In the final scenes of Dr. Zhivago, he discovers his daughter, daughter of his pre-revolutionary romantic love Lara, playing the ancient folk instrument, the Balilaka. Unlike her mother, the daughter has no feminine grace, no nascent womanhood: she looks what we would today call “gender-neutral.” She has been raised by government officials in groups of other children her age. She doesn’t know gender roles. While she is polite, she is also mechanical and coarse: centuries of Russian civilization, emotion, reading, and human love between women and men have been wiped out by just a few years of revolution.
Lara and Zhivago’s post-revolutionary daughter
Now, again, it is a virtual necessity to alter one’s sexuality in order to prove one’s commitment to a leftist movement. Sexual transgression alone is hardly something new: in the Sixties, it was enforced by radical leadership by making people take part in orgies — white women, in particular, were required to have sex with black men, and vica-versa, to prove they were “down with the cause.”
How degrading for both the black men and white women involved. And the black women having to witness it. And the decent white men, like Bill Ayers’ brother, who refused to participate when Ayers demanded this of his girlfriend. There are many other cringing examples stored in the archives of civil rights activists throughout the South.
In early 19th Century, communist revolution in Russia, and later in China, the point of stripping male and female characteristics from people was to destroy the impetus to create “bourgeous” love and thus families. The point was to direct all loyalty to the state.
We’ve largely achieved that here already in the lower classes, economically if not emotionally. Obama’s “Life of Julia” normalized fertile women marrying the government instead of marrying a man as a rational economic choice (take that, George Mason Econ.). Not that, by then, such propaganda was really needed: the majority of young black mothers and a rapidly growing percentage of young white and Hispanic mothers were already raising their children on government benefits, even if the child’s father — or some other guy — lived with them.
Revolutions only lead in one direction. Then they implode. Or explode. What could come after destroying, nuclear families, parent-child relations and male-female relations? Only one thing: destroying gender itself. Of course, the cute kids don’t have to do it: the lithe girls and sexy boys, unless they’re totally committed, don’t need to prove their worth by chopping off their breasts and mutilating their genitals. They can feign “transgenderism” as Manuel Terán appeared to do. Or maybe Manuel really believed that the next step towards pure revolution was to change his gender.
It’s all moot now. He shot a cop, and he’s dead.
But for the many others, what comes next? Do you change back, if you can? Do you pursue increasingly exotic sexual identities? Do you sit underneath a tree until you get hauled away for trespassing?
Do you try to kill a cop?
I don’t believe that Manuel Terán was particularly smart or creative or a deep thinker. I think he was mentally ill, and nobody around him cared. After listening to his parents refer to him as a “symbol” of this or that, I don’t even know if he experienced unconditional love outside political posturing as a human child. I’m sorry to sound harsh about that: but obsessive radicals are obsessive radicals, and his parents seemed obsessive enough to try to seduce other people’s children into doing precisely what got their own son killed.
This is both the deep horror and toe-shallow foresight of revolutionary movements. Years ago, a wealthy Iranian woman told me about the conditions on the ground before the Shah was overthrown by the Ayatollah, and women were separated from their public identities and imprisoned in their own families, slaves to their fathers and brothers and sons. She had been a well-educated, sophisticated, liberated woman. But she and all the young, sophisticated, educated people like herself thought the Ayatollah was just sort of an ally, and he didn’t really intend to enslave women and return their country to the stone age (why would he?), whereas the Shah presented a type of problem they could understand within their socio-economic group, and thus oppose.
So they sided with the Ayatollah; they overthrew the Shah, and then found out that the Ayatollah really meant what he said. And their post-Reformation lives in Iran were over. Women were declared to be slaves to men, and she had to flee to America.
Now there’s no need for a Shah, let alone an Ayatollah, to enslave large portions of a generation. Our children do this to themselves — or rather, they’re taught it from kindergarden. And their teachers call it freedom.
Manuel Terán claimed to have freed himself from gender as a political act, but he was clearly male, and his drawings and writings betray such childishness, confusion, and ignorance — a failure to grow up so extreme that one is left to wonder what was the matter with him. Was it generations of teachers filling minds like his with revolutionary pap? Generations of activists telling him the highest value was to change his sex, or to kill a cop? Generations of environmental nihilists telling him that merely being alive was harming the earth? Put a gun in hands like that, and what does anyone think is going to happen?
The Daily Signal’s Tyler O’Neil just wrote a brilliant article about Terán’s journals. This is, as a well-placed friend of mine says, the sort of reporting the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ought to be doing about this story. Good luck with that. While they cover football and City Hall boosterism, a group of armed terrorists have been camped out in a construction site surrounded by neighborhoods filled with children. Last Monday, they invaded those neighborhoods — again — using cars with out-of-state licenses to block responding police cars. They used idiot college students banging drums and waving incoherent puppets as cover as their Black Bloc agitators crept through the crowd and attacked the police. Then they ran into the forest at a clearly pre-ordained site, trying to invade and possibly firebomb the construction vehicles again.
Why is nobody reporting that? I was embedded in the protest. I have photographs of the Black Bloc moving up and attacking police.
This is the child-like sort of picture Manuel Terán drew in his forest notebooks, courtesy of Tyler O’Neill:
He filled pages and pages with incoherent rants about capitalism, killing police, environmental collapse, prison abolitionism, and all the other talking points of the new radicalism, which is different from the old radicalism only because of its new focus on transgenderism.
About which, O’Neil quotes from Terán’s journals:
“My gender is a loaded gun pointed at capitalism’s heart,” he wrote. “My gender is the strength of the wretched of the earth … My gender is political and abstract, it’s a stick striking a cop’s soft bits. My gender is the rejection of authority.”
“My gender is a knife in the hands of every femboy and gender bender,” he wrote. “It is the flame of a Molotov and teargas tears.”
These aren’t the words of someone who is confused about his gender: they are the words of someone who has been deluded to believe that his gender is a weapon that can destroy capitalism. They’re the words of a mentally ill, brainwashed, post-adolescent in the grips of a cult. Sitting in the Quaker Meeting House in Decatur, Georgia, as hundreds of other cultists were led in shouting “Viva Viva Tortugita” by the dead boy’s mother and father, I saw two parents radicalized enough to exploit their son’s death rather than trying to save him. I saw an allegedly peace-loving Quaker congregation pushing young people towards an abyss of violence. I saw cynical, professional activists building a movement on their acolytes’ dead young bodies.
Here is a page of Manuel Terán’s diary. It reads like the mumbling of a subway schizophrenic, jumbling passages and words that he has heard before. The people saying these words are among us. They and we have the evidence, but the incurious media is doing nothing to expose them. Maybe if they did; maybe if the police were empowered to institutionalize Manuel before he shot at them; maybe if the courts assigned him a guardian who wasn’t as politically obsessed as his own parents, he would still be alive today.
And another decent Georgia trooper wouldn’t have been shot.
Manuel Terán, Just another confused cop-shooter