The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
January 23th
OUR
GREAT GOD PANIC!
By Jack
Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate
Syndicated by Acme Features
"...but, being an idle house, it was a hypochondriacal house."
- G. B. Shaw, "Heartbreak House"
“… they been so long on Lonely Street they never will get back…”
- Elvis Presley, “Heartbreak Hotel”
Take a broth of
population, fast asleep... but too ignorant or frightened to dream of morning’s
harsh mistress… a gumbo of insomniacs ‘n hypochondriacs...
Now add a pinch of
dried-up politician bluster, simmer in a cup of economic stagnation, liberally
seasoned with corrupt left and right-wing entitlements, earmarks and
resentments, stir in a cup of magical conspiracy theories and unicorn piss,
waft in a breeze of race, religious and gender war...
Voila!: your politics of panic!
In the wild, panic
has its purpose - stimulating bodies to produce chemicals necessary to enhance
the fight-or-flight response. Domesticated panic, likewise, produces a torrent
of adrenaline and testosterone-fueled legislation; "doing something" that
may or may not protect the public, but will (usually, unless carried to an
extreme… such as shutting down the government to build a healthcare system or a
wall or simply setting it afire because… well… because) enhance the longevity
of the sponsoring politician. Controlled
burns – they tend to redound to the benefit of the arsonist. Cross burning. Flag burning. Fag weddings. Bird flu, killer bees; killer flu, murder
hornets; the birds, the bugs, the Plague – squirrels, jalapeños. Snail darters.
Big cups of soda. Underwear bombers. Sharks. Mosquitoes. Movie matinee shooters, beautiful walls and
ugly Hollywood executives with greasy fingers. Dirty Mes’cans smuggling
eggs into the heartland! They’re all coming
to getcha! Electrifying those… er… slats all along
the Mexican border in the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico – too wussy, how
about mines? That Giant Peanut Panic, as
just went away after Halloween, disappearing... SPLAT!... like rotten pumpkins
crashing across someone's driveway, leaving the airlines to rediscover certain
other problems (like the Boeing Max contraptions) stickier than goobers!
Denmark Groover,
late state rep from down in Macon, told me how them in Atlanta were so irate
over the carjackings, somebody wrote a law to make it
a Federal offense, despite the fact that state legislators do not have the
authority to write Federal law. No matter! A crowd of professional victims
showed up with television cameras, so they passed it on up to the courts to
deal with. "Some people are as addicted to being busybodies as others are
addicted to drugs," said Thomas Sowell, and Mr. Sowell is, of course, a
civil libertarian of the finest white on black striped pelt.
Nowadays, if not
9-11, it's "for the children", the panic-stricken recite when, as a
few times every season, pedophiles are found lurking under every bush or psychopaths
turn schools into happy hunting grounds. But, despite the famous report by the
Department of Health and Human Services that a million and a half kids were
abducted in 1983, the National Center had cut that figure down to a little over
three thousand two years later, 2,882 for 2001, the last year for which figures
have been compiled. Of these, nearly three in four were runaways, about six
hundred more were taken by family members, leaving only 59 grabbed by somebody
other than a relative like that uber-stupid Mister Patterson as left his
abductee under a bed - “locked in” with furniture and pillows and then went out
to look for a job. Even adding in all
unidentified dead children found by the FBI, we're talking maybe… a hundred per
year? Two?
Out’n
three hundred sumpin’ million?
Good copshow fodder, lousy stats.
“But if (our new
law) saves only one life a year…”
wail the Squeamish… duly noted. And, in
fact, since Q-Anon asserts that DC, New Yawk and
Hollywood liberals are not only pedophiles but cannibals, the recent disclosure
of Armie Hammer’s predilection for human flesh
confirmed… everything! Gotcha!
Ain't
that more "strangers" are stealing our children, demurred Ellen
Goodman up in Boston, it’s that impersonal medicine, employment, education, law
enforcement, daycare and the such all lead to Americans' estrangement from one
another as they lurk, lobby and lollygag on Lonely Street, casting wistful,
lustful glances at the playground while they’re loading their magazines (and I
do not mean the Atlantic Monthly!).
Panic likewise
prospers because some as claim to speak for Renaissance get so caught up in
their own tussles over ego, surf, turf, foldin’ money
and next generation-vasks and maxxiens
that Entropy catches a free pass. Enviro-mental cases are a case in point...
the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society too busy fighting one another to mount coherent
opposition to Oregon's clearcutting; fish people and clean water people
spitefully killing off each other's legislation; animal-righters defending wild
pigs against the flowerpeople over endangered tulip
bulbs that boars (as have infiltrated America’s suburbs due to habitat
destruction) like to gobble.
Or, for the
politically intoxicated coupla months back, Liz and
Bernie!
For example, the plague
cure spiffled where a drug (Remdesivir)
that works… sort of… allegedly racking up a score of 62 percent in the testing
phases which, as any schoolboy knows, shakes out to a D-minus… against one that
doesn’t (Hydrochlorothiazide) which gained status as the personal pet project
of an incompetent, outgoing President who still believes that science is a deep
state conspiracy to tarnish his image, destroy the economy and bewitch the
electorate into raising up a raging, left-of-Bernie Socialist who will take
away your guns and blow up Mount Rushmore.
A man who lost (by the
numbers, if not in his own mind) to Joe Biden! (Although if I had gotten into that race, that White House Duck Commander and his army
of quacks and Sleepy Joe and his army of Armies in pizza parlour
basements would really have had something to squawk about… the both!)
And more bores,
everywhere, celebrities!... donning overcoats of deep thought and deeper state righteousness,
lending their profiles to high-visibility causes (always, as it seems, just
when they have a book or movie or CD coming out, as witness the explosion of
print and electronic recapitulations of numerous Gomers’ three weeks as an aide
to an undersecretary to an acting White House placeholder)! Get him ten minutes of MSNBC or the five on
Fox.
(Not Tony Manuzzo, of course, Tony’s... what the word, not “woke”
but... something...
Not to mention common
criminals finding the cloak of political "activism" useful cover for
their depredations, speaking of tree destruction to enable those books and
megawatts of coal-fired electricity to post and pamper those electronic
versions of same. Nasty little Earth
Liberation Front elves potshotting the few remaining
summer job bush-clearers in national forests (Hi, Austin!), defending the
rights of dead trash trees to become tinder for “organic” wildfires which then
generate organic mudslides. That deaf
psycho who torched three of those new hearing aid outlets as “genocidal” to his
ilk. Them dopers and burglars and such
who turned Occupy Minneapolis, Seattle, Nashville and Wall Street into a
twenty-first century People’s Parks, like that original in Berkeley or, on the
other end, neo-Nazis attempting to crash gun-rights rallies (with, of course,
lots and lots of guns) in the hope of starting a Revolution (or, at least, a putsch) as culminated in the Pugoesque coup du cocasse (look ‘em up in your French dictionary) as
kicked off the Year After the Worst Year Ever at the Capitol. Conspiracy theorists denying Elvis Presley’s demise,
the moonshot or insisting that plague vaccinations are a Deep State plot to
turn Don Jones autistic with Bill Gates’ or George Soros’ nanochips while
terrified children by the tens of thousands are wearing their counterfeit masks
from China to bed and so dying of suffocation – just like George Floyd. Marginal doctors implanting or enhancing "false
memories" of molestation or Satanic rituals to be harvested in cold cash
by attorneys.
Who were those masked men?
"Everybody
is a victim," wrote Mona Charen upon the
occasion of Lorena Bobbitt striking a blow for feminism and getting 45 days'
confinement in a bughouse, "and to victims, all is permitted." (A
sentiment echoed, stage left, by peaceniks who defended the "moral
authority" of G. Jalen House and Cindy Sheehan as absolute and even ran
the latter up against Nancy Pelosi, though to no avail.)
That is, those
victims as can pay lawyers... in cold, contingency cash or marketable publicity
(as witness that jailhouse shrink whose two hours with whatzisname,
the moviehouse Joker-face shooter, paid off with a
book that reached Number Eight on the New York Times best seller list). Those as can’t… well consider that West
Virginia gives three years’ negligency hard time to
this guy as lost his job and home and moved into an old bus with his kid who
got the frostbite. California, fighting
back for ascendancy in the three, two and one-strike sweepstakes, swept another
derelict into the PIC for a repeat offender 25-to-life for breaking into a
church soup kitchen to steal food. And,
segueing from subhuman to the ridiculous, a tenner to that hoverboarding
dentist for… successfully… extracting a tooth whilst on his hoverboard. (Meanwhile, due to the overcrowding, states
are pardoning and paroling drug pushers, robbers, rapists and murderers to make
room for these fiends.) And, of course,
all those Zero Tolerance idiocies... school expulsions for asthma medicine and
Swiss Army knives, Midol and Certs and Tweety Bird
keychains.
"Cough drops
appear harmless," warned school nurse Brenda Isaac in another West
Virginia ZT fiasco. "But none of them are!"
Those sneaky Smith Brothers
with their long... uh... Hebraic beards? Look ‘em up! Then, lock ‘em up!
"Many years ago,
late at night, two police officers threw me into an alley and beat me up so
badly that I had to go to a hospital," complained… or, more precisely, boasted…
one John Engelman to the Oakland Tribune a few Halloweens back. "I had not
been doing anything illegal, immoral or even impolite. I never learned why they
did it, although I suspect they mistook me for someone else. Liberals have difficulty understanding this,
but it is not possible for the police to be effective without occasionally
overstepping their boundaries."
Needless to say, he wasn’t
black. Otherwise he’d be dead.
Consider, too, the case
of this Chicago lady, Magica Bottari,
hauled down to Belleair Shore, Florida... west of Disneyland... on a six year
old warrant for illegally drinking iced coffee on the unmagical kingdom
beach with her mother, the local astrologer: "It's so clear that these
rules or laws or whatever they are not about keeping peace or keeping harmony,
they are about controlling people and making people feel unwelcome."
Replied former Mayor
Robert Clayton, defending the unmagical fugitive snatch and proposing three
years’ jail time for fleeing his $30 ticket, "... you have to defend your
town!" Hey – he’s a bleeding heart
compared to the Georgia jurist who socked a mother with twenty long ones for
walloping her boy with a belt after he beat up some classmates and, admittedly, the teacher.
Panic is global, as
well as national… economic as well as political. The price of oil, we now know, is largely
calculated on fear and spite (like the spat between the Russians and the Saudis
that brought some brief, temporary relief to America’s road warriors before the
Ukrainian bombing started and Mad Vlad Putin started cutting arms deals with
Iran that may or may not include nukes while President Joe apologizes for
fist-bumping the Saudi hitman emeritus... or, rather, Crown Prince), not the
supply and demand of the here and now. So if Iran does build (or buy) nuclear bombs
and threatens to blockade the Straits of Hormuz, America (or maybe Israel)
assassinates some Iranians who, in turn, assassinate some Texans and a Saudi
prince or two as isn’t busy chopping up domestic enemies or nosy journalists. The price of oil goes up, profits to the oil
companies go up and overt or covert payoffs to the politicians and parasites of
the world… they go up too.
Where is any
incentive not to follow the politics
of panic? (Kindly note – we haven’t even
mentioned Infowars, antifa, the Boogaloo Boys,
goop, MTG or Marianne Williamson. Yet.)
Check out the news last
week? Panic at the Vegas casinos, where
the gamblers mistook
the rock some loser threw through a window for gunfire. Cards and cash left on the table. Somebody profited.
"Love casts out
fear," Aldous Huxley reminds us in "Ape and Essence", "but
conversely fear casts out love... Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out
goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth." AIDS activist Larry
Caputo adds another item to Huxley's catalog: "...fear casts out the discriminating power
to know what should be feared and how it should be feared."
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