The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
October 16th
COMMUNITY... COMMUNITAS... COMMUNITERRITORIALITY!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated
by Acme Features
Now and agin’, I shall confess to hauntsomeness
by those "Better Communities" of Ms. Barbara Johnson, no less than by Mr. James Reston's "General Good" ... virtuestans of left and right... as both
make habits of portraying nasty circumstances in terms of the children's shows
on PBS. But contentious politicians... no less than sports-entertainment
figures or the interchangeable scarecrows as shuffle in and out of boy bands,
Apprentice III with Billy Bush or Am-Idol... these are ever with us; fire-ants
drawn to picnics through the years and the administrations. Like Trump’s red
hats, Hillary's villary, Uncle Joe’s dark shades or
thousand points of Bush lite; like straight talk and Washington talk and
change, chump change, more change, Chinese social credit cards, sixpence
rogues, fungible subway tokens and swamp mavericks everywhere; these easy, greezy visions of community are with us, also...
inoffensively insidious, genial, covenanted as any gated covenant community of
termites at the fringe of cities from whose timbers they swarm forth to gnaw
every weekday morning before returning home by night..
Geniality sells...
especially where affinity replaces productivity (as especially during the CV
plague when so many were paid so little for working so not-at-all). When the incentive to produce tangible wealth diminishes, as
posited the late Mancur Olson, "the incentive to
seek a larger share of what is produced increases.
"The divisiveness
of distributional issues can even make societies ungovernable."
“Social distancing” was
(and remains) a media myth. Defective Americans... as failed to suicide themselves, take up Islam or zone out on
smuggled pills (or go up some clocktower with the shootin'
irons and start blasting at a schoolhouse or multiplex)... crave artificial
communities to join (whether Tweeterer X-Muskrats,
the New Mexico border vigilantes or NRA’s bitter Pennsylvanians totin’ AK-47s to church or among them neat retreats of
sweet elites). Thus the proliferation of 12-step
groups, where people confess defectiveness, then slop around blamin' relatives and teachers as damaged their
self-esteem. There's communities of one... Dick Nixon
walked beaches in dark shoes and a business suit, that more recent Tricky Dicky
shootin' quail, hittin' a
lawyer and, like LBJ, turning left with his daughter in his old age... there’s
golfers who play to maim and destroy, like the Picts intended golf to be played
in the first place. Rappers... I tune in to WBTY when it comes in clear from
over the line, up in Evansville... and am impressed, if not cheered, by the
sheer persistence of playa-haters; gangstas who seem
to have no other reason for being than to shoot up people they think of as
having more fun in life than they do. "To be a martyr, that's
something," boasted the mother of a recent Palestinian suicide bomber. Not
so different from them old right-wing golfers like Alice Cooper and Marilyn Manson,
sharing the foursome with the ghost of Gerald Ford and the con-troller of Fox
News, these!
"As a
species," suggests Naked Ape fellow Desmond Morris, "we are not
biologically equipped to cope with a mass of strangers masquerading as members
of our tribe."
However that’s defined.
The social critic
Vance Packard repeatedly predicted that the artificiality of the 50's would
provoke some sort of backlash, as did occur in those 60's. Then came back
back-backlash, now so popular among aging playa-haters, as find their
children’s music too loud and bones too achy-breaky for all-night post-plague
orgies of sex, kat and whatever's passing for entertainment at the minute. Of
course the nostalgia as some of us pine for is a past as never quite existed
except, mayhaps, on television. "Man cannot
avoid looking backwards as forwards," Mr. Darwin said, and one of his most
vehement foes, a local Kentucky gentleman of faith, agreed by telling me he missed
the Communism. In fact, he applauded the Jazzies and
mourned Osama; he prayed that Mad Vlad Putin would be the real deal, a new
Stalin or Hitler come along... too, somewhere... to get America "right by
God" - anybody's God, especially after God whacked us on the back of the
head with His Plague.. Remember: Dennis Hopper… Captain America and Frank Booth… died collecting Warhols, selling investment opportunities and shilling for Bush
Two (th’ol’ lawyer-shootin’,
daughter-lovin’ Cheney I could understand, but Doubleyou?) and, after Bruce Jenner changed
his name and sex to Caitlyn, he/she went into the tank for Ted Cruz, then for Djonald Unchained until POTUS lowered all the military
freak-flags to half staff! Her afternoon
show on that cable station… or is it streaming… rocks, however. Be on it to voice my choices for the midterms
next Wednesday...
At least the plague…
not to mention technology… is makin' prostitution
obsolete (except for priests and pedophiles and pedophile priests) – inasmuch
as it’s been renamed “sex trafficking” the way that “rape” got gentled down to
“sexual assault” or, as in the recent conviction of Cuba Gooding Junior (but
not Huggable Joe), “forcible touching”. Well before the dawn of Net voyeurism, Mr.
Packard arrived at the conclusion that people increasingly preferred television
characters speaking television euphemisms to flesh and blood neighbors,
relatives and plain-talkin’ friends inasmuch as they
were more pleasant and diverting than real people, and wouldn’t cough in your
face. Also, those who were not could be
turned off! "Perhaps," he allowed, "we are witnessing a
withdrawal syndrome." Same story, different… but more narrowcasted,
blogcasted oculoid… mediums
these days.
So, if 'Murkans, having been programmed by predilection and disease
to cocoon with smartphones, narrowcast talk radio, social media and cable porn,
maybe interaction with others should take
place remotely... whether or not the Coronavirus, retreating to the Southern
Hemisphere for the season, returns when the leaves start to falling once more
in a vengefully new, vax-immune mutant strain. We can prob’ly have sex
with robots, or thru those VR glasses someday… but, in the mean-while, herding
together to advocate gumment persecution of those other guys, as is called "Communitarianism"
(never to be mistaken for the flat out Communism), might should be legislated against
also. Fast-talkin' dude Amitai
Etzioni invented or, at least, marketed this term...
Communitarianism plays among both neo-liberals and compassionate conservatives
because it says, with a wink, that it will do things to things
nobody much likes: broken windows, graffiti, gum on the sidewalks, guns
in the pocket, dogdada, subversive dognas... not so different, truth be told, than what our
own CNC block-militias promulgate…
Communitarians mean,
of course, they want to do mean things to people: mostly as come
poor and dark as them that useta slink through Djonald Unchained’s nightmares. Now
some spoil-sports contend it's all about putting Aryanism (if not the exactly that Arianism as slunk underground
after the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD) back into communities, but I will point
out that our 21st century Leni Riefenstahl, Dinesh Di Souza,
seems to like the concept, as did the former-Aygee Ashcroft's
Vietnamese Deputy. Judge Long Dong
Thomas and his freshly-minted rent boy Kavanaugh, too.
It's the code
talking. Boys from good homes as write their names on schoolhouse walls get the
parents called in and maybe billed for damages so they lose keys to the Tundra
away for a week or two... those from the wrong side of the tracks get five
years in an adult bloody-ass prison, a lifelong ticket to joblessness and a
fifty-fifty crack at AIDS or crack addiction (or, thanks to our
munificence in welcoming about half of Russia's criminal population,
tuberculosis... as poets used to call "consumption"). You got
patriotic parking spaces, now, for “Government Officials” and “Combat Veterans”
to go along with the handicapped spaces at SmartMart and
Etzioni waxes sentimental over truck stops with special
stools and showers for "Drivers Only", tho’
it's a short, slippery step to taping signs back up over the public water fountains.
Desperate times, as
Communitarians call ours'n, "call for something
beyond the pale."
One very pale
Communitarian venture,
Things bottom out, as
usual, in Alabam' where State Public Safety Director,
Jim Alexander codified ticket-writing quotas as a minimum one per hour. "We
have to do evaluations and the only way for evaluation of troopers is what kind
of product he puts out," Jim said. (The italicism's
mine... you know, there was a day when made-in-America product meant bread and beef and beans... steam, steel
beams, and beer, steers and s’mores. No
more! No dreams. Not here!)
Most upright
citizens, Amitai says, so hate the crime that they'd
support police checkpoints in "drug-infested neighborhoods". Not in their own pale Rush
Limbaugh, Internet oxy-continin’ 'hoods... thick with
the Dewars and Xanaxed gentry
of a sort that even Adam Smith, Capitalism's right invisible hand, called "decadent
agglomerations of merchants, commonly ambitious of becoming country
gentlemen!", each with five to eighteen bottomless prescriptions for their
feelgood pellets... but over there, on those people's mean
streets.
"You don't know
it's over," Ralph Reed, that cute munchkin of the MicroTimeTM
Pit (as sidetracked his own political career playin'
hide-the-casino with Native American-type Indians), gloats over fallen
communities of surplus Americans, "until you're zipped up in the body
bag."
Which talk of body
bags brings me round to the role of the Second Amendment in resolving
contradictions through discrimination: "A well-regulated militia
(sorry all youse Constitutional Patriots back from
the NRA festival and Kristi Noem’s two year old
cowgirl, all you Wolverine Watchmen), being necessary to the security
of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms
shall not be infringed." Thanks to the Coalition for a New Consensus,
armed and disciplined Americans… duly background checked and registered… are
patrolling their own neighborhoods, helping old ladies cross the street and
keeping a watchful eye on the criminal element, both homegrown, like Beto O’Rourke, and such as wear the blue berets of the UN's
so called "peacekeepers". And,
should the ‘publocrats tie up the budget and econ’my so much as to incite some sequestration or default
once a Catfish administration takes hold, I’ll just shut down the gummint, declare martial law, issue a few dozen Executive
Orders and deputize our CNC militia
to keep order in their neighborhoods agin’
blue-collar and white-collar crime – the both.
Cut a deal with the Saudis
to let women vote for our adopting sharia law – at least that part of it that chops
off the hands of crypto-thieves and Internet scammers? Gallows on every streetcorner? If our current ex-President can
tout moats full of gators (or them flesh-eating bacteria), why not? Watch crime rates plummet through the basement
into the sub-basement and some of those cockroaches lobbyin’
and legislatin’ in Congress book the first flights
available to Zurich or the Cayman Islands to cuddle up with their money!
"People want to
improve their community," as remarked Paul Samuelson in Barry Bluestone
and Bennett Harrison's "Deindustrialization of America", "not
abdicate from it."
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