Serving the Metropolitan Area

Since 1872

March 29th

FIDIT! FIDIT!

By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate

Syndicated by Acme Features

"I didn't want to be treated like a common criminal... or an entertainer..."

- Mort Sahl

Used to be: things got bought and sold on their reputations as being right, more or less. Steak dinner with fries, overcoat, '57 Chevy with all the detailing... qualities as some hippie Japanese motorcycle fellow called the "quality". Quality still sells, on the upper floors, but... for most... that virtue we worship above all others is fast! Fast food. Fast sex, its sublimations or its simulation. Fast service.

Fast politics!

Look at any man with the go-getter grin, and them as jerk his strings around will be pleased to tell you he's on the fast track. Devil knows what station, what line, but he'll get there quick! The digitalis and everything turning e-this, i-that, bio-such, lite little dialectics... brewed up mostly by e-lites, truth be told, obsessed with taking out quality and substituting its antithesis, e-quality, the way blood in corpses on the undertaker's slab's get replenished with formaldehyde.

Bela Lugosi quaffed formaldehyde during the Eisenhower years, when liquor and heroin no longer supplied the kicks they did in his good old days, getting ahead of that curve as goes back, like Freeman Dyson said, to championing economies of speed over those of scale: "Innovations that take years to implement are likely to be obsolete when they kick in."

"Remove the excitation and manipulation of consumer demand," Herbert Schiller cut to the chase, four decades back, "and industrial slowdown threatens." An economy "favoring impulse and immediacy" became the consequence of such "instruction" as JFK and LBJ liberals practiced, "bordering often on psychic chaos and material indigestion, presented to the average citizen as a reasonable and unmanipulated system."

Our jobs age faster, now, otherwise them as might stick in the same slots all their lives get to hop like toads from dead end to dead end, or get swept off'n the road. Over the last twenty years, we've gone from twice the moving-round per year as Euros do to three times... five times that as out in Japan. Careers tend to last shorter, even, than the time it takes to educate a body for them, so companies don't even bother with training anymore. S'cheaper to raid each other, or call India, or China, for take-out.

Employees as win Darwin's race can expect to move round so often, doin' eighty, ninety-hour weeks, that most of their kids... near as I can see... grow up TV and ZT-nannied psychotics. Conservative media doctor John Rosemond suggests media may actually be a cause of juvenile attention-deficit-disorder (JADD), though "...as is the case with a disease-causing microbe, some children are probably more resistant to the negative effects of TV-watching than others."

Infected kids as whose brains don't blow out from the stimulation are growing amongst us now, jaded as young Eurofops as read Goethe, then blew out their brains, back in the day. "Images, sense, impression are what count," says one big cheese at the MTV, "not words. You sell through emotional bonding, through images." So we send 'em up to college to learn to talk Squeamish and, if their checks clear, we give them degrees four or fourteen years later as testimony, one old Perfessor in old New Orleans 'afore the flood told me, "to an education that never occurred."

"KU knows that being a Jayhawk fan is a lot more fun than going to classes," a Kansas student is quoted in Murray Sperber's "Beer and Circuses". "It doesn't care what we do as long as we pay our money for season tickets, tuition and everything else..."

When the working day's done, the overtaxed and underemployed alike (as have been able to somehow get access to HDTV since the great cutoff) chill out on news programming as elevates spurting blood and isolated, anomalous tragedies (conveniently crowding out coverage as might offend increasingly petulant advertisers). We have no end of cute or heroic pets, bodies covered with tarps with the coincidental insurance company pop-ups, footage of burning buildings from somewhere, anywhere, little girl celebrities dressed like streetwalkers and... especially of late... appeals from dying children trying to raise funds for medical attention.

That's usually by night, so's to influence our dreams. On morning commutes we have radio programming narrowcasted by race or ideology. Jerry Falwell warn't far off on the evil intent of Tinky Winky and them other creepy Teletubbies as kept crying "fidit... fidit!" (Korean for "faster... faster"!)... the Rev just accidentally-on-purpose assumed it was a homosexual solicitation when it's really an solicitation into a deathstyle of whir and blur and nonsense-marketing.

Fast... or "fidit"... in politics... strangely enough... tends to exert an inhibitory effect on genuine solutions. Take Hoover Dam, completed over four years in 1935 when Vegas was a dusty little cowtown, population seven thousand, and Los Angeles wasn't much better, except for the tasty oranges. "Consider what we have lost that the country had when it had a will for such great works," George Will lamented. Today, if we absolutely had to have a Hoover Dam, we'd squander years niggling over snail darters or the size of nails driven into the railing, then rig something up with pressboard and obsoleted microchips like that prefabricated Jewish Temple in Tim LaHaye's Armageddon books, or contract the job out to Indonesia, then look for scapegoats when it busted and drowned all those high rollers waitin' on line to get into the Lou Reed/Wayne Newton matinees in Vegas.

Were I a liberal, I'd contemplate the former light-heavyweight boxer Jose Torres' suggestion to tax violence on the media... were I to go over to the Republican side, of course, I'd just knock speed limits down to 40 or so, and as for our jobs problem, just dragnet the illegal immigrants, ban women working outside of the home and watch all those unemployed homies on the corner suddenly become chased after by all kinds of employers! Fidit that!

But that wouldn't be Catfish, since even conservatives like James Kilpatrick have begun suggesting "government should leave citizens alone to live their potty little lives." What might work would be to start leaning on corporations to begin lowering hours and taking more responsibility for training employees to do the sort of jobs they're always whining about not being able to find people qualified to do. Makin' quality pay. After all, when the bottom twenty percent of Americans got shut out of television owing to the digital scam of February, 2009, student reading and test scores… briefly… of our lowest demographic quintile soared from down around Pakistan up to the lofty neighborhoods of Paraguay and Bolivia…

Nurse... I'm ready for that shot of the formaldehyde! Now!

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