The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
February 6th
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 seven
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 s’terminate
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.
Minnesota ICE 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. Those whining millionaire and billionaire
businessmen over ICE wars on the brownskins… was it humanitarianism? Guess again!
It meant they had to pay real Americans real American
wages.
In President Obama’s last
budget and Trump’s first term 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 put the
whatsoever on America’s tab, blame the Coronavirus, 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 shivering neo-Joe asses’ “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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to PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS |