New word coined; "disnormal" sheds light on situation

Since I've chosen to eschew the state I call the New Normal, I'd better be sure you understand my terms. Normal is defined, roughly speaking, as a state of being somewhere around the middle ground, whether it be in values, behavior or circumstance. My feeling is this New Normal represents a shift, too violent many would say, toward a zeitgeist, an ethos, in which we accept as "normal" what we would have viewed in more balanced, less troubled times as wildly aberrant.

To help us track this kind of violent shift away from American values, I'm going to refer to each act or set of acts as "disnormal," indicating a perversion of accepted cultural, historical and traditional ethics and mores.

Okay?

Let's try it out. In recent months the Congress passed a transportation bill that was nortorious for its pork-barrel spending, thus proving that Republicans who claim they are fiscally conservative can out-pork the best Democratic spender who ever lived. The most toasted bit of pork in the bill was the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" linking an Alaskan town to a nearby island to help 50 people get to the other side, at a cost of $223 million.

When in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita the Congress was looking at pork to trim, Repubican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska threatened to resign if funding for the bridge was pulled. It wasn't.

But now The Heritage Foundation, hardly a liberal bunch, has reported that the bridge is no more, having felt the knife in conference committee. Still, and perhaps to keep Senator Stevens quiet, the $223 million still goes to Alaska to spend as it wishes. Looks like we trimmed the fat and threw it to the wolves.

We will in the future call this sort of behavior "disnormal."

Okay?