The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
August 31st
THE TYRANNY of EXPERTISE!
By
Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate
Syndicated by Acme Features
Here's one more good reason not to
chase Egyptian chicken! Down the Nile a ways from Cairo, as I hear, this farmer
tried to rescue some ol’ biddy fell into a well, sixty feet deep, and tumbled
in after. He drowned, but not a’fore his sister and
two brothers jumped in after him and drownded, too, as
did a few more neighbors who jumped in after. Finally people as knew how to
swim jumped in and pulled out the six bodies... and also that chicken, still
alive and cluckin'.
Somebody once said how the road to
Hell’s paved with good intentions, and I guess it may be so. One of them Rob Zombie evil clown movies (as
distinct from the Steven King ones) also said that people in Hell still love
popcorn. The more gumment
tries to help people by putting experts on the job... buzzin' day n' night like busy little gnats n' skeeters...
the more people resent 'em when their help turns bad. Bad as
neighborhood regulators fining folks without the lawnmores
for tall grass so’s they fall deeper in the hole, bad as in Katrina's FEMA,
ERCOT’s ENRONics or Flint’s water, or those citizens
of Oklahoma - as promised Santa's sack o’ goodies to the Goodyear people for
bringing that tire dump to town, as then made that mosquito hotel Ground Zero
for the West Nile n’ the Zika 'til someone finally set it afire! Bad as Hurricanes Laura and Marco, the both,
making a gumbo of things, down there in New Orleans, and on Katrina’s birthday,
her sweet twenty fourth then bein’ visited by last
winter’s snow and ice storm that had the negative temperatures shivering all
the way to the Mexican border.
Bad as taking evil old dictators off’n their Middle East pots they’re squatting on and wind
up with a popular revolution just about evenly divided between Al Qaeda, ISIS,
Russia and Iranian puppets – all of ‘em armed to the teeth (those as still have
teeth, that is) – agin’ us and lookin’
for soft targets into which to bite while the Communist Chinese wait and watch
in the shadows. Upsetting the balance of
power, like taking out Iraq strengthened Iran, a certain former Chief Executive’s
dissing NATO encouraged Putin’s war and the dude after him’s
running out of Afghanistan brought us ISIS-K.
(At least they’re mostly the
Taliban’s problem now.)
Some of the worst travesties of good
intentions, like them cynical Lascher-Williams campaign
finance reforms steamrolling thru Congress (as force taxpayers to subsidize the
same old bipartisan mummery without taking action on Citizens United, now
controlling six justices of the seven justices on SCOTUS, result from what
those of us as sat on Congressional Armed Services committees, called the
"mission creep". It's like
going into somewheres to save the world...
Especially in hard times, we've had
experts step to up to the plate, as were able to meet such exigencies as arose
out of wars, disasters, depressions... even those few, especially valuable expert
experts, like Jefferson, Madison and Franklin, Hamilton, Edison,
Lincoln and Henry Ford, too (‘cept for the slaveowning and Nazi stuff). We've also been lucky to
import such experts as other countries didn't want… with apologies to Mister Drumpf… experts like Einstein and Liz Taylor and all them
Mexican and Korean movie directors, vegetable pickers and boy bands, as well as
all kinds of imported experts came to occupy our government, like Madeline
Albright, Henry Kissinger from the CFR (love his politics or don’t), them
Russian Google people, Brzezinski from the Trilats
(see Kisso), not to mention our owntimes'
Jared Pettigrew, native – tho’ he did graduate London
School of Economics. Even a fistful of
Canadians, like Celine Dion, Bill Shatner, Leonard Cohen, Elon Musk…
Probably nowhere, since 1776, did
there come such an upswell of government expertise as in the New Deal, then
during the war against Hitler... so effective were they (and so numerous) that
conservatives still fume at the society they created where, as Brother Rush
contended before ascending into Hoover Heaven, people got so used to
seeing money come back from Washington that some decided to vote,
in perpetuity, for the liberals.
Except... the liberals broke faith
after the sunset of the W.P.A. It is my
own often-stated position… see the Don
Jones Index of six years back… that liberalism as a virtuous principle
took its mortal hit on eleven twenty-two sixty-three, and lingered on
death-support until the double tap summer of '68 when its leading
practitioners, President Johnson and Vice-President Triple-H Humphrey, rigged
that nomination in Chicago to stiff the voters in all the primaries as had
expressed... by their votes for McCarthy, McGovern and Robert Kennedy... a
desire for the '68 election to be an honest referendum on the Vietnam war and
certain other problems. After that, liberalism turned slithery... corrupt...
the termites lured bearded Leninists out of universities and into the
psychological testing and polling scams: marketing strategies to seduce people
into buying stuff they didn't need on credit, law enforcement into detecting
deviance - as opposed to solving crimes - and the National Institute for Health
(a fine anthill of expertise, to be sure) into isolating genes and brain
chemicals suspected of causing deviant or self-damaging behaviour...
crime, sexual unorthodoxy, enlisting in the National Guard... these sort of
things. Even started calling themselves
Progressives once “liberal” became a cussword, setting Teddy Roosevelt and Fightin’ Bob LaFollette to spinnin’ in their graves.
Having discovered correlations between
low seratonin levels and violence in the brains of
rats, NIH's liberal sociologists promised "to examine brain chemicals in
children growing up in high-risk neighborhoods," reported Anne Rochell in the Atlanta papers. "Kids with low
serotonin could be singled out for intervention programs. These could include
medications..."
Or lobotomies…
Or warfarin...
'Nother
foreign expert, Dr. Simon Young of Montreal, justified kiddy-doping by saying:
"I know people who have had to spend years manacled in the locked portions
of mental institutions because of their aggressive impulses.
There is a need for the pharmacological treatment of those patients."
But Dr. Peter Breggin,
author of "The War Against Children" saw that short, slippery slope
all the way down to a chemical
Big Pharma carried the day after
cutting their deal with Brainworm Bobby and got their
funding with a spoonful of sugar (or oxy contin) to
make the medicine go down. The Prozac people, now, sell their dope in little,
sweet red gelatin squares; Abbott Laboratories markets raspberry-flavored
narcotic lollipops containing the sedative fentanyl which, say the drug police,
is so more likely to cause a fatal overdose than heroin that the high sheriffs
of Nebraska are using it to execute their prisoners and tombstone stoners like
Michael Jackson and Prince made it their chemical of choice. "What kind of message are we sending to
our children when we mix potent narcotics, like fentanyl, into their
candy?" asked Dr. Allen Hinkle of the FDA.
Saw, th’other
day between scenes of more Ukrainians being shipped off to some gulag... the
lucky ones, as I suppose... this advertisement promoting some sort of treatment
as imitates the anti-amxiety medications harried
housewives consume by the handful, thanks to Doctor Feelgood. For cats.
Cat Quaaludes. As the Russians in
Moldovia are crawling over the border towards Bucharest...
So disregarding and disoriented are
Federal regulators that action has to be delegated downwards to the state and
local level. The opioid pushers at
Johnson & Johnson got socked with a half a billion in civil judgments (the
plaintiff’s lawyer dejected that it wasn’t the seventeen billion he’d sought)
down in Alabama… the Devil’s Island of gumment
indifference but also the Mecca of civil litigation. Did it retard their racehorse in the
Vaccination Derby against Pfizer and Moderna?
Prob’ly.
And up in Massachusetts where, I
guess, Pocahontas wields a mean tomahawk, the Febbies
currently have Big Pharma’s big pushers, the Sackler family, being marinated up
for the griddle.
Then we came to the coronavirus. President Trump believed that discovery of a
vaccine a few days before November 3, 2020 would push him over the top, so he
rushed to greenlight that icky stuff from Russia that Mad Vlad assured him
(smile, wink!) was breathtakingly effective and absolutely safe. Unfortunately, it killed so many rats and
mice and guinea pigs and beagles that the project was aborted despite Djonald’s rages.
Took a lot of breaths away, it would
have. But they would have been true
believers as probably caught the plague, in the first place, from attending
some maskless, crowded disco, or one of those MAGA rallies. Killing off the base would prob’ly have turned a few more red states blue, but Don
Jones may be assured that the incumbent would have found some conspiracy hook
to hang his red hat on, and his lawyers would still prob’ly
be hashing the matter out in some court or another.
Far as I recollect, the Good Shepherd
was not a vegetarian!
A simple message! Ban harmless, hemp-flavoured jawbreakers as thoughtcrime, but trust the
strangers with fentanyl candy... hey, they're doctors! (Or
maybe veterinarians?)
Other experts in psychedelic lollipopupopaloozery brought America the phone company and
Microsoft breakups and NAFTA... supposed to be just a temporary measure giving
relief to Mexico and Canada but, of course, the camel's nose underneath the
tent to pass CAFTA, PIFFAFTA (or whatever that
stood for) and, now, EAFTA (or should that East Asian Trans-Pacific scam be
called TAFTA?). So now that the supply chain’s been linked in and foreign ships
of stuff have Qual-Marts bulging with toys churned out by lesser tariffed slave labor camps in Vietnam and Saipan after TACO...
to the detriment and eventual extermination of American jobs... while phone
service in nine states is being disrupted by… talk about retro!... a strike,
and down in Oklahoma, the litigating and mosquito-breeding and tire burning's still
goin' on!
"One terrible sentence haunts
NAFTA," wrote Sandy Grady, up in Philadelphia, as also mentioned that, too
often in the past, we'd "been betrayed by experts..."
"I'm from the government, and I am
here to help you."
"Humans are absurdly easy to
indoctrinate," contended that cranky sociobiologist, Eddie Oh Wilson, so
despised by both virtuecrats and politically correct
Squeamish, "they seek it!"
Well, next time as some damn Egyptian
like Fatty al Sissy asks me to jump down a well, think I'll just hand the
fellow a copy of Grammy Parnell's favorite recipe for drownt-chicken
soup and boogie on up the Nile towards the Pillow People’s magic
fields of cotton... tiptoeing 'round the potholes an' mosquito-tires fast as I
can... far, far away from that truckstop of good intentions
as hides the semi behind which hide Leatherface, Mike Myers (the Friday the 13th
guy, not the Austin Powers actor), Norman Bates, Rob Zombie’s wicked clowns and
Stephen King’s Pennywise, too, Zazzbo, the First
Family and Freddie Kreuger. Rudy Giuliani
also – and two thirds of the President’s Cabinet of Curiosities!
(Damn – I miss John McCain… he’d tell
Uncle Joe what to do with that
bunch!)
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