PJ Media

Every cause has deplorable supporters like Neocomrades C. Toto and B. O’Leary, Mr. Bones.

The thing for you and me to do, sir, after once having thoroughly deplored, is to try to learn from their example back-handedly. In the case at hand, to realize how silly one would look oneself, pretending to be victimized by shifty conspirators who are so exceptionally shifty that there is nothing concrete that they have actually done to point to.

One writes ‘pretending’ merrily, yet of course in really grave cases of brain fever the patient is not pretendin’ one bit, she walks sincerely in dread of Hidden Persuaders and Power Elites and Invisible Hands and … and probably of Ishtar and Marduk to boot. (Most human misbehavior that is not obviously fun or profitable can be classified as religionistical in nature without doing too much damage to common conceptions.)

Another possible factor is cynicism, though that is an attainment of which Neocomrades C. Toto and B. O’Leary seem not likely to be capable. To make up imaginary conspiracies that one does not believe a word of in the path of furthering some genuine more-or-less conspiracy of one’s own is rather a taxing business, IQ-wise. Or if cynicism does not absolutely require the mystic fluid behind the Herrnstein-Murray Curve™, it at least demands what one might label the ‘lawyerly’ sort of mindset, a love of sharp edges and fine distinctions and jolly litigations. Neocomrade Prof. J. Yoo, Esq., might be up to cynicism — he’d be a shade less abominable if he were guilty of it, by my lights — but your run-of-the-mill Totos and O’Learys? Not a sound wager.

To turn from the quacks to the patients: here in Pajamastán the natives are poised, I suppose, along the right slope up to the apex of the H-M Curve: graduates of Wombschool Normal University, by and large, but honour graduates thereof. Wingnuts _cum laude_, so to speak. Neocomrade Dr. Limbaugh has no more to teach them, so they flock hither in hope of more and better than a merely AM Excellence. Also in hopes of gettin’ a word of their own in edgewise, I suspect, because they’ll be struck by lightnin’ sooner than be deemed worthy of direct communication with Himself.

Now if we are honest, Mr. Bones, we must admit that we have no solid notion how to conduct agitprop for such a market as Pajamastán. Or indeed for any other market: _sobie spiewamy a Muzom_, [0] sir, and it would be unseemly indeed to treat our dread patron ladies as customers or consumers. All you and I can do when it comes to Totos and O’Learys is look in through the barbed-wire fence around the reservation and try to make sense of aboriginal behavior from afar. Having no instinctive sympathy with the self-doin’s at Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh, we are in some danger of missing the point. Worse, after missing what seems to the natives the point, we might substitute some other supposed point of our own invention, probably one designed to make the neo-tribalists look even more backwardly neoteric than they really are. In short, sir, we are at some risk of behaving no better than a C. Toto or a B. O’Leary. No better than how they seem to us to be behavin’, that is.

Still, let’s have a go at it, shall we?

It seems safe to assume (1) that the neocomrade agitproppers bringin’ their “Smash Squawk Radio!” product to market expect a demand for it. And it is a mere fact of observation (2) that Neocomrade Dr. Limbaugh has been hawkin’ this same product at least since the mornin’ after the night before, 5 November 2008.

To analyze that a little before slicing some more off the loaf, it might seem that my thesis of Pajamastán bein’ a cut or two above Rio Limbaugh is challenged if the same shoddy goods are for sale both places. The error is plain, however: a great deal of what wingnutettes and wingnuts crave is available every place they shop. The peckin’ order of emporiums is established by a comparatively small number of ideoproducts at the margin. At Rio Limbaugh one will find wares that few Pajamastánís care to buy, thinkin’ them rather crude. Over at _Common Terror_ magazine, on the other hand, there are toney gizmos for sale that the Pajamastánís would not know what to do with if they had one. [1]

As usual there is a Great Scale of Being — or Great Curve of Murray and Herrnstein™, ding-a-ling! — at work in the background.

It is natural to wonder at this point whether Princess Neoterica and the other autoimperial folks up at Castle Podhóretz would be interested in purchasin’ a couple of gallons of “Smash Squawk Radio!” moonshine. Given their tertiary-educational advantages, they are not likely to actually believe the advertisements for this ideoproduct, but they might buy a little anyway, so as to maintain good relations with their own lower orders in general, and more particularly to help keep the vendors in business durin’ these economic hard times in the wake of the Crawford Crash.

O’Learys and Totos (and squawk radio) are mere pawns in Her Imperial Highness’s eyes, no doubt, but political chess would not be political chess without pawns, now, would it? Up at the castle there must be at least a few neocomradely cynics who do not narcissistically insist on swallowin’ their own agitprop cocktails before they offer them to others.

The practical question, I guess, is whether this one will be drunk by any drinkers who matter politically. It is pointless to invite Rio Limbaugh to take a sip: at that level the Party base-’n’-vile already know that the whole world is out to get them. Whether the Grand Consolidated Enemies List contains 14,308 names or only 14,307 is not worth carin’ about.

The ideal dupe or mark or cocktail drinker would, I presume, be a neocomradess who does not herself listen in to Dr. Limbaugh and the Rev. Hannity, or watch the bozo Beck, but fancies herself a Voltaire or Zola when it comes to her neocomrades’ imprescriptible right to say things that she mostly agrees with when worded more genteelly. This _shtyk_ would of course be vastly more impressive ethically if the lady wanted to go to bat for Mr. Glenn Greenwald or Prof. Dr. Chomsky or some other such fiend with whom she could not disagree more. Politics is politics, however, whereas ethics is only ethics.

Defendin’ *everybody’s* right to be obnoxious and nasty and widely publicized makes sense only in conjunction with the Islamophalangitarian Menace™ and/or Hyperzionism, as far as I can ascertain. When the neo-Levantine angle is absent altogether, there is no benefit to the neocomradely cause in an endorsement of universal uglification and derision.

To generalize that plan would indeed be idiotic, from the neocomrades’ perspective. This conclusion follows from the elementary axioms of Neocomradism, Mr. Bones: except in the most extraordinary circumstances — circumstances so unusual that when they arise, your typical neocomrade feels an irresistible urge to abuse the word ‘existential’ — they want nothing to do with our Prof. Kant and his silly Goose-and-Gander Principle. If the action of the neocomradely community were such as to be a model for all–even worse, if neocomradely action were to be actually emulated by every Tom and Dick and Barry that comes down the pike–why, the wingnutettes and wingnuts would slice their throats in despair!

That is not what they have in mind at all, sir! Ideally every neocomradely action would be such as to rub in the pet maxim of Buckley Minor, _Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi_, “WE have a right to do this, but if WE ever catch you attemptin’ it, O Lesser Breeds Without . . .!”

Even when they had temporary control of their Uncle Sam’s Sole Remainin’ Hyperpower™, even with Neocomrade Viceroy R. B. Cheney preachin’ the dogmas of the Omnicompetent Unitary Executive™!, they fell far short of actually realizin’ their ideal to the max. But anybody with a pricey education comparable to yours and mine, Mr. Bones, would have to be blind not to see what the Holy Grail of Neocomradedom looks like.

After once beholding that miserific vision, no competent student of Neocomradology can take their occasional playin’ at Voltaire or Callas or Zola or Captain Dreyfus at face value. Father Jupiter (in the person of His archpriests and inferior devotees) is to have His paternal and jovial rights, we cows are to have our bovine rights, and the two categories scarcely overlap at all. _Suum cuique tribuere_, don’t you know?

It is a very old song, and one scarcely disguised by the sometimes grotesque contortions imposed upon illiberalism and antidemocracy by _La Démocratie en Amérique_. Both the narrow Hate-’68 Movement and the broader Party of Big Management could not exist politically if they did not go through most of the motions prescribed for a holy-Homelandic™ political party by General Jackson and Mr. Van Buren long ago, but here again one would have to be blind, Mr. Bones, not to notice how little they believe in these formal gestures that they are externally compelled to make. The neocomrades’ insincerity about equality and fraternity [2] is so patent and so ancient that it is a waste of breath to call it insincere. And it certainly cannot be called lyin’ when nobody politically competent can be deceived by it.

However the times are in one sense opportune for an ideoproduct such as Neocomrades B. O’Leary and C. Toto set out to market. Their crew’s paws have been pried off the levers of Fedguv power to such an extent that it would be laughable to think of *them* settin’ up as formal and official censors. Hence the Otherparty can blithely accuse America’s party along “Smash Squawk Radio!” lines without any risk of an immediate _tu quoque_. “I could not possibly have done that, Your Honor” is, when verified, a satisfactory defense in court.

Politics is not exactly like jurisprudence, though. In the latter forum one may legitimately wonder what America’s Otherparty would like to do if only they could. It flabbers my gast to suppose that they *really* want everybody to set up as a Danish cartoonist — imagine a Danish cartoonist arbitrarily allergic to wingnuttinesses and neoteric reaction! Just the other day the common terrorisers were throwin’ the word ‘slander’ around [3] in a manner that seemed more in line with what I take to be the neocomrades’ authentic druthers.

But let us not get carried away, Mr. Bones. If one evaluates the sweet puppies of Endarkenment as a whole, one must conclude, I think, there was no general wish, even under George XLIII and His aforementioned Viceroy, to go to law against the ‘slanders’ of liberals and democrats and Democrats. The neocomradely community want that sort of impertinence hushed up, but not by official censorship.

In this department, their ideal would be, I suppose, that anybody who ventured to use the word ‘aggression’ of one of their preëmptive retaliations, or ‘torture’ of their scientific investigative techniques, would _ipso facto_ become unemployable in the Private-or-Secret Sector. No respectable neocomradess would talk to the wretch in the street, and if the wretch were to venture to accost a respectable neocomradess, a posse of neocomrades with horsewhips at the ready would appear on the scene _pronto_. All sanctions would be strictly informal and unofficial and civil-socialist, don’t you see?

Something like that, Mr. Bones. Something like that.

Happy days.

__
[0] http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Kochanowski

[1] For example, yesterday a few of the weekly standardisers and common terrorisers were havin’ a ball

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/boot/65611

with amateur armchair invasion-’n’- occupation therapy for the Brave New Afghanistan, on the occasion of Neocomrade General McKiernan’s dismissal. Pajamastánís are not up to active participation in Father Joseph’s grand parlour game of “taking fortresses with fingertips,” but they know vaguely (as I conjecture) who McKiernan was and are content to take Neocomrade Rear-Colonel M. Boot’s word for the substance of it.

Down in Rio Limbaugh, it would be rash to assume that the average shopper ever heard of the good neocomrade colonel himself, let alone takes any interest in his latest armchairisms about the state of the aggression.

But God knows best.

[2] For some reason, they’ve lately started sneerin’ at _la fraternité_ under the label of ‘empathy’. BGKB.

[3] “I love how Obama and Co. gave George Bush no credit for the work he was doing to protect the country, slandering and hindering him whenever possible.”

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/category/contentions?author_name=gjermani

(( Singled out for special notice by the wingnutette in charge ))