On Obsolete Institutions, Immoral behavior, Old Standards. Mehr Mensch Sein. Cornell Rape and Other Matters.

Sanctify yourself and you will sanctify society.

St. Francis of Assisi

Chi Phi (ΧΦ) house at Cornell.

Every once and a while I publish something here which I know, if anyone reads it, will offer offense.

This will offer massive offense.  It can't help but do so.¹

It's also one of those posts which involves a lot of synchronicity.

The details.

I felt like bait.

Cornell rape victim.

Caption to lawsuit, entire suit visible here:  Suit.

Recently the news of a gang rape of a young woman at Cornell University has been much in the news.  I actually didn't pay a lot of attention to it at first as, oddly enough, I'd just read an article in the New York Times magazine supplement of a young woman who was gang raped at a university and the details, to the minor extent I was aware of them, were much the same. Turns out that it was actually a different event, and frankly the one I read about first was significantly more horrific in some fashions.  After that, I looked on the net a bit, and as I'll explain below, I read of a young woman who had, almost successfully, but apparently not quite, achieved the removal of her self posted nude images from the net, and then following that, due my Twitter feed, saw a Catholic young woman commenting in horror to the comments by one of a contemporary comedian regarding sexual conduct.

Eh?  Are these all related?

Yes, they are.

Let's start with Cornell.

The way the story is more or less reported is that the young woman. age 20, went to the fraternity room of a male friend she was interested in, after having become heavily intoxicated earlier in the evening. At the fraternity, she drank more and consumed at least ketamine and then was gang raped by members of the Chi Phi (ΧΦ).  In a 50,000 foot sort of way, all that's correct.  But when you did into the details the story is quite a bit different.

Rather, what happened, is the young woman in a sorority had an interest, both romantic and sexual, in a young man in a fraternity.  Now, frankly, in any romantic interest there's always a sexual element, which will explore below, so the two are not necessarily completely separated.  But what picks up from there grossly departs from what standards had been only fairly recently.  She spoke to him on the phone and was invited out for the evening, starting off at a bar. They adjourned to the frat house, and when she got there, he included a friend and proposed a sexual threesom, i.e., that she consent to being screwed by him and by his buddy, and she agreed.  The complaint alleges she was too drunk to say no, but frankly that seems incorrect.  She also agreed to take ketamine, and consumed more alcohol.  This didn't render her unconscious, but it did render her sexually pliable and various frat members came in to screw her and the word got around that you could have sex just by stopping in.  At least at some point in this horrific series of events, one male member of the fraternity stopped in just out of concern, and found the first two men there and the woman under the covers.  Satisfied, I guess, that things were okay, he left. Ultimately, several men penetrated her, including the first two.

The next day the one guy she liked and the girl started exchanging texts and she wanted, at first, to develop a romantic relationship with him still. She confessed awkwardice at what hat happened, but admitted at least some of the actions were consensual.  And as gross as it was, she was an underaged drinker, the first gross act was.  As time went on she convinced herself she'd been raped, and indeed she had been, and reported it, which at the same time was coincident with news of the event getting around campus and the girl feeling her reputation was ruined.²   It was not prosecuted in part as the Cornell police did not report the full details to the prosecutor.  Apparently New York retains a very antiquated view of the law in this area, although it's not historically unique, that if a person starts consenting and passes out (which she didn't) they've consented.   

Again, that view of this topic is antiquated, but it's not unique.  The concept that if a girl starts down the road to sex, even if she didn't get very far down the road, which this girl clearly did, and passes out due to alcohol, has still consented, used to be a cultural norm and that tended to reflect itself in the law.

The cultural view is still there to a significant degree.

Which takes us there to the next horror.

In the second instance, a young woman went away to college.  She was an adoptee raised by loving parents but it's pretty clear that when she got there she used it as an opportunity to "party".  Indeed, she was drinking like crazy.  She had some male friends she trusted, and went to a bar with them. While there, she drank very heavily and passed out. They raped her and used their phones to video themselves raping her. They then posted it on social media, which is how she learned she'd been raped.

This story is frankly more horrific. The young woman's error here was in getting drunk. She thought the men were her friends.  When she was vulnerable, they flat out raped her. But they were so debased they shared the images of the rape on social media.  The event was too much for her, and she dropped out of school.

Which takes us to social media.

While looking into this I ran across a story of another young woman.  Looking at it, she appears to be a fairly nice if highly naive young woman who graduated with a fairly common but somewhat difficult four year degree.  While in school, she participated in activities of a collegic nature, being a cheerleader.

She is also massively endowed, which even her "clean" photos make plain.  She apparently picked up on that being a real attractant and started posting images of herself on social media, showing offer her clothed assets, which then linked to an "Only Fans" account where she could be seen nude.  At some point the danger or stupidity of this must have occurred to someone (she graduated and I wonder if it was employment related) and she mounted a vigorous campaign to wipe out all the nude images.  Apparently she was mostly successful, which is impressive, and which also suggest that she probably had to resort to legal help. In spite of all this, she still posts TikTok streams, clothed, which are clearly designed to show off her boobs and which frequently involve heavy drinking.  She's trying to be an "influencer".

Well, it's sure not a good influence.

And finally to our last item.

 A comedy clip, which appears to have started off as a "reel", showed up on my Twitter feeds as a comment by a horrified Catholic young woman.  In it, the comedian is doing the engagement with the audience routine.

There are piles of such reels around by female comedians right now, and quite a few (but not all) like to engage in sex as a topic.  I'm not sure, but I think it has to do with sort of the Lenny Bruce Effect, which is basically that to say something shocking when its not expected draws attention.  It also expand the boundaries of what's considered shocking in a culture.  Bruce was crude and vulgar and used the topic of sex in his routine.  His personality trod close to his topics, he married a stripper.  He died at age 40 of a drug overdose.

He also opened up the door to acts like Richard Pryor's.  Today vulgarity is common.  

Anyhow, the comedienne called out a couple and asked them if they were married, which they were, and how old she was when they met.  16.  She then asked how many men she had engaged in sex with, something that in an earlier era would have resulted in immediate rebuke. That's become a big female edgy topic recently, with women boasting of their "body counts", as if it's all that hard for any woman who wants to have sex, to have it (more on that in a moment).  She'd only had sex with her husband, which was then lampooned.

That's worthy of praise, not lampooning, and that was the American, and the European, norm up until the Sexual Revolution.  Multiple sex partners were not admired in anyone, and for women that resulted in their being regarded as a "slut", which we'll discuss in more depth below.

Okay, where do we go with all of this?  There is a lot to consider, and a lot of it isn't being considered.

Let's take the low hanging fruit first.

Chi Phi (ΧΦ) badge.

Fraternities, and sororities, need to be abolished.

A student movement at Cornell realized this before this assault.  It wasn't the first assault alleged to have occurred in this frat house, and they tried to ban fraternities, unsuccessfully.

There is really no reason for fraternities any longer. They reflect the nature of education that existed before World War Two, and really well before World War Two.  In the US, at least, they have their start in the late 18th Century.

While there are exceptions, for the most part university dormitories, "the dorms", did not become common in university settings until after World War Two at which point there was a massive expansion in the student population due to the GI Bill.  The first purpose built drom at the University of Wyoming, which is of course a land grant institution, was considerably older than that, however, being Merica Hall, which opened as a women's dorm in 1908.  It was originally called "Women's Hall."  There was early housing for male students at UW before that, but in what is now called "Old Main", which also held all of the classrooms.  It was built in 1886.  This shows, perhaps, some of the awkward nature of the original housing arrangements.  Combined classrooms and living quarters in buildings was a common early solution to student's residential needs.  Hoyt Hall, which was a drom and a education building, was started in 1915.  Knight Hall and the the Student Union were built as a part of a late 1940s Depression era construction project.    Wyoming Hall was completed in 1951.

The first fraternity at UW, Sigma Beta Phi, opened in 1903.  The oldest sorority in 1905.

That might seem to cut against my argument here, but it really does not.  Upper education was mostly for the well to do.  Land grant universities were not.  There were some early school housing buildings in various locations, but they tended to be in buildings that were otherwise used for classes.  Early dormitories at coeducational institutions tended to be built for women first.  There were no such things as "coed" dorms.

Casper College, in Casper Wyoming, opened as Casper Junior College on September 17, 1945, a date we failed to note on this site.  It was originally in the upper floor of hte high school, but moved onto its own campus in 1955.  It did not have a dormitory until 1965.

So, then, what did a student do if there wasn't a dormitory, or wasn't room in one?

A person might think this is an easy question to answer, "rent an apartment", but it's not as easy as it sounds.  As we've already discussed, lodging was more complicated for single people before refrigerators and modern stoves came into existence.  Sure, you could rent an apartment, but it wasn't until the mid 20th Century that it was really relatively easy to live on your own in one.  Students tend not to have a lot of money, and therefore its not like eating out every day was an option for a lot of them.  "Starving student" had a meaning then that it doesn't now.

An option therefore was living in a boarding or "rooming" house, which a lot of single people did in general. We've already discussed that.  Privately owned, they provided room and board but often under fairly strict supervision.  A good example of this is given in the movie Brooklyn, which depicts a boarding house in the 1950s for young single women.

Student apartments did exist in some areas where the student population was fairly high.  For large private schools, like Harvard, these tended to be multiple room, say with bedrooms for about four students, and a small room for a servant.  That person took care of the cooking and cleaning for the students.  Clearly this is long gone.

Cornell, we'll note, is a private university.

And then there were fraternities and ultimately sororities.

Housing and food was the main advantage of fraternities.  A person needed a place to live, and like student apartments, fraternities had and still have a person who cooks and cleans.  Indeed, I recall some students claiming they were joining fraternities just as the food was better than at the dorms.

Early on, with upper education being very exclusive, fraternities tended to function as literary societies.  In the 19th Century, however, they were part of the large Protestant fraternal organization movement, and they began to incorporate secret rituals, some of them which were outright bizarre.  I don't know about Chi Phi, but it does have an initiation ritual, which interestingly enough emphasizes integrity and honesty.  This is interesting in that at the same time clubs that focused on dinner with dinging halls also started to exist, giving another food option to students, but also functioning sort of like fraternal organizations do today.  Having said that, dining clubs never became enormously common in the US.

The GI Bill flooded universities after World War Two and they responded by creating dorms.  Fraternities and Sororities also expanded, but by the 1960s their real purpose had passed. There was no longer a real need to join one as there was no real living advantage to doing so. Given that, their main purpose became social.

Social clubs with significant numbers of people who range from 18 to 22  years of age are a bad idea in general, unless they have massive supervision.  A lot of returning World War Two veterans were, of course, over that age, and the real impact of things didn't begin to settle in until the 1950s and 1960s.

In the 50s and 60s the US was hit with the combined impact of a massive demographic influx, the Baby Boomers, a huge boost in the wealth of the country, and an assault on morals and image of women in the form of the views espoused by Playboy magazine.  The impact was society wide but it had a particular impact on college and university campuses.  Nowhere was that more felt than in fraternities.

The classic depiction of this is, of course, National Lampoon's Animal House. That's an exaggeration, like most comedy, but National Lampoon, an expression of Harvard Lampoon, was depicting what it knew, including really vulgar and immoral treatment of women.  A central depiction in the plot of the film is a fraternity member wheeling a  drunk underaged girl home in a shopping cart, after she passes out while they're about to have sex, from a "toga party" . Raping her was a bridge too far for the Lampoon, but it's depicted in such a fashion that it's implied that the chivalrous character, if you will, could have legitimately done that if he wanted to.

When I was at UW in the early 1980s, fraternities actually had "toga parties", although my guess is that they were inspired in that by the film.  One fraternity that was familiar with, as a friend was in it, annually had the "Baby Ball" in which the members and invited sorority girls dressed in sheets, like babies, and slid down the stairs, which were supposed to be fallopian tubes.  They also drank really heavily at this event.

By the time I was in law school, which would be the late 80s, fraternities were on the decline.  That probably reflected a generational change, and a technological one.  You could just as easily live on your own, and if you didn't want to, you could get a really nice dorm room.  They've been declining ever since.

But, as we can see, they are still around.

They ought to be extinguished, as the Cornell student movement tried to do.

Let's start off with a statement that states the obvious, but apparently it isn't.

College students in the 18th Century are not the same as college students in the 21st.

This isn't to suggest that they were perfectly behaved.  The 19th Century US was awash in alcohol all the time and there were some huge alcohol fueled student riots in the 19th Century, including one at West Point (the Eggnog Riot).  And all sorts of weird harassment of underclassmen was common.  In some ways, the abuse of younger students which remains common in some fraternities, occured on a wide scale.  That wide scale abuse of younger students has pretty much stopped in the general student body (not in all fraternities, however), but that came with a broader student body.

What was not as common was the outright abuse of women in this fashion, save for one odd but instructive instance.  Prior to 1865, some university students had enslaved women as servants, and they were subject to sexual abuse, not surprisingly.³ 

And up until the 1970s, seemingly, society appreciated that young men without supervision and young women without the same would get into all sorts of trouble.    Kipling noted that "single men in barracks don't grow into plaster saints", a line he wrote about the peacetime British Army, but which applies equally to any group of warehoused young men.  Along the lines of our topic, sexual abuse of female service members has become widespread and nearly incapable of being eradicated.  Given the atmosphere of fraternities, which has been libertine at least in the popular imagination since the 70s, rapes are going to be a feature of them.

Whatever function fraternities, and sororities, served, is pretty much over.  Any benefit they provided, can be provided in other ways.  There are going to be campus rapes no matter what, but keeping fraternities around is encouraging them.⁴

Which takes us to the next thing.

Failing young men and women.  The battlefield casualties of the sexual revolution.

When this topic broke the week before last, it ended up on the weekend news programs, not too surprisingly.  One of the people who commented on it was Republican 2028 Presidential hopeful, Chris Christie, in his role as a This Week commentator.  Christe noted, albeit only briefly, that young men needed to be better educated that such conduct as was exhibited here is appalling.

That's a given, but how did we even get here, and what do we need to do?

And, frankly, young women need to be better educated in these areas.

And so do adults.

One thing that society in general needs to be better educated on is that university isn't for partying.  As noted above, this sort of view has been around forever, I think you can even find Medieval examples, but starting in the 70s it became pretty bad in some quarters.    In my view, this was part of the post war largess of the Baby Boom era.

Students going to university in the 60s and 70s that if they got through university they were getting a white collar job. That frankly, in many disciplines, built in a  real slack attitude.  Set from from home with parents that held real values but who had been damaged by the horror of the Second World War and the Great Depression, college was a chance to live it up, often on somebody else's money.  Much of this has passed as the economy has changed from what it formerly was to one in which its much more difficult to get by in, but some of that attitude still exists, good examples of which, or perhaps more accurately bad ones, above.  All of the examples except for the last one feature examples of this sort of behavior, and the "influences" example may actually be the worst.

This needs to end.  

How to end it is another matter, although as noted the economy is ending some of it.  Something that impacted it a bit when I was in university was raising the drinking age from 19 to 21, but that's already been done.  In the Cornell example the problem of admitting teenagers to bars legally is highlighted That should end.  If it were me, I'd just make counties that feature educational institutions dry.  That's a severe approach, of course, but I'd take it.  Studies show, fwiw, that almost all rapes of this type and of the service member type are accompanied by overconsumption of alcohol.

Beyond that, however, putting the bullet in the Sexual Revolution needs to happen, and frankly it's starting to. This helps explain the Trad Movement, in part, in the Catholic and Lutheran laity.  When I go to Mass on Sunday and find a young married woman, often not much over 20 years old, in a matilla with her husband and a baby, I'm looking at the foot soldiers of the counter revolution.  Same thing when I go to work and see the young men and women of Luther Classical College walking to school.

This We'll Defend.⁵ 

This emphasizes that the reaction ot the the Sexual Revolution has to be all inclusive and organic.  You can't have a "Me Too" movement that doesn't recognize that. Adopting and teaching a standard, has to adopt it and that's adopting the entire smash.  As Yeoman's laws of human behavior note:

Yeoman's Thirty-Fourth Law of Behavior:  All things are synthesized.

Ultimately, all things are synthesized.  Everything is a whole.  A person may not grasp parts of it, as we are imperfect, but it all goes together. A person may not act immorally in one area and be perfectly moral in another.  The more immoral a person is in one thing, the more immoral they are overall.  A person may not willingly believe little lies without coming to believe great ones, and to be a liar, and so on.

It's interesting how often people try to evade this principal. All people fail in it, as we're fallen and we don't grasp the correctness of various things, but there are those who make a dedicated effort to avoid it.  In a minor way I'm reminded of a couple I know that lived without the benefit of marriage for years, even having a child, who have gone hardcore into the MAGA world, and who are sending their child to Hillsdale school.  They can't quite make it sync as while their instincts are good, they really have to work around to the origin of things to make what they're doing, make sense.

Indeed, while this goes off topic, this particularly American trait is one of hte fundamental flaws of MAGA.  Many of the MAGA faithful, or former faithful, are in it as they have a sense that American society has gone off the rails.  But what they're doing is leaning out of the wreckage of the train car they are in looking back at other toppled cars not realizing that theirs tipped over too.  I.e., they're holding the Car Transgender and Car Homosexual in contempt while wanting to get back to the party in the Car Cheating On Spouse or the Car Divorce which tipped the train over in the first place.

Drilling down on this, what this means is that American society, if it doesn't want college age boys raping college girls, needs to dump the pornographic lifestyle its living in.  Put a bit more bluntly, you can't have a naked Sydney Sweeney advertising a sports website and not expect rape to result.

Also drilling down, the old standard here, which was never perfectly applied, needs to be reapplied.  Young men living in groups didn't generally rape young women as it had been emphasized that it was indescribably wrong.  Moreover, they were taught, and again things happened, that sex was for marriage, not just their own selfish entertainment.⁶   They were taught was decency was.  Decent people don't post "free pussy in alum pu".

A lot of work needs to be done in this area, but it can start right now by holding those men in this in contempt.  Matthew Ingalls, Johnathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris, Scott Kretzschmar. Yes, they're innocent until proven guilty, but unless proven to be disconnected with these events, and to have acted to prevent them.  Ingalls and Newell not only deserve contempt, they deserve to be branded as perverts, which is what they are.⁷ 

And assuming, which we are taught not to do, that this meets the New York definition of rape at some point, they shoudl be convicted and sentenced.

But what about Jane Doe?  Indeed, what about all the Jane Does mentioned in this thread?

One of the really disturbing aspects of this is that we now have a society where a 20 year old girl at a prestigious university not only agrees to sex on a sort of first date, she agreed to group sex.  That's perverse. Granted, there are people who are perverse, but now we have been taught not to say such things.

A girl who would have engaged in this conduct when I was young would flat out have been branded a "slut".  That's not to be done now, and is termed "slut shaming", and perhaps the collapse in moral standards make the shaming obsolete.  And it's worth noting that Jane Doe's conviction that everything was morally tainted here grew as the news of what she'd done was spread around.  She was specifically taking heat from two sorority sisters over her role in the whole matter.  That doesn't mean she wasn't raped. So much was going on in terms of drugs and alcohol in this story that if she wasn't impaired at the onset, at some point she most likely was, and she took the position right from the onset that most of it wasn't consensual.  But what we have here is a really gross sex act with two young men she did consent to becoming a sort of orgy in a way, which she didn't consent to.  This isn't the same at all as the Red Army showing up to a village in eastern Germany in 1945.

We need to avoid making this worse that it already is, but frankly we need to get back to a point at which that sort of conduct is shameful.  Which brings me to the last two young women mentioned in this post.  The influencer and couple mocked by the comedienne.

Regarding the influencer, somebody in her orbit, and may she herself, woke up to the fact that posting naked photographs of yourself was shameful, and they were yanked after quite an effort.  Good for whomever woke up that fact.

But bad that her "influencing" is depicing the same sort of conduct that got the second young woman in this story in trouble.  Her failure, if we are to deem it that, was not being sexually immoral, but in allowing herself to get into a drunken stupor in the presence of young men.  

Which leads me to a comment that was made on the Facebook feed for the author of the article mentioned above.  A commenter noted as the asnwer to the article entitled;  Caitlin Flanagan: What Was Jane Doe Looking For?:

So basically… it’s dangerous to be around men? 

I understand the argument about risk, judgment, alcohol, and putting yourself in vulnerable situations. Those are conversations worth having. 

But there’s something deeply unsettling about telling young women: You know what men are like. You know these places are dangerous. Why did you go? 

Women go to fraternity parties because they want to socialize. They want to flirt. They want to meet men. They may even want to have consensual sex. 

None of those things should require accepting sexual assault as a foreseeable consequence of being around men. 

At some point, “women need to make better choices” becomes an extraordinarily damning statement about men. 

So the feminist position is “not all men,” but the anti-feminist position is apparently, “Ladies, you knew there would be men there”?

Well, she's correct in everything she said, the commenter, but she's wrong.   Large groups of young men have fallen off the rails in this way since we have been a species. So, yes, "it's dangerous to be around men".

It is.

Not all men all the time, but this gets back to standards of the past.  It's not that dangerous to be around a bunch of young men. . . who are near older men. . .and better yet if some of them are relatives.  I've seen young men begin to act improperly towards young women where older men were present and intervened, sometimes forcibly.⁸    In other words, being at the Sheepherders' Fair is one thing, being at Moonies, apparently, quite another.

And, influencer, having a wardrobe made entirely of overly tight halter tops is dangerous. That does, in the real world, one thing.  It advertises your boobs, and advertises that your boobs are available for the taking, along with things located elsewhere on your female body.

We'll loop back around here to the Flanagan article, which is drawing flak.  Flanagan condemns franternitis solidly in the article.  She notes that fraternities were dangerous when she was in college, and that a boyfriend she was breaking up with warned her never to go upstairs in one, which she never did. 

Then she asked this question:

That’s the saddest thing about these old rituals. What attracts women to those parties—late at night, like Jane Doe—to walk alone to a fraternity house and take her chances? 

She answers:

What she’s really looking for is a man. And she has no idea how to find a good one.

Footnotes:

1.  On offering offense, Caitlin Flanagan, a journalist, has already written two articles on this and the second one, which will be noted above, has really drawn criticism.

2. We've left out a lot of details in our first summation of this, but her concern for her reputation isn't surprising.  She consented to getting screwed by one man while performing oral sex on another, and then was screwed by multiple other men.  One of the two original men actually texted her not to worry as things like this were becoming more a societal norm, which is complete bullshit.

3.  Having said that, the practice of "wenching" was common amongst certain men, which involved picking up young women in bars of a certain class, that being the desperate underclass.  This pretty clearly crosses over towards the topic of prostitution pretty quickly.  Having said that, this definitely occurred.

4.  On another note, not one of the very few men I knew who were in fraternities at the University of Wyoming graduated with a degree.  This caused me to be surprised when I learned that a long time partner of mine had been a member of the same fraternity that two individuals I knew, who did not graduate, hate been.

I should note that one of those two fellows, while he did not graduate, didn't live in the frat house the entire four years either, and later went on to become a millionaire.

5.  Motto of the U.S. Army, first adopted in 1778.

6.  The topic of birth control has not come up here.

7.  Ingalls actually has claimed that Jane Does sodomized him, and he's a sexual assault survivor.  Oh please.  At any rate, their joint actions on the girl were perverted, but frankly, her acceptance of being engaged in sex with both at the same time is also perverted.

Kretzschmar maintains that he was not part of the rape at all, and what he did was to go into the room and check on things. This seems to be more or less correct.  His sin, here, is one of omission.  He knew that something was going on and did nothing.

8. Contrary to what people might expect, middle aged men are often way stronger and more adopt in a fight than young men are.

On Obsolete Institutions, Immoral behavior, Old Standards. Mehr Mensch Sein. More additional labels.

On Obsolete Institutions, Immoral behavior, Old Standards. Mehr Mensch Sein. Additional links.

On Obsolete Institutions, Immoral behavior, Old Standards. Mehr Mensch Sein. Yeoman's Laws of Behavior Links.

The Agrarian's Lament: On Wendell Berry. An introspection.

The Agrarian's Lament: On Wendell Berry. An introspection.: We noted the passing of Wendell Berry here on September 1, but I didn't go into much introspection on him in relation to us.  This omiss...

On Wendell Berry. An introspection.

We noted the passing of Wendell Berry here on September 1, but I didn't go into much introspection on him in relation to us.  This omission was, ironically, time caused. 

I didn't have time to.

Since Berry's death I've ready comments by people, principally on Twitter, reflecting on how influential Berry was on them.  He was certainly influential on me, but not quite in the way that he was on others.  Berry wasn't the source of my world view.  Rather, what he was was the distiller of it.

I had an Agrarian mindset before I'd ever heard of Berry.  I came into Berry, in fact, because I had an agrarian mindset.  Indeed, I had an agrarian mindset before I had heard of agrarianism in a philosophical sense.  I was really a nascent agrarian by the time I graduated from high school, although only vaguely so.

By the time I had graduated from university as an undergrad, I was a full blown, if undefined, agrarian.  What I really wanted to do was to hunt, fish and garden, and be allowed to do so.  If I could have, I would have ranched.  I didn't have the means to do that, or to make my other goals my present habitus or mode of living, at least in full, although at the time wildgame provided most of my meat, and my father's garden most of my produce.  What I didn't have, was a good and steady income and the destruction of the extractive economy, which I was disenchanted with anyhow, kept me from having one.   I had already found a literary fellow traveller in the form of Aldo Leopold.

Law school seemed my only option, and so I went.

The Agrarian impulse however only strengthened during that time.  Getting out of law school in 1990 I recall telling a friend of mine that I had no ambition, as all I wanted to do was ranch.  He told me that didn't mean I had no ambition, that was my ambition.  Well, that's one of those insights that is a bit shocking when you first hear it, but it was correct.  At that time I still carried a sort of weltanschauung that required me to make something of myself in the eyes of the world, something that had been instilled by my mother.

In spite of starting practicing law, my agrarian world outlook only increased.  At that time I discovered the Southern Agrarians somehow, which was mind blowing.  For the first time, really, I learned that there others who held the same viewpoints on many things that I did. The Southern Agrarians, who are very problematic on some things, nonetheless really helped define my philosophical worldview to me and I realized that what I was, was an agrarian.

The Southern Agrarians were almost all dead by that point in time.  Only Andrew Nelson Lytle was left alive.  So the movement seemed to be dead itself, but the arrival of the Internet allowed even a very isolated person such as myself to learn who else was out there.  That lead me to Gene Logsdon and Wendell Berry.  Berry was by far the more influential.

Indeed, Berry took the world out look I had and really distilled it. There were a lot of things I believed but I didn't have the existential nature of defined. Berry did that for me.  His influence on how I sese the world was massive.

Distilling my world view didn't stop with Berry.  Sometime after discovering him I discovered the Distributist, including Chesterton, and that really completed it, basically.  I often say, when there's ears to hear it, that while not all Distributists are Agrarians, all Agrarians are Distributist.

Berry stands in my intellectual formation with Leopold and Chesterton, three men who now are at some lively gathering beyond the veil.

Berry's death is a major and tragic loss for the intellectual life of the nation.  Not just agrarianism, but the soul of the United States itself.  Berry lived life the way it really should be lead.  He was deeply Christian (he was a Baptist) and a man of letters who farmed.  He saw America for what it was, what it had become, and what it should return to.  He advocated for Christian principles and lived a Christian life, while having a deep land ethic and understanding of the land itself.  He urged us to "become native to this place".

I've never really been able to pull off what he lived and advocated.  But I may be about to.

Berry, in his youth, was an opponent of the Vietnam War in a region that was likely not opposed to it.  His departure comes during the reign of Donald Trump.

Berry, like all true agrarians in contemporary society, likely knew that what he stood for was not going to be adopted by the culture at large.  The Southern Agrarians were already lamenting the destruction of the last of agrarianism during the 1930s.  The Unsettling of America, a masterpiece, was published in 1977. Particularly after the election of Ronald Reagan, each passing year has made the plight of agrarians worse in this country, as its yielded to an unprincipled culture and greed. Restraints placed on the evolution by the law, which do exist, and by the culture, which also exist but which are greatly weakened, have nearly fallen by the wayside.

Berry was 93 when he died this past week.  Donald Trump, suffering from dementia in the Oval Office while nearly ruling as a dictator, is 80 years old.  Berry was of the Silent Generation (Leopold was of the Lost Generation). Trump is a Baby Boomer and virtually defines that generation, in spite of what many in it would like to believe.

Berry stood for, and will continue to stand for, the opposite that everything Donald Trump does.  He was a sincere Christian deeply in nature and the virtues of self control on al things. Trump is, at best, a faux Christian who stands for destruction and avarice. They represent the two poles that struggle for the soul of the nation, one who would anchor us in a quiet and unassuming harbor, and another who would drag us out into and down under in the tempest.

Wendell Berry, August 5, 1934 – August 31, 2026.  May the perpetual light shine upon him.

The 2026 Election, 18th Edition. Primary Voting Commences Edition. Vote like your future and that of your state depends on it, because it does, part three. Yet more labels.

 

Mid Week At Work: What Succession Gets Right.

 

Why Won’t America’s Aging Elite Retire? | Interesting Times with Ross Douthat or Russ Douthat and his guest discover what I've been saying for years.

 

I've been shouted down for saying that the elderly Baby Boom generation needs to yield, often by Boomers themselves.

Well, it's a good interview.  A lot of this is exactly what I've said here.  The one thing I adamantly disagree with is his endorsement of euthanasia.  That is completely immoral.

I've noted this enough here that it might be one of the most common, or at least reoccuring, themes of this blog.  As noted, when I've brought it up, I often get shouted down.  Now we see a law professor in his 50s bringing it up, and noting that he's a victim of the situation himself.

He's a Gen Xer.

 

The Congressional Oath Does Not Include “Until Death Do Us Part”

The death of Lindsey Graham. A timely American reminder.

 

There will be, no doubt, a lot of mention today of the death of Lindsey Graham.  It'll feature, in some fashion, on all the news programs.  

I've commented a little on Graham in the election thread.  He was standing for reelection. That's all beyond him now.

What I'm commenting on instead is the "surprise" by his death.  Here's the most American, and stupidest, one:

I’m sorry, but Lindsey Graham dying out of the blue like this doesn’t make any sense at all. 

We have him on camera yesterday looking perfectly healthy. 

None of this is making any sense…

Sorry junior, somebody dying suddenly at age 71 makes all the sense in the world.

And frankly, Graham was more than looking his age in recent months.

It only doesn't make sense to modern Americans. Graham's own father was 69 when he died of a heart attack, which is likely what Graham died of as well.  

All human beings die, and after about 30, all males are on borrowed time, females after about 45.  After that, if death comes, maybe people are surprised, but they ought not to be.

My own father died at age 62, and his father at age 47.    My father's mother was 65 when she died.  I was a child at the time, but I can recall it.

The point here isn't to just point out the obvious, but to add something else.  American culture has moved in the Baby Boom Era from knowing that death can arrive at any point, and will arrive ultimately, to sort of believing it just can't happen.  Graham was 71 years old and running for a position which would have ended for him at age 78.  At 71, that position should go to a younger person.  People have to yield at some point.  Moreover, by putting positions of responsibility in the hands of people who are that old, society is just gambling with death.

Indeed, some morning in the news few days to years, we're going to wake up to the news that Donald Trump is dead.  Maybe he'll live through his term, but there's utterly no guaranty of that.  Right now he's taking a physical every six months, which is probably due to his declining mental status, but that shows it right there.

In earlier times countries would occasionally come under the reign of the the very young, but it was rare.  Almost always a regent was put in place to govern until they were old enough to do so.  There are rare exceptions.  Ismail I became Shah of Perisal at just 13 years old in 1501 and actually governed..  King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem  dismissed his regency and took personal control of his kingdom at age 15. I'd frankly rather have a 15 year old in charge than an 80 year old.  Society would say that's nuts, and indeed having a 15 year old in charge is nuts.  Having an 80 year old in charge is nuts too.

I'll deal with it in another post, but as for myself, at 63, I've recently started sending out the signals that I'm headed towards a career landing.  I'm 17 months out, no more.  It's funny how that's received.  Some are nervous, and some just don't believe it, including two older partners of mine, one in his 70s . It's not possible to retire at that age (I'll be five months shy of age 65).  But for that matter, there's no guaranty at all I'll be living by that time.  I may spend the next 17 months of my life paying for the fear of my long suffering wife that I can't retire, right now.

That's a bit different, however, from the hubris of "I'll be living" and "I'll be fit".

And so the general lesson.  We don't allow for old airline pilots as they may get suddenly ill, and kill everyone on the plane

The same is true for the elderly in charge of anything.

There's a time people should stop.  And people imaging that any male death over 50 is shocking or unusual are merely trying to comfort themselves.

Afflicted with the world they helped make, and afflicting it on everyone else. The Baby Boomers, old age, the Sexual Revolution, and expelling the Barbarians.

This is going to be harsh.

But not as harsh as it started out to be.  I actually toned it down.

And yes, it's another dissing the Baby Boomers thread.

This past week there's been two articles in major journals regarding the aging of the Baby Boomers.  One I had to hunt for as it was published in The Free Press, and I don't subscribe to that.  Still, I found it here.

The Long Boomer Farewell

This will not be a clean handoff. It will be an extended interregnum.

The article is well written and largely correct, although in my view, much more gentle than it should be.  It will be an extended interregnum because, like actual regents, the obsolescent monarchy cannot accept that the obsolescent monarchs should go, and go right now.

I said that this would be harsh.

But not as harsh as it started out to be.

I've been dealing with this topic directedly, recently.  The entire country has been in fact.  On a personally local level,  I'm presently so frustrated with it that, as a member of Generation Jones, I'm about ready to drop out of employment in my "good office job" right now. I don't only because a panicked spouse feels that's financial devastation, even if she's wrong.  I keep on keeping on only for domestic peace, that's it.

In this, I've been dealing with the intersection of the stubborn refusal of an entire generation to yield power on absolutely anything, while at the same time, watching how their choices and that of the post WWII era continually to negatively impact an entire society today.

In my experience Boomers just will not yield in offices, or in office.  Indeed, right now, Donald Trump, who is clearly demented is lamenting former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani being in the hospital in critical condition.  Giuliani is an 81 year old serial polygamist like Trump, age 79.  A hallmark of the generation is that it just thinks its going to live forever and that none of the rules that held society together from when the first Vandal was taught to read until 1968 apply to them.

They've never stopped to ask about the reason the rules were there and what tearing them down would do . . . even to themselves.

Or acknowledged they'll die.

They will, they are but they will not acknowledge it or yield, and they are well on their way to going from being celebrated, albeit mostly by themselves, to unlamented.

In professional offices, and often in politics, where they were granted power in their 30s and 40s, they retain it as a last ditch matter no matter what.  For two weeks running I've seen a Boomer confronted with the "it's time to go" reality and simply refuse.  That person would rather retain an presence in an office where the person is not wanted rather than leave with dignity.  It's bad enough that Gen Y and Gen X in that situation cites the Boomer presence as a reason that they might now want to commit to what the older person cites as his "legacy".

Well, if they have to work it, they may just let his legacy die in an economic desert.

Regarding one such struggle, I've seen a number of minor requests made recently of a Boomer, and some not so mild ones.  The latter come from an awareness by the Boomer's fellows that there's some cognitive decline.  "Whose project is this?" is the question, followed by, well Boomer took it in. . . 

Oh oh.

Less significantly, a minor request made by one Gen Xer to the effect of "can you move your office so the most active person in it could occupy it as we want that person up front was met with "No."  It's a prime example of the Afghan Warlord Principal. As we previously noted:

1.  "The Afghan Warlord Principal".  Years ago I saw a photograph of a body of men, all armed, in Afghanistan.  They were tribesmen fitted out to fight the Soviets. Some were boys.  The boys carried ancient rifles, and if I recall correctly one had a muzzle-loading rifle.  One man, squatted down dead center, had an AK47, the only one so armed.

He looked like he was 80, if he was a day.

He had the most effective combat weapon not because he was the most effective combatant, but because he was senior to everyone else.  Much technology in any one office setting works the same way.

It's not actually the physical trappings that concern anyone in this latter instance, it's just the stubborn grasp on the institution itself.  A better space is available for somebody who needs it, or who can better profit through its use. That person, whose in Generation Jones, cannot have it.  It'll sit, instead, largely empty a gaping Arch de Trump type monument to somebody who is largely not htere.

Things like this are the reasons that quite a few professional firms have a partnership agreement that actually expels a person at age 65.  

In the meantime I'm familiar with the descent into oblivion of another person, Gen X I think, who is killing herself with cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana.  I think it's intentional, but it's also putting the person into a situation in which she can really no longer be employed.

That'd be tragic by any measure, but the entire time I've known the person she's had the same grossly underemployed "boyfriend" that she's shacked up with.  Her life is the job she's no longer able to do, pet cats, the deadbeat long-term underemployed boyfriend, and bar hopping.  If she was in her 20s it'd still be bad, but redeemable.  Now it really isn't.

Left to Gen Jones to clean up, I'd note.

Related to this, the aforementioned Boomer was approached by another Boomer, also in her 70s, about a job.  Her company is closing, and no wonder.  Also a professional company, it just never was successful in recruiting anyone young to work with it, save for the son of one of the partners who has decided to leave the field and go into a new one with his wife, who has a successful business.  No succession plan, just an end.  At least the owners of that business were able to successfully bring it to an end. Nothing of it will remain.

She's worked for them for something like 30 years.  In the 30 years that I've known her she was never married.  I don't know if she was ever married, although I dimly recall it being mentioned that she had a daughter. She's been hinting to another professional firm in her office that she "needs to work" and needs to find a job, which was a broad hope that they'd offer her a job.  She finally just flat out asked. . . the Boomer, for one.  A 70 year old office worker asking a 70 year old professional for a job which everyone else would have to pay for.

Gen. Jones vetoed it.

They don't doubt she needs a job.  They just don't have one for her.  They're not going to hire her based on her resume for a position that doesn't exist.

And here's the harsher reality.  

People love concept of romantic love, which is a real thing.  But on top of it, marriage is, as so often noted, a fundamental aspect of society.  An institution so ancient that it seems to be full ingrained in hte species, the Boomers broke that, and they're inflicting the damage on everyone.

When lifetime marriages went out the gate, and bed hopping and living for yourself came in, did nobody think that there would be implications?

The main Boomer I noted here is divorced.  He's shacked with somebody too, which is extremely unseemly for somebody in their 70s, but it means that not only does he have no attachments, his attachment to his (former, more or less) place of employment is massively disordered.  He won't go, as it that is what he dedicated his life to, and he's clinging to it as if its his life. 

It is, but like life itself, it won't life on forever.

Estranged from his family, living in a relationship of convenience, and hostile to religion, he has the four walls of his old office.

Would that have been different in prior eras?

It's hard to say, but at least to a degree we can say yes.  Their father's generation had their families, and families first.

The two women in this story?

Well, had marriage remained the institution it once was they'd both have spouses and children to rely on, at least to some degree.  Maybe the one has a child, but that gets to another point below.

The first point, however is that societal structures existed for a reason.  Marriage has always featured love, in spite of what some may say, but it also was society's protection against children and destitution.  Married couples provided for the needs of their children, not the Department of Family Services and the school free lunch program.  And husbands provided for their wives, unless a husband was too sick to do so, in which case the reverse was true.

People did very often work into old age, and we should not pretend otherwise, but I have to say that the Boomer woman in this scenario would very likely not be in it, but for the destruction of structure mentioned.

Likewise, before anti biologic pharmaceutical's women could not become the sexual playthings of men save at great risk.  The younger woman mentioned above would be married. And the pressures of society would have bene such that the man in question, who could get a real job, would have gotten one.

The FDA allowed the first pharmaceutical birth control pill in 1960.  The Boomers had taken it up in spades by the late 60s and were engaging in illicit sex on a broad scale.  No fault divorce was first introduced in California in 1969, and spread throughout the country rapidly.  Abortion was made a right by the Supreme Court in 1973.

No matter how it was sold, the impact was pretty clear.  The Sexual Revolution reduced women to sex slaves and slaves in general.  In essence, Western women had their status stripped to what it had been in pre Christian times.  Toys for sex, who very soon had to work.  Feminism didn't liberate them, it enslaved them, prisoners of war of the Sexual Revolution.

But not just them, men too became casualties of the war.

So here we are.  Crediting Generation Jones, as we should, as a real generation, the youngest Boomer is now 72 years old.  Save for those who solely own a business, or who are in family businesses actually run by their families, not one single one should be working.  Those who have the means to retire, absolutely should. Those who are in position of societal power should not be.  Sure some may be in great shape, and "want to contribute", but most aren't, and aren't contributing in a meaningful way.

But not all can retire.  For one thing, a lot of them don't have the spouses that would help them to.  Many lack the children that would provide guidance.  Even those with children are finding that the warehousing of the elderly they advocated and participated in, and the warehousing of children they advocated for and participated in, has come back to haunt them.  The damage they did to societal structures, in particularly their churches, has aided in all of that.

But the expectations remain there.  Gen X and Gen Y will still employ us, right?

No, they won't.  They have their own families and priorities, often much more traditional than yours.

Well Generation Jones will, won't it?

No, we're tired.  We had to struggle our whole lives due to you Boomers and are ready to lay our burdens down ourselves.  We will go, however.  You often never had a place for us, and we're not going to end our lives finding one for you.

The past was far from perfect, in every sense.  Women got married as they had very few options for a single life, if that's what they would have preferred.  Couples that did not have children, prior to 1960, or actually some time following that, did not have them due to what was usually a tragic medical situation, or because the marriages were truly ones of convenience.  Children didn't always grow up in a home in which they were really valued and wanted, but then of course that's true now.

But it is also the case that in fact much more of life had to wit with the family, and was much kinder.  My paternal grandmother, for instance, was in close contact, often daily contact, with all of her children.  My maternal grandmother was in close contact as well, in spite of her children being spread across two, and often three, countries.  One of her sons lived with her until he died, and then his siblings were careful to take care of him.

Now, well the barbarians are back through the gate.  The Boomers let them in.  Everyone behind them is struggling in some ways to toss them out.

Sic transit Gloria Mundi.

Chris Christie on the Baby Boomers. How to make an entire demographic outraged with one fairly truthful comment.

Chris Christie said this in a C-Span interview. 

Baby boomers—the most selfish generation in American history, the most self-centered generation, the least sacrificing generation American history. You look at Biden and Trump in particular, and they personify that

I commented on it on Twitter, defending what he said.

There's a large element of truth to it.

People reacted overall to the statement with outrage.  Lots of Boomers died in Vietnam, it was pointed out.

Biden and Trump sure didn't serve in Vietnam.

Christie is fat, was all some people could say.  Well, yep, Christie is fat, and Biden and Trump are demented due to age.  I'll take fat over demented  (indeed, from personal experience I'll note that demented people really like to point out when somebody is fat, oddly enough, and Trump does that a lot).

There are "some" good Boomers.  Oh come on, there are lots and lots of good Boomers. Defending a generation with a reserved "some" means the person making the statement basically agrees with the underlying comment.  

"Biden isn't a boomer".  True, he was born in 1942, not 1945.  But as one person posted in reply to that, "he's close enough".  

"Christie is a boomer".  Yeah, so what?  And to add to that, he really isn't.  Both the Biden comment (1942) and this one  (Christie was born in 1962) point out that the guardrails to generations are somewhat fluid.  Moreover, the fact that late Boomers in no way whatsoever fit into the Boomer generation has caused later demographers to define them as being in Generation Jones. Their experiences, including getting the shaft from Boomers, is completely different from the real Boomers.

And indeed, Boomers just can't grasp that.  There's a lot, and I do mean a lot, of discontent, and even outright animosity, towards the Boomers, and its largely justified.

Boomers are a unique generation.  There are a lot of them, for one thing, but they also came into the country at a unique time. They were the children of the generation that was young during the Great Depression and which fought World War Two.  We're not going to use the "Greatest Generation" moniker here, as while that generation is admirable, it doesn't deserve that title.

The World War Two Generation was a broken one.  As with the Boomers, you can't take a sweeping statement like that and apply it to everyone, but there are generational characteristics.  That generation's attachment to home and family was weakened by the desperation of the Depression.  As an example, my mother was pulled out of school at age 16 in order to work, and while she was always close to her family, she left home when still a teenager as she was tired of her income being treated as just the family's, and not her.  Her mother begged her to stay, and then begged her to return.  She didn't (she lived with an uncle who gave her a job across the continent).

And an entire generation of men was trained to kill with a large number of them actually experiencing that.  Killing other people, particularly in that fashion, is not normal, and every other human vice opens up after it.  Not everyone who killed or was trained to kill engaged in that vice, but more did than Americans cared to acknowledge.  That helped bring about postwar domestic instability everywhere, with some of those Boomers born not so much into idyllic families but into ones that were struggling with parental infidelity, violence, brutality and alcoholism.  Not all, to be sure, but more than you might suspect.

They also came home to a United States in an economic boom which meant a massive transfer in economic status for people who hadn't expected it and who didn't really know how to handle it.  Those pictures of ideal American families in the 50s don't address a culture that was beginning to be taken ever by consumerism.  

By the time the first Boomers, the real ones, were entering their adulthood all that was in full bloom.  And their parents wanted them to be free of the horrors that had been inflicted upon them, so they handed them educations and businesses when they were young, not trying to really hold on to them.

The Baby Boom Generation early on figures that all the rules that preceded were stupid, and like people who succeed in business and life early on (the latter of which they really didn't), they came to believe they were really smart.  And they often held the generations, including Generation Jones, that came behind them in contempt.  Handed businesses, they wouldn't hand them over.  Handed advantage, they didn't see that they needed to help others obtain it.  Handed wealth, they felt free to use to use it for personal and societal destruction.

American society has become one, as one commentator noted, that's being run by oligarchs. Well, the Boomer focus on money, making it, and career, which really started to come into focus in the 1970s, helped get us there.  The mess they made of their family lives and indeed even the topic of sex, in which everything was all about themselves, has made a mess of domestic life that current generations are trying to fix.   

And they won't let go of things now.

And that's the main thing.

Now, let me take a step back.  I've written here as if all the Boomers are a monolith.  They are not. 

Thousands of men volunteered to fight in Vietnam, and a lot of them did not come back.  Environmentalism, which the Republicans have struggled against, was something started by their parents, but which was adopted to an enormous degree, had a huge positive impact, may have saved the planet for generations, and my save it in its entirety yet.  The same is true of conservationism, which dates back well over a century but which was very well expressed in the Boomers.  The combined legacy of environmentalism and conservationism is so deep that younger generations truly cannot grasp it.

So then, what of reality?

Well, the record is mixed.  It always was.  The World War Two generation did save the country, but in doing so they were rising to a challenge that they had to, and many sacrificed not only their bodies, but frankly their temperaments.  The Silent Generation built much of the post war world in their shadows and without their acknowledgement, even fighting a war without complaint that costs the US as many lives as the Vietnam War but which is in fact largely forgotten.  The country started yielding to the young Boomers by the 60s and in their heyday they tore everything down and when they went to build back up, they managed to forget and dump much of the humanity that had characterized prior generations, no matter how flawed they were.

So what now?

The old order changeth yielding place to new And God fulfills himself in many ways Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me I have lived my life and that which I have done May he within himself make pure but thou If thou shouldst never see my face again Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.

Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Boomers can rightfully take credit for some great things, although the current ones, in the age of Trump, don't seem to want to.  They can be blamed for a lot of things that caused the rise of Trump and MAGA, which is a movement largely in younger generations, something that's often missed.  The liberal "Me Generation" aspect of the demographic was harmful in ways that we are still desperately trying to recover from, and turning, oddly, to Boomers who exhibit the trait, such as Trump, to try to fix.

They won't.

The Boomers want to remain relevant.  Post anything on this topic and you'll be accused of agism.  But the truth is, they needs to step back to the sidelines now in everything they are in.  The biggest favor they can do for Gen X and Gen Y (it's too late for Gen. Jones, our day is already over having never started) is to step back, and out of the way.  If in office, get out.  If heading a business that isn't you alone, step down.  If hoping for a Bishopric, stop.

Time to yield.