The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
September 26th
FIDIT! FIDIT!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated
by Acme Features
|
|
"I didn't want to be treated like a common criminal... or an
entertainer..." |
|
|
- Mort Sahl |
Used to be: things got bought
and sold on reputations as their being right, more or less. Steak
dinner with the fries, wool overcoat, '57 Chevy with all of the detailing...
qualities as some hippie Japaneasy motorcycle fellow called “the quality". Night out with the little lady at the supper club
or Johnny Mathis show, suit and tie for Don Jones off to work; hat, shoes, gloves
for Dawn pricing those newfangled “TV dinners” at the local grocery (remember
them olden days when no decent woman would go out in public without a hat and
gloves?). Quality still sells, on the
upper floors, at least, but... for most... that virtue we worship above all
others is fast! Fast food. Fast fashion.
Fast travel – and damn the destination. Speedy sex, its sublimations or its
simulation. Fast service...
Fast money. Fast politics!
Look at any bizznessman
with the go-getter grin, and them as jerk his strings ‘round will be pleased to
tell you that he's on the fast track. Devil knows what station,
what line, but he'll get there quick! The digitalis and everything turning e-this, i-that,
bio-such, lite little dialectics... brewed up mostly by e-lites, truth be told,
obsessed with taking out of the quality and substituting its Obamian
antithesis, e-quality, the way blood in corpses on the undertaker's slab's gets
replenished with formaldehyde.
Bela Lugosi quaffed formaldehyde
during those Eisenhower years, when liquor and heroin no longer supplied the
kicks as quickly they did in his good
old days; getting ahead of that curve as goes back, like Freeman Dyson said, to
championing economies of speed over those of scale: "Innovations that take
years to implement are likely to be obsolete when they kick in."
"Remove the
excitation and manipulation of consumer demand," Herbert Schiller cut to
the chase, four decades back, "and industrial slowdown threatens."
An economy "favoring impulse and immediacy" became the consequence of
such "instruction" as JFK and LBJ liberals practiced, "bordering
often on psychic chaos and material indigestion, presented to the average
citizen as a reasonable and unmanipulated system."
These are the people
whose children formerly castigated President Trump for chaotic impulsiveness
and recklessness; whose grandchildren have turned on Joe Biden for his
deliberations and indecisiveness?
Our jobs age faster,
now, otherwise them as might stick in the same slots all their lives get to hop
like toads from dead end to dead end job or get swept off'n the road. Over the
last twenty years, till they stopped writing paper mortgages in oh-eight, we'd
gone from twice the moving-round per year as Euros do to three times... five
times that as out in Japan. Careers tend to last shorter, even, than the time
it takes to educate a body for them lengthens, so companies don't even bother
with the training anymore. S'cheaper to
raid each other, or call India, or China for the take-out people or, for pissant
jobs done by pissant people before the plague, order in the robots.
Employees as win Darwin's
s social race can expect to move round so often, doin' eighty, ninety-hour
Amazonian weeks that most of their kids... near as I can see... grow up TV and
ZT-nannied psychopaths, glued to their devices like flies to flypaper. The
obscenely rich contract “affluenza” – which syndrome can excuse crimes all the
way up to raping or killing people. As
for the merely common rich… well, conservative media doctor John Rosemond
suggests media may actually be a cause of juvenile
attention-deficit-disorder (JADD), though "...as is the case with a
disease-causing microbe, some children are probably more resistant to the
negative effects of TV-watching than others." And the not-rich make do by moonlighting, stringing
together three or four part-time on-call gigs to such extent that the e-con-mists
write misty paeans to America’s job-creating machinery as cause some of the
lower-yen Dons and Donnas to exclaim: There’s plenty of jobs in America – I got
three of them!”
There’s furor, now,
that the Furhrers of Tik Tok are gathering intelligence and mind-probing the postmillennial
generation to gain insight and advantages over Americans. Can there be any more horrific job than being
trapped in a bubble, trying to make sense of the social media wanderings of
socially illiterate teenagers?
Infected and neglected
kids as whose brains don't blow out from the simulations’ stimulation are
growing up amongst us now, jaded as young Eurofops as read Goethe, then blew
out their brains, back in the day (as
having not yet plumbed the pleasures of shooting others). "Images, sense, impression are what count," says
one big cheese at the MTV, "not words. You sell through emotional bonding,
through images." So we send 'em up to college to learn to talk Squeamish
and, if their student loan checks clear, we give them degrees four or fourteen
years later as testimony, one old Perfessor in old New Orleans 'afore the flood
and salty drinkin’ water told me, "to an education that never
occurred."
"K.U. knows
that being a Jayhawk fan is a lot more fun than going to classes," a
Kansas student (too oblivious… or drunk… to comprehend the wretchedness of both its Big Ten… is it thirteen, now, fifteen with the addition
of South Dakota?… football teams) is quoted in Murray Sperber's "Beer and
Circuses". "It doesn't care what we do as long as we pay our money
for season tickets, tuition and everything else..."
On credit.
When the working day's
done, overtaxed and underemployed drones alike (as have been able to somehow
get or retain access to MHDTV since the great cutoff) chill out on news programming
as elevates crashing metal, spurting blood and isolated, anomalous tragedies
(conveniently crowding out coverage as might offend increasingly petulant
advertisers). We have no end of cute or heroic pets, bodies covered with tarps
with the coincidental continental insurance company pop-ups, personal
destruction politics based on twenty year old video, footage of burning
buildings from somewhere, anywhere; little girl celebrities dressed like
streetwalkers and... especially, of late as Amurkans grow accustomed to the new
normal of intermittent plague and Russian atrocities migrating from Ukraine into
Moldavia... appeals from parents of dying children trying to raise funds for
medical attention.
That's usually by night,
so's to influence our dreams. On morning commutes we have Serious radio
programming narrowcasted by race or ideology. Jerry Falwell warn't far off on
the evil intent of Tinky Winky and them other creepy Teletubbies as kept crying
"fidit... fidit!" (Korean for "faster... faster"!)... the Rev
just accidentally-on-purpose assumed it was a homosexual solicitation when it's
really a solicitation into a deathstyle of whir and blur and nonsensical marketing
of vanities. As his own Junior would find out by and by!
Fast... or "fidit"...
in politics... strangely enough... tends to exert an inhibitory effect on
genuine solutions to genuine problems. Take Hoover Dam, completed over four
years in 1935 when Vegas was a dusty little cowtown, population seven thousand,
and
Were I a liberal,
I'd contemplate the former light-heavyweight boxer Jose Torres' suggestion to
tax violence on the media... were I to go over to the Republican side, standard
version of course, I'd just knock speed limits down to 40 or so, and as for our
jobs problem, go beyond dragnetting the illegal immigrant leafblowers to the
full Sharia as is now unfolding in Talibanistan: banning women working outside
of the home… Kamala and Sarah, the both! Then, just watch all those unemployed homies
on the corner suddenly become chased after by all kinds of employers! Fidit that!
But that wouldn't be
Catfish, since even conservatives like James Kilpatrick began magnanimously
suggesting "government should leave citizens alone to live their potty little
lives." What might work would be to start leaning on corporations to begin
lowering hours and taking more responsibility for training employees to do the sort
of jobs they're always whining about not being able to find people qualified to
do for reason that the tuition charged for their advanced educations doesn’t
even half-cover the premiums that their obsolescing jobs provide during the two
or three years before something newer and better… something faster… comes along. Makin' quality pay.
After all, when the bottom twenty percent
of Americans are shut out of television owing to the digital scams that began
in February, 2009 and escalated annually, until the twenty percent above them
tuned out over price increases due to cable mergers, student reading and test
scores of our lowest demographic quintile soared… briefly, until the gumment and
the nerds agreed to shower the ghettoes and hollows from down around Pakistan
up to the lofty neighborhoods of Algeria, Bolivia, the French, Belgian and
Swedish banlieus and the Comoros with
free tablets preprogrammed with paeans to the con-sumer state and games as
might teach poor kids how to shoot better… and faster…
Nurse... I'm ready for
that shot of the formaldehyde! Now!
|
CLICK the CATFISH to go to
PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS |