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.

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[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>