Posted on November 3rd, 2006 by Gavin M.
We subscribe to a few right-wing news services, via email and RSS, but mostly use them for background. That is, the daily parade of teh stupid is usually so consistent that it hardly seems worth posting about Outrage #10,052 of Type F, subclass B, when a dozen more items will have flown past in the time it takes to type “Jeesh, look who’s at it again,” or “Are these people stupid or evil? I can never figure it out,” or any of the appropriate and standard codicils. So what we try to do a lot of the time is to use the daily swirl and babble as a way to take the temperature of the wingnut corpus — what are they mostly up to, or predominantly shrieking about? What are the interesting exceptions to the stock narratives?
We don’t always do a good job of it, but we do try. And I’m beginning to realize lately that a flaw in this method is that we’re often so immersed in the context of the items we post about that we don’t remember to say what they represent, or why they seem notable.
Here’s an example. I was just going to put up this link with some title like, ‘The Burning Of The Alexandrine Library.’ And then I would’ve been, “Yoshi’s lookin’ over here but he won’t get it out me, y’all,” like from that Nelly song, and then hit the ‘post’ button and went to go play slot cars or something.
But unsaid would’ve been that human knowledge has suffered a palpable loss. The archives of adamyoshida.com are gone, erased. No more to be seen are Yoshida’s definitive and architectonic ‘policy analyses,’ so tonally attuned to those in the respectable journals and editorial pages, yet so jabberingly insane in their calls for nuclear first-strikes against Iran and/or North Korea, for the imprisonment of Bush critics in concentration camps, for killing, maiming, torture, and ethnic cleansing.
Above: Due to a lack of color photos, Yoshida is trad-
itionally depicted as a genocidal Kure Kure Takora
I have trouble describing Yoshida’s importance because I’ve known him so well and loved him so warmly. To attempt it in simplest terms: It was impossible to read Adam Yoshida without understanding Charles Krauthammer for what he really is. Or Michael Fumento, or Mark Steyn, or Victor Davis Hanson, or (in a larger compass) Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld — all of that wide coterie whose hands are, to various degrees, on the levers of American foreign policy and therefore on those of the American ethos and conscience.
Yoshida has been a definitive and priceless batshit-insane wingnut, a Goldwater-grade bellwether, in that he perfectly tracks the positions of the policy elite while voicing their carefully unexpressed (and unspeakable) premises and implications: He reads in some tainted journal article that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat to America, and will conclude — like Goldwater with the Soviets, quite logically — that if life or death is the choice, then the US should destroy its enemy utterly and at whatever cost. If liberals are threatening the President’s success in the War on Terror, then liberals should, for the common good, be purged from the body politic. If global radical Islam threatens to destroy Western Civilization, then let millions of dead Muslims, right now, serve as a merciful warning against future and more dire holocausts. If our freedoms threaten Freedom, let them be amputated like gangrenous limbs. The rule of law is not a suicide pact; force and the free market are the guiding facts of history; survival is for the strong.
Above: Yoshida, often asked to
guest post, has so far declined.
Yoshida may be a hurtling fruit wagon, but he has that peculiar stupidity that verges on genius — the reducto-expansive stupidity of a Nietzche or a mature Marx, which clearly sees both the forest and the tree, but somehow always seems to be looking at the wrong one. As a Libertarian he believes in individual freedom, and thus large corporations must be allowed to do as they please, free from regulation. As a foe of tyranny, he supports unrestricted government surveillance and extrajudicial imprisonment. His economic ideal is to eliminate taxation of individuals and businesses, while having ‘the government’ support massive defense spending. Democracy is our inalienable heritage, while an election represents an ignoble attempt by the bad people to seize power.
Yoshida. The right-wing thoughtscape always made better sense somehow when you saw him make his effortless, intuitive leaps, the way he played the sonatas from memory. (Try it yourself and you’ll find that it only looks easy.) The ultimate Shorter of any Adam Yoshida essay — and by extension, of any such essay by a neocon or a neocon enabler, or by what used to be called a fascist, back when believing in the principles of fascism accorded the use of that term — might go like this: “Now look what those barbarians are making us do!”
Let’s hope together that Yoshida’s ouvre comes back to us, so that we can again learn and be better through his guidance.
