The unraveling of America's healthcare system

A tragic story here in Ohio that got me to thinking.  God rest that child and her grieving parents.  I don't even like to think about it.  But here's the thing.  

Most who ignore the news media are aware that death from medical malpractice is no small thing, and hasn't been for decades.  Whether it's getting worse proportionately or not, I don't know.  As much as we like to imagine that there is some treasure vault out there with a stat for everything that needs proven, it doesn't always work that way. 

Especially when something, like the medical community, is what I call the Priesthood of Privileged Professions.  Like academia in general, or education (public or higher), or the scientific community at large - at least the scientific community that toes the line.  Ever notice that these are professions or vocations that the news media will promote, but seldom if ever critique, no matter how bad things are or how many failures stack on failures? 

So that there is no small number of Americans who die from medical malpractice each year, though it is seldom mentioned, is not surprising.  Likewise, there are the growing problems with medical care in general.  We've seen it ourselves in recent years.

The last time my mom had a stroke while she was still living with us, my oldest son and I took her to the emergency room.  By then it was not the first stroke she had, and we were fast learning the symptoms.  But you couldn't get anyone there to say she was anything other than just old.  Maybe a UTI.  Both of us fired back and said dig deeper, it's a stroke.  My normally introverted oldest became almost angry, telling them we've seen stroke, we know stroke, this is a stroke.  After about ten minutes of back and forth the ER doctor, she finally agreed to run some tests in that direction and, would you believe it? 

But then a year earlier, she had a stroke, they knew she had a stroke, and she remained in her ER bed for over a day, because there was no room at the inn.  Or the hospital in that case.  And this isn't some Billy Bubba's Hospital and BBQ medical place either.  It's one of the premier hospitals in Ohio.  Yet they just didn't have the beds.  Finally they discharged her because, well, that was that.  They set up some homecare visits instead. There simply were no rooms. 

This is happening more and more as well.  Even critics of America's healthcare who pine for good old socialized medicine have conceded that the one area American healthcare did shine was speed of service.  While the legendary wait times in more socialized environments is a thing, in America it's one problem we didn't have.  Until now.  

My third son had a health emergency a year ago.  He went to the ER, and they patched him up, but told him to call his primary care provider ASAP.  So next day he did.  He explained the problem, what the ER said, and his provider's office said sure, they can get him in.  In about three weeks.  He explained he actually needed seen, you know, now.  But that was that.  They told him to go to a clinic or wait.  It made me think of this scene from Caddyshack: 

Or, are you sick?  I'm afraid we can't see you.  What?  That's what you're there for! 

I've experienced the same thing.  As have others.  I know some who have said it seems like the medical offices are just not invested in things like making you better anymore.  I'm sure it's not all like that. But there comes a time when you start thinking it can't just be our little corner of the world and everything else is just peachy. 

But it's this sort of thing that is under reported, if reported at all, that so many don't want to talk about, that more and more people are seeing and getting fed up with.  I know it's tough to think things are as bad as they seem.  We love the ones who say 'Democracy isn't collapsing, America isn't unraveling, why things always seem that way but it always works out!'.  

Yeah, they often do seem that way in this fallen world.  They always seem to be falling apart, going from bad to catastrophic, or on the edge of collapse.  And often it turns out things finally cross a bridge and pick back up.  But sometimes they don't.  Sometimes those yelling the sky is falling loud enough turn out to be vindicated when, in fact, the sky finally falls.  And we know from history, the sky will fall.  And if the good guys don't admit things are unraveling fast, the bad guys will be happy to step in and do something about it, even if it's all the wrong things. 

The Ohio State University continues to do dumb things

It was just announced that Senior Day for the Ohio State Buckeyes will be on the season opener. Traditionally and barring catastrophic incident, across all sports, 'Senior Day' is when senior athletes and their family/parents gather on the field or court at the end of the season to celebrate their last home game together.  It's one of those traditions you check each year, but a tradition that means something.  That 'last hurrah before we go our separate ways.' It's something I've seen done in every town and city and state I've lived in. 

Until now.  There is nothing about having that on the first home game of the season that means anything.  Because the players will return time and again for the rest of the year.  I mean, all it is now is saying 'Hi, we're the seniors this year, see you next week.'  If the argument is that it was only some old tradition we had to do, at least it meant something.  Now it's a tradition we have to do that means nothing.  There is no word on whether this is now permanent or not.  But we know how these things usually go.  

Despite the reasons given, virtually nobody believes that the driving force behind this isn't contracts with broadcast corporations and sponsors for the televised final home game - which happens to be against Michigan. College athletics is in a flux right now, and few sports have been hit harder by the 'make the students professional millionaires' (NIL: or Name, Image and Likeness) decision than college football. The sport has been flopping about like a goldfish on the living room carpet ever since they began trying to wrap up the season without the old Bowl series.  The 'money for important athletes' rule has merely torpedoed an already listing ship.

Now this.  An obligatory tradition that will still play out for no reason now except being an obligatory tradition, shorn of what heart and soul it possessed, most likely for the money.  It makes me think of the Mirror Lake debacle, which I mentioned here.  Long and short, in the 90s a 'tradition' emerged in which hopped up, drugged and drunk morons gathered to jump into the shallow waters of Mirror Lake.  For ages, that location was voted one of the most beautiful locations on any college campus in America. Nonetheless, that new trend kept up until the inevitable, when someone dove in and snapped his neck and died.  So naturally, instead of dropping the hammer on the practice, the OSU leadership gutted the entire location, turning it into a 'natural beauty area.'  Another way of saying 'just a pond that, half the year, looks like a fetid swamp instead.'  

Another fumble of worth I can think of was when OSU announced it would no longer give a shout  out during graduation to the students graduating with honors.  We wouldn't want those students who didn't achieve the highest grades to feel bad after all.  And the last thing we want to do is celebrate greatness or success.  

For me, things like this symbolize the dearth of worthwhile leadership in our nation as much as anything.  A leadership that seems capable of doing not much more than strip away everything meaningful and leave an empty husk of an institutional stamp in the wake. Sometimes I think all of our problems today are because of nothing more than the fact that our modern leaders suck. They're no good.  They're Barney Fife without the virtues.  It might be as simple as that.

Telescoping cultural history

Internet age style.  One of the odd quirks I've noticed over the last decade or so is how so much of older culture is being forgotten, or at least devalued.  Outside of certain fanboy circles, what once was held with reverence and revered is today almost entirely irrelevant.  It isn't that I'm shocked that the 80s are now as far away as the 50s were when I was growing up.  But I'm shocked at how aware we were of the 50s culture versus how little awareness there seems to be regarding the 80s, 40s, or any other decade today.

Let me explain.  The reason why Back to the Future worked for my generation is not that we were stunned by the cultural differences that Marty McFly discovers on his way back to his parents' teen years.  It's that we knew the references very well.  We knew the music, the TV, the fashion.  We were aware of those things.  We knew who the biggies were.  We even admired some of those old icons.  We knew the movies, the stars, Elvis and the other early rock stars.  We also knew the older stars they were replacing: Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, even older Bing Crosby. We knew the TV shows, the movies.  We knew how people dressed.  And we sometimes admired and even liked their craft.

Today, when I read sites dedicated to culture, like movies, it's as if there really wasn't a film industry before 1992.  Oh sure, some will have the obligatory Chaplin movie, or Duck Soup, or The Seven Samurai.  But on the whole, you'd think if it wasn't laden with CGI or featuring the latest, hippest, it just didn't exist.  And if older movies are mentioned, there is almost an apology for the lack of sophistication, or old standard styles that existed at the time.

Which brings me to Steve Graydanus.  He's every Catholic's favorite movie critic.  And yet?  He exemplifies what I mean.  Set aside the fact that when it comes to movies influenced by American Protestantism, you can expect at least a finger wagging, if not a drop of a letter grade.  That's just the Catholic coming out.

But go to his site here, and see what he praises, what he doesn't, and what he doesn't even mention, which to me represents everything I'm noticing.  Movies like The Godfather, Gone With the Wind*, Cool Hand Luke, Cape Fear, Psycho, and The Sting - movies considered revolutionary, influential, or among the greatest ever made, aren't even mentioned.  You might say it's because his is a family guide site, and those aren't family.  Yet he has R rated movies (see The Silence of the Lambs).  Why not these?

When he does rate classics, such as Snow White or Stage Coach, he often injects slights at them for various era based distinctives, or seems to say 'nothing special, but an A for reputation', even if he ends up praising  the overall films for reasons his review doesn't reflect.  Or he dismisses them outright.  Yet he gives a B- to The Phantom Menace.  A B+ to The Lego Movie!  Are you kidding me?  Sure it was cute, but Lawrence of Arabia gets an A-, while the Lego Movie gets a B+?

It's as if the Internet age has changed things.  Changed what we accept as good, quality, acceptable, unacceptable, classic, legend.  Sometimes it's as if things that once were the "Essentials" have suddenly been tossed on the trash heap.  What was once legend is now antique at best.  Once the medal standard is now a forgotten footnote.  I don't know why. I don't even have a theory.

I just know that when my friends and I watched 1933 King Kong, in the post-Star Wars era, we thought it was awesome.  We got that it was old, the special effect weren't up to Star Wars.  We got that the acting was different than modern acting.  We hadn't been influenced by Multi-cultural PC enough to look for racism and bigotry in every frame of every movie, but we got that it was of its time.  Unlike modern movie review sites, we wouldn't lament the special effects, acting, racism, or anything else.  We took it for its time and praised it accordingly.  And any young, budding movie critic would also have to grapple with such films, even if they didn't care for them, because they were part of the whole cinematic package.  It's noteworthy that Decent Films doesn't even review the original Kong, mentioning it only in the review of Jackson's 2005 remake, and then more or less dismissing it as uninteresting and not worth much more acknowledgement than setting up the basis for Jackson's B Graded remake. A movie that once garnered praise and adoration from critics, movie buffs, film historians, and youngsters of every generation, reduced to an afterthought.  Such is the fruits of the Internet Age.

Mr. Graydanus is not alone.  Like so many modern film critics, he seems to have little to say about anything old, unless it tickles his fancy for this or that reason.  Likewise, fanboy that he is, his respect is reserved for the latest fantasy/comic book laden stories with copious amounts of CGI.  Sure, he gives bad reviews to movies, often when they flagrantly assault a major part of the Catholic ethos.  This isn't to pick on Mr. Graydanus.  In fact, I enjoy reading his reviews, even if I disagree with many of his conclusions.  But he represents a trend that is far more common, even among older critics trying to appeal to the Internet age, than it is the exception.  Just look at the IMBD top movies list for examples.

It's post-modern, mixed with the Internet cubicles of a fragmenting generation. I owe nothing to anything greater than myself or the particular clique to which I belong. If I'm a movie reviewer, and don't care about or want to look at a given movie, then so be it. And woe betide anything other than a small handful of old offerings that fail to measure up to the awesomeness of Now (compare his C rating for the delightful 1977 The Hobbit animated movie with his B level rating for Jackson's 2012 cinematic version - what was better in Jackson's other than the use of CGI?).  Back in the day, a movie critic who didn't include The Godfather would be like a Revolutionary War historian who had nothing to say about Washington.  But not today.  What that says about the greater trends of our post-modern Internet age, I don't know.  But I'm 100% convinced it says something, and eventually will say it loudly.

*It's worth noting that Decent Films has few reviews of the greatest movies from 1939, considered for almost all time as the Greatest Year in Movies.  Including Gone With the Wind.  Again, it says much, IMHO.

NOTE:  This is an old post from about a decade or so ago.  This was well before Deacon Greydanus banned me the first time, when we used to get on well even when we disagreed.  So this was not some slap at him over his clear swing to the Left of center.  This was when we got along, and he sometimes would admit I made a good point or two, even when we disagreed.  It just came up with a slew of visits, and I found it interesting.  Especially as I pondered how he did exemplify many of those old 'postmodern' traits, well before his shift left. I wondered if there might be a connection, somehow postmodernity being a gateway drug to the left of center so to speak.  Perhaps that's the loud statement I was expecting.  

Sad but true

 This has been around for several years:

But it continues to be true.  The problems we see today are the result of endless causes.  Figuring out which are the key factors to what we've become is a task unto itself.  Admitting that something went seriously wrong, on the other hand, is simple.  

The war on alcohol continues to intensify

As yet another study shows that no alcohol is safe, now where dementia is concerned.  This being among an apparent growing number of ailments driven by booze.  Pretty soon alcohol will be why Adam and Eve really rebelled and Napoleon lost at Waterloo.  

Now, something is definitely wrong in the dementia world, that I admit.  More and more people are being diagnosed with dementia and Alzheimer's than ever before.  And these diagnoses are happening at ever younger ages.  My grandma - born in the late 1800s - had a stroke and became confused and, based on what we know, stricken by some form of what we now call dementia.  Of her siblings, however, she was the only one.  The rest of her generation passed, many at very old ages, as sharp as tacks.  Her brother Earl was well known for being completely together mentally until he passed (he was a consummate story teller).

The next generation, my parents' generation, have had only a couple who didn't end up with some form of dementia or Alzheimer's.  Including both my parents.  And while my dad drank like a fish when he was young, he gave it up after an accident involving my sister.  Though it had nothing to do with him drinking, he was playing cards and drinking with his brothers when it happened.  He felt his reaction time to her injury was compromised, so he never drank again. And that was when he was still young.  Except for a few parties and wedding receptions when they were young, I don't believe my mom drank at all.  Yet they, like their siblings, were struck with dementia, albeit at very old ages. 

Now we have an increasing number of people having these elderly ailments at younger and younger ages.  And unlike some things, perhaps cancer or some diseases which we could argue are simply easier to detect now, you can't miss dementia.  Long before the diagnoses, you begin seeing the signs.  As we did in both my parents' cases.  Yet suddenly, it's alcohol!  You know, that thing people have been doing for thousands of years before dementia began spreading like wild fire among younger and younger people.  The thing that, per the same stories going after alcohol, fewer and fewer people are indulging in today.

Yet the assault continues.  So as I said last time, my cynical historian's mind asks - why?  Why out of the blue, over the last year or so, has the medical community (and the media) suddenly come out and said burn beer burn! Do not drink wine nor strong drink thou, whether ye go into the corner tabernacle or not! What's up? 

First up?  The conspiracy explanation.  Why do people drink?  Apart from alcoholism, to enjoy, to relax, to unwind.  To indulge in the giddy side effects of the product in a troubled and difficult world.  Also, just because they like a cold beer on a summer day or a nice wine with a fine meal.  Sometimes they take Paul's advice when perhaps having stomach problems or other difficulties like sleeping.  

But if we don't have alcohol, then what to do about all of those reason?  Well, apart from the enjoyment around meals and for culinary peasures, we have - drugs.  The media push for legalized recreational drugs continues apace with some pretty impressive wins.  And in terms of other problems, such as difficulty sleeping or stomach issues or any such things, we have - drugs.  Prescription drugs.  The cynic in me has a hard time thinking there isn't some connection there.  

Others have suggested it's a way to deflect from the increasing health problems plaguing more and more people.  I mean, it's almost normal now to see at least one or two celebrities or well known persons die of cancer, heart disease, suicide or unknown reasons in a given week.  Things that decades ago would have made the news for weeks because it was so rare.  The deaths of celebrities were typically reserved back then for the elderly celebrities whose days had passed.  Exceptions to that rule being exceptions to that rule.  But today?  I can't think of a week where I haven't seen someone, often well under 50 or even 40, dying in such a way.  It seems connected to the observation that we are becoming less and less healthy overall.  Why? Nobody seems to know, or dwell on the details much, but blaming alcohol could certainly work.

Some have suggested it deflects from the catastrophic results of our Covid measures, including questions about vaccines and the overall response from our medical communities.  It isn't hard to see that things have definitely spiraled in some areas of life in recent years, and over a host of issues. If already we've seen alcohol linked to cancer, dementia, anything you want - why not anything else? 

But one thing I'm sure of, it isn't an accident.  It's not some bizarre coincidence out of the blue.  There is a reason that alcohol is being targeted and fast becoming the latest cause du jour of all problems in the world.  And whatever the reason - and it can obviously be more than one - it's those reasons being deflected from that we should likely be focused on. 

Also, I'll add that this is not an advertisement to drink.  If you don't, great.  I'm not being paid by Paul Masson or Budweiser.  I just see things like this in our day and age and have a very difficult time believing it's just good old medical science discovering the truths of the world that we need to know in order to thrive.  As I've said before, sometimes it takes far more naivete and credulity to disbelieve a conspiracy theory than to believe in one. 

I will give JD Vance credit

He is willing to call out the BS and mendacity that has come to define our post-Christian, postmodern era:

That we have taken an entire generation and told them that every word uttered should affirm them as the gods of their realities, or they should unleash endless hatred or commit suicide - either being an understandable reaction - shows just how low we've sunk.  The only thing worse is how so many of our institutions that should know better (ahem, hello Christian Church), have pretty much gone along with it.  And have done so no matter how disastrous the results. 

We'll see how it goes.  Vance better be good enough to die for the sins of humanity, because even the slightest discovered transgression will be hyped more than Pearl Harbor was.  And more than that, almost everyone left of center, and the bulk of those who have settled into our post-Christian status quo, will jump on him like rabid inquisitors.  

Enough said

Special counsel worried jurors would see Biden 'as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory'

Special counsel Robert Hur wrote that he was concerned jurors would not believe that Joe Biden “willfully” kept classified documents, and that was one of the reasons why he does not think the president should face charges.

“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur writes.

“Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him – by then a former president well into his eighties – of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

Hur wrote that: “Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023. And his cooperation with our investigation, including by reporting to the government that the Afghanistan documents were in his Delaware garage, will likely convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully – that is, with intent to break the law – as the statute requires.”

Interesting point

I'm back!  It's been a whirlwind to be sure, as the previous posts demonstrate.  Thanks for all the well wishes and comments and emails everyone!  We certainly are blessed.  

As I've said before, I don't intend to keep up with the old pace of blogging, times being what they are, and obligations and family dynamics shifting and all.  Nonetheless, I'll still comment a time or two each week, though I hope to spend more of my blogging time on the finer things of life.  

You know, family fun and games, the latest book or movie, or just being glad about our new bishop who actually makes us think we are important to him.  The previous bishop - Bishop Brennan - also gave us that feeling, but he was sent back to his stomping grounds in Brooklyn before we had a chance to get to know him.  Nonetheless, our latest bishop more than rises to the occasion, and I can't say how nice it is to have a bishop who seems genuinely glad about not just his Catholic Faith, but its traditional roots as well (bonus point: he's also an official exorcist for the Church). 

Nonetheless, I thought I would throw out this little observation that caught my eye and has made me think. It was something that really made sense, is obvious, and yet something I hadn't put together.  It was pointed out that up until WWII, most of humanity believed two crucial things.  One, that there is something very important beyond this physical world.  And two, that there are things in this world that are more important than me.

After WWII, those assumptions began to collapse quickly.  Soon individualism became 'me, myself and I, as opposed to the rest of the world that is dead last in importance'. You can see this in those media psychiatrists who insist we owe it to our kids to put ourselves first ahead of them, or anyone else for that matter.  Heck, you can see it everywhere. 

And the importance beyond this world, which likely was already collapsing in the West among the upper classes before the World Wars, began to unravel fast across the board.  Really.  I wonder how many Christians today believe that one's religious confessions have anything to do with the afterlife.  For that matter, I wonder how many think anything has to do with the afterlife, other than the assumption it happens and we get to see our loved ones and cuddly puppies after we die, because of course we do. 

But those two beliefs, bigger than this world and a world bigger than me, were far from exceptional, even if humans had millions of different ways to unpack those beliefs.  But in the modern age, it's largely me as the center of my world, and nothing beyond this world of terrible importance, if there is anything at all.  The results of these perspectives speak for themselves.  

File this observation under 'solutions to the problem that the media will never cover.' 

Expressing your individuality like everyone else

Is the mantra of our modern age.  It's worth noting that true non-conformity has never been vogue.  True non-conformists will always be outcasts.  It happens.  Societies have that which is acceptable, and that which is not.  Nonetheless, during the counter-culture revolution of the 1960s, the flower children of that age managed to systematize non-conformity in a way never really seen.  Presenting themselves as freethinking rebels with a cause, there are probably few cases of more like-thinking conformity in history than the entire 60s hippy movement.  I mean, you could see a free thinking flower child hippy rebel ten miles away because they all looked and acted the same.  

Since then, and with help from the good people at Madisen Avenue, non-conformity has become big business.  There's money to be made in convincing people that the best way to be a non-conformist is to get in line and do what all the other non-conformists are doing. 

I thought of this when I saw a story about some local police department changing its policy where tattoos are concerned.  I mean, how much of a rebel are you when the symbol of the oppressive machine is on your side?  More to the point, when the symbol of the oppressive machine is groveling at your feet and willing to change policy in the desperate hope that you apply for a job!  Perhaps that's why so many celebrities and rock stars grovel before the State Machine today instead of boldly rebelling against it - if they ever really did rebel against it. 

I have to say, based on the evidence around us, I'd call my sons about the most rebellious non-conformists I know.  And generally it was with little prompting from us parents. In most cases they were free to pursue their appearances and interests as they saw fit.  Long hair I would tolerate, though I wouldn't recommend it.  That's a battle I wasn't going to fight.  But I drew the line at piercing and tattoos.  Anything that could cause an infection would not be allowed as long as they were on my insurance.  They more or less accepted those  boundaries, and thus far, none of them have gotten the body art or piercing or goth this or dyed hair that is embraced by about 97% of their free thinking peers.  Which makes you wonder just who is the bold non-conforming rebel.

The courage of our youth

When pondering the hot mess police response in Uvalde, Texas, one of my sons said something damning.  He said the kids in the school were braver than the adults in uniform.  We then discussed why.  We concluded there was a time when the natural fearlessness of children was formed and shaped into bravery, sacrifice, honor, duty and loyalty. Not always perfectly, but that was the goal.

Today, that natural fearlessness of children is formed and shaped by Wall Street, Hollywood, our schools and universities and even many of our churches into cowardliness, narcissism, nihilism, hedonism and decadence.  Had those poor children been outside their school, I feel they would have charged forth blindly to save their classmates.  It took growing up and being weaned in our post-modern nation to get the response from adults that we witnessed.  Though the bravery of those who did act shows that, like old teaching, the new hedonism doesn't always stick either. 

I thought of that when I saw the below speech. It's from a Harvard undergrad.  According to John C. Wright, it was met with stunned silence.  Because she is spot on.  And we all know it.  And those who have surrendered and consigned future generations to tyranny and oppression and squalor know it, too. 

Kudos young woman.  You are a credit to those who waded ashore at Normandy and in every other conflict that was waged to keep us free.  You're better than the schools, culture, corporations and even religious traditions that raised you. 

I admit this was in bad taste

But it still made me laugh:

Because let's face it, there is some truth there and we all know it.  Though you could replace Dr. Fauci with a news logo and it would be just as true. 

I blame Gutenberg

 Yep, this is his fault:

When books are this cheap and easy, you get the above book on a Barnes and Noble bookshelf.  Personally I could come up with at least one or two other important speeches before stumbling on anything young Ms. Thunberg has to say.

The problem isn't just the proliferation of books, however. I only jesting.  It's that the above cover reflects the dominant media narrative.  Per the media, Ms. Thunberg is one of the most important people of our age.  Because the media says so, that's why. 

It almost makes you rethink anything we've ever heard from the media over the years, don't it. 

St. Patrick's New Breastplate

Courtesy of that sage and prophet Bono:

Oh Saint Patrick he drove out the snakes
With his prayers but that’s not all it takes
For the snake symbolizes
An evil that rises
And hides in your heart
As it breaks
And the evil has risen my friends
From the darkness that lives in some men
But in sorrow and fear
That’s when saints can appear
To drive out those old snakes once again
And they struggle for us to be free
From the psycho in this human family Ireland’s sorrow and pain
Is now the Ukraine
And Saint Patrick’s name now Zelensky

Yep.  You read that right.  We live in a shallow and superficial age.  A godless, aimless, pointless age with nothing to anchor it except the latest fad. If that fad is lifting Ukraine up to the level of Heaven and worshipping Zelenksi as the new Buddha Messiah God, so be it.  

I think it was Chesterton who once said something to the effect that if people stop believing in God, they won't believe in nothing, they'll believe in anything.  If that was said, our age proves its right more than anything I can imagine.

For the record, and to be honest, I was never a U2 fan.  I always had the impression they were waving their arms in the air and saying, "Look at us, we're important!"  They clearly imagined themselves as the next Beatles in terms of social and  cultural relevance.  Complete with their own 'Rooftop Performance' back in the mid-80s.  So part of this could be bias on my part.

But I don't think all of it. It shows that for all of our post-WWII contempt for the entire pre-WWII world, we've made it our life's ambition to repeat everything we condemned our ancestors and parents for doing.  

You know what would be neat for the black community to do?

Every once and awhile say that criminals cause problems too. Right now, the American black community  has entered an almost Dali-like world of surrealness where blacks - or anyone really - can break the law, rape, murder, assault, threaten the innocent, and if anything goes wrong, police are killers! 

I mean, that's nuts, and more nuts than I dare you to find in many other eras in human history.  Yet not only has it gripped the black community, but I'm seeing nobody anywhere else - and that includes in education, corporate America, politics, and even religion - point out that every now and then there is such a thing as personal accountability.  That every once in a while, criminals can sometimes be a least slightly to blame for crimes. 

Bonus points for recognizing in that article another 21st Century post-modern distinctive.  That is, in addition to post-human race group identity, whether or not you are capable of making a mistake or accidently doing something as opposed to purposefully doing evil is based solely on which group you happen to belong to at the moment.  

So to group A - black America - anything done by anyone in groups B (Police) and C (whites in general) can be for no reason than  purposeful killing and racism.  Accidents simply don't happen in these cases.  There can be nothing other than a purpsose  Everything is on purpose and for the worst reasons. 

Meanwhile, again, we don't even care about blacks committing crimes.  Accident or not, nobody - including politicians, educators, journalists and religious leaders - appears to care enough to do something about it more than an occasional block party or march through the streets. Because the main cause of most violence against blacks isn't the problem?  

It's one crazy age.  As my sons said, if Medieval peasants had Monty Python, their skits would probably look a lot like us. 

This is why I advised my sons not to join the military

This is what our military has been reduced to.  At a time of increased fatalities through accidents, cases in which servicemen have proven ill-prepared for combat, and mounting cases of criminal assault and unexplained murders, our military focuses on - all things gay sex. Because that's what the leftwing says to focus on. 

So what if as many Americans have died of AIDS - with the majority being homosexual men - as have been killed in all of America's wars combined?     If anyone doubts the 'cold civil war' or 'culture war' or whatever you prefer has been lost by those who would preserve the Christian Western tradition, I give you this. 

I try to imagine what future history will say about us. I don't think it will be pretty. 'So dad, you're saying that in a world of pandemic and mounting crisis, the thing they care about the most was who those in their military units wanted to have sex with?' 'Yes son, that explains a lot.'

It's not that Black Lives Matter

It's that no lives matter until black lives do. On a more serious note,  my old Patheos editor Sam Rocha takes it to the next level by echoing the latest development in the 'judge by skin color, not content of character' movement.  Now no life matters - hear that oh sons of mine - until black lives matter.  And when and what that means means nothing since, like most things of postmodernity, there is no end game or goal or measurable outcome.  There is a slogan to be used to pummel, pummel, and pummel again.  

By the lack of clear finish lines and goals, combined with Sam's statement, my sons' lives may never matter again.  Or his life may not matter. Or even black lives may not matter? Who knows except what we all know which is always nothing ever.  And while we don't know, the goalposts continue to be moved. 

Note, however, how he easily weaves in and out of 'it's all sooooo complex' to stating his position about BLM with all the uncertainty of a Waco tent meeting. That's a trick my sons have noticed.  They saw it most recently in our neck of the woods when a police officer shot and killed a teenager who was attacking another girl with a knife.

They noticed that now the debate is over when a knife fight is OK, when it isn't, when wielding a knife and attacking someone might make you the victim, why police should have comprehensive knowledge of all people involved before reacting, and basically how we can ever know if C-A-T really doesn't spell DOG.

The important point isn't finding an answer, but keeping things in perpetual question mode.  Keep things jumping, hopping, and confusing.  Insist everything is always except for when it isn't until it's never which is yes no.  And that way, amidst the confusion, you can then plow forward - as Sam does - with the gospel of BLM, racial profiling, and guilt by group identity, ethnic liability, national origins and what have you.  In fact, so sure is he in pushing BLM that, compared to all the 'it's all so nuanced' filling his post, you can't help but pay some level of attention when he makes such dogmatic statements.

Which, my boys imagine, is the point.  Complexity when convenient, surrounding a juggernaut of dogmatic utterances that would make a Nuremberg speech seem nuanced by comparison.  That is one of modernity's neatest tricks.  It's how we went from a post-war liberalism that said violence is never the answer, to a 2020 insistence that those innocent killed by the BLM riots were sad, but necessary collateral damage for the greater cause.  Or the national 2021 debate about when trying to stab someone to death makes one the victim.  

There are so many other things wrong with this post.  It's sort of a condensed 'everything wrong with the modern left in one post' publication.  Such as Sam's easy dismissal of the lives ruined and incomes  lost from last year's riots.  Sam points out that so horrible has been the terror visited on black Americans for the last four hundreds years by all the racist whites in this racist nation, that they could riot and destroy (and perhaps kill?) for decades and it would never make up the balance.  Again, you heard liberals say violence is never the answer, but the Left now says that it can be a beautiful thing when executed for the leftist cause.

It's enough for my post, however, that his appeal to circular dogmatic nuance is why things like this, meme though it is:

Fall on deaf ears. It's a perfectly sane and valid point.  Why have our highest paid professionals concluded that a few seconds of often edited, fuzzy and shaky videos is enough to execute judgment, when we watch same highest paid professionals spend endless amounts of time examining the  most sophisticated and expensive motion picture capture before arriving at a conclusion?  In a sane and mature world not polluted by lies and foolishness, that is a valid point. But in a world of 'it's so complex let's charge forth with new morals that are right this time', it is, sadly, a waste of breath and ink. 

Three Amigos, Internet Trolls and the death of freedom

Huh?  What?  That's the sort of headline I write that can only make sense to me.  So let me 'splain.  

I'm sure we've all been watching with jaws on the floor as a growing number of our nation's leaders make it clear they wish to eliminate the right to oppose them.  Furthermore, we've watched as billionaires in the tech world took it upon themselves to control speech and thought crimes by banning people who disagree with them.  And if that wasn't enough - and by golly it ought to be  -  I'm sure I'm not the only one who stared in disbelief at so many who seem perfectly fine with this and are sure such measures would only be applied to those type of people over there.  As one who has spent my life reading, teaching, studying and lecturing on history, that's the equivalent of an astronomer stumbling across a flat earth conspiracy theorist.  How could we be this stupid?  How could we be this historically illiterate? 

Well, let's start with my blogpost title. Back during my purgatory at the Patheos site, I learned all about internet trolls.  I'm sure I had seen a few in my time before that, but since at Patheos we were expected to keep watch on each others' blogs, I had plenty identity the trolls on my site and what I should do about it.  One incident leapt to mind the other day when I saw an advertisement for the old 1980s comedy The Three Amigos, and it got me thinking of a couple others and the subject at hand.

One frequent troll at Patheos commented under the name Andre B.  He wasn't your typical troll.  He was obviously smart, and when he wasn't trolling he had interesting things to say. But when he trolled, he trolled. I had several readers tell me over the year that he had really nailed them.  They thought he was an insightful, good faith commenter, and he ended up being a troll!  One once wrote in capital letters he was so frustrated.   And Andre could frustrate.   It was nothing to see him gobble up hundreds of comments as people took a long time to figure out they were being trolled by him.

Like all trolls, the point is to hijack debate, derail conversations, and argue ad nauseum to no ultimate point.  So once I posted on something I remembered back when I was in college.  It was an early example I witnessed of 'water cooler talk' on a news cast after a previous night's television program.  Not that I had never experienced talking about television programs.  But this was different because not only did people talk about it the next day, but I actually saw it discussed on the news.  This was in the 80s before news broadcasts were as much about promoting pop culture agendas and corporate interestse as talking about news.

The topic involved an episode of Johnny Carson.  Carson had Chevy Chase on as he was touring about, promoting his latest movie The Three Amigos.  Carson also had film critics Siskel and Ebert on.  At one point Carson asked them what were the best and worst movies they had seen recently.  Roger Ebert, in keeping with his somewhat abrasive personality, said the worst movie he had seen recently was The Three Amigos.  The audience gasped.  And then Carson did something very un-Carson.  He rebuked Ebert.  He said if he had known that would be the answer, he wouldn't have asked the question.

Anyone who grew up with Carson or had spent any time watching him knew that was the equivalent of Carson standing up and smacking Ebert with a medieval mace.  I can't remember the context, but I posted about that at Patheos.  Andre, ever the troll, stepped up to inform me how wrong I was.  He found the clip on Youtube and, to him, it was a love fest.  Nothing to see at all.  Respect and love and admiration from Carson.  Ebert and Carson a love story.  I was obviously wrong.  

I said he was nuts, that Carson was not only upset, but it was talked about the next day.  They even mentioned it on the morning news!  And then Andre said something he had said before.  He said he couldn't trust my memory.  I was possibly lying.  Or maybe mistaken.  But my recollection was entirely irrelevant.  I became frustrated because I remembered the talk that occurred the next day.  It's just one of those things in a person's life that makes an impression.  I had watched Carson for years.  Everyone could tell he was unhappy.  Carson was the king of lifting people up, but on the rarest of occasions, he would put people in their place, and this was such an occasion.

By his own admission, Andre is a millennial.  At best he would have been an infant or young child around this time, if he had been born at all.  How could he tell me what went on when there is no way he could have experienced any of it? 

And then I got to thinking of other trolls I bumped into at my time on Patheos.  Another was a fellow named Rob Lot (IIRC).  Rob's shtick was very simple.  The past is irrelevant.  Bring up what Democrats said in the past or that the Left had once dismissed Bill Clinton's behavior as the irrelevant part of his personal morals, and I was constantly told it was of no value.  Bring up what LGBTQ activists promised would never happen about punishing people over gay marriage, and again it's the past.  It doesn't matter.  That was almost always his response to the references about the past or history in general.

Another individual commented under the name 'Neko.'  She was a regular on M. Shea's blog.  I believe she stopped by mine a couple times.  Once she made a claim about religious people being religious because that's what they've been told by mommy and daddy.  I responded that not only was I quite liberal in my youth, I was also an agnostic.  I became a Christian as an adult, having been seeking the Truth for quite a few years.

Not to be dismayed, she fired back that I was a boldfaced liar.  I was never an agnostic, nor was I a liberal.  What?  I told her I had no reason to doubt she was a mother or an atheist.  Why so difficult accepting my testimony?  Who would call someone a liar on the internet when they're merely posting about themselves?  That would be like calling me a liar for saying I like pepperoni on my pizzas.  But she stuck to it, and what's more, when I pushed back at her, other readers got - on me, rather than her for calling me a liar.

All of this came to my mind when I saw that advertisement.  And it got me to thinking, as I am wont to do.  In each of these cases, we have things that I've discovered are quite common in modern (postmodern) discourse.  Especially on the internet, but I wonder how exclusively on the internet.  In each case an appeal is made to the past, and in each case in different ways, the appeal is smacked down.

In one case, I'm told by someone who wasn't there that just because I was there is irrelevant.   I am told by another that the past itself is entirely irrelevant.  And when all else fails, a third just called me a liar when my own personal experience didn't conform to her broad stereotypes. 

Now we might think this is all just internet trolling. Again, the point of a troll isn't to defend the helpless or aid the starving or seek justice in the world.  The point is to wreck online debate.  To that end they'll write anything.  For quite some time I assumed that such arguments, as annoying as they were, just happened to be tools of the trolling trade.  They didn't believe these things.  They merely wrote them online because they could.  

But what if I'm wrong?  What if they weren't writing these things just to troll?  What if they really believed them?   What if in their real lives in the real world this is how they approach reality?  They will look at someone from the 1940s and say that person knows nothing about growing up in the 1940s, or they will call someone a liar for experiencing or seeing things that stand against their social media informed opinions.  Or, in the end, they just say the past doesn't matter anyway, no history, no anything - anything before yesterday isn't worth worrying about.  What if they really believe these things?  What if we've raised an entire generation - and I believe they were all millennials or younger - who think this about history and the people and events of the past? 

When you see the growing number of 'communists rock', or 'censorship might work', or 'what's wrong with digging into people's teen years to destroy them', or 'America invented racism in 1619', or 'the only way to defeat racism is with new racism', or most recently 'I'm sure they'll just ban them, but never me' comments, editorials and articles, you wonder how the most educated generation in history could actually believe these things.  But then, if the above examples are the rule today, and a general disdain for anything before yesterday is now dogma in terms of buttressing our own righteous superiority over those who came before, it shouldn't be surprising.  Terrifying perhaps, but not surprising. 

If only conservatives were more like liberals

And accepted the loss of a presidential election with maturity, dignity and grace, the world would be a happier place.

When I see the rage inducing level of hypocrisy, false equivalency or double standards that define so much progressive discourse, I'm reminded of what my sons say: arguing with liberals is like playing a game of Monopoly with someone who keeps throwing pots and pans at you.  

It's a senseless and stupid analogy, but then that's the point. 

Why I don't do Twitter

 In one easy picture:

This was shown me because of my focus on the growing love we have for American Indian culture.  With a blank slate, we celebrate 'Indigenous Peoples'.  I've said I would never support a celebration of 'European Peoples' because that's too broad, and could include too many things that shouldn't be celebrated.  When it comes to Europe, that's clearly the belief held by many today.  Europe, Christianity, America - all evil, all bad, no way can they be celebrated.  But American Indians?  Why, 100% celebration there.

Partly this is due to American Indian activists not being beholden to the old Christian notion of repentance and confession of sins.  That is something unique to the Christian West.  Most cultures and societies don't spend their time beating up on their ancestors, their heritage, their culture or their people.  So American Indian activists can promote their own heritage 100%, condemn anything from Europe 100%, and increasingly be given the free megaphone to do so.

This includes support from a growing number of Christians and Christian leaders, who seem to agree that the Christian West brought bupkis to the New World; not democracy, not civil rights, not sanctity of life, certainly not the Gospel.  In fact, that's the craziest thing.  I get non-believers saying the Gospel is crap and not worth the bad that happened.  But more and more I see Christian - and Catholic - leaders saying the same thing.  And that's a problem if our assessment of the Gospel's worth hits about the same note as non-believers.

We're acting as if things like civil rights, equality and the sanctity of human life - not to mention the Gospel of Jesus Christ - are garbage.  More to the point, a culture that was pre-modern, where matricide, infanticide, patricide, human sacrifice, and its own fair share of genocide and slavery, was just awesome on every level.

So common is this now that one of my sons experienced a debate in his college cultural anthropology class.  The issue of pre-Columbian American culture came around, and their practice of conquest, slavery and human sacrifice came up.  The class held a splendid debate where the conclusion was - who are we to judge?  Ours is the worst culture to ever exist after all.  Plus overpopulation is causing Global Warming.  The Indians had it right.  Keep overpopulation in check.  If their reasoning was a bit on the superstitious level (just like moderns who still believe that God in a manger silliness), the reasoning was quite sound.  You trim off the undesirables, the unwanted, the inconvenient.  You don't need elaborate ceremonies appeasing some fire god today of course.  We have Science.  But the desire to keep too many people from happening was quite sound, and of course to be celebrated - and copied. 

Such is the legacy of what we're seeing with the mantra of 'Indigenous People rock it 100%, not like evil Europeans with their Jesus and democracy and human rights rubbish'.  That is a major problem, and Matt Walsh, who I'm no particular fan of, is right to call it out.  Even if he didn't do a particularly good job of presenting it in a way that would encourage discourse, at least he threw it out there.  A problem with Twitter right there. 

But Mark could have responded with - anything to do with the topic at hand.  He could have said why Walsh is wrong. He could have defended the unqualified celebration of such a culture and its trappings, despite holding 'pro-life' views.  He could have explained that the celebrations should be understood someway, or that it is wrong to give a blank check as many do.

Instead, you get Twittertalk, which means acting like you haven't made it through puberty yet, with variations on 'your mamma's ugly and she wears army boots'.  Just the type of behavior our children in our age of suicide, drugs and depression need to see.  I would expect Mark's reply from someone who has yet to experience adolescence.  And yet that, along with the requisite F-Bombs that define much of his Catholic Social teaching, is about par for the Twitter course.

I believe Social Media has devastated our intelligence, our discourse and our society.  Nowhere is this more evident than Twitter.  After seeing some unfortunate Twitter entries by Dawn Eden, I was happy to see her post that she was taking a break from the platform.  That is good.  Like most carbon based lifeforms, she's better than that.   I see Twitter being a 0% gain in the world of human interaction.  And nothing demonstrates that assessment better than the above image.  Not because it is uniquely bad.  Quiet the contrary, because it it almost universally indicative of how people handle themselves on Twitter. 

Really Google?

Celebrating the Dachshund Bobblehead?  That's the only thing you could come up with to celebrate today?  Such is the 21st Century.  I don't think we realize how close we are to the End of the West and the way we've understood living out the Christian Faith for the last many centuries.  We'll have to dig back to a period in the early generations of the Faith to come to a similar experience.  

A lot to hang on a stupid Google doodle about a bobblehead I know.  But let's face it, ten years ago there is no end to the possibilities Google could have celebrated.  Today, there's no end to the possibilities that Google dare not celebrate. And that makes all the difference.