Sunday, January 3, 2016

John Hinderaker

At Powerline titles his piece The Middle East Couldn't Possibly Get Worse, Could It? A thing of such beauty I read it twice. Or the déjà vu thing happened again because the link quoted the best part. I won't do that. It's too beautiful. Instead I'll describe it.

It has a ruminant quality to it, I suspect bourbon, where a set of circumstances piles up and bugs somebody so much they mull it over until sorted into one continuous diatribe and delivered burnished.

My dad showed me this. One time he came home late lit and vocalized his ruminations. I asked him, "Dad, is this what you're doing, drinking all night thinking about all the things that make you miserable?" He looked up wearily and said, "I'm going to bed."

The rumination(s) remain in the light of day. The misery still there. Sets of them. Rumination for specific miseries, very well sorted and available for delivery at the drop of a cue. When viewed disinterestedly they're hilarious. They really are very well thought out comedy routines. My dad could have been a comedy writer, his cynicism with bourbon is completed and when delivered at once flawless as John Hinderaker is. Reading it you go, pow, Dude, you've keeping all that bottled up inside?

The tell that the burnished rumination at the end is a separate object of art by itself, considered separately and in a different state, the next concluding sentence, a separate paragraph by itself,  telescopes out of the bar to the clear light of day to give a jab to the ribs with parochial bathos that, frankly, brings down the whole piece. Better to have stayed drunk.

I'm always wrong. Someone's going to say he's teetotaler. And that's okay. This is how it seemed to me as  I read it and enjoyed it immensely for reminding me of Dad.

4 comments:

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

We generally think of demonstrators as opponents of the government, but that isn’t necessarily true. (Occupy Wall St., for example, was basically an inept arm of the ruling Democratic Party.) Here, as in 1979, those who stormed the Saudi embassy were doing the Iranian government’s bidding. Note how the mob threw fire bombs at the Saudi embassy and “forced their way” into the embassy, but then were “cleared by police.” Likewise, they were allowed to start a fire that was then “swiftly extinguished.” I am pretty sure that if Iran’s government wanted to protect the Saudi embassy, it could do so.

mmmm.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

My recollection from what little i know about them. Iran, after the fall of the Ayatollah, held Americans hostage and Saudi Arabia has a marriage of convenience with the United States.

My recollection is that Iran and SA adhere to a different form of Islam. Because of this, and other things, I'm sure, they never see eye to eye on things.

Now, I suppose, the rift is more out-in-the-open and honest?

Funny I should use that phraseology, given their penchant for hanging people who can't come out in the open.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

A war between the house of Saud and Iran would conveniently give an opening to people who may want to knock Iran down a peg or two.

I'm just saying.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

By holding oil prices so low, a gallon of milk right now is more expensive in some parts of the country than a gallon of gas, the house of Saud has done all it could to bankrupt Iran.

Unfortunately for the Saudis, Obama has been Iran's best friend.