Serving the Metropolitan Area

Since 1872

January 12th

DEFECTIVE AMERICANS!

By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate

Syndicated by Acme Features

How and why did Americans come to obsess upon their defects? Warn't long ago, historically speaking, we tossed out the Brits... world's alpha empire at the time... cleared the frontier, slaughtered Indians, fought a bloody Civil War and then bounced back to more or less world domination by the close of World War Deuce. Oh, them Russians had some bombs, and did bushwack us on Sputnik, but turned out just a suit of empty armor... see?... nobody home inside once the Gipper snapped his fingers.

We ruled the roost, we did, from '45 on until... well that's the point at issue. Some say we started falling apart November 22nd, in '63, others point to Vietnam, the Watergate... after that, things get somewhat partisanly nebulous as to fixing blame.

I, personally, point to this ol' cowpoke Congressman Morton Scow told me 'bout. Drifted up the Sierras from Santa Cruz with his horse Blackfoot and dog Pudge round the turn of millenium, moseyed into Altaville among all them dot-Commies priced out of Santa Clara to set up shop as...

A panhandler!

God's truth! Hide your face, John Wayne, kick your hats out'n the ring Ron Reagan and Clint Eastwood. Ringo plants himself on the sidewalk with a tin cup, telling anybody as bothered to ask: "World owes me!"

Guy coulda cleaned up, selling rides to kids, Morty says. "Ten dollars a spin atop ol' Blackfoot, five more per Polaroid. Far as I know, it wasn't the insurance people who stopped him. He just wanted to go on the bum."

Shed a tear for a lonesome cowpoke.

Soul of America!

I think something in a lot of 'Murkans wants to be kicked round and degraded these days. Back in the Old World, they've a sort of name for it... imitation principle, I think, or else identification... (something as begins with "i"!)... where people most proud of being kicked round like curs are those proximate the biggest, stinkiest cheeses. Maids and butlers, coachmen, middle management of big corporations, little Remains of the Day people as delude themselves into thinking the glory of their betters reflects across them, that rooting on overdogs will sustain the self-delusion that they're to the purple people born, as well. "Conservatives," opined Christopher Lord of the Institute of International Relations, have always depended upon "a working-class vote, based on tradition."

Used to think Americans were smarter... after all, we were settled by people who didn't cotton to all that bulldada over there, so they left and became us. But, lately… and as conservatism has decayed from Barry Goldwater to Reagan, to the Bush family, finally to the snake-handlers as run most of the Republican party… I think this kick-me attitude's crawled over the Atlantic like rats on a plague ship.

Some head-doctors call this attitude "Drift"... for reasons that bad self-esteem tends to drift round, scooping up other bad ideas from the minds that hate. Police hold "drift theory" cause for crime and prostitution, in that abused children who get told they're no good drift into the juvenile delinquency, "accepting labels on themselves as they go," says one psychologist, "then acting out roles suggested by the labels. They become who their labels have told them they are."

We pile our own angst over kids. School dress-code warriors outlaw differingly-colored shoestrings, Stars of David and crescents (though not crosses, as yet), dollar signs, pitchforks, the numbers 5 and 6 (but not 13), Playboy Bunny logos and single gloves (presumable gestures of solidarity with acquitted pedophile baby-dangler Michael Jackson). And God's Supremes uphold California's "Zonker Law" as criminalizes "advocacy" of drug use in the media. "Zonker (a burned-out hippie in the formerly liberal comic strip Doonesbury) is a real person in our society," alleged Brian Lungren, brother and campaign manager of a defeated candidate for Governor. "He is not fictitious. And we should put Zonker behind bars where he belongs."

We surrender ancient liberties, fearing that ultimate, irremediable personal entropy... death... vainly attempting to fend it off by embracing, however inconsistently, the Ancient Mariner's old opium-buddy, life-in-death. Either we flush national undinism down the crapper and content ourselves with an imperfect society (whereby the actions of miscreants may be sanctioned, but not their aspects, thoughts or precious bodily fluids) or bring back total prohibition against any substance perceived suspect to the eye of God... or the AMA. Tobacco first, of course, then the rest... beer and sugar, red meat, extreme sports and aspirin. And, of course, chocolate.

This Catfish has one reactionary remedy for substance-related crime. Back a ways, six or seven hundred BC, this tyrant, Pittacus... now, to the early Greeks, tyranny was just a word meaning any gumment... anyway, Pittacus was Tyrant of Lesbos and enemy to this lady Sappho, who gave the whole island its reputation it has (she being one of those lesbian Lesbians while Pittacus was just a Lesbian, and tyrant thereof, though not necessarily tyrannical). Aristotle and Plato mention Pittacus, not for his difficulties with lesbian Lesbians, but for his policy on substance abuse, which went like this...

Anybody could put anything into any bodily orifice, Health Nazis be damned. (Anything, in those days, meant mostly wine, also the occasional lotus, mandrake or something else as cannot be mentioned in a family publication.) But if a man committed a crime under the influence, his condition was not... as here, without involvement of automobiles... considered mitigating. It was an aggravating circumstance! Harsher, not easier, sentences for wobbly rapists, robbers and murderers... and no more whining.

Pittacine justice (and the public whipping post for misdemeanors)... that'll cut down on crime faster'n any John Ashcroft directive to, as he put it back in the day, notice and report "anomalies... things that are different."

"I think it's despicable that so many Americans feel compelled to pour out their flaws," remarks Mimi Silber of the Delancey Street rehab, one of the few as works, most often as not. "People seem almost obliged to tell others how bad they are."

In the eighteenth century, genuine libertines like King George, Ben Franklin and the Earl of Sandwich raised unholy hellfire "not like these whimpering mashers who keep fouling our headlines today," observed degeneracy's connoisseur, Hunter S. Thompson who, at least, had the foresight to shoot himself as an alternative to soldiering on as a sick, old man in the bipolar American empire of Cushes and Blintons. Against them stood genuine economic and moral conservatives like Adam Smith, men who applied both soft or "amiable" and hard or "awful" virtues first to themselves... "self-denial, dignity, honor," and a capacity "to feel much for others and little for ourselves."

Today, we enjoy the worst of both virtue and vice... how far we've drifted, like that lonesome cowpoke of Altaville, and over such a short time, too!  

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