Outremer for Dhimmies

Dear Dr. Bones,

Look what just discovered Outremer!

To spend ninety minutes or so working up such a theme from scratch for purposes of factious polemic is not unworthy of Don Rossito de Douthát’s chosen faction.

Doubtless, ninety-nine neocomrades in a hundred will stick with their received Party-an’-Ideology line, "History is bunk," yet even they can enjoy hearin’ an illiberal and antidemocratic señorito stickin’ it to what selfservative kiddies call "the Democrat party" and all bicycle-challenged perfessers by condescendin’ to "a mix of amnesia and self-abnegation."

Speaking of self-abnegation, I should say the best part of this, or any, Douthatian joke is that corporate soapbox from which Sir Oracle the quick study gets to condescend. Why, sir, with Don Rossito, ’tis almost as if the late M. de ‘Arafát had been in a position to use the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘our’ with reference to the Tel ’Avîv Parliament!

Genuine TAPsters may worry about drowning suddenly in a tempestuous sea of Natives, but the New York Times Company soars far above such courage-challengedness, setting an admirable example for all decent political grown-ups.

Genuine TAPsters and Hyperzionists generally, not to mention serious historians of Century VI/XII//XLIX, will probably notice that the señorito does not take quite a perfectly tel’avîvocentric view:

[Hyperzion’s] friends can learn something from Outremer as well. Like today’s Jewish republic, the Crusader kingdoms were small states forged by military valor, based in the Middle East but oriented westward, with distant patrons and potential foes just next door. Like Israel, they were magnets for fanatics from east and west alike.

I daresay any ninety-minute analogy whatsoever is likely to be deficient with that sort of deficiency. Your P&I agitpropper wants her neo-analogies for a reason, after all; she is not going to spend lots of time puzzlin’ out wie es eigentlich gewesen when it is so extremely easy to come up with wie es wiedermassagiert werden dürfen, a neoproduct which, as noted, very few marks and dupes can reliably distinguish from the former. Such being the nature of the neoproduct before us, we ought to attend to the analogy that a Don Rossito thinks it has discovered quite without reference to any of its long-ago analogy-fodder. Nothing could be easier: this ‘conservative’ ‘intellectual’ would dearly like to live in a parallel universe where Jewish Statism is "based in the Middle East but oriented westward, with distant patrons and potential foes just next door."

Though perhaps not too far off in the manifold, that is plainly not quite the universe Don Rossito is actually stuck in. As I started to say, though, such Jewish Statists as have taken the trouble to emigrate to the neo-Levant personally and find themselves playing the "Immigrants and Natives" game for high stakes will see as well as the Muses and you and I do that el mondo douthatiense is not quite the Terra which Hyperzionists know and congenitally rise far above.

At any rate, they won’t be liking their little North American fellow traveler’s talk about "distant patrons" one bit. M. le président de Nétanyahou and Gospodin Ministr von Liebermann and the rest may consider that they still need Uncle Sam at least a little, but there can be no question of neo-indigenous Immigrants to Hyperzion accounting their "Jewish republic" any patron’s client.[1]

And I wish you, sir,
Happy days through affordable healthcare.

___
[1] If one may decently draw Miss Clio into a dispute with Fordian bunkists and opportunist señoritos and militant extremist HZ’s at all, then serious value ought to be attached to the mass of evidence that she has assembled to suggest that the words "Jewish Statism" pretty well mean not being anybody’s stinking client ever again.

I conjecture that Don Rossito de Douthát is a tad unreliable on this point due to its personal circumstances. One might say that Cui servire regnare est is the maxim the NYTC neoladdie tacitly goes by: "To be a client of Sam is to enjoy Perfect Freedom™."

That’s all very well in Hackensack, maybe, and when it is thought in English. Thought in neo-S*m*te at, say, Haifa, however, . . . .

To venture on a little ad juvenem, Dr. Bones: I would not be altogether flabbergasted to learn that Don Rossito thinks it really nifty that he (dba as ‘we’) should get to be somebody else’s "distant patron." Quite a number of more adult neowingnuts, some of them actual members of The Greatest Demographic, think like that.

When Mr. Walt and Prof. Mearsheimer start making those distressing noises of theirs about "dual loyalty", I fear they run off the track as regards most of the Little Foreign Friends of the Tel ’Avîv Statelet, missing the not exactly obscure point that pushin’ other folks around is a good in itself, a good thing that does not have to be explained in terms of some comparatively abstract Kiddie Kause like Hyperzionism or Anti-Islamophalangatarianism. To be sure, one almost always finds the practitioners of neoconnery pretendin’ that some Kause makes ’em do the pushin’. And, oddly enough, ’tis always a Kause that the pushy happen to devoutly neobelieve in.

What this flummery signifies, of course, is only that even at Rio Limbaugh and in the neo-Levant, the Spiritual Evolution of the Human Race has not yet progressed far enough for "I just happen to LIKE pushin’ other folks around" to stand alone in splendid isolation and full ethical-intellectual respectability. It looks like we will be sinking to that any day now, but today is definitely not the day. Check back next October, Dr. Bones, why don’t you?

(( A tad more ad juvenem: with RD and the señoritoly element in general it is unquestionably a matter of "JUST happenin’ to like to push." At a loftier level, though, another factor enters in, the factor of Big Management: this señorito’s Daddy Warbucks and its Tio Ruperto and Uncle Scrooge can claim without total absurdity that, over and above and quite distinct from the sheer innocent merriment that libido dominandi affords all its practitioners, some of the practitioners, like for example themselves, have a special flair for around-pushin’. Or make that a special mastery of it credentialised with an M.B.A. from the H*rv*rd Victory School, if you take around-pushin’ to be a science rather than an art.

(( Now obviously Big Management, like Global Tourrorism, is not of itself a Kiddie Kause, but rather a tool or weapon available in principle to any Kiddie Kause that may come down the pike. Yet this obviousness is one easily lost sight of, especially when your HVS MBA’s start goin’ on about ‘efficiency’ or ‘productivity’ or ‘technocrats’ &c. &c. That unwarranted self-esteemin’ could be tolerated if the Big Managers were playin’ at contract bridge or dominos, but the case is rather different when ’tis all us noncorporate organic persons who are to get pushed around, not tiles and cards.

(( BTW, what on G*re’s green earth is more bigmanagerial than WHOSE service is perfect freedumb? And what more laughable than for Don Rossito de Douthát and the Singin’ Señoritos to echo the paternal motion as Nobis servire regnare est?

(( But Mammon knows best. ))

A Traitor to his Faction?

Dear Dr. Bones,

Is not Neocomrade R. L. Simon, Freelord & Kiddiemaster Padjaama in the peerage of Foxcuckooland, here sacrificin’ the very essence of his belovèd Party and its AEIdeology for trashy yalodramatic effect and comfy self-chauvinism?

As follows: if The Wicked State be always wrong, and the Secret Sector almost as good as infallible (which is the crux and pith and gist of wingnuttinesss, no?), does it not follow in a flash that all boycotts and blockades, not to mention lesser political tamperin’s with Absolute Freedumb of Trade, are an unclean abomination in the eyes of Lord Mammon?

You may recall that thirty or forty years ago the hard-rightist scribbler of anticommunist potboilers A. S. Drury wrote a book about the former Suid-Afrika in which he seemed generally distressed about this point. One of the reasons why he could not enthuse about the Baní Malan as much as he wished he could was that, although they were forever representing themselves at Washington as a crucial concern of the former Free World, examination of how they actually ran their racket at home made them seem like a ragtag band of quaint backwoods Socialists.

Naturally even neo-Dutch rednecks have their excuses: the S-A Secret Sector of 1967 was all Brits of dubious loyalty to the Pretoria neorégime, not to mention that they (or Brits, anyway) had fed ground glass to the alone Daughters of Virtue & Sons of Wisdom in their concentration camps circa 1900.

Nothing would be easier than to write a yalodrama about all that. And, who knows?, the DVSW of S-A might even have managed to pull the wool over the eyes of Neocomrade A. S. Drury altogether, had he not been (roughly speaking) in the yalodrama business himself.

And I wish you, sir,
Happy days through affordable healthcare

Snoopy at Bay meets The Shadow

Dear Sir or Madam Bluepearl, High-falutin’ though your matwood be, I believe I will see it and raise you one evermeule and half a snoop. [0] The Sea Might Folk of Hyperzion must (or at any rate, ought to) feel that what impends overhead like the sword of Bar Damocles is a good deal more substantial than any mere ‘shadow’. To be sure, an iceberg would do even better than an icicle, substancewise, but what with global warming and all nowadays . . . . Furthermore, that discrepancy--the fact that the immediate danger is merely ridiculous--was an original part of the Rev. Schultz’s little funny. The esteemed H*rv*rd did not have any use for that angle in elucidating Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry, but happily the courage-challengedness does fall in with the neoëxistential Angst of the self-exceptional, and self-indispensable, and in every conceivable and inconceivable way selfwunnerful and wunnerselfish, Tel ’Avîv statelet. Happy days. ___ [0] This must be my all-time favorite cartoon -- a judgment that presumably establishes me as a total Palestinian in the killing fields of graphic art. ( Music is much more like it, if you ask me.) Nevertheless, "Snoopy At Bay" would be striking just as anecdote and ‘narrative’, would it not? Which leaves me amazed that G@@GLE has swiped it only in conjunction with the entire specimen eruditionis I remember it from myself.

"Changes everything"

"Changes everything"?

An odd estimate, even as coming from the little green gentlebeings of Planet Justworld, zillions of light years removed from Terra, not to mention from the neo-Levant. Possibly an original High Justworldic expression has been mistranslated, one that originlly meant something more like "One just don't see how the earthlings’ world can keep on like this!"

Less remote and aetherial observers may take refuge with the New York Times Company, which almost certainly thinks and writes in North American English and sees fit to write as follows :

Israel’s deadly commando raid on Monday on a flotilla trying to break a blockade of Gaza complicated President Obama’s efforts to move ahead on Middle East peace negotiations and introduced a new strain into an already tense relationship between the United States and Israel.

Rather a fascinating forty-four words, though scarcely because they contain anything utterly unprecedented. Au contraire, the main fascination is to find so much that is stale and trite crammed into so tiny a package. Especially to be relished in this revelation of the NYTC Weltanschauung is how POTUS and Peaceprocess stand in the center of the ring, Natives and Immigrants alike relegated to their proper and peripheral rôles.

Here, in fact, is a tale that can wag two different dogs simultaneously.

But alas, from every perspective but the literary, the performance only narcissism as usual. Narky D. [1] will no doubt be among the last to have his whole day wrecked when "Changes everything" actually takes place some day.[2]

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the good, gray NYTC is trying her [3] best to make quite sure nothing changes. This is a bit of a challenge in light of that organ’s traditional bias in favour of Immigrants as opposed to Natives. Notice how boldly she grasps the obvious and obnoxious nettle: ‘deadly’ comes right up front, word #2 of 44. [4]

Once that's out of the way, the rest can be pre-owned fudge, and that it more or less is, apart from possibly 'break a blockade of Gaza." Without countenancing any Chicken Little exuberances of Planet Justworld, I must admit not having heard much about Gaza being under a blockade before early Monday morning. But of course the NYTC cooked that piece of fudge on the basis of this blockade being the status quo, in place ever since the year 1387/1967/5726. To take a "changes everything" stance would sadly spoil the NYTC confection, which requires that the burden of aggression, or at least of status-quo infringement, fall upon Natives rather than upon Immigrants.

An objector might object that this ploy rather tends to make the neo-Levantine status quo a sort of endless surprise packet: "Who knows what hitherto unknown unknowns," Ms Objector expostulates, "We shall be told next have been the established rule for decades?"

I reply: though naturally each particular surprise must be unanticipated, yet the general surprise-packet shtyk has indeed been going on for decades. I do not pay a great deal of attention to the Palestine Puzzle compared with true fans and passionate groupies of Immigrants or Natives, but even I have learned to expect about a Copernican Revolution in international law that finally and definitively proves that one or the other crew are right -- have been utterly right all along!! -- about every month or six weeks.

‘Fudge’ , I calls that parlour game myself, though you may call it ‘spinach’ if you prefer. "Changes everything" I should never dream of calling it.

More as a curiosity of literature than as substantive agitprop or serious analysis, I notice that the NYTC rather paints herself into a corner: if the blockade is to star in this production by the Surprise Packet Players, then the hapless Natives (or friends of Natives) must have been "a flotilla trying to break" the blocakde. Sort of like at the Dardanelles in 1333/1915/5674, don't you see. (The parallel is especially happy because the Terrible Turks come in on both ends.)

Zeal and chauvinism will stand anything, I know, but it takes a great deal of them to swallow what the NYTC here strives to get swallowed, that a foolish and deplorable publicity stunt is to be classed well up there with the Spanish Armada.

***

The little green viewers from afar write "[Israël] can [not] hope to have this version of events generally accepted-- or at least, accepted by enough of the people in power around the world that they don't need to worry about the real facts getting out. It seems they don't understand the 21st century," -- referring to a ‘version’ in which that the publicity stuntsters "fired first."

I suppose the proposition is likely enough to prove verbally true, but not in such a way as to warrant any tripe and baloney about "changes everything." There is no need at all for the hack pols and violence pros of the Tel ’Avîv government to insist on "people in power around the world" genuinely believing the T. A. version of events. Simply not being laughed at to their faces when they rehearse it will do nicely.

Few human events are less like "changes everything" than a parcel of rogue diplomats solemnly assuring the world of facts that pretty well everybody anywhere near being "people in power" understands to be fictional.

If the Planet Justworld theory be that Terra will abandon old-fashioned insincere diplomacy in Century XV/XXI/LVII and take to something else instead, one cannot rebut without relying on those very tricky "predictions about the future" that the wise have warned us to be wary of. For all I know, "Changes everything" may be lurking just around the very next bend in Ms. Clio’s dark tunnel.

Nevertheless, I detect nothing in this teapot tempest to support so extraterrestrial a conjecture.

Happy days.



___
[1] Strangers refer to my hero as "Master Narcissus Dexter." But come along, gentile reader, who is really a stranger to Narky?


[2] Narky is ubiquitous and unavoidable, yet more so some places than other: “When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Kentucky, because everything there happens twenty years after it happens anywhere else.” – Mark Twain."

(( The NYTC folks oddly classify that as a joke about "the current state of the U.S. economy," when obviously it mocks Paul Minor, the dilbertarian dingaling nominated for the Fedguv Senate by the KY GOP. For practical purposes, Planet Dilbert can be taken to be quite as distant and alien as Planet Justworld herself, only in a polarly opposite direction. ))


[3] The present keyboard’s holy Homeland™ having resolved by a five-to-four vote that corporations are persons once more, it shall loyally do my best to pronominate them accordingly. Fifty-six percent of the time, anyway.


[4] Making it the very first word would be a stiff challenge to an Anglphone stylist, though perhaps not insuperable.