Dark Ages 2.0

 This may be the most poignant thing I have read all year.

Cardozo High School in Queens, New York, has banned cell phones and announced it to be a success.  Students are less distracted in class, move more efficiently through the halls and actually talk to one another at lunch.  There is an unexpected problem, though:  many cannot read the clocks on the walls.

It's universal.  British schools have begun removing analog clocks from exam rooms because the students' inability to read the time increases anxiety.  Many American schools are doing the same, and Cardozo will probably follow.  I knew kids could no longer write in cursive even to sign their names, and rotary phones might as well be butter churns, but replacing beautiful clocks like the ones in old train stations with sterile digital displays saddens me more than I can say.  I-phones can, with a few taps, unlock all the information we spent hours learning in the before time:  State capitals, kings of France, the atomic weights of the elements, remember all the stuff we had to memorize?  And the stuff we wanted to memorize, like the starting lineup of the 1927 Yankees?  A whole shared culture is vanishing.  Probably no one even reads poetry anymore, much less learns it "by heart."  Stop me before I turn into Allan Bloom.

Rotary phones are no loss, they were slow and clumsy.  It's the destruction of beauty by barbarians that makes me rage, like Trump destroying the White House and the Taliban blowing up the Bamiyan Buddhas.  Not content with defacing the Kennedy Center, our own Mullah Omar wants Kennedy's name removed completely because JFK has been "elevated to obscene levels."  Replacing his wife's beloved rose garden with the Pedo Patio wasn't enough.  Any day now I expect to read that the Eternal Flame at his grave has been discontinued as a cost-cutting measure.  Now and forever the slob from Queens yearns for the sophistication and grace he will never possess and the admiration he will never earn.

In the short time since the appropriation Doug Varone and Dancers joined Chuck Redd in heading for the exit, while ticket sales for the rest of the events remain anemic.  Ric Grenell is proving as incompetent an administrator as he was an ambassador (the German government demanded he stop encouraging the neo-Nazi AfD or go home).  He responded with a screed calling all those who cancelled "far left political activists rather than artists willing to perform for everyone," as if the audience was the problem and not the Ministry of Culture and Public Enlightenment he represents.  (The only time an audience made trouble was when Grenell gave passes to a bunch of Log Cabin Republicans and encouraged them to jeer at Yasmin Williams.)  "The arts are for everyone and the left is mad about it," he concluded, which at least made me laugh.  

I never thought I'd write this but Mona Charen at The Bulwark had it exactly right today:  "Somebody needs to tell Trump everybody is laughing at him."  "Of all the wrong ideas you hold in your heart..." she tells him, "perhaps the most gobsmacking is your cherished notion that people respect you when they kiss your ass...With every renaming of a building you are sending up a signal that screams, 'I am so insecure.'  You cannot piggyback on the respect John F. Kennedy earned by slapping your name on the arts center that was named by statute to be his living memorial....in our hearts we will never respect you."  Read it all.  Remember it the next time the Klown Kabinet praise the Creator for allowing them to inhale his flatulence.