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!

The quality of early childhood education is in free fall. No more do we initiate our children to the sublimities of the English language with Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses,” which uses words that are actually used by adults. In fact, we barely use words at all.

The decline can be traced back to the modern parenting movement after WWII. The first indication of serious trouble was the introduction into the bedtime reading lexicon of the works of Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss. (Seuss was actually his middle name.) He was, of course a genius, in his own berserk way. But instead of animals which bear some resemblance to the fauna of the planet Earth, his creatures appear to have been drawn from microscope slides in the Infectious Diseases wing of the pathology laboratory. This is not entirely unreasonable given his background, since he paid his way part way through a Ph.D. which he never finished by drawing cartoons for Flit insecticide adverstisements, which featured gigantic insects on the point of consuming a quavering victim. But his rolicking doggerel (which I admit the kids love — in fact, I love it myself. I can recite the entire Sleep Book by heart) is not the problem. Seussisms at least resemble English.The problem is “Pat the Bunny.”

“Pat the Bunny” came out in the 1940’s, and invited the child to perform various revolting acts, including stroking the pseudo-fur of a  tan rabbit figure artfully glued to the page. It has been followed by endless imitators which invite the child to rub the skin of dinosaurs, animals, and monsters, all of which the child is assured are their friends.

The bunny is not your friend. Ask the Australians, who need to use everything short of 105 mm howitzers to keep them at bay. And in the United States, what do we get from bunnies? Tularemia, also known as rabbit fever, a particularly nasty generally fatal rikettsial disease which you contract by, you guessed it, patting the bunny.

That is not to say that bunnies are totally useless. Their pedal appendage is frequently employed as a good luck charm, despite the fact that it did not work very well for the bunny. But more importantly, they are reasonably tasty when used as the primary ingredient in hassenpfeffer, the aromatic rabbit stew.

So we have an amusing avenue to improve children’s reading material, which will shift their focus from touching a contagious rodent to enjoying a delicious repast. We need only make a single orthographic substitution, changing “P” to “E” to produce a more practical first book for baby:

EAT THE BUNNY!

You might argue that we do not want to scare the little darlings, or bring out their essential beastliness. Why not? Remember what happenned to Grizzly Adams, the lover of bears who ended up as a bear luncheon? Of course we want to scare the little darlings spitless! Their survival depends on it.

You have a choice when you’re part of the food chain: be an eater or an eatee. Which would you like your kiddies to be?

Pre-civilization, we all lived in packs and helped each other. But as civilization advanced, we learned better, and for many years screwed each other over in a ferocious Darwinian duel which led to vastly improved living standards. Unfortunately, the last generation or two has attempted to undo this important social advance. We are now enjoined to be nice to each other. Yeah, yeah, this has always been the advice of organized religions (except for a few like the Cult of Kali, also known as Thuggees, which made a virtue of strangling complete strangers to appease Kali, the goddess of death). But nobody follows religious advice. The problem is that this injunction now emanates from the government. What is the result?

DISASTER!

Let me give you an example. King George III (also familiarly known as Dubya) decided that, because substantial middle class people owned their own homes, the government should do whatever was necessary to give nice houses to bums in order to convert them into substantial middle class people.

Do you know what happens when you put a bum in a house?

You get a bum in a house.

And pretty soon you have a deadbeat bum in a house, because if he or she had the right stuff to maintain a house and pay the mortgage, he or she wouldn’t be a bum in the first place.

So here we are with more mortgage defaults and foreclosures than even in the Great Depression, crashing banks, and an astronomical unemployment rate. How do we explain this descent into a financial maelstrom that is making the U.S. look increasingly like Argentina?

By the invidious effects of kindness!

Do-gooders invariably do bad. Do something nice for soneone, and he will invariably spit in your eye. But there is a way out, and we can have FUN while we solve the problem

We can become do-badders! Yes indeed, we can organize a new movement devoted to openly and avowedly screwing our fellow citizens. Sort of like the Mafia, only without the daylight shootouts. We will kick the downtrodden, all the while singing the mantra of those deep philosophers, The Sillouettes:

Sha Na Na Na

Sha Na Na NaNa

Sha Na Na Na

Sha Na Na Na Na

Sha Na Na Na

Sha Na Na NaNa

Sha Na Na Na

Sha Na Na Na Na

Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip

Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom

GET A JOB!

Want to join the chorus?

We have reversed the once inexorable advance from primitive scribblings to precise written communication, and are descending into an inarticulate pit. You doubt me? Fools!

Around fifty-thousand years ago, the Australian Aborigines (Yeah, yeah, yeah, native peoples. Actually, not native: they arrived from Africa by way of Asia.) carved petroglyphic images onto rocks for purposes which we do not know. However, we do know that they expected somebody to look at them and get some message or other.

Around twenty-thousand years ago, the Frenchmen (excuse moi, Frenchpeople) inhabiting Lascaux took time off from their culinary pursuit of frogs and snails to paint pictures of horses (their other favorite food) on the walls of the caves in which they resided. By this mechanism, they hoped to increase their hunting success, either by propitiating the gods of really disgusting foods, or by attracting particularly vain nags who wished to gaze upon their likenesses. Notice that the French did not express their desires in written words, such as “Here, horsey, horsey, horsey!”

About five thousand years ago, the inhabitants of the Middle East and Southeast Asia made the great leap into symbolic writing. In another thousand years, the writing evolved into an alphabet. While the Egyptians were at first thought to have missed  the boat because their writing consisted of strings of pretty pictures, it turned out that the pictures were actually phonemes, just like letters of the alphabet.

So we were off and running, and soon followed Euripides (also known as “Ifixadese”), Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson (no, not the sex toy guy – the dictionary guy), and other literary lights.

All for nought!

The first source of our destruction and descent back into orthographic barbarism? Ubiquitous electronic buttons!

Think about elevators! Little triangles pointing toward each other where the rational person would just stamp the word “Close” on the damn button. How about video players? Little vertical lines instead of “Pause.” A little red dot instead of “Record.” Of course this is all the result of our ceding technological manufacturing to the Japanese in the 1980’s. Given their command of the English language at that point as evidenced by the instruction manuals they prepared (e.g. “putting the lovely wire into the holy place, you see many hours.”) maybe  it was all for the best.

The second source? The texting capability of the smartphone!!

Spelling counts, dammit! “U” is not “you.” “r” is not “are,” “rotflol” is not “rolling on the floor laughing out loud.” “fos” is not “****”.  As the next generation of larvae grow to loathsome maturity, they are doing so with no knowledge of the role of the silent “p” in “pneumonia,” the silent “k” in “knife.” They are not learning the virtues of patience, taking the time to lovingly inscribe a missive that would gladden the heart of the most pedantic maiden lady English teacher. They have lost the ability to pen a winsome poem which says tenderly “Hey , baby, let’s jump in the sack.”

The anemic concatenations of letters laughingly called “text” are nothing of the sort. They are a puerile parade of acronyms better suited to the mad ravings of government bureaucrats. [N.B. the latest Federal education guidelines mandate the replacement of some seventy percent of the high school reading list with government memoranda. Out with “Hamlet.” In with “The Environmental Impact of Peeing on the Lawn.”]

lol. The Feds are fos. Gdby.

A village is the antithesis of a civilized society. Why did the world urbanize? Because people wanted to leave the village environment in which everybody knew everybody else’s business. But as early as the 1970’s, Marshall McLuhan predicted that, thanks to modern mass media, we would all soon live in a global village. He was more correct than he knew. He was writing pre-Facebook and pre-Twitter.

McLuhan’s vision has been realized in spades. The busybodies are in the saddle. Billions of people are on Facebook, sharing the most intimate details of their lives with tens of millions of their closest “friends,” and being subjected to their “friend’s” details in return. And it gets worse; with Twitter, you receive an update on all this trivia minute by minute, your smartphone (which is smarter than you)  insistently dinging or buzzing like an angry wasp to force you to read the latest nonsense.

You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Telepathy has now left the Ouija board and entered the real world. Some non-mad scientist neurophysiologists have successfuly connected two rats together using little thinking caps, and what Rat One thinks, Rat Two knows. And the connection wasn’t physical wires, joining them like robotic Siamese twins; it was a datalink mediated by the internet.  Let us think about the implications of this technology as it matures, as technologies are wont to do.

The first application, of course, will be cheating on tests. By implanting the transmitter and receiver in the mastoid bone behind your ear, you will be able to surreptitiously transmit each question to your buddies outside the examination room, who will either look up the answer on Google or calculate it using their supercomputer. And presto, as soon as they obtain it, their new knowledge of the correct answer will appear in your head. Everyone will have a 100% average in everything, and the average SAT score will rise to 2400.

But it gets much better. The fear and uncertainty that characterizes one’s entrance into a room full of strangers, say a cocktail party, convention session, or a holiday dinner with the family, will be a thing of the past. You will know immediately if the smile on the face of the lovely young lady or handsome young man across the room denotes interest or disbelief. You will know if the person walking down the street talking to no one at the top of his or her lungs is on the cell phone or suffers from Touretz Syndrome.

The nature of government will also change. Our masters will hire professional thinkers to think about the government’s orders and think them to us. They will also develop high-powered thinking transmitters which will overwhelm your personal thinking machine, ensuring that you only hear politically correct thoughts.

And think of the impact on advertising! You may be able to mute today’s TV commercials, but you won’t be able to block the thought bolts from Target and Subway, because the gummint will allow compliant companies (aka campaign contributors) to purchase the same high-powered brain wave transmitters that the government uses to brainwash you politically. You, of course, will not be permitted that luxury, since these transmitters will be denied to all but government officials and their sycophants, sort of like semi-automatic assault rifles.

Where will it all end? You will spend essentially all your time thinking somebody else’s thoughts. But the thoughts you receive will immediately become your thoughts, and hence will be re-transmitted to everybody else, who in turn will re-transmit them again, leading to an endless loop. Within a short period of time, your brain’s capacity will be exhausted, your head will explode, and you will be relieved from the unending cacaphonous din.

Thank Heaven for small favors!