Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor passes, an unfortunate icon for her times.

Sinéad O'Connor had, by the time of her death, eschewed her name and an additional one, as she traveled through a world that celebrates narcissism and which treats mental disturbance as self-expression.  

Her cause of death has not been revealed yet, but if it turns out not to be suicide, I'll be amazed.

O'Connor is going to be celebrated as a musical genius and a cultural beacon.  I've listened very little to her music, which I don't care for at all, but what she really was, was a really screwed up personality that had been crying for help in a world that instead just urges "self-expression".  In a way, although their personalities and music, etc., were very different, she's the Irish Michael Jackson, the American pop artist who went from fame to weirdness to an early death.  The public is unlikely to turn on O'Connor, however, as unlike Jackson who did a deep dive into cultural weirdness, O'Connor did a deep dive into rejecting Western Culture, and the cutting edge of Western Culture loves rejecting Western Culture, making our culture unique in that fashion.

Her name was taken from Sinéad de Valera, the wife of the Irish revolutionary leader and the mother of her attending physician.  Her parents divorced, which was unusual for Irish Catholic couples and her father, at least, remarried and moved to the United States.  That shows fairly clearly her family had fractured. She lived with her father and stepmother for a time and then returned to Ireland, by which time she'd take up shoplifting and ended up in the Magdaline Asylum, which, like most things in Ireland at the time and many things now, was run by a Catholic religious order.  She actually did very well there developing her talents, but not too surprisingly chaffed under the discipline.

A lot of O'Connor's musical career was used to turn attention on herself, which has proven in the post Madonna music world to be a good vehicle towards success.  Early on, in 1992, on Saturday Night Live, she tore up a photograph of St. Pope John Paul II ostensibly in protest of the sexual abuse scandal in the Church, but which is more symbolic of the childish Irish temper tantrums that were just then starting to really develop.  The act was so shocking at the time that even Madonna criticized it.

By that time she'd already identified as a lesbian, when that was shocking, although she later retreated from that claim. At some point in the 1990s she was ordained by the Irish Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church, which is not in communion with Rome, an apparent "Independent Catholic Church" which is in no way in communion with Rome.  She announced at that time that she wanted to be known as Mother Bernadette Mary.

In 2018, she converted to Islam, an ironic but perhaps predictable conversion as it is somewhat shocking for somebody who claimed earlier to be retaining Catholic beliefs.  The irony, of course, is not only that she was Irish and self-proclaimed type of Catholic, but joining a religion that is generally hostile to female equality.  Following that, she became a critic of Christian and Jewish theologians and called non Muslims "disgusting", from which she also retreated.

She was married at least once, and had four children, one of whom recently committed suicide.

The problem with being shocking and in despair is that the attention you get from being shocking is pretty temporary, and so goes the relief as well.

O'Connor stands out in the end as somebody who needed help and didn't get it.  There are a lot of people in that category.  With a strong-willed personality, and her world set upside down early on, she might not have accepted the help anyway had it really been offered.  But celebrating the public descent of a tortured soul isn't really doing her a retroactive justice, and it didn't help while she lived.

She also stands, however, for something additional.  Jackson stood for a long held American negative trait of rising people to great heights based on something superficial, and then destroying them.  O'Connor, however, stands for the destruction of Western Society following World War Two, but in a time delayed way as she was Irish, and Ireland's entry into modern Western Society was delayed by at least 40 years.  Prior to the Second World War a person's departure from the culture would not have been openly celebrated even if known, and it would have been somewhat arrested so that the individual self-destruction was less likely to be so open.  And rescue from that destruction was a real possibility, with individuals such as C. S. Lewis, Oscar Wilde and Whitaker Chambers providing diverse examples of the same.  Following 1968, however, hope for rescue started to become fleeting and open attack on the culture became a liberal virtue.

Now that she has died, she'll be celebrated and her many strange paths and failings turned into personal triumphs.  In the end, however, it's clear she was grasping for the existential and metaphysical in a world that is hostile to both and would prefer to find all expression in as self-centered.  Her conversion to Islam, which is openly hostile to those concepts, probably best expressed that desperate search, as misguided as the path she took was.

That's the modern way, however.

Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, 

and let perpetual light shine upon her. 

May she rest in peace. 

He's gone, and not really mourned all that much

Thomas Gobblers, that is.

He was a persistent urban turkey in town.  Quite recognizable.

He was also, like most turkeys, as dumb as a box of rocks.  Unlike most turkeys, however, he had become highly acclimated to people.

Whom he largely disliked, in spite of the fact (yes, we know that you were doing it) some fed him.

He blocked traffic.  He chased and attacked people, particularly women (hmmm. . . .perhaps he was the first to be revealed in a current trend).  He chased the same poor female middle school student every day on her way to class.  He tried to use his claws on a female game and fish biologist. 

He was, quite frankly.  A menace. Even my daughter went from loving him to aggravated with him..

Well, a Star Tribune expose reveals that he's truly disappeared.  He hasn't been seen on anyone front stoop crapping, or roosting in anyone's backyard, or chasing people. . . .mostly women.

Apparently Mrs. Hopper, the female turkey that tried to follow him around (she's crippled on one foot) has been spotted somewhere.  Well, she's better off without him, and I note that he abounded her during that certain season when the other female turkeys came into town.  He had a bad character . . even with the other turkeys.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Ernie Pyle, the great World War Two journalist,  once quoted a sergeant in Italy as saying:"son of a bitch alive. . . son of a bitch dead."

Ernie, apparently, didn't believe any more in the Latin maxim "De mortuis nihil nisi bonum" than I do.

Ba'h.

And now we have this story from the BBC:

British IS recruiter Sally-Anne Jones was reportedly killed in a US drone strike in Syria, in June.

Jones, from Chatham in Kent, joined so-called Islamic State after converting to Islam and travelling to Syria in 2013.

Also from the Beeb:

A British jihadist reportedly killed by a US drone strike in Syria should have faced trial, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has said.

Asked if he would have preferred Sally-Anne Jones to be prosecuted, he said: "I think that people who have committed crimes ought to be put on trial.

"That way... when you interrogate someone, you get more information."

Jones had recruited Western girls to the so-called Islamic State after travelling to Syria in 2013.

It is understood she was killed in June, close to the border between Syria and Iraq by a US Air Force strike.

Whitehall officials have declined to comment publicly on her case, but have not denied the story.

The former punk musician from Chatham, Kent, had encouraged people to carry out attacks in Britain and had offered guidance on how to build a bomb.

Well, play stupid games, win stupid prizes, as the saying goes. 

I suppose figuring you are a Holy Warrior for a true cause, no matter how deluded, is one thing, but to urge people to blow up your fellow citizens, well, that is quite another.  Not that such conduct is unanticipated.  St. John counseled that:

. . .  in fact, the hour is coming when everyone who kills you will think he is offering worship to God.

Speaking of that cause which he served, sort of, but taking instead their fellow travelers in Afghanistan, the Canadian Boyle family, after five years of captivity in the hands of the Haqqani network, which the United States funded during the Afghan war against the Soviet Union, raped his wife and killed their newly born infant daughter.  I'm not saying that this is indicative of the views of all Muslims, but I am saying that Muslims from the Islamic regions of the globe do an oddly bad job of distinguishing their beliefs from such atrocities.

The Boyles were in the region, they have claimed as they anted to help those"who live deep inside Taliban-controlled Afghanistan where no NGO, no aid worker and no government has ever successfully been able to bring the necessary help."  Noble, perhaps, but stupid.  There is a certain amazing naive nature in some folks in the West about going to the rougher regions of the globe and believing your good will will protect you.

Beyond that, however, if reports are correct the Boyles were "hiking".  Hiking?  In Afghanistan?  What sort of a dullard takes his pregnant wife hiking in Afghanistan?

One who, apparently, actually refuses an airlift home, after being rescued, on an American aircraft in protest of the American role in Afghanistan.

Now, Mr. Boyles was married previously, it turns out, to a woman who as a cousin of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner and now he holds a dim view of his present wife's country.  But under this circumstance, if you are offered a lift on a Air Koryo, the flagship airlines of North Korea, out of there, you freaking take it.

Now, I've already violated the societal nicety of "de mortuis nihil nisi bonum" here, i.e, speaking ill of the dead, so I'll go one further.  Mr. Boyles is an ignoramus complicit, in my view, in the death of his baby and the rape of his wife.  No, he didn't do it directly, but he should have allowed it to occur.  Unless his pregnant wife decided to fly to Afghanistan and walk out into the wild country full of wild men on her own and with a gun at the head of her husband, he has blood on his hands.

Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh. Throwing one more rock

I know that I should let the passing  of the ossified creep Hugh Hefner go, but one more minor comment, following the several I kicked off with this one:

Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh:   Yes, this is the third time I've run this photo.  I just like it.  Two young couples.  Migrant farm workers in Louisiana and thei...

He's going to be buried in the plot next to Marilyn Monroe.

How unfortunate for Monroe, but how oddly appropriate in a way.

Hefner nearly ruined Monroe's career by running her as Playboy's first centerfold, but she sure managed to accidentally boost his career in the same fashion.  The fact that the introductory issue of the magazine didn't torpedo Monroe was due to Life magazine running the photo first, in a smaller form, as a glamour shot of some sort.  It was an intentional act on Life's part to try to save her career, and it worked.  But the thousands of men who wanted to seek Monroe naked so that they could. . . well anyway, worked for Playboy too.  It was a gamble on Hefner's part as he had to buy the images from a vendor who had them, they were not new but she had posed in her original name at the time, when he didn't have a lot of cash.  The fact that a glamorous actress was the subject of the centerfold, rather than a prostitute (whether people realize it or not, the subjects of those magazines prior to Playboy and still for much of pornography today are prostitutes) meant it was off to a less trashy superficiality than was the standard at the time.

But what became of Monroe?  She was a troubled person to say the least.  Defined by her image, she became a captive of it.  She was never all that mentally stable to start with, but she does not seem to have been a happy person. I accept that her death was an accident, but it was an accident in some ways that people should have seen coming.  She was unlikely to gracefully make the transition from youth to middle age to old age and she didn't.  It's sad.  And tragic.

Well, she's been preserved forever in the American memory as a sleepy eyed barely clad beauty in her twenties and even now adorns countless t-shirts and, bizarrely, even shows up in an increasing number of tattoos on women.  How Monroe, who never would have tattooed herself and who of course lived in an era when women did not get tattoos ends up as a tattoo for women is truly odd in and of itself.  But all of that just pertains to an image.  The truth is that in some ways her image deprived her of an actual life, after making her early life rich, after having been desperately poor.  She died alone.

Hefner died old in comparison, having profited first from Monroe's image and then from the naked images of hundreds of other female subjects, all of whom have to trod Monroe's path in some fashion in the end. We should pray that they do and have endured it better.

Infamnia. Vices to Virtues

In 1931, under the leadership of Charles Luciano, the heads of the American Mafia families gathered in Chicago to reorganize the American Mafia on a corporate basis.  Prior to that, the American Mafia was organized, sort of, on an old world monarchical basis, sort of, in which heads of various Mafia families would attempt to unite the American Mafia under the leadership of a dictatorial boss, called the capo di tutti capi.  That is, the head of all the heads.

 Charles Luciano

Luciano, whom we of course usually know as "Lucky", wasn't just lucky.  He was a business genius.  The organization of the Mafia on corporate lines, with a commission acting as the board of directors and Luciano as the first chairmen was brilliant.  It didn't solve all of the Mafia's problems, to be sure, but it sure made its operation easier, and coming just as Prohibition was ending, it couldn't have come at a better time for the American mob.

The Commission not only organized the mob, but it organized the criminal activities of the mob.  The Mafia's activities were (and probably still are. . . the Commission is known to have last met in 1985) varied, but it was classically concentrated in three areas, those being; 1) Prostitution, 2) Gambling,  and 3) Drugs.

Now, again, I'm not saying that the Mafia left every other criminal activity alone, but it was focused on these three over the decades.  And the third one, we would note, was actually the source of violent debate in the Mafia, as to the morality of engaging in the activity.

Now that may strike the reader as odd, and indeed it is odd, but consider the mindset of the group.  Yes, this was crime, but it was a type of crime that was rationalized in in its purveyors.

All of these activities feed on human weaknesses.  Indeed, in the modern parlance, we are told that you can be addicted to any of these. There are sex addicts, pornography addicts, gambling addicts, and certainly there are drug addicts.  All of this is tragic.  But if you are of a cold hearted view, these are all vices that their users have fallen into due to their human weaknesses.

I'm not endorsing that view, but I'm noting that a person can rationalize it, and the Mafia did.  The Mafia didn't want its members using prostitutes.  It didn't want its members taking drugs. And it didn't want them gambling.  It figured that people of lower moral and personal character would fall into these vices, however, and therefore there was no real harm in being the party selling them.  It was just vice. That is, if people of low moral character are going to go to prostitutes, and if women of low moral character are going to sell themselves, why not be there to be the seller?  If people of low moral character are going to take drugs, well why not be the ones selling them?

Looked at that way, the Mafia is sort of a libertarian radical free market business organization.  Sure, all of that stuff is against the law, but people are going to buy it anyway so the law doesn't really matter, right?

Well, the law of course always matters, but the mob was right that people were always going to buy.  The law really served to discourage and take the edge off of these activities, rather than prevent them wholesale, as preventing them was always an acknowledged impossibility.  That's true, however, of most laws.  Most criminal activities can't be fully prevented, only reined in somewhat.

All of these activities adopted by the Mafia are quite unique, compared to other things.  They aren't like theft, or extortion, or the like, even if they may be associated with them. For one thing, they all travel together, making adopting them criminally somewhat easy. Where you find prostitution, you will find drugs.  Where you find gambling, you will find prostitution and drugs.

And they are all uniquely addictive.  People don't become addicted to other criminal activities they way they do, on a close personal basis, to these three.  

And now they've all become incorporated into American society.

And that should give us pause.

Just last week Hugh Hefner died. Hefner made his living by being a successful pornographer and pornography is a species of prostitution.  The women who appeared and still appear in its slick magazine have prostituted their images, offering them up for imaginary sex for a few bucks for the men who buy the magazines. Hefner's genius was in the portrayal, and the ugliness is in the reality. That it was s success, and that American culture has reduced nearly the entire female population into the same category as the prostitutes, and that's what they've become by appearing in the magazine, who appeared there, is a huge blight on our society and part of a massive current social problem.

Gambling has come out of the backroom and has built at least a couple of cities of false glamour.  Now, I'll admit that I don't feel that individual acts of gambling are immoral. But let's also not hide that its effects can be very destructive. Also, and given as I don't gamble its easy for me to say this, it's just weird, although its something that goes back, in an unorganized form, into antiquity.  Perhaps the original unorganized nature of it should be its default setting, if possible.  A Distributist view of gambling, per se.

And drugs. .. well, think of big weedy Denver.  Like gambling, they've gone mainstream, and all the vice that goes with it will simply keep on keeping on.

And we wonder why things seem so messed up.

Well, consider poor Charles Luciano.  A business genius who had to spend his declining days back in his country of birth, Italy.  And not a statute to such a leading light in contemporary American culture anywhere.

Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh. Ross Douthart of the New York Times says what I did, more bluntly.

It's not everyday that I beat Ross Douthat of the New York Times to the punch, or press, or whatever the proper phrase would be, but with this entry below:

Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh:   Yes, this is the third time I've run this photo.  I just like it.  Two young couples.  Migrant farm workers in Louisiana and thei...

I did.

Indeed, the title of my entry, one of the original Latin versions of the phrase counseling that a person not speak ill of the dead (literally, "of the dead not ill, only good") was informed from the same phrase that Douthat's is, which was Speaking Ill of Hugh Hefner.

I beat Douthat by only one day, I'll note, and while I thought my entry risked being too blunt, I can't hold a candle to Douthat in those regards.  He noted:

Hugh Hefner, gone to his reward at the age of 91, was a pornographer and chauvinist who got rich on masturbation, consumerism and the exploitation of women, aged into a leering grotesque in a captain’s hat, and died a pack rat in a decaying manse where porn blared during his pathetic orgies.

Hef was the grinning pimp of the sexual revolution, with quaaludes for the ladies and Viagra for himself — a father of smut addictions and eating disorders, abortions and divorce and syphilis, a pretentious huckster who published Updike stories no one read while doing flesh procurement for celebrities, a revolutionary whose revolution chiefly benefited men much like himself.

Right on Ross!

Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh. Throwing rocks at Hugh Hefner . . . I'm not alone in that.

Just a couple of days ago I posted this about the passing of Hugh Hefner:

Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh:   Yes, this is the third time I've run this photo.  I just like it.  Two young couples.  Migrant farm workers in Louisiana and thei...

Folks who may have thought, and probably still do, that I was a bit off base by going after the recently departed Hefner and essentially condemning him as one of the worst products of the 20th Century may be disturbed to know that I wasn't the only one.  Of course, I'm cheered to know that myself.  Maybe there's some hope out there.

One of Time's columnists, in fact, did much the same thing.  Op ed writer  Jill Filipovic, who shares two of my three vocations with me, did the same but from a female prospective, starting off her article with:

Hugh Hefner loved his things: his silk bathrobes, his palatial mansion, his vintage cars. And of course, he would be quick to say, his girls — those interchangeable blondes all below a certain age, with their Barbie-shaped bodies and smiles that never moved their eyes.

Hefner claimed to "love women." He certainly loved to look at women, or at least the type of women who fit a very particular model. He loved to make money by selling images of women to other men who "love women." He certainly met a lot of women, had sex with a lot of women, talked to a lot of women. But I'm not sure Hefner ever really knew any of us. And he certainly did not love us.

And it goes on from there.  Well worth reading.

She notes:

What Hefner and Playboy never did was present women as human, or consider us anything like men. Hefner made female sex objects more relatable and accessible — the Playboy centerfold was the girl next door, not the famous movie actress —but this wasn't so much an elevation as a downward shift: social permission for men to look at all women through the zipper in their jeans, and not even bother to pretend it was otherwise.

Quite right.

De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh

  Yes, this is the third time I've run this photo.  I just like it.  Two young couples.  Migrant farm workers in Louisiana and their children, 1939.  Candidates for "Mommy Makeovers" featuring huge boobs so they can wear nearly no clothes?  Definitely not, as I coincidentally noted earlier this exceedingly long week..  Why aren't they the standards of feminine beauty?  Well, Hugh Hefner has a lot to do with that. These gals aren't stupid sterile toys, pretty clearly, which Hefner portrayed all women to be.

The long 20th Century certainly had its share of despicable people who rose to influence.  Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Guevara, Sanger, and many others. Those watching PBS this week got a reminder of how one American President, Richard Nixon, seemed to have a slim grasp on moral conduct in regard to obtaining and acting in his office.

Amongst those whose actions did damage in untold ways and whose legacy is wholly negative is one figure who passed into the next world two days ago.  While his lifetime actions would suggest that he believed in nothing greater than his bank account, Christian charity would require prayers in hopes that some last moment or untold conversion, or some profound degree of invincible ignorance, would allow that his soul might still be saved.  But that same charity does not require people to adhere to the bromide that a person must not speak ill of the dead, particularly when the world is worse off due to him.

We speak, of course, of pornographer Hugh Hefner.

Hefner is of course well known and therefore probably requires no introduction. But over time the filth that he sold and pushed contributed, but did not lead, to the decay of the American and European view of women back to the chattel status it had been liberated from with the onset of Christianity in Europe in the 1st Century.  The damage his did work to women has been massive.  So massive that its extent can hardly be appreciated by younger generations who now grow up in a society that has largely accepted a perverted sexual chattel view of young women and which has gone on to seeing the world the way that Hefner argued for, defined by nothing more than a person's sex drive.

Hefner's genius, if we are to term it that, lay in being able to take what already existed, the distribution of sexualized nude images of women in print, in a glamourous form.  Beyond that, he managed, by doing that, to take those images away from what they clearly were, photographs of the extremely desperate and prostitutes, and rebrand them as prostituted images of the extremely busty girl next door.  In this he had the odd help of massive events of the time as coincident with him reaching adult status the world found itself engaged in a massive global war and such events always lead to a decay in moral standards. The change in the photographic prostitution of willing women was therefore already underway as wartime magazines like Esquire and Yank, pitching towards American youth now in uniform but not in the gutter, presented a cleaner and less obvious prostitution of their subjects than magazines otherwise sold on the edge of the law on the edge of the tracks.  An entire minor industry sprang up taking off from popular illustration styles that had been promoted in magazines like Country Gentleman and the The Saturday Evening Post of slice of life, often romanticized, images of American life but instead using the same illustration styles to portray nude or nearly nude young women with soldiers as the market.  That style spread all the way to the fuselages of American (but only American) aircraft, painted by soldier artists a long ways from the public eye back home. And of course thousands were exposed to real prostitution globally.

Hefner in fact worked for a magazine that was already taking that approach just after the war when he broke away to pimp on his own.  He saw, however, that what magazines like Esquire were doing somewhat on the sly could be done boldly in the open.  Not that he did not meet with some opposition in the beginning, he did.  And that opposition was not always from the obvious quarters.  It was widespread in a society that was more decent at the time. Even the print media found his actions inappropriate.  In one unusual example of that Life magazine saved the career of Marilyn Monroe when Hefner went to publish purchased nude photographs of her in 1953 (maybe its first issue).  Knowing that this would ruin Monroe, Life beat Playboy to the punch and published them in a smaller version first, as art photographs. The distinction is clearly thin, but the act done in charity, something we'd not see the press do today, saved Monroe's career from early destruction.

That Monroe went on to self destruct later is something that is perhaps telling.  It would be interesting to know how many of Playboy's subjects have gone down in destruction.  Starting of a young life by prostituting your image, which is what the centerfold of every issue is doing, isn't a good start to things.  It's known that at least one Playboy centerfold was murdered some time after she appeared in the magazine and its been said (but I don't know, and I'm not going to research it) that one of the still widely viewed subjects of decades ago committed suicide. 

Those events may have nothing to do with the magazine at all, of course.  But the treating of young women as nothing more than sexual objects who must put out does.   The spread of unnecessary surgery that does nothing more than to try match real women's images to those airbrushed images of the exceptional that appear as "playmates" does as well.  And, as things have spread to the internet, untold misery of every kind, including apparently pornography induced dysfunction of very young men, does as well (there's a lawsuit in there somewhere).

Everything about this body of work has been negative.  Hefner helped contributed and was very active in promoting a view of sex that was unnatural and has lead to confusion on its very nature at its essence. The negative results have ranged from societal disaster to surgically unnecessary, as noted above. The damage has been deep and lasting and there's no sign of any correction to it coming any time soon.

Perhaps in a slight example of some justice operating in the temporal world, where we cannot and should not expect it, Playboy itself has fallen in hard times, the victim of competing purveyors of smut who often tried to take it back towards its original back alley origins, and the pornographication of the culture, which sees the nearly Playboy like portrayal of women in everything from television, to Sports Illustrated, to billboards.  Not being unique, there's been no reason to buy it.  The magazine has accordingly suffered.  Hefner himself apparently suffered a bit as well, according to one of his recent female roommates, in requiring the use of his product in order to complete the act it celebrates, something that isn't really too surprising.  The glamour that was once bizarrely attached to his enterprise wore off as well, and the clubs that once existed (and maybe still do) in Chicago, and the large parties that were once reported on at his mansion in California, faded from view.  Indeed, in perhaps a final ironic note one of the more legendary celebrated attendees of those parties, Bill Cosby, went from "America's Dad" to giant creep in the public's view in recent years only to see, bizarrely, Hefner abandon him in a "I didn't know" statement.  He likely didn't, but given what he sold, what possible difference could that have made?

Well, Hefner, like everyone, has passed on.  The money generated from the prostitution of young women by photographic means will not go on with him.  His legacy of smut here on Earth and the untold damage it has done are still with us.  The negative acts of real bastards just keep on keeping on.