"Obama’s New Linkage"

Obama’s New Linkage Noah Pollak - 05.18.2009 - 9:20 PM The good news from the Obama-Netanyahu press conference today is that the president indicated his engagement with Iran would not be endless, which is nice to hear — but the sense of relief that this has caused indicates a bar that couldn’t be set lower for Obama if it was held off the floor by a couple of Legos. The bad news is that Obama reiterated his endorsement of “linkage,” or as it’s known around here, the myth of linkage. He said: If there is a linkage between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I personally believe it actually runs the other way. To the extent that we can make peace with the Palestinians — between the Palestinians and the Israelis, then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with the potential Iranian threat. This of course gives rise to a predictable set of questions, such as: what if Israeli-Palestinian peace will take many years to accomplish, but the Iranian nuclear bomb will only take a year or two to accomplish? Obama essentially proposes that America will race the Iranians — our peace process versus their nuclear program. Does anyone wonder who will win? There are lots more problems with all of this, many of which are discussed with great clarity in the myth of linkage link above. But I’d be surprised if Obama himself believes that the kind of cosmetic progress that might be accomplished in the peace process over the next year will actually create leverage on Iran. Rather, I suspect that his invocation of linkage serves a different purpose: to incorporate the peace process into the U.S.’s dealings with Iran, enabling Obama to extract the maximum possible concessions from Israel in the course of his fruitless attempt to talk the Iranians out of nuclear weapons. It won’t work, but it is shrewd. And it is linkage, albeit of a new kind.

"... 'linkage', or as it’s known around here, the myth of linkage. "

That is clearly not the strongest rhetorical ploy ever invented: the señorito's shudder-quoted ‘linkage’ and its mythical-like-unicorns linkage are but one and the same toxic substance, after all.

However the high-and-dry neocomradely crowd do happen to be talkin’ sense for once, be their language skills what they may. "Every tub on its own bottom," and let's not fash ourselves that the Palestine Puzzle™ is the axis of Weltgeschichte, please. Pretty well every ‘us’ in sight ought to drive by that simple rule of the road, and also some ‘us’es that are not immediately visible. Plus, preëminently, the US of poor old Uncle Sam Hyperpower.

Not disagreeing much with the neocomradesses and neocomrades about putting linkage down a peg or six, I have leisure to hyperventilate about their distinctly proäctive notion of "around here." One had thought Zip Code 96127 for weekly standardisers, or possibly some address in London or Kangarústán where the proprietor hangs out.

With common terrorisers it is not so easy to get a snail-mail address, but presumably Area Code 212 must still be the savin’ remnant of what it once was. Beltway City and Manhattan Island, in short.

Imagine one’s surprise to find that "around here" refers to that glorified imitation mobile home [1] over at 1737 Cambridge Street in 02138 / 617, just down the pike from the present keyboard! Golly!! [2]

But seriously, Demosthenes Jr. here has a tin ear as well as pebbles in its mouth, as may be seen by substition of a less emotive noun substantive than ‘linkage’. Who would acclaim Comrade POTUS as a firm supporter of the unicorn community on the basis of a remark beginning "If there are unicorns . . . ."?

Nevertheless, linkage is a bad thing and BHO is a bad thing, so how shall the two not travel together? [3] Si erit malum in civitate quod Dominus non fecit?

The student of neocomradology will notice that the rest of the Presidential assertion is not expressly contradicted. That is to say, N. Pollak does not venture to claim that a solution of the Palestine Puzzle™ would somehow make the evil Qommies *more* formidable than they are at present.

Bein’ a real smart cookie, St. Martin the Less perhaps could pull that neosophistry off successfully, though he does no such thing in the scribble referred to. [4]

Happy days.

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[1] The charms of the ædifice are such that it is no surprise the pet google could not find a proper snapshot with { Harvard | 1737 | Weatherhead } . There is, however, a not bad icon of St. Martin the Less that comes in thirty-ninth. Not to mention the heraldic device of ¡¡¡MESH!!! itself in position nine.

’Tis not, perhaps, the happiest acronym a pack of linkage-bashers could pick to christen themselves with! And a close examination of the heraldry suggests a somewhat constipated conception of the geographical neo-Levant. But never mind: H*rv*rd remains a private- or secret-sector institution, not a public utility, so these matters are no business of thine or mine. And anyway, God knows best.


[2] I beg your pardon, O pet google! There was this



in eleventh position. Though very overlookable as regards the core monstrosity, this picture does show off that glass pyramid thingee that everybody architectural at Paris must be dying from envy of.


[3] The Pollakian Ploy is what the Comp. Lit. folks used to call "self-referential" -- the señorito practices linkage of its own in the very article of talkin’ ’bout other folks’ ditto.

(Comp. Lit. seems to be relocated to between Lamont and the Faculty Club .)


[4] I hope Ms. Student will not be offended if I point out that the Kramerian neo-ingenuities are eleven months old and were not ‘crafted’ to exploit exactly the present correlation of farces. ¡¡¡MESH!!! seems to have affected the little laddie’s mind for the worse in at least two respects:

(1) It is absurd to make Hyperzionism out the ninth (9th!) most important cause of divisions in the neo-Levant. If Kramer Minor had been content to rank it third or fourth, he might have taken some people in. Similarly if he had stopped countin’ on his fingers and only said vaguely that the whole region might well be a mess even if the Tel Avîv statelet did not exist. (The latter seems to be the line adopted by Neocomrade Prof. Dr. B. Lewis of Princeton, and works much better for the neocomradely cause, me judice.)

(2) Boo-boo (1) is only a special case of a more general brain disease: Kramerides began as an area student, but, havin’ fallen into the ¡¡¡MESH!!!, he has taken to thinkin’ in PowerPoint® like the rest of them rather than in any natural language. Hence a social-scientistic nonsense like "I have called linkage a myth, both in past and present. It is a myth because the Middle East is not a single region."

To reason anti-empirically and _de haut en bas_ on the basis of some stipulative definition of the word ‘region’ may not be completely incapable of ever adding value -- who are we lay sheep to pronounce on so high a question of methodology? Yet we may fairly baaaaaah that Neocomrade Dr. M. H. Kramerovitch in particular comes up with nothin’ worth mentionin’.

Neocomrade N. Pollak does not, as I conjecture, give a hoot about the actual quality of the Kramerite product. The señorito is pretty clearly operatin’ on the " ‘Shut up!,’ she explained " paradigm. The customer is to take one look at that dread H*rv*rd augustness and then just take N. Pollak’s word for it that M. Kramer has refuted ‘linkage’ definitively and forever.

Well, it's a cute whore move, Mr. Bones, but naturally it has no chance of workin’ on thee and me, who notoriously cannot be told much.