More specifically, radical refusal to consent to the spirit of the times. It's part of what I admire in them, but it didn't strike me until recently.
John Pondoro Taylor, in his memoirs, recalled having seen Maasai walking through Nairobi as if it simply wasn't there, as they had always done, dressed in their traditional fashion, and carrying spears. On their way from one place to another, refusing to consent that the development of the city meant anything in real terms.
I was recently waiting in the Church for the confession line to form. One of the Mantilla Girls walked in. I've seen this one once or twice before, but not at this Church. She not only wears the mantilla, and is very pretty, but she carries herself with pride.
They don't all do that. Some of the younger women who wear chapel veils do so very naturally. Some sort of timidly, or uncomfortably. With at least one, and I could be massively off the mark, it's almost sort of an affectation. But here, you see something quite different.
Or so it seems.
I don't know her. I could be wrong. But it's clear she isn't timid and it's not an affectation.
It is, it seems to me, a radical rejection of the modern secular world in favor of existential nature.
For those who believe in the modern world, in modernism, or the spirit of the times, or who are hostile to religion, that may seem like a shocking statement. But the essence of our modern lives (or post-modern, if you insist) is a radical rejection of nature, most particularly our own natures. Wearing a chapel veil indicates that the person deeply believes in a set of beliefs that are enormously grounded in nature. The wearer is a woman, in radical alignment with biology in every sense, and accepting everything that means, including what the modern world, left and right, detest. I nolunt. She's accepting of the derision, and ironically, or in actuality not ironically, probably vastly happier than those who have accommodated modernity.
Moreover, those who think they're reaching out for a radical inclusion of the natural, who don't take the same approach, never can quite reach authenticity. There can always be a slight feeling that something isn't authentic, and there isn't. Reserving an element of modernity defeats it.
Pastoral scene, pre Soviet Ukrainian village. Not a lot of homsexuality, transgenderism, etc. going on there.
Those who protest vehemently belong to small ideological groups," Francis told Italian newspaper La Stampa. "A special case are Africans: for them homosexuality is something 'bad' from a cultural point of view, they don't tolerate it".
"But in general, I trust that gradually everyone will be reassured by the spirit of the 'Fiducia Supplicans' declaration by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith: it aims to include, not divide," the pope said.
We all see things through thick lenses of our cultures, and the history of our cultures. This was true even of the authors of the Gospels, which sometimes come through on certain items in their writings.
I think Fiducia Supplicans demonstrates this.
For that matter, to use a bad secular example, I think Justice Kennedy's opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges did as well, which is not to say that the documents are analagous. They are not.
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy seems to have generally believed that the Obergefell decision overturning tens of thousands of years of understanding on the nature of marriage would be met with rapid universal acceptance, rather than turning out to be the metaphorical shot heard around the world that gave us Donald Trump in short order.1
The Supreme Court, in Obergefells, and the Papacy, in Fiducia Supplicans, are reacting to the same development seem to have made the assumption of thinking that what happens in European cultures is what happens, or what even really is of major concern, all over the world. That just isn't the case in this instance.
A pretty good case can be made that "homosexuality", as Western Society regards it, doesn't even exist, although certainly same sex attraction and sexual conduct does. They are not the same thing. Therefore, when the Pope says "A special case are Africans: for them homosexuality is something 'bad' from a cultural point of view, they don't tolerate it" it might in fact be the case that the opposite is true. That is, the "special case" is Western Europeans, for whom homosexuality exists, and is not a "something 'bad'", or at least a significant number of Western Europeans, of which North and South Americans are (once again) part, have now been schooled or accepted that it isn't bad.
In most, of the world, homosexuality is regarded as a European thing. Again, the conduct occurs, but not the gender characterization. And in no society, does it occur with the frequency it does in Western Society, which is also the society which as become the most libertine, albeit only in the last seventy years, particularly in regard to sex and manifestations of sex, including outward manifestations of sex.
We've dealt with that before, but now that It's come back up in this fashion, it's worth looking at again. Pretty much everywhere this conduct occurs, it's strongly associated with a variety of factors, one of which, in its broad manifestation we now see, is a wealthy society that has lots of idle time. Put another way, it's a factor of resources and availability to them.
This is true of a lot of human disorders that are closely related to elemental needs and what we tend to universally see is that when we have a society that is heavily deprived of an elemental needs, a disordered desire for it, combined with disorder conduct, pops up in a minority (never a majority) of the population.
Food is a good example.
Scarcity of food will result in a massively strong desire to eat. In some people, that leads to desperate acts under desperate situations. Cannibalism, for example, comes to mind in regard to the Donner Party, or the residents of Leningrad. People took measures they normally wouldn't.
Not everyone did, however.
At least in the Soviet examples, which repeated in various fashions from 1917 through early 1944, most people didn't. People would starve instead.
Conversely, in food situations where there's a surplus of food, the entire population will tend to gain weight, but not everyone tends to become excessively overweight. Modern dieticians will yell in horror at this, but overweight, and truly grossly obese are not the same things. Grossly obese happens for a number of reasons, including people having a makeup which is extremely efficient in order to avoid famine, but it's only in an unnatural situation of surplus calories that it manifest itself.
As a scene in Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee presents it:
Sergeant Chillum: Don't look to me like them gut-eaters has been feeding them very good.
Wiley: Did you ever see a fat Apache?
Sergeant Chillum: I ain't yet.
This scene depicts the pick up cavalry formation taking the kidnapped children and feeding them, but the point raised, accidentally, is a good one. Native Americans lived in a state of nature, and in that state, they were in good shape and not packing around extra weight. No culture in a state of nature does.
When things become disordered, such as in famine, some people will do something that can be argued to be disordered, eat other people. When there's too much food and no real need to work too hard, physically, to obtain calories, everyone puts on weight, but some will very much to their detriment.
So what's this have to do with homosexuality, let alone Fiducia Supplicans? Well, quite a lot, really.
Just as, in a balanced state of nature, or close to one, people don't get fat, and don't turn to cannibalism, in a balanced state of nature, they don't turn to the range of sexual deviations that they do in an unbalanced one.
Edgar Paxon's Custer's Last Stand. While it might seem odd to see this posted here, the Cheyenne and Sioux warriors who won this battle, and one just days before it at Rosebud, were never more than a day's ride from their families. Women were of course present in the Native camp at Little Big Horn, as the battle was brought on by the 7th Cavalry's attack on the village, but at least one native woman had been present at Rosebud as well. Native raiding parties might separate from their families for a period of days, but not months.
In a state of nature, people live in pretty small communities and there's pretty much a 1 to 1 sex ratio. Men would only be separated from women for very brief periods of time. A war party, for example, might separate for several days, but not months. The Great Raid of 1840, for example, which is regarded as the largest Native American raid every conducted, just lasted two days. Add in travel, and the warrior bands were gone longer, but it probably wasn't much more than a week, if that long.
Hunting parties are also often cited for periods of separation, but in a healthy native state, the separation was often just a matter of hours. Women were usually close enough to a really large hunting party that they could partake in the processing of the game. There were undoubtedly exceptions, but by and large, this was the rule.
Taking the war example again, consider this from Ethiopia's mobilization order of 1935 when Italy invaded:
Everyone will now be mobilized, and all boys old enough to carry a spear will be sent to Addis Ababa. Married men will take their wives to carry food and cook. Those without wives will take any woman without a husband. Anyone found at home after the receipt of this order will be hanged.
Emperor Haile Selassie
Married men, take your wives. Not married? Find a woman who isn't married and taker her.
It's only once you begin to mess with the basic human living patters that the opposite is true. Industrialization, which we'll get to in a moment, really brought in a major disruption from the normal living patter, but there are preindustrial examples that are notable. War provides a pretty good example again.
Major military campaigns in antiquity relied on theft of food, which is not ordered, and which is well known. If the fighters were separated from women, they also rapidly descended to disorder. Early military campaigns (and some recent ones) are famously associated with "rape and pillage", and by men who would not ordinarily do that.
Another example of adjusting to desperate times might be taken in Muhammed authoring his troops, who were ready to go home as they were tired of being without their wives, to have sex with their female saves taken in war. This is widely denied by Muslim scholars today, but it seems to be fairly well established and in fact the practice has been resumed by Islamic fundamentalist armed bands and its the origin of Muslim sex slave trading, which is an historical fact. That this is basically an example of licensed rape can't really be denied.
Conversely, in Christian societies the "marital debt" was taken very seriously up until recently, and it was taken so seriously in the Middle Ages that a wife of a man who wished to go on crusade could veto it simply by citing the marital debt. That's fairly extraordinary, but telling, in that she could simply declare that if her husband departed her needs in this category might cause her to fall into sin, and therefore, he couldn't go. Moderns like to look down on such things today, but in reality that was a very natural and realistic view of human sexuality.
Same gender attractions play in here too, but within bands of men kept away from women for long periods of time. The most famous example of that may be the Spartans, who were fierce warriors trained from young adulthood, in the case of men, to be soldiers. However, the warehousing of men, and boys, away from women brought about widespread homosexual conduct as the living conditions were, rather obviously, completely abnormal.
So too are much of our current living patters.
Industrialization separated men from women and parent from child in a major way, recreating the abnormality of living conditions noted above on a society wide level.
And that's deeply unnatural.
It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that men left their homes every day, working long hours, and were separated from their wives and children for what amounts to well over half of their adult waking hours. And this was not only true of industrial laborers, but also of their white collar bosses. In many industrial societies, moreover, this was amplified by the fact that men further segregated themselves, or were segregated by society, even on off hours.
It was essayist Henry Fairlie who noted:
Work still gives meaning to rural life, the family and churches. But in the city today, work and home, family and church, are seperated. What the office workers do for a living is not part of thier home life. AT the same time they maintain the pointless frenzy of hteir work hours on thier off hours. They rush form the office to jog, to the gym or the YMCA pool to work at their play with the same joylessness.
Fairlie wrote this in 1986, well after the most aggressors conditions of the Industrial Revolution had slackened, but he did note in The Idiocy of Urban Life what that had been like. Men left early in the morning and walked, on average, seven miles to work. They worked their all day, and then returned home after twelve hours of labor. Well over half their day had been spent away from their family.
By the 20th Century that had, in many heavily industrial regions, created a new pattern of living he didn't address, and one which lasted well into the 1970s. Men left for work in blue collar jobs, worked all day with other men, and at quitting time, they hit the bars. Men in the American Rust Belt, for instance, commonly hit a bar every night on the way home, spending a couple of hours drinking beer in an all male company, save for the barmaids whose tips went up as the beer flowed. Rough and tumble places, these were not the equivalent of charming English or Irish pubs of the same period. The maleness, if you will, of their work was all the more amplified by the nearly universal membership of men in organizations that excluded women.
Not surprisingly, this all encouraged conventional sexual vice. Some men, a minority but nonetheless an appreciable nature, took the jousting with bar maid and waitresses further, with some of the women reciprocating. When Hank Thompson and Kitty Wells sang about the "wild side of life" it's easy to wonder why they were hanging out in bars, not really appreciating that a lot of men in particular simply did. Indeed, the term "family man", conversely, had real meaning.
Not to dump this exclusively on blue collar workers by any means, philandering conduct was common in the white collar world as well, to such an extent that it became instantly recognizable to people who went to see 1960's The Apartment, the entire theme of which plays out through the vehicle of cheating married executives using their younger colleagues' apartment.
Indeed, when I was young, I can recall my parents openly talking about professionals in town who had affairs and mistresses. This certainly didn't include anyone in my family, which was 100% Catholic and meant it. That conduct was clearly not approved of, but my point is that it occured. While never discussed in this fashion, in the context of what we're discussing here, the mistresses were sometimes targets of opportunity, so to speak. Secretaries and assistants. Indeed, I heard a lawyer of the generation prior to mine, once relate of the generation of lawyers two generations older than hers, that quite a few of the paralegals of that old, now largely dead or very old, were effectively mistresses. One such assistant had mysteriously had a child out of wedlock when that was pretty rare, and it was widely known who teh employer father was.
There's a lot more that could be explored here, but the point is that the contra natural working conditions give rise to departures from morality and nature. Even now, or particularly now, you'll hear a close female colleague of a male be referred to as his "work wife". I've even heard a person refer to herself that way. Work wives have no marital debt, but hidden by the statement is the vague suggestion or fear that they might be providing such a service, illicit thought it would be.
Homosexuality, in large part, comes about, I strongly suspect, due to something similar.
In an earlier thread, we noted that there are in fact cultures that not only have low incidents of homosexual conduct, but none. As we earlier posted:
Somewhat related to this, interestingly enough, I also came upon an article by accident on the Aka and Ngandu people of central Africa, who are branches of the Bushmen, or what some people still call "pygmies". They've been remarkably resilient in staying close to nature.
A hunter-gatherer people, they naturally fascinate Western urbanites, and have been studied for many years by Barry and Bonnie Hewlett, a husband and wife anthropologist team. Starting off with something else, after a period of time the Washington State University pair "decided to systematically study sexual behavior after several campfire discussions with married middle-aged Aka men who mentioned in passing that they had sex three or four times during the night. At first [they] thought it was just men telling their stories, but we talked to women, and they verified the men's assertions."
The study revealed some interesting things, besides that, which included that they regarded such interaction as a species of work, designed for procreation. Perhaps more surprising to our genital focused society, they had no concept of homosexuality at all, no practice of that at all, and additional had no practice or concept of, um. . . well . . .self gratification. You'll have to read between the lines on that one.
Perhaps the Synod on Synodality ought to take note of the reality of the monotheist Aka's and Ngandu's as that's exactly what the Catholic faith has always taught.1 And so it turns out in a society that's actually focused that way, what Catholics theology traditionally has termed disordered, just doesn't occur. It's also worth noting that the rise of homosexuality really comes about after men were dragged out of the household's on a daily basis by social and economic causes, and the rise of . . . um., well, anyhow, recently is heavily tied to the pornificaiton of the culture that was launched circa 1953.
In other words, those like Fr. James Martin who seek a broader acceptane of of sexual disorder, might actually be urging the acceptance of a byproduct of our overall economic and social disorder, which itself should be fixed.
But what would be the conditions that bring it about in our culture?
We're not even supposed to ask that now, but for most people who have same sex attraction, it's a pretty heavy cross to bear. We should be looking at how it comes about.
Well, what we know is that if we separate men from women, particularly in their formative years, we'll get it at a higher rate than when that doesn't occur.
Going back to war, that fountain of all problematic things, we can look back as far as the Spartans to find this. Spartans, faced with a constant threat of war, took up separating men from women large-scale and raising boys in barracks. It also had a notable degree of homosexual conduct.
Hmmm. . . separate young men and keep them separates just as things begin, for lack of a better way to put it, turn on, and . . . .
The Spartans were a notable early example of this, which in turn tends to be exaggerated. It's not likely that every single Spartan male was a homosexual. It's also not the case, as is sometimes suggested, that Ancient Greece was wildly homosexual. Indeed, Plato abhorred it and regarded it as contrary to nature and proposed the Athenian assembly ban homosexual acts, masturbation, and illegitimate sex in general.
Going forward in time, when we really start to see references to the acts (but not a claimed "homosexual" status) comes with the first semi modern navies. It was a constant concern, for instance, of the Royal Navy, which perhaps might be regarded as the first modern navy. A great navy, it was not necessarily recruited in the most charming way and many sailors were simply press-ganged, a type of conscription, into it against their will. As press gangs favored hitting bars in ports, many of the men conscripted into the Royal Navy already lacked a strong attachment to home and family, and ports were notoriously associated with prostitution. Anyhow, a lot of men away from sea for months, or years, at a time, and a lot of them being fairly young. . . well the problem rose again.
It replicated itself in large modern armies as well, interestingly often among the officer class. In European armies where the officer class was made up of minor nobility as a rule, the men in it had entered as the only other real employment option, if they were not set to inherit the estate, was the clergy. In some European armies officers were strongly discouraged from marrying, which in part reflected the fact that their pay was very bad, as their countries knew that they could rely on family money. While it didn't occur universally in every such army, in some, such as the pre World War One German Army, there was a strong streak of hidden homosexuality.
English private schools, which were widely used by the upper class, were notorious for homosexuality for the same reason. Homosexual conduct became so common in them that homosexuality used to be referred to elsewhere as "the English Disease". Private schools were segregated effectively by class, and very much by gender. Unlike the charming portrayal in the Harry Potter series of works, boys went to boys schools and girls to girls school. Quite often, over time, parents enrolled their children in the same schools they'd gone to. Overtime, a closeted institutional homosexuality, or at least its common occurrence, crept in.
It could be legitimately asked how on earth any of this relates to our current era, but it does in more ways than we might imagine.
In most Western societies today, we make no effort, for the most part, to separate men and women in anything, formally. But as we've already detailed, we do send men, and now women, out of their families and into an unnatural environment on a daily basis. People often meet their future spouses in periods of time when young people are constantly together, such as in school or university, but as soon as they are established, we pull them apart.
Starting during World War Two, moreover, a false academia combined with the corruption and destruction of the war, gave rise to the Sexual Revolution. We commonly think of that as arriving in the 60s, but in reality it probably really started in the 1940s with the publication of Kinsey's false academic narratives. That was the first shot, so to speak, and the publication of Playboy the second one. While Playboy was opposed in some localities into the 1980s, by the 1950s it was so well established, in spite of completely rejecting conventional morality, and in spite, moreover, of publishing photos of women younger than 18, that the ground had been massively lost. The pill followed in the early 60s, work patterns changed due to the introduction of domestic machinery, and sexual morality took a beating. Once its natural purpose was obscured, and then lost, which really basically took all the way into the 1990s, the widespread acceptance of homosexual sex was inevitable.
None of which means that a large number of people will take it up.
But what does mean, that some people, in some circumstances, will. And the unnatural conditions that we live in, amplified by societal moorings having been cut by the Sexual Revolution, help bring that about. And as society has chosen to simply embrace everything that deviates from the norm, and natural, as it applies to ourselves, those afflicted have almost no place to go, but deeper in, no matter how destructive that may be.
All of which is a good reason that people in this circumstance need blessings, if blessing are properly understood.
And which would, therefore, support Fiducia Supplicans.
But none of which suggests that the Church's view on sex is what is causing a decline in attendance in Europe, and that a wider acceptance of homosexuality as normal, as some would urge, would actually do anything. This all is a problem in the West, to be sure, but the underlying evolution of thought that some have, that this is all natural, is not supported by the evidence.
The evidence supports the contrary.
Which gets us back to our original point. African and Asia, for all of their problems, have lived closer to nature, longer, than we have. But that is rapidly changing, and in much of Asia in particular it already has. People who like to imagine that there is such a thing as broad progress, for which there is no good evidence, would argue that this is all progress, so that everything we have noted as a byproduct of the evolution of industry in the West will necessarily happen everywhere else. But that's not necessarily the case at all.
And indeed, in the West itself there seem to be an awakening of tradition, and a desire to return to a more rooted lifestyle. Ironically, evolutions in technology may bring that about. We know that populations are declining everywhere in the Western Northern Hemisphere, which is seen as a disaster but which in fact may emphasize this sort of return to the village.
Footnotes:
1. Obergefell is an incredibly weak decision which, if it were to reappear in front of the United States Supreme Court today, would be reversed. My prediction is that it will be within the next decade as it devoid of solid legal reasoning.
When it was handed down, it was my prediction here that it would cause massive social disruption and resistance, which in fact it has. Pollsters like to point out that the views on same gender unions have moved greatly since it was handed down, which is true, but what they seem to miss is that it was basically the last straw on the part of traditional social conservatives, as well as (Southern type) populists on forced social change. The latter group had long ago accommodated itself to divorce, to people shacking up, and begrudgingly to homosexual conduct but it wasn't about to be told that homosexual unions equated with marriage. In very real terms, Anthony Kennedy, whether he realizes it or not, has always been Donald Trump's running mate.
This tells us something about the danger of AI, as what they were searching for is AI generated faux nudes of the singer.
It also tells us something about entertainers we already knew. Yes, their art counts, but part of their popularity, quite often, is that they're a form of art themselves. Which leads us to the next thing.
Everything about this is wrong on an existential level. AI, frankly, is wrong.
And once again, presented with the time, talent, and money to be sufficiently idle to do great things, we turn to the basest.
There's a creepy fascination going on with Tyler Swift
I don't know anything about Tyler Swift, other than that she's tall, and from the photos I've seen of her, on stage she wears, like many female singers, tight clothing. She appears to be very tall, and is sort of a classic beauty.
I suppose that's the root of it.
Apparently, right wing media and MAGA people are just freaking out about Tyler Swift. This has been headline fodder for some time, but I only got around to looking it up now, as I don't follow entertainment at all and don't care that much.
Swift is dating some football player. I don't follow football either, so that doesn't interest me. Beautiful female entertainers dating sports figures, or marrying them, isn't news, and it isn't even interesting. Consider Kate Upton and Marilyn Monroe. Indeed, under the evolutionary biological precept of hypergyny, most rich women in entertainment would naturally gravitate in this direction, as much as we like to pretend that our DNA does not push us in one direction or another (lesser female entertainers, such as Rachel Ray and Kathy Ireland, tend to marry lawyers). Billy Joel may have sung about the opposite in Uptown Girl, but that truly is a fantasy. There's really very little direction from them to otherwise take, whether they are cognizant of it or not.
And so now we have this total weirdness:
Right wing conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec:
People who don’t understand why I have been commenting on Taylor Swift and Barbie are completely missing the point and NGMI These are mascots for the establishment. High level ops used as info warfare tools of statecraft for the regime.
Newsmax host Greg Kelly:
They’re elevating her to an idol.
Idolatry. This is a little bit of what idolatry, I think, looks like. And you’re not supposed to do that. In fact, if you look it up in the Bible, it’s a sin!
Far right activist Laura Loomer:
The Democrats’ Taylor Swift election interference psyop is happening in the open … It’s not a coincidence that current and former Biden admin officials are propping up Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. They are going to use Taylor Swift as the poster child for their pro-abortion GOTV Campaign.
Donald Trump fanboy and poster child for political train derailment, Vivek Ramaswamy:
I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month. And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall …
And if all of that isn't weird enough for you, a host on the right wing OAN claims the Swift football dating is a deep state psy op, because sports brainwash kids when they should be focused on religion.
This is insane.
Liz Cheney warned us that idiocy had crept into the nation's politics. What more evidence of this is required than this?
Celebrity endorsements.
Some of this stems from a fear that Swift might endorse President Biden. I read something that claimed she had in 2020.
I don't know if she did or not, and I don't particularly care.
There are a host of celebrities who have endorsed Trump. Nobody seems to get up in arms about that, or even notice it. So why the concern.
Probably because Swift is seen as the voice of her generation, and that sure ain't the generation that MAGA is made up of. I.e, she's young and an independent female.
Look at it this way, would you rather have her endorsement, or Lauren Boebert's?
I frankly don't get celebrity endorsements anyhow. I don't know why we care what any actor or singer thinks about anything. Freaking out about it is just silly.
Jay Leno is seeking to be the guardian and conservator for his wife, Mavis, who is 77, and has dementia.
This is a tragedy.
It's also a tragedy in the nation's eye. Most of the time really notable figures endure something like this, it's out of the public eyesight. We didn't watch Ronald Reagan decline on the news. Of course, we're unlikely to see Ms. Leno endure this either.
But this serves as a warning. Old age, we often hear, isn't for wimps. And one of the things about it is that those who remain mentally fit have to take care of those who do not. Most families find this out.
But what about when they're running for office?
The National Park Service reports a 63-year-old man died on a trail in Zion National Park. Heart attack.
This headline tells us something, too. 63, we're often told, isn't old. But then we're not too surprised when a 63-year-old dies hiking, are we?
A concluding thought. We're getting scary stupid.
Freaking out about Tyler Swift, letting two octogenarians run to carry the nuclear football, engaging in endless weird conspiracy theories. . . we've really let the dogs of insanity out big time.
Frankly, a lot of the time the "elite", by which we mean the educated elite, the cultural elite, etc., kept a lid on this. It wasn't as if the opinions of "the people" didn't matter, but they were tempered.
That's not happening in the country now at all. Swift is part of a left wing conspiracy, efforts to prevent gender mutilation are due to right wing meanness. This is out of hand.
One of the nice things about being in a farm community as a working travelers is that their Sunday morning Masses usually start really early, as in 7:00 a.m. in this case.
At least not like portrayed in the movies, and certainly not like the silly "whaling for justice" type of stuff that the plaintiff's bar likes to shovel out.
Recently I tried a case out of town. I've tried so many in the past three decades I no longer have any idea how many I've tried, and if I stopped to try to count them, I know that I'd be inaccurate. When you apply for a judicial appointment, which I've done several times, unsuccessfully (obviously), you are required to count them up, and I'm sure my numbers weren't the same any time I did that, even though I made an effort to be correct.
I do know that the year COVID restrictions on the courts lifted, I tried three that year. That may not sound like a lot, but for a civil litigator it is. I know quite a few civil litigators who have tried less than that over decades' long careers. One law school colleague of mine who does the same work, has never, in so far as I know, tried a case. An ABA review I once read of lawyers who had long civil careers and then retired (which seems to be a rarity) remarked that one of the subjects was proud of her "six" trials.
Six.
Hah.
There are a lot of reason there are not very many civil trials and even fewer serious civil trials, but one reason is that trials are hard stressful work.
But I'll get to that.
This past year, dating back a year ago or so, has not been a good one for me on a personal level. I had surgery in the fall and missed the hunting season. It was colon surgery, and I've never completely recovered, which is to say that my digestive track has not returned to normal, and it isn't going to. During that process, it was revealed by a scan that I had a major thyroid nodule. Followup on that showed it to almost certainly be cancerous, so during the trial, was looking forward to a second surgery, a partial thyroidectomy, and if really lucky I won't have to take medicine for the rest of my life. There is, however, a good chance that I will have to.
Having the trial to accomplish meant that I didn't have to think about it, however.
In terms of good news, it turned out to be benign. Strange, but benign. It's basically a result of an old injury, one I don't ever recall sustaining.
Current wound status.
Hopefully the recovery time isn't really long, but it varies quite a bit for people.
I ended up never taking a day off from the second surgery, not even the day of the surgery, which was a mistake, I'll note.
Anyhow, for about a year running now, my life has been nothing but work. As noted, I missed the hunting season and what little I got in prior to surgery was marred by being incredibly tired. I'm not sure what was up with that (perhaps the thyroid), but I was. I couldn't go for big game after that least I rip my stitches out.
I did get out for waterfowl quite a bit late in the season, mostly on Sunday's after Mass. I'd work on Sundays but for the Commandment to keep the Sabbath holy, which I take seriously, although occasionally I find myself working on that day too.
That's mostly a reflection of my personality.
The trial in question had been from a pre COVID case and it finally rolled around to to. Just before it did, my opponent let me know that his young female partner was leaving, and she did before the trial commenced. I was stunned, really, as she was bailing out of a really good firm and she's a really good lawyer. She was leaving private practice to go in house.
No more trials for her.
Then my younger female partner let me know she was leaving. She stuck with me through the trial.
Finding a lawyer you can comfortably try cases with isn't easy. Frankly, maybe one in ten lawyers who do trial work are really talented at it and of those, maybe only 10% anyone one person meshes with well enough to have that role. But here she definitely did. Her leaving is a big loss to me, just as my opponent's younger counsel leaving was a big loss to him. I don't know, really, if I'll be able to replace her.
For some time I've frankly wondered how she does it, as she's married with young children. When I was first practicing law, the female litigators I'd meet, and they were few, tended to be childless, often by choice. Quite a few women started to come into the law about the time that I did, and by and large if they were married and started to have children, they dropped out of practice. It was just too much of a burden.
This recalls the old phrase, supposedly written by Jean Little, a Canadian author:
A man can work from sun to sun, But a woman's work is never done.
There's a lot of truth to that, quite frankly.
For some reason, even in our "modern" age, the traditional division of labor in which women are burdened with raising children while they're young and keeping the household has never gone away, even when the woman of the house is a professional and its first breadwinner. Perhaps its simply genetic, although we're not supposed to say that. About the only relief I see them getting is from willing grandparents, really, and that too, oddly enough, is a very traditional role for grandparents.
Anyhow, juggling a household and having a professional job that requires long hours and travel. . . that's brutal. I don't blame these women a bit for seeking something else out.
One more example of how our modern "you live to serve this ship" lifestyle makes no sense and makes nobody happy.
You always go to the location of the trial early.
On Sunday, I looked out of my hotel window and saw this:
Horses by an old homestead, still being farmed.
Sigh.
The only thing I got out to do was to go to Mass.
I like everyone to have their own vehicles at a trial. It gives everyone some independence. If I control things, and at my age I do, everyone drives themselves.
This, I'll note, isn't the case with some lawyers, although it is with all the ones I know. Those people must be the really extraverted ones who just think everyone needs lots of sharing time all the time, and therefore they make the whole team prisoners to their automobile.
Hotels have evolved quite a bit in the past thirty years. Thirty years ago I'd look for a hotel with a restaurant and then catch breakfast. Now, most hotels that I stay at are "business hotels" which means that they have a light kitchen with the bare minimum. As breakfast is an afterthought with me anyhow, I’m good to go with that.
I’m not good to go with these monstrosities:
I hate Keurig machines and their stupid one cup at a time system. I always have. I never drink just one cup of coffee bu several, and I don't want to screw around making endless little cups. To make matters worse, it's invariably the case that the person who stocks the rooms leaves you hardly any real coffee, but lots of stuff like Ceylonese Green Herbal Tea or something.
Blech.
We always go down and get a bunch of real coffee for the stupid Keurig machine.
One thing about trials is you get to wear your cool dress shoes that otherwise would look odd in our modern era.
These are saddle oxfords. Saddle oxfords made from buffalo hide, I might add.
I've never worn out, I might note, a pair of dress shoes. I have my black low quarters from basic training still. When I was first practicing, I bought a pair of wingtips made in Ireland, just like the dress shoes my father had when I was young. They've been resoled once, but they're still in good shape.
Indeed, I only have five pairs of dress shoes, one being the aforementioned Army low quarters I very rarely wear. I'm never going to need to buy another pair.
I do need to shine them.
Parking lot view.
One thing about doing a trial in farm country is that it always causes me to think how lucky some people are that they get to farm as a career.
I don't think they appreciate that.
I never think that about trying a case in a big city. I've tried cases twice in Denver and wasn't envious of a soul associated with Denver. The poor judge looked like he'd been rode hard and put away wet in the second one. Denver itself, out on the street, was like a Middle Easter Dysentery Ward in the 30s. The jurors had jobs I wouldn't have wanted.
Grim.
In farm country you see, however, people living the way that people are supposed to live.
Restaurant view. The field below is one I've hunted geese in.
I constantly hear people in agriculture complain about it, and by that I don't mean the weather or something, but about being in agriculture itself. Maybe complaining is just something people do. Pascal noted:
If a soldier or labourer complain of the hardship of his lot, set him to do nothing.
I'm not sure what Pascal was aiming at there, but I think it might have been that people just complain. I also think, however, that a lot of people who were born into agriculture have no idea what other work is like, including working as a professional.
I turned 60 recently as well, which of course is a sort of milestone for many people, although I really didn't pay that much attention to it at the time. It really started to set in, however, when I attended a mule action by video. Everything was too expensive, and I didn't buy anything, but leading up to it, I got a fair amount of opposition from my spouse. Most of it was of the nature of "you don't have time".
I don't have time, which is because I work a work schedule at the office, in this civil litigator line of country, that's very heavy. I work a schedule that's heavier than a lot of lawyers in their 20s and 30s. I have nobody, I guess, but myself to blame for that, sort of. Part of it too has to do with the circumstances during which I came up in the law, and part of it has to do with my own character.
When I was young, before I was a lawyer, I wanted to work outdoors.
It's never really stopped being in a least the back of my mind. The net effect of that is that from the exterior I'm one of the rare trial lawyers who tries a lot of cases. I'm cited to other lawyers that way, and because of the work that comes through my door, it's pretty obvious that my reputation as a trial lawyer is impossible to escape. But part of the reason that I can't escape it is that those immediately around me, including those closest to me, see me that way and can't imagine a world in which I'm not yoked to the plow in this fashion.
Elijah set out, and came upon Elisha, son of Shaphat, as he was plowing with twelve yoke of oxen; he was following the twelfth. Elijah went over to him and threw his cloak on him.
Elisha left the oxen, ran after Elijah, and said, “Please, let me kiss my father and mother good-bye, and I will follow you.” Elijah answered, “Go back! What have I done to you?”
Elisha left him and, taking the yoke of oxen, slaughtered them; he used the plowing equipment for fuel to boil their flesh, and gave it to the people to eat. Then he left and followed Elijah to serve him.
1 Kings, Chapter 19.
I've always thought Elisha's actions baffling. But they are not. He was wanting to set out with Elijah, who had just anointed him his successor. When he left the oxen and spoke to Elijah, Elijah seemed annoyed and told him to go back.
Yoke's were expensive, and so were oxen. By burning his wooden yokes, there was no going back.
If this seems harsh, consider the similar lines from Luke in the New Testament:
As they were proceeding on their journey someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” Jesus answered him, “Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head.”
And to another he said, “Follow me.” But he replied, “[Lord,] let me go first and bury my father.” But he answered him, “Let the dead bury their dead.* But you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”
And another said, “I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say farewell to my family at home.” Jesus said, “No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God.”
In modern American life we imagine we can always go back and most of us live our lives that way. Had Elisha decided, well, I'll plow the field and bring in the crops and take up being a prophet later, he wouldn't have become a prophet. Those setting a hand to the plow, and looking back, don't plow a straight row.
And so back to the main.
There's really no glory in trial work, in spite of what people like to imagine. It's hard work. If you win, your clients view the victory as theirs. If you lose, it's your fault. Everyone wins some and loses some, and moreover, wins some they should lose and lose some they should win. It's so stressful that most civil litigators, truth be known, and this includes both plaintiffs and defendants lawyers, won't try a case. Those who will tend to be a tiny minority, and we try lots of cases, because we will. You get used to a lot of the things about it, but like the way Jock Lewes is portrayed in SAS, Rogue Heroes (stay tuned for a review shortly), some of that is suppression of anxiety rather than its elimination, although anxiety does indeed decrease with time. People who run around claiming they love everything about a trial tend to be weirdos or liars, more often the latter than the former.
And, for what its worth, I've tried a minor case since this one.
This is a fine, sturdy pony standing so stockily for his photograph, and he can make light of his burden of buxom beauty with her heavy can of milk. She cares not for saddle or stirrups, for most of these island people are born to horseback, and her everyday costume amply serves the purpose of a riding-habit for this strapping Viking's daughter, with her long tresses shining in the breeze.
(Original caption, of interest here I wouldn't call this young lady "buxom" or "strapping", but just healthy. This might say something about how standards have changed over time.)
The other day, I posted this in a footnote on a completely different topic.
4. One of the odder examples of this, very widespread, is the change in our relationship with animals.
Our species is one of those which has a symbiotic relationship with other ones. We like to think that this is unique to us, but it isn't. Many other examples of exist of birds, mammals and even fish that live in very close relationships with other species. When this occurred with us, we do not know, but we do know that its ancient. Dogs and modern wolves both evolved from a preexisting wolf species starting some 25,000 to 40,000 years ago, according to the best evidence we currently have. That likely means it was longer ago than that.
Cats, in contrast, self domesticated some 7,000 or so years ago, according to our best estimates.
Cat eating a shellfish, depiction from an Egyptian tomb.
We have a proclivity for both domesticating animals, and accepting self domestication of animals, the truth being that such events are likely part and parcel of each other. Dogs descend from some opportunistic wolves that started hanging around us as we killed things they liked to eat. Cats from wildcats that came on as we're dirty. Both evolved thereafter in ways we like, becoming companions as well as servants. But not just them, horses, pigs, sheep, cattle. . .the list is long.
As we've moved from the natural to the unnatural, we've forgotten that all domestic animals, no matter how cute and cuddly they are, are animals and were originally our servants. And as real children have become less common in WASP culture, the natural instinct to have an infant to take care of, or even adore, has transferred itself upon these unwilling subjects, making them "fur babies".
It's interesting in this context to watch the difference between people who really work with animals, and those who do not. Just recently, for example, our four-year-old nephew stayed the night due to the snow, and was baffled why our hunting dog, who is a type of working dog but very much a companion, stayed the night indoors. The ranch dogs do not. . . ever. The ranch cats, friendly though they are, don't either.
I started this thread back in February, when the entire news on "transgenderism" really hit the fan, so to speak. Since that time there's been the filing of the sorority lawsuit in Laramie, a host of transgender mass shooting, and an absolutely freakish campaign by Budweiser in which a guy trying to channel a girl of the 1960s is sponsoring Bud Light. Anyhow, this thread was to tie into it somehow, but now a lot of time has gone by, and working seven days out of seven, etc., I've really forgotten what my brilliant point here was to be, more or less.
But I'll go on anyhow.
This photograph shows a young woman at work, doing something that counted, and doing it in a way that was very close to nature.
We've gotten to the point where we don't deal with animals as they really are, daily. We also are at the point where a large percentage of the original WASP demographic of the nation (more on this shortly) has lost most of the values it originally had, and replaced them with very weak tea instead. And we've so removed ourselves from a state of nature, that most people don't have a grasp on what nature really is.
It's hard not to know the reality of the world if you live in it.
This past week, the Wyoming Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case in Casper in which the plaintiffs claim they suffered emotional distress as their two pet dogs were caught in snares which they claim were improperly placed on public lands by a trapper. Apparently, in a companion criminal case, the trapper was exonerated. The state land is very close to the city, which is a problem, but it's still state land, and still unincorporated.
Losing dogs is a tragedy, but emotional distress? This has never been allowed in the common law, as the law always held that the law is, basically, for people. If you can claim emotional distress due to the loss of a pet, why not anything?
Now, that sounds cruel, and I understand grieving over the loss of an animal. I've done it myself. That is, in fact, one of the things about owning pets. Normally, you outlive them, and if you are normal, you'll miss them when they die.
It's a part of life.
But emotional distress has been reserved, in the common law, for the loss of humans, based, in the end, for what we feel with the loss of a loved human being. Not an animal, no matter how loved.
And of course, up until recently, there was no such concept as a legally recognized animal for "emotional support". Support they did provide, but the bond was in a naturalistic way, not one for which the law afforded protection.
Have we lost something here?
I think we have, and it's connected with real work and real animals.
We'll explore What's Wrong With The World more in this series of threads, but here's one. Being connected with animals in a real sense, and not in the sanitary removed from nature sense, helped keep us real.
We've lost that.
It's hard to be obsessively focused on yourself, including your reproductive self, if you're around animals as animals, particularly great big ones that can hurt you.
And I'll bet the thought "I'm a girl, but I want to be a boy" didn't much cross the minds of Icelandic pony riding milkmaids, Oklahoman girl cowpunchers, or Los Angeles mounted mail carriers.
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