Wheels Within Wheels (EOY ‘24 Thoughts)

 

No, I’m not in a wheelchair to date. But I do have a cane, which I sometimes need in my rare ventures outside the house. And I’m liking the symbol of wheels right about now. When I was young, ‘wheels’ meant fast cars. Of late it has come to mean, for me, that slow turning of powerful forces which affect us all at different levels of our experience. 

The Wheel of Chronological Old Age

I have discovered that there is a change in life when you move from being ‘aging’ to being ‘old’. It can come on more swiftly than you’d expect, but I’m pleased to report that it is not all bad. There are step-changes in mind and body that seem like diminutions and yet provide offsetting benefits. Most importantly, there is a shift in perspective that changes one’s personal relationship to time and life itself. Why this ‘End of Year’ reflection will be different from what it’s been in years past. And why I have also posted just before this one, a Context Document which contains links to previous years’ thoughts on the 12 months just completed. I will touch on many of the same topics here but from an altered perspective at some remove from DC politics that may serve to unify their varied focal points. Terms I use here without much definition (Overton Window, Mental Models) can be found in the companion document if needed. That’s its purpose, not a summoning to a lengthy, lecturing sitdown.

So what’s all this about an ‘old’ perspective? It’s an awareness that the end of life is truly approaching, not vaguely but specifically and with some momentum. There’s a whole body of sites and virtual gangs of oldsters on the Internet, swapping jokes and time travel gems based around the proposition, “You know you’ve gotten old when…” The most popular laugh lines have to do with the loss of short term memory and its petty humiliations, as well as the speed of the rotating aches and pains that limit travel in the world and at home. The light tone of such references implies what isn’t said, that the body is reminding us of just how well it served us for so many years and is now forcing us to sit and think more. Another favorite topic is the hilarious persistence of long term memory about trivialities. I have seen long comment threads about advertising slogans and jingles from 50 or 60 years ago. People remember the exact words and the wry variations that entered common usage way back when. There were several hundred comments on the question, “What is ‘LSMFT’?” The technically correct answer — Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco — was surfaced at once. Then came innumerable colloquial re-uses of the initials ranging from the political to the risqué. Several posted photos of the print ads and of the olive drab packaging that marked the brand in the World War II years. All this from people unified by the frequent experience of arriving in a room and forgetting what they’d come to get or do. 

Who’s collecting these mementoes? OLD people with a sense of humor and knack for small talk.

You’ll note that this is not an example of nostalgia for a better age. Nearly all the respondents were not old enough to remember World War II, for example, which means that their recollections include learned history as well as memory. WWII was not a happy time for the nation, cigarette smoking is not a treasured tradition or value from the past, and yet some of the time touching going on here is still more vivid to the elder set than the names of current movie stars and other media hotties. Suppression of short-term memory is, in many ways, a rebalancing of attention, away from the moment to moment, day to day impact of the present on our thoughts. 

We oldsters are being invited to take a longer view of our lives and where those lives fit in the continuum. Why does this happen? And why is there so much market and media pressure to convince us that it’s still possible, desirable, and admirable to stay young to the very last breath?

The answer to these questions is another question. Why has the consensus of human civilization in epochs past associated old age not with infirmity and uselessness but wisdom, a sometimes sacred ability to rise above the hurly burly of today’s obsessions from a mind’s eye that can only become so keen by living observantly through a long passage of years? 

We’ve lost respect for our elders. This isn’t a personal complaint. It’s a sad fact of life. We are ignoring a population that seen more and has been better educated than the younger ones (say 60 and under) who are staying young through plastic surgery, fad diets, dopey exercise regimes, dressing too young, and trying to imitate increasingly more juvenile cultural and political slang that will be obsolete in a year or two. How did we reach such an intense focus on looking good right now, with little or no attempt to understand what deep forces have made us into pierced and tattooed mannequins? (See Context document, 2022.)

The View from Here

We have been living through a time of world-changing turbulence for the whole of this young century. The 9/11 attack began an existential struggle for the soul of America. The amplitude of that turbulence has increased rather than decreased or leveled off in the past decade. In Obama we elected a President who seized his moment to punish America for sins he saw in the nation’s past. A daunted electorate thought he could exorcise the ghosts of sins most of them could barely remember, if at all. They did not realize that the punishment he had in mind was the destruction of the Constitution and the social contract imposed by slave-owning plantation owners and aristocratic, Christian New Englanders. The rise of Trump was a repudiation of the process of division and decline Obama set in motion. The outcome of that existential war between the enemies and the defenders of the American Way is still undetermined. The re-election of Trump is not the happy ending of the story, only the beginning of its next phase.

As this often spectacular year comes to an end, my thoughts are not on the headlines or the specifics of policy wrangles and administration personnel appointments. Yes, these things have their own importance (I dutifully trudge through them in my Facebook posts), but in my current mindset they are below my pay grade.

What’s that? The mental and emotional state of the American people. Are they ready for the fact that the next four years will not fix everything, because so much needs fixing and the government is so huge that even drastic actions will take more time than anyone admits to take effect. There will be more turbulence, more violence, more attempts to change the course of history with one or a thousand or a million bullets. The media will continue to publish narratives not news reports, and the DC Deep State will writhe and strike like a cornered snake.

And that’s only the most visible of the wheels that are turning. There are many more wheels in motion. Despite its historical slowness in action, the political wheel is still turning faster than the others, which all have different scopes and scales and move at different rates. Kind of like this model:

The Wheel of Judeo-Christian Morality

No, this post is not going to be a sermon about Dante’s deadly sins. Sins are with us as a part of the human condition, a by-product of free will, and they can never be exterminated, only constrained sufficiently to promote civilization. But religion is one of the wheels that has been turning at greater speed since the Constitution was written. Atheism is a modern invention, bubbled up by the rise of a scientific materialism that turned Newton’s Scientific Method from a tool to understand God’s creation into a myopic, reductive orthodoxy that rules out of existence anything that can’t be seen, measured with calipers, or tested to 99.9 percent probability under laboratory conditions. A side effect of this seemingly pristine objectivity is that the vacant office of God has been usurped by scientists, who see themselves as smarter than the apocryphal authors(s) of the Old and and New Testaments. The reason this matters is that the most powerful morality-based religion in history presently has a knife at its throat all over the world, specifically including here in the United States.

What has been lost in the largely uncritical worship of high technology, genetic tinkering, pharmacological experimentation on vast populations, Artificial Intelligence, and the fantasy of infinite human malleability (including sex and gender) is the simple, brilliant verity of the twin foundation stones of everything we value in Western Civilization — the Ten Commandments and the Gospels of Jesus Christ. The Commandments are a rules set for establishing a peaceable human community of any size, from the nuclear family to the nation state. The proscriptions against thievery, adultery, murder, lying, covetousness, disrespect of one’s elders, foul language, and the impersonation of God by any man are a pragmatic short list of ways to prevent civil discord. All manner of subtleties are implied. The declaration that “There is no God but Me” delivered from on high by a God who “shall not be named” (hence the empty monicker of Yahweh) makes the point that no mere man is a god, ever, and no man may claim to speak for a God whose name is forbidden to be used at all, in vain or presumptively. Sex is a key subtext as well. Marriage, the concept of a husband and wife faithful to one another, is not a Beaver Cleaver nicety; it’s indispensable to ensuring that a father knows his children were sired by him, because it is his duty to care for them, and they for him in a lifetime contract. When paternity is in doubt, through infidelity or false witness or covetous behavior, violence is an obvious possibility. Violence is abhorred throughout. 

From the Ten Commandments came law, in the form of the Hebrew Talmud, prototype for all the sophisticated legal systems established since. The laws depend on the allegiance of the practitioners of law to the Commandments which undergird them. Laws are only good if they are superintended by good men. The increasing sophistication of thought, put down down in writing, leads through time to the intellectual and spiritual advance made by the Gospels, with their Two Commandments replacing the strict “Thou Shalt Nots” with the new God-given power of consciousness, which empowers human moral judgment by, again, good men. 

The U.S. Constitution is an example of the wedding between the Ten Commandments and the Gospels. Our omniscient technocratic atheists who believe that natural law dictates the supremacy of enlightened Government over benighted individuals. They jeer at the echoes of the “Thou Shalt Nots” in the ten amendments that constitute the Bill of Rights. What they miss — over-programmed, under-educated narcissists that they are — is that the “Thou Shalt Nots” of the Bill of Rights are specifically focused not on individuals but on Government. The central postulate of the Constitution is that governments are a necessary evil, always a danger in the hands of the power grabbers who lack the moral compass of faith in a higher power, in whose hands true justice always resides. The enmity of so many political constituencies to the protection of citizen rights by the Constitution is the purest proof we have that their intentions are not friendly, benign, or moral in the American tradition. (See Context Document, 2023, Part 2.)

So that’s the biggest of the wheels that has been turning against the American people for most of this young century. But there are other wheels, linked by sometimes obscure gears to the one just described. This is where I must make mention of a recent analytical invention called the Overton Window, which presumes to tell us what kinds of “reality” people are prepared to accept (or not) in some short-term timeframe. I discussed this tool and its (mis)uses in my EOY posts back in 2018. What I will add here is that old age is reminding me of the truth that everyone has his own Overton Window. I actually described my own without realizing it years before the 2018 piece.  (see Context document, 2018, Part 1)

There have been times when I regarded myself, only half in jest, as the Last Victorian.

The Wheel of Time

I have spent most of my life in places that have been around for a very long time. My present home is the newest I have lived in. The house I grew up in was multi-generational in its own right. Begun in the early 18th Century, added to in the early 19th, again during the Civil War, and finally, with an addition my parents had built in the 1960s. The history of the rural area I grew up in was similar, a nearby village that had its own Tea Party in 1775, and today the place known as Greenwich Township still looks very much as it did when I lived there. The same kind of age continuum existed, still does, in the town where my Dad was born and died, the 19th century house he grew up in, came to live in himself, and sold to me late in life in order to move to a smaller, even older house in the same town. All the schools I went to lived in architecture from the 17th through 20th Centuries. When I moved to Dayton OH I bought a house in the city’s oldest district, which long predated the Wright Brothers. What a relic I have always been…

The past has always been a big part of my life, and so my Overton Window takes in a lot of time and experiential territory. 

Why I am not buying is the sense so many of us have that time has uniquely speeded up on us now, thus presaging some kind of End of Days. This is simply not true. We will be going through months and possibly years of chaos with the second Trump administration and time is moving relatively faster than it was in the first Trump administration, but that’s not a function of End Times. Time speeds up and slows down all the time. It’s its own wheel. I had a grandfather who fought as a Captain of Infantry in the trenches of WWI. How was time ticking along then? Woodrow Wilson was re-elected in 1916 on the back of the slogan, “He kept us out of the war.” In 1917, American troops were shipped to France and won the war in 1918 by leaving the trenches and pursuing the enemy to exhaustion. That same year, the 100,000 American combat deaths were beggared by the 600,000 who died from the Spanish Influenza, when people thought they could hold it at bay with surgical masks and prayers. They couldn’t. By 1920, the country had gone crazy enough to join the delusional League of Nations, pass the Prohibition amendment, and (risk-taking enough?) give women the right to vote in national elections. How’s that for time speeding up in a hurry?

Then time slowed down for a while. People partied to flout Prohibition, the fun stories were about gangsters shooting their way across the country with Tommy guns, and rich people got richer by buying stocks on margin. Then, in 1929, the stock market crashed and time kind of went completely dead for a while. People listened to FDR’s Fireside Chats on the radio because they couldn't afford any other entertainment, being broke, unemployed, and often homeless and hungry. Nothing got much better for like ten years, which seemed like they lasted forever. Until Pearl Harbor happened in 1942 and time shifted into high gear again. My Dad fought in the second war to end all wars as a fighter pilot, which was very real to me, because by his own admission he had been a little spoiled before then, and the man who came home and provided for our family was a very serious and upright husband, father, and corporate innovator. The war had lasted four years for the U.S., though much longer for other nations, and FDR traded being senile for being dead right before it ended. High school Harry Truman became President, dropped A-bombs on Japan, and like his predecessor, thought sending American troops into a meat grinder in Korea was a good way to prove how foresighted a foreign policy commander-in-chief he was. Along the way, he invented the brand new American tradition of fighting a war you don’t actually do enough to win. This led to the Presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, who stopped time dead in its tracks for eight years, building highways instead of Asian enemies, which he wisely left to the French, who couldn’t seem to figure out how to slow down their own clock. I got to see the aftermath of an attempt to assassinate their President, Charles de Gaulle, in Paris, and I returned home with my family just in time to remember forever the day when my mother picked us up at school instead of taking the bus home with the other kids, because somebody had just assassinated the President of the United States. 

Which most of you, I know, do not remember. If you’re less 60 years old, you’re not old enough to have it in your Overton Window, except vicariously from whatever scraps of the still mysterious facts surrounding the event have lodged in your political landscape. I was watching live television on Channel 10 when Jack Ruby somehow sneaked through the police cordon in Dallas and murdered Lee Harvey Oswald. I remember my Dad, and others, suspecting Lyndon Johnson of being behind the assassination. It’s true Johnson had big plans. The assassinations (RFK, MLK too) started time a’jumping, but LBJ revved things up even more by spending every dime he could beg, borrow or steal on a War in Vietnam and a Great Society that would help black people in the cities by bulldozing their neighborhoods, making unwed motherhood a lucrative career opportunity, and building faceless urban renewal barracks for the suddenly homeless poor, along with do-nothing agencies to write the checks. 

All of which led to war protests, a generation of young men who decided to smoke dope and escape the draft by any and all means, including fleeing to Canada and becoming Ivy League professors of Marxist Revolution. While sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll replaced anything resembling morality in the younger generation, Johnson retired to Texas (more about LBJ at the Context document, 2020, Parts 1-4), and Nixon came in to slow time down again. He succeeded, though not in the way he intended. The New Left had conquered the papers of record by then and they skillfully drove Nixon from office so that his boring, arms length governance he could be replaced by two of the most soporific Presidents in American history, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. The most Carter managed to stir up in terms of time acceleration was making people wait in line for expensive gas that wasn’t there, and negotiating with terrorists he had put in power in Iran to release 200-some hostages they had grabbed for no particular reason. Some other President might have gotten some protests and violent threats from voters out of these circumstances, but all Carter could muster was grousing, which he called “malaise” and scolded us for, leading to the shocking (to the MSM, as they had coalesced into in the wake of their Watergate coup) landslide victory of Ronald Reagan. (You think the news anchors were desolated by the Trump victories…?) After which the clock remained strangely slow for eight more years, distracted by the Gipper’s laughing off of an assassination attempt that nearly did kill him, his unfailing good cheer, winning the Olympics, and far less visibly somehow, winning the Cold War against the Soviet Union. 

It goes on like this. Time speeds up, time slows down in the political realm. Except for a brief foreign adventure in Iraq, George H. W. Bush kept the clock on low throttle, so low that Clinton came out of nowhere to keep it slow his own way, most memorably with an extramarital fling which seems like it should have speeded time up, but was in fact so long drawn out, repetitive, and unpleasantly uninteresting that people finally arrived at a consensus of not giving a shit. Then came, W, 9/11, nasty wars with highly publicized American casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a ramping up of the obsession with minute-by-minute crisis narration, Bush Derangement Syndrome, so overwrought that the electorate fell hook, line, and sinker for Obama’s Pollyanna campaign of Hope and Change. Which bumbled along for eight years with as passive and listless a commander-in-chief as we’ve ever had. His only memorable accomplishment approved by the American people was that he was present in the room listening to the Navy Seals mission that killed Bin Laden and buried him ignobly at sea. He did other, much darker stuff that the MSM didn’t cover and so nobody knew about it until much later. 

Obama thought he could secure his place in history by passing the baton to the much more excitable but equally aggrieved Hillary Clinton. Which led to Trump, who took a crowbar to our obsolete mental models (see Context document, 2018, Part 2), and you know the rest, or should.

That’s the wheel of time everyone is so afraid of. It’s partly a default state of people who are going about their lives without too much interference or incompetence by the Government, partly a function of the increasingly intrusive and politically skewed media, who raise and lower the frenzy level depending on who they’re for and against.

The media, though, are part of yet another crucial wheel which has been turning in a dangerous, spiraling fashion downward for all the years since the Kennedy assassination.

Who killed Kennedy and why? We still don’t know. That’s a sword of Damocles that’s been hanging over our heads for 60+ years. Who out there can we trust to tell us the truth? About anything?

The Wheel of Institutional Performance

This is the wheel representing the performance of our institutions, which are also inextricably linked to the wheel of Judeo-Christian morality embedded in and exemplified by the Constitution. Institutions are no better than the people who populate and run them. All the fine words of standards, mission statements, oaths, official pronouncements, and action reports mean nothing if the men (and women) behind those words are motivated only by the desire for power, wealth, fame, and/or sensual pleasure.

The chief by-product of atheism as an express or implicit belief system is what I have elsewhere called The Universe of One. It’s a built-in slippery slope once you have decided there is no God, no life after death, and no final judgment on the decisions and actions you have taken in life. I believe it was Orson Welles who called atheism a brave choice because agnostics are hedging their bets. Clever but untrue, I think. Atheism is a convenient choice, a lazy choice, often deliberately so. It was Voltaire who said, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” 

Without the acceptance of an absolute divine power who sees all and is measuring us in terms of good and evil, there is no philosophical stopping point between skeptical agnosticism and absolute malignant narcissism. Which is the definition of the Universe of One. 

Atheists reject this idea vociferously, of course. They argue that the civilized world does have commonly accepted and almost universally followed standards of right and wrong that make formal religion superfluous. I once had a young man I was mentoring insist that this was the case, and within a couple of paragraphs he declared that there was, in terms of scientific fact, a quantitatively identifiable point in the development of a fetus which provides an impeccable dividing line between “bundle of cells” and “life.” Abortions should be legal up to that point and no further. He went on to criticize my personal Christianity in particular, with resort to an already decrepit Internet meme known as The Flying Spaghetti Monster. Religion is just a myth, long disproven and no longer required to maintain civilization. Anyone taken in by it is just stupid.

I asked him who could prove that he was right about his dividing line. He told me it was a scientific determination that couldn’t be argued with. You know. Science.

“Who’s God now?” I asked. 

His biggest problem with me was that I vehemently reject the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, which takes the naive position that enlightened self interest with no religious crutch can be the basis for successful human organization. Committing crimes, for example, is not in anyone’s self interest, because you can be caught and punished, turning any benefit from the crime into an unacceptable cost. A rational calculation of course. Why it doesn’t work.

There are two insurmountable problems with this line of reasoning, one micro, one macro. The micro version is that the envisioning of consequences is not a capability shared by all people. As I’ve suggested above, everyone has his own Overton Window. What’s in yours? How wide is it? What if instant gratification and the sources that celebrate it are the principal components of your Overton perspective? What or who is the criminal relying on to compute the cost-benefit calculation if he even knows the necessary math? And what if the criminal is so confident of his own self capabilities that he believes he is clever enough to plan and lie his way out of paying any price ever for what he chooses to do? In this context, the most bad things will be attempted and carried out successfully by the smartest, most conscience-free persons. How we get serial killers like Ted Bundy. And murderous despots like Hitler and Stalin and Mao and Caligula and Pol Pot and Osama Bin Laden. how we get a Jack Smith with a permission slip to recreate Kafka’s The Trial (Ch. 6)on a leading Presidential candidate. Which leads us to the macro argument.

The macro argument? As an operating philosophy for large institutions like governments, corporations, universities, professional organizations in legal, medical, scientific, educational, military, journalistic, technological, religious, and philanthropic fields, atheism simply does not work. It turns into Stalinism, the totalitarian control of everyone and everything by one man or a tiny cabal), as depicted in Orwell’s 1984. The only tool left after all rational opponents have been locked up or killed is fear mixed with small rewards for obedience. It’s inhuman, but it is a category of what we might call artificial life. It uses human beings to survive and grow until it dies, which it always does, because it runs out of ideas, capable people, and everything but paperwork and go-bags for the prime offenders. Not many people know this, but the average life of an American corporation is less than 40 years. The exceptions are incredibly famous because they are exceptions. Nazi Germany lasted 12 years. The Soviet Union, after Stalin became dictator, lasted about 60. Most tinpot dictators survive far fewer years than that. The United States, now almost 250 years old, is a remarkable exception in longevity and continuity. But the U.S. government, as the largest largest single organization in recorded history, is in trouble. 

All human organizations, whatever their charters say, are themselves inhuman. This does not mean they are inert. They possess the artificial intelligence of rules and algorithms usually best approximated by game theory. Everyone who participates in the organization is subjected to incentives for advancement and penalties for opposition to the reality the organization accepts. The incentives are promulgated from the top, the most powerful game players in the organization. What is rewarded? Loyalty, obedience, subservience to those in charge, results that a superior can take credit for, whether the supposed accomplishments are real or contrived. What is punished? Refusing an assignment or an order, insisting on ethical responses to circumstances that will embarrass the organization or cost it money, organized opposition by subordinates to a plan, policy, decision, or presented supporting data, going outside the organization to correct a wrong or a grievance, whistleblowers. Why certain kinds of complaining, like sexual harassment lawsuits, are lifetime career killers in entire industries. 

How does the larger community within which these organization operate prevent ethical and performance catastrophes from destroying companies, firms, and other powerful entities within a nation’s power structure? Historically, this has been the mission of formal education and, perhaps more importantly, the role of Dads in the nuclear family. 

Dads? Really? It’s been forgotten for quite a long time now. There was a division of labor between fathers and mothers, hopefully with considerable overlap between the two. Mothers were the constant proof of unqualified love for the child, the master of what happened inside the home and its routines; much of the adulation once accorded to motherhood itself was reinforcement of that ideal female role. The child comes first, before the parents, before comfort, before things. The house was her nest for raising and protecting her young. The mother was willing and usually able to protect the child from all kinds of danger, and the newspapers were happy to run stories about the mom who lifted a car off a child’s foot. That kind of thing.

Dads weren’t as good at the unqualified love obligation. They were usually the breadwinners and often not home. They were also the recipient of the situations they faced when an angry mom told the child, “Wait your father gets home.” Simple spankings, before they were ruled out of bounds by child psychologists with delinquent kids of their own, were Dad’s job. While the mother applied ice to the black eye administered by a bully in school, it was Dad who surreptitiously took the kid out to the back yard and taught him to counterpunch in self defense. And to seize an occasion as soon as possible. It was also Dad’s responsibility if the bully happened to be his kid to put him in the car and take him to the house of the victim and apologize, in full view of the bullied child’s parents. (I have seen this done. It’s not an invention of screenwriters.)

Sunday School and other church-related rituals for children had a role to play as well. Complemented by parental support, not just as a drop them off and pick them up chore. What was the lesson today? Do you understand it? Conversation. Listening to the answers, answering the questions. The abiding lesson has to be that there is right in this world and wrong in this world. It is everyone’s responsibility to do the right thing. Including parents.

How is this part of the defense against organizational influences proceeding? I was shocked when I read the Twitter responses by fathers to the Hunter Biden pardon. How many said Biden’s fault was lying that he wouldn’t do it, although they, personally, would issue such a parson for their son because he was “my son.”

I know damn well my Dad wouldn’t have pardoned me. And I wouldn’t do it myself. You see, it is as much part of the Dad’s role to protect the world from his son as it is the mother’s to protect her son from the world. Children are not supposed to have a license to cheat, steal, break rules in sports, use foul language, be rude to their mother, or hit girls (no, girls shouldn’t do it either). All of these can be punished without a belt or food deprivation. My paternal grandfather told me he spent so much time “sitting in the corner” that he read the Bible cover to cover two times over. My own Dad accomplished quite a lot of correction with a Look. It wasn’t a threat. It was a communication of anger and disappointment. 

The schools are supposed to play a parallel role in loco parentis. Bullies are far more unacceptable than a bullied child who defends himself or herself. What do teachers (say they) usually see? Just the punch thrown alongside the locker of the one who claims to have been retaliating for bullying. Who gets punished? The one who’s not used to concealing hostile acts. Bullies are much more skilled at alibiing one another and carrying out their worst assaults in secret. And we wonder why the bullied ones return to school one day with semi-automatic pistols for the bullies AND the sheep who watched it all and never told a teacher. And the teacher who turned a blind eye to all of it. The lesson about never being a whistleblower is taught in school, early and unforgettably. The teacher also never sees the secret price paid by the whistleblower in the bullysphere.

Universities, particularly professional schools, have an enormous obligation to insist on comprehensive ethical instruction for students of law, medicine, business, education, journalism, and even those in preparation for ordination. The ethics of professions are more important by far than the money or advancement they offer, because honor is not a commercial property to be traded for promotion or career safety. Sadly, the universities have also lowered their admission standards and dumbed down their curriculums accordingly. We really are stupider now (See Context document, 2023, Part 3)

When my father retired from his 37 year career with a major chemical company, he told his director that he had worked through most of those years without being lied to, even when the news was bad. The director suggested that he had been naive. My Dad said, “Fuck you,” and walked out.

The amazing post-war economic boom that made the United States so much richer than all the other countries in the world was brought about in large part by the huge population of war veterans who had returned alive, perhaps gone to college under the GI bill, and then gone to work for corporations that made things. The eternal organizational incentives to get ahead by playing the game were generally recognized early on by these men, who had seen the stark difference between life and death stakes and a title on the door. They had seen suffering, courage under fire, extraordinary loyalty within units, even great personal sacrifices, and they still believed that honor was more important than quid pro quo deals for personal gain. Corporate life should not be war. My Dad told me about two phenomena he had witnessed in his combat days. It seemed that when a man ducked a mission he was scheduled for (fatigue, hangover, garden-variety hookie), the man who took his place was wounded or did not make it back. Coincidence? Thoughout his career, I never saw my Dad take a sick day. If we’d had snow, he did his best to blast though any drifts and make the 40 mile commute to work.

The other phenomenon disturbing to hear about. Men who died of slight wounds in hospital. They turned their faces to the wall and gave up. Fear, some species of guilt, disillusionment with life itself, no one could ever say. What impact this had on my father I never knew, but he told me about it as if it still troubled him. He’s also been the closest witness to the immense courage of his own father, who lived on for decades after an errant radiologist burned a fist-sized hole in his back that never healed. I was a witness too as he became my best friend when I was a boy. I could see the same kind of endurance in my father, who knew how to fight for people and projects he cared about and he could, and did, stay the course on anything he seriously undertook.

Well, we’ve lost all those war-tempered men by now. I know there are still veterans of quality in the commercial and professional world, but it doesn’t seem they’re in as much demand as one might expect, and the media narrative has done a pretty thorough job of tarring all veterans as suspect on the subject of guns, domestic violence, PTSD-style mental illness, and unacceptable political views. They have no home at all in the universities, which are run by 95 percent quasi-Marxists who toss away ethics as quickly as their anger over petty causes rises.

I went to graduate business school myself and lived inside the post-Greatest Generation corporate world for a long time. I was in college when “The Godfather” came out. Initially, I was amused when I heard corporate types in 3-piece suits quoting lines from that movie as if they were the scripture of business as well as mafia life. Then I got sick of it. It wasn’t a fad. It was a deeply embedded rulebook for savvy MBAs. The same kind of changing of the guard was occurring simultaneously in all the other professions and avocations as well. I had many reasons to remember that in my freshman year in college, 50 percent of the class declared the ambition to go to medical school. Why? The money. But there were two courses that were make-or-break for medical school hopefuls. Without an ‘A’ in Chem10 and Chem20, you forget law school. Why they turned immediately toward law school. Why? The money.

The result? Our institutions are rotten to the core. We do not build the characters of our young strong enough to withstand the corrupting influences of every kind of organization (Want proof? Look for true stories about the totalitarian rule setters who dictate the appearance and signage of homeowners in gated and other kinds of closed suburban communities. Hair curling stuff.)

We have seen the consequences of this pervasive rot most recently in the lawfare against Trump, his political and military colleagues, and the J6 protesters, whose treatment is literally indistinguishable from torture for purely political purposes. We have seen similar consequences in the scientific/medical/pharmacological complex, whose COVID edicts violated any humane standard with respect to vaccine development, vaccine mandates, masking, and segregation of unapproved groups like churches (while bars and liquor stores remained open). Climate scientists are just as avaricious and fraudulent in their quest for PC grant money. We have seen American universities transform at a moment’s notice into hotbeds of violent antisemitism, vandalism, and loud proponents of Hitlerian genocide. We have seen them go nakedly woke in their choice of unqualified female presidents whose résumés are peppered with question marks. We have seen the financial community and corporatist tycoons inseparably in league with government regulatory institutions misrepresent the state of the economy and employ grossly unethical tactics to manipulate the prime rate and other key instruments of fiscal policy. We have seen the mass media openly and self-righteously abandon their sole reason for being, reporting facts accurately to the general public, in favor of a leftist narrative stuffed with lies, libel, incitations to violence, including assassination, and blatant efforts to rig polls, debates, and other campaign events. We have seen them engaged wholeheartedly in a coverup of Joe Biden’s crumbling mental faculties that represents the longest, most serious scandal in Presidential coverage in American history.

We have seen the Congress of the United States complicit in all the ethical and moral betrayals described above, including the worsening of their historic clandestine corruption involving insider trading, sex settlements, and immense campaign payoffs from lobbyists, foreign agents, and massive money laundering schemes on two continents.

We have seen the Biden administration subsidize the commencement of two unnecessary wars, the destruction of the U.S. border, the consistent and systematic alteration of data about the economy, illegal immigration, climate change, fossil fuels, alternate energy sources thwt donK’t work any better than electric cars, crime rates in Democrat-run cities, and the amount of waste and  erroneous policy derived from the fraudulent DEI mandate. And we still have no clear idea who’s in charge at the White House this very moment or who has custody of the nuclear codes Joe Biden isn’t compos mentis enough to be trusted with.

The Biden administration will be gone as of January 20. None of the other institutions will be. They are still fastened around our necks like a noose, each such institution one more strand of the rope it’s made of.

Are we done yet? No.

The Wheel of Sex

This one has always been there. It’s the biggest wheel. It’s the most important social contract underlying civilization itself in all communities and nations since cave days, and probably before. In ancient days there may been matriarchal communities which never produced written language because for them time did not exist except as the lunar cycle and the seasons, endlessly repeated, making history and monumental architecture as unnecessary as cities. If they existed, they were supplanted by the time prehistory became history, with ancestors remembered and exalted, humans buried with offerings because they were still remembered as sources of wisdom and inspirations for emulation, and cultures committing their lives to a future they wouldn’t live to see by building temples to their Gods over a span of centuries. Key to all of this was the family structure, the smallest unit of a hierarchy in which names and descendants were the legacy of every life lived.

The basic model of marriage as the basis of all civil society remained in place for at least 5,000 years. Here and there were exceptions called matrilineal cultures, where men ruled but property passed through the female line. These did not last because men married child brides for their property and killed them to keep it. Not a good compromise. The marriage model that has been in force in the west for 2,000+ years is the Christian model, which has been taking a beating for decades now, with an astonishing increase in illegitimate births since the LBJ Great Society, over 70 percent in the urban black community and over 30 percent elsewhere. Single moms are working full time and playing the role of both mother and father to children whose “baby daddies” are absent, in prison, dead, or just carelessly engaged in impregnating the next iteration of single moms. For this, the psychologists blame the institution of marriage itself and the patriarchy which has assigned arbitrary, unfair roles to both sexes. 

How to fix this. Destroy all our definitions of sex and gender, and annihilate all the rules about governs acceptable/unacceptable sexual behavior. Thus, now, suddenly in the 2020s, we have a movement that claims to be American, democratic, and possessed of a dramatic redefinition of the social contract, including what gender is and how many of them there are. The result has been absurdities without end, castrations and mutilations of children who are not yet fully conscious, and the pitting of female against male in sporting competitions that are both dangerous to women’s lives and destructive of the very concept of sport (which, btw, may very well have been the first sophisticated organized activity in human history, with rules, penalties, teams, and non fatal competitions.)

What remains of the nuclear family — as least as represented or celebrated on TV and in the movies — is two parents with full-time jobs, no set mealtimes together, sullen and surly post-pubescent children with X-rated mouths, cellphones permanently attached to their faces, and bedrooms secured from parental invasion by padlocks and KEEP OUT signs. Nothing you’d call conversation occurs. The girls always have their bra straps showing, the boys have the obligatory cargo pants that make them look like prematurely hirsute little boys, and both sexes seem to have tattoos peeking out from their oversized T-shirts. If you happen to be a post-pubescent girl or boy in America, what is all this visual propaganda telling you about how to look and act? If you want to belong, go along with the obvious trends.

We have all this, suddenly, and people should damn well know better are afraid even to denounce it all as the vandalizing lie it is. The purpose of it is not to liberate or empower anyone but to destroy the nuclear family once and for all. Women with advanced educations cannot define what a woman is. They have made Motherhood a dirty word, and abortion a sacrament. Their purpose is not to achieve any societal good, merely to confuse the obsolete traditionalists by upending definitions, criminalizing ancient words, and depriving families from control of the educational inputs their biological children receive from the tyrants ruling the entire elementary and secondary school systems of the nation.

Final Thoughts

Everything I’ve said here is clear to me. I can see and feel the line of changes, shifts, directions of rotation in all these wheels (See Context document, IPR 2020), because I remember the most important events that made us, either directly or through the close relationships I had with my parents and both sets of my grandparents, all of us living within 15 miles of one another. I’ve traveled widely, at least briefly on four continents, I’ve worked for major corporations in the most important industries of the 20th (automotive) and 21st (computer technology) centuries. I have made a living and met a payroll as an entrepreneur, and I have recorded much of what I have experienced in books, essays, audio and video recordings, and multimedia projects. In other words I have been thinking about all of this the whole time.

Why I know that we are facing a complicated time, hopeful, dangerous, risky in many respects, and beset by huge impediments that cannot be solved by one man or abandoned after the inevitable stumbles and setbacks. The mission is brave and bold. Save a nation that is half buried in ignorance, corruption, and, on both sides, an emotional hysteria which should rightfully be one sided, if the ones who want to restore what is lost can be honest enough to admit our own failures as we set about rectifying the wrongs that have been done to this nation and all of its people. The past as we knew it is gone. It will never back come back. You will never be able to watch a John Wayne western the same way again. Ladies will never again be quite as chaste as we once imagined them. The language we encounter in public and on the screen will never be really clean again. The novel will not return as a leading staple of literature. Everything will have to be remade, better, if we can make it that far. And we have dangers of our own potential excesses to be pro-active about preventing. 

Lots of bad attitude around. Reasons for worry. But people forget (or never knew) that Dante also had a vision of ultimate redemption. Something to hope for. We may not all live to see it, but all the wheels do keep turning…