Politics, as they say, makes for strange bedfellows.
New Senate Whip John Barrasso with President Elect Donald Trump and President John F. Kennedy with his nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Politics is, we also know, the art of compromise, but to what extent is a politician to blame for compromising with the truth?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been chosen by Donald Trump to be the new head of Health and Human Services.
He is, frankly, a nutter on health topics, who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near such a post.
John Barrasso is, by training, an orthopedic surgeon.
I've long suspected, well I'm pretty much certain, that Dr. Barrasso doesn't actually believe even half of what he's saying..He's doing it to 1) keep his Senatorial seat; and 2) advance himself in the Senate, even though at his age he could easily retire and be done with it.
Without getting too deep into it, I also believe that once you start compromising on fundamental things, you keep doing it, including with the truth. You don't start off deep into it, but you end up there.
Dr. Barrasso was known, at one time, as "Wyoming's Doctor" and had spots on local television with health minutes, and hosted the Labor Day Marathon. He continued to do this after he became Senator, a spot he was appointed to by the legislature to fill a vacancy before he was elected.
I've met him, as a physician, but can't claim to know him. I've been with him on commercial aircraft numerous times. I've always left him alone, as I figure that while traveling, people don't like to be bothered. I don't. Not everyone was like that, however, and I'd see people who recognized him treat him sort of like fans treated Elvis Presley.
Dr. Barrasso is originally from Pennsylvania. With a solid Italian American parentage, and an early Catholic education, I'd guess, but don't know, that he was a Catholic up until some point. He list himself as a Presbyterian now, and has been divorced, and later remarried. He's in his early 70s. Early on, his positions were clearly moderate Republican, but starting at least as early as 2016 they began to rapidly head towards Trumpism. He had a right wing challenger in the GOP primary last go around, and while I think the chances of him every losing were small, he went hardcore to the right.
Now he's the whip. Trump is going to expect him to whip up support for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, holds some of the nuttiest ideas on healthcare, and particularly vaccines, imaginable. He shouldn't be anywhere near the Department of Health and Human Services.
Will Barrasso choke those down and support them.
Again, people don't get to supporting anything overnight. Some do rapidly, some over decades.
RFK, Jr. has no business in this office.
Kennedys
Before moving on, hasn't the country had enough of the Kennedys?
I certainly have.
The over tattooed and expropriation.
Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is taking a lot of flak. Some of it is for things he's said or believes
Some of it for his tattoos, which are interpreted to mean things which they might not.
One of those tattoos is of a Jerusalem Cross.
The Jerusalem cross consists of a large cross potent surrounded by four smaller Greek crosses representing the spread of the gospel to the four corners of the earth. It was used as the emblem and coat of arms of the Kingdom of Jerusalem after 1099.
Hegeth is a member of a church which is part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. Therefore, he's appropriating a Catholic symbol, while he's not a Catholic. Indeed, he's not even close, as he's on his third spouse, something no adherent Catholic would have done.
He also has a tattoo on a bicep that states Deus vult, "God wills", a phrase that dates back to the First Crusade, but which has been appropriated by many groups over the years. And it doesn't stop there.
“Israel, Christianity and my faith are things I care deeply about,” he's stated.
Perhaps he should learn more about the faith espoused by the symbols that he's had inked on himself. Indeed, quite frankly, the men who cried Deus vult in the 11th Century and those who fought to defend the Kingdom of Jerusalem would have regarded him as a heretic.
Anyhow, one thing that I've worried about since the rise of Christian Nationalist is that Catholics are the ones who are going to take a beating in the end, even though its really a Protestant movement. I can already see it starting to happen. Former Senator Adam Kinzinger, who comments heavily on Blue Sky and Twitter, had a post noting that "the Crusades weren't Christian". Oh yes they were, the thing they weren't is the edited version that English Protestants came up with to attempt to tar and feather the Church. Others have been running around claiming that the Jerusalem Cross, which Catholics use a lot, is a Nazi symbol, which it isn't, or a camouflaged swastika, which it isn't.
The United States remains a Protestant nation, including in the way it reacts to symbols and in its misunderstanding of history.
All this serves, I'd note, to bury a deeper item that should be of actual concern, which is the American Evangelical view towards Israel. This is not universal, by any means, but there's a branch of American Evangelicalism which sees itself as having a direct role in bringing about the Second Coming through its interaction with Israel. According to somebody who knew him and commented on it recently (therefore at least making it somewhat suspect) former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who has been nominated by Trump to be Ambassador to Israel, and who is a Baptist minister, has those views.
Really, people with the apparent views of Huckabee and Kinzinger really have no business in the offices they've been nominated to serve in.
Hairless wonders.
This is sort of an odd aside, but the huge increase in male tattoos, including chest tattoos, has caused me to wonder, has there been a reduction in male chest hair in recent years?
Chest hair is a secondary male characteristic which is caused by a variety of genetic factors. One of those is a high testosterone level, and for that reason, hairy chests have gone, at any one time, from being regarded as "brutish" to sexy. Because of the conditions of the Second World War, Americans were acclimated for a time to seeing men shirtless, which was unusual, and for a good several decades after the war, hairy chested men, or just flat out hairy men in general, were in vogue. Indeed I can recall seeing some 1960s vintage war movie with Fabian in it which was ridiculously hairy.
This is clearly really out now, but it still raises the question, what's going on. Personally, I couldn't have a giant chest tattoo like Hegseth for the same reason that Tom Selleck couldn't. I doubt that I really could have a tattoo anywhere safe for the the generally non visible part of my arms either.
It's interesting to note that there has been a substantial reduction in detected testosterone levels in the US since the 1980s.**
Maybe RFK, Jr. can look into that.
Creeps
It's a real irony that the man so many Christian Evangelicals saw as the Christian candidate has such a horrible personal tract record at least in the sexual ethics category, but perhaps that fact should cause us to be less than surprised that he nominated Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General of the United States.
There seem to be no doubt that Gaetz dabbled down in this category to a 17 year old. Yes, he wasn't prosecuted, but he may have had a credible defense based on scienter. According to at least one report, once he learned she was 17, he abstained from her favors until she was 18.
The thing here, however, is that this conduct is completely immoral. Not only is it sex outside of marriage, which Christianity, but Gaetz is a creep who is fishing in the bottom of the well. Frankly, this deserves further investigation as most 17 year olds or 18 year olds would have had no interest in Gaetz, so something should be done to figure out why they did and what's behind that.
This guy has no significant legal experience and shouldn't be anywhere near the AG's office.
Scenes from the American dumpster fire.
Strange bedfellows indeed.
At this point, however, if Matt Gaetz invited Mike Johnson over to the Playboy Grotto, if it still existed, I'd expect him to go.
Something about this photo just shows how trashy American culture has become.
Trashy.
I think there is sort of a faction in the Republican Party that has a strange kind of... sort of homoerotic fascination for Putin.
Boris Johnson recently stated this.
The fascination for Putin (who has a hairless chest, I'd note) is pretty weird.
Trad Rant
The recent election seems to have bubbled some stuff up from the bottom of the cultural dutch oven, and not just stuff like the weird things noted in the two above entries. Some of this is interesting to ponder, including pondering whether its a serious trend or something else.
One of them is the emergence of secular (and religious) trad women, holding a romantic, it seems, view of the not so distant path.
Here's an example. Interesting trad rant starting at 21:00.
I don't want to go to far in criticizing this, really, as it has a real appeal, as does a lot of sort of agrarian conservatism and Chesteronian distributism I see creeping into the culture, sort of sideways. These people are sincere, and there's a real appeal to it. Shoot, I'd live an agrarian life if people around me would allow it, or so I tell myself.
Others tell themselves that too, and also mock themselves, as for example, here:
Student Alan Canfora waves a black flag before the Ohio National Guard shortly before they opened fire at Kent State, May 15, 1970.
and never as part of that did I ever imagine being used in the US to round up immigrants.
I have the strong feeling that if Trump attempts this, there's going to be a lot of men leaving the military, and a drop off of enlistment of epic proportions.
“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
Everyone sort of knows what Halloween is, although in its extremely secularized form. It's become so popular in that style that its now the second most popular holiday in the US, and you don't even get the da off from work or school.
Originally, and in Catholic and Orthodox Churches, it was All Hallowed Evening, the day before All Saints Day, which in the Catholic Church is a Holy Day of Obligation. There are some debates about it, but the secular traditions that are observed stem from Celtic cultures of Great Britain in a much modified form. The door to door trick or treating stems from a religious tradition in which the poor went door to door for food and were given it.
Reformation Day is a day not much observed in North America commemorating Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the Cathedral door at Worms, which he actually didn't do. The legend was that he did it on this day. No matter, he did get the rebellion of the reformation going, and with it the concept that people can make up their own minds on anything, no matter how ill informed they are. Luther was fairly well informed on some things, but that was the unintentional result of his act of rebellion.
At the time of his 95 Theses, he hadn't intended a rebellion at all, but he worked his way sort of around to it. It'd be interesting to know what he thought he'd done by the time of his death, but one thing he knew is that he'd caused others with more radical ideas than his to also break away and create their own Christian sects.
Many of those new denominations have considerably changed over the years. Some of the Lutherans, who followed Luther, often with no choice due to their localities, have become almost more Catholic than the Catholics, while others have gone in another direction. The Reformation, at any rate, is winding down,and its really collapsing.
With its collapse has come the mess of contemporary culture, much of which we seeing being fought out in the United States right now, which is a Protestant country. The massive secularization is a minor example of that, but is evident in all of our religion derived holidays, including this one, but also including Thanksgiving and Christmas.
The last acts of rebellion were those against nature, which we also see playing out doay. They began in the late 1940s and came into full bloom in the 1960s, and are still enormously playing out today. Part of that has been the acceptance of rebelling against truth, which we see in the current election in more than one way, and in both political parties, although certainly Donald Trump has manifested it in a heretofore unseen level.
So its Reformation Day and Halloween in 2024. Lots of tricks on the culture are being played, and not too many treats being received.
Evelyn Nesbit, model and archetypical Gibson Girl, 1903.
And indeed, I'm likely foolish for bringing up this topic.
Model in overalls . Photos by Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1944. This is posted under the fair use and other exceptions. Life, by 1943, was already posting some fairly revealing photographs on its cover, but there was a certain line that it did not really cross until 1953, when it photographed the full nudes of Marilyn Monroe prior to Playboy doing so, in an act calculated to save her career, as it was a respectable magazine. The publication of nude Monroe's from the 1940s went, to use a modern term, "viral" both in Life and in Playboy showing something was afoot in the culture. This photo above shows how much things were still viewed differently mid World War Two, with a very demure model demonstrating work pants.
This post actually serves to link in a video posted below, which probably isn't apparent due to all of the introductory photographs and text. And that's because of all the commentary I've asserted along the way.
If you do nothing else, watch or listen to the video.
This post might look like a surprising thing to have linked in here, but in actuality, it directly applies to the topic of this website, the same being changes over time. Or, put another way, how did average people, more particularly average Americans, and more particularly still, average Wyomingites, look at things and experience things, as well as looked at things and experienced things.
This is an area in which views have changed radically, and Fr. Krupp's post really reveals that.
At some point, relatively early in this podcast, Fr. Krupp, quoting from Dr. Peter Craig, notes that what the Sexual Revolution did was subtract, not add, to sex, by taking out of it its fundamental reality, that being that it creates human beings.
That's a phenomenal observation.
And its correct. What the Sexual Revolution achieved was to completely divorce an elemental act from an existential reality, and in the process, it warped human understanding of it, and indeed infantilized it. That in turn lead, ultimately, the childish individualist focus on our reproductive organs we have today, and a massive focus on sex that has nothing whatsoever to do with reproduction, or at least we think it doesn't. It's been wholly destructive.
We've addressed that numerous times here in the past and if we have a quibble with the presentation, it would be a fairly minor one, maybe. Fr. Krupp puts this in the context of artificial birth control, but the process, we feel, had started earlier in the last 1940s with the erroneous conclusions in the Kinsey treatise Sexual Behavior in the Human Mail, which was drawn from prisoners who were available as they had not been conscripted to fight in World War Two and who displayed a variety of deviances, including sexual, to start with. The report was a bit of a bomb thrown into society, which was followed up upon by Hugh Hefner's slick publication Playboy which portrayed all women as sterile and top heavy. Pharmaceuticals pushed things over the edge in the early 60s.
Lauren Bacall, 1943.
The point isn't that prurient interests didn't exist before that time. They very clearly did. La Vie Parisienne was popular prior to World War Two for that very reason, and films, prior to the production code, were already experimenting with titillation by the 1920s. But there was much, much less of this prior to 1948 than there was later, and going the other direction, prior to 1920, it would have been pretty rare to have been exposed to such things in average life at all.
Indeed, it's now well known, in spite of what the Kinsey report claimed, that men and women acted very conventionally through the 40s. Most people, men and women, never had sex outside of marriage. Things did occur, including "unplanned births" but they were treated much differently and not regarded as the norm. Included in that, of course, was the knowledge that acting outside of marriage didn't keep things from occuring in the normal and conventional biological sense.
Given that, the normal male's view of the world, and for that matter the normal female's, was undoubtedly much different, and much less sexualized. Additionally, it would have been less deviant than even widely accepted deviances today, and much more grounded in biology. That doesn't mean things didn't happen, but they happened a lot less, and people were more realistic about what the consequences of what they were doing were in every sense.
Something started to change in the 1940s, and perhaps the Kinsey book was a symptom of that rather than the cause, although its very hard to tell. Indeed, as early as the 1920s the movie industry, before being reined in, made a very serious effort to sell through sex. It was society that reacted at the time, showing how ingrained the moral culture was. That really started to break down during the 1940s. I've often wondered if the war itself was part of the reason why.
From Reddit, again posted under copyright exceptions. This is definitely risque and its hard to imagine women doing in this in the 30s, and frankly its pretty hard to imagine them doing it in the 1940s, but here it is. The Second World War was a massive bloodletting, even worse than the Frist, and to some extent to me it seems like it shattered moral conduct in all sorts of ways, although it took some time to play out.
Kinsey released his book in 1948, and like SLAM Marshall's book Men Under Fire, its conclusions were in fact flat out wrong. Marshall's book impacted military training for decades and some still site it. Kinsey's book is still respected even though it contains material that's demonstratively wrong.
By 1953 (in the midst of a new war in Korea) things had slipped far enough that Hugh Hefner was able to introduce a slick publication glorifying women who were portrayed as over endowed, oversexed, dumb, and sterile. There were efforts to fight back, but they were losing efforts.
Cheesecake photograph of Marilyn Monroe (posted here under the fair use and commentary exceptions to copyright. This photograph must be from the late 1950s or the very early 1960s, which somewhat, but only somewhat, cuts against Fr. Krupp's argument, which is based on the works of Dr. Peter Craig and heavily tied to artificial birth control as the cause of the Sexual Revolution. I think that's largely correct, but the breakdown had started earlier, as early in 1948 in my view, such that even before the introduction of contraceptive pharmaceuticals a divorce between the reality of sex and reproduction had set in, leading to the "toy" or plaything concept of women that we have today.
And then the pill came, at the same time a society revolution of sorts, concentrated in young people, started to spread around the globe.
We've lost a lot here. A massive amount. And principal among them are our groundings in the existential, and reality. And we're still slippping.