"Steeped in deferral"

Contender #3's "steeped in deferral" is not bad at all, Mr. Bones!

It would make excellent sense, ¿no es verdad?, if the Mañana People were finally to have their day. A. Greenspan and B. Madoff and all the witch doctors of Chicagonomics from 'C' through 'Z' have rather discredited the world mastery of premature ejaculators. So a little "steeped in deferral" might hit the spot exactly. (The neocomrades can steep theirs in that ten years supply of teabags that they will have equipped their estate bomb shelters with.)

Speaking of the landed gentry, Princess Neoterica is gettin’ haughtier than ever, it seems to this peasant: many of the nonorganisers of Death and Teabags Day proclaimed (nonauthoritatively, quasi radices graminis) that nobody they knew (and would not of course ever dream of pretendin’ to speak for) simply frontin’ for the militant extremist Republican Party. Or frontin’ for RupertNews either.

Her Imperial Highness is not in the Market for that wishy-washy unpartisan product (or bumptious Putsch attempt by a few dotty dilbertarians.) Extra Crawford nulla salus!

The quarrels of the ideogentry -- ((dip pitchfork here as token of deferral)) --are far over one’s own humble and overeducated head, naturally, but H. I. H. may be makin’ a slight miscalculation. Since Señorito D. Brooks lives in the third McMansion down the hill from the Kaiserhof, figuratively speaking, Princess Neoterica might ask the lad in for tea and a Soc. Sci. pow-wow some afternoon. By Her Highness’s own acount, she is at present waitin’ for the holy Homeland™ to rise against Comrade POTUS as one wingnut, which means that she ought to be able to squeeze in a half-hour audience for Master Davey.

I do not recall the amateur sociologist-in-residence at the New York Times Company ever addressin’ himself to the mysteries of Planet Dilbert (vulgarly called ‘libertarianism’) directly. It is not needful that he should have, however: Señorito Brooks thinks about the world (this world) in an amateur-sociological kind of way, and he must at least have heard the names of the late Miss Rand of Petersburg and the later Mr. Nozick of H*rv*rd. That ought to be adequate for a preliminary readin’ of the tea leaves, extraterrestrial in origin though they be.

This coarse and illiterate peasant inclines to view Death and Teabags Day largely under the aspect of a dilbertarian revival, after the micromovement had nearly gone extinct altogether in the immediate aftermath of the Pentagon-WTC attacks. Roughly the same emotional satisfactions were provided by Kiddie Krusadin’ as by dilbertating, and, for a change, the Daughters of Ayn and Sons of Bob could emote in company with their nominal compatriots. So far the analysis is easy going, though naturally I deference ((dip pitchfork slightly)) to Master Davey’s disagreement, if he disagrees.

One might have guessed in advance (though in fact this peasant failed to) that Planet Dilbert was not dead, only restin’. And now it looks as if they’re back. Obviously an economic exuberance like the Crawford Crash is up their traditional alley, Dilbert Street, in a way that some mere feigned Islamophalangitarian Menace™ could never have been permanently under any circumstances. Like a great many others in the neocomradely community, not to mention the disciples of M. b. Ládin and Dr. Zawáhirí (and ultimately the Rev. Ibn Taymiyya), the Baní Nozick and Bnê Rand have been in a mild state of cognitive dissonance ever since the Big Bang, all their hormones torn between hatin’ a "far enemy" and hatin’ a "near enemy." The far enemy is, of course, the dread Islamophalangitarians themselves. The near enemy is America's party, or perhaps l*b*r*lism generically. People like Comrade POTUS and the present peasant, don't you know?

I assume the learned señorito of NYTC will will confirm both that this configuration is unstable in itself, and that when it eventually breaks down, the "far enemy" will almost invariably wind up on the back burner. Accordingly, the Crawford Crash ought to have been a twofer for the Dilbertarians: (1) they now get to talk about their crank economics, a subject-matter they much prefer to exotic considerations adduced by jihád careerists, and (2) they get to loathe somebody near at hand of whom they have a reasonably clear and distinct mental picture, not just a Danish cartoon.

That is what one would expect antecedently, and that seems to be what is actually coming to pass.

This peasant’s own experience, which happens to include 45 minutes of a Death-and-Teabags Day event beside Boston Harbour, is in accordance with theoretical expectation. In Eastern Massachusetts, at least, very little of the anti-Obama windbaggery professes to be specifically in the path of the militant extremist GOP. One bozo after another callin’ in to Neocomrade H. Carr (WRKO 680) or Neocomrade the Duke of Sanseverino (WTKK-FM 96.9) announces that she is some kind of ‘conservative’, yet not the strict Grant-McKinley-Hoover-Dubya kind. This far down into the sewer of Romulus, the word ‘libertarian’ is echoed and re-echoed often enough, but the peasant impression is that the talk-show fodder are scarcely prepared to recite on exactly what it means. Still, they kinda know what they like. Presumably the wombscholars kinda like ‘libertarian’ because they do vaguely grasp that it means somethin’ conservative that is yet NOT tainted by asociation with the Party of Goldwater and Atwater.

The objection is obvious: Eastern Massachusetts may not be typical. And indeed the whole Commonwealth actually IS atypical insofar as windbags and wombscholars and regular Republicans between them cannot manage to elect even one Congressman out of eleven. This makes it especially amusing when the Duke of Sanseverino, who is an avowed slave of Dilbert and who can be quite rude about the Party of Prescriptive Wisdom and Virtue (and Áyatalláh Bill Bennet) on occasion, does that Herbert Marcuse impersonation of his, threatenin’ to withdraw toleration from the rest of us. [1]

Hence the peasant suggestion that Her Imperial Highness of Pajamastán confer with Master Davey of the New York Times Company about the current status of dilbertarianism in the holy Homeland™ viewed from sea to shinin’ sea. Are there enough Homeland™ers who want to be Kiddie Konservatives without bein’ militant extremist Republicans as well to matter? And even if they do not matter today, how about mañana?

And even if they won’t matter any quadrennium soon, one would still like to know how many of Her Highness’s "hundreds of thousands of tea party attendees" actually gave much of a hoot about Her Highness’s Big Management Party as such.

Turning the tables 180 degrees, Planet Dilbert as such cannot reasonably be expected to appeal to the up-market tastes of the Commentariat and the Weekly Standardisers; everythin’ about the Baní Nozick and Bnê Rand reeks sadly of banausic Trade, and Miss Rand’s ludicrous attempts to make banausic Trade seem romantic only aggravate the underlyin’ incongruity. Though standards have been slippin’ badly lately and continue to slip, yet Princess Neoterica and the whole Imperial court still retain some traditional notion of what a novel should be like, a notion that overlaps with Miss Rand’s curious fictional productions not at all.

Mr. Mansfield of H*rv*rd might serve as a litmus test for ‘libertarianism’: any patient who knows approximately who that toneyest of livin’ neocomrades is may safely be pronounced free of infection. Alternatively, the patient might be exposed to some brief Mansfieldian scribble [2] and then acquitted of suspicion if she can get to the end of it without actually breakin’ out in hives or tossin’ the book / magazine / computer across the room in exasperation. (Like everything else here, that humble peasant suggestion should be flown by Señorito Dr. Brooks of NYTC for a thorough Soc. Sci. vettin’ before actual implementation. But it sure seems to me that this plan ought to work!)

Happy days.


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[1] His Lordship is a very typical dilbertarian, though of course the peasant notion of ‘typical’ is once again parochial, and has a lot to do with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in particular, especially MIT as viewed from the best college in the county (of Middlesex), the one which lies two subway stops farther west.

Neocomrade J. Severin combines an I.Q. of 150 with an over-all developmental age of about fifteen years. Folks like that want human events to be as easy to grasp as quantum physics, and they do manage to get the sort of product they want from Miss Rand and Mr. Nozick. Dilbertarians are not, to put it gently, picky about quality in a political product, so long as it exudes a strong whiff of steel-claptrap-mindedness.

The generic brain disease can happen on the other side of the aisle as well, though it is rarer chez nous. Consider Jimmy XXXIX Crater, the soi-disant nuke-you-larry physicist.


[2] The Weekly Standardisers keep a good deal more in stock on line than Commentariat Centre does, a fact which mildly surprises this peasant. Anyway, Neocomrade H. C. Mansfield's most recent e-performance, as retrieved by the pet google, ought to make perfectly servicable litmus paper, despite bein’ specifically about an economic topic. There is, after all, economics and then there is economics: few if any denizens of Planet Dilbert know much about the recondite Chicagonomic points that this Renaissance neocomrade refers to.

Best of all, the word ‘virtue’, sine quâ non!, makes a personal appearance.