Throw the bedbug plague in with all the other signs of national decay. With transience in housing now part of the national structure due to the Great Recession, it’s provided bedbugs with a superhighway to new digs everywhere.
The things crawl in
The things crawl out
The bedbugs prance across your snout
The neighbors have all come and gone
But something else is always home
Spray some Raid around the bed
So to bedbugs you are not fed
Bedbugs are always free!
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha
Spray some Raid on your nightshirt
It looks better than bedbug dirt
If you detect a sudden itch
There’s always more, it’s just a —–
If you tell of bedbug bite
No friends or presents will come at night
Bedbugs tell of social justice
There ain’t none
It’s the relentless China-is-wonderful gig. Reporting from Tianjin, Tom advises that Chinese are set to beat us again, this time in above-ground “green” plastic-mining.
He finds two sources, one a flack for Chinese innovation, another someone named Mike Biddle, the standard American businessman — this one rationalizing the shipping of most of his work overseas because he just can’t afford enough lobbyists to get Washington to listen to his plan to create plastic mines from discarded computer junk for him. All our fault!
This is Friedman’s brain at work. Meet a flack and a businessman at some economic meeting of the wealthy where he can undertake the job of official ass-sniffer while masquerading as someone sifting through cutting-edge brain power. Then whip out a column on the farting. wisdom emitted.
“China is changing from the factory of the world to the clean-tech laboratory of the world,??? said the flack for Tom. Tom would have said it, but since he had the p.r. person for the “Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy” around …
Last week, Tom told us we all needed to adopt more Confucian values because we aren’t sacrificing enough.
If you Google Tom Friedman and pie you get pages of stuff on the man being pelted with green whipped cream while onstage at Brown in 2008.
Unsurprisingly, almost everyone was rooting for the pie throwers — before and after.
The video is on Youtube in a couple spots. It’s great footage of Friedman slipping about and eventually giving up. If you were a two-time Pulitzer winner, would you have let a couple pies upset you? No! I bet you’d just have smiled, shouted some defiance at the auditorium and continued your speech.
Here’s this blog’s Tom Friedman Blooz, homemade video of the pie incident with a hodgepodge of senseless quote taken from Friedman columns (including today’s) on China. It’s set to the “China Toilet Blooz Reprise,” a Captain Beefheart-styled outro to the original I’ve been flogging.
The Biddle fellow, according to Friedman, is based in California. And he’d keep 250 whole jobs here. But we just don’t have those booming above-ground plastic mines.
More Tea Party music, this time set to Bob Seger tracks “Like a Rock” and “Turn the Page.”
“They Liked Barack” is the better of the two. It had me laughing — sometimes by real intent. Whatever the reason, the softer approach than usual Tea Party material works.
“Change the Change” — hmmm, could’ve used a better central lyric. “Unemployed again …” is good, even though it confuses the crashed economy for the middle class with the arrival of Obama.
Nb: The ChangetheChange fellow also rebrands Paul Simon’s Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover as Fifty Ways to Save Our Country. The karoake track betrays him a little when the background singers come in. But it’s made up for by his swimming pool shot.
Since DD blog is on Yahoo, I get a daily dose of the sites “news department.”
Everyday there’s stuff on “hot jobs,” or “how to get a job,” or how you probably f—– up your resume, your interview and life. And after being out of work so long you’re hardcore unemployable, so pay someone for ersatz reintegration and skills training now.
It’s part of an industry of parasitism, one designed to make money from those who have little but who also happen to be looking fruitlessly for work in a wrecked economy.
One facet, for example, is the current job fair.
“Job fairs” are now places where you go to find an opportunity to give your money to an assortment of lampreys and hagfish. Five hundred dollars down and we’ll train you to be able to work in an insurance office, no guarantee of work or placement though, buddy.
What years ago started out as a way to launch people into work is simply turned over to parasite businesses which thrive on unemployment and desperation, psychologically and financially chiseling the afflicted.
Believe it or not, there are even state government training courses to teach the unemployed how to be unemployment counselors.
However, even the readers know it’s a joke. In the broke economy, the jobless are not actually able to run out and invest in a four-year college degree for Yahoo’s hottest jobs. Over the weekend, the hot jobs were financial analysts (you know, the bankster industry) and teachers.
Today, it’s nurses, accountants and software engineers.
Tomorrow it will be bedpan technicians or windmill repairmen. Do you like mucous and/or great heights?
The best quotes are in the comments, where nobody is really buying the horseshit as practical or even good.
The fastest growing market in the recession is in the market of buying lots of goods at bargain basement prices. I have a 6 month leave from my employer, and had the means to move and just shop for the time being. This guy at the table next to [me] bought a T-shirt at OLD NAVY for 49 cents. For the consumer with means the recession [is] like a permanent sale.
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Americans do not appreciate their industrial heritage. Their shrinking industrial base. We have invented massive numbers of products and inventions now taken for granted. What happened?
What our kids see on TV is models, lawyers, cooks, entertainment elite, sports rich. They do not see reality.
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We now have a government that is closer to the labor unions than any government in the last 50 years. You show me one industry other than government employees that is heavily unionized and survives and grows jobs. It dont happen.
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If you buy foreign cars and foreign refrigs and other high ticket items you are part of the problem. You are not the greedy corporation sending jobs overseas.
If you want prosperity for your children – then understand that we need a industrial base. Right here in the USA
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Well that is great for a young person…What Jobs are avilable for people between 50 and 62 ( before the Republicans raise the retirement age ) supposed to be avilable???
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My grandfather worked in the mines. My father was a life long dairy farmer. What happened to these jobs?
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I do not know where they got the information. I do not see any hiring for accountants and auditors. I have been looking work as an accountant for two years, and I have not heard the word, you are hired. Companies have been shipping work to overseas.
And here, another fitting musical one-minute interlude from US of Fail:
For Labor Day, most likely a lot of college football, too.
Did he watch the Great Recession on his gadget?
Brad Paisley’s “Welcome to the Future,” coupled with the video, morphed into a public exhibition of his love for consumer electronics, the dancing robot, veterans on sprung metal legs and cute-overloaded children, launched just as the economy crashed for the middle class.
I was a little bitty baby
I was rocked in the cradle
In an old Middle Class-style home
Now that I’m old and broke
I wanna give the rich a poke
In those big places they call home
We’re gonna invite ourselves to dinner
And shoot ’em in the kisser
And raze their ritzy mansions to the ground
It won’t be very hard
To piss in the front yards
Of all the shiny houses they called homes
We’re gonna pull ’em out of cars
And dip ’em in some tar
Then throw ’em in a hole and have a laugh
We’re gonna find a big ol’ oak
Hang ’em all ’til they croak
In America, the place that we call home
In America, the place that we call home
In America, the place that we call …
You see the mainstreamed face of extremism, those who hold the central belief that it’s the others — the lazy poor who will take your money, the enemy within which hates the soldiers, those who don’t pray in public — pitted against all the good people, now in rebellion, who believe in guns and the bible.
Skynyrd’s profile now, beyond the Nugent bottom-out-of-sight casino circuit, is boosted only by classic rock radio oldies programming and the involvement of Fox News, in this case — Sean Hannity.
Ironically, it’s their only leg up in the music world. Although revered by every act on country music television, the industry will never play this Lynyrd Skynyrd. With an eye to building a younger audience, one that likes Taylor Swift and Lady Antebellum way more than Toby Keith, they’re atavistic bad news. (Even despite Van Zant’s hit, “Get Right With the Man,” from a few years back.)
Consider the title of the band’s latest album, “God & Guns.” Besides being one word away from being U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe’s platform since 1994, the song contains the following lines:
“There ain’t nobody safe no more
So you say your prayers and you thank the Lord
For that peace maker in the dresser drawer
God and guns keep us strong
That’s what this country was founded on
Well we might as well give up and run
If we let them take our God and guns.”
It’s a long way from the sentiments expressed in the band’s 1975 song, “Saturday Night Special,” which includes the lines “Hand guns are made for killin’/Ain’t no good for nothin’ else.”
A little more than the reporter lets on.
Most of Lynyrd Skynyrd is long dead.
Half of the band was wiped out in the famous plane crash of 1977, one which ended its recording career. Almost all the rest — gone from hard-living and the disease and misadventure associated with it since. The only surviving member actually in the band now is guitarist Gary Rossington.
One could make a discussion about how this band’s writing differs from the subtlety of “Sweet Home Alabama” and the mythology that evolved from the song over the years:
“In Birmingham they love the governor/Boo boo boo”
But it’s probably more logical to attribute the loss in intellect and spirit to the fact that 90 percent of the act is dead. And now they do what they can do for the Nugent circuit. Boo boo boo.
Like so many others, it’s quite something to make the mass delusion — “they’re gonna take my guns and my bible” — your defining world view as well as the backbone of a record by a band with a famous name.
Mass delusion, in fact, may be a little too mild a term.
Shared psychosis is more accurate, a sickness built on group fear in a hard time, nourished and stimulated by cynical and very real villainy, Fox News’ broadcast of barely veiled intolerance, always directed at the others. It’s a search for scapegoats and backstabbers. You’ve tuned into Glenn Beck and one day he’s jabbering about the Weimar Republic and how a video snip of Liza Minelli in Cabaret is sexually decadent, the next — how the country was founded to be a theocracy and that this has been expunged from history books.
It may be cause for alarm in other western nations. Observers can’t help but see that a noticeable portion of the country appears incapable of rational thought, unreachable through reasoned argument.
Ignorance and Fox News alone, for example, do not precisely explain why one in five people believe the president is Muslim, today’s big news.
What’s certain is that this won’t turn around anytime soon. The old journalist structures left in the mainstream media aren’t up to the task. To them, the one-in-five story is just another news item, one to be leavened with a paragraph saying the president does go to church and pray. (Or worse, finding a semi-egghead in 30 minutes to provide a few quotes for something that takes on an air of refinement and reason, blithely putting most of it away to human nature.)
You think the Skynyrd 2.0 or 3.0 guys believe what they read in newspapers? Rhetorical question.
Those who pay attention to these things may have noticed that a good number of modern country artists scurry sub rosa to Fox News when presented with the opportunity. For example, the musically apolitical Trace Adkins — his new album, Cowboy’s Back in Town, is actually quite good — is the latest example.
Another mental inconsistency in the white man’s country music is how so many of the manly guy artists make a big deal out of supporting the troops. They do it in song. They blabber it in interview. God bless ’em, they even play overseas and publicize it as much as they can. But for all the public devotion to the honor of service, not one single man among them, strapping men of action as they are portrayed by Nashville, took the example of Pat Tillman and ran with it.
DD has it figured this way: It’s overcompensation. As committed as they are to the mythology of their music and reverence to Uncle Sam, they’re subconsciously feeling guilty as hell over not stepping up to be in the war. So they feel they can work it off with penance.
Good news, lads! Good news! The Tea Party does really bad hard rock, too.
I was gonna get into the genre of white folk music “Obama anthems” with Photoshopped Obama Hitlers and ObamaSatans but there were way too many. Your browsers would crash.
Here. Wait for your WM Player to come up. QuickTime version here.
This country doesn’t make stuff for everyone anymore. No jobs. It’s kaput.
Now — if you can qualify for a gig designing electric cars or high-end custom shop guitars for the super rich (or 3-D blockbuster movies or flying robots for assassinating people in other countries), we can really get somewhere.
