Friday Farming: The Branding, 2018

The Branding, 2018

Jack Johnson Pardoned

Jack and Etta Johnson, his first wife.

Not that it will do him any good. He passed away in 1946.

Johnson was the larger and life boxing champion who was loved and hated in the early 20th Century.  He was flamboyant, athletic and impossible to ignore.

Johnson was convicted in 1913 of violating the Mann Act, that statute which was passed in 1912 prohibiting taking a woman across state lines for immoral purposes.  He was arrested originally for taking Lucille Cameron across state lines for such a purpose, with the added allegation being that Cameron was a prostitute (whose mother claimed she was insane.  Johnson married Cameron shortly thereafter and she wouldn't cooperate in the prosectution and the case fell apart.  Soon thereafter Johnson was arrested again on the same charge but with a Belle Schreiber.  In an odd twist of fate the court that presided over the trial was that of Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who in a few years would resign from the bench to become the Commissioner of Baseball in the wake of the Black Sox Scandal.  It has long been maintained that the charges against him were trumped up as a strike against him, as he was a famous black athlete who, additionally associated with white women. The Mann Act, under which he was convicted, was actually passed after the dates of his alleged violation of it.

Johnson was sentenced to a year and a day in prison but skipped bail and fled to Canada, joining Lucille there.  He lived a life in exile, traveling the globe, until he returned to the United States in 1920 and served his sentence.

Johnson and the second of his wives, Lucille.

Johnson was a fantastic boxer by any measure.  Even during the time of his exile he was the heavy weight boxing world champion, a title that he lost in 1915 in a 45 round fight against Jess Willard.  Perhaps more significantly to this story, he'd also lost his first wife by that time, Etta Terry Duryea. She had committed suicide after battling depression, a condition worsened by her stormy marriage to Johnson and his marital infidelity.  Johnson married Cameron just three months later.  They divorced in 1924 due to infidelity.  He married Irene Pineau in 1925.  According to Johnson's autobiography, he latter married Mary Austin in his home town of Galveston in 1927, which if correct would have been the only one of his wives who shared his ethnicity, although no record of the marriage has been located.  Having said that, there'd be no real reason to doubt his account of the marriage.

Johnson continued to fight professionally until age 60, an impossibly old age in a sport in which very few ever fight beyond their 30s.  For that reason, there have been suggestions that Johnson's fights that came after 40 years of age should not be counted in his record as they were fought due to economic need.  His final appearance in the ring was at age 67 in a benefit exhibition for U.S. War Bonds in November , 1945.  He died that following June in a car accident after leaving a diner in anger that had refused to serve him in North Carolina.  He died in a black hospital in Raleigh at age 68.  He was buried next to his first wife Etta in Chicago and his third wife, Irene, was subsequently buried next to him.  All three graves are marked by a single headstone that bears the name Johnson.

And yes. . . I still don't care about the royal wedding. . .

although it's been on here as other folks do, so I'm slightly grumpy about it.

The overblown analysis that followed it, however, I must say was highly amusing.

Why would the NRA want to associate itself with Oliver North?

Doing that is just dumb.

I know little about North personally and I still think that his exact role in the Iran Contra matter is murky and poorly understood.  But that's the problem. We know that what happened in Iran Contra was illegal and even if North's role was one that was pushed by the Administration all the way to the top (and we still don't know that) North is really not a hero to anyone with a deep intellect.

So, associating yourself with somebody who has a murky involvement with spooky illegality and who is really only admired by the far fight in the shallow end of the pool makes you look dim.

That's not smart.

Empirical SCOTUS: Retirement plan blues

Empirical SCOTUS: Retirement plan blues

Despair and meaningless work

The Patrick Coffin Show recently had an episode on despair.

Ours is an age of social disruption, isolation, and atomization. Rates of suicide among young people, rich and poor, along with instances of clinical depression are on the sharp rise since 1999. A dark ennui—call it despair, or melancholia, or depression—has settled into the lives of millions of people.

Ennui indeed, depression is a First World epidemic.  It's rare, along with all its attendant results, in the Third World.  Yes, the very people that people in the First World think live in a state of dark deperation, don't.  That's the developed world. For all its problems, people in the more primitive less developed parts of the globe are a lot happier than we generally are.  There's something going on.

If they have less in the way of material resources and less wealth, they have more of a lot of other things. They're more religious. They're more family oriented.  They live closer to nature even if not  all farmers or pastorialist by any means.  They've kept a lot. . . so far, that we have lost.  And they have a lot less of some things we have in abundance.  They have less angst. They have less depression. They have less gender confusion. They seem to know who they are and what they are about.

We don't.

And I wonder if one of the things we don't have is work that matters.

We have plenty of work that's about money.  And the "best" jobs in our society are all about money, and little else. There are plenty of people whose jobs entail dealing solely with making money and nothing else, to include some jobs that are ostensibly about something else but which in reality, for quite a few occupying them, have become all about money.  Some people have jobs that are only about money.  And there's lots of jobs that aren't all about money, but rather are about. . . about. . . . well. . . . 

Now, work has always been with us and unless a person is a hopeless romantic there's no earthly way to pretend that all work has always been worthwhile to the worker, other than perhaps in some basic sense that its work and work serves a purpose in and of itself. So, you might ask, how can I state that?

Well, I am stating that, and I think perhaps this observation is true.

This observation comes about in part, I'd note, due to some work last Sunday. But in my other occupation.

Worthwhile work.

We were branding.

I love working cattle and I love the hard work part of it as well as the parts that aren't hard work.  It's hard to be blue when doing it.  Indeed, it's hard to focus on anything else.

And at the end of the day, you know what it was that you did.

And this is not true in a tangible sense for almost everyone working a modern job.

Only, or at least mostly, jobs that have a very direct, and I'd argue physical aspect, to them retain this feature.  Being a cabinet maker does, and probably being a surgeon does. But people working in offices doing reports don't get it.

And because my next day was a day in the office, that was abundantly clear to me.

I rarely talk about my own office work directly for a lot of reasons.  Indeed, I really can't.  But I'll make a slight exception here.

I recently was working on a case that was venued in Colorado, and more specifically in one of the endless outliers of the Great Blight.  The opposing counsel was consistently aggressively difficult to get along with even as it seemed that our facts were vastly out pacing their concept of the case.  Finally, a setting of a certain type was held.  I went and met opposing counsel whom I had only seen previously via their website head shots.

And there they were.  An aging lawyer who was artificially thin, the way that people are who run off their weight in a desperate manner until they look unhealthy.  And a somewhat younger lawyer who engages in some similar activity who had the facial complexion of wallpaper paste. And the latter continually had a sort of titch or grimace associated with people who are painfully ill at ease and nervous.   It was revealing. 

And the contrast is remarkable.  On Sunday I dealt with young and old but a lot of now middle aged.  Tan and healthy and all pretty happy and comfortable.  A lot of people that I deal with in the refrigerated antiseptic offices in big cities aren't that way. . .unless they're the staff. The staff, which more concrete goals, often seem to be pretty happy.

And that might have to do with the lie that all work is meaningful.

It's all meaningful in some fashion.  But at least on my day to day job, the fib that law school professors relate to the law is pretty clear.  Perhaps its about "helping people" like its so often claimed, but that's far from apparent but it's really not generally the case that we ride in on unicorns and hurl out bunnies to the emotionally needy.  I could go on, but I'll not.  It's not that the work of this type, or work as an accountant, or a computer programmer, etc, isn't needed. Rather, its need is highly intangible and in some cases its needed because we've created a system of need requiring it.

I suspect that the nature of a lot of modern work creates a lot of despair.  We're separated from nature, which we don't like, and ever more concentrated in big glass and steel heating and cooling units, which we don't like, and on a treadmill where we never see the completed cabinets, the built wall or the branded cattle.  We're doing something, and indeed there must be a need for it or we wouldn't be paid to do it, but you can't really see your results in physical terms and in some cases the results in some kinds of work exist because we've created a system requiring that type of work.

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There's not a lot of consolation for reaching any one goal of an obvious nature.

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Not that this observation is brand new.

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Well what of it? Are we all to become Leo Tolstoy and abandon the larger world for the peasant commune?

No, probably not.  

And indeed, most people can't afford to and quite a few who try some less weird version of this than Tolstoy did fail at it.  

Which doesn't mean there isn't something to a Wendell Berry view of the world.

And that certainly isn't the prevailing view.  The entire society has been pushed towards working at InnerTrobe.

Of course, I may be too harsh.  Maybe people love the glass and steel refrigerated antiseptic worlds where they work on topics they've never never dealt with in the field, impacting lives of people much different than their own.

But the statistics don't seem to support it.

The question would be, how to restore meaning to work?  That wouldn't be easy for much of our economy at this point, but it would seem that the level of despair associated with it would warrant it.

Making it less about money and more about value would be a good starting place.

When the news is the primary cause of the ongoing tragedy . . .

is it morally responsible for it to keep behaving the in the same fashion?

At this point, there's no doubt about it. The news is feeding a certain violent event.  Indeed, the attention of the news medial on it feeds into the psyche of those who commit it, causing it to repeat.

Now, by no means, can we suggest that the media is the sole cause nor is it the existential cause.  But it is the immediate cause. 

This is interesting, at least in the abstract, in that this occurs in an atmosphere in which its repeatedly suggested that the Second Amendment to the United States needs to be very much curtailed or perhaps even eliminated in the name of public safety.  But everything that could be said in that fashion can equally be said about the First Amendment.  Indeed, those who view the Second Amendment as inherently weak in these regards should, if they are honest, concede that this is even more the case about the First. 

The reason we don't have this discussion, however, is because people are so focused on the First Amendment being necessary for a free state, it can't be restricted in any fashion.  We are, therefore, not willing to tolerate any restrictions upon it of any kind whatsoever.  The last battles of this came in the 1980s when an effort was made to address pornography and that got nowhere.   Indeed, things have gone in the opposite direction. That being the case, there's going to be no effort to restrict news broadcasts and the like that are causing the repeated event.  And maybe there shouldn't be.  But if restricting an immediate an obvious cause is beyond the pale, then restricting a less immediate one should be as well.

None of which means that the news media, which likely knows in the back of its mind, but only in the back where it's cherished view of itself covers it up, that it is causing this to occur can't self restrict.  It'd be unusual in the extreme, but by  the same token in recent years the New York Times has taken the position that once undecided issue will be treated as decided in its pages.  The news media could self blackout.  But maybe it shouldn't.  It won't, however, as it can't imagine itself acting that way in modern times, even though it very much did at one time.

Railhead: Scenes from the A Train. What the crud is this thing?

Railhead: Scenes from the A Train

 

Art at a RTD parking lot.

Hmmm. . . .

Today In Wyoming's History: May 22, 1918

Today In Wyoming's History: May 22:  1918  Four hundred Belgian soldiers passed through Wyoming over the Union Pacific Railroad on their way to the war in Europe.  The men had been assigned to fight with the Russians and were evacuated from Russia to the United States across the Pacific. Their train trip across the United States was to send them to an Atlantic port so they could return to service in Europe.

They received warm welcomes in Wyoming as they passed through the state.  Their compliment included several wives of soldiers, likely Russian brides, and one infant.

Mais non! Henri 11 - "Oh, revoir"

Oh great. . .as if the Colorado flood wasn't enough. . .

Harris County Texas Courthouse.  The big legal dome of Houston.

now Texas

Texas law graduates would no longer face the Texas bar exam, and instead take a test with fewer essay questions that could qualify them for a law license in 29 states, if the Texas Supreme Court accepts a recommendation from one of its task forces.

When the UBE became the rule in Wyoming, I predicted, and I wasn't alone, that the net result would be bad for Wyoming's lawyers.

We're five years into the new UBE and it has been pretty much as predicted, although I haven't personally been affected by it and recently even started to do some litigation in the big poaching state to our South.  But I have seen a real decline in the standard of practice.  Indeed, I've been in cases in which the UBE minted lawyers from other states were pretty much wholly ignorant of Wyoming's law and missed filings they could have made to their client's advantage as they were too ignorant of the law to know to make them.  And I've likewise been in a case in which a major mistake was made due to the plaintiff's counsel's ignorance and disbelief that the Wyoming law was what it was.

Now, I don't blame Texas for doing this.  Indeed, it makes sense. There are nearly 100,000 lawyers licensed in Texas of which near 90,000 live in Texas.  So they have plenty of lawyers and in any situation in which you have plenty of lawyers you have plenty of lawyers looking for something to do. Now some of them will look for something to do in Colorado, a UBE state, to the detriment of Colorado's lawyers, who are already practicing in Wyoming do the detriment of Wyoming's standards of practice.  This will make a bad situation worse.

But with big population states like New York and Texas joining this trend, the it's probably unstoppable. The net result will be that things like divorces and the like will be left for local lawyers, but courtroom representation will go.  Indeed, trials are likely to go as the big city trial lawyers in reality hardly ever actually try a civil case.

So this makes the center of mass all the more the big cities, for big matters.  And to the detriment of the local.  Law was once a field that people from rural areas who wanted to remain in their home towns could enter and expect to make a middle class living.  Now its increasingly become one which is a big city occupation characterized by lower standards.  Of course, there's been an overpopulation of lawyers for some time, but this doesn't help states with rural populations.

Some law will remain, of course.  But less of it.  And that's shame . . . most particularly for good representation by those who might want a person attuned to the area they are in.  But we can't be too surprised.  Everything is weighted to the blight of the big cities, which turns everything into a blighted field with it.

Today In Wyoming's History: May 21, 1918.

Today In Wyoming's History: May 21:  1918   Tagiro Tanimura of Rock Springs granted a patent for a fountain pen.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: All Saints Episcopal Church, Wheatland Wyoming

Churches of the West: All Saints Episcopal Church, Wheatland Wyoming:

This is All Saints Episcopal Church in Wheatland Wyoming.  I don't know the vintage of the structure, but there are a couple of "historic" renderings of it in the form of drawings, to it does date back some decades.   The architecture of the church is a bit unusual, so its style is a bit difficult to characterize.

The Best Posts of the Week of May 13, 2018

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Church Ruin, West Laramie, Wyoming

Airmail! Lt. Torrey Webb gets a watch and New York and Philadelphia get air mail service (and meanwhile on the Western Front). May 15, 1918.

Lex Anteinternet: The 2018 Wyoming Election. Volume Two

Disruption and Stability

The bombing of the Canadian Military Hospitals at Etaples. May 19, 1918.

Funeral of Nursing Sister Margeret Lowe of Manitoba, who was killed in the German air raid on Etaples on this day in 1918. 

On this day, in 1918, German aircraft struck the Canadian Military Hospitals at Etaples.

In the process, sixty six Canadians were killed, including three nursing sisters.

Most of the casualties were subsequently buried in a mass grave.

The Lynching of Mary Turner, May 19, 1918.

On this in 1918 Mary Turner was lynched in Lowndes County, Georgia.

She was lynched in retaliation for having protested, in a neighboring county, the lynching of her husband Hazel Turner, who had been accused with two other men of murdering a white planter.  The planter, Hampton Smith, had a history of being abusive to black workers and had in fact been murdered by Sidney Johnson, who also wounded Smith's wife in the assault..  Johnson fled after committing the crime and in the following manhunt thirteen blacks were killed by whites.  Turner was one of several men who were lynched.  He'd known to have had conflicts with Smith.

Turner protested that her husband was not guilty and threatened to report the participants in the lynching.

In retaliation she was hung upside down, doused with gasoline and burned alive.  She was eight months pregnant at the time and she was slit open and her baby killed on the spot.  She was one of four people lynched, or actually five if a person includes her infant, following the Smith murder.

She left two small children.

The Governor of Georgia was given a report of the incident including the names of participants and the instigators.  None were charged.

A historical marker stands at the spot of the murder today, noting her lynching and that of the others killed in this mass racial assault.

Disruption and Stability

For reasons I barely grasp, our upstairs (or most of it) is being remodeled.

I hate that this is occurring.

It's really hard to explain and I think that I can actually somewhat separate myself from it in the abstract, but none the less I'm not at all happy about this development, and that's the the only thing that's a bur under my saddle this year.

Coventry, 1940.  Pretty much how I view remodeling in a house.

I have an inkling of why, but I'm one of those people who tend to opt for stability over disruption.  This isn't always the case, and I've struck out on more than one thing that has been hugely disruptive in my own life from time to time.  This was particularly when I was younger, I'd note.  

I haven't done that much since I was married, however, which was at age 32.  After that, I've made pretty conservative, which is to say stable, choices on most things.  Not always, but often.  

Okay, that's note exactly on point, but who could resist.

Anyhow, now that I'm almost 55 I don't care for certain things being disrupted and I have to even fight against that in my personality, I know.  But stuff like this really bugs me.

We've been in this house since shortly after we were married and there were things about it that definitely needed to be addressed.  The upstairs carpet, for example, was likely original to the 1983 vintage house and had been through the prior owners, out two kids, and our volunteer pirate cat that showed up years ago and declared the house to be his possession.  It has needed replacement for some time, and we decided to go with hard wood floors which we all like better.  Indeed, we decided to do that over a year ago but held off as the cat was obviously headed for the last roundup and not always well in his final year.  Better to wait.

But he shuffled off his mortal coil a few months ago and so we proceeded.

I'd thought, quite frankly, that were going to limit this to the floor. But my wife has wanted to remodel the kitchen for a long time and for reasons that I don't appreciate now and frankly regret I agreed to that.  So now our upstairs is ripped to shreds and I hate it.

I don't really grasp why kitchens supposedly need to be updated.  If things work, I figure, they're good to go.  And everything was working.  I'd have left it alone.  We're even now missing a wall to "open things up" and I hate that.  I like walls in houses.

I'm enduring this, but not all that well and probably not all that gracefully.

Added to the changes is that we now have a dog.

Odo, over a month ago.  He's now a giant.

I don't really know how this happened either, or actually I do.  

My wife has always wanted a dog.  And I have wanted a dog seasonably during duck season.

I'm frankly not all that keen on dogs in general.  I like cats much better.  I'm allergic to both, but I really like cats and for some reason the late Manx did not bother me that much.  He passed away shortly after waterfowl season and during that time I'd been otherwise lamenting the lack of a hunting dog.  I listened to the arguments for acquiring one and half heatedly sort of acquiesced to one under certain conditions not really thinking that it would come to pass. Well, my wife took it and and ran with it and we ended up with a supposedly hypoallergenic sort of breed that is supposed to have hunting aspects. Frankly, he's mostly a standard poodle and looks more and more like one everyday, but standard poodles are a hunting breed actually.

I think he's dumb as a post but he does have a sweet nature.  I have no knowledge or ability to train a dog and I've found that reading a book where a guy trained a Black Labrador that obviously had the instinct in spades didn't really help that much.  I'm going to have to send him out for training but I'll be frank, this is the second, or rather the first, thing I did this year where I regret holding my tongue.

At least so far.

This isn't the only such instance where I've been struggling, really struggling, with disruption and order.  I'm really not enjoying it.

I've found that some years are really that way.  I can remember some of them very specifically.  1986, the year I graduated with my bachelor's degree, with that trailing into 1987.  The year my father died as well was one such year. They come.  They go.  Thankfully.

Podcast Mirror: The Fragility of Order

Really interesting discussion on the Great War:

#148 The Fragility of Order - George Weigel
Posted: Thu, 26 Apr 2018 14:20:00 -0400
Play NowGeorge Weigel's newest book, The Fragility of Order: Catholic Reflections on Turbulent Times, offers a diagnosis of how the world, and the Church, got into the situation of disorder we face today. Join us, as Weigel discusses the book, the world, and his chats with Pope Francis.

As well it would seem on other matters.  I'll have to pick this one up.

For What It Is Worth, it would be impossible for me to care less about the Royal Wedding.

And I don't know why anyone who isn't English would care either.

Shoot, as a "Royal Family" their claim on the throne isn't even as good as a lot of other royal families, of which there are a pile.

Monarchy.  M'eh.

Oh oh. . . The Casper Daily Press for May 18, 1918.

Seems the Huns might not be beaten. . .and even optimistic.