Who Is Jim Holt?

(( Moderation in Mu’ámariyya! What next after that, Mister Bones? ))

Having no notion of this teller, we must perforce start with the tale, the tale as anyone may find it at the London Review of Books. ('Tis a sadly tame and unconspiratorial commencement already, begorrah!)

Suppose I were to quote very briefly indeed,

One can’t say for certain that oil supplied the prime motive. But the hypothesis is quite powerful when it comes to explaining what has actually happened in Iraq.

, already the wimpishness is manifest. "War for oil" is in itself a sadly rational business, or at least seems so here on Lord Mammon's Planet. Really fun conspiracies feature extraterrestrial (extramammonian) invaders from Utterly Elsewhere, faith-crazies or race-crazies -- or best of all, sheer evil-crazies, like those apocryphal comic-book "mad scientists determined to destroy the Universe for ends of their own." As soon as the Mu’ámara Junction gentry and all that ilk are presented with hypotheses about secret manipulations tending towards ends that might conceivably be their own, their interest wanes, their attention wanders, they resume talking about other folks' alleged ‘cartoons.’ [2]

And if "War for Oil" is wimpy already, what word suffices for the wimpicity of "War for Oil" being advanced only as "the hypothesis ... explaining what has actually happened in Iraq"? What chance have we complacent Hypothesis People against all the ravenin' hordes of Conspiracy People?

It's a nifty appeal antecedently, that one, but as a description of How The World Works as of 10/15/2007 08:02PM , is it not rather a misleading one, O Bones? Are not we Hypothesis People fundamentally in charge at present, with the Conspiracy People reduced to smashing other people's airliners into other people's skyscrapers just to get a paragraph in the press for themselves, perhaps occasioning a slight uptick in casualty insurance rates, thouh scarcely life insurance rates, for others?

But that's only me as usual. Here's unusual Jim:

The costs – a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists killed because of repealed helmet laws) – are negligible compared to $30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and cheap gas for voters. In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success.

Is that not moderation and proportion and a sense of measure, Mr. Bones? What's the point of our Uncle Sam being the Grand Exception from Mere Mankind, the One Indispensable Nation, the Sole Remainin' Hyperpower, if "a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen" deaths either deters Sam or encourages? Maybe the Peaceful Freedumbia now created by the militant extremist GOP was a good idea, or maybe it was a bad idea, or maybe it was only an idea of its time -- why should it concern us first and foremost to sort all that out, Mr. Bones, as long as it's all only a matter of spare change in Weltpolitik rather than of basic solvency?

But you may have noticed, sir, that Jim Holt (who?) and I are not broadcasting on exactly the same wavelength. Jim says "resounding success," I speak of "spare change." Not quite the same thing, though of course our Sam must have had some very resonant and well attested successes in his CV to be able to spare the change now, to simply soar far above the whole Bin Búsh v. Bin Ládin historic sideshow and all Greater Texan or Outer Khurasánian backwaters of history whatsoever.

Eventus probat acta, what I myself like best about Jim Who is his literal bottom line:

Still, there is reason to be sceptical of the picture I have drawn: it implies that a secret and highly ambitious plan turned out just the way its devisers foresaw, and that almost never happens.

Just so. Reflect upon that, Mr. Bones, mark it well and deeply digest! Are we Hypothesis People now become Weltherren und Weltherrscher, BinBushies or BinLadinites, thanks to some "secret and highly ambitious plan," some emanation or ebullition from the Tanks of Thought? Possess we anything to write a sure-fire best-seller about, like The Managment Secrets of Attila the Hun -- "You, too, can make your own country as great as Greater Texas is, just send $139.95 to learn exactly how, call toll-free . . . ."

Surely not. Wince! Yuck!! SURELY NOT!!!


_____
[1] "Jim Holt writes for the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker."

No doubt he does, and since both organs of trendiness are well worth avoiding, we usually avoid them and thus is no great mystery that we have not heard of him before.


[2] Why is a ‘cartoon’ not like a comic book? Not a hard question: at Mu’ámara Junction ‘cartoon’ is a technical term, a muSTalaH, whereas I have just spoken of comic books merely literaliter et vulgariter.

As to the exact nature of the MJ gentry's technicality, I am not altogether sure of my ground, but part of this high matter, at least, must be that one cannot (literally) cartoon a conspiracy and produce a drawing that any editor is likely to buy to grace her corporation's editorial pages. Nine times out of ten the graphics are inadequate -- which makes it a lousy cartoon, me judice -- so labels have to be attached to this or that icon and perhaps a verbal punch line appended. But once that supplementation has been done, what emerges is at best a pictorial representation of Conspiracy Detected, not of Conspiracy simpliciter. Conspiracy Detected must displease the MJ gentry for two reasons, if not more: (1) if it's already detected, MJ may not hope to gain the honour of first detection, and (2) a bit less selfocentrically, naturally undetected conspiracies worry the mu’ámarian mindset worst.

AEI and GOP and Heritagitarians and Hoovervillains might loosely be said to be in a "conspiracy" to advance Lord Mammon's interests and coënjoy them forever with their Master, but now that everybody politically awake and adult has heard that creaky Juggernaut comin' at us for about the last fifteen decades, there are no "missing links" left to trace and scarcely even any serious controversies about exactly how to connect up the Mammonite dots already discovered.

Observe, Mr. Bones, that I have just tried to drawn you a political cartoon -- to the extent that an utter Unpicture Person like me can aspire to do so with mere words. The gentry at Mu’ámara Junction think about ALL ‘cartoons’ the way you (and I) think about my feeble attempt, that's the heart of the matter, I believe. However you must not let it confuse you that the MJ gentry happen to side with, and propagandize for, certain clients in the Greater Levant who happen to theological iconoclasts. That's only an accident, sir, or at least so I unconspiratorially suppose it to be. The MJ gentry invite one to throw away the ‘cartoons’ of Ann Arbor and Times Square and Rancho Crawford not because all cartoons are pictures -- truly a reason for dummies, that one! -- but because what the MJ gentry toploftily despise as ‘cartoons’ are bad pictures, cheap trashy icons and idols far inferior to their own vastly more Rembrandt-like portraits and panoramas.

I fear I simply don't like these MJ gentry very much, Mr. Bones, but like Jim Holt, I at least know that I don't. You tell me, sir: am I spoofing MJ too outrageously to accuse it of holding that the only real difference between an ideological ‘cartoon’ and an ideological Rembrandt is how many dots are connected and how many links went unmissed?

The serious -- theological or post-theological or paratheological -- iconoclasm of the Greater Levant must find the MJ gentrification as unsatisfactory as I do, and probably even more unsatisfactory, for after all it's their ideological cargos, not mine, that get shipwrecked or highjacked whenever routed through Mu’ámara Junction. Serious Greater Levantine iconoclasts don't want fewer links missed and more dots connected and better ideological pictures painted, what they want, oddly enough, is simply no pictures at all, not even ideopictures. (Golly, who'd 'a' thunk it, that ‘iconoclasm’ might mean that!)