Charlie Kirk and the hypocrisy of the Wyoming GOP

Charlie Kirk and the hypocrisy of the Wyoming GOP: A recently passed resolution to limit free speech demonstrates how little the state Republican Party believes in the First Amendment, writes columnist Rod Miller.

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 109th Edition. Lost love. Painting Targets. Piggy. Articles of Surrender. Voting in opposition of something that isn't going on.

Lost love

The big news this past week is that Marjorie Taylor Greene, who came to prominence as one of the most notable and frankly disagreeable figures on the far right, and then who moved away from Trump, is leaving the 119th Congress in January after her pension vests.

What's exactly going on here is really unclear, but Green's transformation was remarkable.  She used to come across like an ignorant howler monkey.  If  Eva_Vlaardingerbroek is the "Shieldmaiden of the far right", she was more like an buffoonish bouncer.

All of a sudden, however, she really came around to opposing Trump and in fact suddenly sounded like a different person completely.  That suggests her antics were always an act put on for her constituents.

Given her change, she was drawing the direct opposition of Trump who was opposing her in next year's Congressional election.  She already had stout opposition and may just be taking off because she doesn't want to spend the next year dealing with a pack of extremists.  Her transformation did not cause her to be loved by moderates who were baffled on her transformation, save perhaps for Thomas Massie, whom Trump also hates.  Trump is vicious to all who oppose him.

Well, as W. E. B. Dubois famously said, only a food never changes their mind.

The Seditionist accuses others of Sedition.

Oh horse shit.  No "great legal scholars" are venturing that opinion.  Pam Bondi probably would, if told to do so, but her sycophantry disqualifies her from being a great anything. 

Donald Trump is a seditionist insurrectionist.  He has not had his act of sedition excused by Congress, so he's actually ineligible to be President of the United States, and legally, isn't.

So that makes it all the more ironic and hypocritical that he's gone after a collection of Congressmen and Senators, all veterans, who reminded service members that they can, and must, obey an illegal order, under certain circumstances (they can't for instance, just assume an order may be illegal).

Some of this has actually already been happening.  Resignations of senior officers, and some firings, have hit the news, usually with a "gosh, I wonder why this is happening" sort of commentary.  It's happening because they're opposing illegal orders.  It's also the case that National Guardsmen have started a backchannel internet communication discussion that includes the same topic.

Trump seems to be in a full blown panic about this, and probably for good reason.  The US is currently murdering people on the seas in extrajudicial killings using military force that some regard as being on the edge of illegality.  Trump has sent National Guardsmen to cities with Courts repeatedly intervening to stop the deployments.  Trump is constantly rumored to be on the edge of using the Insurrection Act.  But as time goes on he gets more and more erratic.

The majority of American people already disapprove of Trump's presidency.  There's no national stomach at all for using the military against the population, but the administration has constantly flirted with it, and to some extent, already done it.  The legality of Trump's actions on all levels are in the Courts.  There's a reviving movement to impeach him, and his behind the scenes support may well be reaching the breaking point.  We still don't know what was in the Epstein files, other than that rich and powerful men feel they can get away with whatever they want, including screwing teenage girls.

Declaring the politicians who spoke to be seditionist is absurd.  They were no such thing.  But it does paint a target on their backs.  This was reprehensible.

It's also a sign of extreme desperation.  We'll note that below.

Piggy

One of the increased signs of Trump's dementia is his inability to hold his tongue.  Last week he called a reporter who asked a question he didn't like "Piggy".  It was a female reporter.

He's demented.

Any other politicians in the US who said such a thing would be howled down to the point they'd offer an apology.  Not Trump, of course.  The fact that he hasn't been is evidence of what redneck trash this country has become.  It's appalling.

It's also a sign that at this point Trump is so stressed by something that the wheels are really coming off of his psyche.

Articles of Surrender

One of the most notable things about Donald Trump is the degree to which he truly seems to abhor war.

Or does he?

It's actually a bit difficult to tell.

Regarding the Russo Ukrainian War, Trump has repeatedly issues statements that approach being homo erotic about the war and how it needs to end, due to all the "beautiful" young men it kills.  At the same time, of course, he doesn't mind killing South American men very much.

Going back to that, however, Trump has being trying and promising to end the Russo Ukrainian War for well over a year now.  He's flip flopped on positions, but one of those that he periodically occupies is acting as an agent for Russia.  We're back at that point again.

The West promised to secure Ukraine's sovereignty when it gave up its nuclear weapons.  The West has not fulfilled that promise fully.  President Biden did a good job of helping Ukraine right from the onset, but didn't go as far as he should have.  The various European nations have done far, far more than they've gotten credit for.  

Trump desperately wants a Nobel Peace Prize, and although he may have convinced himself that he ended "eight wars", so far, he's not really ended any, if we consider that the only real claim he could have made to that effect was the war in Gaza, where Israel conducted a bombing raid yesterday.  Most people who have really looked at the situation in Gaza don't expect the peace to hold permanently.

A real peace between Ukraine and Russia would be a major accomplishment, however.  The thing is, however, that the "peace plan" that Trump presented was basically that Ukraine surrender.  Indeed, it resembles the treaty that ended the Great War to some extent, in that Ukraine gives up land and limits the size of its army, which are two of the things Germany did at the end of World War One.

That worked out oh so well.

Of course, to realize that would require a sense of history, which Trump lacks.  That the plan smacks of the Munich Accords also would require that.

So, back to a couple of things .Why is Trump the only Western leader outside of Viktor Orban who  likes Putin?  It isn't because he's on the populist right.  Giorgia Meloni is on the populist right and she's not a Putin fan.  

But Meloni also is very intelligent and not trying to suck up unwarranted praise all the time.

It might be just because the Russians know that Trump is demented and a narcissist, and they play into that.  But it's hard to wonder if it isn't something else.

At any rate, member of the Administration are already attempting to walk the document back.  That's interesting, as Trump seemed very solidly behind it.  That suggest that there are some forces behind the scenes that can operate a bit independently of Trump.

Voting no on Socialism while Trump cozies up to it.

The House voted on a resolution to disapprove Socialism, which is just about as stupid of thing as they could done.  What on earth was that exactly supposed to prove?

The GOP has really gone off the rails on this topic in that it now asserts routinely that Socialism=Communism.  It doesn't.  All Communists are Socialist, but not all Socialists are Communists, and those who maintain the opposite need to go back to school.

Ronald Reagan's big French buddy Francois Mitterrand was a Socialist.  He was also completely democratic.

Of course, Donald Trump isn't completely democratic, but interestingly, some of his policies are socialist, and now he's had a fawning meeting with the new Democratic Socialist mayor of New York City.  He declared that they had a lot of views in common.

Look for the GOP to now propose joining the Comintern.  

Turning Point at CC

One of the things that the assassination of  Charlie Kirk seemed to do was to boost the creation of Turning Point USA chapters.  There's one at one of the local high schools now, and one at the local community college.

At that one, there was just an event at which the far right Secretary of State and a far right politician who wants less government but who is a major landlord, thereby occupying a role in society that only exists due the major support of the government, or else people would ignore your claim to property rights, spoke.  

Wyoming's far right is sounding more and more irrelevant, so its interesting how these things are a bit behind the curve.  Of course the Secretary of State, in order to try to keep ahead of the curve, has been sounding like a member of Greenpeace recently.  I thought this would have generated some news, but it doesn't seem to.

Interesting.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 108th Edition. Lost love.

Labels: Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Politics, Zeitgeist

Erika Kirk, and J.D. and Usha Vance.

I'm not going to link it in, as I think it's shallow on the solution, but pundit Ezra Klein has a current segment of his vlog in which he discusses how the Democratic Party is in such a mess, in spite of people really not being all that keen on Donald Trump's Fascist Roadshow, because they're really lost touch with average people at the street level.  I've been saying the same thing now for what's approaching a decade.

Well, actually more like two, or more.

Anyhow, yesterday I ran this item which was sparked by liberal/center left blather about J. D. Vance hoping that his wife Usha become a Christian:

Lex Anteinternet: Religion, J.D. and Usha Vance.: Because this blog is steadfastly horrified by Donald Trump and his administration, it'd be easy to assume that it's run by a rampagi...

One of the things this event shows, quite frankly, is the degree to which the left holds religion in contempt.  The fact that they so obviously hold religion in contempt is part of the reason that people who are serious about their faiths, and that isn't limited by any means to  Christians, do not trust the Democratic Party and, as long as it continues, aren't going to trust the Democratic Party.  As I warned would occur, this is leading to a massive exodus from the Party by Hispanics, who are largely Catholic.  If you demonstrate contempt for people's existential beliefs, they're not going to vote for you even if you promise all kinds of nifty social programs.

They also are not going to vote for you if you show childish glee over a made up sense of morality over an event that doesn't mean anything.

As people who stop in here know, I really don't particularly know what to make of the late Charlie Kirk.  I've expressed my views on that elsewhere and I'm not going to back into them here.  As little as I know about Charlie Kirk, and that's not much, I know even less about Erika Kirk.

The widowed Erika Kirk has been in the news a lot recently, as she's sort of taken up the mantle of her late husband's organization, Turning Point USA.  In that role, she's been very public and is making public appearances.  She's drawn criticism for that alone, as apparently those generally on the left feel, even if they don't, that she should be dressed in widow's weeds and moping around the house or something.  Quite frankly, if she was a figure on the left, the same people would be praising her for her bravery.

And now comes the embrace with J. D. Vance.

Vance was speaking at some Turning Point USA event.  He's probably a good choice for that, as Donald Trump is 750 years old and most Turning Point members aren't.  The populist right has to keep in Turning Point's good graces, moreover, as it's part and parcel of the Evangelical embrace of Trump, albeit one that wasn't initially certain about Trump.

Anyhow, Kirk made some comment about Vance and her late husband being similar.  I don't see that at all, quite frankly.  And then she went on to hug him after introducing him.

This is a big non event.

Indeed, if you see the whole video, the entire thing lasted just second from beginning to end.  You can only really make it a big deal, if you desire to, by screenshotting the whole thing as if it was an endless romantic embrace.*

Nonetheless, the left has reached out in shock and horror, certain after Vance's recent comments about hoping his wife converts, that he's about to ditch her as Kirk and Vance are now a couple.

Oh horseshit.  

This shows once again the degree of contempt for conservative views that people on the left hold. There's no evidence at all that Erika Kirk is happy that her late husband was murdered and has now moved on to Vance. There's no evidence at all that Vance would betray his wife.  Indeed, as he is a Catholic, and is expressing a Catholic view on his desire that she also convert, the better evidence is that he'd never do that.

This is, again, the very sort of thing that causes people on the right to regard the left and contemptuous and mean.  And that doesn't win votes.

Footnotes:

*FWIW, as an Irish American (and genetically, I'm more Irish than many Irish), with some Westphalian heritage, I'm in that category of people who abhor hugs from people I'm not extremely close to.  By that I mean I'll accept hugs from my wife and children, and I'm uncomfortable with them from anyone else.

This is a real northern European thing.  We aren't a touchy people, and any kind of physical contact of this type is an unwanted intimacy unless its a wanted intimacy, in which case, you're contemplating marriage.  Out in society, however, this just ain't so.

I've known people, almost invariably women, who are very touchy and it means nothing at all.  And for some reason, in recent years, it's become increasingly common.  I used to work with somebody, for example, that would do this routinely, particularly if you were at any sort of a function and she's had a drink.  She's latch on to an arm and not let go.  I took up using my wife as sort of a shield to avoid that.  Another female lawyer I know invariably will make physical contact.  There I am sitting at a hearing when all of a sudden there's hands on my shoulders so that I'll say "hi".  Couldn't you have just said hi?

To make matters worse, I'm 5'6" tall and that puts me way down torso wise on any woman who is inclined to hug me for some reason.  If they're short too it's okay, but if they're not, it's really awkward.

Anyhow, a flap like this reinforces my desire to avoid that sort of thing.  The irony is, the people complaining about this probably aren't bugged by hugs at all, and a lot of them probably aren't all that concerned about personal or sexual morality either.

Death of an Evangelical. On Charlie Kirk's Protestant American legacy

Almost (well probably all, up until now) of the religion blogs linked in here are Catholic.  There is, of course, a reason for that.  I'm a Catholic.   

Anyhow, I recently put in a blog link to a protestant (Episcopal) one as it's a really broad blog.  It does have religious content, of course, but a lot more.  Anyhow, in its religious content is this item:

Death of an Evangelical

On Charlie Kirk's Protestant American legacy

I think this may sum up Kirk's religious legacy as much as anything.

I've noted that it appears that Kirk was headed towards Catholicism, and he was.  What I didn't know is that he'd lead his wife away from it.  This is more of a problem for her soul than for his, but it would appear that she was coming back, but hasn't quite made it yet.  She likely will.  Jewish novelist Herman Wouk noted in his novel The Caine Mutiny, about the young WASP Naval officers love interests that lapsed Catholics, such as the love interest, had a way of suddenly and devoutly returning to the Faith.  I've noticed that in people I've known myself.  Catholicism is the original Christian religion, and frankly it's hard not to accept that the more you know of it, which is why entire "Bible Believing" Protestant churches will convert when they go down the road of really studying the Faith.

Anyhow, there's been a bit of an effort, an innocent one, of some Catholics to basically claim Kirk as almost a Catholic.  I don't know how far down that road he'd gotten. He was traveling it, but if we're honest about it, and we should be, his legacy, because it was cut short, will be an Evangelical Protestant one.  

And that's why his death has become such a huge deal in this political climate, where as others would likely not have been.

Churches of the East: Blog Mirror: Sisters of Charity of New York Respo...

Churches of the East: Blog Mirror: Sisters of Charity of New York Respo...:   Sisters of Charity of New York Respond to Cardinal Dolan’s Remarks on Charlie Kirk

Blog Mirror: Sisters of Charity of New York Respond to Cardinal Dolan’s Remarks on Charlie Kirk

 

Sisters of Charity of New York Respond to Cardinal Dolan’s Remarks on Charlie Kirk

Blog Mirror: Stephen Miller's Charlie Kirk speech draws Joseph Goebbels comparisons

 

Stephen Miller's Charlie Kirk speech draws Joseph Goebbels comparisons

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 103d edition. Missing the obvious demographic aspect of the story . . ."Wyoming Churches See Revival, Shakeup After Charlie Kirk's Death"

 The Cowboy State Daily claims:

Wyoming Churches See Revival, Shakeup After Charlie Kirk's Death

What's the real story?

Do it yourself and Evangelical Churches saw a boost in attendance, and it will be temporary, as in probably over by today.

Protestant "mainline" churches, of which Kirk had been a member, saw nothing going on. The same is true of the Catholic churches, which have been increasingly packed in a way that can't be ignored, and which Kirk was clearly evolving towards.

Does this tell us that the far right Evangelical Churches are particularly tapped into the American mindset?  Not really.  But it does tell us that far right Evangelical Protestantism is particularly, and indeed oddly, aligned with MAGA.

Long term, this will mean for it, what being aligned with the Confederacy in the South meant for the Episcopal Church in the South, but even more dramatically.  

Evangelical Protestantism, in its far right wing form, is dragging Evangelicalism into what theologically and politically untenable position.  Trump isn't Charles Martel, holding back the Saracen hoards.  This will pass and people's head will begin to clear up.  When they do, the close association of right wing Evangelicalism with Trump, including the downright goofy occasional statements by some of its leaders about Trump being Divinely appointed, will have the effect of damaging Evangelicalism as a whole.  

The far right Evangelical Churches, which make up only a portion of Evangelical Churches, are telling people what they want to hear.  That works only as long as people aren't being hurt by what they hear.  The truth of tends to hurt.

One thing most Evangelicals won't be hearing are today's readings in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church, which are:

Reading 1

Amos 8:4-7

Hear this, you who trample upon the needy

 and destroy the poor of the land!

 "When will the new moon be over," you ask,

 "that we may sell our grain,

 and the sabbath, that we may display the wheat?

 We will diminish the ephah,

 add to the shekel,

 and fix our scales for cheating!

 We will buy the lowly for silver,

 and the poor for a pair of sandals;

 even the refuse of the wheat we will sell!"

 The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob:

 Never will I forget a thing they have done!

Reading 2

1 Timothy 2:1-8

Beloved:

First of all, I ask that supplications, prayers,

petitions, and thanksgivings be offered for everyone,

for kings and for all in authority,

that we may lead a quiet and tranquil life

in all devotion and dignity.

This is good and pleasing to God our savior,

who wills everyone to be saved

and to come to knowledge of the truth.

For there is one God.

There is also one mediator between God and men,

     the man Christ Jesus,

who gave himself as ransom for all.

This was the testimony at the proper time.

For this I was appointed preacher and apostle

— I am speaking the truth, I am not lying —,

teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.

It is my wish, then, that in every place the men should pray,

lifting up holy hands, without anger or argument.

Gospel

Luke 16:1-13

Jesus said to his disciples,

"A rich man had a steward

who was reported to him for squandering his property.

He summoned him and said,

'What is this I hear about you?

Prepare a full account of your stewardship,

because you can no longer be my steward.'

The steward said to himself, 'What shall I do,

now that my master is taking the position of steward away from me?

I am not strong enough to dig and I am ashamed to beg.

I know what I shall do so that,

when I am removed from the stewardship,

they may welcome me into their homes.'

He called in his master's debtors one by one.

To the first he said,

'How much do you owe my master?'

He replied, 'One hundred measures of olive oil.'

He said to him, 'Here is your promissory note.

Sit down and quickly write one for fifty.'

Then to another the steward said, 'And you, how much do you owe?'

He replied, 'One hundred kors of wheat.'

The steward said to him, 'Here is your promissory note;

write one for eighty.'

And the master commended that dishonest steward for acting prudently.

"For the children of this world

are more prudent in dealing with their own generation

than are the children of light.

I tell you, make friends for yourselves with dishonest wealth,

so that when it fails, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.

The person who is trustworthy in very small matters

is also trustworthy in great ones;

and the person who is dishonest in very small matters

is also dishonest in great ones.

If, therefore, you are not trustworthy with dishonest wealth,

who will trust you with true wealth?

If you are not trustworthy with what belongs to another,

who will give you what is yours?

No servant can serve two masters.

He will either hate one and love the other,

or be devoted to one and despise the other.

You cannot serve both God and mammon."

No health and wealth gospel there.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 102nd edition. Short attention span and a Ballroom Blitz*. And self sabotage.

Labels: Apostolic Christianity, Catholic, Charlie Kirk, Christianity, homosexuality, News, religion, Republican Party, Spencer Cox, The Kennedy/Guevara Effect, The Press, transgenderism, Utah, Weltanschauung, White House, Zeitgeist

Charlie Kirk killing fuels free speech disputes in Wyoming as newspapers come under attack

Charlie Kirk killing fuels free speech disputes in Wyoming as newspapers come under attack: Local businesses, UW’s student paper, a Teton County daily among those in the fray.

Things in the air. Some observations with varying degrees of introspection.

Cheerfulness strengthens the heart and makes us persevere in a good life. Therefore the servant of God ought always to be in good spirits.

St. Philip Neri.

I've recently had the opportunity, or rather no choice, but to observe some interesting personalities at work.

The first one I'll note I've known for a very long time, and over time I've watched this person sort of crawl into themselves.  

They're mad.

I'm not really sure at what.  But I'll make an observation below that may explain it.

This person had a really rough early life, but it picked up considerable in the person's teens.  Still, coming from a "blended" family, this person sort of got the short end of the stick on a major family deal, and was quietly resentful about it.

Now the non blood "step" is seeking to address it.  The person is middle aged, and the other person is in early old age, as am I.  The middle aged person is now outright refusing to accept the fix.

What the crap?

"They could have done that years ago. . .".

Dumbest excuse for being a difficult pain in the ass ever.

Same person has something much like this shorter term.  

I've also had the occasion to observe a really angry person.  The really angry person is obviously pretty intelligent, but also obviously very uneducated.  It's a bad combination.

A lot of fairly intelligent, but uneducated, people like to use words that they don't know the meaning of, so they use them incorrectly.  This person does that repeatedly.  If you know what the words actually mean, it's really very sad.

It's also a bit sad to see how this works when the bloom is off the rose of righteous, if misguided, indignation.  When lots of people have their pitchforks out, a person in this situation is sort of a leader.  But real people, with family, jobs, children, move on.  They have to.  New things develop, olds things go by the wayside.  

Watching somebody getting into a one sided yelling match while everyone else is just bored is sad, in an odd sort of way.  You can tell they know that themselves.  The spotlight moved on.

There's a lot of Twitter Twits raging about how pastors didn't preach on Charlie Kirk last week. As I've said before, why would they?  And if they did, in a truly Christian fashion, what would they have said.

Mind you, I'm a Catholic, not a member of a do it yourself protestant church that is heavily invested in the American Civil Religion.

Truth be known, Americans always have been.

If you did preach on Kirk, the preaching probably would be awkward for all.  You could simply make it:

We see today the horror of the Western world's perversion of our God given natures, and how that warps the mind and leaves it prey to evils of all kind.  Let us keep that in mind in our society, as we address such lies as transgenderism.

But that's only one such ill that warps our nature.  How did we get there?  Allowing for mass societal infanticide, which Kirk complained about?  Yes.  But also making our reproductive organs chemical cesspools designed to destroy nature from the onset, and ignoring the injunction against divorce, warping marriage into a  big party for "fulfillment"  Those of you in the pews contracepting, or living with third or fourth "spouses", you are as much to blame for the death as transgenderism is.

So too those who now identify their religion with any political party.  Our  home is in the next world, not this one, and the Republican Party or Democratic Party are not an apostolic synod.  If you are finding your politicians to be saints, you need to sit alone and pray for yourself.

Bear in mind also that our time will come like a thief in the night.   We cannot rely on a future to repent, as we may not have that future.  The sins we commit for any reason, including with our words, may find themselves still on our souls.  Let us resolve to be right with God today.

Probably everyone would be mad

Which gets me to this.

Charlie Kirk, I'll fully accept, was Christian.  He said some very Christian things, and some very non Christian things.  He was a provocateur, and that's a dangerous thing for a person's soul.

As for the other two people mentioned here, I don't know about one, but I do know about the other, that being the first one.  That person is a Christian but more or less a lazy American sort of Christian. They believe in God, have a grasp of Christ, and figure if you don't steal or shoot people, you are probably good with God and they don't want to know much more than that.

That describes most Americans, quite frankly.

That hasn't always been the case, however.

Those Christians who are all upset about Kirk not being mentioned from the pulpit are too heavily invested in the American Civil Religion.  When the next world arrives for them, and it will soon, and they're not recognized, saying "I left my church as there was no preaching about Kirk" won't make up for not feeding the poor, letting people die in droves in Gaza, and the like.  Presenting your "I'm a real read blooded (white) American card" isn't going to get you a free pass.

And, additionally, the pastors whom they want to preach on Kirk probably ought to instead preach instead on greed, divorce, shacking up, and other stuff that the American Civil Religion is pretty okay with.

And, also, here's something else.

I saw a Twitter Twit who was outraged as a transgendered person murdered his parents in Utah awhile back, and the news, he thought, had not paid any attention to it.

Well, I'm sure they did in Utah, but that's not a national news story.  Part of our contemporary problems in this country are that we treat local stories as if they're of global importance, while ignoring global stories because they don't pertain to us.

Christians, mostly Catholics, are being murdered in droves in Africa. That is important. Why don't we hear about that?

Well, they're black, African, and Catholic.  Ho hum. . . 

But there's more to this, Outraged Twitter Twits.  Charlie Kirk was murdered last week.  Most Americans no longer care one bit.

That may be uncomfortable for those who are a member of the populist Sturmabteilung, but it's the truth.  Charlie Kirk isn't going to become their Horst Wessel as most Americans just don't care.  They're desensitized to killing, which is actually at a record low in any event, and by now most average Americans are sick of the right and the left and worried about groceries, while starting to watch the national opiate, football.  Sydney Sweeney's cleavage falling out of her jeans jacket will have longer legs than this.

We aren't going to have a civil war. There's not going to be a lot more violence.  And they'll be disappointed.

Speaking of crawling into one's self (you'll have to go back up to the top for the reference), I've seen that happening to somebody I know, whose husband I know better.

And frankly I sort of see this in a fair amount with younger Boomer and older Gen X women . . . women who bought the lie that careers will make them happy.

Frequently it plays out with the same script.  Well educated middle class women of this vintage married well educated men.  The men of the same generation were still part of the "you need to get a good job to support your family" culture, as we've seen before, but the women were part of the "a career will make you happy".  What seems to have happened to a lot of them is that work didn't make them happy, no surprise, and at some point many, but not all, dropped out of it.

Kids grew up and moved on, if they had kids at all.  Now they're getting to what would normally be retirement years and they feel cheated and lost.

The story for a lot of men isn't much different.  I see it with professional men all the time.  Earlier this week a lawyer in his 70s told me gleefully how he loves his job.  Oh horseshit.  There's just nothing left.  The thing is, however, for women who bought off on this, there's really nothing left.  Quite a few of them, however, are in pretty good economic situations due to a husband that worked for decades to support everyone, and who has kept on.

Anyhow, in this case, the spouse, probably of over 30 years, packed up and left basically with no warning.

She'd been seeing a counsellor, a profession that does so much damage to people it isn't funny. The counsellor had told her to work on herself, which is pretty close to instructing somebody to be a narcissist.  She moved out, moved away, and is camping with her adult daughters.  They're getting a "grey divorce".  

The husband, whom in my view should have retired some years ago.  There's some fault there.  A lot of times when I see some old male lawyer keeping on keeping on, I really wonder what his relationship is at home.

All in all, I suspect, he worked too much, she got lonely, and wondered why life hadn't turned out like Cosmopolitan promised it was supposed to.  

Well, it was never going to.

I'd also note that he was raised Catholic, while she was not, but he fits into the Catholic satellite category. That is, the lessons of the faith were just too inconvenient for him to apply.  He, and his siblings, remain cultural Catholics, basically, but not practicing ones.  It clearly tortures him as he knows better.  Probably not that much should have been expected out of her, however, as she was never Catholic.

And so you have a couple living the 1970s version of the American Dream, which turns out to be a pretty shallow dream at that.  Same with the folks mentioned above.

And the shallowness of that dream explains a lot about post Boomer generations abandoning it and returning to more foundational existential beliefs.

The State bar convention is going on.  I never go it in person.  I don't have the time, and I'm such an introvert that I don't want to go to the dinners and the like just on the random chance one of my lawyer friends might be there, but now you can attend some of it electronically.  I did that yesterday as I needed the CLE credits. 

I wish I hadn't.

The first CLE I attended I picked up as I needed the ethics credit.  It was an hour of "mindfulness" which is usually a bunch of bullshit suggestions on how to deal with stress that you really can't implement in the real world.  That's what it turned out to be, in part, but it descended into "this job really sucks" for an hour.  All of the panelists, including a judge and a justice, had to have counselling at some point in their careers for work stress.

I hope some students were in the audience to see that.  If even Wyoming Supreme Court justices say the practice is so bad they need psychological help to endure it, well that's pretty bad.

The last CLE of the day was the legislative panel.  Usually I think of that as being new laws that are coming down the pipeline, which it partially was, but the first part started off as a plea from a lawyer/legislator for lawyers to run for office, noting how in Wyoming that's declined enormously.  That turned into an outright dumping on the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, which needs to be dumped on.  The last part of that session, however, dealt with the ongoing massive decline in civil practitioners putting in for judgeships.  They just aren't doing it.  They were urged to do it.

As noted, I wasn't there to ask a question, but if I had been, I'd have asked why should they, when Governor's have agendas and the current Governor is only really interested in appointing prosecutors.  It's extremely obvious.  The one before that would almost always pick a woman, if possible, and was very open about that.  If you are a male civil practitioner, just forget it.

Justice Kautz, who is now the current AG, noted how being a judge, and particularly a justice, was a great job for a law nerd.  The last panelist, a current Fed defender who was a private lawyer with a very wide practice, noted how he had put in many times and urged people to do so, even though it was disappointing if you did not make it.

It's disappointing for sure.

For me, hearing Justice Kautz talk was outright heartbreaking, as what he expressed made up the very reasons I wanted to be a judge and replied repeatedly, with no success.  I never even got an interview, even though at one point I was being urged by judges and members of the judicial nominating committee to apply.  I'm frankly bitter about it even while knowing that I should not be.  It's hard not to come to the conclusion that the system has become a bit of a fraud, frankly, particularly now that the committee has been rounded out to include non lawyers in it.  I've felt for some time that the Governor's office had an influence on who was picked, even though I have no inside knowledge on that sort of thing.  It's just a feeling, and not a good one.  When judges are picked which leave almost all the practitioners wondering what happened, it's not a good thing.

It leads to me listening to everything Justice Kautz said about the reasons he wanted to be a judge, and myself realizing I once felt those things, but I no longer do.

Back on the stress part of this, a lawyer I've known for a long time, but who is quite a bit younger than me, recently took a really neat vacation.  He came back to the office and announced he's leaving the law.  I was so surprised I called him.  He revealed that being on vacation had taught him he didn't have to live a miserable life.

Blog Mirror: Law enforcement charge alleged shooter in Charlie Kirk killing

 Provides a lot of good details:

Law enforcement charge alleged shooter in Charlie Kirk killing

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 103d edition. The tragic co-opting of death and politics.

I posted this the other day:

Lex Anteinternet: What's the meaning of Charlie Kirk? Sometimes the...: This is not intended, I'd note, to be a hagiography of any kind for Charlie Kirk.  The populist far right is already trying to do that, ...

I'll note that I'm already tired of commenting on Charlie Kirk and his murder.  I guess I'm like a lot of Americans that way.  But I will note some things here, which I hope will be my last commentary on this event, although it probably will not be.

The first one is that I still really don't know anything about Kirk.

It's becoming increasingly difficult to.  The populist right's latching on to the story, not the man, has created a full blown set of hagiography.  Kirk was a wonderful family man, and a man of God, we're told.  Those not buying into this propaganda, which is now what it's become, have pointed out that he said some really horrific things.  I saw a short clip of an African American pastor lambasting the late Kirk from the pulpit in one effort to address the record.  

Where does this leave us with Kirk's character. . . the real one?

Well, there were things to admire about him, and things to detest, but where he seems to come out is on the end of populism that creeps up on being fascist in some ways.  He's not the only one on the far right who hold those views.

Indeed, National Conservatives and Christian Nationalist come really close in some instances to holding these views, and they have Trump's ear, or more accurately, perhaps, his inattention.

Those who do hold those views appear to be making a dedicated effort not only to form the record, but to suppress anything counter to it.  It's amazing.  We've never been closer to an outright crackdown on dissent in the US than right now.  

I'm also amazed by how people are intermixing religion in this.  

As readers here know, I"m a Catholic and Mrs. Kirk is as well.  Charlie Kirk was headed in that direction.  It'd have been interesting to see what would have happened had he become a Catholic.  I've never been in a Catholic parish that wasn't multiracial.  Catholics have been reminded from time to time that while they are citizens of many nations, they're just passing through.

I support the Second Amendment, I'd note, but one other thing that I'm just baffled with is how some people seemingly must mix things that are political with their religion in odd ways.  One example is the flood of Twitter commentators who are appalled that their pastors didn't mention Kirk last Sunday.  If that's not odd enough, there's this:

This morning I walked into a church I’d never heard of, let alone stepped foot in. I prayed with strangers. I cried with people I’ve never met before. I held hands with them and sang about God. 

The Pastor openly talked about how important our gun rights are. How you cannot legislate against evil. How we cannot be afraid to speak out for fear of consequences from the HR department (this is an actual quote!!). He honored and spoke genuinely about the life and impact of Charlie Kirk for *the entire* service. It was absolutely amazing. 

If I told y’all how improbable it was that of all the churches I could have chosen to attend for the first time in many many many years that it would be this one…and that it would be so perfect…you’d believe me when I say that God absolutely led me there….He led me back home.

The pastor preached on gun right?  He preached on Kirk for the entire service?

This is a very Catholic thing for me to say, but it's bizarre to me in the first instance that Protestants of some denominations will listen for an hour or more to some pastor talk.  This isn't the way Apostolic Faiths work at all. And frankly, only an audience that is fully convinced of what you are saying will listen to that sort of address.  Effective deliveries often tend to be short, and conclude suddenly, leaving the listener with a "oh crud" feeling.

Here's the reading that Catholics, and some others who follow the Latin lectionary, heard last Sunday.

Numbers 21:4b-9

With their patience worn out by the journey,

the people complained against God and Moses,

"Why have you brought us up from Egypt to die in this desert,

where there is no food or water?

We are disgusted with this wretched food!"

In punishment the LORD sent among the people saraph serpents,

which bit the people so that many of them died.

Then the people came to Moses and said,

"We have sinned in complaining against the LORD and you.

Pray the LORD to take the serpents from us."

So Moses prayed for the people, and the LORD said to Moses,

"Make a saraph and mount it on a pole,

and if any who have been bitten look at it, they will live."

Moses accordingly made a bronze serpent and mounted it on a pole,

and whenever anyone who had been bitten by a serpent

looked at the bronze serpent, he lived.

Philippians 2:6-11

Brothers and sisters:

Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God,

did not regard equality with God something to be grasped.

Rather, he emptied himself,

taking the form of a slave,

coming in human likeness;

and found human in appearance,

he humbled himself,

becoming obedient to death,

even death on a cross.

Because of this, God greatly exalted him

and bestowed on him the name

that is above every name,

that at the name of Jesus

every knee should bend,

of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

and every tongue confess that

Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father.

John 3:13-17

Jesus said to Nicodemus:

"No one has gone up to heaven

except the one who has come down from heaven, the Son of Man.

And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert,

so must the Son of Man be lifted up,

so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life."

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,

so that everyone who believes in him might not perish

but might have eternal life.

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world,

but that the world might be saved through him.

As already noted here, it was the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. Most pastors of the Apostolic Faiths preached on that.

People have a strong tendency to want the Church to reflect their political views.  That's a lot easier for people who are members of Protestant Evangelical churches which are often sort of do it yourself type of faiths.  That doesn't challenge people in the pews at all.  Here locally there's a massive Evangelical congregation which, I know, contains unmarried couples living in sin, people who have multiple marriages, and the like.  They go to hear the Good News, and they should be hearing the Good News.  But part of that news is a person needs to confess and repent.  

We're not hearing much of that out there on the net.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 102nd edition. Short attention span and a Ballroom Blitz*. And self sabotage.

Blog Mirror: There are no MAGA heroes

 

There are no MAGA heroes

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 102nd edition. Short attention span and a Ballroom Blitz*. And self sabotage.

Attention span deficit.

Something I hadn't expected, but which really says something about our times, is that the murder of Charlie Kirk is already, for the most part, in society's rear view mirror.

Yes, there's a lot of discussion about it still, but it's in the chattering class, which I suppose includes this website.  Otherwise, things have already moved on.

The speed at which news moves, and the lack of attention to it, is a very bad thing.

Of course, now that it doesn't really appear to be a politically motivated killing, it's lost its attraction as a story to some degree.

A fictional narrative

The story, as noted, is now in the domain of the chattering classes, but also the possession of right wing myth makers, which are really working on it.  The odd thing here is that the media has an incentive to downplay what is being learned about the killer, and to an extent, the MAGA myth organ does as well.

What we now know about the killer, Tyler Robinson, is that he was a homosexual living with another homosexual who was in the process of being mutilated to take on the appearance of a woman.  Unless this isn't clear enough, they were in a "romantic" relationship, which means they were engaged in sodomy.  The "transitioning" roommate was apparently shocked by the killing, but according to one family member, that person was deeply anti Christian and hated political conservatives.

Now, the reason that this isn't getting this much press as the "transgendered" aren't particularly associated with crimes of any kind, let alone violent ones, and homosexuals certainly are not, but this story is deeply weird.  A man trying to become a woman is deeply weird, and it is not the same thing as homosexuality.  One man screwing another man who is trying to take on female morphology is very weird as well.

We touched on this in a post about Robert Westman, who was an actual "transgender" figure who committed a mass shooting recently.  Indeed, he's the only "transgender" figure I know of to commit one, the overwhelming majority are white hetrosexual men.

Anyhow:

A deeply sick society.

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.  We laugh at honor and are shocked find traitors in our midsts.  We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.  

C.S. Lewis.

I explored the topic pretty fully there, and I'm not going to repeat it here other than to note that finding a transgender person hating Christianity isn't surprising. Real Christianity holds that to be wholly immoral, even while real Christianity still loves the person. And such a person hating conservatism isn't surprising either, as conservatives hold a similar view.

Robinson wasn't the transgendered person here, but the whole story of this relationship would lend to the theory that he was pretty pliable as a personality.  The point is, therefore, this likely wasn't really an act of domestic terror in the conventional sense, so much as it was a person reaching out  under the influence of a sexual partner.  In an odd sort of way, this killing is more comparable to Dr. Carl Austin Weiss Sr.'s murder of Huey Long, which was over redistricting that impacted his father in law.  I.e., a personal connection is likely to have motivated it more than any overarching weltanschauung.

That's a story that's not really going to get explored, I suspect.  The right wing wants Kirk to be a martyr, the left doesn't want to talk about the mental health issues this really brings up.

Groypers?

I'd never heard of this term before, but apparently they are followers of Nick Fuentes.  As I don't pay any attention to Fuentes, I didn't know that.

Apparently they've drawn a lot of attention following Kirk's murder as there was some peculiar speculation that they were responsible for it.  They obviously are not, but that speculation was there, and I'm not sure why.

Fuentes, whose movement is outwardly anti homosexual, as well as anti a bunch of other stuff, has said some really odd things in this arena, one being that having sex with women is gay.  Eh?  Another apparently was that homosexual sex doesn't mean what it used to, as women aren't living up to their reproductive responsibilities.

A shit post?

This is a really interesting analysis of this topic.

Shit post.

The extra scary part of this is noting, as this person does, how many people in Trump's administration sort of fit into the same demographic.

Not in homilies

Apparently, at least according to Twitter, a lot of people are mad today as their parish priest didn't include a reference to Kirk's murder in their homilies yesterday.  

Why would they?

For Apostolic Christians, Catholic and Orthodox, yesterday was the Feast of the Cross, and homilies probably largely had to do with that.  Moreover the Catholic Church is just that, catholic, i.e., universal, and this is a domestic American matter that remains unclear.  Kirk wasn't attacked because he was Catholic, he wasn't, and the attack upon him may only have a tangential relationship with his Christianity.

Nonetheless, I saw one person who was irate at the Pope for having not mentioned it.

Spencer Cox

The guy who is really coming out looking good after all of this is Utah Republican Governor Spencer Cox.  He's spoken multiple times and has been a calming voice every time.

This isn't the first time he's waded into these issues.  Following the killing at an Orlando gay bar some years ago he appeared at a vigil and stated:

How did you feel when you heard that 49 people had been gunned down by a self-proclaimed terrorist? That’s the easy question. Here is the hard one: Did that feeling change when you found out the shooting was at a gay bar at 2 a.m. in the morning? If that feeling changed, then we are doing something wrong.

Cox's comments are clearly against the stream of the MAGA mainstream. He was originally a never Trumper but claimed to have changed his mind and voted from Trump in his Presidential contests.  I suspect we'll be hearing more out of  Cox going forward, and he may very well be a Presidential candidate in 2028.

Ballroom Blitz

King Donny went from being outraged by the Kirk killing to bemoaning how it interrupted his might fine, in his mind, ballroom from being the focus of everyone's adoring attention.

That's pretty weird.

Also weird is how quickly this is going up.  It's apparently under construction right now.  Trump clearly wants it up before he leaves office, on the theory that will mean nobody will take it down.

The monstrosity will now be 40% bigger than originally planned.

Quite frankly, I thought this vandalization of the White House would not actually occur, as it would, in normal times, take quite a while to design and engineer a building. Indeed, I was frankly planning on just that.  I never thought the monstrosity would go up, as whomever is Present next won't be stupid or narcissistic enough to bother with a Trump "look at me!" ballroom.  It's really moronic.

But it's going up.

If I were President, which of course I never will be, my first executive order would be for the Army Corps of Engineers to remove the offending pile of dogshit within twenty foour hours of my being sworn in.  I'd have the resulting trash hauled and upmed in front of Trump Tower.  But that won't happen.  Trump is probably right.  A giant cancerous growth will be there forever.

Here is the oldest photo of the structure, and what it's actually supposed to look like:

Of course, as it might be noted, the building has been altered before, most notably the addition of the West and East Wings.  Those additions were made due to legitimate working concerns, however.

Again, if it were me, I'd be tempted to take it back to purse original.  It's just supposed to be a big house.

The architects for the vandalization are McCreery Architects, whose website has an image of the interior of the structure as its first slide.  The following slides show a lot of other impressive structures they've worked on.  They do seem to favor heavily classic styles, which is nice.  The site oddly doesn't have any text, but maybe if you need to hire a  heavy duty architect, you don't need text and the equivalent of architectural headshots works better.

A rational question would be why does this bother me so much?  Well, perhaps I just have an irrational reaction to all things Trump by this point.  But the ostentatiousness of the whole thing smacks of trying to be The Sun King.**Have we reached that point in this country?  I fear we have.

We've always had rich men, of course, but this is the era of fabulously wealth men.  It's not right.

Ah, sic transit gloria mundi.

Something we may wish to consider a bit. . . 

Maybe we have it too darn good (so we're self sabotaging).

It sounds absurd, but there's something to it.

The current Wyoming Catholic Register has an article pointing out that, in 1980, the year before I graduated from high school, 40% of the world's population lived in desperate poverty, an improvement from the mid to late 19th Century when it was 90%.

Now, just 10% does.

Big, huge, improvement.

By any objective measure, the condition of the world has massively improved. 

Why do we believe otherwise?

Evolutionary biology has a lot to do with it.  We evolved to live in a state of nature, and nature if pretty rough on everyone.  So we're acclimated to things not being quite right, and trouble being just around the corner.  Now, for most of us, that's not the case.

Gershwin wrote:

Summertime and the livin' is easy

Fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high

Oh, your daddy's rich and your ma is good-lookin'

So hush little baby, don't you cry

Well, it turns out that in summertime when the cotton is high and the fish are jumping, we're looking for a thunderstorm and worried about work on Monday.  

I know that I do.

And a super rich society, like ours, seems to make up its own problems.  

This is all the more the case when the gates are off the door, as they are.  Now, not only are there all our real and imagined problems, but we just go ahead and make new ones up.  Woman trapped inside a man's body?  Not if the Goths are at the city gates planning on killing everyone.  

Anyhow, it seems like we're busy, now that we are in the richest period of our existence as a species, making sure that real problems appear.  Apparently we missed them.

Footnotes

*Ballroom Blitz is an early 1970s, rock song by the band The Sweet.

**King Lous XIV.

Related threads:

A deeply sick society.Labels: 1960s, 2020s, AR15 Effect, Commentary, Health, Politics, Weapons, Zeitgeist

Last edition:  

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 101st edition. The Vandal in the museum.

Labels: 20th Century, Agnes Repplier, Americanism, History in politics, It was because of the Vietnam War, Politics, Populism, Red Scare of 1919, Red Scare of the 1950s, The Second Trump Administration, Zeitgeist

Blog Mirror: A desensitized America is moving on from political violence faster and faster

 

A desensitized America is moving on from political violence faster and faster

What's the meaning of Charlie Kirk? Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me. Other times I can barely see. Lately it occurs to me. What a long, strange trip it's been

This is not intended, I'd note, to be a hagiography of any kind for Charlie Kirk.  The populist far right is already trying to do that, as are some just on the right or conventional conservatives.  

And frankly, even though its a few days past, this story is already in a lot of the country's rear view mirrors, including Donald Trump's whose taken up babbling about his ballroom vandalization of the White House grounds when this topic comes up.

This is an analysis, or hopes to be, of what causes a figure like Kirk to exist, and then come into prominece.

Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me

Other times I can barely see

Lately it occurs to me

What a long, strange trip it's been

No doubt the caption to this article is an odd question.  People, after all, don't have to have meanings, even if their lives always do.

I think Kirk's did, however, and a good place to start in looking at it is this:

An interesting and thoughtful clip by Douthat on Kirk.

The first time I'd ever really heard of Kirk is when somebody I know worked to have him speak at UW.  I don't know that person well, but I do know that his political views have inclined towards Francoism, which he likely doesn't really understand.¹   But that it's a clue about Charlie Kirk.

Kirk was born in 1993 in Chicago (Arlington Heights) Illinois and had an interest in politics young.  Chicago has always been a sort of frontier town, really, in spite of its location, and has been legendary throughout its history for being violent and a center of crime.  It was also a center of industry at one time, but by 1993 American industry wasn't even what it had been in 1973.  

Kirk was from middle class home where both of his parents worked.  His father was in the solidly middle class profession of architecture, and Chicago reportedly has some great architecture.  His mother was a mental health counsellor, interestingly enough.  He was (although by the time of his death, not really) a Presbyterian, which is one of the three big Protestant churches in the United States, and the only Calvinist one.  Traditionally, it's extremely unyielding, although much of it has changed enormously since the 1970s.²

Kirk dropped out of college early and was a right wing organizer and figure by 2016.  During that short time period he became a right wing speaker.  Bill Montgomery, a wealthy conservative figure, heard him give a speech at Benedictine University and then met with him and encouraged him to form Turning Point USA.³   Montgomery, who heard that speech when Kirk was 18, told him not to pursue a college degree.  He was an Evangelical Christian and an advocate of the Seven Mountains Mandate that  Christians should  take control of the seven societal “mountains” to establish God’s kingdom on Earth.

From 2016 on. . more or less. . .  Kirk espoused far right political views as well as real conservative views.  He was in the Evangelical camp of the Christian Nationalist movement.  He routinely attacked university educations as being left wing and Marxist.  He espoused conspiracy theories about COVID-19.  He's been middle of the road on LGBTQ matters but had evolved towards a religion based view of them by the time of his death.  He was a hard line opponent of abortion, stating that it a worse institution than the Holocaust.  He espoused a highly traditionalist view of women and the roles of men and women in marriage, which is a huge clue as to his underlying weltanschauung.  He credited urban gun violence as being due to African American women raising children as single mothers.  He advocated for completely stopping immigration into the U.S.  He was radically opposed to DEI.  He was pro Israeli and repeated Russian talking points about the Russo Ukrainian War.  He was critical of climate change concern, but had evolved from it being a fib into acknowledging that it was real, which is also a huge clue about his evolving weltanschauung.

Yesterday, we posted an item in which somebody compared him to Malcolm X.   That may be more true than many are ready to admit.

Kirk is a Millennial or Zillennial⁴ Rust Belt American male.

Eh?

There's been a lot written about the plight of American men in the post 1960s eras.  And, indeed, there should be.

We've discussed this before, but it seems to us that Americans were family centric prior to World War Two. The post war economic boom had the impact of depressing the age at which Americans married, and much of the family centric nature of American life remained, but it also started to erode family values at the same time. 

Prior to 1945, the vast majority of men married, but those who did not entered into occupations which supported bachelorhood, of which there were a number.  For the most part, nobody lived alone.  Women lived with their parents until they married, or if all hope of marriage was lost, with their parents until they died.  One of my mother's aunts who openly detested children did this, her only real option, other than religious life, as marriage meant children.  Men in contrast lived at home, or in boarding houses, or in bunkhouses or barracks, for example. My mother was a real exception in that she left home as a teenager to move to Western Canada at the urging of an uncle, who had employment for her, but that was after the Second World War when things had begun to change.  My father lived at home until he went to university, then in barracks in the Air Force, and then back at home again when he came home from the Service.  All of his siblings basically repeated a similar pattern.

Men were expected to provide for their families and were respected for doing so, or disdained if they did not.  Contrary to what is commonly believed, all the way into the 1960s there was pressure on married women not to work, which was regarded as an embarrassment to their husbands.  Prior to my birth, my mother worked, over the objection of my father, and she returned to work when I was probably about 10 or 12, again over the objection of my father.  They were both born, I should note, in the 1920s.

While its a delicate subject, something else that was a feature of pre 1953 American life was that sex outside of marriage was more than looked down upon.  It's common to pretend there was a double standard, and to some extent there was, with women being "ruined" by premarital sex and "boys being boys", but this is not anywhere near as true as widely claimed. Good statistical data from the late 1940s demonstrates that a vast majority of American men abstained from sex until marriage.  It was only after the assault of the false data Kinsey reports on men and sex (1948) and women and sex (1953) and Playboy magazine that this really began to change, although World War Two had a big impact on this as well.  The launch of the Baby Boomers into their adult years on the cusp of the 1960s began, however, to have a major impact on this as they rejected every convention in society.

In principio antequam pondus officii.

By the time I graduated from high school in 1981 things had started to change but not as much as supposed.  Girls in high school when I was there were expected not to says yes to sex, and indeed the bank The Knack made a point of it with their 1979 song Good Girls Don't as the J. Geils Band did in 1981 with Centerfold.  Boys were still expected to get a "good paying job" so they could "provide for a family".

Nonetheless, the bulldozer of the Baby Boom generation had already had a heavy impact on the culture and converted much of the family centric nature of it to being money centric. This was also starting to show itself in spades by the late 1970s and very much did in the 1980s.  Sexual morality began to erode like crazy in the mid to late 80s, following the path the Boomers had set it on in the 60s, and the expectation that everyone should be a consumer. . . of good and people, took over.  On the latter, things were so bad by the late 1980s that I can recall an instance in the late 1980s when a guy I knew who was fairly religiously devout was asked out on date by a girl he barely knew, and went, and the next day her friends were all asking her if they'd had sex on the date, with it being the expectation that they had.  Having said that, even that late "getting a girl pregnant" meant marriage, usually, or it meant the girl dropping out of sight for a while until the baby was born, and then reemerging as if nothing had happened.

Or, after 1973, it meant an abortion.

Divorce was pretty uncommon prior to 1945 as well. The first no fault divorces came into law in 1947 in the US, probably as a result of hasty marriages contracted during World War Two.  They spread relatively slowly and Wyoming didn't adopt a variant (its not truly no fault divorce) until the 1970s.  Actually getting divorced was regarded as shameful into the 1970s.  It was so shameful in the early 20th Century that my great grandparents outright disowned a son who had obtained a divorce from his spouse, although they later reconciled (he moved to the US, years later I was contacted by his son from a later marriage).  When I was a child, knowing somebody who lived in a family in which the parents were divorced was really unusual.

So what, you ask?

Well this.

By the time I graduated from law school in 1990 things had already changed a great deal in the US, but the bare bones of the older culture were still there.  It was possible, although it would soon turn disastrous, to get a job without a college education that paid okay, but not to the extent that it had been in 1970.  Men and women were still expected to get married and remain married, and anticipated doing so.  As the song said, it was still the case that "Good Girls Don't".  Homosexuality existed, but it was concentrated in cities or closeted, the latter often to such an extent that those who were homosexuals didn't really ever acknowledge it to themselves.

However, at the same time, the generation graduating into the 1980s started to have to obtain university degrees in much increased numbers.  Lots of people I went to university with were "first time" attendees, and that was because they had no other choice.  And by the 1990s divorce had become common, as well as shacking up, premarital sex, and bearing children out of wedlock.

Also at some point in the 1980s it became outright necessary for a married woman to have a job in order to help "make ends meet".  Only the spouses of professionals really had any other option.  In a radical reversal of things, male spouses of professionals started to elect for that option by the early 2000s, which would have been regarded as outright shameful before.

Well, if things got rough, and they did, for Generation Jones, it was worse for Gen X and Y.

Generation Jones suffered eroding economic opportunities, while at the same time a cultural drift that not only got started in the 1960 continued to erode the culture, a new culture was outright forced upon Gen X and Gen Y.  That peaked with Obergefell v. Hodges, which was a watershed, as I predicted that it would be.  It broke the dam.

The flood that resulted caused a limping wounded cultural remanent to lash out, just the upper economic edge of the WASP class started to foist the result of Obergefell on a resistant society.  An upper class erudite conservatism epitomized by William F. Buckley and George F. Will, which secretly had always expected to be out of power, yielded by force to a populist conservatism first defined by the Tea Party but then refined post Obergefell by Trump's MAGA movement, which Trump, a salesman, used, even if his personal life looked more like something out of Studio 54.

And then you have the generational, and Rust Belt, aspect of it.

Men Kirk's age, particularly men Kirk's age from certain regions, came into a world that they felt was particularly stacked against men. There was no way that they could get what they hoped for, which they imagined to be the life of the 1950s they believed their grandparents had.

Popular traditionalist meme with some truth to it, but it requires more thought than this.  Also, this pertains more to the 50s and 60s, than it does to eras before

Rust Belt men came of age not only with this concept in their minds, but a history of racial strife that dated back to the Great Migration which had seen African Americans leave the South in large numbers from 1910 to 1970 as they sought to improve their lives.  Internal migrants, while their economic condition improved, they did not escape racism and found themselves living segregated, urban, lives.  Chicago was a city particularly impacted by this.

The Arthur family arriving at Chicago's Polk Street Depot, August 30, 1920.

It wasn't the only one, however.  The Rust Belt in general did, to include such cities as Detroit and Omaha.  African American communities formed in all of them, and in each racial strife featured.

The atmosphere of the Great Migration came to be part of the Rust Belt culture.  Blue collar, and even middle class, whites grew up not believing that they were not racist, like white Southerners, but to speak to them they clearly were, and this often remains the case today.  Blacks were definitely "others" with a different culture, and one that was often rendered into a cliche.  Displaced Rust Belt whites in the West often baffled locals with racial references that made very little sense to locals (I was once asked where the "brothers play basketball", for instance).  Some relocating Rust Belt whites felt free to tell locals that they were relocating specifically to be in a region with few blacks, leaving locals completely out to sea on how to react.

While these tensions existed throughout the entire migration period, once the region slid into economic decay starting in the 1970s tensions of every kind became worse.  By 1993, when Kirk was born, lots of Rust Belt Americans believed that their economic plight was due to minorities who were not real Americans and an educated WASP class that had exported jobs overseas.

Mixed into the background of the moral decay that started with the Baby Boomers in the 1960s had been around long enough by the 1990s that the glamour of evil was really wearing off, particularly the attraction to sexual sin.  Oddly enough, people who had lived the life of 70s largess, like Donald Trump, were regarded, save for Trump, as having engaged in moral redress.  The problem at the same time was that the culture had been so badly damaged over a thirty year period that restoring it was difficult, as the map was partially lost.  Various movements very much sprung up to do it, however, including ones that were based in religious conservatism in various religions.

National Conservatism and Christian Nationalism was a bit of a synthesis of these trends, on the upper end.  On the lower end, was MAGA.

And that gave an opportunity for a flamethrower like Kirk, which is not to say that he was not genuine in his beliefs.  On the younger end, he pretty well defined what populist Rust Belt conservative whites believed.  He was an economic nationalist, a populist, an Evangelical Christian, and xenophobic.

Malcolm X.

As noted above, I think there's reason to believe that he was following sort of the same path as Malcolm X, although both of them would find the suggestion to be insulting.  He may have been further down that path than Malcolm was.  Contrary to the way we tend to remember him, Malcolm X was a deeply conservative man.  He was very religious after converting first to the Nation of Islam, then actual Islam.  He was a Black Nationalist, which isn't all that much different, oddly enough, than being a White Nationalist.  He was an ardent opponent of gun control who was gunned down, just like Kirk.  He was an evolving figure, murdered young, which is true of Kirk as well.  He said outrageous things for effect, which Kirk did as well.

Kirk was clearly moving, and indeed had moved, from Evangelical Christianity into Catholicism, with their being a deep intellectual gap between the two.  Cardinal Newman had stated that to know history was to be Catholic, but it's also true that to convert to Catholicism, in some people, is to become deeply knowledgeable about history.  Kirk's statements about the Church would suggest that he was headed into the Traditionalist wing of the Church, which has seen a lot of entries by those who might loosely be regarded as fellow travelers of Kirk, such as J. D. Vance, Eva Vlaardingerbroek, and Tammy Peterson.  Indeed, as noted here last week, there's been a wave of conversion to Catholicism in recent years and with this year the Catholic Church will bring in more converts than it will lose to those leaving the faith.  The same is happening in France, where the majority of converts are young students.  Catholic conversions are on the rise in England and Scotland as well, with more Catholics attending Sunday services than Anglicans.  In Ireland, which suffered as a result of an abuse crisis, the country seems to be shaking off the negative impacts of a "special relationship" imposed on the Church and on the country by DeValera and the Church is reviving again.

All of this is really interesting in regard to the long strange trip the culture has been on since 1945.  Maybe it offers some hope that the redneck Sweet Home Alabama nature of the populist movement, and the fascistic aspect of the National Conservative movement, may be starting to retreat, while a focus on the interior may have begun.

Who do you trust?

Why in the world don’t you tell me who you trust?

Yeaah! You got your lawyer he will give a way

Why don’t you tell me who you trust

Why you lost your trust in bible

You better get on your knees and pray

Maybe all of this is expecting too much, but there are some interesting things going on, and Kirk seems to have been part of them.  His being murdered cuts that short for him, and perhaps that's the greatest tragedy of all, as it was for Malcolm X.  Their own lives were cut short, but also the impact of their anticipated longer lives upon the group they represent.  

Or maybe I'm all wet.

One thing I've noted here is that I didn't know much about Kirk prior to his assassination, and frankly I wouldn't have paid much attention to him.  I had him in the same class as Joe Rogan, who I think is simply a right wing yapper.

Indeed, there's some reason to regard Kirk as being sort of a latter day Charles Coughlin in a world filled with latter day Charles Coughlin, with Caughlin perhaps being notable that when silenced by Church authorities, he actually shut up.  No such authority, of course, exists that pertains to Kirk, or Rogan, so they don't have to shut up, but as their occupation seems to be based on public attention, they can't really afford to.  The best example of that is Tucker Carlson, who has gone from being a conservative media figure to being a  Russia backing nutjob.

Would Kirk have been like that?

I guess a lot of that depends upon how you take his comments, a section of which I set out above. Some of them, in spite of the media latching on to them, are fairly conventional, and Christian, points of view, such as those on abortion.  Others flirt with racism, including I'd note at least one about Dr. Martin Luther King, whom some are now oddly associating him with.  Would he have abandoned the one set and continued to develop the other?  Now we will not know.

What we do know is this.

Attention spans in American politics are short.  The Doddling Fool in the White House had already moved on from Kirk's death, which he was outraged about the day prior, to his pet project, a ballroom, as he noted twice in press questions about the death of Kirk:

. . . was in the midst of, you know, building a great—for 150 years they’ve wanted a ballroom at the White House, right? They don’t have a ballroom, they have to use tents on the lawn for President Xi when he comes over; if it rains it’s a wipeout, and so I was with architects that were design[ing]—it’s gonna be incredible,

Donald Trump. 

How are you holding up over the last three and a half days?

I think very good.  And by the way, right there you see all the trucks; they just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House. Which is something they’ve been trying to get as you know for about 150 years, and it’s gonna be a beauty, it’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure.

And I just see all the trucks, they just started, so it’ll get done uh very nicely and it’ll be one of the best anywhere in the world, actually,” the president went on.

Donald Trump 

Kirk may soon be yesterday's news, in spite of a dedicated Republican effort to canonize him.

And that may, interestingly enough, turn out to be the ultimate meaning of Kirk's life.  Like Coughlin, he may end up an historical footnote in a later history about a narcissist demented President.  Less remembered than Robert Kennedy, who isn't really remembered that much.

That is what will happen if the National Conservatives and Christian Nationalist, of which Kirk was part, do not succeed in remaking the society by next November, or by 2028 at the latest.  No matter how Kirk would have evolved, their time is limited.  Kirk's death, given his articulate nature and youth, probably acts to hasten the expiration of that passing time, in spite of MAGA's efforts to canonize him.  And, if we assume he would have evolved, it deprives the movements of a figure that could have helped move it along, which the Reno's and Dineen's of the movement cannot, and know that they cannot.

Footnotes:

1.  That story was broken by The Laramie Reporter, whom we link in here, as his net feed was interesting as he was working for Harriet Hageman.  It cost him the job.

2.  "Kirk" is a Scottish name meaning "church", and Presbyterianism is heavily associated with the Scots, who adopted it during the reformation, which is to say it was at least partially foisted upon them during the Reformation.  It's massively different in theology from the Church of England and traditionally is Calvinistic.

All of this is interesting as to Kirk's mindset, as traditional Presbyterianism would have contributed to his unyielding view, and traditional Presbyterians remain extremely religiously conservative.  However, the religion has basically split and some portions of it today are hard to distinguish in view from the liberal end of the Episcopal Church, which also may have influenced how Kirk viewed societal drifts with alarm.

4.  Zillenials, long Generation Jones, are a microgeneration born between two others, whose generational characteristics are unique.  Kirk was born between the Millennials and Gen. X.

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