Also sprach K. Priestap!

To sink much below the level of Neocomradess K. Priestap [1] would seem to be impossible.

Yet look closely, Mr. Bones, at what the estimable wingnutette is doin' as she slums: unless she is recitin' her favourite bits from recent sermons of the Rev. Dr. Limbaugh merely to pleasure herself, which would not be very public-spirited, she must consider that some of the weaker siblin’s of the Big Management Party can not take in HIMSELF's profundities on the first pass.

That is to say, "K. Priestap" takes for granted that these lower levels and depths below the deep exist, that there is a market down there in the abyss somewhere for a CliffsNotes or Readers-Digest-condensed-book version of Citizen Rush. Or, if not a ‘market’, exactly, at least a window of opportunity for charitable visitation of the Good Poor [2] by their ideological betters.

Can wombschoolin’ and Niederdümmung really have come so far, so fast?

Though the thought be appalling, Mr. Bones, I fear we must think it. Take a gander at the K. Priestap peanut gallery, where the neokiddies scramble to get their sarcasm detectors synchronised on some very elementary examples. [3]

Happy days.


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[1] It's a acronym, right?


[2] Beati pauperes intellectû, quoniam "Be good, sweet maid, / And let who will be clever!"

(( Mr. Kingsley's poetic flight of fancy could be used to emblemize, if not exactly explain, a good deal of what has been goin’ on in America's Otherparty lately. ))



[3] That is the obvious primâ facie account, but it occurs to me, Mr. Bones, that it might not be the right account. A neospecimen like #19 may only be shammin’ dumb, so to speak. It may realize clearly enough that #2 is an authentic "Democrat Party" fiend, whereas #3 is the fruit of a thoroughly respectable home in the Rio Limbaugh quarter of Wingnut City, but eccentrically happens to like wearin’ a Halloween mask in August. (Perhaps it is attemptin’ to terrorise its congresscritter? Father Zeus knows best.)

I am only guessing from outside the asylum grounds, of course, but would it not make a sort of Big Management Party neo-sense to ignore the distinction, or even, ideally, to prefer fake liberals and democrats and Democrats to the real thing. You must know yourself, Mr. Bones, how disappointing the real thing can be at times. Reverse the colours here, sir, and reflect whether unquestionably genuine illiberals and antidemocrats do not let us decent political grown-ups down sadly from time to time. Being indeed real, they often forget, or fail for some other reason, to live down to their own Party-’n’-Ideology weekly-standardised new criteria. No straw wingnutette or wingnut would ever dare behave so uncharacteristically in a spoof scenario where thee and I conduct the ‘narrative’.

"Every man is dictator in his own book," said their belovèd St. Jack: of course we would dictate that Professor Anthrax and Miss Diphtheria and "K. Priestap" and the rest of our cast of wind-up-toy zombie rightists be so relentlessly illiberal and antidemocratic that everybody this side of Wombschool Normal University would perceive in a flash that they must be dealing with a fiction even though we would have titled the performance something like The Memoirs of Rabbi Ben Trovato. (That feeble gesture of pretending to attempt to deceive is itself part of the genre and has been since at least Defoe.)

Specimen #19 is unlikely to have thought this plan through as far as I expound, but he may be settin’ out in that general direction. Or he may not be.

Setting present company aside altogether, Mr. Bones, and re-reversing the colours, don't you think this direction ought to be especially congenial to the neocomradely community and the Wingnut City mindset? Neocomrade Karl, Lord Rove, may have gone a trifle too far with his "' That is not the way the world really works anymore. WE are an Empire now, and when WE act, WE create OUR OWN reality...." &c. &c.. Plus of course there are logical and physical limits to how far anybody merely human can hope to advance in that make-up-one's-own-facts direction.

Nevertheless, don't you see why I think that subscribers to CommonTerror magazine, and weekly standardisers, and neocriterionmongers, and pajamatarians (both lay and clerical), and AEIdeologues, and Hoovervillains, and Catoholics, and ... -- indeed, pretty well all the GOP geniuses and much of the Big Party base ’n’ vile as well is what it comes to -- .. would not such folks LIKE to live in the Rovan Empire? If the militant extremist neocomrades could find an airline that flies to it, wouldn't they all be gone rovin’ in a couple of months?

To be sure, there is no such airline. Yet in a certain sense there need not to be. In theory the wingnutettes and wingnuts could simply emigrate internally, and that seems to be what scads and scads of ’em are actually doin’ in practice.

Consider this late flash from Neocomrade M. Drudge, Mr. Bones:

CABLE NEWS RACE NITE (( ahem! )) OF AUG 10, 2009 FOXNEWS O'REILLY 3,814,000 FOXNEWS HANNITY 3,118,000 FOXNEWS BECK 2,417,000 FOXNEWS GRETA 2,388,000 FOXNEWS BAIER 1,988,000 FOXNEWS SHEP SMITH 1,833,000

Though the kiddie konservatives cannot ever build a proper Rovan Empire, as far as I can see, they may, without clinical insanity, propose to innovate themselves a Foxcuckooland™ product that would offer many of the same advantages. And one of the chief advantages, apparent even from outside the factional monkey-house, is just what we have been discussing: in Foxcuckooland™, the ideosky will never, ever be cloudy all day, but that does not mean that the occasional discouragin’ word won't be heard. What it does mean is that the discouragin' word will never, or hardly ever, be heard directly. The sweet puppies of Endarkement could always go look at some other network if they were interested in that.

Most of them are not the least bit interested, though, and thus the management and staff of Foxcuckooland™ must add some value to the product before marketin’ it. Naturally that plan requires that the Discouragin’ Word product be presented indirectly. Even if the DW fills the whole canvas, there is always a hefty frame of Murdochoid gildin’ around it. More often, the DW proper is only a small part of the total composition. Exactly what sort of neovalue gets added to the product will vary from case to case, though I daresay "Look what idiots they are!" is a formula that will cover an immense number of instances.

At the extreme tippy-top of Wingnut City, up around Castle Podhóretz, the neogentry have been caterin’ to that taste for years. One might almost venture to say that the Foxcuckooland™ shtyk is only a vast vulgarisation of a select up-market shtyk from The New Criterion, the one called Notes and Comments. There is no reason why middle- and low-brow neocomrades should not have a "Worst-Liberal-Abomination-Ever of the Month Club" of their own, though naturally the selections and the bonus WLAE's cannot be identical.

But Father Zeus knows best.