You Heard It Here First: Peculiarized violence and American society. It Wasn't The Guns That Changed, We Changed (a post that does and doesn't go where you think it is)

(Note.  This is a post I thought I'd posted back in November.  Apparently not, I found it in my drafts, incomplete.  So I'm posting it now having just finished it.  As I have a pretty distinct recollection of actually having posted a completed version, perhaps this is a semi duplicate.). 

I ran this item on violence in the US back in October, 2015:

Lex Anteinternet: Peculiarized violence and American society. Looki...: Because of the horrific senseless tragedy in Newton Connecticut, every pundit and commentator in the US is writing on the topic of what cau...

Its one of the most significant posts on this blog.  And it remains the analysis that I think continues to explain what we've been seeing, and more than that refusing to see, in recent years.

Because this is such a politicized story, in which those arguing on it basically refuse to see anything but their own preconceived notions, serious discussion on this topic is extraordinarily rare.  People just go immediately to default arguments, even when some particular examples pretty much defeat the default arguments in certain circumstances.  People then wonder why "nothing happens", by which they mean, they wonder why everyone hasn't adopted the view that they held before any incident and continue to hold after an incident.  Rarely do I see any analysis on root causes of what we're seeing, and even rarely analysis which portrays the current situation correctly, other than I dare say my own.

Which is why I'm now posting on a public speech I ran across on television by Spokane Washington Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich.  I saw a segment of it on television and intended to link it in here on Youtube, but as I couldn't' find a link to it, in any form, that wasn't just screaming out the posters preconceived notions ("Sheriff Slams Gun Banning Commies" vs. "Puppy Kicking Sheriff Makes Fascist Rant") I gave up, and finally determined exert the portions of the speech that I think really say something in the context of this post, maybe in a narrow way, on just a narrow section of it, more succinctly than I did in my prior post.  In any event, it was nice to see that somebody else, somewhere, had actually given a little thought to this issue rather than leaped to their material based default argument.

In the Sheriff's September speech he states

I can tell you, folks, I carried a gun all my life. I hunted, I shot. My friends and I…It’s hunting season back home. When I was in high school, every one of those rigs in the high school parking lot had a gun in the gun rack. Why? We went hunting on the way home. None of those guns ever walked into a school. None of those guns ever shot anybody. What’s the difference? Did the gun change? Or did you, as a society, change? I’ll give you odds that it was you as a society, because you started glorifying cultures of violence. You glorified the gang culture, you glorified games that actually give you points for raping and killing people. The gun didn’t change, we changed.

As my long prior analysis shows, I think its more complicated than this, but I think there's a lot, indeed a very lot, to this statement.

Like the Sheriff, I come from a region of the country where guns have always been very common and that would frankly describe the entire American West.  The Sheriff gives one example which I recall very much from my own teen years and which nobody would ever have thought much of.  Indeed, this still happens, or at least did happen, in some regions of the country as at least one attempted mass shooting was stopped a few years ago when two high school boys went to their trucks and armed themselves with their hunting rifles, stopping the shooter before he accomplished anything. An interesting and relevant story but one which, of course, was missed in a media environment where such things just don't occur.

And not only is the Sheriff correct about that practice, but he is about the weaponry as well.  Mechanically, there's really nothing actually new on the firearms market that hasn't been there for at least fifty, and more likely more like seventy, or even up to 100 plus, years.  I noted that in my earlier posts, just as the sheriff did, although he didn't elaborate on it.  One thing that he elaborated on, which I didn't, is that teens frequently had access to weapons of this type, at least in rural areas, as teens. That's very true, and very significant evidence that it was we that changed, not the instrumentalities themselves.

So, what did the sheriff stated changed?  Society.

The way he put it was much simpler, and perhaps much narrower in focus, than I did.  He simply stated:

I’ll give you odds that it was you as a society, because you started glorifying cultures of violence. You glorified the gang culture, you glorified games that actually give you points for raping and killing people.

I think he's 100% correct on that.

I didn't put it quite the same way, and I view it somewhat differently. But I think is point is completely correct.  In my earlier post I noted:

So, what we'd generally note is that there were a set of behavior and social standards that existed, and they generally seem to have a root in the "Protestant" ethic.  I'll note here that I'm not claiming this as a personal heritage of mine, as I'm not a Protestant. Simply, rather, it's been widely noted that this ethic has a long running history in the US, and North American in general, and has impacted the nation's view on many things.  These include, I'd note, the need to work and the value of work, and the relationship of the individual to society, all of which have greatly changed in recent decades. Again, I'm not seeking to campaign on this, merely observing that it seems to have happened. This is not a "Tea Party" argument, or direction towards one political thesis or another.

These are related in this way.  No decent society would make a game of killing. But we oddly have, and in spades.  And we've oddly done it as we've become less and less personally familiar with the reality of it.  Indeed, on this upcoming Christmas a lot of people are going to receive gifts that glorify killing human beings.  That's really disturbing.

We worried, in earlier decades, that exposure to war would make young men violent. And it did make some violent.  Men in the James Gang, for example, had come straight out of Missouri guerrilla war before taking up a life of crime.  But by and large war didn't make men violent, it tended to do the opposite.

But the fascination with violence seems deeply rooted in the human heart.

In a grounded society, the depiction of violence will only be allowed to go so far.  People now make fun of things like the Legion of Decency and earlier film rating boards for what they wouldn't allow. But, rooted in a Christian world view, they simply wouldn't tolerate depictions of violence of any kind, including killing, but also sexual violence (more on that in an upcoming post) to go too far.

That started to break down when the influence of such organizations started to break down. And its all but gone now.  A film like The Wild Bunch is still shockingly violent, but even it has to show its shocking violence in context.  Perhaps only Wind River compares to it in that use in recent films.  Many other films are, frankly, just violent for violence sake.  A film like the 2012 example of Lawless, for example, is just perversely violent for no good reason at all, but its violence is so routine we don't even take note of it.

And those are just films. Games, I'd wager, are much more destructive to the long term psyche.

In earlier times, "war games" as played by children, involved running around the neighborhood pretending to shoot each other. The causalities, however, always got back up.  Now, however, people spend hours, sometimes days, doing just what the Sheriff noted, realistically pretending to kill people they do not now. For some, that's going to be horribly corrosive.  As I earlier noted:

One thing it seems that they do with their time is to play a lot of video games, or computer games, and a lot of those games are highly male oriented, and highly violence oriented.  Quite frankly, by all appearances, they appear to be highly sexualized as well.

This is one aspect of this situation that is completely new.  Violence isn't new, and the implements aren't new, but this type of cartoon active violent entertainment is.

Violent works of literature have existed forever.  Beowulf, for example, is pretty darned violent.  The Niebelungenleid is awash in blood and gore. The Iceland sagas are pretty darned violent.  But they're all written. And the written word is just a tiny evolution of the spoken word.  Both seem to serve the function of redecoration and entertainment, but neither seem to lodge in the brain in a way that comes out as "I'd like to replicate that".  Indeed, to a degree they seem related to the function of play, in which humans replicate certain scenarios as unconscious rehearsal for what we'd do in similar situations.  In other words, to use the Beowulf example, "if confronted by hideous evil I will. . . ."

Visual images seem to be different to us, as a species.  This seems, therefore, to dull us to what we see, or to actually encourage us to excess.  It's been interesting to note, in this context, how sex and violence have had to be increasingly graphic in their portrayals in order to even get noticed by their viewers.  In terms of films, even violent situations were not very graphically portrayed in film up until the 1960s. The first film to really graphically portray, indeed exaggerate, violence was Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch.  Peckingpah used violence in that film to attempt to expose Americans to what he perceived, at that time, as a warped love of criminal violence and criminals, but the nature of our perception largely defeated his intent.  At the time, the film was criticized for being so violent, but now the violence is celebrated.  In that way, Peckinpah ended up becoming the unwitting and unwilling equivalent, in regard to violence, to what Hugh Hefner became intentionally in terms of pornography.  Ever since, violence has become more and more graphic and extreme, just to get our attention.  Likewise, Hefner's entry into glamorizing and mainstreaming pornography starting in the 1950s ended up creating a situation in which what would have been regarded as pornography at that time is now fairly routine in all sorts of common portrayals.

Recently, due to video games and computer games, both of these items, sex and violence, have crossed over from film into a type of hyperactive concentrated sophisticated cartoon portrayal.  Video games have popularized the concept of over muscled, hyperactive, amoral violent men, whose glory is their violence.  Their reward very often is an over endowed cartoonish female.  Neither portrayal is realistic in anything that it seeks to portray.

So, then, certain people are left with no work, and no socialization.  In a prior era, these people fit in, even if they were awkward themselves. Their work was valued and on Friday night, when pay came, they were dragged along to the local bar, the Union Hall, or the Enlisted Man's Club, even if they had little to say and were work oriented.  More than a few probably found a family that way.  Others never did, but their work and workers became a sort of family

Now, they're in the basement watching a make believe world glamorizing violence with M4 carbines which seems to offer them hero status and sex.  

This, I would note, rolls us back around to the analysis that this sort of violence and the Arab suicide bomber are committed by the same type of people.  Youth unemployment in the Middle East is massive.  Those societies have a set of standards, to be sure, but they're under internal attack, with one group arguing for standards that only apply to the group itself.  And violence has been massively glamorized in the region, with the promised reward for it being highly sensual in nature.  In other words, out of a population of unemployed young men, with no prospects, and very little in the way of learned standards, recruiting those with narcissistic violent tendencies should not be very difficult.  The difference between there and here is that there, those with a political agenda can recruit these disaffected misguided youths with promises of the reward of 70 virgins, while here we're recruiting them through bombardment by violent entertainment. 

Raised in a society of relative values, and taught that killing is a fun game, that some take that as the lesson shouldn't surprise.

The Sheriff also blamed the mental health system in the country as well.

This is another example of the mental health system in this county collapsing around our ears. And perhaps those elected officials who control those monies could fund a little more to help those people out.  This is a state and national issue that they better wake up and start dealing with.  And I don't blame the local mental health either. They don't have the money to deal with this because the state has abandoned them. They have pushed this problem to the local level and the local levels are not equipped to deal with it.

I went into that as well, but frankly I've gone a lot further and feel that this problem not only exists, its growing deeper.  As I've noted we've now marginalized an entire large group of people that we once employed and basically forced into being members of society, for their own good it turns out. People with mental conditions that rendered them socially marginal were none the less included, as I"ve previously noted.  People with mental conditions that made them dangerous or totally incapable of being in society weren't treated as if their misery could be abated by not noting that they would never in this life be normal.  Neither group was warehoused in their parents basements for years and years pretending that Johnny will get it some day, poor soul.  

Okay, all stuff I've said before, but should we stop there. That's all the changes, right?

Well, not.  And I touched on this the other day as well.  Here's probably where all the folks who  are to the right of the NRA and have been cheering so far as they read this get mad, and here's something that the Sheriff didn't note.  While the guns didn't change, one of the things that changed about us, as a culture, is that somehow we became fascinated with a different set of guns than we were in prior decades.  It's quite odd actually.

Just as we've moved, as a society, from one in which most men, then many many men, and now few men, have seen actual military service, let alone combat, while the games young men play have become more and more combat oriented, that same thing has expressed itself in the firearms that people are fascinated with.  it's truly remarkable.

I focused on that a bit the other day in discussing the AR15.  The AR15, as I noted, has been around since the very early 1960s. But it didn't have very much respect in the firearm community until at least the 1970s.  It's become absolutely dominant since the early 1990s, and now is to a ridiculous extent.  At the present time, the M4 carbine and clones of M4 carbines are absurdly dominant in the firearms sector.

Now, there's nothing that's really new about the M4 carbine itself.  The M4 carbine is a development of a carbine version of the AR that goes all the way back to the origins of the AR.  First sold on the civilian market as the CAR15 the first military use of the little ineffective carbine was during the Vietnam War, at which time it was the XM177.  What's new, however, is that you didn't see ARs, let alone the carbine variants, every time you went to the sporting goods store or the range until the last fifteen or so years. Now, they're everywhere.

That's something that's significant, as something has changed that makes them that popular. And it isn't that they're all that. The AR isn't that good of design. The folks at Springfield Armory waged a rear guard action against it until they lost their place of work, and real marksmen in the service then carried that battle on for decades. The Army is really up front about its desire to dump it as soon as a new cartridge can be found to replace the existing service round, and the old complaints about its jamming keep on keeping on.  The AR15 of course did have a following right from the first moment it was first offered on the civilian market, but it was never simply everywhere and at least for the first couple of decades after it was introduced it wasn't a rifle that dominated every issue of every sporting magazine and which you'd see at the range every time you went.  It was there, but it isn't there like it is now.  And that tells us something.  It's something in the minds of the purchasers.

Now, military rifles have always been popular with certain shooters. But traditionally, they were very serious target shooters.  Achieving long range results with military type rifles has always been a shooting sport, and there have always been a class of very serious shooters that seriously studied and admired military rifles, including modern semi automatic military type rifles.  And there still is.  Indeed, this makes up a strong segment of the AR base as this class, if they shot National Match, were forced into AR type rifles when the rules were changed to require them.  Before that, M14 rifles dominated.  When the AR rifles became mandatory a vast amount of attention was then given to them by this sector which worked on creating a large number of target variants, some of which depart significantly from the military basic model.  Today they're used by lots of lots of target shooters and lots of precision civilian sporting shooters of all types.  And that's absolutely legitimate and fine.

And there have always also been serious gun collectors who like military type rifles and therefore are likely to have M16 and M4 variants as part of their collections.  Some, I suspect, would regard as nearly being mandatory to their collections. 

So neither of those demographics are new.  But what is new is the casual, and not really terribly serious, shooter who must have a M4 type rifle or some military rifle. That's new.  

Some time ago I happened to be at a range (I'll leave the location unmentioned for reason that will become apparent) that I regards as sort of the less than serious shooter's range.  It's always packed with guys who have AR variants, some of whom just seem to blaze away to blaze away.  On the range on this day in question was a class.  At the class a man dressed in military clothing was yelling, drill sergeant style, to a collection of men wearing mixed military clothing and equipped with a mixed variety of military inspired weapons.

Now, I have nothing against these weapons at all.  A lot of serious marksmen take a serious interest in semi automatic rifles that have military inspiration.  But when you see guys dressed like soldiers and taking a class from somebody  yelling at them like they're in boot camp, well, that's a bit different.

I'm pretty sure that at the time that I went through boot camp you could  not have offered such a class and had anybody show up.  A large percentage of men my age had been in real basic training and; 1) we'd been paid to do that (let's be honest, no matter how patriotic we may have been, we weren't doing it for free); and 2) it wasn't fun and we had no desire to pay somebody to go through that against, even if only for an hour.  Indeed, for those of us who stayed in what was then a very male, and very foul, and very rough organization and who, because of their career path would endure that treatment again, they were doing it for other reasons.  Not because they liked to receive verbal abuse.

I note this experience as there's some atmosphere out there now that is sort of relevant to this story just a bit.  Back when I was young, and back in the years prior to that, there were a lot of men, and a few women, who shot military inspired weapons for all sorts of reasons.  And that's 100% fine.  But I don't recall very many people for whom the weapon was ancillary to something else.  And maybe that's what I'm trying to define here.

Now, a lot of firearm users in fact regard the firearms as ancillary.  There are many serious hunters for example who like their hunting arms, but they're ancillary to the activity.  Indeed, I've seen guys who normally hunt with the finest rifles or shotguns borrow something on the border of being junk if a hunting opportunity came up suddenly they found themselves without their normal arms.  Many of these people are also firearms enthusiasts, but their enthusiams has a particular application its very closely tied to.  This varies from person to person but for example I've known men who knew all about shotguns in great detail but who knew next to nothing about any other firearm.  It didn't meet their application.  Conversely I knew men who knew all about all arms, but loved one class that they used.

This certainly wasn't limited to hunting arms.  There were target shooters who were the same way. And there were collectors who shot examples of their collections.  Those latter men, and this is very important to note, often shot military inspired weapons, including semi automatics, but their interest was different from what I noted above. Some were basically historians of a fashion, interested in the history of warfare, which is much of history, and whom sought to experience the material history directly (the same guys often found other material items very interesting).  Others were sort of like applied engineers, and found the mechanical nature of the firearms interesting.  Some, many, were both.

This differs it seems to me to what I'm sort of seeing on many ranges today.  But it's hard to describe.  I'll try an example to lead into it.  I once knew a fellow who had a vast detailed knowledge of the AR rifles in every sense.  He owned at least one, and probably more than one, over the years.  He didn't like them as a military weapon, or even in general, but he owned them as he had a historical and engineering mind and found them interesting.  Now, in contrast, I'll speak to people who have a tricked out M4 type carbine and are completely ignorant on all of that.  They really only know, in some instances, that it seems cool in a "tacticool" sense.

Am I saying that there's something wrong with that?  No, I'm not, if it leads to a greater interest in firearms and shooting and outdoor activities in general.  But if we focus on an imagined world of battlefield glory, well maybe there's something wrong with that.

Now, I'm  not saying that most of the owners of these rifles imagine themselves taking on the Taliban in some heroin infested sinkhole in Central Asia.  But I also think the popularity of these rifles has been undoubtedly fueled by a "cool factor" that has emphasized their military role. It's pretty interesting as in contrast what we used to see is an emphasis, when we sought it, on the sporting nature of military weapons, which is undoubtedly there.  So, we'd see artifices on "using the M1 Carbine for turkey hunting", or "accuraizing your M1 Garand for the match".  Now it's not unusual to read articles about using your M4 carbine for a personal home defense weapon.

Now, by all means, if you need a weapon to defend your home, find one that suits your needs, if you have the knowledge and capability to use it, and do what you think is right.  But the big emphasis on this we see in some quarters that glamorizes an imaginary world of local combat is something that is new and which we should really re-assess.

Again, I'm not saying that these weapons don't have a place in the civilian world.  Indeed, a sporting writer for Rifle who normally writes on hunting rifles recently wrote an article about shooting submachineguns, of which he apparently has several, as plinkers.  He says they're fun to shoot.  Perhaps they are.  But he wasn't writing about how you need one to defend the neighborhood from some big coming crisis.

So going back, what changed?  It's pretty clear we did.  We really lost our values in a real sense, replacing a set of values that was deeply grounded in Christian ethics with one that assumes we can all create or own individual secular Heavens, and as we became more remote from violence, we oddly glamorized it, including a bit in regards to the things we use. We can fix all that, but it takes some action and thinking.

His last pictures

He came here seventeen years ago, with another cat.  He was just a kitten, but a very large one.  He came right in the house like he owned it.

Which he quickly really did.  Our constant companion for nearly two decades.

He was a fantastic mouser, and that probably caught up with him a couple of years ago when he became deathly ill.  We think he ate some poisoned mice somewhere in the neighborhood.  It seemed sure he'd die, but instead he lost about half of his weight.  He carried on for another few years however, as friendly as ever, but skinny.  Then a couple of months ago another neighborhood cat beat him up and he received an infection he couldn't beat.

We'll miss him.

Today In Wyoming's History: New Mexicans In Wyoming

Today In Wyoming's History: New Mexicans In Wyoming: 

 

The oldest house in the United States, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  New Mexico very much has its own distinct cultures that have been in theregion for a very long time.

This blog has a sidebar entitled Hispanics In Wyoming.  It's one of several that deal with important Wyoming ethnicities.

One of the nice things about blogs is that you can correct and expand on topics as you learn about errors or omissions, and that's what we're doing here, thanks to a recently issue of the Annals of Wyoming. We really missed the important story of New Mexicans in Wyoming.
 

It was a huge omission.

I don't know that we can really fully correct it, quite frankly, as our omission was so vast, but we'll at least mention it here in hopes of getting this part of the story inserted here.  We'd first note, however, that finding a copy of the issue and reading it is highly recommended, even if a couple of the articles in it fit into social theory that's really outside of the main theme of the issue, which deals withHispanics in Wyoming. One of the things the issue really focuses on in is the story of NewMexicans in Wyoming, which I only knew a little about.  It was fascinating.

What that story reveals is that Wyoming once had a vibrant New Mexican population that maintained direct links to Hispanic New Mexico.  Largely made up of men with experience in sheep tending, they came up to work on Wyoming's sheep ranches and then ultimately went into available blue collar jobs, mostly in southern Wyoming.  For a long time these communities traveled back and forth between Wyoming and New Mexico, but they stopped doing that around World War Two and permanently located in Wyoming, mostly in southern Wyoming.  They were a significant minority community all along the Union Pacific, and their presence as a community that lived in Wyoming but had immediate roots in New Mexico continued well into the mid 20th Century.  Indeed, I know one retired fellow whose parents, it turned out, lived this very story.

I didn't deal much with this in my earlier sidebar, and indeed I really haven't dealt with it much here.  But it is important to recall that a term like "Hispanic" is a very broad one and it may be used unfairly in an overly broad fashion.  New Mexicans in Wyoming, while Hispanics, have their own story.  I missed that.  That story remains, but it's slowly being lost as the New Mexican community, now well into its third and fourth generation here, and now removed from its original distinct occupations, is less identifiable as that than it was when it first located here.  Indeed, the article referenced above credited the Catholic Church with allowing the identify to go forward, given that they were Catholic, an aspect of Hispanic culture I did mention previously.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Maria Lanakila Catholic Church, Lahaina Maui Hawaii

Churches of the West: Maria Lanakila Catholic Church, Lahaina Maui Hawaii

This impressive church is the Maria Lanakila Catholic Church in Lahaina Maui Hawaii.  The Church was established in 1846 with the present church having been built in 1873. Renovations were done in 1918, including the cleaning of the impressive paintings that are located within the church, gifts of Maui residents who might possibly be King Kalakaua or his sister, Queen Liliuokalani.

One of the very unusual features of this church is the chicken weather vane that is affixed atop the cross on the steeple.  I have no idea what the story behind this is.

 The name of the church means Mary Victorious in Hawaiian.

Poster Saturday: Triple Entente

A World War One Imperial Russian poster showing France, Russia and the United Kingdom, in that order, as three glamorous women.

Best Posts of the Week of December 9, 2017

 The best post of the week of December 9, 2017.

An argument on what you can and cannot think about stuff that people don't understand with implications you just don't expect but maybe ought to.. Fallout from Obergefell

Time to plan for a post Trump future. Success or Failure.

Field Marshall Edmund Allenby entered Jerusalem. December 11, 1917.

Oh, for the want of a third party. . .

Jerusalem

Juxtaposition and Bad Analysis

The strangeness of ladies' hats

Geez, but they were odd

This is what I want for Christmas. . .

Perceptions on being armed, and the use of force.

(Note, this was originally a post that I went to post in 2015, but for some reason held back.  As I have quite a few old posts in the stable that I haven't published I'm either publishing them or deleting them.  Hence the out of date references).

"Welcome to Wyoming. . . consider everyone armed".

That's a common bumper sticker in this region.  And its not far from the truth, although it isn't really true either.

Recently I happened to have the pleasure of dining with a retired FBI agent.  He's a firearms owner and proponent of gun owners rights, but he's also from a big East Coast city and was fairly horrified by the recent change in concealed carry laws across the nation.

For those who do not follow this, and I suppose most people do not, over the past 20 years there's been a real evolution in this area.  At one time, many, perhaps most states, had really local provisions on this.  It wasn't atypical to have it be in the control of a local police force.  In Wyoming, for example, concealed carry permits, up until about 20 years ago, were issued by the local sheriff.  Some sheriffs would issue anyone one a permit, some almost nobody.

There's also been a bit open carry movement in some places, which is very much an oddity from a Wyoming prospective.  Absent some frontier towns that would ban open carrying of firearms during times of civil unrest, anyone has always been able to openly carry a firearm here.  You don't see people routinely doing it, but it's perfectly legal and always has been.  There were no restrictions at all, other than building restrictions the owners of buildings put in place.

All of this has somewhat changed in recent years.  We, like most states, went to a concealed permit system that normalized issuance through the state, and our state has reciprocity with numerous others.  This sort of permitting system has spread across the US.  Also, our state, like some others, has licensed concealed carry without a permit under some circumstances.  Our system allows anyone qualified for a permit to carry concealed, although people commonly erroneously believe that the state now allows everyone to carry concealed. That's incorrect, you still have to qualify under the law to carry concealed.

I don't know what got this movement rolling, but a friend of mine who occupies a position with a governmental body, but which isn't a law enforcement position, carries a concealed arm, to my surprise.  Indeed, I was in a meeting and found that both that fellow and another one we were meeting with were both armed, which I would not have guessed.  Asking my fried about it, he explained it in a manner different than I would have supposed it to be explained. The gist of it was, that by carrying concealed, the concealed carrier was ready should there be a need, but he also was not giving alarm and stressing people. And, by allowing it widely, there was no way for criminals to know who was armed and who was not, and that this was sort of a deterrent therefore.

Indeed, only shortly before that, a man tried to rob a hair dresser shop at our mall. He was armed, but it turned out that one of the ladies in the shop was carrying a pistol, and he accordingly fled upon her withdrawing it.  I guess that's the gist of it.

My FBI friend feels, as the NRA does, that there should be nationwide reciprocity, but he pretty clearly feels that open carry and concealed carry should both require training.  Our concealed carry requires some sort of training or proof of military service, but open carry does not.  This reflects the views of the locality.  Open carry has always been legal here except, perhaps ironically, during the late Frontier period when some cities would ban it temporarily if something was going on. 

Which is a long introduction to this point.  I've recently learned and become amazed to find how many people do in fact carry concealed handguns here. It's a lot. And I'm comfortable with that.

I'm comfortable with that as firearms are part of the culture here, and there aren't very many improper uses of them.  It just doesn't happen much.

People are acclimated to them, however, and they're pretty ready to use them if they need to.

When the terrible terrorist attack happened in Boston last year, the trial of which is now going on here, I was amazed by how the entire town shut down.  People talked a lot about how brave Boston was, but from here, I'm sorry to say, it didn't look that way.  I know that sounds awful, but there's no way that the reaction would have been the same in a Western town or city.  The hunt wouldn't have gone on all day, and the terrorist would have been really lucky if the police found him before an armed citizen did.  For that matter, I doubt the police would have been able to really keep people from getting involved.  I'm sure they would have tried, but my suspicion is that the second people knew what was going on, there'd be a lot of firearms loaded.  It'd be hard to get a person here to wait for the police to come to your boat to trap him, at least in some instances.

The same occurred to me during the recent tragedy of the terrorist strikes in Europe. They're  horrible, but I can't help but feel that they wouldn't have lasted quite so long here.  Indeed, I suppose, we have a local, although old, example in the form of the Johnson County War, when an illegal army invaded Johnson and Natrona counties, and was put under siege by the mad armed citizenry of Johnson County. It wasn't the Army, or law enforcement that stopped the invasion, although Sheriff "Red" Angus did mobilize the residents of Johnson County.  It was the citizenry of the county.

An approach somewhat like this actually makes up the defense posture of some nations, albeit in a much modified form. The Swiss, famously, have had for years what amounts to a giant militia.  Target shooting is the national sport of Switzerland, and the Swiss have simply issued individual weapons, with ammunition, to each male of military age.  They are not to break into the ammo, of course, but it's interest to find an entire European nation that has simply issued selective fire weapons to half its citizens, for decades.  Switzerland had not fought a war since the Napoleonic era, and some speculate that this is party of the reason why.

The British, amazingly given their strict gun control policies, nearly did the same in the early 1960s prior to the elimination of National Service.  The plan was to issue individual weapons to the Territorials, their reservists, based on the Swiss model. The plan fell through when National Service was abruptly ended, and the UK fell back on its tradition of a small but highly trained professional army.

Various nations in Africa, however (including the Middle Eastern example of Israel) have relied upon this model at different times, although I'm not really informed on the details, so that's about all I can say about it.  Interestingly, the Republic of Vietnam was set to return to the model, which had partially been used by the French for trusted hamlets when they governed Indochina.  South Vietnam felt that the Communist insurgency in its country had fallen to the state that it planned on issuing military weapons at the village level so that villages could take care of their own problems, prior to the North Vietnamese invasion of 1975.  That the latter stage of the Vietnam War was a conventional war is sometimes a bit ignored in the story of that conflict.

This taps into the controversial views expressed quite a few years ago in an essay called "A Nation Of Cowards".  Frankly, I didn't pay very much attention to that essay at the time, as it just didn't seem very relevant to my life here, but there's something to it, strong words though they be.  A person can clearly overdo this, and I'm not really saying that everyone should go around armed all the time, but the psychological differences between groups of people whose first resort is to seek help form the authorities if something develops, as opposed to do that and prepare to take it on themselves, is real.  

Of course, distance and isolation, as well as history, have a lot to do with that.  Critics of this area, as well as fans of it, will cite to our "Frontier mentality", which may be a bit inaccurate in these regards, but there is a different sort of history in regions where people are of the view that they have to take care of a lot of things themselves.   

Is this good or bad?  I guess that depends on your point of view.  But for those of us here, the concept of having to depend on the police to handle the problem, and not being able to yourself if you needed to, seems odd.  But then, for many elsewhere, the opposite probably does.

Roads to the Great War: America's Decision to Send an Expeditionary Force ...

Roads to the Great War: America's Decision to Send an Expeditionary Force ...: "America to the Front" A Contemporary Cartoon from Punch By Michael McCarthy Even  after Congress had approved the War...

This is what I want for Christmas. . .

but I'm not getting it.

Not this drawing, fine though it is.

No, I want a riding mule. I.e., a saddle mule.

I ask for a saddle mule every year.  I'm just flat out told no.

  #gallery 2017800566

The strangeness of ladies' hats

Geez, but they were odd

 I wonder why?


Related threads:
 
Caps, Hats, Fashion and Perceptions of Decency and being Dressed.

Blog Mirror: Roads to the Great War: Foodies! Our Doughboy Cookbook Has Been Honored!

Roads to the Great War: Foodies! Our Doughboy Cookbook Has Been Honored!: A food aficionado very close to me has passed on the information that the Doughboy Cookbook at our Doughboy Center website has been honor...

I have to admit I find things like this interesting and I'm always tempted to try a thing or two from the.

Happy Birthday National Guard. . .

serving, the way that its calculated, to 1636, as an heir of colonial militias.

Predates, we might note, any of the other defense establishments by quite some margin.

Lex Anteinternet: Oh, for the want of a third party. . .

 No, not a painting of somebody Roy Moore was accused of dating back in the day. .. but rather how members of third parties envision coming to power.

From yesterday:

Lex Anteinternet: Oh, for the want of a third party. . .: Watching the story of the election in Alabama, which will occur today (I'm dreading the flood of news tonight), I have to once agai...

Well thank goodness that's over with.

A couple of observations.  The Republican lost but maybe the Republicans won by that Republican loosing.  It was hard to see how the GOP would have overcome the taint of Moore.  Moore was more than a little spooky even without the teenager ickiness stories floating around him.  One man I knew who worked in Alabama for years and who is a staunch conservative regarded him as a power spook.

Of course, the GOP only wins, long term, if it finds a way to both do what it claims it stands for and to heal the rift that's splitting it effectively into two parties, in one falling down house.

The Democrats of course get one more in a nearly evenly divided Senate, meaning that maybe they take the Senate in 2018.  Or maybe not.  Democrats being Democrats would likely apply their seeming rule that a person must be at least 175 years old to be in a leadership position and then wreck their new chances.  If you couldn't vote for FDR, darn it, you should just sit and be quiet, you whippersnapper.

I have to wonder why, in a race like Alabama's, third parties didn't try to take a real run at the seat that was up for election.  There are at least three serious third parties, but they all seem to operate on the idea that they'll win the White House in some magic election and then rule from the top down. That's absurd.  They need to crack open a door into legislative bodies, and the best way to do that is to push on a door that's already broken with a pole that can actually batter it down.  Nobody seemed to.  In a race like that in Alabama, in which voters wanted a conservative candidate which didn't present them with troubling moral choice, one third party, the American Solidarity Party, would seemingly have had at least a chance of getting a few votes.  If it could have persuaded a known disaffected Republican to run, it might have had more than a chance.

But it doesn't seem to have done that, in  so far as I know.

As seemingly the concept that there ought to be more than two parties, and and that there effectively are more than two as the Democrats and the Republicans have huge internal devices, just can't seem to find an expression in actual elections.

Mid Week At Work. That dreaded early morning news

 

Oh goody.

Juxtaposition and Bad Analysis

I unfortunately seem to have to stop by the grocery store about every other day. There's some things we forgot to get last time we were there, and some of them you can't put off.  So, quite a bit, I find myself in the grocery line at Albertson's or Riddley's sometime between 5 and 6 p.m.

I invariably end up noticing the magazine covers as I wait.  I don't really want to, I just do. And, because of that, I've been seeing the creepy robe wearing visage of an ossified Hugh Hefner staring out smiling from Life Magazine in a special issue, the only kind Life does anymore, dedicated to his memory.  As we recently passed his death.  His life, we're told, is to be celebrated as he broke down those musty old standards and let in the bright light of the "sexual revolution".

What he actually did, of course, is tell all men that the girl next door was theirs for the taking and that she probably had enormous boobs.  In real life, Hefner was married when he started out his smut based enterprise but that soon ended and, if the stories are to believed, females in the Playboy enterprise, or at least some of them, could expect to be screwed in Hefner's office.  Certainly the "girlfriends" who lived in his mansion knew that was part of the deal as they signed up for concubinage in order to advance their "careers" or to just have a roof over their heads.

Every morning, of course, we start off with the Today Show and I usually crank up my computer, both of which give me the current news. And much of that news has recently been on the topic of men who have been revealed to have engaged in "inappropriate behavior".  Matt Lauer has been a frequent topic of that recently with lurid tales of workplace skirt chasing and his conquering of various female subjects, all so far, if what we are hearing is correct, seem to have been purely voluntary, but to have submitted to sex, we're told, as he was their boss.

In other words, Lauer, who has earlier related that he grew up in a home in which his parents had no religious values at all, his father having abandoned his Jewish faith and his mother never having one, apparently, lived liked Hefner.  And that was the way that up until recently was supposedly the liberated cool dude way to live, assuming the tales about him have some grounding in reality (his first wife, he's been married twice, wholly denies the accusations being made against Lauer, and unless he underwent a radical personality shift that should tell us something).

And, sometime during the week, I listen to the weekend news shows which are also dealing with the same story of Lauer and all his many fellows.  Indeed, fellows who have transgressed in varying degrees.  Lauer, if the stories are true, was truly a Hefneresque cad, but that may be all he was, with Hefner's lesson to men about women, they'll submit, proven correct.  Others are like Al Franken, lately Senator from Minnesota, who engaged in lessor behavior but have now paid the price, even if in his case his rise to power was based on fame generated through gross humor of the sophomoric type for which grabbing butts and boobs is par for the course, and everyone should have known that.  And there's all manner of bad behavior in between.

And in each weekend show there's a cry about how are we going to create a new standard.

Eh?

Isn't something obvious here?

We had that standard.  Guys like Hefner tore it down, guys like Lauer lived the new libertine one that was supposedly cool in its place, and now the inevitable messed up wrecked lives and consequences of that have come roaring back.

As yes, the First Law of Behavior and the Fourth.  

Laws of that type simply can't be broken.

And reinventing the wheel isn't necessary.  It's just remembering where you put it.

Jerusalem

 Jerusalem, 1915

We've recently run a couple of articles from 1917 that featured the city of Jerusalem.

Which turn out to be quite timely, as it were, as President Trump recently indicated that the American Embassy to Israel will be moved to Jerusalem, thereby fulfilling a campaign promise of his.

This has resulted in a lot of confusing news coverage, including the suggestion taht President Trump has unilaterally decided to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capitol, which is quite incorrect.

Let's take a look at this mess a little more carefully to see where we're really at, if we can figure that out.

Israel itself has regarded Jerusalem as its capitol since its modern founding.

But you can't start there. And that's the entire problem.

Jerusalem is a really ancient city. The area was inhabited at least as far back as 7,000 years ago.  It comes into importance, however, in a significant way, as the City of David, from which the significant rulers of Israel in antiquity ruled.  We're not going to go into that much, but it was obviously a holy city to ancient Israel.  It was also one of the seats of the earliest Apostolic Bishops at the time dawn of the Christian Age, with  St. James, son of Alphaeus, being the first Catholic Bishop of the city (before I get some uninformed dispute on this, research it.  There's no doubt, he was the first Bishop of the Church in the City).  So, by the 1st Century, the city was not only a political capitol of the region but also a massively important religious site, none of which is news to anyone reading this.

During the period of Roman occupation the city was destroyed, specifically in the year 70. According to the Jewish historian Josephus the city "was so thoroughly razed to the ground by those that demolished it to its foundations, that nothing was left that could ever persuade visitors that it had once been a place of habitation".  If that's correct, it was sufficiently reoccupied to be destroyed at least twice more during the period of Roman occupation.  Of interest, the temple was destroyed in the 70 event which is one of the ways which the various books of the New Testament can be dated, as the event can be looked at in terms of whether it remained a prediction, or a historical event, at the time that the writing was authored.  If it remained a prediction, the writing can be assumed to predate the year 70, and therefore come within forty years of the Crucifixion.

Following the Bar Kokhba revolt in 132 the Romans rebuilt the city and in fact renamed it Aelia Capitolina.  They actually prohibited Jews from entering the city upon pain of death, except for a single day each year.  During the reign of the Emperor Constantine the Great, who of course had converted to Catholicism, this was relaxed and Jewish Christians were allowed back into the city.  Burials from the 4th Century through the 5th show that the town was Catholic during this period.  During the 5th Century the town passed back and forth between Byzantine rule and Persian rule.

In 638 the city was conquered by Umar ibn al-Khattab who was a lieutenant of Muhammad.  The city, in fact, became a holy city to Islam as well as Muslims claim that Muhammad ascended into Heaven after a miraculous nighttime journey from Mecca to Jerusalem.  Interestingly, Muslims at first prayed facing the direction of Jerusalem. a custom almost certainly picked up from Christians and Jews, as early Christians prayed facing Jerusalem as did Jews in the diaspora.* Muslims were instructed to face Mecca some thirteen years later.  Following the initial Islamic conquest Jews were allowed back into the city for the first time since 132, thereby creating a notable historic irony that initially Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem were on good terms and the restoration of a Jewish presence in the city came about due to Islamic military success.

Following the conquering of the city by Islamic Arab armies the city began to decline in importance.  It had in this period a Christian, Jewish and Muslim population.  Indeed, the region of Palestine was heavily Christian and the Islamic kingdoms in the region made little effort to impact that in any fashion until the ascension of the Turks as a primary force of Islamic expansion.  As the Turks began to replace the Arabs in these regards, in the East, a change began to occur, in the East and the West wherein Islamic rulers became increasingly intolerant of other faiths.  In 1099 Christians were expelled from the city by the Islamic rulers of the region, an example of the conduct which gave rise to Christian military expeditions into the region which are now termed "The Crusades".  Given no such name at the time, they were originally an effort to protect Christian pilgrims in the region.  In 1099 Western Christian armies arrived and took Jerusalem, resulting in a major change in political direction and one of the great overblown myths of history.  Even though the sum total of all the dead from the Crusades does not equal a single day of heavy casualties during World War Two, the period custom of grossly over-exaggerating deaths gave rise to the famous claims of vast Crusader slaughter (blood up to the knees of horses) which are wildly exaggerated, which is not to say that loss of civilian life did not occur.

 Representation of the Crusader victory at Jerusalem in 1099.

This resulted in the establishment of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, a misunderstood "Crusader Kingdom" which in fact represented the reestablishment of Christian rule to a largely Christian countryside, but with the introduction of European nobility.  As odd as that was, it largely worked and the existing Arab Catholic population worked well with the introduced Catholic nobility.

Struggle for the control of the city, and hence the kingdom, went back and forth between Christians and Muslims until 1244 when the city was conquered by the Tartars who slaughtered the Christians and drove out the Jews.  In 1247 they were in turn driven out by Islamic forces.  As of 1267, one notable figure found that the city, which had once numbered 200,000 inhabitants, was down to 2,000, of which only two families were Jewish and only 300 people were Christian.  The then minor city was mostly Muslim.

In 1517 the Ottoman Turks gained control of the city.  As I don't want to get into a long history of the Ottoman Empire, I'll only note that they ruled the city from 1517 until December 9, 1917, when the British entered it, as we noted here the other day.  During that period of time the population of the city recovered and it became one that had a majority Muslim population, but also an appreciable Jewish and Christian population. Christians were mostly represented by Catholic Arabs, which make up 20% of the Palestinian population even today, and Orthodox Christians that came in during the Ottoman period.  Armenian Christians actually started coming in during the 300s.

 Field Marshall Allenby approaching the Joffa Gate.

It was into this situation that the British stepped in 1917. Here, the British have to be admired in some ways for attempting not to play favorites.  But events would conspire against them.  With the introduction of a European power into the region, and one with a sense of fair play and equity, it was inevitably the case that the horrors of late 19th Century and early 20th Century Europe and Eurasia would begin to have an influence.  Faced with oppression everywhere, Palestine, and the United States, increasingly became the destination for immigration for Eastern European and Eurasian Jews, which the British could little anticipate or address.  Zionism, a political movement that sought to restore Palestine as a Jewish homeland, influenced the migration which was ongoing in any event.  As this occurred, the Jewish population began to rise, as it also did in Palestine in general.  A reversal of the early history of the city in which Jewish residents of Palestine were allied with Islamic Arabs occurred as the latter increasingly viewed the former as a political threat. World War Two, with its horrors, dramatically increased Jewish immigration and aspirations as the Jews themselves came to believe that they were not safe in particular in Europe, and not in general without a state.  The British, faced with irreconcilable aspirations on the part of its Jewish Palestinian charges, and its Arab Islamic ones, simply chose to leave, probably the best and only option under the circumstances.

The partition of Palestine, resulting in Israel on one hand and the Jordanian West Bank on the other, divided the city.  Israel, for its part, declared Jerusalem its capitol right from the onset, which had the practical impact of declaring a city that was in two different nations, Jordan and Israel, to be the capitol.  No nation could really acquiesce to that without playing favorites between one country, and religion, and the other, so nobody was bold enough to take sides in the matter, and no wonder.

Events would be forced in 1967 when Israel captured the city in the Six Day War.  That had the impact of unifying the city, but not happily.  For that matter, Israel occupied the entire West Bank and treated it for some time as its own.  Ultimately, however, Israel recognized the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, which incorporates that territory as part of its own, but which gives the Authority administrative control of the West Bank.  The Authority regards West Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel, while stating that East Jerusalem shall be its capital.

Enter the United States Congress and the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, which provides:

JERUSALEM EMBASSY ACT OF 1995

Public Law 104-45 104th Congress

An Act To provide for the relocation of the United States Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the ``Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995''.

SEC. 2. FINDINGS.

The Congress makes the following findings:

(1) Each sovereign nation, under international law and custom, may designate its own capital.

(2) Since 1950, the city of Jerusalem has been the capital of the State of Israel.
(3) The city of Jerusalem is the seat of Israel's President, Parliament, and Supreme Court,and the site of numerous government ministries and social and cultural institutions

(4) The city of Jerusalem is the spiritual center of Judaism, and is also considered a holy city by the members of other religious faiths.

(5) From 1948-1967, Jerusalem was a divided city and Israeli citizens of all faiths as well as Jewish citizens of all states were denied access to holy sites in the area controlled by Jordan.

(6) In 1967, the city of Jerusalem was reunited during the conflict known as the Six Day War.

(7) Since 1967, Jerusalem has been a united city administered by Israel, and persons of all religious faiths have been guaranteed full access to holy sites within the city.

(8) This year marks the 28th consecutive year that Jerusalem has been administered as a unified city in which the rights of all faiths have been respected and protected.

(9) In 1990, the Congress unanimously adopted Senate Concurrent Resolution 106, which declares that the Congress ``strongly believes that Jerusalem must remain an undivided city in which the rights of every ethnic and religious group are protected''.

(10) In 1992, the United States Senate and House of Representatives unanimously adopted Senate Concurrent Resolution 113 of the One Hundred Second Congress to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem, and reaffirming congressional sentiment that Jerusalem must remain an undivided city.

(11) The September 13, 1993, Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements lays out a timetable for the resolution of ``final status'' issues, including Jerusalem.

(12) The Agreement on the Gaza Strip and the Jericho Area was signed May 4, 1994, beginning the five-year transitional period laid out in the Declaration of Principles.

(13) In March of 1995, 93 members of the United States Senate signed a letter to Secretary of State Warren Christopher encouraging ``planning to begin now'' for relocation of the United States Embassy to the city of Jerusalem.

(14) In June of 1993, 257 members of the United States House of Representatives signed a letter to the Secretary of State Warren Christopher stating that the relocation of the United States Embassy to Jerusalem ``should take place no later than . . . 1999''.

(15) The United States maintains its embassy in the functioning capital of every country except in the case of our democratic friend and strategic ally, the State of Israel.

(16) The United States conducts official meetings and other business in the city of Jerusalem in de facto recognition of its status as the capital of Israel.

(17) In 1996, the State of Israel will celebrate the 3,000th anniversary of the Jewish presence in Jerusalem since King David's entry. SEC. 3. TIMETABLE. (a) Statement of the Policy of the United States.-- (1) Jerusalem should remain an undivided city in which the rights of every ethnic and religious group are protected; (2) Jerusalem should be recognized as the capital of the State of Israel; and (3) the United States Embassy in Israel should be established in Jerusalem no later than May 31, 1999. (b) <> Opening Determination.--Not more than 50 percent of the funds appropriated to the Department of State for fiscal year 1999 for ``Acquisition and Maintenance of Buildings Abroad'' may be obligated until the Secretary of State determines and reports to Congress that the United States Embassy in Jerusalem has officially opened.

SEC. 4. FISCAL YEARS 1996 AND 1997 FUNDING.

(a) Fiscal Year 1996.--Of the funds authorized to be appropriated for ``Acquisition and Maintenance of Buildings Abroad'' for the Department of State in fiscal year 1996, not less than $25,000,000 should be made available until expended only for construction and other costs associated with the establishment of the United States Embassy in Israel in the capital of Jerusalem.

(b) Fiscal Year 1997.--Of the funds authorized to be appropriated for ``Acquisition and Maintenance of Buildings Abroad'' for the Department of State in fiscal year 1997, not less than $75,000,000 should be made available until expended only for construction and other costs associated with the establishment of the United States Embassy in Israel in the capital of Jerusalem.

SEC. 5. REPORT ON IMPLEMENTATION.

Not later than 30 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary of State shall submit a report to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate detailing the Department of State's plan to implement this Act. Such report shall include--

(1) estimated dates of completion for each phase of the establishment of the United States Embassy, including site identification, land acquisition, architectural, engineering and construction surveys, site preparation, and construction; and

(2) an estimate of the funding necessary to implement this Act, including all costs associated with establishing the United States Embassy in Israel in the capital of Jerusalem.

SEC. 6. SEMIANNUAL REPORTS. At the time of the submission of the President's fiscal year 1997 budget request, and every six months thereafter, the Secretary of State shall report to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate on the progress made toward opening the United States Embassy in Jerusalem.

SEC. 7. PRESIDENTIAL WAIVER.

(a) Waiver Authority.--

(1) Beginning on October1, 1998, the President may suspend the limitation set forth in section 3(b) for a period of six months if he determines and reports to Congress in advance that such suspension is necessary to protect the national security interests of the United States.

(2) The President may suspend such limitation for an additional six month period at the end of any period during which the suspension is in effect under this subsection if the President determines and reports to Congress in advance of the additional suspension that the additional suspension is necessary to protect the national security interests of the United States.

(3) A report under paragraph (1) or (2) shall include--

(A) a statement of the interests affected by the limitation that the President seeks to suspend; and

(B) a discussion of the manner in which the limitation affects the interests.

(b) Applicability of Waiver to Availability of Funds.

If the President exercises the authority set forth in subsection (a) in a fiscal year, the limitation set forth in section 3(b) shall apply to funds appropriated in the following fiscal year for the purpose set forth in such section 3(b) except to the extent that the limitation is suspended in such following fiscal year by reason of the exercise of the authority in subsection (a).

SEC. 8. DEFINITION.

As used in this Act, the term ``United States Embassy'' means the offices of the United States diplomatic mission and the residence of the United States chief of mission.

[Note by the Office of the Federal Register: The foregoing Act, having been presented to the President of the United States on Thursday, October 26, 1995, and not having been returned by him to the House of Congress in which it originated within the time prescribed by the Constitution of the United States, has become law without his signature on November 8, 1995.]

This was, a bad idea.

Right now its widely believed that Donald Trump "recognized" Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel.  In reality, it was Congress that did this 1995.

And when I mean Congress, I mean Congress.  This bill passed into law with out the President's signature.  Bill Clinton was the President at the time.

This raises the question of why would Congress have done this?  And that has to do with politics.

A lot of the reason that this passed may in fact be because Bill Clinton was President.

Let us take a look at that.

It is not possible to recognize Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel without making a lot of people mad. We are well aware of this. We commonly hear that the city is "holy to three major religions".  It is, but it's a lot more complicated than even that.  The city is obviously holy to Jews, and so identified with their history that it is not really possible to conceive of a government of Israel really wishing to share the city with any other group politically.

It is also obviously holy to Muslims in a way that they cannot be expected to simply ignore.

And the city is holy to Christians, but not to all Christians in the same fashion.  It is obviously an important city for to all Christians because of what happened there during Christ's time on Earth.  It's additionally important to all Apostolic Christians and those Protestant Christians who closely identify with the Apostolic Churches as it was an Apostolic seat and it has had a presence on the part of Apostolic Christians from the very beginning.  Indeed, they have the second longest presence in the city next to Jews.

However, it's become important to some fundamentalist American Protestants who associate restoring Israel's rule to the city with the End Times, which they seek to hasten. That is something that Apostolic Christians largely miss and which Jews find to be rather uncomfortable.

And all of this has a role in American politics.

The United States has been uniquely friendly to Israel since its founding in a way that no other nation has been. In no small part this is due to the United States being uniquely friendly to refugees and immigrants to a degree no other nation has been which has meant that it has a large Jewish population that stems from European immigration.  Indeed, the United States has received more Jewish immigration than Israel has.  Given this, the US has been uniquely supportive of Israel.  If you look at the issue of Jerusalem, for example, even Norway is opposed to Jerusalem being Israel's capitol  We're pretty unique in these regards.  Right now, only the Philippines seems slated to follow us, and given their leadership, that really can't be taken as a great sign.

Anyhow, there's no way to move an embassy from Tel Aviv without sending a message you probably don't really want to send unless that message is that you wholeheartedly take Israel's position in this.  But do we,  and should we?

FWIW, in pondering this I came up with an idea I thought was original, but it turns out not to be.  It won't happen, however.  I'd make Jerusalem a self governing city.  That's the position, as it turns out, of the Vatican and at least a few other countries.  It's also the position of at least the Armenian population of the city, it seems.

About any other result ends up favoring one culture and one religion over another. And that doesn't seem to be recipe for resolution.

____________________________________________________________________________________

*This is really entering dangerous territory but this custom was almost certainly adopted from Christians and Jews, with whom Muhammad was very familiar and had been influenced by.  To get into this in greater depth would require an exploration of the history of Islam which will have to wait for some future thread, assuming that we post on it ever.