KONSERVETKULT UPDATE. The Friday after Brad Reed's and my American Prospect article appeared, I could find no film reviews at National Review Online. Shaming works! I thought; advantage: blogosneer!

Hubris, my friends, that's what that was. Conservatives still see culture war in some unlikely places.

The encouraging thing about this Weekly Standard article is it focuses on conservative artists who are actually trying to do work. You may think actor Steve Shub silly to say "I don't want to know what [movie actors'] agenda is in life because the whole idea is that you're supposed to seduce people into suspending their disbelief, just see the character," when of course he's in the article because he has consented to lay out his own agenda ("radical Objectivist") to the reporter -- but at least he's working a venerable show-biz PR hustle (like the actresses of olden times who annnounced they would only do nude scenes if they had artistic merit, whether or not anybody was observably asking them), and I can respect that. If artists can con moneyed wingers into giving them financing -- "the Human Rights Foundation will sponsor Schub's 'Afro-Celtic Yiddish ska' band, the Fenwicks, on a mini-tour this fall" -- I say swindle, comrades, and God go with you.

The reporter, alas, opens the show with a smoke-and-flashpots vision of Hollywood evil: Larry David.

...the very attractive female lead in the musical invites Larry into her dressing room for a quick fling. The liberal New Yorker is game, making out with the starlet until he notices something not quite right: a picture of George W. Bush beside her vanity mirror. Disgusted, he turns away, deciding he'd rather let his gift expire than have sex with a Republican.

To many conservatives, this vignette neatly sums up Hollywood's ideological monomania: Left-wing politics trumps even a good old fashioned roll in the hay.

I'm surprised his editor didn't query this: a TV star turning down sex? Maybe it's part of this "comedy" thing we've been hearing about.

At Red State we are encouraged to consider "Is Fight Club a 'Morally Serious' Movie?" Not necessarily a ridiculous topic, but get a load of author Leon H. Wolf's terms:

The moral objection to the first half of the movie typically goes that the movie is violent, and that violence on the screen is objectionable. This is an idea in which I find little merit, from a Judeo-Christian perspective. Recall that in the Old Testament, stonings (a particularly violent form of execution) were to be performed in front of the entire community, so as to encourage the rest of the community would learn to have the proper fear...

Why all those people in the multiplexes are cheering the Dolby explosions when they should be running in terror to their pastors is beyond me.

Later the author admits that "the movie pays homage to objectionable Rousseauian ideas concerning the primitive state of nature." C.S. Lewis is quoted -- the bit about men without chests. You can smell the rat there. Not all his observations are crazy, but his idea of the "morally serious" comes out of the same stew-pot as a thousand conservative essays on the Dark Age of feminazism and self-esteem. It gives the whole thing an air of peg-cramming to make an obstreperous film fit into depressingly standardized value hole.

And guess who Dr. Helen doesn't like anymore? Drew Carey. He made jokes about Bush, and speciously interpretted data on feminism ("The questions may be phrased in a way that does not allow one to know why the pollee answered the way he or she did"), which is of course vitally important in a freaking TV game show, from which these offenses are culled. Carey "was much more politically incorrect" a few years ago, sighs Dr. Helen; "I wonder what happened to him?" Some commenters suggest his Big Media masters jerked his chain. (Does that explain Leno's Bush jokes?) Another suggests his taste for "pron" is "starting to have a negative impact." Finally someone says "TV is a waste." In the kingdom of the blind, etc.

THE TURNING POINT. Salon runs an interview with Turkish science writer Taner Edis about the parlous state of the sciences in the Islamic world. Edis lays it on the line from the get-go:

Right now, if all Muslim scientists working in basic science vanished from the face of the earth, the rest of the scientific community would barely notice. There's very little contribution coming from Muslim lands.

He's very explicit that religious fundamentalism is the main problem: whereas "Europe got lucky" and shook off Church control of science centuries ago, in Islamic countries religion actively stunts scientific enquiry:

[Q.] I suppose [Islamic countries] could just import the science that's developed in the West. Is this really a big problem?

[A.] Falling further behind in something like condensed matter physics means that you'll have a harder time adapting technologies that are going to be based on this new knowledge of physics. And you're excluding Muslims from the creation of new technologies. It permanently locks the Muslim world into a subordinate position in those aspects of modern life that depend on creativity in technology and science. And this is a huge swath of modern life....

[Q.] ...I'm willing to bet that many Islamic thinkers would say the price of scientific success in the West has been too high. Once science was divorced from religion, you could argue that it was only a matter of time before secular values would triumph, atheism would become a viable option, and the modern world would end up with the rampant materialism and consumerism that we have today...

[A.] This is a dilemma for many people in the Muslim world who are thinking about science and religion... You can find many Muslim thinkers who say that Western Christians made a mistake by allowing science to operate independently of religious constraints. However, that is the way modern science has achieved the success it has. So it's hard to negotiate between these options.

Fascinating article. Guess how Ace of Spades reads it?

What is shocking is the interviewer's combative apologism on behalf of the benighted and backward state of Islamic science -- or pseudoscience, in the main. A science writer for an NPR station, no less.

Watch how the interviewer continues insisting, in the face of an expert telling him "no, no, no" that Islamic religious orthodoxy prevents genuine science. And then set a pillow beneath your jaw as he begins arguing on behalf of creationism -- Creationism, that most hated of all beliefs, to liberals -- so long as the creationism in question is of a suitably privileged foreign, non-western culture. And then it just gets more ludicrous as this supposed writer on science issues for NPR begins arguing for a more humanistic approach to science -- one that incorporates Islamic style religious dogma, apparently -- as preferable to cold, clinical (monstrously successful) Western science.

There's no "right" way to do science, this NPR science writer seems to believe, just different views of it. And, of course, the ultimate moral this story is driving towards is that we can both learn equally from each other.

Go read the article. There's nothing in it remotely like what Mr. Spades describes.

At first I thought maybe Mr. Spades had just misunderstood the devil's-advocate questioning style -- an ancient journalistic device, examples of which appear in the excerpt above. But as I read on, and saw the unquestioning linkage from Ole Perfesser Reynolds, I realized that we were on a cusp of a massive shift: conservatives have actually begun speaking a different language than the rest of us. When we say "creationism bad," they hear "Islam roolz," and tell each other how stupid we are to say "Islam roolz" when what we should have said was "creationism bad."

I'm beginning to get nervous about them. I've thought before that they'd crossed the final frontier, but they've always managed to kick the madness up a notch. This new threshold must surely be the very end -- but I know they'll try to outdo it, and by God, knowing the moxie they bring to such tasks, they might just make it. What will be the bone-chilling result? Will they draw the very fabric of time and space in upon itself, dooming us all? Or will they just start wearing their pants inside out like Dexy's Midnight Runners?

UNEARNED RICHES. Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds links to not one but two articles whose apparent purpose is to tweak silly elitist types. In both cases I can sort of see the point, but the point evaporates when considered for more than a minute, unless you are ferociously dedicated to a particular kind of class war.

Though in our post-Marxist times class war is generally discussed as a liberal phenomenon, conservatives frequently get their licks in, too. In one of the current cases we have rich urban women who resent that they aren't getting all of the "all" they feel they should be getting (with baleful commentary from a rich collegetown woman who resents them), and in the other we have one of those liberal please-mug-me articles in which the author rails against what he professes to be his own tribe; in this instance, the target is the "media liberalist" BBC, and the author "ceased to be a BBC employee 40 years ago" but still feels entitled to an insider perspective and a self-excoriation that mainly hits other people.

There's nothing wrong with this. In fact it can be great fun for participants. But I wonder where that leaves those of us who, though we profess liberal views, have no nannies, and are not movers and shakers at giant media corporations. I feel we're missing out. I live in Brooklyn, drink cheap beer, and have a job in which I am actively discouraged from assailing the institutions which made this country great. Where's my class war?

I suppose that my views, as well as my location in a major metropolitan area, entitle me to some trailing strands of the broad brush that these people use to paint the left. But I still feel left out. Why don't these people occasionally turn their attention on liberals who are not newsreaders, movie stars, columnists, tenured professors, or members of a six-figure power couple? Why don't they mock our crummy apartments, our struggles to balance a budget, our discount warehouse furniture?

I guess the "rich liberal" thing will never get old. It's humorous and perhaps soothing for them to concentrate on wealthy toffs who mouth off about the working stiff, as opposed to focusing on the working stiffs themselves.

HAWKS & SHEEPLE. A while back I said that Dean Barnett's Generation Nine Eleven article showed that pro-war conservatives have shifted their rage almost entirely away from Middle Eastern terrorists and onto Democrats. The President's statement that the Iraq adventure is the "decisive ideological struggle of our time" seemed, in its context last January, to refer to action in the Iraq and thereabouts, but his supporters appear to have reinterpreted it.

If you take a stroll through most of their opinion journals, you will find only occasional references to the war itself -- mostly based on favorable surge updates from milbloggers -- with most of the attention going to the treasonous activities of the domestic opposition.

It seems a bit rich, as the newly empowered Democrats in Congress are more or less rolling over for the President on war-related measures from funding to FISA. But these struggles are in the main not about winning a war, but about soothing the anguish of operatives who cannot understand how the consensus of five years ago slipped away from them.

I don't think they're even interested in changing people's minds anymore. Ten months after the last elections, they're just finding new and more entertaining ways of lashing out.

Here's a ripe example. I can't imagine any dispatch from Iraq -- aside from such citizens as are left alive gathering to spell out a giant WE LOVE YOU W message for an aerial photo -- getting as much attention from them as this amazing Philadelphia Daily News column, "To Save America, We Need Another 9/11."

Having only riffled the work of author Stu Bykofsky -- seen here delivering a fairly generic "Bush Derangement Syndrome" column -- I can't be sure whether he was in this case dead serious or merely provocative. His suggestion that another big attack is needed to unite the country did a lot of provoking, though, generally of the understandable WTF variety.

Less understandable is the response of some conservatives. This one goes for a denialist position that Bykofsky, as a "'mainstream' American political commentator," is merely doing more MSM treason. Others grasp the nettle, and take perverse comfort in the pain.

At National Review Mark Steyn paints this bleak picture:

For a start, the author overstates the immediate unity post-9/11. Even then, there was a big difference between the "righteous rage" crowd and those who wanted to wallow in bathetic weepy let's-hold-hands-and-drone-"Imagine" candlelight vigils and retreat into antiquated tropes about "root causes" like global poverty (notwithstanding the middle-class backgrounds of Mohammed Atta and co). The second time round, there won't even be a momentary veneer of unity...

He quotes approvingly Michelle Malkin, who says "We don’t need healing," which sentiment will come as no shock to her regular readers, and goes on:

We need the half of the country that doesn’t believe we are under threat from global jihad to wake up and smell the suicide bomb smoke.

The answer isn’t to pray for another mass terrorist attack. The answer is to educate the sheeple about our enemies, name them, shame them, fight them overseas, and fight them and their apologists with every fiber of our collective being here at home.

"Sheeple"! No wonder unity is hard to come by. Other unity-building alternatives to a Bykofskian holocaust include "Another Reagan" and, speaking of which, "Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson," with the sad caveat that these worthies "may be able to unite some of the nation, but not all." Well, a little unity is better than none, I guess.

As, for these folks, the war is not the problem, so is ending it not a solution: only a better explainer, one who can penetrate the thick skulls of the sheeple with oratory, is needed. This is at once a hopeful and a grim vision: half a nation, at least, given over to treason, but tractable in the right hands. I wonder how long they'll be content to prescribe mere words to solve the problem?

LIMITED MODIFIED HANGOUT ROUTE. Before she gets to telling her heroic story of how Little Bill Frist operated on Little General Petraeus who would grow up to be thrice Lord Mayor of Baghdad Town, Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan makes a startling analogy:

Normal Americans just want Iraq handled. They want America to succeed: for the war to end in a way and time that prove if possible that the Iraq endeavor helped the world, or us, or didn't make things worse for the world, or us. My hunch: The American people have concluded the war was a mistake, but know from their own lives that mistakes can be salvaged, and sometimes turned to good.

I suspect that if said Americans had seen their entire state invaded and occupied, with thousands killed, streets impassable, water and electricity sporadic, and bombings and beheadings at regular intervals, they might decide that the required salvage job for this "mistake" would have to start with removal of the troops, and the importation of a federal relief agency that, they would fervently pray, was not FEMA.

At Time, Bill Kristol looks for silver linings: "It's true that Iraq is an unpopular war. But hostility to President George W. Bush, or to the war, hasn't spilled over onto the military." Consequently Kristol believes the brave men and women of the Iraqi occupation "will be major figures in American life for the next couple of decades," proving that "The Vietnam era is over. The post-9/11 era is well under way."

Though Kristol implies that the occupation is going well, none of the anecdotes he brings from Iraq are too convincing -- he sees, for example, a colonel "deftly manage the political-economic interactions with local shopkeepers and citizens," which might mean he told them not to worry about the blackout because when the goat milk spoiled they could sell it as cheese. But whether or not these young soldiers have made a real difference in Iraq, they have shown "community building" skills, "sophisticated political-military leadership," and the ability to "operate in a more fluid and volatile environment." Clearly Kristol is hoping that a nice class of future Republican candidates will emerge from the war, able to repeat before crowds of voters their qualifications as possessors of the abstract values Kristol sees in them. If they can get away with that, what they left behind in Iraq won't mean much to anyone.

THE MONEY SHOT. National Review's Jonah Goldberg's consideration of our nations youth is scent-identifiable bullshit, but some passages beg for a smidgen of research. F'rinstance:

The burgeoning “children’s rights” movement — to which a young Hillary Clinton was connected — saw treating kids as peers to be of a piece with the new egalitarianism. Movies as diverse as Taxi Driver, Bugsy Malone, and Irreconcilable Differences fixated on treating kids like adults in one way or another.

What might Goldberg mean by "children's rights movement"? Knowing the depths of his incuriosity, we might reasonably expect he is working from his own publication's 1992 condemnation of Clinton's alignment with the Children's Defense Fund:

She is a member of five corporate boards and is chairman (currently on leave) of the Washington-based Children's Defense Fund...

But she has also acted consistently to reduce the area of parental authority and to make children direct clients of government agencies. On her principles, the state could decide that parents violate their children's "rights" by keeping them out of public schools, or deny them "equal protection of the laws" when they forbid them to do whatever liberal judges think they should be allowed to do. No doubt other implications would be discovered by ingenious lawyers, to the detriment of the family's independence of the state. It's chillingly . . . Swedish.

Gasp! She endeavored to Swedify our children -- which means nudity! And she fought to keep children in school, and subject to hippie-nudist "equal protection of the laws"! Was there no end to her depravity?

Perhaps sensing the lack of observable connection between Jodie Foster's teen prostitute in Taxi Driver and non-fictional disaffected youths, Goldberg lunges for low-hanging cultural signifiers :

The result? Large numbers of kids raised to be like adults have concluded that they want to stay kids, or at least teens. People my age hate being called “Mr.” or “Mrs.” by kids. Grown women read idiotic magazines, obsess over maintaining a teenager’s body, and follow the exploits of Lindsay Lohan. Grown men have been following professional wrestling and playing video games for 25 years.

All that disrespectfulness and video gaming would be a heavy burden to place on Hillary-forced public education, were it not for the admitted assistance of Goldberg himself. And not only does he admit his own demoralizing distaste for honorifics: he adds,

I’m part of these trends. Not only do I still enjoy "The Simpsons," but I’m addicted to shows like "House" and "Grey’s Anatomy."

Yet instead of cutting his wrists in a bunker, as good taste would demand, Goldberg descends to further depths of culture analysis:

Consider that in the old days, "Marcus Welby" and "Ben Casey" were the ideal: selfless father figures in surgical garb, dispensing not just medical advice but authoritative life counseling. Modern-day "House," by contrast, is about a defiantly drug-addicted doctor who admits week after week that he doesn’t care about his patients, but merely about the personal satisfaction of solving a medical mystery. In "Grey’s Anatomy," horribly wounded patients are wheeled through each episode to serve as metaphors for the relationship problems of the residents. Impaled by a steel rod? That reminds me, my boyfriend hasn’t told me he loves me today! The patients often die, but at least the doctors learn important life lessons about dating.

I, too, mourn the loss of Robert Young's paralytic visage on network TV, but it would never occur to me to blame the insolence of teenagers on Hugh Laurie.

Amazingly, Goldberg skims a more meaningful statistic on his way to the snack bar:

Another result is that the generation taught to share and care beyond all precedent has become the most singularly concerned in history with making a buck. A recent UCLA study found that nearly 75 percent of college freshmen think that it’s important to be rich, compared with 62.5 percent in 1980 and 42 percent in 1966.

What Goldberg cannot admit, even to himself, is that the success of the Reagan Administration played a larger role than any TV show in getting Americans of every age to prize material success above all other values, though this result is blazingly evident in the stock market, in the newspaper obsession with box-office grosses, in the rise of financial reporting in mainstream media, and in the increased interest of ordinary Americans in mortgage and interest rates.

If there is any connection between our culture and what some of us consider a lack of respect from the young, Goldberg might have logically begun his investigation with what we might call the money shot. He might have asked youthful entrants to our economy, who cannot easily afford an apartment of their own even with a full-time job, or a decent health-care plan, how that state of affairs affects their interest in making as much money as they can right away, and their feeling toward those of us who were able to rent studios and get our cavities filled without pledging our troth to a corporation right out of school.

But Goldberg's prior conviction that negative developments begin and end with the Clintons and/or network television prevents that line of enquiry. The conservative faith in the free market really is faith, and like other kinds of faith disallows the possibility of negative results.

ANOTHER DAMN DEBATE. There was something nicely old-fashioned about the Big Labor debate for Dems: local t-shirts, crappy sound, folks shouting "louder!" and who knows what else off mike, booing, and some fun pandering contests over who was on the picket lines when it counted.

But old-fashionedness and even pandering only go so far at present, and the AFL-CIO has declined to make an early endorsement, which was never likely but obviously hoped for by Biden, Dodd, and Edwards, who fought for it as if for life itself -- and for at least two of their campaigns it might well have been. Dodd in particular, in his green tie, subtly enhanced Irish accent, and booming tones, looked to be angling for the Labor endorsement for 1952. His alderman at the picnic routine didn't go, though, and I can't imagine how he'll hang in; Biden, whom I still think is running for Secretary of State, will just keep it up till the tank runs dry, as will Edwards, who has more fuel and a chance of being remembered when people get nervous about Clinton.

It's too early for most of the rest of us, too, so the most important part of the exercise might have been the continuing education of Barack Obama. Callow though he may be, he certainly didn't wilt under questioning on his Pakistan remarks. Maybe controversy suits his cause; maybe he benefits from stirring things up and drawing his opponents into something resembling actual debate. Or maybe it only works when the controversy is actually meaningless.

Kucinich should keep up the good work and get his shirt cuffs tailored so he doesn't look like the Artful Dodger. Bill Richardson should go home. And I hope Mike Gravel is lying doggo, ready to spring when the contenders have been rendered soft and weak by his absence.

SERVICE ADVISORY. Sorry for the infrequncy of posting. In the immortal words of the Circle Jerks...



No reason why you should be deprived, though, so here's an article by Brad Reed (of Sadly No!) and myself at American Prospect online. I'm still proudest of my "erotic fiction," but I think this one is pretty good.

IT'S HARD TO BE, HARD TO BE HUMAN AGAIN. Sadlynaut Brad has discovered vintage chatter from the "transhumanist" community -- those forward-looking folks who see the heads-in-jars on "Futurama" and sigh longingly:

If your head is cryogenically frozen today, you will be alive in 2100.

Your mind is a pattern of activity in your brain. The ability to induce that pattern is encoded primarily in your neurons — in which neurons are of which type, and which neurons are connected together. Freezing a brain today in liquid nitrogen destroys many things, but seems to preserve this type/connection info. By 2100 we should be able to scan this info from a frozen brain. If we scan your brain and then build and run a computer simulation of it, someone who remembers being you would wake up and feel alive...

Go ahead and laugh -- many more will take his place! The TransVision 2007 conference convened in Chicago last week. On the scene, Reason reporter Ronald Bailey found participants "wondering if it is more appropriate to refering to the transfer of your mind to a silicon substrate 'uploading' or 'downloading.'" Cryonics was also on the agenda:

Shannon Vyff, the author of the children's book 21st Century Kids and self-described "proselytizing immortalist"... became interested in cryonics when she was experiencing a high-risk pregnancy when she was 21 years-old. She has signed up her children as well, but Vyff says, "I don't tell them that it will work. I tell them that it's a chance."

Further reportage from New City Chicago:

Finally, a speaker approaches the stage to introduce the man of the hour, and after a short, bizarre video featuring a "Star Trek"/James Bond mash-up to transhumanist lyrics like "We can live forever and make everything better!" [William] Shatner takes the stage.

Another keen follower of the man-machine movement is Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds. A few years back the "transhumanist libertarian" Reynolds told us he found that "the Singularity is something to take seriously" -- the Singularity being a transhumanist re-creation myth -- and foresaw "the creation of many millions (and eventually billions) of individuals with powers that would have been until recently regarded as godlike..." Today he notices that William Gibson has grown leery of predicting the future, given the pace of change, and asks, "Does this mean we're already into the Singularity?... If the next 10 or 15 years is that unpredictable, and it probably is, then I'd say we're already into the singularity. "

There are many different kinds of wishful thinking. Who among us has not at times hopefully surmised, despite what reason and experience have taught us, that our negative actions may yet lead to good because some unrelated event would somehow alter our chances of success? More than once I have foolishly concluded, in matters of relationship and career and even simple physics, that things would go my way this time because of a shift in the zeitgeist or luck or my own personal development; yet the odds always seem to favor history and the house.

Similarly, it would seem the Perfesser expects the burgeoning technology of our time to deliver unto him an exalted android immortality. That he might expect technology to improve his life is only logical, but why would he expect it also to lift him out of the realm of the merely human? Technological revolutions have come and gone, yet man has remained man. Why should the tech advances of the Perfesser's time alter that seemingly deathless formula?

The ancients would call hubris. I, being a damned modern, have a different idea. I have followed the Perfesser's devotion to the war in Iraq as a war on terror, and seen where it has led. I notice also what the war has done to our traditional ideas of humanity. The New Yorker recently reported on the offshore torture operations of the American intelligence community. One example was the interrogation used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who, after months in U.S. custody, confessed to several grave offenses, including both the 1993 and 2001 World Trade Center attacks, Richard Reid's attempted shoe-bombing, the murder of Daniel Pearl, and the 2002 Bali nightclub explosion. The New Yorker reported how these confessions were brought about:

According to sources, Mohammed said that, while in C.I.A. custody, he was placed in his own cell, where he remained naked for several days. He was questioned by an unusual number of female handlers, perhaps as an additional humiliation. He has alleged that he was attached to a dog leash, and yanked in such a way that he was propelled into the walls of his cell. Sources say that he also claimed to have been suspended from the ceiling by his arms, his toes barely touching the ground. The pressure on his wrists evidently became exceedingly painful...

Mohammed is said to have described being chained naked to a metal ring in his cell wall for prolonged periods in a painful crouch. (Several other detainees who say that they were confined in the Dark Prison have described identical treatment.) He also claimed that he was kept alternately in suffocating heat and in a painfully cold room, where he was doused with ice water. The practice, which can cause hypothermia, violates the Geneva Conventions, and President Bush’s new executive order arguably bans it...

The inquiry source said that most of the Poland detainees were waterboarded, including Mohammed. According to the sources familiar with the Red Cross report, Mohammed claimed to have been waterboarded five times. Two former C.I.A. officers who are friends with one of Mohammed’s interrogators called this bravado, insisting that he was waterboarded only once. According to one of the officers, Mohammed needed only to be shown the drowning equipment again before he “broke.”

Etc. A human being, of the pre-transhumanist sort, might wonder -- as even some U.S. officials quoted by the New Yorker have -- whether Mohammed's "confessions" were merely an attempt to escape further torture. But one who has left his humanity behind might only be expected to say, "Does anyone besides the liberal media and the Far Left actually care how we treated this murdering bastard? We could tie the sob to a cross and take him around the country to town squares everywhere and give the kiddies a whack at him with a hardball for a quarter a pop, for all I care. And they'd get a stuffed animal if they nail him in the manly bits ... before we hang or shoot him on the National Mall." Or "i can't hear u/i am singing the theme/from green acres."

The Perfesser, whose alleged opposition to torture has always been more potential than kinetic, may have deduced that the best way out of this whole human conundrum might be an upload into a powerful computer with a lifelike silicone shell. Physically he would at least as comfortable as he is in his Toyota Highlander. If he needs adventure, he can have images uploaded from his digital archive. And from there the traditional "bugs" of humanity -- among them conscience, justice, and fellow-feeling -- may be in time forgotten.

UNGAWA, BLACK POWER! I hadn't been to Gates of Vienna for a while, and with fond memories of previous visits in mind I returned today. Much of the current writing is about the dire situation of white people:

It is noticeable how aggressive many Leftists have become against whites, parallel to Muslim immigration. I think the Leftist logic goes something like this: We failed to achieve our Socialist society during the Cold War. The “white,” Western culture blocked our goals. Since a Socialist society is good, those blocking it are evil, hence whites are evil and need to be subdued and destroyed, even if this includes our own sons, daughters and grandchildren. Utopia requires a Villain Class to be smashed and sacrificed. In the global, Multicultural Utopia, this appears to be whites in general.

This causes me to reflect: first, have I been doing my part in the War on Whitey? Being white myself, I have been able to observe Caucasians at close range for some time, yet to my knowledge I have done nothing to dismantle their power structure. Am I a sleeper cell, to be activated on Der Tag? Readers, please advise; in code, it goes without saying.

But I also reflected that the Gateseans write mostly from a European perspective, which is little known to me; it may be that their analysis has more to recommend it than I can judge. So I sought out a passage from a Gates of Vienna U.S. correspondent:

And what about the United States? We, too, have (or had until recently) a common culture, based on a common language, a widely shared religious faith, and shared values. But we are even more loosely connected to it than are our European cousins, since our national founding myth welcomes all newcomers and repudiates traditional aristocratic hierarchies.

At one time each individual state may have approximated a demos. In 1789 Connecticut and South Carolina were quite distinct polities; hence the necessity of a federal structure. But the ensuing centuries have seen the federal behemoth rampage unchecked through the rights and traditions of the individual states. Add to that the customary mobility of the American populace, and the groundwork for the homogenized Multicultural nanny-state has been laid.

Those bastards Lincoln and FDR sold us out, apparently. This may explain the popularity of tanning salons; white Americans might be trying to "pass," and so avoid persecution in homogenized America.

Gates of Vienna is like a worldwide game of Telephone, in which multicultural outrages are transmitted and embellished until the conversation is all about race war.

JUST A FLESH WOUND. The downgrading by some conservatives of the show "24" because of an environmental project its makers are conducting was previously covered here. Now someone at Ace of Spades has treated the subject, and the post is very instructive:

Can a show jump the shark by virtue of something it does off screen? If so, I nominate 24…

This obviously presents a conflict for the left. Sure Jack Bauer is the pop-culture face of torture but on the other hand he’s oh so concerned about global warming. What’s a modern progressive to do?

The "24" news infuriates conservatives, and the AoS author fantasizes the discomfort it will cause liberals.

This shows admirable pluck, or something.

SOFT BIGOTRY. At National Review Jonah Goldberg suggests "lower expectations" in Iraq:

Instead, explained a former administration official, America needs to set its sights lower. We need to keep Iraq from becoming a terror sponsor or safe haven for al Qaeda. The best we can hope for, the consensus seemed to be, is a “Jordan-style” Iraq with a moderate, somewhat reliably pro-American regime that will, on occasion, vote with us in the United Nations. What we need in Iraq is a “strong state” that can assert its will domestically. A Jeffersonian democracy on the Euphrates isn’t in the cards, most agreed.

Refresh my memory: why did we depose Saddam? It sounds like we could have just sent Rumsfeld over to shake his hand a few more times and achieved a similar goal.

SECOND (AND THIRD AND FOURTH ETC.) TIME AS FARCE. Conservative bloggers writing about the Scott Thomas Beauchamp thing have reached the Simon Says stage of analysis. From Confederate Yankee, for example, we get this:

Gavin M. [of Sadly, No!] blasts Charles at LGF for using the phrase, "purported to be written by a soldier." Charles used the "P" word to describe someone hiding behind a pseudonym? Why, that's the exact same thing as directly calling him an impostor, isn't it folks?

One wonders how Confederate Yankee would react if someone described him as a purported heterosexual.

NOT PEACE BUT A SWORD. Rod Dreher thinks the trouble with religion today is it's not masculine enough. After a quote about how there are too many women at services, Dreher preaches:

I believe one reason so many male Christians responded deeply to Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" was because it depicted a masculine Jesus who chose to endure excruciating pain to rescue those he loved. The Christian faith teaches that this is what Jesus did, but somehow the intense physical courage that that act of love required is easy to overlook. Gibson didn't overlook it. The Jesus Christ of his film embodied manliness par excellence: a strong, brave man who was willing to suffer and die to save others. After I saw that film in a press preview, then went to Ash Wednesday services and heard the plush priest give a homily about how Lent is really supposed to be about learning to love ourselves more, I wanted to slug the guy.

This helps me understand the appeal not only of The Passion of the Christ, but also of contemporary action movies in which the hero emerges after numberless beatings and explosions to kick the ass of Evil. This certainly makes The Passion more interesting than I originally thought. Jesus got more savage treatment than even John McClane gets in the Die Hard movies, and in an age before gunpowder. But since the Biblical conventions made it impossible for Gibson's Jesus to go out and beat hell out of his persecutors, The Passion left its audiences to carry a dream of vengeance out of the theatre and into the world. One of Dreher's sources writes that a Mass "must be a certain kind of ritual. It must be majestic, soaring, even martial. It must challenge and call you on." No wonder Dreher hates the happy-clappy stuff: when one's God has been torn to bits, Christian Soldiers go not inward but Onward.

I have generally assumed that the agon of action heroes was something through which fans released the little frustrations of their lives, but I begin to see that for the devout it may actually be an animated version of the Stations of the Cross.

ARSENIC AND OLD LACE. Pretty much everything Peggy Noonan writes here was written better (naturally) by Gore Vidal in 1960:

MRS. GAMADGE. And your two fine sons. They're very attractive and that was a nice spread of them in Life, at the barbecue. Very, very nice. We'll want more of that. But most important, your wife should be at your side at all time. (Mrs. Gamadge rises and hands the empty glass to Jensen.) She must seem to be advising you. The women must feel that there is a woman behind you (Mrs. Gamadge has maneuvered herself into position behind Russell's chair.) as there has been a woman behind every great man since the world began! (Russell, aware of Mrs. Gamadge's presence, rises and crosses to Jensen at L.)

RUSSELL. Alice plans to campaign with me, if...

MRS. GAMADGE. She's a tremendous asset. I don't need to tell you. The women like the way she doesn't wear makeup and looks like a lady, and seems shy...

RUSSELL. She is shy.

MRS. GAMADGE. She doesn't make the women feel jealous. And that's good. Keep her with you, Mr. Secretary, at all times. It did Adlai Stevenson great harm, not having a wife, and trying to be funny all the time. Great harm...

...(Somewhat nervously, Alice enters and starts to cross to Mrs. Gamadage, who to Alice's alarm, starts backing away with a speculative look, taking in everything.)

ALICE. How very nice to see you...

MRS. GAMADGE. (slowly, deliberately) You... couldn't... look... better! I mean it! I like the whole thing... especially the naturally gray hair, that is such an important point with the women. Of course Mabel Cantwell dyes her hair, but she gets away with it because she does such a bad job the women feel sorry for her... (To Alice, cozily) When you're the First Lady just remember this: Don't do too much... like Mrs. Roosevelt. The women didn't like that. On the other hand, don't do too little... like Mrs. Eisenhower. The women didn't like that either. All in all, Grace Coolidge was really the best, bless her heart. My husband had such a crush on her...

Forgive my taking the Dramatists Play Service style, which includes stage directions from the original prompt book. I would so rather be seeing a good play now than paying attention to these idiots.

UP THE FLAGPOLE WITHOUT A SALUTE. Anyone here see the premiere episode of "Mad Men," about the bullshit kings of old Madison Avenue? I did, and though I have my objections (remarkably similar to those of James Wolcott), I'd like to see more, because the subject fascinates me. I puttered around some ad agencies in my freelance career, and took great pleasure in hearing the old bulls' recollections of the era depicted in the show. While doing newsletters for Ogilvy, I dug through some of their archives, which transmitted some of the impatient energy that "Mad Men" is going for. One finding concerned a board meeting at which a large batch of new vice-presidents had been proposed. That title is ubiquitous in advertising now (as David Ogilvy once observed, it is cheaper to give titles than raises), and one of the bulls at that particular meeting appears to have smelled an unhealthful change coming. "Seems to me," he sniffed, "that we're giving helmets to cheerleaders." If "Mad Men" can capture some of this tonal mix of patrician hauteur and homespun wisdom, I might have to get cable.

If you did see the premiere, you must recall the drama over the Lucky Strike acount, in which the client, a George Washington Hill type played by John Cullum, bitterly lamented all the foolishness about cigarettes being bad for you ("I've never been sick a day in my life"); the nervous ad guys tried to ease him into the new reality, till hero Don Draper tap-danced a new slogan based on one of the few points of difference left to discuss ad-wise: "It's Toasted." What do you think that scene was about? Draper's poise under fire? The situational ethics of mid-century advertising? The shift in the business between prose poetry and a crisper kind of nonsense? The difference between research and inspiration?

Whatever you saw, I can assure you the view of National Review's S.T. Karnick will surprise you:

In responding to 1950s revelations about the connection between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, the cigarette companies had been making claims that each one’s product was healthier than its competitors’. The federal government moved to put a stop to it.

That might seem a reasonable response at first glance, but it certainly runs afoul of the First Amendment, and it exemplifies the twentieth-century trend of government increasingly overriding people’s personal choices. This ham-fisted action by the feds resonates, of course, with the current crusade by all levels of government to eradicate cigarette smoking from the United States altogether.

Something else you have to give the old Madison Avenue guys: they were much smoother than the bullshit artists of today.

LINDSAY LOHAN'S "COME TO JESUS" MOMENT. The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger expresses concern -- or is it contempt? It's hard to tell -- for the celebrities who take drugs, whether performance or pleasure-enhancing. At first he seems to think marketing is the culprit:

I now take it as an article of faith that marketing rules the world. Marketing is an ancient business tool, but unlike some other artifacts of the past, product marketing is a perfect fit for the age of electronic mass media. The Web has been marketing's Manhattan Project, and like Iran, everyone wants access to marketing's mysterious, sometimes dark powers...

The players became platforms outside the game for selling shoes, brands "and everything." Like Nascar drivers, the shirts of the Tour de France racers are festooned with product logos. But consumers aren't going to buy stuff promoted by any palooka. Professional athletes were tutored that part of the deal was they had to pump extra hang-time into their personalities. And if they couldn't do that, the guys making the Nike commercials would do it for them. In the early days, journalists derided this as "hype," but even the press eventually signed on, and suddenly lumpen athletes and entertainers had "attitude" and "edge." This was now admirable.

Henninger must have realized at some point that blaming the free market for Barry Bonds is a non-starter in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, so he comes to Jesus -- or, rather, swings Him at the heads of "the thousands of high-IQ people buying all those the God-Is-Dreadful books":

The simple idea that Mr. Bonds and Ms. [Lindsay] Lohan ought to go find something resembling a church to offset the compulsions of modern life drives the no-religion people nuts. If so, they should stop making funny jokes about sprinkling holy water and start proposing an alternative way to learn integrity, self-respect and character that will have a longer shelf-life than "Don't Be Evil."

Our great nation is covered with churches and filled with believers, and ruled by a fundamentalist Christian President, yet Henninger is worried about atheism's deleterious effect on Barry Bonds and Lindsay Lohan.

When I first approached his essay, I assumed that Henninger took movie stars and professional athletes as his subject because people are more inclined to read about them than Johnny Methhead or Jane Crackwhore. Now I think that if he expanded his purview to include ordinary citizens' drug habits among the horrors of atheism, it would too closely resemble a Chick Tract without the saving grace of lurid illustrations to suit the Journal's upscale clientele.

Of course, once Murdoch gets his hands on the Journal, Henninger may never need to be that cautious again.

UPDATE. Flash! Lindsay Lohan, at least, may be closer to redemption than we thought:

Christian pop culture critic Mark Dice insists he knows the cure for Lindsay Lohan’s problems. Jesus.

Dice credits himself for making Paris Hilton find ‘God’ in jail, and is now focusing his prayers on Lindsay Lohan.

“What Lindsay really needs is Jesus. She needs to read the Bible and find out who she is and why she is here. There is a vast black hole in her soul which nothing else can fill. No expensive rehab facility. No jail sentence. No family or friends. Only Jesus can fix what’s wrong” Dice explains.

Maybe Murdoch can just dump Henninger and hire Dice. He certainly has a livelier style.

ANOTHER "COME TO JESUS" MOMENT. I have a little cold and was not wont to post, but Kia Pienso has pointed out to me a new essay by Camille Paglia which has lifted my spirits somewhat.

The thing is hard to synopsize, but let me say that toward the beginning Paglia writes:

A primary arena for the conservative-liberal wars has been the arts.

Sometime later:

I would argue that the route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion.

Then:

Hymnody should be viewed as a genre of the fine arts and be added to the basic college curriculum.

The salutary effect of sacred song on the "the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism" is hinted at in this description of what to unsympathetic readers may appear an outbreak of mass hysteria:

The most influential camp meeting occurred at Cane Ridge in Bourbon County, Kentucky, in 1804. For three days and well past midnight, a crowd estimated to be between twenty and thirty thousand sang and shouted with a great noise that was heard for miles around. Worshippers transported by extreme emotion jerked, writhed, fell to the ground in convulsions or went catatonic. This Kentucky Revival, called the Second Great Awakening, spread through the inland regions of the South and eventually reached western Pennsylvania.

(I pause here to add crucial emphasis, which Paglia's famously logorrheic style denies, to the punchline:)

But the movement never flourished in the North because of its harsher weather.

The 6,425-word essay covers a lot of ground, but we might say the key to it is Paglia's account of the attacks on Chris Olfili's The Holy Virgin Mary when it was shown at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. Paglia blames this lunacy not on the people who made the attacks, but to the "the total failure of curatorial support" by the Brooklyn Museum, who presumably erred in failing to properly instruct a no doubt receptive Mayor Giuliani in African fertility symbology.

The whole thing pretty much goes like that. Examples of religious violence and absurdity are given, and the arts community gets the blame for being insufficiently acquainted with the Bible. While the little jihads are mostly described in coolly descriptive language, the irreligious artists and arts supporters are subjected to the kind of editorial attacks ("Supporters of the arts who gleefully cheer when a religious symbol is maltreated act as if that response authenticates their avant-garde credentials") that are sure make this essay, like many of Paglia's public explosions, a treasure trove for conservative quote trawlers, who will rejoice that somebody in the Academy is talking their language.

HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE. James Lileks reports from an Alaskan cruise about some damn kids who sang badly ("'Y.M.C.A' – a song about anonymous sex, incidentally") in a fucking karaoke bar. Later he goes to a tavern populated by waxwork dummies.

He leaves out the part where Rod Serling explains what happened to Lileks when he took the pig mask off.

GOOD OLD BOYS. The deaths of Antonioni and Bergman came to me as a double whammy from a great distance: I haven't watched their films in years, but both made a lasting impression on me. The astute Terry Teachout had a less than optimal experience revisiting Wild Strawberries in 2003, and it may be that either or both of these giants might look punier to me upon reconsideration than they did in my youth. But my memories of both director's films are clear and happy and I more or less trust them. It may be that I am less prone to disappointment than Terry, or more childish about old loves -- I enjoy Jason and the Argonauts on pretty much the same terms today as I did when I was a child; take that for what it's worth.

As for John Podhoretz' bizarre denunciation of Bergman in today's New York Post, I can only assume the 1970s were so traumatic for him that he feels it necessary to bear his grudges into the realm of excruciatingly bad taste. He certainly seems angrier at those of us who enjoyed Bergman's films than he is at the director himself, declaring that we think art "wasn't supposed to be easy to take or pleasurable to take in. It was supposed to punish you, assault you, scrub you clean of impurities." Well, The Virgin Spring ain't Star Wars, but there is more than one kind of pleasure, and Bergman's Medieval parable, rough as it may be, is well-built, stunningly photographed by Sven Nykvist, and deeply satisfying in its resolution. I don't think you have to be a snob to enjoy it, or to enjoy Max von Sydow's battle with the optical printer at the end of The Passion of Anna, or the recognizable conjugal truths of the contentious couple in Scenes from a Marriage.

For that matter, Antonioni's famous bleakness can be pretty funny, as in the first scene of The Eclipse, in which the most active member of the menage a trois is a rotating fan. I had many reservations about The Passenger when I saw it in re-release a few years ago, but I was never bored: even the misfired pairing of Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider was fascinating, and that last, long unbroken take at the end is exhilarating whether you think the film has earned it or not.

Rank them however high or low you like, but they applied themselves to their visions energetically and consistently and with undeniable craft. That's no small achievement.

HOW BULLSHIT WORKS, PART 5,858,351,117. Psst -- liberals are calling themselves progressives because they want to bring back eugenics via global warming and stem cell research. Pass it on! And if anyone asks, you didn't hear it from me!

(Oops -- almost forgot the glibertarian angle.)

MUST-FLEE TV. I finally watched one of those vlog things. Jesus Christ. Jonah Goldberg and Peter Beinart on comedy? If bongs had floated up into view, that would at least have provided an excuse.

For the record:

Goldberg acknowledged that Jon Stewart is "funny," but "what a lot of liberals are not appreciating is, come a Democratic President, Jon Stewart is going to be pretty funny about Democratic Presidents." Then who'll be laughing, traitors?

Goldberg: "On the whole humor is still much more helpful for conservatives than it is for liberals" because humorists are "equal opportunity guys and I have a couple of friends who are in the comedy business" who are of the fabled "conservative... actually libertarian" tribe, which Goldberg further qualifies as "Giuliani-type."

Goldberg: "People like Michael Moore or Al Franken don't help liberals all that much" because Franken is "dour and dark and kind of nasty," whereas Rush Limbaugh is a big ball of sunshine.

Not content to wait for Jon Stewart to make fun of future Democratic Presidents, Goldberg warns that "Jon Stewart can get into trouble... when he tries too hard to make the left-wing bloggers happy." So when I laugh at Stewart, America scowls? Thank God I don't have cable.

Goldberg says "I don't think it necessarily speaks particularly well for liberals they keep having to recruit comedians to do their arguing for them." I don't know, I thought Slappy White's keynote address at the 1992 Democratic Convention was pretty awesome.

"Humor right now still is in many respects in terms of the way we live our social lives more of an asset for conservatives," reiterates Goldberg, using as examples himself ("I win a lot of points with audiences"), Limbaugh, and noted right-wing funnyman Dave Chappelle.

On the whole Goldberg seems to think liberal humor is creaky and preachy ("going after televangelists and preachers is so old"), while attacks on "political correctness" are as fresh as springtime.

Beinart pretty much gawks at the camera and goes "muh muh muh muh" at intervals.

No wonder Republicans are crapping out of the YouTube debate.

SHUT UP AND SING. TBogg has a lot of fun with this Rockanomics site. I can't say I'm in complete agreement with his assessment. The proprietors are clearly mad, but so what? Music is for everybody, even and perhaps especially the disturbed. Neither the "house band" nor The Right Brothers (whom they closely resemble) are my style, but they don't sound any worse than a lot of other old-fashioned bands. I don't relate to "Open Season," but I don't relate to "Cop Killer," either, and they both rock pretty hard.

The bloggy parts of the site are expectedly tedious, but the parts that have music... have music. My standards are blessedly low, as are the standards of rock and roll itself. Goethe's dictum that there's nothing worse than active ignorance doesn't apply to rock. As a sprat I had my "California Uber Alles" and "Beat on the Brat." These are not works of measured analysis, but cool tunes.

The state of arts education being what it is, I have to applaud anything that motivates people to play. Long-term it may even have a civilizing influence on them. I've seen more than one anti-social type redeemed by immersion in a useful craft. Why might it not work on anti-socialist types?

But that is all to one side; the lively arts need no justification outside themselves. We shouldn't let the odd Horst Wessel Lied sour us on Euterpe. Her charms are for us all.

ATTENTION COMRADES! Previous meme "Scott Thomas does not exist" is no longer operative. Please to substitute "Scott Thomas Beauchamp is a bad man" or "Scott Thomas Beauchamp is Oliver Stone" or "Scott Thomas Beauchamp is a semiotic construct" or "We'll get Scott Thomas Beauchamp fired" or whatever damn thing you can think of.

UPDATE. Comrades show initiative! Conservative commentator tells Beauchamp to " get busy watching your back." I've heard of dolchstosslegende, but I thought it was supposed to go the other way round.

UPDATE II. "Scott Thomas Beauchamp is a bad writer" is apparently the libertarian angle. Armed Liberal quotes a soldier who says if we insist on acknowledging the existence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, our soldiers will never become "a new Greatest Generation" (i.e., useful propaganda for Republicans). Hollywood is blamed. Filmed in der back!

UPDATE III. The libertarian response continues via Jane Galt, who offers a few puzzling restatements of the anti-anti-Beauchamp POV ("Well, everyone who's talking about this is evil"), hems and haws, then, perhaps sensing the quagmire rising about her (and that's another bad thing about us, we use words like "quagmire"), declares:

But as I say, my passing interest in the entire thing, which is animated almost entirely by the fact that I have spied some of the editors involved at cocktail parties, is not very great; somewhere below the neighbour's termite infestation, but above my urgent need for curtain rods and bookshelves. This will almost certainly be my last post on the subject.

Thence, of course, follows another post, in which she talks about famous frauds and the difficulty of fact-checking, which would be a relevant addition if the news were that Beauchamp had been shown not to exist, instead of, well, what actually happened.

This is a customary reframing of events: point out the ridiculous reactions of a number of well-regarding idiots, and you become a "TNR defender." Thereafter, if the New Republic drops a gum wrapper on the sidewalk, so to speak, you will take the fall, at least in the Second Life inhabited by such people.

AFTER THE FARTING: JONAH GOLDBERG CONSIDERED. At National Review, Jonah Goldberg says liberals are hypocrites. Oh, one asks wearily, pre-emptively shielding oneself from the spray of cracker crumbs that will accompany the reply, how so? Because

Liberals in the 1990s argued – sometimes with nuance, sometimes starkly – that the bright line for intervention was genocide... I am open to [John Derbyshire's] prediction that genocide may not be in the offing if we leave Iraq. Ultimately, none of us knows. But what I find fascinating is the growing acceptance among liberals – who are often quite strident about the need to intervene in Darfur, for example – that even if our departure results in genocide, that’s not reason enough to stay... For liberals to have supported Kosovo or who now agitate for intervention in Darfur on the grounds that America should put steel in the words “never again” to suddenly say that genocide largely caused by the US is irrelevant is astounding to me. And it won’t be forgotten. The next time liberals want to stop mass slaughter in country X where we have no interests, it will be pointed out to them that they abetted slaughter in Iraq when our vital national interests were involved.

In other words: liberals like to say they care about genocide, but they obviously don't, because they want to leave Iraq, which stands poised at the brink of genocide (or maybe doesn't, he isn't sure) thanks to the efforts of Jonah Goldberg et alia.

Goldberg is a little like a hostage-taker who, when seized after a ten-hour standoff, wants everyone to know that the hostage negotiator's arguments were really intellectually inferior to his own.

And I'm sorry, but whatever you think of the Kosovo intervention, Iraq makes Kosovo look like we gave everyone in Serbia ice cream and then flew them to heaven in a private jet.

I have a better way of preventing genocide in our client states, and stage one involves the removal of Jonah Goldberg and his colleagues from spheres of government influence via the election to government office of non-retards.

PLEASING THE AFFILIATES. "THINGS ARE JUST AS MUCH FUN AS EVER over at Protein Wisdom," blurbs Ole Perfesser Reynolds. I go over to the recommended site and see a long post by one of the second stringers (PW proprietor Jeff Goldstein being engaged, perhaps, in one of the long bouts of anomie that seem to naturally follow the logorheic fits for which he is known) making jokes about Amanda Marcotte's vagina. I sometimes wonder if the Perfesser and I are seeing the same internet.

I also see one of the Perfesser's pals hauled out to say stuff like "Like some modern opponents of globalization and free trade, the Nazis viewed economics as a zero-sum game between nations." I guess Godwin's Law is just for the little people, or had perhaps been overturned. Now I'm doubly eager for the Second Amendment revival to reach my town, so I can compare my opponents to Hitler while brandishing a gun. Who knows? The Perfesser's life may turn out to have been a net plus in the end.

BABY STEPS. "The Takoma Park city council has unanimously approved a resolution urging Congress to go forward with impeachment proceedings against President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney."

Lotta people working in or for the Federal gummint live in Takoma Park.

One such voter writes:

I’m telling you, it was straight out of Norman Rockwell’s 'Freedom of Speech' in that council meeting tonight. It was really, really good, I was very proud of us.

This looks kinda like an Instapundit post, doesn't it? Hehindeed.

MY YOUTUBE DEBATE. I have a better computer now, and will abuse the privilege by posting YouTube videos.

I've already told you fuckers The Penetrators of Syracuse, New York were gods, and here is the proof:



Whassamatta -- as the janitor told my friend Simon when he recoiled at the taste of angel dust in the joint the janitor had given him -- you don't like it? Okay, down the road I'll provide a Lester Bangs-style essay on the band that will at least confuse you. For now I'll just leave you with a few, harmless words... just a bunch of letters scrambled together, but their meaning is very important...

• The Bobby Fuller Four
• Willie Dixon
• Gunfight at Carnegie Hall
• Metallic K.O.
• Marcel Proust
• Reader's Block
• Andre Breton

But soft, the matin grows nigh! Adieu.

BELIEF SYSTEM. Don Surber reports on Rasmussen reporting that liberal bias rules the news -- sorta:

The current survey finds that 30% of American adults believe the Associated Press has a liberal bias and only 12% believe it leans the other way. Local television news is viewed as having a liberal bias by 30% and a conservative bias by 17%. MSNBC is seen as being a bit more to the left—33% say it has a liberal bias and 13% say the opposite. For CNBC, 29% say it has a liberal bias and 14% say a conservative bias.

Thirty-seven percent (37%) say local television stations deliver news without bias while 36% say the same for the Associated Press.

Hold on: Only 30/30/33/29 percent see AP/local/MSNBC/CNBC news as liberal-biased? After decades of conservative propaganda to that effect? I would have thought the notion would by now have as much support as the existence of angels (79 percent per FOX News), but the current numbers are closer to the 37 percent support FOX found for belief in astrology.

Someone's not getting his money's worth.

In case you're wondering what I mean by propaganda, you can find a good example in Surber's own post:

My pet theory is that as they rise in stature and income, the muckedy-mucks at AP start attending more upscale parties, where the Old Money Socialists and the Scholarly Professors push a political agenda that holds since American institutions are not perfect, they must be replaced.

Who wouldn't be moved by that? I can see it myself: the red velvet curtains, the crystal chandeliers, the mahogany furnishings; the Old Money Socialists in their wide-lapel suits and Pierre Trudeau haircuts sharing a glass of baby's blood with the gowned and mortarboarded Scholarly Professors; and the AP men of rising stature and income (the stature- and income-deprived AP men having been dispatched to comb John Edwards' hair) standing by with steno pads, asking how they might better effect the destruction of American institutions with their wire reports.

And I never get invited to those parties.

UNHINGED. Ann Althouse reacts badly to Greg Sargent's brush-off with a huge, intemperate post that accuses Sargent of quoting her accurately and includes genuinely spooky passages like this:

Now get up off your ass and write a real response to me. I'm sick of these cranked out non-responses that pretend you've suffered no real attack. You have!

Then she demands an apology. How long before Sargent finds a boiled rabbit in his kitchen?

UPDATE. Comments are rather hot. I have to say I cannot endorse cracks on Althouse's appearance. All women are beautiful, for one thing, and Professor Althouse is decidedly not an exception.

I was raised for the most part by a single mother, and am perhaps oversensitive on that account to this sort of thing.

HOT AIR. Roger Scruton makes a case for conservatives as stewards of the environment based largely upon hatred of liberals, represented here by Mao, György Lukács, and other such like. As is typical in such arguments, Scruton uses "little platoon" environmental successes -- like the disposition of a dump in his small Virginia town! -- as an example of how the whole problem can be solved.

It is almost embarrassing to have to point this out, but America's large-scale successes against its large-scale pollution problems have been overwhelmingly won through the use of state power, as with the late-20th-century regulation of air quality in Los Angeles. When people started blowing black snot, LA didn't ask polluters to please think of the children -- county supervisors enpowered pollution control officials to create regulations suggested by scientific research. State officials got in on the act, and eventually so did the Feds. Car and gas companies got the message and began retooling to meet both regulations and regulatory threats. (So much for Scruton's claim that "Environmental movements on the Left seldom pause to consider the question of human motivation.") Neither urban California nor America became as a result unproductive Sovietized wastelands, but healthier places to live.

Scruton wants to portray the effects of industry on the environment as if they were theoretical issues, leading to such humorous sentences as "First, the damage done to our environment is connected in many people’s thinking, and to a great extent in reality, with the activities of business," and to his association of environmentalism with "the cult of the victim." Mises, Burke, and Hayek are mentioned; the current Administration's notorious politicizing of science is not.

The article is merely a pernicious fantasy dressed up with grad-school citations. I wonder if even Scruton thinks it serves any purpose other than filling a need for a "conservative" position on an important issue. They have to have one, I guess, and apparently all it needs to do is criticize what liberals have been doing, not matter how successful they have been.

GET YOUR WAR ON. TBogg sees and raises on the "Generation 9/11 vs. Boomers" narrative that conservatives are starting to push.

I often wonder where such ideas originate, particularly when they relate to absolutely no verifiable facts. I wouldn't be surprised if this one were based upon a stray finding from a recent New York Times poll, which sees the young'uns "leaning left" in many areas, but adds:

But when it came to the war, young Americans were more optimistic about the outcome than was the population as whole. Fifty-one percent said the United States was very or somewhat likely to succeed in Iraq, compared with 45 percent among all adults.

Maybe some ambitious worker in the Ministry of Truth gleaned from this factoid an opening: if the kids are more inclined than their elders, if only by six percentage points, to believe that the Iraq adventure will prove successful, this point of difference might be marketable. Young people famously prefer to dress, rock, and recreate themselves differently than do the old folks: maybe they can be encouraged to see war boosterism, too, as a hallmark of youth.

By this theory, the Weekly Standard and little-read blogs are only a start, and the campaign will follow through in more popular arenas:

• AST Dew Tour Iraq -- the sands of the Mesopotamian desert come alive with the sounds of FMX racing.
• Jackass Baghdad -- Johnny Knoxville walks into an IED.
• And, of course, Qube TV.

If that doesn't work, there's always the draft.

THE NEW MAGISTERIUM. Thers had this first:

Newsbusters discovers that production of the show "24" (heretofore hailed in rightwing circles as double-plus good) is going "carbon neutral," and Kiefer Sutherland is doing a global warming promo.

Newsbusters commenters immediately start downgrading the show.

Thers' analysis is very astute -- their list of beliefs that render one unacceptably "liberal" expands in new and nuttier directions all the time. I would only add, as is my tedious wont, that this is exactly what you can expect when people start thinking about "culture" as something aligned with their political agenda: they recreate little Inquisitions in their minds, and the pleasure centers that should be receptive to such treats as "24" become subject to their review.

Little children are taught right and wrong, and it follows they will learn to disdain certain childish pleasures, such as screaming in public or late at night. But as adults we are expected to evaluate our training; sometimes this means making new rules, alas, but in the main adulthood is about finding sensible exceptions to the strictures of social life (e.g., screaming is acceptable when exhorted by a DJ or orgasm). We don't grow up by sealing off pleasures but by maximizing them intelligently. This development also affords grown-ups the ability to appreciate mixed blessings. Fat Russian novels can be hard to read but rewarding to finish. Disillusionment may deprive us of the joys of childish faith, but we may find new ones in a mature exploration of our beliefs and of the world around us. And we can enjoy the work and even the company of people with whom we happen to disagree.

These guys apparently missed a step.

A heathier approach to the news is found at fansite Blogs.4Bauer's "24 ways that Jack is carbon neutral":

1. Every day he eliminates at least one carbon emitting life form.
2. Cordite is safe for plant life.
3. The Jack Sack, among it’s other amazing properties, absorbs carbon dioxide...

If this be conservative, it's the sort of conservatism I can get behind.

HATE WILL BRING US TOGETHER. Rod Dreher:

In my Dallas Morning News column today, I defend Pope Benedict's recent official statement describing my church as "defective," and Protestant churches as not churches at all...

I end by saying I'd rather be on the side of those Christians and non-Christians who are willing to tell me respectfully that my beliefs about God are wrong, instead of those who would say, for the sake of diplomacy, that nobody can say what's true about God. At least the former know what's really at stake.

This changes my understanding of ecumenicalism: it's about churches united not by common beliefs, apparently, but by a common enemy, the dreaded agnostics -- some of whom aren't even being diplomatic about it -- into a sort of Coalition of the Willing. Though the partners consider each other defective, and even not churches at all, they will yet convene to smite the heathen.

Should these combined forces succeed in overcoming agnosticism, I look forward to their afterparty, which should be very rowdy. (I say "look forward" in a rhetorical sense, of course, since I will thankfully be dead by then.)

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.

Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, and Spike Milligan having a bit of fun in 1972. All the "Last Goon Show" clips at YouTube are well worth it; this one gives Milligan a star turn.

There is no overestimating the Goons' effect on... well, everything.

THE WAR AT HOME. At the Weekly Standard, Dean Barnett speaks to some fine young men in the military, and that's always nice. Less nice is the angle of his story, entitled "The 9/11 Generation: Better than the Boomers."

In the 1960s, history called the Baby Boomers. They didn't answer the phone.

Confronted with a generation-defining conflict, the cold war, the Boomers--those, at any rate, who came to be emblematic of their generation--took the opposite path from their parents during World War II. Sadly, the excesses of Woodstock became the face of the Boomers' response to their moment of challenge. War protests where agitated youths derided American soldiers as baby-killers added no luster to their image...

But now, once again, history is calling. Fortunately, the present generation appears more reminiscent of their grandparents than their parents.

Huh? What can this possibly mean? That more young people are serving their country now than in the Vietnam era? As has been pointed out by the Heritage Foundation (!), vastly more Americans went to Vietnam than have served thus far in Iraq, and I doubt the age difference between the two populations is so vast as to support Barnett's judgment by volume.

Many of the Vietnam attendees were of course forced to "answer the phone" by the draft. Maybe Barnett counts that against them.

The only Boomer boogeyman cited in the story, besides the unnamed Woodstock hippies, is John Kerry. Non-Boomer Charles Rangel also takes a hit. Both have exemplary service records.

That Barnett couldn't get a story about young servicemen into the Standard without this meretricious frame is -- well, I was going to say hilarious, but as I've been writing about it I've come to think that the better word is creepy. These days the dead-enders can't content themselves with even a simple portrait of courage and valor in the U.S. Armed Forces without a heavy dose of hatred toward their domestic opponents. When they say "Iraq" and "the enemy," they're thinking about Democrats. That's their war now.

ME, OR YOUR OWN LYING EARS? Talking Points Memo has uncovered footage of Rudolph Giuliani stirring up the NYPD at a 1992 rally. This is old news to longtime citizens, but it's nice that outlanders have been treated to this glimpse of Giuliani's approach to group dynamics.

Those fans of reasoned discourse, the Ole Perfesser and Ann Althouse, have leapt to Giuliani's defense. Perfesser Reynolds is typically gnomic, but Althouse goes in for heavy deconstruction:

I've watched it. He's not "screaming" "bullsh*t." Nor has he "come unhinged" (as TPM puts it)...

Shouting is not "screaming."

...it's a normal and useful word. I'm sure cops appreciate it. Using it doesn't make you crazy, and I'm positive TPM doesn't think it does. TPM is simply trying to hurt Rudy's chances with conservatives so he won't get the nomination and get his chance to win over liberals...

First, a report on how the cops "appreciated" Giuliani's speech from Sydney Schanberg:

The police were angry at the first African-American mayor of New York, David Dinkins -- in particular his proposal to create an independent, all-civilian review board to examine citizen complaints about police rudeness and rough behavior. The word "nigger" was heard loudly several times from the crowd. A number of protest signs called Dinkins a "washroom attendant." Giuliani in his remarks at the protest, which was organized by the police union, whipped the crowd to even fiercer heights by reciting a list of Dinkins’ policies and, after each one, starting a chant of "Bullshit! Bullshit!" About 1,500 of the demonstrators eventually stormed onto the Brooklyn Bridge and tied up traffic there for an hour...

As to Althouse's semantic argument, that is best understood within the closed system of modern conservative analysis. In that rarefied field, it is liberals who scream -- or, more classically, "shriek" -- and make other unmanly sounds, while conservatives speak only in a deep voices swathed in homespun, which is why Fred Thompson is Giuliani's primary competition for the Republican nomination.

Their arguments are easier to understand in their own special language. Translation to simple English usually wounds them terribly.

I WISH I WAS IN BAGHDAD! HOO-RAY! HOO-RAY! An inspirational tale from Iraq dead-ender Michael Yon:

An Iraqi Colonel was generous enough to offer that he believed it to be just a mistake that “God is Great” was left off the flag that was used on the slides. But the Iraqis all agreed that nobody was going to sign anything that displayed an Iraqi flag without the phrase “God is Great"...

Seeing “God is Great” written on the Iraqi flag might provoke some to protest “Why did we come here just to stand up a country who would write such things on their flag?” But I sat there in that meeting, which was completely civil and professional, and I thought about another flag, the one flying over South Carolina. Some people call that flag “heritage,” while others call it “hateful,” “painful” and “demeaning.” And today in that meeting, I thought about the descendants of slaves who are now top military commanders in the American Army, and in that moment I knew that Iraq could make it.

I think that Yon has hit upon a winner: selling the Allah Akbar flag to conservatives by comparing it to the Stars and Bars. Will the folks at, say, Little Green Footballs go for it? Well, he's already got a taker at National Review.

RAPER'S DELIGHT. Rod Dreher relates the latest sex-abuse headline story, and declares:

What kind of culture produces such boys? [Answer: a culture where men live by the depraved values celebrated by hip-hop music. You raise generations to venerate that kind of morality, and this is exactly what you can expect.]

Then he relates, by way of back-up, a story about his own near-abuse at the age of 14 (i.e, 1981) while with a "school group on a weeklong summer trip to the beach." I admire Dreher's candor, but I have to ask: what hip-hop song inspired his assault? "The Message"? "That's the Joint"? I doubt Schoolly D made it down to Louisiana in 1981. And Dreher himself describes his '81 tormenters as "preppies and jocks," which class of teen morons were not in my experience early adopters of rap music.

Lots of us were bullied in school long before the emergence of the Sugar Hill Gang. Yet some of us think it all comes down to gangsta rap. You don't suppose race has anything to do with it, do you?

"LET'S ROLL" YOUR OWN. Jason Apuzzo is issuing one of his occasional calls for right-wingers to make their own movies. Regular readers will know that I have endorsed such an approach: I would much rather see a Unification Church production of Petreus: Man of Iron than another silly rant about how Hollywood is engaged in treason. It doesn't matter much what particular belly-fire spurs artists to action; whether they are animated by vanity or a cause, if it gets them to do something constructive, and employs talents, it can't be a total loss. Many otherwise shiftless musicians have been driven to greater productivity by fealty to indie rock or the straight-edge scene or the kids who, once united, would never be divided, or some other tommy-rot, and we got some nice records out of it.

Still, at the risk of killing their buzz, I continue to ask what this is supposed to mean:

You would think conservatives/Republicans would understand this. You would think they would’ve learned by now that what happens on the battlefield isn’t the whole story. You would think they would’ve learned a lesson from World Wars I & II (entertainment industry rallies public support for war = we win) or from Vietnam (entertainment industry undermines public support for war = we don’t win), but apparently not.

I have to side with the conservatives/Republicans on this one. No one has ever explained the mechanism of action for this formula to me. When Hollywood was allegedly losing Vietnam for us with such potent weapons as The Strawberry Statement, Nixon was twice elected President. Which is the more reliable indicator of political will? Despite what Apuzzo apparently sees as a barrage of hippie celluloid bombs, the Silent Majority stood by their man and his Vietnamization plan. And political forces, including Watergate (the actual Watergate scandal, not All The President's Men or any other movie), brought about the end of Nixon and of the war.

In the current war, George W. Bush is standing firm and the Democrats can't get anti-war traction -- so the war goes on, despite the existence of V for Vendetta and Jarhead. What happens in Iraq is determined by Washington, not Hollywood. Apuzzo says, "We need stuff like The Passion, stuff like 300, Team America, whatever. Edgy, in your face films." Well, we've had those films; which battles did they win?

Culture works in mysterious ways, yet these guys constantly mistake it for a simple tool -- something like a sledgehammer for the soul. Still, if it keeps them busy...

ANOTHER REASON TO HATE THE OLE PERFESSER. Glenn Reynolds shore finds global warming a knee-slapper when Al Gore mentions it, but when a fellow nerd says we have to get to Mars in 46 years because the world is a-comin' to an end, the Perfesser grows credulous.

I think the Perfesser is secretly rooting for global warming to make the planet uninhabitable, so the technocrats he expects to be ruling the world in ten years will rocket him and all his nerd friends off to a cool outer-space vivarium, where he will enjoy the attentions of Montana Wildhack.

If that doesn't make my case, consider this:

YOU CAN HATE CROCS ALL YOU WANT, but they're damned comfortable, and they protect your toes in a way that sandals don't. That's why I like to wear 'em on dive boats.

Forget, if you can, that this is eerily close to Dan Ackroyd as Tom Snyder telling Mick Jagger on SNL, "I don't wear 'em 'cause they're ladies' things -- I wear 'em 'cause they're damn comfortable!" Surely you good people agree that any middle-aged man who wears crocs should be buried alive under a giant pile of fanny packs and cargo shorts.