Blog Mirror: The Bishops Blend Novemdiales: A Timely Smoke

A moment of Catholic culture:

The Bishops Blend Novemdiales: A Timely Smoke

Movies In History, The Six Triple Eight.

This will be the third time I've tried to publish this review. The prior two times it outright disappeared.

Uff.

The 6888 on parade in honor of Joan d'Arc.

The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion is a unique U.S. Army unit that served in Europe during World War Two.  Deployed in February, 1945, the unit was tasked with straightening out a massive mail backlog in the ETO, and by all accounts did yeoman's work doing it.  The unit was all female, and all black, including its officers the only such unit to be deployed to Europe during the war.  The unit not too surprisingly encountered racist opposition, which is a large part of the theme of the film.

The film is quite well done, featuring dramatizations of real characters for the most part.  The story, as noted, is dramatized, but with one exception, it does not depart massively from the actual events. The sole exception is a romance between a  rich white Jewish young man and one of the black female characters, before they join the service, which seems to take place in the American South, and which features a desegregated high school.  Desegregated high schools would not have existed in the South, making this an odd error, and while such a romance could have occurred, it would not have taken place more or less openly as depicted.

Material details are very well done, including the depiction of M1943 Field Jacket Liners in use as jackets, which did occur but which is rarely depicted in film.  Indeed, I can't recall it ever being depicted in another film.

Well worth seeing.

Thursday, April 3, 1975. Operation Babylift.

President Ford ordered the evacuation of Americans from Phnom Penh.

Operation Babylift began as a U.S. effort to bring South Vietnamese orphans to the United States.  Widely lauded today (it would be unlikely to take place, frankly, under the current administration), there was some criticism at the time on the assertion that not all the children were actually orphans, and that it was a cultural based decision given that young people were being taken out of their native land to avoid communism.

Gen. Weyand met with President Thiệu in Saigon and promised more American aid to South Vietnam, but declined Thiệu's request for a renewal of American bombing of North Vietnamese forces.  As they both well knew, without U.S. air support there was no hope for the ARVN.

South Vietnamese Prime Minister Trần Thiện Khiêm resigned.  He would take up exile in France and then the United States, converting to Catholicism there.  He died in 2021.

Israel and South Africa signed SECMENT, a secret mutual defense agreement.

Bobby Fischer refused to play a chess match against Anatoly Karpov, and thereby ceded the title of chess champion.

Actress Mary Ure, most famous for her role in Where Eagles Dare, and the wife of Robert Shaw, died of an overdose of alcohol and barbiturates at age 42.

Last edition:

Wednesday, April 2, 1975. Driving on Saigon.

Labels: 1970s, 1975, North Vietnamese Army, Saigon Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam War

Combat Arms Standards.

 

Related Threads:

Women and combat

Labels: Army, Men, The roles of men and women, trends, War, Women, Work

Killing people and breaking things. . . and women in the service.

Labels: Donald Trump, Evolutionary Biology, hunting, Men, Military, Pete Hegseth, The Madness of King Donald, The roles of men and women, Women, World War Two

Yes, it's bad behavior. Immoral, and criminal. But at what point is it nature?

Labels: Army, Commentary, Men, Military, nature, The relationship between men and women, The roles of men and women, United States Marine Corps, Women

October 31. An Observation.

Today is Halloween.

It's also Reformation Day.

Everyone sort of knows what Halloween is, although in its extremely secularized form.  It's become so popular in that style that its now the second most popular holiday in the US, and you don't even get the da off from work or school.

Originally, and in Catholic and Orthodox Churches, it was All Hallowed Evening, the day before All Saints Day, which in the Catholic Church is a Holy Day of Obligation.   There are some debates about it, but the secular traditions that are observed stem from Celtic cultures of Great Britain in a much modified form.  The door to door trick or treating stems from a religious tradition in which the poor went door to door for food and were given it in exchange for a promise to pray for the donor's dead.

Reformation Day is a day not much observed in North America commemorating Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the Cathedral door at Worms, which he actually didn't do.  The legend was that he did it on this day.  No matter, he did get the rebellion of the reformation going, and with it the concept that people can make up their own minds on anything, no matter how ill informed they are.  Luther was fairly well informed on some things, but that was the unintentional result of his act of rebellion.  

At the time of his 95 Theses, he hadn't intended a rebellion at all, but he worked his way sort of around to it.  It'd be interesting to know what he thought he'd done by the time of his death, but one thing he knew is that he'd caused others with more radical ideas than his to also break away and create their own Christian sects.

Many of those new denominations have considerably changed over the years.  Some of the Lutherans, who followed Luther, often with no choice due to their localities, have become almost more Catholic than the Catholics, while others have gone in another direction.  The Reformation, at any rate, is winding down,and its really collapsing.

With its collapse has come the mess of contemporary culture, much of which we seeing being fought out in the United States right now, which is a Protestant country.  The massive secularization is a minor example of that, but is evident in all of our religion derived holidays, including this one, but also including Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The last acts of rebellion were those against nature, which we also see playing out doay.  They began in the late 1940s and came into full bloom in the 1960s, and are still enormously playing out today.  Part of that has been the acceptance of rebelling against truth, which we see in the current election in more than one way, and in both political parties, although certainly Donald Trump has manifested it in a heretofore unseen level.

So its Reformation Day and Halloween in 2024.  Lots of tricks on the culture are being played, and not too many treats being received.

Going numb in 2024.

I first heard of the attempted assassination attempt on Donald Trump yesterday.  Since that time, up to now, what has surprised me the most is the level of disinterest in it.

Normally, such an event, the attempted assassination of a Presidential candidate, would be so shocking it would seem to dominate the news cycle.  And had the Secret Service not disrupted it before Trump was seemingly in actual danger, it likely would have been.  Indeed, based on first reports, the Secret Service did a really good job in detecting the assassin prior to his firing a shot.

But people are almost taking the "m'eh" approach ot the news.

This isn't a good sign of the state of American politics or culture.  People are, apparently, so worn out, they've  just tuned out entirely.  Indeed, this is one of several such shocking stories recently that have drawn very little attention.

Carpetbaggers and Becoming Native To This Place.

 

His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them - neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them - and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.

Wendell Berry, A Native Hill.

From the Cowboy State Daily:

Now Other People Are “Pissed” At The “We The People Are Pissed” Billboard On I-80 in Wyoming

Probably the most revealing thing in the article:

The Kahlers moved to Wyoming from Colorado about three years ago. Jeanette Kahler said they moved to Wyoming for the state’s “conservative values.”

In other words, they're carpetbaggers.

Wyoming has always had a very high transient population.  Right from the onset, a lot of the people we associate with the state, actually weren't from here, and more significantly weren't from the region.  Francis E. Warren, for example, the famous early Senator, wasn't.  Joseph M. Carey wasn't.  A person might note that they arrived sufficiently early that they hardly could have been, but this carries on to this very day.  Sen. John Barrasso is a Pennsylvanian.  Secretary of State Chuck Gray is a Californian.

This does matter, as you can't really ever be a native of the Northern Plains or the Plains if you weren't born and raised here.  You might be able to convince yourself, and buy a big hat like Foster Freiss, but you aren't from here and more importantly aren't of here.  If you came from Montana, or Nebraska, or rural Colorado, that's different.  Or if you came in your early years, before you were out of school.  

But earlier arrivals did try.  They appreciated what they found, took the effort to grasp what it was, and sought to become native to this place.

The recent arrivals don't.  They brought their homes and their attitudes with them.

They were fooling themselves that they were "Wyoming" anything.

Or were.

Recently, however, something else has been going on.  Just as the Plains were invaded by European Americans in the 18th and 19th Centuries, Wyoming is enduring it again with an invasion of Southerners, Rust Belt denizens, and Californians, who image they have Wyoming's values while destroying them.  One prominent Freedom Caucuser is really an Illinoisan with values so different from the native ones it's amazing she was elected, but then her district elected Chuck Gray as well, whose only connection with Wyoming is thin.  They do represent, however, the values of recent immigrants.

Whether you like it or not, Wyomingites have not traditionally been hostile to the Federal Government, and we knew we depended upon it.  Indeed, while one Wyoming politician may emphasize a narrative of being a fourth generation Wyomingite, and is, whose agricultural family pulled themselves up from the mule ears on their cowboy boots, and they did work hard, we can't get around the fact that the state was founded by the Federal Government which sent the Army in to kill or corral the original inhabitants and then gave a lot of the land away on a government assistance program.  

Wyoming was formed, in part, by welfare.

The government helped bring in the railroads, helped support agriculture, built the roads, kept soldiers and later airmen and their paychecks at various places, funded the airports, and helped make leasing oil rights cheap so that they could be exploited.

No real Wyomingite hates the government, no matter how much they may pretend they do.

Populist do, as they're ignorant.

Wyoming's cultural ethos was, traditionally, "I don't care what the @#$#$ you do, as long as you leave me alone".  The fables about Matthew Shepherd aside, people didn't really care much about what you did behind closed doors, but expected that you wouldn't try to force acceptance of it at a societal level.  Wyoming was, and remains, for good or ill the least religious state in the United States.  You could always find some devout members of various Protestant faiths, and devout and observant Catholics and Mormons have always been here. But the rise of the Protestant Evangelical churches is wholly new, and come in with Southerners.  When I was growing up, a good friend of mine was a Baptist, the only one I knew, as the church was close to his house (now he's a Lutheran).  I knew one of my friends was Lutheran, and there were some Mormon kids in school.  There was one Jehovah's Witness.  In junior high, one of my friends was sort of kind of Episcopalian, and I knew the son of the Orthodox Priest.  By high school I knew the daughter of the Methodist minister.  But outside of Mormon kids and Catholic kids, the religion of my colleagues was often a mystery.

I'm not saying the unchurched nature of the state was a good thing, but I am saying that by and large there was a dedicated effort to educate children and tolerance was a widely held value.  It was a tolerance, as noted, that required people to keep their deviations from a societal norm to themselves.  People who cheated on spouses, who were homosexuals, or any other number of things could carry on doing it, but not if they were going to demand you accepted it.

And frankly, that was a better way to approach things.

Now, that's being fought over.

The Freedom Caucus group might as well have Sweet Home Alabama as their theme song, and that's not a good thing.

The Obituary

Mira qué bonita era by Julio Romero de Torres, 1895.  Depiction of a wake in Spain.

I didn't have him as a teacher in high school, but I certainly knew of him.¹  Somehow or another, I also knew that a student that was in school with us, and who my cousins knew, was not only his daughter, but also one of his students.  Apparently that was awkward. 

I don't do a good job of keeping track of former teachers.  I probably couldn't tell you where a single one of them was, even the ones I really liked, let alone those I only sort of knew by association.  In his case, there was our classmate, whom I also didn't know (she was a couple of years ahead of me), but he was also known to our parents.  Without knowing for sure, in looking at it, I think that must have been because he was from a Catholic family here in town.

My classmate died the year before last.  She was 62.

I read his obituary as he was so well known locally.  And then I recalled there were bits and pieces of his story I'd picked up over the years.

His wife was also a teacher.

Sometime after I left high school, the couple apparently civilly divorced.²   He remarried, and apparently to an apparently significantly younger women whom I take was also a teacher.  According to the obit, they had a child after he retired, who would now be about 31.  He would have been about 56 when she was born.  I can dimly recall my parents and my father's siblings talking about this as well, mostly in a somewhat bemused manner, given the difficulties of raising an infant, in their view, when you are that old.

When my classmate died, her mother was mentioned in the obituary.  Indeed, her obituary characterizes both of her parents as loving, and contains praise of them.

His obituary mentioned both of his daughters by his first marriage, and then goes on about his second.  His wife, the mother of my classmate, isn't mentioned at all.  The obituary is profuse on his latter "marriage", calling that individual, named in the obituary, the "love of his life" amongst other things.

Of course, the dead don't write their obituaries.  If they did, who knows how they'd read?  We might all fear how they'd be penned.  I've read plenty where a "first" and "second" spouse are mentioned.  This one is profuse on his love of one woman that he had children by and which the civil law would regard as his wife, but totally silent as to his wife who was the mother of my classmate. My classmate's obituary mentions her, and kindly, using the Americanism "step" to describe her as her "stepmother", which is polite, but the second "wife" of a divorced person isn't anything, relationship wise, to a child of the "first" marriage at all.³    Children, of a later marriage of any kind are, of course, as they're related by blood, i.e., genetically. Of course, children born out of wedlock to an illicit partner, to which I am in no way comparing this situation other than to note it, are "half" siblings as well.⁴ 

It must be a later child of the second union that wrote the obituary, as it concluded with the funeral details, those being an apparently civil funeral, followed by an "Irish wake", the latter something not really understood by Americans.  A real wake comes before, not after, the ceremony, and the body of the deceased is present. Indeed, the body is key to the wake, and the dead's family and friends do not allow the body to be left alone.  Prayer for the dead is a feature of it, but there is also food and drink and even courting, which in part has to do with the fact that life goes on, but in part because in more natural societies people live much closer to death than they do in our false one.

Everywhere, real wakes have much diminished.⁵

But then, so has our understanding of, and appreciation of the metaphysical and the existential, and as most people do not dwell deeply on those topics, and the culture has drifted many of those who drift with it bear no fault for having done so.

There's no Irish wakes without prayer, the deceased, and a sense of the next world having stepped into this one.  In our age, however, we expect this world and how we define it to step into the next one.

Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine,

et lux perpetua luceat eis.

Te decet hymnus Deus in Sion,

et tibi reddetur votum in Jerusalem.

Exaudi orationem meam,

ad te omnis caro veniet.

Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine,

et lux perpetua luceat eis.

Kyrie, eleison. Christe, eleison. Kyrie, eleison.⁶

Footnotes:

1.  In no small part because he was a well put together athletic man who drew hall monitor duty, but didn't seem to care for it much.  Indeed, if you went by him in the hall, when he had it, he didn't bother to ask you where you were going.

2.  I'll admit that this entry disregards the topic of Catholic annulment. Did they obtain one?  No idea.

To add to that, do I know anything whatsoever about the circumstances of their "divorce" and what brought it about, including who brought it about.  No I don't.

3.  The etymology of the prefix "step" goes back to the 8th Century and denoted an orphan.  It was later extended in Old English to connote a remarriage of a widow.

Some "step" parents, it might be noted, particularly in the case of an early death of an actual parent, or an abandonment by one of them, really step up to the plate and become effectively de facto parents.

The Pogues song Body of an American gives a good description of Irish wakes and how they can be.  The movie Road To Perdition, however, gives a very good depiction of a traditional wake, complete with the body iced.

4.  Again, as the fraud of civil divorce is so widely recognized as real in the Western World, I am in no way comparing the children of illicit affairs to the children of later contracted civil marriages.

5.  I've been to a real wake once, for a deceased second cousin, and it was horrific.  My father, who was 1/2 Irish, and 1/2 Westphalian by descent, but whose family did not retain any Irish customs, detested them.

6.       Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord,

and let light perpetual shine upon them.

Thou art worthy to praised, O God, in Zion,

and to thee shall prayer be offered in Jerusalem.

Hear my prayer,

for to thee shall all flesh come.

Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord,

and let light perpetual shine upon them.

 Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

The Ongoing 2023 Legislative Session of Other States.

How we all imagine legislatures once were. . . because they didn't have the opportunity to put every dumb thought they had out on Twitter.

At least Wyoming can be thankful that its citizen legislature can't afford to be in ongoing session.

May 21, 2023

Minnesota, deciding that Americans aren't stupid enough, and don't already have enough in the way of options to make themselves even stupider, voted to legalize marijuana.

It also passed a new gun measure.

June 3, 2023

Connecticut banned marriages under 18 with no exceptions.

September 7, 2023

California has banned caste based discrimination, which is something prevalent in the Indian culture. The Governor has not indicated if he will sign the act.

While I agree with the measure, this is frankly an example of a Western culture declaring its values to be superior to that of an Asian one.  Western cultures have a Christianity based concept that all people are equal.  Lots of cultures hold the polar opposite.

Massachusetts has passed funding for universal "free" school lunches.

Of course, they aren't free, they're government funded. And the government doesn't make an income through production, so they're tax funded.  This means they're taxpayer funded.  Massachusetts has ain income tax, so this means that Massachusetts is separating cash from the wallets of everyone in the state in order to buy lunches for school kids, irrespective of parental obligations to pay to feed their kids.

October 3, 2023

Nebraska is requiring transgender youth seeking "gender-affirming care", the Orwellian term for gender mutilation, to wait seven days to start puberty-blocking medications or hormone treatments under emergency regulations as well as to receive at least 40 hours of “gender-identity-focused” therapy   This followed a Nebraska law that took effect on Sunday which bans "gender affirming" surgical mutilation for those under 19.

Nebraska, intentionally or not, is following a global trend here which is limiting such procedures in minors, with the data showing its frequently regretted.

October 8, 2023

California has put into effect a law requiring  requires public and private US businesses with revenues greater than $1 billion operating in California to report their emissions comprehensively.

January 4, 2024

Passed last year, some new state laws:

• A new Minnesota law allows authorities to ask courts for “extreme risk protection orders” to temporarily take guns from people deemed to be an imminent threat to others or themselves. 
• Colorado has banned "ghost guns"
• A Connecticut law requires online dating operators to adopt policies for handling harassment reports.
• A North Carolina law requires pornographic website operators to confirm viewers are at least 18 years old by using a commercially available database. Parents can sue for failure to comply with the law.
• A new Illinois law allows lawsuits by victims of deepfake pornography,
• Bans on chemical gender mutilation of minors take effect in Idaho, Louisiana and West Virginia. 
• A new law in Hawaii requires new marriage certificates to be issued to people who request to change how their sex is listed. 
• In Colorado, new buildings wholly or partly owned by government entities are now required to have on every floor where there are public restrooms at least one that does not specify the gender of the users.
• A new Indiana law makes it easier for parents and others to challenge books in school libraries. 
• A new Illinois law blocks state funding for public libraries that ban or restrict books.
• Kansas dropped the sales tax on groceries drops from 4% to 2% .  It plans to eliminate the slaes tax on groceries entirely.
• Connecticut and Missouri reduced their state income tax rate.

More observations on the Hamas Israeli War. A sort of primer, war aims, and campaign aims. Part I.

War Aims.

A lot of reporting on the Hamas Israeli War, indeed nearly all of it, is devoid of discussion on war aims.  Some of it vaguely discusses Israeli campaign aims.  None of it so far that I've seen has discussed Hamas campaign aims.  Given that, a lot of the reporting is sort of naive.

Hamas, having started the campaign, will be discussed first.

Hamas was formed in 1987 (probably considerably more recently than many suppose.  Hamas controls Gaza, Fatah, the political arm of what had been the Palestinian Liberation Organization, controls the West Bank.  The two entities have actually fought each other.  Hamas started off with the goal of pushing Jews out of the boundaries of what had been the 1948 Palestinian borders, but earlier in the 2000s seemed to lessen its demands.

It seems to have returned to them.  As far as can be told, its war aims are to remove the Jews from Israel, dead or alive, and of any age, and create an Arab Palestinian, and seemingly Islamic (not all Palestinians are Muslims) state in its wake.  That's what's summed up in the phrase "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free", which like a lot of slogans is catchy but doesn't really convey the full meaning of what it seeks.

Those are the war aims.

Without abandoning them, Hamas cannot back down, and Israel cannot unilaterally realistically convert the current war into a large scale punitive action at this point.  War aims can change, but Hamas shows no desire at all to do so.  A limited raid that was not aimed at civilians could have been undertaken if it has some other goal, but it didn't.

The campaign aims are much more difficult to discern.  Perhaps it was to spark a wider war in the belief that it could be won, or perhaps it was just a gross act of terrorism in furtherance of its remote, unobtainable goal.

Of course, discerning campaign aims, is often tricky in regard to an entity like Hamas, or even large entities.  In spite of long knowledge to the contrary, they may have thought that their raid, if that is what it was intended to be, would scare Israel into submission.  Hitting civilians never does that.  The British didn't surrender after the Blitz, and the air raids on civilian populations in Germany and Japan, perhaps if we exclude the atomic bomb, didn't cause them to surrender either.  Air raids on military targets in North Vietnam which inflicted civilian deaths didn't cause North Vietnam to give up.  9/11 only made Americans mad, it didn't achieve whatever it was that Al Queda thought it would, which seems to have been a hoped for general economic collapse.

Israel's war aims are also simple.  Its goal is to destroy Hamas as it views it, correctly, as irreconcilably opposed to its existence and genocidal in nature.  Its campaign aims seem to be to occupy Gaza, or perhaps the northern portion of the Gaza Strip, trap Hamas, and destroy it and its infrastructure.

Outright destroying an underground organization, however, is very difficult to do. The US basically did it in Afghanistan, however, so it can be done.

Nobody is talking at all about what's going to become of the Palestinians.  Israel isn't addressing it. The Arabs aren't either.  Hamas is simply using their own people as human shields and for propoganda.

A cultural existential difference, or Why can't everyone get along?

Cultures play a part in wars, which people in the West are oddly inclined to forget.  Jimmy Carter famously absent-mindedly quipped that the problems between the Israeli's and Palestinians would go away if they all started acting "like good Christians", but of course neither group is predominantly Christian.

I've taken some criticism on a more stretched observation in this area recently, so I'll explain a bit what I mean.

This question posed above is really a Western one, filtered through our eyes, which are the eyes of heavy Christian influence.  As a South American atheist friend of mine once stated, culturally, "we're all Catholics", even if we often don't behave like it.  That's why we're shocked when people don't behave accordingly.  

Historically and culturally, that's not necessarily the default human norm at all, which doesn't mean that every non-Christian culture (including the two in question) default to bad behavior.   But, as Genghis Khan supposedly noted (often filtered in our culture through Conan the Barbarian in a modified form):

The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.

We don't think that way, and we don't want others thinking that way.

Back to this war, the fact of the matter is that these two groups of people aren't going to get along.  The Western concept that somehow they can be made to is simply in error at this point.

It might have been true a couple of times.  One was in 1948, just before the first Arab Israeli War broke out, although that's pretty debatable. The second time was when the 1993 and 1995 Palestinian Accords were reached. The big problem is that both times, large numbers of Palestinians simply rejected a future which included Jews within the 1948 Palestinian boundaries.

The 1948 rejection was accompanied by voting with their feet by the Palestinians, a logical choice but one that was taken advantage of by Israel in that it offered the opportunity to truly make the country principally Jewish.  Nobody can fault somebody for fleeing fighting, but the fact that it occured meant that a large Arab population removed itself.  If it had not, demographics alone would have repeated what in fact occured in Lebanon, where a majority Christian population at that time is now 32% of the population.

Instead of taking that route, the Palestinians first relied on Arab hostility to take the country back for them, and then for the PLO, which ultimately compromised on that, to do so.  Now, a certain percentage are relying on Hamas.

Regarding that calculation, relying on it in the 1950s, and even into the 1960s, wasn't irrational.  After that, it really started to be. At some point, the land belongs to those who live there.  It was Zapata who stated; “The land belongs to those who work it with their own hands”, which is how it should be (and how it's increasingly ceasing to be in the United States)  That same analogy pertains to revolutions.  It instinctively makes sense for the people ruled by another people to rebel, but not so much a people that had once lived in a land where the majority of the population isn't yours, and the majority of your population wasn't born in that land.  Indeed, the fact that the initial Jewish war for independence sort of violated that tenant is part of the reason that many nations around the globe were quite hesitant about supporting Israel early on, combined with the fact that it appeared they'd lose.

Beyond that, as an essay in Minding The Campus has related:

(Professor Mordechai) Kedar, a former officer in the Israeli Defense Forces, has spent his academic life studying Islamic and Arab history and society. He explains that the animus of Palestinians, Arabs, and Islamists against the Jewish state is based on the consensus of Islamic religious thought that believes that Jews as a religion, people, or nation are never to be the equals of Muslims, and so their independent state, Israel, must be “struck down.”

While that can be debated, there's at least something to it, or there has come to be.   For the most part, since World War Two, Middle Eastern Islam, which is its cradle, has become increasingly more "conservative", if that is the correct term, and militant over the decades.  That was always there, and indeed Saudi Arabia was founded due to the Saud family's alliance with a group so conservative it was regarded as heretical.  Islam does not have a real coexistence ethos as we'd understand it towards other religions.  It's often noted that it has allowances for "People of the Book", meaning both Jews and Christians, but that tolerance is limited and provides that they are to be second class citizens.

Neither Christianity nor Judaism have something similar towards other religions, which doesn't mean that individual Christian or Jewish societies are de facto tolerant.  People tend to generally be intolerant of any group that's different from themselves.

Interestingly, early Middle Eastern governments didn't have this feature to them, or at least not to the same extent.  Turkey just celebrated its 100th founding as a modern state, and that state was founded as a secular one.  Atatürk suppressed Islam in his country.  Jordan has always been a Muslim state, but the Hashemite family that rules it, and once controlled Mecca, has tended towards moderation consistently.  The Baath movement that controls most of Syria and once controlled Iraq was a fascist movement early on that included Muslim and Christian Arabs and which sought a secular state in the Middle East.  The PLO was a secular organization that leaned heavily on Communist thought.  There was at one time a strong sense amongst Arab nationalist that Islam had to be suppressed or, if not outright suppressed, the state's had to be secular. That really began to fall way with the Iranian revolution, and there's been a good deal of retreat from it since that time.

Which takes us to the current highly conservative (again, if that is the right word) Israeli government.

The current Israeli government is the most conservative, again if that's the word, one ever.  It follows part of the global drift towards far right populism.  Prior to the Hamas attack, it was receiving a good deal of pushback from Western nations and internally, in no small part due to an effort to subordinate the Israeli supreme court to the Knesset.  In the irony that all such conflicts create, that's all been forgotten now.  At any rate, a sharp turn to the right by Israel made it pretty clear that any current Israeli desires to really find a mutual solution to the problems now being fought over just weren't there.

All of which leaves us with this.

Hamas has attacked and made it clear that it thinks it can murder its way towards achieving its goals, a sort of accelerated variant of the 1939-1945 lebensraum at this point.  Israel can't allow that to happen.

There are paths to a lasting peace here, but nobody involved, or even with influence, is going to try to bring them about, so the question is whether the warring parties, or more precisely Israel, can bring it about by force.

Lex Anteinternet: The West. Was, No, he didn't.

In an age of relativism, orthodoxy is the only possible rebellion left.

Dr Peter Kreeft

Lex Anteinternet: No, he didn't.:  A headline: Pope Francis signals openness to Catholic Church blessing of same-sex unions. Marriage remains off table He didn't say that...

It's striking how much of the angst those of us in the West endure on a daily basis, in everything, is unique to us.

The Western world, that is.

The entire gender based who is attracted to whom, and gender confusion, is a Western, largely European (of which European Americans are part) thing.

We aren't the entire world.

And we're an eclipsing part of it.

In terms of religion, it's orthodoxy, not what we in the west are experiencing at some levels (but are on others), that's on the rise.  In Africa, the churches, Catholic and Protestant, are orthodox.  And in terms of Catholicism, on the rise.

Culturally, the entire self obsessed gender thing, well that's our deal too.

And economically, we're not once we once were, and will get less so.

And perhaps that's a good thing.

In the Catholic world, it's already the case that parishes are often served by orthodox African priests.  In the Anglican World, the conservatives look towards Africa as well.  As the generation that came of age in the 60s and 70s ages out, much of this will be much more evident.

As will the rise of cultural conservatism in younger generations.  Just the other day, a survey of Australian Catholic women revealed that younger women were more conservative and less willing to make changes in the Church than older ones. And while this may surprise, it's large the case that post Boomer generations are weary of the experimentation to a larger degree than might be suspected, where they aren't being ripped up by it in the secular world.

Rich Men North of Richmond, Part I. Resisting the "signs and wonders" and completely missing what's gong on.

Rich Men North of Richmond, which is independently produced, I think, had made a big Internet and music scene splash, and frankly, not because it's good.

It is, as of this writing, on Billboard's Hot 100.

The ballad is played by Oliver Anthony, a genuine blue collar Virginian, apparently.  All of his music videos seem to be filmed in a heavily wooded lot, which also appears to be genuine, although the rural South provides a certain cache in country music to such an extent that a Canadian band has even affected it, calling itself The Dead South.  All of Anthony's music is played on a Resonator Guitar, a type of guitar I normally call a Dobro.  I associate resonated guitars with the blues, not with country music, so this is a bit odd in and of itself.

How I imagine a guitar with a resonator properly being used.

Fans have gushed on the "return" of "real" or "authentic" country music, and this may indeed be the first genuine example of authentic country music to become a big hit in decades.  Even 1st Lt. Austin von Letkemann, the author (host? mc?) of the wickedly funny Army satire series Mandatory Fun Day mentioned it the other day, as a real fan, citing Colter Wall at the same time.  Wall is authentic, that's for sure, but in a different genre, genuine Western, i.e., cowboy, music.

But I don't think it's the music that boosted Anthony's song to the top of the C&W charts.  It's the content.  Consider the lyrics:

I've been sellin' my soul, workin' all day

Overtime hours for bullshit pay

So I can sit out here and waste my life away

Drag back home and drown my troubles away

It's a damn shame what the world's gotten to

For people like me and people like you

Wish I could just wake up and it not be true

But it is, oh, it is

Livin' in the new world

With an old soul

These rich men north of Richmond

Lord knows they all just wanna have total control

Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do

And they don't think you know, but I know that you do

'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end

'Cause of rich men north of Richmond

I wish politicians would look out for miners

And not just minors on an island somewhere

Lord, we got folks in the street, ain't got nothin' to eat

And the obese milkin' welfare

Well, God, if you're 5-foot-3 and you're 300 pounds

Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds

Young men are puttin' themselves six feet in the ground

'Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin' them down

Lord, it's a damn shame what the world's gotten to

For people like me and people like you

Wish I could just wake up and it not be true

But it is, oh, it is

Livin' in the new world

With an old soul

These rich men north of Richmond

Lord knows they all just wanna have total control

Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do

And they don't think you know, but I know that you do

'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end

'Cause of rich men north of Richmond

I've been sellin' my soul, workin' all day

Overtime hours for bullshit pay

Rich Man North of Richmond, it might be noted, comes hard on the heels of In A Small Town, by Jason Aldean.  

Consider its lyrics:

Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk

Carjack an old lady at a red light

Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store

Ya think it's cool, well, act a fool if ya like

Cuss out a cop, spit in his face

Stomp on the flag and light it up

Yeah, ya think you're tough

Well, try that in a small town

See how far ya make it down the road

Around here, we take care of our own

You cross that line, it won't take long

For you to find out, I recommend you don't

Try that in a small town

Got a gun that my granddad gave me

They say one day they're gonna round up

Well, that shit might fly in the city, good luck

Try that in a small town 

See how far ya make it down the road

Around here, we take care of our own

You cross that line, it won't take long

For you to find out, I recommend you don't

Try that in a small town

Full of good ol' boys, raised up right

If you're looking for a fight

Try that in a small town

Try that in a small town

Try that in a small town

See how far ya make it down the road

Around here, we take care of our own

You cross that line, it won't take long

For you to find out, I recommend you don't

Try that in a small town

Try that in a small town

Ooh-ooh

Try that in a small town

Aldean, I'd note, isn't from a small town.  He's' from Macon, Georgia, population 150,000 or so, so it's a mid-sized city.  And In A Small Town isn't real country, but rather country and enjoyed the same popularity.

Both of these songs immediately became populist anthems.  So much so that none other than liberal economist Robert Reich, whom this blog has an obvious love/hate relationship, just posted on the song, with frankly a typically disappointing analysis.

Rich Men North of Richmond

Republicans court cultural populism, while Democrats eschew economic populism. But economic populism is the key.

Reich offers his view, but he's wrong on what's going on here, at least in part, and certainly wrong on the fix.  Like other left wing economists in the United States, Reich is a corporate capitalist, which is also what all the right wing economists are. Reich correctly believes that the system has gone wonky to the detriment of the working class (whatever the current working class may be), but he fails to grasp, as nearly every economist in the United States and perhaps the Western World, or maybe even the planet, that the economy is supposed to serve average lives and average lives come first.  I.e., it's 1) my life and;  2) I need to work.  Not I'm a worker in a glorious worker's state and work will exalt me, or I'm a consumer in a glorious consumption state and consumption will exalt me, which are effectively the flip side of corporate capitalism.

So what's going on here?

Well, the economy isn't serving people's lives, and that's because corporate capitalism doesn't.  Neither right nor left economists get it.  For that matter, left wing politicos, as exhibited by Reich's writings, particularly don't get it.

Reich is one of the people who keep interpreting this stuff from solely an economic prospective, while simultaneously, and increasingly from a bigoted prospective, issuing warnings about "Christian Nationalism", which actually isn't a movement this is part of at all.  Southern Cultural Christianity is, but that's completely different, and indeed largely leans on a different branch of Christianity (the same people who go to Trump rallies and find him to be a fine Christian probably think Constantine the Great ripped the faith away from the Baptists, or something).

Constantine the Great watching the burning of the books of Arian heretics.  Constantine would likely regard most MAGA Christians as appalling on religions grounds, while he'd recognize Christian Nationalist.  He can't be considered one, however.  He's regarded as a saint by the Easter Orthodox and the Ukrainian Catholic Church.

You can get a taste of what's actually up with these songs from the comments to Rich Men North of Richmond on Youtube.

1.  39 years old. Spent 12 1/2 years as a plumber until the small company I worked for went under as the pandemic began. Working for a big chain home store for the last 3 years getting beaten into the ground, treated like a disposable asset, and watching my earnings equal less and less as the prices of basic necessities goes up. Ive fought addiction and won. Ive found love and lost it. This song resonates on a level that I havent felt in a long time. Thank you and god bless. 🙏

2.  As a disabled Marine, struggling to even be in public, struggling with all the bullshit in this world, struggling with thoughts of suicide, struggling to find pride in my Country, struggling to find the strength to get up every day to do the same damn thing to barely make ends me… as an American STRUGGLING with LIFE… thank you for bringing a little hope to my small part of the world… thank you for letting me know I am not alone with my thoughts and feelings… THANK YOU and God bless you Oliver Anthony

3.  I’m a 42 year old ex addict living in a camper trailer pay cheque to pay cheque with my kids part time while working to help the homeless and addicted community. I won’t stop working like the rest of you because we know at some point that one day will come that we may get that one break that shows us it was all worth it. 

Amazing song Oliver, thank you for sharing it

4.  As a hard working black American man, this song is 🔥 📛  the first country song on my Playlist and I hope for more. In an Era where soul is gone from music THIS IS A BREATH OF MUCH NEEDED AIR. even put a tear in my eye 🔥

5.  And just like that you became the voice of 40 or 50 million working men. Amazing work, sir.

And there are a lot more.

Let's break down the lyrics again, emphasizing the ones that are telling.

I've been sellin' my soul, workin' all day

Overtime hours for bullshit pay

So I can sit out here and waste my life away

Drag back home and drown my troubles away

It's a damn shame what the world's gotten to

For people like me and people like you

Wish I could just wake up and it not be true

But it is, oh, it is

Livin' in the new world

With an old soul

These rich men north of Richmond

Lord knows they all just wanna have total control

Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do

And they don't think you know, but I know that you do

'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end

'Cause of rich men north of Richmond

I wish politicians would look out for miners

And not just minors on an island somewhere

Lord, we got folks in the street, ain't got nothin' to eat

And the obese milkin' welfare

Well, God, if you're 5-foot-3 and you're 300 pounds

Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds

Young men are puttin' themselves six feet in the ground

'Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin' them down

Lord, it's a damn shame what the world's gotten to

For people like me and people like you

Wish I could just wake up and it not be true

But it is, oh, it is

Livin' in the new world

With an old soul

These rich men north of Richmond

Lord knows they all just wanna have total control

Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do

And they don't think you know, but I know that you do

'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end

'Cause of rich men north of Richmond

I've been sellin' my soul, workin' all day

Overtime hours for bullshit pay

 Okay, some of that, like Mr. Reich notes, is economic, but a lot of it isn't. The protagonist notes:

1.  He has "an old soul".

2.  The rich men he complains about want total control, even over what he thinks.

3.  He complains about the Jeffrey Epstein saga, but more in an allegorical way than a specific way, suggesting that politicians are more concerned with their immoral pursuits than the lives of average working people.

4.  He takes a shot at the welfare poor, and unusually, notes fat ones (hardly anyone does that in contemporary America).

Hmmmm. . . Doesn't seem to be all economic. . .

There's a common liberal belief, and Reich is one of those espousing it, that if only the economy is good, everyone is happy.  Reich is one of those who goes on to point out, and correctly, that the economy really is good right now.  One who also does this nearly weekly is Donna Brazile, who is a Democratic political commentator I really like.

Nobody is saying the economy is perfect, of course, including Reich or Brazile.

But there's something they've noted, that they are missing.

If the economy is really good, and in actuality it is, and a large section of the middle class (and contrary to what pudits claim, its definately not all the "white male" middle class) are bitterly unhappy, what's going on.

The usual assertion is that the economy is doing well, but people just don't know it, which is a bit of a bizarre assertion.  People tend to know if they're doing well or not, which raises this question, with unemployment down, wages up, and inflation slowing, are people doing well?

Well, they might not actually be, and COVID may have made that plain to them.

One thing that's underlying the tone of the song is the economic shift in the nature of work since about 1970.

Well, the economy isn't serving people's lives, and that's because corporate capitalism doesn't.  Neither right nor left economists get it.  For that matter, left wing politicos, as exhibited by Reich's writings, particularly don't get it.

Reich is one of the people who keep interpreting this stuff from solely an economic prospective, while simultaneously, and increasingly from a bigoted prospective, issuing warnings about "Christian Nationalism", which actually isn't a movement this is part of at all.  Southern Cultural Christianity is, but that's completely different, and indeed largely leans on a different branch of Christianity (the same people who go to Trump rallies and find him to be a fine Christian probably think Constantine the Great ripped the faith away from the Baptists, or something).

Constantine the Great watching the burning of the books of Arian heretics.  Constantine would likely regard most MAGA Christians as appalling on religions grounds, while he'd recognize Christian Nationalist.  He can't be considered one, however.  He's regarded as a saint by the Easter Orthodox and the Ukrainian Catholic Church.

You can get a taste of what's actually up with these songs from the comments to Rich Men North of Richmond on Youtube.

1.  39 years old. Spent 12 1/2 years as a plumber until the small company I worked for went under as the pandemic began. Working for a big chain home store for the last 3 years getting beaten into the ground, treated like a disposable asset, and watching my earnings equal less and less as the prices of basic necessities goes up. Ive fought addiction and won. Ive found love and lost it. This song resonates on a level that I havent felt in a long time. Thank you and god bless. 🙏

2.  As a disabled Marine, struggling to even be in public, struggling with all the bullshit in this world, struggling with thoughts of suicide, struggling to find pride in my Country, struggling to find the strength to get up every day to do the same damn thing to barely make ends me… as an American STRUGGLING with LIFE… thank you for bringing a little hope to my small part of the world… thank you for letting me know I am not alone with my thoughts and feelings… THANK YOU and God bless you Oliver Anthony

3.  I’m a 42 year old ex addict living in a camper trailer pay cheque to pay cheque with my kids part time while working to help the homeless and addicted community. I won’t stop working like the rest of you because we know at some point that one day will come that we may get that one break that shows us it was all worth it. 

Amazing song Oliver, thank you for sharing it

4.  As a hard working black American man, this song is 🔥 📛  the first country song on my Playlist and I hope for more. In an Era where soul is gone from music THIS IS A BREATH OF MUCH NEEDED AIR. even put a tear in my eye 🔥

5.  And just like that you became the voice of 40 or 50 million working men. Amazing work, sir.

And there are a lot more.

Let's break down the lyrics again, emphasizing the ones that are telling.

I've been sellin' my soul, workin' all day

Overtime hours for bullshit pay

So I can sit out here and waste my life away

Drag back home and drown my troubles away

It's a damn shame what the world's gotten to

For people like me and people like you

Wish I could just wake up and it not be true

But it is, oh, it is

Livin' in the new world

With an old soul

These rich men north of Richmond

Lord knows they all just wanna have total control

Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do

And they don't think you know, but I know that you do

'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end

'Cause of rich men north of Richmond

I wish politicians would look out for miners

And not just minors on an island somewhere

Lord, we got folks in the street, ain't got nothin' to eat

And the obese milkin' welfare

Well, God, if you're 5-foot-3 and you're 300 pounds

Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds

Young men are puttin' themselves six feet in the ground

'Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin' them down

Lord, it's a damn shame what the world's gotten to

For people like me and people like you

Wish I could just wake up and it not be true

But it is, oh, it is

Livin' in the new world

With an old soul

These rich men north of Richmond

Lord knows they all just wanna have total control

Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do

And they don't think you know, but I know that you do

'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end

'Cause of rich men north of Richmond

I've been sellin' my soul, workin' all day

Overtime hours for bullshit pay

 Okay, some of that, like Mr. Reich notes, is economic, but a lot of it isn't. The protagonist notes:

1.  He has "an old soul".

2.  The rich men he complains about want total control, even over what he thinks.

3.  He complains about the Jeffrey Epstein saga, but more in an allegorical way than a specific way, suggesting that politicians are more concerned with their immoral pursuits than the lives of average working people.

4.  He takes a shot at the welfare poor, and unusually, notes fat ones (hardly anyone does that in contemporary America).

Hmmmm. . . Doesn't seem to be all economic. . .

There's a common liberal belief, and Reich is one of those espousing it, that if only the economy is good, everyone is happy.  Reich is one of those who goes on to point out, and correctly, that the economy really is good right now.  One who also does this nearly weekly is Donna Brazile, who is a Democratic political commentator I really like.

Nobody is saying the economy is perfect, of course, including Reich or Brazile.

But there's something they've noted, that they are missing.

If the economy is really good, and in actuality it is, and a large section of the middle class (and contrary to what pundits claim, it's definitely not all the "white male" middle class) are bitterly unhappy, what's going on.

The usual assertion is that the economy is doing well, but people just don't know it, which is a bit of a bizarre assertion.  People tend to know if they're doing well or not, which raises this question, with unemployment down, wages up, and inflation slowing, are people doing well?

Well, they might not actually be, and COVID may have made that plain to them.

One thing that's underlying the tone of the song is the economic shift in the nature of work since about 1970.

A meme version of the economics of the 1950s. . . dealing with more than economics.  This depiction of the 50s drives commentators nuts, who decry it as a myth, but there's more than a little truth to it, both in what it states, and in what it otherwise depicts.  

Americans tend to look back to the 1950s as some sort of golden age, and have a really mythologized view of the era.  Be that as it may, in the 50s, most men could in fact support a family on their income alone, and not just from white collar jobs but from blue collar jobs.  Not only could most men do it, but most men did do it.  As late as the 1970s, a lot of husbands actually objected to their wives working, whereas now most married women not only do work, but must work.  Perhaps an error in here, however, is that in the 50s that a lot of people were going to college.  In reality, in 1950 only 7.3% of men had a college degree and only 5.2% of women did, which by 1960 was 10.3% and 6% respectively.  This means, however, that a university degree was like gold.  Of interest, both of my mother's parents had university degrees, which is phenomenal given that they obtained them in the early 20th Century.  Neither of my father's parents did.  Also of note, my mother had a college degree, an AS, but she obtained in the 1970s and was not a high school graduate due to the Great Depression, where has my father had a DDS and his brother and one of his sisters attended university in the 1940s/1950s.

The 50s through the early 1970s really reflect post World War Two conditions, however, and might not be the best era to look at.  The 40s can't be looked at either, due to World War Two, nor can the 30s, due to the Great Depression.  You really have to get back to the 10s and 20s for economies to compare to, with some comparison from later decades.  Any way you look at it, however, a lot more families were supported from a single, usually male, income, but it was also the case that a lot more women always worked than is recognized.

Myths have power, however, and they also reflect aspects of reality as a rule.  Beowulf may not have slain a dragon in Sweden, but a warrior named Bear (Bee Wolf) probably was an early Scandinavia warrior vassal of note.  There really was a big battle at Troy, and it probably did start off as a totally juvenile spat over a girl that somebody regarded as a babe, although it's likely there was more to it than that.  Arthur wasn't a chivalric knight, but somebody the legend was based on, probably was a British Roman who did take on the invading Teutons in defense of Roman Britain heroically before going down on a battlefield.  There was indeed an era, not long ago, when a high school education could bring a person a living wage for not only the graduate, but a spouse and kids, and provide a middle income life.

And there was also a time during which, as harsh as the reality is, that you weren't in grocery store lines behind people who are paying for food with assistance, but who had money for tattoos, and who have suspended any regard for their personal appearance.

This is all obvious to people who are barely eeking by, but who know that their grandparents, with no more education than they have, did relatively well.

To add to it, although only subtly grasped, people are also aware, even as they participate in it, that the country's become a moral sewer.  The problem, in a way, is not that Jeffrey Epstein is uncommon, but rather than he is common in a way.  Only the rich, of course, used him as a procurer for teenage prostitutes, but the entertainment industry is essentially a society wide procurer for cinematic prostitution that has become increasingly debased.

All that does involve wealth, but part of the underlying tone, and one that people like Reich can't seem to grasp, is that the American political left insists that it all conduct be accepted and each person's choices, no matter how self-destructive, anti-natural, debased, or weird, be celebrated.  People very well know that the entire movement to support surgical gender mutilation of children is wrong, for example, as well as deeply weird, but the left demands it be celebrated, just as it insists that what nearly amount to homosexual sex manuals be placed in public schools with public funds.  It is not that the standard bearers of the right are moral people.  Trump is a serial polygamist.  It's rather that there's a difference in promoting immorality and demanding that it be accepted and distancing policy from it, even if you engage in immorality yourself.  Double standards abound, but what the unhappy class is looking at doesn't seem to be grasped.  

Indeed, as the left repeatedly fails to grasp in regards to the that unhappy class, is that the class itself may not really apply the standards it mourns all that deeply, in regard to at least some of them.  Critics from the left, like Robert Reich, keep branding the movement "Christian Nationalist", as do some critics from the right, such as Susan Stubson.  They're both in correct.  Christian Nationalist take the practice of Christianity really seriously.  Southern Cultural Christian Populist, however, have a world roughly framed out by the Southern Baptist Convention, the pre-1970 Episcopal and Methodist Church's, or the African Methodist Church loosely in mind, but as a framework, not as a fortress.  Put another way, Christian Nationalist look to the Apostolic age and know what that meant, and aren't really comfortable completely with people who sit around watching NASCAR on Sundays.  Southern Cultural Christians are perfectly comfortable with watching NASCAR on Sundays and attend church for weddings, funerals, Easter and Christmas. They aren't the same thing.

But what both are uncomfortable with, but in different ways, is a liberalism that insists that genders can be changed, and there's nothing wrong with books in public schools that explore sodomy.  That exceeds the boundaries of the loosely defined structure for Southern Cultural Christians and is definitely gravely immoral to Christian Nationalists, as well as frankly gravely immoral to any Christians of any stripe who are serious about what their faiths hold.

In 2008, I stopped at the liquor store on my way home from work to buy a six-pack of beer.  It was late summer.

In the liquor store there were two young women, in their very early 20s, with a young man of the same age.  One of the young women was holding a baby.

The girl, and that's really what she was, holding the baby was pretty, but in a trashy sort of way, and in the way that you know won't last.  The other girl was not.  Both young women were wearing t-shirts that were too small for them, and too tight to be decent.  They were both wearing Daisy Dukes.  The young man was shaking and incredibly disheveled.  It was pretty clear that he was the father of the baby, equally clear that he and the young woman weren't married, and just as clear that he was a tweaker.

The pretty girl holding the baby had eyeliner and a proud visage, sort of like the pretty but trashy girls did back when I was in high school. They'd retained the eyeliner sort of make up that girls in junior high wore, back when I was in junior high, after girls of that age first started taking up makeup.  Most girls abandoned that by high school, but the ones that were of a certain type didn't.  That girl, the pretty one, was wearing an Obama for President t-shirt.  I knew at that moment, well before the election, who would win.

The image that was on the girl's t-shirt.  It wasn't "Hope" that they had a vested interest in.

Now, this isn't a comment on President Obama at all, but rather on something else, and that something else gets back to Rich Men North of Richmond.

The young man in that group is likely dead by now.  Tweaking in his early 20s, it's unlikely he survived another fifteen years.  The girl who the mother likely is, and if she was 21 then, she's 36 now.  She's also likely in the 300 lbs category the song referenced, the signs of that already being there.  And indeed, what she was supporting, and likely at least her female cohort, wasn't "hope", as Obama was espousing, it was government assistance.  The child, now 15, has probably spent his or her entire life on it.

And that, in some vague sort of way, is what Oliver Anthony is lamenting.  

All of these people likely descended from people who had held blue collar jobs.  But a modern society reconstructed in a liberal image had turned them into wards of the government in some ways, and they weren't ashamed of it.  Their attachment to any sort of conventional morality had lapsed, perhaps beyond repair, and they were reproducing without structure and raising a generation behind them, perhaps as they'd been raised, that recalls Philippians,  "Their end is destruction, their god is the belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things."  They didn't go on to be Megan Rapinoe, who would be just about their age, almost undoubtedly, but probably heavily tattooed, and living on the funds generated by others.

A large number of abandoned rust belt and other blue collar Americans are well aware of this, even if they aren't necessarily beyond some of the call of that themselves.

That's what liberal pundits are missing, and that's what populist, some sincere and some not, have picked up on.

El Paso Sheriff : What's it mean? What's it leadin' to? You know, if you'd have told me 20 years ago, that I'd see children walking the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses, I just flat-out wouldn't have believed you.

Ed Tom Bell : Signs and wonders. But I think once you quit hearing "sir" and "ma'am," the rest is soon to foller.

El Paso Sheriff : Oh, it's the tide. It's the dismal tide.

No Country For Old Men. 

And that's why their message is failing.

And for traditional conservatives, as, well as liberals, there may now be, by this time, something even scarier at work. . . .