Jungle King

For the past two days, a friend’s email with the unassuming subject line: “My depressive rant” sat in my inbox. When I finally read it tonight, I told him that the only thing that depressed me about his story was the knowledge that, even if I spent the rest of my life before a keyboard, I could never write a story as good.

The author wishes to remain anonymous, but kindly allowed me to share his story.

One of my favorite stories—Las Naranjas de Joaquín Molina written by my friend Luis at Boiling Frogs—begins: “There are stories that demand to be told.”

Jungle King is one of those stories. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Jungle King

When I was 14 years old (back in the ‘70’s), I had a paper route in North Haven, Connecticut. Perhaps I was 15. I can’t truly recall. The forty-odd papers to be delivered each day taught me to serve customers, get up on early on weekends to work in sometimes inclement conditions, and enjoy the jingle of quarters in my pocket.

As a kid, I had many excellent opportunities for dispensing these quarters. The ceramic piggy bank with the pink cork sporting a small brass ring was one. Though perhaps not my favorite. Sorrentos Pizzeria another. But after all, a kid knows he’ll get free food at home. Again a second choice. Then there was AMF lanes up at ‘The Mart.’ This was at times viable, but it was quite a way to haul on your ten speed between fast-moving cars, and you could get all the way up there only to find the lanes were full and the pinball machines occupied. Older guys with leather jackets and cigarettes would pile a couple rolls of quarters on the edge of the machine as a sign to runts such as myself to take a hike. My favorite place to lose those quarters was Bill’s variety. It was close to home, run by a friendly if under-achieving store owner who sold cigarettes and soft drinks and maintained a couple pinball machines for the passers-by.

Bill’s shop was the first place where I as a customer experienced that look of a proprietor who is glad to see you and your money walk through the door. The doctor doesn’t count. They can read your name off a chart and your parents were there and paying the freight to the extent there was freight to be paid. But Bill learned our names and welcomed us with an understated nod. My favorite pinball machine was FreeFall. The graphics were of a sky diver or two sailing over chequered agricultural fields with an old fashioned airplane banking out of sight. One can only assume the plane had dumped us in flyover country and left us to our own devices. It helped add to the sense of expectation and adventure these amazing amusements managed to supply through the haze of smoke where they were normally used.

For 25 cents back then, you got five balls to flip and spin around the table top. The object was to depress a series of flags (drop targets) and some rollovers which, when all touched off, would create a condition called WOW when extra balls could be earned and beaucoup points. The joy of this game was achieving the free balls. Some kind of clapper inside the machine would snap against the casing of the unit creating a solid loud sound. Such achievement for a young soul.

The other machine, a good one but easier to beat, was called Jungle King. I would play this while waiting for Freefall to open up. The truth is, I might never have actually figured out all the levels to Jungle King. Either way, I must have spent hundreds of dollars on these two contraptions. Bill had a reason for liking his teenage clientele. We were respectful, dependable and cleaned-up enough that I doubt we deterred other customers from stopping in. Perhaps we even lent a certain energy or aura of bustle that might have been good for business. Afternoon upon afternoon as I recall. The competition was pretty healthy. We would try to beat one another’s high scores and practiced the sort of braggadocio which in this day is termed ‘trash talk.’ Sometimes a new kid would come along and show us how it was really done.

We had unwritten rules though. You could put up three quarters at a time then someone else put a quarter above yours on the glass and you would let them have a chance. The thing is if you ‘tilt’ a pinball game from that era you lose the rest of the game. 25 cents down the hatch. Sometimes on the last ball you’d get a little more aggressive wiggling the machine because after all it was your last ball anyway and you wanted to achieve a new high score or earn a ball before this one drained. The draining or saving a ball hung on a knife edge most of the time and gave focus for our adrenaline and best efforts.

One day when I showed up and greeted Bill, I noticed guys goofing off at the Jungle King game. Nothing strange except that the studious attention to the second by second successes or failures of the guy at the flippers was gone and replaced with a casual goofiness. More oddly, Freefall was not being used. Hmmm. As I approached the Free Fall game a guy said “Don’t waste your money.” “Why? Is it broken?” I asked. “No this one is.” Confused because Jungle King was being played I must have made a face. Obviously my friend was enjoying my ignorance. “The machine keeps giving free games” he said. Just wait and play this and save your money.

Any other day I’d have been delighted to pay 25 cents to play Free Fall with no competition for replays. But now I was perplexed. I honestly can’t remember how many times I played thinking about playing Jungle King for free. The guys started getting a bit rough with Jungle King. But the guy playing Jungle King didn’t really care if he tilted. Without the great equalizers (cash money) it was pretty hard to decide when your turn was really up. The broken coin processor on Jungle King had pretty much destroyed the atmosphere down there. Apparently the technician had been called, but it wasn’t clear when he would show up.

When I came the next day, the Jungle King game was smashed. It had been vandalized when I wasn’t there. The same guys who had so devoutly fed it money only a few days earlier had turned on it, having lost all respect. Bill turned out to be too weak to have us kicked out of his shop or shut the thing down—and the goofiness had escalated. Tilts ever more aggressive. Battles for access to the flippers rougher and rougher and unbounded by cultural norms or force of law. Apparently, the technician had been called, but did not arrive in time.

Soon after this Bill’s variety closed down. I never heard what happened to Bill. A nice guy of the variety that always finishes last, a heavy smoker, unwilling or unable to control his own assets.

This entire suite of images and memories flashed before me when I woke from fitful sleep this morning. Two dominant parties in American politics squared off yesterday. And regardless of how objectively ridiculous this sounds, I believe in some ways they have done so for the last time. Jungle King is broken and some bad actors have gotten hold of the machine. They aren’t ever going to let it go. Don’t bother putting quarters on the glass. They are no longer coin of the realm. They have figured a way to by-pass the coin op. For a dozen reasons I’ll not review here, one party tilted, but did not lose this game. No “game over” light to signal the definitive arrival of cold hard reality. The balls just keep coming. No technician ever arrived. No grownup called a halt.

So Bill, God bless you wherever you are. Thank you for your little shop. There I learned that I’d rather play Free Fall for a quarter and even wait my turn than play Jungle King forever for free. It’s a lesson that has escaped us in the aggregate and the vandals are at the flippers.

The integrity of worthy human activity has a certain tension about it. Balancing bank accounts. Tuned cello strings. Toned athletic muscles. Tight tolerances in engineering design. By all accounts the natural feedback loops and dynamics of things should have led to a different result yesterday. I accept the fact that they didn’t. It has been a long time coming. The river has been crossed. More than half the people want to be fooled all the time.

The mission of a Christian Soul is to love. And in this respect, nothing has changed. God has granted us a target rich environment. Blessed be the Lord.

P.S. Just because I know that 51% of you are stuck on asking such things, the ‘Jungle King’ was a white guy.

USSA 2015

USSA 2015

H/t: Imaumbn™ on Twitter

Message to Certain Segments of the U.S. Electorate

I tried.

Lord knows I tried.

I tried to find a silver lining. I tried to be philosophical about what happened.

I know that God is in charge—not Obama. I know that God draws straight with crooked lines… and if He needs a crooked line to work with, He sure found one in Obama. I know that God’s justice is perfect; and if we are being punished for our sinfulness and for abandoning God, then so be it. I don’t really think He’s punishing us, but perhaps leaving us to our own devices (with Obama in charge, Lord help us!) is how a merciful and loving Father reminds us that we desperately need Him. And secretly (well not really a secret), I’m hoping He’s fed up with Obama’s pride and blasphemy, and is setting him up for the biggest fall since Humpty Dumpty.

I want to believe that the hand of Divine Providence is guiding us in spite of ourselves and that these struggles will produce a greater good. Romans 5:3–5

But today I haven’t been in much of a philosophical or religious mood. I’m not quite ready to hear the better angels of my nature.

I’m livid.

I thought of Ronald Reagan’s quote yesterday: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” And I’m livid that I am part of the generation that actively worked to extinguish freedom.

Yesterday’s result confirms Mencken’s observation in 1916: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” The only consolation re: yesterday’s obamanation is that the fools who voted for it will get what they richly deserve, and it will be all the worse for them because they can’t see what’s coming whereas we can see and prepare.

Mencken also said, “There are times when every man must be tempted to spit on his hands, hoist a black flag, and begin slitting throats.” That’s how I feel today. Call me Bad Mencken. At least my expression when I saw Obama supporters let even the dimmest among them know to give me a wide berth today.

Consider this missive a first draft on my enemies list—I didn’t have an enemies list until this morning. Should I worry that I found compiling an enemies list therapeutic? But since the President has an enemies list—and a kill list—and he won the Nobel Peace Prize, I figure I deserve a little something, you know, for the effort.

Message to Certain Segments of the U.S. Electorate:

To African American voters who voted with the 99%:

[Disclaimer: This is not directed to every African-American voting for Obama. I'm sure there are many of you who honestly think he's doing a great job considering the bad hand he was dealt. They may be misinformed, but are not racist. No, this is directed to those who know perfectly well that he's ruining the country, but take perverse joy in "sticking it to THE MAN" so to speak.]

You are the same fools who cheered when OJ was found not guilty, and for the same reasons. This election was your OJ verdict writ large, a middle finger salute to middle America. Enjoy your brief Reginald Denny moment. Cheering OJ’s acquittal was a safe eff you victory lap; after all OJ wasn’t likely to go on a killing spree in (or even be seen anywhere near) your neighborhoods after getting off scot free. This time you will reap what you sowed: even higher unemployment than the double-the-national-average you currently enjoy courtesy of Barack, more dependency on the federal government, higher gas and food prices (which disproportionately hurt the poor who must pay a higher share of their income on these things). Oh and guess what, you’re still poor after a nearly 50-year long “War on Poverty” and significantly poorer if you live in states run by Democrats you keep voting for.

Does it make you feel proud voting for a president who supports Planned Parenthood 100%? An organization whose founder Margaret Sanger enthusiastically promoted abortion as an instrument to reduce the black population (but opposed abortion for whites). But thanks to progressives, at least you have a great public education system so your children and grandchildren won’t have to face multi-generational poverty. Oh wait.

To seniors who voted for Obama because they feared Romney would end Medicare as we know it:

You fools! Don’t you know what will end Medicare as we know it? Answer: Medicare as we know it. The program is unsustainable and known to be so for many years. Don’t you know that unsustainable means it will collapse all on its own unless we come up with a plan to save it. What’s Obama’s plan? As Obama’s Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geitner said to Congressman Paul Ryan: “We don’t have a plan, but we know we don’t like yours.”

You voted for the guy who gutted Medicare (which you paid into) to expand Medicaid (to redistribute healthcare services to those who didn’t pay). You voted for ObamaCare, which will lead to rationing, make health insurance even more unaffordable, while driving more doctors and health professionals out of the market, requiring even more rationing. Guess who’ll be first on the list to be denied necessary medical care. Congratulations! Soon you’ll get to pay the ultimate stupid tax.

You voted for the party that raised FICA/SS taxes to keep Medicare and Social Security solvent then looted the “lock box,” replacing our money with worthless government IOUs. Recall the scene in Dumb and Dumber when the suitcase with the randsom money is opened and found to contain no currency, but lots of IOU’s. You’re voting for those guys, difference being this time the suitcase contains $16 trillion in IOU’s, and you voted for… more IOU’s. But at least you won’t be lonely in your retirement, with your adult “children” living in the basement to keep you company… and using your utilities, eating your food and contributing nothing toward household expenses.

And at least you’re getting a decent interest rate on your savings to supplement your measly Social Security checks, thank to Obama’s and the current Fed’s policies. Oops, my bad.

To the so-called “War on women” voters:

Remember when you used to boast “We’ve come a long way baby!” Now you have reproductive rights in lieu of babies and seem determined to prove what a recipe for disaster the suffrage movement was. Congratulations! Every time there’s an election between a decent honorable man and a worthless lying POS, a majority of you ALWAYS vote for the POS. Every $^*^ time! Even a laboratory rat learns to avoid those parts of the maze where they get zapped with electricity, but so-called feminists NEVER learn. You voted overwhelming for Ted Kennedy six times after he left Mary Jo Kopechne to die from asphyxiation while he went to sober up get help. You voted for the rapist Bill Clinton. You voted for Anthony Weiner and you would vote for Anthony Weiner’s weiner.

You voted to protect your precious “constitutional” right to kill your unborn child. You voted for a president who opposed a law to protect babies who survive abortion attempts. You voted for a president who supports abortion rights absolutely without exceptions, when the leading reason for abortion worldwide is sex-selection. Can’t have too many girls being born, and you support this perverse and barbaric form of gendercide.

You voted for this disaster because of a risible fictitious “war on women” that insulted your intelligence, but somehow you weren’t insulted. Meanwhile you ignore the actual war on women that’s taking place in the Islamist world. That real war on women is going to get uglier thanks to this president who gives support to Islamist extremists who promote Sharia law, which means honor killings, legalized rape, sex slavery for millions of women and de facto slavery for all women forced to live under Sharia. Their blood should be on your hands, but you couldn’t care less. It profits a man nothing to sell his sold for the world, and you sold yours for thirty pills a month.

To the “mainstream” media:

Congratulations! Your deceitful and malevolent campaign to accelerate the destruction of America worked beyond your wildest dreams. You manufactured this year’s October Surprise in the form of a September, October and November suppression of the shameful betrayal of Americans in Benghazi. Once reporters competed with one another to see who could uncover the next Watergate story. Now you conspire in AOL chat rooms to ensure that inconvenient stories about Democrats never see the light of day. And we still haven’t forgotten your endless stories about that 30-year-old National Guard letter to discredit Bush, a letter that was as obviously fake as Obama’s online birth certificate. Speaking of which, you mock those who raise questions about the president’s shady past as “birthers,” seemingly oblivious to the fact the original list of “birthers” includes Obama himself (who started the idea by telling people he was born in Kenya), Obama’s publisher, Obama’s grandmother, and Hillary Clinton who first raised the eligibility issue in the 2008 primary.

You’ve been hemorrhaging readers and viewers and losing advertisers and advertising revenue due to your obvious bias and contempt for truth, indeed contempt for all traditional values. But instead of doing the respectable and honorable work that journalists once did, you double down on lies and propaganda and join JournoList groups to ensure group think and no deviation from the approved (Democrat) party line.

You’ve gone from publishing daily to just a few times a week to publishing online only, You’ve cut salaries, staff and office space and you’re still going broke. You mock Rush Limbaugh who has an audience of 30 million and Fox News which has more viewers than all other cable news networks combined. By the way did you know that Rush earns more money per year than all newspapers make combined? But then again, so do I.

To 68% of young voters:

Truly you are the biggest losers. How much does a college education cost these days? Good thing the colleges are doing their best to keep skyrocketing education costs down, unlike those greedy Oil Companies that gave us $1.83/gallon gas under evil Bush. But of course, it’s tough having a car when you can’t get even an entry level job with just a bachelor’s degree. So here’s a thought: while you spend the next ten years or so waiting for the economy to recover after the next round of StimuLESS (Thank you sir, may I have another?), maybe you can double down on your investment by getting a masters degree, in say puppetry like that OWS guy who for some reason couldn’t find a job. Guess the really good puppetry jobs require a Ph.D.

So by the time you finally graduate—when you’re 30 or so—you’ll owe $500K or more but can’t find work. Did you know that you can’t discharge student loans in bankruptcy and if the banks forgive part of the debt, it’s considered income? Lucky you! Good thing your parents let you live in the basement and eat for free, assuming your parents still have homes that aren’t in foreclosure.

Of course I’m exaggerating when I say you can’t find work; many of you have excellent part-time jobs at McDonald’s, Game Stop or Blockbuster (until the recent layoffs—bummer). The good news is things are so bad all around, the fact that you get to live and eat free and contribute nothing to your parent’s household bills means you likely have more disposable income than your parents!

But don’t worry about your student loan debts. When If you miss a payment, you can get your parents to co-sign the paperwork and the government will deduct a certain amount from your parents’ Social Security checks. Isn’t life grand when you’re (barely) young, (over)educated and totally dependent on your parents’ charity? But hey, your President never grew up and look where he ended up, so the same plan could work for you. And if it doesn’t, you can do as he does and blame Bush.

It’s a partial enemies list. I left out government parasites workers, union thugs, Hollywood/other “celebrity freaks” and above all Democrat and duplicitous RINO politicians from New Jersey. Unfortunately I can’t say what I really think of them in words not beginning with the letter F. Suffice to say you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious!

Schooled

Did CNN’s Candy Crowley collude with the Obama campaign before last night’s debate in Hempstead?

I think so, and I think I can prove it.

Let’s restate the obvious:

For this Town Hall format debate, alleged undecided voters submitted questions to the candidates. As moderator, Crowley selected which questions would be asked. Her selections were curious to say the least; they appeared designed to highlight issues helpful to the incumbent and embarrass the challenger. For instance, one audience member asked a question about “equal pay” for women. The premise of the question is bogus, but pointing out its deficiencies can only hurt the side inclined to tell the truth. Crowley repeated the tired assertion that women receive 72% pay for “the same work” as men.

Where to begin? Hasn’t the percentage of the disparity changed since the feminists first made this claim? Crowley repeated a number dating back to the 70′s. It was bogus then, and bogus now. If the premise is true, then it must also be true that employers are paying men nearly 40% more than necessary for the same work. Most businesses operate on much tigther profit margins than this, so any employer with a grain of common sense would hire employees willing to work for 72% of what their costly male counterparts demand. Mitt opted not to challenge the premise of the question. I went to the kitchen to make a sandwich rather than find out which candidate gave the better vapid answer.

I loved the most obviously slanted “question.” Paraphrasing for brevity, the “questioner” prefaced with an editorial: while he was disappointed with the last four years, he blamed George W. Bush for most of our problems. “So please tell us Governor Romney, how your policies would differ from those of George Bush?” Classic heads-we-win/tails-you-lose trick question for the challenger forcing him to choose between defending Bush (so Obama could run against Bush again) or discrediting the 44th President. I think Romney should have challenged the premise of the question and turned it on Obama, e.g., “The President always talks of failed Bush policies of the previous eight years, but doesn’t specify which ones? Does he mean the failed $1.83 per gallon gasoline prices or the 4.7% unemployment we had before the Democrats took over Congress and caused Fannie and Freddy to trigger the 2007 financial crisis?

Throughout the evening, Crowly kept challenging Romney on his answers, and thanking Obama for his.

Obama was much better prepared this time, kept his talking points straight with no signifcant flubs. In fact, he seemed a little too prepared, uncharacteristically so without his teleprompter in my opinion. I began to smell a rat.

Actually, I began to smell a rat before the debate started when it was announced that the questions were not disclosed to either campaign. I was reminded of how I cringe when I hear an inexperienced magician say “I have here a perfectly normal deck of cards.” Normal people don’t go around making disclaimers before they are challenged. Try this experiment: next time you play cards for money, announce to the table “I have here a perfectly normal deck of cards” as you introduce a new deck when it’s your turn to deal. Media moderators give disclaimers for the same reasons magicians say they’re using a perfectly ordinary deck of cards. Usually the magicians who say this are lying.

Midway through the debate, I saw the proof.

Toward the end of the debate, finally we heard a good question about the Benghazi attack that left four Americans dead, including US Ambassador Chris Stevens. The questioner asked about reports that the State Department denied Embassy requests for additional security. He wanted to know if that was true and if so, why? Obama dodged the question and Romney, who’s much quicker on his feet than the President, didn’t call him on it. Not because he missed the point, but because why flick a jab when you can go for the knockout. And to everyone watching, Obama had left his glass jaw wide open by making the ludicrous claim that he correctly called the attack on the embassy an act of terrorism the very next day.

An incredulous Romney challenged him, but Obama stuck to his preposterous claim. When Romney asked him to repeat what he just said, Obama turned to Crowley, who confirmed that Obama was right. Suddenly the knockout punch missed wildly and Obama scored a telling counterpunch.

Except he didn’t. The counterpunch was a cheapshot, delivered not by the limp-wristed flyweight, but by the super-heavyweight referee. Before an audience of 70 million, Crowley said to Romney, “He’s right. That’s what he said.” Except, in the immortal words of Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra, Obama never actually said what Crowley insisted he said. Afterwards, before an slightly smaller audience (400K vs. 70 million), Yogi Crowley admitted she’d “made a wrong mistake.”

The whole thing was a set-up, and one that Obama could not have pulled off without collusion on the part of Crowley. Obama’s unmemorable comments the day after the Ambassador’s murder included a throwaway line that “acts of terror will not go unpunished.” He never said the embassy attack was a terrorist act. Indeed, it defies logic and common sense to claim he would have done so one day after the incident, and then spend several weeks, blaming the attack on a silly internet movie trailer. (This from an administration that three years later still won’t concede that the Camp Hood massacre was a terrorist act even though Maj. Hasan shouted “Allah Akhbar” as the shooting began.)

When Crowley affirmed Obama’s deception, some members of the audience applauded—in violation of the house no applause rule. Who broke the rules? Michelle Obama and members of the media.

Think about this. Crowley just happened to have the transcript of a perfunctory Obama speech that was about as memorable as a typical Soviet apparatchik’s glowing paen to the architects of the latest five-year plan. In the Soviet Union, such speeches were worth saving—to line birdcages. Yet somehow Crowley just happened to bring a copy of the same speech Obama misleadingly quoted in response to a question he wasn’t given in advance. And Crowley already had highlighted the selective quote, as if it was somehow important.

The setup was interesting. While Romney looked as stunned as everyone else who’s been following the story and challenged the statement, Obama, looking like the proverbial cat who ate the canary, calmly replied, “Proceed Governor.” Understandably, the exchange left Romney speechless. For Obama to claim that he correctly called the attack a terrorist act from day one wasn’t a mistake or “spin,” it was a shockingly brazen reality-denying Orwellian Big Lie. To anyone who followed the news, it was utterly preposterous to suggest he told the truth when his entire Administration spent weeks knowingly and falsely blaming the attack on a silly video—including Obama himself in a speech to the United Nations—when the Aministration already knew the video story was a lie.

And then like an amateur magician reaching into his top hat, Obama asked Crowley to pull the transcript. Huh? By a remarkable “coincidence” Crowley just happened to have the transcript of Obama’s September 12 Rose Garden speech right in front of her, with the relevant quote highlighted. And she said that Obama was right.

Riiigghhht!!!

How could Obama KNOW that Crowley would have the transcript ready to refute Romney when he pounced on what was an obvious lie?

Equally curious, how did Crowley immediately produced the precise sentence in question when Obama asked for the transcript? Have you ever heard a talk show host ask a producer for a tape and the producer has trouble locating it? It happens all the time … even though radio shows prepare these things in advance. Yet last night, Obama referenced one of his hundreds of unmemorable speeches, and the moderator not only had the transcript with her, she had the line Obama cited already queued up to make Romney look bad.

If that isn’t evidence of collusion, what more proof do we need?

And like the amateur he is, Obama made Candy repeat herself “a little louder this time.” (“You never saw me go near the deck of cards right?”) And the intrepid journalist obediently wagged her tail and stood up on her hind legs on command. I was disappointed Obama did not give her a puppy treat; she definitely earned one.

On a related note, a friend asked: Is CNN’s Candy Crowley related to Satanist Aleister Crowley?

We report. You decide.

Two Weddings and a VP Debate

This probably isn’t as sinister as it sounds, but it sure seems bizarre.

The liberal media/politician/bureaucrat revolving door spins so rapidly, sometimes it’s hard to keep pace. Today we learn via the Daily Caller that the moderator for tomorrow’s vice presidential debate, ABC News reporter Martha Raddatz, hosted President Obama as a guest at her 1991 wedding to the man who would later become Obama’s FCC commissioner, Julius Genachowski.

That’s shocking enough in its own right but things are further compounded by the fact that ABC News, home of veteran Democratic adviser George Stephanopoulos, has long known about this conflict of interest and did nothing about it. Even worse, the network has actively tried to prevent the public from learning of it.

So Radditz invited Obama to her wedding in 1991. I suspect they didn’t even know each other, but he was at least a B-list celebrity in Liberal World when he was named President of the Harvard Law Review.

Elite liberals inviting minority mascots to their parties is par for the course—classic liberal pandering/tokenism. However, inviting a mascot to your own wedding seems to be taking the concept a Verrazano bridge too far.

But that’s only in the real world.

In Liberal World, Leonard Bernstein once threw a fund-raiser for the Black Panthers in his NYC penthouse digs. Mrs. Bernstein worried about the catering, unsure whether the Panthers would prefer Roquefort or Brie. Bernstein’s A-List guests kicked in big bucks to hobnob with these special guests who delivered an inspirational message about the Revolution and killing whitey, while a beaming Bernstein—then in his 60’s—said “I can dig it” over and over. (I guess an “Amen” or a “Hallelujah” after each applause line would have sounded ridiculous.) The Panthers collected the checks for their charity work and—to quote the vernacular of the day—promptly “split.” I don’t recall if Mrs. B’s cheese dilemma was ever resolved. It’s been many years since I read Tom Wolfe’s chronicle of that memorable dinner party in Radical Chic.

That Raddatz didn’t bother to disclose the fact that she knew Obama is also par for the course in Liberal Land. Remember that liberals, especially media liberals, sincerely believe that laws exist to protect enlightened liberals from the benighted masses and especially from evil conservatives. Since liberals are the epitome of all that’s right with the world, they don’t have to follow the rules like everyone else. That’s why liberals can say without irony that sexual harassment laws “backfired” when Clinton found himself hoist upon his bent petard.

This week, Ms. Raddatz will host the debate between Vice President Joe Biden and Congressman Paul Ryan. One wonders if Ms. Raddatz will be as fair a moderator as Jim Lehrer, who was viciously attacked for the crime of attempted impartiality toward Wascally Wepublicans.

Plus ça change in Liberal World, plus c’est la même chose. It’s an easy prediction that Ms. Raddatz will be much more pugilistic toward Congressman Ryan and will give Amtrack Joe the kid glove treatment. Civility in Liberal World is reserved for decent folk like the Black Panthers and Khalid Sheik Muhammad.

One hundred years ago, the London Times asked a number of public intellectuals to submit an essay for a special edition on the topic “What’s Wrong with the World.”

GK Chesterton replied:

Dear Sirs:
I am.
Very truly yours,
GK Chesterton

If the Times did a centennial survey, I’m fairly sure President Obama would give the same answer… to a slightly different question: “What’s Right With the World?

Can you dig it!

Breadlines and Chocolate

Great news comrades! Fake US unemployment rate is down to 7.8%.

I haven’t read any “analysis” of the job numbers yet, but here’s what I know:

In general, the US needs to create at least 300,000 jobs per month just to maintain current unemployment levels. We need to create that many jobs in order to keep up with population growth and new graduates entering the available workforce pool in numbers higher than the number of retirees leaving the workforce.

Employers added 114,000 jobs in September. The September number was 86,000 lower than the August job numbers and the August numbers were lower than July’s.

Yet the “official” unemployment rate went down three-tenths of a point to 7.8%.

Does this even remotely make sense?

Three numbers—dates actually—come to mind: 1936, 1948 and 1984.

1936:
Franklin Delano Roosevelt is running for reelection as the Great Depression entered its eighth year.

Roosevelt won reelection in a landslide against a wealthy moderate Republican businessman turned governor who ran a lackluster uninspired campaign marked by bickering between the nominee and his conservative running mate and primary opponent, Frank Knox.

Despite persistent high unemployment, the majority of voters, conditioned by eight years of double-digit unemployment, began to believe the economy was finally turning around. There was evidence for optimism. Deficit spending on New Deal make-work programs leading up to the 1936 elections, helped bring down the unemployment rate to 13.7%.

But the salutary effect of Roosevelt’s spending binge was short-lived. The following year, Roosevelt tried a “balanced” approach of spending cuts and tax increases in an effort to reduce the national debt, which had doubled to 40% of GNP under his leadership. The result was a sharp economic downturn during the next two years—a Great Recession within the Great Depression, as unemployment spiked to 19.0% in 1938.

1948:
George Orwell’s futuristic dystopia 1984 is written. 1984’s protagonist, Winston Smith, works in the Ministry of Truth for the government of Oceania. His job is to rewrite old newspaper articles to ensure that the historical record would conform to the totalitarian dictatorship of Big Brother’s ever-changing propaganda announcements and official statistics.

Early on in the book, Smith is tasked to write a propaganda piece about a grateful nation thanking Big Brother for increasing the weekly chocolate ration to 20 grams. He has a moment of self-doubt in his ability to pull off this propaganda feat. Because less than a week earlier, he’d written a similar piece about how the people wildly cheered when Big Brother announced that the weekly chocolate ration would never be reduced below 30 grams. (To put this in context, a regular size Hershey bar is 43 grams.)

Winston Smith writes the propaganda piece as directed. The previous week’s article is flushed down the memory hole to an incinerator so that not even ashes remain. Smith is shocked to discover that no one—besides himself—mentions or even seems to notice the glaring contradiction.

“But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at one-hundred-and-forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been over-fulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than one-hundred-and-forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.”

1984 vs. 1Q84:
I recently finished reading Haruki Murakami’s trilogy 1Q84. The book’s title is a pun based on Orwell’s 1984 since the Japanese word for the number nine is a homonym for the letter Q. The story takes place in Tokyo in the year 1984. As the novel progresses, the protagonist, a young woman named Aomame, begins noticing both subtle differences and jarring discrepancies between what she experiences and her memory. These unsettling cognitive dissonances suggest she is not in her normal 1984 world, but in a not-quite parallel world she names 1Q84.

Another character in 1Q94, a writer named Tengo, also experiences similar unsettling paradoxes between perception and reality or between perception and memory. While riding on a train to another town, he reads a story called The Town of Cats about a young man riding a train who gets off at an unfamiliar stop. The next train passes and does not stop, the next one doesn’t stop either. He goes into town and finds it still functioning, yet completely abandoned. There are sidewalks, buildings and shops, but no people to be found. When the last train fails to stop, the young man has no choice but to spend the night in the abandoned town. As the sun starts goes down, cats of all different breeds and colors, but much larger than ordinary cats, begin to arrive in the town and being nocturnal, go about their business in the dark town. The frightened traveler hides in a clock tower until the next morning when the cats vanish as mysteriously as they arrived. When the train comes the next morning, curiousity overcomes him and he decides to stay another day in the town of cats. The next night, the cats notice his scent and the discovery drives them into a frenzy. They look for him everywhere, but morning comes just in time before finding his hiding place. On the third day, the train does not stop.

This is no town of cats, he finally realizes. It is the place where he was meant to be lost. It is a place not of this world that has been prepared especially for him. And never again, for all eternity, will the train stop at this station to bring him back to his original world.

Aomame and Tengo discover clues along the way as they struggle to escape the 1Q84 world. Very early on, a Tokyo cab driver says to Aomame: “Don’t let appearances fool you. There’s always only one reality.”

I could relate to Aomame’s and Tengo’s experiences. I feel a similar cognitive dissonance and confusion each time these BLS numbers are released.

October 5, 2012: On this day, a grateful nation thanks President Obama for his steadfast leadership that brought our nation’s unemployment rate down to 7.8%. We must continue to support the President who works so hard each day for the American people. We must never go back to the failed George W. Bush policies of $1.83 per gallon gasoline prices and 4.7% unemployment.

Orwell is dead, but Big Brother is alive and well. And we are trapped in a world very different from the one we knew. The existential question for us is will we find our way back to the real world in time? Or are we destined to remain trapped forever in the year 2Q12 in an abandoned country despoiled by rats.

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
—George Orwell, 1984

But don’t let appearances fool you. There’s always only one reality, and reality doesn’t change no matter what the numbers appear to show.

I could be wrong…

… but I think Donald Trump had the right idea from the beginning on how Romney should respond to Harry Reid on the tax return “issue.”

I suspect both sides’ internals show the opposite of the skewed sample media polls. That would explain the Democrats’ desperate attacks and Mitt’s do nothing strategy. The first rule of politics is when your opponent is digging a hole, stay out of the way. Or maybe Romney’s strategy is a variant of George Constanza’s rule for success: do the opposite of what your opponents and their media allies tell you to do. Let them continue beating a dead horse until they look ridiculous. This satirical masterpiece from The Onion drives home the point.

The downside is the people who get it probably weren’t voting for Obama anyway, so this preposterous claim could actually net Obama a few undecided (i.e., uninformed) votes.

I know discretion is the better part of valor and all that, but man, I wish we’d go for the jugular sometime.

Here’s a first draft at the Mitt rebuttal speech I’d like to hear.

“First of all, there is no law requiring anyone to make their tax returns public. However, I understand that we expect greater disclosure of presidential candidates and I’m prepared to release my tax returns for the last 10 years. I believe in full disclosure; presidential nominees from both parties should be fully vetted. Failing to do so, even with the best of intentions, is a disservice to the American people. Never again should a national party nominate for the nation’s highest office a candidate with so many secrets, so many unanswered questions about his past.

“I find it curious that this president and his party are basing so much of the case for his reelection on my tax returns. One would think we had bigger issues to worry about. I find it ironic that they’re so insistent that I release my tax records when the President hasn’t released his Occidental college school records, his Columbia school records, his Harvard Law School records, his college thesis, his published law review articles, his SAT scores, his LSAT scores, his medical records, even a certified copy of his actual birth certificate. Every other Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidate in the modern era has made these records public. President Bush released his grades and SAT scores. Vice President Gore and Senator Kerry released theirs as well. But this president won’t release his. Doesn’t that seem a bit odd?

“In fact, he’s spent over $4 million on legal fees fighting against disclosure of these documents. Now he and I can afford to spend that kind of money, but why would someone spend $4 million to keep his personal records hidden? Particularly someone who campaigned on transparency, another empty promise that today appears as hollow as the “Hope and Change” slogan he sold to the American people four years ago.

“The other day, the Senate Majority Leader of his party said—on the floor of the US Senate no less—that I didn’t pay any taxes for 10 years. This is a bold and brazen LIE. My tax records will show: one, I made a lot of money; two, I gave a lot of money to charity; and three, I paid every cent I owe in taxes. You know, I actually feel sorry for Harry. Because if he is capable of shame, then he must feel terribly ashamed to serve as the instrument of such a smear. And if he doesn’t feel shame, then he is to be pitied even more.

“Now I understand the President’s and his party’s motive—they’re desperate. They know this president can’t run on his record, because his record is one of unmitigated disaster and epic failure. Even he must realize this or else he would not sanction such desperate and sleazy tactics.

“Throughout our history, incumbent presidents seeking reelection have proudly run on their records. But this president is running away from his record, and what a record it is:
• 42 consecutive months of unemployment at or over 8% (15% when you include people who’ve given up looking for work altogether)
• a stalled economy, with no semblance of leadership and no plan for turning things around
• a cynical and confused foreign policy that bows before foreign leaders, lectures and insults our best allies and appeases and emboldens our worst enemies
• a proposed budget that was rejected unanimously by the same Senate his party controls
• his signature accomplishment—a 2,700 healthcare bill that the American people opposed and many of his own supporters sought and received exemptions from
• record job losses
• record deficits
• adding $5 trillion to the national debt in just three years, and lastly
• the credit rating of the US downgraded for the first time in history.

“All on this president’s watch. This is his record and it isn’t pretty. No wonder he’s running away from it as fast as he can run.

“Well Mr. President, in the famous words of Joe Louis, ‘you can run, but you can’t hide.’

“Here’s the deal. I’ll release my tax returns when you release your school records.

“Or as they say in Chicago, ‘put up or shut up.’“

H/t to The Donald for the basic idea. The “speech” literally wrote itself on my computer tonight.