’d been born twenty years later? Maybe, but I don’t think so. As an outsider, an anachronism, I could impartially observe creeping nihilist deconstructionism and the resulting erosion of collective sanity in a world that denied objective reality. I remember singing along with the Kinks’ “Lola”: “Boys will be girls and girls will be boys; it’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world…” but I never took that seriously. I suspect the Kinks didn’t either.

Today though, the Democrat left is determined to continue pushing the idea that boys really can change into girls, and vice versa, if they simply declare it. Twenty years ago, no one would have predicted this concept would be accepted by any but a wacky few, much less such a large portion of American citizenry. Efforts to criminalize those still daring to publicly voice a contrary opinion continue nationwide. Nonetheless, there’s a chink developing in the Democrat LGBTQIA… armor: women’s sports. They have been infiltrated by men pretending to be women, and real women cannot compete.

Cheryl Radachowsky, mother of a champion high school track star, wrote in a New York Post article last October: “As a parent, it is gut-wrenching to know that no matter how hard my daughter works to achieve her goals, she will lose athletic opportunities to a pernicious gender ideology. Left unchecked, this ideology will in the long run eliminate fair play for all biological females in all sports.”

Radachowsky pointed out that men are stronger and faster than women “Even when the men’s testosterone levels matched that of ­biological women [according to a recent Swedish study], the men’s competitive advantages remained almost fully intact, with muscle size and bone density remaining virtually unchanged in some and decreasing only 5 percent in others.” Men are setting records in women’s sports. They’re taking championships and scholarships away from real women like Radachowsky’s daughter, Alanna Smith.

As a sophomore, Ms. Smith set two new records at a recent New England championship meet held in Maine and is a complainant in an ongoing Title IX investigation with the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. She and about 30,000 others would like to prevent males from competing against females. The reader may notice that I’m not calling them “trans-females” because I don’t accept that there’s any such thing.

If the so-called Equality Act passes Congress and is signed by a Democrat president, I would be subject to lawsuits by LGBTQIA… litigants for writing such things. President Trump won’t sign it, but a President Biden would. Should it ever become law, Alanna Smith and other real females athletes would have to permanently give up their dreams of an athletic scholarship. Doctors and nurses who refuse to cut off healthy breasts, penises, and testicles would be fired. The 15% of our hospitals that are Catholic and would be sued for sticking to their beliefs.

As the Heritage Foundation puts it: “[The Equality Act] would empower the government to interfere in how regular Americans think, speak, and act at home, at school, at work and at play. Any bill promoting such authoritarianism is a danger to our freedoms.” The feminist movement is divided on the Equality Act and some radical feminists have joined conservatives in opposition. Has the LGBTQIA… “community” finally pushed the envelope too far? Could be, but then who ever thought it would get half as far as it has?

The Widening Generation Gap

Solid evidence has arrived to confirm what many feared. Despite what has been visibly obvious for the past several years, many held out hope that it really wasn’t so bad, or that it was only temporary and would eventually turn around again. The results of an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll last week dispelled that hope. They were a reality slap and a very painful one at that.

According to the poll, nearly four out of five Americans aged 55+ consider patriotism a strong value, but only about half as many millennials believe that. Two out of three aged 55+ believe religion/belief in God very important, while fewer than one in three millennials do. Lastly, desire for children is way down too. Most 55+ Americans consider having children very important, but fewer than one in three millennials do. There is a little good news, however. Most of us still value hard work, community involvement, and tolerance for others.

The values my generation (I’m 68) considers essential for the continued survival of America as we know it are dying and will soon expire along with us. As conservative essayist Rod Dreher put it: “Those under 40 don’t believe in God, their country, or having children (which is to say, the future), but they do believe in fulfilling themselves. They have nothing to live for except themselves and their jobs.”

While millennials believe in hard work, what about the fruit of their toil? If their money isn’t spent raising a family, what is it for? If it’s not donated to a church, where does it go? Do millennials spend it all on themselves? And why don’t they want children? It’s a question I’ve visited in this space often over the past twenty years. Asking millennials why they eschew raising a family, they cite the high cost of children — a claim for which there is much evidence. Others point to the huge sacrifice of time and energy. Still others want to avoid pregnancy because it can cause stretch marks and sagging breasts.

Also released last week was a very insightful book by essayist Mary Eberstadt called Primal Screams, a collection of essays by several authors which attributes the rise of identity politics to many of the trends highlighted in the above-mentioned poll. During an interview with Kathryn Lopez in National Review, Eberstadt claimed that Americans are becoming more tribal as family support diminishes. They identify with others of their race, sex, and sexuality and Eberstadt claims these trends result from the sexual revolution and social upheaval of the ’60s and ’70s.

When asked what the connection is, Eberstadt said: “In part, it’s simple arithmetic. Think of all the post-revolutionary phenomena that are quotidian facts of life. Abortion, fatherlessness, divorce, single parenthood, childlessness, the shrinking family, the shrinking extended family: Every one of these developments has the effect of reducing the number of people whom we can call our own. And since we are relational creatures, the result is a great vacuum. That’s a lot of what the increasingly panicked flight to collective identities is about.”

As an undergraduate sociology major in the seventies, I recall my left-wing professors still referring to the family as “the basic unit of society.” I doubt sociology departments would countenance that assertion today. Eberstadt points to recent confusion about “gender identity” stemming from the same source. Social upheaval starting in the sixties, she said: “… whittled away at our primary attachments [and] have by now deprived a great many people of traditional answers to the question, ‘Who am I?’ These traditional answers involve our relations to others: I am a sister, mother, aunt, cousin, wife, etc. We define our identities relationally — as the popularity of 23 and Me indicates; as the well-known search for biological relations by children of anonymous sperm donors also affirms. But for a lot of us today, thanks to family vanishing, those fundamental familial building blocks of identity are harder to come by.”

They are indeed. Throughout my long teaching career I assigned students to interview someone seventy or older and ask them: Do you think it’s easier for children to grow up today compared to sixty years ago? Elders said it was easier back then because everyone had the same values. Other questions included: How many brothers and sisters did you have? How many children did the average family have when you were growing up? Did you know any couples who got divorced? To that last question, the answer would often be: “No. I didn’t know anyone who was divorced.” I wanted students to understand, first hand, that it didn’t use to be this way.

The great unraveling began in the late 20th century and continues at an accelerated pace today. Not only are we unable to answer the question “Who am I?”; we can’t even figure out if we’re male or female — or something else entirely.

Left & Right June 5, 2019

Mark Guerringue again sits in the left chair. The producer asks us both if we support President Trump's increasing tariffs on China and Mexico. I support the China tariffs but not necessarily the recent ones on Mexico. Mark questions all tariffs and thinks conservatives should too. They always did.

Mark says tariffs never worked anywhere but I point out how the US Government used tariffs almost exclusively to support itself until the Graduated income tax was enacted in the early 20th century. Mark raises history too saying that tariffs on Merino wool were a boom to sheep farmers in northern New England in the early 19th century resulting in all the stone walls through what are now woods.

I bring up historian and biographer Dave Garrow's claim that Martin Luthor King was much more of a womanizer than previously reported. He participated in orgies and witnessed a rape by a fellow minister and laughed. Mark questioned why I brought it up and I answer that it shows mainstream media's bias against stories that don't fit their left-wing narrative. Mark says it's insulting when I question the professionalism of the New York Times and others in media. We go back and forth on that for quite a while.

At about the halfway point Mark brought a print-out of my column submission to his newspaper for the week and voiced several criticisms, ultimately saying he would not run it. It pertained to the Drag Queen Story Hour due to run at the Conway Public Library later this month. I see it as a danger for drag queens who are usually homosexual men to be models for children aged 3-8 who may become confused about their own sex. Mark says I'm wrong to conflate drag queens, homosexuality, and transgenders.

I contend there's a spectrum and what is lately referred to as gender dysphoria is on it. Mark says that's just wrong and they're all separate and distinct. This discussion takes up nearly all the second half of the show and gets heated. He claims I pull people out of thin air who support my ideas.

I cite research by Lisa Littman MD of Brown University who documented a group of fourteen-year-old females that together declared they were males after showing no signs of gender dysphoria previously. Mark contends she rescinded her study but I disagreed, pointing out that the former dean of Harvard Medical School backed up the science behind Littman's study. (Later I learned that she republished the study with minor modifications but didn't change her basic claims.)

Mark suggests I'm unenlightened and need therapy because my beliefs run counter to the LGBTQ narrative. I obviously disagree and claim that whoever dares publish data or opinions contradicting that narrative is publicly vilified by the LGBTQ lobby and Littman suffered a politically-correct assault at Brown University reminiscent of fascist tactics.