The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
August 21st
LOCKE and LOAD!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated
by Acme Features
Is it even reasonable
to speak of Renaissance ‘midst this commodity culture of ours?
As some would tell, America's
not merely politically divided, but morally venal, venereal and fatally
shallow. Virtuecrats abhor its violence and sexuality...
much as Roman Emperor Augustus blamed the poet Ovid for such ills as permeated
the culture of 7 AD... they blame "roll" music, school shooters,
liberals and "Matrix IV". Liberal ostriches, meanwhile, dismiss its
commerciality as facile and insincere, debate whether Spanish gender triggers
are racist, sexist or both and blame Virtucratic talk
radio for those gorps who shot the Arizona Democratic
Congresswoman, the Republican baseball playing Congressman, the candidate for
Governor of Colorado (promptly freed on bail to shoot again), those black
church congregations in Michigan and South Carolina and Jewish synagogues here
and there, the two Midwestern governors, dozens of school board members or, for
all we know, that gomer as poisoned those trees in Alabam’ – resting, now, in an even warmer place than
Montgomery.
Both wag fingers at
H. Rap Brown, as preached (then practiced) violence - "American as cherry
pie," inferring a psychic connection with George Washington. Or was the culprit Stokely
Carmichael, with apple pie, or chickens, coming home to roost? Or Colonel Sanders, calling violence American
as a liberal slice of chicken pot pie, and drug-addled, too, from the looks of
that dead sarcastic Canadian comedian who replaced him for awhile before the
lady country singer and then the… whatever! Minds do wander in the face of
stiff Entropic winds.
Came to me once... in
Texas, during this penal junket, eatin' fried chicken
with sides and biscuits, sweet tea and strawberry pie at one of those
prison-theme restaurants outside Huntsville (you've been to or heard of them
places - death penalty memorabilia all around, daguerreotypes of Texas-fried
cons posted to the walls)... everything as goes down in public sectors, much of
our privates, also, revolves around the posture.
I don't mean the sit
straight, eat your greens variety... tho’ the collards
there were marinated in plenty of
coronary-inducing bacon pot likker… I'm munching
lunch besides a bunch of shanks on display under glass, and thinking about
Kleberg, south aways, where it used to be mandatory for bodies to greet each
other by saying "Heaven-O!" instead of "Hello" (being that
the latter might be taken as an invitation to debauchery by those inclined to
evil thoughts). Gave it up after the ice
storms of twenty one on top of that plague there, but they were illuminative.
Fact is, we're souljackers... the one and all, and posturing aside... no
matter how we greet one another. Them pilgrims,
first over; they weren't seeking freedom from persecution, as we get told in
second grade. They were fanatics who thought Oliver Cromwell something of a nancy-boy for not persecuting other religions enough
– the true believers of Deuteronomy 20:17 come down to Inauguration Day 2017, but
little else. After these came boatloads
of scum... convicts, maybe not so bad as those shipped
to
And… oh yes, the
slaves…
If the Statue of Liberty
had been erected in the Seventeenth Century instead of the Nineteenth, she’d
have scrunched up her green copper mouth and called for a thicker blindfold a’fore the firing squad did its duty!
"I am not meant
for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington," concluded
Hillary’s old buddy
Vince Foster a’fore blowin’
his brains out, "where ruining people is considered sport." (Allegedly
committing suicide, I correct myself, so as not to offend the ex-President’s not-fake
news, just like SlickWillie snuck into Jeffrey
Epstein’s cell to strangle him before he could snitch… or was it Prince Andrew?
The Dersh?)
Twentieth century culture
broke down by thirds. In its first, written fiction and philosophies, European
high-hat music and the stage prevailed, as it had for the several previous
centuries. Most durable American literature was written or staged before the
Second World War... the epoch of Fitzgerald, O'Neill, Odets and Zane Grey... or
during and shortly after (Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway).
Radio did not so much compete with as complement literary traditions... Roosevelt
chatted by his fireside, LaGuardia read Sunday funnies and The Shadow Knew!
Foreigners had rants from Stalin and Hitler on their radios to keep them amused
of a wintry night in the 20's, 30's and 40's before, as Todd Gitlin complains, "...public speech became the
McDonald's of language."
During the middle of
the century a cinematic perspective flowered, lasting from the end of the war
until well into the sixties or, some might say, early seventies. Hollywood
produced giants... "Giant", in fact, with Liz and Jimmy Dean, "Citizen
Kane", "Gone With The Wind", the comedies of the Marx Brothers, Ub Iwerks and Charlie Chaplin
and, finally, “The Godfather”, “MASH”
and a tip of the helmet to Captain America in “Easy Rider”.. It was the Golden Age of television too with all
them sponsored theatres, with Alfred Hitchcock, Twilight Zone, I Love Lucy… cowboys
and cartoons on a Saturday morning and Disney by night.
But, as the twentieth
century dissipated into our own like a fart in the wind and television and its
rhythms permeated American culture, then grasped it by the throat, a universal
devolution started. Quality in books, films and music swiftly declined into a
quantitative sludge of undressings, beheadings,
mumblings, car crashes, and explosions. Free speech has often showed a little
blue, but it's been a long, low road down from Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Henry
Miller and Nabokov to Julie Pryor's statutory memoirs, Snoop Dogg's kiddie show on cable or that
Farrelly Brothers' book with the scratch n' sniff. From Willie Dixon to 2Crazy, "Casablanca" to "Craphouse III".
At least there’s
something for the idle rich to watch on hyper-costly cable. Last summer, the proles
endured their absolute worst distractables ever…
incredibly cheap, incredibly cruel “game” shows where the desperate are
tortured for a chance to win nickels and dimes - contemptible programming with no other
purpose than to hammer home to America’s bottom third how useless they are, and
how everybody is against everybody.
(And, of course, to
sell shit. Literally… serious persons
are scrutinizing those toilet paper ads with the blue and red incontinent
bears, scrying to determine what, if any, partisan
secrets are being transmitted.) Maybe a
few more paragraphs worth adding to “The Coming Kill Off” about why America
does not deserve to survive or why Mister Trump’s action figure is more
actionable than Li’l Marco’s,,,
(And it looks like
DC and Marvel are going to bury the hatchet in tradition’s skull when that Avengers/Justice
League mashup blockbuster unreels next Christmas. Three hours sixteen minutes, I hear.)
Though an occasional
"Schindler's List" or "Spin Cycle" might be risked with
profits reaped from noisier fare and the coronavirus did
put the machine back in the garage for a while, serious Kultur's
been marginalized... to the university presses, obscure festivals and art-house
outhouses of the borderlands where bitter, NEA-funded crybabies still fling chocolate
and elephant ordure. Like old publishing houses, moviemakers and even TV
studios morphed into media oligopolies... ham-handed to the point that advertisers
as demand two, sometimes three "intermissions" in the longer
films wield the moral compass. JFK International Airport slapped Picassos up on
its lobby walls for commuters to gape at during the bodysearch
lines; Boston's Logan installed a kinetic sculpture by George Rhoads which, a
travel writer observed, "…plays snippets of music ranging from
Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture to Polly Wolly Doodle."
And despite the
superhero smash-up sequels with big budgets and bigger ticket prices, the old
classic cinemas and even mall megaplexes are shutting
down. AMC went broke and now, just the
other day, Regal. Don Jones (the average
American) may or may not prefer to stream his entertainment on jerky,
ad-infested little devices, but he’s got no choice. Better waste his time cyberkilling
aliens and Afghans on his X-Phone.
So now we’re settled
near onto a quarter into the twenty-first under the umbrellae
of Obama, Trump and Joe; the Cyber-Century sucking us down like rats in quicksand,
with the cable companies, networks and mega-movie producers mega- merged into a
virtual monopoly; first-person shooter games, funny money printed out by loser
loners in their exurban garages being hoarded and traded like cans of soup
after a hurricane and all that so-called social
media as drives teenagers to suicide! The television perspective has been conquered
by one thousand and one game and reality shows, supplemented (and soon
supplanted) by moronic podcasts with a streaming peanut gallery of screaming
millions jabbering and jabbering until the man with the hook cuts them off to a
soundtrack of flushing toilets.
Inevitably, a
culture of trash engenders a politics of blame.
Blame the 60's or
corporations for commodifying culture... blame Harry Potter, Howard Dean, John
Dean or John Locke... whose legacy, as scowled know-it-or-don't fellow Allen
Bloom, "has been one of almost unbroken decline in philosophic
substance." Blame videogames, the Bush/Clinton/Trump rotting, rotating
dynasties (not Michelle Obama or the daughters, not yet, and with the good
Biden boy killed off by toxic military waste, I don’t think America is quite as
fallen as to embrace Hunter)/ Blame The
Apprentice IV or Wittgenstein's adoration of Betty Grable.
A national cowardice
ensues – rife with fake offenses, fake apologies and finger-pointing...
President Joe, who called Djonald Untrustworthy “…the most reckless and incompetent
commander in chief we’ve ever had,” for deserting the Kurds to be massacred by
Turkey then, himself, deserting the Afghans to be massacred by the Taliban (as
explicated in a prior DJI
Lesson) and is
prepared to hand over millions of Uighurs and
Ukrainians to the butcher’s block in the name of peace for our time.
“’Being blamed’ and ‘taking responsibility’ are not one and the
same,” asserts an Atlanta banker, Imani Dhaklya. “When we make them one and the same to gain
power and control over others through guilt and manipulation, we do more damage
than we realize.”
Can't blame the
terrorists, too busy blaming us for corrupting their bloodthirsty,
pre-Renaissance, misogynistic Islamophiliac dystopias
with canned Polish ham and Danish cartoons to the point where Dinesh D’Souza
proposed that we appease Al Qaeda by implementing the Sharia – as would leave
Washington populated by hundreds of Congressmen, lobbyists and “fair and
balanced” pundits truckin’ round, pickin’
boogers out’n their snouts with steel digits, like
Captain Hook. Maybe he has a point –
certainly as far as the identify cybercrooks who
steal seniors’ Social Security checks go. Tempering (if not entirely repealing) the
Eighth Amendment to bring back the whipping post and ducking stool for
borderline misdemeanant/felons as only use their prison time to acquire more...
uh... skills would be a vast
improvement over the incarceration nation’s Stasi Quo and... as for the
juveniles... a few years in a tough but salubrious military school where they
would learn manners, edification and useful skills as they can carry into their
post-high-school mandatory military service and then onwards to the higher
education or workplace.
"The reason extremists are so upset,"
says UCLA law professor Khaled Abou El Fadl, "is
because there are so many teenagers, Muslim teenagers, who eat this stuff (Western
culture) up." Finally
Your prize at the end
of a Pokemon Go… a suicide vest! Dope!
So let a cry of: "We're
from Washington, and we've got to do something!" rise up at any
crisis-of-the week and, folks, all I can say is lock your daughters away, hide
your Bible and your Constitution, both! Stuff your guns, your Coca Cola and
folding money into a dead, hollow tree because the politics of posture goes on
the march every election season, just like them fire ants as 'et their way
through the meth lab trailer, then the rest of Dayton, Ohio, including the
Wright Brothers’ Museum!
After all, "ain't nowheres to go from here but
up!" I recall thinking, back there in Texas, readin'
this article by some slacker syndicated in the College Station paper as sobs: "Every
social phenomenon is considered a disease now!" and the notation that them
Lonestarsters are even considering springin’ them jailbirds as didn’t do the crimes as brought
their time. For economic reasons… most states
are as broke as Washington, or worse. Mopping up prison-diner gravy, washed down with
the sweet tea and paying the tab for the waitress to ring up on the cash
register (as got made up jus' like ol'Sparky,
electric sizzle and all!) Being sure to smile... 'case
any of them High Sheriffs out of Kleberg were eavesdropping from the Charleie
Whitman booth...
"You say
goodbye, I say Heaven-O!"
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