The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
January 15th
ON PRODUCTIVE and DEGENERATE CAPITAL!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated
by Acme Features
Other day, I was taking
the truck back home from Lexington... having had some more or less fruitless
discussion with a man about a horse... or the vice versile…
came upon this flea market of Hell! Far
as the eye can see were coffins - resting in mud, lying on parking lot gravel,
caskets being loaded into wheezing twentieth century pickup trucks or strapped
down with bungee cords atop sad little Asian, American and European gas-misers;
a whole stampede of kids opening and closing lids, playin’
Dracula, dogs barking, doing all those other dog-things dogs just have to do. Other people with tape measures taking
measurements agin’ the day...
It's the old story:
times so hard the local funeral parlour went bust;
nobody able to afford a proper burial in these times just as all the caskets
made in China and crossed the shining sea to combat plague variants as spiked
so fast that everybody on death’s door as might have lingered there awhile
crossed through. Container ships stalled out in Western ports for months before
docking did finally unload and glut the market, so the stock's going, pennies
on the dollar, albeit as a do-it-yourself deal. A dollop of good fortune for families of he plague
and post-plague gun fun and just plain dead folks as were being cut in pieces
and burned in old oil drums or buried out in backyards beneath the old spreading
chestnut tree, like burying was done in the good ol’ days, a’fore
the chestnut blight.
Well, I'm all for
tradition, but we're in the deep dada when honest folk as drop dead after lives
of work or lookin' for it can't afford the
store-bought smokes or store-bought funerals...
When I first thought
of runnin' for President after steppin'
away from Cannibal... pardon me, Capitol... Hill, I entertained brief thoughts of
a glorious MacArthurian return; maybe a'front of fifty thousand good people brandishing torches, shovels
and rakes (to whack them termites on the back of their wriggly necks and
backsides). Was just a whiskey dream, however, as would pop, like most do, under
the cold, cruel sun of global reality once I trekked to Arlington's Qual-Mart to price shovels, all of which, I quickly saw… as
weren't the high-end sort made in Korea… came from Brazil.
So I left that
torchlight dream to rot by the side of the road like them flea-market
caskets... they've got troubles enough down in Brazil (what with a crime rate
higher than Detroit, their infected President still promoting failed One Sixish coups from his hospital bed in Florida - claiming
there’s no such creature as infection, to prevent his restoration and
resumption of burning down the Amazon to make grazing space for the gaunt and
sickly cattle with the hoof and mouth plague or worse as end up in Big Macs)
without pushy Americans storming the Capitol with their runaway shovels (as
mostly rip up the middle, bein’ made of some tin
compound, not that good American iron from upstate Minnesota, where the
T-wolves cyclone-bombed Houston yesterday, Bob Dylan was born and my pal Jesse
was elected Governor). Things went so bad after our men in black destabilized
the government in order to provide for that safe, secure (if not very sanitary)
Olympics that Brazilians are still pouring over the Argentine and Chilean
borders... there are people called IBASE down there who, honestly, measure
the edible quality of the garbage down there some people there have to eat.
Back in 1970, nearly half of what was thrown away in Rio could be scavenged and
eaten by dog, pig or man. Ten years later that had dropped down to 37%, by the
turn of the Millennium, less than a third. Went up a tad on lefty crook Lulu's
watch but as more land used to grow food was switched over to sugarcane for
gasohol and grass for McDonalds’ cattle after the World Cup meltdown in 2018,
the Bolsonaro years (and coup attempts against Mister
Bolsonaro by even fourth-generation crazier
neo-Nazis), IBASE determined that only 28% of Brazilian trash
contained significant nutritional value. So they brought Lula back from prison and now
estimates range from 26 down to twenty three
percent!
Too
many people chasing too few calories, consequent from too few decent-paying jobs.
Here, there and everywhere! Back in the spare room at Miller's Ridge, I
keep a pair of Acme boots... made in the early 70's in Clarksville, state of
Tennessee. Acme ran off to Puerto Rico in '93, leaving half the county to make
a bonfire of old boots and throw the burnt heels at Randy Travis, who was to
Acme what Michael Jordan used to be to Nike.
At least Puerto Rico
is American, sort of… they got American-style bankruptcy
and corruption problems although when it comes to extending a helping hand to
the disaster-stricken citizens with darker skins and different languages,
Washington’s fist, at present, seems firmly wrapped around a tire iron. So Acme might follow the example of the
swoosh-gang, as moved their sweatshops from enterprise-unfriendly Indonesia to
the territory of Saipan (over which flies the American flag... though not any
of our child-labor and sex-trafficking laws). Shipped in more twelve-year old
girls, making the same twelve cents an hour and charged them for so much rent
and transportation that, when they clock out after their twelve-hour shifts,
they’re still in the red and have to moonlight as prostitutes for vacationing
swells from Hong Kong, L.A. and Tokyo. And if somebody squawks, out they go in
cheap coffins and in come some effin' Vietnamese!
Secret Vietcong toys and clothes, pickles, paperclips and radios saying
“assembled in Taiwan” are washing over the American heartland like locusts,
commingling with Red Chinese prison goods (ordinary Chinese workers are
starting to get too costly for American corporations, not to mention the
tariffs) and clothing from Bangladesh (some with slight scorch marks from the
endemic sweatshop fires) and the infinitesimally more expensive junk from the
rest of the Third World! As my late colleague Archibald, "Bum" Howser
from Lou'siana used to say: "I'll take off my
hat to 'em, but don't expect me to doff my rug!"
"The United
States escaped a lot of the political turmoil that plagued other
countries," warned Charley Reese, a big-time conservative newspaper
columnist back when mention of Vietnam still raised fur on the forearms and
MAGA was what some called May in that ol’ Rod Stewart song, "because we’ve
had a huge middle class. Deindustrialization will destroy that middle class. We
will end up with a small, very rich elite and a large proletariat, the
traditional formula for revolution." I guess that means we should be thankful that
those elites just tossed their outsourcing lariat over the proles,
such as they are… or were… now with Amazon replacing all its persons with
robots!
If you will listen
to the termites… pardoned moviemaker and chronic scold Dinesh
D’Souza being a capable and culpable example… they will
tell you that drawing distinctions between productive capital and degenerate
(finance capital unhindered by either government or moral moderation) is really
a plot for or against the Jews and is a certain mark of fascism, or Nazism… or
progressive liberalism… or the altogether. Then again…
Adam Smith... whom
many venerate, but few actually read... attributed the wealth of nations as
that ratio between "the number of those who are employed in useful labour and that of those who are not so employed." Among
this latter, he included menial servants, kings, lawyers, priests, artists and the
taxman, even standing armies - as being less efficient for the homeland security
than citizen militias. Useful labour derived from
farmers, manufacturers and their employees, and... lastly,
and grudgingly... tradespeople. (He was aware of, but rejected, the contention of
physiocrats like Tommy Malthus and, oddly enough, Fast
Freddie Engels, as venerated landlords, but consigned merchants, exporters and
the manufacturers of "vanities"… like, I don’t know; iPods, My Pillows?...
Moon Pies?... to termitististic
obscurity.)
More recently, a
decade or so back, Scientific American glanced at comparative poverty rates,
and determined those hereabouts to have been about as bad as in Romania, which
facts they detail in this article "The Discreet Disappearance of the
Bourgeoisie". Now "Bourgeoisie" is one of those buzzwords with a
bad tag… being French for a start… but, after all, it's just one more term for
the middle class, if a little more upper than lower. Most of 'em want to
be rich, but need to at least stay middle-class (them Rolling Stones
pointed out, then Donald Trump hijacked that difference until the British
solicitors… not prostitutes, that’s just their word for lawyers… stopped
that!), just as most low-rent people want to be rich, but would settle for a
job, a cot and one, (if not three hots) while rising
up to the middle-class themselves, the way people did routinely throughout the
last century and that one before (albeit sometimes with the help of Indian
lands and African labor).
Fact is, though,
recent history's against them. Back when the average
CEO only made a hundred times as much as his employees, some Berkeley professor
opined: "The pay differentials aren't as bad as in King Herod's day, but
we are heading back in that direction." Last time I looked, it was five hundred forty…
though it’s probably more like seven hundred, by now. (Hear tell the Don Jones people will look into
that next week, after they finish with the life expectancy stumble and slide!)
Those Romanians with
poverty rates the Scientific American people mentioned... they, at least, can
blame their problems on Dracula jumpin’ out’n his low-rent
coffin!
Oh... forgot to tell
you I did surrender to the temptation to profit off'n
the misery of others; I picked up not one but two of those distressed caskets.
Both fit snugly, side by side in the flatbed, and the dogs got to ride up in
the cab. I'm keeping the cedar one agin’ the day and
holding that lead-lined other for when that Joker terrorist up in Boston, or
the Honorable Joe Smoal, as carried the President's
dirty water by pushing that UN Peacekeeping Occupation bill through keep their
appointments with Osama and the other boys down below. Whichever son-of-a-bitch
goes first. It'll be only a little dented and smelling just a smidgen of dawg.
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