On Life Support

Some trends last longer than others.

For example, parachute pants were an instant joke and truly popular for about a week. Celebrity-owned restaurants were hot for a few years, and then we moved on. 

In contrast, classic rock had an incredible run. Whole generations grooved to the same 300 songs, until hip-hop and other genres finally vanquished the sound. However, let me point out that Led Zeppelin still rules.

In any case, the list of fads and wacky trends that have run their course has a new entry. And that dying fad is democracy. 

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Minority Rule

Among the 47 jobs I held in college—back when tuition was almost reasonable—was a gig with the US census. As part of the job, I walked around Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods, knocking on doors and asking the inhabitants how many people lived there, how many bathrooms were in the house, and other random questions that constituted the worst ice breakers of all time. I wrote their answers on my clipboard, and then moved on to the next nonplussed resident.

My job with the US census lasted for only a couple of months. Some of the other jobs I had in college were cafeteria worker, phlebotomist, press release writer, and test-tube washer. Seriously, those were my gigs.

In any case, my total contribution to the most recent census was filling it out and marking “Latino” in the ethnicity section. But that must have made an impact. 

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Smokescreen

Listen, you wouldn’t teach advanced calculus to second-graders, would you? Nor would you make metaphysics part of the curriculum for nine-year-olds. Therefore, it makes sense to ban teaching critical race theory (CRT) in grade school.

As we all know, CRT “is an academic study at the undergraduate and graduate level that aims to examine the role of racism in the modern era and the ways it has become woven into the social fabric.” Virtually no grade schools are teaching CRT, but you can’t be too careful. Some overzealous teachers out there, somewhere, might abruptly thrust college-level academics onto their unsuspecting grade schoolers, so we need legislation to make sure that doesn’t happen. 

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Office Space

So the pandemic is finally ending, and all of us are ready to return to the office. Well, by “all of us” I mean White guys, and let’s face it, they’re the only ones who get a vote, right?

You see, recent surveys have shown that most corporate executives—still predominately White men—want to end all this touchy-feely flexibility and 21^st-century telecommuting nonsense. They want to get back into their cushy offices where they can survey their kingdom of cubicle serfs and more effectively terrorize their employees. In fact, “executives are nearly three times more likely than non-executive employees to want to return to the office full-time.”

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Craving Chaos

If you can’t beat ‘em, kill ‘em.

You would be forgiven if you believed that this was the GOP slogan for the midterms. After all, the modern conservative movement is not about lower taxes, traditional values, or all the other supposed principles that long obscured the right-wing predilection for violence. No, the Republican Party has quit the exhausting task of hiding its affinity for head-bashing, and instead, conservatives are openly celebrating mayhem. 

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