The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
February 5th
THE SHAME (and the PROMISE) of CITIES!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated
by Acme Features
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"Genes hold culture on a leash..." |
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- E. O. Wilson |
Might lose a few votes
from the country folk haters of New York (or Dallas or Birmingham) values with
this slice of truthbaloney, but hey!..
I like a city.
Now, might be one someplace
near you, might be not. Might not even be a real place... just an amalgamation
of neighborhoods from
I like the slap of shoes
(not sneakers, not for adults) against pavement. Walking's
good for soul and body... whilst driving (or being driven) round, your eyes play
tricks. You miss details. (Or, if you’re in one of those robot chauffeur
Teslas, stop signs!)
I like a city with museums,
real libraries and at least two daily papers as so despise the one another that
some truth can often be parsed from between their bluster. Plenty of watering
holes as survived the plague, major league sports, a hall for country music, rasslin' and the foreign symphonies. Don't care for most
ballets… too many Russians… 'ceptin’ that "Nutcracker"
for the kids, over Christmas (that one that the squeamish people got banned in
Boston and some other places for culturally appropriating Chinese tea, Arab
coffee and, to the #MeToo gang, “nutcracker” being a
slur against assertive women), but I'd rather live in a place that still had
'em, if I changed my mind, even if ol’ Drosseldorf does
seem a bit creepy amongst all them tweener Russian
nieces of the Trump wives. Stores as
aren't owned by franchises... restaurants where you might taste something out
of this world, might catch a sickness. Never know! The noise and the risk of
it...
Risk is what's at issue... people who don't like cities being those
as don't like taking chances in societies where everything's gone at risk.
Not that myself, nor any politician,
should have authority into telling people where to live... Pol Pot drowned that
pup!... but it does seem we've beaten up on cities for
too long. One Replutocrat boyo
with vestigial Libertarian leanings... forget which, was back in the Congress...
shows me this picture from his New England paper after them riots in St. Louis.
Whole streets where buildings are burnt out, cars up on the sidewalk, burnt out
too, and this policeman walking up and down, writing out parking tickets like a
goldarned U.N. peacekeeper.
Writing out friggin' parking tickets!
Pretty much sums up how
most in Congress treat the cities. Yet, if you'll open your kids' history books,
most of what people think significant, even noble, sometimes, took place in or
near a city. Athens.
Not to libel
groundhogs, but when the Founding Fathers got together to draft that
Constitution of ours'n, they convened in
Philadelphia, not Punxsatawney.
Someone almost forgotten
now, for having been too much the optimist during exciting times, was Francis
Hutchison, the great adversary of Hobbes and certain other termites as infested
the English royal courts. His heresy was that life is inherently social, not
"nasty, brutish and short", and that governments should "...prohibit
the greatest or wisest of mankind to inflict any misery on the meanest, or to
deprive them of any of their natural rights." (He employed the term “meanness” as its
original designation of material, as opposed to moral want.)
Most great philosophers
and statesmen of the past lived among each other, in cities, not walled away in
security communities. They got great by running into one another in taverns and
coffee shops and other public places, having to sharpen those faculties as
improve by discoursing with people smarter than you. "As darkness falls,
the great capitals of Asia and Europe hum with human vitality," observes
the modern pundit, Andrew Glass. "At the hub of these urban centers,
streets swarm with people enjoying the gentle August nights. (Was a few years
back, this, before the plague and before the Euroheat
sent daytime temps up into triple digits!) They stroll. They talk. They eat and drink."
So... why's the difference
between over here and the over there? We know, but cannot speak. Paula Deen settled
that issue. Squeamishness clamps our
tongues.
Most as get out of cities
move to get away from...
Well...
After I'd said I'd
not stand for re-election due to the gerrymandering and became... how shall I
describe it... more libertinious in thought, speech and
deed after the wife refused to take me back, the Washington Post, that beacon
of liberal squeamishness, took issue with my designation of Chicago's Reverend
Fellows as "one diseased (n-word)" for demanding he be
the one paid off after those two church bombings on the South Side of
Indianapolis, after which he would be
the sole distributor and authority regarding funds for the survivors and the
victims’ families. Or
maybe not. They were, as ever, ticked off over the use of that
word whose utterance is, apparently, more terrible than extortion or
setting children on fire.
So, I am going to
resort to the n-word minus its dash like this... nword.
It's a made-up word (if Ex-President Covfefe and
Shotgun Sarah Palin can coin terms, why not me?), as insinuating swords (which stand in for the cheap
guns that nwords raise against everyone not of their tribe, and most as are);
it also reflects the negativity as keeps these victims of history
nwording their way 'round as how life has been so
unfair and et cetera and et cetera. Take
a look at more over there in that Don
Jones Index four years back!
As nwordist apologist Corinne Brown of the Congressional Black
Caucus puts it: "We keep hearing, 'Get over this.'
We will never get over this." Gimme a dime! Which
leads to the inverted theocracy of JFK as practiced by the so-called
“progressive” wing of the flying donkees (in itself a
gross insult to the memories of recently cancelled TR, Upton Sinclair and Fightin’ Bob LaFollette) – ask
not what you can do for your country, ask for what handouts your gummint can dole our. Neither party seems willing to expect and
demand a fair day’s work… infrastructure, healthcare, whatever – or even
serious training for seriously needed skills… for a fair wage. Some Republicans, of course, have a final solution…
wait until next winter, next iteration or variation of the plague or climate
apocalypse and kill off the American surplus; President Joe wants to shower
cash over the undeserving of all races and, as for the even further left, the
Bern loves bums, for example, and bums love Bernie.
Not
that race, poverty and corporate de-urbanization hereabouts aren’t problems.
Black South Africans, at least, "have had their own earth under their feet," posited the
late South African writer Nadine Gordimer. "It is unfortunate to have to say
it: History is against you in the U.S.A."
History's agin' us all! Between the Crump and Trump we might as all be skipping down some garden path to Fascism between Djonald Duck and David Duke. Hitler's mistake, declaims one Jason Brent, lawyer
and Mensa member was "the fact that his actions prevent a rational discussion
of the creation of a master race." Another Mensoid
as deems surplus Americans in the Outsourcing Age "...too stupid, too lazy,
too crazy, or too anti-social to earn a living..." recommends
they "be humanely done away with, like abandoned kittens." Guy as did
that shootin’ of the children in the West Texas town northeast
of El Paso warn’t no Mensoid,
but came to the same conclusion - that we can exterminate our way out’n the population crisis…
He ain’t talking ‘bout the Trump kids…
Virtuecrats
graciously eschew genocide, favoring bible-thumping private schools, segregated
by color and the content of one’s bank account – financed by the taxpayers’ vouchers,
Singapore-style catchlaws and a sea of privately- or
public disfunded jails (aka plague incubators). Those
who still had jobs and money once the George Floyd race wars and… may we call
it, the China virus?... wall themselves up in gated enclaves: "...to protect
the value of my home, to shut out other races, other cultures and crime," as
let slip this city planner, Edward Blakeley.
Now, I pick up the paper
and read about the return of the six dollar gas, seein'
smirkin’ sheikhs, Burisma boys
and Texas oilies as clustered 'round that energy
lobby, so to speak, like barnacles in big hats, apologizin’
for their inability to seal the deal and blaming windmills. Quixotically kited gas prices do make cities desirable
again, so the question gets to be... who benefits? Do people living there
finally get their jobs and communities back, or do those who commute out’n compounds during the week get to take their homes, too,
and leave the meanest (18th and 21st century applications,
the both, intended) to spin down and out into nwordism;
fodder for social workers, poverty pimps, cardboard cities under bridges and overpasses
and more jails?
One reason I mentioned
Francis Hutchison, earlier, is that he also championed discrimination (as
was noted in a somewhat older Don
Jones Index). He discriminated between
so-called "perfect rights", which are guarded by law and so-called
imperfect ones "governed only by men's honour and
conscience"... equality and charity and gratitude, for example, as become
precarious without opportunities and justice. The anti-government pundit Walter Williams…
citing Madison, Franklin Pierce and Grover Cleveland… asks whether politicians
as vote to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable are “just plain
constitutionally ignorant or mean-spirited, or has our Constitution been
amended to authorize charity?”
"There does come a
moment," surmised former HUD Secretary Cisneros, being of a different
persuasion, "when the country simply can't carry on its shoulders a
permanent and growing underclass of 10 or 15 or 20 million people." And that was more than a decade ago, before the
plague wiped out maybe half of the minwage service and
factory jobs (with the virus itself taking a deadly toll on the least
protected… and paid… healthcare workers), outsizing and
downsourcing vaporized much of the middle class,
jacking that number up towards fifty, even… taking Mitt Romney’s forty-seven
percent useless eaters as a benchmark… a hundred mil adult Americans, and
lightening the complexion of the problem, as if by pouring more artificial
cream into the coffee.
In President Obama’s last budget
and Trump’s first (before the triumph of the haters negated everything, the good
and bad, the both), Executive and Legislators waxed each others’ loins by reinstituting
tax cuts for billionaires and shelling out back-unemployment insurance for
those as sit on their butts of a day or year, rather than being marshaled to
perform the tasks that private sloth and government cutbacks… some justified,
others not… are leaving undone. (Djonald Unchained’s subsequent
budgets wobbled into months upon months of shutdowns, gimcrack fixes and more
shutdowns, Uncle Joe just puts the whatsoever on
America’s tab, blame the Coronavirus and fumigate
against Joe Manchin and cursed Sinema.)
And who’s delegated to pay for this –
now that the markers are honing in on thirty tril,
inspiring Chinese and Russian moneylenders (not to mention the French, the
Japanese and a couple dozen other creditors to come a calling with garbage bags
of American IOU’s engendered by another round of Trump tax cuts for Jeff Bezos
and his ilk or by President Joe’s “what, me worry?” patter on a silver platter.
The kids, that’s who…
Or our grandkids – if we’re
lucky.
Americans must Awaken to the need to plug the holes in our lifeboats,
Assemble to do this necessary work in common, and Attack such
worms as keep chewing away against our ship of state. We cannot accomplish this
by cutting cities adrift. They are our promise. But... with or without new oil
crises... they also represent our enduring shame.
CLICK the CATFISH to go to
PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS |