Keep Your Head: Part 2: It Always Degenerates To Bugs And Death

One key to knowing the current mess is almost entirely contrived from bullshit is to know it happened before. I’ve linked to a fictional example of the show we’re watching in real life. Watch this clip:

It’s a powerful scene from an excellent movie. (If you haven’t seen the movie Network, from 1976, you should watch it.)

In Network the man on the set is desperately struggling with his inner turmoil. You can feel his loss. He shouts “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” It’s not pure unhinged rage, it’s a cry of freedom. He’s telling the world “I’m not your fuckin’ pawn!” He’s not completely insane. In fact that’s the tragic part. It’s his sanity that causes his misery. His is the frustration of a man swept up in events beyond his control. His misery is exploited by everyone around him.

TV newsman Howard Beale is acting out not just because he feels like a pawn in other people’s games but because he knows it and doesn’t like it. He didn’t choose to join the parade. He cannot find a way out. He feels trapped.

That role was played (beautifully!) in 1976. I don’t think it feels outdated in 2022. I’d point out that Beale was a man of some accomplishment. He wears a suit and tie. He’s reasonably wealthy, has a position of some respect, pays his taxes, and so forth. He’s articulate and is thinking about the world around him. The thinking is the part that causes trouble. He’s a full fledged adult in a place where adults are seemingly not in charge. He’s upset that everything is going to shit but he’s also upset that the situation was neither caused by nor can be resolved by… him. He has been robbed of agency.

[Note: there was a time when a man who controlled or at least had influence over his own affairs was said to have “agency”. Online dictionaries lack this definition. They see agency as they would see bureau. Orwell called it! Words are robbed of meaning whenever it’s convenient. Tough shit, I know words and “agency” works here. Online dictionaries can kiss my ass.]

Anyway Beale hasn’t lost it because he made dipshit unwise decisions. He’s not a drug addict, bankrupt, or deeply unwise. He was pushed over the edge. In fact, he has a trace of dignity and he’s bravely holding on to it. He won’t simply submit to the madness that surrounds him. Beale would have been a straight arrow in a world that made sense to him. He could be a straight arrow again if given the chance. In the parlance of the internet in 2022; he didn’t take the ticket and therefore he resents the ride.

The movie was made in 1976. Half a century has passed.

I was alive in 1976. I was just a whippersnapper but I remember the feel of the era. It felt like that movie scene. 1976 was not a time of stable, reasoned, people doing stable reasonable things.

Everyone from that time starts their story with the oil embargo. This made the price of fuel very high. There was a recession (we’re in a recession right now if you use the original definition of “recession”). Inflation was rampant. Unemployment was high. Absolutely everything I just said is equally true of 1976 and 2022.

Economic collapse hurts. I remember my parents worried about bills. I remember plans for a house addition that never happened. I remember my dad rolling out building plans and saying something about loans. I was a smart kid. I remember hearing the interest rate he mentioned and thinking immediately and without hesitation “I guess that’s not going to happen”. I knew it instantly. And of course it didn’t happen. Inflation becomes a current that makes you stop swimming forward. Sometimes when things suck, it’s enough to tread water. (If we calculated inflation the same way we used to, we’d have a number about the same as the 1970’s. Notice how the definition of “recession” and the calculation for inflation have both changed recently. This has no effect whatsoever on the true situation. All it does is tell you the folks in charge aren’t interested in solving problems so much as appearing to solve them.)

Scarce fuel meant that for a few winters the house was chilly. After some cold winters my family installed a wood stove. I remember that wood stove fondly! It felt oh so warm to stand next to a wood stove! I remember my dad working his ass off to haul wood. I haul wood now for my own house. It’s just as hard now as it was then. From then until now, I can’t feel safe in a house that doesn’t have some sort of auxiliary heating system.

Just as now, school got funky. It went through a cycle I can only call “proto-woke”. All of a sudden my teachers started saying strange things. Most of my life they’d said things that wouldn’t be out of place in 1940 or even 1740. Fractions and letters and basics remain the same… so of course school dispensed with them and focused on “the current thing”.

First, they beat us to death over the metric system. I didn’t (still don’t) mind the idea but they went at it with the zeal of true believers. I was (am) perfectly happy measuring in centimeters or inches or fucking parsecs; units are units. The teachers were just super extra on board as if an invention from the time of Napoleon was the greatest idea of the 20th century. I assume that was an order from on high?

Later, I remember reading pamphlets generated for kids by newspaper companies and National Geographic. The pamphlets said strange things in a strange way. They had an egghead tone I eventually associated with Al Gore. The “I’m an expert so believe this crazy shit I’m saying” tone. I, a young innocent Curmudgeon, believed what they said. They were teachers and experts; how was I to know they were idiots?

I forgive myself for buying their crap. I was just a kid. I’m lucky they were enthused with millimeters instead of sexual identity. As for buying crap as an adult, how many adults tuned in to Fauchi. How many checked weekly to see if the rules from this week were different than last week, as if a virus has a calendar. How many people followed rules by Governor A and thought the dumbasses under Governor B were all going to die? How many assholes hoped those lose and risky shitheads in State B would die to prove the point? How many folks quietly grinned when the annoying uptight Puritans in State A died just as fast as the beachgoers in B? All over the world, how many elderly died alone while their full grown kids stood on the other side of a glass wall? What the fuck is wrong with society that we’d let people die alone?

Back in my youth in the 1970’s, as I had my first experience watching society crumbling, I was sure I’d never drive a car. Gasoline was running out when I was barely old enough to pedal a bicycle. It would be long gone by the time I could get a license. So sad. On the other hand, my parent’s gas guzzling Chevy turned into an efficient Volkswagen and I liked it. It was a lot cooler than the big dumb Detroit iron. It’s hard to remember, but back then most cars were made domestically and domestic cars universally sucked. They were just future rust wrapped around gutless engines. The little VW I liked so much was strange and foreign.

In 1979 America bailed out Chrysler. I was just a kid but I wasn’t dumb. “If Chrysler made shitty cars shouldn’t they go bankrupt? We bought a VW because it’s awesome. Why prop up a factory that makes junk?” A kid too young to buy beer could figure this out. The question for a cycle of bullshit is this; could adults surrounded by bullshit reason as well as naïve kid just trying his best? The answer wasn’t reassuring: “Shut up kid, this is an emergency and a one time thing.” It sounded like crap to me. I wondered why they didn’t have a better answer. Did adults just say whatever they want to get whatever feels good?

Now that I’m older I know that’s exactly what they do. What sounded like crap turned out to be crap. Always was, always will be. Detroit tanked then and has been tanking ever since. The Chrysler bailout was a “one time emergency” until it was a “happened twice” emergency. Chrysler’s second bailout came in the second wave of bullshit I’ve experienced, in 2009. General Motors got on board too. Why not? It’ll never stop so long as there’s a population of votes to be purchased with someone else’s money. [In case you’re wondering what these cycles of shitty cars and bailouts are like, here’s a post yours truly made during the second cycle (2012). (Note: Like the changing definition of “recession” and the altered calculation of inflation, the YouTube video from 2012 was memory holed. That’s the thing about bullshit, by definition it’s more for show than an actual legitimate effort to do something.)]

As happens in most shit-cycles, the food supply ebbed. Mismanaged economies always damage the food supply because mismanagers like to tinker with things. Foods popped up with packaging that looked exactly like something served in Soviet Russia or a prison. (Oh the stories I could tell about the blocks of cheese!)

The shitty packaging somehow made it cheaper in ways that weren’t clear to me. It doesn’t cost more to make packaging with a happy font or a clever word… but generics tired hard to look ugly. That was the point.

It wasn’t enough. Generics weren’t sufficiently demoralizing. Eventually school told me I’d eat bugs when I got older.

The bugs things was necessary because of overpopulation. You might think crickets on a plate is a new thing but it’s not. Every time eggheads have too much power they fuck things into the ground. Every time they fuck things into the ground someone gleefully announces their new improved variant of “peasants eat bugs”.

I was too young to know the backstory. Long before fictional Newsman Beale started shouting, Paul R. Ehrlich an incompetent dipshit professor wrote The Population Bomb. He wrote it in 1968. He predicted mass starvation at exactly the time when human beings were on the cusp of eliminating mass starvation. No kidding, the man was the most wrong a human being could be in any timeframe from Neandertals to last Tuesday.

Everything he predicted didn’t happen but it was pure crack to the elite. It “went viral” and authority figures freebased that shit like a President’s son doing coke. Elites love stories of mass die offs. The Georgia Guidestones, fretting over automated workplaces, and Fauchi all bask in the same Malthusian doom Ehrlich was peddling in the 1960’s. (Note: In the 1970’s the coked up president’s son was George Bush Jr.. Now the coked up President’s son is Hunter Biden. Different political parties, similar behavior.)

My school teachers liked to predict massive and unpleasant changes in the future. In retrospect I see a clue in the timing. All those massive and unpleasant changes were always slated to arrive after the teacher or professor or politician has exited the scene. Nobody talks about how they’re going to enjoy the bug eating future. They talk about how you’re going to enjoy a bug eating future. They harped to me (an innocent little Curmudgeon) that he’d be eating bugs before he was old enough to not drive the cars that no longer had fuel. Thanks guys!

Is it different now? Not even a bit! Here’s Nicole Kidman (inexplicably dressed like a vampire) happily eating bugs. Watch her talk about how great it is. She’s on Vanity Fair (I think) and using words like “microlivestock”. She’s proof that no matter how hot you are, you’ll eat bugs if the boss tells you to.

Here’s Southpark making fun of Matt Damon eating an Impossible Burger with a cup of piss.

When I was in 5th grade there was a pamphlet about how we’d all eat bugs in the future because it was necessary. Someone right now is in 5th grade watching Nicole Kidman choke down live worms. Same stupid shit from the first and third cycles of bullshit in my life.

One last note; the world can go to shit but doesn’t necessarily matter to an individual. When I was a kid, the president was a loser and the economy sucked and society was crawling up it’s own ass. Yet I was a happy kid having a good time. I was happy right in the middle of a crumbling society; as are many kids right now. I had a dog and a bicycle and I went fishing. I wasn’t going to eat worms, I already knew how to catch fish.

I was growing the psychic armor I wear today…