Newspaper ads soliciting potential spouses. Somewhat amusing, I suppose, is the German working girl "anxious" to meet a mechanic, followed by an advertisement from a 36 year old mechanic looking for a "working girl". The typesetter had to have arranged that order intentionally.
This is a topic that tends to fascinate people as a relic of the past:
This, from a Thai in the AFA Reddit threads probably explains a lot of it currently:
If you want to get out of Thailand, you marry a foreigner. It's a better life for me, and my family as I bring them over. So my parents, my sisters and I are all here in the US now.
I met Paul online through a mail order bride agency when I was 16. We talked, and he flew here when I was 17 to meet me, and he met my family. He got the approval from my parents, and when I turned 18 we got married and he brought me to the US.
I have a nice house, a man who cares and takes care of me, and a good job. I don't think I would have this back in our home country. I'm glad for Paul, and everything he's done for us. So, I am happy.
Icky aspect of this aside. . . well maybe the whole thing is icky, this probably defines things in a way, then and now, for mail order brides. Economic desperation. Perhaps more then, a bit, than now, but both.
Men meeting their "mail order" spouse to be at Ellis Island. These women were from Armenia, Turkey, Greece and Romania, and likely were all Eastern Orthodox.
This is a popular story for things like romance novels. It's the topic of at least one movie, 1974's Zandy's Bride, which was based on a 1942 novel called The Stranger. I suspect it was way less common than generally supposed, but I don't know. Added to that, some of what we regard as "mail order" were actually very long distance courtships by correspondence. I.e, they knew each other that way, which is apparently at least somewhat the case for modern mail order brides as well.
Gree, women entering the country to marry correspondent fiances.
The photos that were put up here, and the advertisement, show an aspect of this that was really significant at the time, and seems to be forgotten (including by current mail orders) that being religion and culture. The Greek women, at least three of whom appear to be very young, were escaping poverty, but they were marrying into their own culture. Pretty rough, but they were at least marrying somebody who spoke Greek and who was Greek Orthodox. Likely all the women in the first photograph were marrying somebody from their own culture as well. The advertisement, however, provides less of that, but some of it. Some men were just looking for somebody to marry. The Jewish man was looking for a Jewish woman, however. The German working girl, on the other hand, wanted a "mechanic" (somebody who worked with machinery) and a comfortable small home. Two men wanted widows for some reason, which would probably make sense if I knew the context (perhaps they wanted somebody who was used to be married and whom they didn't have to romance). Even where culture wasn't referenced, chances are they would likely be ofose cultures.
Of course, if you go further back, you can find more peculiar examples, such as the French "King's Daughters" who were sent to Quebec. Up to 1,000 of them were sent between 1663 and 1673, which followed prior private efforts starting in the 1640s. The King's Daughters were actually vetted for their future role, and were held to scrupulous standards based on their "moral calibre" and physically fitness. Authorities in Quebec actually sent some back that were found not to be vigorous enough, which presumably was disappointing for them.
What all of this says we could debate. Contrary to what some people like to assert, it's never been the case, ever, that regular people didn't marry for love. They always have. The thing is that modern people often have a hard time recognizing that in the conditions of earlier times.
Catholicism brought in the requirement that there be consent on the part of both parties in order for their to be a valid marriage, and after that marriage ages jumped to the current norms. Chances are pretty good that the way most couples relationships developed looked a lot more like what's depicted in Flipped, set in the 1950s, than Dirty Dancing or something. I.e, the ultimately married couple knew each other from childhood. That still occurs, of course, particularly in some communities. Doug Crowe's ribald A Growing Season references that being the case in ranching communities of the 1950s, and I'd seen the same thing as late as the 1990s. But where women were in short supply, desperate times always called for desperate measures.
Photograph from Montana, 1901. Clearly the man with the cat was the most eligible Batchelor.
Something that should be noted is that there was a pretty high incentive for women to marry prior to the 1920s, or even prior to the 1940s, in comparison to currently. Obviously marriage remains, but to be a "spinster" prior to the mid 20th Century came with a massive set of problems for the woman and her family. The classic Pride and Prejudice deals with this repeatedly as the failure of the Bennet sister to marry is creating an impending financial disaster for the family and Charlotte Lucas accepts a less than desirable proposal because, in part, she's a burden on her parents. Those concerns are subtle in the film, but they were real. The "German working girl" in the advertisement above was likely looking at serving out a life's sentence as a domestic servant if she couldn't find somebody to marry. Most women who weren't married lived at home, and when they aged into their 30s they were looking at taking on that role for increasingly elderly parents.
All of which raises the question, do you have a couple that met in your background this way? It'd be almost impossible to know, I'd think. Having said that, in thinking of it, my chances of being descended from a King's Daughter are fairly high and, while not really the same thing, one of my aunts who did a family genealogy claimed that one married couple we descend from did not speak the same language when they married, although her information was notoriously unreliable (the husband was Scottish, the wife Irish. . . I think they both clearly would have spoken English). On my wife's side, my father in law told me once that one set of his grandparents were both from Ohio originally, but that they had not met there. Somehow the bride was sent out to marry the groom, and they married.
I"m putting up this interesting Out Our Way cartoon from this day in 1946 as it refers to something we've discussed here before, and its a bit surprising.
What we've discussed here before is hunting during World War Two.
I've always thought this was one of the more interesting threads on this blog, and it's one of the many ones I post and wonder why there's never any comments on it. But that's common for blogs. Usually, they don't get posts.
Anyhow, this cartoon by J. R. Williams sort of confirms what I'd suspected. Some people supplemented their table fare during the war by hunting.
Williams was, as we've discussed before, a Canadian cartoonist who moved to the U.S. with his family at age 15, locating in Detroit. He soon dropped out of school and became an apprentice machinist, providing topics for his cartoons which frequently depicted machine shops. He drifted after that, something not uncommon in that era, and worked as a cowboy in the West, as well as serving a three year stint on the U.S. Army as a cavalryman. All of that experience likewise reflected itself in his cartoons. Family life, in spite of his being a bit short (again, not all that uncommon for the time) also featured frequently.
He became a professional cartoonist in 1922 and remained one until his death in 1957 at age 69. He'd used the proceeds of his cartoons to buy a ranch in Arizona, before relocating later on to Pasadena, California. His cartoons carried on to some extent after his death in the hands of other artists.
Anyhow, one of the things about his cartoons is that depict fairly accurate slices of life, and this running gag from 1945-46 no doubt did. The father has taken an elk and a deer, and the family is keeping it in the ice box. The part that surprises me is that I really like venison, and these cartoons suggest that this venison was bad, which may be explained in an earlier cartoon I'm not familiar with.
Eighteen nations entered into an Agreement on Reparation from Germany.
Rockwell's World War Two era illustration of one of Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, this one being Freedom from want. This came from a March 6, 1943 Saturday Evening Post illustration although it was completed in November, 1943. Rockwell was inspired by a Thanksgiving dinner in which he photographed his cook serving the same in November, 1942. The painting has come to symbolize Thanksgiving dinners. Interesting, compared to the vast fare that is typically associated with the feast, this table is actually fairly spartan.
This is a really good article on grocery shopping.
I'm going to take this in a slightly different direction, but this blog post is, I'll note, really good.
And I love the kitties featured in the article.
Anyhow, it ought to be obvious to anyone living in the US right now that groceries, that odd word discovered by Donald Trump in his dotage, are pretty expensive. Less obvious, it seems, is why that is true. Again, not to overly politicize it, but the common Trump Interregnum explanations are largely complete crap. It's not the case, as seemingly suggested, that Joe Biden runs around raising prices in a wicked plan to destroy the American lifestyle for "hard working Americans". Rather, a bunch of things have contributed to that.
To start with, the COVID 19 pandemic really screwed up the economy, and we're still living with the impact of that. One of the impacts of that is that certain supply chains somewhat broke and have never been repaired. Added to that, global climatic conditions are impacting crops in what is now a global food distribution system. Weather has additionally impacted meat prices by impacting the Beef Cattle Heard in the last decade, which has been followed up upon by the visitation of cattle diseases, and poultry diseases, that have reduced head counts. That definitely impacts prices. The Administration, however, believing that the country exists in the economic 1820s, rather than the 2020s, fiddles with inflation causing tariffs on a weekly basis, which raises prices on everything. And finally the ineptly waged Russian war against Ukraine has impacted grain supplies world wide. It reminds me of, well. . . :
Then I watched while the Lamb broke open the first of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures cry out in a voice like thunder, “Come forward.”
I looked, and there was a white horse, and its rider had a bow. He was given a crown, and he rode forth victorious to further his victories.
When he broke open the second seal, I heard the second living creature cry out, “Come forward.”
Another horse came out, a red one. Its rider was given power to take peace away from the earth, so that people would slaughter one another. And he was given a huge sword.
When he broke open the third seal, I heard the third living creature cry out, “Come forward.” I looked, and there was a black horse, and its rider held a scale in his hand.
I heard what seemed to be a voice in the midst of the four living creatures. It said, “A ration of wheat costs a day’s pay, and three rations of barley cost a day’s pay. But do not damage the olive oil or the wine.”
When he broke open the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature cry out, “Come forward.”
I looked, and there was a pale green horse. Its rider was named Death, and Hades accompanied him. They were given authority over a quarter of the earth, to kill with sword, famine, and plague, and by means of the beasts of the earth.
Not that dire, of course. . .
Anyhow, this reminded me of an agrarian topic. How can you, dear agrarian reader, reduce your grocery bill?
Well, do it yourself, of course.
What do I mean?
Well, grow it and kill it yourself.
Assuming, of course, you can. But most people can.
Now, let me be the first to admit that this is more than a little hypocritical on my part now days. The pressures of work and life caused me to give up my very extensive garden some years ago. I'd frankly cash in my chips and retire life now, but my spouse insists that this cannot be so. So, in my rapidly increasing dotage, I'm working as hard as ever at my town job.
Anyhow, however, let's consider this. Many people have the means of putting in a garden, and many have the means to take at least part of their meat consumption in by fishing and hunting. Beyond that, if you have freezer space, or even if a friend has freezer space, you can buy much, maybe all depending upon where you live, of your meat locally sourced.
Given as this is Thanksgiving, let's take a look at how that would look.
I'll start off with first noting that there's actually more variety in Thanksgiving meals than supposed, as well as less. This time of year in fact, you'll tend to find all sort of weird articles by various people eschewing the traditional turkey dinner in favor of something else, mostly just in an effort to be self serving different. And then you have the weirdness of something like this:
I suppose that's an effort by our Vice President to be amusing, something he genuinely is not, but frankly, I do like turkey. I like it a lot. A lot of people do. Vance, of course, lives in a house where his wife is a vegetarian for religious reasons, so turkey may not appear there.
Anyhow, what is the traditional Thanksgiving meal? Most of us have to look back on our own families in order to really determine that.
When I was growing up, we always had Thanksgiving Dinner at one of my uncle's houses. My father and his only brother were very close, and we went there for Thanksgiving, and they came to our house for Christmas evening dinner. Both dinners were evening dinners. We probably went over to my aunt and uncle's house about 4:00 p.m. and came home after 9:00 p.m., but I'll also note that this is now a long time ago and my memory may be off. This tradition lasted until the year after my father passed away, but even at that, that's now over 30 years ago.
Dinner at my aunt and uncles generally went like this.
Before dinner it was likely that football was turned on the television, which is a big unfortunate American tradition. My father and uncle would likely have a couple of beers. My father hardly drank at all, so this was relatively unusual. My mother would generally not drink beer and interestingly it was largely a male drink.1 I don't think I saw women really drink beer until I was in college.2 Anyhow, at dinner there's be some sort of white wine, although I can barely recall it. Nobody in the family was a wine connoisseur, so there's no way I could remotely give an indication on what it was, except that one of my cousins, when he was old enough to drink, really liked Asti Spumante, which I bet I haven't had in over a decade.3 Dinner itself would be a large roasted turkey, mashed potatoes, bread, salad, and a marshmallow yam dish. Dinner rolls would also be present.
Desert was pumpkin pie.
Pretty common fare, and frankly, very good fare, for Thanksgiving.
After my father died, Thanksgiving dinner was briefly up to me for a time, as my mother was too ill by that stage in her life to deal with cooking much.4 In light of tradition, I'd probably cook a smaller turkey, although if I had wild waterfowl I'd shot, I'd go with that. Otherwise, mashed potatoes and yams. To drink, for me, probably beer.
After I started dating my wife, Thanksgiving was at her folk's place. My mother in law is an excellent cook, and my wife is as well. Unlike J. D. Vance, I'm not afflicted with vegetarian relatives, and indeed, as my wife is from a ranch family, all dinners very much show that.
On the ranch, Thanksgiving is a noon meal. So is Christmas dinner. Noon meals are generally odd for me, as I don't usually eat lunch, but that reflects a pretty strong agricultural tradition. Big meals are often at noon. Meals associated with big events, such as brandings, always are. So it makes sense.
Thanksgiving there shares a common feature with the ones that were at my aunts and uncles, in that usually somebody offers everyone a drink before dinner, while people are chatting. Unlike my aunts and uncles, however, somebody will usually offer people some sort of whiskey.
Their Thanksgiving Dinner has a very broad fare. There's a large roasted turkey, but there's also a brisket. Both are excellent and everyone has some of both. There's salad, mashed potatoes and two different types of stuffing, as some of us likey oyster stuffing, and others do not. Cranberry sauce is handmade by one of my brothers in law, who is an excellent cook. There are other dishes as well, and there's a variety of desserts. Homemade dinner rolls are served as well.
So, that leads to this. If I were cooking a Thanksgiving Day dinner, what would it be.
It's be simple compared to what I've noted for the simple reason that I'm simplistic in my approach to dinner in general. I had a long period as a bachelor before being married, and I know how to cook, but my cooking reflects that bachelorhood in some ways.
The main entre would be a turkey, or perhaps a goose, which I'll explain below.
Two types of stuffing, for the reasons explained above.
Salad.
Mashed potatoes (but with no gravy, for reasons I'll explain below).
Bread.
Yams.
Pumpkin pie and mincemeat pie.
To drink, I'd probably have beer and some sort of wine. I'd have whiskey available before dinner.
Okay, if that doesn't meet the Walmart definition of a Thanksgiving dinner, that's because nobody should buy things at Walmart. . . ever.
So, in applying my localist/killetarian suggestions, how much of this could I acquire while avoiding a store entirely?
Almost all of it.
Starting with the meat, I always hunt turkeys each year, but I don't always get one. If I was going to cook Thanksgiving dinner, however, I'd put a more dedicated effort into it. Turkey hunting for me is sort of opportunistic, and given that I do it in the spring its mostly a chance to try to get a turkey while getting out, usually with the dog (although poor dog died in an automobile accident earlier this year, he only every got to go out for turkeys). If I put in more hours, which I should, I'd get one.
If I can't get one, however, by this time of year I definitely can get a goose.
Which, by way of a diversion, brings up J. D. Vance's stupid ass comment above. If your turkey is dry, that's because you cooked it wrong. And if wild turkey is dry, that's because the cook tried to cook it like some massive obese Butterball.
Tastewise and texture wise, there's no difference whatsoever between a wild and domestic turkey. People who say there are say that because one of them, if not both of them, were cooked incorrectly.
Which is true of goose as well. Goose tastes very much like roast beef, unless the cook was afraid of the goose and cooked it like it was something else and ruined it.
Anyhow. . . I can provide the bird myself
So too with the vegetables, mostly. When I grew a garden, I produced lettuce onions and potatoes. One year I grew brussels sprouts. Of these, only the lettuce either doesn't keep on its own or can't be frozen in some fashion. I could grow yams, I'm quite confident, even though I never did.
Now, on bread, I can bake my own bread and have, but I can't source the ingredients. So those I'd have to buy. I could likely figure out how to make my own stuffing, but I probably wouldn't bother to do so, unless I wanted to have oyster stuffing. I would have to buy the oysters.
I'll note here that I wouldn't make gravy, as I really don't like it. My mother in laws gravy is the only gravy that I like. Otherwise, there's no excuse for gravy. I put butter on mashed potatoes, and I always have.
But I buy the butter.
I'd have to buy marshmallows for the yams too.
That leaves something to drink. I know that some people will distill their own whiskey as a hobby, but I'm not about to try that, and I"ve never brewed beer. If I ever lived solely on what I produce myself, mostly, I'd take it up. I clearly don't have the time to do that now.
Dessert?
I'm fairly good at making pies. I like pumpkin pie, but I've never grown pumpkins. I could give that a shot, but I'd still have to buy most of the constituents. My grandmother (father's mother) used to make mincemeat pies, but I've never attempted that. The real ingredients for mincemeat pies freak people out, I"d note, those being, according to one granola website I hit and may link in, the following:
Which brings up a lot of stuff I'd have to buy. Everything but for the beef, as I too have beef from grass fed cows that I knew personally.
All in all, pretty doable.
Cheaper?
Well, if you are an efficient agrarian/killetarian, yes.
Footnotes:
1. My father normally only bought beer during the middle of the summer, and sometimes to take on a fishing expedition if somebody was going along. Otherwise, it just didn't appear in your house. The only whiskey ever bought was Canadian Whiskey, and a bottle of it would last forever. We often didn't have it at all. . . indeed, normally we did not. He only bought it when I was very young, if we were having guests.
This is interesting as in this era offering a drink to guests was very common. A different aunt and uncle liked Scotch and would offer it to guests, but my father hated Scotch.
When I was young, my parents would occasionally buy wine, but it was almost always Mogan David. Clearly were were not wine connoisseurs.
2. This probably seems odd, but it's true. I saw women drink beer so rarely that it was a shock when I was a kid to see a woman drinking a beer. They just normally didn't.
Indeed, by the time I was a teenager a girl drinking a beer sort of made her a "bad girl", but not in the Good Girls Don't sense. Rather, that was in the rowdy party girl sense. Or so we thought. We knew this, but we really didn't know any beer drinking girls as teenagers.
In college things were different, but the reputation that college students have for partying didn't really match the reality, at least for geology students. As an undergraduate in community college we might very occasionally go out for a beer, and that was almost always the collection of us who had graduated from high school together when everyone was home. For part of the last year of community college I had a girlfriend and I can remember being in a bar with her exactly once, when she was trying to introduce another National Guardsman to her sister. Otherwise, that relationship was unconsciously completely dry.
At UW as an undergrad most of my friends were geology students, like me, and the discipline was so hard there really wasn't any partying. Sometimes a group of guys would go out for a beer, but that was about it. Early on I recall there being a party of geology students who had all gone to community college together in the freezing apartment that one of us had. There were some beers, but generally, we just froze. A girlfriend who was also in the department and I went to a Christmas party the year I graduated, which was a big department affair and there was beer there, but that's about it.
In law school the story wasn't much different, frankly. Indeed, it wasn't until I got out of law school, and started practicing law, that I encountered people who really drank heavily.
3. To be honest, as a person always should be, when my mother's illness began to advance dramatically, she began to drink heavily. It was a problem that my father and I had to deal with. The oddity of it was that she had never done that when she was well.
As an added element of that, when she was well she took a wine making class. The wine she made was absolutely awful and she was the only one who would drink it, but because it was so bad, she'd fortify it with vodka to make it tolerable. That acclimated her to drinking. She gave it up completely as she began to recover just before my father died.
4. While she recovered a great deal, she never fully recovered. She was also an absolutely awful cook. As my father's health declined in the last year of his life, I took over cooking from him.
I was going to use the work "revolution", but didn't as I don't want it suggested that I mean an armed revolution. I'm not. Indeed, I'm not keen on violence in general, and as I intend to refer to the American Revolution in this essay, I'll note that had I lived in the 1770s, I'd have been genuinely horrified by events. I highly doubt that I would have joined the "Patriots" and likewise I wouldn't have joined the Loyalist either. I'd have been in the 1/3d that sat the war out with out choosing sides, but distressed by the overall nature of it.
Interestingly, just yesterday I heard a Catholic Answers interview of Dr. Andrew Willard Jones on his book The Church Against the State. The interview had a fascinating discussion on sovereignty and subsidiarity, and included a discussion on systems of organizing society, including oligarchy.
Oligarchy is now where we are at.
I've been thinking about it, and Dr. Jones has really hit on something. The nature of Americanism, if you will, is in fact not its documentary artifacts and (damaged) institutions, it is, rather, in what it was. At the time of the American Revolution the country had an agrarian/distributist culture and that explained, and explains, everything about it.
The Revolution itself was fought against a society that had concentrated oligarchical wealth. To more than a little degree, colonist to British North America had emigrated to escape that.
We've been losing that for some time. Well over a century, in fact, and indeed dating back into the 19th Century. It started accelerating in the mid 20th Century and now, even though most do not realize it, we are a full blown oligarchy.
Speaking generally, we may say that whatever legal enactments are held to be for the interest of various constitutions, all these preserve them. And the great preserving principle is the one which has been repeatedly mentioned- to have a care that the loyal citizen should be stronger than the disloyal. Neither should we forget the mean, which at the present day is lost sight of in perverted forms of government; for many practices which appear to be democratical are the ruin of democracies, and many which appear to be oligarchical are the ruin of oligarchies. Those who think that all virtue is to be found in their own party principles push matters to extremes; they do not consider that disproportion destroys a state. A nose which varies from the ideal of straightness to a hook or snub may still be of good shape and agreeable to the eye; but if the excess be very great, all symmetry is lost, and the nose at last ceases to be a nose at all on account of some excess in one direction or defect in the other; and this is true of every other part of the human body. The same law of proportion equally holds in states. Oligarchy or democracy, although a departure from the most perfect form, may yet be a good enough government, but if any one attempts to push the principles of either to an extreme, he will begin by spoiling the government and end by having none at all. Wherefore the legislator and the statesman ought to know what democratical measures save and what destroy a democracy, and what oligarchical measures save or destroy an oligarchy. For neither the one nor the other can exist or continue to exist unless both rich and poor are included in it. If equality of property is introduced, the state must of necessity take another form; for when by laws carried to excess one or other element in the state is ruined, the constitution is ruined.
Aristotle, Politics.
Corporations were largely illegal in early American history. They existed, but were highly restricted. The opposite is the case now, with corporations' "personhood" being so protected by the law that the United States Supreme Court has ruled that corporate political spending is a form of free speech and corporations can spend unlimited money on independent political broadcasts in candidate elections. This has created a situation in which corporations have gobbled up local retail in the US and converted middle class shopkeeping families into serfs. It's also made individual heads of corporations obscenely, and I used that word decidedly, wealthy.
Wealth on the level demonstrated by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump simply should not exist. It's bad for average people and its corrupting of their souls. That corruption can be seen in their unhinged desire for self aggrandizement and acquisition. Elon Must acquires young white women of a certain type for concubinage Donald Trump, whose money is rooted in the occupation of land, has collected bedmates over the years, "marrying" some of them and in his declining mental state, seeks to demonstrated his value through grotesque molestation of public property.
Those are individual examples of course, but the government we currently have, while supported by the Puritan class, disturbingly features men of vast wealth, getting wealthier, with a government that operates to fork over more money to those who already have it. The MAGA masses, which stand to grow poorer, and in the case of the agricultural sector are very much already suffering that fate, deservedly after supporting Trump, continue to believe that the demented fool knows what he's doing.
I don't know the source of this, but this illustration perfectly depicts how MAGA populists treat Donald Trump.
This system is rotten to the core and it needs to be broken. Broken down, broken up, and ended.
The hopes of either the Democrats or the Republicans waking up and addressing it seem slim. The GOP is so besotted with it's wealthy leaders that the Speaker of the House, who claims to be a devout Christian, is attempting to keep the release of the names of wealthy hebephiles secret. Only wealth and power can explain that. The Democrats, which since 1912 have claimed to be the part of the working man, flounder when trying to handle the economic plight of the middle class. Both parties agree on only one thing, that being you must never consider a third party.
It is really time for a third part in this country.
In reality, of course, there are some, but only one is worth considering in any fashion, that being the American Solidarity Party. Perhaps it could pick up the gauntlet here and smack it across the face of the oligarchy. Or perhaps local parties might do it. In my state, I think that if enough conservative Republicans (real conservatives, not the Cassie Cravens, John Bear, Dave Simpson, Bob Ide, Chuck Gray servants of the Orange Golden Calf Republicans) it could be done locally. The U.S. has a history, although its barely acknowledged, of local parties, including ones whose members often successfully run on the tick of two parties. New York's Zohran Mamdani and David Dinkins, for example were both Democrats and members of the Democratic Socialist Party. Democrats from Minnesota are actually members of the Democratic Farm Labor Party, which is an amalgamation of two parties. There's no reason a Wyoming Party couldn't form and field its own candidates, some of whom could also run as Republicans.
Such a party, nationally or locally, needs to be bold and take on the oligarchy. There's no time to waste on this, as the oligarchy gets stronger every day. And such candidates will meet howls of derision. Locally Californian Chuck Gray, who ironically has looked like the Green Peace Secretary of State on some issues, will howl about how they're all Communist Monarchist Islamic Stamp Collectors. And some will reason to howl, such as the wealthy landlord in the state's legislature.
The reason for that is simple. Such a party would need to apply, and apply intelligently, the principals of subsidiarity, solidarity and the land ethic. It would further need to be scientific, agrarianistic, and distributist.
The first thing, nationally or locally, that such a party should do is bad the corporate ownership of retail outlets. Ban it. That would immediately shift retail back to the middle class, but also to the family unit. A family might be able to own two grocery or appliance stores, for example, but probably not more than that.
The remote and corporate ownership of rural land needs to come to an immediate end as well. No absentee landlords. People owning agricultural land should be only those people making a living from it.
That model, in fact, should apply overall to the ownership of land. Renting land out, for any reason, ought to be severely restricted. The maintenance of a land renting system, including residential rent, creates landlords, who too often turn into Lords.
On land, the land ethic ought to be applied on a legal and regulatory basis. The American concept of absolute ownership of land is a fraud on human dignity. Ownership of land is just, but not the absolute ownership. You can't do anything you want on your property, nor should you be able to, including the entry by those engaged in natural activities, such as hunting, fishing, or simply hiking, simply because you are an agriculturalist.
While it might be counterintuitive in regard to subsidiarity, it's really the case, in this context, that the mineral resources underneath the surface of the Earth should belong to the public at large, either at the state, or national, level. People make no contribution whatsoever to the mineral wealth being there. They plant nothing and they do not stock the land, like farmers do with livestock. It's presence or absence is simply by happenstance and allowing some to become wealthy and some in the same category not simply by luck is not fair. It
Manufacturing and distribution, which has been address, is trickier, but at the end of the day, a certain amount of employee ownership of corporations in this category largely solves the problem. People working for Big Industry ought to own a slice of it.
And at some level, a system which allows for the accumulation of obscene destructive levels of wealth is wrong. Much of what we've addressed would solve this. You won't be getting rich in retail if you can only have a few stores, for example. And you won't be a rich landlord from rent if most things just can't be rented. But the presence of the massively wealthy, particularly in an electronic age, continues to be vexing. Some of this can be addressed by taxation. The USCCB has stated that "the tax system should be continually evaluated in terms of its impact on the poor.” and it should be. The wealthy should pay a much more progressive tax rate.
These are, of course, all economic, or rather politico-economic matters. None of this addresses the great or stalking horse social issues of the day. We'll address those, as we often have, elsewhere. But the fact of the matter is, right now, the rich and powerful use these issues to distract. Smirky Mike Johnson may claim to be a devout Christian, but he's prevented the release of names of men who raped teenage girls. Donald Trump may publicly state that he's worried about going to Hell, but he remains a rich serial polygamist. J.D. Vance may claim to be a devout Catholic, but he spends a lot of time lying through his teeth.
And, frankly, fix the economic issues, and a lot of these issues fix themselves.
The Ezra Klein show recently ran two really interesting vlog episodes on why the Democratic Party is in the dumpster, even as the Republican Party makes the entire country a raging dumpster fire. They're instructive, but in the case of the first one, not for the reason the guest likely hoped for.
It wasn't all that long ago, we should note, that political scientists had declared that the GOP doomed to demographic extinction. It was, and is, a small tent party. The party needed to reach out, it was told, and bring in all the people in the Democratic camp. Long time readers here, of which there are likely very few, will recall that I predicated that some of the demographic analysis was flat out wrong, and that Hispanics in particular would start moving into the Republican Party.
I was right.
Now we live in the opposite world. People hate the Republican Party but they hate the Democratic Party more. Really a new party is needed, one that doesn't see global warming as a fib but which opposed abortion, for example, would have a lot of appeal. But that's a post for some other time.
Let's look at what the experts have to say. First, as it was first in time, is the interview with Suzanne Mettler, a political scientist at Cornell and co-author of the new book “Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy"
The interview is here.
I could tell in listening to it that Klein thinks the book is wrong, and while I haven't read it, I know it is, if it espouses the same views that Mettler did in her interview. She looks at everything economically and that's about it. Social issues don't mean anything.
Well, I lived through this and saw a Wyoming that had a large, but minority, Democratic Party almost completely die. Most of the major active Democrats in the party started to move to the Republican Party during the Clinton Administration and that trickle became a flood. All sorts of respected "traditional" elder Republicans in Wyoming were once Democrats. They left as it increasingly became impossible to be a centrist or conservative Democrat. There's no room for a pro life Democrat, for instance, in the party anymore. Once homosexual marriages, transgenderism, and showing up at rallies with blue hair became the norm, the normal largely dropped out and won't come back.
That's what killed the Democrats in the West.
This interview with Jared Abbott, the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics, is much better as Abbot is realistic and not hopelessly clueless, as Mettler seems to be:
Abbot actually admits that he isn't sure if the Democrats can come back from political exile in rural areas, but the examples he gives of people running from the outside are excellent. Nebraska equivalent of Wyoming's John Barrasso, Deb Fischer, provides an interesting example as she nearly went down in defeat to independent Dan Osborn.
Osborn's race is really instructive as he wasn't a Democrat, but called bullshit on a lot of Fischer's politics. Osborn himself is a working man, and he's pretty conservative.
And there's the real lesson.
Democrats right now can't get any traction in rural areas as frankly nobody can stand to vote for anyone they are putting up, most of the time, and then when they do put up a good candidate, the party's platform kills them. The Democratic Party became, quite frankly, the Transgendered Vegan Party, and that's going nowhere. It not only became that, it can't get away from it. Look at any protest of Trump's policies that's a public one, and you'll see the usual suspects. If there isn't a hugely overweight middle aged woman with blue hair, you just aren't looking hard enough.
Indeed, this has become so much the case that that left wing protests that are popular now are sometimes all Republican. In Natrona County the recent Radiant Energy No Nuke protests were lead by Republicans including a Wyoming Freedom Caucus member of the legislature. Chuck Gray came up and lead his support, sounding like he was Chuck Gray from Greenpeace. If Democrats can't own that issue . . . .
There seems to be a little waking up, but only a little. Public lands is what did it.
Back in the 1980s, when I switched from the Republican Party into the Democratic Party (I left the Dems with the great flood of us who couldn't hack the weirdness), public lands and attention to environmental issues is what did it. People worship Ronald Reagan now, but James Watt, his Secretary of the Interior, was an Evangelical Christian zealot in favor of ravaging the land now, as he was certain that the Second Coming was going to be very soon. That land ravaging instinct remains very strong in the GOP and recently came out in spades.
Wyoming Democrat Karlee Provenza picked right up on that and came out in front. The Democrats need to do more of that. Land issues are near and ear to Wyomingites and the Republicans are very vulnerable on them. That issue alone might, if really exploited, bring the Democrats back if their campaigns were really strategic.
Some of that strategy has to be getting really personal. Sure, Hageman is for turning public lands over for sale. . she's from a "fourth generation" ranching family, and the ranchers always believe they'll get the land, even though they won't. Same for Lummis Sure, Dr. John is for it, he's a Pennsylvanian not a Wyomingite. Did you every see him at your favorite fishing hole?
But one issue alone is a risky proposition. What they also need to do is dump the weirdness. Being lashed to transgenderism is a completely losing proposition. A Democratic candidate is going to be asked about it . . and could really make hay on it.
But only if they're willing to fight dirty, which the GOP definitely is. But they're not prepared for the same.
For instance, if a public lands Democrat was running for the House, and asked about this issue, we would expect the usually milk toast fall in line answer they normally give. But if they said, "oh gosh no, that's a mental illness and it needs to be treated that way, and women's sports and role in society needs to be protected. . . " it'd leave the Republicans flat footed.
They'd be on their heels, however, if it went further. If you added "and by the way, I constantly hear our GOP talk about being pro family. I don't know how pro family you can be if you are jacking up their cost of living and particularly their insurance rantes, but what about that family stuff? Hageman's been married for years and she ain't got any children. . nephews and nieces aren't the same thing, and Chuck Gray is 36 years old and unmarried. . .what's up with that? Why I think a decent man ought to marry a decent woman young and have some kids. . . and when that doesn't happen that's because they aren't focused on families, darn it".
Yeah, that's nasty, but how do they reply? It is the case that Hageman and her husband have never had children. Maybe there's a medical reason, but maybe it was a focus on careers and using pharmaceuticals to avoid it. If so, that ain't very populist Republican. And Chuck Gray is 36 years old and unmarried. I know that he's a Mass attending Catholic, and I'm not accusing him of any intimate immorality, but I will note that by age 36 men are usually married, or in our current society, living with some female "partner". Gray doesn't appear to fit either of these which is odd, as it demonstrates something about his character, perhaps simply an unlikeable character, that's keeping it from occurring, unless he just doesn't want to get married, which is unlikely.
FWIW, as I'm a bit connected, I know that Gray dated women while living in Casper. Obviously those relationships didn't work out. I'm not claiming he's light in his loafers.
I will say, however, that once you get out there, there are die hard right wing Republicans in this state who are subject to some unwelcome attention on their personal lives. Is that fair? Well, if you are calling for suppressing certain groups, and you are part of them, you owe people an explanation.
Which gets back to the inevitable question that comes up now, "what about gay marriage". Again, it's easy for a Republican to say "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman". A Democratic coming back with "so do I, and I believe that union arises once. . . what do you think about that Dr. John. . . and is that why you abandoned your original faith?".
Nasty. But Dr. John wouldn't have a very good answer for it.
Abortion is always going to come up. Abortion is the issue that ultimately drove a lot of us out of the Democratic Party, including me. The Democrats should simply abandon a position on it and let candidates stake out their own ground. There remain a few pro life Democrats out there, and to be one shouldn't be an anathema.
And, indeed, if that was allowed, it allows uncomfortable questions to be asked. Republicans claim to be pro life, but now their massively in favor of IVF, which kills most of the embrioes that it creates. Current Democrats can't really ask about that without hypocrisy. A pro life Democrat could.
We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked find traitors in our midsts. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
C.S. Lewis.
Let's start with a couple of basics.
You were born a man, or a woman. We all were, and you can't change that. If you are a man, no amount of surgery or drugs is going to make you bear life and bear all the consequences of the same, from hormonal storms on a monthly basis, to monthly blood loss, to a massive change of life, mid life.
Thinking that you can, and even wanting to makes you deeply mentally ill.
And a society that tolerates that attempt, is deeply sick.
An account I follow on Twitter notes the following:
It's worth asking that question, and we'll touch on it in a moment.
Part I.
Robert Westman,1 who tried to be Robin Westman, but failed. The photo alone shows you can't choose to be a woman if you are man, and that he was accordingly deeply mentally ill. "You don’t need a weatherman. To know which way the wind blows" Subterranean Homesick Blues by Bob Dylan.
Robert Westman, mentally ill young man, raged against the reality of life that had tolerated his perverted molestation of himself and lashed out against the existential nature that doomed his molestation to complete failure, and a deeply sick society now will wonder why. Moreover, even his final act shows how deeply he failed in his effort. Women nearly never resort to mass violence in frustration.
That's a male thing.
And so we start, again by finding myself linking back to some old threads on this blog, unfortunately. This was the first time I tackled this topic.
Over the coming days and weeks pundits will ponder this event, and mostly spout out blather. The explanation here may have deeply disturbing aspects to it, but the underlying root of it is not that complicated. Robert Westman fell into the trap that ensnares some of the young in our society and hoped to completely change his nature by changing the outward morphology of his nature. He was mentally ill.
A just society treats compassionately the mentally ill.
We do not live in a just society.
By and large, we just turn the mentally ill out into the street to allow their afflictions to grow worse until those afflictions kill them. Go to any big city and you'll see the deranged and deeply addicted out in the street. This is not a kindness.
Gender Dysphoria is a different type of mental illness, but that's what it is.2
And its deeply delusional.
To put it bluntly to the point of being crude, no man, no matter what they attempt to do, is going to bear children and have the risk of bearing children, bleed monthly, and be subject to the hormonal storms that real women are subject to. And, frankly, men generally become subject to some, if varying, degrees of drives that are constant and relenting, and never abate.3
No woman, no matter what she attempts to do, is going to hit a certain age in their teens have their minds turn to women almost constantly, as men do, in a way that women do not understand, and frankly do not experience the opposite of themselves.
Indeed, no man really wants to be a woman, or vice versa. What those engaging in an attempt to pass through a gender barrier seek is something else, and what that more often than not in the case of men likely is to drop out of the heavy male burdens in an age in which it increasingly difficult to meet them. In spite of everything in the modern world, women remain conceived of as more protected, and therefore not as subject to failure for not meeting societal expectations.
Being a man has never been easy.
In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man
And now I've reached that age
I've tried to do all those things the best I can
No matter how I try, I find my way into the same old jam
Good Times, Bad Times, by Led Zeppelin.
I don't think lectures on what it means to be a man occur anymore. I know that I've never delivered one, but I didn't need one to be delivered either. The examples were clearly around me, including all the duties that entailed. We knew, growing up, that good men didn't abandon their families, and provided for their families, and were expected to protect women to the point of their own deaths. Women weren't expected to protect men, at all.
Some men have always sought to escape their obligations, of course, and we all know or new those who did. Most aged into disrepute over time. Others got their acts together.
You can’t be a man at night if you are a boy all day long.
Rev. Wellington Boone.
And some have always descended into madness. But society didn't tolerate it, and it shouldn't have to.
So what do we know about Westman?
Not that much, but what we do know is revealing:
He killed himself after his cowardly murders.
He'd developed an inclination towards violence.4
He once attended the Catholic school whose students he attacked, leaving in 2017 at the end of Middle School.
He started identifying as a female in 2019, age 17, and his mother signed the petition to change his name.5
After middle school attended a charter school and then the all-boys school, Saint Thomas Academy, which is a Catholic military school.6
An uncle said he barely knew him.7
His parents were divorced when he was 13.
He worked at a cannabis dispensary, but was a poor employee.8
What can we tell from this?
Maybe nothing at all, but the keys are that in spite of they're being Catholic, his parents divorced, and his mother thereafter tolerated to some degree his drift into delusion, while at the same time there's evidence they were trying to correct it. After school, he drifted into drugs, which is what marijuana is.
Blame the parents? Well, that would be too simple. But societal tolerance of divorce and transgender delusion is fostering all sorts of societal ills.
It's notable that he struck out at a childhood school. That may be all the more his violence relates, but probably not. His mother had worked there. He was likely striking out at her too. And he was striking out an institution that doesn't accept that you can change your existential nature, because you cannot. He likely was fully aware of that, which is why he acted out with rage at it, and then killed himself.
There may, frankly, be an added element to this, although only recently have people in the secular world, such as Ezra Klein, began to discuss it. Westman may have been possessed.
Members of the American Civil Religion don't like to discuss this at all, and frankly many conventional Christians do not either. Atheist and near atheist won't acknowledge it all, of course. But Westman's flirting with perverting nature may have frankly lead him into a really dark place, and not just in the conventional sense.
Part 2. What should we do?
Well, what will be done is nothing. Something should, however, be done.
The topic of gun control will come up, which brings us back to this:
We're going to hear, from more educated quarters defending the Second Amendment, that firearms have not really changed all that much over the years, society has. This is completely true.
But we're at the point now that we need to acknowledge that society has changed. And that means a real effort to keep firearms out of the hands of the mentally ill needs to be undertaken.
When the Constitution was written, Americans were overwhelmingly rural. Agrarianism was the norm everywhere. People generally lived in a family dwelling that included everyone from infants to the elderly. Normally the entire community in which a person lived was of one religion, and everyone participated in religious life to some degree. Even communities that had more than one religion represented, still had everyone being members of a faith. Divorce was not at all common, and in certain communities not tolerated whatsoever.9
Westman was mentally ill. Transgenderism is a mental illness. He was a drug user. Cannabis is a drug.
In 1789 the mentally ill, if incapable of functioning, would have been taken care of at home by their families. Transgenderism would not have been conceived of and not tolerated. Alcohol was in heavy use. Marijuana was not. The plethora of narcotics now in circulation were not conceived of.
Yes, this will sound extreme. Am I saying that because a tiny number of transgendered might resort to violence they shouldn't own guns? Yes, maybe in a society that simply chooses to tolerate mental illness, that's what I'm saying, although it also strikes me that the people who have gone down this deluded path might be amongst those most needing firearms for self protection. So, not really. I am saying that attention needs to be focused on their mental state.
Am I saying that marijuana users shouldn't own guns? Yes, that is also what I'm saying, along with other chronic users of drugs, legal and illegal.
And as we choose to simply ignore mental illness, perhaps the time has come to see if a would be gun owners is mentally stable and societally responsible before allowing them to own guns. People in chronic debt, with violent behavior, with unacknowledged children in need shouldn't be owning firearms.
Of note, at the time the Second Amendment was written, none of these things was easily tolerated.
Part 3. Getting more extreme.
Knowing that none of this will occur, I'll go there anyhow.
Societal tolerance of some species of mental illness should just end. There shouldn't be homeless drug addicts on the street and gender reassignment surgery and drugs should be flat out illegal.
For that matter, in the nature of extreme, plastic surgery for cosmetic reasons should be banned. Your nose and boobs are fine the way they are, leave them alone.
No fault divorce should end, and for that matter people who have children should be deemed married by the state, with all the duties that implies. Multiple children by multiple partners should be regarded as engaging in polygamy, which should still be regarded as illegal.
Love between man and woman cannot be built without sacrifices and self-denial. It is the duty of every man to uphold the dignity of every woman.
St. John Paul II.
Yes, that's rough.
Life is tough for all of us. Ignoring that fact makes it harder on all of us.
Part 4. Doesn't this all play into Dementia Don and his Sycophantic Twatwaffles?
Unfortunately, it does. I fear that this may prove to be the Trump Administration's Reichstag moment.
Indeed, this event is like a gift to people like Stephen Miller who will now assert that this came about due to the liberal policies of Minneapolis, and moreover, as proof that outright attacks on transgendered are needed, the same way the Nazis asserted that dictatorship was necessary in Germany after the Reichstag fire.
Isn't that what' I'm stating?
I am not.
I think we need to address mental illness as a mental illness, and do what we can to treat it. And rather obviously, what I've stated above doesn't square with Second Amendment hardcore advocates.
And as part of that, we need to get back to acknowledging that the mentally ill are mentally ill, rather than "tolerating" it.
And we need to quite tolerating "personal freedom" over societal protection, right down to the relationship level. A married couple produced this kid. Once they did that, they were in it, and the marriage, for life. That included the duty not to make dumb ass decisions for their child, like changing Robert's name to Robin.
Part 5. What will happen?
Absolutely nothing.
People on the right will argue its not the guns, it's the sick society. People on the left will argue that the society isn't sick, except for the guns, and the guns are all of the problem.
Nothing, therefore, will occur.
Well, maybe.
If anything occurs, it'll be that Dementia Don will use it as an excuse to send the National Guard into Minneapolis.
Footnotes
1. His name was Robert, not "Robin". The free use of female names for men afflicted by this condition and the press use of "she" for what is properly he, is part of the problem.
2 By gender confusion, I"m referring to Gender Dysphoria, or whatever people are calling it, not homosexuality. Homosexuals don't fit into this discussion at all. For one thing, homosexuals are not confused about what gender they are.
3. This does not advocate for license, although some men argue that it does. Inclinations are not a pass for immorality.
Anyhow, I'd note that even honest men in cebate professions acknowledge this. Fr. Joseph Krupp, the podcaster, frequently notes having a crush, for example, on Rachel Weisz.
4. Again, some women grow violent, but its a minority and, when it occurs, tends to be accompanied by something else. There are exceptions.
5. I don't know all of the details of his personal life, of course, but that was inexcusable on his mother's part. I'll note, however, that by this time his parents were divorced and no woman is capable of raising children completely on her own. Again, I don't know what was going on, but this screams either extreme "progressive" views, or a mostly absent father, or extreme fatigue.
6. I didn't even know that there were Catholic military schools.
Military schools have always been institutions for troubled boys, and this suggests that there was an attempt to put him in a masculine atmosphere and hopefully straighten him out. The school had both a religious base and a military nature. Both of his parents must have participated in this.
7. The modern world fully at work. People move for work, careers, etc., with the result that nuclear families basically explode, nuclear bomb style. People more and more are raised in families that are the immediate parental unit, or just one parent, that start to disintegrate the moment children turn 18. This is not natural, and is part of the problem.
8. I don't know of course, but I'd guess that in order to be a poor employee at a cannabis dispensary, you have to be a really poor employee. There are bars with bartenders who don't drink, but I bet there aren't any dispensaries with employees that aren't using.
The impacts of marijuana use are very poorly understood, but as it becomes more and more legal, that there are negative psychological impacts for long term and chronic use is pretty clear.
9. Contrary to widespread belief, not only Catholicism prohibits divorce. The Anglican Communion does not either, and at that time particularly did not tolerate it. Divorce occurred, but it was not common.
Also, and we've touched on it before, the United States at the time of its founding was a Christian nation. It was a Protestant Christian nation, but a Christian nation. Protestants of the 19th Century would not recognize many Protestant denominations today at all, even if they are theoretically the same. A 1790s Episcopalian, for example, would be horrified by many Episcopalian congregations today. In contrast, a Catholic or Orthodox person would find the churches pretty recognizable, save for the languages used for services.
