"a fact of life because of, well, the Americans"

Has Señorito S. de Rosnér learned its political metaphysics lesson -- that 'linkage' is not to be reified -- or not?

About half and half, it look like: the pupil concedes that "It’s a fact of life because of, well, the Americans who believe in it."

Thus the substantive point is yielded. But consider the wistful tone of the concession: Oh, that our philosophy pupil lived on some other planet or in some other universe where facts and life are separated with greater ‘seemliness’! [1] [2] A Planet Beulah where facts are FACTS, goddammit!, and utterly cannot be "socially constructed" by low-life North American liberals and democrats and Democrats. Some blessèd Neualtland where non-linkage is an immutable fact as plain as potatoes and Original Sin [3] and not even in the lowest depths of tribal pond scum and ideological trailer trash can anybody so depraved as to attempt to perpetrate a linkage be discovered.

Alternatively, the señorito nuevo might conceivably settle for parity in linkage here on Terra, a correlation of farces such that the Tel Avîv régime pols have as much right and power to join together and put asunder as the pols of Rancho Crawford and Cook County. This, however, is only an off-the-cuff remark by the present keyboard that begins to look dubious only fifteen seconds after I have scribbled it down, for would not native and (non-Zionist) local pols be instantly wanting to play too if any such rules of the game were adopted? A world in which Islamic Resistance Movements and God Parties can link and dissever with impunity scarcely bears thinking about -- not even to mention the evil Qommies . . . .

On the practical rather than speculative level, though, I suspect the señorito and his ideobuddies will manage to cope. The long-term crisis management proposed by their M. de Ya‘alôn looks about as sure-fire and fool-proof as merely human contrivances can reasonably hope to be.

Its only obvious weakness is the fact that a dhimmí like the present keyboard has got wind of it at all. There is bound to be trouble with those linkage-crazed Obamacrat fiends if a policy of "maintain and strengthen (our) interests while managing the conflict, and working towards stabilization in the distant future" is frankly avowed. The fiends have a relatively short time horizon, not located much farther off than January 2017 at the utmost. Still, to let them know in May 2009 that one proposes to stall them for over seven years can scarcely fail to be counterproductive.

If the Hyperzionistical crew would stop printin’ their clever schemes in the newspapers and just DO them in stealth and silence, however, the prospects for success strike me as excellent. [3]

"Softly, softly, catchee monkey!"

If one takes the Ya‘alôn Plan™ as one’s overarchin’ strategy for Jewish Statism, then the metaphysics of ‘linkage’ will be seen in a quite different perspective than the present señorito’s. If a Ya‘alônite, one certainly does not want linkage and nonlinkage to be brute facts -- it would be absurd to want that. What one wants is for them to be talkin’ points. Furthermore, one ought to prep oneself to talk them either way. To talk them anywhich way that conduces to still more prevarication and delay. To run out the clock on Team Obama with linkage chatter, as it were.

A Señorito S. de Rosnér may well find all this philosophically disquietin’, insofar as it lies at the opposite pole from Rosnerian reification. ‘Linkage’ is to mean no more than Tel Avîv's commissar for foreign affairs chooses that it should mean, and there can be no guarantee that she will not change her mind what that meanin’ is between now and sundown on Thursday. "Everything solid melts into air," as Whazzizname used to say. [5] Though, as I began by noting, the neocomrade does admit that linkages and nonlinkages are not really quite as solid as platinum and potatoes, he is not happy about havin’ to make the admission, and therefore seems unlikely to take to ya‘alônicatin’ with blithe abandon.

I suppose the Hyperzionistical crowd in general will be divided in their feelin’s about linkage-as-prevarication versus linkage-as-fact. M. de Ya‘alôn himself speaks of "strategy," and at the strategic level his superiority over reifiers and wannabe reifiers is indisputable. At any rate, I cannot think of any plausible way of disputing it. Consider: if linkages and nonlinkages be socially constructed, if they are entities that can be invented rather than merely sit there and sog ‘objectively’ as they await discovery, the strategist has a powerful weapon at her disposal that would not be available on the alternative hypothesis.

This strikes me as so obvious a good thing that it overwhelms its own reverse, a negative flip side which does exist but amounts to no more than that what has been constructed by man can by man be dismantled. The nonlinkage between Occupied Palestine and neo-Muslim Iran that Neocomrade S. Rosner and many others desiderate cannot be relied upon as permanent. There may exist no particular reason the nonlinkage should melt into air this week or this month or this year, yet it is in principle a meltable-into-air sort of thing. (For us philosophical and critical Ya‘alônites, that is.)

Here in Greater Anglosaxonia, this peculiar class of evanescent entities may be slightly less alarming than it is to alien outsiders. We have been told, after all, that "Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests." Specifically in the Heimatland Gottes, there is Washington's Farewell Address: "[N]othing is more essential, than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular Nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated ...."

Plainly M. le général de Ya‘alôn thinks so too, although, like Lord Palmerstone, he speaks of "interests" rather than of "feelings" -- language which perhaps makes Y. and P. (very) slightly more reificatory than General Washington was. [6] [7]

Happy days.


___
[1] Could the philosophy pupil be an M.I.T. chauvinist or victim of so-called "physics envy"? A neo-Cartesian, in the sense that animals would be much more satisfactory to Neocomrade S. Rosner if they really were made of clockwork instead of meat?


[2] As ever, ‘seemly’ and its verbal cousins are used with the gracious nonpermission of Her Imperial Highness, Jennifer Princess Neoterica of Outer Pajamastán.


[3] "The ancient masters of religion ... began with the fact of sin--a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt."

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1909, second paragraph of Chapter Two. (P. 24 of the Googleswipe.)

[4] Mais que sçay-je?


[5] Alle festen eingerosteten Verhältnisse mit ihrem Gefolge von altehrwürdigen Vorstellungen und Anschauungen werden aufgelöst, alle neugebildeten veralten, ehe sie verknöchern können. Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft, alles Heilige wird entweiht, und die Menschen sind endlich gezwungen, ihre Lebensstellung, ihre gegenseitigen Beziehungen mit nüchternen Augen anzusehen. [ p. 465 ]


[6] Considering its date, that Presidential reference to the cultivation of feelings is quite remarkable--almost as improbable as an Encomium to Empathy from the same source would be.

Yet I dare say there is no sound reason to suppose His Excellency had fallen for Jean-Jacques all across the board. Perhaps in Century XVIII feelings were considered somewhat less perishable than they are in 2009? (This is the sort of puzzle that one dearly wishes historians of thought treated better than they seem able to do.)


[7] An objector may object that a ‘linkage’ of issues is not the same thing as an alliance of States. Very true, but I take it that what applies to the latter applies to the former as well a fortiori. An ‘alliance’ or ‘attachment’ looks and sounds much more solidly thinglike than a mere ‘linkage’, does it not? And yet Washington and Palmerstone could contemplated the melting away of alliances and attachments into air with equanimity!