Wednesday, September 20, 2006

 
Re Derbyshire's "Talpra Magyar"

Parliament of Horthy*?

[of that which what follows and doth not suck, is taken from, natch, from the book referenced above by P.J. O'Rourke]

[Once again, Mr. Derbyshire helps those of us feel not so all alone(note to Ferenc Gyurcsány: everybody must get "stoned" -by idiots, that is)who were inclined to feel some sympathy for the Hungarian PM, even if they(like me)didn't have the foggiest if he led a "Center-Right" or "Center-Left" coalition or just where on some possibly alien political spectrum the protestors were coming from.
Those of us on the Right are fond of anecdotes about the awfulness of our political and intellectual elites - would rather be governed by the first 50 names in the phone book- some ideas being so moronic that only intellectuals could believe in them, and so on- but there is something appealing with respect to leaders speaking some truths which are not meant for general distribution. While one's skin might crawl reading some account of say, a Nazi commandant carping that he needed more gear for his crematoriums, we might read, say, some frank assessment(one not intended for broadcast to the troopers) by Erwin Rommel that the war in North Africa was going badly or that Fortress Europa was less than festung, with some grudging respect for the guy. And there has been some gushing, largely from the Left, I guess, about Nikita Khrushchev's courage in making his "secret speech." -Which I haven't read, but will charitably assume was a call for a kindler, gentler, more compassionate, totalitarian and messianic state.

From P.J. O'Rourke's "Parliament of Whores"-

page 64: "Thus we Americans have struck a remarkable bargain. We pay $566,220 a year -less than a dollar apiece-for a congressman and his staff, and in return they listen to us carp and moan and fume and gripe and ask to be given things for free. Because this is, in the end, what legislators do. They listen to us. Not an enviable task."

page 65: "..One constituent wrote every week for months saying that the CIA was using low-level pulsed microwave radiation to read his thoughts. Finally, the congressman suggested that he line his hat with tinfoil, and the fellow has not been heard from since.
Most of the inquiries, however, involve real things -all the things already mentioned that Congress is considering and all the things it has or will or might consider and all the world's other things besides. There are protests on behalf of cousins who want to immigrate, sons who want to go to West Point and daughters who want civil service jobs; and problems with Medicare, the Veterans Administration, the IRS, the FHA, DOT, OSHA, AFDC, ABCDEFHIJKLMNOP. There's something that must be done about each of these, say we voters; what's more our Social Security check was late again this month. And out to every inquiry goes a respectful, responsible, dutiful reply, a reply that is as helpful as possible.
I read a week of the congressman's mail, more than seven hundred letters. There were exactly two thank-you notes in the pile."

page 233-at the end of the book: "....Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores.
The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us."



*I've heard of "Admiral" Horthy only from a reading of Jeffry Z. Muller's classic piece in Commentary, "Communism, Anti-Semitism & The Jews." -brings to mind an old Mad magazine parody of "The Sound of Music"-set, I guess, in the Alps, which had fun with the "Captain" title of Baron von Trap. Yeah, yeah, I know that Hungary was once part of "Austria-Hungary" and was therefore not, at that time, strictly landlocked.