The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
November 9th
MAKIN’ (n' keeping faith with) the FOURTH AMERICAN REVOLUTION!
By Jack
Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate
Syndicated by Acme Features
Once I'd made my mind up to retire,
this Tennessee Democrat (as agreed with me about Obamacare bein’
nothing but an in-cider in-sureman’s scam but
couldn't say so in public) brought up ol' Jack Daniel from a district not far
from his own. Most "entrepreneurial personalities" begin early in
life; some may even have dropped out of school or failed a few times before
succeeding. "Many would have as much difficulty with corporate bureaucracy
as with government," this eighty-something Democrat said (a’fore his district was gerrymandered Republican,
too), "most would feel restricted in the now-large companies bearing their
names. Many might not even be hired to mop the floor."
Creation and its pride's
more important to the true entrepreneurial mind than mere income. And Jack
Daniel's having made it while Cubans, as don't sail to Miami, still drink
rum... not very good rum, at that, since Bacardi decamped... calls to mind the
words squeamish persons there in the Continental Congress uttered, as made Tom
Jefferson remove this out of the Declaration of Independence, as being
personally injurious to England's George the Third:
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"Future
ages will scarcely believe that the hardiness of one man adventured, within
the short compass of 12 years only, to lay a foundation so broad & so
undisguised for tyranny over a people fostered and fixed in principles of
freedom." |
Sound familiar? Cut twelve to
four and George III to Charlie III. Or here, thisaway,
Him whose name cannot be uttered?
Keepin’ in the martial spirit of Veterams’
Days past and present, I've no doubt that Fidel Castro, like many others,
started out some sort of entrepreneur. (If he'd made the Yankees as a player
and then gone on to manage, might even be hawking credit cards on the ESPN, if
he weren’t a-molderin’ in his grave, having handed
off the Presidency to his brother… for the most part, these days… a vegetable
or, maybe, tropical fruit!) Quite a few down in
Where there is confidence and a
stability of leadership, Entropy withers and, where vision is exceptional and
transmutable through generations, it may even be possible to occasionally
reverse the drift into decline, allowing for Renaissance to flourish. Rome
lasted as long as it did by reinventing itself constantly... with a consequence
that the germ of civilization was preserved, after its final collapse, from
Irish monasteries to Byzantine palaces, through the long Dark Ages after
Constantinople’s fall, finally to emerge in that actual epoch as we call the
Renaissance.
Hereabouts, we've bested three
transitional crises of the sort as occur every seventy years or so. If the
First American Revolution succeeded by fortune (and, yeah, we got by with a
little help from the French!), the Second was inevitable... industrious, 19th
century industry would've doomed and zoomed past pastoral plantation-feudalism
even if the South had prevailed on the battlefield. The New Deal's Third Revolution
reforms enabled us to rise to the challenges posed by depression, Germany,
Japan and Russia so that, if you look at your calendar, you'll be alive to see
portents of a Fourth Revolution of technogoguery and globalization
swarmin' round and swimmin’
round under the microscopes, today, thick as the cemetery gnats.
I mean... a multi-billion dollar “augmented
reality” glasses empire being erected on the backs of Americans who want to see
funny cartoon pustules on the people they pass in the street? Have to go along with God’s Butcher, Kirill on this one...
decadence!
Boxcar Willie, down in Branson, may have been a former bowling-alley manager
name of Lecil Martin, instead of a real hobo. May have been a fake, gone to fake hillbilly Hades with them Propecia cases in big hats, or that advertising fellow as
wrote and sang "Convoy". His theatre in Branson may have been
as full of tacky, overpriced souvenir crap as was the Platterdome,
or Smirnoff's joint... but, by God!, it was American
crap, as Lecil used to tell anybody who'd pay mind...
"All the toys are made overseas now. I don't know why the hell we can't
get American-made toys... I could get whistles from Taiwan, but there's a
family in Arkansas that makes them. It's their only damn income."
What do Americans have left, now –
aside from the frackin’ oilies,
empty promises from Djonald Unchained and Candy
Crush, as got toted up being worth some six billion bucks for its being sold to
some conglomerate? Finance.
Insurance. Real estate*. Wise
guys put them together, spell it "FIRE"... ever since November, 1963,
they've been burnin’ off America's productive capacity
to the extent that we were trillions of dollars in debt to others, ourselves
and our future even before the plague
manifested. While the Dow sprints back
towards 40,000, foreclosure, real unemployed and homeless rates are soaring
too; them as stoked the fires living high on Washington bailouts, and middle-classicals have become an endangered species.
* …although now, given the proliferation of bullshit
high-tech balloons as some claim to be worth more than General Electric or
General Motors, one might as well add Dotcoms to the list, which spells out
F-I-R-E-D (as is the status of more and more of those as used to be called the
Great American Middle Class.
So when mobs storm the Capitol hereabouts
and meetings of the European Union in Dublin or Antwerp over thataways, and the IMF, G-10 and other diabolical, global rattlesnakes
have to meet behind barbed wire, armed police and, for all we know, the Swiss
Guard I say, it's only all they deserve... Revised Patriot Act be damned!
Before pawning his soul to Clowntontown, Robert Reich... that little Tyrion Lannister who was Labor
Secretary for awhile and now writes for the Brits (and sometimes the DJI)... suggested that,
instead of trampling round the world sticking our nose in other nations'
business, we institute no less than a "Marshall Plan" here at home to
bring the bucks back home and propel America into the Twenty First century as
an awake, breathing participant in exciting, if dangerous, times, rather than
as a dead buck... admittedly with a magnificent rack of history’s antlers...
draped across the hood of Entropy's pickup truck. President Joe tried doin’
so until that Senator got mysteriously shot, the Republican Governor appointed his
newphew and them American Jobs and Families Acts (Mr.
Jones’ current Index, again) went to the boneyard to
quietly decompose among all them Acting cabinet officials, military brass and
commissioners of dis and dat
appointed by The Donald and discarded by Midnight Joe of whom the question will
arise in exactly one year: which is the worse... weak or crazy?
"Herein lies
the real problem America faces at the dawning of the 21st century: While a small
fraction of Americans has the conceptual skills to add substantial value to
this new world economy, most Americans do not."
Managing the Fourth Revolution will be
more complicated than just ratcheting up "productivity"... as the
bombastic one-world experts will tell you... making people work sixty-hour weeks
at the $4.30 (or, even, $4.50 the hour) “training wages” now doled out to
“independent contractors” is only slightly more tolerable than herding them off
into prisons or Bombay street crematoria.
This time, this revolution's got
to deal with the who we are and the what we've been
put on God's green earth for.
And followin'
Entropy's rules won't cut it. I also recall how (if the gumment
was advanced as it is now, back in 1866, when Jack Daniel discovered the
limestone spring he intuited might make good sippin'
whiskey for a century or so 'til corporate cockroaches as came after diluted
it, then diluted it again down to where it might as well be Old Thompson) one
of the child welfare people would have slapped an elbow down around the back of
his head, twisted his ears and hauled him off to school. Jack was thirteen
when he started up his company... nowadays not even seven birthdays from bein’ old enough to taste-test his product.
"As soon as the government forced
Jack Daniel to quit making whiskey on a Sunday," was what the Congressman
from Tennessee told me, as a means of wrapping up this with two fingers o'that, "...they made the school children quit praying
the Lord's Prayer."
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