Literary-critical observations on The Next Right (Pat. Pend.)

¡Bienvenido a Rancho Republicánico, Señor Doctor Huesón!

(( That mostly just comes to "Dear Dr. Bones," sir. We will talk about the R.R. address in a moment. ))

As to Espíritu Santo and Party Neocomrade Dr. R. H. Limbaugh, it occasionally seems good to me to mix in a little bit of Spanish lingo. There’s already enough of it, I trust, to set the mortal remains, el cadáver, of Uncle Sam Huntin’ton of H*rv*rd in revolution. If I ventured on anything substantive, I fear I’d soon be more ungrammatical, analfabético, than Miss Eleanor Roosevelt’s worst nightmare idea of a Tee Party thug’s placard.

Do you suppose, by the way, that Neocomrade (Fourth Class) P. Ruffini plays golf, sir? I take for granted that Daddy, El Papá, and Tio Ruperto--that’s Neocomrade R. Murdoch, Firstlord Foxcuckoo, to you and me, so tug your virtual forelock a little, sir--must have taught the lad the game, but I mean, does Don Patricito actually get out on the links, la cancha del golf , much? Or has the Patrician countenance grown gray and pasty from spendin’ too much time indoors neoconspirin’ in the path of Party an’ AEIdeology?

Our preordained Betters are all related to one another, or might as well be, as every peon knows, so if this morning’s effusion of keystokes looks as if it might have come from Il Barone Michaele, who knows?, perhaps Signorino dei Ruffini actually did have a word or two with big Cousin Mikey. He (the nextist señorito) must at very least have huddled with El Almanaque de la política estadounidense.

’Twere hopeless for such peons as the Muses and you and I to compete with la famiglia Barone-Ruffini when it comes to, say, "FL-22 (Allen West vs. Ron Klein), where, oh by the way, we lead." [1] So let us talk about this specimen from the literary / rhetorical / agitation-propaganda side instead of trying to guess election outcomes in advance.

At first sight, I was tempted to suggest we create a whole new dossier for Don Patricito to be first into, one labelled maybe "Gloatin’, Unilateral and Preëmptive (by Party of Grant & Hoover)"

Further reflection calmed me down enough to notice that all gloating is unilateral. And now that I have diligently keyboarded away for a while, I believe you can just file it in the usual place, "Extremism, militant (Party of Grant)" with a CC in "Element, señoritoly, of the KSM."

NC4 P. Ruffini is adequately classified, I think, as a militant, extremist señorito, a neospecimen such that preëmptive gloatin’ is exactly what one would anticipate from the label affixed to it. There being no new Begriff here, there should be no new dossier either. But let me know if you disagree, of course.

I suppose the heart of neodarkness here is this passage,

"We are coming off two successive, ahistorical Democratic wave elections. Democrats have managed to swing something like 52 House seats in the last two elections. They are at an historic high water mark, as President Obama recently acknowledged. The fact that Democrats were able to pad their majority in 2008 would not have happened but for the fact that Obama changed the electorate. As I noted right after the election, Republicans in Congress were killed by the fact that young people voted straight ticket -- for Obama and then for Democrats in Congress."

Now "What could be more señoritoly than that?," I ask you. Don Patricito conceives it as a sort of violation of Nature, a diabolical miracle, for America’s Otherparty ever to lose an election. Should this actually happen on a significant scale, the Nextist Politburo evidently files it away under "historical, A" and tries to forget.

Notice how their laddie paints himself into a bit of a tangle here with two different senses of ‘history’ clashin’ against rather than mutually reinforcin’ one another. Perhaps Don Patricito imagines the court historians of Princess Posterity churchillating centuries hence of America’s party that "1201-1300 EST 20 January 2009 proved to be ‘their most anhistoric hour’." [2]

I can enjoy that imagination myself, even without having a clue what I’d say if challenged to point out the historic high-water mark of anhistoricity in the career of, say, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. [3]

Meanwhile, back at Rancho Republicánico, anybody who has once properly intuited das Señoritobegriff must see at once why Don Patricito here incarnates it to the max. As follows:

Though he feels with his mind [4] that there exist certain villagers, ¡monsters of ingratitude! -- or possibly only the hapless prey of outside agitators -- whose politics is displeasin’ to Papá and Tio Ruperto, Don Patricito cannot strongly know this in his heart [4], for it is flies in the face of all that is right and just and decent, not to mention respectable amongst the Daughters of Virtue and Sons of Wisdom, LLC. Everybody who is anybody at all loves Papá and Tio Ruperto!

That is where das Señoritobegriff begins, but if it ends there as well, ’tis but a shadow of itself, a lovely adornment for las señoritas lindas de Rio Limbaugh but not a weapon for steel-claptrap-minded political warriors. Bein’ a virile neogander rather than any sort of silly goose, however, Don Patricito wants to help Papá and Tio Ruperto bígmanage the family hacienda, that far-flung complex of manors and estates usually known to outsiders as "the United States of America."

This natural (?) desire by the little to help out a little is where the trouble starts, the trouble that leads eventually to grave organs of reference defining the term señorito with distinctly discouragin’ words like "rich kid" and "high and mighty" and "lordly" and [persona] excesivamente fina y remilgada and joven acomodado y ocioso.[5] Y así sucesivamente.

By denotation alone, as opposed to connotation, the dread S-word signifies no worse than "hijo de un señor o de una persona importante," which brings us to the sole respect in which I have tampered with it a little for purposes of inclusion in the El Chipo de Silicio Schimpflexicon : as you have seen, Dr. Bones, I have pinned the label on the tail of NC4 P. Ruffini without knowing or caring who, if anybody, its male parent may have been. Whether one may do that in Spanish without being ridiculous or unintelligible, I have no idea, though I kinda suspect you can.

In English, it is even more fun to stick it to Kristol Minor and Podhóretz Minor and D. Richardovich Pipes, ’71, Ph.D. ’79 , and so on, to little neoladdies whose papá by DNA is genuinely notorious. Best of all is Don Jonasito de Ignoto y Goldberg, the "liberal fascism" twerp, the Mommy of which gets to be its conceptual papá.

Nevertheless, zoölogical male parents are entirely facultative. Feel free, Dr. Bones, to imagine that all political neoseñoritos are the spawn of Daddy Warbucks, whose surname so handily sums up most of what is wrong with ’em.

As a parting shot, I would have you notice, sir, how preëminently señoritoly a crew of neoterics and Destructive ©®reationists that call themselves "The Next Right" must necessarily be. True, even for Schimpflexicon purposes, we can scarcely offer a formal definition of ‘señorito’ that incorporates the feature of wantin’ to bump poor Papá off and probably sideline Tio Ruperto as well, so as to attain unto personal GOPT®UF without stint or limit prontíssimo. The point is rather that NC4 P. Ruffini and its ideobuddies have antecedently positioned themselves so as to invite the imputation of Señoritismus, for who is more eager to get her own private next rights right now than a graspin’ an’ greedy heiress?

Estoy del Doctor Huescón Su servidor, querendo siempre Sus
   Días saludables y asequibles
      JHM

___
[1] Though it was interesting and maybe even slightly profitable to follow up the señorito’s graciously provided link and discover that this alleged Party Neocomrade "Allen West" looks superficially not unlike former Party Neocomrade Alan Keyes, aka "Moshpit Man." On the other hand, Key West appears not to lie in the twenty-second Congressional district, which, as you may know, centers around the well-gated community of Rio Limbaugh and includes such toney waterin’ places as Boca Ratón and Palm Beach (East) and Palm Springs, even a gated hamlet actually called ‘Golf’ -- small world, innit?

If you look at what LEW says about the demographics of FL-22, especially the median age and median income, and compare that with "a Cook Partisan Voting Index score of D+1," you may wish to agree with my amateur guess that the Vast White-Wing Conspiracy has made so much progress down in those parts already that pickin’ up any further easy pickin’s may not be a cinch even with the help of invasion from Planet AstroTurf™ over and above nominatin’ the honourable and gallant Neocomrade Lt. Colonel A. West.

Mr. Cook accounts it a district that "looks like America," close enough, when it votes, but which, in so looking, shows definite symptoms of Frank’s Disease , or call it "Kansas Syndrome."

(( And by the way, they don’t lead by very much: "Republican congressional challenger Allen West’s campaign released a poll this morning that shows West with a 44-to-42 percent lead over U.S. Rep. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton." Plus notice where the poll came from. ))

Mais que sçay-je? "We impart, you deride." And Father Zeus knows best.


[2] Or perhaps whatever hour it was, exactly, wherein President Summers and/or Mr. Barák Husáyn Obáma signed the so-called "Patient Protection and Affordable [Health] Care Act of 2010" into law, sorta.


[2] Nobody who suffers as much from imaginatiotitis as I do would be totally flummoxed by that question. One could always talk around it by, for example, pointing to how historians disagree about Frederick II Hohenstaufen, whose reign has been celebrated as the apex of Reichskaisertum by some but alleged to have scarcely anything to do with it by others. ‘Anhistoricity’ proper does not come in, of course; Big Freddy is bound to get a fair number of pages in any serious manual of Old Euro Sievalisation conceivable, the only issue being what line those pages take about him.

This example of Big Freddy is close enough to Paddy McRuffian for Fedguv work, is it not? The señorito almost certainly meant somethin’ very like what the anti-Frederician faction of the learned mean: little Paddy’s private-sectorian notion of where the holy Homeland™ is headed is intrinsically incompatible with liberalism and democracy and "the Democrat party" flourishing here to any very marked degree, just as the Teutonic historians thought the ‘true’ trajectory for the Ottonian imperium (what they ought to have done) was not towards Frederick II mucking about in Lombardy and Sicily and the Levant the way he mucked. If one of them had labelled the Stupor Mundi ‘ungeschichtlich’ -- and for all I know, one of them may have -- he would not have been proposing literally to wipe Big Freddy off Ms. Clio’s maps, but arguing sub figurâ verborum that History and the Hohenstaufen were not headed the same way in the first half of Century VI/XII/XLIX.


[4] Perhaps it would be better to reverse the Goldwaterism and its flip side here. What do you think, Dr. Bones?


[5] Dear Rio Limbaugh & Port Ste. Lucie, / "It means ‘rich an’ lazy an’ useless." / As ever, / JHM