Monday Memory Fart Ramble: Death By Clown

 I seem to remember an old black and white movie. It started off great. The cowboys are all at the saloon, chewing snoose, playing cards, and snorting whisky. Clint Eastwood wanders in (might a been someone else) and deliberately walks up to the bar. Without moving his head, he scans the tables and patrons through grit teeth. Seated on the at one of the tables, John Wayne (might a been somebody else) looks up from his cards at the stranger... and his eyes narrow  and his expression grows grim. Other famous bad guys wander in and you KNOW something real BAD is about to happen. Then the camera focuses on three little men at the end of the bar. It is the 3 Stooges, and they are loading a machine gun belt of ammo - into a meat grinder based improvised Gatling gun. I was just a tot and for me the sun rose and set on the stooges. Seeing all the top flight movie stars working with them was icing on the cake. What a hoot! Hollywood knew how to take good care of us kids back in the day.

The wanks on Blab today are all out of sorts: apparently they are bringing back the old Hanna-Barbara cartoon - Scooby Doo. In the latest version, that fat dumpy short geeky girl in the toon is now a black lesbian that hates white people. I don't much care one way or the other...compared to other current  Hollywood children's offerings... this is pretty tame. Apparently the thing is bombing so that is good news at least. Angry, miserable lesbians have nothing to offer kids and the little ones seem to instinctually know it.

Somebody else did that - a famous author of two bit thrillers - Jeffrey Archer? Robert Ludlum? The set-up to the gag was the same but infinitely better. The book starts off with men in black suits and ski masks crashing through the windows of the Vatican: the frags go out, the MP5's burp - and in seconds, all the guards and security are dead. The bad guys knock out the pope, truss him up like a pig and hook a static line up to him and themselves - and in seconds they are hauled aloft and away by a black helicopter. You KNOW this is gonna be a roller coaster of a ride! But... The phone rings in the bedroom on Air Force One... and the POTUS turns out to be a guy like Burt off that old comedy called SOAP. His number one general is a cigar-chomping fop that offends people wherever he goes with his jingoism. A soyboi flimp of politico and lawyer is sucked in to the ensuing yarn that has the bad guys trying to to ransom the pope, the pope himself enjoying the peace and quiet of confinement and vowing never to return, and the clownish presidential administration screwing up ... and whatever was left of a sensible suspense thriller turns into a farce. The Road To Gandolfo...? I can't remember. I smiled as I read it, decades ago.

The old black and white western made by the Stooges became iconic of the vaudevillian comedy era  long ago. But that book... it became a fulfilled prophecy, looking back at it. If the pope got kidnapped today, he probably wouldn't want to be rescued. Nobody would want him back either. Joe Biden is the Don Quixote of our times and would be funny if he weren't actually a president in power. The freaks and carnies in his administration are literally right out of the circus. 

It is sobering indeed to think that Canada and America are probably going to be the first countries to die this way. There was a time when no one would have thought it possible.