Well, this writer may have failed 40 years ago at a standup career. Now I plan to use this new piece as fodder for another attempt to be in front of an audience. Perhaps just in front of a radio audience will suffice. The bottom line is, like the Howard Beale character in Sidney Lumet’s fine film Network, this Senior Citizen is mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore!
Don’t many of those television commercials, made by a slew of yuppie know nothings, get under your skin like they do mine? That manure about if you have over $10 grand owed to the evil IRS you can call the ‘ Tax Hotline’ and have a ‘ Team’ come to your aid. What about the poor schmuck who owes a few thousand less than the required $ 10K and is in dire straits? Is he the one who you read about that blew away a bunch of people before becoming ‘ Suicide by Police’? Of course, the super rich who may owe tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions to the government will have the best lawyers and accountants to make a deal with Uncle. You won’t see them going ‘ Postal’ right?
As a sports fan this writer just loves how the embedded in corporate America Sports Complex ( so called) journalists and pundits love to use words and phrases not really ideally suited for sports. They’ll refer to what goes on within a team or sport as the Culture. Or they talk about a star player and his Brand. They discuss the goings on of a part of a football team as The Quarterback Room or Defensive line Room. Also notice how none of these sports media whores will ever dump on a coach or manager while he is still coaching. Once he is gone then all hell breaks loose.. but not before! Meanwhile, more and more of their conversations are about salaries. How much so and so is asking for or getting instead of discussing strategy. Why should they when, just like with professional wrestling, this has become strictly entertainment? Look what has transpired the past two years when our lovely Supreme Court made it legal to allow ‘ Pay for Play’ in major college sports. Used to be a kid had to wait one full year after he transfers colleges before he could play for the new school. Now all hell breaks loose! The kids in some cases are getting paid literally millions in endorsement money. In the ‘ Good old days’ it was booster bribery that the schools and NCAA looked the other way on. I was taught that ‘ Two wrongs don’t make a right’ but what the hell do I know? I have become a non entity in this new ‘ Money talks’ world.
What really pisses me off is when we delve into the world of the military. For the past few decades new phrases have become standard. A war zone became a ‘ Theater of Operations’. Sounds better than the killing fields war zones are. How about when they send our drone missiles or bombers into their ‘ Theater of Operations’ and civilians are destroyed? You know, like pregnant women, little babies, young kids and old people. They never say ‘ Oh shit we made a mistake’. Instead, they say this was ‘ Collateral Damage’. Of course, to the poor slobs who are on the other end of the **** they know what collateral means. When we illegally and immorally attacked, invaded and then occupied Iraq the resistance fighters to our actions were called terrorists. We copied that from the Nazis and the Brits from their occupations of the Poles, French, Russians and of course the Boers in Africa. No such word as ‘ Freedom fighter’ was ever used.
Don’t you just love it when politicians tell us in their campaign ads how they will ‘ Fight for you’? Is that what happened on Jan 6th 2021, that Trump and his crew of sleazy elected officials told the mob to go and fight to make America great again? How about the overused BS phrase of ‘ Bipartisanship’? The only bipartisanship is when the two parties together allow us to be screwed by the super rich and the big corporations. Case in point: My ‘ better half’ had tremendous abdominal pain recently, barely able to move in her bed. Now keep in mind that she is one year off from being eligible for Medicare, and only has a Blue Cross hospitalization policy ( which obscenely costs us $7,000 annually for really nothing, as we perhaps used it once in 20 years). The hospital is literally 5 minutes away, so I told her I would run her over there to the ER. She was in such pain and said ‘I cannot get out of the bed… call 911 for an ambulance.’ She knew, as we both knew from the only other time we had to have an ambulance, that this brief ride would cost us in excess of $600 0r $700. Well, I called, they came quickly and were highly professional as they scooted her to the ER. It turns out that she had a very large kidney stone, and after treatment I took her home. The last time this scenario happened with her being taken to the ER for treatment ( five years ago), the bill came to over $2000, which we just finished paying off. WHERE ARE THE TWO POLITICAL PARTIES TO GET US THE NATIONAL HEALTH CARE WE ALL NEED, NOT JUST THE SENIORS!!!!
We are all, excepting the mega millionaires, prisoners of this Military Industrial Empire folks. Most working stiffs have a history of being treated like indentured servants. Of course, despite what this Florida governor and his minions are selling us all, we can never fall to the status of the African slaves who were shipped here in chains hundreds of years ago. To DeSantis and his crew those slaves were lucky, as many of them learned ‘ useful skills’. No comedy writer could ever think of such nonsense to transition into laughs.
The BS from the corporate world via their advertising crap selling us mostly ****, the BS from the military and their ‘ Warrior mentality’, the BS from political world who represent the super rich, the BS from the sports world… all contribute to create a nation of serfs that become spectators at their own execution!
Philip A Farruggio is regular columnist on itstheempirestupid website. He is also frequently posted on Nation of Change and Countercurrents.. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 500 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘ It’s the Empire… Stupid ‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected].
