Common Sense Ain't What It Used To Be . . .

Last evening, watching television news and marveling at what must be either the really incredible stupidity or dissimulating dishonest of “analysts” and pundits there, I was about continue here with examples of the ominous gullibility of “Americans” in the face of their rapidly devolving and decaying governmental systems when my wife brought in the mail. One envelope contained a check for $1.08 cents, that from my car insurance company. That’s the same company who suddenly cancelled my insurance for reasons I have yet to discover or divine, inasmuch as I simply went to my insurance agent’s office and had them put me with another insurer. I do not suffer fools gladly.

But I wondered. Having suffered through seventeen years of IRS harassment by tampering using every conceivable kind of electronic chicanery and “Nixonian dirty trick,” I wondered. From a few minutes ago, and my conversation with Oscar at Ford Credit, I’m still wondering. But I’m looking forward to the morning (I called The Border Federal Credit Union before calling Ford Credit, only to find the credit union closed for the day) with really delighted anticipation. I’ll call the bank. Oscar tells me the checks, which I have copies of, were returned because “no such account numbers exist.”

Now, that’s the same account I’ve always had – six years, now - with the Credit Union, and the check in question was the twelfth from the pad of checks those in question came from. I write only checks for payment of car insurance and car loan from that pad. So something is afoot, and I have a good idea what it is. When I finally file my lawsuit against the government, the evidence they have given me will come into court by the truckload.

The mental duel with the federal government is always entertaining, too, especially in that it serves as a measure by which to keep track of that same government’s decay. That I watch with relish. I can hardly wait for them to collapse. But there’s more. Let’s go back to that phone call to Ford Credit. The first voice - a recording, of course – instructs me if I want to speak English, I should press one. Now WHAT THE HELL COUNTRY IS THIS? Do want to speak English? Hell, no, I take option two – Spanish. When the guy answers, it’s Oscar, and he’s speaking English – sort of. I should have insisted on Spanish, because Oscar is obviously not one of us. It turns out he’s Hispanic, but I guess he didn’t like my Cuban accent.
That’s the way it is, isn’t it? When I purchased my last cell phone at the local radio shack, the counter guy attempted to make the call necessary to initiate service, only to scowl and look puzzled, then hand me the phone. “Can you tell what she’s saying”” he asked. Taking the phone and recognizing the woman’s accent, I spoke to her in my then fluent Japanese. “Nippongo o hanasu koto ga dekimasu ka?” Do you speak Japanese? Hoshii no desu ga? Would you like to?

The young woman was much relieved, and the transaction completed quickly. But you wonder. Japanese! Sometime ago, during one of the federal attacks that are launched on my website continually – none, thankfully, with any more efficacy or competence than our attack on Iraq – I was obliged to speak first with Bombay, India, then London, England. Another foray into international commerce and diplomacy required my Japanese again, plus an exchanged of e-mails with Frankfurt, Germany (I speak German, too).

And then, of course, there’s the fact that each time I’m mugged while hiking and camping or bicycling here in South Texas, I have to speak Spanish.

The girls who have fucked up my bank account and car payment will have been “Hispanic,” like the girls at the insurance company. The space between my last names is too much for them, and with the wonders of a nation incapable of thought without computerized assistance . . . . well, you know. My last trip to the doctor’s office, for another instance of same, has resulted in a brouhaha of bungling. This one, though, was not un-anticipated and prepared for, inasmuch as Medicare and Medicaid are federal matters, and when has any of our governments ever done anything even remotely efficient or well? Personnel at the Social Security Administration have already bungled the matter so badly that all hope of straightening it out – in any of seven languages I still have some command of – is hopeless. I’ll just pay the cash. Why we call as system whereby the doctor and hospital are assured of payment, but the “insured” still gets a huge bill “insurance” is still beyond me, anyway. More federal FemSpeak, I suppose.

If perhaps anyone is so astute as to notice, and wonders why my bank account is still in Del Rio, Texas while I live in Kingsville four hours away, what I’ve already said here ought be a hint. When I moved from Corpus Christi to Del Rio some years ago, it took the U.S. Mail seven months to get my mail to me, and until I was willing to open an account at the Border Federal Credit Union in Del Rio and accept direct deposit of Social Security monies owed me, I was kept completely devoid of funds. Fortunately, I do have a number of marketable skills, and know how to live off the land. When I had camped by the Rio Grande for a year, I simply decided to stay there. Meanwhile, my driver’s license, concealed handgun license, college credit transcripts, and a number of additional missives of similar importance could not be gotten to me. Too much for “the greatest nation in history.”

An attempt to do something as monumentally complex and difficult as transfer my checking account from one bank to another, and to notify the Social Security Administration, would result in a hassle at least as frustrating and annoying - not me, them; and they get mean and vindictive right away (it’s my fault, of course) – as that which I’ve already been through and described.

In my book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story,” I detail some of my travail with federal record and communication tampering, exacerbated by the spastic stupidity and incompetence of culturally mix-mastered “America.” No one need dispute with me concerning what now deceased comedian Steven Allen called the “dumbing-down of America.” I could, from my own experiences, make an open and shut case, even without Jay Leno’s Jay-Walking segment as an exhibit in evidence. In Germany, we are the equivalent of the “dumb Pollack” joke. Small wonder.

But the media’s analysts are something else again. Six months ago, when one retired general pontificating on FoxNews said something particularly stupid, I started reviewing the fustian pronouncements of people like Col. Oliver North, Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis, Col. David Hunt, and Major Robert S. Bevelacqua, all FoxNews “analysts.” It would have been a bit of a coup to review the record of their tactical brilliance and related prognostications, but Media Matters has beaten me to the punch this morning (damn!).

http://mediamatters.org/items/200604240005 is the URL for the article, and it reports just what I learned with my own digging. If these guys are analysts, it must be by way of analyzing the entrails of an owl. Wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! For god’s sake – with this kind of expert advice, is there any wonder why we can’t even accomplish something as dirt simple as stopping illegal immigration?

It’s got me wondering (to say nothing of being fearful of leaving the house). During my formative years, there was an expression, “common sense.” Most people built their lives with it, and they were successful enough to have built everything our children are now busily intent on squandering. Way of all flesh, I guess. But common sense has fallen into disrepute these days, sneered into silence by wondrous things like technology, “higher” education, the information highway (reminds me of a grandfather’s observation that a local college boy “knows a helluva lot, all right – it’s just that everything he knows is wrong”), and “Fox Reality.”

That last one, hot off the presses as it were, tickles me. Fox reality. Sounds like the diagnosis for a guy on LSD, doesn’t it? Try to think of something more oxymoronic than that one. Military intelligence? How about government organization or reasonable woman?

But I digress. Couldn’t help it – some things just blow your train of thought off the tracks. Common sense used to be the result of rationality confronted by reality – getting along in the real world. What now passes for common sense is the result of rationality confronted with rhetoric and rationalization. Everything the mind deals with now is in some major degree some kind of virtual reality (talk about oxymorons!). Where once an error in reasoning was quickly apparent, like making a mistake in a fight, it is now sometimes never apparent, or subject to more of the detached rationalization that caused it in the first place. Somebody else pays the price, too.

The historically biggest, loudest example of that the future will find is feminism. Remember all its basic tenets? Its results? Only a few will do to illustrate. The one parent – meaning mom raised the kids – family? Kids didn’t need a male parent. That, of course, quickly expanded to both parents women, or men.

“A woman needs a man like a fish need a bicycle!” Remember that little intellectual dandy? How about “All men are rapists!”? I read a whole lot of it, all mental meandering by women living in an environment – one provided by the very gender they were excoriating – that would never suffer their theorizations to be tested, that of all but total societal protection. Outside that only virtually real realm – the future then, for instance – only others would pay the price. Even when the resulting Dodo mentality resulted in turn with, for instance, the continual rape and murder of their sisters, they went on with their brainless blabber and psycho-babble.

Women in military combat, like women in police uniform and a host of similar nonsense (I use the word literally; i.e., non sense - not of the senses) are not common sense. Neither is female nudity or semi-nudity in public.

Note that if I re-phrase that to say “to invite rape,” I have, of course, committed the ultimate sin against feminism. But I have also illustrated the difference between common sense born of interface between mind and reality and interface between mind and reality that is only language and rhetoric. Reality and experience with it do not have a problem with equating or differentiating the two statements; rationalization and reality made only of words do.

“The great tragedy of science,” Thomas Huxley observed, “is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”