The looming doom of the Student Loan thing appears to be the next headline meant to divert the attention in the expected Orwellian manner — whatever the blowhards and talking heads have to say about this call to have students pay back their loans.

Here's where we are now from a CBS affiliate:

DES MOINES, Iowa — President Joe Biden's plan to forgive eligible borrowers for up to $20,000 in federal student loans is still in limbo, as the U.S. Supreme Court is still deciding if it's legal.

With debt relief for up to 43 million Americans at stake, the Biden Administration argued this plan is within the president's authority.

It's basically to help out people that maybe took on a lot of student loan debt and don't have a job that allows them to then reasonably pay, make those payments and pay that loan back," said Tim Hagle, a political science professor at the University of Iowa.

The plan was quickly met with opposition from those who say that, not only does Biden not have the power, but it's just plain unfair.

It vaguely reminds me of the $4.00/gallon gas in the summer of 2007 that coincided with a bunch of ARMs, or adjustable rate mortgages, changing — then the whole TARP whatever.

This time, well...AT readers probably have their own prognostications in that regard.

What has always struck me in the student loan forgiveness plan, or the call to restore payments, is the apparent lack of any rational discussion around the nature of the problem.  The side that psychotically screeches about genitalia is not worthy of any consideration; one cannot reason with a child, a drunk, or a lunatic, and they are all three.  I am disinclined to preach to the choir, so I'm speaking to the other side.

Republicans and conservatives oppose the mass forgiveness of student loans, and many are calling for an end to the current longtime forbearance of student loan payments brought on by COVID, which is coming up around August 30.

I understand at least some of their logic.

First, yes: Many if not most academic programs are absolute fetid garbage.  As a general rule, I have nothing but contempt for any "major" that includes the word "studies."  Academia is a rotten, evil, corrupted cesspool — full stop.

But, like most everything, it is not nearly that simple.

It is much too simple to mock the participation-ribbon-bubble-wrapped-perpetual-adolescent with zee/xir degree in Mongolian underwater basket-weaving.  The nauseatingly simplistic suck it up buttercup, you took a loan, pay it back reply from many on our side does nothing but make the thing worse.

No, I do not believe that these kids are "victims" — but you might try not sending more people over to your opponents by merely dismissing the portions of their complaints that are legitimate.

The combination of non-bankruptability and capitalizing interest (it becomes principal), among other things, in these student loans makes these loan contracts unconscionable.

Mocking an 18- or a 19-year-old kid (who wasn't allowed to run on the playground, got a ribbon for everything, and was never spanked) for getting sucked into an unconscionable contract is hardly a rational act.

When one considers the overwhelming pressure to join that world (a bachelor's is "the new high school diploma") — and the majority having had no support from their parents — the picture becomes a bit more nuanced.

Yes, they could have chosen a STEM degree — but university is not trade school.  Besides, what's that about outsourcing and H.R. being wholly sold out to DIE or ESG, or the unpronounceable alphabet mafia?  Even a STEM degree is useless to a cis-white-guy in this schizophrenic job market.

The thing that gets at me the most is the total lack of recognition that it is decidedly not STEM majors that, you know, make laws and decide what is or is not published and taught to your kids as TRUTH.

After the military, and nearly twenty years in six different industrial trades (a world brimming with its own sicknesses and wholly enslaved to banksters), I got sick of waiting 90–180 days for my depressed labor wages while getting abhorrent bills from the IRS and watching my body fall apart to barely meet my most basic bills.  I returned to academia as an act of desperation.

It was not avocado toast and lattes that made me poor, though some of my own decisions certainly play their part.  It's that most tradesmen are impoverished — it doesn't matter that your uncle's cousin gets paid $150 an hour to weld in the oil fields, or that you were the beneficiary of the artificial prosperity of the decades after Nixon's "dollar" or Bretton Woods before that.

For every "successful" tradesman, there are at least 20 guys pawning their drill so they can get gas to make it to work while they pay inflated prices and earn depressed wages — when the work is actually available.

I am nearing completion of my doctorate.  My major (though as a grad, I am supposed to be snooty and call it a "discipline") is history, with a B.A. in philosophy and a lesser degree in criminal justice.  I have student loan debt that, barring a God-wink in the form of a lotto win, I will never be able to pay.

When I last spoke to a plumber buddy, he laughed at the idea of studying philosophy.  I get it (most philosophers are useless potheads), but I wonder if he knows (or would care) who discovered things like science, engineering, math, ethics, and law.  To this day, I wait for the next person to laugh: "Yeah, studying wisdom is a stupid waste of time...nobody should do that."

Studying the past is stupid, too — only gender-phrenics do that, right?  Right?

The student loan thing may well be the straw that shatters this house of cards we call a "national economy," though maybe not.

It certainly is a divisive political issue.

So, while mocking (even deservedly) the army of citizens trapped in lifetime indentured servitude — in no small part because there really aren't very many good options — and laughing at people who waste their time with Aristotle, Aquinas, Augustine, Descartes, Locke, and Jefferson, consider for a moment what disciplines become teachers, professors, policymakers, and legislators.

Yes, most "degrees" are garbage.  Equally true, the traditional disciplines are invaluable.  But more than this, dismissing everyone who is lost in this absolutely diabolical and usurious "economy" as a deadbeat will guarantee that legislatures continue to overflow with delusional, narcissistic blue-hairs.

Ten-thousand bad decisions over the last 110 years are coming to a head.  Perhaps the situation is just a little more nuanced than blowing student loans on pizza and weed.  

Spencer D. "I normally wear pants" Miles; emeritus guy, super-important director of things and stuff, FAS, MDBS, FPDHA (hons.), Hominus notimportantus atallii.

Graphic credit: Peggy_Marco, Pixabay license.