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
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.
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.
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