How did Pence "cave". Please do remember that Indiana's religious freedom law was signed by him and is part of the state's law code now. Pence was willing to negotiate on some features of the original law, but the bulk of the law is as drafted. This is how politics works-- horses are traded, half loaves are cut. The unwillingness of so many on the Right (et tu?) to accept this necessary reality of public life is one reason I could never sign on to such a movement. Hence also on abortion nowadays where rather than crafting compromise laws that might actually be acceptable to the voters too many legislatures have rushed totalizing measures into place and provoked a huge backlash so that states like Ohio and Michigan now have voter-enacted abortion license even more extreme than Roe vs Wade. Let the ideologues write 100 times: Politics is the art of the possible.
The law had been hammered out in the state assembly over 60-days, and Pence was ready to sign it...until the media took up a leftist protest on the national level. Scared, Pence sent it back, and a closed-door committee gutted the law. What they resubmitted was not the law the state lawmakers had agreed to, but Pence signed it. He’s a gutless wonder.
Generally speaking you’re right about politics being horse trading, but this was a situation in which both parties had hammered out an agreement, and the governor had already said he was going to sign the law. Then the media got involved, and he backed down. Its not hyperbolic at all to say that they gutted the law. Once they changed it, it did not have the teeth to protect people and businesses from being sued by LGB activists. It was entirely pointless.
He used to be pretty solidly pro-life and sane. This is his second term. I came to despise him during his first term, when he botched Covid and appeared on tv every single day (I kid you not) for a "Covid update press conference." He also took millions of dollars of federal Covid relief money and established a lottery for people who go the shot, making random Ohio residents millionaires with money that was supposed to go to businesses and families HE MADE SUFFER through his Covid policies. I also kid you not. But the candidates who challenged him for the Republican nomination for governor weren't stellar and no one really coalesced around a candidate (the state party obviously wanted DeWine), and his opposition in the actual election was a far-left progressive, so there was no other choice.
It absolutely was, but therein lies a problem we don't talk about much but looms large over this landscape.
Campaign cash makes the world go round - gets pols elected and re-elected. Yes, the donor class trends left and will continue to do so - the more people seek out higher education, the bigger the "credentialed class," and that class prides itself on being not just smarter than than the short-fingered vulgarian class, but more virtuous. Cutting the breasts off a psychologically confused teenaged girl is seen as the moral thing to do, increasingly, by those who have the most money to give.
Those who oppose such things tend to have less money. They may constitute an outright majority of the population (not sure about that, but maybe); but if they're not giving campaign cash, their voice matters less; they are yappy plebs to be kept at bay while the REAL work of the GOP, doling out tax breaks and other favors to the special interests, takes precedence.
When the people with the money who give the money favor wokism, how are those who don't have the money and don't give the money to resist?
Mark, to me, the most appalling aspect of DeWine's "statement" was his presenting it as a move to protect human life.
Work means freedom. Eastasia is our mortal enemy, while Eurasia has always been our dear friend, blah blah blah.
If I'm not mistaken, DeWine is in his mid 70s, at least. People become demented in different ways, so I guess it isn't surprising that he did this. He's a loyal Republican, after all, and conscientious about leaving a legacy as that.
Despite our governor, Tony Evers, the WI Legislature and State Senate are overwhelmingly Republican, to the point where there's a decent chance they'll have a big enough majority to override vetos with the next round of elections. That being said, nobody wants to be the one "out there" to stand up for things the governor won't sign. It makes them look "weird" and gives the Ds something to campaign against, I guess. I haven't been paying attention to politics nearly as closely as I used to, and I think they've got a good strategy on trying to kill DIE in the University of Wisconsin system, but there's so much where I'd just like to scream "get a backbone"!
When voters divide about 50:50 statewide, but both houses of the legislature are 2/3 one party or the other, the gerrymandering is obvious. That's how a governor or a senator can get elected whom the majority of the legislature would never have approved.
I agree ... contemptible and despicable, but also understandable.
I'm not at all familiar with Ohio politics but I suspect it was just a political calculation. If there are indeed enough Republicans to override his veto, DeWine probably considered it the safest political move to let the legislature do the "dirty" work of overriding his veto. While he may anger all the Republicans and conservatives who voted for him, they most likely wouldn't vote for a Democrat. On the other hand, come election time, his veto might give him a "moderate" glow in the eyes of disillusioned Democrats who might give him their votes.
An alternate possibility is that he may know someone, or have a family member, who is gay or trans and he doesn't want to cause familial discord. Or he might just have beloved, but liberal, grandchildren threatening to disown him if he were to sign the bill. Politicians are only human, after all.
I'm hoping that's it, and that he gave tacit approval for the legislature to override him, but he can't be reelected so if he's really for this, he ought to have taken the bullet. But considering all that he did "to save just one life" during the Covid debacle, I am also quite willing to believe he did this for exactly the reason he said -- because he's dumb enough to believe this will save lives.
I think that makes sense, Gail. Too many people believe what they read, if it is "science" or "statistics". The supposed statistics about suicide, always presented by USA sources as far as I know, are as fake as a $3 bill. But I needed to watch a Swedish documentary - yes, Sweden is changing - to get the facts about the transgender youth suicide issue.
Always remember the apocryphal Disraeli quote/ there are lies , damned lies and statistics (yes I have taken statistics on a graduate level and am well aware of how to cook that stew).
He has always been a political conservative, and used to be pretty solidly pro-life. This is his second term. I came to despise him during his first term, when he botched Covid and appeared every single day (I kid you not) for a "Covid update press conference." He also took millions of dollars of federal Covid relief money and established a lottery for people who go the shot, making random Ohio residents millionaires with money that was supposed to go to businesses and families HE MADE SUFFER through his Covid policies. I also kid you not. But the candidates who challenged him for the Republican nomination for governor weren't stellar and no one really coalesced around a candidate (the state party obviously wanted DeWine), and his opposition in the actual election was a far-left progressive, so there was no other choice.
Chris Christie adopted the same line in the last Republican debate. The state shouldn’t get between parents and children. Thats generally a sound principle. But of course the state gets between parents and children all the time. So this kind of argument in this context is absurd. It’s allegedly conservative politicians trying to use conservative sounding rhetoric to justify positions which are antithetical to any form of conservativism. It’s an ugly spectacle to watch
I wish somebody would get specific and, erm, point out that the State gets between daughter-raping fathers and their prey all the time. Of course that would put this loathsome practice in the right bucket and we can't have that.
Government interferes in family life on many things. Divorce. Statutory rape. Purchase of alcohol. Purchase of cigarettes. Mandatory school attendance.
It's such nonsense. The worst thing about this is it means the State of Ohio now regards this gobbledygook as real. That a child (more likely his wacked-out mother) decides he is the other gender and then proceeds to drug and mutilate him. Court cases will be decided on this basis. Lawsuits.
There was a hideous case in Texas maybe forty years ago in which a father tried to get back at his ex - wife by setting their little boy on fire. ( I'm pretty sure that tragic child survived. )
Now, all - but - murder can be accomplished by a vengeful parent with the protection of the state.
When you and I were young, the big fight about physicality between mothers and their daughters tended to be about whether the daughter was old enough to get her ears pierced. Girls from wealthier homes might become obsessed that their noses were "off," and rhinoplasty in the summertime would be the reward for Tiffany's making the honor roll.
Wasn't the hot question a few years ago about when a girl was old enough to be given breast reduction surgery?
I'm surprised no entrepreneur has yet established a boutique business, making tasteful necklaces with severed, taxidermied penises as the pendant for MtoF types.
More than 40 years ago my best friend (he still is), a major horndog, told me he was a feminist because it made it easier to get laid. He said it as a Leninist, if you take my meaning.
We already had one Ohio case a couple of years ago, where parents lost custody over a kid who claimed to be the opposite sex. The judge gave custody to the grandparents, who "affirmed the teen's gender identity."
Yes, but you don't even have to go to such a troubling example. Here in Maryland, as in many other jurisdictions, the state-run school system literally gets between parents and students with regard to gender identity by hiding said identity from the parents!
The principle here is clear: Let parents and children make their own choices, as long as those choices are always pro-"trans."
Mike DeWine lost re-election to the Senate in 2006 because of his devotion to the Bush/McCain wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He shares the blame for the deaths of thousands. As for overriding DeWine's veto, I don't think the Republicans have the votes. Further, the old mossback sort of Republican still exists in places like Ohio. Small town businessman, Rotary Club member, owns a piece of the town bank, sits on his sofa all day Saturday watching the "student-athletes" of Ohio State give Purdue of whomping.
Nor would old fashioned Democrats favor sex change surgeries for kids. This is a very recent, distinctly modern insanity. Logically the trans issue has nothing to do with the traditional left-right disagreements.
That's the big change. The Democrats and Republicans battled over taxes and spending for much of the last century. Cultural issues began to bubble up in the Sixties. Now cultural issues are pre-eminent. Most Democrats don't want to seriously raise taxes and most Republicans don't want to seriously cut spending.
There were cultural issues in the past, some of the of course around the issue of race (e.g., interracial marriage). Also women's issues like female suffrage. Prohibition of course was a major cultural issue. These things seem to go in cycles, with the cultural issues bubbling up when there's no overriding war or economic emergency to suck up all the political oxygen.
None of those things were literally insane. Opposition to interracial marriage was bigoted and stupid -- people of different races have always intermarried. Prohibition was based on the incorrect but eminently arguable position that the immense alcohol addiction at the time would best be ended by no longer selling alcohol. There's nothing insane about that. What we're talking about here is the literally insane idea that people can change their sex. There is no justification for this, other than pseudoscience and good old occult/hermetic transmutation of substances, both of which anyone with a brain should laugh at. But we're not laughing -- we're mutilating children. Politics don't even begin to explain this.
Insanity is drifting standard. There certainly were people who argued that it was insane of women to get involved in politics, and that "race-mixing" was insane. Do not credit the modern world with some sort of special god's-eye view of things. Epistemic humility is called for., Who knows what the future will say of us? Something I remind myself regularly if I am tempted to judge the past for its errors.
This is such an interesting comment, and vindicates my long held conviction that many if not most of the best comments are seen by few because they come in so far down in the queue.
Yes and no. Of course an old Catholic blue collar Democrat would have hated that but that’s a dying breed. To paraphrase The Chambers Brothers Time Has Come- our souls have been psychedelized.The new religion is some pastiche of Wicca and narcissism under which transgenderism is not merrily ok it’s sacred. So if the left is the home of that ilk and I think it is- yes this is a left- right issue.
Note: What we might call classical Marxism might have seen this as some form of bourgeois decadence- which I think it is- but we’ve since been enlightened by gender queer theory.
When I was a kid growing up in Pennsylvania, the Dem/Rep split was blue collar union versus business or manager class, and the issues were economic. Most people on both sides in that time and place were culturally conservative.
Catholic voters were Democrat( by and large). That is key in understanding the change. Catholics have effectively disappeared.You people like Biden and Pelosi- who “grew” with time.
And it wasn't until well into the 80s the parties both was split on abortion. When people nowadays castigate Ronald Reagan for not making abortion a litmus test in his judicial appointments they forget that such was not yet GOP orthodoxy.
Yes, and I've stated my view of this before: guys like Jerry Falwell were blights on the nation. God alone knows how many billions of dollars Americans donated to Republican politicians from the 80s on. What, really, did it achieve?
Imagine what it might have achieved if every penny of that money had gone to maintaining a system of well run homes for unwed mothers, places which would have been appealing not only as places of refuge from furious parents, but as the locus of genuine and effective prolife work.
Such homes would have offered girls pregnant out of wedlock free and good accommodations. They would have been fed well. They would have been worked with by counselors, who would have encouraged them to think they had a future, and might have been able to help them discover what that might be.
When I was young, we had something like that in the United States, The Florence Crittenden Homes for Unwed Mothers. I have no idea who Florence Crittenden was, except to suppose she was a philanthropist of angelic disposition. I have no idea if this network of homes exists any longer.
But imagine if every penny given by well meaning but sadly naive people to politicians and even to good organizations like National Right to Life had gone to the funding of these homes. Another thing God alone knows is how many abortions would never happened.
This, however, would have required insightful religious leaders, who would have been stunned by Roe v Wade, but more important, would have realized that the lack of public outcry after Roe v Wade was the "tell" about how complacent American Christians had become by then, that any political efforts to reverse Roe would be a waste of time and money, and that the Church in America had become the thinnest of Christianities.
Here's how somnolent American Evangelicals were: the first Southern Baptist Convention "meeting" of "messengers" after Roe passed a resolution approving of Roe v Wade.
Here's something which fascinates me. In The Godfather, Part II., one of the most volatile scenes is the one in which Kay tells Michael that she'd had a recent pregnancy, and had aborted the baby. This makes Michael temporarily insane, and in rage he slaps Kay so hard in the face it seems surprising Diane Keaton didn't have to be taken to an emergency room.
Michael's rage may be more about patria than about morality, but he doesn't disagree with Kay's sobbing admission that she had done something evil ( that is the word she uses ) because she couldn't abide the thought that "this THING!!", the Corleone crime family, would go on.
The Godfather, Part II., wasn't released for maybe a year after Roe v Wade. Audiences would, of course, have realized that in 1950s America, Michael's and Kay's reactions would have been more likely than not to be the norm, but one might have thought that in the Brave New America post Roe, there might have been catcalls in theatres, angry statements by the ACLU and the like, but I don't recall any of that. I think that post Roe, most Americans still saw abortion as an evil thing, and that yes, Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other rabble rousers could have achieved great and lasting good if they hadn't gone groveling to Reagan.
We still had some Evangelical intellectual heavyweights around then, men such as Carl F.H. Henry. Did any of them try to oppose the politicization of abortion, to draw properly dismayed Americans to spend their money wisely in prolife work?
I don't recall it. If someone does, please let me know.
I'm not American, but I think there's still a lot of that about. The vocally pro-abortion people I know tend to fall into three groups: (i) obnoxious, fat feminists with wacky ideas and multiple piercings; (ii) lecherous males; and (iii) economically hard-right types who would support infanticide if it reduced welfare spending.
You are right. But your iii could have the added explanation that abortion kills black babies disproportionately. Certain types on the far right think that way.
On the professions: It’s reached the point where, to keep your professional license ,mandatory ideological training is the norm in some areas.You will be instructed on micro aggression , proper pronouns, unconscious bias etc. That this is a very specific ideological position is not acknowledged. It is presented as , this is reality.You can not question it. It’s revealed truth that was unknown in the dark ages of say the 80s.
I just meant that the luvvies aren't going to invite this wanker to ANY of their parties. Has he lost his way morally? Of course he has. They all have.
I don’t know what it’s all about, truly. I wish I had your certainty. But what is certain is that doctors will remain able to “break out the dick saw” in Ohio, to quote Bill Maher. I hope the legislature overrides the governor.
YMMV, but that house looks ugly inside to me. A cookie-cutter white-and-black staged monstrosity, devoid of any sign it's ever been lived in. My wife refuses to consider selling and moving from our history-laden, personality-filled 115-year old home precisely because to merely market it, let alone attract actual buyers, we would have to rape it with blunt-force updates until it looks like that. I manage and count the dollars in our marriage and while I understand that this is the way to sell a home nowadays, the immorality of it repulses me.
I’ve been trying to figure out when it became necessary, not just a bonus, to sell a house in “move-in condition”. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, my family moved a couple of times and the only things you might ask the sellers to do in a real estate contract were to fix actual problems, such as a hole in the roof or a leak. Now people won’t move into a place unless you present it to them with a pre-packaged idea, nice and sterile.
Maybe the home renovation / flipping shows that started flooding cable and satellite TV around Y2K (during the last r.e. explosion) made the Inoffensive Gray and White Home Sale prevalent.
Amen, sister! As a future house seller, I dread this extortionate pressure. And as a potential house buyer, I resent having to pay for a bunch of trendy, unnecessary crap-doodle that I don’t actually want.
And I refuse to do it. In my area, most older houses are bought by developers (although they may not let you know they are). So why waste the money on a pre-sale remodel? Once the papers are signed, the bulldozers move in.
I once sold used furniture. Sometimes I rescued old pieces that had to be painted. My young customers wanted stark white furniture. I quickly grew tired of that. I began to sell only smalls like Fire King bowls, beautiful pieces with history that I stated on the sale tag.
I'm trying to sell antique furniture and it ain't easy. I've read multiple sources that say "brown is out" meaning that young folks don't like dark wood furniture. Also, a lot of retired folks who are downsizing are finding they can't even give their un-needed furniture away. Younger folks would much rather have something from new from Ikea, something nice and flimsy with a substrate of "manufactured wood" (which is just a fancy marketing name for cheap particle board) covered in laminate with a faux finish to make it look like something it's not. It's all a bunch of crap that will never last long enough to become an antique.
No, it’s not easy. I’ve done it for 17 years. I’ve had booths in Georgia and South Carolina. I’m in South Carolina now. I love the store I’m presently in. It’s a Victorian cottage. I have a whole room to fill. It’s work to keep it stocked. It’s basically a thrifting desert here. Dark wood does sell but it has to be really special. I may soon leave. I really prefer gardening at this point.
It's difficult. My grandmother died in the house she was born in. Certainly, for whatever furniture my grandparents bought, there was a sense that it would be there forever. These days, when you have the people who are actually moving out from their parents, and they're going to condos where they split the rent with somebody else, there's much more of a sense of even the furniture being temporary. I've moved with nothing more than a couple of suitcases. I've moved with USPS.
In Germany, before IKEA, furniture was very, very expensive and it was meant to last a long time. I had a friend whose grandparents were going to gift her a furniture set - in storage - I think when she got married or when they died. She was in her early twenties and convinced them that the only time in her life where she could actually use all that furniture (4 big pieces, including a wardrobe, since Germany doesn't have built-in closets) was then since if they waited, she'd have to purchase her own in the interim. She's moved a couple of times though - I can't imagine how difficult it was doing that with those pieces, though!
I'm 44, at the end of Gen X. With the Millennials, you started with a generation who, despite all of the DIY shows on TV, can't fix anything ("let's just buy a new one!") and don't know what somebody means when they mention a "Phillips-head screwdriver". Of course most of them can't come into a house and think that they could improve it with some work!
I’m a middle Xer and we all had delusions (until 2008, anyway) that we COULD easily fix a place up and sell it. A lot of us lost our shirts on this misconception.
My philosophy - if you don't do something enough to be familiar with it, it's probably going to cost twice as much as imagined and take three times as long. Sometimes, it's still a bargain, and sometimes, it's also the process of becoming familiar with doing something. I still had shops in high school, so I have some idea/experience doing certain things but I'm not going to be building my boys a new dresser anytime soon to replace the broken one.
Even if you ARE familiar with things, and if you already have the supplies, it has become incredibly expensive to make or do them yourself. I have been sewing since high school, and making clothing is now so expensive that, other than alterations and repairs, it is purely for hobby purposes or to make something you can’t find at the store.
Yes. I pretty much have to sew, and know how to do a few alterations to off-the-rack items, to ensure my clothes fit properly. However, it is still possible to sew things for less cost than buying them. A couple of years ago I made myself a coat out of part of a vintage Pendleton blanket for about 30% of cost of new. There are some reasonable fabric outlets on line, and some even avoid the cheap Chinese goods. Happy sewing, Brigitte!
The thrift shop is a good place for yard goods (i.e., tablecloths and drapes) but you're limited to what you find and is it big enough?
The thrift shop is also full of clothing that can be taken apart and recombined which is a good, cheap way to learn how garments are put together. The trendy name is "altered couture".
Middle school ("Junior High" in my day): Shops were elective classes for boys, and Home Ec was a requirement for girls. I really wanted to take wood shop, but not an option for me as a female. I was severely disappointed, but I was not going to be That Person who sued the school district over it. Thank goodness my dad taught me a few things - but I still feel shortchanged after 55 years.
I had wood shop, electric shop, auto shop, cast metals shop, & print shop in the 90s. Mind you, a couple of these were merely shadows of what they should have been, long gone were then days of the school sending kids straight into professional industry. However, print shop was amazing, very much a mix of the old school & high tech (AGFA had donated some nice, very professional stuff). It's all gone now, because "college prep" is sooo much more important!
I do know people who have successfully done the buy-and-fix-up thing. A friend's father was still doing that (and turning a profit) when he died at 86. But it's not an occasional hobby. You have to be dedicated and disciplined, exactly as if it were a job. And you have to have some money to work with not a shoestring budget and lots of plastic.
My neighbors have owned the house next door to mine for twenty years. It was built in 1840 or so. They are a married couple who live on Capitol Hill in Washington. They are both architects. And they are still working on it.
It’s also the realtors. My uncle is one and he pushed me to paint our house interior white so it would resell easily. I planned to live in it for a while so I went with pale yellow. In the pacific northwest the color made the interior sunny and cheerful compared to the gloom outside. When we went to sell, it took about 2 weeks to find a buyer. 😉
I am trying to sell my house up in Delaware. I'm getting disparaging comments from some lookers like "Yard looks like it would be a lot of work" or "We'd need to paint the walls different colors". Well of course: that comes with buying a house as opposed to a condo where the outside is cared for, or renting an apartment where the walls are painted bland off-white and even if you don't like that you can't repaint.
Oh, and I actually did relandscape the place and repaint all but one room when I bought the place (the previous owners had execrable tastes). IMO, that's to be expected when you buy a pre-owned home.
There are good buyers out there but the tendency is for buyers to try to milk sellers particularly after they’ve signed a contract.They know they aren’t getting a new house but they want to get as many fixes as possible. It’s reasonable when it turns out you have a leaky roof but you’ll find the demands can be unending.
I know that when we were house shopping for our most recent house my mentality was ,if it’s going to cost this much, then I don’t want a fixer upper. We aren’t especially handy people.
We bought a fixer-upper for our first house and we ended up with more repairs than we could afford to fix. We were willing to do it, but It was a money pit. We ended up foreclosing. We learned a lot of lessons from our previous experience of owning a house that we didn’t want to repeat. We were a lot smarter about the second house we bought.
Edited to add: I just meant cosmetics like painting, wallpapering, sprucing up to suit your own tastes—not a total redo where you find out the plumbing is bad, rodents have eaten your wiring, etc.
You can sell houses that need work, but most people find that they make more if the houses are fixed up, especially as housing is in short supply in many areas of the country My daughter and her husband were lucky enough to find an elderly seller who was moving to an apartment and didn't want the expense or hassle of having her house rewired, etc., so they got a house at a great price (for the area). But if the buyer had wanted to do those things, she probably could have made a bigger profit. And where my daughter bought, houses were selling in days, often the first day. It wasn't because people wouldn't buy "starter homes," it was because there WERE none.
The all-gray look is much better, IMHO, than the standard all-beige look of the past few decades. No "fixer-upper" shows had anything to do with that one, it was just builder-grade standard.
I guess I'm the outlier. I love the open floor plan and the updated kitchen and bathrooms (I really like subway tile and modern fixtures). I love the idea of moving into a solidly constructed house that doesn't need a lot of repairs, that's been freshly renovated. I am a big fan of color on the walls, so I don't look at those pictures and imagine living "as is" in that space; I would paint and decorate to suit our personal taste, but the floor plan looks awesome to me, as do the updates in the critical spaces. Call me lazy, but I'm not handy, nor is my husband, and we don't have the time, energy, or inclination to become DIYers, so a home like this (were we looking to move to that area) would be a perfect. And I especially love the idea of a hero's misstep scarring my ceiling in perpetuity—as my kids would say, "it adds to the lore."
Rod, Thank you for this post. Of all your recent writings, this one re: memories has affected me more than most. I too long for "home" and am beginning to realize that memories seem, "more full of life" than present days. Everyone has things which are just "bowls" but to us they are so much more. Thanks again.
I remember when they had my Grandparent’s estate sale and my mother called me from out of town asking if I wanted my grandmother’s three tiered side table as it was marked at $30. I sobbed as I thought of all my childhood memories being sold for so little. That table sits right beside me now and I remember exactly where it stood once and I hold these memories close to my heart
After my grandmother had a stroke (Gramps had passed already), she moved in with her brother and his second wife, who threw out a lot of her stuff. I would have loved to have the opportunity to take the telephone table and the little floor lamp/table with Gramps’s pipe ashtray built into it. But then it would probably cause actual, physical pain to see those beloved things every day.
Eric Kauffman's findings are interesting. When I first went to college in the late 70s, I would gather that students were more conservative then and conservatives were a majority on campus. Males were a slight majority over females. Most of us were the first in our families to attend college. Our fathers worked hard to provide and our mothers kept the home. Jimmy Carter was considered a failed president, the Democrats were considered the tax-and-spend party, Ronald Reagan offered hope and tax cuts, the USSR was on the march and liberalism was looked down on. Homosexuals were widely despised. Physical work was honored. Leftist social engineering was considered a failure- the Great Society, school busing for racial reasons, urban riots that ruined cities like Detroit and Newark.
Today, the campuses are majority-left. Women are 60 % of the campuses and women tend to be more liberal on almost every issue. The easy divorce culture is over fifty years old which has wrecked the influence fathers have on their daughters. The USSR is dead. The old work ethic is weaker and the society is much more therapeutic. Democrats are no longer the tax-and-spend party. George W. Bush is considered a failed president. The modern youth, heavily influenced by the left-wing media buzz, is much more liberal on social issues than my generation. Physical work is looked down on as something rednecks have to do because they're too stupid to get through college. Homosexuals and blacks are at the apex of society. White males are both privileged and despised. Dare I say it, the college and university students of today are unusually ignorant, easily led, soft, coddled, and don't have a firm understanding of how the world works.
We need it that way because we no longer need producers; we need consumers to keep our fake, debt-based “money” system constantly inflating. The more emotional, flighty, and effete we make people, the more consumption (shopping, pornography, eating) occurs.
Who tends to make an unaffordable shopping order at 2 a.m. with a credit card, a conservative male or a wine-drunk liberal woman who allegedly hates capitalism?
Well, I know guys who have no financial sense and routinely max out credit cards, whether buying junk, spending to impress others, or doing travel and the like and always going first class.
Well, people have been griping about "kids these days" since Aristotle was frustrated with Alexander and his friends, and probably long before. It might also be useful to remember the old nostrum about anyone who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart. One big reason young people tend liberal in youth is that they are on the outside looking in-- and also don't have much practical experience, the sort that brings eventual wisdom. Of course they're willing to upend things. And we do need that even if it often gets taken to excess. A society that can't question itself or reform Bad Old Things is going to stagnate and fail.
"...no matter how hard one works, and how brilliantly one plans, life, ultimately, cannot be controlled or perfected. To have a tragic sense of life is to live with an awareness of time’s meaning. But tragedy also requires wisdom, or even pleasure, to emerge from suffering. In a way, my writing in this space, and in my books, is all part of a deep emotional need to find meaning in events, and especially to pull redemption out of the ruins."
Well. No way to add to this simply perfect assessment. Happy New Year, Rod.
Rod, I'm approaching 50 myself here in a few days and "the past" has been prominent in my thinking lately. I'm not scared of growing old, but I'm.... sad? Maybe that's not it, either. But it's something. I think about all of the relatives and ancestors and old family times and I feel more cognizant now that they are in the past. I'd say strange but I think it's just normal.
As far as Mike DeWine goes, he was also a covid tyrant. Maybe a skosh better than some of the democrats, but still bad. He has already shown his stripes.
I came to a realization a few months ago that as mad as I am about the covid tyranny, many ,many other people - a majority of Americans even - are not. Or at least aren't mad enough to do anything about it. I think the trans nonsense is the same way right now. Lots of people don't like it, but many more just don't care or don't care enough. Politicians like DeWine know that and that's why they do what they do. They want to appease the donors and aren't sufficiently scared of the voters.
My sister was the typical “tomboy” in the late 70’s and 80’s. She could beat all the boys in sports in our neighborhood. Being my older sister she used to always stick up for me when the older boys tried to pick a fight with me. It was nice. In high school she changed and became all girl. Today’s society and internet would have gotten into her head and probably make think she should transition.
Your last sentence nails it. The entire system is rigged to prevent just such a "populist uprising." Bread and circuses are still in effect -- they just look different.
I personally spent several thousand dollars in 2022 paying for yard signs advocating against our county executive who rushed to institute a mask mandate in 2020 and tried to start a legal fight with our local school districts to keep them closed in the fall of 2020. He lost and the schools were opened.
Nonetheless, he still won re-election by 10 points. In Texas. It was horribly dispiriting. People just didn’t care what he did.
Your childhood house - wow! I don’t know why, but you posting a real link to Zillow to a real house for sale makes you feel somehow more accessible to those of us that follow your work. I love your insight and memories and feel very similarly about my own childhood places. I can get lured into nostalgia pretty quick, and think about artifacts I’ve collected, like your aunt’s green bowl, and what they meant to people I’ve known and what they’ll never mean to anyone else. There’s a sort of an appealing haunting I feel when I go home and see buildings and things people who are gone left behind, and the memories of life as it was. I think that I too have always been searching for a “Home that doesn’t exist here.”
As for the political move left of professionals, I’ve spent most of my career in academia (now working to complete Ph.D) and my secular higher education might have moved me slightly left on some things, but largely affirmed and fed my Christian worldview (but, I’m a bit of an odd ball). What moved me more towards what used to be traditional democrat territory was witnessing and experiencing the decline of job security for workers, and GW Bush policies. I’m still a Republican only because conservative Blue Dog Democrats are now extinct.
I’m an Ohioan, and as for Gov. Dewine, I’m betting his decision has more to do with economics since the Columbus area is attracting huge investments from Intel and other large corporations - which as you consistently and rightly point out, are lefties.
I have relatives that live near the area where the big Intel chip factory is going in. From what I understand the company has already begun efforts to prepare the local semi-rural population for progressive colonization: "Many new people will be coming here who may look, think, and behave differently than you do, etc., etc.," and other such bullshit.
So Intel not only brings jobs, it brings Progressive Enlightenment!
It's okay to feel a little bad for the house: it is one thing to fix something up and bring out its charm, it's quite another to remake it into the bland and abstract 'International Airbnb Style' - yes that's a real thing. I think of the 'Crunchy Con manifesto' (still one of my favorite books): 6. A good rule of thumb: Small and Local and Old and Particular are to be preferred over Big and Global and New and Abstract.
I agree. Too long and you drown in nostalgia, but revisiting the memories briefly is sweet. After my parents downsized to a patio home I put together a photo book showing the two homes they lived in through the years, and the gardens they planted. It's beautiful to enjoy for short time.
If there’s one positive I can say about Trump is that the base he built will all but ensure we don’t get a DeWine/Kasich/Romney type candidate. Based on 90s/early 2000s standards of electability, DeWine would have been a top choice. Now if only we could get a serious populist conservative on top of the ticket.
Trump had both houses of Congress for two years and played with himself. Keep saying that until it sinks in. From everything I can see his "base" cares about him, not about the country.
I don’t disagree, and will be very curious to see what his ardent supporters will do when he is no longer a force. Still, for now, they are keeping the DeWines of the world away from higher ambitions. But I agree with you that the base is otherwise baseless when it comes to conservative principles.
What will Trump's base do when he's gone? Shatter into a thousand or millions of shards, each sharp edge looking for The One who can put them back together. Until then, if that time ever comes, they will drift back to their ordinary lives, complaining about the world and the politicians who can't do anything about it.
Trump was the most conservative president we've had since Reagan. Not perfect, but this backbiting grousing about him from people who most likely voted for Dubya is ridiculous.
Trump was not very conservative. In some matters (e.g., free trade and entitlements) he bucked conservative precepts. And the guy was no SoCon. In fact he was easily the most gay-friendly Republican in the White House to date.
Again, I said most conservative since Reagan. And since conservative means, "to conserve" and his trading policies conserved American economic interests, I would say they WERE conservative. I've never bought the idea that "conservative" was default "free trade with no restrictions". Or that conservative principles were a national suicide pact.
If Reagan is the gold standard of political conservatism in this country Trump was on board the train when it came to tax cuts and not much else. Note that the National Review and much of "official" Conservatism disparaged him.
Tax cuts, foreign, policy, judges, looking out for American Interests and on down the line.. And the LAST place I would go for the last word on conservatism is RINO Republicans or a trash rag like NR.
You watch: if Trump chooses Nikki Haley as his running mate, most of his sycophants will fall all over themselves advocating for the brilliant Nikki Haley.
Look at Pence. He caved, and got rewarded with a (supposedly populist!) Vice Presidency.
Pence makes Dan Quayle look like Winston Churchill. Pence is another "God wants me to be President" type, you know.
There is one thing in Pence's favor: he's shown that in place of being a man with authentic dignity, being a stiff will do.
How did Pence "cave". Please do remember that Indiana's religious freedom law was signed by him and is part of the state's law code now. Pence was willing to negotiate on some features of the original law, but the bulk of the law is as drafted. This is how politics works-- horses are traded, half loaves are cut. The unwillingness of so many on the Right (et tu?) to accept this necessary reality of public life is one reason I could never sign on to such a movement. Hence also on abortion nowadays where rather than crafting compromise laws that might actually be acceptable to the voters too many legislatures have rushed totalizing measures into place and provoked a huge backlash so that states like Ohio and Michigan now have voter-enacted abortion license even more extreme than Roe vs Wade. Let the ideologues write 100 times: Politics is the art of the possible.
The law had been hammered out in the state assembly over 60-days, and Pence was ready to sign it...until the media took up a leftist protest on the national level. Scared, Pence sent it back, and a closed-door committee gutted the law. What they resubmitted was not the law the state lawmakers had agreed to, but Pence signed it. He’s a gutless wonder.
It's hyperbolic to describe the law as "gutted".
As I said you have to accept that this sort of horse trading is how politics works. Those who demand whole loaves end up going to bed hungry.
Generally speaking you’re right about politics being horse trading, but this was a situation in which both parties had hammered out an agreement, and the governor had already said he was going to sign the law. Then the media got involved, and he backed down. Its not hyperbolic at all to say that they gutted the law. Once they changed it, it did not have the teeth to protect people and businesses from being sued by LGB activists. It was entirely pointless.
It wasn't so much the media as Big Business. This was the Waterloo of social conservatism.
He used to be pretty solidly pro-life and sane. This is his second term. I came to despise him during his first term, when he botched Covid and appeared on tv every single day (I kid you not) for a "Covid update press conference." He also took millions of dollars of federal Covid relief money and established a lottery for people who go the shot, making random Ohio residents millionaires with money that was supposed to go to businesses and families HE MADE SUFFER through his Covid policies. I also kid you not. But the candidates who challenged him for the Republican nomination for governor weren't stellar and no one really coalesced around a candidate (the state party obviously wanted DeWine), and his opposition in the actual election was a far-left progressive, so there was no other choice.
"His was a donor class move."
It absolutely was, but therein lies a problem we don't talk about much but looms large over this landscape.
Campaign cash makes the world go round - gets pols elected and re-elected. Yes, the donor class trends left and will continue to do so - the more people seek out higher education, the bigger the "credentialed class," and that class prides itself on being not just smarter than than the short-fingered vulgarian class, but more virtuous. Cutting the breasts off a psychologically confused teenaged girl is seen as the moral thing to do, increasingly, by those who have the most money to give.
Those who oppose such things tend to have less money. They may constitute an outright majority of the population (not sure about that, but maybe); but if they're not giving campaign cash, their voice matters less; they are yappy plebs to be kept at bay while the REAL work of the GOP, doling out tax breaks and other favors to the special interests, takes precedence.
When the people with the money who give the money favor wokism, how are those who don't have the money and don't give the money to resist?
Citizens United - the gift from SCOTUS that keeps giving.
I share your contempt for DeWine. Despicable is as polite as I can put it at the moment.
I bet he campaigned as oh-so conservative to deceive voters into electing him. That's how red state RINOs roll.
Mark, to me, the most appalling aspect of DeWine's "statement" was his presenting it as a move to protect human life.
Work means freedom. Eastasia is our mortal enemy, while Eurasia has always been our dear friend, blah blah blah.
If I'm not mistaken, DeWine is in his mid 70s, at least. People become demented in different ways, so I guess it isn't surprising that he did this. He's a loyal Republican, after all, and conscientious about leaving a legacy as that.
A man without a chest.
I didn't need a purgative today.
Despite our governor, Tony Evers, the WI Legislature and State Senate are overwhelmingly Republican, to the point where there's a decent chance they'll have a big enough majority to override vetos with the next round of elections. That being said, nobody wants to be the one "out there" to stand up for things the governor won't sign. It makes them look "weird" and gives the Ds something to campaign against, I guess. I haven't been paying attention to politics nearly as closely as I used to, and I think they've got a good strategy on trying to kill DIE in the University of Wisconsin system, but there's so much where I'd just like to scream "get a backbone"!
When voters divide about 50:50 statewide, but both houses of the legislature are 2/3 one party or the other, the gerrymandering is obvious. That's how a governor or a senator can get elected whom the majority of the legislature would never have approved.
I agree ... contemptible and despicable, but also understandable.
I'm not at all familiar with Ohio politics but I suspect it was just a political calculation. If there are indeed enough Republicans to override his veto, DeWine probably considered it the safest political move to let the legislature do the "dirty" work of overriding his veto. While he may anger all the Republicans and conservatives who voted for him, they most likely wouldn't vote for a Democrat. On the other hand, come election time, his veto might give him a "moderate" glow in the eyes of disillusioned Democrats who might give him their votes.
An alternate possibility is that he may know someone, or have a family member, who is gay or trans and he doesn't want to cause familial discord. Or he might just have beloved, but liberal, grandchildren threatening to disown him if he were to sign the bill. Politicians are only human, after all.
A override has the votes in the Ohio House while the Senate is dicey. As to why DeWine vetoed, perhaps Rob Portmann asked him to do so.
Portman, who changed all his principles because of his son.
Human respect. Super weapon of the Devil.
I'm hoping that's it, and that he gave tacit approval for the legislature to override him, but he can't be reelected so if he's really for this, he ought to have taken the bullet. But considering all that he did "to save just one life" during the Covid debacle, I am also quite willing to believe he did this for exactly the reason he said -- because he's dumb enough to believe this will save lives.
I think that makes sense, Gail. Too many people believe what they read, if it is "science" or "statistics". The supposed statistics about suicide, always presented by USA sources as far as I know, are as fake as a $3 bill. But I needed to watch a Swedish documentary - yes, Sweden is changing - to get the facts about the transgender youth suicide issue.
Swedes are willing to consider the data, the evidence is damming.
Always remember the apocryphal Disraeli quote/ there are lies , damned lies and statistics (yes I have taken statistics on a graduate level and am well aware of how to cook that stew).
He has always been a political conservative, and used to be pretty solidly pro-life. This is his second term. I came to despise him during his first term, when he botched Covid and appeared every single day (I kid you not) for a "Covid update press conference." He also took millions of dollars of federal Covid relief money and established a lottery for people who go the shot, making random Ohio residents millionaires with money that was supposed to go to businesses and families HE MADE SUFFER through his Covid policies. I also kid you not. But the candidates who challenged him for the Republican nomination for governor weren't stellar and no one really coalesced around a candidate (the state party obviously wanted DeWine), and his opposition in the actual election was a far-left progressive, so there was no other choice.
Chris Christie adopted the same line in the last Republican debate. The state shouldn’t get between parents and children. Thats generally a sound principle. But of course the state gets between parents and children all the time. So this kind of argument in this context is absurd. It’s allegedly conservative politicians trying to use conservative sounding rhetoric to justify positions which are antithetical to any form of conservativism. It’s an ugly spectacle to watch
I wish somebody would get specific and, erm, point out that the State gets between daughter-raping fathers and their prey all the time. Of course that would put this loathsome practice in the right bucket and we can't have that.
Government interferes in family life on many things. Divorce. Statutory rape. Purchase of alcohol. Purchase of cigarettes. Mandatory school attendance.
It's such nonsense. The worst thing about this is it means the State of Ohio now regards this gobbledygook as real. That a child (more likely his wacked-out mother) decides he is the other gender and then proceeds to drug and mutilate him. Court cases will be decided on this basis. Lawsuits.
I agree. I would guess most of these confused children have nutty mothers who are divorced and very left-wing. Dingbats.
That terrible case in Texas involved a mother getting back at her ex through the kid. Monstrous.
There was a hideous case in Texas maybe forty years ago in which a father tried to get back at his ex - wife by setting their little boy on fire. ( I'm pretty sure that tragic child survived. )
Now, all - but - murder can be accomplished by a vengeful parent with the protection of the state.
When you and I were young, the big fight about physicality between mothers and their daughters tended to be about whether the daughter was old enough to get her ears pierced. Girls from wealthier homes might become obsessed that their noses were "off," and rhinoplasty in the summertime would be the reward for Tiffany's making the honor roll.
Wasn't the hot question a few years ago about when a girl was old enough to be given breast reduction surgery?
I'm surprised no entrepreneur has yet established a boutique business, making tasteful necklaces with severed, taxidermied penises as the pendant for MtoF types.
Good point. I come across far more woke women than woke men. But of course there are the pussified men who go along with it just to keep the peace.
More than 40 years ago my best friend (he still is), a major horndog, told me he was a feminist because it made it easier to get laid. He said it as a Leninist, if you take my meaning.
There's a lesson to be learned from the eugenics movement of 100 years ago.
We already had one Ohio case a couple of years ago, where parents lost custody over a kid who claimed to be the opposite sex. The judge gave custody to the grandparents, who "affirmed the teen's gender identity."
Yes, but you don't even have to go to such a troubling example. Here in Maryland, as in many other jurisdictions, the state-run school system literally gets between parents and students with regard to gender identity by hiding said identity from the parents!
The principle here is clear: Let parents and children make their own choices, as long as those choices are always pro-"trans."
Mike DeWine lost re-election to the Senate in 2006 because of his devotion to the Bush/McCain wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He shares the blame for the deaths of thousands. As for overriding DeWine's veto, I don't think the Republicans have the votes. Further, the old mossback sort of Republican still exists in places like Ohio. Small town businessman, Rotary Club member, owns a piece of the town bank, sits on his sofa all day Saturday watching the "student-athletes" of Ohio State give Purdue of whomping.
Would those "old fashioned" Republicans (the old "I like Ike" crowd) have favored sex change surgeries for kids? I don't think so.
Nor would old fashioned Democrats favor sex change surgeries for kids. This is a very recent, distinctly modern insanity. Logically the trans issue has nothing to do with the traditional left-right disagreements.
That's the big change. The Democrats and Republicans battled over taxes and spending for much of the last century. Cultural issues began to bubble up in the Sixties. Now cultural issues are pre-eminent. Most Democrats don't want to seriously raise taxes and most Republicans don't want to seriously cut spending.
There were cultural issues in the past, some of the of course around the issue of race (e.g., interracial marriage). Also women's issues like female suffrage. Prohibition of course was a major cultural issue. These things seem to go in cycles, with the cultural issues bubbling up when there's no overriding war or economic emergency to suck up all the political oxygen.
None of those things were literally insane. Opposition to interracial marriage was bigoted and stupid -- people of different races have always intermarried. Prohibition was based on the incorrect but eminently arguable position that the immense alcohol addiction at the time would best be ended by no longer selling alcohol. There's nothing insane about that. What we're talking about here is the literally insane idea that people can change their sex. There is no justification for this, other than pseudoscience and good old occult/hermetic transmutation of substances, both of which anyone with a brain should laugh at. But we're not laughing -- we're mutilating children. Politics don't even begin to explain this.
Insanity is drifting standard. There certainly were people who argued that it was insane of women to get involved in politics, and that "race-mixing" was insane. Do not credit the modern world with some sort of special god's-eye view of things. Epistemic humility is called for., Who knows what the future will say of us? Something I remind myself regularly if I am tempted to judge the past for its errors.
This is such an interesting comment, and vindicates my long held conviction that many if not most of the best comments are seen by few because they come in so far down in the queue.
Yes and no. Of course an old Catholic blue collar Democrat would have hated that but that’s a dying breed. To paraphrase The Chambers Brothers Time Has Come- our souls have been psychedelized.The new religion is some pastiche of Wicca and narcissism under which transgenderism is not merrily ok it’s sacred. So if the left is the home of that ilk and I think it is- yes this is a left- right issue.
Note: What we might call classical Marxism might have seen this as some form of bourgeois decadence- which I think it is- but we’ve since been enlightened by gender queer theory.
When I was a kid growing up in Pennsylvania, the Dem/Rep split was blue collar union versus business or manager class, and the issues were economic. Most people on both sides in that time and place were culturally conservative.
Catholic voters were Democrat( by and large). That is key in understanding the change. Catholics have effectively disappeared.You people like Biden and Pelosi- who “grew” with time.
Catholic voters are split, about half vote Democrat and half Republican. There is no longer any "Catholic vote."
The blue collar workers in Pennsylvania at that time were largely Catholic or Orthodox; many of them immigrated from southern and eastern Europe.
It does seem that a Pagan Roman sex cult is now the religion of the United States.
I've pointed this out before, but legalizing abortion in the 1960s was a Republican cause celebre, asserted publicly by very few, but there.
And it wasn't until well into the 80s the parties both was split on abortion. When people nowadays castigate Ronald Reagan for not making abortion a litmus test in his judicial appointments they forget that such was not yet GOP orthodoxy.
Yes, and I've stated my view of this before: guys like Jerry Falwell were blights on the nation. God alone knows how many billions of dollars Americans donated to Republican politicians from the 80s on. What, really, did it achieve?
Imagine what it might have achieved if every penny of that money had gone to maintaining a system of well run homes for unwed mothers, places which would have been appealing not only as places of refuge from furious parents, but as the locus of genuine and effective prolife work.
Such homes would have offered girls pregnant out of wedlock free and good accommodations. They would have been fed well. They would have been worked with by counselors, who would have encouraged them to think they had a future, and might have been able to help them discover what that might be.
When I was young, we had something like that in the United States, The Florence Crittenden Homes for Unwed Mothers. I have no idea who Florence Crittenden was, except to suppose she was a philanthropist of angelic disposition. I have no idea if this network of homes exists any longer.
But imagine if every penny given by well meaning but sadly naive people to politicians and even to good organizations like National Right to Life had gone to the funding of these homes. Another thing God alone knows is how many abortions would never happened.
This, however, would have required insightful religious leaders, who would have been stunned by Roe v Wade, but more important, would have realized that the lack of public outcry after Roe v Wade was the "tell" about how complacent American Christians had become by then, that any political efforts to reverse Roe would be a waste of time and money, and that the Church in America had become the thinnest of Christianities.
Here's how somnolent American Evangelicals were: the first Southern Baptist Convention "meeting" of "messengers" after Roe passed a resolution approving of Roe v Wade.
Here's something which fascinates me. In The Godfather, Part II., one of the most volatile scenes is the one in which Kay tells Michael that she'd had a recent pregnancy, and had aborted the baby. This makes Michael temporarily insane, and in rage he slaps Kay so hard in the face it seems surprising Diane Keaton didn't have to be taken to an emergency room.
Michael's rage may be more about patria than about morality, but he doesn't disagree with Kay's sobbing admission that she had done something evil ( that is the word she uses ) because she couldn't abide the thought that "this THING!!", the Corleone crime family, would go on.
The Godfather, Part II., wasn't released for maybe a year after Roe v Wade. Audiences would, of course, have realized that in 1950s America, Michael's and Kay's reactions would have been more likely than not to be the norm, but one might have thought that in the Brave New America post Roe, there might have been catcalls in theatres, angry statements by the ACLU and the like, but I don't recall any of that. I think that post Roe, most Americans still saw abortion as an evil thing, and that yes, Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other rabble rousers could have achieved great and lasting good if they hadn't gone groveling to Reagan.
We still had some Evangelical intellectual heavyweights around then, men such as Carl F.H. Henry. Did any of them try to oppose the politicization of abortion, to draw properly dismayed Americans to spend their money wisely in prolife work?
I don't recall it. If someone does, please let me know.
In private places sixty years ago, you had sorts of Republicans who wanted fewer births of "those people."
Oh, sure, there was a eugenic factor, but I think most of it was libertarian driven. Peggy Goldwater, Barry's wife, was one of the public ones.
I'm not American, but I think there's still a lot of that about. The vocally pro-abortion people I know tend to fall into three groups: (i) obnoxious, fat feminists with wacky ideas and multiple piercings; (ii) lecherous males; and (iii) economically hard-right types who would support infanticide if it reduced welfare spending.
You are right. But your iii could have the added explanation that abortion kills black babies disproportionately. Certain types on the far right think that way.
On the professions: It’s reached the point where, to keep your professional license ,mandatory ideological training is the norm in some areas.You will be instructed on micro aggression , proper pronouns, unconscious bias etc. That this is a very specific ideological position is not acknowledged. It is presented as , this is reality.You can not question it. It’s revealed truth that was unknown in the dark ages of say the 80s.
“You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.”
DeWine wants to pass the proverbial Nina Totenberg test, like so many other squishes, so he can remain in respectable society.
Really? REALLY? Look at him. It's all about the Benjamins.
I wish it were but the corruption is much deeper.
I just meant that the luvvies aren't going to invite this wanker to ANY of their parties. Has he lost his way morally? Of course he has. They all have.
I love your use of Britishisms particularly wanker🙃
I don’t know what it’s all about, truly. I wish I had your certainty. But what is certain is that doctors will remain able to “break out the dick saw” in Ohio, to quote Bill Maher. I hope the legislature overrides the governor.
YMMV, but that house looks ugly inside to me. A cookie-cutter white-and-black staged monstrosity, devoid of any sign it's ever been lived in. My wife refuses to consider selling and moving from our history-laden, personality-filled 115-year old home precisely because to merely market it, let alone attract actual buyers, we would have to rape it with blunt-force updates until it looks like that. I manage and count the dollars in our marriage and while I understand that this is the way to sell a home nowadays, the immorality of it repulses me.
Completely agree. It’s sterile like an operating room. No books, wool rugs, or character at all.
Well, it's certainly not my style, but the poor old house desperately needed updating. I remember what it looked like before.
I see. It was done to sell.
I’ve been trying to figure out when it became necessary, not just a bonus, to sell a house in “move-in condition”. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, my family moved a couple of times and the only things you might ask the sellers to do in a real estate contract were to fix actual problems, such as a hole in the roof or a leak. Now people won’t move into a place unless you present it to them with a pre-packaged idea, nice and sterile.
Maybe the home renovation / flipping shows that started flooding cable and satellite TV around Y2K (during the last r.e. explosion) made the Inoffensive Gray and White Home Sale prevalent.
Amen, sister! As a future house seller, I dread this extortionate pressure. And as a potential house buyer, I resent having to pay for a bunch of trendy, unnecessary crap-doodle that I don’t actually want.
And I refuse to do it. In my area, most older houses are bought by developers (although they may not let you know they are). So why waste the money on a pre-sale remodel? Once the papers are signed, the bulldozers move in.
Fixing up a house to put up for sale was pure agony. At age 60, I sold my last house and will never have to sell another.
I once sold used furniture. Sometimes I rescued old pieces that had to be painted. My young customers wanted stark white furniture. I quickly grew tired of that. I began to sell only smalls like Fire King bowls, beautiful pieces with history that I stated on the sale tag.
I'm trying to sell antique furniture and it ain't easy. I've read multiple sources that say "brown is out" meaning that young folks don't like dark wood furniture. Also, a lot of retired folks who are downsizing are finding they can't even give their un-needed furniture away. Younger folks would much rather have something from new from Ikea, something nice and flimsy with a substrate of "manufactured wood" (which is just a fancy marketing name for cheap particle board) covered in laminate with a faux finish to make it look like something it's not. It's all a bunch of crap that will never last long enough to become an antique.
No, it’s not easy. I’ve done it for 17 years. I’ve had booths in Georgia and South Carolina. I’m in South Carolina now. I love the store I’m presently in. It’s a Victorian cottage. I have a whole room to fill. It’s work to keep it stocked. It’s basically a thrifting desert here. Dark wood does sell but it has to be really special. I may soon leave. I really prefer gardening at this point.
It's difficult. My grandmother died in the house she was born in. Certainly, for whatever furniture my grandparents bought, there was a sense that it would be there forever. These days, when you have the people who are actually moving out from their parents, and they're going to condos where they split the rent with somebody else, there's much more of a sense of even the furniture being temporary. I've moved with nothing more than a couple of suitcases. I've moved with USPS.
In Germany, before IKEA, furniture was very, very expensive and it was meant to last a long time. I had a friend whose grandparents were going to gift her a furniture set - in storage - I think when she got married or when they died. She was in her early twenties and convinced them that the only time in her life where she could actually use all that furniture (4 big pieces, including a wardrobe, since Germany doesn't have built-in closets) was then since if they waited, she'd have to purchase her own in the interim. She's moved a couple of times though - I can't imagine how difficult it was doing that with those pieces, though!
Ikea furniture is butt-ugly. The style should be known as "early-Gulag"
Yes, but easy to put together. Even an incompetent like me can put together IKEA furniture.
I'm 44, at the end of Gen X. With the Millennials, you started with a generation who, despite all of the DIY shows on TV, can't fix anything ("let's just buy a new one!") and don't know what somebody means when they mention a "Phillips-head screwdriver". Of course most of them can't come into a house and think that they could improve it with some work!
I’m a middle Xer and we all had delusions (until 2008, anyway) that we COULD easily fix a place up and sell it. A lot of us lost our shirts on this misconception.
My philosophy - if you don't do something enough to be familiar with it, it's probably going to cost twice as much as imagined and take three times as long. Sometimes, it's still a bargain, and sometimes, it's also the process of becoming familiar with doing something. I still had shops in high school, so I have some idea/experience doing certain things but I'm not going to be building my boys a new dresser anytime soon to replace the broken one.
Even if you ARE familiar with things, and if you already have the supplies, it has become incredibly expensive to make or do them yourself. I have been sewing since high school, and making clothing is now so expensive that, other than alterations and repairs, it is purely for hobby purposes or to make something you can’t find at the store.
Yes. I pretty much have to sew, and know how to do a few alterations to off-the-rack items, to ensure my clothes fit properly. However, it is still possible to sew things for less cost than buying them. A couple of years ago I made myself a coat out of part of a vintage Pendleton blanket for about 30% of cost of new. There are some reasonable fabric outlets on line, and some even avoid the cheap Chinese goods. Happy sewing, Brigitte!
Dana
The thrift shop is a good place for yard goods (i.e., tablecloths and drapes) but you're limited to what you find and is it big enough?
The thrift shop is also full of clothing that can be taken apart and recombined which is a good, cheap way to learn how garments are put together. The trendy name is "altered couture".
Middle school ("Junior High" in my day): Shops were elective classes for boys, and Home Ec was a requirement for girls. I really wanted to take wood shop, but not an option for me as a female. I was severely disappointed, but I was not going to be That Person who sued the school district over it. Thank goodness my dad taught me a few things - but I still feel shortchanged after 55 years.
Dana
I had wood shop, electric shop, auto shop, cast metals shop, & print shop in the 90s. Mind you, a couple of these were merely shadows of what they should have been, long gone were then days of the school sending kids straight into professional industry. However, print shop was amazing, very much a mix of the old school & high tech (AGFA had donated some nice, very professional stuff). It's all gone now, because "college prep" is sooo much more important!
I do know people who have successfully done the buy-and-fix-up thing. A friend's father was still doing that (and turning a profit) when he died at 86. But it's not an occasional hobby. You have to be dedicated and disciplined, exactly as if it were a job. And you have to have some money to work with not a shoestring budget and lots of plastic.
My neighbors have owned the house next door to mine for twenty years. It was built in 1840 or so. They are a married couple who live on Capitol Hill in Washington. They are both architects. And they are still working on it.
It’s also the realtors. My uncle is one and he pushed me to paint our house interior white so it would resell easily. I planned to live in it for a while so I went with pale yellow. In the pacific northwest the color made the interior sunny and cheerful compared to the gloom outside. When we went to sell, it took about 2 weeks to find a buyer. 😉
I am trying to sell my house up in Delaware. I'm getting disparaging comments from some lookers like "Yard looks like it would be a lot of work" or "We'd need to paint the walls different colors". Well of course: that comes with buying a house as opposed to a condo where the outside is cared for, or renting an apartment where the walls are painted bland off-white and even if you don't like that you can't repaint.
Oh, and I actually did relandscape the place and repaint all but one room when I bought the place (the previous owners had execrable tastes). IMO, that's to be expected when you buy a pre-owned home.
There are good buyers out there but the tendency is for buyers to try to milk sellers particularly after they’ve signed a contract.They know they aren’t getting a new house but they want to get as many fixes as possible. It’s reasonable when it turns out you have a leaky roof but you’ll find the demands can be unending.
I know that when we were house shopping for our most recent house my mentality was ,if it’s going to cost this much, then I don’t want a fixer upper. We aren’t especially handy people.
We bought a fixer-upper for our first house and we ended up with more repairs than we could afford to fix. We were willing to do it, but It was a money pit. We ended up foreclosing. We learned a lot of lessons from our previous experience of owning a house that we didn’t want to repeat. We were a lot smarter about the second house we bought.
Yeah. I definitely understand this.
Edited to add: I just meant cosmetics like painting, wallpapering, sprucing up to suit your own tastes—not a total redo where you find out the plumbing is bad, rodents have eaten your wiring, etc.
You can sell houses that need work, but most people find that they make more if the houses are fixed up, especially as housing is in short supply in many areas of the country My daughter and her husband were lucky enough to find an elderly seller who was moving to an apartment and didn't want the expense or hassle of having her house rewired, etc., so they got a house at a great price (for the area). But if the buyer had wanted to do those things, she probably could have made a bigger profit. And where my daughter bought, houses were selling in days, often the first day. It wasn't because people wouldn't buy "starter homes," it was because there WERE none.
The all-gray look is much better, IMHO, than the standard all-beige look of the past few decades. No "fixer-upper" shows had anything to do with that one, it was just builder-grade standard.
I guess I'm the outlier. I love the open floor plan and the updated kitchen and bathrooms (I really like subway tile and modern fixtures). I love the idea of moving into a solidly constructed house that doesn't need a lot of repairs, that's been freshly renovated. I am a big fan of color on the walls, so I don't look at those pictures and imagine living "as is" in that space; I would paint and decorate to suit our personal taste, but the floor plan looks awesome to me, as do the updates in the critical spaces. Call me lazy, but I'm not handy, nor is my husband, and we don't have the time, energy, or inclination to become DIYers, so a home like this (were we looking to move to that area) would be a perfect. And I especially love the idea of a hero's misstep scarring my ceiling in perpetuity—as my kids would say, "it adds to the lore."
Rod, Thank you for this post. Of all your recent writings, this one re: memories has affected me more than most. I too long for "home" and am beginning to realize that memories seem, "more full of life" than present days. Everyone has things which are just "bowls" but to us they are so much more. Thanks again.
I remember when they had my Grandparent’s estate sale and my mother called me from out of town asking if I wanted my grandmother’s three tiered side table as it was marked at $30. I sobbed as I thought of all my childhood memories being sold for so little. That table sits right beside me now and I remember exactly where it stood once and I hold these memories close to my heart
After my grandmother had a stroke (Gramps had passed already), she moved in with her brother and his second wife, who threw out a lot of her stuff. I would have loved to have the opportunity to take the telephone table and the little floor lamp/table with Gramps’s pipe ashtray built into it. But then it would probably cause actual, physical pain to see those beloved things every day.
Please watch the French film "Summer Hours" -- it's all about this. One of my favorites.
Eric Kauffman's findings are interesting. When I first went to college in the late 70s, I would gather that students were more conservative then and conservatives were a majority on campus. Males were a slight majority over females. Most of us were the first in our families to attend college. Our fathers worked hard to provide and our mothers kept the home. Jimmy Carter was considered a failed president, the Democrats were considered the tax-and-spend party, Ronald Reagan offered hope and tax cuts, the USSR was on the march and liberalism was looked down on. Homosexuals were widely despised. Physical work was honored. Leftist social engineering was considered a failure- the Great Society, school busing for racial reasons, urban riots that ruined cities like Detroit and Newark.
Today, the campuses are majority-left. Women are 60 % of the campuses and women tend to be more liberal on almost every issue. The easy divorce culture is over fifty years old which has wrecked the influence fathers have on their daughters. The USSR is dead. The old work ethic is weaker and the society is much more therapeutic. Democrats are no longer the tax-and-spend party. George W. Bush is considered a failed president. The modern youth, heavily influenced by the left-wing media buzz, is much more liberal on social issues than my generation. Physical work is looked down on as something rednecks have to do because they're too stupid to get through college. Homosexuals and blacks are at the apex of society. White males are both privileged and despised. Dare I say it, the college and university students of today are unusually ignorant, easily led, soft, coddled, and don't have a firm understanding of how the world works.
We need it that way because we no longer need producers; we need consumers to keep our fake, debt-based “money” system constantly inflating. The more emotional, flighty, and effete we make people, the more consumption (shopping, pornography, eating) occurs.
Who tends to make an unaffordable shopping order at 2 a.m. with a credit card, a conservative male or a wine-drunk liberal woman who allegedly hates capitalism?
Well, I know guys who have no financial sense and routinely max out credit cards, whether buying junk, spending to impress others, or doing travel and the like and always going first class.
Indeed! and thank you for using the word “effete.”
Well, people have been griping about "kids these days" since Aristotle was frustrated with Alexander and his friends, and probably long before. It might also be useful to remember the old nostrum about anyone who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart. One big reason young people tend liberal in youth is that they are on the outside looking in-- and also don't have much practical experience, the sort that brings eventual wisdom. Of course they're willing to upend things. And we do need that even if it often gets taken to excess. A society that can't question itself or reform Bad Old Things is going to stagnate and fail.
What you say is true. Young people have been disappointing old people since the beginning of time.
"...no matter how hard one works, and how brilliantly one plans, life, ultimately, cannot be controlled or perfected. To have a tragic sense of life is to live with an awareness of time’s meaning. But tragedy also requires wisdom, or even pleasure, to emerge from suffering. In a way, my writing in this space, and in my books, is all part of a deep emotional need to find meaning in events, and especially to pull redemption out of the ruins."
Well. No way to add to this simply perfect assessment. Happy New Year, Rod.
Rod, I'm approaching 50 myself here in a few days and "the past" has been prominent in my thinking lately. I'm not scared of growing old, but I'm.... sad? Maybe that's not it, either. But it's something. I think about all of the relatives and ancestors and old family times and I feel more cognizant now that they are in the past. I'd say strange but I think it's just normal.
As far as Mike DeWine goes, he was also a covid tyrant. Maybe a skosh better than some of the democrats, but still bad. He has already shown his stripes.
I came to a realization a few months ago that as mad as I am about the covid tyranny, many ,many other people - a majority of Americans even - are not. Or at least aren't mad enough to do anything about it. I think the trans nonsense is the same way right now. Lots of people don't like it, but many more just don't care or don't care enough. Politicians like DeWine know that and that's why they do what they do. They want to appease the donors and aren't sufficiently scared of the voters.
"They want to appease the donors and aren't sufficiently scared of the voters." THIS.
"Lots of people don't like it, but many more just don't care or don't care enough."
And this
You wait. In 10 years there will be a federally mandated series of tests for six year olds.
"He throws like a girl."
"Then let's make him one. Tell the parents."
Obama throws a baseball like a girl. Is it too late for a change.
Hey there. A lot of us girls throw better than he does. 😉
I am sure you're right. Women have a harder time throwing across their bodies due to basic anatomy.
My sister was the typical “tomboy” in the late 70’s and 80’s. She could beat all the boys in sports in our neighborhood. Being my older sister she used to always stick up for me when the older boys tried to pick a fight with me. It was nice. In high school she changed and became all girl. Today’s society and internet would have gotten into her head and probably make think she should transition.
Your last sentence nails it. The entire system is rigged to prevent just such a "populist uprising." Bread and circuses are still in effect -- they just look different.
But why aren't Americans mad about those things? That's what I don't understand.
We are. We just don’t do anything except gripe on forums.
I personally spent several thousand dollars in 2022 paying for yard signs advocating against our county executive who rushed to institute a mask mandate in 2020 and tried to start a legal fight with our local school districts to keep them closed in the fall of 2020. He lost and the schools were opened.
Nonetheless, he still won re-election by 10 points. In Texas. It was horribly dispiriting. People just didn’t care what he did.
That sucks. I’m sorry to hear it in Texas.
Well why should they be? No one is confronting them in public or making phone calls in droves.
Your childhood house - wow! I don’t know why, but you posting a real link to Zillow to a real house for sale makes you feel somehow more accessible to those of us that follow your work. I love your insight and memories and feel very similarly about my own childhood places. I can get lured into nostalgia pretty quick, and think about artifacts I’ve collected, like your aunt’s green bowl, and what they meant to people I’ve known and what they’ll never mean to anyone else. There’s a sort of an appealing haunting I feel when I go home and see buildings and things people who are gone left behind, and the memories of life as it was. I think that I too have always been searching for a “Home that doesn’t exist here.”
As for the political move left of professionals, I’ve spent most of my career in academia (now working to complete Ph.D) and my secular higher education might have moved me slightly left on some things, but largely affirmed and fed my Christian worldview (but, I’m a bit of an odd ball). What moved me more towards what used to be traditional democrat territory was witnessing and experiencing the decline of job security for workers, and GW Bush policies. I’m still a Republican only because conservative Blue Dog Democrats are now extinct.
I’m an Ohioan, and as for Gov. Dewine, I’m betting his decision has more to do with economics since the Columbus area is attracting huge investments from Intel and other large corporations - which as you consistently and rightly point out, are lefties.
I have relatives that live near the area where the big Intel chip factory is going in. From what I understand the company has already begun efforts to prepare the local semi-rural population for progressive colonization: "Many new people will be coming here who may look, think, and behave differently than you do, etc., etc.," and other such bullshit.
So Intel not only brings jobs, it brings Progressive Enlightenment!
That's what happened to Ireland. The corporates paved over the old country and built a new one on top.
It's okay to feel a little bad for the house: it is one thing to fix something up and bring out its charm, it's quite another to remake it into the bland and abstract 'International Airbnb Style' - yes that's a real thing. I think of the 'Crunchy Con manifesto' (still one of my favorite books): 6. A good rule of thumb: Small and Local and Old and Particular are to be preferred over Big and Global and New and Abstract.
Quite right! I still live by this rule (and still inwardly chuckle when I drive by Our Lady of What's Happening Now).
I agree. Too long and you drown in nostalgia, but revisiting the memories briefly is sweet. After my parents downsized to a patio home I put together a photo book showing the two homes they lived in through the years, and the gardens they planted. It's beautiful to enjoy for short time.
If there’s one positive I can say about Trump is that the base he built will all but ensure we don’t get a DeWine/Kasich/Romney type candidate. Based on 90s/early 2000s standards of electability, DeWine would have been a top choice. Now if only we could get a serious populist conservative on top of the ticket.
Trump had both houses of Congress for two years and played with himself. Keep saying that until it sinks in. From everything I can see his "base" cares about him, not about the country.
But Ted, Trump had center stage and got to perform for the masses. He was on television every day starring in his own soap opera.
I don’t disagree, and will be very curious to see what his ardent supporters will do when he is no longer a force. Still, for now, they are keeping the DeWines of the world away from higher ambitions. But I agree with you that the base is otherwise baseless when it comes to conservative principles.
What will Trump's base do when he's gone? Shatter into a thousand or millions of shards, each sharp edge looking for The One who can put them back together. Until then, if that time ever comes, they will drift back to their ordinary lives, complaining about the world and the politicians who can't do anything about it.
That's about right.
Trump was the most conservative president we've had since Reagan. Not perfect, but this backbiting grousing about him from people who most likely voted for Dubya is ridiculous.
Trump was not very conservative. In some matters (e.g., free trade and entitlements) he bucked conservative precepts. And the guy was no SoCon. In fact he was easily the most gay-friendly Republican in the White House to date.
Again, I said most conservative since Reagan. And since conservative means, "to conserve" and his trading policies conserved American economic interests, I would say they WERE conservative. I've never bought the idea that "conservative" was default "free trade with no restrictions". Or that conservative principles were a national suicide pact.
If Reagan is the gold standard of political conservatism in this country Trump was on board the train when it came to tax cuts and not much else. Note that the National Review and much of "official" Conservatism disparaged him.
Tax cuts, foreign, policy, judges, looking out for American Interests and on down the line.. And the LAST place I would go for the last word on conservatism is RINO Republicans or a trash rag like NR.
Bush has never apologized for any of his mistakes. Just grins, maybe he thinks voters are simple suckers.
You watch: if Trump chooses Nikki Haley as his running mate, most of his sycophants will fall all over themselves advocating for the brilliant Nikki Haley.
Yep. "Nikki Haley brings in moderate women that Trump needed to win. An inspired choice."
Nah, she will suck. But if we get good policy from him, not a big deal.
I wouldn't group Kasich in with DeWine and Romney. He wasn't perfect but he was much less "establishment" than either of those two.
There may indeed be more to the Ohio story. See Howard Friedman's Religion Clause blog: https://religionclause.blogspot.com/2023/12/ohio-governor-vetoes-ban-on-gender.html
What "more"? It's ok to cut the balls off an unhappy teenager if the doctor washes his hands first?
What more? That's just Gov. DeWine's statement, which is in all the stories. What are you referring to?