Down With The Lifeless*

[* Lifeless = Dead, NOT Tired.]

More and more laws now target the homeless. There’s the Las Vegas ordinance that prohibits feeding anyone who even looks homeless in public parks. There’s also a Sarasota law that lets non-homeless people sleep on public land if they’re neat and tidy and don’t dig holes, but makes it a crime for homeless people to do the same, no matter how good their behavior.

These laws are based on the governing principle that even if we can’t get rid of the homeless people we have, we can at least make them miserable in order to make examples of them and so discourage others from joining them.

As always, the organization behind this gutless, bleeding-heart, liberal rag is so opposed to such laws that I wouldn’t dare support them in this column. That’s why I want to change the subject and talk about another class of wastrels out to get a free ride at the public expense: the lifeless.

It’s time we decent, hard-working, voting, living people stood up to bone-headed, do-nothing liberals who always want us to mollycoddle lifeless people and who constantly apologize for their good-for-nothing behaviors. Or, I should say, non-behaviors. That’s the trouble with the lifeless: they’ve taken non-behavior and turned it into high art. You could call them “ne’er-do-e’er-agains.”

Come on, people, do you really buy the liberal line that lifelessness is almost always involuntary? These lifeless people may not enjoy being lifeless now that they’re all up in it and they’ve found out it means they can’t watch Survivor anymore, or eat pâté de foie gras, but I guarantee you, every last one of them got that way by means of their own bad lifestyle choices.

Even if a lifeless person is housed underground and out of sight, it still sickens me to know that I’m living in a city that lets them lie about in padded boxes every day and all night too, never lifting a finger to help themselves or to contribute to society. They may not be watching TV, shooting heroin in front of my kids, or taking up space on my sidewalk, but they’re sure as hell also not taking baths, working, paying taxes, or making America great, like the rest of us do.

Oh, wait; they do pay taxes, don’t they? For now they do, but they won’t be paying taxes when those liberal do-gooders, George Bush & Company, get their way. Here’s a population that pays not one cent of income tax or sales tax, and George Bush and his buddies want to relieve them of the one significant tax they do pay. Why? You know perfectly well they’re not going to use the break we give them to pull themselves up out of the holes they got themselves into. They’re not even going to use it to fly themselves to France and get out of our lives.

I first realized what a drag on society the lifeless could be a few years ago when comedian Bob Hope became lifeless. Instead of presenting him to our children and our feeble-minded as an example of how far a once-good man can fall, our liberal media spent an entire week praising the man and giving his current condition a complete pass. Sure, he was a great comedian years ago, but now he’s lifeless, and whose fault is that? It sure isn’t mine. I didn’t tell him to get 100 and die.

What we need is a law like Sarasota has, for the lifeless instead of the homeless. Say a person who isn’t dead lies in a box and decomposes. That should be legal. But if a person lies in a box and decomposes because he’s incapable of doing anything else, we should fine that person $500 and/or jail them for 60 days.

That may not end lifelessness, but it would show our impressionable children, and our feeble-minded, that being lifeless isn’t “cool” and it isn’t going to be tolerated. And that’s worth doing.

Stupid. Creative! But Stupid

Today I want to honor stupid creativity in the news.

I am a great fan of creativity. I especially enjoy stupid creativity. The things that the newsmakers I’m going to honor today have done are outstandingly, stupidly, creative.

To start with we have the Laotian government, which has recently been under pressure from the Thai government to repatriate and create homes for thousands of Hmong refugees that have been living in Thailand since Laos fell to the communists in 1975. The Laotian government has brilliantly, creatively, responded to Thailand’s demands by asserting that 6000 or so Hmong are not, in fact, Laotian.

“Hmong? What Hmong? Oh those. Those are Hmong, sure, but they are not Hmong Hmong. They are your Hmong now. Good day.” Way to go Laos, you are awesomely creative!

Also awesomely creative is an individual, Mayor Frank Melton, of Jackson, Mississippi.

Mr. Melton was elected mayor in a campaign in which he promised to reduce violent crime in Jackson. When his assumption of office did not in itself achieve his stated goal, even after it was given plenty of time to work its magic, Melton decided to declare a state of emergency in the Mississippi capital, and under his emergency authority ordered a curfew for all minors and homeless people.

No, he didn’t claim that the homeless people were responsible for Jackson high levels of violent crime. He just tacked the curfew for the homeless people on to his order out of sheer liberal utopian idealism: he was moved by the plight of a homeless teenager to want to help. Which he did, by threatening homeless people with arrest if they didn’t let themselves be packed into a school gym every night.

How stupidly creative was Frank Melton’s curfew? Well, in the one month since it’s been in place, Jackson’s homicide rate has more than doubled! Fantastically stupid! I guess it’s easier to murder people now in Jackson than ever before, what with all the witnesses being put out of the way every night. And, better than that, Jackson has become a liberal utopian paradise, because Frank Melton has ended homelessness there, just like Franklin Roosevelt, our greatest liberal president, ended Japaneseness during WWII.

I thought nobody could top Frank Melton for stupid creativity until I heard about the new Las Vegas ban on feeding homeless people in parks. This new ban, devised by the Las Vegas city council, is outstanding. It is breathtaking in its stupidity and depravity. Only truly creative geniuses could be so stupid.

Boring cities elsewhere are always coming up with laws that are intended to ban feeding homeless people but that actually say boring things like, “you need a permit to feed more than such-and-so many people, so apply for a permit, and we’ll charge you so much for it you could have just used the money to buy dinners at fancy restaurants for everyone in the park.” Unlike those boring cities, Las Vegas has written an interesting and creative law, which addresses the problem head on. Their law says you just can’t feed homeless people in city parks. That’s it. You can feed housed people all you want. You just can’t feed homeless people.

How do you know if the person you’re feeding is homeless? They’ve thought of that problem and they’ve dealt with it in their brilliantly creative direct way. If they look homeless, that’s enough. The actual law defines a homeless person as an indigent "whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive assistance." So it doesn’t matter if they’re really homeless, you just need an ordinary person, like a cop, to think they might be.

The beauty of the law, to me, rests with the idea that to be ineligible to be fed in a park a person has to be believed, by an ordinary person, to be eligible to be fed. Congratulations Las Vegas! I could never have made that up!