"My research on grassroots lobbying laws reveals"

Dear Dr. Bones,

"Where do they [1] dig ’em up?" one wonders. What sort of grass is it that has roots with labels attached to it at all, let alone a label like "Middleclassick Professor of Social Scientism at the College of Ste. Marie de la Poujade, South Succotash WY"? [2]

It wouldn’t take a bicycle to challenge this meospecimen, sir. Why, I betcha it couldn’t park a pencil-sharpener straight!

Speaking of "straight," Neocomrade (Fifth Class) Herr Prof. Dr. J. X. Milyo manages to sound much like one of those evil shysters it is so zealous to lynch: it (our neospecimen du jour) seems to possess not just a vague, but positively an inaccurate, idea of which direction its client the Kiddie Selfservative Movement (KSM) propose to be movin’ on in. As if it had never so much as heard of AstroTurf™Baggery (ATB) until about five minutes before it sat down at the keyboard and amazed its Faculty Club friends by crankin’ out the present trippa e bologna. The friends will doubtless have been expectin’ a product more like, say, the late George Fitzhugh’s Sociology for the South ....

I beg your pardon, Dr. Bones, my gaster is more than a little flabbered at the moment, for ’tis not often that one encounters a confessed devotee of Soc. Sci. who pretends to speak for Rio Limbaugh and Port Ste. Lucie. [3]

Now the Muses and you and I deprecate social scientism almost enough to satisfy the average dittobrain, though that which we depreciate SS by comparison with is not dittobrained, but mostly our own Ms. Clio, reviled as a witch at Wingnut City and throughout Foxcuckooland under Their Ford’s ever-immortal label of "bunk."

It never occured to me before running into NC5 JXM to wonder how the Baní Ibn Khaldún relate to universal attorneydom. Perhaps I had subconsciously noted that ‘khaldoonery’ rhymes with ‘buffoonery’? In any case, practitioners of the Black Arts never seemed particularly alarming, whereas the lawyers come armed with writs and injunctions and foreclosures and liens and estoppels (?) and the like, little things that could wreck one’s whole day given half a chance. Whereas even Talcott Parsons of H*rv*rd in all his glory , nay, even Max Freiherr von Weber in all his Pracht ...!

No doubt khaldoonery would have been a monster worthy of Baron Victor had it ever gotten its act together, but, it was perfectly obvious in advance -- not to mention in retrospect over two centuries and more of Destructive ©®eationism™ during which somehow nothing as useful in practice as an eggbeater or a corkscrew ever got created -- that so splendid a performance as Social Scientism undertook to produce and direct is never going to get off the runway. We’d have already been enslaved to the khaldoonists for many decades, Dr. Bones, had any "science of society" comparable to the sciences of locomotion been a possible thing. Lucky us that it ain’t! [4]

Nowadays lots of kiddies and neokidies and not a few kiddiemasters, genuine or wannabe, devoutly believe in a supposed "science of management." This amusing self-delusion and not-so-funny attempted self-boostin’, however, has little to do with khaldoonery of the traditional type. Even at South Succotash WY, a "Middlebrow Perfesser of ..." would be titled differently towards the end of its title, were it into the H*rv*rd Victory School racket and not the Ibn Khaldún racket.

As a practicin’ khaldoonist, our neospecimen is unimpressive:

"My research on grassroots lobbying laws reveals that these regulations are not written in a manner accessible to laypersons."

Though perhaps the neospecimen did not original-intent the kiddies to understand that this reference is to its professional and tertiary-educationist ‘research’? Father Zeus knows best!

As to "not written in a manner accessible to laypersons" and (a little farther on) "... 0.9 on a 100-point scale in a readability test. Going by such tests, it would take 34 years of formal education to understand that paragraph ...", well, naturally words fail me, Dr. Bones, to find such noises emitted by a social-scientiser, even an off-duty one! As you know, the late Talcott Parsons of H*rv*rd is my personal highwater mark of lysdexia induced with malice prepense.

The neospecimen is typically socioscientistic, though, in its desire to drag in some numbers to make its neoself look more wissenschaftlich than reality can allow. Anybody who actually believes in machine-rated prose is eo ipso a barbarian and a dingaling. Khaldoonists have it in for literature almost as bad as they have it in for history, I fear, though the isolated example of Dr. I. A. Richards and his Practical Criticism perhaps suffices to establish that khaldoonery need not be totally toxic when dumped into the lily-pond of belles-lettres.

The neospecimen is even more typically wingnutty on a couple of other related fronts: (1) it is an extreme and militant Philistine: kiddies and neokiddies in the P.J. Corral are to despise anybody with (a right to put) "Esq." after her name, because she is likely to think and scribble well above the pajamatarian level. And (2) it is completely impervious to goose-and-gander or pot-and-kettle considerations: as noted, its own alleged profession would have to close down shop at once if pellucid self-expression ever became mandatory.

Point (2) may be the best short answer known to the great question What’s the Matter with Rio Limbaugh? The kiddiemasters have talked their dupes into thoroughly believin’ in Buckley Minor’s Quod licet Jovi , non licet bovi -- and, oddly enough, ’tis not for Bessie the Cow that kiddies and neokiddies mistake themselves! This brain disease has been diagnosed under a variety of different labels, most recently--and intolerably tertiary-educationalistically [5] --as "epistemic closure." Yuck.

The present coarse and illiterate keyboard usually types " wombschoolin’ " to point at the delusions of Zeushood cherished by the Big Management Party base an’ vile and by the ’turfbagged classes more generally, now and then tossing in "self-exceptional" and "self-indispensable" and niedergedümmte, etc., as particular occasions may demand. The usage is not perfect, I admit, especially insofar as knowing that the sweet puppies of Redarkenment have been reared in a wombschool -- deliberately trained, that is, never to think of an immense and almost R. L. Stevensonian number of things that G*re’s green earth contains -- does not indicate the content of the kiddies’ misindoctrination on the positive side.

Still, almost anything at all has to be better than "epistemic closure," no?

And I wish you, sir,
Healthy and affordable days.

___
[1] By "they" the questioner presumably refers to Neocomrade R. L. Simon, Freelord and Kiddiemaster Padschama in the peerage of Wingnut City, distinguished yaleodramaturge, little big friend to all the whirled, . . . .


[2] One of these decades, Bones, we shall have to actually read Frankenstein and not just work from late-night TV. For the moment though, we can make do with what we have: you are to envision M. le Baron du F. as havin’ original-intented to produce le Surhomme poujadiste -- Miss Rand’s "John Galt" or thereabouts -- only to wind up with somethin’ more like Mr. Hobbes’s "Leviathan." Not the Wicked State itself, I suppose, was M. la monstre franquensteinienne, but at least it was the wickedest statist ever, not to mention eight feet tall and shambles when it walks.

The villagers, who may not have always related to their appointed Betters quite so successfully as we ALL look respectfully up towards the battlements of Castle Podhóretz nowadays, find that M. la monstre insists on despoiling their flocks and herds and milks and honeys and figtrees and wines (an’ the whole pastoral m’gillâ) appoint a delegation to climb up Sinai II and lobby with Baron Victor, bringin’ along some peaceable pitchforks only because, due to an almost impossible glitch in Absolutely Free Trade that can’t possibly happen again in two hundred million lightyears, has resulted in a temporary, and no doubt merely local, shortage of walkin’ sticks.

And who should be at the head of the forefront of the vanguard of this up-hill lobbyin’ expedition but "Jeffrey Milyo, who is the Middle..." &c. &c. ?


[3] Another indication that the political perversion of NC5 JXM may be only hours old is that it does not notice that is usurpin’ prerogatives that Neocomrade Dr. R. H. Limbaugh reserves unto Himself.


[4] There is Leostraussianity, to be sure.

That dark cloud comes with a couple of built-in silver linin’s, however, the greatest of which is that you simply cannot do it with only half a brain, not even should you tie the latter behind your back. Indeed, in addition to callin’ his own cranky ideoproduct ‘philosophy’ rather than ‘science’, St. Leo of Greater Chicagoland went to extremes about prescindin’ from all crude libido dominandi such as the Heathen affect, even layin’ that cuckoo’s egg that was all his own in the nest of Plato.

M. de Voltaire spoke of "a pack of tricks we play on the dead," and nobody does that shtyk better than St. Leo did it. Nevertheless, the dead, being dead, are not fit objects of die Wille zur Macht. ’Tis no fun pushin’ other folks around if they can’t feel and resent and futilely resist the pushin’, after all! Even if, per impossibile, St. Leo had managed to cloudcuckcoofy poor Plato, the Party of Big Management and of the AEIdeology would not be the least bit advanced thereby.]


[5] Worse than that, really, since in fact this neoverbiage is but PSEUDO tertiary-educationalist lingo. Khaldoonists will love "epistemic closure," no doubt, as will all the victims of PES, "physics envy syndrome." We humble, though, may hope "epistemic closure" dies out swiftly and darwinianly, as being ill-adapted in the extreme, apart from these two narrow niches and refugia.

‘brimmeth over’ sive Qan. Lit. for Dhimmies

Dear Dr. Bones,

You remember Neocomrade (Fifth Class) D. X. Solway, self- or pajama-described as "Canadian poet and essayist"?

You must remember, sir, for was it not DXS [0] in the path of which we invented or discovered Qannádî Literature? Not quite Mlle. O. Qannádâ Herself, of course; credit for that vast inscovery or devention must go to, among others, the late Duddy Kravitz and the soon -- (no, that won't do, make it "the quick") -- Neocomradess (Second Class) Ruth, Freidame vom & zum Wisse [1]

Anyway, hee ... eere’s Davey:

Yes, there is plainly something excessive and volatile about Glenn Beck, but on the whole I am glad of it. His virtues and his vices are really one and the same and flow from the same turbulent source: he brimmeth over. As poet William Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” Fortunately, Beck’s propensity toward excess is, more often than not, indeed leavened with wisdom, though he may find himself one day in a different America, living in a pillbox rather than a palace.

That passage is -- cross my bones and hope to croak! -- the first sign I have seen that there is a literary side to Massa David at all. Fortunately this one is a very strong sign, a sign so forceful and seemighty that I hereby retract all my low suspicions that Massa David is any more of an ‘essayist’ than your average G.O.P. niece or nephew puttin’ in its time down at AEI or Heritage an’ scribblin’ mechanically against the pestiferous evils that arise from decent political adulthood.

Not to go hog-wild, though, sir! I still hope never to have to risk too close an encounter with Solwayoid versifyin’. And indeed, a really strict critic might criticise real strictly that Massa David could be just tryin’ to make himself look lit-like in the middle-browed eyes of fair-skinned and -headed Rio Limbaugh and Port Ste. Lucie. Mr. Blake is not the most esoteric of authors. Still, he spared us Yeats, Massa David did, you can’t take that away from his point score, Dr. Bones. Should you run into Ms. Strict, tell her I said she can’t either.

To anticipate what seems the obvious objection, if I may, Dr. Bones: Massa David’s subject-matter, the P&I neodunce NC2 G. L. Beck, cannot eo ipso exclude either product or producer from the World Lit. Temple of Fame. Did not Erasmus write in praise of La Folia? And is not Erasmus a host in himself whenever battle is joined as to what is Lit. and what ain’t? I rest my case, sir, even without playing the dulce est desipere in loco ace of trumps that, as luck would have it, Father Zeus was pleased to put up my e-sleeve.

No, Bones, the Master was, as usual, quite right: form trumpeth matter . Even in a weird twilight-cum-seemight zone like Qan. Lit., Omnia vincit Forma. [2]

Nowhere is this universally-to-be-acknowledged truth truer than when it comes to World Lit. Imagine, sir, the foamin’-an’-zoomin’ R. R. Wisse aforementioned at repose in her M. X. Péretz Chair at H*rv*rd, faced with an alleged comparandum. Surely her freedameship must first weigh the merits of the allegation, that is, decide whether this be any sort of Lit. at all that her freedameship examines? And equally surely, as it seems to me, the criterion by which her freedameship, or rather, by which any competent practitioner, must go is this: does the scribble at hand make some plausible pretence of possessing Formam (intelligently designed, one must insist) as well as materiam?

Sine formâ, nulla litteratura!

And furthermore, Dr. Bones, le bloghiatture need not trouble to apply! Is it not so written high aloft on the very portals of Outer Hell ?

Now as to Massa David, NC5 DXS, our local e-gloss on the Master’s ruling does not exclude the neocomrade itself from the pale of Lit., it only excludes what it, uh, ‘bloggeth’. This is so for two reasons:

(1) The casual conversation of a literary gent or gentile or neogent can establish the speaker as worthy to come within the Foam and Zoom of Comp. Lit. without being anything the least bit like an instance of literature by itself. Such must have been the case with the late Professor Saintsbury[, ] a very learned man and along certain lines a judicious literary critic and many others. [3] La blogghiatura does not add up to anything much, but it would be disproportionate to rank it lower than casual conversation, or than George Saintsbury scrappin’ with his scrapbooks.

(2) A stronger proof still, for us Aristotelians, is the manner in which NC5 D. X. Solway ‘bloggeth’: the jerk Beck is praised (in the paragraph swiped, I mean, hardly in the whole m’gillâ) with praise that is entirely æsthetic.

True, the dupes and marks of Padschamaheim do not need to be told about NC2 G. L. Beck; and true, it may well be the case that NC5 D. X. Solway does not enjoy exactly the same beauty-appreciative flutters when it watches somebody on Team Jabotinsky gettin’ swiftboated without stint or limit.

But I reply: (2) "So! You like dishin’ your ‘excess’ out more than you like takin’ it, eh, buddy?" is the objection of a moralist objector. And (1) that the quiddity of Don Glennito is a merely factual matter.

Anybody who supposes that Qan. Lit., or Yid. Lit. , or GTX Lit. , or any Lit. whatever stands or falls on the basis of facts or moralisms may be an excellent person in secret- or private-sector life, but certainly she and the present keyboard shall never agree about Was heißt Literatur?

And I wish you, Dr. Bones,
Healthy and affordable days.

___
[0] It is high time to be getting our Großes Schimpflexicon des Rio Limbaugh assembled and weblished, sir, and to that end I rule as follows: from today on, whenever we encounter a fresh Party-an’-Ideology neocomradess or neocomrade or neocomradlin’ or neocomradette who either has no discoverable middle initial (like this morning’s Qan. Lit. glamour boy ), or who seems too subinsignificant even by Wingnut City standards to disturb the pet google’s slumbers with a snark hunt for, we just stick in an ‘X’ -- to mark the spot with, like.

A confection like "Party Neocomrade (Third Class) Prof. Dr. F. X. Fukuyama" would have the additional bennie of maybe suggestin’ to some of the weaker siblin’s out there in Foxcuckooland that their Freddy boy must be a Papish. (( In real life, though, Freddy is Yoshihiro Frantsovitch . Oh, well! ))

Also it might be well to keep a nomenklatura for ourselves as we scribble, since not many of our legitimate prey refer to their own "much esteemed and best belovèd" neoselves à la Russe.

Finally, we really do need to finalize, or at least stabilise, our secret-sector Tábel’ o Rangákh for the peerage and neogentry of Wingnut City and Greater Foxcuckooland.

Farcimentum longum, vita brevis.


[1] Ruth R. Wisse is the Martin Peretz Professor (psyk) of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at H*rv*rd University and then it is all downhill from there.

Her freedameship’s fancy institutional neomonnicker might suggest active personal as well as passive-comparational participation in Qan. Lit., but this appearance is almost certainly delusive. The arts an’ letters of O Qannádâ will be taken, until further notice, to have been thought and scribbled in the vernacular of Greater Texas.

If anybody else’s lingo is admitted to the charmed neocircle hereafter, I betcha twenty-to-one, sir, it will be French rather than Yeedeesh. But the odds on even French makin’ it are long: "What has Québec to do with Neojerusalem? asks jesting Tertullianus, but does stay for an answer." And that’s a wrap for Endnote the First: ¡Au revoir, M. le Docteur!


[2] I seem to have stumbled into a sandtrap here, Bones: Ms. Strict would conclude that I consider mockin’ Master Davey’s neoëxhumation of Goldman-Saxon verb forms like ‘brimmeth’ (yuck!) more important than that Aristole has taught us the superordination of Eidos over hylos. A pain in the anatomy can Ms. Strict be at times, though of course if we dispense ourselves from her we lapse at once into neobarbarism.

[3] St. George of Orwell wiganising his right-wingnut perfesser is so much fun and so pertinent to America the AstroTurf™Bagged, Dr. Bones, that let’s damn the bandwith and swipe it in full:

The reason why class-hatred seems to be diminishing is that nowadays it tends not to get into print, partly owing to the mealy-mouthed habits of our time, partly because newspapers and even books now have to appeal to a working-class public. As a rule you can best study it in private conversations. But if you want some printed examples, it is worth having a look at the obiter dicta of the late Professor Saintsbury. Saintsbury was a very learned man and along certain lines a judicious literary critic, but when he talked of political or economic matters he only differed from the rest of his class by the fact that he was too thick-skinned and had been born too early to see any reason for pretending to common decency. According to Saintsbury, unemployment insurance was simply ‘contributing to the support of lazy ne'er-do-weels’, and the whole trade union movement was no more than a kind of organized mendicancy: " ‘Pauper’ is almost actionable now, is it not, when used as a word? though to be paupers, in the sense of being wholly or partly supported at the expense of other people, is the ardent, and to a considerable extent achieved, aspiration of a large proportion of our population, and of an entire political party." (Second Scrap Book) It is to be noticed, however, that Saintsbury recognizes that unemployment is bound to exist, and, in fact, thinks that it ought to exist, so long as the unemployed are made to suffer as much as possible: " Is not ‘casual’ labour the very secret and safety-valve of a safe and sound labour-system generally? ... In a complicated industrial and commercial state constant employment at regular wages is impossible; while dole-supported unemployment, at anything like the wages of employment, is demoralizing to begin with and ruinous at its more or less quickly arriving end. (Last Scrap Book) What exactly is to happen to the 'casual labourers' when no casual labour happens to be available is not made clear. Presumably (Saintsbury speaks approvingly of ‘good Poor Laws’) they are to go into the work-house or sleep in the streets. As to the notion that every human being ought as a matter of course to have the chance of earning at least a tolerable livelihood, Saintsbury dismisses it with contempt: " Even the ‘right to live’ ... extends no further than the right to protection against murder. Charity certainly will, morality possibly may, and public utility perhaps ought to add to this protection supererogatory provision for continuance of life; but it is questionable whether strict justice demands it. As for the insane doctrine that being born in a country gives some right to the possession of the soil of that country, it hardly requires notice. (Last Scrap Book) It is worth reflecting for a moment upon the beautiful implications of this last passage. The interest of passages like these (and they are scattered all through Saintsbury's work) lies in their having been printed at all. Most people are a little shy of putting that kind of thing on paper. But what Saintsbury is saying here is what any little worm with a fairly safe five hundred a year thinks, and therefore in a way one must admire him for saying it. It takes a lot of guts to be OPENLY such a skunk as that.

Briefly returning our noses to the grindstone, I put it to you, Dr. Bones, that Freedame Foam an’ Zoom (or any competent practitioner) ought to be able to figure out from that passage alone -- without benefit of Orwell’s identification, or even minus every word quoted that is St. George’s rather than Saintsbury’s -- that what we have here is a very literary skunk indeed.

And as with great things, so with small: though the merest skunk cub by comparison with the learnèd perfesser, NC5 D. X. Solway can very safely be pronounced a literary skunk cub on the basis of the above performance.

De Projectione apud Limbaugh

Dear Dr. Bones,

I don't remember about you, sir, but I had not much use for the former Freudianity back when it was fashionable. Now that it is has become hopelessly passé except for desperate attempts like this one to regalvanise it, usually, as here, to discredit some political or sentimental/‘ideological’ enemy, one must . . .

. . . . Oh well, when there is nothing nice to say, it is time to change the subject at least a little.

So let us look at Mr. Poster’s modus operandi without worrying about whether he fetched it from St. Sigmund or not, whether the said M.O. be strengst wissenschaftlich or only cheapjack scientistic. [1]

Neocomrade Dr. R. H. Limbaugh, long-time missionary from the Party of Big Management to the unwashed and beastly mob, is accused by Mr. Poster of bigmanagin’ his dittobrains with ‘projection’. What does he mean by that, exactly, once all the stale Vienna sausage about ‘paranoia’ and "defense strategy" and yimmer and yammer has been tossed out the window like an amblongus pie?

Not an easy question. There are so many amblongusses [2] crawling around here that it no cakewalk to think them away. It it were a can of worms, one could go by one’s general antecedent notion of an empty tin of Campbell's Cream of Tomatoe[3], but it is not.

The amblongus marked "You convince yourself that you only hate the other guy because he hated you first" is not without taint, but it is not so toxic we cannot disentangle it a little, Dr. Bones, for purposes of dissection.

The good news is that Mr. Poster almost certainly grasps that the Witch Doctor of Democracy believes his ‘projections’ with complete subjective sincerity, at least when caught in very article of projectin’, and probably all the time. We are spared the ludicrous notion that RHL secretly admires and reveres those nomina clara whom he badmouths and swiftboats in the course of his radio performances. No doubt the Party neocomrade does not believe the following two propositions

(1) "Two plus two makes four"

and

(2) "President Summers and Mr. Barák Husáyn Obáma are deliberately laying the holy Homeland™ waste so as to gratify the spite of all those Blacks and Tans out in the boondocks of the world who ‘hate US because we are free’ " [4]

in exactly the same way. Nevertheless, the idea that he does not believe the second at all, that he is cynically pretendin’ to believe so as to advance the private-sectorian interests of his Party-of-Grant golfin’ buddies is just . . . silly. Dr. Limbaugh is very far from bein’ even half bright enough to be cynical, no matter what he ties behind his back.

Mr. Poster has got over the great pons asinorum, then, which is more than most can claim. Sigh.

Not so happy is that the proposed diagnosis ignores how Himself has expressly and repeatedly denied hatin’ anybody at all. Of course He believes that proposition, -- say it His way,

(3) "Rush Limbaugh is ‘a lovable little fuzzball’ "

-- as well as the others cited, with that naive and unreflective self-sincerity alloted by Father Zeus exclusively to children, drunkards, and Uncle Sam. [5]

There bein’ ex hypothesi uingnuttensium no hatred at Rio Limbaugh, of course there cannot be any projection of hatred thence. Q.E.D.

From the point of view of a decent political grown-up, the correlation of farces here looks a bit different, and has more to do with Mr. Poster than with Neocomrade Dr. R. H. Limbaugh. For is it not pretty plain, Dr. Bones, that ‘Xenghis’ would not be very willing to accuse his foe of ‘projecting’ cute an’ cuddly fuzzballism?

And now, that’s enuf of that.

I wish you, sir,
Healthy and affordable days.

___
[1] Notice how the scribbler approximates to nastiness even as he professes to be turning away from it. ‘Pretermission’ they calls that gizmo.


[2] Orthography from the original.


[3] Orthographie by gracious nonpermission of Neocomrade J. D. Quayle, Freelord Hoofinmouth in the peerage of Wingnut City, Viceroy to George XLI, Charlie McCarthy to the Edgar Bergen of Kristol Minor, &c. &c.


[4] An objector might object that Himself would never word proposition (2) as I have worded it.

Respondeo: Right you are, sir! Right, yet not very much to the point, because anybody who can't distinguish the cake from the icin’ just because the sugar sprinkles have been scraped off and replaced with a paste of sand and minced cockroaches needs to learn how to do that trick before she goes up a dab hand at rhetoric and agitprop like Neocomrade Dr. R. H. Limbaugh.

"If you can’t keep your eye on the ball, stay out of the kitchen!"


[5] Dr. Limbaugh manages to belong to all three categories more or less equally. Or so it seems to me.

Literary-critical observations on The Next Right (Pat. Pend.)

¡Bienvenido a Rancho Republicánico, Señor Doctor Huesón!

(( That mostly just comes to "Dear Dr. Bones," sir. We will talk about the R.R. address in a moment. ))

As to Espíritu Santo and Party Neocomrade Dr. R. H. Limbaugh, it occasionally seems good to me to mix in a little bit of Spanish lingo. There’s already enough of it, I trust, to set the mortal remains, el cadáver, of Uncle Sam Huntin’ton of H*rv*rd in revolution. If I ventured on anything substantive, I fear I’d soon be more ungrammatical, analfabético, than Miss Eleanor Roosevelt’s worst nightmare idea of a Tee Party thug’s placard.

Do you suppose, by the way, that Neocomrade (Fourth Class) P. Ruffini plays golf, sir? I take for granted that Daddy, El Papá, and Tio Ruperto--that’s Neocomrade R. Murdoch, Firstlord Foxcuckoo, to you and me, so tug your virtual forelock a little, sir--must have taught the lad the game, but I mean, does Don Patricito actually get out on the links, la cancha del golf , much? Or has the Patrician countenance grown gray and pasty from spendin’ too much time indoors neoconspirin’ in the path of Party an’ AEIdeology?

Our preordained Betters are all related to one another, or might as well be, as every peon knows, so if this morning’s effusion of keystokes looks as if it might have come from Il Barone Michaele, who knows?, perhaps Signorino dei Ruffini actually did have a word or two with big Cousin Mikey. He (the nextist señorito) must at very least have huddled with El Almanaque de la política estadounidense.

’Twere hopeless for such peons as the Muses and you and I to compete with la famiglia Barone-Ruffini when it comes to, say, "FL-22 (Allen West vs. Ron Klein), where, oh by the way, we lead." [1] So let us talk about this specimen from the literary / rhetorical / agitation-propaganda side instead of trying to guess election outcomes in advance.

At first sight, I was tempted to suggest we create a whole new dossier for Don Patricito to be first into, one labelled maybe "Gloatin’, Unilateral and Preëmptive (by Party of Grant & Hoover)"

Further reflection calmed me down enough to notice that all gloating is unilateral. And now that I have diligently keyboarded away for a while, I believe you can just file it in the usual place, "Extremism, militant (Party of Grant)" with a CC in "Element, señoritoly, of the KSM."

NC4 P. Ruffini is adequately classified, I think, as a militant, extremist señorito, a neospecimen such that preëmptive gloatin’ is exactly what one would anticipate from the label affixed to it. There being no new Begriff here, there should be no new dossier either. But let me know if you disagree, of course.

I suppose the heart of neodarkness here is this passage,

"We are coming off two successive, ahistorical Democratic wave elections. Democrats have managed to swing something like 52 House seats in the last two elections. They are at an historic high water mark, as President Obama recently acknowledged. The fact that Democrats were able to pad their majority in 2008 would not have happened but for the fact that Obama changed the electorate. As I noted right after the election, Republicans in Congress were killed by the fact that young people voted straight ticket -- for Obama and then for Democrats in Congress."

Now "What could be more señoritoly than that?," I ask you. Don Patricito conceives it as a sort of violation of Nature, a diabolical miracle, for America’s Otherparty ever to lose an election. Should this actually happen on a significant scale, the Nextist Politburo evidently files it away under "historical, A" and tries to forget.

Notice how their laddie paints himself into a bit of a tangle here with two different senses of ‘history’ clashin’ against rather than mutually reinforcin’ one another. Perhaps Don Patricito imagines the court historians of Princess Posterity churchillating centuries hence of America’s party that "1201-1300 EST 20 January 2009 proved to be ‘their most anhistoric hour’." [2]

I can enjoy that imagination myself, even without having a clue what I’d say if challenged to point out the historic high-water mark of anhistoricity in the career of, say, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. [3]

Meanwhile, back at Rancho Republicánico, anybody who has once properly intuited das Señoritobegriff must see at once why Don Patricito here incarnates it to the max. As follows:

Though he feels with his mind [4] that there exist certain villagers, ¡monsters of ingratitude! -- or possibly only the hapless prey of outside agitators -- whose politics is displeasin’ to Papá and Tio Ruperto, Don Patricito cannot strongly know this in his heart [4], for it is flies in the face of all that is right and just and decent, not to mention respectable amongst the Daughters of Virtue and Sons of Wisdom, LLC. Everybody who is anybody at all loves Papá and Tio Ruperto!

That is where das Señoritobegriff begins, but if it ends there as well, ’tis but a shadow of itself, a lovely adornment for las señoritas lindas de Rio Limbaugh but not a weapon for steel-claptrap-minded political warriors. Bein’ a virile neogander rather than any sort of silly goose, however, Don Patricito wants to help Papá and Tio Ruperto bígmanage the family hacienda, that far-flung complex of manors and estates usually known to outsiders as "the United States of America."

This natural (?) desire by the little to help out a little is where the trouble starts, the trouble that leads eventually to grave organs of reference defining the term señorito with distinctly discouragin’ words like "rich kid" and "high and mighty" and "lordly" and [persona] excesivamente fina y remilgada and joven acomodado y ocioso.[5] Y así sucesivamente.

By denotation alone, as opposed to connotation, the dread S-word signifies no worse than "hijo de un señor o de una persona importante," which brings us to the sole respect in which I have tampered with it a little for purposes of inclusion in the El Chipo de Silicio Schimpflexicon : as you have seen, Dr. Bones, I have pinned the label on the tail of NC4 P. Ruffini without knowing or caring who, if anybody, its male parent may have been. Whether one may do that in Spanish without being ridiculous or unintelligible, I have no idea, though I kinda suspect you can.

In English, it is even more fun to stick it to Kristol Minor and Podhóretz Minor and D. Richardovich Pipes, ’71, Ph.D. ’79 , and so on, to little neoladdies whose papá by DNA is genuinely notorious. Best of all is Don Jonasito de Ignoto y Goldberg, the "liberal fascism" twerp, the Mommy of which gets to be its conceptual papá.

Nevertheless, zoölogical male parents are entirely facultative. Feel free, Dr. Bones, to imagine that all political neoseñoritos are the spawn of Daddy Warbucks, whose surname so handily sums up most of what is wrong with ’em.

As a parting shot, I would have you notice, sir, how preëminently señoritoly a crew of neoterics and Destructive ©®reationists that call themselves "The Next Right" must necessarily be. True, even for Schimpflexicon purposes, we can scarcely offer a formal definition of ‘señorito’ that incorporates the feature of wantin’ to bump poor Papá off and probably sideline Tio Ruperto as well, so as to attain unto personal GOPT®UF without stint or limit prontíssimo. The point is rather that NC4 P. Ruffini and its ideobuddies have antecedently positioned themselves so as to invite the imputation of Señoritismus, for who is more eager to get her own private next rights right now than a graspin’ an’ greedy heiress?

Estoy del Doctor Huescón Su servidor, querendo siempre Sus
   Días saludables y asequibles
      JHM

___
[1] Though it was interesting and maybe even slightly profitable to follow up the señorito’s graciously provided link and discover that this alleged Party Neocomrade "Allen West" looks superficially not unlike former Party Neocomrade Alan Keyes, aka "Moshpit Man." On the other hand, Key West appears not to lie in the twenty-second Congressional district, which, as you may know, centers around the well-gated community of Rio Limbaugh and includes such toney waterin’ places as Boca Ratón and Palm Beach (East) and Palm Springs, even a gated hamlet actually called ‘Golf’ -- small world, innit?

If you look at what LEW says about the demographics of FL-22, especially the median age and median income, and compare that with "a Cook Partisan Voting Index score of D+1," you may wish to agree with my amateur guess that the Vast White-Wing Conspiracy has made so much progress down in those parts already that pickin’ up any further easy pickin’s may not be a cinch even with the help of invasion from Planet AstroTurf™ over and above nominatin’ the honourable and gallant Neocomrade Lt. Colonel A. West.

Mr. Cook accounts it a district that "looks like America," close enough, when it votes, but which, in so looking, shows definite symptoms of Frank’s Disease , or call it "Kansas Syndrome."

(( And by the way, they don’t lead by very much: "Republican congressional challenger Allen West’s campaign released a poll this morning that shows West with a 44-to-42 percent lead over U.S. Rep. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton." Plus notice where the poll came from. ))

Mais que sçay-je? "We impart, you deride." And Father Zeus knows best.


[2] Or perhaps whatever hour it was, exactly, wherein President Summers and/or Mr. Barák Husáyn Obáma signed the so-called "Patient Protection and Affordable [Health] Care Act of 2010" into law, sorta.


[2] Nobody who suffers as much from imaginatiotitis as I do would be totally flummoxed by that question. One could always talk around it by, for example, pointing to how historians disagree about Frederick II Hohenstaufen, whose reign has been celebrated as the apex of Reichskaisertum by some but alleged to have scarcely anything to do with it by others. ‘Anhistoricity’ proper does not come in, of course; Big Freddy is bound to get a fair number of pages in any serious manual of Old Euro Sievalisation conceivable, the only issue being what line those pages take about him.

This example of Big Freddy is close enough to Paddy McRuffian for Fedguv work, is it not? The señorito almost certainly meant somethin’ very like what the anti-Frederician faction of the learned mean: little Paddy’s private-sectorian notion of where the holy Homeland™ is headed is intrinsically incompatible with liberalism and democracy and "the Democrat party" flourishing here to any very marked degree, just as the Teutonic historians thought the ‘true’ trajectory for the Ottonian imperium (what they ought to have done) was not towards Frederick II mucking about in Lombardy and Sicily and the Levant the way he mucked. If one of them had labelled the Stupor Mundi ‘ungeschichtlich’ -- and for all I know, one of them may have -- he would not have been proposing literally to wipe Big Freddy off Ms. Clio’s maps, but arguing sub figurâ verborum that History and the Hohenstaufen were not headed the same way in the first half of Century VI/XII/XLIX.


[4] Perhaps it would be better to reverse the Goldwaterism and its flip side here. What do you think, Dr. Bones?


[5] Dear Rio Limbaugh & Port Ste. Lucie, / "It means ‘rich an’ lazy an’ useless." / As ever, / JHM

Landlord and Peasant in Foxcuckooland

Dear Dr. Bones,

Please find enclosed today’s neospecimen, straight from the Monkey House -- or, as the case may be, the Zombie Jamboree -- untouched by human thought:

Freelord Zombiemaster C. K. McLeod ponders neolife and neopartisanship from the lofty, airy, and far-flung battlements of Castle Podhóretz:

He [Neocomrade Dr. R. H. Limbaugh] is leaving the distinct impression, not just coming close to saying but pretty much saying, that the Obama Administration and its supporters do not love the United States of America, and are seeking to destroy it. The clear implication is that the liberal left are engaging in treason. They’re not fellow Americans any longer, but enemy invaders. This isn’t some cherry-picked, decontextualized offhand remark from 15 hours/week of entertaining and engaging live radio. It’s the conclusion of a written op-ed [in the Wall Street Jingo]. And in a few sentences it defeats Limbaugh’s entire purpose, of putting himself and people like him on a higher, more positive, more grown-up and also more truly American, dissent- and debate-friendly plane than those on the other side."

When suddenly a yokel voice from far below:

April 23rd, 2010 at 10:03 am (2) David wrote: You don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh on a regular basis, do you? If you did, you wouldn’t be so shocked by his statement regarding the Administration’s contempt for this country. The administration believes a culture of a free people minding and doing their own business is corrupt and that capitalism is unjust. Limbaugh says this at least once during his show, every day. And, he’s right.

Well, the peasant’s first sentence is sound, anyway: the neogentry up the slippery slope at Castle Podhóretz do not attend very closely to what their own superior hired hands -- the NCO’s of the Klassenkampf, if you like -- are doin’ from day to day, not to mention Monday to Friday 12-3 Eastern Daylight Time.

Had Freelord Zombiemaster MacLeod paid a little attention to the run-of-the-mill performances of Neocomrade Dr. R. H. Limbaugh, it would not have taken his freelordship long to figure out that Dr. Limbaugh cherishes reservations about the C. P. crowd as well as vice versa. His freelordship is clever enough to work out, once cognizant of the data points, that most of the verbal stinkfruits that RHL presents to a certain straw R.I.N.O. labelled "David Brooks" are meant for his freelordship & company as well.

And the moral of that, I suppose, is "Why did Neocomrade K. R. Murdoch, Kaiser of Cloudcuckooland, want to publish Dr. Limbaugh in the chaste, though possibly just a tad rabid, op-ed columns of The Wall Street Jingo in the first place?" [0]

That is to say, what we have here, Dr. Bones, is some excellent fodder for our "Anatomy of the Elephant" dossier. Not just because it is always a pleasure to look on when the neorighteous overmuch fall out with one another, but strictly on the intrinsic merits of such material for possible future reference.

___

The other sentences of Neocomrade ‘David’ may be passed over, unless you want to take a cheap shot about how in fact the Witch Doctor of Democracy would never, nowadays, bark "The administration believes ... that capitalism is unjust." Of course what HIMSELF would bark, and frequently does, is " The ®EGIME believes..." &c. Possibly, then, Neocomrade ‘David’ approves of Dr. Limbaugh more than he listens to Him?

Considered in that light, that shot may not be bargain-basement cheap, after all. Of Neocomrade ‘David’ I know only that he read the Freelord Zombiemaster’s here effusion of words and answered it as he answered. That is not much evidence, but on the other hand, it is a very strong indication of its kind, for his freelordship mentioned capitalism only in rehashin’ Dr. Limbaugh, without showin’ any special interest of his own therein. And we have read enough of his freelordship and his freelordship’s immediate entourage to have arrived at a secure judgment that up at Castle Podhóretz, the neogentry faithfully reproduce their correspondin’ palæodittos’ notion that there is somethin’ vaguely shabby and ungenteel and ‘vulgar’ (whatever that may mean) about Trade.

Far be that from Neocomrade ‘David’, who likes Trade so much that he drags it in pretty much uninvited! Any fan of the Huntin’tonian ©lashism ideoproduct should want to have this exchange stuffed and put on display in her permanent collection:

Q. Don’t you think it was rather bad form for Dr. Limbaugh to attempt to corner the market on love of country? A. Anythin’ done in the path of Absolutely Free Enterprise is well done! Anythin’ at all!! Whatever it takes!!!

If not worlds in collision, or even the clashant sieves of Uncle Sam Jr., surely there is at least a little something in the way of neocomradely dissonance here?

***

I am not sure, Dr. Bones, whether our own provisional anatomy of the elephant from twelve or fifteen years ago needs to be revised and update. The obvious stimulus to do so is, of course, the Rise of AstroTurf™Baggery, a development which pertains to Neocomrade Dr. H. R. Limbaugh, but scarcely (as far as I can make out off-hand) to either Freelord Zombiemaster MacLeod or to Neocomrade ‘David’.[1]

C. P. brand-name neoterics like his freelordship are not exactly what they used to be; the Big Bang of 1422/2001/5761 increased their importance -- and we promoted them from Party-of-Grant factionette to full-fledged subfaction accordingly -- but did it change their spots? Further research is advisable.

Then came the Crawford Crash of 1429/2008/5767, which has distinctly changed the content of the neogentry’s agitprop emissions. But, again, the difference may well be circumstantial and tactical rather than neo-essential or neo-existential. His freelordship must run into a lot of lesser breeds without of Neocomrade ‘David’ 's general type, Matthew Arnold Philistines, that is, who lack proper appreciation of "the unbought grace of neolife." [2]

My best guess, then, Dr. Bones, tentative and revisable, is that the Common Terror magazine crew have not moved an ideological centimetre, which entails that they must be secretly wishin’ in their minds that Hurricane Greenspan - Paulson - Bernanke - Geithner - Summers will blow itself out as soon as possible, permittin’ weeklystandardizers and commonterrorizers to get back to invasionism as usual.

But Father Zeus knows best.

Healthy days.

___
[0] Don’t think I regard this as less than a genuine and important question because I shall not be answering it here and now. Like (former?) Neocomrade D. J. Frum , I take the Kommunikationsmittelskaisertum of Massa Rupert very seriously indeed.


[1] "Didn’t their nurses and tutors advise them that it is not nice to talk about money all the time?"

Neocomrade ‘David’ might do for a textbook example of the "Political Capitalism" or "Petty Management" subfaction that we detected at Wingnut City years ago. But still, there is only the one data point, and no need to rush to judgment. Stick it in the dossier, sir, and time will maybe tell.


[2] The card-carryin’ Little Friends of Eddie Burke, LLC, may serve to illustrate what a factionette, as opposed to a subfaction, of America’s Otherparty looks like. Like a sort of vermiform appendix that hardly anybody would notice if it just quietly evaporated.

The Baní Podhóretz are well beyond that, but there is no need to fall off the other side of the horse either by going on about "neo-con cabals." Via media tutissima.

Ideology

Dear Dr. Bones,

Allow me to begin as if I were Plutarch, that is to say, three fields away from the announced topic.[1]

Almost all available products come in a variety of styles and colours and flavours and -- all hail Mammon Wrex! -- especially prices.

Yet certain weekly standards and neocriteria apply only to specific product lines: Ice cream comes in vanilla and pistachio and tutti-frutti. Automobiles and bookmarks and LeoStraussians and garage-door openers do not, or, at any rate, not literally. Before Lord Mammon began rexin’ it an’ wreckin’, say "down to A. R. 1100/1688/5448" [2], Freelord Rilke’s famous plight

wir nicht sehr verläßlich zu Haus sind / in der gedeuteten Welt

must have been intolerable. [3] Every way a zombie looked, five or ten klicks down the road there was the beginnin’s, at least, of a distinct and different Deutungssystem.

On the other hand, if one stuck very close to hearth and hormones, perhaps one could avoid noticing the alien and bewildered Welt? Most of the sham tradition purveyed by (so-called ‘cultural’) rightists and neorightists since 1789 assumes that back in the Really Dark Ages, everyzombie was always verläßlich zu Haus in the highest degree, havin’ the privilege to live in a noble and upliftin’ Gemeinschaft rather than some wretched ghetto of a Gesellschaft such as you and I and Wally Wombschool -- and even Neocomrade Governess S. Heath-Paling of AK-49 herself!-- have been consigned to by Fate and Time. O nos infelices!

Well, that is a fun parlour game for self-pitiful rainy days. However at the moment it is literally morning in Massachusetts, so let us not play the Gesellschaftskolporteurspiel ourselves, Dr. Bones, but instead attempt to get some serious (?) neocomradology done. You must have noticed that more than one decent political grown-up has analysed the AstroTurf™baggers as proposin’ to give their poor perplexed sweet puppies back that cheese that some white-coated labóratory fiend and global warmist moved on ’em, the cheese in question bein’ pretty much the above-spoofed Gemeinschaft rigmarole.

Not to avoid the obvious, how about this ?

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

The kiddies and their kiddiemasters did not care for that bit of amateur neocomradology at all, Dr. Bones, though as usual they failed to articulate their distress so clearly as to rule out the possibility that they have not more than noticed that words of their POTUS are discouragin’ words, words intelligently designed (and malignantly!) to cloud over their own Mo®nin’ in Ame®ica product. (Your average deer or antelope could almost get that far, comprehensionwise.)

Prescinding from animal intelligence studies, I find the turfbaggers and turfbaggees whom I have noticed attemptin’ to respond to that impertinent swift-boatin’ on their blind side get fixated on the word ‘cling’ for some reason. It might be worthwhile to figure out why [4]. Indeed, there are two possible WHYs here: (1) the real objective reason of cause of ‘cling’ making sweet puppies cringe, and (2) the WHY a really competent puppiemaster would have suggested, as opposed to what was actually suggested

"It’s a remarkable statement and extremely revealing," McCain adviser Steve Schmidt said in a statement. "It shows an elitism and condescension towards hardworking Americans that is nothing short of breathtaking, it is hard to imagine someone running for president who is more out of touch with average Americans."

Blindsided and swiftboated was Neocomrade S. Schmidt, obviously, to the point that he went on to maage to lose the election for the Fabulous Flyboy of AZ somehow. But why, exactly? What was goin’ on between the Party neocomrade’s ears when he made that remark to the guy from Fox-on-15th?

Trying on purpose to be superficial, as befits our subject-matter, I put it to you, Dr. Bones, that the kiddiemasters may have (in effect or in deed) met secretly and decided that ‘cling’ is to be billed as an antonym of ‘hardworkin’’. On the model, as I conjecture, of that unavoidable, but almost never explicit, antithesis of "The Middle Class" [raaaah!] and "the special interests" [boo! hisssssss!!] .

Arbeit macht frei, after all, nicht wahr?. She who hardworks all her days -- [plus optionally toss in "an’ plays by the rules" here] -- may not achieve riches beyond the dreams of McAvarice, but she is guaranteed to achieve, i’n’t she, a lifetime supply of the GOP-brand True Freedom (®) product? ’Course she is!

And whatever GOPT®UF may be on the positive side, on the negativem it is quite incompatible with clingin’. [5] Q.E.D.

That would probably pass muster in Foxcuckooland, provided a certain unfortunate clause were translated into any language other than New High Prussian. The ever-immortal co-inventor or -discoverer of the Herrnstein-Murray ©u®ve™ has successfully marketed a sort of negative image of the same product to the Tanks of Thought at Wingnut City: the trouble with the Bad Poor ("the underclass") is that they, well, that they cling -- that is to say, they exhibit Murrayan Dependency (Pat. Pend.).

Seen in this light, I believe the extreme vexation of a pro kiddiemaster like Neocomrade S. Schmidt about ‘cling’ becomes empathisable with: why, Senator O’Bama (as he then was) had the uppity nerve to swipe the very megaphone used by the Daughters of Virtue and Sons of Wisdom, LLC, to badmouth welfare queens with and deploy it against Bubba! Movin’ their cheese on the neocomrades was bad enough, but movin’ their heavy artillery on ’em . . . !!!

As I said, sir, this has been only a superficial analysis so far.

If the student looks a very little deeper, I believe he can detect from a new angle something that the Muses and you and I have already detected, as follows: remember our handy-dandy scheme from the middle ’90s for expounding the political psychology and sociology of the holy Homeland™ in such a way as to get rid of "the Middle Class" altogether? (And along with it all sorts of intolerably tedious tripe and horsefeathers, I might add.)

(( For those of them in Rio Limbaugh: take a blank sheet of paper and divide it into two equal parts vertically and two parts horoizontally. Voilà!, that’s it! To label the upper left "Upper Left" and ... and the lower right "Lower Right" is strictly mustahibb, "encouraged but not mandatory." The sheet of paper is in fact dispensable, though maybe not at Port Ste. Lucie. ))

We are not wading in much deeper, Dr. Bones, if we now define the relationship of Lowers to Uppers in each column as "clings to" rather than "is bígmanaged by." Or rather, I propose that we accept that "clings to" is an alternative formulation partially interchangable with "is bígmanaged by."[6]

Nevertheless, in order to get the maximum mileage out of what was, for its time, a very pricey and not unclassical education, I shall ordinarly pretend we find ourselves _in fæce Romuli sive Platonis Respublicâ_ and continue to speak of patrons and clients.

One inadequacy of the blindsided Neocomrade S. Schwartz’s response to takin’ some swiftboatin’ for once, instead of always only dishin’ it out, leaps to the eye once the lighting has been thus readjusted. Any rational creature who does not happen to give a hoot about holy-Homelandic™ parties and factions and factionettes is likely enough to notice that "elitism and condescension," regardless of what the neocomrade may have original-intented by the words, are not the names of qualities possessed by the Clingin’ Classes. Barry the Abominable has his faults, no doubt, but Murrayan Dependency (Pat. Pend.) is not among them. The Daughters of Virtue and Sons of Wisdom, LLC, must respect those six- and seven-digit numbers on his income tax return even if they respect nothin’ else about him whatsoever. That is what ‘LLC’ means, after all, or close enough for gummint work.

Which brings me back to near where I started, the "especially prices" bit. Here under the dark wing of Lord Mammon, I betcha 99.74% of kiddies and neokiddies and even kiddiemasters would look at our quadrated blank sheet of paper and suppose with no further ado that the upperness of the Uppers must be measurable in sh’qálîm and daráhim and doits and bucks, for what other kind of Upperness is there, except inside special hothouses like Sabbath School and Commencement Day? If their own Neocomrade Freelord Dr. Prof. Ch. A. Murray meant anythin’ less or more or other by ‘dependency’ than "takin’ money from," his true view has been hushed up admirably. And thus the underness of his freelordship’s ‘underclass’ is strictly fiscal. And thus further, knowin’ of his freelordship’s invaluable neocontributions to the Party of Big Management and of the AEIdeology, your rank-and-file kiddiemaster is bound, in the absence of a warning label, to take our own fourfold scheme the same way they take Ch. A. Murray. [7]

******

And now for the Agatha Christie: though it has been fun, and pleasantly self-reinforcing, to write up the Fourfold Root of the Nonexistence of ‘The Middle Class’, I have done so not for its own sake but rather exempli gratiâ.

The Freelord Zombiemaster and his peanut-gallery peanuts are free to peruse the above scribble and learn from it what semi-educated adults mean by the term ‘ideology’. Apart from a certain amount of stylistic folderol, not hard to isolate, the whole thing is ideological through and through, yet nothin’ at all to do with what everyzombie seems to think in and around Castle Podhóretz.

To conclude with a formula definition, one can pick it out of Big LEW’s first paragraph in the obvious article , neglecting some dubious alternatives that only litter the joint up:

An ideology is a set of ideas ... proposed by the dominant class of a society to all members of this society....

The key words are ‘set’ and ‘dominant’ about equally. If it is not systematic, or if it is not a tool for mastery, it simply ain’t ideology. Period.

And I wish you, sir,
Healthy days.

---

---

[1] Well, yes, there is no topic announced. This way, Dr. Bones, you can have Plutarch and Agatha Christie at the same time. Or feel free to suppose that I have no notion where I am headed. (( No matter: everythin’ to do with the wingnutettes and wingnuts is Liberty Hall, innit? ))


[2] Make that specifically 5 November 1688 in the (older) calendar of the Middle Religionism:

On 3/13 November the invasion fleet entered the English Channel through the Strait of Dover in an enormous square formation, 25 ships deep, the right and left of the fleet saluting Dover and Calais simultaneously, to show off its size. The troops were lined up on deck, firing musket volleys, with full colours flying and the military bands playing. Rapin de Thoyras, who was onboard one of the ships, described it as the most magnificent and affecting spectacle that was ever seen by human eyes. William intended to land at Torbay but due to fog the fleet sailed past it by mistake. The wind made a return impossible and Plymouth was unsuitable as it had a garrison. At this point, with the English fleet in pursuit, Russell told Burnet: "You may go to prayers, Doctor. All is over". At that moment however the wind changed and the fog lifted, enabling the fleet to sail into Torbay, near Brixham, Devon. William came ashore on 5/15 November.

Prayers were out, Lord Mammon was in like Flynn.

A glorious day of turnabout indeed, Dr. Bones, and not just meteorologically. Our from under Dutch Willem’s overcoat come we all! (By and large & *mutatibus mutandis).

A mildly curious day in other respects as well: if my software for the New Religionism be reliable, it was 11 Muharram 1100, which if presented as 11.I.1100 looks as if it had been imported straight from Planet Turing.

And for sure it was the eighty-third anniversary of the Fifth of November par excellance, that memorable moment in Middle Religionism that featured an aborted human event our now AstroTurf™baggers really ought to make more of. Just finishin’ what M. Gui de Fawkes began are they, no?


[3] I mean, naturally, that if anyzombie then alive had been such a hot-house flower as Freelord Rilke was back before His Lordship of Mammon took the world in hand. To the extent such creatures did exist, they would have been only infant-mortality statistics, had the collection of statistics commenced, which it mostly had not. The past can be a very foreign country, Dr. Bones!


[4] It also might not.


[5] Hegel and M. de Kojève and Neocomrade Freelord Prof. Dr. F. Fujuyama might have fun by proposing to define True Freedom as "freedom from independence," but that is only another rainy-day game.

(( A shame not to be lysdexic enough to make a confounding of ’turf’baggery and GOPT®UF tolerable. Oh, well.... ))


[6] Were the Greater Texan language in need of more irregular verbs, as I think it is not, one could make this a grammatical feature:

(Active voice) *Neocomrade S. Schwartz bígmanages Bubba.
(Passive voice) *Bubba clings to Neocomrade S. Schwartz.

and similarly

(A) *The ‘lamestream media’ bígmanage Wendy, the Welfare Queen.
(P) *Wendy the W. Q. clings to the L. M.

No existing verb is irregular in that particular way, however, which reinforces my doubts about the advisability of the proposed Destructive ©®eativity. But Hermes knows best.


[7] The P&I kiddiemasters word themselves a bit differently dependin’ on whose Uppers and Lowers are gettin’ gored, but I believe that phenomenon is secondary.

(A) When a Neocomrade S. Schwartz wants to rouse his home-team rabble against their POTUS with talk of "elitism and condescension," he appeals above all to envy of those tax-return numbers. Barry the Abominable has "never worked a day in his life," and, more importantly, he certainly won’t have to in future.

(B) By contrast, when a Neocomrade Dr. R. H. Limbaugh wants roughly the same rabble to think well of Himself’s golfin’ pardners and ‘bidness’ buddies, to revere the Right Uppers, their natural Betters, he does not push the envy button, but spins his dittobrains some "Whig pastoral," as (I believe) Schlesinger Minor called the product in The Age of Jackson.

The locus classicus of Whig Pastoral comes (a tad backhandedly) from Comrade Matthew Arnold, and it is so good that here’s a hefty chunk of it:

Show him [Paddy the Feenian fiend] our symbolical Truss Manufactory on the finest site in Europe, and tell him that British industrialism and individualism can bring a man to that, and he remains cold! Evidently, if we deal tenderly with a sentimentalist like this, it is out of pure philanthropy. But with the Hyde Park rioter how different! He is our own flesh and blood; he is a Protestant; he is framed by nature to do as we do, hate what we hate, love what we love; he is capable of feeling the symbolical force of the Truss Manufactory; the question of questions, for him, is a wages’ question. That beautiful sentence Sir Daniel Gooch quoted to the Swindon workmen, and which I treasure as Mrs. Gooch’s Golden Rule, or the Divine Injunction “Be ye Perfect” done into British,–the sentence Sir Daniel Gooch’s mother repeated to him every morning when he was a boy going to work: “Ever remember, my dear Dan, that you should look forward to being some day manager of that concern!"–this fruitful maxim is perfectly fitted to shine forth in the heart of the Hyde Park rough also, and to be his guiding-star through life.

I trust you see, Dr. Bones, why I take these two seemingly different spins and twistifications to be primarily similar, both about sh’qálîm &c., the difference between envy and emulation being only a second-order affair.

It would not take a very accomplished rhetor or agitprop artiste to turn both examples upside down and make the customers or patients or victims envy Sir Daniel Gooch -- or make that somebody they have heard of, Bill Gates or M. le baron Georges du Soros -- and crave to be just like Barák Husáyn O’Báma.

"purported needs of the State"

Dear Dr. Bones,

The self-educationalist quest of Don Ricardito de Morán y Podhóretz has now reached Mr. Jeremy Bentham, it appears, an author whom one may safely presume to be excluded by all competent institutions of neoteric wombschoolery and/or Foxcuckooland tomfoolery.

Though an enemy of Church and King and, especially, of Rulalaw as Rulalaw worked 1748-1832, Bentham addressed himself literarily only to certain selected TopPercenters on Airstrip One who were capable of reading and comprehending all the greater works written in favour of Church and King and Rulalaw, even if they had never got around to actually doing so. I betcha 95% of them had read Blackstone’s Commentaries, which should have been enough to allow them to decrypt most of the mysteries of l’utilitarianisme britannique if taken in conjunction with every gent’s then residual knowledge of extinct languages.

Addressin’ itself to (passively) pajamatarian wingnutettes and wingnuts no better educated than its own neoself, Don Ricardito is reduced to quotin’ from a reference manual. I daresay Philosophy for Penguins probably comes in at least a nose or two ahead of anythin’ colonial deployed nowadays at Wombschool Normal University and St. Dilbert Antistate College [1]. Nevertheless, one must be shackled well down the Great Chain of Agitprop if one cannot avoid such slummin’ entirely.

To its credit, the señorito neotérico does, sort of, try to break free for a moment, as follows:

[R]egardless of what you think of the tea party people and movement, it should be recognized as being part of the classic American push-pull between the rights of the individual and the purported needs of the state.

It sure ain’t tryin’ very hard, not with that jocular ‘purported’ stuck in, but all the same, such a sentence would be impossible for most of the lemmin’ pack ever to emit. They, poor sweet neopuppies, have never got beyond the public-sector teachin’s [1.5] of Their Ford, whereas Don Ricardito the autodidact has become decidedly an advanced chela.

Perhaps the best way to diagnose this bit of factional drain bamage, Dr. Bones, would be to elaborate the distinction of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ wingnuttery that I casually ventured upon above. As follows:

Your PASSIVE wingnutettes and wingnuts -- 98.507% of 19% of holy-Homelanders™ at last count -- understand Their Ford’s ever-immortal oracle "History is bunk!" only passively, that is, the way a Dan Quayle brand Couch Potatoe (®) naturally would: Ms. Clio simply never says anythin’ that redstate-blooded go-getters need attend to. [2]

ACTIVE wingnutettes and wingnuts, by contrast, who constitue 01.593% of 19% of 306,666,666 holy-Homelanders™ -- and thus 928,188.5 real or purported ‘individuals’ --, have been made privy to the Esoteri© T®adition of Their Ford. At this higher level of self-wunnerfulness, Dr. Bones, the adept becomes aware that "History is Bunk" is rather a Kiddie ©ause than a consumer ideoproduct. Or at any rate, in addition to bein’ a consumer ideoproduct.

History, that is, can be turned into Bunk by (ahem!) affirmative action whenever it happens not to be there yet already.

Needless to say, those who march loyally in the path of Party an’ Ideology wish this blessèd and mysterious transmogrification to come to pass ASAP. Hence, inter alia nonnulla, Neocomrade Don Ricardito’s tendentious little "purported needs of the [S]tate." [3] [4]

And now, that’s enough for now, if you read the notes too.

I remain, sir, ever wishing you, and all the world,
Healthy and affordable days.

___
[1] WNU: http://law.pepperdine.edu/ St. Dilbert’s: http://tinyurl.com/y6rpaax . Plus quite a number of inferior wannabes and wannabe-inferiors.


[1.5] At Hooverville, and Wingnut City generally, the inferiority of public-sector teachin’s to secret- or private-sector ditto utterly goes without sayin’. But since we stand outside the monkey house, Dr. Bones, the Muses and you and I may point this sort of point out from time to time, for the benefit of decent political grown-ups, and the court historians to Princess Posterity, and such other unmonkeys as possess a liberal curiosity.


[2] Since that is the road I shall not go down from the fork, Dr. Bones, qualifications and restrictions about the antihistoricism of passive wingnuts are mere digressions that belong in a short note, if anywhere.

A fuller treatment would have to pace such manifestations as [http://tinyurl.com/y5kxol8], wherein Party Neocomrade Don Guillermito Whittle-Patxama offers the sweet puppies a sort of Powe®Point show that trots out dogs and ponies who were undoubtedly historical in one plain sense, and whom the señorito cannot be supposed to desire its patients/victims/customers to regard as bunk.

(( I am tempted to lay it down dogmatically that anything that touches Powe®Point is instantly defiled and degraded to the rank of Bunque First Class. But that won’t quite do, because (1) Whittle-Patxama’s self-servicin’ neoreveries about Auld Lange Syne only resemble Authentic µicrosoft, without actually bein’ the real McCaughey. And (2), the Venerable Framers™ scarcely had to wait for Whittle-Patxama to get this type of trick played on them. The Rev. Neocomrade M. L. Weems was at the Wh.-P. game, close enough, as long ago as Anno Religionismi 1240/1825/5584. [http://tinyurl.com/y4sghsh] ))


[3] Perhaps the Muses and you and I ought to mosey over to St. Dilbert’s some sunny afternoon this spring, sir, to find out exactly what trippa e bologna is fed to innocent wombscholars as regards Mr. Madison and the Gang of Eighty-Seven. I find it very difficult to imagine that even the Party of Big Management and of the AEIdeology can totally hush up the fact that there was a certain pro-State aspect to those famous transactions.

But Father Zeus knows best.


[4] Though doomed to be utter hogwash as wie es eigentlich geschehen, a brief Purported History of the Holy Homeland™ (or some similar title better adapted to the market niches of Rio Limbaugh and Port Ste. Lucie) from the keyboard of P&I Neocomrade R. Morán-Podhóretz might be of considerable literary interest.

One fantasizes Neocomrade John, Freelord of Galt, assistin’ the "forgotten man" of Neocomrade Herr Prof. Dr. W. G. Sumner of Y*L* in a never-endin’ struggle against the squid-like--nay, sir, the hydra-like!--tentacles of a Wicked State, the capital chapter of whose wickedness is that it is all so very, very needless and useless.

The WGS F. M., call him Oblivianus provisionally, keeps gettin’ sandbagged and sandtrapped again and again, but he always keeps right on comin’ back for more. After elevenscore and umpteen years of Homelandic™ independence, Oblivianus has somehow managed to become ...

... lemme see ... ah, here it is! ...

managed somehow to become "wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and ... no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class." (( Dixit [http://tinyurl.com/y53llhb] . ))

At which point a previously unnoticed tentacle [*] called PPACA, the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" of Y. R. 1431/2010/5770 aka "Public Law No. 111-148," coshes poor Oblivianus suddenly in the back of the redstateneck with forty-five subtentacles and a thousandscore-odd pages of utterly needless wickedstatism [http://tinyurl.com/ya4nxab] , whereupon . . . .

(( Please stay tuned for the next thrillin’ neoëpisode, everybody! ))


[*] A tentaclette (?) "no larger than a man’s hand," as it were: In septimâ autem vice, ecce nubicula parva quasi vestigium hominis ascendebat de mari . . . . [Lib. III Reg. XVIII:44]