Posted on 04/01/2004 12:00:11 PM PST by mrustow
Such clear thinking.
The NYT is run by the Gay Mafia.
Leftists in America are striving to compile a body count to earn their place in the Black Book of Communism.
Spurred by your prompt, I went back into my disorderly clippings "file" and found it after some resolute digging. (Other goodies: national newsmag article "Why Not Real Gun Control?" -- yeah, right.)
The real title was "Defining Deviancy Up", and it was an elaboration on Moynihan's article by Charles Krauthammer in The New Republic, November 1993. It was the cover article, and the cover featured an old Kodachrome of dad coming home to his family after a day in the office, circa 1953 -- distorted, so we can see how sick that image is supposed to be now, how pathological in the sense that Susan Sontag meant it when she said that "the white race is the cancer of the planet".
BTW, Krauthammer, in citing Moynihan, gives the publication of Moynihan's article as The American Scholar; I don't know which is correct.
Sample quote from Krauthammer's article:
There is a complementary social phenomenon that goes with defining deviancy down. As part of the vast social project of moral leveling, it is not enough for the deviant to be normalized. The normal must be found to be deviant.....Large areas of ordinary behavior hitherto considered benign have had their threshold radically redefined up, so that once innocent behavior now stand condemned as deviant. Normal middle-class life stands exposed as the true home of violence and abuse and a whole catalog of aberrant acting and thinking.As part of this project of moral leveling, entirely new areas of deviancy -- such as date rape and politically incorrect speech -- have been discovered. And old areas -- such as child abuse -- have been amplified by endless reiteration in the public presses and validated by learned reports of their astonishing frequency. The net effect is to show that deviancy is not the province of criminals and crazies but thrives in the heart of the great middle class. The real deviants of society stand unmasked. Who are they? Not Bonnie and Clyde but Ozzie and Harriet. True, Ozzie and Harriet have long been the object of ridicule. Now, however, they are under indictment.
The moral deconstruction of middle-class normality is a vast project. Fortunately, thousands of volunteers are working the case. By defining deviancy up they have scored some notable successes. Three, in particular. And in precisely the areas Moynihan identified: family life, crime and thought disorders.
And thanks for the powerful passage from Mr. Charlie, who sure knew what he was talking about, in giving a powerful summation of a phenomenon which has since consolidated its takeover of American culture.
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