The Journal

Serving the Metropolitan Area

Since 1872

August 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 genl'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 bat, rat and lettuce plagues in retreat for the time being (but beware of jalapenos), 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 those bats (or maybe platypussies) 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 were saner than the Russians, more or less, and now... with Restoration 2.0 that’s down the tubes, too.

It’s an age of uppered stocks and bonds, but 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 before his dinner at Tiffany’s, 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:

"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, fentanyl freakazoids get counseling, cots and hots.

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 Ol’ Goneaway Joe and his underwater VeepVlop Kamala or any of 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 while their Republican dogsbodies 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 2028 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 gumment 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."

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

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