‘Overarching’

That overarching truth is often obscured by the arguments over how many troops should stay in Iraq — or by the dysfunctional nature of Iraq's government.

The "All you really need to know about X is Y" mindset is not just limiting, but limited. Usually those sophisticates who kindly propose to dumb X down for the vulgar know a few incidental details about it beyond Y, but in order to save time and avoid needless confusion on the part of the attention-challenged, whole alphabets of additional details are willingly trash-bagged. The peddlars of such shoddy intellectual wares don't often admit the shoddiness, but how can it not be there? As long as anything exists to be known about X other than Y alone, knowing Y alone can at best be only an adequate knowledge. The way the product is worded establishes that it cannot be a comprehensive knowledge.

But what does "adequate" mean to Dr. Claptrap? In political discourse it seems invariably policy-oriented: to be brief, she who knows only Y about X will at once perceive the beauties of the Claptrap Plan for X. It is perhaps better that her mind should not be clouded with miscellaneous truths F and K and Q3 and B14. Unless he's a Goebbels or a Rove, Dr. Claptrap will admit, I daresay, that all that other stuff might be useful for a throrough knowledge of X, but he's not aiming at thorough knowledge, he aiming at getting the Claptrap Plan adopted. [1]

Now reflect, Mr. Bones, that this is the first occasion on which we have encountered this downdumbization formula in conjunction with aggression and occupation policy for the former Iraq. A great many of the Party base-and-vile obviously think that nobody needs to know more about it than which side she's on, is she a loyal lemmin' or a ratfink defeatist? But one never hears it worded exactly according to the formula, not even in the dankest recessess of the Wingnut City e-gutter. The great age of "overarching truth" was Impeachmentgate, as I am sure you recall, Mr. Bones. One couldn't click a mouse (over on the Big Party side of the tracks) without running into "All you need to know is that Clinton committed perjury" or something very like it.

Why is now so different from then? The base-and-vile show no signs of bein' less downdumbed and wombscholarly in 2007 than in 1998, the contrary is the case, if there has been any change at all. I take it the main difference is that there was a clear and distinct Claptrap Plan available then -- impeachment itself. As regards Peaceful Freedumbia, it would be very injudicious for any lemmin' to bellow "All you need to know about Iraq is Y" because the Executive Branch stumblebums have run through so many different Y's: WMD, Domino Democracy™, "stability," cheap gas, Jewish Statism, credibilitarianism, anti-Islamophalangitarianism, . . . . At the moment the obvious Party candidate for Y would be "antiextremism" or Petraeo-MacNamaran counterinsurgency, which are more or less the same thing. Perhaps now that Mr. Rove is gone, lesser GOP geniuses will put all their agitprop eggs in that one basket and we shall start hearing the formula in question again? Time will tell. [2]

However the Dr. Claptrap du jour is not a militant GOP extremist, he is, rather amazingly, a journalist for the intellectually respectable press, Mr. Robert H. Reid of the A.P. I am amazed because the downdumbization formula comes very oddly from somebody who specializes in providing his customers with a more or less random assortment of facts about X scattered all the way from A001 to Z999. No doubt the article in question is rather a personal "analysis" than a news story, although it is not marked that way at the A.P.'s own website. We may safely assume that the Associated Press has no official corporate policy as to what overarches in the former Iraq and what does not.

I have not told you what Mr. Reid's pet Y is, and I wonder if you could guess it. If it is comparatively unimportant how many GOP troops remain in the semiconquered provinces, and also comparatively unimportant that the colonial neorégime is "dysfunctional," what Y is it about the former Iraq that they are being compared with and found wanting?

Actually I am not quite sure myself. The immediately preceding two sentences/paragraphs run

Senate Democratic leaders rejected the call for only limited reductions by next summer. "This is unacceptable to me, it's unacceptable to the American people," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

but that seems such an odd Y that you had better examine the whole scribble down through the overarchment, Mr. Bones:

In Iraq, Little Pressure for Reforms / By ROBERT H. REID – 6 hours ago BAGHDAD (AP) — The debate in Washington over troop numbers is intense. But in Baghdad, there's been little sense of alarm or urgency among the Iraqi politicians who would have the most to lose if the United States decides to begin a major pull back. Both Sunni and Shiite leaders have been largely convinced for weeks that President Bush would press to keep forces in Iraq until he turns the White House over to a successor. That has set up one of the grand ironies of the troop build-up that began early this year. Washington threw more personnel and firepower into Iraq to give the Iraqi leadership more room to settle disputes and adopt U.S.-backed reforms. But the signals this week of just modest troop withdrawals ahead — perhaps back to pre-surge levels of about 130,000 — mean the Shiite-led government feels little pressure to accelerate work toward true political reconciliation. Instead, they are focusing their energy on shoring up their positions: outflanking political challengers, leaning on more-radical Shiite factions to behave and flirting with Sunni sheiks to build personal alliances. Iraq's national security adviser was asked Wednesday to explain why the government has been so slow to enact power-sharing agreements that Washington deems necessary for lasting peace. He had nothing new to offer. "Of course we want to do it, but they are so complicated," Mouwaffak al-Rubaie said. In Iraq's political reality today, Shiites who account for 60 percent of the population hold the country's political power and have no intention of yielding it to Sunnis. Neither side has given up on violence to achieve its goals. "Many Sunnis continue to see their political pre-eminence as a birthright. And most Shiites believe that their numerical superiority and the oppression they suffered under Saddam Hussein give them the right to dominate the new Iraq," one war critic, Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, noted this week. Senate Democratic leaders rejected the call for only limited reductions by next summer. "This is unacceptable to me, it's unacceptable to the American people," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. That overarching truth is often obscured by the arguments over how many troops should stay in Iraq — or by the dysfunctional nature of Iraq's government.

The scribbler seems to contradict himself directly, unless we take him to mean that the future dissatisfaction of Televisionland and the electorate (and Sen. Reid) about GOP troop levels is entirely a different matter than the levels themselves. Probably that is what he means, since other guesses that look farther back through the text are even less satisfactory, but he certainly ought to have spelled the point out more distinctly. To recommend a downdumbization product in language that needs to carefully parsed and construed seems wilfully perverse: those who really need it will not be able to get at it.

Senator Lugar's fortune cookie would make a much less unsatisfactory sort of Y: though far from all one needs to know about the bushogenic Peaceful Freedumbia, yet there is quite a lot of valuable knowledge in it. A good deal more than in what follows, I'd say, but I do not feel up to foisting my own stuff or Lugar's off on Mr. Reid after the strong readerly fashion of Prof. Dr. Harold Bloom of Y*l*.

Perhaps we may improve on Reid's Y a little by dropping not only the other Reid but the troop levels as well and say "Nothing matters in the former Iraq except what the American people will ultimately accept." I can imagine the location of a mindset that feels itself overarched by that "truth," but it is a deplorable location. Does Mr. Reid stand side by side with Kristol Minor, then, and consider far the most impressive thing in the former Iraq to be the Republican Party occupation forces? That is not exactly the same Y, yet both Reid and Kristol manage to omit the indigs altogether and thus warrant a common diagnosis of acute narcissism.

Narcissistic or not, of sole real importance or not, is it even the case at all that We The People shall determine our Uncle Sam's aggression and occupation policies at the end of the day? It would be nice to think so, but comfort is one thing and accuracy rather a different one. Certainly Little Brother will continue to determine unilaterally and preëmptively through mid-January 2009, and there is not much question what the Big Party brat's determination will be. Anybody inclined to take short views might reasonablly feel well overarched by that fact, which has the additional advantage of being somewhat more certainly factual than Mr. Reid's.

In the long run, of course, and in the impartial judgments of Princess Posterity, that fact is bound not to overarch. Doubtless General Washington's slogan exitus probat acta -- somewhat maliciously rendered "the end justifies the means" -- will become applicable at last, but meanwhile we unfortunately do not know what sort of exitus it is going to be. Perhaps Mr. Reid is perfectly assured that the eventual upshot in the former Iraq cannot possibly be "unacceptable to the American people," but if so, that is the assurance of faith rather than knowledge.

If he is less perfectly assured and only means that when Televisionland and the electorate become sufficiently disgusted with a failed aggression they can kick the aggression faction out, that proposition is factual only as regards the potentiality: America can do that, but whether she will do it, who knows? That is entirely another story. I remain unconvinced that enough people are disturbed enough about the bloody shambles in Peaceful Freedumbia to actually do it in November 2008. We donkeys may not win the White House back at all, and if we do, it will not be exclusively due to the Big Management Party's incompetences abroad.

And whether we are to have "President Clinton" or "President Giuliani" or any other likely candidate, it is only too easy to imagine policies "unacceptable to the American people" being persevered in. Unacceptability by itself is not enough, because the pols and the "bipartisan foreign-policy community" and certain lobbies can simply ignore the cries of the ignorant mob for irresponsible withdrawal from the former Iraq unless those cries are very loud indeed -- louder than such cries ever actually have been in our annals, if I am not mistaken. There is no reason why ochlocratic foreign policy cannot happen for the first time, and naturally one hopes that it will happen. That would make an admirable "overarching hope." But "overarching truth"? I fear not.


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[1] I suppose this, too, is "pragmatism," the holy Homeland's great contribution to intergalactic philosophy, although Prof. Dewey, and even Mr. James of Harvard, would probably find the gruel a bit thin. Still, it could coincide rather well with the authentic snake oil in the future perfect tense: the Claptrap Plan for X having been successfully instantiated, in retrospect Y is all that anybody ever really needed to know. Short of philosophy, there have been quite a number of historians who have worked on some similar paradigm, so many that a certain school of them got spoofed for perpetrating "Whig History."



[2] "Antiextremism" is not a very good name for a basket, I shouldn't think. It's a bit of a mystery why the Party perps ever traded in "terrorism" for "extremism" at all. That switch dates back to the Rove Epoch, so perhaps even Homer nodded a little?