Morton Downey Fucking Junior

I remember reading years ago about Brazil or Argentina that it was the country of the future, and always would be.  That was maybe thirty years ago, and now it is still the country of the future.

Sixty, maybe sixty-five years ago I remember sitting in a darkened room at Enrico Tonti grade school and watching the flickering image cast on the wrinkled screen, something about when our leaders wore wigs and wrote with feathers and the phrase "Monroe Doctrine," stood out.  The tone of voice of the crackly narrator was like he was speaking of something noble and good.  I remembered the phrase for years, but not really what it was until I learned that it meant that European countries should keep their hands off South America.  If there is any fucking to be done with those countries the USA would do it.

Kind of daring for the pipsqueak of a country we were at the time, but I guess it speaks to the disinterest of Europe that it was never violated, or not too much.  Plenty of people, plenty of resources I don't know why it never amounted to much on the world stage.  I don't see the a United States of North and South America.  We don't even want to let Puerto Rico become a state.

Here's another odd thing I learned poking around on wiki.  Argentina is 85% white.  How is that?

When I returned to Chicago in 1987 every now and then some rattletrap car armed with loudspeakers would rumble down the street blaring the glory of LaRouche.  Every now and then I would run across them at some table or on a street corner, youngish guys as I recall, their eyes with that gleam like you sometimes saw in Moonies or Hare Krishnas, but those guys were headed for some bright eternity, but the LaRouches, what were they getting out of it?  I dared not approach them and ask because there would go the afternoon.

I remember Lar Daley, and wasn't there some guy who dressed up like a clown, maybe it was the same guy.  Thinking of him I remember a similar flaming crackpot, Morton Downey Junior.  What a flash in the lunatic pan he was.  I especially remember him now that the city is abuzz over that Jussie Smollett affair.  As his star was rapidly fading he faked being attacked by neo Nazis and the KKK in some public restroom who, he claimed, roughed him up and drew a swastika on his forehead.  The swastika was backwards, the way it would be if somebody was looking in a mirror and drawing it on their own forehead.


The network news shows, after giving you the bad news in the first fifteen commercial free minutes, tend towards softer stuff afterwards, and the very last segment is something heartwarming like kids and animals.  It doesn't fool me any, I know we are going to hell in a handbasket.

I don't remember many people speaking Czech or Polish (not that I would have known the difference) in my hood.  I do remember the shopping cart women, older, not very well dressed, who trundled up and down the busy streets fiercely dragging their full or empty carts behind them.  Oh and I remember the term DP (Displaced Persons, a phrase from WW II), used to disparage somebody's fashion sense as in "You look like a DP."