The Spirit of Saladin

It was Dryden, not I, who decided to write Annus Mirabilis as a serious and lofty historical poem on what he regarded as the ‘successes of a most just and necessary War’. If, after that decision, he describes the enemy as Vast bulks which little souls but ill supply, then we have every right to tell that a nation of reasonable men, not to say men of courage and honour, are very ill-celebrated by the insinuation that their enemies are lubbers. This kind of thing runs through all Dryden's attempts at the graver and more enthusiastic kinds of poetry, and it must be remembered that such attempts make up a large part of his work. The sin is so flagrant that I cannot understand how so cultivated a critic as Mr Eliot has failed to see the truth; which truth had now better be stated quite frankly. Dryden fails to be a satisfactory poet because being rather a boor, a gross, vulgar, provincial, misunderstanding mind, he yet constantly attempts those kinds of poetry which demand the cuor gentil. Like so many men of that age he is deeply influenced by the genuinely aristocratic and heroic poetry of France. He admires the world of the French tragedians -that exalted tableland where rhetoric and honour grow naturally out of the life lived and the culture inherited. We in England had had an aristocratic tradition of our own, to be sure; a tradition at once more sober and more tenderly romantic than the French, obeying a code of honour less dissociated from piety. The Duke and Duchess of Newcastle were perhaps its last exponents. But Dryden seems to know nothing of it. He and his audiences look to Versailles, and feel for it that pathetic yet unprofitable yearning which vulgarity so often feels for unattainable graces. But the yearning does not teach them the secret. Where their model was brilliant they are flashy; where the Cid was brave, Almanzar swaggers; refinements of amorous casuistry out of the heroic romances are aped by the loves of grooms and chambermaids. One is reminded of a modern oriental, who may have the blood of old paynim knighthoods in him, but who prefers to dress himself up as a cheap imitation of a European gentleman.

Ordinarily it would be unreasonable to demand chivalry over and above mere decency or respectability, Mr. Bones. The Third Estate triumphed a very long time ago, sir. Lord Mammon put down Zeus and Caesar both so many years ago that by now even the little friends of Eddie Burke have learned how to do the ‘unbought grace of life’ shtik fearlesly and shamelessly. Ordinarily calling General David Petraeus or Mr. Spencer Ackerman an "ass-kissing little chicken-shit" ’ would have to be accounted mere de gustibus stuff in this year of religionism 1429/2008 insofar as it may seem to be incompatible with the Spirit of Saladin. [1]

Materially, Mr. Ackerman’s apostasy from himself is so blatant it can only be treated seriously if it is treated as a bad joke. The badness cannot be smoothed away with the quibble that after all, he did not announce that he personally respects the most respected general officer of his generation. "Respectable" is a sort of semi-performative expression, Mr. Bones: if one wishes to be included out of the respecters that one mentions, one must make that point expressly. The ’asl, "default assumption," is that one corespects. [2]

Formally, one could make a case for the apostasy along Dr. Pangloss’s lines and Dale Carneigie’s, perhaps. Mr. Spencer Ackerman has learned to see good where before he did not: vos plaudite!. However only a wannabe biographer of Mr. Spencer Ackerman will much care about this happy news, and one suspects that the set in question is empty. [3]




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[1] To regard such a goofball vivacity as an attempt at serious contribution to biography or Weltpolitik is another question. So considered, the difficulty is entirely intellectual rather than ethical or sentimental: the biographical goof does not know enough about her victim to make such a judgment, and the Weltpolitik goof errs in drawing the line properly between gossip and her announced business. The doin’s of the Doctor General -- or the l*b*r*l scribbler. or the rigorously nonsectarian Sunni-lover, or anybody else in politics and politics criticism -- will be neither better nor worse because of the motives that produced them.

The only exception to that canon that I can think of, Mr. Bones, would be if such doings were presented as typical of this or that broader class of public actors and operatives. That exception has no application to the present case. Mr. Ackerman was not arguing (on Pass One) that the Petraean ambition and the alleged Petraean sycophantism are precisely the commonest faults of AEI and GOP and DOD, just the way such folks naturally would run off the rails. Nor do the Mu’ámara Junction gentry take Mr. Ackerman’s change of heart or coat or whatever as but one example out of thousands that might be adduced.

I daresay the MJ gentry could do that if they chose, but they are not at all likely to so chose, because the holy Homeland does not much interest them in the first place, not compared to the fate of the Sunnintern. When they do on occasion take cognisance of Yank affairs, they run to a facile populism that would not be edified by the suggestion that ambition and sycophancy are Jonathan’s characteristic sins. Alio modo: the staff and management and peanut gallery of Lynx, Badger, Cartoonoclastes LLC are not at all likely to rave against the ass-kissing chickenshit of all those voters who, as Mr. Gallup and King Zog and the rest of the pack assure us, used to support the aggression of 20 March 2003 but have since changed their hearts or minds or coats or whatever.


[2] Anybody who insists on "just the facts, Ma’am" would have to allow that Dr. Gen. Petraeus of Princeton and Crawford and West Point wins in the Most Respected General Officer category a fortiori, him bein’ the only known neo-Hannibal as far as Televisionland and the electorate are concerned. The former Adm. Fallon’s name recognition, for instance, or the former Gen. Abizaid’s, must be about on a par with that of Marie of Roumania.

However, this is not what S. A. meant. We were intended to understand that the Doctor General is well though of at the Tanks of Thought and amongst the classes that deploy PowerPoint® rather than brains to keep their ears apart.


[3] Non-goofs will notice that the culprit disagrees with the Dr. Gen., and if they are non-goofs who happen to disapprove of aggressions and occupations, they should find Mr. Spencer Ackerman at least as uncongenial as D. Hannibal Petraeus. Unfortunately S.A. is in fact typical of an important slice of opinion in America’s party, those Democrats who want to shake off the albatross of Peaceful Freedumbia only so as better to wage a Long War against Global Tourism. The implication is that although the bushogenic quagmire long since reached the point where it is beyond repair, next time things will go much more cheerfully with Sec. of War Albright (or equivalent) in charge rather than GOP geniuses and Harvard Victory School MBA’s. There is no reason I know of to suppose that Mr. Spencer Ackerman has ever changed his mind (or whatever) about that preference, and every reason to consider it far more significant that the respectability of an individual D. H. Petraeus.

Mr. Ackerman may have misunderstood where the Dr. Gen. actually stands, however. Chickenhawk control of the military makes it difficult to discern what Uncle Sam’s violence pros really think before they retire and tell us how everybody else screwed up in their memoirs. Will D. Hannibal really "oversee" "battlefield victories" in such a way as to interfere with the Long War against Global Tourism? Mr. Ackerman quotes that language from a Chiarelli groupie as a thing to be agreed to, but should we be well advised to agree, Mr. Bones? I have no idea worth mentioning on the subject. Do you?

Happy days.