Agrarian of the Week: The Victory Garden.

The television show, not the World War Two institution from which it takes its name.

Somewhat quirky and odd, the long-running show commenced in 1979 and was hosted by the late James Underwood Crockett originally.  I recall it from the Roger Swain era, however, which apparently from the mid 1980s to 2002, which surprises me as I recall watching it with my father, and not thereafter.  He died in the early 1990s.  Swain, with a huge red beard and suspenders was ahead of his time in the hipster movement, held a PhD in biology, so he knew his stuff.  It apparently ceased production in 2010.

One interesting thing I'll note is the name, The Victory Garden, which takes its name from the gardens people were urged to plant in World War One and World War Two to counter food shortages.  While both wars were obviously horrific, this aspect of the home front remains fondly remembered, and therefore the name is familiar.

Canadian World War One Victory Garden poster.

Going Feral: Subsistance Hunter/Fisherman of the Week: Dick Proenneke

Going Feral: Subsistance Hunter/Fisherman of the Week: Dick Pr...: 

Subsistance Hunter/Fisherman of the Week: Dick Proenneke

Dick Proenneke may be the ultimate modern subsistence hunter and fisherman in so far as the Western World is concerned.

Proenneke was born in Iowa in 1916.  His father was sort of a jack of all trades laborer, which is and was common to rural areas.  His father was also a veteran of World War One.  Dick followed in his father's footsteps prior to World War Two, leaving high school before graduation, something extremely common in that era (less than 50% of males graduated from high school prior to World War Two  He joined the Navy in World War Two and took up hiking around San Francisco while recovering from rheumatic fever contracted in the service.  Having the disease was life altering for him, as he became focused on his health.  He received a medical discharge from the Navy in 1945.

After the war he became a diesel mechanic, but his love of nature caused him to move to Oregon to work on a sheep ranch, and then to Shuyark Island, Alaska, in 1950.  From 1950 to 1968 he worked for a variety of employers, including the Navy and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.  He moved to the wilderness in 1968, at age 52, the year that in many ways gave us the Post Post World War Two World we are now seeing collapse.  He lived there, as a single man, until 1999, when old age forced him out of the woods and to his brother's home in California.  He died in there in 2003, at age 86.  His cabin now belongs to the Park Service.

Proenneke loved photography and left an extensive filmed record of his life in Alaska.

There's a lot that can be gleaned from his life, some of which would probably be unwarranted, as every person's life is their own.  Having noted that, however, it should be noted that Proenneke is not the only person to live in this manner in Alaska's back wood, including up to the present.  So he's not fully unique, but rather his high intelligence and filmed record has made him known.

It's also notable, fwiw, that he was a single man.  Basically, if looked at carefully, his retreat to the woods came in his retirement, as he had very low expenses up until 1968, and had worked for the government for many years.  He never married, so he never had a family or responsibilities of that type.  Many of the men who live in wild Alaska have married into native families, so their circumstances are different.

Probably every young man who loves the outdoors has contemplated doing something like what Proenneke actually did, while omitted the decades of skilled labor as a single man that came before it.  And in reality, Proenneke, had lived over half his life as a working man with strong outdoor interests, rather than in the wilderness.  People really aren't meant to live the way he lived, in extreme isolation, save for a few.

Related Threads:

Dick Proenneke in Alone in the Wilderness

Dick Proenneke in Alone in the Wilderness part II

Lex Anteinternet: Two random items. Andy Griffith and Taylor Swift

Lex Anteinternet: Two random items. Andy Griffith and Taylor Swift: 

Two random items. Andy Griffith and Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift

On "X", fka "Twitter" a man who was the father to a large family of daughters (it was either 7 or 9), and who is very conservative, posted an item expressing relief for Taylor Swift.

His points were really good.

Populist right commentators are all up in arms about Swift right now, for reasons that are darned near impossible to discern.  It seems to stem from her expressing support for Democratic candidates in the past, including Joe Biden in 2016.  Well, guess what, she has a right to do that.  You have a right to ignore it. 

She also expressed support for abortion being legal.  I feel it should be illegal.  That doesn't mean she's part of a double secret left wing conspiracy.

But, and here's the thing, there are real reasons to admire her, or at least her presentation, and the father in question pointed it out.  He'd endured taking his daughters to Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, "Lady Gaga" etc., and found them disturbing.

Indeed, they are.

Miley Cyrus went from a child actress to being a freakish figure posed nude on a ball, looking like she was a meth addict who was working in a strip club.  Ariana Grande has at least one song that's out right graphic about illicit sex.  Lady Gaga has made a career out of being freakish, until she couldn't any longer, and like Madonna is another woman who was the product of Catholic Schools who took to songs that are abhorrent in terms of Christian, let alone Catholic, morals.

Swift, in contrast, can only be criticized a bit for dressing semi provocatively on stage, but only somewhat so. Off-stage, she's always very modestly dressed.  Indeed, she's a throwback, with her ruby red lipstick and classic nearly 1940s appearance.

And in terms of relationships, it's noted that she's dating a football player.

Now, we don't know what their private lives are like, but they're admirably keeping them private.  It's hard to know what Swift's views are on most issues.  And we really don't need to.  But in their visible relationship, made visible to us only because of media fascination, they're quite proper.  As the poster noted, the football star is "courting" her.

It's not that there's nothing to see here.  There's nothing to see here which any conservative in their right mind wouldn't have an absolute freak out about.  They're behaving exactly the way in public that supposedly Christian conservatives want dating couples to do.  No piercings, no weird tattoos, no scanty clothing.

Which would all suggest all the angst is about something else, and what that is probably about is the secret knowledge that huge numbers of real conservatives can't stand Donald Trump and won't vote for him.

The Andy Griffith Show

I was at lunch two days ago at a local Chinese restaurant, and across the way an all adult family was discussing the plot of the prior night's Andy Griffith Show rerun.  It struck me that that may not have happened since the 1960s.

It's interesting. 

The Andy Griffith Show went off the air before the Great Rural Purge in Television, but not my much.  It ran from 1960 to 1968.  It was consistently focused on the rural South, and it felt like it depicted the 1950s, which it never did, save for the fact that what we think of as the 60s really started in about 1955 and ran to about 1964.  Indeed, while the show was in tune with the times in 1960, it really wasn't in 1968.

But that in tune with the times is what strikes me here.  The family was speaking of it as if it was a currently running show, not like it was something from 60 years ago.  That suggests that in some ways people have groped their way back in the dark to idealizing the world as it was depicted then, rural, lower middle class, devoid of an obsession with sex (although it does show up subtly in the show from time to time), and divorce a rarity.

Now, the world wasn't prefect in 1960 by any means.  But the show didn't pretend to depict a perfect world, only one that was sort of a mirror on the world view of its watchers.  To some degree, that world view had returned.

Epilog

The Taylor Swift story also appears on the most recent entries for City Father and Uncle Mike's Musings, both of which are linked in on this site.

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 54th Edition. The swift and the not so swift edition.

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 54th Edition. The sw...: T

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 54th Edition. The swift and the not so swift edition.

• Twitter has banned searches for Taylor Swift.

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.

Last Prior Edition:

The Lost Cause and the Arlington Confederate Monument. Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 53d Edition.

Agrarian of the Week: Diocletian

Diocletian (Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus) was Emperor of Rome from 284 to 305, brining in the system in which the Empire was split in half and ruled in two separate administrations.  In that capacity, he was the Emperor from 284 to 286 and Emperor in the Eastern half of the Empire, the more important part, from 286 to 305.

There are definitely things not to like about Diocletian, but there are admirable things as well, chief among them being that he retired, something unusual for Roman Emperors, and went back to his villa to farm.

We've included him for that reason.

He famously stated, when being asked to return to power to resolve conflicts that had arisen follwoing his retirement:

If you could show the cabbage that I planted with my own hands to your emperor, he definitely wouldn't dare suggest that I replace the peace and happiness of this place with the storms of a never-satisfied greed.

If only more in power had those thoughts. 

Going Feral: Subsistence Hunter of the Week: Jack O'Connor

Going Feral: Subsistence Hunter of the Week: Jack O'Connor: 

Subsistence Hunter of the Week: Jack O'Connor

Arizona born writer/professor/big game hunter Jack O'Connor was, in my opinion, the best firearms author the country has ever produced, and certainly the best one on the topic of North American big game rifles.

Born in Arizona in 1902, he was partially raised by a bird hunting maternal grandfather, due to his parent's divorce when he was five years old, which influenced him heavily.  His paternal grandfather was a judge who also ranched, which also influenced him a great deal.  His mother became a university professor after that, at the University of Arizona, which he ultimately would as well.  As a very young man, he'd briefly worked as a market hunter for an uncle's saw mill.

O'Connor served in the military twice.  He joined the Army at age 15 during World War One, but was discharged due to tuberculosis.  He later joined the Navy in 1919, serving as a hospital corpsman until discharged in 1921.

He took to big game early on.  By profession, he was a writer, as noted first being a college professor.  He was the first journalism professor at the University of Arizona, a position he left to write in sporting journals full time in 1945.  In that role, he became famously associated with the .270 Winchester and Mountain Sheep hunting.  Not too surprisingly, he moved to Idaho in 1948, where sheep are indigenous, although he stated that this was in part as he felt Arizona had become overpopulated following World War Two.

While associated particularly with sheep, O'Connor was the class western North American hunter, and hunted every big game animal native to the region, frequently with his wife.  He was a noted conservationist as well.

Agrarian of the Week, Thomas Jefferson.

 

Thomas Jefferson is on that cast of characters that's gone from deeply admired as a hero to treated as a goat in later years, the latter due to his problematic relationship with slavery, that latter being uniquely personally problematic in his case.

Jefferson was an agrarian, but he was not a member of the agrarian class.  Indeed, as a planter, his class was in some ways in opposition to the yeomanry.  But he saw them as the foundation for the republic and feared the day when that would cease to be the case, an act which led to his support for acquiring Louisiana, which he inaccurately believed would give the country 1,000 years breathing room.  His warnings once seemed too dire, but now seem to be rapidly coming into fruition.

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Monday at the Bar: The best of ...

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Monday at the Bar: The best of ...:

Lex Anteinternet: Monday at the Bar: The best of both worlds: Rodeo...

From Opal Harkin's Instagram. The sentiments on the mortaboard are quite correct.  FWIW, it's a little unusual to see mortorboard for a law school graduation, more typical is a certain sort of old style beret.

Earlier this week, I ran this post:

Lex Anteinternet: Monday at the Bar: The best of both worlds: Rodeo...:   

Monday at the Bar: The best of both worlds: Rodeo and law live side by side in the life of CNFR competitor

 

The best of both worlds: Rodeo and law live side by side in the life of CNFR competitor

When I did so, I did it without commentary.

Didn't have the time to comment.

Opal Harkins (what a delightful old school name), has had an impressive rodeo career, and a pretty impressive academic one as well.  Included in that academic career, she's just completed attending law school.   That's what made me curious, as it's really unusual.

It would not, quite frankly, be easy to go to law school and be on a rodeo team, although one of the members of my law school class was a place kicker (or whatever the kicker on a football team is called) for one year on the UW football team, and one of the members of my father's dental school class was also a rodeo team member for his university, and a very accomplished one at that.  The latter, I'd note, would be even more difficult than going to law school and being on a rodeo team.

So, it's possible.

Opal Harkins had a long association with rodeo, and did throughout her academic career.  She was, for example, the National High School Rodeo Queen for 2016-17, which I only know due to this story.  Oddly enough, she was sort of homeschooled, although through what I'd call remote schooling for high school students, which means she studied from home, but through an online program run through a Montana university, but had home school aspects.  Indeed, when I read it I thought it was probably because she came from a remote ranch, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

The five Harkins siblings are memorable for their talents alone – but their unique names contribute to their trademark as well. The three oldest siblings are boys: Odis, Othniel and Ogden, followed by two girls: Ouana and Opal.

“The story is that in my mom’s family, their names all start with “Sh” and my dad’s brothers and sister all start with “J,” says Harkins. “Odis was named after my great-grandpa, and after that, they had to keep the tradition up and find
“O” names for all the rest of us.”

Like the rest of her siblings, Harkins was homeschooled until 7th grade, when she had the choice to attend public school, which she did for a year. “My parents decided to homeschool all of us so they could be in control of what we were being taught,” says Harkins. “They wanted to be the main influence in our life and didn’t want it to be teachers or other students.” They learned through a Christian curriculum, including taking Bible classes since they were young.

The homeschool flexibility worked perfectly for a family that loved to rodeo together.

“We had schedules when we were all homeschooled together, we would work ahead on cold days and then ride all day on warm ones,” she says.

Now, technically a junior in high school, Harkins is again homeschooling and also taking college courses through the Montana State University – Billings High School Connections program. When she graduates high school, she will also have an associate’s degree in English.

“Being homeschooled is the reason why I am where I am in college right now,” she says. “It taught me to be self-motivated, and being able to take high school classes when I was in 8th grade is the reason why I was able to start college my freshman year of high school.”

Following graduating from that, she went on to university and then on to law school, staying in rodeo the the entire time.  She obtained a big following in her high school years, with one print commentary calling her "a natural doe-eyed beauty", something I wouldn't have expected to see in print following the 1940s.

There's a number of Harkins who are lawyers in Billings, and she's likely (well. . .is) the daughter of one of them.  So she's basically following in her father's footsteps.  I wonder, in fact, if she'll hang her shingle there.

There are a lot of negative things posted here about the practice of law, without a doubt, including some comments about how lawyers themselves, surrendering their professionalism to their wallets, and law schools, having churned out vast numbers of lawyers in the 60s and 70s, have caused the profession not to be that.

And those comments are deserved.  

A former president of the Wyoming State Bar had a "proud to be a Wyoming lawyer" campaign at one time.  Well, that was before the UBE meant that a lot of those lawyers never darkened Wyoming's border.  Plenty of "Wyoming lawyers" today are Colorado lawyers, or Utah lawyers, or Texas lawyers, and that's for the money.

What else would it be for?

But in fairness, law has and still does provide a means for a lot of rural people to make an in town living. And a lot depends on the type of law a person does.  Litigation is one thing, estate planning quite another.  Domestic relations, something else.  As a child of a lawyer, perhaps she knows which direction she's headed.  A lot of new law school grads really don't.

One of the things noted in the article was this:

One day, she’ll have a career that will allow her to continue rodeoing, she’ll be able to afford her own nice trailer and nice horses.

I'm inclined to say, don't bet on it.  And don't bet on having the time to be able to enjoy, well, pretty much anything of that type.  But maybe I'll be wrong, and indeed lots of lawyers I know manage to do just that.  And that says something about matching a career to a personality, something there is very little effort to do, at least by my observation, for law students.  

Well, anyhow, remarkable story.

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Monday, March 15, 1943 A Wyomin...

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Monday, March 15, 1943 A Wyomin...: 

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, March 15, 1943 A Wyoming Federal Reservat...hmmm. . .

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, March 15, 1943 A Wyoming Federal Reservat...: Today In Wyoming's History: March 15: 1943  Franklin Roosevelt used executive authority to proclaim 221,000 acres as the Jackson Hole National Monument, the predecessor to today's Grand Teton National Park.  Governor Hunt threatened to use the Highway Patrol to prevent Federal authority on its grounds.  Congress, for its part, refused to appropriate money for the monument. 

His principled stance on McCarthyism aside, it's just this sort of thing that makes it so you can't really be too sorry that the Legislature didn't honor Hunt this session.

Bill Gates is the nation's largest farmland owner. . . which is not good news.

 Gates owns 242,000 acres of farmland.

This is not to say that Bill Gates is a bad guy.  

I know very little about Gates personally, but I don't think he's a bad guy by any means. Quite the contrary.  Gates is a quietly religious man who, along with his wife, is a dedicated Catholic.*  He donates heavily to very serious causes.  He's such a philanthropist and, along with Warren Buffet, on a certain edge of things, that he's feared by certain sections of the alt right, that have cooked up, amongst other things, the wild theory that he's responsible for the Coronavirus pandemic in an effort to inject people with microchips and control them through cell towers, which is frankly an absurdly stupid conspiracy theory.

So I'm not saying Gates is a bad guy.

Actually, he seems to be a pretty good guy, to the extent I know anything about him, which admittedly isn't all that much as I don't really find the lives of the famous to be all that interesting.

Rather, what I am saying is that a nation of over 300,000,000 whose economics are heavily scaled towards the wealthy in some ways deprives opportunities to entry farmers, and to those who would become real farmers, by treating land as a freely obtainable resource for people who don't actually use it for their own personal principal income.

Now, again, I can't blame Gates.  He didn't create the system, he's simply living it. And to his credit, his farm land is farmed, not retired.  

But a nation where most people can't enter the most basic and fundamental livelihood has something existentially wrong with it.  That's happened to many nations in the past, and it's always been a fundamental flaw when it occurs.

*In the idiotic way it so often does in American journalism, this has caused one noted journal to comment that Gates departs from his Catholic faith as he "follows science", apparently unaware that Catholics are big believer in science and that most Christian denomination do not hold positions antithetical to science.