Strike Two

Dear Dr. Bones,

In the second most ever-immortal Secret Speech delivered since 1945, (( fold here )) Mittius Coriolanus Pompo, Idiot Nephew of Nikita [0], Demander of Apologies, Despiser of the Apologetic, Master of Seamus, Stepmaster to Rafalca, Baincapper Extraordinaire, &c. &c. &c. &c. &c. was both like unto and unlike his Bolshevik intellectual uncle. The great similarity, obviously, is that there was nothing really ’secret’ involved. Every elitist in the Party audiences at both Moscow and Hooverville knew more or less all about it before the cryptorhetor opened his mouth. The fresh revelation, such as it was, is that now high Party cadres were permitted to actually say what they had long thought. To the assembled Hoovervillains, Nephew ’Mittens’ expounded what their freelordships had ALWAYS thought, taking ’always’ in a political rather than astronomical sense. Uncle Nikita addressed insider ideobuddies who cannot, of course, have known about the crimes of the late Dzugashvili much before Dz. had got around to committing them. [1] But then the Party neocomrades’ daddies an’ grandaddies would not have been afraid to bark out boldly before the early 1930’s. In a rough an’ rugged-individualist way, the Great American Economic Adjustment of 1929-1941 and its sputnik, the Lesser Economic Adjustment of 2007-2XXX, might be paralleled with the sins of ’Stalin’. Beyond question, these two are the matters of record which neocomrades and comrades would most prefer to hush up in the path of their respective Parties. In both cases there was a time before any up-hushing was necessary. Not a recent time, yet not absolutely outside the memory of man either. In both cases the prime motive for up-hushing amounts to "¡Please don’t anybody blame us innocent lambs who honcho the surviving Party!" The Greed of Gecko and the Purges of Dzugashvili were somebody else’s fault altogether. ¡Nothing to do AT ALL with the New Management Team! Of course in both cases the neomanagement is not significantly different in its personnel from the bad, or at least bad-looking, old palæomanagement. And in neither case is the remoter past disavowed: by what is presumably mere coincidence, Uncle Nikita and Nephew Mittens can even agree on a date for When Everything Went Wrong and History Turned into Bunk. The Great Readjusment began in October 1929; "Bukharin (sc., the last Old Bolshevik obstacle to le dzughachvilisme dans un seul pays) was ejected from the Politburo in November 1929." Small world, ¿innit? That date, however, is the wrong end of the shtyk for our purposes, being the far or trailin’ edge of the world’s bunkiness. More to our point is when the wrongness supposedly ended, when it became possible to make secret speeches about the wrongness but not yet desirable to thunder against it outside the Secret Sector and in particular the hire ranks of the Party. Uncle Nikita works from exactly 5 March 1953, naturally, secretspeechwise. With Nephew Mittens, no such precision is possible. Pretty well everythin that has taken place in WhightGuard circles over the last degeneration has pointed towards His Mass. Excellency’s wickedly betrayed cryptoratorical exercise. [2] Moreover, America’s Otherparty did have its brief lucid or Early Reagan period, when what was "voodoo economics" both before an afterwards could be frankly avowed without too much risk of self-embarrassment. For the cryptoration of M. Coriolanus Pompo is what one might, if hostile, describe as "a speech writ on cocktail napkins." [3] Happy days. --JHM

[0] This is he latest fresh addition to His Excellency’s formal style an’ neotitulary, which grows more et cætera-worthy with every day that passes.

[1] All really SEVERE neocomradologists and Kremlinologists agree on that, I think, but there are free-lance amateurs with different notions. Over to The Fehrnstrom Fishwrap, for example, of Louisedayhicksville-by-the-Sea in Massachusetts, kiddiecon journalists who did not care to sign their names took the position yesterday, 22 September 2012, that "Warren did not have a role ... but ... some contend she should have foreseen."

That pretty slice of tripe iillustrates how weekly standardizin’ and ever-a-new-criterium-mongerin’ can go wrong in the hands of less expensively instructed Party neocomrades. The nameless Fishwrappers took no precautions whatever against the obvious question how they themselves, or their Party, or their beloved AEIdeology, would like to be judged by "should have foreseen."

A particularizer might particularize this as follows: ¿May one legitimately deplore the shortsightedness of those who installed George XLIII Bush in 2000 or re-installed in 2004 without awareness that the Crawford Crash of 2008 would come of it? No tonsured slave of Fehrnstrom or lay denizen of LDHV will agree to that, needless to say, but if she is to maintain with any scrap of plausibility that failure to foresee, F2F, is O.K. when serviles an conserviles an neoserviles an Republicanines do it, -- "Hey, ¡give us a break!, nobody’s perfect." -- is nevertheless an unpardonable deficiency in liberals an democrats an "the Democrat Party." Also an above all in H*rv*rds.


[2] Cranbrook an’/or the H*rv*rd Victory School are scarcely likely to notice, let alone complain of, our flagrant barbarism. The trouble is that there seems not to be any obvious Attic word for the sort of verbal thing in which Demosthenes specialized: rhetôrike is the name of the technique with which he did it, but the thing itself was nothing more notable than only another logos. One cannot simply English that L-word, of course, because ’-ology’ is firmly established in our vernacular with a mening that has pretty well ceased to have any special connection with the oral-aural sphere.

*Cryptorator and *cryptoratoric(al) and *crytoration are about as campy as *camp can be. Which means that they are kinda fun as well as revoltingly spinachoid to every polished palate.


[3] His firstlordship bein’ a teatotalitarian personally, to call it that especially delights us who are SEVERELY hostile to NapkinThink.

Unfortunately most glossators of the Secret Speech have passed over the neococktail party as if it is not there. An honorable exception is Mother Jones, she to whom the loot was fenced. In a list of 7 Highlights You Missed From the Romney Video the comradess mentions

Predicting easy dividends from his anticipated electoral victory: "…if we win on November 6th there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country. We’ll see capital come back, and we’ll see—without actually doing anything—we’ll actually get a boost in the economy."

There is a more to it than that, but MJ did at least catch that little self-exuberance, unlike the rest of the press pack.

Ideally, she should have pointed out how "without actually doing anything" reduces His Excellency’s hired handlers’ principal campaign strategy to nonsense. One does not need to go out and dig up a H*rv*rd Victory School MBA ’75 an’ Baincapper Extraordinaire in order to -- not actually do anythin’. (¡!) The late Perfesser Gangrenerich, or the Rev. Santorum, even Michelle Baron Bachmaness itself, could undoubtedly manage a perfectly adequate King Log impersonation. If one is not interested to some extent in the King Stork side of Mittens, there is no good reason to be interested in him at all, unless maybe you are a relative or employee of the Serene House of Romneycare.

Moreover, His Excellency did not merely propose to DO nothin’ much. In a passage everybooby without exception seems to have overlooked, H. E. piously abstained from makin’ any of them risky predictions about the future: "If the president gets reelected, I don’t know what will happen. I can never predict what the markets will do. Sometimes it does the exact opposite of what I would have expected."

It appears that if one but pays the outrageous full tuition required by the former Allston (Massachusetts) Academy of Chirurgy and Haircut Science, one can master not only the art of "without really doing anythin" but also that of "I don’t know what will happen. I can never predict." Not a bargain to be refused lightly, that one.

Between this etch-a-sketch of Mittens the Taoist, an’ the economic consequences of Dubya (also HVS MBA ’75 -- a bumper crop that year), an’ the ineffable effusions of Niall Freelaird Fergusson, as its personnel most in the public eye, the H*rv*rd Victory School has quite a lot to be modest about just at present. No doubt American D*cl*ne Syndrome (Pat. Pend.) would be happening in any case, but this sort of thing could lead to nasty rumours that the 02134 Victorians are actually in favour of ADS(PP), doin’ their level (?) best to push us out the Window of Opportunity lest perchance we decide to try not to jump after all.