THE WAGERS OF SIN: NOW ACCEPTING BETS ON MARXIST U.S. TAKEOVER
By: Rich Smith
Inspired by the fun and profit that office workers, factory hands and others across the country enjoyed as they wagered on the outcomes of National Football League games throughout this season now ended, I’ve decided to set up a betting pool just for us conservatives. But instead of speculating on trifling sports events, my pool will be devoted to gambling on more serious endeavors - like guessing the month and year by which America’s Marxist Left will succeed in totally eradicating our liberty.
I’ve already got the details of the pool laid out. Cost to pick a date: one piece of gold jewelry (or two gold dental fillings). Pay-off to winners: one extra ration of moldy bread crust at whichever concentration camp you happen to be interned.
Since I’m the one who organized this, I allowed myself to make the first pick. My moolah’s down on November, 2017. That, of course, is an easy choice and a lead-pipe cinch to win. It will, after all, mark the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik takeover of Russia. Knowing of the Left’s utter adoration for narcissistic celebrations of its milestone successes, I figure the anti-America crowd is planning to commemorate that event with a final, all-out assault on our republican brand of government. Goodbye, Constitution. Hello, commissars. Looking at it through their eyes, what could possibly be sweeter than to fully conquer the United States exactly one century after doing the same to the land of the czars?
My wife wanted to get in on this action, too. She picked December, 2099. What??? That’s crazy, I told her. No, that’s optimistic, she replied. Her hope is that we’ll all be dead and buried - or raptured - long before the Left can complete its evil mission. I think she’s dreaming, but then again, she’s just a dizzy dame (from the Lucille Ball school of dizzy damery, no less).
My son also caught pool fever, and chose a more realistic April, 2025, based on military intelligence forecasts expecting war with China long about then. However, seeing as the lad is but 11 years old, I had to disqualify him from the betting - too young to participate in this form of adult entertainment. He reluctantly accepted the return of his two gold fillings. Still, ever the enterprising youth, my son tried to con his way back into the pool by borrowing a grown-up’s trench coat and wearing it to conceal a second little kid on whose shoulders he was standing in order to pass himself off as an nine-foot-tall man. The ruse almost worked. It failed not because the fake handlebar mustache he’d pasted on to complete the disguise fell off at an inopportune moment, but because he gave his name as Tommy Pickles - and who but a kid would use the name of a character from a currently popular cartoon show (in this case, "The Rugrats," which airs on Nickelodeon)?
Anyway, the pool is open. Come on in, the water’s warm. It will only get warmer, though, given that the Marxist Left views ordinary Americans as the equivalent of the proverbial frog in a slowly heating kettle: by gradually bringing the water to a boil, the hapless frog won’t notice the change in temperature; when at last he does, it will be too late to save himself.
I encountered one such frog only this week in the course of my regular job as a freelance journalist writing for various specialty and trade magazines. The frog was a woman who owns a small business in the south-central part of the country. She’s successful at what she does. But, like many, many, many people in her position, she wants to avoid being perceived in a poor light. Accordingly, as I interviewed her for a story about her life and career, she repeatedly spouted a number of the pieties that the Left has ingrained in the populace.
The most obnoxious of those pieties was the one about the imperative for business owners to "give back" to the community. You’ve no doubt heard it uttered in your own city or town when a publicity-seeking entrepreneur is asked by the media to explain why he decided to support this philanthropic activity or that charitable organization. The idea behind this mantra of giving back is that businessmen are capitalists who exploit the needs of their communities; since this exploitation is the source of their wealth, it is therefore only moral and just that these money-makers donate some of that ill-gotten gain to groups helping the poor (translation: the indolent), the infirm (i.e., those with AIDS), the afflicted (meaning wastrels and ne’er-do-wells) and the oppressed (everyone except white males, conservatives and Bible-believing Christians). Failure to make such contributions can result in organized boycotts and other types of commerce-killing opprobrium from agitators on the Left, who need only make examples of a couple of high-profile businesses in order to whip the rest into line.
But so repugnant was my interviewee’s bandying of the phrase that I couldn’t resist urging her to never again let it pass her lips. I told her in an e-mail, look, each and every morning when you open the doors at your place of business you are engaging in the act of giving to the community. As a result, it is the community that must give something back to you -- which, hopefully, they do by paying their bills on time, becoming loyal customers and encouraging relatives and friends to likewise patronize your fine establishment. I repeat, you do not owe your community anything because you are not taking anything away from your community but are instead daily adding to its betterment with the products and services you provide.
For my trouble, I received back a tersely worded note: "Thank you for your comments." I was dismayed. Here I had made a sincere, upbeat bid to set her free from intellectual bondage and the best she could do was feed me the same blase, trite, non-responsive response usually generated by the public-relations department at major corporations whenever you write to them in protest of their support of abortion, gay rights, Satanism and what have you.
Still, I appreciated that reply if only for the reason that it served to buttress a point I had made a day earlier to an Ether Zone reader reacting to my recent column about the lessons we can learn from Hollywood’s anti-Nazi movies of the late 1930s and early- to mid-1940s. The reader expressed befuddlement as to how Americans today can be so blind to the evil that is gathering strength and preparing to do them in. I told the reader it’s not that they are blind so much as it is they are turning a blind eye. In other words, they see what’s transpiring but have consciously chosen to make no public judgement of it. Why? Because their private, individual calculus tells them that, at this late date, ignoring the Left’s assaults on liberty, decency and common sense will prove far more advantageous than will resisting. My interview with the business owner clearly demonstrates how this is so. She has arrived at the conclusion that it’s in her best economic and social interests to go with the Marxist flow and not make waves. To do otherwise would extract too high a price - chiefly, ruinous loss of income and a subsequent inability to pay her mortgage and car loan, coupled with complete ostracism from the A-list people whose acceptance she craves.
Fearing much the same fate for themselves, tens of millions of this hollowed-out woman’s fellow Americans have elected to follow her down the coward’s path to nowhere. Tragically, their ranks are growing. As a result, the momentum of the Left is also growing. Soon, it will achieve critical mass. Watch for that to occur in November, 2017.
You can tell by that last extremely prejudicial statement just how bad I must want to win my own betting pool. Hey, with a prize like an extra ration of moldy bread crusts at stake, can you blame me?
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