Parts Known

I keep having days when I get up, look at the news, and find it hard to believe I’m not dreaming. My dreams are more plausible than actual events I read about.

I went to Drudge today and read about Anthony Bourdain. He is dead. He hanged himself at age 61. The article Drudge linked to didn’t say much, but other articles provide more details.

I thought Bourdain was an elitist, if a self-doubting one, and some of his political pronouncements were typical, fashionable, ill-considered New Yorker prattle, but as a food show host, he was engaging and even likeable.

He seemed like a seeker to me. I don’t think he was a closed door.

There are certain prominent leftists who, even if shrill and unreasoning, seem to have the potential to come to God (or at least the GOP) and escape the bicoastal peer pressure vortex. We have seen individuals like this change course and come out as conservatives and even Christians. Something about Bourdain made me think he was likely to wake up one day. Now that can’t happen.

I don’t know his religious beliefs. He was known for drug abuse and wild living, and he lived in a godless environment, so my best guess is that he was an atheist. He comes across as Jewish, too. Let’s see if I can find anything.

Okay. He was a Jew. His father was Catholic, and his mother was Jewish.

He has said he did not believe in a higher being. He visited the Western Wall, and a religious Jew, perhaps a yeshiva bucher, accosted him, asked him to repeat some words, and said something like, “You are now bar mitzvah’d.” Here is his response:

“I never felt so much like I’m masquerading as something I’m not. I’m instinctively hostile to any kind of devotion. Certainty is my enemy. I’m all about doubt, questioning oneself and the nature of reality constantly. When they grabbed hold of me and in a totally non-judgmental way, you know God’s happy to have you, ahh man my treachery is complete.”

Not good. Tragic.

That there was hope for Bourdain is evinced by his remarks concerning the left’s vicious, condescending, unreflective persecution of “flyover” people. Here is a quotation from his exclusive interview with Reason.com:

The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes is largely responsible for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that we’re seeing now.

I’ve spent a lot of time in gun-country, God-fearing America. There are a hell of a lot of nice people out there, who are doing what everyone else in this world is trying to do: the best they can to get by, and take care of themselves and the people they love. When we deny them their basic humanity and legitimacy of their views, however different they may be than ours, when we mock them at every turn, and treat them with contempt, we do no one any good. Nothing nauseates me more than preaching to the converted. The self-congratulatory tone of the privileged left—just repeating and repeating and repeating the outrages of the opposition—this does not win hearts and minds. It doesn’t change anyone’s opinions. It only solidifies them, and makes things worse for all of us. We should be breaking bread with each other, and finding common ground whenever possible. I fear that is not at all what we’ve done.

The truth was gnawing at him, but he made a fatal choice before it had time to work its way through.

It’s hard to imagine what could make a spirited, extremely successful, highly admired man of 61 to put a belt around his neck and die. Depression is always irrational, though. People always think there has to be a reason, but individuals with what appear to be relatively trouble-free lives kill themselves every day.

Little voices tell them things are worse than they are, and the biggest lie they tell is that things will never be any better. People listen. Without the countervailing voice of the Holy Spirit, all we have to battle the round-the-clock murmuring of demons who don’t need sleep are our own objections. A depressed person is like a sole suspect who is interrogated by tormentors working in shifts. He gets tired, and his abusers are always fresh and energetic.

Mr. Bourdain’s actions have probably assured that he will never see his God-fearing friends again.

Hell is a serious matter. No matter is more serious. It’s astounding how much suffering we are permitted to bring down on ourselves in fleeting moments of recklessness.

Famous tweeters are wishing him rest. How inappropriate. Right now, there is nothing he would not give to be back here with all of his problems.

The other story that got my attention is about the University of West Alabama. This is a government-run school. As a government-run school, it is bound by the Bill of Rights. If UWA suppresses the civil rights of its students, it can be sued, and the state and the feds can come in and force the administration to bend the knee and repent.

UWA passed a speech code for text messages and other electronic communications! Unbelievable. Do the administrators live under a rock? How can they think they can do this?

More amazing: they did this in Alabama, which is not known for its leftist ethos. It shows that education is infected–gangrenous–all over America. Educators are completely out of touch with the decent people who trust them to mold their children’s hearts and minds. If it can happen in Alabama, it can happen anywhere. How did the people of Alabama let things get this far?

Here is what the policy bans:

Examples of cyberbullying and cyber harassment include, but are not limited to, harsh text messages or emails, rumors sent by email or posted on social networking sites, and embarrassing pictures, videos, websites, or fake profiles

“Harsh text messages or emails.” The government can’t ban those. It’s way too vague. If you text people telling them their children are dead, and it’s not true, yes, that’s a crime, but angry and insulting words are protected by the First Amendment. If UWA’s unconstitutional policy were applied nationwide, most celebrities would be put on trial for their tweets about Donald Trump.

Imagine what life would be like if one American couldn’t send another American a text reading, “Leave me alone, you idiot.” Courts would be so busy prosecuting texters, they would have time for little else.

“Embarrassing pictures.” Who defines “embarrassing”? Do they mean revenge porn? I’m all for banning that. I’m for bringing back obscenity laws, generally. But people end up in all sorts of situations which are embarrassing and yet legitimate topics of public discourse. What if a student photographs another student who fumbles during a football game? Should he be expelled? What if a student records an insane instructor calling conservatives filthy names and publishes it so something can be done? That has happened more than once, and it’s important that students be encouraged to continue exposing deranged teachers.

UWA bases its Orwellian code loosely on an existing Alabama statute. Under certain circumstances the statute makes a criminal of a person who:

Directs abusive or obscene language or makes an obscene gesture towards another person.

or

Communicates with a person, anonymously or otherwise, by telephone, telegraph, mail, or any other form of written or electronic communication, in a manner likely to harass or cause alarm.

Obviously–I don’t even have to check–the state can only get away with enforcing this law in extreme situations. I can go to Alabama right now and drive around giving people, including the police, the finger, and if I am arrested, I will eventually prevail in court, and I am likely to motivate the legislature to change the law. The law is poorly drafted, overbroad, and vague, and the UWA code, which draws strength from it, is even crazier.

UWA’s Committee for Snowflake Coddling looked at a law which has been challenged many times–a law which people involved in education should consider threatening and even oppressive–thought it didn’t go far enough, and made it worse!

Everyone understands the importance of limiting genuinely harmful communications that have no legitimate purpose. I get that. But Alabama already had a law for that purpose. UWA wasn’t satisfied. They wanted to shackle people and back the shackles up with the threat of inflicting permanent damage on their lifelong earning potential.

When I was a student at Columbia University, I knew a young lady named Cathy. I’ll tell you what I was told about her. I did not witness it; it’s what I was told. One of the Columbia University Lions–a football player–had sex with Cathy in a dorm room. Unbeknownst to her, several other football players were hiding in the closet with the door ajar, enjoying every moment.

If this happened today, video of Cathy would probably be on the Internet, and it would almost certainly have been exchanged via email.

Things like that have to be banned. Everyone understands that. But we all know UWA isn’t setting its sights that high. If they were, they would have been satisfied with state law. In all likelihood, they want to go after everyone who says a girl is fat. They want to go after anyone who uses the accurate term “illegal alien,” calls Bruce Jenner a man, or says, rightly, that gay relations are sinful. Anyone who supports the Second Amendment via electronic means will do so at his peril.

Maybe I’m wrong, but what are the odds? We’re talking about a demographic that provides puppies and coloring books to students traumatized by the results of a fair and legal presidential election.

In order to be true to its mission, a modern university has to be more accepting of controversial speech than the rest of us, not less. Galileo was controversial. Darwin was controversial. If they weren’t hypocrites, educators would be using the power to censor speech very sparingly. They appear to want a tool for swatting people who disagree with them.

Since I have brought up Orwell, I’ll bring up a very prescient term he used: “doublethink.” He knew exactly what modern leftists would be like.

Doublethink means cognitive dissonance. It means believing two or more contradictory things, simultaneously. Doublethink is in play in many areas of leftism. It’s in play when universities, which sponsor all sorts of offensive speech and behavior, pass draconian speech codes which give them the leeway to censor nearly anything they want.

It’s amusing that universities sponsor debate teams while chilling speech.

If a private college with an unusual mission passed a speech code, I wouldn’t be nearly as amazed. If a hypothetical Billy Graham University rejected government money and told its students they couldn’t say “heck,” well, okay. But a secular government school? Come on.

Cognitive dissonance will increase. Those who rule us will get crazier and crazier, and their skulls will get thicker as their ability to listen and change wanes. Get ready for it. It may be hard to believe that things can get any worse, but it has happened elsewhere, and Americans are no better than Cambodians or the Burmese.

If, in the mind of a leftist not currently confined to an institution, a boy with boy parts and boy DNA can be a girl, no absurd conviction, and no cruelty it is used to justify, are impossible.

Human beings don’t believe what reason tells them to believe, even when the truth is obvious. We believe what we want to believe, and our desires are becoming less and less compatible with the safety of those who disagree with the rising left.