Is there anything left to say? We have reached the moment words no longer matter. They stream out of us, a ceaseless procession of utterances in a media world which swallows them whole. Undigested, they nourish no one.

A civilization hungry for extinction has no taste for anything but death. Between a quisling pontificate, a debased political class, and a confused electorate, our age is caught up in a romance with doom. Words skim the surface but cannot penetrate the mystery of it. We have been made mad. We hurtle toward our own end, proud to discover new means for committing suicide.

In my mail last night came a flyer from New York City’s Commission for Human Rights on the overriding issue of gender identity and expression. It bears the imprimatur of Bill de Blasio, Mayor. In bright contrasting colors, it assures us that our overlords are committed to insuring that transgender and gender non-conforming New Yorkers are free to enter any bathroom or locker room they like. They can put on any get-up and groom themselves to suit. They have an inalienable right to be addressed by their preferred pronouns “without showing ‘proof’ of gender.”

In their wisdom, the city fathers define gender identity for us: “One’s internal, deeply-held sense of one’s gender as male, female, or something else entirely.” Something else entirely. The phrase is a casual betrayal of nature, a  traitor to the honor due to conditions of normalcy. For these creatures of Progressive bureaucracy, language is a wrecking ball. No concept of normality or of the truth of things can be left standing.

Words are useless because reason has become useless. Yet I cling to them. Or to some of them. These are the ones that conform to images I carry, images that are more present to me, make more eloquent sense, than the tides of  discourse that roll over us. Here is Jacques Ellul, writing four decades ago:

Some god is blinding men. Despite the choices still possible and the options still available, despite the paths still open to be taken, despite the warnings of prophets and sentries, despite the outcries of the poets .  .  .  this blindness is leading men to will, at any cost, their own destruction. With their own hands they are tearing down their citadels and turning reason into unreason.