Wally Wombschool for Congress!

Dear Dr. Bones,

Wally Wombschool can probably coast through life easily enough by becomin’ a Dan Quayle brand Coach Potatoe (®) and reposin’ all his faith--what’s left after he’s laid aside a very safe store for future believin’ in himself--in the balance and fairness of the Foxcuckooland Ministry of Customer Management.

Such outstandin’ qualifications do not suffice to make Wally a plausible pol, however. Not a mainstream Party-of-Grant pol, anyway. Perhaps if the R. Paul dingalingism catches on, weekly neostandards will be even lower in a few years, but that time is not yet.

Meanwhile, if Wally, here spotted doin’ business as "Party Neocomrade (j.g.) A. X. David," seriously wants to move to Washin’ton City and get whipped into line by Eric Ivan, Freiherr und Kindermeister von Cantor[1] et al., he will have to unlearn what he learned at the knee of Karl, Reichskindermeister von Rove, WE are an Empire now, and when WE act, WE create OUR OWN reality!

Whatever the RKM may have original-intented to convey to Mr. Suskind, it can not have been that every rank-an’-file Wally an’ Cindy should go build themselves a Rovan Empire out back behind the garage of their McMansionette in beautiful neoëxurban Rio Limbaugh. Lesser neobein’s like A. X. David have to make certain concessions, rovanempirewise.

"Concessions to reality," we say outside the monkey house, in a language unintelligible to the inmates. But that unintelligibility does not matter, sir, because I should never dream of telling Master Wally and Cindy from Wasilla and all their freelords and all their kiddiemasters what to do. I am only discussing with you what it might be advisable for the monkey-house crew to do with themselves, individually or collectively. Since we do not give a hoot what becomes of them, collectively or individually, we cannot be said in idiomatic English to be ‘advising’ them. (Can we?)

But to the point: the particular reality on which the particular monkey A. X. David has stubbed its factious toe happens to be one of those happy days for Terry Gaudens and us when kiddie selfservatism gets hoisted by its own petard. The august and ever-immortal Five of Nine have recently vouchsafed an oracle very much in favor of the kiddies’ Party an’ Ideology by most accounts. It proclaims that the secret-sector business corporation is to possess free speech rights under Amendment I comparable to those of a lowly zoölogical organism. No doubt the militant extremism of the G.O.P. will soon be demandin’ that the intriniscally superior entity should have far more and much better rights, but they ought to be happy enough for the moment.

But not Wally Wannabe! No sooner was this franchise granted (or re-recognized and restored) to Citizeness Apple of Cupertino CA, then she, the secret-sector business corporation, turned Liberty into License by deploying it against poor feckless Wally! Under the circumstances, Ms. Apple can hardly have been unaware that little Wally was proposin’ to become a Republicanian hack pol, and therefore by definition a stalwart defender of secret-sectorianism all down the line. Hence it would not be crazy to headline this yaleodrama something like

APPLE TO HOOVERVILLE: DROP DEAD!

Ms. Apple has her detractors for other reasons, some of whom surface as peanut-gallery peanuts here. Open-source software is not entirely irrelevant to Wally Wannabe’s personal comeuppance, but to elucidate that connection is more than any of the peanuts attempt.[2] Insofar as they think it open-sourcin’ a Jeffersonian self-evidence, they are fodder just waitin’ for some Paulista Party or AstroTurf™Bag Bloc to come along and chomp ’em down. (Hopefully they will have a very long wait indeed. Time to grow up and get over their physics envy problems &c.)

Meanwhile, no regular Republicanian with any empathy for the spirit of her Party as exemplified by Gen. Grant and Col. McKinley and Dr. Hoover and Goldwater and Atwater and ... and her now contemporaries, can fail to be tempted to Just Bark ¡NO! at open-source notions. I daresay one can unearth a couple of ‘conservative’ ‘intellectual’ señoritos at the kiddie selfservatives’ Tanks of Thought who have performed some strenuous AEIdeological calisthenics allegedly showin’ that the GNU is not that bad an animal after all. But they are utterly unrepresentative: 99.527% of G.O.P. geniuses would side with Citizeness Apple on this one, were they unaware of the factional background. "I know Miss Apple, and she is no public utility!," might they bark an’ bellow.

Pajamatarian Peanut #4, though almost certainly a spoofster, is to be commended for noticin’ this aspect of the matter, which is surely the most important aspect, short of tertiary-educationalist Pol. Phil. discussions about the really fundamental differences between Planet Dilbert [3] and the Party of Grant.

***

The NCj AXD neoünit’s autoblurb is of some interest. The unit’s great qualification for replacin’ Mr. Waxman appears to be simply its not bein’ Mr. Waxman, which seems a bit skimpy to the present keyboard.

Mais que sçay-je?

Less controversially or de gustibus, the AXD unit is definitely no lawyer, as I had guessed from its throwin’ around great chunks ripped out of a reference book for the shyster community Nonwombscholars invoke dictionaries rarely, and would never do so in a case like this one, where it is plain to the meanest intelligence that Citizenness Apple is not bound by any such tin-foil legal chains as Party Neocomrade A. X. David would like to shackle her corporationship with.

Miss Appy may turn down Wally Wannabe without giving any reason at all, or alternatively, WITH giving any-reason-at-all. "It is defamation to claim that (Henry Waxman believes that) the earth is round" would make an admirable example of an any-reason-at-all, though some of Master Wally’s are admittedly not bad either. The only trouble is they have no more to do with the case than the wingnuts that bloom in the spring, tra-la.

Healthy days!

___
[1] His freelordship’s parents had a really wicked sense of humour -- unless ‘Erich’ is just ‘Ari’ in mufti, that is. That question I cannot resolve at the moment because I seem to have mislaid the Crackerjack box that contanins my LeoStrauss brand Secret Decoder ®ing.


[2] About the verb "to advise," Dr. Bones: peanuts who offer detailed suggestions for the NCj AXD unit like "make the app for the Google Android open source operating system" are primâ facie on the Party-an’-AEIdeology side politically and sincerely want to obtrude the said unit into the Fedguv Congress. They are therefore ADVISIN’ their neoguy when they talk like that. (As I am not.)

It is possible, though unlikely, that the point of the scrap quoted was rather to drum up market share for G@@GLE than to benefit Party Neoomrade A. X. David. Even so, the peanut would be at least pretendin’ to advise his dupe. (And that is not me either.)


[3] "Dear Rio Limbaugh, / "Planet Dilbert" is H*rv*rd Élitist for what you good folx call ‘libertarianism’ in Greater Texan. / As ever, / JHM

As to the deep-structure differences, dilbertarians tend to find find the GOPT®UF™ product -- Republicanian brand (®) True Freedumb -- unsatisfactory because the G.O.P. geniuses seem so transparently insincere about it. If they really believed in their own GOPT®UF, they would not bat an eye when Miss Apple big-manages her own affairs her own way rather than the way Massa Tom Donohue of the CCUSA prefers.

As usual, decent political grown-ups have a parallel problem, rhe old clash between the Form of Democracy (hurrah!) and the merely material fact (boo!) that most of the population does not want what theoretical democrats wish they wanted. As sound Aristotelians, the Muses and you and I, Dr. Bones, must of course take the formal side, which implies, I guess, that we ought to like dilbertarians better than regular Republicanians. My own spontaneous reactions are not in line with that particular ‘ought’, as it happens, but please let’s nor talk about me.