The Ides of March: When the Madness Blooms

Like you, Refuge Farm is dealing with the Spring Ahead as best it can. There was a vigorous discussion of the moment of discontinuity, the one where a cursory look at the baleful blue light of the clock announced one thing, while the tiny solid black letters on the tablet, connected to some atomic clock somewhere, announced the precise new time. I personally did the right thing. I shook my head, mussed my hair, and strode toward a new horizon. It is an appropriate day for it: The Ides of March.

I know it is hard to keep up with something so old. The Romans, who held slaves, waged expansionist wars, worshipped ethereal beings and all sorts of things prohibited now, used this day for a lot of equally repugnant things. This is, for example, the 74th Day of their annual calendar. It was marked by several now-improbable religious observances and was regarded as a propitious day for the settlement of public and private debts. In their version of social madness, that included the assassination of the dynamic Julius Caesar. It made today a turning point in the mad history of the Roman Empire, and a day they used to tell us to beware.

In today’s amazing world, we are expected to embrace it. On this iteration of the Ides, it is already late, though still early. I don’t know how many days it takes for the new reality to set in, any more than old Julius did. If it is like the new Administration, it will be a couple months before things become clear. Or clearer, as the case may be.

We have deliberately stayed away from the more contentious aspects of the new world being imposed upon us. Since everything is now tinged with vitriol, it is tempting to wash our hands again and ignore it. But the reality of our current madness still imposes itself. A pal sent a note to the Farm about schoolkids being taught to chant to Aztec Gods. The presumable lesson of this was supposed to be respect to indigenous tradition, something crushed by the evil colonialists. The problem, of course, is that the old Aztec gods were placated only by the sacrament of blood, human in origin. One of the more spectacular demonstrations of which thirst took 80,400 victims to slake. A parade of that size would fill our country lane for a day, with a dramatic denouement at Zachery Taylor highway when they got to the end of the road.

Meaning no disrespect to our indigenous non-forbearers, that sounds like a lot of people to sacrifice. But it is considerably fewer than the number of non-citizens being permitted to amble across what used to be a border every month, including children just short of draft age. The lunacy blooming there is focused on the nature of the words “family” and “child.” I am in favor of both, of course, though in our constantly changing language they do not seem to mean what they used to. In fact, it includes a curious perversion of something that used to be important. The nuclear family. Obviously that term is an artifact, since we are opposed to all nuclear things. Back in the country many of us knew, the family was an institution of good.

Thankfully we have come to our senses. Now it is a target to be destroyed and replaced by a strong paternal state. Which is completely in keeping with the madness that surrounds us. On the one hand, “patriarchy” has become a term of castigation. On the other, newer hand, it is the benevolent empowerment of a non-gender-specific enlightened cadre of illuminated wisdom.

Which is where some of us on the Editorial Staff begin to spin into wooly miasma. A recent nominee to the Department of Justice is enamored of the Critical Race Theory, which appears to be neither critical nor valid. She asserted in sworn testimony that the theory tells us all people are racist. She did not have an answer to the perfectly logical inquiry about who, exactly, she was racist about.

Our new world demands that sort of thing as a matter of course. It even asserts more extraordinary things. The very nature of our species is under revision. You would think that matter would be mostly settled after the last hundred thousand years. But that experience has been deemed a purely social construct, and our genders are transmutable. This is where the madness become palpable. According to the new theory, “gender” is a purely social construct. “Sexes” appear resolute by immutable chromosomal determination, and hence are disposable.

I view the struggle for persons of one chromosomal determination desiring another for social equality to be a just one, and hard fought over the brief time I was happy to live. Now, in the interest of a higher revealed truth, that equality can be discarded in favor of a more just and economical term. Equity.

Many of us had been accustomed to thinking of ‘equity’ as a thing gained by regularly paying the mortgage. Now, the revealed truth is that equity is bestowed upon us, whether we like it- or work for it- or not. This is equal madness, I grant you, but madness none-the-less. Of the panoply of recent cases, I have been instructed on the curious case of a chromosomal “male” who self-identified as the other chromosomal variant. Thus, in a more just equity, and in a more equitable pronoun, ‘she’ was transferred from one chromosomally-segregated facility to another. That person was then charged with the heinous personal violation of another inmate. I have not delved into whether the process of self-identified gender can accommodate self-identification as a same-but-alternate attraction and predisposition. That part of the madness seems to lead to a certain dysphoria.

The madness surrounding us is in everything. One would think that the cis-gender founders of this nation would be celebrated for their rejection of a paternalistic and authoritarian Monarch. Instead, they must be destroyed. Not to re-establish that sovereign, of course, but…

You see, that is where I get lost. And it is where we teach our children- I think that is still a neutral term- to shout for intervention by blood-drinking Gods of Darkness. I puzzle at that, since the madness also says “gods” is an outmoded term, as is the state of non-light tinged with its absence an awkward but necessary purification.

We are using more words than even I prefer to accommodate it all. It makes me a little mad, not in an outmoded and aggressive manner, but mad with delight that all things have been overthrown, and that “dark” is now ”light,” even though “light” is an outmoded term that should be used only with caution. You will note that I have progressed sufficiently to not even attempt the good/bad inversion of our times. Since what was good is now de facto bad, we must indeed be mad. In the best possible way, of course.

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com