27 March 2010

Ah, Dr. Bones! The Radiant Effulgence of _les belles-lettres qannádîennes_ hath ascended to resplend upon our palæosabbath!

’Tis sort of like "Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning" [0] today, doncha know? Except for the palaeoreligionistical connexion, of course, and the neobile ’n’ venom, and the fact that instead of that mundane hippopotamus [1], the R. E. of Qan. Lit. comes offerin’ everybody a swell deal on some used camel jokes.

The camel’s nose is in thy tent
Qannádâ!
Free speech is gagged and straightness bent!
Qannádâ!
Avenge the heckler patriots
Who die the death of endless cuts,
Before the window of opportunity shuts,
Qannádâ! Dave’s Qannádâ!

"Just kidding, Señor Torquemada: I was never more than in B’rons’vîq Hadasht [2] once for about half an hour. Qannádâ is "all your misfortune, and none of my own," sir. Whereas Neocomrade Ann, Baronness Coulter in the peerage of Wingnut City, well, . . .

" .. How about this, Your Churchship? Qannádâ the Qurst lets Her Ladyship out of the dungeon in exchange for Neocomrade D. Frum and a future draft pick? Or howa about Neocomrade D. Frum plus Neocomrade J. Kuhner and two draft picks? (...)

"Your Churchship has never heard of Neocomrade J. Kuhner?! Well, the pet google can fix that up pronto:

’Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a radio host in Washington DC on WTNT, a columnist and writer. He is a regular contributor to the commentary pages of [_America’s Moonpaper_] , where he writes a weekly column, and has written for _Human Events_, National Review Online and _Investor’s Business Daily_. He is also the president of the Edmund Burke Institute for American Renewal, a Washington D.C. think tank devoted to integrating minorities into the conservative movement. The Institute produces a monthly magazine, _Reflections_, to which he regularly contributes. He is also a radio personality, appearing often as a guest or fill-in host of the "Savage Nation" and the Jerry Doyle show.
’Kuhner was BORN IN MONTREAL . . . ."

*** ... and now, enough of that! ... ***

The Muses and you and I are safe enough from the iron talons of the Qannádî Inquisition[4] , I guess, Dr. Bones, for me to ask out loud how it is that neoscum, like the Kuhners and the Frums and the Davey Brookses and the _Freidamen_ R. von Wisse [4] , regularly drifts downwards from them to US, whereas it is almost a proverb that ordinary scum RISES?

No rule without a probative exception! The (hopefully) one and only Neocomrade Dr. M. A. Weinstein-Savage was NOT born at Montreal, only in the Bronx [5]. That fact probably helps explain why the hoity-toity neogentry from Castle Podhóretz up the slippery slope over there to your starboard, Dr. Bones, keep poor "Michael Savage" at arm’s length and more.

Which brings us back to the Radiant Effulgence of Qan. Lit., in the sense that Neocomrade D. Solway is not quite so hoity-toity as he might be, gallantly risin’ to the defense of a (_dhimmiyya_!) neothuggess in distress. Crown Prince Johnny and Princess Neoterica have degenerated sadly from what thei elders were back in the palmy days of the Hate-’68 Movement™, but not yet to the point of makin’ used camel jokes and Danish cartoonin’ the crux of Hyperzionistical agitprop. Ann, Baron Coulteress, is bound to seem at least a little distressin’ to really refined and hereditary neocomrades.

Be that as it may, the Radiant Effulgence of Qan. Lit., hereinafter REQL, lays considerable rhetorical stress on a dichotomy of camels and aeroplanes. Unfortunately, it does not get the maximum mileage out of either, if the present keyboard be the judge. The camel I shall abandon to neo-Levantine hands, and that is itself rather my point: the REQL certainly should have pointed out that the fiendish Natives completely failed to invent heavier-than-air aviation, despite all the silly guff their apologists talk about Islamic ‘science’. [6]

The aeroplane, in fact, was invented right here in Qannádâ -- North Carolina bein’ close enough to Québec City for government work. And though that claim might be quibbled against, surely nobody who has been marketeered into buyin’ any release of the Western Sieve (®) neoproduct whatsoever can suppose Terror From On High to have been invented anywhere else than in The Grand and Glorious West. Natives, even the non-fiendish ones, simply are not up to that sort of trick any more. If, indeed, they ever were. Everybody around here knows that, does she not?

I guess the REQL will accuse me of "blaming the victim" when I point out that the Big Bang of 23 Jumádae l-’Awwal 1422 could never have happend, had the Wright stuff never come to pass. On the other hand, even the most militant and extremist of self-crazed neoterics can scarcely deny the factual substance of ny victim-blaming. (Can she?) No Orville and Wilbur would have meant no Guernika, no Rotterdam, no Hamburg, no Dresdan, no Tokyo, no Hiroshima; not even a tiny little Belgrade during Secretary Albright’s War! And, in the fullness of parallel time, it would have no "9/11" either.

This is what anybody outside the Rovan Empire [7] or some less select loony bin would call a "just a fact," no?

The REQL and its ideobuddies can have their "Our Western Civilisation," as far as I am concerned, the intellectual history of Old Europe being more than enough for the present _dhimmí_ to be getting on with. Nevertheless, the self-servicin’ flim-flam that the neocomrades like to package that way--and even the Huntin’tonian Clashism (®) neoproduct, to some extent--are not without all basis in the former Real World. The Natives of the world have indeed borrowed a long, long list of miscellaneous appliances from Greater Europe, even though it a joke both tasteless and witless to call any such inventory ‘Civilisation’ or even "a civilisation."

Quite a number of items on that laundry list of appliances could be classified as DIRTY laundry.

Or, since the REQL presents itself as a literary neo-gent, "poet and essayist ... [and] author," let us shake our own tiny Eng. Lit. spear a little and call the dirty appliances ‘petards’ -- _i.e._, appliances capable of being deployed against Wunnerful US from whom they have been borrowed. Most likely without proper royalty payments, too, though that is rather a different neogrievance.

So then, Dr. Bones, when Party Neocomrades Rosencrantz and Guildenstern get their comeuppance in the old play, may one not describe them as "blameworthy victims" or the like without gross inaccuracy?

If perchance I got that one wrong, perhaps you could explain whether it is wrong (A) because R&G are not to be called ‘victims’, or (B) because there is no issue of ‘blame’ involved, strictly speaking, or (C) for some other reason?

And I remain, sir,
Yours for the Advancement of Qan. Lit.

__
[0] Should be "Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning SERVICE," for Massa Tom ’10 was a High Anglican even before he perverted to Christojudaeanity from H*rv*rd Buddhism. See http://www.bartleby.com/199/23.html. (( Notice that after June there might be a problem about which ’10 it was, in the case of less notorious persons. ))


[1] You promised me, Dr. Bones, that you would ask Dr. Liddle and Capt. Scott why the poor unpoetic beast was not christened a _*potamippus_, as all analogy clearly demands that it should have been, Hippopotamus, "Horse River," being obviously the site of one those sea battles--_nautomachiai_, not *_machonautiai_!--that fall somewhere around the end of Thucydides and beginning of Xenophon.

Did you ever get an answer about it?


[2] http://www.canada-photos.com/data/media/10/new-brunswick-lighthouse_2321.jpg


[3] What do you suppose the neo-S*m*te for ‘inquistion’ is, Dr. Bones? After all, the father of _M. le président du conseil des ministres israëliennes B. de Nétanyahou_ has written on the Spanish version at length, http://tinyurl.com/yku7cz3 , and I should think his (the Daddy’s) chauvinism would forbid publication in Greater Texan alone, despite it bein’ scarcely a tract fit to edify the masses of Hyperzion.

For Modern Written Palestinian, Doniach gives [604a] _maHákimu t-taftysh al-’isbániyya_, which suggests that the late M. de Ben Yéhouda [http://tinyurl.com/ykekt8v] will have neoconcocted himself somethin’ like maybe _*pittûsh_.

But Father Zeus knows best, sir, and especially when I can’t lay my hand on that cheap paperback bilingual dictionary. (The neo-S*m*te wikipedia just transliterates our _dhimmí_ word: http://tinyurl.com/yk24yam .)


[4] http://tinyurl.com/232rwb . And further http://tinyurl.com/yfrw8jl : "Wisse is ORIGINALLY FROM MONTREAL, Canada and earned her PhD from McGill University in 1969...."

(( Somebody should advise the learnèd wikipædiatricians that "Montreal, Canada" sounds dreadfully tacky and provincial and parochial, especially when the danger of anybody this side of Rio Limbaugh FL thinkin’ first of Montreal, Pennsylvania, is negligible. ))


[5] http://tinyurl.com/yl35ldr


[6] Like "Dr. Saliba demonstrated through examples that this spirit of innovation and liberation from Greek sources was not only confined to the field of astronomy. He described that implementing Islam’s laws of inheritance requires complicated computations and these computations necessitated the development of new arithmetic tools and eventually the new discipline of algebra by Al-Khwarizmi. As a result a new discipline, _ilm-al-faraid_ (the science of inheritance) came into being, once again thanks to Islam’s unique juridical requirements. The concept of the decimal fraction was introduced, toppling the cumbersome use of Greek numerals. Dr. Saliba also showed several Latin manuscripts produced in the Middle ages that in fact wrote numerals from right to left (in keeping with the Arabic tradition) while the remainder of the text was in the usual direction from left to right. Ibn-al-Haitham (d: 1039) overthrew the old Greek model explaining how the eye sees and conjectured a model of vision that we still use today. Abu Bakr al-Razi (Latin Rhazes d: 925) had the intellectual courage of challenging the Greek master Galen and describing the clinical differences between smallpox and measles. These examples served to demonstrate that science in the Islamic world was far from being a preservation exercise, rather we glean that the incoming Greek sciences were approached with utmost criticism, were comprehensively attacked and most of the sciences, especially astronomy, were established on new footings." [http://www.khwarzimic.org/islam/report_saliba.htm]


[7] ’’That is not the way the world really works anymore. WE are an Empire now, and when WE act, WE create OUR OWN reality. And while you’re studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- WE will act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. WE are history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what WE do.’’

[ http://tinyurl.com/533kj ] (( It can NEVER be quoted too often, that gem! ))

13 March 2010

The Cleric, the Brat and the Turfbags



Any wingnutette or wingnut who actually knows about the Frankfurt School must be taken seriously, Dr. Bones. But please remember that seriousliness comes in a variety of paradigms or models, of which that of Grand Ayatollah Michael Bin Ledeen is one of the neo-tackier. [1]

For instance, it occurs to me that Señorito de Brooks y Podhóretz itself could probably spot a horkheimer at fifteen yards or so, especially in bright sunlight with the winds of neonuttiness behind it.[2] Neither Big Mikey nor little Davey is a real heavy-hitter for the Rio Limbaugh Mensas, I fear. Neither is an instance of le formidabilité from sheer weight of pedantry, I mean, as even a sub-par-lookin’ Leostraussian must prudently be assumed to be until the contrary has been established beyond cavil.

Alio modo: the Muses and you (and even the present keyboard, maybe) are not likely to learn anything from such specimens beyond that of which they are neospecimens, namely P&I, Party ’n’ Ideology--of neoterror simply as such. By contrast, when we steel ourselves to endure the over-all and systematic self-dingalingism of Neocomrade Mr. H. Mansfield of H*rv*rd, there is a reasonable chance of picking up a few pearls of general knowledge. [3]

Whether the Very Rev. Neocomrade M. Ledeen properly understands the Port Huron manifesto is a question I cannot get interested in. Whether Don Davidito misunderstands it is even tediouser. (Not even to speak of how old the American Ideological Enterprise, LLC, will be on its next birthday!) If we forget about all such bologna, what’s left for Ayatollah Tweedledee and Master Tweedledumb to be quarrelin’ over? The true nature and probable destiny of the Astroturfbagger Movement, presumably.[4]

Not an unpromising topic, were any competent discussants available. But these two neocomrades are not exalted above the P&I gutter high enough make an adequate survey. His Eminence thinks astroturfbaggery is swell, Señorito de B. y P. is not so sure. A decent political adult might award the rattle to Tweedledumb (little Davey) on that basis alone, but he who strives to be an informed practitioner of neocomradology will demand at least a few additional data points. Since Big Mike is not gonna to help make little Davey’s case for it, I guess we must go re-read what it said for itself:

The New Left then, like the Tea Partiers now, had a legitimate point about the failure of the ruling class. But they ruined it through their own imprudence, self-righteousness and naïve radicalism. The Tea Partiers will not take over the G.O.P., but it seems as though the ’60s political style will always be with us — first on the left, now the right.

(Don Davidito’s bottom line, THAT is.)

The señorito is more hostile to its own P&I neocomrades than I remembered, which may be grounds for subtraction of a few Prudence Points from its score rather than from the turfbaggers’. Plus subtract a few Coherence Points also, Dr. Bones, insofar as DBP leaves the customer wonderin’ how, if this Menckenoid "conspiracy of kittens" never does manage to topple the Washington Monument, as it says it does not expect that they will, anybody will be able to tell they were imprudent.

Or, at any rate, why anybody sane would care. Who now worries about the prudence or imprudence of Neocomrade Zillionaire H. R. Perot’s dupes and marks? Submersi sunt quasi plumbum in aquis vehementibus, don’t you know? And a good riddance, too.

At this point, sir, I believe we may award the rattle to Master Tweedledumb with some confidence, even without working through the alleged self-righteousness and naïvety and radicalism. Grand Ayatollah bin Ledeen deserves to lose on formal and procedural grounds, it seems to me, insofar as he simply does not respond to any of the points in the señoritoly indictment.

Does the Rev. think Astroturfbaggery will take over the Party of Hoover and Atwater? Does the Rev. consider that the turfbags are in fact prudent and humble and sophisticated and moderate? Maybe he does, maybe he does not, maybe he thinks some of that but not the rest -- there is no way to tell.

The only point quite unmistakable is that the Rev. Bin Ledeen approves of the turfbags and wants to suck up to them. But that is of no interest to anybody but future biographers of His Eminence, should there be any such. The neocomradologist can make nothing of that without knowing WHY he approves of the turfbags. It is, in the abstract, as likely that the Rev. likes his kitten conspirators for their imprudence as for their prudence, for their arrogance rather than their Uriah Heep shtyk, and so on down the Brooksian list. And the abstract is exactly where we stand with this guy.

For that matter, His Eminence may even want to suck up to the turfbags *without* likin’ ’em, for, if that were his case, Dr. Bones, what better plan for the Rev. than to talk about the hatefulness of old enemies of the Hate-’68 Movement™ rather than reflect upon the character of present company?

"If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all" is never quite the whole megillâ, Dr. Bones: there is always the flowers that bloom in the spring, should all else fail.

So then:

BROOKS 42, BIN LEDEEN 15


And I wish you, sir,
Healthy days.

______
[1] Like all the present keyboard’s pronouncements, whether expressly posted or not, that one is strictly me judice and entre nous and comes with a nothing-back warranty for the first thirty hours, concepts and workmanship excluded.


[2] Davey Boy’s homebrew Geisteswissenschaft product has, I suspect, been strained carefully to make sure that Frankfurtisms, call ’em, do not turn up unexpectedly in the customer’s soup. The sort of customer for whom Davey scribbles--one thinks of her, Dr. Bones, as a Starbucks Gal™ sipping a lactem over to the Cambridgeside Galleria in Zipcode 02140, or the Beaconhillside outlet would do [2.1]--does not care to be outshone by her servitors, as she plainly would be if she essayed to holler "Waiter, there’s an adorno in my soup!" but could not pull it off for lack of nerdish technical vocabulary.

That Don Davidito spares such a fine lassie’s finer feelings certainly does not mean that it does not itself have a tolerably adequate notion of St. Theodor. [2.02]


[2.01] By golly, sir, there she blows! At http://tinyurl.com/yk77zdh (in Transcaroliana, dial http://tinyurl.com/yhnqjvu )

[2.02] http://tinyurl.com/2p85a4 (( Wiesengrund?! ))


[3] Only "a reasonable chance," however. The Leonine guru’s latest performance in the path of weekly standardisation is of better quality than anything comparable on offer here in Padschamastán, but then, beatin’ out poor old Neocomrade Rear-Colonel V. D. H. Blimp is no great feat. Being a card-carryin’ Mister of H*rv*rd, though, Neocomrade H. Mansfield may be deliberately dumbin’ himself down to suit his target market. That is, he may be doin’ on this one occasion the same trick that I take Don Davidito to be perpetually engaged in. Father Zeus knows best.

01 March 2010

All Presidential Politics is Local


How about a quotation from almost my favourite scribbler in all the world, Dr. Bones?


Eight hundred words is only eight hundred words, so naturally Master Ross [Douthat] had to leave somethin’ out. Probably a whole gaggle of not insignificant somethin’s.

The barkless dog this Democrat noticed most is that it did not cross the mind of the publicist to wonder whether the success --let us stipulate the success--of Neocomrade Governor M. E. Daniels, Jr., in Indiana might have to do with the peculiarities of Indiana as well as of the Party hero himself.

In the United Kingdom there was once a rightist-to-reactionary politician of whom it was said, after he was established as Prime Minister, that he made "a good lord mayor of Birmingham in a lean year." And every schoolboy remembers Dr. Harvey's little zinger about Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, who "wrote philosophy well for a Lord Chancellor." I.e., a candidate's C.V. ought to jibe with the real-world requirements of the position that she seeks in deed, and not in word alone.

Whether any of our G.O.P. geniuses consciously reflect that "After all, the USA is only Indiana writ large," I have no idea. It would account for a couple of strikin’ characteristics of that neocrew, however, to attribute some such notion to them.[*] And they could act like that even without ever consciously thinkin’ ’bout it.

Healthy days.

___
[*] As a perfunctory gesture at the so-called ‘bipartisanship’: it goes quite a long analytical distance towards explaining the unhappinesses of Mr. Clinton's administration, I’d say, that Arkansas does not "look like America" much more than Indiana does. (Of Alaska, we need not speak!)






Play that again, Sam, only the other way, please.



Eight hundred words is only eight hundred words, so naturally Master Ross [Douthat] had to leave somethin’ out. Probably a whole gaggle of not insignificant somethin’s.

The barkless dog this Democrat noticed most is that it did not cross the mind of the publicist to wonder whether the success --let us stipulate the success--of Neocomrade Governor M. E. Daniels, Jr., in Indiana might have to do with the peculiarities of Indiana as well as of the Party hero himself.

In the United Kingdom there was once a rightist-to-reactionary politician of whom it was said, after he was established as Prime Minister, that he made "a good lord mayor of Birmingham in a lean year." And every schoolboy remembers Dr. Harvey's little zinger about Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, who "wrote philosophy well for a Lord Chancellor." I.e., a candidate's C.V. ought to jibe with the real-world requirements of the position that she seeks in deed, and not in word alone.

Whether any of our G.O.P. geniuses consciously reflect that "After all, the USA is only Indiana writ large," I have no idea. It would account for a couple of strikin’ characteristics of that neocrew, however, to attribute some such notion to them.[*] And they could act like that even without ever consciously thinkin’ ’bout it.

Healthy days.

___
[*] As a perfunctory gesture at the so-called ‘bipartisanship’: it goes quite a long analytical distance towards explaining the unhappinesses of Mr. Clinton's administration, I’d say, that Arkansas does not "look like America" much more than Indiana does. (Of Alaska, we need not speak!)





HTML being far more interesting and important than anythin’ whatever scribbled in the Party Chinese of Señorito Douthát y Podhóretz, I think the big issue here is whether to fix up the template so BLOCKQUOTE does not imply double spacing and everything in italics, or just forget about it altogether. The drawback of the latter plan is that when not chez soi, BLOCKQUOTE is all that exists: I have yet to find anybody else's peanut gallery where the TABLE\TD gizmo works intelligibly, let alone right. What do thee think, sir?

Happy days.