Serving the Metropolitan Area

Since 1872

March 1st

THE TYRANNY of EXPERTISE!

By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate

Syndicated by Acme Features

Here's one good reason not to chase Egyptian chicken! Down the Nile a ways from Cairo, as I hear, this farmer tried to rescue some biddy as fell into a well, sixty feet deep, and tumbled in after. He drowned, but not before his sister and two brothers jumped in after him and drowned, too, as did a couple more neighbors who jumped in after. Finally people as knew how to swim jumped in and pulled out the six bodies... and also that chicken, still live and cluckin'.

Somebody once said how the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and I guess it may be so. The more gumment tries to help people by putting experts on the job... buzzin' day n' night like busy little gnats n' skeeters... the more people resent 'em when the help turns bad. Bad as in Katrina's FEMA, or those citizens of Oklahoma - as promised Santa's sack of goodies to the Goodyear people for bringing that tire dump to town, as made it Ground Zero for the West Nile 'til someone set it afire!

Some of the worst travesties of good intentions, like them cynical Lascher-Williams campaign finance reforms steamrolling thru Congress (as force taxpayers to subsidize the same old bipartisan mummery), result from what those of us as sat on Congressional Armed Services committees, called the "mission creep". It's like going into somewhere to save the world... Bosnia or Baghdad, Somalia or some trailer during the domestic dispute. Quicker than you can say "but, it's for the children!", both the fighting parties have turned on you! Cops understand, and really really hate this!

Especially in hard times, we've had experts step to up to the plate, as were able to meet such exigencies as arose out of wars, disasters, depressions... even those few, especially valuable expert experts, like Jefferson, Madison and Franklin, Edison and Lincoln. We've also been lucky to import such experts as other countries didn't want, like Einstein and Liz Taylor, and all kinds of imported experts came to occupy our government, like Madeline Albright, Henry Kissinger from the CFR, Brzezinski from the Trilats, not to mention our owntimes' Jared Pettigrew, from the London School of Economics.

Probably nowhere, since 1776, did there come such an upswell of government expertise as in the New Deal, then during the war against Hitler... so effective were they (and so numerous) that conservatives still fume at the society they created where, as Brother Rush contends, people got so used to seeing money come back from Washington that some decided to vote, in perpetuity, for the liberals.

Except... the liberals broke faith. It is my own often-stated position that liberalism died over the summer of '68 when its leading practitioners, President Johnson and Vice-President Triple-H Humphrey, rigged the nomination in Chicago to stiff the voters in all the primaries as had expressed... by their votes for McCarthy, McGovern and Robert Kennedy... a desire for the '68 election to be an honest referendum on the Vietnam war. After that, liberalism turned slithery... corrupt... the termites lured bearded Leninists out of universities and into the psychological testing and polling scams: marketing strategies to seduce people into buying stuff they didn't need on credit, law enforcement into detecting deviance - as opposed to solving crimes - and the National Institute for Health (a fine anthill of expertise, to be sure) into isolating genes and brain chemicals suspected of causing deviant or self-damaging behaviour... crime, sexual unorthodoxy, enlisting in the National Guard... these sort of things.

Having discovered correlations between low seratonin levels and violence in the brains of rats, NIH's liberal sociologists promised "to examine brain chemicals in children growing up in high-risk neighborhoods," reported Anne Rochell in the Atlanta papers. "Kids with low seratonin could be singled out for intervention programs. These could include medications."

'Nother foreign expert, Dr. Simon Young of Montreal, justified kiddy-doping by saying: "I know people who have had to spend years manacled in the locked portions of mental institutions because of their aggressive impulses. There is a need for the pharmacological treatment of those patients."

But Dr. Peter Breggin, author of "The War Against Children" saw that short, slippery slope all the way down to a chemical Auschwitz. Poor children "live in a society that hates them, and they grow up in constant humiliation. For America to suggest that the problem lies in them is hypocritical and evil."

They got their funding with a spoonful of sugar (or artificial sweetener) to make the medicine go down. The Prozac people, now, sell their dope in little, sweet red gelatin squares; Abbott Laboratories markets raspberry-flavored narcotic lollipops containing the sedative fentanyl which, say the drug police, is more likely to cause a fatal overdose than heroin. "What kind of message are we sending to our children when we mix potent narcotics, like fentanyl, into their candy?" asked Dr. Allen Hinkle of the FDA.

A simple message! Ban harmless, hemp-flavoured jawbreakers as thoughtcrime, but trust the strangers with fentanyl candy... hey, they're doctors!

Far as I recollect, the Good Shepherd was not a vegetarian!

Other experts in psychedelic lollipoppaloozery brought America the phone company and Microsoft breakups and NAFTA... supposed to be just a temporary measure giving relief to Mexico and Canada but, of course, the camel's nose underneath the tent to pass CAFTA and, now, EAFTA. So Qual-Marts bulge with stuff churned out by slave labor camps in China and Saipan... to the detriment and eventual extermination of American jobs... while, back in Oklahoma, the litigating and mosquito-breeding's still goin' on!

"One terrible sentence haunts NAFTA," wrote Sandy Grady, up in Philadelphia, as also mentioned that, too often in the past, we'd "been betrayed by experts..."

"I'm from the government, and I am here to help you."

"Humans are absurdly easy to indoctrinate," contended that cranky sociobiologist, Eddie Oh Wilson, so despised by both virtuecrats and politically correct Squeamish, "they seek it!"

Well, next time as some damn Egyptian asks me to jump down a well, think I'll just give the fellow a copy of Grammy Parnell's favorite recipe for drownt-chicken soup and boogie on up the Nile... tiptoeing 'round the potholes an' mosquito-tires fast as I can... far, far away from the truckstop of good intentions!

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