Exactly a hundred years ago, an enterprising gentleman named James Edward Ferguson took office as the Governor of Texas. He was of a generation born long enough after the conclusion of the Civil War that hardships associated with that war had faded somewhat. The half-century long conflict with raiding Comanche and Kiowa war-bands was brought to a conclusion around the time of his birth, but he was still young enough to have racketed around the Wild West as it existed for the remainder of the century, variously employed in a mine, a factory making barbed wire, a wheat farm and a vineyard. Having gotten all that out of his system, he returned to Bell County, Texas, studied law, was admitted to the bar, and married the daughter of a neighbor, Miriam Amanda Wallace. Miriam Amanda was then almost 25, and had been to college. James Ferguson and his wife settled down to a life of quiet prosperity in Belton, Texas. There he founded a bank and dabbled in politics as a campaign manager, before running for and winning the office of governor in 1914 as a Democrat, which was expected at the time and in that place and as an anti-prohibitionist, which perhaps was not. Two years later, having not done anything in office which could be held against him, James Ferguson was re-elected … and almost immediately walked into a buzz-saw. A quarrel over appropriations for the University of Texas system and a political rival for the office of governor ensconced among the facility as the newly-anointed head of a newly-established school of journalism eventually blew up into such a huge ruckus that James Ferguson was impeached, with the result that he could not hold public office in Texas again at least not under his own name.
Feminism
I Am Woman …
… hear me roar … and then turn around and whine because some cis-male said something, or looked something, and I feel so … so threatened! Look, girls…ladies … possessor of a vagina or whatever you want to be addressed as this week in vernacular fashion; can you just please pick one attitude and stick too it? Frankly, this inconsistency is embarrassing the hell out of me (sixty-ish, small-f feminist in the long-ago dark days when there was genuine no-s*it gender inequality in education, job opportunities and pay-scales to complain about and campaign for redress thereof). This is also annoying to my daughter, the thirtyish Marine Corps veteran of two hitches. The Daughter Unit is actually is very close to losing patience entirely with those of the sisterhood who are doing this “Woman Powerful!-Woman Poor Downtrodden Perpetual Victim!” bait and switch game. So am I, actually, but I have thirty years experience in biting my tongue when it comes to the antics of the Establishment Professional Capital-F Feminist crowd.
Some Catholic Items
There was much discussion and speculation regarding the recent synod on the family, including a media-driven suggestion that the Catholic Church was going to change long-standing rules pertaining to sexual morality.
George Weigel has a good recent piece which clarifies matters.
The Church’s diminishing appeal to men is a crisis which few have been willing to speak about bluntly. Cardinal Burke (pictured above) is an exception, as this piece shows.
One snippet:
“Sadly, the Church has not effectively reacted to these destructive cultural forces; instead the Church has become too influenced by radical feminism and has largely ignored the serious needs of men.”
The truth will set you free.
Pope Francis, in one of his controversy-provoking interviews, mentioned that one of his favorite spiritual writers is Fr. Louis Lallemant. I found on the Internet, and read, The Spiritual Doctrine of Father Louis Lallement, which is indeed an excellent book. Recommended.
UPDATE:
I meant to include this list of ten really short prayers to say during the day.
A very good list, with good commentary.
History Friday, or, Demography is Destiny, Theodore Roosevelt in 1916
I am currently reading Theodore Roosevelt’s outstanding book
A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open. In it he describes visits to various interesting locales where he enjoyed the outdoor life of hunting, riding and exploring.
Chapter 4 is entitled THE RANCHLAND OF ARGENTINA AND SOUTHERN BRAZIL. He begins by telling us of his visit to a ranch house in Argentina. His hosts were an “old country family which for many centuries led the life of the great cattle-breeding ranch-owners.” He notes that the modern Argentine ranch is no longer a frontier outpost, but part of the world economy, and not much different than you would find “in Hungary or Kentucky or Victoria.”
But, he notes a critical difference, and offers a stern lecture against those would fail to produce large families, as they are duty-bound to do:
[T]here is one vital point—the vital point—in which the men and women of these ranch-houses, like those of the South America that I visited generally, are striking examples to us of the English-speaking countries both of North America and Australia. The families are large. The women, charming and attractive, are good and fertile mothers in all classes of society. There are no symptoms of that artificially self-produced dwindling of population which is by far the most threatening symptom in the social life of the United States, Canada, and the Australian commonwealths. The nineteenth century saw a prodigious growth of the English-speaking, relative to the Spanish-speaking, population of the new worlds west of the Atlantic and in the Southern Pacific. The end of the twentieth century will see this completely reversed unless the present ominous tendencies as regards the birth-rate are reversed.
Rape Culture
The country is going through one of the increasingly common episodes of hysteria in modern times. In the 17th century, there was the period of The Salem Witch Trials.
From June through September of 1692, nineteen men and women, all having been convicted of witchcraft, were carted to Gallows Hill, a barren slope near Salem Village, for hanging. Another man of over eighty years was pressed to death under heavy stones for refusing to submit to a trial on witchcraft charges. Hundreds of others faced accusations of witchcraft; dozens languished in jail for months without trials until the hysteria that swept through Puritan Massachusetts subsided.
The episode was begun by what sounds like hysterical symptoms occurring in the daughter of the new minister. Before it was over, a number of people of the village of Salem had been accused of witchcraft and 19 were executed and five others had died.
Suspected witches were examined for certain marks, called “witch marks,” where witches’ “familiars” could nurse. The hysteria ended as quickly as it began. By the end of 1692, it was over and all surviving accused were released.
The period of the hearings in America after World War II, in which many were accused of being communists, the so-called “McCarthy period,” is often compared to this era and a left wing playwright, Arthur Miller, wrote a play called “The Crucible,” which made the connection between the Salem trials and Senator McCarthy’s accusations the theme.