THE YEAR OF LIVING INSANELY

THE YEAR OF LIVING INSANELY The day before we left Lisbon, we got up, showered, dressed, looked at each other and said simultaneously, “Maybe we should stay.” We didn’t, and that was our big mistake. When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez And it’s Eastertime too. Dylan, Bob 1965 Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues. Highway 61 Revisited . New York: Columbia Records. Having just arrived back in the United States from a civilized country; it wasn’t Eastertime. It was mid-January. We got off the bus from O’Hare, and there were no taxis. We trudged to a hotel blocks away because there was no one who would call a cab. The last person we asked said it with casual bitterness: “We don’t do that.” Sanity still hasn’t returned, and civilization, fuhggedaboudit. The beginnings of 2020 did not bode well, and it went downhill from there. The US president was a rodeo clown, and as usual, the Brits followed suit. A new flu broke out in central China. We had been thinking and talking about the return of fascism for years. 1988 George H W Bush was elected US president. He had headed the CIA, born to the Bush fortune, mainly a bureaucrat, not a politician, and rather awkward in the more typical US politician’s role of glad handing and showmanship. Poor Michael Dukakis, his opponent in the election, ran afoul of American White supremacy, that founding pillar of (North) Americana, built on genocide and slavery. Shortly after the 2020 US presidential election, some people say the election was rigged. The claims were but a replay of similar outcries about the 2016 election, but that time the rigging had been attributed to Vlad (The Impaler) Putin, or some caterers in formerly Leningrad, or some GRU officers somewhere in the Soviet Union (but no, wait; there is no Soviet Union) so it must have been some Russians somewhere. I’ve been trying to think of a US presidential election that wasn’t. I considered the 1860 election, with multiple parties, an array of candidates, and it was all about slavery. More people were barred from voting than were allowed—Blacks, Indians, slaves, women, to name the more numerous. There were some that didn’t have to be rigged, 1936 for example. But there weren’t any that could be called fair, free, and open. It just wasn’t the American way. But all that was at the end of the insane year so back to the beginning. Back in the USSR The Beatles. 1968. The White Album. Of course, the USSR was long gone, succumbing to the twin ills of traditional Russian bureaucracy and trying to operate a socialist country within a world-system of capital. Back in the States, it was depressing, but there was no imagining how bad it would become. Like boiling frogs it had been a long time coming. Most people barely noticed the rising temperatures. Of course there were those who denied there was any change at all. To them the water was as it had always been, sometimes warmer, sometimes cooler. It varied from year to year. Then within a week or so, everything was locked down. The government told people not to leave their houses. Only “essential” stores were open, and people had to hide their faces to go into them. Pretty soon, by April or at the latest May, the most cartoonish pronouncements came to be generally accepted. Schools closed. People couldn’t go to work. They had to work “remotely,” which was a techie word for at home, except of course for some workers like those in meat packing plants who just faced the usual line speed-ups. Everything slowed, except oddly in the construction industries. Buildings of all kinds were cropping up. There was plenty of that. It was strange for a plunging economy, but for the fact that the “economy” wasn’t slowing. It was only slowing for most workers who got laid off, and had to wait extra long for unemployment payments. Evictions were supposed to stop, but not the rent plus interest so that if and when people got their jobs back, they faced crushing debt. The year of living insanely, roughly March 1, 2020 to March 1, 2021 had a new set of contradictions and official lies. It’s not that there weren’t any before. It was just that these were new ones so hardly anyone was accustomed. The old ones had crept up on people. It was public relations of the old school invented by Edward Bernays and promoted by Walter Lippmann. The allies of WWII, the USSR and China, had become the enemies of the 1950s. The enemies, Japan and Germany became the allies. Everyone believed it except for a few dangerous communists who threatened to overthrow the United States and its acolytes who worshiped at the site of global capital. In those days the FBI, MI 5, the French DST, German BfV, and so on chased down the non-believers, arrested them, kidnapped them, ruined their lives, or in the later years by the FBI especially, murdered them, particularly if they were Black. It was like killing flies with a 50 mm machine gun, and about as effective. To save my typing fingers, I quote from a column 8 March, 2021: I'm going to be obnoxious and quote myself, so that I don't have to try to explain this again. Here's a passage from a recent column: "A globally-hegemonic system (e.g., global capitalism) has no external enemies, as there is no territory 'outside' the system. Its only enemies are within the system, and thus, by definition, are insurgents, also known as 'terrorists' and 'extremists.' These terms are utterly meaningless, obviously. They are purely strategic, deployed against anyone who deviates from GloboCap’s official ideology … which, in case you were wondering, is called 'normality' (or, in our case, currently, 'New Normality') ... [t]he new breed of 'terrorists' do not just hate us for our freedom ... they hate us because they hate 'reality.' They are no longer our political or ideological opponents … they are suffering from a psychiatric disorder. They no longer need to be argued with or listened to … they need to be 'treated,' 'reeducated,' and 'deprogrammed,' until they accept 'Reality.'" As we shift from Phase 1 to Phase 2 of the "New Normal," the pathologization of political dissent will continue, and intensify, both overtly and subtlely. GloboCap and the corporate media will continue to warn of imminent "attacks on democracy" by imaginary "domestic terrorists," as well as the old "non-domestic terrorists." They will also continue to warn of imminent threats posed by exotic viruses, and "variants" of exotic viruses, and permanent "conditions" caused by viruses, and other threats to our bodily fluids. Above all, they will continue to warn of the dangers of ingesting "misinformation," "conspiracy theories," and any other type of unverified, unauthorized, un-fact-checked content. They will thoroughly diagnose the sources of such content, and exhaustively explain the pathological conditions these sources will clearly be suffering from. They will explore a variety of treatments and cures, and recommend prophylactic measures against potential exposure to these sources. These multiplicitous "threats to democracy" (i.e., "terrorists," "viruses," "misinformation," "racism," "sexism," "homophobia," "transphobia," "electoral-system scepticism," "white-supremacist pancake syrup," "premeditated pronoun abuse," "oppositional-defiant-infant masklessness," "vaccine hesitancy," "religion," et cetera) will fuse into a single Goldstein-like enemy which "New Normal" children will be conditioned to reflexively hate and fear, and want to silence, and quarantine off from "normal" society, or "cure" of their "illness" with government-mandated, "safe and effective" pharmaceutical therapies. But whatever ... I wouldn't worry about that. I'm probably just getting all worked up over nothing. After all, as a lot of my ex-friends will tell you (through their multiple masks and prophylactic face shields), I'm just a paranoid "conspiracy theorist" spreading "unverified misinformation." # CJ Hopkins March 8, 2021 http://consentfactory.org/2021/03/08/the-new-normal-phase-2/ CJ and I are in complete accord. He already wrote it so I don’t have to. I offer a few glossary items. ‘Globocap’ refers to the ruling class of the world-system. ‘Phase 1’ is the March 2020 to March 2021 year of insanity. All the rest is easily accessible for intelligent readers. For all the others, it is too dark to read, as Groucho said about reading books inside of dogs or like Mister Magoo, the elderly, short-sighted cartoon character. Darkness and short-sightedness plague lucid analysis. Lack of enlightenment, tunnel vision, and similar synechdoches for conceptual failures are buttressed by long and short public relations and propaganda campaigns so that the ruling class can control and shape the state of public consciousness. Like moving from flint knapping to 3D printing, the machinery of public consciousness has spurted ahead of people’s ability to adapt. Seeing through the spiels and patter of snake oil salesman in the nineteenth century became commonplace by that century’s last few decades. In the twenty-first century people are still bamboozled by a television, a technology of the mid-twentieth century. Who can blame them? Capitalism has always worked behind the backs of workers. Accelerated technological developments always leave workers behind, but now the machines do not just churn out automobiles and jet fighters, the create a new shared consciousness controlled by the euphemistically named Big Tech for a sector of the ruling class and its executive apparatuses. As Marx explained and Guy Debord said so concisely, commodities are congealed social relations. Social relations are institutionalized social interactions. Changing the social order then, entails changing the way people interact with each other. The most dramatic changes occurred in the year of living insanely. What Changed? People became agoraphobic. ‘Agoraphobia’ is an interesting word. I quote from the Mayo Clinic’s diagnostic page. “People with agoraphobia often have a hard time feeling safe in any public place, especially where crowds gather. You may feel that you need a companion, such as a relative or friend, to go with you to public places. The fear can be so overwhelming that you may feel unable to leave your home” https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/agoraphobia/symptoms-causes/syc-20355987. Even more interesting is an etymological dissection. The Agora was the public place in Athens where people trafficked in commodities, opinions, discourses, and invented the Western notion of rhetoric. Of course there was the plague of Athens (430 BCE). It was the second year of the Peloponnesian War, and Thucydides described the effects in social and moral terms: “...the catastrophe was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would happen next to them, became indifferent to every rule of religion or law.” History of the Peloponnesian War 2:52. In contrast in the twenty-first century in the Western world based largely on ancient Athens, people did just the opposite. They became excessively obedient, even authoritarian. Culture change can appear suddenly as when a perceived crisis occurs. At such times, people are conscious of the changes as they have recent memories of how things were different just a short time before. After a while, though, they adapt, and their sharp awareness fades as the new becomes the normal, as in the “new normal” of the year of living insanely. Most commonly, however, culture change is gradual and people sort of wake up one day to find that, for example, they can travel thousands of miles in only a few hours, or they speak to one another across continents. Oldsters can be counted on to recount how the world has changed, and from the twentieth century on, people generally recognized progress, unlike in the ancient world when the belief tended toward the opposite. This contrast between the ancient and the modern, if thoughtfully analyzed, might begin to raise suspicions of propaganda promoted by the engineers of commerce. All of which brings to mind the even broader doubts about just how much what we think and believe comes not only from someone else, but that the someone else has motives deriving from profit seeking and or political power. Nowadays such skeptical inclinations are derided as “conspiracy theories.” Safer to maintain that really little or nothing has changed, everything is as it had been, or if there has been change it is all for the better. It used to be called Panglossian or maybe the Goldilocks Doctrine. Everything is just right. It all depends on gradualism. Gore Vidal called the center of the global empire the United States of Amnesia. There was even a movie about it, Gore Vidal: The Unite States of Amnesia (2013) directed by Nicholas D. Wrathall distributed by Tribeca, to add verisimilitude to him and his scathing insights. Vidal is safely dead now, and those few who follow in his footsteps, albeit without his eloquence, can only be heard through that increasingly controlled and contrived medium of the internet, an invention of the US military-intelligence apparatus. Pretty soon we won’t have to worry about disturbances like memories of how things used to be different when people could travel where they wanted, talk with whom they wanted, go to movies, concerts, ball games, and so on without anonymizing masks. It will all be smoothed out, just one gelatinous gray goo of everyday life. But in that year of living insanely, we had not yet achieved the nirvana provided by the Great Reset. There were still people who could remember how things were when things worked, and if they didn’t you could call for repairs. King of Hearts, the movie is a cult classic. Made in France, released by Les Production Artistes Associés December 21, 1966 (United Artists in the USA), directed by Philippe de Broca, and starring Alan Bates as Charles Plumpnick, a kilt-wearing French-born Scottish soldier of the Signal Corps, who is sent by his commanding officer to disarm a bomb placed in the town square by the retreating Germans. Set at the end of WWI, the dark comedy depicts a small French town taken over by escaped inmates of an insane asylum. They decide Plumpnick (Bates) is their new king, who has no clue, but for different reasons than those US Presidents, who served after the last US president who did understand and tried to change it, got his head blown off. In the latter 1960s the movie was an allegory for the insanity of the Vietnam War, among other things. It was popular among a spectrum of skeptics. Today, it’s no longer an allegory. Over a half-century later, skeptics have been returned to the asylum, called various epithets, most popularly ‘conspiracy theorists’, an invented term by Allen Dulles, who promoted it as part of his cover-up of the John Kennedy assassination of 1963. By the year 2020 the inmates had taken over the asylum, the town, and globally. There’s Good News and Bad News: Nothing Works Well, maybe not nothing, but less and less. The good news is that revolutions happen when things stop working. The bad news is more complicated. In the second decade pf the twenty-first century things don’t work very well. It’s most noticeable in communication and transportation. Let’s start with communication. By the eighteenth century advanced countries had postal services. Ancient empires had them, but they were not for public use. In the eighteenth century the educated classes wrote letters, and newspapers began to publish for public readings. Literacy began to filter downwards in national class structures, and the US Constitution even had a provision for a national postal service. By the start of the insane year, the US Postmaster General decided to do away with it so that cronies could take over the dissemination of writing on paper. Consequently what used to take three or at most four days to get a letter sent across the continent, took longer and longer, not infrequently a week. An interesting aspect of letter writing is that when people did it, it was more than a one channel form of communication. All kinds of paralinguistic information traveled with the letter. There was the handwriting (or type writing) itself, the paper, the envelope, scented or not, colored, with imprinted marks and designs, etc. In other words, personal letters had personality. In the twentieth century, while letter writing still prevailed, a new way to communicate seeped across the industrialized world: telephones. I’ll skip over telegrams, although they have an interesting history too. Suddenly, people could speak with friends, family, businesses, and others across town, and eventually across continents. By mid century cables carried telephone traffic under the ocean. Like letter writing, telephonic communication is more multi-channel than first appearances suggest. The old Bakelite phones made by Western Electric, in addition to serving as handy lethal weapons, could be used to convey a range of voice intonations and modulations. Background noises were audible. Telephones were generally available using wires on poles or underground. There were even tiny houses (famously red in Britain) where people could go to talk to each other by phone. After 1962 there was a red phone in the Kremlin and the White House where the Soviet premier and the US president could chat about recipes and how to avert a civilization destroying nuclear war. Skipping a few decades to the 2020s, try finding a public telephone. Oh, there are still a few, but they are on their way to extinction. An interesting advantage to the disappearance of public phones is that telephonic privacy has disappeared. Back in the twentieth century, cops had to get a warrant from a court, and then physically connect with a telephone wire to listen in. No more. Now they can just tune in to “wireless” phone conversations. Even better, wireless phones depend on point-to-point radio technology, which requires broadcasting and receiving towers sprinkled across the landscape, which has provided countless hours of employment for telephone technicians and dumped truckloads of profits to tower building companies. In the past, occasionally telephone lines would break or come down, but that was unusual. In 2020, wireless phone connections are uncertain, they cost small fortunes to buy, and people have to “subscribe” to services, which costs up to hundreds of dollars a month for reliable (sometimes) service. Wireless phones have obviated memory and scheduling rendezvous to add to their contribution to the cellularization of social life and intellect. In the United Sates all this was made possible in 1996 with the Telecommunications Act of that year that gave away public airspace to the telecom industry—i.e., privatization of air. Phone booths are gone, landline telephones are fast disappearing, email supplanted letters decades ago, and more recently increasing numbers of people use (anti) social media like Facebook and Twitter to communicate. Both are heavily surveilled and censored. In the West, social media and other protuberances of Big Telecom are so bound together with the national security state apparatuses of the global empire that they might as well be special departments of the global military-intelligence corps. So-called Mainstream Media, now owned by five or six (depending on how they’re counted) companies, are about as independent as sheep dogs, and serve a similar role. The kinds of communication using technology, whether pen and paper or along wires, have been forced into obsolescence, and will soon largely disappear entirely. In person, face-to-face communication became restricted with The Plague. Broadcast communication, mainly radio and television, but also movies, was always censored and molded, which is why subversives used other means. By the 2020s those means are hardly available. The story of transportation breakdown differs from that of communication. In the West and its dependencies—China is a dramatic exception—public transportation has been allowed to deteriorate as part of the neoliberal policies of austerity. Decaying infrastructure accompanies less service. Private transportation, mainly private automobiles, suffers from a decline in infrastructure, roads, bridges, traffic control, etc., similar to public transport infrastructure. Transportation has become less reliable and less safe. Air transport was turning into a horror before The Plague almost shut it down completely. Even maritime transport in the 2020s suffers from extension beyond current technology and infrastructure, as illustrated by the recent blockage of the Suez Canal by a ship that was too big. Similar events are inevitable. The strategy is self evident. First steal from the people. Take whatever is worth selling to somebody else. When the market wanes, sell what you’ve stolen back to the people you stole it from. It’s the old colonialism in new bottles. Restricting communication to only what the ruling class controls not only improves profits, it is a way to repress and mold the populace to ensure ruling class hegemony and forestall uprisings and revolts. Tell people what they can say, where they can go and how, and the twenty-first century has the most totalitarian society in history. The best part, for the ruling class, is that by the time of the year of living insanely nobody, or almost nobody, noticed, or if they did, they didn’t care. In such conditions revolution is impossible no matter how much things stop working. Access to any sort of public in the 2020s goes through Facebook (now at 2.3 billion users out of a world population of almost 8 billion). Other social media function similarly. Censorship on all of them is rampant with each employing armies of censors to review postings, removing some, and people who try any more than interpersonal communication, have access suspended, and sometimes banned entirely. It’s not just communication and transportation, although they are central to civic life. It is all manner of goods and services. Anyone who uses computer programs (these days renamed ‘apps’) notices that over the past 20 years or so they have become increasingly worse. They’re too big. Someone once referred to Microsoft programs from operating systems To Office™ as ‘fat wear.’ It takes up way too much computing capacity. The last good Microsoft operating system was XP. It expired long ago, although the US Navy still uses it. The same goes for most of the other soft ware products. Making things more complicated, bigger, and clumsier used to be called ‘planned obsolescence.’ It is a business strategy. There are exceptions to the devolution of goods and services. Surgery has gotten safer and more effective, but medicine uses other strategies to make profits. In her sweeping history of social movements and political struggles, A People’s History of Europe from World War I to Today, Raquel Varela observes that “In the West, people are earning less and consuming products of inferior quality (in clothing, food and other products for mass consumption to guarantee the reproduction of the workforce). Cheaper consumer goods allowed for wage restraint or decline.” Raquel Varela, A People’s History of Europe from World War I to Today. (London: Pluto Press, 2021), 179 The result has been the crapification of everyday life. Psychotic Break At mid-century (twentieth), it was called nervous breakdown, as if people just became too nervous to carry on. Depending on one’s class, a person got either straight jacketed or a sedative and prescribed “rest.” Then there were the raving ones. Today they are visible on the streets of many cities. They talk, or sometimes yell, at invisible people. One time on a city bus in Berkeley, California a women was flagellating herself with a belt and yelling at the demons to leave her. Such people were generally thought to be insane. Another fellow I see mostly on Milwaukee city buses talks to invisibles incessantly. His conversations are measured, doubtless interesting to him. I say “hello” to him, and he always acknowledges me before resuming his conversation. I have a few times talked with him about current matters, such as not trusting police. He was coherent and more reasonable than most people I know. The woman in Berkeley seems distraught, the man in Milwaukee lives with equanimity. What is the measure of insanity? One measure is reality. Who decides? At the end of 2019 Chinese medical personnel said they thought they had identified a new flu virus soon to be dubbed COVID-19. They were unsure. It was hard to isolate, and it still is. If it exists, it is a coronavirus. There are many. Some cause flu—i.e., respiratory diseases. By March of the next year (2021) officials panicked, like the woman who flagellated herself. They did the same. They advised political leaders to “lock down” entire countries. They told people not to leave their homes under penalty of law. Whole societies shut down, like the waxy flexibility of catatonia. They were terrified. For the insane, the medical “experts” assume that their fears are unfounded. Here is the problem. People die from flu. They always have. Suddenly millions were dying world-wide from the new flu (but not the old, because the category had disappeared from the “causes of death”) Almost all were not young, over 80, and even those were otherwise sick. It was time to self-punish. After a little over 11 thousand deaths in the world of almost 8 billion, the World Health Organization (WHO) decided the new flu was a “pandemic.” A civil servant in the US, a former physician who latterly became a shill for global Big Pharma, Anthony Fauci, joined with the Ethiopian fellow employee to promote a global health danger that can only be averted by a Big Pharma produced vaccine. These social psychiatrists are not insane. They are good employees. They do their jobs. Look at what they say that is not profit driven, especially face masks and lockdowns. A lot of people in eastern Asia wore face masks, because the air was so polluted with particulate matter generated by factories and too many automobiles. They did nothing for ozone and carbon dioxide, but at least the masks caught the dirt. They don’t catch viruses. “Lockdowns” are a giveaway. They were not quarantines. Quarantines were what authorities imposed on sick people. Lockdowns are for prisoners. Crazy people used to be locked in “insane asylums.” There they could be tortured in various interesting ways from water torture to lobotomies, and electrical torture which is also used for interrogations by counter-revolutionary militaries the world over. The last they euphemistically call ‘shock therapy’. In the early 1950s Big Pharma came to the rescue. The developed and deployed a new kind of tranquilizer. Originally known as neuroleptics, but more recently as antipsychotics. They aren’t. They don’t make people less crazy or more sane, but they do make them calm. The calmness is to make them tractable—i.e., they do what they are told without causing a fuss. After jolting them with the juice, they can be let out of the asylum. They don’t cause trouble. They might still hear “voices,” but their voices are less threatening, because of course, they are tranqued out. They still have a different reality, but, with a sigh of relief, it doesn’t disturb ours. In the year of living insanely, people still had neurotic symptoms, especially obsessions and compulsions. They washed compulsively. They avoided each other. They thought about getting sick and dying, they forbad their kids from going to school and kept them home where they were subject to parental surveillance. Of course Big Pharma rode to the rescue with Vaccines. ‘Vaccine’ is an interesting word. Originally it referred to cowpox, hence the ‘vac’ part in recognition of Edward Jenner who discovered that people infected with cowpox, which did not make them sick, were immune from smallpox, which did. It worked famously. Two centuries later smallpox, hitherto a major killer, was eradicated, as it only lived in humans, and almost everyone had been immunized. This effect was latterly and in different contexts called “draining the swamp.” In other words, remove the ecosystem and eradicate the threat. In 2021, however, such easy solutions as had been applied to smallpox eluded Big Pharma, partly because smallpox is caused by a DNA virus, which evolves slowly, not a messenger RNA virus, which evolves rapidly—months at most. To 2021, there has never been a flu vaccine more than 40 percent effective because of RNA’s rapid changes. Nonetheless and low and behold, the vaccines against COVID were miraculously over 90 percent effective, if they were produced by Pfizer and Moderna, two US Big (really Big) Pharma companies. They don’t make vaccines. They make genetic manipulation treatment for a flu that is not susceptible to inoculation, but does result in sudden death for hundreds of people per million. The COVID psychosis interrupts normal cognitive processes. Shortly after global health so-called authorities sounded alarms about the invented pandemic, they also said that transmission via surfaces was almost nil and the only thing mask wearing did was make people feel better. The surface transmission message was repeated a year later. Nonetheless, people, stores, and various retail businesses continued assiduously to “sterilize” (actually it takes a lot more than an alcohol wipe to sterilize) surfaces. People continue to walk around outside wearing masks, as well as alone in the automobiles. In the United States alone over 4 thousand deaths are attributed to COVID vaccines, enough to be labeled a vaccine pandemic by WHO standards. Meanwhile, civilization destroying weapons proliferate. The US-NATO axis continues to antagonize China and Russia, surrounding those countries with military forces and all the while attacking them with the biggest propaganda machines in the world. In a third dimension, climate change has been turned into a profitable enterprise to the neglect of hundreds of millions of people whose homes will be swallowed by rising oceans and whose access to potable water becomes ever more tenuous. The psychotic break rejects anything remotely resembling reality in order to serve the global ruling class. In the midst of this, people pursue pointless protections against catching the flu. Explanations abound for these abnormal psychological conditions. I prefer those of depth psychology, also known as psychoanalysis as invented by Sigmund Freud about a century or a little more in the past. Many anti-Freudians (I hate to add the following, but I’ve found that as soon as I mention his name, readers close up) torture his simple and straightforward meanings to turn his ideas into something esoteric. They are not. Freud discovered at the turn of the twentieth century that people lose touch with reality every day. They go to sleep and while asleep they dream. Dreams are a normal psychosis. Dreams are engendered by out biological selves, and the dream stories are then concocted by our psychological selves. When awake, our dreams might seem fantastical, but Sigmund realized they were meaning filled, because humans are the meaning-producing animals. The transition point (kind of like an auto’s transmission) between the physical and psychological, he called ‘drives.’ Our dreams are “driven.” To become psychotic is to lose the distinction between wakefulness and sleep, between the stories we make up out of aggressions, desires, and fears and the real, material world. There are many reasons for this failure to distinguish between being awake and being asleep, but the one preeminent here and now is gas lighting. George Cukor (dir.) 1944. Gaslight (Hollywood: MGM), a movie based on the play Gas Light by Patrick Hamilton with Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, And Joseph Cotton in which a husband tries to drive his wife insane for his own benefit. A few people who own and control most of the world want the rest of us to be crazy. Unlike the movie, however, there is no rescuer. The insane year was planned and carried out deliberately. I just don’t believe in accidents or magic. Things happen for causes, and people cause them. I do believe in conspiracies. Conspiracies are what two or more people plan and then carry put their plans. If this is a “conspiracy theory,” I merely ask who else caused the occurrences. Maybe it was errant gods, fairies, demons, and every manner of imaginary beings. I think conspiracies are a lot more sensible and believable. The pressing question is who conspires? To find the answer, look around. I take but one example. A global phenomenon has dragged itself up from the swamp, and in the Anglophone empire, it is called cancel culture. Like pornography, it is hard to describe and even harder to define, but we can know it when we see it. It started with #metooism. Middle-aged women said they had been subjected to unwanted sexual advances typically more than 20 years before, perpetrated by rich and famous men. There were a few exceptions in which men asserted the same. Instantly, the rich and famous suffered downfalls. In no cases did the accusers present any evidence for their claims, but the public’s propensity to schadenfreud embraced the victims. Sticking to the sexual (always a big seller), another example is transgenderism. Please note the italicized ‘ism’ which denotes the public relations aspect. Transgenderism almost always involves men claiming to be women, which in and of itself has fascinating implications. It should not be confused with transvestitism, which has a long history, and involves men and women both—i.e., it is not a one way street from male to female. Nor is it about hermaphrodtism, or intersex phenomenon, which is a biophysical fact in which people have primary characteristics of both sexes—i.e., penises and vaginas. Transgenderism is about gaslighting. It is about people who claim to be what they are physically and objectively not, and use social pressure to make other people believe it. Take Bruce Jenner, an Olympic decathlon winner in 1972 who parlayed that feat into lucrative ads plugging Wheaties breakfast cereal—a American success story. Get this from the Wikipedia article. “Assigned male at birth, Caitlyn Jenner publicly came out as a trans woman in April 2015.” Note the “assigned,” as if physical materiality had no bearing. Note the “came out,” a term previous used to denote people who announced they had different sexual desires than expected based on their material, objective sex. Finally note the “trans woman” as if a trans woman was either a.) not a real woman (most likely) or b.) one whose claim is irrefutable because . . . well . . . because they say so. Readers (I hope it’s plural) might be excused if they wonder how the hell can he get away with it and why? That is what is known in Talmud reading circles as a good question—the highest praise. Bruce decided to change his name to Caitlin, and made a public announcement that he was now a she by his fiat in June 2015. According to cancel culture, anyone who asks why Bruce thinks he can get away with this is an anathema. According to cancel culture anyone who asks whether Bruce has cut off his penis is an anathema. Anyone who asks whether Bruce is now attracted to the opposite (an adjective not allowed by cancel culture) sex is an anathema. According to cancel culture, “trans” people should be applauded, never questioned, because to question is abhorrent. Never ask about material reality, because to do so starts the bell tolling for thee (cf. John Donne). How did people start falling for such rubbish, the inquisitive reader might ask. A little social psychology might come in handy. First, people form their ideas and opinions according to those they are with. Second, people form their ideas and opinions according to those they admire. Third, people form their ideas and opinions against those they despise. Fourth, people form their opinions according to those they perceive are held in high esteem generally. There may be a few other social-psychological findings, but these should suffice. In other words, people go along with the crowd, their own crowd, against those not in their crowd, and with those they look up to. Of course, the foregoing are all big surprises to anyone who has lived more than four or five years, but then that’s what social-psychology is for. If you consider yourself someone who despises Donald J Trump—and all right thinking people you hang with, do—then you’ll be against anything the Trumpists support and for anything your friends support. I live in a near suburb of a city composed of a high level of professionals, middle managers, and other middle income, educated people. They mostly hated The Donald. They supported Black Lives Matter. They are for gender equality, tolerant of alternative lifestyles, etc. They are transgenderists because it’s cool, and it would be uncool to be against them. It is predictable, scientifically (sort of) proven, and everybody knows it. They denigrate those who don’t go for transgenderism, thinking them uncouth, uncool, and akin to Trumpists. But you, the reader, already knew that. People need to be in with the in crowd. To add some flavor to the broth, here are some excerpts from an article published by RT, that notorious purveyor of bad (Russian) information. Richard Dawkins stripped of ‘humanist of the year’ award after inviting discussion on transgender issues in tweet 20 Apr, 2021 05:26 https://www.rt.com/usa/521540-dawkins-stripped-humanist-award/ The American Humanist Association has withdrawn its top honor from evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins over a tweet calling for dialogue on transgender issues, accusing the atheist speaker of “demeaning marginalized groups.” The organization said Dawkins had recently implied that “the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient,” noting he would be stripped of an award granted to him some 25 years ago. It declined to specify the offending comment. “Regrettably, Richard Dawkins has over the past several years accumulated a history of making statements that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalized groups, an approach antithetical to humanist values,” the AHA said on Monday. Consequently, the AHA Board has concluded that Richard Dawkins is no longer deserving of being honored by the AHA, and has voted to withdraw, effective immediately, the 1996 Humanist of the Year award. While the Humanist Association gave few other details and offered no examples of Dawkins’ “accumulated history” of inflammatory remarks, an April 10 tweet from the biologist drawing comparisons between transgenderism and the self-described “trans-black” activist Rachel Dolezal is a likely culprit.  “In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as,” Dawkins wrote, calling on his followers to “discuss” the apparent contradiction. So, Richard Dawkins has been canceled as part of cancel culture. There is no reality in a regime of gas lighting. Note too that what the anticommunist George Orwell depicted in his notorious novel, which was then taken up by Western propagandists as “air brushing history,” has now come full circle when a self proclaimed rational organization strips an award post hoc, indeed, 25 years post hoc. There is only cancel culture. There Must Be Some Way Out of Here, Said the Joker to the Thief Dylan, Bob. 1967. All Along the Watch Tower, in John Wesley Harding. New York: Columbia Records. Probably not is the most likely answer. Inmates who temporarily escape are eventually brought back, or they die. Death, of course, is always an escape, but not many want to take that route. The alternative is the struggle. Beware, though. The struggle is unrewarding and unlikely of triumph. The year of living insanely has taught us that. There is only one path: “There is just one thing I think you ought to know before you take on this job. And don’t forget it. If you do well, you’ll get no thanks and if you get into trouble you’ll get no help. Does that suit you? “Perfectly. Then I’ll wish you good-afternoon.” Maugham, W. Somerset. 1947 (1927). Aschenden or the British Agent. New York: The World Publishing Co. with Doubleday and Company, p.4 Being sane in an insane world will get you stoned (with reference to another Bob Dylan song Dylan, Bob. 1966. Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 in Blonde on Blonde. New York: Columbia Records.). You won’t get stoned as in high or drunk. You’ll get stoned in the Biblical way. People will throw stones at you. This is an extremely unpleasant experience akin to being sane in an insane world. There are a few people who try to speak rationally. C J Hopkins quoted above is one of them. I don’t know him personally, only through his writings that he publishes online. There are a few others in the same category. Out of almost eight billion people, three-fourths of whom have internet access, I know of no more than a dozen saying sane things. Two people I do know personally who say some sane things. One is my life partner, but she doesn’t count, because we wouldn’t be together otherwise. The other person is in the process of being anathematized by friends because of it. I presume the stoning will come later for her. Being sane in an insane world has few rewards. If successful in talking sense into people, there will be no thanks. In the more likely possibility of getting into trouble, there’ll be no help. The absurdists had it right. Albert Camus and Eugène Ionesco come to mind as exemplars. The former wrote a nice little treatise on the idea: “The Myth of Sisyphus.” Camus, Albert. 1942 (1955). The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage Books. In the preface, Camus writes “that even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to proceed beyond nihilism. . . . Although ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ poses mortal problems, it sums itself up for me as a lucid invitation to live and to create, in the midst of the desert.’” Ibid. page v. Being sane puts one in the desert. That is the lesson of the year of living inanely. 14