Serving the Metropolitan Area

Since 1872

May 3rd

MASSAGING the MOB!

By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate

Syndicated by Acme Features

Once I made my mind up to retire from Congress, I decided to have some fun.

Now, maybe I oughtn't to have done a few things after... like giving George III ideas about the poll tax, or punching out Sikes on the anti-suicide commission. Oh, I wasn't wrong; he richly deserved his thrashing but maybe I ought also to just have beat the crap out of that other little twerp from the class of '94... as said he'd go home after three terms, then didn't... 'stead of sayin' he had a "purty mouth" and kissing it with the C-span cameras running. Hell, most Americans want to see cockroaches violated or knocked tumblin' down the Capitol steps, domestic and foreign currency flying from out'n their pockets!

Fact is, most see the politics as entertainment contrary to that scolding by Carl Boggs, out in L.A. that, where it "degenerates into a remote spectacle," well, then, "the most rational act may well be cynicism and withdrawal."

Entertainment matters if'n you're de-skilled, de-educated and de-sensitized, almost to the extreme of those poor old folks in Alabama nursing homes they let the ants eat up. Americans are mostly unemployed, or doin' the sixty, seventy-hour workweek, likely without overtime... some, now, with wires, stuck into hands and brains, as run back computers in Provo, Utah, broadcasting: "You are not working as fast as the person next to you!" every forty two seconds or thereabouts. We're tired and pissed-off... and it shows in the quality of what little we do produce.

One of my most humiliating weeks came just a while before I retired, when I took this junket to this trade conference and had to endure being lectured by Hungarians... effing Hungarians!... all riled up because the crap they imported from Germans and the Japanese was better than ours'n. Could've made the excuse as most of what's stamped Made in America really comes from China, Mexico or points south, but... I suspect... that wouldn't exactly have been burnishing the reputation of the Land o'the free, Home o'the brave.

Ain't just Hunkies complaining, of course. The South African Nadine Gordimer, as concluded History was agin' us explained that: "Americans cannot give back to blacks a lost identity." "While the nation used cheap, young black labor for centuries," points out Troy Duster of the National Council of Crime and Delinquency, "the new generation faces, for the first time, both the rejection and massive irrelevance of their labor."

Makes Presidential mandatory marriage schemes a little suspect. "At the minimum wage," proclaimed Gregg Easterbrook of the Los Angeles Times, before the ACTA pushed it back down to $4.30, less for "trainees" (as are anybodies of any age as work for six months, then get laid off and have to go trainee someplace else), "an unskilled man who wants to work and marry offers a prospective wife less than the government offers via the dole."

This narcississism fellow, Lash Christopher... someone as that... well, he said once Americans stopped gazing at themselves in mirror (presumably because our mirrors had cracked for lack of the maintenance), what would happen would be total breakdown, the Last Crusade, ultimate war of "all against all!" Like in Iraq, where we kicked out Saddam and got Zazzbo... formerly the Ayatollah Ziz al' Abbozziz bin al' Barzan... as snuggles with Jazreel terrorists and opium smugglers, the both!

As warned critic Albert Murray on that PBS jazz series, as ran a couple of years back: "You cannot embrace Entropy."

Ain't as if we haven't known we'd have to face the music some day... be it free jazz, al Jazreel or Zazzbo, Doggy Style or "The Syncopated Clock" as counts down these last minutes until the last American worker's replaced by a Chinese, a robot or a rat. As columnist Dick Nolan put it, "in order to support all those paper profits, plus the enthusiastic usury of the banking system, working folk have to pay an ever-increasing portion of their wages just to keep a roof overhead." Of course that was back when there were working people, as had wages... until gumment gave the green light to merge the banks with airlines, break up the phone company and scramble everythin' round with oil and the media until the whole rotten pile fell over and lies stinking, now, like the dead, fat uncle on the kitchen floor of a Thanksgiving afternoon as nobody wants to drag out back and bury.

Now it ain't my intention to deny Americans an occasional sojourn in mental Fantasyland... if we didn't dream, most state lotteries would collapse, and gumment would have even more problems bailing out the schools. So, let's paste on a smile, admit that our troubles, while legion, are minimal when stood against those of most of Africa, Costa Rica, the Mideast or former Yugoslavia. Until I see lines, at consulates, of them as want to emigrate to Burkina Faso, Burma, or, even, Bermuda, I'll take my stand for America, for Catfish politics and economics... as sweep up riverbottoms, settin' floors, not ceilings!... and the CNC. "A third party succeeds," suggested those people in London's Economist, "only when it can harness an issue that is stirring the country to some extraordinary degree, but which the big parties are ignoring."

Might not win, but... like Teddy Roosevelt and Fightin' Bob's bull moosers, crazy Ross and them Wallace boys, George and Henry... I do intend to talk sense and have fun, the both!

All them smart fellows laughed when Austin Tillerman, myself and others started going out door-to-door, starting with people in militias and ghettos, talking those of 'em as would hear into turning their longings for decency and for community into positive action, like cleaning up neighborhoods, painting fences and pitching in when those floods hit Ohio and Missouri last year, or after Hurricane Ester picked up where Katrina left off.

We're gaining altitude and momentum... and without having the use of gumment helium! Our enterprise remains the lifting of vision for all Americans so that we may break through and finally begin to see blue sky above this forest of leafy tribulations. And then... watch out, all you as ain't with the CNC program!

It was, I believe, Ron Reagan's Navy Secretary, John Lehman, as admitted: "Power corrupts. But absolute power's kind of neat."

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