Showing posts with label Yeoman's Fourth Law of History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Yeoman's Fourth Law of History. Show all posts

Monday, June 16, 2025

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 92nd Edition. Immigration. How did we get into this mess?

Our Nation’s ICE Officers have shown incredible strength, determination, and courage as they facilitate a very important mission, the largest Mass Deportation Operation of Illegal Aliens in History. Every day, the Brave Men and Women of ICE are subjected to violence, harassment, and even threats from Radical Democrat Politicians, but nothing will stop us from executing our mission, and fulfilling our Mandate to the American People. ICE Officers are herewith ordered, by notice of this TRUTH, to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.

In order to achieve this, we must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside. These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens. These Radical Left Democrats are sick of mind, hate our Country, and actually want to destroy our Inner Cities — And they are doing a good job of it! There is something wrong with them. That is why they believe in Open Borders, Transgender for Everybody, and Men playing in Women’s Sports — And that is why I want ICE, Border Patrol, and our Great and Patriotic Law Enforcement Officers, to FOCUS on our crime ridden and deadly Inner Cities, and those places where Sanctuary Cities play such a big role. You don’t hear about Sanctuary Cities in our Heartland!

I want our Brave ICE Officers to know that REAL Americans are cheering you on every day. The American People want our Cities, Schools, and Communities to be SAFE and FREE from Illegal Alien Crime, Conflict, and Chaos. That’s why I have directed my entire Administration to put every resource possible behind this effort, and reverse the tide of Mass Destruction Migration that has turned once Idyllic Towns into scenes of Third World Dystopia. Our Federal Government will continue to be focused on the REMIGRATION of Aliens to the places from where they came, and preventing the admission of ANYONE who undermines the domestic tranquility of the United States.

To ICE, FBI, DEA, ATF, the Patriots at Pentagon and the State Department, you have my unwavering support. Now go, GET THE JOB DONE! DJT

Trump on "Truth Social". 

Over the last few days soldiers of the California National Guard have been backing up ICE in immigration raids in Los Angeles.  The Marine Corps is as well.  The Marines, we now are told, have actually performed an arrest.  There are somewhere between 11.0 million to 18.6 million illegal immigrants, mostly, but not exclusively, from Central America in the country.  During his run for a second term, Donald Trump basically promised to deport them all, but he's really not been much more successful than President Obama was on the same topic.

Of that number, probably about 1.6 million came in during the Biden Administration, not all of them as Republicans seemingly like to suggest.

Lots of reasons are given for this situation, most of which are devoid of historical analysis, and therefore, inaccurate.  We'll take a more indepth view here.

As noted, most illegal immigrants into the US are from Central America. At one time, "illegal alien" almost always tended to mean an illegal entrant who was Mexican, but that never really reflected the entire situation.  As late as the 1980s, the second largest group of illegal entrant into the US were Irish, something almost uniformly ignored.  Indeed, illegal aliens in the US come from all over the globe.  Nonetheless, the big problem is a Central American one.

When you conquer a foreign people and arbitrarily draw a map of convenience for yourself on what you are keeping, you create a problem.

That may sound like a non sequitur, but we need to start there.  

The United States fought Mexico from 1845 to 1848, wi th most of the last part of that period being an occupation of the country.  The Mexican War is more complicated than its generally considered to be, and I'll not go into the origins of the war.  Suffice it to say, however, that a result of the war, the principal result in fact, was that the US acquired 55% of Mexico.

Now, that 55% is a bit deceptive in that the US did not acquire 55% of the Mexican population.  In 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed by Mexican representatives chosen by hte US to sign it, the overwhelming majority of Mexicans lived south of the Rio Grande.  There were, however, Spanish speaking populations north of the river, with most of them living in Texas, which Mexico had not regarded as properly lost, New Mexico, and California.  Mexican populations, however, stretched all the way up into Spanish speaking settlements in Colorado as well.  

Depending upon where they lived, many of those Hispanic populations were distinct with distinct histories, which also set them apart from the population of Mexico, although that population is more diverse then imagined.  The closer you got to the Rio Grande, however, the more "Mexican", the population was.

The border was extremely fluid, although real, and would be for decades thereafter.  People crossed back and forth over it fairly readily for various reasons.  To the extent there was control of the border, on the US side it was by the US Army, and on the Mexican side, the Mexican Army, both of which occasionally crossed the border in pursuit of Native Americans.

It was the Mexican Revolution that really began to change things.

Mexican refugees crossing into the United States in 1915.

The Mexican Revolution saw an increased rate of border crossing as various groups of displaced people picked up and fled into the US.  The US was a haven for combatant leaders and politicians from all sides of the war itself, which remained the case for decades.  Villa famously attacked Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916, but he also had taken refuge in the US prior to that.

The Revolution caused the US to really patrol the border in earnest for the first time, with the National Guard serving on the border up until early 1917, while the U.S. Army crossed the border in pursuit of Villa.  In the popular imagination the war ended in 1920 when Obregón sworn in as President after having rebelled against Carranza, but that simply isn't true.  Villa was assassinated in 1923 and Plutarco Elías Calles came into power as a radical anti Catholic in 1924, which resulted in heavy repression of CAtholicism even though over 80% of the population was Catholic. This sparked the actual last major rebellion against the government in the form of the Cristero War, which lasted until 1929.

As with earlier phases of the Revolution, the Cristero War caused refugee populations to migrate to the US.  Indeed, the Cristero's weren't even the first religious refugees of the war, as Mormon populations had in some instances migrated out of Mexico earlier.  As that had an ethnic component to it, the Mormons were mostly Americans culturally or in fact, we should note that migrant Japanese populations in Mexico were in some instances evacuated by the U.S. Army during the Punitive Expedition.

There were concerns about the large number of migrants even then, with it interestingly being the case that some of the existing Hispanic populations were amongst those concerned, which has tended to be the case more recently as well.  Colorado passed the first law in the US banning marijuana as Hispanics native to the state associated it with Mexican refugees, with whom they did not wish to be confused or associated.

These various events caused the Border Patrol to be created in 1924. By that time, the really hot period of the Mexican Revolution was over, and the Cristero War had not yet begun, so the early Border Patrol entered the story at a time that is quite different from the present.

Indeed, while the  Cristero War saw an influx of migrants, its end came with the arrival of the Great Depression, during which illegal immigration was not a major problem.

But that brings us to why this Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist is being published first here, rather than on Lex Anteinternet where  they normally are.

Let's take a look at pre World War Two agriculture. . . and economics. . . and marriage.  Well, let's take a look at the US before World War Two.

It's easy to say, "it's was a different country", but it wasn't.  It was much different, however.

Ironically, lots of rank and file Trump supporters look back to that era, or the one that came immediately after it in the 1950s, as a Golden Age they'd wish to return to.  And to some extent, now without good reason. . . although they themselves would largely choose to keep the moral laxity of the post 1960s, as long as it applied to men and women.  What they seemingly want, sort of, is the economy of the 1950s with the personal morality of the high Playboy era.  Or maybe they want the 60s themselves, but without the drugs and Vietnam, but with good paying industrial jobs, no fault divorce, and Fran Gerard.1

The pre World War Two world, indeed, the pre 1980 world, was much less corporate than it is now.  While there were chain stores of one kind or another, Piggly Wiggly, Safeway, Woolworths, etc. much of retail was very local.

From Safeway's website.

Agriculture in much of the country was of the classic "family farm" type. Ranching definitely was.  Outside of the South, remote owners of farms and ranches was extremely unusual.  The South stood out as an exception due to historical reasons, as there was a tremendous amount of sharecropping in that region, but the owners of the land were still local.  Hobby agriculture was a thing, but it wasn't a major thing.

Economics were almost much thinner.  The middle class was much poorer than it is today and large portions of it lived very near the poverty line. The reverse is true today.  Much of the middle class slips into the upper class periodically, and drops back out of it, without realizing it. They don't consider themselves "rich", but they periodically, statistically, are.  

Indeed, while its disturbing to many, including frankly distributist, the modern American economy has had the effect of making Americans as a whole extremely wealthy.  Americans like to note that the average wage hasn't rising in years, but because average prices have effectively dropped, in comparison to inflation, their spending power has continually grown.

Not that everything has been perfect, by any means.  As often noted, it's impossible for families, for the most part, to get by on a single income, which cuts against what I just stated.  

Popular traditionalist meme with some truth to it, but it requires more thought than this.  Also, this pertains more to the 50s and 60s, than it does to eras before it.

Considering that, however, we need to start off with noting that what people imagine as "traditional" really means the 1950s, in this sense, with the "1950s" really being the years from about 1955 to 1965, that is from the end of the Korean War to the beginning of largescale troop deployments in Vietnam.  The "American Graffiti" era, in other words, which is set in the early 1960s, ot the 1950s as sometimes imagined.  The economy really was exceptional then for a wide variety of reasons.  Europe and Asia's economies had been flattened by the Second World War.  China's economy, which was not a major player in the world in any event, was removed from the international scene by its fall to Communism.  The US was really on the only major industrial power in the world that didn't suffer two decades of economic recovery due to the war.  Technological advances of the 30s and 40s came inot the American market on a largescale due to the end of the Great Depression.  American education advanced enormously due to the GI Bill.

Before 1940, however, families got by on one income due to home economics, to a large degree.  That is, people lived in smaller houses, they had one car, they didn't go on extended vacations, they didn't buy "home entertainment centers", and so on.  We've dealt with it extensively, but unmarried women and men living in the communities they grew up in, lived with their parents.  It was unusual for an unmarried man to own a home.  Men and women basically went from their families home and economic care right into marriage, as a rule.

If they got married.

We haven't dealt with that much either.  By and large, most people in American society got married.  But there were entire classes of people that did not.  One we've dealt with before is Catholic Priests.  As we've noted, the Priesthood, and religious orders, were two ways in which Catholic men and women could have what amounted to a middle class existence without getting married.2 

Other professions of that era had the same feature, however.  Enlisted soldiers in the services were largely unmarried.  They were not paid well, particularly in the lower grades, although that was somewhat made up for by the government providing housing, food and clothing.  If they were married, it was usually only after they'd climbed in rank, which in the pre World War Two Army took an extremely long time.  Junior officers were rarely married either, although more senior ones normally were.

And agricultural workers, those who worked for wages, were often unmarried.  Working cowboys almost never were.  Their jobs just didn't pay enough for them to marry.

Cowhands are a particularly interesting example.  The end of the open range meant that ranches became more established and were normally family outfits.  But the sons of those who were not to inherit the ranch, as well as some men who were just attracted to an outdoor life, provided a pool of men who became cowboys working for wages. There was more of a need for cowboys at the time than there is now, as machinery had not made inroads into agriculture like it has since.  There are lot of things a person could point to in the case of farming, which became much more mechanized in the 1950s, but this is also true of ranching, which had not yet seen the introduction of the 4x4 truck.  Cowhands were expected to provide their own equipment, but the ranch provided everything else for them.3 Even on farms, there were lifelong farm workers who were just that, unmarried men who spent their lives working on a farm they did not own.

That's where things circle back into the story of immigrants and agriculture.

Prior to World War Two, temporary agricultural labor was usually local.  Farms tended to be small in comparison to the giant ones that exist now, and the labor was often made up of the extended families of the farmers.  There was temporary labor, including Hispanic labor from Mexico near the border, but its need didn't exist to the extent it later did.  As noted, people lived closer to poverty, which meant that they endured those conditions more readily, by necessity.  The world was simply smaller too.  People didn't consider it odd to send teenagers, or even children, into the fields during the summer months.

World War Two removed thousands of those people from their pre war lives, including their prewar economic existences.  Men who had been sent all around the country, and overseas, didn't tend to return to agricultural work involving remaining single, and they didn't have to either, given the post war economy. Women who had worked in fields prior to the war worked in factories during it, and had grown used to a new life. They had no interest in returning to the pre war lifestyle either, and they also didn't have to.

Somebody had to do the work.

During the war, Mexican labor was brought in to do it under the Bracero program.  And to some degree, the situation it created, has been with us ever since.  Yeoman's Fourth Law of History at work.

So now what?

Well, in order to really reduce the number of immigrant farm workers, legal and illegal, at work in American fields, you'd need to create a situation in which Americans would do the work. That won't happen in the current farm economy, however.

After the Second World War the US went to a "cheap food" policy, and we've had it ever since.  We note this as one thing you could do is pay Americans the necessary rate to work in the fields, but that would be grossly in excess of what immigrant laborers are now getting paid.  That raises all kinds of moral issues, but one practical issue is that if we are going to address this, just like the topic of imported foreign products, the time to do it was decades ago, not now.  Indeed, in the case of immigrant farm labor, the time to address it would ideally have been 1945.

In other words, it'd cause a huge spike in food prices.

Another thing you could do would be to try to address industrialization of agriculture.  When farms were smaller and there was less of a need  for extra labor.  That could be done by making the remote corporate ownership of farms illegal, although that would frankly not address all of the problem by any means.

Any way it is looked at, it would mean that Americans would pay more at the grocery store, and the question there is whether or not they're willing to do it for a major societal shift.  Hardcore National Conservatives are banking on Americans being able to be forced into this.  

Trump?

Richard Ortiz is a migrant worker in Nipomo, California where famous photographer Dorothea Lange took a photograph of the Migrant Mother, Florence Owens Thompson in the 1930s


Florence Owens Thompson.   The mother of ten children, her first husband was the son of a farmer with whom she became a migrant farm worker.  Her second, if he was a second, would have been a common law arrangement.  She also occupied a wide variety of other occupations through the 1940s.  In 1952 she marred a hospital administrator and her life obtained stability.  Essentially, her life demonstrates exactly what we've set out above.

I somehow doubt it.  But who knows.


Suffice it to say, in much of this, basic morality seems to have gone right out the window.

Footnotes

1.  This is not how National Conservatives see things, however, which is one of the ironies of the Trump movement.  National Conservatives have a definite Benedict Option worldview and the libertine nature of the post 1960s American culture doesn't fit into that at all.  Immigrants frankly don't much either.

2.  I'm not suggesting that people's callings were not real.  Indeed, because of economic conditions, and society norms, particularly regarding the conduct of young women and men, callings were easier to hear.  I would note, however, that the economic realities of the era probably at least influenced the thinking of some people.

3. Good descriptions of this can be found in Louise Turk's book Sheep! and Doug Crowe's book A Growing Season, all of which discuss this in the context of cowboys.  A good description of it in a novel can be found in Horseman, Pass By, by McMurtry.

Last edition:

Subsidiarity Economics 2025. The Times more or less locally, Part 7 and Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 91st Edition. Reality is hard.


Friday, February 9, 2024

European Farm Protests

French and German farmers have been protesting.

But why?

Some of it is related to costs.  Energy, fertilizer and transport costs have risen in Europe since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine while at the same time, governments and retailers, have moved to reduce rising food prices in what basically amounts to a joint wartime effort to keep "cheap food" rolling.  

It's partially a "cheap food" policy, then, which the US has had since the Second World War.

And ironically, in that wartime category the cost of Ukrainian agricultural imports are down as the EU waived quotas and duties following Russia’s invasion in order to try to make up for the impact on the huge Ukrainian agricultural sector which was stressed due to Russian control of the Black Sea.

And extreme weather, which is been very notable in Wyoming this year, and if things don't turn around will lead to a major drought this summer (although we're not supposed to talk about that here), is impacting production in Southern Europe.

And then just as with Franklin Roosevelt's Depression Era agricultural programs, and the post World War Two cheap food policy in the US, Europe's six decade old common agricultural policy (CAP), a huge subsidy system designed for food security. . . for the consumer, massively favors economies of scale.

That has resulted in farm consolidation, just as it has here, with the number of farms in the EU dropping off by 1/3d since 2005.

Somewhat ironically, however, a EU program designed to combat global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, based on a "farm to fork" or "farm to table" model, has been unpopular, as such things usually are with farmers, even when, if they stop to think about it, it'd help them.  Anyhow, the EU has the ability to impose rules, and its imposing rules to force this.

Among the rules being imposed are ones to cut the use of pesticides by 50% by 2030, cutting fertilizer use by 20%, and allowing land to be idled up to the rate of 25% of all European farmland.

That latter, which sort of resembles some policies in the US, no doubt is seen as a shocker, but as agricultural production has become more efficient, and the European population is rocketing into decline, it makes sense.

And environmental programs in individual countries, such as ending tax breaks on agricultural diesel to balance the budget in Germany, or reducing nitrogen emissions in the Netherlands, have been unpopular.

Well, what of this?

Interesting, at the same time, in Southern Europe there's been a trend of people returning to small agricultural holdings and making a go of it.  This has been occurring in France and Greece.  And maybe there's a thought there.

Farmers are among the most resistant people in the world to change.  So much so, that it must be an inherent part of the nature of farming. At the same time, they're also among the people who are most wedded to doing things in an expensive way, once they adapt to it.  The disaster that fence to fence farming would bring to individual farmers was something that Willard W. Cochrane warned about in the early 1960s, and he also worried about the evolving scale and expense of farm equipment.  He actually proposed to regulate it in favor of small farmers, but of course that's something that Americans, who are addicted to economies of scale to their own detriment, would never do.

European farmers, who were still principally equine powered until the end of World War Two, have become addicted to the petroleum fueled agriculture that the US brought in starting in the 1920s.  Sadly, we're likely to go to more and more automated farming, and by extension make large number of Americans more and more miserable.  Europeans are likely to follow suit.

But it doesn't have to be that way.

Sunday, March 19, 2023

Wednesday, March 19, 2003. The Second Gulf War Commences

F15E over Iraq.

The United States and a coalition of Allies, including its principal western allies, on this day in 2003, commenced operations against Iraq.  The war commenced with air operations.  

The causa belli of the undeclared war was Iraq's lack of cooperation with weapons inspectors.

President Bush went on the air and stated:

At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.

Congress is just now considering a bill to deauthorize military force in Iraq, which at this point would be more symbolic than anything else.  

The initial invasion went well and swiftly, but the war yielded to a post-war, war, against Islamic insurgents that lasted until 2011.  Iraq has remained unstable, but not Baathist, and it has retained democracy, although frequently only barely.  Iran has gained influence in the country, which has a large Shiia population, which was not expected.

The war remains legally problematic in that it was a full scale invasion of a foreign power with no declaration of war, setting it apart from any post World War Two war, with perhaps the exception of the war in Afghanistan, that had that feature but lacked such a declaration.  At least arguably it was illegal for that reason.  Amongst other things, Art 1, Section 8, of the Constitution provides that Congress has the power to:

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

Presidents are the commanders in chief of the armed forces, and in Washington's day actually took to the field with it, so it would not be correct to assume that only Congress can deploy troops, even into harm's way.  But full scale wars. . . that seems pretty exclusively reserved to Congress.

The war also came while the U.S. was already fighting, albeit at a low level, in Afghanistan, and the Iraq episode would prove to be a distraction from it, leading in no small part to that first war ended, twenty years later, inconclusively.

The war redrew the political map of the Middle East, which it was intended to do, so to that extent it was at least a partial success, although it took much longer than expected.  It's effect on the national deficit, discussed this past week by NPR, is staggering and the nation still is nowhere near paying for it, something that will have very long term consequences for the nation going forward, and providing a reason, amongst others, that undeclared wars should not really be engaged in.  Congress, for its part, simply chose not to debate the topic in that context, an abrogation of its duty, although it did authorize military action in another form.

The war contributed to the rise of ISIL, which was later put down.  It increased Syrian instability, which has yet to be fully addressed.  

It also contributed to a rising tide of military worship in the US, while ironically would be part of the right wing reaction to "forever wars" that gave rise to Donald Trump.  

One of only two wars, the other being the First Gulf War, initiated by a Republican President since World War Two, the war had huge initial support from the left and the right, something that many of the same people who supported it later conveniently forgot.

Wednesday, February 15, 2023

Monday, February 15, 1943. Princess Elizabeth appears on the cover of Life, We Can Do It appears at Westinghouse.

Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen Elizabeth II, appeared on the cover of Life magazine.  The black and white photograph of the young Elizabeth is a shock to see today.

The Battle of Demyansk began, with the objective of encircling German troops in a salient and relieving the front near Moscow.  It'd more or less achieve the latter, but not the former.

Sarah Sundin's blog has a number of interesting items in it:

J. Howard Miller's little seen "We Can Do It" poster.  Note the "Post Feb. 15 to Feb 28" notation on the poster.

Today in World War II History—February 15, 1943: J. Howard Miller’s “We Can Do It” poster, now identified with Rosie the Riveter, is first posted at Westinghouse for a two-week in-house campaign.

The poster is one of the most recognizable in history now.  Ironically, it was little known to the World War Two generation itself, and only became widely known some forty years later.  In this sense, it's much like the "Keep Calm And Carry On" British poster, which was so rare in World War Two that it's debated if it was put up at all.

The poster, which is in fact not particularly skillfully executed, was limited to 1,800 runs and 17" x 22" in side.  In its original posting, it was put up only in Westinghouse factories, and in fact the female subject in the image wears a Westinghouse Electric floor employee badge. The workers who would have seen it were engaged in making helmet liners, and the poster was part of a gentle effort, in part, from dissuading strikes.  It was part of a 42 poster series by Miller.


Miller himself may be regarded as a somewhat obscure illustrator.  He was busy during World War Two and issued other posters that had an industrial theme.


Miller's female worker was based on a photograph of Geraldine Doyle, nee Hoff or Naomi Parker, it isn't really clear which, although some claim that it's definitely Parker.  It might have been both women, and more than just the two. The poster was painted from a photograph or photographs, and not a live model.

During the war itself, the Rockwell Saturday Evening Post illustration of a stout, defiant female riveter was the accepted depiction of Rosie the Riveter.  Rockwell, with his keen eye for detail, had painted "Rosie" on her lunch box.  

The name, Rosie the Riveter, was first used in a song by that name by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb, recorded by The Four Vagabonds, which came out prior to Rockwell's May 1943, illustration.  The song, in turn, had been inspired by a newspaper column about 19-year-old Rosalind P. Walter who had gone to work as a riveter in Stratford Connecticut as part of the war effort. The model for the Rockwell painting was not an industrial worker, but a telephone operator, Mary Doyle Keefe, née, perhaps ironically, Doyle, who was Rockwell's neighbor.  She actually posed for a photograph for Rockwell's photographer, rather than for Rockwell live.

Keefe, who was not yet married, didn't like the painting as Rockwell had made her image so beefy, for which he apologized.  She attended Temple University, became a dental hygienist, married and passed away in 2015 at age 92.  Rosalind P. Walter went on in later life to become quite wealthy and was a noted philanthropist, particularly supporting public television.  She died in 2020 at age 95.

J. Howard Miller lived until 2004, but remained obscure, unlike his famous poster.

It should be noted that the depiction of the women and their story itself is interesting.  Vermonter Keefe was the daughter of a logger, but was obviously from a solid middle class Catholic family, something that would not have been surprising in any fashion at the time. As noted, she was not an industrial worker herself.  Geraldine Doyle worked only very briefly as an industrial worker in 1942, quitting as she feared injuring her hands as she was a cellist.  She later married a dentist later in 1943.  They met in a bookstore.  While her association with the painting is disputed, her World War Two factory photograph is remarkably similar to the poster.  Parker was employed in a factory prior to the war and continued to be during it.

The Miller image is used for a sign on the outside of the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in California, a Federal park dedicated to the World War Two home front.  World War Two, immediately following the Great Depression, had an enormous and permeant (and probably not good, really) impact on California, so the location is well placed.

Democracy returned to Uruguay.

Wednesday, January 11, 2023

Ready To Wear.

Racks of ready to wear clothing, Lord & Taylor, New York.  1948.

We recently had a big item on sewing.

Well, sort of. We had this item:

"Government Housewives". Sewing, sewing and seamstresses.

American soldier in Cuba in 1898 doing a sewing repair.

That entry, concluded with this:




Which brings us to this.

Prior to the early 19th Century, pre manufactured clothing didn't exist at all.

This is something that's difficult for us to really imagine now.  We don't think of our daily clothing being homemade, or anything of the type.  Indeed, this is so much the case that we pass right over the references to it on the rare instances in which they occur. For instance, in the song House of the Rising Sun, which we discussed here recently.  In the classic Eric Burdon version, we hear:

My mother was a tailor

She sewed my new blue jeans

My father was a gamblin' man

Down in New Orleans

And as we know from the lengthy discussion the other day, in the original version we find:

My mother she's a tailor

Sews those new blue jeans

My sweetheart, he's a drunkard, Lord God

He drinks down in New Orleans

What?  Sew blue jeans?

Now, in fairness, my mother, who had learned to sew and wasn't bad at it (although she doesn't compare in that category to my mother-in-law, who is a true and very talented seamstress) actually did sew some trousers in the 70s that I can recall, right about the time that women started to wear trousers.  As we've also discussed here in the past, women didn't really wear trousers until the 20th Century, or didn't wear them much, and it was the combined impact of the First and Second World Wars that really started to open that up.  Contrary to popular myth, the Second World War did really move women into the workplace, but it did certainly help move them into trousers.  As part of that my mother sewed some jeans, and they truly had really long wear as I can remember her wearing them into the 90s. They weren't blue jeans, however.

And they were bell-bottoms.

But I digress.

Royal Navy sailors, 1850s.

Bell-bottoms are a good place to start this discussion, in fact, as before the American Civil War the only pre-made ready to wear clothing of any kind for civilians was made for sailors.  Sailors were their own rootless class, and they didn't often have wives and sisters at home to make clothes for them, particularly if they shipped out of an English port and wore their clothes out prior to returning to it, but they stopped in an American port, or any version of that you might imagine.

Interestingly, the only other group for whom ready to wear clothing were made, at least in North America, was for slaves.

Port towns had ready to wear clothing made in a single size.  Most sailors were pretty good with a needle and thread as it was necessary knowledge for the age of sail, and they or a member of the crew had to tailor what they bought to fit after they bought it.

This, by the way, was a pretty common male role.  In addition to civilian sailors, and slaves, soldiers also had ready to wear clothing issued to them, and it too tended to be altered by a member of the company, which in the case of cavalrymen at any rate, was usually a saddler, who had to be particularly adept with needle and thread.  Interestingly, this role carried through all the way to the end of the horse cavalry and artillery and was picked up by parachute riggers for the airborne during World War Two, who likewise were good with needle and thread and who heavily altered the uniforms issued to U.S. paratroopers.  Modern riggers should be envious of their Second World War predecessors skills.

Clothing for slaves was advertised as "Negro Clothing", for what it's worth.  It was produced by seamstresses working for low pay, better than that for slaves, which was nonexistent, but hardly a wealthy class.  Singer, the sewing machine company, actually noted in its advertisements that its sewing machine was particularly suitable for making "Negro clothing".

As an example of the operation of Yeoman's Fourth Law of History, it was the Civil War itself that really got ready to wear clothing rolling.  Military clothing, unlike that for sailors and slaves, was sized.  What it wasn't, prior to the war, was massed produced. The war took care of that.

While we don't tend to think of military clothing of being readily adaptable to civilian wear, in facts it's an old maxim, which had broad truth to it, that all men's clothing comes from war or farming, although in recent years some of it seems to have come from toddler departments.  While the uniforms of Civil War ear soldiers don't look immediately close to civilian wear, particularly as the war went on, they were much closer than we might at first imagine.  In terms of clothing, the soldier wore wool undergarments (an unpleasant thought) wool trousers, a cotton shirt, and a wool coat year around, unless for some reason he chose to strip himself of the coat in hot weather, which was rare, or to equip himself with some civilian clothing that could be worn under the wool trousers and coat.

Mass production of Army uniforms lead to post-war mass production of clothing in general.  The entire industry exploded after the war, as clothing was really expensive in general, and this offered a cheaper way to obtain this basic need.  By the 1920s, ready to wear clothing had so expanded that it had taken over the female clothing market in addition to the male.  

As mass production clothing rose, it had a leveling effect.  Finely tailored bespoke clothing had a much different appearance than "home spun".  It was easy to tell the difference from a wealthy person, or an in town professional, and a farmer or rural person simply by this fact.  When mass-produced clothing came in, it not only represented a cheaper option, it was frankly also generally better looking than homespun was likely to be.  That upgraded the appearance of people of more modest means, and over time it also caused those of middle class income to opt for the cheaper option as well, and even some wealthy individuals did.  It's no wonder then that when we look at scenes of the 1920s through the early 60s that so many people we know to be of modest means were "well-dressed". While still a significant expenditure, they were able to "dress up" to a higher standard, while those of middle class and even wealthy means would "dress down" to it.  There were, of course, exceptions.

This didn't mean that everything was off the rack, and particularly with more dress wear, some tailoring was needed.  If a person bought a suit, for example, it would often need alternation by a tailor. The same was true for dresses, with it often being the case that more was required for women's wear.  Still, there's a big difference between going into Brooks Brothers, for example, and buying a suit that's finished by a tailor, and going into a tailor to have a suit made.

For much in the way of daily wear, however, ready to wear really took over by the early 20th Century.  People generally don't have, for examples, shirts made, J. Gatsby not with standing.  Most sizing problems, even with suits, have long been adjusted with belts and suspenders.  Nobody has their "new blue jeans" sewn by a seamstress, and only a few would ever have them tailored.

Which gets us to a claim I saw the other day that "everything now is poorly made".  Is it?  We'll take a look at that.

Sources:

Much of this entry relies upon the excellent:

A Brief History of Mass-Manufactured Clothing

Sofi Thanhauser on the Early Days of Ready-to-Wear

By Sofi Thanhauser

Sunday, June 19, 2022

Friday, June 19, 1942 . James Dougherty and Norma Jean Baker marry. The Second Washington Conference commenced. The Germans execute Eliáš,


The then Norma Jean Dougherty, as she looked when she appeared in Yank, as an employee of the Radio Plane Company

James Dougherty, then serving in the U.S. Navy, married Norma Jean Baker in Los Angeles, California.  He was 21, she was 16.  Their marriage prevented her from having to return to an orphanage following the relocation of her foster parents.


The sixteen-year-old had, as her living situation would indicate, a rough start in life.  Her parentage was uncertain, although her birth certificate had indicated that it was one Edward Mortenson, her mother's second husband.  In any event, Mortenson abandoned her mother when he learned of the pregnancy.  She was given up to a family by the last name of Boelender when only twelve days old to be raised until her mother, who had fallen into depression, had recovered enough to resume her role when she was somewhat older.  During this period of time, she acquired the last name of Baker.   Her mother's depression returned and became worse, and the child was raised in a series of foster homes.


While Dougherty was serving overseas, Baker dropped out of high school and went to work, something typical for service spouses, although the very young age of her marriage was unusual. She was noticed by photographer David Conover while taking photographs for Yank, which we discussed just the other day.


Dougherty did follow Conover's advice, and was quickly offered a modeling job by the Blue Star Agency. A provision of it required that she be unmarried, so she filed for divorce.  Her husband was still in the Navy, serving overseas.


And Conover's advice turned out to be good advice, in terms of her aspirations. As a model, her beauty was rapidly noticed, and she was in fact noticed by Hollywood and introduced into acting.  In the meantime, she'd changed her name to Marilyn Monroe.


Dougherty dismissed his wife's ambitions upon receiving divorce papers, but there wasn't much he could do about it.  He was, effectively, one of thousands of servicemen whose marriages had gone wrong during the war.  Effectively, he'd married a high schooler of obvious beauty and then departed from her, understandably, for years.

Probably the only one of the Conover photographs in which Monroe is actually recognizable in regard to her later appearance.

It was a story that repeated itself, but quietly, all over the United States.

Dougherty went on to become a significant figure in the Los Angeles Police Department.  He never spoke ill of his first wife, and after her death was of the opinion that she was too gentle of a person to survive in Hollywood.

The Second Washington Conference, a conference between the British headed up by Winston Churchill and the Americans headed by Franklin Roosevelt, convened.  Military matters were the topic.

The 1st Ranger Battalion came into existence.

World War Two Ranger shoulder patch.  By Zayats - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11400404

The brainchild of cavalryman Lucian Truscott, the Rangers were modeled on the example of British commando forces and supposed to fulfill a similar role.  Named after the examples of Rangers, light backwoods infantry of the French and Indian, and Revolutionary Wars, the several battalions of Rangers were formed during World War Two.  Most of them were comprised of volunteers, but at least one that was formed in the Pacific was an amalgamation of existing units that had served other purposes, including a disbanded pack artillery unit.

After the war they were disbanded but then reformed during the Korean War. The Army has retained Ranger units since. The British example is similar, in this regard, to the SAS and the SBS.

German Maj. Joachim Reichel went down behind Soviet lines in a crash landing, putting documents pertaining to an upcoming German offensive in Soviet hands. The Germans didn't change them, and the Soviets didn't believe what they captured was genuine.

The Germans executed Alois Eliáš, a former Czech general who was the prim minister of the German puppet state of  the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, for underground activities.  He was in fact working against German interests and had participated in the attempted poisoning of some collaborationist reporters, resulting in the death of one of them.

Thursday, June 9, 2022

Some thoughts on the late teen/early adult years.

The gun control bill that passed the house proposes to raise the purchase age for firearms to 21.

Teenage soldier, i.e., me. 1982.  At that age I was plenty mature enough for this role.

The counterargument is somewhat predictable for this.  "If you can serve in the military at age 21 and carry a weapon for your country. . ."

But why can you do that at age 21?

Under the original U.S. Constitution you couldn't vote until you were 21 years of age, that being the age at which the founders deemed a man (and originally it was just men) mature enough to participate in the serious business of choosing a government.  The age was changed in the late stage of the Vietnam War, under the logic if that if you were old enough to fight for your country, you were old enough to vote and participate in the decisions that led to the fighting.  That reflected the conscription age at the time, which had reached down to 18 for most of the war, even though, as noted above, it had climbed a bit late war, and even though teenage soldiers in the Vietnam War were actually fairly rare.

All the states had militia duty requirements at the time the Constitution was enacted, as the colonies also had them prior to that and dating back to their founding. Most of these made men liable for militia service between 18 and 45 years of age.

The Federal Government didn't conscript men into military service until the Civil War, at which point it passed a bill during the war making men from age 20 to 45 years of age eligible for conscription.  The southern rebellious states passed a federal conscription provision which at first covered ages 18 to 35 and then later ages 17 to 60.  The South had a real manpower problem, it might be noted, and at the bitter end of the war, it made slaves liable for conscription, demonstrating that, because there's no reason to believe they would have made willing soldiers against their own best interest.

The draft ranges for conscription during World War was fell between age 21 and 30. The first draft range for World War Two was from 21 to 35, but as the war went on it dropped to 18 years of age and up into the 40s for the upper range.  Starting in 1948 men were eligible again for the draft at age 19.  It dropped to 18 during the Korean War and stayed there until 1969, when Nixon ordered it back up to age 19.

We lack conscription now, of course, but men between the years of 18 to 35 are liable under the Selective Service provisions to conscription and are "obligors" under the law.

Hmmmm.

Interestingly, the mid 20th Century also saw men start to graduate high school as a rule, which is also at age 18.  High school graduation rates overall, for men and women combined, rose from 6% in 1900 to 80% by 1970, near the end of the Vietnam War.  The American system of education developed such that schooling normally completed, as noted, around age 18, although some did graduate at 17 when I was a high schooler, and some at 19.  As late as the late 1930s only around half of the male population graduated from high school, but that was very rapidly changing and soon after the war most men and women graduated.

In every U.S. state you can marry, the most serious thing a person can do, and marry freely, at age 18.  While people who like to get spastic about it misconstrue it, you can marry below that with permission of your parents or authorities in most states younger than that.  18 years of age in order to contact a marriage is the global norm, interestingly, although there are some exceptions.  Honduras, for example, sets the age at 21.  Japan at 20.  The Philippines at 21.  A few nations set the minimum age for women, oddly enough, below 18, usually at 16 or 17.

The other "age of consent" is generally age 18 in the United States, although there are all sorts of other rules and factors that go into that, so it's not really safe to opine on.  What's safer to opine on is that generally in the US women become far game for male predation at age 18 and that's the age where it's generally legally safe for them to be subject to all sorts of creepy behavior.  The same is true for men, but it's women that are largely the victims in this area, although not exclusively so.

In the US, the drinking age everywhere, due to Federal pressure on the topic, is 21. When I was 19, the drinking age in Wyoming was 19, which it had been dropped to during the Vietnam War due to the same logic that prevailed regarding voting.   

As of 2019, the minimum age to buy tobacco is 21.  In most of "progressive" Canada, it's 18.  Where it isn't 18 in Canada, it's 19.

In much of the US, you can drive at age 16.  This is true in Canada and Mexico as well, but the global norm, although there's lots of variety in it, is 18.

In most of the US you have to be at least 20 to rent a car, although as a practical matter, that age is really 23.

Odd, isn't it?

Research has determined that the male brain continues to develop until age 25, which is when men basically reach maturity, whereas for women it's 21.  Some studies push that up to 25 for men and women. A British study found that men reach full emotional maturity at approximately age 43, whereas women do at 32, which is a bit of a different thing than developmental maturity.

Which brings us to this.

The founders setting the voting age at 21 reflected their actual experience.  People like to imagine that everybody did everything younger back in the day, but this isn't really the case at all.  As we've discussed here before, actual marriage ages haven't changed hardly at all since the Middle Ages.  They'll occasionally go up (usually due to economic conditions), and rarely go down, but they return to a well established median.   The current "everyone is getting married older" story really reflects the latter.

Marriage, rather obviously, was allowed at a younger age than 21, but there are biological factors at work there that would tend to explain that, at least up until the government became the substitute daddy allowing men to evade responsibility for their offspring.

The odd thing about age in the early history of the country was the age for compulsory bearing of arms was 18.  Why?  No idea.  When conscription first came about, it was set at age 21, the age you could vote, and remained that age until the Second World War, when it was dropped to 18.

Driving ages are at low ages in North America because of farm economies.  Lots of drivers were, at one time, young farm drivers.

Which brings us to this.

The current pattern of living may reflect the historic norm in the US more than we suppose.  We've dealt with it before, but up until World War Two, the basic norm for most men was to leave high school, by graduation or otherwise, and then go to work.  Most men lived at home until they married.  Most women lived at home until they married. And for most, they were 21 years of age or older at that time.  The World War Two period brought in a demographic and behavioral exception, but it was due to external forces.  Large scale conscription and a booming economy, following the Great Depression, followed by the massive expansion of the economy and higher education.  The trend that started in 1939 lasted a few decades, but we've seen a return to the older pattern of living more recently.

Which perhaps gets back to this.

The new gun control provision probably makes a lot of sense.  There are reasons to preclude people who have not reached maturity from buying firearms.

But there are probably reasons not to allow them to do other responsible things as well, including voting.

Maybe, looked at this rationally and scientifically, the military ought to not be open to enlistment until age 21.  Maybe the "age of consent", or exploitation, ought to be 21.  Maybe public education ought to expand up to age 21.

Wednesday, June 8, 2022

Casualties of War. The Attu Islanders and their island.

Attu woman and child, 1941.  She'd never see another summer on her home island again. By Malcolm Greany - https://www.flickr.com/photos/12567713@N00/2667001144/sizes/o/in/photostream/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17118121


On June 7, 1942, the Imperial Japanese Army landed on Attu Island, ferried there, of course, by the Imperial Japanese Navy.

Attu is part of the Aluetians.  It's 344 square miles in size.  For comparison's sake, that's a little bigger than Molokai in the Hawaiian Islands, and a little smaller than Kauai.  

It's relatively large, in real terms, 35 miles by 20.

It has an Aleutian climate, with average temperatures below 60F in the summer and in the mid 20s in the depth of winter.  It's coldest temperature ever was -17F, in 1902, and the hottest temperature ever, 77F in 1925.


The island has been inhabited since antiquity, and it's estimated that prior to contact with Europeans, the island had a native population between 2,000 and 5,000 souls.  Archeologists believe that settlement came from the east, not the west, even though it's the closest of the Aleutians to Asia and very distant, today, from the nearest Alaskan settlement of any kind.

It's one of the "Near Islands", as its near Asia.

Attu, along with the other Near Islands, seems to have first had settlements about 3,000 years ago, surprisingly late if it's considered that the arriving populations had spread throughout North America far before that.

The first contact with  Europeans came from Russian fur hunters in 1745, when they actually went to Attu after being confronted by a large body of armed natives on the first island they attempted to land at.  The first Russian contact on Attu violent, withe Russians taking an old woman and a boy hostage, oddly keeping the boy as an interpreter, although it has to be presumed he spoke no Russian.

A few weeks after that, the Russians raided an Attu village and killed fifteen men, with the purpose of the raid to take Attu women as sex slaves.  The location has ever since born the name Massacre Bay.

In 1750, the Russians introduced Arctic Fox to the island.

The Russian presence caused the decline of the local fauna rapidly, a devastating event for the natives, and the Russians also introduced disease, playing out a story that is often associated with the European conquest of North America. By 1762 the population was estimated at about 100 natives, which would mean that the population decline had been unbelievably massive in just a twenty or so year span.

The decline in fortunes for the Russians on the island meant that it thereafter largely skipped the Russian colonization of the Aleutians, to the extent it could be called that, and it remained free of Russian economic control.  The Russians reappeared in the early 19th Century, and the Attu population remained very small.

Christianity was introduced at least as early as 1758, but a chapel was not built until 1825, with a Russian Orthodox Priest being assigned to it, along with other island churches in 1828.  He made his first visit to the island in 1831.  By 1860 the native population had rebounded to 227 plus an additional 21 individuals who were "Creole", i.e., of mixed heritage.  When Alaska was sold to the US in 1867, services to the island dropped off massively, and by 1880 the population had declined by half.  Nonetheless, visitors to the island in the early 20th Century, who were few, were impressed by how happy the residents were and how clean the two villages were.  In the 1920s the sod structures were replaced by the natives with wooden ones, with imported wood, which included building a wooden Russian Orthodox Church in the 1920s and a school, without a teacher, in the 1932.  The teacher first appeared in 1940.

In the 19th and 20th Centuries, and indeed before, the men worked as trappers part of the year and moved to the hinterlands to do that.  Again, in the 20th Century, visitors were uniformly impressed by how happy the people living on the island were. And why not? Free of the chaos of the outside world, living a natural life, and with a Christian world view, they were as close to living in a paradise on earth as any people could be.

And then the Japanese came on June 7, 1942.

The Japanese removed all of the Attuans and kept them on Hokkaido.  By the war's end, half of them had died.  The US retook the island itself in May 1943.

The survivors wished to return to their homes when the war ended, but the US government did not allow them, garrisoning the island instead for a long range navigation site.  Truly, the government really did not have an existential right to deprive the Attuans of their home, but it did so.

The U.S. Coast Guard left in 2010.

In 2018 the descendants of the dispossessed Attuans were allowed to visit Attu.

Monday, January 31, 2022

Blog Mirror: Just Another Day On the Prairie. Thoughts on "Freedom Day" and the spirit of the times.


I really hesitate to post this, as I don't want it to seem to be some sort of an endorsement.  I'm copying it over as a link for another reason.

Freedom Day

This is from the following blog:

Just Another Day On The Prairie

The diary and musings of an Alberta ranch wife.

So, what of it?

I like this blog as the photos on it are beautiful.  

And also, as a Wyomingite, and a rural one, and an agricultural one in one of my three vocations/avocations, Alberta is part of the same region I'm from, different country though it is.

Indeed, I sometimes think Easterners don't really grasp that in a lot of ways, natives of the Rocky Mountain Region and the Prairie states have more in common with the Canadian western provinces than they do with any other region of their own country.  Indeed, they have quite a bit in common with the highly rural ares of northern Mexico as well, but they very much do with western Canada.

Rural Western Canadians are part of the exact same agricultural/livestock/hunting/rural culture that real Western Americans, not imports from other regions, including quite frankly the South, are from.  Indeed, ranching in Alberta has the same roots as ranching in Wyoming, Montana and Colorado do.  At one time ranchers went back and forth across the border as if it wasn't there.  Many of Charles Russell's paintings of ranch life are actually set in Alberta, not Montana.

So not too surprisingly, rural Albertans, and rural Canadians from much of the rest of the Canadian West, have the same views that rural Western Americans do.

This isn't really true, I'd note, of Canadians as a whole. While I don't mention it often, I'm a dual citizen and hold Canadian as well as American citizenship, but my Canadian relatives are all Eastern Canadians by origin, and their views are extremely different on many things than Western Americans' are.

Now, I mean to be careful here, as I do not wish to offer insult.

When I speak of the views of Wyomingites, Montanans, and rural Coloradans, etc., I'm speaking of their views.  I'm not speaking of the views of Texans and Oklahomans.

I'm not slamming Texans and Oklahomans here.

I'm noting this, because we're an oil province here, we have lots of people here, from time to time, who come from the oil provinces of Texas and Oklahoma.  Interestingly, as Alberta and Saskatchewan are also oil provinces, we also have quite a few people from these regions who make an appearance as well, although they don't tend to have much of an influence on local culture and politics.  Indeed, they're pretty quiet on both, and they'd nearly have to be on the latter, as of course they can't vote after being here a year. Texans and Oklahomans can, of course.  I note this as during oil booms the latter groups tend to be somewhat influential in local politics, and often their local views are imported.  Canadians in the US tend to be really quiet if they're not in numbers.

Canadians in Canada are not, and to a fair degree, prior to COVID 19 Canadians were expressing a fair amount of contempt for American culture.  Donald Trump really brought it on.[1]

Note, I'm still not commenting on any of this.

What I will note is that open contempt tend to inspire contempt back, and people should be careful about that.

Anyhow, what I"m now noting is that Western Canada has had, for a long time, the same relationship with the Canadian East that the Western United States tend to with our East, and this entry really shows that.  Note:

This Convoy is not just for the truckers mandates. It’s for the 30 million people that Trudeaus government approved to allowed to be spied on their cell phones. It’s for the family members banned from visiting family in nursing homes. It’s for the censorship on all social media platforms. It’s for all the people afraid to speak In fear of being called conspiracy theorists. It’s for the people who didn’t want to give up their freedom of choice! It’s for the people who don’t want to give up their right to bear arms. It’s for the people who don’t want to be in debt for the next 100 years. 

Did you just read a Canadian post referencing a "right to bear arms".

Yes you did.

Now, this post also deals with a lot of other things, and as is typically the case, most Americans are going to be completely clueless about what's going on.  We don't tend to follow Canadian news here, and we don't tend to get it.  Both are inexcusable.

I do, or at least I used to. With the news being what it is recently, I've grown a bit numb to it.  Well, really numb.  I was aware, vaguely, that something was going on, but not that aware.  I had to look it up.

I looked it up on the BBC.

The BBC's Toronto reporter notes (original font, bold text and mother tongue speallings):

After a week-long drive across Canada, a convoy of big rigs has arrived in the national capital to protest vaccine mandates and Covid-19 measures. Organisers insist it will be peaceful, but police say they're prepared for trouble.

The article goes on:

The movement was sparked by a vaccine mandate for truckers crossing the US-Canada border, implemented by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberal government earlier this month.

Upset with the new measure that would require unvaccinated Canadian truckers crossing the two nations' boundary to quarantine once they've returned home, a loose coalition of truckers and conservative groups began to organise the cross-country drive that began in western Canada.

It picked up steam and gathered support as it drove east. Many supporters, already opposed to Mr Trudeau and his politics, have grown frustrated with pandemic measures they see as political overreach.

Okay, a couple of things.

I've thought about noting it before, but because we're so focused on our own selves in the US, we tend to view the entire COVID 19 mask and vaccine story as exclusively our own.  Heck, for the most part, if the entire population of the globe had died of COVID 19 it probably would have taken most Americans a couple of weeks to actually notice it.

We tend to be rather self-absorbed.

Part of that self-absorption, however, is our failure to note that a lot of big social and political stores around here are actually international ones  and some of those have widespread regional expression.  

There have been huge mask protests in Australia and parts of Europe, including, for example, Germany. Refusals to vaccinate have occurred in at least Australia and across Europe as well.

Now, I'll note that as I'm not hugely familiar with this story, I don't want to go too far in commenting on it.  I was dimly aware of some provisions in Canada as a friend of mine had recently been to British Columbia, and I'd asked him about things, and he noted mask requirements for where he was, stating beyond that bluntly that Canadians "didn't tolerate stupidity".  That's a very blunt comment, but I'd also note that my Canadian contacts also would not be critical of Prime Minster Trudeau's policies here.  Frankly, I don't know that I am, either.

On that, our luck in our small family finally ran out.  My daughter now has COVID 19.  I'm so weary at this point, I'm not angry, and hopefully it'll be mild.  She's away from home and I can't do anything about it, or even to help.

And I've watched COVID 19 rip through places I know and people I know.  I don't understand the reluctance to get vaccinated at all.  A rancher I vaguely knew died of COVID 19 and left a devastated widow.  A bunch of people who were with him at a cattle sale where he surely picked it up got it and were pretty sick.  My daughter got the disease, potentially, from being exposed to a person who didn't get vaccinated and who went here and there before that person finally had to acknowledge the infection.

None of that had to be.

Maybe we couldn't have beat the virus.  But our refusals made it certain that we could not.  It will go on to become endemic now.  Is Trudeau being unreasonable for trying to keep American infections from spreading back across the border?

Without really commenting on it, this may be the one area where I agree with Trudeau.  I haven't followed Canada's response to COVID 19 now for some time (I did at first) but Canada has had a hard time with the disease. The US started off with a bad start, but Canada somehow fell into a bad situation.

I'll also note that at this point Canadian news in the US started to drop off because, well, Canadians were suddenly less condescending towards the United States than they had been for awhile.  As the weirdeness surrounding the Trump lie that he won an election he lost has caused many in the US to wonder about the future of their democracy, and many outside of the country to wonder the same thing, that's returned a bit.

That might drop off again as Trudeau went into hiding yesterday during the protests. . . shades of insurrection. . . 

Anyhow, as noted, I don't know that I'm not sympathetic to Trudeau's response here to COVID 19.  Truckers are entering a country where the Omicron variant is infecting many and the chances of them bringing it home. . . well, they seem pretty high.

Which will make this the one area where I'll ever say that, most likely.  I don't like Justin Trudeau as a politician, and I never have.  Indeed, I've characterized him as a soy boy at one point.  

It used to be pretty clear that Western Canadians took a much different view of a lot of Canadian politics than Easterners did, and obviously that's still the case. But for that matter, our regional political culture used to be a lot clearer here, too.  Things like gun control have always been hugely unpopular in the rural West, but even here that's gone from "don't mess with me taking my pistol and rifle out in the sticks" to the "we need to be prepared to fight Stalingrad" sort of atmosphere.  And, starting with the campaign which pitted our current Governor against Foster Freiss, you'd have thought that some people were running for the Governor of Alabama in the 1970s.  Freiss' campaign even sported lightly clad young women in a state which has winter about nine months out of the year, which inspires a "geez, doesn't somebody have a coat for those poor girls" type of reaction rather than a "whoa. . . look at those Daisy Dukes".  Underlying it all, however, the old views, by us old residents, are still there.

Globally it seems a lot of the same strains are also at work everywhere.  Populism, something that never had much of an appeal here, has taken over in the state's GOP and across the nation in Republican organizations.  But not just here.  Populism helps explain how Boris Johnson rose to power in the UK.  Populist dominate the Hungarian government, which is strongly right wing.  Populists threaten to take over the Polish government.  Strong populist elements exist in French politics, and you can find populist elements everywhere.

That would seemingly have nothing to do with COVID 19 and it doesn't, but what it does have to do with is politics in the era of COVID, so it gets mixed in. And there's a really strong cultural element at work here that the political left wants to dismiss and even pejoratively label, but it shouldn't.  A big part of what's given rise to right wing populism is a feeling that traditional culture is being attacked.  To some degree, it is being attacked.

That's serious for a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons is that in the US, and elsewhere it would seem, a lot of rank and file people who are of the traditional culture feel that they have nowhere to go democratically.  People who are basically traditionally Western European and Christian in culture are being told that clearly Christian values are obsolete, their inherited European values are wrongheaded if not outright racist, and they just have to lump it, at best.  

A big part of that has been a radical reconstruction of domestic values, which are inherited from a Christian heritage. Christianity has always focused on families as the center of secular life, and took what was the radical view early on that marriage meant one man, one woman, until one of them died.  Pagans didn't believe any of that.

That Christian belief, in part, gave rise to the success of Christianity in spite of huge governmental and cultural repression.  Christian families were solid because of that belief, and Christians cared for their own in times of trouble, even caring for others where they could.  They therefore survived repression, oppression, wars, and plagues in spite of being in cultures that held "don't be stupid, you can abandon the sick. . .don't be stupid, you can kill the infirm. . . don't be stupid, if you are male you can screw who or what you want, and by force if you want."

Now, we're darned near back there in signficant ways, although we certainly didn't arrive at this spot in an instant.  The assault on marriage began as far back, really, as 1534.  It arrived in a flood fashion after World War Two, with that war having damaged so much of Western morality, and achieved legal assistance from, of course, California starting in 1969.

European values, including democratic values, were also inherited from the Church  A body that held that everyone was equal in God's eyes necessarily would spill into the secular world.  Indeed, the poor and common born could and did rise to position in the Church long before that became the case in secular society.[2]

Western culture is essentially Christian in its values and even non practicing people, and non Christians for that matter, tend to hold Christian philosophical values without realizing it.  One non-Christian friend of mine, but one who lives in the Western world, noted to me once that culturally, "we're all Catholics".  There's a lot of truth to that.

But progressives have been acting for some time now to rip that down and are offering, in its place, a construct based on what individual's "feel", which is not a very solid basis for any sort of larger philosophy.  Reality keeps on keeping on, irrespective of what we feel about it.

And at the same time, progressives have been big on "you must", including what you must think.  It doesn't matter if your moral code holds one thing, if the current progressive view is to the opposite, you must not think that and you must not say that.  Canada has gone a lot further down this road than the U.S.

But that very "feel" and "must" ethos leads us to where we are now, ironically, in regard to the COVID 19 virus and what we feel about it.  While the science is solid as to what it is and how to avoid it, a nearly century long campaign on deconstructing our focus and changing it into one based on what we "feel", as long as we also feel to be consumers, set us up for the current crisis. And that dovetails into the "must".  A group of people who have been told that they "must" think something that is contrary to centuries of their cultural values and their own experiences, because of what we individually feel, is going to lose, at some point, a willingness to accept what its being told, no matter how extremely well founded one particular item may be.

In other words, introducing these same policies in 1950, in a different U.S. and a different Canada, probably wouldn't be provoking this result, as it would have come in the context of little else being under assault.

Whether it's a 500-year attack on our central foundational values, or only a 75-year-long one, at some point we reached a tipping point.  A good case can be made that for the United States that point came in 2015 and I warned at that time that a Supreme Court case in which the Court sought to redefine a traditional view of the world contrary to the long run of human culture would have future dire consequences.  It seems to me that I was proven to be right.  The Court, in its waning liberal days, usurped the legislatures, created a result, and those benefitting from it, as well as those who were on the political left, ran with it far beyond what was predicted, including what its author predicted.  Where as that result only took one more step on a road that had mile markers at 1534, 1953, 1963, 1968, and 1969, it seems to have been a societal bridge too far.  The same movement had already made large impacts across the globe legislatively, making the US somewhat unique in that it was done judicially.

It is not what a person thinks of that movement per se, but rather what occurs when a very large percentage of the population gets the sense, even just vaguely, that it's being attacked and has no place to go.  In the case of the US, a large, formerly Democratic demographic, has had its economic foundation stripped away and exported, and its traditional values eroded.  Much of that is a rust belt sort of thing, which is where the epicenter of discontent can be found.  But it spreads out elsewhere in areas of economic distress, including the rural West, where what we're essentially told is that we ought to get computer jobs and become urban cubicle dwellers.  Even our own governments aid in this process by eroding, on occasion, what local business there is.

As massive as the change is here, the post-war change is even more dramatic for Canadians.  Canada was a fundamentally conservative country founded in agriculture with a strong tie to the United Kingdom. Going into World War Two, most of Canada, outside of Quebec, was extremely rural and extremely British.  Quebec was divided, but the bulk of the Francophone population was not only very conservative, but rural and agrarian, the only thing that had kept it from being absorbed into the larger Canadian whole.

War, we've noted here, changes anything, and the Canada that came out of World War Two started to change pretty rapidly.  Not all at once, to be sure.  As late as the late 1950s, people moving to Toronto could expect to be moving to an essentially English city that closed up on Sundays entirely.  

Much of that has now been swept away. Canada is an urban country, like Australia is, with urban values.  The US is actually much more rural, by and large, than Canada, in spite of its much larger population.  But the rural areas do remain, and the strong East/West divide does as well.  What's also occurred, however, is a huge cultural shift in which Canada has become a very liberal country.

Or it makes pretense to being so.

In the homes, out on the farms and ranches, you'll get rumblings of another view.  Many I know, and again I know more in the East than the West, are certainly very "progressive" in outlook.  Nonetheless, I could never get a straight answer from anyone why people were enthralled with Justin Trudeau.  And in individual news I see the photos of people visiting the traditional Canada, including Canadians, not the side streets of the Second City.  

And out in the West, Western Canadians often seem distressed about how a society that isn't and wasn't that much different than the Western US has become so controlled in a fashion.  The comment on the Canadian right to bear arms, which in Canadian law doesn't exist, is telling on that.

A lot of these same factors are playing out in every country in the Western world simultaneously.  This helps explain, I think, a lot of the reaction to masks and the like.  People have actually been upset with the direction of things dating back to the 1980s, or even the 1970s.  They're reacting now. What probably pushed them over the edge, however, happened before COVID 19.

These are dangerous times.  The assumption that democracy is an inevitably victorious force is an assumption, not an historical fact.  History teaches us that when a large minority feels it can get no voice, it puts a country at risk.  In those times, the people who tend to pick up the voice are: 1) demagogues (Huey Long, Donald Trump, 2) Caudillos (Franco, Petain) and would be Caesars (Hitler, Putin).

Of course, in such times others can rise to save the day, and that's more often the case.

It's clear that the United States is a lot more down this disastrous path than Canada is, but the protests show that it isn't the case that everyone in Canada is thrilled with the path its been on since, really, 1945.  The same forces are at work in nearly every Western democracy right now.

The solution?  

That may be for true conservatives to offer.  Finding uncompromised ones who haven't sold out partially to populist and demagogues is pretty tough in the US right now, however.  Canada's politics are different, so perhaps they have a different path forward.

Footnotes

1.  Anyone who is a dual citizen or who has Canadian relatives probably speant some time trying to explain Donald Trump and often being embarrased for the country by having to explain Trump.

At the same time, we also would occasionally get unsolicited emails and comments from Canadian friends who were big Trump fans, but had to keep their opinions more or less silent themselves, which is also embarassing as they would tend to assume that any American they knew probably held the same view.  Indeed, the assumption that everyone you know personally holds the same views you do is probably a default human assumption.

2.  Indeed, the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church's prohibition on clergymen marrying came about in order to prevent the priesthood from becoming an inherited position.  After the seperation of the English Church from the Catholic Church in 1534 this was changed in in the UK and in the UK itself the priesthood did become somewhat of an inherited position.