New Normal
This is not a camp joke. Many of us are actually living in Stepford, Connecticut. The one from 1975, not the “comedy” remake.
Those of you in Gen X and early Boomherhood will remember how good 1970s horror and science fiction was. The made-for-TV adaptation of Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives runs circles around any modern big-budget theatrical release.
You know the feeling you had when you watched it. That you were being spied on. That a thin veil separated you from a world that looked almost, but not quite, like the real one.
This is the feeling I experience every day leaving my house and interacting in public in Burlington Vermont.
Yesterday I went to a specialty locksmith to get a set of keys cut.
This is a family business that’s been around forever. It’s the place you go to for serious lock and security needs. They know their stuff. The grinders are cast-iron mechanicals from the 1940s that can cut any key from a guide set. None of these flashing touchscreen modern machines that will only cut the ones they’ve been digitally programmed to believe exist.
I reach the front door. There is a sign in all caps:
WE HAVE A TWO-PERSON LIMIT AT THIS TIME!
RING THE BUZZER TO BE ALLOWED IN AND WAIT TO BE CALLED!
I ring the buzzer. 1 minute later I barely hear the door lock opening (no, they will not do the courtesy of speaking ‘hello’ to you on the intercom while you wait).
It’s a small lobby with two cash registers, one on the left, and one on the right.
From counter to ceiling, all the way across the service counter and wrapped around, is “Covid” plexiglass.
New sign:
STAND SIX FEET APART! ←—→SIX FEET!
The plexiglass is tightly sealed at the seams. Just above the counter, two very small rectangular openings were cut out. Like the ones you see in New York City bodegas to pass cash through, but that you rarely see outside crime-infested urbania.
But these are so small many people would not be able to comfortably pass a hand through at all anyway.
New sign:
NO REACHING YOUR HAND THROUGH THE PASS-THROUGH!
There are two staff on duty. In the modern manner, they do not greet you, and they turn away from you mid-sentence to answer the phone because you are not important, and neither are manners.
Both the employees are wearing masks. Big, black, N95 face cones that obscure 3/4 of the face. Only the eyes are visible.
It is February, 2023.
Comes a third employee in the background, stocking parts. This third employee shares a set of characteristics with one of the other employees.
Neither of them can be sexed. I literally could not tell what sex they were, and I’m very finely tuned to that task.
Why?
1. Morbid obesity had obliterated all visible bone structure, and also covered over actual body shape. It was impossible to see male or female skeletal or facial features.
2. Both had voices just in that overlapping range between male and female. It was not possible to discern whether I was hearing testosterone frog-voice that is native to women who take testosterone claiming to be men, or whether they were two men with naturally androgynous voices.
Both of them had adorned themselves with either light makeup, or piercings, or jewelry, or haircuts, that clearly declaimed I AM LGBTQ QUEER WHATEVER.
If they had personalities, let alone the disordered variety, one wouldn’t know. Because they had no affect. No, not “weird” affect.
No affect.
Dead eyes. Monotone with no pitch shift in sentences. Movements that were more falling-in-a-direction than they seemed to be purposeful.
My skin was crawling. The stirrings of what might turn into a panic attack were starting.
This is not normal.
This is New Normal.
And it’s demoralizing me more every day.
This is what it’s like in Vermont. And this is what it’s like in any heavily Democrat-Progressive area of the country.
From talking with Disaffected supporters around the US, and around the world, I know that it is not like this in many places. Those of you who live in more Southern or Midwestern states report, happily, that not everyone is “broken” this way, as one Iowan member put it.
”The people here aren’t broken yet.”
I’m glad.
But when you read this from me, you’re not reading one man’s experience in Burlington, Vermont. Millions of Americans are living in cities and states like this. I know this because they tell me.
Like me, they are Noticers. Noticers have finely honed observation skills. Their gut intuitions are, while not perfect, highly accurate above chance.
Noticers often feel. . .observed. Surveiled. Monitored.
We can see it, and we can feel it. We know what that very quick glance means. We can sense when we are being sized up in public to suss out whether we’ve been robotized, or if we’re still free humans.
No. This is not “paranoia.” This is real.
In The Stepford Wives, it turned out to be retired Disney Imagineers who clandestinely abducted their wives and replaced them, or altered them, into animatronic copies. They wanted docile, flighty, thoroughly domesticated wives whose greatest joy aside from putting out was scrubbing floors.
In Stepford, Vermont, the roles are reversed. The Imagineers are women, and they want docile, mindless, thoroughly domesticated and compliant husbands. And sons. And daughters. And girlfriends.
Every day, I hear lines from The Stepford Wives in my mind. “Bobbie, you’ve changed,” Joanna said to the animatronic replacement of her formerly lively friend.
Bobbie flips her hair and smiles.
”Isn’t it wonderful?”