29 July 2012

Who ARE These People?




(( "Chick Checks Out the Chikin" ))


"Superman comes to the Supermarket" [*] it ain’t quite:

Sarah Palin waded into the controversy surrounding Chick-fil-A and gay marriage by tweeting a picture of herself and her husband Todd visiting one of the the fast-food chain stores Friday after a Texas campaign stop.

“Stopped by Chick-fil-A in The Woodlands to support a great business,” the former Alaskan governor and vice -presidential candidate tweeted following an appearance at a rally for Republican Senate primary challenger Ted Cruz outside Houston.

At the Cruz rally, Palin said: “Jason, you’re going to have to take me on our way back to the airport later. We drive by a Chick Fil-A. We don’t have that in Alaska,” she said, referring to an aide. “Love me some Chick Fil-A. (sic) So we’ll go there, Jason, on the way, OK?”

Palin urged Cruz’s supporters to visit Chick-fil-A, which has been mired in controversy since its president said the chain supports “the [B]iblical definition of the family unit.” Palin told Fox News this week that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s comments on the chain amounted to “thuggery.”

Happy days.

_____
 [*] "Thank you, Comrade Mailer."



20 July 2012

When the Story Hits the Sieve


Dear Dr. Bones,

One can hardly wander half a verst out in WWWonderland without running across strangers and aliens who are performing miracles of benefaction aimed evidently at oneself.

Take, for example, the Poet Laureate of Northwestern Civilisation,

>


a far-flung freelordship whom one would expect to concern himself with, say, creatin’ the literary happiness of Prince Patrick Island, 76° 45’ N 119° 30’ W.

But not at all: his freelordship is usually (and here) found addressin’ the wombscholars an’ freedowndumbees of Pajama Junction NJ, apparently with some thought that, through them, and aided by the Squire of Simon Pajama, ¡World’s Greatest YaleoDrama™ist!, his freelordship of Solway will somehow be able to dictate postpolicy and neomorality and especially ... ta-DAAH ...What Happened in History, plus maybe a little belles-lettres, I guess, there is any time left over, to our own dear Heimatland G*ttes.

Paddy McTammany ought to be grateful, of course, but . . .

But please ¡let’s not talk about me!

Instead, let us look under the Exmas Tree and see what his boreal freelordship has left for us this time. Hmmm. Another large sack of coal, it looks like.

"Corruption, delusion, and mendacity" sound pretty coal-like to me, anyway, who think traditionally of fossil fuel a dirty and smelly rather than as workin’ wonders for the portfolioes of the Chosen. His freelordship bein’, as we happen to know, an ornament of the Greatest Demographic™, the term ‘corruption’, comin’ thus from the Laurel Keyboard [0], cannot mean anything strictly Calvinistic or Augustinian. Paddy and Eye are not, however, entirely sure that it means no more than what your run-of-the-mill Tammanyphobe means by it.[1]

Perhaps it does not much matter, though, for his freelordship keystrokes of "mass deception" a little farther down in a fashion that suggests that in the freelordly neogeography, the province of Deceptio Magna comprehends and incorporates the inferior jurisdictions of Corruptio, Delusio, and Medacitas. Think of Cæsar on Gaul.

Deceptio Magna appears to be a very large ideoprovince. Very large and very deplorable:

The ability of dominant elites to influence and even control the thought-world of vast populations to an historically unprecedented extent is now an integral part of contemporary life.

Kinda fun to notice that, if one had no notion of who his freelordship is, one might think at this point that one was in for a hell-fire sermon against Rupert Firstlord Murdoch and Kiddiemaster Ailes et hoc genus omne, pajamatarians and YaleoDrama™ists not excluded.

But no, of course ¡that can’t be whight!

And, sure enough, when the persiflage clears a little, one finds that Deceptio Magna is not so much a matter of that abstract high-falutin’ neotrinity first proclaimed, but subsists at a more meat-and-poatatoes, yet still a neotrinitarian, level:

[T]he three consummate trumperies (sic) disfiguring the era in which we live:

(1) the Palestinian “narrative,”
(2) the climate change shakedown, and
(3) the ascent of Barack Obama to the most powerful office in the world.

Truth is now at a discount as never before and has been increasingly replaced by promiscuous (sic) and sovereign mythologies. [2]

Freelord Solway seems to have nothin’ new or otherwise remarkable to impart about any of these Manifest Signs of the End of Times, though of course that does not hinder the freelordly gush in the slightest.

Moving on, then, to the bottomline, Paddy expected to find all the freelordly Ends tied together neatly, perhaps in the form of the (not obviously faction-crazed) maxim that to tell a story is not the same thing as to make an argument, and a much lesser thing than to discover and expound a proof.

That theme would in fact not do perfectly for this puddin’, I admit, but the fault is rather his freelordship’s than my own: "the ascent of Barack Obama" is simply not parallel to the other two. Mostvolks outside the Eng. Lit. Dept. would casually call The Régime a ‘fact’ rather than a ‘story’, I betcha.

Freelord Solway’s storification of BHO is unobjectionable to those of us who have been expensively educated, but only because we take for granted that the S-word is polysemic, that there can and do coëxist (say) "The Story of Jonah and the Whale," which can never have happened, and "The Story of Willie Horton," which certainly did. Along with all sorts of intermediate and dubious examples there is no call to go into here.

His freelordship’s own puddin’ theme is a disappointment. Eliminate all the symptoms of thesauroma [3] with which the last paragraph is festooned, and it comes to only this, that Judæostatism, and extraction-based Capitalism, and America’s Otherparty would not need to worry what stories their enemies tell unless somebooby out there in Televisionland and the electorate actually thinks them to be true stories.

You can’t get much trivialer than that, now, ¿can you?

Happy days.
--JHM

___
 [0] Rhymes with "Golden Microphone."

 [1] "For those of [them] at Rio Limbaugh," that would be chiefly the ‘corruption’ that exchanges Spiro Agnew Brand® paper bags full of Federal Reserve notes for political favors.

[2] I think his freelordship probably knows what the words I have sicced (and there are others that might have been) signify for most Anglophones, but feels licenced by Laureateship, or maybe only by neoself-esteem, to marshal them poetically rather than prosaically.

[3] "the malignant swelling of Roget’s gland"


07 July 2012

Little Ronnie Radosh bashes Psocialism


Dear Dr. Bones,

"There are no more socialists — if they were honest they would change the name of the party .... [Socialism] evokes the nightmare of the Soviet Union, whose leaders named themselves socialists.” Today, he ["the most well-known [0] Parisian intellectual, writer Bernard-Henri Levy"] maintains, European socialists are essentially like American Democrats — there has been no ideological left in France that matters since the effective demise of the Communist Party, which was “the true exception française.

¡Alas! Comrade Ronnie of the Seventh (?) International, as His now Effulgent Freemightiness of Radoszcz once was, brings this news so extremely belatedly that HFM might as well be talkin’ ’bout the late Queen Anne’s vital signs.

I suppose perversion must always be to some extent in the mind of the pervert.

Clearly H. E. FM. relishes the "History is bunk" side of his new-found ideobuddies. This, however, is maybe a little problematical from the careerist angle, since it is questionable whether Wally Wombschool an’ Cindy from Wasilla could successfully be astrofunded to take an interest in so obsolete a geezer as this one, were he to confine himself narrowly to the events of Century XV-XXI-LVIX; to matters, that is, not yet entirely effaced by the salutary paw of Destructive ©®eationi$™.

One might speculate, a tad uncharitably, that the AstroTurf™-Bagger Class regale the kiddiecons with the likes of HEFM as what might be termed "dogmatic vaccination." As follows:

Even today, Master Wally an’ Mizz Cindy might accidentally run into Ms. Clio in a public place. Say, when accompanyin’ their brats to the local Palace of Postliteracy, formerly the public library. In the long rule, the thing to do, obviously, is to make sure that all places without exception--with as few exceptions as humanoidly possible--have been (what the Freelords an’ the Kiddiemasters jubilate over as) ‘privatized’ thoroughly. Left without a hole to hide in, as it were, Clio will then either just curl up and croak, or emigrate to West Neptune, well out of infection range.

Meanwhile, though, it will be better for everybooby involved, if the Wombschool volks have been inoculated in advance with an Ersatzgeschichte that unquestionably is bunk. And that is an ideoproduct which His Effulgent Freemightiness of Radoszcz possesses primâ-facie qualifications to prepare.

It may seem rather a slender factional niche, Dr. Bones, but you are to consider that the Party of Grant & Hoover maintain a number of others that are not in principle different. Take Neocomrade Associate Justice C. X. Thomas, or Neocomrade Prof. Dr. Fu’ád al-‘Ajamí of the Johns Hopkins University, specimens whom we have agreed operate basically on the lines of "You can trust ME, Neocomrades! Eye am not like the others. ¡Not like THEM in the least! And now, let me fill you in on how very icky the others are . . . ."

¿Surely His Freemightiness of Radoszcz is turnin’ essentially that same trick?

No doubt this general class of whight-wing niches an’ refugia is ‘narrow’ in the sense that only a tiny numerus clausus of Party neocomrades can subsist on any given one of them.   If "the others" suddenly started perverting to Hooverism en masse, the YCTM-INLTO shtyk would break down in a jiffy, no doubt about it. Yet as long as it is not overused, I see no reason why it should not continue workin’ indefinitely for the chosen few.

Perhaps you, sir, can think of such a reason.  If so, Paddy and Eye will be pleased to learn what it may be.

Happy days.


(( It is maybe a difficulty for today’s McScenario that H. E. FM. is certainly in no position to give the selfservative kiddies inside poop on the abominable Frogs, modern as well as mediæval and ancient, a project which his freemightiness spends at least as much time on here as on bunkifyin’ our Miss Clio. Still, we have previously observed that once the Squire of Simon Pajama has made an acquisition for the freelordly stable, it (the acquisition) is allowed to range rather widely. A special pet like Don Ricardito de Fernández y Podhòretz does not have to discuss (Blacks or) Tans in more than every tenth scribble, if that.
(( And Mammon knows best. ))


___
[0] A faint whiff of subliteracy--not displeasing, considering the source-- emanates from that neocomradely wordin’. As opposed, that is, to "the best-known Parisian intellectual," which seems to Eye and to Paddy not only impeccable but also not notably stiff or formal. To be sure, we do not go in for linguistic pajamatarianism any more than for political. What is fine by us could easily seem impossibly stuffy to Master Wally an’ Mizz Cindy ensconced on their potatoe couches.