SHORTED CRAZY JESUS LADY. I only wrote 600 words, yet Jesus has blessed me with a 3,500-word story. Praise His Holy Name!

THE DEATH OF THE WEST. When critics say that radical professors have "a unique hostility toward Western traditional and commonsense attitudes," and that their "true raison d'etre is in practice nothing other than to destroy to destroy utterly whatever allegiance a young person might have to traditional conceptions in morality, religion, politics and culture," are they talking about this guy?

…I am especially pleased that the killing — and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act — was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging…

…I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness.

These are the words of right-wing legal eagle Eugene Volokh, whose sadism is excited by the Iranian mullahs’ decidedly pre-Enlightenment idea of justice.

Though the guilty party – and I suppose his guilt is a settled matter, the Iranian courts being models of probity – was convicted of unspeakable crimes, you might expect a Professor of Law (Constitutional Law, at that!) to at least acknowledge that flogging, stabbing, and slow-throttling to death is definitely Cruel and Unusual Punishment. Professor Volokh does, but with a surprise twist!

I'm not an expert on the history of the clause, but my point is that the punishment is proper because it's cruel (i.e., because it involves the deliberate infliction of pain as part of the punishment), so it may well be unconstitutional. I would therefore endorse amending the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause to expressly exclude punishment for some sorts of mass murders.

His fellow tenured radical agrees. Well, Volokh was always comfortable with torture – I just didn’t know he considered it a desirable part of the criminal justice system of free nations.

This is about as anti-Western as you can get, but somehow I don’t think Feser, Horowitz, and all the other Canon-keepers will give Volkh a hard time. Because while they’re not above using Western Civ as a cover for their inquisitions, they really couldn’t give a shit about it. What do they care about? Hard to tell. I think it has to do with power, and perhaps pain.

UPDATE. Fixed links.

OUR POST-LITERATE FUTURE. I've been having some fun with the whole stupid "protest babe" thing, but some people take it more seriously: Michael Totten shows a bunch of pictures of Lebanese protestors, pro- and anti-Syria, and says that the relative prettiness and happiness of the anti-Syrians' pictures "really do speak for themselves."

Of what do they speak for themselves? Totten's commenters explain:

What you see is the difference b between pure hearts and evil ones. The smile on an evil face can never be as refreshing ad one one a good face. Evil betrays itself for all to see.

...coercive people are almost always mean, angry, repressive, and they think it's all for the greater good...

Look at the faces in each group...A picture tells a thousand stories.
One group looks happy and free,
*******while the other,*********
with their faces covered, looks dark and violent, (why?)...

It almost looks like Men and Elves vs. Orcs from the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, doesn't it? Too bad that in many ways it is. Let's hope the outcome is the same, albeit with a lot less bloodshed.

...I'll go out on a limb and say the Syrian thugs look a heckuva lot like the anarchist punks who riot in the streets of San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland, all the way down to the flag-burning and masks.

In case you're thinking I'm tarring Totten with the imbecility of his guests, the last quote is from Totten himself.

The political issue is a non-issue. Can you show me an article by any prominent American writer, liberal or not, calling for Syria to crack down? Lebanon will get as much freedom as America finds it expedient to insist upon. Ask, if you have a Ouija board handy, Reagan, the hero of Beirut.

So why the photo-heavy posts? My guess is that the blog elite have decided that they have done all the recruiting they can from the literate classes, and that it is time to pitch a little lower. And so they run lots of posts showing cute Cedar Revolutionaries versus grim Assadists. We are in favor of happy people! the crude photo juxtapositions say. Join us! It is the "whiny liberals" theme that has served wingers well since the Age of Safire, but dumbed down for an audience increasingly disinclined to read anything, but trained by the electric shocks of mass media to respond affirmatively to pitchers of purty gurls.

In a few years -- maybe months -- I expect the sites of Totten, Reynolds et alia will be replaced by streaming media of the Parallax Corporation's training film.

THE FUN NEVER STOPS WITH THE FUN FACTORY. Fresh from his bout with a rubber doll, Jonah Goldberg encounters another, but after a brief flail he shows a capacity to learn and gets his buddies to help him wrestle the rubber doll. After they have subdued the doll, Jonah gets some milk, which seems to calm him down.

Sometimes I think they're providing all this entertainment just for me.

STRAINED CREDULITY ON A BED OF PABLUM. Leon Kass, the Chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, seems to be working up a winger consortium devoted to outlawing some forms of genetic research, including cloning and stem cell variants. One might think that the President's Council was already such an organization, consulted as it has been by such as Charles "I'm Not Nuts, You're Nuts" Krauthammer and Robert P. "Unite Organically With Me, Baby" George, but apparently they weren't hardcore enough for Kass.

This has Iain Murray at Tech Central Station in full libertarian regalia, calling for Kass' resignation. As Murray usually defends Administration science policy, this must have been difficult for him, and it shows in the shuffling of his rhetorical feet as he explains himself: he is not for "objectivity," which is after all a word used by Rep. Henry Waxman, but for "procedural justice," which sounds like the same thing, only with an air of mystery wafted over it, as with Arlen Specter's invocation of Scottish Law.

But the kicker is that Murray says Kass' sin has been to defy the will of President Bush:

The merits of Dr. Kass's preferred policies are irrelevant here. The problem is that by hitching his star to a particular set of policies he has breached the trust set in him by the President, whose executive order creating the council asked it to "explore specific ethical and policy questions related to these developments; [and] to provide a forum for a national discussion of bioethical issues."

Does anyone on God's green earth believe that Bush would countenance even a Procedurally Just Council if there were any chance that it might come back with a full-speed-ahead on cloning etc.?

This reminds me of the popular invocations among this sort of Saudi Arabia as a nexus of Middle Eastern tyranny. Of course it is, but the notion of a Bush crackdown on the corrupt House of Saud is hilarious. Still we have guys like Cal Thomas citing "straight-talking Donald Rumsfeld" and Victor Davis Hanson as indicators that the Sauds are in our sights, and comparing the Wahhabi menace to the American Communist Party. One would think the Sauds were being propped up by Ted Kennedy. Yet as long as the Sauds keep the oil pumping, we have every reason to expect that figleaf elections will do to keep Saudi Arabia exempt from our invasions-for-democracy program, and in line for gentle treatment.

A Council that was a set-up from day one is said to have strayed from its original, procedurally-just charter; a tyranny to whom we are friendly is portrayed as a potential target. It makes my head spin just to read it -- I can only imagine what the effect of writing it must be.

DIPLOMACY, SCHIPLOMACY. For our new Undersec'y State for Public Diplomacy, Bush has hired family friend and flack Karen Hughes. The job had previously been held in this Administration by advertising giant Charlotte Beers, which seemed like a bold move at the time, but produced confusion and boondoggles. Beers was replaced by longtime GOP/Big Business insider Margaret Tutwiler, whose 2004 pitch to Congress for funds contains lots of wounded references to budget shortfalls, and uninspiring proposals such as "micro-scholarships" for Middle Eastern kids.

With the elevation of Ms. Hughes, the position has been officially demoted from "sinecure" to "something for a relative or pal who needs a leg up and wants to get home early on Fridays." And "mandate," apparently, means "we don't give a fuck."

"RIGHT" AGAIN. An odd conservative tic I've noticed over the years is their tendency to describe rights as quote-unquote "rights" -- e.g., "There is no end to the so-called rights which can be demanded," and "So-called rights of homosexuals really amount to a campaign to legitimize homosexuality," and "I have no sympathy for the so called 'rights' of terrorists or killers or those that plan it at all," etc.

This schtick is taken a little further than usual today by Arnold Ahlert, whose credentials for his New York Post column are a mystery to me -- maybe someone at the paper thought it would be neat to hire someone who looked like Jerry Della Femina after two years in a survivalist camp. In an article regarding the Atlanta escaped-defendant incident, Ahlert writes, "If reports out of Atlanta are accurate, the so-called 'rights' of an accused person to a 'fair and impartial trial' have passed the point of absurdity."

Yeah, what kind of rights freak thinks you have a so-called right to a 'fair and impartial trial'? That's not even in the Bill of So-Called 'Rights'!

How to explain Western jurisprudence to Arnold Ahlert? Well, Francis Gaffney, speaking at an OSCE Meeting in 2003, said it pretty well (and on behalf of the U.S. Government): "...citizens should be able to expect that their grievances against the state or other individuals or against organizations will be addressed impartially in a professionally competent judicial system. This is a bedrock principle of democracy. In the absence of rule of law and an independent judiciary, democracy cannot take root or flourish. All the guarantees of a constitution are set aside when citizens cannot be assured of the right to a fair and impartial trial."

The relationship of Ahlert's outburst to the alleged topic of his article is tenuous at best. If you want to read something smart about a killing spree, try Julia.

FUN WITH RETARDS. When I saw the first installment of Jonah Goldberg vs. Some Guy, I was perplexed, but by Jonah Goldberg vs. Some Guy II (Extended Remix), I was tickled, because I had hit upon the appropriate visualization of the colloquy: Goldberg in a dark room, wrestling feverishly and at length with a large rubber doll.

No one knows how Goldberg and the doll came into contact with one another -- perhaps Derbyshire had been using it to explain buggery to Kathryn J. Lopez, and left it in Goldberg's office as a gag. But it is clear that upon contact with the doll Goldberg panicked, and now flails so violently that he cannot tell that his assailant is of rubber and cloth, and poses no threat to him. To make matters worse, whenever it starts to dawn on Goldberg that his opponent is not really reciprocating the struggle in any meaningful way, the poor man inadvertently touches a button on the doll's head, causing a tiny speaker there to emit phrases like "that's not conservative" and "we'll be watching." Goldberg, his terror renewed, resumes flailing.

Actually the whole Corner is pretty hilarious this morning. We also have Rick Brookhiser harshing on Lucas and Spielberg, an obvious provocation in this nest of nerds. Brookhiser gets a little too into it, of course, and falls into that sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-God mode to which culturecons are prone ("Junk on stilts... It was excrement you would not put in the compost..."). He argues that Lucas' and Spielberg's creations have been detriments to our culture, and uses the lofty examples of Keats and Shelley to, if not support, then sanctify his thinking ("Keats's and Shelley's imaginations did not match their talents or their intellects," sniff), and -- get ready for the punchline! -- ends by asking, "Thought experiment: post-Lucas, post-Spielberg: Could Lawrence of Arabia be made today?" Lawrence of fucking Arabia! Keats and Shelley aren't quite up to snuff -- now David Lean, he was a giant! In the immortal words of Edmond O'Brien, Jesus wept!

Some of the hilarity comes by proxy. One of the madder Cornerites, Stanley "Save the White Race Through Financial Ruin" Kurtz, sends us off to visit Harvey Mansfield, who is on about manliness and Teddy Roosevelt. Mansfield's man-thing starts with the assignment of political gender roles common among conservative testosteronologists like Mansfield: liberals have been "delivered... to the feminists," while conservatives "sneakily enjoy" TR's "political incorrectness." (What does Mansfield mean by that, I wonder -- perhaps TR's white supremacism? If so they have good reason to enjoy it "sneakily.") Also, "conservatives keep their admiration [for TR] under wraps because they fear the reaction of women should they celebrate his manliness." I guess those creatures we imagined to be female conservatives actually belong to some sort of Ladies' Auxiliary.

Having established his butch bonafides, Mansfield dives into the TR legacy, and what he comes up with does not bear close reading, but do get a load of this excerpt:

Reason is disdained by pragmatism as being prompted by the tender wish that things will somehow fit together on their own. Progress under pragmatism requires an addition of will-power, of manly assertiveness, to reason so that reason, in the form of science, does not construct a boring, peaceable civilization that appeals only to mollycoddles and fails to meet the ambition of humans who want dignity more than peace. The trouble is that the manliness needed to express confidence depends on doubt of reason, yet reason is the source of our confidence in better things to come. When you add manliness to reason so as to make reason more capable, you also subtract from the capability of reason. The danger to progress is that manliness, instead of endorsing reason, will get the better of reason.

I think I saw an early draft of this leaning in a corner of the Second Avenue F-train stop, along with some rags and other personal effects. Then, as now, it seemed a cry for help. Still, the image of a white-coated Professor Mansfield in his lab, painstakingly measuring out the appropriate amounts of Reason and Manliness to give his creature LIFE!, is at least as amusing as the others.

The whole world's a circus, Mike, if you know how to look at it.

BIPARTISAN STATUS REPORT. In case you were wondering how that quest for support from Rush Limbaugh and National Review Online in the fight against the Bankruptcy Bill was going, here are my most recent findings:

NRO suggests (gingerly, and of course by proxy) that the Bill might be good for drug addicts ("...as a common practice of drug addicts, obtained credit cards from several department store chains... I'm completely sympathetic with the argument that this kind of irresponsible build up of debt is not the type of situation where the bankruptcy laws should be used for a 'fresh start'). I can find nothing else there about it at this writing, but keep hope alive!

Rush, insofar as I can determine without giving the scumbag subsciption money, is silent, though his home page informs me that ONLY THE RICH PAY TAXES so I'm guessing he has not rallied to our cause as of yet.

Mind you, this does not mean that a bipartisan blogospheric challenge will not soon strike terror into the hearts of the overwhelmingly Republican House of Representatives. After all, blogs have assisted in the defenestration of people like Trent Lott, Ward Churchill, and Dan Rather (unpopular already at the time of their demise, but that just shows we're in tune with the will of the people) and shown support for various Administration policies (see previous parenthetical phrase). What can we not accomplish? Nothing that has not already been endorsed by the powerful! A mighty fortress is our blog!

I LOST YOU AT THE MOVIES. I have been very inattentive, dear readers, for the past few days, and though there is much excitement afoot on subjects previously considered here, I would much rather talk about some 2004 movies I just now caught up with. Skip this post if you wish, and wait for the next purple-faced rage.

The Village. The trouble with coming late to all of M. Night Shamalamdingdong's movies and knowing how they end is that my attention is diverted entirely away from the whoa-nellie money shots, and toward the virtues of the storytelling and the concepts. I call that trouble because, in the case of Unbreakable, the story wasn't much, and in the case of The Sixth Sense, while I admired the skill employed, I kept giggling at all the scenes in which Bruce Willis spoke to the living -- it turned into parody in my little mental theatre: Oh, so ya won't talk, eh? Givin' me the silent treatment? Well, two can play at that game, sister! The existence of superheroes and supervillains, and of the dead among the living, don't do much for me, unless Tim Burton is working the former and Matsutaro Mizoguchi the latter.

It is kind of sad to see Oscar Winner Adrien Brody acting like an extra from Popeye, and the devices employed to make the Big Trick work (especially that labored language -- the repeated invocation of "medicines from the towns" made me think of The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe, in which the great poet grinds out masterpieces to keep his beloved Virginia supplied with "medicine and blankets") are kind of annoying. But the story moved, and blind Ivy Walker's quest and its attendant sufferings seemed to me much bigger and more meaningful than the conventions of the movie. The reveal at the end wasn't so much "ha ha, fooled you" as a pleasing coda to a modest but worthwhile theme.

Napoleon Dynamite. Greater hearts than mine love this thing. I came around at last, but with some misgivings. The style is pleasing, but not too different -- okay, not at all different -- from what we've seen in the hipper commercials of the day. Yeah, I like bright colors, negative space, and piquantly juxtaposed objects and/or people -- who doesn't? For a while it all looked like Wes Anderson lite, and Wes Anderson is pretty lite already. (Of course, as a former financial-aid preppy, I will always revere Rushmore as a sacred item.) I thought Rick Altergott's "Doofus" covered this ground better. Fuck, Napoleon's uncle was a direct ripoff of one of Stinkhair Stu’s buddies!

But I guess I'm getting soft, because when Napoleon found his bumbling way to coloness on his own terms, I melted. If the test is whether you care what happens to the characters -- and it is -- then this is a success (and, on the convincing evidence of the stupid epilogue provided with the DVD, a success despite itself).

The Manchurian Candidate. If you’ve seen and loved the Sinatra-Harvey-Lansbury version, this new take is almost comically wrong. Silence of the Lambs is lovely, and the idea of a new Demme thriller based on a famous 60s movie must have been an easy sell to backers, but festooning high-tech creepy-crawlies onto the witty old George Axelrod script is like sewing NASCAR decals onto a Coco Chanel original.

The Motorcycle Diaries. In 1952 two bright, attractive young men set out from Buenos Aires to explore South America on a motorcycle. Inevitably, one of them turns into Che Guevara. I almost do mean inevitably, because the character’s sensitivities, apparent by the end of the first half-hour, make his transformation believable, and the rest of the movie makes it real. In classic buddy-movie fashion (I’m thinking of Withnail & I more than Midnight Run here), Ernesto Guevara’s adventuresome accomplice Alberto provides the jam and the joie de vivre, but it’s the Che-to-be who gleans the insights from their journey and the ability to move on. All politics aside (despite the insistence of some Hollywood insiders), this is a beautiful, well-built coming-of-age story in which someone actually comes of age.

Well, that’s it for now. Back to the trenches, ¡hermanos!

AU REVOIR, EAST VILLAGE USA. I saw some art this week: first, the new London and New York stuff at "Art Rock" in Rockefeller Center, and then the "East Village USA" show at the New Museum.

The Art Rock show I caught during the recent snowstorm. The installations were set up in doorless boxcars on the Plaza, except for Rob Fischer's Mirrored House (a, er, little house made of mirrored panels, one of which had been damaged, unintentionally for all I could tell). The Plaza and the boxcars were sparsely populated; the wooden ramps leading into the boxcars were dusted with snow and streaked with slush. Maybe crowding would have lent a festive air to the proceedings, as with The Gates. As it was, the art had to do all the uplifting, and failed dismally. Freezer cases housing concentric, colored neon tubing; an urban Yeti in a dark case with wreckage; a dumpster folded into a paper airplane shape, which, like the glass-plated dumpster I saw at the last Whitney Biennial, revealed nothing except how hard it is to make art out of a dumpster.

I left dispirited. But I looked forward to the New Museum show. I lived in that Village in that time, and, though I was not a painter or sculptor or graffitist, spent many Thursday nights living off the cheap wine and cheese freely available at their openings. I laughed to imagine people I knew staring out from the portraits, full of their lost, youthful glower.

I liked more of the individual artworks on display than I had expected. In the old days there was, Lord knows, a lot of crap, but this is a museum, so someone did some picking and choosing, and on the limited terms of the exhibition it paid off. The George Condo paintings had great flair; so did James Romberger's sketches -- I was sorry to see they used Wojnarowicz's feeble assemblages instead of the masterpieces James made of his writings, but those came a while after the period. I liked the Basquiats and Harings better than I did back in the day, and was grateful for the second look. The Jeserun and Nomi videos reminded me that even in the days when performance art was a terrible nuisance, sometimes a performer made you look up and smile. Even the Richard Kern film looked good to me.

But a lot of the work withered outside its original context. The graffitists' canvasses just sucked. A few small photos -- and a video of Wild Style -- gave some idea of how great their stuff looked in situ, boldy riding subway trains across the grey city skies. Screw conventional wisdom -- those things were beautiful and I miss them. But the paintings are self-conscious and emphasize the crudeness of the artists' ideas. You might as well invite your favorite loquacious bum to do a one-man show on Broadway, or hang your favorite sidewalk chalk artist's work at MOMA. Where they live they are powerful; in the gleam of gallery bulbs, their power crumbles.

Other works suffered a similar fate. The poesies by the outhouse are a piquant thing, a testament to the persistence of beauty. Pluck them and put them in a vase, and what have you got? Flowers that smell like shit. After a quick shock of recognition, the Kenny Scharf canvas was to me just a birth certificate for Drawn Together. The Tseng Kwong Chi photo said nothing except "I am Tseng Kwong Chi." The odd, aesthetically plausible pictures became mere worthies stuck among unworthies; after a while there was no show, to me, anymore -- just survivors and things that had not survived.

It was sad to be reminded that this time and this place were not so magical as the pixie-dust that accretes to my memory of them. Of course I had thought I knew this, but until someone turned on these spotlights the fact was escapable. Though, as I said, there was a better ratio of good to bad at the New Museum than I expected, if the work had been much worse and yet had delivered unto me the spirit of those times, when I ran those dangerous and garbage-strewn streets with a guitar case slung over my shoulder and a spray-painted leather jacket on my back, I would have laughed at the crap as heartily as I did then, spraying wine and cheese and flinching at the expected ejecting pinch of my shoulder, but I would have been happier. As it was I felt even worse about the Rockefeller Center show, and about every shitty show that now couples in my imagination like snowy boxcars from Back In The to the present Day.

CLAP YOUR HANDS FOR CAPTAIN HOOK! Just One Minute marvels that the Bankruptcy Bill is almost a done deal despite the opposition "of Atrios, Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, the Daily Kos, Glenn Reynolds, Jane Galt, John Cole, and many more... what happened here?"

He explains that pro-Bill Congressmen were quick off the mark, while Atrios, Drum, and Marshall (and the New York Times!) were "caught napping." Presumably their complaints would have dispirited the mandate-rich Republicans had they been delivered earlier.

Democrats share blame for this Bill because some of them joined a rock-solid Republican majority in favor. Paul Krugman shares blame,too, because he made "phoney" arguments against the Bill -- intentionally, perhaps; JOM doesn't say.

Also, JOM finally allows, "money talks."

But there is hope:

The CW is that this bill can not be stopped in the House, but they only say that because it's never been done. Besides, an e-mail doesn't even cost 37 cents.

Folks who plan to fight on (don't rush me) ought to check something - where is Rush Limbaugh positioned on this bill? Could he be re-positioned?

And picking up the NRO could help...

Let us recap: to fight back the Bankruptcy Bill pushed through Congress by Democrats, the New York Times, and Paul Krugman, JOM proposes seeking the aid of Rush Limbaugh and National Review Online.

Maybe if we all gathered in the street with cute girls on our shoulders...

SHORTER ANN ALTHOUSE: I wonder how those tree-huggers around here would like it if we shot their cats.

SHORTER JONAH GOLDBERG: What you liberals see as our hypocrisy is rendered null and void by our religious exemption, activated by a professed awareness of original sin. So spare me your accusations -- see, they bounce right off! Focus rather on the Communists who pretend their bullet wounds were caused by someone trying to shoot them.

BLOGOSPHERIC PRESSURE DROP. Chuck Schumer's been fighting hard, as mentioned here earlier, but the fortifications against the Bankruptcy Bill are crumbling:

Republicans pushed aside the final obstacle to passage Tuesday when they defeated an abortion-related amendment to the bankruptcy bill that had impeded it from becoming law in the past... The amendment, sponsored by Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., was voted down, 53-46.

In 2000, Schumer's amendment passed the Senate 80 to 17, with 35 Republicans voting in its favor. This time, only four Republicans backed the change. The dramatic turnaround on the abortion amendment reflected the Republican Senate gain of four seats in last year's elections, giving them 55 seats and a more conservative outlook...

Finally procedural delays against the Bill were ended by a 69-31 vote. 14 Democrats (including Republican favorite Joe Lieberman) joined the majority. Zero Republicans voted no.

The Perfesser's response is a reader's quote and an indeed:

It has occured to me that the bankruptcy bill (which I detest for the same reasons that you have mentioned) would be an interesting test of blogospheric power. Here's a situation where the Democrats are planning to make a major issue out of Bolton's appointment to the UN -- where is crime is merely speaking out loud what most Americans already feel about that place -- while rolling over to the corporate lobby on something most Americans would want some opposition to. If the blogosphere could mount an effective campaign for people to write to their senators, it would mark its emergence as a genuinely independent force in US politics.

The Perfesser's schtick is to talk, if not a good game, then at least a vaguely-populist, plausibly-deniable one -- and then, when the shit starts to fly, blame the only people who did anything to keep it from flying. He did it with gay marriage, even suggesting that Bush's fierce opposition would be good for it in the long run, albeit in a kind of "whee, I'm being counter-intuitive" sort of way.

He's doing it again now. And when the dunning notices and crushed hopes start tumbling out, he'll swing the camera around to some reporter who just got fired and hail the mighty power of the blogosphere. In-fucking-deed.

THE ELEPHANT, THE BLIND MAN SAID, IS VERY LIKE A RACE-KILLING SOCIALISTIC FALLACY. Well, with Stanley Kurtz providing the link, I sorta had a feeling this guy'd be trouble. Like classic Kurtz, Pavel Kohout is on about the withering white race, and how social security schemes are to blame.

But I stood up and took notice when Kohout quoted a citizen who recounts the declining standards of American middle-class life in the late 20th Century:

I am the son of a Pittsburgh steelworks worker. I was born at the end of the Second World War. I have three sisters. Our mother never went to work... yet they could afford to own a house, and our father used to buy a new car once every three or four years. My parents paid for my university education and bought me my first car when I was twenty. We were by all standards part of the middle class, and I was proud of my parents' achievement. (...) Today both my parents have to go to work in order to maintain a middle-class living standard, due to the increase in taxation that has occurred in the past half-century...

And I said, "Hell yeah! Of course the little guy used to get a bigger piece of the pie; unions (of the sort a "Pittsburgh steelworks worker" would know) were strong; America had enough money to accommodate them, and enough left over to keep making the best stuff in the world, and to make it available to a broad range of its citizens. And to help keep it all humming, the rich were heavily taxed.

"Now America is grotesquely in debt; we make crap and import everything; we work, man and wife, like dogs just to keep up; and the rich contribute hardly at all, on the theory that the freeing of their capital leads to 'economic growth' -- and there has indeed been growth in their pesonal and corporate budgets, real estate holdings, and general ability to escape economic responsibilities and leave them to everyone else. So the rest of us get less and less of the pie, and more and more of the bite."

Well, that's what it stirred in me. Here's what it stirred in Kohout:

The tax burden in the United Stated has indeed grown significantly over the past 50 years. The birth rate has been falling proportionately, although not to the critical level that is now current in Europe. The birth rate in the US is nearing the replacement level...

I am fast approaching the point where the expression "What planet are they from?" is no longer figurative.

THINGS ARE GETTING COYOTE UGLY! Pro-Assad forces are fighting back -- and with the blogosphere's own weapons!

Quick, Perfesser -- call the Suicide Girls!

SHORTER JIM LILEKS. I really, really, really, really like it when Cagney shoves that grapefruit into that bitch's face.

WORTH REPEATING. You probably already seen this, but a few bloggers have pointed out that if the scourge of Kansas abortion clinics, Phil Kline, were really looking for abused minors, he might try checking out the live births in his jurisdiction to mothers between the ages of 10 and 16 (!!), instead of fishing through the clinics' files in hopes of finding a crime. While the clowns wring their hands over TV treatments of abortion, the shock-troopers do whatever it takes, including misuse of office, to get what they want.

OLD SCHOOL. Scott of Lawyers, Gun & Money, who is smart and deserves a patient hearing, appears to think my complaints about the changes New York City has experienced in recent years are "snobbery" with "a very strong class element," and, worse, "hipster." I assure him that I have not been hip in many years, if I ever was. I'm so unhip, when you say Dylan, I think you're talking about Dylan Thomas, whoever he was.

In my own fanciful account, I pointed out that there is something lost as well as something gained by the social alterations of the past few decades. Since everyone usually concentrates on how great things are -- look, Madame Tussaud's has replaced porno! The genius of the marketplace (enriched with eminent domain seizures) rules! -- being a contrary sort I focused on the downside.

I like low crime rates and low, low prices, too. But let me point something out: Just because I like old-fashioned New York neighborhoods, and am a snob, does not mean that I only like old-fashioned New York neighborhoods because I am a snob.

If I point out, for example, that the real-estate land-rush has made it hard for dancers, directors etc. to establish theatre spaces anymore in New York, it is not necesarily because I am a whining hippie whose opposition to "creative destruction" is fueled by Marxism and marijuana. It may be because when the City's contribution to American culture is reduced to that which is funded by its most powerful forces -- when the sort of cheap rent in which the Aileys and Ramones of yesteryear flourished goes away -- you get fewer opportunities, more safe decisions, and crummier art. (Compare the arts scene of our times to just about any other since the Second World War. Don't we suck?)

Since I was just talking about art, maybe a lot of you still imagine us in whiny hippieland. Okay, how about this: runaway rents make it tough for people of all sorts to put down roots in neighborhoods. What do you think is better for yourself and your family: a neighborhood of transients, or a neighborhood where people get to know and look out for one another?

None of this means I want to keep indigenous New Yorkers from reaping the rewards of the strip-mall. If anything, I should think the present circumstances would be less attractive to regular citizens than to the shallowly hip: it provides them with a never-closed playground where there are no community standards because there is no community, that will keep entertaining them so long as they or their parents have enough money to keep the ride going.