Surreal: The United States of America - Made for Television

“For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth; action, nor utterance, nor power of speech, to stir men’s blood; I only speak right on; I tell you that which you yourselves do know.” -Shakespeare (“Julius Caesar”)

The little guy, his hand held protectively by his pretty mother, walked up to where I was signing autographs at one of the hundreds of judo tournaments in which I competed in those days. Before mom could say anything, the little man blurted, “Are you Superman – can you fly?”

I winked at his smiling mom, and said (it’s been a long time ago; I was only reminded of it by my topic for today) something like, no, winning a judo tournament doesn’t mean you’re Superman. To fly, I needed an airplane, too.

But when I’d thought about it, I knew where the little guy was coming from. The martial arts movies, magazines, and related media were already then spewing such incredible nonsense that one assumed then that they did so knowing that no one really believed them. It was like the tabloids, Christ back on earth disguised as an alligator stuff, and those mindless soap operas. In his child’s mind, there was yet no way to tell the truth from fantasy. Little kids, you know, used to have parents, parents who knew the real world, that is, parents who helped with making such distinctions.

No more. Today, in the gossip coffee-klatsch that is our nation and its news and information media, people drive nails with a feather, break automobile leaf springs with a shuto (karate chop), and exploded chickens with ki (projected mental power) all the time. Kung-fu and karate fighters fight streetfights that are the equivalent in energy expended and calories burned of sprinting a twenty-six mile marathon. Utter nonsense, in other words. But that’s not all. In Hollywood, the U.S. Congress, and the Never-Neverland like, a Miss America candidate who weighs a hundred, ten pounds can street-fight three guys capable of playing in an NFL line and knock the snot out of them.

Women, of course, can do anything a man can do. It’s the law, besides.

Utter, as I said, nonsense.

And that’s just the beginning of it all. If it can be said, and made to hang together even in today’s pseudo-logic, it’s possible. No, it’s true. It’s reality. The sweeter it sounds, the more real it is. Politically correct, in other words. No matter how absurd to the reason, if it sounds good, it must be. Everyone’s opinion is as good as anyone else’s. No race is more intelligent than the others. No culture is more successful, and – therefore – to be respected than any other. No one – therefore again – should have to compete; to compete, after all, means someone must lose or fail, and we can’t have that – not if we’re all equal and alike. We must find a way to make all the kids in all our schools pass, and magna cum laude, at that or the result will be “hateful” (of course, we can always blame the tests, or the schools, or the teachers when the kids can’t read or do their sums).

Competition and tests are “discriminatory.”

In short, what was once known as common sense, that solid, everyday-experienced and lived contact with reality is as rare as the proverbial hen’s teeth. People who have never swung a hammer, used a spade or shovel, or mixed and poured cement tell us all about calluses. Worse, perhaps, they advise us on the value of buildings. We call them “appraisers.” Men whose closest experience with fighting is a spat with their wives - and now even more incredibly (formerly, that is), women - advise us on how and when to fight a war. And nobody sees any connection between that and the incredibly stupid way we’re fighting the war in Iraq, or the even stupider way we fell into the morass that it is in the first place.

I’ll tell you what, parenthetically, if I were a member of the Air Force Wing who woke up the other day to learn that their commanding officer was a woman, I’d refuse further service. AWOL – whatever it took. Ridiculous is ridiculous, and everyone who doesn’t know what’s ridiculous when he sees it is damned well not the guy I want flying my wing in a “furball” fight.

And it goes on, and on. It seems, these days, pointless to site common sense as an argument or reason for much of anything. This has become, largely the result of female and effeminate influence resulted from the rise of feminism, a nation ruled by emotions and emotional argument. As I said, the litmus test of everything nowadays is how it feels. As I returned home just now, for instance, a man being interviewed on National Public Radio was arguing that black people are entitled to say things white and other people aren’t. Emotional people, he implied, are entitled to argue using their best attributes (I guess he thinks black people are more emotional than others – and I will leave the obvious implication of that to the reader’s . . . oops – I was about to say “common sense”), so if they say things which would be hateful coming from a white, that’s okay.

Don Imus can’t say what he said, but Jeremiah Wright (the pastor of Barak Obama’s church) can.

And a few minutes later, one of those “analyst” pundits on the Tee and Vee says Wright is hateful, just plain hateful. He should be prevented from saying things like that, and his racist ranting is going to ruin Barak Obama’s run for the presidency.

Well enough. That’s as it should be. After all, hate speech is hate speech. Like Professor Ward Churchill a while ago, the Reverend Wright should lose his position, he should be banished and prevented from any more public speaking, drawn, quartered, and fed to the fishes. His family should be banished to a desert island. And all the customary, madder-than-a-wet-hen rest all those of us he has done such terrible hurt can dream up and devise.

What is even more crucial here is that we rail and rage against this sort of thing as much, as often, and as long as possible. I hope I have done my bit. Curses upon saying hateful things. I hate hate. I have gnashed my teeth, rent my garments, and uttered imprecations upon the miscreants who disturb the peace and quiet of anything.

I condemn and contemn the killing of wolves in Yellowstone and decry cock fighting . . .

Wait a minute – where was I? I may have gotten carried away.

What is far more interesting to me concerning the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Professor Ward Churchill, and so many others like the, however, is that much or most of what they said happens to be true. Ah, yes, you say, but Wright is Afro-centrist (did I make that word up just now?). He is biased toward his race and his point of view, and if what he says is on the opposite side of the circle from the teachings of the Christianity he purports to espouse – well, his fellows in the hypocrite community are legion.

“Americans” – the fact that I often feel the need to remind the people of the United States that there are thirty-four other nations in the “Americas” is a facet of the words-only reality in which we now anguish fecklessly – share one characteristic bias more than any other people on the planet. Like their government, they hate the truth when it offends whatever falsehood they happen to cherish or worship. In the words of H.L. Mencken, "The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."

H.L. Mencken (who passed away in 1956, years before the feminist revolution and the rhetoric-reality it demanded and spawned), you hadn’t seen anything yet.

But I have seldom seen that observation successfully gainsaid, and here we are again. Nothing is more hateful than the truth. The U.S. of America is a woman who asks her husband or boy friend how her new hair-do looks, or if she’s too fat for this dress, and now that the old bat looks like a cartoon caricature of a woman and is so fat that she requires a motorized cart to haul her overindulgent and corrupt carcass around, it is still hateful for him to recognize aloud the reality of her condition.

Today, Barak Obama goes to Philadelphia, and standing before a row of U.S.A. flags, delivers a large serving of common sense truth. Something the little kid four-year-old I mentioned at the outset would recognize at once. Mom, probably, wouldn’t – but he would. This is truth so thunderously obvious that sixty-four percent (my numbers, based on my own history-based accounting) will recognize it as such. The lunatic fringe, and those paid to appear in the lunatic fringe, will fulminate pro and con. Emotion, remember? Emotion! – Gotta remember the female audience, you know.

And about one-fiftieth of one percent will see it all for the bad, soap-opera, drive-a-nail-with-a-feather martial arts movie, pro wrestling, feminist rhetoric reality that it is.

Well, on second thought, you have a choice (assuming you have the commons sense remaining, that is). You can believe that the Reverend Wright is that stupid, that demented, or that careless, or you can believe he did it on purpose. You can believe that he cares so little for Barak Obama and his campaign for the presidency that he sought to be “divisive” (at a time like this), or you can believe he had another agenda.

Need I say “crazy of crazy like a fox?” Soap opera? Romance novel? Pro wrestling match? Hollywood-staged, made-for-television martial arts fight? Feminist rhetoric?

In this Never-Neverland production, the Dudley Do-Right hero – just when it appears that Snidely Whiplash has delivered the dastardly and fatal blow to Dudley’s plan to rescue the Nell Fenwick nation – has arrived with the antidote anecdote.

What a speech!

But meanwhile, as all this wondrously glamorous, excitingly emotive (there’s the magic ingredient, in case you’re still adrift with Winkin’, Blinkin’, and Nod), and even tear-jerking (or have we forgotten Hillary’s weepy, Joan of Arc frustrated performance of a few weeks ago), nail-biter is played for us, the reality outside goes on.

While we – those of us vapidly engrossed, and we, who still live in the real world and are fully aware that we have real reason to bite our nails – sit watching or enduring this soap opera, the planet’s fever goes unrestrainedly higher for wont of treatment. The misery and killing we have inflicted and are inflicting in Iraq mounts, while the infection resulted from the self-inflicted wound it represents – I speak figuratively of the seemingly uncontrollable costs there – races toward the heart of the nation’s economy. The border with Mexico remains so porous that hundreds of Mexican criminals, tons of illegal drugs, and all the rest of the execrable Mexican government’s flotsam and jetsam pour into our country. Gasoline for the car is nearing four dollars per, the price of groceries will soon drive most of us to cat food, and that “ain’t the half” of all our real troubles.

But we’re watching a “soap.” Oprah is interviewing the teary-eyed, three hundred pound walrus in chintz who can’t understand why her husband went to another woman. Mr. Clean is about to be bludgeoned with a ringside chair by the Evil Angel, and the Houston Rockets are on a winning streak. Then, too, someone found a Frosted Flake that looks like the outline of Illinois (the remarkable thing is that someone knows how the outline of Illinois looks?), and is selling it for $2,000 dollars.

Hell of a speech, all right! Hell of an election campaign, too. Too bad it has nothing to do with anything out here in the real world.