The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
March 31st
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 heappie 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 the 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 and great grandchildren are wary of Trump 2.0?
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 Federalize
speeding tickets to draw down the deficit, 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 misogyny isn’t Catfish,
since even conservatives like Ted Cruz now defend the First Amendment and 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 I.V. 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 |