4528 The President and the Hershey Bar

This used to cost a nickel.  And it was bigger.

What do you think of when you hear the name “Hershey?” Chances are it’s a candy bar, the chocolate of peasants and kings the world over.

Or maybe you think of the small, unincorporated company hamlet in Pennsylvania with the chocolate factory, museums, a large and well-attended amusement park where people don’t fall off rides. 

There’s also a pretty decent hospital, some charity offices and a couple of dozen saloons, none of which is called “The Hershey Bar,” where people can retire while their friends and families are busy not falling off rides, having their hearts transplanted or getting contact chocolate highs from the factory smokestacks.

And you can’t swing a dead cat in certain areas of the state without hitting someone named Hershey.

it’s also a place where people gather to hear tall tales told by America’s Storyteller, donald trump, currently pretending to be president and always on tour.

And there he was, earlier this week, with a sputtering 90 minute extravaganza of a tall tale, delivered to an allegedly unpaid cheering crowd. And showman that he is, he followed an important rule of vaudeville, never turn your back on the audience.  We’ll see why that’s important at the end of this tale, which is roughly five times shorter than the Great Man’s speech.

Selling his usual snake oil concoction of lies, brags, racism, sexism, antisemitism; salting it with seeds of victimization, and manufacturing fake enemies for you to devour along with him, trump zigged and zagged through his ever-expanding repertoire of disconnected insults.

--The FBI is corrupt, he says.  Then there are the usual cast of countries and characters:

-Hillary

-Russia

-Ukraine

-Any and every Democratic officeholder, former officeholder, potential officeholder… But especially

-Schiff

-Nadler

-Pelosi

-Obama

-Jews

-Nazis

-Socialists

The usual gang of people and things he’s either for or against.

An hour and a half of that is poison. Tell him that and he’ll give you the cure: more poison, more venom.

To use a trumpestuous form of the language: “I don’t know whether or not this is true.  But what I heard is that our teller of tales has a tail. Also, Doctor Bone spurs removed the horns.

The scars that may be on his head are why he wears his hair that way. And the tail is why he never turns his back.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ® 

Comments: please send to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2019

4525 Let's Invade... Somewhere

Standing in the freezing Black Friday morning, watching the crowds gather in front of Best Buy was a show of pent up desire.  People wanting stuff on the cheap were gathered in the parking lot, ready to snap up a pair of those new wireless earbuds or the latest game console or maybe the last of this year’s overpriced cellphones … marked all the way down to usurious.

Pent up.  We have pent up desires all the time.  And thinking about it, we haven’t invaded anywhere new lately.  That Afghanistan thing? Iraq?  All that’s old news.  It’s like last month’s whitebread or the magazines in a doctor’s waiting room.

So where should we pick?  The Pentagon is too busy with internal combustion right now, and its war with the white house.  So let’s think this through for them like the good-hearted, stand-up flagged up patriots we are.

There’s always Iran.  But that’s probably dangerous, in that they may have Saddam Hussein’s old stash of weapons of mass destruction.  So cross off Iran.

Hey, how about North Korea.  Nah. Also dangerous. Crazy Little Kim is just crazy enough to hurt us pretty badly.  After all, a dictator who kills his uncle can’t be trusted to wage war in a gentlemanly fashion.

Russia? Of course not. Not with its puppet still on the Punch ‘n’ Judy stage that passes for the White House these days.  Remember Nikita’s idle boast, “we will bury you?” Well, Putin’s the guy who might actually do it.

We’d have to spend too much on reparations in Venezuela, softies as we are when we actually win one.  Same with Bolivia.  And Brazil is out of the question.  Our firefighters are busy enough in California.

Ahah! Mexico!  That would be perfect.  All we have to do is declare the drug cartels as terrorists and we’re free to do what we do best: regime change.

There are advantages to invading Mexico.  First, they don’t have our appetite to fight.  At least they haven’t since they stopped celebrating victory at The Alamo. 

Second, it’s close by. That saves on both transportation costs and the creation of a workable supply chain.  Oh, and it makes the body bags less costly to ship back to Dover Air Base.

Next, we have to search for a puppet to install as president once we declare “mission accomplished.”

Gotta satisfy that pent up desire so we don’t keep turning our blood lust onto ourselves.

SHRAPNEL:

--No comment this year on Cyber Monday.  Our spyware must have been discovered and debugged by some federal busybody or a 400 pound acne-plagued social misfit operating from mommy’s basement in Slovenia. So we have no unofficial results to report.

--The usual outpouring of Thanksgiving editorials by newspaper publishers who can’t write has ended for another year. They are heavy on fake heartfelt emotion and lacking in substance. For this, we should be thankful.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ® 

Comments? Send ‘em here: wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2019

1427 The Crisis

What crisis?  Which crisis.  Oh, dear. There are so many to choose from.  Here’s an experiment:  go to Google News.  Put the word crisis in the search block.

One recent attempt brought almost 60-million results in under four seconds.

Russia’s currency crisis.  Russia’s vodka price crisis. Ukraine electricity crisis. Ebola crisis.  New York Mayor’s crisis over relations with the police. Global financial crisis.  Crisis center.  Sony’s movie crisis.  Marriage in America crisis.  Crisis management.

We’re having a crisis crisis.  Or to put it another way, if everything’s a crisis, nothing’s a crisis.

But, of course, there are real ones.  Katrina was a crisis.  The Sony hack is not.  Afghanistan is a crisis. A highway closed for an hour after a wreck is not.

The Cosby crisis. The Takata crisis.  The court backlog crisis. Midlife crisis.

And if a simple crisis no longer is enough for you, the Huffington Post will tell you that the “doctor shortage is a crisis within a crisis.”

It’s like those Russian/Ukrainian nesting dolls.

Open one crisis and find another.  That little one on the far right? That’s not really the end.  Open that one and you’ll find a crisis on a cellular level, then a molecular level, then an atomic level.

This is not to say times aren’t tough.  But labeling everything a crisis is beyond useless.

It’s yet another devaluation of the language.  

But when we devalue words we’re also devaluing concepts.  And THAT’s a crisis.

Get a grip.  We can fix the airbags.  And the bad ignition switches.  And the 40-year old stockbroker who trades in his Honda Civic for a Corvette, his wingtips for cowboy boots and his wife for his just-post-adolescent secretary.

We can fix the Ruble.  We can fix the shortage of Oranges.  These are problems or -- if you must -- challenges. But Crises? Nah.

Shrapnel:

-- “The Interview” debuted on Christmas day.  There were no 9/11-class attacks.  So the hype and counterhype worked.

Grapeshot:

-Question for Radio Shack, Penney’s and Sears/K-Mart: when are you going to solve your crises by closing?

-Question for the zillion radio stations that spent the last month playing only Christmas music: Okay, you got your ratings bump, now how are you going to keep all those new listeners?

-Question for those with fruitcakes under the tree:  What are you going to build with them?  A fort? A dog house?  An ant trap?

-Another question for the fruitcake crowd, the two of you who actually eat that stuff: Do you have your dentist on speed dial?

-Question for the Tea Party: What’s the Mad Hatter really like?

-Question for the ladies:  Will you please try to remember to close the hood on the copy machine when you’re finished using it?

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2014