More Claved Against Than Clavin’

Dear Dr. Bones,

This morning’s pajamaclad looser distinctly puts me in mind of Mr. Matthew Arnold and Mrs. Gooch’s Golden Rule, or the Divine Injunction ‘Be ye Perfect’ done into British [1]"

"Ever remember, my dear [Andy], that you should look forward to being some day [Imperial Klavan of the Kolorblind Kiddiecons]."

‘Imperial’, by the way, is at least a little more than pure spoof, for ¿Hath not Karl, Freelord Rove, laid it down that WE are an Empire now, and when WE act, WE create OUR OWN reality (&c. &c.)?

The visibility of the Rovan Empire, of its acts and its [destructivist] creations and its new-model Realities, may be a bit problematical at times, especially when his freelordship’s Party happen to be out of executive office, but the theory of Rovan imperialism is clear enough. Anyway, "Invisible Empire" has already been put under moral copywhight by a certain organization which you certainly won’t find *me* specifying in lurid detail. [2]

Perhaps we might coin and utter "the Transparent Empire of Tee Putty"? What the puttymoulders are up to is not impossible to see through, after all. [3]

Moving whight along from words to things, Kiddiemaster Klaving indeed claves [4] almost up to the "¡Be ye perfect!" mark in the path of his Party an’ Her AEIdeology. If his freelordship misses a knavish neotrick, I miss him missin’ it.

The exact arrangement of knavish neotricks is his freelordship’s only vulnerable point, I think, and naturally there may be different arrangements of them from scribble to scribble. Here everythin’ Evil in the Garden is made to revolve around "network news," which is bound to please Wally Wingnut an’ Cindy from Wasilla as they recline in slumberwear -- an’ in profoundest self-sorrow -- upon their potatoe couches of state [5]. It also, as I mentioned in the first note, makes good sense as a distraction from the spectacle of Firstlord Newscorp bein’ mobbed by Lilliputian Brit pols an’ paparazzis.

As a considered account of the correlation of farces, however, I don’t think mainstream mediacentricity is quight whight even by Wingnut City standards. Kiddiemaster Rove cannot have untended his Imperial manifesto to herald an ‘empire’ of mere entertainment. His freelordship definitely intended somethin’ a little more neoreal than that, though it serves his freelordship whight, in a way, to be so misunderstood or travestied after venturin’ on a partisan redefinition of so ordinary and vulgar a term as ‘real’. _Securus judicat orbis terrarum_: the Quackers never really got away with skyjacking ‘friends’ either, as St. Jack well points out somewhere.

Plainly, though, his freelordship original-intented the Rovan Empire to be a racket in which his freelordship himselt an’ other obviously predestinate Uppers --our old pals the Daughters of Virtue & Sons of Wisdom, L.L.C. -- dictate what is to be done, an’ then the forelock-tuggin’ classes go an’ do what is good for us. [6] If his freelordship did not mean that, he would presumably not have deployed the word ‘empire’ at all. The administration of the Rovan Empire is to be vaguely ‘postmodern’, no doubt, yet underneath all the superficial trendiness of methodology lies essential the same old "Me Tarzan, you Jane" substance as ever. Or make that "US Godzilla, you Bambi."

Nobooby can actually big-manage (the former ‘govern’) on the basis of foolish soundbarks like "We report, you decide." What Rovan imperialists require is far more like "We decide, and you report back when you have complied in full." This is not a new song. [7]

So, then: the Jungherr von Clavingck appears to the present keyboard to have taken the cliché notion of agitprop as "a fourth estate" for several times what it is worth. Mr. Walter Cronkite was never a Mussolini to the _Heimatland G*ttes_ and the chances of Kiddiemaster Ailes, or even the World’s Greatest Yaleodramatist himself, ever becomin’ one are too slight to be worth pooh-poohing. His freelordship is letter-perfect (as far as I can make out) in the twistifications an’ spins an’ miscellaneous clavin’s most likely to advance the Kiddiecon Kause. His freelordship’s failure is not to appreciate that such advancement can never amount to single-handed establishment.

Fraud is necessary, but not sufficient.

Happy days (through affordable health case)
--JHM


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[1] I guess one ought to make that "done into Foxcuckoo."

Speaking of Foxcuckoos, can it really be pure coincidence that this factious drool should appear even as Rupert, Firstlord Newscorp in the neopeerage, must appear in the dock to be outrageously persecuted by a very inferior class of kangaroos, the Parliamentary?

¡How are the Whighty fallen! (Mr. Bulger too.) An’ fallen into such dreadful paws . . . .

***

[2] ’Tis not for you and me to put ideas into the dittopans of selfservative kiddies, sir.

(( Hmm. It occurs to me that, up to a point, the kiddies’ very wombschoolin’ an’ freedumbin’ down an’ pious allegiance to Their Ford’s ‘History is bunk’ may reduce the amount of wreckin’ their neocrew can wreak. Imagine, for example, if the Freiherren von Böhner und von Kantor were *deliberately* tryin’ to reproduce the constitution of Ancient Poland in Father Zeus’s green and entrepreneurial Homeland™.

(( Still, the traditional theoproduct was not labeled _peccatum ORIGINALE_ for nothing. Dogmatic mythographers of the former Christojudæandom have disagreed widely as to exactly what is so ‘original’ about their product, but not one ever suggested that P.O. requires to be independently neo-invented by each successive degeneration. _I.e._, the freelords an’ kiddiemasters an’ puttymongers of today need not have heard of _zlota wolnosc_ and _nie pozwalam_ to reproduce them. Or if ‘reproduce’ be ruled out as not strictly accurate in the case of the blissfully self-ignorant, then say "produce the effective equivalent of" or the like.

(( Furthermore, Neocomrade Fedguv Representative M. M. Amble-Bachmann’s recent troubles hearin’ shots supposedly heard ’round the world warns us what can go ’rong when kiddiecons an’ kiddie-conners think they do know a little bunkstory. Better ignorance and bliss, I’d vote, than flat out unwhighteousness about elementary matters of fact. ))

***

[3] A small world, sir: it appears that the Freiherr Kindermeister Andreas von Clavingck is a literary gent: "In 2008, he released a war-on-terror political novel, _Empire of Lies_."

Should you have any pots at home that require boiling, Bones, half an ounce of "Jason must confront the buried fear that he’s inherited his mother’s insanity and can’t control his own dark urges" ought to take care of them _pronto_.

***

[4] Verb intransitive: I clave / thou clavest OR clav’st / she claves / we clave / ye clave / they clave \\ clavin’ is us \ more claved against than clavin’

As to the semantic side, no doubt you can work that out for yourself empirically. "¡Don’t ever let even Foxnews tell you what is in _The Critique of Pure Reason_!

(( _Dixit_ Schopenhauer, more or less ))

***

[5] _Cf._ _kichô_ in Waleynese.

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[6] What happens to be even better for our Betters than for us humble. But that plan makes excellent sense, ¿does it not?

***

[7] A couple of variant versions cross my mind. General Washington is quoted _chez_ Mencken as having vouchsafed that "Government is not eloquence, it is not reason -- it is force." The learned glossator elaborates

Bad government is that which is weak, irresolute, and lacking in constabulary enterprise; when one has defined it, one has also defined a bad bishop, cavalry captain or policeman. Good government is that which delivers the citizen from the risk of being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily . . . .

HLM pussyfoots, probably quite deliberately, through Church and violence profession around the most pertinent illustration of all, the bigmanagement of a secret-sector business corporation. To put the emphasis in the whight place, then, I prefer to recur to those ever-immortal last words of Charles I Stuart, "An EMPLOYER and an employee are clean different things."