30 September 2012

They ('We') are ALL Twits Now


Dear Dr. Bones,

Should you ever feel tempted to think too highly of us human racists, sir, a quick look at Twitter ought to set you straight:

At least 7 Warren signs stolen from yards in Scituate last night. Not just cowardly, also illegal.


Ad quem responduisset Patricius McTammany


‘Qui pauca considerat, facile pronuntiat’

(( fold here ))

The much-esteemed Blue Blazer gets far, far ahead of himself [1], and that on two fronts:

(A) Like many others of the nobility and gentry, and like pretty well everybody without exception down amongst the plebes and proles, His Worship supposes that the virtue of Courage to be somehow connected with thinking Worshipful thoughts, meaning that his political enemies need not apply. H. W. has presumably no idea WHO borrowed his like-minded neighbors ideological lawn decorations, all he knows for sure is WHY -- and even that conjecture could be mistaken, though this is admittedly most unlikely.

I daresay His Worship figures he can drag Lady Virtus into his partisanship on the basis that the danger of such a borrowing being interfered with either by the householders in person or by such secret- or public-sector police as the householders have engaged seems slight. Scituate being Scituate--$108,138.00 (2010)--the perps could rationally bet they would not collide with a huddle of trigger-happy gunclingers.

Had they been deliberately intendin to give their intrepidity a workoout, they could have stayed home at (let’s guess) Louisedayhicksville an amused themselves by prowlin the mean-spirited streets to collect mementoes of S. Philip Fratboy’s re-election campaign. Betcha the LDHV householders an/or Boston’s Finest would soon have put a stop to that caper!

It would not do formally to define virtus in a way that specifically invokes the Heroes in Blue [2] Nevertheless, anybooby who knows that her project might easily lead to a run-in with them is not to lightly diagnosed as a craven. The merits of the project have, of course, nothing to do with the case. Eye and Paddy doubt that even the Worshipful Nobility and Gentry would venture to insist on the contrary in the seminar room of a Prussian-style graduate school. Standards slip, however, when our Betters start thinking mostly with their thumbs.

One hopes, by the way, that H*rv*rd, at least, has banned nifty electronic playthings from the aforesaid seminar rooms. Tert. Ed. would do better to insist strictly on the technology of Century VIII-XV-LII-- the master to read out of his book and each student to listen attentively and wriite down her very own ktêma eis aiei, from which, eventually, her students . . . .--than to succumb to most of the more recent whizbangery. Paddy McTammany would draw the line right after the invention of the Xerox, though I am willing to haggle a little.

B. So much for ‘cowardly’. His Worship’s deployment of ‘illegal’ cannot be attacked root and branch, but it does displease a little at the margin.

One trouble is that what these perps did could very easily be represented, by your stick-at-nothing D*rsh*w*tz breed of defense shyster, as a form of ‘expression’ to which protection under Amendment I of the Fedguv Constitution ought to be extended at least as a courtesy, and preferably by a split decision from the Five of Nine. The slippery slope here is obvious enough: next thing you know, Paddy and Eye will be nabbed ‘borrowing’ goodvolks’ garden gnomes and idolatrous bathtubs under the pretext of engaging in Kulturkritik. Probably the best thing is to leave all that to the Zoning Board. But though that is easy to say, it is not easy at all to advise the august Zoners exactly how to proceed.

Worse, His Worship could be (but probably is not) deploying ‘illegal’ in the witless Planet Dilbert fashion: whatever the householders of Scituate or LDHV or Wherever Centre "do with their own property" is "nobody’s business but their own." They possess that absolute whight to "use, abuse and destroy" that Pipes Major attributed or misattributed to the mediæval civilians. To anybody who is at least as liberal and democratic as the late Comrade J. S. Mill this will be obvious tripe and baloney. To call it "self-regarding" when the neighbors of His Tweetship put up propaganda for Citizeness Warren in their front gardens that can be seen from a hundred metres off would be plumb dotty. They could have hung the damned things in the basement if their own private æsthetic appreciation had been the object of the exercise. Whatever taking them way may be, erecting them definitely was ‘expression’ under Amendment I. Even if D*rsh*w*tz, Esq., says so too, ¡Expression was it!

By Paddy’s lights, then, what the self-expressers have an absolute whight to is mostly contradiction. Trespassing is as illegal as petty larceny, but it might pass with us as legitimate civil disobedience to climb over the invisible fence and risk it with Fido the pitbull to (say) paint a moustache on the mug of the little lady from the Big University. Or, indeed, a feathered headdress.


Happy days.


____
[1] Our irrandomly chosen specimen of twattle comes from "Chris Matthews ?@chrismatth," whom we tentatively take to be an entirely different personage from the notorious MacL@@han-T@@ba virtuoso.

(( Might be kinda fun, though, if His Tweetship were only partially diferent from somebooby else. ))

Vice-Chair, Scituate Dems | Accountant/Organizer/Operative | Opinions here are my own, and a retweet is not an endorsement.
South Shore, MA · http://ChrisMatth.com
[2] A different shade of blue, obviously, from that which identifies the Worshipful Nobility and Gentry, unjoo-bito, who dwell above the clouds on the upper slopes of the Great Blue Hill, hard by the Palace of Public Tubavision on Market Street in Bestembrighton MA 02135.


(( Concluding unscientific postscript goes here ))

Happy days.
--JHM


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