Lex Anteinternet: Secular suffering for nothing & on Ash Wednesday

A couple of reruns. for the first day of Lent, Ash Wednesday, 2023, from a couple of years ago:  Lex Anteinternet: Secular suffering for nothing.

Secular suffering for nothing

Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent.

While Catholic observances tend to at least somewhat baffle those who are not familiar with them, and therefore reinterpret them either though the bigoted Anglicization of popular history they've received, or through their own broken lenses on the world, lots of people are at least somewhat familiar with them.  One of the things they're somewhat familiar with is fasting.

We've dealt with this before, but Latin Rite Catholics have a minimal duty of fast and abstinence during Lent.  And it is indeed very minimal. The fast days are now down to two.  There are more days of abstinence during Lent.

And this post isn't about that.

Rather, this post is about American secular suffering and its pointless nature.

I'm occasionally the accidental unwilling silent third person in a long running conversation between two people on diets, which they're constantly off and on. The oddity of it is that neither of the two people involved have any need whatsoever to be on a diet. They aren't even ballpark close to being overweight.  None the less, they'll go on diets and the diets tend to be based on pseudoscience.

I don't want to be harsh on people for this as there's now so much pseudoscience in American culture it's simply mind boggling. We've gone from a society that in the 1960s and 1970s emphasized science  to one that now abhors it and goes for non scientific faddism.  There are so many examples of this that actually going into all of it would require a blog the size of the Internet at this point.  Food faddism is common.

Not a day goes by when I don't get a bunch of spam posts (and how ironic that they'd be called "spam" devoted to dietary bullshit, most of which has to do with eating something that will "melt away fat", probably overnight so that you don't have to be inconvenienced while watching television during the day.  It's not going to do that.  A wild example of that is one that bills itself as some sort of ice cream, with the photographs in the spam showing chocolate ice cream.  Chocolate ice cream is disgusting in the first place, and it's not going to make you think.  

Anyhow, these two fit people are constantly on diets of the faddish variety, involving such things as "cleanses" and the like.  None of that does anything, at least not in the way a person thinks.  Some of it might, accidentally, such as abstaining from alcohol. That'll do something, but not in a cleanse fashion.  And some of it probably does something as it approaches a sort of low yield style of intermittent fasting.

I've now watched people on diets for decades, and I'm wholly convinced that none of them doing anything whatsoever.  I've watched people on Keto lose weight and then balloon back up to just as heavy as they were before, for example.  

Nothing ultimately escapes from the basic fact that weight=calories in-calories out.   That's it.

So you can be on keto, but if you eat bacon and eggs for breakfast, a ham for lunch, and then go eat a big dinner, you're going to be really heavy if you are an office worker.  Pretty simple.

That is why, I'll note, intermittent fasting actually does cause people to lose weight, but it's not a diet, it's fasting.  I'll also note that I'm not a doctor and I'm not telling you to fast to lose weight.  If you need to lose weight, see your doctor.  A real doctor.  Not the homeopathic doctor of Burmese weight loss and orthopody.  No, not him.  A real bonafide physician.  They exist.

Anyhow, I don't think that a lot of people need to go on diets at all, including the folks I just noted.

Now, some people really do. A lot of Americans are really, really, heavy.  Some say a majority are overweight.  I get that.  But none the less I'd guess about 60% of the people I see on diets or discussing diets are not overweight.  I don't think they go on diets, deep down, as they're overweight.

They do it as they need to be suffering for something.

Now, this gets back to Lent. Catholics don't fast and abstain in order to suffer. They do it in order to focus and build discipline, and sacrifice for their sins.  If it involves an element of suffering, well so do a lot of things.

But devoted Catholics accept suffering as part of life.  It's inescapable.  Life is full of suffering.  Part of that suffering is brought about by license.

The irony of freedom is that freedom to chose isn't freedom.  License doesn't actually equal liberty.  The freedom to chose is the freedom to chose wisely, and that brings a sort of real freedom.  It doesn't mean, kid like, that I can choose to eat ice cream for dinner, and it doesn't mean, modern society like, that I chose all the members of the opposite sex, or whatever, that I might fancy at the moment. 

And indeed, that sort of "freedom" leads not to freedom but to slavery.  People become enslaved to their wants.  A massive amount of American culture is now presently completely devoted to slavery of this type, particularly sexual slavery of both an intellectual and actual kind.  The entire pornography industry is a type of "white slavery", involving the prostitution of women and the enslavement of men to lust.

Catholic fasting ties into freedom as it has as an element the concept of building resistance to enslavement.  If you can say no to food you can also say no to alcohol, or tobacco, or to vice.  It might take practice, hence the discipline of fasting.

Which is also why the slow Latin relaxing of fasting and abstinence rules was, in my view, a real mistake.  The concept of the Church in North American, for example, that relaxing abstinence on Friday's throughout the year would result in the substitution of a meaningful personal substitute was, frankly, largely wrong.

And it achieves, of course, more than that.

Fasting, experienced as a form of self-denial, helps those who undertake it in simplicity of heart to rediscover God’s gift and to recognize that, created in his image and likeness, we find our fulfilment in him. In embracing the experience of poverty, those who fast make themselves poor with the poor and accumulate the treasure of a love both received and shared. In this way, fasting helps us to love God and our neighbour, inasmuch as love, as Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches, is a movement outwards that focuses our attention on others and considers them as one with ourselves.

Pope Francis, Lenten message, 2021.

Secular fasting doesn't actually achieve anything.  But then, much of modern American life is aimless and directionless.  It's been wholly focused on materialism and nothing else.  People aren't rooted to place or people as those things interfere with "freedom". They aren't bound by traditional rules of right and wrong, obligation and duty, service to country and community, or the obligations imposed by law outside of the civil law, those being the walls of canon law and natural law, and biological law.  They aren't even accepting of the final binds of death, which Americans don't acknowledge as real, and which provides the reason that at 40 years old you aren't going to be the physical specimen you were at 20, and things will certainly be different at 60.

Now, to be sure, most Catholics are no different in the modern world than anyone else.  A people who were once outside of the culture as they were different, where they were a minority, and were outside the world in a way as they were distinct from it even where they were a majority, now fall prey to all the modern vices that are portrayed as virtues, and self excuse those that are regarded by the Church as sins.  Some of the Church religious itself, mostly older baby boomer aged whose time is past but they don't realize it, still campaign to overthrow Church law in the name of temporal freedom, not realizing that they propose to bring in the chains of slavery.  None of that, however, changes the basic point.

Humans sense that abundance can be slavery.  They also reject so often the breaking of their chains. But even when they do, they reach out, darkly, to the disciplines that would free them.  They sense they have to do something, and often substitute suffering, vaguely, for the practices that would open the manacles.

And one on Ash Wednesday itself:

Ash Wednesday

Today is Ash Wednesday for those churches that follow the Catholic Latin Rite's liturgical calendar, which includes a fair number of Protestant churches.

Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent for Western Christians, Lent being the (approximately) forty day long penitential season preceding Easter.  Great Lent, the Eastern Christian seasons, precedes Ash Wednesday and commences on Clean Monday for Eastern Christians on the new calendar, but not on the old calendar which has, of course, which departs from the calendar we're otherwise familiar with.   The day is named for the Catholic practice, which is observed by at least some Anglicans and Lutherans as well, of placing ashes on the foreheads of those who come to the Ash Wednesday service, with the reminder being made that from ashes you were made, and from ashes you will return.*

For Latin Rite Catholics, Ash Wednesday is a day of fast and abstinence.  I.e, they eat only one full meal on this day and it can't include meat, which under Latin Rite Catholic rules does not include fish.  For Eastern Christians a much stricter Lenten fast and abstinence set of rules applies.  This sacrifice serves the purpose of being penitential in nature.

It also serves to really set Catholics apart, as fasting and abstinence are the rage in the west now, but for purely secular purposes, not all of which square with science or good dietary practices.

For the members of the Apostolic faiths, Lent also serves as a time in which for penitential reasons they usually "give up" something.  A lot of people have a really superficial understanding of this, assuming that Catholic "give up" desert or chocolate or something, and in fact quite a few people do something like that. Indeed, as an adult I've been surprised by how many Catholics (usually men) give up drinking alcohol, which means that frequent consumption of alcohol is pretty common society wide in a way that we probably underestimate.

Indeed, just recently, on that, I was asked by an exuberant Catholic Midwestern expat, who seemingly has no boundaries at all, on what I was "giving up" for Lent. This was the week prior to Ash Wednesday at which time I wasn't particularly focused on it myself.  The same fellow asked at least one Protestant what she was giving up, with that Protestant being a member of one of the American millennialism religions, to receive a totally baffled reply.  Indeed, I'm sure they don't celebrate Lent at all, so the question was odd.  Anyhow, he was giving up alcohol and asked if I'd like to join him, to which I absent mindedly said sure.  Later he was wondering if I thought it would be tough, which I'm sure it won't be at all and I'll have to find something else to mark Lent really.  But that sort of "giving up" line of thinking is very common.

In a lot of Catholic cultures the Lenten penitential observations have traditionally been much stronger, which helps explain Mardi Gras as we just discussed.  Even well after the Latin Rite rules were very much relaxed, in many Catholic areas, including Catholic areas of the United States, people engaged in much more extensive penitential observations with the "giving up chocolate" type thing really sort of an introduction to the practice.  In Louisiana, without going into it too deeply, there was traditionally a big spike in births nine to ten months after Easter, which reflected a very widespread serious observation among Catholic couples as to their penitential practice, for example.

Some of that is really coming back, which reflects an interesting trend towards a deeper understanding of their faiths by members of the Apostolic faiths and even a return of Lenten traditions in some Protestant ones.  During the full "Spirit of Vatican Two" era there was a lot of attention devoted to not giving anything up but rather to work on some spiritual need.  I.e, be self reflective and work on what that lead you to.  At the same time, the misuse of the word "fasting" became very common, with there being advice, even from the clergy, to fast from things other than food or drink.  You can't really fast from sinful behavior, or from narcissism, for example.  You can't even "fast" from the Internet, although "giving it up" for Lent might be a darned good idea (one that I really ought to consider, probably).

A lot of that is now passing and there's been a real return to more traditional observations of Lent, including fasting but also forms of dedicated worship and observation.

Which brings me to the next thing about "giving up".  One feature of this season is that many Apostolic Christians, as it is the season of repentance, have used the season to break bad conduct when there's support, spiritual and temporal, for doing it.  People with alcohol problems will use it to break them, smokers will quit smoking during Lent so they can quit smoking.  And sometimes people with serious attachments to sin take it head on during Lent, with some people I've known even announcing the renouncement of what are very serious sins from a Christian purpose over Lent in the hopes of breaking from the permanently. And many who do that, succeed at doing that.

Which in turn takes us to our final observation.  This season, which is lead by the Apostolic faiths but which is observed by at least some of the Protestants as well, tend to turn the self indulgent retained Puritan abstinence on its head.  I've noted this before, but North American and the Northern Europe may have strayed enormously from Calvinist influence in terms of faith, but not in terms of the concept that public suffering is really necessary.  That retained concept explains in large part the real focus in these lands, as opposed to others, in "giving up" something for no real purpose other than the sense it must be done.  People give up all sorts of things that Apostolic Christians around the world give up for forty some days, and often on a declared permanent basis (they fail at it more often than not), with it being notable that the purely secular nature of that makes it shallow from the onset.  Indeed, plenty of people who will spend Lent scoffing at Catholics for Lent will spend part of the season or all of it on some no carb, or no meat, or whatever, diet, for no real reason other than a constructed one. Suffering, in many instances, is the ultimate goal of those efforts, but suffering without something to redeem it.

For Apostolic Christians, all fasts are followed by feasts, and that's something to remember.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*I don't think this is a practice in the East and its not a requirement for Catholics, something that in fact even confuses some Catholics.  Ash Wednesday is widely observed by Catholics and the placing of the ashes isn't restricted to Catholics.  Perhaps for that reason quite a few Catholics assume it is a Holy Day of Obligation.

One thing of note here is that Ash Wednesday also serves to point out to everyone who is a Catholic, as if a person has ashes on their head, they're probably Catholic, although not necessarily.  By the same token, if you are known to be a Catholic and don't make it to Ash Wednesday you'll tend to get comments about it.

The Political Left, having recently rediscovered democracy, now rediscover's shame. A blog entry by Robert Reich.

Marjory Taylor Greene, left, Howler Monkey's right (By Steve from washington, dc, usa - howler monkees doing their thing, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3963947).  One of these examples is shameful, and it ain't the one on the right.

This is an interesting and in my view largely correct, insightful blog entry by Robert Reich:

The death of shame

It also comes, I'd note, on the same day that a Wyoming Republic commentator made what are somewhat similar comments, calling a member of the GOP Central Committee a hypocrite in no uncertain, and indeed highly crude, terms, although if true, they'd be deserving ones.

And hence, I guess, my comment.

While I think that what Reich is complaining about is in fact shameful, which starts with Marjorie Taylor Greene acting like a Howler Monkey during the State of the Union Address, how the crap can anyone on the hardcore political left sincerely make this claim? The hard left in the country has spent the last 50 years totally dismantling any concept of shame in absolutely everything whatsoever.

And that's a lot of the reason why we are exactly where we are.

Do we have no shame?

Of course not. We were told that nothing is shameful.

And indeed, this tracks well into the purpose of this blog, looking at then. . .and now.  And, moreover, we often fail to note this trend, i.e., descent, in literature, as we assume that everyone in the past was living in the sewer or wanted to be like us, in the sewer.

That's truly not how it was.

I'll admit that I am torn in how to present this post.  When I started drafting it, I found I went into detail on where shame has exited.  I hadn't intended in the first place that the thread be a catalog of things formerly shameful, and now no longer shameful.  And in looking at it, I don't think that's the correct approach.  Maybe I'll expand on individual items later.

But what I will note, is there are a lot of things that were once regarded as highly shameful, in the arena of personal conduct, that no longer are, and in some instances, left-wing social engineers have gone so far as to impose shame on anyone commenting on them, or not engaging in them. Shame hasn't really left in that sense, it's been transferred.

Taking what is a short arch of history, but a long one in terms of individual lives, since World War Two, and really, since the late 1960s, a massive effort has been expended on this by the left.  Even as late as the early 1980s, for instance, many things that are now not shameful, were.  

Sex outside of marriage, particularly for women (or girls) was shameful.¹   Having a baby out of wedlock was shameful.²  Homosexuality was shameful.³   Men dressing in women's clothes or affecting a female appearance was shameful. Prostitution was shameful⁴ . Avarice was shame, including avarice in these areas.⁵

Even into the 1970s, being divorced conveyed an element of shame.⁶   Living with the opposite gender and not being married was shameful. 

Well beyond that, having a child and not supporting the child economically, even to the point of your own well-being being impaired, was shameful.

While it was definitely changing during the 60s, putting yourself on display, i.e., being an "exhibitionist" was shameful.

Pornography, even after Playboy, and its consumption, was shameful.

All this started getting ripped down in the late 1940s, it accelerated in the 60s and 70s, and it's gone on to really stretch the balloon in our present age.  The results have quite frankly been a disastrous assault on nature.

Now, I don't wish to suggest that every conveyance of shame was warranted or a good thing. There were some really bad results.  The high abortion rates of the 70s and 80s were partially due to it being simply too shameful in many people's minds to bear a child out of wedlock, with the shame being imposed both on the young woman, but also on her family.  That this has ended is a good thing.

But the Me Generation's deep dive into themselves, and "if it feels good, do it", as the ethos, has been hugely destructive.  The KIA, MIA, and WIA of the Sexual Revolution has caused a limping society.  The focus on "me" lead to a focus on "mine", destroying community and boosting greed.

And in no small part, it's lead to where we are in things like Reich has complained about, and not just in this post.  It's all sort of the same package.  If the whole world is about me, me, me, and my needs, needs, needs, I really don't need to care what anyone else thinks or even reality.  The difference, therefore, between Marjorie Taylor Greene howling for attention and a transgender advocates demanding that a man be viewed as a woman, as he wants to be, are really thin. Likewise, the difference between a AoC and Elon Mus isn't all that much.

Also, really thin is the difference between individualized self-expression, including pantless individualized self-expression, and Harvey Weinstein pulling the latter off of somebody else.  It all just goes together.  In a way that they likely couldn't recognize, Hugh Hefner, Harvey Weinstein, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert are all fellow travelers on the same destructive cultural bus.

Reich cites to shame being a necessary social engine, and it is.  But you can't partially restore shame, really, as it has to be based on a larger something.  You can't just say "bad", and it's bad, because it's bad.  Bad things are bad, but due to something else making them bad. 

We've been seeing a lot of this recently, interestingly, and some of that's a good sign.  The Me Too movement is an effort to restore shame where it had once been.  At least up into the 50s, if not beyond, men who expected women to put out were called "wolves", and to be tagged that was shameful.  While the name was no longer around by the late 70s, early 80s, the same conduct was still not admired at that time, but Hefner and company were ripping it down, and in deed, raping it down, basically.  Hollywood, where actress self prostitution was pretty common all along, was interestingly the first to really say "enough", on an individual level, and try to reverse it.

But you really have to restore the metaphysical basis for why that's wrong, to really get anywhere.

Young people, left without the guide rails of the culture that was torn down, have partially restored it as well, although groping for a basis for it remains.  And in some odd ways, as we recently addressed, even the transgender movement, deep down, is an effort to reach out to get back to a less material, less perverted, time.

So here we now are.  Having become comfortable with a Quasi Judaical Dictatorship that's suddenly betrayed autocracy and restored democracy, the left finds itself now championing what it had become comfortable omitting, and here at last, its rediscovered, shame.

So is this a "everything was better in the past" post?  No it isn't.

But shame exist for a reason, and excising it wholly was a mistake.

Footnotes.

1.  People will instantly claim that there was a double standard, and to some degree that was true, but not to the degree that people commonly imagine.  It is true that it's becoming public knowledge that a girl had sex outside of marriage would tarnish, and often severely, her reputation, and if it was a case of multiple men, it would put her in a category that would be difficult to ever get out of, but men who were multiple standard violators likewise got tagged with a permanent, indeed lifelong, reputation they couldn't get out of either.  They had greater leeway than women, but not absolute leeway.

2. As noted in later in the thread, this probably partially lead to the high abortion rates of the 70s and 80s.  It also, however, lead to a lot of children being given up for adoption in a process in which the pregnant girl often absented herself, or her family absented her, for a period of time so that the pregnancy would not be discovered.  I know at least one person who experienced, this, later going on to a very respected adult life and the pregnancy not being discovered until after she had died.  As there was a high demand for healthy infants to adopt, and frankly white healthy infants (and there still is), this often worked out well for the adopted as well. Again, I personally know one such person whose mother was a college student when she became pregnant and the father never knew.

Indeed, that latter item is surprisingly common.  You'd think the distressed young woman would have always told the father, but often, they didn't.  This is because they didn't want, quite often, to be faced with the choice of marrying the individual, which also often occurred.  Such marriages usually happened quickly before the woman "showed".  In cases in which the women were in their 20s, they often just didn't want to be married to the man in the end, and for teens, their families didn't want to put them in that spot, quite often.  And of course, date rape wasn't really a concept at the time, and therefore in cases in which that resulted in pregnancy, not wanting to marry the man made sense.

3.  This tended to have an arresting influence on open displays of homosexuality, and it also led to quite a few homosexuals simply suppressing it individually, or even refusing to acknowledge it in any sense.

4.  It still mostly is, of course, but there are ongoing efforts to break this down.

The degree to which prostitution is shameful, although not really being a prostitute, tends to change by era.  In rough and ready frontier areas, the institution tends to exist pretty openly, and it also tended to very much be associated with certain armies, sometimes by compulsion.  That doesn't necessarily mean that the individual shame associated with it evaporates, but rather the tolerance of it is pretty open.  In other eras, there's very low tolerance for it.

There tends to be a myth that prostitutes were the founding women in a lot of regions of the frontier, which is just flatly false.  I've heard this myth associated with one local, now long deceased, historian, but as I've never read his work, and for acquired bias reasons I'm unlikely to, I don't know if that's really true.  Be that as it may, the most typical fate for prostitutes was early death, due to the lack of protection from disease.

5.  But not just in these areas.  Being "greedy" has been something that's always been around, but which wasn't tolerated in the way it now is until after the Reagan Administration came in.  

Americans have always had a very high tolerance for the accumulation of wealth, but not to the present level.  Simply being wealthy is not a sign of avarice, but having wealth was at one time very much associated with a social expectation of charity. Quite a few wealthy people still exhibit that trait today.

"I pay my taxes", while something nobody likes doing, was actually something the very wealthy used in their self-defense at one time, as the upper tax rate was extremely high.

6.  Fault, of course, had to be demonstrated for divorce up until nearly everyplace, or maybe everyplace, adopted "no-fault divorce".

Divorce is really regarded as being routine today, but even into the 1970s it was a mark against a person.

Thursday, December 21, 1922. Catholic Justices, and others, of the United States Supreme Court, Catholic Presidents of Lithuania. Women Vetrinarians.

Pierce Butler was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as a Justice of the Supreme Court, 61 to 8, after sixteen days of hearings.  

We discussed Justice Butler here:

President Harding nominated Democrat Pierce Butler to the U.S. Supreme Court to replace William R. Day.  Nominating a Democrat assured Harding that he could get his nomination past the then Democratic U.S. Senate.

Gee, it's almost like politics played a role in Supreme Court nominations back then. . . 

While he was a Democrat, he was also a staunch conservative, this being a day when conservatives still existed in the Democratic Party.  He was one of the justices that proved to be trouble for Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s.

Butler was also a devout Catholic. Today he's partially remembered for issuing the only dissenting opinion in Buck v. Bell, a case which permitted compulsory sterilization of the intellectually disabled and which is regarded now as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of all time.  Bell's dissent, was, interestingly, without a dissenting opinion, but it was a dissent.  Oliver Wendell Holmes attributed his dissent to his Catholicism.

Butler also dissented from Olmstead v. United States, which upheld Federal wiretapping.

He died at age 73 in 1939.

His religion was noted in our earlier entry, but this does make for an interesting topic.

Prejudice against Catholicism was intense for much of American history, and indeed it remained so at least up until the post World War Two era.  The Oval Office was effectively barred to Catholics for that reason, but interestingly the United States Supreme Court was not.

Just Roger B. Taney was the first Catholic appointed to the Supreme Court, with that appointment coming in 1836 via President Andrew Jackson's nomination.  Taney would serve all the way until 1864, when he passed away in office.  Taney is unfortunately remembered today for being the author of the Dred Scott decision, not a good way to be recalled, and he interestingly died during the Civil War.  Somewhat ironically, the next Catholic justice, Edward Douglass White, served in the Confederate forces during the war.   Since White's appointment, there's never been an occasion when there wasn't at least one Catholic on the bench.

Theoretically, there's been a total of fifteen Catholic justices, including the six currently serving on the bench.  Having said that, Justice Sotomayor is not an observant Catholic.  Justice Thomas is a Catholic "revert", having been an Episcopalian at the time of his appointment.

Catholicism is a large, but still a minority, religion in the United States.  The impact of Catholic jurists has been noted, but not always very accurately.  An interesting observation on this is that Catholics are heir to an intellectual tradition that suits legal inquiry.  The same observation has been made about members of the Jewish religion, and there have been eight United States Supreme Court justices who have been Jewish over the years, a fairly substantial recognition in light of their minority status.

It's often noted that the Court today has a Catholic majority, which is true, but it's less of a majority than it might seem given Sotomayor's ambiguous status.  Having said that, it'd be a bare majority even without Sotomayor.  This hasn't always meant predictability, however, in spite of what critics like to assert, as Catholic justices have taken positions that are at least facially contrary to Catholicism, such as Justice Kennedy's decision in Obergefell, and certainly Sotomayor was in Dobbs.

Thirty-three Supreme Court justices have been Episcopalians, reflecting that Protestant denomination's massive standing in the United States up until the 1970s.  Once the dominant Christian denomination, culturally, in North America, it's suffered a huge decline to which it's reacted by moving to the left on social issues, which has seemingly accelerated the decline.  Eighteen have been Presbyterians, which likewise was a Protestant faith of wide influence for many years.  Episcopalianism and Presbyterianism reflect the country's early settlement, with both being religions that hailed from Great Britain and which descend from the Church of England and the Church of Scotland respectively.

The Lutheran faith, which is widely represented in much of the United States, interestingly has contributed only two Supreme Court justices.  The Baptist faith has contributed only one more than that, even though it is currently the largest Protestant denomination.  Five justices have been Methodists, which make sense in that it descends also from the Church of England and once called itself the Episcopal Methodist Church.

Fifteen Justices have been non-denominational Christians whose religious affiliation is not really known, and who may have not all been dedicated in their faiths.  The religious background of one Justice, James Wilson, has been debated, but it seems likely that he was a Christian of the same type that some of the founders were, who seemingly favored various Christian denominations without being clearly of any particular one.

Nine justices have been Unitarians, which is somewhat surprising. 

Generally, the religious affiliation of Supreme Court justices has been nearly wholly uncontroversial, save for Catholics and Jews, both of whom continue to be subject to prejudices that date back to the country's founding and early colonial history.  Prejudice against Jewish justices tends not to be openly spoken, but prejudice against Catholic justices is.

Aleksandras Stulginskis was elected President of Lithuania.  He was already serving in the role.  He'd serve in that role until 1926.

Stulginskis had started off with the intent of being ordained a Catholic Priest, but abandoned that pursuit in favor of agriculture.  He retired from politics in 1927.  In 1941, he and his wife were arrested by the Soviets, and he was held as a Soviet prisoner until 1956 when he was released following Stalin's death.  He died in Kaunas in 1969 at age 84.

Aleen Cust became the first licensed female veterinary surgeon in the United Kingdom.  She'd been in practice for twenty years at the time.

Appendix: Down the rabbit hole. (Additional topic references).

This appendix consists of additional labels for this entry:

Down the rabbit hole.

Michael Ramierez: The Trigger: Gun Or Culture

This photo is directly linked into a newspaper,s o you can track the post back.
 

How a Generation Lost Its Common Culture - Minding The Campus

How a Generation Lost Its Common Culture - Minding The Campus: By Patrick Deneen My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, […]

Lost as to what to do, Stepping back to the bench, Leaving and coming back, and Cultural heritage. More conversations, was Lex Anteinternet: Mid Week At Work. Overheard retirement conversations.

Lex Anteinternet: Mid Week At Work. Overheard retirement conversati...: Now it's 67, after a certain age. . . for the time being.  Just like Wyoming judges used to have to retire at 70 and Game Wardens at 60....

I posted this just the other day, but since that time have heard two more conversations, both among fellow lawyers, regarding retirement that made me pause.

The first was from a lawyer I know well, well I'm related to him, more or less (it's sort of complicated).

Anyhow, he stated something to the effect that he'd be completely lost as to what to do with his time if he retired and therefore, implicitly, has no intention of doing so.

Now, it's not the case that this individual is 80 years old or something.  He's in his mid 60s.  But still, this is remarkable for a variety or reasons that I'll not put in here.

One of the most remarkable things about it is that an individual with a really lively mind, in an occupation that appeals to polymaths by it very nature, wouldn't at some point to want to leave it to explore other interests, while they still could.

It truly baffles me, but I hear that a lot.

Of course, some of that view is subject to a person and pressure.  At least, from what I've observed, lawyers who have that view are the ones who have a very limited number of things going on at any one time.  Lawyers who are extremely busy seem to be more inclined to ponder retiring, as they really can't look into things other than what their work demands.

I'd note that there's a legal journal out there that notes this view as a problem for the law.  Some lawyers get to where they can't leave it, as they're so dedicated to their work. But their work starts to decline anyway with advancing age.

Not related to this conversation, but to another one that I recently also heard, a lawyer I know whose just past his mid 60s and who has been talking about retirement for years, now says he wants to step back to a more advisory role.

The concept that this can be done is something you'd read in things like the ABA Journal.  Maybe some small percentage of lawyers actually can do that, but I think it's pretty small, and it also depends on what they did.  Litigators?  Nah, can't be done.

Again, it's interesting.  A person goes from wanting to step back, and just take life easy, to wanting to step back and let somebody else carry the ball and only be called in for special plays.  But once you are the quarterback, if you will, you probably are going to be hesitant to do that, particularly with an older lawyer, who will tend to criticize your decisions, if you are younger.  And lawyers who do only what they want to do, in litigation, rather than what has to be done, don't turn out to be that much help and people know that.

Which leads to another random observation.  A couple of years ago I ran into a lawyer who had switched from some sort of business law field into litigation, and into insurance defense litigation at that.

That's the hardest kind of law there is, and people don't get in it when they are old.  But he must have entered into it in his 60s.  He was good at it, I'd note, but I think that's frankly crazy.  It's also a little pathetic.

It's crazy for one thing in that it's one of the fields of law that's 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all the time.  Just at the time most people would actually think about retiring, that's effectively retiring into backbreaking work.  It's like giving up a seat in the construction company's front office to go dig ditches.

Of course, there are some people who like fighting or crave field excitement.  That's why you see old guys try to volunteer for wars in some instances, or policemen who have worked as bailiffs for 20 years ask to go out on the street.  They probably really love their occupations, but felt less worthy of them as they'd never been in the thick of it.  People who have been in the thick of it are less likely to feel that way later on.

And on another overhead item; 

But that’s not what I came here to talk about. I came to talk about becoming native to this place—

Wes Jackson, taken grossly out of context.

There's a fellow (I'm clearly not going to name him) whom I first knew when he was part of a professional firm years ago.  It was significant, to be sure, and therefore, he was also, as part of it.

He left it for some reason, I never knew why.  In the following period, he practiced his profession on his own.  He ran for office in that time period.  I might have voted for him, I can't recall, but he remained a pretty serious figure and I recall at least contemplating voting for him.

Then he left the state.

For decades.

Things happened in the intervening decades.  People died, people arrived, new political figures came and replaced the old.

He returned. But, as would be the case, he returned a couple of decades older, or more than that, than he'd been when he left.

A couple of decades in a person's life is a long time.  We sometimes tend to forget that.  

Returns from long absences are not uncommon in this region.  People grow up and move out, taking jobs in far off regions of the country, and then come back in retirement.  Others, like the fellow I mentioned above, grow up here, go to work here, and then leave for brighter horizons, or due to marriages, or due to family, or just because they've become sick of living in a place where life is always hard, and life here is always hard. And then they return, having secured their fortunes, usually, in the form of some sort of secured retirement.

Everyone once in a while, however, a person returns to go back to their original pursuits. That's really rare.  That's the case here, however, in the instance of the fellow I'm mentioning.

This nameless essay is about all sorts of these folks.

When you leave a place, you leave it.  Some of that place remains with you, but it remains with you in a way that's sort of fixed in time.  Ft. Sill is that way with me.  It'll always be part of me, even though I wasn't there for eons, but it is the Ft. Sill that existed in the early 1980s.  It's changed since then.  I know that from people who have been there since.  Yes, much of what makes Ft. Sill, Ft. Sill, still exists, but the Army of 2022 isn't the Army of 1982.  I can look back and still see it in my distant rearward looking mental view, but that view isn't the same, exactly, for those who are receiving artillery training in 2022.

Now, things would be much different if I'd never left Ft. Sill.  It'd all be part of my mental makeup.

When you leave and go to a new place, and stay there for quite some time, that new place becomes part of you significantly.  At some point, while the old place never leaves you, what it is today isn't.  Or, in quite a few places in modern American life, quite frankly, no place becomes part of you.  You aren't native to this place. . . . you aren't native to any place.

The fellow I started this essay off with is beyond retirement age, which makes this sort of a strange return in the first place.  He's not retired.  He's at an age where he really should be, truly.

And in the intervening years, he's lost his relevance, but doesn't seem to know that. Due to a recent event in which he participated, he really ought to.  You really don't get to spend half your life somewhere else, and then go back to where you were from, and pick up again and expect people to know or care who you are, or to treat you like you are thirty years younger than you really are.  You are an old stranger in a country which, as Cormac McCarthy reminds us, is "no country for old men", at least to the extent that you were a young man when last here, grew old somewhere else, and came back as though you never aged.

Back to my original interlocutor, the other thing he noted is that he'd be worried whether or not he had saved enough money to retire.

Knowing him, I'll bet he has.  As we are from the same extended family and share the same general cultural roots, we're in the group of, essentially, blue collar Catholics who ended up lawyers.

There are, frankly, a lot of us, and in many instances our parents weren't industrial workers either.  But we're drawn from the same pool of Irish, Italian, and South Slavs by cultural heritage whose ancestors never would have thought of going to university prior to World War Two, and who worked in industries or agriculture in one way or another that were pretty working class in some fashion.  He tends to bring that up, in another form, more than I do.

The reason that matters is that we all live pretty modest lives, so it's not like we're taking big fancy vacations or driving new cars all the time.  

It also means, however, that even in our early 60s we probably still have kids in college and, due to the history of our families, we expect things to fail.  There's going to be an economic depression. There's going to be hyperinflation.  Things are going to be bad.  It's just earlier to work until we're sure that we're safe, and that day will never come.

Looking to 1953

There's a really interesting, and scary, article on Salon right now which consists of an interview of Joe Walsh.

For those who don't recall him, Walsh was a Republican who ran against Trump.  He'd been a Tea Party Republican who was an early defector in opposition to Trump and, apparently, has remained there.  Indeed, he was associated with Trump allies before he bolted to sound a warning against Trump, which he's still trying to sound.

The reason I note this is that the article, while it definitely has its flaws, is insightful and, for anyone reading this blog, probably a little familiar.  A lot of what he's warning about has been addressed here.

Walsh's main point, and its a good one, is that Trump populists have an existential view of the world that's fundamentally such that it's become unapologetically anti-democratic. Therefore, those who have the view that once Trumpites learn what really occurred in regard to the November 2020 election, i.e., it wasn't stolen, or what really occurred on January 6, i.e. it was an insurrection, that they will change their mind and oppose Trump are simply wrong.  The reason for that is that their Weltanschauung is such that Trumpites view their opponents as existentially illegitimate.

That's a really scary point, but its correct in large measure.  And he's correct on how we got there. . . in part, and also, not in part.

Walsh takes the view that going back to the Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan, without every mentioning Reagan, the GOP adopted, or rather co-opted, this view, for its own purposes.  That's' partially correct.  And he's definitely correct when he notes that the Trumpites know that they were completely ignored in their concerns by generations of American politicians, left and right.  And like we've said, by voting for Trump in 2016 they were voting to throw in the match and burn the system down.  Like we also said at that time and since, if Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic candidate in 2016 (and frankly, maybe 2020)  he would be President now.  Sanders appealed to the exact same base.  

And as we've also noted, by choosing Uber Establishment Hilary Clinton, the Democrats blew it.

What we've noted, but what the article doesn't, is that the roots of this go back further than the 1976 election.  They go back at least to the 1960s when fundamental long established aspects of western culture came under surfaced attacks from the left.  Animosity in some part of the left to western culture had existed for almost all of the 20th Century, but they had not been able to emerge into mainstream political and cultural discourse until after World War Two.  Part of that attack came in other ways right after the war, and we've been dealing with another in our series on an attack on the culture that came from another quarter.  As we have noted before, the war did something that set things up in some fashion for what occurred in the 60s.  But it was the massive introduction of new wealth, combined with an expansion of the economy, combined with the Vietnam War that really exploded into a left wing eruption in the culture by the fateful year of 1968.  The article misses that.

The hard hat reaction to 1968 existed in that very year.  But the elite drift to the left, which had been going on since the 1950s, really accelerated at that time and the left, using the courts, started gaining ground in the 1970s to force cultural changes up on the country through litigation, not through the ballot box, where the ballot box would not suffice, or seem to suffice.  As also noted here before, such decisions really do not tend to really fix an issue in the public's mind immediately, and sometimes not at all.  Combined with that, in the 1970s, the American economy began to fundamentally change with nothing done to stop it. Both Democrats and Republicans winked at manufacturing jobs, particularly low tech manufacturing jobs, going overseas, confident in the view that what this would undoubtedly mean is the arrival of high paying replacement jobs that everyone wanted.

Walsh puts this in terms of "1953", more or less arguing that populist Republicans seek to return the country to its status, economically certainly, but culturally also, that it had in 1953.  His analysis is sophisticated in some sense, and not in others.  In one way he gets it correct that contrary to what the press asserts, outward racism isn't part of it, but at the same time the sense that the "perfect" world of 1953 was a white one.

More accurately, of course, the United States of 1953 had a white protestant culture.  The Catholic Ghetto was still very much a thing in 1953 and Catholics were attending university for the first time.  And the big advancements in civil rights for African Americans were very much part of the story of the 1950s, although that may be part of it too, as almost all Americans look back on that as a success.  1953 was during the era in which American industry dominated the world without question, although 53 is an odd choice as the Korean War, which was not actually a popular one, was ongoing.  Having said that, the Vietnam War was yet to occur.

1953 was the year in which Playboy magazine premiered and the assault on the traditional family really, therefore, began in earnest.  It was also, however, during an era in which most men, including men with no college degree, could support a family without anyone else in it making an outside income.  That era has very much passed.

Of course, the irony of an idealized pass is both that it never actually matches the reality of  the past or the current lives of those who advocate for it.  Many in the populist camp look back on this prior era strongly romantically, however, and Walsh is correct. The desire is to return the culture to something like that era.

A desire to return to past standard, or even some of them, is not in and of itself anti-democratic or illegitimate.  Globally, strongly conservative, and not just populist, movements often have varying elements of that as a goal. Certainly the American conservative movement, at least weakly, had that as a goal to some extent for some time.  The problem becomes when the mindset of some with such goals reduces them both to myth, and strongly endorses a conspiratorial view of their opponents.  Liberals, in taking to the courts, were not engaging in conspiracies, although there were always some extreme left wingers who acted somewhat hidden goals that they were advancing incrementally.  The problem that the left, and the larger society right and left, now has is that its overarchingly difficult for those outside of the populist right to grasp that many in that section of the electorate have convinced themselves that what was done was completely illegitimate and that those who took those positions are illegitimate as well.

With that view, the Trumpites, and they vary enormously in loyalty and world view, go from being somewhat predisposed to believe that the left would resort to stealing an election all the way to believing that views outside of their own are so fundamentally flawed as to be irrelevant.  The big problem is the question of to what degree do the latter makeup the GOP today.  Seemingly, in some quarters at least, they're driving the party.

Given that, as noted in the article, the hope that the sun will come out, people will look around, and return to their democratic senses, as seems to be the hope in the left and center, may well be a forlorn hope for at least the time being.  What's the way out of a danger for democracy if this is the point we've reached?

Ironically, the answer may be in part the same way we got here.  In spite of the whining and crying about them, the current Supreme Court seems intent on dismantling "progress" by judicial decree, and leaving that, whatever that is, up to the state legislatures and Congress.  If distrusts of the parties and the government started with the courts, which it did to some extent, maybe this will start to restore it.  The problem still is, however, that it took us around fifty years to get to this point.  Getting back. . . well there may not be fifty years to do it.

And even if there is, are there enough on the right and left from whom democracy is the first principal, to get there?

Secular suffering for nothing

Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent.

While Catholic observances tend to at least somewhat baffle those who are not familiar with them, and therefore reinterpret them either though the bigoted Anglicization of popular history they've received, or through their own broken lenses on the world, lots of people are at least somewhat familiar with them.  One of the things they're somewhat familiar with is fasting.

We've dealt with this before, but Latin Rite Catholics have a minimal duty of fast and abstinence during Lent.  And it is indeed very minimal. The fast days are now down to two.  There are more days of abstinence during Lent.

And this post isn't about that.

Rather, this post is about American secular suffering and its pointless nature.

I'm occasionally the accidental unwilling silent third person in a long running conversation between two people on diets, which they're constantly off and on. The oddity of it is that neither of the two people involved have any need whatsoever to be on a diet. They aren't even ballpark close to being overweight.  None the less, they'll go on diets and the diets tend to be based on pseudoscience.

I don't want to be harsh on people for this as there's now so much pseudoscience in American culture it's simply mind boggling. We've gone from a society that in the 1960s and 1970s emphasized science  to one that now abhors it and goes for non scientific faddism.  There are so many examples of this that actually going into all of it would require a blog the size of the Internet at this point.  Food faddism is common.

Not a day goes by when I don't get a bunch of spam posts (and how ironic that they'd be called "spam" devoted to dietary bullshit, most of which has to do with eating something that will "melt away fat", probably overnight so that you don't have to be inconvenienced while watching television during the day.  It's not going to do that.  A wild example of that is one that bills itself as some sort of ice cream, with the photographs in the spam showing chocolate ice cream.  Chocolate ice cream is disgusting in the first place, and it's not going to make you think.  

Anyhow, these two fit people are constantly on diets of the faddish variety, involving such things as "cleanses" and the like.  None of that does anything, at least not in the way a person thinks.  Some of it might, accidentally, such as abstaining from alcohol. That'll do something, but not in a cleanse fashion.  And some of it probably does something as it approaches a sort of low yield style of intermittent fasting.

I've now watched people on diets for decades, and I'm wholly convinced that none of them doing anything whatsoever.  I've watched people on Keto lose weight and then balloon back up to just as heavy as they were before, for example.  

Nothing ultimately escapes from the basic fact that weight=calories in-calories out.   That's it.

So you can be on keto, but if you eat bacon and eggs for breakfast, a ham for lunch, and then go eat a big dinner, you're going to be really heavy if you are an office worker.  Pretty simple.

That is why, I'll note, intermittent fasting actually does cause people to lose weight, but it's not a diet, it's fasting.  I'll also note that I'm not a doctor and I'm not telling you to fast to lose weight.  If you need to lose weight, see your doctor.  A real doctor.  Not the homeopathic doctor of Burmese weight loss and orthopody.  No, not him.  A real bonafide physician.  They exist.

Anyhow, I don't think that a lot of people need to go on diets at all, including the folks I just noted.

Now, some people really do. A lot of Americans are really, really, heavy.  Some say a majority are overweight.  I get that.  But none the less I'd guess about 60% of the people I see on diets or discussing diets are not overweight.  I don't think they go on diets, deep down, as they're overweight.

They do it as they need to be suffering for something.

Now, this gets back to Lent. Catholics don't fast and abstain in order to suffer. They do it in order to focus and build discipline, and sacrifice for their sins.  If it involves an element of suffering, well so do a lot of things.

But devoted Catholics accept suffering as part of life.  It's inescapable.  Life is full of suffering.  Part of that suffering is brought about by license.

The irony of freedom is that freedom to chose isn't freedom.  License doesn't actually equal liberty.  The freedom to chose is the freedom to chose wisely, and that brings a sort of real freedom.  It doesn't mean, kid like, that I can choose to eat ice cream for dinner, and it doesn't mean, modern society like, that I chose all the members of the opposite sex, or whatever, that I might fancy at the moment. 

And indeed, that sort of "freedom" leads not to freedom but to slavery.  People become enslaved to their wants.  A massive amount of American culture is now presently completely devoted to slavery of this type, particularly sexual slavery of both an intellectual and actual kind.  The entire pornography industry is a type of "white slavery", involving the prostitution of women and the enslavement of men to lust.

Catholic fasting ties into freedom as it has as an element the concept of building resistance to enslavement.  If you can say no to food you can also say no to alcohol, or tobacco, or to vice.  It might take practice, hence the discipline of fasting.

Which is also why the slow Latin relaxing of fasting and abstinence rules was, in my view, a real mistake.  The concept of the Church in North American, for example, that relaxing abstinence on Friday's throughout the year would result in the substitution of a meaningful personal substitute was, frankly, largely wrong.

And it achieves, of course, more than that.

Fasting, experienced as a form of self-denial, helps those who undertake it in simplicity of heart to rediscover God’s gift and to recognize that, created in his image and likeness, we find our fulfilment in him. In embracing the experience of poverty, those who fast make themselves poor with the poor and accumulate the treasure of a love both received and shared. In this way, fasting helps us to love God and our neighbour, inasmuch as love, as Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches, is a movement outwards that focuses our attention on others and considers them as one with ourselves.

Pope Francis, Lenten message, 2021.

Secular fasting doesn't actually achieve anything.  But then, much of modern American life is aimless and directionless.  It's been wholly focused on materialism and nothing else.  People aren't rooted to place or people as those things interfere with "freedom". They aren't bound by traditional rules of right and wrong, obligation and duty, service to country and community, or the obligations imposed by law outside of the civil law, those being the walls of canon law and natural law, and biological law.  They aren't even accepting of the final binds of death, which Americans don't acknowledge as real, and which provides the reason that at 40 years old you aren't going to be the physical specimen you were at 20, and things will certainly be different at 60.

Now, to be sure, most Catholics are no different in the modern world than anyone else.  A people who were once outside of the culture as they were different, where they were a minority, and were outside the world in a way as they were distinct from it even where they were a majority, now fall prey to all the modern vices that are portrayed as virtues, and self excuse those that are regarded by the Church as sins.  Some of the Church religious itself, mostly older baby boomer aged whose time is past but they don't realize it, still campaign to overthrow Church law in the name of temporal freedom, not realizing that they propose to bring in the chains of slavery.  None of that, however, changes the basic point.

Humans sense that abundance can be slavery.  They also reject so often the breaking of their chains. But even when they do, they reach out, darkly, to the disciplines that would free them.  They sense they have to do something, and often substitute suffering, vaguely, for the practices that would open the manacles.

A 2020 Holiday Reflection. Part 1 of 2, . . . or 3, maybe. The Annus Horribilius Edition

No one can doubt that 2020 has been an awful year for humanity.  And 2021 is going to start off that way too.  Just rolling over from December 31 to January 1 doesn't make things suddenly better. 

March, they say, comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. . .but this year. . . 

Which is not to say that years don't have their own characters or that 2021 will not turn out better than 2020.  It almost certainly will. By this time next year COVID 19 should largely be beaten and, it if isn't, it'll be something that we will start receiving annual vaccinations for, or at least a lot of us will.

Back to 2020.

2020 has been the year in which the entire world was put to a stress test and the United States and its citizens particularly were.  There's been a lot of personal tragedy and disappointment, with some disappointment measuring towards tragedy.  

By and large the United States hasn't come out of this looking good. But then a lot of the Western world hasn't come out of it looking very good either.

2020 was always going to be a stressful year for Americans as something has gone wrong with the American body politic, and moreover American culture, that really started to fester within the last twelve years.  In future years historians are going to debate about the point at which what we just went through became inevitable, just as they debate the point at which the Civil War, the last somewhat analogous American event became inevitable.  I have my own theories about this, but suffice it to say, something really went off the rails in our culture and its politics during this time frame.

It had been going off the rails, in all honesty, for some time well before that, like a lot of things, it can be tracked back to the mid 20th Century.  Whatever else we surmise the culture started to experience some serious decay following the Second World War and pretty quickly at that. A cynic might say that the culture went from hypocrisy, on some things, to libertinism, and we could debate which is worse, and they'd be at least partially correct.  But at any rate cracks in the culture formed during the Second World War and began to widen considerably in the 1950s.  They really started to split in the 1960s when the Baby Boom generation came into their own.

That generation is still "in its own" and its fighting out a lot of its fights right now, even as its members increasingly reach advanced old age.  Be that as it may, in the 1980s a shift started to occur that was a reaction to much of what had occurred in the 1960s.

As that occurred, the cultural left in the country moved increasingly far to the left and following them, but some time behind them in terms of the trend, the cultural right did as well, with reaction to the left being a strong part of the latter, and a sense of inevitable triumph and superiority being a feature of the former.  At the same time, the long post war economic dominance of American industry faded and ultimately industry, to a large degree, simply left the United States.  Economic globalism and cultural globalism came in, fueling a sense of abandonment in a large middle demographic in the country whose cultural, political and religious values had been celebrated as defining those of the nation and who were now told that none of that was true.  Reactions from the right to this became increasingly strident as did the policies of the left, with none of it really helping that large American class that tended to define in the past who Americans were supposed to be.  To make it worse, some of the reaction on the right made erosions into advancements that had served that American middle demographic, particularly in education.  Science education and solid history education took a pounding in the late 1980s and the level of science education that was common prior to those years has never returned to average Americans.  

By the time of Barack Obama's election in 2008 there were a lot of Americans who were prepared to accept arguments that Obama, who was a centrist candidate if ever there was one, was a radical leftist, with accusations of "Socialist" and even "Marxist" being leveled against him.  As we've noted before here, up until the last two years of his term about the most Obama could be accused of was being largely ineffectual, a reflection of his policy making style, but perhaps simply despairing of acceptance he took a diversion to the left at that point.

In 2016 the Democrats made the bizarre choice of running Hillary Clinton for the Oval Office when she was one of the most despised individual politicians in the United States.  That year the middle revolved in the form of support for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, with the Democrats essentially fixing their primary system so that Sanders couldn't possibly win.  That left Trump the natural candidate for the dispossessed middle.

Not really appreciated at the time, the choice of that demographic to back Trump also meant that traditional Republican conservatives were either pushed aside or even out of the GOP.   The GOP rapidly became Trump's party, with a rearguard of the traditional GOP backing him but for their own purposes.  Trump embraced the concerns and radicalized beliefs of his "base", which included a long festering view that the left was the cultural enemy of the country.  The Democrats managed to feed this feeling through ineptness, choosing to oppose Trump at ever turn.  When that failed, they chose to attempt to impeach him, an effort that was doomed before it started.  All of this fueled an increasingly radicalized Trump base in the belief that Trump was a hero standing against what has been practically portrayed as a Marxist tide, when in reality it was the old Boomer left trying to retain its gains, including significant gains made in the last two years of the Obama Presidency.

None of which is to say that the middle doesn't have a set of legitimate complaints.  And not just in the US, but seemingly all over the world.  Politics over the globe have increasingly come to resemble the United States's recent politics to a much greater degree than the American press might imagine.  Parties based on populism and traditionalism, some of which are highly radical, have made progress all over Europe, and not just there. The trend has been global.

And then came COVID 19.

COVID 19 entered the world in a way that no plague has, ever.  The Spanish Flu may have entered during a World War, but the Germans didn't blame it on the Allies and the Allies didn't blame it on the Central Powers.  It just was.  Prior pandemics haven't been attributed to political actors.  But in the heated political scene of 2020, views on the virus and what it meant rapidly took on a bizarre political atmosphere and a "with us or against us" type of character.  Donald Trump took action fairly quickly, but then he cast doubt on the danger of the disease, which took off to the point that by mid 2020 there were those who were arguing the entire matter was a Chinese conspiracy.  Support for or against measures to counter the disease came to signal political points of view.  This carried on to views about the vaccine, with people making medical decisions based upon their politics or even worse based upon wild rumors that were developed by the most extreme members of the camps and given life by an anti scientific movement symbolized best by the prostilzatons for it by Jenny McCarty, a boob model twit who came to fame by prostituting her mammary glands for cash and who would not be taken seriously on anything else in any other era of humanity.

That McCarthy would be taken seriously enough, before the pandemic, to give rise to a line of thought prevalent mid crisis, says a lot about the decline of American education in some fields and its politicization.  But that's only one stick thrown on a fire that's gone from smoldering in the last twelve years to raging.  

Coming out of World War Two the United States was not only an industrial titan, but no nation rivaled it.  Together with Canada, Australian and New Zealand, the US possessed the world's only major economies that didn't feature largescale firsthand devastation of its infrastructure during the war.  America's position in the global economy had less to do with American genius, although that was certainly an aspect of it, than it did with being the only giant economy which was not bombed during the war.  That fortunate positioning was sufficient to keep us going for thirty years before other industrial nations began to catch back up, and catching back up was what they were doing.  Naively secure in our new position, we not only failed to guard against what was occurring, we actively encouraged it, such that by the 1970s up and coming Asian economies began to seriously erode the American economic position.  Nothing has been done since then to address it, with one single exception.

That erosion meant that while the United States came out of the gigantic post Vietnam War recession of the 1970s, it did so as a nation that was shipping its industry overseas wholescale and which was creating no new jobs to replace those being lost. At the same time it became apparent that a country which had been a petroleum exporter, in the Oil Age, was now an oil importer, and had been for some time.  The first blue collar losses helped bring Ronald Reagan to power, to make a course correction, but it was already clear at that point that the nation was dividing sharply into two sections and people realigning accordingly.  New England liberals whose liberalism had been based on the views of Episcopal and Methodist preachers going back to colonial times began to base their views instead on those like Chomsky and his fellow travelers.  Mid state blue collar Democrats who had backed politicians like Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy now saw their fates aligned with prewar radical right wing Republicans who had opposed FDR.  Southern Democrats abandoned the GOP wholescale, brining with them a set of views that were formed in the 18th and 19th Centuries and which had never changed, driving out the first batch of Republicans who were fiscal conservatives but more moderate elsewhere, and whose Republicanism was based on a conservative economic model more than anything else.  With the drive still invested from the fall out of the Vietnam War, in spite of the success of eight years of Ronald Reagan, "progressives" in the Democratic Party, who shared nothing in common with the Progressives of the Republican Party from early in the 20th Century, began to seriously imagine remaking the United States from a solidly centered (small d) democratic nation based on a Protestant world view combined with a radical democratic impulse into one that had its religious and cultural origins expelled and instead based on a court enforced cultural secularization and collectivisation which was generally alien to American culture.  In this they were aided not only by the fallout of the Vietnam War but also by the pornification of the culture by the Sexual Revolution and the destruction of the industrial economy.

Already by the 1990s these divides were becoming sharp, if not fully obvious to all.  The rise of a new right lead by individuals like Newt Gingrich foreshadowed what was coming even as the last of the old left found new voice in the GOP through the Neo Conservatives.  The election of solidly middle ground Bill Clinton sparked a massive radicalized and fairly anti democratic effort in the GOP to expel the President through an impeachment, an effort that never ever should have been attempted.  The second George Bush and his first rival Al Gore were throwbacks to earlier calmer times, but in Barack Obama those on the left read in hope for a radical change even if Obama himself did not hold such radical views.  This in turn took the lid off of the rust belt centered populism that was mistaken for conservatism in that branch of the GOP.

Barack Obama's Presidency drug up a lot in both parties, much of which hampered his Presidency and made it fairly ineffectual.  By the last two years of his time in office he'd accommodated himself to being the presumed head of the liberal wing of the party and began to accordingly give some voice to that wing, although it was really the court, in the form of the Obergefell decision, that sparked a revived radical left in the Democratic Party. That same decision  helped ignite the already shouldering populism in the GOP as individuals who, as noted above, had defined Americanism culturally were informed that htey not longer did, and that their views were no longer really wanted.

During the same time, as already noted, the industrial base of the country did not recover at all.  On the fringes of the Midwest, that being the West, times were good in that the high prices of fossil fuels sparked economic booms that made the rugged region a success.  As that occurred, however, some areas began a population influx of those from the coasts, such as Colorado, that changed their cultural and political natures permanently.  The collapse of the fossil fuels in  the 2010s, however, brought the economic grief of the Rust Belt to the Far West, which was already conservative in its views.  The impact, however, of a large influx of migrants for economic reasons from other areas of the country had begun to change the region's political views from radical libertarianism to math the insurgent populism that was already at work in the GOP elsewhere.

And that brought us to the election of Donald Trump.

Whatever Trump himself may stand for, for his supporters he has come to symbolize the stand of a "real" America against an insurgent "foreign' one.  Democrats have reciprocated in a way by urging their supporters to "resist" Trump, recalling the "resistance" of World War Two, something which is unfortunate in a way as the resistance itself of that era was heavily left wing and which is moreover unfortunate in that it suggests that those engaging in the "resistance" are "resisting" an illegitimate power.

It was that view that took us in a little over three years from heated polarization to outright intellectual battle lines.  Populists in the GOP already regarded the Clintons as criminal and Obama as a socialist.  Democrats seemingly confirmed that by immediately resorting to words recalling the struggle against fascism of the 1940s and informing the Republicans that they basically would not work with the elected President.  They then confirmed that through a dedicated effort to remove him. That effort in turn convinced the GOP populist that the Democrats were in fact an enemy, something made very easy by a section of the Democratic Party already having declared itself to be just that.

With that view, the politicization of everything became easy, just as it tends to in times of real extreme tension.  And then that extreme tension arrived in the form of SARS-CoV-2, or as it is commonly called, COVID 19.

All through the election there were those who called for extremism.  Old symbols of radicalism came out and were demonstrated. Then George Floyd was killed by police in Minnesota and that in turn was used by various groups as a basis to demonstrate against the government and the times.  In far off areas which saw themselves as removed from the Minnesota event, this seemed like a thinly veiled excuse to attack the nation. And the pandemic became worse and worse.

All of which leads us to where we now are.

And where we are at is not good.

The middle of the nation in ever sense has voted for Joe Biden in what can truly be regarded as a vote to return to normalcy.  This means that most of the electorate has not bought off on the arguments of the populist and it doesn't seem the country as engaged in a war against a foreign alien radical ideology. They have also indicated, through their vote, that they don't want to radically remake the American nation and they basically share a lot more in common with the cultural ideal of the populist than they do with the radical democrats. They've basically decided to elect an old, JFK style, middle of the road imperfect Catholic, rather than a fire breathing radial of any stripe.  That probably tells us where we need to go, and how we want to get there, but it also tells us that there's an element of the nation that wants none of it.

On the right, right now, there's a very strong populist element that has become anti democratic, but doesn't recognize itself as such.  It's defining whose vote is legitimate to an extent by their politics, and its also given way to conspiracy theories that demonize their opponents to the point where it can be believed, in spite of all evidence, that they lost the election due to fraud.  Inherent in that belief is the belief that real Americans would have voted only one way.

At the same time, there are those who are already discontented with the new Democratic President as he shows no signs of equally extreme radicalism, but in the other direction. This body, accustomed to rule through the courts, would have the new President pack the Courts with jurists who would disregard the Constitution, even though those very jurists are the ones who saved the election from being overturned.  Following that, they'd force the remaking of society in their progressive image, a world devoid of gender, faith and connection with reality.

This is a road that we started on somewhere during the last seventy years, or at least the last fifty.  We're going to have to get off of it, or the nation won't survive.  Finding the off ramp wont' be easy, but it also means that if we don't do it, we're headed for disaster.

One thing already noted here is that, demographically, the country, and indeed the entire Western world, is headed towards a more conservative, and more educated, future.  The character of the up and coming demographics doesn't resemble those in control and those in the streets very closely.  So maybe we'll be saved from ourselves by our future selves.  

Anyway you look at it, the fall out of things that rose up since 1945 are plaguing us in the extreme right now, with a genuine failure to really deal with a plague as part of that.  Lincoln called on the better angels of our mercy in the 1860s, we don't seem to be calling upon them in 2020 very much.

All of which is helping to make 2020 not only an an annus horribilius, but probably a watershed as well.  The question of whether its a good one, or we're just going off a cliff, isn't evident yet.

Amy Coney Barrett as a Mirror

Judge Laurence Silberman, for whom Barrett first clerked after law school, swearing her in at her investiture for the Seventh Circuit.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Coney_Barrett#/media/File:20180223_185543_NDD_5533.jpg  CC BY-SA 4.0view termsFile:20180223 185543 NDD 5533.jpg Created: 23 February 2018

Yesterday we published this item about long term demographic trends in the U.S.

The Conservative Tide?

Um, correction, we published those about long term demographic trends on Earth, and how that will, and already is, impacting culture..

Following that news, Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed to the United States Supreme Court.

This is interesting in the context of itself, as well as the context of what we were writing about.  Barrett is, in some ways, a mirror on where we are now, and where we're going.

She's also a mirror on how we view democracy itself, at an existential level.  Are we for it, or against it?

Barrett's nomination angered and upset the old order liberal establishment.  She appeared to be what liberals have really feared over the years but never had to really fully face, at least since the death of Scalia.  A legal genius who is a textualist.  And here, in a Twitter exchange between two U.S. Senators, who can see the upset distilled and refined.

First, Senator Ed Markey, a semi freshman Senator (he started finishing John Kerry's term in 2013 before being elected to his own first full term and had a long stint in Congress) from Massachusetts and then the reply from Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse.

Markey, who made it to Congress for his freshman at age 67 (he's now in his 70s) although he did have a prior term as a Congressman from Massachusetts from 1976 until 2013.

Ed Markey@SenMarkeyOriginalism is racist. Originalism is sexist. Originalism is homophobic. Originalism is just a fancy word for discrimination.1:22 PM · Oct 26, 2020·Twitter for iPhone

Sasse, on his second term and still in his forties.

Senator Ben Sasse@SenSasseReplying to u/SenSasseActually, “originalism” is another way of saying that texts and words have meaning. That's not to claim that all texts and words from 1789 were correct – but that when they need to be changed, they should be changed by elected legislators, not unelected judges.4:55 PM · Oct 26, 2020·Twitter Web App

First of all, it must be stated that Markey' statement is so blisteringly ignorant that it should disqualify him from voting for dog catcher.  This is dumb beyond belief.  It's not only partisan, it's just outright stupid.  The fact that Markey has a law degree from the Boston College of Law is proof, as if any is needed, that you really don't need to know anything about anything in order to graduate from law school.

You also apparently don't need to know the Constitution or care about the truth of it.  Markey has been in Congress since 2013

It also shows that the oath of office that Senators take is regarded as a complete joke by some. The oath states:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God. 

I know that it's hoping against hope, but there should be a point at which the violation of your oath of office has an implication, with that properly being that the Senate should refuse to continue to seat you.  You're an oath breaker in your office.  You should go. 

Sasse isn't a lawyer, and is a PhD, so there's apparently some hope for other disciplines yet remaining.

Of interest, Markey, who joined the National Guard while in college, which he says wasn't to avoid service in Vietnam, and who made it to Specialist E4 after five years of National Guard service, was born in 1946.  Sasse in 1972.  Markey is a reliably left wing politician who just made it to the US Senate, after a long career in the House. Sasse is a very independent Republican who is on his second term.*

In other words, here we see the prefect example of what we wrote about yesterday.  An aged, and now nearly irrelevant, East Coast Boomer politician is stating absolute idiocies about the Constitution, and being corrected by a post boomer respected, and more experienced at the Senatorial level, Mid American politician.

In the reaction to Barrett we're seeing a lot of this, although savvy politicians of all generations avoided it.  Long term political survivor, for example, Dianne Feinstein just flat out didn't go there, and for good reason.  She's taking a lot of whiny heat for her decision not to, but given her long history in politics, she's adept at reading the Washington tea leaves and avoided committing forced errors in the second Barrett confirmation she participated in.

The real complaint on the left, to the extent they've been able to express it, is expressed in terms of "she's going to take away our rights", ignoring the fact that it takes five Supreme Court justices to do anything and if Barrett is reliably a textualist there's only one other actually on the Court.  But beyond that, what the real fear is that the Justices will stop making stuff up and send things back to the states to be voted on.

That fear is based on something we all know to be true. The Constitution doesn't cover all that much.  If it isn't in there, it really is left up to the states.  Liberals fear that the American people simply aren't as liberal as they are.  So they don't want these things voted on.  Its not the Courts taking away their rights that they fear, but rather a declaration that they aren't rights and therefore they aren't protected by the Constitution, and are free for legislative address.  

Liberals have real reason to fear that, to be sure, because the evidence is pretty good a lot of state legislatures would in fact not recognize a lot of things that the Supreme Court has said are rights over the years.  But that's the thing about democracy.  People don't always see things the same way you do.

Indeed, they often don't.

Indeed, the recognition of this by humorist and social commentator Garrison Keillor, who is openly left wing also brought a firestorm of criticism from his own fellow travelers.  Keillor made a comment about some things just not worth ripping the country apart for anymore, and included abortion among them, and then was subject to aggressively negative comments.  Keillor's suggestion was that the country could tolerate the states deciding their own way.   That brought the classic argument used when somebody can't think of something to argue about from some on the left, which was to turn on accusations that Keillor acted inappropriately to women on his staff.**

Garrison Keillor was accused of bullying and humiliating women on his staff and no one should be shocked that he continues to be anti-women. . . 

Lyz Lenz, former columnist for the Cedar Rapids Gazette. 

I don't know the details of the arguments about Keillor, but that reply is just weird.  What Keillor stated isn't anti woman, and what we'll note below here should be obvious, Barrett is a woman.

Anyhow, at the same time, this also means that Liberals have become acclimated to an elitist view of government over the years, with the Supreme Court serving as a Platonic council of elders.  They liked the idea of the wise, symbolized by the late Justice Ginsburg, declaring things for the less benighted.  

The problem with that is that if you accept it, you have to accept it Soviet style.  I.e., if the Politburo says one day that we're friends of the Third Reich, we are, and if later it says they're our enemy, they are. No asking questions.

So you really can't ask a legislative body to appoint only benighted elders who are enemies of legislators. That makes no sense.

Indeed, in order for the Court to really work the way the left would have it work, the Court would have to be appointed by itself, something nobody is really willing to do.

Which is in part why court packing, as backed by AOC, is such a dumb idea.  Some upset Democrats would have the next Senate pack the Court.  This presumes that the next Senate will be Democratic, which is looking increasingly unlikely late in the election, but if that comes to pass, some future Republican Senate would just pack it more.  There's be no reason not to, once that was established, and at that point the Court would be nothing more than an arm of the national legislature, the very thing the left wing fears the most.  

Indeed, if it's packed, why not paced, why not pack it with jurisprudential conservatives, that would approach the law the same way that judicial liberals do.  The results of that would be to rule from the bench in a way that conservatives have never done in the U.S., but which there could easily be found people who would do.  Right now, a liberal focus is on abortion, for example.  Judicial conservatives might, at the very most, say that there's no right protecting it to be found in the Constitution, which is actually quite unlikely at this point, and send it back to the states.  But jurisprudential conservatives could take the same approach to the law that judicial liberals have and find that abortion is contrary to the natural law and therefore contrary and hence illegal due to factors that underlie the Constitution and which are beyond it.  People like AOC who would pack the Court, if they have any intellectual honesty, which is doubtful as it would require reasoning beyond politics, would have to accept that even if they are in the highly liberal camp.

In Ginsburgh, Barrett, Sasse, and Markey, we have the reflection of what we noted  yesterday. Ginsburg was a symbol of her times, and a hero of them for legitimate reasons. But those times have passed.  The geriatric nature of the national government makes this something that, for those in it, that is hard to appreciate, and the unusual domination of a single generation, the Baby Boomers, in the culture of the Western World further obfuscated it.  But the oldest departing recent Supreme Court justices, Kennedy and Ginsburg, were well past their eras when the departed the bench, one voluntarily and one through death.

In her life, Ginsburg very much reflected her times. She was a pioneer in the law and in the life of women at the time, becoming a lawyer when it was hard just for women to enter the profession, and raising two children while having a career, the oldest of which, also a lawyer, is now 65 years old herself.  She was a political liberal in a liberal era, and lead a pioneering life.

Barrett, in her 40s, is by contrast younger than both of Justice Ginsburg's children and is a pioneer in her own right, but the kind that many of the left don't care for and fear, just as in the 70s Ginsburg was the same for some on the right.  Also a career women, she is the mother of a large family of seven, for which it is always noted that two were adopted.*** She's outwardly religiously devout where as it seems Ginsburg was secular, at least to appearances.  And Ginsburg quietly endorsed an activist judicial approach which accepted, in essence, that the populace would not go where it needed to on its own and had to be lead there, while Barrett takes the approach that the populace goes where it goes, and should be restrained only where it clearly has been structurally provided that it can't go there.

That this would create fights on the left is telling.  It makes sense that justices like Ginsburg were opposed on the right, as they accepted imposing changes from above and irrespective of democratic feelings on them.  It would seem that everyone would be more tolerant of the concept of imposing changes from below, except for the basic distrust that most people don't want to go some places.

But the acceptance of the imposition of change on the left is mostly because the right has never attempted that in the United States.  It most definitely has in other countries.  Indeed, while its often argued by some that the American Revolution was a "conservative revolution", the disproof of that is that we've never really had one.  Other countries most definitely have had conservative revolutions which imposed conservative ideals from the top.  The Spanish Civil War was a species of conservative revolution in its impact, for example.  It could be likewise argued that Petain's premiership from 1940 to 1945 in France likewise was.

This is not to argue that those are really fully analogous examples, and certainly not admirable ones.  Franco and Petain were definitely anti democratic, where as the American conservatives most definitely are pro democratic.  As noted, it's ironically the American left that tends to be somewhat anti democratic with that impulse existing even somewhat in the mainstream, although recently the hard alt right has flirted with being anti democratic as well.  Rather, the point is American conservatism has always limited its efforts to argument, in the mainstream.****Indeed, American conservatives have not argued for jurisprudentially conservative justices at any point, and don't even seem to know what that would mean.

So the question now becomes, in the short term, how society might deal with increased legislative activity being licensed and licensed at the local level, something that reverses a 90 year trend.  And the added question is how American liberalism, which even in conservative administrations has basically been either been in the driver's seat or right besides the driver with a hand on the wheel, reacts when this is no longer true.  Conservatives in most places are used to the idea of being "strangers in a strange land", i.e., at least somewhat outside of their own societies.  Liberals are not.

Added to that we're just beginning to see the very first reactions of the Cosmo Girl meeting the Twitter Girl.  That may seem to be superficial, but seeing what's gong on out there shows its not.  One hip, young, cool female Twitter figure defines herself as:

real. raw. bold. brave. Marian devotion to apocalyptic proportions. in the pursuit of corn juice.

No hip, cool, Boomer, when young, or ever, defined herself that way.

Changings of the guard are only smooth transitions in organizations that are designed for that.  Cultures, don't design for that.  And as we've noted before, cultures are sticky, yet plastic.  The times, turly, are a changin'

___________________________________________________________________________________

*Markey's South Boston unit contained at least two other then young future notable political figures and his two brothers.  Service in the Guard and Reserve was an honorable Vietnam War option and I'm not claiming the opposite.

**One of the weird ironies of the Me Too movement is that men should have been acting like Christian gentlemen, even though the movement has been grounded in a camp and industry that declared its animosity towards Christian values eons ago.  

This doesn't endorse male wolfish behavior, but so far none of the real backers of the movement have been able to state why men shouldn't act the way that they've been complaining about, even though everyone knows why they shouldn't.  Be that as it may, a society that was raised on a diet of the evolved products of Playboy and Cosmopolitan has taught the very horrific lessons that brought about the behavior now complained of.  In seeking to revive the old standard, in the guise of it being the new woke one, some argument has to be created to back it.  Just "you shouldn't" is an anemic argument and fails on its face.  Nobody makes the argument, however, as "you shouldn't" as it wrong, and its wrong because. . . well nobody wants to go there and discuss what else might be wrong.

***She was oddly accused of racism for adopting orphans from Haiti and criticized simply for having a large family, the latter an example of prejudice of varying types, some religious, but some generational.  The new woman, as viewed from the 60s and 70s, isn't supposed to have a large family.  The problem is, that some of the younger ones now do, as we noted yesterday.

****In the American South, however, this isn't always true by any means.  And there's no denying that Southern conservatism backed racism and went beyond arguments to back it.