THE TRIUMPH OF THE GROTESQUE: THE CELEBRATION OF CONTRADICTION,
 PERPETUAL CONFUSION AND INSUFFERABLE INCONSISTENCY
by Pauly Fongemie, December 12, 2013
Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of the Americas



Every week brings new evidence of the decline of western Tradition in coherent thought, mores, and manners in the country. It is as if the people are actually celebrating willful contradiction without any sense of the absurd and the morbidly moronic. De fide, if not officially by open proclamation. Everything that is true and or of truth is now diminished and or sacrificed on the altar of the extreme politically correct for the sake of the favored few with the apparent acquiescence of the subdued, submitting majority all too often. A few examples from a plethora in the news these past two weeks should suffice:

A woman who was drinking alcohol while nursing her baby in a restaurant was taken into custody for endangering her infant. No argument there, although I do think this was a bit overbearing. Some women still do not realize the harm a little alcohol can do to a baby or even a child, so a simple warning ought to have been the first response. The waitress who reported the mother to the authorities after the manager refused to take any action to assist the helpless infant was summarily fired. The person trying to do the moral thing is now regarded as a societal threat, an untouchable who can be dismissed at will without any opportunity to address the situation in a normal manner. Felons get their day in court but well-meaning restaurant workers do not get so much as a hearing because the politically correct, which includes the denial of common sense and the exclusion of the actual intention of the person under interdict, is now so supreme that we are now under the tyranny of the moment, the quickened impulse to enthrone the fustian, as if to say such an impossibility deserves to be taken seriously by serious people.

Let us briefly look at this incident: a breast feeding mother imbibing alcohol is determined to pose a threat to her innocent child [rightly]. But if that baby had survived an abortion and was known to have "birth defects", that mother could enter into a conspiracy with medical personnel and let the baby die on a cold slab, unattended without even palliative care [with the blessing of one Barack Obama], in some jurisdictions. Hello!!! Are we paying attention??? Infanticide outside of the womb, okay, even if a bit sordid by modern standards, but simple abuse, cause for arrest. I do not know if the arrest was followed up with further procedures or the charges were dismissed. This is not germane to our purpose here. It is the inconsistency and the dominance of contradiction that is.

A six-year old boy was suspended from school because he kissed a classmate on the hand and on the cheek [earlier], charged with "sexual harassment". The condemnation was changed to "misconduct" after an uproar - some common sense prevails, thanks be to God. This sort of overreach diminishes the real thing and makes a mockery of the law and its original intent. Again, let us compare this case to a current television commercial being aired on the news channels. I won't name the company because that is also not pertinent; what is, is the content of the ad, which uses a young girl, not much older than the little boy just referred to. She is talking with her grandfather, the owner of the business, which is a match-making service. She is counting off the merits of the service, one of which is that it has "hot" babes, women, whatever feminine tag you prefer. The point for persons viewing the ad, supposedly men [I am presuming] is that the women are sexually appealing. "Hot" does not refer to modesty and quiet femininity for certain. A young girl of that age should not be thinking like this - if it was meant to be "cute" it certainly is not! Mature persons with decorum may have to be exposed to this sort of thing but they surely do not use such a phrase themselves. Here the girl is more than being exposed to the term, she is in command of it. Well, if the mother of the boy is supposed to keep her son disciplined - not innocently kissing girls who do not want him to - perfectly understandable - then how come this commercial features the granddaughter telling her grandfather that the women are "hot"? His disclaimer is "that he did not say that" himself. So what? he is letting her say it anyway - "having their cake and eating it, too", how clever. And where are her parents in all of this? Is not this a form of child abuse? - the deliberate sexualization of a young girl who should still be in the latency period, one in which the formation of empathy for others is developed, especially since others as objects are not the focus in that stage of development - sexualization in such a crass manner predisposes to orient the person so disrupted into focusing on others as objects, such as "hot" by definition.

We seem to be in a suspended state of perpetual confusion at best, flitting from one inconsistency or double standard to the other. The only rule is that there are no rules except the rule of the day which is imposed by the elites in charge who show every evidence of being fatuous, that is, when they are not demonstrating utter incompetence in their respective fields and contempt for the regular person who does not have the desire to live in a self-contained bubble of heathen ideology as a substitute for the simplicity of true religion, the adoration of the one True God.




And this brings us to the latest assaults on Christ and Christians. Please note there is no such affront to any other but Christians. Period! And period! Let us proceed down the parlous path of "Winter Wonderland", fraught with a lack of right reason, and or simple common sense. All of these reports have been broadcast by FOX News, to its credit, of course, and Billy O'Reilly has been in the forefront and admirably so - kudos and gratitude to him. This is why I am confounded by FOX's own hypocrisy here. During the Hanukkah period, each day, the show, THE FIVE, had a Jewish Menorah prominently displayed - the Jewish festival is a beautiful celebration of courage and hope and light itself; it was such a lovely thing for FOX to do! The Menorah is a religious symbol of the holy day [s], the pre-eminent symbol.  Now that Hanukkah is past and the national holiday of Christmas is upon us the Menorah has been removed but the pre-eminent religious symbol of Christmas, the Crèche, is absent. It has been five days or more for THE FIVE, and like the émigrés from the Nazis in the introduction of the movie, CASABLANCA, I am waiting, waiting, waiting and waiting ... so where at least is the Catholic Eric Bolling? He seems to be MIA. I mean, if fair and balanced is what FOX is all about, then should not all pre-eminent religious symbols be of equal value and worthy to be displayed? Why does one religion merit a religious symbol but another a secular one, the lit fir tree? I do not apologize for asking. I am tired of the slap in the face otherwise known as the "double standard". A POX on FOX!

Meanwhile Bill O'Reilly, who has not always been consistent in the past himself when it comes to Christmas has grandly risen to the occasion and come out swinging without mixed messages in defense of Christ and the national holiday of Christmas under attack by self-appointed censors who use the law to circumvent its intention. A sign of diabolical influence. There have been several cases that O'Reilly has looked at critically with all the right questions but not always receiving credible answers. We will look at but one which is representative of the genre.

A so-called "Festivist" appearing to want to exert his crass hatred of Christ has assembled some beer cans into a pole and demanded that he be allowed to display it along side the Nativity scene in the public square. First, it is unusual to still find a Nativity left in the public - square or round; but he presses on anyway. There is no known holiday of Festivus, except in fiction and his darkened callow mind that is fueled by malicious impiety. I am not Jewish, but I would not even think to want to desecrate the sacredness of the Menorah, whether Hanukkah or not. It is simply unseeming, not in keeping with human dignity, that dignity that Pope John Paul II taught so much about. The contempt of this Festivist is without comprehension in the normal way of looking at life.

No one should feel forced to believe in any religion, but it is one thing to dissent or not believe, it is something else against to want to mar or destroy or otherwise impinge on the rights of those who do have religious faith that is not threatening the safety of society, the property and right to life of others. The lack of self-imposed restraint out of basic respect for others who are sincere and not harming others is alarmingly dissipating exponentially.

But beyond the false claims of Festivists, is the uncontrovertible fact that Christmas is indeed, for now at least, a legal state and federal holiday. The name is Christmas, that is Christ's Mass literally, the Mass that honors His Holy Birth in Bethlehem. It is not a national day of Fir Trees, Santas and Sleighs; it is Christmas. This means by definition, Christ, the Infant Jesus in the crib of hay being adored by His Mother Mary and Foster Father Joseph as depicted by the Nativity set. Period! And period again! It is not treemass, lightmass. Sometimes Hanukkah and Christmas tide overlap, so it makes sense to then have both religious symbols displayed at one and the same time, the Menorah and Crèche although to be consistent Hanukkah is not an actual legal holiday, but I can at least understand why most people see nothing incongruous in simultaneous displays. Hanukkak is a real holy day for those Jews who still observe. But we now see the first but less and less the latter. However this may unfortunately be, it makes absolutely no sense to have a pagan symbol or a secular concoction that is mockery itself, side by side with the Nativity, because there is no authentic such "holy day" of Festivus or whatever the current obscenity is going by. Now, if the boorish louts, the iconoclasts who get their kicks by reveling in nihilism want such a public display of their pet projects, then it ought to be at some other time. As I said in an earlier column some years ago, to place a secular symbol next or in place of the Nativity at Christmas is in essence the same as demanding that homofascists have the right to march in the St. Patrick Day parade. The courts for now have ruled that this is not fair play and the homosexualists may have their own parade elsewhere and at another time, which they do every year, actually, anyway. A beer can pole signifying  the rejection of normalcy is nothing but "marching in" on the Nativity display or "parade" of the images of holy figures wherein to contemplate the Divine in peace and solitude. There can not be any such right for Festivus, without removing the meaning of things as they are so that everything results in a celebration of the absurd, the mass confusion of the masses. It is a grotesque undertaking for the sake of the grotesque itself!



The banner image is taken from "Autumn Allegory" by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 1573.

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