Dredd Blog: Normalization Of The Abnormal

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Normalization Of The Abnormal

McTell it like it is, Snooper Man

The news media habit of normalizing the abnormal went awry when candidate Trump bloviated on and on about what was considered to be abnormal politics.

Like soon-to-be, it is said, "Senator Judge Roy L. Bean" (out of Alabama).

But I digress.

In their media minds, Candidate Trump could never be elected to the most powerful office that an individual could hold in the United States, so why bother normalizing his abnormality?

It was a waste of time, besides, the media world already had lots of work to do with all the paid expert-bloviators it took to normalize everlasting war without even mentioning it (Secret Afghanistan Underground - 3).

Or, I guess I should say mentioning it about as much as it mentions climate change:

"In 2016, evening newscasts and Sunday shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC, as well as Fox Broadcast Co.'s Fox News Sunday, collectively decreased their total coverage of climate change by 66 percent compared to 2015, even though there were a host of important climate-related stories, including the announcement of 2015 as the hottest year on record, the signing of the Paris climate agreement, and numerous climate-related extreme weather events. There were also two presidential candidates to cover, and they held diametrically opposed positions on the Clean Power Plan, the Paris climate agreement, and even on whether climate change is a real, human-caused phenomenon. Apart from PBS, the networks also failed to devote significant coverage to climate-related policies, but they still found the time to uncritically air climate denial -- the majority of which came from now-President Donald Trump and his team."

(How Broadcast Networks Covered Climate Change In 2016, emphasis added). They reduced it because, you know, both are life and death matters ("One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.").

If it bleeds it leads, unless it can't be explained by those expert-bloviators.

Like mass-murders.

Let's review one of many exceptionally famous cases ("we're number one" at mass murderers) for some key points:

"... [Whitman] killed a receptionist with the butt of his rifle. Two families of tourists came up the stairwell; he shot at them at point-blank range. Then he began to fire indiscriminately from the deck at people below. The first woman he shot was pregnant. As her boyfriend knelt to help her, Whitman shot him as well. He shot pedestrians in the street and an ambulance driver who came to rescue them.

The evening before, Whitman had sat at his typewriter and composed a suicide note:

I don’t really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I can’t recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts.
By the time the police shot him dead, Whitman had killed 13 people and wounded 32 more. The story of his rampage dominated national headlines the next day. And when police went to investigate his home for clues, the story became even stranger: in the early hours of the morning on the day of the shooting, he had murdered his mother and stabbed his wife to death in her sleep.

It was after much thought that I decided to kill my wife, Kathy, tonight … I love her dearly, and she has been as fine a wife to me as any man could ever hope to have. I cannot rationa[l]ly pinpoint any specific reason for doing this …
Along with the shock of the murders lay another, more hidden, surprise: the juxtaposition of his aberrant actions with his unremarkable personal life. Whitman was an Eagle Scout and a former marine, studied architectural engineering at the University of Texas, and briefly worked as a bank teller and volunteered as a scoutmaster for Austin’s Boy Scout Troop 5. As a child, he’d scored 138 on the Stanford-Binet IQ test, placing in the 99th percentile. So after his shooting spree from the University of Texas Tower, everyone wanted answers.

For that matter, so did Whitman. He requested in his suicide note that an autopsy be performed to determine if something had changed in his brain — because he suspected it had.

I talked with a Doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt [overcome by] overwhelming violent impulses. After one session I never saw the Doctor again, and since then I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail.
Whitman’s body was taken to the morgue, his skull was put under the bone saw, and the medical examiner lifted the brain from its vault. He discovered that Whitman’s brain harbored a tumor the diameter of a nickel. This tumor, called a glioblastoma, had blossomed from beneath a structure called the thalamus, impinged on the hypothalamus, and compressed a third region called the amygdala."

(Atlantic Monthly, emphasis added). The "well educated Eagle Scout Marine" dood became a domestic enemy, and turned on his loved ones.

The Blind Willie McTell News goes the most bananas when they have no paid expert-bloviators to explain what happened in "Las Vegas" (Choose Your Trances Carefully - 6).

Whatever happens in "the Las Vegas trance" stays in "Las Vegas trance" it would seem.

They do the 24/7 trance and begin showing the same videos over and over 24/7 ... until ... well ... they don't anymore.

Then it never happened it would seem.

They may soon devolve into the Normalize The Abnormal trance to try to convince you, and themselves, that this is the new normal.

They may also resort to pabulum indicating that it is the fire sale price we pay for MOMCOM freedom (MOMCOM - A Mean Welfare Queen).

Historically, they have a record of accomplishing this (Blind Willie McTell News, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).

But in the end, that accomplishment can only be brought about by their incessant appeal to the base (the exceptional despotic minority):

"In the Study Toynbee examined the rise and fall of 26 civilizations in the course of human history, and he concluded that they rose by responding successfully to challenges under the leadership of creative minorities composed of elite leaders. Civilizations declined when their leaders stopped responding creatively, and the civilizations then sank owing to the sins of nationalism, militarism, and the tyranny of a despotic minority. Unlike Spengler in his The Decline of the West, Toynbee did not regard the death of a civilization as inevitable, for it may or may not continue to respond to successive challenges. Unlike Karl Marx, he saw history as shaped by spiritual, not economic forces."