Even the Wall Street Journal smells collapse. For months they have been chanting the dirge “The MBA Is A Relic of the Past.” How dare they impugn the honor of the laborers in the vineyard of spreadsheets, who have taught us all how to outsource every useful job to Outer Uzbekistan! How dare they fail to respect the masters of Excel, Word, and PowerPoint! How dare they fail to tremble in the presence of the denizens of cigar bars!

Well, OK, maybe there are a few too many guys who, despite the name of their degree, could not manage their way out of a paper bag, but in fact spend their days writing reports that no one will ever even read, let alone act upon. But that’s a graduate degree, after all, and makes no claim to provide a basic education in the skills of a civilized person. How about the foundation provided by college?

Even this foundational institution is approaching eclipse. Not content with denigrating the MBA, the evildoers of the popular media are now chanting “Is College Worth It?”

College!

First of all, everyone knows that the main objectives of college, as has been the case for several thousand years, are to drink beer, chase (and catch) members of the opposite sex, and occasionally attend classes. The problem, of course, is that these activities can no longer be pursued using Daddy’s or Uncle Sam’s money; it has now become necessary for collegians to borrow the money to fund these activities, leaving the graduate at the end of his or her college days with a mortgage but no house.

The bubble-meisters are of course weeping, wailing, and gnashing their teeth over the “Student Loan Bubble.” The solution they are now suggesting is: College, phooey! Don’t go! Enter the workforce immediately!

Doing what?

First of all, there are no jobs, unless you want to move to Outer Uzbekistan (see above). Even if you do find a job, what prospects do you have if you are an ignorant slob? Like it or not, even running a modern computerized milling machine is an exercise in mathematics. The kid at the supermarket checkout counter calls his or her manager (college educated) seventy-five times a day to reboot the cash register, which has been transmogrified into an all-knowing computer terminal.

And what do you do in your spare time? Contribute to the decay of civilization by watching WWF Raw? Read Cosmopolitan or (heaven forfend) People Magazine? Drink lite beer?

Hey, that doesn’t sound too bad.

You have a dirty mind. This is NOT a discussion of excremental over-inflation. We are talking about Form Over Substance.

A 62-year old man, on doctor-recommended sick leave for stress, went to the beach to unwind. Seeing  a shark heading for a group of children, he rushed into the water, wrestled the shark into submission, and saved the children from becoming fish food (well, shark food). His reward? Obviously, he was fired from his job when his exploit was captured and posted on YouTube so that his boss found out that his de-stressing was carried out at the beach.

This raises the old bromide “No good deed goes unpunished” to a whole new level.

[The boss clearly agrees with W.C. Fields who, when asked how he liked children, responded “boiled.” We have reached a point of civilizational collapse at which personell policy trumps childrens’ lives. His boss could have just said “OK, fella, that sick leave just became your vacation. After all, we can’t set a precedent for shark wrestling as therapy. It would be too hard on the sharks.” The boss is probably right. Mako shark is delicious. We eat them, they eat us. Fair is fair.]

“Zero tolerance” has gone mad. No amount of virtuous action can offset the smallest picadillo. “Ve haff rules!”

A lot of rules. In fact, enough rules that nobody knows what they are, even the people who make them.

But this is great!

How better to keep the peasants in line? In a 1960s movie entitled “Mickey One” starring Warren Beatty, the lead character, who has been enduring the third degree, finally shouts “All right, I’m guilty!” The disembodied voice of his interrogator says “Guilty of what?” to which the interrogee answers “Of not being innocent.”

There you have it. The ultimate triumph of complexity: everybody is always guilty of something, probably a felony. The only reason you are walking around in the fresh air, rather than sharing a cell with Bubba the Cannibal, is prosecutorial discretion.

This mechanism is guaranteed to keep the social pot from boiling over, since nobody wants to stick their neck out, or their head up, for that matter. So our betters can steer the ship of state without fear of mutiny. No transfats! No guns! No soda! No baby formula! Let the endangered coyotes eat your kids!

Don’t you feel safer?

The phrase of the day is “Grand Bargain.”

Balderdash!

The first issue this raises is: why do we need a title? This evil practice hies  back to the days of the Iran hostage crisis, when a pusillanimous president cowered in the White House, allowing American diplomats to remain captive by the heirs of the Barbary Pirates for 444 days. How did the brave media respond? With loud cries for brave action? (You know, “to the shores of Tripoli” and all that stuff.) Nope.

What they did was have their graphic designers, who otherwise would have been designing logos for “John’s Other Wife,” design nightly changing cover pages stating “The Iran Hostage Crisis – Day N” for a one-hour news report whose burden was “Nothing Happened Today.” (The format was easy to update: N became N + 1).

The floodgates were opened. Now everything needs a catchy title: “The Fiscal Cliff,” “The Grand Bargain,” phooey! The populace has become so dumbed down that they can’t tell the topic without a scorecard.

But the Grand Bargain is not restricted to the pursuit of a Federal budget compromise that will inevitably leave everyone completely miserable. (Think about the results of compromises. Remember the Missouri Compromise in the 1800’s, the solution that was going to prevent  a civil war. How did that work out?)

But the Grand Bargain has descended from the sublime to the ridiculous. What other Grand Bargains are being touted? How about the fracking Grand Bargain, which will only permit fracking if the frackers are forced to inhale the natural gas released for at least three hours a day? How about the school districts in Miami and Hong Kong (really!) looking for a Grand Bargain to equitably distribute the school funding extorted from the starving populace (OK, not actually starving, but you get my drift). How about the North Korean nuclear Grand Bargain, pursuant to which they will only immolate the populations of U.S. cities with a population of 378,264 or less? How about the EU budget Grand Bargain, under which the Germans will agree to eat moussaka and drink retsina at least six times per week in order to prop up the Greek economy instead of snarfing down bratwurst and beer? How about the Middle East Grand Bargain, under which absolutely nothing will change?

“Bargain” would be bad enough; after all, “bargain” connotes an agreement in which both parties gain, in contrast to the current rash of bargains in which everybody loses, a plethora of demolition derbies. But “Grand?”

We’ve heard that before. Remember the “Grand Alliance” of WWII, which joined the U.S. with our traditional friends the UK (Revolutionary War, War of 1812) and the USSR (old Cold War, new Cold War)? How about the ocean shipping Grand Alliance, which allows the major ocean shipping lines (owned, of course, by fat sweaty Greek billionaires with super-celeb trophy wives) to collude on shipping rates and thus prevent WalMart’s price structure from declining too sharply, or the Chinese economy to overheat due to excess demand?

In all fairness, “Grand” was already a problem in the 18th and 19th centuries. There was the “Grand Tour,” a rite of passage in which the over-indulged scions of the robber barons and baronesses traveled the world for a year, contracting new and interesting venereal diseases in each European country they visited, before embarking on their careers of rapine and plunder. Ah, the good old days!

How can we deal with the Grand Bargain onslaught? I know, I know! We will make our own personal Grand Bargains!

The ideal one is the one with the Internal Revenue Service. Of course, we all know that the IRS, in its infinite generosity, does negotiate payment plans when you are in arrears, either because you ran afoul of the unbelievably arcane Revenue Ruling that (foolishly) disallows a deduction for purchases of medically required single malt scotch whisky, or because the dog ate the original copy of your return so you could not file on time, thus subjecting you to a 786% penalty, plus interest. But that’s just a Little Bargain.

A Grand Bargain would run something like this: we agree to assign all of our income to the IRS in perpetuity. In return, the IRS agrees to enroll us in every Federal subsidy program in existence: milk price supports (even if we do not possess a single cow); green energy credits (even if we live in a styrofoam shack heated by an open coal fire); bank bailout support (even if we do not own a bank and our personal checking account has a balance of twelve dollars).

I will write to the IRS as soon as I finish typing.

The city of Fall River, Massachusetts (most renowned  for its famous axe-wielding citizeness, Miss Lizzie Borden) defaulted on its municipal bonds early in the last century and was managed by a creditors’ committee for twenty eight years. The creditors eventually got their money back. We should be so lucky.

Fiscal armageddon impends. Within the last year, four (4) California cities have declared bankruptcy, following in the illustrious footsteps of General Motors. So has Harrisburg. Beautiful Detroit has already been seized by the mandarins of Lansing, who have appointed a fiscal guardian. As we all know, trends sweep from West to East, so how long can it be before the more civilized metropoli of Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Altoona, Bridgeport, and their ilk follow suit.  Why? Because all these burgs suffer from the identical fundamental fatal fiscal fallacy: refusing to stop giving money to their overpaid laborers and bureaucratic drones when they retire. Notice that I say “when they retire,” not “when they stop working,” because, indeed, they never started. After thirty years of leaning on shovels or shooting paper airplanes at wastebaskets, chatting on their cell phones while filing their nails rather than their files, they head off into the Florida sunshine, secure in the knowledge that some poor shnook like you will continue to toil in the hot sun, toting barges, lifting bales, and struggling to pay the usurious real estate taxes and income taxes and sales taxes that fund their pensions and benefits.

But what happens when you all join the ranks of the unemployed? You will stop paying all those taxes! And then what happens?

The cities run out of money. The states run out of money. The Feds print so much money that nobody will accept it. Soon, very soon, ALL the governments will collapse financially, go through bankruptcy, and quit paying pensions and retiree health benefits.

Just think of the new opportunities this change will afford you!

To begin with, you will all have the opportunity to sleep once more outdoors in the fresh air. While the average grate may not appear very comfortable, a few copies of the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Enquirer, or whatever your local rag is, provide a comfy mattress. If your are judicious in your choice of grate, you can enjoy warmth in the winter as the fumes from the subway waft through your couch de papier avec ink, and coolth in the summer as passersby pee on you.

Your diet will expose you to a variety of comestibles, as you plunge your greedy hands into the best garbage cans you can find (once again, your choice of venue is important here. Dumpster diving is much better behind the Palm than behind Emma’s Greasy Spoon). At the same time, you will find it much easier to exercise, since you will need to beat off your compatriots to secure the finest morsels for yourself, and run swiftly from the minions of the law who will attempt to ticket you (no, I am not making that up).

During the 1930’s, there was a popular ditty, discovered written on a jailhouse wall, that somehow continues to ring true today, and I suggest that you internalize the sentiment encapsulated in its title:

HALLELUJA, I’M A BUM!

Swine before pearls. Well, diamonds, actually. Rihanna, a chanteuse of renown, wore two megabucks worth of jewelry to the Grammy awards, including 100 carats on her bracelet, 30 carats on  her earrings, and who knows how much on the various rings that covered her fingers. (A side note: “grammy”is derived from “gramophone,” an early brand of record player. It was  in direct competition with the “phonograph,” another brand of record player. You can see why the trade association chose to honor the gramophone. If they had made the other choice, the award would be the “phony” which, while undoubtedly more accurate, would not have been well received by the awardees.)

She doesn’t own them, of course. It is standard procedure for the glitterati to rent or borrow jewelry with a value approximately equal to the GDP of Luxembourg for gala events like the Grammys, the Oscars, the Hermans, and public hangings. One wonders why, since everybody knows that they don’t own them. (If I had loaned or rented two thousand large in ice to a fame-addled entertainer, I would be petrified that she would hock them and fly to Tierra del Fuego, secure in the knowledge that her fans would still follow her on Twitter and Facebook and that she could avoid extradition for years.)

Now, Rihanna does have a petty good excuse. She recorded a song/video entitled “Diamonds” that made it way up on the pop charts. But how about Jennifer Lopez, who wore five megabucks, or Carrie Underwood who wore thirty-one megabucks.  That’s a lot of money, even to me.

Why not wear fake jewelry that they could even keep? In part, it’s the fear that they might be found out. Nah, they can’t be that sensitive. Think about the amount of lip-syncing that goes on, and that’s much easier to detect than a cubic zircon. Mostly, it’s the fantastic feeling of seeming richer than everybody else. If you got, it flaunt it. Even if you don’t really “got it” for keeps.

It’s form over substance, Dear Reader, a signature characteristic of collapsing civilizations. The grammyphites know their audience: teenie boppers, twenty-somethings, thirty-somethings, swine all! For these cohorts, the image is the reality. Marshall McLuhan got it right.

But this attitude provides us with unlimited fun opportunities!

We can rent a glitzy tux and crash swanky parties! We can put on surgical greens and collect enough livers to provide pate for the whole crowd! We can put on business suits, enter the corridors of power, and embezzle gazillions! We can run for political office even if we have no qualifications at all!!

NYAHAHAHAH!