Yesterday I committed treason – yet again.
At least that’s how many NHS fanatics describe using private medicine. This proves that a state doesn’t have to be unashamedly totalitarian to scour the people’s minds free of any modicum of sound thought.
Anyway, my treasonous act involved a series of lung function tests, administered by a young man with a sense of humour. Afterwards he lifted my spirits by saying that the results exceeded expectations for a man my age and size.
“How do you know I’m a man?” I asked, thereby claiming impeccable modern credentials. “I may identify as a woman.”
We had a short laugh about that feeble joke, but then the young chap said something serious. “Men and women show different results, mostly because women’s lung capacity is much smaller,” he explained. “That’s why whenever we test transsexuals, we have to tell them in advance that for our purposes we have to go by their biological sex.”
“Do they protest?” I asked. “Not at all,” he smiled. “When it comes to their health, they don’t mind at all.”
I don’t get it. We are made to believe, on pain of punishment, that a man who used to be a woman is as much of a man as anyone blessed with the XY chromosomes. Such a freshly minted man may sue anyone for ‘misgendering’ (referring to him as a her), and he’ll probably win the case every time.
And yet when the health chips are down, he is happy to be regarded as a woman. Does one detect a touch of hypocrisy there somewhere?
Far be it from me to hold myself up as a model, but in this case I’m sure I’m no different from most XY humans. As such, I uncompromisingly identify as a man because, well, I am. That’s how God made me.
Now, if a nurse told me I’d have to be treated as a woman for medical purposes, I’d object vociferously, possibly violently. Much as I adore women, I’m not one, happy not to be one, and I won’t be treated as one, health or no health.
Methinks, on this basis at least, those recent converts to manhood remain somewhat different from me and, though I haven’t been delegated to speak for other men, from other XY humans as well. And whoever insists they aren’t different is either a fool or, more likely, a rank hypocrite.
While we are on the subject of hypocrisy, Putin and his propagandists struggle to pinpoint any legitimate reason for their bandit raid on the Ukraine. As a former adman who had to plug any number of lost causes, I follow their efforts with schadenfreude leavened – I’m man enough to admit this – with some latent empathy.
The overall thrust of their PR campaign is neither strategic nor strictly military. It’s mostly moral, which I, as an admirer of the early Crusades launched for moral reasons, have to welcome.
Morality is a multifaceted notion, as any reader of the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount will confirm. However, even Putin and his merry men aren’t so cynical as to feign commitment to the injunctions against murder, theft, perjury or cupidity.
Instead they’ve crystallised the whole moral message to its sexual aspects, none of which, incidentally, is mentioned in the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount. And even those are reduced strictly to railing against rampant homosexuality, transsexualism and their derivatives, such as homomarriage, propaganda of homosexuality, child adoptions by same-sex couples and so forth.
Since the West is depicted, not groundlessly, as the bastion of such perversity, and the Ukraine is treated as the West’s proxy, the on-going bandit raid can be described as a moral crusade. Russia casts herself as the last upholder of traditional morality, what one of Putin’s Western propagandists obligingly called “the most conservative and Christian nation in Europe”.
It’s not immediately clear how carpet bombings of cities, accompanied by mass murder, torture, looting and rape, can cure unnatural sexual propensities. Even if they can, the therapy strikes me as somewhat too radical.
Hence, much as I sympathise with the cause of traditional morality, I deplore Russia’s championship of it. And since my knowledge of Russia doesn’t come from books or flying visits on tourist visas, I find it hard to see it as a stronghold of sexual probity.
Words like Sodom and Gomorrah come to mind more readily, and today’s leaders of the country can claim residency in those towns with ample justification. Enter Lieutenant General Aleksandr Matovnikov, deputy chief of Russia’s land forces, member of the Kremlin inner circle and currently commander of the Russian contingent in Belarus.
In such capacities, the good general can be seen as the cutting edge of pristine morality slashing through the mire of Western degeneracy. That image, however, is rather at odds with the selfie video Gen. Matovnikov shared on the Telegram messaging app: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_WMtkduN6E
The general is seen performing full-frontal striptease and, unfamiliar with the genre as I am, I can’t judge the choreography. I can, however, judge the general’s physique and let me tell you: a Chippendale he ain’t.
A message accompanying the video describes the general as being “an avid connoisseur of restaurants and ladies in Minsk”. However, the facsimiles of his letters published later (whose authenticity is disputed) show it’s not just ladies that the general is an avid connoisseur of.
Yet even assuming that the intended audience is straight as an arrow, one finds it hard to see the general as a moral crusader. It’s easier to see him as a betrayer of state secrets, one of which is that Russia’s leaders hardly set an example of monastic behaviour.
Many of the country’s top functionaries are widely rumoured to be homosexuals. Mentioned in this context, inter alia, are Duma Speaker Volodin, the late LDP leader Zhirinovsky, former PM Zubkov, Gazprom chairman Miller, chairman of the Duma budget committee Makarov. And even Putin himself hasn’t been spared such accusations.
His KGB career was rather sluggish, plagued as it was by an early scandal involving his using a safehouse for illicit assignations, believed to be of a “non-traditional” nature. That may explain why his terminal rank at age 40 was a lowly major (he was promoted to lieutenant-colonel at retirement to give him a higher pension). By comparison, his KGB superior Oleg Kalugin was already a lieutenant-general at that age.
It’s widely believed that Putin ordered the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko mainly because the KGB defector was about to publish documents proving those accusations. Currently, another KGB defector, Sergei Zhirnov, refers to Putin’s homosexuality as common knowledge within the ranks of that organisation (in view of what happened to Litvinenko, Mr Zhirnov would be well-advised to watch his step).
Reports of both hetero- and homo- orgies within the Kremlin elite are too numerous and detailed to be treated as so much smoke without fire. I for one am sure they are true: it’s that absolute power that, as Lord Acton explained, corrupts absolutely.
It would be easy to shrug and say something about boys being boys, or girls if they so choose. We are all sinners, aren’t we? We are, to varying extents. But not all sinners pretend to be crusaders for righteousness. And even fewer are willing to do mass murder under that pretext.
It’s that hypocrisy again.