21 July 2024
I watched a vintage Western the other night whose plot revolved around the murder of a banker. He was shot dead as he looked out of a window in his upstairs office.
This show was a half-hour drama. It could have easily been an hour-long episode, but the character development was given exceedingly short shrift, leading to a fast-paced, but somewhat static plot.
I nonetheless knew, within the first few minutes, who the killer was. I didn’t voice my opinion. I’ve ruined too many flicks and tv-shows for fellow viewers by revealing my hunch as to the identity of the guilty party. Paying more attention to the dialogue then becomes my focus, and I do enjoy dialogue dissection.
One statement by the lead character was particularly good. He said something along the lines of:
“Once a person has killed someone, he crosses over a bridge from which there is no turning back. That makes the second killing easier.”
This rugged Westerner-detective of the post-Civil War era thus arranges plumped-up pillows in his hotel-room bed as a decoy for the suspect whom he believes will shoot to kill him. And, right on cue, that night, the door opens slightly. The barrel of a pistol is inserted through the doorway of the slowly opened wooden door. It aims at the long linear lump in the bed. Several shots are fired.
The door handle has been altered by the killer so that the cowboy-detective is unable to fully open the door and give chase. That telling detail provides insight into the fact that this killer has familiar, if not, intimate, knowledge of this hotel where the dude-detective is staying.
My theory of the identity of the bad-guy thereby became much more solid. The biggest tip-off, however, was his ardent devotion to the victim; his thickly emotional claims of their enduring bond, forged during the Civil War; and the solid-as-a-rock friendship that prompts this oily operator to offer a sizable reward for Finding the Real Killer.
In short, the real killer laid it on too thick in disguising himself as the horribly aggrieved friend and ally.
We’ve been living through an odious phase of American history, a few decades to be precise, wherein the atrociously aggrieved friends and allies of The Working Men and Women have laid it on so thick that I’ve often felt exasperated as to why those lying skunks weren’t found out sooner. In my attempts to shed light on the forever-forked tongues, I was perpetually taking on the role of the skunk at the picnic.
That scenario was especially so whenever I mingled, as a homeschooling mom, with other home-schooling moms who were wives of blue-collar workers. Those women held themselves pristinely high above me in terms of their certainty that their children were going to be helped by the Real Skunks (politicians) to get those Jobs of The Future.
And Mr. Gates, with his computer-donation-program-to-schools, is going to help my daughter.
Yes, I fully agreed. He sure is gonna help . . . himself . . .
Before boarding my train from Yesterday to Today, I had to unload a load of emotional baggage that has since been claimed by many other citizens in America. I suppose that’s how unburdening oneself of unnecessary freight takes place.
Try as I might during those years that led up to the 2008 subprime spending collapse, I was unable to convince any suburban working-class wives that they were being fed many lines of unpalatable and unctuous stuff. It used to drive me . . .
away from those uppity but ignorant women.
The degree of their uppity-ness was in direction proportion to their lack of truthful information and real knowledge, and any desire to hear truth and facts. Just try to offer that kind of assistance to a body who holds herself so high above you, that you’re treated like a servant to her. That lesson in humility never gets old.
Success in life is a matter of getting aboard the train that’s going in the right direction, even if that train ain’t headed where everyone else is going — especially if that train is headed away from the noisy throngs at the train station. Any train bound for the glory of that liberty is travelling toward triumph.
During that era, I was an outcast among mostly everyone. It felt normal to me. Those know-it-all homeschooling mothers merely formed one subset of the hostile, rude and untutored Americans who had a firm fix on fallacies, but were seemingly incapable of learning anything from anyone in the school of life. I’d not experienced such willful self-delusion since my childhood in New Jersey.
The commonality, I discovered, between my childhood and that of each of my children was an atmosphere of easy affluence among people who hadn’t truly earned it. They’d been on the receiving end of middle-class welfare, brought, hah, guaranteed! to them by the re-disguise of politics as Caring for the People.
I really couldn’t believe my eyes, and ears, witnessing the preposterous lies and haughty hoaxes by the Public Servants, posing as compassionate crooks.
Live and learn, I thought. But I’m getting as far away from this saccharine swindle set-up as I can.
I did find solace in the friendship that I forged with one home-schooling woman, out here in the boonies. She was rearing a brood of six children. She agreed completely with me, during our time of alliance, from roughly 1999-2003, that there would be a heavy price, one day, for those adult children to pay for their parents having indulged in such smug poppycock. Those youngins had been pompously misled by wretchedly egotistical parents, who were almost predictably manipulated in terms of what was best for the offspring they’d brought into the world.
“The Guvmint’s giving to ME, instead of to Somebody Else”
was the Russian-peasant mindset of this large segment of a freshly-contrived middle-class. Boy, howdy! A nation certainly arrives at UNITY through that divide-and-conquer plan by the swine known as career politicians. Forget that noble JFK bromide of the early 1960s! That patriotic sentiment got turned into:
“Ask not what you can do for your country; demand what your country must do for you!”
Of particular concern, and prescient worry, was the complete absence of duty to country as part of family education within those families. Patriotism wasn’t even an afterthought among the “values” being inculcated in these heirs to an American future. The political pablum of an ever-weakening morality was spoon-fed to these adults, who passed on the non-virtue to the next generation. And once those piggish adults accepted the first bribe-lie, the second one was swallowed much more easily, as was the third, and the fourth . . .
The brightest and bravest among the children of those selfish adults saw the lights that their parents refused to see. They’ve shown up, in massive droves, rallying to take their country back from the horrid hack job that passed for “leadership” during the past 30 years of low expectations and high demands to be The Winner of the Golden Ticket from Guvmint. Those benevolent beacons show the way for the train of patriotism that’s been subjected to many an attempted derailment. Sabotage of the citizenry is not taken lightly or kindly by the Forgotten Americans.
That iron horse is chugging toward liberty in America. It’s the little engine that could — and CAN, and WILL — no matter what the odds or the obscene levels of opposition strewn in its path toward truth, justice, honor, and the American way.
The basic problem with any human being, lining up at any trough, is that it negates, denigrates, corrodes and contaminates the human soul. The dignity of working for a goal higher than oneself gets chucked out the window, at the same time that the destructive forces of self-entitlement, self-righteousness, self-interest, and self-centeredness come moving, like a bullet-train, into the room of that sacred soul. Until, primed with sufficient resentment and bitterness, that entire apparatus of the Lord becomes an ugly evil diesel, driven only by envy.
Envy as fuel for the soul burns up all the virtue within a person. Love is a much more fine, fierce, and efficient form of energy to motivate a being. Mankind is an acquisitive beast. That woeful facet of human nature cannot co-exist with love. Americans-in-name-only exchanged love of country for love of everything-else, which really isn’t love at all.