Nothing good comes out of Babylon

Drag is an expression of non-conforming sexual identities that are designed to titillate adults. Leave children out of it. Or get used to the ugliness of a sin-soaked world.

For some strange reason, or perhaps for no reason at all, truly horrible things have been happening to people at the edges of my acquaintance. Untimely death and violence and abuse have this year brushed past me to call at the door of others, and all I have been able to do is breathe deep into my gratitude for the peace in my life, and in my own atheistic way, pray for their healing.

I can’t even tell you their stories, as their stories are not mine to tell. I’m no stranger to loss and grief, but these disparate events I have witnessed from afar have been so outside the norm of our normally safe and predictable daily lives that I’m not sure I would be able to come up with the words to describe them. It would seem like I was making up tall tales.

So I ponder.

What on earth is going on with us? With our societies? 

Not only is individual suffering very apparent to me, around me in my real life, but every time I look at any social media platform I see scenes that are just so out of whack with what we all knew to be reality even two short years ago. One example: yet another drag show for families, where a scantily clad man in woman-face is throwing himself around in suggestive ways — in Texas of all places. Two men aggressively tongued each other outside for cameras. A line of armed men in black masks stood outside to guard the drag queens. Wasn’t Texas some scary conservative state where people said things like: ‘we don’t like your type round here’? The most haunting thing about the scene was one of kids in the audience hid from the grotesque performer as he brushed past the little girl’s table. She went into a full crouch position, like she was bracing for impact, turning her back and burying her face into her mother. The mother did not seem to notice her daughter’s discomfort.  One performer stood up at a mic and told the crowd: “It’s time to stop living in the dark ages…start noticing us cuz we’re not going anywhere.” Another, a fellow with line-backer shoulders putting considerable strain on a skin-tight sequin-covered red dress, said he (at least I think it was a he) was a teacher — and elicits a cheer for the educators in the audience.

The reason — or one of them, anyway — that this spectacle repels me is because it feels like we are all being forced to participate in someone’s fetish. I will repeat myself from last week: children do not belong in the transgressive sexual demimonde that is drag. Drag is not the same as Tootsie or Mrs Brown, drag is not the same as clowns, drag is not the same as the pantomime dame. Drag is an expression of non-conforming sexual identities that are designed to titillate adults; and children, who are in the sacred process of forming their individual identities, should not be party it. Children have far, far better things to do with their time — like playing with each other, outdoors, without the prurient socio-political manoeuvring of adults.

In this confounding and morally draining environment, I feel drawn to the ancient ways of seeing: between good and evil, light and dark, sin and grace. How could I not? Sin and evil and darkness are all around me. 

The title of this rumination comes from a book I just finished, Vice of Kings by Jasun Horsely. It’s an odd, flawed work, but with flashes of insight into our sin-soaked world. It is from its final pages that I took the phrase “nothing good comes out of Babylon.” Writing those words, I can almost hear my classical liberal (and lover of the ancients) father groan. But he’s not alive to see what chaos and destruction the classical liberal world has wrought.

Lately my mind constantly returns to two venerated works of literature that I was lucky enough to study as a young woman, before educators introduced derangement and disassociation into young minds as praxis. First, the Inferno by Dante. Sometimes I ruminate about where he would put so hideous a character as Joe Biden and his misbegotten son Hunter? Where would blow-hard Trump end up? In the beginning of Canto 1, Virgil tells Dante he lived “in times when all the gods were lying cheats.” Same here Virgil. Same here.

Second, the Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope, the great mock epic of the age of reason. It’s a hilarious work, which I remember from high school as a sly but devastating take-down of the fools and sycophants of high society. It’s like looking in a gilded mirror and seeing our contemporary hysterias reflected back to us. The preening and posturing and triviality of the elites in the decades before the French Revolution are very, very similar to our own.

I was reminded once again of Pope’s great work last week when 50 mostly Venezuelan migrants arrived on the winsome shores of Martha’s Vineyard, only to be shunted off the island the following day. That was all the time the famously wealthy residents of the island needed, to be “enriched” by these destitute unfortunates. A Tik Tok video went swirling around the internet of a lithe, toothy blonde in oversized shades and floppy hat — think Carly Simon’s granddaughter — ecstatically waving goodbye as the text reads: “Migrants leave Martha’s Vineyard for a military base on Cape Cod.” This woman was the was a Statue of Liberty in reverse: 

“The wretched refuse of your teeming shore

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me

I lift my tanned, toned arms and I push them out the door!”