The Voice of Generation Jones

There are times when perhaps we should retitle our blog just that.

Members of Generation Jones, including myself, in about 1965.

I hadn't realized that what I've been calling "the Gap Generation" has actually been defined as "Generation Jones" and that it's actually pretty well-defined.  Indeed, according to Wikipedia:

Generation Jones is the social cohort^[ of the latter half of the Baby Boomer Generation to the first years of Generation X.  The term Generation Jones was first coined by the cultural commentator Jonathan Pontell, who identified the cohort as those born from 1954 to 1965 in the U.S. who were children during Watergate, the oil crisis, and stagflation rather than during the 1960s, but slightly before Gen X.

Yup, that's about right.

And so is this:

While charismatic leaders like John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. inspired millions of older Boomers to work for — and witness — positive social change, younger Boomers were in preschool or not yet born. Woodstock was a defining moment for older Boomers; younger Boomers have no memories before the Watergate scandal and the cultural cynicism it begat.

Many came of age during the 70s and early 80s. They shared similar pop culture and MTV with Gen X'ers. They were young adults navigating the workforce in the 80s and 90s, but still felt the 2008 economic crisis. This hit them hard because they had to help and advise their older Millennial children while also providing for their younger Gen Z kids.

* * * 

Key characteristics assigned to members are pessimism, distrust of government, and general cynicism.

Yup, again.

And of potential interest: 

Though there are few studies on voting behavior with respect to Gen Jonesers during the 2016 and 2020 election cycles in the U.S., a general distrust of the government and cynical voting behavior tracks well with this cohort's majority support for Donald Trump, who was seen as a boisterous political outsider, in 2016. However, the cohort shifted left 2020: (Mr. Pontell says) Mr. Trump’s fumbling response to the Covid-19 crisis ... hurt him with Jonesers, who are part of the demographic most at risk from the disease ... And ... Mr. Trump’s cruel mocking of Joe Biden’s senior moments (offended them). “There are lots of seniors out there that also have senior moments,” Mr. Pontell says. “They don’t really like the president mocking those one bit.”

If I were to quibble, and indeed I'm inclined to do so, I'd not put the floor in 54, as those folks came of age in 72, when the Vietnam War was still on.  Indeed, I'd put the floor in 56.

Having said that, it's interesting to read this short synopsis, and frankly it has a lot of merit to it.  Taking a look deeper, I'd add a few things, and then I'll expand on that.  Indeed, I think it explains a lot why those of us in this generational cohort bristle at the thought that we're part of the Boomers.

Let's look again.

While charismatic leaders like John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. inspired millions of older Boomers to work for — and witness — positive social change, younger Boomers were in preschool or not yet born. Woodstock was a defining moment for older Boomers; younger Boomers have no memories before the Watergate scandal and the cultural cynicism it begat.

John F. Kennedy was assassinated when I was a few months old. I have no personal memory, rather obviously, of him at all, and the phrase "everyone remembers where they were when Kennedy was shot" might as well be stated about James A. Garfield in so far as my personal memory goes.  And, while it might surprise people who are old enough to remember him, for those of us in my generation he supplies no sort of inspiration at all.  

My mother, I'll note, really admired Kennedy, and continued to admire Jacqueline Kennedy, whom she followed.  My father, however, was never particularly impressed with Kennedy, although a Mass card was among the collection of things in his dresser drawer.  If I heard about a President that my parents both admired at home, it was most likely to be Truman.  What I was left with, regarding Kennedy, is that he was Catholic like us (which my mother would bring up), that he came from a family that my father regarded as a bit dicey in some ways, that he had questionable personal morals, and that he was responsible for the Bay of Pigs invasion, which was stupid.  Lyndon Johnson got better overall marks.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was another matter.  Everyone admired him, but he seemed like a character from the distant past.  Even with King, however, I'm pretty sure all my memories about King came from learning about him in the 1970s, probably starting with junior high or high school, and from the cultural background after he'd been killed.  When he was living, I didn't know of his existence.  Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, at which time I was five, and I have no recollection of it whatsoever, other than that I can remember riots being on television from 67 or 68, and these may have been the 68 riots that followed the assassination of Dr. King.

Indeed, the Civil Right Era, which was in full swing when I was born, seemed like something that had happened within recent American history, but far enough back it was very removed from our modern lives.  That I recall that shows my very early recollections of the times, times that "Baby Boomers" were supposedly living.  The civil rights movement wasn't something I participated in, in any fashion.  Nor was the "Camelot" atmosphere of the Kennedy Administration.

The same thing could be said about the Vietnam War, sort of, modified by the fact that it was really long.  I have some very early recollections of the war, including that a son of the couple who lived across the street was a paratrooper who was serving in Vietnam.  I mostly recall that as he had been dating, literally, the girl next door, and when he went on leave during the war he went to Hawaii, and she flew out to visit him, which was a topic of conversation in my parents home.  I also recall a sign on a door that stated "War is harmful to children and other living things", which I recall as it was such an odd thing to see in a place where nobody outwardly opposed the war.  I was in school at the time, so that may have been actually observed in the 1970s, however.  By the early 70s, and maybe even the late 60s, the background of the war was constant and so even the young were fully aware it was going on.  But it was the defeat of South Vietnam in 1975 that I really recall, although POWs returning in 1973 or so is pretty vivid as well.

The earliest thing of the "60s" I really directly participated in was the July 20, 1969, moon landing, which we watched on television.  Kids were fascinated with space at the time, and we all participated in that.  For me, personally, the next thing I really recall was the televised scenes of Jimi Hendrix playing at Woodstock.  But you really have to get into the 1970s, with the US invasion of Cambodia, that I was old enough to be aware of what was going on in the world and the culture.

That in turn means that it was really all the way into the 1970s before people like me were aware of what was up, and had a feeling about it, and that came with the backdrop of the 1970s.  Indeed, the experience is depicted really well in the television series The Wonder Years, which is specifically set from 1968 to 1973.  That means that it involved children who were older than I was, but the setting was pretty accurate.  And keep in mind, that I'd place the high school graduating class of Generation Jones as starting at 1976, whereas The Wonder Years is dealing with the class of 1974.   I debated where to put that line, but 74, the year after the active participation in the Vietnam War for the US ended, would be another good place to put it.  All in all, it has the feeling right, and the characters would have a little more of the late stages of the Vietnam War whereas folks in my line would have a little more of the rampant inflation of the 70s.

In any event, The Wonder Years does a really good job of showing how the "60s Generation", the real Boomers, were observed from Generation Jones from the outside.  We didn't participate in the events of the 60s, but they were background.  I've touched on this in a way, in a long thread regarding my early years, Growing up in the 1960s.  Indeed, in that I noted:

The Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the (American portion of the) Vietnam War, the Prague Spring, Woodstock, the Stonewall Riots, two Kennedy assassinations, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. . . all of these are things that remain fresh in the nation's memory and as long as there is a member of the Baby Boom generation still with us, they will continue to.  Youth rebellion in the United States and Europe, particularly in Germany and France, combined with a rejection of conventional morality by some of that demographic combined with the introduction of "the pill" also reach back as long influential developments.  Finally, in our list, the Second Vatican Council concluded making changes of debated nature to the practices of the Catholic Church, impacting the 2,000 year old foundational Christian religion in ways that are still being sorted out and which are still hotly debated as to their merits.

So that all must have really been something growing up, right?

Well, that's another topic, isn't it?

We're all impacted by the years in which we grow up. It cannot be denied. I've often noted here that a person's personality is basically fixed by the time they're five, and they're going back to that personality, one way or another, sooner or later.  And part of what influences that personality is the era in which we are young.

But only part, and perhaps not in the way we might imagine.

In really real ways, the central events for the Baby Boom Generation, that defined that generation and its view of the world, were like a hand grenade thrown by that generation and its events into a room we were in.  It blew up on us.

We didn't fight in Vietnam, but might have known somebody who had a family member who did.  The impact of the war on us wasn't the lost cause in Vietnam, but an ineptitude and uncertainty about the American place in the world that followed it.  If it was more direct, it was the Laotian kids at school who showed up and kept to themselves, strangers in a very strange land, guest of the nation that had helped wreck their nation.  Experimentation with drugs wasn't something cool and enlightening, but a cancer that had crept into society and was wiping out the minds of the young, including kids who were hauled out of junior high and high school as they were them.  The revolution of the 60s had torn things down, but it didn't build up anything in its place.  We hadn't participated in the counter culture, but by our early teens we were aware of it, and it had its remnants in the girls who still wore elephant bells after their time had passed.

And we didn't participate in an American economy that was the strongest in the world as the world was still recovering from World War Two. By the time we were young enough to be aware of the economy, it was suffering from inflation 

And all of that gets back to something noted above.  General skepticism.

Like the entry noted, we have memories of Watergate, the Nixon resignation, the failed Carter Administration, the fall of Vietnam, the withdrawal from Saigon, boat people, the Iranian hostage crisis, and rampant inflation.

We're not looking back on that with nostalgia.

We also have memories of lives wrecked with drugs and a drug culture that never went away.  We watched the 60s promise of a "counter culture" kill its members and then continue on to the present day and keep on killing.  We heard of the "sexual revolution" and then grew up to watch it continue to corrode society and carry on to the modern era in which all that some think about is their glands.

And we graduated into an economy with no jobs.  Unlike our older Baby Boomer predecessors, we never enjoyed an economy in which simply holding a college degree meant that a "good job".  We had to scramble to find work, and going to college, in our era, involved none of the revelry that the college experience supposedly had come to mean in the 1960s and 1970s, but a landing approach on an economic carrier in stormy seas . . . maybe you were going to make it, or maybe you were going to wreck.

Indeed, we ended up resembling The Silent Generation more than any other.  That generation came after the "Greatest" Generation that fought World War Two, and experienced that horror, and the Great Depression, as background to their childhood, like we experienced Vietnam, the Counterculture, and the like.  And we were focused, like they were, on getting by.

Also, like the Silent Generation, we didn't have a sense of rebellion against anything. We'd seen that, and it didn't work out, and we bore the brunt of its failures.  The Silent Generation hadn't rebelled against the Greatest Generation or the Lost Generation, the two generations that its parents were drawn from. Generation Jones didn't rebel against the Silent Generation or the Greatest Generation, which its parents were drawn from.  We mostly hoped just to get by, and were very much aware of what had been lost.

We still are.

Prior Threads:

Growing up in the 1960s

Shining shoes.

A video on "fire shining" boots.

Does anyone even do this anymore?

Shine their shoes to a  high polish, that is.

Maybe they do.  I still see shoe shine stands in places like airports, for example, and I see people getting their shoes shined there.  But It's certainly not like it once was.

When I was a kid, my father wore wingtips down to his office nearly every day.  He has a black pair and an oxblood pair.  I associated those sorts of shoes with adult work, as a result. 

He didn't keep them shined to a high polish, but he did polish them relatively regularly.  

Later, when I was a CAP cadet in my mid-teens, I was issued a pair of the then current black Corcoran jump boots, which are I'd note a fine boot.  I'm surprised that we were issued something of such quality, frankly, but we were, which may have been as the USAF issued jump boots to their MPs at the time (they might still, I don't know) and our feet were small.  In retrospect, they had a surprising amount of stuff for small sized servicemen that was issued to the CAP, including Tiger Stripe jungle combat trousers that, if you look it up, were never "official" issue to anyone. Well, be that it may, they had a lot of them and I had several pairs as a result.  

Now, by the way, they're worth a fortune.

I wore mine duck hunting and then, when I grew too big for them (they were really small) I gave them away.

Anyhow, once I had black jump boots I had to learn how to shine them, which I did.

That's the first I'd ever heard of fire shining, as some of the CAP cadet officers were big on stuff like that.  I never did it, and still haven't, as I don't like playing with fire.

I did learn, however, how to polish jump boots to a high shine, something that proved useful when I joined the National Guard, as we were issued black combat boots and the Army was big on shining shoes at the time.

When I mustered out of the Guard I more or less mustered out of regularly shining shoes.  I occasionally shine my cowboy boots and I also will occasionally shine my dress shoes.  I really ought to more often than I do.  I don't shine my boots, i.e., my boots that aren't cowboy boots, ever.  I will occasionally water proof them, however.

Of course, really formal dress shoes are simply worn less often than they once were.  I don't wear mine every day, although I'm sure a week hardly ever goes by when I don't wear them.  Still, I'm not very good about polishing them.

Fire shine?  Well, hardly necessary.  Simply using shoe polishing and buffering gets all the shine you really need.

Chuck 70 vs Basic Chuck Taylors - (CUT IN HALF) - Converse Chuck Taylor ...

Proof, I guess, that things really were better back in the day.

Of course, I don't know why "Chuck 70s", which apparently are marketed as retro Chuck Taylors are a thing, because I didn't know they existed.  

Chuck Taylors were introduced in their current form (from a previous pretty close form) in 1922.

1920 advertisement for the predecessor of the Chuck Taylor, which was formally introduced in 1922.

The shoe itself was introduced as a basketball shoe, even though it'd be nearly impossible to imagine anyone playing basketball wearing them today. They grew to be the basketball standard by the 1960s and had about 80% of the basketball market at the time. They were also very popular in the mid 20th Century with young adults and teenagers, and fit in a bit with the postwar Levis and leather jacket image.  

In the 60s and 70s, when I was growing up, you felt lucky if your parents would buy you a pair, rather than the lesser "Keds", which we usually ended up with.  They were also popular with adults, to some degree, as fishing shoes, for those who waded in streams and rivers but who didn't wear waders, or were forgoing them for some reason.

That was before the running style shoe became popular in the late 70s and basically pushed them out.

They've bounced in and out of popularity since them.  

Wednesday, June 30, 1971. Dropping the voting age to 18, Soviet Space Disaster, the Pentagon Papers.

On this day in 1971 Congress ratified the 26th Amendment to the United States Constitution which dropped the voting age from 21 to 18.

Marine Corps position in Vietnam, 1967.

The Vietnam War, and the increasing involvement of young Americans in protesting it, really caused the change to come about.  18 was the conscription age, which thereby made men that age liable for combat, and there was a widespread feeling that you couldn't really justly ask people to potentially go to their deaths for a country and not let the same people vote in its elections.  That logic was pretty solid really, even though as a practical historical fact very few 18 year olds served in Vietnam.  That point, while correct, is really irrelevant, however. The larger point, that you could require people to divert from their plans and force them to serve in the military, but they couldn't vote, didn't make a lot of sense and Congress recognized that fact.

Indeed, the voting age was really a carryover from a much older era in which the drafters of the Constitution paternalistically felt that a lot of people couldn't vote as they didn't have the mental maturity before a certain age or,  in other instances, because of their gender. Women couldn't vote, originally, at any age.  And the feeling in Colonial times that only propertied men could vote was widespread.

Indeed, in English speaking countries the concept that a person became an adult at age 18 was not the norm and is somewhat of an American oddity.  Ultimately it came to be the widespread view, but that was in no small part due to World War One. The English, for example, originally viewed 21 years of age as the service age, although it accepted the oddity of allowing parents to enlist their children, without the children agreeing to it, down to about age 13, if I recall correctly. Be that as it may, younger enlistees were not supposed to serve outside of Great Britain, although it occasionally occurred. The Great War changed all that.

The United States really started off with this view, which reflected, to some degree, its origin as an agrarian nation.  Contrary to widespread believe, youthful marriage was not an American norm and early in the country's history a man of 18 or 19 was most probably working on his parent's farm, or perhaps apprenticed to a nearby tradesman.  He wasn't out on his own, normally, and he wasn't in the Army, which was so small as to be nearly nonexistent, as we covered here the other day.   That started to increasingly change with industrialization and when the formal public school system became universal by the 20th Century the distinct concept of a person graduating from high school and into the adult world arrived.

By and large, however, people usually didn't.  Most 18 year olds who graduated, which was a minority of men well into the 20th Century, still went into nearby work and they weren't setting up their own households. The real separation of generations, as noted, began with World War One. Following that, the Roaring Twenties briefly started what the 1960s would more fully develop, which was the concept of leaving home to go to university.  The Depression put an end to the Jazz Age abruptly, but World War Two massively introduced the idea that at age 18, you were an adult.  It not only did that, it massively separated teenagers from their homes and, if they weren't in the service, many were in university on their way to the service.  The war also boosted youthful marriage, briefly, as people rushed into adulthood not knowing how long the war would last.

Coming out of the Second World War the trend continued with the GI Bill and the concept of "graduating from high school and going to college" really set in.  My own father was the first in his family to do that (my mother's parents, in contrast, were both university graduates from the 1910s, something extraordinarily unusual at the time).  He was somewhat compelled to do so, however, by family pressure and circumstances.  My grandfather had died and with him my father's probable future employment.  My father's Irish American mother, to whom he was close, had already seen him enter "junior college" and when my grandfather died she wouldn't allow my father to retain a job he'd taken with the Post Office and required him to move on, on the basis that "he was too intelligent" to work the job that he'd been comfortable with.  He was a genius, so perhaps her view had merit.  We'll deal with that another day.

My father, like many men of his generation, went right from university, where he'd obtained a DDS degree, into the service, in his case the Air Force.  After his Air Force service, however, he came back home and was living at home when he met and married my mother. That retained pattern of life remained common as well.

But by the 1960s things were really changing.  And Congress followed the change.  On this day in 1971, the voting age became 18 years of age.  Only nine Congressman and two Senators voted against it.

I recall this actually occurring. In 1971 I was a grade school student and it was the talk of the school.  The fact that all of us very young people thought it was a great idea, and that even then we associated it with the Vietnam War, shows to what extent that must have been the view of our parents.

It should be noted that right about this time, although I don't recall exactly when, the Wyoming state legislature dropped the drinking age to 19 years of age. The rationale was exactly the same.  Wyoming had only one military base, but the thought was that you really couldn't ask people to go off and fight in Vietnam and tell them they were too  young to have a beer.  It frankly makes some sense.  The neighboring state of South Dakota dropped it to 18.  I don't know why Wyoming didn't go that low, but the thought of having people in high school young enough to drink probably had something to do with it.  As it was, the drop in the age came to mean that there was almost no drinking age as a practical matter.

Of course, over time, things change in various and interesting ways.  The Federal Government came about and ultimately punished states that had dropped their drinking ages with the threat of withholding highway funds, so they all boosted them back up to 21.  Wyoming did so only very reluctantly and nearly didn't.  In the end, however, it came around.  Conscription came to an end with the end of the Vietnam War, although men and women can still enlist at age 18.  On base, those in the service could drink at the 1-2-3 clubs by my recollection, irrespective of age and state law, although only 3.2 beer.  I don't know if that's still true or not.

The big change, however, is that the older pattern of living, with adult children living at home, has returned in a major way as the post World War Two economy finally ground to a halt in the last quarter of the 20th Century.  A matter of constant speculation by the press as a "new" development, it's nothing of the kind, but rather a return to prior days.

On the same day, the crew of the Soviets Soyuz 11 spacecraft were all killed in reentry, a horrible tragedy that I can can also recall being talked about at the time.  Interestingly, while we feared the Soviets, the heartache over the disaster was so palatable that I can still feel it, in thinking of it.  May God rest the souls of the Cosmonauts who perished so tragically on that day.

Also on this day, the United States Supreme Court found the New York Times publishing of the "Pentagon Papers" to be constitutionally protected by rejecting a Federal government effort at imposing an injunction on it as an unconstitutional instance of illegal prior restraint.

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-être 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 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

Is her career choice absurd?

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.

Queen Elizabeth visiting war wounded in Canada when she was much younger, obviously.

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.

Me and my father at the fish hatchery in 1966 or 1967.

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.

Anyhow, while was only due to the recent conversation that I had noted on another one of our blogs that I recalled it, my thinking was pretty similar to my father's.  The law would bring me back here and as close to my feral state as an adult as I was in my youth. Or so I thought.

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.

In Memoriam. Hank Aaron.

Hank Aaron died yesterday.  The two years leading up to his breaking Babe Ruth's homerun record are an enduring memory of my youth.  I'm actually surprised to realize that I was only 11 years old when that occurred.

A really good account of that can be found here:

Hank Aaron, 1934-2021

Forty years ago right now I was between my junior and senior years of high school trying to decide what I was going to do for a living.

I knew that I was going to college after high school, and for that matter, I knew that I was going in the fall.  I only had half days my senior year, so I had registered for the community college to get a jump start on my college "career".

My old high school, prior to renovations, at night.  Up until my last year of high school I'd been on the swim team and saw a lot of the building from this prospective as we had early, early morning practices and evening practices too.

In 1980 I wasn't sure what that career would really consist of.

Earlier, when I was in grade school and junior high, I'd thought I wanted to join the Army and have a military career.  Even by junior high, however, that desire was somewhat waning and by the time I had entered high school, and the immediate post school world became more real, that desire was rapidly diminishing.  I still thought of entering the service, but probably following graduating from college and maybe not for a career.  Indeed, at that time my immediate plan was to go to UW and join Army ROTC, although I'd avoid JrROTC in high school.   The loose thought, at the time, was that I'd major in wildlife biology and after a stint in the Army, I'd either get out and get into the Wyoming Game & Fish Department or make a twenty year career of the Army and then do that.

I didn't do either of those things.

In 1980 I knew that what I wanted was an outdoor life.

What I really loved was hunting, fishing and being out in nature.  I didn't want to be indoors.  I didn't at that time even know how to tie a tie, and as my high school graduation the following year would show, I was in the class of people who were so unfamiliar with formal clothes that I couldn't wear them and look unnatural. 

Next month will be the 30th anniversary of my admission to the bar.  I've worked indoors now for thirty years.

How did that happen?

It's weird looking back as even now that's really not apparent. 

What I do know is that I changed my views on attending UW in the fall by August of 1981.  I went down to the orientation and didn't like it, so I enrolled at Casper College instead.  I enrolled, moreover, as a geology student as my father had related to me how there were a lot of guys around with wildlife management degrees who didn't find work, and I didn't want that to happen.  My plan then was to do two years at CC and then go down to US and I still planned on enrolling in ROTC. 

Me as a geology student.  I'm one of those people in the photo.

However, the same summer I enlisted in the National Guard for a six year term of enlistment. That really wouldn't have kept me from joining ROTC but by the time I went down to UW two years later I knew that I really didn't want an Army career.  It wasn't that I didn't like the National Guard, I did.  It's that I didn't need to be an Army officer to know what being an Army officer was like, and that I had no interest in that as a career.  The Guard served me really well in a lot of ways, that being one of them.

Geology was my choice as it was still outdoors.  Living in a state in which extractive industries are such a big deal, it seemed like a safe employment choice. But the bust cycle was setting in even by the time I was getting ready to graduate from CC and it was fully in by the time I was ready to graduate at UW.

Geology building class room, 1986.

Law school as an option first occurred to me as a suggestion from a CC professor.  I didn't know it at the time, but the professor, a history professor, was a licensed lawyer.  I was surprised by it as I conceived of studying law as being really difficult and lawyers as being really smart, but I did toy with the idea a bit.  In part I did that as my father was a professional and an outdoorsman and so were a lot of his friends.  I was also worrying, by that point , how employable I was going to be. And I knew, by that point, that getting a job in geology meant going on to grad school and I had real personal doubts about whether I'd be able to get in, and if I did, whether I'd be able to make it through, geology grad school.

Frankly, I could have on both points, but at that point in time I labored under the burden of scholastic myths more than reality.  When I did take the geology GRE I did really well and in retrospect the worries were self created.  The same year I took those I took the LSAT, not really expecting to do well, but I did.  I told myself that if I got into law school, and I only applied to one, I'd go.  I did, so I did.

M110 howitzer.  I was an artilleryman.

I didn't know any lawyers personally when I went to law school and I never bothered to ask them anything about what being a lawyer was like. That was an odd way to go about that, I guess, but then in the thirty years of doing this, I've only been asked what practicing law was like by young people perhaps two or three times.  Indeed, of younger people I remotely know whom I know to be interested in the law, none of them have asked me nor, to my knowledge, any other lawyer.

But then I never asked any game wardens what being a game warden was like.  In later years, when speaking to them, a couple of them have related a daily life much different than I would have anticipated.  And for that matter I never spoke to any geologist either.  I had spoken to soldiers, however, just because in those days it seemed like most men had been in the service.

And so, thirty years, thousands of depositions, lots of trials, and countless office hours later, here I am.

Is there a moral to this story?  I don't know that there is, other than like the they sing in Truckin:

Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me
Other times, I can barely see
Lately, it occurs to me
What a long, strange trip it's been 

Or maybe that's just lame.

It's funny how we get where we are going sometimes without realizing that we're getting there, and when we get there, we're not only a lot further along than we realize, but it'd be pretty hard to get back.

Amen, amen, I say to you,j when you were younger, you used to dress yourself and go where you wanted; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.

John  21:18.

None of this, I suspect, is uncommon.

Debbie Harry turns 75 today.

The band Blondie in 1977, Debbie Harry front and center.

Debbie Harry, the central figure for the band Blondie, turns 75 years old today.

In the 1970s I was a big fan of the band.  Blondie fit in, in terms of the evolution of my musical taste, between Rock and Roll from the 1950s, swing and jazz (all of which I liked before "New Wave"), and Jimi Hendrix and the blues.

I have eclectic musical taste.

In that period, I really liked some New Wave bands, of which I liked Blondie the best.  I still have all their original albums.  

I still like Blondie, although their star faded for me a bit in the late 1970s when I was tasked to be the music reviewer for my high school newspaper.  Taking on the task in the late 1970s very early 1980s  meant that you were going to have to review "hard rock" and "heavy metal" albums, neither of which I've ever developed a taste for.  Knowing that I didn't really know that much about them other than a passing familiarity with what was then current in those genres, I did a little research on the, which was something much, much harder to do then than now.  No Internet.

That research lead me to Jimi Hendrix, which I think some fellow musically knowledgeable student lead me to.  I had to buy an album to know anything about his music, and that frankly blew me away.  Hendrix is, to this day, by far my most favorite musician.  Hendrix in turn lead me directly to the blues, which is by far my most favorite musical genre.  In spite of how he may be remembered, Hendrix was basically a blues musician.

But I retain a soft spot for Blondie.  And even a little bit of a soft spot for music that was in the same orbit at the time.

Nothing better serves to make you feel old, than to realize that pop figures you admired are old.

I remember it.

The event referred to here, that is:

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.

Engineers of the 11th ACR sweeping for mines ahead of a M551 Sheridan.

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.

Our house in about 1958. This was before my birth.  My mother is to the left of the house, the only ones my parents ever owned.

That's interesting in a way as over time there's come to be a genera of literature that reflects childhood memories of war, and mostly of World War Two.  And when I say that, I mean American memories.  Europeans and Asians who were 6 or 7 definately have memories of World War Two as there wasn't a square inch of Europe that wasn't impacted by the war.  Even lands where a German jackboot never set foot, or where Japanese infantry never trod, were heavily impacted directly by the war.  The British were bombed and sent their children, if they could, to the countryside.  Swedes lived on short rations, pinned into between the Germans in occupying Norway and the war raging on the Finnish/Soviet border.  Swiss rations in the neutral nation became so short that serious worries over starvation set in and commons gardening became common.  And of course if you were in an area where ground forces contested for ground or even occupied it the events were unforgettable.

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?

11th ACR in Cambodia.

Well, a lot in terms of my recollection of this day.

We grade school boys were familiar with war, as in "the war", and that war was World War Two.  Some of us had fathers who had been in World War Two, although they were older fathers, keeping in mind that in that era people had larger families and children stretched out over their parent's lifespans often differently than they do now.  It wasn't unusual for a grade school kid to have a father who had been in World War Two, and indeed my closest friend's father had been in the ETO during the war.  The dominance of World War Two in the culture, however, may be shown by the fact that I had a father who had been in the Korean War and I still thought of World War Two as "the war" and my father more or less did as well, which is odd to realize in that it wasn't just him, but others of his age and equivalent experience who took that view.  Indeed, it seems to me that it wasn't until right about this time, 1970, that the started to talk about their own war at all, and indeed also about this time it began to creep into the culture as background elements in popular stories.

Adding to this was the impact of popular culture.  As noted, the movie The Longest Day was such a big deal that it sticks out in my mind as something shown on television around 1969, probably in a network premier.  The movie Patton, one of the most celebrated American military movies of all time, was released in April 1970, and indeed its sometimes noted that President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger watched a private screening of it just shortly before U.S. armor went into Cambodia, although the suggestion that this influenced Nixon seems specious to me, the invasion having been something that events were working up to since the mid 60s and which had been ongoing for weeks prior to the US putting its forces in.  In other media, kids who liked cartoon books, which I never have, circulated such works as Sergeant Rock or GI Combat, both of which were set in World War Two.

So, for a 6 and 7 year old boy, we knew about wars, in the childish youthful glorification of war sense that has been a common feature of the play of boys since the dawn of man, but the war we knew about was a movie and cartoonish version of World War Two.

On May 1, 1970 I watched Gilligan's Island.  Following that McHale's Navy came on and I started watching that.  My father got home almost immediately after McHale's Navy started and switched the channel to the news, over my protest.  To my shock, the news featured M113 Armored Personnel Carriers crossing a river.  

I was stunned and asked my father "what's that?".  It looked like something out of The Longest Day.  I can't recall his exact words but he told me that the scene depicted US troops in action in Cambodia.

The fact that it had an impact is best demonstrated that fifty years later, I still recall it.  It was unsettling.  Even at 6 it was obvious that the school yard games we played in which the Allies and the Axis duked it out in Europe and Asia 30 years prior were being overshadowed by a real war in our own era.  People were fighting and it wasn't a game.

It was a type of epiphany, to be sure.  But a person needs to be careful about claiming too much.  It isn't as if at nearly age 7 I suddenly became keenly aware of everything going on in Indochina.  But suddenly I was much more aware of something that had actually been playing in the background my entire life.  Indeed, as it was in the background, but subtle, and often limited at that age to a short snipped on the nightly news that was often devoid of any real engaging footage, it was just something, up until then, that was.

Of course, while 7 years old isn't old, even at 7 your early early childhood years are waning.  The next five years in Vietnam, only three of which had a large scale American presence, were ones that were hard not to be aware of.  The unrelated but still huge news event of Watergate was impossible not to be aware of.  And by the time the Republic of Vietnam started collapsing in 1975, I was old enough to be very much aware of it.

But that awareness started on this day in 1970.

_______________________________________________________________________________
Related thread:

Growing up in the 1960s