Split Screen

This past week gave us a tragedy which shows how divided, by way of the country's reaction to it, the United States really is.  Oddly, it gives me a little hope that we're now at the point where we're going to start the process of overcoming it as well.

I'm writing, of course, about ICE agent Jonathan Ross's killing of immigration protester Renee Nicole Good.

Body cam footage of Renee Nicole Good seconds before she was shot by ICE Officer Jonathan Ross, a ten year veteran of ICE.  Prior to ICE, he served with the U.S. Border Patrol from 2007 until 2015, and before that he served in Iraq in the Indiana National Guard.  Contrary, therefore, to my suspicions, he wasn't a new or green officer.

Or, at least, I'm writing about it, somewhat.  What I'm more particularly writing about is the reaction to the killing and the instant polarization surrounding it.

Let's start with the killing itself and what we actually know if it.  

Good was killed by Ross on January 7, 2026, a few days ago.  ICE was operating in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a quite liberal Minnesota city in which ICE was undoubtedly wholly unwelcome.  Donald Trump has used ice in various municipalities, but he's sent it into liberal bastions as what may be regarded as a sort of taunt.  ICE, moreover, has acted like a pack of Brownshirts everywhere it's gone.  Not only as militarized police, but as Sturmabteilung, stormtroopers really, for Trump.

Good was there as a protestor, and she was blocking their way with her car.  To the extent we know much about her, she was a classic Minneapolis lefty.  Apparently originally from Colorado, she was graduate from Old Dominion with an English degree, she was a poet.  She had a daughter who was 15 years of age and sons who were 12 and 6. While not alway so identified, she presently identified as a lesbian and was "married" to another woman.   

On January 7, what was known to Ross was none of this at all, other than that she was blocking the road.  Another ICE officer went to confront her in the typical heavy handed ICE fashion, a fashion that no trained municipal force, and I've worked a lot with municipal police forces, would have used.  A trained municipal force would have, rather, simply walked up and said, "ma'am would you move your car?"  Based on her last words, she would have.

ICE, however, does't operate that way.  Like SA in German streets in the early 30s, or, if you prefer, like strikebreakers at Ludlow in 1914, they hit or strike first and ask questions later, having been given license to do just that. 

Colorado National Guard, many just newly recruited, breaking up a crowd with the flats of their sabers, Ludlow, Colorado, 1914.

This always leads to the loss of innocent life sooner or later.  Good had no legal right to block ICE, but what she was doing is a time honored, and mild, form of protest.  

Good appears to have turned her car wheel to the right, in compliance with ICE's wishes, but not in compliance with being drug out of her car, which an ICE agent was stupidly, but typically, trying to do.  I wouldn't have done that either, and frankly I have actually been in a vehicle, by accident, at the wheel, in the midst of a huge urban protest.  I wouldn't have gotten out my truck in that for anyone, including the police.¹  Ross, inexplicably, got in front of her car.  He drew his sidearm, and as she moved forward, armed as he was with a 9mm, a fine police weapon, he shot her three times, exhibiting the training that's carried over from the Armed Forces where the anemic 9mm is a known complete dud, necessitating multiple shots to kill.²   As a police weapons, supplaning the old .38 revolver round, which doesn't kill either, it was perfectly adequate.

Shot three times, she died, probably instantly.

There's a lot to break down here. ³ 

The thing, however, it reminds me of, is Kent State, in 1970.

Student Alan Canfora waves a black flag before the Ohio National Guard shortly before they opened fire at Kent State, May 15, 1970.

Which might give us a slight bit of hope.

For most Americans today Kent State doesn't mean anything at all, or if it does, that's because they're a student of history.  For some of us yet, however, Kent State is both a prescient moment in history, and a personal memory.

I was only seven years old or so when Kent State happened.  I feel like I can remember it, but that may be a false memory.  In 1970 we had a television and my father and mother watched the news every night.  The television, which we had only had for two years, was by that time located in the kitchen, moved from the living room in our 1958 vintage house which was not designed to house a TV.  It seems to me that I can recall this event from them, but I might not be able to.   Having said that, I can remember seeing some of the rioting of the 1960s on television, and seeing Jimi Hendrix on the news on the last morning of Woodstock, so my memory goes back to my early years.

Kent State was a pivotal moment in the Vietnam War and in the ushering in of the liberal 1970s.

The real lynchpin in the decline of American support of the Vietnam War was the Tet Offensive of 1968.  The American military reacted to the Tet Offensive brilliantly and completely crushed the North Vietnamese effort.  NVA and VC gains were temporary and despoiled by atrocity.   Only in Hue did the NVA hang on, and to their everlasting discredit by their horrific actions against the civilian population there, which should disqualify the current regime in Vietnam from evcen existing.  But in spite of that, the American public was shocked and horrified, feeling, really, betrayed by promises and assurances broken.

Much like some are now about the end of "forever wars" when the regime that promised the end to them kills Venezuelans for some reason, and then entertains oil executives in the White House shortly thereafter, while also acting as Putin's agent, for one reason or another, in making claims against a NATO Ally.

1968 saw the American public abandon support for the war in Vietnam, but not for the American soldier. A new Republican President came in promising to end the war with a secret plan.  Richard Nixon was going to make things better in some vague, undescribed, way.

The war hung on and 1970 arrived.  By that point college campuses were solidly opposed to the war.  The working class, in contrast, remained behind it, sort of, with it supplying the troops.  University students who didn't want to serve in Vietnam found ways towards deferrements, with people like Dick Cheney, and Donald Trump, finding ways not to serve. Working class people, on the other hand, largely served, and in many instances joined the National Guard and ARmy Reserve, something that rich people like Donald Trump would not condescend to do.

This was the situation in Kent, Ohio, in 1970.  Often missed in the analysis of the terrible events that happened there, the students at the university were neither serving in Vietnam, or serving in the National Guard.  Those in the Ohio National Guard were from the town.  Blue collar men who didn't go to college, and because they were in the Guard, were not in Vietnam.  They were likely in the Guard as they didn't want to go to Vietnam, although that wouldn't univerally work for everyone who joined the Guard, contrary to what's commonly imagined.⁴

The Cold War National Guard was trained for the Cold War, not riot patrol, and in 1970 it would have had a lot of older soldiers in it who had served in World War Two and Korea.  Even when I joined the Guard a little over decade later we still had one soldier who had served in World War Two, and a lot who had served in Korea.  Soldiers do not make very good policemen as they aren't trained to be police and are trained to react to a threat with aggression.

Perhaps for that reason, it's always surprised anyone familiar with this role of the Guard that the Guardsmen at Kent State had been issued ammunition  That alone would have predisposed them to believing that they were going to need it.  What occurred such that they used it has never been clear, and there are of course conspiracy theories associated with it.  What's clear is that rocks were thrown and shooting started.  Allison Krause, age 19, an honors college student and anti-war activist,  Jeffrey Miller, age 20, a psychology student who was participating in the protest,  Sandra Scheuer, age 20, a speech and hearing therapy student who was walking to class, and William Schroeder, 19, a psychology student and ROTC member, also walking to class, were all killed by National Guard bullets.

It's the reaction to the event that causes our long winded recollection of it here.

In 1970 Americans were still divided over the Vietnam War, but the mass of American people had pulled away from strongly supporting it. The 1968 Tet Offensive had been an American tactical victory and a NVA disaster, but the public was so shocked it no longer supported the war or trusted the Government.  In the 1968 Election the Democrats paid the price and Republican Richard Nixon, with a "secret" plan to end the war came into power.

If Nixon ever had a "secret" plan to end the war, we don't know what it was, but it quickly became pretty unmanageable for him.  His basic strategy seems to have been to turn the war over to the South Vietnamese, and let them fail, which he ultimately did, but in trying to get breathing room to do that he ended up having to occasionally expand the war or the war's violence. The Kent State protests were over the invasion of Cambodia, which had just occurred.

Young college bound people had turned against the war.  Middle Americans, however, were hoping in Nixon to find a way out.  Kent State turned a lot of those people against the war as well.  Americans moved to the left.  By 1972  and 1973 they'd moved substantially to the left.  The collapse of the Nixon Administration with Watergate brought a wholescale distrust of the Republican Party that had come in to power as it was perceived that the Democrats had no solution to the war.

Sort of like Donald Trump and the GOP coming in as it was perceived that Biden was senile and Harris a bad candidate, and they were all responsible for COVID era inflation. . . 

The shift was massive.  Large elements of the American population went from weakly opposing the war to strongly opposing it, and strongly backing an increasingly left wing Democratic Party. The military, both active and reserve, was held in open disdain.  Law enforcement also was.  The active duty military would not recover its reputation for well over a decade and the Guard for two decades. Contempt for policemen remained widespread into the 1980s.

On the other side, however, right wing Americans backed cracking down on protestors and what happened at Kent State, regarding the use of arms as justified.  I can remember this still being discussed in the 1980s.  The right's hard drift in this directly helped shit it out of politics for the rest of the 1970s.  The pre 1973 Republican Party never fully recovered and in order to come back into power in 1980 the Republican Party had to seduce Southern Democrats who were hardcore right wing populists, thinking that they could control them.  The entire event went a long ways towards giving us the modern Democratic and Republican  Parties.

We are starting to see history rhyming right now.

Donald Trump was elected in no small part because most Americans eligible to vote, don't.  He's massively unpopular with large elements of the American public.  While his supporters do not like to acknowledge it, and some cannot believe it, the majority of Americans do not like or support him.  Trump himself, who is not a smart man, and whose been coddled by wealth his entire life, can't grasp why he isn't loved.

But there is no doubt that the Democrats helped bring his rise about due to ignoring many issues that we've referenced here for years.  Immigration is certainly one of them.  In reality, even though nobody wants to portray it this way except for those on the Republican hard right, most Americans have had enough of largescale immigration.  Frankly, most Americans would like to see the country have a smaller population than it does.  It's not just illegal immigrant that upsets people, it's immigration.

People wanted something done about that, but they did not want the Sturmabteilung in their cities, just as people wanted an end to the Vietnam War, but didn't want to bomb Hanoi and invade Cambodia to get there, and they didn't want National Guardsmen killing college kids on campus.  In short order, they'd make it pretty clear that they didn't want a President who covered up a paranoid breakin, although they did return him to office in 1972.

We're seeing the same thing now.

People don't want militarized police at all, and they don't want masked policemen patrolling their cities dragging people out of cars. They don't want men who have been trained as part of ICE special units shooting women in the street.  No amount of excuses as to why this occurred are going to matter at all.  Middle American started shifting this past week, which it already was doing.

The right in turn is making the classic mistake on doubling down on the shooting, trying to justify it.  The officer had PTSD, we are told in which case he shouldn't have been there and in which case it means, implicitly, if he had fully had his faculties he wouldn't have shot.  The shooting was justified as it wouldn't have occurred if she wasn't there protesting, which is true but is true about every government act of violence wherever it occurs, from Tehran to Kent State.  The film shows he was justified, just as, we were told at the time, the film at Kent State, which is in fact much more dramatic, shows that the Guard shooting was justified.  No, it shows the opposite.  

And finally, and not too surprisingly in our current era, there's the character attacks, which nobody who has participated in this discussion here has engaged in.  Renee Nicole Good was a lesbian flake.  She was woke. Well, she was a lesbian and she may have been a flake, but that doesn't mean, as is implied by those statements, that it was okay to kill her.

Nixon's managed to get elected, and handily, in 1972.  Part of the reason for that is that the Democrats, as they tend to do, just flat out botched the election.  They botched the election of 1968, and they did it again in 1972, although their 1972 candidate was better than 1968.  Had they run from the center, Nixon may well have lost.  It was all unraveling already however, and by 1973 he'd bring himself down in scandal.

Before he finally resigned, those around him were extremely concerned by his mental state.  He was drinking heavily and impairing himself accordingly.  Trump's becoming impaired quite rapidly by dementia.

Trump is unraveling, politically as well as mentally, right now.  Americans are already upset by his continual weirdness, and a man elected on the promise of no more wars seems really eager to start them, while openly admiring some of the worst foreign powers that exist.  Sending Guardsmen into the streets, as he has done, has been no more popular in 2026 than it was in 1970, and the same thing is beginning to occur. A National Guard that worked hard to avoid the errors of the 1960s and recover its reputation is finding it besmirched, and ironically by one of the very people who didn't serve in the 1960s.  ICE and the Border Patrol, which most Americans had no opinion on before 2025, are regarded, and rightly, with suspicion.  Now they're going to be disdained.

If there's any hope in any of this, it's this.  The country did get over the events of the 60s and 70s and start to recover, although it would really take into the mid 1980s to do it.  Looking back, almost everyone agrees that both sides were too extreme at the time.  Part of the reaction in 1970s was that Americans didn't want a government that would kill American kids, and after the completion of the Nixon regime it didn't want one that foreign kids either.  We're probably headed in the same direction.

Footnotes:

1. In my case I happened to accidentally drive right into the middle of a Nation of Islam protest on Martin Luther King Blvd in Denver.  It was large and I was the only person of my demographic on the street, and was driving a pickup truck with Wyoming plates at that.

I'll say, however, that the protestors were very gracious.  I could see them looking at me, but as Wyomingites often find, I was protected in part by my cluelessness.

2.  People hate it when this is stated, but the 9mm is a worthless military round.  

A military sidearm serves one of two purposes, use or ceremony.  If its to be used, it actually should stop the opponent immediately, keeping in mind that an armed combatant in war is a much different target than those the police normally face.  Most of the time when a policemen uses a firearm a single bullet from a light weapon will stop the opponent who is much less motivated than a soldier in war.

For that matter, in most trained police forces the first resort anymore is to a taser, not a sidearm.

9mms were a Continental European round in armies which at first used pistols as sort of a gentleman's thing.  Officers carried them, and rarely used them. By World War One that had changed, but the 9mm had set in.  By World War Two any soldier who had the option to carry a .45 ACP rather than a 9mm did, which is why you see British Airborne so frequently armed with M1911s.

The 9mm hung on, however, and by the 1980s those armies used them had gone to the multiple shot, "double tap" technique, acknowledging its deficiencies.  The round spread to the U.S. at the instance of NATO which wanted the service to play nice on this topic.

3.  Ross wasn't green, so that doesn't explain what occurred.  What might, however, is that he's seen too much service, quite frankly.

4.  For much of the Vietnam War the National Guard was hard to get into.  

The history of this isn't very well remembered.  The Vietnam War was a big war, for the U.S, from 1965 until 1972.  Contrary to what's popularly imagined, the majority of soldiers who served in Vietnam were volunteers, which is in fact somewhat complicated by the fact that people facing conscription often volunteered prior to being drafted.  Conscription itself had been in place since about 1948, after briefly terminating after World War Two.  Setting that aside, the U.S. had conscription pretty continually since 1940.  Most men expected to be conscripted form 1940 forward and therefore, for that reason, they planned on military service as an aspect of their immediate post high school life.  Those going to college and university obtained deferrements, up until the late Vietnam War period, which were just that, deferrements.  They entered the service after they were done with university, which was the case for my father and two of my local uncles.  Usually, although not always, that meant that they entered the service as officers and chose their branches, none of which was the case for men who were simply conscripted.  Added to that, as conscripts only served two years, the service often assigned them to Reserve units following their active duty service, which was the case for one of my uncles.  Indeed, men who were part of ROTC units often found that they were assigned to hometown Reserve units rather than active duty units, which was often to their frustration as it mean six years of Reserve duty rathe rather than two years of active duty.

As a lot of working class men who didn't intend to go to college didn't want to do two years away from home and disrupt their post high school lives, the Guard and Reserve were already popular options before the Vietnam War.  That meant that it was nowhere near the case that men who were in the Guard were avoiding Vietnam.  At the time a hitch in the Guard for an enlisted man was at least four years (it might have been six).  Therefore, men who joined the National Guard as late as 1965 and prior to the Marines being deployed at Da Nang were still in the Guard in 1969.  The war itself did not really start being unpopular until 1967 meaning that somebody joining the  Guard in 1967 was still it at least until 1971.  And the war would have had no impact on retention as the service was never going to call up anyone who had completed Reserve or Guard duty.

This does not mean that nobody joined the Guard to avoid Vietnam.  I know at least one person who in fact did just that.  But getting into the Guard was hard.  Getting into the Reserve also was, although I know one person who joined the Reserve in order to avoid going to Vietnam.

People who really wanted to avoid joining the service, however, were better off finding a doctor who would qualify them as medically unfit, or, up until the end when conscription deferrements changed, staying in university.

Finally, contrary to what people imagine, some Guardsmen in fact served in Vietnam.  Not many, but as the war went on some Guard units were called up and deployed to the war.

Related Threads:

In Memoriam. Renee Nicole Good.

Labels: 2020s, 2026, Homicide, In Memoriam, police, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Zeitgeist

Additional Labels:

Split Screen, additional labels.

Saturday, April 26, 1975. The attack on Saigon begins.

The NVA commenced its attack on Saigon with a bombardment of the Bien Hoa Air Base.

Cable from Graham Martin, Ambassador to South Vietnam, to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger Concerning the Evacuation of Vietnam

TV Guide had an article on Sex and Violence in television, which is interesting given the context of the times.

It also featured McCloud, which was a popular police drama in the era of police dramas.  The show featured Gunsmoke veteran Dennis Weaver as a New Mexico police detective somehow assigned to Brooklyn.  I recall my father used to watch it.  That entire plot line sounds a lot like the plot of 1968 film Coogan's Bluff, which featured Clint Eastwood as a sheriff's deputy from Arizona on assignment in New York.

TV Guide was a weekly magazine my father subscribed to.  I don't know if it exists anymore.  It ran all of the television schedules for the week.  I always thought it was an odd thing to subscribe to really, but it came to the house.

Last edition:

Friday April 25, 1975. White Christmas.

Labels: 1970s, 1975, Australia, Communism, Mexico, Mexico City, Portugal, Saigon Vietnam, South Vietnam, Terrorism, The Fall of Saigon, United States, Vietnam, Vietnam War

Friday. March 26, 1875. Violence in Texas.

Syngman Rhee or Lee Seungman (이승만) was born in Whanghai Province to Rhee Kyong-sun, a member of the aristocratic Yangban family.

Elected by the South Korean parliament in 1948, he'd assume dictatorial powers and govern the country until forced out of the country following student unrest in 1960.  He lived in Hawaii thereafter until his death in 1965.

In certain ways, Rhee symbolized a strategy that both Democratic and Republican administrations employed during the Cold War of supporting right wing autocrats in the belief that their countries would evolve into democracies.  In the case of South Korea, they were right.

Last edition:

Tuesday, March 23, 1875. The Marianas Trench discovered.

Labels: 1870s, 1875, Geology, Marianas, Marianas Trench, Pacific Ocean, Royal Navy, Science

It is May 12, 1968.

 

It is May 12, 1968.

Wednesday, December 13, 1944. USS Goshen commissioned.

Today In Wyoming's History: December 13: Today is St. Lucy's Day. She is one of the patrons of writers. 

1944 The USS Goshen, originally named the Sea Hare, commissioned.  She was a fast attack transport.

The USS Goshen was sold in 1947 to American Mail Lines Ltd and renamed Canada Mail. In 1963 her name was changed to California Mail. In 1968, she was sold to Waterman Steamship, re-registered as the La Fayette. She was scrapped in 1973.

The US prevailed in the Battle of Metz.

The First Battle of Kesternich began on the German border with Belgium.

The Battle of Mindoro began in the Philippines

The Myōkō was  damaged beyond repair by the USS Bergall.

The USS Nashville was severely damaged off Negros Island by a kamikaze attack.

The U-365 was sunk in the Artic Ocean by a Fairey Swordfish.

The Great Snowstorm of 1944 ended.

Last edition:

Tuesday, December 12, 1944. Heavy artillery.

Labels: 1940s, 1944, boats and ships, British Army, Dekemvriana (Δεκεμβριανά), Germany, Greek Civil War, Mediterranean and Middle East Theatre, Royal Air Force, World War Two

Notable passing. William J. Calley.

 

William J. Calley, who was convicted for his commanding role in the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War, has died at age 80.

Calley only served three years under house arrest at his military apartment for the crime, before being released and cashiered from the Army.  About 500 Vietnamese civilians were killed before a helicopter pilot heroically intervened, with some ground troops assisting him.  Calley was convicted on 22 counts of murder, having been originally charged with about 100, but only served three days behind bars before President Nixon confined him to house arrest.

He kept to himself after release, but maintained the classic "only following orders" defense, which is no defense at all.  He became a successful businessman in Columbus Georgia.  In later years he admitted to friends that he'd committed the acts charged with.  In 2009 he issued a public apology, stating:

There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai. I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.

He was in some ways an interesting example of the officer corps at the time, in that he had gone to, but failed to complete, college. He entered the Army due to poverty in 1966.

Four solders were charged with crimes due to the massacre, but only Calley went forward to conviction.  There was at the time some reason to believe his "following orders" story, but in a general, rather than specific, sense.

Oddly, on this day, I'm drinking Vietnamese coffee.  I have some baseball type "patrol" caps from Australia around here that were made in Vietnam.  Vietnam is courted by the US as an ally against the country's traditional enemy, China, even though it remains a Communist state controlled country and economy.  A vast amount of the shrimp served on American tables comes from Vietnamese waters.  The country has become a tourist destination for Americans, and there is, bizarrely given the build of the Vietnamese, a Victoria's Secret in Hanoi.

Most Americans, and Most Vietnamese, were born after his conviction in 1973.

The world moved on, save for those whose lives ended that day, or were impacted by those events over 50 years ago.  Calley, at 80, was a member, however, of the generation which is only now beginning to lose its grip on power.  Joe Biden is just about the same age.  Donald Trump, who was not impoverished, is two years younger and obtained four student draft deferments while being deemed fit for military service.  In 1968, the year of My Lai, he was classified as eligible to serve but later that same year he was classified 1-Y, a conditional medical deferment, and in 1972, as the draft was winding down, he was reclassified 4-F due to bone spurs.  No combat veteran of the Vietnam War has been elected President and none every will be, as they begin to pass on.  Al Gore, agre 76, who served in the country as a photographer, was a Vietnam Veteran, however, and George Bush II, age 78, was an Air National Guard pilot who did volunteer for service in the country, but who did not receive it.

Calley's generation, which is now rapidly passing, was the most influential in American history, and in many ways which were not good ones, which is not to say that there weren't ways in which they were positive influences.  They'll soon be a memory, like the generation that fought World War One became some twenty or so years ago, and the generation that fought World War Two basically has been.  

Calley's death serves as a reminder and a reflection of a lot of things.

Two random items. Andy Griffith and Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift

On "X", fka "Twitter" a man who was the father to a large family of daughters (it was either 7 or 9), and who is very conservative, posted an item expressing relief for Taylor Swift.

His points were really good.

Populist right commentators are all up in arms about Swift right now, for reasons that are darned near impossible to discern.  It seems to stem from her expressing support for Democratic candidates in the past, including Joe Biden in 2016.  Well, guess what, she has a right to do that.  You have a right to ignore it. 

She also expressed support for abortion being legal.  I feel it should be illegal.  That doesn't mean she's part of a double secret left wing conspiracy.

But, and here's the thing, there are real reasons to admire her, or at least her presentation, and the father in question pointed it out.  He'd endured taking his daughters to Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, "Lady Gaga" etc., and found them disturbing.

Indeed, they are.

Miley Cyrus went from a child actress to being a freakish figure posed nude on a ball, looking like she was a meth addict who was working in a strip club.  Ariana Grande has at least one song that's out right graphic about illicit sex.  Lady Gaga has made a career out of being freakish, until she couldn't any longer, and like Madonna is another woman who was the product of Catholic Schools who took to songs that are abhorrent in terms of Christian, let alone Catholic, morals.

Swift, in contrast, can only be criticized a bit for dressing semi provocatively on stage, but only somewhat so. Off-stage, she's always very modestly dressed.  Indeed, she's a throwback, with her ruby red lipstick and classic nearly 1940s appearance.

And in terms of relationships, it's noted that she's dating a football player.

Now, we don't know what their private lives are like, but they're admirably keeping them private.  It's hard to know what Swift's views are on most issues.  And we really don't need to.  But in their visible relationship, made visible to us only because of media fascination, they're quite proper.  As the poster noted, the football star is "courting" her.

It's not that there's nothing to see here.  There's nothing to see here which any conservative in their right mind wouldn't have an absolute freak out about.  They're behaving exactly the way in public that supposedly Christian conservatives want dating couples to do.  No piercings, no weird tattoos, no scanty clothing.

Which would all suggest all the angst is about something else, and what that is probably about is the secret knowledge that huge numbers of real conservatives can't stand Donald Trump and won't vote for him.

The Andy Griffith Show

I was at lunch two days ago at a local Chinese restaurant, and across the way an all adult family was discussing the plot of the prior night's Andy Griffith Show rerun.  It struck me that that may not have happened since the 1960s.

It's interesting. 

The Andy Griffith Show went off the air before the Great Rural Purge in Television, but not my much.  It ran from 1960 to 1968.  It was consistently focused on the rural South, and it felt like it depicted the 1950s, which it never did, save for the fact that what we think of as the 60s really started in about 1955 and ran to about 1964.  Indeed, while the show was in tune with the times in 1960, it really wasn't in 1968.

But that in tune with the times is what strikes me here.  The family was speaking of it as if it was a currently running show, not like it was something from 60 years ago.  That suggests that in some ways people have groped their way back in the dark to idealizing the world as it was depicted then, rural, lower middle class, devoid of an obsession with sex (although it does show up subtly in the show from time to time), and divorce a rarity.

Now, the world wasn't prefect in 1960 by any means.  But the show didn't pretend to depict a perfect world, only one that was sort of a mirror on the world view of its watchers.  To some degree, that world view had returned.

Epilog

The Taylor Swift story also appears on the most recent entries for City Father and Uncle Mike's Musings, both of which are linked in on this site.

Monday, August 23, 1943. Kharkiv changes hands for the last time.

Today in World War II History—August 23, 1943: Soviets take Kharkiv, Ukraine, the fourth and final time it changes hands during World War II, and the Germans lose the Donets Basin industrial area.

From Sarah Sundin's blog.

Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=593872

And that was a big deal in the war, we might note.

We should also note that the Red Army took massive casualties in the Battle of Kursk and its independent subparts, and in the counteroffensive following it.  While putting it oddly, an achievement of the Red Army by this point of the war was being able to sustain huge manpower and material losses and not disintegrate.  On the other hand, while the Red Army has numerous fans, it was fighting in a style that simply tolerated losses at a level that anything other than a totalitarian state could not endure, something the Germans also would do, but with the Soviets taking much larger casualties.

Konstantin Konstantinovich Rokossovsky, a Polish born senior Soviet commander, had his illustration appear on the cover of Time.  The painting, which we cannot put up here as it is copyright protected, featured the Soviet general looking forward with piercing blue eyes and the words "USSR" behind him.  He was painted seemingly thinner than he was in real life.  Rokossovsky had been arrested during the Purge but had amazing survived, and then was dragged back out of confinement when it ended and the Red Army was in need of experienced commanders, which he was, after the disaster of the Winter War.  He never blamed Stalin for his confinement, but rather the NKVD, taking a politic, if toady, approach to both the horror and his ongoing servitude to the monstrosity of the USSR.

Orphaned as a child, he'd joined the Imperial Russian Army during World War One, then went over to the Reds during the Revolution.  After the war, in 1949, he became the Polish Minister of Defense under Stalin's orders, showing the extent to which Communist Poland was a puppet. He was not popular with the Poles, which he knew, commenting;  "In Russia, they say I'm a Pole, in Poland they call me Russian".

Rokossovsky and his wife Julia had a daughter named Ariadna.  He cheated on his wife with Army doctor military doctor Galina Talanova during the war, with whom he had a second child named Nadezhda.  He was fond of hunting.

He died in 1968 of prostate cancer in Moscow at age 71.

Life magazine, in contrast, had a black and white portrait of a young couple dancing the Lindy Hop.

Uruguay transferred German sailors of the battleship Graf Spee and auxiliary ship Tacoma to an internment camp at Sarandi Del Li after they violated the conditions of their internment in Montevideo boarding houses.

The Pasadena Post reported on the cast of Poppa is All touring military bases, which included Casper born and Lander raised former Miss Wyoming Helen Mowery.

Fairly forgotten in our present age, she was born Helen Inkster to parents who parents who owned the Quality Grocery in Casper, back in an age when Casper, like most communities, had a large number of local grocery stores.  Her father worked at a local refiner as well, and died in an industrial accident there when she was five.  Her mother then moved to her parent's ranch in Fremont County, while also giving birth to her only sibling at that time, the boy being born after the father's death.  When of high school age, she was sent to Cheyenne to complete her public school education.  Her popularity was notable even at that early age.  She became Miss Wyoming in 1939 in a competition that didn't qualify for the national one, as it was essentially a rodeo queen competition, with riding part of it.

She attended the University of Wyoming for two years after graduating from high school in 1940, but became an actress after that.  Never a big screen name, she acted as late as 1961, and died in 2008 in Pasadena at age 86.

Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor passes, an unfortunate icon for her times.

Sinéad O'Connor had, by the time of her death, eschewed her name and an additional one, as she traveled through a world that celebrates narcissism and which treats mental disturbance as self-expression.  

Her cause of death has not been revealed yet, but if it turns out not to be suicide, I'll be amazed.

O'Connor is going to be celebrated as a musical genius and a cultural beacon.  I've listened very little to her music, which I don't care for at all, but what she really was, was a really screwed up personality that had been crying for help in a world that instead just urges "self-expression".  In a way, although their personalities and music, etc., were very different, she's the Irish Michael Jackson, the American pop artist who went from fame to weirdness to an early death.  The public is unlikely to turn on O'Connor, however, as unlike Jackson who did a deep dive into cultural weirdness, O'Connor did a deep dive into rejecting Western Culture, and the cutting edge of Western Culture loves rejecting Western Culture, making our culture unique in that fashion.

Her name was taken from Sinéad de Valera, the wife of the Irish revolutionary leader and the mother of her attending physician.  Her parents divorced, which was unusual for Irish Catholic couples and her father, at least, remarried and moved to the United States.  That shows fairly clearly her family had fractured. She lived with her father and stepmother for a time and then returned to Ireland, by which time she'd take up shoplifting and ended up in the Magdaline Asylum, which, like most things in Ireland at the time and many things now, was run by a Catholic religious order.  She actually did very well there developing her talents, but not too surprisingly chaffed under the discipline.

A lot of O'Connor's musical career was used to turn attention on herself, which has proven in the post Madonna music world to be a good vehicle towards success.  Early on, in 1992, on Saturday Night Live, she tore up a photograph of St. Pope John Paul II ostensibly in protest of the sexual abuse scandal in the Church, but which is more symbolic of the childish Irish temper tantrums that were just then starting to really develop.  The act was so shocking at the time that even Madonna criticized it.

By that time she'd already identified as a lesbian, when that was shocking, although she later retreated from that claim. At some point in the 1990s she was ordained by the Irish Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church, which is not in communion with Rome, an apparent "Independent Catholic Church" which is in no way in communion with Rome.  She announced at that time that she wanted to be known as Mother Bernadette Mary.

In 2018, she converted to Islam, an ironic but perhaps predictable conversion as it is somewhat shocking for somebody who claimed earlier to be retaining Catholic beliefs.  The irony, of course, is not only that she was Irish and self-proclaimed type of Catholic, but joining a religion that is generally hostile to female equality.  Following that, she became a critic of Christian and Jewish theologians and called non Muslims "disgusting", from which she also retreated.

She was married at least once, and had four children, one of whom recently committed suicide.

The problem with being shocking and in despair is that the attention you get from being shocking is pretty temporary, and so goes the relief as well.

O'Connor stands out in the end as somebody who needed help and didn't get it.  There are a lot of people in that category.  With a strong-willed personality, and her world set upside down early on, she might not have accepted the help anyway had it really been offered.  But celebrating the public descent of a tortured soul isn't really doing her a retroactive justice, and it didn't help while she lived.

She also stands, however, for something additional.  Jackson stood for a long held American negative trait of rising people to great heights based on something superficial, and then destroying them.  O'Connor, however, stands for the destruction of Western Society following World War Two, but in a time delayed way as she was Irish, and Ireland's entry into modern Western Society was delayed by at least 40 years.  Prior to the Second World War a person's departure from the culture would not have been openly celebrated even if known, and it would have been somewhat arrested so that the individual self-destruction was less likely to be so open.  And rescue from that destruction was a real possibility, with individuals such as C. S. Lewis, Oscar Wilde and Whitaker Chambers providing diverse examples of the same.  Following 1968, however, hope for rescue started to become fleeting and open attack on the culture became a liberal virtue.

Now that she has died, she'll be celebrated and her many strange paths and failings turned into personal triumphs.  In the end, however, it's clear she was grasping for the existential and metaphysical in a world that is hostile to both and would prefer to find all expression in as self-centered.  Her conversion to Islam, which is openly hostile to those concepts, probably best expressed that desperate search, as misguided as the path she took was.

That's the modern way, however.

Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, 

and let perpetual light shine upon her. 

May she rest in peace. 

What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 2. Care, lack of care, and an existential lack of focus.

 

Basically- Save the tomboys, let little boys paint their nails, don’t be a jerk to your kid because there are bad people/groomers in the world- protect your child and teach them they’re great the way they are and doing those things doesn’t mean they’re a different gender

Luka "Bunny" Hein.

Last Sunday I had a long item on community, and how we're lacking it, and need to restore it.

In that, I also noticed the operation of synchronicity.  And here I find it at work again.

Among the various bills pending in front of the state's legislature are two regarding the horrific abuse of minors in the name of "gender affirming care".  Chemical and surgical attacks on gender and surgery to "reassign", or at least partially remove, a person's gender characteristics is "care" in the same way that the Holocaust was a "solution".  It isn't, it demonstrates extreme moral depravity, and it's an absolutely insane rejection of nature.

Some of this topic, and that one, started off with various items I'd read or heard, which was then followed, by what I just noted here:

Well, I was in the bookstore for three days running, but that's another story.

And just before the trip to the bookstore, I became aware that somebody who I've known their entire life now identifies as transgendered, but there's something else, I suspect, going on there that I'll not deal with here.

I noted in that I'd post another one on this particular topic.

And then the very brave Luka "Bunny" Hein testified in front of the legislature, saying a lot of this stuff more bravely than I could have.

I so thoroughly killed off my younger self to become what I was, what I am, that I truly feel as though trying to find any part of her left in me would just feel like resurrecting someone else’s corpse 

I suppose that metaphor is appropriate with how Frankenstein-like I feel now

Luka Hein.

Hein isn't alone.  She's joined by Chloe Cole, whose name has been given to one of the proposed statutes, "Chloe's Law".  Cole, like Hein, is an activist against this horror, but she's gone further and is crusading generally against what we might call the perversion of youth.  If you want to know why there's so much furor over a certain book that keeps getting mentioned in regard to school libraries, look at her Twitter feed. She put the pages of the book up, complete with the male on male dick sucking images, which are the reason people are complaining about the book.¹

I've known little boys who played with dolls who grew up to be men's men, and I've known plenty of girls who took up what had been formerly regarded as very male activities, or male habits.  Indeed, ironically in our day and age, younger women who have retained highly traditional ideas, or perhaps I should say highly feminine behavior, have been ridiculed and belittled, while women as a whole have been pushed into entire roles that are not only traditionally male, but in some (limited) instances, such as combat soldiers are likely genetically so.  Up until just recently, however, it wasn't the case that the conclusion was made on some societal level that this must mean those boys want to be girls, or those girls want to be boys.  

Now that's being shoved down upon them.² 

What's really going on here?

We discussed some of that just the other day, but there are a number of things going on, the first of which is the complete rejection by the WASP class of the concept of nature and standards, which we touched on in our earlier essay.  That's left them a ship adrift, and subject to the winds of forces which very much have an agenda.

As we've already gone into it in some depth, we won't here. But basically to sum it up, up until after the Second World War the dominant American culture, the WASP culture, was rooted in a Protestant sense of Christianity, which means that it was rooted in a Christian world view.  Even people who were not Protestant Christians picked up large portions of this world view, given us the oddity of Protestantized Catholics and Protestantized Jew, as well as Protestantized Agnostics and even Protestantized Atheists. Humorist Garrison Keiller has a joke in one of his monologues about claimed non believing bachelor farmers going to Lutheran Easter services and noting that "it was a Lutheran God they didn't believe in", but there's something to that.

As part of that, or related to it, American society, and European society wasn't all that far removed from nature in a way up into the early 1960s.  You certainly can find examples of people who lived an urban life for generations by the 60s, but more often than not you'd tend to find some recent rural connection.  People's parents, or grandparents, had been farmers quite often.  And certainly in North America, as Gene Shepherd noted in one of his essays, even urban people retained outdoor activities to some degree if they had no farm connection.³

Why does this matter? Well, for a couple of reasons.  Starting in the 60s, this really started to breakdown.  The Spirit of 1968 essentially rejected all conventions, existential or otherwise, and started society on a path of radical self defined, "if you feel good, do it" type of thinking, inroads into which were already being advanced by the Playboy culture that started attacking the family, in essence, in 1953.  Things were well advanced in this direction by the time Tom Wolfe redefined the Boomers as "The Me Generation" in 1976, by which time the Greed Is Good ethos was also taking root.  By the late 1970s the WASP culture was so diluted it was already about individual self definition, as long as that also included monetary success.  Ties to the land were being lost, in spite of efforts to revive it in an unrealistic idealized sense, so lessons that are plain in nature, were gone.⁴ 

With the guardrails removed, it's no wonder where things ended up, but it didn't happen, of course, overnight.  Indeed, it really took until the Boomers children raised in the larger WASP culture started having their own, and passed on only a very diluted sense of anything whatsoever, with that mostly being "be yourself" and "be successful".  Nobody was a loser, everyone (up until you needed to make money) a winner, and whatever you wanted to do was okay.

Well, nature is nature, sometimes cruel, and that's not the way things work.

And hence we see the fork of a dilemma here, which is impacting the modern age, and the rise of transgenderism in confused, mostly female, adolescents, and confused males in their early 20s.

And that means the root is likely not the same.

The Confused Girls

Luka Hein describes this, having lived through it, about well as anyone can.  By and large, what we see with these girls, and that's what they are, is this.  They're mostly distressed female teenagers with ADHD, some of whom are Tomboys, who are pushed in this direction or find temporary refuge in the identifier.  Totally lacking a community, with parents who are about as firm as milk toast and who have no existential concept of anything, they head that way and then are pushed that way.⁵

In a society grounded in nature, let alone the existential, they'd get real support from their families, which would like be sports, the outdoors, and a community with external standards.  Instead, they get "support" which amounts to pushing them into mutilation.

The big root in this is the lack of a community, combined with an exposure to the perverse early on.  Girls this age don't want to be pushed into sex, let alone pushed into sex, which up until very recently was regarded as extremely weird.  Now they are.  They're pushing back and away. Getting away is the real desire.  Given enough time, and support, to realize that they don't have to yield to whatever weird conduct Reddit is boosting at the moment, or appearing on the cover of "teen" magazines, and they'd be okay.  Moreover, being somebody like Hein, whose Twitter photo is a baby rabbit sitting on a large caliber handgun, doesn't mean you have interest which mean you have to be a closet male.

Polish mountain climber Wanda Rutkiewicz, Tomboy extraordinaire, difficult personality, married woman, and a real woman.  Polish Olympian Maria Magdalena Andrejczyk provides another, very contemporary, example.

The Confused Young Men

Some of what we noted above applies to men as well, but I suspect that we have more often is a cry for attention, or the Laying Flat culture, or both, at work.

While it's not popular in any fashion to say it (although it is being said), it's always been hard to be a man.  This is not to say that it's been easy to be a woman, but frankly the burdens of life have traditionally fallen on men and women quite differently. The historical burden on women is indeed tied to their biology, bearing children is dangerous, or at least was up into the 20th Century, and hard on the body.  And up until the Government stepped in to be the husband of women who cared not to marry the father's of their children, having even one child tied a man to the father if she kept the child permanently as there was no other economic option for the most part.  People have tended to therefore look back and be wistful on the "patrimony".

Truth be known, however, male roles in societies have been blisteringly simple traditionally, if not always easy.  Men were expected to take a societally defense role, with their first obligations being to protect their families first, protect women and children in general secondly, and protect their nation last.  On that last one, you can put in tribe if you are thinking of a more aboriginal society.

Men were also expected to "provide" for their families.  When I was young, it was still the case that people would excuse some other real or imagined failure of a man by stating "he's a good provider".  This had all sorts of meanings in context.  In one hand, a man might have some real moral failings, perhaps he hit the bars a lot, or perhaps he dallied with other women, but if he made a good income and brought it principally home to his family, that was regarded as excusing a lot of other conduct.

Conversely, it was also used in the instances in which a man might otherwise be regarded as boring, plain looking, or not an otherwise romantically attractive person.  "He's a good provider" would be regarded as excusing those failings on one hand, or be used as a basis for suggesting to an unmarried woman why somebody should be regarded as a prospect for marriage.⁶

This goes back to the dawn of the species and reflects the original genetic dimorphism, physically and psychologically, that our species exhibits.  In modern industrial times it reflected itself in a number of interesting ways that directly made, if you will, men's life "hard".

Men working themselves to death wasn't really regarded as abnormal and in certain societies with thin resources, such as Finland, men died much earlier than women did. Men in general still generally die younger than women for that matter.  And dangerous work was a male role, including not only industrial work, but the most dangerous work of all, war.  Indeed, in spite of feminism and a general societal effort to suppress this, this is still largely true.

Much less true, however, is how society reflected this.  

Men were expected to respect women in a much more formal manner than they do now, where this is very much no longer the case.  They were expected to defend them, even in a situation in which they really didn't know them.  They were expected at some point to plan to make a living which "would support a family", or if they didn't feel up to that, and not all did by any means, to drop out of the family raising role for some other societally acceptable one.  They were expected to support families if they had one, including marrying a woman if they got her pregnant and were not married. And they were expected to bare arms if need be.

A good example of this in the early 20th Century is interestingly the Titanic.  A monument in Washington D.C. introduces to us the reason why on its front and back inscriptions:

TO THE BRAVE MEN WHO PERISHED IN THE TITANIC

APRIL 15 1912

THEY GAVE THEIR

LIVES THAT WOMEN

AND CHILDREN

MIGHT BE SAVED

ERECTED BY THE

WOMEN OF AMERICA

Back:

TO THE YOUNG AND THE OLD

THE RICH AND THE POOR

THE IGNORANT AND THE LEARNED

ALL

WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES NOBLY

TO SAVE WOMEN AND CHILDREN

The men on the Titanic, rich and poor, stepped aside so that women and children would live.  This was the traditional expectation, and they fully fulfilled it, stupid modern movies notwithstanding.

The reward, so to speak, for the role was in part simply genetic.  Husky's, the dog, are happy pulling sleds, which coyotes would not be.  Much of this just worked the same way.  Additionally, however, male life tended to result in male societies, formally and informally, going all the way back to tribal society.  Membership in them was part of being male, and amazingly universal.⁷ Indeed, it started off in childhood, with the first "band of brothers" usually being a "band of boys", and later some formal organization, like the Cub Scouts.

Now all of this is shattered.  A society that confused equality of the sexes, which existed much more than imagined prior to feminism, but which has been confused by the failure to understand how technology impacted that, with samism, has created a societal requirement that, save for professional sports, the physical differences between women and men are not to be mentioned.  Men have become shy about defending women the way they once did, least they receive a rebuke. Well-intentioned government subsidies combined with the society wide adoption of the "Playboy Ethic" has blinded society to the physical and psychological impacts of sex so that not only are men not really expected to take care of any children they cause, or the women who bare them, but they're actually expected to put out irrespective of the consequences.  This is so much the case that in a fairly recent notorious event in which somebody was unjustly killed, the press was full of his being a "good father", which in real terms simply meant that he'd fathered a lot of children, and not all by the same woman.  Not that he was acting as a parent.

Added to that, the traditional role of "defense" has seen female intrusion as something that must be accepted, although in reality it hasn't gone that far at the armati homines level.  

Male societies now are completely verboten. You can't do that.  The Boy Scouts must admit girls, and is the Scouts.  Men, basically, have no larger societal refuge from their male lives.

And the point of those lives is now warped. The "get a good job" pressure is still there, but point is missing. Getting a good job is supposed to occur, so you can buy toys.  In the WASP end of things, many of the upper middle class WASPs avoid children entirely.  Ultimately procreation, a reality of earlier years, is just regarded as recreation, and therefore the object of it on the giving and receiving end easily disposed of.

As feminist author Susan Faludi has put it, men have been "Stiffed".

That gets to this.

If young teenage women, on the cusp of becoming young women, have been freighted by the Reddit/Internet portrayal of their expectation that they serve as harem concubines for men in general, and have opted out through transgenderism, young men, a little past their early teen years, and perhaps fully past them but still in their very young 20s, have looked at this in some instances and looked for the door out.

In the past, as noted, there was an outdoor, even before much of this became so perverse.  In rural societies, bachelor farmers, who often weren't terribly good farmers, were a pretty common and accepted thing. Farming, and ranching, was good honorable work, and not getting married as part of that was more common than a person might suppose.

The unmarried industrial worker was also surprisingly common.  A sort of portrayal of this, combined with one man's desire to get married, is shown in the movie Marty.  Enlisted men in the Army, with the exception of senior NCO's, sometimes, tended to be unmarried.  Indeed, junior officers were usually unmarried, and in some militaries, such as the British Army and, while a bad example, the Imperial Russian Army, marriage was highly frowned upon. Moreover, certain male occupations tended to fall towards unmarried men by default, and some, such as the Catholic priesthood, required it.  Just as male society tended to accept the mentally off a bit into it's ranks in the larger group, it accepted unmarried men into it as well.⁹

With the rise of the societal acceptance of homosexuality as ostensibly normal, this dynamic completely changed. While there have always been people with same sex attraction, unmarried men were not assumed to be "gay", they were assumed to be unmarried.  Homosexual men did fall into the categories mentioned, as the wealth in society started to rise mid 20th Century and certain low paying occupations became increasingly societally unacceptable to obviously intelligent men, this increased. But the postwar economic boom, the Playboy culture onset, the Sexual Revolution, and Feminism completely destroyed what had been.

At some point, by the late 1980s, society would no longer let men who wanted to basically drop out of things, for whatever reason, do it.  A couple of decades prior society accepted that a guy could take an industrial job, for instance, and work it his entire life as a single man, with a single dwelling, and not be homosexual. By the late 80s, no longer.  And no longer was such a person really even allowed to peaceably dwell in that condition, but an absolute need for sex of some sort was presumed.  Such people were presumed to be homosexual and if they were younger, relationships they might not really want were forced on them.  The Friends and Big Bang Culture had arrived.

At the same time, the rise of the Me Generation meant that money for individual hedonistic purposes was now the point of being.  You needed a "career" so you could live well, even if living well really meant that everything was for entertainment, including other people.

How do you get out of that?

Well, "transitioning" will work.

Based at least on some observation, young men just getting ignored in their plight, with parents who aren't going to provide any guide rails, is a big factor in this.  They aren't really seeking to change genders, they're trying, ironically enough, to get back to the 1950s.

How does this end?

I'm usually pretty cautions about quoting Rod Dreher.  I like some of his stuff, and not so much others.  Be that as it may, he's spot on here:

There will be no justice until every damn doctor, hospital, and medical association responsible for this atrocity has been sued into the ground, and some of them imprisoned. Forgiveness? Yes, in time (though that's easy for me to say, as I have not suffered what this father has suffered) -- but only after full lustration, only after Nuremberg-like tribunals, only after the trials, only after utter and complete shame shattering all the luminaries and the institutions -- including the Democratic Party, the TV networks, the major newspapers -- which brought this evil onto the lives of American children and their families.

Those who did this to young women like her -- people like Dr. Gallagher above, who revels on social media in her success in slicing the healthy breasts off of women -- God willing, they will pay within the limits of the law for what they have done. As evil as the Tuskegee Experiment was, this is even more damaging, because it has created, and is creating daily, thousands of more victims.

He's exactly right.

Indeed, it's already happening. Chloe Cole has filed suit.  My prediction is that if she doesn't win, somebody soon after her will.  And like the Opioid lawsuits that are now so common, they'll drive this out of the societal field by litigation force and judgements.  In the meantime, the same society that was just lately pushing pills will be "oh my, oh my, how could this terrible of thing have happened.

But that won't solve the larger problem.

Their end is destruction. Their God is their stomach; their glory is in their “shame.” Their minds are occupied with earthly things.

Philippians; 3:19.

This pretty much defines where we are, even though's worshiping their stomachs and glorifying in their shame don't recognize it.   That has to change, and changing that is a tall order.

Because in order to do that, the lens, in society has to be turned back to me, towards the whole, and the existential.

Footnotes:

1.  I really haven't tracked the library debate much and have discounted it, but Cole's posting makes it plain how far things are gone.  The book clearly illustrates the author's descent into homosexual conduct and is frankly pornographic.  It shouldn't be in a school library, and it does amount, intentionally or not, to transgender propaganda.

At no point prior to our current era would there even been a debate on whether a book which graphically depicts sexual acts, let alone homosexual acts, should be available to be checked out of a public school library. The fact that there is such debate now is a sign of how far gone things really are, and additionally how entrenched certain interests are that not only want to defend their contra natural lifestyle, but actually promote it.

2. To state this bluntly, what people feared about the Obergefel decision has not only come to pass, but it's surpassed those fears.

This should not have surprised anyone.  Many years ago the homosexual book After the Ball, according to those who have read it, and I have not, not only argued for the normalization of homosexuality, but apparently for the dismantling of marriage and the traditional and long-established incidents of male/female relationships.  Presently, not only are those campaigning for the normalization of transgenderism, but campaigning for it, which is accompanied by foisting medial "treatments" upon the very young, and the accompanying large-scale transfers of cash that entails.  

This has happened before with other industries.  Think, for example, this:

3.  Shepherd noted in one of his books how the men in the Indiana city in which he grew up all subscribed to Field & Stream, even though they largely were not outdoorsmen.  It was a retained desire.

4.  One of the odder examples of this, very widespread, is the change in our relationship with animals.

Our species is one of those which has a symbiotic relationship with other ones.  We like to think that this is unique to us, but it isn't.  Many other examples of exist of birds, mammals and even fish that live in very close relationships with other species.  When this occurred with us, we do not know, but we do know that its ancient.  Dogs and modern wolves both evolved from a preexisting wolf species starting some 25,000 to 40,000 years ago, according to the best evidence we currently have. That likely means it was longer ago than that.

Cats, in contrast, self domesticated some 7,000 or so years ago, according to our best estimates.

Cat eating a shellfish, depiction from an Egyptian tomb.

We have a proclivity for both domesticating animals, and accepting self domestication of animals, the truth being that such events are likely part and parcel of each other. Dogs descend from some opportunistic wolves that started hanging around us as we killed things they liked to eat.  Cats from wildcats that came on as we're dirty.  Both evolved thereafter in ways we like, becoming companions as well as servants.  But not just them, horses, pigs, sheep, cattle. . .the list is long.

As we've moved from the natural to the unnatural, we've forgotten that all domestic animals, no matter how cute and cuddly they are, are animals and were originally our servants. And as real children have become less common in WASP culture, the natural instinct to have an infant to take care of, or even adore, has transferred itself upon these unwilling subjects, making them "fur babies".

It's interesting in this context to watch the difference between people who really work with animals, and those who do not.  Just recently, for example, our four-year-old nephew stayed the night due to the snow, and was baffled why our hunting dog, who is a type of working dog but very much a companion, stayed the night indoors.  The ranch dogs do not. . . ever.  The ranch cats, friendly though they are, don't either.

5.  Both Hein and Cole have been reluctant to criticize their parents, but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be criticized.  These strong daughters honor their parents by providing the backbone that their parents completely lacked.

Having said that, this illustrates the point I noted above.  These young women are roughly in their early 20s, which means they were born either in this century, or the tail end of the last one.  This means that their parents were likely born in the 70s or 80s, to parents who had come up in during the 60s.  So in effect they are the grandchildren of Boomers whose children were often raised with the ethos of the 60s and 70s, which combined would be there are no standards and your goal is to make money.  Additionally, their parents came up during the GOP's gutting of science funding in schools.  So they were born to parents whose grasp of the physical and metaphysical is weak, and whose principal world view is that it's nice to be nice to the nice.

6.  While citing to fiction is always dangerous, an interesting example of this are well depicted in the fiction of Jane Austen.  Not really intended for wide circulation, and limited to the concerns of her class, they nonetheless demonstrate the basic nature of male and female relationships across the ages, which is why they remain incredibly popular, particularly amongst young women who tend to see themselves in the characters.

A feature of this is the "provider" aspect.  Tending to focus on families made up of women, the unmarried women are the concerns of their parents and concerned themselves.  Finding a suitable match, to so speak, dominates the novels, with tension between that and romantic love.  An example in Pride and Prejudice, her best novel, is found in the character of Charlotte Lucas, the protagonist close friend, who opts to marry the Episcopal Churchman, William Collins, who is the epitome of boorish and overbearing, as she's 27 and has no other prospects, and his position is secure.

7.  An example of this given that at some point, it must have been in the 1950s and perhaps early 60s, my father was a member of the Knights of Columbus.

Now, my father was not a joiner by any means, but in the 50s and 60s a man would almost by default be a member of some organizations.  He was the President one year of his profession's statewide professional association, which means that he had been active in it.  And based on some recollections he related to me over the years, he'd been a member of the Knights when the Knights still had a downtown clubhouse.  So had two of my uncles, at least.  Maybe, and probably, all four of them were.

The Knights were a much different organization then, at least locally, than now.  Now I know that they act as a mutual benefit society, as I am sure they did then, and I note them most frequently for having pancake breakfasts at one of the parish churches every Sunday after the early morning Mass.  They may have done that then as well, but the big difference is that their clubhouse, like most men's clubs of the day, had a bar, and it could get a little rowdy.  The long serving Parish Priest of the era stopped in every night at closing time to make sure that they were actually closing, and their St. Patrick's Day parties were legendary.

Be that as it may, it's almost impossible to imagine my father in that setting. Probably after he married, or at least after I was born, he chose not to be, which was in keeping with his character.  Still, it's interesting that you pretty much had to be a member of some social club, probably male only, if you were a man prior to the 1970s.

I've never been a member of anything like that, really, although when I was first practicing law the county bar association was amazingly active and often met one evening, right after work, in a bar, ostensibly to present a CLE.  My enduring memory of one of those meetings was getting there in time, but just in time, and having to squeeze into the back row of table seating, only to have one notoriously rude female lawyer saying something like "so you think you can get around my fat ass?"

She later was subject to a scandal when her husband turned her over to the authorities for molesting him when he was a minor.

9.  This is reflected back to us by the culture of earlier eras in some odd ways.  

For instance, in cartoons, an unmarried male character was really common. Gasoline Alley's central protagonist was, at first, unmarried, with this changing as female readership was low.