More excuses, except without the nice picture of Emily.

Okay, so here’s the thing: I do have some stuff to post, but the pieces (there are two of them, you know, but they are not about the same thing, which makes them fraternal twins, I suppose) are not ready for prime time. In short, I have not finished either one of them and I have used a great deal of psychic energy these past few weeks justifying to myself why I have not finished them.  I could blame George W. Bush, but I started both of these pieces several years after Bush left the Presidency, although, if the newspapers are anything to go by, incumbency is not a requirement for things to be George W. Bush’s fault. But I can’t, not really, a result, I think, of long years of Roman Catholic teaching. The well-developed Catholic conscience understands that blaming others for one’s own faults is the oldest sin in the Book, other than eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and that Adam's excuse that she made me, and Eve's excuse that the serpent made her, does not excuse either one of them at all. So it is not George W. Bush’s fault that I have not been posting as much as I should, much as I would like to say otherwise.

My desultory posting is also not the fault of my brother and his potato salad, even if I am certain beyond a reasonable doubt that he gave me that potato salad in order to poison me.  In the cold salad realm, I have always been partial to macaroni salad, especially my mother’s macaroni salad. Unlike so many people, including my brother, my mother does not annoy the palate with a multitude of flavors. There’s vinegar and mayonnaise, some tomatoes and celery, which I pick out of the salad and throw to the nearest cat, and macaroni. Simple, basic, filling, all the things I want in a cold salad. My brother, on the other hand, is a pupil of the more is better culinary school, and in his potato salad there are potatoes that you cannot taste and every manner of spice that you can, sort of, when those spices are not fighting for space and attention on your taste buds.  In short, I hate my brother’s potato salad and I would not eat the ghastly stuff at all except that my mother values family peace over almost everything else, especially at family get-togethers, and so in the interest of peace and brotherhood and good will I ate my brother’s potato salad and quickly came down with a nasty case of food poisoning.  As you might imagine, my brother did not like my accusing him of attempted murder nor did he appreciate my calling his potato salad loathsome noisome swill. All right, I didn’t use those words exactly, but I am sure you get the point. My brother certainly did and he certainly didn’t like it. Some people get very defensive about their potato salad and my brother is one of those people. In his defense, however, I should point out that my refusal to buckle down and start writing pre-dated his attempted fratricide for quite a while, and so, in the interests of truth and fair play and all sorts of other virtues Americans hold sacred, I cannot blame him for my unswerving loyalty to procrastination as a virtue.  I still hate his potato salad, though.

What I do blame for all the delay is my recent commitment to lemur ranching for fun and profit.  Ranching on a spread filled with ring-tailed lemurs is something that can drive a grown man to Despair, which, people tell me, is a pretty upscale new French bar and grill here in our happy little burg.  I didn’t know that the French had bars and grills; none of those bistros you see in the travel brochures ever look like what I’d consider to be a bar and grill, but then I don’t get out much. The food is very nice though, if you like overly intellectualized hamburger. Contrary to what you might have heard, the cow involved is not having an existential crisis as a response to its search for meaning in a meaningless world; the cow has passed from being to nothingness by becoming hamburger. Ergo, the cow has solved its existential crisis by finding the meaning denied to so many human beings. For the cow, the purpose of existence is simple: it is dinner.  That the cow is no longer in a position to grasp this elegant solution to its existential problem simply demonstrates the inadequacy of any overarching philosophical system when that system confronts reality. And steak tastes good.

I don’t know what the lemurs taste like and I don’t intend to find out. I’m not raising them for food, at least not for people, and I don’t think the furry little bastards have enough meat on them to interest the pet food manufacturers.  So why bother with lemurs?  Lemur oil will cure a boatload of skin ailments, yes it will, everything from eczema to seborrhea and psoriasis, so step right up and put in your order for your own 12 oz. bottle of Dr. Green’s Old Fashioned Green Lemur Miracle Oil and if you order within the next ten minutes I will be happy to send you another bottle absolutely free; just pay shipping and handling. And then I sit and watch the money roll in, or I would, if only get the ornery little beasts to stay still for long enough to press some oil out of them.  Lemurs object to pressing, for reasons I am not sure I fathom—a consequence of poor parenting and equally poor socialization in the public schools seems a reasonable hypothesis—and while I am not pressing them the lemurs insist on three meals a day and a roof over their heads, which makes them seem less an investment than members of my family.  In addition to this, I have the Department of Agriculture inspectors going over every inch of my operation and the Humane Society and every other animal rights group in the country camped out in my front yard demonstrating against my pressing the lemurs at all. The lemurs don’t like the animal rights people very much; one of those PETA people broke into the lemurs’ compound two weeks ago to “liberate” them and the lemurs bit him on his ass for his troubles. Serves him right, too; I hope the bastard gets rabies.

So as you can see, as a small aspiring entrepreneur in the age of the Illinois Incitatus I am up to my backside in money problems and government red tape and high-minded idiots who don’t know the first thing about lemurs or business trying to tell me how to run my business. I simply do not have the time to whip up these little funny bits regularly. I have things to do, important things, like trying to figure out where the damn lemurs are hiding my pencils. Damn, I hate when they do that; it’s more annoying than you can imagine.

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.