Originally published December 14, 2009
Logic is lost in your cranial abattoir
As I mentioned, I’ve been listening to a lot of music. A few weeks back it was Christian Contemporary (don’t laugh at me or I’ll set you on fire, I mean it). Before that, it was a lot of Rai, and Ska. On the way down to my last Arabic tutoring session (as opposed to my class) I was listening to Public Image Limited, the music from the album/cassette/CD that was simply titled “Cassette” when I bought it back in the mid ’80s. A lot to wrestle with on this album, let me tell you. But today, and recently, one song has been speaking to me strongly. FFF, from which the brilliant quote above comes.
Those who know me well and with whom I discuss “weighty matters” on a regular basis will know I’m going through something of an ideological crisis. It’s nothing so severe as when I went from extreme Left to the conservative Right (and I was extreme Left, and extreme gender Feminist). It’s nothing so dramatic, nothing so earth shattering, and the fallout is not nearly as devastating.
When I moved Right, first being openly pro-Life, and then deciding to leave law school to stay home with our oldest child, I was deserted by my friends on the Left. With those two things, I achieved pariah status. (Yay me!) The fall out from my question of the orthodoxy of my conservative compatriots is more one of a desire to bring me back on those issues on which they think I’ve fallen into error, rather than a casting out as I experienced before. But still, the idea that some people with whom I’ve shared ideas, thoughts, and who have provided a good support system for me through Dad of Monsters deployment, Monster 4′s various medical issues think I’ve gone a bit off the rails because my mind has been opened somewhat on the issue of Muslims (not agreeing that they’re all just waiting for the radicals to call for open jihad to restore the caliphate), immigration (doesn’t work me into a lather, sorry), and a few other minor issues is bothersome. I understand of course, that some of them are genuinely worried about me, especially for my safety as I go off to Morocco and Lord knows where else, and hang out from time to time with my Arabic teacher, but I’m okay.
Of course, if some of them knew the depths of my heterodoxy (a bad word for an Orthodox Christian to use, as it implies something bordering on heresy), they’d be a little more than miffed, or amused, or worried. But still, it would be nothing close to the treatment I received at the hands of my “friends” and comrades on the Left when I questioned their orthodoxy, or rebelled against their paradigms. It was mainly those people, from my undergrad and grad years, that I think of when I listen to the song that’s been running through my mind, especially the lines quoted at the opening, and the following”
Whatever you want it to be
For you that’s what it will be
Honesty to you is arbitrary
Logic is lost in your
Cranial abattoir
Shallow
Empty inside
Sly witted
Full of snide
Bad times
Now they must end
The shutter-speed of your thinking process
Is small
Too small
Too full of pride
Linky to the song in it’s full glory. Nobody beats John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) for sneering, self-righteous, condemnation. Nobody.
