Time is a lot shorter than we imagine.

In looking at the old newspapers I sometimes put up here, I saw in a local paper that the building that I work in was sold this past week. . . 100 years ago.  It made the front page as it was one of the few "skyscraper" buildings in town at the time.  Maybe the only one.

That is, news of that sale hit the front page on December 31, 1920.   The building was 103 years old at the time. The new owner soon changed the name of the building to what it is today.

Yesterday I had a man in the office who was 93 years old. He asked about some details of the building and lawyers who had practiced in it in the past.  We spoke about the sidewalk out front and that some odds and ends.  He noted that out in front, on the street, "there were probably horses back then".  

No doubt there were some.

He was ten years old when this building was 13 years old. That struck me at the time.

The building was built in 1917 and first occupied in 1918.  I don't know when he first saw it, but it would have been in its early history.  That's stuck with me.  I can recall things easily back when I was ten.  He may have recalled this building when it was only a little over 20 years old, maybe even earlier than that.

For that matter, I recall this building being here, and my father having business in it, over 40 years ago, maybe 50 years ago, when the building was less than 50 years of age itself.

I've worked in the building for 30 years.  It was 73 years old when I started working here.  The man I was talking to was 63 then.  My father would have been 59, two years older than I am now.  He died at age 62.

Time just gets away from us.

The last dialogue from True Grit.

December 31, 1920. Review of the Year.

 

Blog Mirror: Tom Purcell - Longing for authenticity

 

Tom Purcell - Longing for authenticity

A 2020 Holiday Reflection. Part 2 of 3, . . . maybe. The Mehr Mensch Sein Edition.

Earlier in this blog I ran a long piece on what changes the pandemic might bring to us. Changes, that is, that would be deep and long lasting.  That items started off as follows:

Which way is the wind blowing? Changes: The Impact of the Coronavirus Pandemic

The professor visits yet again.

I have several threads that are nearly ready but not quite ready, for publication that I just stopped working on due to the Pandemic. They seemed entirely superficial in context.  As the pandemic has worn on, of course, the blog has been slowly returning to superficiality, as those who stop in here have perhaps noted, but there's no escaping the fact that things are weird right now, and they may continue to be for a long time.

In that article I examined if the pandemic might expose the falsity of the modern life and turning people back towards, well, reality.

Indeed, as odd as it may seem, up until I started writing this post, I was struggling with how to start it.  As much text as gets spewed forth here (and its proof I need to get to work on my novel, more on that coming up) you wouldn't guess that.  I'd decided, in fact, to start this post off with Billie Eilish and Ellen Page, but obviously I didn't.  More on that later.

Anyhow, others might put it different. Turn back towards things that matter, perhaps.  Well, maybe they have. Consider this episode of NPR's Politics:

What Will Justice And Foreign Policy Look Like Under Joe Biden?

Eh?

Well toward the end, there's the "can't let go segment", but it is instead an early, by just a week, compilation of things that the hosts are going to look back on the year fondly about, which may sound odd.  But one of those things is how much more they were at home, with their families.

When I looked at this topic earlier I had some hope, but not as much as others, that people might turn back towards certain fundamentals.  I started off fairly strong with that hope at first, somewhat like Fr. Dwight Longnecker, whom I quoted in that item, but the hope has dimmed a great deal.

Indeed, since the Election its really worn off.  I'd tack some of that up to the Pandemic.  People have been in their homes, cooped up, or at least not getting out. And by not getting out, they're become prey to their own fears and vices.

According to people who track these things, visits to Pornhub, some sort of pornography website, are way up in 2020.  People don't like to be honest about pornography, and even what it is.  The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition is pornography, it's just we're so pornified that we tend not to realize that. 

And pornography is prostitution.  According to those who study it, it's literally prostitution in the classic sense in many instances.  Many of the anonymous young women who are photographed, and its mostly women have fallen into the "world's oldest profession" and therefore getting photographed isn't worse than what they're already doing a few times a day for cash.  Indeed, it's probably a welcome break, except that many, many women in that category are species of slaves and really can't leave what the dim "woke" have come to call "sex work".  Enslaved by desperation, drugs, or guaranteed violence should they attempt to leave, they don't have much freedom to leave and they're not making most of the money either for what they're selling, including selling their images. And those images are sold so that men can. . . well you know, over them.  It's vile and wrong.

2020 also saw a spike in murders and suicides we're now reading.  And both the increase in porn viewing and violence have the same root to at least some degree, and to a large degree fairly substantially.  Men alone at home and lonely are resorting to cyber female substitutes and some of the alone are killing themselves intentionally or accidentally.  Sales of alcohol, the legal substance that fuels vice of all sorts, are way up this year.  Sales of illegal drugs almost certainly are.  Of note, some big cities that closed everything down early on didn't touch liquor stores, marijuana dispensaries and porn shops.

For where your treasure is, your heart will be also.

Matthew 6:21.

Pretty clearly, our heart is in the wrong place.

We put it there some time ago, and I've written about that a great deal here on this blog.  It's hard, as I've noted before, to really tell when that started but there are a pile of elements that go into it.  The irony is that where' the same species we were 100,000 and more years ago, so our basic desires, needs and wants remain the same.

But we can't seem to recognize that.

Which is why during a year like this its' not surprising to find the end of the year featuring a couple of celebrity cries for help not recognized as such.

The first one I was going to mention was Billie Eilish, whom I was originally going to start this blog off with.  I'm not an Eilish fan by any means.  Indeed, while even at my advance old age I like some younger acts, I'm singularly unimpressed by Eilish and I don't really think any of her fans like her music because she has real musical talent. Rather, I think young women like her music as she's a teenager with angst and young men like her as she's cute.

Anyhow, watching her slow motion public melt down makes some things pretty clear. She's been powerfully screwed up by the influence of her parents and environment even though she has talent.  She's looking for a way out, but she's not finding it.

As noted, Eilish is what men regard as cute, and even attractive, in a woman her age and what women regard as fat.  She's made an image out trying to have people avoid looking at her for both of those reasons, whether she really fully realizes it or not.   She is, also, a big gal, as in a little chunky, but not in a way that makes her enormous, but which obviously makes her self conscience in 2020 and which would have caused the press to declare her "voluptuous" and a "bombshell" in the 1950s.

If she wasn't messed up, she'd be able to deal with this, and plenty of singers have.  Indeed, female media personalities who have figured out the overall dynamics of how this works have made a living from it.  Kate Upton is a pretty big gal too, and there are no doubt piles of other examples a more informed person could give.  Any of the 1960s Italian actresses would fit into this category, for example.

But the actresses of the 1960s lived in the early Playboy era when Playboy was busy converting the image of women into what it would descend into, so while its not a claim to virtue, Claudia Cardinale didn't have to live in the screwed up world in her prime that Billie Eilish is in hers.  And to add to it, Eilish has that somewhat overweight, roundy, anemic look that a lot of vegetarians acquire in the misdirected believe that that diet is "kind" or will extent their lives out beyond infinity.  Eilish, therefore, is melting down in public as she doesn't have a chance, or at least overcoming all that is stacked up against her is going to be pretty impossible.  Once the cute wears off its an even bet whether her career bites the dust or not.  If it doesn't, its either going to be something much more substantial than it currently is or something much weirder than it currently is.  I.e., is she on the Taylor Swift track, or the "Lady Gaga" one?  We can hope she's on her own, but she'll have to overcome her upbringing and insecurities to get there. She's still young, so maybe she can.

Which takes us to Ellen Page.  And to this (which will also be the topic of a future entry at some point):

This is a graphical representation of the idealized human diploid karyotype.  This particular examples shows the organization of the genome into chromosomes, further showing both the female (XX) and male (XY) versions of the 23rd chromosome pair.

This gets into the field of evolutionary biology which, as a geologist, we're huge on.  Sociologist may like to sit around and debate nurture vs. nature but geologist don't, as that debate is unscientific complete crap.  This doesn't mean that environment doesn't matter.  Of course it does.  But the fundamentals of your DNA are fundamentals.

This is what really determines the basic nature of what you are.  It's a biological and physical fact and it doesn't care if you feel you aren't comfortable in your own body.  It is.  It controls far, far more than what you might imagine or care to imagine.  It makes you essentially identical, in so far as any remote observer might care to note, with any member of homo sapiens sapiens back to the dawn of our species, whether that be 100,000 years ago or 200,000 years ago.  Indeed, you share so much of this with closely related subspecies, like Neanderthals, or preceding species, like Denisovans, that a good argument can be made that they're simply subspecies of us.  It's clear that we could breed with them, and that we did.   

This doesn't mean that we are perfect in every fashion or that we ever have been.  No mammal or any other living thing is.  Indeed, mutations are both a defect and part of how we evolve, so they are part of the process. That's why we aren't Denisovans today.  We are, however, Homo Sapien Sapiens and our DNA  hasn't changed in any substantial fashion whatsoever for the last 150,000 years plus.  The big changes, if you want to regard them as such, is that our skull volume is a little smaller than our ancestors, which means they actually had bigger brains, which may not mean anything whatsoever or which may in fact mean that they had something going on up there we don't, whatever that is.  We're not really sure what our appendix does and thought at one time it was a vestigial organ that they used, but current views on that no longer hold that's the case. And they always had at least (and yes, I do mean at least) four extra molars that some of us have now and some of us don't.

They also had all the usual sex organs and sexual dimorphism that we do now, and all the same desires.  And it worked in the classic fashion.  The reason that some human populations still back around bits and pieces of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA is for that reason.  Whatever else may be the case, Cro Magnon men though Neanderthal women hot enough to . . . well you know.

All of which gets to this.  Ellen Page is a woman and the fact that she doesn't want to be, and has declared herself to be Elliot Page, doesn't change that.  You can't wish away your DNA.  And you can't wish away what your DNA does and wants you to do.  This doesn't mean, we'd note, that she's not attracted sexually to other women.  I'll take it at her word that she is. But it also means that she's a woman who is attracted to other women, a phenomenon that's not novel in any fashion.

Anyhow, what you can do, as we're a really smart species, is wish things to be otherwise than they are, and most people do to some extent.  That sort of thing has gone on for a long time and in all sorts of areas of human life.  Some white academics, for example, in recent years have wished that they were ethnically black.  Some years ago a university professor in a university made a big deal out of being a Native American, which it later turned out to be he wasn't, but he continued to insist he was.  Elizabeth Warren had to live down a false claim to being a Native American more recently.  And so on.

Indeed, most people have at least something about themselves that they wish wasn't.  Billie Eilish (her again) apparently is uncomfortable with being kind of a big gal, and that's really common with young women in particular.  Lots of people who are short wish they were taller.  Based on the ads for surgeons I see around here, lots of small chested women wish they were built like Sophia Loren or Claudia Cardinale, or the person we stumbled on here to our horror due to the Tribune not giving us any read flags awhile back.  Some really strong compulsions that put those who have them out of sink with the larger culture or simply their own lives must be things that those who have them daily wish they did not.  Everyone has a cross to bear and I'd guess a fair number of those crosses are deeply seated compulsions and desires.

That some men are sexually attracted to other men has been something that has occurred for eons.  That some women are sexually attracted to some women has also occurred for eons. While we know believe that we know everything as every generation of human beings believes that it knows everything and that all prior generations were dim, we really don't know why this is and the best evidence is that it has a strong environmental component to it.  If that is the case, that doesn't change that for the people who have that drive.  We went into this fairly deeply in a long post in May 2019.  Those compulsions don't change a person's biological makeup and certainly not their morphology.

And that is why they are different form the current focus on "transgenderism", which is something that the best evidence would suggest doesn't exist at all in biology, so it is solely environmental, and tends to be transitory in the young who claim it.  That is, a person can't really be a woman trapped inside a man's body or vice versa, as its biologically impossible.  A person can of course be a woman attracted to women who wishes they were a man, or vice versa, and examples of that have been around for a long time.  There's another term for that that was routinely used, but now all of this is becoming very confused by the transgender movement which is actually forcing people into new categories that they wouldn't have taken up before and which they may not wish to be doing, commonly, now.  It's something that hardly was commonly discussed until recently, although certainly its received some discussion over the past half century or more so its not completely new, and its now become so accepted in the United States that the US is repeating something that occurred in Europe and then retreated from there in accepting claims of the very young that they're experiencing it and causing the claimants to be chemically altered.  This has become so accepted that a liberal left wing newspaper reporter, Abagail Shirer attempting to report on it was basically censored for it, resorting to having to publish a book on it, Irreversible Damage:  The War On Our Daughters.  

A person isn't really supposed to discuss it as that's regarded as being socially unacceptable, even though not discussing something that's not very well understood at all may in fact later have the same implications of other things that our society once fully accepted and now we do not.  At one time we regarded as fully acceptable to perform medical tests on subjects without telling them it was being done.  At one time we neutered those who fell below a certain IQ and regarded that as kind.  Some young people were given lobotomy's at one time simply because they weren't quite as sharp as others and had reached the age of sexual maturity, Rosemary Kennedy providing a famous but hardly singular example.  We took, in the United States, Indian orphans away from their parents to educate them as non Indians and we took Indian orphans away from their tribes to give them up for adoption.  All of these things were regarded as "progressive", in the current common sense of the woke political word today, in their eras.  

None of which is intended to be an overall commentary on the phenomenon of what is being termed transgenderism at all. Something is going on with people who claim that, we should be careful about assuming that we know what it is and we should really be careful in regard to doing anything permanent to children. All of this commentary, however, should lead the careful reader to the question, at this point, of what do Ellen Page, Billie Eilish, the views of young women, suicide, have in common?

Well, we'll add some more things to that.

In the same year in which Billie Eilish and Ellen Page were uttering their cri de couer, and some overworked and not so overworked figures resorted to suicide, and the lonely resorted to the nude images of women they don't know and just imagine that they do, and others resorted to drugs and alcohol, and some became violent (and some resorted to mixes of all of the above), the nation went through a crisis of faith in its basic nature unlike any other since 1865.

Americans have been rightly criticized in the past for a strong belief in American exceptualism, which doesn't mean that the United States has not in fact been exceptional.  France is proud of its history including its spectacularly failed 18th Century revolution, which was the mother of all failed revolutions hence, but the American Revolution really did usher stable democracies into the world.  Right now, however, and in this year, things aren't looking so good.

The General Election of 2020 was free and fair and more voters turned out for it than for any other election over the past century. The nation should be proud of that.  Instead, the President of the United States has been attacking the legitimacy of the election and a large percentage of his followers believe his lies on this.  That too is at least partially a pandemic side effect, as thousands or millions of people have become completely self isolated in their views.

That problem has been going on for awhile, and its definitely Anti American in culture.  We like to claim that there's strength in our diversity, but we eschew diversity in a way that hasn't been seen since the 19th Century.  When the pandemic came we quit going to work with people who weren't like us as we just stayed home.  That dude at the water cooler who simply hung around to give his views on everything to everybody was now easy to avoid completely.  The guy you never saw at any time other than lunch who liked to talk politics, if only mostly to himself, was now home with himself.  The secretary who was running for school board was nowhere to be seen or listened to, and probably living off of assistance payments.  The guy at the office who seemingly has no other job but to wonder around and try to engage  you in talks about football or basketball during those seasons was home watching ESPN by himself.  The Jewish employee who was serious about Jewish holidays took those in only with his family members.

In the wake of that isolation has come isolation of views, even for those who are not fully isolated.  People who would have considered an opposing view from somebody they respected fully formed their own views without that input. By the time they rolled back around to meeting that respected individual, they'd already voted and concluded whether the election was fair our foul, sometimes fed only on news by the like minded.

And so too on the news of the virus.  People who would have gone to work and talked to the father whose son was a doctor, or a secretary whose sister is a nurse, or that guy who just likes to read science magazines, instead tuned in to those sources that they limit themselves to when their sources are limited, concluding in the end that well established science was wrong or worse.

All of which gets back to where we now are, and that's a mess.  We're incredibly isolated in our self isolation, focused on them vs. us if we're focused at all, or focused on how to distract ourselves by any means possible even at our own physical and metaphysical destruction.

So how do we get out of this place?

Well, it's going to be a major effort, and some of the institutions that need to get us out are still reeling from everything.  One of those I've already noted is really falling down locally in simply getting in touch with people.  And frankly most Americans institutions are firmly in the hands and control of the Baby Boom generation that encouraged and developed the lion's share of the social disfunction that we have now.  In other words, Billie Eilish's parents aren't going to lead us out of this and neither are Donald Trump or Joe Biden.  

Somebody's going to have to.

Well, I suppose I'm not without hope.  It seems to me that the young are trying.  Trying and failing in part, but still trying. And the strong structure of the real remains there, the real being unable to be destroyed by the generation that warned us not to trust anyone over 30. . . unless it was them in which case that mark has now moved down in the other direction.  And people have resumed some activities that have taken them out of the house and into the fields, and that's hopeful.

But they shouldn't have to go it all alone, and in large part, they are.  Concerned that "tradition is the democracy of the dead" mean excising the wisdom of the past and now reconstructing the best of it, which means to reconstruct values, is a hard project.  

It'll require a lot of work from a beat up, bruised, and sick society to do that.

On the plus side, however, it means that things will be, or can be, real.  Or at least you don't have to dress like a clown and worry you don't have a stick figure, and can save some bucks on hair die.

And maybe you ought to go out ice fishing this winter, read a book, and investigate the mysteries of the Mass or Devine Liturgy, read a long Russian novel, call an aunt or uncle, and other things real.

Mid Week At Work: Vermont State Trooper, 1936

Some states have state troopers, some have highway patrolmen.  In any event, this week's reflection on work is put up noting the dedication of the first freeway in the United States on this date in 1940, four years after this photo was taken across the country.

December 30, 1940. The Freeway

 The Arroyo Seco Parkway, California's first freeway, opened.

I don't know what I think of this event.  It was no doubt necessary, but it also was an early sign that California was becoming congested.

It's hard to admire in any sense what California has become, and there's a lesson in that for everyone.

More on that here:

Today in World War II History—December 30, 1940

And on the war:

Day 487 December 30, 1940

December 30, 1920. Criminals

The body of Monk Eastman, notorious criminal, receives a guard of honor from the New Yor, National Guard.

 

On this day in 1920, the remains of New York criminal, and heroic World War One veteran, Monk Eastman received a guard of honor on his way to his funeral

Eastman was a well known New York thug in an age filled with Empire State thugs.  He was 44 or 45 at the time of his death, making him an old soldier at the time of his enlistment.  He served heroically in the Great War and received a pardon from the Governor of New York before resorting to his prior life of crime.  He was gunned down by a criminal confederate after an argument about bootlegging proceeds, with the gunman claiming he feared for his life.

He was a bad man in an age filled with really bad men, and a good soldier.

The USS John D. Ford was commissioned.

The Clemson Class destroyer would serve through World War Two, but was sold for scrap prior to the Korean War.

An unknown Vietnamese Communist, Nguyn Ai Quoc, would address the French Communist Party on this day.

He would later be known as Ho Chi Minh and was one of a collection of nationalist, by not all means Communist, figures who would oppose the Japanese occupation and then the French return following World War Two.  A central figure in the Vietnamese Communist Party in the 40s and 50s he'd help shove aside the non Communist nationalist and thereby set his nation up for rivers of blood that would follow the French expulsion.

He deserves to remembered in unending infamy today, less bloody than Moa or Stalin, but still a figure representing a collection of real bastards.

On this day in 1920, coincidentally, Yugoslavia outlawed the Communist Party.  Outlawing a stupid idea rarely works, and instead causes it to fester, and following World War Two it would reemerge, although in a less virulent form than in the USSR, or for that matter Vietnam.

DETROIT IN THE GOOD OL' DAYS! 1961 Chevy TV Ad in Color

December 29, 1940. The Great Fire of London and the Arsenal of Democracy

Tank engine for M3 tank, which were used by the British and the Soviets in combat during the war, but not the US, being manufactured in a Chrysler plant.

On this date in 1940 President Roosevelt delivered his radio address that included the phrase "arsenal of democracy"

MY FRIENDS:

This is not a fireside chat on war. It is a talk on national security, because the nub of the whole purpose of your President is to keep you now, and your children later, and your grandchildren much later, out of a last-ditch war for the preservation of American independence and all of the things that American independence means to you and to me and to ours.

Tonight, in the presence of a world crisis, my mind goes back eight years to a night in the midst of a domestic crisis. It was a time when the wheels of American industry were grinding to a full stop, when the whole banking system of our country had ceased to function.

I well remember that while I sat in my study in the White House, preparing to talk with the people of the United States, I had before my eyes the picture of all those Americans with whom I was talking. I saw the workmen in the mills, the mines, the factories; the girl behind the counter; the small shopkeeper; the farmer doing his spring plowing; the widows and the old men wondering about their life's savings.

I tried to convey to the great mass of American people what the banking crisis meant to them in their daily lives.

Tonight, I want to do the same thing, with the same people, in this new crisis which faces America.

We met the issue of 1933 with courage and realism.

We face this new crisis -- this new threat to the security of our nation -- with the same courage and realism.

Never before since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock has our American civilization been in such danger as now.

For, on September 27th, 1940, this year, by an agreement signed in Berlin, three powerful nations, two in Europe and one in Asia, joined themselves together in the threat that if the United States of America interfered with or blocked the expansion program of these three nations -- a program aimed at world control -- they would unite in ultimate action against the United States.

The Nazi masters of Germany have made it clear that they intend not only to dominate all life and thought in their own country, but also to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world.

It was only three weeks ago their leader stated this: " There are two worlds that stand opposed to each other." And then in defiant reply to his opponents, he said this: "Others are correct when they say: With this world we cannot ever reconcile ourselves .... I can beat any other power in the world." So said the leader of the Nazis.

In other words, the Axis not merely admits but the Axis proclaims that there can be no ultimate peace between their philosophy of government and our philosophy of government.

In view of the nature of this undeniable threat, it can be asserted, properly and categorically, that the United States has no right or reason to encourage talk of peace, until the day shall come when there is a clear intention on the part of the aggressor nations to abandon all thought of dominating or conquering the world.

At this moment, the forces of the states that are leagued against all peoples who live in freedom are being held away from our shores. The Germans and the Italians are being blocked on the other side of the Atlantic by the British, and by the Greeks, and by thousands of soldiers and sailors who were able to escape from subjugated countries. In Asia the Japanese are being engaged by the Chinese nation in another great defense.

In the Pacific Ocean is our fleet.

Some of our people like to believe that wars in Europe and in Asia are of no concern to us. But it is a matter of most vital concern to us that European and Asiatic war-makers should not gain control of the oceans which lead to this hemisphere.

One hundred and seventeen years ago the Monroe Doctrine was conceived by our Government as a measure of defense in the face of a threat against this hemisphere by an alliance in Continental Europe. Thereafter, we stood (on) guard in the Atlantic, with the British as neighbors. There was no treaty. There was no "unwritten agreement."

And yet, there was the feeling, proven correct by history, that we as neighbors could settle any disputes in peaceful fashion. And the fact is that during the whole of this time the Western Hemisphere has remained free from aggression from Europe or from Asia.

Does anyone seriously believe that we need to fear attack anywhere in the Americas while a free Britain remains our most powerful naval neighbor in the Atlantic? And does anyone seriously believe, on the other hand, that we could rest easy if the Axis powers were our neighbors there?

If Great Britain goes down, the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the high seas -- and they will be in a position to bring enormous military and naval resources against this hemisphere. It is no exaggeration to say that all of us, in all the Americas, would be living at the point of a gun -- a gun loaded with explosive bullets, economic as well as military.

We should enter upon a new and terrible era in which the whole world, our hemisphere included, would be run by threats of brute force. And to survive in such a world, we would have to convert ourselves permanently into a militaristic power on the basis of war economy.

Some of us like to believe that even if (Great) Britain falls, we are still safe, because of the broad expanse of the Atlantic and of the Pacific.

But the width of those (these) oceans is not what it was in the days of clipper ships. At one point between Africa and Brazil the distance is less from Washington than it is from Washington to Denver, Colorado -- five hours for the latest type of bomber. And at the North end of the Pacific Ocean America and Asia almost touch each other.

Why, even today we have planes that (which) could fly from the British Isles to New England and back again without refueling. And remember that the range of a (the) modern bomber is ever being increased.

During the past week many people in all parts of the nation have told me what they wanted me to say tonight. Almost all of them expressed a courageous desire to hear the plain truth about the gravity of the situation. One telegram, however, expressed the attitude of the small minority who want to see no evil and hear no evil, even though they know in their hearts that evil exists. That telegram begged me not to tell again of the ease with which our American cities could be bombed by any hostile power which had gained bases in this Western Hemisphere. The gist of that telegram was: "Please, Mr. President, don't frighten us by telling us the facts."

Frankly and definitely there is danger ahead -- danger against which we must prepare. But we well know that we cannot escape danger (it), or the fear of danger, by crawling into bed and pulling the covers over our heads.

Some nations of Europe were bound by solemn non-intervention pacts with Germany. Other nations were assured by Germany that they need never fear invasion. Non-intervention pact or not, the fact remains that they were attacked, overrun, (and) thrown into (the) modern (form of) slavery at an hour's notice, or even without any notice at all. As an exiled leader of one of these nations said to me the other day, "The notice was a minus quantity. It was given to my Government two hours after German troops had poured into my country in a hundred places."

The fate of these nations tells us what it means to live at the point of a Nazi gun.

The Nazis have justified such actions by various pious frauds. One of these frauds is the claim that they are occupying a nation for the purpose of "restoring order." Another is that they are occupying or controlling a nation on the excuse that they are "protecting it" against the aggression of somebody else.

For example, Germany has said that she was occupying Belgium to save the Belgians from the British. Would she then hesitate to say to any South American country, "We are occupying you to protect you from aggression by the United States?"

Belgium today is being used as an invasion base against Britain, now fighting for its life. And any South American country, in Nazi hands, would always constitute a jumping-off place for German attack on any one of the other republics of this hemisphere.

Analyze for yourselves the future of two other places even nearer to Germany if the Nazis won. Could Ireland hold out? Would Irish freedom be permitted as an amazing pet exception in an unfree world? Or the Islands of the Azores which still fly the flag of Portugal after five centuries? You and I think of Hawaii as an outpost of defense in the Pacific. And yet, the Azores are closer to our shores in the Atlantic than Hawaii is on the other side.

There are those who say that the Axis powers would never have any desire to attack the Western Hemisphere. That (this) is the same dangerous form of wishful thinking which has destroyed the powers of resistance of so many conquered peoples. The plain facts are that the Nazis have proclaimed, time and again, that all other races are their inferiors and therefore subject to their orders. And most important of all, the vast resources and wealth of this American Hemisphere constitute the most tempting loot in all of the round world.

Let us no longer blind ourselves to the undeniable fact that the evil forces which have crushed and undermined and corrupted so many others are already within our own gates. Your Government knows much about them and every day is ferreting them out.

Their secret emissaries are active in our own and in neighboring countries. They seek to stir up suspicion and dissension to cause internal strife. They try to turn capital against labor, and vice versa. They try to reawaken long slumbering racist and religious enmities which should have no place in this country. They are active in every group that promotes intolerance. They exploit for their own ends our own natural abhorrence of war. These trouble-breeders have but one purpose. It is to divide our people, to divide them into hostile groups and to destroy our unity and shatter our will to defend ourselves.

There are also American citizens, many of then in high places, who, unwittingly in most cases, are aiding and abetting the work of these agents. I do not charge these American citizens with being foreign agents. But I do charge them with doing exactly the kind of work that the dictators want done in the United States.

These people not only believe that we can save our own skins by shutting our eyes to the fate of other nations. Some of them go much further than that. They say that we can and should become the friends and even the partners of the Axis powers. Some of them even suggest that we should imitate the methods of the dictatorships. But Americans never can and never will do that.

The experience of the past two years has proven beyond doubt that no nation can appease the Nazis. No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it. There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness. There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb. We know now that a nation can have peace with the Nazis only at the price of total surrender.

Even the people of Italy have been forced to become accomplices of the Nazis, but at this moment they do not know how soon they will be embraced to death by their allies.

The American appeasers ignore the warning to be found in the fate of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and France. They tell you that the Axis powers are going to win anyway; that all of this bloodshed in the world could be saved, that the United States might just as well throw its influence into the scale of a dictated peace, and get the best out of it that we can.

They call it a "negotiated peace." Nonsense! Is it a negotiated peace if a gang of outlaws surrounds your community and on threat of extermination makes you pay tribute to save your own skins?

Such a dictated peace would be no peace at all. It would be only another armistice, leading to the most gigantic armament race and the most devastating trade wars in all history. And in these contests the Americas would offer the only real resistance to the Axis powers.

With all their vaunted efficiency, with all their (and) parade of pious purpose in this war, there are still in their background the concentration camp and the servants of God in chains.

The history of recent years proves that the shootings and the chains and the concentration camps are not simply the transient tools but the very altars of modern dictatorships. They may talk of a "new order" in the world, but what they have in mind is only (but) a revival of the oldest and the worst tyranny. In that there is no liberty, no religion, no hope.

The proposed "new order" is the very opposite of a United States of Europe or a United States of Asia. It is not a government based upon the consent of the governed. It is not a union of ordinary, self-respecting men and women to protect themselves and their freedom and their dignity from oppression. It is an unholy alliance of power and pelf to dominate and to enslave the human race.

The British people and their allies today are conducting an active war against this unholy alliance. Our own future security is greatly dependent on the outcome of that fight. Our ability to "keep out of war" is going to be affected by that outcome.

Thinking in terms of today and tomorrow, I make the direct statement to the American people that there is far less chance of the United States getting into war if we do all we can now to support the nations defending themselves against attack by the Axis than if we acquiesce in their defeat, submit tamely to an Axis victory, and wait our turn to be the object of attack in another war later on.

If we are to be completely honest with ourselves, we must admit that there is risk in any course we may take. But I deeply believe that the great majority of our people agree that the course that I advocate involves the least risk now and the greatest hope for world peace in the future.

The people of Europe who are defending themselves do not ask us to do their fighting. They ask us for the implements of war, the planes, the tanks, the guns, the freighters which will enable them to fight for their liberty and for our security. Emphatically we must get these weapons to them, get them to them in sufficient volume and quickly enough, so that we and our children will be saved the agony and suffering of war which others have had to endure.

Let not the defeatists tell us that it is too late. It will never be earlier. Tomorrow will be later than today.

Certain facts are self-evident.

In a military sense Great Britain and the British Empire are today the spearhead of resistance to world conquest. And they are putting up a fight which will live forever in the story of human gallantry.

There is no demand for sending an American Expeditionary Force outside our own borders. There is no intention by any member of your Government to send such a force. You can, therefore, nail -- nail any talk about sending armies to Europe as deliberate untruth.

Our national policy is not directed toward war. Its sole purpose is to keep war away from our country and away from our people.

Democracy's fight against world conquest is being greatly aided, and must be more greatly aided, by the rearmament of the United States and by sending every ounce and every ton of munitions and supplies that we can possibly spare to help the defenders who are in the front lines. And it is no more unneutral for us to do that than it is for Sweden, Russia and other nations near Germany to send steel and ore and oil and other war materials into Germany every day in the week.

We are planning our own defense with the utmost urgency, and in its vast scale we must integrate the war needs of Britain and the other free nations which are resisting aggression.

This is not a matter of sentiment or of controversial personal opinion. It is a matter of realistic, practical military policy, based on the advice of our military experts who are in close touch with existing warfare. These military and naval experts and the members of the Congress and the Administration have a single-minded purpose -- the defense of the United States.

This nation is making a great effort to produce everything that is necessary in this emergency -- and with all possible speed. And this great effort requires great sacrifice.

I would ask no one to defend a democracy which in turn would not defend everyone in the nation against want and privation. The strength of this nation shall not be diluted by the failure of the Government to protect the economic well-being of its (all) citizens.

If our capacity to produce is limited by machines, it must ever be remembered that these machines are operated by the skill and the stamina of the workers. As the Government is determined to protect the rights of the workers, so the nation has a right to expect that the men who man the machines will discharge their full responsibilities to the urgent needs of defense.

The worker possesses the same human dignity and is entitled to the same security of position as the engineer or the manager or the owner. For the workers provide the human power that turns out the destroyers, and the (air)planes and the tanks.

The nation expects our defense industries to continue operation without interruption by strikes or lockouts. It expects and insists that management and workers will reconcile their differences by voluntary or legal means, to continue to produce the supplies that are so sorely needed.

And on the economic side of our great defense program, we are, as you know, bending every effort to maintain stability of prices and with that the stability of the cost of living.

Nine days ago I announced the setting up of a more effective organization to direct our gigantic efforts to increase the production of munitions. The appropriation of vast sums of money and a well coordinated executive direction of our defense efforts are not in themselves enough. Guns, planes, (and) ships and many other things have to be built in the factories and the arsenals of America. They have to be produced by workers and managers and engineers with the aid of machines which in turn have to be built by hundreds of thousands of workers throughout the land.

In this great work there has been splendid cooperation between the Government and industry and labor, and I am very thankful.

American industrial genius, unmatched throughout all the world in the solution of production problems, has been called upon to bring its resources and its talents into action. Manufacturers of watches, of farm implements, of linotypes, and cash registers, and automobiles, and sewing machines, and lawn mowers and locomotives are now making fuses, bomb packing crates, telescope mounts, shells, and pistols and tanks.

But all of our present efforts are not enough. We must have more ships, more guns, more planes -- more of everything. And this can only be accomplished if we discard the notion of "business as usual." This job cannot be done merely by superimposing on the existing productive facilities the added requirements of the nation for defense.

Our defense efforts must not be blocked by those who fear the future consequences of surplus plant capacity. The possible consequences of failure of our defense efforts now are much more to be feared.

And after the present needs of our defense are past, a proper handling of the country's peacetime needs will require all of the new productive capacity -- if not still more.

No pessimistic policy about the future of America shall delay the immediate expansion of those industries essential to defense. We need them.

I want to make it clear that it is the purpose of the nation to build now with all possible speed every machine, every arsenal, every (and) factory that we need to manufacture our defense material. We have the men -- the skill -- the wealth -- and above all, the will.

I am confident that if and when production of consumer or luxury goods in certain industries requires the use of machines and raw materials that are essential for defense purposes, then such production must yield, and will gladly yield, to our primary and compelling purpose.

So I appeal to the owners of plants -- to the managers -to the workers -- to our own Government employees -- to put every ounce of effort into producing these munitions swiftly and without stint. (And) With this appeal I give you the pledge that all of us who are officers of your Government will devote ourselves to the same whole-hearted extent to the great task that (which) lies ahead.

As planes and ships and guns and shells are produced, your Government, with its defense experts, can then determine how best to use them to defend this hemisphere. The decision as to how much shall be sent abroad and how much shall remain at home must be made on the basis of our overall military necessities.

We must be the great arsenal of democracy. For us this is an emergency as serious as war itself. We must apply ourselves to our task with the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice as we would show were we at war.

We have furnished the British great material support and we will furnish far more in the future.

There will be no "bottlenecks" in our determination to aid Great Britain. No dictator, no combination of dictators, will weaken that determination by threats of how they will construe that determination.

The British have received invaluable military support from the heroic Greek army and from the forces of all the governments in exile. Their strength is growing. It is the strength of men and women who value their freedom more highly than they value their lives.

I believe that the Axis powers are not going to win this war. I base that belief on the latest and best of information.

We have no excuse for defeatism. We have every good reason for hope -- hope for peace, yes, and hope for the defense of our civilization and for the building of a better civilization in the future.

I have the profound conviction that the American people are now determined to put forth a mightier effort than they have ever yet made to increase our production of all the implements of defense, to meet the threat to our democratic faith.

As President of the United States I call for that national effort. I call for it in the name of this nation which we love and honor and which we are privileged and proud to serve. I call upon our people with absolute confidence that our common cause will greatly succeed.

On the same day, a Luftwaffe air raid caused the "Second Great Fire of London in that city.

Post raid view from St. Paul's Cathedral, which survived the fire, looking towards the Old Bailey court, which also did.

Over 100,000 bombs fell on the city in the nighttime air raid. Deaths were surprisingly light, being under 200 in number, as the district hit was not one in which a large number of people lived.  The publishing industry was particularly hard hit by the raid, losing many of their publishing records as a result.

You can read more about the air raid and President Roosevelt's speech here:  

Today in World War II History—December 29, 1940

And more about that day in the war here:

Day 486 December 29, 1940

December 29, 1920. Death and taxes.

On this day in 1920 the Congressional Income Tax Committee met.

 

The oddball effort to make Fiume some sort of independent Italian state came to an end as Italian forces occupied the city.

Fireside Chat The Arsenal Of Democracy (December 29th 1940)

Blog Mirror: A Twixmas Poem

 

A Twixmas Poem

December 28, 1920. Famous Aviator and Aviatrix, Committees, Soviet Subjugation, the Roar from the 20s.

On  this day in 1920 a young Amelia Earhart rode in an airplane piloted by Frank Hawks at the California State Fair in Los Angeles.  She was 23 years old and her father paid the $10.00 charge for the ten minute flight.

Earhart in 1928.

It was the beginning of her interest in aviation.

We're all familiar with the Earhart story, of course, so I'll not go into it here.  Frank Hawks, however, is likely less well known to a modern audience, and of course there's no enduring mystery surrounding his death.

Frank Hawks.

Hawks had been an aviator in World War One and then was a record setting aviator after the war.  He retired from air racing in 1937 to become an executive in the Gwinn Aircar Company, being in charge of sales.  He flew around the country in that capacity demonstrating the safety features of the aircraft, but died in 1938 piloting one.

Gwinn Aircar.

Only two of the aircraft was ever made, and the Gwinn company subsequently folded.

Women in Washington D.C. who were on the inaugural committee were photographed.

Unlike now, the inauguration was in March at the time.

On the same day the Ukrainian communist party surrendered its independence to Russia's, which it probably had little choice but to do, in the Workers Peasant Union Treaty.  

Self determination of nations was a declared policy of Lenin's, but it was clearly not one that the Russian Reds meant.  At this point in time they were busy reassembling those portions of Imperial Russia that they could grab, and Trotsky was already proposing that the revolution should be taken to neighboring states.

General John T. Thompson received the first of his patents on his submachine gun.  The gun would go into production the following year but initial sales were poor.  The U.S. military did buy some, and it was intended as a military weapon, but overall it was a new gun in an era which didn't seem to require it.  The first real military application by the United States of the initial model, the M1921, came at the hands of the Marines in the Banana Wars.  The United States Postal Service bought some for guards and there were some police sales.  An early indication that it might acquire some infamy came in the form of sales that ended up being for the Irish Republican Army.

1921 advertisement for the expensive Thompson Sub Machine Gun.   While the gun may have been advertised as "sold only to law and order", it quickly came to be used by the unlawful and disorderly.

It would be the spate of Prohibition related crime, followed by Depression era crime, that would make the gun famous and which would in part lead to the National Firearms Act regulating the sales of automatic weapons.  A new improved version was introduced in 1928 which is the most famous various of the gun, outside the M1 version used during World War Two.

Lance Corporal of the British East Surry Regiment with M1928 Thompson Sub Machine Gun.

Of interest here, in redesigning the weapon for military use during World War Two it was discovered that part of the patented mechanism in the gun was unnecessary and it was omitted.  By that time soldiers were stripping the "H piece" from the earlier variants and leaving it out given that this slightly reduced the weight of a very heavy weapon.  M1A1 Thompsons remained expensive to produce and the military sought to supplant them during the war, but some remained in use as late as the Vietnam War.

And the Laramie Boomerang (from Wyoming Digital News Paper Collection) let the public know that it was flu season.

"Denver has outgrown us". El Chapultepec closes.

I really wondered how it was hanging on.

I'd never been in there, and I apparently never got a picture of it from the outside for our Painted Bricks blog.  It wasn't very photogenetic anyway.  But when the Mexican restaurant turned jazz club found itself no longer in the seedy Five Points district it had survived in for years, but in the new gentrified up and coming Coors Field area, without moving an inch, it just didn't look quite right.  It's old school "the nightlife ain't the right life, but it's my life" type of genuine atmosphere didn't squire with the hipsterization of where it was.

COVID 19 didn't help things, but the owners were quick to note that it wasn't solely responsible for brining its 87 year existence to an end.

Jazz musicians and blues musicians, they shouldn’t have to time their sets around baseball innings and when the crowds are going to get out and be wild. They should be able to play their music, and the crowd should just be there to enjoy them, The employees and our musicians, our customers, we shouldn’t have to be worried about our safety when it’s time to leave.

Denver’s outgrown us.

So stated one of the owners.

I love Coors Field and baseball, about the only thing about Denver I actually like. But there isn't anything I like about Denver without some degree of reservation.  Like everything else, there really isn't a permanent "old Denver" that was in some state of perfection.  The area that El Chapultepec was in prior to Coors Field was a scary dump which was a bit scary to drive through in the middle of the day.  It wasn't until Coors Field overhauled everything downtown that it changed.

But it was a change that to an end the feeling that the jazz club belonged there.  A jazz club could probably exist somewhere else in Denver, but it wouldn't be genuine in the same fashion that El Chapultepec was.

But that's true of a lot of Denver now.

Indeed, that's true of a lot of the US, but Denver is somehow sort of unique in this way.  The town that my father was born in, four years before El Chapultepec opened, was still around in many ways into the 1980s when I first started to go there on my own. Bits of that, indeed, still are.  But when it pulled out of the oil recession of the 1990s it really started off in another direction even as the oil companies came back.  Prior to that point it was sort of an overgrown cow town in some real ways. Then it started to become a hipster epicenter, followed soon thereafter by a new weedy culture based on pharmacological stupefaction. That's what basically characterizes the town town today.  And the change hasn't overall been a good one.

Not that those who hung out at the jazz club were models of universal clean living.  It was a bar. But the set in seediness in the old Five Points district was of a different sort than the new widespread seediness that characterizes a lot of Denver.  In between was sort of a high point when it looked like the city would overcome its decay without creating a new one, based on Coors Field and what it brought to the downtown.  It did partially succeed but weed took a lot of it away.

A 2020 Holiday Reflection. Part 1 of 2, . . . or 3, maybe. The Annus Horribilius Edition

No one can doubt that 2020 has been an awful year for humanity.  And 2021 is going to start off that way too.  Just rolling over from December 31 to January 1 doesn't make things suddenly better. 

March, they say, comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. . .but this year. . . 

Which is not to say that years don't have their own characters or that 2021 will not turn out better than 2020.  It almost certainly will. By this time next year COVID 19 should largely be beaten and, it if isn't, it'll be something that we will start receiving annual vaccinations for, or at least a lot of us will.

Back to 2020.

2020 has been the year in which the entire world was put to a stress test and the United States and its citizens particularly were.  There's been a lot of personal tragedy and disappointment, with some disappointment measuring towards tragedy.  

By and large the United States hasn't come out of this looking good. But then a lot of the Western world hasn't come out of it looking very good either.

2020 was always going to be a stressful year for Americans as something has gone wrong with the American body politic, and moreover American culture, that really started to fester within the last twelve years.  In future years historians are going to debate about the point at which what we just went through became inevitable, just as they debate the point at which the Civil War, the last somewhat analogous American event became inevitable.  I have my own theories about this, but suffice it to say, something really went off the rails in our culture and its politics during this time frame.

It had been going off the rails, in all honesty, for some time well before that, like a lot of things, it can be tracked back to the mid 20th Century.  Whatever else we surmise the culture started to experience some serious decay following the Second World War and pretty quickly at that. A cynic might say that the culture went from hypocrisy, on some things, to libertinism, and we could debate which is worse, and they'd be at least partially correct.  But at any rate cracks in the culture formed during the Second World War and began to widen considerably in the 1950s.  They really started to split in the 1960s when the Baby Boom generation came into their own.

That generation is still "in its own" and its fighting out a lot of its fights right now, even as its members increasingly reach advanced old age.  Be that as it may, in the 1980s a shift started to occur that was a reaction to much of what had occurred in the 1960s.

As that occurred, the cultural left in the country moved increasingly far to the left and following them, but some time behind them in terms of the trend, the cultural right did as well, with reaction to the left being a strong part of the latter, and a sense of inevitable triumph and superiority being a feature of the former.  At the same time, the long post war economic dominance of American industry faded and ultimately industry, to a large degree, simply left the United States.  Economic globalism and cultural globalism came in, fueling a sense of abandonment in a large middle demographic in the country whose cultural, political and religious values had been celebrated as defining those of the nation and who were now told that none of that was true.  Reactions from the right to this became increasingly strident as did the policies of the left, with none of it really helping that large American class that tended to define in the past who Americans were supposed to be.  To make it worse, some of the reaction on the right made erosions into advancements that had served that American middle demographic, particularly in education.  Science education and solid history education took a pounding in the late 1980s and the level of science education that was common prior to those years has never returned to average Americans.  

By the time of Barack Obama's election in 2008 there were a lot of Americans who were prepared to accept arguments that Obama, who was a centrist candidate if ever there was one, was a radical leftist, with accusations of "Socialist" and even "Marxist" being leveled against him.  As we've noted before here, up until the last two years of his term about the most Obama could be accused of was being largely ineffectual, a reflection of his policy making style, but perhaps simply despairing of acceptance he took a diversion to the left at that point.

In 2016 the Democrats made the bizarre choice of running Hillary Clinton for the Oval Office when she was one of the most despised individual politicians in the United States.  That year the middle revolved in the form of support for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, with the Democrats essentially fixing their primary system so that Sanders couldn't possibly win.  That left Trump the natural candidate for the dispossessed middle.

Not really appreciated at the time, the choice of that demographic to back Trump also meant that traditional Republican conservatives were either pushed aside or even out of the GOP.   The GOP rapidly became Trump's party, with a rearguard of the traditional GOP backing him but for their own purposes.  Trump embraced the concerns and radicalized beliefs of his "base", which included a long festering view that the left was the cultural enemy of the country.  The Democrats managed to feed this feeling through ineptness, choosing to oppose Trump at ever turn.  When that failed, they chose to attempt to impeach him, an effort that was doomed before it started.  All of this fueled an increasingly radicalized Trump base in the belief that Trump was a hero standing against what has been practically portrayed as a Marxist tide, when in reality it was the old Boomer left trying to retain its gains, including significant gains made in the last two years of the Obama Presidency.

None of which is to say that the middle doesn't have a set of legitimate complaints.  And not just in the US, but seemingly all over the world.  Politics over the globe have increasingly come to resemble the United States's recent politics to a much greater degree than the American press might imagine.  Parties based on populism and traditionalism, some of which are highly radical, have made progress all over Europe, and not just there. The trend has been global.

And then came COVID 19.

COVID 19 entered the world in a way that no plague has, ever.  The Spanish Flu may have entered during a World War, but the Germans didn't blame it on the Allies and the Allies didn't blame it on the Central Powers.  It just was.  Prior pandemics haven't been attributed to political actors.  But in the heated political scene of 2020, views on the virus and what it meant rapidly took on a bizarre political atmosphere and a "with us or against us" type of character.  Donald Trump took action fairly quickly, but then he cast doubt on the danger of the disease, which took off to the point that by mid 2020 there were those who were arguing the entire matter was a Chinese conspiracy.  Support for or against measures to counter the disease came to signal political points of view.  This carried on to views about the vaccine, with people making medical decisions based upon their politics or even worse based upon wild rumors that were developed by the most extreme members of the camps and given life by an anti scientific movement symbolized best by the prostilzatons for it by Jenny McCarty, a boob model twit who came to fame by prostituting her mammary glands for cash and who would not be taken seriously on anything else in any other era of humanity.

That McCarthy would be taken seriously enough, before the pandemic, to give rise to a line of thought prevalent mid crisis, says a lot about the decline of American education in some fields and its politicization.  But that's only one stick thrown on a fire that's gone from smoldering in the last twelve years to raging.  

Coming out of World War Two the United States was not only an industrial titan, but no nation rivaled it.  Together with Canada, Australian and New Zealand, the US possessed the world's only major economies that didn't feature largescale firsthand devastation of its infrastructure during the war.  America's position in the global economy had less to do with American genius, although that was certainly an aspect of it, than it did with being the only giant economy which was not bombed during the war.  That fortunate positioning was sufficient to keep us going for thirty years before other industrial nations began to catch back up, and catching back up was what they were doing.  Naively secure in our new position, we not only failed to guard against what was occurring, we actively encouraged it, such that by the 1970s up and coming Asian economies began to seriously erode the American economic position.  Nothing has been done since then to address it, with one single exception.

That erosion meant that while the United States came out of the gigantic post Vietnam War recession of the 1970s, it did so as a nation that was shipping its industry overseas wholescale and which was creating no new jobs to replace those being lost. At the same time it became apparent that a country which had been a petroleum exporter, in the Oil Age, was now an oil importer, and had been for some time.  The first blue collar losses helped bring Ronald Reagan to power, to make a course correction, but it was already clear at that point that the nation was dividing sharply into two sections and people realigning accordingly.  New England liberals whose liberalism had been based on the views of Episcopal and Methodist preachers going back to colonial times began to base their views instead on those like Chomsky and his fellow travelers.  Mid state blue collar Democrats who had backed politicians like Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy now saw their fates aligned with prewar radical right wing Republicans who had opposed FDR.  Southern Democrats abandoned the GOP wholescale, brining with them a set of views that were formed in the 18th and 19th Centuries and which had never changed, driving out the first batch of Republicans who were fiscal conservatives but more moderate elsewhere, and whose Republicanism was based on a conservative economic model more than anything else.  With the drive still invested from the fall out of the Vietnam War, in spite of the success of eight years of Ronald Reagan, "progressives" in the Democratic Party, who shared nothing in common with the Progressives of the Republican Party from early in the 20th Century, began to seriously imagine remaking the United States from a solidly centered (small d) democratic nation based on a Protestant world view combined with a radical democratic impulse into one that had its religious and cultural origins expelled and instead based on a court enforced cultural secularization and collectivisation which was generally alien to American culture.  In this they were aided not only by the fallout of the Vietnam War but also by the pornification of the culture by the Sexual Revolution and the destruction of the industrial economy.

Already by the 1990s these divides were becoming sharp, if not fully obvious to all.  The rise of a new right lead by individuals like Newt Gingrich foreshadowed what was coming even as the last of the old left found new voice in the GOP through the Neo Conservatives.  The election of solidly middle ground Bill Clinton sparked a massive radicalized and fairly anti democratic effort in the GOP to expel the President through an impeachment, an effort that never ever should have been attempted.  The second George Bush and his first rival Al Gore were throwbacks to earlier calmer times, but in Barack Obama those on the left read in hope for a radical change even if Obama himself did not hold such radical views.  This in turn took the lid off of the rust belt centered populism that was mistaken for conservatism in that branch of the GOP.

Barack Obama's Presidency drug up a lot in both parties, much of which hampered his Presidency and made it fairly ineffectual.  By the last two years of his time in office he'd accommodated himself to being the presumed head of the liberal wing of the party and began to accordingly give some voice to that wing, although it was really the court, in the form of the Obergefell decision, that sparked a revived radical left in the Democratic Party. That same decision  helped ignite the already shouldering populism in the GOP as individuals who, as noted above, had defined Americanism culturally were informed that htey not longer did, and that their views were no longer really wanted.

During the same time, as already noted, the industrial base of the country did not recover at all.  On the fringes of the Midwest, that being the West, times were good in that the high prices of fossil fuels sparked economic booms that made the rugged region a success.  As that occurred, however, some areas began a population influx of those from the coasts, such as Colorado, that changed their cultural and political natures permanently.  The collapse of the fossil fuels in  the 2010s, however, brought the economic grief of the Rust Belt to the Far West, which was already conservative in its views.  The impact, however, of a large influx of migrants for economic reasons from other areas of the country had begun to change the region's political views from radical libertarianism to math the insurgent populism that was already at work in the GOP elsewhere.

And that brought us to the election of Donald Trump.

Whatever Trump himself may stand for, for his supporters he has come to symbolize the stand of a "real" America against an insurgent "foreign' one.  Democrats have reciprocated in a way by urging their supporters to "resist" Trump, recalling the "resistance" of World War Two, something which is unfortunate in a way as the resistance itself of that era was heavily left wing and which is moreover unfortunate in that it suggests that those engaging in the "resistance" are "resisting" an illegitimate power.

It was that view that took us in a little over three years from heated polarization to outright intellectual battle lines.  Populists in the GOP already regarded the Clintons as criminal and Obama as a socialist.  Democrats seemingly confirmed that by immediately resorting to words recalling the struggle against fascism of the 1940s and informing the Republicans that they basically would not work with the elected President.  They then confirmed that through a dedicated effort to remove him. That effort in turn convinced the GOP populist that the Democrats were in fact an enemy, something made very easy by a section of the Democratic Party already having declared itself to be just that.

With that view, the politicization of everything became easy, just as it tends to in times of real extreme tension.  And then that extreme tension arrived in the form of SARS-CoV-2, or as it is commonly called, COVID 19.

All through the election there were those who called for extremism.  Old symbols of radicalism came out and were demonstrated. Then George Floyd was killed by police in Minnesota and that in turn was used by various groups as a basis to demonstrate against the government and the times.  In far off areas which saw themselves as removed from the Minnesota event, this seemed like a thinly veiled excuse to attack the nation. And the pandemic became worse and worse.

All of which leads us to where we now are.

And where we are at is not good.

The middle of the nation in ever sense has voted for Joe Biden in what can truly be regarded as a vote to return to normalcy.  This means that most of the electorate has not bought off on the arguments of the populist and it doesn't seem the country as engaged in a war against a foreign alien radical ideology. They have also indicated, through their vote, that they don't want to radically remake the American nation and they basically share a lot more in common with the cultural ideal of the populist than they do with the radical democrats. They've basically decided to elect an old, JFK style, middle of the road imperfect Catholic, rather than a fire breathing radial of any stripe.  That probably tells us where we need to go, and how we want to get there, but it also tells us that there's an element of the nation that wants none of it.

On the right, right now, there's a very strong populist element that has become anti democratic, but doesn't recognize itself as such.  It's defining whose vote is legitimate to an extent by their politics, and its also given way to conspiracy theories that demonize their opponents to the point where it can be believed, in spite of all evidence, that they lost the election due to fraud.  Inherent in that belief is the belief that real Americans would have voted only one way.

At the same time, there are those who are already discontented with the new Democratic President as he shows no signs of equally extreme radicalism, but in the other direction. This body, accustomed to rule through the courts, would have the new President pack the Courts with jurists who would disregard the Constitution, even though those very jurists are the ones who saved the election from being overturned.  Following that, they'd force the remaking of society in their progressive image, a world devoid of gender, faith and connection with reality.

This is a road that we started on somewhere during the last seventy years, or at least the last fifty.  We're going to have to get off of it, or the nation won't survive.  Finding the off ramp wont' be easy, but it also means that if we don't do it, we're headed for disaster.

One thing already noted here is that, demographically, the country, and indeed the entire Western world, is headed towards a more conservative, and more educated, future.  The character of the up and coming demographics doesn't resemble those in control and those in the streets very closely.  So maybe we'll be saved from ourselves by our future selves.  

Anyway you look at it, the fall out of things that rose up since 1945 are plaguing us in the extreme right now, with a genuine failure to really deal with a plague as part of that.  Lincoln called on the better angels of our mercy in the 1860s, we don't seem to be calling upon them in 2020 very much.

All of which is helping to make 2020 not only an an annus horribilius, but probably a watershed as well.  The question of whether its a good one, or we're just going off a cliff, isn't evident yet.