Blown Up and Turned Upside Down

Our world has been blown up and turned upside down. Which happened first? I think the latter; but it doesn't matter now. We are where we are; it is what it is. 

With that, let's look at the turning upside down part first.

That started a long time ago. Some say it was when the "asteroid" hit in the 1960s (not my word; read it elsewhere). Moz def. I still wince when I hear some talk about the 60s wistfully. Was it because they were young then? Did they really think that "the revolution" - or whatever was being pushed back in those turbulent years - was going to result in a better world? Apparently some do. 

Okay, so the popular music did have its charm. I must say, though, that what I hear today makes it easy to like what was pumped out then - or at least some of it. Frankly, I dip in from time to time via Youtube, if for nothing else than The Beatles. Other recent favorites: Spanky and Our Gang and The Association. I pick those because of their relatively sophisticated songs - at least for pop tunes. What makes them sophisticated? For starters, the chords, vocal harmonies, lyrics, melodies - Did I leave anything out? 

The point here is that what we hear now incorporates super-production, hyper-tech effects layered on top of mostly mediocre melodies (when there is one) and harmonies, with generally vapid, sometimes offensive, always dumbed down lyrics - except for maybe some rap lyrics which can be ingenious if hardly conveying the most uplifting messages - for the most part.

But what do I know?

To music, we add the rest of our purported cultural treasures. While don't have time to get into specific examples, I'll just say this: If you "appreciate" or possibly like what passes as culture these days, you've likely been turned upside down yourself. 

Now it wouldn't be so bad if contemporary composers of what passes for classical music just put out their stuff and left the rest of our Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc. But the modernist cultural pooh-bahs can't keep their mitts off the true classics. You find this especially true in opera (a favorite). So many new productions try to be at best "different," at worst insist on deconstructing these venerable works. The result is a combination of weird, disturbing, pornographic, stupid...I could go on. It turns what should be beautiful, sometimes inspiring and uplifting to something odd and/or trashy. Why?

Maybe because it's part of the "upside-down" movement. Yeah, there's a chunk of humanity (or at least they make the claim to being so) that wants to turn everything upside down and inside out. For whatever their reasons, they can't abide the True, the Good, and the Beautiful as we once knew them. Instead they turn it all into the opposite of True, Good, or Beautiful. Simply creating their own junk doesn't do the trick. 

Then there's the whole social realm. The first to be ripped apart: the family. Not saying some folks haven't had difficult or even disastrous family relationships of course. It happens. But was that any reason to do anything and everything to destroy the family - or at least try to. (And by family here, we're talking mother, father, children - where the mother's female, the father's male, and the children are either or.)

And right in line with this, we've had our financial lives turned upside down. The simplest for instance: Zero rates from 2008 until just recently. The average Joe couldn't save and invest his savings safely and get some reasonable return - you know, something like the 5% savings account once provided to us kids who saved our nickels and dimes and put them into an account opened by our parents - the result of which was that we had a little sack of money worth something when we started the independent leg of life, rather than the more common situation of kids graduating from college in debt with no savings. Oh, and the 5% that was paid was higher than prevailing inflation. So the money we saved increased in purchasing power. Exotic, eh?

We could go on - and may in some future post - but we need to get to the "blown up" part.

So what's happened in the last few years is that the stuff we put our money into has been blown up out of all proportion by a partnership of the Federal Reserve, Banks, and Wall Street. Of course, the big boys of Wall Street have always had a louder voice than the rest of us when it comes to calling for the Fed to do this or that with their policies. And with that louder voice, it wasn't unheard of for a raising or lowering of the Fed Funds Rate that benefited the gangland-style coalition of Banksters and Wall Street Brokesters. But since 2008 with the Bernanke/Yellen Fed and their zero interest-rates combined with endless (until recently) Quantitative Easing, the blowing up of all assets definitively spun out of control.

Which leaves us now being pummeled as the stock and bond market bubbles implode, taking with them every other asset in which we might have invested to get at least a modicum or return on our money vs. leaving it in the bank.

Now it's all changing. What was blown up is deflating. If we haven't felt the bursting of the financial balloons yet, we will. But it's likely we all have already, inflation being perhaps the most obvious example.

What about what's been turned upside down? Well, I haven't seen anything righting itself. Have you? All we can hope for is that there's some contingent of reasonable, God-fearing souls out there who might be stirred from their decades-long slumber by recent events. But so far, aside from a few examples that haven't yet moved the needle on the cultural and social scale to any noticeable degree, has there been all that much push-back?

It will be interesting to see if that changes as things turn uglier.