De Imperio Ridicularum Ridiculorumque

Paul Ryan requires that his staffers read Atlas Shrugged. I mean, I [Paul Krugman] was inspired by Isaac Asimov, but I don’t think I’m Hari Seldon — whereas Ryan, it seems, really does think he’s John Galt. (...) Future historians will giggle at our expense.

After that improbable and thoroughly ‘unprofessional’ giggle fit, though, the court historians to Princess Posterity scrambled right back up on their stilts and pointed out how this, too, is only what one should have expected all along:

"The Party of Grant and Hoover and Goldwater and Atwater was never a genuinely political Party, never an inferior facsimile of the good ship ’Andrew Jackson,’ though it was compelled all its life to simulate that paradigm in order to gather votes. Krugman wrote as if Neocomrade Fedguv Representative P. D. Ryan, Jr., (as he then was) were an Ajax or Achilles, a protagonist of the forces of selfservatism, a prime mover in the path of Party an’ AEIdeology. The professor only fell to giggling when he started to exaggerate his mistake, fancying the Intellectual Archpontiff of Janesville to be so *extremely* protagonistic as to resemble the fictional Freelord of Galt. More exactly, to fancy that His Eminence fancied himself in some such rôle.

"Perhaps His Eminence did indeed do so, self-criticism and self-knowledge being about the only self-entities frowned on in U.S. Republicanian circles of 1854-2090. Nevertheless H. E. will not have required his coadjutors and sacristans and altar boys to pour over the Evangel of Ayn in hopes that they would confuse their boss with a comic-book action figure -- an’ then His Eminence would enjoy the exquisite self-pleasure of shruggin’ "Aw, shucks!" &c. &c.

"Not at all. ’Tis a pretty scenario, Dr. Krugman, but you must not call it Ronpaul Ryan I.

"In practice, though possibly not in consciousness, Neocom. Fedrep. Ryan knew his own place in the Hire-archy well enough, understood that he was but a lowly merc in the eyes of his Party Paymasters, the alone prime movers and protagonists of Selfservatism. Accordingly, the true original intent of havin’ his subhirelin’s read Atlas Shrugged was that they should, hopefully, become imbued with Miss Rand of Petersburg’s inimitable romantic swoon for the Titans of Commerce & Industry, whereupon they would, hopefully, confuse John, Freelord of Galt, -- not with their immediate boss, ¡G*re forbid! -- but rather with their boss’s crucial contacts amongst the Campaign Contributin’ Classes. Or at least divine that the boss wished they would treat CCC nobility an’ gentry with Randian awe an’ reverence, whether real or undetectably simulated."

But Clio knows best.

Happy days.

(( I omit a footnote to the 2nd edition of 2317 that rather frivolously pointed out that "to cast Tex, Freelord of Exxonmobil (say), or Rupert of Murdoch, or Neohengist Lloyd of the Goldman-Saxon hordes, as ’John Galt’ might be worth a giggle or two in its own right."

(( Besides being frivolous, the remark was out of place: it is for the specifically literary historian to point out that Miss Rand, like her coæval Master Ernest Hemingway, has always been quite unreadable by anybody over the cultural age of fourteen in the absence of a firm antecedent resolution, perpetually renewed, not to laugh. ))

O'Bama meets O'Beese

Q. "Can fat white guys like me ... show up and get free care ... too?"

A. But of course! All you have to do, Neocomrade O’Beese, is select the right doorstep to show up on.

That scribble in the Boston Humbug to which you refer gives the mistaken impression that you might be wantin’ a doorstep outside "the highest illlegal aliens still swarm[in’] the emergency rooms and pay[in’] nothin[’]." [1]

I am sure the Freelord an’ Kiddiemaster of Carr (whom I shall take for argument’s sake to be your Cousin Howie and my own) was not thinkin’ for an instant of puttin’ a hard-workin’ family-valuer like *you* in any such zoo as that! Why, not even fit to die in [2] is that company!

First thing to do, then, once you have boldly resolved to become sick, is to stay as far away from High Illegal Aliens as possible. "Policy begins at home," the proverb sings, and "Be it ever so humble," chimes in its mate. So always _shtyk_ to Our own, sir, as much as possible. "Neither a borrower nor a deficit spender be!"

(( Insert further neofolk wisdom here _______________________ quant. suff.. ))

But that is mere negative advice. On the neoproäctive side, what I think you ought to do, sir, is appeal to Daddy Warbucks or Uncle Scrooge. Maybe somebody a little younger over in that branch of Our Family would be a little less intimidatin’, but it definitely has to be somebody from that branch and no other. [3] Aunt Patty with her respectable Republicanian cloth coat is bound to be mooey simpática, but she probably won’t let you pawn her coat to buy your pills with, or even to reimburse your PCP. (Unless maybe he is in the Family too?)

This brings us straight to Cousin Mitty an’ Cousin Howie. To understand what you read in the Humbug correctly requires appreciatin’ that the latter was conductin’ a holiday strike against the former rather than offerin’ anybody practical advice about doorsteps or emergency rooms. Howie would obviously like to neoëxcommunicate Mitty from Our Family altogether, but I betcha he understands well enough that that plan won’t fly. Not that Howie the Joker was only jokin’, either, but . . . . Well, YOU know! [4]

Was you to turn up on Cousin Mitty’s doorstep, which I fear I have forgotten where it is, you may have to pretend not to mind bein’ strapped to the top of his murder vehicle for the trip to a swarmfree secret-sector emergency room. Just one of Cousin Mitty’s little ways, that strappin’ is -- the good Man does it for all of his Best Friends. Still, you might do well to wait until the weather is warmer. Don’t say I did not warn you.

An’ then there is Cousin Howie’s own doorstep, which, by the way, is rather alarmin’ly easy to locate. ’Tis a wonder poor Howie does not have Union thugs encamped there year ’round as if the joint were Gettysburg or Appomatox. [5]

’Tis a little uncertain, I fear, whether Cousin Howie really an’ truly belongs to the Warbucks-Scrooge side of Our Family. He always barks an’ bellows on the radio as if there could be no question about it, but down here in the shanty many of us think he is only bluffin’. To be sure, sayin’ "The most expensive Carr on OUR lot" around here does not exactly commit one to a Rolls-Royce! Suppose Our relations back Home had had the gumption to set up a murder-vehicle industry back when the goin’ was good and they could get those Alzheimer’s-challenged Old Euros proper to fund damn near anydamnthin’ Highburnian. Suppose further a low-end economy model called the "Pseltic Tiger" or thereabouts, a sort of Yugo on stilts. Like unto that is Cousin Howie, car-on-lotwise. IMHO.

Be that as it may, do not let yourself be suckered in by Howie’s "grinch with a heart of gold" _shtyk_. Strictly showbiz, *that* is. In all probability Cousin Howie really DOES has the heart of a grinch, even if he says so himself, and accordin’ly won’t let you anywhere near his pots of gold, no matter how few or many of ’em there may be. No matter how heart-rendin’ a tale of pills you tell when you turn up blockin’ his driveway.

There are lots of other driveways in Our Family, after all. Even if you exclude Our rich-out-of-sight relatives at Castle Scrooge an’ Château Warbucks an’ so on., the superfancy lace-curtain places where one can’t glimpse even a doorstep of the Stately McMansion itself from a public-sectorian highway, there are plenty of Family doorsteps to choose from.

BUT . . .

. . . but you really do oughta make reservations well in advance. Especially if your are, as I conjecture is the case, only an umpteenth cousin three times removed from the O’Doorstep in question. [6]

Happy days.

___
[1] A tad ungrammatical in English, maybe, but in the Gaelic, ’tis Eloquence Herself,. I assure you.


[2] (Goak here.) (( Two goaks, if the Time Style golden oldie still counts. ))


[3] Hath not siblin’-in-law Willie Sutton -- no relation to Willie HORTON,¡thank G*re! -- explained this point in full?


[4] Hammabîn yabîn," saith the Gael.

If, after thinkin’ about it a little, you decide that you do NOT know, please accept my profoundest apologies for supposin’ you so far down the Great Scale of Bein’ as to belong to OUR Family. "Policy begins at home" may or may not work with your own fôx: WE are, ¡O Wunnerful US!, outstandin’ly self-exceptional over all, but not necessarily exceptional on each an’ every single particular point.

Should you happen to have roots in Outer Kangarústán, you might apply to Tio Ruperto. When you do, please make sure to tell his firstlordship that McCloskey sent you. Then simply fill in the blank look his firstlordship gives you, an’ you will already be halfway through the Foxcuckooland freebie application process. ((( Third goak, shamelessly swiped )))


[5] The Family ought to get Aunt Jason to tell everybody who does her freegrace’s security arrangements. Short of a gated community that actually has some gates in place -- plus naturally locks an’ bars an’ moats an’ stormtroopers an’ rotweilers an’ all that good, but fearfully pricey, stuff -- Castle Sanseverino-Taxis up in L@@nchester-by-the-Sea is a model of modern self-preservation.

Howie’s Wellesley is nice enough to visit, but far too accessible by the Bad Poor to be deemed safe for when the Crunch comes.


[6] If overtaken out of the blue, probably almost any genuine Family doorstop will do. The average Kevin-an’-Mary-Finnegan chosen completely at random may be reluctant to take you in: after all, anybooby could *pretend* to be an O’Beese!

But once you remind them that at least they will enjoy your wake, why, in like Flynn will you be. (((( Goak fourth and final ))))

Logic "schlepped to Baghdad"!

Dear Dr. Bones,

I'm not sure if I understand your logic. If one opposed the invasion of Iraq, that did not make one a partisan for Iraq.

Ah, and who shall tell Mr. Poster of the Logicke of Hyperzion?

Well, let us take a stab at it. We can but bellyflop . . . .

The particular neologician poor Poster goes up against fails to fully to exemplify those intellectual/civilisational talents with which The Greatest Demographic is notoriously endowed to a unique degree, for there is here a distinct whiff (is there not?) of "You’re another!"[0]: the Freelord of Cantor may advise his favorite parcel of alien pols how to interfere at Washington City without drawin’ any legitimate flak BECAUSE somebody or another once upon a time "schlepped to Baghdad to show progressive fealty to S[addám] Hussein."

What kind of a BECAUSE is that, sir? I ask you!

I conjecture that Hasbara House distinguishes a number of different product lines, with this one well towards the downmarket end. Such inconsequent shlepware would (I guess) sell well enough at Pajama Junction [1] or Rio Limbaugh/Port Ste. Lucie, partly because the selfservative kiddies an’ neokiddies out there already hate everythin’ that their honourable and gallant Kiddiemasters label ‘progressive’. And partly because "You’re another!" is about the way your typical PJM/RL-PSL kiddie neoreasons for herself, should she ever attempt so disagreeable a task. [2]

Around TPMC, the presumption of witless hostility certainly fails, and I should be happy to believe that most café lizards can detect the inconsequence of Dr. Schleppes, not so clearly as to be able to mark up his paper with a red pencil as the Muses and you and I can do, perhaps, yet with a fairly strong instant conviction that his cheaper brands of neoärgument are unsuitable for consumption by decent political grown-ups.

Happy days.


___
[0] A.k.a. "Two wrongs don’t make a rite."


[1] Neocomrade R. L. Simon, Freelord and Kiddiemaster Padjaama in the peerage of Foxcuckooland, is celebratin’ PJM’s fifth anniversary today. Presumably they’ll be hittin’ what Jesuits used to call the "age of reason" (seven years, was it?) over there any day now. "And the sooner, the better," say I.


[2] This is no place to recapitulate Neocomradology 101, Dr. Bones. But you must remember our tentative hypothesis that havin’ hated School explains a lot about run-of-the-mill wingnutettes an’ wingnuts.

Now, what could be more like School -- and less like Fun! -- that gettin’ lectured/hectored about how the misbehaviour of Mr. George Galloway, M.P., can have no significant ethical -- or even much ‘logical’ -- connection with the neodoin’s of a Neukamerad Bundestagsgesandte Erich Iwan, Freeiherr und Kindermeister von Kantor?

And a true, redstate Kiddie Selfservative would be at least equally bored should her tormentor start spoofing her crew’s ever-immortal Balance ’an Fairness (®) product by pointing out that there is at least a little something to be said for the Foxcuckooland side of this question. As for instance, say a sayer were to say

Loyalty, like Logic, has always had a certain standing with the traditional moralists of Old Europe. Not usually so lofty a standing that it becomes the ethical ace of trumps and takes every trick no matter what other cards are presented (which seems to be what Von Kantor and Hasbara House and Team Zhabotínsky [would] have in mind [if they thought their own selfservicin’ stuff through], but definitely SOME standing. And some INDEPENDENT standing, as well, for a solidarity that has not gone to Lady Logic and "asked for permission to be solid," as it were, is nevertheless a legitimate moral factor, for most of the dead Old Euro males of moralism. Kant would not allow it, but most of the rest of the DOEMM pack would.

Though on the selfservative kiddies’ side (more or less), that tune can be counted on not to appeal to them, simply because of the way it is orchestrated and made to "sound like school."

To be sure, I have laid the Old School Sound on pretty thick to make my example.

Moreover, a few of the neocomradely señoritos are capable of noticin’ that I was not being one hundred percent straightforward in my exemplification, inasmuch as the Republican Party base an’ vile are not (I fear) really all that gung-ho for Loyalty.

When one relabels the Ethical Geometry textbook diagram for a pop quiz by calling loyalty ‘solidarity’, there has been, obviously, no change in substance. Nevertheless the flavor of the thing changes, especially for the Wingnut City or Wombschool Normal University palate. ‘Solidarity’ is for Union thugs -- everybooby knows that!

---

Speaking of pop quizzes, sir, here is one for you:

When Jewish Statists do ‘solidarity’ or ‘loyalty’, the proper name for what they are doin’ is _____________

If you can fill in *that* blank confidently (and with a common noun not starting in 'Z', please!), you are far ahead of me.

In any case, let me know what you think.

On Granting "special protection"

Dear Dr. Bones,

Sir, this morning your colleague Baker writes,

Insofar as Harshaw objects to ... questions being raised about Bowles and Simpson he is asking that they be granted special protection. That is a request that does not deserve to be treated seriously.

This looks to me like a failure to understand the rôle of the blue-ribbon commission in American demoplutocracy. "To think structurally, please, gentlepersons!"

If such an extraordinary assembly of the Daughters of Virtue and Sons of Wisdom LLC as that presided over by the Freelord of Simpson and Citizen Bowles does not possess "special protection" -- special IMMUNITY might be the better wording -- there is no sound reason for it to happen at all. Why, one might as well let Congress handle our legislative requirements! [1]

I cannot tell whether Comrade Dr. Baker would endorse that dotty plan, or whether he merely dislikes the Concord Coalition snake oil recommended by B. ’n’ S.

His own pet notions are so far removed from all respectable Wisdom and Virtue that even a vivid imaginer might be at a loss to imagine any means, however ir- or neo-regular, of obtaining them. Under those circumstances, it is understandable, but not ideally admirable, for him to say nothing about institutional end-runnin’ as such.

We, however, as disciples of The Master, can allow ourselves no such informal laxity. We must begin by declaring against all blue-ribbonism (and equally, all referendumbmongerin’) formaliter, no matter what the DVSW (LLC) or Cleon may be up to materialiter. When the substantive results we crave are unobtainable by the mechanisms which Mr. Madison and the Gang of Eighty-Seven proposed, and to which our civic ancestors agreed on our behalf, we ought to do without them. [2] Period.

As simpson as that, it is, really.[3]

Happy days (through affordable health care!)

___
[1] Perhaps not Congress utterly without extra- or superconstitutional run-arounds, though. That love for the plebescite or referendumb that flourishes in CA and MA and other dark corners of the realm is basically another scheme for getting irregular results via dubious processes. The matter of the irregularity is usually different, some folkish or neofolklike measure of which the DVSW (LLC) would gravely and ‘bipartisanly’ disapprove. Furthermore, referendumb groupies can count (usually) on nobody darin’ to be as disrespectful of THEMSELVES, THE PEOPLE as Comrade Dr. Baker is of E. B. Bowles and of his freelordship.

Nevertheless, it comes to much the same thing formally or structurally: a quest for irregular results via dubious processes. For "end runs," as the kiddies say about one of their kiddie games, I forget which.


[2] Or formally amend the mechanisms, of course. (But everybody knows how impossible that is!)


[3] Well maybe not quite. I am arguing, sir, that she who can swallow the whole camel of blue-ribbon-panel neoregularity is only being silly to object to so slender a straw as according a neoregular degree of respect and deference (naturally including utter noninvestigation by hirelings of the New York Times Company) to the Lords of the Ribbon.

As often, what is inadequate straight up would have been admirable if intended as spoof. If, that is, Comrade Dr. Baker had been trying to get rid of this quasi-institutional neoregularity (in all cases, not merely this one) by pointing out that superpartisan panels of DVSW (LLC) won’t work well unless everybody piously tugs our figurative forelocks to the likes of the Freelord of Simpson -- and even to the likes of E. B. Bowles, M.B.A., by golly! -- in a manner scarcely consistent with what used to be called "republican simplicity."

I can see no hint of that, however. Can you? Dr. Baker sounds to me like he is not kidding, and as to the man Harshaw, how many virtual peasants can show such a splendidly tuggable and well-tugged forelock nowadays?

(( Comrade Greenwald of Salon has written well on the modus operandi harshawensis and how it consists in always bein’ very solemn an’ upper-case-‘S’ Serious. Plus insinuatin’ relentlessly that if one disagrees, one ain’t Serious at all. ))

"Yes, boy, we KNOW the barn is empty."

Dear Dr. Bones,

I don’t believe you should award any points at all to your pupil, Master Joseph Conason, for noticing the Citizens United matter. Not NOW.

Had he hollered bloody murder immediately after the "Votes for Geckos" movement had their big win, he might pass for a minor reincarnation of Nostradamus, but what can be said for a lad who, six weeks after the horse was stolen, comes down the pike with "Hey, Mister, did you know your barn is empty?"

I heard very little hollering on V-G Day, and almost all of that little from Reptile House specialists whose concern with the cold-blooded critters an’ neocritters that hiss an’ rattle over at the CCUSA [http://j.mp/cwQAd5 before they "strike unseen" [1] is a full-time affair anyway.

If anybody wants to distribute praise and credit where it might conceivably do a little good for the future, I would suggest she pass over all the Joe Conasons of the world automatically and as a matter of resolved policy. Though it is possible for merit to emerge even from a Middlesex (Mass.) School of Journalism, Barber Science and Barbarian Studies, it would be silly to expect that most of what such a candidate will be really good at is anything more beautiful or useful than burbling bullshit. [2]

So, then, sir, I think you ought to ask Master Conason to worry about what comes next for a change. For example, the laddie might be required to consider

(A) Militancy an’ extremism bein’ what we know they are, where will "Votes for Geckos" end? Will V4G eventually turn out to mean that only geckos have votes that count for anythin’? [3]

(B) Even if the Daughters of Virtue and Sons of Wisdom (LLC) are never quite that successful, would they not like to be? Indeed, is not somethin’ not very far from (A) pretty much what General Firstlord Alexander of Hamiltonstein original-intented when he created political geckoanity as we know it down in the dungeon labóratory of Castello Federalista? His firstlordship’s famous "great beast" quotation is disputed, and may indeed be a hostile parody, yet what principle or neoprinciple is to keep merely organic voters in check, if not V4G? What other principle or neoprinciple CAN make us organisms keep our slimy pseudopods to ourselves -- an’ off our betters’ Sacred Capital Gains -- the way we obviously ought to?

And so forth, and so on -- there is lots of fun stuff to be said about V4G and, as it were, " The Birth of AstroTurf™-baggin’ from the Spirit of Wombscholarship " for anybody with a little bit of imagination backed up with even a half-expensively educated familiarity with the annals of our holy Homeland™.

Your Master Joseph is content to grumble about predictable (but Conason-unpredicted) tsunamis and naïve mistakes and cynical partisanship and indisputable idiocy and ... and ... and a’ that, all the way down through "sewer money ... advocated for decades," at which point he admittedly almost totters on the brink of substance, yet manages (whew!) to be saved by his bottom line before anything interesting comes of it.

So then, NO EXTRA POINTS.

Happy days.





[1] McSarcasm uses ‘unseen’ is the specialized sense of "whilst J. C. of S. Magazine was not watching."

The only redeeming feature of little Joe’s scribble, me judice, does not belong to Joe at all, but entirely to Party Neocomrade B. X. Smith, who quite sensibly points out that if you do not know what the CCUSA is all about -- has always been all about -- well, perhaps you had better get out of the kitchen so as not to interfere with the hired hands.

Notice how the Freelord an’ Kiddiemaster of Smith "gets away with it," sufferin’ nothin’ worse from the urching Conason than a little purely verbal abuse that is way off the mark to boot: one may hesitate to evaluate ‘breezy’ without a scrupulous examination of the MacL@@han-Tube original, but "characteristically misleading" is completely absurd on its face.

The freelordly an’ kiddiemagisterial view of Massa Tom Donohue’s crew is neither concealed nor fudged. The worst a hostile sayer can accurately say along those lines is that his freelordship did not bark in so many words, "Massa Tom and the CCUSA have EVERY RIGHT to hide behind rocks an’ bushes when they fire off their paymasters’ bucks shot at lieberals an’ demonocrats an’ Union thugs[http://j.mp/3NLwx1] ."

But it is so extremely obvious that such is what his freelordship thinks -- what any freedame, or kiddiemistress, or plain kiddie selfservative worth her salt, must think to remain incompliance with the AEIdeology an’ in communion with the First Chu..., with the Party, that is, of Big Management, that express statement is unnecessary.



[2] If Little Joe should happen to see these presents and feel he is being inadequately appreciated again, tell him to take a hard look at his trophy case and try to decide how many of those nice prize-giving ladies and gentlemen were thoroughly impervious to bullshit.

On the other hand, he does seem to know the word ‘cynical’. Can it be that he is a practitioner of the thing, and consciously plans to die with a trophy case to match that of St. George Orwell himself? As you recall, we once agreed that Mr. Eric Blair is the all-time champion at being thought an incomparable critic of human events on the basis of style -- and (pretty much) style alone. Presumably the first time around that track it was not the burbler’s fault that his noncomparers simply did not remember how to compare any longer. Now that the trick has been performed to perfection once, however, almost anybody with a degree in hair-cutting and grammar abuse (&c. &c.) can go for the gold! Maybe even with not much more in the way of ‘news’ than "Hey, Mister, your barn is still empty!"!!


[3] I write merrily, Dr. Bones, but would have you mark that there is room for some serious neocomradological research about inorganic-versus-organic voters. Cousin Bob (and many others) wrote up the Grant-to-Hoover phase of inorganic-electorate AEIdeology well enough, but I take for granted that our now Destructive Creationists will not be satisfied to rehearse the pre-neo Catechism Accordin’ to Mark Hanna, but are bound to have an irresistable itch to be neoöriginal. With ninety-odd percent of ’em on the payroll of Foxcuckooland in the narrower sense (it sure looks like), not much of lastin’ neovalue is likely to emerge. The built-in ethos of the MacL@@han Tube would see to that, I believe, even without any assistance from P&I wombschoolin’ an’ Niederdümmung. But I betcha there will be lots an’ lots of neoïdiocies to ridicule.

Meanwhile, it is just possible that a few really toney nuevoseñoritos -- maybe even the Leostraussian neogentry! -- will condescend to think about how to improve on the inorganic electoralism of Palæocomrade Senator M. A. Hanna. Last time around, once Field, J., and his gang had given the Robber Freelords what they wanted in practice, there seems to have been no theoretical development of any importance other than perhaps what one may call "The Social Darwinist Rag."

(( One must say ‘perhaps’ here, because the interest taken by a proto-Yaleodramatist like Palæocomrade Prof. Dr. W. G. Sumner in St. Charles of the Monkeyhouse was very superficial. Had it been otherwise, a collision with the residual Christojudæanity of the holy Homeland™, a vastly more potent factor in A. D. 1890 than anything mythological in 1431/2010/5771, must have eventuated.

(( Furthermore, unless I misremember, most of the pre-Hardin’ thinkers who proposed that the secret-sector business corporation might conceivably be an ‘evolutionary’ advance over free-form Scrooges an’ Rothschilds an’ Goulds an’ Vanderbilts an’ whatnot were in fact enemies of demoplutocracy, being so zealous in their (para-)Darwinism that they proposed, as it were, to skip a step and move on straight to the NATIONALIZED business corporation -- which was plainly not a decent an’ yaleodramatic Field-Carnéigie-Hanna-Sumner product at all. ))

¡N. D. Kristof Discovers Whole New World!

Dear Dr. Bones,

The last (?) and least (in some ways) of Aunt Nitsy’s sad op-ed sack of idiot nephews and nieces has quite unaccountably discovered America:

There are many other elements in play, but put these big ones together and what do you get, on a comparative basis? The Democrats worsen the deficits by a net of about $640 billion, while Republicans worsen them by some $1.1 trillion — almost twice as much. (...) I grant that estimates about jobs and revenue are uncertain. But they are not meaningless, and the strong implication is that Republican rule would lead to the Trifecta of Torment: higher unemployment, worse deficits and greater inequity.

Nothing new here for the Muses or you or me, sir, nor for any decent political adult, unless one absurdly promotes it to the rank of News that Mr. Kristof suddenly wants to join the club.

He’s a little shy about it, though. He seems dreadfully afraid that somebody who was struck the Two Nations Unequal question all along is going to bark at him rudely, "So where have you been all these years, little laddie?" Of course you and I would never do that. Quite apart from good manners, we already know exactly where Master Nicholas has been, call it "Outer Dárfúrestán."

What makes his account of finally seeing the Great Whight Light so unaccountable is that he relentlessly pretends to have been somewhere else altogether. He claims to have been watching the holy Homeland™ all along, not gadding about in other people’s souks ten thousand kilometres away from Wall Street, to say nothing of Main Street. The trouble, says he, is that he has up to this morning been watching US from a klassenkampflos perspective that he has now discovered to be inadequate:

We journalists (sic) tend to cover politics the way we cover sports: "Republicans are gaining yardage on their immigration play! ... The Tea Party is stealing second base! ... A bench-clearing brawl over health care! ... Look at the politicians and pundits mud-wrestle!

That is how he begins today’s scribble, apparently hoping to achieve a preëmptive strike on the "Where have you been?" front.

What a prodigy of self-ignorance is N. D. Kristof! There certainly exist paid scribblers who cover figurative and literal horse races, but NDK is not one of them. He does not, or did not, do donkey-versus-elephant any more than he does/did Redsox-v.-Yankees. What he did do was Outer Dárfúrestán. Only O.D. and nothing more. And that small percentage of Homeland™ers who recognize the laddie’s name when they hear it are bound to be aware that he does not at all belong to them journalists who tend to cover politics the way they cover (other) kiddie games.

In short, if you know who Master Nicholas is, you can’t believe a word of his alibi. And if you don’t know, I betcha you’re not going to start caring who he is or what he is up to as from Thursday, 7 September 1431/2010/5771. [1]

Why on G*re’s green earth should you? Apart from the autobiographical fudge and flumnnnery, this piece is a perfectly respectable statement of the eternal case for us jackasses and against America’s Otherparty. Perfectly respectable, but not at all exceptional either in its analysis or in its invective.

***

Nevertheless, there is one extreme singularity lurking inside it, one that has no direct connection with politics, adult or horse-race. Allow me to point it out:

. . . as Andrew Romano, a senior writer for Newsweek, noted in an excellent blog post THAT HELPED INSPIRE THIS COLUMN, the Republicans propose other actions that worsen the fiscal situation even more. For starters, the Republicans favor almost $700 billion in extended tax cuts for the most affluent Americans. The Democratic leadership opposes them.

Almost any hired scrivener would stand out if she had made that public confession of self-nonreliance, but coming from a Timesster it takes the breath away. Try to imagine Little Tommy Wobble with the big moustache ever admitting that certain of his ... (ahem) ... ‘inspirations’ were not altogether 100.00% indigenous and autochthonous! Even though it is plain that most Friedmann performances come straight from somebody with whom the hack ate lunch the other day, conveyed to us "untouched by human thought," as it were.

It does not matter for my purpose here whether Mr. Romano’s piece is really as ‘excellent’ as Master Nicholas makes out. It may matter a little, though, that it should be about a month old, dated "August 27, 2010."

I am also inclined to subtract a few points from Krystof’s score for that quotation from Comrade Buffett, which, though very striking, has already floated past down the stream of discourse rather too many times.

On the other hand, perhaps it was brand new in Outer Dárfúrestán last month when Kristof first saw it? Perhaps.

And I wish you, sir,
Happy days through affordable healthcare.


___
[1] You might join me, sir, in poking around in the e-gutters of the Vast Whight-Wing Conspiracy during the next few days to see if many, or any, of the selfservative kiddies or, more likely, their Freelords an’ Kiddiemasters, detectably notice that Comrade Krystof is home on leave and has decided to come out against the VWhWC. I am inclined to guess that if they see the piece at all, they’ll ignore the by-line and assume it is only another dose of Krugman.

Who Speaks for H*rv*rd?

Dear Dr. Bones,

Even when alma mommy does not happen to be involved, the particular sloppiness that Mr. Rosenberg here exhibits, with the same sloppiness exhibuted far worse by the Herr von Mondoweiss whom he quotes, makes me wonder if we donkeys are really any better than Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh.

WC and RL bark a dozen times a week, it seems, that "The New York Times thinks" or "says" so-and-so. All but invariably, it turns out that they are not referring to an unsigned corporate editorial, but to an opinion piece or news story with author’s or authors’ name plainly attached. Maybe everybody in the NYTC boardroom in fact agreed with Sam Scribbler, but a Dr. R. H. Limbaugh or a Governess S. L. Heath-Paling -- or indeed, anybody else -- can only guess at such unanimity.[1] [2]

Even with The Wall Street Jingo, which is about as ideologically gleichgeschaltet an organ of agitprop as a hoper could hope to find, one really ought not say "The WSJ says" about some slice of factious tripe and baloney signed by Karl, Firstlord Rove, or by Party Neocomrade Prof. Dr. Fu’ád al-‘Ajamí of the Johns Hopkins Univesity, or by Miss Piggy Noonan formerly of the Reagan Demoncrats -- by whoever the wingnutette/wingnut du jour may chance to be.

"Every tub on its own bottom" used to be a H*rv*rd apophthegm. A genuinely corporate-H*rv*rd apophthegm, a plan that all the Vice-Presidents of Holyoke Centre had intelligently designed and then deliberately put into practice. ETOIOB was about fiscal responsibility, as I recall, but it seems to me to apply to op-ed responsibilty. I don’t say one may NEVER attribute Sam’s scribbling to some larger class of "people like Sam," but one should not do it often. Above all, one should never do so casually or witlessly, meaning: without discussing and defending the supposed likeness at least briefly.

The proposed rule does not apply to flat-out spoofery: "All’s fair in Love and Foxcuckooland." But Messrs. Rosenberg and Mondoweiss are not, in general, foxcuckoos, nor do they appear to be anything less than completely serious on this particular occasion, and so I fear we must subtract a few points from their score.


*** THIS JUST IN! ***

I sent out the pet google to dig around a little, and it looks as if the principal basis of the pathological "H*rv*rd says" is located at The Daily Beast, as follows:

[T]he university sent the following statement to The Daily Beast: “As an institution of research and teaching, we are dedicated to the proposition that all people, regardless of color or creed, deserve equal opportunities, equal respect, and equal protection under the law. The recent assertions by Dr. Peretz are therefore distressing to many members of our community, and understandably so. “It is central to the mission of a university to protect and affirm free speech, including the rights of Dr. Peretz, as well as those who disagree with him, to express their views. “We are ultimately stronger as a university when we maintain our commitment to the most basic freedoms that enable the robust exchange of ideas. The undergraduate research fund donated by friends, former students, and colleagues of Dr. Peretz was established earlier this year to recognize his teaching and scholarship as well as his stewardship of the social studies program from its inception in the 1960s through the 1990s. The fund will enable undergraduates to undertake significant research experiences as part of the social sciences curriculum and strengthen our commitment to rigorous intellectual inquiry. ”

Presumably at least one beastly must know exactly with whom she was in contact when she was talking to "the university." Many, many points must be subtracted for not sharing that information with her publication’s victims/patients/customers/freeloaders. [4]

And I wish you, sir, as ever,
Happy days through affordable healthcare



___
[1] One time in 14,309, Sam Scribbler may have actually written "And furthermore, everybody here at the NYTC Twistatorial Bureau agrees with me." I’ll spot the kiddies that one.

Similarly, on one outin’ in 133,265, Limbaughs an’ Heath-Palings an’ such may be allowed to discuss the general ethos of the New York Times Company and drag in some formally unaffiliated sad Sam merely because his handiwork crops up on the NYTC op-ed page so frequently that the real perps can safely be assumed to approve of his views. That special exception is not quite as reliable as the other, but one would not want to spoil ALL the kiddies’ fun, now, would one?


[2] On proofreading, I find that this paragraph might be taken to have been pointing out that there exist (scattered individual) persons of H*rv*rd who zealously agree with M. le baron de Pèretz. Though that is not what I original-intented, yet ’tis nothing to apologize for on the factual side. Such neogentry are undeniably out there, and out there in considerable numbers.

The student of neocomradology used to be able to find ’em flockin’ together (to a certain extent) ar a webspa delightfully called ¡MESH!, the acronym having no doubt been carefully chosen to put one in mind of the application of barrier technology to problems of Native Management.

The formal expansion is "Middle East Strategy at H*rv*rd," which would be pretty bad even without any visions of razor wire, no?

(( Dr. Bones: please make sure to download the whole treasure trove , would you? ))

Having done so myself, I find that the good Herr [¿Prof.?] Dok. Martin von Peretsch is never so much as mentioned, implying there may be something to that business about "He didn’t go to H*rv*rd and he was never more than a TA there."

At the moment, we are not concerned with Master Marty’s exact credentialization, however, but with TNYTS, the "The-New-York-Times-Says Syndrome." Plainly it would be less outrageous to attribute the neoëxuberances of the Baní MESH to H*rv*rd pure and simple than to encourage the Peretzian neo-ego by pretending that it can be the Solo Voice of University Hall. There are a lot of Meshites, to begin with, and then, most of them DO possess scholarly qualifications, more or less.

Worse still, that monnicker that the PowerPointers of Cambridge Street picked for themselves and the URL really does rather tend to give the impression that they somehow speak for a broader institution, maybe the Law School, maybe the whole shebang.

Bein’ real smart cookies, they’d deny in a flash that they meant anythin’ of that kind, should anybody equally smart cookiewise ever raise the point. Yet I put it to you, sir, that the Little Friends of Marty Kramer would not at all mind if lesser breeds without were to infer that anybody in the immediate vicinity of 1737 who significantly disagrees with MESH about ‘strategy’ must be some kind of isolated oddball: "Wink, wink, nod, nod."

Nevertheless, MESH sure as Hell ain’t H*rv*rd simpliciter.


[4] Probably the passage is authentic, in the sense of having emanated from Holyoke Centre, possibly even from University Hall. It has an echt 02138 ring to it, nicht wahr?

That much provenance, however, does not even begin to eliminate the "Says who?" issue. Not as far as I am concerned. Let me know what you think, sir.

Charity Begins at Krugman's Corners

Dear Dr. Bones,

Aunt Nitsy’s least godawful surviving opeddist has distinguishes two classes of SSS -- "smashers of Social Security" --- gentry and neogentry as follows:

What’s really going on here? [SSS-A] Conservatives hate Social Security for ideological reasons: its success undermines their claim that government is always the problem, never the solution. But they receive crucial support from [SSS-B] Washington insiders, for whom a declared willingness to cut Social Security has long served as a badge of fiscal seriousness, never mind the arithmetic.

Any analyst who comes up with so grossly asymmetrical a Manichee system as ‘conservatives’ versus ‘insiders’ ought to know enough to go back and check her work without being told. Or at least she might try out the obvious flip-side a little, call it "L*b*r*ls versus Outsiders."

One need not try anything, actually, one need only formulate the thing to be tried, to put oneself in a position to suspect that Prof. Krugman may be a closet wingnut: (you bleedin’-heart) Lieberals v. (us wunnerful self-announcin’) Outsiders is, in itself, tiresome old bilge and Party cries comin’ across the oilslick waters from way off to starboard. The core Party of Grant and Hoover (and Goldwater ’n’ Atwater ’n’ ______) has never for a nanosecond consisted of "Washington outsiders." Long before the POG proper existed, Mr. Cash’s "tariff gang" had already put in decades lobbyin’ at Washington’ City for special favors and extraordinary self-servicin’s from their Uncle Sam.

Elephants and Bourbons really do seem pretty near incapable of learnin’ new tricks, though not of hirin’ themselves a few clever and smirkish young señoritos who can. Though to be sure, the Wreckin’ Crew callin’ themselves ‘outsiders’ chiefly because they have always left what America’s party would call ‘politics’ to third- and fourth-rate comrades an’ neocomrades, who presumably can’t cut it out there in Lord Mammon’s Market, was already an ancient Big Shtyk by the time Freelords Rockefeller Major and J. P. Morgan got around to playin’ it far back in the Ulyssean Epoch of kiddie selfservatism.

If Prof. Krugman truly permits the Party of militant extremists slip that "Barefoot Boy from Wall Street" song an’ dance about what "Washington outsiders" they all are past him, better he should confine himself to wonkery altogether and leave politics to decent political grown-ups.

However PK may have stuck in the word ‘Washington’ by inadvertence, and mostly mean that GOP Geniuses are outsiders at the Faculty Club of the best university in Mercer County NJ. That is, I daresay, true enough. [1]

But I set out to recommend Prof. Krugman’s chairity to you, sir, not meaning by that his taking Wingnut City and Hooverville at their own word about outsider status. More to my original-intented point is when he says that wingnutettes and wingnuts "hate Social Security for ideological reasons." Expressio unius est exclusio alterius: to specify that the selfservicers’ hatred is ‘ideological’ in character lets them off the hook about all their cruder pocketbook (and whight-supremacist) reasons for hatin’.

Unless he has just fallen victim to the vulgar habit of labeling other folks’ silly stances ‘ideological’ when all one really means is "sincerely held" or the like. I myself preach continually that one must almost always assume that political opinions are subjectively sincere, but that presumption has nothing to do with ideology, a product that America’s Otherparty can scarcely be accused of possessin’ since they had to stop callin’ themselves Federalists. Wingnuts love wingnuts; that is, we are Wunnerful US is a brain disease, not ‘ideology’ in any intelligible sense.




___
[1] Note, though, that even if the patient ‘only’ meant that, he exhibits dangerous symptoms of omphaloscopy, nobody’s Faculty Club being the luminous orb about which the former Real World in fact revolves.

Only TWO right wings, milord?

. . . Social conservatives and libertarians, the two wings of the American right . . . .

Presumably this Party-and-Ideology señorito does not want anybody else to count beyond two, though it is very difficult to believe that he does not know better than that himself.

Maybe he regards the rest of the Party of Big Management and the Kiddie Selfservative Movement as nonwinglike in nature? That would make more sense: the "malefactors of great wealth" in particular, Don Rossito’s Daddy Warbucks, and his Uncle Scrooge, and his Uncle Rupert (&c. &c.) are not mere pinions, they are the heart and soul and brain (?) of Yank reaction. And, apart from a few short and unimpressive intervals, they have always been firmly in charge of the Party of Grant and Hoover.

The idea that their traditional Ascendancy is threatened at present by an uppity crew of AstroTurf™ amateurs is very exaggerated, the sort of thing that journalism school alumnuses are predestined suckers for. [1]

Happy days.

___
[1] Don Rossito lives far enough above the fray, evidently, not to be aware that ‘libertarian’ is a trademark of Planet Dilbert, not properly to be used to refer to run-of-the-mill victins or patients of AstroTurf™ Therapy. These latter are good folks, perhaps, but singularly lackin’ in that steel-claptrapmindedness that marks off true Rand-Nozick groupies from more normal people.

Perhaps the culture-bound señorito considers that all those publicists at Wingnut City tanks of thought who preach Finanzkapitalismus as a revealed religion are ‘libertarians’ as well. That neocrew he cannot fail to have actually run into personally, however, which makes it likely that he is hushing up who and what his ideobuddies are rather than in ignorance of it, as he may well be with Dilbertarians proper. Can Don Rossito de Daúthat really not have noticed that what his factional daddies and uncles and cousins and brothers-in-law actually do in the path of Big Management often bears very little resemblace to the dogmas of the AEIdeology?

Were he a little better informed, or a little less given to secret-sector secrecies, he might have sided with the Family against mere hired-hands: I believe freelords Murdoch and Scrooge and Warbucks never had a good word to say about "cap and trade," whereas it is well known that many of their lackies and runnin’ dogs "were for it before they were against it."

But Mammon knows best.

" ...future historians will inevitably...."

Dear Dr. Bones,

... future historians will inevitably wonder ... Will future historians NOT wonder how a democratic state--any democratic state--should presume to [whatever]? ... future historians will have better things to do than wonder about the narcissism of people ....

Speaking of ‘narcissism,’ here's a rather extreme example of the way publicists and tertiary-educationalisers take for granted that the court annalists to Princess Posterity will not -- ¡can not possibly! -- disagree significantly with themselves. What could be more patently silly and selfocentric than to be cocksure like this about any ‘future’ more than (say) fifteen minutes off? [1]

I guess it is a sort of virtual power grab: Rear-Colonel Armchair over at the Commissariat for the New American Innovation invokes a vast host of little imaginary friends from A. R. 1946/2510/6270 to redress all perceived fairness-and-balance problems of 1431/2010/5770.

Oh, well, Qui pauca considerat, facile pronunciat.! Life is far too short to waste any moments noticing that one would have to ransack the year 0916/1510/5270 to find much trace of proleptic agreement with Newhousism and Avishaianity.[2]

Happy days.


___
[1] Let the Rev. Sidney Smith say it: "4th--short views of human life--not further than dinner or tea.


[2] I betcha zealot Avishaians and pious Newhousites have no use at all for the one literary genre where the notion that die Zukunft might actually turn out to be ganz anders is frequently recurred to: science fiction, so-called, even though Nat. Sci. proper has usually very little to do with the product.

(( Less unseriously, one might name this trendy brain disease in honor of the late Carl Becker, who unearthed and emphasized M. Diderot’s little zinger, La postérité pour le philosophe, c'est l'autre monde de l'homme religieux.

(( But Condorcet knows best. ))

Crater the Less

Dear Dr. Bones,

Wouldn’t it be fun if Neocomrade J. X. Crater here happened to be President Jimmy's idiot neonephew?

Nepotism is probably lacking, but neoïdiocy abounds. Today’s little neoladdie seems genuinely to expect that if somebody will only repeat the Executive Summary of Chicagonomics for Dhimmies to us economic heathens slowly and emphatically enough, why, naturally we must see The Neolight at once.

One must lead a very sheltered life to believe that sort of baloney, a well-wombschooled life, a life full of "cognitive hiatus" every way one looks. The kiddies can have their Neocomrade Rear-Colonel V. D. H. Blimp explain to them why Crater Minor lives the life of an "idiot" in Greek -- not gettin’ out of Foxcuckooland half enough is the crux of it.

This is the sort of blinkered factious scribble that leads many to wonder whether mammonology can be a science at all: will not Crater Minor keep on floggin’ the same ol’ cocktail-napkin neowares regardless of market response?

But not so quick. Perhaps the señorito is a devotee of Neocomrade Karl, Freelord Rove? Perhaps it supposes the former so-called "real world" to have been abolished [1]. in that case, I guess we must say we have to do with a fancy neoïdeologue rather than a plain vanilla neoïdiot. In that event, from the patient's or victim’s perspective there would be no ‘blinkers’ -- what a Crater Minor declines to acknowledge as real eo ipso ain’t real.

Dr. Krugman suffers from a mild case of the Craterian brain disease, but "with colours reversed" as the chess groupies say. This morning he solemnly and emphatically repeats from the Catechism of us lieberal fiends and demonocrats passages including this one,

Ronald Reagan said that his tax cuts would reduce deficits, then presided over a near-tripling of federal debt. When Bill Clinton raised taxes on top incomes, conservatives predicted economic disaster; what actually followed was an economic boom and a remarkable swing from budget deficit to surplus. Then the Bush tax cuts came along, helping turn that surplus into a persistent deficit, even before the crash. But we’re talking about voodoo economics here . . . .

Bein’ naturally [2] less IQ-challenged than a kiddie selfservative, Krugman detects the fragrance of voodoo in the air, but he does not in fact take the whiff very seriously. He scribbles as if he expected that little history lesson more or less settles the greedies’ neohash once and for all. Fat chance of that!


***

Perhaps the neospecimen at hand is a crank as well as a sorcerer? It fantasizes (right above its bottom line) that "Using dynamic economic analysis would prove the critics wrong."

Would you happen to know, sir, whether there is a brand-name ideoproduct available in the bazaars of Rio Limbaugh and Hooverville that is labeled "Dynamic Economic Analysis"? It might be fun to pick up a jug or two, even if it proves no better than that Bolshevik snake oil about how formal logic sadly neglects Dialectic™ and thus arrives at all sorts of uncongenial results that are just dumb mistakes, really.

If Crater Minor is playin’ that sort of neogame, I suppose it falls about halfway between Wally Wombschool and Cindy from Wasilla on the naïve end and Kiddiemaster Rove on the slick end of the Great Scale of Wingnuts. The señorito would not simply fail to see certain uncongenialities because it lives in a womb with its Uncle Rupert and wears blinkers, but neither would it possess his freelordship's sublime self-neocomfidence about damnin’ other people's torpedoes. Presented with detestable whinings like Krugman's, it would neither simply fail to hear the objections with Master Wally and Mizz Cindy, nor dismiss them out of hand as incapable of threatenin’ so august a neoracket as the Rovan Empire. It would have to muster up its DEA neoärtillery and actually do some semiserious shootin’ at poor Rear-Col. Krugman’s retrograde static views.

I doubt anybody would actually learn much from watching such a show, but it might do for a Silly Season entertainment.

And I wish you, sir, as ever,
Happy days through affordable healthcare.



___
[1] ''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.''


[2] I have a proof that narcissism and selfocentricity are at bottom strictly intellectual failures, but unfortunately the e-margin is too narrow to contain it.

Dr. Krugman Visits the Dumbdumbs

[F]lirting with crisis is arguably part of the [militant extremist G.O.P.] plan. There has always been a sense in which voodoo economics was a cover story for the real doctrine, which was “starve the beast”: slash revenue with tax cuts, then demand spending cuts to close the resulting budget gap. The point is that starve the beast basically amounts to deliberately creating a fiscal crisis, in the belief that the crisis can be used to push through unpopular policies, like dismantling Social Security.

Dear Dr. Bones,

Has your colleague Krugman ever met a real, live Republicaniac? Or even read their Party-an’-Ideology agitprop with the same level of attention he would grant some technical paper on a fine point of academic mammonology?

I cannot tell from that paragraraph, or from the whole scribble, whether P.K. supposes that there ever existed a Plan VooDoo, let alone whether he supposes the VooDoo Plansters are carryin’ on with their VD even as we speak.

Obviously (to normal persons, but not to Krugman) if VD was a "cover story," than the genuine Grand Old Plan must have been something else, something daylight-shy that one would have to rip the VD camouflage off in order to detect and deplore. He does think the G.O.P. geniuses are still hidin’ their ¡Smash Social Security! [1] attitudes, which is inaccurate only insofar as there has long ceased to be any serious attempt at concealment.







_____
[1] Like PK, I single out State pensions as especially obnoxious to the slashin’ and smashin’ gentry. Presumably he, like me, understands that what lurks under the Party-an’-Ideology cover story is far broader than that, that the militant extremists really mean somethin’ more like ¡Abajo los entitulamentos! ¡Que comen el pastel!

(( Not altogether relevant, but definitely of interest is that there seems to be no established term in Undocumentol corresponding to ‘entitlement(s)’. I expected that *entitulomento(s) or something close would be all over the place, but not so. The Portugals do have entitulamientos, but not so many of them that they use the word often.

(( The G@@GLE Gibberish Machine cranks out simply derechos, which obviously will not do at all: Uncle Scrooge and Daddy Warbucks certainly think creditors have a derecho to be repaid, they’d die at the barricades spreadsheet in hand for that proposition. Nevertheless, although one may say idiomatically in Greater Texan "Freelord Shylock is entitled to payment in full as originally covenanted for," should we start calling every secret-sector indebtedness "an entitlement" on the lender's side, what we really mean by the E-word would disappear in a vast cloud of irrelevant chaff. ))

The Moynihan Neolegacy

Oh dear.

I had thought Dr. Baker and I agree about the ¡Smash Social Security! gentry and neogentry, but that was before I saw

"The article also implies that it WOULD be reasonable to cut Social Security benefits to finance other parts of the government. This WOULD mean describing the payroll tax as a "Social Security" tax even though the money was being used to finance the war in Afghanistan or other expenditures. It is unlikely that this WOULD be a popular position."

Three ‘woulds’ in a row there, you see, and only the last of them warrantable by my prior understanding of the situation. The first two are to be classified firmly under "have already." Guided, I presume, by the late, and fathomlessly cynical, Neocomrade Senator D. P. Moynihan, our Betters have already taken their loot and disbursed it on "other expenditures." Now that pensions cost more yearly than they bring in, naturally the Betters desire to terminate that racket and replace it with a different one. Any arrangement that has the Great and Good financin’ the Bad Poor -- rather than vice-versâ, as decency demands and all history illustrates -- is not merely unreasonable, it is "irrationality on stilts," as Mr. Bentham might say.

Pretendin’ to do something of the Robin Hood sort -- or more exactly, pretendin’ that one will do it thirty years down the pike was delightfully Moynihanesque, but to assume that the Guide of All Possessive Humanity intended the Sherrif of Nottingham and his golf buddies to be out of pocket for even a single day underestimates the neocleverness of guidance seriously. ’Tis a great pity that we can never know exactly how Dan Paddy himself proposed to handle the inevitable peripateia.

The beneficiaries of Guidance are doin’ remarkably well, it seems to me, although of course it is still very early days, smashwise. Just to get those misleading ‘would’s out of a malignant lefty and paupersymp like Dean Baker is a triumph in itself. Moreover, that third ‘would’ is correct enough: hardly anybody on the ‘popular’ team sees through the DPM flimflam yet. Naturally I keep hoping that (1) some effective rabblerouser will point out that ‘our’ old-age money has already been misappropriated, whereupon (2) We, the Rabble of the United States of America, will arise as one man . . . &c. &c. A dream fit for the Silly Season, no doubt.

In previous articles, Dr. Baker has needled the Moynihanophile Classes a little bit about about placin’ their Uncle Sam in a ("merely technical") status of default. This is great fun for everybody educated expensively enough to have learned about their Gen. Hamilton’s rigid notions of the creditor’s obligation. Nowadays, though, most of the Betters get their history from Master Glenn Beck or thereabouts, and it is pointless to pick on Betters for not livin’ up to an antique Federalist rectitude of which they will scarcely even have heard.

In 2010, who can more realistically be taken as the very model of a modern Fiscal Selfservative than Neocomrade P. G. Peterson, Freelord Concord? And it just happens that His Responsibility was quoted in the McClatchy piece, as follows:

This week the International Monetary Fund urged the U.S. to cut future Social Security benefits, among other painful steps that it said were necessary to avoid unsustainable debt and an increased risk of global economic instability. "If we could address Social Security reform," said Peter Peterson, the founder and chairman of a foundation that works for federal debt reduction, "it would provide a much-needed confidence builder with our valued foreign lenders ... so they don't lose faith that we can manage our own fiscal affairs."

I don’t think Dan Paddy would have taken quite that line. His own neotericities in the foreign-policy line tended, as I recall, to insist that it is for the lesser breeds without to win confidence from Wunnerful US, exactly the opposite of his freelordship’s approach.

On the other hand, Mr. Moynihan must approve from the warm downbelow of the Petersonian jive: his freelordship almost says (does he not?) in so many words that a mere verbal promise or outward show of "Social Security reform" will reassure the heathen with too much money on their hands than Sam will default on mere domestic obligations first before expecting them to take any haircuts.[1]

Happy days.


___
[1] It enhances the general moynihanicity of the performance that Freelord Concord is almost certainly worried most about Fedguv obligations to neofolks like himself located much closer to home than Cathay.

Also fun to notice is his freelordship’s solemn insinuation that the Voice of the I.M.F. is the voice of the whole human race, admonishing wayward Sam from the outside. In fact, the Voice comes straight out of pretty much the same pseudo- / para- / quasi-academic Tanks of Thought that Mr. Lightman had recourse to in quest of quotations. Maybe your occasional Gnome of Zürich gets a word in edgewise occasionally, but for practical purposes it is all Yanks all the time at the ‘International’ Monetary Fund. (Is it not?)

In the long run, the Betters at Beijing may not much care for being made to play Charlie McCarthy to his freelordship’s Edgar Bergen like this.

Obviously I am no economist, so let me ask Dr. Baker to assess the possibility that the Chinese might also like the idea of lots of elderly barbarians buying their manufactures with (unreformed) SS checks.

But Ricardo knows best.

"... a seismic shift in the political preferences of ..."

Dear Dr. Bones,

As you may have heard elsewhere, there is a classy struggle goin’ on about exactly who is to big-manage the Party of Big Management.

The trouble with those elsewhere accounts, I fear, is that few GOP/AEI kiddiemasters or Christokorean guruetttes or Castle Podhóretz neogentry start themselves with an accurate notion of how "their own Party" has traditionally misbehaved itself.

Despite Rupert, Firstlord Murdoch and Kiddiemaster Foxcuckoo in the peerage of Wingnut City, bein’ in person an admirable example of the true principle, his freelordship’s own wage slaves--not even to mention the ultimate patients / victims / ‘customers’ (big-managees) of News Corporation[1] --are unwillin’ to admit that the racket in question is far more about Big Management than about anythin’ else in particular. America’s Otherparty (like the associated AEIdeology), for which they gush forth endless effusions of keystrokes, belongs far more to Freelord Rupert than to the small people, "cloth-coat Republicanians" an’ so on an’ so forth. Honest jackals in attendance on their freelordly betters, as it were.

The jackals are ‘honest’ by my standards, at least, though I recognize that you have always thought I let political troublemakers off the hook about plain lying and fancy ‘cynicism’. Today’s neospecimen does my position no harm. Who can seriously suppose that a Neocomrade (Seventh Class) S. X. Deace is bright enough to rehearse specific lies that it has has not talked its own neoself into at least sorta believin’ first? And the idea that an NC7 SXD mechanism could adhere to American-Otherpartisan or AEIdeological views all across the board entirely because it has decided that such is the best way to butter its own bread? That agreeable fantasy is straight out of Lookin’-Glass Land To suggest such a dotty scenario strikes me as only an especially displeasing way to make fun of intellectual and ethical cripples.[2]

Jackal Deace is far from able-minded. Who but a clown or a cripple would meak out that "civil war" and "a tale of two paradigms" are completely different notions. [3] Still, most of the guruettes and gurus of the Kiddie Selfservative Movement do undoubtedly talk like that of late. As if, that is, becomin’ a wholly-owned subsidiary of the AstroTurf™baggin’ classes would radically change the nature of the Party of Grant and Hoover an’ Goldwater ’n’ Atwater. Also as if such a further self-degradation by Big Party Managers were a highly probable event, like it or not.

It (our figurative jackdaw or jackal) likes ‘seismic’ and ‘lavish’ as well as ‘paradigm’, notice:

... a seismic shift in the political preferences of the Republican base as the GOP has squandered the power voters lavished upon it over the past decade....

The evidence of thesauroma [4] is plain on the rhetorical or agitprop front, unlike the alleged ‘shift’, which I appear to have slept through without noticing.

The self-servicin’ kiddies have, to be sure, shifted a little away from cowerin’ under their potatoe couches in terror for their (?) airliners and skyscrapers, but that cannot be what NC7 SXD means: George XLIII was installed by extraördinary judicial mechanism well before the Big Bang, after all.

Master Jackdaw does seems to wish that the base an’ vile of its Party had remained more vigilant against the Islamophalangitarian Menace (Pat. Pend.) than they actually have. And indeed, if the Granto-Hooverites were ever to decide that aggression and invasionism overseas are henceforth to be their core and pith and crux and gist and general neoëssence, why, that factional self-degradation and act of Destructive Creationism would merit some stronger term than ‘shift’. Students of neocomradology would require somethin’ with a whole lotta syllables, like maybe ‘transmogrification’.

Yet since even the NC7 SXD mechanism does not think it is actually happenin’, I believe I will spare you my fun pscenario of how Kiddie Selfservatism en Amérique might actually go that route someday until it is really called for.

Meanwhile, one might adequately explain this Silly Season scribble by considering what is antecedently likely to eventuate when the eye of the jackdaw is combined with the mind of the cripple. All that gets ‘shifted’ is the neomechanism’s attention. On Monday an’ Wednesday an’ Friday, it is struck by one part of the Anatomy of the Elephant, on Tuesdays and Neosabbaths, by another, an’ on Thursdays and Palæosabbaths, by yet a third. Of course the whole triune beastliness of Party and Ideology is present every day of the week. There is no question of anythin’ actually changin’ here, only of the beastliness in question not bein’ perfectly homogeneous.

If that is not adequate--and I think, now that I have written it down, that perhaps it is not--you may fortify it with the consideration that an other-ranks whiner from the Party Base an’ Vile like Neocomrade S. X. Dease is vaguely pretendin’ to advice its Betters, the big-managerial G.O.P. Geniuses, what to do next. Unfortunately, it has no proper conception of the significance of bein’ a hack pol for America’s Otherparty. Master jackdaw shows no sign of understandin’ that its Daddy Warbucks and its Uncle Scrooge and, literaliter, its Tio Ruperto are the true G.O.P. geniuses, that the likes of Freiherr Johann von Böhner and Freiherr Erik von Kantor and Freelord McConnell (&c. &c.) are comparatively unimportant.

If that crew were REALLY smart cookies and neocookies, naturally they’d be workin’ over at Goldman Sachs or thereabouts; certainly not at Beltway City DC.

I can spin you a pscenario in which the rise of AstroTurf™baggery would be a disaster for the existin’ Party Paymasters, easily enough: imagine that Lord Mammon’s team becomes a wilderness of Messrs. Ross Perot, checkbook-wieldin’ cranks and boobs who have not the slightest notion of TopPercenter solidarity. The Grant-Hoover racket could easily then fall apart pretty much the way the Lenin-Gorbachev racket fell apart.

Easy enough to imagine, that is. Yet one would have to be almost as wet behind the ears, and empty in between them, as Neocomrade S. X. Deace to expect it.

***

The little neoladdie manages to be confusin’ about its own druthers. It says tolerably clearly that it expects its own New Paradigm -- a ’Turf’bagger Ascendancy -- to prevail, though of course not that the fantasy will collapse immediately once it happens. At the same time, it emits nothin’ that has any tendency to make your typical Kiddie Selfservative root for ’Turf’bagger Ascendancy.

The neospecimen does not even seem to want ’Turf’bagger Ascendancy much itself. If we were dealing with an intellectually and ethically competent publicist, this could be explained with reference to its remark about ’turf’baggery bein’ "a force of nature." That is to say, "Who cares whether you like it, little man, when the thing is goin’ta happen anyway?"

Anybody can talk that talk, of course, and it does have a bracing air of steel-claptrap-mindedness about it, does it not? Nostradamus and M. de Lénine know the future before it happens, unlike us humble..

However when all the rest of an agitprop performance is wimpy mush of the lowest grade, there is no warrant to drag in Nostradamus. Inevitability and "force of nature" are themselves just conceptual baubles that happen to have caught the jackdaw eye. And the cripple mind cannot tell the difference between two ‘paradigms’ and two laundry lists.

***

Probably the best thing to do with this baloney, Dr. Bones, would be to file it under Hormone-Basin’. The neocomradlin’ does not care much about the substance of its Brave New Foxcuckooland, but it certainly does seem to consider that the more militant and extreme the Vast Whight-Wing Conspiracy becomess, the better.[5]

And cheer up, sir! There cannot be a large number of loony godzillionaires who will be wantin’ to pay for the type of artificial dirt that Neocomrade S. X. Dease happens to like best. We may run into a great deal too much whight-wingery for our own tatste, but few economic TopPercenters are likely to abandon themselves to it altogether.

(( "[B] iblical worldview," forsooth! ))

Happy days.




___
[1] The really accomplished neocomradologist, or an insolent pretender to erudition, can evidently score a few points by knowing that, like the former "Moral Majority," there is no definite article in "News Corporation," even though the Greater Texan language makes it seem all but unidiomatic to omit a ‘the’ in from of both. And Bentley knows best.


[2] For the very, very few capable of systematic cynicism, I daresay there is a lot to be said for a world in which everybody else piously believes in the oracles of Lord Mammon, but one sees through that shamanism oneself. But come along, Dr. Bones! You might as sensibly accuse a Neocomrade S. X. Deace of havin’ invented the Internet as of entertain’ any such all-but-Moynihanian neocleverness.

I’d be amazed if such a neospecimen ever got as far as worryin’ a little that His Selenic Effulgence , the neospecimen’s concrete paymaster at least as regards this one scribble, has not the happiness to be a subject of the Heimatland Gottes. Not even a semisubject like Firstlord Murdoch is HSE! Not even a native thinker in Greater Texan!! Golly!!!


[3] I betcha our jackal has a jackdaw eye for verbal trash and trumpery like "paradigm." Perhaps it is a product of Wombschool Normal University or St. Dilbert Antistate College that would like to whistle itself up somethin’ a little tonier, backgroundwise?

Big LEW doesn’t know more about this neospecimen than that it "previously did sports talk radio (most recently with sister station KXNO) before taking over the afternoon drive slot in June 2006," which is not much.

KXNO is siblin’ to WHO-AM at Des Moines, a burg that must be located on both side of the Mississippi, if I still have my ‘K’s and ‘X’s right.

Be that as it may, NC7 DXS almost certainly did not pick up its ‘paradigm’ from the lingo of any holy-Homelandic™ kiddie game played by ostensible grown-ups. Possibly futból connoiseurs talk about los paradigmas del juego in Undocumento, but in plain clean-cut an’ redstate-blooded Greater Texan? No weigh.


[4] Malignant swellin’ of Roget’s gland.


[5] "Electing people who don’t share my core convictions is a loser - period."

¡Blame the Voters!

Now here is a pretty dingalingism for you, Dr. Bones:

It is the voters who do the electing.... Therefor[e], blame the voters for what their elected officials do, or do not do.

Have no fear of the AstroTurf™bagger Community, sir!

Possibly economic TopPercenters DO hand out bucks galore to their dupes and their marks and their squawk-radio artists, to candidates for office, and to candidates elected to office, to 14,309.6 different Tanks of Neothought, but none of these benefactions have any bearing on la démocratie en Amérique, because ... (ta-DAH) ... because AstroTurf™ doesn’t buy pols, only voters buy polss.[1]

His Daddy Warbucks and his Uncle Rupert ought to give the neocomrade a special medal just for thinking of such a nifty. Should it actually catch on, perhaps they could give him half of Connecticut or thereabouts.

To be sure, it is a tad extreme even by militant extremist G.O.P. standards, so it may not corner the market instantly. Or ever.

But it certainly deserves to! Johannianity offers all that the Secret Sector has ever required in the way of utter irresponsability and unaccountability, and it offers it without the superficial (?) appearance of selfishness that comes with the Rand-Nozick-Dilbert ‘libertarianism’ product. The neoëvangelist of Mammon does not risk his flock noticin’ that they do not themselves happen to be Warbucks or Scrooges or Murdochs or Soroses as they are called upon to celebrate a True Freedumb product that only a Big Manager can make proper use of. Au contraire, the sweet little puppies of the Right are flattered by bein’ told how remarkably incorruptible they are.

And what goes down better with the Big Management Party base and vile than flattery? [2]

In an ideal and logical world, Foxcuckooland would toss out its present agitation and propaganda at once and switch over to this one. But of course the neocomrades could not turn on a dime even if their Oberkommando issued the order. As thing stand, the TopPercenters are rather heavily invested in the notion that money CAN influence organic persons as well as corporate persons. Remember that "Louisiana purchase" swift-boatin’ job they did on Sen. Landrieu? Or Neocomrade Dr. R. Limbaugh barkin’ and’ bellowin’ against supposed "slush funds" disquised as ‘porkulus’? None of that noise would make sense if voters are radically unpurchasable.

More abstractly and less immediately, intramural problems might develop inside the Party of Grant and Hoover: once the rank-and-file base and vile become genuinely convinced that bucks cannot matter in politics, what, exactly, would inspire them with awe and affection (genuine or well simulated) when they look up at their G.O.P. geniuses, the good folks who run that show and almost always have run it? True, bucks that cannot be exchanged for Power could still buy lots and lots of brandy and cigars and real estate and motor carriages and flyin’ machines and . . . . But even my low estimate of the ideological heirs of Gen. Hamilton does not involve them carin’ for nothin’ beyond consumer goodies.

It seems clear enough that what the sweet puppies want from their Party’s Big Managers is not so much trickle-down from the gravy train, but Respectability, which is, in its way, a spiritual affair. Sort of. Johannianity may or may not be able to accommodate that demand, but I fear the ideoproduct will need a little work first. In the preliminary version vouchsafed here, there is the grave difficulty that (for all that explicitly appears to the contrary), NO voters can be bought, none at all. If simply bein’ unpurchasable makes one Respectable, than everybody and her brother-in-law is entitled to call herself so.

Unfortunately what is common to all is dirt cheap. From Gen. Hamilton of New York all the way down through Governess S. Heath-Paling of AK-49, it has always been understood over to starboard that one can fail to be Respectable. And many do fail.[3] (Fortunately there is a place to put them politically. But that is another donkey.)

Perhaps I was too enthusiastic above [4]. Viewed in light of the long-term difficulty just expounded, the Neogospel accordin’ to Johann could be dismissed as only another glimpse of Foxcuckooland’s never-endin’ Great Snipe Hunt, the quest to establish that kiddie selfservatives (as well as KSM kiddiemasters a fortiori) are simply not subject to Original Sin the same way demonocrats and lieberals and "the Democrat party" have the misfortune to be. [5]

(( There remains the obvious cheap shot: "blame the voters for what their elected officials do" ought to mean that Neocomrade Johann would never even dream of blamin’ President Summers and Mr. O’Bama for anythin’ about the existin’ régime that displeases him.

(( Perhaps we may make a memorandumb of his name and check how well he complies with his own oracles? ))

I wish you, sir,
Happy days through affordable healthcare.




___
[1] Comrade Labour Commissar Reich started out from Brits v. Yanks, so perhaps it is not off-topic to point out that the Johannine "We the People" seems to have been studying Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam: litigants may give Our Honour as many golden candlesticks and vicuña coats as they like -- ¡the more the merrier! -- but must understand that these are sheer unsolicited marks of respect for Our Wunnerfulness, and will have no influence whatever on how their cases get decided.

[2] Nothin’.


[3] The current Party-and-AEIdeology line would perhaps define these impossible-to-respect losers as that half of the adult populace that "pays no taxes." I usually just say "the Bad Poor" myself, leaving unspecified exactly what, if anythin’, is bad about them in the eyes of the neocomrades, over and above technical credit-rating problems.


[4] But, as the lady said, "How can I know what I think before I see what I keyboarded?"


[5] I trust, Dr. Bones, you recall prof. Fischer’s ‘fallacy’ that runs "It is a sad thing to be a frenchman, for all Frenchmen must die."?

Concerning True Poorblindness

Wingnutettes and wingnuts, the most desirable of demographics from Fox-on-15th-Street's point of view, are well known to suppose themselves personally to be colourblind, which condition, far from being any sort of defect, affords the unafflicted endless opportunities for self-gloatin’ that if, perchance, there are still some remnannts of a racial problem in the United States, all least that fact has nothin’ whatsoever to do with wunnerful them.

Since this ploy has worked -- and keeps tight on workin’! -- so well for the ploysters, Neocomrade R. J. Samuelson and other movers and shakers of Rio Limbaugh might want to consider extendin’ it to the problem discussed this fine holiday morning: why don't they just proclaim themselves ‘poorblind’ as well?

"Some folks," R. J. Samuelson might neo-orate, "can perhaps never see a stranger without instantly classifyin’ her economically. But, ¡thank Father Zeus!, I am not like that! Dives an’ Lazarus are all the same to me!"

Needless to say, once poorblindness has become the prefered self-saucin’ for Neocomrade R. J. Samuelson and the F-15 crew and all their ideobuddies, it follows ineluctably that all the neocomradely community’s Uncle Sam must be poorblind as well. Anythin’ else would be unconstitutional. Obviously.

Not quite so obvious, perhaps, are the policy implications. I may be wrong here, but I believe on the whole they would be just what Neocomrade Dr. P. G. Peterson, Freelord and Kiddiemaster Concord, might have ordered: the Fedguv must be conducted on a strict fee-for-service basis.

PROOF: Sam can set prices for his services because to do so requires knowing only his own expenses. But even flat-taxers err against poorblindness insofar as they must demand to know what Neocomrade R. J. Samuelson’s income is in order to charge X.Y% of it for services (supposedly) rendered.

Hence a really strict "don't ask, don't tell" attitude towards wealth and poverty, that is to say, True Poorblindness, forbids anythin’ so un-American as taxation, in the sense ordinarily given to that word.

Q.E.D.

This plan may be rather too good to flourish in the real world, yet anybody who considers that a significant objection to it ought to find the True Colourblindness of Wingnut City and the G.O.P. almost equally problematical.

Such lieberals and demoncrats as doubt the latter to begin with should notice that in neither case do the neocomrades have to be *literally* blind to anythin’ at all. OF COURSE our Betters will know very well who is rich and white as opposed to poor an’ black-or-tan. The ‘blindness’ consists only in Their promisin’ never to make decisions, outside the secret sector [*], on such invidious bases as pigmentation and credit rating.

And who would venture to disbelieve promises made by Betters?

Healthy days.

___
[*] Delineating the boundaries of the secret sector is itself a well-known can of worms.

In conjunction with the True Poorblindness Plan (Pat. Pend.), the immediate point is first to rehabilitate Neocomrade R. Paul of KY and then to comply with his unfashionable oracles. Individual entrepreneurs who waive their Zeus-granted secrecy rights to the point of operating, for example, a greasy spoon into which anybody may walk and maybe even sit down, cannot decently be required to pay no attention to whether they are dealing with Lord Dives and Kiddiemaster Peterson (not to mention well-salaried agitprop neocomrades from Fox-on-15th), or only with lazy Lazzy and Joe the Hobo and the occasional Mother Teresa.

The Panera Intergalactic Trust LLC seems to be attempting, misguidedly, to apply poorblindness in a secret-sector context, but I anticipate that the attempt will break down sooner rather than later. In a way, that attempt broke down even before it started: the Baní Panera feel obliged to suggest sandwich prices to the unimaginative.

That breakdown may point to the general solution, however. Let every customer exhibit her proposed payment to obtain admission to the sanctums of commercial secrecy. A twenty dollar banknote in hand ought to do the trick at Panera, and even Mother Teresa might accidently happen to have such a thing as that from time to time. In any case, there need be no *general* inquisition into anybody’s poverty or unpoverty: Dives and Peterson would not get in on the basis of how expensive their suits look or what their chauffeurs drive; they, too, would have to have the cash in hand. Should they find that prospect humiliating, well, they can always have lunch at the Union League Club or the Burnin’ Tree Club, refugia magnatum conducted in full compliance with the Randpauline regs.

(But Mammon knows best.)

"I don't play golf."

Dear Dr. Bones,

Hidden here amidst the weekly (daily, hourly, minutely, ... ) neo-re-standardizin’ for purposes of Party and AEIdeology lurks an Eternal Truth: "I don’t play golf."

A golfless Neocomrade & Kiddiemaster Prof. Dr. Rear-Colonel Victor D. H. Blimp? Egad!

’Tis easy to see how His Serenity may find it difficult to get out to the links much lately, for, obviously from this neosabbath morning’s sermonette alone, he must spend many hours aloft workin’ away at the paradigm that goes ego - mei - mihi - me - me. [1] Pluggin’ things into holes on the ground (or out at sea) would only be a distraction from more geistlich concerns, after all. [2] [3].

Nothing is more suitable, surely, than that V. D. H. Blimp should abstain from golf. After all, he has not properly earned the right to it. The gold stand of such right, politically considered, must of course be Dwight David XXXIV, who was a real militarist before he became a real golfer. Blimp bein’ only a virtual militarist [4], let His Serenity autowaft no farther afield than virtual golf; seemliness demands it.

Though Blimp does not do (what I believe the gamesters in question call) ‘slice,’ he is a dab hand at ‘spin’. Thorougly wrapped up in his own neoself [5], His Serenity does not mention the Great Game as mere gossip. Naturally not! He mentions it because "in the spirit of live and let live, I also never cared much for deconstructing the game in terms of culture and sociology."

Far more interesting than golf is that little self-exuberance. Prescinding straightaway from the part that features the good rear-colonel pattin’ himself on His Serenity’s own back [6], I rush to suggest that probably he does not much care for the deconstruction products generally available, which run, more or less, to the tune of malefactors of great wealth accompanied by cigars (possibly even by Neocomrade Dr. R. H. Limbaugh -- talk about "a great way to wreck a walk"! ) as they make their conspicuously consumptive rounds. All that is largely out of date, to be sure.

On the other hand, it is by no means completely out of date. At a time when the War against the Wetbacks rages furiously, golf will still do as being an example of the sort of activity that one does not, with some confidence, expect to find the Bad Poor engaged in. Or that José and Juanita violate the sacred perimeter of the holy Homeland™ in desperate quest of opportunity to pursue.

Perhaps a year ago, as General Motors was succumbing to the impact of the Crawford Crash in particular and the vast sweep of G.O.P. economic genius more broadly, I recall certain wingnutettes and wingnuts raisin’ a howl about certain Union thugs™ setting up a country club for their members. One may take for granted that, had the shameless boondoggle been a bowling alley, not even the most militant and extreme of Republican Party class warriors would have bothered about it.

And the moral of that is, I guess, that there is still some mileage to be gotten out of golf as culture and deconstruction and sociology, perhaps especially if deployed on behalf of TopPercenterdom and the Blimpoid Classes rather than against them as hitherto.

Golf is doubtless not the best such weapon of Party and AEIdeology. Neocomrade R. H. Limbaugh, who after all is no mere idiot, brandishes the Sports Utility Vehicle for essentially the same polemical and symbolic purpose, and (from outside the monkey house, of course) I think the Doctor of Demoplutocracy is wise to prefer it to golf. Though the Bad Poor do not actually possess, as I conjecture, more SUV's than mashies and niblicks, it is far, far easier to imagine them wishing to possess the former. An angry mob of B.P. breaking into an automobile dealership and helping themselves is a topos that a Kiddiemaster V. D. H. Blimp could work up rhetorically and present to readers and cruisemates in a fashion so plausible as to be heart-chillin’ and even wallet-threatenin’.

The idea of José and Juanita, and the Revs Wright and Sharpeton, and the superintendant ghost of Mr. Saul Alinsky, summoning Roxbury and Dorchester and Everett and Framingham [7] to sack THE Country Club is a good deal less plausible.

At the opposite extreme from SUV’s (and much remoter from them than golf) stand artefacts of culture and deconstruction and sociology like Attic Greek and classical music. Blimp is known to retain traces of his Greek, at least, but it has been a long time since that attainment made him (or anybody else) gentry eo ipso. The likener who likened it to lace was right on, for if His Serenity were to dress up like this tomorrow, his kiddies and his kruisemates would only wonder if their neoguru supposes Memorial Day to be identical with Halloween. [8] Mobile vulgars demolishing (or perhaps squatting on, sitting in at) THE County Club is conceivable, though hardly likely. The Loeb Library, by contrast, may be pronounced perfectly safe.

Josquin and Boccherini and Dvorak would make an even better example, since a taste for such antiques is much easier to simulate than a reading knowledge of Thucydides and Pindar. Unfortunately, our good rear-colonel and Coriolanus wannabe has not yet exhibited that particular war (?) wound in the Forum: I have no idea whether he cares, or professes to care, for so-called classical music.

In any case, the chances that any particular specimen of the Bad Poor cares can be estimated at zero, despite the product being vastly easier to get at than Greek. If, however, the specimen should happen to found Microsoft (or win some other similar lottery), it would be odd, almost an impropriety, if it did not feel obligated to start faking an enjoyment of Mozart. [9]

***

To generalize, perhaps idiotically, Dr. Bones: it looks as if Neocomrade Rear-Col. Blimp has managed to dumb himself down into a tolerable facsimile of the pre-1929 North American college professor, the sort of "genteel" target Mr. Mencken and Prof. Veblen loved to bang away at.

Healthy days.

___
[1] The vernacular body count is EYE (‘I’) 26, ME 8, MY 1 in appoximately 1,265 words of autoblimpification.


[2] Furthermore, that magisterial Serenity one always admires as Blimp drifts by overhead, borne on the Winds (wings? wingnuts? windnuts?) of Faction, may take a bit of a beatin’ when this or that particular hole fails to get plugged. But Ike knows best, golfwise.


[3] As you know, Bones, this coarse and illiterate keyboard tries to stay as far away from idols and icons and cartoons and Planet MacL@@han as possible. That means that its judgments about the visual may be worthless. Nevertheless: would not a literal blimp, weapon of War and Hucksterism , trying to emulate Charles I Stuart or Mr. Woods of Tigergate defeat almost any crayon or pencil?

The notion reminds one of a certain bicycle-mad fish, nicht wahr?


[4] And a former virtual militarist as well, for practical purposes. But hush! Mr. McCloskey’s general theory of V. D. H. Blimp has already been expounded rather too frequently. Let us take it for granted and attempt to move on.


[5] The eyeball-locked-on-omphalus business that His Serenity is so good at may explain why the kiddies and neokiddies and Conservative Tours pseudogentry put up with Blimp so readily.


[6] Also a bit tricky to picture this scene with a literal blimp. (( Remember Mr. Scarisbrick’s "exquisite anatomical tautology," sir? ))


[7] Pardon my Boston, sir, but in pscenariomongering one should stick to the concrete and avoid flabbinesses about nameless ghettoes and barrios and other dark corners of the realm where the B.P. hang out.


[8] I should myself assume that VDHB had just encountered the expression "Decoration Day" and made a very natural mistake about hermeneutics. (( The Goodyear blimp decked in lace makes another good unpicture, no? ))


[9] The culture / deconstruction / sociology gets a little complicated at this point, however. A lottery winner like Mr. Warren Buffet can cash in backhandedly by NOT pretending any fancy pretence about Wolfgangus & Co.

Possibly His Serenity’s "I don't play golf" was aimin’ at thet sort of effect?

Veblen knows best.

Apologizin’ for Bee Pee

Dear Dr. Bones,

This morning you may watch a cub agitpropper flounderin’ , sir.

Its intended patients or victims are NOT to think ill of Party Paymasters and the AstroTurf™bagger classes -- that general proposition goes almost without sayin’ inside the well-gated neocomradely community.

No system of gatin’ can ever be absolutely perfect, however. "Things leak," one might idiotically generalize, and such leakage can produce neoideologically unsatisfactory situations like "76 percent of respondents disapprove of the way BP has handled the spill." Not to mention a holy Homeland™ awash with crimmigrants and criminaliens leaning ever inwards.

The cub fears that this dreadful three-misguided-citizens-in-four mob may include a few upstandin’ kiddie selfservatives and Party base an’ vile who really ought to know better. Not even Foxcuckooland -- not even National Review itself! -- is 100% gleichschaltet as yet, and indeed, they presumably never will be, given the perfluctus originalis, the inherent Original Leakage of all mortal things. Father Zeus alone can keep a really tight pipe.

Some of the weaker siblin’s, then, of Party and Ideology seem to the cub, or, much more likely, to its cubmasters, to be likely to deviate from GOPT®F, the Republican Party brand (®) True Freedumb product. The success of P&I wombschoolin’ has brought with it the problems of success [1], one of which is that wombscholars and downdumbees cannot be relied on to handle hard or marginal cases well. Wally Wingnut and Cindy from Wasilla have never been allowed to look upon GOPT®F bare, after all. They are quite clear that they ought to cheer for GOPT®F, and doubtless they wish to cheer for it even harder in this oil-black hour of apparent need. But what are the kiddies to cheer, exactly?

The correct textbook answer is easy enough to accomodate to the meanest intelligence of kiddie selfservatism, say,

Bee Pee! Bee Pee! / Leakin’ Oil is Liberty!! / RAAAAH!!!

Of course you must see how that won’t quite do the trick, Dr. Bones. But let us be clear about why not. Or rather, about the various levels of reasons why not.

(0) Master Wally and Mizz Cindy won’t be cheerin’ that cheer or anythin’ equivalent because they really and truly do not grasp that GOPT®F entails it. For reasons too obvious to discuss at length, wombschoolers and invigilators at the various hatcheries deliberately inculcate the notion that GOPT®F has somethin’ nontrivial to do with the rank-and-file Party base and vile. To expect Wally and Cindy to fall on their wallets for the Hayward classes with full awareness of what is actually goin’ on would be absurd. The ideological neowomb must spare them THAT awful realization, perhaps more than any other single glimpse of the former Real World.

Hath not Comrade Frank of Kansas explained all these things?

The Frank explanations are necessarily general, however, and do not of themselves indicate what the Party of Grant & Hoover operative is to incite Wally and Cindy to holler just at present. That is where a Neocomrade (j. g.) M. X. Patterson ought to come in. As you can see, the cub gives it a college try, so to speak, but loses a couple of yards on the play.

(1) MXP is a doubtful juvenile neospecimen, but we can assume that most full-grown PG&H agitators and propagandists more or less know what they are doin’. Accordingly, they find themselves temporarily in basically the same plight that their Party Neocomrade Rand Minor of KY is in all the time: honesty is by no means the best policy when it comes to defendin’ Freelord Hayward and Bee Pee (or the Planet Dilbert theory of public accomodations and the Wicked State).

If all the world were Foxcuckooland and everybody in it sincerely addicted to GOPT®F taken straight up, no defense would be necessary. The divine right of Big Management to bigmanage would not be questioned merely because of a little perfluctus originalis from time to time. Kiddies and weaker siblin’s might grumble against GOPT®F from time to time, the same way Wally and Cindy might grumble against a thunderstorm when they happen to want to have a picnic, with a very tame grumblin’ that certainly does not mean that the kiddies have started thinkin’ unorthodox thoughts about the Omnipotence™ and All-Benevolence™ of Father Zeus, Compeller of Clouds.

I daresay life would be far easier for the Party-an’-AEIdeology apologist if kiddie selfservatism could just be converted into old-fashioned Enthusiasm and Superstition wholesale. That little trick once accomplishes, Freelord Hayward and the crew at BP would qualify for all (or at least most) of the special allowances and double-thinkin’s and special pleadin’s presently accorded Dr. Ratzinger and the VC crowd without anybody batting an eye. M. de Rome is not Father Zeus in person, but rumours about a special relationship between the two of them are quite sufficient to check and balance pretty well everybody this side of Party Neocomrade Ch. X. Hitchens.

Alas, the AEIdeology radically does not lend itself to vaticanisation. The whole P&I m’gillâ" would have to be rewritten, from the Gospel of St. Adam all the way down through the Cocktail Napkin Apocalypse, to accomodate the (now) utterly heretical neodogma that particular persons can enjoy a Zeus-Ratzinger-like special relationship with Mlle. de la Main Invisible.

Of course in one sense those who win the lottery are Her favorites and Freelord Mammon’s. Verbally, one could call lottery-winnin’ a "special relationship" with Their Freelordships Above. Even, maybe, speak of the "divine election and predestination" of lottery winners. But such borrowed verbiage and plumage signally fails to smoothe over the crack in the ontotheological [2] wallpaper. If the words really meant the same thing in the AEIdeology as in the former Christojudæanity -- that is, if Mme. de la Main Invisible be reconceived as havin’ individual pets as opposed to a generic class of pets -- then obviously the fix would be in and one could speak of a ‘lottery’ or ‘market’ only out of courtesy, genuine or sarcastic.[3]

When Her Freeladyship Above’s apologists and seconds and bottle-washers have happier narratives than the Bee Pee Saga to chant, they can and do appeal to this radical secularism and un- or anti-religionism of the AEIdeology. Master Wally and Mizz Cindy are extremely unlikely ever to win big at Le Grand Casino des Événements Humaines, yet it is not absolutely impossible that they might. Such has ever been the burden of Schlesinger Minor’s Whig pastoral. That is what Mr. Arnold was making sport of when he spoofed -- spoofed just a bit too much, as usual -- about “Ever remember, my dear Dan, that you should look forward to being some day manager of that concern!"

But what avails that thoroughly traditional snake oil now? Imagine Wally Wingnut checkin’ the number on his bettin’ slip and discoverin’ that he has just won a license to pollute the Gulf of Mexico without stint or limit! Unless the prize is transferable and he can sell it to somebody like Freelord Hayward, I doubt poor Wally would think he had won anythin’ much to brag about.

Pari passu, the trouble for Party-an’-Ideology spinsters like Neocomrade (j.g.) M. X. Patterson is that Wally and Cindy will not much care whether Bee Pee and Freelord Hayward possesses such a license or not. Such concern of that sort as they can muster (for I assume their wombschoolin’ will have wired in at least some tendency towards a disinterested pity for poor little rich corporations and the Big Managers thereof) may not manage compete successfully against a deluge of pictures of oilslicked birds &c. &c.

Our junior birdman for GOP & AEI does not expressly notice the oilslicked bird menace, an omission that I incline to attribute to incompetence rather than the reverse. Had the cub thought of that angle, he would have tossed in some steel-claptrap-minded boilerplate against bleedin’-heart environmentalist whackos. ’Tis a mere accident that a past master of the Goebbels School curriculum would probably not mention it either, havin’ calculated that it would be better the dupes and marks thought about concrete and picturesque details of perfluctus originalis as little as possible. [4]

However the great difference between somebody competent and Neocomrade (j. g.) M. X. Patterson is unquestionably that the former would not have offered Cindy and Wally two completely different distractions from what Party and AEIdeology want theor base and vile distracted from. The kiddies should be set to thinkin’ EITHER ’bout "the dangers and complexities ... [required] to bring forth the lubricant that greases the gears of our civilization" OR ’bout the Bartlettisms that cluster around that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns

Neocomrade M. X. Patterson, the neosorcerer’s apprentice, as it were, wants to work both these spells at once. That is overreachin’, and ’twill serve the cub right if he gets no results at all.

¡Healthy days!


___
[1] Perfluctus originalis at work before our very eyes, Dr. Bones, is everything implied by that little phrase "problems of success."!

(( You’ll have to bear with me this morning, sir, if I seem a lot more interested in my own stuff than in the shoddy wares of Neocomrade (j. g.) M. X. Patterson. Trying to work out how a competent alumnus of the Joseph Goebbels School of Agitation, Propaganda and Public Diplomacy would set to work on behalf of Hayward et al. is vastly more fun (and at least a littl more valuable) than wading though M. X. P.’s sophomore blue book with a redstate pencil.


[2] That unnecessary coinage is so silly and so unnecessary that I wish I had thought of it myself.


[3] The only objection I can think of to myself off-hand is that famous apology or self-panegyric of Freelord Rockefeller Major, "The Good Lord gave me my money."

Sed respondeo that his freelordship did not even begin to speculate WHY the grant in question was made. Furthermore, had somebody from the lamestream media of 1929 asked whether his freelordship would agree that all lottery winners were entitled to say the same, I betcha he would have acknowledged that they are.

But Mammon knows best.


[4] Perhaps the comrades over at Media Matters will examine RupertNews contra mundum as regards pictorial representation of what Bee Pee hath wrought in the way of oilslicked flora and fauna? I detest Planet MacL@@han and the Y@@ T@@B far to heartily to do it myself, but somebody ought to.