Not Freepers, But Teapers!

O frabjous day! Here we are, Mr. Bones, present at the recreation!

To amuse themeselves, and to exalt the horn of the haute bourgeousie, the entire population of darkest Pajamastán will turn out as one wingnut and . . . .

. . . and . . .

....

Hmm.

Neocomrade Field Marshal J. Emmanuel does not exactly say what his shock trooperesses and troopers are goin’ta do once they are turned out. Perhaps we may take it as given that, on each separate tribal reservation, some high officer of their Big Management Party or their AEIdeology will inspect the formation to make sure that nothin’ is amiss. Only a low mean cynic, or a dupe of the MacLuhan Cult, would suggest that this inspection is more or less the main event, that the whole shebang will succeed or fail accordin’ly as it is reported on Party-and-Ideology Television for the convenience of print-challenged nonparticipants. Far be it from me to say any such thing, Mr. Bones! Although you will remember that I have been wrong about such questions in the past.

In any case, if the good field marshal (scheduled to pontificate at the Chicago wigwam, it appears) and his subordinate officers, scattered at various outlets of economic reaction all across the Fruited Plain™ of Neocomrade Dr. R. Limbaugh, should omit to conduct such an inspection, they will be makin' a mistake. For that matter, somebody is makin’ a different grave mistake if what I have called the good field marshal's "subordinate officers" are not, in fact, subordinate: all chiefs and no enlisted savages might make for a nine days' wonder, but come Day Ten, there won't be any ‘there’ there. This mistake is less likely than not savin’ the TV appearances, I suppose, in light of the obvious connections between the good field marshal and his officers and his officerettes and his trooperesses and his troops on the one hand, and the Party of Big Management on the other. [1]

What's that you say, Mr. Bones? "Am I deliberately trying to make the good field marshal's Party-and-Ideology groupies sound like the Kook Klux Klan?" Not at all, sir, not at all! I am aiming rather at a sort of Enron Corporation or Madoff Fund model of these new sweet puppies of the Right. You are not to make fun of me, sir, merely because I point up that a great many holy Homelanders™, a few of them not wingnuts or wingnutettes even at all, have a distinct tendence to go overboard in the organization-chart direction.

"Didn't I read the G. H. Reynolds article?" Oh, I see -- you must mean the agitprop neocomrade’s elegant smoke and mirrors to the effect that the Teapartisans are to get along without any organization charts at all,

"[M]odern communications and social-networking technologies allow quick coordination among large numbers of people who don't know each other,"

and so on and so forth. Come along, Mr. Bones, do I have to remind you that we heard the same sort of drool from much the same class of droolers twenty years ago, without anything much comin’ of it? Master Dilbert sincerely believed that high-tech whizbangs had overthrown the Soviet Union and refuted St. George of Orwell and "changed the world for ever" -- meanin’ chiefly, as I reconstruct, that the laddie himself then expected his holy Homeland™ swiftly to become the paradise envisioned by the dupes and marks of Miss Rand of Petersburg and Mr. Nozick of Harvard. ("Ah, ‘What went wrong? ’ " ! "Well may you ask, Neorabbi Bernie! [2])

Dilbert thinks so still, it appears. Well, OK, he is not the sort of spineless wimp who gives into mere reality. Like Neocomrade Lord Rove, Master Dilbert believes in "WE are an Empire now, and when WE act, WE create OUR OWN reality!" and all the rest of the neocatechism that baloney comes from.

The rest of us, however, would do better to come quiet, when reality arrests us. Especially now that the Crawford Crash has removed us several thousand additional light-years from the Beulah Land of dilbertarian bliss.

"Do the Teapers fancy themselves Rovean Empire-founders, then?" ’Tis an interesting question, Mr. Bones, though of course nobody off the reservation can ever know for sure what the Party-and-Ideology base-and-vile are thinkin’. Still, it strikes me as very unlikely that they are imperialists of anythin’ like Neocomrade Lord Rove’s sort. It goes without sayin’ that this present frabjous day would not be happenin’ at all, had the Fabulous Flyboy from AZ not been shot down on his White House sortie. "If Samuel Adams had had Lord North's job . . ." -- would be the properly ludicrous parallel in Century XII/XVIII for that counterfactual.

Less improbably, le teaperisme en Amérique may be a consequence of, or a collateral damage from, the Crawfordite Griff nach der Heimatlandmacht. If one prescinds from unreality-basin’ of the sort His Excellency formerly condescended to Mr. Suskind with, it looks as if there is not goin’ta be any Rovean Empire. All those power options that Neocomrade R. B. Cheney and Neocomrade Gen. A. Gonzales and Neocomrade J. Yoo, Esq., and all the militant extremist merry men so laboriously heaped up in the White House coal cellar are still there, but since the Roves and the Cheneys and the Boy and the Boy’s Dynasty are *not* still there, what good do these things avail the neocomrades? Quid enim prodest homini si mundum universum lucretur, animae vero suae detrimentum patiatur? [2]

You might try, Mr. Bones, to think of the 2009 Teapers after the model of Generalissimo Chiang in 1949: they used, just the other day, to be in control of all the levers of State power, but their attempt to perpetuate that arrangement in saecula saeculorum amen sadly miscarried. A small island far off to the starboard edge of the political world is all that remains in militant extremist GOP hands securely at the moment, though that misfortune does not mean that they have lowered their pretensions to be the alone echte und legitime Heiligheimatländer one whit.

Reconquest of the mainland is not goin’ta be easy no matter how the neocomradely remnant go about it. Of a reconquest accordin’ to the top-down models proposed by Neocomrade K. Freiherr von Rove back before the Republican Party's Nakba Day , there can be no question at all.

Teaperism, at least, is not obviously hopeless!

But God knows best.

Happy days.





___
[1] A rather less juvenile version of this same scribble appeared in yesterday’s Wall Street Jingo , than which nothin’ on Gore’s green earth could be more bigmanagerial! One learns that

When Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele asked to speak at the Chicago tea party, his request was politely refused by the organizers: 'With regards to stage time, we respectfully must inform Chairman Steele that RNC officials are welcome to participate in the rally itself, but we prefer to limit stage time to those who are not elected officials, both in Government (sic!) as well as political parties. This is an opportunity for Americans to speak, and elected officials to listen, not the other way around.' "

To be sure, the ever-august Chair of Steele™ is not the very toniest and farthest upmarket sort of executive-suite furniture available. How could it be, in a Big Party for which it has always been axiomatic that all first-raters will be found enrichin’ themselves with their bigmanagerial skills, not throwin’ these pearls before the swinish multitude?


[3] Ev. Matt. XVI:26.