“pet room Archie’s”!

Today, attempting to comment upon a recent post by Robert Spencer in Jihad Watch — one, in fact, where I was pleased that he was showing a small inclination to discuss something utterly pivotal to fighting jihad — I saw that I was having my writing corrected, amazingly I felt than and now, to

“pet room Archie’s”!

I laughed so hard at “pet room Archie’s” — a correction repeated twice — that I had to tell my mother and brother, and I still feel amazed.

The correct word I intended to type, of course, was “petromonarchies”. As the graph below from Google Ngram shows, the word “petromonarchies” has existed for almost half a century to describe the Persian Gulf states of Baḥrain, Kuwait, Qaṭar, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, alongside the Bornean state of Brunei.

Use over time of the word “petromonarchies” and the phrases “oil monarchy” and “oil monarchies” according to Google Ngram. The singular “petromonarchy” was not found

The word “petromonarchies” has its first documented use (from Ms. magazine) in 1982. That ought to be enough for the web to recognise it, even if the graph above does show “petromonarchies” to have become a more frequently used word since the middle 2000s. “Pet Room Archie’s” sounds so artificial one wonders how it came about unless these were seen as the only possible words with the group of consonants p-t-r-m-r-ch-s.

What is amazing is not merely that “pet room Archie’s” is so funny, but how frivolous it seems. What a “pet room Archie” would be is not clear. What petromonarchies are is anything but frivolous. They are a massive problem for the planet and for the immense majority of the world’s population, because their ability to maintain huge revenue with zero taxes on capital:

1. produces a continuous downward pressure on capital taxation at a global scale
2. prevents the smallest possibility of reducing emissions to curtail climate change
1. this is because doing so would necessarily weaken the power of the petromonarchies
2. as implied by 1), weakening the petromonarchies would reduce or eliminate the downward pressure on capital taxation that has so enriched the world’s richest since the energy crisis
3. allows them to sponsor terrorism that has the effect of weakening the resistance of the world’s lower classes to the upward transfer of wealth made possible by their high revenues and zero taxes on capital