Heller Mountain

Forfeit

I am not an American. None of us are. No such thing exists today.

"Divided, We Fell". That's next week's headline whether the economy collapses or continues teetering like a house of cards. Whether we throw a 7, an 11 or Snake Eyes.

Welcome to the bottom of the slippery slope. No, no... Don't try to climb back up; you'll only embarrass yourself. And we've already had plenty of embarrassment, pumped into us from front and back, without relent.

By now, we should be numb to it.

I grew up in a great country, they taught us in school. And it seemed that way until after I had moved away from the quiet, maple-strewn cul-de-sac where I grew up. Then I began to see. And hear.

Through the whine and static of AM radio, it came. Anger. Hate. Ridicule. Calumny. Bigotry. Misogyny. All of the things that our teachers told us we had defeated. The crimes that brought the Red, White and Blue wrath down on our enemies.

Today, the Bad People are on TV. They're all over the Internet. They've been elected to our highest levels of government - largely in states that once identified as Confederate, so, perhaps not surprising. But no less harmful.

They were only able to do this because of corporate bankrolling. Corporations don't care who is in power as long as the powerful are friendly to them. And if the ones who appeal to the lowest common denominator are the ones who end up in office, that is where the pandering goes. It's a two-way street...

Or it was, until the GQP started messing with giant entities, like Anheuser-Busch and Disney. But even if Corporate non-America gets its shit together and rejects the Rabid Right, it will only be because of their bottom line. Not because they believe in the things that most of us believe in.

And they still won't be paying their fair share in taxes. That, we know. Which brings us to the debt ceiling. The national debt is now over $31 trillion; it was $5.6 trillion when Bill Clinton left office. The annual tax revenue brought in by the IRS is a clearly insufficient $2.3 trillion, much of that being taken from hard-working (formerly) American families.

The United States will default on its debt obligations next week, largely because of the inactions of the same Republicans who mock school shootings, who profit from pollution, who enjoy racism, who view intolerance as a legal tool. These are not responsible people, and yet we pay them $174,000 a year each (which in no way explains the obscene wealth possessed by most of them).

What Ri¢hie Ri¢h doesn't seem to realize, though, is that we are not the ones who are going to suffer when the economy collapses. Most of us already know how to properly prepare Top Ramen. Some of us even know how to hunt, how to fish, how to chop wood, how to steal. We might not like it, but we'll get through it, and we may even look back on it fondly someday. Just as some of us may fondly look back and remember America.

But that's not what this is anymore.

See you next week. Amid the rubble.

- Paul Heller, Thursday, 25th May, 2023

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Child's Play

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things. - 1 Corinthians 13:11

America's is a depressing culture. It has been from the very beginning, and has not changed much over the years, occasional bouts of ebullience notwithstanding. This is not to equate our Western woes with those of our foes in places like Russia or North Korea (which veer into madness and misery), but still, look at us:

We're not happy unless we're not happy.

The not-happiest of us all: The Children. Like the song goes, life was easy when I was a kid, and who among us wouldn't like to spend his/her time meandering down Memory Lane? We all remember the nest. We all remember getting nudged out of it.

The adults of tomorrow, however, are not likely to look back fondly on the childhoods they are leading today. How could they possibly? Forget about the pandemic, the active-shooter drills, the cyber-bullying, or the fading away of so many species. Ignore the political rancor. Our contemporary tykes have no time for such realities; there's work to be done.

Child labor has come back to America in the 2020s. The hyper-dynamics of our wee workforce tumble in all directions. Whether it's a McDonald's franchisee or an Iowa farmer, employers have seemingly exhausted their resources where the talent pool is concerned, and are now dipping into the workforce's minnow bucket.

Painfully obviously, there's no feasibility to study in this. By most laws, kids can't be put to work, so many of these cases are illegal through and through (only with civil penalties rather than criminal ones). And many of the young victims are, you know, not from around here. So they would not know that this is something we left behind long ago.

In school, when I was a pupil, we learned about the horrors of child labor. The stories were gruesome in nature (like much of our history): Tiny, trembling hands reaching into the tight spaces among the cogs and gears of the Industrial Revolution... We shuddered accordingly and went back to our finger-painting.

Whether or not those Dickensian nightmares were actually true remains to be seen as staffing shortages push the profiteers further and further into our playgrounds. Many (red) states are trying to make sure it happens - as long as we're talking about big, strong kids.

One would think that the kindling of capitalism itself would be enough of a driver to get these young punks to punch the same time clock as their parents. Want a phone? It takes money. Oreo Blizzard? Takes money. Shoes you'd prefer? Money.

When I was a kid, to be sure, there was always plenty of work to be done. Some kids ended up at the concession stand counter. Others had newspaper routes. Or ended up corn de-tasseling. In some seasons, we raked leaves, or shoveled driveways. In others, we mowed lawns and washed cars. Or had babysitting gigs. Or lemonade stands.

The key difference, though, is that we wanted those jobs - even competed for them. We weren't much forced to do anything too unpleasant. It wasn't meat-packing.

If this republic cannot live up to the ideals that were presented to me as a young person, then it isn't worth keeping, period. If America cannot fulfill the promises that each generation makes to the next, then it is no better than any of those other places that we despise and fear so bloody much.

No kidding.

- Paul Heller, Friday, 5th May, 2023

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Words That Rhyme with 'Tucker'

See me ride out of the sunset on your color TV screen/Out for all that I can get, if you know what I mean - AC/DC

It has been a chilly Spring so far in Southwest Michigan, but the fishing is already good. Yesterday, casting off the boat dock on Little Paw Paw Lake, I hooked into a good size largemouth bass. I unceremoniously dragged it up onto the boat ramp, got the pliers out, and started working to back the hook out of its cheek. And it occurred to me that I felt sorrier for that poor fish than I do for Tucker Carlson.

Just like Fox News did, I let the thing go, albeit for very different reasons.

"Be patient and calm; no one can catch fish in anger." - Herbert Hoover

Six years ago, the retread Carlson replaced the disgraced Bill O'Reilly at Fox. O'Reilly had been the chief provocateur at the extremist far-right cable news network for a very long time, and Carlson had big shoes to fill. Which he did. Before long, he had run off most of the remaining sponsors from his predecessor's tenure.

Ad revenue notwithstanding, Carlson's not-subtle dog-whistle racism - about as attractive as his neck flab - gave Fox News what it wanted: Ratings. A subsequent lawsuit filed by a former producer at the network alleges that Carlson also ran the same kind of aggressively sexualized workplace as Bill-O had... Predictable, though not admirable.

"There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech." - Idi Amin

Everything was going so swimmingly for all parties concerned until just after the 2020 election. That's when a number of Fox News personalities decided to ride or die with Donald Trump as he flailed and railed about his failed re-election bid. Carlson was pretty much the captain on that ship of fools.

Perpetuating such bombastic falsehoods eventually got his employer sued for defamation by Dominion, a company that makes voting machines. Having been sued for defamation myself, I can tell you, it is no fun - unless you win. I did; Fox News did not.

"A man is not finished when he is defeated. A man is finished when he quits." - Richard M. Nixon

Tucker Carlson signed off on his last program by stating he would see everyone on Monday - finally telling his last lie. But we don't need to worry about him. His middle name, after all, is "Swanson" (don't laugh, it's not polite). His family fortune makes him, if nothing else, the Chicken Broth Man. So he was rich before he was even born. And all of this is a stupid game to him.

Carlson was not, however, the only talking head to leave the airwaves yesterday. CNN released longtime host and news anchor Don Lemon. He will also be okay, leveraging book deals and speaking engagements to make lemonade out of lemons, just as Carlson should still be able to make chicken broth out of chickenshit.

"You're fired." - Donald Trump

Hateful Tucker was hardly the first domino, and perhaps not the last, to fall as Fox scrambled to mitigate the damage done by its red-light talent. Mushy Lou Dobbs was the first to walk the plank. The disturbing Jeanine Pirro was fed to the sharks shortly thereafter. That did not satisfy Dominion's hunger, and as the suit dragged on, it became clear that Defendant Fox could not win.

They settled for about three quarters of a billion dollars, and there is rampant speculation that part of the agreement must have included the removal of Carlson from the airwaves. From a shareholder's standpoint, it probably wasn't a very hard decision to make. There will always be another Tucker Carlson, unfortunately, and the network wishes to be around to exploit that for profits... To the detriment of us all.

- Paul Heller, Tuesday, 25th April, 2023

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Take It From The TOP

"It would have been more comfortable to remain silent." - Anita Hill

God knows, when it comes to love of being more comfortable, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas* shares the feelings of the woman who testified against him at his Senate confirmation hearing in the millennium preceding this one. The revelations that have been brought to light about Thomas* (and his weird wife) being treated so amazingly well by a billionaire benefactor effectively drives a golden stake through the heart of our beloved princess, Appearance of Impropriety.

Island getaways, private jets, men's-only retreats and many, many meals were "gifted" to Clarence* and Ginny, and to hear the government tell it, no laws or hearts were broken. If a wealthy man like Harlan Crow - son of Jim? - wants to piss his fortune away by buying access to the Supreme Court, that's just a function of capitalism, don't you know?

No, you don't know. Or care. I get it. But at least now you do know why the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United - so that dark cash could be sprayed all over everybody at the Party.

Old Crow, though, isn't the only one filling the insatiable bellies of our public officials. He's just a bejeweled emblem of the problems. A billion problems.

In a country where wages haven't gained one yard against inflation since most of us were born, a certain class of people are happy to spend more money in one evening than most families see in a year, just to pamper their pet politicians. But nobody values every last dime like a billionaire does - you can bet your bottom dollar that they make a profit on an investment like that.

They used to prefer anonymity, but once Citizens United hit the fan, the uber-wealthy suddenly flooded the dance floor. Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Jerry Jones, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon, George Soros, Mark Cuban, Michael Bloomberg, Charles Koch, Robert Mercer... Did I miss anybody? Oh, yeah, Donald Trump. They bought the world stage. Without even pooling their money.

In short, the United States has become the world's lone Superfiefdom. Meanwhile, we scramble to pay the bills, to put food on the table and medicine in our bodies, hoping to have enough left over to spend on booze and women and movies.

Can we, the Bottom Ninety-Nine Percent, flip the script? Sure. It's called "taxation". Look at what top rate-payers had to give back to the nation that tolerated their existence during our postwar boom, a time when some feel America Was Great. And what did those 90 points do for the rest of us?

Everything.

Well, now there are a lot more of us than there were back then. Nobody's needs have changed. And nobody has gained anything, as fewer and fewer people continue to control more and more of the money. It works great for them; it doesn't work at all for us.

It's not payback time...

It's clawback time.

* - estimated annual salary: $285,000.00

- Paul Heller, Sunday, 16th April, 2023

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