Hazmat suits, on!…and that’s an order.
If you’ve been online these past few days [especially in the last thirty-six hours], you surely have heard of the controversy surrounding an article written by Kevin Williamson for National Review wherein he quotes from Lena Dunham’s latest book.
Stacy McCain has chronicled the situation in two posts, here and here, but this is the offending passage by Mr. Williamson:
Still, to dismiss Lena Dunham as an insulated and spoiled child of Manhattan’s ruling class is to misunderstand her story entirely. If there is such a thing as actually abusing a child through excessive generosity and overindulgence, then Lena Dunham’s parents are child abusers. Her father, Carroll Dunham, is a painter noted for his primitive brand of highbrow pornography, his canvases anchored by puffy neon-pink labia; her photographer mother filled the family home with nude pictures of herself, “legs spread defiantly.” Self-styled radicals from old money, they were not the sort of people inclined to enforce even the most lax of boundaries. And they were, in their daughter’s telling, enablers of some very disturbing behavior that would be considered child abuse in many jurisdictions — Lena Dunham’s sexual abuse, specifically, of her younger sister, Grace, the sort of thing that gets children taken away from non-millionaire families without Andover pedigrees and Manhattanite social connections. Dunham writes of casually masturbating while in bed next to her younger sister, of bribing her with “three pieces of candy if I could kiss her on the lips for five seconds . . . anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl I was trying.” At one point, when her sister is a toddler, Lena Dunham pries open her vagina — “my curiosity got the best of me,” she offers, as though that were an explanation. “This was within the spectrum of things I did.”
Two comments left by reader’s in Stacy’s latest post linked above are one’s that should go viral.
The perverse are only upset that they are not celebrated for their perversity. She, Dunham, just happens to have proved that point.
And she wonders why people scold and mock her.
I have a story from my childhood in which I would pretend to make my Daddy coffee and grits with my little stove and tea set. And my Dad would fold himself into the tiny chair at my play table and pretend to eat and drink out of the wee cup and plate. And at that, people say, “Dawwww…isn’t that precious?”
Dunham molests her sister, and wants the same response. And when she doesn’t get it, becomes enraged. She really ought to be institutionalized if she can’t figure out what’s wrong with what she said. In fact, while she seems to understand the difference between right and wrong, she doesn’t see why these moral standards ought to apply to her.
Any sane person sees that there is, indeed, something wrong with her mentally and that Mzzz. Dunham should seek help.
They exist within their cloistered world, where God and Nature have been relegated to the realm of the untutored and foolish. Their only concern seems to be power, and immediate sexual gratification.
So Lena Dunham molests her sister (there is no other description for the acts she describes). To her, this is Avant Garde, and ought to be praised. After all, she didn’t KILL the little sister. And, what’s the worst that could happen? Little sis grows up confused and goes Lesbian? A badge of honor!
The problem is that they forget that their worldview is, in essence, a private club. The members of that club associate primarily with one another, they have their secret signs and handshakes and whatnot. They cluster in areas to such a degree that they believe themselves to be more numerous than they actually are. Then, they present these ideas to the wider society, and are shocked and dismayed to find that, surprise, surprise, what passes as common thought in Manhattan and LA is NOT, in fact, the common wisdom of the American people.
In fact, not only are they ‘uncommon’ to the society, they might be considered ‘disgusting’ or even ‘anathema’.
Oh, they are all that. I like the all-encompassing term: Perverse.
Is it too late? Are we too jaded to summon the justified outrage needed? Have we been so beaten down by years of Leftist Indoctrination that we lack the Will to shun these kind of people from Society?
Every since artistic talent became celebrated in civilized societies [perhaps, the Greeks were the first], up until sometime in the 20th Century, the non-artists have recognized and understood that the kind of people who emerge themselves in Art are not to be permitted into full acceptance in respectable society and most certainly not to be looked-up to as cultural leaders, let alone, people worthy of having their political views treated with the legitimacy granted rightly to Normal people.
In order for them to be good or great at their craft, Artists segregate themselves from Normality, so, they believe, they can effectively probe and explore the underside of the Human Condition, which they believe makes their performances [such as acting, painting, writing, etc.] ring more true to their audiences. Whether this is an efficient approach is a discussion for another time, but this is what the vast majority of them have and continue to believe.
Being aware of this, Normal People have rightly, up until recently, relegated Artists to the fringes of Society, least this obsession with transgressive Chaos infect their Society and cause it to embrace the Perverse.
In their quest to fundamentally transform Western Society [ie: to destroy it], the Left has used Artists as tools to bring about the undermining of the foundations of The West.
Could This Be One Explanation? Why, yes…yes, indeed.
The elevation of Artists to welcomed and accepted members of Legitimate Society has been one of the main reasons why we find ourselves in The Present Crisis.
That West of ours having become a buffoon, its final tragedy could well be a joke.
—Jean Dutour
