“Hello, I’m Dr. Bean. Apparently. And my job is to sit and look at paintings. So, what have I learned that I can say about this painting? Well, firstly, it’s really quite big, which is excellent, because If it were really small, you know, microscopic, then hardly anyone would be able to see it.” – Bean
If you look closely, you can see itsy-bitsy fur bikini women.
The death of the United States as we know it is near. COVID-19 isn’t the cause of it, despite being in the news nearly as much as a Kardashian. Coronavirus is, rather, a symptom. Like any organism, as soon as a nation is born it begins the process of growth and eventual death. This cycle is a common theme in history, and I’ve visited it before in posts here because I find it more fascinating than, say, beekeeping.
One post I wrote about the how empires have a natural cycle and end date is here (End of Empires, PEZ, and Decadence). That post contains information about Sir John Glubb’s paper called The Fate of Empires. You can also find Glubb’s original paper here (LINK), and you’ll be pleased to find it’s been translated from Glubb’s original fish language.
Which brings us to Thomas Cole. Mr. Cole was an American painter. I say “was” because he’s now dead. This is good, because otherwise he’d have to explain to his wife where the heck he’s been since 1848. Cole did a series of five paintings depicting Glubb’s paper between the years of 1833 and 1836, which was pretty amazing, since Glubb’s paper wasn’t published until 1976. Cole’s five paintings are collectively known as The Course of Empire.
The first of these paintings is called The Savage State. It’s the first picture up above. Cole wasn’t horribly inventive with names, and it’s rumored that he had a dog named “Dog” and a cat named “Cat” and subsisted entirely on a diet of unsalted boiled potatoes. His painting, The Savage State is just that, a savage land dominated by nature, which is also how The Mrs. describes my side of the bedroom. In his painting, you can see that the civilization matched the landscape – rudimentary and rough. It’s chaotic, but that describes a great deal of the prehistory of man. This period of history can last a very, very long time, and would have lasted even longer if humanity would have failed to invent shag carpet.
If you look closely, all these paintings are set in the same place, at different times. Cole even changed the time of day from morning in the first one to night in the final one. I guess this is what you had to settle for as an 1836 version of HD television.
The next painting in the series is The Pastoral State. Each of the paintings presents the same area, just at different stages in the development of the civilization. The land from the original painting has been tamed enough for farming and herding animals. The wild nature of The Savage State has been at least partially replaced by enough control of the land that a greater degree of specialization and start of civilization is possible.
At this stage in the civilizational cycle, there is generally a single dominant culture. If there are two competing cultures, they’ll fight. This explains the Spartans and the Athenians, the North versus the South, or my ex-wife and humans not possessed by Satan. Having a single culture breeds trust, and the uniformity of purpose required for this phase.
The theme of the pastoral state is expansion along the frontier, and is characterized by growth and optimism. It’s how it feels to be on the winning team. Religion is dominant, as are ideals that are higher than self – in Rome, public service was considered honorable. Plutarch wrote about Spartan mothers and their attitudes when their sons went into battle: “Another woman handed her son his shield, and exhorted him: ‘Son, either with this or on this.’”
Legend has it that at one point when Athens was fighting Sparta, that a Spartan, hidden by a hill, taunted the Athenians by yelling, “One Spartan can beat a thousand Athenians!” Enraged, the commander of the Athenians selected his thousand best men and sent them over the hill to kill the insolent Spartan. After fifteen minutes of battle sounds and screaming, a single Athenian, mortally wounded, limped to the top of the hill and yelled down to his general: “Don’t fall for it! It’s a trap! There are actually two of them.”
This state ends when there is no more expansion and frontier. At that point, someone always gets the bright idea that they want to make a buck. The pursuit of profit then replaces the pursuit of honor.
This is the most beautiful and intricate of the paintings. Of course, I had to meme all over it. And looking at the multitudes of people in the painting I had to wonder, “What would a decent three bedroom in the suburbs cost?”
After profits have been pursued for a time, the Empire then reaches the height of power. Cole depicted this phase in his painting The Consummation. Both as a military and economic entity, the Empire will never be better off than at this time, well, at least until it builds that Death Star®. It is here that the greatest works of arts and literature of the society will be created. While the society retains the myth of the expansion, the reality is that is no longer a concern.
Also at this point, intellectuals will start rejecting all of the values that allowed the society to be great, and replacing them with ideals that are often the direct opposite of those that led to success. Virtue is replaced by vanity. Honor and discipline will be mocked as the philosophy of a fool, and be derided as inferior to the values and beliefs of amorality, nihilism, materialism, and collectivism.
Not that I have an opinion, or anything.
Somewhere about this time, with the Empire ceasing to grow, powerful groups figure out that it’s much easier to steal wealth than create it. Politicians devise ways to maximize how much money and power their group can take from the others.
This is the Cole painting, The Destruction of Empire, I see most often out of this set. Perhaps it’s a sign of the time, or perhaps it’s a sign that everyone likes a good Viking raid? Okay. Not everyone. But remember that Roman soldiers are trained, but Vikings are Bjorn.
With the Empire past its peak, the wealth is used to create decadence. Focus is on material goods, and religion declines across the Empire. Since the focus is on wealth, the welfare state forms – Romans had bread and circuses, we have EBT and Netflix®. Historically, foreign peoples from across the Empire stream towards the original culture. Why? Again, the focus is on material goods and not a cohesive society. Why would a Greek want to leave Greece for Rome? I prefer to read books about Rome in Braille – it makes it feel like ancient history.
And as the focus grows on material goods, the originality of the goods disappears. Art becomes a cynical mechanism of control and a means to harvest cash. The remake of the original is remade or rebooted to once again drag the culture for profits. I heard that Hollywood was even going to remake a Muslim version of Footloose, but this time without the Bacon.
An example of that is Spain after the conquest of the New World. Spain found itself with immense wealth in gold. How much wealth? So much that the Spaniards decided that they didn’t want to do the day-to-day things in life, and drew workers in from all across Europe to Do The Jobs Spaniards Wouldn’t Do. So much gold flew into Europe that it changed the exchange rate and wrecked the market for gold. After a century of such luxury, the Spaniards ceased to be the conquistadors that boldly conquered a continent with grit and bravado and became a culture that complained when the Dutch help didn’t peel the grapes correctly.
As an example, in one park I found a cannon seized from a Spanish warship during the Spanish-American War. I looked at the engraving on the cannon – it was beautiful. But this cannon, taken from the Spanish in 1898, was actually forged in 1780 or so. The United States was using cannon that were state of the art and sophisticated, with more than a century of technological advances on the Spanish.
Heck, when a friend got at tattoo in Spain, I was shocked. It was really good. Why was I shocked that it was good? No one expects Spanish ink-precision.
The destruction of Empire can flow not only from battle, but also from a checkbook – a financial collapse can be nearly as devastating as a foreign army, as Spain proves. Regardless, when vigor is gone, pessimism prevails, and sacrifice for the common good to a trustworthy state disappears? Why would you want to be a hero, as all of the national myths and heroes are, one by one, destroyed to make way for the new myths of the intellectual class?
Destruction is just around the corner.
If you look closely at this picture, there are no people, only birds, which must mean that Cole felt that the birds would take over the Earth. This is my favorite, because it makes me feel better about how my yard looks.
Cole’s final painting in the series was the Desolation of Empire. The Empire is over. The drama is over. What remains are a scattered people and the ruins of a great civilization. It sounds bleak, but it doesn’t need to be.
The desolation of Empire isn’t the ending for every person in it, it’s just the ending of the golden age of the way things were. Imagine someone near the end of the Roman Empire, worried about what they saw going on around it. Would the Roman Empire collapse? Certainly. Would all of the people die as a part of this collapse? No. But the globalism of the day did.
And the Roman Empire, in its death, set the stage for a new series of cultures all around Europe – from the reuse of Caesar as “Czar” in Moscow to the United States, which consciously adopted many of the symbols of ancient Rome. What was the first name of the United States Army? Under its first commander, Major General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, it was known as Legion of the United States from 1792-1796.
This isn’t the end of the world, it’s just the end of what we have now, and the end of the United States as we knew her. It’s the beginning of something new as the old structures cease to serve us. There’s a common phrase that I can’t find the source of but that describes the cycle simply and well: “Hard times breed strong men. Strong men breed good times. Good times breed soft men. Soft men? They bring hard times.”
We are in for hard times. But don’t fear. This will make strong men, and, if they are strong enough, a new United States that deserves those strong men.
Something most people under 30 don’t get is just how good we had it. 70 years ago in 1950 the U.S. was at the apex. Europe was still wrecked. Japan was too. The Communists were butchering their own people in Russia, East Europe and China. We were at the top of our game, wealthy and proud. By the time the 70s and 80s rolled around, things were getting worse but I would trade today for the 1980s in a heartbeat. Now it is 2020 and we are right on the verge of destruction. 70 years and we went from the undisputed heavyweight champ to a nation bordering on systemic collapse.
Humans are just not wired to live too comfortably. We need challenge and struggle and perhaps even some suffering. Absent that we turn into the average American in 2020. Add in the mass migration of millions of people from cultures that have proven themselves incapable of self-governance and you get AOC and Ilhan Omar in Congress.
The U.S hit its apex on November 21, 1963.
You could make that argument, but in my mind we hit it on January 12, 1946, That was the day Jumpin Jim Galvin led the All American Division down Fifth Avenue to the tune of the Victory Polka, after that would come the birth of the Deep state with the creation of the CIA and the DOD, Russians getting the Bomb, The ChiComs takeover of China, the whole shit shows in Berlin, Korea and the ChiCom Bomb, the Berlin Wall and the CubanMissile Crises By the time JFK came Along we were in the throngs of the Deep State, which he tried to extricate us from, and which killed him for it,
Had JFK lived we may have been able to pull out of the dive, avoided the VIetnam clusterfuck, the great society boondoggle, the currency devaluations of 1965 and 1970, but we were on the downward trajectory by the time of the 1963 coup
Well said. But hardship? That will change us. Who knows what 2050 looks like?
The current estimates for the number of deaths from the beer disease are around 50,000 total for the USA.
For that, we burned the Constitution and shot the economy in the back of the head.
My estimates for Civil War 2.0 involve scores of megadeaths, and the exodus of even more.
The economy was already executed, last year. Every time oil production stalls we get a huge economic downturn. 1971 US peak production, 2005 peak global conventional production and 2019 peak fracking production. The Bill Of Rights was dead with “indefinite detention without charges”
Well, Lord Bison, that happened in 1860.
But that might just be your point :).
This is, however, the Big One of our lives.
As of April 15, the Case Fatality Rate is over 4.8% (according to JHU’s coronavirus dashboard). About 600,000 people have tested positive, but that is only about 0.2% of the US population. There has never been a vaccine developed for a coronavirus. It may not be likely, but the worst-case scenario supported by current data is that eventually, everyone is infected, and 4.8% die. 4.8% of 350 million people is 17 million. Without taking steps to minimize the rate of transmission, all 17 million could die in the next two months. That’s just how exponential growth works. If we take measures to slow the spread, we might have 1 million COVID-19 deaths over the next 17 years, by substituting linear growth for exponential. These measures may not be as severe as what we have now, but it may be a long time before people pack shoulder-to-shoulder in Times Square for New Year’s Eve, or Mardi Gras.
Now, 5% is an enormous number when applied to the whole country, but it’s just one in twenty, so it could easily turn out that it’s nobody you know or care about. It might be your neighbor’s parents, and it might hit some families a lot harder than others. But passing the peak rate of infection is not the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning. I don’t know anyone who has died, but I know of a neighbor who’s hospitalized with pneumonia, and a co-worker of my wife who is recovering. If you look at the case count broken down by county, or even by zip code, you can see how unevenly the infection is distributed. You may not be in a “hot zone”, where you can see it with your own eyes, but my county hospital is overwhelmed and sending new patients elsewhere for treatment.
This is what is so confusing about this. Lots of “experts” are saying the models were completely wrong and we are looking at maybe 50,000 deaths but then other “experts” say stuff like millions of deaths. Which is correct? I have no idea and neither does anyone else, from the top down. The Chinese clearly have been lying the whole time so we have no idea how many cases they had or how many died. How many people who died and had their death attributed to the Chinese virus were going to die anyway? This information simply isn’t known.
In the absence of information, I think it prudent to be cautious, and to take whatever actions we can to protect ourselves… both from the virus, and from poverty.
No argument there but there is another side to this, namely the issues of economic collapse. 22,000,000 Americans have filed for unemployment in the last month. That has huge ramifications for all of us.
To clarify my prior remark: “1 million coronavirus deaths PER YEAR for the next 17 years”. We had 2.8 million deaths of all causes in 2019, so to add an extra million would be statistically significant but not catastrophic, and perhaps not even noticed by the average citizen. Vacate a million housing units, though, and the real-estate market would notice!
Thankfully, it’s very slow here. Will it stay that way?
You just went ancient aliens on us. My husband used to love the show, because we’d play spot the moment when the voice-over guy makes a speculation, but states it as a known.
The mortality rate is not 4%. Or 10% or .05%. It is unknown.
And not only is it unknown, it is variable.
What’s the death rate in a state that short-changed its infrastructure (including hosptials) to play intersectional grievance games and party; one full of ancient elderly, and poor obese; one mass-importing dys-hygenic migrants where nobody can learn modern hygeine, because infrastructure failures, common language failures, and OMG! RAAAACIST! -?
How about the death rate in places that have fewer of these features. Or it’s own opportunities, like draconian cell-phone surveillance, or…
All that wall of text with predictions in detail just went poof. Because we don’t actually know that the aliens landed in pre-historic MesoAmerica.
I take your point. There is great uncertainty, not just about the future, but even about the past. Who knows how many people really died in China? Who knows the significance of “died of COVID-19” vs. “died with COVID-19”? My point is that, to inform our actions, we need to have some plausible basis for making decisions. They don’t need to be accurate, as long as they’re not simply from our imagination. (We can imagine that COVID-19 is merely present when people die of something else, or that it’s going to kill us all next week. But those extremes aren’t useful.) I just picked some actual numbers from the public record, and applied a plausible forecasting model, to demonstrate that inconvenient precautions are justified, and will be justified for a long time.
What information guides your decisions?
I pretty much never go wrong assuming the very worst and basing my assumptions from there.
About the Chicom Herpes and the eclectic lockdown? Basic hygeine rules, some micro-biology, and doing the “follow your gut” thing (Like flipping a coin.Only probably more biased) Then see what happens.
And I don’t pretend that I’m doing anything else, not anymore, and not since it’s clear we ALL identify as mushrooms now.
N.B. If you don’t mind, could you explain what you mean by “justified” in the above?
That’s at one range, and I think it’s realistic. If we have a soft Balkanism? Maybe it’s better than that, but still millions will have to move. And it won’t be entirely peaceful.
Or we have a Caesar.
The people who would be the most vehemently against peaceful separation are the same people who are most vocal about their hatred of regular Americans. They hate us but down deep they know they need us, which makes them hate us even more and guarantees they will never let us separate.
Their ability to prevent us from separating is dependent on federal power and the courts, when the economy goes belly up and the government has no way to impose its will, because the military has either disintegrated, or the troops the bulk of which come from Texas, the south and farm country simply refuse to go all General Sherman on those who wish to leave,
I suppose the snow flakes could rush to federal district court in Hawaii court and get some sort of injunction to hand to the states that say hasta la vista baby to las Estadious Americanos but once every one finally decides that some left wing Obama judge doesn’t get to make the rules for places like Oklahoma and Florida and flips the bird to the federal courts en toto, what are they going to do? Send in a dozen or so US Marshalls, if they have any at that point, to enforce that injunction?
Is New York and Massachusetts going to send its national guard to South Carolina and Louisiana to enforce it, I doubt it but if they do, how does that not end badly for them,
Is President Biden going to ask for the UN to come in, well maybe, but which country is going to have the ability to do so when they are also broke and sinking as well, and if some do show up for the most part, they won’t have the logistics to do anything beyond what we did in Afghanistan, and probably a lot lot less.
You’re right, I fear. It’s like this one girl I dated in high school . . . .
Over under on whether they shut it down again when we get the anticipated second wave of Chinese virus from the relaxation of restrictions?
Anyone who reads dystopian fiction knows that there is always some threat that requires ongoing government control.
Yup. A dozen cases here, a dozen there . . . .
The Permanent Emergency may be here.
I too would trade today for the 1980s in a heartbeat. And not just because they had good music back then, unlike today.
Here’s the Cole paintings as we lived them…
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/04/13/an-alchemist-explains-to-joe-sixpack-covid-19-alters-americas-hidden-war-forever/
Great post.
And metal chicks were hot.
That was an interesting article. I don’t know enough to judge, myself and since it is a site run by liars*, I’d appreciate someone like Mr. Wilder confirming the salient points. It reads as plausible, and of couse, an untrustworthy site – like NR – can have solid contributers – like VDH.
*See this -unsigned- editorial piece:
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/04/17/trumps-tantrum-over-who-funding-exposes-fragile-ego/
Defend the WHO and I’ll pay attention, but if you have to do it by telling blatant lies, I’m out for good. Call it the anti-Gel Mann effect.
“No one expects Spanish ink-precision.”
John, are you drinking again?
Again?
No. That would imply a stoppage.
Please forgive me for being a dirty, rotten, no-good, low-down quibbler. But, unless I’m badly mistaken, cannon were cast, not forged.
I am a big Forged In Fire fan, so I had to go check. Generally cannons were indeed cast, but in the final decades of their production often had forged bands around the thick end to help hold it together – a hybrid design.
Here’s an interesting article I ran across – the so called Rodman Gun, the largest cannon ever built in the US.
https://www.militaryfactory.com/armor/detail.asp?armor_id=316
Absolutely. My bad. In my mind I was thinking of the advances that would follow in the 1800’s – things like autofrettage that would increase strength and thus pressure. Forged was a poor word choice. I’ll edit it at some point.
Thank you for mentioning it.
Excellent post, John.
Thank you. It was kicking around for a while.
Steve,
“No one expects Spanish ink-precision.”
John, are you drinking again?
That pun was tortured.
Well, at least I’m in the comfy chair. No cushions, which might be what has saved me from the three, no FOUR, four weapons of the . . .
“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”
Alexis de Tocqueville
100% winner of commenting name.
I laughed out loud.
And now we’ve reached Alexis’ end game. Will silver be worth anything, or will we pay in .22LR rounds?