Afflicted with the world they helped make, and afflicting it on everyone else. The Baby Boomers, old age, the Sexual Revolution, and expelling the Barbarians.

This is going to be harsh.

But not as harsh as it started out to be.  I actually toned it down.

And yes, it's another dissing the Baby Boomers thread.

This past week there's been two articles in major journals regarding the aging of the Baby Boomers.  One I had to hunt for as it was published in The Free Press, and I don't subscribe to that.  Still, I found it here.

The Long Boomer Farewell

This will not be a clean handoff. It will be an extended interregnum.

The article is well written and largely correct, although in my view, much more gentle than it should be.  It will be an extended interregnum because, like actual regents, the obsolescent monarchy cannot accept that the obsolescent monarchs should go, and go right now.

I said that this would be harsh.

But not as harsh as it started out to be.

I've been dealing with this topic directedly, recently.  The entire country has been in fact.  On a personally local level,  I'm presently so frustrated with it that, as a member of Generation Jones, I'm about ready to drop out of employment in my "good office job" right now. I don't only because a panicked spouse feels that's financial devastation, even if she's wrong.  I keep on keeping on only for domestic peace, that's it.

In this, I've been dealing with the intersection of the stubborn refusal of an entire generation to yield power on absolutely anything, while at the same time, watching how their choices and that of the post WWII era continually to negatively impact an entire society today.

In my experience Boomers just will not yield in offices, or in office.  Indeed, right now, Donald Trump, who is clearly demented is lamenting former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani being in the hospital in critical condition.  Giuliani is an 81 year old serial polygamist like Trump, age 79.  A hallmark of the generation is that it just thinks its going to live forever and that none of the rules that held society together from when the first Vandal was taught to read until 1968 apply to them.

They've never stopped to ask about the reason the rules were there and what tearing them down would do . . . even to themselves.

Or acknowledged they'll die.

They will, they are but they will not acknowledge it or yield, and they are well on their way to going from being celebrated, albeit mostly by themselves, to unlamented.

In professional offices, and often in politics, where they were granted power in their 30s and 40s, they retain it as a last ditch matter no matter what.  For two weeks running I've seen a Boomer confronted with the "it's time to go" reality and simply refuse.  That person would rather retain an presence in an office where the person is not wanted rather than leave with dignity.  It's bad enough that Gen Y and Gen X in that situation cites the Boomer presence as a reason that they might now want to commit to what the older person cites as his "legacy".

Well, if they have to work it, they may just let his legacy die in an economic desert.

Regarding one such struggle, I've seen a number of minor requests made recently of a Boomer, and some not so mild ones.  The latter come from an awareness by the Boomer's fellows that there's some cognitive decline.  "Whose project is this?" is the question, followed by, well Boomer took it in. . . 

Oh oh.

Less significantly, a minor request made by one Gen Xer to the effect of "can you move your office so the most active person in it could occupy it as we want that person up front was met with "No."  It's a prime example of the Afghan Warlord Principal. As we previously noted:

1.  "The Afghan Warlord Principal".  Years ago I saw a photograph of a body of men, all armed, in Afghanistan.  They were tribesmen fitted out to fight the Soviets. Some were boys.  The boys carried ancient rifles, and if I recall correctly one had a muzzle-loading rifle.  One man, squatted down dead center, had an AK47, the only one so armed.

He looked like he was 80, if he was a day.

He had the most effective combat weapon not because he was the most effective combatant, but because he was senior to everyone else.  Much technology in any one office setting works the same way.

It's not actually the physical trappings that concern anyone in this latter instance, it's just the stubborn grasp on the institution itself.  A better space is available for somebody who needs it, or who can better profit through its use. That person, whose in Generation Jones, cannot have it.  It'll sit, instead, largely empty a gaping Arch de Trump type monument to somebody who is largely not htere.

Things like this are the reasons that quite a few professional firms have a partnership agreement that actually expels a person at age 65.  

In the meantime I'm familiar with the descent into oblivion of another person, Gen X I think, who is killing herself with cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana.  I think it's intentional, but it's also putting the person into a situation in which she can really no longer be employed.

That'd be tragic by any measure, but the entire time I've known the person she's had the same grossly underemployed "boyfriend" that she's shacked up with.  Her life is the job she's no longer able to do, pet cats, the deadbeat long-term underemployed boyfriend, and bar hopping.  If she was in her 20s it'd still be bad, but redeemable.  Now it really isn't.

Left to Gen Jones to clean up, I'd note.

Related to this, the aforementioned Boomer was approached by another Boomer, also in her 70s, about a job.  Her company is closing, and no wonder.  Also a professional company, it just never was successful in recruiting anyone young to work with it, save for the son of one of the partners who has decided to leave the field and go into a new one with his wife, who has a successful business.  No succession plan, just an end.  At least the owners of that business were able to successfully bring it to an end. Nothing of it will remain.

She's worked for them for something like 30 years.  In the 30 years that I've known her she was never married.  I don't know if she was ever married, although I dimly recall it being mentioned that she had a daughter. She's been hinting to another professional firm in her office that she "needs to work" and needs to find a job, which was a broad hope that they'd offer her a job.  She finally just flat out asked. . . the Boomer, for one.  A 70 year old office worker asking a 70 year old professional for a job which everyone else would have to pay for.

Gen. Jones vetoed it.

They don't doubt she needs a job.  They just don't have one for her.  They're not going to hire her based on her resume for a position that doesn't exist.

And here's the harsher reality.  

People love concept of romantic love, which is a real thing.  But on top of it, marriage is, as so often noted, a fundamental aspect of society.  An institution so ancient that it seems to be full ingrained in hte species, the Boomers broke that, and they're inflicting the damage on everyone.

When lifetime marriages went out the gate, and bed hopping and living for yourself came in, did nobody think that there would be implications?

The main Boomer I noted here is divorced.  He's shacked with somebody too, which is extremely unseemly for somebody in their 70s, but it means that not only does he have no attachments, his attachment to his (former, more or less) place of employment is massively disordered.  He won't go, as it that is what he dedicated his life to, and he's clinging to it as if its his life. 

It is, but like life itself, it won't life on forever.

Estranged from his family, living in a relationship of convenience, and hostile to religion, he has the four walls of his old office.

Would that have been different in prior eras?

It's hard to say, but at least to a degree we can say yes.  Their father's generation had their families, and families first.

The two women in this story?

Well, had marriage remained the institution it once was they'd both have spouses and children to rely on, at least to some degree.  Maybe the one has a child, but that gets to another point below.

The first point, however is that societal structures existed for a reason.  Marriage has always featured love, in spite of what some may say, but it also was society's protection against children and destitution.  Married couples provided for the needs of their children, not the Department of Family Services and the school free lunch program.  And husbands provided for their wives, unless a husband was too sick to do so, in which case the reverse was true.

People did very often work into old age, and we should not pretend otherwise, but I have to say that the Boomer woman in this scenario would very likely not be in it, but for the destruction of structure mentioned.

Likewise, before anti biologic pharmaceutical's women could not become the sexual playthings of men save at great risk.  The younger woman mentioned above would be married. And the pressures of society would have bene such that the man in question, who could get a real job, would have gotten one.

The FDA allowed the first pharmaceutical birth control pill in 1960.  The Boomers had taken it up in spades by the late 60s and were engaging in illicit sex on a broad scale.  No fault divorce was first introduced in California in 1969, and spread throughout the country rapidly.  Abortion was made a right by the Supreme Court in 1973.

No matter how it was sold, the impact was pretty clear.  The Sexual Revolution reduced women to sex slaves and slaves in general.  In essence, Western women had their status stripped to what it had been in pre Christian times.  Toys for sex, who very soon had to work.  Feminism didn't liberate them, it enslaved them, prisoners of war of the Sexual Revolution.

But not just them, men too became casualties of the war.

So here we are.  Crediting Generation Jones, as we should, as a real generation, the youngest Boomer is now 72 years old.  Save for those who solely own a business, or who are in family businesses actually run by their families, not one single one should be working.  Those who have the means to retire, absolutely should. Those who are in position of societal power should not be.  Sure some may be in great shape, and "want to contribute", but most aren't, and aren't contributing in a meaningful way.

But not all can retire.  For one thing, a lot of them don't have the spouses that would help them to.  Many lack the children that would provide guidance.  Even those with children are finding that the warehousing of the elderly they advocated and participated in, and the warehousing of children they advocated for and participated in, has come back to haunt them.  The damage they did to societal structures, in particularly their churches, has aided in all of that.

But the expectations remain there.  Gen X and Gen Y will still employ us, right?

No, they won't.  They have their own families and priorities, often much more traditional than yours.

Well Generation Jones will, won't it?

No, we're tired.  We had to struggle our whole lives due to you Boomers and are ready to lay our burdens down ourselves.  We will go, however.  You often never had a place for us, and we're not going to end our lives finding one for you.

The past was far from perfect, in every sense.  Women got married as they had very few options for a single life, if that's what they would have preferred.  Couples that did not have children, prior to 1960, or actually some time following that, did not have them due to what was usually a tragic medical situation, or because the marriages were truly ones of convenience.  Children didn't always grow up in a home in which they were really valued and wanted, but then of course that's true now.

But it is also the case that in fact much more of life had to wit with the family, and was much kinder.  My paternal grandmother, for instance, was in close contact, often daily contact, with all of her children.  My maternal grandmother was in close contact as well, in spite of her children being spread across two, and often three, countries.  One of her sons lived with her until he died, and then his siblings were careful to take care of him.

Now, well the barbarians are back through the gate.  The Boomers let them in.  Everyone behind them is struggling in some ways to toss them out.

Sic transit Gloria Mundi.

Monday, December 31, 1945. The end of a historical episode and the dawn of a new one, additional labels.

Blog Mirror and Pondering: Cassie Craven: Welfare Was Supposed To Be Our Job

Let me start off by noting that as a rule, I can't stand Cassie' Craven's op eds.  They tend to be in your face unthinking populist, and I also resent (I'm not kidding) the co-opting of a cowboy hat that obviously doesn't fit.

And frankly I don't much like people spouting off about protecting Wyoming or what Wyoming is or was, when they aren't from here. She's from Nebraska, so that's not far off, but Nebraska is not Wyoming.  

Well, like some other populist things, or NatCon things, I'll confess that as a real conservative, and for htat matter a distributist agrarian, I find myself occasionally disturbed by a one of their members saying something that taps into something I've said myself.  This article by Craven does that:

Cassie Craven: Welfare Was Supposed To Be Our Job

As much as I hate to admit it, and I do hate to admit it, she has a point, although in the typical populist manner, she starts off by saying something cruel to get to the point.  Indeed, it basically takes her 40% of her article to quit being an asshole before she gets to the point that 's worth considering, with this paragraph:

Welfare, in the 14^th century meant one’s good fortune, health and exemption from evil. This changed in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries as public assistance became a role the government took over from the private charities, which had historically helped to ensure that people fared well. Welfare was holistic, community-driven and just as much emotional and spiritual as it was physical.

The shift of society away from the church-based and community associations and toward the government was no good for our fellow man. Adding fuel to the fire were the rapid technological advances that made us distant, isolated, and serotonin-addicted.

This has addled people’s ability to engage in real conversation or romance.

Well, she's correct, sort of .

Craven seems to edge up on the point, actually and then wonder off again, being slightly mean spirited once again.  She never gets to the bigger point which is that a welfare system that creates semi permanent benefits, run by a bureaucracy, creates dependency, and corrupts.  Indeed, that was the huge difference, other than an inability to cover all who really needed help, from modern welfare and pre Great Depression charity.

Support form charitable organizations, and churches, and the like, was always very temporary.  And it tended to come with some requirements.  State funded welfare tends not to, although the GOP has attempted to insert some.  There are work requirements, of course, but it is difficult to tell how much they're winked at as the principles of subsidiarity have not been applied, so there's no real control.  In contrast, I know of a situation in which a Church collects directly for the poor and distributes directly to the poor.  In doing so, they do ask "are you working?"

And there are more uncomfortable truths as well.  Welfare has, ironically, been a major driver in the decline of Western morality, and more particularly, and arguably much more pronounced, American morality.

Prior to the current welfare regime, children were very much the responsibility of both parents, in every fashion.  We've discussed this in the context of the Playboy Philosophy and what not, but what was the case, even into the early 1980s, was that people that had children were normally married, and to a large degree, women who became pregnant out of wedlock either married the father or gave the child up for adoption (or after 1973, aborted).  Moral decay brought on by the Sexual Revolution, aided by pharmaceuticals, started to erode the two parent family however and in our current age that's pretty pronounced.  An African American commentator got in trouble a year or two ago by claiming that some women "married the government", but there's more than a little truth to that.  Kids raised in this environment are more subject to abuse by subsequent "boyfriends" of their mother, and are more likely to  be raised in poverty and declining morality.  It's simply the truth.

That in turn kicks back to society at large.  The American lower middle class tends to wade at least knee deep in a sort of moral sewer even while being horrified by those swimming in it.  This wasn't the case thirty year or more ago.  The trend line isn't good.

So, Cravens has a point.

But how do you end this? She doesn't opine on that, which is the cowardly way out.  Indeed nobody, except perhaps for those deep in the Heritage Society, is doing so.  What Project 2025 did, apparently, is to suggest an increase in work requirements, which was attempted sort of sub silentio earlier this year.  But then, the entire NatCon group in the government right isn't really willing, in general, to admit trying to bring into play any of their policies. They do them all silently while sometimes denying they're doing them at all.

Which is one of the things I really detest about the Trump Administration.  It's dishonest.  They should simply admit, if they think it, that "welfare is contributing to moral decay and we have to do something about it."

Of course, the problem here is that most Americans really don't want to do anything about the things they claim they do.  Bloated Americans who spend Sundays watching the NFL and who are living with their second or third wives or girlfriends might think about going to the megachurch once a month where the pastor is not going to equate their lifestyle with adulterous mortal sin, or preach about the dangers of wealth to their souls, and might bitch about homosexuals and the like even while being just as morally adrift, but they don't really want the responsibility of responsibility.

Of course, save for some, which explains a movement towards cultural conservatism in the young, thereby being proactive in the culture, even if not attempting to be cultural revolutionaries.

The life of Fran Gerard/Francis Anna Camuglia. Was Francis Anna Camuglia and Cynthia Blanton.

The top half of the March 1967 centerfold depicting the 19 year old "Fran Gerard".  This photo was taken from Cynthia Blanton's webpage, where it appears in this fashion (i.e., you can't see her nude) and is put up here under the fair use exception.  No doubt if the full centerfold was spread out, Camuglia's happy smile would not be what attention was drawn to.

Lex Anteinternet: Francis Anna Camuglia and Cynthia Blanton.: I ran into this item in a really roundabout way, that being a random link to a 1967 newspaper article.  That isn't mentioned in either o...

Sort of going down the rabbit hole, I suppose, on this one, but the story is so illustrative of certain things, most of them pretty sad, so it's worth an additional, illustrative, look.

Cynthia Blanton replied to the post here, which was extremely nice of her to do, on her being a doppelganger for Francis Anna Camuglia, the March 1967 Playboy "Playmate", who appeared in that role as Fran Gerard.  It turns out that my comment that they were close in age was not only correct, but there's an added freakish element of. The two young women were just eight months apart in age and, while Blanton had not met Camuglia, they had even been schoolmates in the same California high school, Granada Hills High School, prior to Blanton's family moving only shortly before March 1967.  

Camuglia's obituary simply notes that she "attended" the school, which causes me to suspect, with nothing to back it up, that she might not have graduated.  Her life would likewise suggest she didn't graduate.

The high school still exists, but is a charter school now.  It was nearly new then, having opened in 1960.  It seems to have consistently been a well regarded high school.

Camuglia was just a teenager when she appeared in Playboy and only barely out of high school.  And not only was she only 19 when the photos ran, give the nature of production, she was 18 when they were taken.  

One year younger would have made this child pornography.

Not that this would prove to be a deterrent for Playboy.  At least two of the Playboy "Playmates" were 17 years old when their photographs were taken, and the magazine knew that at least one of the girls had that young age. They waited to run that girls' 17 year old nude photographs until she turned 18, which would not have made it legal, but rather likely to be undiscovered.  Another seems to have lied about her age, although seemingly this could have been checked up on.  One girl was specifically run as a recent high school grad who was the "youngest" playmate and getting her high school wish to be a centerfold, when in fact she was 17.

Early on, Playboy was under a serious European threat for advancing pedophilia, although oddly enough from its cartoons.  It turns out, however, that it did in fact go as low as it could go, age wise, for nudes, and even lower than legally allowed.

To add to the sadness of this, Camuglia's first husband had divorced her, or vice versa, just a month prior to these running.  When he married her he was 37 years old. She was 18.

I don't know the reasons for the divorce, or the marriage.  What did an 18 year old see in a 37 year old. I don't know what he saw in her, but her physical attributes were no doubt undeniable. The marriage lasted only seven months and he disappears from the record.  A person has to wonder if the Playboy spread brought about the divorce, although that's pure speculation.  The odds wouldn't have been good for its survival at any rate, given the odd age disparity.

Her next marriage was in 1970.  She would have been 22 years old at that time.  Her second husband doesn't seem to be mentioned on her headstone, however, which suggests that she was not married at the time of her death.

Her father died in 2010, and her mother in 2016.  Their devotion to each other, and their children, is noted on their headstones.

Undoubtedly another Playboy photograph, but as she more likely actually appeared.  Fran Camuglia didn't actually wear glasses.  This was taken from an entry on Find A Grave and is likewise put up under the fair use exception.

I don't know where this all goes, but its a sort of morality play on bad decisions, combined with a lack of societal safe guards, and declining public morality.  It's perfectly legal for a 37 year old to marry an 18 year old, but it's almost never a good idea.  I'd guess her parents opposed it, and we don't know the story behind it.   Really short marriages of much older men to teenagers have historically tended to be explained by pregnancy or mistaken belief in pregnancy, and the 18 year old Camuglia could fairly easily pass for an older young woman.  Male interest in her can easily be explained by her obvious, apparently, physical assets, something which has apparently caused her to retain a fan base forty years after her tragic death.

It's hard to believe that this story wouldn't have worked out better if Playboy hadn't been around to exploit young women.  I'll spare repeating all the details that were given in the documentary on the magazine, but they're horrific.  Suicide wasn't limited to Camuglia.  Murder was visited on at least one Playmate and visited upon a person by one.  According to the documentary one young woman associated with the magazine died at a party and her body simply disappeared.  One suicide scrawled her opinion on Hugh Hefner graphically on a wall in the apartment where she killed herself.  A host of "bunnies" was  used by men at an event physically in a way that traumatized them.

What, if anything, Camuglia endured we don't know.  Maybe only having her 18 year old body be the object of, well, for forty decades, which would be odd enough, and which would also contribute to psychic loss.

In 1967 when Camuglia appeared in the magazine, in middle class society the magazine was both accepted and regarded as dirty.  It claimed for itself that it managed to become the Stars and Stripes of the Vietnam War, and as grossly exaggerated in Apocalypse Now, it was so accepted by that time that Playmates appearing in the way that movie stars had in World War Two and Korea in the combat theater occurred.  Pinup girls didn't appear overseas in the earlier wars, even though they existed.

At the same time, however, the magazine remained a "dirty" magazine and there were legal efforts as late as the 1970s to try to address its obscenity, although they failed.  Being n the magazine branded those who did it in ways they could not escape.  Whatever happened to Camuglia, she apparently couldn't escape it.

Well, may God rest her soul and may the perpetual light shine upon her, and all who endured such tragedy..

Related thread:

Francis Anna Camuglia and Cynthia Blanton.

Labels: 1960s, 1967, 1970s, 1980s, 1985, Commentary, Growing up in the 1960s, Growing up in the 1970s, Playboy Philosophy, pornography, Teenagers, The relationship between men and women, Women

2024 Election Post Mortem, Part I. What the heck happened?

And so the finger pointing, blaming, and name calling has begun.

The 2024 Presidential Election was supposed to be close.

It wasn't.  And that means something.  How did the nation elect a convicted felon who hung out with a procurer and who is a creepy serial polygamist, who also is likely sliding into dementia, as President of the United States?

Well, there are a lot of views out there.  We offer ours, including some things we noted early on.

1.  It turns out that we were correct that Biden shouldn't have run in the first place, and that Harris shouldn't have stepped into the breach.

Biden was supposed to be a caretaker President.  "Go with the Joe you know" only made sense as long as it was just one cup of coffee.  People didn't want a refill. Biden was supposed to carry on for four years while the nation got back on its feet from a traumatic Trump presidency and figured out where to go next.

Biden's diehard insistence on running again doomed that, and in some ways, the Democrats chances in 2024.

Biden, in his defense, was dealt a bad hand right from the onset.  Left with an economy impacted by COVID, he had to deal with it, and he did a good job.  The inflation that caused was not of his making, and he actually pulled off a soft landing.  In the future, he's likely to be regarded as having pulled an economic rabbit out the hat.

And his rallying to the cause of Ukraine is singularly responsible for the country not being overrun by the Russians.

But people are stupid about economics, and stupidly believe that once inflation slows, prices return to the pre inflation norm, which actually required deflation, which generally causes a depression.  That tar baby is now Trump's, as Trump won't be able to pull that off either.

More than that, however, Biden's advanced age was showing, whereas its seemingly not as noticeable with Trump.  It was real hubris of Biden to run for a second term, and he shouldn't have done it.  That set the Democrats behind.

When he finally stepped out, I noted that the time that Harris shouldn't step in.  She did.  She actually also ran a much better campaign than I initially thought she would.  Frankly, I don't know that I can blame her for running, or blame the Democrats for running her.  She proved to be too easy to tag with the issues that had hurt Biden, however, which did not make up the reasons that I thought she should not have run.

2.  It's actually the social issues, stupid.

El Paso Sheriff : What's it mean? What's it leadin' to? You know, if you'd have told me 20 years ago, that I'd see children walking the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses, I just flat-out wouldn't have believed you.

Ed Tom Bell : Signs and wonders. But I think once you quit hearing "sir" and "ma'am," the rest is soon to foller.

El Paso Sheriff : Oh, it's the tide. It's the dismal tide.

No Country For Old Men. 

We warned prior to 2016 that Justice Kennedy's opinion in Obergefell had awakened a latent sleeping giant.  It did.

People keep analyzing the race in terms of the economy, which I myself partially did above.  But the big issue, to put it bluntly, is that Obergefell shocked many people into confronting the moral decline of the nation, something that had been going on for a very long time.

Sexual immorality in the US really commenced its roll in the late 1940s, as we've discussed before, and started to accelerate in 1953 with the launch of Playboy, and then really took off in the 1960s with the pill and the Sexual Revolution.  The irony of all of this, however, is the public tolerated it, although not always very comfortably, as it fit into conventional immorality.  That is, the White Anglo Saxon Protestant community basically tolerated a boys will be boys attitude at first, and then accommodated itself to other trends later, as long as things roughly worked out the way they were supposed to in the end, although they have not been working out for quite some time.  Once Obergefell came along, however, the public was asked to accommodate something else, and it hasn't, and for a host of reasons.  Transgenderism, which really doesn't exist, came hard on the heels of homosexual marriage, and it was just too much for large sections of the country.

At one time, it might be noted, it was a common assertion that the Babylon Berlin atmosphere of 1920's Germany had brought about the Nazis, in part, as they seemed to stand against unconventional immorality.  In truth, homosexuality was present in the early Nazis, but the movement did a good job of plastering over it so it was ignored, if known, just like Trump's flagrant immoral conduct with women is at least somewhat known, if ignored.  It allowed people to believe that that the Nazis would foster a return to pre 1914 moral standards, while ignoring that they would inflict new horrors.*  A lot of that has gone on in the populist movement as well, which sort of imagines that the country will sort of return to an imagined 1950s, or an imagined 1970s.

The Democrats didn't even try to do anything about this, but rather embraced the matters that the Trump populists and their fellow travellers opposed.  That's a big part of what occured.  Americans proved to be willing to go pretty far with changes in Christian morality before they started regretting it, which they did, but to be kicked into a new room with a bunch of very unconventional behaviors was more than they could bear.  It not only spawned a massive counterreaction, but it spawned radical new theories about the nature of what was going on, much of them false, and sort of a modified variant of a Great Awakening, that we haven't seen the end of yet.**  This reaction, moreover, wasn't limited to the US, but has been scene all over the Western World, caused by similar events.

You have to know the times you live in.

3. What we repeatedly said about abortion being a hill to die on was correct.

Hell Courtesan by Kawanabe Kyōsai.

Part of the solid evidence of the Democrats being marooned in a post Vietnam War liberal past is the absolute adherence to swimming in a sea of blood.

I warned earlier that grasping tight to abortion was a critical mistake for Democrats, but they saw it as a great issue, one that would turn women out to vote in favor of infanticide.

Instead, what it did was to force truly adherent Christians to vote against them, even if not to vote for Harris. I was one of them.  I voted for the American Solidarity Party.  I would have anyhow, but in a state that was close, this cost the Democrats votes.  It may very well have cost them the election.

Ironically, and the Democrats failed to grasp it, Donald Trump's wishy washiness on this helped him.  Lots of Evangelicals and even Catholics could rationalize voting for him as he seemed to be against abortion, sort of.  Hadn't his court brought Dobbs around?  And Republican women who otherwise adhered to the American Civil Religion could rationalize voting for pro abortion ballot measures while voting for trump, essentially voting for the things they were comfortable with from the 1970s, like abortion and birth control, while voting against homosexuality and transgenderism.

Indeed, the entire religiosity of the Trumpites is much like this, although not of the National Conservatives. They're okay with cheating men, up to a limit, premarital sex, and divorce, as long as the plumbing matches. They aren't okay with homosexuality.  Truly religious voters were never supportive of abortion, which Harris leaned deeply into.

Democrats should have known that and figures out a way to deal with it.  Even simply taking the same position as Trump, let the states deal with it, would have leveled the choice for many.  Or they could have just remained completely silent in the election on abortion and transgenderism, which would have caused some votes to swing their way.

If the Democrats don't modify their position on abortion, they're not going to do better in 2028.

4.  What we noted as long ago as 2016 about ignoring rust belt issues is still true.

We noted a long time ago that Trump's 2016 victory was brought about in part due to a massive discontent over immigration issues and American jobs going overseas.  Both Democrats and Republicans were complicit in this for years.

The problem here is that this festering sore has become infected, and crossed from discontent into malevolence.  Basically, its much like small town Germans thinking that a local Jewish butcher was odd, to thinking he's in league with evil. This has been downright scary.

Democrats woke up to the problem of decades long mass illegal immigration, but too late.  Now, it appears, we're about to engage in a mass immorality.

This one was a hard one for the Democrats.  Biden screwed up early in his administration on this issue.  Harris was tarred with it.  It would have taken a different candidate to distance from it, perhaps, quite frankly, a Hispanic one.  There are solutions, but some of them are quite out of the box, very pre 1940, and a bit drastic.

Likewise, Trump introduced his absurd tariffs concept.  The idea is underdeveloped and economically flaccid.  But Rust Belt people don't care as in their minds if electric vehicles don't come in from China, 1965 Chevrolet Impalas will come back. This won't happen, and this will rapidly prove to be incorrect.

5.  Demographics change.

Roman Catholic Cathedral Santuario de Guadalupe (Cathedral Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe), Dallas Texas

Dedicated in 1902 as the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, this cathedral was renamed the Cathedral Santuario de Guadalupe in 1977, when another aging Dallas church dedicated to the Lady of Guadalupe was torn down. This cathedral has the second largest parish congregation in the United States.

Democrats in the 1960s abandoned white Southern racists in favor of the minorities of the time, much to their credit.  Up until that time, African Americans had been Republicans.  Democrats remembered that Italian American and Irish Americans had been, and were, theirs.

But they failed to notice that Roe v. Wade shattered the Catholic immigrant retained vote of earlier eras. For some reason, they didn't grasp that retaining abortion and embracing transgenderism and abortion would come to offend  large groups of American, and even immigrant, Hispanics, who had a similar Catholic morality.  And they didn't grasp that at the pew level, this was also true for the Black Church and many African Americans, who came to resent having their cause compared to ones based on sexual orientation or practice.

They also forgot that minority adherence to patronage only lasts as long as poverty does.  Once a demographic moves into the Middle Class, it begins to disappear within a generation or two.  Irish Americans and Italian Americans were once solidly Democratic.  This hasn't been the case for a long time.  Hispanics have been moving out of poverty, and so have African Americans.

And Hispanic Americans, which are a diverse group to start with.

This left the Democratic party a party of old Boomers, and the white upper middle class, and lower upper class, white, effete, elites.  They're aren't enough of them to win an election.

Footnotes

*The Nazis ended up sending homosexuals to the death camps.  They were highly resistant to women working, and only relented on it as the war began to go very badly.  They'd also encourage pregnancy, including out of wedlock, by German women, which was definitely contrary to traditional Christian morality.

This is of note, not because there will be death camps, but because Germans voting on morality issues didn't get what they bargained for at all.  Americans doing the same in the 2024 election are likely to find they may be surprised.

**As an example, while at the county courthouse to vote early, I encountered an elderly man wearing a MAGA hat who was informing people that transgenderism "wasn't invented here", whatever that would mean, and that this was a reason to vote for Trump.

October 31. An Observation.

Today is Halloween.

It's also Reformation Day.

Everyone sort of knows what Halloween is, although in its extremely secularized form.  It's become so popular in that style that its now the second most popular holiday in the US, and you don't even get the da off from work or school.

Originally, and in Catholic and Orthodox Churches, it was All Hallowed Evening, the day before All Saints Day, which in the Catholic Church is a Holy Day of Obligation.   There are some debates about it, but the secular traditions that are observed stem from Celtic cultures of Great Britain in a much modified form.  The door to door trick or treating stems from a religious tradition in which the poor went door to door for food and were given it in exchange for a promise to pray for the donor's dead.

Reformation Day is a day not much observed in North America commemorating Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the Cathedral door at Worms, which he actually didn't do.  The legend was that he did it on this day.  No matter, he did get the rebellion of the reformation going, and with it the concept that people can make up their own minds on anything, no matter how ill informed they are.  Luther was fairly well informed on some things, but that was the unintentional result of his act of rebellion.  

At the time of his 95 Theses, he hadn't intended a rebellion at all, but he worked his way sort of around to it.  It'd be interesting to know what he thought he'd done by the time of his death, but one thing he knew is that he'd caused others with more radical ideas than his to also break away and create their own Christian sects.

Many of those new denominations have considerably changed over the years.  Some of the Lutherans, who followed Luther, often with no choice due to their localities, have become almost more Catholic than the Catholics, while others have gone in another direction.  The Reformation, at any rate, is winding down,and its really collapsing.

With its collapse has come the mess of contemporary culture, much of which we seeing being fought out in the United States right now, which is a Protestant country.  The massive secularization is a minor example of that, but is evident in all of our religion derived holidays, including this one, but also including Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The last acts of rebellion were those against nature, which we also see playing out doay.  They began in the late 1940s and came into full bloom in the 1960s, and are still enormously playing out today.  Part of that has been the acceptance of rebelling against truth, which we see in the current election in more than one way, and in both political parties, although certainly Donald Trump has manifested it in a heretofore unseen level.

So its Reformation Day and Halloween in 2024.  Lots of tricks on the culture are being played, and not too many treats being received.

Blog Mirror and Commentary: QC: Human Sexuality | January 17, 2024 and the destruction of reality.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Alexander Pope. An Essay on Criticism.

Evelyn Nesbit, model and archetypical Gibson Girl, 1903.

And indeed, I'm likely foolish for bringing up this topic.

Model in overalls . Photos by Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1944.  This is posted under the fair use and other exceptions.  Life, by 1943, was already posting some fairly revealing photographs on its cover, but there was a certain line that it did not really cross until 1953, when it photographed the full nudes of Marilyn Monroe prior to Playboy doing so, in an act calculated to save her career, as it was a respectable magazine.  The publication of nude Monroe's from the 1940s went, to use a modern term, "viral" both in Life and in Playboy showing something was afoot in the culture.  This photo above shows how much things were still viewed differently mid World War Two, with a very demure model demonstrating work pants.

This post actually serves to link in a video posted below, which probably isn't apparent due to all of the introductory photographs and text.  And that's because of all the commentary I've asserted along the way.  

If you do nothing else, watch or listen to the video.

This post might look like a surprising thing to have linked in here, but in actuality, it directly applies to the topic of this website, the same being changes over time.  Or, put another way, how did average people, more particularly average Americans, and more particularly still, average Wyomingites, look at things and experience things, as well as looked at things and experienced things.

This is an area in which views have changed radically, and Fr. Krupp's post really reveals that.

At some point, relatively early in this podcast, Fr. Krupp, quoting from Dr. Peter Craig, notes that what the Sexual Revolution did was subtract, not add, to sex, by taking out of it its fundamental reality, that being that it creates human beings.

That's a phenomenal observation.

And its correct. What the Sexual Revolution achieved was to completely divorce an elemental act from an existential reality, and in the process, it warped human understanding of it, and indeed infantilized it.  That in turn lead, ultimately, the childish individualist focus on our reproductive organs we have today, and a massive focus on sex that has nothing whatsoever to do with reproduction, or at least we think it doesn't.  It's been wholly destructive.

We've addressed that numerous times here in the past and if we have a quibble with the presentation, it would be a fairly minor one, maybe.  Fr. Krupp puts this in the context of artificial birth control, but the process, we feel, had started earlier in the last 1940s with the erroneous conclusions in the Kinsey treatise Sexual Behavior in the Human Mail, which was drawn from prisoners who were available as they had not been conscripted to fight in World War Two and who displayed a variety of deviances, including sexual, to start with. The report was a bit of a bomb thrown into society, which was followed up upon by Hugh Hefner's slick publication Playboy which portrayed all women as sterile and top heavy. Pharmaceuticals pushed things over the edge in the early 60s.

Lauren Bacall, 1943.

The point isn't that prurient interests didn't exist before that time. They very clearly did.  La Vie Parisienne was popular prior to World War Two for that very reason, and films, prior to the production code, were already experimenting with titillation by the 1920s.  But there was much, much less of this prior to 1948 than there was later, and going the other direction, prior to 1920, it would have been pretty rare to have been exposed to such things in average life at all.

Indeed, it's now well known, in spite of what the Kinsey report claimed, that men and women acted very conventionally through the 40s.  Most people, men and women, never had sex outside of marriage.   Things did occur, including "unplanned births" but they were treated much differently and not regarded as the norm.  Included in that, of course, was the knowledge that acting outside of marriage didn't keep things from occuring in the normal and conventional biological sense.

Given that, the normal male's view of the world, and for that matter the normal female's, was undoubtedly much different, and much less sexualized. Additionally, it would have been less deviant than even widely accepted deviances today, and much more grounded in biology.  That doesn't mean things didn't happen, but they happened a lot less, and people were more realistic about what the consequences of what they were doing were in every sense.

Something started to change in the 1940s, and perhaps the Kinsey book was a symptom of that rather than the cause, although its very hard to tell.  Indeed, as early as the 1920s the movie industry, before being reined in, made a very serious effort to sell through sex.  It was society that reacted at the time, showing how ingrained the moral culture was.  That really started to break down during the 1940s.  I've often wondered if the war itself was part of the reason why.

From Reddit, again posted under copyright exceptions.  This is definitely risque and its hard to imagine women doing in this in the 30s, and frankly its pretty hard to imagine them doing it in the 1940s, but here it is.   The Second World War was a massive bloodletting, even worse than the Frist, and to some extent to me it seems like it shattered moral conduct in all sorts of ways, although it took some time to play out.

Kinsey released his book in 1948, and like SLAM Marshall's book Men Under Fire, its conclusions were in fact flat out wrong.  Marshall's book impacted military training for decades and some still site it.  Kinsey's book is still respected even though it contains material that's demonstratively wrong.

By 1953 (in the midst of a new war in Korea) things had slipped far enough that Hugh Hefner was able to introduce a slick publication glorifying women who were portrayed as over endowed, oversexed, dumb, and sterile.  There were efforts to fight back, but they were losing efforts.

Cheesecake photograph of Marilyn Monroe (posted here under the fair use and commentary exceptions to copyright. This photograph must be from the late 1950s or the very early 1960s, which somewhat, but only somewhat, cuts against Fr. Krupp's argument, which is based on the works of Dr. Peter Craig and heavily tied to artificial birth control as the cause of the Sexual Revolution.  I think that's largely correct, but the breakdown had started earlier, as early in 1948 in my view, such that even before the introduction of contraceptive pharmaceuticals a divorce between the reality of sex and reproduction had set in, leading to the "toy" or plaything concept of women that we have today.

And then the pill came, at the same time a society revolution of sorts, concentrated in young people, started to spread around the globe.

We've lost a lot here. A massive amount.  And principal among them are our groundings in the existential, and reality.   And we're still slippping.

QC: Human Sexuality | January 17, 2024.

Related threads:

We like everything to be all natural. . . . except for us.

Labels: Agrarianism, Agriculture, An hoc pertinet ad naturam?, Commentary, Daily Living, Food, Friday Farming, Medicine, Men, nature, The roles of men and women, transgenderism, trends, Women

Boy Scouts no more.

 

The Boy Scouts of America is changing its name to Scouting America

Boy Scouts of America has announced it will rebrand as Scouting America, which, if media impressions are any measure, is a very big deal. Within days of the announcement, the collective online impressions of the news surpassed 14 million, according to the organization — a staggering figure that underscores the institution’s widespread influence.

Article in the Tribune. 

Does it really suggest the "institution's widespread influence", or its tragic decline from what had been that influence?

I teed this up quite a while back and since that time the Southern Rockies Nature Blog, which is linked in here, has a really nice and personal blog entries on this item, entitled Bye Bye Boy Scouts.  I can't really say goodbye to the Scouts that way, as I never was much of a Scout.

Usually I say I was never a Boy Scout, but that's not true.  I was briefly.  Probably around when I was in 6th Grade, or at whatever point it is when a person goes from Cub Scout to Boy Scout, when there were Boy Scouts.  I didn't really last long in it, and it's hard to say exactly why.  Part of it was, I think, as they group I was in, while they did do things, was slow to get around to doing them.  The several merit badges I earned while I was in, I just picked out and did by myself.  That "by myself" thing probably had a lot to do with it also, as by this time my lifelong introvert nature was firmly set in, and unless compelled by external forces or acclimated by long exposure to a group, you'll feel uncomfortable in a group.  Usually I say that I'm "not much of a joiner", with this being, I think, part of it.

Another part may simply be that I'm highly rural and was then.

We don't tend to think of it this way, but Scouting was an urban movement.¹   Aware of the inadequacy of young British men in the Boer War, Lord Baden-Powell, who after the war became the British Army's Chief of Cavalry, founded the Boy Scouts.  The idea was twofold, those being 1) British boys had become a bunch of anemic unskilled wimps who needed some manning up from nature, and 2) British boys had become a bunch of anemic unskilled reprobates who needed some Muscular Christianity.

The original organization had no place for girls.  Girls wanted to participate in things, and soon had their own organizations.  The two didn't mix.

And frankly it didn't mix for good reason There are such things as manly, and womanly virtues.  Much of what the original Boy Scouts sought to address was spot on in its observations, and Scouting did a really good job of addressing them.  Often affiliated with churches, Scouting groups were successful in teaching boys a lot of valuable outdoor skills that often stuck with them for life, and they were benefitted in that goal by the absence of girls, who at a bare minimum are extremely distracting to boys and young men.  Given their natures, young women are usually, although not always, much less distracted by young men.

There's been a lot written on the decline of the Boy Scouts, and there are various theories about it.  One of the blogs linked in here, The Southern Rockies Nature Blog, has an article about it that's worth checking out.  Whatever it was that brought it to its current state, it was still a pretty strong organization in the 1970s, when I had my brief association with it. At that time, even in the rural West, a lot of boys were part of it, and for that matter quite a few of their fathers had a strong association with it.  Being in the Boy Scouts (which my father never was), was part of a multi generational thing.

Signs of decline were there even then.  Of my good friends, only one was a Boy Scout, which his father had been.  Another had a father who had a strong history of Scouting, but my friend wasn't in it.  I was in a youth organization in my early teens, but it was the Civil Air Patrol, which with its martial aviation theme was a completely different type of organization.  Rural kids, of whom I knew a lot, tended to be in the FFA, which had direct practical application to them.

I wish I could pinpoint what was going on, but I really can't.  I've tried to do so here before, and probably haven't been successful.  Looking at the topics addressed in this thread, however, I think part of it may have been that in the post World War Two era that went into the 1970s, the retained gaze upon the rural really faded.  Even television reflected that as programming went from the rural focused on the 1960s, such as The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverley Hillbillies, and Green Acres, the last two of which anticipated the change, to urban centric dramas such as Newhart, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, WKRP In Cincinnati, etc.  Americans had been moving into the cities for a long time, but suddenly they quit looking outside of them.  Even a gritty urban environment depicted in something like The French Connection was celebrated in a way.  It's notable that a figure like Clint Eastwood, who had come up in westerns, started appearing as Dirty Harry in urban California at the same time, and Dirty Harry, like Popeye Doyle, wasn't portrayed as any sort of Boy Scout.

The atmosphere of the late 60s also brought in destructive forces that we're still dealing with.  The resolute male admired and celebrated from the era of The Strenuous Life on to the Ballad of the Green Berets suddenly, in the Strauss Howe fashion, yielded to the feminized and marginalized male, at least in the dominant WASP culture.  It's never really recovered, and we can see some of the reactions to that playing out in society now.

In that atmosphere, Scouting attempted to adapt, but that's part of the problem.  The campaign hat went out, and the red beret came in.² Out with the old, and in with the new.  The institution already had, however, its close association with Christianity and a sort of "goody two shoes" reputation.  It probably should have just doubled down on that and its rural focus, but it tried to adapt instead.

Like other institutions that were heavily male and which had become somewhat soft, it also began to be plagued, apparenlty, with male on male sexual conduct.

People hate to discuss this part, so the realities of this should be noted.  One of the byproducts of keeping boys and girls separate in Scouting is that it not only allowed boys to focus, but it kept boys and girls out of close proximity to each other. Scouting involves teenagers.  No matter how focused or watched, when male and female teenagers are together, some of them will misbehave in ways that create life changing byproducts.  A person only has to look at the expansion of the role of women in the military in order to appreciate this.³ 

We already know that the largest group of abusers of teenagers in this fashion are teachers.  The decline in personal morality brought about by the Sexual Revolution helped unleash this, and I'd wager that a person could easily find a story of a teacher engaging in this conduct with a teenaged charge nearly every month.  I ran across one just last week, in which the assailant was a female teacher and the victim something like a mere 13 years old.  If this happens in an institution in which being discovered will result in the end of a career and jail time, and in which getting caught is highly likely, it's going to happen in situations in which this is much less discoverable.

Put bluntly, as the Muscular Christianity focus waned, the Sexual Revolution came on, and an overall feminization of society advanced, predatory homosexuality in the Boy Scouts became inevitable to some degree, and it had probably always been there at least to some extent.  It's customary at this point to note that not all homosexuals are predatory, and that only a minority are, which is absolutely true, but it happened.  That some people would let their behavior go in an all male setting shouldn't be any more surprising than those instances of male coaches preying on young teenage female athletes.  It's reprehensible, but without additional external controls, it was going to occur.

This helped cause Scouting's popularity to drop off massively, and not surprisingly. Parents quit encouraging their children to be Scouts.  Not really knowing what to do about it in the context of the culture, Scouting opened its doors to girls. This predictably hasn't helped, and it won't.  Scouting will, I'd guess, be largely taken over by girls, but it won't be an organization that Boy Scouts prior to the 1970s would recognize.

There's something to all male bonds between conventionally oriented males that is unalterably different from ones with women.  Probably our biology has a lot to do with it.  The mateship that exists in military units, for example, which are all male, is completely different from an organization that has even one female in it.

The larger tragedy is that the very thing that Scouting was created to address in the first place, in large measure, is probably need as much now as it was then.  The source of the problem is large the same, the urbanization of the country and the corrupting influence of urban life, combined with the absence of male roles, something that existed in the very early 20th Century and something that exists now, albeit for different reasons.  Scouting, by having gone first soft, and then semi feminized, is no longer the organization that it was, that addressed that.

Footnotes:

1. Recently I read Doug Crowe's book A Growing Season, which is extremely off color, but extremely interesting.  The back of the book, where the short review is, terms it a novel, but it isn't.  The figures in it are all real, I either know of them or actually knew some of them.

It occured to me in posting this that part of the reason that the Boy Scouts lost its appeal to me here is that in a highly rural setting the first purpose of scouting, to introduce the outdoors, will be taken up by those who have a strong affinity towards it, which most young men do, all on their own.  Going to Scouting events actually retards a person's ability to go outdoors and do what you want, with your young male associates, once somebody is of driving age, or at least it did then. As soon as somebody was 16, we were pretty much loose in the world.

As noted, not surprisingly, our companions in these forays were all male.  I can't recall going on an outdoor adventure of any kind with a female of my own age until I was at the University of Wyoming.  Nature segregates us in that fashion, even if society doesn't want us to.  As A Growing Season demonstrates, that certainly gives rise to opportunities to engage in vice, although did not in any serious fashion, and the few of my fellows who really fell into it did so, notably, in town.

2.  Only if troops adopted it, however.

3.  Without putting too fine a point on it, two women I know of who were justifiably very proud of their military service, and neither of which might be regarded as libertine, had early discharges from the service for this very reason, followed by the birth of their oldest child not long after.  The service with the biggest problem, seemingly, is the Navy, where close proxmity on ships has caused an alaraming pregnancy rate in some instances.

Related threads:

Youth organizations. Their Rise and (near) Fall, or is that a myth? And, did you join?

No place for boys. . .

Exit the Boy Scouts Stage Left. Boys, Men, the "Masculinity Crisis" and the "BSA" as an example of it.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part 7. One more won't hurt me. . .

Today In Wyoming's History: May 8. The LDS severs ties with the BSA.

Blog Mirror: What Scouting Has Lost