The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
Jan. 5, 2025
SLANTED!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated
by Acme Features
Few years back I watched
my successor in Congress, Hank Mayhew, sworn in... shook
his hand, wished him luck and, being that Janine had already left and taken the
kids, packed the dogs and a change of clothes into the truck and headed West.
Rather as folks did during the Great Depression, I s'pose, or, more recently,
as some try making it to Hollywood to land a spot on the "You Bet Your
Car!"
Enjoyed some sun and
some tequila, walked on the beach a spell, visited Chinatown and then, on my
way home, I took this little detour (large detour, truth be told) on my way
back to Parnell County, Kentucky, and civilian life... I went to Branson.
Always thought Yaakov Smirnov one hell of a funny Russian before, even, the
civil war in Ukraine and trollixed American elections
and, though I may draw heat on this, I'll also cop to a soft spot for the
Platters, even if they haven't had a top-forty hit in forty-something years.
In the fifties and early
sixties between Elvis and the Beatles (the former back from Germany with his
balls lopped off, the latter in Hamburg, just growing theirs), the Platters were
about the only pop vocal musicians to even hint at something in motion, something
wrong, just under the surface... their songs roaming darker perceptions
at the margins of those lazy, hazy, Eisenhower years. Homages
to smoke and sunsets; shadows, fog and twilight. I believe Mr. Stephen
King came to more or less the same conclusion... the harmonies are damn sweet
but, if you listen to the words, you're likely to find something off,
something just a little disturbing.
To use the title of one
of their best (after "Twilight Time", perhaps) something a little slanted.
Still humming Platters'
tunes, I stopped off a ways north in Springfield for a bite to eat; driving all
the way into the downtown... mostly deserted, as so many downtowns are these
days – less like a location for the Simpsons than for a minor Stephen King
movie (or an original Rod Serling "Twilight Zone" from back in the
fifties, in those dear, departed days of black and white).
Springfield, you
see, wasn’t always the place where junior MAGAboys (and
girls) used to go to party hearty in the lake and pools and then catch the
plague – it used to be where they made the Zenith televisions; black and whites
at first, and then, until about the turn of the Millenium, the color. They
were, in fact, the last TV company left in the United States after GE, Philco,
Sylvania and all the others ran off to the South or West... finally Zenith shut
its door, too, and turned out the light. They make Zenith TVs in Mexico now, I
think, or maybe they've moved along to China. And when China gets too expensive, with or
without any newfangled tariffs, they’ll be made in Taiwan… so they say… but they’ll
really be made in Vietnam and just
marketed through Taiwan like all their stuff is, since the both have reason to
hate the Chinese.
Won’t be the folks of
“Outer Limits” taking control of your TV, like in the old show, it’ll be the
Vietcong! “Ho! Ho! Ho
Chi Minh! NCIS gonna win!”
Take a slow drive through
an American community... keeping your ID close at hand, as you'll likely be
stopped by police searching for contraband heart medicine... and you will find
prematurely retired steelworkers and electronics assemblers (now well up in
their 70s, even 80s, some, since the pensions vanished with the companies)
mowing lawns and delivering the sort of newspapers as still remain. Jobs kids
used to do... kids who, by now, have copped to the fact that they're likely as
not to still be flipping burgers or temping at QualMart when they
reach the middle age, no matter how many debt-financed sheepskins they’ve
tacked to the wall in their parents’ basements. Might as well smoke crack.
A smart fellow, Bill
Wolman, wrote this book about "The Judas Economy", ending where the middle
management replaces itself with cheap foreigners too. Now I'd be
last to deny an Ethiopian statistician or Pakistani cardiologist (even an
underappreciated Russian comedian or computer nuclear genius left over from Chernoble) gainful work. But... after the termites finish
gnawing, you see, ain't enough left from those indentured workers' paychecks
sent home to slap a coat of paint over their relatives' cinderblock shanties
and, meanwhile, people over there have to do without doctors and videogame repairmen
and such, and wind up blaming us for this exodus.
As Mr. Wolman argues,
it's become a waste of money for Americans get an MBA, engineering, medical or
technical degree, and that is why, through the Coalition, I intend to keep
alive the spirit of that legislation I introduced into Congress, only to see it
tabled in Committee.
I proposed, during
my tenure in that august body (and still believe it necessary) that we slap
on... not exactly a tax or Trumpian tariff, but...
let's call it a re-import surcharge on the difference between... say...
two-buck-an-hour Tijuana wages (not to mention the formerly twenty-cent Chinese
now being offshored to the good ol’ Vietcong) and
those twenty dollars once paid that laid-off American citizen. What differentiates this from Mister Trump’s
moribund import tariffs and our sleepy President’s abject trade surrender is
that one third the difference is returned straight to the foreign worker
- half in the currency of his own country, the rest in scrip redeemable through
the purchase of American exports so Juan, Apu or Yakov can afford a box of Queetos
or a Florida orange now and again. So's all them little girls sewing shirts for
Kardashians or shoes for Nike can get legal
CDs by that American Idol whom little girls scream about, now that they've
stopped screaming for last year's model. A second third goes into a fund to
keep unemployed Americans putting in a fair day's work for their own
communities (not sleepwalking through phony social service or retraining
scams), keeping up the healthcare (as opposed to Obama’s late, unlamented
health insurance scam), emergency
rent and mortgage assistance so's to keep more neighborhoods from becoming
vacant, bank-owned kathouses as happened in that last
gumment shutdown.
(This still leaves the
runaways with a 33 1/3% rebate if they otherwise exhibit good citizenship but
absolutely have to run away... which makes the difference between
Catfish and all that high-Commonist bulldada elephant-men rail against, as if
the measure of national greatness is its quantity of sick children, or unemployed
people hanging out on burned-out city streetcorners or
in jails. And, of course, since there would
still remain a pecuniary shortfall, and the deficit is high enough already,
there would have to be further adjustments. Good-bye to Trump’s tax cuts for the rich! And good bye to President
Joe’s plague, war or economic meltdowns to Joneses making over $100K per annum
– even those who pay 90 percent of that back to the termites in rent, mortgages
on kited land values and the property taxes they generate. Since corporations moving their higher end
functions into places like New York, California and, more recently, Boston and
Austin, those companies as stood by or even collaborated with Entropy in
raising money to defeat rent controls, let them lose their best who’d rather
move to Oklahoma and become janitors or, if young enough, retrain as pilots,
long-haul truckers or healthcare workers.)
And
then? Well, I'd have to admit final solutions to unemployableness will
require a little of this and that... a whole lot of tinkering and
experimentation and maybe, even (gasp!) science – stepped-on toes and the
inevitable screwups. I might ought to have my head examined for wanting to step
into a place so deviously slanted... better to hole up on
Miller's Ridge with the dogs and boys, the shotgun, coupla
bootleg George Jones and Roger Miller concert CDs and a case of Wild Turkey.
But that would be, to paraphrase Richard Nixon, wrong!
It would hurt,
seeing some homegrown Yaakov Smirnov yukking it up onstage in Budapest or Buenos
Aires, cracking red-to-redneck jokes about the mean, bumbling Americans like he
used to be.
So instead, I'll
pack the dogs and head back to DeeCee if needs be, tho’, truth be told, I think
I'd rather hang out in Branson.
|
CLICK the
CATFISH to go to PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK
HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS |
|
|