A fable: the Murphys of Pittsburgh

Apollonius of Tyana, speaking of Aesop:

     "He made use of humble incidents to teach great truths. He was more attached to truth than the poets are; for poets do violence to their own stories in order to make them probable. But Aesop, by announcing a story which everyone knows not to be true, told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events."

 

A specter is haunting American politics. The specter is the narrative of a land that has fallen from a golden age of prosperity, productive work, and self-respect, now replaced by unemployment, poverty, and deaths of despair. 

Closed Bethlehem Steel plant

That narrative leaves a hole. Will a hero emerge to restore past glory and make America great again? Trump offered himself. He seems confident. He takes action. The country starts winning and winning and winning until people are tired of so much winning.

Jerry Murphy's writing gets him in trouble with content moderators on social media. He is a retired high school English teacher and a playwright who has had dozens of short plays produced for school and church groups. But what gets him in trouble are his satirical pieces in social media. Irony confuses people. Readers complain that he writes things that are believable, almost, and it confuses them, and they can't tell if he is cheering something or mocking it.

Jerry Murphy wrote a fable. Everything is going to be all right.

Murphy

A fable by Jerry Murphy: The Murphys from Pittsburgh

I hadn’t heard from my Pennsylvania cousins since the election, but I recently received a missive from Charlie Murphy.

Charlie’s father, Joe Murphy, had moved his family out to the Pittsburgh area after WWII, where he told everyone “I’m gonna get me a job in an Allegheny County steel mill. You watch - pretty soon I’ll be living off the fat of the land like you never seen before.”

And Charlie’s pop was as good as his word. He moved to Pittsburgh, got a good union job at the Homestead Mill and was soon raking in good money, especially since he was hungry for money and would never turn down overtime. He had at least three weeks of vacation every year and he’d take the kids camping in the summer. Also, he and the boys went buck-hunting every fall.

“I feel sorry for you people stuck back in Philly,” he’d write. “Your dad should have figured out how to get a union job where you get some time off instead of being a roofer 52 weeks a year. I tell you, you all ought to move out here where you got a chance for a good job and you can buy yourself a decent home like I got. Also, I get plenty of extra meat from hunting every year.”

We only heard from this family maybe once a year, usually around Christmas. For a long time, he was bragging about how good things were there. Gradually, of course, things began to turn a bit. It was sometime in the 80s that we began to hear about layoffs. Never happened to Uncle Joe, of course, because he had a union job and had years of seniority.

But his boys weren’t so lucky. The Pittsburgh area had about twenty-five mills in the 60s, but they’re down to three now. And around 1973 they had that oil embargo, and the price of gas quadrupled overnight. Things turned to crap fast. When the recession hit, the steel mills closed all over the place. Uncle Joe died, and his boys, including Charlie, lost their union jobs and what little savings they had managed to keep.

Luckily, their dad had a big house. It got crowded with all the wives and kids moving back, but it was better than going out on the streets. When their father died, all the kids got half-decent shares in the old man’s legacy, enough to begin thinking about buying their own places.

Then the oxycodone thing came along.

Two of the brothers died of overdoses.

Most of the grandkids dropped out of school and the whole family was a welfare-dependent mess. Everything around them was going to crap.

And then, out of nowhere, a miracle happened.

A man named Donald Trump ran for president. He promised the Murphy clan, and others like them, a new beginning, a better America. An America where jobs would be plentiful, government waste eliminated, and undesirable immigrants, especially those who would take your job, sent back to where they came from. And most important of all, a family could buy a dozen eggs without mortgaging their future.

So. the Murphy clan changed their voter registration and helped to vote in Donald Trump. The good times came back so fast for the family it was enough to make you dizzy. Donald took all the jobs stolen from us by Mexico, Canada and China and started up a whole bunch of new Pittsburgh steel mills. Abortions ended because women were now proud to have many babies. People started working and drug use stopped. Haitians stopped eating dogs and cats, and they moved back to Haiti. Black people stopped playing professional sports and took up their rightful places as maids and shoe-shine boys. Students began to learn the true history of our country, a proud country with a proud White heritage. And finally, and most importantly, you could once again buy a dozen eggs for less than a dollar.

God bless America!

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