Contemporary English is proficient at tossing up new words or phrases—”vogue words,” H. W. Fowler called them, in his classic Modern English Usage—that convey less meaning than they seem to but that nonetheless apparently charm the multitudes who use them. Off tongues they come not so much tripping as slurring. Tipping point, outlier, iconic, meme, and more, the job of such words and phrases is to contort precision and, at no extra charge, distort reality. Confronted with the latest of these phrases, “the new normal,” I hear gears grind, fingernails break, sight strange foreign objects floating in punch bowls.
A young man crosses the street in a Kim Jong-un shaved-sides hairdo, topknot added, the knot dyed electric blue, white wires connecting him to the smartphone plugged into his ears. “The new normal,” one might say, though I think instead it makes more sense to say “the new mildly grotesque.” One turns on the Chicago television news and is presented with an angry black activist, commenting on recent murders by black gangs in his neighborhood, saying, “They better get some programs down here fast.” Some might call this dependence on searching for federal solutions to local problems “the new normal”; I would prefer calling it “the sad old foolish.” A celebrity announces he is transgendering himself. “The new normal?” Better, I should say, “the new hormonal.”
“The new normal” is, if you think about it, a phrase imbued with resignation. When one avails oneself of the phrase what one is really saying is, “I guess we might as well get used to this, because there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it.” I cannot recall “the new normal” ever being used in an approbative way. When confronted by urban violence, lying politicians, men in gray ponytails on walkers, people shrug and mutter “the new normal.” When learning of an act of exceptional bravery or impressive altruism or pleasing decency, “the new normal” is not the first phrase that comes to mind. What the phrase “the new normal” actually means is “the new awful.”
What “the new normal” chiefly covers is changes in etiquette, dress, relationships, conduct—in short, morals, manners, and customs. One might think these items trivial next to the importance of changes in the law. Montesquieu, the great Enlightenment philosopher, thought otherwise. In his Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, Montesquieu wrote: “More states have perished by the violation of their moral customs than by the violation of their laws. Not always but often changes in customs precede changes in law.” Changes in customs, in fact, generally pave the way for changes in laws.
Jihadist attacks in France and Belgium and now in the United States are too often referred to as “the new normal.” Yet even to use the phrase in this context is to concede the enemy ground that ought never to be conceded. The killing of innocent people, the chief modus operandi of ISIS and al Qaeda, however regular its occurrence, can never be regarded as other than the old ghastly, the behavior of barbarians, the antithesis of civilization. The same holds for blacks killing other blacks along with innocent bystanders in gang warfare, and the deliberate killing of police officers. Nothing normal about it; quite the reverse: It is the far from new heartbreaking. To grant any of this “new normal” status is to be partly resigned to its continuance. More and more regular it may become, but normal—never!
Laws can be blocked, voted down, reversed, vetoed, but changing customs on their way to formation is a trickier matter. One can shift into full crank and rant against them. One can mock them, hoping to laugh them out of existence. The best hope, though, is that they will die out of their own inherent silliness or aesthetic repulsiveness or moral loathsomeness. If the young man wishes to dye his topknot blue, let him. If the old gent wants to retain his ponytail, hey, however pathetic it makes him appear, isn’t that his business? The same goes for those who choose to have their faces tattooed, or wear T-shirts that say “Zip Your Fly” and worse, or go about got up in youth-drag clothes hoping to be thought decades younger than they in fact are. May they all find joy in their choices. Let the games begin, let Paris be gay, let a thousand flowers bloom, but let us not, whatever we do, refer to egregious taste, vulgar manners, and offensively aggressive behavior, and especially to the slaughter of the innocent as “the new normal.” Widespread as all this ugliness and horror may be, and whatever else one may think of it, normal it ain’t.
