A Potpourri Of Profundity And Piffle

By Ed Raymond
Staff Writer

Einstein said he didn’t know what World War III would be fought with, but he knew that World War IV would be fought with rocks. Maybe we have been lucky to escape the nuclear holocaust that he was predicting for WW III. I think WW III started in Great Britain last week with the urban poor throwing rocks at the rich and coordinating arson and looting with their Blackberries. World War III will be fought over economic inequality. Two unemployed young women, actively participating in looting high-end boutiques and then burning them, told a British Broadcasting Corporation reporter: “We are showing the police and the rich that we can do what we want.” Remember that just six months ago Prince Charles and his wife Camilla riding in their Rolls-Royce limo to a charity concert were attacked by young people rioting for jobs. Then the “extravagances” of the Prince William-Kate wedding just a few weeks ago costing millions of pounds enraged English poor.

These recent “urban poverty” riots, the worst in 25 years, were not limited to London. Every major city in England, including Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Sheffield, and Southampton, had serious disruptions. Why? Unemployment among youths between 18-24 exceeds 20 percent. England’s economic growth in 2011’s second quarter was a sick 0.2 percent compared to our sick 0.8 percent growth. As one young unemployed man said: “We ain’t got no jobs, no money. We heard other people were getting things for free [bankers], so why not us?” Another said: “This is the uprising of the working class. We’re redistributing the wealth.” Another said: “This is a battle between the haves and have-nots.”

The Conservative government has started a decade of austerity, cutting 80 billion pounds (equal to $130 billion US) and spending billions to rescue British banks and bankers from bankruptcy. (Sound familiar?) Welfare payments will be slashed and tens of thousands of public sector jobs are being cut by 2015. Currently one-fifth of English households have no wage earner. England is hosting the 2012 Summer Olympics. The organizers are getting very worried about the cost of security. The consensus is that both political parties have ignored the problems of a troubled underclass for some time.

I picked up a magazine about boats and yachts in the library the other day. The “haves” around the world are now buying bigger and better yachts in the 100 to 250 ft. class. Currently there are 750 yachts over 80 feet long being constructed in the world’s shipyards. One can rent a 200-ft. yacht for between $565,750 to $825,500 a week. You can buy a cheap one of this size for $50 million.

The magazine contained a fascinating article about how “have” yacht owners can protect themselves from “have-not” kidnappers and yacht pirates around the world. A dozen or more security guards armed with the latest laser-guided weapons may be needed for a 200-footer. Owners are also lining the gunwales (around the entire deck) with razor concertina wire so that kidnappers and pirates cannot storm the ship easily. I guess if you have to be protected by guards, concertina wire, and laser-guided machine guns as you lollygag your way around the world, it must give you a feeling of security.

Welcome to World War Three.

A poem by Calvin Trillin “Memo To A Wall Street Highflier” is topical enough to be dedicated to WW III and the collapse of Western economies:

“It’s more than likely that you caused this wreck
By schemes like selling what you knew was dreck.
And ordinary folks have paid the cost:
Their homes are gone, their livelihoods are lost.
But friends on high have guaranteed the onus
Is not on you. Relax. Pick up your bonus.”

Another good reason for WW III.

I saw Michele Bachmann’s picture on Newsweek’s cover. I thought it was a perfect representation of her character. Michele has the penetrating eyes of Grand Inquisitor Tomas de Torquemada of the Roman Catholic Church Inquisition. He burned thousands of heretics at the stake in the Middle Ages. He had those burning eyes of the zealot as he lit the rushes and branches huddled around the feet of all of those naked heretics. Michele has the eyes, attitude, and some of the beliefs of Torquemada. As a good religious evangelical, she would have made him the perfect “housekeeper,” cooking his meals and enthusiastically lighting his torches. As a bad Protestant girl, she would have made him a perfect succubus.

Fifty-six years ago I had the pleasure of visiting Guantanamo Bay, courtesy of the U.S. Marine Corps. Marines have spent a lot of time in the Caribbean, occupying Haiti for a time, and, of course, fighting in the Spanish-American War of 1898 where we “acquired” beautiful Gitmo Bay to park some of our Navy. In 1903 Cuban President Tomas Estrada Palma offered us a perpetual lease which gave us sovereignty over 45 square miles of tropical paradise. We have been sending annual $4,085 checks to Cuba since 1934. The Cubans have cashed only one. Fidel stuffed the checks into his desk drawer and refused to cash them. Something about capitalism I suppose.

We currently have over 9,000 Navy and Marines at Gitmo maintaining facilities, guarding prisoners, and patrolling the “Cactus Curtain.” Fidel planted eight miles of cactus around the base to keep Cubans from escaping to the U.S.

Barack Obama is having a helluva time closing Gitmo. I suggest an alternative. I think our Department of Commerce should sub-lease the land to resort corporations and have them develop five-star resorts and golf courses around the bay. The beaches are beautiful, the weather is great, and it would piss off the Castro brothers no end. We could even offer them limited partnerships. In the end they are as greedy as a Wall Street banker and would buy in. End the embargo, end the guarding of all those terrorists, ship them to federal prisons, and we could make a real bundle for the Bush-bankrupt treasury.

For the “right-brained” young lady in USA Today who wrote that government doesn’t make anything and doesn’t create any jobs, I would suggest she have her huge stupidity tumor removed by doing research on what roads, buildings, and parks were built by FDR’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Great Depression. And perhaps she should examine a 360-degree video of the space shuttle cockpit developed by NASA which contains thousands upon thousands of switches, relays, gauges, computer screens, monitors, and other control devices. It’s a nerd-geek’s heaven.

The WPA, among thousands of projects, built 325 firehouses, renovated 2,384 more, and built 20,000 miles of water mains. It built over $1 billion worth of public buildings, including the Dock Street Theater in Charleston, the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, and the Park Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood. Fargo still has dozens of buildings built by WPA workers. WPA even trained 30,000 women for domestic employment. It also operated large art, drama, photography, media, and literacy projects. And, by the way, local and state governments supplied from 10 to 30 percent of the funding for WPA projects. In eight years the WPA provided eight million jobs for breadwinners of families who had no long-term job. And check out the cockpit of the space shuttle. Then tell me government hasn’t made anything.

Ah, the intricacies and petty gobbledygook of big business. Two toilet paper titans, Georgia-Pacific and Kimberly-Clark, are going at it tooth and butt over who had quilted paper first. G-P sued K-C over patent infringement and unfair competition. The court case involved dozens of high-end (if I may use that term) intellectual property lawyers, a dozen witnesses, and over 675,000 pages of corporate documents. The court bristled over debates about quality, puffiness, bulk, absorption, and “nesting.” (What in hell is nesting with toilet paper?) The judges in the case, perhaps while daubing away their tears of laughter with Quilted Northern Embossed, decided for G-P. We spend $4 billion on pampered, papered U.S. butts alone, so I guess this momentous trial was necessary. How exciting.

Middle-class Minnesotans and North Dakotans will be happy to hear that about 1,500 U.S. millionaires paid no federal income taxes in 2009, out of 235,000 taxpayers who earned over a million (8,274 taxpayers earned more than $10 million). How many of the $10 million bracket escaped federal taxes was not revealed. Minnesota taxpayers will be happy or horrified, depending upon political party, to discover that they have paid a total of $38 billion on the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and billions more on the Medicare Prescription drug fiasco. In the next two years Minnesotans will pay $26 billion toward settling up the accounts for losing both wars.  Minneapolis taxpayers will cover $255 million of that; Fergus Falls taxpayers will pay $17 million toward this losing effort. As my sainted French mother would say: “c’est la vie!” (That’s life!)

I would love to interview Pope Benedict after he has a session with our Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She would have to be close to being the most important woman in the world, even including Lady Gaga. Would he listen to her? Would he think his foreign affairs advisors are a lot smarter than Hillary? Would he discount her as he discounts the rest of the women in his prostated world?

The average American woman in 1800 had eight children. By 1900 that was down to four with the help of “womb veils,” homemade diaphragms, cloths stuffed in the vagina, a kind of reusable condom of dubious design, and over-the-counter (or behind it) medications such as The Samaritan’s Gift for Females (doesn’t that have a biblical ring?). Douching after sex with very cold water and baking soda was cheap and popular. It certainly kept women from sleeping after the “act.” Bishops and doctors often got all screwed up trying to explain the rhythm method, more commonly known as Vatican Roulette, which resulted in more babies.

Eve was probably the first woman to ever try to separate sex from reproduction–-and found out that rolled fig leaves didn’t work. Here Abel, here Cain. Today experts say 99 percent of women in the world have tried some method of birth control. Polls indicate that 98 percent of Catholic women use some form of contraceptive. But still we have the tired old men dressed in gold, cardinal, and black skirts insisting on withdrawal, exhaustion, or abstinence, even while the men they are in charge of are cutting large swathes among boys, girls, and widows. I would like to ask the Pope and his cardinals and bishops this question: “What is it about sex that drives you all crazy? Do you think celibacy does something to the left side of the brain? Do you think testosterone drives men to war?” I want Hillary to hear his answers.

“I pledge never to have an accident where my head hits concrete, asphalt, or oak tree. If it does happen, I pledge to pay all of my own health care and rehab costs if I survive.”

Signed,

Bieker sans Hellmett, Esquire

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