Ostensibly exploring the practice of law before the internet. Heck, before good highways for that matter.
Friday, May 20, 2022
Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part XXXII. The, public address, forgetting where you are, graduation speech, ⚥,part II, exhibitionist edition.
Berkeley commencement speech delivered by President Theodore Roosvelt in 1903. The speech resulted in a "mighty cheer".
A person should not hold back on their deeply held opinions, but a person ought to remember where they are.
Lummis forgets where she is.
Cynthia Lummis, United States Senator, R-Wyoming, was the graduation keynote speaker at the University of Wyoming's general graduation ceremony last Friday.
The first question to ask there is, frankly, why?
Now, I ought to not that I'm pretty cynical about graduation speakers, and I've become highly cynical about politicians.[1]. My cynicism about politicians is more recently earned, but my cynicism about graduation speakers goes way, way, back.
The first graduation speaker I ever heard speak, I'll note, was Governor Ed Herschlar, who spoke at my mother's Casper College graduation in the 1970s. I can only vaguely recall that, and I don't know if it was a good speech or not. Ed Herschler was a blunt man whom, prior to being Governor, was a lawyer in far western Wyoming who practiced real courtroom law. Prior to that, he was a World War Two Marine Raider. He likely gave a good speech, or perhaps I just recall that my parents liked the Democratic Governor.
The first graduation speech I somewhat remember, however, was my own high school graduation. The speaker was the new University of Wyoming football coach.
Now, right there, that inspired cynicism. It's not like we, the graduating class of that year from central Wyoming, really were in love or admired the football coach at the university. Some of us probably did, but for that matter the local community college basketball coach, Swede Erickson, was probably a lot better known to most of us. Whatever the case, I'm pretty sure we hadn't chosen him to speak. He'd been chosen for us.
Evidence of that, to some degree, comes in the form of the class song. I don't remember what it was. I remember which song won the pole to become the class song, however, which was the Ramone's Teenage Lobotomy.
Now, clearly you can't have that song, which one of our extremely smart classmates was boosting. My friends and I boosted Turning Japanese by the Vapors, which came in second.
Somebody picked the class song for us. And the speaker too. A more mature person who was not a student, probably.
I don't know who the speaker was when I graduated from Casper College in 1983 as I didn't go to the ceremony. As I was graduating with an AS in geology, which had no marketable value whatsoever, and had to go no to a BS, I figured there was no point. Indeed, I actually started UW that summer after I was done working, taking a short geomorphology class offered through UW/CC
I also would not know who was the speaker when I graduated with that BS. The last class I had to take as a geology student was Summer Field Camp, which I took that summer. As I couldn't graduate until I had the class, I didn't think going to a graduation ceremony made sense, or for that matter was even a possibility. One of my lifelong good friends did, however. He actually had a class to take that following fall, but he went through the spring graduation ceremony. He later received permission to take the one class from his home in Casper, but he never did. I've always felt bad about that. He should have done it. To go so far, and then let it go, is a type of tragedy.
Anyhow, I don't know who the speaker was that year either.
I do know who the speaker was, or rather I can recall the speaker, from when I graduated law school. Law school is a smaller school, so you know everyone graduating to at least some degree, and so its natural that you wouldn't miss that one. High school graduations are enormous by comparison. Anyhow, there was a committee whose job it was to invite speakers.
Whomeever was invited, the actual speaker was an ancient lawyer from a really big firm in Denver whose firm was under investigation at the time. He was a UW graduate, I guess, and at least one of my colleagues suggested he'd been a major donor, and that's why he was the speaker.
He was awful. Basically, his speech was "I'm a lawyer and I love me, so you should love everything about the law too" except that it went on for an extended time.
An effective speaker could have delivered an effective speech about loving the law, but it wasn't him.[2].
I don't know who chose Cynthia Lummis to deliver a commencement speech this year at UW, but it was a bad idea.
And I'm saying that perhaps not for the reason a person might suspect, but rather for a variety of reasons. I'll criticize Lummis speech too, but not for the reason that you might suspect.
There may be politicians who could deliver great and meaningful graduation speeches this year. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, provides a good example and for obvious reasons. Maybe Sanna Marin, the 34-year-old Prime Minister of Finland, would be another, in no small part due to her youth. And, frankly, Liz Cheney, as controversial as she would be, who had taken steps which must be regarded as principled and brave, although many Wyomingites would disagree with that. Lynettte Grey Bull would have sparked controversy as well, but she provides another example. This year, maybe Cale Case also does.
That's frankly about it right now.
In this polarized atmosphere, any other politician of any stripe is going to be a bad choice, and anyone inviting them should know that. This would have been particularly obvious, you'd think, of Lummis, who was immediately associated with an effort to question the election which returned her to office.
A lot of UW students, we should note, are not Wyomingites, and many who are, are pretty liberal, if only briefly. I went to UW for most of the 1980s, and it wasn't a conservative town then. It was particularly liberal when I was an undergrad, during which Ronald Reagan was President. Reagan may be admired by many now, but at that time he was hated by the left, and that included much of the UW student body. If you admired Reagan, you kept it to yourself. And this was in an era in which the right wing of the politics wasn't nearly as far left as it is now, and for that matter, the left wasn't nearly as far left.
Inviting Lummis to speak, therefore, was a bad idea, if it was going to be assumed that politics of any fashion was going to creep into her speech.
And that it would, should have been assumed.
Lummis isn't a great speaker, we'd note. She isn't horrific, but she's not great, and she read her speech. No really good speaker ever does that, and quite frankly its a rare great speaker who even sticks to any text they've written. Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream Speech" was largely extemporaneous, for example. Lincoln's Gettysburg address departed from his prepared notes. Good speakers do that, and therefore have a natural delivery. Bad speakers don't, and therefore do not.
What Lummis stated that's gotten her so much negative attention, is here:
Text wise, what she said was, "even fundamental scientific truths, such as the existence of two sexes, male and female, are subject to challenge these days.”
Now, I'll be frank that I’m not a Lummis fan, and that's due to January 6. But she's absolutely correct here. Scientifically, there are only two sexes beyond a shadow of a doubt. And it's worth noting that. But you also have to know your audience.
A person shouldn't shield their opinions, but to be effective you have to have effective delivery and know your audience. Lummis clearly didn't know her audience, which shows, perhaps, that she's been too isolated in Wyoming Republican politics recently, or that she wanted to spark a controversy. She didn't seem, however, to want the latter. Rather, it strikes a person as if she thought she was speaking to an audience that wasn't liberal in any sense.
A person shouldn't shield their opinions, but to be effective you have to have effective delivery and know your audience. Lummis clearly didn't know her audience, which shows, perhaps, that she's been too isolated in Wyoming Republican politics recently, or that she wanted to spark a controversy. She didn't seem, however, to want the latter. Rather, it strikes a person as if she thought she was speaking to an audience that wasn't liberal in any sense.
The same statement could have been made, although making it in a commencement speech is questionable, in a much more different fashion if the object of a person's statement was to persuade. Again, doing that in a commencement speech would be a curious choice. If, however, a person wished to deliver a point about the seemingly constant shifting of long held opinions, a person could have delivered it in yet another fashion, and then have made a point about the value of education, or the uncertain nature of the times. If that was the goal, it was badly delivered.
A bad delivery, and not knowing your audience, and not being a great speaker in the first place, is just a recipe for spoken disaster.
It ought to also serve as a lesson in actually inviting somebody who matters to the audience, or somebody who can deliver a really meaningful speech.
Freed from the official line.
Speaking of politicians, and indeed one already mentioned, one thing the state GOP's attack on Liz Cheney seems to have done is to set her free to say things she really thinks, to wit:
May 17, 2022
It seems that getting attacked by the Republican Party has freed Liz Cheney to say things that we normally wouldn't have expected, to wit:
The House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-semitism. History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse.
leaders must renounce and reject these views and those who hold them.
That was a bold thing to say, concerning the Buffalo, New York shooting that occurred over the weekend. It also puts squarely in issue the factor of the more extreme elements of the GOP (which is not to say that the Democrats don't have their own far left members), and certain conspiracy theories that have been circulated in recent years. Now Hageman, who likely doesn't share those extreme views internally, but who is extreme enough on a state policy level, is placed in the position of either denying they exist, endorsing them (which she will not do), ignoring the matter entirely, or trying to deflect the issue, the latter being the most likely approach for her.
Wow.
I would never have thought I'd hear Liz Cheney going after the GOP that way, although she's long had a streak of independence. She's right, however. The House GOP leadership has gone down a path that has encouraged such views. It's not 100% responsible for it, but there hasn't been a time since the 1850s that one entire political party was either endorsing such views, or silent on them, to a large degree. Now we're there again.
No renunciations so far, I'd note.
Don't know much history.
NPR's Politics touched on this, and the guest, Odette Yousef, made an excellent point. Part of the reason we're in this cycle of weird violence in the US is because we don't study history. An historically educated person wouldn't have acted this way.
We need to.
Any student of American history would know that African Americans are the second-oldest non-native demographic in the country, with a history nearly as long as what in inaccurately referred to as "whites". The first non-native immigrant group would be English, of course, which actually isn't the same demographic group as, say, Irish, or Italians, or other "white" groups. That aside, the shooter was apparently an 18-year-old adherent of a certain theory proceeding in ignorance that African Americans share the same culture as the oldest demographics in the country, and indeed share the same Anglo Celtic culture, due to the legacy of slavery, that white Southerners do. Lashing out at them as some sort of non-European culture due to their skin is blisteringly historically ignorant for that reason, as well as boatloads of other, besides being evil in general.
There are a lot of reasons to study history besides that, and there are a lot of additional reasons our society needs its citizens to be historically educated, but this provides one tragic example. People are believing a lot of made up facts these days, including historical ones.
Cultural Colonialism and the Woke
Back to the point, sort of, that Lummis was trying to make, I guess, and on the topic of making things up, one of the ironies of the modern gender definition saga is that there's fairly good reason to believe that the classifications that people are now arguing about, other than male and female, are cultural and not much more. People hate that idea.
It comes up, however, in the context of, ironically enough, cultural colonialism. And ironically enough, it comes up in the context of an entity long accused of cultural colonialism, the National Geographic.
While these debates have been going on in the West, it's hardly been noticed that in quite a few cultures around the globe the cultural classifications regarding same sex attraction aren't the same as in the West. In much of the Orient, for example, homosexuality is regarded as purely a Western thing and something absent in their own cultures. Other cultures have other treatments of the topic. The cultural colonialism thing comes up, however, as certain cultures have long-established examples of men who dress as women. Apparently they're being cited as examples of transgenderism in other cultures of a long-lasting nature.
It turns out that these individuals don't view their status this way at all, and it really pisses them off. In at least one Asian culture that exhibits this, the men who dress as women turn out to very definitely regard themselves as men, but with a different attitude. They have no desire to switch genders and regard it as abhorrent, and a recent citation to them as transgender examples by the National Geographic makes them angry. They make, moreover, the excellent point that Westerners have no business pigeonholing them into a category that they feel they don't belong in, thereby placing them into a Western model they don't really recognize.
An example of this is in Samoa, in regard to the categories of fa’afafine and fa’afatamas, which literally mean "men who dress as women" and "women who dress as men". All sorts of Western press have discovered them and declared that Somoans recognize four genders, or maybe three.
Not so at all. Samoans in fact recognize only two genders, men and women, and fa’afafine and fa’afatamas are miffed that people misrepresent them. They know that they're men and women. Indeed, it turns out that their view on sex doesn'st involved same sex attraction at all, but is more in the nature of asexual. They just don't want the traditional male and female roles that would otherwise be expected of them.
This is very close, I'd note, to another island culture in the Pacific in which young men basically drop out, as boys, of the male society. They don't dress as women, but they join a social class in which leadership and being a warrior are just not expected of them.
Indeed, such examples show up in Native American cultures as well, with an example occurring in the Dene people (whom we usually call the Navajo) of the nádleehi. Nádleehi means "effeminate man", and they tended to be treated in the same way by Western commenters, but in their own culture their position is much more complex and may not involve same sex attraction at all, although it might. It has more to do with their societal role, however, and it is expressed in the way that they dress.
And, indeed, there's no reason to suspect that their own concept of this situation isn't at least as accurate, if not more so perhaps, than the current Western one, which is of much, much shorter duration.
It doesn't every seem that such categories existed in the West, and where there's sometimes an attempt to force that conclusion it's often based on very bad historical analysis. Modern Western campaigners have liked to cite all sorts of past examples that are often hugely misconstrued, particularly in regard to post Reformation Western society. The often cited example of the ancient Greeks, for example, is probably way off.
That some same sex attraction was occurring is of course well known. St. Paul roundly condemns homosexual sex, along with all sex outside of marriage, as a mortal sin. He also uses a word, however, that would seem to apply to men who make their appearance effeminate. This cannot, of course, be ignored.
All of this, however, brings us to this point that in the West, and indeed everywhere, seems largely to be missed, except by a few astute students like Fr. Hugh Barbour, which is this.
There are, in fact, only two genders. That's a biological scientific fact. Same sex attraction does exist, but so does asexualism and near asexualism. People who are asexual, or nearly so, are not necessarily homosexual by any means. And these impulses, for lack of a better way to put them, are psychological in nature, not biological. Their expression, however, is cultural in nature.
In other words, while same sex attraction, and nearly no sexual attraction at all, have always existed in a small minority of people, how that expresses itself is not uniform. Indeed, as Barbour notes, and as Samoans are complaining about, current Western concepts force people into cultural categories, and then into behavior, that they'd not really want to otherwise engage in, just as the Sexual Revolution forced huge numbers of Westerners into heterosexual sexual libertinism that was both destructive and unwanted.
Barbour does an excellent job of noting that in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century this often expressed itself entirely differently. Women, for example, who would fit into the sexual active, or presumed sexually active, "lesbian" role today were in many cases attracted to what was then called a Boston Marriage, which was something quite different. And many men who were effeminate were instead just regarded as very gentle, meek men, and lived conventional lives.
At least in the 20th Century there has long been, particularly in regard to female homosexuality, some who were aggressively so, although indeed even here at one point that may have had a very political feature to it. The difference now, however, many be that a fairly large percentage of the very small demographic that we're discussing, is now subject to a massive cultural campaign, largely dominated by the remnant WASP class, that insists on the most radical definitions.
The left rediscovers the female gender.
Interestingly, at the same time, some debates have been going on that go right back to the existential nature of being a woman.
One of these has been coming up on the now revived debate on abortion.
As recently as the recent Judiciary Committee hearing, the nominee hesitated to define what a woman was, even though we all know that she knows what women are, she being one herself. What she was seeking to avoid was a trap on the "legal definition" of a woman, which is the odd territory we now find ourselves in. I.e, can a person whose DNA defines the subject as male make himself have the external appearance of being female, with the help of surgery and pharmaceuticals, and then have the legal status of being a woman? That's part of the very debate which Lummis was referencing.
We can leave that for some other day, but the irony here is that the very left that says you can do that, now suddenly really knows what women are as they don't want "men" telling "women" what they can do with their "wombs" or "ovaries". It would seem that, as a society, if we can't tell what's a woman and what's a man, at law, we don't know what's a human at all, and obvious protecting the rights of everyone would preclude abortion. Nope, says the left, in this are we're dead certain what a woman is, as they're the ones that can get pregnant.
Part of that, we all know, is that women are equipped to feed infants through their own bodies, and men are not, which seemingly we all know, and which is now also the subject of its own odd debate, which is reflected in this item:
Moms seeking formula tired of those who say, just breastfeed
So says a headline that's ran across the country in newspapers and on the net.
As we don't have kids that age anymore, and haven't for, well, a couple of decades, this is a story that caught me off guard and I still haven't researched it. Suffice it to say, this is a genuine crisis.
And it's also a crisis where some really tone-deaf comments have been made, and some pretty stupid ones at that, from the left and probably the right. "Just breastfeed" is one of those.
To back up a yet again, we have people like Bernie Sanders who, pretty much every day, says something about the government funding the warehousing of kids à la Tyson Chickens, at government expense, as a social kindness as it means mothers can get off their lazy asses and get back to work.
No, he doesn't say it in that fashion, but that's probably how it's largely received. Mothers would rather stay home with their children to a large extent, save if they're from the post 1970s Cosmo feminist generation which wanted all women, tall, skinny, flat, and childless in the office. Things didn't really turn out that way, and in spite of what people may socially advocate for, as already noted in this post, people continue to be people.
Part of that being people means that people still have babies, but the joint project between the left and the right means that the economy has become less efficient so that now women must work, to a large degree, irrespective of whether they have children or not. And that means, in part, that formula isn't really an elective food for a lot of them.
For that matter, it's always been the case that not all women could successfully really breastfeed their children. It's one of the aspect of our biology that not every woman is able to efficiently do this. In times long gone, women who could, would end up serving as wet nurses for those who couldn't. Once other options came in, that tended to go away, albeit very, very slowly. There's been, for example, an early vessel discovered in Europe that was obviously designed to provide cow's milk to an infant, so substitutes have been going on for an extremely long time.
Nonetheless, you have folks like Bette Midler, who later apologized for the comments, saying things like:
"TRY BREASTFEEEDING! It’s free and available on demand,"
That didn't go over well, hence the apology, but the entire topic is irritating women who are now being told what to do.
Things being what they are, it wasn't long until the political left recovered to make one of its repeated and bogus stalking horse arguments, that being "if men. . . then", in this form:
That item was brought to our attention via the Twitter feed of Kasie Hunt, who obviously is close to the issue. I wasn't able to read the article, but as breastmilk obviously isn't an invention, the story might relate to what she otherwise noted here.
“Donated” breast milk kept babies alive for generations, in one form or another, for generations before formula. Now our experts advise against it. But our modern formula system is failing moms who need it. What to do??
She was referring to this:
Why pediatricians don't recommend sharing breast milk
Amid the ongoing baby formula shortage, some parents are relying on donated breast milk from other moms. CNN's Elizabeth Cohen reports on why the American Academy of Pediatrics says this isn't a good idea
I think "donated" breastmilk would be milk from a wet nurse. We certainly have managed to make it a complicated world.
The return of female chattel slavery.
Staying in the same neighborhood, in a way, something quite notable and really disturbing is a leap backwards into the pre-Christian presentation of women. This is expressed, interestingly enough, by this headline:
Ariana Grande Wore A Bra Top To Her Brother's Wedding.
Now, this tells us a few interesting things, some deeper than others. In the shallow end of the pool, what it tells us is that Ariana Grande is an exhibitionist.
But she's not alone by any means. Just a few days after that headline ran, a photo ran on Twitter of two women in Los Angeles going to the grocery store wearing high boots, underwear, and long coats, unfastened.
In the book They Never Surrendered: Bronco Apaches of the Sierra Madres 1890-1935, there's a really good description of young Apache women who recently lost their husbands in battle collectively dancing in an evening ceremonial dance nude, around a fire. The reason is a simple, straight forward economic one. These women were now in a bad situation due to the death of a provider in a resource tight society, and the traditional way in which they'd become wives had been disrupted by early death. The Apache were largely monogamous, but polygamy was tolerated, particularly sororal polygamy, but warfare no doubt disrupted that too. Essentially, therefore, they were putting themselves on display, as they were on the market.
This sounds shocking, but it isn't meant to be. The reason that it shocks at all is that the modern concept of male/female relationships is largely Christian in the first place. The adoption of Christianity pushed marriage ages way up when it was adopted, as the Church required consent by both parties. Arranged and forced marriages, of any kind, were out. Families couldn't sell or give away daughters. And the lower your economic class, the more this was true. Medieval courting, if you will, was much like what it's been for most of modern history at the village level.
The Sexual Revolution, and the ongoing left wing attack on the Christian inspired advances in society, is really reversing this, to the detriment of women in particular.
The advance of Christianity freed women from being chattel and ultimately that lead to a co equal, if not identical, role in society, reflected best perhaps by the granting of the franchise to women. That didn't make society perfect overnight by any means, and indeed society hasn't ever become perfect. But starting with the onset of the Sexual Revolution, and disguised as advances in women's rights, we've gone retrograde.
Women are now back dancing around the fire, on display.
Footnotes
1. Not all politicians by any means, but events running now for over a decade have been particularly dispiriting in this area. Lummis it might be noted contributed to this by being openly disdainful of Trump when he first ran for President, and then figuring as a central character in the effort to deny Pennsylvanian of its electors when truly she must know better. Acts like this, in liberal Laramie, probably made her a poor speaker choice from the onset.
2. One slight thing I'd note here is that a 120 year old speaker whose only known claim to fame is that he occupies the same occupation you are about to is not really that intersting to a group of people in their 20s.
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