The Journal

 

Serving the Metropolitan Area

 

Since 1872

 

 

January 25th

 

  

POE BOYS on the CORNER!

 

By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate

 

Syndicated by Acme Features 

 

          As I was growin’ up in Miller's Ridge, must've seen... oh... several hundred movies by Roger Corman, with Vincent Price actin’ in most, at the Kentuckian Theatre or on fuzzy old Channel 5 from Bowling Green, over the hill. One I remember... adapted from ol' Eddie Poe as died, so I have heard, either from drink or bein' stomped upon for voting too often (so's to earn a little more money for drink)... this’n had Vinnie going to some castle of the high and mighties (like Mar-a-Lago) during a plague (not Covid but a Camus/DeFoe plague like that Black Death, carried by rats, only red – the symptoms, not the rats). Walled up in their castle, they wined, dined and fornicated like Fannie Mac executives while, outside, those little people (as did the real work to support these termites) caught the Red Death and expired horribly.

          That was before the start of that other now-cancelled series with Kevin Bacon, as is related to everybody, now… I'll get back to what happened later, but have a point to make, first, and it's about how the general crazinesses on our streets, halls of legislation and media feed off each other, just like plague-fleas drinking blood off some infected rat.

          Look round today - you'll see all of your favorite monsters sloughing down city streets between the shambling zombies looking for brains to eat (and not a brain in sight). We got Frankensteins, randomly splicing genes into agglomerations of pig, man, tomato and lethal virus. We got vampire ‘conomists – banks wrapped tight as mummies with the red tape so’s to pocket all that Federal money ‘n not make loans to homes, nor business.  Pirates of Outsourcing, Draculas and Blackulas. Ray Nagin and Pat Robertson impersonators pimpin' God a’tween puffin’ wacky weed in the jug. Congolese authorities telling a UN panel that "...pygmies are subhuman, and eating them bestows magical powers."  Coughing Q-Anon shamans.  One so-called youth newspaper that promotes mean-eyeballing everyone you walk by, while having the means at hand to do unto others before they do unto you: "Would you take your eyes off a snake about to strike?"

          This lady Doctor Frances Cress Welsing, as holds black men emasculated by their single mothers and the white power structure, inspired moviemaker John Singleton to exhort: "the dysfunctional rite of passage in the black community that says you're not a man unless you're a killer..." anticipating the swarthy, racially ambiguous Souljacker. "The alpha male in the black community has to be able to explode at any time."

          Leonard Pitts called Singleton "full of crap" in the Miami paper (and didn't get blown away, as Bill O'Reilly did, after dissing rapper 2Crazy) and suggested everybody find a white man to blame for their less-than-perfect living. "Even the white man should have a white man."  (Or, as recent events in Memphis prove, every black man five black men.)

          Or a nurturing mother.  Like the Affluenza teen’s enabler.  Coupla Bamalama third-graders poured disinfectant into their teacher's sweet tea months before the President advised folks to do the same, got 45 days in alternative school and their mamas went ballistic. Cynthia Rock called her li'l paleface poisoner a "wonderful and sweet child" who got A's and wanted to be a heart surgeon. "This teacher failed to recognize the potential danger of the chemical being left out in the reach of children."  Happens with guns, too.

          Renee Newman, noting another poisoner was a Cub Scout and baseball star, said: "I also think the teacher should have been reprimanded... I want to feel that my son is safe, not in danger because of a teacher's negligence."  (I hear that Mad Vlad Putin is looking for a few good men, or women, to help him with his Navalny problem.)

          "Children today grow up amid so much violence it's hard to imagine them becoming docile adults willing to line up quietly for dinner at a soup kitchen," opined Marilyn Geewax of the Atlanta Constitution after two adolescents executed volunteers delivering food to the homebound poor for no particular reason other than that they were bored. "It's possible that many kids will turn out to be too volatile and undisciplined to ever work - or even to accept charity…" a premise come to fruition at the Superdome during Katrina, back then, or St. Louis, during the terror.

          (Ain't just the ghetto poor exploding in our world of role-modulation gone nuts... considering them last few serial killers being white, well-off family guys: neuroscientists, Norwegians and New Zealanders, even!… well, Australians, rather squatting those islands to the east… and I'm sure that college student in Pennsylvania as chopped the noggin off a beloved campus swan and carried the head around to impress co-eds was seeking some sort of emotional validation. Ronald Shanabarger, out in Indiana... sensitive soul whose girlfriend hurt his feelings by not comforting him enough after his father died... knocked her up, married her, waited until their son was seven months old, then strangled him "to make Amy feel the way he did when his father died." Empowering Kampgrounds Of America marketing people to cringe... "Screaming sirens keeping you awake at night? Afraid to go walking after dark?" then start turning strange... "Silly sitcoms poking fun at your family values?"

          Their remedy, go out and sleep in the woods… where habitat-deprived mountain lions, wolves and bears join the rabid bats and foxes and bubonic squirrels as are a-waitin’ for ya!  (Not to mention murder hornets and the maniac Canadians!)

          Back around the late 50s, early 60s, Alan Harrington, anticipating Mary Trump, suggested in this Playboy article (at the U. of K., of course, we always read Playboy for the articles) that just about every other famous person, Hollywood celebrity, and Wall Street shark were psychopaths gone plumb out of their heads – and nobody was calling them out on their fondling the ladies, either. And, wrote Hef's other media massager, Marshall McLuhan: "...once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left."

          Ask a liberal what to do... they'll promote more taxes and social workers... like this Hawaiian anger-management counselor on the Family Court payroll, as punched out one of his under-performing clients and killed him.

          Twenty-first century conservatives will fall back on the same old Revised Patriot Act laws; jails, Gestapo-type roadblocks and door kick-ins, beautiful walls, collecting more DNA and little paper cups of piss and implanting microchips in dogs and welfare queens.  Deep in their guts, they admire Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Mad Vlad Putin and the Taliban for persecuting women, minorities and infidels as deserving of death, just like Deuteronomy Twenty and the Koran say, and their predilection for chopping off hands n’ heads. Some Wisconsin politicians even proposed that "violent criminals, drug abusers and welfare recipients" be made to "donate" expendable organs like a single kidney or cornea, sans anesthesia, during their incarceration, and the unexpendable ones of them after death.

          Sounds like a job for young Master Newman once he gets his cardiology degree. Personally, I could do without that lion-killing dentist’s heart, Jim Holmes’ brain or David Crosby’s second liver!

          "Evil exists in this world not to create despair but activity," I recall having read once... I think it was Tommy Malthus who said this, or maybe Batman on the topic of the super-villain Bane… or was it a salesman from Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital?  "It is the duty of every individual to use his utmost efforts to remove evil from himself and from as large a circle as he can influence."

          Now - as to how that movie of the Red Death ended - well, all those rich people, thinking they're so smart to have walled themselves away from the world and its afflictions, not to mention the Mexicans (there weren’t too many of those in Middle Ages England, but no matter), well, some rat found a crack in the wall, its fleas dropped off an commenced to bitin’ and all them swells swelled-up, turned red and then dropped horribly dead. There's this more ominous-than-usual "The End" up on the screen or television and credits roll.

          And Vinnie Price... well, he's left the castle.

 

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

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