Psychache

Psychache (pronounced sahyk-eyk)

Psychological pain, especially when it becomes unbearable, producing suicidal thoughts.

1993: The construct was psyche- + ache.  Psychache was coined by US clinical psychologist Dr Edwin Shneidman (1918-2009) and first appeared in his book Suicide as Psychache: A Clinical Approach to Self-Destructive Behavior (1993).  The prefix psych- was an alternative form of psycho-.  Psycho was from the Ancient Greek ψῡχο- (psūkho-), a combining form of ψυχή (psukhḗ) (soul).  Wit was used with words relating to the soul, the mind, or to psychology.  Ache was from the Middle English verb aken & noun ache (noun), from the Old English verb acan (from the Proto-West Germanic akan, from the Proto-Germanic akaną (to ache)) and the noun æċe (from the Proto-West Germanic aki, from the Proto-Germanic akiz), both from the primitive Indo-European heg- (sin, crime).  It was cognate with the Saterland Frisian eeke & ääke (to ache, fester), the Low German aken, achen & äken (to hurt, ache), the German Low German Eek (inflammation), the North Frisian akelig & æklig (terrible, miserable, sharp, intense), the West Frisian aaklik (nasty, horrible, dismal, dreary) and the Dutch akelig (nasty, horrible).  Historically the verb was spelled ake, and the noun ache but the spellings became aligned after Dr Johnson (Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)) published A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), the lexicographer mistakenly assuming it was from the Ancient Greek ἄχος (ákhos) (pain) due to the similarity in form and meaning of the two words.  As a noun, ache meant “a continuous, dull pain (as opposed to a sharp, sudden, or episodic pain) while the verb was used to mean (1) to have or suffer a continuous, dull pain, (2) to feel great sympathy or pity and (3) to yearn or long for someone or something.  Pyscheache is a noun

Psychache is a theoretical construct used by clinical suicidologists and differs from psychomachia (conflict of the soul).  Psychomachia was from the Late Latin psӯchomachia, the title of a poem of a thousand-odd lines (circa 400) by Roman Christian poet Prudentius (Aurelius Prudentius Clemens; 348-circa 412), the construct being the Ancient Greek Greek psukhē (spirit) + makhē (battle).  The fifth century poem Psychomachia (translated usually as “Battle of Spirits” or “Soul War”) explored a theme familiar in Christianity: the eternal battle between virtue & vice (onto which can be mapped “right & wrong”, “good & evil” etc) and culminated in the forces of Christendom vanquishing pagan idolatry to the cheers of a thousand Christian martyrs.  An elegant telling of an allegory familiar in early Christian literature and art, Prudentius made clear the battle was one which happened in the soul of all people and thus one which all needed to wage, the outcome determined by whether the good or evil in them proved stronger.  The poem’s characters include Faith, Hope, Industry, Sobriety, Chastity, Humility & Patience among the good and Pride, Wrath, Paganism, Avarice, Discord, Lust & Indulgence in the ranks of the evil but scholars of literature caution that although the personifications all are women, in Latin, words for abstract concepts use the feminine grammatical gender and there’s nothing to suggest the poet intended us to read this as a tale of bolshie women slugging it out.  Of interest too is the appearance of the number seven, so familiar in the literature and art of Antiquity and the Medieval period as well as the Biblical texts but although Prudentius has seven virtues defeat seven vices, the characters don’t exactly align with either the canonical seven deadly sins, nor the three theological and four cardinal virtues.  In modern use, the linguistic similarity between psychache and psychomachia has made the latter attractive to those seduced by the (not always Germanic) tradition of the “romance of suicide”.

A pioneer in the field of suicidology, Dr Shneidman’s publication record was indicative of his specialization.

Dr Edwin Shneidman (1918-2009) was a clinical psychologist who practiced as a thanatologist (a practitioner in the field of thanatology (the scientific study of death and the practices associated with it, including the study of the needs of the terminally ill and their families); the construct of thanatology being thanato- (from the Ancient Greek θάνατος (thánatos) (death)) +‎ -logy.  The suffix -ology was formed from -o- (as an interconsonantal vowel) +‎ -logy.  The origin in English of the -logy suffix lies with loanwords from the Ancient Greek, usually via Latin and French, where the suffix (-λογία) is an integral part of the word loaned (eg astrology from astrologia) since the sixteenth century.  French picked up -logie from the Latin -logia, from the Ancient Greek -λογία (-logía).  Within Greek, the suffix is an -ία (-ía) abstract from λόγος (lógos) (account, explanation, narrative), and that a verbal noun from λέγω (légō) (I say, speak, converse, tell a story).  In English the suffix became extraordinarily productive, used notably to form names of sciences or disciplines of study, analogous to the names traditionally borrowed from the Latin (eg astrology from astrologia; geology from geologia) and by the late eighteenth century, the practice (despite the disapproval of the pedants) extended to terms with no connection to Greek or Latin such as those building on French or German bases (eg insectology (1766) after the French insectologie; terminology (1801) after the German Terminologie).  Within a few decades of the intrusion of modern languages, combinations emerged using English terms (eg undergroundology (1820); hatology (1837)).  In this evolution, the development may be though similar to the latter-day proliferation of “-isms” (fascism; feminism et al).

Death and the College Student: A Collection of Brief Essays on Death and Suicide by Harvard Youth (1973) by Dr Edwin Shneidman.  Dr Shneidman wrote many papers about the prevalence of suicide among college-age males, a cross-cultural phenomenon.

Dr Shneidman was one of the seminal figures in the discipline of suicidology, in 1968 founding the AAS (American Association of Suicidology) and the principal US journal for suicide studies: Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior.  The abbreviation AAS is in this context used mostly within the discipline because (1) it is a specialized field and (2) there are literally dozens of uses of “AAS”.  In Suicide as Psychache: A Clinical Approach to Self-Destructive Behavior (1993) he defined psychache as “intense psychological pain—encompassing hurt, anguish, and mental torment”, identifying it as the primary motivation behind suicide, his theory being that when psychological pain becomes unbearable, individuals may perceive suicide as their only escape from torment.

Although since Suicide as Psychache: A Clinical Approach to Self-Destructive Behavior appeared in 1993 there have been four editions of American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), “psychache” has never appeared in the DSM.  That may seem an anomaly given much in the DSM revolves around psychological disturbances but the reason is technical.  What the DSM does is list and codify diagnosable mental disorders (depression, schizophrenia. bipolar disorder et al), classifying symptoms and behaviors into standardized categories for diagnosis and treatment planning.  By contrast, psychache is not a clinical diagnosis; it is a theoretical construct in suicidology which is used to explain the subjective experience of psychological pain that can lead to patients taking their own lives.  It thus describes an emotional state rather than a psychiatric disorder.

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December, 2011.

Despite that, mental health clinicians do actively use the principles of psychache, notably in suicide risk assessment and prevention and models have been developed including a number of “psychache scales”, self-reporting tools used to generate a metric measuring the intensity of psychological pain (categorized with headings such as shame, guilt, despair et al).  The approaches do in detail differ but most follow Dr Shneidman’s terminology in that the critical threshold is the point at which the patient’s pain becomes unbearable or inescapable and the objective is either to increase tolerance for distress or reframe troublesome thoughts.  Ultimately, the purpose of tools is to improve suicide risk assessments and reduce suicide rates.

DSM-5 (2013).

Interestingly, Suicidal Behavior Disorder (SBD) was introduced in Section III of the DSM-5 (2013) under “Conditions for Further Study”.  Then, SBD chiefly was characterized by a self-initiated sequence of behaviors believed at the time of initiation to cause one’s own death and occurring in the last 24 months.  That of course sounds exact but the diagnostic criteria in the DSM are written like that and the purpose of inclusion in the fifth edition was to create a framework so systematically, empirical studies related to SBD could be reviewed so primary research themes and promising directions for future research could be identified.  Duly, over the following decade that framework was explored but the conclusion was reached there seemed to be little utility in the clinical utility of SBD as a device for predicting future suicide and that more research was needed to understand measurement of the diagnosis and its distinctiveness from related disorders and other self-harming behaviors.  The phase “more research is required” must be one of the most frequently heard among researchers.

In the usually manner in which the APA allowed the DSM to evolve, what the DSM-5s tentative inclusion of SBD did was attempt to capture suicidality as a diagnosis rather than a clinical feature requiring attention.  SBD was characterized by a suicide attempt within the last 24 months (Criterion A) and that was defined as “a self-initiated sequence of behaviors by an individual who, at the time of initiation, expected that the set of actions would lead to his or her own death”.  That sounds uncontroversial but what was significant was the act could meet the criteria for non-suicidal self-injury (ie self-injury with the intention to relieve negative feelings or cognitive state in order to achieve a positive mood state (Criterion B) and cannot be applied to suicidal ideation or preparatory acts (Criterion C).  Were the attempt to have occurred during a state of delirium or confusion or solely for political or religious objectives, then SBD is ruled out (Criteria D & E).  SBD (current) is given when the suicide attempt occurred within the last 12 months, and SBD (in early remission), when it has been 12-24 months since the last attempt.  It must be remembered that while a patient’s behavior(s) may overlap across a number of the DSM’s diagnosises, the AMA’s committees have, for didactic purposes, always preferred to “silo” the categories.

DSM-5-TR (2022).

When in 2022 the “text revision” of the DSM-5 (DSM-5-TR) was released, SBD was removed as a condition for further study in Section III and moved to “Other Conditions That May Be a Focus of Clinical Attention” in Section II. The conditions listed in this section are intended to draw to attention of clinicians to the presence and breadth of additional issues routinely encountered in clinical practice and provide a procedure for their systematic documentation.  According to the APA’s editorial committee, the rationale for the exclusion of SBD from the DSM-5-TR was based on concerns the proposed disorder did not meet the criteria for a mental disorder but instead constituted a behavior with diverse causes and while that distinction may escape most of us, within the internal logic of the history of the DSM, that’s wholly consistent.  At this time, despite many lobbying for the adoption of a diagnostic entity for suicidal behavior, the APA’s committees seem still more inclined to conceptualize suicidality as a symptom rather than a disorder and despite discussion in the field of suicidology about whether suicide and related concepts like psychache should be treated as stand-alone mental health issues, that’s a leap which will have to wait, at least until a DSM-6 is published.

How to and how not to: Informatie over Zorgvuldige Levensbeëindiging (Information about the Careful Ending of Life, 2008) by Stichting Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek naar Zorgvuldige Zelfdoding (The Foundation for Scientific Research into Careful Suicide) (left) and How Not to Kill Yourself: A Phenomenology of Suicide (2023) by Clancy Martin (right).

Informatie over Zorgvuldige Levensbeëindiging (Information about the Careful Ending of Life, 2008) was published by a group of Dutch physicians & and researchers; it contained detailed advice on methods of suicide available to the general public, the Foundation for Scientific Research into Careful Suicide arging “a requirement exists within society for responsible information about an independent and dignified ending of life.”  It could be ordered only from the foundation’s website and had the advantage that whatever might be one’s opinion on the matter, it was at least written by physicians and scientists and thus more reliable than some of the “suicide guides” which are sometimes found on-line.  At the time research by the foundation had found that despite legislation in the Netherlands which permit doctors (acting within specific legal limits) to assist patient commit suicide, there were apparently several thousand cases each year of what it termed “autoeuthanasia” in which no medical staff directly were involved.  Most of these cases involved elderly or chronically ill patients who refused food and fluids and it was estimated these deaths happened at about twice the rate of those carried out under the euthanasia laws.  Since then the Dutch laws have been extended to included those who have no serious physical disease or are suffering great pain; there are people who simply no longer wish to live, something like the tragic figure in Blue Öyster Cult’s (Don't Fear) The Reaper (1976) © Donald Roeser (b 1947):

Came the last night of sadness
And it was clear she couldn't go on
Then the door was open and the wind appeared
The candles blew then disappeared
The curtains flew then he appeared
Saying don't be afraid

There is a diverse literature on various aspects of suicide (tips and techniques, theological & philosophical interpretations, cross-cultural attitudes, history of its treatment in church & secular law etc) and some are quite personal, written variously by those who later would kill themselves or those who contemplated or attempted to take their own lives.  In How Not to Kill Yourself: A Phenomenology of Suicide (2023) by Canadian philosopher Clancy Martin (b 1967), it was revealed the most recent of his ten suicide attempts was “…in his basement with a dog leash, the consequences of which he concealed from his wife, family, co-workers, and students, slipping back into his daily life with a hoarse voice, a raw neck and series of vague explanations.”

BKA (the Bundeskriminalamt, the Federal Criminal Police Office of the FRG (Federal Republic of Germany (the old West Germany)) mug shots of the Red Army Faction's Ulrike Meinhof (left) and Gudrun Ensslin (right).

The song (Don't Fear) The Reaper also made mention of William Shakespeare's (1564–1616) Romeo and Juliet (1597) and in taking her own life (using her dead lover’s dagger) because she doesn’t want to go on living without him, Juliette joined the pantheon of figures who have made the tragedy of suicide seem, to some, romantic.  Politically too, suicide can grant the sort of status dying of old age doesn’t confer, the deaths of left-wing terrorists Ulrike Meinhof (1934–1976) and Gudrun Ensslin (1940–1977) of the West German Red Army Faction (the RAF and better known as the “Baader-Meinhof gang”) both recorded as “suicide in custody” although the circumstances were murky.  In an indication of the way moral relativities aligned during the high Cold War, the French intellectuals Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) compared their deaths to the worst crimes of the Nazis but sympathy for violence committed for an “approved” cause was not the exclusive preserve of the left.  In July, 1964, in his speech accepting the Republican nomination for that year’s US presidential election, proto-MAGA Barry Goldwater (1909–1998) concluded by saying: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!  And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”  The audience response to that was rapturous although a few months later the country mostly didn’t share the enthusiasm, Lyndon Johnson (LBJ, 1908–1973; US president 1963-1969) winning the presidency in one of the greatest landslides in US electoral history.  Given the choice between crooked old Lyndon and crazy old Barry, Americans preferred the crook.

Nor was it just politicians and intellectuals who could resist the appeal of politics being taken to its logical “other means” conclusion, the Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen (1934-2016) during the last years of the Cold War writing First We Take Manhattan (1986), the lyrics of which were open to interpretation but clarified in 1988 by the author who explained: “I think it means exactly what it says.  It is a terrorist song.  I think it's a response to terrorism.  There's something about terrorism that I've always admired.  The fact that there are no alibis or no compromises.  That position is always very attractive.”   Even in 1988 it was a controversial comment because by then not many outside of undergraduate anarchist societies were still romanticizing terrorists but in fairness to the singer the coda isn’t as often published: “I don't like it when it's manifested on the physical plane – I don't really enjoy the terrorist activities – but Psychic Terrorism.”

First We Take Manhattan (1986) by Leonard Cohen

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom

For tryin' to change the system from within

I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

 

I'm guided by a signal in the heavens

I'm guided by this birthmark on my skin

I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

 

I'd really like to live beside you, baby

I love your body and your spirit and your clothes

But you see that line there moving through the station?

I told you, I told you, told you, I was one of those

 

Ah you loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win

You know the way to stop me, but you don't have the discipline

How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

 

I don't like your fashion business, mister

And I don't like these drugs that keep you thin

I don't like what happened to my sister

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

 

I'd really like to live beside you, baby

I love your body and your spirit and your clothes

But you see that line there moving through the station?

I told you, I told you, told you, I was one of those

First We Take Manhattan performed by Jennifer Warnes (b 1947), from the Album Famous Blue Raincoat (1986). 

Whatever they achieved in life, it was their suicides which lent a lingering allure to German-American ecofeminist activist Petra Kelly (1947–1992) & the doomed poet American poet Sylvia Path (1932-1963) and the lure goes back for millennia, the Roman Poet Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso; 43 BC–17 AD) in his Metamorphoses telling an ancient Babylonian tale in which Pyramus, in dark despair, killed herself after finding her young love lifeless.  Over the centuries it’s been a recurrent trope but the most novel take was the symbolic, mystical death in Richard Wagner's (1813–1883) Tristan und Isolde (1865).  Mortally wounded in a duel before the final act, Tristan longs to see Isolde one last time but just as she arrives at his side, he dies in her arms.  Overwhelmed by love and grief, Isolde sings the famous Liebestod (Love-Death) and dies, the transcendent aria interpreted as the swansong which carries her to join Tristan in mystical union in the afterlife.  This, lawyers would call a “constructive suicide”.

Austrian soprano Helga Dernesch (b 1939) in 1972 performing the Liebestod aria from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde with the Berlin Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan (1908–1989).  While she didn’t possess the sheer power of the greatest of the Scandinavian sopranos who in the mid-twentieth century defined Wagner, Dernesch brought passion and intensity to her roles and while, on that night in 1972, the lushness of what Karajan summoned from the strings was perhaps a little much, her Liebestod was spine-tingling.  By then however, Karajan had been forgiven for everything.

Accidie

Accidie (pronounced ak-si-dee)

Sloth; apathy, in the sense of both (1) a general listlessness and apathy and (2) spiritual torpor.

1200–1250: From the Middle English accidie, from the Anglo-Norman accidie, from the Old French accide & accidie, from the Medieval Latin accidia (an alteration of Late Latin acedia (sloth, torpor), from the Ancient Greek ἀκήδεια (akḗdeia) (indifference), the construct being ἀ- (a-) (in the sense of “not”) +‎ κῆδος (kêdos).  It was a doublet of acedia, still cited as an alternative form and replaced the Middle English accide.  The word was in active use between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries and was revived in the nineteenth as a literary adornment.  Accidie and acediast are nouns and acedious is an adjective; the noun plural is acediasts.

The alternative literary words include (1) ennui (a gripping listlessness or melancholia caused by boredom; depression), an unadapted borrowing from the French ennui, from the Old French enui (annoyance), from enuier (which in Modern French persists as ennuyer), from the Late Latin inodiō, from the Latin in odiō (hated) and a doublet of annoy, (2) weltschmerz, used as an alternative letter-case form of the German Weltschmerz (an apathetic or pessimistic view of life; depression concerning or discomfort with the human condition or state of the world; world-weariness), the construct being Welt (world) + Schmerz (physical ache, pain; emotional pain, heartache, sorrow) and coined by German Romantic writer Jean Paul (1763–1825) for his novel Selina (published posthumously in 1827) and (3) mal du siècle (apathy and world-weariness, involving pessimism towards the current state of the world, often along with nostalgia for the past (originally in the context of French Romanticism) (literally “disease of the century”) and coined by the French writer Alfred de Musset in his autobiographical novel La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Century (1936)).

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December, 2011.

In Antiquity, the Greeks seemed to have refined accidie (which translated literally as being in “a state so inert as the be devoid of pain or care”) to be used of those who has become listless and no longer cared for their own lives or their society, thus distinguishing it from other conditions of melancholy which tended to be individually focused although in surviving medical texts, what’s being diagnosed was something like what might now be called “depression”.  Predictably, when adopted by moral theologians in Christian writing, it was depicted as a sin or at least a personal flaw.  Others wrote of it as a “demon” to be overcome and even a temptation placed by the Devil, one to which “young men who read poetry” seem to have been chronically prone.  It can be thought of as falling into the category of sloth, listed in the Medieval Latin tradition as of the seven deadly sins and appeared in Dante Alighieri’s (circa 1265–1321) Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy (circa 1310-1321)) not only as a sin worthy of damnation & eternal punishment but the very sin which led Dante to the edge of Hell.  In his unfinished Summa Theologiae (literally Summary of Theology), the Italian Dominican friar, philosopher & theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) noted accidie was a spiritual sorrow, induced by man’s flight from the Divine good, “…on account of the flesh utterly prevailing over the spirit”, the kind of despair which can culminate in the even greater sin of suicide.

Google ngram: Accidie 1800-2020.

Google ngram: Because of the way Google harvests data for their ngrams, they’re not literally a tracking of the use of a word in society but can be usefully indicative of certain trends, (although one is never quite sure which trend(s)), especially over decades.  As a record of actual aggregate use, ngrams are not wholly reliable because: (1) the sub-set of texts Google uses is slanted towards the scientific & academic and (2) the technical limitations imposed by the use of OCR (optical character recognition) when handling older texts of sometime dubious legibility (a process AI should improve).  Where numbers bounce around, this may reflect either: (1) peaks and troughs in use for some reason or (2) some quirk in the data harvested.

Etymologists note that between the mid sixteenth and mid nineteenth centuries the word acedia was close to extinct and whether it was the revival of interest in the Romantic poets (often a glum lot) or the increasing number of women becoming novelists, there was in the late 1800s a revival with the term, once the preserve of theologians, re-purposed as a decorative literary word; in the “terrible twentieth century” there was much scope for use and it appears in the writings of Ian Fleming (1908–1964), Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) and Samuel Beckett (1906-1989).  Intriguingly, in The Decline and Fall of Nokia (2014), Finnish-based expatriate US writer David J Cord introduced the concept of corporate acedia, citing the phenomenon as one of the causes of the collapse of Nokia's once dominant mobile device unit.

Joan Didion (1934-2021) and cigarette with her Daytona Yellow (OEM code 984) 1969 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray (on the C2 Corvette (1963-1967) and in 1968 the spelling had been "Sting Ray”).  The monochrome image was from a photo-session commissioned in 1970 by Life magazine and shot by staff photographer Julian Wasser (1933-2023), outside the house she was renting on Franklin Avenue in the Hollywood Hills.  To great acclaim, her first work of non-fiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), had just been published.

Writing mostly, in one way or another, about “feelings”, Joan Didion’s work appealed mostly to a female readership but when photographs were published of her posing with her bright yellow Corvette, among men presumably she gained some “street cred” although that might have evaporated had they learned it was later traded for a Volvo; adding insult to injury, it was a Volvo station wagon with all that implies.  She was later interviewed about the apparent incongruity between owner and machine and acknowledged the strangeness, commenting: “I very definitely remember buying the Stingray because it was a crazy thing to do.  I bought it in Hollywood.”  Craziness and Hollywood were then of course synonymous and a C3 Corvette (1968-1982) really was the ideal symbol of the America about which Ms Didion wrote, being loud, flashy, rendered in plastic and flawed yet underpinned by a solid, well-engineered foundation; the notion of the former detracting from the latter was theme in in her essays on the American experience.

A 1969 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray in Daytona Yellow.

Disillusioned, melancholic and clinical, Ms Didion’s literary oeuvre suited the moment because while obviously political it was also spiritual, a critique of what she called “accidie” of the late 1960s, the moral torpor of those disappointed by what had followed the hope and optimism captured by “Camelot”, the White House of John Kennedy (JFK, 1917–1963; US president 1961-1963).  In retrospect Camelot was illusory but that of course made real the disillusionment of Lyndon Johnson (LBJ, 1908–1973; US president 1963-1969) leading the people not to a “great society” but to Vietnam.  Her essays were in the style of the “new journalism” and sometimes compared with those of her contemporary Susan Sontag (1933-2004) but the two differed in method, tone, ideological orientation and, debatably, expectation if not purpose.

Susan Sontag (1962), monochrome image by Village Voice staff photographer Fred McDarrah (1926–2007).

Ms Didion’s used accidie to describe a society which the troubled 1960s seemed to have bludgeoned into a state not of acquiescence but indifference, a moral exhaustion.  Her writings were observational (and, as she admitted, sometimes “embellished” for didactic purposes), sceptical and cool, her conception of the failure of contemporary politics a matter of describing the disconnect between rhetoric and reality, understanding the language of theatre criticism was as appropriate as that of the lexicon of political science.  In a sense, twas ever thus but Ms Didion captured the imagination by illustrating just how far from the moorings of reality the political spectacle of fragmentation and myth-making had drifted.  Ms Sontag’s tone was declarative and distinctly authoritative (in the way of second-wave feminism), tending often to the polemic and the sense was she was writing in opposition to a collective immorality, not the kind of moral indifference Ms Didion detected.  Both were students of their nation’s cultural pathology but one seemed more a palliative care specialist tending a patient in their dying days while the other offered a diagnosis and suggested a cure which, while not something to enjoy: "would be good for them".  While Ms Didion distrusted ideological certainty, Ms Sontag engaged explicitly with “isms”, not in the sense of one writing of the history of ideas but as a protagonist, using language in an attempt to shape political consciousness, the former a kind of secular moral theologian mourning a loss of coherence in American life while the latter was passionate and wrote often with a strident urgency, never losing the sense that whatever her criticisms, things could be fixed and there was hope.  The irony of being an author to some degree afflicted by the very accide she described in others was not lost on Ms Didion.

Susan Sontag, circa 1971, photographed by Jim Cartier.  The pop-art portrait of comrade Chairman Mao Zedong (1893–1976; chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 1949-1976) was a print of Roy Lichtenstein's (1923–1997) Mao (1971) which had been used as the cover for US author Frederic Tuten's (b 1936) novel The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (1971).  Ms Sontag had written a most favourable review of the book and the framed print was reputedly a gift.

Joan Didion with Corvette, another image from Julian Wasser’s 1970 photo-shoot.  The staging in this one is for feminists to ponder.

While a stretch to say that in trading-in the Corvette for a Volvo station wagon, Ms Didion was tracking the nation which had moved from Kennedy to Richard Nixon (1913-1994; US president 1969-1974), it’s too tempting not to make.  Of the Corvette, she used the phrase: “I gave up on it”, later recounting: “the dealer was baffled” but denied the change was related to moving after eight years from Malibu to leafy, up-market suburban Brentwood.  While she “…needed a new car because with the Corvette something was always wrong…” she “…didn’t need a Volvo station wagon” although did concede: “Maybe it was the idea of moving into Brentwood.”  She should have persevered because as many an owner of a C3 Corvette understands, the faults and flaws are just part of the brutish charm.  Whether the car still exists isn't known; while Corvette's have a higher than average survival rate, their use on drag strips & race tracks as well as their attractiveness to males aged 17-25 has meant not a few suffered misadventure.

Joan Didion with Corvette, rendered as oil on canvas with yellow filter.

The configuration of her car seems not anywhere documented but a reasonable guess is it likely was ordered with the (base) 300 horsepower (hp) version (ZQ3) of the 350 cubic inch (5.7 litre) small-block V8, coupled with the Turbo-Hydramatic 400 (TH400) (M40) three-speed automatic transmission (the lighter TH350 wouldn't be used until 1976 by which time power outputs had fallen so much the robustness of the TH400 was no longer required).  When scanning the option list, although things like the side-mounted exhaust system (N14) or the 430 hp versions (the iron-block L88 & all aluminium ZL1, the power ratings of what were barely-disguised race car engines deliberately understated, the true output between 540-560 hp) of the 427 cubic inch (7.0 litre) big-block V8 would not have tempted Ms Didion, she may have ticked the box for the leather trim (available in six colors and the photos do suggest black (402 (but if vinyl the code was ZQ4)), air conditioning (C60), power steering (N40), power brakes (J50), power windows (A31) or an AM-FM radio (U69 and available also (at extra cost) with stereo (U79)).  Given she later traded-in the Corvette on a Volvo station wagon, presumably the speed warning indicator (U15) would have been thought superfluous but, living in Malibu, the alarm system (UA6) might have caught her eye.

Quintessential symbols of France, Bridget Bardot (b 1934), Citroën La Déesse and a lit Gitanes.

The combination of a car, a woman with JBF and a cigarette continued to draw photographers even after smoking ceased to be glamorous and became a social crime.  First sold in 1910, Gitanes production in France survived two world wars, the Great Depression, Nazi occupation but the regime of Jacques Chirac (1932–2019; President of France 1995-2007) proved too much and, following the assault on tobacco by Brussels and Paris, in 2005 the factory in Lille was shuttered.  Although Gitanes (and the sister cigarette Gauloise) remain available in France, they are now shipped from Spain and while in most of the Western world fewer now smoke, Gitanes Blondes retain a cult following.

Emily Labowe with Mercedes-Benz 300 TD (S123), photographed by Kristin Gallegos.

An image like this illustrate why, even if no longer quite as glamourous, smoking can still look sexy.  The 300 TD is finished in Manila Beige and for the W123 range Mercedes-Benz also offered the subdued Maple Yellow and the exuberant Sun Yellow which was as vivid as the Corvette's Daytona Yellow. 

No images seem to exist of Joan Didion with her Volvo station wagon but Laurel Canyon's Kristin Gallegos (b 1984) later followed Julian Wasser’s staging by photographing artist Emily Labowe (b 1993) with a Mercedes-Benz 300 TD station wagon and that once essential accessory: a cigarette.  One of the last of the “chrome Mercedes”, the W123 range was in production between 1975-1986 and the station wagon appeared in 1977 with the internal code S123 (only nerds use that and to the rest of the world they’re “W123 wagons”).  The designation was “T” (the very Germanic Tourismus und Transport (Touring and Transport)) or TD for the diesel-powered cars and the S123 was the company’s first station wagon to enter series production, previous such “long roof” models coming from coach-builders including many hearses & ambulances as well as station wagons.  The English still call station wagons "estates" (a clipping of "estate car") although a publication like Country Life probably still hankers after "shooting brake" and the most Prussian of the German style guides list the compound noun Kombinationskraftwagen which for decades has usually been clipped to the semi-formal Kombiwagen, (plural Kombiwagen or Kombiwägen) or, in general use: Kombi.   

Mercedes-Benz G4s: Gepäckwagen (baggage car, top left) & Funkauto (radio car, top right) and 300 Messwagen (bottom left) at speed on the test track, tethered to a W111 sedan (1959-1968, bottom right).

The factory did though over the decades build a handful including a brace of the three-axle G4s (W31, 1934-1939), one configured as a Gepäckwagen (baggage car), the other a Funkauto (radio car).  In 1960 there was also the Messwagen (measuring car), a kind of “rolling laboratory” from the era before technology allowed most testing to be emulated in software.  The capacious Messwagen was based on the W189 300 “Adenauer” (W186 & W189 1951-1962) and was then state of the art but by the 2020s, the capabilities of all the bulky equipment which filled the rear compartment could have been included in a single phone app.  Students of design will admire the mid-century modernism in the curve of the rear-side windows but might be surprised to learn the muscle car-like scoop on the roof is not an air-intake but an aperture housing ports for connecting the Messwagen’s electronic gear with the vehicle being monitored, the two closely driven in unison (often at high speed) on the test track while being linked with a few metres of cabling and although we now live in a wireless age, real nerds know often a cable is preferable, the old ways sometimes best.  The Messwagen remained in service until 1972 and is now on display at the factory’s museum in Stuttgart.

1957 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser (left), details of the apparatuses above the windscreen (centre) and the Breezeaway rear window lowered (right)

The 1957 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser was notable for (1) the truly memorable model name, (2) introducing the “Breezeway" rear window which could be lowered and (3) having a truly bizarre assembly  of “features” above the windscreen.  There’s no suggestion that when fashioning the 300 Messwagen the engineers in Stuttgart were aware of the Turnpike Cruiser but had they looked, it could have provided an inspiration for the way access to ports in the roof could have been handled.  Unfortunately, the pair of “radio aerials” protruding from the pods at the top of the Mercury’s A-pillars were a mere affectation, a “jet-age” motif embellishing what were actually air-intakes.  They were though a harbinger of the way in which future “measuring vehicles” would be configured when various forms of wireless communication had advanced to the point where a cable connection was no longer required.  

Liberal

Liberal (pronounced lib-ruhl (U) or lib-er-uhl (non U))

(1) Favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs (and in this context a synonym of progressive and antonyms of reactionary.

(2) Noting or pertaining to a political party advocating measures of progressive political reform (used often with an initial capital letter, something in some cases perhaps influenced by the existence of political parties with the name (where the initial capital is correct)).

(3) Of, pertaining to, based on, or advocating liberalism, especially the freedom of the individual and governmental guarantees of individual rights and liberties.

(4) Favorable to or in accord with concepts of maximum individual freedom possible, especially as guaranteed by law and secured by governmental protection of civil liberties (now better described as libertarian now the definitions of “liberal” are so fluid).

(5) As “liberal education”, of or relating to an education that aims to develop general cultural interests and intellectual ability (as distinct from specific vocational training).

(6) Favoring or permitting freedom of action, especially with respect to matters of personal belief or expression.

(7) Of or relating to representational forms of government rather than aristocracies and monarchies.

(8) Free from prejudice or bigotry; tolerant, unprejudiced, broad-minded

(9) Open-minded, free of or not bound by traditional or conventional ideas, values etc.

(10) Characterized by generosity and willingness to give in large amounts; unstinting, munificent, openhanded, charitable, beneficent; lavish.

(11) Given or supplied freely or abundantly; generous.

(12) Abundant in quantity; lavish.

(13) Not strict or rigorous; not literal (often of translations, interpretations etc).

(14) Of, relating to, or based on the liberal arts.

(15) Of, relating to, or befitting a freeman (now rare).

(16) A person of liberal principles or views, especially in politics or religion.

(17) A member of a “liberal” party in politics (if applied to a part actually named “Liberal”, in some contexts an initial capital should be used).

(18) Unrestrained, licentious (obsolete although the sense seems still to be understood by the Fox News audience).

1350–1400: From the Middle English, from the twelfth century Old French liberal (befitting free people; noble, generous; willing, zealous), from the Latin līberālis (literally “of freedom, pertaining to or befitting a free person” and used also in the sense of “honorable”), the construct being līber (variously “frank, free, open unrestricted, unimpeded; unbridled, unchecked, licentious”) + -ālis.  The –alis suffix was from the primitive Indo-European -li-, which later dissimilated into an early version of –āris and there may be some relationship with hel- (to grow); -ālis (neuter -āle) was the third-declension two-termination suffix and was suffixed to (1) nouns or numerals creating adjectives of relationship and (2) adjectives creating adjectives with an intensified meaning.  The suffix -ālis was added (usually, but not exclusively) to a noun or numeral to form an adjective of relationship to that noun. When suffixed to an existing adjective, the effect was to intensify the adjectival meaning, and often to narrow the semantic field.  If the root word ends in -l or -lis, -āris is generally used instead although because of parallel or subsequent evolutions, both have sometimes been applied (eg līneālis & līneāris).  The noun came into use early in the nineteenth century.  The antonym in the sense of “permitting liberty” is “authoritarian” while in the sense of “open to new ideas and change”, it’s “conservative”.  Liberal is a noun & adjective, liberalism, liberalizer, liberalization, liberalist & liberality are nouns, liberalize is a verb and liberally is an adverb; the noun plural is liberals.

The mid-fourteenth century adjective meant “generous” (in the sense of “quantity”) and within decades this has extended to “nobly born, noble, free” and from the late 1300s: “selfless, magnanimous, admirable” although, as a precursor of what would come, by early in the fifteenth century it was used with bad connotations, demoting someone “extravagant, undisciplined or unrestrained”; Someone something of a libertine (in the modern sense) therefore and it was in this sense Don Pedro in William Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) Much Ado About Nothing (1599) spoke of the lustful villain in Act 4, Scene 1:

Why, then are you no maiden, Leonato,
I am sorry you must hear. Upon mine honor,
Myself, my brother, and this grievèd count
Did see her, hear her, at that hour last night
Talk with a ruffian at her chamber window
Who hath indeed, most like a liberal villain,
Confessed the vile encounters they have had
A thousand times in secret.

The evolution in use continued and while in the sixteenth & seventeenth centuries “liberal” was used as a term of reproach suggesting “lack of restraint in speech or action”, with the coming of the Enlightenment there was a revival of the positive sense, the word now used also to mean “free from prejudice, tolerant, not bigoted or narrow” and that seems to have emerged in the late 1770s although by the nineteenth century, use often was theological rather than political, a “liberal” church (Unitarians, Universalists et al) one not so bound the rigidities in doctrine & ritual as those said to be “orthodox” (not to be confused with the actual Orthodox Church).  It was also in the nineteenth century that in England the phrase “liberal education” became widely used although what to claimed to described had a tradition in pedagogy dating from Antiquity although the it path to modernity was hardly uninterrupted, various forms of barbarism intervening and in this context it probably is accurate to speak of some periods of the Medieval era as “the Dark Ages”.  There was never anything close to a standard or universal curriculum but theme understood in the nineteenth century was it was the only fitting education for what used to be called “a gentlemen” (a term related in sense development to the Classical Latin liber (a free man)) and contrasted with technical, specialist or vocational training.  Historically, the “liberal arts” inherited from the late Middle Ages were divided into the trivium (grammar, logic & rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music & astronomy).

Much associated with the worst of America’s “corrupting coasts” (New York City & Hollywood), Lindsay Lohan is a classic liberal.

The now familiar use in politics began in the first decade of the nineteenth century, one of the many ripples from the French Revolution (1789) when it was used to suggest a tendency to “favor freedom and democracy” over the long dominant hierarchical systems which characterized feudal European society.  In English, the label was initially applied by opponents to whichever party or politicians championed individual political freedoms and it seems the word often was spoken with a French accent, the implications being that such notions were associated with chaos and ruin; the revolution of 1789 had shocked and frightened the ruling establishment(s) just about everywhere.  However, there seems to have been a fork in the sense development in the US which came from a tradition which of course viewed more approvingly revolutions which swept away tyranny and there, certainly by the 1820s, “liberal” was already being used to mean “favorable to government action to effect social change” and some historians have linked this to the religious sense of “free from prejudice in favor of traditional opinions and established institutions” (and thus open to new ideas and plans of reform); this theme has continued to this day.  From the very foundations of the first colonial settlements, in what became the US there has always been a tension between the lure of freedom & democracy and that of religious purity, the notion what was being created was a society ordained by God.

In politics the usual brute-force distinction is of course between “liberals” and “conservatives” and while the nuances and exceptions are legion, it does remain the core template by which politics is reported and it applies to institutions as varied as the Roman curia, the Israeli cabinet, the Church of England and presidential elections in the Islamic republic or Iran; while not entirely accurate, it remains useful.  What is less useful is the noun “liberalism” which in the nineteenth century did have a (more or less) accepted definition but which since has become so contested as to now be one of those words which means what people want it to me in any given time and place.  That the title of the “true inheritor” of liberalism has been claimed groups as diverse as certain neo-Marxists and the now defunct faction of the US Republican Party which used to be called the “Rockefeller Republicans” illustrates the problem.  Also suffering from meaning shifts so severe as to render it a phrase best left to professional historians is “neo-liberal”, first used in 1958 as a reference to French politics and theology but re-purposed late in the twentieth century to describe a doctrine which was a synthesis of laissez-faire economics, deregulation and the withdrawal of the state from anything not essential to national security, law & order and economic efficiency.  Some critics of latter day neo-liberalism call it "an attempt to repeal the twentieth century" which captures the spirit of the debate.

1972 Chrysler Valiant Charger R/T E49 (left) and 1974 Ford Falcon XB GT Hardtop (right), 1974 RE-PO 500K endurance race, Phillip Island, Victoria, Australia, November 1974.

The fifth round of the 1974 Australian Manufacturers' Championship, the 1974 RE-PO 500K event was run under Group C (Touring Cars) regulations over 106 laps (501 km (311 miles)) and one quirky thing about the race was it being a footnote in Australian political history, both the E49 Charger of Lawrie Nelson (b 1943) and the Falcon GT of Murray Carter (b 1931) carrying “Liberal” signage as part of a paid sponsorship deal arranged by the Liberal Party of Australia.  Carter finished second (Nelson a DNF (did not finish)), like the Liberal Party in that year's federal election (ie, they lost), although then party leader, Sir Billy Snedden (1926–1987), provided one of history's more memorable post election statements when he claimed "We didn't lose, we just didn't win enough votes to win." and he'd today be most remembered for that had it not be for the circumstances of his death which passed into legend.  Carter would later reveal that despite his solid result, the Liberal Party never paid up, the sponsorship deal apparently what later Liberal Party leader John Howard (b 1939; prime minister of Australia 1996-2007) might have called a "non-core promise".  

Death of former Australian Liberal Party leader Sir Billy Snedden.

The Liberal Party was in 1944 founded by Sir Robert Menzies (1894–1978; prime-minister of Australia 1939-1941 & 1949-1966 and a confessed Freemason) as essentially an “anti-Labor Party” aggregation of various groups and he emphasized at the time and often subsequently that he wanted his creation truly to be a “liberal” and not a “conservative” party; it was to be a “broad church” in which some diversity of opinion was not merely tolerated but encouraged.  Mostly he stuck to that although some would note as the years passed, perhaps he became a little less tolerant.  By 2024, the Liberal Party of Australia has fallen under the control of right-wing fanatics, religious fundamentalists, soft drink salesmen & suspected Freemasons and it doubtful someone like Sir Robert would now want to join the party, even if they’d have him.  In retirement, Menzies did become disillusioned with the party he'd help create and admitted he'd at least once voted for the DLP (Democratic Labor Party, a Roman-Catholic based outfit which was probably the most country's most awful political excrement until One Nation crawled from the sewer of discontent).  The current party leader is Peter Dutton (b 1970; leader of the opposition and leader of the Australian Liberal Party since May 2022).

The Australian arm of Rupert Murdoch's (b 1931) media empire has become essentially the propaganda unit of the Liberal Party of Australia.  In 2018 Brisbane’s Murdoch-owned Courier-Mail (known to sceptical locals as the “Curious Snail”) was able to run a gushing puff-piece on Mr Dutton, headed (left) by a statement from his wife Kirilly (b 1974): “He is not a monster.”  People might give him the benefit of the doubt on that one but the Courier-Mail has never been able to run the one on the right because neither Mr Dutton or his wife have ever denied he’s a Freemason.

Whether the Courier Mail will be tempted to run another advertorial under the heading “He is not a scientist” is doubtful but if it does it won't be fake news.

During the televised leaders' debate with Anthony Albanese (b 1963; prime-minister of Australia since 2022) on 16 April, 2025, Mr Dutton was asked whether climate change was making weather events more serious.  He agreed there was “an impact” but when asked if recent natural disasters were examples of climate change happening now, he responded: “I don’t know because I’m not a scientist”, adding he'd “let scientists pass that judgment”.  Conceptually, that’s not unreasonable and is way the most of us relate to stuff like number theory or quantum mechanics: we don’t “know” because we don’t have the background to understand but we “accept” the explanations of those who do understand.  That of course means accepting “facts” which one day turn out to be wrong because the history of science is a tale of disproving long-held orthodoxies but the approach does allow civilized life to unfold.  However, it’s believed Mr Dutton’s statement reflects more a need to pander to his constituency of climate change deniers who variously (with some multi-membership) are (1) those with a vested financial interest in the fossil fuel industry, (2) right wing fanatics and (3) pig-ignorant.  Demonstrating some intellectual flexibility, Mr Dutton doesn’t let his lack of scientific training prevent him from being an enthusiastic advocate of nuclear power generation.

Never denied: A depiction of Peter Dutton in the regalia of a Freemason Grand Master (digitally altered image).  Note the ceremonial apron being worn underneath jacket, a style almost unique to The Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry.

The arrival of political parties called “Liberal Party” & “Conservative Party” (often with modifiers (Liberal Democrats, Liberal Movement etc) created the need for labels which distinguish between the “liberal” and “conservative” factions within each: while all members of a Liberal Party are “big L Liberals” some will be “small c conservatives” and some “small l liberals” which sounds a clumsy was of putting things but it’s well-understood.  Some though noted there were sometimes more similarities than differences, the US writer Ambrose Bierce (1842-circa 1914) in an entry in his Devil's Dictionary (1911) recording: "Conservative (noun), a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others."  These days, he might be called a cynical structuralist.  Bierce, a US Civil War (1861-1865) veteran, never lost his sense of adventure and, aged 71, vanished without a trace in one of the great mysteries in American literary history.  The consensus was he probably was shot dead in Mexico and in one of his last letters there’s a hint he regarded such as fat as just an occupational hazard: “Good-bye. If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think it is a pretty good way to depart this life.  It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico--ah, that is euthanasia!”

So, “liberal” being somewhat contested, while the comparative was “more liberal” and the superlative “most liberal”, modified forms appeared including anti-liberal, half-liberal, non-liberal, over-liberal, pre-liberal, pseudo-liberal, quasi-liberal, semi-liberal, uber-liberal, ultra-liberal, arch-liberal, classical-liberal, neoclassical-liberal and, of course, liberal-liberal & conservative-liberal.  In modern use there have been linguistic innovations including latte-liberal (the sort of “middle class” liberal who, stereotypically, orders complicated forms of coffee at the cafés & coffee shops in up-market suburbs, the term very much in the vein of “Bollinger Bolshevik” or “champagne socialist”.  A latte liberal is a variation of the earlier wishy-washy liberal (someone who will express fashionable, liberal views but will not deign to lift a finger to further their cause) with the additional implication they are of the middle class and committed only to the point of "virtue signaling".  The portmanteau word milliberal (the construct being mil(ennial) +‎ liberal is a liberal of the millennial generation (those born between 1981-1986).  The term boba-liberal comes from internet-based (notably X, formerly known as Twitter) political discourse (mostly in the US it seems) and is a slur describing a liberal-leaning Asian American with politics or attitudes considered too tepid or whitewashed by other Asian Americans, stereotyped as focusing on superficial gestures over more meaningful actions especially in regards to Asian American activism.  Those who comment on stories on Fox News have also contributed to the lexicon, the portmanteau libtard (the construct being lib(eral) + (re)tard) and the meaning self explanatory, as it is for NazLib, the construct being Naz(i) + Lib(eral).  So, especially in the US, “liberal” is a word which must be handled with care, to some a mere descriptor, to some a compliment and to others an insult.  While there are markers which may indicate which approach to adopt (is one's interlocutor carrying a gun, driving a large pick-up truck, listening to country & western music etc), none are wholly reliable and probably the best way is to work into the conversation a “litmus paper” phrase like “liberal gun laws”.  From the reaction, one's path will be clear.

But although there are some for who it seems a calling, being a liberal is not in the DNA and there have been some who became conservative, just as there are conservatives who converted to liberalism.  Indeed, were the views of many to be assessed, it’d like be found they are various to some degree liberal on some issues and conservative on others, a phenomenon political scientists call “cross-cutting cleavages”.  Political journeys are common and may be endemic to one’s aging (and certainly financial) path, there being many youthful anarchists, socialists and nihilists who have ended up around the boardroom table, very interested in preserving the existing system.  The path from liberalism can also be a thing of blatant opportunism.  It is no criticism of Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021) that he re-invented himself as an anti-liberal because that was the way to become POTUS (president of the United States), despite for decades his stated positions on many social issues revealing his liberal instincts.  It’s just the way politics is done.  It’s also the way business is done and it was unfortunate Rupert Murdoch (b 1931) elected to settle in the matter of Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News to ensure no more of Fox’s internal documents entered the public domain.  Those which did appear were interesting in that far from Fox’s anti-liberal stance being Mr Murdoch’s ideological crusade, it was more the path to profit and were Fox’s audience to transform into something liberal, there would go Fox News.

Once was liberal: Candace Owens Farmer (née Owens and usually styled “Candace Owens”; b 1989) with "Candace Coffee Mug", one item in a range of Candace merchandise.

Because race remains the central fault-line in US politics, political cartoonists and commentators have never been prepared to have as much fun with the black conservatives as they enjoyed with “gay Republicans”, the latter a breed thought close to non-existent as last as the 1990s.  Black conservatism is to some extent aligned with black Christian religiosity but it’s a creature also of that under-reported demographic, the successful, black middle class, a diverse group but one which appears to have much in common with the priorities of their white counterparts.  In that sense Candace Owens is not wholly typical but she is much more entertaining and here early political consciousness was as a self-declared (though apparently retrospectively) liberal before moving to a nominally conservative stance although whether this was an ideological shift or a pursuit of clicks on the internet (on the model Mr Murdoch values to maximize revenue from Fox News) isn’t clear.  What is clear is Ms Owens knows about the Freemasons, her research into the cult beginning apparently when she “freaked out” after learning Buzz Aldrin (b 1930; who in 1969 was the second man to set foot on the Moon) is a confessed Freemason.  On 30 September, 2024, she discussed the Freemasons on her YouTube channel:

What is Freemasonry?  OK, so during the late Middle Ages, the world was united under the holy Roman Catholic church.  OK?  So if you had any opposition to the church throughout Europe, you were forced to go underground.  Right?  We were a Christian society.  And among the only organized groups that were able to move freely throughout Europe were these guilds of stonemasons, and they would then be, therefore, because they could move freely, hence, Freemasons.  They were able to maintain the meeting halls or lodges in virtually every major city, and the Masons were, essentially, very talented at architecture, and they had a bunch of secret knowledge — sometimes secret knowledge of architecture and of other topics.  And that knowledge was dated back to the times of Egypt. Right?  And it was essential maintaining this knowledge in the construction of European churches and cathedrals.

So one of the things that is well known is that Freemasons were in opposition to the church.  Right? They wanted to crush the church, which is why it is not ironic that the person who founded the Mormon church, as just one example — many of the churches, the very many Protestant faiths that we have — was Joseph Smith and he was a Freemason.  That's a fact, just as one example. Now, you may know some people that are Freemasons and you're going, well, I know this person and he goes to a lodge and he's completely harmless.  Yes. It is a known thing that 97 — like, something like 97% of Freemasons are not in the top tier degree of Freemasonry.  And it is understood that at the top tier degree of Freemasonry, you essentially become one of the makers of the world.

So I'm — just for those of you guys who've never even heard of that, and like I said, I would have been among you. I'm very new to relearning American history through the lens of Freemasonry. Some known Freemasons — George Washington was a Freemason, Thomas Jefferson was a Freemason, Benjamin Franklin was a Freemason, Buzz Aldrin was a Freemason — don't get me started. For those of you that have been listening to this podcast for a long time, you already know where I'm at — or where I'm at when it comes to NASA and the weird satanic chants that they were doing to establish the Apollo program and all the weird stuff that happened leading up to the moon landing. So I freaked out when I learned Buzz Aldrin was a Freemason.  It's not helping my case in believing those moon landings, I'll tell you that for free.  Franklin Roosevelt was another Freemason.

They're even on the moon: Autographed publicity photo of confessed Freemason Buzz Aldrin issued by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) prior to the Apollo 11 Moon mission (16-24 July 1969).

Most have concluded Mr Aldrin secretly would have left on the surface of the moon some sort of Masonic symbol or icon.  Of the other eleven men to have walked on the moon, only Apollo 15's James Irwin (1930–1991) and Apollo 16's John Young (1930–2018) are known to have been confessed Freemasons but so secretive is the cult there could be others.  As a footnote, as a member of New Jersey's Montclair Lodge No. 144 which is associated with the Scottish Rite, Mr Aldrin presumably would have worn his apron underneath his jacket, something unique to the Scottish tradition. 

Whether Ms Owens changed her views on matters Masonic after hearing Mr Aldrin had endorsed Mr Trump isn’t known but he issued an unambiguous statement of support, sentiments with which presumably she’d concur.  The former astronaut was especially impressed the Republican candidate had indicated in a second term he would elevate space exploration as a “policy of high importance again” and that his first administration had “reignited national efforts to get back to the Moon and push on to Mars.”  Beyond that, Mr Aldrin noted: “The Presidency requires clarity in judgement, decisiveness, and calm under pressure that few have a natural ability to manage, or the life experience to successfully undertake. It is a job where decisions are made that routinely involve American lives – some urgently but not without thought.  For me, for the future of our country, to meet enormous challenges, and for the proven policy accomplishments above, I believe we are best served by voting for former President Trump. I wholeheartedly endorse him for President of the United States. Godspeed President Trump, and God Bless the United States of America.”  Masonic votes having the same value as any other, Mr Trump welcomed the support.

They're everywhere: Confessed Freemason Most Worshipful Brother Harry S. Truman (1884–1972; US president 1945-1953) in Masonic regalia including Worshipful Master collar and apron (over jacket) with Provincial Honours.  Although he served as US president or vice president for eight years, Truman later wrote: “The greatest honor that has ever come to me, and that can ever come to me in my life, is to be Grand Master of Masons in Missouri.”

Masonic aprons are obligatory wear for any Mason when in a lodge or temple and they’re worn always on the outside except in Scotland where the tradition is for them to sit under the jacket.  Like much else in the cult of Freemasonry, the apron is a symbol of a mason’s place in the hierarchy (as codified a system as the precedence afforded to the orders of knighthood in the UK's imperial honors) and although variations exist, there are essentially five layers of apron-wear:

(1) Enterered Apprentice: The apron of an entered apprentice is plain white to symbolise purity and innocence and usually made of lamb's leather.

(2) Fellow Craft: The Fellowcraft apron has the same white background as that of the Enterered Apprentice except for the addition of two blue rosettes.  Despite much research and speculation, it’s not known why the color blue is used.

(3) Master Mason: The decoration on a Master Mason’s apron is much more elaborate and is recognizably Masonic in a way the simpler constructions are not.  Because many Master Masons elect not to progress to the status of Worshipful Master, for many this will be the apron they wear for their entire Masonic career.

(4) Worshipful Master: The only change to the apron when one enters the chair as Worshipful Master is the blue rosettes are replaced by three levels.  The symbols are distinctive so the wearer instantly is recognizable as being a present or past Worshipful Master of a Lodge.

(5) Provincial Honours: Once a mason has gone through the chair and become Worshipful Master, his title changes from Brother to Worshipful Brother.  As the years pass, he may be granted Provincial honours and his apron will then be changed from light blue to dark blue with gold braid.

Knowing masons are everywhere among us, Ms Owens had been scheduled to speak at a number of engagements in Australia  & New Zealand but interestingly, in October 2024, the Australian government issued a press statement confirming her visa had been "canceled", based on her "capacity to incite discord", leading immediately to suspicions her silencing had been engineered by the Freemasons.  It’s good we have Ms Owens to warn us about liberals and the Freemasons, an axis of evil neglected by political scientists who tend often to take a structralist approach to the landmarks in the evolution of the use of the term “liberal” which they classify thus:

(1) Classical Liberalism which emerged in the seventeenth & eighteenth centuries, was rooted in the ideas of the Enlightenment with an emphasis on limited government, a free market (ideas as well as goods & services), individual liberty, freedom of speech, the rule of law and the enforcement of private property rights.  The movement was a reaction to absolute monarchies and state-dominated mercantilist economies.

(2) Social Liberalism (understood as “liberal” in modern US use) was a layer of rather than a fork off classical liberalism but it did accept a greater role for the state in regulating the economy and providing social welfare to ensure a fairer distribution of wealth and opportunity.  It was a nineteenth century development to address the excesses of “unbridled” capitalism” and its critique of economic inequality was remarkably similar to that familiar in the twenty-first century.

(3) Neoliberalism as a term first appeared in the late 1950s but in the familiar modern sense it was defined in the era of Ronald Reagan (1911-2004; US president 1981-1989) & Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013; UK prime-minister 1979-1990) who embarked on project built around a philosophy which afforded primacy to free markets, deregulation, privatization and a reduction in government spending, often combined with globalization.  Their program simultaneously to restrict the money supply while driving up asset prices had implications which wouldn’t be understood for some decades.  The Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal project was a reaction to the post oil-crisis stagflation (a portmanteau word, the construct being stag(nation) + (in)flation)) and the alleged failure of the welfare state & the orthodoxy of Keynesian economics, named after English economist and philosopher John Maynard Keynes (later Lord Keynes) 1883-1946).

(4) Political Liberalism was most famously articulated by US philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002) in his book A Theory of Justice (1971), a work nobody much under forty should attempt because few younger than that would have read enough fully to understand the intricacies.  In summary, it does sound remarkably simple because it calls for a pluralist society built on principles of justice and fairness, administered by a system of governance which permits a diversity of viewpoints while maintaining a fair structure of cooperation.  Rawls’ political liberalism draws one in to what soon becomes and intellectual labyrinth; once in, it’s hard to get out but it’s a nice place to spend some time and most rewarding if one can maintain the same train of thought for several weeks.

(5) Cultural Liberalism is not new but from the mid-twentieth century, its range of application expanded as previously oppressed groups began to enjoy a recognition of their rights, initially usually as a result of a change in societal attitudes and later, by a codification of their status in law, the matters addressed including ethnicity, feminism, civil liberties, reproductive rights, religion and the concerns of the LGBTQQIAAOP community.

(6) Liberal Internationalism is an approach to foreign policy (really a formal doctrine in some countries) advocating global cooperation, international institutions, human rights, and the promotion of democracy.  Its core tenants included support for multilateralism, international organizations like the United Nations (UN), global trade and the promotion of liberal democratic governance worldwide.  What is called the “liberal world order” has underpinned the western world since 1945 but its dominance is now being challenged by other systems which have their own methods of operation.