This Year Be Thankful You Don’t Have an Orange for a Head
Did someone say eat Turkey?
Be thankful you used to live in the greatest country on earth. Until, you know, it was fundamentally transformed. Which reminds me of an old joke:
A man walks into a bar. He has an orange for a head. The bartender pours him a drink and says: “So—you want to tell me about it?”
“Well, I was walking on the beach,” says the man with an orange for a head. “I found an old lamp in the sand and took it home. When I polished the lamp, a genie came out and offered me three wishes in return for setting him free. Thinking it was some sort of trick, I offhandedly wished for a million dollars. Instantly, the doorbell rang. A man had arrived to tell me I’d won a mail-order sweepstakes for exactly a million dollars. So I returned to the genie and wished I could have sex with every Playmate of the Month for last year. The doorbell rang again—and all 12 pinup girls came prancing in, at my service. I went back to the genie a third time,” says the man with an orange for a head, “and I think this may have been where I made my mistake.”
“What did you do?” says the bartender.
“I wished to have an orange for a head.”
For the connection between that and the election, read the rest here. And more seriously, have a great day.
*****
Cross-posted from Klavan on the Culture
From the link:
“I believe the answer is that, for those of us who have worked hard to master the storyteller’s craft, the joke both dramatizes and exemplifies the most painful and ridiculous truth we’ve learned: no narrative structure is big enough to contain the infinite perversity of the human heart.”
I think that’s the clinch – the people of this great and proud nation want it finally to be over and done with and there’s nothing else to say to it…….
I don’t think that’s the case. I think that the voters have decided to believe the people who tell them they can have their cake and eat it too. At some point in the not-too-distant future Reality will get a vote and show everyone that the price of having cake is not eating cake, and the price of eating cake is not having cake. When that day comes I wouldn’t want to be a Democrat (I don’t want to be a Democrat anyway, they’re dumb and smell bad, but on that day people will be fixing to make ornaments out of them.). Most people don’t take kindly to being lied to.
People are honest in that they are full off with being the world’s policeman and the central bank for the global economy. What they are lying to themselves about is that they can keep the corner office………
I don’t get it. Why did the guy ask for an orange for a head?
I don’t get it either.
It took me a minute of thinking – being a little slow on the uptake sometimes – but I think I understand: You get what you ask for.
*Between 1776 and 1850 people wanted liberty. They voted for people who supported that. They got it.
*Between 1850 and 1930 people wanted wanted goods and transportation and so we built an industrialized economy. They voted for people who supported that. They got it.
*Between 1930 and 2012 people increasingly wanted more government safety nets and more regulation of the economy. They voted for people who supported that. They got it.
So we shouldn’t be surprised we’ve got exactly what we asked for. Whether we’ll ever recover from that wish is unknown. But those around us look at our decaying social fabric and decaying economy and ask, “What the hell did you do?”