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Dear Dr. Bones,

One of the great inconveniences of being a Sole Remainin’ Hyperpower, _c’est les autres_!

The paymasters of Party an’ Ideology used to like to get their base of sweet puppies worked up about _les autres_ by havin’ Neocomrade Dr. R. H. Limbaugh--and many inferior rip-offs of the same ideoproduct--bark an’ bellow "They Hate Us Because We Are FREE!"

There has been much less of that, recently, so I betcha, sir, that the TopPercenters have decided that they are not quite so FREE as they were before noon on 20 January 2009. And so indeed they are not, although the difference is far from immense.

Small or large, the recent, and evidently unexpected, reduction in the True FREEdom of Uncle Scrooge and Daddy Warbucks undoubtedly does mean that Party an’ Ideology have lost control of the naming of our Uncle Sam’s naval vessels.[1]

[Q.] This is about as petty as petty chickenshit comes, is it not?

[A.] Yes, for civilized adults, but it is not, after all, civilized adults who scribble anonymously for _America’s Moonpaper_ .

Curators out at the Chickenshit Museum [http://tinyurl.com/po23mu] will be interested in the latest thrillin’ episodes [http://tinyurl.com/y3j9bhj] of the personnel wars amongst ChristoKorean expatriates at Washin’ton City.

If it would conciliate them and their sweet puppies any, I should gladly e-mail Secretary Mabus to recommend that he relabel the unfortunate ship (say) "the CKS Samuel Dealy."

Neocomrade S. Dealy has certain dual or triple loyalty problems, however, perhaps "the HIS Sam Dealy" would be quite as suitable a name, for neither the Hoovervillains nor the ChristoKoreans have any fleet to call their own. Not yet, anyway.

Big Sam has scads and scads and SCUDs and SCUDs of violence-pro gear to spare, as every nonwombschoolboy knows, so plainly there would be no harm, or not much, in gratifying this or that loyal band of Little Foreign Friends with mere nomenclature: "Shock an’ Awe may break my bones / But names can never hurt me." [I quote from memory.]

On the other hand, give the LFF an inch, and they may possibly want to grab an ell, therein emulatin’ the paymasters of the Party of Grant.

Were "Little Sam," Neocomrade S. Dealy of CK and Hoover, or his principals to obtain actual *control* of the USS ExMurtha, who can say for certain that he would not use it to sack the American Ideological Enterprise, or wreak bloody crusade upon the Rev. Neocomrade D. Virtue [2], or hurl himself violently upon almost any other sentimental / ‘ideological’ competitor with fixed assets located reasonably close to salt water?

One would not care to be responsible for such potential _sequellae_ of neoproliferation, now, would one, Dr. Bones?

Accordingly, I believe I shall draft a memo to SECNAV suggesting that little foreign friends of the holy Homeland™ be permitted to buy and decorate advertising space, in effect, on our warships, but no more than that. Like the buses of the MBTA, donch know? [http://tinyurl.com/y7eklc4] No redecoration below the belt! And, needless to say, no command-and-control whatsoever.

On the same basis, why not issue holy-Homelandic™ postage stamps bearing the likenesses of persons nominated by the LFF, as for example M. de Zhabotinsky, or Freiherr Freddy von Hayek, or ... or indeed, pretty well anybody the LFF would care to mention who was not actually _Reichskanzler_ in 1940.

Even His Lunation [http://tinyurl.com/y54xp39] itself.

After all, why not? As long as the proper fees -- as high as Mlle. de la Main Invisible will bear, of course -- are paid in advance. Plus renewals annually or semiannually, so that all the LFF get a fair shot at it.

A very traditional objector might at this juncture object that coins and other such paraphernalia of the Wicked State have always been used to propagandise on behalf of whomever or whatever appears iconographically or nominally in the ad space.

_Respondeo_: yes, indeed, but "that was then, and this is now." Furthermore, "History is bunk."

Even without the wombschoolin’ and _Niederdümmung_ so valiantly contributed by Party and AEIdeology, very few Homelanders™ will know or care what exotic neoproducts from _les autres_ are thus advertised. After a month at most, it will all be only so much white noise, so to speak.

Indeed, it is already so on a small scale: when was the last time, Dr. Bones, that you actually scrutinized the reverse of one of those sovereign-State quarter-dollar pieces? We live, sir, in an Epoch of Destructive ©®eationism (Pat. Pend.), and have ever since the venerable science of mammonology was reduced to cocktail-napkin format!

Another example of how we are already there yet affords Neocomrade Dr. A. B. Laffer, as it happens. If you, sir, pay the least bit of attention to names or addresses or images graven on napkins and ball-point pens and the like, you are one in a million.

***

From the technical direction of the violence profession, no objection arises at all. As long as each unit is named differently from all the others, it matters not at all what any of them are named. USS John P. Murtha, USS David W. Jones [3] , USS Runcible Spoon -- anybody who has strong druthers about which one of those it is to be only pronounces herself deeply unserious.

And I wish you, sir,
Healthy and affordable days.

___
[1] If the matter were not so nearly invisible to the naked eye, one might assimilate it to the recent Executivitarian™ innovations of Neocomrade Viceroy R. B. Cheney. Neocomradess Anonymous of the _Moonpaper_ should grasp that she is not goin’ to dictate to her POTUS about foreign and aggression policy any more successfully than the late Rep. Murtha could dictate to George XLIII.

And the moral of that is, "What goes around, comes around."


[2] http://tinyurl.com/5abt3x


[3] Note the happy, but entirely accidental convergence, with "Davy Jones’ locker."