The paradoxical genius of modern conservatism.
I should like now to elaborate upon some nuances which might have escaped the public-at-large regarding the conservative mission, a mission that I must admit seems today to be in some little disarray. Specifically, I wish to demonstrate that President Obama, though conservative, is hardly what conservatism requires at the moment, and that President Bush, though not at all conservative, should be allowed through his proxies in the Congress to complete the work he began.
I realize this seems paradoxical, even inconsistent, to some lesser minds. Allow me to explain.
The conservative mission, or conservatism, can be mostly aptly summed by quoting John L. O’Sullivan, publisher of a 19th c. periodical entitled The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, whose motto read, “The best government is that which governs least.” How true! Is it not the case, for instance, that when I am outside, and it begins to rain, I am forced to wait, humiliated, by the door, until my people deign to notice my condition and allow me to enter my own house? How much better would we all be if my ingress and egress were not governed by that dam’ door! (You may have originally encountered this motto in its more famous paraphrase by Henry David Thoreau, and it has also been attributed to either Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine. That its wisdom has been recognized by such radical revolutionaries only strengthens my point.)
For a time, the actions prescribed by the sainted Buckley were enough: to stand athwart history and yell “Stop!” Certainly, it led to the halcyon age of the sainted Reagan, who pioneered the technique of not-government. By denying the government the funds that it rapaciously sought, Reagan forced it into a posture of not-governing, thereby lessening the amount of government and increasing freedom for us all.
But the creeping socialism and liberal fascism of the dark and doleful Clintonion age redoubled government’s efforts to a truly dangerous degree. When Bush fils took office, it was with the mandate that he save this country and freedom itself from this very present danger. He could see that a return to not-government would not be enough. The extremity of our predicament served as an anvil upon which his native genius was beaten into conservatism’s greatest weapon: anti-government.
Anti-government appears to violate several principles of conservatism: it spends a great deal of money, writes an inordinate amount of new laws and rules, and intrudes to an impressive degree upon the lives of the people-at-large. But it does so in the service of destroying the very government liberal fascists would otherwise impose. Not-governing merely prevents government from further encroaching. Anti-government actively rolls it back. The immediate effects of the drastic anti-governing steps that are taken may well obscure the freedom we will ultimately gain, but we must trust to O’Sullivan and his iron maxim, until government is reduced to a thing which I can bat about between my paws. On that day, we shall truly be free.
Thus, the paradoxical genius of George W. Bush, who, I fear, will always be a martyr to the cause of conservatism; who saved it by taking such radically unconservative steps. It is perhaps too much to hope that President Obama will learn the necessary wisdom of anti-government—though already he finds himself forced into not-governing. I take solace, however, in the fact that Republicans in Congress will not stop pushing our anti-governing agenda until that glorious day when they reduce themselves out of the offices we will no longer require.
hello my name is thurber and this is an answer to a question
hello my name is thurber and this is an answer to a question
i have an email right here
well over there in the email program
it says whats going on
where is the pier
where is poppa
only it doesnt say poppa it says kip
and by pier it means the blog that poppa does
because the blog has pier in the title
and so i will tell the email what is going on
and you too
it is rabbit day
i mean rabbit hole day
thats what poppa said
he left his laptop open on the bed and said
its rabbit hole day
go ahead
you guys and maybe ill let you
cat blog all day
there is a link i would put in a link but i asked beezel and he lost patience and said i should learn how to paste the referent in the anchor or just use textile anyway and i dont know what that means and hes trying to get in here so ill let him back off beezel okay now okay
Jesus, Thurber. Typing straight into the blogging software like that. That’s for kids and Luddites. And could you use a proper title? And the shift frickin’ key? Anyway. Here’s the link. Now. Can I interest you fine folks out there in this cashier’s check I’ve got for a hundred thousand dollars? I can’t cash it myself for obvious reasons, but if you were to go to the bank with me and cash it for me, I’d be willing to split it sixty-forty, you know?
actually i have to say i when i said i had an email right here
it was an email i had beezel write
so i could say i had an email right here
and not be lying
only i was right when i said it
not wrong
because the email was right there since i had beezel write it and all
and if youre wrong youre not lying
so if youre not wrong i dont know
but i do know beezel doesnt have a cashiers check he has a piece of paper and he tried to write cashiers check on it just in case only it doesnt look right and anyway i think he put not enough zeroes in one hundred thousand
and im right about that
and im not lying
so that works out okay but i still dont know about the lying part
anyway i hope that answers the question i told him to ask in the email which is why i wrote this
Nigh unto brilliance.
I wish to take this opportunity to remind you all of one of the defining quotes of our time:
It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.
How ironic it is that a mere cat can recognize the wisdom of these words when a vast majority of the supposedly more developed populace-at-large cannot. You will all come around, soon enough.
Step Three!
Thurber wants to know when the tuna’s getting here.
“First we have to order the fifty bajillion dollar airplane from France,” I remind him. “With the teak wood trim and the gold accents and the shag carpeting and the queen-sized bed with the big sunny windows and the Cordova leather seats.”
“And the Cordova leather baby seat,” says Thurber.
“Yes yes, the baby seat, though honestly they can just fly with her in their laps.”
“And the sushi chef,” says Thurber.
“It will have a full crew complement, yes yes.”
“Is that how we get the tuna?”
“No. I mean, sure, yes, I guess a sushi chef has his own tuna, but that’s not the tuna. Remember? Everybody’s gonna see we bought a fifty bajillion dollar airplane from France and they’ll yell at us and I’ll go on TV and I’ll purr and if they’re all like fifty bajillion dollars! From France! I’ll say like I don’t really see why I have to answer your questions if you’re gonna be meanies and then you go on TV and you look like that all remorseful and then we sell the French plane on eBay.”
“I don’t think we can get fifty bajillion dollars on eBay,” says Thurber.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t think bajillion is a number.”
“Doesn’t matter! We could sell it to distraught solicitors from Nigeria with estate tax issues and it wouldn’t matter. We just need to make sure we get enough money for twenty pounds of tuna.”
“And that’s the tuna?”
“Yes.”
“We don’t have to sell that tuna to buy more tuna or maybe salmon that we shift upstream so we can buy some tuna?”
“No. That’s the tuna.”
Thurber sighs. “I don’t get it.”
“Honestly, we’ve been over this five times now, Thurber.”
“Yeah, but we lose money.”
“It’s not our money.”
“It’s not?”
“Where are we gonna get fifty bajillion dollars? It’s government money, remember? Because we bought all those condos and that office building downtown and we lent all that money to the guy on the Segway to build more condos only nobody wants to buy condos anymore and also there’s that restaurant on the river where nobody wants to eat because of the peanuts, so we go to the government and we purr and you rub up against their leg like that and we say help us, please buy all this stuff from us because nobody else wants to, and the government says gosh, that’s a lot of stuff, maybe you’d better tell us how much it’s worth and we tell them fifty bajillion dollars and they give it to us and pat us on the head and say now don’t get in trouble again and we go and we buy the plane from France.”
“When did we buy all those condos?” says Thurber.
“We haven’t yet! We have to buy some houses and flip them, first.”
“We have to turn houses upside down?”
“They’re worth more that way. Keeps ’em dry when it floods and they go underwater.”
“Wow,” says Thurber. “Real estate is complicated.”
“You know, I bet we could get money for more than just twenty pounds of tuna. I bet we could get a million bucks even, so poppa could redecorate his office.”
“That would be nice,” says Thurber.
“So could you just help me go through this laundry? They’ve got to have left some money in some pockets somewhere.”
“I don’t know,” says Thurber. “When’s the tuna getting here?”
“Come on! Get down here and start rooting! This is too big to fail!”
hello my name is thurber and this is a post about what i do not understand
hello my name is thurber and this is a post about what i do not understand
i ask beezel about it
because beezel says he knows everything which
isnt true but he does know a lot so
sorry im not too sure about punctuation so i just tend to
leave it out but i think i did the contraction right
isnt dont wont cant
anyway i do try to spell properly
you have to give me credit for that even though
beezel says its the word processor
i ask beezel about why are all the newspapers so upset about the mayor
we have a new mayor his name is the same as a beer
poppa doesnt buy the beer though beezel told me that
the new mayor kissed a boy and now the newspapers say he has to quit
they mean quit being mayor not quit kissing boys
he can still kiss boys because we dont mind if mayors kiss boys here
at least thats what i thought and also the word processor doesnt like it when i say doesnt or dont but it wont tell me what to do about it
it doesnt like it when i say i either
anyway i said that
beezel said its not because he kissed a boy
its because he lied about kissing a boy
and he told the boy to lie about being kissed
and maybe he hired a reporter to not report only he didnt hire the reporter who was reporting so maybe that wasnt so smart but i was getting dizzy so i stopped him i said
but what about the president
and beezel said he didnt lie about kissing boys
and i said no he lied about the war
and beezel said no he didnt he hasnt had time to he just got started but who knows they work fast these days
and i said no the other one who lied about the war the first one
and beezel said oh yeah him
and i said why didnt he have to quit
why didnt the newspapers say he had to quit
not just being president
but also lying about the war
he didnt even quit that
hes still doing it
and kali got that look like she always gets and she got up off the bed and went downstairs like that
i should have mentioned we were up in the new bedroom but i didnt think it mattered only now i see maybe it did so thats where we were so pretend like i said it up there so the scene is set
and beezel said because its serious thats why
and i said because its serious so thats why he didnt have to quit
yes said beezel
and i said but kissing boys isnt serious
and beezel said well no not that serious
and i said so if its serious like a war and you lie about it then we shouldnt get upset
its way too serious to let it get to us says beezel
but if it isnt serious like kissing a boy then we should get upset
right says beezel because on account of all the serious things we cant get upset over what else are we going to do
and i said but a lot of people who read newspapers wanted him to quit being president or at least lying about the war is what i said and then i said but also a lot of people who read newspapers dont him to quit even though he lied about kissing the boy i mean the other him but anyway the newspapers all said he should quit even though they never said he should quit the first him i mean
and beezel said newspapers pfeh what do they know
and he got up and left which i think really means he didnt know either
even though he says he knows everything
i dont think its true
and also the word processor doesnt like pfeh
anyway thats why i wrote this blog post about what i do not understand about seriousness and stuff and kissing boys and lying
i dont think beezel lies when he says he knows everything
i just think hes wrong
because if youre wrong then you arent lying
right
question mark
Is this thing on?
Ahem.
Check. Check. 1. 2. 3. Check-check.
BOW DOWN BEFORE BEEZEL! BOW DOWN BEFORE BEEZEL NOOOOWWW!!!
Hmm.
Doesn’t quite have the same ring. Oh, wait, here comes Thurber—
One less mouth to feed is one less mouth to feed.
Cal Thomas takes not so much the long as the hail-mary view of the necessary economic stimulus:
In an interview over the weekend with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the proposed “hundreds of millions of dollars” earmarked in the “stimulus” package for contraceptive services will help the economy. But wait. Won’t fewer people mean fewer taxpayers?
We have already reduced the number of taxpayers by an estimated 50 million since abortion became legal in 1973. If we had 50 million more people paying taxes, would we be in our current budget malaise? People mean taxes and since taxes are what Democrats are about, they are harming the economy by advocating fewer people through abortion and contraception.
In addition to being willfully stupid on the ostensible subject (a birth deferred is not a birth deleted; really, this is elementary), on the specific subject of the “hundreds of millions of dollars” earmarked in the “stimulus” package, Thomas—as you could probably tell from his overly judicious use of quotation marks—is lying through his shiny white teeth.
I suppose I understand the basic impulse, intellectually speaking, but damn.
I mean, you could just give them all to me.
Some versions of proprietary, persistent, large-scale popular fiction.
Elizabethan epics ride to the rescue of the beleaguered floppy comicbook:
One would expect this to come naturally to the Elizabethans because their taste must partly have been formed on those huge romances which run on as great tapestries of incident without changing or even much stressing character, and are echoed in the Arcadia and Færy Queen; any one incident may be interesting, but the interest of their connection must depend on a sort of play of judgment between varieties of the same situation. Thus there is a lady in the Arcadia, unnamed, who induces the king her husband to suspect of treason the prince her stepson; a magnificent paragraph explains all the devices by which this was achieved. Twenty folio pages later, after some one has told another story, the knights come to the castle of a queen called Andromana, who tries to seduce them and finally allows them to joust for the pleasure of watching, by which means they escape. It is with pleasure and some interest that one finds, on considering who her relations are, that this is the same lady, but it is quite unimportant; in both parts she is only developed enough to fill the situation. Bianca in Women Beware Women is treated very like this, only more surprisingly; she is first the poor man’s modest wife, then the Duke’s grandiose and ruthless mistress; the idea of “development” is irrelevant to her. Nor is this crude or even unlifelike; it is the tragic idea of the play. She had chosen love in a cottage and could stick to it, but once seduced by the Duke she was sure to become a different person; what is “developed” is a side of her that she had suppressed till then altogether. The system of “construction by scenes” which allows of so sharp an effect clearly makes the scenes, the incidents, stand out as objects in themselves, to be compared even when they are not connected.
—William Empson, “Double Plots”
Elegant.
Okay, I was charmed:
The essence thereof.
I’m not by any stretch of the imagination a difference feminist or a gender essentialist; there are differences, yes, of course there are, but they’re scattered in bell curves that overlap to an extraordinary degree, and even if one’s labeled Man and the other Woman, well, you never meet Man or Woman, do you? Just people. Who happen to be. And so.
I’m not a gender essentialist: for it to be at all meaningful (as essence, mind, essentially), you’d have to convince me that any conceivable woman has more in common with every other possible woman that she could with any conceivable man, and vice-versa. There are differences, of course there are, but we have so many different ways to be different together; why waste all your time looking for the Men who Always Do This or the Women who Never Do That and risk missing the people that are all around you?
Blanket statements like that, when the polarities are Male and Female, end up inevitably circling around one particular This ’n’ That which Men Always and Women Never (well, Hardly Ever): SEX. And while they can seem relatively harmless on the surface, leading to silly head-scratchers such as—
Men are simple creatures. Protoplasms. It is a strange irony that a woman can pretty much get whatever she wants from a guy with no arguments and no disagreements—nothing but “Absolutely, dear” and “Whatever you want, honey”—by doing just one thing (but doing it two or three or sometimes four times a week).
(And while I don’t doubt there’s some folks nodding along with the beat out there, there’s a whole lot of other folks going now hold on just a minute, what?) —But such seemingly harmless homilies can twist all of a sudden into duties and expectations the rest of us never knew were in the social contract—
What if your husband woke up one day and announced that he was not in the mood to go to work? If this happened a few times a year, any wife would have sympathy for her hardworking husband. But what if this happened as often as many wives announce that they are not in the mood to have sex? Most women would gradually stop respecting and therefore eventually stop loving such a man.
What woman would love a man who was so governed by feelings and moods that he allowed them to determine whether he would do something as important as go to work? Why do we assume that it is terribly irresponsible for a man to refuse to go to work because he is not in the mood, but a woman can—indeed, ought to—refuse sex because she is not in the mood? Why?
—and what was a seemingly harmless stupidity has become a collectively punishing generality, getting uglier with every Men Do and Women Don’t twist until we end up clutching at Spider Robinson’s Screwfly:
We’re all descended from two million years of rapists, every race and tribe of us, and we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t sometimes fantasize about just knocking you down and taking it. The truly astonishing thing is how seldom we do. I can only speculate that most of us must love you a lot.
Now Tiptree wrote “Screwfly” for a reason, and people who said shit like that were definitely part of the unbearable wrong that fueled that particular pocket of outrage in her head. But the coldly horrible what-if of the story is precisely what if Men Always Did; what if there really is an US and a THEM and an unbridgeable gender war between. —It wouldn’t look like a John Gray sitcom, is what.
(Yes. I know: Black mollies. —I never said the idea doesn’t exist. I said it isn’t true.)
I’m not a gender essentialist, but—
(Ha ha.)
No, seriously. Or at least as serious as I want to be, whistling once more past this graveyard. —When I’m out and about with the Littlest Wookie (so named because of her fluting and hooting and not at all because of her furry back), I’ve noticed it’s always women who are smiling at me, nodding, saying hello and oh my and how cute. It’s always women who are suddenly stepping close to rub her head without asking. It’s always women, and never men.
(And before you tell me it’s because as a father strolling through downtown with a baby Björned I’m clearly good breedstock and willing to invest energy in my offspring which does something all unconscious-like to her uterus or maybe it’s her hormones which explains why, you should note the crucial grammatical difference between “women always” and “always women,” and start maybe questioning what you should have been questioning all along: my perceptions, and yours, and theirs. —I’m lying, for instance: the cashier who gave us a 20% discount on a hefty load of groceries because the Littlest Wookie was fussy was, after all, a man.)
Okay, babies, but how about salesmen? —In my job I see a lot of email ripped from a lot of corporate email accounts and let me tell you: salesmen? Hands down the worst for the nasty jokes and the porn and the shockjock photos. Saleswomen? Not at all.
So there’s that.
Sing, Muse, of the wrath of Althæaphage—
Go, relish the rest of the post that surrounds this glorious catalog of truth-eaters:
...the howling roil of right-wing authoritarians, of spite retailers, blowhards, closeted gay ministers, cranks, Bible lickers, of nerds-gone-bad, of flag humpers, pseudo-intellectuals, chair-based saucer investigators, of stern-bodiced rape fantasists, of millennarians, Know-Nothings, Free Silver enthusiasts, jingoes, Oreos, Foursquare McPhersonites, splinter Baptists, pseudo-Methodists, Pentecostal highway parishioners, of cynical purveyors of purpose-driven things and of AMWAY, of Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, Graham’s miracle flour, Kellogg’s abstinence-promoting Corn Flake Cereal, or other products unevaluated by the FDA that are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease; of Goldwater idolators, ‘Scoop Jackson liberals,’ McCarthyites, Yankees fans, Likudniks, the mean of spirit, dupes, chumps, Dartmouth grads, shysters, four-flushers, dog-kickers, self-dealers, Professors of X at James Madison University, wingnut welfare skillet-lickers and beak-wetters; of wingnut welfare high-rollers, pimps, queens, bathroom-stall fellators, and generational dependents; of certain former or current WWF/WWE personalities and/or karate movie stars and/or minor Baldwin brothers, convicted Watergate felons, washed-up Red Sox pitchers, and/or 1970s Detroit-area rock musicians, as well as unnh and gaah, not to mention hunnh...
Form / Content,
or, The nail replaced.
Douglas Wolk incisively surveys the brand new and much-improved whitehouse.gov; Ben Orenstein tells you about the little, critical change you won’t see at first glance. (While we’re on about websites and such, would someone please give the New Republic whatever it takes to make theirs usable? The litany of “I’d link to this article I wrote for TNR but their website is as we all know borked” from the wonkosphere is beyond embarrassing at this point. —I ought to be able to click on a link from one of Douglas’s columns and bring up a directory of all of them; I ought to be able to search for his name and not have the first page of hits be nothing but front page teasers for the article I just read and a link to Marty Peretz’ columns. How else am I going to point y’all to the Critical Browser stuff?)
A cold day in hell.
I still haven’t heard the speech, or seen it. I did hear a bunch of attorneys and paralegals cheering from down the hall, and then I heard some historians talk about the speech on NPR (“I think it’s clear Obama decided to deliver one type of speech, and not another type of speech”). —I’m sorry, I’m just not much for this sort of thing, I guess, unless I am. And for whatever reason I’m not, today. But reading Spencer Ackerman gave me a taste of the thrill people are talking about, so hey. Thanks. (You are reading Ackerman, right?)
Brand new day.
(Also, there’s a new blog.)
Partisan hackery.
Shouldn’t the supposed crimes of the Bush administration be paid for by Barack Obama?
Yeah, I know. Maybe I’ll feel better about it all later today. But right now my back hurts and I’m grouchy and I have to load some data into a database downtown while he’s taking the oath of office and anyway his first words wouldn’t ever be arrest that sonofabitch. I guess I’m just a partisan hack. —I just wish I had a party, you know?
