Yesterday Juan the Wicked deviated into seasonal goofery thusly:
| AFP also reports that in Baghdad's Jadid district, Iraqi forces arrested the head of an Awakening Council for involvement in terrorism and conducted a raid on guerrillas so that 250 displaced persons could return to the neighborhood. My guess is that this translates that at least some members of the Sunni Awakening Council had earlier been involved in ethnically cleansing Shiites, and that the al-Maliki government is now cracking down on it so that some Shiite families can safely return. The US views the Awakening Councils as valuable anti-al-Qaeda paramilitaries willing to take American money to fight the QUTBIST VIGILANTES. |
Every schoolboy and his sister-in-law understands who it is that the Bribe-a-Tribe™ artists bribe tribes to oppose; if JC had written "runcible thugs," there would have been no actual loss of information. The objection, however, is that so exceedingly fancy and tertiary-educationalist-sounding a monnicker ought positively to add value to the analysis, which "Qutbist vigilantes" does not do. It is insufficient to defend such a phrase on pure stylistic grounds as the "elegant variation" of the Fowler brothers, as though QV were only a glorified pronoun. Thee and I, sir, might have said "faith-crazies" or "neo-Muslims." We’ve said both of those a lot, and hope to survive a while to repeat them ever more abundantly. But they are not comparable, because the words "faith" and "Muslim," so deployed, are not the moral equivalent of an examination question, they are genuinely quasipronominal in that everybody pertinent does in fact know what one is pointing at with them. "Qutbist" sounds like a puzzle because it is a puzzle. It would be mildly objectionable even if the answer to the puzzle were obvious. Since it is not obvious at all, one is tempted to object less mildly.
Walter Mitty, I suppose, would not object at all, he would only figure that it his own fault. He "must have" missed some learnèd Ann-Arboreal account of who and what is to be accounted Qutbist in the former Iraq that the invasionites have made. Plus WHY, naturally. Self-effacement is always charming, perhaps mostly because it is met with so infrequently. Nevertheless, truth matters a little bit also: there has been no learnèd Ann-Arboreal account, and now that JC knows that his maneuvre was noticed, thee can pretty well count on there not ever being one. We either make up one for ourselves or we go to bed hungry.
Nothing occurs to me off-hand that is worth thee staying awake for, Mr. Bones. The specific kind of neo-Muslim religionation associated with M. Sayyid al-Qutb has very little obvious connection with the AEI-GOP-DOD-USIP mess in Mesopotamia. Thee will recall that Mr. Eponym was terribly, terribly SHOCKED to learn what our own holy Homeland is really like when he visited it long ago, back in Good King Ike’s golden days, I believe it was. No doubt the holy Homeland has grown even shockinger still to a Qutbist sensibility over the subsequent half century: two more degenerations of unmitigated Change and Decay and extremist GOP! ’Tis ever an edifying theme, Mr. Bones, that one! I could bore thee about it till the cows come home to roost. Unfortunately if that be what thee understands by le qotbisme, there can scarcely be any of it worth mentioning in the former Iraq. Juan the Wicked may have grown bored with the obvious and decided to milk the bull for a change, but unsurprisingly there ain’t any milk. ‘We’ are unpopular in those parts not because of Change and Decay and rampant Goldwateranity, but only because the Coalition of the Willful decided to aggress their way to Baghdád.
‘Our’ victims are not , I fear, all that interested in the pathology and epidemiology of US. They are almost as narrowly narcissistic as extremist Republicans would be if somebody hyperpowerful from Mars were suddenly to invasionize them and start inflicting a mandatory course of Petraeo-McNamaran Occupational Therapy. No doubt a few peripheral wingnuts would scribble in the vein of Neorabbi B. Lewis -- and indeed, in the vein of Neomufti S. Qutb -- enrichin’ themselves by explainin’ What Went Wrong? with Martian Civilisation to allow such deplorable interplanetary misbehaviour to happen. Nevertheless, these parlour games of educationalizers and publicists would be peripheral in the extreme. Ordinary sane patients would -- obviously -- concentrate on trying to regain control of the asylum and expel the alien intruders.
So then: ¡Muqáwama, sí; cotbismo, no!
"Vigilante" is even worse than "Qutbist," being the exact technical term for the misbehaviour of the Martians of Kennebunkport-Crawford. To transfer it to the other column risks grave confusion. A very strict legal pettifogger indeed might maintain that the Muqáwama are on a par with the Martians, legitimacywise: that is, neither party possesses a shred of it. More informal inquirers -- including thee and me, Mr. Bones -- are bound to notice who started the bushogenic quagmire and cut their enemies some slack on that account. And merely as everyday Chicagoland English, sir, does not the word ‘vigilante’ have a decidedly proäctive ring to it? Does not ‘vigilantes’ apply much better to the perpetrators of Preëmptive Retaliation™ than to those retaliated upon in advance?
It would be going far overboard to claim that the Muqáwama "are simply defending themselves" from the Martians. Plainly things in the former Iraq are not that simple: if nothing else, the enemies of AEI-GOP-DOD-USIP are also squabbling for Power like mad amongst themselves. Yet not even Juan the Wicked would pretend that ‘vigilante’ means "she who squabbles intramurally to get herself into power." At least, one hopes he wouldn’t.
So much for my own displeasure with "Qutbist vigilantes." As thee might easily have anticipated, O Bones!, the displeaure of Cartoono the Magnificent is far more entertaining:
| We've all heard of the standard "AlQaeda in Iraq" brand, and of course the crossover "Sunni Arab guerrillas" label, which so memorably fused the badness of AQ with the broad sweep of the "Sunni-Arab" resistance. But times and fashions change, and now there's this new thing Juan calls "Qutbist vigilantes". What is it? The truth is no one really knows. All we know for sure is that it was time for a change and a new look. |
Thee will observe that I have titled this performance with my own evaluation of exactly what o’clock it is in the former Iraq: poor Don Juan has but succumbed to the Dog Days and the Silly Season, as almost anybody human might. Miss Lynx and Mr. Badger and Dr. Cartoonoclastes are exceptional in this respect, for, being goofballs all year ’round, they cannot engage in the same intellectual aestivation that the rest of us enjoy, even at Ann Arbour. Goofs who are on duty 24/7 cannot ever goof off, I fear. "Life is unfair."
Rhetorically, the zany threesome are ahead of the calendar: they feign themselves in Paris in October, shopping for a winter wardrobe. That trope is their own latest offerring, which is not one of their stronger efforts, as it seems to this keyboard. Cartoono’s crew strikingly fail to indicate WHY Juan the Wicked should suddenly require to dress up his nakedness with a new set of invisible threads. I am so unsympathetic to the whole cartoonoclastic shtik that perhaps I often miss the points they intend to illuminate. Nevertheless, is not one of the great beauties and pleasures of goofy conspiratorializing the assignment of motives? And is not "it was time for a change and a new look" about as close to assigning no motive at all as one can sail? Not up to the usual mark are they!
Of course there was a little more yimmer-yammer than that:
| "Al-Qaeda" was obviously getting to have a shopworn feel to it. And as for "Sunni Arab guerrillas", something interesting happened. Many of them became "Awakenings", thus changing from bad to good. Which is important because that makes Maliki's refusal to hire them a bad thing. Not only a bad thing, but his signature bad thing, and the feature that could well be the hook for a new "Maliki-bad, we can't withdraw the troops just yet" theme. So the broad bad sweep of the "Sunni Arab guerrillas" label became a problem. If you don't want to get stuck in yesterday, you can't harp on "AlQaeda", and you can't harp on "Sunni Arab guerrillas" either--you need a fresh look. |
When Cartoono says ‘you,’ he does not, of course, refer in a pedestrian fashion to thee and me, Mr. Bones. He must mean Juan the Wicked and all his vile co-conspirators. I have doubted my own ability to appreciate a cause I find ridiculous. Dr. Cartoonoclastes has the same problem, it looks like: he attempts to think like a Martian invasionist rather than a rigorously nondenominational pro-Sunní patroniser of the blessèd and mysterious Muqáwama, but he just cannot do that particular trick well. The idea of Juan R. I. Cole advising Richard Bruce Cheney "We do not want to get stuck in yesterday, sir, so we can’t harp on Al Kayduh or go on about Sunni Arab guerrillas any more. What we need is a fresh look!" . . . !
"If you believe that, sir, you would believe anything." [1]
To be sure, being a goofball does pretty well mean believing anything one likes, does it not? The puzzle is usually why they like their own latest goofinesses, and usually it is a much easier puzzle than this one. In any case, note that Dr. Cartoonoclastes has no constructive theory of "Qutbist vigilantes." Freshness is not construction.
At that point, the Mu’ámara Junction gentry suddenly jump their tracks and take to ranting about a freshness unconnected with Juan the Wicked and/or M. Sayyid al-Qutb:
| We've all heard of "government,""opposition", and "resistance". So what's with the new PTA/PTB label that's all the rage? Same thing--it's the fresh look that's important for the new age. In the old days there were groups that resisted the American military occupation, and on the other side, there were the collaborators. But not any more, say the stylists. Nowadays all anybody wants is a slice of the cake, it's human nature. Of course it's paradoxical, but now that the whole country opposes the American occupation, with Maliki in the lead, they're all resistance and none of them is--so there's no more "resistance versus collaboration". It's all PTA versus PTB. |
"Same thing"?! Thee must be cautious hereabouts, Mr. Bones, and take care to attribute no more sense and rationality to the goofballs than they actually earn. As ever, our default assumption must be that they mean what they say and say what they mean, however bizarre they wind up looking to outsiders. In particular, there are no grounds for attributing to Lynx and Badger and Cartoonoclastes the faintest inkling that maybe the good TwentyPercenter folks they rejoice so righteously and so disinterestedly to patronise are losing the struggle -- or even simply "have lost" it already. It may seem incredible to thee and me that so elementary a thought never occurs to them, but our difficulties of imagination have no evidential bearing on their behaviour. I therefore take Cartoono the Magnificent to really and truly believe that his own factionette’s glass is half full rather than 98% empty when he declaims "now that the whole country opposes the American occupation...."
For a rational creature, though, his dottiness makes a very pretty bookend to match and balance the one commemoratin’ V-IQ Day, 1 May 2003: "Misson accomplished! We are ALL watan-nationalists of the former Iraq nowadays. Why, even poor M. al-Málikí has become a watan-nationalist! Who’d ever ’a thunk THAT? O frabjous day! Callooh!! Callay!!! Mission accomplished!!!!"
What’s that, sir? . . . Well, OK, maybe I am spoofing the clown element just a little.
Dr. Cartoonoclastes is aware enough that AEI-GOP-DOD-USIP have not actually gone away yet, and there are, I think, slight traces of his thinking of the Hannibal of Da‘wa in the poet’s immortal and ornithological terms :
| "Of W. W. (Americanus)" [By Not John Donne] The clear cool note of the cuckoo which has ousted the legitimate nest-holder, The whistle of the railway guard despatching the train to the inevitable collision, The maiden's monosyllabic reply to a polysyllabic proposal, The fundamental note of the last trump, which is presumably D natural; All of these are sounds to rejoice in, yea to let your very ribs re-echo with: But better than all of them is the absolutely last chord of the apparently inexhaustible pianoforte player. |
Happy days.
___
[1] Duke of Wellington anecdote VIIIb.
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