An alternative history of the culture war Joshua shows a hint of Harry Turtledovish talent: what if the Democrats hadn’t betrayed working-class RCs in the 1970s? The feminists would have flocked to the Rockefeller Republicans and the GOP would be considered the abortion party today. Given the Dems’ 20th-century track record (lefty hawks including pushing US involvement in both world wars) I’m not so sure they would have ended up a peace party but who knows?
On the box: ‘The Simpsons’ on the Spanish Armada Revd Lovejoy as an Anglican naval chaplain:
Lord Jesus, although our country turned Protestant for the sole reason that our fat, mean king could dump his faithful wife, we know you’re on our side. So please, destroy these horrible monsters who believe your Mother should be revered. Amen.
The kakure kirishitan and the Anglo-Catholic experience.
Owen White, neither an ‘online Orthodox’ nor one for mushy ecumenicism, a little like this blog is an ecumenical one for people who don’t like modern ecumenism: I suspect that ecclesiophiles are sometimes given to overconfidence with regard to what an increased ecclesial largesse and reach would bring to the cultural markets. And, yes, it is right to speak of cultural markets today, and not so much cultures. The great Roman Catholic thinker Josef Pieper left me with that insight. I am of the opinion that were the RCC and EOC to unite, secularism, materialism, and “the rape of man and nature” (to borrow the title from one of my favorite Orthodox books), would continue on without so much as a flinch. You mean the world doesn’t work the way church geeks (including me) think? Say it ain’t so! I’m not endorsing all of this, only throwing it out for discussion. I say: parallel lines don’t meet. The ISTM irreconcilable views on the scope of the Pope (a central command vs a communion held together only by a shared faith) separate what’s otherwise the same: two Catholic churches, each of which of course claims it’s infallible.
Liccione vs Vasquez. Regular readers know I favour Arturo’s folk Catholicism over the Novus Ordo neocons. Owen: The nature of neo-catholicism is to spin anything and everything so that it fits the current box. Sometimes I think Arturo is insane. Other times I wonder if he is the last sane man left.
It seems you can blame the New Deal on an Anglo-Catholic. She was a Yankee do-gooder with a mystical bent. But like with the Pope today even orthodoxy is no guarantee of a correct understanding of economics. Neither she, he nor Jim Wallis gets it.
28th & Snyder, South Philly before the storm. The cats who usually sit on the houses’ front steps like the good honorary Italians they are were running for cover.
Facebook fatigue. Avoiding the temptation of narcissism or don’t bore your friends! I like it: I use it for little things that don’t fit the main messages of this blog. But sometimes it can be too much.
Another story of mainline decline. It seems that the more “inclusive” it becomes, the fewer people it includes. I can think of nothing more “inclusive” than the grave; and these people have certainly achieved it. My goodness, where will they quilt when the church’s doors close? That may be the sewing circle with the world’s highest overhead costs. Not a great mystery why it didn’t turn out to be financially self-sustaining. Rather a hard sell for evangelism. What’s fascinating to me is that it’s the younger parishioners who appear to be the more doctrinally and theologically orthodox/conservative, while the ones proudly waving the “inclusiveness” flag as the ship sinks are the older ones. Much as punk rock was a reaction against the flower-child namby-pambyness of the late sixties and early seventies pop music, a rejection of the hippy ethos after the movement crumbled under its own weight, so too are those youth who actually care about God rejecting the watered-down theology that was born of the same age but has been far more pervasive.
Just as the American Media establishment declared Woodstock as the defining event of a generation, these aging baby boomers obsess over the Kennedys as American political royalty. To be fair, it was reporters of “the greatest generation” that originally promoted the Kennedy Myth, taken as they were with JFK, who was what they all wished to be: rich, handsome, a war hero, powerful, and (best of all) able to bed just about any woman he wanted.
Clearly the boomers in charge of the media are trying to hold onto their youth.
Ted Kennedy’s funeral on MSNBC So far: everything that’s wrong with the Novus Ordo. The first half of this isn’t a Requiem (the man probably needs prayers for his soul badly now) but a Protestant memorial service canonising the deceased and trying to make the mourners feel better by flattering him. Obama is to give a ‘eulogy’. Against the rules and dead wrong. (Tribute speeches are fine but not in church.) And why is this man, an abortion ghoul, speaking in a putatively Catholic church?
Update: After the de facto canonisation sermon the petitions sound like a Democratic rally speech. Apparently Obama isn’t speaking during the service itself, getting around the rules.
At least the prayers of the offertory and consecration are just orthodox enough, mentioning in the Secreta for example that it’s offering Christ’s sacrifice for his soul.
The mythical anti-war movement. The Buckleyite project turned the American right inside-out, one of Murray Rothbard’s points.
The trouble with Ted.Like all good liberals Teddy believed America’s greatness was in its government. If it is true that Kennedy represented what was best about our government, it must also be true that he represented what was worst.
The American Spectator’s James Antle notes that, “Kennedy paid less of a price for behavior that led to the death of a human being than did professional football player Michael Vick for cruelty to animals.” Indeed. And for me, liberals’ ongoing love for his lifelong pursuit of “social justice” remains hard to reconcile with the fact that the career of Edward M. Kennedy would have never even been possible if he had not first used his privilege and family name to get away with murder.
Mary Jo Kopechne, RIP, apparently was pure, a practising RC and a sincere RFK believer; she suffocated in that car and did not drown. Inexcusable. You can say it’s symbolic of putting your trust in such princes who don’t deserve it.
Mark Sanford had an affair, none of our business, and used government money to have it. He didn’t kill anybody. Media hypocrisy. (But his treatment of the Clinton affair arguably makes him a target.)
American statesmen are typically measured by how much they’ve “accomplished,” which basically means how much money or liberty they’ve extracted from citizens to put toward their own political ends. In his book “Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty” author Ivan Eland takes the opposite approach by categorizing American presidents by how little they accomplished, or in other words, actually took their oaths seriously by keeping the executive branch within its constitutional boundaries.
A Requiem Mass is not a de facto canonisation so eulogies are banned. A speech honouring the person is fine but, because of the nature of Catholic prayer for the dead, it belongs outside of church.
Craigslist government. “People are good and trustworthy and generally just concerned with getting through the day,” Newmark says. If most people are good and their needs are simple, all you have to do to serve them well is build a minimal infrastructure allowing them to get together and work things out for themselves. Any additional features are almost certainly superfluous and could even be damaging.
Dr Williams admits Anglicanism is not apostolic. Whoops. What an ‘own goal’. From the MCJ. So it would appear the English Reformation is over and everybody is clear that Henry just made a bunch of stuff up in order to grab English Church properties and marry his doxy. So... can we have our stuff back since you aren’t using it anymore, Rowan? Y’see, our communion is apostolic and some of us could use the facilities for things like Mass.
The politics of guilt. When I mentioned research by Thomas Sowell in the late 1970s proving that American blacks had made greater economic strides in the 1930s and 1940s than in the 1960s or 1970s, my acquaintance responded by saying that no economic gain is as important as the fact that blacks can now vote in large numbers. When I then proceeded to cite a study that suggested that women were happier in the 1950s than they seem to be now, the retort was that women in the 1950s had no right to be happy.
I never liked the Kennedys and never believed in Camelot, but Ted always seemed to be the worst of the bunch. But picking on Teddy for his shortcomings is like shooting fish in a barrel. More often than not conservative criticism of Kennedy was about picking an easy target and firing away in order to deflect attention from the Right’s own bizarre political fetishism. “More liberal than Ted Kennedy” became a meaningless stock talking point for Sean Hannity and friends with “more liberal” often being used as a euphemism for “opposes the needless mass murder of Arab children.”
The only thing I kinda liked about “Teddy” was that he made feminists and other assorted Leftists frightfully nauseated when they were obliged to praise this “Liberal Lion” as their champion, while knowing in their guts that he ultimately thought all women were disposable sex dolls. He served other useful purposes as well. After 50 years of the media depicting the Kennedy Clan as an embodiment of aristocratic virtue and charm, the vulgar and dim-witted Teddy stood as a constant reminder to many of what the Establishment really is.
Troparion, Tone 1 In giving birth thou didst preserve thy virginity; in falling asleep thou didst not forsake the world, O Mother of God. Thou wast translated to life, O Mother of Life, and by thy prayers thou didst deliver our souls from death.
Kontakion, Tone 2 Neither the tomb nor death could hold the Mother of God, who is sleepless in her intercessions and an unchanging hope in her mediations. For as the Mother of Life she was transferred to life by him who dwelt in her ever-virgin womb.
Spending ourselves to death. Government expenditures are running at 185 percent of revenue, which is like the lone family breadwinner earning $50,000 a year, while the family spends $92,500 a year.
The same White House claims swine flu will infect half the US. The editor gets it: It’s still a frickin’ flu-bug, which we all suffer through just about every year. It’s not a mass-killing malaria, or AIDS, or similar peril; raise your immune system, wash your hands a bit more, and relax! That and 100 per cent preventable Aids doesn’t emperil most people but that’s another conversation.
Scotus: church can’t hide criminal priests’ records. I think Connecticut recently tried to violate religious liberty by undermining episcopal government, trying to make RCs congregationalists (BTW Congregationalism was CT’s state religion into the 1800s — perfectly legal as the US Constitution only covers the federal government), but I’ve said ever since this made the news 7 years ago the best thing the church could do is turn these criminals in and let the state throw the book at them. (The RC neocons have Marcial Maciel to answer for.)
La Ronda owners turn down offer It’s their right but that’s just hateful. Philistines. Philadelphia’s Main Line was so opulent in the ’20s-’50s that when filmmakers came out to make The Philadelphia Story they didn’t use the actual Ardrossan house and grounds because they thought audiences wouldn’t believe it. More on La Ronda.
FiFNA’s new bishop. You can read my comments there. It’s well-meant — I wish Bishop Ilgenfritz well — but, like the circa-1988 Episcopalianism this replicates, it makes a hash of Catholic ecclesiology.
I’ve done some Google research and a friend has volunteered some information about Canon Wittkofski and St Mary’s, Charleroi; I used to know a priest from there, Fr Steven Kelly, and have met Bishop Ackerman. Interesting, at least to me.
(Here followeth a ramble about history that touches on Episcopalianism. You can skip over it if that doesn’t interest you.)
Wittkofski (1912-1976) was interested in using hypnosis in his ministry but other than that wasn’t liberal in the sense understood today, theologically (against wholesale liturgical revision and WO) or politically (in the ’60s he was in the John Birch Society), and St Mary’s apparently has long been ‘working-class Anglo-Catholic’, a type once known in England. (In the States Fr Clayton Hewett and his son Bishop Paul Hewett in the Continuing movement — I slightly know the bishop — come from that background in the Midwest.) I’ve never been to that town but of course know and love upstate Pennsylvania. I imagine it’s a more charming church than many local Novus Ordo parishes.
Wittkofski’s issue with Rome was apparently he was a sort of statist super-patriot, ‘200 per cent American’, IMO his failing: the Americanist heresy or Freemasonry comes in both liberal and conservative versions. He belonged to a missionary order (OMI), was stationed in China (in the ’30s?) and claimed (per Protestants’ suspicions about Rome) that the church was operating at cross-purposes with the US government. Which of course to me seems to be to Rome’s credit, and why Stalin for example hated it so much he banned it in the Ukraine: he couldn’t control/subvert it.
Such trying to make a play for lapsed RCs (historically the Episcopalians tried to co-opt immigrant schisms) is bad. Of course the mainstream Episcopalians wanted to make Protestants out of them eventually.
I wrote to the friend that Father probably fitted in back when there were good Barry Goldwater (should have been president — Camelot was a big nothing) Republicans among the Episcopalians.
Anyway, much like the PNCC’s appeal that church and priest seemed nice, upstanding 1950s small-town citizen types. RIP.
It underscores how unjust it would be to prosecute only low-level interrogators rather than the high-level officials who implemented the torture regime.
That’s Protestants for you I almost didn’t blog about this and this because of course I don’t belong to this or any other Protestant denomination, as a libertarian I believe people have the right to conduct their relationships and religions the right to govern themselves in peace, and... it’s just not news. Here’s the irony of Protestantism: Luther broke with Rome because he objected to what he claimed were innovations; he said it overstepped its bounds. In the fallible church he posited, anything goes. It claims a power to change things, to redefine and change reality itself (as understood by most religions, reason traditionally understood and the cultures of most of mankind throughout history) that the Pope has never dared to. So according to these people’s lights these moves make perfect sense. They can go live in peace. Conservatives, as you figure things out we’ll leave the light on for you.
Illegal immigration and national health care. I appreciate the point that it’s theft but unlike many in my corner of the right (some of whom take human biodiversity and go the racist loser route with it, blaming non-Asian minorities for their problems... race is only one factor in a person so to base policy right or left on it is immoral) I favour open borders. Obviously you can’t have that and socialised medicine for all. Basic economics: limited resources, unlimited wants and somebody’s got to pay for it.
Obama has thrown around the name of God even more often than George W. Bush. A smart man, this élite agnostic has learnt something both from the black community he’s always wanted to belong to and the mainline Protestants he’s long been affiliated with: how to preach. Like the similarly unbelieving Lincoln with the Gettysburg Address he knows how to use the rhetoric of the Bible. I welcome an atheist libertarian like the writer not the Protestant left.
Big pharma is drugging you. There are real advances in the understanding and treatment of mental illness but this is about pathologising people to rip them off and as social control. Soma, anyone?
Obamism. So, let us in on the secret, Barack. Will the Martians pay? Or, as Joe the Plumber first predicted, is this all just a redistributionist scheme to loot the middle class for the benefit of the “poor”?More.
Good Shepherd, Rosemont revisited My comments start here. What is ‘orthodox Anglicanism’? Well, shared with Catholicism there are the creeds, bishops with the claim of apostolic succession and belief in baptismal regeneration. That’s it: fine as far as it goes but nowhere near far enough for Catholics. Everything else from Calvinism to gay weddings is in the club as long as your bishop is invited to Lambeth. From T1:9.
It’s now a crime to be poor. You won’t be arrested for shopping in a Dollar Store, but if you are truly, deeply, in-the-streets poor, you’re well advised not to engage in any of the biological necessities of life — like sitting, sleeping, lying down or loitering. The ordinances that afflict the destitute, most of which go back to the dawn of gentrification in the ’80s and ’90s. In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has actually been intensifying as the recession generates ever more poverty.
Too ignorant to get the right wrong answer. The birther movement is stupid, attacking Obama’s person when he’s a symptom of big long-standing problems nothing to do with what country he was born in. (In the very unlikely event he was born in Kenya it wouldn’t matter because according to the law in 1961 his mother kept her US citizenship despite marrying a foreign citizen, which no longer forfeited citizenship, so Obama would still be a natural-born citizen, a silly requirement but it is in the Constitution.)
Harper published his book — one of the major mainstream media publishers. It is owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Jim Wallis is in fact an Establishment insider who is playing the role of a prophetic outsider.
There is nothing in the Bible that suggests that the state is to take money at gunpoint from one voting bloc to heal people in other voting blocs.
You equate “society” with “the state.” They are not the same.
Beware of any politician who promises anything on this supernatural scale in the name of God. Such an offer is always demonic: a variant of “stones into bread.”
Fr Hunwicke: A change might be organic if you could just paste a newly authorised liturgical text, perhaps for a newly canonised Saint, into your Missal or Breviary ... and still keep using it. Or if it mandated revised Rubricæ Generales so as to purge the Calendar a bit, so that you could use the old Books as long as you kept your eye on the ordo. Change certainly is not organic if it means you have to dump, as now totally unusable, your old Books, and shovel money at publishers to buy the new ones.
Love and the ruins William Murchison at Chronicles describes the popularly understood ’60s, as Charley says ‘at university between about 1967 and 1972’. Not only was it hateful and destructive, and essentially rich kids looking for a good time, but it didn’t challenge the status quo really. The anti-war posturing (selfish really — ‘don’t cramp my style by drafting me, man’) belied the fact that these people supported the Great Society (‘Daddy State will pay my way for ever’). Woodstock was a big nothing.
She goes on to answer old nuns’ ‘Why us?’ Because you’re a bunch of screeching heretics who repeatedly talk in public about how much y’all hate the Catholic Church.
The MCJ: Skin color is not a choice. Being kidnapped and sold into slavery is not a choice. Engaging in unnatural acts is a choice. In America, unlike blacks, gays were never slaves except maybe in response to a Craigslist ad. To which the Catholic faith adds, orientation like many other temptations is not a choice so it’s not a sin. And to which libertarianism adds, as long as it’s not a public health hazard it’s none of my business. It’s the church’s place to say it’s wrong but as Ron Paul says I’m not trying to run your lives.
This anti-war movement’s got no good songs which possibly explains its anæmic state though more likely it results from the lack of any middle-class kids being drafted for the conflict.
If one recognizes that the state is not the Church, and should not be turned into the Church, that utopian dreams are of the devil and always result in evil and injustice when tried, that faith is about the personal struggle to overcome sin and to acquire holiness and not about building a perfect world, then yeah I think there’s such a thing as faithful politics.
Godwin’s law and arguments against socialism. Or why’s it OK for a leftist to compare somebody on the right to Hitler but not for someone on the right to point out the left’s economic and health-care schemes are close to the Nazis’?
“Progressive”: a self-congratulatory word used by the lemming at the front of the pack to describe himself, as he and his fellows “progress” toward the edge of the cliff.
As C.S. Lewis noted some time ago: Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
Our Catholic faith is a sacramental faith. It is more than ethics, morals, or healthy lifestyle. It is more than human assent to these things. It is a faith of sacramental action, sacraments that convey what the signify, signify what they convey. From this.
One of the good kinds of modern churches. The modern road not taken. From 1950: Gothic meets art-deco meets the legitimate liturgical movement. Not a decorated barn nor ostentation nor pastiche but quality architecture fit for a Western Catholic church. As TNLM said, innovative approaches to design that nonetheless fell within the bounds of tradition, and sought to expand them in new directions rather than simply forsaking them.
Blessed Mary ever virgin: I’m a prison chaplain (Anglican) and I’m doing a Bible study in the inter-faith dorm when one of the guys asks about the belief in the perpetual virginity of the Virgin Mary. As a way of helping the majority Protestant crowd grasp Catholic reverence for Mary, I speak of her as the “Ark” of the New Covenant who bore the Word. I go on to explain... “Now if Uzzah was struck down for touching the Ark of the Old Covenant, how do you think Joseph felt about touching the Ark which bore the eternal Word, Jesus Christ?” At this point, a L-A-R-G-E black brother from Cleveland (former drug dealer) says Mr. T-style — “Makes sense to me. You’d hafta be a fool to touch her! She was God’s baby’s mama!” Honestly, that’s a great boost for ecumenical understanding.
On euphemisms. Really trying to be nice or sanctimony? My rule is the simpler the expression the better. The new politically correct phrase is “intellectually disabled.” That sounds like how you would describe someone who had been taken apart by Bill Buckley on “Firing Line,” not someone who is, well, mentally retarded.
Everything government touches turns to crap. At least some of the Beatles were smarter than many of their fans. Ringo Starr gets it right whilst John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ was terribly wrong. (Howard Stern: imagine there’s no royalties; it’s easy if you try; no pad at the Dakota...)
Banning texting while driving. Some behaviour seems inherently to violate the no-harm principle but some libertarians argue you can’t arrest someone to prevent harm not done (as in drinking and driving).
His way of war. Many Americans like to think that foreign policy and war, on the one hand, and domestic policy, on the other, are distinct, unconnected political realms. The antiwar hippies who chanted, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many boys did you kill today?” didn’t suffer much cognitive dissonance condemning LBJ’s war and endorsing his Great Society. Murray Rothbard attempted to bring the New Left full circle in the ’60s and capitalize on its anti-state animus with respect to the war. Rothbard’s mistake was to think that your average hippie or Ramparts contributor really meant it when he occasionally used “libertarian” sounding-rhetoric in the specific context of criticizing the war. (It’s almost as if someone from the Campaign for Liberty heard a Republican question the constitutionality of Obama’s Cash for Clunkers program and then concluded that he must also grasp the fundamental illegitimacy of the Iraq invasion. (No, he doesn’t.) As Joshua has written the tragedy for America in ‘the ’60s’ as commonly understood (as Charley Wingate and Rod Dreher say, essentially it was being an upper-middle-class white at university between about 1967 and 1972) was that the Old Right and New Left never got together: if only, as impossible as it sounds, the rednecks and the hippies before they became hippies (rather like Carl Oglesby in the early days) sat down, actually talked to each other, realised they were being played by both major parties and said ‘no more’. No race-baiting, no more stupid wars, no parlour Marxism and none of the narcissistic nonsense still romanticised today that accomplished little and ruined what many honestly remember as a golden age. Actually the hippy double standard is easy to understand: to a spoilt, self-centred rich kid the war meant an end to his good times; with the Great Society he thought Daddy State could pay for his good times for ever.
The Bubba bubble. We saw this before about 15 years ago. Don’t believe the Republicans now either... or the Democrats.
The real story of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad and ecumenism.More.Ecumenist has become an all-purpose insult used by online converts rather like mainliners use fundamentalist for any conservative. Irish Hermit’s right. The old Russian батюшки (‘fathers’, priests) knew who they were and had nothing to prove by verbally beating up other Christians. Metropolitan Anastassy (Gribanowsky) once preached at St Paul’s Cathedral in London. The fanatical stuff in ROCOR came and went with the Greek Old Calendarists taken on board in the 1970s who later left. Reunion with the church in Russia two years ago seems to be setting this right again.
What should secular journalists call the Blessed Sacrament? Speaking as a secular journalist (like I’m a secular libertarian — secular ≠ anti-religious) I think Communion (elements) with a capital C seems a good all-purpose usage as does consecrated bread, which is not perfect but there’s no room to get into a theological discussion when writing for a non-church paper or magazine. Much like simply saying the Episcopal priest or the Methodist bishop without getting into an argument about holy orders.
Summing up the Anglican row FWIW. The deleted links in short: an Episcopalian describing his denomination’s highest council boasted that he belonged to a democratic organisation with no Pope to which I said ‘precisely’. In a fallible church everything is up for grabs. (In Orthodoxy it’s not so it’s not about the Pope.) An infallible church is self-limiting: it can’t change its mind and decide two men can marry each other in one of its parishes for example. (So his denomination claims a power the Pope doesn’t!) The conservative Protestants happen to agree more with the Catholic faith on hot-button moral issues but on whose authority? Ultimately it’s not about sex but ecclesiology/authority. The ‘Reformation’ was evil.
The case for early marriage Been saying that for years after learning it from Jeff Culbreath: ideally society — extended family (not the modern nuclear one uprooted by multiple corporate moves), neighbourhood, village — would make it possible again for people to act like adults as soon as they grow up rather than imposing an unnatural, nearly impossible demand of abstinence on them in their sexual prime (obviously not all are called to live like monks and nuns). (Or pretending the ‘new morality’ world the upper classes have created is real.) Young men could be some sort of apprentices; young women would have built-in child care and maternal wisdom from their elders and other relations as well as their friends. More from Rod Dreher. And more from Reactionary.
Booze and smokes split the atom and conquered the moon. Beatnik drugs are responsible for cultural innovations such as teaching second-graders how to put a condom on a banana.
Taki’s Scott Locklin watches ‘Mad Men’ which I’ve not seen but considering how much I like this show I’d like to, just to compare.
One of those historical TV shows which is pleasant to look at, but has almost no historical verity to it.
Everyone on this show sports an accent that didn’t exist until around 1980.
I can imagine: young people in historical fancy dress talking like Valley Girls and dudes.
People were more refined in 1961 than they are now, just as they were more refined in sartorial style. People had good manners in the old days. It was considered important.
Does anyone actually think professions such as “life coach” or “diversity officer” or even “C++ programmer” won’t seem absurd and dated 50 years from now? I suppose there are a lot of modern Panglossians who think they are living in some sort of high era of moral and intellectual sophistication — “the best of all possible worlds,” rather than a shabby age of cultural decline. Such people will find a lot to feel smug about in watching “Mad Men.” The reason modern SWPLers are able to experience this smugness is the very definition of cultural decline: they never spoke to their grandparents about the way things actually were in the old days.
Real beatniks made the imaginary misogyny of “Mad Men” seem like small beer.
While the cultural revolution of the 1960s claims to have freed women from the sexist chains of their evil white male overlords, women are now “free” ... well, to work unpleasant office jobs and to be chased down like pieces of meat.
Certainly women didn’t have the bludgeon of political correctness in those days. They were also generally expected to eventually quit work to raise a family. In normal societies where people get married and reproduce themselves without requiring the intervention of trillion-dollar social-engineering programs, this is how things generally function. Yet, women were measurably happier.
The woman who gave me my break in the newspaper business was a national news reporter from this period who indeed dropped out for a time to raise a family.
Modern people have certainly developed a similarly byzantine set of status rules for “polite society” to replace the antiquated WASP folkways of fair play and avuncular good manners. Really, we’ve replaced all the outdated cultural totems of 1961. Instead of valuing sexual fidelity, we sort our recyclables. Instead of general consideration for the feelings of others, we have developed a sort of Kabuki theater of politically correct groveling. Rather than fly-fishing, sailing and hunting, the modern upper middle class goes on ecological vacations to third-world hellholes to marinate in their superior state of moral consciousness. Upper middle-class sanctimony is now generally directed at people who drive large cars, or who make “insensitive” jokes, rather than the old WASP vilification of people who abandon their families, or who cheat and steal. Being rude and egotistical is now considered “being yourself.”
Some jottings about the news
