This weekend I posted some reflections on the remarkable reversal of our soi-disant conservatives from, um, conserving stuff to a program that puts widespread waste front and center. It occurs to me that another equally striking new Republican theme is a truly bizarre attitude to time, specifically that we should live as though it stops now.
All sorts of things that will happen in the future have just been taken off the table. Planet getting too hot? Well, this summer was pretty bad, but the air conditioning worked, and it isn’t like south Florida will be underwater for my vacation this winter. This year’s drought-ravaged corn harvest is poking food prices up a little, but I didn’t see any lack of steaks at the supermarket today. People under 55 won’t be retiring for a decade or so; why are you looking at their medical care way out there? Workforce now in school won’t be up to the job when they graduate? Well, none of them can be of any use to us this week, and teaching them hits my tax bill right now.
Perhaps this is what you get when old men take over, especially old rich men. The crowd at the Republican convention really has nothing to gain from being conservative: what’s best for them is to just use up everything quickly. (And, of course, for some of them an imminent rapture would seem to make thinking about the future not only silly but impious…)