Lord Fribble's Castle

This fribble disposes of its own grasp of Chicagonomics with "I’m told on reliable authority." To be balanced and fair, then, one ought to consider only those points on which the fribble is itself authoritative. But which points are those?

It has personal subjectivity or ‘experience’ to fall back on, that inaccessible and therefore inexpugnable fortress

available to pretty well anybody, even to light-weight neocomrades of the Big Management Party. But the fribble seems to have some faint recollection of far-off notions of Brit gentility, "When I am not worrying about how I am going to pay for our children’s college education[,] I worry about what sort of country we are preparing to bequeath them" That is to say, it assures everybody that it does have domestic worries of its own, but the object of the exercise is rather a courageous self-profilin’ rather than a trailer-trash appeal for empathy: "Look how stiff my upper lip is that I hurry on so rapidly to worry about everybody’s kids! About your kids, O men of Pajamastán! Have you seen anythin’ like that since Cincinnatus and General Washin’ton?"

But since it then proceeds to worry only chicagonomically, we may move on without purchasing that particular product.

The main product bein’ hawked here is, I take it, "Barry XLIV himself does not know any more chicagonomics than Neocomrade Roger, Viscount Kimball, happens to have picked up in a casual and amateur way." That is probably not an entirely accurate estimate, yet one could strike "Mr. O’Bama" and insert "President Summers," in which case there would be no point in denial that the fribble is just plain wrong. ("Resistance is futile" when it comes to the proposition that Larry knows best.)

So naturally there is no sign of Larry the Learned in the scribble of the fribble. No faintest hint that the men of Pajamastán [1] might need any more chicagonomics than they possess already, whether acquired casually and amateurishly modo kimbalensi or through rigorous indoctrination at Wombschool Normal University.

It, the fribble, might perhaps have done a bit more with its own resources at this point: the men of Pajamastán might have been reassured that their own aforementioned kids can hope to become POTUS one day even without a thorough mastery of chicagonomics. They will always be able to hire themselves an anti-Summers or two, after all.

(Its lordship may conceivably hold that the customers’ kids will not even require to have that much truck with professional mammonology: once in the Oval Office they need never employ the likes of Larry. But that view is so forceful and ‘exuberant’ that one should really have been put unmistakably on notice.)

Once it starts dancin’ that quaint rhetorical fandango of its about ‘delicacy’ and ‘fastidious’, we find ourselves on an alien and bewildered planet uninhabited by any creature the least bit resembling President Summers. Its lordship’s neocomradely inferiors are reassured that Barry XLIV must be an economic dunce because "Mrs. Obama’s compensation at the University of Chicago Hospital ... jumped from $121,910 in 2004, ... to $316,962 in 2005." As if there existed no such thing as chicagonomical raison d’état, no difference between the petty management of a literal oikos and bigmanagin’ the U. S. of A.!

Even if that were in fact how the world works, the point of insistin’ on it to the base-’n’-vile of the militant extremist GOP would not be apparent, when they mostly believe it already. The Party of Grant would have gone extinct before 1890 had its marks and dupes understood much about economics. [2]



As it stumbles across its own bottom line, however, the fribble does manage to suggest that there may be hope for us all. It turns out that even a Neocomrade Roger, Viscount Kimball, is capable of a Luther-at-the Diet-of-Worms impersonation! Observe how boldly its lordship stands up against received Party-and-AEIdeology orthodoxy, as formulated authoritatively by its lordship’s Neocomrade Karl, Prince of Rove: the latter has laid it downthat to

believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality .... that’s not the way the world really works anymore ... WE are an Empire now, and when WE act, WE create OUR own reality. And while you’re studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- WE shall act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. WE are history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what WE do.’’

The fribble does not believe a syllable of that august Bushevik tripe and baloney, and it is not afraid to say so out loud:

"The discomfort [of ‘cognitive dissonance’] is a salubrious reminder that REALITY COUNTS FOR SOMETHING, that you cannot live a contradiction."

Even subtracting a few points for the fribble’s evident inability to distinguish between changing one’s maind and cherishing a contradiction, one must award it high marks for prudence and courage, the two virtues in which other militant extremist neocomrades have been most signally deficient ever since 11 September 2001.

But God knows best.

Happy days.

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[1] The present keyboard guesses that "O men of Pajamastán" would be Ô ándres Batzamastánioi. However it, the keyboard, is no so completely ungentlemanlike as to remember all of its Greek. Anybody who does that must be a union thug. Or worse.


[2] Not that America’s party has ever reposed itself upon sound popular understanding of trade and finance and securitized illiquid assets. Being a genuinely political movement, however, and not basically a conspiracy of economic OnePercenters like you-know-who, we jackasses are on a much longer leash vis-à-vis Lord Mammon.