Its safe to say that when nice guys take off the gloves people are aghast. Remember in the movies when people were aghast? A cry would go up, something more than a murmur but less than a scream.
Back in the primary campaign pundits and voters were aghast when Bill Clinton went snarly. He had turned into Bubbastein right before our eyes. Whatever happened to our Oxfordian Fat Elvis who felt our pain? Down there in South Carolina he was seen comparing Barack Obama’s success to that of the REv. Jesse Jackson and he was showing his teeth, oh yes.
Sometimes nice guys just get off the rug. They decide to let their inner backwash out of the drain so to speak. No one really knows why they snap. Something happens to their super egos and you can blame it on heavy drinking or the tabloid press but this doesn’t explain the Nice Guy Next Door who formerly was known for smiling and waving and who now gives people the finger. At cocktail parties they say: “He was always such a nice guy. But now he gives you the finger!”
Oh its a dark world. The Nice Guy Next Door is whipping up a good old fashioned case of Greco-Roman malevolence. He’s going to put salt on the fields. He’s going to stop shoveling his portion of the sidewalk just to watch you fall. He will say you are inferior much as Athenians said the Carthaginians were weak. The Nice Guy Next Door doesn’t need social Darwinism because now that he’s no longer nice he doesn’t need to believe in advantages or “goodies” for a select few, he just thinks the whole world is a pis pot and he’s heading for the covert even if its just the basement.
The whole business is a kind of anti-conversion; there’s no transubstantiation just inter-substantiation–one minute he was nice and now he’s a scab picking, lightbulb stealing, window soaper. He’d soap the windshield of an ambulance if he could find one.
So here’s my argument: Americans don’t take disappointment very well. In our mythology we are a nice nation as we stand in bread lines or whatnot, but in truth when things go poorly in the land of milk and honey the Nice Guys and Galsshow their refined teeth very quickly. Teeth are a metaphor and dont you forget it.The Haymarket riots and the burning of our cities in the late sixties offer the ugly teeth of the last century when in both instances people felt raw despair.
Last week over 30,000people filed new jobless claims. That’s over 1.7 million unemployed people if the pace keeps up over the course of the year.
Imagine all those formerly Nice Guys and Gals who aren’t in the neighborhood anymore. The GOP is currently arguing up on Capitol hill that we should be spending less on the national recovery and cutting social programs and cutting taxes and apparently they don’t live in genuine neighborhoods where one can see Nice Guys and Gals feeling seriously inter-substantiated into ever smaller and meaner versions of themselves. Capitalism is only worth its cultural glory when it creates jobs.
Not even Nice Guy Obama knows how to make jobs without social programs and investments.
And I for one wouldn’t want the Nice Guy in Chief to get inter-substantiated anytime soon.
SK
Planet of the Blind 