Pistol Packin' Mama was number one on the country charts.
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.
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.
A corn husking bee, January 18, 1924.
The news recalled 1916.
The other day Robert Reich, whose writing I have a love/hate relationship with, wrote this article:
I'll admit that I was prepared to dismiss it when I started reading it, but I can't. It's a well reasoned article.
I don't think it sums up everything that's "wrong" with Iowa, but it gets some things right. This could just as easily be said, about Wyoming, however:
I saw it happen. When I was helping Fritz Mondale in 1984, I noticed Iowa beginning to shift from family farms to corporate agriculture, and from industrialized manufacturing to knowledge-intensive jobs.
The challenge was to create a new economy for Iowa and for much of the Midwest.
I didn’t have any good ideas for creating that new economy, though — and neither did Mondale, who won Iowa’s Democratic caucuses that year but lost the general election to Ronald Reagan in Iowa and every other state, except his own Minnesota.
Yet not until George W. Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004 did a Republican presidential candidate win Iowa again.
When Tom Vilsack was governor of Iowa in the early 2000s and flirting with the idea of a presidential run, he told me he worried that Iowa’s high school valedictorians used to want to attend the University of Iowa or Iowa State, but now wanted the Ivy League or Stanford or NYU. Even Iowa’s own college graduates were leaving for Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and New York.
Vilsack wanted to know how to keep Iowa’s talent in Iowa — a variant of the question I couldn’t answer for Mondale. By this time I had a few ideas — setting up high-tech hubs around major universities, blanketing parts of the state with free wi-fi, having community colleges supply the talent local industries needed — but they all cost money that Iowa didn’t have.
As The New York Times’s Jonathan Weisman noted recently, Iowa continues to lose more than 34 percent of its college graduates each year. Illinois, by contrast, gains 20 percent more college graduates than it produces. Minnesota has about 8 percent more college grads than it produces.
This talent migration has hastened America’s split into two cultures, not just in Iowa and the Midwest but across the nation.
But not entirely.
The thing people like Reich don't get is that much of the country doesn't want to become an upper middle class urban cesspool. Places that people like Reich worship are largely abhorrent in living terms. There's a reason that people look to rural areas and an idealized past.
But people also lash themselves to a dead economy as if it'll come back, even if it means losing track of reality at some point, or even if it means becoming something they claim to detest, welfare recipients. This has happened all over the US.
Something needs to be done to revitalize the main street economy, and people like Reich don't have the answers because at the end of the day, all American economists see things the same way. Everything is corporate, the only question is how much, if any, restraint you put on corporations.
Distributism would cure a lot of this.
If we had a more Distributist economy, we'd have a more local one. For rural areas, that'd mean much more local processing of locally produced goods. There's no reason for the concentration of the meat packing industry, for example. Beef could be packed locally. At one time, my family did just that. And that's only one example.
If the economy was reoriented in that fashion, local industry would expand a great deal. The thing is, of course, not all of those jobs would be the glass and steel mind-numbing cubicle jobs that all economists love.
But here's the other thing. As long as the economy is oriented the way it is, rural states are going to be colonies of urban areas, just as much as, let's say, French Indochina was a colony of France, or Kenya a colony of the United Kingdom. Exploitative, in another word. It's not intentionally so, it is an economic reality.
The problem there is that in those sorts of economies everything is produced for export alone, and everything is precarious. That gets back to my Distributist argument above.
But it also gets to a certain cultural thing in which those deeply aligned with the economy, which includes most people, can't see anything thing else. As long as the economy keeps working, that's okay. But when changes come, that can be a disaster.
Wyoming's very first economy was the fur trade, if we discount the native economy (which is a real economy, and accordingly should not be discounted). Contrary to the popular belief, the fur trade was not displaced, it just was never really very large, and therefore it diminished in importance when other things came in.
The other things were 1) agriculture, which came first, followed by the 2) extractive industries. Both are still with us. Agriculture has suffered to a degree as the naturally distributist industries that support it have been sacrificed on the altar of corporate economics and consolidation. The state, for its part, did nothing to arrest that trend and simply let it happen. In part, that's because the state has always deeply worshiped the thought that the extractive industries will make us all rich and nothing is to be interfered with, including losing local production of the raw resources that are first produced here. I.e., we don't refine the oil as much as we used to, we don't pack the meat, we don't process the wool. . . .
And the extractive industries certainly have made a lot of people and entire communities rich, there's no question of it.
But the handwriting is on the wall. Coal is declining and will continue to do so. And a massive shift in petroleum use is occurring, which Wyoming cannot stop. Petroleum will still be produced far into the future, but its use as a fuel is disappearing. Petrochemicals, on the other hand, are not.
We seemingly like to think we can stop those things from changing in any form. We've tried to through lawsuits and legislation. And yet it turns out that people buying EV's don't listen to our litigation or legislation, any more than they do to Nebraska's Senator Deb Fischer's whining about recharging station funding. Like some who can't face death due to illness, we'll grasp at what we can, rather than adjust.
Part of that is listening to people who tell us what we want to hear. A lot of politicians have tried to gently tell us the truth of what we're facing. Governor Gordon did just recently. When they do that, they're castigated for it.
In 1962's The Days of Wine and Roses the plot follows a man who is a social drinker and introduces alcohol to his girlfriend. They marry, and over time they become heavy drinkers. He finally stops drinking, his wife having left him, and finds her in an apartment, where she is now a hardcore alcoholic. He resumes drinking then and there, in order to be with her.
In the end, however, he reforms and quits. She doesn't. We know how that will end.
That's a lot like Wyomingites in general. We've received the hard knocks and blows. Some of us are going to put the bottle down and face the day, some are not going to under any circumstances.
For some, it's easier to believe that a "dictator for a day" can order the old economy restored and reverse fifty years of demographic change, while reversing supply, demand, and technology to sort of 1970s status. In other words, go ahead and have another drink, it won't hurt you.
But in reality, it might, and probably will.
This year I haven't posted anything.
The grimness of 2023 has a lot to do with that. On a professional note, and by all externals, I had a fairly good year last year. Economically, it went well, in spite of being knocked out for surgery. But surgery and health wise it was really tough. So I haven't been in the mood for that.
I am one of those people who do resolutions, and looking back on them, I'm also one of those people who typically fail at them. That's not a reason to try, however. And I've had enough in the way of shocks and major setbacks over the year not to look at life in 2023 as sort of ending me to the penalty box. So here's at it.
Rather than set resolutions, and I know generally what mine would be anyhow, I'm instead going to note a dedication, which is a form of resolution. And that would be Honesty and Authenticity. I'm tired of the dishonest and unauthentic.
I believe, as part of this overall, that dishonest and unauthentic behavior and actions are responsible for almost all of the problems our society faces right now, and I need to reflect that myself. Casting a wide net, almost all of our personal problems, and our national, and international ones, are due to dishonesty and inauthenticity.
Not that the honest and authentic win any prizes of any kind with people. People like to be told lies that they agree with to support their own dishonest beliefs, wants and behaviors. And people like fake too.
But deep down, that doesn't work.
It's not as if I've been living a dishonest and inauthentic life. But most of us make a lot of mental compromises to get along in daily life this way. It's really not good for anything.
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