We’ve outsourced our food for too long.

 

Lex Anteinternet: Chris Christie on the Baby Boomers. How to make an entire demographic outraged with one fairly truthful comment. And a further comment.

From our companion blog, Lex Anteinternet: 

Lex Anteinternet: Chris Christie on the Baby Boomers. How to make a...: Chris Christie said this in a C-Span interview.  Baby boomers—the most selfish generation in American history, the most self-centered genera...

Chris Christie on the Baby Boomers. How to make an entire demographic outraged with one fairly truthful comment.

Chris Christie said this in a C-Span interview. 

Baby boomers—the most selfish generation in American history, the most self-centered generation, the least sacrificing generation American history. You look at Biden and Trump in particular, and they personify that

I commented on it on Twitter, defending what he said.

There's a large element of truth to it.

People reacted overall to the statement with outrage.  Lots of Boomers died in Vietnam, it was pointed out.

Biden and Trump sure didn't serve in Vietnam.

Christie is fat, was all some people could say.  Well, yep, Christie is fat, and Biden and Trump are demented due to age.  I'll take fat over demented  (indeed, from personal experience I'll note that demented people really like to point out when somebody is fat, oddly enough, and Trump does that a lot).

There are "some" good Boomers.  Oh come on, there are lots and lots of good Boomers. Defending a generation with a reserved "some" means the person making the statement basically agrees with the underlying comment.  

"Biden isn't a boomer".  True, he was born in 1942, not 1945.  But as one person posted in reply to that, "he's close enough".  

"Christie is a boomer".  Yeah, so what?  And to add to that, he really isn't.  Both the Biden comment (1942) and this one  (Christie was born in 1962) point out that the guardrails to generations are somewhat fluid.  Moreover, the fact that late Boomers in no way whatsoever fit into the Boomer generation has caused later demographers to define them as being in Generation Jones. Their experiences, including getting the shaft from Boomers, is completely different from the real Boomers.

And indeed, Boomers just can't grasp that.  There's a lot, and I do mean a lot, of discontent, and even outright animosity, towards the Boomers, and its largely justified.

Boomers are a unique generation.  There are a lot of them, for one thing, but they also came into the country at a unique time. They were the children of the generation that was young during the Great Depression and which fought World War Two.  We're not going to use the "Greatest Generation" moniker here, as while that generation is admirable, it doesn't deserve that title.

The World War Two Generation was a broken one.  As with the Boomers, you can't take a sweeping statement like that and apply it to everyone, but there are generational characteristics.  That generation's attachment to home and family was weakened by the desperation of the Depression.  As an example, my mother was pulled out of school at age 16 in order to work, and while she was always close to her family, she left home when still a teenager as she was tired of her income being treated as just the family's, and not her.  Her mother begged her to stay, and then begged her to return.  She didn't (she lived with an uncle who gave her a job across the continent).

And an entire generation of men was trained to kill with a large number of them actually experiencing that.  Killing other people, particularly in that fashion, is not normal, and every other human vice opens up after it.  Not everyone who killed or was trained to kill engaged in that vice, but more did than Americans cared to acknowledge.  That helped bring about postwar domestic instability everywhere, with some of those Boomers born not so much into idyllic families but into ones that were struggling with parental infidelity, violence, brutality and alcoholism.  Not all, to be sure, but more than you might suspect.

They also came home to a United States in an economic boom which meant a massive transfer in economic status for people who hadn't expected it and who didn't really know how to handle it.  Those pictures of ideal American families in the 50s don't address a culture that was beginning to be taken ever by consumerism.  

By the time the first Boomers, the real ones, were entering their adulthood all that was in full bloom.  And their parents wanted them to be free of the horrors that had been inflicted upon them, so they handed them educations and businesses when they were young, not trying to really hold on to them.

The Baby Boom Generation early on figures that all the rules that preceded were stupid, and like people who succeed in business and life early on (the latter of which they really didn't), they came to believe they were really smart.  And they often held the generations, including Generation Jones, that came behind them in contempt.  Handed businesses, they wouldn't hand them over.  Handed advantage, they didn't see that they needed to help others obtain it.  Handed wealth, they felt free to use to use it for personal and societal destruction.

American society has become one, as one commentator noted, that's being run by oligarchs. Well, the Boomer focus on money, making it, and career, which really started to come into focus in the 1970s, helped get us there.  The mess they made of their family lives and indeed even the topic of sex, in which everything was all about themselves, has made a mess of domestic life that current generations are trying to fix.   

And they won't let go of things now.

And that's the main thing.

Now, let me take a step back.  I've written here as if all the Boomers are a monolith.  They are not. 

Thousands of men volunteered to fight in Vietnam, and a lot of them did not come back.  Environmentalism, which the Republicans have struggled against, was something started by their parents, but which was adopted to an enormous degree, had a huge positive impact, may have saved the planet for generations, and my save it in its entirety yet.  The same is true of conservationism, which dates back well over a century but which was very well expressed in the Boomers.  The combined legacy of environmentalism and conservationism is so deep that younger generations truly cannot grasp it.

So then, what of reality?

Well, the record is mixed.  It always was.  The World War Two generation did save the country, but in doing so they were rising to a challenge that they had to, and many sacrificed not only their bodies, but frankly their temperaments.  The Silent Generation built much of the post war world in their shadows and without their acknowledgement, even fighting a war without complaint that costs the US as many lives as the Vietnam War but which is in fact largely forgotten.  The country started yielding to the young Boomers by the 60s and in their heyday they tore everything down and when they went to build back up, they managed to forget and dump much of the humanity that had characterized prior generations, no matter how flawed they were.

So what now?

The old order changeth yielding place to new And God fulfills himself in many ways Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me I have lived my life and that which I have done May he within himself make pure but thou If thou shouldst never see my face again Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.

Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Boomers can rightfully take credit for some great things, although the current ones, in the age of Trump, don't seem to want to.  They can be blamed for a lot of things that caused the rise of Trump and MAGA, which is a movement largely in younger generations, something that's often missed.  The liberal "Me Generation" aspect of the demographic was harmful in ways that we are still desperately trying to recover from, and turning, oddly, to Boomers who exhibit the trait, such as Trump, to try to fix.

They won't.

The Boomers want to remain relevant.  Post anything on this topic and you'll be accused of agism.  But the truth is, they needs to step back to the sidelines now in everything they are in.  The biggest favor they can do for Gen X and Gen Y (it's too late for Gen. Jones, our day is already over having never started) is to step back, and out of the way.  If in office, get out.  If heading a business that isn't you alone, step down.  If hoping for a Bishopric, stop.

Time to yield.

Why did we post this here?

Well, a big aspect of the last ninety years has been the shift, in the Western World, from family centered lives, including a lot of rural life, towards career and money.  Career and money are inherently self centered, if they are a person's primary focus.  And yet we teach people that those should be their primary focuses, which has been destructive to us all.

Lex Anteinternet: Why I stopped growing vegetables, from a growers p...

Lex Anteinternet: Why I stopped growing vegetables, from a growers p...:  

Why I stopped growing vegetables, from a growers prospective.

 

Marilyn Monroe and the Wedding Industrial Complex

Lex Anteinternet: Saturday, March 23, 1946. Marilyn Monroe and the ...: A really interesting Richard C. Miller photograph of Marilyn Monroe was taken, which we learned of due to Reddit's 80 Years Ago Sub, and...

Saturday, March 23, 1946. Marilyn Monroe and the Wedding Industrial Complex. Truman warns Stalin, and holds up testing the bomb. No public necking in Japan.

A really interesting Richard C. Miller photograph of Marilyn Monroe was taken, which we learned of due to Reddit's 80 Years Ago Sub, and which we repost here via fair use.

Miller had "discovered" Monroe, who was already modeling following her photo spread in World War Two's Yank.  Miller, typical for the era, photographed her in swimsuits, including bikinis (very modest ones by today's standards), but also  had a an entire series of other topics, including the subject shooting firearms.  Here he depicted her in a wedding dress.

The real life model had already been married and divorced by this time, having married at age 16 and then filing for divorce while her husband was deployed in the Navy during the Second World War.  This photograph is actually commonly claimed to be a wedding photo from her first marriage, which it is not, although the veil is remarkably similar to the one she actually wore in her wedding.

Actual photograph of Monroe at her first wedding, when she was 16 years old.

In the studio photograph she's holding some sort of book with a Christian cross on it, with that style of cross depiction very common for the era.  This is what causes us to note this photograph in a way, as it brings up the topic addressed here:

The Wedding Industrial Complex

Notes from the Spesia Underground

A really interesting episode.

This really fascinating look at modern weddings brings up a whole host of things we routinely discuss here, including agrarianism and subsidiarity.  The episode from Catholic Stuff You Should Know points out the extent that weddings were, at at the time the photo of Norma Jean was taken above still remained, community affairs and not big bride focused shows.

We've lost a lot here.

And we really need to recapture it.

While indelicate, this also shows the portrayal of a really beautiful woman before Playboy perverted all of that.

Monroe was, as is well known, Playboy's first, and unwilling, centerfold.  But what's interesting here is that prior to Playboy arriving on the scene, this was not an uncommon depiction of a really beautiful woman.  There were, of course, already some women who were focused on for being really busty, Jane Russell giving an example, but the theme did not absolutely dominate.  To look at the 19 year old Monroe here, you would not have thought of her in that fashion.  A decade later, you would, and even after Life intervened to push her nude photograph first as an art item.  We've dealt with that before here as well, although frankly we need to modify our entry.  That post is here:

Appearance. Shape and being in shape and women (men will come next).

Also posted via fair use, Colliers had an article on keeping everyone employed year around, showing how times were in fact changing.

We've looked at that here too.

Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two

Tucker Carlson: “There's not a single Western city that's thriving"

Here's a thought (other than Carlson is a twat waffle, but that's obvious).

Maybe that's because cities are dumpster fires in general and without a thriving Agrarian Class, they're really pointless concentrations of the dispirited.

I leave the garden better than I arrive

 

Lex Anteinternet: CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 119th Edition. Comments on Culture. A Galwaywoman's comment on men and women, Rubio's comments on Western Civilization, and Hegseth hosts a Christian Nationalist.

Lex Anteinternet: CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 119th Edition. Comm...: A series of posts on viewpoints that aren't related. . . well maybe there are. The first one is from Chloe Winter's vlog, which is o...

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 119th Edition. Comments on Culture. A Galwaywoman's comment on men and women, Rubio's comments on Western Civilization, and Hegseth hosts a Christian Nationalist.

A series of posts on viewpoints that aren't related. . . well maybe there are.

The first one is from Chloe Winter's vlog, which is one of the agricultural ones that we link in here.  Ms. Winter is a married Galway greenhouse farmer (that's how I'd put it) in her very early 20s (maybe actually 20) who took up greenhouse farming when a close friend of hers died.  Galway is very rural Ireland and Galwegians are very rural Irish.  I've actually heard them referred to as "Bog Irish" by other Irish.  The county is one of the few areas of Ireland where there are bonafide Irish Gaelic speakers and it has its own accent, which Ms. Winter very thickly has.

This entry was surprising, in a way in that its very anti first wave feminist, but in a really genuine way.  It may actually be fourth wave feminist.  If released in the US (I believe most of Ms. Winter's followers are Irish), it'd create some sort of firestorm in some social medial communities.

Having said that, she isn't wrong.

And her vocabulary and manner of speech is delightfully Irish.

Two different right wing cultural views emerged from Trump servants so far this week.  What's interesting in part about them is that many commentators aren't able to realize that they actually express radically different world views, which shows how poorly people are informed and educated in some things.

The State Department, which still calls itself the Department of State, posted a photo of Marco Rubio with this entry, summing up his recent deliveries to European figures:

The United States and Europe belong to a civilization that stretches over continents, crossed over oceans, and persisted for thousands of years: from Athens to Rome to America.  

Western Civilization must embrace its noble legacy if it is to reverse its decline.

This flat out puts Rubio in the National Conservative movement and is their thesis to the core.  It doesn't say anything, you'll note, about religion at all, it's all about culture.  You can perhaps read more into that if you want, any many would, but this is pretty much the Dinneen/Dreher/Reno thesis.

You can pretty much rest assured that its not the Trump thesis. Trump just isn't smart enough or interested enough to grasp something like this at all.

Rubio has endorsed Vance for 2028, but it's probably an endorsement of convenience.  By doing this, Rubio has raised his flag in the National Conservative camp.  This, moreover, may actually be what Rubio believes.

Rubio is drawing a lot of attention, and getting a lot of excitement, in Reaganite and other genuinely conservative camps.  He's not a populist.  The big question is whether he can overcome the stench of having been associated with Trump.  A secondary question is whether contemporary American culture, less than half of which is all that conservative, sees itself in this fashion very deeply.

In contrast is Pete Hegseth, who will never overcome the stench of Trump.

The Department of Defense posted this item about its activities this past week:

We have gathered at the Pentagon for our monthly worship service.

We are One Nation Under God.

 

First of all, the Department of Defense has no business whatsoever having monthly prayer meetings.  The United States may be One Nation, Under God, but this basically is a forced acknowledgement of a certain type of Christianity, that being a minority branch of it by far, over every other religion.  Yes, I'm a Christian, and a member of the original Christian faith, but not every soldier is, and no doubt there are soldiers who have no religion at all.  

Moreover, this is Doug Wilson, who appeared here in an earlier discussion.  He's a Calvinist who holds really extreme views.  You can be rest assured that considerably less than half of the American population wants a Puritan Calvinist regime in the U.S. Indeed, a couple of people responded to this Twitter post with:

Christopher Hale@ChristopherHale 13h

Doug Wilson routinely mocks the pope and the Catholic Church.

It’s beyond shameful that  @PeteHegseth  allowed him to lead taxpayer-funded anti-Catholic worship services.

Hale a Democratic Catholic blogger who has a pretty good blog dedicated to Pope Leo that you can also find on our blog lists.  He served in a prior Democratic administration and I'm still waiting for him to explain how an insider Democrat reconciled that with the Democratic Party's support of abortion.  That's an side, but that issue is one of the ones that keeps people like me from being Democrats, even though we aren't voting for very many Republicans any more.

Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇺🇸@jimstewartson 13h

Listen. Doug Wilson is one of the most disgusting revanchist monsters on Earth. He doesn’t think women should vote, wants slavery back, and believes the U.S. should be a theonomy—Government by God. He runs a cult in Moscow, ID.

This is wildly unconstitutional & deeply immoral.

I don't know who Stewartson is, but describing Wilson as a revanchist is correct.  Monster might be a bit much, but he doesn't think women should vote and does think that the U.S. should be a Calvinist theocracy.  I don't know what he thinks about slavery and I'm not going to look it up, but Wilson is articulate and extreme.

And that's why Hegseth's actions here are really disturbing.  Rubio is trying to stake a claim for Western Civilization as special, something the National Conservatives hold and which a lot of people disagree with.  Hegseth is here advancing Christian Nationalism of a type that holds a very peculiar view on the United States' place in the world. 

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 118th Edition. Why are the women discounted? The corruption of wealth. Hanging around in a cult will make you a weird cultist. New links and the fallen. A gift of cash on the floor of the legislature.

Labels: Distributism, Epstein Scandal, Seven Deadly Sins, Sex, Standards, Taxes, The wealthy, Yeoman's Twentieth Law of Behavior, Yeoman's Twenty-fifth Law of Behavior, Yeoman's twenty-third law of behavior, Zeitgeist

What have you done for me lately? Addressing politicians in desperate times, part 5.

An agricultural country which consumes its own food is a finer thing than an industrial country, which at best can only consume its own smoke.

Chesterton.

A long time ago I started a post on one of our companion blogs about agriculturalist and the Republican Party.  I can't find it now, maybe I published it, or maybe I didn't.

As I"m in both worlds, the urban and the agricultural, I get exposed to the political views of both camps.  The Trump administration has made this a really interesting, and horrifying, experience.  By and large professionals detest Donald Trump and regard him as a charleton  Farmers and ranchers are, however, amongst his most loyal base, even though there's no real reason for them to be such.  Indeed, with the damage that Trump is doing to agriculture this will be a real test of whether farmers and ranchers simply reflexively vote Republican or stop doing son and wake up.

The Democratic Party, not the GOP, saved family farmers and ranchers in this country when the forces of the unabated Homestead ACt and the Great Depression were going to destroy them.  They've seemingly resented being saved from those forces, however, as an impingement on their freedoms, and they've bristled at every government act since that time.  Farmers and ranchers would rather sink in a cesspool of their own making than be told how to properly build one, basically.

We here, of course, aren't a pure agricultural blog.  This is an Agrarian blog, and that's different.  We are, quite frankly, much more radical.

"The land belongs to those who work it." 

Zapata.

Agrarianism is an ethical perspective that privileges an agriculturally oriented political economy. At its most concise, agrarianism is “the idea that agriculture and those whose occupation involves agriculture are especially important and valuable elements of society

Bradley M. Jones, American Agrarianism.

Still, we can't help but notice that American agriculturalist, more than any other class of businessmen, have voted to screw themselves by voting for Donald Trump. They voted for tariff wars that leave their products marooned here in the US while foreign competitors take advantage of that fact.  They've voted for a guy who thinks global warming is a fib (which many of them do as well) in spite of the plain evidence before their eyes, and the fact that this will destroy the livelihoods of the younger ones.  They've voted to force economic conditions that will force them off the lands and their lands into the hands of the wealthy.

Indeed, on that last item, they've voted for people who share nothing in common with them whatsoever and would just as soon see them out of business, or simply don't care what happens to them.

They've voted, frankly, stupidly.

Well, nothing cures stupidly more than a giant dope slap from life, and they're getting one right now.  The question is whether they'll vote in 2026 and 2028 to be bent over, or start to ask some questions.

We're going to post those questions here.

1.  What connection does the candidate have with agriculture?

They might not have any and still be a good candidate, but if they're running around in a plaid shirt pretending to be a 19th Century man of the soil, they should be dropped.

They should also be dropped if they're like Scott Bessent, who pretends to be a soybean farmer when he's actually a major league investor.  Indeed, big money is the enemy of agriculture and always has been.  

I'd also note that refugees from agriculture should be suspect.  The law is full of them, people who were sent off to law school by their farmer and rancher parents who believed, and in their heart of hearts still believe, that lawyers, doctors and dentist, indeed everyone in town, don't really work.  All of these refugees live sad lives, but some of them spend time in their sad lives on political crusades that are sort of a cry out to their parents "please love me".

I know that sounds radical, but it's true.

2. What will they do to keep agricultural lands in family hands, and out of absentee landlord hands?

And the answer better not be a "well I'm concerned about that". The answer needs to be real.

From an agrarian prospective, no solution that isn't a massive trend reversing one makes for a satisfactory answer to this question. Ranches being bought up by the extremely wealthy are destroying the ability of regular people to even dare to hope to be in agriculture.  This can be reversed, and it should be, but simply being "concerned" won't do it.

3.  What is your view on public lands?

If the answer involves transferring them out of public hand, it indicates a love of money that's ultimately always destructive to agriculture in the end.

Indeed, in agricultural camps there remains an unabated lust for the public lands even though transferring them into private hands, whether directly or as a brief stop over in state hands, would utterly destroy nearly ever farm and ranch in local and family ownership . The change in value of the operations would be unsustainable, and things would be sold rapidly.

Public lands need to stay in public hands.

4. How do you make your money?

People think nothing of asking farmers "how many acres do you have" or ranchers "how many cattle do you have", both of which is the same as asking "how much money do you have".  

Knowing how politicians make their money is a critical thing to know.  No farmer or rancher, for example, has anything in common with how the Trump family makes money, and there's no reason to suppose that they view land as anything other than to be forced into developers hands and sold.

5. What is your position on global warming?

If its any variety of "global warming is a fib", they don't deserve a vote.

6.  What is your position on a land ethnic?

If they don't know what that means, they don't deserve a vote.

7.  What's on your dinner table, and who prepares it?

That may sound really odd, and we don't mean for it to be a judgment on what people eat. . . sort of.  But all agriculturalist are producing food for the table. . . for the most part, if we ignore crops like cotton, or other agricultural derived textiles, of which there are a bunch, and if we ignore products like ethanol.

Anyhow, I'll be frank.  If a guy is touring cattle country and gives an uneasy chuckle and says, "well, I don't eat much meat anymore" do you suppose he really cares about ranching?  If you do, you need your head checked.

You probably really need it checked if the candidate doesn't every grill their own steak but has some sort of professional prepare their dinner every night.  That would mean that they really have very little chance of grasping 

8.  What's your understanding of local agriculture?

That's a pretty broad question, but I'm defining agriculture very broadly here.  Indeed, what I mean is the candidates understanding of the local use of nature, to include farming and ranching, but to also include hunting, fishing and commercial fishing.

Indeed, on the latter, only the commercial fishing industry seems to have politicians that really truly care what happens to them. How that happened isn't clear, but it does seem to be the case.

Otherwise, what most politicians seem to think is that farmers wear plaid flannel shirts.  I see lots of them wondering around in photographs looking at corrals, or oil platforms, but I never see one actually do any work. . . of pretty much any kind.  That is, I don't expect to see Chuck Gray flaking a calf, for example.

Last and prior editions:

Claiming the mantle of Christ in politics. Don't support liars and don't lie. Addressing politicians in desperate times, part 4.

Claiming the mantle of Christ in politics. Addressing politicians in desperate times, part 3.

Questions hunters, fishermen, and public lands users need to ask political candidates. Addressing politicians in desperate times, part 2.

Labels: 2026 Election, 2028 Election, Commentary, Democratic Party, Politics, Questions for politicians, Republican Party, Trailing threadLabels: 2026 Election, 2028 Election, Camping, Climate Change, fishing, hunting, Politics, Public Lands, Questions for politicians, Right Wing Politics and Politicians, The Land Ethic, This is why we can't have nice things

Addressing politicians in desperate times. A series.

Labels: 2026 Election, 2028 Election, Commentary, Democratic Party, Politics, Questions for politicians, Republican Party, Trailing thread

Stan Kroenke Is Nation's Largest Landowner, Including 560,000 Wyoming Acres

This flat out shouldn't be legal. That is, a carpetbagger who doesn't depend on agriculture for his livelihood and who isn't directly working ag land, owning it.

Stan Kroenke Is Nation's Largest Landowner, Including 560,000 Wyoming Acres

Rejecting Avarice. Some radical rethinking.

Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

We just published this item here on Donald Trump's insatiable lust for the destruction of land, lands even beyond our borders.

The Agrarian's Lament: Lex Anteinternet: Manifest Destiny and the Second ...: Lex Anteinternet: Manifest Destiny and the Second Trump Administrati... : Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, dramatizing Manifest ...

In the movie The Patriot, which is okay but not great, commences with these lines:

I have long feared, that my sins would return to visit me, and the cost is more than I can bare.

In a lot of ways, that opening scene is the best one in the movie.

No nation has a singular linear history, even though people tend to hear things that way. "This happened, and then that happened, resulting in this. . . ".  In reality, things are mixed quite often, and things are quite fluid with juxtapositions.  

Shakespeare claimed:

“There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat;

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.”

Perhaps.  But in reality the tide in the affairs of men drags everyone along with it. But it's a rip tide.  People's individual goals, desires and aspirations often are quite contrary to the tide on the surface.

That's certainly been the case with the United States.

If you have a Trumpian view of the world, the history of the United States looks like this, sort of:

This again.  It never occurs to many that the mines and cities aren't really everyone's dream.  It particularly doesn't occur to a rich real estate developer who isn't smart and whose values are shallow.

Lots of people have that view.  We came, we saw, we exploited, and everyone got happy working for Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

Trouble is, that's not true for a lot of reasons, a core one being it doesn't comport with who we really are.  The entire worship of wealth and what it brings, and the wealthy and who they are, is deeply contrary to our natures, and frankly men like Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk are deeply perverted.  Not because of their relationship with women, or because their names appear in the Epstein files in some context, although in the case of Trump, we really still don't know what context, but because of their shallow avaricious acquisition for and desire for wealth.

Timothy warns us:

Those who want to be rich are falling into temptation and into a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires, which plunge them into ruin and destruction.  For the love of money is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains.

And not only have their pierced themselves, but they pierce others, and entire societies with them.

So let's look at a few concrete things that we feel should be done.

Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.

G.K. Chesterton, A Miscellany of Men

Revisit the Homestead Act.

Right from the onset of English colonization of North America, there was a pull between business exploitation and the simple desire for an agrarian place of one's own.

The truth of the matter is that when the nation started off, most people weren't "Pilgrims" seeking shelter from religious oppression.  Nor did they wish to be servants of big mercantile enterprises.  Most of the early English colonists were from agriculture or the trades and wanted to just work for themselves.  That's about it. 

The American Revolution was as much about that as anything else.  When American Colonials dumped tea in harbors, they were protesting taxes, but what they were also doing is dumping mercantile controlled property into waste.  It was grown somewhere else and it belong to rich remote classes.

The struggle was always there. The American South in particular had the planter class which depended upon enslaved labor to raise a market crop.  That was about generating wealth.  Most Southerners, in contrast, were Yeoman who had small places of their own.  When the Civil War came the wealthy had the South fight the war.

The analogies to the present day are simply to thick to ignore.

The Homestead Act came about during that war, and in real ways, it expressed a Jeffersonian dream. People willing to invest their own labor could acquire a place of their own.

The drafters of the Act never envisioned the wealthy controlling the land.  In some very real ways it was wealthy landowners that the North was fighting at the time.

Over the last few days residents of Wyoming have read about Chris Robinson, CEO of Salt Lake City-based Ensign Group, L.C., buying the Pathfinder Ranch.  I have nothing about him personally, but the listed price for the ranch was $79.5M due to its giant size.

I can personally recall when it was owned by locals  At that price, rather obviously, Robinson isn't planning on making money from cattle.  And to make matters a bit worse, residents of Natrona County got to read about another local outfit going up for sale, which is much smaller, for $9M.

Even into my adult years, by which time it was already impossible for somebody not born into ranching or farming to buy a place such that it could be their vocation, most ranches were owned by locally born ranchers.  This trend of playground pricing is making the status of the land the same as that which English colonists were seeking to escape from.

This could be fixed by amending the Homestead Act. The homesteading portion of that is fixed, but it would still be possible to go back and amend it such that land deeded to individuals under it, had to remain in agricultural use, and had to be held by families that made their money that way. exclusively.

I know it won't be, anytime soon, but it should be.

Revisit "Ad coelum ad damnum"

One of the absolute absurdities of the original Homestead Act is that it gave away not only the surface of the land, but the mineral rights as well.  This made the system sort of like buying lottery tickets. Some people got rich just of because of where they'd chosen to homestead.

I really struggle with the concept of private ownership of minerals, including oil and gas, in the first place.  I understand private enterprise exploiting it, but owning it?  Why?  It's not like private enterprise put the minerals in the ground.

Addressing this creates real constitutional problems, but ideally the mineral wealth of the nation should belong to everyone in it, not private parties.  And it should be exploited, or not, in the national interest, not in the primary economic interest of those who claim to own it.

I know that this brings up the cry of "that's Socialism".  It probably really is, but an unequal accidental distribution of mineral wealth on lands taken from the native inhabitants isn't just.  At a bare minimum, something needs to be looked into.  Indeed, as there was no intent to transfer that mineral title in the first place, perhaps it could collectively be restored and held in truth for the descendants of those original inhabitants.

Tax the wealthy

Every since Ronald Reagan there's been a ludicrous idea that taxing the wealthy hurts the economy. We know that this is completely false.  We also know that a certain percentage of the wealthy will allow themselves to become obscenely wealthy if allowed to, and that they'll harm everyone else as a result.

There's no reason on earth that anyone ought to be a billionaire.  Indeed, if you have more than $50M in assets, you have too much and something is potentially wrong with your character.  High upper income tax rates and wealth taxes can and should address this.  Elon Musk can be nearly just as annoying if his net worth was $50M as whatever it currently is, but he'd be a lot less destructive.

An alternative to this, if this is simply too radical, is to prevent corporations from owning most things, and to provide that once they get to be a certain size, at least 50% of their ownership goes to employees of those corporations.  It'd at least distribute the wealth some, and keep avarice from defining our everyday existence.

Final thoughts

What seems to be clear in any event is that we cannot keep going in this directly. Today's "conservatives" serve the very interests that the American Patriots rebelled against, remote wealth.  In spite of their tattoos and car window stickers, they'd form the Loyalist Militia trying to put down an an agrarian revolution in 1776.  The thing is, that those conditions always lead to revolution. They did in 1776 in North America, and then again in more extreme form in France a few years later.  They lead to the uprisings of 1848, the Anglo Irish War in 1916 and the Russian Revolution in 1917.  It's time to address this while we can, as it will be addressed.

"How am I complicit in creating the conditions I say I do not want?" Before I can doubt myself, I have to press publish on this one...

 

"How am I complicit in creating the conditions I say I do not want?"

Before I can doubt myself, I have to press publish on this one...

The Promised Agrarian Standard Good work was necessary for the blessings of the Promised Land to be enjoyed. It is the same for us today.

 

The Promised Agrarian Standard

Good work was necessary for the blessings of the Promised Land to be enjoyed. It is the same for us today.

Lex Anteinternet: Turning our backs on American Careerism. A synchronicitous trip.

Lex Anteinternet: Turning our backs on American Careerism. A synchr...: The Angelus by Jean-François Millet I experience synchronicity in some interesting ways from time to time.  Ways which, really, are too stro...

Turning our backs on American Careerism. A synchronicitous trip.

The Angelus by Jean-François Millet

I experience synchronicity in some interesting ways from time to time.  Ways which, really, are too strong to put up to coincidence.

Sometime last week I saw this post on Twitter by O. W. Root, to which I also post my reply:

O.W. Root@owroot

Nov 29

Sometimes I have wondered if I should write about being a parent so much, but I've realized that it's one of the most universal things in the whole world, and one of the most life changing things for all who do it, so it's good to do.

Lex Anteinternet@Lex_Anteinterne

Nov 30

It's also, quite frankly, one of the very few things we do with meaning.  People try take meaning from their jobs, for example, which are almost universally meaningless.

My reply, was frankly, extremely harsh.  "[A]lmost universally meaningless"?

Well, in fact, yes.  I was going to follow that up with a post about existential occupations, but I hadn't quite gotten around to it when I heard some podcasts and saw some web posts that synched into it.  I've been cat sitting recently and because of that, I've been able to catch up on some old ones (note the synchronicity of that. . . the tweet above was from November 29/30, but the podcast episode was from June).  The podcast episode in question is:

People to Catholicism Today? ⎮Flannel Panel - Christopher Check

That episode discusses a very broad range of very interesting topics, and it referenced this one amongst them:   Catholicism Is So Hot Right Now. Why?

I haven't listened to the second podcast, but the first is phenomenal.

These are all linked?

Yes they are.

I've noted here on this blog and on Lex Anteinternet that the young seem to be turning towards social conservatism and traditionalism.  It's easy to miss,. and its even easy to be drawn to it and participate in it without really realizing it.  This is different, we'd further note, than being drawn to the various branches of political conservatism.  There's definitely a connection, of course, but there are also those who are going into social conservatism/traditionalism while turning their backs on politics entirely, although there are real dangers to turning your back on politics.

What seems to be going on is that people are attracted to the truth, the existential truths, and the existential itself.  

Put another way, people have detected that the modern world is pretty fake, and it doesn't comport at all with how we are in a state of nature. It goes back to what we noted here:

Yeoman's Third Law of Behavior.  I know why the caged tiger paces.

I think what people want is a family and a life focused on that family, not on work.

As noted above, most work is meaningless.  That doesn't mean it's not valuable.  

Very few jobs are existential for our species.*  We're meant to be hunters and gatherers, with a few other special roles that have to do with the organization of ourselves, and our relation to the existential.  Social historians like to claim that society began to "advance" when job specialization, a byproduct of agriculture, began, and there's some truth to that, but only a bit, if not properly understood.  That bit can't be discounted, however, as when agriculture went from subsistence agriculture to production agriculture, i.e., agriculture that generated a surplus, wealth was generated and wealth brought in a great perversion of social order.  Surplus production brought in wealth, which brought in a way for the separation of wealth from the people working the land, and ultimately ownership of the land itself.  Tenant farming, sharecropping and the like, and agricultural poverty, were all a byproduct of that.  When Marx observed that this developed inevitably into Feudalism, he was right.

Agriculture, originally, was a family or family band small scale deal.  While it's pretty obvious to anyone who has ever put in a garden how it worked, social theorist and archeologist got it all wrong until they made some rather obvious discoveries quite recently, one of the most obvious being that hunter/gatherer societies are also often small scale agricultural ones.  How this was missed is baffling as Europeans had first hand experience with this in regard to New World cultures, most of which were hunting societies but many of which put in various types of farms.  Even North American native bands that did not farm, it might be noted, were well aware of farming themselves.  Even into the present era hunter/gatherer societies, to the extent they still exist, often still practice small scale farming.

It turns out that grain farming goes way, way back. But why wouldn't it have?

Additional specialization began with the Industrial Revolution, and that's when things really began to become massively warped for our species, first for men, and then with then, with feminization, for women.  We've long noted that, but given the chain of coincidences noted above, we've stumbled on to somebody else noting it. As professor Randall Smith has written:

It’s important to understand that the first fatal blow to the family came during the Industrial Revolution when fathers left the house for the bulk of the day. The deleterious results that followed from ripping fathers away from their children were seen almost immediately in the slums and ghettos of the large industrial towns, as young men, without older men to guide them into adulthood, roamed the streets, un-mentored and un-apprenticed. There, as soon as their hormonal instincts were no longer directed into work or caring for families, they turned to theft and sexual license.

Randall Smith, A Traditional Catholic Wife?  

So, in the long chain of events, there was nothing wrong at all about farming. There was something wrong about the expropriation of the wealth it created, and that fueled the fire of a lot of development since them.  That first set of inequities ultimately lead to peasant revolts in Europe on occasion, and to a degree can be regarded as what first inspired average Europeans to immigrate to various colonies. . . a place where they could own their own land.  . and then to various revolutions against what amounted to propertied overlords.  The American Revolution, the Mexican Revolution, and the Russian Revolution all had that element to them.  Industrialization, which pulled men out of the household, sparked additional revolutions to counter the impacts of the Industrial Revolution, with some being violent, but others not being. The spread of democracy was very much a reaction to the the evils of the Industrial Revolution.  Unfortunately, so was the spread of Communism.

Money has never given up, so the same class of people who demanded land rent in the bronze and iron age, and then turned people into serfs in the Middle Ages, are still busy to do that now. As with then, they often want the peasants to accept this as if its really nifty.  People like Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk are busy piling up money and concubines while assuring the peasantry that their diminished role in the world is a good thing as its all part of Capitalism.

It is part of Capitalism, which is a major reason that Capitalism sucks, and that there's been efforts to restrain its worse impulses since its onset, with efforts to limit corporations at first, and then such things as the Sherman Anti Trust Act later on.

All that's been forgotten and we now have a demented gilded prince and his privileged acolytes living off the fat of the land while people have less and less control of their own lives.  Most people don't want to glory in the success of Star Link of even care about it, but people feed into such things anyway, as the culture has glorified such things since at least the end of the Second World War, the war seemingly having helped to fuel all sorts of disordered desires in society that would bloom into full flower in the 1960s.  A society that grew wealthy from the war and the destruction that it created, saw itself as divorced from nature and reality, and every vice that could be imagined was condoned.

And we're now living in the wreckage.

I think this is what is fueling a lot of this.  Starting particularly in the 1950s, and then ramping up in the 60s and 70s, careerism really took hold in American society, along with a host of other vices.  Indeed, again, as Professor Smith has noted:

The “traditional Catholic family” where the husband worked all day and the wife stayed home alone with the children only really existed – and not all that successfully – in certain upper-middle class WASPy neighborhoods during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Working in an office all day is not necessarily evil (depending upon how it affects your family). It’s just modern. There’s nothing especially “traditional” about it.

Most careers are just dressed up jobs, not much else.  Nonetheless people have been taught they need to leave their homes, their families, they're very natures, in order to have a career, sometimes abandoning people in their wake.  They're encouraged to do so, to a large extent.

Indeed, I dare say, for most real careerist, nearly always abandoning people.

And average people are sick of it.

That's why young men are turning towards traditionalism of all sorts.  They're looking for something of value, and they're not going to find it behind a computer in a cubicle.  And that's why young women are reviving roles that feminist attempted to take away form them.  

They mean something.

Footnotes: 

* Existential Occupations are ones that run with our DNA as a species.  Being a farmer/herdsman is almost as deep in us as being a hunter or fisherman, and it stems from the same root in our being.  It's that reason, really, that people who no longer have to go to the field and stream for protein, still do, and it's the reason that people who can buy frozen Brussels sprouts at Riddleys' still grown them on their lots.  And its the reason that people who have never been around livestock will feel, after they get a small lot, that they need a cow, a goat, or chickens.  It's in us.  That's why people don't retire from real agriculture.

It's not the only occupation of that type, we might note.  Clerics are in that category.  Storytellers and Historians are as well.  We've worshiped the Devine since our onset as a species, and we've told stories and kept our history as story the entire time.  They're all existential in nature.  Those who build certain things probably fit into that category as well, as we've always done that.  The fact that people tinker with machinery as a hobby would suggest that it's like that as well.

Indeed, if it's an occupation. . . and also a hobby, that's a good clue that its an Existential Occupation.

If I were to retire from my career, which I can't right now, I wouldn't be one of those people who spend their time traveling to Rome or Paris or wherever.  I have very low interest in doing that.  I'd spend my time writing, fishing, hunting, gardening (and livestock tending).  That probably sounds pretty dull to most people.  I could imagine myself checking our Iceland or Ireland, or fjords in Norway, but I likely never will.