Iowa Independents Blog

The picture above is typical of a Protestant Church you could see anywhere in a small town in the Midwest. A lot of those churches now exist “on the edge“. COVID is the latest of the trials that have put a real hurt on them. It was real easy for people not going to church, to forget about giving to that church. I’ve also heard reports of churches that simply lost 30% or so of their parishioners during that time. I don’t know how a “virus” did it, but it did, without question.

I visited my childhood church recently and it was quite an eyeopener. Attendance was low. The people who were there were all older. There were no kids. The “interim pastor” was now starting their second year. Little indications about maintenance and upkeep were evident. If 1968 was a measurement of the ‘Best of Times’ ( a ’10’), these were clearly the worst of times ( a ‘2’). Then I started to wonder, “Why was that?” What was different now?

In 1968 they had a pastor at the top of his game. The Sunday school was full in all grades. The church had lots of activities throughout the week and a Youth Group. All that in the “old”, original building. None of that exists today. Including the building. They had even gotten rid of the ‘newer’ education building where Sunday school was held and the offices were.

In the early 80’s they had decided they needed a new building. Unknown to them it was at the start of the “farm crisis”. A lot of their big money people had been farmers. The transition that took place in farming in the ensuing years was very damaging I believe. Land values skyrocketed (for those who survived). When a couple retired they no longer sold the farm to the next generation of farmers. It stayed in the family. It was literally worth millions.

The farmers today that surround the community are rarely the landowners, the ones with the big money. They’re renters. And while they’re doing okay, they’re not rolling in the big bucks. If its a dairy, egg, poultry or pork situation, its very likely the hands are illegals who don’t care one wit about the community. In fact the manager of the farm might live in Des Moines. There’s no sense of community in that.

Another hit was a double whammy with the local schools in the late 60’s. Instead of each town having its own junior high and high school (and all those good jobs), with school consolidation, only every 3rd or 4th town had “the high school”. The other hit that happened were with the associated jobs like bus driver and food services. Instead of being district employees with good pay and benefits, they were now contract employees of people who put in the lowest bid.

Then in the 70’s when the new EPA rules made lots of industry nearly impossible, outsourcing of good jobs to Mexico and China went through the roof. Those 3 areas: farming, schools, and manufacturing just decimated the churches. Each small town would have some sort of decent job, a jerky plant, a spice plant, something that paid a decent wage.

I just realized something else. I had been reading a national columnist a few years back and they had made a simple observation about returning vets after WW II. A lot of them opened up a service station! We had 3. A Sinclair, a Phillips 66 and a DX. Once again the EPA destroyed an entire class of family owned service stations. Those small time operators couldn’t withstand changing fuel tanks every few years at the EPA’s whim for a quarter of a million dollars.

Regulation forced those guys out. Now all they got is a Casey’s. And the manager of that Casey’s doesn’t make anywhere near what the owner of that service station did. The owner that paid to have his name on the back of the local little league team. And sponsored the girl’s basketball team to State. The guy who paid for the local Boy Scout Toop’s uniforms.

You combine the economic hits on the small towns, with the societal (internet, cable TV), all these influences working against the church, its no wonder they’re hurting. Wages for the average worker just have not kept up. Its a lot easier to be respectable making $25 bucks an hour, then it is at $7.50. Another thing was about 1963 a court case removed “prayer from schools”. That seems like a small thing now, but I don’t think it was at the time.

And regrettably, the money a lot of us give to ‘the church’, is from the money that’s left after everything else has been paid. The churches didn’t help themselves either. Losing a pastor to a morality failing. Not finding a way to accommodate a special needs girl wanting to be in the church choir. Little things that cause hurts and lost members.

What the small town church’s do have going for them is they own the land they’re on and they are tax exempt from property taxes. Regrettably another really big plus they would have had, but none have today, is the parsonage. Those went by the wayside many decades ago. Pastor’s in the rich times had to have bigger and better homes. Now in the lean times a parsonage would have made a smaller income go a lot further.

They knew what they were doing in the old days. We think we’re a lot smarter then we actually are.

[What gives me hope though was observing another church in that town when I drove through Sunday morning. It had a service! I saw people going in! I had thought it was on the National Registrar of Historic Places and was no longer a functioning church, but it was. In a lot of small towns the church closest to teetering on the edge, the one I’m talking about, is a Congregationalist Church. I don’t know why, I don’t know all the backstory on it, but it is something I’ve observed. So I realized at the end of this piece, if they can do it, my old church should be able to do it too!]

Inspired analogy I have to admit. What I’ve been thinking about a lot lately while watching videos on Twitter is just how much society is disintegrating before our eyes with an out of control crime wave. For those who have the brains to know, our government was charged with securing our right to Life, Liberty & Property.

Well, what do you do if evil bad guys want to remove you of your life, liberty or property? Well, you kill them or jail them. Yes, that’s what you have to do with evil bad guys, put their ugly ass in jail. That’s how you stop crime. I hope I’m not being to technical.

A lot of people on the aforementioned Twitter think its about the “defund the police” campaign of the last 4 or 5 years. I really don’t think so. Cops have been worthless and lazy a lot longer than 4 or 5 years. I think (know actually) that the problem is with prosecutors and the courts. Lawyers and judges have created an abomination far removed from the way the judicial system is supposed to work.

They have strived to make a system as convoluted and drawn out as possible for personal enrichment and power. The system as it stands now does not have to stay that way. It can be streamlined and made more efficicent. They created this mess in the last 50 years they can unmake it. Aside from the unnecessary complication, is the almost total reliance on plea bargaining.

Plea bargaining will never get society ahead of the criminal. The theft of an automobile used to be a serious charge. Now they downgrade it to ‘theft’ or “operating a vehicle without the owners permission”. So instead of 8-10 years, we might be talking 1 year if that. So of course auto theft and carjacking is through the roof! You can’t do that.

There was a period in the 80’s and early 90’s where States were going to a “3 strikes and your out model”. It worked. Minorities were screaming bloody murder because it was locking their damn ass up. You charge them with the crime committed and unless there is some good reason not to, you sentence them to max.

Really lawyers and judges brought down this society. In Natural Law the state’s function is to secure your Life, Liberty & Property. In order to do that they have to jail or execute those who threaten those rights. They no longer do that. Execution has essentially been taken off the table. Jail is no longer a certainly, and 100% not for the crime committed.

Lawyers and judges made this convoluted system. There’s no reason for it. It does not benefit society, only lawyers and judges. It is not unusual for it to take 4 years for a case to come to trial. That’s absurd. Law is supposed to serve the people not harm them. Eliminate the maze.

The #1 key to a free society is to rigorously lock up the ones who would steal that freedom.

No not the TV show. The 7 months that I’ve been back on Twitter leads me to the belief that people are pissed off about crime. We seem to go through this roughly every 30 years. It coincides with gun control bills. The clamor to control crime causes action from Congress, then within a few years the minorities bitch about “unfair policing” (we locked them all up), then we move to soft on crime policies. The pendulum sweeping back and forth.

It hit me last night something that gets talked about once in awhile, then is promptly forgotten: Plea bargaining. A common theme is that “Soros backed” prosecutors don’t prosecute criminals. True enough (i.e. the recent death of the 44 time loser who died in a chokehold by the Marine). Every once in awhile prosecutors do get around to prosecuting criminals. But we never get anywhere. The “message” isn’t being sent. Why is that?

It got crystal clear a few days ago when I heard someone explain the myth about “people are in prison for marijuan possession!” No. What it was was prosecutors who are lazy, shiftless and good for nothing, don’t want to go to trial. Evidently going to trial is work. So in the case of the marijuana dealer they don’t want to go to trial and prove that, so they offer to drop that 12 year sentence in exchange for a guilty plea for simple possession. Well guess what? That dealer is now out in 12 months, and he never learned the lesson he doesn’t ever want to do that again.

And the cycle continues. These prosecutors take a firearm in the commission of a robbery case, a serious felony (probably 10 years), and drop that to theft, and he’s out in less than a year. Not to mention his record doesn’t show the more serious crime on his record. It just goes on and on and on. Until they start prosecuting for the actual crime, and not the plea bargained down crime, nothing is going to get better.

It just hit me, judges don’t want trials either. That’s work. So the victim, the person who was harmed by all this, is told “you’re not worth it”. You’re not worth going to trial for.

Just happened to flip on the TV to TCM, and there she was, Jennifer O’Neill. Gary Grimes had just read the death notice that “Dorothy” had gotten from the Army that her husband was dead. In the part I saw only 3 words were spoken between Hermie and Dorothy in the final 10 minutes: “Sorry“, and “Goodbye Hermie“.

Right before I got there I know she had said, “I’m not so pretty now, am I?” (she had been crying) It took years for me to understand how much that one sentence conveyed. Her character had played all sweet and innocent until now, like she didn’t have a clue that Hermie was swept away by her beauty and completely taken with her. She knew. I myself didn’t know for years that women are completely tuned into how you look at them.

Seeing it again (for the 12th time?) I noticed things I hadn’t before. The love scene lasts about 10 minutes with only 3 words spoken. How did director Robert Mulligan (To Kill A Mockingbird) make it work? One thing he did was was just use the sound from inside the beach house. The waves crashing. The sound of her feet moving about as she picks up. Turning off the faucet in the kitchen.

The close up of her hands as she clasps Hermie’s. Having Dorothy move in super slow motion. Cutting back to the closeup of concern on Hermie’s face. It was just so powerful, those 10 minutes. I wonder if it seemed odd for the actors not to have any lines? Knowing it was only their expressions and body language that would ‘make or break’ the most important scene of the film?

Mulligan’s mastery of light and film was so impressive. He catches the fading light making a shadow on the wall from the lace curtain, when he cuts away from Hermie and Dorothy. He didn’t try to go crass during the love scene. Just very dignified and loving. And in a couple of spots Mulligan plays that iconic theme song, “The Summer Knows”, by Michael Legrand.

The soft, soft nature of the available evening light when summer wanes, and you can sense the coming of fall. My 3 keys to a successful film were clearly evident in this final scene. Both actors you could care about. The script was great. And the cinematography was incredible. Mulligan does all 3 equally well.

If I had to notice anything, its that Mulligan loves the evening. It showed in Mockingbird also when Atticus is rocking on the porch of the jail to keep the mob away from Tom Robinson. There are many other twilight scenes in the film that shows Mulligan’s love for the power of the night.

Having messed around with mutual funds and IRAs for over 30 years, I feel like I know more than when I started. I wish there was a way to transmit that to a young person interested in beginning investing. Oh well. As I have made every dumb mistake there is, its a shame someone else should do the exact same thing. I’m no longer investing for myself, I’m investing for my heirs. All the ‘V”s in the title stand for Vanguard. I submit that company is the best one for the small investor to be in.

I’m talking about for the average blue collar investor. He will likely have a 401K or pension of some sort, but I realized what the ROTH IRA investment account outside of work, is really for the wife. A lot of times she took off work for a time to have or raise kids. They enter back into the workforce maybe in their 30’s in a not real high-powered job. One that doesn’t come with a 401K. That’s who my target is. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a couple get to retirement and the wife not have anything to show for her work years.

Even if she had a $1,000 a month to add to her Social Security it would really make a big difference to the family income. Its easy to achieve even much more, I was just being conservative. The trick is to start young. Even $50 or $100 a month at 18 or 19 and into the 20’s will make a huge difference. A traditional IRA for a lot of people is obsolete. What they really want has only been around about 25 years: the Roth IRA. As everyone knows that is tax advantaged at the backend, not at the front like the traditional.

What you want from Vanguard (for both of you really) for the wife without a pension, is a Roth IRA Brokerage Account from Vanguard. What you want to put into that account are ETF index funds. 5 years ago I saw Exxon around $54 bucks a share with a great dividend and thought, “That’s for me!” I bought some, made 20% and got out. I couldn’t get this nagging feeling out of my head that in the coming years Exxon was going to be getting beat up by the greenies who hate petroleum.

That’s the risk with individual stocks, even the most robust companies (i.e. Exxon) have risk associated with them (Sears, GE, Blockbuster, K-Mart…). Any company can fail. So what if there was away to realize the returns of individual companies, but without the risk? That’s where index sector funds come in. I thought I had to have Exxon to get max oil profits. Nope. Or Royal Dutch Shell. Nope. Or Conoco-Phillips or Cheron. Nope.

Vanguard’s VDE is an ETF index fund that mirrors the energy sector. I laid its 3 year chart over the 4 oil giants the other day. They were at different levels due to share price, but they charted the same about exactly. But! VDE has one thing they don’t have: no risk. VDE represents a sector. An individual company can fail, but it would be pretty tough for an entire sector to fail. Once I realized that, identical profits without the risk, I realized I could comfortably ride those funds to the grave.

VOOG is a subset of VOO (the S&P 500 index). Its the highest growth stocks within the S&P. VGT is the technology stocks, dominated currently by Microsoft and Apple. VPU is the utilities fund. When times get tough utilities traditionally kept chugging along. Those 4 funds when I put them into Vanguard’s ‘compare’ engine, gave me some actual diversification, which is hard to find nowadays.

There are other funds someone might prefer more. Like VBX, the Russell 2000 fund. Or VDC, the consumer staples fund. The point is 4/5/or 6/ funds should cover you for about anycontingency. Another thing index funds have going for them is they operate at the lowest costs. VDE returned 69% last year (very unusual, but not unheard of). 2023 might be VOOG, VPU or VGT’s year. That’s why you diversify.

What you need to decide is how much you can afford a month to devote to a Roth IRA. Type that into their auto-invest box and it will be automatically deducted from your checking account. Even starting in your 30’s, with a modest amount like $3,000 a year ($115.38 a pay period), could easily give you with a 10% average annual return, $526,802 after 30 years. That’s a little over $21,000 a year over a 25 year retirement. That’s actually barely touching principle.

They had a promo on Twitter for some channel playing the “Playboy Murders“. I have a warm feeling for (reading the articles) Playboy Magazine from my youth. I just had this vision of this one Playmate, a beautiful & voluptuous redhead from I thought ’72 or ’76 and her name was ‘Cheryl’ or ‘Candy’. Luckily Google’s memory is a lot better than mine. Candy Loving. I’ve looked through a list of like “Playmates of the 1970’s” and a lot of faces are familiar. But Candy’s was always imprinted on my brain. The redhair? The great breasts? That wonderful smile? Incredible eyes? Who knows. Classic 70’s hair and features. I think I’ll post below some random snippets I can find on her, and then some photos. I say that to tell you the following text unless in [brackets] is not mine.

Favorite Playmate of All-Time: Candy Loving Candy Loving (that’s her real name), January 1979 Playmate of the Month, and Playboy magazine’s iconic 25th anniversary Playmate. She had enough of Playmate life, car shows, incessant oggling, and after a few years went back to OU and got her degree and settled back into normal life, and had a fulfilling career in the health industry helping people.

Candy Loving (born Candis Loving; September 4, 1956) is an American model. She was Playboy’s Playmate of the Month for the January 1979 issue, which made her the magazine’s 25th Anniversary Playmate. Her centerfold was photographed by Dwight Hooker.

Gorgeous brunette stunner Candy Loving was born Candis Loving on September 4, 1956 in Oswego, Kansas. Candy grew up in Oklahoma after her family moved from Kansas to Oklahoma when she was three years old. She graduated from Ponca City High School in Ponca City, Oklahoma. Loving was the Playmate of the Month in January, 1979 issue of “Playboy;” she was paid $25,000 dollars to be the magazine’s 25th Anniversary Playmate. Candy did a follow-up nude pictorial in the August, 1979 issue of “Playboy.” Loving was rated at #6 in “Playboy” ‘s Top 100 Playmates in 2000 and was listed at #39 in the spin-off special newsstand publication “Sex Stars of the Century.” Her sole feature film credit was a fleeting walk-on bit part at the end of Woody Allen’s “Stardust Memories.” Moreover, Loving played herself in the “Who’s the Sexiest Girl in the World?” episode of the TV show “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo.” Candy attended the University of Oklahoma and earned a bachelor’s degree. She later got a graduate degree in human relations. Candy Loving moved to Florida in 1984 and works in the health insurance industry. – IMDB [I suppose at age 24 in Woody Allen’s ‘Stardust Memories’ (1980) she would have been a little too old for Woody.]

Candy & ‘Hef’

Sue Lyon, Davenport, Iowa (Born: July 10, 1946, Died: December 26, 2019). Iowa girl. Through advanced mathmatics I have her living to age 73. A year or two ago I had finally seen a portion of the movie ‘Lolita‘ (1962) with her and James Mason (and regrettably Shelly Winters. A number of young women at the time wanted the role, a number were wanted that didn’t want the role. One of them that would have proved interesting was a personal favorite of mine Hayley Mills. She said later she regretted not taking it as it would have helped get her away from being pigeon holed as “the Disney kid”. Around that time there were songs like ‘Youngblood’ from Flash Cadillac and the Continental Kids. ‘Go Away Little Girl’ (Donny Osmond), ‘Sweet 16’ (Ringo Starr). And 16 was the age Sue was supposed to be as the object of Mason’s desire.

It just now reminded me Jerry Lee Lewis suffered greatly career wise for marrying his 13 year old cousin right around that time, but it was legal. There was a time 100 years ago when it was not particularly uncommon for a 16 year old girl to marry. But in 1962 this movie caused quite the consternation. The book Lolita was out in 1958 when Sue was 12. Her and Michelle Phillips found a copy of the banned book. She said she didn’t finish it as it was too complex for her at that age. 3 years later when they filmed the movie it evidently wasn’t! She did a wonderful job.

I see from IMDB she just missed the chance of a lifetime when Warren Beatty wanted her for ‘Bonnie and Clyde‘ (1967). I don’t think its an exaggeration to say that missed opportunity changed her life. 5 marriages (4 failed), a struggling acting career. Dead at 73. A tough life. Diagnosed a manic depressive, she was off and on Lithium her whole life. When her mother became a widow at age 42, they moved to LA with the express idea that Sue could pick up some modeling jobs. They knew they had a cutey on their hands.

Great nose.

My favorite shot! My gosh I love that one! Oh…. to have a 16×20 of that.

The classic ‘Lolita’ shot from the movie, used in promotionals I believe. I just noticed what and interesting sunshade/hat that is!

“When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home. I was wishing I looked like Paul Newman — he looks tough and I don’t — but I guess my own looks aren’t so bad. I have light brown, almost red hair and greenish-gray eyes. I wish they were more gray, because I hate most guys that have green eyes, but I have to be content with what I have. My hair is longer than a lot of boys wear theirs, squared off in back and long at the front and sides, but I am a greaser and most of my neighborhood rarely bothers to get a haircut. Besides, I look better with long hair.”

I saw on Twitter this morning that it was the 40th anniversary of the movie adaptation of the 1967 book by S.E. Hinton: The Outsiders. I’d read the book about 1972 and several more times after that over the years. It was required reading for contemporary literature back then. The hip/youth oriented teenage angst book. Gangs, teenagers struggling “to find themselves“. It was well written. Timeless. Something most of us didn’t know back then was that it was written by a 17-yr-old girl. You can kind of see it now in the opening paragraph above where she says, “My hair is longer than a lot of boys wear theirs…”. A guy never would have said that. I had always assumed from the street gang angle that it was set in NYC or Chicago, but it’s Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Susan Eloise Hinton (picture below) was 16 when she wrote it. They say in the paragraph that it was published in her freshman year of college. What a time that was. It sounds like she was unprepared for the fame and fortune. She had a real bad case of writers block for several years. She finally got past it and wrote: That Was Then, This Is Now (1971). It was was just creepy. In The Outsiders written in the mid-60’s the drug of choice was alcohol. Whiskey and beer. In her second book it reflected the changing time of 1971 for sure, but it was hard drugs then. LSD, heroin, uppers, downers, not good stuff. And it was not uplifting either. A real downer. There was a little cross-pollination with a character or two from the original book, which was fun.

Her third book: Rumble Fish (1975), I don’t think I got past the first couple of chapters. It was that depressing. Seeing as Susan was on the “college track”, I don’t know how she captured so well the poor/essentially criminal class she wrote about. I “know” the type of people she wrote about, people who were on the absolute very last rung of the economic ladder that could be considered ‘working class’. In Iowa in would be the area just to the west of the Iowa State Fairgrounds. The best of people, the worst of people.

But back to The Outsiders. I see the author was born July 22, 1948. If she wrote it when she was sixteen it would have been over the 1964/1965 time frame. Its hard to describe to someone who didn’t live back then, but 1964 America was not the same country as 1970 America when she wrote her second book. It just wasn’t. It was smack in the middle of a “social revolution” in 1970. America was experiencing very painful upheaval. Kind of like the ‘happy sunny‘ opening of Midnight Cowboy, versus the dark repulsive middle end when his life had self destructed.

She was an early “baby boomer”, I was a late baby boomer. She was at the vanguard of that huge population bubble, America was booming and the workplace was hungry for young people. Our economy hadn’t been decimated like it would be in the latter part of the 70’s when I came along. She was part of old America, full of optimism and opportunities. I was part of stagflation and Arab oil embargoes. The loss in Vietnam. The Carter years. My group didn’t have sexual liberation we had Aids in the early 80’s. I was old enough to have seen what I missed.

Susan’s later books dealing with families destroyed by drugs I can relate to. I didn’t understand it at the time. 50 years ago. The trailer parks, cheap apartments, the gaunt faces, the stagnation of their lives. The odd hours they kept, their suspicious nature towards strangers. Rust bucket 15 year old Impalas. Drugs does that. Alcohol. Because in Outsiders the ‘battle’ was between the rich kids (Socs/socials) and the poor kids (the greasers – hair grease). And basically what seperates rich from poor is substance abuse. You either have it or you don’t. That’s what she covers.

The “war on drugs” would be fought in earnest over the next 30 years. The various incarnations of “just say no”. She dives off at various places into politics and left/right, but really I see it as much more basic. Because its pretty hard in this country not to advance, even in the most mediocre job if you keep your nose clean and work hard. I suppose what she covers so well is what its like trying to come out of the environment, when you weren’t born on “3rd base” with a bunch of opportunities. Being in a family where you didn’t have a bad dad, you had no dad. Maybe where you didn’t have an old wreck of a home, your home sometimes had wheels. And moved.

A home where they didn’t tell you to stay away from drugs alcohol and cigarettes, but a home where it was fine to do that stuff, even encouraged. They didn’t tell you to do your homework because they never figured you’d graduate from high school. A place where if you were going to climb the ladder of success, you had to get up to the bottom rung first. In the movie version below, the main character ‘Ponyboy‘ is the 3rd from the left.

Jim Roach

Susan Eloise Hinton’s career as an author began while she was still a student at Will Rogers High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Disturbed by the divisions among her schoolmates into two groups–the Greasers and the Socs–Hinton wrote The Outsiders, an honest, sometimes shocking novel told from the point of view of an orphaned 14-year-old Greaser named Ponyboy Curtis. Since her narrator was male, it was decided that Hinton use only her first initials so as not to put off boys who would not normally read books written by women. The Outsiders was published during Hinton’s freshman year at the University of Tulsa, and was an immediate sensation.Today, with more than eight million copies in print, the book is the best-selling young adult novel of all time, and one of the most hauntingly powerful views into the thoughts and feelings of teenagers. The book was also made into a film, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and featuring such future stars as Emilio Estevez, Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon, and Tom Cruise.Once published, The Outsiders gave her a lot of publicity and fame, and also a lot of pressure. S.E. Hinton was becoming known as “The Voice of the Youth” among other titles. This kind of pressure and publicity resulted in a three year long writer’s block.Her boyfriend (and now, her husband), who had gotten sick of her being depressed all the time, eventually broke this block. He made her write two pages a day if she wanted to go anywhere. This eventually led to That Was Then, This Is Now.In the years since, Ms. Hinton has married and now has a teenaged son, Nick. She continues to write, with such smash successes as That Was Then, This Is Now, Rumble Fish and Tex, almost as well known as The Outsiders. She still lives in Tulsa with her husband and son, where she enjoys writing, riding horses, and taking courses at the university.In a wonderful tribute to Hinton’s distinguished 30-year writing career, the American Library Association and School Library Journal bestowed upon her their first annual Margaret A. Edwards Award, which honors authors whose “book or books, over a period of time, have been accepted by young people as an authentic voice that continues to illuminate their experiences and emotions, giving insight into their lives.” – from Amazon

In the mid 60’s an increase in tax rates to fund the Great Society and the Vietnam War pushed women into the workforce along with the Astroturfed “feminism“, creating a wave of divorces in the 70’s. With no mom at home, kids were forced into daycare. They were more sedentary. If you do a search on YouTube you can find a ton of videos like the one above (they often limit what platform you can put a video on, so the one above may be gone soon).

This push to fight a war at the same time they were greatly expanding the “social safety net” was literally called ‘guns & butter‘. With the tax rate increases, 1968 was the closest (if I remember correctly) we’ve been in modern times to a balanced budget. But the societal impact of government policy is easy to see now, but you couldn’t see it then when we were in the midst of it.

In fact just yesterday was a reminder of the concerted effort in culture, academia and government to “shape” the new thinking. 1959’s ‘Pillow Talk‘ was on TCM. They portrayed the single girl’s life as party phone lines and Rock Hudson boyfriends. Hollywood worked with government to get a shift in thinking about changing male/female roles.

In 1966 you had ‘That Girl‘ on TV once again reinforcing the new ideas of the exciting single girl life forgoing marriage. The birth control pill 1964. Silicone breast implants at the same time. I saw the effects of all this in my own family about 1975, divorce. My sister-in-law never would have had the temptation to stray if she’d been a stay-at-home mom. Women in the workforce were finding what they thought were greener pastures.

One Day at a Time (1975-1984) further pushed the notion that being a single mom was unavoidable and even ‘fun & exciting!‘ In ‘The Brady Bunch’ (1969-1974) the “blended” family was still the proper widowers, and not divorcees.

Later on in the 80’s and 90’s what was happening was too common to ignore any longer. Books, news specials, TV movies all tried to explain away the disintegrating nuclear family without ever getting near the truth. They want to make sure and address symptoms and not causes.

Words like “latch key kids, single mom, daycare kids” became commonplace. Some of the more conservative cultural anthropologists started totalling up the amount of time kids spent in school and daycare. It was incredible. Parental guilt about this led to discipline going out the window and the resulting delinquents created a whole new set of problems in schools and society.

The thinking was to create the mechanisms to make it work, not to ditch it.

Just in the last few years did I hear a conservative thinker explain it in the succinct fashion I just relayed. It was easy to see what had happened. It didn’t “just happen”, it was completely avoidable. But the collusion of government and liberal thinking forced this crap on society and destroyed it. In fact I’m not even sure it was ‘liberals‘ behind it.

I’ve noticed on Twitter that not everyone has picked up on the change on the Left. Culture Warriors like Pat Buchanan were onto this 30 years or more ago. And trust me I was with him back then but I really don’t think my brain could grasp it. The McGovern liberals, the Muskie liberal, and most certainly the JFK liberal, no longer existed. They are gone, they are no more, they are extinct.

They are what made up probably a majority of the Democrat Party even up through Bill Clinton, but that changed. You could see it in the treatment of George W. Bush (2000 – 2008), that you didn’t see with his father George H.W. Bush (1988 – 1992). What the liberal was replaced by was the marxist. Leading conservatives have been pointing this out on Twitter.

There are a lot of Republicans and conservatives in politics who just aren’t able to make that mental leap right now, with their puny pea-sized brains. The game has changed and they haven’t caught up to that. They are not dealing with liberals anymore. I don’t know how to say it anymore plainly than that. Marxists bring a couple of items to the table that liberals didn’t.

For the longest time in American politics there was an axiom that the election night anchors would close with on TV, “In the end, we’re all Americans.” But starting in 1965 with Immigration & Naturalization Act, we started importing almost exclusively the 3rd world. So that now nearly 60 years later we are no longer in the end “all Americans”. We are not in fact or in spirit.

What a marxist brings to the table that is different from a liberal is violence and godless communism. Marxists very much believe in guerrilla street tactics. They also hate God (the Jesus one). Because communism and Christianity cannot coexist. Christianity/Natural Law is about Life, Liberty & Property. Marxism is about thievery, tyranny and death. They are exact opposites.

Jim Roach

[Thinking about it just now I remembered a phrase I think Buchanan coined: Cultural Marxism. The philosophy cultural marxists have been employing for a generation now. After I posted this I remembered another film from 1976 that was very well attuned to what was going on in society with divorces and trouble in the home, ‘The Bad News Bears‘. Walter Matthau and his Little League Team of juvenile delinquents.]