Random Catastrophes Of A Cold, Unfeeling Universe, As Contemplated By Staring Into The Eyes Of A Chicken

Jonah Goldberg, "Planet Bull's Eye". July 29

ROY points to this thing and laughs; we'd read it, or as much as we could take in a sitting while sober, yesterday via the Indianapolis Racist Beacon (Motto: We Were Wingnuts Back When Wingnuttery Wasn't Cool Was More Like A Localized Outbreak of Scrofula). And, as is sadly far too often the case, we had to reject targeting yet another Goldbergian issuance on the grounds that, well, Fuck the man's a walking encyclopedia of compensatory psychoses, not to mention the Wingnut Sinecure to beat all Sinecures, which makes poking at him over and over again feel like ridiculing contemporary American food pretensions by writing about Mountain Dew™ four times a week.

But that was before we knew there'd be prizes. Mark S. in comments:

I missed this stupidity when I read this earlier today:

Meanwhile, a "deep impact" is a terribly inconvenient threat, partly because it requires making peace with the idea that nature can be conquered.

A copy of Armageddon for anyone who can decipher this sentence.

So here's where we were when we realized a novella was about to break out:

Decipher it? Hell, it's the keys to the Wingnut Kingdom, though you'd want those only to melt 'em down and sell 'em for scrap. And it's filtered through Goldberg, so it's topped with an extra double-dollop of smirky "Who's talking whose lunch money now, liberal fascist hippies?", but here goes:

An inconvenient threat is intended as a sort of informational signal, to let us know a even wittier riposte involving fascist liberals is dead ahead and we should slow our progress to a crawl to enjoy it. Note that Goldberg finds it necessary to sprinkle continually the trail of his writing, or "writing", with breadcrumbs this way, the explanation of which requires delving more deeply into Goldbergian psychology as I'm willing to go without three more cups of coffee. A more mundane observation is that he also belongs to the "if one adjective is funny, seven must be hilarious" school, which may or may not have already been named for Dennis Miller.

Partly because is just in there because the one thing Goldberg seems to've learned in forty years is that he can't unleash simple declarative sentences without a high degree of certainty that he'll be forced to eat them later. We should ignore whatever impulse we have--mostly humanitarian--suggesting these little circumlocutions mean anything, particularly that they mean he's actually equivocal.

The payoff, of course, is making peace with the idea that nature can be conquered, which I grant you is confusing on an almost uncountable number of levels, but which simply refers to that Rose-Golden Age of "conservative" imagining, an amalgam of the 1880s, the 1950s, the seventh Andy Hardy flick in the series, half-slept through on Turner Classics, an admixture of Reagan anecdotes on everything from the unfair tainting of Columbus Day to the banning of Lawn Darts™, and Jim Crow, an era when iron men of Northern European extraction showed half a continent's worth of hardwood forest, not the mention the people who already lived there, what the relentless use of explosives could accomplish if the Can Do Spirit wasn't unfairly regulated by sissies. American "conservatives" have been driven to regard even the suggestion that unfettered rapine in pursuit of profits may have any deleterious effect whatsoever as The Drumbeat of Global Commie Fascism, though, oddly for percussion, only they can hear it. Again, this is filtered through Goldberg, and thus is presented as a sort of culmination of everything from Anti-Fluoridationialism through Dirty Hippies Are Having Miscegenated Sex At Lunch-Counter Sit-Ins, to Jimmy Carter Gave Away Our Canal, which wisdom he received from his parents and never bothered to check on.

So, in short--yes, yes, too late for that (again), Riley!--Jonah Goldberg, born 1969, folks, and hence a completely undeserving beneficiary of the Clean Air and Water Acts, believes it's a libbyliblibrul idea that Puny Man Cannot Control Nature, apparently on no more grounds than the effect turning his thermostat up or down has on his immediate surroundings. Which leads him to produce this sentence, worth repeating the way automobile accidents are worth reconstructing:

Meanwhile, a "deep impact" is a terribly inconvenient threat, partly because it requires making peace with the idea that nature can be conquered.

And as no docent-guided tour of that total vacuity should be allowed to end without directions to the gift shop, let's note that "understanding" that sentence, most of the rest of Goldberg, and that auto-vaunted political philosophy to which is is such a fitting heir, is perhaps the single example of it actually being wiser to look for your keys a block from where you dropped them, on the grounds that the light is better.


Now, the last time I was forced to argue with someone insisting that Mankind could dig his way out of any and every hole its digging created we were interrupted for Recess. It's certainly worth asking how an entire political movement came to believe it was being singled out for oppression by the 20th century, and how that came, in just fifty years' time, to be subsumed by a religious mania for cheap, mass-produced gewgaws and prohibitively expensive military hardware in search of a purpose, or how--even in Goldberg, its most spectacular breeding experiment failure--it comes to enlist scientific expertise in the effort to blow up scientific expertise. But there you are.