Andy Warhol, who became an art icon in the 1960’s by mass producing banal paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans and beatifically smiling Marilyn Monroes, which were supposedly brilliant commentaries on the banality of mass-produced culture, knew a good scam when he saw it. Having started his career as an illustrator before discovering gullible museums and collectors were willing to call him a genius for creating perfectly ordinary paintings of perfectly ordinary objects, he summed up his creative philosophy succinctly: “Art is anything you can get away with.”
Welcome to the America that started celebrating the quick buck, the shoddy product, the half-assed effort—and hasn’t looked back since.
Although it must be remembered that con artists have been with us since the founding of our Republic, the inflection point in the 1960’s and 70’s was that this unseemly behavior began seeping into our businesses, our educational systems, and Wall Street. What we purchased became tackier and less durable, what we learned became more facile and less demanding—and our financial systems became openly predatory and wholly unconcerned with the long-term viability of investments. All three of these declines fed upon and reinforced one another because people too uneducated to understand they were being sold junk while being robbed blind turned out to be wonderfully easy to manipulate—which goes a long way toward explaining the clothes and music of the whole disco era.
Think, for example, of the implosion of the automobile industry in Detroit; what was once the finest example of American industrial prowess became a wasteland in the 1970’s that spewed out ugly cars that started to rust the day they were offloaded onto the dealer lots. While we were gluing upbeat names and vinyl trim onto ghastly automobiles, Japan, Germany—and now China—rose rapidly and started producing nimble and durable cars that didn’t rattle or die on the roadside on a cold day. Squeezing out a few more pennies of profit by using more plastic and less steel, substituting glitz for solid engineering, and forgetting to manufacture products people would actually love to own turned midwestern cities such as Detroit, Michigan, which were once manufacturing powerhouses, into symbols of our industrial failures.
The hand-in-glove schemes of government and Wall Street to inflate the costs of housing, food, education, medical care, and a host of other essential products and services to “help” Americans have made a favored few ridiculously rich, hollowed out America’s once-thriving middle class, and left everyone else scrambling to get by. The American Dream died on a long con perpetrated by brazen crooks armed with only a spreadsheet a smile—and a guarantee that the protection they bought with campaign contributions made them bulletproof. Over the past half century our government has been the enemy of average Americans; to presume otherwise makes one a fool. Just try to live the lives your parents or grandparents enjoyed before “affordability” became the new buzzword —and ask yourself if your life is better or worse today.
Of course, the second problem bequeathed to us during the 1960’s and 1970’s was our accelerating abandonment of meritocracy in favor of hiring quotas, which allow the lazy and stupid to get away with making less effort and demonstrating more incompetence. The creation of a lawyer-friendly system where it became, quite literally, illegal for those of a certain race, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation to not be promoted or—perish the thought!—even fired for malfeasance left the door wide open for those who saw employment as another entitlement rather than an adult obligation.
Government jobs became, of course, the promised land for all manner of slackers and fakers who have continued to parley marginal ability and effort into secure careers, but private businesses were also shackled by governmental decrees that required their workforces to reflect mandated quotas in order to avoid being fined or sanctioned by state and federal bureaucrats who likely held their own jobs due to—wait for it!—those very same hiring quotas.
Combined with a generalized societal devotion to doing the least possible work, economically-disastrous (but politically popular) hiring quotas have turned into a stupendous drag on both the quantity and quality of work throughout America, which has robbed us of national wealth and personal initiative. We are poorer because we celebrate the quick buck and the slow worker.
Truth be told, I can imagine why so many Americans are today succumbing to the siren song of the Democratic Socialists, who are promising cheaper food and housing, free education and medical care, and a host of other benefits as a part of a government-run utopia paid for with the private property, private wealth, and private businesses of those Americans who are stubbornly productive—despite the damage done to our country’s work ethic over the past half century. A Communist program that promises to punish those with more money sounds like justice instead of the societal suicide it truly is. People who are desperate tend to make dumb decisions; those who cast their votes for Zohran Mamdani for New York Mayor are like people who decide to cure their migraine headaches—by shooting themselves in the head.
However crazy, unrealistic, and fated to fail Communism might be, it would be foolish to dismiss its allure or neglect to understand its attraction. Fifty years of social programs that lifted almost no one from poverty, schools and colleges that handed out diplomas to the functionally illiterate, and Wall Street pirates who bribed the regulators and legislators to ignore their ongoing plunder of our hopes have created the dire conditions that have convinced many Americans that a political and economic philosophy that always results in tyranny, misery, and famine is worth a try.
Today’s loopy Leftists are not the cause of our problems—but they are a sad symptom of the wreckage left behind by the scams of the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Peace out, everyone.