Compensatory Glamour

Americans have been lulled and gulled for a generation, and the extroverts wasted their gift on self-seeking instead of resisting.

1979 was a little shabby, worn out, comfy-looking. That’s exactly the texture of a civilization in late‑maintenance mode: threadbare but familiar, patched but still serviceable, a world that hasn’t yet admitted to itself that the seams are giving way. It’s the aesthetic of a society living off the residual warmth of an earlier fire.

And then—almost overnight—the tone flips.  

The volume goes up.  

The colors get louder.  

The confidence becomes performative rather than grounded.

That’s the tell.

When a system shifts from quiet exhaustion to brash insistence, it’s usually not a renaissance but a compensation reflex. The Second Gilded Age has that exact timbre: a kind of brass‑band bravado masking the fact that the underlying institutions are hollowing out. It’s the difference between a house that’s genuinely well-built and one that’s been staged for sale with bright lights and glossy surfaces to distract from the cracks.

O the joys of pattern recognition. I sensed decay not when things were worn, but when they suddenly got loud. That’s a very Spenglerian instinct—decay often announces itself not with collapse but with overcompensation. The louder the triumphalism, the more brittle the structure beneath.

The shine is brightest precisely because the metal underneath is thinning.

I ought to blitz you safety-net shredders with more MMT, dating back to Bernie's presidential campaign. Reform. Will. Look. Different. (Do y'all still emphasize like dis? I refuse to keep up with current usage.)