Cliffsnotes of the Zeitgeist, Part XIX. Making Michael Coreone look good

Hypocrisy. 

Warren G. Harding, whom during his presidency looked like a solid person of conservative values, but who was banging his young assistant in the Oval Office, after having only recently dumped his long time paramour, who was potentially a German spy during World War One.  He wasn't exactly what he seemed to be.

Senator Pat Geary: I despise your masquerade, the dishonest way you pose yourself. You and your whole fucking family.  

Michael Corleone : We're both part of the same hypocrisy, senator, but never think it applies to my family.  

The Godfather, Part II

So goes the exchange from The Godfather, Part II.

Indeed, the scene early in the movie is full of hypocrisy.

When I started typing this out, some time ago, there was something that was really bothering me, but I've managed to forget precisely what it was.  I will say, however, I'm constantly amazed by the degree of hypocrisy that people engage in but don't seem to realize it.

Perhaps that's because realizing it requires a real element of self awareness and, more than that, self-sacrifice.  If you are doing something, that is, that is hypocritical, you either have to acknowledge it and carry on as a hypocrite, which we all do to at least some extent, or reform what you're doing, if you can.

That "if you can" element of this, I'll note, is a biggie.  Public social moralists, who often turn out to actually be hypocrites themselves are big on dumping criticism on folks on topics you can't really do anything about, at least right away.  For example, you'll find people who go after other people about driving and their carbon footprint, but that's an easy thing to do if you aren't employed in the sticks and have to drive to get where you are going simply to put food on the table.

As another example from our own times, I used to subscribe to a Twitter feed that started off on the topic of Prisoner of War camps in Nebraska during World War Two.  Somewhere along the way it devolved as the author got divorced and took up continually dumping on her ex spouse (why does anyone think that people who respond to that on Twitter are really your friends), and then dumping on her former fundamentalist Christian faith of her upbringing, and then gushing about the new boyfriend with even occasional references to their doing, shall we say, the deed.  Blech. . . 

But what was the final straw for me was when COVID hit and there were constant suggestions that those who did not stay home were the worst people in the world. Well, madam, It's easy to stay home if you are employed by a university which will pay you to sit on your butt at home. . . it isn't easy to stay home if you are a mechanic, for example.  

If that doesn't seem like an exercise in hypocrisy, it is.  There are entire classes of people who dip their cups in the government well and then criticize those who are scrapping out in the cold world for a living.  Get a clue.

Anyhow, the essence of the quote from The Godfather Part II is that both men engaged in the conversation present themselves to the outside world as respectable men, but in reality, their incredibly corrupt.  Michael Corleone has gone from somebody who realized his family was corrupt but who didn't wish to participate in the corruption, to  completely corrupt himself and head of a murderous crime family.  Pat Geary is a U.S. Senator (something that we know from the first installment of The Godfather that Michael's father Vito Corelone had hoped his son Michael would become), but at least Michael has the ability to still grasp that he's involved in crime and therefore hypocritical.  Geary may condemn Corleone for his "masquerade" but Geary can't even see that in himself.

There's an awful lot of that going around society wide.  Perhaps there always is.

I'm just frankly seeing, however, absolutely everywhere.

 One such instance is some really strong populist outrage at President Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan.  I'm upset about that too, but I was in favor of staying in the country indefinitely.  What I don't get is Trump diehards who somehow blame Biden for carrying out what Trump started and don't also criticize Trump.  The scenes at the Kabul airport became inevitable the moment that Trump announced we were pulling out, after dealing with the Taliban without the central government.  Yes, the pull-out was botched, but it was going to be botched.  Biden shouldn't have gone down the primrose path that Trump set out, but you can't be mad at one without being mad at the other.

And yet I keep seeing some proclaim that things would have been different if Trump was in office.  

How?  This is exactly what he wanted to do.

One such instance is some really strong populist outrage at President Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan.  I'm upset about that too, but I was in favor of staying in the country indefinitely.  What I don't get is Trump diehards who somehow blame Biden for carrying out what Trump started and don't also criticize Trump.  The scenes at the Kabul airport became inevitable the moment that Trump announced we were pulling out, after dealing with the Taliban without the central government.  Yes, the pull-out was botched, but it was going to be botched.  Biden shouldn't have gone down the primrose path that Trump set out, but you can't be mad at one without being mad at the other.

And yet I keep seeing some proclaim that things would have been different if Trump was in office.  

How?  This is exactly what he wanted to do.

On this, I'll note, I'll give props to Tulsi Gabbard.  I'm not a Gabbard fan, but she released a video criticizing pretty much everyone,  but noting that its almost certain the nation will get committed to another war that sooner or later it doesn't want to be in.

Locally, we're back to the typical hypocrisy regarding oil prices. When oil is down, we cry that the low price is killing the economy. When its up, we cry that it's killing our pocket books.  You really can't have it both ways.

A major national exercise in hypocrisy is going on right now over Texas having restricted abortions.  Democrats, and much of the Press, is all verklempt over what amounts to an exercise in democracy.  Everyone seems to be for democracy until people vote, then they're not.

Boiled down to its essence, if Texas votes to ban abortions, and if Roe v. Wade isn't the law anymore, which it probably isn't, they can do that.  Complaining that this is somehow wrong is not much different from claiming the last election was stolen.  You either respect the vote, or you are anti-democratic.

Regarding personal hypocrisy, we're also getting a major dose of Boomer left wing Catholics moral blindness.  Both Joe Biden, a practicing Catholic, and Nancy Pelosi, a practicing Catholic, are expressing public outrage.  In doing that they've gone from obvious moral ambiguity, at best, to outright departure from the tenants of the Faith.

This really crosses over the morally dubious position of "I'm personally against, but . .  " line that is usually the pathetic excuse that's laid out for taking a position contrary to the moral teaching of the Church here.  That isn't much different from a German in 1942 saying, "well, I'm personally against gassing the Jews, but . . "  That's never been any sort of real excuse, but it's one the Bishops have put up with for some reason, although it appears that day is ending.

This is really crossing a line.  You can't be an adherent Catholic and hold those positions.  The Bishops really need to act on that.  Frankly, at this point they really should be denied Communion.

Pelosi is promising to bring a bill in Congress to protect "reproductive rights", which is a hypocritical term in and of itself, as what she really means is "anti reproductive rights for women--but not men".  In doing this, she called the Supreme Court "cowardly" for not taking up a Texas appeal. That's complete bullshit and she knows it.

The point here is that Biden and Pelosi really can't hold the positions the are and pretend that they not only aren't square with the tenants of the Church, they've crossed into mortal sin.  I'm not saying they should leave the Church, they shouldn't.  I am saying that at their ages they're about to meet their maker as a guaranteed certainty and if they are believing Catholics, which I believe they are, they need to reform their conduct right now before It's too late.

On that, I'd also note, they're both in the "to whom much is given" situation that most of us aren't.  Powerful people seem to frequently compromise their morals at some point, and frankly average people do as well. That's not the point.  Their problem is that most of us could simply go to Confession and we'd be good to go.  The repentance requirement here, however, means they really have to do something more. They can't simply go to Confession and then ignore the entire topic.

What they could do, however, is respect democracy, or even reality.  Is it that hard to say "well, the legislature of Texas has spoken, and we all knew that Roe didn't make much sense in the first place. .  "

On the Supreme Court, politicians who are gnashing their teeth over the Court not taking this up right away know that the Court doesn't have to take anything up it doesn't want to, and if it did take this up, it'd just reverse Roe v. Wade.  Given as Pelosi rather obviously in the pro abortion camp, she ought to be really glad they didn't take it up.

This gets to the topic of politicians lying.  I grasp sales puffery, but lying is another matter entirely.  We're seeing this anymore all the time.

I'm still, I'd note, bothered by the hypocrisy that has become endemic in the law, of which I'm part.  I don't know if that makes me Geary or Corleone. .. but it's probably Corleone in context (at least he's a better dresser than Geary). Lawyers still tend to yawn and declare that "we have the greatest judicial system on earth" which has just about as much factual backing as getting a big foam finger and yelling out "we're number one" at a sports event.  Oh, really?  The evidence of that isn't very good.

That would argue, I'd note, for major league tort reform, but that's not going to happen as lawyers are too much of the legislative session for it to happen.  We make money from the system, and hence, we're going to keep it just as it is.

And that aspect of it goes on and on, starting with the stuff force-fed to prospective law students about how broadly applicable a law degree is, which it isn't.

Speaking of law schools, a public figure has finally managed to note that the University of Wyoming's College of Law picks up professors that are dedicated opponents of the state's industries.  You have an absolute public right to be an opponent of anything, but the state employing professors who have had a history of trying to do in big sectors of the state's economy is hypocritical and should be stopped.  Indeed, at this point, as I've stated here before, with the UBE now the laughable path to entry into the practice of law in the state, simply doing away with the law school makes economic sense.

Finally, I keep hearing people base their views on religion, politics, and science, on their pocket books.  That doesn't make sense.  If your religion, politics, and science, all square with your pocket book, you probably ought to rethink something.

One final thing on politicians.  If anything proves that it's really time to move on from Boomer politicians, it's the defeat in Afghanistan.  Indeed, it really brings up, once again, the degree to which we've tolerated a group of leaders who when the country's call came, didn't go.

That's a little over broad, I admit, but we got into a long war in Afghanistan thanks to a President who had served, in the Air Guard, who was a Boomer, listening to bad military advice from Donald Rumsfeld, who wasn't, but who was associated with the end in Vietnam to a degree, and to a host of former Trotskyite Neo Cons.  Our embarrassing departure was presided over by two Boomers who didn't serve in the service during the Vietnam War as they both had medical deferments.  I'm not commenting on the deferments, but there's something that's just flat out unsettling about all of this.  I'd feel a bit better if the guy yanking us out in the Saigon like fashion was able to say that, if he was a Boomer, "well, I look back when I was with the Marines in DaNang and . . ."

That's not happening.

Why is Billie Eilish hanging out on my Twitter feed?

I was getting this ad on my Twitter feed for a while.

I'm not sure why the pouty visage of Eilish was showing up there, and I don't know what the Adobe Creative Cloud is.

According to technogeeks, your feed is based on what you've been looking up.  I was updating Adobe the other day and this appeared shortly thereafter, so perhaps that's it.  I don't like Eilish's music at all, so I was downloading any of her stuff, but I will admit she's sort of a fascinating example of a persona evolution, although she can quit pouting any time now.

For comparison . . . 

Governor Gordon, probably too beat up to dare to attempt any renewed mask restrictions, has announced that there won't be any. This comes at the same time that the state's largest hospital is now full to overflowing with COVID 19 patients.  Yes, they're mostly unvaccinated people, but they're people.

Anyhow, it's interesting to see what restrictions are like in other English-speaking countries that share a common heritage with our own.  Consider Sydney Australia:

Greater Sydney restrictions

The situation is now so bad in Sweetwater County that they've opened up a new wing in their hospital to deal with it.  And I'm not at the point where I once again know people or know of people who are dying.

On COVID, conservative firebrand Candace Adams reportedly was turned away from a rapid test station when the owner recognized her as somebody who had been discouraging vaccinations.  Adams then tweeted on it and received a blistering back from the Twitterverse.

I think that Christian charity madates that she be allowed to be tested, but this is an interesting evolution in public attitudes. We're now seeing people reacting towards the refusals openly, and getting support for doing so.

Tanzanian female soccer players and their president.

The president of Tanzania is a woman, which should be noted given her recent comments about emigrating Tanzanian female soccer players.

She said they were "flat chested", looked like men, and therefore had "no prospects of marriage".  She termed it sad.

Eee gads.

First of all, I'm not going to bother to follow it, but I'm pretty sure that they'll find husbands, if they want to marry, and it'll all be okay.  I'm also pretty sure that they're leaving for better economic prospects.

I guess its also an interesting example of how our world outlook really doesn't translate globally at all.  We often forget that.  Many of our social trends, for example, are strictly our own, or limited to the Western world.  This is particularly the case regarding recent gender based trends.  In much of the world, probably most of it, this isn't happening and there's no sign that it will.  That fact says something regarding science and sociology, but we'll not go into that here.

This, of course, is a different matter, and President Samia Suluhu Hassan wasn't commenting on any of that, at least directly.  Being Tanzania's first female president is a really notable accomplishment and frankly means a lot more, in context, that being the first "female" in any political role in the United States at this point.  So we'd of course expect her to be a feminist icon.

Well, at least right now, she't not going to be.

More hypocrisy

News reports hold that the Taliban tricked a homosexual man into meeting with a group of them on the pretext that they were offering help for him to escape the country.  Reportedly, Afghan homosexuals are desperate to leave as they fear the treatment they'll receive under a Taliban regime, with it being a given that they were no doubt not exactly very open about things even before that.

Upon meeting with them, they beat him, and. . . raped him.

We don't mention this to simply be gross, but there's something exceedingly strange about the logic at work here, and its something that's actually been noted about things in Afghanistan.  Islam specifically prohibits homosexual acts, with it having been mentioned as prohibited in the Koran.  None the less, there are relatively common reports of men on boys at the village level.

And then there's something like this.  In seeking to punish this person, the Taliban committed a homosexual rape, which is a homosexual act.  What sort of weird logic allows a person to think this is somehow acting in accordance with a faith that condemns homosexuality?

Sins of Omission and Commission

One of the things I've become aware of recently is omission.  I.e., things we didn't do, but could have.

This is a tricky matter.  I suppose some people might be charged with a broad public duty because of their stations in life, which require them to speak up all the time.  Most of us, however, probably aren't in that category.

It comes to mind because of the topic of lying, which we've dealt with up above, again.  It'd be a rare person who tells no lies at all, but in spite of that in Catholic moral theology there's very low tolerance on lying.  This isn't to say that every lie is a mortal sin or something, but even "white lies" are regarded as sinful, even if only in a minor way.

But what about the situation in which you're a bystander to an error?

This comes up as I'm a witness to a situation in which one person is encouraging another to do something pretty significant.   What's being urged isn't morally wrong in any way, it's simply based on a set of erroneous assumptions.  It's more or less like Person A is urging Person B to get on the train at Cheyenne as he believes the train will take you to Worland, when in fact the rails down't lead there, and you'll end up in Rock Springs.  Maybe Person B will love Rock Springs, but if his goal is to go to Worland, he won't be going there.  Person A, however, really believes the train goes to Worland.  Moreover, it's not impossible that tracks will be built to Worland in the future.

So, if you are Person C, and nobody is asking you to join in this conversation, do you have an obligation to say "um. .  the tracks don't really go to Worland, they go to Rock Springs."

I dunno.

Added to that, what if the situation is that much more complicated as what Person A has said is that B should get on the train, go to Worland, meet Person C there, and the three of you can go fishing in the Big Horns.  Person C really is going to go Worland and then go on fishing, but he's not taking the train, as it doensn't go there.. What about then?  Person B can go to Rock Springs, and he might go on to go fishing at Flaming Gorge, and he might really like that, but it isn't quite the same thing.

Well, fwiw, in my hypothetical I think Person C will just shut up and let A and B plan out their rail trip.  Nobody is asking C anything, and until they do, C isn't going to speak up.