The Monsters Have Arrived on Maple Street

The title of this piece plays on the title of a Twilight Zone episode that aired nearly half a century ago: back then, the monsters were "due" on Maple Street; fifty years later, they have arrived.

Back in 1960, liberals were still huffing and puffing over the McCarthy hearings, in which an American senator claimed the government had been infiltrated by communists. "Witch hunt!" howled the liberals, and the public agreed. Yet many years later, it turned out the accusations were true. Ever-more-tiresome doom-monger James Kunstler fears a new witch-hunt, this time inspired by the crimes of the Monsters of 85 Broad Street, Main Street America's mortal enemy: Goldman Sachs. The intellectual aristocrat Kunstler fears "the savagery of right-wing broadcasting and how it had led, in one instance, to the murder of a doctor who performed abortions. What bothers me is that, sooner or later, the conduct of Goldman Sachs will lead the growing ranks of the unemployed, foreclosed, disentitled, and hopeless into the hands of a savage right wing seeking mindless vengeance, for instance, against "the Jews," (as represented by Goldman Sachs), or brown-skinned people (as embodied by a vilified president)."

Jimmy the K forgets how savage left wing violence led to the extermination of millions in a secularized, Bolshvik Russia and in the China of Mao. Perhaps Mr. K should take a close look at the portrait of soviet exterminator Nilolai Yezhov, aka "The Bloody Dwarf." Look closely at his facial features. Perhaps I'm hallucinating, but he seems to bear a curious resemblance to an American president of darker hue. Uh oh! Prejudice! Yipes!

It is K who is prejudiced, as is often the case with so-called liberal-progressives of his sort. He worries less about the rape of the United States and indeed the world by a cabal of materialists and more about vengeance against "for instance.. the Jews."

Fear not, bold defender of your tribe: I, an Irishman, would like nothing better than to see the downfall of: Kevin W. Kennedy; Timothy J. O'Neill; Terence J. O'Neill; E. Gerald Corrigan (former NY Fed prez); John P. Shaughnessy, etc., all managing directors of the "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money," to quote Matt Taibi in Rolling Stone. But I don't fear a pogrom of the Irish (and there are many more at GS). No, Mr. K is a professional Christian-baiter, a bore, a one-trick pony, a snob whose endless predictions of catastrophe next week or whenever (like those of Rapture-huckster Gray North) never come true. Mr. K worries more about the homicidal physician tragically murdered than the many innocents that same doctor killed, of the millions he encouraged killing. Then again, Mr. K, like many "liberals," is an elitist, a eugenicist, most likely, and all those working-class babies... well, the fewer the better.

Main Street, USA, for Mr. K, is populated by the "the growing ranks of the unemployed, foreclosed, disentitled, and hopeless ," and it would be well for Main Street to remember this. If I have to read a liberal commentator, I'll take Joe Bageant, who is an actual representative of that class rather than a Sixties work-shirt-and-weejuns retread with a tattered Pete Seeger songbook under his arm. Joe worked!

The monsters have arrived on Maple Street, Main Street and nearly every other Hometown USA street, and perhaps it is time for the "unemployed, foreclosed, disentitled, and hopeless " to begin seeking justice from those who have manipulated them into that position, without regard to race, creed, religion, "gender preference" or whatever other qualificative nonsense the professional whiner wishes to apply. The "great unwashed," which is how pundits like Mr K see the American working class, have been lazy and easily gulled by the Goldman whizz kids and their elitist monster bosses. Time to take action, unless it is already too late.

I took my action by leaving the north. I took my action by obtaining a wholly-owned home, a rental property and arable land in a place where such things are affordable and outside the reach of the Krakens of the financial district. I took my action by obtaining a second citizenship and a permanent residency in a country not of the northern hemisphere. I took my action by changing my way of life from that of an intellectual elitist who "earns a living" speculating on the financial markets to that of a semi-hermit who grows his own food but, somewhat shamefully, continues to get cash by speculating in the financial markets, at least while such is still possible. I do not like earning money in this way, but it is what I know and in what I have experience. I am not a real estate tout, a stock tout, a gold tout, a newsletter tout... And that pleases me. I get by on little. I write for a fortnightly and that small income goes a long way toward sustaining me.

I live in a small town, a place in its own way somewhat like the "Maple Street" depicted in that long-ago Twilight Zone episode. The monsters haven't arrived here yet, largely because I live in a country in which "credit" is largely unobtainable. "Credit," aka "debt" issued by a cartel of counterfeiters, hasn't made it to Maple Street here, thank God.

That debt and those who deal in it are the true monsters. That is not a witch-hunt perception; it is a fact.

Do away with it and watch Maple Street return to "a tree-lined little world of front porch gliders, barbecues, the laughter of children, and the bell of an ice cream vendor," to quote the introductory narrative to the episode.

Ignore Kunstler, Gary North and all the rest of the huckster phonies who are concerned first, last and always with their own interests and those of whom they perceive as their "tribe." Follow the money, as the saying goes. And then see where nearly all of it ends up: not on Maple Street, but at 85 Broad Street and elsewhere in the neighborhood.

The monsters have arrived, but they are most emphatically NOT Mr. Kunstler's "factory drone[s]" and "growing ranks of the unemployed, foreclosed, disentitled, and hopeless ." The monsters are the elitists, the financiers, the intellectually arrogant and the godless, the eugenicists who believe themselves superior to lesser human life forms, the Yezhovs and Rahm Emmanuels, the Bidens and Blankfeins, the Gores and the Geithners and the Bilderbergers, the toadies and their masters... those monsters have arrived on Maple Street and if you look carefully, you will see that they are in your living room as well.

Don't worry about a "witch-hunt;" worry about them getting away.

Don't let that happen.