Thursday, July 2, 2009
Processes, Birth Certificates, Referenda, And The Rule Of Law
Imagine along with your Curmudgeon for a few moments.
Imagine that it were discovered, incontrovertibly, that Barack Hussein Obama really was born in Kenya, rather than in Hawaii as he alleges. Imagine further that Obama would refuse, even after the discovery was publicized and proved beyond the shadow of a doubt, to relinquish the presidency. Imagine still further that he offers as justification his having won the 2008 presidential election. Would you support or oppose his claim to the authority of the presidency?
You'd oppose it. Of course you would! The qualifications for the presidency, slender as they are, are spelled out explicitly in the Constitution of the United States: Article 2, Section 1, paragraph 4. If Obama cannot satisfy the Supreme Court that he was born in the United States, he cannot hold the presidency, any more than Arnold Schwarzenegger could.
Yet Obama has refused to present a legitimate birth certificate to public scrutiny, despite numerous attempts to get him to do so. The reasons aren't far to seek...but so far, the Supreme Court has failed to act on its duty to compel him to satisfy the constitutional requirements for the highest executive position in the land.
Imagine a bit further: that Obama were to win re-election in 2012, and were then to stand for a third term in 2016. The Constitution, in its 22nd Amendment, forbids exactly that. But Obama could trot out any of a number of rationalizations, including "this ongoing crisis," or his "unprecedented popularity," or whatever your fevered imagination might produce. Would you regard any such justification as adequate to set aside the 22nd Amendment?
No, of course you wouldn't! The Constitution is the Supreme Law of the Land, and cannot be altered save by the procedures set forth therein. For Obama to stand for a third term in defiance of the 22nd Amendment's two-term limitation would constitute a coup against the Constitution itself. Impeachment, trial, and conviction be damned; that would be a hangin' offense.
Yet there are already leftist shills arguing that Obama has a "duty" to remain in office long enough to finish "remaking America" -- that is, destroying capitalism, or the facsimile of it we've known, and imposing totalitarian federal control on every aspect of life and commerce. New York social-fascist Jose Serrano claims that this would merely restore the status quo ante 1951, when the 22nd Amendment was ratified.
As it happens, Obama has offered his backing to Manuel Zelaya, deposed as president of Honduras a few days ago. Zelaya attempted to circumvent the constitution of Honduras, which limits a president to a single four-year term, and which forbids amendment to that particular provision, by holding a referendum on the subject, which Honduras's Supreme Court ruled forbidden by the specific dictates of the Honduran constitution. In this, our social-fascist president is joined by Cuba's Raul Castro, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega: three Marxists who claim a right to wield unlimited power for life.
Quite a lot of people would shrug. It might seem incomprehensible to a Gentle Reader of Eternity Road, but it is nevertheless true. Constitutions, they'd say, should be "living documents," able to bend to the Zeitgeist when it asserts itself. A constitution that won't make way for a popular movement, they'd say, is a dead letter with no claim on anyone's time or attention.
Now that we've got all that out of the way, allow your Curmudgeon to ask his key question for the evening, very, very quietly, so as not to disturb anyone's slumber:
What makes the provisions of a constitution something to respect and uphold?
Think about it.
A constitution is a unique document. It's a popular contract, either explicitly or implicitly given force by the acquiescence of the mass of the people, that sets down the terms under which the actions of a government will be deemed legitimate. If it contains provisions for amendment -- which the overwhelming majority of constitutions do -- those provisions will undoubtedly specify the exact process by which an amendment might excise a part of, or become a part of, the document.
If we leave aside the specific terms of such a document, and all the justifications, whether from Hobbes, Locke, or Pee-Wee Herman, that might be offered for it, we're left with a single stanchion to which to cling: accepted processes. Some process was deemed a legitimate way of arriving at a constitution, which would thenceforth be the Supreme Law of the Land. That constitution must define a compendium of legislative processes by which laws foisted upon the citizenry might be adjudged legitimate or illegitimate, plus executive processes within which the executive power might legally enforce legitimate laws. Surrounding all laws must be a corpus of judicial processes by which one accused of violating some law might be determined guilty and therefore punishable, or not guilty and therefore not to be harmed.
If any of these requirements is not met, the "constitution" amounts to a rationalization for reposing unchecked power in the hands of some discernible group of men and whatever inheritors they nominate. The rule of law, to which we grant near-sacred allegiance, reduces to the rule of accepted processes.
Americans don't think about such things very much. As a mass, we're averse to hard thought about whys and wherefores. Things are as they are, we tell ourselves, because they work satisfactorily, or because that's the way they've always been, or because it would be too much trouble to change them. But in point of hard, ground state fact, our entire political system is founded on a single notion, one your Curmudgeon has harped on many times over the past eleven years of commentary on innumerable subjects:
Our Constitution was formulated and ratified according to a process to which the thirteen original states gave their assent, and to which all the states admitted to the Union since then had to acquiesce. State constitutions and county and municipal charters had to meet a similar test. Even those who disliked the outcome had to admit that the agreed-upon process had been followed. If they could have demonstrated otherwise, they'd have had grounds for deeming the results illegitimate and unworthy of their respect -- and their opponents would have had to concede the point or be exposed as power-mongering liars.
Our laws are supposed to be made according to the relevant Constitutional processes, and under the constraints imposed by that document as to subject matter and enforcement. Rather often these days, nothing could be further from the truth -- and in this lies the greatest shame of the current generation of Americans: We could easily reach that judgment for ourselves, each and every one of us, yet we've done little or nothing about it.
We're unwilling to buck the Mainstream Media and the special-interest groups in the name of constitutional fidelity, even when the justifications are plain and the matter is dire. We don't want to be thought hairy-eyed Cause People by our neighbors, whose kids go to school with ours and to whose backyard barbecues we hope still to be invited. We don't want to "rock the boat."
In other words, we're cowards.
Today, we have a president and a gaggle of federal legislators -- never mind the state and local equivalents -- who disbelieve in constitutional constraints, and who dismiss all considerations of legitimizing process. There's been no uprising yet, partly because so many of us are in shock at the brazenness of the Obama Administration's all-out attack on freedom, the free market, and America's position as the world's guarantor of acceptable international behavior. But one thing leads to another; little violations of agreed-upon processes pave the way for larger and larger ones. When 2012 is upon us, will we have enough spine to resist the Administration's arrogation of the power to rule a candidate unacceptable because of his convictions? Will we be capable of denying ACORN the privilege of counting the votes? Should 2016 find Obama still in office, will we rise up to oppose his quest for a third term?
Unclear. Massively unclear, all of it -- and it will remain dubious and worse for so long as Americans refuse to acknowledge the supremacy of processes over arbitrary claims of power, in particular of constitutional processes and constraints over all bids for and uses of power. On what other basis can anyone strive against the social-fascists now in power? Their Ace-of-trumps argument is "I won," remember? If we can't recur to process requirements to defeat that, what can we do?
Don't delude yourself that any argument about rights or similar abstractions would carry the day. Americans aren't generally interested in such things, except as they might be used to justify some subvention in their favor. Besides, our opponents have their own definitions for "rights:" A right to health care. A right to a job -- or an income. A right to abortion on demand. A right to force their way into some voluntary assembly minded to exclude them. A right not to be frightened or offended. A right to stick their hands into our pockets to fund whatever vague fantasies they might concoct about their "rights." The Bill of Rights is just wastepaper in the hands of the imaginative statist; consider what the courts have done to the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, and see if you can disagree.
And pray.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Birds of a Feather…
Graphic courtesy of: The Real Nicaragua.com
On 22 January of 1980 your humble blogster experienced the doubious honor of viewing what passed for a Nicaraguan (Sandinista) jail from the inside. The account of that saga can be read here. At the time, Daniel Ortega was “president?” of that unhappy nation. Since then, Nicaragua has experienced its ups and downs with recent emphasis on the downs by having returned the Marxist child rapist Ortega to the presidency.
One day in 1998, Zoilamerica, [Ortega’s stepdaughter] a militant Sandinista, walked into one of the counselling centres she had established to challenge the cult of machismo and abuse of women and told her friend, psychiatrist Marta Cabrera, ‘I want to talk.’ The story she told was that since she was 11, Ortega had fondled, abused and finally raped her.
With the recent events in neighboring Honduras seizing the attention of the media, one can not be blamed for wondering what on earth is going on. A simple explanation by way of analogy is probably appropriate:
Let us suppose that in June of 2008 with the November election upcoming and George W. Bush due to be term limited out of the White House he decides to stage a special election to decide if he should be allowed to be a candidate in the November election. Houston, we have a problem. There’s a little matter of the 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution which clearly states that “chimpy bushitler mc halliburton” cannot be a candidate in said election. Not to worry. Since various administrations routinely ignore the Constitution, Bush proceeds to stage the special election (which he probably intends to rig anyway) but the supreme court declares the special election to be illegal and orders the military to prevent it by any means; which it proceeds to do.
That is the simplest analogous description of what has transpired in Honduras. However, Honduras being a smallish republic of about 7.5 million souls, outside powers feel free to intervene, and local governments led by those of the Marxist persuasion are lining up to flex their international muscles by restoring their soul mate Mr Zelaya to the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa (this aparently includes the Obamessiah).
The Messiah’s international hands-off policies only appear to apply to entrenched despots and not to democratic governments attempting to apply the rule of Law.
cross posted at: Fighting in the Shade™
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
When in the Course of Human Events…
It seems like only yesterday we were treated by the leftists to the refrain that “dissent is the highest form of patriotism”. Actually that was during the administration of “chimpy bushitler mc halliburton” which concluded a mere 5+ months ago.
Now that the political left is in the catbird seat, it seems that the refrain has gone down the memory hole along with the hoola hoop and the Studebaker. The current terms used to characterize the left’s political opponents are: “terrorists, right wing extremists and those guilty of “treason” (against the planet?).
In the following question posed to Speaker Karen Bass (D LA) of the California Assembly she stated:
Q. How do you think conservative talk radio has affected the Legislature’s work?
A. The Republicans were essentially threatened and terrorized against voting for revenue [tax increases]. Now [some] are facing recalls. They operate under a terrorist threat: “You vote for revenue [tax increases] and your career is over.” I don’t know why we allow that kind of terrorism to exist. I guess it’s about free speech, but it’s extremely unfair.
Free speech exercised by opponents objecting to collectivist agenda items is ALWAYS “unfair”.
Recent characterizations of conservative and libertarian protesters of far left policy positions as “right wing and potential low level terrorists “ continue almost unremarked except in the alternative media (internet and talk radio) which are in turn attacked as “terrorist”)
In just the last few days the scam of the erstwhile religion of the global warmistas was used as a cover for the passage in the US House of Representatives of the most draconian tax and power legislation in recorded history. The occasion of the debate on this outrage elicited the assertion of one leftist “economist” on the payroll of the New York Times (Paul Krugman) that opponents of this abomination “are guilty of treason against the earth”
Could the time be approaching when it is appropriate to take down the musket above the mantle in order that it should be cleaned and oiled?
ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
cross posted at: Fighting in the Shade™
Yeah, I’m Still Alive
JUST A LITTLE busy’s all. Spent the weekend putting a floor in the downstairs bathroom. Discovered that what we thought was the cats’ water dish spilling was actually a slow leak from the shower. Don’t ask.
Life’s tough and those fardlers you lot elected to Washington over the last couple of years are bound and determined to make it worse. So easily led and credulous you are. The captive state-run media whines and moans about the evil George Bush and you fall for it like the suckers Mencken said you are. So—just for the change—you vote in the media’s party of choice to become your new lords and masters. And, now they’re going to enslave not only you, but all your unborn descendants and there’s nothing you can do—that you’re willing to—to stop it.
Their latest round of programs—thrown up like so many bomb-craters in your life’s road, more and faster than you can comprehend, let alone act to prevent or obviate—will reduce this once great nation to a shadow of its former glory.
No, they’re not stupid. They know what they’re doing. The incentives reward them for enhancing their own entrenched power. So they do.
Don’t try to tell yourself that they surely can’t be that evil. Don’t delude yourself that they’ll never get away with it. They’ve been getting away with it for over a hundred years. The Constitution won’t stay their hands. They rely on your sheeplike acceptance, on your desire to play the game according to rules they scorn, spurn, and spit upon.
You can’t vote them out, because there’s no change on offer. The opposition candidate is cut of the same cloth and the media has persuaded you that the third party is composed of loons and nutters. Your choice is between violent revolution, and you shrink from that, or slavery, and that’s too much to be borne. Sorry, Charlie. Those are your options. Choose now. The clock is running.
You’d better act before such sentiments as these bring the dark knock on your door at 3AM. Because by the time it does, it’ll be too late, and the butcher’s bill will be ten times what it would be today.
Have a good one.
Cross-posted at BabyTrollBlog.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Politically Driven Socioeconomic Suicide
While the wall to wall 24-7 Michael Jackson death freak show has occupied the attention of the MSM circus attendees, truly catastrophic events have transpired. On Friday June 26th by a vote of 218 to 212 the US House of Representatives passed Waxman-Markey, the largest tax bill in the history of organized crime government.
We are duped into believing that we, or the planet, will benefit by the micro-regulation and macro-taxation of our behaviors. Prostituted scientists and “climatologists” in black robes had christened natural, life-sustaining carbon dioxide a “poisonous pollutant.” The over-reaching Environmental Protection Agency teamed with the pathetic Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to steamroller legislation before their gig was up. (Way too many inquiring minds had been exposing the AGW urgency, as presented, to be fraud. The Australian Senate is rejecting its own version of Cap-and-Trade. The EPA has been caught red-handed censoring a global-warming study that was inconvenient. New EU Parliament Group includes climate skeptics. The Polish Academy of Science is challenging man-made global warming. The earth’s temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of CO2. Green jobs are found to be a cost not a benefit to our national economy.)
Only in a society dumbed down for two plus generations by forced immersion in the government indoctrination centers skools could the nonsense that a colorless odorless gas (CO2) necessary for sustaining life itself be accepted as a poisonous pollutant needing to be taxed and regulated using political duress by a substantial portion of the population.
Economic train wreck. Coming soon to a theater near you.
The Dems, ignoring 90 years of experience with ineffectual and destructive government interference in economic matters, charge ahead with more ineffectual and destructive government interference in economic matters:
”Why stagflation is coming. That certain aroma means it’s baked in the cake.” By David R. Burton and Cesar Conda, Washington Times, 6/28/09 (emphasis added).An economic train wreck is coming. Its cause is simple and straightforward: the breathtakingly bad monetary and fiscal policy during the past six to nine months - in other words, too much money and too much federal spending.
The first thing policymakers need to do is to stop doing harm. The Fed needs to immediately raise the federal funds target interest rate and slow money growth to normal levels. Congress needs to return federal spending to a more normal 19 percent to 23 percent of gross domestic product. It should reduce the U.S. corporate tax rate, currently the second-highest rate among industrialized nations, and, if possible, reform the tax system to promote work, savings and investment. Finally, it needs to control rather than exacerbate federal entitlement spending.
Instead, the Obama administration seems bent on doubling down and making a bad situation even worse . . . .
Is the fix in?
Reading the following by Karl Denninger, I got to thinking about my reaction to seeing Bernie Madoff hounded by reporters on the street and his being escorted in and out of the court house. I am always struck by the curious equanimity he displays, an almost Alfred E. Neumann-like “What, me worry?” affect. For someone who’s royally taken a large number of people for astronomical sums of money and faces, so we’re told, a possible life sentence, this is a man who is remarkably calm about his prospects.
Moreover, I don’t recall that his troubles suddenly manifested themselves over a 12-hour period catching him flatfooted. With, I presume, no small amount of cash at his disposal, did he not consult in the distant past with competent legal counsel on the issue of possible extradition free havens? Did he not have a contingency plan that involved something more sophisticated and effective than trying to transfer some of his assets to his wife (and relatives, if my memory serves me)?
I’m not one for conspiracy theories and do not know how prescient Mr. Denninger is. But in my view Madoff is one cool customer, strangely so, and if he is indeed as cool in fact as he seems, it could be that he knows very well that he has little to fear for the reason that Denninger sets out.
His sentencing is today and we will get an initial read on this from the outward severity of the sentence. If the sentence is lengthy, then it will be interesting to see where Madoff is sent and what conditions he will face when he gets there. Parole is also a possible exit from his predicament.
That said, here’s Mr. Denninger’s view that Madoff operated with the explicit assistance and cooperation of the U.S. government:
True. I may be reading too much into what I perceive in Madoff. Maybe he’s just not that bright, not that foresighted, and just resigned to his fate and Denninger is making something out of nothing.At best Madoff is a 20+ year scam that occurred with not only the intentional blindness of our government but its explicit assistance and cooperation. It is simply not possible for one man to run a Ponzi Scheme of this size, sending out statements every month to hundreds if not thousands of clients and employing a group of people, moving this amount of money around, and have the entire thing be a scam without the cooperation of literally hundreds of accomplices including accomplices inside regulatory agencies and the government itself, along with regulated entities including the banks that lost money. You cannot place that sort of capital as a bank or other regulated entity on nothing more than “trust” - no matter who its being placed with. There is much, much more to this scandal and you can bet the people involved will do their level-best damndest to keep the truth from coming out.
Perhaps. But I doubt that Madoff is stupid.
”Where We Are, Where We’re Heading (2009).” By Karl Denninger, The Market Ticker, 12/31/08.
UPDATE: Well, scratch that theory. Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison today. It looks like he was just resigned to his fate after his fraud became unsustainable. Denninger’s point is still on the table, though. How could fraud on such an immense scale have gone on for so many years without the complicity of a great many people? Maybe “the fix” will be evident in the small circle of people who are made to pay a criminal penalty and eventual revelation of a very limited version of the facts.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
AGW—collapse of the “consensus.”
”The Climate Change Climate Change. The number of skeptics is swelling everywhere.” By Kimberley A. Strassel, Wall Street Journal, 6/29/09.The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N.—13 times the number who authored the U.N.’s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world’s first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak “frankly” of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming “the worst scientific scandal in history.” Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the “new religion.” A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton’s Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists’ open letter.)
The collapse of the “consensus” has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth’s temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans.
Sunday Reader’s Corner: Kierkegaard’s Works of Love
Eternity Road readers may have picked up on the fact that I am generally more perky about the political climate these days - it looks like Obama’s “blitzkrieg” strategy is going to backfire rather than produce a quick and massive transition to socialism. Grasping for everything at once, it seems Obama will find that most of it has slipped through his fingers. It’s not necessarily over yet, but I for one am breathing a big sigh of relief.
My optimism about the political situation is not, however, matched by optimism about most of life’s other material realities. I may be gainfully employed for now, but the position of a recruiting firm is particularly perilous in a recession and I foresee major turbulence hitting the economy in the next 6-9 months. I’ve laid out some reasons why I think so, and this post at the Market Ticker is an even more concise distillation (and the source for many of my thoughts).
On the other hand, my reading life has gotten a lot richer since I graduated, and I do have to credit a lot of that to my lapse in internet service during my recent move. Now that I’m getting back online, I can only hope I have the discipline to continue.
To help me along the way, I’m going to funnel my reading activities to Eternity Road where appropriate. Book reviews are one thing I want to do, but I’m also hoping for something more collaborative. That’s the point of the “Reader’s Corner” tag in the title to this post. I wouldn’t consider these posts to imply a reading assignment or anything similar - the choice of our commenters to follow along with their own copy of the book is completely voluntary. Still, I would relish the chance to bounce ideas off those reading the same works simultaneously.
Anyway, I went to the bookstore a couple weeks ago and picked this one after it caught my eye:
I’d heard of Kierkegaard in some of the classes I’ve taken, but I had never read anything by him nor knew his general outlook on life. It turns out that he is a theologian of some renown, and that this book is a distillation of his views on Christian (as opposed to pagan, or “poetic” as he styles it) love. In form, the work is presented as musings and discourses on the two Great Commandments from the Gospel of Matthew in the first part, and on 1 Corinthians 13, the “love chapter” from Paul in the second.
I’m a few chapters into the book right now, but I’m going to refrain from comment this Sunday in case anyone has a hole burning up their reading schedules and might like to pick this up. For those who do, I have read chapter 1 ("Love’s hidden life"), chapter 2a ("You shall love,” chapter 2b ("You shall love your neighbor”), and am beginning in chapter 2c (”You shall love your neighbor"). It’s a difficult book and I expect to be working my way through it slowly, reading a bit each night. I’ll post some thoughts and reflections on those four sections next Sunday.
I hope that everyone is enjoying a restful Sabbath!
If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels
Foreign language studies are an unjustly neglected part of American education these days, a fact that I think every American ought to feel a bit embarrassed and then more than a little concerned about. The study of foreign languages, like the study of history, expands the mind and slows the creeping provincialism of time and place that is all too often a defining characteristic of American civilization. It seems odd that in a society as relentlessly empirical as that of this our Great Republic there is no voice supporting the study of foreign languages as a tool for personal and professional advancement, but facts remain facts: Americans are notoriously bad at learning foreign languages. Indeed, one could make an excellent case that the troubles Americans have in learning foreign languages are dwarfed only by their struggles to learn English, an obscure West Germanic dialect whose speakers are largely found on large islands and pool halls.
The slow death of foreign language studies in American schools is counterbalanced by the growing demand for self-instruction CDs, so that the average person who wants to learn a foreign language may pick up the rudiments while driving to and fro from work. I can personally attest to the benefits of this approach, as I have spent a goodly number of transport miles deep in the study of Gibberish. My knowledge of Gibberish, although shallow at the moment, has already stood me in good stead. On my occasional photographic forays to the Great Metropolis, where I do my best to capture the indigenous inhabitants in their native habitat, a few well chosen words of Gibberish are often all I need to fend off the hordes of overly aggressive street vendors trying to sell me everything from a small A-bomb (the better to eliminate your boy/girl/whatever friend with a minimum of physical evidence left over to send you to the slammer) to tap dancing zebus (don’t ask). Faced with such a situation I merely say,
“Ag’du na cha’u’ay no tritogashda angleskui.” Then I smile apologetically and say, “No spik Eeenglish.” I follow this blatant falsehood with a small bow and then walk away. The small bow is crucial, however; most Americans may not speak Gibberish with any degree of fluency, but everyone knows that Gibbers are an extremely polite people, almost as fastidious as the Japanese in their respect for the proper use of etiquette in any social situation.
Why, you might be asking yourself, would anyone choose to learn such an obscure language when there are so many other, more popular languages I could attempt to learn. There is Spanish, after all, which remains the most popular foreign language still taught in American schools, followed by French, Japanese, and Chinese. Latin is still extremely popular amongst dead people, as is classical Greek and Akkadian, and Akkadian, which is written on clay tablets with a wedge-shaped stick, also counts as a ceramics class credit in a good many universities nowadays. In the foreign language marketplace, Gibberish is a distinct nonstarter and yet this language has become wildly popular amongst the nation’s cultural and governing elites.
Why this is so is something of a mystery. The Gibbers are a small people, as ethnic groups go; most modern Gibbers and their country as well would fit comfortably inside a caravan of recreational vehicles heading up from Florida to see the grandkids over the summer holidays. But even with their demographic and geopolitical deficiencies, there is scarcely a capital city anywhere in the world where you will not find devotees of Gibberish. More than one modern politician has made a great name for him or her self for spouting nothing but the purest Gibberish in public, and the interested legal researcher can find whole passages in much of today’s proposed legislation written in Gibberish, usually without a convenient translation and usually found in the section where the pol whose bright idea this bit is explains just where the government is supposed to find the money to fund this idea. There’s nothing that will bring out the inner Gibber in any politician than an explanation of whose pocket the money is coming out of.
Gibberish has also become extremely popular in many other walks of life, such as the arts and the academy. One can seldom read a critical essay on modern art, for example, without finding long purplish patches of Gibberish explaining why the reader is too dumb to recognize a modern masterpiece when they see it, a phenomenon that occurred with great frequency as the latter half of the late and now unlamented twentieth century slid away towards a long overdue retirement. So much modern artistic criticism is written in Gibberish that it is difficult at times to tell the difference between a paean to the genius of Jackson Pollock or Andy Warhol and the New York City regulations regarding alternative side of the street parking during a prospective snow emergency.
What is odd in all of this is that the Gibbers themselves have little use for law, the arts, or the academy. Natural anarchists, the Gibbers’ own revolutionary period began and ended when they set fire to their country’s only opera house as a wandering troupe of Wagnerians rehearsed Die Gotterdammerung while listening to the Beatles’ White Album inside. No one is quite sure whether it was Wagner or the Beatles that the revolutionaries objected to, but the troupe did escape from the fire unscathed and with the record unscratched. The record player, on the other hand, was a total write off. When asked about the cause of this terroristic action, one revolutionary told the press that the music sounded too much like the death scream of the yellowfin tuna for your average Gibber to bear, an excellent answer until one realizes that Gibbers live nowhere near the sea and so have no idea what sounds a yellowfin tuna makes in extremis, but then no one ever said that the Gibbers were an especially bright group of people as people go.
To return to the subject, and yes, I think it’s about time too, nowhere is the relationship between Gibberish and its devotees more intense than in the case of the modern academy. Your average professor will write more Gibberish in a week than your average literate Gibber, assuming you could find such a rara avis, will write in twenty years. The Gibbers banned compulsory education after particularly acrimonious teachers’ strike in 1523 and now educate their children at home. Since most Gibber families are dumber than rocks, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the general level of educational achievement amongst Gibbers tends to be on the low side; they are, however, excellent at sharpening scissors, which is the national sport as well as their country’s leading export. Given this, it is something peculiar that academics find Gibberish so attractive. There are many explanations, but I think the most persuasive one is found in Gibberish’s ability to convey the most complex and subtly nuanced shades of meaning in more than a few words, something that plain English is incapable of.
Still, even with the language’s popularity amongst the elites, it is a shame that more people do not take the opportunity to learn the language. It is among the most beautiful of the unnecessarily polysyllabic tongues and it is among, or so I have heard, the easier foreign languages for an American to learn. I turn to it whenever my decades long pursuit of Spanish frustrates me to the breaking point. My attempts to learn Spanish have been an exercise in linguistic futility, leaving me with little more than the ability to order two beers and ask where the men’s room is. Important things to know, to be sure, but not something that will allow me to read Don Quixote in the original or impress a date with a well-chosen line from Garcia Lorca. Spanish, Polish, Danish, Swedish, Gibberish, Finnish already, they are all mysteries to me, I fear.
