If you’re not a geek, you probably don’t know that PHP stands for “PHP Hypertext Processor,” if you even know what it is. (Hint: You’re soaking in it!) For that matter, you’re even less likely to know about GNU, or that it stands for “GNU’s Not Unix.”

Geeks love those self-referential language games. They treat them like logic puzzles, thinking that such blandly clever constructions will Blow. Your. Mind.

Except that they don’t, no more than All Cretans Are Liars. (And All Cretins Are Assholes, but that’s just a mere tautology.) Language is not a mirror of the world. It’s not even a system of representation. It’s just a means of expression, better articulated than most. (Ask your cat.) We swim in language, and sometimes pee in it, but we shouldn’t mistake it for the stuff natural scientists deal with. It’s just hot air, dead trees, and excited pixels.

Which is why this annoys the hell out of us:

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• “I think I would have raised an outcry if I had believed my eyes. But I didn’t believe them at first — the thing seemed so impossible. The fact is I was completely unnerved by a sheer blank fright, pure abstract terror, unconnected with any distinct shape of physical danger. What made this emotion so overpowering was — how shall I define it? — the moral shock I received, as if something altogether monstrous, intolerable to thought and odious to the soul, had been thrust upon me unexpectedly.”
• “He’s got to be drunk, I thought. I didn’t want to offend the president of France, but this was getting stupid. I kept thinking, surely, someone will pop up and say something like, ‘OK, the five minutes are up,’ but the call just went on and on and on.”

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Our guest columnist this morning is Richard Hofstadter.

If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country — that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

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So, our neighbor asks while we’re desperately wondering what the hell to do about the Morning Blather, have you seen the video with the whale jumping onto the sailboat?

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Hey, ever hear of the Tides Foundation? Neither have we!

Okay, fine, some of you have. Everybody who’s an activist — leave the room.

All gone? Good.

Truth be told, we have heard of them, but it’s a name that only crosses our path every two or three years — or only slightly more frequently than we’ve heard “Saul Alinsky” since a boring polisci class some thirty years ago.

Until last year, of course, when wingnuts made “Rules for Radicals” an Amazon bestseller.

So we’ve found it more than a little odd that Byron Williams was heading for the ACLU and the Tides Foundation when he got into a little exchange of Second Amendment Remedies with CHP on the 580 Saturday night. Like, dude, you’re going after a soap company? What’s up with that?

Or, to put it another way: If we, an advanced-degree Left Coast libtard who recently had to drop our NYRB subscription to help pay for our iPad, don’t know our Tides from our Surfrider from our Ducks Unlimited, how the hell is Williams so hip?

Unless — no, wait, let us guess…

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Competitor		Latest Play
	Andrew Breitbart	Playing an impressive three matches at once, snookered the NAACP, Roland Martin, and the Obama Administration.
	Fox News	Executed a stunning bank shot by snookering the Obama Administration on both sides of the Sherrod Smear.
	BP	Despite early setback, now poised to snooker American politicians and courts.

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The judges also would have accepted The Matrix, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Usual Suspects, An American Werewolf in London, Citizen Kane, and Singin’ in the Rain.