Come Meet Perry Mason III, Everybooby!

Dear Dr. Bones,

Another week, another whight-wing señorito of whom few hearers have heard.

Today’s neospecimen is likely to interest us in the neocomradological community a good deal more than it interests Wally Wombschool, or the shapely Mizz Cindy from Wasilla, or even The World’s Greatest Yaleodrama™ist.

I would say, "Somebooby must have gave it a bad tip about where to get its stuff published," except that it is expressly blurbed as bein’ already a hired hand up the slippery slope to Castle Podhòretz, where classy drool about the Fedguv Constitution ought to be welcome enough, provided, of course, that it can show two _nihil obstat_s an’ one _¡imprimatur!_.

One of the things that that obstood imprintation in a tonier e-district may have been that Party Neocomrade (eight class) R. X. Richman is not authorized to affix "Esq." after the freelordly johnhancock. Our Hate-’68 nobility an’ gentry originally went neo- under the impression that they were defendin’, not smashin’, the traditional _shibbolôth_ of Academe, among them that legal commentary is best left to well-credentialled _Juris Doctores_, in return for which the freelords an’ Ziocomrades graciously abstain from teachin’ Joe the Wurtzlebacher how to unclog a water closet. _Suum cuique tribuere_, as it were. Plus, up to a point, _suum cuique bene olet_.

¿Perhaps it was the pajamas?

I mean, kiddiecons who do not distinguish -- who militantly resist distinguishin’ -- between their slumberwear an’ their street clothes are not likely to be expected by their factional Betters to worry about "Esq." and a’ that. Why anticipate that Master Wally an’ Mizz Cindy will care exactly what is, or what ain’t, on the C.V. of a PNC-8 RXR neomechanism?

Well, I betcha the kiddies don’t care, but, more important, I further betcha they will not be ravenously wolfin’ down this mess of pottage no matter where it came from. Unfortunately a scribble that could not make the cut at CommonTerror magazine will, accidents and hoaxes apart, read not unlike the sort of scribble that gets accepted there. The difference between Manhattan Island and the proverbial ‘Dubuque’ was not simply what letter grade ought to be awarded to metropolitan scribbling, but involved the nature of the product purveyed, the _causa materialis_ of _The New Yorker_ magazine. [1]

***

So much for literature / rhetoric / agitprop.

The factional or AEIdeological interest of the thing (for me) is it makes one wonder how well the PNC-8 RXR mechanism has grasped its own team’s talkin’ points. Like many, or even most, ‘conservative’ ‘intellectuals’, it does not (I think) much *enjoy* scabbin’ for its Daddy Warbucks an’ its Uncle Scrooge _y su Tio Ruperto_. In its heart of hearts, or its cold, steel-claptrapped mind, or wherever, it probably fancies itself a sort of Eddie Burke look-alike: Eddie was a stout defender of the "Venetian oligarchy" of Brit Whigs, yet nowadays the latter is far more likely to be dredged up and dusted off by Burke groupies than vice versa.

We may, I think, fancy the PNC-8 RXR neomechanism secretly cherishin’ the hope that "He sacrificed to [P]arty what was meant for [M]ankind" need not be the last word, that -- to leap at once to the flaming walls of extravagance -- America’s Otherparty will be chiefly remembered by the court historians of Princess Posterity for havin’ occasioned the eloquent an’ ingenious defenses an’ apologies of P. E. More, an’ I. X. Babbit, an’ R. X. Richmond, plus perhaps a few lessers of that ilk. [2]

To that should be added an epicycle or pænumbra about the Judæostatist or CT-magazine angle here, it being a great deal less extravagant to fancy some folks over on Team Zhabotinskiy imaginin’ that Uncle Sam must at last prove to have been but a footstool for Hyperzion. [3]

Figuratively, that would reduce the Fedguv Constitution to bein’ one leg of the _Zukunftshocker Zions_. Clear enough, but the _literaliter_ of the business is not so easy to work out.

The Jewish Statists are, or behave as if they were, well aware of the dificulties. Not only have they signally failed to borrow Madisonian constitutionalism from Wunnerful US, they prefer that their Tel ’Avîv statelet go constitutionless altogether. Evaluating this preference is itself a tricky matter, for how can a mere dummy-_zimmî_ decide _ab externo_ whether the Greatest Demographic™ has made this decision on Kantian lines, for everybody in general, or for Themselves Alone?

Essentially the same question has been endlessly addressed as a matter of reconciling Judæostatism with ‘democracy’. Given the way the D-word is actually used, that enterprise make nailing Jello™ to the wall seem a rational occupation. There might be at least a little conceptual progress made, then, by narrowing the issue and inquiring what sort of constitutionalism would be best for The Greatest Demographic™, subdivided into (A) best for Themselves to practice, and (B) best for Themselves that we others should practice.

Sub-subdivisions amongst different sorts of dummies and _zimmiyyîm_ could be added, if necessary. It is not antecedently obvious (¿is it?) that the GD Folk would be best served by any one species of constitutionalism common to, say, the United States of America and the Arab Republic of Egypt.

I am not sure it would be ridiculous to cut out the middleman, as it were, and wonder directly whether or not it is better for The Greatest Demographic™ that the US Fedguv be able or unable to ‘mandate’ purchase of health-insurance lottery tickets from secret-sector business corporations. After all, the interests of the GD Folk come into this question at least two different ways, both plain as day: in the short term, via "My son, the [millionaire] doctor," and, eventually, in the form of how healthy, both zoölogically and fiscally, the _zimmiyyîm_ of central North America ought to be permitted to become.[4]

Let me know what you think, sir.

Happy days.
--JHM

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[1] I just noticed, O Bones, that the word ‘quality’ is ambiguous: in one sense, the quality of the Richmondite drool is simply ‘C-’. But the Q-word could also be used to point towards "amateur, fake-technical legalese" or the like.

"What it tastes like" is a thing’s quality, then, but so is "How good it is."

Further research is indicated.

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[2] ’Tis a pity, sort of, that the late Freiherr Prof. Dok. von Strauss, who was better at this parlour game than anybooby, was not interested in the local institutional history of the _Heimatland G*ttes_. Various dummy-_zimmî_ epigones have, indeed, attempted to remedy Massa Leo’s scandalous oversight or near criminal disdain, but I fear they are so exceedin’ly epigonal that the less said about ’em, the better all ’round.

For that matter, his freelordship was no proper Hyperzionist. Up on Planet Leostrauss, I presume respectable kiddies are indoctrinated that all of the Greater European _tiers état_ is the footstool, and seated on the throne is ... ¡ta-DAAA! ... Freedame Philosophia. With Massa Leo assistin’ at Her Majesty’s whight hand, naturally.

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[3] To say ‘permit’ of what it would be impossible, or in impossibly bad taste, to forbid is dubious, and not only because it is so likely to give offense.

But there you are, Dr. Bones -- I see no way of adequately discussing ‘ObamaCare’ and SmirkCare and the like without bringing up life-and-death questions -- questions precisely of *comparative* life and death. "In for a penny, in for a pound," say I: let us talk even about the possibility of deliberately poisonin’ the wells of the Lesser Breeds Without so as to keep their numbers down an’ thus preserve Western Sieve as we know an’ adore it.

I don’t say actually DO it, for Pete’s sake!

"So, who is your ‘we’ *this* time, Kemo Sabe?"

Dear Dr. Bones,

The economic weather being what you can see out the MacL@@han Tube for yourself, it occurs to me to take a little _Schadenfreude_ upon those poor souls (poor judgers, anyway) who have pitched their ideological tents high atop the Great Blue Hill of H*rv*rchussets . It may not be quite Mount Washington up there yet, wind- and precipitationwise, but I ask you, sir, ¿five hundred millimetres of downpour on Friday? ¿¿Then six hundred on Monday?? ¿¿¿In August????

Even back in more settled times, the Blue Blazers’ self-inflicted situation was maybe a little problematical. "Conveniently located on Market Street in Bestembrighton, across from the Palace of Public Broadcasting," as the real estaters assured everybody, truthfully enough, never implied convenience vis-à-vis anywhere else in particular. Or did not imply it so explicity as to make a fraud litigation look promising.

If I remember my CliffsNotes™ to Comrade Professor Veblen whight, though, it may be that our provincial nobility and gentry select such out-of-the-vulgar-rut spots deliberately, to establish that they can afford to domicile themselves where the landscape is almost as sublime as the maintenance expenses. ’Tis not exactly CONSPICUOUS consumption, to be sure: the GBH itself may--nay, it does--stick out like a sore thumb, yet to spot the not un-McMansionlike abodes of the Blazers nevertheless requires either powerful binoculars or an engraved invitation. Or being on the receiving end of the aforesaid maintenance expenses.

(( Probably I had better move on, though, for as a mere Chicagolander by birth I have never grasped even the _literaliter_ of RE in MA: all that lovely waterfront land, choice properties that anywhere else would have been snatched up at once by Goulds and Rockefellers and Morgans first and foremost, with the Great Blue Hillbilly subclass of also-rans not very far behind, but here obviously belongs (I presume, legally) to the readership of, pardon my Prole, _The Boston Herald_. About the last place the spiritual scions of Governor Winthrop would care to be caught living in 2011 is the town named after His Excellency, an arrangement which can be explained by airport whiff and roar for the last few decades, but still, ¿how about the fifteeen score years before that? Similarly with Dorchester, Revere, Lynn the Unmentionable, and many more.

(( Conversely, ¿what on G*re's green earth do the GBH (and their worldly Evenbetters) find special about Weston 02493, "median income for a household in the town was $153,918 ... 97th most expensive zip code in a _Forbes_ survey in 2010"? Though pleasant enough, I suppose, that joint might have been picked by randomly throwing a yardarm, or a polo stick, or a Powe®Pointe® at the map. ))

But seriously, Charlie-on-the-MTA(-once-every-other-decade-need-it-or-not) finds himself unpanicked, somehow, even though "If Republicans win, we all lose money."

The _¿Kemo sabe?_ issue is blatant, although I guess it is barely possible his blueship is talking about Medicaid and the like, about, that is, our dear MA’s collective access to the Fedguv trough. In context, however, it seems all but certain that he is referring rather to secret-sector specuvestment and investulation, on Wall Street and elsewhere.

Perhaps our best analytic course is to work backwards from what we have in hand, stipulatively *defining* the WGBH ("We, the Great Blue Hillbillies") subclass as those who, on the one hand, possess at least a little gamblin’ money to lose in an up-market casino like NASDAQ, but, on the other hand, neither carry cards for the Party of Grant and Hoover nor think of themselves as members of The Class, on Whose behalf that neo-organization’s operations are now, and always have been, conducted. "Affluent without being positively needle-challenged," if you like. [*]



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[*] Dr. Marx and the Muses and you, sir, and I are not obliged to agree with the Blue Blazers’ self-classification, or with anybody else’s. We’d be in an impossible pickle if we were, considering that at least 9,843.06 Homeland™ers in ten thousand are absolutely sure they themselves personally belong to a blessèd and mysterious entity they love to call "The Middle Class."

(( The last word on that silly drool, as far as I am concerned, may be allowed to the bard O. E. Mandelshtam:

В Петербурге мы сойдемся снова —
Словно солнце мы похоронили в нем —
И блаженное бессмысленное слово
В первый раз произнесем . . . .

(( Words don't come much more _bessmyslennoe_ than “The Middle Class.” Not in Yank English, anyway. ))