Flip This Dancing Storage Unit off Bridezilla Island

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

Flip This Dancing Storage Unit off Bridezilla Island

Viewing reality television is rather like watching Republicans trying to dance to rock music, repulsive and yet somehow fascinating.

A current entertainment is the flatscreening of shaky images of people arguing with each other about other folks’ junk. 

Back in ye olden times television filmmakers hired writers who then generated scripts featuring plot, character, and setting.  Producers then hired actors, cameramen, set designers, electricians, carpenters, and other professionals to put together often-beautiful works of art.

Perhaps the ultimate Hegelian dialectic of television art now would be James Arness, Loretta Young, and Patrick McGoohan shrieking at each other while bidding on a cowboy boot that was once seen in Gilley’s Place, like babushkas squabbling over the last bowl of lentil soup in Petrograd in the winter of 1917.

What might the obsession with abandoned storage units symbolize?

“Look at this, dude – rare monaural recordings of Duke Ellington’s early work!”

“Who’s Duke Ellington?”

“I dunno; I guess we could get something for these old records from the recyclers.  But, hey, look at this old book. Nice leather.  Must be worth something.”

“That’s a Bible; someone will want that for a dashboard decoration, you know, along with fuzzy dice.”

“Okay, we’ll keep that.  Oh, hey, look at all this metal junk.”

“Oh, I know what those are – that’s a hammer, that’s a saw, that’s a folding carpenter’s rule, and those pointy things in that bucket are nails.  I’ve seen pictures of such things on my laptop.”

“But what are they for?”

“Oh, back in the Dark Ages, y’know, in the 1980s, people used them to, like, cut wood, and, like, build and repair their own stuff.”

“Freakin’ primitive, dude!  But how do you plug them in?  Or do they have batteries?”

“No, the cavemen used these things by hand.”

“So did they get to sue someone for that?”

“No, I think I remember being told that they felt fulfilled or something by work and sweat and creativity – totally old school.”

“Wow, that’s like, you know, existential and stuff.  People were, like, so spiritual back in the day when they did stuff with hammers and read books and stuff.”

“What does ‘Made in USA’ mean?”

“Back during the Civil War in the 1930s people used to make their own stuff in this country, polluting the rivers and killing the striped owls or something.”

“That was dumb.  Stuff comes from the mall, and doesn’t pollute.”

“Hey, what’s that covered by dust?”

“This?  Oh, it’s the soul of a civilization.”

“What’s civilization?”

“Oh, art, music, literature, faith – you could look ‘em up on Wonkiepedia.”

“Can we get any money out of it?”

“No.  Old stuff.  Forget it.”

“So the meaning of life is outbidding other people for old golf clubs and record players in an abandoned storage shed?”

“Gosh, dude, you make it sound so inadequate.”

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The Autopen is Mightier than the Reality Show

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

The Autopen is Mightier than the Reality Show

Techniques for job seekers change with the times, but although a dark suit might not be required now, reporting for a job interview while wearing a red cape is probably a no-no.

What’s really funny – laugh now -- is that you’re paying for the red cape.

A taxpayer-funded body called Workplace Central Florida (“employment agency” is, like, y’know, so old-school) has wasted – um, invested -- some $14,000 for red capes for central Floridians looking for work. Folks in the off-center parts of Florida can be grateful that they are merely unemployed, not both unemployed and made to dress like really fey superheroes. The feeling – obviously not thinking – behind this public humiliation of the unemployed is that if they are required to costume themselves like fools they will then take heart as they battle the scourge of (I am not making this up) “Doctor Evil Unemployment.”

Just why the former Mister Unemployment has been granted a doctorate and by what institution eludes the perceptive reader, but then one supposes that “Reverend Unemployment” would offend the millions of men and not a few women who like to be saluted in that market place mentioned in the Gospels.

Workplace Central Florida receives $24 million dollars annually from those of you who already have jobs, and I say that’s money well-spent. If working people were to keep more of the dollars they earn they’d probably waste their income on a new roof or a more dependable car. How good of the wise and benevolent government people vote for to relieve them of making decisions about the results of their own work.

A few states up, in North Carolina, a Presbyterian church in Charlotte has been fined $4,000 for pruning their own crepe myrtle trees (otherwise known as really big weeds) on their own property.

The city of Charlotte employs a “senior urban forester,” who missed his true calling as a Nazi UberSturmPoopFuhrer, to punish people for taking care of their lawns. If there is a senior urban forester then it follows that there are junior urban foresters and perhaps even stadtwaldjugend marching about in black shorts and snooping in Charlotte’s back yards for unauthorized and disharmonious vegetation.

If you wish to trim your own trees in your own yard in Charlotte you must apply to the city foresters, the Green Gestapo, for a permit, preferably with your cloth cap clutched in your dirty hands, you swine, and your head ‘umbly bowed. If your papers are not in order you will be punished at $100 per branch. The North Carolina Division of Forestry makes the friendly suggestion that you should be should be certified by the National Horticulture Board in order to lop off a branch that’s scratching your car, but we’ll overlook it this time, comrade. We have ways of making your daisies talk, and we know where your tomato plants live.

Punishing people for being tidy and responsible is clearly very profitable for the thugs – um, public servants -- in Charlotte’s city hall: look at a tree, decide that you don’t like the way it’s shaped, and write a ticket for $4,000. Someone in Charlotte, North Carolina is looting lots of money from the people through the misuse of police powers.

But, again, the people of Charlotte, just like the people of every city, have exactly the city government for which they voted.

But in fact most people don’t vote. The turnout for presidential autopen elections every four years barely tops 50% of the electorate; off-year state and local elections are characterized by a few dutiful poll-watchers who are as lonely as a touring opera company in Nashville. Perhaps those who don’t vote are too busy listening to Rush Limbaugh and Oprah Winfrey.

But have no fear, the Republicans are here – only it turns out that some of those running for the office of Autopen of the United States don’t have much of a voting record either. They want your money, though.

Sarah Palin, for instance, is touring the United States in a big ol’ bus in order to ask for money. Now since Mrs. Palin already has lots and lots of money from her book and even more from her speaking tour, and according to rumor has recently bought a really big house in Arizona, just why she needs the few pot-metal coins the Tree Gauleiters haven’t yet seized from you is another philosophical question.

Maybe the voters aren’t showing up because there isn’t much to vote for; the Dancing With the Stars audition rejects presented to us by the Republicans won’t cut it any more than the autopen. To paraphrase Wordsworth, “Patrick Henry! Thou shouldst be living at this hour!”

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