Lex Anteinternet: Carpetbaggers and Becoming Native To This Place.

Lex Anteinternet: Carpetbaggers and Becoming Native To Ths Place.:  

Carpetbaggers and Becoming Native To This Place.

 

His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them - neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them - and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.

Wendell Berry, A Native Hill.

From the Cowboy State Daily:

Now Other People Are “Pissed” At The “We The People Are Pissed” Billboard On I-80 in Wyoming

Probably the most revealing thing in the article:

The Kahlers moved to Wyoming from Colorado about three years ago. Jeanette Kahler said they moved to Wyoming for the state’s “conservative values.”

In other words, they're carpetbaggers.

Wyoming has always had a very high transient population.  Right from the onset, a lot of the people we associate with the state, actually weren't from here, and more significantly weren't from the region.  Francis E. Warren, for example, the famous early Senator, wasn't.  Joseph M. Carey wasn't.  A person might note that they arrived sufficiently early that they hardly could have been, but this carries on to this very day.  Sen. John Barrasso is a Pennsylvanian.  Secretary of State Chuck Gray is a Californian.

This does matter, as you can't really ever be a native of the Northern Plains or the Plains if you weren't born and raised here.  You might be able to convince yourself, and buy a big hat like Foster Freiss, but you aren't from here and more importantly aren't of here.  If you came from Montana, or Nebraska, or rural Colorado, that's different.  Or if you came in your early years, before you were out of school.  

But earlier arrivals did try.  They appreciated what they found, took the effort to grasp what it was, and sought to become native to this place.

The recent arrivals don't.  They brought their homes and their attitudes with them.

They were fooling themselves that they were "Wyoming" anything.

Or were.

Recently, however, something else has been going on.  Just as the Plains were invaded by European Americans in the 18th and 19th Centuries, Wyoming is enduring it again with an invasion of Southerners, Rust Belt denizens, and Californians, who image they have Wyoming's values while destroying them.  One prominent Freedom Caucuser is really an Illinoisan with values so different from the native ones it's amazing she was elected, but then her district elected Chuck Gray as well, whose only connection with Wyoming is thin.  They do represent, however, the values of recent immigrants.

Whether you like it or not, Wyomingites have not traditionally been hostile to the Federal Government, and we knew we depended upon it.  Indeed, while one Wyoming politician may emphasize a narrative of being a fourth generation Wyomingite, and is, whose agricultural family pulled themselves up from the mule ears on their cowboy boots, and they did work hard, we can't get around the fact that the state was founded by the Federal Government which sent the Army in to kill or corral the original inhabitants and then gave a lot of the land away on a government assistance program.  

Wyoming was formed, in part, by welfare.

The government helped bring in the railroads, helped support agriculture, built the roads, kept soldiers and later airmen and their paychecks at various places, funded the airports, and helped make leasing oil rights cheap so that they could be exploited.

No real Wyomingite hates the government, no matter how much they may pretend they do.

Populist do, as they're ignorant.

Wyoming's cultural ethos was, traditionally, "I don't care what the @#$#$ you do, as long as you leave me alone".  The fables about Matthew Shepherd aside, people didn't really care much about what you did behind closed doors, but expected that you wouldn't try to force acceptance of it at a societal level.  Wyoming was, and remains, for good or ill the least religious state in the United States.  You could always find some devout members of various Protestant faiths, and devout and observant Catholics and Mormons have always been here. But the rise of the Protestant Evangelical churches is wholly new, and come in with Southerners.  When I was growing up, a good friend of mine was a Baptist, the only one I knew, as the church was close to his house (now he's a Lutheran).  I knew one of my friends was Lutheran, and there were some Mormon kids in school.  There was one Jehovah's Witness.  In junior high, one of my friends was sort of kind of Episcopalian, and I knew the son of the Orthodox Priest.  By high school I knew the daughter of the Methodist minister.  But outside of Mormon kids and Catholic kids, the religion of my colleagues was often a mystery.

I'm not saying the unchurched nature of the state was a good thing, but I am saying that by and large there was a dedicated effort to educate children and tolerance was a widely held value.  It was a tolerance, as noted, that required people to keep their deviations from a societal norm to themselves.  People who cheated on spouses, who were homosexuals, or any other number of things could carry on doing it, but not if they were going to demand you accepted it.

And frankly, that was a better way to approach things.

Now, that's being fought over.

The Freedom Caucus group might as well have Sweet Home Alabama as their theme song, and that's not a good thing.

Labels: 2020s, Blog Mirror, Carpetbaggers, Catholic, Culture, Education, Francis Warren, Government, Joseph M. Carey, Mormon, Music, Politics, Populism, Protestant, religion, Wendell Berry, Wyoming

Lex Anteinternet: Bud Light, controversy, and why are you drinking that stuff anyway?

Lex Anteinternet: Bud Light, controversy, and why are you drinking t...: 

Bud Light, controversy, and why are you drinking that stuff anyway?

Real beer, made locally.

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?