BY DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI NEWS AND COMMENTARY

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, TUESDAY, JAN. 19, 2016) — Welcome to MLK Day+1, the day after the day when governmental employees enjoy a paid day off while most of the Dreaded Private Sector (DPS) has to schlepp it into work. Counting federal, state, regional, and municipal, that’s 21,995,000 employees getting another free ride upon taxpayers in the bedraggled working class. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the nearly 22 million government employees outnumber those employed in the U.S. manufacturing sector — 12,329,000 — almost 2-to-1.  Game, set, and match. THE PLANET shall leave it up to the more intrepid scorekeepers to tally up the lost productivity due to this forced holiday.

THE PLANET shall be the first to admire the work of Martin King. This includes not just his fearless stand for social justice but also his use of writing as a signature tactic of non-violent resistance. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” remains one of the great prose essays of the 20th century. He remains a seminal figure whose influence for good cannot be overestimated.

Fact is, though, we have the MLK holiday only because of King’s fate as a martyr. The bullet that cut him down on April 4, 1968 assured his secular sainthood. It stopped cold the dark side of King just beginning to emerge from behind the cover of the virtuous God talker, the all-too-human flaws that made him something other than the mythic black Christ figure that never existed. It is novelistic irony that King, a lifelong smoker who hid his habit not only from the public but from his family, was gunned down on the motel balcony while sneaking a cigarette. After the bullet felled King, one of his aides, Dr. Billy Kyles, reached into King’s pocket to confiscate the cigarette pack. No one must find out.

King is the only American not named George Washington to have a holiday in his personal honor. King moved ahead of Jefferson, Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, and Robert E. Lee, to name a few, but why? What form of honor can people not give King without a national holiday? Name one. Someone.

THE PLANET is waiting.

To shut down the nation so politicians can go back to district gooey photo ops and bask in the glory of government employees for the “free” day off strikes us as unnecessary as well as economically sentimental.

The Country Can’t Afford This Holiday

Go back to the statistics cited earlier, which the BLS has been keeping since 1939. For the first 50 of those 76 years, manufacturing employed more than government. That changed in August 1989. For the first time, government workers pushed ahead of private-sector manufacturing, 17,989,000 to 17,964,000. Since that fateful month, private manufacturing has shed 5,635,000 jobs while government padded the payroll by 4,006,000 “workers” (2015 figures).

One could peg that August 1989 date as The Day The Empire Collapsed, Part 2. Part 1 occurred on Sept 16, 1985. On that day, the United States of America officially became a debtor nation. Prior to that, since 1914 when New York City superceded London as the world’s financial center, America had been a creditor nation. Thank you, Ronald Reagan, the Howdy Doody of presidents — a star before the cameras but clueless without his script-writing Buffalo Bobs.

It’s been all uphill (downhill?) for the DPS since then. The United States of Amnesia — the late, great Gore Vidal‘s immortal phrase for the dissipated country that blew its chance for greatness — doesn’t make things anymore. It imports the goods of other countries. The U.S. of A. provides services — take Pittsfield, please. The city’s moth-chewed twine-ball “economy” is based on Recreation and Resorts, a mottled collection of eateries, bars, movie theaters, and art venues that provide relief from boredom for the La De Dahs and minimum-wage dreariness for locals who serf the jobs.

The government gets bigger, employs more people to do less and less, and the DPS fades into oblivion. Makes one want to take up smoking.

Make ours Camels. Unfiltered.

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“And I take a good look, at all the time that it took to find you.” — Mick Valenti, “I Know Everyone,” from the album Beatlesque, (2011).

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.

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