"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.