George Rebane
Yes, that is the advertised name of the event in public libraries, including our own, during which a man, who dresses and wears make-up to look like a woman, will gather children ages 3-8 around him and read them stories. Our 21jun19 Union reports (here) on the program and the community’s reaction. Therein we hear Supervisor Heidi Hall extoll of overwhelming public support for the program, and assert that “naturally open and curious” children in that age bracket will be “better off” when they “see that the world is a big place with a lot of variety.” And some supporters even feel that such a ‘flaunting display of sexuality’ will be of special benefit to young boys who “could use a little bit of help in growing up and not being jerks.”
Here I want to record my reaction to this most visible evidence of the recent years’ rapid transformation of what was our culture. It has been a long-enduring intention and objective of our country’s progressives to convince Americans that what we formerly considered as aberrant should now be seen as just another aspect of an accepted and embraced ‘normal’ in our society. In this case, we should not look askance, let alone discourage, a young boy traipsing around in his mother’s dress and heels. And even more so when he wishes to expose this different mode of expression on days he goes to school wanting to feel like a girl.
Before going further, we need to have some understanding of ‘normal’ as it has been normally conceived and used in language. Start with any type of critter or thing and measure/observe one of its attributes, say weight, over a large enough of its population. Since such attributes vary from specimen to specimen, we have a distribution of the measured attribute – think of a histogram that bulges in the middle. The histogram shows the relative frequency of such specimens over a (preferably numerical) range of the attribute in question.
One can easily calculate the mean or average of such a distribution (histogram), and also the distribution’s spread or dispersion in the form of its standard deviation (or sigma). With these notions in mind, a useful definition of ‘normal’ for almost all kinds of such attributes is when their values lie within one standard deviation from the mean. For the ubiquitous and familiar bell curve such an attribute range covers a little over two thirds (actually 68+%) of the population – a pretty generous and inclusive boundary that most people would accept as being normal. So, for IQs constructed so that 100 is the mean, and 10 points is one standard deviation, we can say that the IQs of normal intelligence range between 90 and 110. The nearby figure, filched from Wikipedia, illustrates all this with its central green bars.
(For the technically oriented – an alternative and, perhaps, even more generally useful measure of normal, that also encompasses highly asymmetrical distributions of attributes – e.g. exponential or Weibull – alternatively defines normal, or sometimes ‘normative’, as that minimized attribute range that includes half the described population. Both definitions serve when mono-modal symmetrical distributions define the populations.)
What happens when you widen the range of normal? Well, for openers it loses its formerly useful meaning that allowed you to discriminate between things with attributes gathered around the average and those more distant from the average. In sum, if ‘normal’ will now cover, say, the +/- two sigma range, then we will have lost the ability to easily describe an individual with an attribute near the middle or mean. And still wanting to do that, we will have to come up with a new descriptor for no other reason than to comply with imposed political correctness.
So let’s get specific about the number of men preferring drag in a population of 320M Americans. First, we have to acknowledge that the remaining non-normal gender dressers of the feminine persuasion would populate one end or tail of the gender dresser distribution (bell curve). In the US that tail would number over 50M people or about 25M men. By what I hope is now a better quantitative understanding of normal and normative with regard to human behavior, we would have to admit that not only 25M US men like to cross dress, but for such men to leak into the normal range, more than 25M of them would have to prefer wearing dresses. By any dint of the imagination, I don’t think that there are even one million drag queens in the country seeking public expression of their preferred accoutrements. In short, by the above definition, the desire to exhibit and promote men’s wearing of feminine attire is anything but normal. And to represent that as ‘normal’ to young formative minds is simply telling them a perverse lie, and bending the twig in a yet untried and unknown direction.
In this little missive I want to be clear that I don’t oppose men wearing drag or even their holding story hours for children. What I do oppose is that such happenings are suddenly to be promoted under the imprimatur of government, and all that this always implies about acceptable and/or transformative social norms (there’s that term again). Collectivist ideologues, such as our progressives, have always had in mind an idyllic future state of Man accompanied by a long list of desiderata about his economics, behavior, and beliefs in general. Their intent is always to achieve this ‘workers’ paradise’ through the directed and hastened imperatives of the collective – i.e. government of the gun. In this enterprise a few cracked eggs to make society’s omelet are to be expected.
To achieve this without having to crack too many eggs, the pre-collectivist cultures must be changed, and changed not so much as by Cal Sunstein’s “nudging”, as by diktats from on high for the common good. Such diktats are to be implemented sooner than later for the common good of the people. Cultural change through historical open market, free-wheeling evolution has never been acceptable to the collectivist central planners and controllers. To the progressive, such glacial change reeks of troglodyte mentality.
In our consideration of drag queens, I would have no problem if a private association of such men would seek to make the case for their predilections known through, say, advertised townhall meetings where the normal public is invited to learn, discuss, and debate. Depending on public acceptance of overt cross-dressing, the next phase might involve bringing in the younger generation to make their case. Again, given the success of such discourse and broader public feedback, story hours for young children could be contemplated. At this point I suspect that some wiser heads would ask that the objectives of such intended story hours be made clear ahead of time.
Today we have a New York non-profit of cross-dressers who organize themselves under ‘Drag Queens Story Hour’ (here). And they have been able to avoid the intermediate hurdles I’ve outlined to connect with local progressives, and land themselves in public facilities all over the country to begin indoctrinating the very young with their message that “you don’t really have to follow the rules that have been set in place.” According to my lights, this is an aberrant development in the government promoted education of our young which demands that our culture transforms too much and too quickly.
[24jun19 update] So how does the apparent acceptance of all such unnormal or aberrant public behaviors come about. The politically correct reason given is that drag queens are nothing but an exercise of the freedom of expression, which is sold to the people as a recently discovered and newly guaranteed right in our land. What is not revealed is that such freedoms of expression are not ubiquitous, but carefully paced within a deliberate process to destroy/compromise existing cultural norms that stand in the way of the broader political agenda. As an example, today we still will not allow a female third grade teacher to freely express herself by showing up in class wearing a topless dress. But if that’s necessary tomorrow? … stand by.
From my readings and observations, governments, especially the liberal ones, are the carefully concocted institutions that (sufficiently) like-minded people form and support to serve their collective in organizing society to perform functions not easily or suitably undertaken by individuals. Most liberally educated people understand government, because of its received/assumed powers, to be a necessary evil, and therefore to be minimized in the people’s affairs. As such, governments are always intended to support the population’s aggregate as measured by its central tendencies and normative attributes.
Illiberal governments fashioned their laws and strictures to perpetuate the ruling cliques and used the predominant religion along with convenient taboos of the dominant culture to corral/direct public behaviors so as to maintain constrained and controllable norms. Behaviors aberrant from such norms were suppressed with a broad range of sanctions. It was the advent of liberal governments which began accepting certain aberrant behaviors, but only so long as they did not violate the established (cultural and legal) sensibilities of the normative aggregate. In short, aberrant behaviors were tolerated as long as they were practiced insularly and out of the public forum.
Peace and prosperity were generally maintained as long as such a governed society’s culture was allowed to evolve without obvious interdictions by government. It is easy to see why this approach to organizing societies worked as long as the dominant culture was sufficiently cohesive. A little reflection reveals that culture is able to inculcate and control the most complex sets of human behaviors, and allow their natural expressions in new environments/situations without having to write down a single law or regulation. Behaviors (acceptable and unacceptable) are learned in the family and in the village square, and ‘enforced’ by the culture’s collective – i.e. everyone.
As I have pointed out over the years, the more diverse are the cultures of any given political jurisdiction, the thicker must be its book of laws and regulations, and the larger and more numerous its government’s enforcement bureaucracies. These rules and diktats usually formalize what is considered the considerably limited intersection of allowable behaviors from the multiple cultures, but then must needs be quickly expanded to control all the unintended collateral contingencies which then arise, basically forming a new ‘imperial’ culture that is foreign to all. This has always created a living environment that satisfies none but the ruling elites. We are witnessing such an ongoing process here in America.
It is easy to see how problems arise in a nation-state when government seeks to expand its imperial culture through fast-paced and unexpected legal extensions designed to garner the continued political support of this or that aberrant faction in its population. No such faction wants to be identified as ‘aberrant’, hence public speech expressing that is proscribed with a clear implication that the aggregate normative is thereby expanded by fiat. History shows that such expansions are supported until autocracy replaces the now thin veneer of propagandized liberalism, and then (usually for economic reasons) is soon replaced by a tyranny that now has no problem in imposing a very much constrained and ruthlessly imposed imperial culture. We have seen this happen multiple times over the last two centuries, and this evolving process of governance continues today wherever the public is (often made or kept) sufficiently ignorant to allow it.
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