The Death of Civilization

I had a thought today.

Our civilization is already dead. Think of it like a tree, standing there all tall and proud, home to squirrels and birds.  Dead as a stump.

Its actually been dead for some time. Decades probably. It, we, have been slowly rotting from the inside ever since.    We keep expecting the end to come quickly, suddenly, and violently.

Have you ever seen a dead tree rotting away? Sometimes they don't fall over. There is no grand moment of violence, just a never ending series of minor collapses, and no recovery.

Now, by itself that is a slightly dark, but not terribly persuasive thought exercise. But of course, I haven't actually explained WHY I had this thought.

You see, once upon a time people valued ability, skill... hard work. They did things with their spare time that required significant practice, learning and were generally useful to a large number of people.

We play video games. Sure, if you play them long enough you eventually develop something resembling a skill...

... but let me back up. We'll touch on our free time in a moment.

Convienence isn't really the explanation for what changed. By the time of our grandfather's generation the industrial revolution had been going for generations, and all manner of mass production, labor saving and so forth had already been invented.

It starts with the Boomers.

No. I think it starts earlier. I can't prove it, not in time for a simple blog post, but I suspect that a large number of the progressive minded elites in this country, the ones who didn't go to war (I or II), were already showing signs of the decay, masked by robust and living body of the ordinary people.

But with the Boomers we see it clearly for the first time.  Ask any Boomer to sum up the zeitgeist of their generation, their era, and you will inevitably hear about Woodstock, about the Civil Rights marches and the Vietnam protests.

Those aren't accomplishments. At best they are participation merit badges, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the vast majority of boomers didn't really do any of those things.

If you ask a little more, you'll probably hear about Fighting the Man, Free Love and 'sex, drugs and rock'n roll'.

That's not to say that great things weren't done, often by skilled and talented people of their generation. We put men on the moon, invented the Internet and the home computer. We put the power of a million minds on your desktop for you to watch elf ass wriggle across your screen before you got bored and switched to porn.

But for the first time in our era, our civilization, we stopped caring about the great creations of the age, the masters of science and industry, the creators and workers and shapers. We began caring more about rejecting the rules, fighting the man. We didn't care about success, we cared about the Revolution for its own sake.

And most of it was a lie.  Woodstock was, by all accounts, a miserable experience created by its own propaganda. Even the music was second rate due to shoddy preparation and planning. Even the best stars struggle under the conditions they were forced to play in.  The Vietnam protest didn't really do much to end the war, which lasted twenty years. Its more probable that the US government finally asked itself what it was doing there, unloved by almost everyone, and just gave up.  Twenty years from now we'll hear how Cindy Sheehan single handedly brought the Iraq War to a close by that logic.

And the Civil Rights movement? Well... lets just say that things haven't exactly gone as planned and leave it at that, for today.

There is a theme here, not just in the lack of accomplishment required to take pride in being a boomer, but in how all the things they prize are effectively anti-establishment. The word "anti-establishment" has become something complimentary, hasn't it?  But think about it for a moment. Do you like having roads to drive on? Establishment built that. You like having relatively crime free neighborhoods? Establishment.

The Establishment, for all its flaws, is something of a defining characteristic of Civilization itself. Civilization is far, far preferable to Barbarism, which is also Anti-Establishment.

The curious thing was that this sort of attitude began manifesting everywhere.  The very tale end of the Boomer Generation holds power now, and yet they'd rather use that power to tear down the very country they rule, to destroy the last vestige of The Establishment, The Man, and remake it in their own image.  What of Art?  Have you seen most modern art? It doesn't require a heck of a lot of talent to create most of it. The irony is that the real artists, the craftsmen with skill and vision, all seem to work in the corporate sector doing 'visual design' pieces or as 'hobby artists' working on the web for bux.  The guy getting the grant is more likely to shit on a plate and garnish it, selling it for forty thousand dollars in the process.  Since skill and accomplishment mean less than marching for the Cause, than Fighting the Man, the shit-plate gets the money and the praise, while the guy painting a mural on the wall of a chain restaurant gets to eat the plate.

The ultimate expression of this is schools. Teachers have the easiest degree of all college degrees, and they have the lowest IQ of any credentialed profession. They give out awards for participation to students, they reject thousands of years of math to teach 'fuzzy math', where just trying really hard make the answer right.  And yet, because it is 'for the children' they are among the highest paid professionals in the country. Not that you'll ever get them to admit it, of course.  They wail and complain about long hours, about being underpaid and under appreciated...  then they call a six year old a rapist for kissing another six year old. They throw a kid out of school for eating a poptart the wrong way (so that it looks vaguely like a gun).... the litany of indignities they inflict upon our young seems endless.

And when they finally go to far, when their utter lack of professionalism, accumen or ability is revealed? They aren't fired, they are made administrators, which is why there are now schools with more administrative staff than teachers.

Participation and believing in the right things is far more important that actually accomplishing anything.

As an indictment of the Boomer Generation, I think that would be far more than enough to see the lot of them tossed out to make their own way, without vampirically bleeding the young dry so they can have a few more years of living it up.

Unfortunately, that isn't the goal of this post.

No.

Its to point out that my generation, by which I mean both the Generation X crowd and the Millennials (hey, the Boomers claim nearly 30 years of people in their generation, why have they divided up the following generations into mere decade lengths?), have been raised by people who are merely squatting in the carcass built by better men in better times.  Far fewer of 'us' are interested in hard work, in craftsmanship, in anything that takes years to master than the Boomers were.  We worship celebrity, even of the most crass and pointless sorts. Make a fool of yourself on the Internet, make a million dollars. Film a dog doing dog stuff, make a million dollars.

I'd like to say the Nadir of this movement is Girls, a show that is a crappy rip-off of an older, marginally smarter show, with less attractive people and far fewer fans, but all the critical praise due a great, moving peice of Art.  Lena Dunham is the new model Sexy for our age, the goddess of beauty our debauched and worthless age deserves, but I'd be reaching.

The Tree is dead, but that just means things aren't going to get better, just slowly worse. Girls is merely a vanguard of the new depths we will sink to.

Idiocracy was Prophecy,  our Cassandra.

All Hail President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho!