Serving the Metropolitan Area

Since 1872

May 7th

MAKING (n' keeping faith with) the FOURTH AMERICAN REVOLUTION!

By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate

Syndicated by Acme Features

Once I'd made my mind up to retire, this Tennessee Democrat (as agreed with me on Slick Willie, but couldn't say so in public) brought up ol' Jack Daniel from a district not far from his own. Most "entrepreneurial personalities" begin early in life, some may have dropped out of school or failed a few times before succeeding. "Many would have as much difficulty with corporate bureaucracy as with government," this Democrat said, "most would feel restricted in the now-large companies bearing their names. Many might not even be hired to mop the floor."

Creation and its pride's more important to true entrepreneurial minds than mere income. And Jack Daniel's having made it while Cubans, as don't sail to Miami, still drink rum... not very good rum, at that... calls to mind the words squeamish persons in the Continental Congress uttered, as made Tom Jefferson remove this out of the Declaration of Independence, as being personally injurious to England's George the Third:

"Future ages will scarcely believe that the hardiness of one man adventured, within the short compass of 12 years only, to lay a foundation so broad & so undisguised for tyranny over a people fostered and fixed in principles of freedom." 

I've no doubt that Fidel Castro, like many others, started out a sort of entrepreneur. (If he'd made the Yankees and gone on to manage, might be hawking credit cards on the ESPN, if he weren’t… for the most part, these days… a vegetable or, maybe, tropical fruit!) Quite a few down in Miami fought with him, then split when it became clear he was no more serious about changing Cuba's top-down nature than its failed dictator, Batista. Top-down bureaucracies always rot, bringing the same sort of people out into the streets as overthrew Batista or Czar Nicholas... or them King Georges, on both sides of the pond!

Where there is confidence and a stability of leadership, Entropy withers and, where vision is exceptional and transmutable through generations, it may even be possible to occasionally reverse the drift into decline, allowing for Renaissance to flourish. Rome lasted as long as it did by reinventing itself constantly... with a consequence that the germ of civilization was preserved, from Irish monasteries to Byzantine palaces, through the long Dark Ages after its fall, finally to emerge in that actual epoch we call the Renaissance.

Hereabouts, we've bested three crises as occurred every seventy years or so. If the first American Revolution succeeded by fortune (and, yeah, the French!), the Second was inevitable... industrious, 19th century industry would've doomed pastoral feudalism even if the South had prevailed on the battlefield. The New Deal's Third Revolution reforms enabled us to rise to the challenges posed by depression, Germany, Japan and Russia but, if you look at your calendar, you'll see portents of a Fourth Revolution of technogoguery and globalization swarmin' round, today, thick as cemetery gnats.

Boxcar Willie, down in Branson, may have been a former bowling-alley manager name of Lecil Martin, instead of a real hobo. May have been a fake, gone to fake hillbilly Hades with them Propecia cases in big hats, or that advertising fellow as wrote and sang "Convoy". His theatre in Branson may have been full of tacky, overpriced souvenir crap as the Platterdome, or Smirnoff's joint... but, by God!, it was American crap, as Lecil used to tell anybody who'd pay mind... "All the toys are made overseas now. I don't know why the hell we can't get American-made toys... I could get whistles from Taiwan, but there's a family in Arkansas that makes them. It's their only damn income."

What do Americans have left, now? Finance. Insurance. Real estate. Wise guys put them together, spell it "FIRE"... ever since November, 1963, they've been burnin’ off America's productive capacity to the extent that we're billions of dollars in debt to others, ourselves and our future. The foreclosure and homeless rates are soaring and middle-classicals have become an endangered species.

So when mobs storm meetings of the European Union in Dublin or Antwerp, and the IMF, G-10 and other diabolical, global rattlesnakes have to meet behind barbed wire and armed police, even here, I say it's what they deserve... Patriot Act be damned!

Before selling his soul to Clinton, Robert Reich... that little fellow who was Labor Secretary for a while... suggested that, instead of trampling round the world sticking our nose in other nations' business, we institute no less than a "Marshall Plan" here at home to bring America into the Twenty First century as an awake, breathing participant in exciting, if dangerous, times, rather than as a dead deer... admittedly with a magnificent rack of antlers... dangling off'n the hood of Entropy's pickup truck:

"Herein lies the real problem America faces at the dawning of the 21st century: While a small fraction of Americans has the conceptual skills to add substantial value to this new world economy, most Americans do not."

Managing the Fourth Revolution will be more complicated than just ratcheting up "productivity"... as the one-world experts will tell you... making people work sixty-hour weeks at $4.30 (or, even, $4.50 the hour) is only slightly more tolerable than herding them off into prisons or crematoria.

This time, this revolution's got to deal with who we are and what we've been put on God's green earth for.

And followin' Entropy's rules won't cut it. I also recall how (if the gumment was advanced as it is now, back in 1866, when Jack Daniel discovered the limestone spring he intuited might make good sippin' whiskey for a century or so 'til corporate cockroaches as came after diluted it, then diluted it again down to where it might as well be Old Thompson) one of the child welfare people would have slapped an elbow down around his ears and hauled him off to school. Jack was thirteen when he started up his company... nowadays not even old enough to taste his product.

"As soon as the government forced Jack Daniel to quit making whiskey on Sunday," was what the Congressman from Tennessee told me, as a means of wrapping up this with two fingers o'that, "...they made the school children quit praying the Lord's Prayer."

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