Mr. Gary Makiya is no Blaise Pascal, to be sure, but then he is so much nearer at hand that he looms even larger, and there can be no problem about background information at all, for res nostra agitur: his tirade endeavors to blame the Big Party's Kiddie Krusade on faults in the general or collective or national character of us denizens of the holy Homeland, and he goes about his task with all the gusto of M. Pascal in hot pursuit of some exotically surnamed Molinista Jesuit. Perhaps a tiny sample of the general flavor will lure you to read the whole thing, Mr. Bones? I have no intention of quoting much of it.
| Sept. 11 is a totemic date for the Bush administration. It justifies everything, explains everything, ends all argument. It is the crime that must be eternally punished, the wound that can never heal, the moral high ground that can never be taken. [1] (...) Bush's America responded to 9/11 by lashing out. We chose vigilantism over justice, instinct over reason. Bush demanded that America play the role of the angry, righteous avenger, and America followed him. But we were not taking vengeance on the guy who attacked us but on somebody standing on the corner. The war was like the massacre in Haditha on a global scale. |
That's not half bad in isolation, me judice and I'm especially pleased to notice and commend our own word "vigilantism" -- but I fear it's not in isolation, there's a great deal more of it where that came from, and most of the "more of" is also "same as." Severity of moral condemnation makes for an excellent show, but mere prolixity of severe moral condemnation wears out severity's welcome out pretty rapidly. Three-quarters of what Mr. Makiya wants to tirade about could be summed up in four or five words, had he a convenient and standardized Schimpflexicon precompiled such as we possess, Mr. Bones, as is proved by the fact that I just did so sum it up at the top of this very scribble.
Perhaps we should begin with the other twenty-five percent, though, and get it out of the way. "Gland-baser" is only part of what's allegedly wrong with ourselves and Our Sam, Mr. Prosecutor G. Makiya levels a TWO-count indictment:
| Bush's, and America's, response to 9/11 was fundamentally flawed for two reasons: [1] it was atavistic and instinctive, and [2] it was based on a distorted, ignorant and bigoted view of the Arab/Muslim world. These two founding errors are qualitatively different: [t]he first involves emotions, the second ideas. But mixed together, they created a lethal cocktail. The grand justification of "spreading democracy in the Middle East" merely provided a palatable cover for vengeance and racism. |
Count [1] comes first because it seems most important, to Mr. Prosecutor, but perhaps I inflate the difference too much by proposing a 75%-25% ratio. I should be very sorry to be though to despise "ideas" unduly and exalt "emotions," but unfortunately I agree with Mr. Prosecutor about the emotions, closely enough, but have grave difficulty taking his "ideas" very seriously. I think he misunderstands, or misremembers, the actual course of Big Management's aggression into the former Iraq. "[S]preading democracy in the Middle East" may be a "grand" justification, but it certainly was not the Party perps' own original justification of their perpetration. The latter, of course, was a certain little matter of Mr. Blair's terror-tipped forty-five-minute specials that turned out to be all poodle Tony and no monster Saddam. Nobody can rewind Ms. Clio's tape and revisit what would have happened if the stumblebums had actually discovered all the anthrax and nerve gas and nukes that they had so thoroughly autoterrorized themselves of. Perhaps they would have hung around in their semiconquered Mesopotamian provinces even if Dr. Hans Blix had been utterly discredited in the first five minutes of supralegal GOP aggression, and hung around not only to defang the unearthed WMD but maybe even to "spread democracy in the Middle East" -- at least a little, for Tel Aviv's sake if not for Castle Cheney's and Rancho Crawford's. Nobody knows for sure what would have happened if. But equally, nobody at Mr. Prosecutor's level has much excuse for not remembering what did happen when.
With that, let's dismiss the 25% about "ideas" and turn to the primary indictment about Uncle Sam the alleged gland-baser? How would you plead, Mr. Bones, was you Sam Himself?
What's that, sir? You refuse to plead either way, not actually being Sam Himself?
Very sensible of you, Mr. Bones, and very commendable in its way, yet how are we to get on if you refuse to plead for Sam, sir? Uncle Sam is, strictly speaking, only a cartoon such as those ineffably high-falutin' narrow partisan gentry over at Mu’ámara Junction turn their supercultivated noses up at instinctively, but must we only wretchedly conclude with the Friends of Eddie Burke that cartoons of whole nations, like the whole nations themselves, are unindictable simply as such? Is all the looms-as-large-as-Pascal moralist zeal of a Gary Makiya radically misspent, then, mere "expense of spirit in a waste of shame"? Say it ain't so, Bones! And then think of it from Our Sam's side too, sir! If little Gary can't ever indict big Sam due to alien exotic Burkean -- or even aliener and exoticker mu’ámariyya technicalities --if Our Sam can't ever get a day in court at all, He may be perfectly safe from conviction, but is He not equally "safe" from vindication as well?
Let us bethink ourselves carefully hereabouts, O Bones! To recur to first principles, we have as ever travaillons donc à bien penser, and. should mere second principles need to be recurred to in case of a tie, how about Steve Decatur's "Our Sam, right or wrong"? Should nephew Gary ever find a suitable jurisdiction to indict his uncle Sam in and then obtain the verdict he seeks, what would you and I do, Bones? I trust that we should NOT just instantly disown Sam and point out all the reasons why a GOP-kidnapped Sam's doin's have nothing to do with ourselves, although all that we might urge along those lines be perfectly sound and accurate in itself. That plan would not at all be to make Decatur primary and Pascal secondary, it would only be what most families with convicted relatives presumably do all the time, neither to dispute the August Verdict of Impartial Justice nor break with one's own justly condemned Sams: "Maybe he's a gland-baser, but he's OUR gland-baser still, goddammit!"
An objector might object that this mixed attitude is only more gland-basing, after all, but oddly enough Prosecutor Gary has something to say for it, sort of:
| It's biological hard-wiring -- after you're hit, your instinct is to hit back. For conservatives, this instinct is not only natural but necessary. Hence the endless right-wing denunciations of war critics as wimps, girly-men and appeasers. (...) Of course, instincts play a vital role in human life: [t]hey underlie virtually all of our thoughts and actions. To ignore them is to fall into a deracinated world of sterile rationality. Lashing out is sometimes an effective way to defend yourself. But . . . . |
Hopefully our own Master Blaise never quite proposed any "deracinated world of sterile rationality," mathematician and technocrat and prescriptively evil (and actually proscribed) Jansenist though he undoubtedly was. All M. Pascal did, as I conjecture, was first to bring to everybody's (subjective) attention that such a world as that exists elsewhere and is a vast universe zillions of time larger than "Our World." He never proposed that anybody actually apostasize to Vastness-As-Such, let alone submit to be judged by it, and all subsequent serious attempts so to apostatize to, or be judged by, have never lead to anything much better than the verses of Robinson Jeffers -- maybe a 'B' or 'B+' if you happen to like that sort of thing, as I myself happen to, yet certainly RJ is no proper anti-Dante to be universally laureated and canonized per contra.
Still, it's a great read, Mr. Bones, even if Nephew Gary slips and slides and slithers around about exactly whom he's indicting and what crimes he's inditing for, exactly, whilst he arraigns the malicious GOP action-cartoon of his Uncle Sam. Very sub-Pascalian indeed, yet such is the merit of M. Pascal that even lots and lots of subness in that path leaves lots and lots of room for verity still!
By all means take a look at this comparatively elegant performance, Mr. Bones, and please don't just instantly set it aside if you don't feel seriously indicted personally by "cower when it comes to war ... afraid to criticize the irrational, instinctive nature of" Nephew Gary's kaleidiscope-worthy instant transitions between yimmer-yammer and yammer-yimmer. Look upon this uncle-indicting nephew Gary with an eye of pity, O Bones, and yet not without due regard for the eventual Eye of Truth either. Try to be fair, sir! My own fairness fails me when it comes to Master Gary Makiya, I fear. His bravura performance leaves me mostly wishing that that both nephew and uncle should be expunged from memory as quickly as possible -- yet of course no other niece or nephew can ever simply wish cold-turkey that Our Sam should simply cease to be, and as to ungrateful (?) Gary, it really was was a bravura performance, after all, Mr. Bones.
Please advise.
___
[1] A little work on his travaillons donc à bien penser -- a self-improvement project that I take to include good expression of the well thought -- would do Mr. Makiya no harm at all. One can either comprehend "moral high ground that can never be taken" as it stands, with a little bit of cheap ingenuity, or else mentally emend the text to "moral high ground that can never be abandoned" with much greater ease, but whichever one he meant, he should have made his intention unmistakable.
Cheap ingenuity as exercised chez moi takes "[The Pentagon/WTC attacks] are the moral high ground that can never be taken" as a sort of accidental autogarble or unintelligible foreshortening of "The Pentagon/WTC attacks absolve [Little Brother, or Uncle Sam, or whomever] from ever needin' to take the moral high ground again." That would amount to our own "All's fair in love and war" as one of the major Keys to All Kiddie Krusader Mythology very closely. If emendation be preferred, then the "moral high ground" is so extremely toplofty that it trumps mere morality, which means that "moral" must be a sarcasm, which amounts to the same thing once we work the sum out. Both the high road and the low road lead to the same Scotland at last -- "Scotland" from Greek skotía, don't you know? If there is any point in being lured to try to take both roads to Darkness simultaneously, however, it's too subtle for me, and from the rest of this scribble, subtlety does not appear to be quite Mr. Gary Makiya's métier. (He does seem to fancy himself a bit of a stylist, though, as witness that "totemic"!)
No comments:
Post a Comment