Category: Culture

Why America is Still Great: More People Own Guns and Dogs Than Cats.

When something makes you smile.

According to the latest researdch, about 45% of American households have guns. With some fluctuation. that number has been fairly steady for decades. That, of course, dependent on people actually answering honestly when a stranger tries to find out if they own guns (so the actual number is likely more than 50%).

There are about 46 million households with pet cats in the United States, or about 37 percent. That’s a lot of murder kittehs running around. Bear with me here.

As for man’s best friend, about a 65 million households have a dog living with them. That’s about 52 percent of the total.

So what do I get out of this? Gun owners have good taste because more Americans households own dogs than cats. I suppose cat ownership might increase when you can train cats to retrieve birds and flush pheasants, but until then….. There’s nothing quite like the loyal habits of a 90-pound Lab lapdog.

Go team dog! Oh, and guns, too.

How about you? Team dog or team cat? (Because of course you own guns, right?)

L-o-n-g read, but worth it.

The Return of Paganism
The spiritual crisis afflicting contemporary America has ancient and enduring roots—and so does the cure

When a 28-year-old person identifying as transgender shot up a Tennessee school in March, killing three children and three adults, the usual grim afterlife of tragedy was underlined by an odd note: One by one, media outlets rushed to apologize for “misgendering” the shooter, who, they explained, had been born female but had recently begun identifying as male.

How to make sense of such a statement? And what to do when a newspaper headline tells you about a “trans woman left sobbing in JFK Airport after TSA agent hit her testicles”? Appealing to reason hardly helps, as J.K. Rowling and others learned the hard way when trying to ask simple questions such as how one might define sex if not according to the chromosomes rooted in literally every cell of our bodies. Instead, anyone wishing to find his way through the thicket of American public discourse these days should start by embracing one simple and terrifying idea: The barbarians are at the gates.

I mean this almost literally. Everywhere you turn these days, pagans are afoot, busily hacking away at the Christian and Jewish foundations of American life and replacing them with a cosmology that would have been absolutely coherent to followers of, say, Voltumna, the Etruscan earth god, or to those who worshipped the Celt tribal protector Toutatis.

If you think the above paragraph is a little bit overblown, consider the numbers. In 1990, scholars from Trinity College set out to learn just how many of their fellow Americans practiced some form of pagan religion. The numbers were unsurprisingly small: about 8,000, or enough to pack your average Journey reunion concert. But the researchers asked again in 2008, and this time, 340,000 Americans said yes to paganism. A decade later, the Pew survey posed the same question, and, if it is to believed, there are now about 1.5 million Americans professing an array of pagan persuasions, from Wicca to the Viking lore, making paganism one of the nation’s fastest-growing persuasions.

So fast-growing, in fact, that my colleague Maggie Phillips recently reported in Tablet magazine about the thriving, and officially recognized, pagan faith groups within the U.S. Army. “What’s important now,” one of its leaders, Sergeant Drake Sholar, told Phillips, “is showing religious respect and understanding across the board as Norse Pagans, or Heathens, return to a distinguishable religious practice.”

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Is Woke Fatigue Finally Setting In?

The Broadway show “Ain’t No Mo’” may soon be no more, if ticket sales do not pick up. If you have never heard of it, you are not alone. But for the sake of expediency, here is a brief description  from the home page of the show’s website:

Direct from a smash-hit run at The Public Theater, AIN’T NO MO’ dares to ask the incendiary question, “What if the U.S. government offered Black Americans one-way plane tickets to Africa?” The answer is the high-octane new comedy from the mischievous mind of playwright Jordan E. Cooper.

Moving faster than a transatlantic jet plane, this unprecedented, unpredictable comedy speeds through the turbulent skies of being Black in today’s America.

Brilliantly blending sketch, satire, avant garde theater, and a dose of drag, AIN’T NO MO’ will leave you crying with laughter—and thinking through the tears.

So put your tray tables in the upright position. Enjoy your flight. And never look back.

The site’s banner shows a jetliner, painted in a Kente cloth pattern, and a ragged U.S. flag on the tail, being shredded by the wind. And there are references in the show to privileged white people. It is made up of a series of sketches about how various black characters would react to the idea of the U.S. Government offering black people free flights back to Africa for repatriation. Of course, it is getting rave reviews. But the show is slated to close because it is not drawing an audience. Cooper, who also acts in the production, said that because there were no celebrities, no smash-hit songs, and no well-known intellectual property, people were just not lining up at the box office. An effort is underway to rally the theater-going public to save the production. You can watch Cooper’s interview and see a brief clip from the show’s opening on MSNBC here.

Page Six had an Instagram post from Cooper urging people to attend:

Ain’t No Mo’ needs your help! It’s a new original play that’s BLACK AF, which are both things that make it hard to sell on Broadway. We need all hands on deck with urgency. In the name of art, in the name of resistance, in the name of we belong here too, in the name of every storytelling ancestor who ever graced a Broadway stage or was told they never could.

Cooper said that the production has kept ticket prices low and urged people to sponsor someone by buying them a ticket. Will and Jada Smith purchased tickets for an entire show.

Maybe the production does not have the star power to generate an audience. Maybe there’s just not been enough publicity. And, of course, it may be due to racism because, reasons.

But it may also be that people are burned out with trying to be woke 24/7. For years, from the office of the president of the United States to the local school boards and every office, activist, bureaucrat, and administrator in between, people have had racism, trans, and every other phobia and “ism” pounded into them at every juncture. People who have known they are not racist are tired of defending themselves every minute, except perhaps when it comes to their children. And they also know that discussion is simply impossible. And even the true believers may be growing weary of confessing their sins with every other breath. How many times can you flog yourself on the steps of Canterbury Cathedral, especially for offenses you know you did not commit? How long are you supposed to clap for Stalin before your hands start to bleed and your arms cramp? You may be opposed to racism. You may even have rended your garments and heaped ashes on your head over your privilege. But when the accusations become unrelenting and perpetual repentance for values you do not hold and actions you did not commit becomes a mandatory national ritual, you might begin to tune out. At least personally. Never publicly, lest a fresh round of accusations commence. But privately, you may be too tired to go the distance yet again. No matter how non-racist you are, you will never be non-racist or anti-racist enough.

At this point, I must add the mandatory disclaimer that there are racists. We all know that. It has always been thus. But not everyone is racist. I was never a racist and am still not. You can visit some of my other pieces if you want to read those stories. But no matter my history and my views, society still says that I am racist by virtue of my existence. It is the only permissible conclusion. And as the Borg might say, “Debate is futile.” Since in the public square, everything is racist, people may simply be looking for some emotional respite in their private lives. They may be tired of constantly being relegated to stereotypes and not individuals. And eventually, the response to an accusation of an “ism” or phobia may become autonomic, with people, even in their private moments, routinely driving themselves into the ground over prejudices they do not really hold. Struggle sessions may become everyday things, as people replace their daily affirmations with their daily accusations.

Which may have been the point all along.

One thing that ties recent mass shootings? Harassment

One thing I think we do a terrible job of when it comes to preventing mass shootings is trying to get a peek inside the minds of the killers.

People don’t just wake up one day and suddenly decide to slaughter people by the gross. That kind of pathology likely develops over time, which means it can be prevented from ever happening, preferably without a single restriction on any civil liberty.

In fairness, there have been looks at what mass shooters have in common. They found things like treatment for mental illness and broken homes as common themes.

Yet in looking at recent shootings, I found something else. A history of harassment.

I’m not talking about them necessarily harassing others, but instead being the victims of harassment.

Let’s start with the University of Virginia shooter. He allegedly killed three of the school’s football players after a field trip.

However, it also appears that he reported to his father that he was the victim of bullying.

The alleged killer at Club Q in Colorado Springs also dealt with harassment, and on a much larger scale. In fact, entire legions on the internet enjoyed harassing him.

In Chesapeake, the killer there left a note outlining his grievances, which included claims of being harassed by others.

That’s three recent killers who were either being harassed or felt as if they were, but they’re not the only ones.

In Uvalde, for example, the killer there had a history of being harassed, with some actually calling him a school shooter.

Now, understand that nothing about this is an attempt to excuse these killings. It’s not. There’s literally no valid reason to respond to harassment like this with homicidal action.

But if we’re ever going to uncover the roots of these horrific crimes, we simply have to discuss some uncomfortable things. That includes any potential role that harassment of these individuals might play in this.

It’s not an excuse and I’m not necessarily saying the harassers are responsible for these crimes. No, that responsibility rests on those who pull the trigger, as it always has.

Yet on the same token, if this is a unifying thread, then it’s a thread we as a society can work together to severe.

It’s one thing to be in the public sphere and receive harsh reactions to what you’ve offered up. I’ve been there myself and while it sucks, it’s the price you pay for playing in that sandbox.

But these cases appear to be different. These are people who were reportedly being harassed without that kind of action.

Now, I also have to admit that harassment may not be the issue, but a persecution complex. Maybe many of these people who reported being harassed really weren’t. It’s possible that they just thought the criticism they received was harassment when it was really nothing of the sort.

Sure, we know at least some were actually harassed and bullied, but it’s possible this isn’t a unifying thread among mass killers. I don’t think it is, necessarily, but I wouldn’t be intellectually honest if I didn’t concede the possibility.

Either way, this is something that the supposed experts should be looking at.

Too bad they can’t look beyond pushing for gun control.