Jack Parsons - Rocket Man

Jack grew up in a broken home (his father was a depressed adulterer) and spent most of his childhood reading alone and blowing shit up.  Jack loved explosives.  His extremely patient mother put up with his hobby, but was horrified when she caught him trying to do a supposed occult ritual to summon the devil.  Jack was sent to military school to straighten him out, but it wasn’t long before he was expelled for blowing up toilets.  Exasperated, his mother then sent him to a very liberal private school that didn't give grades and let its students do whatever the hell they wanted.  What Jack wanted to do was blow shit up, work for explosives manufacturers, and write letters to famous rocket scientists, all of which he did.  Though too poor to attend college, Jack started hanging out with several CalTech science students, bribing them with marijuana in order to gain access to the science labs.  Together, Jack and his new friends formed a rocketry club, which also wrote pro-communist science fiction screenplays which they sent to Hollywood, because of course those two things go together. 

As the country suffered through the Great Depression, Jack and his club built rockets out in the desert.  It was around this time that he married Helen Northrup, a woman he met at a church dance, the place where all pot smoking socialists meet their wives.  The marriage was a little rocky, with Jack spending all of their money on rockets (even once pawning her wedding ring) and making homemade nitroglycerin on the front porch.  When World War II broke out Jack and his fellow club members, in a convoluted scheme to avoid the draft, founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and convinced the military to fund their research into rocket powered planes.  Over the next several years Jack developed rocket fuels and engines which would later propel humans into space.  Being such a genius he of course became inspired to join a cult.  The cult of Thelema, founded by Alestair Crowley, who claimed Egyptian gods told him of the dawning of a new age, believed in spiritualism, cosmology, the finding of one’s true path, and of course sexual promiscuity.  How sexually promiscuous do you ask?  Well, when his wife Helen left for a trip, Jack started sleeping with her 17 year old sister Sara.  When Helen got back, Sara declared that she was Jack's new wife because she was better at having sexing with him.  When Jack agreed, Helen took a new lover and all four moved in together.

Things of course got weird.  Jack poured all his money into the cult, buying a compound where they lived as a commune and slaughtered their own animals for food and blood rituals.  He started walking around with a large snake draped across his shoulders and sleeping with every woman at the compound and at work, even the married ones.  Though to be fair, he always politely paid for any needed abortions.  Jack also started using large amounts of peyote, meth, and opiates, because what’s the point of running a cult compound if you can’t be high as shit the whole time?  As the war began to wind down Jack left the JPL and rocketry to focus on the occult.  It was around this time that L. Ron Hubbard (later the founder of Scientology) moved into the compound.  Jack's main squeeze Sara was quite taken with Hubbard to the point that she started sleeping with him.  Jack dealt with this by masturbating on sacred tablets in an attempt to call forth a goddess to have sex with him.  Soon after a random vivacious woman named Marjorie Cameron showed up, and lo and behold, she did start having sex with Jack, so maybe don't be so quick to judge.  Together, with Hubbard watching, Jack and Marjorie involved themselves in sex magic rituals.  At least they did until Hubbard and Sara ran off with all of Jack's money.

Downtrodden, Jack quit the cult, claiming it wasn't culty enough for him, married Marjorie, and moved into a small house where he set aside an area for chemistry experiments and the homebrewing of absinthe.  Jack tried to find a job, but had difficulties because he had been black balled by the government.  No, not for being part of a drug fueled sex cult, but for writing communist themed screenplays when he was just out of high school.  Such was the 1950's.  To make ends meet Jack got work making fake fog and imitation bullet wounds for movies.  Marjorie left him for a time to join a commune in Mexico, but came back after a few years.  Jack made plans to go to Israel to get back into rocketry, but before he could, accidentally blew himself up in the lab he had set up in his home.  Marjorie of course then went on to found her own cult called the Moon Children.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:JackParsons3.jpg

Hillary Clinton - That’s Ms. Rodham If Your Nasty

Pantsuit was born in to a fairly boring middle-class family.  When she was a little girl she wrote a letter to NASA saying she wanted to be an astronaut.  NASA, apparently not having enough to do sending people to the moon, replied with a letter saying a female astronaut was a stupid idea.  Somewhat upset by this, Pantsuit swore she would do everything in her power to prove that a woman could do anything that a man could do.  Her first step in this epic quest was attending an all women's college.  Her second step was to hook herself up with a womanizer nicknamed Bubba, staying an extra year at school just to be with him.  As far as plans went, it didn't really make a whole lot of sense.  Despite such setbacks, Pantsuit rallied on, gaining accolades, earning respect, and sparking predictions of a tremendous future law career.  With such high hopes she of course failed the bar exam her first try, which she dealt with by marrying Bubba and agreeing to support him in his political career.  Again, not exactly the best laid out plan.

For a time, Pantsuit tried to be an independent woman, working as a lawyer and keeping her own last name, but over time the weight of voter expectations (voters mostly being yokels in this case), wore her down until she morphed into the demure woman the American voter demanded.  Bubba got elected president and Pantsuit learned to be a political chameleon, appearing as whatever people wanted her to be, until nobody, including herself, was really sure what she was.  This made Pantsuit a very secretive person, paranoid to the point where she wouldn't even let anyone read her college thesis.  She also got in the habit of countering anyone calling her a liar by calling them a liar, a tactic that worked amazingly well.  Pantsuit spent a good chunk of Bubba's presidency claiming his many affairs were part of some kind of vast conspiracy against the two of them and plotting on how she could become president.  Pantsuit wanted to prove to the world that a woman could president.  Which was a very different goal than her husband’s, who mostly seemed to become president for just the hot chubby intern action.  Pantsuit began her march to the presidency by becoming a senator for New York, a state in which she had never lived.  She then ran for the presidency in 2008, but was beaten by a man whose spouse had never sexually harassed anyone.  Pantsuit became Secretary of State, and waited around for her chance to run again eight years later.

In 2016, Pantsuit was sure she was going to be elected president.  We’re talking so sure that she probably already bought monogrammed towels.  To be fair, she was a poised well informed candidate running against a shaved misogynistic racist baboon who openly talked about groping women.  How could she lose?  Well, apparently she could, because she did.  Some say she lost because over the previous eight years a significant part of the country suddenly became racist and misogynistic again.  Some claim it was because she couldn't connect with younger voters.  Perhaps it was the fact that her every smile seemed kind of fake and her every reaction a calculated veneer.  Maybe it was because, like your grandmother, she had absolutely zero knowledge of how technology works (seriously, the woman doesn't even know how to run a desktop).  It most definitely didn’t help that when a scandal broke out about her using private emails for official business, she decided that it would be a better option to have some people believe she was a Machiavellian genius rather than an out of touch luddite.  

In the end, the election was decided the same as so many others, by a group of probably drunk laid off factory workers from the Rust Belt, who upon realizing that neither party really gives a shit about them, vote for whichever candidate seems like the biggest middle finger to the current establishment.  Whatever the reason, Pantsuit hid herself away, wrote a concession speech she never thought she'd have to give, and now has to move on with her life. What is she going to do? Who knows, but hopefully it involves buying herself one of those Computers for Dumbasses books.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hillary_Clinton_(30129908473).jpg

Carrie Nation - A Blitzkrieg on Booze

Carrie was a tank of a woman.  Standing at 6 feet tall and weighing in at 175 pounds, she described herself as a bulldog, running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what he didn't like.

Carrie was born under some pretty piss poor conditions.  Her father was a hard luck man who failed at every business he tried, and her mother was a woman who loved finery and social airs, but suffered from delusions that often times left her convinced that she was Queen Victoria.  Due to these two familial quirks, the family moved constantly throughout Carrie's childhood, leaving little time for formal education.  What little schooling Carrie did get came from random books she managed to get her hands on and the family bible.  After the Civil War, Carrie fell in love with a young physician named Charles Gloyd, who, as luck would have it, happened to be a severe alcoholic.  Carrie's parents did not like the match, what with Gloyd being a drunk and all, but Carrie was smitten.  Gloyd unsurprisingly died a little over a year later, his liver pickled the maximum amount possible.  Carrie, unfazed, used his estate to build herself a nice little home and get her teaching license.

At age 28, Carrie got remarried to a minister and attorney 19 years her senior named David Nation.  The couple lived in Texas for a time until David got involved in local politics, by which I mean several of the local politicians murdered each other.  Not holding his beliefs that tightly, David and Carrie then moved to Kansas where David made a pittance working as a minister and Carrie made good money running a hotel.  However, the hotel apparently didn't take up enough of Carrie's time for she soon founded a local temperance movement.  At the time, due to the prevalence of drunken cowboys, Kansas had banned the sale of booze, but the law wasn't really being enforced and saloons operated openly.  Carrie, a woman of action, spent her time off going to bars and singing hymns to the drunks, which unsurprisingly had little effect.

After nine frustrating years of hymn singing, Carrie, now a woman of 54, had a bit of a revelation, or perhaps a breakdown.  Convinced that God had given her a divine order in a dream, she collected a big pile of rocks, took them to a saloon, and smashed all the liquor bottles.  After destroying two more saloons in a similar fashion a tornado struck Kansas, which Carrie took to be a thumbs up from the man upstairs.  More raids followed, after which her husband David sarcastically suggested that a hatchet would be more effective.  Carrie, believing it to be the first sensible advice the man had ever given her, divorced her husband and then bought herself a hatchet.  With her new weapon in hand, Carrie began a reign of terror across the country, smashing taverns wherever she found them.  She was arrested and fined numerous times, but was unapologetic.  The fines were paid off using money she earned doing speaking engagements, autographing pictures of herself, and selling souvenir hatchets to her many admirers.

Carrie Nation became big business to the point where she trademarked her own name.  When President McKinley was shot, Carrie, believing him to be a secret drunk, applauded the act because drinkers get what they deserve.  As her fame grew a vaudeville group, for god only knows what reason, convinced her to join them on a tour to England.  Carrie, evidently not understanding what vaudeville was, spent her time on stage giving sermons on the evil of drink, which were rebutted with eggs thrown by the audience.  It didn’t take long for Carrie to understand that she was being treated as some type of joke, so she ripped up her contract and went back to the American speaking circuit.  In the middle of one of these lectures she collapsed on stage and died at the age of 64.   

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carrie-nation-feature-543882879.jpg