By Sonnie Ekwowusi
Once upon a time, narrates a bosom friend of mine, there lived in his village a certain mad man called Papauwa. Like most village madmen and women, this particular mad man is ill-attired. He eats from the dirty gutter, drinks from the gutter and sleeps in the gutter. Although Papauwa was held captive by incurable progressive full-blown insanity, he was distinguished by his exceptional brilliance in expanding and expounding any subject matter that casually comes out from his mouth. Small wonder he commanded an incredible large village followership. On any Eke or Orie or Afor or Nkwo Market day, Papauwa, who did not break any slate in any school, is seen standing in the heart of the village Market lecturing a motley crowd on any subject matter or discipline under the earth ranging from politics, law, medicine, religion, sports, science, liberal arts, humanities to Classics to the thrilling of the crowd.
On a day he elects to lecture them on politics, he will not hesitate to copiously quote, ex-tempore, Plato, Socrates Zik, Awo, Abraham Lincoln. Martin Luther King (jr) and others to buttress his arguments to the amazing delight of his listeners. And if he was discussing religion, he speaks at length on the salvation wrought by Jesus Christ for mankind, interlacing his brilliant arguments with quotations from different parts of the Sacred Scripture. Mouth agape, hands akimbo, jaw dropped, his listeners and interrogators are held spell bound and thereafter some of them would fire their respective salvos at him, if not for anything, to try to prove to the mad man that he is after all a mad man while they are not mad at all.
The aforesaid village mad man is a metaphor for the paradoxes that are common place in our contemporary society. Those who boasts that they are intelligent or learned or wise are filled with ignorance and stupidity whereas those whom we contemptuously treat as the lowly, the ignorant and idiots are filled with the spirit of wisdom, great learning and discernment. Papauwa, by all definitions, was a village madman. But paradoxically, he was the merchant of light in the village, a public intellectual commanding public respect.
Everyone who prudently and intelligently looks at the history of the world today would clearly understand that modern democratic liberalism is emerging out of the desire to snuff off the older order and replace it with laissez-faire economic and political principles in assuage the thirst for progressiveness. The idea is that the rise of modernism, and secularism necessitated the decline of religious values and those communally-binding principles remains a fundamental postulate of European and American intellectual life. Surely, something terrible has definitely happened to our political intelligentsia and elites. Our intelligentsia and elites are made up of intellectuals of a sort including some who carry the label: “progressives”. Their political thinking is therefore dominated by ideologies. While some of these ideologies are useful in some ways and to some extent true, others are just mere trash, or, if you like, strange suffocating ideologies. And amazingly enough, the intelligentsia and elites are bent on imposing these suffocating ideologies on everybody as the new liberal culture to the imperiling of the society. The idea is to promote transgression and destroy traditional cultural norms. Children are taught that they have a right to enjoy unrestrained freedom-enjoyed fully in contraceptive “safe-sex”- and, that it is good for them to be freed from inherited authorities of parents, community, church and Mosque because the aforesaid impose “outdated values” which inhibit child’s growth. In dictatorship of relativism, which is now a part and parcel of the today’s new liberal, the cardinal virtue are affirmation of one’s “personal choices”, nonjudgmentalism, transgenderism, non-binarism, abortion, bisexuality, intersexuality, queer sexuality, animalism and bestiality (legalized in America by ex-President Barak Obama).
Talking about Obama legalizing bestiality as the U.S President, President Trump is loathed as the offscouring of the earth by the CNN, BBC, New York Times and other liberal media directly opposed to what Obama stood for at the White House. For refusing to imbibe “political correctness”, Trump is accused of being unrefined, insolent, brash and rude. He is a racist. He is a mad man. He is an idiot. Unfortunately the undiscerning who have no foggiest idea why the left is calumniating Trump are ready to indulge their prejudices by believing anything said against Trump without verifying whether the accusations are true or not. At the greatest height of these unsubstantiated accusations in 2016, the white voters, non-white voters, Latino voters, college educated white voters, young adult white voters in the age bracket of 18-29, black voters and even American women voters stunned the left and voted for Trump.
Now, with only 26 days to the American Presidential election, Trump remains the loathsome man in the liberal media. Many still wonder why many Americans elected Trump to the presidency in 2016 in the first place, and, still poised to elect him again in 2020. If you want to understand why Trump is a sign of contradiction, you should read F.H. Buckley’s The Republican Workers Party: How the Trump Victory Drove Everyone Crazy, and Why It Was Just What We Needed. In this work, Buckley, who is a professor law at George Mason’s Scalia School of Law and an erudite writer, explains that Trump keeps triumphing because those opposing him fail to understand that the meaning of the “American dream”. The “American dream” is often misunderstood as driven by materialism and economic prosperity. This misconception traces back to the time Alexis de Tocqueville took up the assignment of studying the American democracy. But as far as Buckley is concerned, the “American dream” goes beyond economic prosperity: Americans also clamour for enduring fundamental principles. They want to leave good legacies for their children, who they hope—or used to hope—would achieve greatness.
Trump may be an idiot. But he is a useful idiot. I prefer a useful idiot who brings back the Almighty God to the White House, American public space and American schools to a clever-by-half orator who through his oratorical skills imposes gods of sexual licentiousness, carnality, eroticism, transgenderism, occultism, Satanism and mammonism in America. I prefer a useful idiot who will not be afraid to look at a Nigerian leader in his face and ask him, “Why are you killing Christians in Nigeria?” to a “politically correct” leader who tacitly supports the killing of Nigerian Christians. I prefer a useful idiot who stops infanticide to a genius who legalizes infanticide. I prefer a useful idiot who permits the teaching of moral instruction in schools to a Harvard University-graduate genius who authorizes the teaching of the techniques of having “safe-sex”, bestiality, exercising gay and transgender rights for teens in schools. I prefer a useful idiot who guarantees my right to religious freedom to a deceitful and pretentious leader who allows the killers of the infidels to kill me and my family. “If you remove the word ‘human’ and all that the belief in the supernatural has given to man, you can view him finally as no more than an extremely clever, adaptable, and mischievous little animal.” (T.S Elliot). In the same vein, if you give a man all the material possessions in this world in exchange for his soul, you would have succeeded in reducing him to the level of a clever animal.
