Counter-Currents
Jules Chéret, 1880 Parisian advertisement for a recurring Saturday masque performance
8,691 words
This past winter I lost my last grandparent — the most stubborn one, still to the end a strict English schoolteacher after having long since retired from the profession in the 1970s. She suffered through the desegregation years while working at Marshall High and was never dishonest about the experience. She possessed that combination of Southern decorum and irascible (and accurate) bluntness, which gave her the ability to reduce anyone, including 250-pound, six-foot-three black football players, to tears.
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4 comments
I learned about the medieval concept of bodily ‘humors’ through all my historical fiction reading as a child. Then I lived in Asia and learned they still believe this, and Whites now lap it up as great ancient wisdom. Same with the medieval medical tradition of ‘cupping’ – now an expensive (and utterly useless) celebrity ‘cure.’ A great deal of Oriental tradition dealing with bodily humors involves food and other ‘cures’ that can actually be lethal. Western civilization outgrew that long ago but has been going backwards now for over a century.
As far as all the melodrama, that’s merely a symptom of the gynochracy. Women are emotionally incontinent, and Western society is now utterly feminized. So sympathy on the loss of your grandparent, but the rest is tl;dr.
Hi, 3g4me. Normally I’d say thank you for reading, but I’ll stick to: thanks for commenting.
I don’t advocate physical/medical humoral cures; going back to those barbaric practices would be insane (and it would make me guilty of the mumbo-jumbo I talk about at the end). For gawd’s sake, don’t diet based on ideas about black bile. But like many ancient belief systems, the old humoral temperament theories might still have something valuable to say to us in the modern world. We all know lazy, depressed, or careless people — and our societies often have the same faults.
Melodrama has a bit more of a complex history, and it is traced back to the age of revolutions and the ending of the old sacred, patriarchal institutions, which isn’t quite the same thing as gynochracy.
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
The twelve jurors were all writing very busily on slates. “What are they doing?” Alice whispered to the Gryphon. “They can’t have anything to put down yet, before the trial’s begun.”
“They’re putting down their names,” the Gryphon whispered in reply, “for fear they should forget them before the end of the trial.”
“Give your evidence,” said the King; “and don’t be nervous, or I’ll have you executed on the spot.”
I believe this is what the kids call “a story for our times.”
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