The Passing Parade: Cheap Shots from a Drive By Mind

"...difficile est saturam non scribere. Nam quis iniquae tam patiens urbis, tam ferreus, ut teneat se..." "...it is hard not to write Satire. For who is so tolerant of the unjust City, so steeled, that he can restrain himself... Juvenal, The Satires (1.30-32) akakyakakyevich@gmail.com

Friday, November 20, 2009

RULES FOR RADICALS, OR HOW NOT TO MAKE A KNISH: In Hemingway’s short story, ‘God rest you merry gentlemen,’ two Kansas City emergency room doctors make fun of a colleague named Wilcox as they wait for an emergency to happen on Christmas Day. Doctor Wilcox, as Hemingway makes clear, is not the best doctor in either Kansas City (there are two of them, for those of you new to American geography, a category you’ll be happy to know includes most American schoolchildren); in a short flashback, one of his medical school professors tells Wilcox that he has done his best to keep Wilcox from becoming a physician at all, but having failed to prevent this, the professor tells his erstwhile student to buy a medical book, The Young Doctor’s Friend and Guide, and urges him to use it. Doctor Wilcox, no doubt mindful of his professional inadequacies, does buy the book and uses it frequently, with, one imagines, no small degree of success. Doctor Wilcox’s troubles, and the subject of his colleagues’ jokes, arrived the night before, when the good doctor is faced with an emergency not listed in his book. For those of you interested in what happens next and the details of the emergency, I suggest you find a copy of The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway and read the story for yourselves.

I bring up this very lengthy literary prefacing in order to talk about current problems in American foreign policy (that was a considerable leap, wasn’t it? You thought this was about Hemingway, didn’t you?) The root of this administration’s current foreign policy dilemma is this: like Doctor Wilcox, the former junior Senator from Illinois gets most of his practical professional knowledge from a book, and while Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals may help the oppressed speak truth to power or to Fox News, which I think are the same thing and I know Valerie Jarrett thinks so, too, the book says very little about how to deal with the vast hordes of icky foreigners who infest the Earth’s surface. So here are those rules, with some comments and cream cheese on the side.

1.) Power is not only what you have but what people think you have.

Perception is very important. The trouble here is that the opposite is also true. Before the First World War, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II spent millions of marks building the Imperial High Seas Fleet, making it one of the world’s most powerful combat fleets. And then, when the war broke out, the Kaiser would not let the High Seas Fleet fight for fear that Britain’s Royal Navy would sink his expensive ships. So, after all the millions spent on building the fleet, and with the exception of a few minor raids and one major naval attack (the Battle of Jutland), the Imperial High Seas Fleet spent the war tied up at dockside, gathering rust and barnacles, while the Royal Navy’s blockade slowly choked the life out of the German war economy. In the end, Germany lost the war anyway and the Kaiser didn’t have to worry about the British sinking his ships; before the war officially ended, the Germans scuttled the fleet themselves. If people don’t think you have the nerve to use your power, then it doesn’t really matter how much power you have, does it?

2.) Never go outside the experience of your people.

Well, it’s a little late to worry about this one, isn’t it? The former junior Senator and his merry crew of Chicagoans already occupy the White House, where they are now fully prepared, like the youth of Mr. Wilde’s aphorism, to give the nation the full benefit of their inexperience.

3.) Whenever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy.

The current administration does this quite a lot, actually. Except for the Queen, God bless her, and the odd dictator—Castro and Gaddafi come immediately to mind—most of the world’s rulers did not rule their countries in the late 1970’s, the last time the United States attempted an experiment in on the job chief executive training. One trusts that the former junior Senator will learn not to shoot himself in the foot any more than is absolutely necessary, but until he does, he will confuse and confound the enemies of this our Great Republic, who are used to a very different style of American foreign policy. What we have here is a matter of two learning curves: can the administration learn what it is doing before the nation’s enemies conclude that the foreign policy of the United States of America looks more than a little like Gertrude Stein’s description of Oakland: there’s no there there. If the latter scenario occurs first, the nation is in for a rough patch for the next few years.

4.) Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.

This is a very admirable concept, to be sure, but one that suffers in actual practice, since the major rule in our enemies’ book of rules is this: we get to stay on top, no matter what. The next time we see the mullahs in Iran shooting down demonstrators in the streets we should remember that these guys are living up to their book of rules.

5.) Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.

Yes, it is. I can see crowds of ACORN and Code Pink activists laughing Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-il out of office right now, those crazy guys. Ridicule is just that strong. I mean, hey, it worked like a charm in Tiananmen Square, didn’t it?

6.) A good tactic is one your people enjoy.

Very true, but I don’t think that threatening not to pick up Russia’s garbage is really going to work. The White House staff may long for the days whey they could do this sort of thing in Chicago, but I don’t think Vladimir Putin cares very much one way or the other. He’s already got people to pick up his garbage.

7.) A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

I blame George W. Bush for this.

8.) Keep the pressure on with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.

The administration does not believe in keeping the pressure on the nation’s enemies at all, unless they’re Republicans, and the administration is not interested in the events of the period, unless it helps them pass their health care program. This poses something of a problem for the foreign policy people, whose choices in dealing with those who wish the Republic ill are no longer carrots and sticks, but carrots and more carrots, with the enemy getting a choice of sliced, diced, or julienned.

9.) The threat is usually more terrifying than the reality.

I don’t think the Israelis are going to accept this argument. The operative word here is usually. Usually is a wonderful word with a fine family and a nice house in the suburbs, but it is a word that smacks of conventional wisdom, which is wisdom only as long as everyone accepts the convention. Religious fanatics don’t accept other people’s conventions; they don’t have to, what with their personal hotline to the Almighty, and if it is the will of Allah that the State of Israel disappear in a radioactive mushroom cloud then that’s what’s going to happen. For the people telling the Israelis to calm down, one need only point out that the Jews have heard this sort of rhetoric before within the memory of people still living and the result was disastrous for everyone involved.

10.) The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure on the opposition.

Is there opposition to the United States? If there is, it is clearly the fault of the preceding administration.

11.) If you push a negative hard enough and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside.

In many countries, if you push a negative hard enough and deep enough, the government will shoot you for your troubles. And since the CIA will be CYAing for the near future, the people in these countries who might help us push a negative won’t.

12.) The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

True, but what if no one wants your constructive alternative? In 2000, Clinton had a constructive alternative and Arafat launched the Intifada anyway. Go figure.

13.) Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

And Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are not Sarah Palin. In the first place, she has better legs than they do, and second, they have large internal security establishments (the only thing that changed about the old KGB was its acronym—it’s the FSB now) dedicated to keeping them in their jobs. And third, they can use all these same rules against the United States and probably with greater effect, since they don’t have to worry about critics in the media or in the government undermining the message. Or, as George C. Scott says in Patton just as he blasts the Afrika Korps to bits at the battle of El Guettar, “Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!” This does not bode well for the future, I think.

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Sunday, November 08, 2009

PELOSI TO COUNTRY: DROP DEAD!:

The above is a headline you are not likely to see in the New York Daily News today, however much it reflects last night’s events. Still, it is always nice to know what the minions of Queen Nancy really think of the people they allegedly represent.

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Sunday, November 01, 2009

AT RANDOM: Hi there. No, I don’t have anything new to say and it’s not even the usual writer’s block; it’s just me being lazy again. It is hard to be satirical, you see, when the times are satirical. The former junior Senator from Illinois is blaming all of his woes on the mess his predecessor left, as if Mr. Bush had just decided to leave the Oval Office and go golfing, leaving all of his work for the former junior Senator to do. As I remember it, the former junior Senator desperately wanted Mr. Bush’s job; he spent the better part of his senatorial term actually trying to get Mr. Bush’s job, as opposed to doing whatever it is Senators actually do in Washington, if anything; and it seems a bit unbecoming to me at this point that, having succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, he finds that his current office is not all he hoped it would be. Ah well, there are more tears spilled over answered prayers than over unanswered ones, as someone much smarter than I am once pointed out. It may have been Mayor Daley, the real one, not the one who rules the Second City now, a man who routinely sent those members of the Cook County Democratic Committee he deemed too dumb to be city aldermen to the Illinois statehouse or to Congress, in order to limit the damage they could do. That the former junior Senator never held a municipal office in Chicago tells us more about the man than his legions of fanatic followers would want us to know, I think.

If you live in North America or anywhere nearby; I’m not sure what that would cover exactly-Iceland, maybe, or Poughkeepsie?-then you’ve seen the newest TV ads for Macs. It features the dynamic duo of Mac commercials, the cool with-it kind of guy who represents the cool with-itness of Macs, assuming with-itness even counts as a word, versus the staid, plodding, definitely not with-it guy who represents PCs. The Windows guy, who looks an awful lot like me, which I find increasingly annoying the more I think about it, reassures the Mac that Windows 7 will not have the problems that Windows Vista had and that Mac should trust him this time. The ad then goes into flashback mode, with my PC doppelganger promising that each Windows operating system going back to Windows 2 would fix all the problems that the previous operating system had ("trust me”). I will leave the pros and cons of whether or not the consuming public should actually trust Microsoft to another day. I find the commercial fascinating, to tell you the truth, especially in the current political climate. Today in this our Great Republic, the Democratic Party is proposing a health care plan of Brobdingnagian proportions and Rube Goldbergesque complexity that will torpedo the American economy, and the former junior Senator from Illinois and his minions in the Congress are telling an increasingly suspicious citizenry to trust them, this time will be different. Based on the welfare state’s track record to date, this will require an Olympic gold-winning leap of faith. The end result, with or without the leap of faith or the gold medal, will still be the same. If you choose to stand in front of a moving train, the train will hit you, usually with unpleasant results. This will be true no matter how many times you choose to stand in front of the train. Ask William Huskisson, if you don’t believe me.

It is November now and the World Series is still going on. I wish that someone would think of a better system of determining the championship of baseball before the Colorado Rockies make it back to the Series. I don’t know how you feel about it, but I like being able to tell the difference between the World Series and the Stanley Cup playoffs. It's not terribly ecumenical, I know, but it's just how I feel about it.

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