Living in a Loony Bin
I often hear from people wondering how I am able to stand living in California. Lately, that question is accompanied by a second, asking how I feel about cutting California into three parts.
I often hear from people wondering how I am able to stand living in California. Lately, that question is accompanied by a second, asking how I feel about cutting California into three parts.
The answer to the first question is that aside from the politics, the crime, the illegal aliens and the traffic, it’s a perfectly fine place. In other words, if my wife and I were younger, we’d be long gone. But, at our age, the idea of selling a house, packing up and moving to another state is overwhelming. Still, if the weather was a lot worse than it is, we might still consider it.
As for the second item, I will vote against breaking California into three parts, but only because the divisions they’re talking about would divide the state horizontally. If they were divided vertically into three equal parts, I would endorse it.
The problem is that when you divide this state horizontally, each portion would contain the coastline with its major population centers of left-wing pinheads. Were it divided vertically, only the western portion of the state would remain insane. The other two portions would be rural, Republican and rational.
The reason that the loons wish to cut up the state is so the Democrats could add four more Democrats in the Senate.
Still, if every state would follow suit and carve itself up into equal portions, I would reconsider my “No” vote. After all, in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton only carried 19 states, Trump carried 31. If that proportion held after the great divide, the Democrats would wind up with 114 (19x2x3) senators, the GOP with 186 (31x2x3) senators.
The only downside is that so many voters are terminally out to lunch that 13 states are represented in the U.S. Senate by one Democrat and one Republican. Although I can sort of understand a person wearing both a belt and suspenders, I can’t get a handle on why the folks in Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Maine, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia or Wisconsin think it makes the slightest bit of sense to send two senators to Washington with the sole intention of canceling out each other’s vote.
At least in California, goofy as the voters are, they know enough to elect two Democrats to represent their foolish interests in the nation’s capital.
One of my readers, Dan Parker, suggested that liberals are so moronic that they’re pulling for President Trump to fail even if that inevitably means that America fails. I was reminded that Golda Meir once famously said that there would never be peace in the Middle East until the Arabs come to love their children more than they hate the Israelis.
I also heard from a woman who is a former police officer in the Bay Area. Commenting on Brit Hume’s injunction to be kind, she said that it hit home, and that she hoped to remember it the next time she had to deal with one of those people whose sole purpose on earth seems to consist of trying the patience of those who can’t avoid them.
I let her know that in my opinion, sometimes just not taking out your service revolver and shooting someone can be considered an act of extraordinary kindness.
Another lady wrote after I stated in an article that I thought they should come up with an entirely different word for the depression that leads some people to commit suicide and the depression one experiences upon the death of a loved one or even the emotional letdown when your favorite team fails to win the World Series or the Super Bowl.
From the serious and detailed message she sent me, I suspect she thought I might be suffering from what she took great pains to point out was clinical depression as opposed to the run-of-the-mill annual depression that, say, Chicago Cub fans had to deal with for over a hundred years.
I want to assure her and anyone else who might be concerned with my state of mind that I don’t suffer from either form of depression. I just felt and continue to feel that they should come up with an entirely different word for the more serious condition. Most people, prior to taking their own lives, don’t say “I am clinically depressed.” Instead, they simply say “I’m depressed,” which more than likely is going to fall on deaf ears because the other person is probably thinking, “He’s depressed? I’m the one who had to walk an entire block because there weren’t any parking spaces!”
The biggest laugh I’ve gotten recently was supplied by, of all people, Chuck Schumer. In his role as the spokesmen for the Senate Democrats, he naturally saw his duty and did it by denouncing the Singapore summit. He had nothing but praise for Barack Obama when the weasel-in-chief flew $150 billion to the Iranian mullahs, regarding it as statecraft of the highest order. But Schumer couldn’t wait to excoriate Trump when Kim Jong-un didn’t dismantle his nuclear program within the first 20 minutes after his return to North Korea.
In summing up the absolute futility of Trump’s mission, “Hopalong” Schumer unintentionally cracked me up by announcing: “As they say in Texas, it was all cattle, no hat.”
A friend passed along a three-minute video purporting to be an interview with God. To the accompaniment of nice music and endless scenes of mountains, streams, forests and lakes, “God” dropped pearls of wisdom.
After sitting through it, I mentioned to my friend that it was nice, but that I couldn’t help noticing that people don’t appear to exist in God’s world.
He, in turn, suggested: “Maybe that’s a big reason why it is so reflective and warm.”
“Maybe,” I replied, “but from my point of view, it was too reminiscent of those ecology zealots who keep insisting that this would be a wonderful world if it weren’t for people, meaning other people, of course.”
That’s not to say that it wouldn’t be a far more pleasant world if it weren’t for some people. This was driven home for me when I received a picture of a conservative demonstrator carrying a sign that ironically read: “Hey, NRA, Stop Killing Our Kids! That’s our job! Sincerely, Planned Parenthood.”
The first email I received after the release of the inspector general’s report alerted me to the fact that the IG had determined that although James Comey had been insubordinate and that Peter Strzok and Lisa Page had indeed stopped canoodling long enough to try to first prevent Trump’s election and then to undermine his administration, the IG did not believe that Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server was a criminal infraction that should have led to her indictment.
“In other words,” I replied, “it was 500 pages of squat. Sort of like one of Judith Krantz’s old romance novels.”
Penny Alfonso sent me a compelling flow chart titled “If a White Person…”
As the chart showed, if a white person moves out of a neighborhood, it’s condemned as white flight. If he moves in, it’s condemned as gentrification. If he sees a person’s color, it’s racism. If he doesn’t, he’s ignoring racism. If he doesn’t partake in black culture, he’s being non-inclusive. If he does, he’s accused of cultural appropriation.
In 1920, the Yiddish humorist Sholom Aleichem wrote a comedy about two Russians, one Jewish, the other Gentile, switching identities. He called his play “It’s Hard to Be a Jew.”
Nearly a century later, it might be time to update the material and title the result “It’s Hard to Be a White Man.”
This is to alert you folks to the fact that a movie I wrote and coproduced will be screening at the Arena Cinelounge (6464 Sunset Blvd.) for one week, July 13-19.
“Angels on Tap” is a comedy set in a bar frequented by disgruntled angels. It stars Ed Asner, Jamie Farr, Marion Ross, Ron Mazak and Alan Rachins.
If you plan to be in LA that week and think you’d care to catch this laugh riot, send me an email ([email protected]) and I’ll let you know the screening times as soon as they let me know. I hope to see you there.
