Charley Reese Sings to the Mad Gods.

There are few writers with any sort of comprehension of the world as it stands. Charley Reese is one of them. Regrettably, he has recently retired. I swipe a list from him:

hat follows are a few of the basic premises on which I base my thinking. You might or might not agree with them, but may I suggest that you make a list of your own basic premises. It will help you clarify your thinking.

1. Government is inherently incompetent, and no matter what task it is assigned, it will do it in the most expensive and inefficient way possible.


2. The American government is corrupt from top to bottom.


3. If you rely on the mass media to inform you about your community, state and nation, you will, with rare exceptions, be woefully ignorant of what is really going on.


4. The universal franchise is a bad idea. The notion that the destiny of the nation should be put in the hands of ignoramuses, parasites, boobs, party hacks and idiots is absurd on its face.


5. Public education in America is a failure and is so flawed it cannot be reformed.


6. Not much has changed in the past 5,000 years of human history.

All of that might sound cynical, but it really isn't. True conservatives have argued for years that government, even a benign one, is like a clumsy, retarded giant, and therefore you have to be careful to limit what tasks you assign it.

All this, and now Michael Jackson. It sounds like I have a particular problem with the fellow, but I don't. It's really the mirror he held up to American Society. Here, now, in the middle of a small economic depression which threatens to turn into a huge economic depression, we throw absurd quantities of e-cash into the purchase of 20-year-old recordings of this fellow, who can be heard for free on the Video Appliance, any channel. The only thing holding the Chinese back from stomping us out must be the novel ways we discover to mal-invest. Unemployment insurance, stimulus money, whatever - all floods into the pipeline to pay the creditors who loaned money for the husbandry and upkeep of llamas at this warped boy's estate and ranch, Neverland. Next year, in the soup kitchen line, we can reflect on how much of this capital could have gone, perhaps, towards the means of making of things, rather than feeding our own narcissism, which certainly seems to be regarded in America as Durable Goods. We produced this man-child, and cruelly too, melting even his face like plastic Army Men under the magnifying glass - and then hated what we made, and loved it, too. One of my favorite talk-show hosts has gone nutters over this Tragic Event, comparing it to the last Great Tragedy, the death of Princess Diana. They are merely two examples of the beloved Meme In Our Head who receive daily sacrifices, lares et penates, the house gods of stardom, Jon and Kate, petulant and powerful, living on the shit-Olympus with the Hollywood sign on it. That's what we're all about, America. Gimme a hooyah.