The phrase “New Normal” is like “critical race theory.” The chattering class hates it, and bristles: There is no push for a New Normal. Also, a New Normal is good, and necessary. The people who want the Old Normal are probably fascists. What was Hitler, if not an advocate of the Old Normal of ancient Teutonic virtues? There you go.

No one knows what the New Normal is, aside from “masks unto the end of days,” with the concomitant conviction that everyone is exhaling an invisible cloud of poison. The phrase has an almost erotic appeal to progressives, because it seems to leapfrog all the bothersome work involved in changing hearts and minds, rearranging things through plebiscites and governmental bodies. Covid changed everything! Let’s get busy.

“I hate to be the one to break this bad news,” said a doctor on Twitter the other day, “but guys, things are never going to return to ‘normal’ and neither are you. Plan accordingly.”

No. As a big fan of Old Normal, or “Classic Normal” as some call it, I am a Neo-Orderalist denier. To explain why I want the old world back, let us take a digression into a topic dear to my heart: the reinvention of paper towels.

A few years ago some genius invented the select-a-size paper towel. Instead of a standard square, the individual sheets were narrower — say, five-eighths of the usual size. A helpful picture on the package showed how you could use the smallest size for a little spill, two for an ordinary job, or three for big, demanding chores, like scooping up something the dog hawked on the good rug. It’s always the good rug. I guarantee you the first dog ever domesticated blarged up on the good bearskin the chieftain kept on the cave floor, almost as a test. If I can get away with this, we got it made.

Anyway, now you could select your own size for cleaning up messes, freed from the rigid square-sheet paradigm into which humanity had been locked for decades. No more wasting a big sheet to daub up a dab of jam! You could adjudicate precisely the quantity of towel needed.

Why, you’d feel a smug sense of pity if you visited a friend who could not select his own size. Still taking your marching orders from Big Towels, eh?

It may strike some as “late-stage capitalism,” a term used by unhappy socialists who believe such innovations stand in the way of turning our attention to true and necessary goals, like making everyone in America ride a bike to work and live in a dense apartment block that’s within walking distance of a grocery, a museum, an abortion clinic, and a vaccination center. Do you really need the option of selecting your own paper-towel sizes?

“Policemen in Seattle, Washington, wearing masks made by the Seattle Chapter of the Red Cross, during the influenza epidemic.”

National Archives

Hah! Sorry, this is America. “Need” is not the word you’re looking for. Try “want.” But to the tiresome scolds, such innovations belong in the same category as “35 types of deodorant” and Wi-Fi toothbrushes that count your strokes and send text updates to the video screen on your fridge to remind you to floss. They’re products of a land of bounty and innovation. Signifiers of a culture so insanely rich, it can turn its attention to the psychology of paper-towel consumption.

If it sounds as if I’m overthinking this, well, sure. I do the household shopping, and I have a lot of time in the aisles to study the vagaries and varieties of common necessities. Paper towels, I’ve learned, are the leading edge of the New Normal. Before Covid, paper towels had seasonal designs. Paper napkins, the same: snowflakes for winter, flowers for spring. Kitchen sponges came in packs of six, with six colorful patterns. Not anymore.

Everything’s generic. It makes sense. Wherever the New Normal takes hold, everything is at least 3.67 percent worse.

There are people whose heart skips a beat when they read about a new stealth Omicron variant in a French village, and figure this means at least three months of mask mandates on flights from Fargo to Bozeman, and they are hugely annoyed if you note that the New Normal is drab and depressing. The time for such fripperies has passed, citizen! Be grateful you have paper napkins at all. It is one thing to expect select-a-size towels in a pandemic, but to expect a seasonal pattern when our hospitals are overwhelmed?

As one tweet put it, replying to the no–Old Normal doctor: “We could demand something better than normal. We could come together at this pivotal moment and demand a livable planet and life for all. Normal was a short path to mass death for people and for animals and the planet. Normal was not okay.”

Climate change, in other words. A short path to mass death. That was January 2020. It takes a disordered mind to look back on that time with fondness.

I’m lucky I have a few old pre-pandemic rolls of towels, so I can show them to kids in 30 years. They’ll be delighted by the designs. Or they might narrow their eyes and ask Gramps in a cold tone of voice why I was slaughtering trees when sustainable hemp-based alternatives were available. Perhaps I’ll be reported. “And he tried to bribe us with Werther’s candies to be silent, too. Not even the soft ones, but the hard ones you have to work on for half an hour.”

“Is this true, Mein Herr? Your papers, please.”

Okay. One sheet, two, or three?