Invisible Empire Watch

Neocomrade(ss) 'Gettysburg' from Grant’s Ol’ Party believes in teachin’ by demonstration: it/she/he has certainly derailed this train of thought -- the gang has somehow wound up discussing, in effect, whether General McClellan (obit ann. relig. 1303/1885/5656) is qualified to conduct the War on Global Tourism (Pat. Pend.), which Little Brother and the Party of Big Management did not even get around to declarin’ until Y. R. 1422/2001/5762.

Possibly "pretty much the dumbest thing I've ever heard" is a little too harsh, criticismwise. On the other hand, possibly it fits exactly?

The Party neocomrade(ss) somehow did the derailment trick without even puttin’ a visible Lincoln penny on the tracks -- nobody but its/her/himself said a word about who is to take the blame for Fedguv mismanagement of 1861-1865 military operations. Or Rebguv mismanagement either, admittedly: nothin’ if not balanced ’n’ fair is Neocomrade ‘Gettysburg’.

How did it/she/he pull this act of rhetorical tourorrism off without even a penny? As far as I can see, it/he/she just blithely assumed out of nowhere that Dr. Gitlin had taken it on himself to expel Senator Davis and Colonel Lee (et hoc genus omne nefandum) from the American Democracy.[1] Social scientisers don’t have much use for pedantic historical accuracy, of course, but I doubt that sound maxim applies all the way down at the third-grade level where the neocomrade(ss) pretends to detect it. Why, I betcha T. G. knows what colour ocean was sailed by the 1492 Person of the Year! [2]

Unsurprisingly, what we have here is the rhetorical technique of Murdochville, just make up whatever you'd like your antagonist to have said, whatever makes her look silliest or most ignorant or ickiest, and then carry on as if it had actually been said. As to the former Real World, well, always bear in mind the gold platinum words of Neocomrade Viceroy R. B. Cheney:

''That is 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 will 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.'' [3]

So here am I, studying here and now exactly how Neocomrade‘Gettysburg’ has created a microcosm or nanocosm of G.O.P. Brand ®eality in which all cultivated despisers believe, or pretend, that Abraham XVI was somethin’ other than a Black ®epublican.

Either there is not a whole lot to study or I am missing a whole lot. There doesn't *seem* to be any more to this neocomradely rhetorical hocus-pocus than "Me sayin’ it makes it be so."

But I may be congenitally unfit to judge, for I fear that Neocomrade Cheney’s version has always left me dissatisfied in much the same way. Oilslick Dick does, it is true, paraphrase a little differently: "EMPIRE sayin’ it makes it be so." [4]

There is a lot of fodder here for moralists, both traditional and neoselfservative, so I shall leave it to them at this point, confining myself to a purely literary observation: Neocomrade ‘Gettysburg’ has concocted a sort of inside-out or per contra reflection of "The Emperor's New Clothes," managin’ to derail a real-world train of thought with a penny fetched straight from Foxcuckooland. [5]


Healthy days.

___
[1] Perhaps we donkeys ought to hold a general membership meeting or postcard referendumb about doing just that? "Better late than never"! Now that Dixieland has finally been succesfully neoconstructed--seven score plus five years after the neocomrade's eponym!--with the Party of Goldwater ’n’ Atwater more firmly in the saddle down there than anywhere else nearer to civilisation than Wasilla, what have good guys got to lose? Shout it loud and shout it proud, "Treason must be made infamous, and traitors must be impoverished!" (No question what party that guy adhered to, comrades: Impoverishment R US!)

An objector might object that although we can excommunicate ratfink militarist Lees and bigoted slaveholdin’ Davises from our own ranks, we cannot actually kick them into the Harrison-Grant-Hoover-Atwater sham log cabin retroactively. Beyond a certain point of loserdom in practice, not even conservatives want you on their team any more, apart from maybe the weepy-creepy Little Friends of Eddie Burke™ brand of ‘conservative’ ‘intellectual’, as for example chez_ http://tinyurl.com/3m2r64.

A replier might reply that the Lees and Davises, when they actually had a 'nation' of their own to misgovern for a few brief shinin' moments, vociferated that they had no use at all for parties and partisanship, that these were only yet another of the icky Northern corruptions and perversions that they had decided to purify their garments of. Taking the Dixieland gentry at their word, we could infer (as neutral intellectual historians) that adherence to the Rebguv tacitly involved resignation from the Democratic Party of Yankeedom. Members of the latter might optionally go on to conclude that it would be gratuitous for us to disown Slaveocracy and Treason at this point in time.


[2] Speaking of pedantry, the year of religionism in question was 897/1492/5253.


[3] http://tinyurl.com/533kj


[4] While we are collecting specimens of this species, notice what might be called the Murdoch Variation of the Cheney Gambit, "REPETITION sayin’ it makes it be so." Though that shtyk did have rather a long history even before fallin’ into the hands of weekly standardisers and Wall Street jingos.


[5] I can't resist just a tiny bit of palaeomoralizing: "What does it say about us, jennies and jacks, if we are the kind of donkey whose thought trains can be derailed by pennies visible only to the impure of heart?"

BR>

Towards a Unified Theory of Political Fiendishness

A Unified Theory of Political Fiendishness from the keyboard of Neocomrade Rear-Colonel V. D. Hanson-Blimp might have been a work of modest valuable, had it been prepared and issued several years ago, but, alas!, the moment for that has passed. Private and public misfortunes have come to pass that rule out what once was not impossible. "Tripeness is all."

On the private- or secret-sector side, L'Enterprise ideologique américaine (English acronym: AEI) has now irretrievably rotted poor Blimp's brain, which used to be quite different from the correspondin’ organs of the first two hundred names in the Wingnut City telephone book.

Out in the Naked Public Square (Pat. Pend.) , AEI and AEI’s Blimp were seriously taken by surprise, it looks like, by the P.F.’s [1] scrambling back into power. Most neoässuredly, THAT was not supposed to happen! Why on G-re’s green earth should the Daughters of Virtue and Sons of Wisdom LLC (English acronym: GOP) ever lose an election? Come to think of it, did not Neocomrade Freiherr K. C. von Rove prophesy that would not? The DV&SW were, one remembers thinking oneself to have been told neoäuthoritatively, not just "in like Flynn" with George XLIII; they were in like Palaeocomrade Major W. McKinley, Jr., was in after that Bryan fiendishness and foolishness was put down. [2]

So much from outside the Monkey House. But if I had the personal misfortune to be a wingnuttete or wingnut or wombscholar or dittomind, I think I'd be a bit displeased with the good colonel from a strict Party-’n’-Ideology angle. Surely the time to raise the alarm about "Where Did These Guys Come From?" was before the jackasses broke into the stable?

On the other hand, perhaps he did? Since his regrettable self-decerebration, Blimp’s pieces have been, from any great political distance, as indistinguishable from one another as they are from what any idiot niece or nephew of a DV&SW biggie might scribble durin’ her internship at AEI as a sort of graduation present before havin’ to face the real world, meetin’ payrolls and runnin’ railroads and possibly makin’ the occasional campaign contribution . . . . [3]

Certainly quite a number of the sweet puppies of Endarkenment, even, must have been aware well before Black Tuesday, 5 Dhú l-Qa‘da 1429 [4], that the particular Black Lagoon from which the Obaminable Creature set out slouching towards Beltlehem City DC was Cook County in the great and sovereign State of Illinois. [5]

I begin with the strictly geographical part of today’s performance, which is much the soundest based leg of the Blimpian tripod. Only secundum quid, though, only "gradin’ on the curve," because Cook County, considered simpliciter, is one of a kind -- the last refugium of classical machine politics. For the brave new Sororland of Virtue and Fraterland of Wisdom (Pat. Pend.) [6] to be overrun from THERE is almost as if the sweet puppies were to be conquered and annexed by the year of religionism 1896 come again. Or make that, more specifically and just for fun, "invasionised and occupied by the day 30 Ramadán [7] in the year of neoreligionism 1314/1897/5657." I.e., that ‘day of woe and woeful day’ [8] when William Jennings Bryan took the helm as POTUS over in Parallel Universe 54110-KX-37(b). Bill XXV promptly ran the holy Homeland™ on the rocks, of course. (I could tell you all a pretty story about it, but the e-margin is too narrow to contain it.)

Rear-Col. Blimp views his Chicagoland from a high altitude and through factious haze, however. "government channels stimuli to blue-states, key Congresspeople are bought off with tens of millions of government largess, every campaign promise is simply cynical fluff that no sane person would take seriously" -- that could be pretty well anywhere, nowadays. Like, exempli gratiâ and just to begin with some particular toponyms, take Kennebunkport ME and Crawford TX. [9]

Pitchforkin’ through the dungheap backwards, I see that Blimp summarizes his Point II as "the postmodern belief that race/class/gender oppressions require government affirmative reactions (which also abroad explains why we reach out to enemies and shun allies)."

Is that AEI-ogenic decerebration, I wonder, or is it just KSM Brand (®) agitprop as usual? [10] Neocomrade V. D. Hanson-Blimp’s tertiary-educationalist credentials are such that he ought to have some idea what an actual practitioner of Postwhateverism understands the term "postmodern" to involve. Run-of-the mill Party base ’n’ vile haven't a glimmer and are likely to swallow any malicious nonsense that a Blimp chooses to cropdust ’em with from on high.

I guess in this context most of the sweet puppies will understand their obese aëronautical guru to be revealin’ that PoMo begat Affirmative Action -- and young Affy they DO know lots and lots about. They may not know his daddy's name for sure (insert stale joke here), but they do know that Master Affy is the [expletive] [substantive] that keeps snatchin’ away all those luscious plums that ought to be their own. That, once upon a time, and not so long ago, WERE their own. That WILL BE their own again as soon as "accident, fate, bad luck, bad decisions, poor judgment, illegality, drug use, and simple tragedy" are once again properly diagnosed (and then left untreated.) [11]

That last footnote was already tottering on the brink of The Utterly Unmentionable, so let's skate on real fast to Blimp's Point I, which is so old it is positivly neo-: "Who dunnit, you ask? Why, M. Jean-Jacques Rousseau donnit! Next question."

Q. Qu’est-ce que l’ étatisme? A. L’étatisme, c’est LE VOL!

Well! One may guess that the neocomrade rear-colonel (volant himself, as it happens, though of course only in a benign way) began with that golden oldie precisely aureâ ex vetustate. His neochoir is bound to know the words to that hymn, or at any rate the first couple of stanzas. It's not as if Wombschool Normal University sets no graduation requirements at all! A passin’ grade in Chicagonomics 666 is absolutely mandatory: NO EXCEPTIONS ADMITTED EVER. Period. Full stop.

Well, ’tis a waste of energy to argue with the neochoir about the economically Wicked State, so I shall not. Instead, allow me to point out very peripherally that Blimp adores Chicagonomics but can't stand Cook County. Presumably that establishes where the neoäction is located at, if nothin' else.

Historically, to be sure, Chicagonomic neoselfservatism was almost entirely imported from Old Vienna, as Comrade Judt argues in a somewhat tonier e-forum than this present. [12] Oh, well. It does not actually matter much. Even before AEI wreaked its drain bamage on him, Neocomrade Rear-Col. V. D. Blimp-Hanson treated all history since about Procopius on the demons Justinianus and Theodora [13] as perfect bunk. Their Ford must surely be beamin’ His high approval up at VDB-H from down below where the weather is always a little too warm for comfort.

Healthy days.



___
[1] "Political fiends," Messrs. les ennemis de la Républicainique. Foreign agitators. The Muses and Dr. Bones and yours truly.


[2] Major Bill was of the non-rear variety, as it happens, although it’s a little unfair to poke at poor Blimp on that account, him bein’ really more comparable to Parteiobersturmfeldwebel Markus Alphonsius von Hanna. Who -- sure ’nuff! -- got himself a student deferment or somethin’ close: "served as a quartermaster in the United States Army during the Civil War and was always close to veterans’ organizations. (It is not true that he was awarded the Medal of Honor -- that was an unrelated Marcus Hanna.)" [http://tinyurl.com/yg3c7y2]


[3] The serious student of neocomradology is not to declare the Real World of AEI idiot nepotism ‘unreal’ simply because they instantly slam the boardroom door shut in her own silly face -- if, indeed, they ever left it open for her to peep in a little to begin with. Comrade F. S. Fitzgerald's remarks on that score are admirable, even though he never made them. [http://tinyurl.com/yjlhz3r]


[4] Bein’ the former "4 November 2008."


[5] http://tinyurl.com/yjtzjmo (for the B. L. Creature: Massa Yeats must take care of himself)


[6] English acronym: USA


[7] 30.IX.1314 will have been the former "March Forth, 1897!" Unless they use a different paracalendar, that is, naturally.


[8] http://tinyurl.com/yfff2m4


[9] Presumably Blimp doesn't really require any hard data points about Cook County beyond the notorious one that the Virtutis filiae filiique Sapientiae win municipal elections very rarely indeed. Oh, that all the world were Scarsdale and Shaker Heights and Lake Forest and Loudon County VA!

No, sorry, I beg your pardon, it should run the other way ’round: "Oh, that S. (&c.) were all the world!" The neocomrades are never goin’ta be altogether safe, after all, until the neowilderness outside their gated communities is not just a solitudo devastata, loosely speakin’, but literally uninhabited. Extra Mammonopolem nulla salus.


[10] "Kiddie Selfservative Movement" es Marca ®egistrada de la Nuevocompañería Estadounidense y de Israël.


[11] The student should bear in mind, however, that, inside the monkey house, Exhortation Therapy is almost always classified as ‘treatment’. Neocomrades who do not agree that preachin’ at the Bad Poor they ought to shape up and be Good Poor instead is a wonderdrug in itself are rare, but not quite impossible to find. Neocomrades Profs. Drs. R. Herrnstein and Ch. Murray, discoverers or inventors of the ever-immortal Herrnstein-Murray Cu®ve [dingaling, heads up!, http://tinyurl.com/zexdn], come to mind at once.

There exists, though, in my view, a certain ‘protocynicism’, so to christen it, on the matter amongst the Big Management Party’s base ’n’ vile, quite apart from what their factional betters may be up to. The sweet puppies are not bright enough to be cynics -- the theorem follows à fortiori from the fact that even card-carryin’ G.O.P. geniuses are too dumb to keep what they think and how they bark ’n’ bellow in completely different wateretight compartments. At the puppy, or protocynical level, what it comes to is that Exhortation Therapy oughtabe a Wundermedikant for the Bad Poor, but most wingnutettes and wingnuts don’t seriously expect that it actually will be.

At this point the Hegelian student of Neocomradology will notice one of her Master's most famous products at work, the so-called "cunning of reason." Or cunnin’ of selfservatism: where would the sweet puppies find themselves, after all, if Exhortation Therapy did work wonders? All the Bad Poor would become Good Poor, and then any given sweet puppy would be at least as likely to miss its plums due to the sheer number of qualified candidates, without evil Affy putting even the slightest pressure of a [expletive] Statist thumb on the scale. Randy Redneck and Cindy from Wasilla cannot possibly have worked that calculation out consciously, but they might as well have.

(( I suppose it is possible that the neokiddies still retain some last savin’ (or damnin’) remnant of the former specifically Christian Christojudaean dogma of peccatum originale, which did, more or less, amount to preaching at unregenerate folks being somehow a good thing even though true repentance and amendment of life, amongst the Bad Poor and even to some extent elsewhere as well, were never easy to spot. To believe that the Randies and Cindies of any age ever really grokked Original Sin is more than I can manage, but there can be no doubt that the 1431/2009/5770 Prod models and their predecessors, since at least YNR 1040/1630/5390 heard about it endlessly at Sabbath School. To hypothesize a boiled-down and garbled version of lofty mythological speculations that the puppy classes did not ever actually grasp at any point in their degeneration would save the appearances without any need to page Dr. Hegel. But Father Zeus knows best. ))


[12] http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23519, "Volume 56, Number 20 · December 17, 2009
What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?"

"Tony Judt directs the Remarque Institute at NYU and is the author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. His latest book, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, was recently reissued in paperback.? (January 2010)"


[13] http://tinyurl.com/ylrry5o

Th. and J. would bill nicely in melodrama as moustache-twirling, stimulusmongering Wicked Statists, would they not? A pity so little is known about Byzantinomics.

Blimp was a coach in extinct languages before he was a geistlicher Militärist, before the AEIdeologues shorted most of his his circuits for him, and it still shows: he appears to know all sorts of things about "the agenda of the classical ... Roman turba." He ought to write it up for the delectation of the Muses and me (and maybe even the neokiddies as well). Assuming, that is, that he means somethin' at least a little more recherché than Mr. Madison in Federalist X, "any other improper or wicked project" &c. &c.

Doin’ the Cheney-Thing

R. B. Cheney and T. L. Friedman are undeniably two peas in the same onepercenterly pod, both located at the rich-out-of-sight end of the income and wealth distribution. Some speak of "the Herrnstein-Murray Curve," although they may be asking for litigation about patents and trademarks and the like when they do.

However the T. L. Friedman specimen, for purposes of this morning's fifteen-minute ideological zig--or, as the case may be, sentimental zag--sets up to be a traitor to its curve, as it were, a stance which is as curious as it is unimportant. By tomorrow morning, it (the TLF specimen) may be safely back inside Wingnut City with all that gated communitys many community gates securely bolted behind it. [1]

Anyhow, today it has chosen to stumble leftwards a little, possibly annoying Neocomrade Viceroy R. B. Cheney, though more probably not. His Omniexecutivity is far from bein’ Mr. Nice Guy, but he is also no dummy and has probably long since written the TLF thingee off as beneath adult attention. Or perhaps decided that it "knows in its heart", à la B. Goldwater, that neoreaction must necessarily be THE wave of the future.

In order to (even pretend to) be bratty, it has to work up some minimal sort of RBC/TLF compare-and-contrast exercise, some superficial distinction of icin’s externally laid onto the same basic cake-mix product. The specimen welcomes its opportunity, it seems to me, for it could well be sniggerin’ to itself about how elegantly its latest fifteen-minuteman shtyk about foreign and native-management policy fits into the rhetorical ploy du jour: the specimen quite agrees with Lord Undisclosure that relyin’ on one-percent probabilities can, on special occasions and under certain specific circumstances, be an admirable guide to speculation at the Grand Casino of Human Events.

It then goes on to rib His Omniexecutivity for not noticin’ that AGW, anthropogenic global warmin’, affords one of these occasions. It does not expressly mention that (for about the last thirteen-and-a-half minutes straight) it has considered that Viceroy Cheney and his Boy and his Dynasty and his Party and his AEIdeology were, after all, quite right to agress their way into the Brave New Afghanistan and the future former al-‘Iráq on the basis of onepercenterly speculations. [2] "Better safe than sorry," don't you see?

Herr Prof. Dr. C. von Sunstein--who, incidentally, looks very like a recent TLF lunchmate and plunderee--tarts that preowned old saw and trite apophthegm up as (ta-DAH!) a "Precautionary Principle." The grown-up reasons to have reservations about that up-tartin’ could probably be discussed with Prof. Sunnstein, who may not even endorse the Afghan and Iraqi neo-aggressions. Almost certainly, the distinguished shyster and tertiary educationaliser will be a serious environmentalist, and therefore not really on either the TLF or the RBC wavelength. TLF is utterly unserioius, and RBC utterly ungreen. Antigreen, even, is Lord Undisclosure.

Our Warholian jackdaw picks up the professor's gaudy bead and then . . . well, why be surprised that what happens then is far more jackadawsical than perfesserly? The TLF specimen is not actually gamblin’ about global temperatures and climatic disasters here. Close examination will reveal that it is chiefly bettin’ that maybe those overzealous subordinates at East Anglia U. were guilty much as Foxcuckooland and Rio Limbaugh charge: Master Friedman’s effective 99 percent probability is not that AGW will produce consequences not altogether intolerable, which must be what C. Sunnstein originally meant, but rather that AGW ain’t happenin’ at all -- just like Citizen Rush says!

And just like Neocomrade Viceroy R. B. Cheney can be very easily conjectured to agree!!

So the jackdaw is a sort of unexpected twofer or daily double for Lord Undisclosure: not only does the silly NYTC bird tacitly agree with Cheney (and with Cheney's Boy / Dynasty / Party / Ideology) about the good guys aggressin’, it tacitly agrees about the bad guys hoaxin’ as well!!!

Compared with these substantive Wonders of Wingnuttism, it must seem very small potatoes to Lord Undisclosure that little Tommy Wobble, and for that matter, Prof. Dr. Sunstein, agree with his lordship (and with B-D-P-I) about the soundness of selected one-precenterly speculations in lotteries and at casinos.

Croaks the jackdaw, on the formal side[3]:

When I see a problem that has even a 1 percent probability of occurring and is “irreversible” and potentially “catastrophic,” I buy insurance. That is what taking climate change seriously is all about.

It might be fun to look at Master Tommy Wobble’s real-life insurance portfolio: it has such an inflat such an exalted notion of its own self-wunnerfulness that it probably ought to have taken out several billion dollars of term life insurance with its Uncle Sam the beneficiary, "in case somethin’ happens." But I betcha it hasn't actually.

Healthy days.

___
[1] The nifty Friedmanite wobbles and ficklenesses seem to depend on exactly whom it ate lunch with most recently, although perhaps its dinner companions matter sometimes as well.


[2] Did the specimen perhaps even call up His Omniexecutivity to assure him that it is all in fun, really, so don't get made and cancel that next lunch appointment? Father Zeus knows best!


[3] Big Management Party Neocomrade R. B. Cheney and jackdaw Th. L. Friedman are, of course, mistaken to superordinate Matter over Form, in this case or in any other. Not bein’ bright enough to be sound Aristotelians, naturally ‘formal’ and ‘formalism’ are perjoratives for them, as for all holy-Homelanders™ beneath a rather high plateau of semi-demi-education. And Father Zeus knows best.