Indeed, if I had power for some thirty years I would see to it that people should be allowed to follow their inbred instincts in these matters, and should hunt, drink, sing, dance, sail, and dig, and those that would not should be compelled by force.
Hilaire Belloc
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In one of the absurd American corporate efforts to get on the cutting edge of a social trend, irrespective of whether it's temporary, existentially justified, or related to the product, Budweiser released an advertisement with Dylan Mulvaney, a man claiming to be transgendered and who affects a very girlish persona, badly, in a cartoonish fashion. Indeed, it's an example of how those who claim to be transgendered men sometime affect a much more girlish behavior than girls do, and it's accordingly more than a little cartoonish. It's a pretty extreme example, which raises its own questions.
Mulvaney is apparently an actor, and came to prominence in the play The Book Of Mormon. I haven't seen the play and don't care to. I'm obviously not a Mormon, but I don't like people poking fun of, or making a satire out of, religious beliefs in that fashion. Eye of the Tiber or The Babylon Bee are one thing, but they aren't actually hostile to religion, and indeed the Bee has come to be controversial as it has started being satirical about society in general, from a general Christian prospective. The three person team who are responsible for The Book Of Mormon, however, are out of South Park, which is an aggressively nasty cartoon, and one of them is a stated atheist and the other, a theist who declares religion itself to be silly, something that shows a massive intellectual deficit on his part. It's sort of like saying that you believe in cars but find transportation silly. They aren't coming out of a prospective of love, suffice it to say, and while I haven't seen The Book Of Mormon, South Park is of the National Lampoon brand of humor which is juvenile, self focused, and mean. I don't know if Book takes a mean spirited approach to Mormons, but what I tend to find is that for people who live outside the Rocky Mountain West, the LDS faith isn't understood in any context at all, and people tend to think of them as 1) some sort of Protestant evangelistic faith, maybe like the Baptists, or 2) something that Warren Jeffs defines, or 3) a tiny silly group. None of that would be correct, and in the Rocky Mountain West the LDS church is a major institution, not some sort of odd joke. From a Christian prospective, particularly in from a Catholic one, there are a lot of things that could be taken on, discussed and critiqued about the LDS, but making fun of them in a sophomoric fashion is disrespectful and reflects very poorly on the people doing it and a society that finds it amusing.
My overall view of mine is that if you wouldn't feel comfortable making analogous jokes about Islam, you probably flat out avoid doing it about any other faith. In other words, if you are going to do a Book of Mormon, you ought to follow it up with The Koran in the same fashion.
That's not going to happen, nor should it either, as The Book Of Mormon shouldn't have.
But I digress.
Mulvaney decided he would affect the appearance of a woman, sort of, at some point and has affected an Audrey Hepburn like style, which nobody in this current age does. Hepburn's style was unique to herself, but she was a genuine, lithe, woman, who genuinely defined grace in her own era, and to a large extent still does. She wasn't girlish, but rather very mature while young at the same time, and frankly rising up in popularity as a reaction to the Playboy influenced huge boob actresses of the time, something that would actually see further influence in the 60s while really being limited, however, to movies and television. Mulvaney on the other hand, if truth be told, looks like a really anemic guy trying to look like a girl, and failing at an attempt to affect an appearance of an actress of a prior era, something he's tried to do in a TikTok series apparently called Days of Girlhood. It's really creepy.
For some weird reason, Budweiser thought he'd make a good spokesman for Bud Light.
Bud Light is awful, as are most of the mass-produced light beers. I don't know why anyone drinks it, which brings me to this, something that has nothing really to do with transgenderism.
Light beer, or American Light Lager as beer aficionados like to call it, is so popular in the US that even small local breweries brew it. Small local breweries have gotten really good, and they tend to put out a better product than huge industrial alcohol concerns like AB InBev, which owns Budweiser.
I really don't think average companies have any place in social movements of any kind. I'll make an exception for companies particularly associated with some sort of institution. So, for example, a company that makes backpacking equipment being involved in conservation, etc., makes sense to me. But beer is just beer. If there was a cause associated with beer, it would be combating alcoholism, but a cause like that wouldn't exactly sell more beer.
Here the decision was blisteringly odd. Is AB InBev trying to show its hip cool and down with the times, in a Justice Kennedy type fashion? The beer market is saturated (no pun), and therefore the only real option left is to try to grab somebody else's market share, but do people who claim to be transgendered constitute a self-conscious body when they buy beer, or are they just people buying beer?
I'm guessing they're just people buying beer.
Obviously AB InBev thought there was some market share to grab there, while not losing some, but as market decisions go, it seems like a rather odd one.
Oh well, it's worth noting that this is the same beer brand that once sent out paintings of Custer's Last Stand, although they probably had their actual market right at that time.
Anyhow, just buy local. If a microbrewery is boosting a cause, it's probably a local one, or one that's more focused, and it probably doesn't involve a cynical marketing effort like this does.
And indeed, just this past week I went to a local microbrewery and bought two small growlers of their beer. It actually did have a beer that it had brewed boosting a cause. I didn't buy it, but I did buy two of their other beers, to go with the first grilling attempt of the season. The brots I bought were from a local butcher.
There are other options out there, and given that there are, why would a person, causes aside, go with a bad massed produced beer, ever?
I wrote out a blog entry for Lex Anteinternet on what the first Thanksgiving Dinner in 1621 must have been like.
It really surprised me, even though it shouldn't. We modern Americans are so used to the "poverty of resources of our ancestors" story that, well, we believe it. In reality, that first gathering in English North America to celebrate God's bounty and give thanks for it, no matter how imperfect the Church of England and Puritan celebrants, and the native ones as well, was a really bountiful feast. I've joked in the past that it probably consisted of salt cod, but in fact it seems likely to have featured waterfowl, maybe turkey, deer, mussels and quite an abundance of other foods stuffs.
Unlike now, what it didn't feature was pie, probably, even though pies of all sorts were a feature of the English diet, although at this point I frankly wonder. What would have kept there from being pie would have been a lack of wheat, as that crop wouldn't have come around for at least a few years. And the lack of a grain crop meant that there wouldn't have been beer, if that's something your Thanksgiving usually features (mine does). It's an open question if there would have been wine. There would have been a lot of fresh vegetables, however, as well as fresh foul, venison and fresh fish.
It would have been a good meal, in some ways one we'd recognize, but also one in which we might note some things were missing. No potatoes, for example.
This set me to wondering what a killetarian/agrarian like me might end up with if allowed to do a Thanksgiving Dinner all of stuff I'd shot or gathered. Could I do it?
Well, there'd be no mussels on my table, but most years there would be fare similar to what the first celebrants had. There are wild turkeys in my region, although I failed to get one this year. Events conspired against me and I didn't get a deer (at least yet) either. But if I had a major dinner, and time, I think I could muster it. It might be pheasant rather than turkey, or a wild turkey, which is really no different in taste, only in bulk, from the domestic ones.
The challenge, however, would be vegetables, depending upon how feral I'd take this endeavor. If I went full hunter/gatherer, here I'd really be in trouble. I frankly know next to nothing about edible wild plants.
Now, starting off, I'd note that in my region, like the rest of the globe, a vegetarian would have starved to death in a few days prior to production agriculture. It's not only an unnatural diet, but it's impossible up until that time. Indeed, one of the ironies of agriculture has been the introduction of unnatural diets. When you read, for example, of the Irish poor living on potatoes and oatmeal, while that's not what their Celtic ancestors had eaten prior to 1) row crop agriculture, and 2) the English. Shoot, potatoes aren't even native to Ireland.
Anyhow, I note that as the native peoples of the plains were more heavily meat eaters than anything else, as that's what there was to eat. But there is some edible vegetation.
I just don't know much about it.
I guess I'd start off with that I knwo that there's a collection of native berries you can eat. I mostly know about this as my mohter used to collect some and make wine with them, and I've had syrup and jelly made with them as well. UW publishes a short pamphlet on them, which is available here. There are also wild leeks, which my mother and father, and at least one of my boyhood friends would recognize, which my mother inaccurately called "wild onions".
And that's about all I know about that.
Which isn't enough to make much of a meal.
Now, a person could probably research this and learn more, and I should, simply because I'd like to know. Indeed, on the Wind River Indian Reservation there's a "food sovereignty" movement which seeks to reintroduce native foods to the residents there in order to combat health problems, which is a really interesting idea and I hope it has some success. I hope that they also publish some things on this topic, assuming that they haven't already.
So, in short, at least based on what the present state of my knowledge is, the Thanksgiving fare would be pretty limited, vegetable wise.
Now, what about grow your own?
Well, if expanded out to include what I can grow myself, well now we're on to something else indeed. . . assuming that I can get my pump fixed, which I haven't, solely due to me.
If I were to do that, then I'm almost fully there for a traditional Thanksgiving Dinner, omitting only the bread and cranberry sauce.
And I'm not omitting the cranberry sauce.
I'm not omitting the bread, either.
Frankly, I think the modern "bread is bad for you" story is a pile of crap. People have incorporated grains into their diet for thousands of years. To the extent that its bad for you, it's likely because Americans don't eat bread, they eat cake. That's what American bread is.
Of course, I think the keto diet is a pile of crap too, which I discuss on another Lex Anteinternet post. So here, I'd have to make bread, or buy it, and I'd prefer to make it. Soda bread more particularly.
On this, I'd be inclined, if I could to have an alcoholic beverage for the table, which is another thing, albeit a dangerous one, that humans have been doing since . . . well too long to tell. The Mayflower sojourners started off their voyage with a stock of beer. . . ironically in a ship that had once been used to haul wine, but they were out when they put in at Plymouth Rock. By the fall of 1621 it's unlikely that they'd brewed any. as they lacked grain. The could have vinted wine, however. If they did, we don't know about it.
So in my hypothetical, if I stuck to local stocks, I could probably do the same. I don't know how to do it, but I could learn. But I'm not going to do so, as frankly my recollections of that wine aren't sufficiently warm to cause me to bother with it, and I recall it took tons of sugar, which obviously isn't something I'm going to produce myself.
I'm not going to brew beer either, although plenty of people do. I don't have the time, or the inclination, and either I'd end up with way too much or not enough.
And this reflects the nature of agrarianism, really. A life focused on nature with agriculture as part of that. I don't have to make everything myself, but I have to be focused on the land, have a land ethic, and focus on what's real.
Maybe next year I'll try this.
Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 66th Edition. A littl... : Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 66th Edition. A little song, a littl...
