Notes:
1) So wait, maybe it’s necessary to look over his post to experience the full double-barreled assness of it, but has York been a grandiose, shit-twisting authoritarian this whole time, and merely pretending to be an upper-class twerp as envisioned by Branch Cabell? Was he merely affecting the fanciful winged hairdoesn’t that is his trademark, and that forces you each new time to imagine him running around naked with a flower basket at incredible speed, suggestive as it is of the Mercurio-Hermetic helmet of the FTD man and Jay Garrick, the so-called Golden Age Flash?
Or rather, is it just that it’s the biggo-thingo these days to be a slavering extremist, like how everyone was into Guitar Hero awhile ago, and next year all the people will be wearing a miniature toilet plunger suctioned onto their foreheads, so you should invest in my company that makes miniature toilet ear brushes, as in, it’s a miniature toilet brush that when they don’t expect it, you stick it in someone’s ear? The company is called UnCo because it’s not like boring corporate companies. ‘I’m an UnCo operative,’ reads the T-shirt. I mean no, seriously, what’s up with York lately?
2) It’s both typical and relevant that there were never any specific accusations leveled at Jones. As usual, the complaints weren’t about any definable offense against the law or public morals that he might have committed in the past, or that he might be liable to commit in the position of Green Jobs Czar. His three offenses of signing lawful and even conscionable 9/11 petitions, of being at one time a self-made communist (or really, of admitting it without regret), and of calling Republicans “assholes” were — to misapply a very specific term only slightly — ‘thoughtcrimes,’ or abstract breaches of an ideal conformity of belief and speech that’s defined not by what real people find genuinely offensive, but by the things that people imagine would offend others, especially others whose opinions are weighted by authority or power. More simply, it’s a conformity defined by the things for which a passive-aggressor can successfully claim offense.
Stripped of emotional ballast and pleadings, the accusations against Jones were simply that certain things he said and did looked suspicious, not of anything in particular, but of secret plotting in league with Obama, that superlatively suspicion-provoking man whose plots are continually being revealed, yet somehow never diminish in variety. The charge was that Jones seemed like the kind of person who would plot secretly against America somehow — or rather, “How can we be sure that Jones is not the kind of person who would somehow plot secretly against America?” (The answer, even pretending for the moment that the accusers wanted any questions answered, is that no one can ever prove any such thing, up to and even exceeding the need for certainty that Byron York is not the kind of person who would speed off tooting ‘shave and a haircut’ after driving a Mini Cooper through a synagogue on Yom Kippur and accidentally running over an oversized brocade handbag harboring an ill-tempered but beloved Pekingese.) Ah, suspicion.
The right-wing zealot begins each of these campaigns (or, more properly, is discharged upon each of them) by unleashing the Protean suspicion and presumption of bottomless guilt that is native to him — and that has so often been flattered by talk radio hosts, assorted TV pundits, manipulative bloggers, and so forth, that it no longer operates as a ‘suspicion’ of the maybe-x, maybe-y variety into which evidence can be introduced, but as a yet-unrequited foreknowledge spiked with anticipation, like if you’re pulling the ring on a can of Pringles suspecting that there’ll be Pringles inside, and you’re impatient for the being-right to occur, so that it can be added to your inner tally vs. the always-wrong hard-left liberal Nazi communists, who think they’re so [crunch] smart.
But then it can alternately be, and in fact generally is, more like you’re opening the top of the can suspecting that there’ll be Pringles inside, and awaiting rightness, when the can goes ‘bam!’ and is suddenly unrolled with dough coming out the spiral seam, and you go “Ohmygodwhatthe…!” and drop it on the floor, peeing a little in your pants before realizing it isn’t a Hamas pipe bomb, at which point you notice the little white Pillsbury dough guy on the can, and you know before even being told multiple times that it must be a plot, therefore a leftist plot, to mislabel Pringles cans with Pillsbury instant biscuit labels. Except patriots must have already started exposing the plot, because then they had to also do it the other way, so as we have just seen, certain Pringles cans have both the label and the inside switched, so heh, it is just as I was expecting, you communist Hitler lib-lefterals whom we will one day shoot into a pit dug by you with our legal firearms. I mean no, you did not dig the pit with our firearms, but the other way around.
It is the application of this gloating and self-rewarding suspicion to the task of juridical logic — logic in the sense of ‘creating a case’ for a desired conclusion — that is the means by which a primate of a competing family group who is politically or socially vulnerable can be ‘exposed’ as an enemy of the larger clan, and can be shamed and driven off through the ritualized behavior of thrashing branches and screaming — i.e. by force of majority and through a general suspicion of those suspected, as well as a general inclination among most primates toward siding in a conflict with the more popular contender.
At the commencement of the ritual, the aggressing primates enter en masse from the forest under the eyes of as many witnesses as possible, and separate their target from any allies or bystanders, surrounding him bodily while expressing worry and outrage at his presence, the females hugging their children to their breasts as though threatened, and the males feigning warning gestures, continuing this behavior as more spectators arrive while carefully preventing the target from leaving the circle or achieving a more favorable defensive position. The fear and warning cries become more intense and aggressive until a piece of ritualized ‘evidence’ is produced — a half-eaten fruit, a fingernail or toenail, a clump of hair — that in context seems darkly to suggest hidden misdeeds, otherness, a secret agenda. At this cue, a scream rises from the circle and the branch-thrashing and dust-throwing erupts as a general melee, directed toward the target but performed for maximum noise and spectacle. The frenzy ebbs and surges as new evidence is grabbed up and displayed — a handful of leaves, a stone, the bottom of a turtle shell, another stone, a dirt clod — until finally a handful of feces is produced and shown, then hurled at the target. The branch-thrashing and dust-throwing becomes sparse as more feces is produced by the aggressing primates, then by parts and then most of the audience. A calm arrives, turns mordant, and is blasted away by an excremental typhoon whose turbidities and Coanda jets catch the target and sweep him howling out of the circle in a random, fecal-pasted trajectory into the darkness of the forest, and once there out of sight and away.
And as his howls retreat into the distance, all the rest of the primates find themselves standing there steaming in the sun with one another’s shit splatted and nuggeted across skin and hair, flecked in eyes and snotted in noses and licked by stomach-heaving surprise on lips. But see, that never seems to slow them down the next time, is the moral, if any, of such a story.
