The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
September 28th
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 their reputations as being right, more or less. Steak
dinner with the fries, wool overcoat, '57 Chevy with all the detailing... qualities
as some hippie Japanissie 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; hat, shoes, gloves for
Dawn (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 travel – and damn the destinations. Speedy sex, its sublimations or its
simulation. Fast service.
Fast money. Fast politics!
Look at any biznessman 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 get replenished with formaldehyde.
Bela Lugosi quaffed formaldehyde
during the 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
now castigating President Trump for impulsiveness and recklessness?
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, or get swept off'n
the road. Over the last twenty years, till they stopped writing paper mortages 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 training anymore. S'cheaper to raid each other, or call India, or China, for the
take-out people.
Employees as win Darwin's
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."
Infected kids as whose
brains don't blow out from the 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 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… or is it thirteen, now,
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, the overtaxed and underemployed 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, footage of burning
buildings from somewhere, anywhere, little girl celebrities dressed like
streetwalkers and... especially, of late... 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 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 nonsense-marketing.
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: banning
women working outside of the home… Hillary and Sarah, the both!… and 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 have begun
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 escalate annually, and 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 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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CLICK the CATFISH to go to
PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS |