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"
No comments:
Post a Comment