The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
October 23, 2025
GROW UP, AMERICA!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated
by Acme Features
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"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." |
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- Donna
Britt in the Washington Post on the narcissism in America (before Donald Trump’s election) |
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During his time as Senator,
Pa always availed himself of opportunities to take an early winter break from
Washington each other year, teaching a seminar for newly minted Congresspeople...
dems and pubs, the both... up at that Harvard School
of Government.
By the turn of the Millennium,
however, them seminars became a painful partisan
experience like to passin’ the kidney stone. At the
last ever held, newcomers segregated themselves like high school cliques in
cafeterias, so the whole charade was scrapped before I came 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-maker, 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 (like yours truly) with the
family affluenza 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, handouts to plague un-unemployed couples hauling down a
hundred forty thousand yearly or suckers who signed up for thousands of dollars
in junk education from the onliners 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."
From adolescence,
over the past few years, we have devolved back into early childhood – throwing tantrums
and bowls of oatmeal at the wall – and I’m not just talking about Ol’ 45. All of us
collaborated on cutting taxes on the rich, tossing food stamps, paper towels
and circuses at the unrich and stimulizing the both;
and with funds borrowed from Saudis and the Chinese (and, until around the
start of the plague, the Russians) and ran 'round burnin'
dollar gas like rotten kids as filched their parents' titanium cards. Gas spikes to five when our friends, the
Saudis, cut deals with Mad Vlad Putin and we whine… drops back to two, we
party… goes back up to seven on the Ukrainian thing, we whine again. Big crashes, bright lights, loud noises, sweet
and salty smells, spattering blood... these are the sensations as excite apes
and children and infantilize grownups, as oughta know
better, and the debt ceiling keeps going up, along with mortgage rates.
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" to the political debate podiums as cover
everything from Chief Executives on down through the Congress and the States to
Don Jones’ local showdown for Commissioner of Sewers. 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."
Ukraine is the
template but we’re not so far behind here in the Land of the Free – where
organized anarchists and atheists down in San Diego snatch away permits for
Easter services, rejected poets round up slackers to picket the little
magazines as then go out of bidness. Wealthy teenage girls
stage beatdowns of the nerds from poor families for that Tik Tok there in China;
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 Purell to pay
for 'em...
Entropy loves
its lawyers! They’ll be raking in the
plague revenues until 2080, if we make it that long!
Now it may well make
sense to certain virtuecrats whose self-proclaimed
expertise on moral hazard slides over into e-con'mics...
specifically, on calling upon 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 will it ever 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 lived long enough to have actually voted for FDR somewhere ‘bout
the time of these remarks). "I find such men abhorrent, never to be
trusted."
Although when FDR
did institute his WPA… he called it the Works
Progress, not Welfare…
Wonder what Woodie Guthrie
would've said 'bout them music publishers, suing girl scouts for singing "This
Land Is Your Land", among others, ‘round the campfire?
Probably something grouchy,
as that slouchy Old E-con-mystic, 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 clean coal lobby’s
dime! Might say a House that can't keep its own in order would have trouble
policing 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 as goes all
batshit over those Korean boys taking away our music and our teenage daughters
and says so on the anti-social media... 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 President Joe aping all that Romanian
harvesting of fetal tissue from abortions being sold on the London market like
purple potatoes, or the Chinese creeping into Siberia while the big, ogly bear still has
its gaze turned towards Kyev, just like Big Tom Clancey (Mister Tillerman’s nemesis) warned they'd do!
I was told, back in the
day, 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 justify their privileges by climbing up a pyramid to
dance before their subjects, then pull jagged stingray spines through their
earlobes, lips and places as can't be mentioned in family papers while the mob
just howled with glee. 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."
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CLICK the CATFISH to go to
PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS |