The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
June 19th
ASSEMBLY!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated
by Acme Features
What, then,
shall be the architecture of our national Renaissance?
America stands atop
a league of superiors... one of a favored few... where greatness has arisen
and, the insanity and weakness of the past two Presidential administrations to
the contrary, still flourishes through the nourishment by the blood of patriots
and the sweat of millions of hard-working clear-eyed citizens (and, to be
honest, a few tears for those lost and left behind). And it never really went away, no matter what the
somnambulists in Washington, the crazy rioters and lone wolf gunmen, the crybabies
in their universities promulgating their substitution of awakening with the
bums’ bonanza of “wokeness” and the parsitical schemers
in Wall Street boardrooms say.
We tamed a great
frontier as, in the Old World, would’ve stretched from Dublin to Moscow,
Stockholm to Madrid. With blood, we tore away from Britain's Empire and, with
reason, drafted a Constitution of perfect and tiered rights... a code of law,
as applauded by Francis Hutchinson, to prohibit "...even the greatest or
wisest of mankind to inflict any misery upon the meanest or to deprive them of
any of their natural rights."
Over the 19th and
20th centuries, we redressed unfortunate exceptions to our national charge to
life, liberty and the pursuit... not, I, emphasize entitlement...
of happiness (in that order) by ending the tyranny of slavery through Civil
War, acknowledging the status of women and absorbing millions of immigrants
from Old World despotisms. We defeated Nazis and Communists, are shutting down
Islamic fanatics, built an industrial and cultural colossus that still remains
the envy of the world and put a man on the moon. And, to be fair to my predecessors, we
wrestled the worst plague since the Spanish Flu to a standstill and those not
in absolute thralldom to their failed Papas’ counsels of denial and/or dispair have Mister Plague on the run.
And yet... the
precise date may be arguable but, for argument's sake, call it
We've changed, with
the world, and not for the better. Our pride has become arrogance, our personal
and national strivings soured into a politics of deception, hate and envy,
tempest-tossed in that senseless whirl of spectacle exhaled by our junk culture
and virulently anti-social media. Excellence is scorned; enemies are bribed,
not dispatched. Honesty has been swept
away in a tide of large money and small print. Partisan venom cossets the mean and venal,
driving capable Americans from public service and, even, motivating old scolds
like Alan Bloom to boast that there has never been an age so trivially wicked
as our own except, perhaps, Weimar Germany, where "decent people became
used to hearing things about which they would have, in the past, been horrified
to think."
As a Don Jones Index coupla years back revealed, we are no longer either the freest
or the happiest people on the planet.
Why?
"In terms of
personal hatred," marveled that former Clinton spin-doctor Paul Begala, the recent political climate has been "really
without precedence!"
Are we still great? Yes! Are we iniquitous? Yes, to be sure, we have been – and still are.
We are a great
iniquity.
Our higher
educational institutions (as pass through graduates incapable of holding a
job... if we hadn't already shipped most real jobs off to India or China or to
the robots) are rotten with burned-out 60's losers who, admits Barbara Epstein
of the arch-liberal History of Consciousness Board at Santa Cruz, warp little
minds with politically correct identity politics as "their only point of
leverage in a society with shrinking resources," and consider it an act of
conscience to tear down a statue of Abraham Lincoln because… well, just
because.
"Personal piety
has become an end in itself instead of the energy of social justice," contends
the evangelical Christian Jim Wallis.
Against these Squeamish
stand flat-earth vouchercrats and Party of Trump POTheads... whom I earlier referred to as DeVosocrats before even Betsy Wetsy
threw in the wet towel of MAGA... religious fanatics intent upon camel-racing
the Taliban back to the 13th century as local gumments
lay off teachers to hire more prison guards and replace them with ranting, brainwormed preachers and trigger-happy militias. No wonder we’re having our clocks cleaned by
the Chinese, the Koreans and the Finns… just as the economic sectors of the Don
Jones Index informs us… while our institutes of higher education keep churning
out MBA’s who can’t make change at the local Burger Jack!
Dirk Olin, as
questioned the intensity of our culture of 'hate' in E. J. Dionne's "Why
Americans Hate Politics", noted "...we seem more sedated than
impassioned." Normally a good night's sleep's a fine thing... one awakens
refreshed, ready to tackle problems, bring bacon home, slap fat in the fire,
all those good American tasks as real men and women do before breakfast. Ours,
however, has been a restless, enervating half-century of apnea-plagued
somnambulism.
We don't even count
sheep, we are sheep... "sheep in
the wool factory," specified the financial writer Jay Hancock... and, soon
enough, off on our way to the slaughterhouse.
Now the right
Reverend Pat Robertson once assured us (between seducing Senator McCain and
hatching assassination plots against assorted Venezuelans perfectly capable of
destroying their own country without his help) that the poor (and, presumably,
middle-class, ever one corporate penstroke away from
penury) are so beaten down that they only rise when "some upper-class
reformer somewhere stirs them up." And, well… look at Trump’s base! So, having a little money, if less class...
guess that brings it down to me. My critics in Congress called me a madman... I
will consent to being termed a mad man.
Mad at labor's share
of the national income as fell from 80% in 1960 to 67% by the '80s, 58% in Y2K
and finally, now, below the midpoint at 49% and at the pride some radio pundits
take at our still being first, worldwide, in imports, while having fallen to
fourth in exports despite the President’s patchwork quilt of random tariffs. Mad at a military re-enlistment rate lowest
since 1948 even as the Russian dictator crowns his atrocities in the Ukraine
with schemes to conquer and enslave the world (if the Chinese don’t beat him to
it) and a prison population approaching five million, including thousands of immigrant
children locked up in cattle pens to die of tuberculosis, measles or the plague
while Homeland Security blows this way and that, depending on what our
gridlocked Congress wills. The new laws
passed by midterm Congressional creepers slap some hundred twenty thousand geezers
crossing over from Toronto or Tijuana with emphysema medicine (a third of whom
refuse bail and squat in Federal, State and local jails alongside the gay rights
and contraception doctors and that guy in Alabama who arrested for putting flowers
on his fiancée’s grave for “littering” - all awaiting jury trials as a ploy to
get the medicine they need under the Eighth Amendment or three hots and a cot). Mad at the biased and lying press… yes, Trump
was right on that, see this DJI from the last
Adminisration touting all the new jobs created by
Americans getting their hours cut to evade wage and healthcare mandates so that
three employees now work the same hours as one for half the pay while retirees
in their eighties and nineties whose savings were decimated by the parasites
have to return to 60 to 80 hours a week, sleep in their cars because they can’t
afford rent and sell their blood (or, here and there, a kidney). Mad at seeing outsourced machinists and engineers,
bankrupt farmers and surgeons who can't afford malpractice insurance find
themselves stacking cans at QualMart (or even scavenging
empty cans for recycling); Congressthings voting for
bipartisan termitery as ignores debt and terrorism
while promising to repeal the Constitution. "The most awful consequence of
long-term unemployment..." declares "Termination" author Arthur Slote, "...is the development of the attitude 'I
couldn't hold a job even if I found one,' which transforms a man from
unemployed to unemployable."
In consequence, I
submit our charge is no less than to restore to Americans their trust in
country, community and... above all... in themselves, and that, when CNC
community organizers knock on the door to ask: "Your money or your life?"
our hope and expectation is that you'll offer up the latter.
We have... by latest
count... 282 county organizations in 36 states, as include 1,421 district, over 18,000 precinct and 62,000 block
organizations. In addition to registering voters and recruiting novice Catfish
fingerlings (some of whom are now finding friendly waters on local school
boards, zoning commissions and State legislatures), we offer disaster, firearms
and CPR training, work with local charities and participate in Neighborhood
Watch programs. CNC community watch members identified and brought down the
Sandusky Strangler with over seventy other felons... including bank robbers,
drug dealers and rapists. Armed CNC deputies, exercising their Second Amendment
rights, kept half the commercial district of Trenton from going up in flames
during those riots last year, as would have left the place another
Hear that alarm clock
ringin' now... ringing to beat the band!... and some
of you might have at least one, maybe both feet on the floor. Work to be done!
Raisin' up an alternate
party to donkey boys and elephant men ain't been done
proper since 1860: Teddy Roosevelt propping up Progressives before getting shot
and his legacy being hijacked by tired, corrupt liberals, George Wallace nearly
throwing the race into the House back in '68 a'fore...
go figure!... getting shot. Nader, firing off a lone gunman bullet of his own to
elect George III and crash our economy by taking a needle to Clinton’s high-tech
bubble balloon. Perot rounded up near
twenty percent of the popular vote his first time out (avoiding victory and
certain martyrdom by showing himself so crazy that the very lead in any assassin's
bullet would have turned to soft, runny gold out'n the
fear!).
"This is not
about me running for President," Bro' Ross protested, "the last thing
I want is for this thing to be about me." But, of course, it was... even crazy
as Perot turned out to be. Without ol' Bat-ears (and, of course, his money),
Reform sunk like a uranium rat pellet, leaving the Washington barnyard dirty as
ever: China Gore and George III posturing as to who was the more outside
outsider in Y2K and, after the financial meltdown, the humiliation of the
crawling, cringing Obama years and the casino guy’s strange regime that avoided
nuclear war only by dint of his groveling at the feet of Moscow with policies
being so un-understandable to the rest of the world and, after that, a back-to-the-future
take-a-nap government as is making us relive 2013 all over again (or is it
1963?)… well how can a decent or even semi-decent fellow like myself not take the plunge?
That stink wafting
out of
(Still not convinced?
Waitin' for Silverado Neal Bush or Donald Junior
versus either Roger Clinton or Hunter
Biden in 2028? I ain’t!)
So I say people have
the right... if not the obligation... to start third and fourth, even ninth
parties because of the dismalicity of the status quo;
shake Americans from their endless sleep and whip 'em... still yawning and rubbin' eyes, some... into a lean, mean fightin'
machine. But, on the other hand, if the Tweedle-dumb
and Tweedle-dumber parties are so rotted out from the
inside, why not just march in and take ‘em over… that one of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt
I leave to Austin, while I take that other of Jackson, Jefferson and the other
Roosevelt back for us real Americans!
Not to excuse or to
imply concurrence with some as have borrowed from Freddy Nietzsche's
philosophies in the past, but I can find encouragement that, against Entropy's
will to nothingness, "a concealed Yes drives us, that is stronger than all
our No's!"
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