As the USA rollicks along in what appears to be a never ending path of destruction for destruction’s sake, I cannot help but think of the parable of the fence which comes from the writings of G.K. Chesterton. I doubt anyone reads Chesterton much anymore other than perhaps his Father Brown mystery stories. It’s too bad, he was one of those early 20th century English authors who could bore through the conundrums of modern life with a pithy word or two. His parable of the fence, looks at the dangers of reform without thought. To make his point about the abolition of laws or social institutions, he uses the metaphor of a fence has been placed for some time so that no one is still aware of the purpose or intent behind it. The reformer who comes along demanding that the fence be removed should be countered with no, it should not be removed until you can explain why it was erected in the first place and how removing it will not cause unintended consequences. There’s little understanding of why the various regulatory agencies and functions of the federal government which are being so gleefully undone came into being. I doubt much of anyone in leadership, especially among the DOGE minions has any understanding of what the systems they are undermining actually does or why they were put together in the way that they were.
That’s not to say that federal systems and programs should not be reformed. They absolutely should. To use one with which I am intimately familiar, Medicare, as an example. Medicare’s legal constructs and language were originally conceived nearly a hundred years ago and it became law sixty years ago. It was put in place to allow the elder post-employed population access to health care for acute disease. No one was worried about octogenarians with multiple chronic diseases – they didn’t exist. And no one at that time thought through the consequence of conquering the more common acute diseases of aging which ended up creating a large number of chronically ill elderly. Medicare is desperately in need of reform so that its function more closely matches the health needs of today’s elders. But that’s unlikely to occur when reform power is turned over to a bunch of post-adolescents with no clinical experience and no understanding of how aging works (as they’re still in that phase of life when aging and its attendant issues are a completely foreign concept that will only happen to other people).
Middle America has finally started to figure out that tariffs are, in fact, paid by domestic consumers and not by foreign governments as their Temu and Shein prices all doubled and tripled overnight. Empty shelves should start appearing soon at big box retailers as overseas shipments stop arising. MAGA seems to think that domestic manufacturing can take care of this and doesn’t seem to understand the length of time and the amount of money it would take to reconstitute the manufacturing sector. Corporate America isn’t about to sink those kinds of dollars into fixed costs in an uncertain economic environment and the only institution large enough to shepherd something like this through the myriad hoops to fruition, the federal government, has been running the kind of people with this kind of expertise out of town on a rail.
It’s going to get really interesting this holiday season when there are no toys on the shelves, no decorations available, no stocking stuffers in the 99 cent aisle, and no artificial trees – nearly all of which come from China. We’ll start to see if American’s gather in the town square like the Whos of Whoville and celebrate anyway or if they’re going to turn on each other in snarling mobs fighting over the few items that are available. I give books as Christmas gifts and there shouldn’t be any difficulty with my finding something appropriate for everyone on my list in that category. If the Democrats are smart, they’ll start working on a PR campaign portraying the current occupant of the White House as the grinch when the holiday season turkeys come home to roost.
In other economic news, there was an announced 100% tariff on foreign films. I’m not sure how you would even do that in a globalized economy where even major Hollywood releases contract out special effects work to non-American companies all the time. The days of film being cans of celluloid shipped round the world are long since over. Different pieces of the end product come from different places and it’s all sent back and forth over computer networks as it’s essentially all digital these days. I expect that one will be walked back and quickly forgotten. But pretty much every complex product has components from multiple nations within. I don’t see how we’re going to have much in the way of functional high tech medical equipment soon. Ventilators, dialysis machines, ECMO, MRI scanners, PET scanners – all have vital components that are not manufactured domestically. When they start breaking down through normal wear and tear, how do we keep them running without replacement parts available?
Today’s really silly idea was reopening Alcatraz as a federal prison. Someone has been watching too many old movies. There are reasons why it lasted less than thirty years as a prison. It was incredibly expensive to run – everything has to be barged in and garbage and sewage need to be barged out. The corrosive effects of salt water lead to skyrocketing maintenance costs. It would require billions to retrofit a crumbling 1930s infrastructure to modern standards. The glorious birthday military parade is dirt cheap by comparison.
The latest casualties in the culture war appear to be the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (NPR and PBS) and the National Endowment for the Arts. CPB runs about $535 million and NEA runs about $205 million annually so together they’re about 1/15 the cost of an aircraft carrier. The arts infrastructure in this country runs on a shoestring and is incredibly fragile. The cancellation of already awarded grants this last weekend is going to send any number of opera, theater, ballet, modern dance, film festivals, visual art festivals, and museums budgets suddenly into the red. Some will survive. Some will not. In earlier generations, private philanthropy supported the arts as a civic duty. As a member of a number of arts organization boards, I have noted that current generations simply do not. Private wealth is flowing more and more toward conspicuous consumption and less and less toward civic endeavor. I’m going to have to reread Thorstein Veblen again – I think he got it right. Artists will continue to create in some way but the ecosystem that has allowed most communities of any size to have robust cultural offerings is likely done for and only those who can afford to travel to larger metropolises and pay premium prices are likely to have continued access.
Speaking of the performing arts, I am in technical rehearsals for the play Second Samuel which opens Thursday night at East Lake United Methodist Church under the aegis of Bell Tower Players. If you want to see me in a fully type cast role, it runs this weekend and next – evening performances on Thursday and Friday and matinee performances on Saturday and Sunday. It’s a Southern Fried comedy with a twist and message that’s timely.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 