This past April Fools’ Day, 2013, presented some highly perplexing issues. Because, normally, I would take some absurdly ridiculous news story from the previous year, blow it up way out of scale by taking it to truly deranged and demented levels of extremism, and tell a story on it like what one would find in the news.
After all, no one would take offense. There’s just barely enough truth left in the story to qualify it as an April Fools’ Day prank. And everyone would find it hilarious.
But this year, there’s just a smidge of a problem with using this tactic. For America’s right-wing have become such extremists that they make North Korea’s loony, glorious leader, Kim Jong Un, seem like a commonsensical moderate!
For instance, let’s try a topic that’s completely divorced from the mainsteam, media-fed divisiveness; like economics. Oops, we can’t use the word “divorced” because that would remind the extremist’ right-wing that women aren’t their property or chattel.
And ladies, if there’s one term that we really should strike from our lexicon by empowering women and putting its practices behind us for good, it’s “chattel!” For that’s a French word from which a very demeaning English-language insult against women originates that criticizes the perfectly natural results of living in a stress-filled environment, and the beneficial development of your bodies for your good health. (being ultra-skinny is not healthy)
However, getting back on topic and borrowing from North Korea’s Kaechon internment camp (a penal labor colony), I considered perhaps a positive story on putting Americans back to work. But… America’s reinstituting “forced labor” in the form of bringing back the “workhouses.”
Not to mention, here in “incarceration nation,” 2.3 million of our people, 40 percent of whom are African-American (African-Americans only make up 13 percent of our population) are behind bars, making them subject to prison labor. We have 700,000 more of our citizens incarcerated than China, a country with a population more than four times larger than ours.
The U.S. has only 5 percent of the world’s population. But we have 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Ok, so let’s try something else.
I next thought of U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s warning of the “Next Pearl Harbor,” and Pakistanis and Afghanis continuing to live back in the eighth century, turning off our lights through a cyber attack. Only, thanks to “Big Media,” efforts by those of us in the field are being turned away in favor of “Big Media’s” efforts to steal our intellectual property through their insidious monstrocity called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). So let’s try something else.
Next, I thought about pointing out the highly ridiculous extremes of wealth and poverty in America — after all, America is today the absolutely most economically segregated nation on Earth. But no matter how bizarro I tried to be, America’s right-wing extremists just kept “one upping” me in the real world! For example, just like common grifters, thieves and criminals, America’s “hoity-toity” are doing everything in their power to steal our Social Security and Medicare from us.
America’s “hoity-toity” have already “bought off” America’s right-wing extremist’ legislators. So America’s “hoity-toity” are promising them a “piece of the pie” to come from “privatizing” Social Security and Medicare… raising the inevitable question: once Social Security and Medicare have been “privatized,” and America’s right-wing extremist’ legislators have been paid off, what’s going to be left for those Americans who’ve spent their entire working lives paying into it just when they need it the most?
And, again, this is to afford WHAT? Giving more tax breaks to the richest 100 people on the planet, and in ALL of history — the very same people who haven’t paid one red cent in taxes in a decade?
Ok now, there just has to be something I can use for truly deranged levels of extremism that America’s right-wing extremist’ legislators hasn’t yet. There just has to be!
So let’s see; the FCC — that protector of the “public airwaves” — three months ago was allowing “Big Media” to devote 36.2881 percent of on-air time to commercials. And today; it’s now up to 36.6667 percent of on-air time (I timed them). So nope, the “public airwaves” have been “privatized.” Let’s try the FEC — our harbinger of “fair” elections — Citizens (Corporations R Us) United, election outcomes going to the highest bidders, enforcement delays stretching into infinity, ignoring complaints, et cetera, ad infinitum.
Ok, let’s try the EPA — Texas is trying to revoke mandatory testing of the air around oil refineries and chemical plants… just in time for crude flowing from fracking… for benzene and hydrogen sulfide from pollution watch lists. After all, shale fracked crude is rich in benzene and hydrogen sulfide… with benzene causing a loss of bone marrow, anemia (decrease in red blood cells), excessive bleeding and can affect the immune system, increasing the chance for infection, just for starters (see CDC’s Facts About Benzene).
And hydrogen sulfide causes health problems for your respiratory tract and nervous system, spontaneous abortion, asthma, and significantly increases the risk of developing cancers of the trachea, bronchus, and lung (see CDC’s Background and Environmental Exposures to Hydrogen Sulfide in the United States (PDF)).
Ok then, let’s try a sightly different tack; the “Group of Eight” (or “Gang of Eight” Senators) recently resolved key issues on immigration reform: apparently this “Gang of Eight” Senators feel having 21 million Americans out of work and underemployed isn’t enough, because they want to legalize a like number of “guest workers.” After all, we can’t have those poor richest companies the world has ever seen be forced to pay living wages to American workers. After all, that simply isn’t how “capitalism” works. Everyone, the world over (except for America’s economic elite) MUST be FORCED to accept austere, third-world wages in slave conditions.
Besides, as Halliburton will attest from their “slightly less than legal” employment of Mexican and Central American nationals at their customer’s Chocolate Bayou facilities as those Mexicans and Central Americans toil — without protection from the toxins within the containment vessels they are tasked to clean, outside of the scarfs they bring — resulting in the deaths of roughly 21 per year according to those Mexicans and Central Americans (where I grew up, Spanish is not so foreign a language); this is how shareholders (typically just “preferred” shareholders) benefit in this new laissez faire (or “laisser-faire” — stringent opposition to governmental regulation or interference) capitalism.
Ok, so that’s out too. The extremists of America’s right-wing beat me there also. This creates a bit of a quandary. It would seem that irregardless of what truly deranged and demented level of extremism I may try, America’s right-wing extremists have already beaten me there. This, however, raises another question: just how much more utterly banal insanity, vapid inanity and completely vacuous ludicrosity are the American people willing to tolerate?
Well… at least — I hope — I can hold onto my sense of humor!
You must be logged in to post a comment Login