The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
August 7th
THE SHAME (and the PROMISE) of CITIES!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated
by Acme Features
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"Genes hold culture on a leash..." |
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- E. O. Wilson |
Might lose a few
votes from the country folk haters of New York (or Dallas or Birmingham) values
with this slice of truthbaloney, but hey!.. I like a city.
Now, might be one
someplace near you, might be not. Might not even be a real place... just an
amalgamation of neighborhoods from
I like the slap of
shoes (not sneakers, not for adults) against pavement. Walking's
good for soul and body... whilst driving (or being driven) round, your eyes
play tricks. You miss details. (Or, if you’re in one of those robot chauffeur
Teslas, stop signs!)
I like a city with
museums, real libraries and at least two daily papers as so despise the one
another that some truth can often be parsed from between their bluster. Plenty
of watering holes as survived the plague, major league sports, a hall for country
music, rasslin' and the foreign symphonies. Don't
care for most ballets… too many Russians… 'ceptin’
that "Nutcracker" for the kids, over Christmas (that one that the
squeamish people got banned in Boston and some other places for culturally
appropriating Chinese tea, Arab coffee and, to the #MeToo
gang, “nutcracker” being a slur against assertive women), but I'd rather live
in a place that still had 'em, if I changed my mind, even if ol’ Drosseldorf does seem a bit creepy amongst all them tweener Russian nieces of the Trump wives. Stores as aren't owned by franchises...
restaurants where you might taste something out of this world, might catch a
sickness. Never know! The noise and the risk of it...
Risk is what's at issue... people who don't like cities being those as
don't like taking chances in societies where everything's gone at risk. Not that myself, nor any politician, should
have authority into telling people where to live... Pol Pot drowned that
pup!... but it does seem we've beaten up on cities for
too long. One Replutocrat boyo
with vestigial Libertarian leanings... forget which, was back in the
Congress... shows me this picture from his New England paper after them riots
in St. Louis. Whole streets where buildings are burnt out, cars up on the
sidewalk, burnt out too, and this policeman walking up and down, writing out
parking tickets like a goldarned U.N. peacekeeper.
Writing out friggin' parking tickets!
Pretty much sums up
how most in Congress treat the cities. Yet, if you'll open your kids' history
books, most of what people think significant, even noble, sometimes, took place
in or near a city. Athens.
Not to libel groundhogs,
but when the Founding Fathers got together to draft that Constitution of ours'n, they convened in Philadelphia, not Punxsatawney.
Someone almost
forgotten now, for having been too much the optimist during exciting times, was
Francis Hutchison, the great adversary of Hobbes and certain other termites as
infested the English royal courts. His heresy was that life is inherently
social, not "nasty, brutish and short", and that
governments should "...prohibit the greatest or wisest of mankind to
inflict any misery on the meanest, or to deprive them of any of their natural
rights." (He employed the term
“meanness” as its original designation of material, as opposed to moral want.)
Most great
philosophers and statesmen of the past lived among each other, in cities, not
walled away in security communities. They got great by running into one another
in taverns and coffee shops and other public places, having to sharpen those
faculties as improve by discoursing with people smarter than you. "As
darkness falls, the great capitals of Asia and Europe hum with human
vitality," observes the modern pundit, Andrew Glass. "At the hub of
these urban centers, streets swarm with people enjoying the gentle August
nights. (Was a few years back, this, before the plague and before the Euroheat sent daytime temps up into triple digits!) They stroll. They talk. They eat and
drink."
So... why's the
difference between over here and the over there? We know, but cannot speak. Paula Deen settled that
issue. Squeamishness clamps our tongues.
Most as get out of
cities move to get away from...
Well...
After I'd said
I'd not stand for re-election due to the gerrymandering and became... how shall
I describe it... more libertinious in thought, speech
and deed after the wife refused to take me back, the Washington Post, that
beacon of liberal squeamishness, took issue with my designation of Chicago's
Reverend Fellows as "one diseased (n-word)" for demanding he
be the one paid off after those two church bombings on the South Side of Indianapolis,
after which he would be the sole
distributor and authority regarding funds for the survivors and the victims’
families. Or maybe
not. They were, as ever, ticked off over the use of that word whose
utterance is, apparently, more terrible than extortion or setting children on
fire.
So, I am going to resort
to the n-word minus its dash like this... nword.
It's a made-up word (if Ex-President Covfefe and Shotgun
Sarah Palin can coin terms, why not me?), as insinuating swords (which stand in for the cheap guns that nwords raise against
everyone not of their tribe, and most as are); it also reflects the negativity
as keeps these victims of history nwording their way
'round as how life has been so unfair and et cetera and et cetera. Take a look at more over there in that Don Jones Index four
years back!
As nwordist apologist Corinne Brown of the Congressional Black
Caucus puts it: "We keep hearing, 'Get over
this.' We will never get over this." Gimme a dime! Which leads to the inverted theocracy of JFK
as practiced by the so-called “progressive” wing of the flying donkees (in itself a gross insult to the memories of
recently cancelled TR, Upton Sinclair and Fightin’
Bob LaFollette) – ask not what you can do for your
country, ask for what handouts your gummint can dole
our. Neither party seems willing to
expect and demand a fair day’s work… infrastructure, healthcare, whatever – or
even serious training for seriously needed skills… for a fair wage. Some Republicans, of course, have a final
solution… wait until next winter, next iteration or variation of the plague or
climate apocalypse and kill off the American surplus; President Joe wants to
shower cash over the undeserving of all races and, as for the even further
left, the Bern loves bums, for example, and bums love Bernie.
Not
that race, poverty and corporate de-urbanization hereabouts aren’t problems.
Black South Africans, at least, "have had their own earth under their feet," posited the
late South African writer Nadine Gordimer. "It is unfortunate to have to
say it: History is against you in the U.S.A."
History's agin' us all! Between the Crump and Trump we might as all be skipping down some garden path to Fascism between Djonald Duck and David Duke. Hitler's mistake, declaims one Jason Brent,
lawyer and Mensa member was "the fact that his actions prevent a rational
discussion of the creation of a master race." Another Mensoid
as deems surplus Americans in the Outsourcing Age "...too stupid, too
lazy, too crazy, or too anti-social to earn a living..." recommends
they "be humanely done away with, like abandoned kittens." Guy as did
that shootin’ of the children in the West Texas town
northeast of El Paso warn’t no Mensoid,
but came to the same conclusion - that we can exterminate our way out’n the population crisis…
He ain’t talking ‘bout the Trump kids…
Virtuecrats
graciously eschew genocide, favoring bible-thumping private schools, segregated
by color and the content of one’s bank account – financed by the taxpayers’
vouchers, Singapore-style catchlaws and a sea of
privately- or public disfunded jails (aka plague
incubators). Those who still had jobs and money once the George Floyd race wars
and… may we call it, the China virus?... wall themselves up in gated enclaves: "...to
protect the value of my home, to shut out other races, other cultures and
crime," as let slip this city planner, Edward Blakeley.
Now, I pick up the
paper and read about the return of the six dollar gas, seein'
smirkin’ sheikhs, Burisma boys
and Texas oilies as clustered 'round that energy lobby,
so to speak, like barnacles in big hats, apologizin’ for
their inability to seal the deal and blaming windmills. Quixotically kited gas prices do make cities
desirable again, so the question gets to be... who benefits? Do people living
there finally get their jobs and communities back, or do those who commute out’n compounds during the week get to take their homes,
too, and leave the meanest (18th and 21st century
applications, the both, intended) to spin down and out into nwordism;
fodder for social workers, poverty pimps, cardboard cities under bridges and
overpasses and more jails?
One reason I
mentioned Francis Hutchison, earlier, is that he also championed discrimination
(as was noted in a somewhat older Don Jones
Index). He discriminated between so-called
"perfect rights", which are guarded by law and so-called imperfect
ones "governed only by men's honour and conscience"...
equality and charity and gratitude, for example, as become precarious without
opportunities and justice. The
anti-government pundit Walter Williams… citing Madison, Franklin Pierce and
Grover Cleveland… asks whether politicians as vote to comfort the afflicted and
afflict the comfortable are “just plain constitutionally ignorant or
mean-spirited, or has our Constitution been amended to authorize charity?”
"There does come a moment,"
surmised former HUD Secretary Cisneros, being of a different persuasion, "when
the country simply can't carry on its shoulders a permanent and growing
underclass of 10 or 15 or 20 million people." And that was more than a decade ago, before
the plague wiped out maybe half of the minwage service
and factory jobs (with the virus itself taking a deadly toll on the least protected…
and paid… healthcare workers), outsizing and downsourcing vaporized much of the middle class, jacking
that number up towards fifty, even… taking Mitt Romney’s forty-seven percent
useless eaters as a benchmark… a hundred mil adult Americans, and lightening
the complexion of the problem, as if by pouring more artificial cream into the
coffee.
In President Obama’s last
budget and Trump’s first (before the triumph of the haters negated everything, the
good and bad, the both), Executive and Legislators waxed each others’ loins by
reinstituting tax cuts for billionaires and shelling out back-unemployment
insurance for those as sit on their butts of a day or year, rather than being
marshaled to perform the tasks that private sloth and government cutbacks… some
justified, others not… are leaving undone. (Djonald Unchained’s subsequent budgets wobbled into months upon
months of shutdowns, gimcrack fixes and more shutdowns, Uncle Joe just puts the whatsoever on America’s tab, blame the Coronavirus and fumigate against Joe Manchin
and cursed Sinema.) And who’s delegated to pay for this – now that
the markers are honing in on thirty tril, inspiring
Chinese and Russian moneylenders (not to mention the French, the Japanese and a
couple dozen other creditors to come a calling with garbage bags of American
IOU’s engendered by another round of Trump tax cuts for Jeff Bezos and his ilk
or by President Joe’s “what, me worry?” patter on a silver platter. The kids, that’s who…
Or our grandkids – if we’re
lucky.
Americans must Awaken to the need to plug the holes in our
lifeboats, Assemble to do this necessary work in common, and Attack
such worms as keep chewing away against our ship of state. We cannot accomplish
this by cutting cities adrift. They are our promise. But... with or without new
oil crises... they also represent our enduring shame.
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