Serving the Metropolitan Area

Since 1872

February 5th

THE SHAME (and the PROMISE) of CITIES!

By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate

Syndicated by Acme Features

"Genes hold culture on a leash..."
	- E. O. Wilson

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 New York or Louisville, Chicago, Denver... maybe even Vegas! Even Washington DeeCee, as I miss sometimes...

I like the slap of shoes against a pavement. Walking's good for soul and body... driving (or being driven) round, your eyes play tricks. You miss details.

I like a city with museums, real libraries and at least two daily papers as despise each other. Plenty of watering holes, major league sports, a hall for country music, rasslin' and the foreign symphonies. Don't care for most ballets 'cept "Nutcracker" for kids, over the Christmas, but I'd rather live in a place that had 'em, if I changed my mind. 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's what's at issue... people who don't like cities being those as don't like taking chances in a society where everything's gone at risk. Not that myself, nor any politician, should have authority of telling people where to go... Pol Pot messed that up!... but it does seem we've beaten up on cities for too long. One Kennedy pup... forget which... shows me this picture from the Boston 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 cities. Yet, if you'll open your kids' history books, most of what people think significant, even noble, sometimes, took place in or near cities. Athens. Rome. Cairo. London. Paris.

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. 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."

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 each other in bars 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," says the pundit, Andrew Glass. "At the hub of these urban centers, streets swarm with people enjoying the gentle August nights. 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. 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 and became... how shall I describe it... more libertinous in thought, speech and deed, 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. 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, as insinuating swords (which nwords raise against everyone not of their tribe, and most as are); it also reflects the negativity as keeps them nwording their way 'round as how life has been so unfair and et cetera and et cetera.

As nword apologist Corinne Brown of the Congressional Black Caucus puts it: "We keep hearing, 'Get over this.' We will never get over this."

Black South Africans, at least, "have had their own earth under their feet," agreed the 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! 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."

Virtuecrats graciously eschew genocide, favoring military schools, Singapore-style catchlaws and a sea of jails. Those who still have jobs and money 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 five dollar gas, seein' smiling shiekhs and Texas oilies as clustered 'round the Bush Boys like barnacles in big hats. High 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 from their compounds during the week get to take their homes, too, and leave 'em to spin down and out into nwordism, fodder for social workers and the jails?

One reason I mentioned Francis Hutchison, earlier, is that he also championed discrimination. 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. "There does come a moment," surmised former HUD Secretary Cisneros, "when the country simply can't carry on its shoulders a permanent and growing underclass of 10 or 15 or 20 million people."

Americans must Awaken to the need to plug the holes in our lifeboats, Assemble to do the 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.

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