The Good Old Days.

Among the blogs linked in to our companion blog Lex Anteinternet is the blog of the Adam Smith Institute.

I'll confess when I linked it in, I'd run across it and had confused it with another entity, perhaps The Philadelphia Society.  No matter, this British institution celebrates the thinking of Scottish economist Adam Smith, a person whom free marketers herald, and with good reason.

In terms of economics, I'm a distributist, which puts me in a group of about five people or so, all of whom have to spend endless time, if the topic comes up, just trying to explain what distributism is.  Distributism, a species of free market economics, hasn't been popular in the main since the Second World War, and to compound the problem of its obscurity, its not only saddled with an unfortunate name, but it attracts people who are sometimes on fringe of wacky, or not outright wacky.  For example, as its modern founders were Catholics (Chesterton and Belloc), and English, it'll attract very conservative  Catholics who have strayed into thinking they are monarchists.  As Belloc had an absurdly romantic concept of the Middle Ages, and as some Belloc fans think everything he said must be accepted without analysis, perhaps there was some inevitability to that, and to a completely inaccurate view of what Medieval economics were like (and I do mean completely inaccurate).

Anyhow, the Adam Smith Society posts some really thought provoking items, and todays' entry is not exception.

THE GOOD OLD DAYS ARE RIGHT NOW - AND DON'T FORGET IT

I'll admit, I don't really fully agree with what the headline relates, but in some significant ways, this is really correct.  They correctly note, for example:

We’re richer, live longer lives, have more choices, are, in general, just the generation of our species living highest upon the hog. At levels quite literally beyond the dreams or imagination of those significantly before us.

They go on to honestly note, however:

The good old days are now.

However, happier is more complex, one correspondent grasping this point:

People had lower expectations and were less bombarded with images of all the other lives they could be aspiring to.

The nub here is that second important lesson of economics, there are always opportunity costs. The true price of something is what is given up to get it. If we have more choices then the price of gaining any one of them is giving up many more of those alternatives.

Here's an interesting item on this:

This is why all those surveys showing that female - self-reported - happiness has been declining to standard male levels over recent decades. That wholly righteous economic and social liberation of women has led to greater choice and thus higher opportunity costs. As women gain those same choices as men therefore happiness rates converge.

The article doesn't really draw any conclusions, save for one, these are the "good old days".  And it makes some pretty solid arguments.

All of this is in reply to a post in The Guardian, which posed the question of "when", or "what" were the good old days. ^[1].   It wanted reader comments on the same.

The Guardian is a notoriously left wing newspaper with frequently very radical ideas.  It's gained global circulation in the age of the Internet, and it now is fairly widely read in the US, helped in part by the fact that it lacks a "pay wall", unlike the Washington Post or New York Times.  My point here isn't to criticize those latter papers, but to simply note that's how The Guardian is now read by the same folks in rural Wyoming who read the NYT.  Indeed, perhaps they're more like to read The Guardian, even though its radically "green" position is likely to make some folks pretty upset locally and they are, in my view, often way off in left field.^[2]. 

Anyhow, the Adam Smith Society likely is correct that in all sorts of substantial ways, we're in the good old days right now.  But it is interesting that female happiness is declining.  And what its declining to is the rate of male unhappiness.

A couple of years we reported on the finding that workplace discontent is way up over 50% in the United States. That makes it seem like Joanna might be right in her comment to Peter in Office Space that "everyone hates their job", but if that's true, it's really distressing, to say the least.

The Guardian item brought a lot of replies, and its clear that a lot of people really do look back on a prior era, material advances not withstanding, as happier than the current one.  Some people cited the 1950s, which seems to often hold this status in people's recollections, in spite of the really scary Cold War, the hot Korean War, and for the British the falling apart of the British Empire all being a feature of it.  One person commented that it was the 1970s, which wouldn't occur to me, as I lived through the 70s and have a pretty good recollection of it.

Indeed, there's a good case to be made that "the good old days" were the days in which you were young and without burdens, as your parents took care of them, or some past era you didn't experience, reflected through a mirror, inaccurately, with the bad things filtered out.  There are, for example, people who are real fans of the 1940s, and the 1940s were generally horrific on the main.  The British often look fondly back at the 40s, I'd note, as, at least in modern times, it really was "their finest hour."  Be that as it may, if you were on a beach at Dunkirk hoping not to become a casualty or a German prisoner of war, it would have been unlikely to be seen as a nifty time, at the time.

But I digress.

Focusing on the rising level of female discontent, the Adam Smith Institute correctly notes the following, in my view.

There are those who take this to mean that society should regress, to where those opportunity costs are lower and therefore we would be happier. The correct answer to which is that 50% child mortality rates did not in fact make people happier.

We’ll take the vague unease of having so many choices over parents having to bury half their children, thank you very much, we really do think we’re all truly happier this way around.

That's pretty hard to disagree with.

What that comment means is that the calls by those who would really return truly to the past are misguided due to the horrors of the past.  One of those was high infant, and female, mortality.

Both of those factors are well known but easily forgotten in romantic recollections of the past.  Indeed, its interesting to see how this has evolved over time.

To set things in a bit of context, if we went back, let's say, to the 1700s, we'd find that the normal state for men and women to live in was, not surprisingly, marriage.  No matter what moderns may like to believe, this is the normal state and for a society on thinner resources, it was actually the only one really safe if people were to yield to their reproductive instincts in any fashion.  This is not a surprise.

What might be a surprise, however, is that remarriage by males was extremely common at the time due to a high female mortality rate mostly associated with childbirth.  I.e., lots of women died in childbirth and the men usually went on to remarry.  It must of hung like a cloud over pregnant women like nothing else.

Additionally, infant mortality was really high.  Indeed, a lot of the illusion that we now live longer is based on the massive reduction in the deaths of infants and young children.  Take those figures out, and average lifespans aren't much different than they are now.  Additionally subtract those figures for women who died in childbirth and this is even more the case.

Not too many women in developed countries now die in childbirth and infant mortality is also way down.  We know this intellectually, but we have a hard time grasping it in real terms.  I don't know of a single person, personally, who has died in childbirth.  I know of couples that have lost infants in childbirth, but not many.

So the Adam Smith blogger certainly has a point.

But it also begs a point.  If being free from the high risks of death in childbirth and the risk of losing an infant aren't making women happier, why is that.

That gets back to what we've noted before.  People aren't really meant to live this way.  I.e, in an industrial society.

And that gets back to the overall happiness rate.

We noted the other day that what the Industrial Revolution achieved, in social terms, was to take people off the land and into factories and work places, but not all at once and not by gender all at once.  It took men first, due to their physical build in part but also in part as it was easier to spare them from the home.  I.e., you can take a young man with a child and send him down a coal mine without the child, but you really can't send a nursing young woman down the coal mine without the kid.  

We're so used to the concept of men being out of the home and away from their families that it not only seems the norm, it became celebrated as the social norm for a long time.  However, as we've also noted here in the past, the development of domestic machinery changed that for women over time and their labor became surplus to the home.  When that happened, they were redeployed in the economy in the workplace. That went from a more or less temporary matter in a lot of households to a necessary one over time and now the economy demands it.  It demands it so much, in fact, that a recent (and maybe still ongoing) effort in the U.S. Congress was to subsidize the workplace by government funding for daycares.  People are so used to this concept by now that they don't recognize that for what it is, which is a pure subsidy for employers so that women with children have no excuse but to go to work.

Starting to resist that are women themselves.  We just dealt with that more recently here:

A lamentation. The modern world.*

That post contained this item from a young woman in her early twenties from Twitter:

Kay (momma of two)

@jacelala

·

May 6

I don’t want to work. I want to be home with my baby and I can’t afford it. I hate that. I hate it so much.

I don't mean to keep belaboring this point, and this does all recall, kind of, Thomas Wolfe's comment that "you can't go home again and stay there". That seems to be sort of true, but then what Chesterton stated, and which is featured on the footer of this blog, about clocks being human contrivances and being capable of being set back is also completely true.  What we seem to have achieved, however, is to create a system that makes us materially much wealthier but its contributing to some degree to our misery.

Why is that?

Well, it might be that a major deep seated reason for all of these changes was to secure us from the wolf at the door, but it was never meant, psychologically, to take that door out of the field.    In other words, maybe we burned down the farm, in order to save it.

And we could always rebuild that.

Footnotes.

1.  My favorite reply to the question was this one:

I remember a time when nostalgia was a thing of the past.
I'll get my hat...

2.  The Guardian aids itself in being taken seriously, I'd note, by not prominently featuring Cheesecake like so many other British newspapers.

Lex Anteinternet: Friday July 8, 1921. Whiskey in some jars but not...

Lex Anteinternet: Friday July 8, 1921. Whiskey in some jars but not...: 

Friday July 8, 1921. Whiskey in some jars but not others. End of the Anglo Irish War, Prohibition, and the formation of Land o Lakes.

On this day in 1921 the Irish Republicans and the British government agreed to a truce in order to commence discussions concerning Irish independence.  The truce was to go into effect on July 11.

De Valera's note to David Lloyd George at the conclusion of the meetings read:

Sir, The desire you express on the part of the British Government to end the centuries of conflict between the peoples of these two islands, and to establish relations of neighbourly harmony, is the genuine desire of the people of Ireland. 

I have consulted with my colleagues and secured the views of the representatives of the minority of our Nation in regard to the invitation you have sent me. 

In reply, I desire to say that I am ready to meet and discuss with you on what bases such a Conference as that proposed can reasonably hope to achieve the object desired. 

I am, Sir, Faithfully yours, Eamon de Valera

With this, a major mental impasse had been reached in the conflict with the British all but agreeing to some form of Irish independence.

Land o Lakes agricultural co op was formed.  We noted their formation date, and the controversy surrounding their former promotional image, here:

Exit Mia.

On July 8, 1921, Minnesota Cooperative Creameries Association, a dairy cooperative, formed for the purpose of marketing their products.  They didn't like the name, however, and held a contest that ended up selecting a submission made in 1926, that being Land O Lakes, noting the nature of Minnesota itself, although we don't associate lakes much with dairy.    In 1926 the coop received a painting of an Indian woman holding a carton of their butter, looking forward at the viewer, with lakes and forests in the background.  They liked it so much they adopted it as their label and while they had it stylized by Jess Betlach, an illustrator, the image itself remained remarkably consistent with the original design, which says something as illustrations by Betlach sometimes approached the cheesecake level and depictions of Indian women in the period often strayed into depictions of European American models instead of real Indian women.

For reasons unknown to me, the depiction of the young Indian women acquired the nickname "Mia" over time.

And now she's been removed from the scene, quite literally.

In 1928 the Land O Lakes dairy cooperative hired an advertising agency to come up with a logo for them. The logo that was produced featured an Indian woman kneeling in front of a lake scene, with forests surrounding the lake, and holding a box of Land O Lakes butter in a fashion that basically depicted the woman offering it to the viewer.  From time to time Land O Lakes actually changed the logo on a temporary basis, but it always featured Mia, but not always in the same pose.  On at least one occasion she was shown in profile near a lake and seemingly working (churning) something in a pot.  On another, she was rowing a canoe.

Frederic Remington nocturn, The Luckless Hunter.  This is a fairly realistic depiction of a native hunter in winter, on the typically small range horse of the type actually in use on the Northern Plains.

The adoption of Indian depictions and cultural items as symbols in European American culture goes a long ways back, so Land O Lakes adopting the logo in 1928 was hardly a novelty.  In ways that we can hardly grasp now, European American culture began to admire and adopt Indian symbols and depictions even while the armed struggle between the native peoples and European Americans was still going on.  Frontiers men dating back all the way to the 18th Century adopted items of native clothing, which may be credited to its utility as much as anything else.  In 1826, however, a tribe was romantically treated in Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, which virtually defined the "noble" image of the Indian even as the "savage" image simultaneously kept on keeping on.  The popular genre of Western art continued to do the same in the last half of the 19th Century, and often by the same artists (with Russel being an exception, as he always painted natives sympathetically, and Shreyvogel being the counter exception, as always did the opposite).  Cities and towns provided an example of this as their European American settlers used Indian geographic names from fairly early on, after the original bunch of European place names and honorifics ceased to become the absolute rule, with some western towns, such as Cheyenne, being named after Indian tribes that were literally being displaced as the naming occured.

William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody and Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake, i.e., Sitting Bull, in 1885, the year he joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.  Sitting Bull received $50.00 per week, as sum that's equivalent to $1,423.00 in current U.S. Dollars.  He worked for the show for four months, during which time he made money on the side charging for autographs.  This came only nine years after he was present at Little Big Horn and only five years before his death at the hands of Indian Police at age 59, just two weeks before Wounded Knee.

The entire cultural habit took on a new form, however, in the late 19th Century, just as the Frontier closed. Oddly, the blood was hardly frozen at Wounded Knee when a highly romanticized depiction of American Indians began.  Starting perhaps even before the last major bloodletting of the Frontier had occurred, it arguably began with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, which employed Indian warriors who had only lately been engaged in combat with the United States.

The principal Indian performers, if we wish to consider them that, were men, as were most of the performers.  But women had a role in Wild West shows as well,  as did children.  As Cody was not unsympathetic to Indians in general, his portrayals of Indian women and children were not likely to have been too excessive, but this is not true of all wild west shows of the era, some of which grossly exaggerated female Indian dress or which dressed them down for exploitative reasons.

Nonetheless, as this occurred, a real romantic view of Plains Indians arose and white performers affected Indian dress or exaggerated Indian dress and an entire romanticization of a people who were still very much alive and not living in the best of circumstances oddly took off.  White performers made the circuit performing as romantic Indian couples and an adopted romanticized Indian culture seeped into the general American culture in various ways, including in the form of depictions and ritual.

Camp Fire Girls in 1917.  The first half of the 20th Century saw the rise of the scouting movment and in the English speaking world this spread to girls after it has become very successful with boys.  The Boy Scout movement had military scouting and hence military men as the model for its idealized muscular Christianity movement, but no such equivalent existed for girls.  In the US this came to be compensated for, however, by the adoption of the Indian woman as the model, as she was outdoorsy and rugged by default.

This saw its expression in numerous different ways, including in its incorporation into the Boy Scout inspired female scouting organizations and in popular "Indian maiden" literature.  But it also saw the development of the use of depictions of Indians in advertising and popular culture.

Out of uniform Girl Scouts in 1912 in clothing and hair styles that were inspired by presumed native female dress.

In 1901 one of the legendary American motorcycle companies simply named itself "Indian", for example.  Savage Firearms named itself that in 1894, with there being no intent to demean Indians but rather to name itself after Indian warriors.  Cleveland called its baseball team the "Indians".  The NFL being a late comer to American professional sports, the Washington football franchise didn't get around to naming itself the "Redskins" until 1932 in contrast.

The psychology behind this cultural adaption is an interesting one, with a conquering people doing the rare thing of partially co-opting the identify of the conquered people, even as those people remained in a period of trying to adopt to the constantly changing policy of the post frontier American West.  Celebrated in their pre conquest state, and subject to any number of experiments in their day to day lives, it was as if there were two different groups of people being dealt with, the theoretical and the real, with the real not doing so well with the treatment they were receiving.  Indeed, that's still the case.

Following World War Two this began to be reconsidered, with that reconsideration really setting in during the 1970s.  Books and films, and films based on books, that reflected this reconsideration became widely considered. Thomas Berger's brilliant Little Big Man remains in its brilliant and accurate reflection of Plains Indian culture what True Grit is to the culture of the southern American European American West.  Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee destroyed any remaining claim the Army had to the event being a battle definitively.  The 1973 American Indian Movement occupation of Wounded Knee brought the whole thing into sharp focus.  Kids who had gone to school their entire lives with Big Chief writing tablets would finish the decade out with Son Of Big Chief, who looked a lot more like he'd been with AIM at Wounded Knee or maybe even at Woodstock.

American Indian Movement flag.

As this occured, people questioned the old symbols and depictions. But it wasn't really until the late 1990s that the commercial and popular ones began to go.

Slowly, and sometimes controversially, after that time, people began to reconsider the depiction of people it had used in advertising where those people had been minorities.  It didn't just apply to Indians, of course, but too all sorts of things.  Sombrero wearing Mexican cartoon characters and bandits disappeared from Tex-Mex fast food signs.  Quaker Oats' "Aunt Jemima went from being a woman who was clearly associated with Southern household post civil war servants, who had only lately been slaves, in an undoubtedly racist depiction, to being a smiling middle aged African American woman whom Quaker Oats hoped, probably accurately", would cause people to forget what being an "aunt" or "uncle" meant to African Americans.  As late as 1946 Mars Inc. would feel free to do something similar but without the racist depiction and use the "uncle" moniker  and a depiction of  well dressed elderly African American for Uncle Ben's Rice, something they've kept doing as they'd never gone as far as Quaker Oats.  And these are just common well known examples.  There are leagues of others.

But removing labels and depictions has been slow.  The Washington football team remains tagged with the clearly offensive name "the Redskins".  Cleveland finally retired the offensive Chief Wahoo from their uniforms only in 2018.

So what about Mia?

She started leaving, sort of, in 2018 when the logo was redesigned so that the knees of the kneeling woman were no longer visible, in part because in the age of easy computer manipulation she became a target for computer pornification by males with a juvenile mindset. That fact, however probably amplified the criticism of the logo itself, which was changed to being just a head and shoulder depiction.  Now, she's just gone.

But did that really make sense, or achieve anything, in context?

A literal association between Native Americans and dairy would be odd and was probably never intended.  While native agriculture varied widely, no Indian kept cattle until after they'd been introduced by European Americans and cattle are, of course, not native to North America.  Indians did adapt to ranching in the West, something that's rarely noted for some reason, and indeed the entire Mexican ranching industry is a mestizo one and therefore a blending of two cultures by definition.  On the northern plains some Indians were working as cowboy and even ranchers by the early 20th Century and Southwestern tribes had adopted livestock in the form of sheep by the mid 19th.

But dairy cattle are a different deal and there's no, in so far as I'm aware, Native American association with it.  Indeed, 74% of Native Americans are lactose intolerant.*  This isn't surprising as its fairly well established that lactose tolerance is a product of evolutionary biology.  By and large, the vast majority of cultures have had no reason over time to consume the milk of cattle they were keeping, which were kept first for food, and then for labor, and then as things developed, for labor until they could not, at which time they became food.  Milk wasn't high on the list.  And for Native Americans, being one of the three inhabited continents in which cattle were not native, it was obviously off the list.**

Some critics have called the imagery racist. North Dakota state Rep. Ruth Buffalo, a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, says it goes “hand-in-hand with with human and sex trafficking of our women and girls, by depicting Native women as sex objects".  But that comment seems misplaced with this logo. She's definitely not the odd blue eyed "Navajo" woman wearing blue beads that still appears on the doors of the semi tractors of Navajo Express.

Indeed, the irony of Mia is that in her last depictions she was illustrated by Patrick DesJarlait, who was a Red Lakes Ojibwe from Minnesota.  He not only painted her, but he painted her wearing an Ojibwe dress.  So she was depicted as an Indian woman, by an Indian artist.

It's hard to see a man panting a woman of his own tribe, fully and appropriately dressed, as being a racist or exploitative act.

Indeed, the opposite really seems true.  The original dairy co-op was really trying to honor their state in the name and they went the next step and acknowledged the original owners.  Mia was the symbol of the original occupants.

And now she's gone, and with that, the acknowledgment of who was there first.

Which doesn't seem like a triumph for Native acknowledgment.

________________________________________________________________________________

*As are 70% of African Americans and 15% of European Americans. Surprisingly 53% of Mexican Americans are, in spite of dairy products being common to the Mexican dietary culture.  A whopping 95% of Asian Americans are lactose intolerant.

Just recently I've come to the conclusion that I'm somewhat lactose intolerant myself, something I seem to be growing into in old age.  Only mildly so, and I've only noticed it recently.  My children, however, have problems with dairy.  My wife does not. So they must get that via me.

***Cattle are not native to the new world or Australia, but are found just about everywhere else.

Prohibition raids were going on in the Washington D. C. era on this day a century ago.

Pouring whiskey into a sewer

In legal proceedings elsewhere, French observers at German warc rime trials departed after declaring the German proceedings "a farce".

Lex Anteinternet: Mid Week At Work: Wood vendor and burros at Fort Marcy, with bakery on left, Palace Avenue, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Lex Anteinternet: Mid Week At Work: Wood vendor and burros at Fort ...: 

Mid Week At Work: Wood vendor and burros at Fort Marcy, with bakery on left, Palace Avenue, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Wood vendor and burros at Fort Marcy, with bakery on left, Palace Avenue, Santa Fe, New Mexico

A fantastic photograph from 1905, and one truly from a bygone era.

This guy had a hard, very hard, job, and probably lived on the edge of poverty.  

On the other hand, he got to work outdoors, and with animals, two things deprived to the majority of people in the industrialized world today, a sort of poverty we endure.

An Agrarian Rage

One of the blogs we follow here is The South Roane Agrarian which is posted by an agrarian farmer in Tennessee.  It's the best agrarian blog around ^[1]. 

Absent Landscapes

It ain't easy being an agrarian in the modern world, or a distributist either.  As an orthodox Roman Catholic, agrarian, distributist whose was once a geologist but who practices law out in the world, I can assure that may daily existence is a sort of existential crisis.

The reason for that is pretty simple.  You can't really reconcile them, and the world, very easily.

Indeed, being a distributist in economic mindset puts you at odds with a lot of the American economic mindset to start with.  Very few people understand what Distributism even is.  Deeply conservative in nature, if you take a tour through Reddit's Distributism subreddit you'll find it populated by what are pimply faced teenagers fascinated with socialism and monarchy, which have utterly nothing to do with Distributism whatsoever.  It's not even worth bothering with (and the fact that its moderated by one guy is, well, anti distributist.  So that leaves you with the half dozen or so people on the continent who grasp and like the Chestertonian species of small, but very real, free marketism to start with.  Most Americans now days figure the world is instead divided between Capitalism and Socialism, with the former not grasping the role of corporations in capitalism and the former not even understanding what socialism is, and that its a big giant massive failure (yeah, yeah, I know, some socialist will come by and say "oh, that's because real socialism of the Prudhommeistic, anarchist, monarchist fluffy bunny type has never been tried. . . "). 

And being an Agrarian works the same way.  People smile and think, how charming, and then wonder on. Maybe they'll tell you that the buy free range squab at the farmers market or something if they're inclined to talk at all.  Maybe they think that your into "homesteading", a that term is used in the modern world, which is vaguely.

And we can't even begin to explain how much the remainder puts you outside the world.  Apostolic succession. . . the real (and yes, it's real) influence of evolution in our mental makeup, the broken but fixed nature of our biological makeup.  Pretty much 95% of contemporary Americans have any sort of grasp of that stuff at all, and depending upon who you are talking to, and why, people are going to assume that you are some sort of flaming left wing radical, or some sort of flaming right wing radical.

Indeed, I guess that latter point is pretty good evidence of being generally on track.

Anyhow, there isn't day that goes by that I don't think of what it would be like to step out of a low ceilinged log cabin and looking out at a range homestead (using that word in the old sense) knowing darned well that at my age that's never ever going to happen.  Nope.  Never.  I have cattle, to be sure, but I'm almost 60 years old and the thought that someday I'll raise my family by that means alone is too late to be realized.  Both of my children are in their 20s. When I die, and people ask them what I did, it'll be "he was a lawyer".  Same with my friends. Same with everyone I know.

Most days I just keep all of this to myself as I have no choice.  I'm like my father that way.  To this day I'll occasionally hear "he was a great dentist", which is what his profession was.  I oddly never think of him that way.  He was an outdoorsman, a Wyomingite, and he put in a garden that was so large that it was effectively a subsistence farm.  Dentist?  Yes, but I'm more likely to think of him fishing than I am that way.  It's not like I hung around at his office admiring that constantly.  Indeed, in an era when dentist didn't make gobs of money, what I mostly remember about his work is the extraordinarily long hours he put in.

Same with me.  Practicing law has became so time consuming, it's really about all I do for the most part.  I have no big garden this year.  I'm getting one day per week off due to what I have going on.  Tomorrow they're gathering cattle.  I'm not.  I'll be in the office practicing law.

Bitter screed, I don't mean it to be.  Like the Hyman Roth character in Godfather II, I could say that "this is the life we chose", but I don't think that's really terribly accurate for most adults.  It is in part, but like T. E. Lawrence's character in David Lean's depiction of the man, we "can't want what we want".  Circumstances play a big part in that.

All of which leads up to this.  South Roane has posted a new entry (his are weekly, as opposed to the vast flood of meaningless stuff I put out on Lex Anteinternet) which is a Cri de Coeur.

Usually when I see a post like this, there's a back story of some sort to it.  Some experience that somebody has had that causes them to put metaphorical pen to paper.  I'm guessing there's one here.  No matter, it's from the heart and its well worth reading.  It sets itself well with this:

I grew up on a dirt road at the end of which was an old-growth wood of many hundreds of acres. It bordered what is called Contraband Bayou. I have written before of this wood and Jean Lafitte, the pirate rumored to have buried his loot among the cypresses. I hunted those woods, fished those waters, was a boy along those banks, in that place. Today, like all the area surrounding, it is concrete pavement illuminated by halogen lights, a Walmart, a Super Target, a casino or two, budget and luxury hotels, homes built on every conceivable patch and lot. It is an absent landscape.

It then goes on with this stout comment:

For those of you still advocating for eternal growth and progress, I pose these questions: What is your secret to finding beauty in what we have achieved? Does your heart flutter at more shopping opportunities and a new strip mall? Are the woods and bayous and rivers an obstacle to your betterment? Do you see productive agricultural land along the highway as an opportunity for a solar farm of concrete and silicon and metal? When you see a pastured hill or a majestic stand of hardwoods, do you calculate only the fill dirt or the timber that can be sold from it. Is your heart unmoved by the leveled and the dead? If so, then I will tell you that you are the enemy.

The past couple of years I've had the odd experience of driving up a road that I've known my entire life.   The current owners of the land on both sides of the road have been familiar with it only a fraction of the time I have.  It figured two sharp right turns that went around a beautiful hay meadow.  

No longer.

Now the road goes right through it.  For some reason, I'm told, the current owners, who don't depend on agriculture for a living, wanted it straightened out, possibly so it didn't go so close to their house.  

It's a tragedy.

Further down the road WYDOT has taken out an old wooden bridge and put in a new one.  It's completely absurd.  I don't know what the motivation is, but the new one is a massive concrete structure that they had to elevate the road for in order to put it in.  It's a good bridge alright, where no bridge was needed at all.

That bridge goes through a ranch yard that belonged to a family that we knew well.  My father employed one of them for years, and we knew them, as a family, for many years longer.  Decades. They sold it out to some wealthy people who posted the crap out of it.

At least they didn't bust up all their land for "ranchettes", which in this arid climate become weedettes.  Land to fool new arrivals that if they buy a cow they're ranchers, before they go broke, abandon the cow and let the land go to the county.

All that is mild compared to what South Roane is noting, which is the unyielding development mindset. We must develop because we must.  Unoccupied land has no value because its unoccupied, they seem to think.  South Roane is bitter, and declares them to be the enemy.

Whether they are the enemy or not, we have to keep something in mind. We can't develop every square inch of everything and a society that doesn't allow average people to make their living from the land is fundamentally broken. We're already there.

I can't, or at least shouldn't, complain about my life.  My parents were both extremely intelligent people and part of their inheritance to me was a pretty good intellect.  I've made my living from it.  I've really had no choice, however. 

To say that isn't a complaint, but an acceptance of reality.  In McPhee's excellent book La Place De La Concorde Suisse one of the central characters who is followed (the book is about a reconnaissance unit of the Swiss Army during its annual training) is a man who has a science degree related to agriculture.  He'd wanted to be a farmer, but couldn't, the entry cost of becoming a Swiss farmer, like becoming an American one, being far too high to realistically do.  He's not portrayed as bitter, only portrayed as taking a different direction.

Indeed, I know a lot of younger sons and daughters from ranch families who have themselves been faced with the same situation.  There are a lot of lawyers and a fair number of doctors and dentists of my vintage and a little older who fit that definition.  No place to go on the ranch, so they went into a profession, keeping a tie with the ranch in their communities.

I fit that category to an extent myself, although its a double remote connection in a way.  My grandfather owned a packing house in his county which also had farm ground.  It owned cattle, had a brand, and raised potatoes.  They also owned a "creamery" which is the equivalent to a dairy.  My father, as the oldest son in the family, one of two boys (he had two sisters as well) would have stepped into the business.  My grandfather's death ended that.  It was all sold.  He was still a teenager.

That left him with no choice but to find other employment, which he did.  But he never lost his interest in things associated with the outdoors, which his early life clearly involved.  I've touched a little on that already.

I graduated high school, like my father, at age 17.  At that time what I really wanted to do was to be a rancher, but I knew it was unrealistic.  I looked into what I could, even looking at the options to homestead, in the old fashioned sense, in the Canadian far north.  I decided to become a Game Warden, but concerns about being employed kept me from that.  Instead, I went into geology, but when I came out, there were no jobs.  Law followed.

Early in my legal career my father and I had an opportunity to buy a small ranch.  A real one, but a small one.  Had we done it, I would have kept my job for some time, and he his, but ultimately, we would have done that. Then he died.

My mother would have supported me going on with my father's plan, but I didn't know that and I didn't bring it up to her. She'd been ill for a very long time, and as she was in her 60s, my thought is that she'd need every bit of saved money to carry on.  She was just 65 at the time and in fact did live many more years.  As each passing year went by, the cost of ranch land went up and up.

Now, I am married, as it were, into a ranch family and we do have cattle. That marriage has nothing to do with the above, other than how we met, a story which varies depending upon whose version of it you believe.  At any rate, people who travel in common circles will commonly meet each other.  I know other "power couples" who are married lawyers or married professionals, but we aren't.  We're married rural people.

But as a rural person I've watched the houses spring up outside of Denver or Dallas, or any larger city you can name.  And I have heard again and again the cries for progress.  But what is that?

The name "progress" implies a progression towards something. And we're always progressing towards something.  On the day I'm writing this (it usually takes me several days to write a "thoughtful" entry like one), a column of U.S. battle ships was progressing a century ago towards somewhere, the sailors on board not realizing that the very ships they were on were progressing towards obsolesce.  Also on this day, the Wehrmacht was progressing towards Moscow and the Volga, in a progression that would lead to mass rape, murder and ultimately the Red Army in Berlin.  And both of those were human planned progressions.

In our own benighted day and age the left wing of one of our two political parties, as we unfortunately only seem to have two that every get anywhere (although in reality, of course, there are several, and at least a grand total of five substantial ones) labels itself as "progressive" and is referred to in the press that way.  This would suggest that they're progressing towards something, but what the end goal is, is never stated.  You really can't label yourself as a progressive unless you have a plan to progress to a point, and that point has to actually be a final destination.  There is no such thing as perpetual progress.

There's no such thing as perpetual growth either.  Things that grow without bounds suffer. They grow too big, too fat, or too something, and die.  

It's noteworthy that Solzhenitsyn famously noted that there is no progress.  He tended to drive westerners nuts, as once he left/was ejected from, the Soviet Union the common assumption is that he was going to say "Wow!  Free market economics, K-marts and consumer goods with no restraint, sign me up baby!".  He didn't.  Instead, he went on to be just as big of critic of the West as he had been of the Communist East.

Solzhenitsyn was deeply intellectual and deeply conservative in an existential sense.  He tended to say shocking things. Doing that got him tossed out of Russia and doing that caused him to be criticized in the US.  But in a very real sense, he was right.  There is progress in various ways, but existentially, we progress very little and perhaps not at all.  Indeed, the more removed we are from our natures, and our natures are pretty feral and agrarian, the more unhappy as a society we become.

Not matter what your current view of history may be, one thing that can't be ignored about the US is that it was settled in part because people could do here what they no longer could in their homelands, and that was to own, their own.  And what often was, for many, was their own farm.  Now that dream is dead for most Americans.  We're no more able to own a farm than our ancestors were who stepped off the boat from Westphalia or Cork.

And that, in and of itself, makes the American Dream more than a little bit of a lie.  There isn't perpetual progress if you can't progress towards the most basic of occupations.  We're told, of course, that progress moved us off the land and into the city for great jobs and the like, but we know better when we go to the big box stores.  

A land in which you must live in a big city, and you can't simply be a farmer, or even really want to be, is more than a little sad.  It's unjust.

Footnotes

1.  Not that there are very many.  There are a few, but quality wise, South Roane's is far and away above the rest.

The same is true, I'd note, for Distributist blogs.  There's a few, but so far none of them really measure up, and Reddit's Distributist subreddit is a mess.  At least, however, its more active than the Agrarian subreddit, which is barely making a pulse.

What this says, I'm not sure of.  Off the radar in general society perhaps.

Lex Anteinternet: I don't like being upset with the Wyoming Game & F...

Lex Anteinternet: I don't like being upset with the Wyoming Game & F...: 

I don't like being upset with the Wyoming Game & Fish Department but. . .

I am.

Again.

The department changed its fairly horrible license application system to one that has the appearance of being somewhat better earlier this year.  A couple of months ago, I went to apply for limited draw licenses and had to register for the new system. I then applied for my licenses.

When I did, it had the feel that something didn't work right, but I chalked that up to paranoia about the old site, which was pretty glitchy.  I went along on my way happy I'd complied well before the due date for applications.

Later, I helped set up the new site for the kids and helped them apply.

Well, the draw results came out on Thursday and sure enough, the system has me not applying for anything.

I haven't drawn an antelope license or a limited deer or elk for two years running. The G&F insists on giving out more licenses to out of staters than any other Western state, which certainly doesn't help that at all.  And now their website has screwed me.

As a subsistence hunter, I'm angry.  Over the past two, now three, years I haven't been able to draw a license in the state I'm native to.  For two years running I've been harassed by Game Wardens while bird hunting as I note the routes into places better than they do. Both of those wardens are imports from out of state, the latter one from California, in a job that used to go to people who had grown up in a wild environment. The first one, in fairness, apologized for being wrong and the second one eventually backed down, but he also acted like a big city cop.  He ought to be sent packing back to California where he's from.

Somehow government entities manage to have bad websites fairly frequently. There are exceptions. The Wyoming Oil and Gas Commissions is excellent.  The Game and Fish site, on the other hand, has always been bad. They now force you to use it, however.

Well, even though its tilting at windmills, I tried to call. . . two days running. The phone was off the hook.

I probably wasn't the only one with a problem.

Related threads:

The Agrarian's Lament: A Tribune op ed and some thoughts on outfitters and locals.

The frustrating big game season of 2020.

Lex Anteinternet: Saturday June 18, 1921. Illustrations

Lex Anteinternet: Saturday June 18, 1921. Illustrations: 

Saturday June 18, 1921. Illustrations

A deeply illustrated bond of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes for the liquidation of the agro-debts from Bosnia and Herzegovina, issued on this day in 1921, and featuring many agrarian themes.

Lex Anteinternet: On Empathy

Lex Anteinternet: On Empathy: 

On Empathy

I really pondered whether to post this at all.  Ultimately, I decided to, but with some hesitation.

When people who intend to go to law school, or those in law school, are asked "why do you want to become a lawyer" a common answer is "I want to help people".

Indeed, if you read interviews of young lawyers that tends to show up  as well, and if you read late career interviews of lawyers, there sometimes, but not always, is an effort at autohagiography in this regard.

Any occasional reader of this blog would realize that there's a lot of cynicism that's expressed here about certain things, and one of those things occasionally has to deal with this topic.  Suffice it to say I've been deeply skeptical of a lot of the propaganda lawyers put out about their occupation and, additionally, I've occasionally pondered why they put it out.  Is it advertising, or is it verbal laudanum?  Or both, or some of each.

Anyhow, for almost all of my career as a lawyer I've been exposed to the really vigorous propaganda that's put out by "trial lawyers" on the nature of their purpose.  

I should note here, before I go on, that "trial lawyers" are far less than 50% of all lawyers.  Lots of lawyers don't go anywhere near a courtroom.  Probably less than half engage in litigation frequently.  Of those, most who do are lawyers in the criminal law arena, whom "trial lawyers" don't really count as "trial lawyers" unless they also do that in addition to plaintiff's work in civil litigation.  And, for some weird reason, "trial lawyers" don't include those who do defense work as "trial lawyers", even though they very clearly are.

So we're talking about a minority of lawyers here.

Anyhow, it's really common to read trial lawyer assertions about their deep compassion for mankind.

And for some, it's really, really true.

But I've come to the conclusion that for a lot of them, that's pretty much merely propaganda.  

Now, some of that may be my cycnical nature, to be sure.  But the origin of this post comes from an event last year in which I spent almost all day, on a Saturday, as a defense lawyer working to make sure that a massive disaster didn't happen to a plaintiff, working to contact people and arrange for a type of rescue, if you will.  I was aware of the situation as the pliantiff's lawyer informed me, but that lawyer didn't do anything to effectuate the rescue.  

It was as if they really didn't care.

More recently I've experienced another incident in which it seemed as if the plaintiff's lawyer really didn't give a carp about the fate of plaintiff.  In another situation I sat through an event in which the plaintiff's lawyer somewhat made fun of an excused a deeply held belief of the plaintiff as it wasn't something, probably that, he expected a middle class lawyer to understand or even accept.  Frankly, being eclectic, or having a very different world view, I didn't find the subject's belief to be odd at all and I was appalled by the subject's representatives reaction.  Following that, I endured another event in which I tried to make certain that a result wasn't going to have a detrimental effect on a person in real terms to sort of receive a yawn from the person representing them.

More recently, however, and the event that sort of pushed me over the edge here, I was out for a family medical matter of real importance and received a series of pushy emails from an impatient opposing lawyer until I reacted extremely sharply to it. Even then, I didn't really receive an apology for it.

Having said that, I did receive a real expression for concern, under somewhat similar circumstances, from another lawyer representing a plaintiff.

One of the really dispiriting things about practicing law is the long slow disillusionment that accompanies it. Law students are told by their friends and family that lawyers are really smart, and the fact that you are in law school means you too are really smart.  Soon after practicing law you learn that there's a lot of lawyers who are very far from smart.  And if you are like me, and had an unusual background before going into law, you were already shocked to find that law school is extraordinarily easy.

A later shock comes when you realizes that the concept that all jurists are chosen from the smartest and wisest simply isn't the case.  There are some extremely smart judges, and there are some extremely good judges who may not be geniuses, but they're really good.  But it becomes clear after awhile that politics and political agendas enter the selection process.  Indeed, at one point a friend of mine, a really good lawyer, was told by somebody in the know, that lawyers with established civil trail practices really ought to stop putting in for judgeships as they "didn't need" the positions and therefore wouldn't be considered.  I'm not going to go into criteria on what it takes to become a judge, but after having been asked to apply again and again, it became pretty clear to me I lacked some criteria that I really couldn't do anything about, but which really ought not to matter. That was disillusioning.

And as a sort of final disillusionment, at some point it becomes very hard not to view civil litigation as being mostly about money, and mostly about money for the lawyers engaged in it.  It's hard to feel that its about justice, or redressing wrong, when so many of the lawyers engaged in it really don't seem to care about the actual parties.

Not that this is universal.  Oddly enough, in litigation, I've found a fair number of defense litigators who actually are deeply empathetic towards people, and towards the plaintiffs they're opposing among those.  And I've seen some plaintiff's lawyers that even though they had a rough exterior, would go far out of their way to help people, including strangers.

So maybe I'm just deep in my cups due to recent events.  But I don't think so.  I think the law, or rather civil litigations, has an empathy problem.  Money is the root of that.

St. Paul wrote that "the love of money is the root of all evil."

That's pretty much what civil litigation has become for lawyers, I fear.  An expression of the love of money.