Deepery Thotzing

In part, an homage to Jack Handey

Eventually, pain is converted to humor. It’s true. It’s right there in the physics books.
Everything that matters is eventually lost.

Don’t look at me like that. I’m not the Creator of how life works. Blame that guy. Physics and biology is what he was in charge of. I’m just the janitor here.

Pain is a process. It can wear you out or you can beat it down. It’s a challenge to your survival skills. The ultimate game show. It’s a test of endurance, your patience and your sense of search for the right perspective. Humor is when you’ve won.

SNL genius Jack Handey: I wish I would have a real tragic love affair and get so bummed out that I’d quit my job and become a bum for a few years, because I was thinking about doing that anyway.

Anyone who’s been in a tragic love affair knows that the pain of losing access to that special someone via breakup or death is no laughing matter. The Handy quote injects the humor, just one of the available antidotes. The best antidote. The reminder that there’s always a light at the end of a flashlight. Which is superfluous to its original use as a billyclub when you’re playing Cops And Robbers with your kids.

The country is polarized and divided like never before. Unless you were paying attention to all the bitter divisions that polarized us yesterday and the day before. Just like the ones that polarized the other 200 countries. Since basically forever. Is your memory failing you so fast? You need to ask yourself if it’s time to give up your daily quest for tacos. The Burrito Council has a handy guide to help get that monkey off your back.

Jack Handey did not say “Ay-yi-yi, it smells like something died in here!” Think about that. Only Ricky Ricardo ever said ‘Ay-yi-yi’ but it’s never been authenticated that he ever remarked on the aroma of your farts.

Kevin Hayden: Fart jokes are a useful antidote to all known sources of pain. It doesn’t cure the malady. The only cure is to give up the burritos too. We need to go back to the Hunter Gatherer years. When things were perfect, before Other People told us we had to share. ”Buy yur own burritos, ya bum!”

(Memo to my self: invest in Bean Futures. There’s gonna be more pain coming.)

Cultivate your garden with whatever feast amuses you. Spaghetti squash is never funny. Kumquats were, before weightlifters bragged about how many kumquats they could do. Weightlifters never cared about you or your garden.

Try Snap Peas. Just don’t leave semi-automatic weapons around when they snap.
Rutabaga.
Big Ol’ Honking Pumpkins if you want County Fair ribbons because nobody actually eats them..
Beets. You don’t even need the expensive headphones if you pick the right varieties.
Basil, if you like Brit humor.
Spinach, if you want to stay strong to the Finnish like the Danes are.

Never plant zucchini. The first one tickles. Then the tickling becomes torture and you’re forced to kill your brother. Don’t waste your precious years granting any sympathy to zucchini planters. Deep down, they’re Nazis.

Planting seeds of guilt can create weird results.

Jack Handey: If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is ‘God is crying.’ And if he asks why God is crying another cute thing to tell him is ‘Probably because of something you did.’

Guilt is a pain that can wear you out too. Use it wisely for kiddie control or you could become the guiltiest at messing things up. Likewise fear. The most simplistic unoriginal politicians use fear to convince you to do something. They don’t grasp positive incentives to encourage us to be nice or courteous or considerate. Fear somebody else is all they have for ammo.

It can make us all instinctively defensive when you’re trained to obsessively fear government. Most of government is just middle class people putting in their 8-to-5. They’re not plotting to oppress and/or kill you. In a conversation with a dearly loved person today, I heard them say the government is all gestapos. Because they heard that:

a) a White House hireling said the government has lists of unvaccinated people “which they’re not supposed to have”, and

b) they’re going to the doors of the unvaccinated to get them vaccinated.

I’d heard that certain groups were doing door to door conversations hoping to get more people vaccinated and some of the funding for that effort came from government coffers.

I think the Gestapo did far worse things than trying to encourage you to wear a seatbelt in your car and making car manufacturers install brakes so you can live longer. Unsafe at Any Speed was a gift from Ralph Nader who also wasn’t Gestapo.

Government can be oppressive but the actual people doing things we need to resist are a tiny part of government. Some politicians want to take too much of your hard-earned money via taxes. Some in the middle class have legit beefs about that because most of the tax burden lands on them. Some politicians want certain groups marginalized and encourage you to arrest and imprison those groups. Or they want to start wars that create an unecessary and expensive number of corpses. To defend mineral rights or fossil fuels.

You and I were never going to be attacked by Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese. Nor did North Korea ever have plans to invade the United States. El Salvador, Nicaraugua, Iran, Iraq, Syria? Same. Defending the country from an invasion necessitated a defense from Hitler and Hirohito who were actually invading neighboring countries and wanted control of everyone.

North Korea now is an actual threat because they’ve gained nuclear capacity and nobody wins a nuclear war. Everybody loses then. But to be logically consistent, we need to destroy all nuclear weapons. I know that US adults in control of nuclear weaponry are also capable of making that mistake. Make nuclear weapon ownership a crime against humanity and jail everyone who possesses them. They’re a lot more dangerous than people knocking on your door to explain where to get a vaccine and why you need to consider doing that. They’re not pushing Zyklon B or forcing you to do anything.

The government deciders we elect can hurt and kill. They can overdo the tax burden the middle class endures too much pain from. They can train and fund armed people who can hurt and kill. Like the Air Force, Army, Marines, Navy, Space Force, CIA, FBI, ICE, National Guard and state & local police forces. If you really are committed to fear something about the government, you might want to shift your focus to elected officials championing wars against other people and other countries.

Instead of supporting politicians faking a threat of rampant illegal voting, why not insist that threats without evidence is insulting our intelligence? Unless logic is not your forte.

The majority of the country’s adults is smarter than that. Not because of ideology but because logic isn’t rocket science. Do we really have to put up with efforts to limit the voting of certain groups of legal US citizens so the gullible minority can constantly overrule the voting of the logical majority? I mean, get real.

Evidence can’t be easily faked. We had more than one president who tried to do that and some succeeded in convincing the majority. So yeah, the majority can be fooled some of the time, as Lincoln noted. But it’s much easier to convince a minority of citizens far more often. Some think it’s going to be easy to suppress voting so the gullible minority gets to overrule the logical majority.

Why do they think that? What motivates their desire to grant the minority excessive power? Why do they play Pavlov and push that fear button to make them drool?

Their jobs as elected politicians must be dependent on that practice. They’re getting their campaigns funded by people who like the return on investment. Which is why campaign finance reform is a necessity. The ultra wealthy simply like it when they can get bunches of armed men to defend their holdings. (I don’t mean millionaires, but people with megamillions and billions.)

The ultra-wealthy are heavily invested in keeping the current system intact which protects the smallest minority of all: the ultra-wealthy. It’s logical to assume that because the circumstantial evidence of how things are working strongly suggests there’s some truth in it.

If an elected official is making efforts to hide things, to punish whistleblowers and investigative reporters, it’s reasonable to conclude that there’s a reason why. Somebody benefits from the hidden stuff and it just has ever been us, the citizens of the US. And the Citizens United ruling by the Supremes is another example where they’re hiding the campaign donations of ultra-wealthy citizens, ultra wealthy PACs and ultra wealthy corporations.

If democracies are to function at their healthiest, getting more people to vote is always best. Politicians should be winning elections by offering solutions for the most people. Compete at being best and demonstrate your merits, instead of limiting voting.

We understand what motivates people to participate in healthy government practices. Fear and greed. Bread and circuses. Greed and bread, to some degree, are driven by survival essentials. Fear is beneficial only in an actual emergency not a faked one. Fake emergency fear pitches only benefit a few. And if you see the tell tale signs of a circus show, start looking for a gaggle of clowns running it.

Skepticism is more useful than fear in a healthy functional society.

As to all the trained heavily armed guys? That’s how we got Timothy McVeigh. That’s how we got Osama Bin Laden, by helping to arm him and the other people resisting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Most of the armed people actively participating in the January 6th violence at the US Capitol were trained in the military and/or police groups. Most of last summer’s peaceful protests and the tiny percentage of violent acts were caused by deadly and destructive police actions, not by Black people trying to gain an advantage over White people.

Or you can follow the evidence-free theories of vast conspiracies launched by Q-Anon. Who is gaining an edge by doing that? Who gains by trying to convince millions that their political foes are all secret pedophiles who plan to screw your kids? I’m gonna have to guess it’s the ultra wealthy again, behind that ridiculous bluff.

They mine your data. They target you with sales pitches to sell products and political outcomes that enrich them. They fund tax bills that grant huge loopholes to the ultra wealthy and permit new versions of tax havens. Our middle class should be reining them in, not some relatively powerless group of people.

We overcome pain with patience and endurance. Listening to fake fire alarms leads to bad voting decisions. It leads to Proud Boys promoting violence and shouting and slugging in Charlottesville and politicians claiming the counter-protestors (Antifa) are causing the violence.

Again, evidence. It’s not difficult to weigh for the majority. And winning is not everything. Reason and an informed citizenry is much closer to everything useful and desirable in successful civilizations. It doesn’t require a college degree to have common sense, to consider multiple perspectives, to patiently look beyond simplistic answers to complicated matters.

Patience and endurance is how to overcome political pain. And humor.

Israel Putnam may have passed on the orders of a Colonel at the Battle of Bunker Hill with these words: "Men, you are all marksmen—don't one of you fire until you see the white of their eyes."

I’d advise holding fire till you hear their punchlines. The overly serious fear promoters don’t have effective pain solutions. My life experience has been that the people who can make you laugh at the pain have seriously thought things through.

My political ideology was born of this personal experience. The guys who can really make you laugh have a common motive: to make you feel better in the midst of the pain. George Carlin, Wanda Sykes, Tom Lehrer, Dick Gregory, Billy Crystal, Kate McKinnon and dozens of others. Not a lot of politicians have the gift of providing a laughable punchline. I clearly can see that AOC can do it. But so could Barry Goldwater in his later years, so there’s no clear line between liberal and conservative there.

None of them is perfect, but lean to the ones who bear fart jokes.

They know something about reducing pain which is what we all should want from elected government leaders.

Jack Handey: "I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it."

Reporter: “What do you think of Western civilization?”
Mahatma Gandhi: “I think it would be a good Idea.”

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith: “Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite.”

Wheelchair-bound FDR: “A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.”

Mazie Hirono: “I bring quadruple diversity to the Senate. I’m a woman, I’ll be the first Asian woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate, I am an immigrant, I’m a Buddhist. When I said this at one of my gatherings, they said ‘Yes, but are you gay?’ and I said ‘Nobody’s perfect.’

Pat Paulsen: “All of the problems we face today can be traced to an unenlightened immigration policy on the part of the American Indians.”

Jon Stewart: “If your regime is not strong enough to handle a joke, Then you don’t have a regime.”

Barack Obama: “There a few things in life harder to find and more important to keep than love. Well, love and a birth certificate.''

Jimmy Carter: "My esteem in this country has gone up substantially. It is very nice now when people wave at me, they use all their fingers."

Kevin Hayden: “Farting on an elevator would be wrong on so many levels.”*
(*stolen from the internet)