The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
Jan. 4, 2024
SLANTED!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated
by Acme Features
Few years back I
watched my successor in Congress, Hank Mayhew, sworn in... shook
his hand, wished him luck and, being that Janine had already left and taken the
kids, packed the dogs and a change of clothes into the truck and headed West. Rather
as folks did during the Great Depression, I s'pose, or, more recently, as some
try making it to Hollywood to land a spot on the "You Bet Your Car!"
Enjoyed some sun and
some tequila, walked on the beach a spell, visited Chinatown and then, on my way
home, I took this little detour (large detour, truth be told) on my way back to
Parnell County, Kentucky, and civilian life... I went to Branson. Always
thought Yaakov Smirnov one hell of a funny Russian before, even, the civil war
in Ukraine and trollixed American elections and,
though I may draw heat on this, I'll also cop to a soft spot for the Platters,
even if they haven't had a top-forty hit in forty-something years.
In the fifties and
early sixties between Elvis and the Beatles (the former back from Germany with
his balls lopped off, the latter in Hamburg, just growing theirs), the Platters
were about the only pop vocal musicians to even hint at something in motion,
something wrong, just under the surface... their songs roaming darker
perceptions at the margins of those lazy, hazy, Eisenhower years. Homages to smoke and sunsets; shadows, fog and twilight. I
believe Mr. Stephen King came to more or less the same conclusion... the
harmonies are damn sweet but, if you listen to the words, you're likely to find
something off, something just a little disturbing.
To use the title of
one of their best (after "Twilight Time", perhaps) something a little
slanted.
Still humming
Platters' tunes, I stopped off a ways north in Springfield for a bite to eat;
driving all the way into the downtown... mostly deserted, as so many downtowns
are these days – less like a location for the Simpsons than for a minor Stephen
King movie (or an original Rod Serling "Twilight Zone" from back in
the fifties, in those dear, departed days of black and white).
Springfield, you see,
wasn’t always the place where junior MAGAboys (and girls)
used to go to party hearty in the lake and pools and then catch the plague – it
used to be where they made the Zenith televisions; black and whites at first,
and then, until about the turn of the Millenium, the color. They were, in fact,
the last TV company left in the United States after GE, Philco, Sylvania and
all the others ran off to the South or West... finally Zenith shut its door,
too, and turned out the light. They make Zenith TVs in Mexico now, I think, or
maybe they've moved along to China. And
when China gets too expensive, they’ll be made in Taiwan… so they say… but
they’ll really be made in Vietnam and
just marketed through Taiwan like all their stuff is, since the both have
reason to hate the Chinese.
Won’t be the folks of “Outer
Limits” taking control of your TV, like in the old show, it’ll be the Vietcong!
“Ho! Ho! Ho Chi
Minh! NCIS gonna win!”
Take a slow drive
through an American community... keeping your ID close at hand, as you'll
likely be stopped by police searching for contraband heart medicine... and you
will find prematurely retired steelworkers and electronics assemblers (now well
up in their 70s, even 80s, some, since the pensions vanished with the
companies) mowing lawns and delivering the sort of newspapers as still remain.
Jobs kids used to do... kids who, by now, have copped to the fact that they're
likely as not to still be flipping burgers or temping at QualMart
when they reach the middle age, no matter how many debt-financed sheepskins
they’ve tacked to the wall in their parents’ basements. Might as well smoke crack.
A smart fellow, Bill
Wolman, wrote this book about "The Judas Economy", ending where the
middle management replaces itself with cheap foreigners too. Now
I'd be last to deny an Ethiopian statistician or Pakistani cardiologist (even
an underappreciated Russian comedian or computer nuclear genius left over from Chernoble) gainful work. But... after the termites finish gnawing,
you see, ain't enough left from those indentured workers' paychecks sent home
to slap a coat of paint over their relatives' cinderblock shanties and,
meanwhile, people over there have to do without doctors and videogame repairmen
and such, and wind up blaming us for this exodus.
As Mr. Wolman
argues, it's become a waste of money for Americans get an MBA, engineering,
medical or technical degree, and that is why, through the Coalition, I intend
to keep alive the spirit of that legislation I introduced into Congress, only
to see it tabled in Committee.
I proposed, during my
tenure in that august body (and still believe it necessary) that we slap on...
not exactly a tax or tariff, but... let's call it a re-import surcharge on the
difference between... say... two-buck-an-hour Tijuana wages (not to mention the
formerly twenty-cent Chinese now being offshored to
the good ol’ Vietcong) and those twenty dollars once paid that laid-off American
citizen. What differentiates this from
Mister Trump’s moribund import tariffs and our sleepy President’s abject trade
surrender is that one third the difference is returned straight to the foreign worker
- half in the currency of his own country, the rest in scrip redeemable through
the purchase of American exports so Juan, Apu or Yakov can afford a box of
Queetos or a Florida orange now and again. So's all them little girls sewing
shirts for Kardashians or shoes for Nike can get legal CDs by that American Idol whom little girls scream
about, now that they've stopped screaming for last year's model. A second third
goes into a fund to keep unemployed Americans putting in a fair day's work for
their own communities (not sleepwalking through phony social service or
retraining scams), keeping up the healthcare (as opposed to Obama’s late,
unlamented health insurance scam),
emergency rent and mortgage assistance so's to keep more neighborhoods from
becoming vacant, bank-owned kathouses as happened in
that last gumment shutdown.
(This still leaves
the runaways with a 33 1/3% rebate if they otherwise exhibit good citizenship
but absolutely have to run away... which makes the difference
between Catfish and all that high-Commonist bulldada elephant-men rail against,
as if the measure of national greatness is its quantity of sick children, or
unemployed people hanging out on burned-out city streetcorners
or in jails. And, of course, since there
would still remain a pecuniary shortfall, and the deficit is high enough
already, there would have to be further adjustments. Good-bye to Trump’s tax cuts for the rich! And good bye to President Joe’s
plague, war or economic meltdowns to Joneses making over $100K per annum – even
those who pay 90 percent of that back to the termites in rent, mortgages on kited
land values and the property taxes they generate. Since corporations moving their higher end functions
into places like New York, California and, more recently, Boston and Austin,
those companies as stood by or even collaborated with Entropy in raising money
to defeat rent controls, let them lose their best who’d rather move to Oklahoma
and become janitors or, if young enough, retrain as pilots, long-haul truckers
or healthcare workers.)
And
then? Well, I'd have to admit final solutions to unemployableness will require
a little of this and that... a whole lot of tinkering and experimentation and
maybe, even (gasp!) science – stepped-on toes and the inevitable screwups. I
might ought to have my head examined for wanting to step into a place so
deviously slanted... better to hole up on Miller's Ridge with the
dogs and boys, the shotgun, coupla bootleg George
Jones and Roger Miller concert CDs and a case of Wild Turkey. But that would
be, to paraphrase Richard Nixon, wrong!
It would hurt,
seeing some homegrown Yaakov Smirnov yukking it up onstage in Budapest or
Buenos Aires, cracking red-to-redneck jokes about the mean, bumbling Americans
like he used to be.
So instead, I'll pack
the dogs and head back to DeeCee if needs be, tho’, truth be told, I think I'd
rather hang out in Branson.
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