No More American Pie For The NRA
No More American Pie For The NRA
I’m Don McLean and it’s my American Pie and I’m keeping it from you this weekend. No pie for you NRA. Not this weekend. It’s too soon.
Ok, I get why you may be a bit confused because it wasn’t too soon after Buffalo or the Santa Ana massacres which, I guess, were also kind of close. But they were just a few more days ago so they didn’t really give me pause in accepting money from gun pushers who have bribed our congressmen and senators with shady money for decades to ensure it’s easier to own a gun in this country than to buy lawn darts or Sudafed.
And Sandy Hook, Parkland, Las Vegas, Columbine and all the others were years ago right? Just footnotes buried quickly on our news sites like the notices of church bake sales and lynchings in the almanacs of yore. Mere murmurs in our hairy ears from the stale breath of history. Unlike the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper. That’s still ever present in our minds, thanks to my song and the sweet sweet crack of the weaponized nostalgia industry that smothers us crusty old boomers into a pampered decrepitude and criminal ignorance.
Ah, sweet sweet nostalgia. “Did you write the book of love? Do you have faith in God above?”
My song is the defining mantra of a generation. It’s not just a song, it’s 25c malts, Mickey Mantel and a living wage. It’s going to college and not being saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. It’s buying a house with your sweetheart and putting a bun in the oven. It’s Walter Cronkite and a time when the news was regulated and had to be factually accurate. It’s Benny Goodman and watching racist and sexist Walt Disney cartoons without having short apologies popping up on screen. It’s hoop skirts and laughing off date rape. It’s cable TV. It’s America when it was arguably still a democracy and not this ‘for profit democracy’ thing we’ve got going on now. It’s a time when people still ate a lot of actual pie. And not in Edward Hopper’s diner either but surrounded by smiling people drawn by Norman Rockwell. And nary a black or brown face in sight unless they were grinning and bringing us things. Things like pie.
Who wouldn’t want to live in that world?
Well the NRA do not get to have me personally sanctifying and propping up their monstrous agenda this weekend.
For you youngsters out there, you woke millennials, cynical ‘X’ers and what not, who might think depriving the NRA of my hit song is just more empty gesture politics from the olds. Well think again, without me and my guitar on stage they are going to have to play my song from some kind of speaker system and believe me, that is going to be a real nightmare!
It’s not even record players or CDs anymore, it’s something called synching and streaming now. Unless they have my nephew Sam there, who is a real whiz with these things, then they are going to be well and truly fucked.
They’ll probably have to drive Ted Nugent in to do a cover version. Nobody wants that, believe me.
The NRA has of course contacted me to reconsider my position. They do present a really strong case. They assure me there are lots deer hunters who use AR-15s. I agree. I once saw Al Pacino do so myself in Miami in the eighties. The deer were trying to steal his cocaine as I remember it.
They also point out that the answer to our mass shooting epidemic is more guns. Guns for teachers. Guns for the kids themselves. More and more guns so that, just by the sheer law of averages, some guns will eventually fall into the hands of some ‘good guys’. Hopefully.
Not ‘good guys’ like George Zimmerman or Kyle Rittenhouse. I’m thinking some other ‘good guys’. I’ll ask Sam, maybe he has some ideas.
It surely is a lot to think about. But while I support the second amendment, I just read it and I’m beginning to see it doesn’t quite cover selling automatic weapons to kids and psychopaths. It does after all say ‘well regulated’ right in the wording there. Maybe some new regulations could ensure that the hunters using AR-15’s prove they are actually using them to kill deer? Maybe if we do this we’ll start seeing more cheap venison around to offset the need for all these ‘food banks’ we’ve got now?
I’m thinking It could turn out to be a real win win.
Come on people! Lets do something and get back to the good old days when a mass shooting just meant some depressed dude ‘going postal’ with a handgun and taking out two or three middle managers at a bank.
Also, I guess the ‘good guy argument’ is starting to look a little weak given what we’ve seen at this last shooting. With the police. I hope those cops haven’t been watching Tucker and all that stuff about ‘The Great Replacement’. I hope it was just good old fashioned cowardice like the Parkland dude.
Now I think of it, if there were any ‘good guys’ left in America, they might be riding out now to the NRA convention. And they would be there to put an end to the insanity that profits off the murder of children and the incitement to violence on a twisted propaganda of white supremacist patriotism. And I, for one, will not condone it on this weekend.
I’ll leave that to Governor Gregg Abbott and Senator Ted Cruz.
But sure, hit me up after memorial day and we’ll work something out for next time, just be sure the next mass shooting is a least a week away from the convention and in different state.
The Democrats currently hold the Presidency and Congress and the Senate. They would like you to believe they are powerless while they continue to fund raise off tragedy and pour billions into anti abortion and pro gun members of their own party. The Civil Rights act was only passed by overriding the filibuster in the Senate. Biden could issue an executive order right now stopping the sale of automatic weapons for six months pending a review by the Attorney General and even offering us a referendum on the second amendment, which is the kind of thing that should happen in a supposed ‘democracy’ as opposed to the ‘democracy for profit’ oligarchy we have slipped into. Please contact your representatives and the White House. Please stop giving money to pro gun politicians. Please help stop this madness.