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.
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