The latest From sock puppet is something called Third Way, a name that has some ironic resonance for us oldsters. Jackie prattling finishing-school French to Malraux, and the assassins busy in the dark corners. Ah, those were the days.
But that's comparing small things to great. The contemporary Third Way is classic 18 Brumaire: First time as tragedy, second time as farce. The style is even more downmarket than Jack and Jackie's glamor-mag product: an earnest, clunky web site draped top-to-bottom in the inevitable red-white-and-blue bunting that everything in DC, from cocktail napkins to condoms, has got to display. I think there's a Federal law.
But credit where it's due. If you're looking for pompous, self-infatuated intellectual comedy, this outfit is a little ahead of the other From flacketerias. "Idea industry," for all I know, may already be a cliche, but I never saw the phrase before I blundered onto the Third Way website. It got me thinking.
Scenes from the Idea Industry
(The Third Way conference room. It's morning in the District of Columbia, and a dark-skinned PAROLEE, wearing a stylish-by-DC-standards RFID TRACKING COLLAR, has just finished arranging the red-white-and-blue ROSES in a depleted-uranium VASE at the center of the CONFERENCE TABLE, made from a single plank of the last surviving specimen of a now-extinct tree. Two BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS, Eric and Craig, enter at opposite doors, wearing identical clunky not-quite-Brooks-Brothers SUITS. They are white, but trying very hard to talk as if they weren't.)
Eric: Dr Foozle! How they hangin', dawg?
Craig: Dr Boozle! My man!
Eric: So... any ideas this fine mornin', m'nizzle?
Craig: Sho'nuff. You sittin' down?
Eric [suiting the action to the words]: Sittin'.
Craig: How 'bout -- we do anything that a really big corporation wants?
Eric [smacks self upside the head] Genius!
hit it
the third way
avoid the third rail
use yer third leg
when dah ball lands
they all be fairway lies
so to speak
the fucker stretches
as far as it takes
to get
frum here to inanity
rain spout indeed
if t'were only just wet
try
errr...
coal shute