A 2020 Holiday Reflection. Part 3 of 3. The Resolute Edition

In prior years I've put up a string of threads entitled Resolutions For Other People.  I haven't done it every year, but I have quite a few times.  My last one is here:

New Years Resolutions For Other People (and maybe some for everyone) 2020.

And the one before that:

New Years' Resolutions for Other People. 2019 Edition

These fall largely into the category of satire, and like most satire there's an element of seriousness to it.  This past year, 2020, however, has been altogether far too serious to really effectively delve into satire with.  Some serious resolutions, on a societal and personal basis, are really needed now.  

2020 has exposed some cracks in the fabric of Western society that have been there for a long time, at least since 1968, if not since 1939, or 1929, or perhaps 1917 (or maybe 1914).  Spanning a long period of history for other reasons, it's pretty obvious that the depth of our societal strife is much, much deeper in terms of years and origins than the weekend pundits would have it.  Something didn't suddenly go wrong during the Trump Presidency. Something was wrong a long time before that.  Anyone who has experienced at least a half century has been able to see that unless they've chosen to blind themselves to it.  Much of the "progress' that has been allegedly made in society has in fact been deeply retrograde.  In some significant ways we're much closer in societal influences to the year 20 now than to the year 1920, and that's not good at all.

So, with this in mind, some resolutions.  Yes, for other people, but also some individual, perhaps, down below.

Gravitas

1.  1968 didn't work out because the 1960s didn't.

When we hit 2018 we ran, along with retrospectives on 1918, some on 1968.

1968 was a pivotal year in the history of the West.  Things were revolutionary in the true sense of the word because it was the year that smoldering revolutionary views of society harbored in the college age Baby Boomers, but dating back to revolutionary views that became deeply seated in some sections of society in the 1910s through the 1950s, busted out.

Well, like the French Revolution, that was all a big fat failure.

That doesn't mean that there weren't things that needed to be addressed, but a lot of the addressing was just a rich kids tantrum that he didn't get an extra slice of pie for desert and we've been paying for it in spades.  

The 1960s were the decade in which the Boomers decided that none of the "conservative" values of any kind were correct and that none of them applied to them. Well, that was an ignorant approach to the world. And that was followed up by the "greed is good" 1970s in the same generation.

Overall, the generation that still in power in the Untied States, and still very influential in much of the West (although that's passing away with blistering speed in much of it) ripped down the ediface and then the structure of nearly everything.  The edifices may have needed some stripping, but the structures were torn down without reflection.

I've long maintained that the generation that's up and coming, the ones that are below age 35 now, are much more like the ones born before the World War Two/Depression Era/Greatest Generation, than any since then.  They've been left, however, without much structure.  Of course, in some ways, the generation that fought World War One suffered through that as well.

Tennyson wrote that:

The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

Well, sometimes the old order changes simply because its under assault.  Here we have Tennyson's writings twice before us. The old order was attacked a bit too much, and what replaced it is now the old order and needs to go.

Chesterton noted;

There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, "You can't put the clock back." The simple and obvious answer is "You can." A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed.

This doesn't mean that everyone who has reached the age of 50, and I have, needs to suddenly find an iceberg and float out to a watery demise.  Far from it.  But lots of what we reassessed in 1968 and the years that followed need to be reassessed as the results are a mess. The Sexual Revolution alone looks a lot like the French Revolution. . . a spectacular celebrated failure that sparked more spectacular failures.  Celebrating the French Revolution is vicariously celebrating Stalin, Moa and Pol Pot.  Celebrating the Sexual Resolution is pretty much just like that.  And that's but one example.

2.  Something old

It used to be the case, for some reason, brides were told they needed;

Something old 

Something new.

Something borrowed

Something blue.

I don't know about that, but the entire society needs to try the first one, as we by and large don't know what works anymore.  And by that, I mean something serious, and some things not so much.

What I more particularly mean is that everyone, and I'm serious about this, ought to look back prior to the Boomer generation and try something, and really try it, that your progenitors of that generation prior would have regarded as routine.  Because this blog is directed at the faceless void, I don't know what that really means in your case.

In my own, that'd be pretty easy as my parents weren't Boomers.  So for folks like me, I'd say go back one prior to that.  I.e., if your parents were in the pre Boomer generation, look at least one back.  If  your parents are Boomers, look to the generation or generations prior to that.

And be at least partially serious.

Now, I know some people who think they've done this.  Their great grandparents might avhe been immigrants from Poland, for example, so they've adopted Polish names for their newborn and they eat kielbasa on the Polish national holiday, whatever that is.  And I in fact mean something sort of like taht. . . but more.

On the light side, that is what I mean.  I don't care if you are a dedicated vegan.  If your grandparents routinely had a hefty Sunday meal of roast beef, potatoes, and finished it off with coffee (and many people did just that), try it for a few weeks running.

Try it.

But beyond that, try something serious.

Did your grandparents always put in a garden?  Put one in. Did one of them go fishing, and not in the weeny "catch and release" way, but in the "I'm eating that" way.  Do it.  Was one a farmer. . . think about farming if you can (which you probably can't, so put in a garden).

And beyond that.

Were your grand parents Italian immigrants and you think that you celebrate that heritage by having lasagna every now and then?  You don't.  Go to Mass for three months in a row.  Were they Romanian?  Well go to the Romanian Orthodox Church three months in a row or the Greek Orthodox or Byzantine Catholic one if you can't find one and see what that's like . . .seriously.  

And are you living a life that your Italian grandmother would have regarded as an infamnia when she was 20. Well knock it and try to live like she did.

With all of this stuff, I think you'll find something. . . and something serious, real, and seriously real.

3. Reassessing the reassessment of retiring.

Over the past several years I've read endless articles in business journals and newspapers about how retirement is dead, nobody should retire, and isn't it nifty that people don't retire.

It isn't.

There tend to be only so many jobs in an economy and when they're occupied, they're occupied.  It's different if you won the work, and professionals and business owners do, but otherwise, that's just not the case.

Additionally, there comes a time when there needs to be a shifting over, and we're now there.  This past several months we saw Finland field a slate of candidates for their nation's chief executive who were all in their 30s with one exception who was in his 40s.  That guy lost.  In contrast, the United States fielded a slate of candidates that were sifted down to people in their 70s and 80s.  That's insane.

People routinely complain about the American infrastructure being past its prime.  Of course it is.  The entire nation is vested in people who are past their prime in some ways. Even taking the most recent election, there's no earthly way that either Donald Trump or Joe Biden were the men they were twenty years ago.  

At some point, this is getting dangerous if for no other reason that an entire society in the hands of people in their natural decline will be a country in decline.  But it can be worse. So far the nation's been spared what will happen if we keep this up, which will be a President who descends into mental illness or a Supreme Court with more than one member who have Alzheimer's.  It's inevitable.

Moreover, there's something wrong with a society in which people who have worked their entire lives can think of nothing else to do.  Travel, if you still can. Write.  Photograph. Become a Church reader or a Synagogue canter.  Be more natural.  Mehr Mensch sein.

4.  Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood

If you worked your entire life in Dayton, you owe the place something or at least you owe Ohio something.  Don't pick up and move simply because you can when you retire your job at Amalgamated Amalgamated.  If you hated Ohio, you should have left before then.

Okay, family ties, health, etc., all matter.  And I don't have a problem with people moving from Craig to Ranger, or Riverton to Dubois, or Santa Fe to Taos. But we owe where we are from something and to have lived and worked in a region and then to pick up root when we retire and relocate does a double disservice.  It deprives our community of what it gave us, both in resources and in knowledge, and it drops us in a place where we may very well be an economic and cultural menace.

If you retire from Giant Co in Illinois and then buy a farm in Nebraska as a hobby, some young farmer in Nebraska probably won't be able to get a start.  If you wanted to be a farmer you should have tried it prior to that point.  You get the picture.

And frankly, if you stick around and finally pass in your region, people remember you.  And for a long time.  If you pick up and move to Arizona, people forget you, and your obituary in the paper just brings a "I wonder who that was and why they're in our paper?".  Don't fools yourself.  You may have been a big lawyer at big law firm, but if you die some place distant, nobody is going to remember you.

5.  Right, Left and all points in between.

Let's start here with "the Donald".

You lost the election, President Trump, and you need to accept that immediately.

You are doing a massive disservice to the nation by pretending otherwise.  

And for those participating in this, its' hurting the country.

We are a democratic nation.  We're not Weimar Germany.  Denying the results of an election, even if it means that the person elected is somebody we detest, is detestable.  It needs to stop.

And remember, if things devolve to them against us, there's always the chance that there's a lot more of them, then us.

Let's go beyond that, however, and really look at what's going on underneath and resolve to address it.

The country ended up with Donald Trump not because, as some lefties seem to think, 50% o the country is crazy.  Rather, 50% is totally disenfranchised. That needs to be brought to an end.

Americans who defined what to be an American is up until Berkeley radicals suddenly determined they had the right to do that need to be heard from, and in a large way. And that means that the nation isn't going to become a "progressive" (and we'll get to that definition in a moment) petrie dish.  The more that occurs the more the subjects of the experiment don't like it.

Indeed, the irony of the recent populist movement is that you really have to look outside the US to find analogous examples and they're all really disturbing.  A good one is pre revolutionary Russia.  Most Russians never became Communists and they certainly weren't in 1917. They were just sick and tired of a government that served only itself and they were happy to let it burn to the ground even if they were burned up in the process. That's sort of what's going on now.  

The needs, desires and views of the Rust Belt demographic needs to be taken into account and given voice.  If it isn't, this is going to keep on and get worse.

The left also needs to quit ignoring the actual views of various demographics they claim. The rise of real lefty ideas is very limited and the up and coming generations, including those concentrated in ethnic minorities, are much more conservative than they are.  People being both, for example, against abortion and Hispanic isn't nuts, its the norm in that demographic.  The left is going to have to change or it'll render itself irrelevant in a generation.

But before we leave that, those now in the diehard populist camp need to wake up and realize that they aren't the majority of Americans anymore. There's a lot of them, but the old assembly line manufacturing America is gone forever.  In towns and cities people are more left wing and are a lot more accepting of a government role in everything.  Not everything urbanites confront is invalid by any means, and populist are going to have to yield to that.  That means that people need to quit screaming "socialism" every time the government is involved in something and frankly, as we transition into a new economy, the government's role in everything is going to increase enormously.

And conservatives and progressives need to figure out what the heck those labels mean.  To be a conservative presumably means you are conserving something, but what?  If its just the way things were, that's not going to work, as things were never the way that we think they were and some things move.  Beyond that, somethings need to be dumped.  So if its core values, it needs to be thought out. And part of that means adopting some things that conservatives in the US have seemingly never aligned themselves with.  Conservatives, for example, ought to be conservationist. The same core value is at work.  And if you are pro life, you ought to be pro vaccination, even if that means a strong element of government control in that.  Conservatism isn't libertarianism, which is a completely different ethos.

Progressivism has an even bigger problem in that it suggests we're progressing towards something.  If that's the idea, and I think it is, progressives need to be honest about that. Where are we progressing too.  All too often its seems that concept of progress is rooted in a weird science fiction like world where through better chemistry and gene splicing, we'll make a brand new species.  Most people don't want that, and for good reason.

Progressivism supplanted the world liberalism, or rather it returned.  Progressives at one time were populist liberals like Theodore Roosevelt.  Now they aren't.  The term Liberal made more sense and I think it ought to return.  To a certain degree the world lost favor as liberal came to essentially mean libertine, and government funded libertine, but that was more honest.

Anyhow, everyone ought to resolve to listen to the other side more.  The simple fact is that if you are adopting your views because your party seems to hold them, or because Donald Trump does, or AoC does, you aren't thinking.  No sane person can hold all the views that anyone party seems to. 

One final thing here. Other than next week, this isn't going to be an election year, but none the less I'll give a voting resolution. Everyone, and by that I mean absolutely everyone, ought to find a third party candidate to vote for in the next election they vote in.  Everyone.  To not do so is to acquiesce to an anti democratic two party structure which is part of the overall problem.

6.  Listen to Science.

I think I've posted this one before, but this year in particular has brought out some very odd developments in regard to the public's views on science.

I'm hearing a lot of people say they don't trust the science behind the vaccines.  Okay, maybe you don't, but why?  If it's not an informed basis, you should question your conclusion.

Now, that doesn't mean that a person should automatically accept everything that's currently a scientific theory. Even scientists don't do that.  But it does mean that a person needs to weigh and measure their views against the appropriate yardstick. That yardstick is never "scientists are telling me something I don't want to hear".

All too often that's all it amounts to.  We used to get a lot of that with cigarettes, but that's now pretty much gone away. We still get some with drinking in which people insist they can drink a gallon of beer a day or something like that.  In some instances, as noted, and particularly it seems in regards to diets, there are good reasons to question the latest scientific stuff, but you should do so in a scientific fashion.

Americans have always tended to question science based on their politics when they mixed with fundamentalist Christianity, which is a uniquely American thing.  In Europe, where Catholicism remained influential even where the Protestant Revolution forcibly supplanted it, the tradition of the Faith supporting science remains very strong.  Catholics are huge on science and informed Catholics nearly always are everywhere, with the Catholic belief being that science serves to illuminate and explain God's creation.  But in the US the trend in some regional sectors, and spreading over the country in the late 19th Century, was that everything had to be reconciled strictly to the Bible, with it unfortunately being the case that various Protestant theologians read some things into the Bible which actually weren't there, or which were based on erroneous translations, or which lacked nuance.  That has caused the illusion in some quarters that science and religion are at odds with each other, which in fact they are not.

Beyond that, a decline in science education and funding following the Reagan Administration really hurt science education in the generation that immediately followed the Boomers, Generation X.  The Baby Boomers were a large generation and the country didn't always do well in educating them, but up until Reagan came in there was a huge emphasis on science in education.  Following him, there wasn't. This mean that subsequent generations, for a long time, had a poor foundation in science and engineering, with the subsequent result that we ended up having to import a lot of people in that category as we weren't generating our own.

Combined with the Boomer "let's rip everything down" impulse, this gave rise to popular bogosity.  Dr. Oz says ridiculous stuff on television and people believe him.  Jenny McCarthy, fresh out of prostituting herself in Playboy, has a baby and determines that vaccines, not genetics, caused the child to have Downs Syndrome.  Patrick Coffin hosts wackadoodle pandemic conspiracy theorists on a show that started off on orthodox Christianity.  Enough is enough.

The entire society is getting a lesson on science right now and we need to listen to scientists. Some of that means when somebody says something is wrong to outright question them if it is contrary to the scientific opinion.  Retreating into "I heard" or something like that isn't a defense.  I've heard, for example, that the new COVID 19 vaccines "change your physical makeup" and are "new". Neither of those is true in any meaningful scene, but you have to know the science a bit to know why that's not true. But then to make those statements you should know the science as well.

Part of this involves the uncomfortable realization that nobody knows everything about everything, and all of us too.  Which gets me to the next thing.

7.  Learn Some History

When the Internet first became widely used, some eternal optimist gushed about how everybody was now going to easily learn everything, including history.  On the contrary, what really occurred is that vast amounts of bogosity spewed forth on everything including historical topics.

There are really good histories that are written by people who are not trained historians, but usually those same individuals are trained in something analytical.  Rick Atkinson, for example, has a Masters in English and was employed as an analytical journalist before writing his popular histories.  Barbara Tuchman had a BA in Arts from Radcliffe with a focus in literature and history.  Lars Brownworth is a university educated historian who was a high school history teacher.  Generally, when  you find somebody writing good histories who isn't an academic historian, they're probably a 1) teacher, 2) writer from another discipline or 3) a lawyer, all of whom are trained in analytical research.

This used to be the source of raging debates between academic historians, who have traditionally tended to despise historians who come in from other disciplines. They still despise them.  One academic historian who is employed by a university spends piles and piles of time on Twitter writing about about how awful her ex husband is and how great her boy friend is and crap like that, but still has time to take shots as historians who come in from other disciplines. But if ever academic historians have a point on this, and they do, the Internet has really proven it.

Since the Internet has come in people who believe in warped myth, the way the Germans believed that they'd been stabbed in the back in 1918, have had free reign to publish in that medium, and even simply publish, on their favorite myths.  Unfortunately many people treat historical topics the same way that they treat a grocery list, only buying what they know they like.  This has given rise to re revival of a bunch of real baloney of all sorts, a good example being that the Confederacy was about something other than keeping blacks enslaved.  It wasn't, but there's all sorts of bull out there to the contrary.  This has had a lot of really bad results over the past ten years, and right now its giving credence to the absurdity of the AG of Texas engaging in near sedition and suggesting that his trampling of the United States Constitution is supported by respect by the Constitution.  

One of the things about real histories is that they not only keep us from repeating mistakes of the past, we learn what the errors of the past and views of the past really were.  That is in part why historical works keep coming out on topics that have been written about before.  As our distance increases from the times being written about, the body of knowledge that prior readers had on those topics fades.  At the same time, not too surprisingly, people come into the topics today assuming that their beliefs found expression in prior times or that they're enlightened now as their beliefs were contrary to those held in prior times.  Often neither assumption is even close to true.

A lack of historical knowledge has been cited by some in our society as a real problem my entire life.  Most really well educated Americans on historical topics are at least to some degree self educated.  Perhaps this didn't matter in less politically stressed times, but in politically stressed times this always really matters.  Our culture needs a crash course in real history and every American ought to read some works of real history this year, and that doesn't mean some internet screed on a topic but a real book.

8.  Quite listening to celebrities.

I've posted this before so I'm going to be brief, and frankly extreme.  But I mean it.

If you became famous because you are an entertainer, you forfeited your seriousness card and nobody, and I do mean nobody, should listen to you on anything other than your field. That's it.

Nobody should care one whit what any celebrity says on anything serious matter, whether it be politics or science or a social matter.  Staying famous is the stock and trade of celebrities and no celebrity is ever going to say anything that impairs that.  Ever.  If Nazi Dogs For Injustice became a big deal tomorrow, all celebrities would suddenly be Nazi Dogs For Injustice.

9. Don't take any political view, or news story view, from Twitter.

It's probably wrong.

10.  Time to reassess late education.

This should be obvious now, but the education model we're working on, which is really the early 20th Century one modified by the post World War Two one, needs some serious rethinking.

This is likely a topic for another thread, but the current trend is to publicly fund university.  The better argument is to defund a lot of what we're already publicly funding.  We don't really need to fund students who are studying something "studies" and we certainly don't need to give student loans to law students.  We do need to boost science and education funding.

This would mean, of course, that the Department of Departmental Largess in a lot of universities would fail and the department members would be wondering the streets trying to sell pencils while giving left wing advice to anyone who would listen, who would be nobody, while at the same time science and engineering departments, and more traditional departments like history, English, various languages and the like would prosper. They ought to.  It would also mean that students would seem to have fewer options, but which would mean that they'd have more realistic ones.

11.  First thing we do. . . .

No, not "kill the lawyers". But their number needs to be reduced as there's way too many. 

This is party of the byproduct of what we noted in section 9 above, but it goes beyond that. Without getting into the American Default Degree, we can simply note that.  

Since the 1970s this has had a hugely detrimental effect on American society, although we must  note that just recently the courts really shined in defending democracy against an attempt at a coup through the courts.  That doesn't take away from the fact that if you live in a society where any time you turn on a televisions you are confronted with an add asking if you took "x" and then later experienced anything, you might have a lawsuit, is fundamentally whacky.  It's hurting things and this is a good time to reach in and saw off this limb.

It'd be easy to do.  Simply quit giving student loans to law students. That would do a lot. But another thing would be to reinstate real bar exams instead of the moronic Uniform Bar Exam. That really needs to go an d ought to go by January 15, 2021.

12.  Stop slandering everyone, including public figures you don't know.

An example from, of course, Twitter.

Don Winslow

@donwinslow

·

5h

When

@BenSasse

lays on the grass the worms beneath him think he has come home for a visit.

Well, "international best seller" author, a lot more people are aware of Sasse and respect him than will every read any of your books, none of which I've heard of, and all of which will be in the bargain bin of the library book sale within five years.

Stating something like this may pass for whit in the 21st Century, but it's awfully close to the infantile school yard taunts of the pre Internet age.  It's easy to imagine Winslow running around with the old "I guess I'll go eat worms" playground chant after a thing like that, but there's a lot of that on Twitter.

Something Less Serious, which doesn't mean I don't mean it.

Well, alright then.  A few things less weighty.

1.  Enough with the tattoos already.

When I was young, as I've written before, having a tattoo meant: 1) you'd landed in the first wave at Iwo Jima, or 3) had been a prisoner in a Concentration Camp; or 4) had been a member of the SS and had your blood group tattooed on your arm; or 3) had been in the Vietnamese Marine Corps, or 4) you were a member of an outlaw biker gang.

I miss those days.

I'm sick of tattoos.  

The novelty of tattoos is completely worn off. At this point, everyone who gets a tattoo should be required to get a tattoo of a sheep, as you're just joining the herd.

Expressing your individuality?  Not hardly.

Additionally, one tattoo seems like the gateway drug for another.  It's gotten so as soon as you see a tattoo pop out on a neckline or shirt line of a woman in particular, you should start looking for more.  If they aren't there yet, they're going to be.

Enough already.

Unless you recently took shrapnel in the knee in Afghanistan or embarked on a religious pilgrimage to the Holy Land, you don't need a tattoo.  You need not to have a tattoo.  If you have some, be original.  Get one removed.

2.  Try some real clothing

Eh?

If I read one more article about "sustainable fashion" I'm going to scream. There's nothing sustainable about fashion unless it came from something that grew or crawled.

Give up that petroleum byproduct blouse or shirt and actually try something real.  Give it a whirl.  Your skin, and the planet, will thank you.

3.  Skip the cartoon moves

Cartoon super heroes are infantile and watching them make you infantile.  Don't go.  

Want to see a move about Wonder Woman?  There's a fairly recent one on Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

4.  Quit abusing the English language.

If you have a bedmate of the opposite gender you live with, that person ain't  your "partner", partner.  That person is your common law spouse in a natural sense, and somebody you are avoiding committing to in a more natural sense.  Whatever you choose to do, don't call him or her your "partner" unless you are engaged in actual business or criminal activity.

Illegal aliens are still that also, not undocumented workers.  Undocumented workers are French slave laborers who are being held in captivity in Nazi Germany who have lost their papers.  It's different.

That doesn't mean that illegal aliens are bad people.  They're people.  But they're here illegally. That doesn't mean that you have to think they should be deported if you don't, but ignoring the fact of an illegality is contempt for the concept of law.

Et tu, Brute?

Okay, so while correcting the world, how did I do personally?

Not great really.

From the exterior I didn't have a bad year in any fashion, but on the interior and on a personal level it wasn't great at all.  I have certain resolutions I make every year and I never seem to fulfill them.  On at least one of them, there's a resignation element to it that means I really ought to quit resolving it.  I.e., maybe if you resolve to become the Czar of Russia every year you ought to reassess your goals.

On the other hand, I suppose, there's that grasp ought to exceed your reach thing that can go on.  That is, a goal may be unrealistic, but how unrealistic?  Becoming the Czar is unrealistic, and becoming the Metropolitan of Moscow is likely as well, but with each step down something is more within you reach.  By that , for example, I could become a Russian Orthodox Priest.  I don't want to be one, and I'd have theological problems with doing that (I'm Catholic), but there are steps I could fairly easily take to do that, if that is something that I desired to do.  You get my point.  But if you just decide, oh, I can't do that, then at some point you become one of those people whose horizons become quite narrow and close in.  I find that a lot of people enter that stage as they age.

Of course, at some point you really can't do that for one reason or another.  For example, way back three parish priests ago, the pastor of my parish asked me to consider becoming a Deacon.  I did consider it, but decided I had no calling there.  If I were to reconsider now, I'd be too old at age 58 to take it up, as the local rules are that you can't be older than 55 when  you enter the program to pursue it.  Now, having said that, they do allow exceptions and I know one fellow who received such an exception, although his example likely provide the reason for the existence of the rule.  His health declined very rapidly and he served very briefly, as he was already in  the "old age" category.

Which gets to the topic of time and physical limitation. In our society there are still some occupations that have upper age limits for entry, with the Federal Government perhaps being unique to some degree in that category as its exempted itself from the laws it imposed on everyone else in this area. But they do make sense.  You don't want 50 year olds trying to enter the Army and you probably don't want htem entering your local police force either.  I feel that we ought to put some age limits on how old a person can be and still run for Congress or the Presidency, quite frankly, or go on the bench.  And at my current age I can't realistically dream of becoming an outfielder for the New York Yankees, assuming that would have been a realistic dream in the first place.

All of which is to say that I'm well on my way to becoming something I didn't grasp when I was younger and now see how you fall into.  And I should do something about that.

January 1, 1921.

 

Blog Mirror: “I Know Where I’m Going”

 

“I Know Where I’m Going”

Time is a lot shorter than we imagine.

In looking at the old newspapers I sometimes put up here, I saw in a local paper that the building that I work in was sold this past week. . . 100 years ago.  It made the front page as it was one of the few "skyscraper" buildings in town at the time.  Maybe the only one.

That is, news of that sale hit the front page on December 31, 1920.   The building was 103 years old at the time. The new owner soon changed the name of the building to what it is today.

Yesterday I had a man in the office who was 93 years old. He asked about some details of the building and lawyers who had practiced in it in the past.  We spoke about the sidewalk out front and that some odds and ends.  He noted that out in front, on the street, "there were probably horses back then".  

No doubt there were some.

He was ten years old when this building was 13 years old. That struck me at the time.

The building was built in 1917 and first occupied in 1918.  I don't know when he first saw it, but it would have been in its early history.  That's stuck with me.  I can recall things easily back when I was ten.  He may have recalled this building when it was only a little over 20 years old, maybe even earlier than that.

For that matter, I recall this building being here, and my father having business in it, over 40 years ago, maybe 50 years ago, when the building was less than 50 years of age itself.

I've worked in the building for 30 years.  It was 73 years old when I started working here.  The man I was talking to was 63 then.  My father would have been 59, two years older than I am now.  He died at age 62.

Time just gets away from us.

The last dialogue from True Grit.

December 31, 1920. Review of the Year.

 

Blog Mirror: Tom Purcell - Longing for authenticity

 

Tom Purcell - Longing for authenticity

A 2020 Holiday Reflection. Part 2 of 3, . . . maybe. The Mehr Mensch Sein Edition.

Earlier in this blog I ran a long piece on what changes the pandemic might bring to us. Changes, that is, that would be deep and long lasting.  That items started off as follows:

Which way is the wind blowing? Changes: The Impact of the Coronavirus Pandemic

The professor visits yet again.

I have several threads that are nearly ready but not quite ready, for publication that I just stopped working on due to the Pandemic. They seemed entirely superficial in context.  As the pandemic has worn on, of course, the blog has been slowly returning to superficiality, as those who stop in here have perhaps noted, but there's no escaping the fact that things are weird right now, and they may continue to be for a long time.

In that article I examined if the pandemic might expose the falsity of the modern life and turning people back towards, well, reality.

Indeed, as odd as it may seem, up until I started writing this post, I was struggling with how to start it.  As much text as gets spewed forth here (and its proof I need to get to work on my novel, more on that coming up) you wouldn't guess that.  I'd decided, in fact, to start this post off with Billie Eilish and Ellen Page, but obviously I didn't.  More on that later.

Anyhow, others might put it different. Turn back towards things that matter, perhaps.  Well, maybe they have. Consider this episode of NPR's Politics:

What Will Justice And Foreign Policy Look Like Under Joe Biden?

Eh?

Well toward the end, there's the "can't let go segment", but it is instead an early, by just a week, compilation of things that the hosts are going to look back on the year fondly about, which may sound odd.  But one of those things is how much more they were at home, with their families.

When I looked at this topic earlier I had some hope, but not as much as others, that people might turn back towards certain fundamentals.  I started off fairly strong with that hope at first, somewhat like Fr. Dwight Longnecker, whom I quoted in that item, but the hope has dimmed a great deal.

Indeed, since the Election its really worn off.  I'd tack some of that up to the Pandemic.  People have been in their homes, cooped up, or at least not getting out. And by not getting out, they're become prey to their own fears and vices.

According to people who track these things, visits to Pornhub, some sort of pornography website, are way up in 2020.  People don't like to be honest about pornography, and even what it is.  The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition is pornography, it's just we're so pornified that we tend not to realize that. 

And pornography is prostitution.  According to those who study it, it's literally prostitution in the classic sense in many instances.  Many of the anonymous young women who are photographed, and its mostly women have fallen into the "world's oldest profession" and therefore getting photographed isn't worse than what they're already doing a few times a day for cash.  Indeed, it's probably a welcome break, except that many, many women in that category are species of slaves and really can't leave what the dim "woke" have come to call "sex work".  Enslaved by desperation, drugs, or guaranteed violence should they attempt to leave, they don't have much freedom to leave and they're not making most of the money either for what they're selling, including selling their images. And those images are sold so that men can. . . well you know, over them.  It's vile and wrong.

2020 also saw a spike in murders and suicides we're now reading.  And both the increase in porn viewing and violence have the same root to at least some degree, and to a large degree fairly substantially.  Men alone at home and lonely are resorting to cyber female substitutes and some of the alone are killing themselves intentionally or accidentally.  Sales of alcohol, the legal substance that fuels vice of all sorts, are way up this year.  Sales of illegal drugs almost certainly are.  Of note, some big cities that closed everything down early on didn't touch liquor stores, marijuana dispensaries and porn shops.

For where your treasure is, your heart will be also.

Matthew 6:21.

Pretty clearly, our heart is in the wrong place.

We put it there some time ago, and I've written about that a great deal here on this blog.  It's hard, as I've noted before, to really tell when that started but there are a pile of elements that go into it.  The irony is that where' the same species we were 100,000 and more years ago, so our basic desires, needs and wants remain the same.

But we can't seem to recognize that.

Which is why during a year like this its' not surprising to find the end of the year featuring a couple of celebrity cries for help not recognized as such.

The first one I was going to mention was Billie Eilish, whom I was originally going to start this blog off with.  I'm not an Eilish fan by any means.  Indeed, while even at my advance old age I like some younger acts, I'm singularly unimpressed by Eilish and I don't really think any of her fans like her music because she has real musical talent. Rather, I think young women like her music as she's a teenager with angst and young men like her as she's cute.

Anyhow, watching her slow motion public melt down makes some things pretty clear. She's been powerfully screwed up by the influence of her parents and environment even though she has talent.  She's looking for a way out, but she's not finding it.

As noted, Eilish is what men regard as cute, and even attractive, in a woman her age and what women regard as fat.  She's made an image out trying to have people avoid looking at her for both of those reasons, whether she really fully realizes it or not.   She is, also, a big gal, as in a little chunky, but not in a way that makes her enormous, but which obviously makes her self conscience in 2020 and which would have caused the press to declare her "voluptuous" and a "bombshell" in the 1950s.

If she wasn't messed up, she'd be able to deal with this, and plenty of singers have.  Indeed, female media personalities who have figured out the overall dynamics of how this works have made a living from it.  Kate Upton is a pretty big gal too, and there are no doubt piles of other examples a more informed person could give.  Any of the 1960s Italian actresses would fit into this category, for example.

But the actresses of the 1960s lived in the early Playboy era when Playboy was busy converting the image of women into what it would descend into, so while its not a claim to virtue, Claudia Cardinale didn't have to live in the screwed up world in her prime that Billie Eilish is in hers.  And to add to it, Eilish has that somewhat overweight, roundy, anemic look that a lot of vegetarians acquire in the misdirected believe that that diet is "kind" or will extent their lives out beyond infinity.  Eilish, therefore, is melting down in public as she doesn't have a chance, or at least overcoming all that is stacked up against her is going to be pretty impossible.  Once the cute wears off its an even bet whether her career bites the dust or not.  If it doesn't, its either going to be something much more substantial than it currently is or something much weirder than it currently is.  I.e., is she on the Taylor Swift track, or the "Lady Gaga" one?  We can hope she's on her own, but she'll have to overcome her upbringing and insecurities to get there. She's still young, so maybe she can.

Which takes us to Ellen Page.  And to this (which will also be the topic of a future entry at some point):

This is a graphical representation of the idealized human diploid karyotype.  This particular examples shows the organization of the genome into chromosomes, further showing both the female (XX) and male (XY) versions of the 23rd chromosome pair.

This gets into the field of evolutionary biology which, as a geologist, we're huge on.  Sociologist may like to sit around and debate nurture vs. nature but geologist don't, as that debate is unscientific complete crap.  This doesn't mean that environment doesn't matter.  Of course it does.  But the fundamentals of your DNA are fundamentals.

This is what really determines the basic nature of what you are.  It's a biological and physical fact and it doesn't care if you feel you aren't comfortable in your own body.  It is.  It controls far, far more than what you might imagine or care to imagine.  It makes you essentially identical, in so far as any remote observer might care to note, with any member of homo sapiens sapiens back to the dawn of our species, whether that be 100,000 years ago or 200,000 years ago.  Indeed, you share so much of this with closely related subspecies, like Neanderthals, or preceding species, like Denisovans, that a good argument can be made that they're simply subspecies of us.  It's clear that we could breed with them, and that we did.   

This doesn't mean that we are perfect in every fashion or that we ever have been.  No mammal or any other living thing is.  Indeed, mutations are both a defect and part of how we evolve, so they are part of the process. That's why we aren't Denisovans today.  We are, however, Homo Sapien Sapiens and our DNA  hasn't changed in any substantial fashion whatsoever for the last 150,000 years plus.  The big changes, if you want to regard them as such, is that our skull volume is a little smaller than our ancestors, which means they actually had bigger brains, which may not mean anything whatsoever or which may in fact mean that they had something going on up there we don't, whatever that is.  We're not really sure what our appendix does and thought at one time it was a vestigial organ that they used, but current views on that no longer hold that's the case. And they always had at least (and yes, I do mean at least) four extra molars that some of us have now and some of us don't.

They also had all the usual sex organs and sexual dimorphism that we do now, and all the same desires.  And it worked in the classic fashion.  The reason that some human populations still back around bits and pieces of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA is for that reason.  Whatever else may be the case, Cro Magnon men though Neanderthal women hot enough to . . . well you know.

All of which gets to this.  Ellen Page is a woman and the fact that she doesn't want to be, and has declared herself to be Elliot Page, doesn't change that.  You can't wish away your DNA.  And you can't wish away what your DNA does and wants you to do.  This doesn't mean, we'd note, that she's not attracted sexually to other women.  I'll take it at her word that she is. But it also means that she's a woman who is attracted to other women, a phenomenon that's not novel in any fashion.

Anyhow, what you can do, as we're a really smart species, is wish things to be otherwise than they are, and most people do to some extent.  That sort of thing has gone on for a long time and in all sorts of areas of human life.  Some white academics, for example, in recent years have wished that they were ethnically black.  Some years ago a university professor in a university made a big deal out of being a Native American, which it later turned out to be he wasn't, but he continued to insist he was.  Elizabeth Warren had to live down a false claim to being a Native American more recently.  And so on.

Indeed, most people have at least something about themselves that they wish wasn't.  Billie Eilish (her again) apparently is uncomfortable with being kind of a big gal, and that's really common with young women in particular.  Lots of people who are short wish they were taller.  Based on the ads for surgeons I see around here, lots of small chested women wish they were built like Sophia Loren or Claudia Cardinale, or the person we stumbled on here to our horror due to the Tribune not giving us any read flags awhile back.  Some really strong compulsions that put those who have them out of sink with the larger culture or simply their own lives must be things that those who have them daily wish they did not.  Everyone has a cross to bear and I'd guess a fair number of those crosses are deeply seated compulsions and desires.

That some men are sexually attracted to other men has been something that has occurred for eons.  That some women are sexually attracted to some women has also occurred for eons. While we know believe that we know everything as every generation of human beings believes that it knows everything and that all prior generations were dim, we really don't know why this is and the best evidence is that it has a strong environmental component to it.  If that is the case, that doesn't change that for the people who have that drive.  We went into this fairly deeply in a long post in May 2019.  Those compulsions don't change a person's biological makeup and certainly not their morphology.

And that is why they are different form the current focus on "transgenderism", which is something that the best evidence would suggest doesn't exist at all in biology, so it is solely environmental, and tends to be transitory in the young who claim it.  That is, a person can't really be a woman trapped inside a man's body or vice versa, as its biologically impossible.  A person can of course be a woman attracted to women who wishes they were a man, or vice versa, and examples of that have been around for a long time.  There's another term for that that was routinely used, but now all of this is becoming very confused by the transgender movement which is actually forcing people into new categories that they wouldn't have taken up before and which they may not wish to be doing, commonly, now.  It's something that hardly was commonly discussed until recently, although certainly its received some discussion over the past half century or more so its not completely new, and its now become so accepted in the United States that the US is repeating something that occurred in Europe and then retreated from there in accepting claims of the very young that they're experiencing it and causing the claimants to be chemically altered.  This has become so accepted that a liberal left wing newspaper reporter, Abagail Shirer attempting to report on it was basically censored for it, resorting to having to publish a book on it, Irreversible Damage:  The War On Our Daughters.  

A person isn't really supposed to discuss it as that's regarded as being socially unacceptable, even though not discussing something that's not very well understood at all may in fact later have the same implications of other things that our society once fully accepted and now we do not.  At one time we regarded as fully acceptable to perform medical tests on subjects without telling them it was being done.  At one time we neutered those who fell below a certain IQ and regarded that as kind.  Some young people were given lobotomy's at one time simply because they weren't quite as sharp as others and had reached the age of sexual maturity, Rosemary Kennedy providing a famous but hardly singular example.  We took, in the United States, Indian orphans away from their parents to educate them as non Indians and we took Indian orphans away from their tribes to give them up for adoption.  All of these things were regarded as "progressive", in the current common sense of the woke political word today, in their eras.  

None of which is intended to be an overall commentary on the phenomenon of what is being termed transgenderism at all. Something is going on with people who claim that, we should be careful about assuming that we know what it is and we should really be careful in regard to doing anything permanent to children. All of this commentary, however, should lead the careful reader to the question, at this point, of what do Ellen Page, Billie Eilish, the views of young women, suicide, have in common?

Well, we'll add some more things to that.

In the same year in which Billie Eilish and Ellen Page were uttering their cri de couer, and some overworked and not so overworked figures resorted to suicide, and the lonely resorted to the nude images of women they don't know and just imagine that they do, and others resorted to drugs and alcohol, and some became violent (and some resorted to mixes of all of the above), the nation went through a crisis of faith in its basic nature unlike any other since 1865.

Americans have been rightly criticized in the past for a strong belief in American exceptualism, which doesn't mean that the United States has not in fact been exceptional.  France is proud of its history including its spectacularly failed 18th Century revolution, which was the mother of all failed revolutions hence, but the American Revolution really did usher stable democracies into the world.  Right now, however, and in this year, things aren't looking so good.

The General Election of 2020 was free and fair and more voters turned out for it than for any other election over the past century. The nation should be proud of that.  Instead, the President of the United States has been attacking the legitimacy of the election and a large percentage of his followers believe his lies on this.  That too is at least partially a pandemic side effect, as thousands or millions of people have become completely self isolated in their views.

That problem has been going on for awhile, and its definitely Anti American in culture.  We like to claim that there's strength in our diversity, but we eschew diversity in a way that hasn't been seen since the 19th Century.  When the pandemic came we quit going to work with people who weren't like us as we just stayed home.  That dude at the water cooler who simply hung around to give his views on everything to everybody was now easy to avoid completely.  The guy you never saw at any time other than lunch who liked to talk politics, if only mostly to himself, was now home with himself.  The secretary who was running for school board was nowhere to be seen or listened to, and probably living off of assistance payments.  The guy at the office who seemingly has no other job but to wonder around and try to engage  you in talks about football or basketball during those seasons was home watching ESPN by himself.  The Jewish employee who was serious about Jewish holidays took those in only with his family members.

In the wake of that isolation has come isolation of views, even for those who are not fully isolated.  People who would have considered an opposing view from somebody they respected fully formed their own views without that input. By the time they rolled back around to meeting that respected individual, they'd already voted and concluded whether the election was fair our foul, sometimes fed only on news by the like minded.

And so too on the news of the virus.  People who would have gone to work and talked to the father whose son was a doctor, or a secretary whose sister is a nurse, or that guy who just likes to read science magazines, instead tuned in to those sources that they limit themselves to when their sources are limited, concluding in the end that well established science was wrong or worse.

All of which gets back to where we now are, and that's a mess.  We're incredibly isolated in our self isolation, focused on them vs. us if we're focused at all, or focused on how to distract ourselves by any means possible even at our own physical and metaphysical destruction.

So how do we get out of this place?

Well, it's going to be a major effort, and some of the institutions that need to get us out are still reeling from everything.  One of those I've already noted is really falling down locally in simply getting in touch with people.  And frankly most Americans institutions are firmly in the hands and control of the Baby Boom generation that encouraged and developed the lion's share of the social disfunction that we have now.  In other words, Billie Eilish's parents aren't going to lead us out of this and neither are Donald Trump or Joe Biden.  

Somebody's going to have to.

Well, I suppose I'm not without hope.  It seems to me that the young are trying.  Trying and failing in part, but still trying. And the strong structure of the real remains there, the real being unable to be destroyed by the generation that warned us not to trust anyone over 30. . . unless it was them in which case that mark has now moved down in the other direction.  And people have resumed some activities that have taken them out of the house and into the fields, and that's hopeful.

But they shouldn't have to go it all alone, and in large part, they are.  Concerned that "tradition is the democracy of the dead" mean excising the wisdom of the past and now reconstructing the best of it, which means to reconstruct values, is a hard project.  

It'll require a lot of work from a beat up, bruised, and sick society to do that.

On the plus side, however, it means that things will be, or can be, real.  Or at least you don't have to dress like a clown and worry you don't have a stick figure, and can save some bucks on hair die.

And maybe you ought to go out ice fishing this winter, read a book, and investigate the mysteries of the Mass or Devine Liturgy, read a long Russian novel, call an aunt or uncle, and other things real.

Mid Week At Work: Vermont State Trooper, 1936

Some states have state troopers, some have highway patrolmen.  In any event, this week's reflection on work is put up noting the dedication of the first freeway in the United States on this date in 1940, four years after this photo was taken across the country.

December 30, 1940. The Freeway

 The Arroyo Seco Parkway, California's first freeway, opened.

I don't know what I think of this event.  It was no doubt necessary, but it also was an early sign that California was becoming congested.

It's hard to admire in any sense what California has become, and there's a lesson in that for everyone.

More on that here:

Today in World War II History—December 30, 1940

And on the war:

Day 487 December 30, 1940

December 30, 1920. Criminals

The body of Monk Eastman, notorious criminal, receives a guard of honor from the New Yor, National Guard.

 

On this day in 1920, the remains of New York criminal, and heroic World War One veteran, Monk Eastman received a guard of honor on his way to his funeral

Eastman was a well known New York thug in an age filled with Empire State thugs.  He was 44 or 45 at the time of his death, making him an old soldier at the time of his enlistment.  He served heroically in the Great War and received a pardon from the Governor of New York before resorting to his prior life of crime.  He was gunned down by a criminal confederate after an argument about bootlegging proceeds, with the gunman claiming he feared for his life.

He was a bad man in an age filled with really bad men, and a good soldier.

The USS John D. Ford was commissioned.

The Clemson Class destroyer would serve through World War Two, but was sold for scrap prior to the Korean War.

An unknown Vietnamese Communist, Nguyn Ai Quoc, would address the French Communist Party on this day.

He would later be known as Ho Chi Minh and was one of a collection of nationalist, by not all means Communist, figures who would oppose the Japanese occupation and then the French return following World War Two.  A central figure in the Vietnamese Communist Party in the 40s and 50s he'd help shove aside the non Communist nationalist and thereby set his nation up for rivers of blood that would follow the French expulsion.

He deserves to remembered in unending infamy today, less bloody than Moa or Stalin, but still a figure representing a collection of real bastards.

On this day in 1920, coincidentally, Yugoslavia outlawed the Communist Party.  Outlawing a stupid idea rarely works, and instead causes it to fester, and following World War Two it would reemerge, although in a less virulent form than in the USSR, or for that matter Vietnam.

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