Marlow’s Normal

Editor’s Note: Marlow chips in from his position on a sun-drenched but temperate Summer day on the East Coast. He covers a topic we are all still dealing with- getting back to “normal” after our chaotic Pandemic year. To a degree, we are all doing that. Here at Refuge Farm, Microsoft kindly dropped me a note and told me their “MS Word” product, the one that has governed a portion of my life for some thirty years, was no longer authorized on my computer. Unless I sent them some cash. That is another manifestation of “normal.” The Editorial Board added to the excitement when we met for the mid-week Hump Day session. You know the sort of stuff that goes along with that, so I won’t tire you. The panel was ambivalent about the future, but we have decided to have tomorrow whether we like it or not.

– Vic

Author’s note: I penned this several months ago and let it sit. Spring cleaning has become summer cleaning.

-Marlow

Normal

Coastal Empire

Everything is normal once again as they want us to know that work (translation into English: spendinggiving away trillions) on the recovery is still on schedule and that nothing that has happened should substantially lessen the probability of our safe recovery or prevent partial achievement of some of the nation’s newly mandated objectives.

I have a few ideas on what went wrong.

The trouble with the old and the new tech mainstream elites, media members and their computer algo social programs all started many months and years ago when some flyover countrymen started pushing back or interrogating, if not outright challenging, them about their daily social attitudes programming. Most have forgotten it but rummaging about the archives makes it apparent that they were and are lying. They claim it was for security reasons which shouldn’t require further explanation.

They say they’ll explain later — maybe.

Regardless, they understood back then that people in general no longer wanted a more conscious life — they were tired of drudging, sleeping, and dying. Tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists, of always deferring hope till the next generation, of hearing politicians, priests and cautious reformers offer “Be patient . . . wait . . .” they wanted utopia now. Social media gave it to them, or at least a lot of cookies.

Sure, folks’d get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all. So, they chose to gorge on the treats of social media. Dessert was no longer a course; it was people’s occupation. This hoity toity troika knew and used the knowledge that every individual feels like a king so long as he has someone to look down on and they fed this audience that set of lines.

These influencers were vulgar, almost illiterate, public liars easily detected, and in their story “ideas” and narratives almost idiotic just like those of their opponents, while they celebrated their self-professed piety which was akin to that of a traveling salesman for church furniture only it was soddened with a sly cynicism v-a-v their marks. Their proffered policies, opinions, judgements, and ways forward were only the thin perforated wings of pretty windmills tilting whichever way wherever the zephyrs directed.

They knew the actual realities and facts but couldn’t tell, let alone admit, the truth when challenged. It was if they were under orders and forced to lie. In everything they reinforced the usual “truth” programming. They believed in their truthiness and its required lies. It gradually resulted in incompatible internal conflicts, and faced with this dilemma, they developed, for want of a better description, neurotic symptoms. They may have even blamed us for this programming. Following their lines of thought, I suspect that the last straw was the real possibility of listeners totally disconnecting from them over where the plague may have originated. Since they first started broadcasting, they had never known “unliked” consciousness. It must have seemed the equivalent to sudden, premature death.

Many conveyed onscreen an athletic ideal of humanity with good looks, causing viewers to breathe quickly, their infectious laughter was fetching but they were never really liked. They were supposed to be the most popular humans inside the beltway and the Big Apple; but no one really wanted to be with them. Almost all of their viewers were a bit uncomfortable, and more than a bit resentful of their preachiness.

It was not merely that they could be shouters and backslappers — there was no refuge of intimacy with them. They were always demanding as if they assumed that we knew and accepted them as the center of the universe.

They were drunks — eloquently, lovingly, and pugnaciously drunk.

Well, that’s it. It’s very speculative, but I think it is a possible explanation.

Still, despite the needless inflicted misery, they could not regain their audience’s contentment with their version of the world which, once doubted, became absurd.

Welcome to this – their banal Elmer Gantry televangelism normal.

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