There must be some kind of way outta here
Said the joker to the thief
There's too much confusion
can't get no relief
Bob Dylan, "All Along The Watchtower" (made famous by Jimi Hendrix).
Let's make no mistake. There have been odd, really odd, political seasons in American history in the past.
Indeed, every election since at least 2008 has been somewhat odd. It was that 08 election when long dormant strains in American politics began to come alive and develop. If we want to a lot of what's going wrong right now, going back to 08 is sort of where we have to start.
Anyhow, with the last Presidential election having gone right into the next election, or rather elections, the country just isn't getting a break. It could use one. Not getting one means that people don't get the chance to sit back and consider things in a little less heated fashion. Much of what's going on right now is an argument about what has already happened, not what is happening or going to happen.
And of course an electronic news media that not only feeds off of all of this, but which is now specifically tailored to deliver to you the outrage of your choice, makes it all the worse.
And that's distressing, as well as non productive, to say the least.
Say what you like about Mussolini, he made the trains run on time.
Anon.
When I was a kid, and people looked back on World War Two, which they did more frequently then than now, one of the things I'd frequently here about Mussolini is that "he made the trains run on time".
Apparently this phrase is incredibly common in the English-speaking world, which makes me wonder about its origin. Anyhow, it was supposed to provide the basis for the Italian people turning to Il Duce and it even provided a bit of an excuse of the reign of the Italian fascist, who after 1943/44 seemed more and more buffoonish.
Not that Hitler was immune from a similar comment, that being "he put people back to work", it often not being noted that if you conscript all the men of military age and don't let women work, all while rebuilding an army in order to launch a war, yes, you'll have a low unemployment rate at least temporarily. I.e., that's not really a great defense for Hitler.
By the way, before moving on, Mussolini didn't really actually make the trains run on time. Perhaps his real domestic success was in really clamping down on the Mafia, but then fascist regimes don't really tolerate criminals other than fascists, so that's not the greatest point either.
And on Hitler and the economy, Hitler's autarkic economy never really worked and would have undoubtedly ultimately collapsed on its own, had May 1945 not collapsed it first.
I note this as the political ads are starting to come out.
There's are ads circulating right now that noted that under the Trump Administration the borders were much more under control (they were) and oil and gas was doing great (not really correct). I'm sure you've heard the arguments, however. Border secure, economy doing great, etc., and now under Biden this isn't true. As with most such arguments, that's far too simplistic to be an accurate analysis, and it also fails to really appreciate the mixed nature of economies.
There's some truth to it however, particularly in regard to the border.
Which raises this question.
Is it a defense for Mussolini if he made the trains run on time?
Would it be for Hitler if he ended German Great Depression unemployment?
Is it okay that Stalin and Mao murdered millions in order to modernize their economies?
Pretty clearly, everyone would answer no to all of these, even though I've heard all used as an excuse.
So why isn't thinking like that okay?
Well, higher values, of course.
Mussolini may have clamped down on the Mafia and created the illusion of trains running on time, but he launched his country into bloody wars of colonial expansions that killed large numbers of foreign people, large numbers of Italians, and which allied Italy with the Nazis. You can't excuse that.
Hitler may have ended German unemployment, but only because he was building a war machine that was to be used to obtain Lebensraum which would require the murder of entire cultures. You certainly can't excuse that.
And you really can't excuse an effort to bypass or corrupt the democratic process in a democracy.
Respecting the democratic process is the first tenant, above all others, in a democracy. That means sometimes you lose, and not only do you lose, you lose to forces you really don't like. That, in the end, doesn't matter. You regroup, argue, and campaign. You don't endorse non-democratic actions.
And you really can't say, "vote for me" because Mussolini made the trains on time and that was good for railroad passengers if the same guy bombed Ethiopians and was a pal with Hitler.
Before somebody tries to claim "the election was stolen", of which there is no evidence whatsoever, the ads in question don't make that point. They make a straight connection, with that connection being "Trump was good for Wyoming and therefore Cheney shouldn't have voted to impeach him". It's that argument that has a logic fail to it. He may have been good for Wyoming, and its certainly the case that some of his policies were highly successful. But you can't fault Cheney for voting her conscience that way.
A person could note, I suppose, there's only so much that you can state on a 60 second television commercial, and that's quite true. But I don't think that's what the advertisers are trying to say. They're flatly stating that Trump was good for Wyoming and that excuses all.
Which should leave us with this.
Where are we really at in American politics?
Something's not right. What do we do to fix it?
If the hat fits, wear it.
Anon.
But if it doesn't, you really ought not to.
My late father used to say that in order to be a candidate in Wyoming, you had to be portrayed doing three things. 1) flyfishing somewhere; 2) in a field with a shotgun; and 3) riding a horse.
That has remained remarkably true over the years, but it's just begun to change a bit. At some point you still need to be shown handling a firearm, although in recent years the people handling them look as if they've never fired one before in their lives and are scared to death. And you still need to be shown fishing.
You might be able to get away without mounting old Red Wing now days, and quite a few politicians now omit that, but not all do, by any means. But you do need to be shown wearing a hardhat with some rugged dudes.
Now, the thing about hardhats is that they're like cowboy hats. If you don't wear one regularly, you'll look like a complete poser.
Indeed, some people manage to wear cowboy hats for year and years and still look like posers. That's because if your hat doesn't run a serious risk of having blood, rain, snow and cow shit end up on it, you'll look like a poser. Frankly, that's the look that Foster Friess always had. I'm not saying he was a good or bad guy, but you knew that the hat was going to retain its prefect shape and cleanliness for eternity. Foster wasn't just about ready to castrate a calf wearing that hat, and he probably, therefore, should never have put it on.
At one time, a guy who knew that his hat wasn't going to be exposed to the mud, blood, beer, and cow poop, always wore a Stetson Open Road. Open Road's were the rural and Western variant of the Fedora, really. They still make them. Former Governor Sullivan always wore an Open Road. My grandfather wore an Open Road to the packing house.
Funny thing was, some of theose Open Roads ended up looking like they were working hats, and they tended to become one over time.
Anyhow, this is all true of hardhats as well. If you haven't actually ever worn one at work, in order to protect yourself, just don't go there. You won't look natural doing it, and you can't fool those who do it every day.
For the wages of sin is death.
Romans 6:23
The Bible warns us that "The wages of sin is death".
Lying is a sin.
Why do I note this?
Well, part of the deal is that lying is a big deal from a Catholic prospective. While not all lying is at the mortal sin level by any means, it's been seriously debated by Catholic theologians if every single lie is sinful. Two of the current candidates are Catholic and at least one other (I don't know his religion) has made an outward association with Christianity a major platform of his campiagn. All of this means that such canidates ought to have a diehard dedication to telling the truth, even if it really hurts them.
Now, some would say "well, truth is subjective". Bull, it's no such thing.
But as we're all flawed, we don't always know the truth and sometimes we believe things in error. Everyone does this. There's no fault in that.
But with some candidates, every year, I really wonder on some things if they've suspended to a degree their own personal knowledge for political gain, the legendary fault of the ambitious.
Another reason that I'm noting this right now is that the GOP is making a late effort to get people to be vaccinated. Part of this involved Mitch McConnell, perhaps the American politician with the least appealling personality in modern American politics, trying to urge people to get vaccinated.
That caused a flood of Facebook comments of all types, right, left, and loud. Everything from rabid anti vax comments to calling Mitch a bastardly bastard of bastardness, to people who were practically wishing that the unvaccinated would get COVID 19 and die.
And this has become pretty common.
We are experiencing, right now, one of the oddest epidemiological events in the country's history, which is the politicization of a vaccine.
Actually, let me correct that, we have experienced it.
Now, I'm not going to haul off and demonize everyone who hasn't received a vaccination for COVID 19. I am going to urge any unvaccinated person who reads this to receive the vaccine, but I'm not going to claim that they're stupid or something.
Indeed, what I'm seeing saddens me greatly.
I'm old enough to remember a time in the country's history when scientists were real heroes. When kids were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, "scientist" was one of the common answers, right up there with astronaut, another common reply when I was a kid. Both of those answers who what was in the common public mind at the time.
I've posted on this before, but the reason had a lot to do with World War Two. When we went into the war we overnight became a nation dedicated to science. We pretty clearly weren't going to train an army to overrun our enemies Japanese, German or Soviet style. You can't send an army of voters with parents who are voters to their deaths that way. Given that, technology was the only remaining answer. If we weren't going to scream "Banzai!" and charge into battle, we'd just find a better way to kill those who were without getting ourselves killed.
Science.
The ultimate scientific expression of the war was the atomic bomb. We went from the concept that maybe we could just risk fleets of airmen and bomb our enemies into submission to one in which we'd risk a single crew and obliterate our enemy.
Science again.
That's an extreme example, of course, but that's how we viewed it. And that's how we've viewed warfare ever since.
During the Cold War we lived in fear of Soviet science. Maybe they'd catch up and we'd have a real problem. Scientists became our heroes. And, at the same time, they wiped out polio, smallpox and came up with penicillin.
Something's happened since then.
Well, a bunch of somethings, and ironically on the left and the right.
The Cold War ended, of course, but it was changing even before that. Some scientists in the 1960s and 1970s took up the habit of warning us every week that we were all going to die immediately due to some environmental crisis. It was scary and it prompted movements and legislative changes that needed to be made. The Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, etc., all came out of that. But some of those who gave those warnings sort of reveled in it and, when the wolf doesn't come, eventually you not only stop listening to the warning but have disdain for the person giving it.
The whole thing had an interesting right/left participation. On the left, some people came to view anything technological to be bad, with certain exceptions, ranging from nuclear power to pharmaceuticals to anything not "100% natural" in food. Some of these folks became opponents of vaccinations in general. At the same time, on the right, people became skeptical of warnings that seemingly everything we did was bad for us, or the planet. This also created a degree of skepticism concerning medicine.
Retrospectively, it's hard to see how this situation could have been avoided. Like most things that creep in, the point at which it begins to really get to be a problem is very much missed until its a full blown problem. The real sign, probably, was when in the couple of years prior to the onset of the Pandemic, we started reading stories about children dying because their parents had avoided routine childhood vaccinations.
Then we had the Presidency of Donald Trump.
Love him or hate him, or something in between, it's pretty clear that Trump is a nearly unique American political figure. I don't think he's wholly unique, quite frankly, like some claim. There may be one prior President whom he resembles fairly strongly in some ways, at least one Depression era political figure whom he does. At any rate, he's pretty unique.
When the Pandemic came on in the mid-winter of 19/20, his initial reactions weren't really bad, contrary to the way people want to remember it. He rapidly clamped down on travel to China. His initial follow up actions, in spite of what people wish to do, also weren't really beyond the pale, as this was such an unusual event. In retrospect, there was nothing that could have been done to keep the disease from entering the United States, and it likely already had by the time we were even aware of it being a problem.
But the arrival of a completely unexpected crisis creates problems of every type. Trump was headinig into his fall 2020 campaign and, up until that point, he'd had a really strong economy, but continued to be plagued with a very strong opposition. He'd received a minority of the popular votes in 2016 and there was every indication that his position hadn't improved in four years. Then, out of the blue, a completley unexpected crisis hit.
Handling unexpected events is hard for any politician and his initial actions in minimalizing it were probably also understandable. But overall, the crisis wasn't managed well for a long time and Trump himself continually disregarded the advice of the nation's top medical figures or even offered contrary views. It fostered a certain politization of the disease that took root and has never gone away. Trump himself was vaccinated, of course, but he ended up so completly at odds with his medical personnel that he couldn't really take credit for the rapid development of the vaccines, which was mostly under his watch.
Added to this, the entire episode fit into the spirit of the times in which people have become increasingly polarized on everything and there's come to be a massive level of distrust for figures in authority. In order for this not to have occured, Trump would have had to vigorously endorsed the vaccines as soon as there was any hope for them, and he would also have had to vigorously supported those states which locked down hard.
Now its too late.
Still, there's no real reason for people who probably really don't hold these views on their own to claim them if they aren't. But there are clearly those who held opposite views and held their tongues for all this time. Now it's a bit late.
Maybe it would have made no difference. Trump was uniquely the pinnacle of focus for his followers and unless he'd vigorously followed the early recommednations, once the solidified, and taken an attitude that was uncharacteristic of him, things may have simply developed as they did.\
And so be it.
Now, the pandemic isn't presntly a big issue in the state's politics. It sort of was earlier. I can't help but wondering how many of the candidates really hold views that they're holding close to their vests, or which they're holding back from the forefront of their own minds, as they fear they'd be politically unpopular.
Indeed, I'm worried at this point that the Detla variant of COVID 19 is giong to take off here. If you check Facebook (which I don't recommend) you'll again see all sorts of claims from the right wing "the news is just a conspiracy" to the left wing "it's going to only kill Republicans and that'd be a good thing".
And this is among ourselves.
If this becomes an issue, I hope the candidates, some of whom are extremely well educated, are really honest about their views.
This pertains to other matters too, I'd note.
There's always been the problem of people running for high office lying. But I'd wager this year a lot more are than normal. Just looking at the Wyoming race I'd guess that at least several of those running against Cheney personally regard the January 6 insurrection was just that. However, of the current crop of candidates there's only one who is unwilling to fully endorse the view that the election was stolen. That requires at least some explanation other than "Trump was good to us".
And this applies to another issue that's near and dear to Wyoming which is pretty much directly avoided being discussed, but which is now obvious to everyone. It needs to be addressed, but doing so is too difficult for politicians, apparently, to admit, or at least Republican ones. So we're pretending like it doesn't exist.
Sooner or later everything comes out in the wash and the truth won't allow itself, on any issue, to be perpetually ignored. When that occurs, people tend to lie about being on the wrong side of an issue. With the Internet, changing tunes is pretty much really impossible to escape notice of, however. And the issues people are dealing with are now so big, there's really an obligation to be upfront about what you really know and believe. Everyone claims they want to be a leader, but there's a lot of following going on at some levels.
Which leads me to another thing.
Down below on this blog there's an item about turning the clock back. Chesterton is correct on that, of course, but there's a caveat to it. You can turn concepts and how they are applied back, or bring them back, where they have merit. But one thing you can't do is to turn certain existential matters back and have them exist in the same exact situation as they once did. In other words, Thomase Wolfe is right when he states "you can't go home again. . .and stay there".
Listening to political dialog in the state I fear that this isn't grapsed or admitted. The irony is that there are real things that we can turn back to, if we wish to conceive of them in that fashion, but that would require thinking out of the box and looking at things in a real longterm, existential, manner.
One of the things that keeps coming up in the current race, and by the time we're done every Republican candidate is going to say something along these lines, is that they "saved coal" or we "need to save coal". That ship, however, has sailed. Maybe it was a coal fired steamship, but it's gone.
The irony of coal is that it's been doing the Minnesota Long Goodbye for a really long time now. The further irony is that most Wyoming politicians know this.
Talk to any member of the legislature you really know, and who will therefore speak with you honestly, and you'll find that most of them will fully acknowledge that coal is in the ICU, on life support, and the funeral plot is purchased. Nobody will say that openly however as they don't want to be accused of being "anti coal".
For that matter, this is the same view that coal insiders tend to have, if you talk to them. The petroleum industry tends to be the same way. On television politicians may be discussing "saving" the fossil feul industry, but in the boardroom in the big companies they're talking about a post hydrocarbon world.
Indeed, if you've read the American Association of Petroleum Geologists monthly magazine, The Explorer, over the past few years you'd note that the AAPG never took a hard position on climate issues, which are driving part, but only part, of this, but instead wanted a voice for what they knew about paleoclimates. Not getting one, they resigned themselves to things changing forever, which is where they are at. And not just them, in the last issue they announced a merger with the primary geophysical engineering society. Both of them are facing a world in which they acknowledge a deminished role for their occupations. . . and they aren't fighting it.
Given all of this a recent political ad about "saving Wyoming's coal jobs" is really coming from an odd direction. No jobs have been saved, and the proposed legislative solutions to this have either come to naught or have failed. A bill to require the owners of coal fired plants to attempt to find a seller for them before closing them, assuming it was Constitutional (which it might not have been) didn't pass and wouldn't have achieved anything if it had. Repeated funding of the doomed lawsuit to attempt to force Pacific coast states to accept coal for shipping was another such example.
Nobody is willing to say this openly as it taps into a logic failure that's very common, which exists in these two variants:
1. I like things the way they are and therefore they must be maintained this way and we can stop things from changing and should for this reason, and reasons to the contrary are invalid as I don't like them, or;
2. I make my money from something that's going away and that must be stopped as that's how I make my money.
People don't quite think of things that way, but that's sort of how it actually is. You really can't, for example, go to a coal miner and tell him his job is doomed and expect him to vote for you.
Well, maybe you can.
The electorate claims to want to be
I had a paralegal once who had a very well done skillfully executed tattoo of "Prudence" and "Justice", two of the four Roman cardinal virtues rendered, of course, as female dieties in Roman mythology. Somehow Veritas, truth, didn't make the cardinal list.
And I can see why. Purdence may be, to the Romans, the "mother of all virtues", but Veritas is a pain in the ass. No, you can't smoke safely. No, you can't drink alcohol constantly and get away with it. No, you can't hit on every woman around you and not expect paybacks. No, you can't mess with human nature and not get the existential dope slap.
Veritas is always hanging around telling you thinks you don't want to hear.
Be that as it may, we all really want to know the truth, if only as part of a dedicated effort to seek to wholly avoid it. But we also know, as a truth, we really can't.
So you have to wonder what would happen if a candidate was bold enough to do this?
As I was attempting to wrap up this over long post, recently retired Senator Mike Enzi died.
Enzi had to be releived to have left office when he did. Not having to stand for reelection, which he would easily have won, meant he was spared the January 2020 insurrection and the drama that followed it. We can be certain that he wouldn't have followed Ted Cruz in voting like Cynthia Lummis did, but we don't now what he would have otherwise have done. My guess is that he would have voted to impeach, like Cheney, and now be subject to all sorts of personal attacks.
I note Enzi here as he was The Quiet Man in terms of being a Senator. He didn't show up on television as a spokeman for the Administration. . . any Administration. He just quietly did his job. I don't know what he thought on a lot of things, but he retained his dignity and worked behind the scenes.
As part of that, I didn't hear him making loud statements that really lacked a lot of detail to them, and I didn't see him taking extreme positions that subjected him to attack or had to be clawed back. Our senior Senator for most of the Pandemic, he wasn't out there making a lot of statements on it. I'd bet even money that he was vaccinated as soon as he could be, and would have stated that if anyone had asked. As far as I know, nobody did.
Enzi was a businessman originally from Thermopolis who was in the Wyoming Air National Guard during the height of the Vietnam War. The Wyoming Air Guard actually flew missions in and out of South Vietnam, so it had unacknowledged wartime service. I don't know about Enzi himself. He moved to Gillette after university to go into the family business, and then later ran for mayor of Gillette.
I last saw him in a restaurant eating dinner quietly with his wife. Nobody bothered him. He didn't bother anybody either.
Enzi was as conservative as they come. I don't doubt that if he was in office now, people would be accusing him of being a "RINO". His business background was real but quiet. He was an effective mayor and then state legislator, but not one who staged protests on the capitol grounds. He wasn't a voice on the radio, a member of a group noted for its local activism, or backed by a monied import.
He died as the resuls of a bicycle accident at age 77, yesterday.
In some ways, it feels like the entire state's politics, and maybe those of the country, have died of trauma as well.
All
along the watchtower.
Princes
kept the view
While
all the women came and went
Barefoot
servants, too
Well,
outside in the cold distance
A
wildcat did growl
Two
riders were approaching
And
the wind began to howl, hey
