Public Figures, Repentance, and Down Time.

The Last General Absolution of the Munsters.

This blog isn't intended to be a blog of Catholic apologetics or a blog on theology, although both have shown up here from time to time.  Indeed, as noted somewhere on the face page of the blog, it's really a history blog focused on the period from 1890 to 1920. . .which means that some of the daily updates here are now "out of time".  They have been before, we'd note, and that's in overall keeping with our general historical focus.  I.e., we looked quite a bit at 1968 in 2018 and there are some posts on 1940-41 showing up now that these events are hitting their 80th anniversary.

Probably not nearly as well noted yet, the updates that started with the 100 year mark for things occurring in 1916 and carrying on up till now are slowing down. That's also for a variety of reasons, but they'll largely end in March on the anniversary of another event.  You'll have to keep reading into March to catch that.

Anyhow, we also post on a lot of other topics including current events, and we've been living through some really weird current events, to say the least.

Earlier on this blog there are entries about "the Catholic vote" in 2020.  There are also entries on the turmoil of the times including the turmoil caused by the sitting President's refusal to acknowledge the results.  The comments are one sided by any means and there are more than one thread up on the failure of Catholic politicians to adhere to the expressed tenants of their faith.  On December 13, 2020, we had a long post on this that came up in the context of a post that was developed from an article written by Archbishop Chaput on the Catholic concept of scandal.

This isn't on scandal, and my guess is that some of the people that this article may touch upon in some ways would read the Archbishop's post and cheer.  This article touches upon repentance and measures.

The measure by which you measure shall be measured out to you.

Matthew 7.

It's been noted by people both Catholic (or Orthodox) and non Catholic alike that the Apostolic faiths generally have the easiest, if you will, beliefs about being forgiven for sins of nearly any religion.  Protestants sometimes hold fast to a "once saved always saved" theology, but nobody who has listened to the words of St. Paul could be very comfortable with that.  Rather, relying on the conveyance of the keys and the right to bind and loose, the Apostolic faiths hold that a person can be forgiven for their sins, including their serious ones, by somebody holding a commission that descends from the original one, i.e., a Priest.  This year some people have learned of the concept of "perfect contrition", which doesn't absolve a person of confessing, but which may forgive sins prior to confessing, but frankly, unless a person has a very relaxed view of things, perfect contrition is hard to achieve.

Indeed, the Apostolic faiths don't hold that a person has to confess out of perfect love or perfect contrition, they have to confess honestly but they can do it out of a sense of duty or a sense of fear.  The confession is the key.

For the vast, vast majority of Apostolic Christians the confession solves everything.  But there's also a duty to repent.  For most people, that's a frame of mind in which they resolve to try not to repeat the sin, but even if its a serious one they're habituated to, they don't have to guaranty mental success in that effort.

A bigger problem, however, exists for Catholics in the public sphere.

That gets us back to Catholics like Biden and Pelosi who publicly take positions outside of the established view of the Church on grave moral matters.  I'm not, as noted, a moral theologian but I've heard it stated by Catholic apologist that in that case, as they remain in a position to address the evils that their positions have brought about that they remain obligated even after confessing to do something about it.

As noted, some above probably are nodding their heads about this. . . .

He's a Catholic and goes to my parish

That's a statement I've heard more than once about Catholic public figures in a debate.  It only comes up between two Catholics and its supposed to end the debate through a logical fallacy, that being "you and I are Catholics and so is so and so, therefore we must presume that his actions are correct".

Years ago, as a child, I heard a minor debate between my parents on something of this type.  Both my parents were loyal orthodox Catholics.  My mother stated the "he's a Catholic" line about somebody, and my father replied "so was Al Capone".

Al Capone.

My father didn't like arguing and rarely did, and I've inherited that view from him although due to my occupation, I'm acclimated to it.  My father would not have written a blog.  But he was good at arguments if he chose to engage in them, and that line ended the debate.

Now, did Al Capone attend Mass?  I have no idea whatsoever and I sort of doubt it, save for the end of his life.  Right at the end, after he was back out of prison and dying, he did and is known to have gone to Confession.  By that time, there was nothing that Capone could have done regarding his prior life.  He didn't need to drop out of the bootlegging business as Prohibition was long over.  Therefore, Capone's situation, as dramatic as it is, would be little different than most other Catholics.

And, beyond that, the frequent statement that "so and so was a Catholic" about somebody infamous is often quite wrong.  Frequently such statements are about people who placed themselves many years prior to their infamy well outside of the Church.  Indeed, I heard a while back an careful informed discussion on the claim that "Hitler was a Catholic" claim you often hear by a Priest who took the position that this was pretty debatable, from a Catholic prospective.  He may well be regarded as having left the faith more or less officially decades prior to his role as the horrific leader of Nazi Germany.

Claus Von Stauffenberg.

Indeed, that examples circles back to members of the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler, which included a lot of Catholics as well as some members of other Christian faiths.  They'd concluded that they had an obligation to act even to the point of committing tyrannicide, an act which cost most of them their lives.  Von Stauffenberg is known to have been a frequent confessor.

So, what's the point and where is this going?

Well, again, fortunately for most of us, the burden of being a common man is a lot less than that of being a public figure.  So for most of us, none of this discussion brings up any real problems.

But if you are engaged in advancing something based on a lie, and you are publicly espousing the lie, it might.  Or it might not.

Again, I'm not a theologian, but Catholic concepts on lying are really strict but not universal.  Some Catholic theologians have held that all lies, no matter what their nature, are sinful. The degree to which they are sinful would vary with their seriousness.  Some others have held that lies that are told in context, such as lies that are deceptions told in just wars, are not sinful.  You get the point.  But lies that are simply mistruths to achieve a goal. . .well that's pretty dicey.

I note this as we're in such a weird time right now and there are so many things in public debate, with public figures doing a lot of the debating, this is simply worth considering.  If a person advances a lie and tells the lie. . .that seems pretty clear.  If a person advances a challenge based on a legal technicality which is also advanced by people telling a lie. . . well that might not be.  If a person advances something that tears at societal fabric and has no chance, and is based on that technicality?  

Fortunately for me, I'm not burdened with any of those problems.  But I am a lawyer and I've frankly long been bothered by the assumption in the legal community that nearly anything, as long as it follows the rules, is allowed in the law because we have "an adversarial process".  Wars are also an adversarial process but not everything is justified in them.  Having said that, the recent example of the law has shown the law to really shine through. The Courts have done a magnificent job.

At this point, anyhow, it's pretty hard to tell who believes the challenges they are asserting, and who is advancing them simply for personal political gain and positioning.  According to Senator Ben Sasse, he hasn't heard a single Republican Senator actually state that he or she believes any of the things being said in public about the election, which means that in his view its 100% politics.

So that brings us back to this.  Being a politician, like being lawyer, or being a soldier or being a policeman, doesn't license a person to do everything for their party or their own position.  A person can insist that it's "for the process", but at some point do you have to say that you'll stand down before completely exhausting the process?  In wars the just war theory says you must, but wars are extreme.  

All of which goes to a greater point.  St. Pope John Paul the Great banned Catholic clerics and religious (Priests and Nuns) from serving in public office as he thought that moral compromise was inevitable and that it took them outside of their proper roles.  This was back in the 1970s, which is now a long time ago, but at which time there were already some significant moral issues in the public sphere.  Since that time they've grown greater, even as progress has been made on some.  At some point it became clear that Catholics couldn't serve in some roles in society that they had in the past, but something that has never happened is an overall discussion on what the role of the elected public servant is in regard to the process and what is done in the name of the process.

We know, based on solid apologetics, that a loyal Catholic can not advance goals that are contrary to the faith and morals of the Church if they're grave matters.  But what about the vast grey area for Christians beyond that.  Can Christian politicians take positions that they know, or should know, are simply wrong?   Can they endorse deception in the name of politics, and if they aren't doing that, can they endorse efforts that are fueled by deception.  If they state their efforts are grounded solely in the process and nothing else, and do not endorse the deception, are they fully in the clear, morally?  Are some goals so overarching, for some reasons, that deception is merited in their name?  If a position is suspected to be false, and doomed, does a person have a duty to investigate the degree of its falseness and whether than can support it in any fashion?  If you become aware that you've endorsed a false view, when do you have the obligation to clear that up publicly?  If your position isn't based on a falsehood, but on something else, but its confused with a falsehood, must you make it clear that you aren't endorsing the falsehood?  Where does strategy separate from morality?*

Anyway you look at it, it takes us back to the fact that being a Christian isn't a set of three or four ideas, or something of the type.  The Pharisees were observant Jews, but their example is often held to a negative light in the New Testament.  

Being honest means telling people a lot of things they don't want to hear.  Honesty is the best policy, as frequently noted, and oddly enough, long term, it's the easiest policy as well.  But its often not the short term popular one.  All that is obvious in the secular world.  But when we go beyond that, it gets even more important.  One Saint who had been a lawyer noted when he gave it up he was doing so as it was too easy to loose ones soul in the occupation. That might be even more true in politics.  And indeed, when laying down one path, it's not an easy thing to publicly back track on it even when that might be a moral obligation.

Georgy Malenkov

Georgy Malenkov graduated school in 1917, just before the Russian Revolution, and he served in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. He became a commissar in 1920.  He rose steadily in the Communist party, surviving Stalin's purges, and was the head of its nuclear missile program when that era arrived.  He became a member of the Central Committee, the real ruling body in the USSR.  He suffered a downfall, however, when he tried to stage a coup against Khrushchev, and was accordingly expelled from his positions.

Khrushchev was decidedly an opponent of the Church.  Malenkov had never been adherent in his adult life.  But upon his release from position, he converted to Russian Orthodoxy and became a lector, which in the Russian Orthodox Church is a minor order of clergy.

I'm not saying, of course, that anyone needs to follow this path, or even that its a clear example.  Malenkov was not in a position to rectify any of the wrongs he brought about in any fashion.  But this is a remarkable example of somebody confronting and acting upon a moral duty when it finally became clear to him.  He didn't need to become a lector and indeed, becoming one, and even simply joining the Church, was counter to his daily good.

Sometimes, losing gives people a chance to think things over, if they'll avail themselves of that opportunity.

__________________________________________________________________________________

*Added to that, simply as a matter of strategy, at what point does endorsing a doomed effort merely for position purposes turn out to be a really bad idea?

History is full of "last stands", some of which are identical and some of which are intentional, but rarely noted in the analysis is that they largely don't work out. Sometimes they do, but more often than not they're a "last stand" as somebody has made a major tactical blunder.  Custer's Last Stand is a good example as it didn't have to happen and Custer is now negatively remembered, although it took quite some time for history to arrive at that point.  None of the officers associated with that day in 1876 really came out looking great.

We could look at Dien Bien Phu, or even Khe Sanh, or any number of less militaristic examples, but no matter what glory may seemingly be conveyed by going down in defeat to the last man, its almost always the case that last man could have been better used somewhere else if he'd been taken out before there was a last stand.

The spiritual crises of a society.

No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crises of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid the folly and live his life in order.

Eric Voegelin.

January 3, 1941. The Battle of Bardia commences.

The Battle of Bardia commenced in North Africa, the longest battle in Operation Compass, the Dominion campaign against the Italians.

Australian soldiers in Bardia on January 4, 1941

.

The Germans conducted an air raid of Bristol that lasted twelve hours.  In Ireland, Eamon de Valera protested the German raids on Dublin following an emergency cabinet meeting.

Nazi official and member of the SS Martin Bormann issued a decree banning the use of the German "Gothic" type script as it was difficult for people in occupied countries, which did not use it, to read.  The banning was not without irony as the Gothic typeface was unique to German speakers.  It was overall in decline in any event, except in Germany.

More on the Second World War on this day:

Today in World War II History—January 3, 1941

Day 491 January 3, 1941

The 77th Congress of the United States went into session.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Covenant Lutheran Church, Wheatland Wyoming

Churches of the West: Covenant Lutheran Church, Wheatland Wyoming: 

Covenant Lutheran Church, Wheatland Wyoming

This is Covenant Lutheran Church in Wheatland Wyoming.

This church is a modified modern style church, featuring some traditional elements that recall Prairie Gothic style architecture, but which also is updated to a modern look contemporary for when it was built.  When that was, I'm not exactly certain of.

Best Post of the Week of December 27, 2020

The best post of the week of December 27, 2020.

A 2020 Holiday Reflection. Part 1 of 2, . . . or 3, maybe. The Annus Horribilius Edition

"Denver has outgrown us". El Chapultepec closes.

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

Blog Mirror: Tom Purcell - Longing for authenticity

December 31, 1920. Review of the Year.

Time is a lot shorter than we imagine.

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

Resolute Progress. Weeding the Cyber Garden.

Resolute Progress. Weeding the Cyber Garden.

Weeding the cyber garden.

On a private theme, but harkening back to the last entry in the recent Resolutions post, I'll note the following.

I have a reddit account.

Reddit is pretty stupid.  It's like Twitter that way.  I have a Twitter account too, but it mostly serves only to popularize these blog posts.

Reddit, well I'm not sure why I got an account.  Probably because I was researching something historical and I tapped into a thread there.  There's a reddit sub on everything.

I like a couple of reddit sites, mostly those that deal with history.  But a few years ago I removed myself from posting on Asks Historians, which is moderated by people whose sole role, it seems, is to remove posts on a difficult to discern and dictatorial basis.  In checking into the moderators at that time I was quite unimpressed with their qualifications as "historians" and I packed up and left.  In that case the "historian" was a student working on a masters, I believe, in one of the highly rarified and highly irrelevant categories of any discipline that exists anymore, that one being a "woke" one that demonstrates a lack of understanding of the era upon which he was writing to start with.

About the same time I left all of the ones that dealt with the law.  I deal with that at work.  Why would I want to read about that when I'm not at work?

Today I packed up and left from a pile of reddit "subs" including an economic one on which I posted quite a bit.  Being on an economic sub was just an invitation to constant argument with people's whose views don't matter in any real sense in the larger world, but whose presence on a sub gives them a place to massage their often off centered egos and pretend like people are listening. To make it worse, economic subs tend to be flooded with teenage socialist and anarchists who aren't that in the real world, and those who have a completely Utopian view of the world such as, and I kid you note, Christian Monarchist who seek a restoration of a world that never existed.

Indeed, reddit is really characterized by its anonymity, which is true of the net in general, but particularly true of reddit.  Economic subs, for example should be populated by the fairly serious, but they tend to be populated by some who are really on the margins of the topics. Added to that, you never know if the person you are debating is a 60 year old PhD in economics or a 14 year old writing in their parents basement.  Indeed, the Socialist Anarchist Monarchist stands a good chance of being the 14 year old son of two orthopedic surgeons in suburban Detroit rather than a down and out machinist in Dresden.

I suspect, moreover, that this is true of all threads on serious topics of broad interest.  They probably all start out populated by a very few who care deeply, and know deeply, on the subject, but then the margins come in.  I'm a pretty serious Catholic, for example, but I avoid the Catholic reddit subs like the plague and from what I hear they're deeply rad trad, which probably leaves the orthodox normal in constant highly rarified debates.  The same with economic and political topics.  You may start of with the economics of subsidiarity but sooner or later you'll be debating with teenage socialists.  About that point the people who really cared about the topic leave.

Who needs it?

I sure don't.  

Needless argument only serves angst.  So, on day 2 of 2021, I've reduced my participation in that.

I also did that, I noted, by wiping out not only a whole bunch of reddit subs I had on my follow list, but a bunch of Twitter accounts I was following.  Twitter is even worse that reddit for its screaming irrelevancy but thanks to the times it's become something that is actually influential.  Our departing President hasn't helped that by posting on Twitter all of the time, but this didn't start with him.  

Following anything on Twitter is nearly a guaranteed way to end up disappointed in somebody.  For example, I like some cartoons quite a bit, and one of them is Dilbert.  I made the mistake of recently following, therefore, Scott Adams, who writes the cartoon.

I can't say I wasn't warned by eee gads, his political posts are the far edge of outright nuts.  Just a few days ago he was repeating the "won Georgia" fantasy that Donald Trump also posted on and it wasn't too long ago that Adams was insisting Trump would still be re-inaugurated on January 20.  I really don't care what Adams thinks on politics and now I wish I didn't.  I removed him a couple of days ago.  But after weeding the reddit patch, I went in and did the same on Twitter. Stuff than just causes angst has gone.

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.

Thoreau. 

January 2, 1921. Beaches and Balloons.

 Winter bathing at Miami Beach, Miami, Fla., Jan. 2, 1921.

News came on this day that an Army balloon that had been missing for several days after taking off in New York had been found near Moose Factory, Ontario, not far from Hudson's Bay.

The story was a dramatic one. The balloon had been missing for days and was far from its point of launching.  All of the crew members were found alive by a Cree Indian who thought, at first, that they were revenue agents.

January 2, 1921: The first religious service broadcast on radio

The radio broadcast was of a service of Pittsburgh's Cavalry Episcopal Church which is still there.

January 2, 1941. The work of 1941 commences.

Americans went to work on the first day of work for the New Year.  Always a joyous occasion.  The Bookkeeping department of Manufacturer's Trust in New York on this day in 1941.

Dublin in neutral Ireland was bombed by the Luftwaffe.  It'd be bombed again the next night.

Cardiff in Wales was also bombed, this being the second and worse day of the Cardiff Blitz.  Both events are not unrelated in that, in the context of 1941, air forces had a difficult time bombing accurately by night, and largely did not.  In that context, it was possible for the Luftwaffe bombing crews to miss their marks by a large distance and, as this demonstrates, end up bombing a neutral city.

Today in World War II History—January 2, 1941

The Andrew Sisters released Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, one of their signature songs.

This song is strongly associated, of course, with World War Two, but at the time of its release, the United States was not at war.  Rather, large numbers of men were in the service in training, having been drafted in anticipation of the war, or being in called up National Guard units.

The US announced its plan to build Liberty Ships as part of our war effort while we were not yet at war.

An enormous number of them would come to be made, and manufacturing time was reduced to such an extent that they were manufactured in twenty-four days or less.  Part of their innovation was to use welds, rather than rivets, in their construction.

Only four remain.

Elsewhere on this day during World War Two:

Day 490 January 2, 1941

And then the UK left. . .

Yesterday, that is.

Brexit took effect.

Southern Rockies Nature Blog: Arizona Ponders Ban on Hunters' Scout Cameras

Southern Rockies Nature Blog: Arizona Ponders Ban on Hunters' Scout Cameras: Two "bear boxes" partway through painting and another vintage camera wrapped in UCP camouflage tape. Earlier this month the Arizon...

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”