Normal Makes a Comeback

[endicom]

American Greatness
Mark Bauerlein
July 5, 2018

Trump supporters who work in intellectual zones have to laugh at the latest efforts to discredit the president because he is allegedly “not normal.” It is OK to suspend the ordinary rules of civility and oust Sarah Sanders from a restaurant, the critics say, because Trump’s administration is beyond the pale, off the charts, an aberrant, rogue outsider cohort that demands a stern and sweeping resistance. Apparently, they forget that liberal thinker-heroes for the past half-century have mounted a campaign against the very norms they invoke, raising violations of it into a moral necessity for an enlightened society.

For instance, in one of the most influential essays of the 1960s, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Susan Sontag praised the camp sensibility for its “love of the unnatural, of artifice and exaggeration.” The camp attitude prized things that are “off” such as “the androgyne,” which were so much more fun than that tedious “Ozzie and Harriet” stuff. The essay made Sontag famous, and she became for decades a potent voice against the norms of bourgeois America.

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[To-Whose-Benefit?]

Been a long time coming.

We sat, horrified, as DaVinci took a backseat to Warhol painting soup cans.

Pop music went from people who actually had to play their instruments to bad, anti social poetry about shooting cops and beating women over a $150 drum machine.

Movies went from morality plays to Tarantino.

And in the midst of it Mel Brooks dumped one of the biggest belly laughs I ever had on All of it, All the Bad Taste/Coarsening/Shock Value/Anything for a Buck we were all being fed non-stop.

! No longer available

[endicom]

Been a long time coming.

We sat, horrified, as DaVinci took a backseat to Warhol painting soup cans.

Pop music went from people who actually had to play their instruments to bad, anti social poetry about shooting cops and beating women over a $150 drum machine.

Movies went from morality plays to Tarantino.

And in the midst of it Mel Brooks dumped one of the biggest belly laughs I ever had on All of it, All the Bad Taste/Coarsening/Shock Value/Anything for a Buck we were all being fed non-stop.

I sensed a cultural shift with the election of JFK. We were suddenly more interested in Jackie's hat than with serious matters. We kept shifting.