People talk about “garbage time” in basketball. The last couple minutes of a blowout, where the starters are sitting on the bench with warm towels, and the coach is sending in guys whose mothers don’t even recognize them on the court. And the points don’t matter. The game’s already decided. It’s not history, it’s bookkeeping. Garbage time.

Now, I’ve been thinking because that’s what I do and I think a lot about our civilization over the last hundred years. Yeah, that’s garbage time.

See, in the earlier quarters, we had the real players. You had Homer – he’s up there draining threes from the logo. Dante’s running the triangle offense of hell, purgatory, and paradise. Shakespeare’s putting up a triple-double every night. These were the guys you came to see. They set the high water mark of civilization and established the standard that was taught to all who sought excellence.

And then, somewhere around the early 20th century, the coach just waved his hand, said, “Eh, let the scrubs play.” And what do we get? Content. Not art, not philosophy, not literature – content. Instead of philosophy, we get TED Talks about drinking water. No more great literature, just generic airport novels about a spy who looks suspiciously like Tom Cruise. We don’t have Beethoven pounding the keys. We’ve got some mediocre guy remixing “Baby Shark” on TikTok. Garbage time.

And here’s the funny thing: it wasn’t always like this. Couple of generations ago, high school grads walked out fluent in great art, philosophy, literature. They could drop a little Cicero before homeroom. Greek and Latin were standard. Today, you mention Virgil and the kid thinks you’re talking about the guy who won American Idol.

But now? Any vacant mind can drift through high school, stumble into college, and walk out with a degree. “Congratulations, you’re educated!” Except you don’t know anything. You’ve never read Plato, never touched Augustine, never even heard of Kierkegaard. You’ve got a diploma, but the only philosophy you know is “Live, Laugh, Love.”

The great works haven’t been destroyed. They’re still sitting there, same as they always were. Nobody burned ‘em. They’re just buried. Buried under Funko Pops, self-help paperbacks, and ideological nonsense written by people who can’t finish a paragraph without the word “systemic.” They can’t act in a civilized manner because they’ve never encountered any aspect of civilization. Their poor schooling and lack of curiosity kept them from anything valuable. No wonder every crowd is a degraded mess of dummies who don’t even know they don’t know anything.

So instead of a society soaring on the shoulders of greatness, we’ve got one where the mob cheers for layups by players who couldn’t make varsity in 1890. People hooting and hollering over garbage time, saying, “Wow, did you see that?” Yeah, I saw it. It’s worthless.

And if you say this out loud, people get mad. They say, “Hey, that’s not fair, we have great things now. We’ve got iPhones and a toaster that can send you an email.” And yeah, that’s true. But let me tell you, if your greatest achievement as a species is a refrigerator that can talk to you, you’re not in the golden age – you’re in garbage time.

The clock’s ticking down, folks. Civilization’s on the floor, dribbling out the clock with a fidget spinner, and the mob is compliantly enthralled cheering for the trivial. And the buzzer? Oh, the buzzer will come, but you won’t hear it because they’re blasting Taylor Swift over the PA.