Serving the Metropolitan Area

Since 1872

April 23rd

GROW UP, AMERICA!

By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate

Syndicated by Acme Features

"Look at me. Pay attention to me. Be fascinated by me. Love me. If you can't love me, then go ahead, hate me - at least you're paying attention."
	- Donna Britt in the Washington Post

During his time as Senator, Pa always availed himself of opportunities to take an early winter break from Washington each other year, teaching seminars for newly minted Congresspeople... dems and pubs, the both... up at that Harvard School of Government.

By the 90's, though, them seminars became a painful partisan experience. At the last ever held, newcomers segregated themselves like high school cliques in cafeterias, so the whole charade was scrapped before I come in. "The venom quotient," observed Washington Post columnist David Broder, had increased "faster than the ideological polarization." His colleague, Dan Balz, predicted: "When all of you reach the nursing homes, you are going to be leaning on your rockers and beating on each other with your canes because you still won't have resolved those arguments from the 1960's."

Like Mr. Hyde said... not the ex-Congressman nor English doctor-monster, but my junior year Civics teacher in Miller's Ridge... "the worst day of your life will be when you finally get out of high school, only to discover the rest of your life's nothing but high school!"

Everybody knows spoiled kids, and what becomes of them... except those with family money to mop up the damage. And, though it hurts to say so, gumment has been a bad parent; spoiling Americans rotten with permissiveness, promises and the pandering... on everything from taxes to Medicare to cross-dressing Mexican flag-burnin' terrorist Boy Scout marriages. "We can attribute much of the 'crisis in confidence' to unrealistic expectations of leaders," concluded one Phillip Shaver, taker of psychological polls... "a kind of adolescent rebellion encouraged by leaders themselves. Politicians too often lack the nerve to get behind policies and programs that take anything away from their constituents."

So we cut taxes on the rich, toss trinkets at the unrich, borrow from the Saudis and Chinese and run 'round burnin' oil like rotten kids as filched their parents' titanium cards. Big crashes, bright lights, loud noises, sweet smells, spattering blood... these are the sensations as excite children and infantilize grownups, as oughta know better.

Hey!... pay attention to me!

Kids are supposed to be rotten... the expectation, though, being that they'll grow up, which I now see many as not doing. Instead, a culture of showboating and disrespect wafts upwards from the schoolyard where, as the aforecited Donna Britt observed, "in-your-face too often results in in-your-grave." It's not: "I want what you have, too," says talkin' headshrinker Jane Ciabattari, it's "I want what you have, and I want you not to have it. I want to take it away from you, and if I can't do that, I'll spoil or destroy it."

Organized anarchists and atheists down in San Diego snatch away permits for the Easter services, rejected poets round up slackers to picket little magazines. Wealthy teenage girls stage beatdowns for the You Tube; Wal-Mart runs up half a mil in legal bills, appealing this dollar judgement to some gimp who found all the store handicap parking spaces taken by Wal-Mart employees, then marks up our shampoo and mulch to pay for 'em...

Entropy loves its lawyers!

Now it may well make sense to certain virtuecrats whose self-proclaimed expertise slides over into e-con'mics... specifically, calling up God to justify that them as who don't already have it don't deserve it. Take Larry Mead, as in "The New Politics of Poverty", concluding that... "various technical corrections" having left the unemployed with an "inequality of prospects", they stop looking for work, making unemployment their fault. Victims of liberals and a nwordish culture of insolence, "expressive lifestyles" and rock (sic!) music, welfare mothers and unemployed men develop psychological deviance which, Mead avows, "is so important that a number of poverty experts have recently written statements about it!"

Unfortunately, it is not (nor ever will be) hip to be cruel. "I have learned to be suspicious of those well-meaning men who were noisy liberals or even Communists in their youth, only to become hard-edged and even savage right-wingers in their maturity," wrote James Michener (as may be excused for his paleo-liberalism by his having been old enough to have actually voted for FDR). "I find such men abhorrent, never to be trusted."

Wonder what Woodie Guthrie would've said 'bout them music publishers, suing the girl scouts for singing "This Land Is Your Land", among others.

Probably something grouchy, as slouchy Old Economist, John Kenneth Galbraith grumbled, a while back: "A society where the rich are obsessed by stocks and everyone else by lotteries can never be a productive, progressive, happy place. It will not be a place where hard work is the main value, or where people make sensible education choices."

Hell, I'm no tin angel. I've been to Memphis... been to Vail, too, and on the lobbyists' dime! Might say a House that can't keep its own in order would have trouble policing the foibles of the public. Might be right. So, as President, I'd refrain from makin' laws against Hank Bucous, 46 year old mechanic and Kiss-personator fanatic on Miller's Ridge... I wouldn't even make Federal cases of all that end-zone dancing or put folks in jail as defended or derided Derrida. There's real trouble out there... like all that Romanian harvesting of fetal tissue from abortions being sold on the London market like potatoes, or the Chinese creeping into Siberia, just like Big Tom Clancy warned they'd do!

I'm told, by a lady Perfessor down in Texas, that kings and queens of Old Mexico afore Columbus lived lives of luxury and power... but, every so often, had to climb up a pyramid, dance, then pull jagged stingray spines through their earlobes, lips and places as can't be mentioned in family papers. Somethin' to ponder...

"The naked skin on the head of vultures," Darwin said, "is generally considered as a direct adaptation for wallowing in putridity; but we should be very cautious in drawing any such inference, when we see that the skin on the head of the clean-feeding male turkey is likewise naked."

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