The news show I would most like to see, the one I would postpone all other forms of recreation to watch, but which can never be, would be if Tucker Carlson could sit down for 20-30 minutes and talk to Don Rickles about the coronavirus.
Tucker wouldn’t have to say very much, just try to keep a straight face, while Don tells 60% of America that while a few simple precautions would be helpful, for the vast majority of those under age of 80…oK, 75…even black people, the risk of anything greater than normal cold and flu discomfort is very, very tiny.
That 60% of Americans are the same type of people, and in many case, the very same people who laughed at Don’s assault on American thin-skinnedness in the 80s, before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was even born. We still get it. We still laugh.
But since then things had gotten so bad, many had stashed their flags (and in truth, their patriotism) in the closet until Donald Trump was able to convince them to reach in there and pull them flags and start flying them again. That 60% is pretty well locked in for the next few years if Mr Trump can manage to bottle his elixir and pass the recipe on to the next generation, and then the next, one generation at a time.
And those paltry few (we’ve always known who they were) who were offended in the 1980s are still there, offended and bitchy today, only some say they’ve swallowed up a whole new generation, increasing their ranks considerably. College.
Maybe. But they still can’t win a fair election in most of the 50 states, and their prospects for getting bigger are diminishing in some of the blue states where jobs, taxes, crime, and now, the kind of filth that can speed the spread of any disease, are most flagrant.
Of course, Rickles wouldn’t say it as dryly as I do but I am quite sure the camera would catch Tucker as he falls out of his chair when Don cackles “Wuhan Fu!”
Enter The Organizations
What is commonly referred to as “the deep state” I’m beginning to view as the “Organization” a much older classification that existed in government for 40 years before anyone ever thought of the “deep state” as anything other than a clandestine cell to control the normal operations of government. The Organization is much bigger, and “The Organization Man” is a type of person that corporate America began producing after World War II, and was best described in a book by the same title by William H Whyte, Jr in 1956. I read it in college in the 1960s, and didn’t understand a bit of, then left Law to go into corporate management during the 1980s, didn’t like what I saw, so took my show on the road to teach others how to at least understand “the organization” that controlled (by that time) almost every American corporation sold on the stock exchanges (and many smaller ones, not to mention provided the framework for virtually every authoritarian government in existence at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
And, as we’ve recently learned, has had a self-protective?) grip around the throat of our own “corporate” governments, from when rose the epithet, we’ve only recently begun to call the “deep state”.
I recently began to re-read Whyte’s book, and more closely, because I know things he didn’t know, such as how his observations might apply to our intelligence community, especially whether the principles of the Organization would be the basis for why those agencies have grown so big in the past 60 years, adding thousands more ‘desks’ to their organization.
Are laws of bureaucracy involved? Did the Founders foresee this, and did the Constitution empower the people to not only prevent it, but also overcome it, should it get too big or too oppressive?
Worth thinking about and discussing in more detail, here I only want to consider how the “Organization Man” thinking has swallowed major American sports institutions; the NCAA (college sports), the NBA (professional basketball), MLB (professional baseball), and the NFL, [professional football.) Even hockey. I’m told.
Almost in lock step, well actually, in way too lock-step, they are cancelling fans coming to arenas to see their teams play, then bang-bang-bang, cancelling the entire games, denying even their advertisers their television revenues. And as I just mentioned, we’re not even into the baseball season and they’re already canceling fall and winter sports. Wait til Ma an’ Pa NASCAR get the bad news. I guess the same “organization men” run NASCAR these days too. Lawyers.
Everything working white and black folk enjoy, this year they can’t enjoy. Even on TV, Or the radio. The governor of Virginia may as well tell the whole state, except for Fairfax, “Shelter in Place.” He just declared a state of emergency with less than two case known cases and zero deaths. But if we refuse? Will he call up the Virginia National Guard?
Something smells about all of this, but I do know that when not one professional team owner tells “the League” to kiss his black cat’s ass, it’s not just fear of a virus that will kill fewer than the average cold season.
Since Colin Kaepernick took that knee and then no other team would hire him you knew they had to show us who’s boss.
Only, like all lawyers, they’re cowards, and send enforcers to put the squeeze on us, who, incidentally, pay their salaries, their bonuses, and even create their stock options and to whom their allegiance is supposed to be directed.
Other than a couple of collective bargaining strikes by players such as shut-out has never happened in the 70 years I’ve been following professional sports. An Act of God could postpone a race for a day, or maybe cause a rescheduling, but never ruin a season’s worth of hard work by thousands of athletes.
Something else is afoot here.
Let’s see how the Organization plays its cards.
