Introduction
So my latest novel is now out and about. It is entitled Ride, Sally, Ride. And what I would like to do here, besides encouraging you to get five or six of them, is actually to embrace one of the criticisms that some have made about the book thus far. I am, of course, going to embrace the criticism in such a fashion as to include a clear explanation of why it isn’t my fault. Goes without saying.
If I have time, I will also address the criticisms leveled by certain discernment voices out there on the web that have been conducting their ongoing great experiments in telepathy, having analyzed the book to Sunday and back without having read it. They apparently had all the damning information they needed, having seen the cover, upon which it was clearly indicated that I was the one who wrote it.
El Problemo
I thought to begin this section with a little cultural and linguistic appropriation, if that’s still legal, which it probably isn’t. El problemo is not my native tongue, and I went and used it anyway, and I have little doubt that I mangled it somehow. While there were no sombreros or umbrella drinks involved, none of that matters anyway because the doctrine of hegemonic realism dictates my incipient white supremacy regardless. My argument that Spain is white and European still fails to meet the purity tests developed in the struggle sessions of today. I am not sure how I got off on this tangent, but these things happen.
The central problem with my book that needs to be addressed is the result of my plain neglect of Muggeridge’s Law concerning satire. This law sets forth the idea that satirizing political correctness is impossible because genuine political correctness is every bit as ridiculous as any proposed send up of it. How do you sketch a caricature of a caricature? How can you make the nose any longer?
This law apparently grew out of a stint where Muggeridge served as the editor of the British humor magazine, Punch. Sorry, humour magazine. One time Khrushchev, the Soviet big pot of the day, visited Britain, and Muggeridge came up with a proposed list of places that Khrushchev could visit, those places being the stupidest that Muggeridge could think of for a Soviet poobah to visit. Difficulties then arose when over half of places on Muggeridge’s list were also on Khrushchev’s actual itinerary. Hence Muggeridge’s Law.
So Here It Is
My book is set a few decades in the future. I did this to give the reductio I was planning to write enough time to ripen on the branch. I thought the iniquity of the Amorites was not yet full. In the story, a young man named Ace crushes a neighbor’s sex doll in a compacter at the recycling plant where he works. This Phinehas moment happens in the first chapter, and the rest of the book addresses what happens when a local woke prosecutor decides to bring murder charges against him, instead of a mere destruction of property charge, and this is done because the owner of the sex doll identified the doll as his wife. In our new order of things personal identification is the ground of all reality, and I examine what happens when this collides with reality. That’s the set up.
The apt criticism of the book boils down to this: what do you mean, a couple of decades in the future? A couple of months is more like it.
Since the manuscript was turned in, a period of time best counted in weeks, what has happened? It was as though somebody gave a signal, and all the weird stuff came out.
As in, there is one gent who has decided to marry his sex doll. Second, then there is a Japanese artist, and yes, we are using the term artist more loosely now, who offers, for a fee, to conduct a funeral for your sex doll, or to dress you up as a battered murder victim, or to deck you out as a sex doll. And then, third, there is a new movie called Dummy, produced by Quibi, where a woman finds out that her boyfriend has a sex doll, and the twist is that the doll comes to life and starts talking to her. Then the two take a road trip together. “I got news for you, babe — we’re all sex dolls until we topple the patriarchy.”
Allow me to make this observation , offered in all patience and humility — the kind of humility for which I am justly famous, The story here is not the existence of such sad people. We have always had them. There have always been dark corners, and there have always been broken perverts living in them. The story for us is how these things are being reported. You, my friend, are being prepped, managed, handled, steered, and groomed. The problem is not that the asylum has inmates in it; the asylum has always have inmates in it. Dog bites man. The thing you must come to grips with is the more striking and salient fact that the inmates are running the asylum.
A Similar Move
The same play is being run on us with regard to the sexualization of children. For the first exhibit there, you can go back up to the previous link and watch the trailer for the movie Dummy. In that trailer, the sex doll makes a comment indicating that she has the hots for some young teen-aged boy. The objection comes, “He’s like, fourteen.” The sex doll replies so? — “I’m seven.” For the second exhibit, and you knew this one was coming, Netflix has done a 10 billion dollar face plant over their willingness to run with Cuties. In a retroactive move to cover their butts, unlike what they did for the eleven-year-olds who were acting in their movie, they have said that they were actually protesting the sexual exploitation of children. In order to understand this, you have to factor in the notion that protest doesn’t mean what it used to. In 2020, you can protest the mistreatment of black people by inciting white commies to burn down their neighborhoods. And you protest the sexualization of children by having little girls twerk for the camera. You prude. You Puritan. Don’t you understand art? And the third exhibit is the fact that Gov. Newsom, he being the one who, if California were a bucket, knocked the bottom out of it, covered himself with additional glory just a few days ago. He actually signed a bill that prevents LGBTQ+ types from being automatically registered as sex offenders when they have sex with a minor — whether that sex is oral, anal, or vaginal — provided the victim is at least 14-years-old and provided that the perpetrator is no more than 10 years older than the victim. Now please note. This is not legalization of such activity. It just means that a judge now has the discretion to prevent the offender from being registered as a sex offender. It is not legalization of adult/child sex, you moron. It is simply preparation for the legalization of such things. Try to keep up.
But notice how the LA Times headline framed this appalling move in their headline. It was to “end discrimination” against LGBTQ+ types because something similar had already been done in California for heterosexual abusers. Never mind that Newsom could have fixed the “discrimination” problem by returning to the automatic sex offender status for anybody who does anything like that. But no, no, that would make sense, and he is the governor of California when all is said and done.
Since we are here and on this subject, I think I need to make just one comment about those who, over the years, have been telling lies from the left about Christ Church and our stand on sex offenders. We believe that those convicted of sex crimes should be prosecuted by the civil magistrate, should accept their punishments as richly deserved, and should be registered as sex offenders. We also believe that if and when they repent of their sins and crimes, they should be received into the church, where they can be reminded every week of the crucified Lord who saves every kind of sinner “to the uttermost.” The thing that has drawn the ire of our critics on this issue has been that doctrine of repentance and faith. That is the only pathway to the only Savior, and our critics want their savior to be the state. For them, morality is determined by legality, which is why those who falsely accuse me of being soft on the sexual abuse of children will almost certainly be silent about the atrocity that Gov. Newsom just signed.
Straight Cut, Rough Cut
My telepathic critics were something else. I was accused of writing a book of erotica, when the book has no sex scenes in it. I was accused of invoking misogynistic S&M themes, I suppose because a female sex doll got crushed at the recycling center. But of course the whole theme of the book is that to suppose that male engineers can “build” a woman is the doctrine that is misogynistic. It is almost as insane as the idea that a woman’s body can be carved out of a man’s body, provided the surgeon doing it is in love with mammon. So there are those who think that because I wrote a story in which there was a crushing of a female sex doll, this somehow reveals a latent hostility to women on my part. But these are the critics who have therefore accepted an amalgam of silicon and circuitry as somehow an adequate representation of what it means to be a woman. There is a problem with misogyny here, certainly, but it is not with the one who believes that the Creator made man as the crown of creation, and woman as the crown of man. It is not with the one who objects to these jitney jezebels. You can’t be accused of attacking women when the thing you are attacking is not a woman.
One last criticism to deal with. Over the course of the novel, there are a few coarse expressions, put in there by the author, deliberately and on purpose. This was not done in the spirit of being naughty, or getting away with something that’s “not done” in a Christian book. No, the point of it was the pursuit of holiness.
“Nine times out of ten, the coarse word is the word that condemns an evil and the refined word the word that excuses it”
G.K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age
Moralistic is not the same thing as moral. Fastidious is not the same kind of word as righteous. Victorian is not the same thing as biblical — as Rachel Miller tried to warn us. Unholy is not the same thing as holy. There are many ostensible believers out there who would rather have a mouthful of buttery lies than one simple but angular truth.