In 1909, E.M. Forster, author of “A Passage to India” and other joyful classics, wrote a novella entitled “The Machine Stops.” He pictured a world in which face to face communication had died out. People lived underground, and sat at their desks all day communicating with a circle of friends through terminals. HUH? WHAT? Did Mr. Forster borrow a time machine from H. G. Wells and visit 2013, landing in the basement of somebody’s mother’s house to see her hairy, slovenly, unwashed son seated in front of a PC, munching Fritos, slurping 5-Hour Energy, and hacking Fort Knox? NO. Mr. Forster was a smart guy, and cleverly extrapolated what he had observed that the just-invented telephone had done, id est, that it had reduced face to face communication to nonexistence. Forster goes on to describe the consequences when the universal machine that controlled everything from telecommunications to your toilets (Sound familiar, folks? Internet controlled electric toilets, stoves, can openers, right?) began to break down. In the end, everything breaks down: toilets refuse to flush, heat and air-conditioning cease, and everybody croaks except the few brave souls who had rejected the technological civilization and had gone to live above ground, enjoying fresh air and fresh meat which they had hunted down and killed themselves, preferably with their own teeth.

So, the question is: will we suffer the same fate? Have we become so interconnected, gridded, texted. facebooked, twittered that when the Web expires, we will all go down with it?

Probably.

But we will have fun while it happens, won’t we? Look, the original god of texting, Blackberry (almost, but not quite. RIP) has suffered a few world-wide outages, but the only people it really discomfited were lawyers, and that’s a net plus. So what will the upside be when the entire Web goes down permanently, perhaps through an EMP produced by a North Korean or Iranian (or Chinese, or French, or British, or Israeli, or Pakistani, or Indian, or Californian) nuke detonated a few miles above Dubuque?

To begin with, we can stop paying bills … ANY bills! All the accounting data supporting those annoying monthly demands for payment will have been reduced to random bits. WE ALL GET A FRESH START, AND WE KEEP EVERYTHING WE ALREADY HAVE! YAY!

We can stop paying taxes. The IRS databases, the faceless leash that holds us all in thrall, will have been erased. THEY WON’T BE ABLE TO AUDIT YOUR RETURNS, especially the 2010 return on which you claimed Aunt Sally’s pig as a dependent, and deducted the cost of those lap dances in Vegas as a medical expense.

We can create as many identities as we like, since there will be no way to cross-check them. So we can be bigamists, or trigamists, or quatramists, or whatever, with a spouse in every port. And we can aboandon them whenever we want. No child support! Whooppee!

Of course, I must admit, there may be  a downside, too. If you live in a major city, you will starve to death or be slaughtered by crazed, starving mobs, because the system that brings food from flyover country to the sophisticated locales inhabited by the excessively civilized will have collapsed. Unless you follow the storied example of the Donner party, and perfect your skills as a cannibal.

Yum.

Originally, civilizations kept the fun part and the reproductive part of sex intimately entwined, so to speak. You could have wives and concubines, but they were all supposed to produce progeny. Man’s ingenuity (excuse me, person’s ingenuity) then invented the solely recreational part-time concubine, or hooker. (By the way, the origin of the term dates to the Civil War — ours, not Syria’s. General Hooker of the Union Army had an entourage of ladies of the evening who followed along with his troops to keep the men happy. When onlookers asked one of the more savvy members of their group who these brides of the multitude were associated with, the answer was “They’re Hooker’s.”) Eventually, the concubine went the way of the dodo, but the other two groups (wives and hookers) continued to occupy the entire market niche for many thousands of years.

No more. While alternative sexual arrangements have existed for a substantial period of time (in fact, the memory of man runneth not to the contrary), they have only recently begun to displace the at least potentially reproductive couplings in law. Gay marriage is sweeping the Western world!

And it gets better. If romantic love is all that matters in establishing a marital state, why should it be restricted to groups of two? Well, it isn’t. In Brazil, they have now legalized at least one three-way marriage. And if three is OK, how about four? How about five? How about 137?

But the possibilities continue to multiply. Many people say, quite sincerely, that they still love their deceased relatives. Let them marry ’em! It will of course, give the IRS fits, since the number of deductions and exemptions will skyrocket. But this is good, no?

And we can do even better. The SPCA, PETA, and their ilk profess undying love for the lowly creatures of the field. Marry them, too! If we decide, out of a spirit of fairness and the pursuit of diversity, that we can also include insects, the number of marital partners can soar into the trillions! This will, of course, significantly increase the cost of entertaining wedding guests, since there are now a whole lot of them, and, if they include termites and army ants, they will eat the furniture, which will then need to be replaced.

And we don’t need to stop there. Suppose we marry molecules…or atoms…or elementary particles. A quintillion here, a quintillion there, pretty soon we’re talking big numbers.

I just pressed my tux. I expect the wedding invitations to come pouring in soon.

In his classic work Leviathan, which invented the concept of the social contract as underlying civilization,  Hobbes declares that “Life in a state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short.” This is still the situation in primitive uncivilized backwaters, such as Somalia, Afghanistan, and Detroit. But in general, we have created civilizations that enable most of us to avoid living in this unfelicitous state. The question then naturally arises, how have we managed to do this?

By using weapons, dummy!

Ultimately, we convinced people to work together by whacking the people who refused to work together. And what distinguishes the whacker from the whackee? The wacker possesses the whacking device.

The Aeneid, Virgils’ classic poem on the Trojan War which ended with the total destruction of Troy, starts with the line “I sing of the arms and the man.” Damn straight! How else to destroy a mighty city except  with arms.  Athens’ victory over Troy resulted in the ascendant Greek civilization, which brought us philosophy, geometry, poetry, pornographic murals, and stuffed grape leaves.

Which brings me to gun control. Most commentators are hesitant to predict which way the debate will turn out, but I have a guess. The guys who want to preserve their second amendment rights have guns, while their opponents do not.  Damon Runyon said “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet.” Same principle here.

But suppose the Damon Runyon principle fails, and firearms are removed from American society. What changes?

NOTHING CHANGES!

The ingenuity of man knows no bounds. Immediately after a gun ban goes into effect, you will see advertisements for semi-automatic clubs, which automatically rebound from the first whack you give your opponent and then drop for a further blow. Smith and Wesson will develop a repeating knife, sort of like a horizontal pogo stick, with a dial by which you can set the number of stabs per minute it will inflict. (It will not be available with a folding handle, however.) And as soon as Diane Feinstein introduces a bill to outlaw these innovations, new and exciting  products will enter the market.

I can hardly wait.

As the Roman Empire sank into the mire, leaving behind magnificent ruins and a landscape filled with peasants who would one day lift themslves up from degradation to create pizza, their theater went to hell. The diction remained classy, but the staging began to include amputations and actual murders on stage.

Which brings me to reality TV. Reality, Hah! These puerile exercises are actually as tightly choreographed as a performance of “Swan Lake” by the Bolshoi Ballet. Contestants on “The Great Race” are instructed to slow down if they get too far ahead, thus cramping the time available for messages from the sponsor. The idiots on “Survivor” are NOT eating snake heads in a sauce made of rat poop; their meals are actually catered by La Grenouille and then skillfully disguised.

The question then naturally arises: why are we watching this crap?

Aristotle has a coherent theory of theater. In his view, watching other people experience strong emotions would produce an emotional catharsis. (Wonderful word. In modern parlance, a cathartic is a laxative; apparently, to Aristotle, theater is Ex-Lax. But I digress.) You could watch Oedipus pluck out his eyes, feel icky, get over it, and then go out to dinner, relieving you of the necessity of plucking out your OWN eyes. But what does anyone get out of watching “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” other than a surfeit of views of chubby cleavage?

You actually do get something beyond the soft porn titillation; you get an overwhleming feeling that “I’m a lot smarter than these bozos.”

Of course, you’re wrong. You’re watching this drivel, instead of going out to build a skyscraper, design a spaceship, shoot a moose, do something, dammit! You’re a lot stupider than they are! But because you don’t realize it, you bask in delusions of adequacy.

And the bar keeps getting lower. As the drivel creation machines grind on, the intellectual level of reality  TV approaches that of an earthworm, so that soon there will not be a single inhabitant of the planet who cannot say to him/herself “There are lots of people stupider than me.”

This is wonderful.

A great sage (me) once said that “The secret of success is low expectations.” We are fast approaching a time when vainglory will become acceptable not for the few, but for all. Noone will be criticized for anything.  Inferiority complexes will vanish. Depression will evaporate like the morning dew.

And nobody will ever again be forced to spend winter vacation reading “War and Peace.”

The legislature of the State of Washington, no doubt totally stoned pursuant to their recent legalization of marijuana (pot, maryjane, reefer, Maui wowie, etc.), has just enacted a bill requiring the use of gender neutral language in all official documents. For example, “chairman” must now be changed to “chairperson.” This will undoubtedly lead to some confusion in the legislative cafteria, which will now be forced to stop serving “manicotti,” but instead will serve “personicotti.” Such a change will likely confuse those attempting to order such an Italian dish. Whoops! I mean a dish from the ethnic cuisine developed by the inhabitants of an area on the Eurasian continent shaped not unlike a boot.

We are already far down the slope to Orwellian newspeak. People who throw bombs at school buses are no longer “terrorists”; they are now “militants.” A guy who chops his wife into sukiyaki and uses the result as compost in his garden is no longer a “homicidal maniac;” he is now  “a person suffering from a mental disability.” Somebody who sleeps in the gutter clutching a bottle of cheap hooch is no longer a “drunken bum;” he is now “a sufferer from the disease of alcoholism.”

Circumlocutions are a characteristic of cultural collapse. It is unacceptable to say what you actually mean for fear that the emperor will follow the advice of the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland: “Off with her head!” You may not even use words that are even vaguely reminescent of forbidden words.

But again, this is great!

Eliminating words from the language vastly reduces the difficulty of spelling bees, although it does make the game of Boggle somewhat more challenging. But we can ameliorate this problem by allowing shorter words to count, words, say, like “I” and “a.”

Periphrasis makes it much, much easier to write high school essays. Remember being told to write a five hundred word composition on “How I Spent My Summer Vacation?” The assignment will now be entitled “The Activities in Which I Engaged, Including Not Only Their Names, But Also the Details of the Manner in which I Carried Them Out, During the Time Period which Followed the Cessation of Classes at the Conclusion of the Vernal Season but Preceded the Initiation of Classes on the Day Previous to This One.” The expansion of a ten word sentence into a five hundred word essay using this method, without adding a single additional thought, I leave as an exercise for the reader.