It was only a few decades ago that Walmart entered the pantheon of American icons, joining motherhood, apple pie, and baseball on the highest tier of the altar. The people were entranced by this behemoth cornucopia of unbelievably cheap stuff packaged in gargantuan quantities. It was something like their participation trophy for the sheer luck […]
Spring is popping now with a ferocious energy that can only remind the sullenly sequestered masses that life is going on without them. Every living thing is busy making-and-doing out there, except the poor humans, idled without work or purpose. That won’t last long. People don’t submit automatically to zombification when some pissant bureaucrats issue them […]
At least in wartime, the bars stay open. That’s how you know this is a different thing altogether from whatever else you’ve seen in your lifetime. Even those of us who signed up for this trip — that is, who expected a long emergency — may be a little bit in cosmic awe at just […]
A February night in 1924, in a Manhattan concert hall owned by the Aeolian piano company… the wailing, warped, and flatted clarinet glissando that opens George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue announced the 20th century’s self-recognition that something new was up in the world, and especially in the USA. The composer tried to represent the stupendous […]
Do you know your place? In these days of hysterical Wokesterism, the question would surely provoke a riot of cowbell-clanging Antifa cadres, fainting spells in the congressional black caucus, and gravely equivocal op-eds from David Brooks of The New York Times. Yet it’s a central, unacknowledged quandary of our time that so many Americans have no place […]
I like to keep up with the Academy awards to see just how much Hollywood has lost its mind from year to year. And since America is marinated in the juices of Hollywood, it’s a nice Rorschach test for the mysterious tendings of our nation. By the way, I got in a late screening of Black […]
On this solemn night a great stillness falls upon the land as the Leviathan of Washington is sent to its room to get its mind straight, and the USA gets on with collapse in earnest. There will be no visions of sugarplums for the Deep Staters as the government enters its induced coma, only premonitions […]
The Kavanaugh hearing underscored another eerie condition in contemporary USA life that offers clues about the combined social, economic, and political collapse that I call The Long Emergency: the destruction of all remaining categorical boundaries for understanding behavior: truth and untruth, innocent and guilty, childhood and adulthood, public and private. The destination of all this confusion […]
I suppose many who think about the prospect of economic collapse imagine something like a Death Star implosion that simply obliterates the normal doings of daily life overnight, leaving everybody in a short, nasty, brutish, Hobbesian free-for-all that dumps the survivors in a replay of the Stone Age — without the consolation of golden ages […]
Is it possible that we Americans only pretend not to notice the conditions that produce an epidemic of school shootings, or is the public just too dumbed-down to connect the dots? Look at the schools themselves. We called them “facilities” because they hardly qualify as buildings: sprawling, one-story, tilt-up, flat-roofed boxes isolated among the parking […]
The New York Times worked itself into a fugue state this morning of the MLK holiday with a front-page orgy of reproving headlines: “[Charles] Blow: Trump is a Racist, Period”; “Donald Trump’s Racism, the Definitive List”; “‘I’m Not a Racist,’ Trump says, as DACA Hopes Dim”; “In Trump Remarks, Black Churches See a Nation Backsliding.” I […]