The Loser Who Won While Nobody Was Looking

The cornerstone of Professor Doctor Loser's self-proclaimed victory turns out to be as passive-aggressive as everythin' else about him, and that ought to be no great surprise to anybody who has followed his peculiar career trajectory. Furthermore, theoretical students of Weltordnung who never heard of Party neocomrade F. ‘A. Loser could no doubt work out in advance that somebody has to really lose if masochism is to win its zero-sum game.[1] Unfortunately the booby-prize winners in Peaceful Freedumbia, as nominated from the fastnesses of Johns Hopkins University and Castle Cheney, belong to neither class, and they are not at all likely to agree with, let alone consent to, being converted into masochism's footstool as follows:

The Sunni Arabs know that they have lost their war against this new Iraq, that the bet they placed on al Qaeda and neighboring Sunni Arab nations has been lost.

Charity may conjecture that Prof. Loser has become thoroughly goldwaterized by keepin' bad company and thus accidentally overlooked to mention that the TwentyPercenters know this knowledge only in their hearts, it being quite impossible to detect anything of the sort from the behavior of their lips. On the other hand, a little less charity might take the view that Dr. Loser is fibbin' for his Boy and his Party, and understands very well that he is fibbin'. Perhaps at the end of the day TwentyPercenterism in the former Iraq will slink away from the Casino of Human Events hopeless and hapless and politically broke, the late Sunni Ascendancy lost and gone forever along with poor Clementine . . . -- but to pretend that this pretty fable is happening already could easily be classified as a bright star-spangled lie. [2]

Goldwaterizin' seems to be Prof. Loser's preferred modus operandi all across the board:

... Iraqis of all stripes have now come to terms with their country's desperate need of American protection and patronage. Ignore the pollsters who tell you that Iraqis have had their fill of the American presence. There is a realism that comes to men and women who know calamities, and this realism teaches Iraqis that this American project is their country's chance for a way out of a history of grief and terror.

"Damn the pollsters, full steam ahead! Pollin' can't tell you about your neo-Iraqi subjects, Uncle Sam, for that purpose you require the divination services of Big Party neocomrade F. ‘A. Loser! Accept no inferior substitutes, sir!"

But seriously, nobody in the multiply beseiged camp of poor M. al-Málikí says "Alliance with militant GOP extremism [or crudely, 'with America'] is our country's last best way out of grief and terror and history" any more than one can find any Arabophone Sunní political smithereen with a program that begins "Whereas restoration of our theocommunity's traditional Ascendancy has now proved completely unattainable, be it resolved that . . ."

Prof. F. ‘A. Loser of GOP and JHU can read the unspoken secret knowledge of Twelver hearts as well as that of TwentyPercenter hearts! That leaves only the geheime Herzkenntnis of the Free Kurds to be divined, but I fear the learned propagandist is not much interested in non-Arabs:

The Kurds want (and have) their autonomy but have no eagerness to break out on their own to face alone the schemes of the Iranians, the Turks, and the Syrians.

That perfunctory heart scan turns out disappointingly like mere conventional wisdom, does it not? Above all, it is easy enough to find Free Kurd pols who say things like that out loud, so that Dr. Loser's special expertise is superfluous.[3]

Considered as one isolated specimen, neocomrade F. ‘A. Loser is too peculiar to be of much importance. Yet the idiosyncratic neo-Goldwaterism does stand on an interesting boundary, the line between Party agitprop ("Four more wars!") and philosophical Parmenedism ("Whatever you know is wrong!") It's a pity from the specimen's own point of view that it should care so little for philosophy but burn with zeal for Party.[4] Or perhaps in light of its inveterate masochism, that's not a pity but a blessin'? God knows best what this specimen's own Herzkenntniss is like!

Meanwhile, practical successes for Boy and Party and the Responsible Nonwithdrawal™ product will most likely not be achieved after exactly this fashion. Consider where the specimen craves to arrive at last:

[T]here shall [sic] be a substantial U.S. presence for many years to come. In public, Iraqi leaders say that they don't wish to see their country as a battleground between America and Iran. But behind closed doors, there is an acceptance by Iraq's political class of an American presence on the Iran-Iraq frontier. We may sugarcoat the truth, but Iran shall be monitored from Iraq. And the American presence in Araby—historically in Sunni lands—now extends to a republic led by Arab Shiites.

That ‘Araby’ is dreadfully cutesy-cutesy, which may not be just a literary point but part of Prof. Loser's substantial problems quâ partisan: talkin' Televisionland and the electorate into distrusting their senses and assuming that the True Platonic Form of Peaceful Freedumbia must be completely different from all mere appearances is, as I consider, an antecedently hopeless task. Surely what Machiavelli would do, should he favour Little Brother and Big Management and Kiddie Krusadin', is try to hush the whole business up as much as possible? Prof. Loser patiently explains to his Party's base-and-vile that in the Greater Levant, there is always a "but behind closed doors" factor somewhere. That is perfectly true, though it is entirely a different thing than his own neo-Goldwaterizin', because it is always sufficient apparent, to anybody willing to investigate a little, what the cardboard kingdoms and barracks-based republics say to their militant Republican patrons down at the ranch, as well as what they say to their street Arabs at home.

The issue of political praxis is whether better results for extremist purposes will emerge from drawin' the attention of the base and vile to this fact or from not confusin' their poor little heads with it. F. ‘A. Loser of GOP and JHU has clearly made his choice, and I seem two difficulties about it:

(1) the brains he proposes to wash are not up to the level where the detergent suggested would be effective. Six years have passed since the Big Bang, and by now we have seen how much interest Televisionland and the electorate and the GOP base-and-vile are prepared to take in practical Orientalism, and it is not a lot.

(2) In exceptional cases to the contrary, the neocomrade's Goldwaterizin' raises further obstacles. Anybody who can see the "behind closed doors" angle in general is dangerously likely to be bright enough and concerned enough to detect Professor F. ‘A. Loser in the act whenever he just makes up what is supposedly bein' said behind those closed doors from scratch to suit his polemical convenience or his masochistic druthers.

In short, Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses, yá Fu‘ád!


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[1] 'Tis a zero-sum game at best, for what proper masochist could endure anything more cheerful?


[2] Dr. Loser is so good at self-inculpation that it would be sheer impertinence to attempt to assist, yet it should be noticed as an attendant circumstance, merely, that he parades this detectable inaccuracy before a popular audience that could conceivably be deceived. How many customers of U.S. News and World Report know enough about the bushogenic shambles to find his claim about the acknowledged defeat of the TwentyPercenters remarkable, let alone preposterous?


[3] A moderate dose of Goldwater's Salts might actually be appropriate in the case of Free Kurdistán, but it is not a secret that a lot of the montani semper liberi are quite prepared to brave the dangers and go all the way with Peace and Freedom, all the way out of the former Iraq in word as well as in deed. Accordingly, Dr. Loser need not be called in to diagnose and prescribe, one may reserve his services for the really hopeless cases where mere appearances give not a clue of what is really goin' on in the knowledge of hearts. He'd find the Free Kurds very uncongenial patients in any case, for it would be difficult to make their plight seem satisfactory from any masochistic perspective that I can imagine. BGKB.


[4] In the text, I drop the philosophy at once. Down here we may notice, however, the Parmenidean convergence of M. Fu‘ád ‘Ajamí with the gentry of Mu’ámara Junction. They could scarcely despise one another's materia more than they do, yet are joined at the hip formaliter all the same. Both parties cherish thoroughly unappearance-based notions of the former Iraq.

That their two unapparent Real Truths are almost totally contradictory, and that the contradiction admits primâ facie of a straightforward explanation in terms of tá’ifiyya, will no doubt seem to be arguments that tell against Parmenedism and in favor of Aristotle and a more WYSIWYG universe only to those of us who were inclined to think so beforehand. Logically the rejectionist position is sound enough: Parmenedism as such inculcates the dogma that one cannot possibly know anything much about Reality by attending to superficial appearances; it does not address the issue of what happens when one turns one's back on shallow appearances and Deep Reality alike and starts "just making stuff up."

(( What passes for classical philosophy might be rather different had the ("realistic") novel been invented before it rather than long afterwards. As things are, "just making stuff up" scarcely overlaps with most people's notion of a philosophical subject-matter at all. Oh, well! ))