31 May 2009

Bozos at Bay



Think of all that luscious insider prose that burbles forth from politico.com, Mr. Bones! Why is it that thee and I never actually want to read more than a paragraph or two of it at a time? Take for instance:

Former President George W. Bush is sticking by his promise to leave President Barack Obama alone — prompting some second-guessing by allies of Vice President Dick Cheney, who is determined to confront the new president. Bush has stuck to his memorable declaration that he owes Obama his silence, while Cheney continues to grant colorful interviews in which he warns that the Democrat’s policies are making the country less safe.

One Cheney supporter referred to “confusion” and “bewilderment” among conservatives that Bush has not taken the same tack. “A lot of conservatives would have like to have heard from President Bush on this issue,” the Cheney supporter said. “On such a fundamental issue, when such clear untruths are being told, conservatives have wondered why President Bush has been silent.”

What's wrong with that? Why, Citizen M. Allen even sets us up with a mild funny, sir: "Why on earth should anybody expect George XLIII, of all the little laddies available, to point out how the Oilslick Dick Gang have taken to purveyin’ clear untruths about fundamental issues? Hey, aren't they all militant extremist neocomrades one and the same Big Party, the Otherparty of America?"

Citizen Allen gets a little bit annoying in a technical College-of-Journalism-and-Barber-Science way when he insists on telling us provincials and parochials which declarations are ‘memorable’ and which interviews ‘colorful’. Very likely if left to ourselves without guidance from Beltway City DC, we would in fact paste such labels in all sorts of wrong places , yet how much would that matter at the end of the day? Enough to repay the employers of Citizen M. Allen for putting us off a little? I wonder.

Not that ‘us’ considered as strictly the firm of Bones & McCloskey is of any importance even to us! Yet bear ever in mind, sir, how skillfully Rupert, Pressbaron Murdoch of Kangaroostán, has exploited such little flickers of resentment when they occur in the less analytical strata of our holy Homeland™. His lordship's "We report, you decide" is a truly inspired piece of malignant tripe and baloney, is it not?

Possibly Citizen M. Allen and his corporation aim at a, so to say, chiastic relationship with his lordship and News Corporation? M. le baron sallies forth to wash his customers’ little brains for them under a banner proclaimin’ that of course he would never even dream of behavin’ so imperiously; politico.com, per contra, tells us all about ‘memorable’ and ‘colorful’ but without seriously expecting (or, indeed, caring) whether we stay told.

A pretty little picture, that one, but I suspect it is rather my picture than one from the crayon of Ms. Realitas.

We may tone (tune?) the picture down several decibels by supposing that the M. Allen shtyk with ‘memorable’ and ‘colorful’ is a sort of subliminal or background self-recommendation: what the consumer presumably wants from the likes of politico.com is hot insider poop. Obviously M. Allen is not actually delivering that product when he starts with the unilateral and preëmptive epithets, but he is behaving as a poop-laden insider might be expected to by the little old lady in Dubuque. Though, to be sure, God knows best what is expected at Dubuque . . . .

Having done reverence to The Master

Il maestro di color che sanno

by discussing Citizen M. Allen's form before his matter, I will admit that it seems probable that the chief off-putting deficiency at politico.com is material. In the particular case, one's time appears to be being wasted with a more or less imaginary discord in the ranks of militant extremism. Practically speaking and considering the circumstances, the Party of Goldwater and Atwater is united enough to be getting on with. It is not absolutely monolithic, given the existence of peripheral flakes like A. Spector and the sovereign state of Maine, but by and large JUST-VOTE-NO is workin’ out as well for neobozodom as anythin’ available could reasonably be expected to work out.

A subtle distinction of Serene House of Kennebunkport-Crawford NO-voters from plebeian Cheneyite NO-voters seems hardly worth making. Naturally everybody enjoys anecdotes about "‘confusion’ and ‘bewilderment’ among conservatives," but let's face it, sir, the Big Management Party’s base ’n’ vile are in a permanent state of confusion and bewilderment and have been for a century and a half. Why single out occasions when a few of them realize as much for special attention? Or alternatively, suppose that 1LT Bush of the TX Air National Guard did show up for duty and start barkin’ ’n’ bellowin’ in unison with the Oilslick Dick Boys: what earthly difference would it make?




25 May 2009

Dr. Krugman Diagnoses The Rakes’ Regress



Usually, Mr. Bones, Paul Krugman becomes a child rather than a Nobelist as soon as he reflects half a metre away from his technical specialty. But there may be something to this morning's quickie vision of how the Party of Grant and Hoover and Goldwater and Atwater ran off the rails. "I repeat, thee decide!"

For California, where the Republicans began their transformation from the party of Eisenhower to the party of Reagan, is also the place where they began their next transformation, into the party of Rush Limbaugh. As the political tide has turned against California Republicans, the party’s remaining members have become ever more extreme, ever less interested in the actual business of governing. And while the party’s growing extremism condemns it to seemingly permanent minority status — Mr. Schwarzenegger was and is sui generis — the Republican rump retains enough seats in the Legislature to block any responsible action in the face of the fiscal crisis. Will the same thing happen to the nation as a whole?

That is about as much fun as a political adult can decently have in one hundred twenty-five words or less, is it not? One could gloss so pregnant a text forever! Or at any rate, the present keyboard thinks it could say lots and lots and lots about it.

In honor of the Master of Them That Know, let us begin with the Form of the thing, rather than its matter. Anything of this general type with three distinct parts looks vaguely Hegelian. I trust Herr Krug is laughin’ in his pen about this parasyllogism of the militant extremist GOP: "Thesis! Antithesis!! Dick Cheney!!! Let the Swabian sophist damn well ‘deduce’ that one!"

Notice, Bones, how admirably Neuparteikamerad A. von Schwartzenegger comes in on the nondeductibility side of the ledger. Prof. Hegel, and even the immortal Herr Krug himself, could never have seen Arnold coming. And, sure enough, Dr. Krugman cannot account for Arnold now that he has arrived. I wonder, though, that leaving Arnold out simply because he does not fit into anybody's system may be the sort of ploy that gets comeuppanced by the alleged Real World. True, Freiherr von Schwartzenegger can never hope to become Bundespräsident des Heimatlands Gottes personally. But perhaps some other and comparably unique specimen might.

How about, for example, Neocomrade Doctor General D. H. Petræus of Princeton and West Point? Though ethographically and (as I presume) mythologically correct enough to fit into the Grant-Hoover-Goldwater-Atwater Big Tent™, the ever-victorious Dr. Gen. does not look much like the GHGABT Dr. Limbaugh or the GHGABT Judge Baker. Indeed, Master Dubya’s ol’ buddy ‘David’ looks at least a little bit like St. Ike, a second comin’ of whom would not fit into the Krugman Paradigm at all. Still, maybe the ever-victorious Dr. Gen. is a Douglas McArthur rathen than a Dwight Eisenhower? If so, the Muses and Dr. Krugman and thee and I would be embarrassed not at all.

That is enough philosophy and enough Prussia for now. Before turning to matters more likely to have crossed Dr. Krugman’s mind, let us hear him elaborate his ingenious paradigm a little:

To be blunt: recent events suggest that the Republican Party has been driven mad by lack of power. The few remaining moderates have been defeated, have fled, or are being driven out. What’s left is a party whose national committee has just passed a resolution solemnly declaring that Democrats are “dedicated to restructuring American society along socialist ideals,” and released a video comparing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Pussy Galore.

And that party still has 40 senators.

So will America follow California into ungovernability? Well, California has some special weaknesses that aren’t shared by the federal government. In particular, tax increases at the federal level don’t require a two-thirds majority, and can in some cases bypass the filibuster. So acting responsibly should be easier in Washington than in Sacramento.

But the California precedent still has me rattled. Who would have thought that America’s largest state, a state whose economy is larger than that of all but a few nations, could so easily become a banana republic?

That is quite as entertaining as the first snippet, but somewhat more open to the criticism of critics. To begin with, can anybody impartial and informed say with a straight face that the Party of Big Management was not showin’ certain signs of madness even before its paws were forcibly wrenched off the Homelandic steerin’ wheel? The Byronic infant may be signalling that it is still around: taken seriously, that analysis would make Neocomrade Mikey, the Chaire of Steele™, a more significant figure than Neocomrade Viceroy R. B. Cheney -- which is absurd. Neocomrade M. Steele is a national treasure, no doubt, and especially a treasure for us over here in America’s party, and ‘mad’ is pretty much the mot juste for him. Nevertheless, M. Steele does not possess the true gravitas levitatis, so to express it. Though shrinkin’ fast, the Grant-Hoover-Goldwater-Atwater Big Tent™ still has a little space for sideshows, and the Madness of Mikey is one of them.

Indeed, one might speculate without actually lapsing into conspiratorialism that little Mikey is a sideshow deliberately staged to distract attention from the militant extremism that matters, a kind of black herrin’ dragged across the trail of the core GOP in order to throw us hostile bloodhounds off the scent whilst the neocomradely community retreats and regroups and plots their bloody revenge. I do not insist on this point, Mr. Bones, but I do recommend it to thee as the sort of point that Dr. Krugman's inner political kiddie is likely to miss. Little Mikey has no very obvious chicagonomic side to him, which means that the strong side of Krugmanite analysis has scant opportunity to shine. [1] [2]





___
[1] If Mad Mikey really is a black herrin’, then of course he must look aneconomic from a distance: there has never been any mystery about what the Owners of America would most prefer to have American political attention distracted from.


[2] Ms. Pussy Galore may have been dragged in to give the impression that Dr. Krugman is au courant with a world beyond chicagonomics. That is to say, he knows enough about MacLuhanstán to be aware that P. G. is right up there with the death of Queen Anne, popcultwise, so that resort to her makes the Agitprop Arm of militant extremism look fuddy-duddy and dinosauric in the extreme. Which I dare say it actually is.

The trouble is that this fact is of no practical significance, or maybe even of the opposite significance to that which Dr. Krugman assigns it. The Party of Big Management does, in general, not wish to appear popculturally with it. That sort of slummin’ was admissible in their late Neocomrade L. Atwater, but only because the señorito in question was assigned to intelligence and counterintelligence tasks that required it to Know-The-Foe. Run-of-the-mill GOP geniuses have no such task and therefore no such requirement to meet. Their now Neocomrade R. B. Cheney does not succeed well in lookin’ grandfatherly, but there can be no doubt that that is how His Excellency is tryin’ to look, or that His Excellency would be a fool to attempt to look LeeAtwateroid rather than GeorgeWashin’tonian.

A Party of Big Management must strive ever to appear bigmanagerial, and knowin’ all the latest gossip from the entertainment industries contributes nothin’ at all to that end.

Would thee, Mr. Bones, be more likely to hand thee's life savings over to a Citizen B. L. Madoff or to a Neocomrade P. G. Peterson because the secret-sector or Big Party shark was demonstrably well versed in popcult? Folks who play con games successfully have to inspire confidence, sir! Everybody knows that.



19 May 2009

Lost Masterposts of Western Sieve



Here is the very first time, Mr. Bones, that the neobozos have come up with somethin’ that asks to be filed under both Cole Patrol and Rio Limbaugh. And naturally I run into all sorts of strangenesses on the part of Google!

Still, I suppose thee and the Muses will be able to make out what I decided not to trouble to send off to the common terrorisers. (The header is name/e-mail/website as required by the CTM form.)



JHM dba "Anne Arbour"
jhmccloskey@post.harvard.edu
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/cheneys-chappaquiddick_b_15585.html

"It’s been a while since I’ve commented on Juan Cole" &c. &c.

Hmm. Does Neocomrade E. Trager read Don Juan regularly, then, but politely abstain from pokin' factious fun, or does he only do the occasional trawl for stinkfruit, after the fashion of MEMRI?

As stinkfruits go, this one is no great catch. Prof. Cole is so fixated on the Palestine Puzzle™ that when it does really come front and center for once, it would be a wonder if we did NOT hear at once about "the most ___________ __________ ever." The really serious objection to JC's operations arises when he drags the PP™ into other issues, like the condition of the former al-‘Iráq or creation of the happines of the brave new Áfghánestán, issues which may not actually be more important, but concerning which kibitzers worth attending to are far rarer.

A ‘fateful’ ‘encounter’ is not an absolutely dotty way of filling in the blanks, though to be sure one would have to stick in ‘potentially’ or the like in order to be scrupulously accurate and thus up to the lofty standards of Common Terror magazine.

Suppose the Fabulous Flyboy's wish is granted, and "Bomb, bomb, bomb / Bomb, bomb Iran!" comes true, a thing much less impossible than is at all desirable. In that event, the "impact [on] the planet’s geostrategic outlook" (as the neocomrade himself has it) might well be the greatest in quite a while -- the greatest since 1945, even, if one were to include only more or less Eurocentric fatefulnesses with a large military component.

At some risk of sounding like a Wingnut City bumper sticker, allow me to point out that nobody actually *died* at the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Happy days.


Happy days.

18 May 2009

In A Wingnutshell



How about this gem for pious neocomradely double-think, Mr. Bones?

ProReforma [a civil-socialist crew in Guatemala] needed 5,000 petition signatures for its proposal to be introduced into Congress for debate; it has collected more than 73,000. Now the ideological left has begun a campaign of its own, marked by vituperative and personal attacks against ProReforma's promoters. The proposal might be defeated, but the good news is that ProReforma's civic education project has already succeeded. Today, more Guatemalans are aware of their inalienable rights. The question is how they can wrest those [alienated!] rights from the collectivist left.


Mary Anastasia Ogrady's Wingnutshell



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

Lord Fribble's Castle

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.

__
[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.


16 May 2009

"not bother to defend their policies"



(( The following is enough like a background position paper, Mr. Bones, to make me think it worthwhile to save it here as well as post it off to vex the common terrorisers. ))

Too bad Bush and Cheney did not bother to defend their policies when they were in office."

I think not. To do that would have been in violation of the Prime Policy of the Busheviki, the master plan, conscious or subliminal, to which everythin’ else the perps ever perpetrated was subordinate.

Naturally I have no idea how they formulated their PP whilst plottin’ amongst themselves. From outside the asylum, the best analyses I know of make it a sort of hypertrophy of previously existin’ wingnut dogmas about "the Unitary Executive." In vulgar liberal accounts this degenerates into a fun scenario in which George XLIII or Neocomrade Viceroy R. B. Cheney was out to be a General Franco or a Signor Mussolini personally. Of course with Master Dubya such a notion is merely ridiculous.

With RBC, there is not obviously a joke, but there is a mistake. Neocomrade Cheney was an idealist in his way. He would have wanted all those anticonstitutional emergency powers to be usurped and stored in the White House basement even if there was no possibility whatever that he would ever wield them himself. The thing is quite possible psychologically: one has only to look at Neocomrade Prof. Dr. J. Yoo, Esq., who surely can never have deluded himself that *he* would ever get a chance to mussolinitate!

My private theory about the GOP geniuses with the greatest throw-weight is that they were vindicatin’ the prerogatives of their class. Not exactly Dr. Marx's economic type of class, however, but a rather looser social structure, so loose that it is possible the Yoos and Cheneys and von Rumsfelds and von Wolfowitzen (&c. &c.) never conceptualized it much more distinctly than as "people like us."

To be like them, to belong to the class of Neocomrade Viceroy R. B. Cheney, means to be capable of Big Management. Actual possession of an M.B.A. degree from

Harvard Victory School

the H*rv*rd Victory School is not indispensible, though it is conveniently emblematic that their Master Dubya happened to be precisely so credentialized. [1]

Now Big Management has been from its inception almost exclusively a disease of the private-or-secret sector, and pretty well everything that is deplorable about Cheneyanity can be accounted for on that basis. Congress and the courts might as well not exist, for Big Managers at ScroogeBank and Warbucks Industries never run into comparable obstructions. The traditional insincere fandango about "your company" must be danced at annual report time, but Big Managers have not the slightest intention of bein’ actually accountable and responsible to anybody external unless they absolutely cannot dodge it. And so forth and so on.

If this theory of the Busheviko-Cheneyite Prime Policy is sound, then it would be absurd to expect the odious perps to "defend their policies when they were in office." Their official policies were no business of anybody but themselves! to start talkin’ about that business unnecessarily outside of the boardroom and executive penthouse would run the risk of encouragin’ incompetent amateur outsiders to think they had some sort of right to know what their betters are up to.

"Give ’em an inch and they take an ell!" Next thing, the ignorant hoi polloi would inevitably start wanting to be *consulted*, perhaps to be able to amend or even veto BigManagerial decisions -- at which point there would, from the Busheviko-Cheneyite or HVS MBA perspective, be scarcely any difference left between the lot of a credentialled BigManager and that of a galley slave.

A corrollary of my theory is that one need not suppose that George XLIII and his merry men had anythin’ special in mind to do with their usurped powers beyond securin’ them in the White House basement. The principal object of the exercise was to ensure that a lowly public-sector POTUS has at his disposal all the tools would have been taken for granted at ScroogeBank and Warbucks Industries. That, too, was part of Neocomrade Viceroy R. B. Cheney’s curious Pickwickian idealism: it would be an abstract impairment of the dignity of Big Management as such -- entirely without reference to particular persons -- for POTUS not to have all the BigManagerial tools ready at hand. This was a disinterested and even geistlich concern which had not much to do with actually usin’ the tools to perpetrate this-or-that concrete perpetration.

But God knows best.

Happy days.


_____
[1] ’Tis also convenient for some of us to be able to blame as much intergalactic misfortune as possible on alma mater. Though one is mostly only kidding to say so, because Lord Mammon’s other seminaries can not be significantly different from HVS qualitatively.

15 May 2009

The Apotheosis of Aniconism



Photographs are often a propaganda tool.


Great self-esteemers think alike when it comes to idols and icons and cartoons and a’ that.

Easy to see the pleasures of membership in some happy few that esteem themselves far better than they esteem MacLuhanite proles who are so taken with pictures that one cannot be entirely sure that they could decipher the circumambient chickentracks correctly if they wanted to.

'Tis far better to be a tool user than fodder for tool users -- nobody elect or élite or neoteric is likely to dispute that self-evident truth.

Unfortunately this one self-preference is not an adequate field guide to Natural Mastery of the Universe, because MacLuhanated proles come in at least two different flavours, those who are with ‘us’ (bless their little hearts!) and ... the other sort. In a holy-Homelandic™ context, one ought to include a third class, perhaps the most important of all, call them "swing proles," MacLuhan victims whose politics is up for grabs, available to be grabbed by ‘our’ pictures, provided ‘we’ can do better pictures than ... the other sort of picturemongers.

Though I write merrily, as usual, there really is a lot to be said for using idols and icons as a Key to all political mythologies, as long as one gets beyond the unidimensional view of their significance. "Thousand words, good; one picture, bad!" sounds so silly that I doubt anybody really believes it, not even up at Castle Podhóretz -- not even at the New York Times Company and The Wall Street Jingo, where obviously the real basis of all the insufferable self-superioritisin’ is nothing more complicated than exclusion of cartoons. [1]

Iconocratic analysis (so to christen this hitherto neglected backwater of Soc. Sci.) must therefore be two-dimensional: on the Y axis, we have Aniconic Uppers over the losers of MacLuhan. On the X axis, we have the usual left and right, with or without an intermediate category of wishy-washies. However there is little point in admitting a category of Moderate Uppers to accommodate only Senators Collins and Snowe, a footnote would be adequate for that purpose. So draw a horizontal line across a blank sheet of paper and then divide the upper half into two parts and the bottom half into three, and there you are: clockwise from the first quadrant, (1) Wingnut Uppers, (2) wingnut proles, (3) swing proles, (4) Democratic proles, and (5) Democratic Uppers. [2]

With that paradigm borne in mind, the student should be better able to gauge certain practical difficulties that could result from an injudicious application of the insights of Neocomrades P. Wehner, ‘ian’, and K. Gjermani. The effect of exhibiting pictures to the proles, or withholding pictures from them, is likely to vary as between (1) loyal supporters of the neocomradely Party and Ideology, (2) welfare queens, union thugs, et hoc genus omne , and (3) intermediate specimens.

It is plain that the actual scribbler much prefers that the Abú Ghurayb (&c.) pictures should be withheld, but I fail to see exactly what calculation lies behind his announced druthers. "[O]bfuscating what occurred by the power of an image to influence and distort the general perception of events" could do with some disobfuscation itself, unless "general perception" means "everybody's perception." That interpretation is possible verbally, but it strikes me as unlikely. Furthermore, if it is what the neocomrade meant, he errs insofar as a large number of Aniconic Uppers are not going to change their minds about any issue of importance no matter what is in the peep show -- includin’ the neocomrade himself.

If "general perception" meant "the vulgar perception," the perception of everybody except Aniconic Uppers, it would be a little more plausible, but not much. For that proposition to possess any practical significance, one would have to suppose that it matters what the iconodule proles en masse make of the pictures, a supposition for which no support is offered and one that is probably wrong. It would be a mistake to claim that the opinions (as opposed to the interests) of Democratic or Wingnut proles *never* have any impact on their Democratic or Wingnut betters, but it does not happen very often. One would not expect it to: obviously it is for political Uppers to instruct their clients what to think rather than the other way around.

However the ‘general’ in "general perception" may have been originally intended, the principal objection to it is that lumps all the client classes together indiscriminately. It does not take a Nostradamus to predict that Party Neocomradess A. Coulter and Maureen Dowd of the Times (who both affect proledom even if they do not actually possess it) will not respond uniformly to the stimulus. That prediction does not even require knowledge of what the stimulus substantially consists of, i.e., exactly what is in those feelthy peekshures.

One learns as one scribbles: if the student were to start from the perfectly predictable divergence in reaction between wingnutettes and wingnuts on the one hand and the rest of US on the other, he would get these things in better perspective. The reason why these responses are as predictable as knee jerks is that for practical purposes they have already happened. That is to say, reaction to the *idea* of publishing the pornography in question is of more political significance than whatever fuss may arise eventually when the real McCoy leaks out at last.

This results in a sort of Apotheosis of Aniconism:

(aniconic Shiva?)

let it be stipulated that a thousand pictures are worth a million words, but then advance to Square Two: the idea of one picture is worth a thousand pictures, and therefore worth the same million words. Q.E.D. [3]

***

At this point I once again decided, Mr. Bones, not to bore the sweet puppies of Endarkenment with a scribble both rebarbative in its form and hostile in its matter. Entre nous I can speak of the late Dr. Cartoonoclastes , of whom I was naturally thinking to myself throughout.

Cartoono the Magnificent managed to fall off Dr. Luther’s horse on the far side, exaggerating aniconism to a point at which it becomes ludicrous. For that matter, Cartoono never, that I recall, referred to literal pictures of any sort, only to figurative or allegorical ‘cartoons’ made entirely of words. Crudely made of words.

He thus distanced himself from MacLuhanoid loser proles as far as possible, but at the high price of being around the bend and out of sight for most of us Aniconic Uppers as well.

Requiescat in pace! Lux æterna luceat!

Happy days.



___
[1] I have recently heard a rumor, however, that the proles attach as much or more importance to a good horoscope column as to idols and icons. "A cat may look at a king"; this keyboard may observe that it doubts that Princess Neoterica Herself could find anything more alien and bewildering than a taste for journalistic astrology. But God knows best.


[2] Arrogance demands that one mention oneself last, naturally.

More important, it is necessary to admit that the present keyboard had already evolved essentially this scheme fifteen or twenty years ago without the conscious thought that it is aniconism that constitutes the upperness of Uppers. And even today it would be silly to pretend that aniconism is the only salient shibboleth. Nevertheless it makes a very good one, and the earlier scheme did not commit itself to some other Upper-defining factor or factors incompatible with this revision. Upperness was taken to be "self-evident," sort of.)


[3] A historical account would have to make room for the complication that there have existed Uppers who at least pretended to be picture people. In the annals of specifically Christian Christojudæanity the issue is notorious. The present keyboard, being decidedly a Prod rather than a Papish, has always had its doubts about the iconophilia of Rome. The same First Estate gentry who proclaimed that the graphic arts were perfectly OK for the piety of lay sheep did not just prefer books themselves, but books in an extinct language.

And can it be just an accident that no elaborate society has ever seen fit to make painters and sculptors (or even Danish cartoonists) its political élite? Whereas the rule or, or by, or for, or out of some Book is commonplace. But God knows best.


13 May 2009

"my lessers in this weigh station"



Can it be a good sign for the prospects of the ¡Nie wieder Frieden! crowd that they are reduced to the "sixth sense" of Pajama #2, a product which does not appear to from those immortal gut feelin’s with which First Lieutenant G. Walker Bush of the Texas Air National Guard formerly worked international wonders that resonate still?

Bein’ evidently uncommitted to the errors of specifically Christian Christojudæanity, #2 permits himself the luxury of a little soft darwinisin’ on these mysteries. And why not? When the neorhetors have nothin’ obviously better goin’ for ’em, perhaps ’instincts’ primitively accepted and primitively mythologized will do the trick? It is not as if the neocomrades will be any the worse off, should no fresh marks and dupes be attracted. [1]

Political grown-ups who instinctively or reflectively dislike this sort of thing remain free to regard the policy baby-bottle as half full: obviously thirty-seven pages of µSoft PowerPoint® justifyin’ the preëmptive retaliation here in question would be far more impressive at first glance, but anybody in the Duke of Pajama’s class, culturally and tertiary-educationally and otherwise, ought to be able to concoct any number of such pages that do not have much more cognitive content than "JUST SAY ’ICK’!’ AND THEN ’BOMBS AWAY!’"

If on the supply side of agitprop the caveman can always be dragged in freely along omne ignotum pro magnifico lines, so amongst the dhimmí tribe of agitprop customers, there is always at least a little something sincere that one can find to say for brevity.

His Grace also condescends to worry a little -- "invidious, in fact usually absurd" -- before deployin’ the argumentum ad Hitlerum diagnosed by his late neocomrade, Herr Prof. Dr. Leo von Strauss. The present keyboard believes that the original discoverer or inventor was quite right to imply that this particular crutch should never be resorted to. Yet obviously if it is to be deployed, a show of decent hesitation before actually droppin’ the verbal nuke is bound to make the agitpropper look slightly better than she otherwise would in pretty well everybody’s eyes.

The empty aspect of the baby bottle will no doubt be pointed out by others. To rehearse His Grace of Pajama’s sophistry in a way that would tend to make it look ridiculous is not difficult.

More interesting is the generic character or provenance of the sophistry, which I take to be either Madison Avenue or the so-called metaphysical poetry. Discordia concors, don’t you know? A manipulative synæsthesia whereby the dhimmí hopefully winds up buying and eating the steak ’because’ he liked (the salesperson’s allusion to) the sound of the sizzle. In the case at hand, though, it is a question rather of what the dhimmí dislikes.

Quite an interesting grammatical and philosophical conjunction, that ’because’: what it involves is not exactly a physical cause, causa efficiens, but neither is it exactly a logical or mathematical reason. Somewhere between the two stools falls His Grace of Pajama’s wannabe-manipulative ’because’.

If the Joseph Goebbels School of Agitation, Propaganda and Public Diplomacy does not find this specimen worthy to be stuffed and put on permanent exhibition, they will, in this amateur’s opinion, be making a mistake. Should they consider it and then reject it because of an undue concern with the ’wannabe-’ prefix factor, they will be making a more subtle mistake:

"Well dost thou seem to check my lingering here
On this important hour!-I’ll straight away,
And while the fathers of the Senate meet
In close debate to weigh the events of war,
I’ll animate the soldiers’ drooping courage,
With love of freedom, and contempt of life:
I’ll thunder in their ears their country’s cause,
And try to rouse up all that’s Roman in ’em.
’Tis not in mortals to command success,
But we’ll do more, Sempronius; we’ll deserve it. "


After the neocomradely community’s Black Tuesday, 4 November 2008, our holy-Homelandic™ Senate (not even to mention the Pelosi-infested House!) may prove a bit harder for the Duke to rouse than previously, yet what rational animal can blame his lordship for that? Should his lordship persevere and succeed at last despite liberals and democrats and Democrats, the glory of the neoëxploit would be far greater than if he had marked the same product to George XLIII, a laddie who, as noted above, was already predisposed in favour of appeal to sixth senses and gut feelin’s.

A stern critic might criticize that this agitprop product cannot be much good precisely because it could not be marketed to George XLIII.

The objection is thoroughly unreasonable: we do not, to begin with, know that His Grace of Pajama ever attempted to make the sale. It would not be mysterious at all if it should turn out that his lordship overestimated Master Dubya’s gut-basin’ proclivities and figured, until it was too late, that the Dynasty Brat would get there on His own without bein’ pushed. Or perhaps without bein’ pushed by anybody other than Neocomrade Viceroy R. B. Cheney.

After all, it still remains rather remarkable that Master Dubya did not in fact ever get there, does it not? "What went wrong?"

And God knows best.

Happy days.

_____
[1] A certain class of cultivated despisers, one that includes the present keyboard when it is not leaning over backwards to be balanced and fair with militant extremist neocomrades, must inevitably despise this shtyk. But we are obviously of no discernible political throw-weight.

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public," said St. Henry of Mencken. That’s the ticket, Your Grace!


12 May 2009

Testin' ... 1 ... 2 ... 3 ... 4!



(( For a change, Mr. Bones, and probably just this once, I leave the piece the way it would have appeared if dispatched to Common Terror magazine as an ordinary gloss from the peanut gallery. Apart from the neoseñorito's ipsissima verba, that is, and my little editorial cartoon. As usual, I decided there is not much point in being rude to the faces of folks a hundred times more likely to notice incivility than to understand objections.

(( By the way, sir, have thee any idea who on Gore's green earth Ms. Wanda Sykes may be? ))


Attempting to enforce the rules of a neoörganisation that one does not belong to and would ridicule any invitation to join may be perfectly absurd, Mr. Bones, but clearly we must do something, now that it is "All is discovered. Fly at once!" time here at the Hard Left Café!

A certain Neocomrade P. Wehner has managed to figure out what Princess Neoterica and Her Singin’ Señoritos


are goin’ up against when they go up against ‘us’. Like the Gaul of C. Iulius Caesar, ‘we’ are a dark pullulatin’ mass of barbarity and squalor that may be divided into three parts for the analytical convenience of neoörganisms:

(1) For some of those with a liberal cast of mind, to oppose the policies of President Obama is treasonous and akin to bin Ladenism ... (2) the extraordinary double standard when it comes to the rhetoric of conservatives and liberals ... (3) Obama is the man who promised to cast aside what he has called the 'partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.' He was going to be the voice of civility and for high-minded public discourse.


Not havin’ quite got this _shtyk_ of his together (which is perhaps adequate grounds for excommunication from Club Neo all by itself), Señorito de Wehner does not aim any of its brickbats at ‘us’ quite directly or with perfect Kirkegaardian purity of heart:

(1) If some of ‘us’ cry treason every time our skin is e-scratched, yet to word it like that implies that another ‘some’ of us do not. _Omne tulit punctum_.

(3) Comrade POTUS is of course a single individual and no proper ‘us’ except of the merely verbal brand that one might encounter whilst taking tea with Mrs. Windsor at St. James. Probably this blast of the Wehnerian neotuba should be interpreted as comin’ from a crew of antidemocratic illiberals who recently bought into their Neocomrade Viceroy R. B. Cheney’s Omnicompetent Unitary Executive™ product. By OUE™ lights, it will be as great a waste of time to subtly distinguish between Barry XLIV O’Bama and ‘us’ -- _La Démocratie ('D' majuscule!) en Amérique_ -- as between the Oval Office (of George XLIII) and the United States of America.

Anyway, Mr. Bones, it is not as if thee and I have any desire to disassociate ourselves from the Guide of All Progressive Humanity. Like many of those folks who talk to pollsters other than their Neocomrade Dr. Rasmussen, we do not deny that Barry has been progressing in more or less the right direction.

That leaves Blast (2), which the señorito has worded somewhat evasively. If you work the passage out, sir, I believe you will find that in addition to confusin’ ‘us’ with our Leader, which is at least a very old and respectable error for monarchophile reactionaries to make, it simultaneously confuses ‘us’ with what is left of the intellectually respectable press. Though we may accept and even enjoy the honour of conflation with Comrade POTUS, to be taken for Walter Lippman or Walter Cronkite is entirely unacceptable. Maybe Walter Mitty will take P. Wehner up on his kind offer, but the rest of ‘us’ should just-say-no. "Every tub on its own bottom" is the applicable proverb when it comes to ‘our’ scribblers and scribbling.

Also applicable when it comes to *their* neoscribblers and neoscribblin’, naturally. Professor Kant’s immortal Goose-and-Gander Principle is not to be trifled with, Mr. Bones -- not by us, or by ‘us’, or by all of Neoteric Señoritostán marchin’ in lockstep. Not by anybody at all. Period. ¡JUST SAY NO! Exclamation point!

Meanwhile there is the bottom of the P. Wehner tub, which, as I said, is such as to make it remarkable that the rest of the up-market locksteppers should want to keep such a vessel in the garage. Thee and I listen daily to Wehner-worthy bilge from their Neocomrade Dr. R. H. Limbaugh III, and from their Neocomrade the Duke of Sanseverino (when not suspended [1]), and, on occasion, even from their Neocomrade Dr. A. M. Weinstein-Savage [2]. We manage to listen to such colourful and characteristic turkeys without supposing any of them to be THE Voice of Universal Turkeydom. That is to say, we understand how to make distinctions among tubs and turkeys.

One such traditional distinction of ours places _Common Terror_ magazine (along with _The Wall Street Jingo_ and _The Weekly Standard_ and ... and, well, that is about the whole roster, actually) a few cuts above the BigParty / AEIdeological gutter.

Princess Neoterica and the señoritos entertain such exuberant notions of their own cultural and tertiary-educational superiority that it is always a pleasure to laugh at them. But the only reason there is a joke to laugh at is that the first five percent or so of CTM/TWS/WSJ self-superioritisin’ is warrantable. A much smaller percentage of warrantability exists now than when their Hate-’68 Movement™ first got under weigh, and their decline seems to be continuin’ and possibly even acceleratin’. Nevertheless, for the moment and for the immediately visible future, jingoes and weekly standardisers and common terrorisers do remain distinguishable from the _hoi polloi_ at Wingnut City and Hooverville.

Accordingly, the higher neoörganisms have a certain _ton_ to keep up, and I put it to thee, Mr. Bones, that this P. Wehner creature that they have unearthed somewhere [3] is an obstacle to proper upkeepin’ of _ton_ and self-superiority. A shade too crude and Limbaugh-like is Neocomrade P. Wehner. Maybe even a shade and a half.

If the hypothesis of a steadily ongoin’ decay in _Common Terror_ and _Weekly Standard_ circles be correct, this sort of not entirely indefensible boo-boo at the bottom margin might have been predicted in advance. A decade ago, P. Wehner's candidacy for membership in Club Neo would have been blackballed.

Looking the other direction, Mr. Bones, it would be easy enough to spoof that ten years from now the toney neoörganisms will be reduced to pesterin’ strangers on the street and at airports to sign up. Like Jehovah's Witnesses.

Balance and fairness forbid one to make any such prediction, sir, for there are a number of hedges around Castle Podhóretz that would have to fall before the autoelect neoörganisms are reduced to pretendin’ that their Princess Neoterica and her Singin’ Señoritos are only Tom and Dick and Harriet and Louise. [4] When common terrorisers venture on really *popular* populism, Mr. Bones, they do it so badly that nobody could possibly mistake them for regular guys. [5]

Happy days.

(( For what it is worth, Mr. Bones, and I do no claim it to be worth much, the fact that I feel no faintest inclination to contradict the tripartite proposition of P. Wehner, or otherwise discuss it materially, may be an indication of the comparative inferiority of the specimen. If the señorito sincerely believes what it scribbles, then it is a j*rk indistinguishable from the radio-active neoörganisms mentioned. If it does not believe, then it is guilty of mendacity rather than of aggravated mediocrity. There is no reason why decent political grown-ups should care which charge is provable: "Heads we win, tails they lose." ))

___
[1] http://www.boston.com/ae/tv/articles/2009/05/08/severin_furor_has_sponsors_pulling_ads/

[2] http://michaelsavage.wnd.com/


[3] In the cyclone cellar down at Rancho Crawford, it looks like:

http://www.politico.com/arena/bio/peter_wehner.html

"Peter Wehner, former Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. "

But God knows best.


[4] "The rich are different than you and me."


[5] It will not hurt to repeat that with _Common Terror_ magazine, one has to do with a sort of "adjective in the optative mood," as one might speak of "a noun in the past tense" with ‘dinosaur’ or "Marduk worshipper." The higher neoörganisms of our holy Homeland *wish* that their own condition of bein’ self-terrorized of all those many, many nasties on their various enemies lists were a statistically common condition, but they do not suppose that it actually is.

This pathology has no particular connection with what is objectively ‘common’ in the eyes of a mathematician or actuary.

It should not be necessary to add that of course there is also no connection with ‘common’ in the pejorative sense of ‘vulgar’. Indeed, I just said that above by implication when pointing out how foolish they look when they suddenly start pretendin’ to be fans of Neocomrade Governess S. Heath-Paling of AK and her playmates.


11 May 2009

Clubs R Trumps



If Bush ever foresaw how TARP would be used — as a club to cudgel its beneficiaries into complying with government plans and dictates — it would be the blackest mark on his legacy.

I supposed one ought to be pleased, Mr. Bones, when a member of the señoritoly element comes as close as that to recognizin’ the Goose-Gander Principle.

On the other hand, it ain’t all that close. Neocomrade J. G. Thayer says nothin’ to cast doubt on the future infallibility of his factionette (and his Party and his AEIdeology). Humanum est errare is applied retrospectively to 1LT Bush of the TX Air National Guard now that there can be no practical consequences. Or indeed, now that there are (very slight, but noticable) positive consequences for Hooverville and Wingnut City: havin’ once orated like that, the neo-orators can go on to "put Bush behind US," and blame anythin’ they like (and the opposite too) on Comrade POTUS.

Ah, well, 'tis not as if they wouldn't anyway!

The Muses and you and I may linger, Mr. Bones, on the improbable scenario of George XLIII actually forseein’ somethin’. We may find ourselves lingering in a parallel universe rather than this one, but I believe that will be acceptable as long as we agree to draw only moral conclusions about noble ganders and silly geese and make no attempt to derive specific policies for or about wingnutettes and wingnuts.

"Moralise global, act local!", don't you know?

Bein’ in a Move-On mood, the señorito du jour does not speculate what their Dynasty Boy was up to with TARP if he was not interested in

"a club to cudgel ... beneficiaries into complying with ... plans and dictates."

Fortunately the obvious contrary is probably more or less accurate: the August House of Kennebunkport-Crawford originally intended to hand out seven hundred billion dollars to its retainers and cronies and then allow the latter to spend it any way they pleased. Field Marshall Paulson von Hindenburg and First Quartermaster-General Bernanke von Ludendorff will no doubt have had a rough idea what the retainers and cronies--persons indistinguishable from themselves for this sort of discussion, after all--would do with their windfall, but there is no reason to suppose that the Imperial Brat had any better idea of what his gruesome twosome were doin’ than William II had of military strategy in 1918.

You and I, Mr. Bones, have a tendency to be excessively cynical whenever their GOP geniuses start goin’ on about ‘freedom’ in the course of their self-servicin’. Here, at any rate, was a case of the real thing: the Goldman-Saxons were to be given all those scrumptious bucks with no strings attached:

"The only TRUE freedom is the freedom to big-manage!"

As under Ethelred II, so under George XLIII: it would be ‘unseemly’ to worry out loud in public about what the Danes are going to do with their Danegeld after receipt of it. Naturally one crosses one's fingers and cherishes certain hopes of relief, but to write New York Times Company editorials offering advice on how to spend every last silver penny of it would have been fort mauvais in 1108, and was not particularly helpful in 2008 either. Think if the Sassenachs of 1108 had gone on to deplore how the Danes allotted bonus money intramurally to the noble scions of Thor and Odin, Mr. Bones! [1]

As it happens, neocomrades of the strict observance (roughly speaking, those who dwell in the immediate shadows and penumbræ and emanationes of Common Terror and Weekly Standard magazines) bring up Danegeld from time themselves, though invariably, I think, in connection with their overseas escapades, on-goin’ or proposed. In the realm of foreign and invasion policy, they would never dream of speakin’ disrespectfully of clubs and cudgels! Thus it appears to me, Mr. Bones, that weekly standardmongers and common terrorisers would still have goose-’n’-gander problems even if all decent political grown-ups were suddenly annihilated by magic. Payin’ Danegeld would be flatly out of the question with natives and non-Zionist locals, but here in the metropolitan Homeland™ amongst ‘ourselves’ it would seem an outrage to the neocomradely community to deal with the Goldman-Saxons on those lines.

Indeed, my impression is that the stricter neocomrades cannot imagine any serious alternative to domestic Danegeldism. If their Uncle Sam is not to lavish largesse on the economic OnePercenters and humbly hope for some payback and trickle-down (without ever rudely insisting on anything at all), our common terrorisers revert at once to their alleged ancestral Trotskyism -- except that the second time around it is a farce starrin’ themselves as gamekeepers rather than poachers.

Of course you must bear in mind Mr. Bones that in ordinary times the neogentry do not think about banausic Trade much at all. Up until the latter days of George XLIII, they did a magnificent job of never thinkin’ for an instant how to pay for their foreign capers, and almost as magnificent a job of not worryin’ about how to muster political support for ditto. This befits the señoritoly element well enough, for what señorito can imagine a world in which its Daddy is only a formerly important personage who now has to worry about plebeian matters personally instead of leavin’ them to the servants?

Deprived of their hereditary silver spoons, the neogentry may turn into somethin’ different and perhaps even somethin’ better eventually, but this cannot happen in an instant. Meanwhile you and I are perhaps in some danger of being unfair to them, Mr. Bones, especially if we insist on scrutiny of their Economics report card. It is, to be sure, their weakest subject, and one can watch them cribbin’ pretty shamelessly from The Wall Street Jingo and thereabouts. This feeble performance does not reflect their innate ideological aptitude, however. Perhaps we can come back in a couple of years when they have been compelled to think about the icky subject for a reasonable length of time and assess them more accurately. Though of course if the Crawford Crash Depression goes away before then, they'll no doubt be back to their blithe invasionisin’ in a flash.

Flesh and blood can only endure a limited amount of balance and fairness, however, so it is fortunate that I can conclude quâ Pascalian moralist with an unqualified rejection of the neogentry’s wish to be blithe invasionisers who need never count their costs or diddle dupes and marks into bearin’ their burdens for them. An Eighty-Years Depression would probably not cure Peretzo-Podhoretzites of their underlyin’ brain disease, just as it would not cure you and me of wanting to have our cake and eat it too. Still, if they could advance as far as not expectin’ to get everythin’ they wish for . . . .

___

Turning to neocomrades in the looser sense, to run-of-the-mill GOP geniuses and the Big Management Party base-’n’-vile, I find that the señorito’s rhetoric about a "blackest mark" on Master Dubya's "legacy" leads me to the reflection that Hooverville and Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh take for granted that it is red ink that leaves the blackest marks.

Red ink as opposed to blood, that is. [2]


___
[1] Though great fun to think of, that bit is no doubt over the boundary of Moralistán and well into the province of Æsthetica Minor. I beg your pardon, sir.


[2] Do I want to go on to specify "Red ink for ‘us’ as opposed to the blood of lesser breeds without"?

Probably not at this time, Mr. Bones, but only probably. Happy days, sir!


10 May 2009

"Back to indentured servitude"



GOP Neocomrade [1] N. C. Geale ought to be stuffed and mounted for the permanent viewing pleasure of us fiends and democrats and Democrats!

Not in dishonor of his politics and policies, which are only about what one would expect when the Party of Big Management is so badly split on the xenophobia question, but in dishonor of the peculiar form of moralistic wall-paper that he uses to paste over the crack in his Party.

The neocomrade’s former official position under George XLIII is ambiguous in certain respects:

(1) How exalted, exactly, was a ‘senior’ shyster to a ‘deputy’ hack pol in perhaps the single agency of Neocomrade Viceroy R. B. Cheney’s Unitary Executive Branch™ that Hoovervillains care for least?

(2) High or low, might not a Neocomrade N. C. Geale, Esq., have been placed in that position to serve as part of Mr. Frank's Wrecking Crew rather than to departmentalize disapassionately in the interest of "union thugs"?

(3) Would the matter scribbled about here have been in Neocomrade N. C. Geale’s boss's purview at all, and not rather in that of the Department of Agriculture?

(( Agriculture, like advocacy in court, is vastly more respectable in the eyes of (instructed) wingnutettes and wingnuts than ‘Labour’ can ever hope to be. That race is not even close, Mr. Bones! Here are Cato the Elder and Marcus Tædius Cicero standing to your right, sir, with FDR and Mr. Harold Laski seated in the other pan of the scales -- "I report, thee decide" what happens to the beam of the balance! Massa Murdoch won't let me report out loud, Bones, but I betcha can guess what I’d say if were a free man! ))

I daresay that solemn examination of credentials is a bit more than one isolated Christokorean op-ed piece merits. Furthermore, as I began by noting, Neocomrade N. C. Geale, Esq., proposes to play The Morality Card™, a procedure for which no widely agreed-upon credentialization process has ever been established.

Anyhow, watch how he plays, Mr. Bones:

"Aside from the affront to our values, such conditions can drive down wages and impair working conditions for American citizens - to say nothing of the unpaid taxes from the illegal employment. (...) cynical and arguably anti-American (...) many [neo-wetbacks] probably have a limited education, speak little English and may not even be immunized against communicable diseases. AgJobs also makes these workers less well-off financially by arbitrarily slashing their wages across the board. (...) Not content, however, to simply make these people generally dependent (...) the nature of America's moral promise to temporary workers is altered by a cynical plan to legally indenture them - all with virtually no public debate."

I do not pretend, Mr. Bones, that there is anything new about the modus operandi of Neocomrade Counselordeputy N. C. Geale. Hath not their Neocomrade Prof. Dr. Ch. A. Murray been goin’ on in that "generally dependent" vein for years and decades? Perhaps this chela, bein’ an Esq., adds a bit more of a Rulalaw tinge than his guru would have done, but that sort of recipe variation is only icin’, not cake. N. C. Geale, Esq., is patently a Murrayite, and accordingly the fine print on his Morality Card™ that most people skip over without reading informs the customer that nothin’ is less charitable than to do favors for people who actually need favors done them. (Comfortin’ the already comfortable is unobjectionable -- et quicumque non habet etiam quod putat se habere auferetur ab illo, doncha know? -- but that is another story for another Sabbath morning.)

In addition to the faint legalistic tinge, the chela adds a certain amount of plain confusion that his Master would presumably have avoided. That is to say, he introduces, or waves his hands as if about to introduce, other moral cards inconsistent with strict Murrayanity. He even wobbles in his Faith to the point of appealin’ to old-fashioned charity itself, pointin’ out that the neo-wetbacks are in fact needy of worldly favors as well as of metaphysical instruction in The Gospel Accordin’ to Chas.

Note particularly "makes these workers less well-off financially," language which inevitably suggests that the neocomrade has their financial well-bein’ at heart. Of course that suggestion is absurd in light of the over-all thrust of the scribble.

One can only infer that Neocomrade N. C. Geale, Esq., has not quite altogether thought his Party-card-based [1] moralism through. Even at whatever seminary for ambulance chasers he attended [2], he might have been advised that firin’ off ALL his available ammo at the enemy immediately to his front might be unwise if there are internal inconsistencies in it that the hostile fiends targeted, or others like them, might conceivably avail themselves of. In isolation, it might do to pronounce democrats and Democrats and liberals bad people because they do not sufficiently sympathize with the plight of neo-wetbacks. In the present context, though, this ploy is only laughable. [3]

In fact, if thee will examine closely, the Gealean wallpaper is nearly as divided against itself as the Big Management Party wall on which he proposes to paste it. The neocomrade seems fond of ‘cynical’, so perhaps we may speculate for once, in violation of our general policy, that N. C. Geale, Esq., has cold-bloodedly picked up this catchword and that, assemblin’ a wide variety of mutually inconsistent membra disjecta wingnutiana, each of which will appeal to some (but not all) GOP geniuses and to some (but not all) Big Party base-’n’-vile -- whilst ‘cynically’ (?) not givin’ a hoot what clashes and contradictions result.

By my lights, at least, he does not even confine himself to moralistical scrapss and patches, at least not in the case of "may not even be immunized against communicable diseases." So direct an appeal as that to the self-cowardice of his neocomrades seems like something that thee and I, Mr. Bones, might have made up to spoof ’em with. (It would also help if the scribble had been printed several days ago, before the Gadarene swine had stopped bein’ terrorized of H1N1.)

But God knows best about Party Neocomrade N. C. Geale, Esq.

Happy days.


___
[1] Evidence of Big Party neocomradedom available here.


[2] "Georgetown (1999)," says URL cit., which ought to know.


[3] Well, yes, Mr. Bones, we could guess that this Big Party neocomrade accounts us bad people primarily because we disbelieve in his Murrayanity. But that would be even more laughable, no?

In any case, one would have to waterboard his text to get your proposed meaning out of it, sir.

06 May 2009

Jewels in the Head of the Toad



I think, Mr. Bones, that we might respectfully maintain an honour roll of those Heroes of (T)error


who have voluntarily attained unto shaháda vis-à-vis Comrade POTUS and us inferior minions of evil.

Though very few truly worthy names occur to me off-hand -- in the immediate wake of encountering Neocomrade Asness for the first time, that is -- yet I notice that all three principal ideographical parts of the Endarkenment are represented.


Clifford S. Asness, Ph. D. of Hooverville

Andrew C. McCarthy, Esq. of Wingnut City

J. Thompson Severino of Rio Limbaugh

***


(your name appears here)

(your name appears here)

(your name appears here)

(your name appears here)

(your name appears here)

(your name appears here)


***

Happy days.




"Empathy Isn’t Really Empathy, You See"



Princess Neoterica has decreed as follows:

Give Ruth Marcus credit: she realizes that the [P]resident got into some hot water by suggesting ”empathy’is a primary consideration in selecting a Supreme Court judge. The [P]resident didn’t actually mean that he wants a Supreme Court justice who harbors sympathy toward one side or the other — because that would be wrong (wink, wink). No, he’s looking for someone with experience which will ‘inform’ the judge’s thinking, you see. So, she says, Justice Powell would have come out differently in the Bowers v. Hardwick sodomy case if he had known some same-sex couples.

Let’s stipulate that the [P]resident has no problem expressing himself and does not lack for vocabulary. So he could have said he was looking for "life experience to inform the justice’s thinking" if that’s what he meant. But even taking Marcus’ interpretation at face value, we don’t get away from the central problem. If Marcus is right that Powell would have ruled differently had he known gay people, that would mean his interpretation of the case would have been "informed" by bias, albeit friendly bias, toward the litigants. And that’s exactly the problem. One’s degree of empathy or chumminess with the litigants, or people like them, should have no bearing on the cases before the justice.

Otherwise, one would have to excuse a justice who had lots of gay friends and felt oodles of empathy toward them because she could not impartially evaluate disputes involving gay rights issues. That surely can’t be right. We expect her to ignore those relationships and look to the meaning of the Constitution, the statutes before her, and the precedent from prior decisions. We are, in this instance, trying to decide what the Constitution means not whether democratically elected legislators should pass laws protecting gays from discrimination.

Marcus is trying her best to tap dance around the premise which is plainly animating the Obama justice search. He wants ‘empathy’ to guide the justice in reaching outcomes which favor the down-and-out, minorities, women, employees, and criminal defendants. And if you doubt that, go back and look at every confirmation hearing over the last couple of decades. Democrats railed against judges who had written decisions which ruled against these parties. The nominees were therefore tagged as ‘insensitive’ because they did not find a way to conform the law around a favorable outcome for these groups.

That’s what’s going on here. If honest, Democrats would own up to it and stop apologizing for the president’s refreshingly candid admission of what he is up to.


Thanks to a certain infamous pea that whole Himalayas of mattresses cannot extinguish, Her Imperial Highness may know more about the flip side of ‘empathy’ than anybody else alive today. Fancy Princess Neoterica passin’ judgment on a pea-related controversy!

But that is in fact what H. I. H. does here, Mr. Bones. As far as I can see, Princess Neoterica's notions--which we shall unilaterally stipulate to be ‘honest’ and subjectively sincere notions, although forewarned right here that Her Highness will never reciprocate--about the Supreme Court are much of a muchness with Her opinions about college and university admissions and civil-service examinations and the like:

COMMANDMENT XI:

Thou shalt not commit Affirmative Action!

If that be the heart of this matter, as I think it is, then ‘empathy’ is only a side-show even on the good guys’ side of the aisle. So up to a point we agree: Her Imperial Highness considers ‘empathy’ to be a lie in this context, and lies are always secondary to the truths they propose to conceal or subvert, are they not? (Of course they are!)

I myself relegate ‘empathy’ to the sidelines on quite different grounds, as being one possible motive for Affirmative Action but not at all the substance of it. The general neocomradely agitprop about the AA issue differs a little from Princess Neoterica's, it seems to me: ‘empathy’ or somethin’ very like it is admitted as regards one particular class of democratic and l*b*r*l fiends. The identity of that class is not difficult to guess from when the neocomrades start goin’ on against WLG, "white liberal guilt," in their only too familiar way.

Thus ‘empathy’ would automatically be required of, for example, a hypothetical Neocomrade Justice A. Dershowitz, whereas the really existin’ Neocomrade Justice C. Thomas need hardly trouble himself about it. If St. Rudyard of Kiplin’ were with us at this hour, I daresay he might add ‘empathy’ to The White Man’s Burden. Unlike Her Imperial Highness, though, St. Rudyard appears to have been a sort of Affirmative Action groupie, to the extent that any Brit imperialiser and colonialiser of 1899 could be such a thing without anachronism: "To seek another's profit / And work another's gain" could, in isolation, easily be diagnosed as a symptom of the WLG flu. [1] [2]

The refusal to be bullied into WLG was, I think, Pillar II of the original Hate-’68 Movement™, with AntiCommunism as Pillar I and HyperZionism only Pillar III. The annus horribilis was quite a long time ago, however, and Princess Neoterica is a second-degeneration specimen. Her Imperial Highness is not on speakin’ terms with any sort of economics, really, but one may be quite sure that such dreams as that damn pea allows Her are not troubled by dark thoughts of successes and victories for Scientific Socialism. Or for the Muscovite neo-Mongols of Pipes Major either.

Removal of Pillar I left thee and me without any reason to take much further interest in The Common Terror magazine and all its playmates, but naturally it matters more what the neocomrades of the strict observance thought they were doin’ after 1989 or 1991 than what outsiders think of it. Certainly their fear and loathin’ of Affirmative Action never wavered for a second, and naturally Hyperzion loomed larger than before. The two active ingredients of Phase Two neotericity can be painted as complementary or antagonistic: no individual Homelander™ or particular Homeland™ interest group is to get any Affirmative Action, but a certain Levantine statelet is to be favoured with relentless disproportionality.

That's the antagonistic portrait, of course: the complementary one is not far to seek, though it may be a bit infra dignitatem to mention it out loud. To take partial refuge in an extinct language: if one asks Cui bono? about each survivin’ Pillar of Neotericity, the answer is the same for both. Domestic Affirmative Action is plainly bad for the neocomrades; equally plainly, the export product could hardly be improved upon from their factional standpoint. As simple as that.

Perhaps the neocomradely antagonism to WLG can now be promoted to Pillar III? They certainly have no intention of feelin’ the least bit guilty about "self-defense" in the neo-Levant, and is not wardin’ off the dreadful prospect of "Madam Justice Sotomayor" a self-defense issue at bottom also? However it is not up to thee and me to shape their neoïdeology for them, Mr. Bones. And we mun singen Deo gratias that this is so.

When it comes to makin’ their neoïdeology our Uncle Sam's policy, however, it is not unseemly for us to intervene in the internal and foreign affairs of our own holy Homeland™ from time to time, sir. We might even perhaps represent such intervention in a self-defensive (or preëmptively retaliatory, modo crawfordiense) light, although it would be wise to profit from the examples of Professor Walt and Mr. Mearsheimer, should we resolve to move in that direction. Now that the electorate has dismissed their Boy and their Party from the White House, now that their Boy's Party’s AEIdeology suddenly finds itself hard-pressed and on the defensive thanks to the Crawford Crash™, there is really no very urgent need for us to do anything at all. Not even empathize with Judge Sotomayor, or ‘antempathize’ with Princess Neoterica of Pajamastán and Tel Avîv.

Happy days.

___
[1] An extremely speculative question arises at this point: would Princess Neoterica reconsider Her cultivated despite for Affirmative Action if the natives and locals who benefit from it were as segregated geographically in 2009 as those whose 1899 profit and gain Mr. Kiplin’ referred to? Our neogentry's notorious "gated communities" are all very well in their way, but unfortunately they do tend to be surrounded by whole vast Sowetos of ’no-count trailer trash.

One faint hint that Her Imperial Highness might be less uncharitable if the objects of Her uncharity were less frequently encountered is that on the whole opposition to expressly avowed foreign aid tends to be concentrated over on the wrong side of the tracks in Rio Limbaugh and Wingnut City. A Neocomrade P. Buchanan is far more likely than a Neocomradess J. Rubin to be found railin’ against it. Patrons of The Common Terror and The Weekly Standard can become really vexed at bein’ taken for Buchananites, so perhaps if all our holy Homeland™ blacks and tans could be gathered together in Patagonia or Madagascar or East Palestine or some such safely remote place, the terrormongers and standardisers would approve of sendin’ them fairly generous monthly or quarterly remittances, if only to rebuke the churlishness of their cultural and educational inferiors.

But God knows best about counterfactual scenarios!


[2] Thee may have noticed, Mr. Bones, that it is much less annoying when the 1899 Kipling pats himself and his political friends (and ‘his’ Empire too! -- which Mr. Chesterton very properly guffawed at) on the back for their sheer disinterested wunnerfulness than when some wingnutette or wingnut contemporary with ourselves starts singin’ that same vile tune. Why do thee suppose that is, sir?

If we guess that it is simply that _de te fabula narratur_ is inapplicable, then there ought to have many 1899 Brits who found St. Rudyard an insufferable vulgar bounder. Now we know that there were some who did so, but were they a majority or plurality? Were Rudyardophobes even ‘normal’ in the statistical sense? I have no idea, myself.

One could also guess that self-wunnerfulness ceases to be offensive provided it is kept a decent distance off in space or time. Ship all the self-backpatters to Madagascar, and perhaps then one would not care if there never was any repentance or amendment of life amongst them. Again, I dunno.

05 May 2009

¡¡El Señoritíssimo Reducido al Absurdo!!



Perhaps I may solecise with impunity in a little known foreign tongue, Mr. Bones, and speak of an autoreducción al absurdo in honor of Master Davey Brooks’ latest pile of solemn horsepiffle? What the señorito to end all señoritos is self-reduced to is so absurd that only it itself could do the job; anybody else who thought of it would be so busy laughing that she would never get around to doing any reducing.

The little laddie itself

seems to be entirely without a sense of the ridiculous, which may be a precondition for its remainin’ alive and well and able to dabble in that trashy homebrew social- scientisin’ without which its life would evidently be meanin’less to itself.

Be that as it may, now in the fullness of time (i.e., under the sceptre of Barry Husáyn XLIV Obáma -- it hath seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to Davidito itself that the latter should undertake an apostolic quest for, ta-DAA . . .

... a leader who is calm, prudent, reassuring and reasonable ...

Master Davey does not expressly mention that the snark it hunts must not be an incumbent President of the United States. But surely thee can see, Mr. Bones, why it takes that point for granted! If not, there be only be about forty years of age and fourteen orders of magnitude of gravitas to separate Señorito Brooks of the New York Times Company from ex-neocomrade Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.

So, then, Davidito sets itself up to be the new José Antonio Primo de Rivera. For a variety of reasons, it seems unlikely that Davidito will nab any snarks at all, but if its John-the-Baptist imitation shtyk were actually to pan out, something like the late Generalíssimo would be not unlikely. In fact, "Nous, Philippe Pétain"

strikes me as an even likelier candidate, but in order to preserve rhetorical seemliness, I shall stick to the sunny side of the Pyrenees. France may be full of other species of displeasing political frogs and toads, but the specifically señoritoly element, without which Neocomrade D. Brooks of NYTC would be purely a discontinuity in the atmosphere, is not prominent.

Though thee and I can guess easily enough where Davidito’s projected voyage of discovery is likely to terminate, if it ever get past the preliminary belly-laughing from port and barkin’-’n’-bellowin’ to starboard, naturally the specimen itself has no clue at this point who will be found worthy of election. Accordin’ly, it spends most of its 750 words on conditions of worthiness or unworthiness stated abstractly, as for instance

[The New Hero] will have to explain that there are two theories of civic order. There is the liberal theory, in which teams of experts draw up plans to engineer order wherever problems arise. And there is the more conservative vision in which government sets certain rules, but mostly empowers the complex web of institutions in which the market is embedded. (...) The Republicans know they need to change but seem almost imprisoned by old themes that no longer resonate. The answer is to be found in devotion to community and order, and in the bonds that built the nation.

(( Notice, over on the right shoulder, Mr. Bones, how Master Davey has a tin ear for rhetoric: its figure of bonds buildin’ a nation is as ludicrous a literalter as St. George of Orwell’s octopus that had sung her swansong. [1] ))

That parenthetical deficiency may be conceptual as well as dialectical, however. Davidito’s cheapjack amateur sociologisin’ renders it very unfit even to guess at the answer to what has by now become a strictly historical question, "How was our holy Homeland™ originally built?" The political patient it wants to play quack to firmly believes in "History is bunk" and "That was THEN, this is NOW!", which means, in a sense, that quack and dupe are well met. Unfortunately for the little laddie’s future lustre as an ornament to its Party and its Ideology, anhistory is about the only point that Davidito and the mainstream GOP base-and-vile agree on at the moment, and it is not the sort of point that is likely to cross either of their minds.

This brings us to the question of what the señorito supposes itself to be doin’ vis-à-vis the really existin’ Party of Goldwater ’n’ Atwater. I shall be disappointed and even a tad amazed this afternoon if Neocomrade Dr. Limbaugh fails to kick this journalistic cur and patent RINO at least a little. Certainly I would. The kickin’ looks pretty good: it would be both easy and fun to mock the señorito (employed at that very dubious private/secret-sector business corporation the NYTC!) as finally havin’ examined a copy of Die Verfassung der Freiheit, but without even beginnin’ to understand the true Goldwater-Atwater implications thereof.

Up to a point, the darts and arrows of outrageous Limbaugh would be warrantable. The Big Party base and vile may not know exactly what new Hero of Error they are lookin’ for themselves, but the sweet puppies of Endarkenment certainly do not crave a Maréchal Pétain or José-Antonian Generalíssimo much more than thee and I do, Mr. Bones. I should guess about a fifty-fifty split between "Back to Reagan!" and "On to Galt!" in sweet puppiedom at the moment. Master Brooks has nothin’ worth mentionin’ of substance for either of those crews, and neither crew is likely to give an extraterrestrial RINO much credit for politely attemptin’ to communicate with them in a (highly bookish and heavily accented) form of their own vernacular lingo. "Why doesn’t David Brooks just quietly go away and join Benedict Arlen Specter someplace where it is very, very warm?" is the obvious reaction to be expected from Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh. (But not from Hooverville.)

That reaction is so obvious to expect that I am inclined to guess that the señorito itself can see what is comin’. On that hypothesis, it puts its today’s horsepiffle on the record so as to have it there to appeal back to later on, "Look, everybody, I *tried* to be friends with those people, did I not?"

Decide for theeself, Mr. Bones, exactly how sincerely and how diligently the señorito is tryin’ to befriend the Endarkeners.

I hesitate to make any really firm judgments on human events that can be observed only through all those barbed-wire fences around the grounds of the MEGOP Reservation and Lunatic Asylum. The weakest point of my guesswork is, I guess, that it assumes the señorito has already decided, more or less consciously and deliberately, to flirt with arlenspecteratin’. That is not altogether congruent with my own estimate of the Brooks specimen’s intellectual and cultural age. But God knows best.

Happy days.


___
[1] Thee and I may recall, privately and secretly and as may appear seemly in the eyes of Princess Neoterica, that discussion in a French grammar book of how another grammarian was once flummoxed to be informed that Les poutres étaient la maison -- " *The beams were the house. "

To be sure, Davidito’s intellectual plight is not strictly parallel. Mad to suppose that it has some subtle étayer up its sleeve as well as the vulgar être! In any case, when he ran off the rails, little Davey was protestin’ that the beams had somehow BUILT the house.

(( Yes, I take thee’s point, Mr. Bones: a mental grown-up might have meant by Davidito’s childith lithpin’s that the beams were the causa exemplaria or causa formalis of the house, that the Republic was instantiated as an external framework to serve as macrocosmos to ‘bonds’ that had previously existed only in foro interiori. It sounds a good deal like the former Sir Filmer, yet if Mr. Locke could (pretend to) take that clown seriously, why, so can we.

(( Yet come along, sir: if you seriously believe a Master Davey Brooks capable of meanin’ that, why, you would believe anything! ))


01 May 2009

De Inquidamento Specioso Epistula



"If you don’t think there is anything that really needs preemption, then that is your argument. The rest is specious nonsense."

The late Dr. Freud of Vienna still has much to answer for. Where would Wingnut City be if one could not replace argument with diagnosis?

Though Freudianity as high-and-dry social scientizing be almost extinct, yet the vulgar errors that it was always so prone to give rise to have not gone away pari passu. The present specimen is not your average bastard or hybrid offspring of a dying mythology, it is really quite a remarkable ‘mischievment’ [1].

From the outset, Freudianity was abused in the gutt..., in der Gasse, that is, as Contender #6 abuses it here: "I need not respond to you, sir, because you are sick and it is only your sickness that I can hear speakin’."

What makes this neocomradely specimen bastard or hybrid is that previous malpractitioners invariably dismissed everythin’ their victims, or rather, their victims’ diseases, had to say for themselves. To single out part of the contents of the conceptual garbage bag as worthy of re-cyclin’ is neo- indeed! Even those who do not find the sweet puppies of the Commentariat as endlessly entertaining to watch as I do ought to admit that, like poor Jean-Jacques, au mois elle est différent!

Exactly what new criterion or weekly standard does this individual neocomradess apply as she works her way through material that most of her own crew would dismiss as ‘pathological’ trash from stem to stern?

That is not an easy question, unfortunately. Possibly I do not get the hang of so flabbergastin’ a neo-ism right at first glance? Perhaps.

The (apparent) substance of her nifty ploy puts me in mind of an old joke -- Mr. Thurber’s, it may have been -- at the expense of St. Rudyard Kiplin’s If: "If you can keep your head while all around are losing theirs / Maybe you simply don’t understand the situation."

It looks as if Neocomradess #6 will attend to your argument quâ argument as long as it concerns whether or not you "think there is anything that really needs preemption," though she pretty plainly would consider you an imbecile if you were to deny the Tel Avîv government its imprescriptible right to engage in preëmptive self-retaliations. That is what she says, at any rate, although there is a small obstacle to taking it at face value, considering that she makes nothin’ like an argument herself.

Nevertheless, the general structure of her mental Umwelt seems tolerably clear: there are two (2) nonpathological views about "How Obama's America might threaten" the Israël of M. de Netanyahu: one may think, mistakenly but not dementedly, either (1) that Jewish Statism is not in fact very seriously threatened, or else (2) take the line of Neocomradess J. E. Dyer and Ms. Chicken Little, in which case you are not only sane but (by their account) sensible. If you want to talk about any other aspect of neo-Levantine affairs, however, you had better lie back on the couch and get yourself freudianated before you do something regrettable.

I see that I have got the neocomradely tone slightly wrong: she barks "The rest is specious nonsense!" at her figurative patient, a move which I daresay Dr. Freud would never have made. Though the great man did indeed suffer from a certain fascination with medicine as pure science, he never altogether lost sight of it as a so-called "caring profession" also. [2]

Considered as rhetoric, and in that slightly sub-par sense ‘argument’, this shiny new toy turns out to be not really quite so brand new after all. Back during Impeachmentgate, Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh kept informin’ everybody not deaf that "All you need to know about X is Y."

Contender #6 does not word her own oracle that way, but surely it is clear that she might do so if she chose? To assign values to her unknowns mechanically produces a somewhat clunky formulation, "All you need to know about (( a potential Obama threat to Hyperzion )) is (( whether there is anything that really needs preemption )). Naturally one might add that it is evil Qommies and not, Father Zeus forbid!, the holy Homeland™ that may require some preëmptive self-retaliatin’ against. But to stick that in explicitly turns serious clunkiness into terminal ditto, nicht wahr?

Since this is not my oracle that we disconstruct, I shall leave merely cosmetic fix-ups to actual purveyors and purchasers of the ideoproduct in question. However it seems more than cosmetic that the neoclunkinesses should seemingly boil down into one or two maxims that are both familiar and reasonably stylishly expressed, namely Not kennt kein Gebot! and Salus populi suprema lex.

To boil the syrup down further for the benefit of impeachsters und auch für die Gasse überhaupt is not difficult:

"All you need to know about (( the survival of Wunnerful Us )) is (( whether or not We survive )).

As usual with the sweet puppies of the Commentariat, a certain element of spoof naturally enters in as soon as one attempts to reword their own mindwash for them. Still, although I may seem to have reduced the magnificent oracle of #6 to sheer tautology, this is not really the case at present, is it? Certain Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg and M. Tullius Cicero, or whichever modern Prussians or antique Romans the German and Latin versions are to be attributed to, did not think that they were saying something along the lines of "The whole is greater than any of its parts." [3] But God knows best.

Happy days.

___
[1] ‘Mischievement’ was Prof. Kaufmann of Princeton’s little joke for the parapraxis of the labóratory ratfink translators of Freud.

There are several different layers of dead thought superposed hereabouts, so the noëtic archaeologists of Princess Posterity will have to excavate the ideofossils with scrupulous attention to detail.

Prof. K. was perhaps half-way down Freudianity’s slippery slope (the segment from 1939 to 2009): it never crossed his mind that the defendant could be other than a Very Great Man, but at the same time, the VGM himself would presumably not have much relished being praised with Kaufmannite praise, i.e., as a mere Geisteswissenschaftler rather than as the Newton of Noëtics.

The earlier part of this rake's progress was before the present keyboard’s time, but the second half is memorable enough. Dr. Bettleheim of Autistostán marks the three-quarters point, I'd say: he praised the VGM as even greater still because he was not really a white-coated labóratory ratfink at all. By the time Dr. B. had finished with his patient / victim / client, anybody who had the cultural misfortune to inhabit our own holy Homeland™ could be pardoned for seeing scarcely any daylight between Dr. Freud and Herr Geheimrat von Goethe. Getting to that point required lots and lots of colonial or provincial ignorance of Old Euro Kultur , but that commodity has never been lacking chez nous.

Who's left? As far as I know, Prof. Gay is still active for the VGM's fame and glory, but this advocate must be quite elderly by now [4]. In any case, he, too, has never been inclined to boost his favorite product as Naturwissenschaft.


[2] I recognize what a wimpy and wishy-washy and bleedin’-heart notion that cliché refers to, but cannot see any way to dodge it entirely without suggesting that Dr. Freud was a sort of Dr. Rappacini or Dr. Frankenstein or who engaged in freudianizing to advance his own interests exclusively. (Perhaps if he had lived to hear of Chicagonomics . . . ?)


[3] Now that I have typed the words out, it strikes me that it would not be hard to make out that that particular mathematical ‘tautology’ was almost exactly what these celebrated statespersons had in mind in 1914 ABCE and 63 BCE respectively, taking context and circumstances into account. Oh, well!

[4] His age will be eighty-six in two months.