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.

"national paranoia and xenophobia"

Public opinion in Pakistan is fashioned by the newly independent Pakistani media, which is often cross-owned. The media, made independent during General Musharraf’s era, has a pro-Islamist bias, which is reflected both in its vehement anti-Americanism and in its attacks on the social democratic Pakistan Peoples Party. Some analysts have recently referred to the Pakistani media as feeding national paranoia and xenophobia.

Dear Dr. Bones,

Can Roger, Freelord & Kiddiemaster Padjaama, foremost of yalodramatists[1] quick or dead, seriously suppose that he can sneak this neospecimen in over the border?

But wait! Perhaps we should wonder instead which brand of Kiddie Selfservatism is usin’ which here, for his freelordship could conceivably be the gettin’ the kiddie end of his own shtyk here.

Consider, sir, that Brahmin’stán has ALWAYS been at war with Pákístán , and that in deed and not in Orwell alone. Whereas his freelordship perverted to his neoteric pajamatarian kiddie selfservatism only the other decade. M. Apama de Pande has potentially whole kalpas of wombscholarship and wingnuttiness behind him. M. de Pande may or may not be an individual capable of mustering all the vast Brahmingstání forces, natural and praeter- and supernatural, for agitprop purposes -- that’s his look-out.

As to our own look-out, I fear M. de Pande does kind of appear as if he may not be very good at the agitation-propaganda racket. I cannot make out what he is up to in this scribble -- a situation also explainable, of course, on the hypothesis that he is far too smart to let his games be detected by the likes of me.

Still, I ask you, Dr. Bones, are the base an’ vile of the Party of Grant likely to care about the present state of journalism on Planet Mleccha? And even if Wally Wombschool and Cindy from Wasilla cared passionately enough to get their eyes off their bellybuttons and look towards Karachi ("where?") , what could they do? Write a letter to their neoheartthrob, Kiddiemaster Paul of KY, and then Kentucky Taxpayers United sends an ultimatum to ’Islámábád, which insolence bein’ insolently rejected, a state of war obtains between the High Noncontractin’ Parties, whereupon ... ¡B@@M! ...?

M. de Pande is alleged to be a student of political science, though when PJM does the allegin’, ’tis caveat emptor time at the O.K. Corral. Still, it should not take a degree of any sort from Hillsdale or Wombschool Normal or Pepperdine or St. Dilbert Antistate or George Mason to notice that no pack of aliens, legal or illegal, official or secret-sectorian, criminal or tamely conformist, have ever yet brought our holy Homeland™ riding to their rescue by first stirring up rank-and-file Homelanders™ to put pressure on their elected and representative statespersons at Washington City. An attempt along those lines as recently as the year of religionism 1207/1793/5557 was signally unsuccessful. Nothing much has changed in the interval since, which interval is, for those equipped with the Brahmin’stání sense of time, less than the nanosecond of us unspiritual in Greater Europe .

True, the Party of Grant and Hoover an’ Goldwater ’n’ Atwater has been known to flirt with the occasional "China Lobby" from time to time. It has always been clear in such cases that the Natives addressed themselves to the G.O.P. geniuses, all attempts at mobilizin’ the Wingnut City mob (such unimpressive attempts as there were) bein’ undertaken by the latter.

Hence, Pol. Sci. or not, M. de Pande certainly ought to know that he must apply at Beltway City DC to obtain the kind of public assistance and affirmative action for which he feels himself and his congenitals qualified.

And even then . . . .

Suppose the ideal pscenario from M. de Pande’s point of view, Dr. Bones:

Today is Monday, 2 April 2013 in the revised Christian-Christojudæan calendar. M. de Pande has been invited to make his case in a personal audience with the U.S. Secretary of State (John Freelord Bolton) after a ceremonial handshake or snakehandle with the POTESSA herself (Neocomradess S. L. Heath-Paling, the former Freedame Wasilla) plus more substantial strategy sessions with the Vicepotus (not the aforementioned Neocomrade R. H. Paul, who would likely have a tin ear for Natives, but ... how about Holy Joe, the now Senator from Neoconn.?).

So, then, what relief does M. de Pande petition for, exactly?

’Tis obvious enough that he would like to see the abominable Pákís bashed definitively, bashed so well that they will never make trouble again for Brahmingstán -- so well that that they never CAN make trouble. A thorough course of Hiroshima Therapy (®) would be ideal, I guess, but that is a bit around the neobend even for pscenario purposes.

At the other end of the Shock-an’-Awe scale--and improbably supposing M. de Pande to have no more grievances against the eternal abominables than he here rehearses, perhaps every editor in Pákístán might be required to send all her copy and videotape and audiotape--electronically, of course, nobody is talking donkeys--to be vetted first at Varanasi (for substance and ideology and ‘attitude’) and then at Bangalore (to make sure there are no secret code messages). Only after that process might approved media fodder be promulgated amongst the PK abominables.

A small thing to ask (especially compared to the sort of favour one suspects M. de Pande would like to ask), is it not? Yet how is even a Heath-Paling régime (pardon my Limbaugh) to accomodate this little request, the least of mutual courtesies as between fervent ideobuddies? Would the Party of Grant and Hoover not have to conquer the whole PK joint and then administer it seriously in order to grant M. de Pande what he prays for?

‘Seriously’ means at least "not like PGH rule of the former al-‘Iráq." Recallers may recall how the hogen-mogens of Party an’ AEIdeology dealt with the indigenous media of Postiraq, bribin’ WOG journalists (very paltrily) to praise the Occupation and the Occupyin’ Power, but never crackin’ down in earnest of the sort of incorrigible nogoodniks upon whom M. de Pande wants cracked down. [2]

I daresay M. de Pande could get the Heath-Palin’ites to award him a platinum star for being the very model of a modern Little Foreign Friend of the Republican Party, but when it comes to more substantial assistance, one must hope he does not hold his breath until it eventuates.

Oh, well! Che sarà, sarà and vice versa.

Furthermore, Father Zeus knows best.

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


___
[1] Let’s try ‘yaleodrama’ minus that obnoxious ‘E’, shall we?, in unsure hope that the inquiring student of neocomradology will take the first syllable to run to the tune of "halo" -- as it certainly ought to run, given that the ‘L’ is not doubled.

"Ought to" is a very treacherous guide to Mandarin English orthography, but what else is there?


[2] ¡¡For G*re’s sake, Dr. Bones, the Busheviki would not even insist that that arrest warrant (¡a warrant for bloody murder!) on the Rev. Señorito al-Sadr be executed!!

Phashism at Los Angeles and elsewhere

Dear Dr. Bones,

Should you happen to require more fruit of the wombschool, sir, come and get it while the poop is hot!

I betcha, Bones, that Neocomrade (Sixth Class) J. X. Dunphy of the Party of Grant (& Hoover & Atwater &c. &c.) has never before been called a PoG NC-6 in all its little life to date. Whereas no doubt it gets called a phashist at least six times every workin’ day -- every policin’ day, that is -- by all the beautiful people of ...

(( ... a small technical difficulty arises: at five thousand klicks’ distance, I have no idea where the beautiful people foregather way out there in the Mecca of darkest Schwarzeneggerland. And that despite being quite sure I heard the name of it from Neocomrade (Third Class) Dr. M. X. Weinstein-Savage [1] just a few days ago. Dr. Alzheimer seems to be *IN* of late.

(( Well, we can always make something up, Dr. Bones. That is what they do in Foxcuckooland, and we have it on high authority (and even in the High Tongue!) that fas est et ab hoste doceri. Hmmm. Let’s see, to annoy both plain vanilla kiddie selfservatives and tutti-frutti neokiddies simultaneously, how about we pretend "Laguna [de] Mecca" is the Los Angeles equivalent of Weston (oops!) or Dover or Kennebunkport or Chappaquiddick MA. The philological and ethnohistorical objections are formidable, but no matter, we can feign further that Dr. Dryasdust holds ‘Mecca’ to be a vulgar Yank corruption of some earlier and more Hispanically correct form. That should be close enough for Fedguv work. So, then, where was I? ... ))

No doubt poor, put-upon NC-6 J. X. Dunphy gets called "a [exp. del.] phashist" at least six times every workin’ day -- every policin’ day, that is -- by all the beautiful people of Laguna Mecca, who never policed (or even worked) a day in all their élitist lives, and absolutely never miss a chance to make mock of uniforms that guard them while they sleep , as the bard of Wingnut City hath so memorably barded. [2]

At the aforesaid distance of five thousand kilometres, one feels reasonably safe in spoofing NC6 JXD a little from Zip Code 0213X, in the sure and certain hope that Sgt. Crowley of the local constabulary will afford one protection, should protection be required. ’Not Joe Friday of the LAPD, perhaps, but not bad either.

Less unseriously, and before I digress off the map altogether, it seems to me that NC6 JXD does its cowingnutettes an’ cowingnuts a detectable discourtesy. It solemnly assures Cindy from Wasilla and Wally Wombschool that "When They Call You a Nazi, You’ve Won the Immigration Argument," an assurance which we may here, for purposes of pseudargument, admit to be excellent advice. But if I had the misfortune to be Master Wally or Miss Cindy, I’d be a little miffed that NC6 JXD does not explain where the lottery office is located that I take my lucky ticket to and cash it in for my winnin’s.

The purely moral rewards of bein’ defamed as phashist are all very well in their way, I suppose, but it would be ridiculous to pretend that that almost untravelled byway [3] is the mainstream Path of Party an’ AEIdeology. "If it doesn't pay, it doesn't count" is perhaps a slight exaggeration of the consensus omnium of the neocomradely community, but for practical purposes, it is highly reliable.

And I wish you, Dr. Bones,
Healthy and affordable days.

___
[1] Or perhaps Neocomrade (Third Class) Dr. M. X. Savage-Weinstein? San Francisco may not lie beyond the human event horizon altogether like Los Angeles, but it is a long, long way off all the same, so I fear I did not make a memorandumb of what NC-3 MXS-W (or NC3 MXW-S, as the case may be) identified for some call-in neopatient from Flyoverstan as the tip-top toniest zone of L.A. Except I do remember never having heard of the ’burb before.


[2] Needless to say -- but fun to add -- is that none of los alumbrados de Laguna Mecca either (1) knows more Spanish lingo then is indispenable to direct the servants -- always remember, sir, which language it was that the late fiend Kennedy Tertius had to hire a hand to take for him at H*rv*rd! -- or (2), would ever dream of religionating the Muslim way. Religionation of any sort is, like Cathtilian and Andaloosean, more or less left to the servants at Laguna Mecca. Up the slippery slope at Castle Podhóretz, the neogentry take that line too -- possibly it results from lookin’ down (figurative and political) slippery slopes all the time?

Please tell Dr. Dryasdust not to trouble me about los alumbrados being a laughably bad equivalent for "the beautiful people." Remember your Charles Williams Guideline , sir, and apply it a little: when in Hell (or at Sevilla), one must try to talk like a native speaker of Inaccurate (or of Andaloosean).


[3] "A mighty spoof, but not without a plan," that’s OUR lucky ticket, sir! Did the Muses and you and I not long ago identify the obscure by-way in question, and link it up with Sabbath School and Commencement Day in particular? Of course we did!

So then, 95% of neocomradely misbehaviour can be predicted on the basis of ""If it doesn't pay, it doesn't count." When that fails, perhaps as much as 95% of the oddball five percent is classifiable under the rubric of Sabbath Day and Commencement School, that is to say, lip-service paid by the neogentry to geistlich values that real gentry used to really value. Not altogether by coincidence, this rubric overlaps admirably with the one invoked above as "Servants, Matterss best left to the."

So "at the end of the day," there is only .0475% (one part in about 2,105) of neocomradely misbehaviour that calls for really SPECIAL explanation.

From this I draw two tentative conclusions for ourselves, sir, as follows:

(A) to prepare a tract called Neocomradology for Dummies -- or perhaps "for Dhimmies," or maybe even for both classes of customer? -- would be feasible enough, though it is not a project I care to undertake myself.

(B) Few sentimental/‘ideological’ things on G*re’s green earth are less like brand-name Fascismo than "If it doesn't pay, it doesn't count." And the same applies to the Hitlerism with which the kiddiemasters intend that their kiddies should confuuse the Italian product whenever the dread F-word is mentioned.

Even in High Prussian, Dr. Bones, geistlich is nowhere near synonymous with gut. The Master has taught us, Pol. 1267a, that no man becomes a tyrant in order to keep warm, and the same applies, I think, to devotees of ""If it doesn't pay, it doesn't count." Pushin’ folks around after the neomanner of weekly standardisers and commonterrorists &c. is unedifying in the extreme, yet if one insists on deciding whether it is to be called spiritual or materialistic, there is no doubt that it belongs in the ‘spiritual’ pigeon-hole. As, obviously, do all the contents of the "Sabbath School" and "Commencement Day" pigeon-holes. Q.E.D.

But Father Zeus knows best.

"A Fatwa on your head?"

Dear Dr. Bones,

I know your Ph.D. is in Progressive Assyriology, sir, but perhaps you know a trick cyclist or two with a veterinary sideline?

Common sense and general knowledge fail me, I fear, when presented with sweet puppies capable of supposin’ with a straight muzzle that their own 'liberty' -- "(yes, those are sneer quotes)" [0] -- to consist in publicly placardin’ the religionism of others as if it were a communicable disease.[1]

The potential fun side of the latest puppy game is obvious, though, or at least it was great fun for me up to the point at which Paddy knocked me down after noticing the sketches I was preparing for my proposed "You, Too, Can ESCAPE FROM PAPISM!" ad campaign.[2]

Oh, well! I doubt the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority would have taken my doits and sheqels and published my copy in all their buses and trolleys: the VC people are a forty-four percent (44%) plurality up here, according to Big LEW . And by the way, "Isn't that a bit of Destructive ©®eationism™ to set Governor Winthrop revolving in his grave?," I ask you.

Further afield by the way, I walked across Boston Common on a sunny spring afternoon (yesterday’s) and, begorrah, did not hear even a single word of Irish (Gaeilge) ! What does the late Henry Adams make of that, I wonder, down there below where the warming, though global enough, is decidedly ananthropogenic?

Gov. Winthrop, for his part, with a much longer posthumous career already behind him, may (as I conjecture, perhaps a tad wildly) even be somewhat pleased that at least a little something has been snatched from the burning: in A.R. 1431/2010/5770, the bread worshippers of MA mostly worship their bread in "a language understanded of the people."

That was not exactly the main plank of the original reform platform, yet if the Muses and you and I, Dr. Bones, were to concoct something like St. Woodrow’s XIV Point Plan for the salvation of humanity by A. R. 1803/2371/6040 -- as far in the future, that is, as His Worship’s obituary date lies in the past -- would we not, all things considered, be happy if only whichever Point we now original-intent fourtheenth and hindmost were actually instantiated in full?

’Twere a blatantly impar congressus to contrast and compare a Party Neocomradess (Seventh Class) P. X. Geller with a veritable parens patriæ -- so let’s do it! [3]

At any rate, let me point out one seeming resemblance that looks primâ facie plausible to this coarse and illiterate keyboard, namely that, like His Worship, today’s specimen of Chlorella vulgaris in human or pajama form seems to be afraid of the religionism that she craves to badmouth and swiftboat. Furthermore, Gov. Winthrop and the Massachusetts Bay seem, in retrospect at least, to have been in quite as little immediate danger of being overrun by proto-Ratzingerites and Foxites and Laudians (and even Ms. Anne Hutchinson, by G*m!) as is the now Dade County FL by the Baní Ibn Taymiyya.

With NC7 PXG, the Chicken Little shtyk can instantly be put down to bad judgment and courage-challengedness, imprudentia ignaviaque, two qualities very prominent indeed at Rio Limbaugh and Wingnut City and, indeed, up the slippery slope at Castle Podhóretz also.[4]

To present Governor Winthrop as an out-and-out proleptic disciple of Party Neocomradess Ch. X. Little and Party Neocomradess P. X. Geller would be scandalum magnatum to the max. Fortunately there is no need to think it, for His Worship judged by rather different canons of judgment back in Century X/XVI/LIII than those of Dade County FL wingnutettes and wingnuts circâ 2010. Governor Winthrop was not scared of proto-Ratzingerites and Quakers and ‘prelatists’ directly, the way ChXL and PXG cower under their beds in personal terror for the safety of their physical and material hides. Winthrop’s undeniable Enthusiasm having not yet undergone the decerebration process that eventually produced the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, he can have been directly afraid of Father Zeus alone.

As follows: Puritan divines took certain passages of the Uncommon Testament seriously and literaliter after a fashion that I betcha pretty well nobody at all in Dade County does nowadays. Various afflictions that fell of yore upon Palæojerusalem in deed and not in allegory alone were attributed to the anger of Himself at toleration of idolatries and abominations perpetrated upon the High Places. ’Twould be silly to fancy that ’Elîyáhû was afraid of Queen Jezebel as Neocomradess P. X. Geller and her Party base an’ vile are self-terrorised of M. bin Ládin and Dr. Zawáhirí: the problem was simply that if the Elect did not ditch the bitch and stop playing ball with Baal and otherwise change the régime a little, Father Zeus would make sure that it never rained again, so good-bye milk and honey! [Lib. III Reg. cap. 18]

The allegorice of that for the Massachusetts Bay of 1640 was not far to seek, the search being of course conducted upon the inexpugnably sound basis of Enthusiasm in Massachusetts as it was in 1640. It would be extremely unreasonable, Dr. Bones, to subtract even a single point from John Winthrop’s score because, eighteen score years afterwards, an uncharitable painter could, if he chose to, paint His Worship’s short way with dissenters to look like the notions of those evil Qommie ayatollahs who was in the news this week for discovering that female unchastity and impudicity, and missed prayers, and being stingy about charitable giving somehow provoke Father Zeus to harrow the land with earthquakes.[5]

I wish you, Dr. Bones,
Healthy and affordable days.

___
[0] Cf. peanut-gallery Peanut #3.

Final score: singles enclose sneers, doubles mark mere quotation. (( Yet can any 'quotation" ever be really "mere' ? A promising topic for some other day. ))


[1] I had written "COMMUNICABLE disease" but have decided the adjective is unwarrantable.

Neocomradess (Seventh Class) P. X. Geller provides only the one sample of her factionette’s agitation and propaganda -- " ‘Fatwa on your head?’ " &c. &c.--and that one happens to offer relief to victims of the alleged disorder, rather than callin’ upon healthy sheep to quarantine afflicted goats in ‘existential’ self-defense. Though everything we know in general about this less common neobreed of sweet puppy suggests that NC7 PXG would not hesitate a nanosecond to do the latter, still in fact it is not done here.

Accordingly, I withdraw "placard ... as communicable" so as not to fall afoul of the Charles Williams guideline, " Hell is inaccurate. "

And Father Zeus knows best!

(( You may remember Comrade C. R. Dawkins, Oxon., who proposed that all Enthusiasm and Superstition without exception consists of memes , these being feigned entities which, as far as I was ever able to make out, are much the same thing as "communicable diseases." To be sure, when one borrows a term from the High Tongues, or coins one that pretends to be such a borrowing, Wally Wombschool, and Cindy from Wasilla, and (probably) NC7 PXG are not half so likely to notice that one is laughing from them. ))


[2] Cal Luther -- you may remember I introduced you to her once when we were touring Nantes ? -- offered some criticisms that were less trenchant but more weighty, as that simply substituting "Ratzinger" for "Alzheimer" in all sorts of existing scripts would not just "vix dignum ingenii vestri", as Cal neatly put it, but positively tacky.


[3] Like the man said, "Never give a wingnut an even break!" Furthermore, only a genuine blue-state meanie could wish to deprive sweetpuppiedom of their occasions of sweetest self-sorrowin’: "Nobody knows the trouble [they've] seen, nobody knows but G. Suss" -- whoever G. Suss may be.


[4] Hooverville is much more intellectually respectable, perhaps because one can always gauge from casualty insurance rates how afraid of the Islamophalangitarian Menace (Pat. Pend.) Daddy Warbucks and Uncle Scrooge really and objectively are. BFZKB.


[5] Chicken Little and NC7 P. X. Geller et al. might -- but doubtless will not -- reflect that they maybe look just a little silly bein’ existentially autoterrorised by a religionism not yet purged of flagrant Dark Ages stuff like that.

’Tis now to be "war of awesome dimensions," by G*m!

Dear Dr. Bones,

Let us invoke the Spirit of Music, shall we, seeing that Bedrich Smetana will be making a guest appearance this morning?

*** OVERTURE ***

"War of awesome dimensions, a war with a long and bloody history [that] is not the consequence of this or that unpopular policy but above all of beliefs we are not even supposed to pronounce nowadays, the crazed visions of Muslim extremists who are waging jihad against us. And [a war that is the consequence of] the beliefs of radical secular extremists who share the goals of jihad. That war is being waged by people who hate America and Israel, as they hate Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists, and those many Muslims who want to live in peace."

*** INTERMEZZO sive ZWISCHENSPIEL ***

Suppose, sir, that you woke up in your hammock one fine morning to discover that that, presumably either for your sins or for His own entertainment, Father Zeus had transformed you, not into a fat disgusting cockroach like poor Herr Samsa chez Kafka, but into a lean-an’-mean and militant and extreme Hyperzionist. Rather like Grand Ayatollah Mikey Bin Ledeen is, if you know what I mean.

If you prefer, we can leave you out of the game and directly imagine His Eminence wakin’ up and findin’ His own Self-Eminence in the Cartesian plight of literally havin’ "to live [say, the Tuesday of next week, 4 May 2010] as if it were the first day of [His Eminence’s] life." [0]

Well as usual , I don't strictly mean ‘literally’, even as I do not propose to dabble in any philosophy more exalted than the joke Neoëxistentialism of Team Jabotinsky. To refine the hypothesis, then, suppose His scenario-bound Eminence to wake up, recallin’ what Hyperzion is, and more or less able to find it on a map, and--above all--remainin’ militant and extremist that Hyperzion must remain Hyperzion [1], exfoliatin’ all its exotic neobeauties without stint or limit in sæcula sæculorm amen.

What our feigned H.E. does not remember is the correlation of farces in the world: who is a friend to Hyperzion, or at least a useful idiot, who is neutral, and who is not only antimegistodemographical [1a] in sime inherited or religionistic way, but actively and avowedly antihyperzionist, at Turtle Bay or in any other forum that dares to show its head in public.

In short, imagine that my travesty of Mikey Cardinal Ledeen has somehow forgotten who the enemies and friends of the GD™ Folk [1a] are, and must start from scratch to russle ’em up some new ones. [2] How well adapted to that end, in your opinion, Dr. Bones, would be the agitational-propagandistic modus operandi that His Eminence here deploys in "preachin’ to the choir"?

Whether you care to play my parlour game or not, Dr. Bones, please make a memorandumb [3] of this Binledeenian exuberance so we can find it later and use it against the kiddies.

Considered narrowly as choir-preachin’, "We are all Israëlis now" is a damp squib: the sweet birds of neosong would have been given the Frum’s rush [http://j.mp/9a9K9M] out of the Neotemple the instant they were detected to be anythin’ but.

Tthe Cardinal Auxiliary of Jehádkarírestán in partibus infidelium must, one presumes [3], intend His Eminence’s choristers to march forth and proclaim the Neogospel Accordin’ to Mikey unto benighted heathens and perverted heretics proper.

What makes this item memorandumb fodder, Dr. Bones, is how extremely perspicuous His Eminence makes the underlyin’ Common Terror magazine shtyk, which consists in Castle Podhóretz (or other competent neoäuthority) issuin’ a Woodrovian declaration of "War against war." Needless to say, it was THEM that started it, commenced a

"war of awesome dimensions, a war with a long and bloody history [that] is not the consequence of this or that unpopular policy but above all of beliefs we are not even supposed to pronounce nowadays, the crazed visions of Muslim extremists who are waging jihad against us. And [a war that is the consequence of] the beliefs of radical secular extremists who share the goals of jihad. That war is being waged by people who hate America and Israel, as they hate Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists, and those many Muslims who want to live in peace."

Lots and lots of neodingalingism crammed into very few words -- ninety-one, I make it -- that is, Dr. Bones, and therefore memorandumb-worthy to the max.

To be sure, nothin’ human, except of course the GD Folk™, can achieve perfection. Mikey Cardinal Bin Ledeen has not provided us a sort of handy-dandy CliffsNotes™ edition of "Rupert’s List," that conjectural omniumgatherum of all the scattered enemies lists held at Hooverville and Rio Limbaugh and Castle Podhóretz and Port Ste Lucie and Pajama Junction, indeed, anywhere at all in Foxcuckooland from sea to whinin’ sea.

Notably absent are (1) the "Smash Capitalism!" contingent (unless His Eminence’s little word ‘radical’ is read far stronger than I think it can bear), and (2) environmental whackos,

*** CODETTA ***

"war of awesome dimensions, a war with a long and bloody history [that] is not the consequence of this or that unpopular policy but above all of beliefs we are not even supposed to pronounce nowadays, the crazed visions of Muslim extremists who are waging jihad against us. And [a war that is the consequence of] the beliefs of radical secular extremists who share the goals of jihad. That war is being waged by people who hate America and Israel, as they hate Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists, and those many Muslims who want to live in peace."

I wish you, sir,
Healthy and affordable days

____
[0] Not "the first day of the rest of His Eminence’s life" as the vulgarism runs, but Day One simpliciter, the entire space between the ears of His Eminence contain’ nothin’ but hard vacuum, or call it tabula rasa.


[1] Paddy suggested the slogan ¡Hyperzion go bragh! at this juncture when we were confabulating this little fable. I had to point out to him with some asperity that, like most rules, the rule "A cat may look at a king" has the occasional probative exception, this exception, or one prominent exception, being obviously catus felix Kilarniensis.

[1a] A denier may deny, for the sake of argument or with gusto, that the Greatest Demographic™ is in fact so extraordinarly self-exceptional and self-indispensable and all-’round self-wunnerful as to be out of legitimate range of ALL the slings and arrows of us miserable Lesser Breeds Without, but that certainly does not mean than any Irish need apply as archers or peltasts.

Quelle idée!, like my great-great- ... -grandma used to mutter into her porridge in the Gaeilge, before the villagers lynched her for a witch.

As you and the Muses know, Dr. Bones, my favorite breed amongst the LBW to set up with dhimmian uppitiness against the GD Folk fanatics is the Bohemians, who call themselves ‘Czechs’, but thereby deceive nobody and haven’t for several centuries. Probably Herr Smetana [http://j.mp/bs84On] is the efficient cause of this McWhim: "Would you believe it, Princess, that shixy peasant had the gall to associate our tune with his vlast!"

Whimmed or whimless, I have never set foot nearer the place than Schneeburg (?) in Upper Bavaria, or for practical purposes, say Bayreuth BRG. A notorious hotbed of antimegistodemographical activities was that town, to be sure, when the Serene House of Wagner reigned. This is immaterial, however, because with Bohemia Bayreuth has nothing political to do and never did, beyond being Habsburg subjects.


[2] Like any good pscenario, this one is, I flatter myself, not entirely unconnected with the former Real World. For, in a certain sense, every snake-oil salesman and agitprop artiste that ever lived has been in the situation I conjure up for my pseudo-Mikey. As regards the "swing vote," I mean, those who have not yet taken any definite position on the merits and drawbacks of hula hoops, or Shock-an’-Awe (®), or le surchauvinisme hebraïque, or pet rocks, or . . . -- whatever product or ideoproduct the flogger may be trying to flog.

The analogy is imperfect, I admit, because Team Jabotinsky and the Hyperzionism product have been around since, at very latest, shortly after the war of A. R. 1387/1967/5726, twoscore and two (solar) years ago. His Eminence is bound to be especially concerned with official State enmities and friendships and neutralities and idiocies and utilities, and one can scarcely imagine any foreign ministry on G*re’s green earth where the statespersons have simply never heard of Hyperzionism the way Cindy from Wasilla has (almost certainly) never heard of the blessèd and meaningless hula hoop [http://j.mp/aubixm].


[3] To give you a head start, here’s ... Mikey: http://j.mp/9mGUo4

That is the pajamatarian neopost, but who cares? The PJM title of the thing is right there inside it, even if Mikey called it somethin’ different chez soi.

And by the way, the former chez soi seems to redirect straight to Mikey’s latest pair of pajamas in any case.

"Creativity and Destruction in all about I see / Father Zeus, Who wingnuts not, / Abide with me!"


[4] One may be presuming temerariously, however, for it is not impossible that His Eminence intended no more than to warm up the water a little in that bath of self-wunnerfulness in which his immediate auditors incorrigibly wallow: "O nos felices, who alone actually realize that ‘we’ "are all Israelis now."

A wonderer may wonder, after all, whether Neocomradess Ch. Little entirely likes the idea that others should detect the imminence of skyfall with her own eagle eye and squawk against it with equal volume. Or whether the hack pols and violence pros of the Tel ’Avîv statelet would rejoice singleheartedly and without mental reservation to discover three or four additional and undeniable ‘democracies’ scattered around the neo-Levantine landscape.

Grand Ayatollah Mikey Bin Ledeen bein’ what His Eminence is, the only complete certainty hereabouts is that H. E. would dearly love to see somebody bomb the evil Qommies back into the Stone Age. To "wipe them off the map," you might say, even.

Ray Takieh and the Space Invaders

Dear Dr. Bones,

Prescinding from the neo-Levantine politics, wasn‘t that a swell show? [0]

Neocomradess (Fourth Class) R. Solowitz of Boston MA and Masada NL makes for fine entertainment, there can be no doubt at all about it, sir!

Dr. Takieh gets completely eclipsed by the e-Delilah with her Dance of the Seven Veils [1]. That eclipse may even have been a (very) small part of what the producers and directors of the performance intended it to accomplish, although strictly speaking a critic must be only guessing when she takes the on-stage persona "R. T." to be an allusiom to poor Ray.

Ms. Critic must decide for herself, exactly as the slaves of Rupert, Lord Foxcuckoo, keep insistin’ every time we turn on WRKO AM 680 Boston. While she is making up her mind, though, allow me to remind you, Dr. Bones, that we knew poor Ray back when he was only "an Iranian-American Middle East scholar, former United States Department of State official and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations." [2]

Back about breakfast time yesterday, that was. Time sure flies when you are having fun, does it not? Golly!

As I was saying, it is clear enough for Fedguv work that the customer or patient was intended to take "R. T." for Ray Takieh, even though only patients or customers who never heard of the latter can be duped. In context, this point is quite unimportant. The producers and directors of "Rebecca Solowitz" are not really referrin’ to poor Ray in any case, but rather to a previous account of him provided by the management and staff of Planet Justworld, "... nonsensical claim ... gross errors of fact ... extremely tortured ‘reasoning’ ... a very dangerous argument ... bizarre ..." and so on and so forth. You know the drill, Dr. Bones.

Though the Muses and you and I know it well, perhaps we should explain it a little for "those of you at Rio" Limbaugh. The Justworldian account made the literary mistake [3] of telling the reader directly that the villain is a very bad man instead of showing him acting badly. I guess the offender would plead that a link to the URL of bad action was provided. And I guess that there is at least a little something to be said for that notion. But not a great deal, especially not when a little scrap of the supposed badness is in fact provided, and then the lady says, in effect, "Kindly allow me to know best!" Know, that is, that it is ‘nonsensical’ to ‘claim’ that

The notion that the incumbent Arab regimes are reluctant to collaborate with the United States on Iran because of the prevailing impasse in the peace process is a misreading of regional realities.

That unilateral and preëmptive critical aggression won’t do. Poor Ray may be dead wrong, but he is not the least bit nonsensical. Nonsensical would be if he had declared the notion in question to be, say, "a runcible spoon" or, with a different flavour of nonsense, "a round square."

(( It would trespass into talking politics to wonder whether the notion is or is not a misreading, so only inside parentheses dare I editorialize that Dr. Takieh may well be more or less right. ))

On the literary front, though, the upshot is that the customer is being hornswoggled into supposing that Gen. Mubárak and les altesses royales du Ryadh and the rest of the usual crew of heroes really DO put Palestine first. The literary objection to the attempted hornswogglement is not crudely that it ain’t so, but rather that it is not discussed, that the matter is not presented as being discussable. Everybody who is anybody must see that poor Ray might as well be telling us that twice two is five. Period.

Let us have a little argumentum ad verecundiam, Dr. Bones, just to wind things up with, like:

What shocks me is his instantaneous assumption that the question is so simple that there could be no real hesitation about it. It is breaking Aristotle’s canon--to demand in every enquiry that degree of certainty which the subject matter allows. And not on your life to pretend that you see farther than you do.

Naturally to appeal to the Master in that fashion presupposes that it is ‘enquiry’ that one is engaged in, as opposed to, say, agitation-and-propaganda or spectacle. The producers and directors of "Rebecca Solowitz" are spectaclemongers, their "T. R." a phantom fit only for the Yoo Toob, a straw dog that is scarcely even seriously feigned to resemble its supposed original, bein’ obviously trotted out only in order to be rude about somebody else.

The nonsensical and grossly erroneous and bizarrely dangerous (&c.) Dr. Ray Takieh looks a lot like another straw dog to me, and therefore like a tip-off that whatever may have been going on when it was sighted, ‘enquiry’ was not the name for it.

Mais que sçay-je?

Healthy days.

___
[0] So you see, sir, I am NOT the only geezer left who still remembers swellness.


[1] Yes, of course I realize there were only six veils: have you never heard of bloggherary license, sir? I accomodate my facts to a vulgar cliché, as any sensible rhetor would. Give me a break.


[2] Whoever "R.T." may be, if anybody at all, the learnèd elders of Wiki are undoubtedly talking about the same "Ray Takeyh, PhD (born 1966)" to whom the Muses and you and I have been previously introduced.

The article seems harmless enough. I was unaware of "a doctorate from St Antony‘s College, University of (sic) Oxford, in 1997," though, a detail which further lessens the likeness to "R.T." Miss Delilah’s producers and directors presumably missed it as well, St. Anthony’s being to the jihád careerist what Hell is to person of religionism. Here is a short list of fiends and demons.


[3] By low terrestrial standards, this is undoubtedly a literary mistake, though perhaps Planet Justworld is altogether "a foreign country where they do things differently"? Father Zeus knows best.

Be that as it may, we are not cheating when we judge such a product by our own standards rather than attempt to divine how the vendor would prefer his wares to be evaluated. If the human race at large had been silly enough to adopt the latter course, Madison Avenue would have gobbled us all up long ago.

Ardor-Motivated

Dear Dr. Bones,

As long as the Old Sinner is up repenting and amending and rewording anyway, perhaps he would consider a little reordering as well?

First thing I thought, looking at the title before reading the article, was, "But surely the O. S. has got it backwards?"

So, then, how about this?

‘Conservative’ Hatred of Arabs Motivated by Ardour for Israël!

Hmm.

Looking at it done my way, I must pronounce that way to be not infallibly sinfree either, even after disallowing weekly standardisers and Common Terror magazine groupies to pass themselves off as the Little Friends of Eddie Burke, LLC. [1]

Things look a little more complicated still, as is often the case in and around the neo-Levant. There is another factor involved here that has to be reckoned with, though doing so produces something that would be grotesque as a headline:

Hyperzionists’ Ardour for Israël Motivates Hatred of Arabs among ‘Conservative’ Non-Jews!

Probably ‘incites’ is the better verb in a case where the motivators are different from the motivated. On the other hand, that language could make it sound almost as if somebody were committing a (hate) crime here. Far be it from!

After that much revision, who will be surprised if Mr. Rosenberg wants to have nothing to do with his own verbal baby?

Indeed, it really is not his baby any more, for what I have just done amounts to changing the subject from (part of) what it is about Commonterrorists that annoys him to (part of) what it is about them that annoys you and me. And these are mostly not the same things, or parts of things. [2]

Up to a point, they *cannot* be the same things, for you and Paddy and I can no more be "self-hating Jews" than Mr. Rosenberg could plausibly set up as Voice of the Shanty Irish. A great deal of the public misbehaviour by Commonterrorists must be almost a personal embarrassment to him. Whereas we are lucky enough to be saddled with nothing much worse than Miss Piggy Noonan over at the Wall Street Jingo.

Truly, sir, our yoke is easy and our burden light!

Healthy days.


___
[1] It is silly game indeed to guess what so-and-so would have said, were he still alive. But don’t you think it at least *posssible*, Dr. Bones, that Mr. Burke might have seen V. Ye. Zhabotínsky [http://tinyurl.com/y36wmz5] , say, or, M. le géneral du Sharon, or ... as, well, as Warren Hastings Writ Large?

I guess the Commonterrorist response to such an affront would be to ask me whether I suppose their ideopal Eddie wanted to hand central North America back to the Iroquois and the Algonquin and the Massachusetts. There is, of course, no sign that Eddie did, despite having been alive at a time when the pertinent facts were available to him.

But at that juncture things would begin to get complicated, for Mr. Burke almost certainly would have thought it pertinent to point out that the East Indians had Sanskrit, whereas the Algonquins had to make do with only Algonquin. Unwritten Algonquin, too!

At which point Commonterrorists would (I guess) have to protest that in 1431/2010/5770 they certainly do not hate the Natives of the neo-Levantine for being woad-painted savages! ... "Though, by the way, did you know that more books have been written and published in Estonian in the last six months alone than have appeared in Arabic in the last three centuries?" (Or whatever -- I misquote from memory.)



[2] One problem with any scribble of the present sort is the risk of giving pointers to the abusers of the world. Still, facts are facts, and it is really is a fact, is it not?, that the biggest problem Hasbara GHQ faces is gettin’ the *commonality* of their neoterrorisin’ exactly right.

The Old Sinner’s own self-correction illustrates what I mean from the flip side. If Castle Podhóretz were addressin’ its agitation and propaganda exclusively to dhimmís like you and me, then definitely ‘Muslims’ rather than ‘Arabs’ ought to appear at the top of their hatelist. If only to their own coreligionists, pious or nominal, then definitely ‘Arabs’ rather than ‘Muslims’ -- though with perhaps a tacit hope that the dupes and marks will forget that the evil Qommies are not Arabs.

But how shall Commonterrorism broadcast to both audiences simultaneously?

Not an easy question! though I probably wouldn’t tell them the answer even if it were.

We can watch ’em tryin’ to cope, though, Dr. Bones. It looks to me as if they waver back and forth between (1) hopin‘ -- surely a bit desperately? -- that hardly anybody dupable makes the Arab/Muslim distinction, or at least that no great importance is attached to so techical a pettifoggery out in Televisionland, and (2) resortin’ to much vaguer language altogether, ‘radical’ and ‘militant’ and ‘extremist’ and -- in first place, naturally -- ‘terrorist’.

Hasbara GHQ and Castle Podhóretz and the jihád careerist community have it easiest when they can borrow straight from the obvious Enemy. If M. Bin Ládin and Dr. Zawáhirí have already lumped together a "World Islamic Front for Jihád against Jews and Crusaders," why should Neocomrade Amb. M. B. Oren or Neocomrade Dr. D. R. Pipes, ’71, or Bob Cardinal Spencer do more than provide their more wombschooled customers with carefully selected titbits about what happened in the brand-name Crusades?

TPM Café (09 April 2010)

Dear Dr. Bones,

What is the point of signing up for a Ludicrosity Competition? The pig usually wins, and, win or lose, she is *always* going to enjoy it more.

Bint Kh’zîr does put up a remarkable show of un- or anti-erudition with her ‘Quatab’ and her "zionist America circa 1950" [1] Indeed, the show is so remarkable that one is tempted to worry that it may be precisely that -- a performance deliberately staged, as if by one of Dr. Screwtape’s little military friends [2].

Nevertheless, a retaliation such as

Never across the past thousand years of European history has oppression and killing of Jews due to anti-Semitism been more rare than during the past fifty years

won’t do at all. Though the sentence is ludicrous enough to be getting on with, the subject-matter with which it trifles is too grave for trifling.

Moreover, Jewish Statism -- and militant extremist Hyperzionism to boot, as witness the late M. de Jabotinsky, http://tinyurl.com/y8wefwh -- goes back a good deal farther in Old Europe than "fifty years." Quite a lot of the Palestine Puzzle as we know it would look more or less the same even if Auschwitz and a’ that had never come to pass. [3]

If one puts one mind to it a little, Bint Kh’zîr can be taken seriously. Imagine that Hasbara GHQ is deployin’ her with a new secret weapon that works by lurin’ the unwary dhimmí into at least the appearance of an admission that Médînat Yisrá’él possesses some special ‘need’ [4] to exist that nobody sane would ever dream to demand from, or grant to, the Czech Republic, or the Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia, or any other nation-state or -statelet that obviously "just happens" to exist by gracious permission of Time and Tyche. [5]

Regardless of anythin’ B. Kh. in particular is or isn’t up to, such appears to be the T. A. government’s grand agitprop strategy, which I take to be twofold:

(1) the ’dhimmí’s are to be seduced into accepting that M. Y. has "a right to exist as a Jewish State" in some sense not one-tenth as ludicrous as the Czech Republic’s claiming "the right to exist as a Bohemian State" would be. [6]

(2) And then there will never, ever, be any satisfactory elucidation from the direction of T. A. as to exactly what this supposed right comprises. Apart, that is, from its bein’ -- obviously! -- incompatible with any and all offers of peace or ‘peace’ or hudna or whatever from the Natives, for this perpetual incompatibility is the object of the whole exercise. Q.E.D.

It really IS pretty neoclever of them, Dr. Bones, is it not? If there is a weak point, I guess it would be that such a plan can never be frankly admitted without self-destructing on the spot.

Oh, well: no silver lining without a cloud!

Healthy days.

’’’
[1] That lower-case ‘Z’ is a small masterpiece itself. If it happened on Purpose, that is.

The mysterious Monsieur de Qu. almost certainly has at least a little something to do with http://tinyurl.com/ydafh9m . But Father Zeus knows best.


[2] "No doubt you have often practiced transforming yourself into an angel of light as a parade-ground exercise. Now is the time to do it in the face of the Enemy." &c. &c. [ http://tinyurl.com/yba4uq5 ]

Maybe it is a bit paranoid or narcissistic, though, to suppose that Hasbara GHQ has to take TPM Café seriously and send out somebody competent. Mr. Rosenberg they can e-bomb over on J Street, after all, and other than that, why should they bother?


[3] This analysis cuts both ways even-handedly, I believe, inasmuch as the Natives and their apologists often give the impression that the Tel ’Avîv statelet has been gratuitously inflicted upon them by Europe and America solely as a cheap or free form of misdirected reparations for what Germany did in 1933-1945. (( Talk about ‘ludicrous’! ))


[4] Mr. Poster says "Therefore, employing davidai66's form of logic, it is 'ludicrous' to think that now in our period is when Jews of European origin really NEED to have their own special state in the Mideast."


[5] ’Cf.’ http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolivia . Also http://tinyurl.com/z2j4h, but only if you absolutely *must*.


[6] There is nothing particularly self-exceptional or self-indispensible about the Prague government apart from the linguistic accident that English happens to have both ‘Czech’ and ‘Bohemian’ -- which is a fact about us, plainly, and nothing to do with them.

Culture vultures will know at least the Bohemian seacoast of http://tinyurl.com/ycrzg3a . But that, too, is of zero *political* relevance.

"Time for a Persian Sistani," or, Neotourism Unmasked

Neocomrade R. Cohen limps along behind the main body of the caravan, no doubt, but he seems to be gettin’ there all the same. And he’s certainly headed in the same general direction that the self-appointed neoguiders of his Demographic have decreed de haut en bas.

Now decrees emanatin’ from weekly standardisers and Wall Street jingos and the august fastnesses of Castle Podhóretz, ever neoresplendent City on a hill that it is, do indeed emit a special whiff. Neocomrade R. Cohen characterizes the Demographic’s neoguiders as "the Iran-as-Nazi-incarnation-of-evil school," which seems to me not altogether accurate, even apart from the NYTC neocomrade’s personal parti pris. Viewing the colourful caravan of the Demographic from very, very far off (and, needless to say, from a position of categorical inferiority), I cannot find the distance between Neocomrade R. Cohen and (say) M. de Nétanyahou or Neocomradess C. Glick of the Jerusalem Post anywhere near as important as these gentlebein’s find it. (Mais que scay-je?)

Still, there it is: viewed from Mars or from Dhimmi Corners, USA, the Demographic as a whole, with only the extremest of Messrs. les prétendues ennemis de soi excluded, have trouble imagin’ any evil whatever that is *not* Nazi-like. On the flip side, that which is good for the Demographic is -- obviously -- good simpliciter. Neocomrade R. Cohen may not altogether hold with the flipped notion, and of course he is probably burstin’ with wrong ideas of what will benefit the Demographic’s caravan most beneficially in the long haul.

Just like everybody else in the caravan. Their Demographical comedians make "tot Hebraïci, tot sententiae--et nonnullae aliae" jokes all the time. To be sure, when the stern Neoguiders get their way unchecked and unbalanced, that sort of humor will probably have to go extinct. Stern neoguidance aims, in effect, at makin’ the Demographic an S.R.H., "sole remainin’ hyperpower," in its own right, a status obviously inconsistent with village curs and bitches bein’ allowed to bark at the caravan as it passes. Oderint dum metuant! has its virtues, no doubt, but to encourage laughter is not among them.

Almost as obviously, stern Neoguidance and stand-alone Hyperpower will (would) not be easy to reconcile with permittin’ much dissent inside the Demographic itself. Anythin’ noncomformist beyond narrow questions of ‘existential’ tactics and neo-expediency will lead to the sort of trouble that Neocomrade R. Cohen is pityin’ himself over already. Fifty or a hundred years hence, the Neoguiders in plenitudine potestatis eorum will have to expunge idiots like him from the Demographic altogether, or else, what is a thousand times more likely in my view, Neocomrade R. Cohen III will just keep his damnfool mouth shut if he can’t get his mind right. A policy conducive to lower life insurance rates, that is, but not good for stand-up comedy.

All of which, not accidentally, sounds rather like Neocomrade R. Cohen’s tourist impressions of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

No better than tourist impressions are they, I fear, unless we suppose that the laggard neocomrade is very imperfectly acquainted with the dhimmí tongue in which he chooses to scribble. For example, if the Rev. Khamene’i and his allies were really "bent, in the name of money and power, on the bludgeoning of the Iranian people," it ought to be a cinch to find official documents headed with In nomine Pecuniae Potestatisque or the like. When native Anglophones act "in the name of So-and-So," we do not (often) hide the authorizing N-me under a bushel and hope nobody notices it. What native speakers of Cohenesque do, though, I must admit that have no idea. [1]

More to the immediate point is the alleged bludgeonin’. Neocomrade R. Cohen may not yet have climbed as far down the slippery slope as Castle Podhóretz, but he is definitely on his way. That is the sort of word that would be resorted to by a Demographic chauvinist who considers nothin’ really evil unless it be Hitleroid. It goes with the ‘existential’ neomindset to assume that enemies of the Demographic act out of sheer malice. R. Cohen is not quite there yet, since the NSDAP itself would not have been truly Hitleroid if it had been acting "in the name" of Geld und Kraft. But there is nothin’ in sight to stop him from ascendin’ to truly Podhorétzian neodepths at any moment, perhaps by askin’ himself exactly how the alleged bludgeonin’ makes the Rev. and his merry men richer and more potent. Sooner or later, it seems to me, even a Neocomrade R. Cohen is bound to notice that in fact Geld und Kraft are very secondary objectives of the veláyet-e faqíh crew. The chances that he will guess their real motives bein’ infinitesimal, it seems safe enough to conjecture that he'll wind up with the C. Glick or A. von Liebermann view of what the Qommie fiends are up to, viz. sheer unmitigated Nazi fiendishness.

***

Another sign of slippage upslopewards is that Neocomrade R. Cohen makes no clear policy recommendation to anybody except the Qommie fiends themselves, who are to shape up at once and wash behind the ears and, above all, get right with History:

It is time for a Persian Sistani. The sons and daughters of disappointed revolutionaries do not seek renewed bloodshed. They seek peaceful change that will give meaning to the word “republic.” Khamenei, bowing to superior learning, in the best tradition of Shiism, should listen to the wisdom of Iran’s late turbulent priest [the Rev. Montazerí]. Iran would thereby preserve its independence, the proudest achievement of the revolution, while better reflecting the will of its people, who overwhelmingly favor normalized relations with the United States. It is time to retire the stale slogans of a bygone era. It is time for Iran to follow China’s example of 1972 in adapting to survive. Perhaps Khomeini, like Mao in Deng Xiaoping’s famous formula, was 70 percent right — and some brave Iranian leader could say that. He would thereby open the way for one of the Middle East’s most hopeful societies to move forward. (...) "At some point something must give." With the birth of the Green movement, and in the spirit of Montazeri, something has given. The further, critical “giving” has to come in the supreme leader’s office, where the 30 percent error of 1979 has entrenched itself and so denied Iran the governance and society its vibrant population deserves.

Thus sloganises Neotourist R. Cohen, about as ‘stalely’ as can be imagined. That stuff is almost as stale as Neotourist Th. Friedman sloganizes. And Little Tommy with the big moustache sets a very stiff standard.

It is fun, however, to guess what an evil Qommie would make of bein’ lectured by Neotourist R. Cohen that he ought to behave like a wise and virtuous Chicom. Whatever other reactions such a neostimulus provokes, there would probably be a significant element of resentment of the "one size fits all" assumption that seems to be fundamental to neotourism as such. If the fiends pay any attention at all to flat-earthers from the New York Times Company, that is, as presumably they will not.

Meanwhile, I betcha the weekly standardisers, and the Wall Street jingos, and the staff and management and bloggership of Common Terror magazine will pay Neotourist R. Cohen attention enough to render him even more self-pitiful still. Militant extremism bein’ what it is, they are assuredly not goin’ta forgive such a shameless traitor to the Demographic as poor ol’ muddlehead Roger any time soon!

AFZKB.

Healthy days.

___
[1] Again looking forward a century or so, I presume that Telavîvestán will, like India and Belize and doubtless other candidates, have evolved a patois that is nominally still English, but getting pretty distant at points from Westminster and Washin’ton. And Father Zeus knows best!

General Lord George Wont

Why do thee suppose, Dr. Bones, that General Lord George Will was all gung-ho for aggression into and occupation of the former al-‘Iráq, but now cares not at all about creatin’ the happiness of the former Khorasán?

America's finest are ... in Washington's hands. This city should keep faith with them by rapidly reversing the trajectory of America's involvement in Afghanistan, where, says the Dutch commander of coalition forces in a southern province, walking through the region is "like walking through the Old Testament." U.S. strategy -- protecting the population -- is increasingly troop-intensive while Americans are increasingly impatient about "deteriorating" (says Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) conditions. The war already is nearly 50 percent longer than the combined U.S. involvements in two world wars, and NATO assistance is reluctant and often risible. The U.S. strategy is "clear, hold and build." Clear? Taliban forces can evaporate and then return, confident that U.S. forces will forever be too few to hold gains. Hence nation-building would be impossible even if we knew how, and even if Afghanistan were not the second-worst place to try: [t]he Brookings Institution ranks Somalia as the only nation with a weaker state.

Happy days.

A Word about Power-Affirmin’ Nationalism

2. The very feature that makes Lieberman distasteful to many Westerners — his power-affirming nationalism — may make him more respected and, frankly, understandable in other parts of the world, especially in places like Russia and Latin America, where strongmen are respected rather than reviled.

Although this commonterrorist (Neocomrade D. Hazony) has nicely delineated the slippery slope down which Jewish Statism has been consistently proceeding for quite a while, I would not venture to estimate exactly how much "strange new respect" for Hyperzion will be forthcoming in the short-term future. [1]

As a purely rhetorical shtyk, the trope about Jewish Statists bein’ impeccable third-worlders themselves, kitted out with a bonä fide National Liberation Movement just like any other, is almost as old as colonialist mendacity itself. "Places like Russia and Latin America, where strongmen are respected rather than reviled" were never the least bit impressed with that self-servicin’ baloney that I noticed.

To be sure, previous strongpersons of colour obviously thought that product baloney even when they were selling it themselves, so perhaps if they become convinced that the J. S. crew have now really converted to their own brand of strongpersondom sincerely and irrevocably, they will reconsider. Neocomrade D. Hazony might worry a little, though, about how prominent, and how off-puttin’ to mainstream strongpersons of colour, the remaining shreds and tatters of liberalism and Aufklärung inside the Tel Avîv statelet actually are. Doubtless such things are only junk left over from yesterday rather than accurate indicators of future performance, but I am not at all sure that "places like Russia and Latin America" pay enough attention to the neo-Levant to abandon all reasonable doubts as to exactly what direction Hyperzion is degeneratin’ in.

Neocomrade D. Hazony and the CommonTerror crew definitely ought to worry about what they are doin’ if, as appears from the rest of today's scribble, commendin’ themselves to global strongpersondom with "power-affirming nationalism" is only half of their nifty new Weltpolitik -- and possibly the smaller half at that. The other half looks like this:

There is something ingenious about Netanyahu’s deployment of his foreign policy assets, from his assignment of Lieberman to places where he is most likely to be respected and his positioning of Michael Oren ... as ambassador to the U.S., to [M. de Nétanyahou's] æown rallying of Israeli public support against Obama’s firm stance on settlements. It is indeed way too simplistic to look at Lieberman as having been swept under the rug for inner political reasons. That this narrative has carried the day is itself one of Netanyahu’s most impressive diplomatic achievements.

Considered purely æsthetically, is that not, Dr. Bones, the sort of Weltpolitik ideally suitable for weekly standardisers? Indeed, it even pushes the TWS envelope a little to assume, in effect, that not all the benighted heathen and poorly illuminated dhimmís of the world are living in the same policy week at any given moment

On the other hand, should you happen not to care for that sort of thing, I daresay you will feel fully warranted to make some rude remark about Hyperzionism talkin’ with forked tongue, presentin’ itself as "power-affirming nationalism" to "places like Russia and Latin America, where strongmen are respected rather than reviled," whilst continuin’ to agitate and propagandise in Old Europe and central North America along the traditional lines -- i.e., by representin’ the Tel Avîv régime as unique in its immediate vicinity because it alone has no time for, or sympathy with, strongpersondom.

Now in theory Jewish Statism could get away with the nifty Liebermann-Hazony approach toWeltpolitik as long as the outright heathens and we dhimmís of the holy Homeland™ and similar abodes of bliss never venture to compare notes. Yet how likely is that nowadays? Surely it is almost impossible for any neocomradess or neocomrade to start agitproppin’ for Hyperzion in one market stall without bein’ overheard by pretty well the whole súq? The practical consequence of the whole world hearing or overhearing the Tel Avîv government's apologists bein’ "all things to all men" simultaneously, St.-Paulin’ it in the common presence of all their separately targeted dupes and marks are . . . well, let's just say these consequences are easy to foresee and unlikely to be of much benefit to the Jewish Statist cause. [2] [3]

Neocomrade D. Hazony really ought to have noticed that M. de Nétanyahou's "something ingenious" is one of those swell ingenuities that should never be let out of the seminar room at a Prussian-style graduate school where it was first hatched.

In this particular case, however, I reckon the hatchin’ will have taken place at one of the Wingnut City or Telavívestání Tanks of Thought. The learnèd wikipædiatricians advise us that

David Hazony is an Israeli writer, and a regular contributor to Contentions, the blog of Commentary Magazine. Until 2007, he was a fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, founded by his older brother Yoram Hazony, and from 2004-2007 served as editor in chief of Azure, its quarterly. He has a B.A. and M.A. from Yeshiva University. He is an expert on the Jewish philosopher Eliezer Berkovits. [4]

Happy days.

___
[1] You will remember, Dr. Bones, how the wingnuttes and wingnuts used to complain that grown-up journalism always says something like "Senator Specter has been viewed with a strange new respect in unlikely quarters of late" whenever some pol whom Hooverville and Rio Limbaugh had thought reliable begins to wobble in the direction of moderation.


[2] If you insist, Dr. Bones, on my not shirking the task of practical consequence formulation, perhaps it may suffice to point out that every heathen and every dhimmí would furnished with an excellent argument for not paying any attention to Hyperzionistical protestations ever again. Or, in the vernacular: "Any fool can plainly see that those clowns at T. A. are willin’ to say just simply anythin’ at all!"


[3] On re-reading, it occurs to me that one might take Neocomrade D. Hazony quite literally when he announces that "power-affirming nationalism — may make [Neocomrade Gospodin Minister A. von Liebermann] more respected and, frankly, understandable in other parts of the world.

That is to say, D. Hazony may be bankin’ on the assumption that even if the marks and dupes in some other market stall than the one immediately targeted were to overhear a Hyperzion agitprop product tailored for quite a different audience, they would not be likely to understand what they overheard well enough to compare notes about it with other heathens and dhimmís in any way practically dangerous to Jewish Statism.

I admit that this hypothesis is more than a little improbable, but I do not know the particular commenterroriser well enough to be quite sure it can be ruled out. To rule it in more clearly, it would have been nice if he had spelled out the vice-versa case, the case in which well-meaning, but dim-witted, holy-Homelanders™ and old Euros dismiss as incredible primâ facie the notion that the Telavívestánís and their fellow-travelers chez nous could really be serious about alignin’ themselves with the two-hundred-proof political heathen on a platform of "power-affirming nationalism."

In the long run this point will not matter, though. that sort of primâ facie incomprehension has a limited shelf life. Once Hyperzion has actually behaved on the basis of "power-affirming nationalism" often enough, it must inevitably face a day of reckonin’, the day when all but the blindest must see what has been goin’ on. At that juncture, if not before, comparison of notes by the various victims or patients of Nétanyahou-Liebermann-Hazony Weltpolitik will be unavoidable.

Even at that point, however, the two-hundred-proof heathen may decide not to admit the Tel Avîv régime to the Strongperson Club. The current membership could easily decide that "power-affirming nationalism" is not, after all, their Club’s only raison d’être. Thus it may be that Neocomrade D. Hazony et al. will end up not gettin’ that mess of pottage no matter how much of the now useless bric-à-brac left over from their previous, their bad and juvenile, Western Sieve period they manage to jettison in pursuit of it.

No real Realpolitiker can, I suppose, find anything very favourable to say about a plan to "sell out" that leaves the seller-out unpaid. But Father Zeus knows best.



[4] OK, sure, Dr. Bones, why not? Even the most useless looking scrap of knowledge might come in handy someday. One can never tell in advance.

The core of his theology [that of Neocomrade Herr Prof. Dr. E. Berkovits, obit anno Christi 1992] is the encounter as an actual meeting of God and human at Mt. Sinai. The encounter is paradoxical in that it transcends human comprehension, yet it demonstrates that God cares about human beings. He teaches that once human beings know God cares for them, they can act in ways that seek meaning, accept responsibility for their actions, and act with righteousness toward others. This implies the keeping of the commandments, ethical concern for others, and building the State of Israel.

It would perhaps not be entirely absurd and arbitrary to link the Berkovitsian theôria with the Nétanyahou-Liebermann-Hazony degeneration in praxi. My understanding, conceivably mistaken, of specifically Hebrew Christojudæanity, as that ideology stood before the late Dr. B. started remodelin’ it, is that to "accept responsibility for [one's] actions and act with righteousness toward others" is mandatory on everybody irrespective of theophanies. That weird word ‘Noahide’ tends to crop up in such discussions.

The Berkovitsian new-modelin’ has what I suppose Castle Podhóretz would regard as the merit of puttin’ the recipients of authentic theophany safely outside the legitimate perimeter of evaluation by heathens and dhimmís.

The bad news (?) is that it is not easy to see how the lucky few could ever be real allies with anybody at all.

But Father Zeus knows best about authentic theophanies.

Appeasing The Jihád Careerists

... [T]he United States is becoming as culpable as Europe, its liberal news media and college campuses willfully refusing to acknowledge the danger posed by radical Islam and opening their pages and seminars to those who seek the undoing of the very tenets that allow liberals — and everyone else — their freedoms[, and] refusing to highlight the Islamist threat while swallowing the claims of figures like Tariq Ramadan, a supposed moderate who ... is “a habitual practitioner of the Islamic art of taqiyya — which essentially means saying one thing in Arabic and another thing in English or French.

Now although the grandson of M. Hasan al-Banná’ would make a very notable convert to the ’Imámiyya, Dr. Bones, yet somehow it is easier to believe in a Big Management Party neocomrade [1] talkin’ ignorant nonsense rather than in M. le Dr. Ramadán having suddenly detected the infallibility of the Fourteen whilst thinking in either Arabic or Frankish.

The New York Times Company appears to have assigned Neocomrade B. Bawer’s phobic scribble to its ninth-best book reviewer [2]. This ploy is perhaps excusable, considering that B. Bawer despises poor old Aunt Nitsy in lockstep neocomradely fashion: "Bawer devotes much of his book to an attack on The New York Times for refusing to highlight" --and so on as already quoted. Of course it is absurd to suppose it possible to appease militant extremism, so Nitsy really ought to have lowered the heaviest boom available on Master Bruce. That would make quite clear which side she's on, even if it does not actually frustrate any of jihád careerism's knavish tricks. Flying one's true flag is not altogether a matter of expediency and cost-effectiveness, after all! Plus playing this game is a little tough on the customer who just wants to be told what is in the book.

In any case, our ninth-rater does not tell us exactly what the accused has said or written or thought in Indo-Germanic that he won't repeat in Semitic, or vice versa. And it's doubtful, at best, that he (Neocomrade S. Pollard IX) knows the true account of taqiyya to tell it, even if he did not mind embarrassin’ B. Bawer. Oh, well!

You had better read the whole megillah for yourself, Dr. Bones. It's a swell treat, but not quite good enough for me to swipe it in toto.

On the other hand, let me spoil your fun and reveal how it (the ninth-rate review) ends:

“Surrender” is, at times, hard going. In part that is because of the level of detail Bawer offers in support of his argument. But “Surrender” is hard going in another respect as well. Bawer is unquestionably correct, and that fact is quite simply ­- terrifying.

Happy days.

____
[1] Who says wingnutettes and wingnuts can never insinuate themselves into the ranks of the learnèd wikipædiatricians?

Bruce Bawer (born October 31, 1956 in New York City) is an American literary critic.... (...) His most recent book (2009) is Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom. Eliot Weinberger, one of the board members of the [National Book Critics] Circle, when he presented the list of nominations for the award, stated that Bawer's book was an example of "racism as criticism." Following that, the president of the Circle, John Freeman, declared that "I have never been more embarrassed by a choice than I have been with Bruce Bawer's When Europe Slept. Its hyperventilated rhetoric tips from actual critique into Islamophobia." Comments such as those from Weinberger and Freeman came as no surprise, as Bawer was expecting a considerable amount of criticism from politically correct officials, and responded by pointing out that he never criticized a race, only Islam as a political ideology.

[2] A surname to make one wonder irrelevant things, though its bearer is presumably a Brit:

Stephen Pollard, the editor of The Jewish Chronicle, is the author of Ten Days That Changed the Nation: The Making of Modern Britain.

Welcome to Bernieworld!

[T]he June 4, 1967, border is not feasible, but the principle of defining a border on the basis of June 4 certainly is. America needs to offer support, and fast, for a 1:1 land swap to insure that territories allotted to Israel and Palestine are equivalent in area to what existed on June 4. It should appoint a Quartet commission, answerable to Senator Mitchell, to suggest a map. Palestine is not Israel's internal affair, nor will Palestinians ever accept the border envisioned by Netanyahu. Only a new "international" map will reconcile the Arab League peace initiative with the difficulties of moving settlers back into Israel. Sketching a border will bring obvious immediate benefits, such as helping government officials, businesspeople and others on both sides to plan and invest. But it will also help prepare the ground to evacuate those who must ultimately be moved.

There are some proper nouns and adjectives in that prose pudding that sound vaguely familiar, Dr. Bones, but naturally the writer cannot be talking about our planet. Political sci-fi, I guess it must be, parallel-universe stuff.

Evidently "George Mitchell" is the Vespasianus or Titus of Planet Avishai, except that instead of a Roman Empire he commands a "Quartet" endowed with superimperial powers to "define borders" and "offer support" and "ensure equivalency" -- and so forth and so on down through "evacuate evacuees."

A positive John Galt of the diplomatic world is the "George Mitchell" action hero! ZAP!!!

With his Tonto-like "Quartet" behind him, "George Mitchell" is unstoppable--unless perchance some other fictionizer grabs the Avishaian keyboard and manages to write the next thrilling chapter on different lines.

Yet perhaps the current narrative management was aiming at Dean Swift rather than at Miss Rand? Maybe this scrumptious piffle is goal-oriented satire rather than idle fantasy?

Perhaps we (the odious human race) are supposed to wonder why it is that we can NOT successfully behave as if all the world were our conquered provinces unless we actually do, very tiresomely and at great expense, march out and conquer them?

What is it about our Terra, as opposed to the feigned Planet Avishai, that prevents a few hundred thousand charter members of "the international community," journalists and pols and PowerPointers and blogmongers and social scientisers and the like, all the usual suspects!, from designing and implementing and enforcing a real-world Mitchellian Quartet that will then let (or say 'make') everybody--natives and locals and international communitarians all alike--live happily ever after? With, needless to say, each living happily in her proper Quartet-specified place?

I mean, what's the actual hold-up, my fellow Yahoos? Don't you guys want to be Galt-and-Mitchell-worthy Houyhnhnms?

Now, if Father Zeus had asked me for advice on Day One, Dr. Bones, why . . . .


Happy days.