BARRY CRIMMINS

On the national affront

BARRY CRIMMINS — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 18:19:13 GMT

An inescapable year reaches its inevitable conclusion
Where does one begin to recap 12 months of such willful self-parody?

Could 2007 somehow have been avoided? Where does one begin to recap 12 months of such willful self-parody? Isn’t it insulting to explain why, say, waterboarding is wrong, especially when one of the few people who needs this clarified is the new attorney general of the United States?

Corporate and political hoodlums spent the year doing three things: planning crimes, committing crimes, and covering up crimes. If this is news to you, no summary will bring you up to speed. So here are just some highlights of 2007, because it would be cruel and indecent to make you remember it all.

Unreal estate
This past year excised at least one bromide from motivational speakers’ rusty-saw collection — that is, unless they shift gears on the fly and start telling us that whatever doesn’t kill us only serves to make us weaker. Clearly, if you’re reading this, you — like a few million other schmos just trying to keep body and soul in proximity — survived, despite being sandwiched between poverty and the evermore obscenely wealthy cadre of oligarchs who create it.

Americans still dream in dollar signs, but the super rich lack the conscience to dream at all. So the rest of us ended up scrambling after a monetary unit that is no longer the envy of even Canadians. A land of people who once had good jobs with good benefits has now become a place where corporate behemoths slowly squeeze us for everything that was ours — including our very homes.

Mortgages too good to be true, peddled by swindlers too bad to be truthful, led to domiciles being repossessed like there was no tomorrow — for the people living in them, anyway. How were you to know that, when you mortgaged your soul to a predatory lender, it would end up being owned by Bob Jones University?

If the credit hustlers didn’t dispossess us, we still had to worry about having a health-care racketeer tell us that our home, when liquidated, should be enough to cover the co-pay for our first course of meds. The most important American film of 2007 was Michael Moore’s Sicko, a work so entertainingly stark that it left us blankly grinning at the boundless inhumanity of corporate avarice.

The Devil and Dick Cheney

BARRY CRIMMINS — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 15:43:47 GMT

A recently declassified communiqué from one evildoer to another
Dick: e ver since you shoved your fall guy, Scooter, off the political cliff, I simply cannot get in touch with you.

TO: Vice-President Richard Bruce Cheney
FROM: Old Horny, Prince of Darkness
RE: Failure to deliver/breach of contract/eternity

Dick: ever since you shoved your fall guy, Scooter, off the political cliff (albeit onto a stuntman mattress filled to capacity with your own hot air), I simply cannot get in touch with you. Perhaps you thought the conditions of the contract we signed went up in smoke along with the document, but I assure you I can access the pact much more easily than I seem to be able to get hold of you.

This is particularly enraging when I see you cavorting with my minuscule minions at the EIB Radio Network and FOX News. Why waste your Satan-given talents speaking directly to an audience that, according to our pollsters, Frank Luntz and Dick Morris, is already 98 percent signed, sealed, and delivered to Me? For eternity!

The other two percent are hopeless do-gooders who monitor those broadcasts the way My ancient and Almighty Enemy eyes the gates of hell.

So what's the percentage in that, Dickie? Have you forgotten that your job is to recruit souls to our cause? Oh sure, Luntz and Morris have determined that, since you forcibly took office six and a half Earth-years ago, belief in Me has skyrocketed while faith in that little socialist bastard Jesus Christ has flat-lined. But trends show a growing planet-wide disgust with evil. And all you seem to manage is to put a face on it — a smug, sweaty face at that. This makes Me look ridiculous, and an entity in My position cannot afford to look ridiculous.

Most recently, you've been telling people you're not part of the executive branch of the US government. No kidding! You are on loan to the RNC from the bowels of hell, and it is the bowels of hell to which you shall return! And there you shall remain — unless, of course, I reassign you as a soul-skimmer in one of those lovely mega-slums, which are such a necessary part of the corporate profiteering that's led to the purchase of both American political parties for such low, low prices!

Make no mistake about it, Cheney, your undead status is under review. I can't put it any clearer than that. And even if you somehow do manage to escape diabolic recall, you'll be back here anyway if you keep eating those bacon cheeseburgers. (Even My powers are limited.)

What smell?

BARRY CRIMMINS — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 13:28:21 GMT

2006: A second-quarter scorecard — summer fiction bonanza
It’s always summer to George W. Bush, our lazy, hazy, crazy commander in chief who puts in shorter presidential work weeks than Woodrow Wilson did after he was paralyzed by a stroke.

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH: The most sensational publicity campaign since The China Syndrome.

It’s always summer to George W. Bush, our lazy, hazy, crazy commander in chief who puts in shorter presidential work weeks than Woodrow Wilson did after he was paralyzed by a stroke. Having stolen his way into the Oval Office what now seems to be several bad lifetimes ago, GW has treated us to a scorching five years that have inflicted on the world a pandemic of son burn. We have been continually baited and switched by an administration that promises sinsemilla and delivers oregano. As we sweat out the fifth summer of this affront to everything this nation could be, we all need a break.

For those of us who have resisted television’s answer to the morphine patch and live Tivo-less lives, summer is still a time to catch up on reading. Reading books is increasingly quaint because, truth told, the average American reads about as often as Donald Rumsfeld peruses the Geneva Accords. Some of us now absorb the written word by ear, from books on tape or CD, as we drive from one job to the next in the struggle to survive what Bush touts as “economic expansion” — itself a fictional depiction of growth that’s really an insidious weed creeping from beneath the gates of mansions to strangle what’s left of middle-class American life.

But some of us still get time off and will be reading at vacation cottages — though this year, the shore line will probably be several feet closer to the veranda. On the bright side, after a stormy spring that left rivers overflowing like Halliburton’s vaults, many formerly landlocked properties have skyrocketed in value due to the addition of beach frontage.

Climactic shifts have become so obvious that Al Gore’s nonfiction An Inconvenient Truth, a Seurat-worthy mural of environmentally friendly fuel-injected power-points, was rolled out to the most sensational act-of-God publicity campaign since Three Mile Island provided jillowats of juice for The China Syndrome. Gore certainly provided a vigorous (by boneless Democratic Party standards) reminder of where our priorities could have been if it weren’t for the madmen warmongers who stole his rightful job. Talk about inconvenience …

But it’s almost August and, at least at the moment, the sun is shining and daisies and black-eyed Susans are swaying in a tender zephyr. It feels positively lyrical, so why ruin it with thoughts of madmen warmongers? It’s time to pursue a gentler agenda of lovely days spent lazing about and flipping through pages of mindless fiction.

Schmucks unlimited

BARRY CRIMMINS — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 18:58:26 GMT

2006: A first-quarter scorecard
It’s April, supposedly the cruelest month, but after a winter that seemed like 150 days of March, how bad can it be?

It’s April, supposedly the cruelest month, but after a winter that seemed like 150 days of March, how bad can it be? After all, April means spring, Daylight-Saving Time, and warmer temperatures. That's not so cruel. And April is when the umpire yells, “Play Ball” — in some cases with Major League Baseball’s steroid investigators. still, it's nice to think about heading back to the ballpark.

Of course, April is also tax time, when all but a microscopic slice of society too wealthy to be bothered with such piddling matters ante up so that George W. Bush can pay the vig on his five-year hocking of America. So fork it over lest Uncle Scam be left unable to enrich his cronies and perpetuate the wholesale massacre of the Iraqi people, and while he’s in the neighborhood, maybe the Iranians, too. Speak out in protest, and you may quickly learn that it’s also latter-day Scoundrel Time, the label Lillian Hellman pasted on another era when fascistic character assassins operated unchallenged by those who knew better.

Anyway, it’s time for a bit of spring cleaning — time to round up the national experience and put the embarrassing low points of First Quarter 2006 neatly on the curb for pickup and disposal into the dustbin of history. Pray that we do not recycle.

Blasted republicans
In his State of the Union address, in January, George W. Bush told us, “Abroad, our nation is committed to an historic, long-term goal — we seek the end of tyranny in our world.” Which is kind of like the producers of American Idol calling for the restoration of dignity in the performing arts. The event marked the first official public appearance of Justice Joseph Alito, who had just been confirmed to the Supreme Court. Alito looked understandably woozy after a meteoric two-generation ascension from struggling immigrant to robed enemy of the working class. A few weeks later, the man Alito looks to as his “unitary executive” (your one-stop fop for all your authoritarian needs!) attended Coretta Scott King’s funeral. Republicans and several media wags (but I repeat myself) were shocked, shocked!, that speakers used the occasion to nonviolently point out how much the prez and his administration suck. For his part, Bush got through the solemn affair by graciously smirking whenever the orators indicted his policies.