The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
January 30th
POISONING
PIGEONS in the PARK!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated
by Acme Features
Kids at (the now politically incorrect) Columbus School, West
Berkeley, California, were just coming out onto the playground for summer-school
recess, few years back, when stuff started falling out'n
the sky... not rain, hail, not even that so-called "blue ice" from
passing airliners flushing their facilities, but pigeons. Lots of
pigeons - landing on the playground there, plop! plop! plop! Some weren't even dead yet; flopped around in convulsions awhile
before expiring - thoroughly terrifying the kids and causing parents and school
officials to ask questions ‘bout the plague and things and stuff.
What happened was
that officials at a nearby racetrack, concerned that pigeons might transmit
disease to their horses, had seeded the racetrack with Avitrol,
a poison impregnated into grains of corn. Said the concept was to poison some
birds so others would "go into stress" and leave the area. I don't
think too many pigeons made the necessary mental connection, but there
certainly were a lot of stressed-out kids on the schoolyard after that
feathered rain.
"God, that was a
mean way to kill a bird," said LaRon Ingram, the
school custodian as got to sweep those dead and dying pigeons off the
playground.
Environmental tinkering
almost always results in disaster... any kid who's grown up on mutant monster movies…
from them first black n' white Godzillas, Rodans and Mothras to Jurassic Park
VI – Chaos in Cleveland with that guy from the Porky’s series… he’ll tell you
that. There's something in a body wants to play God, but always ends up playing
Frankenstein!
We, as a species, can't help poisoning ourselves with our
ingenuity (not to mention methane). I've heard it said the decline and fall of
Rome was caused, or at least helped along, by state-of-the-art plumbing systems
featuring toxic lead pipes, so that the Emperor, the consuls and Senators and
patricians were, in fact, no better off than the citizens of lowly Flint,
Michigan! In the two millennia since,
we've tried to kill ourselves off with ignorance in a variety of creative
ways... covering our cities with coal smoke in the 19th century,
filling refrigerators and deodorant aerosol cans with toxic anti-ozone gases in
the 20th, now exterminating the honeybees... but we still haven't
quite finished the task.
Yet.
We
seldom think about environmental destruction or depletion except when Hollywood
tells us we'll end up eating bugs and algae (or even Charlton Heston) out of the of the overpopulation or Al Gore, as he did
last week, comes back from Shanghai, or wherever he’s been Goring, to remind us
that the toxic smoke from Western wildfires is turning our atmosphere into an
open sewer. We'll
all get drownt or whomped with
giant meteors, volcanoes will erupt in downtown LA. Wolves will prowl. Amber Heard will get another TV show and we’ll twitter and chatter away about it on cellphones that, like
as not, contribute to brain cancer.
Back in the disco
years, we counted spotted owls and plotted to bring back the wolves and buffalo
to public places. America ranked Number
One by almost all standards known to man or beast so, to prove we were not only
richer, smarter and healthier but also more sensitive; we wore sweaters and
China Gore invented Earth Days, where plenty of bad folksinging
happened.
Mostly, thanks to
them shiekhs of Araby taking
us down a notch, we started thinking... if only for a few years... that so many
people doing so many wrong things at the same time might have an impact on our survivability. Then our own oil sheikhs took them others down
a peg what with the frackin’ and crackin’
of oil sands, Russia gas spigot dried up with the war in Ukraine, and things oozed
back to old normalities.
The trouble became this:
resistance got taken over by doom n' gloomers as were
more interested in gettin' their ugly mugs on
television to sell coffee mugs and books and scrounge spare change. So by the
time Reagan got voted into office, Wise Use spokesman Ron Arnold could promise "our
goal is to destroy, to eradicate the environmental movement" and, since
said movement professionals were allowed to keep on writing books, pursuing
tenure and collecting their speechifying fees, they didn't rock the boat all
that much. Some amateurs, however (and, as Austin Tillerman
advises me, some government agents pretending to be amateurs), blew up
equipment, spiked trees, killed some loggers and raided a few zoos and mink
farms, setting varmints free to be smooshed on the highway.
So, purveyors of rosy scenarios
riled up the faithful and sent forth legions of paid public relations agents,
alleging that the last few rugged winters like that as happened last year mean
there’s no such thing as global warming (and they are right, what we have is global polarization…
where the summers get hotter and winters get colder!). Out in the red states, they ran hug-a-polluter
contests... like this, won by a certain Matt Loudermilk,
for suggesting:
|
"The spotted owls in the
Northwest should not cost the timbermen 30,000 jobs. If all the spotted owls
did die off, we would just have to breed more cats to catch the
mice." |
Oil prices scooted up
in the '70s as a result of the Arab-Israeli wars and now again, with the Coughing
Twenties at hand, as a result of same, plus hurricanes, plus Putin’s hot war,
the Iran-Saudi cold war and all them Indian Indians and Red Chinese buyin' cars with all that money from jobs they lifted off’n stupid Americans. Went down due to the Saudi-Russia trade war, the frackin’
frackin’ and the Chinese learning to drive them smart
cars and sending us the plague to keep us off the road for a spell, then… go figure!...
went up again despite the oversupply, like airplane tickets. And now because of
the fear of Syria and Egypt, Costa Rica and so on… if fear makes money for the oilies, then where’s incentive for the politicians to take
measures against fear? Instead, the oily
crowd murmurs about fracking and pipelines too big to leak, and Texans slap bumperstickers on their pickups, saying "Let John
Kerry Freeze in the Dark". "Hain't no such
thing as the creation or destruction of energy and matter," Congressman Wandiver informed me back in '02, when premium went for
ninety six point nine, some places in Maryland. "Even when you burn oil,
it gets transformed into gases somebody could get hold of, and recycle for
other energy." Who, I ask? Wally goes a little glum, but you don't get to
Congress without having answers to every question. "Buckminster
Fuller?" he finally suggested.
It almost pained me
to tell him that Bucky was dead... even back then... but I had to do my Bad Christian
duty!
I hear that GM will
follow Tesla and now move to all-electric cars by 2035. Problem solved? (Not really, a lot of energy as ain’t generated by wind and waves comes
as a consequence of burning you-know-what or else building more nuclear plants
as tend to blow up now and again.) Now we'll still have gasoline to kick around a while, though
it's going to cost more. And, once it goes back to costing more than hydrogen
or alcohol or the natural gas... well, the Catfish way is to do what must be
done, keep the sortin'-out process clean. I don’t really have anything against pipelines
(aside from the fact that, to terrorists, they’re about as secure as
Crackerjack boxes)… it’s just that putting all our eggs, or oil, in one big
basket is like telling Zazzbo and ISIS and Al Qaeda
(or what comes after them... Q-anon?), “come on down!” On the other hand, that
debate about saving the oceans or going to fish factories is
getting ridiculous... it's clear we have to do the both. And if some of those
Japanese and Russian monster trawlers scooping out whatever's left in the
ocean, edible or not, encounter unforeseen accidents, well there's the price
needs to be paid.
That iceberg drifting
up almost to Buenos Aires, now, is still twice the size of Rhode
Island. France is running out of frogs, Mexico is running out of butterflies,
Florida is running out of sharks and the vast powers of official environmental
communitarianism get focused on this poor Jersey schnook,
as killed a rat with a broomstick. He's waiting on six months' jail
because, as the local prosecuting Humane Society contends, he should've caught
the rodent alive and "set it free in a nature environment." In New
Jersey!
Far as the frackin’ goes - few thousands years before Rome,
some deep back Bible folks conceived a bright idea to build a mighty stone city,
Ur, over an aquifer in the Yemeni desert, drawing up water to maintain some
mighty nifty gardens. Sort of like Vegas is already doing today. Water and/or
natural gas run out... big hole left under the ground, thin crust... whoosh! No
more Ur! And Yemen,
as of the last reckoning in 2013, ranks 117th out of 120 in most
every category ‘cept guns on the loose (actually,
it’s second, behind Guess Who) and terrorists, by the pound, while the Iranese and the Saudis continue playing colonial…
Sayonara,
Liberace museum!
So now we got John Kerry, the pickle guy as flopped in ’04, to manage
our environment. Well, I wish ‘im all the best but, if he talks President Joe
into chopping the speed limits dow to 50 mph, well
remember what that did to Jimmy Carter (another loser, twenty years earlier). That could make enough of the tiny slice of
independent voters so mad that they’d vote to send Biden to the (cold) shower
and elect… who?... Don Junior,
maybe? There goes your wildlife… won’t be pigeons hunters getting licenses for, but American
bald eagles.
The polluters say "trust
in God", but, had those falling birds in Berkeley been ravens, not pigeons,
Christians might have taken it as a sign. In Kentucky (as other places since
the EPA defunding), mine runoff, textile plant pollution and plain old sewage
has so befouled creeks and rivers that born-again baptism's become an affront
to nose and menace to the health.
"Sad to say, but
it's true," I've heard the Reverend James Kelly Caudill of Tom's Creek Primitive
lamenting. "There's none of them fit to baptize a dog in, to be honest
with you."
CLICK the CATFISH to go
to PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS |