Guest Post by Jim Kunstler
If this (first?) summer of Covid-19 has revealed anything about the current version of civilization, it’s the profound exhaustion of a culture reduced to going through the motions of its once-vital activities. A lot of things that we hope will come back are probably gone forever in the form we knew them, though they will eventually return in another configuration, reduced in scale, but perhaps finer in quality.
I miss baseball horribly, and its sad, half-assed attempt to present a rump season with no live bodies in the seats only amplifies the loss. But then, I haven’t gone to a stadium in twenty years, and I certainly won’t pay a hundred bucks or more sit in Fenway Park. I used to go to night games there all the time when I was a starving bohemian writing for the Boston hippie newspapers back in 1972. You could get a decent field-level seat behind first base for five bucks. When I was a kid in Manhattan in 1960, a bleacher seat in the old Yankee Stadium was a quarter (plus 30 cents round-trip on the IRT subway).
They weren’t writing $100-million-plus player contracts until fairly recently, either, and of course that’s been symptom of pro sports’ slide into fatal decadence. If baseball does try to stage a full season in 2021 or 2022, they will not be selling many hundred-dollar seats to an economically demolished middle-class. The teams will be functionally bankrupt by then and if they survive restructuring, there won’t be many million-dollar players. Maybe none. Carl Furillo, the veteran right-fielder for the 1955 World Series champion Brooklyn Dodgers, used to work construction in the off-season. He was on the crew that built New York’s Verrazano Bridge. Imagine Mike Trout hanging sheet-rock (if sheet-rock even exists as a product a few years from now).
I can imagine baseball reorganizing into two separate East and West leagues for a while, to reduce costly airplane travel, but even that might not last very long. If pro sports survives the political turmoil ahead, it will come out the other side as a strictly local and regional thing — and that will be the theme for all the things we like to do and must do. The idiocy of pro football will not survive at all. Its farm system (college sports) will be long gone.
Higher education committed suicide with its dual racketeering model. First was the college loan racket, in which schools colluded with the federal government to jam too many “customers” through the pipeline who didn’t belong there, and who buried themselves under a lifetime debt obligation they could never escape. The second was the intellectual racket of creating sham fields of study that contaminated all the other “humanities” with poisonous bullshit theory, and eventually even invaded the STEM disciplines. Covid-19 screwed the pooch on all that, scotching the four-year party-hearty in-residence part of the deal. For now, who needs an online class in Contemporary Sexual Transgression ($2000-a-credit) when you can just click on Porn-hub for free? Hundreds of colleges and universities will be going out of business in the years ahead.
The outlook for the big centralized high schools is also pretty dark. The teachers’ unions insatiable needs are only part of the picture. Consolidating many smaller schools to save on administrative costs seemed like a good idea at the time. But we ended up with thousands of gigantic schools that looked like insecticide factories and felt like minimum security prisons. They all depend on the costly yellow bus fleets to collect the kids from far and wide. The whole scheme ended up as an elaborate day-care operation that actually retarded the development of young people into functional, autonomous adults.
Covid-19 and the economic collapse it triggered will put an end to all that. How will the school districts cope with an epic loss of tax revenue from all the homeowners defaulting on their mortgages? They won’t. Schooling will have to reorganize, and probably at a very grassroots level, with home-schools evolving into neighbor-pods of tiny schools, and only among parents who have the literacy and numeracy to pull it off. We’ll be lucky if, years from now, we’ll see something like local academies spring up that can handle a few hundred students. I’d also warn you about assuming that the Internet is a permanent installation of the human condition. It depends utterly on a pretty fragile electric grid. We do, after all, have libraries, and maybe they can be persuaded to stop trying to get rid of all their books.
These Covid months have prompted Americans to pass the idle hours of joblessness and anomie with Hollywood’s canned entertainments. Could that all be over, too? The theaters were already sucking wind before the virus landed — relying on an ever more brain-dead repetition of comic book movies — while the quality product moved to Cable TV. Now that’s saturated, with the newer product fermenting into garbage. But who is going to keep paying for all that with unemployment at 30 percent, and moving higher?
Are you already bored out of your skull with reruns of the old classics? People truly need narrative art forms to make sense of reality, but they have to be tuned to the times we live in. My bet would be on the eventual return of live theater on local stages for original stories keyed to the new post-collapse reality — which will not be understood via Star Wars or Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Broadway is finished, with its endless reiterations of old hits, and also, of course, because New York City itself is only beginning a long journey down the drain before it can be reorganize into a functioning entrepôt. I’ve got half a mind to invest in an outfit that can put on puppet shows in my little flyover town.
As you can surely tell by now, the trend is local and smaller for all of these things. That may even be true for national elections and the venerable thing called the United States of America. The Democratic Party was initially only striving for mere suicide, but lately it looks like they want to destroy the country altogether — and they may succeed beyond their wildest dreams. Fifty years from now, several separate American nations may be sending their own regional baseball league champions to some kind of World Series, if we’re not still at war with each other.
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Go to church instead.
church has been canceled.
All forms of public gathering has been outlawed, by governors, with no legislative oversight.
I went to a restaurant to celebrate the folks B-Day(s). First time since the plandemic.
They tell you that you have to where a mask, unless you are seated. That means if you go to the bathroom, mask up. asinine interpretation of imaginary rules.
Imagine the rooms filled with beuracrats who make these rediculous rules:
“let’s see, if we make them jump through hoop X, without a mask, then they must return to hoop Y, while wearing a mask, unless they have a medical reason, in which case then they must move to hoop Z and then wash their hands, however, if there is a bathroom between X and Y, then Z is discontinued, for 2 weeks”
I liken this whole thing to Kabuki Theater. Overly dramatic to make a point, less about the story and more about the theatrics.
I feel more and more every day I am living a real life Monty Python sketch. The maksing, the phases, the social distancing. It’s just silly. You need a decoder ring to figure out what these idiots in charge are trying to do.
I think right now in Massachusetts we are in the mint green phase of reopening, but Tall Deval is mad that some people had the unmitigated gaul to actually want to have fun and be with their fellow humans, so we need to be punished by “indefinitely suspending part 3 of phase 2” reopening, which I believe is the burnt sienna phase. Not sure.
I am truly happy to know that when I go to the liquor store, Price Chopper, or Walmart those magical sliding doors, blessed by the BLM high priests and priestesses, can keep out the virus.
Maybe we should all just move into the local Walmart. They have everything we need after all.
gall
est omnis divisa in partes tres
Oh, I know, let’s let everybody vote – what harm could it do? You’re about to find out.
“Local and smaller” are good things.
NYC and WDC will not tolerate that (the South learned that lesson).
American education, once a shining beacon, has now devolved into mass indoctrination and a mill of idiots.
Gone is any focus on math, science, history (reality as it is, not as some wish it to be), or grammar studies (we are now told our language is evil, rife with bad words and racist phrases. News flash: every language is. Look it up. Oh, wait, Johnny and Susie are basically illiterate).
Yesterday I had an conversation with a very dear long-time friend who used to be an Advanced Placement Biology teacher. He did not come to teaching via a “degree in education” (which is a silly thing. You basically don’t have to know shit about what you are teaching, only that you now are certified to teach it to others). He has an honest-go-god degree in Biology. And several certificates in toxicology, blood pathology, and chemistry. He has always been passionate about science. Loved every aspect of it. He has a methodical mind, driven by observation and patient lab work.
That was beaten down by years of public school bureaucracy. Where it mattered not that a student came woefully unprepared for class, and lacked even a smidgen of caring about the subject. Rather, it was his fault because his test were “too hard” or he assigned “too much homework”. Again…he taught ADVANCED PLACEMENT BIOLOGY. Which is supposed to be challenging.
Parents would loudly complain that Johnny or Susie had football, or jazz, or band, or cheering and so could not be expected to complete his assignments. Folks, this is a small, rural, central Massachusetts town. It did not serve as a feeder school for top-level college football recruits. No one in their band was going to Juliard on a scholarship for their amazing mastery of the clarinet. Cheering is not a career.
Cutting the sports budget in this school district triggered a massive outcry from parents. Asking them to make sure Johnny or Susie brought a damn pencil to class was like asking them to donate a kidney. It was never, ever their child’s fault that their homework went undone. No..somehow the teacher was to blame.
Children who came from a housing project in the same town were known to be raised by a grandmother or foster parent. These children were almost always given a free pass. They were on some kind of IEP. They got additional time for tests, homework, and could do whatever they wanted in class. Rather than work with them to instill a love of learning, they were taught to be victims who apparently could not excel in school.
Now we have teachers who think it’s unsafe to physically be in a school building, yet they want to be paid the exact same amount for a few hours of Zoom learning. Residents are told the school budget to heat, light, and maintain a cavernous suck-hole must be maintained for when they “re-evaluate” distance learning in November. Why November? We can all speculate, can’t we?
Money for bussing that will never happen is still being appropriated.
Many who have read my comments on the coming housing apocalypse know my thoughts on what is going to happen. The bottom is going to fall out, and there will be no more taxes to pay for all this bullshit. Parents are going to have to get their heads out of their asses and pull together to make sure their kids learn.
So my friend and I said that what is probably going to happen is all the liberal teachers who want to work on their BLM signs and their marching will be gone, and the good teachers who still give a rat’s ass about teaching will be hired on privately by smaller groups to teach. There is just no other way this pans out. People are starting to see that these Zoom classes don’t work, especially for very young children who lack the discipline to sit in front of a screen and learn. Kids under 13 NEED peer interaction. They need to be with other kids. This is a fact of our biology, it cannot be undone because of a virus that affects primarily those over 70 or with pre-existing conditions. That is magical thinking on a grand scale.
What we are doing, besides ruining an entire economy, is dooming an entire generation to idiocy, idleness, and crime.
We are going backwards to when England and Europe allowed children to run wild in the street, unable to read, and only useful for the most menial of tasks, and most of them physically dangerous.
When those of us who can read, write, do math, and understand physics, biology, chemistry, die, which we all will eventually, then the world will devolve into merely survival.
Sure, the elites are still educating their offspring, but so what? When you have a handful of chiefs and the rest are illiterate people with zero idea of how to do anything, who is going to run anything?
If you cannot even read a book and retain the knowledge because you were not taught to have reading comprehension, when you are unable to extrapolate knowledge from situations around you, then this country is going to just fall completely into chaos.
We are not that far off folks. Believe it.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/black-teen-take-off-black-lives-matter-mask-graduation
Proud of my alma mater for the first time in over 25 years
I do think a lot of good will come of this. For the first time in many years, almost everybody has had to slow down to a pace very much more in line with historic norms. They are considering whether the lives they are living, particularly in the the large urban areas, are really worth all the stress required. One of the difficulties in making change is trying to imagine what the alternative would be like. They don’t have to wonder anymore. The techies in my area have all reported that nearly everyone they know who is working from home likes it, and wishes it to continue post-Covid. This alone will create huge differences, as many of them will migrate to smaller and more easily to navigate places. The huge waste of commutes will be curtailed. And the cities that have acted as magnets for the young are falling out of favor, and those left behind will have to figure how to meet the financial burden of huge bureaucracies with a depleted tax base. They will have to address this problem, or else risk a further loss of their tax base. This change will not be without pain, there will of course be some downsides, but I do believe we will have something better when things settle down.
The response to COVID-19 was to shut the country down. It was a mistake. They should have just given warnings out like they do every flu season. The country is damaged seriously by the actions the federal and state Gov. did.
Anyone who can be honest with themselves can now see this was no “mistake”. The continued doom porn and closings/rollbacks when DEATH counts are down and continue to go down is nothing more than fear mongering designed to continue to control the masses.
If the masses stood up and said “no more” and opened en masse, what would the governments do? Would we have our very own Tienanmen Square moment? Would our local police, in totality, turn on us and force everyone, everywhere, to stop living their lives?
This is the biggest, most successful psyops ever conducted.
We as a populace continue to be sheep led to slaughter. This will not conflagrate until the masses are starving and the dollar is deemed to dangerous to keep as the reserve currency.
People generally have to learn the hard way, and this will be the hardest lesson of all.
Well now, do we see a plan coming forward?
The Cloward-Piven Strategy To Collapse America:
Healthcare– Control healthcare and you control the people. HAPPENING NOW
Poverty – Increase the Poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live. HAPPENING NOW
Debt – Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty. HAPPENING NOW
Gun Control – Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government. That way you are able to create a police state. HAPPENING NOW
Welfare – Take control of every aspect of their lives. (Food, Housing, and Income) HAPPENING NOW
Education – Take control of what people read and listen to us“ take control of what children learn in school. ALREADY DONE
Religion – Remove the belief in the God from the Government and schools. ALREADY DONE
Class Warfare – Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to take (Tax) the wealthy with the support of the poor. HAPPENING NOW
Right now, steps 1-5 and 8 are being executed right now in how our government is reacting to the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak, with steps, 6 and 7 already having been implemented since 2008. The American economy is being split into pieces right now by the combination of a $2 trillion dollar bailout with more coming, Americans under stay-at-home orders, and with more people right now on unemployment in two weeks of the coronavirus crisis than in the second year of the Great Depression of 1929.
Optimist.
Gee, he voted for Obammy too.
How the woim turns.
There were vast swaths of my life where you could wake me from REM sleep and I could tell you how many games out of first the Yanks were or Mickey’s batting average to the third decimal point. I lived close to Fenway when I was courting my wife in the days of Sal Bando, Reggie Jackson, Carl Yastremski, and Rico Petrocelli. I’d buy a bleacher seat for $2.50 and wrap the stub with a fiver and give it to the ushers who managed the corporate box seats. They knew who was coming and not coming so would put us in the empty box seats. I watched dozens of games with my feet resting on the away team’s dugout.
Now, you couldn’t drag me into a baseball game in chains. So black lives matter? Then my love of the game doesn’t. And fuck you, too.