"My research on grassroots lobbying laws reveals"

Dear Dr. Bones,

"Where do they [1] dig ’em up?" one wonders. What sort of grass is it that has roots with labels attached to it at all, let alone a label like "Middleclassick Professor of Social Scientism at the College of Ste. Marie de la Poujade, South Succotash WY"? [2]

It wouldn’t take a bicycle to challenge this meospecimen, sir. Why, I betcha it couldn’t park a pencil-sharpener straight!

Speaking of "straight," Neocomrade (Fifth Class) Herr Prof. Dr. J. X. Milyo manages to sound much like one of those evil shysters it is so zealous to lynch: it (our neospecimen du jour) seems to possess not just a vague, but positively an inaccurate, idea of which direction its client the Kiddie Selfservative Movement (KSM) propose to be movin’ on in. As if it had never so much as heard of AstroTurf™Baggery (ATB) until about five minutes before it sat down at the keyboard and amazed its Faculty Club friends by crankin’ out the present trippa e bologna. The friends will doubtless have been expectin’ a product more like, say, the late George Fitzhugh’s Sociology for the South ....

I beg your pardon, Dr. Bones, my gaster is more than a little flabbered at the moment, for ’tis not often that one encounters a confessed devotee of Soc. Sci. who pretends to speak for Rio Limbaugh and Port Ste. Lucie. [3]

Now the Muses and you and I deprecate social scientism almost enough to satisfy the average dittobrain, though that which we depreciate SS by comparison with is not dittobrained, but mostly our own Ms. Clio, reviled as a witch at Wingnut City and throughout Foxcuckooland under Their Ford’s ever-immortal label of "bunk."

It never occured to me before running into NC5 JXM to wonder how the Baní Ibn Khaldún relate to universal attorneydom. Perhaps I had subconsciously noted that ‘khaldoonery’ rhymes with ‘buffoonery’? In any case, practitioners of the Black Arts never seemed particularly alarming, whereas the lawyers come armed with writs and injunctions and foreclosures and liens and estoppels (?) and the like, little things that could wreck one’s whole day given half a chance. Whereas even Talcott Parsons of H*rv*rd in all his glory , nay, even Max Freiherr von Weber in all his Pracht ...!

No doubt khaldoonery would have been a monster worthy of Baron Victor had it ever gotten its act together, but, it was perfectly obvious in advance -- not to mention in retrospect over two centuries and more of Destructive ©®eationism™ during which somehow nothing as useful in practice as an eggbeater or a corkscrew ever got created -- that so splendid a performance as Social Scientism undertook to produce and direct is never going to get off the runway. We’d have already been enslaved to the khaldoonists for many decades, Dr. Bones, had any "science of society" comparable to the sciences of locomotion been a possible thing. Lucky us that it ain’t! [4]

Nowadays lots of kiddies and neokidies and not a few kiddiemasters, genuine or wannabe, devoutly believe in a supposed "science of management." This amusing self-delusion and not-so-funny attempted self-boostin’, however, has little to do with khaldoonery of the traditional type. Even at South Succotash WY, a "Middlebrow Perfesser of ..." would be titled differently towards the end of its title, were it into the H*rv*rd Victory School racket and not the Ibn Khaldún racket.

As a practicin’ khaldoonist, our neospecimen is unimpressive:

"My research on grassroots lobbying laws reveals that these regulations are not written in a manner accessible to laypersons."

Though perhaps the neospecimen did not original-intent the kiddies to understand that this reference is to its professional and tertiary-educationist ‘research’? Father Zeus knows best!

As to "not written in a manner accessible to laypersons" and (a little farther on) "... 0.9 on a 100-point scale in a readability test. Going by such tests, it would take 34 years of formal education to understand that paragraph ...", well, naturally words fail me, Dr. Bones, to find such noises emitted by a social-scientiser, even an off-duty one! As you know, the late Talcott Parsons of H*rv*rd is my personal highwater mark of lysdexia induced with malice prepense.

The neospecimen is typically socioscientistic, though, in its desire to drag in some numbers to make its neoself look more wissenschaftlich than reality can allow. Anybody who actually believes in machine-rated prose is eo ipso a barbarian and a dingaling. Khaldoonists have it in for literature almost as bad as they have it in for history, I fear, though the isolated example of Dr. I. A. Richards and his Practical Criticism perhaps suffices to establish that khaldoonery need not be totally toxic when dumped into the lily-pond of belles-lettres.

The neospecimen is even more typically wingnutty on a couple of other related fronts: (1) it is an extreme and militant Philistine: kiddies and neokiddies in the P.J. Corral are to despise anybody with (a right to put) "Esq." after her name, because she is likely to think and scribble well above the pajamatarian level. And (2) it is completely impervious to goose-and-gander or pot-and-kettle considerations: as noted, its own alleged profession would have to close down shop at once if pellucid self-expression ever became mandatory.

Point (2) may be the best short answer known to the great question What’s the Matter with Rio Limbaugh? The kiddiemasters have talked their dupes into thoroughly believin’ in Buckley Minor’s Quod licet Jovi , non licet bovi -- and, oddly enough, ’tis not for Bessie the Cow that kiddies and neokiddies mistake themselves! This brain disease has been diagnosed under a variety of different labels, most recently--and intolerably tertiary-educationalistically [5] --as "epistemic closure." Yuck.

The present coarse and illiterate keyboard usually types " wombschoolin’ " to point at the delusions of Zeushood cherished by the Big Management Party base an’ vile and by the ’turfbagged classes more generally, now and then tossing in "self-exceptional" and "self-indispensable" and niedergedümmte, etc., as particular occasions may demand. The usage is not perfect, I admit, especially insofar as knowing that the sweet puppies of Redarkenment have been reared in a wombschool -- deliberately trained, that is, never to think of an immense and almost R. L. Stevensonian number of things that G*re’s green earth contains -- does not indicate the content of the kiddies’ misindoctrination on the positive side.

Still, almost anything at all has to be better than "epistemic closure," no?

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

___
[1] By "they" the questioner presumably refers to Neocomrade R. L. Simon, Freelord and Kiddiemaster Padschama in the peerage of Wingnut City, distinguished yaleodramaturge, little big friend to all the whirled, . . . .


[2] One of these decades, Bones, we shall have to actually read Frankenstein and not just work from late-night TV. For the moment though, we can make do with what we have: you are to envision M. le Baron du F. as havin’ original-intented to produce le Surhomme poujadiste -- Miss Rand’s "John Galt" or thereabouts -- only to wind up with somethin’ more like Mr. Hobbes’s "Leviathan." Not the Wicked State itself, I suppose, was M. la monstre franquensteinienne, but at least it was the wickedest statist ever, not to mention eight feet tall and shambles when it walks.

The villagers, who may not have always related to their appointed Betters quite so successfully as we ALL look respectfully up towards the battlements of Castle Podhóretz nowadays, find that M. la monstre insists on despoiling their flocks and herds and milks and honeys and figtrees and wines (an’ the whole pastoral m’gillâ) appoint a delegation to climb up Sinai II and lobby with Baron Victor, bringin’ along some peaceable pitchforks only because, due to an almost impossible glitch in Absolutely Free Trade that can’t possibly happen again in two hundred million lightyears, has resulted in a temporary, and no doubt merely local, shortage of walkin’ sticks.

And who should be at the head of the forefront of the vanguard of this up-hill lobbyin’ expedition but "Jeffrey Milyo, who is the Middle..." &c. &c. ?


[3] Another indication that the political perversion of NC5 JXM may be only hours old is that it does not notice that is usurpin’ prerogatives that Neocomrade Dr. R. H. Limbaugh reserves unto Himself.


[4] There is Leostraussianity, to be sure.

That dark cloud comes with a couple of built-in silver linin’s, however, the greatest of which is that you simply cannot do it with only half a brain, not even should you tie the latter behind your back. Indeed, in addition to callin’ his own cranky ideoproduct ‘philosophy’ rather than ‘science’, St. Leo of Greater Chicagoland went to extremes about prescindin’ from all crude libido dominandi such as the Heathen affect, even layin’ that cuckoo’s egg that was all his own in the nest of Plato.

M. de Voltaire spoke of "a pack of tricks we play on the dead," and nobody does that shtyk better than St. Leo did it. Nevertheless, the dead, being dead, are not fit objects of die Wille zur Macht. ’Tis no fun pushin’ other folks around if they can’t feel and resent and futilely resist the pushin’, after all! Even if, per impossibile, St. Leo had managed to cloudcuckcoofy poor Plato, the Party of Big Management and of the AEIdeology would not be the least bit advanced thereby.]


[5] Worse than that, really, since in fact this neoverbiage is but PSEUDO tertiary-educationalist lingo. Khaldoonists will love "epistemic closure," no doubt, as will all the victims of PES, "physics envy syndrome." We humble, though, may hope "epistemic closure" dies out swiftly and darwinianly, as being ill-adapted in the extreme, apart from these two narrow niches and refugia.