The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
February 10th
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, (one going nukular
– but with, not agin’ us), a handful of other more or
less useless wars, 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 five 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 that Don Jones Index 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 Ukrainians or the Palestinians! 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 1.0 may not have been the best
President America ever had, or has… 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) The next
Chief Executive and Congress – well, we can start by saying as they had
problems with science (as well as arithmetic) but that they are saner than the
Russians, more or less, and now that’s down the tubes, too.
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 stagflation, like 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, rousted out of
their hidey holes in the woodlands... pariahs 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 VoterVeepVlop 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 Tulsi
Gabbard’s and RFK Junior’s anti-vaxxing campaigns
going into overdrive, 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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CLICK the CATFISH to go to
PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS |