The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
May 4th
MASSAGING the MOB!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated
by Acme Features
Once I made
my mind up to retire from the Congress, I decided to have me some fun.
Now, maybe I oughtn't
to have done a few things after... like giving the talk radio and ‘publicans
ideas about that poll tax which Tillerman stole out from under me, or punching
out Sikes on the anti-suicide commission. Oh, I wasn't wrong; he richly
deserved his thrashing but maybe I ought also to just have beat the crap out of
that other little twerp from the class of fourteen... as said he'd go home
after two terms, then didn't... 'stead of sayin' he
had a "purty mouth" and kissing it with the
C-span cameras running. Hell, I’m already in the crappits
with the Babtists for my divorce and the what came after,
and most Americans want to see cockroaches violated or knocked tumblin' down the Capitol steps, domestic and foreign
currency flying from out'n their pockets!
And all that
shuddering about “concussions” – that’s just more liberal gloom and doomin’ – I’ve fallen off’n a few
horses in the day, played football too. Kid died the other day, playing soccer? Shake it off and get back in the game. You can lose your mind when you get old –
that’s what getting old is for. Look at Djonald Unchained,
as the Don Jones people called him, or President Joe or Bernie!
Fact is, most see
the politics as a game, or entertainment – and even before the
rise of Trump like a diseased sun over Coldsore Mountain
- contrary to that scolding by Carl Boggs, out in L.A. that, where it "degenerates
into a remote spectacle," after which, then: "the most rational act
may well be cynicism and withdrawal." The few independents on his side finally
deserted when he fired Mike “Lock her up!” Flynn and Shawn Spicer, Bannon and
the Mooch. He’d stopped being fun! (And they all ratted him out, all except Spicer,
that dancin’ machine!)
(And then embracing Mad
Vlad Putin. Fun again!)
Trouble is – you may
wish to withdraw from politics, but politics ain’t gonna
pull out of yours. This analogy, as once
related to war, was propounded by Leon Trotsky, I think, or else the Souljacker… and still holds, right as rain.
Entertainment… now that matters if'n
you're de-skilled, de-educated and de-sensitized, almost to the extreme of
those poor ol’ folks in Alabama nursing homes they let the ants eat up.
Americans, even before the plague, were mostly un- or underemployed, or doin' the Amazonian sixty, seventy-hour workweek between three
jobs, likely without overtime or benefits or restroom breaks... some, now, with
wires n’chips stuck into hands and brains, as run
back to computers in Provo, Utah, then broadcasting into the mandatory
earphones: "You are not working as fast as the person next to you!" every
forty-two seconds or thereabouts. We're dissed, pissed and kissed-off... and it
shows in the quality of what little we do produce.
One of my most
humiliating weeks came just a while before I retired, when I took this junket
to some EU trade conference and had to endure being lectured by Hungarians...
effing Hungarians!... all riled up because the crap they imported
from Germans and the Japanese was better than ours'n.
Could've made the excuse as most of what's stamped Made in America is really
just “assembled” hereabouts with constituents as come from China, Mexico or
points south or east, but... I suspect... that wouldn't exactly have been
burnishing the reputation of the Land o'the Free,
Home o'the Brave.
Ain't
just Hunkies complaining, of course. The South African Nadine Gordimer, as concluded
History was agin' us explained that: "Americans
cannot give back to blacks a lost identity."
"While the
nation used cheap, young black labor for centuries," points out Troy
Duster of the National Council of Crime and Delinquency, "the new
generation faces, for the first time, both the rejection and massive
irrelevance of their labor."
Makes some of those statewide
mandatory marriage schemes a little suspect. "At the minimum wage," proclaimed
Gregg Easterbrook of the Los Angeles Times, before the ACTA in four states pushed it
back down to $4.30 for "trainees" (as are those anybodies of any age as work for six months,
then get laid off and have to go trainee themselves someplace else), "an unskilled
man who wants to work and marry offers a prospective wife less than the
government offers via the dole."
This narcississism fellow from the Don Jones funny farm,
Lash LaChristopher... someone as that... well, he
said once Americans stopped gazing at themselves in mirror (presumably because
our mirrors had cracked for lack of the maintenance), what would happen would
be total breakdown, the Last Crusade, ultimate war of "all against
all!" Like in Iraq, where we kicked out Saddam and got this anarchy an’
corruption finally put an end to by Zazzbo...
formerly the Ayatollah Ziz al' Abbozziz
bin al' Barzon... as snuggles up to Iranian
fruitcakes, Jazreel terrorists and opium
smugglers, the allsome!
As warned critic
Albert Murray on that PBS jazz series, as ran a couple of years back: "You
cannot embrace Entropy."
Ain't
as if we haven't known we'd have to face the music some day... be it free jazz,
al Jazreel or Zazzbo, Doggy
Style or else "The Syncopated Clock" as counts down these last
minutes until the North Korean birdies take flight and the last American
worker's replaced by a Chinaman, a robot or a rat. As columnist Dick Nolan put
it, "in order to support all those paper profits, plus the enthusiastic
usury of the banking system, working folk have to pay an ever-increasing
portion of their wages just to keep a roof overhead." Of course that was
back when there were working people, as had houses
and wages... until gumment gave the green light to merge
the banks with airlines, break up the phone company and scramble everythin' round with olive oil and the media peppers and
onions until the whole rotten pile fell over and lies stinking, now, like dead,
fat Uncle Freddie on the kitchen floor of a Thanksgiving afternoon of old (as
when the friends and family gathered, before the plague) as nobody wants
to drag out back and bury.
Now it ain't my intention to deny Americans an occasional sojourn
in mental Fantasyland... if we didn't dream, most state lotteries would
collapse, and gumment would have even more problems
bailing out the schools. So, let's shake it off, paste on a smile, admit that
our troubles, while legion, are minimal when stood against those of most of
Or when there’s a
fourth party to slice down the margin of victory a little more; or a fifth, or
sixth…
Might not win, but...
like Teddy Roosevelt and Fightin' Bob's bull moozers, crazy Ross and them Wallace boys, George and Henry...
I do intend to talk sense and have fun, the both!
All them smart
fellows laughed when Austin Tillerman, myself and others started trekking out door-to-door,
starting with people in militia compounds and ghettos, talking those of 'em as
would hear into turning their longings for decency and for community into
positive actions of be-longsomeness, like cleaning up neighborhoods, painting
fences and pitching in when those floods hit Ohio and Missouri last year, or
after Hurricane Quincy picked up where Katrina left off and selling
made-in-America firearms and cosmetics.
We're gaining
altitude and momentum... and without having the use of gumment helium or one
of them secret all-secret military blimps as floats away trailing metal cables
that drag along beneath and short out power systems. Our enterprise remains the lifting of vision
for all Americans so that we may break through and finally begin to see blue
sky above this forest of leafy tribulations. And then... watch out, all you as ain't with the CNC program!
It warn’t Jack Lemmon nor John Lennon but, I believe, Ron Reagan's
own Navy Secretary, John Lehman, as admitted: "Power corrupts. But
absolute power's kind of neat."
CLICK the CATFISH to go
to PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS |