Pirates! They seem so cute in the movies with their moral compasses that only point to what they want most! “Take what you can!” they say, “Give Nothing Back!” and then they quaff their beers and go off on another adventure on the high seas–or sleep it off with the pigs. What they want most is to win the GOP primary in South Carolina tomorrow. Pirates of the 2012 election just the same.
Somehow, Johnny Depp is so much cuter than Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Rick Santorum or Mitt Romney. Maybe it’s the eyeshadow.
I’d at least like them better if they were upfront about it–as Captain Jack Sparrow says, “You can trust a dishonest man to be dishonest.” The “Vulture Capitalist”, the “Grandiose Check Kiter”, the “Neologism” who does not believe in personal privacy, and well, Ron Paul doesn’t get enough coverage to have a nickname. What do you look for in a candidate for president?
Rick Santorum seems to be the East India Tea Party, as part of the Congressional Gang of Seven, and Newt like Barbosa, getting his place by attacking someone else. The other pirates in Singapore and Beijing are now taking our jobs and our money, while Mitt Romney pays a tip to the IRS.
We’ve forgotten our real treasure in this country, Know-How and innovation. We don’t make anything anymore, except here in the backward south where a machininst must be a computer programmer, a metallurgist and an engineer. We have people who are so intent on controlling who other people sleep with that they don’t manage their own lives. They live in fear that an idea may broach their ideology. And yet they are good people, working people, who just think that there was a time when things were different.
I remember McCarthy and his paranoia about Communism…which collapsed under its own ideology. I remember Nixon–Tricky Dick, the one who lost the war that never lost a battle. I remember the “Trickle Down” theory of Reganomics, which somehow became “the buck stops at the 99th percentile.” I even remember Eisenhower, who warned us of the Military Industrial complex. Funny thing, but when we had a president whose moral compass always pointed at women, we also had no deficit, lots of jobs, and a growth of GNP. What am I missing?
Like Sparrow and Barbosa, they seem only to fight over the one ship. Of course, it’s our ship of state, and we are the “scabrous dogs” who must run the ship as they set the course and work through their own agendas. It’s beginning to seem time for a mutiny. In the pirate vessels, everyone in the shop was in on the piracy and the crew shared both the danger and the booty. That’s what conservatives seem to want to return to, the American dominance of trade, but somehow we’ve been sold off to the pirates of Singapore and Beijing.
I don’t feel my entitlement by having two jobs to pay off my mortgage which is barely above water due to the crash in real estate values, my credit cards, and my student loans. At least I’m employed. Most of my friends both have a job and try to run a small business to make ends meet. Some of my students are living on financial aid and student grants to go to school, because they can’t find jobs. That’s why they are going to college, since a high school diploma does not cut it anymore. They aren’t stupid, but they don’t have job skills. The pirates of education fill the class room with testing and leave no time to find the child that is left behind.
This is just a rant and my brilliant metaphors are going into Davy Jones’s locker, where everywhere you look, you see only your own face, and you have to figure out what you can do to get the ship back to the water and flip the world right side up again.
Wake up and smell the bloody pirates. They’ve sold us out to the East India Trading company and now they are just on a corporate raiding scheme. Keep a weather eye, and your hand on your wallet, as you listen to the rants from the TV and the hot air balloons over the interstate.
Aye, Jack (Newt, Mitt, Ron and Rick) I ken well what ye be.
Ye hearties, we’ve been sold out. So who are you going to vote against in the primary tomorrow?





You must log in to post a comment.