The Ecphorizer

Jack Brown Endorses Normalcy
Neal Wilgus

Issue #56 (April 1986)


Normalcy, Ohio (LEAK) — In a speech before the National Normalcy Alliance convention today, Jack Brown gave his quasi-endorsement to the Normalcy Wave. Proclaiming his allegiance to the Right-to-Normalcy principle, Brown stopped short of voicing his approval of the controversial Normalcy

A great wave of normalcy is sweeping the planet'

Amendment, advocated by the Uncles' March For Normalcy (UMFN) which hosts the yearly convention.

[quoteright]Brown, author of The Nose in the Pyramid and other books, rejected the calls for Gay Normalcy, Feminine Normalcy and Militant Normalcy which had been voiced in earlier speeches, and called instead for the more moderate position he labeled "normal normalcy." "Followers of Neo-Normalcy and the Normalitarian Movement are just as extreme in their own way," Brown said, "and we should be prepared to round them up and head them off."

Normal normalcy, Brown went on, is a more scientifically precise approach, calling as it does for the establishment of a national normalcy test to establish norms and deviations in the Normalcy Quotient (NQ) of the population as a whole. "Only then," Brown said, "can we establish normal relations on quantified terms and controlling for normal fluctuations in normalcy currents."

Brown then introduced his special assistant, Ambrose Fort, who spoke for some time on the history and philosophy of the Normalcy Wave. "The first Normalcy Wave began under the Great Bloviator himself, Warren G. Harding," Fort told the convention, "when Harding's disciple, Neil Sineffrin, proclaimed that 'A great wave of normalcy is sweeping the planet.'" The second wave, Fort went on, occurred in the 1950s under President Eisenhower, and the present third wave had its beginnings during the Ford administration.

Neil Sineffrin, Fort said, had established the Normalcy Ashram near Blooming Grove, Ohio, soon after Harding died in 1923, and it was at the Ashram that Sineffrin came to realize that normal people can be separated into three types — normal A (aggressive, prone to stress), normal B (bewildered, easily led), and normal C (normal). Sineffrin's classic study Normalcy on Parade (1937), and his editorship of The Journal of American Normalcy from 1929 to 1941, established him as the Grand Old Man of Normalcy until his death in 1942.

Eventually the Ashram became the town of Normalcy, and the rest, as Jack Brown pointed out after Fort's presentation, is normalcy. Brown then gave an hour of extemporaneous footnotes and addenda to Fort's groundwork, recalling for the audience his own role in organizing the UMFN, the mass demonstrations that followed, the cries of "We Demand Normalcy!" and "Normalcy Now!" that were heard throughout the world. "Next to the Blovitarian Movement, which Ambrose here is so closely identified with," Brown noted, "the Normalcy Wave is the most profound development in, certainly, this century.

"The fact that the same man fathered both Normalcy and the Blovitarians is indeed inspirational," he concluded.

There followed the presentation of the classic movie I Remember Normalcy (1950) and the recent TV docudrama Normalcy Revisited, narrated by Leo Sineffrin, the grandson of the Ashram's founder. Jack Brown then closed the convention with a stirring pep talk, which concluded with his    exhortation: "President Harding inspired us all with his cry 'Back to Normalcy!' But I say unto you there's more to come. I say — 'Forward to Normalcy!'"

Then the band ripped into a stirring rendition of "The Normalcy Rag" and everyone took the rest of the day off. 


NEAL WILGUS returns to these pages after a lapse of several years. He is, among other things, author of a book called The Illuminoids.

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