Sleepyville

Who is awake and who is dreaming? And how would you know? This ancient philosophical conundrum is playing out in real time on our public stage in what are called the “culture wars”. In the conservative lexicon, those who “wake” from the sleep of traditional white, Christian, “American” values/culture are maligned as elite “social justice warriors”, expressing their condescending contempt for the common man by forcing their version of equality on them. In this telling, to be progressive is to abandon all standards and conventions and to believe those still committed to tradition to be the ones asleep. Paradoxically, the Q Anon movement believes itself awakened from the nightmare of deep-state propaganda. “It’s time to wake up”, says the mysterious Q. They believe those entrenched in Establishment media are the sleeping, manipulated subjects. Each group believes others are caught in a dream, psychologically captured by those in power. In other words, you need to be awake, just not woke. In the conservative mind, dissolving traditional gender identification and roles is the Trojan Horse, the opening through which the traditional family can be undermined and destroyed. If boys and girls are not male and female, are not he and she, then we have entered the relativistic post-modern hell where there can be no truth, no certainties. To be “woke” is to abandon right and wrong, reason and rationality. It is to condemn and reject the history of Christian morality in favor of libertine tolerance for any and all behavior. It is to condone and promote the breakdown of society. Of course, if you are already “awake” to the vast government conspiracy as imagined by Q, the breakdown has already been achieved, our freedoms curtailed, and stability an illusion. It is disruption that is required to break the sheeple from their “mind forged manacles”. If you get beyond culture war wokeness, you see the machinations of fossil capital as it deems climate awareness a form of wokeness. If they can bundle the Paris Accords in with trigger warnings and trans people playing sports, their job becomes much easier. A prime directive of capitalism is to destroy all foundations. As Marx wrote: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…” This is not a comfortable place. Marx envisioned this tension resolving itself as: “ man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.” Unfortunately, the Old Man may have overestimated man’s “sober senses”. He too believed in rational man. But if you wake into the dream or wake and find you are an insect dreaming you were a human….