All Hail! (starrin’ Al Hale and Señora Teresa Salutaria)

Neocomrade L. Kramer has (I think) opened new vistas of unity for Wingnut City!

Everybody knows that the sweet puppies of the Right are divided into a number of different covens and conventicles, of which the "neocomrades of the strict observance" -- i.e., Commentariat and Weekly Standardisers -- are far from bein’ the most numerous. The gentry used to think that they could make up in tertiary-educationized quality what they lack in quantity, but that has been a pretty ridiculous idea for quite a long time now. [1] But perhaps one has dismissed them prematurely on the cogitation front? for here comes L. Kramer with a really nifty notion!

The Kramer Plan will need some fleshin’ out, I daresay, but the general outlines are sufficient clear from this preliminary draft.

My only reservation from the agitprop standpoint is whether L. Kramer should have begun by bad-mouthin’ that broad Antipopular Front in which his own factionette finds its niche. He tells the Big Tent neocomrades that they are ‘weak’. This is unlikely to go down well at Rio Limbaugh in particular, unless the poor dittoheads take the "We Americans" of the neocomrade’s preamble to refer exclusively to Comrade POTUS and his groupies and the "drive-by media." True, Neocomrade L. Kramer only mentions weakness in order to ballyhoo his own patented strenthenin’ regimen, a neoproduct that this keyboard have already testified to the niftiness of from outside the monkey house altogether.

Unfortunately a large number of the Big Party base and vile get discouraged when their sky becomes cloudy for even a few minutes daily. And there is worse still in prospect for them, since the Kramer Plan involves, among other things, that all that Limblovian barkin’ and bellowin’ about the niftiness of torture simpliciter cease at once. The is no reason to assume that Neocomrade L. Kramer does not mean to be perfectly even-handed and shut up (for example) Neocomrade Professor A. Deshowitz, Esq., of the H*rv*rd Law School on the same terms that he shuts down Dr. R. Limbaugh of Wombschool Normal U. [2]

Shuttin’ down and shuttin’ up is the keystone of the Kramer Plan, at least after this keyboard has finished clearing away the oracular mists in which it comes packaged. The heart of the darkn... of the niftiness, rather, is, "I cannot get to the place where official disclosure of interrogation techniques is a salutary thing." My amateur mist clearance in effect deletes ‘techniques’ and ‘official’ from Neocomrade L. Kramer’s own formulation. Let nobody associated with the Antipopular Front mention the T-word at all!

The intrepid student of Neocomradology bold enough to violate the "History is bunk!" taboo of the militant extremist GOP is free to classify 2009 Kramerism with a much earlier political movement, whose adherents were always to respond "I know nothing" when asked anything the least bit interesting.

The beauty of "know-nothingism" for the barbarus tortor extends far beyond the obvious "Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies," although that is no small advantage in itself, one that this keyboard would not knock it for an instant.

Nevertheless, what really makes Kramerism the jewel in the head of a toad is that, as already adumbrated, it puts lowly dittoheads and lordly Baní Dershowitz on the same plane for once. All neocomrades are to be EQUALLY silent whenever they are accosted by the dread T-word.

Naturally even this coarse and illiterate keyboard appreciates that the Antipopular Front would disappear in about ten minutes if the neocomrades suddenly perverted to l’égalité tout court. What could be more self-evident than that? Yet since wingnutettes and wingnuts and Heritagitarians and and AEIdeologues and Hoovervillains &c. &c. find themselves livin’ in a holy Homeland™ where to come out against equality head-on is not likely to be ... well, to borrow an expression, ‘salutary’ for them. Silence on Torture would give the whole Party of Goldwater and Atwater one more thing to be genuinely equal about -- and Father Zeus knows they could do with a little more of that product! Silence on Torture is a more political sort of thing for the (broader) neocomradely community to be equal about than, say, night bread and sliced baseball, and at the same time it is a rather specialized affair that is most unlikely ever to metastasize into pernicious equality-across-the-board or into "any other improper or wicked project," such as the Madisonian ‘Publius’ forewarned against.

I have left the best and niftiest to last, though, and it consists in how beautifully Silence on Torture bridges the greatest of the many fissures inside the Party of Big Management. If asked at gunpoint to simplify the anatomy of the political elephant down to a gruesome Manichee twosome and "twenty-five words or less," probably pretty well everybody competent to answer at all would distinguish Big Management proper, the core conspiracy of economic OnePercenters, and all the rest of militant extremism. The Kramer Plan for Silence on Torture has the immense merit of treatin’ torture in a sound or salubrious or ‘businesslike’ (i.e., a bigmanagerial) way, removin’ it from the public sector where that detestable ‘transparency’ stuff keeps gettin’ in one's way. Yuck!

Kramerism exalts torture up into the empyrean of the Secret (or so-called ‘Private’) Sector, where it obviously belongs. One is not bigmanagin’ really bigly, after all, when one can be required to talk about what one is up to.

An objector might object that Silence on Torture is unfair to the rank-and-file base and vile, who are to be deprived of all that barkin’ and bellowin’ that they adore in exchange for ... it is not very obvious what. And I suppose the Gospel Accordin’ to Larry can not be preached at Rio Limbuagh exactly as I set it forth here: the inferior sort might get the idea that if torture be strictly a Secret Sector affair, why, they can set up in that line themselves down in the basement.

The OnePercenters’ previously niftiest scheme was to reshape all the various circumambient penumbrae and emanations of the Party of Grant into an Investment Society™, which was also, in its way, an attempt to create a small patch of non-inequality in the midst of the Herrnstein-Murray Curve.[3] Even a Catoholic might blanch at a Torture Society bigmanaged along those lines! Still, perhaps one ought to classify that nightmare under "petty management" or some such rubric?

And God knows best. Happy days.



___
[1] Perhaps since as long ago as Christmas Day, 1991, when the NSO lost their great adversary of stature, the Lenin-Gorbachev racket. The first degeneration of the Homelandic Hate-’68 Movement™, whose parents had been (?) fans of the Fourth International, made some positive mileage out of their generally mitteleuropäisch flavour, a matter in which the Great Adversary figured as well. Te former Second World was not exactly run by WASP God Folk from Kalamazoo and Kankakee, after all. Minsk and Pinsk and CCNY were much more à propos.

"That was then, this is now."


[2] We have agreed (have we not?) about the niftiness of it. Practicability is a separate question.


[3] "Where's the non-inequality?" Not a hard question! If the Investment Society Express had not been suddenly derailed by the Crawford Crash, all neocomrades, great and small, would possess an equal -- and equally ‘unalienable’ -- right to win the lottery. (Actual outcomes might have varied.)