Fascinoma

Leftist She-Devil Amanda Marcotte has it right: In theory, the Republicans are the party of Big Business, but for their base, they are really the party of aggrieved privilege, of straight white men trying desperately to resist equality between all citizens that would deprive them of their unearned superior station in society.

At the Capitol Tea Party the other day, I saw a buch of smug, expensively dressed old-dudes, usually with their somewhat younger (but still leathery in a smoked-sausage way) trade-up wives, and I had to wonder, each time who the hell did this Bozo swindle, screw, shove aside or exploit, so that he could hang out on a weekeday afternoon in Italain shoes, designer shades and expensive tweed, trying to see to it nobody else got any fat off the land? You can be sure that no asshole out there got wealthy on his merits.

From the Ministry I could see the Teabaggers gathering by the Capitol, this time summoned by Michele Bachmann and so I had to walk out and see what they were all about. Just as in 9/12 they were virtually all white, often fat, a surprisingly high number of them smoking. (I suppose smokers might have some extra issues with goverment and health.) The speakers seemed to be primarily Southerners, and they were firing up the lynch mob with a lot of rhetoric about "killing the bill." The idea that government health care might fund abortions was key. The mob itself: rich bigots, cracker assholes and sociopaths out to hustle them both. I especially loved the way each speaker applauded the crowd's love of freedom.

It's clear that none of these people cares one bit about all we're squandering in our quagmire military campaigns, but the thought that a nickel might get spent to assuage the suffering of the poor or the black, well, that's unacceptable.

The banality of evil consists largely in its self-blind criminal negligence, the failure to question its own motives.

Interesting provocation in Newsmax Halloween edition: Pat Boone talking about how all the questionable types at the White House need to be "tented" -- to wit: exterminated, like the "vermin" they are!

If these right-wing assholes had read any history whatsoever they might realize that this "vermin" talk both harks back and leads on to Final Solution, e.g. Farben's repurposed roach powder, Xyklon B. But these morons don't understand history and can't get their heads around metaphor, and so like cargo cultists, when they reify or enact their own hyperbole they think they've revealed and realized Truth. They erect an idol and worship it; confabulate a devil and scapegoat it. Thus it is that when Pat Boone says, "I believe – figuratively, but in a very real way – we need to tent the White House!" -- his figuartrive language is just as dangerous as that of the Nazis. The "very real way" will eventually and fatally equate human beings with cockroaches.

Some years ago, the pop-culture maven Cintra Wilson observed, “I find it to be generally true that the people with the most hateful, inhumane, intolerant politics are suckers for the most obscene forms of guileless sentimental exploitation….” And Pat Boone is the incarnation of this principle literally.

Cintra was talking about Las Vegas, which Hunter Thompson famously described as 'what all America would be doing if the Third Reich had won' but I think HST was a bit wrong there, Branson is what all American would be (or will be) doing under a 4th Reich, and Pat Boone will be a Prophet there.

So, people pay $225 a pop to hear W tell them that popularity is fleeting (especially if you're an unprinciopled bungler like W). And Dick Cheney pops off about Obama "dithering" in Afghanistan, though he and W had about seven years to clean that mess up and couldn't be bothered. And even Condi "Nobody Could Have Predicted" Rice is apparently still in demand as speaker in some circles.

It seems to me that somebody at the top of the Administration should circulate as talking point something like this: "In retrospect, it daily becomes more clear that the Bush administration was a perfect storm of incompetence and dishonesty, arrogance and malevolence. So why should anyone listen to their advice about anything?"

Had Dick Cheney and George Bush not made the Hitlerian error of opening up a second front in a war we might otherwise have won easily, we might well have greater peace in the Middle East, a budget surplus, a rested and ready military, and the wherewithal to address the many pressing problems facing us. Instead we have deepening quagmires in both Irag and Afghanistan. Still various people seem to think that we need to listen to five-time draft-evader Cheney on the subject of war strategy. This might be mostly because Custer was unavailable.

Glenn Beck is living proof that the driving passion of hatemongering assholes is kitsch. He recently went on another one of his crying jags, this time grieving for the loss of the simpler time and with anticipation of the tough love "Dad" is going to have to inflict on the chirren of America because they went to a pot and beer party they shouldn't have (not kidding here -- this is the metaphor he tearfully hyperextends). And now it's time to atone, according to Glenn -- and it's gonna really really hurt.

Christ Almighty. Every day the man sets a new world record for assholery -- and Rupert Murdoch is paying him millions to do so.

Among the many weird elements in this segment are the video nuggets he uses to emblemize the Golden Age of Pure Simplicity for which he sobs: two old commercials. Beck replays the old Coke commercial where a little white boy (what? no speckled puppy? no red wagon?) give his Coke to Ed "Too Tall" Jones eliciting a smile from the giant black football player. This doubtless touches the Beck's racist-shithead heart because it conjures a harmonious universe where 'we all get along' and yet it also encapsulates his Klansman's fantasy -- black folk jus' happy to be entertaining us and also happy with whatever trivial crap the whites are kind enough to toss them.

Then Beck cues up the tiresome Paul Anka song "Remember the Times of Your Life" (which might better be as jingle of anti-Alzheimer's elixir) and explains how it was a tag written for a Kodak commercial "and that commercial became so iconic that he went back and wrote the whole song" (Funny, I seem to remember most of the iconic stuff from them days, and I don't remember any such commercials.) and then we get to watch Beck watch some old home movies "from U-Tube" (or so he claims) and these, lo and behold!, do contain speckled puppy and red wagon. Holy Shit -- he went there.

Then Beck tells us, his voice cracking with emotion, "America has never been a perfect place... But we used to be united, we used to be united on some basic things. If a politician told you right now that he could make that happen again, that you could go back to those simpler times when people were together, you'd do it in a heartbeat, wouldn't you?"

Well Glenn, no, I wouldn't. I'd reach for my wallet and make sure it was still there because I'd know that anyone espousing a simpler time when people were together was a charlatan or delusional and probably both. There's a name for people nostalgic for a simpler superior past: fascist. What you call people who find the proof of that imgained past in carefully confabulated marketing stratagems I'm not quite sure, unless of course it's fascist assholes.

I'm not really an expert on the subject, but as it happens, here in the Ministry of Elegance I do speak to many of the world's leading experts on Italian painting (usually it's to ask if they have a taxi recepit for their expense-claim or something equally scintillating), and, as it happens, several of the world's most eminent experts have floated by my desk in the several days since the "new Leonardo" was announced to the world. So I raised my eyes from the expense reports and asked them directly. None of them seemed to take the claim (which apparently is not very new -- indeed a packet on the picture floated through here over a year ago) at all seriously. There was some eye-rolling and mild disparagement of "the fingerprint man." None of these experts was eager to speak publicly about the picture (as is the wont of such experts) for fear of being embroiled in pointless unprofessional controversy, or worse -- much, much worse -- litigation.

It is a pretty picture, and it does seem to have been composed by someone quite familiar with Leonardo's drawings. But one of the experts said straightaway, "It's too pretty." And this seems correct to me. Again, I'm no expert, but I do, in the course of my work, look at this stuff daily, and to my eye Leonardo paints beautiful women, not pretty ones. I see why some think this picture is 19th century; it looks more Pre-Raphaelite than Renaissance.

I see too, from the comments in the rather good version of the story at Daily Kos, that some people are really taken with the Antiques Roadshow aspect of the scoop; they really like the idea that some one can buy something for X and have it turn out to be worth 100, 000 X. Here at the Ministry we get letters all the time from people convinced they have done something similar, and asking, do we want to buy the Leonardo (Titian, Raphael, Picasso etc) they bought at a yard sale. This, I think, is what drives this story: it's just so, as the Germans say, märchenhaft.

In this rare instance I feel that I have a small direct, debunking window into the news. Today's Express (subway version of the Wa Po) summed it up this way, "Technical, stylistic and material composition evidence had experst believing that had found a da Vinci as early as last year. The discovery of the fingerprint now has them convinced." But I note that these "experts" don't include anybody from the Louvre, the National Galleries of England or the United States, nobody from the Uffizi, the Prado, the Hermitage, and so on. They don't seem to even include anybody with a name or anybody who would call a painting by the author of La Gioconda " a Leonardo" -- as scholars of the period do.

Now it's true, even real, named experts speaking on the record are sometimes wrong and it will certainly be interesting if they are in this case. But I wouldn't bet the rent.