Music Once Was Musical [0]

Which way is the data flow here?

One would expect Neocomrade Professor Doctor Th. Sowell to set forth authoritative talkin’ points for the guidance of his weaker siblin’s in the Party of Big Management, but this performance looks more like His Excellency rummagin’ through Neocomrade Dr. Limbaugh’s ever-immortal Stack of Stuff: de bas en haut, don't you know?

H. E. does have one firm word of instruction for the GOP base and vile: they are advised to agitate and propagandise against their Fedguv and their President as ‘fascist’ rather than as ‘socialist’. His Excellency bein’ a professional Chicagónomist rather than any sort of historian, one has to wonder what that ploy is all about. The practical state of the wombscholars and downdumbees is such as to make it very doubtful that they understand more than "somethin’ very bad" by either epithet. And from outside the zoölogical gardens, it matters not at all which epithet they hurl: "Sticks and stones may break my bones / But slurs can never hurt me."

One can learn little about Comrade POTUS from how the exalted Hoovervillain prefers to insult him, but there may be some instruction about Hoovervillainy. Hard to miss that H. E. recommends the name of the Old Euro bad guys whose badness was less specifically economic. That may seem a misstep, insofar as one might present the facts under the proposed talkin’ point this way: "Dr. Goebbels and Signor Mussolini were soft on capitalism."

H.E. inculcates that his F-word monsters "believed in government control of privately owned businesses, which is much more the style of [our own] government. That way, politicians can intervene whenever they feel like it . . . ." His S-word fiends, on the other hand, "believe in government ownership of the means of production" -- which sounds like it was quoted from some other sect’s catechism because that is in fact exactly where it comes from. H. E. (who was havin’ a bad day, it looks like, inspirationwise) does not actually make the point that he seems to have intended, and so one can count on the weaker sistern to miss it. Allow me: she who owns must also administer, whereas the firm of Goebbels & Mussolini could leave administration to their tame Heroes of the Market and only rarely intervene to veto this or that, and even more rarely to insist on positive action uncongenial to their kept marketeers and to everybody’s old friend Mlle. du Main Invisible. The mystic princess was out of work altogether under Comrade Lenin and Marshal Stalin; in Italy and Germany, she was alive and well, though not invariably in command the way she was before the recent Crawford Crash in the holy Homeland™.

Nevertheless, I conjecture that Neocomrade Prof. Sowell cares very little about the economics of lower-case-'F' fascism and recommends it to his Party inferiors mostly because the primary associations of the word, especially though not exclusively amongst Big Management Party wombscholars and downdumbees, is not economic at all. Nobody thinks of Hjalmar Schacht; everybody thinks of Heinrich Himmler. (Loosely speaking.)

Genocide and holiness and militarism and Homelands and limpieza de sangre, that's the ‘fascist’ ticket! Of course there had to be some sort of fascist economy, even as there had to be some sort of fascist State, nobody can make his way in the modern world without these miserable crutches, but to judge the firm of Goebbels & Mussolini by its necessary crutches rather than by its lofty (in)humanistic idealisms and its national-family values would be to miss almost the whole point. Only at the margin of ‘fascism’, in the realm of M. le Maréchal Pétain, do we find much trace of Lord Mammon. Even at that, the first word of Travail, Famille, Patrie! will scarcely have meant anything that Chicagonomics would be very interested in, or would much approve of if it did take an interest.

With fascism represented more fully and accurately like that, Neocomrade Prof. Th. Sowell's suggested talkin’ point may or may not seem fantastic even at Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh. Not even Barák Husáyn Obáma can be bad and wrong in every way at once, and to make him out bad and wrong after the centrally characteristic fashion of Goebbels and Mussolini and Generalissimo Franco and "Nous, Philippe Pétain" is absurd anywhere outside the factional monkey house. I assume His Excellency is either professionally blinkered and takes no interest in ‘fascism’ or in anythin’ else except insofar as there exists some Chicagonomic angle to it. Or, rather more likely in my judgment, H. E. is playin’ defense here, and would rather have the current controversies between America's party and the militant extremist GOP framed with as little mention of economics as possible.

Call Comrade POTUS a socialist, and the mind may wander to how brilliantly the antisocialists have just managed to wreck "their own" financial system. Call BHO a fascist, and maybe a few instructed persons will laugh out loud at the neocomradely ignorance, but such laughter will not do economic OnePercenterdom any actual harm. Better talk distractive nonsense, in short, than talk sense that might prejudice the interests of Party and Ideology.

His Excellency of Hooverville is endeavorin’ to exalt the horn of the Republican Party and of the AEIdeology, that is to say, the horn of Big Management™ all across the board. From that standpoint, what could be better than to tar opponents, if possible, with the sort of bigmanagement that once ran Dachau and Operation Barbarossa?

The socialist Muscovites at least managed to be on the victorious side in 1945, so of course it would not do at all if Comrade POTUS were to emulate them on that front. One connotation of the word ‘fascists’ that the wombscholars at Rio Limbaugh may actually be able to take in is ‘losers’.

So Neocomrade Th. Sowell's is a plan that the Joseph Goebbels School of Counterterrorism and Public Diplomacy can approve of in principle.

In practice, though, I betcha it doesn't work. The neocomrades may get their paws back on the Executive Branch levers of power sooner rather than later, but if they do, it will not be thanks to the Sowellian antifascism product, nifty though one can write it up. (Or to Señorito J. Goldberg's ditto.)

Happy days.


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[0] Thee tell me, Mr. Bones, why the ChristoKorean editors of America's Moonpaper wanted to call it that, when Neocomrade Dr. Th. Sowell could be totally tonedeaf for all that this scribble indicates.