The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
February 8th
DECLARING WAR on DEATH!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated
by Acme Features
"Those who do not know
how to live must make merit of dying."
- George Bernard Shaw, "Heartbreak
House"
"They've been so long on
lonely street, they never will come back."
- Elvis Presley, "Heartbreak
Hotel"
All things taken into
consideration, Americans had a pretty good twentieth century, barring a few
inconveniences like two world wars, a handful of other more or less useless wars,
a depression, plague and technological innovations of both marvelous and
terrifying aspect.. Life expectancy doubled, incomes
tripled... though, over the last twenty years of the twentieth and first twenty
of the twenty-first, that was mostly due to certain gen'men
at the top and some of those slightly down the ladder with stock options and
untapped 401-Ks doing very, very well (which has made the years since Y2K sort
of a letdown – the devices as perpetrated all those robocalls
earning their marketers a trillion bucks, said the Don Jones Index a
few years back.) Still and all, things could’ve
been worse. We’ve had a taste of the terror – Made in America of late, but tell
it to the Syrians or the Israelis! Gas is still only about two-thirds as costly
as in Italy or Japan, food too, and now, with summer beating down and the
plague in retreat for the time being, there's plenty of glittery, sequinly, sequelly Hollywood distractions
and the Chinese toys spun off from same for our diversions – although possibly
less of the latter in the nearer future when the next round of tariffs rolls
round. Mister Trump may not have been
the best President America ever had… albeit the most entertaining… but he damn
well was the luckiest… until a little round bug as sprung out of Wuhan by
people eating bats (or maybe platypusses) wrecked the
economy, killed nearly a million Don Joneses before fading back into the
shadows (waiting for perhaps next year to emerge, or the year after) and
inaugurating a culture of social distancing as engendered both altruism (mostly
on the part of healthcare workers and first responders) and cruelty (Congress
and the Senate playing at their dumb show while children starved and the
unemployed froze over the two coldest winters in 62 years, as followed the hottest
summer since ‘84) Our current Chief
Executive and Congress – well, we can start by saying as they believe in science
(if having certain problems with arithmetic) and that they are sane, more or
less.
It’s an age of lowered
expectations.
In fact, a lot of
those Americans (well, those with jobs as pay the living wage, at least and, consequently,
them as vote) might say the foreign
object in America's pie isn't material but cultural… code word for racial. Or is the question spiritual?
Since they won’t
balance the budget and the IMF tells them they can’t keep throwing money at the
crisis without raising taxes, nothing's left for politicians to promise short
of the immortality!
And here resides the
germ of a catastrophe! What begins as hope, then expectation, starts becoming
perceived as entitlement. The pandemic will eventually go away or decline to
endemic status, people will wise up and stop having sex with monkeys, and
medical yeomanship might enable doctors to stretch
life out a spell, maybe into the hundred-twenties by Y2.1K (for some); it might
be time spent crippled with arthritis and Alzheimer's, pain and drooling and
watching helplessly as generations' worth of life's savings, get eaten up, but
that’s life in these United States. Then, when the money's gone, friends and
relatives tapped out, they’ll toss you into cheap nursing homes, like down in Alabam' where the staff come back from a long lunch to find
half of the patients et' up by the fire ants. Ants! State can't make
you live forever, but give 'em enough rope to hang you with and it'll seem so.
Label it what you
will, we now have a bipartisan culture built in a large measure on Death...
sliced like processed ham, shaped n' formed... usually peddled under another
name (like that cheap fish doctored up to seem like "krab"
or "loubster"). One booksmart fellow calls this
"Facadesmanship" which is like those New
York politicians painting tin sheets in them broken windows of the burned-out
slums with curtains and flowerpots, hoping commuters driving down the Major
Deegan from Greenwich will get such warm and homey feelings that they'll yank
out their checkbooks out and start investing in South Bronx real estate – and
to Hell (or Brooklyn Heights) with the neo-Legionnaires’ Disease.
"Facade
preservation is new to this country," architect David Schwarz says, "but
in cities like London it has been going on for some time. There, they require
that the front and back walls be kept, but they get rid of everything in
between." A lot of people, too, like those busted-up old tenements in the
Bronx or spiffy new Russian hotels, look fine on the outside (thanks to
collagen, special surgery, Botox and Rogaine) but are all rotted inside...
their rottenness hidden behind a facade, too. Like Michael Jackson’s nose,
models for the Gap or people in the vampire or zombie movies, they appear
human (from a distance) but are, really, just walking petitions to God to wrap
his mortal experiment and start over with some sulfur-eatin'
worm!
"We've
completely lost the distinction between fame and notoriety," was a fin du sieclě complaint by trash-TV and film
director John Waters, whose own "extreme white people" included a
three hundred pound Baltimore transvestite snacking on dog droppings. "If Manson
got out, he would get a better table in a restaurant in New York than Madonna."
Crazy Charlie died in prison, but Casey
Anthony and George Zimmerman… before their Hollywood romance and breakup…
proved the point, once book and movie swag rolled in!
God was put to death
by the liberal theologians, alleged Alan Bloom, in one of his more interesting
mood swings, replaced with Love, which was executed by psychology. Sex replaced
Love, Death overthrew Sex and, finally, Death itself was put to death by thanatology...
that “virtueless intellectual science, abhorrent of
both judgment and discrimination”. (Actually, he was speaking of deconstructionism,
but American geezers might be off the hook, sort of, for not keeping up with
the latest French intellectual tomes.)
I think most Americans
instinctively understand that government cannot solve unsightly
problems like sickness, inequality, poverty and the death, so they'll just vote
for them as best promise to put unpleasantation out
of sight and mind and do tricks for us – like a circus bear or Frisbee retrieving
dog. We banish stuff that might offend or cause apprehension (except what's
specifically birthed to sell detergents or Constitutional Amendments) into that
magical kingdom called Away. Especially the sick and homeless, whom we trundle
out between Thanksgiving and Christmas so as to feed and so feel good about ourselves. Then, back to their jails and underpasses! "The
homeless, simply because they are homeless, are strangers, alien - and
therefore a threat. Their presence, in itself, comes to constitute a kind of
violence; it deprives us of our sense of safety," wrote one Peter Marin in
this Harpers' article, as further enumerated the ritual scourging of the Amerisurplus by liberal bureaucracy:
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"If you stay more than two days (at a gumment
shelter) you are required to fill out and then discuss with a social worker a
complex form listing what you perceive as your personal failings, goals and
strategies - all of this for men and women who simply want a place to lie
down (in) out of the rain!" |
"Only the
castrated man is the good man," concurred Freddy Nietzsche, as went mad
after seeing this other German whomping on a horse,
then had his catechism hijacked by Hitler as he sat in the nuthouse, gnawing
his fingernails.
"If government
can dictate what we do inside our homes and in our automobiles to protect life
and limb," wonders Phyllis Battelle, "is it not conceivable that the
body politic will next order us to jog, eat veggies and stop smoking cigarettes
and consuming chocolates? We will be
better off, physically, if they so dictate. But will we be free?"
Ask former poverty czar
Ben Carson… the one as decreed that public housing tenants are not allowed to
smoke, inside or outside of, the buildings. Nicotine addicts get tossed out onto the streets
to swell the legions of the homeless.
Ask those other Clintonistas, Trumperialists and the
rest of the whole sick crew guarding the Medicare and Medicaid roles as demands
those on either as are unemployed to find work, even the min and sub-min jobs
with no benefits as get them kicked off the government’s teat. And that’s in the blue states – the redsies simply refuse Federal cash on the suspicion that it
might go to keeping unworthy children (especially nwords) undead.
Ask President Joe,
Senate tiebreaking VoterVeep Kamala Harris and the
so-called party of the people who issue blizzards of so-called position papers,
few of which make it into passable legislation and fewer still of which create
some benefits as trickle down to the Don Joneses who pay their salaries, and
then some. And their
Republican dogsbodies to elevate partisan payback
over the welfare of Americans.
Ask Michael
Bloomberg. He’s watching Marianne
Williamson and RFK Junior’s anti-vaxxing campaigns
gain steam, thinking of launching yet another of those trial balloons filled
with rotten-egg sulfur gas as references his unenforceable scheme to prohibit ‘Murkins from eating more than three eggs a week. Those Real Clear Politics people say he’d be the
best performing Democrat loser in the 2024 go-round, better, even than Uncle
Joe.
The notion that
medicine, not money, be paramount in dealing with morbid Americans was
lampooned by Shotgun Sarah as leading to Death Panels back in the day. Maybe some near-future President can launch a "War
on Death" as public discontent "could be a significant factor in bringing
about one's premature demise," said medical writer Joseph Hooper.
So I ask... do we
make government responsible for health; wearing masks and hiding in our
basements, taking out not only sex and drugs but cigarettes, coffee, liquor,
eggs, red meat, fizzy sodas and... as long as Ms.
Battelle and Mr. Hooper brought ‘em up first... angst and chocolate as in this
Time Magazine broadside: “The War on Delicious”? (Not to mention those tasty
bats!) And then… since the Germans
trained their dogs to detect potential CV carriers to be intercepted and
disappeared by the police (subsequently loaned out to security on that
last-ever Superbowl before the Omega Variant, shall
we have carb-sniffing dogs at roadblocks, taking samples or, as the technology
kicks in, Skittles-detecting drones and brainscans to
test for chemical evidence of disgruntlement as might lead to cancer? Replace more teachers with security guards
empowered to prowl the schoolyards ensuring that kids aren’t playing sports
without helmets? Round up all those so-called “free range” children as have the
impertinence to walk to and from school or play in the park… don’t they know
that pedophiles and murderers are everywhere? Don’t they watch television? Give subpoena
power to the big box clerks ordered to interrogate shoppers who fail to answer
their inquiries: “Are you alright?” Let's put it to a vote... but if the 'Murkin public does go the way of the prohibition on
anything as might shorten life, look for this President to be visually active
overseas, attending conferences and funerals. Lots of funerals - of
foreigners of course, in foreign places still barbaric enough where the duty of
the gumment isn't quite to force people to live
forever and death gets celebrated with wakes and banquets.
Could fly. "'Nice
guys finish last!' isn't such a bad deal," Hooper admonishes, "when the
race is against death."
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to PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS |