America’s softheaded parade
Way back there in seminary school … oh, wait, that’s from the Doors’ “Soft Parade.” Let’s start again. Okay, let me switch the record so I can focus a bit more clearly. Sorry, Jim, but it’s time to give you sanctuary.
(Author’s note: The above references are from the Doors’ “Soft Parade,” and Jim refers to Mr. Mojo Risin himself, Jim Morrison.)
The above distraction is sort of like the Biden administration if you get my drift.
If any group of more self-important grifters ever stepped out of the lyrics of Cream’s “Politician” I’ve yet to witness it. Sure, our current leaders look busy, but busy doing what is anyone’s guess.
Theirs is a tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing … or the disasters that precede nothingness.
The Angry Old Man in the Oval Office™ or Old Yeller, gaslights the world with his slight of speech that things are just peachy here at home and abroad, while his crew runs around rhetorically attempting to alchemically transform the sow’s ear of our current economic, immigration, and foreign policy catastrophes into silk purses.
If someone told the Angry Old Man “Don’t” when he tried to smell a little girl’s hair, would he listen? Doubtful. So why would he think using the same word to stop an Iranian attack on Israel would work?
Spoiler alert: it didn’t work. Nor did it work when he issued the same word toward Russia before it invaded Ukraine.
Like the French defenders of the castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, international tormentors flatulate in our general direction and tell Biden his wife is a hamster and the president smells like elderberries.
Are there any adults left in D.C.? The question answers itself.
As this is written Tuesday morning, news comes that National Public Radio in its supreme wisdom has suspended outspoken critic and Senior Editor Uri Berliner. Who didn’t see this coming?
For telling the world what most of us already knew a decade or so ago — that the publicly subsidized national radio network leans heavily toward progressive politics — Berliner is sidelined without pay for five days. The list of NPR’S indiscretions against actual journalism is longer than Hunter Biden’s rap sheet, so I won’t attempt a recitation of them here, but speaking truth to power is a bridge too far for NPR bigwigs when they’re the ones gripping the reins of authority.
Seriously, our country is spiraling swiftly down civilization’s drain.
Then there’s this from NPR’S taxpayer-subsidized twisted sister, The Public Broadcasting System network: a William F. Buckley installment on the program American Masters. It turned out to be a hatchet job.
Readers may grok that I am still a huge fan of Buckley and his efforts to promote conservatism since the early 1950s and the publication of his God & Man at Yale. My father and I watched Buckley’s Firing Line nearly every Friday night in the 1970s, and I became an ardent reader of the Buckley-helmed National Review in the 1980s.
Ironically, the American Masters episode was aired on PBS, which also beamed Firing Line into my family’s living room. Buckley wasn’t always correct, mind you, but he possessed the intellectual honesty to come clean on several topics eventually, including civil rights and the second war with Iraq.
Yet, the PBS producers ultimately try to shoehorn the emergence of Donald Trump and the Jan. 6, 2021, D.C. riot to the legacy of WFB who died in 2008. Not only does this perform slander on the memory of WFB, but it also disparages conservatism as a whole.
Both deserve better and more fair treatment than such vile deceitfulness.
I’m reminded of Morrison’s lines from Soft Parade: “What got us this far to this mild equator?/we need someone or something new/ Something else to get us through.”