Ideology

Dear Dr. Bones,

Allow me to begin as if I were Plutarch, that is to say, three fields away from the announced topic.[1]

Almost all available products come in a variety of styles and colours and flavours and -- all hail Mammon Wrex! -- especially prices.

Yet certain weekly standards and neocriteria apply only to specific product lines: Ice cream comes in vanilla and pistachio and tutti-frutti. Automobiles and bookmarks and LeoStraussians and garage-door openers do not, or, at any rate, not literally. Before Lord Mammon began rexin’ it an’ wreckin’, say "down to A. R. 1100/1688/5448" [2], Freelord Rilke’s famous plight

wir nicht sehr verläßlich zu Haus sind / in der gedeuteten Welt

must have been intolerable. [3] Every way a zombie looked, five or ten klicks down the road there was the beginnin’s, at least, of a distinct and different Deutungssystem.

On the other hand, if one stuck very close to hearth and hormones, perhaps one could avoid noticing the alien and bewildered Welt? Most of the sham tradition purveyed by (so-called ‘cultural’) rightists and neorightists since 1789 assumes that back in the Really Dark Ages, everyzombie was always verläßlich zu Haus in the highest degree, havin’ the privilege to live in a noble and upliftin’ Gemeinschaft rather than some wretched ghetto of a Gesellschaft such as you and I and Wally Wombschool -- and even Neocomrade Governess S. Heath-Paling of AK-49 herself!-- have been consigned to by Fate and Time. O nos infelices!

Well, that is a fun parlour game for self-pitiful rainy days. However at the moment it is literally morning in Massachusetts, so let us not play the Gesellschaftskolporteurspiel ourselves, Dr. Bones, but instead attempt to get some serious (?) neocomradology done. You must have noticed that more than one decent political grown-up has analysed the AstroTurf™baggers as proposin’ to give their poor perplexed sweet puppies back that cheese that some white-coated labóratory fiend and global warmist moved on ’em, the cheese in question bein’ pretty much the above-spoofed Gemeinschaft rigmarole.

Not to avoid the obvious, how about this ?

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

The kiddies and their kiddiemasters did not care for that bit of amateur neocomradology at all, Dr. Bones, though as usual they failed to articulate their distress so clearly as to rule out the possibility that they have not more than noticed that words of their POTUS are discouragin’ words, words intelligently designed (and malignantly!) to cloud over their own Mo®nin’ in Ame®ica product. (Your average deer or antelope could almost get that far, comprehensionwise.)

Prescinding from animal intelligence studies, I find the turfbaggers and turfbaggees whom I have noticed attemptin’ to respond to that impertinent swift-boatin’ on their blind side get fixated on the word ‘cling’ for some reason. It might be worthwhile to figure out why [4]. Indeed, there are two possible WHYs here: (1) the real objective reason of cause of ‘cling’ making sweet puppies cringe, and (2) the WHY a really competent puppiemaster would have suggested, as opposed to what was actually suggested

"It’s a remarkable statement and extremely revealing," McCain adviser Steve Schmidt said in a statement. "It shows an elitism and condescension towards hardworking Americans that is nothing short of breathtaking, it is hard to imagine someone running for president who is more out of touch with average Americans."

Blindsided and swiftboated was Neocomrade S. Schmidt, obviously, to the point that he went on to maage to lose the election for the Fabulous Flyboy of AZ somehow. But why, exactly? What was goin’ on between the Party neocomrade’s ears when he made that remark to the guy from Fox-on-15th?

Trying on purpose to be superficial, as befits our subject-matter, I put it to you, Dr. Bones, that the kiddiemasters may have (in effect or in deed) met secretly and decided that ‘cling’ is to be billed as an antonym of ‘hardworkin’’. On the model, as I conjecture, of that unavoidable, but almost never explicit, antithesis of "The Middle Class" [raaaah!] and "the special interests" [boo! hisssssss!!] .

Arbeit macht frei, after all, nicht wahr?. She who hardworks all her days -- [plus optionally toss in "an’ plays by the rules" here] -- may not achieve riches beyond the dreams of McAvarice, but she is guaranteed to achieve, i’n’t she, a lifetime supply of the GOP-brand True Freedom (®) product? ’Course she is!

And whatever GOPT®UF may be on the positive side, on the negativem it is quite incompatible with clingin’. [5] Q.E.D.

That would probably pass muster in Foxcuckooland, provided a certain unfortunate clause were translated into any language other than New High Prussian. The ever-immortal co-inventor or -discoverer of the Herrnstein-Murray ©u®ve™ has successfully marketed a sort of negative image of the same product to the Tanks of Thought at Wingnut City: the trouble with the Bad Poor ("the underclass") is that they, well, that they cling -- that is to say, they exhibit Murrayan Dependency (Pat. Pend.).

Seen in this light, I believe the extreme vexation of a pro kiddiemaster like Neocomrade S. Schmidt about ‘cling’ becomes empathisable with: why, Senator O’Bama (as he then was) had the uppity nerve to swipe the very megaphone used by the Daughters of Virtue and Sons of Wisdom, LLC, to badmouth welfare queens with and deploy it against Bubba! Movin’ their cheese on the neocomrades was bad enough, but movin’ their heavy artillery on ’em . . . !!!

As I said, sir, this has been only a superficial analysis so far.

If the student looks a very little deeper, I believe he can detect from a new angle something that the Muses and you and I have already detected, as follows: remember our handy-dandy scheme from the middle ’90s for expounding the political psychology and sociology of the holy Homeland™ in such a way as to get rid of "the Middle Class" altogether? (And along with it all sorts of intolerably tedious tripe and horsefeathers, I might add.)

(( For those of them in Rio Limbaugh: take a blank sheet of paper and divide it into two equal parts vertically and two parts horoizontally. Voilà!, that’s it! To label the upper left "Upper Left" and ... and the lower right "Lower Right" is strictly mustahibb, "encouraged but not mandatory." The sheet of paper is in fact dispensable, though maybe not at Port Ste. Lucie. ))

We are not wading in much deeper, Dr. Bones, if we now define the relationship of Lowers to Uppers in each column as "clings to" rather than "is bígmanaged by." Or rather, I propose that we accept that "clings to" is an alternative formulation partially interchangable with "is bígmanaged by."[6]

Nevertheless, in order to get the maximum mileage out of what was, for its time, a very pricey and not unclassical education, I shall ordinarly pretend we find ourselves _in fæce Romuli sive Platonis Respublicâ_ and continue to speak of patrons and clients.

One inadequacy of the blindsided Neocomrade S. Schwartz’s response to takin’ some swiftboatin’ for once, instead of always only dishin’ it out, leaps to the eye once the lighting has been thus readjusted. Any rational creature who does not happen to give a hoot about holy-Homelandic™ parties and factions and factionettes is likely enough to notice that "elitism and condescension," regardless of what the neocomrade may have original-intented by the words, are not the names of qualities possessed by the Clingin’ Classes. Barry the Abominable has his faults, no doubt, but Murrayan Dependency (Pat. Pend.) is not among them. The Daughters of Virtue and Sons of Wisdom, LLC, must respect those six- and seven-digit numbers on his income tax return even if they respect nothin’ else about him whatsoever. That is what ‘LLC’ means, after all, or close enough for gummint work.

Which brings me back to near where I started, the "especially prices" bit. Here under the dark wing of Lord Mammon, I betcha 99.74% of kiddies and neokiddies and even kiddiemasters would look at our quadrated blank sheet of paper and suppose with no further ado that the upperness of the Uppers must be measurable in sh’qálîm and daráhim and doits and bucks, for what other kind of Upperness is there, except inside special hothouses like Sabbath School and Commencement Day? If their own Neocomrade Freelord Dr. Prof. Ch. A. Murray meant anythin’ less or more or other by ‘dependency’ than "takin’ money from," his true view has been hushed up admirably. And thus the underness of his freelordship’s ‘underclass’ is strictly fiscal. And thus further, knowin’ of his freelordship’s invaluable neocontributions to the Party of Big Management and of the AEIdeology, your rank-and-file kiddiemaster is bound, in the absence of a warning label, to take our own fourfold scheme the same way they take Ch. A. Murray. [7]

******

And now for the Agatha Christie: though it has been fun, and pleasantly self-reinforcing, to write up the Fourfold Root of the Nonexistence of ‘The Middle Class’, I have done so not for its own sake but rather exempli gratiâ.

The Freelord Zombiemaster and his peanut-gallery peanuts are free to peruse the above scribble and learn from it what semi-educated adults mean by the term ‘ideology’. Apart from a certain amount of stylistic folderol, not hard to isolate, the whole thing is ideological through and through, yet nothin’ at all to do with what everyzombie seems to think in and around Castle Podhóretz.

To conclude with a formula definition, one can pick it out of Big LEW’s first paragraph in the obvious article , neglecting some dubious alternatives that only litter the joint up:

An ideology is a set of ideas ... proposed by the dominant class of a society to all members of this society....

The key words are ‘set’ and ‘dominant’ about equally. If it is not systematic, or if it is not a tool for mastery, it simply ain’t ideology. Period.

And I wish you, sir,
Healthy days.

---

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[1] Well, yes, there is no topic announced. This way, Dr. Bones, you can have Plutarch and Agatha Christie at the same time. Or feel free to suppose that I have no notion where I am headed. (( No matter: everythin’ to do with the wingnutettes and wingnuts is Liberty Hall, innit? ))


[2] Make that specifically 5 November 1688 in the (older) calendar of the Middle Religionism:

On 3/13 November the invasion fleet entered the English Channel through the Strait of Dover in an enormous square formation, 25 ships deep, the right and left of the fleet saluting Dover and Calais simultaneously, to show off its size. The troops were lined up on deck, firing musket volleys, with full colours flying and the military bands playing. Rapin de Thoyras, who was onboard one of the ships, described it as the most magnificent and affecting spectacle that was ever seen by human eyes. William intended to land at Torbay but due to fog the fleet sailed past it by mistake. The wind made a return impossible and Plymouth was unsuitable as it had a garrison. At this point, with the English fleet in pursuit, Russell told Burnet: "You may go to prayers, Doctor. All is over". At that moment however the wind changed and the fog lifted, enabling the fleet to sail into Torbay, near Brixham, Devon. William came ashore on 5/15 November.

Prayers were out, Lord Mammon was in like Flynn.

A glorious day of turnabout indeed, Dr. Bones, and not just meteorologically. Our from under Dutch Willem’s overcoat come we all! (By and large & *mutatibus mutandis).

A mildly curious day in other respects as well: if my software for the New Religionism be reliable, it was 11 Muharram 1100, which if presented as 11.I.1100 looks as if it had been imported straight from Planet Turing.

And for sure it was the eighty-third anniversary of the Fifth of November par excellance, that memorable moment in Middle Religionism that featured an aborted human event our now AstroTurf™baggers really ought to make more of. Just finishin’ what M. Gui de Fawkes began are they, no?


[3] I mean, naturally, that if anyzombie then alive had been such a hot-house flower as Freelord Rilke was back before His Lordship of Mammon took the world in hand. To the extent such creatures did exist, they would have been only infant-mortality statistics, had the collection of statistics commenced, which it mostly had not. The past can be a very foreign country, Dr. Bones!


[4] It also might not.


[5] Hegel and M. de Kojève and Neocomrade Freelord Prof. Dr. F. Fujuyama might have fun by proposing to define True Freedom as "freedom from independence," but that is only another rainy-day game.

(( A shame not to be lysdexic enough to make a confounding of ’turf’baggery and GOPT®UF tolerable. Oh, well.... ))


[6] Were the Greater Texan language in need of more irregular verbs, as I think it is not, one could make this a grammatical feature:

(Active voice) *Neocomrade S. Schwartz bígmanages Bubba.
(Passive voice) *Bubba clings to Neocomrade S. Schwartz.

and similarly

(A) *The ‘lamestream media’ bígmanage Wendy, the Welfare Queen.
(P) *Wendy the W. Q. clings to the L. M.

No existing verb is irregular in that particular way, however, which reinforces my doubts about the advisability of the proposed Destructive ©®eativity. But Hermes knows best.


[7] The P&I kiddiemasters word themselves a bit differently dependin’ on whose Uppers and Lowers are gettin’ gored, but I believe that phenomenon is secondary.

(A) When a Neocomrade S. Schwartz wants to rouse his home-team rabble against their POTUS with talk of "elitism and condescension," he appeals above all to envy of those tax-return numbers. Barry the Abominable has "never worked a day in his life," and, more importantly, he certainly won’t have to in future.

(B) By contrast, when a Neocomrade Dr. R. H. Limbaugh wants roughly the same rabble to think well of Himself’s golfin’ pardners and ‘bidness’ buddies, to revere the Right Uppers, their natural Betters, he does not push the envy button, but spins his dittobrains some "Whig pastoral," as (I believe) Schlesinger Minor called the product in The Age of Jackson.

The locus classicus of Whig Pastoral comes (a tad backhandedly) from Comrade Matthew Arnold, and it is so good that here’s a hefty chunk of it:

Show him [Paddy the Feenian fiend] our symbolical Truss Manufactory on the finest site in Europe, and tell him that British industrialism and individualism can bring a man to that, and he remains cold! Evidently, if we deal tenderly with a sentimentalist like this, it is out of pure philanthropy. But with the Hyde Park rioter how different! He is our own flesh and blood; he is a Protestant; he is framed by nature to do as we do, hate what we hate, love what we love; he is capable of feeling the symbolical force of the Truss Manufactory; the question of questions, for him, is a wages’ question. That beautiful sentence Sir Daniel Gooch quoted to the Swindon workmen, and which I treasure as Mrs. Gooch’s Golden Rule, or the Divine Injunction “Be ye Perfect” done into British,–the sentence Sir Daniel Gooch’s mother repeated to him every morning when he was a boy going to work: “Ever remember, my dear Dan, that you should look forward to being some day manager of that concern!"–this fruitful maxim is perfectly fitted to shine forth in the heart of the Hyde Park rough also, and to be his guiding-star through life.

I trust you see, Dr. Bones, why I take these two seemingly different spins and twistifications to be primarily similar, both about sh’qálîm &c., the difference between envy and emulation being only a second-order affair.

It would not take a very accomplished rhetor or agitprop artiste to turn both examples upside down and make the customers or patients or victims envy Sir Daniel Gooch -- or make that somebody they have heard of, Bill Gates or M. le baron Georges du Soros -- and crave to be just like Barák Husáyn O’Báma.