Every spirit makes his own house, but as afterwards the house confines its spirit, you had better build well.
-Elbert Hubbard
Wow, what a lovely morning! The Southern Tier in the spring must be about the prettiest place on earth.
A lunkheaded way to start a morning essay, but I'm fumbling around a little looking for topics other than the emerging humanitarian disaster in Ukraine. I could write about the carefully contrived slander by Martha Blackburn, that Volunteer Viper, at yesterdays's confirmation hearings, but maybe some other time. You can read about it if you choose.
She did the same thing to Alexander Vindman when he outed DJT for blackmailing Ukraine, a key moment that paved the way for the present crisis. A piece of work. I shake my head at the Volunteer State for electing someone like that, but it's, well the whole damned South.
On that topic, one of the more interesting pieces in this morning's news assembly was this essay, rich with statistical back-up, regarding the consequences of rural white America's lurch to the far right.
To some degree it seems to me there's a chicken-or-the-egg problem here, to the extent the author ascribes the declining fortunes of white Southerners to their self-defeating politics. Hell, we've strode down that self-destructive lane since my great great grandfather joined the Grays to get himself killed at Shiloh defending the right of his rich neighbors to own other humans. It's a multi-generational curse from which my tribe cannot seem to emerge.
But we do win a lot at college football--corner a Son of the South about the endemic failures of his society, and that factoid will emerge in conversation at some point. Then again, it reminds me of the quote regarding football by Elbert Hubbard (whose words began this post), "A sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture.”
As I said, the startling bits in the linked essay above have to do with hard data, some of which truly seems to suggest a link between bad outcomes and poor political leadership. Four hundred and forty Republican-led counties have per capita GDPs of less than $30,000.00 a year; ten Democratic counties are in the same boat. Coincidence? Or is it that well-educated folks who are prepared for the workplace tend not to want to live in those places?
My favorite nugget, a retort to all my Florida neighbors who bemoan how their tribe pays for all those welfare queens, was this piece of data:
Democrat-voting counties, with 60% of America’s population, generate 67% of the nation’s personal income, 70% of the nation’s GDP, 71% of federal taxes, 73% of charitable contributions, and 75% of state and local taxes.
So the libtards are actually subsidizing the "real" Americans. And they account for 60% of the population, but can't seem to maintain control over Congress because its, well, rigged, and are stuck with a revanchist Supreme Court as a result that seems bent on taking us back to 1950. It makes one wonder who should be demanding that it is time to take their country back.
In other news, your kids have all quit going to church.
The author bemoans the possibility of our society becoming like that of heathen Europe, but frankly I wouldn't mind a little of that. Peg and I have three kids over there as I write this, along with a fourth who seems inexplicably to want to join our clan. If you've not been, Europe is kind of nice. Part of the appeal of this place to me is that it feels almost European in its values and social construct. Trust me--it won't turn you into a latte drinking liberal sissy to dip your toe into a good place, although it'll make life back home a little harder to stomach. As the old song asked over a century ago, "How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm, After They've Seen Paree?"
So why are all of our kids so hesitant to make religion a part of their life? Where do I start?
Okay, how about this story, which to me pretty much sums up why the Jacobins were right to turn Roman Catholic sanctuaries into horse barns:
You've just escaped a war zone, with whatever you could salvage of your life stuffed in a suitcase, maybe a child clutching your hand. Your husband or significant other is back on the front lines. Maybe you were sexually assaulted along the way--that misogynistic component of combat is something so universal it's hard to explain why it occupies such a small space in our war narratives.
If it wasn't for our two dogs loyally waiting for us to come home - I wouldn't return to the backwaters of the globe we call America.
I dread the next two decades of work it will take to have the means to escape this dying empire and live in the agnostic and civilized world if Western urope