MUSIC TO DROWN BY
Part One
If you think of The West as a ship, it does appear to be sinking—though rather more slowly than our favourite metaphor for massive failure, The Titanic, a ship built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast in 1912. I watched that brilliant disaster movie again last night, fast forwarding through the scenes where Jack and Rose nearly down in the bowels of the flooding ship. Jack would have drowned if Rose had not, at the last minute, realized that her lovely betrothed, one Caledon Hockley, has decided to kill him by falsely accusing him of theft, having him handcuffed and then marched to some kind of holding cell in the basement of the third class compartments. Which is flooding…and while all this is going on, there are three musicians on the deck, playing to keep the doomed passengers from panicking. At first they play upbeat tunes like The Wedding March and the raucous dance music from Orpheus, but as the mood darkens, they start playing hymns, like Nearer my God to thee. They keep playing until the ship, its nose pointing to the heavens, finally slips into the deep.
That this is a story about class privilege and class hubris is clear from the outset, and it becomes increasingly obvious as the helpless and disenfranchised third class passengers are locked behind steel doors because the few lifeboats available must be reserved for the first class passengers. Most of them got saved; most of the poor drowned or froze in the icy Atlantic. For fear of getting ‘swamped’, they are not saved by the half empty boats either. Only one of the boat captains does the humane thing; he goes in search of survivors, and he finds six, one of them Rose. Yeah, this is about who survives during a catastrophe, and it is clear that the people responsible for it, the people whose fault this is get saved. They are the Elite, the players who ‘never lose’, as Caledon assured Jack. And they do survive. Physically. Their conscience is another matter: all they can do is wait for an absolution that never comes, observes Rose, the centenarian telling the tale.
Meanwhile, back in present day Victoria, there are metaphorical icebergs doing serious damage. Two of the main businesses in my immediate vicinity, are no more. One of them was the longstanding Antiques Fair, where dozens of small vendors displayed and sold their Royal Albert tea sets, their jewelry, stamps, and what have you. It was a delightful place to browse and discover something rare and not too expensive, like a collectible mouse from a known potter in Britain. That mouse was my last purchase; a birthday gift for my granddaughter who was delighted. The other one was a rather cool and trendy restaurant/coffee shop called Bear and Joey. The “Bear” was the Canadian wife to the Aussie “Joey” who opened with the pandemic in early 2020. Astute management and Joey, the charming Aussie standing in front to welcome (lure?) guests plus the best cappuccino in Victoria kept them afloat. Until debts and a difficult economy felled them, much to the dismay of their loyal clientele. If people as smart and hardworking as these two couldn’t succeed, who could, one might ask. And it’s not just businesses going to zero. One of my friends is, one of the most intelligent, creative and generous people I know. He is a boomer and according to Google, it is they who make up the bulk of the soaring personal bankruptcies in Canada. Yes, going bankrupt in Canada is a thing, with consumer ‘insolvencies’ up by 23.5 percent and business ones a whopping 129.3 percent as of March 2024. And the US is doing even better; bankruptcies hit a 13 year peak in December of last year!
All of this is the continuing fallout of the pandemic, you are thinking. Yes and No. The trends that the pandemic revealed are of long standing; they are the rot in the system, and it finally collapsed and is still collapsing. Nobody is willing to say what the ‘new normal’ might look like; there’s too much churn. But there is a lot of speculation. My new Harper’s Magazine issue is about how ‘passive investment’ is distorting the investment markets and why things in the Wall Street World might not be as rosy as they appear. What goes up must come down, they say. Being on the outside of that world, I can truly say I don’t care. Let them sink. Oh, I see. I should care because those financial ships could end up sinking the entire economy, me included. As with the aforementioned Titanic, saving yourself during a catastrophe is the name of this game.
And this time, the Elites are in desperate search of lifeboats. The rest of us are already in deep water, hanging on for dear life. We’re well aware of what is causing our malaise: The debts that cannot be paid, the reckless printing of money, the increasing belligerence and cooperation between Russia, China and the BRIC nations; a threat to the dollar hegemony on which our economy depends. Two wars. Out of control migration. The unresolved questions and lingering uncertainty about the long term effects of the ‘vaccines’. The loss of trust in our institutions, especially public health and medicine in general. It’s all bad news. And it is their fault entirely. We, the little people, have no say and no sway. If they want to digitize the money system to wipe out the mountain of debts they created, there isn’t much anyone can do about it. Except take to the streets and bring back the rusty guillotine, perhaps. Nobody wants that, of course.
But the rot isn’t just financial. It goes much deeper, into the moral life of the West, into its bad conscience, corrupted scientists working hand in glove with stupid politicians, not to mention our poisoned, Woke morals. I can’t think of a single writer worth reading who isn’t talking about this, a spiritual malaise that is destroying us from within. The best of the lot is a fellow Substack writer and author, Paul Kingsnorth. Who says things like this: I feel that words are savage gods, and in the end, no matter how well you serve them, they will eat you alive. He once was an ‘environmentalist’ who quit when he realized how utterly corrupted it is by Big Money interests. He is now a practicing Catholic. He has figured something out for himself. Admirable. But I can’t follow there.
As for the rest of us, we’re a culture going to zero. How far along we are in this painful process seems to be the only point of disagreement among the chattering classes. Perhaps we’re at the stage where they try to lock the third class and steerage passengers behind locked doors, there to drown. Perhaps we’re at the stage where the ship breaks into two and the real battle for survival begins among those left on the doomed vessel. We don’t know. All we do know is that our world is out of joint. Things aren’t working. Our leaders are fools or worse, criminals.
Just look at who in the USA is ‘running for President’. Really?? Oh, and the Titanic Shipyard in Belfast; they’re in financial trouble too. Which seems rather fitting.
More next week: this is a Big Theme. I hope I didn’t depress you too much.