I’ve got two things on my mind today – one that makes me sad, and one that makes me furious.
The sad one involves – as you may have guessed – the continuing mental deterioration of Joe Biden.
The latest sigh-inducing incident came when he was giving another recorded address, and the teleprompter went out. He hemmed, then he hawed, and faint wisps of smoke began to rise from around his plugs. He stumbled through until the prompter came back, but even then, he managed to mangle some names in his loveable Biden-y way, calling MA governor Charlie Baker “Charlie Parker.”
To be fair to Biden, he could have called him “Ginger Baker,” which would have been another mistaken, yet fine musician reference.
But he picked Charlie Parker, one of my favorite jazz musicians, so that was a good pull from the part of Joe’s brain where some lonely synapses are still feebly firing.
Charlie Parker’s music has been in heavy rotation with me over the years. I usually put music on when I’m writing, and I Iearned a long time ago to choose music without lyrics, because lyrics tended to seep into my writing. (As you may recall from such columns of mine as “Elizabeth Warren is getting under my skin… and… under my thumb, that squirming dog who just had her day!” and “Biden is leading us down the wrong road, a long and winding road, that leads to my door, for some reason.”)
I don’t blame Biden for the teleprompter failing, nor for his fumbling when that happened. Did you ever see Obama when he was off prompter? He was a bumbling, stumbling oaf just like Biden.
But again, do you want this guy in the White House? Do you look forward to him drifting in and out during cabinet meetings, asking if Secretary of the Treasury Thelonius Monk has a report on the bond market? Or in a session with the joint chiefs, when he calls on General John Coltrane for an update on the threat posed by the Quds force?
You do not.
From sad, I moved on to furious. And nothing makes me furious more quickly than a bunch of self-important, virtue-signaling famous people when they deign to condescend to us lowly deplorables.
You may have heard that last week, a bunch of celebrities – inconvenienced by the third consecutive day stuck in their mansions, with the incessant noise from their gardeners’ leaf blowers and hedge trimmers driving them to distraction – decided to bless us all with a song. A beautiful song. Written by a Beatle.
Unfortunately, it was the dumbest of all songs ever written by a Beatle. “Band on the Run” was the 95 Theses compared to the lyrics of this song. “We all live in a yellow submarine,” was Magna Carta-esque by comparison. “I am the walrus, goo goo ga joob,” had the clarity of “cogito ergo sum” next to this song.
I’m speaking, of course, of that hallmark of smarmy leftist naivete, “Imagine.”
I’ve always loved the tune, and hated the message. But now that I’ve heard clueless celebrities singing it in the most self-satisfied way possible, I may just have to start hating everything about it, full stop.
The lyrics are unbearably smug just on their own, but when you put them in the mouths of pampered Hollywood pharisees, the breathtaking hypocrisy and stupidity of some of the lines beggar description:
“Imagine there’s no countries”?
Great. Perfect. That’s what the no-borders crowd has been pining for. Now that we’re getting a little taste of that, how do you like it? Because if there were no countries, we’d all be living a lot more like the immiserated third world than the first world oases, with their individual freedoms and wealth and generally much better conditions for all.
A world with no countries would soon become one gigantic Chinese wet market, with a bunch of knuckleheads washing down a bat salad with a bat shake and then coughing in our faces, before our oppressive government full of Chi Com “dreamers” threw us in jail for pointing out that the winner of the batdog eating contest seems to have keeled over dead, a few feet away.
“Imagine no possessions”?
Recorded from inside a bunch of palatial estates, and sung by a gaggle of ignorant, preening hacks with an average net worth in the 8-figure range. Put your money where your mouth is, you hypocrites! Put down your cell phones, turn off your alarm systems, and invite the hordes of homeless people from right outside of your gated walls to come on in and make themselves at home. Invite them to inject heroin in your walk-in closet, and urinate in your salt-water infinity pool. Throw open your Sub-zero fridge and invite them to clean it out, and then to drop a deuce in the vegetable crisper when they’re done. Hypocrites!!
“Imagine no religion”? That depends on the religion, doesn’t it? Jihadi Islam? I’m with you. Christianity the way Jesus taught it? That’s the only thing keeping many of us from punching you in the face if we ever see you in person, you obnoxious jerks… so you should appreciate that.
Also, for most committed, hard-core leftist/socialists, their political ideology IS their religion. Bernie might be technically Jewish, but does anyone believe that he’s spent more time reading the Torah than Das Kapital? Lots of Dems are nominal Catholics, but does anyone believe that when push comes to shove, “suffer the children to come unto Me” trumps “I pledge allegiance to Planned Parenthood, and to the abortions for which it stands,” for them?
Also, since atheism is an essential tenet of the religion of socialism – and is at the heart of why Lenin et al could so cavalierly sacrifice tens of millions of human lives to achieve their “heaven on earth” — isn’t it accurate to say that religious atheism caused more death in one century (from 1917-2017) than did almost all other religions in history, combined?
Sure, if you’re a socialist, I’ll grant you that those tens of millions of murders might not be fairly laid at the feet of YOUR interpretation of your politico-religion… if you’ll grant me that the many crimes committed in the name of (but in all other ways totally opposed to the teachings of) Christ have nothing to do with my religion.
What’s that? You’d never grant that in a million years?
Okay, fine. Then own the gulags and the Sean Penns and the famines and the world wars and Bernie Sanders and Alyssa Milano and the 100 million dead in one century, buddy, and I’ll learn to live with the Knight Templars and the Irish troubles!
“Imagine all the people, living for today”?
You know who lives for today, you preachy jackasses?
Infants. Junkies. Degenerate gamblers. Serial killers. People who don’t understand cause and effect. Rapists. People with poor impulse control.
Sleazy car dealers. (Not honest ones.) Sleazy lawyers. (Not either of the honest ones.) Sleazy salesmen. College kids who went on spring break last week and gave each other corona virus and chlamydia. Charlie Sheen.
I’m not finished.
High-self-esteem-having career criminals. Broke people. Alcoholics. Grifters. Young people with no life experience. Old people with no life experience. Rich people who got their money from mommy and daddy. Poor people who want to get their money from the evil 1%.
Still not finished.
Desperate and greedy people who fall for get-rich-quick schemes. Bernie Madoff. People who get married 8 times, because each spouse gets boring, or old. People who spend every penny they earn, and count on their fellow citizens or socialist politicians to bail them out.
Harvey Weinstein. Con artists. Jeffrey Epstein. People who say, “YOLO, dude,” unironically. Woody Allen. Sociopaths. Narcissists. Narcissistic sociopaths.
YOU, in other words!
And we don’t like you. We REALLY don’t like you. We don’t want to live like you, and we don’t want to live near you. We don’t want to hear your sophomoric philosophy that the slowest amongst us outgrew by our senior year, if not before.
If you can sing, sing. If you can act, act. If you are funny, tell some jokes. If you are smoking hot, stand there with your yap closed, and look hot. (Mark Ruffalo, I don’t know what it is that you’re supposed to do. But whatever it is, you’re terrible at it – so you should just go away now. Right now. Go!)
But you don’t know how the world works, and you couldn’t identify a logical fallacy or a category error if your life depended on it. You don’t know where money comes from, or what a successful society depends on, or where the sun goes at night!
You couldn’t start a business, or make a payroll, or keep a vow.
If you all moved from America to Venezuela, as you keep promising to do – but never do (see the “can’t keep a vow” above) – you’d improve the collective IQ of the former, and starve to death in two weeks.
And the world would be a better place for it. In fact, that would be my version of Imagine:
Imagine there’s no celebrities,
It’s easy if you try,
No one to insult and lecture us,
And metaphorically poke us in the eye.
Imagine all the people,
Ignoring Mark Ruffalo
Oh – oh – no Ruff-a-lo!
You may say that I’m a hilarious genius,
And you’re not the only one. (HA!)
At no time can you join us,
Or we’ll beat your arse for fun!
Avenatti/ Narcissistic Sociopath 2020!
Martin Simpson 