Monday, February 11, 2013


Fred on Everything  
Scurrilous Commentary by Fred Reed

Fred Reed


The New Soviet Asylum
"You will take this pill, comrade."

by Fred Reed 

January 5, 2013

Today I’m going to explain why gun-control is not only entirely reasonable but also certain to be effective. Only the ignorant can deny this.
First, some orientation.  Cement-headed NRA types need to recognize, and state manfully, that the illegalization of guns is in fact perfectly practical. History has shown this repeatedly. When the government outlaws something that huge numbers of people very much want, the outlawed items immediately disappear from society. This has been shown countless times.
When Washington outlawed alcohol, booze vanished overnight and everyone stopped drinking. Can anyone deny this? When Washington banned the use of cannabis, all of those of us made insane by Reefer Madness quit smoking dope, and today there is probably not a town in America in which one might buy a joint. Similarly, Washington made illegal the downloading of copyrighted music—which also stopped immediately. No one now has illegal music. Ask your adolescent daughter.
So with guns.  They are small, easily smuggled, of high value to criminals and will be of higher value when only criminals have them, so it is virtually certain that they will vanish when the government says so.
Mexico, where I live, has stringent laws against guns, which have proved at least a partial success. Criminals have AKs, RPGs, and grenades, while nobody else has anything. That’s a partial success, isn’t it?
While I am in favor of illegalizing guns and thus ending crime, I think the principle should be democratically applied. Let us begin by disarming the Pentagon. If this seems unreasonable, ask yourself: who kills more children in a month, Ritalin-addled little boys in America, or the US Air Force in every Moslem country it has heard of? All I ask is an honest body count. I will accept your numbers.
But let’s ask the question which, being critical, ain’t asked. I suppose it makes no sense to confuse ourselves with the essentials of things. Anyway, why have American school boys, who in my rural Virginia high-school of 1964 were armed to the eyeballs with deer guns and varmint rifles, and never shot anybody intentionally or accidentally, or had the idea pass through their whirring libido-crazed minds, if any—suddenly start shooting their friends in school? Why now?
We who wended our strange ways through the Sixties know that lengthy use of psychoactive stimulants produces…wild ideas and worse behavior. For example, Ritalin, the first drug I ever tried, in Istanbul—or dex, or…lots of others…produces crashes as we called them, ferocious depressions accompanied by inability to sleep, anger, and irrationality. We’re talking serious psychosis in a bottle. I’ve known speed freaks consistently to ignore stop lights, not bothering to look to either side. And what do they give little boys bored with schools run by intellectual termites?
But let’s look at the question from a different angle. This column is a repository of perfect understanding of everything, and occasionally likes to let a bit of wisdom dribble forth. Herewith a dribble:
The problem is that we don’t have anything worthwhile to do.
Used to be, almost everybody worked on farms, because they wanted to eat. Being males, the males killed each other, neighboring tribes, and all reachable nationalities, but they generally did not murder their own children—though anyone who has been a parent can understand the temptation. People were too busy making stuff that mattered—food, clothes, roofs.
Then farming got automated, so people started making other things that were sensible. Refrigerators. Penicillin. Actual glass for windows. Electricity.
As time went by, nearly everything people really had any use for got made, mostly by automation. This meant two things. First, consumerism became essential to keep the economy going. Nobody much needed designer water, or Farrumcoochie boots, or SUVs, or McMansions with enough space for a large colony of Barbary apes. Which typically they contained. These things were kinda fun, like Corvettes and iPads and whoopee cushions, but hardly vital. Mostly nobody would have thought of buying them if not beaten about the head and shoulders with advertising campaigns subtle as a sock full of hog kidneys.
The second part of the bog of consumerism was that all of this deplorable nonsense was rolling off automated assembly lines. Consequently, people didn’t have anything to do that needed doing or that wouldn’t have been better not done. Yet they still wanted to eat. Two solutions offered: The Democratic, which was to give everybody everything he wanted as an entitlement, and the Republican, which was to have people work their lives away in meaningless jobs that allowed them to buy the unnecessary things advertising told them they wanted. This required the creation of huge numbers of meaningless jobs. Of course, it was politically wiser not to describe them just this way.
An obvious and expandable source of unwork was the government. Conservatives always say that they don’t like big government, but their choice is to pay federal drones to occupy offices pointlessly or else to fire them and put them on obvious welfare. Being decayed Calvinists, conservatives choose the former.
Consider this seriously. The United States has no military enemies, or only those of its own manufacture. Suppose it simply fired the entire force. Whole towns would die overnight with the bases that they support, the troops would go on unemployment, and the vast discreet industries that make unnecessary weapons would unemploy uncounted families.
For that matter, do you really believe that the Department of Education, Commerce, HUD, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs do anything worth doing? But we can’t just fire them because there is nothing for them to do other than the nothing that they are already doing.
But even government couldn’t supply the demand for JAI (Job-Appearing Indolence). However, the inexhaustible fertility of the American uneconomy welled up to fill the gap. Nail parlors popped appeared. Bureaucracies in public schools grew to outnumber the students. Enormous school systems in places like DC and Detroit hired educrats like the sands of the sea who taught nothing to anyone, reasonably enough since they didn’t know anything.
Universities decided that all children needed to go to college, though a maximum of fifteen percent had the intelligence or the desire. This produced a mother lode of Job-Appearing Indolence as professors of low grade churned out grammatically frightening attempts at research whose chief virtue was that no one read it.
So, panting, we come to murder as economic flywheel.
 Suburbia contains a lot of unpleasantly nice people, in particular effeminate men and bored housewives with a Mussolini complex, who want power, money, and something to fill the empty hours. Enter psychotherapy. This is quietly a very big industry. Anybody who is mildly unhappy—and who wouldn’t be, working in a pointless unjob?—is urged to Seek Professional Help. The Helpess—they are usually but not always female—will establish a vaguely sadomasochist relationship with  you  in which you, or your teenage daughter, will be forced to reveal the most intimate and embarrassing details of her inner head. The Helpess will then prescribe at least one and perhaps several forms of suburban soma—Prozac, Depakote, Welbutrin, Ritalin—which frequently have unpredictable but document ably awful effects on brain chemistry. These drugs are heavily—heavily—promoted by Big Pharma, which is the supply arm of the business of compulsory doping of American children,  just as Lockheed-Martin is the supply arm of the Pentagon’s burning of Asian children. There’s money in this, boys and girls. Lots of it. Especially in ADD, anorexia, and bulimia, which didn’t exist until the Helpesses needed them to be in the DSM-IV so insurance companies would pay for treating them. (Stray thought: Why were at least half of the childless women in their—tick-tick-tick—thirties I dated in Washington taking some happy-pill or other?)
But enough. I´ve got a bright idea. (I told you we do bright ideas here.) In a country in which everyone has access to machetes, ice picks, guns, and straight razors, let’s keep putting little boys on half-understood psychotropics, Ritalin,what have you, and expose all of them to crystal. Big Pharma is too important to die. Kids don’t seem to be


All original material©Violeta de Jesus Gonzalez Munguia
www.FredOnEverything.net

14 comments:

  1. I love Fred Reed.

    Did you just stumble upon him?

    He is horribly politically-incorrect and he gores all oxen regardless of ideology.

    He is what our press should be.

    I love these formulations:

    "And what do they give little boys bored with schools run by intellectual termites?"

    "Intellectual termites" describes our entire "education" industry, top to bottom. Not to denigrate teachers. The good ones, freed from the clutches of government bureaucrats, would remake the system and actually teach our kids.

    I also appreciate gems like this, which flow from his pen in every article he writes...

    "Suburbia contains a lot of unpleasantly nice people, in particular effeminate men and bored housewives with a Mussolini complex."

    ReplyDelete
  2. I agree with Curt. You've found a real diamond in the rough, FT. He call a spade a spade and makes powerful point doing so.

    ReplyDelete
  3. These drugs are heavily—heavily—promoted by Big Pharma, which is the supply arm of the business of compulsory doping of American children, just as Lockheed-Martin is the supply arm of the Pentagon’s burning of Asian children. There’s money in this, boys and girls.

    -----
    Hardly a shattering revelation but at least he's managed to understand that Kapital owns our collective ass.

    If anyone denies this they are blind.
    The rest should be asking what we can do about it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I love it when old guys accuse suburbian men of being "effeminate." It would seem for a time that society went backwards. To be "manly" in the ancient Greek sense meant that you were virtuous. To be manly in the Machiavellian sense meant that you were one who was able to seize fortune and make it work to your advantage.

    Then somewhere along the line someone thought that being "manly" meant that your primary employment comes from manual labor or what you like to do in your spare time (hunting, fishing, sports). This isn't the stone age.

    100 years from now, humans will look upon Fred's version of manliness and remark of how antiquated it sounds. No one will know anyone who still feels that way. And that's not a bad thing. In fact, it's a good thing, because someone who is able to realize that those sort of things are arbitrary and ultimately meaningless is someone who is able to focus on what really matters in his or her life.

    Fred's conclusions about gun control I agreed with (in terms of banning guns and the innefficacy of prohibition), but everything else is pretty far off base, and it's indicative of an old guy wishing that everything could be the way it used to be.

    To all of you old timers (sorry FT): Just because it was true and it worked 50 years ago doesn't necessarily mean it's true and works TODAY. Evolve or die (surely the social darwinists can appreciate that sentiment).

    ReplyDelete
  5. Here's Ducky:

    Surely you are not offering as an alternative that we turn our owned "collective ass" over to Big Government?

    Big Pharma, Big Kapital, Big Government: A Three-Headed Monster.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Suburbia contains a lot of unpleasantly nice people...

    Apparently, Fred has met my NLRB neighbor, the neighbor who dumps all her raked leaves and lawn clippings on my lot, which is across the street from her house.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Jack, I think it would broaden your horizons, sharpen your perceptions, increase your understanding and otherwise benefit you greatly, if you read Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind.

    If you've already ready it by any chance, please read it AGAIN.

    I know you have studied "history" and political "science," but have you examined in any depth the philosophy, literature, poetry, music, theater, fashions, culinary developments, architecture, religious values, and advances in engineering, medical arts and technology that inspired, informed, shaped and nourished the events and trends whose existence you've catalogued?

    In truth ALL fields are interrelated. No one can know all there is to know -- or even half of what we've forgotten -- but unless we rise above over-specialization, which tends to give us tunnel vision, we could never begin to comprehend the context into which the myriad details we've crammed into our heads belongs or the ways in which much of it might best enhance the quality of daily life.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Somehow, I doubt, AOW, that Mr. Reed had anyone like your obnoxious neighbor in mind when he used the phrase "unpleasantly nice" to describe the way suburbanites tend to relate to one another.

    I'm pretty sure he was thinking more of the hypocritical mask of politeness and pretended interest people show one another that thinly disguises boredom, contempt, vanity, shallowness and the ever present desire to "find evidence" that might put oneself in a position to influence or dominate others in achieving one's own purposes, etc.

    CIty Councils, Churches, PTA's, "Service Clubs," Scout Troops, Garden Clubs and Bridge Clubs, etc. are full of this kind of thing.

    Without hypocrisy "polite society" would cease to exist within minutes -- possibly seconds. ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  9. Thank you Mr. Fouts, (Should I, perhaps, call you Conan? ;-) You seem to appreciate Mr. Reed more fully than the others. Yes. I have very recently learned of his existence through a private correspondent of some years who hails from -- Beantown!!! -- if you would believe? [Yes, Virginia, a few Conservatives really do live in Boston.]

    Mr. Reed helps to fill in the gap created by the supremely unfortunate absence of Michael Savage from the airwaves.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Canardo, like all leftists, fails to see -- or refuses to admit -- that a tyrannical government is as bad -- and probably much worse -- than gigantic global industries.

    Very very very very few seem to realize that what we live with today is the hideous MERGER of Government with Big Business -- an alliance that truly has --softly, stealthily, ruthlessly, relentlessly over many decades of scheming and manipulation -- turned "The Little Man" into a de facto galley slave once again.

    ReplyDelete
  11. "Canardo, like all leftists, fails to see -- or refuses to admit -- that a tyrannical government is as bad -- and probably much worse -- than gigantic global industries."

    Well said.

    I can refuse to patronize a business, but it is illegal for me to resist the smothering embrace of the feral government.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Thanks, Conan. Please visit us as often as you can.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Whats the sense of watching the Crap-Sandwich tonight, He'll just blame the Republicans for his failure(s).... then Blame Bush.

    That should tell you EVERYTHING you need to know about Obozo's SOTU address..
    If you look up failure in the dictionary you'll find a picture of Barack Hussein Obozo.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Doubtless you spoke basic truth, RR.

    ReplyDelete

IF YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND THE FOLLOWING, YOU DON'T BELONG HERE, SO KINDLY GET OUT AND STAY OUT.

We welcome Conversation
But without Vituperation.
If your aim is Vilification ––
Other forms of Denigration ––
Unfounded Accusation --
Determined Obfuscation ––
Alienation with Self-Justification ––
We WILL use COMMENT ERADICATION.


IN ADDITION

Gratuitous Displays of Extraneous Knowledge Offered Not To Shed Light Or Enhance the Discussion, But For The Primary Purpose Of Giving An Impression Of Superiority are obnoxiously SELF-AGGRANDIZING, and therefore, Subject to Removal at the Discretion of the Censor-in-Residence.

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.