The Journal

 

Serving the Metropolitan Area

 

Since 1872

 

June 8th

 

DOMESTIC SECURITY in a WILD, WILD WORLD!

 

By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate

 

Syndicated by Acme Features

  

          Entropy, understandably, militarizes security. Taxpayer-supported police and armies, private security forces as prowl by dark of night; high walls of stone, concrete and sharpened iron. Vicious dogs and ominous weapons, so the language goes.  Barbed wire, street-surveillance cameras and swooping drones like vampire bats, butt-slappin' airport gropings, motion detection devices on those airport lines where motion… well… isn’t. A thousand clicking, chittering, chirping and droning things out of the CounterSpy - as promise what body as employs 'em peace o'mind.  And soon enough, privatization of them San Francisco killer crimefighting robots.

          The recent spate of school shootings... teenage terrorists with military assault rifles ventilating Parkland and Sandy Hook and Uvalde; others going ape at a Buffalo grocery, a Vegas venue and streetcorners from Hollywood to Boston... inspired some “special” persons of the political persuasion to propose special remedies like “hardening” elementary schools to ape maximum security prisons with, thanks to the dumb but unlucky Texas teacher recently, only one door in and out.  Active shooters aside, can you say: “Fire”?

          Our armies and prisons give us a form of security, but little of the function. An empty suit of clothes, in other words; billion-dollar rat-holes like that wall agin' Mexico as has been uselessized by that most high manifestin’ of high-technology... ladders. Ladders!... some Brazilian, most made in China!… where them not rioting agin the plague lockdowns are making new rubberized ladders as against those electrified fences Djonald Unchained is fomenting for his 2024 restoration a’fore Austin progresses to the smart savagery and mines the border.  "If the talent, energy and resourcefulness of hundreds of millions of men and women are not redirected to constructive ends," echoes Jeremy Rifkin, whom we have heard from on other occasions, "civilization will continue to disintegrate into a state of increasing destitution and lawlessness, from which there may be no easy return."

          You might think the example of "Mel" uplifting. Here's a young man, as the New York Times discovered, went to work after school when he was twelve and, by the age of eighteen, owned his own business. He was, by all accounts, a caring father who supported his brothers and sisters, employed a dozen Americans, maintained a fleet of nine vehicles and, on a good day, might gross $50,000. Virtuecrats might well have considered Mel a role model except... his business was distributing and selling crack cocaine, a trade in which success breeds envy, not respect. For his enterprise, one night, some presumed competitors blew him away.

          In the ghetto, temporary security can be bought with guns, a posse and eternal vigilance. No such luck attends those as miss the fast track to jail or morgue and wind up becoming "proles", as Orwell dismissed them. Of course back in 1948, when "1984" was written, unions, proles and union wages were on the postwar upswerve towards their noontime glory here (if not over the pond); unemployment rates of 2-3% were normal,  A hike to 4% by 1956 brought concern, but was still considered "acceptable", for a recession year, though 5% was deemed "excessive". And these were real rates... no bailout skullduggery, none of the fuzzy math as clouded the pre-pandemic Trump-bump, no sky-deficits, nor were nearly three million discounted for reason of being in prison or the five, or six or however many millions on parole and redlighted from most jobs for their records, then dropped from statistics due to that Fair Reckoning Act passed awhile back as Mitch McConnell’s price for greenlighting a Stimulus Three as paid more Americans to do nothing even as the rich folks cashed in their tax cuts in Singapore and Swaziland banks.

          Childcare?  It might have been politically incorrect, but that was women’s work back in the day… that and cooking, cleaning, various other tasks of household arrangements done while the male of the species picked up his briefcase (or pipe wrench) and went off to work, returning five evenings a week with a cheery “Honey, I’m home!”  A few strange, or pioneering, ladies might dip toes into the economic tide as waitresses, elementary schoolteachers or toiling at one of those occupations consigned, now, to the benighted past… a telephone operator.  Class mattered, then as now, but the majority of households could get by on one income… not two.

          To live otherwise was unpatriotic.

          Back in the Reagan years, conservative George Gilder boasted: "...the fundamental fact in the lives of the poor in most parts of America today is that the wages of common labor are far below the benefits of AFDC, Medicaid, food stamps, public housing, public defenders, leisure and the other goods and services of the welfare state." Gilder, foreshadowing a Bush legacy that civil Americans banished in the recent tributefest – a doctrine validated by Djonald Unamused that outsourced proles look downwards in anger, asked government to provide security from criminal lumpenproles... nwords, of course, plus the occasional Mexican in Texas, Vietnamese in California or Puerto Ricans in New York... by making welfare "unattractive and even a little bit demeaning". The dog whistle proved bipartisan.  So, starting with Slick Willie Clinton and Mike the Knife Bloomberg,  three million lumpens got chucked into prison. Crime went down awhile but fear's still pervasive... we had the gay marriage in ought-four overtaken by fear of Mexican gardeners two years later, flag-burning Constitutional Amendments and mandatory bible waving making the comeback now in the red states, as also the tornadoes and the Burmese flu and now, as it would seem, the seven hundred Taliban moles left over from Hillary Clinton’s Socialist State Department still mole-ing away, urging the Libyans and Pakistanis on to murder our diplomats?  Meanhwile, the Blue State Meanies recruit more and more “victims” into their ranks the way that Mormons baptize dead Jews and Christian into their own posthumous faith and some small towns have achieved the notoriety as attended those in France and Belgium where a plethora of maniacal Muslim refugees declared their communities a “No Go” neighborhood for the police, and enforced their innumerable quirky laws with firepower confiscated from the battlefields of Iraq, Afghanistan and Contra Rica,

So where is this elusive security?

          Zazzbo’s underwear?

          To them as take sick, probably hard to find. As real incomes plummet, post-plague, unemployment remains tolerable due to all those jail people and sick people with the Long Plague doctors seem impotent to stop or even understand, inflation rears its head and scowls, medical costs and the childcare bugaboo rise and the vestiges of Obamacare stand exposed as a sick joke with its replacement being no replacement at all, American life expectancies have gone stagnant and in some Third Wave Plague places, like with the Russians, begun to fall while overcopulation in the poorest states leads to overpopulation of children as are starving to death due to the embargoes occasioned by the Ukraine War.  Ask Don Jones!  A devil's domestic partnership of liberal questioners of sanity and conservative bean counters emptied mental institutions and turned urban centers into outdoor psycho wards to such extent that New York City is now rounding up street people, sane or not, and shoveling them back into the hospitals where they can receive “treatment” (i.e. shut-up pills). Gumment-funded psychiatric clinics, charges Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, author of "Nowhere to Go", "cream" affluent, insured neurotics of the sort as populate Woody Allen movies. "Rather than treating patients with schizophrenia and manic-depressive psychosis, they counseled people with problems with their marriages and self-esteem."  Somehow, these managed to stay afloat during the Medicaid cuts, while children with the amoebic dysentery from water gone untreated for lack of money in places like Flint and Jackson and, now, Houston get turned away from deregulated and/or tripledemic jampacked emergency rooms and die.  Consequently, the downright poor and worried wealthy both turn towards life-imploding escape mechanisms like opiate addiction, gun fun and suicide.

          Watch out!... the headshrinkers, having read the newspapers and internet blogs and watched the parade of psychopaths on their televisions have decided that America’s children are all “victims” of an evil society, victims who will require years, if not decades, of counseling (at Don Jones’ expense) to ever be whole again.

          Tell it to the Ukrainians!

          And, speaking of Mister Reagan and all them others as played by the rules, quit smoking and drinking, jogged, ate lots of tobroccoli and goatbran and stayed married half a century so as to live to an age well past ripe... well, once they started to get the Alzheimer’s, the same compassionate conservatives of Trumptown as repealed that ten percent's inheritance tax on multimillionaire estates by calling it a "death tax" imposed a hundred percent plus confiscation of assets, not only agin' the old folks as entered the plague and fire-ant infested nursing homes run by contributors and cronies once the family house was sold and spent down, they garnished children (including those as had already given up their jobs to empty their parents’ bedpans), siblings and even cousins, they even grandfathered the grandchildren in under Corbin-Reuss, last year. (That these can no longer afford college is less an imposition than in the bad old twentieth century, since the fancy colleges are all about finding and smooshing microaggressions, and there ain't much need even for educated Americans anymore.  Let those robots have all the jobs, they say!)

          "A nation cannot long remain strong," remarked the historian and diplomat George F. Kennan, "...when every man is personally weak."

          Now, with one election gone and another comin' round inasmuch as inaugurees have about fifteen minutes to enjoy their victory before preparing for the next rat race, expect to see plenty of twit and chat about liberty and security… those two axis poles of the political spectrum diamond as replaced the left/right linear lines of the past and have since, themselves, been replaced by my own Ring Theory*… mostly as will be laid at the altar of the "great" (but numerically shrinking) middle class. (Not even Democrats bother with the poor anymore except when they break things and burn people... up to a quarter of ‘em can't vote in some states, anyway, due to tightening up of the crime, ID and voting laws and the Supremes upholding the lifetime bans on juvenile delinquents like teenage potheads despite President Joe’s empty posthumous pardons and the sixteen state governments currently in Federal litigation over State legalization and the Attorney General’s crusade against purple-state Florida’s relaxing of the lifetime prohibitions.) Curiously, America's wealthy tend to be writ off almost as effectively as its poor (their votes – money, of course, excepted). Maybe it is perhaps assumed most will vote Republican, except for Hollywood, trial attorneys, upper-echelon labor and gumment bureaucrats and a slice of the Wall Street mob... so alternate waves of bashing and soothing almost always orbit around gumment's role in the holding onto of wealth, rather than creating it. We're clueless, in DeeCee, as to what actually goes into making a buck, so long have we been bewitched by the termites and FIREmen of Entropy as suck it out of America the way as vampires do… or them viral viruses now mating with those West Nile/Zika mosquitoes.

          That comedy video of Herschel Walker saying how as vampires used to be cool, but now can be killed by werewolves doesn’t seem so comedic now.  (See this endorsement on the latest Don Jones Index page.)

          What does Catfish economic justice demand? What the termites hate - competition – and plenty of it!  Fair taxes… as will punish the rich, the middle class and the poor so as to lay that deficit to rest and meet the challenge of madman dictators as are sproinging up all over the mulch of the Bush-Obama “Arab Spring”… removal of irrelevant regulations and level playing fields against foreign and domestic competition. The pursuit of excellence... not excellence itself, as cannot be infused into the body politic by legislation. Employer freedom from the unwanted burden of brokering healthcare, childcare and other services as should be the responsibility of patients, parents, healthcare workers and... yes, at the bottom, Catfish level... gumment. Not employers.  Not those old racketeers – the lawyers ‘n insurance companies.

          A truly free market – even if we have to use them government drones and jackboots to enforce it, go full werewolf and rip the throats out’n those vampires.

          And… now that demographics and economics are pushing the crime rates up again, rich, middle class and poor alike deserve a criminal justice system where "...punishment is exacted for aberrant behavior," as declared J. R. Labbe of the Fort Worth Star Telegram, "not for the idea that motivated it." Of course, little globules of Total Information Awareness are dribbling into laws like shavings off'n those liquid-metal policemen in the Terminator movies under homeland security Czar Poindexter... I'd rather see criminal justice made a consequence of actions, period, and civil justice reformed to effect tort and insurance reform... to such effect that the only losers would be the insurance companies and the lawyers. Maybe them obese, lifetime smokers as sued the Vioxx and such don't get quite the quarter-billion that class-envious juries have been dishin' out of late but... hey... death comes to all of us – even you, Johnny Depp!

          Now, how can we in the CNC... have you sent in your forty yet?... go about getting this done?

          Do the math! Even with a quarter of its constituency disenfranchised, the Crump-Sharpton-Wright fusion party should pull six percent... maybe eight-five if it sets a legitimate culture hero like (I was gonna say Bill Cosby or Ye and guess the younger, black Jesse’s off the table, for the moment too), well then - Derek Jeter, Charles Barkley (who polls within three percent of Hank Two as Senator from Alabam), even Congressman Snoop or Daddy (the former Diddy, P. Diddy, Puffy, etc.) atop the ticket? Could outpoll that new Christian-Zionist party, as seems stuck round seven thanks to Palin’s Alaska-separatist hubby brown-nosin' Pastor Hagee and them other end-timers and her losing to some damn Eskimo while former Vice-President Pence is still prayin’ that The Donald falls into an elevator shaft and so escapes the noose.  Figure three percent Naderite remnant if the Reform/Green coalition bounces back, maybe more if a torrent of roubles rain down upon the Greenies or the white Jesse throws his NAFTA-lovin' feather boa into the rasslin’ ring.  Call it five if The Squad walks out of the Democratic convention and starts its own Party of Bern.  Another five for various alt-righters, vegetarians, libertarians (as can read a newspaper and thus understand where the world’s hotspots are), fundamentalists, voting anarchists and that Cat Stevens-Sinead O’Connor-financed Islamic Democrat Party, and there goes a quarter of the popular vote! If once and future President Trump holds to his decision not to repeal the twenty-fourth and run again for a third term, cuz he’s “bored”… seeing as the dude changes his mind about every ninety seconds, nobody should be planning any challenges… the donkey boys and elephant men do as expected and nominate Uncle Joe or Kamala or… God preserve us!... Hillary again to run against another Bush (or maybe Nancy Pelosi versus Ted Cruz, or Al Franken v. Roy Moore)… remaining in a rough and weary equilibrium… and Austin takes his fifteen percent of the secular conservatives, I figure my slab of the CNC becomes a player at twenty percent of the popular vote. How that might break down in electoreality becomes, of course, anyone's guess, as does the state n' fate of the nation if it winds up in the paws of them Supremes (whom, it now seems, can be bought for the price of a keg of beer).  After all, those midterm polls saw nothing but a vast wasteland of elephantine and equine turds holdin’ hands across the prairie but, when November 2018 rolled round, independents had made a go of it in New England, and won three Congressional districts and a host of local offices from whenceabouts the decision-makers of the future will arise.

          Nonetheless, in "1984"… the book, not the year… Winston Smith allows himself the indulgence of considering what the proles might do, if awakened...

          "They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely, sooner or later it must occur to them to do it. And yet..."

 

*(See the Ring Theory as defined, here, in this ol’ Don Jones Index.)

 

CLICK the CATFISH to go to PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS

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