"Her professional and official calamity" -- ?
"The absolute worst in American political culture" -- ??
"A monumental and insulting hoax" -- ???!
It requires a special perspective to find Texas GOP neocomradess K. Hughes as important, not to mention as godawful, as all that, Mr. Bones. Naturally nobody in M. Rami Khouri's position could possibly enjoy getting treated as a backward and refractory child by some ignorant parochial member of Little Brother's kitchen cabinet, yet all the same, there must be some element of accident involved here, for surely R.K. will have understood how low mere natives stand in the Crawfordite scale of bein's well before Mizz Karen set to rubbin' it in with salt. He has been around a long time, has M. Khouri, so he ought to have seen this foul ball comin'.
With a slightly different temperament, M. Khouri might even have welcomed the Hughes Hobgoblin Show, pointing out sagely that everybody else sent down previously from Imperial HQ to address the Levantine idiot school has taken basically the same attitude as the resigned neocomradess, merely dissembling their contempt insincerely with more or less success. It won't quite do to go on as if the wretched provincial critter had been dragged in to replace George F. Kennan, Jr., or John Kenneth Galbraith -- or to make like Kissinger of Harvard or Baker of Texas. The Greater Levant has never been found worthy of such high-powered permanent representation as that from Uncle Sam's side.
The holy Homeland's credentialled ambassadors in the zone of darkness are mainly contributorial hacks, and unlike Mizz Karen, they are at least credentialled to somebody in particular. Being hacks, it is not an accident, but a logical consequence, that they should be swept out of sight the instant some authentic GOP genius like Kissinger or Baker shows up to solve it all in a jiffy with a paroxysm of shuttlin'. Party neocomradess C. Rice suffers from no discernible urge to shuttle, which may or may not explain how Mizz Karen crept into the picture in the first place. At very least, M. Khouri ought to reflect that the little lady was not sent to lie abroad to insult anybody, let alone to infuriate Rami Khouri in particular. I'm sorry to say that the (indigenous) Greater Levantines were classified as uninsultable decades ago[1], but also sorry to find that a distinguished journalist at the Daily Star should seem to find this a new discovery. It would be nice to suppose that M. Khouri is only funning with us along "Casablanca" lines, only pretending to be SHOCKED by the abominable K. Hughes. Alas, either he's quite serious or my spoofometer is totally out of order.
Anyway, here's the heart of the indictment:
| The core, devastating flaw in her entire mission was to completely separate the world's critical views of the US government from the conduct of American foreign policy itself. She assumed that the problem was that foreigners misunderstood American values or foreign policy goals - but she never tried to understand Arab-Muslims in the same way she asked them to understand her country and its policies. She never understood that her brand of moralizing and arrogant cultural cheerleading - "Go, Muslims, go! Reach for the sky! You can be modern and democratic, if you really try!" - was part of the problem, not part of the solution. She failed to grasp that she was handicapped from the start by trying to make us love a country whose pro-Israeli, pro-Arab autocrats foreign policy - and now the Iraq fiasco - has devastated our lands and cultures for nearly half a century. |
All perfectly accurate, except perhaps that "nearly half a century" underestimates the chronological depth of LCS, Levantine contempt syndrome. M. Khouri may well be reckoning from the summer of 1968, but if he was magically transported back to then, he'd not be all that happy with the fifty years preceding either. [2]
All accurate enough, though scarcely complete. More important, though, not a word of it is new or different or peculiar to the abominable Hughes. I notice, though, that M. Khouri seems not quite sure how to charaterize the Big Party neocomradess's calamitous activities: was she tryin' to get the Lesser Breeds Without "to understand her country and its policies" or merely "to make [them] love a country whose"? These are not the same thing, and it seems to me clear enough that Mizz Karen was a good deal stronger on seekin' Luv [3] for her Boy and Party than on explainin' policy. M. Khouri is clearly in no mood to give the critter or her employers much Luv, and that is admirable, for she and they certainly deserve none, but all the same, I don't think he quite sees how the internal wind-up mechanisms of Grant's Old Party really work.
Meanwhile, there's been nothing to warrant that harsh four-letter word HOAX, and there isn't anything that comes afterwards either. M. Khouri perorates in a way that a stern critic might classify as toying with his readers, but it casts no light on how he supposes the abominable Hughes to have been practicin' upon himself or tryin' the patience of Greater Levantines more generally:
| We should criticize her personally only for accepting to be part of this charade, and playing the fool on a global stage that increasingly came to see her as a strange combination of a comedy and horror show rolled into one. We should instead remind Americans that this is a moment for them to reconsider this whole silly episode, stop wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on vacuous public diplomacy programs, and stop insulting several billion people around the world who do not need any prompting to enjoy American values, education, business, technology, sports, and other offerings - including Halloween night, with its bags of Tootsie-Rolls, and the fantasy of defeated wicked witches who get on their brooms and disappear into the night sky, to reappear only in our future nightmares. |
Even "charade" is not really warrantable, when it comes to Boy and Party, justly evaluated. Of "hoax" there can be no question at all. To be sure, M. Rami Khouri has never bound himself to our own canons of what is to count as lying in politics, Mr. Bones. Still, where are hoax and charade even by his own standards? He has detected Big Party neocomradess K. Hughes in the act of sayin' all sorts of silly things to the Lesser Breeds Without that the vast majority of LBW's would never dream of believing no matter who alleged them. Fine, but when there is no danger of the intended marks and dupes actually being deceived, "hoax" is the wrong word by anybody's standards.
"Charade" I am not quite so confident about, but should not the implication be that everybody playing at charades knows the rules and has deliberately suspended her usual everyday standards of serious communication? Dulce est desipere in loco, or so they say, and it would be easy enough to extend a little charity to Mizz Karen on those grounds, if only those were the flack's own grounds. But obviously they ain't. She did not expect her Party tripe and baloney to be greeted with winks and nods and a tacit agreement from the audience that of course that is how Crawfordite extremists have to talk, even though we all know what they are really up to. This is more than a matter of neocomradess K. Hughes's subjective sincerity, though it is that as well., for of course she really does consider that the GOP Demoplutocratic Way is so intrinsically warm and wunnerful that if only the Lesser Breeds Without could once catch an unobstructed view of it, they'd pervert to it instantly and never look back. To mock such parochial ignorance and self-infatuation and narcissism is a worthy cause, but unfortunately to mock them with accusations of hoax or playin' at charades is almost entirely off target. Unless criticism starts by conceding that the little lady from Rancho Crawford believed all her own pet nonsenses one thousand percent -- and had not the slightest intention of deceivin' or insultin' anybody with them -- criticism can say nothing to the point.
The worst true thing to be said about Mizz Karen is that she believed every last word of her own Big Management Party sales spiel. That is a very dreadful thing to have to say about any rational animal, I admit, but there is no occasion for M. Rami Khouri to blow the subjective sincerity of partisan hacks and fools up into "the absolute worst in American political culture." He ought to reflect, it seems to me, that he and his patria grande would be in a far worse fix if that "country [that] has devastated our lands and cultures for nearly half a century" were in the hands of subtle cynics rather than omphaloscopic nitwits and applause-lovers. The clownishness of clowns who take themselves very seriously can be very annoying, no doubt, but if the alternatives to Master Dubya and Dr. Condi and Mizz Karen are pondered seriously, I believe the devasted will conclude that they do not inhabit the very worst of all possible Weltordnungen.
King Log is no great treasure, obviously, but King Stork really would be even worse. [4]
And God knows best.
___
[1] The case of the Tel Aviv statelet is sui generis insultwise as otherwise, yet Jewish Statism gets no better diplomats than Gentile intransigeance, as far as I can discern. It's the nine-tenths of the iceberg that Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer have been plumbing lately with very rash zeal that makes the chief difference, and that glacial phenomenon is plainly located in central North America rather than Southwest Asia. M. Olmert is quite as insultable as M. Lahoud or M. Siniora, if considered in himself, yet his cause is hallowed by sentimentality or "ideology" like no other Greater Levantine cause whatsoever.
[2] Or the millennium before that, I daresay. It seems harder in those parts than elsewhere to fix upon any "Good King Charles' golden days" that won't immediately arouse a chorus of boos and snickers from a plurality or majority of any mixed audience of locals. As regards M. Khouri's own patria chica, the Beirut statelet, what was there to yearn back towards now? Perhaps a few years after 1945 when it looked as if the United Nations Charter might make much more difference to this alien and bewildered world of ours than it actually has.
M. Khouri's patria grande is even harder to bask in the ancient glory of, unless that glory be so ancient as to be irrelevant. "Good old al-Mu‘tasim's golden days" would have a rather desperate ring to it, I fear, even if there were not quite a number of Greater Levantines who would be happy to rip the gilt off even that remote gingerbread.
[3] Or let's cut the spoofery and speak like grown-ups of "applause" rather than "Luv." Applause seems to be the commodity that Château Kennebunkport and Castle Cheney and Rancho Crawford are more in quest of than other, which puts them somewhat at odds with certain harder-headed Party neocomrades of the oderint dum metuant school. This generalization applies to the politics of the holy Homeland as well as to all zones of overseas aggression and occupation whatsoever, not merely in the Middle East. Accordingly, I expect that Princess Posterity's historians will discuss the applause-seekin' abominations of K. Hughes in close conjunction with those of neocomrade K. Rove. Since I lump these two P. R. creeps together in a larger whole in a way that M. Rami Khouri does not, his account of the Boy-'n'-Party malfeasance will not agree very closely with my own, even as regards just Kiddie Krusadin' and the Palestine Puzzle.
[4] To think one's way around the GOP geniuses seems the obvious recourse, and in principle what could be easier than that? In practice it is not quite so simple, mainly due to the sad degree of fragmentation that obtains in the Greater Levant. Like pretty well everything else, this difficulty can be blamed on the Fifty Years' Devastation and often is. M. Khouri is far from the worst offender in this respect, but even he might bear in mind that to pass the buck is not in itself any contribution to thinking one's way around the obstruction.
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