Ostensibly exploring the practice of law before the internet. Heck, before good highways for that matter.
Friday, July 23, 2021
Shining shoes.
Wednesday, May 26, 2021
Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part 16. Reality check. Je me souviens.
Perversion.
On May 24, I ran an item about the 1941 sinking of the HMS Hood.
On the same day, the same item, had an item about the sinking, on the same day, of the SS Conte Rosso. Those two events both resulted in massive loss of life, with man of those lives being young. The Conte Rosso, a pre war Italian cruise liner, is forgotten, but the Hood certainly is not.
I don't note this to suggest moral equivalency or something in this, but rather to note something completely different.
The Battle of the Denmark Straits is an epic event of World War Two, but like all epic events of the Second World War it resulted in massive loss of life. It's not funny.
One of the things that has occurred since World War Two is the pornification of everything, and across cultural lines. This is bad in the US, but frankly its worse in other countries. Japan, which doesn't have a Western culture, and therefore doesn't have the remaining restraints of the Apostolic faiths and their protestant split offs, has a much different culture in this regard, and indeed in regard to the societal view of women in general. Japan, quite frankly, tolerates a lot of things in this are area that are outright perverse.
One of the things that it tolerates is a pornographic cartoon industry. Unfortunately, with the Internet, that's developed a huge American fan base, predictably. And oddly enough, and it is really, really odd, a feature of Japanese weird cartoon art is the cartoon treatment of World War Two warships, personified as improbably shaped women in the Japanese cartoon style.
I note this as when I ran the item on the Hood I ran across quite accidentally, on a net search, a cartoon depicting the Hood, Bismarck and Prinz Eugen in this fashion, in what I guess was intended to be a cartoon representation of the Battle of Denmark Strait. And its deeply, deeply, weird and perverted.
We have the Internet in part to thank for this. It's not good.
A existential shift?
One of the things about living in one place for a long time is that you both experience changes and aren't aware of them when they're happening. The recent Anthony Bouchard matter brings this to mind.
I've followed Wyoming's politics since I was a teenager. The first election I really recall closely watching was the 1972 Presidential election. I was nine years old at the time. I paid more attention to the 1976 Ford v. Carter election, where I definitely had an opinion (I was for Ford). So I have a long political rear view mirror.
My entire life the Republican party has been the majority party, although we've also had three Democratic governors, one Democratic Senator and one Democratic Congressman in that time frame. And for almost all of that time we've never fit the national mold.
Wyoming Republicans tended to be more like independents elsewhere. Wyoming Democrats, it was often noted, would have been Republicans elsewhere.
Something happened when Clinton was President and its still hard to figure out looking back. Clinton was not, in retrospect, a bad President and he wasn't actually detestable while he served in any real sense. But the Democratic Party simply died here during that period and it reflects the fringe today. The serious Democrats, including the ones in the legislature, pretty much picked up and moved to the Republican Party.
You'd think that would have cemented the party in the center, and for awhile it sort of looked that way. Maybe it has, but we're about to see.
The Wyoming Republican Party of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, was highly centrist and independent. When a Natrona County member attempted to introduce an anti phonography bill in the 80s he was pretty much howled down as messing in other people's business. Efforts by out of staters to move into the Powell region of the state to set up a white enclave met with an open public demonstration. Whether you thought they should or not, the party wouldn't touch social issues. An effort by ranchers to take over hunting licenses met with a near public rebellion.
But something has happened since then.
I'm not sure what it is, but that party has been captured by real right wing populists and they actually openly hate the old party. By accident and without my desire, I ended up being a silent recipient on an email list for at time made up of Republican figures in the state who are fairly well known. I asked the list owner to drop me off as frankly I'm sure that they wouldn't have wanted me there and I don't know why I was included in the first place.
What that revealed, however, is an open contempt of the populist who control the state's GOP for the old party.
The question is, where are the voters and is the old party still around?
Up until recently, I've thought it was. And I still think and hope it is. But I have to acknowledge that something has really crept into the GOP here and taken it over.
Whatever it is, it isn't conservatism.
To some extent, I wonder to what degree this is imported, and if that's the case, to what degree the importation is permanent. Some of the figures I recognized are very much Wyomingites, but perhaps notably of demographics and regions that were outside the mainstream up until now. But other figures in this change are out of staters.
That really matters as out of staters, or more accurately out of the region immigrants, bring their views and politics with them. They often don't know it, however. Be that as it may, people come here for various reasons and instantly set about trying to make this place like the place they left.
In the last Gubernatorial election the state had a candidate that hailed originally from Wisconsin but who had taken an adult trip, so to speak, through Texas and Arizona before ending up here, part, I suppose most, of the year in that county that's the domain of the wealthy, Teton County. His campaign struck me like something out of the South in the 1970s, complete with lightly clad young women in a climate that's cold most of the time. At one time I saw a car licensed in Colorado that had a bumper sticker for him that proclaimed "Christians for ".
Now, I'm a Christian, but prior to the 2018 race you never would have seen that sticker here. Wyomingites aren't anti Christian, but they tend to be "leave me alone" in their view of things. People simply wouldn't have attempted to garner the support of somebody by citing their religious faith prior to that time. Indeed, I know one of the prior Governors somewhat and know that he is very observant in his faith. At least one of the other prior ones had a profound personal conversion. And yet another candidate in the 2018 race was Greek Orthodox but that was largely unnoted.
That's because what's really meant by that claim is "I'm an evangelical Protestant", usually. And that's interesting as Wyoming is the least observant state, religion wise, in the country.
That's not new to Wyoming, it's always been the case. Over the state's century long history there's been an evolution in Protestantism however. The Episcopal Church was once very prominent in the state, but it's now declined massively and continues to. The Presbyterian Church and the Lutheran Church had pretty strong bases in certain demographics. The Latter Day Saints are very strong in certain regions and have been since before the state was a state. And Catholics form a unique demographic as they're a minority in Wyoming by a long measure, but they're a fairly observant one which actually makes them sort of prominent in terms of groups actually going to church.
Fundamentalist Christian faiths have always been here as well, but the real growth of them is quite new. In the 60s and 70s, your church attending Protestant school mates, probably went to a Lutheran, Episcopal or Presbyterian church. I can recall having one friend who went to a Baptist church, but only one. One of the girls I knew in junior high and high school was the daughter of the Methodist minister and I later knew some Methodists. I knew one Mormon. I knew one Jehovah's Witness.
Indeed, of my immediate grade school friends, one was a Baptist (mentioned above), two were Lutherans (although oddly one of the brothers of one of them became an Episcopal, and then Anglican, priest), one a Mormon, and one wasn't of any religion I can recall, which probably means his parents didn't attend church.
Of my close junior high/high school friends, two were Lutheran, one Episcopalian, one Mormon, and one nominally Catholic. In my wider circle, one was the aforementioned daughter of the Methodist minister and one the son of the Greek Orthodox priest.
Well so what, you may ask?
Well, on my work now there's two churches that are of very much different theology, one being a very large Assembly of God church and one purporting to be free of a denomination, which actually puts it into the evangelical protestant arena. Across town there's a very large non denominational church in that category. A person may say, so what, but this is evidence of something. Truth be known, up into the 1970s these latter types of Christian denominations were pretty rare here and had small congregations. That's changed.
And that's evidence of something demographic, and that reflects back to what I've just noted above about politics.
In the 1970s we had an oil boom that died by the early 1980s. When it died, the folks who had come in during it left. This was the age old pattern here. The mainline protestant churches and the Apostolic churches had congregations made up of people who had roots here, or who had sunk roots here. Some were oilmen and oilfield workers, but an awful lot of them had some other long standing base here.
The recent oil booms, there being two, of post 2000 vintage also brought in the oil demographic, which tends to be from Texas and Oklahoma, and that's really when we saw the rise of the evangelical protestant churches. It's also when our politics really began to change as well.
Now, I'm not saying that everyone who goes to one of the evangelical protestant churches is an outsider, nor am I saying everyone in the populist GOP is. As we'll note on the latter, however, some definitely are. But there's a phenomenon in invasions, if you care to look at it, of the outnumbered invader changing the culture of the invaded territory.
Pre Saxon Britain was populated, not surprisingly, by the British, a Celtic people. It was long wondered if the Saxons killed most of them, although there was little evidence of that, when they came in. We now know, thanks to DNA testing, that they didn't. Indeed, the modern English, or the Anglesch, or the Angles, are pretty much Celts, genetically. The Saxons simply took over and their culture became the dominant one.
I wonder if we something like that going on here. The population of Wyoming at any one time contains more outsiders than Wyomingites. A lot of the immigrants are from the region, who largely share the same culture, but not all of them are. Some are form outside and bring their culture with them.
Indeed, I'm personally familiar with just one such example of a transplanted Midwesterner who is pretty much incapable of leaving his big city, Midwestern view, behind him. He can't, as that's who he is, and there's nothing wrong with that. But very few people realize that they have a regional culture, and that the culture is shaped by where they are from.
The traditional Wyoming culture is pretty Woody Guthrie-esque. "This land is my land", in other words. A lot of the imports don't view it that way at all. And most of the old Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, Episcopalians and Mormons here pretty much figured that their religion informed their daily actions and politics, but none of them would have said "vote for me, I'm a . . . "
Maybe what I'm noting hasn't really happened. I hope not. But I wonder. One of the current Congressional candidates came out of hte chute announcing he was "pro-God, pro-family, pro-life, pro-gun, pro-business, pro-oil and gas, pro-coal." No Wyoming candidate of the 1970s and 80s, would have dared say that they were "pro God" as it would have been presumptuous in the extreme. For that matter, none would have said they were "pro gun" as that would have been assumed, and statements on the extractive industries would have been more intelligent than that.
That candidate is from Wyoming, but he's backed by the Teton County former candidate mentioned above. Of the remaining field we have one from Florida who has acknowledged, but not really show contrition, for what would amount to statutory rape in Wyoming, followed by what would have been pretty much regarded as a shocking marriage to a child by most Wyomingites prior to 2000, but which doesn't seem to now. One who has made a comment about Liz Cheney not really living here, a fair enough criticism that I've made myself in prior years, isn't from here either, but is at least from a neighboring state. Two have long military careers which by definition puts you out of contact with the state and I'm not sure if one is from here. The other most recently lived in California, supposedly the antithesis of all things Wyoming.
Some have noted that Idaho's politics were basically taken over by the populist wing of the GOP and Idaho has definitely gone through something like this in the last decade. Maybe we have too. [1].
I hope not.
Je ne regrette rein. . . mais peut-ĂȘtre que je devrais
Another thing, I suppose, we have the Internet to thank for is the recent decline of politics and the rise of anger as a virtue.
A lot of the current crop of GOP candidates here, which is all we really have so far, are just hoping pissed off mad.1. Now, being mad in politics can make sense, but it's really gotten out of hand.
It has to be kept in mind that people rarely make rational decisions when mad, and the essential element of a demagogue is keeping his followers mad. Mussolini never went to the balcony, and said, "gee, Romans, its such a nice day. . . let's do what Italians do and just take the day off . . . ". Nope was mad, and so his followers were mad.
While comparing anything contemporary to the Nazis is always fraught with danger, the same is true of Hitler. You can view, and if you speak it listen, to lots of Hitler speeches. And he's hoping mad. He's really mad at the Jews. Mad, mad, mad. His followers were mad too. . . so mad they never stopped to think "what exactly has this tiny minority of people in our country actually done to us. . . oh yeah. . nothing".
As I noted in another post, Wyoming populists are busy accusing old line Republicans of being not Republicans. Some mad person put up a RINO billboard here recently, apparently not realizing that may be the majority of the state. Anthony Bouchard is mad at the "fake press" for reporting news that isn't fake.
In earlier eras it took radio and posters to keep people whipped up to this state of perpetual frenzy. Now its the Internet, and that doesn't take nearly as much effort. In large part, that's why the Trumpites of the GOP are mad, and its' why the left winger of the Democratic party, who really love being mad, are made.
Everyone ought to listen to Gene Shepherd's "Fanatics". Truly.
As part of this, nobody seems to publicly repent of their sins.
Not that everyone has to, but let's be honest. If you are public figure and you acted badly, you ought to acknowledge that. Now, nobody is. Up until recently, they did.
And there's some bridges that you just can't cross. Rape, including statutory rape (which is usually consensual we'd note), is one. If it comes out, you have to confess guilt or it says something about you that's icky. Even if you do the right thing, you have to. You can note that you did the right thing, but you can't blame "the fake news media."
And you can't praise the guilty either. Mussolini did make the trains run on time, and Hitler did fix the rather odd German civil legal structure, supported a modernized highway system, and backed the Volkswagen, but that's not a reason to set his greater transgressions aside.
In other words, you can't really let Roman Polanski off the hook. You just don't want to go where that leads. If you start to try to wipe off the shit, you'll smell like it. No two ways about it.
Retrospect
I typed most of this out on a day that happened to be my birthday.
My birthday tends to be no big deal to me. Indeed, I'm always caught off guard when people note it and to a certain degree, with people that I don't know, it can irritate me to have it noted. I know this is unusual.
I note it here as the past year has been hopelessly odd, globally, and only now things are beginning to become less strained. Be all of that as it may, because of a variety of things, I'm irritated and disappointed, but not at anyone I know. From deep thinkers, however, I do appreciate thoughtful wishes.
One of the things that routinely happens on birthdays where I work is a communal late day birthday celebration. I absolutely dread it. Indeed, I always note to people who aske me what I want, etc., for my birthday that I don't really want anything, or if they are going to get me something, they ought to get me a mule, which I really do want. I'm perfectly serious about the mule, but nobody ever gets me one. I think they think I'm joking.
People don't take seriously the request that a birthday not be observed either.
I suppose that's because most people really enjoy having their birthdays celebrated widely. I don't really.
I always try to keep in mind that this is a view that's personal to me. And it isn't for the reason that you hear some people cite about being closer to death. I'm now 58, and at 58, if you are honest, death can come at any time. Oh well, that's the way that is.
Rather, I think it has to do with my early years, which of course people will always say is responsible for everything. But here it actually is.
When I was growing up, we always observed birthdays, but after your very early years it was an immediate family type of deal. And this was the case for the entire extended family. I get birthday wishes from my cousins, and they're sincere, but we don't have parties or exchange gifts. After I was about 7 or so, there were no birthday parties with friends and I can recall my parents even discussing that. It just wasn't done. You'd always get some gifts, but big gifts were particularly associated with real milestones. They didn't come every year. As my birthday comes during the school year, when I was at university I was usually not home when it occurred, and a phone call was about it, which is about all I expected and frankly I appreciated that. To compound things, after I was 13 my mother was so ill birthdays were really a thing that my father, whose birthday was one day after mine, was really the one observing it, and vice versa.
With that background, birthdays are deeply personal and private to me. I don't expect nor desire light wishes and I really don't want gatherings, particularly at work. One at home with my family is fine. I almost always work my birthday and when I'm at work, I'm working. I don't want to take a break late day to eat something. I know that's weird, but that's the way I feel about it.
I don't mind celebrating other people's birthdays, as they aren't mine. I get that. I get the larger cultural tradition. I'm just not participating in it and I never have.
An added part of that is that personal focus or attention is something that a really private person keeps really private. I don't want to respond to a fully day of birthday wishes as people stop by my office as the day is private and frankly, given my history with it, wounded.
I oddly feel the same thing about my first name. My mother was the only one, when I was growing up, who called me by my entire first name. Everyone else, absolutely everyone who knows me, uses a truncated form of it. My mother and I shared that truncated name as our names are male and female variants of the same name. I note that only her siblings called her by her full name. The same name reoccurs in my extended family and nobody uses the full variant of it commonly.
But at work people do. You can't break them of it, and you can't really tell them to knock it off. Why would they know?
Finally, I suppose, birthdays are a reminder of the things I didn't get done over the past year, which are the same things I didn't get done the year before that, and the same things I made resolutions on at New Years. At this age the things you need to work on are persistent, and even if they'd be easy for a younger person to address, at over half a century, they're not. I suppose the reminder is a good thing, in a way, and the birthday serves as a speedbump in that sense, but being reminded of perennial failure is a bit irritating.
Footnotes
1. Ironically, if this upcoming election is like the last, the real Wyomingite who gets the Democratic nomination may be the real Wyomingite.
Friday, February 12, 2021
Friday Farming. Blog Mirror. Blog Mirror with commentary*: NFU Series: Why I farm: Reflections on my absurd career choice.
Blog Mirror with commentary*: NFU Series: Why I farm: Reflections on my absurd career choice.
February 11, 2021
NFU SERIES: WHY I FARM: REFLECTIONS ON MY ABSURD CAREER CHOICE
Just the other day, I ran a post from Lex Anteinternet that is highly related to this topic here. It was:
Lex Anteinternet: A Mid Week At Work
Conversation. Why you became wh...
I'd already started typing out this post when I did that. This makes this one slightly disrupted in some ways, and I've refocused it a bit.
Any, regarding the NFU writer and the question posted above, I don't think it is, but when you review it, you'll see that the young writer in question chose farming as she has very high ideals.
I wanted to be a farmer, but I didn't have high ideals.**
Well, I probably had some high ideals, and in many things they've become higher over time, which isn't to say that I'm close to obtaining sainthood by any means. But my career choice as not based on high ideals. Indeed, whenever I hear a practicing lawyer say they became a lawyer because they "wanted to help people", I automatically think, "oh bullshit".
I don't talk much on these blogs*** about my own early life or frankly my life in general. I keep that stuff to myself, pretty much. But I'll make a slight exception here.
I've wanted to be in the outdoors since I was small. I never imagined a career in anything else really. That's because I'm a nearly feral human, as odd as that may seem. That tracks a lot into my post about being from and of Wyoming, which was linked in above.
My only real vocation, in the deeper sense, is that of hunter. Well, frankly, that may not be true. At least that's not how outsiders view me. Indeed, a conservation of a year ago or so lead one of my legal colleagues to opine that a person such as me could have only two possible vocations, lawyer or priest. That was it.
That's was an interesting comment from a very highly educated person. He's a lawyer too, as noted, but he's also an industrial psychologist. I'm not sure exactly what industrial psychologist do, but they're some sort of psychologist. Obviously he has some insights that I may lack. I've pondered that statement since then and I don't know that he wasn't right.
He's also, I'd note, a German by birth, having come to the United States as a young adult. That makes a difference too, as culture heavily impacts your world view.
Be that as it may, when I was younger, I only wanted to hunt and fish. Frankly, if I could do nothing else but hunt and fish now, that's what I'd do. I'd be some sort of subsistence type character, hunt, fish, and garden. And probably read. What does that make me?
I've wondered if it make me lazy, actually, but I don't think so. I certainly didn't end up in a career for the lazy and as other people think I'm a workaholic, I guess I'm not. And somebody who eschews ATVs and who will go out in all weather and hike, often alone, for miles, isn't lazy.
Anyhow, with that sort of mindset, when I was young, I hoped for an outdoor career. Early on I thought about becoming a soldier as, in my mind, they were outdoors. As I aged into mid teens, however, I wanted to be a Game Warden, as they're outdoors.
Around about the time I was a high school senior I looked at trying to homestead in the Yukon, which still had land available to do it. It didn't seem quite feasible, and soon thereafter the Canadian government shut the door on that, probably correctly, but that option thereby seemingly closed with that door. Queen Elizabeth II apparently had other things in mind for her distant ex pats.
My father was a dentist. Whatever you are thinking that means, it doesn't mean that.
My grandfather on my father's side had owned, in his final years, a packing plant in our small city. He'd been in the packing industry most of his adult life, if you measure adult years the way they are measured today. If you measure them the way he must have, he spent a few years in the oceanic shipping industry in the office, starting when he was 13. But from his early 20s, he worked in the packing industry, which well suited his Iowa origins.
His later years were his 40s, and he died in his 40s.
I don't know what my father's early career goals were. He never said. As the oldest boy, chances were good that he was originally headed down to the packing plant. He did work there in every aspect of it, as my grandfather "wanted him to see what real work was like". The packing plant was sold, however, shortly after my grandfather's death, by necessity. He was still a teen.
Given that, he went to work, while still going to college. He worked at the post office and decided to make that his career, until my grandmother decided that wouldn't be his career. He started off in engineering but one of my uncles was becoming a dentist and he followed that path as well.
By all accounts he was an excellent dentist, but I never thought of him in that way.
Nowadays, dentistry is somewhat associated with wealth, but it wasn't then. Kids of dentists and doctors today will often flaunt it a bit, as it means they have vicarious money. We didn't. Rather, being the son of a dentist at the time meant that 1) people would tell you "I hate dentist", which they really didn't, but which you still hear today, and 2) they'd ask you dental questions, as if dental knowledge is genetic.
Dentists top the charts in professional suicides which says something. My father never commented on what it was like to be a dentist but once, which was to note how people complained about going to the dentist all the time. Anyhow, while conversations he had with other dentist and doctors were really illuminating and educational, outside of the office he didn't discuss dentistry. He brought it home, however, as dentist made dentures at the time, and that was done in his evening hours.
In our home, table talk was on history, nature and science. My father as an outdoorsman, preferring fishing over hunting but doing both. He also was a heavy duty gardener in the subsistence farmer category, really. It's from him that I received my love of the outdoors.
Where was I?
Oh yeah, I was leaving high school.
Well, farming in the Yukon was out and we didn't have a farm or ranch ourselves, so it was off to become a game warden. And then my father mentioned that there were a lot of people around here who have wildlife management degrees that didn't have jobs.
That was enough, from a person who rarely gave career advice, to send me off in another direction, and that direction was geology. Geology is all outdoors, right?
Well, ironically, it also lead to what my father had feared, unemployment. There were no jobs as I graduated into an oilfield depression. I tried to find a job for a year, and then back to school I went, as a law student.
Law student?
Yeah, a law student.
Being a lawyer, you might note, has nothing to do with being outdoors.
It was first suggested to me that I might consider the law as a career when I was a college student in community college.
The reason that it first appealed to me is related to the point linked in above, once again. It wasn't that it sounded like "an exciting career" or that it afforded an opportunity to save mankind. Indeed, when I hear people wo hare law students or contemplating becoming law students express really high ideals regarding being a lawyer, I know that they are in for a monster sized disappointment. "I'm going to become an International Law Lawyer and save the whales!". BS, you're going to litigate in small claims court in Dayton, Ohio, spanky.
What was the case, however, is that, like dentists, you could be a lawyer and be here.
Now, the reason that the law was suggested to me had nothing to do with that. Rather, my community college history professor thought I had an analytical mind and that suited me to become a lawyer.
The professor in question was one Jon E. Brady, and he was a great community college history professor. I think he would have been a great history professor in any institution. In fact both of the history profs I had at Casper College, Jon Brady and Dr. David Cherry, were great teachers.
Anyhow, it was Jon Brady's comment that started the wheels in motion. I didn't actually know that he was a lawyer himself at the time, and only learned that well after I was a lawyer. At least one other lawyer has told me that he made a similar comment to him, which is what caused him to become a lawyer, but that lawyer's on line career story tells a considerably different tale, so who knows. The truth is probably in the middle there somewhere.
And as a student, I was pretty feral. Living in my hometown while attending community college, I went hunting several times throughout the week as a college student. When I moved to Laramie to attend the University of Wyoming, I went hunting less, but still quite a bit. And I lived on wild game at the time. When I was first a lawyer I hunted and fished a great deal, and my father and I came close to buying a small ranch together, before he died. After that, I lived once again pretty much on wild game until I got married.
To make a long story short, my wife and I have livestock so in some ways I came back around to my original career goals, sort of. So is this a success story? I suppose it at least partially is. I'm still as feral mentally as I was when I was 16. I'm not outdoors in recent years, however, anywhere near as much as I'd like to be, and that's due to my work. It's also my own fault, to an extent, and at least according to my wife, it's a matter of perception, as she claims I'm hunting all the time.
My first day on the job, the office manager, who had worked for the firm for decades, and who had probably wearied of young lawyers by that time, made the comment that she hoped I would like being a lawyer and that I might end up "wishing I'd been a farmer". I recall thinking that if being a farmer was an option right then, that's what I'd become. It isn't an option for everyone, not anymore. The NFU writer's article doesn't really explain where she is now and what's she doing, but she is a climate activist and it sounds like she's worked at experimental farms. That makes a person a type of farmer, to be sure, but my guess is that it doesn't make a person a long term one.
Breaking into real agriculture today is really tough. In my senior year as an undergrad in geology I told one of my friends that what I really wanted to do was to be a rancher, and that I guess that I must just not be ambitious. He commented that he thought that a fine ambition. I've actually worked at it now for decades and I am that, but I don't support my family doing it, and I'm now getting old. I've done something else career wise, and I have to be honest about it. I'm never going to be a full time rancher or farmer. Never. When I die, and I find myself in that odd dream retrospective state represented in the final scene of No Country For Old Men now quite a bit, even if that day is a decade or two off (and we never know), people who didn't really know me as a person will simply categorize me as a lawyer, and the state bar journal, in whatever form it is in then, will run an obit like it does for every passing lawyer that hails your achievements, if there were any, in the profession. Lots of people think of me that way pretty much exclusively now, and one of my close friends in the law recently told me that "if I had your practice I'd be proud", which was an odd off hand remark to make (I'm not really sure what brought that up, and I didn't ask).
I'm not really a proud fellow, about anything, I guess, so it was an odd observation to hear. Of course, as Garrison Keillor says, "we always have a backdoor view of ourselves", which makes it hard, I think, for anyone but a narcissist to really be existentially proud of themselves.
Anyhow, is her career choice absurd? No, definitely not. Is the idealism behind it misplaced? Probably so. Idealism behind most careers of that type is misplaced, including the expressed idealism I sometimes hear about entering the legal field, which I tend to discount as self serving propaganda or words for other ears, not your internal ones.
Life is packed with endless compromises. What ultimately governs the success or failure of them isn't based on economics too much, but economics is a big influencer in them, to be sure. A lot of that has to do with your internal values, and if that value is money, you're not going to be a success no matter what. A lot of success can be measured in just how close we can get to what we'd do if we wanted, in a world where we really don't get to do whatever we want. Not too many people anymore can "choose to be a farmer" in the old time sense, i.e., buy a farm and farm it, or buy a ranch and run it, unless they're very rich. There are other ways to do it, but frankly it almost always involves family ties, which is just fine, or it involves working at something else which probably amounts to your main job. We'll take that topic up, the economics of land ownership, absentee landowners, and the wealthy in some other post.
Anyhow, farmers can help save the world. Lawyers can too. Youthful idealism is vital to all human endeavors. But in wanting to be a farmer, and in being a farmer, I tend to think that its something that is practically in your DNA if you have it. Hard to explain, but deep down.
Which I guess is pretty close to the concept of youthful idealism.
Footnotes:
*This is the first original content post on this blog, fwiw. It was originally going to be on Lex Anteinternet, and it actually will be, but here first.
**By farmer here, I meant farmer, or rancher. I frankly have always preferred animals over plants, so ranching would be my first choice.
***We run a whole platoon of blogs, the most active of which as a rule is Lex Anteinternet where this was originally going to be posted.
Friday, May 1, 2020
I remember it.
Lex Anteinternet: April 30, 1970. The Incursion into Cambodia: Well remembered, but not well remembered accurately, on this day in 1970 President Richard Nixon announced that Republic of Vietnam and the ...On May 1, 1970, US troops entered Cambodia in Operation Rock Crusher. The operation sent the 1st Cavalry Division, which was famously air mobile in Vietnam, i.e., "air cavalry", the 11th Armored Cavalry REgiment, the ARVN 1st Armored Cavalry Regiment and the ARVN 3d Airborne Brigade into Cambodia following a massive B-52 air strike.
And that's what I remember.
It surprises me to realize that at the time I was six years old and in 2nd Grade. Indeed, that simply amazes me in recollection. I've long known that I recalled this event, in a certain way, but I'd associated it with being older. Not six and almost seven, and not as a 2nd Grader.
In 1970, the year I was in 2nd Grade, I was in my second year of attendance of a grade school that was later sold by the school district in a sale that I still question, even though I have no real reason to. I'll forgo commenting on that, at that time grade schools here worked the way that they do most places. They had a territory. Later, in a controversial move that I still very much question, that practice was altered so that there were no home schools, leaving parents to struggle to place their children in a district housing over 60,000 people, as they also juggled their daily lives. But that's another story.
Looking back, I realize that I entered public school in the Fall of 1968, completing the year as a newly turned 5 year old. So by extension I completed first grade having just turned 6 in 1969 and I would turn 7 just before school was let out in 1970. In April and the first of May, 1970, I was still 6.
We 6 and 7 year olds didn't think much about the Vietnam War.
But in the United States none of that occured and so the memories are of other things. But they are there. Films like Radio Days and the like by some really well known actors depict the era and what it was like to be in the various stages of being young. Even Gene Shepherd's A Christmas Story touches on it a bit, with Shepherd setting his Yuletide recollections forward in time, as he was actually that age several years prior himself, during the Depression. Shepherd served in World War Two.
Of course, Shepherd's A Christmas Story might in fact be the most accurate depiction for a young person, the way they perceive remote events. Set in 1940, the kids worry about Christmas gifts and school yard bullies, not the Germans having just invaded France. Likewise, in 1968, 69 and 70, when I was first in school, we didn't worry about the Republic of Vietnam. We didn't even discuss it in school.
When I entered grade school, and through the early years of it, the day had a pretty set routine.
My father left for work really early, often before I was up. Back then he got up around 5:00, which seemed really early, but now I get up no later that, and often a lot earlier than that, myself. In my very early grade school years my mother sometimes made me breakfast but a lot of times I just ate cereal and drank milk. I still eat cereal for breakfast quite a bit, but I never drink milk anymore and really haven't since my grade school years.
We had a Zenith television at home. It was in the kitchen, which is also where we always ate. It'd been placed in a spot that was just below a window by the stove, kind of an awkward place to put it, and I know that it had been relocated from the living room to there. That was likely because my father often worked in the evenings using the kitchen table for a work table. Indeed, that some table was used for absolutely everything.
Television was new to my parents at the time and the TV, looking back, I now realize had only made its appearance a couple of years prior. Up until then they didn't have one so this television was their first TV. As first generation television owners their habits didn't really match later generations in regard to it, although in my father's case it came to somewhat resemble the modern a bit at one time, before ceasing to once again. Anyhow, neither of my parents turned the television on in the morning.
But I did, and my mother let me do that.
At that time there was no such thing as cable television, at least in our town, and so broadcast TV was it. Very early on there was only one channel, but because of my specific memory recollected here, I know that we had at least two, and maybe three, channels. One of the channels, even though it was local, rebroadcast material from Denver's KOA television and other channels. In the morning that one played kids shows. One was the legendary Captain Kangaroo, which I would watch before going to school, and the other was a local Denver product which featured a young female host and a sock puppet character of some sort. That one took submissions form the viewing audience and I once had a drawing I sent in shown in that part of the show.
School started at 8:00 and some time prior to that I went out the door, rain, shine or snow, and walked to school. The hike was about a mile, which isn't far. Nobody ever drove me or my associates to school. . . ever. Indeed, while my mother could drive and my father had purchased what I now know was a 1963 Mercury Meteor for her to have something to drive, but she was an awful driver and it was undoubtedly best she didn't drive me to school, but then nobody's parents did. The few kids who were hauled to school by motor vehicle were hauled by school bus, if they lived in the boundaries. At the end of the school day, which I think was around 3:30, we walked back home.
If we had homework to do we did it then, and I know that homework actually did start to become a feature of our routine in 2nd Grade. Our parents were expected to help us with penmanship, which my mother did. Both of my parents had beautiful handwriting. I never have. They also helped us with math, which at that time my mother did as well. Both of my parents were really good with math, which I also have never been. I recall at the time that we all had to struggle with "New Math", which was as short lived ill fated experiment at teaching something that is both natural and in academics dating back to antiquity in a new way. It was a bad experiment and its taken people like me, upon whom it was afflicted, decades to recover from it. It also meant that both of my parents, my mother first and my father later, were subject to endless frustration as they tried to teach me math effectively, having learned real math rather than new math.
If I didn't have home work or if I had finished it, I was allowed to turn on the television once again. Gilligan's Island, the moronic 1960s sit com, was already in syndication and one of the local channels picked it up in a rebroadcast from Denver and played it at 4:30. At 5:00 the same channel played McHale's Navy.
My father normally left work around 5:00 p.m. and was home very shortly thereafter. At this point in time he had to travel further across town so that usually meant that he was home no earlier than 5:15 but on some occasions it was later, around 5:30. Usually he got home prior to 5:30 however, and when he did, he switched the channel to the news over my protests.
The network nightly news came on at 5:00 and ran to 5:30. At 5:30 the local news was shown on one of the local channels. My father watched both and the custom became to leave the television on during dinner, something that I haven't liked as an adult. From around this time until his later years he kept the television on until he want to bed, often simply as something on in the background as he worked. Interestingly, he'd counsel me not to attempt to do homework in front of the television as he regarded it as impossible. I didn't at the time, but he was quite correct.
I don't recall what he watched on TV as a rule. My mother never picked up the evening television habit and just didn't watch it. Indeed, her intentional television watching was limited to a very few number of shows including Days Of Our Lives during one hour of the daily afternoon, and things such as The Carol Burnett Show or Lawrence Welk. Having said that, just looking through the shows that were on in 1970, it seems to me back then they both watched some series that were brand new to television at the time. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was one they both liked and it debuted in 1970. The Odd Couple was as well.. The Flip Wilson Show they also liked and was new. The short run Tim Conway Show they also liked. Some others that were still on that they never watched were shows like Hogan's Hero's, which was nearing the end of its run.
One thing that networks did at that time, as well as local channels, was to run movies. When they did, it tended to be a big deal. I can recall Lawrence of Arabia running when I was in my early grade school years, being broadcast over two nights. My mother, who admired T. E. Lawrence, watched both nights, which was unusual. I also recall The Longest Day running, again over two nights, when I was in 1st Grade.
So what's that have to do with Cambodia?
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Related thread:
Growing up in the 1960s
Tuesday, July 30, 2019
Growing up in the 1960s
I was a kid in the 1960s.
While its an aside, in terms of depictions of the era featuring childhood, I'd also note that The Wonder Years, which was set mostly in the 1970s, was remarkably accurate for the era. Other depictions roughly set in the era hit and miss. Stand By Me, set in rural Oregon in 1959 would precede these experiences by about a decade, but they are remarkably accurate for our lives in rural Wyoming in the 1960s. The Sand Lot, set in 1962, doesn't seem familiar at all, however.
Regarding war, one of the things that come up frequently in people's related stories about going to school in this area is being taught what to do in the case of a nuclear strike. Maybe our school district was an exception but I don't recall a single instance of that. Not one. I recall television of the era having scary station interruptions that completely interrupted television with tests of the emergency broadcasting system and being told that this was done in case of a nuclear war, and I recall buildings having Fallout Shelters that were very clearly so designated in case of a nuclear war. I recall our grade school was designated as a Fallout Shelter. But I don't recall any instance, not one, of being taught to "duck and cover" or anything like that whatsoever.
I do recall tornado drills, although not many. Indeed, I can recall being told that a Fallout Shelter doubled as good protection in case of a tornado. The reason that I mention all of these is because I'm not only certain that drills for nuclear war are something I don't recall, there something that in my experience in the 1960s flat out didn't occur. I'll note the nature of false and constructed memories just below, and I think there's a definite element of that in the widespread recollections of "duck and cover" drills here.
We took our lunches to school with us, or came home if the weather was nice and we wanted to. For a lot of the year, until it turned colder, I walked home about a mile, more or less, to eat lunch at home. We had an hour, and as odd as that may seem to many folks now, that's not that great of distance. There's enough time to walk home, eat lunch, and walk back. Indeed, when I was first practicing law and living in my parents old house, I walked home at noon every day for the same reason and it was over a mile.
If I took a lunch, I took it in my uncle's old lunch box from the 1940s and 1950s. Most kids had newer lunch boxes, but as we had that one that's what I used. The newer ones were usually decorated with scenes from cartoons of the day or the like. I did have a Peanuts thermos that fit in my lunch box that I took with me and I recall my mother was big on making soup for it. I've never liked soup and didn't then.
There were no school prepared meals at all, save for the occasional "Hot Lunch" days. When those occurred women, and they were always women, from one of the post grade school, schools would come up and serve hot dogs. Only hot dogs. You could put relish, mustard and ketchup on your hot dogs, but that was your option. You also could buy a pint of milk to go with it. Hot Lunch days were really big deals for some reason, with the hot lunch served in the school gym. We looked forward to Hot Lunch days.
When we were very young, our parents might try to buy us a dressier pair of shoes of the type called Buster Browns, but we didn't like them. Part of that may have been that the shoe company that produced them was still using an image from a very early 20th Century cartoon which was downright creepy by the 1960s.
We also always wore hats in the winter when going to school and they were all wool knit hats, or "stocking hats". I haven't worn a wool knit hat since I was a National Guardsmen and I don't like them, but always wore them in the winter. There was no earthly way that our parents would have let us out of the house in the winter without a wool knit hat.
This isn't true, however, of being in town in the summer. In things like The Sandlot kids are always shown wearing baseball caps, but we didn't. I don't recall the first baseball cap I owned, but I may have actually been in Little League baseball before I had one. If Cub Scout caps count, that would have almost certainly have been the first one I owned, but I never wore my Cub Scout uniform to school. In nice weather, I went to class bareheaded.
If I was out in the sticks, however, I wore a hat. My parents were adamant about this and they were 100% correct. Modern parents slather their children with sun screen. No such thing existed in my youth but long sleeve shirts and hats did, and we wore them. I can find photos of myself when very young wearing a cowboy hat. I strongly believe that my parents were more on the mark on this then than most are now, and indeed, their outdoor experience was far more vast than most modern outdoorsmen today, particularly in the case of my father.
Football deserves mention here as my father was a big football fan his entire life. While he was only marginally taller than me, he had played high school football in Nebraska and in Wyoming, and he loved the game. As a small boy I loved it too and we'd play yard football on one of our friend's big front yards the same way that movies like to depict baseball being played by children. And we picked favorite teams. When I was in 5th Grade or so I was old enough for "Midget Football", which was what the youth football organisation was called at the time. I was very small compared to many of the kids in it and I absolutely hated it as I was beat up so routinely simply playing the game. I played the 5th Grade season and then refused to play the 6th, after a practice or two. My mother backed me on that but it did upset my father, as I'd started the season and he didn't like what quitting something meant. There's a lot to his view there, but frankly as time has gone by the damage football imparts upon its youthful players has become clearer and clearer. In any event, getting beat up playing football as a 5th Grader was like flipping a switch with me and I lost interest in the game completely and profoundly and I've never recovered it.
I'll turn here to the big social changes of the 1960s here for the first time, really as this is a place where I logically have to do it. As noted, we went to Mass on Sunday and that means rather obviously that I'm Catholic, something that those who read this blog would otherwise be rather aware of anyhow. A lot of times when people recall the 60s in this sort of essay, if they're Catholic they'll note the big changes that the Second Vatican Council brought about in the Catholic Church, or at least the claimed big changes, and wax on them. Their recollections tend to vary with their views, but frankly, I think a lot of those recollections are manufactured, a controversial thing to say I know.
One of the big changes that occurred was the end of the Latin Mass as the usual form of the Mass and the use of the vernacular. That' stands out as a big change in people's minds, but I don't recall the Latin Mass at all. That may be because the Mass went into the vernacular in the mid 1960s and I was still a baby when it occurred, or at least very young. I've no doubt been to Latin Masses as a tiny child, but I don't recall them at all. I also don't recall anyone being hugely upset about it, or even really discussing it.
Alter rails were present in all Catholic Churches up until the mid 1960s, and they came out following Vatican II from almost all of them. This topic was controversial at the time, and it still is, but frankly I don't recall it strongly. I recall it being there, and then I know it wasn't. It hasn't been there for a very long time.
I will note, however that this too plays into the way we recall things. Now, I'm genuinely upset that the alter rail was removed all those years ago as it did architectural violence to a beautiful structure. And it wasn't the only insult to the structure. I don't know what occurred in the decades prior to the 1960s to a structure built in 1921, but starting in the 1960s it seemed that priests routinely caused alterations to the original structure and almost all of them, in my view, were negatives. The angling of the pews, the removal of one row, the addition of speaker systems, the adding of screens for slides, all of it should be reversed, but won't be.
However, my opinion on that really came about in mid life. Before that, as an adult, I mildly disapproved of what was done to the building. Now I strongly do. As a kid in the 1960s, I would barely have noticed. In the 70s I would have noticed, and I would have known (as I do recall) that my parents and his siblings were not approving, but it wasn't a major matter to me at the time.
An honest recollection works that way. Which gets back to my point. School games, family, pets, and daily life as a child are stronger recollections for most people than the big events of the day.
If it seems like I've skipped the politics of this era, 1968 through 1975, when I was in grade school, I have.
Now, at that time any school age boy was familiar with the big amphibious landings of World War Two, particularly the June 6, 1944 landings in Normandy, which had only occurred twenty five years prior. The film The Longest Day was such a big deal that it was advertised days in advance on whichever major network played it and it was sometimes shown over two consecutive nights, when shown. So that was our idea of what that sort of thing looked like. This looked oddly familiar, and not, at the same time. I immediately asked my father what was going on and he explained, although only briefly, that the US had entered Cambodia.
The next things I recall about the Vietnam War are the 1972 NVA invasion of South Vietnam and the 1972 mining of Haiphong Harbor. The 72 crossing of the DMZ and the resulting near collapse of the South Vietnamese Army was a shock. I recall it being a topic at school and we older boys were watching it, if we were in the group that had an interest in history. I recall that my teacher at the time, Mrs. Stafford, voicing her opinion to me that we were going to lose the war, which I disagreed with. The U.S. never lost wars and was always in the right. The thought was inconceivable.
Later that same year came the mining of Haiphong's harbor, which was told to the nation in the form of a very rare interruption of regular television broadcasting with an announcement by President Nixon on that topic. I recall watching that, sitting at the kitchen table. Our television was located in the kitchen.
Following that came the U.S. full withdrawal from Vietnam. By 1972 we were well on our way out anyway, and as we now know, the Nixon Administration regarded the war as unwinnable and was looking for a decent interval, so to speak, to get out and let South Vietnam collapse. The final months of that I can well recall as the U.S. looked forward to POWs returning home, and the news covered their return.
Of course during the entire time the news ran casualty counts every night as a short snippet. That featured a silhouette of a U.S. soldier and an announcement on the number killed and wounded that day. You got used to that as a kid. I don't know if adults did.
Around 1972 my recollection is that my father, a Korean War veteran, was of the view that the United States should never have gotten involved in Vietnam. I don't know when he first had that view, but I suspect he always did. That placed him counter to me, as boys old enough to had an opinion had one formed by the movie image of war. I recall being surprised that was his view, but it was. The only other views held by an adult I can recall came from the house of a friend whose father was very active in Democratic politics. Their front door had an anti war poster on it which stated that "War his harmful to children and other living things", which is an obvious and sappy thing to say. The fact that they had an anti war poster on their front door was extraordinarily unusual.
The war took on a slightly personal feature in the very late 1970s when my father received an official letter from the Air Force notifying him that he was released from the Individual Ready Reserve. Up until then I don't think we had any idea that he was in the IRR or that there even was such a thing as the IRR.
The 1972 Presidential Election is also something that I can recall from this period on the larger national political scene. Our state went overwhelmingly for Nixon, although it had gone for Johnson in 64. Again, the assumption by kids was that our parents were voting for Nixon, but my father wouldn't tell me who he voted for. Looking back, he was of a highly independent political mind, and he may well have voted for McGovern. I have no idea.
The 72 Election was followed by the Watergate scandal, and nobody could possibly ignore that. It was gigantic and on the news constantly. The hearings on it were on the television daily and they preempted my mother's soap opera. It was drama, but it was fatiguing drama. Adults entered a point of high cynicism about the country and its future. That feeling was impossible to ignore.
Another shock was the impact of inflation, which was really ramping up. In 1970 Nixon froze price and wage increases under a national statute authorizing that as an emergency matter. That was a topic at our home as it really hurt us budget wise. As a kid, and even into my early years, the impact of things on that on the psyche of adults was lost to me, but that inflation was bad was inescapable and it too had a real dispiriting impact on the nation.
In some ways that story, which really played out in the 1970s (we'll right about that later) had a huge permanent impact on anyone enduring it. I think it likely as big of impact on my generation as the economic woes of the 1930s were on the "Greatest Generation". It impacted everything about how we viewed economics for those of us who endured it.
Part of that was the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo which commenced a major economic boom in my state. While jobs flooded in with oil exploration resulting from that shock, the accompanying shock that hte United States was now an oil importer was at first hard to endure and then a real crisis. Gasoline prices at the pump shot up constantly, and it made an impact on simply being able to live.
That came, of course, in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. While that Arab Israeli War was just one of a series, it was one in which nearly all Americans rejoiced in the outcome of, as in the middle of our final agonizing failure in Vietnam, what seemed to us to be a western nation triumphing at war was incredibly welcome. But here we really begin to trail into the story of the 1970s.
The turmoil of the 60s spilled out into the arts, society and the streets, and you'd think that would have had a big impact on us, but it really didn't as children. In terms of protests, for example, I can recall watching one scene on the news of a light tank rolling through an American city at night. I definitely recall it, but I can't recall the year or what protest it was. I know that tanks were called out in 1967 in Detroit by President Johnson, but I don't know for sure if that's what I'm recalling. I recall that scene being really disorienting.
I also vaguely recall the rioting surrounding the 1968 Democratic Convention, but not well enough to really be impressed by it. I was left with the impression that it was odd to see guys in hard hats wanting to confront young people.
The 1971 prison riot at Attica also really stands out. It was such an impression that I can recall discussing it on the playground at my grade school after scenes of the aftermath made the nightly news. It looked like a war had been fought there, which in a way, one had.
And I recall the controversy of the 1968 Olympic protests in which three black athletes raised their fists in the black power salute. Everyone where I lived was universally appalled by that act and thought it disloyal to the nation.
Everyone now seemingly recalls the music of the 1960s as overwhelmingly counter culture but at the time, that's not how things really came across at all. Music locally was mostly heard on the radio on one of the local radio stations, of which there were two major ones. One was a Country & Western station that came in at some point, but my parents never listened to it. The other one played pop music of the day and it varied widely. My father was never much of a pop music fan but my mother liked music. Popular songs that I recall her liking varied from such songs as Downtown to country ballads of the time. I can recall that station playing Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze on one occasion. My mother liked Joan Baez, Sonny and Cher and Peter, Paul & Mary, but didn't buy their music. She remained a huge Elvis Presley fan. I can't recall my father liking any particular music artists of the day but I do recall that he didn't like Janet Joplin, save for her song Me and Bobby McGee. Oddly, I really like Joplin and Hendrix, something I obviously picked up elsewhere.
On Hendrix, one additional memory I have is the news showing Hendrix at Woodstock on its final day, playing the Star Spangled Banner. It looked like a Civil War battlefield. Pretty impressive news footage to a young kid.
Maybe that's as good of place to conclude this as any other.
Well, maybe with one addition.
Looking back, it's clear to me that my parents were better people than I am. They were certainly better parents. The central characters last words in The Cowboys, as he lay dying, was "Every man wants his children to be better than he is, you are". Well, I'm not better than my parents, even though my children are undoubtedly better than me. That doesn't have much to do with this entry overall, but that's certainly the truth of it.
And do our early years leave lasting impacts upon our personalities later? Undoubtedly they do, but can we tell what they are? That's harder thing to do in our own cases. Certainly, however, our parents examples were very good ones.
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