May Monostich

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The mating-cry of the lawnmowers    echoes  from glen to glen

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Doctor Justice Declares a Caliphate : the Saga Exfoliates

Doctor Justice Declares a Caliphate

or,  If You Can’t Beat ‘em, Join ‘em

We were bemused at the ease with which a ragtag of runaways, renegades, and Zarqawiite thugs  could propel themselves to regional prominence, and declare their supremacy over the whole Umma of Islam.  And instead of being laughed off the stage, they have received bay`ah from group after group of former rivals (killing those that did not submit).

With a keen eye appropriate to their craft, the  Accounting Department of WDJ Worldwide Enterprises said:  Y’know, there might be money in this sort of thing.

Accordingly, as the long arm of al-Baghdadi  does not yet reach into our home state, we have decided to solidify our base, before it’s too late.  Thus, Doctor Justice, together with his hardy band of few but fanatical followers, hereby declares the

 => Riemannic State of Suburbia <=

a.k.a.  Riemannistan.

Its capital shall be the cul-de-sac wherein we dwell (Married People’s Circle);  our AOR, all the lands in which the Peano Postulates hold good.  

The state religion is Cantorian Realism;  public punishments for apostate Nominalists will be exemplary and fun to watch.

Dr Justice, wisely rendering judgment

 unto his subjects, beneath an oak 

Herewith our immediate, non-negotiable demands:

* Unlimited rights

* Egg in our beer

* A land corridor through Prussia

~

Fun Facts about Riemannistan:

*  Official language:  Latin

*  National anthem:  “Desolation Row”

*  State bird:  what do you think?

Notitia Dignitatum

Recent cabinet appointments :

*  Dr Massey :  Oberreichslateinmeister

*  Carlos the Pirate:  Minister of Marital Affairs

*  Abu-Yahya al-Irbî :  Proconsul for Greater Jordan (includes all territories  claimed by the ISIL)

* Commander Buckwalter:  Minister of Misinformation, and Lord of the CAStLe

Honoris causâ :

*  Named U.S. wifeperson :  First Lady

*  Airman Bob :  Jihadi Performer of the Year [Note:  This position, being istishhâdi, is filled anew periodically.  Applications welcome.]

*  Fluffy the family hamster : Emblematic Animal (to appear on all stamps and currency issued by the RSoS)

Positions still unfilled :

* Ambassador to Azawad

* Chargé d’affaires for the Ottoman Empire

* Court poet

[Update]

The cursèd infidels of the next cul-de-sac over, “Chunky Chipmunk Way” (and here I am barely making anything up:  our town is full of cutesy street-names) have refused to swear bay`ah to Sultân Dawûd, and have set up a counter-caliphate !!!  This means war -- War to the knife!

Chunky Chipmunk delenda est !!!!

[Update, Bastille Day 2014]  Evidently inspired by Dr J’s bold proclamation of a local cul-de-sac-based Caliphate, another would-be imam has claimed a somewhat neglected slice of Africa:

The imam with his seven year-old daughter, Princess Emily,

showing off the flag that their family designed

as they claim a piece of land in the Eastern African region of Bir Tawil.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/va-man-plants-flag-claims-african-country-calling-it-kingdom-of-north-sudan/2014/07/12/abfbcef2-09fc-11e4-8a6a-19355c7e870a_story.html?tid=pm_pop

We welcome this new sacred territory, and have offered an alliance to Imam Jeremiah, to wage Holy War against the infidels of the so-called “caliphate” of Chunky Chipmunk Way.

(BTW, those dead-enders over at Chunky Chipmunk  are also pretty sloppy about recycling.  War to the knife!)

[Update 9 August 2014]  Doubtless inspired by Riemannistan’s righteous Holy War against the kuffar of Chunky Chipmunk Way (a.k.a the Dâr al-Harb), Obama has finally got his man-card back, and is going after the sole entity that can challenge America’s hegemonic rule -- The Islamic Caliphate.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-expands-airstrikes-against-islamic-state-militants-in-northern-iraq/2014/08/09/1014c018-1fb7-11e4-82f9-2cd6fa8da5c4_story.html

[Late-breaking updeate -- Dispatch from the Front]   The raging battle between Riemannistan and the accursèd infidels of Chunky Chipmunk Way (upon whom be grease) has reached a stage of entrenched positions, of the sort familiar from the early years of the Great War: our territories are now separated by an impassable barrier composed of around half a dozen or so  orange traffic-cones.

Meanwhile, our supply lines and economic base have firmed up, relative to those of the foe.  Our yard sale last weekend did wa-a-ay better than theirs did, judging, not so much by the quantity as by the quality of the visitors who dropped by (their SUVs are tacky;  ours are swank).   We even sold an entire, only slightly wrecked swingset (Jenny having outgrown it -- she’s in second grade now)!  Match that, you Gehenna-dwelling Chunkies !!

~

Update: Riemannistan hosts refugees

[Dateline Riemannistan -- Associated Press]

Cousin Pete will be camping on our sofa for a few days.  His common-law wife Midge threw him out of the house.  The Riemmanic Caliphate is dispatching a crack diplomatic team to negotiate.

[Rolling update -- 30 August 2014]

In a stunning development, the exciting new Caliphate of Riemannistan has firmly established its diplomatic creds.

Armed with half a dozen red roses (plus a recycled gift-card from Pete), the Riemannistan emergency team arrived at the fortress-like headquarters of Ms. Midge [surname, age, weight and cup size  withheld by request].   After a tense quarter of an hour of high-level negotiations, the team returned to the lofty caliphal palace of Riemannistan, bearing a chilled six-pack of Pete’s favorite brew, sent over by Midge in appreciation of the roses.  “So you remembered our [editors: common-law] Anniversary, you old you, you” she wrote in an accompanying bordereau.  --  “Uh -- yeh, for sure!” replied a startled Pete, upon reading the note.

~

Geopolitical ruminations

 

Initially, the ISI (Islamic State of Iraq) was nothing but a rump entity around Falluja, over-grandly calling itself an ‘emirate’.  Later, Fortuna smiling, it essayed a power-grab, re-styling itself ISIL, adding the Levant to its self-arrogated AOR.  Finally, having won de facto power in large swaths of both, is proclaimed itself a “Caliphate” (with ipso facto global pretentions).

It now strikes us that we of Riemannistan have been overly modest.

At present, Riemannistan consists of no more than Married People’s Circle, together with all the lawns and dwellings appurtenant thereto.  But now we proclaim our dominion over:

   (1) the woods behind our present demesne, stretching all the way down to the Lake.

  (2)  We extend our sway to the lowly kuffar of Chunky Chipmunk Lane in toto, not excluding backyard hottubs, tacky lawn-ornaments, and what-have-you.  Its denizans are now our serfs.

  (3) The adjacent cul-de-sacs  we do not directly claim, but graciously leave them sub-enfeoffed to their present tenants, against payment of a suitable jizya.

  (4) The surrounding town, together with all the highways and interstates leading thereto, are hereby proclaimed lord's waste, and may continue to serve at our pleasure, as thoroughfares and pasture lands.

Riemannistan expands  its global reach

[Update]

The bozo who heads up Boko (al-Haraam `alay-him), recently posted a video

   Boko Haram Declares A New Caliphate In NorthEastern Nigeria

which was reported as being his declaration of yet another Caliphate -- obviously inspired by our example.  However, as the Long War Journal correctly pointed out, Bozo here uses neither the terms ‘Caliph/Caliphate’ (khalîfah/khilâfah) nor ‘Commander of the Faithful’ (amîr al-mu’minîn).

It’s pretty funny.   In it, he brandishes a sort of wand or sceptre or phallic symbol, waving it to emphasize his vocal bursts;  and then, unexpectedly, stops talking for a bit while he …inserts it into his mouth, and cleans his teeth with the thing!  
 (It was traditional, among the Beduin, to clean the teeth with a toothpick;  but this thing’s humongous, and it’s weird to see him interrupt his own speech  to attend to his toiletries.)

~ For a glimpse of Dr Justice  in his pre-Caliphal days, click here. ~

A fou-faraw in France

In our earlier post, 

 

          F-Word of the Day: “fournée”

we offered a linguistic deconstruction of a recent incident in which which the éminence grise of the Front National, Le Pen père, uttered what was alleged  by his detractors  to be a Discouraging Word, disobliging to la gent israélite.  He denied this.  (In earlier times, this incident might have been settled among gentlemen, with swords, on the meadow at dawn;  nowadays, we slug it out on TV.)

This evening, there was an interesting update.

 “All Things Considered” just broadcast a useful report from France by Eleanor Beardsley. She asked a French rabbi whether he held the Front National responsible for the upsurge of (sometimes violent) antisemitism in France.  “He just laughed”:  The perps in the recent attacks, he explained, are overwhelmingly immigrant “Muslim, African, and North African” -- less FN than FLN, as it were.  As for the FN, it is more worried about precisely that population, than about long-assimilated Jews.

Politics-and-language note:

That piece, though it did not go deep, was somewhat startling in actually naming ethnicities, rather than just referring to “des jeunes”, which is the French media codeword when Maghrebis get out of line.   (Off course, this may have less to do with any courage on the part of NPR, than the fact that the roster of taboo topics  differs from country to country.) Additionally, Ms Beardsly added another bit of profiling, when she reported that, at the end of a recent demonstration, “the male protesters” broke loose can commited acts of vandalism.  Not:  “the protesters, who were mostly men” or what have you.   In fact, the detail added is in some ways so odd (particularly since the issues here, unlike those of the counter-demonstrations relating to the Mariage pour tous, are by no means gender-related) , that I wonder whether it was not so much a swipe at the masculine gender, as a crytpo-French reference to, precisely, “les jeunes” (al-shabaab), and thus covertly ethnic in reference.

[Update 9 August 2014]   As mentioned, in French media-speak, des jeunes is code for ‘misbehaving Maghrebis’ -- what the American media call “inner-city youth” -- except that, in France, they are rather ‘outer-city’ youth, since they live in what, topographically, Americans would call “the suburbs”, but which, sociographically, is quite other than that:  la banlieue, the barely-policeable belt around Paris -- think of it as the inner city turned inside out.  Within the banlieue, you will find the cités, referenced above.   And this morning, this new bit of French political semantics, courtesy of Le Figaro:

De la banlieue rouge à la banlieue «verte» ?

La banlieue du chanteur Renaud a disparu.

The rouge (‘Red’) refers to Communist (Stalinist) influence:  it is a metaphor that the whole world borrowed from the Bolsheviks, after the Russian use.   But the verte -- the ‘Green’?

My first thought was that it referred to les écolos -- and indeed, there are pockets of (let us call it) Ecocentrism out in the banlieue as well, mixed in with everything else.   That is the only sense now current in America (“Go Green!” -- in your grandfather’s day, it referred rather to greenhorns -- newbies to you).  But that is not it.

The headline goes on:

Les anciens bastions du PCF ont cédé face à la montée du communautarisme musulman.

Ah…. ha!   The reference is actually to Muslim identity-politics, coded by the color made especially familiar by Gaddhafi  (he brandished his little  Green Book, a counterpart to Mao’s Little Red Book).    This is not an essentially French usage; it is being borrowed from another culture.   And while the association of green with Islam is widespread, it is not the only color-code in play:  Hizbollah uses (green on) yellow; al-Qaeda and ISIL use (white on) black.   So if you ever see a forest of green banners marching towards your cul-de-sacs, relax:  it might have been worse.

[Update 10 August 2014]  We suggested above that the somewhat “off”-sounding “male demonstrators” might have been in part a crypto-Gallicism, unconsciously inspired by the special contemporary French political use of the codeword les jeunes.  A similar apparent case of unconscious loan-translation appears in this morning’s New York Times, datelined Paris.   In prose reminiscent of a high-end menu, as gooey and thick as pâté de foie gras, we read of a state-subsidized (and rather louche-sounding) real-estate speculator, remaking the Marais section of Paris (“one of the city’s trendiest” districts, the reporter reassures us, lest some francophone-capable American readers hesitate to venture into a section whose name literally means ‘swamp, morass’) into an “Epicurean Village” (epicurean  not in the sense of the  ataraxia of Ἐπίκουρος,  but of self-indulgent sybarites):

“It’s going to be totally designed, with a library so people can think about the meat.”

(I blink.  Did the sentence really say that?  Let’s re-read it slowly:

It’s

going to be

totally designed,

with a library

so people can think

…
so people can think

…

so people can think

…

about the meat.

Yep, that’s what it says all right.)

Quoting the silk-scarf bedraped entrepreneur, our blithe and flighty reporter goes on:

“Over there will be the cheesemonger, where the cheese will be hidden in designer drawers, and taken out and explained.”

All right -- now I’ve lost the readers’ confidence;  you must think I’m making this up.  So here’s the link; go see for yourself:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/world/europe/an-epicurean-village-is-too-rich-for-some-paris-appetites.html?ref=world

One pictures the scene:  “You, cheesemonger!  Explain that cheese!”

Our reporter continue, this time in her own prose, rather than that of the sleek little Frenchman:

Fashionably dressed butchers, …

(Actually we must pause here, overcome.  “Fashionably dressed butchers”, what an image.   Trendily attired plumbers;  dishwasher-repairmen in gay raiment …  -- Let’s try again.)

Fashionably dressed butchers, bakers, and restaurateurs  will work in an upscale collective  --

(No, sorry,  got to pause again for breath.  A “collective” -- shades of those olden times in Berkeley!  But -- faut préciser -- an upscale collective.   Très chic. -- Truly, today’s feminized-and-yuppifed New York Times is priceless.  --- Let’s try one more time:)

Fashionably dressed butchers, bakers, and restaurateurs  will work in an upscale collective, dominated by the principal of zero waste, 

[ => “The  Principle   of  Zero   Waste”  <= ]

peddling [Is that really the verb you want? -- Copy editor] high-concept foods from mod spaces …

(“High-concept foods” -- “Mod spaces”.  Can’t make this stuff up.  -- Well, she can. -- To resume: )

… high-concept foods from mod spaces, using  biological products  sourced only from French farmers.

(We fall exhausted on our labors.)

Anyhow, en tant que philologue,  allow me to draw your attention to that phrase, “biological products”.   For the average American reader, I suspect, that does not have quite the effect that the gushing author intended.   To the ear of the anglo-saxon (as the French call us), that sounds suspiciously like a tissue sample, or an excretion, or something suspected in an ebola outbreak.   But what is really meant is what, in the preceding paragraph, she styled more idiomatically as “farm-fresh gastronomy” (semantically, there is a bit of an enallege adjectivi there, since what is “farm-fresh” here is not really the gastronomy, but the food which the gastronomes are shoving down their pie-holes, washed down with a nice chablis;  but let that pass).   The sense, surely, is an unconscious semantic loan-translation from French biologique: it means ‘natural, organic’, and (among the trendy) is usually abbreviated bio  (as in : des produits bio;  the modifier does not inflect for number or gender).

(Enough, enough.  Epicurean village delenda est.  Times, cancel my subscription.)