The Daily Curmudgeon

February 1, 2012

     You try hard not to do it. You fight it. But inevitably over time it builds and then you finally have to do it. You just have to watch a really horrible movie. So, the other evening, I slunk off to the video room, closed the drapes, locked the door and shamefully took the plunge ( no pun intended ) and watched Two-Headed Shark Attack. It's interesting that in the old days, you would have [insert name of big studio] doing a film by [insert name of famous director] starring [insert name of famous actor]. Now, you spend the first five minutes or more of a film watching a litany of strange organizations sponsoring a film in the apparent hope that by throwing a minimal amount of money in the pot, they'll make a return on their investment. Of course, when the only "name" among the cast is Carmen Electra (who?), you know you're headed for the deep six. Carmen's best scene is where she lies squirming on the deck of the sinking yacht rubbing oil on her bikini clad body. She does get to deliver some telling dialogue when she yells at the usual bevy of teenie victims to "Get out of the water!" When the survivors make it to a small atoll, realizing that even two-headed sharks have difficulty attacking scantily clad women on land, the writers of this epic conveniently have the atoll sinking into the sea. We even polish off a couple with a Tsunami that suddenly appears with no explanation. The nice thing about having a shark with two heads is that even after you destroy one of the heads, the shark still has one left to finish off all but the final babe survivor. Bon appetite! Or is that "Bomb appetite?"

January 29th, 2012

         Enough already! While our Prexy, former speaker Pelousy and other liberals have expressed at least sympathy or downright support for the so-called "Occupy Wall Street" groups, Oakland mayor Jean Quan ( I want to be sure her name is clearly known, so I'll refrain from any intentional misspelling ) took it a step further, actually giving city employees a day off if they wanted to join the protest.  Liberals attempts to equate this movement with the Tea Party on the right is ridiculous. You don't see tea partiers wearing masks to hide their identity as they fight with and injure police, defecate and defile public spaces, break into buildings and destroy property and attempt to shut down public and private enterprise at the expense of working Americans. With predictable irony, Ms. Quan reapedd what she has sewn as this weekend, occupiers broke into city hall, destroyed property, burned our flag and injured several policemen. There is a long history of legitimate protest in our Country which must be preserved. There is also a long history of thugs and miscreants attempting to abuse our liberties to pursue their own disgruntled aims.  Kudos to police and officials who have the balls to enforce our laws. Shame on those, especially those in our government, who pay lip service or worse, give outright support to lawlessness in the name of political expediency.

December 14, 2011

December 6, 2011

     Newt Gringrinch has been criticized because he had the temerity to suggest in a recent GOP presidential debate that in addition to sucruing our borders, we will have to intelligently deal with the estimated 11 million illegals living in our country (many for decades). Gringrinch suggested that solution might include a path to citizenship. Michelle Backwardman and Rick Sanitarium, on the other hand, are among those on the right who continue to advocate deportation for everyone who is here illegally. When pressed as to how they would accomplish deporting millions of people, Sanitarium indicated in an interview that apparently after we round them all up in some fashion, they could all be deported to Mexico. "After all," he said, "Mexico is a nice country." Backwardman, when pressed in another interview, indicated that we would apparently deport each illegal as they are arrested. Now, that's a comprehensive plan! Let's see, how would we actually process these millions of people? I guess we could establish special squads of raiders we could call the "Gestapo" (catchy that) who could knock down the doors of illegals in the middle of the night (when they would be more apt to be at home) and arrest them. Since we would have to put them somewhere and since our prisons are bursting at the seams, we could gather them all up and put them behind barb wire enclosures in the desert (it's warmer there), we could call "concentration camps." Of course, when we haul them in cattle cars (which hold more bodies than trucks) to the border and the cartels (who run most of northern Mexico) refuse to accept them, I guess we can take a page from the KKK's suggested solution for our Black citizens and ship them all off to Africa. And since we pride ourselves on being fair, let's also round up and deport the heads of all labor unions and the employers who promoted the underground economy that encouraged all these illegals to come to this country in the first place. After all, it was the unions who demanded wages in excess of what many employers felt they could profitably pay which provided a convenient excuse for unscrupulous employers to hire illegals at less than fair wages. Or I guess we could acknowledge the complexity of the problem as Gringrinch suggests and start getting real on finding a solution. But probably not. We don't seem to be that smart. Particularly, if we elect someone like Sanitarium or Backwardman.

November 28, 2011

     I have been devoting my time to publicizing my latest novel while Mrs. B slogs away at revising my web site, so I have not authored a column in some time (much to the delight of many of you I'm sure). I received a rather alarmist missive today from one of my friends on the right decrying the demonstrations by Communists and others on the left in support, apparently, of the anti-Wall Street demonstrators. One of the persons who forwarded pictures of these protests commented they "scared" her because of what they might portend for our Country. While there is much to dislike about these protests, not the least of which is the protesters' penchant for spewing racial hatred (including blaming Jews for the ills attributed to Wall Street), these demonstrations don't scare me at all. In fact, when I listen to these people being interviewed, I am reminded that our First Amendment guarantees everybody the right to open their mouths and remove all doubt about how really stupid they are. Just think " Susan Sarandon"  who recently called the Pope a Nazi. Remembering that facts seldom interfere with the beliefs of either the right or the left, it is hardly surprising what these people say or do during their demonstrations.

     I just finished reading the biography of Dashiell Hammett, the author of The Maltese Falcon.  Hammett wrote five superlative crime novels and other than editing some of his lover, Lillian Hellman's plays, devoted the rest of his life to getting drunk and espousing left wing causes. During the 1950's, he went to jail because he stuck to his principles and his beliefs and refused to cooperate with Congress by naming fellow travelers in the Communist movement with which he was in sympathy, at least intellectually. In reading Hammett's biography, I was reminded of that terrible time in our history when we penalized people for their beliefs, stifled their ability to protest and actually sent them to jail to further the careers of nefarious politicians.

     Once again, I urge my own fellow travelers to look to history. The Communist party had its highest membership during the great depression and yet they made no significant progress toward any professed goal to take over this Country. It is axiomatic that the last people to embrace some totalitarian state would be those who espouse anarchy as the current protesters seem to be doing. And I would remind my friends on the right that some of Obama's biggest supporters in 2008 were the very people the protesters are targeting, the so-called Wall Street fat cats who are mostly Democrats, not Republicans, by the way. Ah, if life were just as simple as the right and left want us to believe it is, then we'd know who to really hate. In the meantime, some of us will have to stumble along trying to think these issues through without undue emotion or rancor.

     Tough but somebody has to do it.