Lex Anteinternet: Blog Mirror: Just Another Day On the Prairie. Thoughts on "Freedom Day" and the spirit of the times.

Lex Anteinternet: Blog Mirror: Just Another Day On the Prairie. Th...: 

Blog Mirror: Just Another Day On the Prairie. Thoughts on "Freedom Day" and the spirit of the times.

I really hesitate to post this, as I don't want it to seem to be some sort of an endorsement.  I'm copying it over as a link for another reason.

Freedom Day

This is from the following blog:

Just Another Day On The Prairie

The diary and musings of an Alberta ranch wife.

So, what of it?

I like this blog as the photos on it are beautiful.  

And also, as a Wyomingite, and a rural one, and an agricultural one in one of my three vocations/avocations, Alberta is part of the same region I'm from, different country though it is.

Indeed, I sometimes think Easterners don't really grasp that in a lot of ways, natives of the Rocky Mountain Region and the Prairie states have more in common with the Canadian western provinces than they do with any other region of their own country.  Indeed, they have quite a bit in common with the highly rural ares of northern Mexico as well, but they very much do with western Canada.

Rural Western Canadians are part of the exact same agricultural/livestock/hunting/rural culture that real Western Americans, not imports from other regions, including quite frankly the South, are from.  Indeed, ranching in Alberta has the same roots as ranching in Wyoming, Montana and Colorado do.  At one time ranchers went back and forth across the border as if it wasn't there.  Many of Charles Russell's paintings of ranch life are actually set in Alberta, not Montana.

So not too surprisingly, rural Albertans, and rural Canadians from much of the rest of the Canadian West, have the same views that rural Western Americans do.

This isn't really true, I'd note, of Canadians as a whole. While I don't mention it often, I'm a dual citizen and hold Canadian as well as American citizenship, but my Canadian relatives are all Eastern Canadians by origin, and their views are extremely different on many things than Western Americans' are.

Now, I mean to be careful here, as I do not wish to offer insult.

When I speak of the views of Wyomingites, Montanans, and rural Coloradans, etc., I'm speaking of their views.  I'm not speaking of the views of Texans and Oklahomans.

I'm not slamming Texans and Oklahomans here.

I'm noting this, because we're an oil province here, we have lots of people here, from time to time, who come from the oil provinces of Texas and Oklahoma.  Interestingly, as Alberta and Saskatchewan are also oil provinces, we also have quite a few people from these regions who make an appearance as well, although they don't tend to have much of an influence on local culture and politics.  Indeed, they're pretty quiet on both, and they'd nearly have to be on the latter, as of course they can't vote after being here a year. Texans and Oklahomans can, of course.  I note this as during oil booms the latter groups tend to be somewhat influential in local politics, and often their local views are imported.  Canadians in the US tend to be really quiet if they're not in numbers.

Canadians in Canada are not, and to a fair degree, prior to COVID 19 Canadians were expressing a fair amount of contempt for American culture.  Donald Trump really brought it on.^[1]

Note, I'm still not commenting on any of this.

What I will note is that open contempt tend to inspire contempt back, and people should be careful about that.

Anyhow, what I"m now noting is that Western Canada has had, for a long time, the same relationship with the Canadian East that the Western United States tend to with our East, and this entry really shows that.  Note:

This Convoy is not just for the truckers mandates. It’s for the 30 million people that Trudeaus government approved to allowed to be spied on their cell phones. It’s for the family members banned from visiting family in nursing homes. It’s for the censorship on all social media platforms. It’s for all the people afraid to speak In fear of being called conspiracy theorists. It’s for the people who didn’t want to give up their freedom of choice! It’s for the people who don’t want to give up their right to bear arms. It’s for the people who don’t want to be in debt for the next 100 years. 

Did you just read a Canadian post referencing a "right to bear arms".

Yes you did.

Now, this post also deals with a lot of other things, and as is typically the case, most Americans are going to be completely clueless about what's going on.  We don't tend to follow Canadian news here, and we don't tend to get it.  Both are inexcusable.

I do, or at least I used to. With the news being what it is recently, I've grown a bit numb to it.  Well, really numb.  I was aware, vaguely, that something was going on, but not that aware.  I had to look it up.

I looked it up on the BBC.

The BBC's Toronto reporter notes (original font, bold text and mother tongue speallings):

After a week-long drive across Canada, a convoy of big rigs has arrived in the national capital to protest vaccine mandates and Covid-19 measures. Organisers insist it will be peaceful, but police say they're prepared for trouble.

The article goes on:

The movement was sparked by a vaccine mandate for truckers crossing the US-Canada border, implemented by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberal government earlier this month.

Upset with the new measure that would require unvaccinated Canadian truckers crossing the two nations' boundary to quarantine once they've returned home, a loose coalition of truckers and conservative groups began to organise the cross-country drive that began in western Canada.

It picked up steam and gathered support as it drove east. Many supporters, already opposed to Mr Trudeau and his politics, have grown frustrated with pandemic measures they see as political overreach.

Okay, a couple of things.

I've thought about noting it before, but because we're so focused on our own selves in the US, we tend to view the entire COVID 19 mask and vaccine story as exclusively our own.  Heck, for the most part, if the entire population of the globe had died of COVID 19 it probably would have taken most Americans a couple of weeks to actually notice it.

We tend to be rather self-absorbed.

Part of that self-absorption, however, is our failure to note that a lot of big social and political stores around here are actually international ones  and some of those have widespread regional expression.  

There have been huge mask protests in Australia and parts of Europe, including, for example, Germany. Refusals to vaccinate have occurred in at least Australia and across Europe as well.

Now, I'll note that as I'm not hugely familiar with this story, I don't want to go too far in commenting on it.  I was dimly aware of some provisions in Canada as a friend of mine had recently been to British Columbia, and I'd asked him about things, and he noted mask requirements for where he was, stating beyond that bluntly that Canadians "didn't tolerate stupidity".  That's a very blunt comment, but I'd also note that my Canadian contacts also would not be critical of Prime Minster Trudeau's policies here.  Frankly, I don't know that I am, either.

On that, our luck in our small family finally ran out.  My daughter now has COVID 19.  I'm so weary at this point, I'm not angry, and hopefully it'll be mild.  She's away from home and I can't do anything about it, or even to help.

And I've watched COVID 19 rip through places I know and people I know.  I don't understand the reluctance to get vaccinated at all.  A rancher I vaguely knew died of COVID 19 and left a devastated widow.  A bunch of people who were with him at a cattle sale where he surely picked it up got it and were pretty sick.  My daughter got the disease, potentially, from being exposed to a person who didn't get vaccinated and who went here and there before that person finally had to acknowledge the infection.

None of that had to be.

Maybe we couldn't have beat the virus.  But our refusals made it certain that we could not.  It will go on to become endemic now.  Is Trudeau being unreasonable for trying to keep American infections from spreading back across the border?

Without really commenting on it, this may be the one area where I agree with Trudeau.  I haven't followed Canada's response to COVID 19 now for some time (I did at first) but Canada has had a hard time with the disease. The US started off with a bad start, but Canada somehow fell into a bad situation.

I'll also note that at this point Canadian news in the US started to drop off because, well, Canadians were suddenly less condescending towards the United States than they had been for awhile.  As the weirdeness surrounding the Trump lie that he won an election he lost has caused many in the US to wonder about the future of their democracy, and many outside of the country to wonder the same thing, that's returned a bit.

That might drop off again as Trudeau went into hiding yesterday during the protests. . . shades of insurrection. . . 

Anyhow, as noted, I don't know that I'm not sympathetic to Trudeau's response here to COVID 19.  Truckers are entering a country where the Omicron variant is infecting many and the chances of them bringing it home. . . well, they seem pretty high.

Which will make this the one area where I'll ever say that, most likely.  I don't like Justin Trudeau as a politician, and I never have.  Indeed, I've characterized him as a soy boy at one point.  

It used to be pretty clear that Western Canadians took a much different view of a lot of Canadian politics than Easterners did, and obviously that's still the case. But for that matter, our regional political culture used to be a lot clearer here, too.  Things like gun control have always been hugely unpopular in the rural West, but even here that's gone from "don't mess with me taking my pistol and rifle out in the sticks" to the "we need to be prepared to fight Stalingrad" sort of atmosphere.  And, starting with the campaign which pitted our current Governor against Foster Freiss, you'd have thought that some people were running for the Governor of Alabama in the 1970s.  Freiss' campaign even sported lightly clad young women in a state which has winter about nine months out of the year, which inspires a "geez, doesn't somebody have a coat for those poor girls" type of reaction rather than a "whoa. . . look at those Daisy Dukes".  Underlying it all, however, the old views, by us old residents, are still there.

Globally it seems a lot of the same strains are also at work everywhere.  Populism, something that never had much of an appeal here, has taken over in the state's GOP and across the nation in Republican organizations.  But not just here.  Populism helps explain how Boris Johnson rose to power in the UK.  Populist dominate the Hungarian government, which is strongly right wing.  Populists threaten to take over the Polish government.  Strong populist elements exist in French politics, and you can find populist elements everywhere.

That would seemingly have nothing to do with COVID 19 and it doesn't, but what it does have to do with is politics in the era of COVID, so it gets mixed in. And there's a really strong cultural element at work here that the political left wants to dismiss and even pejoratively label, but it shouldn't.  A big part of what's given rise to right wing populism is a feeling that traditional culture is being attacked.  To some degree, it is being attacked.

That's serious for a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons is that in the US, and elsewhere it would seem, a lot of rank and file people who are of the traditional culture feel that they have nowhere to go democratically.  People who are basically traditionally Western European and Christian in culture are being told that clearly Christian values are obsolete, their inherited European values are wrongheaded if not outright racist, and they just have to lump it, at best.  

A big part of that has been a radical reconstruction of domestic values, which are inherited from a Christian heritage. Christianity has always focused on families as the center of secular life, and took what was the radical view early on that marriage meant one man, one woman, until one of them died.  Pagans didn't believe any of that.

That Christian belief, in part, gave rise to the success of Christianity in spite of huge governmental and cultural repression.  Christian families were solid because of that belief, and Christians cared for their own in times of trouble, even caring for others where they could.  They therefore survived repression, oppression, wars, and plagues in spite of being in cultures that held "don't be stupid, you can abandon the sick. . .don't be stupid, you can kill the infirm. . . don't be stupid, if you are male you can screw who or what you want, and by force if you want."

Now, we're darned near back there in signficant ways, although we certainly didn't arrive at this spot in an instant.  The assault on marriage began as far back, really, as 1534.  It arrived in a flood fashion after World War Two, with that war having damaged so much of Western morality, and achieved legal assistance from, of course, California starting in 1969.

European values, including democratic values, were also inherited from the Church  A body that held that everyone was equal in God's eyes necessarily would spill into the secular world.  Indeed, the poor and common born could and did rise to position in the Church long before that became the case in secular society.^[2]

Western culture is essentially Christian in its values and even non practicing people, and non Christians for that matter, tend to hold Christian philosophical values without realizing it.  One non-Christian friend of mine, but one who lives in the Western world, noted to me once that culturally, "we're all Catholics".  There's a lot of truth to that.

But progressives have been acting for some time now to rip that down and are offering, in its place, a construct based on what individual's "feel", which is not a very solid basis for any sort of larger philosophy.  Reality keeps on keeping on, irrespective of what we feel about it.

And at the same time, progressives have been big on "you must", including what you must think.  It doesn't matter if your moral code holds one thing, if the current progressive view is to the opposite, you must not think that and you must not say that.  Canada has gone a lot further down this road than the U.S.

But that very "feel" and "must" ethos leads us to where we are now, ironically, in regard to the COVID 19 virus and what we feel about it.  While the science is solid as to what it is and how to avoid it, a nearly century long campaign on deconstructing our focus and changing it into one based on what we "feel", as long as we also feel to be consumers, set us up for the current crisis. And that dovetails into the "must".  A group of people who have been told that they "must" think something that is contrary to centuries of their cultural values and their own experiences, because of what we individually feel, is going to lose, at some point, a willingness to accept what its being told, no matter how extremely well founded one particular item may be.

In other words, introducing these same policies in 1950, in a different U.S. and a different Canada, probably wouldn't be provoking this result, as it would have come in the context of little else being under assault.

Whether it's a 500-year attack on our central foundational values, or only a 75-year-long one, at some point we reached a tipping point.  A good case can be made that for the United States that point came in 2015 and I warned at that time that a Supreme Court case in which the Court sought to redefine a traditional view of the world contrary to the long run of human culture would have future dire consequences.  It seems to me that I was proven to be right.  The Court, in its waning liberal days, usurped the legislatures, created a result, and those benefitting from it, as well as those who were on the political left, ran with it far beyond what was predicted, including what its author predicted.  Where as that result only took one more step on a road that had mile markers at 1534, 1953, 1963, 1968, and 1969, it seems to have been a societal bridge too far.  The same movement had already made large impacts across the globe legislatively, making the US somewhat unique in that it was done judicially.

It is not what a person thinks of that movement per se, but rather what occurs when a very large percentage of the population gets the sense, even just vaguely, that it's being attacked and has no place to go.  In the case of the US, a large, formerly Democratic demographic, has had its economic foundation stripped away and exported, and its traditional values eroded.  Much of that is a rust belt sort of thing, which is where the epicenter of discontent can be found.  But it spreads out elsewhere in areas of economic distress, including the rural West, where what we're essentially told is that we ought to get computer jobs and become urban cubicle dwellers.  Even our own governments aid in this process by eroding, on occasion, what local business there is.

As massive as the change is here, the post-war change is even more dramatic for Canadians.  Canada was a fundamentally conservative country founded in agriculture with a strong tie to the United Kingdom. Going into World War Two, most of Canada, outside of Quebec, was extremely rural and extremely British.  Quebec was divided, but the bulk of the Francophone population was not only very conservative, but rural and agrarian, the only thing that had kept it from being absorbed into the larger Canadian whole.

War, we've noted here, changes anything, and the Canada that came out of World War Two started to change pretty rapidly.  Not all at once, to be sure.  As late as the late 1950s, people moving to Toronto could expect to be moving to an essentially English city that closed up on Sundays entirely.  

Much of that has now been swept away. Canada is an urban country, like Australia is, with urban values.  The US is actually much more rural, by and large, than Canada, in spite of its much larger population.  But the rural areas do remain, and the strong East/West divide does as well.  What's also occurred, however, is a huge cultural shift in which Canada has become a very liberal country.

Or it makes pretense to being so.

In the homes, out on the farms and ranches, you'll get rumblings of another view.  Many I know, and again I know more in the East than the West, are certainly very "progressive" in outlook.  Nonetheless, I could never get a straight answer from anyone why people were enthralled with Justin Trudeau.  And in individual news I see the photos of people visiting the traditional Canada, including Canadians, not the side streets of the Second City.  

And out in the West, Western Canadians often seem distressed about how a society that isn't and wasn't that much different than the Western US has become so controlled in a fashion.  The comment on the Canadian right to bear arms, which in Canadian law doesn't exist, is telling on that.

A lot of these same factors are playing out in every country in the Western world simultaneously.  This helps explain, I think, a lot of the reaction to masks and the like.  People have actually been upset with the direction of things dating back to the 1980s, or even the 1970s.  They're reacting now. What probably pushed them over the edge, however, happened before COVID 19.

These are dangerous times.  The assumption that democracy is an inevitably victorious force is an assumption, not an historical fact.  History teaches us that when a large minority feels it can get no voice, it puts a country at risk.  In those times, the people who tend to pick up the voice are: 1) demagogues (Huey Long, Donald Trump, 2) Caudillos (Franco, Petain) and would be Caesars (Hitler, Putin).

Of course, in such times others can rise to save the day, and that's more often the case.

It's clear that the United States is a lot more down this disastrous path than Canada is, but the protests show that it isn't the case that everyone in Canada is thrilled with the path its been on since, really, 1945.  The same forces are at work in nearly every Western democracy right now.

The solution?  

That may be for true conservatives to offer.  Finding uncompromised ones who haven't sold out partially to populist and demagogues is pretty tough in the US right now, however.  Canada's politics are different, so perhaps they have a different path forward.

Footnotes

1.  Anyone who is a dual citizen or who has Canadian relatives probably speant some time trying to explain Donald Trump and often being embarrased for the country by having to explain Trump.

At the same time, we also would occasionally get unsolicited emails and comments from Canadian friends who were big Trump fans, but had to keep their opinions more or less silent themselves, which is also embarassing as they would tend to assume that any American they knew probably held the same view.  Indeed, the assumption that everyone you know personally holds the same views you do is probably a default human assumption.

2.  Indeed, the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church's prohibition on clergymen marrying came about in order to prevent the priesthood from becoming an inherited position.  After the seperation of the English Church from the Catholic Church in 1534 this was changed in in the UK and in the UK itself the priesthood did become somewhat of an inherited position.

Lex Anteinternet: Secrets of Playboy (Parts 1&2).*

Lex Anteinternet: Secrets of Playboy (Parts 1&2).*:   

Secrets of Playboy (Parts 1&2).*

 

We've had Delia Kane, age 14 at  The Exchange Luncheon, Why is her photo up here on this thread? Well, it'll become more apparent below, but we now know that the Playboy mansion had a minor who grew up in it, and whose fell into vice about it, tried to write about it, and who had those writing suppressed by Playboy.  Additionally, from other sources, which won't receive as much press as the current A&E documentary, Playboy actually promoted the sexualization of female minors in its early history to such an extent that the result of an independent European study caused this to cease before it became a matter they addressed. This was apparently through its cartoons, but it's worth nothing that apparently at least one Playboy model was 17 years old at the time of her centerfold appearance and another, who later killed herself, was a highschool student, albeit a married one.  Girls and young women were accidents of unfortunate labor early in the 20th Century. But the late 20th Century, they were the target of pronographers and sex explotiers.  Which is worse?

This is a documentary currently running on A&E which is an exposé on Hugh Hefner.  The A&E show summarizes itself as follows:

Hugh Hefner sold himself as a champion of free speech who created the Playboy brand to set off a sexual revolution that would liberate men and women alike, but over the years he used Playboy to manipulate women to compete for his favor and silenced whistleblowers

I frankly wouldn't normally bother to watch this show, but I did, in part because of my opinion on Hefner and in part because my wife was watching it.  Her interest was sparked because she had been a follower of the "real life" show that followed Hefner and three of his later prostitutes, and let's be blunt, that's what they are, which was a fairly popular show at one time.  Indeed, this documentary includes the last three notables of that lamentable group among those interviewed, with Holly Madison, the principal one, being a major, and very damaged, personality in the show.

Let me be start by being blunt.  Hugh Hefner is one of the worst and most despicable figures of the 20th Century.  

I know that's making quite a statement for a century that included among its notables such individuals as Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Mussolini, but it's true.  Just as those figures were dedicated enemies of Western civilization and values abroad, Hefner was at home.  In the end, the West prevailed over all of these political figures, but it didn't prevail against Hefner.  The destruction he caused is vast and ongoing.

I'm not going to give a full biography of Hefner as I don't know it, and I'm not going to bother to look it up. What I can relate is that he was from the Midwest, served stateside in the U.S. Army during World War Two, and then went to work for one of the then existing girly mags after the war.  Apparently according to his own recollection and that of his friends, he was jilted by a girl while in high school (with there being video footage of her, she was quite attractive and very intelligent looking), and then reformed his central personality into the early Playboy image as a result.^[1]  There's more than a little room to doubt that, but what seems clear is that he was a man who was essentially devoid of morals and driven principally by lust and its monetization, although what came about first is questionable.  The love of money is indeed the root of all evil, and it's possible that he loved money first and came into lust as a result.

Anyhow, in the early 1950s he went out on his own with a brilliant marketing idea that became Playboy magazine  

Dirty magazines of all sorts had existed for a while, and indeed, while I haven't published on it, it's pretty clear that there was a trend towards more and more risqué treatment of women in print starting wth the advancement of photography in the first quarter of the 20th Century.  It was still the case well into the first 1/3d of  the century that illustrations, rather than photographs, dominated magazines, but even by the 1920s black and white salacious magazines existed. By the 1930s, trends overlapping from the 1920s were such that magazines of all types were more and more willing to take risks with female figures for magazines and magazine covers.  By the late 1930s the female figure with a tight sweater was a pretty common feature on magazines of all types and one of the major magazines featured Rita Hayworth in 1940 in a pose so risqué that it rivaled anything put on the cover of Playboy early on. So the trend was on.

At the same time, this trend also started, and indeed was much advanced, in the movie industry, until the Hays Production Code put the brakes on it in 1922.

Something happened in the World War Two timeframe that's really not terribly clear to me, other than it seems to me that it was there. At one time, I would have been inclined to attribute the 1953 introduction of Playboy nearly entirely to the Second World War, but that's unfair.  Going into the war, it was already the case that pinups were around.  

During the war, however, millions of unattached young men spent years away from home at a time when that was quite uncommon, and that had some sort of accelerating impact.  Keep in mind that an unmarried man in his 20s or even 30s likely lived at home, with his parents, prior to the war, and indeed again after the war. During the war, this wasn't true at all.

As a result, during the war, the girly mag and related publications received a big unrestrained boost.  So did prostitution and other sexual vices as well.  And the seeping of sex into things in general, at least in the service, did.  Quite a few U.S. Army Air Corps crewmen flew into combat in World War Two in bombers with paintings of top heavy naked women on the fuselages of their planes, or painted on their flight jackets.  

The genie might not have been fully out of the bottle by war's end, but the cork was loosened.  At the same time, a famous study by Kinsey was conducted during the war, which ostensibly revealed that the average sexual conduct of American men was libertine.  It's now known that Kinsey himself was plagued with sexual oddities, and like a lot of people in such a position, he sought to justify them.  His study, as it turned out, largely focused on the incarcerated, hardly a representative slice of American men, and it went so far as to essentially force some minor males into sexual acts.  It's flaws, to say the least, and was perverted to say more.

That study, however, was released after the war and formed an inaccurate pseudo-scientific basis to challenge Western sexual morality.  And that's where we get back to Hefner.  Unlike the girly mags that had come before Playboy, Hefner's rag was able to claim to be mainstream.

Slickly published with high production values, Hefner took the pinup of the 1940s and published her in centerfold form, starting with purchased photos of Marilyn Monroe for the introductory issue.  It was an incredibly misogynistic publication, darned near outright hating women while celebrating an extremely exaggerated example of the female form. Like nose art on World War Two bombers, all the 1950s examples of Playboy centerfolds were hugely top-heavy. They were also all young, and portrayed as blisteringly stupid and willing and eager to engage in unmarried sex. They were also all sterile.  Playboy didn't run articles on young women getting pregnant.^[2]

In the climate of the time, just out of the Second World War, just following Kinsey's study, and in the midst of the Korean War, the magazine was an instant hit.  It began to immediately impact American culture and became accepted, if still regarded as dirty, as a publication.  It crept into male dominated settings of all types, there virtually not being a barbershop in the United States that didn't have it.  Women in popular media came to rapidly resemble, to some degree, the centerfolds who appeared in the magazines, and by the late 1950s the US was in the era of large boobed, blond haired, probably dumb (in presentation) starlets.  

Playboy had this field all to itself for quite some time and in the 1960s it really expanded.  While the early magazine was sort of weirdly conservative in away, the explosion of the counterculture and the introduction of the pill were tailor-made for its expansion.  While in the 50s, the suggestion was that the Playboy man could have all of these big breasted girls next door for himself, by the 60s it was an outright free for all.

Around that time, Hefner himself began to essentially live that way.  By the 70s it was completely open, with the Playboy Mansion   His big, and creepy, parties were a cause célèbre in the entertainment community.  It meant you were somebody to be invited, and many such celebrated figures of the era were, such as Bill Cosby. . . . 

Yeah. . . 

Well, anyhow, in the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s being invited to the party of a pornographer wouldn't have been something a person wanting a public career would want. By the 70s, the opposite was true.

And that meant, in essence, the new sexual libertineism advocated by Playboy was essentially the American, and indeed Wester World, standard.  Even where not outright accepted, it seeped into being.  The magazine was everywhere, including in many middle class homes, sending the message to boys that lusting after big chested girls was not only normal, but desirable.

It's been a disaster.

Now we're reaping what Playboy helped sew, although the entertainment industry still hasn't quite figured that out.  Women want out of the sex object status that Playboy foisted on them but don't quite know how to get there. The "Me Too" movement is part of that.

Part of things being corrosive is that they corrode.  You can't just corrode a little bit.  That's happened to society, and as we are now being told, a little late in the day, that happened to Hefner.

As this series reveals, all things Playboy were gross. The life inside the Playboy Mansion as one of Hefner's concubines was controlled, gross and revolting, including to at least some of the subjects of his loveless attention.  One resident, whose father lived there, and who practically grew up in the mansion, not too surprisingly had turned to teenage lesbian sex with one of the female inhabitants and later tried to write a book about what she'd experienced in her early years.  It was pretty clearly suppressed, once released, by the declining Playboy empire.  Another former male employee was basically threatened if he went public with what he knew.

Suicides of Playboy models were a feature of its earliest days, with at least one of its most famous centerfolds (already a teenaged wife by the time she posed) being one example.  According to this show, however, other suicides featured among the women of Playboy with the news being hushed.  At least one well known centerfold was the victim of a murder, and a murder was referenced in the show without it being clear to me if that was the same figure or not, as I don't know the names of the characters involved.

Playboy was declining by the early 80s, a victim of its own success.  Penthouse came in, and started to erode its market share by being grosser.  Hustler came in and was grosser yet.  A race to the bottom ensued.  Then the Internet arrived, and they all rocketed into the gutter.  People weren't willing to pay for the smut they could access for free.

At the same time, however, it seems like there's some effort to crawl back out of the gutter. The Me Too movement is part of that.  Its members are clear that they know that they're being treated wrongly, if they can't quite figure out how to define why they're being treated wrongly, and what the origin of the standard they are grasping for is.  And the depths of the salacious portrayal of women on magazine covers arrested in the 1970s.  At that time, the nearly bare breast of a model could appear on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, and Farah Fawcett could be seen nearly falling out of her swimsuit on the cover of Time.  Advertisements in magazines don't feature minors in nearly pornographic poses anymore. That era is over.

What isn't over is the decline of television, however and movies, which remain sex fixated.  They may be behind the curve on this, or not. Having embraced the descent, however, they can't get out of it as easily as print can and has.  The Me Too movement might be helping it to do so, however, as now actresses are expressing regret over nude scenes they've done in conventional films, and some are clear that they outright will not do them.  

What also isn't over is the sex fixated nature of certain aspects of Americans culture, even while it is over in other areas.  It's interesting.  We see both sides at the same time, with part of the American left simply defining itself by sexual desires in a literal sense, while at the same time, posts like this have become amazingly common on Twitter.

if someone could marry me that would be great thx

That girl isn't looking for the Playboy man, and she sure isn't the Playboy "Playmate" bimbo.

So how do you undo six decades of destruction.

Well, it probably won't be easy, but if Playboy's story teaches us anything, it seems that at certain tipping points things can and do happen quickly.  Playboy wouldn't have been a success in 1943, but in 1953 it suddenly became one, and it changed views pretty quickly.  That came in the wake of two world wars, a smaller hot war in the Cold War, nearly universal male conscription, and the flooding of the universities with a massive number of young unattached people.  It also came just before a massive cultural rejection by one generation of the values of prior ones, and a massive infusion of money into society at an unheard of level.  And it followed a bogus scientific revelation followed by a genuine scientific pharmaceutical introduction.

But there was some tipping point that was reached before the wave started to crest.  Another one seemingly might be getting reached now.

We haven't fought a big war for a long time, even though we've fought some smaller ones.  Our military is at its smallest level since 1939.  A lot of the glamour of university life has worn off, and the post Boomer generations face economic realities that resemble the pre-1940 situation more than the post 1945 one.  

A seeming rediscovery of values is going on as part of that.

Footnotes

*It's admittedly unusual for us to start a review of any kind prior to a series being completed, but here we've done so as the points made, and the horrors revealed, are sufficient to do so.  Additionally, given schedules and what not, its very possible that we may not view the reamining parts of the series.

On this topic, it could legitimately be asked why review this documentary at all, on this site.  Actually, however, its one of the very sorts of things this blog was designed to examine.

The very first entry here claimed the purpose of the blog as follows:

Lex Anteinternet?

The Consolidated Royalty Building, where I work, back when it was new.

What the heck is this blog about?

The intent of this blog is to try to explore and learn a few things about the practice of law prior to the current era. That is, prior to the internet, prior to easy roads, and the like. How did it work, how regional was it, how did lawyers perceive their roles, and how were they perceived?

Part of the reason for this, quite frankly, has something to do with minor research for a very slow moving book I've been pondering. And part of it is just because I'm curious. Hopefully it'll generate enough minor interest so that anyone who stops by might find something of interest, once it begins to develop a bit.

How does this to comport?

Well, the blog has clearly gone beyond "the practice of law prior to the current era" and, as noted before, it theoretically is a sort of blog based research for a very slow moving novel I'm theoretically writing. 

Part of that research has been to take a close look at how life really was in the 1910s, and that's expanded out to how life really was in prior eras. And part of that is social history. 

That's why this topic is very relevant.

All too often, portrayals of the past are based on our concepts of values and outlooks of today, which are very often wildly off base.  For this reason, particularly for badly based historical depictions, social views are expressed from a fully current. . . I wouldn't call them modern, point of view.  As modern in the Western world are blisteringly fascinated by sex, and frankly a pornographic concept of sex, this sort of view is extremely common in works that are ostensibly works of historical fiction.  It isn't limited to this, however.  This also tends to be the case with other common aspects of society, ranging from the roles of women in society, the attitudes towards that, and frequently matters of religion as well.

As somewhat minor examples, just recently I was flipping through the channels and one of the more modern Westerns was on, complete with a female gunfighter wearing trousers.  Well, not very likely.  When women started to actually wear trousers, right around 1900 or so, it was somewhat of a controversial matter, and it required, to put it delicately, an evolution of undergarments.

To give another example, there is a popular television show on Vikings where they are the celebrated protagonists.  To the extremely limited extent I've seen it, which is extremely limited, it not only is completely historically inaccurate, but it's also somewhat hostile to religion, by which would have to mean Catholicism as there was only one Christian Church at the time, divided into east and west though it was.  In reality, the Viking era was heroically Christian and obviously so, so much so that the Vikings themselves, by the end of the Viking age, were Latin Rite Catholics.

On the topic at hand, television and Hollywood have really endorsed a sort of combined Cosmopolitan/Playboy view of women in recent historical dramas, or tend to.  The women tend to libertine and more often than not sterile, in an era when neither was anywhere near true.  Indeed, the irony is that many of our ancestors would regard our current conduct in this arena as not only shocking, but appalling.  The further irony is that in large part the Me Too movement seeks to reach back into this prior era, where the standards they're reaching for were the social standard, even if widely ignored.

1.  It's interesting that to be a "playboy" was originally a type of insult, and remained so to some degree when I was young.  In its original sense it meant a superficial male who played women.  It was sort of a nicer and more superficial way of saying that somebody was a womanizer.

2.  Prior magazines were pretty clearly depictions of prostitutes, with all the nasty vice and lack of personal knowledge that goes with that, or of what were essentially burlesque models, whom the vieweres knew that they could look at, but never touch.

Related Threads:

Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh. Throwing rocks at Hugh Hefner . . . I'm not alone in that.

Maybe the biggest unanswered question about the Harvey Weinstein story is. . .

Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh. Ross Douthart of the New York Times says what I did, more bluntly.

De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh

Is it just bad male behavior, or. . .

Accidentally getting an argument right for the wrong reasons. Alyssa Milano discovers the connection between sex and babies.

The Overly Long Thread. Gender Trends of the Past Century, Definitions, Society, Law, Culture and Their Odd Trends and Impacts.

Maybe the biggest unanswered question about the Harvey Weinstein story is. . .

Prostituting their image

Depictions, Mispreceptions, Objectification, Shame, Shamelessness, Progress and Regression.

Lex Anteinternet: Democracy in peril. . . maybe the fix is to amend ...

Lex Anteinternet: Democracy in peril. . . maybe the fix is to amend ...: 

Democracy in peril. . . maybe the fix is to amend the constitution. . .

The one thing, and seemingly right now the only thing, that Republicans and Democrats seem to agree on is that democracy in the United States is in extreme peril, although not for the same reasons.  Democrats have looked out stunned at the Republican failure to defend democracy in the wake of a Trumpist coup attempt and wonder what happened to the Grand Old Party.  Republicans, or at least many of them, seemingly not aware that they are a minority party whose membership erodes daily, have accepted the lie that it simply can't be possible that they lost, and are further revealed to basically hold Democrats in deep, deep suspicion if not outright alien enemies.  To some degree, that's a Republican response to a Democratic belief that Republicans are basically stupid, a view reinforced by the public face of the insurrectionist and the stunning acceptance of a patently false lie.

Now, it seems that Republican populist are set to attempt a second coup and the Republican establishment won't stand in the way of it, and Democrats have demonstrated themselves to once again be legislatively incompetent.  While I don't think we'll get there, lots of Americans believe we're about to drive democracy right over a cliff.

So what can be done?

Well, the Democrats do have a proposal, or actually two, in front of Congress to address this, one being The Freedom To Vote Act and the other being The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.  I don't know that either actually are aimed to address the problems we're now facing, however.  What would address them is taking on and amending The Electoral Count Act of 1887, which everyone agrees is a sloppy statute to start with, and which the hold out Democrats want to amend.  Mitch McConnell has hinted he'd like to take a look at it.  Of course, Chuck Shumer, for inexplicable reasons, doesn't, a typical boneheaded Democratic leadership position.

So let's start there, but let's get a little background.

The founding fathers, . . . they didn't always get things right.

Our Original System.

Whenever we get into this, we tend to get the American version of ancestor worship, with people sooner or later dragging out the Founding Fathers as if they took a break from giving recommendations to the Oracle at Delphi to draft the Constitution.  They didn't, and were just men, and therefore there's no reason to endow them with perfection, but nonetheless, let's take a look at  the system they created, so we can get a grasp of the structure that we largely still hold

This is how it worked.

The House of Representatives was based on the British House of Commons, and was directly elected by the citizenry.  The British system is based on ridings, where the voters  reside, and ours was based on districts organized in states.  It's a modified and actually somewhat less democratic variant of the House of Commons, as the Commons aren't organized into political subdivisions such as states.  But the Constitution was heavy on states, as we are after all the United States.  

We still have that system.

The Senate was elected by the State legislatures and was to represent the states as states.  It was not directly elected.

The President was elected by the Electoral College. This was as compromise between those who wanted the President elected by the state legislatures, directly elected, or elected by the Congress. The first President of the United States, who was not George Washington, was elected by the Senate.  Nobody liked that system much, and the Constitution proposed to give the Executive branch grater powers than he had under the Articles of the Confederation. The question was how to pick him. Radical democrats wanted the people to elect him.  Reluctant aristocrats weren't so keen on that, and after all we already had the House of Representatives. But then, we also had the Senate.  

So the Electoral College was come up with, with the original concept being that the people would vote for electors who were to vote for the winning candidate, with the second place person getting the Vice President slot, but with there being some room to say now if the people voted for a dud.

What we have now

The electoral college system proved to be problematic right from the onset, as did having the runner up end up Vice President. That just meant the runner up could spend four years throwing rocks as the President, so the system was modified to make the VP a slot that was tied to the President. 

By the time of the Compromise of 1877 (that again) it was clear that the Electoral College didn't make very much sense any longer as the President had been an office directly campaigned for nearly the entire time.  Moves existed to abolish it but Reconstruction made that problematic and instead the system was modified statutorily in 1887 to attempt to prevent a Constitutional crisis.  Early inklings that the nation was headed into a crisis over the College resulted in the House voting to approve an amendment to the Constitution in 1969 to abolish the Electoral College. It passed overwhelmingly in the House in 1969 but failed in the Senate in 1970.

So its still around.

In 1913 the Constitution was amended to make Senators directly elected.

So what's that all mean?

Well, what it all means is that we retain an Electoral College that's subject to influence of outside forces and which sets up a system in which a President can be elected after having lost the popular vote. This was regarded as being nearly impossible up until George Bush won over Al Gore, but now it's repeating.  In each instance, it's been in the case of very close elections, hence Trump's efforts to frustrate the mail-in vote and to "find" votes in Georgia.

It also means that the system which imagined the voice of the people coming through the House of Representatives and the voice of state governments coming though the Senate is completely torpedoed.  Frankly, all Senators are, really, is long serving Commons members from giant ridings.

So what?

Well, this system has slowly evolved to where the government isn't really functioning except through its long serving beurocrats.  Gerrymandering of districts has made most districts safe, so things don't change much.  Like it or not, the House is ineffective even though the Democratic Party outnumbers the Republican Party, as it splits pretty evenly most of the time anymore.  The Senate does the same.  There's not much change, and Senate rules designed for a collegial body operate to prevent any action in one that's pretty divided.

And with the Imperial Presidency first brought in by Theodore Roosevelt, an outsized Executive has powers far beyond that imagined by the framers, a fact that's aided by a Congress that hasn't been governing for nearly twenty years.

Can that be fixed?

Oh yes, it can.

Fix No. 1. Abolish the Electoral College.

If this was done, the entire crisis that we're now in, regarding the Oval Office, would not exist or at least it'd make it much harder to come about.

I used to support the Electoral College as, at one point, as George F. Will used to point out, it amplified the popular vote giving the illusion of a mandate in an election that's typically pretty evenly divided.  Now its not doing that at all,, but that frankly is its only remaining purpose.

The Presidency is the one office that is supposed to represent the opinion of everyone.  The Electoral College only existed as plutocrats feared that the people wouldn't install plutocrats.  We don't want to install plutocrats, however.  

We should do what Congress attempted to do in 1969, abolish the Electoral College.  There's no excuse not to, even though Republicans right now come out against it. The real reason they do that is they fear they can't win  the Oval Office if it's abolish, and in fact they would not have elected a President since George Bush I if it didn't exist. That, however, is a Republican problem they should fix. As they win state elections easily enough in spite of being a minority party, nationally, they can fix it.

The overwhelming majority of Americans are in favor of abolishing the Electoral College.  Abolishing it might not fix anything else, but if we are going to continue to have an outsized Presidency, we ought to at least make it one in which election mischief can't develop into a coup.

Fix No. 2.  Repeal the Seventeenth Amendment

Eh?  Have Senators elected by legislatures?

Yes.

Now, at first blush this would appear to flying the face of Fix No. 1, which I'd do at the same time. But it doesn't.

The Senate was always intended to be the voice of states, not of the people.  If it is a directly elected office, it actually serves no point whatsoever and should be abolished (which will be fix no. 3).  All the Senate is right now is a place for really long serving members of a Commons district with state boundaries. Why bother?

Indeed, because the Senate has retained rules from an earlier era, and because its nearly evenly split liek the House, it can't get anything done.  Right now, it's divided 50/50.

If Senators were chosen by legislatures, however, it wouldn't be.

This is a little tricky, but basically (but not really quite) the GOP controls 30 legislatures our of 50, or 60%.  If this was reflected in the US Senate, which it would not be perfectly, the Senate would be 60% Republican.

It'd likely be a little higher or lower than that, but the point is that the Senate would be cleanly the house of one party, the Republicans, reflecting its original purpose of representing the states.  And with those numbers, it could actually do something.

Yes, this is less democratic than the existing system, but it was intended to be. That was the point of the Senate.  And it would ironically function much better this way.

But if we don't like that, then;

Fix No. 3.  Abolish the Senate

If all the Senate is, is a giant House of Representatives, which is exactly what it is right now, just do away with it. We don't need it.

Indeed, right now, it's hard to see what the Senate actually does.  It has some Constitutional roles, to be sure, but they can simply be transferred to the House if it is just a big House with huge ridings.

This may sound radical, but this is how Nebraska's legislature works right now, and Nebraska has not descended into left wing anarchy.  If we really want a democratic senate, well, let's just not have one. The House reflects the vote of the people better and in a more cogent fashion.

That of course means that we'd be creeping up on a modified parliamentary system. Well, so what.  The British, who over the years have more and more sidelined the House of Lords, and most other democratic nations, work just this way.  

Indeed, if we did this, once again, much of the current drama wouldn't be there, as the Senate, which is serving as the blocker of things right now, wouldn't be in the way. Yes, Republicans would be upset, but if the Electoral College was also gone, they'd be working hard to appeal to the voters directly, rather than being mired in conspiracy theories.

Now, am I really in favor of this?  No, I'm not.  I'm in favor of the Senate functioning the way it was originally supposed to, but in the absence of that, this would be the next best thing.

Fix No. 4.  Do away with the quasi official nature of the parties.

Listen to any political discussion, and sooner or later you'll hear the falsehood that "the United States has a two party system".

It does not, at least not existentially.

It has a two party system as we became lazy and let the parties create one, and because of the operation of Duverger's Law which holds that plurality based deliberative institutions devolve into two parties, whereas as proportional institutions evolve into multi party institutions.

It nearly goes without saying that multi party institution are of course more democratic than two party systems.

The two party nature of our political culture has become so ingrained that Congress itself has organized itself accordingly, and in many state laws things have evolved to where boards are supposed to be made up of members of both parties. The Democratic Party and the Republican Party, therefore, while vying for control of the government, become, to some extent, arms of it.

This could, and should, be addressed by wiping out the aspects of our system which favor this.

The first thing to do would be to make all elections non-partisan.  The 49 member Nebraska legislature provides an example here again.  It's non-partisan.  Nebraska's Senators, which is what they are termed, are elected in a single non-partisan election. Get the top vote, and you are it.

That's  the way the elections for every elective office should work.  Yes, you could be a member of a party, and yes, you could let everyone know that, but there'd be no primary and whoever the top vote getter would be, would be the winner.

Taking that a step further, not only should that be how the larger US elections work, but in the national legislature itself the practice of having caucuses and Majority and Minority Speakers and Leaders should be abolished as official practices.  If the Republicans and Democrats, when they are out of power, want to gather in a basketball court somewhere and vote somebody their spokesman, have at it, but that person ought to get no special cred in the chambers of Congress itself. The Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader are real positions, to an extent, so they'd stick around, but no more organizing on party lines officially.

Would that make a difference?  I  think it would.

For one thing, you'll hear around here that Harriet Hageman came in third when she ran for Governor behind Gordon and Freiss. But not really.  Mary Throne, the Democrat, came in second.  If the race had actually been come all and come in, how would that have looked?  I suspect that Gordon would still have one, but I strongly suspect that probably Throne would have been second or third, giving the current reflection back on the state's Governor a considerably different one than we now have.  Indeed, in Wyoming politics, nearly every election would be pulled toward the center as the Democrats and the middle of the road Republicans would have more of a voice, which they should as they are part of the population. The primary system silences those voices.

And wiping out the party organizations inside of Congress itself would definitely have an impact on government.  Minority leaders could run around trying to martial opposition or support for something, but their impact would be much smaller.  Without the ability to control committee membership and the like by party, at least openly, a greater emphasis would develop on getting things done and getting along, rather than getting in the way.

Taking this to the Oval Office itself, if the Presidential election was the top vote getter, in one single election, there's no earthly way we'd have had the last several Presidents.  Trump would not have been President at all.  Nor would have Barrack Obama.  Nor would have George Bush II.  Only a long primary system lead to their rise.  One election, in November, would have no open winnowing system and now way to weed out people's real views.

Yes, that would mean that a President might frequently get in with only 30% of the vote. But that President would also be less imperial by default.

And yet?

Any of this stuff likely to happen?

Probably not.

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part XXVI. Pets and Pope Francis, the man who can't get a break. Pangur Bán. Warped Hollywood. Ghislane? The return of Boston marriages. Khardasian Attention Disorder

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part XXVI. Pets and P...: 

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part XXVI. Pets and Pope Francis, the man who can't get a break. Pangur Bán. Warped Hollywood. Ghislane? The return of Boston marriages. Khardasian Attention Disorder

There's no such thing as "fur babies"

Pope Francis commented on childless couples and pets.

Before I go into that, I'm going to note that one of the things about Pope Francis is that he tends to be incredibly hard to pigeonhole, even though his fans and critics love to go around doing just that.  And here we have just such an example.  Only weeks away from making it pretty clear that the Latin Tridentine Mass needs to be a thing of the past, as far as he's concerned, and while he's the Bishop of Rome, he says something that's radically. . . traditional.

Here's what he said, in so far as I tell, as I can't find a full transcript of his remarks.

Today ... we see a form of selfishness. We see that some people do not want to have a child.

Sometimes they have one, and that's it, but they have dogs and cats that take the place of children.

This may make people laugh, but it is a reality.

[This] "is a denial of fatherhood and motherhood and diminishes us, takes away our humanity", he added.

Oh you know where this is going to go. . . 

Right away I saw predictable "I'm not selfish, it's my deep abiding love of the environment. . . "

Yeah, whatever.

Apparently there were a fair number of comments of that type, as a subsequent article on this topic found that, nope, most childless couples are childless as they don't want children, not because of their deep abiding concern about the environment.

Indeed, tropes like that are just that, tropes.  People tend to excuse or justify conduct that they engage in that they are uncomfortable excusing for self-centered or materialistic reasons for more ennobled ones, or even for ones that just aren't attributed to something greater, in some sense.  

Not everyone, mind you, you will find plenty of people who don't have children and justify that on that basis alone.  Indeed, in the 70s through the mid 90s, I think that was basically what the justification was, to the extent that people felt they needed one.  More recently that seems to have changed, although there are plenty of people who will simply state they don't want children as they're focused on what the personally want, rather than some other goal.  Others, however, have to attribute it, for some reason to a cause du jour.  In the 80s it was the fear of nuclear war, I recall.  Now it's the environment, although it was somewhat then as well.  I suppose for a tiny minority of people, that's actually true, but only a minority.

Whatever it is, the reaction to the Pope's statement will cause and is causing a minor firestorm.  Oh, but it'll get better.

The same Pope has already made some Catholic conservatives mad by his comments equating destroying the environment with sin.   And there's a certain section of the Trad and Rad Trad Catholic community that's unwilling to credit Pope Francis with anything, even though he says some extremely traditional things, particularly in this area.

A comment like this one, if it had been made by Pope Benedict, would have sparked commentary on the Catholic internet and podcasts for at least a time.  There's no way that Patrick Coffin or Dr. Taylor Marshall wouldn't have commented on it, and run with it in that event.

Will they now?

Well, they ought to.

Am I going to? 

No, not really.

I could be proven wrong, but I doubt I will be.

The Pope's point will be difficult for the childless to really grasp.  I don't think I became fully adult until we had children, really.  People who don't have children don't really know what its like to, I think.  And I think that probably includes even those who grew up in large families.

At any rate, I have a bit of a different point, that being my ongoing one about the industrialization of female labor.  In no small part, in my view, childless couples in general have come about as our modern industrialized society emphasizes that everyone's principal loyalty should be to their workplace or a career, without question.  As put by Col. Saito in the epic The Bridge On The River Kwai, people are to be "happy in their work".

That means that they don't have time for children, they believe, and moreover the children are societal obstacles to the concept that the only thing that matters is career.  It's the one place that ardent capitalist and ardent socialist come together.  And, as its often noted, particularly by both working mothers and folks like Bernie Sanders, it's difficult to be both a mother and worker, with it being my guess that the more education that goes into a woman's career, the more this is the case.  Society, and by that we mean every industrialized society, has no solutions to this, and there probably aren't any.  About the only one that Sanders and his ilk can come up with is warehousing children sort of like chickens at the Tyson farms.

It's also a lie, of course.  Careers, by and large, don't make people fulfilled or happy, for the most part, although there are certainly individual exceptions.  Statistical data more than demonstrates that.

The Pope, by the way, is not against pets.

Messe ocus Pangur Bán,
cechtar nathar fria saindán;
bíth a menma-sam fri seilgg,
mu menma céin im saincheirdd

Caraim-se fos, ferr cach clú,
oc mu lebrán léir ingnu;
ní foirmtech frimm Pangur bán,
caraid cesin a maccdán.

Ó ru·biam — scél cen scís —
innar tegdais ar n-óendís,
táithiunn — díchríchide clius —
ní fris tarddam ar n-áthius.

Gnáth-húaraib ar gressaib gal
glenaid luch inna lín-sam;
os mé, du·fuit im lín chéin
dliged n-doraid cu n-dronchéill.

Fúachid-sem fri frega fál
a rosc anglése comlán;
fúachimm chéin fri fégi fis
mu rosc réil, cesu imdis,

Fáelid-sem cu n-déne dul
hi·n-glen luch inna gérchrub;
hi·tucu cheist n-doraid n-dil,
os mé chene am fáelid.

Cía beimmi amin nach ré,
ní·derban cách ar chéle.
Maith la cechtar nár a dán,
subaigthius a óenurán.

Hé fesin as choimsid dáu
in muid du·n-gní cach óenláu;
du thabairt doraid du glé
for mu mud céin am messe.

I and Pangur Bán, each of us two at his special art:
his mind at hunting (mice), my own mind is in my special craft.
I love to rest—better than any fame—at my booklet with diligent science:
not envious of me is Pangur Bán: he himself loves his childish art.
When we are—tale without tedium—in our house, we two alone,
we have—unlimited (is) feat-sport—something to which to apply our acuteness.
It is customary at times by feat of valour, that a mouse sticks in his net,
and for me there falls into my net a difficult dictum with hard meaning.
His eye, this glancing full one, he points against the wall-fence:
I myself against the keenness of science point my clear eye, though it is very feeble.
He is joyous with speedy going where a mouse sticks in his sharp-claw:
I too am joyous, where I understand a difficult dear question.
Though we are thus always, neither hinders the other:
each of us two likes his art, amuses himself alone.
He himself is the master of the work which he does every day:
while I am at my own work, (which is) to bring difficulty to clearness.

Pangur Bán, a poem by an unknown Medieval Irish monk.

The Seamus Heany translation, which I like better.  It really gets at the nature of the poem:

I and Pangur Bán my cat,
‘Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men
‘Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill-will,
He too plies his simple skill.

‘Tis a merry task to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur’s way;
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.

‘Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
‘Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our task we ply,
Pangur Bán, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.

Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light.

The Values candidates

Jeanette Rankin of Montana, who was a pacifist, and voted against delcaring war in 1917 and in 1941. She's a hero, as she stuck to her declared values.

While I’m at it, I'm developing a deep suspicion of conservative candidates and figures that express certain highly conservative social positions but don't quite seem to adhere to them in their own lives.  This coming from somebody who is obviously highly socially conservative themselves.

This comes to mind in the context of "family values", "protecting the family" and the like.  I see and read stuff like that from conservatives all the time.  So if you are saying that you strongly value the family, and protecting the family, etc., why don't you have one?

Now, some people are no doubt deeply shocked by that question, but it's a legitimate one, and I'm not the first person to raise it.  If a person might ask if I seriously expect people to answer the question, well I do.

Now, in complete fairness, all sorts of people don't have children for medical reasons.  But more often than that, if a couple don't have them, they don't want them. That's what's up with that.  And you really can't campaign on your deep love of the family if you are foreclosing that part of the family in your own lives, absent some really good reason.  More often than not, the reason is money and career.

Recently I saw, for example, a statement that a person is deeply committed to family and loves spending time with their nieces.  Well, everyone likes spending time, for the most part, with nieces and nephews.  That's not even remotely similar to having children, however.  Not at all.

I'll go one further on this and note this as I do.

The person who is trustworthy in very small matters is also trustworthy in great ones; and the person who is dishonest in very small matters is also dishonest in great ones.

Luke, 16:10.

I note this as some of the conservative value candidates, if you look into their backgrounds, have question marks that should give pause for the reason noted above. If a person doesn't keep to their principals in small things, or basic things, why would they keep them on anything else?

One conservative candidate that I'm aware of, when you look up that person's background, was born of an ethnicity that's overwhelmingly Catholic and went to Catholic schools growing up.  That person was undoubtedly a Catholic. That didn't preclude, however, the candidate from getting divorced and remarried to another person who was divorced.

Now, that's quite common in our society, but it's completely contrary to the Catholic faith without some explanation.  Maybe there is one.  I don't know, but it's a fair question, just as it would be if a Jewish candidate grew up in an Orthodox household but operates a delicatessen featuring ham.  That may seem odd, but if you are willing to compromise on small things, you'll get around to the big ones, if the small ones also express a deep principle.

If you won't compromise on small things, or things that are represented as elemental to your declared world view, you are dependable in a crisis. On the other hand, if you participated in a faith, and were educated by it, and okay with its elements, and it formed part of your worldview . . right up until you had to do something difficult and chose the easier path. . . well, there's no real reason to believe that haven gotten there once, you won't do it again.

The candidate, I'd note, has been stone-cold silent on the insurrection.  From that, you can tell the candidate knows it was an insurrection, but is unwilling to say diddly.

The Primordal Connection

St. Jerome with lion.  St. Jerome is supposesd to have taken a thorn out of a lion's paw, and the lion thereafter stayed with him. While some might doubt some aspects of this, St. Jerome's lion is also recounted as having caused fear in the monestary in which he lived, and having adopted the monestary's donkey as a friend.

Back to pets for a second, one added thing I think about them is that for a lot of people, they're the last sole remaining contact with nature they have.

There are lots of animal species that live in close contact with each other and depend on each other.  We're one.  We cooperated with wolves, and they became dogs as they helped us hunt. Cats took us in (not the other way around) as we're dirty, and we attract mice.  We domesticated horses, camels and reindeer for transportation.  And so on.

We miss them.

One more way that technology and modern industrialization has ruined things.  Cats and dogs remind us of what we once were.

And could be, again.

Warped legacies

An awful lot of what the Pope is tapping into has to deal with the combined factors of moderns forgetting what, well, sex is for, and what its implications are, and that root morality and human nature remain unchanged.  There are probably more generations between modern house cats and Pangur Bán than there are between your ancestors who were waking up each morning in the Piacenzian and you.

Which takes us to men, behaving badly, and everyone turning a blind eye.

And, of course, Sex and the City.

She is fiercely protective of Carrie Bradshaw and livid that she and everyone else at the show has been put into this position, It is not about the money, but rather her legacy. Carrie was all about helping women and now, under her watch, women are saying that they have been hurt.

Sarah Jessica Parker on the scandal involving James Noth.

M'eh.

A note from Wikipedia regarding the series:

When the series premiered, the character was praised by critics as a positive example of an independent woman in the vein of Mary Richards. However, retrospective analysis tends to place more emphasis on the character's repeated and often unrepentant infidelities, with many critics instead viewing her as narcissistic.

Carrie was about helping women?  Well, excuse me if that was deluded.

Scary legacies

This news item came out the same day, I'd note, that Ghislane Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking.  And by that we mean procuring underage girls for Jeffrey Epstein.

Eew, ick.

Connection? Well, none directly.

Or maybe.  More narcissism and obsession with unrestrained desire, or lust.  

It sort of seems that you can't unleash this without it oozing out as filth sooner or later.

On Maxwell, because I tend to get my news by reading, I'm left perplexed by how a person says her first name, Ghislaine.  I have no idea. I heard it on the nightly news the other day, but the spelling is so odd, I immediately forgot how to pronounce it.

Boston Marriages

Some recent headlines from the ill historically informed press department:

What is a Platonic life partnership? These couples are breaking societal relationship norms

And:

Platonic Partnerships Are On The Rise, So I Spoke To These Friends Who Have Chosen To Live The Rest Of Their Lives Together
"I don't think our love and commitment together should pale in comparison to romantic love."

Oh my gosh! This means that people don't always default to acting like their characters in Sex In The City or Sex Lives of College Girls!

Could this be a new trend?!?  Oh my oh my, what would it mean.

Well, maybe people are just defaulting back to normal, but we're unable to grasp that as we've been steeped in seventy years of Hugh Hefner pornification of absolutely everything. ^[1]  This isn't new.  Indeed, we've dealt with this here before in our  Lex Anteinternet: The Overly Long Thread. Gender Trends of the Past...

 post. Let's take a look:

But there is more to look at here.

Another extremely orthodox cleric but one of an extremely intellectual bent, and who is therefore sometimes not very predictable, is Father Hugh Barbour, O. Pream.  I note that as his comment on same gender attraction in women was mentioned earlier here and came out in a direction that most would not suspect in the context of a "Boston Marriage".  Father Barbour did not license illicit sexual contact, i.e., sex outside of marriage, in any context either, but he did have a very nuanced view of attraction between women that's almost wholly unique in some ways.  Like the discussion above, but in a more nuanced form, it gets into the idea that modern society is so bizarrely sexually focused that its converted the concept of attraction to absolute need, failing to grasp the nature of nearly everything, and sexualized conduct that need not be.  Barbour issued an interesting opinion related to this back in 2013, at which time there had just been a huge demonstration in France regarding the redefinition of the nature of marriage. 

Katherine Coman and Katherine Lee Bates who lived together as female housemates for over twenty years in a "Wellesley Marriage", something basically akin to what's called a Boston Marriage today.  Named for Wellesley College, due to its association with it, Wellesley Marriages were arrangements of such type between academic women, where as Boston Marriages more commonly features such arrangements between women of means.  Barbour noted these types of arrangements in a basically approving fashion, noting that its only in modern society when these arrangements are seemingly nearly required to take on a sexual aspect, which of course he did not approve of.

Hmmm. . . . 

Men and women who don't marry have always been unusual, but the sexualization of everything in the post Hefner world has made their situation considerably more difficult, really.  Society has gone from an expectation that the young and single would abstain from sex until married to the position that there must be something wrong with them if they are not.  This has gone so far as to almost require same gender roommates, past their college years, to engage in homosexual sex.  I.e, two women or two men living together in their college years is no big deal, but if they're doing it by their 30s, they're assumed to be gay and pretty much pressured to act accordingly.

Truth be known, not everyone always matches the median on everything, as we will know.  For some reason, this has been unacceptable in this are as society became more and more focused on sex.

At one time, the phenomenon of the lifelong bachelor or "spinster" wasn't that uncommon, and frankly it didn't bear the stigma that people now like to believe.  It was harder for women than for men, however, without a doubt.  People felt sorry for women that weren't married by their early 30s and often looked for ways to arrange a marriage for them, a fair number of such women ultimately agreeing to that status, with probably the majority of such societally arranged marriages working out. Some never did, however.

For men, it was probably more common, and it was just assumed that things hadn't worked out.  After their early 30s a certain "lifelong bachelor" cache could attach to it, with the reality of it not tending to match the image, but giving societal approval to it.  In certain societies it was particularly common, such as in the famed Garrison Keillor "Norwegian Bachelor Farmer" instance or in the instance of similar persons in Ireland, where it was very common for economic reasons.  

People didn't tend to assume such people were homosexual, and they largely were not.  Indeed, again contrary to what people now assume, except for deeply closeted people or people who had taken up certain occupations in order to hide it, people tended to know who actually was homosexual.

I can recall all of this being the case when I was a kid.  My grandmother's neighbor was a bachelor his entire life who worked as an electrician.  After he came home from a Japanese Prisoner of War camp following World War Two, he just wanted to keep to himself.  A couple of my mother's aunts were lifelong single women and, at least in one case, one simply didn't want to marry as she didn't want children, and the other had lost a fiancé right after World War One and never went on to anyone else.  Her secretary desk is now in my office.  In none of these instances would anyone have accused these individuals of being homosexual.

Taking this one step further, some people in this category did desire the close daily contact of somebody they were deeply friends with, in love with if you will, but that need not be sexual.  Love between women and love between men can and does exist without it having a sexual component.  Interestingly, it is extremely common and expected when we are young and up into our 20s, but after that society operates against it.  People form deep same gender relationships in schools, on sporting fields, in barracks and in class.  

Some of those people won't marry, and there's no reason that their friendships shouldn't continue on in the post college roommate stage.

Well, society won't have it as everything needs to be about sex, all the time.  Haven't you watched The Big Bang Theory?

Tatting for attention?

Kourtney Kardashian, I think (I can't really tell the various Kardashians from one another and don't really have a sufficient interest to learn who is who), apparently is now all tatted up now that she has a tattooed boyfriend or fiancé or something that is.  And by this, we mean heavily tattooed.

Like, enough already?

Apparently Salena Gomez has a bleeding rose tattoo.  I don't get that either, but I'm sure that piles of ink will be spilled on it.

Footnotes:

It would be worth noting here that early on a female researching on Hefner's early publications noted how much of it was actually in the nature of barely disguised child pornography, with cartoons particularly depicting this.  This lead to an investigation in Europe, and the magazine rapidly stopped it, but it's interesting in that the magazine was so debased that it not only portrayed women as stupid, sterile, top-heavy, and nymphomaniacs, but also underage.

The impact however had been created, and by the 1970s the full on sexual exploitation of child models was on.  As debased as society has become, it's at least retreated from this.