| Bush's loathsome toadies actually come out and say that all this spending of our blood and treasure is the price of security. But [they lie.] |
Wow, there goes the toady vote! Who's next?
No, not so fast, the sayin’s of the toadies of Big Management may be important, even though their individual votes are beyond all hope of seduction by America's party.
However in this case the question is rather one of their non-sayin’s. You and I, Mr. Bones, undoubtedly waste far more time examining the e-gutters of Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh than JC does. So I ask you, sir, have you ever heard any spokesperson for the Ever-Victorious Coalition™ [1] say anything very like the words that JC would thrust into their maws? Something along the lines of "Make no mistake, America! All this spending of [y]our blood and treasure is the price of [[y]our] security -- and don't you ever forget it!"
Genuine Boy-and-Party toadies, and mere non-toady fellow-travelers with militant GOP extremism as well, do not often express themselves quite like that. It is not an accident that Don Juan does not provide a direct quotation. [2] The aggressionistas all believe somethin’ like that, no doubt, and probably most of them would sign a petition written by somebody else that contains the exact Colean words, but when they are speakin’ freely and for themselves, they speak differently. Don Juan and we may hold them rigorously to whatever follows logically from their barks and bellows, but that does not warrant the claim that they "actually come out and say" so-and-so. If the L.T.'s, loathsome toadies, had actually come out and said it, you and I would know exactly where to send our pet google to retrieve a verbatim copy. (But we don't, so they didn't, so Prof. Cole is in error. Q.E.D.)
Is not our overwhelming impression of pro-aggression discourse, Mr. Bones, that expenditure of treasure and effusion of blood are scarcely mentioned at all? [3] The context in which they are most frequently rehearsed is a peculiar one, namely the topos that runs "Let not these sacrifices be in vain!" (Alternatively: "Why not throw good money after bad?") In other words, the financing of invasions and occupations and the casualties resulting from them are subjects that the fans allude to predominantly in the past tense. No golden-tongued orator of Republican Party extremism has seen fit to emulate President Kennedy and sloganize "Pay any price, bear any burden!" with reference to future payments and endurances. [4]
How do they talk of things to come, then? That has depended on circumstances: before the Big Managerial bozos had accumulated a track record in their semiconquered provinces, they ran to cakewalks and Jam Tomorrow. Now that they're notably in a jam today, they favor doomsday scenarios of roughly the type that Party neocomrade T. Clancy churns out. Their fall-back or damage-control P. R. scheme does involve the "price of security" half of the Colean misformulation, but "all this spending of our blood and treasure" remains absent in the sense Prof. Cole attaches to it. Instead of that, we get mostly the sense that Neocomrade Clancy attaches to it -- nukes in Nebraska! Islamophalangitarianism in Indianapolis!! -- and, to a far lesser extent, adumbrations of genocide amongst the Coalition's neoliberateds. In neither case do central North American blood and treasure expended in the path of AEI/GOP/DOD aggressions and occupations abroad enter in.
I'm not sure whether "Bush's loathsome toadies" are too IQ-challenged to think of the Colean sense or whether, havin’ thought about it clearly enough, they decide not to mention it in public. Both these possibilities could be combined in any proportions, of course: some toadies too dumb, others too prudent. (But God knows best the general state of the aggressionistas' affairs!)
In the privileged and especially interesting individual case of J. Sidney McCain, however, "too dumb" is almost certainly correct. (894 out of 899, remember!) That is not the whole truth, because there is also the "too Mugwumpish" factor to be considered, JSM bein’ an extremely rare birdbrain. As far as I know, American history so far has never yet presented us with the spectacle of a dumb Mugwump. Nobody could dislike the Baní Greeley at sight more than I do, yet the prominent specimens of it have invariably been gentlebeings of intellectual respectability, though naturally only insofar as that is compatible with a sustained Big Management Party affiliation. Most recently there was Representative John B. Andersen of Illinois, for example.[5] Nothing could have been more pluperfectly mugwumpish than to dye one's hair white, but for all that, the man was clever enough. Whereas McCain . . . .
Happy days.
____
[1] The EVC™ comprises principally AEI and GOP and DOD -- Big Ideology plus Big Party plus Big Violence. Toss in the occasional Tony Blair or Señorito Aznar out towards the periphery. Do not omit Senators Zell and Lieberman, two vast and neobarbarous hordes in themselves.
(The proposed blogghinition uses the branded name of AEI™ loosely and generically to comprise all the doctrinaire tank-thinkers of Wingnut City, and notably Heritagitarians and Hoovervillains as well as AEIdeologues proper. The Catoholics, however, cannot be said to adhere to the EVC™, because a large subfactionette at that address disapprove of aggression, or approve of Representative Paul of TX, or both.)
[2] Well, it could have been an accident if one assumes that JC spends zero [0.00] minutes per week attending to what the enemy have to say for themselves. But that cannot literally be the case, because there is a passage from the wannabe Commanderissimo cited right here.
[3] Since we discuss the slaves of Lord Mammon, it is reasonable to reverse the standard order and place bucks before bleedings. "To the civilized man, the right to Property is more important than the right to life."
[4] This silence of the aggressionistas interferes with the slogans that they actually do bark and bellow: as everybody knows, they are rhetorically and propagandistically determined to be at "war" with somebody or somethin’. For the present purpose it doesn't matter whom or what they bark against; the state of war as such has traditional verbal trappings that one expects to encounter as soon as war is declared. Among these are the topoi of Chivalry and of Sacrifice. Neither of these appeals to the mind of the typical Crawfordite vigilante: she shrieks that she wants to be at "war," but she certainly does not concede that there can be any warriors on the opposing team. Plainly she conceives the crusadin’ kiddies of the Ever-Victorious Coalition™ to be engaged against a conspiracy of cockroaches in human form.
As with Chivalry, so with Sacrifice: possibly both these quaint romantic notions made sense several centuries ago, but "That was then, and this is now." Party neocomrade M. E. Bellona -- i.e., our stereotypical Crawfordite aggresionista -- is fond of those seven little words. The same magic formula was also deployed by Neocomrade General R. Limbaugh yesterday as the compendious answer to Sen. Obama's frivolous objection that there existed no Al-Qá‘ida in Iraq in the former Iraq before GOP extremists marched in. One nail drives out another; evidently TWTATIN ("toot-a-tin"?) has replaced Chivalry and Sacrifice in the collective unconcious of our military/militarist classes.
Be that as it may, Sacrifice is definitely out of fashion here in the Epoch of Creative Destruction™, and is accordingly not often mentioned by loyal neocomrades, except in that one special and retrospective connection already noted. There is one other: it would still be dulce and decorum to mention Sacrifice at the funeral of a particular mercenary sacrificed, or in his obituary notice. But that is an extremely insulated context much like a Sabbath morning lecture or a Commencement Day address, a context in which all sorts of obsolete verbal heirlooms that are purest Cloudcuckooland on regular weekdays may flourish for centuries.
Furthermore, Neocomrade Bellona and the loathsome toadies most assuredly do not want Televisionland and the electorate thinkin’ about funerals and obituaries every time the subject of AEI/GOP/DOD invasions and occupations arises. "Boost, don't knock!" It is not absolutely impossible to boost Sacrifice, even in the Epoch of Creative Destruction™, but as a matter of fact the only militant neocomrade who shows the faintest signs of actually doin’ so is the AEIdeologue V. D. H. Blimp. One buzzard doesn't make a spring, however, except possibly at Perkins OH. For practical and political purposes, the geistige Militärismus of Rear-Colonel Blimp might as well not exist.
Pardon my digression, sir. The "interference" that I spoke of may be conceived as a clash of rhetoric between obsolete Sacrifice and trendy "That was then and this is now." Logically speaking, the loathsome toadies (&c.) cannot avail themselves of both simultaneously, and there is no question but that it is the latter they have more in mind and at heart. It is usually illuminating to consider whatever the Ever-Glorious Coalition™ may be up to most recently from a Harvard Victory School MBA perspective. Only a lunatic or an ignoramus would call on the credentialled private-sectorian exponents of Big Management to concern themselves with Sacrifice. They speak of "cuttin’ our losses" and they don't sentimentalize about it in the slightest.
Master ("of Business Administration") Dubya slept through a good part of the HVS curriculum, but that will not be the whole explanation of why he does not implement TWTATIN ruthlessly out in Peaceful Freedumbia by cuttin’ those losses. So-called "political capital" does in fact exist and behaves differently from mere Finanzkapital. We can discuss it in detail someday soon, Mr. Bones, we've been blown far enough off today's course already.
[5] No, Mr. Bones, I have not forgotten Citizen Ross, but how to pigeonhole that specimen? He might pass, I suppose, for a sort of inferior first draft of the Big Party's wannabe Commanderissimo, half a dunce and half a mugwump.
On the other hand, M. Perot seems to stand outside all previously attested political lineages at least as clearly as J. Sidney falls within one of them. Considering that he seems to have sunk without a trace, perhaps we may pass him over in silence, hoping for no recrudescence of whatever-it-was? BGKB.
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