David Brooks and Richard Cohen aren’t the only people whom Edward Snowden has set to snapping at imaginary flies. A surprising number of my Lefty mailing list comrades have caught the infection too. Here, offered without comment, a communication that just crossed my desk, and had me laughing so hard I really thought I’d pull a muscle:

This whole brouhaha about information gathering is nothing but libertarian or conspiracist fantasies acting as useful idiots for Republican operatives trying to manufacture some shit on Obama – swift boat captains redux if you will. As I sad before, I am not a big supporter of Obama, but I find this kind of tactics quite repulsive.

Yes, it’s true, I read a David Brooks column today, about my new hero, Edward Snowden.

It didn’t really take eight hours to read; it just seemed that way. And then, prompted by comrade Mike Flugennock, I gluttoned my punishment, or punished my glutton, and read another column, by somebody named Richard Cohen, in that strange sad little provincial paper, the Washington Post. So I’ve been Bigfooted to a fare-thee-well today.

What struck me very strongly about these two Jeremiads — and a few others I dipped into — was how intensely, personally, furious and outraged and spiteful the writers were toward Snowden.

Here’s a little sample from Brooks — but really, you have to read the whole thing; you’d have no idea, otherwise, how wildly demented this story has made him:

[Snowden] could not successfully work his way through the institution of high school. Then he failed to navigate his way through community college.

He has not been a regular presence around his mother’s house for years. When a neighbor in Hawaii tried to introduce himself, Snowden cut him off and made it clear he wanted no neighborly relationships.

So far the writer is more or less in control of his iPad, or whatever, though the reference to Mom suggests that danger lurks ahead. But then the word salad course is served:

[Snowden] appears to be a product of one of the more unfortunate trends of the age: the atomization of society, the loosening of social bonds, the apparently growing share of young men in their 20s who are living technological existences in the fuzzy land between their childhood institutions and adult family commitments.

… a life unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society

Whoa! You mean the kids are not all right, David?

Apparently not:

Big Brother is not the only danger facing the country. Another is the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good.

But really, read the whole thing. It’s beyond belief. Every word is a gem. Unlike poor B-teamer Cohen, weltering in the mephitic swamps of the Potomac estuary. His best line:

I think [Snowden will] go down as a cross-dressing Little Red Riding Hood.

These are angry men, eh? Why, I wonder? It goes beyond politics and well into the personal.

Of course the politics is obvious enough: there’s a clear elite consensus that the public needs to be very thoroughly policed. The elites have some very nasty stuff in store for us — nastier even than what we’ve seen so far — and they’re well-informed enough to know that people sometimes get unruly under that kind of treatment.

But ordinarily Bigfeet like Brooks and Cohen would take the high ground of instrumental rationality in discussing these matters. They’d do the standard one-handjob, other-handjob, and make it all sound very thought-out and sensible — as long as you don’t examine the premises, and who ever does?

But Snowden has gotten under their skin; they’re writhing, frothing, chewing the carpet, speaking in tongues, beskiting their breeches, setting their hair on fire and running bare-tit down the street.

Here’s my theory: These Bigfeet love their access. They love being told things ‘off the record’ which they can’t reveal. They actually love keeping secrets more than telling secrets, though the latter is, in theory, their job. They are in fact an important part of the Disinformation Sector, and they love the importance a lot more than they mind the disinformation.

So along comes Snowden — who, by the way, must remind them of the cocky insolent young IT guy who patronizes them when they can’t remember their password. Snowden eats their nominal lunch — breaks a huge story in an upstart publication. All of a sudden Bigfoot is playing catchup to this unheard-of nobody, who clearly knows what he’s talking about while they, equally clearly, do not.

So the alter-kakers are reduced to moralistic blethering about the ‘social cement’ and so on, because they’ve got nothing. Nothing.

Except that they probably knew about this stuff all along, and helped conceal it from us.

I really, really cannot wait for the day when the New York Times and the Washington Post and the New Yorker — yes, the New Yorker — meet the fate of Brontosaurus. I hope I live to see it.

I got a call from the cops today. It was kind of an interesting call. Haven’t had this happen before.

The phone number that came up on caller ID had an area code that I associate with cell phones. So I picked it up. Normally I don’t pick up the phone unless I recognize the number or have some other reason to think I might be interested, but I sorta figured this was somebody I knew, whose phone number I didn’t happen to recognize.

“Is that Mr Rantz?” The caller said. I didn’t place the name immediately, but there was a Jay Rantz who occupied this apartment before I moved in, ten years ago. But I brought my old phone number along, so while this was Rantz’ apartment, it isn’t Rantz’ number. Curious.

Incautiously — when will I ever learn? — I said ‘No, this is Michael Smith’. Imagine my dismay when the caller made it clear that he was calling on behalf of the police force, soliciting money for some supposed charity. Naturally I was nauseated, and hung up after a brisk and brusque ‘not interested’.

Now, of course, I’m wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. I suppose I should have made static noises and clicks and quietly hung up, but what can I say? I’m a naif idiot, basically.

Waiting for the ferryboat today, on my way home from the salt mine, I overheard a conversation between two thirtyish women, well turned out, obviously ‘educated’ (as that term is understood in this country) and, judging by their attire and demeanor, somewhere healthily over the median income, though not one-percenters by any means.

It was actually more of a monologue than a conversation, now that I think of it. One of the women — let’s call her Narratrix — was telling a rather intricately circumstantial story about her son’s preschool, and the other — Echo — made soft cooing sounds of sympathy whenever Narratrix paused for breath.

Narratrix’ narratio began with an Incident. Apparently some crazed parent Made A Scene(*) at the school, and, in Narratrix’s absolute unselfconscious words, “refused to leave the premises when directed. That’s private property!”

If Crazed Parent committed other atrocities — pulling out a shootin’ iron, for example, or defecating on the Head’s desk — we didn’t hear about them. Unruliness, as far as I could tell, was the A to Z of it.

It developed that Narratrix herself was not present for the Incident. She heard about it because the school’s headmistress promptly emailed all the other parents, told the story — or rather, told her story — apologized abjectly that anything as coarse as human passion and anger was allowed to impinge on their little darlings’ lives and possibly interfere with their edumacation, and assured them that Steps Would Be Taken to ensure that no such horror ever occuurred again.

Now up to this point I had thought that Narratrix was telling this tale as an example of wretched excess and absurd overreation.

Wronnng. It developed that Narratrix’s response was to call the school and berate them for not acting more strongly. She said — I jotted this down on the flyleaf of the book I’ve been hauling around, as soon as I got on the ferry, so it’s pretty close to verbatim:

“I said to huuah(**), no, this is not enough. What about graduation(***)? You know, that woman could come back. And it’s not crazy. These days, nothing is crazy. She could come back and shoot the place up. So you need, like, extra security. What are you going to do about that?”

Ungenerously, I hope the school takes the suggestion, and subjects all its parents to a robust, uncompromising cavity search before ‘graduation’. But I can’t help feeling that Narratrix would approve, after one or two small grunts of muted discomfort, such as we all emit, involuntarily, once a year or so, on the doctor’s examining table.

Like many of her fellow citizens, she has fallen in love with Security, and can’t get enough of it.

It’s conventional to depict this passion for policing as a response to fear: people trading liberty for security, in old Ben’s oft-quoted words, because they’re so scared of terr’rists or whatever.

I no longer see it that way. What struck me about Narratrix’ telling of the tale was the lip-smacking relish with which she recounted her demand for more ‘security’. I’ll see your twenty cops, and raise you a SWAT team.

Hers was not the tone of person accepting the lesser evil, because she’s frightened of what might happen otherwise. It was the tone of a person thoroughly invested in being, you might say, on the right side of the gun.

My guess is that Narratrix works in a place much like my own workplace, where shit, as the proverb says, flows downhill. I don’t think she’s very far up the hill, but she likes the thought that there are people down in the declivities who are deeper in the shit than she is.

She’s not allowed to misbehave, or emote, or make a scene. Disaster would certainly ensue if she did. So it follows that anybody else who does these forbidden things must be punished severely, and steps must be taken to ensure that it never happens again.

This is why I’m very pleased about the dismal employment prospects of the twentysomethings. Fewer and fewer of them will have the opportunity to turn into this vengeful, punitive, twisted harpy.

————-
(*) I would very much like to hear the crazed parent’s side of the story. Just sayin’.

(**) Jersey accent. IPA doesn’t have glyphs for these diphthongs.

(***) Apparently preschools now have ‘graduations’, perhaps the most depressing note in the whole story.

Heh. Got you with that one, didn’t I?

Over on Counterpunch, Jeffrey St Clair has written a very droll piece, detailing his persecution — or would-be persecution; of course, like any sensible person, he loves this stuff — by a prudish Trotskyite groupuscule. (Yes, Virginia, there are — still! — Trotskyites.)

His piece will give you all the backstory you need, and it’s a fun read anyway. Teaser: Jeffrey is being taken to task for publishing a piece about some Hollywood ‘personality’ in which there appeared the four-letter word that entitles this post.

Needless to say, much brouhaha about this atrocity on the lefty mailing lists. ‘Sexism!’ cry the Trots. More thoughtful folk have attempted a class analysis of the Hollywood personality’s tits, without much success, since as far as I can tell they are (or, alas, were) in a class of their own.

Why ‘tits’ should be unsavory while ‘breasts’ is OK is entirely beyond me, except that the former is vernacular whereas the second, for some reason, is genteel.

I can’t see why. ‘Breasts’ seems to me both illiterate and prurient, since in English as she was well-spoke, back in the day, no individual had more than one breast.

To pluralize it calls attention to anatomy while purporting to elevate one’s gaze therefrom: consummate Pecksniffery.

But a great deal of campus-PC diction policing comes down to parlor gentility, with a thin — very thin — left cover.

I had an aunt — great-aunt, really — who used to quote the old chestnut ‘horses sweat, men perspire, ladies glow.’ She meant it, too. It wasn’t till years later that I realized this wasn’t original with her.

The same dear lady thought it was quite important whether you said ‘couch’ or ‘sofa’, ‘drapes’ or ‘curtains’, ‘dinner’ or ‘supper’ (though the last was almost Talmudically complex; each term was acceptable — in its place).

‘Tits’ was actually acceptable too, but only if you were talking about a cow. She would have spelled it ‘teats’, but pronounced it ‘tits’.

Spelling it as it sounds would, of course, have been coarse.

Auntie, if dire necessity had ever forced her to refer to a lady’s tits, would have said ‘bosom’. Anybody lewd enough to pluralize — ‘bosoms’ — would have been cast immediately into the outer darkness.

I don’t suppose she ever met any Trotskyites, but she wouldn’t have thought much of them either. She would have figured they were some odd kind of Methodists.

When I hear the word ‘progress’ I reach for my… oh never mind.

A lengthy and highly tedious exchange has erupted on one of my mailing lists about the incredibly puerile question of which American presidents were, on the whole, ‘progressive’.

Really, this notion of ‘progress’ has done more to stultify otherwise thoughtful people than almost any other I can think of.

On a scale of one to ten, estimate the progressivity average of the following. You may extend the estimate to three decimal places, but no farther. Ties are frowned upon, and require substantial justification.

1) Genghiz Khan
2) Vlad the Impaler
3) Maria Theresa
4) Benedict of Nursia
5) Prince Gautama
6) Pontius Pilate
7) Blackbeard the Pirate
8) Henry VIII (of England)
9) Leon Czolgosz
10) Mad King Ludwig (of Bavaria)

Here’s two of ’em. Thank God we still have the gent on the left — visually, not politically — among us.

Had an interesting experience the other day. The backstory is tedious, but suffice to say I was in a room with a couple of other echt West Siders, one of them a local liberal Democratic politician in a small way — let’s call him Aurelius — the other, Manutius, a guy in the publishing business.

Manutius and I were getting acquainted and I happened to mention the name of Noam Chomsky, entirely in passing, while telling some anecdote of my schooldays, a time when Chomsky bestrode the narrow world like a Colossus.

Aurelius, who had not thitherto been much involved in the conversation, snapped instantly to attention. “Chomsky? The guy who said we deserved Nineleven?!”

It was a context where contentiousness would have been out of place, so I contented myself with the mild reply, “He said that? Really?”(*)

I had the feeling Aurelius was ready to come right back at me, but Manutius saved the day. It turned out that he had been Chomsy’s editor, at some point and on some project, and he thought the world of old Noam. Since Manutius works for a large corporation, his imprimatur was sufficient to stifle Aurelius’ objections, and the awkward moment quickly passed.

Now you have to understand that Aurelius is not some mouth-breathing Fox News ignoramus; in spite of his unfortunate involvement in New York City politics, he’s a clever fella, well-schooled, well-read, and a liberal to the marrow of his bones. And he’s funny and amiable, with a very engaging fund of self-mocking humor.

So this was an odd moment. It was as if the restless ghost of Christopher Hitchens had suddenly taken over his vocal apparatus.

Of late I’ve started to reflect that the ancients’ belief in demonic possession wasn’t so dumb. We’re really very far from being unitary executives in our own heads. It’s a chaotic parliament in there, with no rules of order to speak of, and from time to time some particularly brazen-throated monomanic will take the floor and refuse to yield.

Ever known anybody suffering from anorexia? They’re like that: sensible, perceptive, subtle, humorous — on every subject but food. Once that topic comes up, they stop making sense, and contradict themselves three times in every sentence. The voice timbre changes, the body language changes. The impression is hard to resist that another personality has taken charge.

It was a little like that, just for a moment, with Aurelius the other day. One had the sense that Aurelius’ Community Board comperes had taken him over. They’re all staunch old Zionists and Cold War liberals, if not outright neocons — though Aurelius himself is none of these things.

This is one of the reasons why I hate the Democratic Party. Affiliating with it, identifying with it, even to the extent of rooting for its candidates, or even just voting for them, is to invite an incubus into your brain.

———-
(*) Of course as we all know he’s never said anything of the kind.

Hebraice, “טוהר הנשק”, a much-loved though now rather threadbare commonplace of Israeli propaganda. The idea is that war can and should be waged in a deeply moral way. There are people you can kill and other people you can’t; there are ways you may kill them and other ways you mustn’t. One imagines the Marquis of Queensberry refereeing the gory slaughterpit we call the ‘modern world’.

This notion, silly as it is, just won’t go away, and lately I’m hearing a lot of it from my Lefty pals who have lined up with AIPAC to cheer on the Syrian insurgency. The most recent great debate is, who’s using chemical weapons, the insurgents or the ‘regime’, aka the government?

Hmm. Well, suppose they both were? What would become of Queensberry’s Moral Razor in that case? Would all these beautiful-souled Trots just walk away in disgust? Or would they go out to the next decimal place, and consider who was supporting whom, and why?

But that scenario is no fun. The scenario I like is the one where the right side does all the wrong stuff — the chemical weapons, the ‘terrorism’, etc. — and the wrong side does all the right stuff — drones, boots on the ground, bunker-busters, and so on.

This has always been the way of it with the Palestinians and the Israelis, for example. The highly moral smug Israelis have their tanks and bulldozers. The poor Palestinians have none of that, so they’re reduced to hijacking airliners and suicide-bombing discos.

But even so I favor the immoral Palestinians over the moral Israelis. Not that they truly are that moral, of course; it’s sheer hypocrisy, really; but even if all their moral claims were true, I would still be on the side of the sinners. Because, at bottom, the sinners’ cause is just, and the cause of the Zionist bulldozers is not.

Now I really have no idea what’s going on in Syria, and I daresay very few other people who don’t have platinum security clearances have any idea either.

Certainly my moralizing comrades, with their nattering tut-tuttery about chemical weapons, have no more idea than I do. But for them, Purity Of Arms takes the place of actual information.

If ‘the regime’ is using chemical weapons, then the regime stands condemned. Presumably if the insurgents were using chemical weapons, they too would stand condemned; and therefore, since the insurgents are clearly the right side, it follows that the insurgents can’t possibly be using chemical weapons.

Tidy world these people live in.

But there is no morality in war. War is wickedness from start to finish. This is not to say that wars should never be fought. If you’re attacked, you have the right to fight back. But your attackers will observe no morality in attacking you, and you will observe none in defending yourself.

I was a little surprised by Obie’s Drone Speech. I had expected something more political, but what we got was the real Obama, couched in leaden Powerpointese — ‘transnational threats’, for example. A bureaucrat’s speech, a technocrat’s speech, a professor’s speech, in which all the important and interesting questions are ruled out of order and the conclusion is therefore thoroughly foregone. The Summa Stultitiae of crackpot realism.

Just about every sentence is a lie — except for Obie’s rather self-congratulatory observation that Obama bin Laden, like the great god Pan, is dead. That much, at least, I am prepared to believe — once I’ve seen the death certificate.

Little joke there.

Interestingly, Obie seemed to prefer the term ‘extremists’ to ‘terrorists’. Being an extremist myself, by any reasonable standard, this has me casting nervous glances over my shoulder and out the window. Of course I won’t see the drone coming. I know that. But it’s a reflex.

One of the reasons for this choice of words — ‘extremists’ — is to include Timothy MvVeigh and the Boston bomberini and maybe, for all I know, Ted Kaczinsky and Sacco and Vanzetti and Gavrilo Prinzip and the Defenestrators Of Prague and the Gracchi in the list. Munging several different phenomena together under one rubric is a very good way to darken counsel and promote a single solution to a ginned-up imaginary problem. Do you have cancer? Male pattern baldness? Anorexia nervosa? They’re all the same thing, and I have the answer!

Its a very dull, boring, predictable speech — though it’s also a classic exercise in the rhetoric of instutional self-justification, and perhaps worth reading on that account. Go through it and keep a tally: sentence count, X; flat-out, palpable lies, Y. In my case Y/X came out to around 0.99. Your mileage may of course vary, but I bet it won’t vary much.

Among the slight literary ornaments that Obie saw fit to hang on this crudely-fashioned artificial tree was a reference to good old Mattress Jack Kennedy: “the long, twilight struggle of the Cold War”. This is mentioned along with the Civil War and the “struggle against Fascism”(*). So presumably Obie agrees with the cold war liberal consensus on this topic, namely that the Cold War was a righteous struggle and it’s a very good thing that ‘we’ won it. (From my own point of view, life was much better as long as there was a Soviet threat, and I miss it badly.)

All of us — even those who, younger than me, weren’t around for the event — have a kind of vague brainstem memory of Jack’s oratory. Memory tends to flatter it. Here’s the original:

“Now the trumpet summons us again, not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are-but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle…”

Oh boy oh boy. For tinselly, tin-eared, grandiose rodomontade, this is hard to beat. “Arms we need”! “Embattled we are!”

One can’t help thinking of Yoda.

——————-
(*) Other peoples’ Fascism, that is. Our own — quite another matter.

Much has been written — some of it rather good — about Obie’s appalling speech at Morehouse University.

I have little to add: the point has been well made. This is a black guy who has built a career on blaming other black folks for their own situation, so the only thing left to be surprised about is how explicit and banal the Rotary CLub message is. My expectations of him were always low, but it’s amazing, even so, how often he amazes me with the unforeseeable depths to which he can sink.

A few quotes — really, the horrible thing speaks for itself:

Sure, go get your MBA, or start that business. We need black businesses out there. But ask yourselves what broader purpose your business might serve, in putting people to work, or transforming a neighborhood. The most successful CEOs I know didn’t start out intent just on making money — rather, they had a vision of how their product or service would change things, and the money followed.

With doors open to you that your parents and grandparents could not even imagine, no one expects you to take a vow of poverty.

All of you are heading into an economy where many young people expect not only to have multiple jobs, but multiple careers.

If you stay hungry, if you keep hustling, if you keep on your grind and get other folks to do the same — nobody can stop you.

Whatever success I have achieved, whatever positions of leadership I have held have depended less on Ivy League degrees or SAT scores or GPAs, and have instead been due to that sense of connection and empathy.

That last quote brings out what is for me the most repellent aspect of the speech — more repellent even than all the finger-wagging Horatio-Algery of it — namely its insistent tone of preening self-congratulation.

I’m sure the guy was always secretly like this, but being president has brought it out, as it has brought out his inner serial killer.

Here’s the message, in the immortal words of Richard Pryor: I got mine. You get yours.