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BARBWIRE
Go
Trust Yourself
by
ANDREW BARBANO
Expanded from the 5-22-2005 Daily
Sparks (Nev.) Tribune.
5-27-2005 Comstock Chronicle
Franz Kafka, call your office. Evolution has been officially repealed. Mankind is devolving down the rabbithole. We are figuratively (the Crusades) and literally (global climate change) entering the new Dark Ages.
The besieged Public Broadcasting System recently aired an updated version of its 1980 megahit entitled "Death of a Princess," the story of a Saudi-Arabian girl publicly beheaded for the crime of falling in love with a commoner. A quarter-century later, the docudrama's chilling forecast has proven true: Islam's message is that we want to go back to the tribe. We've seen your modern world. We don't like it and we reject it.
That perfectly describes what's happening here in Christendom today as science, democracy and logic are replaced by codified superstition and ideology.
Our political playing field has narrowed to a point that the mainstream lies somewhere between Neanderthal conservative and 19th Century Whig/Know-Nothing. All others are dismissed as godless commie/hippie traitors who want to convert our children into Hollywood homosexuals.
We can no longer look to the Roosevelt New Deal coalition for help. Those who became middle class because of it now often vote to destroy it. Some of the most intractable, conservative, retro-thinkers in northern Nevada politics are retired Sparks railroad union workers. The New Deal made these guys. Some were educated under the G.I. Bill after WWII. They enjoyed the protections of labor, health, safety and pension laws. They helped give us the greatest economy the world has ever seen – which peaked in 1968.
Since then, we've not only been eating our seed corn, but intentionally exporting it to foreign lands where children work for a buck a day or less.
These old birds labor under the superstition that Democrats want to confiscate the precious firearms they will soon need to protect themselves from godless commie/hippie traitors trying to convert them into Hollywood homosexuals.
Talking to true believers doesn't work. Blue-in-the-face innocents have learned the hard way that reasoned debate and earnest dialogue don't mean a damned thing in today's smear-at-will environment.
We live in the age of faith-based voting. Blind to what its leaders really do, the majority is content to believe whatever they say. Reminds me of the old joke about the actual translation of "trust me."
Now, I know evolution is unproven godless commie theory designed by queers and tree huggers, but bear with me on one point: people are very adaptable. Put us (gasp) naked out in the sunshine, and our skins will start to darken.
Place a sane person into an asylum, and he or she will soon begin to exhibit mental instability by adapting to the new norms of the insane environment.
Our increasingly Kafkaesque existence is thus most accurately viewed through the lens of institutionalized inmates.
Here's some hardcore evidence from our fellow madmen.
GOOD MONEY AFTER BAD. Reno and Sparks have flushed about a quarter-billion dollars down the Truckee attempting downtown redevelopments which were supposed to increase property values and tax revenues. Gambling joints, the biggest beneficiaries, have aggressively and successfully campaigned for years to have their taxes reduced. As a result, both corporate welfare projects are now upside down as urban core property values have shrunk despite more than two decades of artificial resuscitation.
Like a compulsive gambler who just knows his luck will turn on the next roll of the dice, Sparks and Reno governments have recently moved to pour over a million dollars of general fund taxpayer money into these losing propositions.
Ironically, Sparks just announced a new thrust for downtown, clustering housing along with business. Back in 1971, well before construction of the infamous B-Street Berlin Wall, local planning officials presented that very idea. It fell on deaf ears.
SUBVERSIVE LIBERAL MEDIA. As the pundits predicted, CBS last week effectively fired Dan Rather by canceling "60 Minutes II." The cowards at Newsweek ate their report about abuses of the Islamic holy book at our Guantanamo concentration camp in Cuba. The stories for which the journalists were punished are true, but that doesn't matter when Franz Kafka has morphed into a corporate CEO.
CRUCIFY HIM. Father Chuck Durante, an enlightened local Catholic priest, has been subjected to vicious personal attacks in the Reno paper for daring to assert that the church might want to commence to get started to sit down and talk about perhaps having a meeting to schedule an agenda about maybe, just maybe, moving the faith forward from the 16th to perhaps the 18th Century. Someone should send the good priest a copy of Kafka's "The Trial" so that he might better understand the mindset of his accusers, some of whom want him out of the church.
FULL COURT PRESS. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is apparently fast-tracking the case of former Harrah's bartender Darlene Jespersen who was fired in 2000 for refusing to paint her face like a proper Nevada hooker. On Friday the 13th, the court reversed its own three-judge panel. A full court of 11 judges will hear arguments in the gender discrimination case in San Francisco on June 22. News of the reversal broke every record for web traffic in the 10 years NevadaLabor.com has existed. The lipstick lawsuit story has worldwide legs.
CLINGING TO THE LEDGE. Last week, I noted that the Nevada State Senate Committee on Commerce and Labor had before it Assembly Bill 69, a mild first step toward alleviating the 53-year government-imposed confiscation of union dues to serve non-union members. Sen. Randolph Townsend, R-Reno, the committee chair, did not bring it up for a vote by last Friday's deadline, killing the measure which the lower house had passed unananimously.
I'll discuss such legislative hijinx on this Wednesday's installment of Sam Shad's Nevada Newsmakers at 12:30 p.m. on KRNV TV-4, repeating at 9:28 p.m. on Charter Cable Channel 12 in Washoe-Carson-Douglas. The full statewide radio-TV rerun schedule will be linked to the web edition of this column at NevadaLabor.com.
Be well. Raise hell.
SMOKING GUNS
Labor history forum scheduled in Las Vegas on May 25
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Copyright © 2005 Andrew BarbanoAndrew Barbano is a 36-year Nevadan and editor of NevadaLabor.com. Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Daily Sparks (Nev.) Tribune since 1988.
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