Ep 4: Normal Rockwell

Blog & Mablog

Canon Press

Christianity, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 3 July 2019

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"The satirist who doubles down is saying, in effect, that the presupposed norm is real. It is transcendentally grounded. It is fixed and cannot be moved. It was written in the spangled stars above us, before any of us were born, and the inscription read, “Thou shalt not allow trannies into the girls’ restrooms.” This is because the satirist is centered. He has a sense of the absurd. But he can only have a sense of the absurd if he knows and loves what plain old surdity is. You know, the normal. A red-checked tablecloth. An apple pie cooling on the window sill. A Winchester over the fireplace. Mom and dad holding hands to say grace with the kids. Norman Rockwell teaching a Sunday School class."

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to blog and May blog from Doug Wills.com.
0:07.0	This audio is brought to you by Cannon Press.
0:20.0	Normal Rockwell.
0:22.0	Wednesday July 3rd, 2019 by Douglas Wilson.
0:29.0	The butterfly flits on wings of gold, the June bug wings of flame. The bed bug has no wings at all, but gets
0:37.3	there just the same. American folk song.
0:46.0	Nonsense literature has a long and storied history. I'm looking at you, Japper Walk.
0:48.0	And then there's Edward Lear, who, had he not been a Brit, could have been a great American poet
0:53.7	laureate. On this side of the pond, our tradition of nonsense and farce has been
0:58.7	robust. And I mention this only because I think it is past time to say when.
1:05.5	There is a difference between living in a world of bedrock normal and deliberately
1:09.7	skewing some aspect of it for the sake of humor, on the one hand, and watching all the little
1:15.3	pieces of the world float off in different directions on the other.
1:19.8	The former is humor, the latter is a postmodern and relativistic tragedy.
1:25.0	A talented humorist takes the normal as his gravity and then does tricks with it,
1:31.0	the way a disciplined trapeze artist does. But under the governance of our postmodern
1:36.2	relativism, it is as though we are all now living in an enormous space station and we are all
1:41.5	floating around in the great Hall trying to make one another
1:44.6	laugh by watching the pens float out of our pockets.
1:48.2	It got old after about 15 minutes.
1:51.8	Nonsense only makes sense, if sense makes sense.
1:57.0	The essence of humor is incongruity,
	...

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