![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The New Normal
Oct. 27th, 2020 10:42 pmWe may be at peak Coronapocalypse, because Buzzfeed finally featured an article about people who were diligent savers who were wiped out by the panicdemic. In other words, a good seven months after every lower middle class person realized that shutting down every restaurant, bar, concert hall, and sports arena would decimate an already fragile economy, the geniuses at Buzzfeed managed to put together the puzzle pieces. Yes, collapse ripples from the bottom up. Yes, the financially responsible types who save every spare penny are feeling the pain right now. Yes, the Professional Managerial Class is next in line.
They Only Wanted Rest
I understand why the Professional Managerial Class was gung ho about shutting down the economy. When I was a kid, my family had more disposable income than we do now. I was upper middle class in the 1980s and I gradually fell down into the lower middle class. This isn't hard to do nowadays. I don't mind though, because I remember being an upper middle class child. Though I had all the ingredients for a happy childhood, it was hell. I had great parents, a nice house, the best schools, and plenty of food and perks. I was academically gifted and I was blessed with good physical health. What made it hell was the lack of sleep. I was cursed by my own night owl temperament. Insomnia was exacerbated by electric lights and constant stimuli. The TV was always on. Between electronic inputs and my mammoth imagination, I couldn't sleep. I wasn't alone. I had friends in high school who opted out of lunch so they could cram in more pre-college classes for credit. Nobody slept. Sleep was for wussies.
Insomnia Takes Its Toll
What happens when you don't sleep? Physically, the eyes become bloodshot and bleary. Everything itches. The ears ring. The gastrointestinal tract gets extremely messed up -- count on gas, bloating, acid reflux, constipation, diarrhea, anything but normal digestion. In the upper respiratory, inflammation is the name of the game. Phlegm: every kid I knew had issues with it, to the point where we all had boxes of tissues in our desks. The body aches. There are migraines.
I existed in a mental fog most of my youth. I was almost always tired. I was often grumpy because of blood sugar issues caused by lack of sleep. On Friday night and Saturday night, from the age of 8 - 17 I slept twelve hours both nights, midnight to noon, as my body and mind frantically tried to make up for sleep debt. Irritation at being forced to conform to the morning-centric schedules of others led to despair and eventually suicidal nihilism. Like many, I retreated to a toxic indoor world. For me, dysmorphia and obsession with my appearance plagued my teenaged mind. For the modern teen, it is often videogames, porn, or social media that becomes addictive.
Insomnia may be bad physically and mentally, but its worst effects happen in the astral plane, otherwise known as the realm of imagination, emotion, and feeling. Deep sleep cleanses the imagination, ridding it of junk. The reason light sleep is often not refreshing is because it's a surface clean. Five hours a night for me was superficial sleep -- the state of constant anxiety and misery I dwelled in as a young person only went away once a week on Saturday and Sunday.
Enter the Panicdemic
The Corona closures that were supposed to last two weeks and have ended up dragging on for most of a year were, among other things, a one size fits all solution to a nearly universal insomnia problem. Before the pandemic, the Professional Managerial Classes (PMC) were the most sleepless of them all. To be upper middle class is to give up on sleep as a human need. I have already explained how I didn't sleep as a PMC child. PMC adults sleep even less. In the PMC household, dad most likely gets up before dawn to face a grueling commute, or at least he used to before COVID. Mom's job is to manage the children, so of course she doesn't get to sleep in.
The pandemic solved all of this by ending dad's commute and cancelling the trip to school as well as all extracurricular activities, including in-restaurant dining and about half to three quarters of all brick and mortar shopping. Plane travel, an activity that used to be de rigueur for PMC families every holiday and summer break, was also cancelled without further notice. The PMC had two weeks of no school, no clubs, no sports, no dance, yet plenty of money to pay for Uber Eats, Netflix, and Amazon.com. Best of all, they had the guilty pleasure of times long past: adequate sleep. COVID was paradise; all they had to do was give plenty of lip service to "essential" workers and order their takeout food from struggling independent restaurants instead of the usual chains once in a while. Some convinced themselves COVID was lethal to large swathes of the population and not just the elderly and severely immunocompromised. Mainstream media was right there to help them gin up death estimates and foment hysteria.
The Declaration of War
The Professional Managerial Classes went to war with the classes beneath them because those classes started demanding to take their pandemic away. The PMC are not dumb. They know that rest time is over once everyone is allowed to go back to movie theaters and soccer games. For now, the essential workers have picked up the slack as they toil fulfilling Amazon orders and stocking grocery store shelves. Make no mistake -- anyone who wants to live in a country where you can hug your grandma without taking weird and special precautions and/or see the high school musical where the unmasked protagonists share a funny albeit brief stage kiss is literally Hitler and most likely a Drumpfen SS sympathizer who kills puppies as a hobby. Eight months into a pandemic that peaked within three weeks of its arrival, the cozy PMC lauds the holy grail of a vaccine by Big Daddy Government that will save us all from a flu that kills a third of a percent of the people it infects.
The New Normal the PMC thinks it wants is a state of permanent rest courtesy of lower class work (the grocery stores and delivery services aren't closing anytime soon) and government handouts. The PMC believes this can happen without a total collapse of the economy. When they pass a permanently shuttered restaurant, they shake their heads and mutter a vacuous incantation about how a vaccine could have stopped the closure if only it had been rolled out in time, or they spit a bit of foul language about people who don't compulsively cover their noses and mouths with masks. There is never an acceptance of personal responsibility such as "Fear did this and I am one who lives in fear." What they have failed to put together is how they've amputated most of the vital parts of the culture in which they used to take pride. As an artist, I have straddled the bohemian gap between lower class pragmatism and high art; I like to think I have a decent perspective of both sides. Like the underfunded inner city public schools that cut out their art and music programs, the PMC has managed to chop away the arts and all who would aspire to work in them for the whole of American society via COVID. The New Normal means no dad will be able to take his kid to a crowded baseball game ever again. It means there won't be any careers being made on New York's Broadway because Broadway will cease to exist. It means no more rock concerts, Olympics, or Nutcracker ballets at Christmastime. The New Normal is an introvert's utopia, a glass snow globe of government welfare, solitary confinement, and Zoom meetings, every man, woman, and child for himself. The New Normal is the ultimate in luxurious quiet desperation, deaf to the cries of the deplorables who aren't well-off enough to similarly virtue signal from a safe window view.
They Only Wanted Rest
I understand why the Professional Managerial Class was gung ho about shutting down the economy. When I was a kid, my family had more disposable income than we do now. I was upper middle class in the 1980s and I gradually fell down into the lower middle class. This isn't hard to do nowadays. I don't mind though, because I remember being an upper middle class child. Though I had all the ingredients for a happy childhood, it was hell. I had great parents, a nice house, the best schools, and plenty of food and perks. I was academically gifted and I was blessed with good physical health. What made it hell was the lack of sleep. I was cursed by my own night owl temperament. Insomnia was exacerbated by electric lights and constant stimuli. The TV was always on. Between electronic inputs and my mammoth imagination, I couldn't sleep. I wasn't alone. I had friends in high school who opted out of lunch so they could cram in more pre-college classes for credit. Nobody slept. Sleep was for wussies.
Insomnia Takes Its Toll
What happens when you don't sleep? Physically, the eyes become bloodshot and bleary. Everything itches. The ears ring. The gastrointestinal tract gets extremely messed up -- count on gas, bloating, acid reflux, constipation, diarrhea, anything but normal digestion. In the upper respiratory, inflammation is the name of the game. Phlegm: every kid I knew had issues with it, to the point where we all had boxes of tissues in our desks. The body aches. There are migraines.
I existed in a mental fog most of my youth. I was almost always tired. I was often grumpy because of blood sugar issues caused by lack of sleep. On Friday night and Saturday night, from the age of 8 - 17 I slept twelve hours both nights, midnight to noon, as my body and mind frantically tried to make up for sleep debt. Irritation at being forced to conform to the morning-centric schedules of others led to despair and eventually suicidal nihilism. Like many, I retreated to a toxic indoor world. For me, dysmorphia and obsession with my appearance plagued my teenaged mind. For the modern teen, it is often videogames, porn, or social media that becomes addictive.
Insomnia may be bad physically and mentally, but its worst effects happen in the astral plane, otherwise known as the realm of imagination, emotion, and feeling. Deep sleep cleanses the imagination, ridding it of junk. The reason light sleep is often not refreshing is because it's a surface clean. Five hours a night for me was superficial sleep -- the state of constant anxiety and misery I dwelled in as a young person only went away once a week on Saturday and Sunday.
Enter the Panicdemic
The Corona closures that were supposed to last two weeks and have ended up dragging on for most of a year were, among other things, a one size fits all solution to a nearly universal insomnia problem. Before the pandemic, the Professional Managerial Classes (PMC) were the most sleepless of them all. To be upper middle class is to give up on sleep as a human need. I have already explained how I didn't sleep as a PMC child. PMC adults sleep even less. In the PMC household, dad most likely gets up before dawn to face a grueling commute, or at least he used to before COVID. Mom's job is to manage the children, so of course she doesn't get to sleep in.
The pandemic solved all of this by ending dad's commute and cancelling the trip to school as well as all extracurricular activities, including in-restaurant dining and about half to three quarters of all brick and mortar shopping. Plane travel, an activity that used to be de rigueur for PMC families every holiday and summer break, was also cancelled without further notice. The PMC had two weeks of no school, no clubs, no sports, no dance, yet plenty of money to pay for Uber Eats, Netflix, and Amazon.com. Best of all, they had the guilty pleasure of times long past: adequate sleep. COVID was paradise; all they had to do was give plenty of lip service to "essential" workers and order their takeout food from struggling independent restaurants instead of the usual chains once in a while. Some convinced themselves COVID was lethal to large swathes of the population and not just the elderly and severely immunocompromised. Mainstream media was right there to help them gin up death estimates and foment hysteria.
The Declaration of War
The Professional Managerial Classes went to war with the classes beneath them because those classes started demanding to take their pandemic away. The PMC are not dumb. They know that rest time is over once everyone is allowed to go back to movie theaters and soccer games. For now, the essential workers have picked up the slack as they toil fulfilling Amazon orders and stocking grocery store shelves. Make no mistake -- anyone who wants to live in a country where you can hug your grandma without taking weird and special precautions and/or see the high school musical where the unmasked protagonists share a funny albeit brief stage kiss is literally Hitler and most likely a Drumpfen SS sympathizer who kills puppies as a hobby. Eight months into a pandemic that peaked within three weeks of its arrival, the cozy PMC lauds the holy grail of a vaccine by Big Daddy Government that will save us all from a flu that kills a third of a percent of the people it infects.
The New Normal the PMC thinks it wants is a state of permanent rest courtesy of lower class work (the grocery stores and delivery services aren't closing anytime soon) and government handouts. The PMC believes this can happen without a total collapse of the economy. When they pass a permanently shuttered restaurant, they shake their heads and mutter a vacuous incantation about how a vaccine could have stopped the closure if only it had been rolled out in time, or they spit a bit of foul language about people who don't compulsively cover their noses and mouths with masks. There is never an acceptance of personal responsibility such as "Fear did this and I am one who lives in fear." What they have failed to put together is how they've amputated most of the vital parts of the culture in which they used to take pride. As an artist, I have straddled the bohemian gap between lower class pragmatism and high art; I like to think I have a decent perspective of both sides. Like the underfunded inner city public schools that cut out their art and music programs, the PMC has managed to chop away the arts and all who would aspire to work in them for the whole of American society via COVID. The New Normal means no dad will be able to take his kid to a crowded baseball game ever again. It means there won't be any careers being made on New York's Broadway because Broadway will cease to exist. It means no more rock concerts, Olympics, or Nutcracker ballets at Christmastime. The New Normal is an introvert's utopia, a glass snow globe of government welfare, solitary confinement, and Zoom meetings, every man, woman, and child for himself. The New Normal is the ultimate in luxurious quiet desperation, deaf to the cries of the deplorables who aren't well-off enough to similarly virtue signal from a safe window view.
