The traffic circle.

 

Amen, amen, I say to you, 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, Chapter 21.

The theme of this week, I fear. 

Approximately 30 years ago, I was presented with an opportunity that I desired greatly to take.  It was, however, irresponsible in about every way a serious person would regard something to be irresponsible.  I accepted it, and then back out.

It was a mistake.

History does not really repeat, as they say, but rhymes. 

This week, I'll start dealing right off the bat with a crisis, and it's a multi party crisis.  From crisis, comes opportunity of all sorts, and if not traveling into a fork in the road, I'm definitely traveling into a traffic circle.

I know with certainty which road I want to take, and that it goes where I want to go, and it can be travelled.

I also know that another road is the responsible one, in every conventional fashion.  That will be the one I'm expected to take.  And even now, that's the one I'm going to.

But I don't want to.

And that will be a mistake.

Reserve Retirement & Regrets.

It dawned on me the other day that if I'd stayed in the National Guard, I'd have been able to start drawing Reserve retirement pay starting in late May.

Even though I was in the Guard for six years, I've never really been able to grasp how Guard retirement pay works.  I tried to look it up this morning, and learned that it's on a point system, one of those nifty military devices that has been around since at least World War Two in some ways.  The system by which soldiers who fought in the ETO were eligible to go home, for example, when the war ended was based on points.

Anyhow, there are some really useful net articles on this topic, of which this is one:

A Quick Overview of How Active Duty and Reserve Retirement is Calculated

What I ended up with, in the end, was this useful rough example, from the above:

The Final Pay Pension

Whatever max pay you find for that rank, multiply it by the service percent multiplier and round it down to the nearest dollar.

That’s your monthly pension.

For an E-7 with 2134 points starting their pension in 2016 it’d be $5061.30 * .1482 = $750/month.

Of course, you wonder how this applies to yourself.  I was an E5 when I got out, and would have had to have gone (and should have already gone) to the NCO Academy if I was to carry on.  Indeed, for the last half of my time in the Guard, I was in an E7 slot for much of that time.  

Had I stayed in, I would have gone to Officers Candidate School.  It would not have made sense not to, and I was eligible to do so.  One of my good friends from the Guard did do so, and he retired from the Guard as a Colonel after reaching age 60.

Without trying to really figure the math, I think I likely would have drawn, had I taken that course, and assuming that I didn't take a grenade in a street in Iraq or Afghanistan, would have been around $1,000 to $1,500 per month.

Not bad, but not enough to live on, which, of course for reserve service, makes sense.

Some reservists, I should note, draw considerably more and even approach Regular retirement pay as they have so many active duty points.  That would have made a difference, as our Guard units did serve in Afghanistan and Iraq, although not every soldier in the local units served in both. Some did.  Some did more than one tour in one of those countries, for that matter.

Here's a big thing, however.

All retired National Guard and Reserve members and their eligible family members may participate in a TRICARE health plan. You have access to certain services and health care benefits based on your age, retiree status, and location. 

• You may get care at military hospitals and clinics if space is available. 

• You remain eligible for the TRICARE Pharmacy Program. 

• You may choose to purchase dental and vision coverage through the Federal Employees Dental and Vision Insurance Program (FEDVIP).

That alone makes me wish I'd stayed in the Guard and gone to OCS.  I wouldn't be retired in the real sense now, but in real terms, I'd be a lot better off insurance wise.

Or so I say. At age 24, when I ETSed, I don't know that insurance was on my mind.  

Well, I know it wasn't.

I also know that our full time NCS who was our Retention NCO wasn't doing a good job.

Moonlight Graham and other lessons. At some point, you are stuck in your career.

Archibald "Moonlight" Graham.

Maybe I don't watch enough television to catch them, or maybe the recent financial crises and the pandemic put the brakes on them, but there used to be a lot of financial planner advertisements based on the theme that you could retire into a new exciting career of some sort.  You know, you worked hard but invested wisely, and now you were a rancher in Monument Valley (where the locals probably regard you as an interloping menace).

M'eh.

Probably, the story of Archibald "Moonlight" Graham is more realistic.

Anyone who has watched Field Of Dreams is familiar with it.  Graham, we learn, played but a single season in the major leagues and got up to bat just once.  After that season, he chose to leave baseball, knowing, the film tells us, that he'd be sent back to the minor leagues, and he just couldn't stand the thought, so he opted to move on, pursuing a career instead of being a physician, an occupation that he occupied for over fifty years in Chisholm, Minnesota.

Graham was a real character, and really did play one season in the major leagues and really did go on to a very lengthy career as a physician in Chisholm, Minnesota.   The film, however, is centered on regrets, and Graham plays into that.

In the film, and presumably the book, the main protagonist is an Iowa farmer who starts hearing voices in his corn field.  At first, the voices have him build a baseball field, promising "if you build it, he will come". The "he" turns out to be Shoeless Joe Jackson, famously banned from baseball due to the 1919 Black Sox scandal.  Jackson brings in the Black Sox, who in turn start holding games against another ghostly team, given as they're all years past their deaths.  The voice returns and tells Kinsella, the farmer, to "ease his pain", which ends up taking him on a cross-country journey in which he picks up a self urban exiled urban author, Terrance Mann, and a trip to a ballgame, at which they see the statistics for Graham.  They go on to Chisholm, Minnesota, to find that he had died years earlier, only to find Kinsella nocturnally transported back to the early 1970s in which he encounters the elderly Graham, who in reality died in 1965.  Graham declines to go with Kinsella and Mann, noting that it would have been a tragedy if he'd only gotten "to be a doctor for one day", his having become so central to the lives of the town's residents.

But then, traveling back to Iowa the next day, they encounter a youthful hitchhiking Graham, who goes back to the field with them and plays on the team of ghosts, apparently actually in reality regretting his having been deprived of a major league career.

The entire move Field Of Dreams is about broken dreams.  It's all about regret.  Every character in the film is full of regrets.  Kinsella regrets having departed company with his father, a former professional ball player, on harsh terms and not getting to apologized before he dies.  Mann, a disenchanted author, regrets not having meaningful writing to carry on with.  Jackson regrets having been banned from baseball.  All of them feature redemption in the form of a second chance at redressing their regrets.

I love the movie, and always have, but it's a dark film in some ways.  Almost every single character in it, no matter how cheerful they are, and they're all cheerful, is laboring under monumental internal regrets.  They're provided a chance to banish the regret, but only through Devine intervention, allowing a redress across time.

Field Of Dreams isn't the only movie that deals with regret, and even Divine intervention, but it's the only one that I'm aware of in which average characters are plagued with it and can only address it in such an intervention.  The closest portrayal of a similar topic of which I'm aware is It's A Wonderful Life, in which the protagonist is about to kill himself after years of hard work at a saving and loan business he was basically forced into due to the untimely death of his father.  In that film, however, a hapless angel takes him back through the lives of everyone he touched to show him how much worse the lives of those he impacted would be had he not been there.  Mr. Holland's Opus is another work that has a similar theme, but with no Divine intervention, in which the dream of the protagonist is shattered by a personal tragedy, but his work, opus, becomes a huge impact on everyone around him.  I like both of those films as well, but not as much, and frankly find them dispiriting for all of the wrong reasons.¹ I probably shouldn't, as the message of both is profoundly Christian and, well, perhaps this below best expresses it.

A film that takes a distinctly different approach from either is Will Penny, which is a great film.  In that film circumstances show an aging single cowboy, who has worked his entire life in that role, what life would have been like had he married and had a family that cared about him.  Right up until the end of the film it seems that, now that the opportunity seems to be unfolding, he'll take it, but as it turns out, knowing that it has in reality passed him by, he regrets his decision, but determines to ride off and live with it.  It's just too late.

Which brings me to this observation.

Recently, or so it seems to me, once you are over 50, and truth be known at some point earlier than that, unless your big planned career change is one involving only self-employment and doesn't depend much on your physical health, you're pretty much stuck with what you are doing.

The first time that really became evident to me in any fashion, oddly enough, was when I was in my 30s and practicing law.  My late mother had a friend who grew up on a ranch and had always wanted to return to his former life.  He'd had a long career as a banker, but now, in his 70s, he was trying to return with what was really a hobby farm.  He wasn't well enough to do it, and his wife was crippled, so their location out of town was imperiling her health.  My mother, who was extremely intelligent but often based her assumptions about somebody based on externals, kept referencing him as a "rancher", which he wasn't.  He was still employed at the bank, and it was a hobby farm that was failing.

He moved off of it soon after my mother first referenced him in conversation, and died soon thereafter.

Why, other than that it's always been obvious to anyone who knows me that my internal vocation is one that involves animals and wild country, she pointed that out, I don't know.  Probably as she conceived of him as somebody who had combined a city job, banking, with a rural vocation, "ranching" (actually farming), he was, to her, a model of what I could do.  My mother was always proud of the fact that I'd become a lawyer and quick to tell anyone that, even though its something I never bring up myself and tend to reveal, to strangers, only if asked.  That probably concerned her some as she wondered why somebody who had obtained such an admirable, in her view, professional degree would want to do something that in her personal experience was of a lower status.²  The point was made, as it seemed to make sense to her that a person could pursue agriculture as a hobby while admirably employed in a profession.

I viewed the banker as somebody who'd led an existentially failed vocation, banking, and was trying to make amends too late.

That's a pretty harsh judgement, but I've always been sort of "no quarters" in my view of some things, including myself.  Now, some 30 years later, I could easily say the same thing about me, and be quite correct.  I've had a long and respected career as a lawyer, which has not involved animals whatsoever, or wild country.  I've also been a stockman for most of that time, which does.  But my being a stockman is sort of a second activity, made possible as my in laws are the full time stockmen, and I'm part-time.  I don't regard that as a personal success, but a personal failure. There's no two ways about it.

For all of my time as a lawyer, I've dreamed of being a judge. That's the sort of dream that's puts you in Moonlight Graham territory as chances are, you aren't going to make it.  I first tried to make that switch when I'd only been practicing a few years, at which time, unbeknownst to me, experienced lawyers regarded that as impossible as you needed experience.

Later on I had the experience and applied several times, and passed by some as well.  I passed by one as I knew that somebody putting in was so close to an influential figure that he'd get it, which he did.  I hope that figure realizes that, even now, he's indebted to an accident of employment for his current position.  

The time I first came pretty close, I nonetheless didn't make it to one of the three finalist.  A friend did.  It was surreal, however, as I received calls from those close to the process informing me I should expect to be one of the three finalists.  I received direct information that I'd interviewed very well.  When I didn't get it, and another position soon came up, I was called by a host of individuals who were within the system and urged to apply, which I had not intended to do.  I did, and didn't make the finals again.

Over time, I've watched the process and realized that politics, which weren't really evident to me early on, played very much a part.  One Governor in this time frame had an expressed preference for appointing women, as he thought the bench lacked them and needed them.  Over time, it became apparent that women stood a much better chance than men of getting appointed.  Well, he's the chooser, so I guess he gets to choose as he will.

The more recent Governor has favored very young appointees and ones who had criminal law experience.  I'm no longer young, I'll be 60 next month, and I don't have criminal law experience.  Nonetheless, I put in one last time when I was probably 58.  Totally pointless.

Since that time, I've awkwardly appeared in front of the very young judge.  That judge may turn out to be great, but the judge confessed that the hearing we were at was the first of the type the judge had ever experienced, and the judge wasn't quite sure what to do.  I'll give that judge credit for that.  Not everyone would admit that.

Well, at 60, I'm not putting in anymore.  I'd have to retire at 70, and I'd never get selected.  Oh, well.

I'm not the only one in that position.  At least one other friend of mine has the same experience.  Whenever we've talked about it, we always express it in an "oh well", we didn't expect to get it anyhow, and we still have our careers.  But frankly, in my case, it's another career failure.  I'll go to my grave as a lawyer knowing that whatever I achieved, I didn't achieve what I'd hoped to, long ago.

Sic transit Gloria Mundi.

Being almost 60, I'm at the age where law journals have articles that claim people like me can have exciting second careers.  What they always entail, however, is some lawyer who moved from litigation combat to telling his younger lawyers how to engage in litigation combat, or some lawyer who moved from a big first into one that his son or daughter has, to mentor them.  I guess that's sort of a second career, but it really isn't.  It's more like going from being the team manager to the pitching coach.  You are still showing up wearing pinstripes and a ball cap for the team.  And frankly for the overwhelming majority of lawyers in the current legal environment, where it's hard to find a younger lawyer to even hire, it's not realistic.

What's notable about those articles is nobody ever suggests that any of the lawyers that they reference really were able to make a radical shift in the field.  None of the Old Hands, for instance, went from practice to teaching.  They keep practicing. At most, you see some who went from litigation to transactional within their firms.

And that's about as realistic as that gets.  Not that such a transition is meaningless, a lawyer I knew personally who practiced into his 90s had done a similar thing at age 60, and just all of a sudden.  The same lawyer, however, had wanted to be a doctor but found his dreams dashed by World War Two, during which he served in the Navy.  Coming back, the lost years didn't leave him time, he felt, to do what he wanted to do.  Indeed, everything about his educational path changed.

What this does do, however, is point out the reinforcing nature of occupations over time.  When the ABA, for instance, runs articles about second careers for lawyers, it's acknowledging that lawyers are looking for second careers, and telling them to stuff it, they're lawyers.  Not that this is a surprise as after a person has been practicing for a while, and I'm sure this is true of every other occupation, you're defined in that role.  I've ridden up to cow camps on trail after having been in the field for days, dressed as a cow hand, and covered with grime, only to be identified as "oh, you're the lawyer".  People who know me only casually from work, when they want to chat, open up topics on legal themes, assuming, logically enough, that what I'd really like to do in the evening while enjoying a cocktail (or more likely a Saturday afternoon at the hardware store) is chat about the law.

Societal expectations, therefore, become reinforcing.  You may have a diesel mechanics certificate, but if your prospective employer finds out you're a 50-year-old lawyer, or 40-year-old lawyer, forget it.  You're not getting hired as a diesel mechanic.

Radical changes, unless, again, they involve self-employment, age out.  I knew one lawyer who became a partner in a small drilling company, but that was a species of self-employment backed by the fact that a collection of business associated had the money, along with him, to invest to start up.  Another who had worked for years in a bank, then entered private practice, did it only briefly before returning to the bank. The brief taste of practice was enough.  One I personally knew dropped out of practice to become a teacher, and one I sort of knew did the same, but they were in their 40s at the time, with time still being available to them to do that.  Probably in their 50s, they wouldn't have been hired.

As I mentioned outdoor professions, one thing I'll note is that the Federal ones have age caps, in some areas, the Federal Government being an employer that can still officially do that.  State ones don't tend to have official ones, but they do have unofficial ones.  Federal ones tend to be based on retirement.  If you can't make 20 years by 60, you aren't getting in.  

One that surprised me recently, quite frankly, was the Ukrainian Foreign Legion.  Its age cap is 55, which is pretty old actually for entering military service, but it's only taking veterans (and only combat veterans, it claims).  Ukrainians men are liable for military service up to age 60s, but Ukraine isn't taking in any old soldiers from other lands.  That probably makes sense, really, as you don't know these guys and can't really vet them much before they show up.  Some vets of other armies, such as my self, are in pretty good physical health and probably could endure a combat environment just fine (maybe), others have grown sick, tired or fat, and couldn't.  There's no point in investing in somebody, whose going to die of a heart attack one week out.

Still, it's interesting as there are so many Western army veterans who trained to fight the very army the Ukrainians are fighting, more or less.  We didn't, thank goodness, fight them in the 80s, and we're not going to be fighting them, it appears, now.

Interestingly, the Canadian Army takes in older enlistees now.  I don't know how old, but the cutoff age is something like 57 or 58.  But those enlistees have to make it through basic training in the Canadian Forces.  Apparently Canadian soldiers are part of the general Canadian government old age pension system, and the Canadian government figures they can get a couple of years out of any who make it through basic, which is probably about what they get out of an average enlistee anyway.

As we live in the age of certification, many jobs that were open to people 30 years ago, when I first started practicing law, have had the doors slammed shut if you don't have perfect certification.  I know of one such field that loosely interpreted its certification requirements 30 years ago and now very strictly construes them. 

Added to that, of course, is the impact of income and influence of disbelief.  A professional changing jobs may be enamored with the idea of it, but it's pretty likely that his family, most particularly his spouse, isn't.  That's also why most of the real changes, such as for example the instance I know of in which a lawyer became a fireman, happen pretty early in careers.  Most professionals don't make the loot that people think they do, particularly when they start out, unless they're recruited into a really high test outfit.  Indeed, the one fellow I know who fits that description looks so stressed all the time, I wouldn't be too surprised if his heart just burst out of his chest in a deposition, and he died on the spot.  For most younger lawyers/doctors/accountants, etc., they're not pulling in the big bucks early on.  At that point, obligations aside, they can make a change as they aren't going to be hurt on a day-to-day basis much.

Obligations, however, change options enormously.  Student debt keeps a lot of people in jobs as they have to pay for their educations.  By the time they have the debt paid off, chances are they have a family and a mortgage, and that keeps them in place.  Most spouses have a low tolerance for dropping family income enormously and while early on couples may endure hardships bounded together by true love, later on the spouse who isn't proposing to drop household income will regard it as insane, bound down by practicalities and perhaps duty to the offspring of the marriage.  Shakespeare claimed that "conscience does make cowards of us all", but debt and expenditures have a big role in that.

So too has the return to long family ties of the pre World War Two era and the insurance system of the post World War Two era.  Couple of the 50s, 60s and 70s pretty much saw their children blast into independence as soon as they were 18, and more than a few families didn't feel the slightest bit of guilt about basically kicking children out into the cold world once they were that age.  It was quite normal.  Now it isn't, but then it really wasn't before 1940 either.  Be that as it may, that has brought about a return to the situation in which the family bread winner retains some financial responsibility all the way into his kid's late 20s, which not only means late career, but it can be career extending, as people can't quite what they are otherwise doing.  I know that I wanted my father to retire when he hit 60, and he wouldn't.  But I'd been paying my own freight by that time, at least partially, for quite a while and knew that I could pull it all.

Or so I thought.  He probably didn't think that, making him an example of somebody who probably was looking at things just the way I do know, right up until he died at age 62, having never retired.

Insurance is another matter.  In the American system you can go on Medicare at age 65, but prior to that, health care is your own problem, and it's expensive.  It interestingly gets expensive for most people right about the time that you really need it for the second time in your life, the first time being when women are of child bearing years.  Switching from one job to another, where health insurance is covered in one, and isn't in another, is pretty hard for most people. Quite a few people keep on keeping on for years until they qualify for Medicare.⁴

And self-determination, which a lot of us aren't that good at, plays a major role.  You are always faced with decisions when they come up, and you make them, usually, on what is important right then.  Personally, the door did open for me to an outdoor career with an agency right after I had become engaged.  It involved a massive income drop and a very uncertain future, as it started off with a temporary position. The responsible thing to do, it seemed to me (and it would seem to most) was to forego it, which I did.

Twice wars came up after I had left the National Guard, and in both instances I tried to get in them.  That has something to do with being trained to fight.  In the first Gulf War I made contact right away with my old Guard unit, but it wasn't called up as it had just switched from heavy artillery to rocketry and wasn't combat ready.  The second time I contacted them as well, and then a Colorado infantry unit being deployed, but the first one wasn't called up, and the second one didn't need any artillerymen.  As the wars dragged on, it just didn't seem like there was a real reason to join, and I didn't.  The door, however, was open in that second instance and I didn't walk through it. At some point it slammed shut due to age, just has it has now for the Ukrainian forces.  Немає (no) you are too old, age cap at 55.  Будь ласка? (Please?).  Nope, but here's some equipment we need you can buy.  (Seriously, they suggested some sort of optical equipment, or a drone.  I dread to think how much a drone might cost).

And so, the lesson's learned?

Édith Piaf famously sang Je Ne Regrette Rien, but if you look at her life, I'll be she did, and plenty of them.  Not that she's a model of an average or even somewhat typical life.  Moonlight Graham probably is in many ways, which is probably why the character appeals so much.  Maybe everyone watching Field Of Dreams feels that way a little.  Maybe not, but I'll bet plenty identify with that character more than any other in the film.

I don't know if most men really lead lives of quiet desperation, but I do suspect that a lot of people highly respected in their careers have unresolved paths they didn't take.  That doesn't mean that they didn't enjoy their careers.  It may mean they have large or small reservations about the paths they took.  I can't even begin to count how many times clients and litigants have told me "I wanted to become a lawyer" (or, pretty often, "I wanted my son to become a lawyer"), followed by a "but".  I've known professionals who didn't follow up on professional sports opportunities, who had been in military service and then gotten out, who had left farms and ranches, or who had thought about becoming a Priest or cleric, and didn't, all to some element of regret.  Indeed, with big callings, like the Priesthood, it probably downright haunts them.³

For those who recall it, people may imagine themselves singing Je Ne Regrette Rien, or maybe the defiant My Way, but Truckin is probably more like it.

The other lesson may be that the common American claim that you can start off doing one thing, and do anything else, is a lie.  

If it's not an outright lie, it comes with an expiration date.  Once you are 50 years of age, you are doing what you are doing, most likely, and you won't be getting out of it any time soon, if ever.

And this:

Well, you know I... I never got to bat in the major leagues. I would have liked to have had that chance. Just once. To stare down a big league pitcher. To stare him down, and just as he goes into his windup, wink. Make him think you know something he doesn't. That's what I wish for. Chance to squint at a sky so blue that it hurts your eyes just to look at it. To feel the tingling in your arm as you connect with the ball. To run the bases - stretch a double into a triple, and flop face-first into third, wrap your arms around the bag. That's my wish, Ray Kinsella. That's my wish. And is there enough magic out there in the moonlight to make this dream come true?

Not without Divine intervention, there isn't.  And even as the movie portrays, decisions made in the past cannot be undone.  Graham reconciles it with 

Son, if I'd only gotten to be a doctor for five minutes... now that would have been a tragedy.

My wife sometimes makes the same point about my career, with "all the people you've helped".  But then, this too:

 We just don't recognize life's most significant moments while they're happening. Back then I thought, "Well, there'll be other days." I didn't realize that that was the only day.

Footnotes

1.  I'm afraid that I'm an oddity with some films this way.  Shane, the classic Western in which the protagonist comes back out of retirement in order that besieged farmers aren't run off by cattlemen, is an example.  I know how the film ends, but I always hope that the cattlemen will win, and the wilderness they represent preserved.

2. My mother was not from here, and didn't hold farmers and ranchers in low esteem, but rather held professionals in very high esteem.  Her family had members who had been doctors, lawyers and engineers and she regarded this as having achieved a certain status.  A lot of people of her generation viewed the professions that way, and frankly, quite a few people still do.

She also tended to view being a lawyer as proof of high intelligence, which it really is not.  A Democrat, she'd frequently give a reason to support President Obama as "he's intelligent. . . he's a lawyer".  President Obama is intelligent, and he is a lawyer, but in reality, there are lots of fairly dim lawyers.

3.  Indeed, that's one of the ones that's most openly expressed.  I've known lawyers who, once they know you fairly well, will discuss having been in the seminary, or who wanted to be Priests, and it's a different conversation.  It's always pretty clear that they're downright haunted by their change into the law, no matter how much success they may have had in it. Conversely, I've known one Priest who had been a lawyer and at least one who had originally intended to be, who had no regrets whatsoever about their change in paths.

Of interest here, there's often an age limit to attempting to revive a vocational call.  Canon Law in the Catholic Church sets no age limit to becoming a Priest, but many dioceses do, and for good reason. Training a Priest takes nearly a decade.  While I can think of stories of some "older" men becoming Priests, in reality, they were middle-aged men when they started off.

Likewise, there's a limit on trying to become a Catholic Deacon, a vocation that's spread enormously in recent decades.  In our Diocese, the provision is:

The minimum age for a single man to be ordained to the permanent diaconate is twenty-five (25) years old, and thirty-five (35) years for married men. Maximum age to enter the Diaconal Formation Program is fifty-five (55) years (age 60 at ordination), unless the Bishop allows an exception. 

Sixty is surprisingly late, quite frankly, and I wonder if this has been recently moved as I thought the age limit lower, although not much.  Be that as it may, I know this only because at one time our African Parish Priest sent out letters to several men whom he thought would be good Deacons.  I was one.  I was flattered by the letter but knew I wasn't called, but I did pray on it.  I'm not called, working on my own defects is a full time enough job as it is.

4. The combined impact of insurance and family responsibilities in the current era is enough, in and of itself, to quash a lot of late career transition dreams.  Before Medicare, many people are hard locked into careers due to the need to keep their insurance.  Changes in the law, over time, have also meant that parents pay for their adult children's insurance well into their 20s.  Changing careers that involve insurance disruption is darned near impossible for many people.

And it likley would be for me, after my health issues of last year and their carryover inot this year.

Related Threads:

These things I'd do differently, maybe. (Or maybe I really wouldn't).

How the heck does a person figure out what to do?

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part XXX. The Russo Ukrainian War Edition.

I started this post prior to the commencement of the war

And several of the comments then related to it. Rather than toss them out, I'm going note them as quotes, FWIW.

Here they are.

On the eve of war?

This installment of this trailing thread finds us teetering on the brink of a war between Ukraine and Russia, which, depending upon how you count such things, would likely be the third such war in a little over 100 years. They're all over the same thing, Ukrainian independence.  The Russians, in their heart of hearts, don't really think Ukrainians are a thing.  The Ukrainians do.

Indeed, several years ago I met a Ukrainian American lawyer, who had the added minority distinction of being a female Jewish Ukrainian American lawyer, who had immigrated to the US as a small girl.  Even though she was a Ukrainian, she told me that as a child she'd first become aware of Ukrainians, of which she was one, was on a bus with her family and some people from rural areas were on it, speaking Ukrainian. She thought it was just a weird accident, even though she herself spoke Ukrainian, and Russian.  Indeed, I sat through a deposition in which she continually corrected a Russian interpreter's translation of her Ukrainian client's testimony.

Bloody

We should note here that all these prior wars between Ukraine and Russia have turned into bloodbaths. Indeed, the last one, which trailed into 1947, featured Ukrainian atrocities against non-Ukrainian populations within their borders.

The memories of that may be strong, as the Russians are claiming that's been occurring recently, which it has not, as part of their false flag operation to justify their probable upcoming invasion of Ukraine.

Eh?

I thought about starting a thread titled "Useful idiots", borrowing the phrase frequently but inaccurately attributed to Lenin.  In fact, he never appears to have used the term.

I don't know if I would have actually have used it.  The term "idiot" is pretty strong, and I don't think most of those whose views I find baffling are in fact idiots by a long measure.  Indeed, I have no doubt many of them are much smarter than me, which doesn't necessarily credit their views here.  At any rate, somethings are just bizarrely baffling.

First, , as an example, let's take Candace Owens.

Candace Owens

@RealCandaceO

STOP talking about Russia. Send American troops to Canada to deal with the tyrannical reign of Justin Trudeau Castro. He has fundamentally declared himself dictator and is waging war on innocent Canadian protesters and those who have supported them financially.

What the crap?

Candace's odd association of Justin Trudeau, whom I don't care for as a politician, with Vladimir Putin, who is a potentially unhinged autocratic monster armed with nuclear weapons, is, in fact, stupid.

She wasn't alone in making that association, however.  Lauren Boebert stated:

But we also have neighbors to the north who need freedom and you need to be liberated and we need that right here at home.

Beobert came to that by way of praising the Ukrainian President and the Ukrainian decision to arm its civilian population, which I also think is praiseworthy.  But the linking to Canada. . . ?

Back to Owens, for a moment, earlier this week she appeared to be fully on board with the ludicrous assertion that the US and Ukraine had been engaged in secret biological weapons production prior to the war. That's such a dumb assertion that it is pretty much impossible not to conclude that Owens is rooting for the Russians, something for which she's not alone on the far right.  Congressman Madison Cawthrorn called Ukrainian President Zelinskyy a "thug" earlier this past week.

Most people regard Zelniskyy as a hero and he's certainly not a thug.

Owens and Cawthorn, but not Beobert here, are basically falling in line with Donald Trump.  Since this crisis developed, I've continued to be amazed by common Republicans who somehow believe that if Donald Trump was President, Putin would never have ordered this invasion.  And this in spite of what Trump keeps stating about Putin, which isn't exactly critical of him, to say the least.

To an outside observer, the relationship between Putin and Trump is so bizarre that it's logical to assume, as many do, that Putin has something, and something serious on Donald Trump.  The question is, what is it?

Maybe it's nothing, of course, and Trump just likes Putin as Putin is a genuine dictator and Trump aspires to be one.  But the relationship is undeniably odd.

Beyond that, Trump hardly had what anyone would call an aggressive foreign policy.  He was always clear that he wanted an isolationist one in which the US basically ignored foreign wars if at all possible.  Regarding Ukraine itself, while Republicans like to point out that his administration provided more military assistance to Ukraine than Obama's did, Obama had declared as far back as 2014 that if Russia invaded Ukraine there'd be serious consequences.

The Obama Administration was fearful, wrongly, of providing weapons to Ukraine out of a fear that it'd amount to a provocation to the Russians.  But it wasn't Trump who wanted to change that.  Trump's operatives went around him and forced him into it, against his will. This was very well known at the time.  Sure, Trump's administration provided increased aid to Ukraine, but not because of Trump, but rather in spite of him.

And yet somehow some oddly believe that if Trump was President, Putin would have been cowering in the Kremlin.

For all we know, Putin may have reacted no differently whatsoever.  If anything, however, a person has to suspect that Donald Trump would have been reminded about that tape, or that payment, or that deal, or something.  Or maybe just his fawning admiration of a strongman would take him there.

Alternative realities

Since this crisis developed, I've continued to be amazed by common Republicans who somehow believe that if Donald Trump was President, Putin would never have ordered this invasion.

Seriously?

To an outside observer, the relationship between Putin and Trump is so bizarre that it's logical to assume, as many do, that Putin has something, and something serious on Donald Trump.  The question is, what is it.

Maybe it's nothing, of course, and Trump just likes Putin as Putin is a genuine dictator and Trump aspires to be.  But the relationship is undeniably odd.

Beyond that, Trump hardly had what anyone would call an aggressive foreign policy.  He was always clear that he wanted an isolationist one in which the US basically ignored foreign wars if at all possible.  Regarding Ukraine itself, while Republicans like to point out that his administration provided more military assistance to Ukraine than Obama's did, Obama had declared as far back as 2014 that if Russia invaded Ukraine there'd be serious consequences.

The Obama Administration was fearful, wrongly, of providing weapons to Ukraine out of a fear that it'd amount to a provocation to the Russians.  But it wasn't Trump who wanted to change that.  Trump's operatives went around him and forced him into it, against his will. This was very well known at the time.  Sure, Trump's administration provided increased aid to Ukraine, but not because of Trump, but rather in spite of him.

And yet somehow some oddly believe that if Trump was President, Putin would have been cowering in the Kremlin.

For all we know, Putin may have reacted no differently whatsoever.  If anything, however, a person has to suspect that Donald would have been reminded about that tape, or that payment, or that deal, or something.  

And then there's Television Evangelist Pat Robertson, who came out of retirement to state:

People say that Putin’s out of his mind. Yes, maybe so. But at the same time, he’s being compelled by God. He went into the Ukraine but that wasn’t his goal. His goal was to move against Israel, ultimately.

Oh no, it isn't.

A person has to be careful here, as this is a religious topic, and it fits into a certain Apocalyptic worldview that is strongly represented in certain strains of Evangelism.  While the Apostolic Churches have no defined interpretation of the text that this strain of Protestantism interprets this way, it tends to be the case that they view much of Revelation as pertaining to the era in which it is written, while also holding that some of it is yet to pass.

Back in the 70s, for those old enough to remember them, this strain of thought was very strong. The common assertion you'd hear from some quarters was that a big war in the Middle East was going to occur at any moment and that would feature the Battle of Armageddon, which would usher in in the Apocalypse.  If you caught television in the early afternoon hours, as kids coming home from school did, that meant you were going to catch television ads for a book called The Late Great Planet Earth on this very topic.

Well, of course, like much human prognostication, the impending disaster didn't occur.

That apparently hasn't meant that those who were invested in the thesis have really given up on it, as this shows.

Ummm, nice weather we're having . . . 

One of the interesting things about the war is that for those locally who have decided that Liz Cheney is a big traitor because she didn't stay on the Trump train following the insurrection are being reminded that she was off of it before then, and part of that was her insistence Russia was a menace while Republicans were saying it wasn't.  She turned out to be right.

She was also right about Afghanistan, we'd note, which turns out to be another embarrassing thing for those who somehow feel that Donald Trump was right on foreign policy.  On that one, Trump loyalist were pretty quick to claim that the withdrawal that Trump initiated woudln't have been the disaster it became when Biden carried it out, because. . . well because.

The Putin invaded Ukraine.

At first there were a lot of the odd claims that "well if Trump had been in office" but those have weakened in no small part because it's obvious baloney.  Indeed, after this fawning expressions of admiration for Putin early on, he's been pretty quiet over the last few days, and for that matter the press has quit paying attention to him.  Even a near air disaster he experienced has received next to no attention.  Voices like Tucker Carlson, whom personally I don't think really believes a lot of what he says, haven't received much attention either after their initial attempts to backtrack seeming admiration of Putin.

More locally, however, a question directed to Harriet Hageman about her position simply resulted in a sidestep.  She's was campaigning with Rand Paul in Cheyenne, which didn't receive that much press either, when the Ukraine question came up.  She really can't. . . well actually she could, say "well, ol' Liz sure was right on that one".

Regrets

March 12, 2022

Adam Kinzinger tweeted yesterday:

Adam Kinzinger

@AdamKinzinger

Thread (and admission): 1) I want to be honest, in congress I have only a few votes that in hindset, I regret. My biggest regret was voting against the first impeachment of Donald Trump.

Adam Kinzinger

@AdamKinzinger

·

Mar 11

Replying to

@AdamKinzinger

2) It’s important for political leaders to be transparent and admit regret when needed. The bottom line, Donald Trump withheld lethal aid to Ukraine so he could use it as leverage for his campaign. This is a shameful and illegal act, directly hurting the Ukraine defense today…

Adam Kinzinger

@AdamKinzinger

·

Mar 11

3) I wish i could go back in time and Vote for it, but I cannot. What we can do now is to ensure that this NEVER happens again, and that we all put the interests of our nation above our party.

@AVindman

and others deserve our appreciation.

Most Recent Prior Thread:

The danger of mental decline.

While he may not really look it, Vladimir Putin is an old man.

I've noted it here repeatedly, but people's mental health becomes increasingly dicey as they age.  People quested Trump's mental health the entire time he was President, and not without some reason.  People are doing that now with Biden.  And a lot of the analysts who know something about Putin are stating that he's not right.

People continually point this out in regard to Biden, but seemingly him alone.  The Supreme Court is old.  Putin is old.  Donald Trump is old.

All of which raises the question of why the legislature just passed a bill seeking to enact a change to the Wyoming constitution, pushing the retirement age of judges up to 75.

This lock grip of the boomers on things, I'd note, isn't something that the whole world is engaged in.  Lots of European leaders are much younger.

Vesting so much of the world's power in the elderly is dangerous.  We don't know, for example, what Putin's mental status is and there's no way to know.  At his age, moreover, he may not really care how much he destroys if he figures the long term historical legacy in Russia will be to his liking, as he won't have to endure that much of the short term.

Unmoored

On all of this, it is seemingly very difficult for people to accept a swing in things when things were going their way.  The absolute refusal of a minority of Americans to accept that they are in fact a minority, no matter how legitimate their positions or grievances, is part, I'm convinced, of what is giving rise to the section of the GOP that simply can't believe that they lost the election.

I think it was Chesterton, or perhaps Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, who observed that if one person is right, he's still right, if everyone else disagrees with him.  Those in the minority who are convinced of their position, and I'm frequently in that position, should take comfort in that.  What you don't get to do is to insist that everyone agrees with you and that if they don't, there's something nefarious going on.

None the less, we do that frequently.  Our sports team didn't lose, the opponent cheated.  You get the drift.  Of course, most of the time people eventually concede a legitimate loss.  But not always.

There's a lot of that which has gone on with the last election, with people seemingly ignoring that the last Republican President to have won the majority of the popular vote was Ronald Reagan.  Trump lost the popular vote beyond a doubt twice, but to listen to some, you'd believe that simply isn't possible.  People take comfort in their own views and own kind, which is easier to do than ever in the modern Internet age.

Added to that, things like this are easier to believe in troubled times, which we've been in for some time, and the fact that Trump won the elector vote in 2016, but some Democrats made noise about rejecting his legitimacy for that reason, even though the electoral college remains part of the system, unfortunately, didn't help. And all two or three Boomers who were somehow rabid Clinton fans felt cheated about that.  But it goes far beyond that. The disenfranchised voters who voted for Trump in 2016, many of whom are former Democrats, convinced themselves that they are the majority of voters, even though they originally probably didn't even make up a majority of Republicans.  Now with Trump having adopted the thesis that the election was stolen, for some reason that even now isn't really clear, those who are inclined to view things conspiratorially are, although again not always for the same reasons.  Some, for example, are simply focused on COVID 19 election year voting changes, which they feel frustrated the normal process.  Others, however, have adopted much more involved fantastical conspiracy theories.  Impacting that are the many politicians who know the election wasn't stolen, but won't stay that as it isn't in their personal best interest.

I'm noting all of this for an introductory reason that doesn't actually have anything to do with the 2020 election.

I'm noting it due to Patrick Coffin.

Patrick Coffin was the long term host of the radio show Catholic Answers, and was really good in that role.  Here a few years ago he left that position, and I wondered why at the time.  It was announced that he was starting a "new project", but frankly, how many jobs are there of that type?  Not many, I'd think.

As it happened, while I liked Coffin in that role, his replacement, Cy Kellett, is hands down much better.  Kellett is humble, and coming from a Dorthy Day branch of Catholicism, he brings in a refreshing view.

Anyhow, Catholic Answers is highly orthodox in its views.  That causes some liberal Catholics to be frustrated, but they've done a real service by giving voice to the orthodox.  That doesn't make them politically conservative, however.  For example, in a couple of instances during the last year various figures have referenced the the atomic bombing of Japan in 1945 as a monstrous evil, which is a position I agree with, but almost no American does, and which when that view is expressed, tends to be viewed as a politically liberal one.

Anyhow, when Coffin left he started his own podcast and website which, right away, was undoubtedly much further to the right in everything that Catholic Answers ever had been.  I frankly wonder if Coffin was somewhat invited to leave now.  Anyhow, I used to listen to his podcast for a while, which had some interesting guest, but after a point it clearly started to veer in a certain directly. The first time I really noticed it was when Dr. Taylor Marshall and somebody else were guest with the basic point being women shouldn't work.  Later Cardinal Burke was on and Coffin kept trying to basically get him to cast doubt on the Francis Papacy, which Burke would not do.  Later, and the last straw, was a podcast casting the COVID 19 pandemic as some sort of a conspiracy.  

More recently Coffin released a pathetic podcast episode on seven reasons that Pope Emeritus Benedict is still the Pope.  It's really pathetic.  That caused Catholic Answers to respond, which they did charitably with a nice podcast that pretty much cut through what arguments Coffin had like a broad sword through butter.  Even there, at one point, they came pretty close to calling one of Coffin's arguments unhinged, and they did accuse him, on another, of calumny in one of its slight, ancillary comments.

Anyhow, this is an interesting example of the same thing.  From the beginning of Pope St. John Paul the Great's Papacy through Pope Benedict conservative and orthodox Catholics had Popes they really could like.  Now they sort of don't, but that doesn't mean he isn't the Pope.  Adjusting to reality is a moral duty in something like this, and certainly an existential duty otherwise.

It's all about the oil!

How many times have you heard that about various wars?

Afghanistan, we would note, is claimed to be the United States' longest war, and it has no oil at all.  None.

And here, we're cutting off the import of oil.

It's almost like, well, it's not all about the oil.

We'll deal with this on some other post, but as we've noted lots of times, wars change everything.  Not only is this war not about the oil. . . . it may be a big step towards the end of the oil age.

Speaking of using petroleum

Speaking of cluelessness, what on earth is the American trucker's convoy about?

Whatever it was supposed to be over, that moment passed. This for all the world has the feel of people who arrived at an event about a week late. "What, this isn't the Johansen wedding. . .where's the food?"

This was, of course, inspired by the Canadian Freedom Convoy.  I had a post on that, but that was really distinctly different in the way it spilled over into other complaints.  I'm not sympathetic with the event, but it came to be the focus of a lot of conservative Canadian discontent with a nation's politics that has become extremely liberal.

It really was a Canadian thing, none of which prevented confused right wing Americans from voicing their support on something that they don't really know anything about.  Most Americans, I fear, couldn't pinpoint Edmonton on a map if their life depended on it.

Anyhow, the spectacle inspired a pretty pointless American truckers convoy, which is protesting. . . well who knows what it's protesting.  In a column by a liberal columnist, one of the protesters, for example, noted that they didn't want to be "digitalized", which means this protest just seems to be, well, a protest without a point.

Or maybe it does have one, but not the one that they're voicing or that they even realize.

Long haul trucking in the United States doesn't really have a long history.  Prior to the Second World War most long distance hauling of anything was by rail, not by truck.  Rail itself dated only back to the second quarter of the 19th Century.  Before that, for millennia, anything of substance moved by boat, and less bulky things moved by land at the speed of a draft animal.  Indeed, for that reason, early in the nation's history projects to extend aquatic transportation, like the Erie Canal, were a big deal.

Rail was a radical alteration of the transportation system with a massive impact on the nation in all sorts of forgotten ways, including the pattern of settlement.  Cities like Denver, Colorado became viable due to rail, without it, they'd be towns.

But through Federal subsidization of roads in the 20th Century, and particularly after World War Two, combined with advancements in automotive technology, long haul semi tractors with large trailers became a viable option in the mid 20th Century.  By the 1950s, but not before then, they began to supplant rail.  By the 1960s the process was well under way, while at the same time air travel and improved roads cut into rail passenger service as well, with railroads seeking to abandon that the latter.

Trucking as a profession was in fact glamorized.  Even early on, Hollywood portrayed it that way, with such movies as They Drive By Night.  Convoy, the Country & Western ballad, was one of only a collection of trucking songs that were on the airwaves in the 70s.  At least two movies, once based on the Convoy song, portrayed trucking as glamorous in the same era.

Well, that's all largely passed. We're told now that there's a nationwide shortage of truck drivers, with the country being 80,000 drivers short. 

All of the major automobile manufacturers are working on electric automobiles.  That transformation will come much more rapidly there than in trucking. Automated trucks, without drivers, are being explored and exist on an experimental level now.  But lurking in the back is the ultimate competition to the semi truck, the electric train.

Locomotives are already much, much, more efficient than trucks, and accordingly far, far more "green". The Burlington Northern in fact advertised that fact a few years back.

Predicting the future is always difficult, but I suspect that on a fairly significant level, the future of long distance transportation looks backwards.  It's rail.

From one population crisis to another.

Twitter, the location of all brilliant insight, recently had this exchange before the war started..

It started with the British newspaper, surprisingly enough, The Telegraph.

The Telegraph

@Telegraph

·

19h

Once a problem far in the future, the population crisis is arriving earlier than expected after the Covid baby bust. Populations in countries including Japan are already in decline, while those in the likes of Spain and China are set to halve by 2100

To which some replied in both an indignant and misanthropic way, clinging to the pretty provable statistically invalid concept that nope, we're going to grow and grow until we all die, population wise.  It's been known for a long time now that while immigration waves around the world are a genuine and ongoing crisis, the world is actually almost at the tipping point right now where populations are set to start declining.  Indeed, in the Western world they already are, and they just reached the point in the United States where, but for massive immigration rates, they would be.

Well, some people who seem to really dislike people won't accept that and made that known.

To which somebody replied:

The problem isn't fewer people, the problem is no people! You can't reverse the downward trend. No Government to date has been able to do that; Not China, Japan, Sweden. At the current trend there will be extinct by the year 2400.

M'eh.

Extinct? Ain't going to happen.

Just a few years ago the headlines were we were going to procreate ourselves into extinction.

Now, apparently, we're going to abstain ourselves into extinction.

We're going to do neither.

I'd note that things have gotten to such an odd state that tehreare those who post, and aren't banned from Twitter for doing so, who hate mankind so much htey hope we go extinct for the "benefit" of everything else. As the only species that has a concept of a benefit, if we disappear that's a stupid nullity.  If that seems anthropocentric, well it is.  

Speaking of population, a headline:

Nick Cannon issues apology to the 5 mothers of his children

This on the occasion of the apparently unrestrained and amoral Cannon announcing that he's sired an eighth child with one Bre Tiesi.

Apparently, Nick is doing his part to keep the Playboy lifestyle alive and the population from crashing.

Wage cause and effect.

We recently noted on another post (maybe another Zeitgeist post), that Chuck Todd of Meet the Press sort of smugly maintained that a recently decreased immigration rate was causing inflation by removing immigrants who took certain jobs, seemingly not noticing that what this also means is that the high immigration rate was depressing the wage rate.

Apparently liberals everywhere make this same argument, as this item shows.

HOWEVER AMUSING THE CONCEPT, LET US TAKE CHRISTINE LAGARDE SERIOUSLY FOR A MOMENT

That from the British Adam Smith Society, which is a masterful example, we'd note, of British snark.

The point however, is exactly the same one we made here.  By keeping immigration rates high, wages are depressed.  If you keep immigration rates low, wages climb.

What seemingly isn't noticed is that what this also means is that, contrary to the widespread claims made for decades, Americans will take any job inside the US, as long as it pays a living or at least decent wage.

Last edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgiest Part XXIX. The Income Inequality Edition.