Daily Archives: September 21, 2013

Evil Empires, Reagan and the Slaviet Onion

Posted on September 21, 2013 by | 2 comments

Hi readers.

When our sainted once-king Ronald Reagan wasn’t parking small Volkswagens under his hair next to his scalp he was fond of saying the Soviet Union was an evil empire.  But Reagan meant this in a good way.  What Reagan intended to communicate was, compared to not being an empire, the Soviet Union was evil.

As the somewhat temporary monarch of his own empire extending from Guam to Hawaii to Alaska to the contiguous states of the continent to Puerto Rico, Reagan had noticed the condition of being part of an empire wasn’t an unmitigated blessing for all the non-aristocrats living inside it.

Reagan was wise enough to know that he couldn’t do much about the ills of being non-aristocrats in an empire, but he wanted to do something good anyway, or something someone might call good in the history books.  And since he couldn’t do it for the non-aristocrats, hell, at least he could be a popular cult-figure doer-of-good-deeds for the aristocrats.

He decided if those aristocrats could be turned absolutely loose to acquire wealth and power beyond their wildest dreams they might be satisfied and allow some of the good to trickle down into the pockets and households of the peasantry who were mowing their lawns, flipping their hamburgers and doing tune-ups on their Rolls Royces.

The result was profound.  The nature of his empire went through a lot of subtle changes and the texture of the evil was distilled in some unexpected subtle directions.  In no time at all US jobs, businesses and small industry were swirling down the toilet headed for China and other countries where the labor was less expensive.  His aristocrats discovered the multi-national grass was a heluva lot greener than the stuff under the purple mountains majesties on the fruited plains.

So in a sense it can be said Reagan destroyed his own evil empire in favor of a much larger one owned by banks and multi-national corporations.  And somehow in the process he managed to make the rednecks and semi-literates lower their voices in reverence when they spoke his name.

Today he’s still remembered that way, but more within the legions of Oliver North clones serving his multi-national aristocrats.

Finding something that rhymes with empire that isn’t evil is a tough gig.

Old Jules

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Finding something that rhymes with it

Posted on September 21, 2013 by | 3 comments

Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.

Boswell told the story of how he and Johnson were in a group with a lot of aristocrats when a woman sitting near Johnson passed noisy gas.  She immediately began rubbing her own leg against a table leg to create the illusion the noise was a friction sound vibration resulting from the two legs in two-part harmony.

“We heard you the first time, Lady.  You don’t have to find something that rhymes with it,” Johnson pointed out.

Which sums up a lot of the problems we human beings have trying to solve what we believe are our major issues on any day.  We fudge on our rhymes.  On big issues we’re especially bad about boxing ourselves into lousy rhymes.

For instance, after Roosky peasantry had been beaten and starved by their aristocrats a few hundred years they wanted to find something that rhymed with the French Revolution.  They talked about it endlessly, batted it around, finally created a poem with rhyme and rhythm of their own.

But it took Joe Stalin to write the last stanza.  The one about Napoleon.

For some reason that particular poem always ends with Napoleon.  Evidently no way of avoiding it.

Today in the US and a lot of the world the folks in power are trying to find something that rhymes with Edward II and the Dispensers.  The folks who aren’t in power are trying to find something that rhymes with the American Revolution.  And both agree there’s a sidebar hope of finding something that rhymes with the crusades.

You don’t hear much out of Washington DC about Edward II and the Dispensers these days, but you see a lot of attempts to find things that rhyme with it.  But nobody’s doing much thinking about the final stanza of that one, either.

For the ones trying to find the US Constitution behind trees and under rocks, the final stanza to the American Revolution was probably the Civil War.

I can’t recall the final stanza of the Crusades, but I suspect a piece of it had to do with the massacre and looting of the Templars [and Edward II and the Dispensers].

When human beings passed gas back in the time of Johnson, or Edward II, or the French Revolution I’m betting it smelled and sounded pretty similar to when they do it today.  We aren’t much better at rhyming today than we were then.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2013, Education, Government, Human Behavior, Science

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