A school board in Virginia has protected an enabled a serial rapist of girls and accused a parent who wanted to stand up for his raped daughter of being a domestic terrorist.

Not a single #MeTooter has anything to say about this situation. There are no protests, no coverage, no pussy hats. The reason is that the rapist is “gender fluid” and the victims aren’t rich Hollywood hookers. It’s only OK to care about the complaints of women who are already very wealthy. Nobody else has a right to object to rape, apparently.

In Jonathan Franzen’s novel Crossroads, there’s a fascinating character, Perry, who’s a very intelligent, hyper-rational young man. He decides that he can figure out good and evil using the powers or his intellect. Who needs God when you are a rational human being and can understand how everything works on an intellectual level?

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SPOILERS AHEAD.

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Perry follows this idea to its logical conclusion and realizes that there is God. He, Perry, is God. And if he’s God, then by definition everything he does and wants is good. And what does Perry want? He wants to be happy. What’s the easiest way to achieve intense bliss? Of course, it’s drugs.

Perry begins to snort cocaine. Immediately, he gets severely addicted because there’s no limit to his desire for cocaine. Snorting cocaine makes him feel good. Hence, cocaine must be good. Remember, Perry is God. He can’t want anything bad. His desire is the most important thing in the universe, and it must be fed. In a search for an ever-, growing supply of cocaine, Perry descends into complete self-debasement. As he digs out specks of cocaine from a pile of excrement in a public restroom where he accidentally spilled the drug and rubs them on his gums, Perry is still convinced that he is infallible and his desire is the perfect guide to what he needs to do.

The complete loneliness and debasement of this character who is incapable of noticing anything or anybody in the world except for his bottomless pit of desire is a perfect example of where placing a desiring individual at the center of creation leads. This doesn’t mean that everybody who looks to himself for the understanding of good and evil will end up snorting cocaine. Crossroads is a work of literature, and Perry is a metaphor. But the power of art is precisely that one could waste a million words trying to explain why individual desires are a poor substitute for religious morality and fail to deliver the message created by an image of a young man kneeling in a pile of shit and worshipping his own obliteration. You can’t read this scene and not think about living in a society full of Perrys that was being born at the time described in the novel and that has reached full maturity today.

Mind you, I’m retelling just a few pages from a 700-page novel. Perry is only one of the characters, and not even the central one. And there’s already so much to say about this part of the book. People often ask how I determine if something is art or not art. This is how. Art brings out feeling and thought. If there’s something to discuss after reading, it’s art. If there’s nothing to say beyond what’s already said, it isn’t.

I’ll be happy if anybody on here decides to read the novel and then comes here to discuss it. My app shows comments as they appear, irrespective of how old the posts are, so your comments on old posts are never lost.

One of the fascinating things about Jonathan Franzen’s novel Crossroads is how each of his characters demonstrates a different way of losing religion.

The saddest, most barren way is to substitute religion with rationality. Trying to reduce life to a series of formulas leads one to the life of an addict who is forever succumbing to every drug-addled method of feeding his narcissistic fixation on the self.

Then there is a less tragic and more pathetic way which relies on embracing the ancestral wisdom of the indigenous cultures because it’s vastly superior to the boring Christianity of the eternally culpable white people. Of course, there is no ancestral indigenous wisdom, and the character who tries to befriend Navajos and “serve” them eventually catches a glimpse of what an enormous dick he is.

There’s also the woke way of displacing religious belief onto political action. A bunch of snowflake wokesters in the novel spends years installing wheelchair ramps on a remote Navajo reservation where nobody has ever seen a wheelchair.

Of course, there’s also the Moralistic Therapeutic Deism of the kind popularized by Oprah. People convince themselves that talking endlessly about their feelings is “spiritual” and use these fee-fee conversations to hide how utterly boring and shallow they are.

Other characters try to substitute religion with “therapy,” sex, food, even smoking. The result is a moral, physical, and relational collapse of enormous magnitude.

In the novel, it’s 1971. The characters don’t know what we do: there’s still a long way down from where they find themselves.

Thank you, Biden voters. Great thinking on this one. Yippee for your analytical skills. Really did us all a solid here.

NEW YORK (AP) — Get ready to pay sharply higher bills for heating this winter, along with seemingly everything else. With prices surging worldwide for heating oil, natural gas and other fuels, the U.S. government said Wednesday it expects households to see their heating bills jump as much as 54% compared to last winter. Nearly half the homes in the U.S. use natural gas for heat, and they could pay an average $746 this winter, 30% more than a year ago. Those in the Midwest could get particularly pinched, with bills up an estimated 49%, and this could be the most expensive winter for natural-gas heated homes since 2008-2009.

By the way, I know how much you love your Russia collusion. So here’s a hint: who makes a lot of money selling natural gas? Yes, that would be Putin. And who worked his tail off from day one in office to dismantle the US energy independence and guarantee soaring oil and gas prices? Yes, that would be Biden.

We are just a few months into this lovely presidency you inflicted on us and I’m already paying 30% more at the gas station and 20% more at the grocery store. In return, we get more COVID deaths than in 2020, exploding polarization, inflation, and trillions more of public money pumped into the pockets of the 1% you so love.

Keep doing exactly what you are doing because no price is too high to avert the terrible tragedy of you having to change your mind once in your life. There is absolutely no chance you made a mistake on this one. Never! You are infallible. It’s evil-doers conspiring with other evildoers plus Trump plus Delta variant something something Nazis systemic racism something that’s causing all this. You have zero responsibility.