Picking on other people's epiphanies is a dubious game. It is awfully likely that one will just make them angry when they figure out that one is not really impressed by, say,
| There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference. |
That little gem happens to be the late Mr. James of H*rv*rd self-intoxicated with nitrous oxide [1].
A critic might plausibly crititicize that the N2O tale gets even funnier when wild Bill, restored to cold blood, more or less, attempts to discredit poor Herr Prof. Dr. Hegel with a Jamesocentric pseudepiphany. Tastes may, however, vary on such funninesses.
***
Meanwhile, back at the ranch,
| "Do you think people should be able to bring a loaded gun and sit in the first row of a President Obama event? And the gun owners flack says --"Yes." |
Not quite on the same level as literature, is it? But perhaps to weigh it against the laughin’ gas would not be too imbalanced and unfair? Let's try it a little and see what happens, shall we?
I have to wonder, myself, what Dr. Taplin thinks Neocomrade G. O. Flack might have said, had he said anythin’ other than YES. There might be something to be said, of course, if there existed a municipal or state or Fedguv law against how these alleged ‘people’ behaved in the presence of their POTUS. Yet if the seer has omitted that small point when he rehearses the revelatory narrative, we could safely ignore the Visions of Taplin now and forever.
More to the point, militant extremist Republicans will, as I conjecture, take the line that if the gun-totin’ was not illegal, there is simply nothin’ more to be said.
As usual, I’d take the sweet puppies of the Right to be perfectly sincere subjectively when they take that line. Sincere or not, most of ’em are far from clever enough to notice, let alone exploit, the fact that they could put decent political grown-ups on the defensive by snappin’ right back with "And just what the [expletive] do you think was wrong with it, if it's not illegal, Mister?"
Not a hard question! One can think of the answer in a flash. The trouble is that, having thought of it, one does not much want to say it out loud. So excuse me if I try to hush it up in a footnote. [2] Wink, wink, nod, nod!
(...)
Reverting to the Visions of Taplin, I maintain that he cannot have beheld Fascism proper, only something that maybe looked a little like it to him.
The F-word gets squabbled over endlessly by boobs and loons, but if we try to apprehend it at the level of a Prussian-style graduate school instead, it is pretty safe to say that Fascism, taken as a generalized brain disease and not just Prime Minister Mussolini, was an Old Euro phenomenon. As Yank-style gun-totin’ and the smelly orthodoxies of the National Rifle Association are not.
The whole ethos is different. For one thing, in Italy and Germany and Hungary and Roumania &c. -- even in France and Britain -- if you did spot a 1930’s Fascist toting a gun, the odds were about ten thousand to one that she would be wearing a uniform as well. Very likely a private- or secret-sector uniform rather than a State uniform, but a uniform all the same. Portsmouth NH is not much like that.
In Germany, furthermore, there was a lot of "street fighting." All the books say so. On the other hand, the books never make this street fighting sound much like Al Capone on St. Valentine's day. Presumably the petty heroes of the proletariat and of the Kleinbürgertum went at one another with clubs and daggers and tomahawks -- or possibly Junker swords, inherited or fresh from the pawnshop -- rather than with semiautomatic firearms. The old joke about revolution being impossible in Germany "because the police would never stand for it" cannot be defended by any ideologue who wants his ‘Fascism’ to be ‘revolutionary’, but there is a little something to it all the same. Above a certain level, quite a low one by NRA standards, a State monopoly on the means of violence was successfully maintained from 30 January 1933 all the way down to 8 May 1945.
Italy, and especially Spain, were somewhat less completely devoted to Sicherheit durch Recht und Ordnung, but let's face it, they were Old Euros too -- meaning sad-sack wimps in the eyes of Rancho Crawford and John Galt wannabes. Venereal rather than martial, like Neocomrade Dr. Whoziz put the point.
Five Glocks, two Uzis and one Kalashnikov per household is a scheme that has no connection worth mentioning with Fascism. I should guess off-hand that it is a frontier or settler-colonialist phenomenon at bottom, a provincial and peripheral nastiness whose roots would be far better sought at Johannisberg and Tel Avîv and Alice Springs and the Alamo and the O.K. Corral rather than at Rome, Madrid and Berlin.
If, that is, one is looking for roots in the spirit of a Prussian graduate school seminar room, and not just for some blunt verbal object to throw at the enemies of one's Big Party or one’s tiny factionette.
Mais que sçay-je?
Happy days.
___
[1] The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Psychology, p. 294.
| ... With me, as with every other person of whom I have heard, the keynote of the [laughing-gas] experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination. Truth lies open to the view in depth beneath depth of almost blinding evidence. (...) [A]s sobriety returns, the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly at a few disjointed words and phrases, as one stares at a cadaverous-looking snow-peak from which the sunset glow has just fled, or at the black cinder left by an extinguished brand.... |
Read Bill's whole NOTE -- it's a hoot any time, but especially suitable for the Silly Season.
[2] Here goes, with emphasis added for the sake of discussion: "NICE people do not gratuitously bring it to an interlocutor’s attention that they could ASSASSINATE her if they chose."
Should they ever stumble across that formulation, no doubt the sweet puppies will bark loudest at me about my crudely saying ‘assassinate’ when that is what I mean. Inevitably they will "know in their heart" (like their late Party neocomrade, B. Goldwater of AZ) that Mr. McCloskey takes for granted that bloody murder is what they crave and that they are thinkin’ of it all the time.
It would avail me not at all to protest--to them--that I take most of their crew to be no worse than rabid self-servicin’ impeachsters left over from ’98. And some not even that.
Which is why I think NICE is even more of a key word than ASSASSINATE. It was not nice for gun-toters to behave like that, but to point out unmistakably that that is how they are behavin’ is an offense against civility as well. If Neocomrade G. O. Flack was five times smarter, he would have thought this ploy up consciously as a way to embarrass such a cultivated despiser of Party and AEIdeology as myself. That idea is merely ridiculous, given the sweet puppies’ average level of mental evolvedness.
All the same, I betcha they knew in their hearts that puttin’ on a show like that one would embarrass liberals and democrats and Democrats generally, and Barák Husáyn Obáma specifically. Exactly how the embarrassment process works few neocomrades will have calculated. Perhaps they did not get much beyond figurin’ that BHO would not think ostentatious gun-totin’ is very nice -- and that it was therefore it would be the perfect thing to do. The Party of Grant and Hoover (of Goldwater! and of ATWATER!!!) have been positively wallowin’ in "No more Mr. Nice Guy" for years, after all. Why, without his I-hate-niceness shtyk, Neocomrade Dr. R. Limbaugh would be out of business in six weeks. (The puppies often bark "politically correct" when we would say ‘nice’. That, too, they’ve been doin’ for years.)
In the small part of the Stupid Party iceberg that is visible above the water, there are a few bright neo-whippersnappers who could consciously think of ASSASSINATE. But doubtless they would tone the thought down and tart it up, even for their own private mental consumption, along traditional holy-Homelandic™ lines of "the people's right to rebel" and A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State ... and so forth and so on. The whippersnapper element will not have intended the fiend Obama to worry about his personal safety, only about maybe finding his régime changed out from under him if he does not start showing Them the People of Wingnut City the respect and deference that they deserve for bein’, like Citizen Rush, infallibly right more than 99.1% of the time. (Not to mention bein’ the only TRUE holy-Homelanders™!)
The whole circus ought to please Prof. MacLuhan down there below where it is always too warm. Gun-totin’ is what a certain specialized kind of wicked elitist would call "symbolic speech." Or call it "picture think." It allows your run-of-the-mill wingnutettes and wingnuts, as opposed to a few señorito-class clevers, to look at the pictures without, I think, EVER formulatin’ anythin’ clearly and distinctly to themselves in old-fashioned words. (Certainly not in icky words like ‘assassinate’!) When the sweet puppies bark offendedly that they certainly never intended to send any message of that sort, they bark honestly enough -- PROVIDED that there cannot be intention without clear and distinct verbal formulation. However a study of the behavior and psychology of lower animals, "dumb beasts" in the narrow sense of wordless beasts, makes this a very questionable proviso.
Be that as it may, picture-think makes analytical difficulties insofar as one can never know for sure what a frog, or a chimpanzee, or a militant extremist Republican, sees in the pictures that she is lookin’ at.
In the case at hand, perhaps the picture thought was (to crystalize it in mere words) that all those bulgin’ pockets visible in the front row of the auditorium reflect great credit on Neocomrade So-and-So for makin’ sure that the citizens with the best politics also got the best seats. How the fiend Obama or the "drive-by media" would react to the bulges may have been quite secondary, although I do not find it easy to imagine that it was absent altogether.
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