The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
March 30th
FIDIT! FIDIT!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated
by Acme Features
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"I didn't want to be treated like a common criminal... or an
entertainer..." |
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- 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!
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