Cartoonoclastes Goes Sarkastic

Naturally, the US policy establishment and their enablers will be devastated by this, because their whole objective in Iraq is stability and peace. We can be sure that the firefights and airstrikes in Sadr City and elsewhere are being carried out with the deepest regret by the American authorities, who want nothing more than the integration of all political trends, including those for and against the occupation, without discrimination, into a democratic government of peace and stability. If you don't believe me, just read today's AP story, the latest version of the outstretched-hand story-line, purporting to dissociate the Americans from Maliki's anti-Sadr hard line.

’Tis a pity, Mr. Bones, that nowadays everybody and her daughter-in-law should be ferociously partisan and narrow, and yet never come very close to what is properly to be called ideology -- the "science of idiocy," as some Frenchman jested back around when the word was first discovered (in French). We endure only what might be called per contra the Witchcraft of Idiocy™, a product that makes much the same claims to gratify heart and mind and self-esteem as ideologies used to, but without explaining how it works. Without there existing any explanation of how it works, that is, for the point of distinguishing the WI product is not that only a small group of Obamoid elitists understand the mechanisms but decline to explain it to their cultural inferiors. Mamma Chiesa has been offering that swindle for centuries, and for that matter, so did the Lenin-Gorbachev racket, so does every vendor of consumer appliances that rely on electrick fluid. [1]

Nobody sane, not even a kangaroo, would lynch a poodle on the basis of indictments brought by the Mu’ámara Junction gentry. Yet Ms. Lynx and Mr. Badger and Dr. Cartoonoclastes are not infallibly over-the-top and around-the-bend. In any case, the latest thought crimes that they impute to the Associated Press and Juan the Wicked may serve to illustrate the nature of the Witchcraft of Idiocy™. Such an exhibit will do for exempli gratiâ purposes even when it is not altogether to be classified as non-fiction.

Observe, O Bones, that we are spared the MJ faction’s characteristic verbal shtik this time: it is only the "latest version of ... a story-line" that Dr. C. wants to clast today. If I could be sure the rhetorical remission is more than temporary, I should praise it a little, despite the fact that it is not the judicial criticism of human events that the Cole Patrol endeavours to stress. We have never denied that there is something wrong, in most cases, with the off-the-shelf and one-size-fits-all opinion about the former Iraq and the Greater Levant such as Cartoono and Co. virtuously loathe. We admit that the patient is diseased, if you like, but we have not the honour to agree with the gallant and learnèd Dr. Cartoonoclastes about the diagnosis of the disease, let alone the therapy. He diagnoses most of his geistlich inferiors as victims of iconitis, a malignant inflammation of Trudeau’s gland. [2] Or, as a lay sheep might bleat out crudely, of "oversimplification."

The objection to this diagnosis is scarcely that it is erroneous: nine Kiddie Krusaders or antiwarriors in ten cannot get much beyond making up their minds which side they are on. We will certainly grant the MJ quack that point, as long as we get to word it carefully. When we think about the syndrome more extensively, however, we diverge from the Mu’ámariyya rapidly. Cartoono & Cie. give the impression, for one thing, that oversimplification as such constitutes a violation of the state of nature, as if every citizen of the holy Homeland would revolve subtle and nuanced views about ex-Iraq if only the AP and wicked Juan would stop hollering some dimwit downdumbed "story line" in her ear all the time. ("If you believe that, sir, you would believe anything," said the Duke of Wellington.)

For what it is worth, if one must start with that Panglossian baloney at all, it is more sensible to continue onward by way of "story-lines" rather than "cartoons." The latter misses the mark rhetorically, because real-world cartoons are once-off affairs, not a systematic campaign of tendentious oversimplification such as warms the heart of the conspiratorializer, and such as District Attorney Cartoonoclastes indites his alleged culprits for. "Story line" is far from perfect polemically, since stories do not necessarily get told over and over again, but unlike cartoons, they at least can be endlessly reiterated, and some in fact are. One of the more conspicuous gentrifications of the MJ gentry is that they have been spotted calling a story a narration, as if all the world were an Eng. Lit. department. One might, though the conspiratorializers themselves presumably do not, distinguish a "narrative" as the sort of story that nobody would care to hear again until the first audition of it had been forgotten. The Wings of the Dove, say, or Sidney’s Arcadia. On that basis, a story simpliciter would be something more like "Little Red Riding Hood," a tale capable of repetition and perhaps often repeated.

Given their Obamatesque view of the fickle mob, the MJ gentry might be regarded as implicitly meaning "bedtime story line." Doubtless that thought never crossed the mind of the rhetor, but some conflation of "story line" with "Party line" may have been more or less nonaccidental. That phrase, too, implies repetition. Taken with both "bedtime story" and "Party line" hovering somewhere in the semantic vicinity, Dr. Cartoonoclastes’ new shtik affords a marked improvement over the one that earned him his monnicker. But as I said, Mr. Bones, let’s not stand up and clap before the MJ gentry shtick with it for a while and eschew all countercartoonist operations.

Repetition once admitted on a par with oversimplification, the gentrified conspiratorializer view comes within hailing distance of our own. Naturally we dispense with the conspiratorializing, and they can not, so a complete and cordial unity of minds and self-esteems is as far off as ever. Oh, well....

Meanwhile, back in the former real world, there is some question whether Lynx, Badger, Cartoonoclastes LLC has identified this particular bedtime story line accurately. The GOP Secretary of War’s strikin’ remarks about Sadr III get folded into the cheeky generality "their whole objective in Iraq is stability and peace" somewhat hastily, I’d say. Maybe even a tad simplistically, Mr. Bones? The vigilante cowpokers have never been in complete agreement about their aggression and occupation policy, so why should they not be at odds with one another in the wake of the Second Muqtadan War? Neocomrade R. Gates wants to conciliate the Firebrand Renegade Cleric™, other invasionites would prefer to clobber him.

For a gentrified conspiratorializer, this can only be a discrepancy between the real intentions of the AEI-GOP-DOD coalition and their phony professions. Less abnormal persons remain free to think that maybe the Big Management Party perps simply disagree with one another, as lesser human beings have been known to do before now. In that case, the proper gloss on Juan the Wicked would be to point out that the hand extended was that of R. Gates, and is not to be confused with the hand of his uncle Sam, or with the hand of the Weltherrscher wannabes down at Rancho Crawford. [3]








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[1] In our sad and disregenerated age, poised on the brink of the Epoch of McCain, it would not surprise me at all to learn that there is a book for sale called Magic for Dummies. Maybe I'll send the google out to check in a moment. Even if one cannot order that tome, Mr. Bones, one ought to understand that Witchcraft for Dummies is a different product. "Magic" means stage flim-flam, smoke and mirrors. "Witchcraft" or "sorcery" is the Real Thing. Or it would be, if the product lived up to the advertising.

[2] Mr. Gary, not M. Pierre, of course.


[3] As every schoolboy knows in the holy Homeland, the favourite Hand of AEI and GOP happens to be invisible. The Rev. Señorito as-Sadr, though, may or may not be aware of this detail.