"little to knock her off her stride"

Dear Dr. Bones,

"And The WINNA is . . ."

. . . not hard to detect (¿is it?) in the following account prepared for the use of the New York Times Company [*]:

[1] Warren demonstrated her ability to combine a professor’s command of the economy with the plain language of a populist fighter. [2] Khazei, co-founder of a national service program, spoke about the importance of building coalitions to advocate for (_sic_) important causes and solve problems. [3] Conroy offered anecdotes about the people he met while walking the state this summer, saying their stories illustrated economic problems in this state [4] Bob Massie, a former candidate for lieutenant governor, said he is in the race “to see capitalism move to a next step...to be sustainable and just.” [5] Marisa DeFranco, a little-know immigration attorney, may have offered the night’s biggest surprise, punctuating her responses with fiery appeals to fight Washington. [6] The sixth candidate, engineer Herb Robinson, made the crowd laugh with a few one-liners about his girth and his marijuana use, but otherwise looked nervous and uncertain on many questions.

The individual slaves of Sulzberger, Comrades N. X. Bierman and H. W. Robinson, are perhaps letting their own druthers show a little more than corporatist decorum ideally demands. To add to the circus fun, the two sets of druthers don't seem to coincide, though one cannot tell which is whose.

Good old Massa ‘Bob’ is obviously a goodguy, far exalted above all stiff formal nomenclature. There can be little doubt that one local cog in the Great Chain of Fishwrap is a Massietarian.

The cog's colleague is almost certainly a pious adherent of the cult of St. Elizabeth of H*rv*rdy, though this guess *could* be in error, inasmuch as if one were to encounter "a professor’s command of the economy" in a dark alley at 0300 hours--or in the columns of a certain debate sponsor at any hour-- one would take it as sarcasm. At a Lower Merrimack Valley institution of tertiary educationalism, however, and not too long after sunset, to take it at face value, as an attempted affirmative direction of the customer’s attention, is, I believe, safe enough.

¡Everything looks suspicious once you get started! It occurs to me that Citizen ‘Bob’ reforming -- no, say rather "guiding the future evolution of" -- _der Finanzkapitalismus_ single-handed might also be hostile caricature, one belonging to the "nonsense on stilts" subspecies.

***

What I think we ought to do, Dr. Bones, thee and eye, is take refuge with The Master. Starting from "Form trumps matter," the NYTC comrades must look positively ‘awesome’ to the sound Aristotelian. A clearer, or briefer, report card on the sixpack I can hardly imagine. Scribblers with so solid a grip on Form as these two exhibit should not be accused of weaselry unless the evidence against them is unmistakeably damning.

(( A formal epicycle: a guesser with a flair for symmetry might guess that items [1]-[3] reveal the Biermanite druthers, and [4]-[6] the Robinsonian. Or maybe the other way around.

(( In that case, we must not miss the next thrilling episode, wherein B. & R. (or, as the case may be, R. & B.) will, presumably, switch sides of the sixpack and thus allow the student to break their seeming tie. If the Elizabethan likes ‘Bob’ better than the Massietarian likes Her Beatitude, well, ¡That will be that! ¿Will it not? [**]

(( I suppose it would be worth knowing which the Freelord of Sulzberger prefers, even though (so fasr as I know) his freelordship and the Corporation, _¡Rex in æternum vivat!_, are technically not permitted to vote in MA. ))

Happy daze.
--JHM

___
[*] Carpetbaggers and carpetbaggery are everywhere you look in this show. If it keeps up, obviously Senator Fratboy should be reëlected by unanimous acclamation. The chances of finding a better representative of the Carpetbag Principle than he are negligible.

Non-Peripatetics tend to lay a great deal of stress on whose carpet is getting bagged, that of Hooverville (with Scottboy) or that of the Great American Muddle Class (with Ms. Lizzie). "Not very philosophical of them," I calls it.

(( Also to be said, by the way, in favor of Comrades Bierman and Robinson is that the M. C. tomfoolery appears only once, and that in direct quotation of Her Beatitude, "“No one has any question where I stand. (...) I fight for m*ddle cl*ss families and nothing, nothing will change that.”

(( The trouble, of course, is that nobooby from either party whom Her Beatitude is likely to go up against would dissent from that supposed unquestionability by the tiniest iota. Or iotum.

(( A second trouble: though ’tis indeed true that not a single booby from sea to shining sea questions where all our hack pols and mornin’-glory reformers stand on Muddle-Class Family Values, poor Ms. Booby has no better idea than the Muses and you and I what any of ’em take THE Muddle to be located, mathematically. The most one can confidently say is that they *never* mean anything so uninteresting and polemically useless as "percentiles thirty-four through sixty-seven of the U.S.A. income-and-wealth distribution."

(( But Mammon kniws best. ))

*

[**] I take it, you see, that R. & B. have already given up Messers Conroy, DeFranco and Hazy--plus "[t]he sixth candidate, engineer Herb Robinson" even more so--for hopeless. But if you can see a glimmer of silver lining in their NYTC obnubilations, please let me know. I definitely need all the help available anywhere to keep on pretending that I do not know how this one comes out.