… when is this schmendrick going to die? There is a grave I would dance on.

I say this as person whose nice old Linux laptop just died, and who is now trying to do some of the same stuff on a Windows machine. With a deadline, yet.

It’s interesting — though maddening — to note that Linux has also become less usable over the years, because it’s trying to be like Windows.

So who’s worse, Maggie Thatcher or Bill Gates? Over to you, God.

… where no doubt she will be batting her rather striking eyes at Don Juan. She was quite a flirt, or so one is told. That other late unlamented, Christopher Hitchens, tells a droll story about her.

All my lefty mailing lists are full of abuse for old Lady Margaret. I suppose it’s understandable, in a way, since everybody who is anybody, from the God-Emperor on down, is hastening to lay posies on her grave, even before she’s in it. The impulse to set the record straight is elevated and correct.

And yeah, sure, she was a bad person, no doubt about it; as bad as you like. Lay on the untiring minions of Tartarus, with their incandescent whips, to the top of your bent; she deserved it all, and more than your punitive imagination can begin to frame.

But really — doesn’t all this posthumous vindictiveness make us Lefties seem a little … small?

Surely here if ever was a foe worthy of our steel — worthy, and then some, since she whupped us six ways from Sunday. She, and Richard Nixon, seem like the only halfway interesting political figures to bestride the world stage in my lifetime. Come on. Credit where it’s due.

This is not about being nice, or respecting the dead, or any such Pecksniffery as that. There are graves on which I would cheerfully dance — though I seldom dance, and don’t do it well.

But somehow, Tricky Dick’s and Lady Margaret’s graves are not among the ones I would dance on, though they themselves, in life, were the worst of the worst. They were so bad that they attained a kind of diabolical dignity, which it’s simply vulgar not to acknowledge.

It’s as if one were sent as ambassador to the court of Beelzebub. Who wouldn’t want to meet the old arch-reprobate? And who wouldn’t be polite to him, once met?

I used to have the picture above taped to my refrigerator door — it was clipped originally from Le Monde, which had really witty photo editors back in the day. It shows Maggie Thatcher dancing with Kenneth Kaunda. The version shown here is so over-contrasty that I don’t know whether you can see the lily-white hanky that the grocer’s daughter has draped over her hand before entrusting its Saxon pallor to the African strongman’s swarthy grasp.

I was reminded of the picture today when I read Barack Obama’s treacly, fulsome eulogy of the inimitable old bat. For sheer dog-faced shamelessness Obie, in his funereal mode, is hard to beat. Here’s the whole thing — really, trust me, you don’t want to miss a word:

With the passing of Baroness Margaret Thatcher(*), the world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend. As a grocer’s daughter who rose to become Britain’s first female prime minister, she stands as an example to our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can’t be shattered. As prime minister, she helped restore the confidence and pride that has always been the hallmark of Britain at its best. And as an unapologetic supporter of our transatlantic alliance, she knew that with strength and resolve we could win the Cold War and extend freedom’s promise.

Here in America, many of us will never forget her standing shoulder to shoulder with President Reagan, reminding the world that we are not simply carried along by the currents of history—we can shape them with moral conviction, unyielding courage and iron will. Michelle and I send our thoughts to the Thatcher family and all the British people as we carry on the work to which she dedicated her life—free peoples standing together, determined to write our own destiny.

Not just freedom, not just liberty, but freedom AND liberty. A twofer. And an example to our daughters, God help us. I don’t think my own daughter particularly admired Maggie, but perhaps she wouldn’t have told me if she did.

And ‘passing’? Fuck, can’t anybody say ‘death’ any more?

All the things that my Obamaphile friends value about Obie come down, in the last analysis, to things he has said, since none of them are right-wing enough to like anything he’s actually done. (Apart from the two or three dedicated Zionists, who strongly approve of his sedulous fellation of Israel.)

But even on the plane of mere words, some of what he says seems to matter to my Obamaphile friends, and other stuff gets swept aside. This paean to one of the most horrible political figures of our time — a real Horsewoman Of The Apocalypse — clearly went into the liberal Memory Hole even before it was uttered.

Now anent Maggie herself, let the record show there was something rather likable about her on a purely personal level, leaving the politics out of it. She always did seem to be having a whale of a time, particularly in the House of Commons — whereas most liberals, and most especially Obama, always have a pinched pained expression, as if they needed a laxative. Badly. But Maggie, in her own carnivorous way, was a good-time girl. One can — well, this one can, anyway — watch old clips of her baiting and being baited at Question Time with real pleasure. And she and that giddy airhead Reagan always looked like teenagers on a joyride as soon as they got into a golf cart together.

I think they were both rather uncomplicated personalities, and neither of them had a shred of conscience. Of course one entailment of this happy state is that you can’t suffer from bad conscience, as liberals chronically do.

——————
(*) By the way, am I correct in believing that this phrase is a solecism? You could say Lady Margaret, with or without the Thatcher, or you could say Baroness Thatcher, or Lady Thatcher. But this overstuffed form just sounds ignorant and wrong to me. I will defer however to those better acquainted with the Sassenach toffery than I.

I am amazed, amazed, at the outpouring of grief this poor gnome’s passing has evoked. Really, is there any occupation more loathesome than ‘critic’? Who needs these people? Can’t we see a movie, or read a book, and experience our pleasure or displeasure on our own?

The history of criticism has probably been written, though I haven’t read it. I suspect the genre arises from bourgeois status anxiety — the same source that gives us etiquette manuals. But correct me if I’m wrong.

Nowadays, of course, ‘criticism’ is also a kind of muted, muffled, bloodless blood sport, like American Idol. Siskel and Ebert even made the blood-sport parallel explicit with that horrible thumbs-up, thumbs-down thing they did: Rogere atque Eugiene Caesares, morituri vos salutamus!

Caesar in this case is not of course Caesar himself but rather some fairly quick-witted drone in a cubicle whom Caesar employs to provide a kind of second-order entertainment, deriving its livelihood from entertainment proper, like a lamprey in the trout fishery.

A kind of court jester, and therefore of course, the funnier-looking the better.

White House Budget to Include Social Security Cuts

This is something we’ve never seen from a Democratic president: An official White House budget that includes cuts to both Social Security and Medicare.

White House officials say the budget the president will unveil next week will include proposed cuts to Medicare (by increasing premiums for wealthier retirees) and Social Security (by reducing annual cost of living increases).

The proposals themselves are not new — they were part of the ill-fated offer the president made [last year] — but they are now part of the official White House budget. And that is a significant change that will open the president up to criticism from liberals and put pressure on Republicans to offer a response.

These proposed cuts will infuriate liberals, but in the budget plan — as in the offer made last year to Boehner — the cuts will be paired with $580 billion in tax increases. Without the tax increases, there would be no cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

The writer seems to be suggesting that the tax increases will at least help assuage the liberals’ pain. How nice for them. One might ask however whether the tax increases will do much to assuage the pain us oldsters will be feeling from the Medicare and Social Security cuts.

As usual with Barack ‘Catfood’ Obama, those who couldn’t see it coming have only themselves to blame. He’s been quite upfront about this, and everything else.

Is anybody else as tired as I am of the phrase ‘gun violence’? Is gun violence worse than other kinds of violence? If I club a guy to death, is that somehow not quite so bad as shooting him?

Of course the phrase is meant to engender support for gun control laws — not abolition, of course; hell, the cops and the soldier boys and the people with enough political juice to get pistol permits clearly need them, right? How would they shoot us, otherwise? But control. Ordinary crazy people shouldn’t have guns. Only official crazy people should have guns.

Personally I’m fairly unexcited by guns, one way or the other, though I grew up in a gun culture, and learned how to shoot quite early, and was rather good at it, oddly enough. Guns don’t scare me, and they don’t much excite me, though there is a certain pleasure in the sounds they make — not so much the final bang, but the complex many-voiced click of the round being chambered, for example.

Even so, if I were Emperor For A Day, and could indulge myself, I’d prohibit all guns except single-shot bolt-action rifles and double-barrel shotguns, suitable for hunting venison and duck, and for dispatching varmints.

I would, of course, completely disarm the cops. Heh. Bottom rail on top dis time, Massa.

But what deplorers of ‘gun violence’ seem to miss is that the abundance of guns here in the City On A Hill is in fact one of its few triumphs of electoral ‘democracy’, as that phrase is understood on these shores. If you like legislatures, and elections, and so on, then you’ve got to accept your creepy neighbor’s arsenal of a dozen assault rifles as an entailment of our extravagant Ptolemaic system of elections: community boards, school boards, city council, not one but two houses of the state legislature, ditto for the federal.

Gun nuts are a minority; but they are more committed to having guns than non-gun-nuts are about taking them away. Consequently the gun nuts are more powerful, electorally speaking, than their neighbors who would only sorta kinda rather people didn’t have guns. This is the way electoral politics works. And it’s the reason why, if you’re going to go in for elections at all, you should decide what your single issue is, and not vote for anybody who isn’t good on your issue. Take a lesson from the gun nuts.

My issue is imperial war. I won’t vote for anybody who’s for imperial war. Of course in New York, where ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ both love imperial war, this means I don’t have anybody to vote for. Therefore I don’t vote.

Other kinds of democracy are not only envisionable, but historically attested. There is, for example, the scheme of picking legislators by lot from among the public, and dispensing with elections altogether.

I’m liking this one more and more. One of the things we would certainly get out of it is gun control; and I bet we’d have less imperial war, too.

North Korea nuclear threats prompt US missile battery deployment to Guam

The Pentagon ordered an advanced missile defence system to the western Pacific on Wednesday, as the US defence secretary, Chuck Hagel, declared that North Korea posed “a real and clear danger” to South Korea, Japan and America itself.

The deployment of the battery to the US territory of Guam is the biggest demonstration yet that Washington regards the confrontation with North Korea as more worrying than similar crises over the past few years. It also suggests the Americans are preparing for a long standoff.

Well, shit, look at a map. Surely this has nothing at all to do with that comic-opera outfit in North Korea, and everything to do with encircling China?

I love the idea that ‘the Pentagon’ took this step — who would have thought an ugly satrap-style building could show such geopolitical finesse? One wonders whether ‘the Pentagon’ might have stirred one of its five cement arms and picked up the phone and consulted with another ugly building across the river, to wit, the White House?

There were some interesting responses to my last on some of the Lefty mailing lists — I mean really interesting; for once, I’m not being snide. In particular, there were some thoughtful attempts to rescue the idea of ‘rights’ in the context of democracy, which I tried to liquidate. (It’s an old habit of mine). Here’s Comrade McGee (not his real name, of course):

Formal democratic rights, the entitlement of all citizens to free political expression and association, is the true precondition for popular rule, for democracy. So then, the people do not “give” rights– it is the rights that constitute the people as a people, as a democratic subject.

I love it when you talk Hegel to me, McGee. But still, this leaves me wondering: If the people don’t give rights, where do they come from?

It’s possible, isn’t it, to imagine a democracy doing something bad — waging an aggressive or imperial war, for example. In fact it’s been known to happen.

One might wish for some countervailing force to prevent that. But then the people wouldn’t be sovereign, would they?

This is not to trash the idea of democracy at all, but to suggest what a deeply radical idea it is, in spite of the unthinking complacent cant about it ceaselessly spouted by the likes of Comrade Zircon, the media, and American politicians.

A democracy operating in accordance with my own ideas (probably shared, to a first approximation, by most of us) would certainly confer certain universal rights, and enforce them. But there’s no assurance that a democracy would operate in accordance with my own ideas. That’s why a real commitment to democracy, in any strong sense, requires quite a leap of faith — faith in the people. It’s a commitment without any reciprocal guarantees.

McGee, I guess, is trying to argue that certain rights — e.g. the right of universal participation — are implicit in the idea of democracy. I would say however that it’s the fact of universal participation — or rather, the fact that everybody can participate; some may prefer not to, like Bartleby — is what constitutes democracy, not the “right”.

But maybe this is a distinction without a difference.

If the word democracy is going to mean anything at all, there have to be some criteria for applying it; equal universal participation seems pretty good. Do you therefore want to characterize that as a ‘right’?

I don’t, mostly because conflating questions of sovereignty and questions of right seem to muddy the conceptual waters and darken counsel — as ha-Shem says somewhere.

I really loved this guy, and now that he’s gone, I worry about Venezuela.

There’s a reason for the cult of personality. There seem to be phases, in revolutions and national-liberation struggles, when finding the right person is important. It’s not the only thing, it’s not the biggest thing, but it matters.

I suppose you could say that there any number of right people out there, and one of them will surely come to the fore if conditions are right.

Maybe that’s true. I’m sure it’s true that there are plenty of right people out there — mute inglorious Chavezes. I’m not so certain that they will surely come to the fore, or not any time soon, anyway.

So I’m sorry, very sorry, that Hugo is gone. He was definitely the right person, and immensely likable too, I thought. Remember his encounter with the King Of Spain?

My pensive mood, after I read of his death, was rudely interrupted by a first-class creep on one of my lefty mailing lists — let’s call him Zircon — who took the opportunity to piss on Hugo as an ‘authoritarian’ and compare him with Kim III in Korea — or is it IV now?

You’ve gotta admire these finger-wagging American leftists, if only for chutzpah. They’re quite happy to tell our subjects just how they should and should not go about kicking us out. Along these lines, Zircon has a carefully worked-out list of things the Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan upsurges should have done, and didn’t.

And here’s what he thinks ‘we’ should do:

I think we should defend the sovereignty of countries like Venezuela or Cuba but not fall into the trap of assuming that means we must support people like Hugo or Fidel or Daniel [sc Ortega — ed.]. Instead we should argue for the extension of democratic rights to all.

Not to be too obvious or anything, but Fidel and Hugo, and yes, even Daniel, back in the day, did a bit more than ‘argue’.

And ‘we’ should defend their right to revolt, but not their actual revolutions — unless, of course, they come up to our high universalist standards about ‘democratic rights’, whatever those might be. Don’t hold your breath.

Indeed, this gibberish phrase, ‘democratic rights’, seems to be Zircon’s conceptual touchstone, though it makes no sense at all.

Democracy, on any informed understanding of the term, is the negation of ‘rights’. Democracy means that the people rule. They give rights, and they take them away, as their good sovereign pleasure dictates. If you’re really into ‘rights’, you have no use for democracy; and vice versa.

But probably what Zircon really means by ‘democratic rights’ is the same thing that old Dr Karl called ‘parliamentary cretinism’: the right to cast a vote for your next slavemaster. You’ll be whipped no matter what, but you can collectively choose which hand holds the lash. Ain’t that America, as the song says.

Venezuela, during the Chavez years, was a much more interesting place than the US, in spite of the latter’s devotion to Zircon’s notion of ‘democratic rights’. Certainly more democratic; and in fact, I’d say people in Venezuela had more rights.

Sit levis terra tibi, Hugo.

Anybody who wastes any time at all on facebook should certainly get the Unfriend Finder app. It is a thing of beauty: tells you who has unfriended you lately.

Maybe it’s perverse of me, but I think the history of unfriendings is a lot more interesting than the history of friendings. I don’t have many facebook friends, so I have a correspondingly small number of unfriends. But I treasure the ones I do have, and they are all big rah-rah’ers for Obie and the Dronocrats — the sort of people who are always posting little clips from some TV humorist, Bill Colbert or Steven Maher or somebody.

The only defect with Unfriend Finder is that it doesn’t tell you when, exactly, your new unfriends clicked you into Sheol. I would dearly love to figure out what sent each of ’em over the edge.