My Drinking History

College professors with tenure have god-like abilities to do what they will.  At my college in the ‘80s, it was hit or miss on whether a given teacher would be particularly interested in teaching on a given day. 

An example was our English composition prof in which at least three classes were devoted to the delicacies of exotic foods. We didn’t ask why since we were freshman. On our last day he even brought in sushi for us to try. 

Being of Irish heritage my sensibilities have always reflexively been against elitism and snobbishness so I took it upon myself to teach our teacher. I wrote my first essay about the delights of McDonald’s quarterpounder with cheese, saying that it was on par with the tenderest filet mignon. Embarrassing in retrospect but the professor inadvertently taught me that you need to write for your audience, in this case him: he gave me a C-. The next paper I wrote on a neutral topic and got an A. He said my writing had markedly improved. I bet. 

So naturally I was similarly skeptical about any expensive beers or liquors. Just the tried and trued Budweiser lager, the McDonald’s quarter pounder of the beer world. Even trying a Miller Light felt  ‘daring’. It was about 8 years into my drinking career before a friend had me try something he called ‘Guinness with training wheels’, which was half Guinness and half Budweiser. Guinness is hardly that risky since it’s not any more bitter than Budweiser and probably has less calories. The fear factor was simply due to the color being black!  Rank prejudice. 

I was content with adding Guinness to my drinking repertoire and liquor never tempted, especially after having too much tequila during the ’89 Bengal Super Bowl appearance. It would be about a quarter century before I’d try that again. 

Budweiser and Guinness were my happy mainstays for about thirty years until the craft beer boom started. It was around 2011 when out of curiosity tried a pale ale, nothing too wild or hoppy like an IPA. And I liked it well enough, it had a lot of flavor and was a bit “spicy”. For the next couple decades I left pilsners behind for the most part.  

And then, not out of snobbishness but for weight control mostly, I experimented with bourbon as a supplement to beer. More bang, fewer calories. And I found I liked the taste and the different interesting varieties...

In short, I fear I’ve become my old professor.

Why Harris Will Probably Win

It’s very unscientific, but I won’t believe Trump can win unless some of the people I know change their minds about him and there’s no evidence of that. There’s a lot of talk about people “waking up” but I’ve seen little real world evidence of that. I don’t think things got nearly bad enough to wake anybody up.  The invasion across the border doesn’t impact most people’s daily lives. The financial crisis is nothing so far, nothing compared to what it could be (inflation is under control and unemployment rate within historical levels). We’re not at war (except a sissy proxy war in which we hide behind the skirt of dying Ukrainians). The two-tier justice system doesn’t affect most people because other people are paying that price. 

The only things that tend to concentrate minds are the economy and war, and both of those are under control so the advantage has to go to the incumbent (which is Harris).

I’m not sure how a divided Republican Party can win anyway (it’s two parties now, MAGA and establishment Republicans).  A house divided against itself cannot stand. I’m sure I’m not alone in no longer considering myself a Republican. I wouldn’t vote for Nikki Haley so I can’t blame Nikki Haley fans for not voting for Trump in November. 

Naomi Wolf, a leftist who has “woken up” said recently: 

“Half the country wanted to get rid of Pres Trump in 2020 in spite of peace and prosperity because they could not take the frenzied emotional tenor. You may not know these people but I do and some of them need to vote for Trump if he is to win.”

I have a sense that things have to get worse before they’ll get better but they have to get worse fast in order to get Trump across the finish line. 

Somebody joked, “how long before we start saying 2028 is the most impactful election in our lifetime?” I replied that we already had the most impactful (2020) so we’re pretty much doomed.  As important as this upcoming election seems there’s a case to be made that it’s too little, too late. It’s pretty hard to recover from a period of truly wretched leadership, from 2003 when Bush went into Iraq to 2016, and then again 2016-2020. That’s 18 of the past 22 years and most of Trump’s years were spent on defensive due to Russiagate and impeachments. Trump lived on a knife’s edge since if he did anything unpopular with a few key GOP senators he would’ve been removed from office because the Senate would’ve impeached him as well. And Obama remade the military and the federal judiciary into his image over his eight years (twelve if including Biden years). 

My stepson was right back in ’16 when he said that Trump’s only job is to throw monkey-wrenches into the machine. That’s still his role so everything is just a delay tactic at this point. 

**

True: 

“If the US had to raise taxes monthly to pay for Ukraine every month, the war would’ve been been over 2+ years ago. Imagine how fast Iraq and Afghanistan would’ve been over. How good would our roads & grid be if we would’ve spent that $8T on infrastructure?”

**

Also true: 

“The problem with addressing mass immigration through the democratic mechanism is one of collapsing decision space. The conservative party is captured, so you need an alternative but that takes a decade to build and the left is importing votes faster than you can convert citizens. It's a race, and the left knows this....Citizens are only converted in the first place by seeing too many imported voters, by which point it is too late to vote against it.”

I think some of it comes down to whether one think humans are “interchangeable robots”. That was what we used to cynically say given how my workplace would lay off large numbers of people and replace with contractors. (This backfired when they had to re-hire a bunch of them back.)

Similarly, we think we can import a ton of people from other countries to cover for our diminishing birthrate but we’re finding out too late that it doesn’t work that way. Different countries have much different educational systems, beliefs, cultural memories, backgrounds and we no longer even try to assimilate them via our education system. They assimilate us in fact. 

The bad thing is I'm too young given the pace of change not to be deeply affected by all this. I had thought, circa 2017, that we didn’t have to worry about the collapse of most of our systems and I might have been right but for not realizing the government had censorship tools and that that would alter the results of the 2020 election (which, in turn, greatly accelerated our national decline). In a sense, the government was far more potent than I’d given it credit for, especially with a compliant media not holding it to account. 

The more religious of the Founding Fathers, like Washington and Adams, said that religion would be crucial to keeping America free. The less religious, like Jefferson, said our liberty depends on the freedom of the press.  In the end I guess they were both right, although since they happened at more or less simultaneously it’s hard to tell which aspect dealt the death blow. 

Changes to the Mass and Society

I’m always intrigued by looking for the boundary line between the “good ‘60s’ and “the bad ‘60s”. 

Romans 1:18-32 says there is a pattern to sexual degeneracy, and a society that rejects belief in God will inevitably follow it. It spirals downward in three stages:

Worship of nature (vv. 21-23)

Homosexuality (vv. 26-27)

“A debased mind” (v. 28)

Is "worship of nature” a proxy for “bad worship’, or pagan worship? Did the Church do anything in the ‘60s that might've disrupted the proper worship of God, i.e. the worship that God wanted rather than what man wanted? Perhaps so. 

A deep dive in the ‘60s: 

What if we paralleled secular events with the changes to the Mass given that the Mass is the hinge on which all things depend.  Exorcists claim that the devil fears Latin more than the vernacular (Protestants hated our Latin so we had to change for them apparently). Could the spread of the vernacular in liturgy and less reverential worship have aided the devil? 

The ancient saying is “Lex orandi, lex credendi (Latin for “the law of what is prayed [is] what is believed [is] the law of what is lived”). It means "prayer and belief are integral to each other and that liturgy determines theology" according to wikipedia. 

So in December of 1964 came the first of the dramatic changes to the Mass. And it feels like the sea change in the culture happened right after that. While I wasn’t old enough to observe the cultural change of the ‘60s I think that 1964 was still sort of “normal”. Maybe I’m wrong; certainly by then prayer was already banned from U.S. public schools and llinois had repealed its sodomy laws, becoming the first U.S. state to do so. 

What if I looked at the ads and articles in a 1964 newspaper versus one just two years later in 1966? Would I see much difference? Obviously this is very anecdotal but it’s interesting to speculate on. 

Cleveland’s largest newspaper, The Plain Dealer, on a randomly chosen day from Dec of 1964: 

The front page has two very large headlines:  “local tax valuations okay’d over objection” and “Rome roars welcome to pilgrim pope”. Below the fold there’s an article on how even little gifts at Christmas are “conveyors of great love.” There is a single paragraph piece on Vietnam. And there’s an article on Cleveland’s fight in the “war on poverty”. The article begins with the optimism of the era: “Recognized at last, after centuries of existence, is the crime of poverty. Everyone is against it. The nation is committed to a war on poverty that could last a generation or more.” 

Everything in it seems pretty normal, even pious. Breezy and friendly. Not exactly “tense”. 

Another random page has advertisements for men’s hats, shoes, and stylish raincoats. On another there are ads for housewares and a jeweler’s. Very few of the ads depict human models but one that does shows a woman in a modest dress, below the knees and not titillating. If sex sells, it wasn’t being used in this 1964 edition of the Plain Dealer. 

Okay, now a random issue from Dec 1966: 

Headlines include one on the Cincinnati Strangler, another on Jack Ruby being seriously ill, Gov George Romney hinted as a candidate for president, an article on Zambia’s conflict with Britain, and Germany’s lack of accord on trade. 

The tone is certainly different. More serious, more international news, more political. The optimism isn't present. 

Page two of the edition immediately presents drawings of girls in bikinis. Well that’s different! One has her legs spread and her hand on hip. There’s also an article on an actor who claims that the “English language itself is racist”. Hey, we’re not in Kansas anymore!

I randomly turned to another page with criticism of the stiff-necked conservatives in the Methodist ruling body. Later more bra advertisements. Conflict and sex seem to be the new major themes. Division and fornication. 

So what happened between those two years? I’m not sure but a few include: the Supreme Court allows contraception, the first Roman Polanski film “Repulsion” is released. There’s a Time magazine cover story "Is God Dead?”.. The Church of Satan formed in San Francisco... “Valley of Dolls” published...Black Panthers founded... Likely I’m missing a lot of other things. 

But the other big faultline is the end of 1967 when the Mass goes fully vernacular. Bad things continue. NYC violent crime rises 20% annually starting ‘67 thru ‘71...The first X-rated movie is produced..Divorce rate goes straight line up until 1979.

Then comes the full monty, the 1969 “new mass” on April 3rd, 1969. We had the Stonewall riots two months later that are universally recognized as the start of the gay rights movement. The Manson murders occur in August... Deaths at Altamont in Dec... No-fault divorce established in CA. Per capita alcohol use up 50% from 1960... Church attendance begins to fall in 1970...Four states -- Alaska, Hawaii, New York and Washington -- legalize abortion. In ’72 the first Playboy with full frontal nudity... “Deep Throat” & “Joy of Sex” are released and in ’73 Supreme Court legalizes abortion.

Driver's License and State Power

I looked up the history of driver’s license as a window into creeping government power, one that would of course grow exorbitantly (most recently shown by the powers exercised due to covid). 

Not surprisingly it all started in Prussia, the “worst” part of Germany historically (the area of the most enthusiastic Hitler supporters, birthplace of militarism and Lutheranism, of a compulsory school system with structured days, and a hotbed of scriptural scholar critics):

On September 29, 1903, Prussia, then a monarchy within the German Empire, introduced mandatory licensing. A mechanical aptitude exam was required, administered by the Dampfkesselüberwachungsverein (“steam boiler organization”).

Germany is in some ways the “California of the world”. It’s where bad ideas start and spread, and it is where permission of the government to drive a car started. This was followed soon by New York (which was then the “California of the U.S.”).

States requiring driver’s licenses came slowly. The length of time between the first state to require and the last was over 50 years; in 1903 it was New York and in 1954 South Dakota. Additionally, a handful of states didn’t impose driver’s tests until the mid-1950s, including big states like Illinois and Wisconsin. 

It feels like back then states had more power.  Nowadays the federal government could simply threaten to withdraw funds for roads and get the states to comply quickly. The covid lockdown was more rigorous in some states (New York) compared to others (Florida), but my impression is that states were far more similar than different.  Not sending children to schools was a huge deal and was countrywide. If the states had more power, at least one of them would’ve bucked this absurd idea given how kids are not at risk from the virus.