America is being trashed from our institutions to our public squares. Look around, roving gangs of cultural and historical illiterates – the uneducated educated – are defacing monuments; downtowns are torched by the very same hordes; public spaces are turned into graffitied homeless encampments with feces and hypodermic needles in a sickening sphere of influence overlapping the places that used to be for rollicking kids and families; and the whole thing spills into our politics. Elections are a pandemonium filled with the hyperbole to remake or tear down America while the chief malefactors designed an election system that made it easy to game. In essence, the rules of the election game function as a game without rules since they are so elastic, confusing, and contradictory with early and earlier voting, voting after election day after the intervention of unconstitutional actors, shot gunning ballots through the mail like the confetti falling from the ceiling after a NCAA national championship game, many jurisdictions lacking the will or ability to verify the ballots, and local Democrat-dominated election boards acting like feudal lords over their fiefdoms and flaunting any rules that do exist. Sounds like the wholesale trashing of America to me.
After the bill is totaled for this parade of the grotesque that we call an election season, we’ll have come to realize that big money was fully on board with the party of big government, the Democrats. Bloomberg was committed to spending $150 million to bring down Trump and his supporters. He ended up ladling $106,000,000. Is there any doubt about the stance of Silicon Valley and its tributaries? Zuckerberg himself answered that question in testimony to Congress – “extremely left-leaning”. Reid Hoffman (Microsoft, LinkedIn) spewed $7.6 million with $1 million each for Schumer’s slush fund and the Biden affiliate Unite the Country. His wife, Michelle Yee, pumped half a million into Biden’s coffers. Allen Blue (LinkedIn), Kevin Scott (Microsoft), Brad Smith (Microsoft), Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook), David Zapolsky (Amazon), Steven Kessel (Amazon), Douglas Vetter (Apple), Eric Schmidt (Alphabet), Reid Hastings and wife (Netflix), and a host of others opened the cash floodgates to the tune of six to seven figures to the left of the decimal point. Do you have any doubts about where K St. and big finance ended up?
Paul McCartney was right in singing “money can’t buy me love”, but it can buy a Mafia-like organization with its many “soldiers” to stretch the waist-line elastic of an election system that was refashioned for any size belly.
The drumroll of tycoons backing (or banking) the Democrats includes the usual suspects such as Warren Buffett, George Soros, Tom Steyer, etc., etc., etc. What’s happening with the rich for them to be lining up behind a party whose political carnival barkers profess to hate them . . . or in reality bilk them? The quandary can’t be easily answered except as a commonality of values and worldview. The coed blathering about evils of George Washington as she affixes a rope around his statue’s neck, the corporate heads of Alphabet, and the rest of the Fortune 500 CEO’s have more beliefs in common than they do with the owner of a local hardware store.
The CEO and the miscreant came to the same ideological place because they arose from the same subcultural ether: the upper third of American life. Through their wealthy metropolitan suburbs, prep schools, and the Ivy League, they are of the mind to either bankroll the Democratic Party to the left or subsidize the pillaging of the country, as the Party’s media darlings – from the same subcultural soup, by the way – wobble around trying to justify the madness. For today’s left, some got rich and others hit the streets from their safe perch on campus.
Today’s nouveau riche are accretions to yesterday’s. American has no official aristocracy, but we do have an unofficial one. It’s anyone with the critical mass of wealth. Millionaires alone don’t count any more. A family pedigree with trust-fund millions and multi-billionaires do. Possession of the equivalent of the GDP of a Central American country is the entry point into America’s nobility of today. No invitation from the queen (Michelle Obama?) is required. The newly arrived add to a polymorphous Patricii.
For the old gentry, someone somewhere down the family tree joined the ranks of the filthy rich and passed it to their scions. Do the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Kennedys, and Waltons remind you of anyone? Add to them the newly minted gazillionaires. John Adams writing in the 18th century extensively wrote on the troubling happenstance of a “natural aristocracy” in America. The Rockefellers, Kennedys, et al, would be the Boston Brahmins of the Bradlees, Brinleys, and Lowells to Adams. He saw their narrow-minded ambition and avariciousness as a threat to the republic. They were “always the most dangerous” class and if unrestrained they would be the “destruction of the commonwealth”. That’s the reason for his support for corralling them in their own house of the legislature, a senate. Once penned, they could be flanked by a chief executive and lower house.
Today, our Senate is in no position to perform that function after the passage of the 17th Amendment (1913). The hyper-rich with their newly acquired gazillions have nowhere to go but be like Caesar: buy the affections of the plebes with bread and circuses, or lavish campaign contributions. There’s nothing quite like having a mob on-call. Caesar could well understand. George Soros has much in common with Julius.
What has this agglomeration of our “betters” given us? Their influence, after all, is everywhere. Our public squares under this cultural miasma seemed to have been inspired by the spare, stern, and hard face of the “beast of Belsen”, Irma Greese (see below). Look at these spaces, and then at her.
Whether they be an open space in a planned development or a courtyard in front of a high-rise, they resemble military parade grounds studded with an odd, out-of-place thing, a “sculpture”, that has more in common with the glacial eratics dotting the landscape of the Scablands of eastern Washington state. New York City’s Hudson Yards has the freak “Vessel”.
New York City seems to be dotted with these sculptural eratics. Another one is the now-deceased “Tilted Arc” (by Richard Serra) in Manhattan’s Foley Federal Plaza. It proved to be a visible and physical contradiction, like all walls, to the very purpose for a plaza: social intercourse, interaction, and “inter- “anything involving human beings. Luckily, wiser heads prevailed and the thing was torn down and hauled off to the scrapyard in 1989.
The buildings surrounding the parade grounds – aka “plazas” – could be jumbled eyesores like LA’s Disney Concert Hall or the structural boxes that were animated by Germany’s Bauhaus movement or Rommel’s Atlantic Wall. Long gone are the graceful lines of neo-classicism with its adornments. Long gone are the interplay of nature, terraces, columns, and balustrades in our green spaces. It seems that our urban landscapes were inspired by the Soviet Union . . . or worse. The setting for the Vessel would be just as fitting for a guillotine.
The only applicable interplay in modern architecture is the one between ideology and design. Speaking of long gone, long gone are defined boundaries and the architectural axis. The limits to a public space are the imposing and ominous structures that resemble Mussolini’s Fascist Party headquarters in Rome, or busy traffic lanes. The spaces are boundless except for the grim and graceless stare of these giants.
The formlessness comports well with the unquestioned obedience to the belief in the tabula rasa of the mind among our so-called cultural superiors. To many of them, there are no preordained limits, only those that we choose to plug and unplug into our self-identity. If we can’t see their function because our minds are too superficial, they are to be discarded like so much rubble in front of a bulldozer’s blade. Functionalism replaces order and standards.
Michael Lewis writing in National Review Magazine makes the case: “… after World War I, modernists abolished the axis, as well as a good many thrones and altars, and replaced it with the idea of flowing space. Paths of movement were to be efficient and functional, without any ceremonial hierarchy, suggesting freedom of motion in any direction. Where the public square was once a kind of bounded outdoor room, it was now a mere incident along boundless space.” It’s now considered a social good for people to intellectually and morally emasculate themselves, just like their public spaces.
And, boy, are we emasculating ourselves. The moral and intellectual castration began in earnest when it started its march through our governmental institutions. Official sanction was given for our urban outdoors to be turned into an open sewer. San Francisco began its slide into the gutter when in 1961 it announced that it would no longer enforce its vagrancy laws. The idea went national when the Supreme Court in 1972 issued one of its decrees in Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville that abolished such laws. Contemporaneously, the doors of our mental asylums were flung wide open and the number of inmates plunged from 559,000 in 1955 to 72,000 in 1994. Adding insult to injury, in 1975, the Supreme Court once again piled on with its ruling in O’Connor v. Donaldson. After the Court jumped into the fray with O’Connor, we could no longer reinstitutionalize because another one of the Court’s infamous “tests” made confinement a Sisyphean task.
Where would the released end up? You guessed it. They congregated in those open spaces meant for kids and families. And thus, our open spaces became informal convention centers for junkies, the mentally troubled, and the bachelor herds that we often call youth gangs. Who wants to go to the park, with or without COVID hysteria? It’s far safer to ride out the horrors beyond your home’s walls with your internet, smartphone, and video games. Hopefully, you’ll have a gun in case what’s outside makes its way inside . . . if your local sovereigns haven’t regulated the 2nd Amendment into oblivion, or, God forbid, defunded the local PD.
COVID became the go-to excuse to further malform our existence. We’re trashing our faces with masks for God’s sake. The masks, social distancing, and lockdowns have killed romance, our children’s schooling, and given us a scorched earth through our economy. Church, Thanksgiving, and Christmas are redubbed super-spreader events.
All of this has come to us not from scientists and medical practitioners, but from lawyers. For some reason, the strong scent of power is irresistible to those who passed the bar. Our governmental pyramid is filled with them. Only a handful have a PhD after their name.
Oh, they, the JD’s, claim that’s what the “science” says. But they don’t understand what the science says any more than my grocery store’s stocking clerk. If I had to bet on the one with the most knowledgeable of science, my money would be on the clerk. To borrow from James Carville, just like one could trawl through a mobile home park with $5 on a fishing line and hook many Paula Joneses, so I could wade my way through the halls of almost any professional building with that very same $5 and hook any number of lawyers.
And, also, you might snag a few politicized “experts” along the way. “Experts” are notorious for having the blinders of a racehorse. They frequently have little empathy for competing “experts” and look at the world through their narrow professional prism. If you want a sure path to hell, find yourself a narrow claque of “experts”, follow their advice to the last punctuation mark, and then scramble for excuses as things fall apart, for them and the rest of us.
These trashed times come to us courtesy of a certain political class with cramped cultural antecedents. With a few politicized “experts” in tow, they have left an inhospitable living space in their wake. We can’t go to work, school, church, see grandma, and experience Christmas cheer due to their singular approach to a science that the lawyers don’t understand, but their patronizing “experts” do, but to the exclusion of any other consideration. If we are ever again allowed to go outside, we’d be reacquainted with the marred urban surroundings that they knowingly and unknowingly left behind.
Trashed elections. Smothered public life. Venturing outside is a walk on the wild side. Our cityscapes are an affront to decency and good sense. The waterboarding of life through a return to lockdowns, school closures, mandatory masks, social distancing, and all along knowing it didn’t work the first time. Other than that, what’s there to complain about?
RogerG
