Father's Day is Different

Mother's Day was invented by a little old lady (Ann Jarvis, and her daughter Anna Jarvis, the holiday was later repudiated by the younger Jarvis*), and later co-opted by Hallmark as (as far as I know) the first Designer holiday, for the purpose of selling cards.  If you didn't know I was a cynic, now you know. 

But at least, everyone knows who their mother is; there are usually witnesses.  Of course, a person could have been switched at birth, and then you wouldn't know anything. But even in the best of all possible situations, it's possible that the identity of the father of somebody could be in doubt.

I think that, given that the relationships between a person and his or her mother, and his or her father are not symmetric, the two 'feasts', if you would, are not symmetric either. 

A mother usually has a strong influence on a person's upbringing for various reasons; the more conservative or traditional the childhood of the person, the bigger the influence. 

The influence of a father on a child varies far more greatly from one family to the next; some fathers are heavily involved with child-raising, while other fathers are determinedly hands-off.

In the past, fathers were more interested with the upbringing of their sons than of their daughters; they would supervise the boy doing all sorts of 'guy things,' while the mothers would model various 'girl things' for their daughters, again, in a traditional home. 

But in the sixties and later, public schools took over the obligation of training all kids in both arts considered appropriate to women and to men.  For instance, my own daughter learned woodworking and metalworking, in addition to needlework and cooking.  Unfortunately, I think some conservative families were apparently unhappy with this, and I'm not sure that this plan has been continued.  The school even taught all the children—regardless of gender—to operate a motor vehicle, and I believe that's standard across the country.  Otherwise,  it would fall to a parent to pass on this skill.  (I don't know why I brought up that fact.)

So when we celebrate fatherhood and motherhood, we could be celebrating very different things.  But it is not uncommon for fathers to feel that Fathers' Day is rather a consolation prize!

Arch 

* P.S. The story of the founding of Mothers' Day is a long, and ultimately unsatisfying story you can look up.

Initially, Ann Jarvis began to work for what she called A Day of Peace for Mothers, as a response to the American Civil War that was just winding down.  She felt that a large international congregation of women—mothers, specifically—might succeed in preventing violence, where men had failed.

Julia Ward Howe (a well-known poet and hymnodist) took up this effort, and briefly succeeded in establishing a Mothers' Day in June. 

The movement to establish Mothers' Day in the present form, to remember and recognize the mother's of individuals, was taken up by Ann Jarvis, the daughter of Anna.  Over the years, the feast was enjoyed more by florists and greeting card manufacturers than by mothers, a situation recognized by Anna Jarvis with increasing anger, and she set out to call for the abolition of the feast of Mothers' Day, with no success.  She is said to have died penniless, and it is reported that she was buried with financial support from the florists and / or card manufacturers.  So the popularity of Mothers' Day never let up, despite all Anna Jarvis' efforts to destroy it. 

 

John Lennon—a Lot to Unpack

 

I've always been an admirer of John Lennon (and the Beatles, as a group).  

The Beatles I admired because of their music.  It is extremely difficult to explain or describe why The Beatles were so awesome; it's a sort of IYKYK* thing; if you got them, they were awesome.  Some people find their music very ordinary, just like I find Elvis's music.  (I think Elvis was amazing; don't get me wrong.)  I got on the Rolling Stones's wavelength late in life, so the Beatles were higher in my hierarchy than either of Elvis, or the Stones.

At first, when Yoko Ono and John got together, I was a little resentful; I thought John was being a drama queen, etc, etc.

After John was killed, I got to hear the John Lennon interviews for the first time.  Only then did I understand the ideological transformation of him that Yoko had achieved.

First, she had to teach him to look past the rhetoric that people were laying on him.  It's not that people were lying to him all the time; people were telling him exactly what they felt would make him think in a way useful to them.  John was doing the same thing, so he had to learn to stop being manipulative, too.  This was huge information; it gave him a platform on which he could build all his interactions. 

Second, she described the gender model that John had taken on from his social environment.  Like other guys around him, John felt he had to dominate the women in his life; if he didn't, he expected to be controlled by his womenfolk by their constant criticism and nagging.  Yoko got him to really listen, to Yoko, and to Cindy, and to Julia, and Mimi; to understand the information, and discard the rhetoric.  (Like most guys, he assumed that it was all rhetoric.)

Thirdly, she described the rhetoric coming out of the US government about the Vietnam War, and placed it in the context of all wars, and especially US resistance to 'Communism.'

These were all difficult subjects, and honestly, most Americans did not have a clear view of the political issues, not to mention the sociological ones.  It is amazing how Yoko persuaded John to take a rational (i.e., logical) view about all these issues.  John resisted many of her ideas, actually because of his intelligence.  The bigger they come, the harder they fall!

I recently recalled John's song Cold Turkey.  (It's in the Shaved Fish album, which is a sort of Greatest Hits, but not exactly.)  The song ostensibly describes the agony of Heroin withdrawal.  But it's also a parody, and utterly funny, IMO.

Only a very intelligent person could deliver a song of that kind.  The story of how hard it was for Lennon to strip himself of all (well, many of) the illusions in his life is very, very long.  He was a man of many fractured parts, and finally Ono was able to forge him into an integral person.  Chapman's murder of him is all the more tragic. 

Over years, Lennon tried to convey to the world (in songs, in writing, in interviews) all his revised thinking, and his political epiphanies, but not everyone was prepared to accept it.  In his last few years of life, he focused on being a family with Yoko, and their baby Sean.  That was a much easier task!  [Edited for clarity: 4-June-2025.]

Arch

* 'If You Know, You Know.' 

Nurses

I recently read an article that confirmed my belief that nurses are among the most well- intentioned, hardworking people in any profession.  (Teachers, too, are well-intentioned; so are social workers, and those in lots of jobs that are service-oriented.  But burnout can happen to anyone, and a large part of management of these jobs is burnout prevention.)

One of my aunts was a nurse, and so was my step-daughter.  These two were among the brightest people I have known.  Nurses, I have found, are generally intelligent, and perhaps that is a factor in their choice of occupation.  One of the first things nurses have to do is to learn how to suffer fools patiently and diplomatically.  Most of them succeed at this task.

Birthright Citizenship

This issue: Should birthright citizenship be removed from the Constitution?  is a difficult one.

I think I should recuse myself, because (1) it does not apply to me, and (2) it looks as though the  proposed change in the constitution has not been made sufficiently clear for the public to have a clear opinion on it.

My understanding of the statement as it is in the constitution is that any child born on US soil is a US citizen.

What the administration wants to clarify is whether the mother is in the USA legally.  (Up to now, any woman giving birth in the US gives birth to a citizen—though one wonders how it can be proved that the birth took place in the US at all.)  In fact, they want both parents to have been present in the US legally.

Arch

A New Style of President

In the US, in the 20th Century and after, the presidents have been focused on getting re-elected, and improving the country, and the lives of the people.

Trump has a different view of the presidency.  It is something he can do with essentially no training, no preparation at all, with just what people are accustomed to calling Bullshit.  It's just spouting, based on prejudice, and the inexperienced advice of business friends and other opportunists. 

Unfortunately, in the upper echelons—I mean financial echelons—of the US population, there are plenty of people who are adept at BS; that's what usually gets thrown around in corporate boardrooms, I believe.  Now that it appears that the people, however poor, still seem to revere corporate managers (Pritzker is one of them, but he has chosen the anti-Trump camp, as anyone should), we're going to get rich businessmen running for President from now on, and the usual scandals that follow presidents are going to be 10 times worse; and now that Trump has stretched the limits of how far presidents can take what is lawlessness to our minds, they're going to go even further.  That's the disgusting thing about Trump's presidency. 

Lame duck presidents can go as far down the self-serving road as their party will allow them, because they aren't going to run again.  This explains Trump's feeble attempts at pretending that he's going to run for a third term.  No, he's a lame duck, looking to squeeze every miserable dollar out of the presidency.  Now that the honor of the presidency has been trashed, only crooks and scoundrels will aspire to be president.  Accepting a plane from Qatar.  Sheesh.  We don't have to imagine George Washington turning in his grave; I'm rolling in mine, and I'm not even dead yet.

Understanding / Better Things

Two—quite different, and unrelated—things inspired this post.

The first is that the people who provide the good things in life: the city volunteer brass bands, the choral societies, the auditorium, for instance, are struggling.  I play with an amateur band, with whom I found myself quite by accident.  My wife and I were getting on each other's nerves at home, but, more importantly, she thought I should learn an instrument, and join this band for seniors.  So I rented—what turns out to be one of the easiest instruments to play—a Baritone horn (how did they guess that it would suit me perfectly?), they gave me lessons, and I was off and, well, walking.  All of them, to my suspicious eyes, seemed to be professionals; hardly ever played a wrong note; wrangled the sheaf of sheet music they were given like pros.

Many of them belong to a semi-professional band in town, an almost symphonic band, and they handed out advertisements to their major performances at our rehearsals.  So my wife—whom I shall refer to as Katie, for short—and I put on our glad rags, and went.

It was a spectacular performance.  (I almost called it a show) by any measure.  For various reasons, it was not as huge a turnout as they had hoped for, but still very substantial.  But the band, and the large city choral society, were clearly hurting for cash.  Katie and I placed all the ready money we had with us into a collection tray, but they were not going to clear a huge amount for their coffers.  These are tough times for the Arts, and the government has stopped a lot of funding for the Arts, so there's virtually no trickle down for community band concerts.  In fact, the band members—even us, in our tiny Seniors band—have to pay something, for the band expenses: rehearsal room, instrument rental, instruction, sheet music, insurance, etc, etc.  It is the same for each of the musical groups: the bands, the choral society, etc.

But, consider: most of the band members took time off, all through their school years, to go to music lessons, and instrument lessons (I took piano, which explains why I had to have baritone lessons at this advanced age), and put in their time playing in school bands, etc.  So it's a long hard road, just for the privilege of being able to entertain people.

Half the people are probably thinking: jeeze, that does sound like a lot of work.  The other half are thinking: why do these people put themselves through this drudgery?  The answer, of course, is that it was fun, and honestly, still is!

The second is something a lot of us are struggling with.  Let's not focus on pres 47, because he isn't typical.  He's just a TV personality, like the other media figures who have been picked to run the Administration.  I have been puzzling over what ideas are driving the typical MAGA sheep?

One thing is: charisma. (Sp?)  They're easily swayed by big personalities.

Next, just when they're beginning to think that, perhaps there might be something to say for those losers, the Democrats / Liberals / Communists, the basic Hate that their leaders have drilled into them, with a lot of mythology built on racism and nativism—words that most of us can look up later, because they aren't super useful, except for understanding hate—their leadership slaps them back into the fold, reminding them of all the comfortable hate, and puts their intelligence to sleep. 

The mag leadership, where do they come from?  Frustrated racism, many of them.  In their early youth, they probably bought into the idea, probably pushed by at least one of their parents, that they're superior, just because their parents looked so handsome.  They probably eventually realized that good hair and a sharp tongue wasn't enough to compete against intelligence, information, skills and aptitude, just about the same time that they were put together—after years of being only among other wealthy whites—with other ethnicities: Italians, Eastern Europeans, Asians, Latin Americans, and African Americans; and naturally conflate these factors.  It was these non-anglos, they musthave concluded, who were showing up the chinks in their armor of superiority!!  It takes disciplined thinking to reject an obvious wrong conclusion, especially if the wrong conclusion was comfortable, and the correct one was uncomfortable. 

Another major source of anger is government corruption.  The government itself is not actually corrupt—except for things like voting themselves huge raises, and superior health insurance for life, etc.—but there definitely are crooked Congressmen in all parties, who become poster boys for cheaters.  People see their taxes disappear into government coffers, but they don't see the benefits of it.  They think that school music programs, the IRS itself, neighborhood schools attended by immigrants and poor blacks, social security, and those no-account Veterans are eating up all of it.  (Sorry about that crack, Vets; we know that you guys are fine people.)

So ignorance and careless thinking results in a lot of hate.  But that's not all.  The GOP dance is now being led by people with very complicated axes to grind.  They give their followers one reason for destroying the government machinery, but they have different actual motives, which do not help the Man in the Street.  Now, of course, they have raised not helping the man in the street into a great virtue.  That was the contribution of must.  Empathy is a fault.  It results in programs for 'useless' (read: foreign, non-white, or unemployed) people.  "It's better we keep our tax dollars."

There's a lot of diversity among the Maga, for all they hate diversity on principle.  Different groups respond to different things, e.g. inflation, religion, abortion, women, Islam, war, peace, Israel, Iran, the Brits, the EU, and so on.

Hey, this is becoming a diatribe, so I must stop here!!  But support the Arts, though I haven't made a clear case for it.  Drudgery is good!  I'm a math teacher, so naturally I think that way!

Arch 

What We Believe

For decades, I didn't have to tell anyone about my beliefs.  I just said I was an atheist, and that took care of it. 

But now, because of how evangelical Christianity has gotten involved in conservative politics, I believe that, once the dust settles down—or maybe it won't; who knows?—people who thought that they once had a home in these peculiar Megachurches, people who are 'menu-driven', whose instinct is to just select a belief system from among those offered, will need a new system, in place of the 'faiths' offered by the jet-set preachers.

Simply surviving these few years with our reasoning skills intact will involve being exposed to a lot of hate from the informal (social) media; hate of Trump and his unscrupulous circle of advisors; hate of the ultra- conservatives, the violently anti-immigrant; the greedy opportunist rip-off artists, etc.  The sly people who try to sneak a buck are easy to forgive.  It is the people who want to make it easy for the robber barons to pick over what little the poor have left: those are the ones who're easiest to hate.  There are plenty of those; they insist on the right of businesses to make extortionary profits.

It will take time to formulate a moral code that people will find reasonable. 

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