| Gazing on my precious treasure, Lost in reckless dreams of pleasure, Thy unspotted heart possessing, Grasping at the promis'd blessing, Pouring out my soul before thee, Living only to adore thee, Could I see the tempest brewing? Could I dread the blast of ruin? |
Ah, woe! Only "Had we never looved sae kindly; / Had we never looved sae blindly" &c. is Robert Burns; the rest, only Mrs. Anne Grant. [2] Yet that's all right too, I suppose, because the gentry of Mu’ámmara Junction are still in their initial swoon, even though it has been neared five years than four since the former Iraq got itself formerized. Well and deeply swooned -- "reckless" is indeed un mot juste -- are the mu’ámmariyya, to be still talking about "First Steps" even as the Blast of Ruin looks to be hard upon them!
The way the infatuate misreckon ex-Iraqi things marches to a very different tune,
| . . . the Petraeus show and all that indicates by way of American failure [3] . . . the pattern of unremitting failure in occupied Iraq, from the collapse of any popular respect for the new political class, to the hollowness of the "reconciliation" schemes by the likes of Hashemi, and the approaching collapse of the Kurdish quasi-separatist dream . . . . |
Today's linkage communiqué is triple-barreled, aimed to blow away not only Free Kurds and traitor Turks, but also that [exp. del.] "new political class." Bliss or Nancy or Dulcinea or whatever the damsel's name be called distinctly reminds me of Cicero on the bosom of Clodia, "a well-traveled thoroughfare only occasionaly available to birds." Yet love is blind, -- did nobody ever tell you that, Mr. Bones? -- and no doubt "Thy unspotted heart possessing" is subjectively sincere enough amongst the impervious gentry.
Speaking of other folks' "reckless dreams of pleasure," I don't quite see why the Free Kurds should be accounted lukewarm half-and-halfers and quasis, separationwise. What's left of Free Kurdish integration into the former Iraq is rather a Crawford or Ankara or Turtle Bay idea than anything they set much store by themselves. Yet perhaps that may change, should the traitor Turks actually invasionize their Beulah Land. More likely, supralegal vigilante invasion would throw them straight into the clutches of militant GOP extremism without so much as a rest stop at brave New Baghdád. Political Willy Suttons go where the Weltmacht is, or at least they very plainly ought to.
The Free Kurds haven't done much for poor M. al-Málikí, and certainly he cannot do much for them. Up to just now, both the mu’ámmariyya and Dr. Righteous Virtue have mostly left the Free Kurds out of their lovely ideodaydreams about the aboriginal unsectarianism of "Iraq," but that fantasy too might conceivably change. The FK's may not be very pious, but technically speaking they have every right to be represented at the Sunní International.
On the other hand, so do the traitor Turks, especially with M. Erdogan and M. Gul firmly ensconced at the top of the greasy pole. The Blast of Ruin can be rather distinctly heard howling right outside the dream palace of Mu’ámmariya Junction, as it seems to me: how come neither Free Kurds nor traitor Turks are keen to ride to the rescue of the TwentyPercenters, so remarkably unkeen that they even feel free to quarrel with one another whilst Bliss and Nancy and Dulcinea stand in gravest peril? Love seems to be quite as deaf as blind. [4]
And now enough of that, though feel free to recycle note [1] again, Mr. Bones, as a sort of dal capo al fin.
___
[1] "Not very elegant prose for the expression of such high concepts, you may say. But let's forget for a moment . . . ."
[2] Cf. on "Fairwell Bliss, and Fairwell Nancy" Hess 193 WoO 152 #20.
[3] Evidently it is intended to augmentate the vernacular by importation of the má ... min gizmo, for there is no reason to believe the paragraph that I pluck a few gorgeous feathers from was originally intended in any language but English. Perhaps we are being humbugged that the gentry have been translating chickentracks so long that they cannot think without an imported mental and lexical toolkit?
[4] As usual, Bones, we raise no question about the subjective sincerity of the blind and deaf and dream-ensorcelled. Even the most speculative discussion of cynicism would be absurd with the factious swains of Mu’ámmara Junction and Historiae.Org. Undoubtedly they cannot "see the tempest brewing," for what sane cynic would have any motive to pretend to believe their beliefs or affirm their affirmations?
Their faction and facticity runs not at all in our own direction, but why on earth should it? Consider Mr. B. and Dr. R. V. a splendid enhancement of the multiform diversity of human events, Mr. Bones, try to keep the aesthetic side of their show uppermost. You might as well, sir, since at the Willy Sutton level these gentry do not significantly exist in any case, and are not likely to start existing any time soon.
To attempt a moral indictment by charging that if they really cared for Bliss and Nancy and Dulcinea, they'd try to see clearer and hear better so as to get their precious treasure out of danger more efficaciously is tempting, slightly, but it won't do. If hard pressed on that front, they'd almost certainly read us a sermonette about how OUGHTABE trumps IS, falling back on a sort of moralizing that has appealed to many other factions and factiousnesses and facticities than their own in the last couple dozen centuries. To invite such gentry to be what you and I and M. Pascal would call "reasonable," to take pains to think well first and foremost, looks to them like a whispering of Satan. They are not totally unaware of what the political weather is like outside their private pleasure domes, they are sufficiently aware (as I conjecture) to turn their thoughts away from meteorology more or less deliberately.
Ah, well, Mr. Bones:
| People in love cannot be won by kindness, And opposition makes them feel like martyrs. |
You and I and M. Pascal really are oppositionists for the Xanaduvians and might as well admit that we'd basically like either to woo them out of love with Bliss and Nancy and Dulcinea altogether, or else win them over to a cold-eyed despair that sees how vast the gulf yawns between OUGHTABE and IS. Whether, in the second case, they finally stick with OUGHTABE or defect to IS is not in fact of any great concern to us, yet the infatuates are bound to think that we urge them to sell out as well as grow up.
"It is admirable that you want it, only don't think you are ever going to get it" is decidedly an adult flavor of moralizing. The young at heart, plus almost all inveterate and subliminal Platonizers, find it scarcely intelligible, let alone palatable. "Idealism" in the cant or journalistic sense is really connected with Father Plato and Grandfather Parmenides, but it goes wrong by greedily and impatiently wanting its Dream Palaces right here and right now, here and now where we can have no abiding Xanadu, as Gloomy Gus wisely remarked. That is the main reason why our dreamy neogentry find Gus such a wet blanket. It is certainly no accident that M. Pascal was affiliated to an Augustinian conventicle. One does not require the Eastern Mediterranean Monotheist jenseits to make platonizing intellectually respectable and keep it from going bad, obviously, for the juggernaut got started centuries before EMM came in, yet Idealism does need some sort of jenseits, and a better quality product that one commonly finds nowadays. To platonize and parmenidate about nothing lofter than a restoration of the former Sunní Ascendancy in "Iraq" is bad thought as well as bad taste. There is no law against rooting for that team if it takes one's fancy, hovever, de gustibus non disputandum: the bad thinking proper starts when one tries to make an "ideal" out of such an extremely diesseitige agenda, and gets worse when it collides with a more nominalist assessment and starts feeling itself martyred, as the poet well diagnoses the Xanadu syndrome. Bad thought culminates when the Xanadu crew lose track of the distinction between "find" and "invent" altogether and start behaving like Hans Christian Andersen's emperor, announcing that there is no need to continue our pilgrimage because -- as everybody pure in heart can see at a glance! -- we have already arrived.
The mu’ámmariyya signalizes "our" happy homecoming as follows:
| [W]e could say the dead end and the midnight of the occupation's dismemberment-scheme for Iraq signals the dawn of a new sovereign and unified Iraq. |
No doubt "we" could say that, if "we" chose, but "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is briefer, no harder to enunciate, and has the advantage of being considerably more pertinent to the present state of the former Iraq. Allow me to recommend it, Mr. Bones, should any mantra at all be indispensably necessary.
(( But God know best what mantras the lovelorn should mumble! ))
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