Q. Everybody knows that, doesn’t she?
A. She sure knows that if she possesses the señoritoly mind of a National Review groupie.
Naturally one should bear in mind, Mr. Bones, that Mizz Provvy -- Mme. Proverbial Wisdom, if thee feel the need to genuflect -- did not mean her sound bite to refer to little wingnuts feelin’ courage-challenged about their own words deployed against others. The original intent was plain: now that Modern Times have arrived, decent political adults are not required to rush out and sue for damages at the drop of an epithet. Our señorito classes still think that remains a swell idea -- on a few selected special occasions. Take for instance the occasion when thee, being a Muslim or Muslima or neo-Muslim or neo-Muslima, chance to encounter a cartoonic vivacity, or a bullet-riddled codex of Sacred Scripture, or a tiefgehend scribble from the keyboard of Neocomrade Doctor R. Scruton (fhkt). Thee are, under such circumstances as those, to remain cool and collected and perhaps deliver a brief sermonette in favour of the two dozen centturies of Western Sieve that deliberately allow such granules as those to pass through the mesh. O nos admirables, "Wow! Wunnerful US!!"
Thee may (or, indeed, must) also shrug off verbal attacks directed at theeself personally, Mr. Bones, as long as they come from Neocomrade Dr. R. Limbaugh or Neocomradess A. Coulter or the op-ed page of the Wall Street Jingo and the like. The ‘like’ in question here may be specified in quasi-juridical terms that fit in nicely with the señoritoly Weltanschauung at large. Thee are to consider it right and proper that brand-name Swiftboaters® should swiftboat® thee, sir, -- and swiftboat® anybody else they choose, for that matter -- whereas it would obviously be an outrage if others were to infringe their hard-earned monopoly. Needless to say, thee shall never attempt to swiftboat for theeself, for that would be like setting up to sell dubious amateur stuff that thee have brewed in thee’s own basement as authentic Coca-Cola® or Power Point®. Fort mauvais, that plan! Civilisation as we know it might not survive if everybody started to misbehave along those lines.
I am confident that Mizz Provvy intended her sticks-and-stones fortune cookie to apply to silly goose and noble gander alike. Almost all her ouevre is conceived that way. One might even maintain with primâ facie plausibility that the adjective "proverbial" contains a built-in implication of semper et ubique et ab omnibus. All that even-handedness and catholicity is utterly alien to the señoritoly mind as we have diagnosed it, Mr. Bones, but we have never pretended that all the little wingnuts and wingnuttes are clinically insane, nor even that an isolated few of them may not be worthy aspirants to the toney up-market rôle of Friends of Eddie Burke. "Sticks and stones" understood in terms of the law of patents and monopoly rather than in terms of the law of slander and libel is not intellectually contemptible. [1]
"To the civilized man, the Right to Property is more important than the right to life." [2] Dr. Reaction did not, that I have heard of, ever go on to explain which Right or right or ‘right’ comes in third in the philosophical sweepstakes, but clearly reputation or "sacred honour," whatever it may be that libel and slander and defamation detract from, cannot do better than show, given that Property wins and life places. [3] Accordingly, the señorito element exalt the importance of "Sticks and stones" when they creatively misread it as havin’ to do with monopoly rights rather than with reputation. Monopoly rights are NOW, reputation and honour were then.
In short, the wingnuts’ and wingnuttes’ stuff may be ethically puke-inducin’, Mr. Bones, but let us not make things too easy for ourselves by pretending that it is beneath contempt in all respects.
The immediate application of all this is of course the ‘appeasement’ of B. Hussein Obáma as alleged by señoritas and señoritos. I happened to start from Big Management Party neocomrade R. Lowry:
| Not all talking is created equal. Which is why it’s folly for a presidential candidate to make a blanket promise to negotiate personally with adversaries (...) he’s tried to elevate his ill-considered improvisation into foreign-policy gospel. |
And so forth and so on. The mills of Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh are grindin’ out that sort of baloney sausage all across the fruitèd plain, a very standardised dupe fodder, so there is no point in picking on Señorito Lowry individually. He’ll do as a run-of-the-mill specimen, though it would be silly to consider his talkin’ points specially touched by human thought. He does go through the motions, sort of:
| The act of talking is, in itself, not appeasement. True enough. But neither is talking a substitute for strategy. [Exemplum of Comrade M. S. Gorbachev and Neocomrade R. W. Reagan] If a President Obama handles relations with Iran as deftly, maneuvering the clerical regime to its doom, he’s worthy of his hype. Nothing suggests that he even conceives of his desire to talk in these terms. To do so, he’d have to develop some appreciation for the concept of leverage. |
Deftly maneuverin’ the evil Qommies -- or in general, whoever it may be that offends militant Republican Party extremism -- to their doom is the señoritoly notion of non-appeasive talkin’. I have already made that diagnosis. I cited the ineffable Dr. Triangle yesterday in support, and here is Señorito Lowry this morning. Rather than heap up further evidence of how well the Big Management Party agitprop machine works, let us look the notion over and kick its figurative tires a little.
It is not quite what one would expect, perhaps. Or rather, the neocomrades are not in fact broadcastin’ altogether on the same wavelength. Their señorito element bein’ comparatively upscale, non-appeasive diplomacy is admitted to be possible, though of course there is no chance whatever that B. Hussein Obáma will ever engage in it. Down in the gutters of Rio Limbaugh and the slums of Horowitzville, non-appeasive diplomacy is a nonsense, a pernicious snare and delusion. THEY will always hate Wunnerful US, no matter what we do, certainly no matter what talkin’ we do.
The practitioners of jihád careerism march out of step with both their señoritoly neocomrades and their dittohead neocomrades. Pipesovitches and Kramerides and the like are clever enough to assign a reason why THEY must hate US, but since that reason is ’Islám, discussion and negotiation are precluded quite as effectively as in the Big Party gutters and slums. Deftly maneuverin’ all the Muslims and neo-Muslims of the world to their doom -- to apostasy or death -- is about as reasonable a scheme as was M. Fourier’s project to convert the North Atlantic to one vast gin and tonic. It might be nice if the world worked like that, but unfortunately it does not.
The Big Party’s base and vile (BV), and the Big Party’s señorito element (SE), and the Big Party’s jihád careerists (JC) thus consitute a conceptual or ideological triangle, although these three vertices are not at all equivalent quantitatively or politically. JC and SE are the less unintelligent parties and recognize that coëxistence will have to be possible, even if negotiation is not. JC and BV are united as against SE in takin’ for granted that negotiation is impossible. The principle of unity as between SE and BV is that they know and care nothin’ about anybody except themselves, whereas not even a GOP genius can be a jihád careerist and a solipsist or two-hundred-proof narcissist simultaneously.
The JC’s are thus slightly less displeasing ethically than the rest of the neocomradely pack. Maybe they deplore that there should exist a world elsewhee, but at least they acknowledge that it is there. On the other hand, the señorito element are slightly less displeasing intellectually, in that they adhere more rigorously to the traditional core of all Republican Party extremism -- puttin’ themselves first and after that, who cares where the rest are put? The poor bedraggled base and vile have nothin’ goin’ for ’em at all, except possibly the consolations of Enthusiasm and Superstition and the National Rifle Association. [4]
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[1] Señoritismo is, to be sure, ethically contemptible, and that on two accounts.
(A) Wingnuts and wingnuttes are almost always in violation of M. Pascal’s canon, Travaillons donc à bien penser: voilà le principe de la morale. Even when they can pass themselves off as ideobuddies to Mr. Burke, their level of bien penser ascends no higher than Eddie’s own. This altitude restriction is perhaps not surprising.
(B) If not individually, then as a faction of pols and herd of lemmin’s, the señoritas and señoritos of the Big Management Party come equipped with an anti-Pascalian canon of their own, namely the late Buckley Minor’s Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi.
That, as you will not fail to perceive, Mr. Bones, is essentially the Monopoly Principle that I have attributed to them above in Chicagoland English masquerading in an extinct language so as to catch the eye of a Yalie jackdaw. His neo-Papish neo-Latin was not the authentic legal Latin of Justinian. He never made the slightest attempt to elucidate that licet, and the omission is what one would antecedently expect of so exemplary a señorito. It is plain enough that Buckley Minor in practice supposed himself and his neocomrades to possess the licet of Jupiter by inheritance. Children of cows are bovial, children of Father Zeus are jovial.... ’Tis all basically a matter of breedin’, don’t you know?
It is not at all plain how the señorito element suppose their Father Zeus to have come into His monopoly rights in the first place. Fortunately for them, the señorito element do not give a hoot about that point. Are they not further equipped with secondary anti-Pascalian canons like "History is bunk" and "That was then, but this is now"?
Ideobuddy Eddie wrote this point up for the señoritos somewhere, though I am too lazy to send out a google in pursuit at the moment. To quote from memory: if one were so rash and tasteless and generally Rousseauvian as to insist on digging up the exact details of where Marie Antoinette’s plumage came from, the results would almost certainly be unedifying and make useful ammo for Tom Paine. The mere lapse of time is not so "mere," for it has done much to surround Sacred Prescription with its present -- still present in the year of religionism 1205/1790, anyway -- nimbus.
That amounts to "‘Shut up,’ she explained" even though it sounds much better in Eddie’s woozy pre-romantic write-up than in mine. Perhaps poor Bessie’s traditional problem in politics was only that "Shut up!" sounds neither explanatory nor otherwise impressive in the mouth of a cow? Festooned with Eddie Burke’s wooze, however, "Shut up!" has become almost de rigeur for the modern señorito. Bein’ backed up with Little Brother’s Uncle Sam’s sole remainin’ hyperpower further endows "Shut up!" with a certain sort of impressiveness, for those whose timber happen to run to the Kantian sort of crookedness.
[2] Palaeocomrade P. E. More, quoted from memory and from the late Big Management Party Neocomrade R. Kirk-rhymes-with-‘jerk’.
[3] In theory or Bloomian strong reading, Honour might win the race, Property show, and life come in third. But the chances that P. E. More thought so are negligible. He was not a real aristo, after all, only a Third Estate wannabe.
[4] The Senatorino from Illinois got himself into trouble talking like that, Mr. Bones. Reflect what a pleasure it is that thee are never going to run for public office! Like health, this sort of negative benefit should not be allowed to pass unappreciated.
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