Dr. Cuteless Goes Social-Scientistic

Dear Dr. Bones,

Axiom I. "People tend to do what other people say they should do"

(( Just look at Citizen Wiener of NY, shamelessly pandering to popular demand ))

Axiom II. "Political people think of ‘other people’ as the other party"

Dr. Cuteless evidently takes my own view that Psociology is half journalism and half rubbish. She puts her former into Axiom I, savin’ the hard stuff for Axiom II, which is, of course, Holmesian drool.

If you are a hack pol in the _Heimatland G*ttes_, the pertinent Others are the CCC, Campaign Contributin’ Classes. _Sine quibus non_.

Now admittedly Hill City City and the Commonwealth of Blue Masses are atypical of Father Zeus’s Country as a whole insofar as the aspirin’ local _Kontributionsmeister_ has only one party and about a tenth to benefact.

In some ways the Otherparty of Massachusetts looks like a lot more than a tenth, but this misleading appearance largely depends on a steady (?) influx of funds in carpetbags. Abandoned to themselves, the neoscalawags would be exclusively the Party of Adams (P. A.) an’ Fattman (R. X.) [*], untroubled by the comparatively patrician likes of M. Willard, second Freelord Romney in the peerage of Foxcuckooland. The piously G.O.P. sector of the CCC simply cannot afford any better product than the Adams-Fattman line. Poor unemployed Mitt, I understand, wound up fundin’ the whight-wing CCC in these parts rather than vice-versa. A nice arrangement when they can get it, no doubt, but ¿how often is that?

Truly, our MA is not like the others. [**]

Dr. Cuteless is not much better with facts than she is with Principles. ¿How often does one catch America’s Otherparty actually exhortin’ the selfservative kiddies to "get all judgmental and vindictive"? Or find us donkeys formally preaching "¡Go thou and get busy and do what you feel like!"?

Cuteless appears in fact to be maintainin’ that Otherpartisans feel some sort of mysterious obligation to behave the Elmer-Gantry-cum-Torquemada way we good guys like to present [***] them as typically behavin’, whilst Lieberals and Demoncrats keep trying to live down to "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion" (as subsequently amended), to what the Daughters of Virtue & Sons of Wisdom , a limited-liability Company, have always supposed us unrespectable to be like.

There is no mystery here, of course, only evidence that stereotypes are often not without a good deal of empirical support.

Happy days (through affordable healthcare)
--JHM


___
[*] Hey, ¿what’s with This video has been removed by the user " ?

Though I trust the video was thoroughly incriminating, were I the Freijungherr von Fattmann I’d certainly get rid of that self-portrait as well: ¡talk about "not because you were an Eagle Scout"! Even that thing the _Worcester Telegram_ got hold of would be less unsatisfactory. It does not make his freelordship look any older or wiser, or not much, but at least there is the buddin’ promise of a truly Republicanian set of jowls.

The student of neocomradology may wish to compare and contrast this freejunker’s self-presentation before the boondocks of Worcester County with a similar example involvin’ a national figure, involvin’, indeed, the Otherparty’s current ‘conservative’ ‘intellectual’ hearth-throb. Nobooby can have compelled The Smirk of Janesville to make himself look like that on his freelordship’s own Fedguv website.

I infer that the CCC must rather like what we may call "the Eagle-Scout look," at least for their junior hired hands. Later on in life, the jowls an’ that pasty-white apoplectic-lookin’ complexion -- Judge Baker of TX , say, or Dr. Limbaugh of EIB -- become more attractive. Though opposites from a medical point of view, morally the William Howard Taft look an’ the Eagle Scout look are much of a muchness, both indicatin’ a resolution to march forth an’ service one’s Party Paymasters without stint or limit. (The smirk appears to be optional.)

*

[**] Some real political Psociology about the exact identity of MA neoscalawags with money to burn on their Adamses and their Fattmen would be worth reading. My own informal notion is based on those of them who advertise their corporations on the Three Weird Sisters of Boston squawk radio, a subgroup bound to be unrepresentative.

Even at the highest level, though, small-town Chambermaids of Commerce such as I conjecture to be the chief consumers of the Adams-Fattman(-Ryan) product are very important for the Anatomy of the Elephant. The Poujadist or "small business" element don’t actually *run* the Party of Grant and Hoover -- or even come very close to runnin’ it -- but they do tend to be, as it were, the "respectable Republican cloth coat" in which the real Party paymasters like to wrap themselves up before addressin’ Televisionland and the electorate. To persuade the latter to sympthize with the misfortunes of ScroogeBank NA, or H*rv*rd Buzzard Health Partners, or NewsCorp, or the Warbucks Widget Trust (&c. &c.) would be almost impossible, but fortunately the good folks on the potatoe couches don’t know beans about money on anything but the smallest scale and can therefore often be jollied into vaguely supposing that "American business" means the Bailey Building and Loan Association from It’s a Wonderful Life .

¡¿Surely Jimmy Stewart would have advertised on WRKO an’ WXKS an’ WTKK-FM if they had been available in 1946?!

*

[***] I think ‘present’ and not ‘perceive’ is the just verb here. Not because anybooby on either side is consciously insincere, but because so much of the stereotyping is far more an intramural ritual than a serious fresh attempt to see and describe what the class enemy is actually like.