America will be Italy in five years — and not in a good way

The future is a façade. It's a thing that's there but hollow, the regime of make-believe. We're headed toward the prevalence of forms without substance.

At the height of the COVID-19 panic, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health ordered the closure of beaches. Just past the peak of that madness, though, health officials decided they wanted to encourage exercise, so they modified the order: They opened the oceans to swimmers but kept the beaches closed. Swimming was allowed, but swimmers couldn't lounge in the water. Recreation was forbidden. Only "active exercise" was to be tolerated, and the sand could only be used as a path to access the site of that exercise. Beach chairs were for killing grandma.

There will still be people in uniforms or with elegant job titles who tell you about rules, but you won’t believe them. And neither will they.

While that order was in place, I took my daughter to Mother’s Beach, a protected place in Long Beach with gentle waves along the side of a bay. Consider this my confession: We recreated.

Joining other families, we put our butts on the sand. And we kept them there. We went into the water, too, but mostly to wade around and fail to perform permissible exercise activities under the published governmental protocols.

After about 20 minutes of illegal beach-lounging, we watched a lifeguard putter up in a boat, cut the engine, and pick up a microphone. “ATTENTION!” he said over a loudspeaker. “The beach is closed. The water is only to be used for active exercise. All persons on the beach must enter the water and begin swimming or leave the area immediately. You may not remain on the beach.”

Then he immediately throttled up the engine and puttered away, not even looking back, and the 40 or 50 people on the beach shrugged and went on with their day. He didn't care, we didn't care, he didn’t care that we didn’t care, and everyone knew that everyone else didn’t care. A government employee did what the formal rules said he was supposed to do, for form’s sake only, and then made sure he wasn't around to watch people ignore what he said.

Nonsense empties and hollows. You listen to the cops, or any other authority, when you trust them and believe they’re trying to protect your community. Sometimes, you grudgingly listen to them because they develop a reputation for being dangerous, and so you go through the motions of obeying them without trusting them. And sometimes, they know they work for idiots who make stupid rules, and officials and citizens join in the project of ignoring the whole dumb show as much as possible.

Ask a military recruiter if you doubt it. The growing stupidity of American institutions leads to a decline in respect and willing participation.

Dr. Saint Anthony Fauci shrugged and told a congressional committee this week that there was never any science behind the public health rule demanding six feet of social distancing. That standard, he said, "sort of just appeared."

LOL, YOLO. Caveat emptor, chumps.

But here’s what real human beings thought of that lighthearted whoopsie, with the casual punctuation of social media: “I watched my grandma slowly die from cancer over zoom because we had to be ‘6 feet apart’ she spent a year in pain and lonely because they wouldn’t let us hug her or go by her. Now as it turns out ‘Fauci just made that up’... No COVID amnesty and no mercy.”

So what happens next time? Public health institutions will remain and even grow, and they’ll go on making rules and telling people about those rules. Will you care? Will anyone?

Military personnel can’t just wander away from work without mentioning it to anyone, but the secretary of defense did just that for the better part of a week, informing neither the person above him nor the person below him in the chain of command that he was in the hospital for a while. How do you punish sergeants and captains who don’t tell anyone where to find them for a while when the person at the top of the Department of Defense doesn’t bother with that same expectation?

Claudine Gay resigned as the president of Harvard University after critics presented plausible claims of plagiarism in her work. The university acknowledged only that she had used "duplicative language" without citations. She keeps her job as a tenured Harvard professor, returning to the faculty after failing as a leader. What does enforcing plagiarism allegations against undergraduates look like in the post-Gay academic environment?

Italians famously know that they have a government but don't concern themselves about the thing too much. Sample headline: “It’s Been 25 Years Since Anyone in Italy Trusted the Government.” Americans are well down the road to having institutions that only rate a distant contempt. There will still be people in uniforms or with elegant job titles who tell you about rules, but you won’t believe them. And neither will they.

The only path that leads away from that destination is to end the double standards and the dismissive shrugging at failure. You can rate the likelihood of those outcomes yourself.