Nothing New Under The Sun

If you have a library card, you can’t help but be a little amused at many of the highly educated people staggering around the halls of governance, education, and media these days. They claim they can and should minutely supervise the activities of all of us, but they can’t even figure out if the Second Bank of the United States should have been abolished or not; never mind what to do about something in this century.

The people who say they are qualified to micromanage the affairs of the world and everybody and everything in it can’t do arithmetic well enough to be a successful bank teller, and can’t figure out whether to put an apostrophe in it is.

I’ve broken ground on many substantial construction projects. We used to paint a shovel to look like it was made of gold, and the bankers and politicians would turn a shovel load of dirt and have their picture taken. Then we’d mount the shovel on a board with an inscription and present it as a keepsake. We used to fashion a box and fill it with sand for the participants, as it was unlikely anyone involved would be capable of turning even one spadeful of real soil from the site.

It’s the greatest metaphor possible for today’s Zeitgeist. People completely unaware of how anything actually gets done or paid for using an instrument fraudulently tarted up to look valuable to perform a meaningless operation in order to be given credit by the media for everything.