Popular 1970s television series Alice premiered on CBS. Based on the 1974 film Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, it ran for nine seasons.
Linda Lavin starred as Alice in a role that I always thought was depressing, although the series itself is very 1970s. The 1970s featured a lot of dispiriting dramas in its second half.
The series played a role in the childhood of my wife, providing a role character which she acted out with her grandfather, taking orders as if she was a waitress.
I had no idea whatsoever that electric dishwashers existed in 1926. It really surprises me.
It's another example, however, on how domestic machinery was entering the home at this point in time, the impact of which was about to revolutionize economics and how people simply lived.
We've discussed this in the context of the introduction of domestic machinery into the home in the 40s and 50s. We've also noted before that this process, which had started early in the 20th Century, was delayed by the Great Depression. This is a good example of that.
I took a look at this topic, which I've never even considered before, and it appears that one American socialite, Josephine Cochrane, was instrumental in the invention of machine dishwashers and was working on it in the late 19th Century. She went into commercial manufacturing of them in 1898.
Cochrane was a widow at the time, and she passed away in 1913 at age 74. In the 1920s a new type of design was introduced by William Howard Livens, a British professional soldier of an inventive mind who is known for his military inventions related to chemical warfare and flame throwers.
His front loading dishwasher introduced the modern form of the device. Introduced in 1924, he continued to work on it and by 1940 had introduced the drying element to the machine. A man of independent means, he served in both World Wars and died in 1964 at the age of 74.
On the same day that this advertisement appeared, December 12, 1941, this was the headline in the same paper:
If Romeo hadn't bought his dishwasher by that time, he was waiting at least four more years to get one.
In 1926 Cochrane's company, which still existed, was sold to the Hobart Manufacturing Company. Using the name KitchenAid, it introduced the first house specific dishwasher in 1949, reflecting a period during which the introduction of domestic machinery, much of it improved by the advances of technology during the Second World War, were rushing into households. Still, dishwashers were still regarded as a luxury item well into the 1970s, and as a kid not only did we not have one, none of the people whose houses I'd visit as a child had them either. They were regarded as really bougie
Indeed, my parents never had a dishwasher, and it would never have occured to me to actually buy one myself. However, the first house we lived in, that is rented, when we were first married had one, which was my introduction to them. When we bought our house (we've only ever had the one), it had one, and when it broke, we bought a new one. Everyone has one now.
Which gets back to the point I made in the Maytag entry noted below. It's not like washing dishes ever seemed like a huge chore to me, but we were a small family. I'm sure for the homes of my parents, which featured large families, they were, particularly when combined with all of the other domestic chores that had to be done in a less automated world.
I won't claim to have a lot of familiarity with Hillsdale, but what I do know, bothers me. From my very little exposure to it, it seems to focus in part on a sort of rah rah Americanism, in so far as culture and history are concerned (and of course the two are highly related.
That sort of view of American history was once very common in general. I'm old enough to have seen the very end of it when I was in grade school, and I'm also young enough to see it pass away. To give a really bad example, as it doesn't involve school text or teaching at all, if you grew up in the 1970s, you could simultaneously see She Wore A Yellow Ribbon run as a not that old rerun on television, and find Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee in the bookstore.
Students had received a pretty narrowly focused history education prior to the 1970s The United States was always right. There was that slavery thing but that was fixed. The West had been won, not conquered, and even if it had been conquered, it was to the benefit of the conquered people.
The Vietnam War really changed all that in a way that it had not been since the 1840s when the country had gone through the Mexican War. Conservatives never got over that.
The oddity to it is that people in this cultural camp would rather be taught lies than the truth, which never serves anything, and they want children taught lies if it means they'll come out of school believing in an unvarnished version of American Exceptionalism. The fact of the matter is, as this article points out, it won't. In the age of the Internet, while many evils have been spread, you really can't just keep a lid on the past. Pete Hegseth can restore Medals of Honor conveyed for action at Wounded Knee but you can't keep the facts, on both sides, from being known about what happened there.
People who are following Hillsdale on stuff like this think you can. In reality, however, what happens is the miseducated student eventually hits university or just real life. It only takes one crack in the dam to cause a flood, and soon they're off and questioning everything.
This is already happening in various spheres, I might note. One of the most interesting example is in Christianity. The entire Protestant Reformation was based on ignorance and its pretty provable. Of all the Reformation era reformers, only Luther had some serious points, and he didn't intend to cause a separation from the Church at all but, rather, once he started rebelling, he couldn't stop. At any rate, what this leaves Protestants with is that every single Protestant faith is founded on some sort of error, and often back with lies. For those with enough savvy or interest, it's easy enough now to find that out. What was the early Church like, they pose. Well, the Didache isn't too hard to find, nor are the works of the Apostolic Fathers. Lots of very serious Protestants have done this, often trying to support their view that their brand of Protestantism reflects the early Church, only to find that it doesn't, and then convert to Apostolic Christianity.
The same is true of history. The American Revolution was founded upon some amazing principals, but at the same time amongst the reason the colonists cited for rebelling was that the Crown was trying to halt westward expansion in recognition that the natives were also his subjects and that they were upset as the Crown hadn't forced the Church of England upon Quebec. The Constitution is amazing but there was a giant acknowledged hypocritical compromise allowing Southern states partial credit for slaves for representation purposes. The Civil War wasn't a glorious highly decorative contest between two equally valid points of views, but a rebellion against decency and humanity by Southern oligarchs. We didn't enter World War Two to save humanity, but entered it only because were were attacked in spite of a real effort by FDR to get us into the war earlier, and once in it, we didn't defeat the Germans or Japanese single handedly by any means. The British had more troops in the field in Europe until late 1944 and the Soviets always had many more in the field. The Japanese regarded the war in China as the main event up until some point in 43 or 44.
It's just the attempt to whitewash American history, which by and large is admirable, that leads to something like Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Indeed, that book came out while I was still in high school and within the last two years I was continually in a situation where a highly educated person who just discovered it was repeatedly engaging me with "did you know"?
Locally there's been a movement in the Trump era to allow for "charter schools" here which are nothing other than private schools that come as close to being Protestant schools as conceivably possible. I'm familiar with one and it proclaims that teaches an "American Classical Education" and that it is "a Hillsdale College Member School, a distinction that offers our school access to curriculum and training from the Hillsdale College K-12 Education Office.". I've known at least two families that chose it as their own world view was in the MAGA camp. The irony here is, as it is so often, that neither of the two families who are so concerned about their children receiving an "American Classical Education" are living an "American Classical Life".
They probably just don't know that.
Which gets back to, well, this:
In order to get back to what you think needs to be restored, you need to know what actually was.
I don't know about the rest of it, but history wise, the current variant of an "American Classical Education" ain't going to get you there.
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I was going to post on it individually, but the July 4, or thereabouts, editions of Catholic Answers had some fascinating discussions on Catholics and the United States.
In spite of what poorly catechized American Catholics may think, there's always been tension between being a Catholic and an American, and early on the country was outright hostile to Catholics. As Catholics always have a worldview that's international in scope, as they view the Church as the Bride of Christ and serving all humanity, Catholics never have the really narrow world view that quite a few very far right wing Evangelical Protestants do. The episodes are worth checking out, but the second of the two is really fascinating on how Catholicism can and is impacting the United States and American culture long term.
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I was also going to post on the recent excommunication of the SSPX and relate it to how far right conservatism has crawled out very far on a branch that's going to snap off. I ended up shelving that, even though I'd started a pretty developed post on it. I'll just complete my thoughts on it here.
Pope Leo XIV recently took an action which his immediate predecessors wouldn't. He excommunicated the SSPX, the Society of Saint Pius X . As this is sort of a confusing topic, we will refer you to this, which explains it.
This is a really serious action. The Vatican didn't just address a few figures in the SSPX, but the whole SSPX. If you are going to an SSPX Mass, you are excommunicated.
Frankly,. while the Pope doesn't consult me on such matters, he did what needed to be done here. And there may be some who should take heed on on this, such as German bishops. Pope Leo isn't messing around. The SSPX is in schism which, in turn, introduces a certain element of irony.
The SSPX is not as large of group as the controversy might cause a person to suppose. Part of the reason this briefly received so much attention is that the SSPX stream sort of flows into the lake of traditional Catholicism, and that's a much larger group.
The actual SSPX has approximately 1,500 formal, professed members globally, including about 750 priests. The SSPX claims around 600,000 worshippers worldwide, with an estimated 25,000 adherents in the United States, but that's a rough number as not everyone who enters the doors of an SSPX church actually quite appreciates what it is, and some are Trads flirting with the society. The SSPX dates back to November 1, 1970 when French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who had served the Catholic Church as Apostolic Delegate for French-speaking Africa, Archbishop of Dakar, and Superior General of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, a missionary order of priests, formed it in contravention to the Vatican. In 1988 the organization went into schism the first time when it ordained Bishops without the authority of the Vatican. The ordinations, as they were done by Bishops with valid holy orders, were illicit, but valid ordinations. They were slowly brought back into the Church and the ordinations lifted, but now they've done it a second time.
Okay, so what's behind this all?
Archbishop Lefebvre, who was at Vatican II and seemingly approved of it at the time, was in the group of traditionalist Catholics that came to take exception to it, most specifically, in the case of the SSPX, ecumenicalism and the new form of the Mass. Ecumenicalism is more of a European thing than an American one, so that one might baffle Americans a bit. It was a big deal here for awhile, but as the Baptist and Baptist like churches are such a big deal here, as opposed to everywhere else, it's more or less gone away. At the same time, in the US, the churches that were closest to Catholicism, the Anglican churches and the Lutheran churches, have been suffering a substantial decline and, as their churches "liberalized" and they began to self educate, they've started to cross over to Catholicism on their own.
For that matter, the Catholic Church globally has become more conservative in recent decades. The Latin Mass, however, is another matter. After Vatican II, and actually separate from it, the new form of the Mass came in and it came in with the "vernacular".
The Latin Mass, in its high version particularly, is beautiful, but frankly the new ordinary form of the Mass is as well, and, well, it has real advantages, the ability to understand it in your own language being a big one. Beyond that, however, the Church enormously expanded the set of readings with the new Ordinary Form from the much more limited set in the Latin Mass. There are real historical reason for both the long lasting use of Latin, which had started off as the vernacular for the Roman Rite, and the limited number of readings, but neither of them held any longer by the mid 20th Century.
The real dispute, however, is over Vatican II's reforms or more particularly, "Dignitatis Humanae," which recognizes a civil right to religious freedom, and "Nostra Aetate," which encourages dialogue with non-Christian religions while recognizing elements of truth and holiness within them. The SSPX feels that these went too far because (to reduce the argument unfairly) "there's no salvation outside the church". The SSPX maintains that these documents are not magisterial whereas the Church maintains they are.
The ultimate irony here is that there's no question that all observant Catholics acknowledge a duty of obedience and that the Pope is the head of the Church. As ultra traditionalist, the SSPX acknowledges this as well. Given that, it's almost impossible to rationalize their taking the SSPX into schism, which is a grave sin.
There's probably a forlorn hope in the part of members of the SSPX that the Church will change its mind on the excommunication and, for that matter, on "Dignitatis Humanae," and "Nostra Aetate". It's not going to.
While the SSPX may refuse to accept that, the entire event brings into focus why Pope Francis clamped down on the Latin Mass. The Mass can still be said, and for that matter the Ordinary Form of the Mass can still be said in Latin, but to say the Traditional Latin Mass requires permission and that's largely been withdrawn.
This was baffling to American Catholics when it happened, but the fact of the matter is that Traditionalist Catholics center around TLM, even if that's not what makes them traditionalist. It's probably difficult to explain to outsiders, but it's one form of observance that's very obviously traditional. Added to that, the persistent use of forms from the TLM in the Ordinary Form (kneeling when others are standing, not taking communion form Extraordinary Ministers, the wearing of manteas, all are visible form. You could be, however, a traditionalist, and I'm sympathetic with traditionalist, without doing any of those things. The line, I suppose, is when a type of devotion crosses into intolerance of a certain sort, or a rejection of something that's magisterial.
I'd thought that Pope Leo might open the TLM back up, but now that this has occurred, I doubt it. I think he's acting forcefully in keeping the sheep inside the gate for their own good.
Before "liberal" Catholics start rejoicing, however, I suspect certain "liberal" groups within the Church are next.
A hint that Pope Leo may be redirecting cames nearly simultaneously. The Pope has called for meeting of the Presidents of the world's Bishops' conferences to discuss Amoris laetitia, Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation on marriage and the family, and which was not popular with "conservatives". On June 30 Pope Leo announced that he is calling the presidents of the world’s bishops’ conferences to Rome in October for “synodal discernment” on how “to proclaim the Gospel to families today, in light of Amoris laetitia.” My guess is that it's going to be scaled back.
Pope Leo has been left with the Synod on Synodality, started by Pope Francis, which is supposed to issue its final report in October, 2028. June 30, 2027 is the deadline for Dioceses and Eparchies to prepare their reports. An international Ecclesial Assembly is slated to occur in October 2028. Some of the group reports have been released already, although that gives input on their thoughts and not really on where the Vatican may be headed. Pope Francis had throughout this process wrestled with the German Bishops who, in the eyes of many, were headed towards schism.
Whether it comes in October, or in 2028, I suspect the German Bishops are going to get the same message the SSPX did and told to conform or be excommunicated. The big difference, however, is that the laity who follow the SSPX are all volunteers, so now they have to determine if they follow their desires, or the Church. My guess is that a fair number will follow the Church. German Catholics, however are to the right of their Bishops by quite some measure and are much more conservative, and the Bishops themselves have been faced with the fact that their leadership has been plagued with declining attendance. If Pope Leo excommunicates the Bishops, or some of them, a large number of their laity are not going to be that upset, and the Bishops for that part have no real ability to follow the example of Martin Luther and take entire congregations out of communion with Rome. Those days are over unless you have a willing laity, and they do not.
All of this means, accordingly that Pope Leo is acting, well, very Catholic, and very traditional Catholic at that. For those who were hoping for a Pope that acted that way, it appears we now have one.
Speaking of Bishops, it was Pope St. John Paul II who required Catholic clergy to no longer hold elective office, as a small number did. That didn't prevent association with politicians, however. One figure who has done that a fair amount since Donald Trump's second term started has been Bishop Robert Barron, who was a highly popular Bishop with a blog. Bishop Barron's close association with Donald Trump has made some of us quite nervous, as Trump definitely isn't a religious man.
There's a lot that occurs within the Trump administration that should worry Catholics. A core membership of the Trump inner circle are American Evangelicals of the far right persuasion who don't believe Catholics are even Christians (and therefore share an interesting mindset with the SSPX which believes that pretty much all American Evangelicals are going to Hell).
Trump's far right positions has naturally caused the rise of the far left in some quarters, notably in New York, which will be sending a Democratic Socialist to Congress, and in Colorado which appears slated to do so. Democratic Socialists are not Communist and, indeed, in the revolutions of the 1910s through 1970s, Democratic Socialist would get the bullet in any country Communists took over. Nonetheless, Donald Trump, who did not seem that gung ho about fighting communists in the 1960s when he actually literally could have, had he wanted to, is all about fighting the Reds now.
All of the above gets back to what should true conservatives and true traditionalist do?
In terms of the Church, as I noted above, I'm sympathetic with traditionalist and I feel badly for them about the general loss of the Latin Mass. But I've noted that when there's a very orthodox priest and traditionalist Catholics in the Catholic population, it tends to show up best a devotionals in their behavior. Frequent attendance at confession, the wearing of outwardly Catholic clothing, and often large families Good for them. They serve, I'd note, as an influence on the larger Catholic community as a sobering and inspiring reminder of the core of the Faith.
But here's the thing. The education of everyone, like it or not, at a younger age, is much better now than it was in the 1960s. For that matter, it's much better now than it was in the 1990s, or 2000s. Vatican II is actually part of that. Following Vatican II the new Mass included many more readings than the TLM did, and no wonder. Advances in printing and the like no longer meant that the Church was challenged with the transmission of the Gospel to a polyglot world the way it had once been. If there are beautiful traditions to look back on, we have to acknowledge at the same time that restoring something means restoring what should benefit us, and that we can't go back, as much as we might want to, to an era when most people knew less and their world was smaller.
Put another way, modern Americans are not going back to what they think the 1950s were like in terms of education (what the 50s were actually like is another matter) and even Rod Dreher doesn't think we're going to build Benedictine walled cities any longer.
That doesn't mean accepting the present either, particularly one in which Americans, civilly, are in the Age of Stupidity.
With the primaries just a month away, I was visited at the front door by a politician for the first time. A local candidate who has run once before. He's been to the door before, and didn't recall it.
It's interesting in part because he doesn't remember me, pretty clearly, but I know him. He was in my high school graduating class and was one of those guys who was on the periphery of my circle of friends. Indeed, he was one of those odd very nice people you know that aren't quite within anyone's circle of friends, but almost are, so they're like satellites, sort of. Something that I recall about him from back then is that he was in amazingly good shape and was the only male gymnast I knew. He still appears to be in amazingly good shape.
What I also recall about him is that he was one of the very few far right Evangelical Christians that I knew in those days. Wyoming is the least religious state in the United States and Evangelicalism, as the time, was very rare. In my actual circle of friends everyone was either Catholic, Mormon, or Mainline Protestant, but I'd also note that the Mainline Protestants were not very observant, if you will. Or, more properly, they weren't very church going, with some exceptions, of course.
That was typical for Wyoming at the time.
Anyhow, I've had a belly full of the far right in this state and last time anyone campaign related showed up, young people paid, most likely, to distribute WFC propaganda, I gave one of them such a blistering that I could tell he was scared.
He deserved it, punk.
Anyhow, I was nice this time. Can't be harsh to an old classmate.
On the change here, at this point my old classmate has more company, really One of the things about the the last large oil boom is it brought in a flood of people. Usually, in the past, when oil booms ended those people went home, which was often home to Texas and Oklahoma. This time lots of them didn't, for a variety of reasons I suspect. One is that the landing of the economic crash was softer. Another was that winters have been much warmer. Winter used to drive a lot of people flat out away.
Anyhow, many of these people were Bible Belt protestants and they often appear not to realize that they're a tiny minority of the world's Christians. Indeed, not only are they are minority, but they often hold views that in early eras of Christianity would have been regarded as heretical. Heretics, we might note, were often extremely aggressive about spreading heresy, and often these folks are pretty aggressive about their views, which of course is their right.
One such example shows up in an editorial by Campbell County legislator John Bear. Bear is a member of the WFC and a member of a tiny Evangelical denomination. He's a carpetbagger from Missouri. He wrote an editorial to the Cowboy State Daily complaining that on the county's 4th of July parade his organization, whatever that was, had been precluded from handing out copies of the Constitution and the Bible. People from up there, in seeing his post, wrote back that 1) the parade was dedicated to the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution or Christianity, 2) that they in fact did pass out New Testaments and copies of the Constitution.
I don't know what actually happened but I'll admit that if I'd been there and somebody handed me out copies of either, and of course I am an Christian, I'd be uneasy. Partially I'd be uneasy as this group of people have a low regard for the real Constitution and have a view of Christianity that is minoritarian and aggressive. Their Bibles, additionally, omit part of the Canon of the Bible, and they tend not to even know that.
I also am cautious here as frankly this group gives Christianity a bad name, in my view. One of their members, since voted out of office, but trying to get back in, asserted during a legislative session that we are not our brother's keeper. A pastor associated with the movement was one of the primary opponents of the bill to raise the marriage age to something rational, and you couldn't help but feel really uneasy about that. There's nothing in Christianity that says it's nifty for girls younger than 16 years of age to get married.
On that, I've recently been amused by some editorials, and I'll be vague on them, by the same protestant pastor heaping praise on somebody he probably doesn't know lost his family due to screwing his secretary and then trying to claim that his children understood in a public setting they were at.
They didn't.
Anyhow, the changing religious landscape here has had an impact on politics, and not in a good way, even if I'm glad that people are attending some church.
One regional politician who I'm sure attends not a church, but a stake center, is Deseret Mike Lee. Lee is a radical right wing populist. He posts constantly about the SAVE act and stuff like that, but I really wonder how much people really know about him.
John D. Lee.
Lee is a direct descendant of John D. Lee, one of the key figures of the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857. Mike Lee even bears a pretty close resemblance to his ancestor facially.
John D. Lee was a Mormon zealot in the LDS's early days. He was also a central figure in the early LDS of that day. He was not just some LDS immigrant to Utah. We've discussed Mountain Meadows elsewhere, but it was a flat out murderous slaughter in the name of religion of a type that you very rarely actually see. People often claim that occurs, but reality, it's phenomenally rare. Here's an actual example.
Lee was eventually charged with murder in 1874. He was executed at Mountain Meadows for his crimes in 1877. The LDS have always maintained that they were not responsible for the murders in an organized way. I.e., they've always maintained that the church didn't sanction or commend the killings to occur. They may very well not have, and given the factors of time and distance of the 19th Century, they likely did not. Still, it took two decades for the cries of the murdered to be addressed and there's always been some lingering suspicion that Lee was a scapegoat. That's more or less the view taken by the Netflix series American Primeval, which while a historical drama doesn't pretend to be strict history. Brigham Young is portrayed as a really bad guy in it.
John D. Lee nineteen wives and fifty six children, which is flat out absurd. Eleven of Lee's wives left him during the course of their marriages.
One of those fifty six children was John Doyle Lee, born in 1851, before Mountain Meadows. His mother was Lovina Lee who had married John D. in 1847. That same year, John D. married Mary Lee, her sister. Both Lovina and Mary are buried in a the same plot in Arizona, where the John D. family ultimately located.
John Doyle Lee was one of eleven children by two wives. His first wife died at age 31. He was an Arizona rancher. One of those children was Rex Lee, who died in 1934 in a hunting accident, leaving his second wife (his first had died) pregnant. She would name their son Rex Lee. She would remarry and have three more children.
Rex Lee, the younger, became a prominent Republican politician, lawyer and BYU academic. He served as United States Solicitor under Ronald Reagan. Mike Lee, his son, has sort of followed his path in that he's also an academic, lawyer and Republican politician.
Mike Lee, while it's been nearly 150 years since his great, great grandfather's death, appears to have acquired not only his facial appearance, but a certain type of zealotry.
It's hard to say this without instantly being accused of being bigoted. The truth is, however, that the LDS are a much more diverse religion than people think they are. Many Mormon "beliefs" aren't canon at all, and are more in the nature of theological opinions. It's not really the case, for instance, that all Mormons are polytheists. Even regular common practices, like abstaining from caffeinated beverages, aren't really church law.As a result, you can have fairly devout Mormons who don't hold those views. You can also have those who very strictly hold the traditional views. The deeper you go into the Jello Belt the more common the really traditional views, save for Salt Lake City, ironically, which has a majority non Mormon population.
I don't know Mike Lee personally, but there's every sign that he holds the very traditional views, one of which is that there's a finite number of souls that were created at the bigging of the creation of our world, and that the sooner they all get on the Earth, the second coming will arrive.
Now, Mike Lee has only three children, so that cuts against this argument somewhat. But he also is a pro development zealot that is sort of explained by this. Lee would rape every square inch of the West if allowed to. Houses, mines, whatever, you name it, he's for it.
And he holds sort of a pan West view of this, which fits into his heritage. Originally the LDS hoped for their own state, the State of Deseret, which would have included a much greater expanse of the West than Utah.
Lee had a fit recently went the Pentagon didn't include the LDS as a Christian religion, which it isn't, in the list of Christian religions. It was pretty clear that Lee felt betrayed, which he wasn't. The Pentagon went back and fibbed for him, the GOP rewarding him for his loyalty, but changing that.
The views Lee holds about public lands and the West aren't really limited to the LDS by any means, we should note. James Watt, Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, believed that the Second Coming was going to come extremely soon so there should be no holding back on using every resource immediately. No need to conserve anything.
We're still here, of course, and Watt is dead.
Watt received a fair amount of portrayal as a weirdo. That must have pained other Evangelicals who didn't hold his views and I suspect there's a fair number of LDS who feel the same way about Lee. Likewise, there's probably a fair number of Christians up in Campbell County who feel that John Bear doesn't speak for them.
Indeed, this raises the interesting point of outliers defining a group to outsiders. Mitt Romney is probably more representative of the views of most Mormons than Mike Lee, but most Americans don't know anything about the LDS and by 2028 Mike Lee is going to seem like the definition of a Mormon to many people.
I get stuff like this in regard to being a Catholic, often by people who really hate Catholics. "You must be one of ten children". Nope, I'm of one. Just yesterday a colleague I've worked with for nearly 40 years, and who has asked me about grade school before, was in a conversation with another colleague who is moving their children out of the local Catholic school. She and her husband are not Catholic. My old colleague turned to me and said "you went to St. A's"
No, I didn't. Neither did any of my numerous Catholic cousins. I'm a practicing Catholics and, therefore, I guess it must be the case that I went to Catholic school.
A minor example.
I'm not going to vote for my old colleague. He doesn't appear to fit into the WFC, but I can't really tell what he's for. He's for jobs, which everyone says.
And I like our serving representative, who is definitely not a WFC member.
The candidate visiting got me to thinking about another person who sort of was in the orbit of my circle of friends back in those days. She was a quiet and mousy friend of the sister of one of my friends. I had a crush on the sister. Later she reappeared in the orbit in law school, as she was the friend of a girl I was dating and just somebody in the class behind me. I got to know here somewhat better then. The very definition of a preppy, people in her circle called her "muffy" as sort of derogative nickname.
After law school she came back to Casper and practiced here for awhile. Something happened, I don't know what, and she not only left the practice of law, but actually took the extraordinary step of contacting the bar and having her name removed from the list of those barred. I.e., she not only was a practicing lawyer who wanted on the inactive list, she wanted off the list entirely. She's the only person I've ever know to do that.
After she left, she went back to Kansas where she'd graduated as an undergrad and worked in basically a clerical job. I lost track of her, but looked her up sometime last year. Too late, she'd died of cancer at age 58. She'd never married. Her obituary states she "will be remembered for her commitment to 4-H and her love of rabbits." I actually hadn't known she was in 4-H, or that she loved rabbits.
In some ways I'm amazed that a body lead by a far right wing Evangelical zealot who formerly conceived of himself as a latter day Moses has time to do anything other than Trump's bidding.
But this yet again.
Harriet is apparently having none of it. She stated:
The Sunshine Protection Act robs Wyoming farmers and ranchers of precious sunlight and ensures the first hours of a student's day is in darkness, The government isn't funded, our elections aren't secure, and Wyoming's legacy industries need help.
I will not vote for a time-wasting bill that puts Wyoming in the dark.
That's the sort of nasty attitude that some Wyomingites have come to love about Harriet. Sure, she'll say bad things about their educational level, but she's mean.
Um, anyhow.
The line about our elections not being secure is 100% pure bullshit and Harriet knows that. She's willing to lie for Trump if it gets her votes. She never really said the 2020 election was stolen, as she couldn't bring herself to lie that big, but lying gets easier for people over time. Now she's willing to lie about election security. That's reason enough to retire her from politics right now.
If she's sent home (she won't return to Wyoming, I'd wager) she might want to familiarize herself with agriculture again. Hageman is from a ranch/farm, but her comment about robbing "Wyoming farmers and ranchers of precious sunlight" is flat out stupid. I've been around agriculture my entire life, and it's one of those occupations that doesn't pay any attention to the clock at all.
A lot of big agriculture activities start "when it gets light". Light comes, when it comes. It doesn't matter what the clock says.
For that matter, generally, what actually happens is people get where they need to be an hour to 30 minutes before the sun comes up and drink coffee until it comes up, then they start working. That isn't impacted by the official time schedule at all. Generally, if you are working cattle, you start when you are sure you can see them.
I've never ever heard a rancher or farmer say "oh gosh, look at the time".
I can remember the experiment from the 1970s, because I can recall walking to grade school in the dark. We walked, but I only had .2 of a mile to go and I didn't have to cross any dangerous streets. Still, I wonder if parents today would regard simply walking that distance too risky.
Not that it would matter today. At that time we went to the school within our boundary and if parents didn't like it, their option was to look for one of the very few religious schools there were, with St. Anthony's being the biggest one. Interestingly, while my extended family is a large Catholic family, none of us went there. I was told my parents had thought about enrolling me there, but there wasn't room at the time.
I frankly don't think going on year around Daylight Savings Time is a good idea. I'd like the natural time, year around, and I don't see a good reason not to return to it. Daylight Savings Time doesn't save any daylight, it just makes you start an hour earlier in the day than nature would provide.
Still, I can't help but find Hageman's Grand Master Crab Blaster response amusing. "We control Congress and cut taxes and now we're bankrupt and I have elections that I want to help steal. .
It was the Bicentennial of American Independence and I was 13 years old
There's been some recent focus on people like me who were young during the Bicentennial and who can recall it. Many of us have real mixed feelings about today, the 250th Anniversary.
The celebrations for the Bicentennial were really a big deal. Students, like me, who were in school at the time had been studying the Revolution in anticipation of it. There were events everywhere. State and local governments were very active in promoting it. The Federal government issued a special series of coins.
Looking back it's interesting to note how the celebrations came as a relief to the trauma of the Vietnam War and gave the country a sense of optimism again. The war had torn the country apart, and of course we'd lost it. Right after that the country went through the Watergate trauma, and it was suffering by inflation brought about by the war and the Arab Oil Embargo. Things weren't going great, but the Bicentennial gave people a sense we'd get through it.
Gerald Ford was President at the time and was campaigning against right wing actor Ronald Reagan as well as the presumptive Democratic nominee, Jimmy Carter.
I'd just completed 7th Grade and turned 13 just before school let out for the summer. I had a job at a wading pool as a lifeguard. It's weird to think of, as I was the only city employee at the pool all day long. I filled it up each day, and drained it every night. They wouldn't let a 13 year old do that now.
As noted, in civics we studied the Revolution that year. I can't recall all that much about the instruction. I do recall the teacher, whom bore sort of a resemblance to Tom Selleck, saying the country had lost the Vietnam War, which was a shock to me. I went home and asked my father, and he had the same view.
They were right, of course.
Fireworks at that time were set off on the municipal golf course. I went up on the roof to watch them.
The IDF conducted a hostage rescue mission at Entebbe, Uganda. 102 hostages, mostly Jewish, were being held by hijackers of the Palestinian PFLP–EO and German RZ groups.
All of the hostages, 33 Ugandan soldiers and 3 hostages died in the raid.
Assassins hired by the Argentine Navy killed three Catholic priests and two seminarians at the San Patricio church in the Belgrano neighborhood of Buenos Aires.
Indeed, it's probably just a trick of the calendar and memory, but this year's Memorial Day seemed freakishly early to me. We probably went fishing.
I was a newly minted teenager as of a few days prior.
Syria invaded Lebanon, occupying part of the country until 2005. In the weird way that history works, the first column which was targeting Sidon was stopped by the PLO, a second by the Lebanese Army, and a third column by Christian militias.
That says something about how crappy the Syrian Army was, and frankly always was. They endured huge casualties.
The goal was to annex Lebanon into Syria. They'd never achieve a full occupation of the country, but they would over time expand the amount of territory they were occupying.
The Indonesian installed "People's Assembly of East Timor" voted unanimously in favor of the "Act of Integration" to make East Timor Indonesia's 27th province.
The UK and Iceland entered into negotiations to end the Cod Wars.
The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that Karen Ann Quinlan, suffering from irreversible brain damage, could be disconnected from the ventilator that had been keeping her alive since April 15, 1975. She had been found unresponsive after she consumed Valium along with alcohol while on a crash diet and lapsed into a coma. A Catholic, her parents had appealed to Catholic moral theology arguing that extraordinary means not be required to preserve her life.
She'd live for an additional nine years.
She had been trying to lose weight to fit into a bikini.
This is one of those events I can personally recall. It was a major news story at the time.
The UN Security Council found South Africa liable for an act of aggression against Angola, a fairly dubious Security Council conviction given that what South Africa really did is intervene in a civil war that other powers were likewise involved in.
The slam dunk was restored as a legal college basketball feature.
Oddly enough, "flashing" was a trend in the 1970s which continued on into the 1980s in the form of "streaking", running through a public area naked. Comedic singer Ray Stevens even authored a song about it, "The Streak".
Laverne & Shirley premiered.
It was a spin off of Happy Days and ran until 1983. Depicting two single women employed in a brewery in Milwaukee for most of its run, it was set in the 1950s to early 1960s. The last season was set in Burbank, California.
I can't say that I was a fan.
The Royal Moroccan Army attacked the Algerian Army at Amgala.
The House passed a bill already passed by the Senate to ban the sale of US arms to or to provide aid to paramilitary groups in Angola.
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