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.
So on this Sunday, 2024, I worked, contrary to God's injunction, like on so many others. As a result, I didn't really catch up with the horrific plight of Appalachia in the wake of Hurricane Helene.
It's awful.
Which makes this the worst, and best, time to note this.
We're headed into a legislative session, and an election season, in which the far right espouses a hatride of the Federal Government. If you are in Appalachia, and vote for the populists, you are voting to handle this disaster on your own. If you are in Wyoming, and voting populists, the same is true of the horrible fires we've experienced and are yet to.
If that is your view, don't ask for help, as stupid and cold as not asking for help would be.
We here are distributists, a philosophy that holds things should devolve to the lowest level possible. Here, that level is the Federal government. Distributism works up, as well as down.
Additionally, how long will we choose to ignore the signs? We've waited longer than we should have as it is. There's still time to act, no matter how much it impacts your temrporary pocket books, with you being temporary as it is.
Because I've referenced it more than one time, but apparently never posted it (cowardice at work) I'm going to post here the topic of "the four sins God hates". I'm also doing this as I'm getting to a political thread about this years elections and the candidates, in the context of the argument of "Christians must. . . " or "Christians can. . . "
First I'll note using the word "hate", in the context of the Divine, is a truncation for a much larger concept. "Condemns" might have been a better choice of words, but then making an effective delivery in about ten minutes or less is tough, and truncations probably hit home more than other things.
Additionally, and very importantly, sins and sinners are different. In Christian theology, and certainly in Catholic theology, God loves everyone, including those who have committed any one of these sins, or all of them.
This topic references a remarkably short and effective sermon I heard some time ago. The way my 61 year old brain now works, that probably means it was a few years ago. At any rate, it was a homily based on all three of the day's readings, which is remarkable in and of itself, and probably left every member of the parish squirming a bit. It should have, as people entrenched in their views politically and/or economically would have had to found something to disagree with, or rather be hit by.
The first sin was an easy one that seemingly everyone agrees is horrific, but which in fact people excuse continually, murder.
Murder is of course the unjust taking of a life, and seemingly nobody could disagree with that being a horrific sin. But in fact, we hear people excuse the taking of innocent life all the time. Abortion is the taking of an innocent life. Even "conservatives", however, and liberals as a false flag, will being up "except in the case of rape and incest".
Rape and incest are horrific sins in and of itself, but compounding it with murder doesn't really make things go away, but rather makes one horror into two. Yes, bearing a child in these circumstances would be a horrific burden. Killing the child would be too.
The second sin the Priest noted was sodomy. He noted it in the readings and in spite of what people might like to say, neither the Old or New Testaments excuse unnatural sex. They just don't. St. Paul is particularly open about this, so much so that a local female lesbian minister stated that this was just "St. Paul's opinion", which pretty much undercuts the entire Canon of Scripture.
A person can get into Natural Law from here, which used to be widely accepted, and which has been cited by a United States Supreme Court justice as recently as fifty or so years ago, and the Wyoming Supreme Court more recently than that, and both in this context, but we'll forgo that in depth here. Suffice it to say that people burdened with such desires carry a heavy burden to say the least, but that doesn't make it a natural inclination. In the modern Western World we've come to excuse most such burdens, however, so that where we now draw lines is pretty arbitrary.
Okay, those are two "conservative" items.
The next wasn't.
That was mistreating immigrants.
This sort of speaks for itself, but there it is. Scripture condemns mistreating immigrants. You can't go around, as a Christian, hating immigrants or abusing them because of their plight.
Abusing immigrants, right now, seems to be part of the Conservative "must do" list.
And the final one was failing to pay workmen a just wage. Not exactly taking the natural economy/free market approach in the homily.
Two conservatives, and two liberal.
That's because Christianity is neither liberal or conservative, but Christianity. People claiming it for teir political battles this year might well think out their overall positions.
Not a housecat, no matter what some commission may decide.
New York's Commission on Human Rights had determined that its unconstitutional not to serve pregnant women alcohol.
That's stupid.
Nowhere in any constitution, state or Federal, is there a clause that says "When a pregnant boozehound comes into your dram shop, you shall liquor her up". Nonsense.
But a lot of or cutting edge social law has become quite nonsensical recently.
Truth be known, a lot of the original concepts of rights involve "leave people alone". They hardly ever involved "you must recognize this". People had the right to assemble, but you didn't have to credit their assembly as smart, nifty or valuable. People had the right to be secure in their own homes, which basically meant leaving them alone, at home. Lots of stuff was that way.
Now, however, there are beginning to be a lot of "you musts". And the "you musts" are often followed by the social derision of the pop class, who is rarely impacted by anything directly. And a lot of this is because our country has become almost completely divorced from nature, and seeing a sudden acceleration of "you must" recognize this or that.
Indeed, just yesterday I actually heard a person interviewed who has "changed" their gender (a genetic impossibility) state that he or she should be allowed in a bathroom that comports to his or her gender reassignment, but that those who dressed contrary to their gender were "perverts". My goodness, how can a person actually make that statement? Its incredibly biased, and at the same time mind numbingly confusing to the vast majority of people who are comfortable with the gender dictates of their DNA and their clothing. Can a person actually say that? I don't think so. They shouldn't say it, and I have to believe that what they meant was actually something else and that htey didn't mean to go after the clothing thing. After all, how can a person who has had surgery and who is taking chemicals to defeat their DNA say that about somebody who is just wearing a different set of clothes. Bizarre.
On the bathroom thing, I'm not commenting on where people who have had their genders reassigned should go and I doubt that they or anyone else actually regarded this as a burning issue. It seems to me that they probably have to go where surgery has now assigned them. Indeed, I'm amazed that this is now an issue that requires Federal pondering. I'll say beyond that, however, that at the point at which the Federal government starts issuing guidelines on this, it obviously has too little to actually do. Likewise, when celebrities start spouting on it, it shows how slavish they are to trends. I don't think any legislature needs to legislate on this at all, and that in the absence of all of the recent legislation, this would never have been an issue, but at the same time what this reflects is a sense in society that something has gone really wrong in what people are being told they must believe. Gender reassignment is a prime example, as statistically its' a disaster with horrific impacts for a large percentage of the people who undergo it. In Europe its generally prohibited for minors and its been shown that the majority of minors who claim confusion later resolve it in accordance with their actual DNA. But here in the US we are actually entering a "you must not question" people who declare that they wish to do this, in spite of the horrible historical track records that actually exist. We claim to have "freedom of speech", but here we are outright declaring that the speech must be squelched and you must accept this, in spite of the evidence.
This is contributing to the outright revolt in a percentage of the American electorate. Commenters wonder why a figure like Donald Trump has seized the GOP nomination this year, but stuff like this is why. When a person can't say "I think this is wrong", about gender reassignment, or "I think this is wrong", about serving a pregnant woman alcohol, they react. And when they do, it'll be an extreme reaction.
Most of this is, in some way, related to our separation from nature. We've always been a fallen species, but we now don't seem to know what we are. As a species, we have the highest degree of morphological and psychological differences between the two genders of any mammal. That's simply a fact. But in the name if equality we must now pretend that isn't so, and that everything is just the same as everything else. And apparently we must also pretend that a woman who is out to drown her baby in booze before the baby is even born isn't committing child abuse. She is.
No group of people can infinitely ignore nature. It will not work. Nature gets even. And societal movements that don't credit that don't last forever. Nor should they.
Yesterday, I made some observations on Denver, and today I'm doing the same on Labor Day, 2024.
Of course, it's immediately notable that I'm making these the day after Labor Day, which was a day I didn't get off. I worked a full day.
I was the only one in the office.
Labor Day dates back to the mid 1800s as an alternative to the more radical observance that takes place in many countries on May 1. Still, nonetheless, early on, and for a long time, there was a fair amount of radicalism associated with it during that period when American labor organizations were on the rise. The day itself being a widely recognized day off is due to organized strikes on the day that started occurring during the 1930s, to the day as sort of a "last day of summer holiday" is fairly new.
Even now, when people think of it, they often think of the day in terms of the sort of burly industrial workers illustrated by Leyendecker and Rockwell in the 20s through the 40s. Otherwise, they sort of blandly associate it with celebrating work in general, which gets to the nature of work in general, something we sort of touched on yesterday with this entry;
Early on, Labor Day was something that acknowledged a sort of worthy heavy work. There are, in spite of what people may think, plenty of Americans that still are engaged in that sort of employment, although its s shadow of the number that once did. Wyoming has a lot of people who do, because of the extractive industries, which are in trouble. Ironically, therefore, its notable that Wyoming is an epicenter of anti union feelings, when generally those engaged in heavy labor are pro union. There's no good explanation for that.
When Labor Day became a big deal it pitted organized labor against capital, with it being acknowledged by both sides that if things went too far one way or another, it would likely result in a massive labor reaction that would veer towards socialism, or worse, communism. Real communism has never been a society wide strong movement in the United States, in spite of the current stupid commentary by those on the political far right side of the aisle accusing anyone they don't like, and any program they don't like, of being communistic. But radical economics did hae influence inside of unions, and communists were a factor in some of them, which was well known. As nobody really wanted what that might mean, compromise gave us the post war economic world of the 50s and 60s, which were sort of a golden age for American economics.
One of the unfortunate byproducts of the Cold War era, however, was the exportation of jobs overseas, which brought us the economic regime we have today, in part. The advance of technology brought us the other part. Today we find the American economy is massively dominated by capital in a way it hasn't been for a century, and its not a good thing at all. The will to do anything about it, or even understand it, seems to be wholly lacking. As a result of that, while an increasing number of Americans slave away at meaningless jobs in cubicles, and the former shopkeeper class now works at Walmart, we have the absolutely bizarre spectacle of two Titans of Capital, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, spewing out populist rhetoric. Populism, of course, always gets co-opted, but the working and middle class falling for rhetoric from the extremely wealthy is not only bizarre, its' downright dumb.
Indeed, in the modern American economy, having your own is increasingly difficult. Entire former occupations that were once local have been totally taken over by large corporations while agriculture has fallen to the rich in terms of land ownership, making entry into either field impossible. Fewer and fewer "my own" occupations exist, and those that do are under siege.
One of those is the law, of course. Lawyers, because of the nature of their work, still tend to own their practices, as to medical professionals of all types. The latter are falling into large corporate entities, however, and the move towards taking down state borders in the practice is causing the consolidation of certain types of practice in the former.
Not that "having your own" in the professions is necessarily a sort of Garden of Eden either, however.
Recently, interestingly, there's been a big movement in which young people are returning to the trades. That strikes me as a good thing, and perhaps the trades are finally getting the due they deserve. Ever since World War Two there's been the concept that absolutely everyone had to achieve white collar employment, which demeaned blue collar employment, and which put a lot of people in occupations and jobs they didn't care for. I suspect the small farm movement reflects that too.
Indeed, on my first day of practicing law as a lawyer over thirty years ago the long time office manager, who must have been having sort of a bad day, made a comment like "you might just end up wishing you had become a farmer". I remember thinking to myself even then that if that had been an option, that's exactly what I would have become. It wasn't, and it never has been for me, in the full time occupation sort of way.
Oh well.
And so we lost the garden to labor in, but we can make things better than they are. And we could do that by taking a much more distributist approach to things. Which seems nowhere near close to happening, a populist uprising notwithstanding.
Yesterday's primary election results certainly suggest that Wyomingites have their alarm on snooze. Nature, however, chose to give another warning overnight.
Good morning, Casper! This summer breeze is bringing smoke (and in some areas ash) into Casper from a fire in Johnson County. Please ALWAYS call 911 if you SEE a fire. At this time we request that members of #ourcommunity avoid calling 911 to report the smoke smell. Thank you for your vigilance!
The map below is available on the Wyoming 511 app (choose the wildfires layer) or access it here https://map.wyoroad.info/wtimap/
Many Casperites woke up in panic to the strong smell of smoke. It woke us up, (smelling much like bacon). I figured the smoke was from yesterday's fire near Glenrock, but no, it's from a huge fire in Johnson County.
Apparently the Police Department received so many calls it decided to post on Facebook. Numerous replies demonstrated that many Casperites thought a fire was nearby, and woke up in panic.
I'm sure some will be waking up like me, a childhood and teenage asthmatic condition somewhat returned, and therefore impairing the ability to breath. For some, it'll be much worse.
A big fire is apparently also burning in Campbell County, one of the epicenters of Wyoming populism.
No matter. The 2025 Wyoming State House will be certain that the old days will return, and nothing is the matter.
BLM fire crews are assisting in response to the House Draw Fire located southeast of Buffalo, WY. The fire is currently estimated at 4,000 acres. Fire engines from Johnson County, Powder River Fire Department, and the Forest Service are also responding in addition to aerial support from Single Engine Airtankers and a Large Airtanker. A Very Large Airtanker has been ordered. The fire is fast-moving and wind driven – for the safety of firefighters and the public, ple…
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In a more primitive time, as we define primitive, which tends to mean any era other than our own, generally, people looked for signs of the Divine in disasters. Some were taken as warnings to correct an errant path, or as punishments for having taken one. As late as the closing days of the Second World War, Germans widely came to the conclusion that the disasters that were befalling them were Divine punishments for their actions under the Nazis.
Now, of course, even in a religious country like the United States, such views are never expressed. But there's something to them, even if what there is amounts to elevating our personal desires above reality and the long term interest of ourselves and our descendants can be sinful, and often will have negative outcomes simply by their very nature.
We didn't use to have massive grass fires every year.
Of course, a lot of Wyoming's "Freedom Caucus" isn't from here, and they have no real recollection of what the state is naturally like. Some time looking into it would benefit us all, even if that means looking at some uncomfortable truths. There's less excuse for those who hold certain views and are from here.
Jeanette Ward, the Freedom Caucus import from Illinois who went down in defeat in her bid for reelection in a Casper district, noted upon her losing:
I’m grateful to the Lord Jesus for the last two years I have been able to serve Him and the people of Wyoming in House District 57. Unfortunately I did not win reelection tonight. I called Julie Jarvis to congratulate her, and I pray she will serve the people and do what is righteous.
Ward infamously said in one legislative session that we were not our brother's keeper, something that Jesus stated we were.
Ward's comments were gracious in defeat. And we might all hope that servants of the people will do what is righteous, and that we all might, no matter how uncomfortable that might. That might start by considering our dedication to the truth and discerning it, which isn't always a fun thing to do.
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