Sorry for the current blogging famine; I’ve been struggling to meet a Monday deadline (although I did take time off this evening to go see Star Trek, and while I enjoyed the revised mythos, I’m not crazy about the new Vulcan salute: “Cheaters never live long and prosper.”)
I also apologize for hijacking this Doghouse Riley comment from over to Roy’s place, but it’s a masterpiece of miniaturization, like the contents of a Fabergé egg, and really must be shared:
It occurs to me that “conservatism” (Nabokov said that “reality” was the only word which should always be surrounded by quotes; so, too, anything suggestive of principle attached to the modern American Right) has, in fact, been operating within a narrow Boom and Bust cycle ever since Americans left the farm in droves in the early decades of the last century, greatly reducing their opportunities for backwoods religious scams and sheep fucking. Glorious Patriotic War! followed by Okay Who Do We Invade Next, and, inevitably Wait, How’d We Lose That One? and its twin corollaries, We Couldn’t Lose, Not Really and Find the Fifth Columnists!
This is overlain by the sorts of biorhythms “reality” imposes on the body politic: you can’t just conjure up Great Patriotic Wars, and the people actually in charge don’t want to fight them (at least not since Well, at least it gets you off the farm stopped being an excuse), they just want to collect tax receipts as if they were about to. Elections, too, whose periodic intrusions may mean you find yourself conferring Constitutionally-mandated sainthood on a worthless drunk one minute, and accusing the holder of the same office of stealing stamps, having sexual intercourse, or eating alien mustard the next. Liberals–American liberals, fer chrissakes, the mild scratchy throat, non-productive cough, and two days bed rest of the international socialist pandemic–just happen to stand somewhere close to where these people have been directing a constant covering fire since 1931.
Further Dijongate-inspired thoughts from the Hoosier sage can be found here.