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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.7Indeed, 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.
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.
Nguyễn Chí Thanh. By Sử dụng hợp lí - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=118355303
Nguyễn Chí Thanh is the man who caused me to go to law school.
Eh?
Now, Nguyễn Chí Thanh was a General in the North Vietnamese Vietnam People's Army and former North Vietnamese politician who died in 1967, when I was just four years old. How could this be?
Well, he was the figure who thought of what became the Tet Offensive of 1968.
From a Vietnamese middle class family, Thanh's father died when he was 14 which forced Thanh into farming, as his family entered poverty. Perhaps it was this experience which lead him in 1937 to join the Vietnamese Communist Party, which in turn lead to being sentenced to French labor camps. He was both a political and military figure, and following 1960, was principally a military one. It was his idea to launch what became the Tet Offensive of 1968, a disastrous, in military terms, general uprising that cost the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese over 100,000 casualties, over twice as much as the Southern effort lost, and which ended so badly that Gen. Võ Nguyên, who accented to the plan and help prepare it, thought that he was going to be arrested and potentially suffer the fate of all who get blamed for stuff in Communist societies do.
Thanh didn't get the blame, for the military failure. Nor did he get the credit for the massive political success, as the offensive shocked the American public and lead to the US abandoning South Vietnam to its fate. He was killed from wounds sustained by a B-52 raid in 1967.
What's that have to do with law school?
Well, this.
In 1980, I had to write a paper in my community college freshman composition class. I was still in high school, but I only went half days and took freshman comp at the college in the afternoon. I wrote a detailed paper on the Tet Offensive of 1968, taking the position that the U.S. had won the battle militarily, but lost the war due to it due to the huge public reaction.
That thesis is widely held now, but at the time, not so much.
Sometime in the next couple of years, I had an American history class of some sort. I can't recall, but I do recall it was well attended. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the professor was a lawyer, but one who had largely not practiced, if he ever had, after doing a stint in the U.S. Navy. I had to write a paper, and what I did, which was legitimate, was to revise and dust off my preexisting one.
Keep in mind, this was in the typewriter days, so that was more difficult than it might sound. Indeed, writing in general was more laborious in those days.
Anyhow, when it came back, I had received an A, and the professor had marked "You should consider an analytical career".
The part of the story I usually don't tell is that I asked my father, "what's an analytical career"? That's probably as I don't want to have my father tagged with any other problematic career stories other than the one that's been mentioned before, which is unintentionally dissuading me from becoming a game warden. Anyhow, he mentioned lawyer. I think that's the only analytical career he mentioned. It's probably the only one that occurred to him, and frankly, it is hard to think of analytical careers.
The Defense Department discovered that a North Vietnamese provided list of 555 POWs included Marine PFC Ronald L. Ridgeway of Houston, who had been listed as Killed In Action. He would be promoted to Sergeant and medically discharged in November 1973.
His girlfriend, Lawanda Taylor, had not married since his disappearance in 1968, and they would subsequently marry. He would go to work in the Veterans Administration.
Chae Myung-shin (채명신,; 蔡命新), commander of South Korean forces in South Vietnam. He had served in the Imperial Japanese Army as a conscript late in World War Two, and then escaped to South Korean to avoid the Communists. A Korean Protestant Christian from a Christian family, he died in 2013 at age 88.
On the same day, the first 125 of 37,000 South Korean troops in Vietnam left the country. The South Korean Army retained a large presence in South Vietnam right up into 1973 and had to be pressured by the US to leave, although the US also considered leaving South Korean troops in the country into 1974 given the slow progress of the ARVN in the regions the Korean troops were located. By 1973, South Korean troops constituted the vast majority of foreign combat troops in South Vietnam
Senator John C. Stennis was shot and wounded in front of his Washington, D. C. home in a robbery attempt.
The rock band Wicked Lester rebranded itself and performed for the first time as KISS.
Giorgia Meloni not sounding like Donald Trump. In a sort of "make Italy great again" speech she calls for uniting the country, governing for all Italians, and doesn't sound like some sort of cheap badly done rendition of Goodfellas. Indeed, her articulate nature comes across, even if you don't grasp Italian, in comparison to Trump's nearly complete lack of it.1Her victory message is certainly different, but the proof, of course, is in the cannolis, not in the menu presentation.
Does the election of Giorgia Meloni tell us something about what's going on in the US right now?
I think it does, or at least did, and therefore explains in part how we got to where we now are.
More than that, does it tell us what isn't going on, and what Trump's backer's might get, or rather the country, if we keep going down this road?
It probably does.
First, we'll note, her victory has already been heralded in parts of the English-speaking world as a non-fascist victory for true conservatism.
At the same time, the American usual suspects, probably none of which actually would be comfortable with Meloni's actual world view, rolled into congratulate her:
Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ted Cruz under fire for celebrating Italian far-right victory
Italian politician Giorgia Meloni’s party traces its roots to the Second World War-era fascist movement founded by Benito Mussolini
All of this tells us a few things.
The first is that the FdI's rebranding of itself as a non-neo fascist party is taking root successfully, but it remains challenged. The party certainly had its roots there, and its symbol is made up of flames from Mussolini's grave, after all. But maybe it has reengineered itself as a right wing populist party that's no longer an anti-democratic fascist one.
Secondly, the English-speaking right is switching its attention from Viktor Mihály Orbán to Meloni, and maybe that's a good thing, if the FdI is no longer fascist and is democratic.
Of course, at the same time, the populist American right remains basically captive to a large degree to Donald Trump and his acolytes.
Finally, it really shows us what the populist Trumpite wing of the GOP, which anymore we might as well just call the GOP, is, and isn't.
So, what is Meloni's platform?
Well, I'm not Italian and I hadn't heard of the FdI until just the other day, or if I had, I hadn't paid all that much attention to it. Italy has had more than one neo Fascist party over the years. But it's easy to find videos of her giving really fiery speeches. A lot of those have been condensed into snippets, but if the full speech is listed to, they go in directions that you don't really expect. As far as I can tell, and I may be way off, the FdI, under Meloni, is hugely and unapologetically traditionalist and right wing populist, by it retains some syndicalist economic views. It also has dabbled, to some surprising extent, in social legislation which would be regarded as left wing in the United States, as trying to pass a bill regarding child care for working mothers.
So what caused more Italians to vote for it than any other party?
Probably that traditionalism, which is grounded in a sort of philosophy of nature, or new essentialism, or even a combination of classical Western thought and evolutionary biology. It appears, at least in its Italian form, to be of deeper thought than that of the normal American version. Indeed, American conservative intellectualism is of a much different type, and really hasn't evolved in any concrete form since Buckley's day.
What it might simply boil down to is what we've already mentioned. The FdI and Meloni are enormously anti-Woke and aren't apologetic about it in the least. They are also very nationalist in the "Italy for Italians" sense of things. And all that instinctively appeals, all around the globe, to people who aren't keen on being as multicultural as progressives assure them they should be and who, deep down, don't believe that a species that is male and female and has had marriage as its central fundamental societal element needs to now change that view.
It's a huge reaction to 1968 and the things 1968 foisted upon Western Society.
It's also, we might note, a reaction to the 1970s and the Greed is Good ethos that a triumphant capitalism brought in everywhere in the 1980s and 1990s. That part of Meloni's public platform seems missed. Meloni, however, has attacked modern globalism, and therefore that part of capitalism, pretty openly as well.
These themes all appeared in the far right before. Mussolini's original fascism was actually extremely radical in a left wing sense, reflecting a radicalism he'd grown up with, and his original membership in the Socialist Party. The Italian Fascist, however, combined some really left wing concepts with some extreme right wing ones, which was common to early fascist movements in many, but not all, places that it took root, that being one of the things that has made fascism so difficult to define. Because it did that, however, it also appealed to societal voters in the countries where it took root, who would adopt some of its views while blinding their eyes to others, and indeed blinding their eyes to the most radical elements of it.
Indeed, that's what made and still makes fascism really dangerous. We can see it in this example, maybe, and we can now see it in the U.S.
Indeed, we'll turn to the U.S. here, with this entry by some conservative journalist:
Republican voters face a clear choice in the 2024 presidential cycle. Those who think the conservative movement has the solutions to the nation’s crises should vote for a conventional GOP candidate. But those who believe the conservative movement is part of the problem should support Donald Trump.
Only Trump defied the deep state empowered by his Republican predecessors. Only Trump has broken from the disastrous foreign policy championed by the conservative movement. Only Trump has taken on the mania for free trade and outsourcing. No other figure of the right has shown the same willingness to break with his own side’s orthodoxies.
We've noted it here before, but we'll start with this and add in the Meloni element.
What's causing this hard right turn?
Well, in the U.S. and in Italy it's a feeling by rank and file, working people, that their politicians have completely abandoned them and their concerns combined with a reaction to modifying millennia old, and DNA rooted, institutions. That's pretty much it. The FdI promises to do something about that. American Conservatives have promised to do something about that since at least 1976, if not earlier, failed to do so, and even basically lied, in some instances, about their devotion to really doing so. They've started to do something, and ironically it's really Mitch McConnell, through his Supreme Court appointments, whose really started to change the social aspect of this around, in part.
The part where this isn't true had to do with unchecked illegal immigration. Trump, once again, did do something about that. Progressives and many others hated what he did, but he did do something, and that made him the first President since Teddy Kennedy's immigration reforms altered what had been in place to do so.
Economically, Trump had a good three-year run until COVID-19 came by plane, most likely, and ran through the country killing people and destroying the economy. Trump never acted like an economic conservative, however, and the GOP was pretty comfortable spending money like sailors on a three-day shore leave. As, by and large, people are happy with a good economy, it didn't really matter.
A person is free to view this anyway they wish, but Trump's far right policies, which appealed to many rank and file Republicans of the far right, and appealed to rust belt Democrats who came into the GOP, were nativist, traditional WASPish, and very socially conservative. To a very large degree, if they had been advanced by a more conventional politician, that individual would have been regarded as a huge success.
They were not advanced, however, by a conventional politician, but by Trump. It can be doubted, quite frankly, the extent to which Trump believed in any of the things he advocated for, or believes in anything at all other than himself, whom he appears to believe in obsessively. Trump is not an admirable man.
Trump may simply have picked up, as a salesman, on what his demographic wanted to buy. If he had done nothing more than that, he could not be criticized for it. Indeed, politicians of all stripes do that and in a democratic system, they must. There's no reason to believe, for example, that Harriet Hageman really thinks the election was stolen. Her base believes that, and so she must. It's an irony of the democratic system that really effective advocates of certain positions, truly believed by a politician's base, might find no real sympathy with the politician themselves. Indeed, that's why we find advocates of traditional family values caught up in sex scandals of all sorts, or advocates of law and order involved in crime.
Selling to your base, we note, is probably also why we find Kyrsten Sinema a Democrat looking out for monied interests. For that matter, it also may very well explain why politicians in certain regions seem to take positions that are contrary to their educations and backgrounds. They likely don't believe what they're saying, they believe they need to say it.
All of that is how democracy actually works, in part, but only in part.
Trump departed with that, however, in a truly fascistic sense. Appearing to believe principally in himself, he created a personality cult, some of which adopted the worst beliefs and inclinations of his supporters. And he became his movement, which is what Mussolini became, for example, to Italian fascism. His supporters still believe in him, but he believes in himself more. He essentially advances the concept that he, and only he, can save the nation against forces which are illegitimate.
And that is the core of fascism. FWIW, it's the core of Communism, too.
We said there may be lessons here. If so, what would they be?
The principal ones are the ones that Trump learned before he ever took office, and what Mitch McConnell, for all his differences with Trump, also knows. 1968 is over and much of what it brought has been ruinous. People look back instinctively to core societal traditional values and do not want change forced on them from above, or at all.
But what is also there is that there's a major society wide rejection of the consumerist economic revolution. People everywhere are wealthier than they used to be, but they are also more tied to their occupations than ever, and they don't want to be.
And people look at their countries and communities differently than capitalist do, and they don't want to look at them differently. They don't really want ever expanding this and that, and they often would just as soon have things be as they once were, rather than where they seem to be going.
All of those things can be advanced democratically. Meloni claims that she will now do that.
We'll see.
But this raises another question, particularly for American populists. Are you really wishing to buy the entire package?
Footnotes:
1. Meloni has a very direct and highly pithy form of delivery. In contempoary American politics it would be nearly impossible to find an analogy, in part because she very clearly means what she says. An interesting contrast would be to Trumpite Harriet Hageman, who is articulate enough, but who lacks the element of sincreity that Meloni obivously has. Perhaps only Liz Cheney, whose delivery is different, is comparable.
Trump's style nearly defies description, but it's odd and sort of oddly childish, as if he's delivering a rambling address to himself, or to a group in a children's club. That he's gained a wide following is surprsing in part for that fact, as people generally don't like being talked down to. He doesn't come across as consdesencing, but as not too bright. Interestingly one realy diehard fan of his that I spoke to some time ago, who couldn't imagine anyone not admiring him, related that "he speaks like us". Of note, that person was of a highly blue collar background from the East, which gives some creedance to the theory that New York politicians of recent years have learned their speaking style from dealing with East Coast mobsters.
Fratelli d'Italia, the "Brothers of Italy", have won the Italian election.
Not outright, but with 26% of the vote. Enough of a command that, together with another right wing party and a center right party, Giorgia Meloni's neo-fascist party will govern.12 The party, in second position, is the Italian center left Democratic Party, but it can't put together a ruling coalition.
This gives Italy, when in the 1945 to early 1970s period teetered on the edge of falling into Communism, its most right wing government since Mussolini was strung up.
The Fratelli d'Italia is nativist, anti-immigrant, anti-European Union, and traditionalist. It's leader, Giorgia Meloni has said of herself; "I am Giorgia. I'm a woman, I'm a mother, I'm Italian, I’m Christian". The slogan is sufficiently popular that it's been set to techno pop with her saying those things, in Italian, and it's pretty effective. You can also find clips of her saying, but to members of the Spanish Vox party, in Italian;
Yes to the natural family, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology... no to Islamist violence, yes to secure borders, no to mass migration... no to big international finance... no to the bureaucrats of Brussels!"
So where is she basically coming from: Well, here:
It's impossible at this point not to see that something is going on in the Western World. It's not just Orban, or Trump.
Its the entire Western World.
Indeed, if anything, Trump's version of this is the most decayed and perverted. Meloni's may be the most open and honest.
So how did we get here?
This might be the reaction, long delayed, to 1968, and all it brought about.
Indeed, it almost certainly is. The question is what form that takes, and where that form takes shape. In Italy, Meloni, running from the hard populist right, will form a coalition government in a parliament in which, perhaps ironically, nobody is claiming a minority government reflects corruption in the vote, whereas in our country, with a Federal democracy that's designed to work slow and defeat "coalitions", or parties, one side is. Therefore, ironically, Italy, which has a history of fascism but never endured de-fascism, democracy may actually be less imperiled.
At any rate, we noted here earlier that in post Boomer generations, liberalism was waning and conservatism building. What we missed is that it's waning quicker than we anticipated, and the reaction to 1968 seems to be very widespread, and increasingly strong.
Footnotes
1. "Meloni" means just what it sounds like.
Indeed, Meloni in a short video clip, can be seen holding two cantaloupes chest high making a joke about it. Something that's somewhat unique to Italian politics, which remains occasionally ribald.
2. The FdI denies that it's neo-fascist, and while we've referred to them here that way, this wants again raises the topic of "what is a fascist". It's not as easy to answer as it might at first seem.
The FdI may have a point here, although I frankly don't know. At the end of the day, fascism implies an element of totalitarianism. The Italian fascists of the 1920s through 1940s made no bones about not approving of democracy. The Spanish fascist were of the same mind set. By and large, neo-fascist have also been anti-democratic.
This contrasts with the Illiberal Democrats, who tolerate a degree of democracy, but within a preset framework. They're okay with the vote, up to a point, and that point is the point at which a society is supposed to have a cultural set of concepts upon which it operates. That's not up for a vote. That concept has a lot of sympathy, it seems, all over the Western World right now.
The basic insignia for the rank of First Sergeant at the E-8 grade, shown with the unofficial summer colors of khaki on OD. This color scheme was common for the summertime khaki uniform, but never approved. The proper colors were OD stripes on a black background.
Today in World War II History—September 22, 1942: Germans split Soviet 62nd Army in Stalingrad and occupy the southern half of the city. US Army raises grade of first sergeant to that of master sergeant.
From Sarah Sundin's blog
Clearly, the item about the Battle of Stalingrad is the important item, but I've linked this in here due to the item on U.S. Army ranks. On this day in 1942 the grade of the rank of First Sergeant was made equal to that of Master Sergeant.
We've discussed enlisted Army ranks here before, indeed more than once, I think.
First Sergeant are the senior enlisted NCO's in a company, battery or troop. It's an important rank, and it's been around for an extremely long time. He is, literally, the "first" sergeant and for enlisted soldiers often the most senior soldier they typically engage with, commonly nicknamed "top".
When the Army was reorganized in 1920, 1st Sergeants were given the grade of E-6. That would surprise modern soldiers, as that's the grade now held by Staff Sergeants, who at that time held the grade E-5. E-5 today is held by the rank of Sergeant, but at that time, Sergeants were E-4s, as they still are in the Air Force.
Master Sergeants, that title indicating a senior status to that sometimes indicated for master tradesmen, were E-7s. Today, that grade is held by the rank of Sergeant First Class. That rank didn't exist in 1920.
On this day in 1942 the Army adopted a new enlisted structure, changing some of the enlisted ranks. Technician grades, which we've earlier discussed, were adopted, foreshadowing the later introduction of Specialists. Enlisted ranks remained the same up through Staff Sergeant. First Sergeants were moved from E-6 to E-7, making them the equivalent of Master Sergeants, and an additional rocker was added to their insignia to indicate their equivalency. In the E-6 position the rank of Technical Sergeant, which had already coexisted with First Sergeant, remained.
This basic structure remained until 1948 when technicians were eliminated, but new rank insignia were introduced for non combatant NCO's, only barely distinguishable from those of combatants. Technical Sergeant, at that time, was renamed to Sergeant First Class. Moreover, the rank of "Recruit" was introduced for what had been "buck privates", and introduced at the E-1 level, making there three grades of privates. The rank of Staff Sergeant was eliminated, and buck Sergeants took their insignia.
Specialists were added in 1955.
n 1959 a jump in grades happened in enlisted ranks overall. Staff Sergeants were reintroduced as E-6s, acquiring their prior insignia, and Sergeants became E-5s and reacquired their three chevron and no rocker insignia., Sergeants First Class took the E-7 grade and First Sergeants (and Master Sergeants) E-8s. The rank of "Recruit" was renamed Private E-1. Privates at the E-3 level worse the single chevron, as they had since 1948. This is basically the structure we've had since then, except that PFC's obtain a rocker in 1968, and Private E-2 reclaimed the single stripe insignia that they hadn't had since 1948. The upper Specialists insignia over E-4 have also largely disappeared.
As this recitation also notes, the Technician grades were introduced during the same year as Top got a promotion and pay raise. They'd existed since January.
In a manner that only made sense to the Army, two stripe technicians were introduced at the grade of E-3, but with the title of Technician 5th grade. If that doesn't quite made sense, its because the "E" structure that I've been using here wasn't introduced until 1949. Prior to that, while the E grades noted here offer equivalency, so that it's easy to tell the actual changes over time, pay grades went by a simple number. Pay grade 7 was the lowest, and it was the one that applied to buck privates, or what we'd later refer to, most of the time, to Private E-1s. Pay grade 1 was the highest, which was equivalent to the post 1949 E-7.
That right there helps explain some of this evolution, by the way. There was nothing higher than pay grade 1, in enlisted ranks, and that was equivalent to E-7. Now, the highest enlisted grade normally encountered is E-8, which Master Sergeants and First Sergeants occupy, as of 1959. In that same year, 1959, the rank of Sergeant Major was introduced at E-9, as was Specialist E-9. E-9 remains the highest enlisted grade today, although there are several different types of Sergeant Majors that occupy it, some being exceedingly rare.
Anyhow, back to technicians. Introduced in January, right after the war started, their existence reflected the much more technical Army of 1940 as compared to earlier. The creation of the rank was an attempt to create a rank and pay scheme for men who were not combatants. Something had to be done, but the experiment wasn't really successful, leading to the change to combatant and non-combatant ratings in 1948, and ultimately to the not hugely successful creation of specialists ranks in 1959. On that latter creation, the number of specialist ranks was already being reduced by 1967 and was further cut back in 1978. When I joined the National Guard in 1981, there were still Specialist E-6s, but in 1985 that was changed so that only Specialist E-4 remained. At the same time, however, the increasingly professional nature of the Army after the elimination of the draft meant that the number of men occupying lower enlisted ranks increased, and therefore the Army reduced the number of Corporal E-4s in favor of Specialist E-4s, the distinction being that Corporals are NCOs and Specialists are not.
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