Madrid and The Rhetoric of "Appeasement"

[womzilla]

Marc Singer, a long-time friend of mine from Usenet (though he hasn't hung out there in too long) has succumbed to peer pressure and gotten himself an online journal. So far, he's had good posts on comics, politics, Lovecraftiana, and the title of his blog; we'll overlook his occasional lapses into raving insanity.

Marc's most recent post, in part about political rhetoric in the wake of the Madrid bombing, is very good:

This is as much a point about stylistics as politics. Can someone really be a Falange fifth columnist, a Chamberlainian appeaser, a CPUSA fellow traveler, and a fascist apologist all at the same time?

and

And in what relationship, if any, "appeasement" has to the problem of terrorism. Chamberlain metaphors have, for the past year or two, been a popular tool for bullying people into supporting war (I'm generalizing out beyond Sean again - although his 3/16 post does not exactly buck this trend), but this is not 1938 and terrorists do not represent the credible threat to Western democracy that Hitler did.

Which reminds me of one of my favorite Jim Henley posts, from a year ago:

Warblogger Mad Libs--In every article referring to "appeasement," the allies, and Hitler, substitute "Austria-Hungary" for the allies and "Serbia" for Hitler. Change "WWII" to "WWI." Laugh till the pee warms your calves.

This, in turn, reminds me of a comment I made on Teresa's blog last month, in response to an entry vivisecting a bogus letter-to-the-editor drawing forced comparisons among various presidents:

Years of arguing politics on rec.arts.sf.fandom (and elsewhere) have shown me that any two historical situations can be made to resemble each other, if you elide or distort enough of the details. This letter is pretty much a perfect case in point; the only real similarities among World War II, Korea, Viet Nam, and Bosnia are that American troops fought in them.

(My dear coyote tells me that there is a law of literary criticism which says that with sufficient ingenuity, any narrative can be found inside any other narrative; my observation is a special case of that.)

Comments

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Kinbote's law. I made it up.

What Someone Would Call a Latent Nonpracticing Homosexual, I Guess

[(Anonymous)]

The above is from John Irving's CIDER HOUSE RULES, where Dr. Wilbur Larch is described as such. Looking at the question again I hear George Carlin's riff on what a hippie-commie-pinko-fag would sound like. ("Power to the People...man." I can see Carlin flipping a limp wrist, much as I can see Kate Bush shutting her eyes and smiling as she sings about "something special indeed" in "The Saxophone Song" and Elvis Costello looking nervously all around him while singing "Oswald and his sister are doing it again" in "Less than Zero.")

Comparisons are odious (Marlowe), not to mention odorous (Shakespeare), but we are soon going to have the Republicans insisting in 2004, as they did in 1932, that however unsuccessful their policies have been, we're lucky that it was them and not some inexperienced Democrat at the helm. If it works now, as it didn't then, I shall try to think of them as Robert Redford at the end of "The Candidate," successful in the election and unsure of the future.

Unfortunately, it won't be a movie...