IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD, IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD, IN THE NEIGH-EIGH-BORHOOD. Some marvels of North Brooklyn: the playground across Bedford from McCarren Park is where a rough crew of grown men play baseball every summer, fueled by styrofoam cups of beer ferried over from the Turkey's Nest. I've watched them many times, making their diving catches on the unforgiving blacktop, from which they get up limping and belligerent. Today I walked by and saw them, in 36 degree weather, playing a spring training game in grey sweatpants and several layers of t-shirts, the top ones uniformly red. They were a little slow -- from cold or disuse I can't say -- but they were playing hard. When someone missed a play they lustily booed. They'll be more ready on opening day than the fucking Mets.

Up in Greenpoint, where Polish is the primary language, the store windows were festooned with posters for a light middleweight named Pawel Wolak who'll be fighting at Madison Square Garden on March 15. The undefeated (13 KOs) Wolak is, per NewsBlaze, "the 26-year-old grandson of Polish farmers and son of a carpenter who arrived in New York as a teenager," and will face Dupre "Total Package" Strickland at MSG. By "Brooklyn" and "Polish" they mean "Greenpoint," of course, and the hometown crowd is with him. It doesn't matter that they can't spell his nickname properly. They'll go drunk to the Garden with their red-and-white flags, and get more drunk, and come home absolutely shitfaced with their flags draped over their shoulders, as they do after World Cup matches. But they won't make much trouble. Brooklyn Polish drunks are the best-behaved drunks I've even seen.

Sometimes I miss Manhattan, but on days like this I feel like I got promoted.

LATE-TERM REVIEW. Finally saw Knocked Up, the funny movie that was supposed to ban abortion. I kind of liked it, yet still endorse Roe v. Wade. How can it be? Well, I'm a little old to be making important decisions about life based on Hollywood movies, and have been since I was 12.

There isn't much to analyze. It's the old drunk-song of renewal, with a stoner chorus and other modern accoutrements. Chance hookup results in a child, entertainingly disparate parents have to come to terms. A good point of comparison is A Thousand Clowns. In that case the father was an uncle, the kid had long since escaped the amniotic sac, and the female factor came in the form of a social worker. Nonetheless, like the 2007 film, the 1965 film allowed us to savor the pleasures of nonconformity (though in the form of genuine wit instead of flaming boxing glove matches) before truckling to the middle-class values of its audience. And there was a bit more rue attending to the decision to straighten up and fly right for the sake of a child. The 60s really were a different time, though the mild undercurrent of misogyny seems to have survived intact. (Ben's smackdown of Debbie outside the delivery room is one of Knocked Up's surprisingly graceless notes.)

I can understand and endorse the popularity of Knocked Up on less depressing grounds. Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen are hella charming as Alison and Ben. She has enough weird nervous tension under her glamour to suggest deeper needs than her plans can fulfill, which justifies her unexpected decisions. And he has real soul behind his goofball persona: from the outset of the meet-drunk romance, we see that he has the spark of life, and we also see that he's decent and capable. In fact we can see it more clearly than he does, which makes him interesting. (It was very bright of Apatow to have the lugubrious Jason second Ben when they approach Debbie and Alison in the club; Jason's not bad, in his way, but it's immediately clear that he lacks what Ben has, despite their outward similarities.)

Again, there's not much to analyze, but I have to add that the New Yorker's David Denby (who has grown more, um, thoughtful since the days when he was comparing Flash Gordon unfavorably to Robert Altman's "crankily personal" [!] Popeye in New York magazine) is mistaken to worry that Knocked Up "breaks with the classic patterns of romantic comedy" for a new "slacker-striver romance." Dude, Ben got a job. In terms of film comedy Knocked Up isn't "heading off into a brave and uncertain new direction" -- it's going back to basics.

That isn't entirely a bad thing, though the great romantic comedy filmmakers Denby cites do have, so far, an edge on Apatow: we can't be sure people will be watching Knocked Up with affection even ten years from now. I saw Sixteen Candles today. It sucks. I mean, it just sucks. "I can't believe I gave my panties to a geek" is kind of a funny line, but so is "I can't let you in cause you're old as fuck," and after 2012 who's going to appreciate it besides people who nostalgically associate it with their youth? If you ran The Lady Eve or My Man Godfrey today for a non-mouth-breathing crowd, they'd still get it. When Irene says the sponging pianist Carlo will give his concert as soon as he's strong enough, and her put-upon father remarks, "He could give a bang-up concert right now with a knife and fork," idiom would not prevent appreciation of the home truth,

I like to think that, years from now, the charms of Rogen and Heigl will still play. But what about the Paul Rudd-Leslie Mann subplot? Will some graybeard have to explain to younger viewers why Pete is a dick and Debbie is a bitch? Or why they sort of hate each other? Or why, despite all that, they're role models for Ben and Alison? I'm not sure I could explain it now.

But let us chill, dudes: now is now, and Knocked Up is fun. Let's fight over abortion and posterity another time. Or in comments!

MORAL RELATIVISM WATCH. Over at Family Security Matters, an alicublog-approved vendor of high-end nuttage, Bob Parks tells us that maybe students who go crazy and shoot up their classmates and themselves are driven to it by the hostile leftist environment of the modern American college. After a familiar catalogue of campus complaints, Parks suggests:

Evil people don’t kill themselves [and others, apparently -- ed]. Desperate ones do, and at some point we must have an honest dialogue (if possible) about who is making these kids homicidal. And we should start by talking to those who spend more hours per year around our kids than parents do.

Some of you teachers out there have some explaining to do.

Assuming this isn't satire -- Candace de Russy of National Review Online and the Perfesser certainly take it seriously -- we would ask if Parks has similarly examined the root causes of suicide bombing in the Middle East. If not, I suggest he get on it; it would make a hell of a companion essay.

HE WHO FUCKS NUNS WILL LATER JOIN THE CHURCH. At Commentary Michael J. Totten, while admitting that Sam Power's A Problem from Hell was "hardly wishy-washy or leftist" (his highest rating!), says he's still glad* she was kicked off the Obama team for calling Clinton a monster. Go ahead, folks, try and guess his rationale -- no matter how smart or familiar with Totten's schtick you are, you'll still be way off:

If she thinks Clinton is a monster, what does she think about the dictators of Syria and Iran? She doesn't approve of them. That's obvious. But neither she nor Obama has ever been so "undiplomatic" as to suggest that they're monsters.

As with Farrakhan, Obama must not just disapprove, he must also denounce, deplore, double-dog dare and be disgustipated with! Otherwise he cannot be trusted with this nation's highest office.

As for the notion that using stronger words to abuse Hitlery Clinton than dictators is wrong, a quick tour of the blogosphere will show that the Obama campaign staff is far from the worst offender.

Once upon a time, Totten might have pointed this out himself, as proof of his reasonable moderation -- you know, back in the day when he was "defending liberals against attacks by conservatives who lumped them in with leftists," making "The Liberal Case for Bush," and portraying himself as a disgruntled Independent who was driven from the Democratic Party, for which he once allegedly felt a "sense of loyalty or affection," by such extreme SDS types as Oliver Willis.

Now Totten beats up liberals for the Podhoretz family. I would say that Totten was the only one who didn't see this coming, but I have a hunch that he did, too.

UPDATE. I doubt that the comments signed "Michael J. Totten" are really his -- Totten's traditional persecuted tone is missing, which suggests either fraud or extraordinary personal growth -- but they do offer what they call a teachable moment.

The commenter asks if we have read Power's book. The book is neither the subject of the post nor relevant to the case.

Why does he bring it up then? It's the sort of rhetorical feint you're left with when you can't justify your own reasoning, like saying, "Okay, so Mars isn't the furthest planet from the Sun, but I can touch my nose with my tongue."

Logic doesn't cease to be logic because you went to Iraq or read a book. Even if Totten had read the entire contents of the New York Public Library, his suggestion that Obama and Power are soft on dictators because they never called Ahmadinejad and al-Ashad monsters would still be an offense to common sense.

It's a small thing, but it relates to a larger phenomenon. I see a lot of my subjects engaging in rhetorical tactics that at first look merely flawed or inept, but which repetition reveals to be conscious and deliberate. The purpose seems to be to short-circuit logical argument; they're like anti-logic viruses. When I get around to taxonomizing right-wing propaganda tactics, I'll need to include an entry for the Argument from Irrelevant Authority.

*UPDATE II. I should note that Totten didn't say he was "glad" Power was fired. Also that I misspelled Power's name through this post, and have corrected it. I wonder if she's related to Cat?

UNLEASHING MY INNER CONSERVATIVE. Crunchy Rod Dreher summons the angels to deliver unto him an Obama parody: "You can't blame Barack Obama for these creepily worshipful viral video ads will.i.am is doing for him, but they are so dead earnest that they're just begging to be mocked -- and Obama along with it."

He gets his wish from a National Review cats-paw. But it suuuuucks. I mean, it makes P.J. O'Rourke look like George Ade it sucks so hard.

"Where the hell is SPY magazine when America needs it?" cries Dreher, forgiving for the moment the curse words and anti-sharia cynicism that worthy publication favored.

24 hours later, Dreher wonders why some people mock him in the comment boxes. "I consider the possibility of ending this blog," he warns, "because it takes up so much of my time."

They really do want it all: nothing but mockery for their enemies, nothing but approval for themselves. Grown men and women, mind you, often with well-paying jobs -- which, despite the tanking economy, you (and they) know they'll keep.

They're the best argument I can think of for corporal punishment, as their Mommas and Daddies obviously didn't beat their asses hard enough when they were children. I suggest we avail the upcoming election to redress this shortcoming retroactively.

MANUFACTURING INSPIRATION. I was alerted by Ann Althouse to this attempted viral vid for McCain. Althouse thinks it's brilliant:

We see images from the past (intercut with views of the galaxy). Images of Churchill and Roosevelt seem to embody a mystical sense of tradition. Even though I was trying to look at this ad with a critical eye, I kept getting chills. At one point — TR looking out onto a crowd — I thought: This is the feeling of being conservative — it is a deep emotional sense that the past matters and flows into the present and makes sense out of the future.

The problem -- well, one of the problems -- with the video is that "being conservative" apparently means attempting the inspirational charge of Obama videos with some of the same technology but none of the actual inspiration.

I am sympathetic to the McCainiacs in this instance, as my own world view would be best represented by quotes from Carlyle's History of the French Revolution and Celine's Journey to the End of the Night, and the music of Roky Erickson. The McCain vid is no less hallucinogenic and hopeless as a firestarter.

It attempts to marry Churchill's "We will fight them on the beaches" and Theodore Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena" speeches with McCain's noble Vietnam sacrifice. But what gives Althouse "chills" will probably get a chilly reception from voters taught a mere four years ago by the then-powerful Republican Party to disregard John Kerry's Vietnam service. However much conservatives complain about disrespect for our fighting men, their 2004 Swift Boat campaign (and its dry-run, the 2002 campaign against Max Cleland) fatally closed a circle on Vietnam veterans: if liberals made their cause suspect, conservatives -- perhaps never suspecting that they would one day need to cash the chips -- made its servants untrustworthy for electoral purposes.

Conservatives have been aggressive about trying to dispel the smoke and smash the mirrors of the Obama media enterprise. I suppose they think that, because disillusionment has been so successful a part of their stock in trade for years, they will win with it one more time. Maybe so. But when they try to use for their own purposes the kind of media magic they've spent years debunking, they shouldn't be surprised when it doesn't go over.

They will be surprised, of course, or will profess to be. For them, media tricks are something only the other side uses, and when they appear to work, it's outright fascism. But their own media machine cannot be crying "fascist" all the time, and must attempt, when votes are needed, to manufacture inspiration. No wonder their efforts are so feeble. In the real world, when a client has cut its ad agency off at the knees, the commercials always turn out to be crap.

ANNALS OF LIBERTARIANISM, PART 3,488. At The Atlantic, Megan McArdle argues that public funding and use of fire departments is justified because it protects Randian Supermen from the possibility of stray flames from some damn free-rider's house:

We force everyone to pay into fire departments because fires have very bad negative externalities: if your house catches on fire, unless you live on a rural farm, there's a good chance that your neighbor's house will burn down too...

I'm persistently disturbed by the notion that most of our fellow citizens are intellectual children who need to be forced to do what is good for them even at massive cost to their liberty, and ours.

Presumably residents of low-density states like Wyoming and Montana, where widely-spaced homes may burn without affecting others, would happily opt out of this public service racket. Here's an opportunity for McArdle and her fellow big-brains to exploit the natural-born libertarianism of frontier state citizens! Ask them why, if they value their liberty, they pay fire insurance for paupers when they could, at reasonable rates and with money saved from taxes, hire their own personal FDs. The ensuing, untamed conflagrations in Shantytown will provide welcome diversion on dark Big Sky nights, and if your own private firemen fail to perform when the time comes (and what are the odds on that, free citizen? You're too smart to have accidents!), you (or your survivors) can take them, or the corporation that owns them, to court for damages, the way nature intended.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: imagine this woman on a lifeboat.

INDOCTRINATION. With the right to volunteer for Iraq threatened from within and without, schools still celebrate Earth Day? This will not stand, says James Lileks:

Had a long conversation with (G)Nat today about whether all life on earth will be destroyed soon by pollution. She’s in an Earth Day play... It ends with a hymn to nature that makes the Romantic poets look like strip-mining company CEOs...

If she was worried about this stuff, I’d be steamed. It’s no great accomplishment to fill second graders full of dread and existential catastrophe... I know it’s terribly irresponsible of me, but she’s seven, and I want her to play and laugh without heed.

Then it's a good thing his local school board (back before it was taken over by Feducrats) declined to accept Lileks' proposed 9/11 Day script. One set of lyrics has reached my desk:

Since the film to scare us straight
For a new Film Board must wait
Lift your voice in terror song:
New York will be nuked 'ere long
Martyrs call out from the grave:
Give me a gun, show me the cave
Grit your teeth and raise your thumbs
'Til great Red Alert Day comes
Against the world we'll stand alone
They also serve who piss and moan

Me, I won't be satisfied until evil abortionist judges mandate a yearly Feast of Reason for middle schools. If you don't like it, cheer up; it will probably be the kids' last contact with Reason in any form and, like most school experiences, will leave them averse to it for the rest of their lives.

IT DON'T MAKE MUCH SENSE THAT COMMON SENSE DON'T MAKE NO SENSE NO MORE. "Obama's Rezko Ties Escape National Radar," says... CBS News.

To restate: a national news outlet (on its blog, and blogs are widely predicted to replace the dinosaur MSM sometime in 2005) reports that national news outlets are not reporting the story it's reporting. And is linked by the Ole Perfesser, who covers everything the MSM won't, which means everyone has seen it.

So strong is the force of habit that, though the temptation is strong, I probably won't stop writing about such total offenses to logic, if only so I can say that for the record, we tried.

GODZILLA NOT-SO-VS. MOTHRA. Hugh Hewitt interviews Christopher Hitchens:

CH: You [Obama] cannot run as Mr. Clean if you’re doing this. You can’t run as the great, new clean breath of a new generation if you’re doing this kind of old trash in Chicago racketeering, deniable racketeering, and if you’re going to an ethnic-based hate Church, as simple as that, and a Church that endorses a man who even when he answered the question disowning him, you’ll notice Mr. Obama, Senator Obama I should say, refers to as Minister Farrakhan.

HH: Now I don’t know that it’s a hate Church. Have you done your work on this?

CH: Yes, it is. Look, a Church, I’m sorry, a Church that sells Creationist literature, that is essentially ethnic-based, is not…

HH: Well, Creationists don’t hate anybody.

CH: …that likes Farrakhan, who’s a fascist, and Qaddafi…

HH: And they have said that? They have said that? That’s fair.

CH: Yes, they’ve endorsed him…

HH: Liking dinosaurs is not hate.

CH: They’ve done business with Mr. Qaddafi...

Whee, dueling hatreds! Also: Hewitt compares Clinton's call for admittance of Florida and Michigan delegates to "John Calhoun announcing that the Constitution did not matter, that he had reserved the right of nullification," and Hitchens tells us that Latinos won't vote for black people, and that Clinton will "lose the African-American vote decisively" but still be elected President of the United States.

You don't get this stuff on NPR. I still hold out hope that some enterprising broadcaster will give Ross Perot and Jesse Ventura a talk show, but more Hewitt 'n' Hitchens will do nicely, so long as they can keep the coffee mugs filled with Scotch.

McCAINMENTUM. McCain love is sweeping the nation! Or at least that sector comprised of well-placed political gasbags. At National Review Online Rich Lowry marvels:

How incredible is it that Bush and McCain are having a love-fest at the White House, and Democrats are at each others throats in an increasingly bitter contest that involves the hot buttons of race and gender?

Not incredible at all: I suppose the hope was that, in the thick of the "increasingly bitter contest" among Dems, no one would be paying attention. I did notice that McCain's Bush-hug was more perfunctory than last time, and may have to be visually enhanced (or soundtracked with ominous low-cycle hum) in future Democratic campaign commercials. Lowry adds:

Polls show that older whites are relatively immune to Obama's charms. Was there ever a better time—if Obama is the nominee—for Republicans to turn to an old white guy?

Actually national elections are nearly always a good time for Republicans and old white guys. But Lowry is doubly confused: even Cialis ads nowadays feature relatively youthful-looking "older whites," rather than someone who looks like McCain. It's an aspirational thing. Maybe future campaign spots can show John and Cindy in bathtubs, and the tagline, "When the time is right, will you be ready? Vote November 4th!"

Backyard Conservative does his bit, counterintuitively:

And this Dem attempt to paint McCain as a rerun of Bush. Don't make me laugh. McCain a compassionate conservative? Get real.

I guess this means the orgy of compassion we've experienced under Bush is over. Mortgage defaulters, extraordinarily rendered prisoners, flood victims, and holders of worthless American greenbacks -- get ready for real pain!

But you don't have to be a putative conservative to feel the McCainmentum. Over at Slate, Jeff Greenfield tells us that in Presidential politics, "Bugs Bunny always beats Daffy Duck," except if the contest has yet to be determined, in which case Daffy McCain has a clear advantage: "And it may be that McCain will be the candidate to break the losing Daffy pattern, because he'll be able to argue successfully that in a dangerous world, you need a president more in touch with the dark side of human nature." Greenfield's Warner Brothers iconography is insufficiently expansive: with the famously irritable McCain, we may find ourselves in Yosemite Sam territory. Certainly Obama qualifies as a long-eared galoot.

Alas, I fear this race, and American life in general, is more likely to resemble a Tex Avery MGM cartoon.

AND HERE COMES PRIDE UP THE BACK-STRETCH, HEARTACHE'S A-GOIN' TO THE INSIDE. I watched both Clinton's and Obama's speeches last night, and it struck me that each has distinct strengths and either could do well in November. Pretty bland sentiment, right? Well, one thing it has going for it: in that nuthouse we call the blogosphere, you won't hear anything like it. What you will hear is stuff like this:

It's done. We all have to endure this...

I couldn't watch it. Sorry...

To keep oneself from despair, it does seem to me to be valid (and not just Obama spin) to recall that a short time ago, Clinton was supposed to crush Obama in both Texas and Ohio...

I just had a Jager shot, and hope to get drunk very soon.

A MySpace blog for Barry O? No, it's Andrew Sullivan, gazing with wild surmise upon the Clinton victories but unlike stout Cortez, alas, unsilent. As a hideous hybrid of blogger and credentialed pundit -- something like Rosie Grier and Ray Milland in The Thing With Two Heads, but without camp value -- Sullivan gives us with one head the modish indie-cred of Obama enthusiasm, while the other, hidden at present from view, limbers up its tongue for an inevitable reunion with its fellow six-figure blabbermouths in praise of John McCain, maverick. You read it here first! (But probably thought of it much earlier.)

Meanwhile Sullivan's fellow desecrator of The Atlantic, Megan McArdle, liveblogs as if it were a painful duty for herself rather than for her readers. Sample inanity:

8:44: Chris Matthews says that this is between the Starbucks crowd and the Dunkin' Donuts crowd, a nifty political analogy as these things go. Then he utterly spoils it by hastening to add that he likes both kinds of coffee equally well. Myself, I'm an unabashed Dunkin' Donuts girl.

Considering that McArdle uses expression like "fannies about" in everyday speech, I thought she met her caffeine needs with a tiny Cimbali machine concealed in her bodice. After hours of useless prattle, she gets to the money shot:

I keep nodding off, and doubt I'll be able to stay the course. I leave you with the thought that the longer this drags on, the more likely this is to become a Pyrrhic victory for whoever wins.

You bored Megan and enraged her mum! That'll teach you to fanny about! And so she begins her slow turn from Obama supporter to McMaverick. You read it here first! (But probably never cared one way or the other, lucky you.)

Meanwhile those fortunate operatives who never had to pretend-like the black guy go for straight-up bullshit: K-Lo at National Review Online and The Ole Perfesser both suggest that Rush Limbaugh's marching orders to Texas Republicans gave Clinton her Lone Star victory by linking to an article... that says it didn't happen.

I think I'll spend the rest of the campaign saying stuff like "it's a real horse race" and "[leading candidate] has a commanding lead." Easier on you and me!

UPDATE. Sullivan's already giving free advice to McCain:

At some point McCain should also risk a fight with some of the uglier elements of the far right. The country is sick of figures such as Ann Coulter, the conservative columnist. A Republican version of the famous “Sister Souljah moment” in 1992, when Bill Clinton publicly took on an African-American rapper for violent anti-police rhetoric, would signal a willingness to shake things up.

I knew he read me, but I didn't realize he was stealing my material. Credit where it's due, though: with the humor removed, the idea sounds almost plausible. Lucky for me, and too bad for Sullivan and America, that no such "moment" will ever take place.

BATTLE OF THE BRANDS. With a couple of big Democratic primaries coming up, no one's paying much attention to John McCain, which may be what convinced the Ole Perfesser that it was safe to run this reader comment:

If John McCain were to end up running against Obama, he should run a Dwight Eisenhower 1952 style campaign. Washington outsider/insider maverick, military background, the older wiser man, the symbol of sacrifice, patriotism, common sense, and morality, against the young, inexperienced, selfish yuppie narcissist.

The intellectual main stream media elites did not like Eisenhower in 1952, and the MSM and academics derided Ike for the next 40 years or more. McCain cannot try to be as cool or hip as Obama, but he could go with his strengths, and like Eisenhower be the anti-cool candidate, the candidate of the silent majority.

McCain's record of service is distinguished, but does not include winning World War II. Neither is he running after twenty years of Democratic rule.

Symbolic analysis only gets you so far in politics. Having heard lots about Obama's youth appeal, we are bound to hear from the other side encomia on age and experience. Military cred helps with the mix. (McCain's in on the game, as shown by his recent reference to himself "on the point of the spear.")

It may be that we are so saturated with inside political information these days that even amateur analysts begin to think of these races as if they took place in a vacuum, or in a focus group. We're used to thinking of campaign messages as another form of marketing: find the target, flatter their prejudices, and sell them the product. But the kind of thinking on offer here misses even the essential logic of marketing: people have needs as well as psychological profiles. If the patriotic brand of detergent doesn't do the job, even patriots may turn to the hippie brand.

The "change" mantra is so associated with Obama now that we might miss what was brilliant about grabbing that association: people are dissatisfied with their government. The appeal of the change message existed before Obama turned up with cool posters and dazzling speeches. Despite the tactical adjustments that the Obama surge necessitated, Clinton's essential message remains that she is the better candidate to affect change.

I really think McCain's best hope is to tell Bush, Rush Limbaugh, Mike Huckabee, and everyone else to go fuck themselves. He should exacerbate every fight he's ever picked with the Republican Party, and as soon as the nomination is sewn up start telling people how happy he is to have reclaimed the GOP from the scoundrels and con men who had given it such a bad name. At the convention, he should ask Huckabee to pray extra hard for him on his frequent visits to church, because McCain will be too busy kicking ass to attend services. He should tell the bloggers who have complained about his economic positions that he really doesn't know what he'll do in office because he assumes Bush has been keeping two sets of books and he won't be able to tell what measures may be necessary until the team of forensic accountants he will send to Treasury has issued their report.

It's not enough for him to rely on operatives to make his opponents look like just-another-politicians. He'll have to demonstrate that he isn't one himself. It's a tall order, of course, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Keep hope alive!

SHORTER JAMES LILEKS. I played "lead" guitar in a rock 'n' roll "gig." My daughter threw up. Then someone gave me a hard time about taking pictures because of 9/11. For years I was totally freaked out about 9/11 ("Make that another smoking crater in New York"), but I have just played a "gig" and so feel really "chill" about terrorism uptightness by "the Man," and will until the Cool Brother gets too damn close to the White House, whereupon I will go back to being a "racist" "asshole."

TAKE THIS SIMPLE TEST. The Charlotte Allen Washington Post article about how women are stupid has been covered to death, but I would like to make a point-by-point comparison between, on the one hand, women as viewed by Allen, and on the other, recent posts at the manliest site on the internet, Ace O. Spades.

Allen: "What is it about us women? Why do we always fall for the hysterical, the superficial and the gooily sentimental? Take a look at the New York Times bestseller list. At the top of the paperback nonfiction chart and pitched to an exclusively female readership is Elizabeth Gilbert's 'Eat, Pray, Love.'"

Ace. O Spades: "I have watched this video over 1000 times and every time I do, tears well up in my eyes." [Link to Budweiser commercial where people waiting for airplanes clap for soldiers.]

Allen: "Depressing as it is, several of the supposed misogynist myths about female inferiority have been proven true... The theory that women are the dumber sex... is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence"

Ace O. Spades: Apparently finding its 372 male correspondents incompetent to operate PageMill, has new site design done by a girl. "I asked her, 'Look, if you start to play with this, you're not going to make it all girly are you? I don't want it to look like Bethany's MySpace page.' She was offended by the question."

Allen: "I swear no man watches 'Grey's Anatomy' unless his girlfriend forces him to. No man bakes cookies for his dog. No man feels blue and takes off work to spend the day in bed with a copy of 'The Friday Night Knitting Club.' No man contracts nebulous diseases whose existence is disputed by many if not all doctors, such as Morgellons (where you feel bugs crawling around under your skin). At least no man I know."

Ace O. Spades: Post on financially-based agoraphobia ("Some telemarketing asshats have been calling me 10 times a day for over a month now... Its gotten very bad lately... I won't answer the phone unless it rings at least 8 times. Most of the dickheads give up after six, I'm only seen one that persisted to 7 rings.") Post on some book about beating off. Post on the new edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Post linking to clip of crook on motorcycle smashing into a police car in slow motion. (You know, I probably should have just linked to the main site and written "Scroll down.")

Conclusion: While Allen thinks women are good for "tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home," Ace O. Spades demonstrates that men can link to rad shit on the internet, and complain. This comparison, like most, is unflattering to males, but I think our larger paychecks and knowledge of sports arcana more than compensate for it.

MURDER ON THE DISORIENTED EXPRESS. When the Perfesser said "GERARD VAN DER LEUN is worried about Obama" getting shot, I knew something was off. And I was right. Guess whose fault Van Der Leun says it will be if someone shoots the Democratic candidate?

And yet it is more probable that an attempt on Obama will be made than at any time in the last few decades. The country has been infected with Bush hate for so long, and the popular culture has been so infested with dreams and threats and "works of art" imagining the death of Bush, that extending that level of political hate to Obama is trivial.

In December of 2003, I wrote this item:

Where Bush Hate is Heading which began:
A minor moron moment making its way on the talk shows today are the new lyrics by Eminem:
"F--k money. I don't rap for dead presidents.
I'd rather see the president dead. "

Even though written to be brain fade of the month, Eminem's lyrics encapsulate where Bush Hate is heading.

Bush Hate, at the rate of festering intensity currently observable, is headed towards only one singular event: An attempt on the life of George W. Bush by an American citizen.

Since 2003 the incidents that have reinforced and promulgated this cultural poison have only proliferated...

That those who hate Bush have, over the past eight years, made an attempt on the life of Barack Obama more probable is not at all ironic. It is horrifying and to their shame.

It's not remarkable that these people think liberalism is fascism; that's a simple inversion familiar to readers of Orwell. Believing that the imaginary death of Obama is caused by imaginary assassins of Bush -- that sees and raises the Vonnegut of Mother Night. But Van Der Leun's proud offering of his spectacularly wrong 2003 prediction that Bush would be shot as proof of his prescience -- I don't know if Dostoyevsky jamming with Italo Calvino and Philip K. Dick could have come up with that. It is something to consider that our greatest feats of imagination these days are mostly in the field of psychopathology.

UPDATE. Nearly all of Van Der Leun's commenters are choice, but this is my favorite:

I just thought of something that sickens me.

It's obvious that if he were assassinated, as a martyr he'd advance their cause far more than as a mediocre president. They're deliberately PLANTING the idea, hoping some nut will take them up on him, allowing them to come down hard on the entire right.

I really hope I'm developing clinical paranoia.

Like the man said, there has never been anything false about hope.

UPDATE II. In our own comments, R. Porrofatto provides some historical perspective: "Were it not for a toxic mix of GDS (Garfield Derangement Syndrome) and fanatic adoration for the messianic Chester Arthur, we wouldn't have disgruntled postal workers to this day."

FILM DORK. The culture-warriors' work of reviewing films they haven't seen is never-ending, but Dirty Harry of Libertas shows that their efforts can lead to ever greater heights of self-parody:

Frequently I’m accused of jumping the gun and judging a film before seeing it. What’s interesting about this criticism is that it only ever applies to those of us on the right who criticize based on ideology. Even though there’s an entire industry made up of people who pre-judge films and fuss over every detail from the trailer to casting to production rumors… It’s only conservatives who are ever dismissed with, “Well, did you see the movie?” What’s odd about this criticism is that given Hollywood’s decades-long war on all things American and conservative you’d think people would understand we’re on much firmer ground than all the other pre-judgers, but I’m just sounding all defensive now, so let’s get to it…

Then, having previously condemned the alleged politics of the film Iron Man based on comments by one of the actors, he praises its alleged politics based on a "script review" of a second draft.

Mr. Harry is right that I would never give so hard a time to such trailer-trawlers as Film Drunk. Film Drunk is intentionally funny and occasionally posts nude photos of Megan Gale. All of the humor of Libertas comes from imagining what kind of dork spends so much time parsing posters, interviews, trailers, and other flotsam of filmdom for evidence of treason. And Libertas has no nude photos of Megan Gale (though it will on occasion flash you some pecs). It's like comparing the films of Russ Meyer with the Army-McCarthy Hearings.

“Well, did you see the movie?” is a question a sensible person might ask any blowhard who criticizes a film based on its lobby cards or ancillary merchandise, regardless of his politics. The maudlin note of persecution just makes the KICK ME sign easier to read.

UPDATE. In comments kia of Gall and Gumption provides the best explanation I've heard yet for this phenomenon: "Seeing the actual film, knowing the history of Hollywood, knowing any facts at all, are for people who don't know what they are. Once you know what you are you know everything. In fact it's his readiness to dispense completely with his own experience that makes him such a good 'conservative' critic..." A lot of people use the phrase "identity politics" mainly to complain about black people, but I think kia's description suggests a better definition of the term.

HOW YOU GONNA KEEP 'EM DOWN ON THE FARM AFTER THEY'VE SEEN THE FARM? The Ole Perfesser is upset that some alleged New Yorker (not me!) sent him an anti-Southerner email -- upset enough to enlist in support of his native land Michael Silence, who suggests that a lot of New Yorkers move down South to... the Washington, D.C. metro area. Yee-haw!

But seriously, the article Silence links also shows a lot of growth deeper within Confederate territory: "Sixty of the fastest-growing counties were in the South..."

As a casual observer may notice from this more recent U.S. Census press release, though, many of the fastest-growing counties (such as Harris, Maricopa, and Tarrant) contain large cities (Houston, Phoenix, and Fort Worth, in the aforementioned cases), and it is not unfair to deduce -- despite the Perfesser's boundless faith in telecommuting -- that job opportunities contingent upon urban life may have motivated much of the resettlement. It's one thing to light out for the territory and another to follow a job or career path.

That many of these opportunities exist in the Southern states is indeed a remarkable phenomenon. But when people have the money to live where they please, where do they choose to go? The alarming masses of trust-funders currently occupying the choicer parts of my borough suggest that the freedom offered by wealth (according to libertarian philosophy, the highest state of man) leads to Blue State metropolitan areas.

I believe this case was most eloquently made by Paul Henning, who mapped the migratory pattern of rural sharecroppers suddenly blessed with windfall profits:

SHADOW PLAY. Michael Bloomberg announces in the Times he won't run for President; the response in published commentary is, as usual, generous. The response of a grateful nation will probably not be detectable by any but the most sensitive instruments. Bloomberg's money is important, but Bloomberg himself is not. His endorsement, when it comes, probably won't even affect votes in New York City, let alone in those wide stretches of the country in which he is perceived as Some Rich Guy.

I expect his long-range plan is to wait for America's price to come down and then buy it. In the meantime, after he tires of running New York, he may opt to run a state, or purchase a Senate seat or a small foreign country, just to keep his chops up.

SEASONS CHANGE AND SO DO I/YOU NEED NOT WONDER WHY, BABE. "People think seriously about writing their dissertations on Radiohead," says James Poulos, who has written one such for AFF Doublethink and invited me to read it. I'm flattered and abashed, not only because it gives me yet another opportunity to play the old fart.

Poulos tells the Radiohead story in epochal flashes. When the Foo Fighters' "The Colour and the Shape dropped... proto-indie emoheads of the high school thrift-store set worked up wrenching solo arrangements of big single 'Everlong.'" But wachet auf! Then came Radiohead's "Let Down," which "blew off the doors on the nostalgia for the present that had already been the soundtrack of every unrequited emo-boy’s life for what felt like one long year." Well, they all seem long at that age.

But Poulos, "a doctoral candidate at Georgetown," spares moments between orgasmic droppings to notice context. He's aware of "sensitive boys just coming of age and desperately in need of equally sensitive girlfriends... college hookups, group-sex ‘friendcest,’ university counseling, a wavelet of party drugs." In his reading these are not, as we are accustomed to think of them, new players and set-dressings for the latest version of an ever-renewing goatsong: they represent something even bigger -- "sexual and emotional corruption" that needed a cleansing fire: "But in 2001, the summer still seemed endless, and any reckoning with the full import of that line was postponed. And then the war came."

There are many reasons for which I thank God that I had no 9/11 in my younger days, and now I have to add the possibility that I might have been tempted to shake it into the kaleidoscope of cliches through which I viewed my own experience. "9/11 set in motion a long span during which neither adulthood nor The Future ever quite seemed to arrive," Poulos informs us. We got instead "a psychosexual milieu in which satisfaction seems obsolete, mutual manipulation is common currency, and fully contingent commitment defines our interrelationships." Sounds like Spring Break stretching backward and forward into infinity. Is there hope of rescue, grandson? Well of course:

Perhaps, among rock bands, only Radiohead has the credibility to do that in a way that can move people to steer away from the rocks of the age on something resembling their own terms....

For its fans, the band has provided a decade-long emotional field guide, and a ready shield against the turmoil of extended adolescence... slowly and surely it has also risen up as a sturdy cultural touchstone, an icon of an age that even those who failed to worship at its feet will remember.

But it remains an open question whether we can ever really convert the shared escape of spectators and audience members into any sort of permanent redemption. Radiohead has imparted a measure of hope even while chronicling its loss.

Boy, that takes me back. Lately I've been revisiting Pere Ubu -- like Radiohead, a technically danceable but willfully freakish band that had less resonance for the hoi polloi than for the "particularly smart and creative but somewhat adrift" back when that Poulos phrase described me.

Pere Ubu came up in a time before their kind of avant-garde twists could be widely appreciated, and we the smart, creative & drifting had no hope of seeing them into the Top Forty. We instead contented ourselves with the warm insularity of fringe fandom.

From our fringe we shouted extravagant and wounded aesthetic claims for our weirdo heroes to the unlistening world. There was no intrinsic merit in these claims -- what God cares what music you dance to? -- but the older-to-younger-brother transfer nonetheless took place. Like many another sticky social phenomenon, Pere Ubu eventually forged a path for future iterations, by adding enough clicks and grunts to the lingua franca of popular music that clubs, fans, and producers would be less confused and more accepting when they came up thereafter.

Flash forward: there are more colors in the pop paintbox than in decades past, and the eccentricities of a Radiohead more easily pass into the mainstream. Their sardonic lyrics and sonic innovations may puzzle, but they don't put off. So critically engaged supporters are relieved of the need to parlay on behalf of their heroes with the mob. What's left for them is to explain to fans, who have already been enjoying their morose sounds, what it all means.

I hate to tell Poulos, but there isn't that much to tell. Though each Radiohead joint is a lovely, grimy snowflake, in terms of content I can't see any significant difference between their glowerings and those of any avant-gardists from the late 19th Century onwards. What distinguishes them other than personality? Here's Poulos' In Rainbows rundown:

“Nude,” though edited down, still speaks for itself; “Weird Fishes” pick at the bones of an emotional captive; “All I Need” lavishes the subject of “Skip Divided” with tuneful, but no less bestial, monomania. Yorke idles in post-coital reverie (“Faust ARP”), disavows pleasure (“Reckoner”), and gives in again to begged-for adultery (“House of Cards”). “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” places Yorke and That Woman in a centrifugal club: drunk, dazzled, losing control. Eyes lock eyes; words function with all the delicacy of a “sawed-off shotgun;” a collapse into sex will finish the night, but the only path open to the future requires that you “wish away the nightmare.”

Sounds like Franz Wedekind to me. Did Bin Laden teach us nothing? In artistic terms, pretty much yes.

Which is great: if we had to define ourselves by our mortal enemies, we'd be very weak indeed. But a loyal opposition -- that's something worth rubbing up against. While I admire Poulos' spunk, I recommend he switch to the short view. Back in '77 Robert Christgau was leery of Elvis Costello, "suspecting that he is 'New Wave' for people with good taste," in the context of the taste-challenging punk rock onslaught of the time. But Christgau had the good sense, and the good taste, to also approve the critical consensus for Fleetwood Mac and Ornette Coleman. He had his political issues, but he also loved music enough to prefer cross-pollination to stasis or revolution.

Any band may find itself, by dint of talent and circumstance, in the Voice of a Generation role, but that doesn't mean it has much more to say to us than "Hey Hey We're the Monkees" (or "Nay, Nay We're the Refuseniks"), nor that it has a stronger or more long-lasting or valid claim on our attention than the next revival or New Wave. Critics, attend: Awareness of this fact may, counterintuitive as it seems, give your reviews a longer shelf-life.

UPDATE. I am pleased to see that Poulos appreciates Eyes Wide Shut more than most. But here too I would advise: it's not so much about now as ever.

UPDATE II. This post has engendered a lively comments section, much of it devoted to which bands/albums/genres suck, and which rool. The shamanistic power of Jerry Garcia is invoked, and Lester Bangs derided (to which I take exception). Fighting over the scraps of pop culture is fun for graybeards and Now People alike. Since pop can't bring us together, let us cherish that it can bring us to one another's throats in entertaining and non-lethal ways.

SUPER METATUESDAY! Cableless, I could not watch tonight's debate, so I will follow the example of conservatives who review movies they haven't seen and review the debate as it took place in the minds of National Review Online contributors.

Kathryn J. Lopez starts the evening's festivities:

I Never Thought I'd Say This, But... I may be angry on behalf of Hillary Clinton. This debate is starting out with Clinton on the defense. Obama bettter get treated like she is.

It would seem a little late for K-Lo to go feminist-deconstructionist, but apparently neither clocks nor spell-check exist in Rightwing World.

Mark Krikorian: "Maybe I'm not as smart as these two, but I have no idea what they're talking about." Why "but"? Both propositions are clearly correct.

"Could Hillary's problem be that no adviser can say 'save the b**ch for the second half hour'?" Wow, K-Lo, that didn't last long!

Stephen Spruiell tries to go substantive, but the whole thing's about what a b**ch Clinton is. Under the usual Bizarro-World formula, we might reasonably conclude from this that Clinton is winning decisively, but there is a Twilight of the Gods atmosphere about their savagery that renders the usual predictive mechanisms inoperative.

Mark Hemingway just admitted that Alan Keyes is a political tomato-can. Such is loyalty in the late conservative era.

"If Fox did this to Hil, the Left would go ballistic. But this is their hometown channel" -- Andy McCarthy. I don't see how I've remained a doctrinaire liberal so long without access to Wolf Blitzer's morning agenda.

"Without condescension, with a gentle nudge, he puts her back in the kitchen" -- Kathleen Parker. Tomorrow's talking point: Obama wants to put Hil in "kitchen"! Long discussion of Obama's sexism, probably absorbed from his hateful mother.

"I don't think Russert's doing it on purpose, but..." Were I blessed with faith in a Liberal Media, I'd believe this were the trick: to avalanche on Clinton in full view of the NatRev types so that their brains fry trying to comprehend how we, pledged in blood though we are to the evil Clinton empire, could treat her so badly. I mean, it's not as if she were Alan Keyes!

Don't Use the L-Word! [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

I wish there were a candidate delighted to be honestly and authentically called a liberal or a conservative. I like partisanship. To paraphrase Gordon Gekko, "partisanship is good."

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, "You're a stupid fucking load, K-Lo."

So rattled are the NatRev crew by this exercise that those members determined to comment on world affairs afterward lose their usual acuity. "The Washington Times has issued instructions that henceforth it will use illegal immigrants rather than illegal aliens," mourns Andy McCarthy. He completely missed the part about gay "marriage"! I don't really know what really happened in Cleveland tonight, but if it put these guys off their customary homophobic feed, it can't have been too bad.

UPDATE. Ann Althouse: "Obama is confronted with his 'most liberal' ranking. I find his talking tiresome and will need to check the transcript to see if he said anything interesting." I don't know what we'd do without the blogosphere -- probably go down to the tunnels of Grand Central and ask Mole People to extemporize. Meanwhile the Ole Perfesser recommends Stephen Green's "drunkblogging." Sample: "Hillary getting all sarcastic in not a pretty sight. Neither are her hips in that bright yellow jacket." Green gives drunkenness a bad name, and the Perfesser gives a bad name to everything else. Andrew Sullivan is freaked out that Obama only "denounced" Farrakhan, as opposed to -- what? Producing a Farrakhan doll and biting its throat open? Later, chided by correspondents, Sullivan says "I find Obama's calm distancing insufficient" and " I also think this will be used against him and worry that it will become a distracting issue" -- by which he means, "Here's what I'll bring up when I inevitably support McCain." Did you know The Atlantic used to publish Mark Twain? Sh, sh, don't cry -- soon the old crazy man will be President and then we will all join Daddy in heaven.

GLASS HOUSE WATCH. Larry Kudlow at National Review Online:

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed Hillary's erratic, roller-coaster, mood swings these past few weeks?

She's all over the map. Irritable and angry. Manic. Pessimistic and sad. One minute she's shedding tears, the next minute she's shouting and attacking, then she's sarcastically ripping on Obama, and on and on it goes.

So, is Hillary depressed?

Now I'm no psychiatrist, far from it, but I think a simple answer is that Senator Clinton could be depressed. She seems deflated. Down in the dumps.

Look, depression is a serious problem. It's also a multibillion-dollar business. Three of the more popular drugs in the market today to treat it are Pfizer's Zoloft, Eli Lilly's Prozac, and GlaxoSmithKline's Paxil. Maybe Hillary's taking meds, but they're just not working for her? Could that be why she's always attacking Big Pharma?

Maybe she just needs a little toot to get her over the hump. Perhaps Kudlow can pull out his old rolodex and hook her up.

SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS. Megan McArdle:

Leave aside the extreme dubiousness of the proposition that Castro has, in fact, made his countrymen better off. This is like listening to those conservatives one occasionally encounters in the darker corners of the movement who drop gems such as "Well, I don't excuse Pinochet, but Chile wouldn't have a privatized social security system without him."

These "darker corners" apparently include the warrens of Mark Steyn...

But, on the passing of one of the great hate-figures of left-wing drawing-rooms, even those not quite as gung-ho for the old strongman as Peter Simple ought to acknowledge that [Pinochet] left his country much better than he found it.

...and Jonah Goldberg...

I THINK ALL intelligent, patriotic and informed people can agree: It would be great if the U.S. could find an Iraqi Augusto Pinochet... Pinochet's abuses helped create a civil society. Once the initial bloodshed subsided, Chile was no prison. Pinochet built up democratic institutions and infrastructure. And by implementing free-market reforms, he lifted the Chilean people out of poverty.

...and the Wall Street Journal...

[Pinochet] is responsible for the death and torture that occurred on his watch, but had Salvador Allende succeeded in turning Chile into another Cuba, many more might have died.

Late in life it emerged that he had probably stashed millions in personal bank accounts. But he also supported the free-market reforms that have made Chile prosperous and the envy of its neighbors.

...and... but why go on? While you have to go to history, entertainment figures, and blog commenters to find fulsome praise for Castro, you can find such praise for Pinochet right smack dab in the conservative political mainstream even after the old bastard croaked.

Is it a meaningful difference? The old commies certainly hold some romantic appeal for many liberals, and it's bleak fun to use Cuba to twit fans of American healthcare. But you'd have to dig pretty hard to find a liberal who'd really like to see more rather than fewer Communist dictatorships. As we have seen, on the right there are highly-placed commenters who don't even class the Pinochet regime as a failed experiment. They think it went just fine, and look forward to trying it again. Some kids may like to wear Che on their t-shirts, but when conservatives are opened, you shall find "authoritarian government" lying in their hearts.

UPDATE. A commenter points out that McArdle cross-posted to her own blog, where you will find a multitude of "darker corners" in comments.

BEHIND THE LAUGHTER. The Oscars were as cumbersome as usual but, bouyed by the unstoppable force of my office-pool picks (Stewart's crack about film editing was much appreciated), I didn't actually start screaming until the third song from Enchanted. It was the black guy suddenly representing Caribbean flava that did it. (I guess Mencken and Schwartz musta gone to Sandals last year.) Now, if they had also brought out a hip Latina and a kickline of differently-abled princes and princesses, I could have rolled with that, but as it was I had to scream and scream again, scream like Blacula, scream for my life like the Tingler was in the house. And it felt damn good.

Thank God we can set aside the usual bullshit for a night of Hollywood bullshit! Well, not all of us can -- like a troll sticking a headshot of Jessica Alba to the face of his love-doll, rightwing bloggers have to superimpose liberal smackdown scenarios ("And Day-Lewis wins! Clooney’s feeling the snub." Wait, what?) onto any event before they can relax and enjoy. But at least, in their emotional crippled way, they're having fun. And whatever pleasure it gives them to write stuff like "Decent people wouldn’t have even nominated these depraved films," I reap at least double that. So hooray for Hollywood! And next year, let's give the honorary award to Kitten Natividad.

OK, just fire McArdle and let her mother write the blog. It couldn't possibly be any worse.

EVERYONE'S A WINNER! I am usually very bad at picking Oscar winners, and though I've seem more entrants this year than usual, I expect to fare as poorly as ever. But talking big on subjects I don't understand is my stock in trade. So I invite you to lift your self-esteem by comparing your picks to mine.

Best Picture: No Country for Old Men. Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis. Best Actress: Ellen Page. Best Supporting Actor: Javier Bardem. Best Supporting Actress: Tilda Swinton. Best Director: The Coens. Best Original Screenplay: Juno. Best Adapted Screenplay: No Country for Old Men.

(I'm all about Julie Christie, but every Oscar show needs a shocker, Juno is well-liked, and youth must be served. I still can't figure out whether Swinton was good or awful, but she sure was acting. Diablo Cody is the new Callie Khouri.)

Best Animated Feature: Ratatouille. Best Art Direction: Sweeney Todd. Best Cinematography: Atonement. Best Costume Design: Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Best Film Editing: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Best Foreign Language Film: The Counterfeiters. Best Music (Score): Ratatouille. Best Music (Song): "Raise It Up." Best Makeup: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. Best Sound Mixing: The Bourne Ultimatum. Best Sound Editing: Transformers. Best Visual Effects: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. Best Documentary Feature: Taxi to the Dark Side. Best Documentary Short: Freeheld. Best Animated Short: Madame Tutli-Putli. Best Live-Action Short: Tanghi Argentini.

(I'm totally groping here. I figure the big lush romance and the big summer movies require craft awards, Elizabethan clothes are wicked cool, and Michael Moore is fat. The shorts I judged, as I expect most voters do, by their synopses. Everything else is juju.)

THEN WHO ARE YOU? Despite honorable ancestors like Kiss Me Deadly, we strongly identify the paranoid thriller genre with the 1970s, when Hollywood disillusionists postulated in widescreen that everything was a fraud and anyone who got too near the truth would be killed.

When bummers went out of fashion, we still got paranoid thrillers, but they were generally more uplifting and mainstream, like the John Grisham (and Grishamesque) dramas that show up every season with horrible conspiracies, happy endings, and big stars. The hero is usually shown to be on some sort of quest for personal redemption as well as for survival, as befits the modern idea of blockbuster entertainment that makes you feel good about humanity because Tom Cruise rediscovered his sense of purpose.

Michael Clayton is of this sort, but more serious about the redemption angle. [Muted spoilers herewith.] Things still go bump in the night and the deck is still stacked until the hero pulls his ace, but we also get more than the usual amount of information about the hero's personal problems, and a stronger invitation to relate to them.

Clayton, once an assistant DA in Queens, has been for years a "fixer," "janitor," "bagman" (his words, and others') for a big law firm without making partner or even getting the kinds of cases he says he prefers. Clayton hasn't found success because he doesn't really want it: something in him is always rebelling against the amoral system in which he's enmeshed, and he screws himself with debts and bitter self-mockery.

Why not just quit? The debts provide an excuse. But as the details of his work and life mount, we get that Clayton doesn't quit for the same reason many of us don't quit. It's what he knows. He's good at it even if he isn't proud of it. Clayton has a fuckup brother whom he disdains, but with whom he nonetheless disastrously co-invested his "walk-away" money. In a simpler script the blown savings would clearly be a convenient accident that motivates the hero, but here they suggest the complicated psychology of a man for whom duty and responsibility have become means for perpetuating self-disgust.

When one of the firm's "bulls," Arthur, goes off his psych meds in the middle of a big case, Clayton is assigned to fix the situation. Arthur's madness is related to his guilt over a really loathsome case he's been working for years. The madness is his way out, and he senses that Clayton needs one, too. In their desperate conversations, Clayton keeps insisting that Arthur won't listen to him, but Arthur has something to say to Clayton, and it's only when reality begins to resemble Arthur's delusions that Clayton begins to listen.

The dread in Michael Clayton starts before any crime is done. The law offices are properly creepy, the lawyers and their big-time clients are scum. Most conversations drip with cynicism, mendacity, or both. Arthur's breakdown spurs the violence, and the violence wakes Clayton up. In old-school paranoid thrillers, the revelation of conspiracies alerts the hero, and us, to the fraudulent grounds under which we've been living. But it's a new kind of world; he, and we, already knew about the fraud before the story began. What he and we want to know is the answer to the question Arthur poses when Clayton, desperate to normalize the situation, tells him, "I'm not the enemy." "Then," responds Arthur, "who are you?"

The paranoid part of the formula is rich, but the thriller part is less so. The fulcrum of the conspiracy is Karen Crowder, newly-risen head of the odious client company whose case has deranged Arthur. In a tic-ridden performance that is either perfectly awful or awfully perfect, Tilda Swinton shows Karen to be an absolutely demolished personality who glues herself together with corporate bullshit. When the case and her career are jeopardized, she's sufficiently freaked out to go with criminal solutions (there's a lovely scene in which she haltingly matches euphemisms with a contract killer).

Karen is Clayton's opposite: if he's got too much soul to succeed in a soulless world, she's got so little that she becomes a perfect medium for the worst consequences of soullessness. But Karen's not the problem, and by having Clayton take her on, the film ties up the thriller without resolving his dilemma -- as the long, anomic coda seems to admit. Despite its "happy" ending, the film leaves us rattled. Is it because the filmmakers cleverly shifted the burden of resolution onto us, or because they couldn't craft one that suited the movie? We may be forgiven for thinking that having George Clooney take down a yuppie bitch might be a cop-out.

This is Tony Gilroy's first directing credit, and he has maximum support in every area of craft. James Newton Howard's score gently gooses the mood-shifts; as he showed with There Will Be Blood, Robert Elswit has a great eye for pockets of murk, even in sterile environments; Gilroy's brother John cuts the film to suit the patience of its style. Clooney is perfect for the movie. The script's wealth of character detail suits his easy-does-it approach. He doesn't hit the emotional cues too hard, letting the story tell him rather than vice-versa. It's odd: Michael Clayton is ambitious, maybe too ambitious for its own good, but its best features come from artistic restraint.

There, my Oscar duty's done (sorry, but even duty can't drive me to see Atonement). Predictions later.

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT.



Happy Friday!

UPDATE. Holy shit:



Crooks and Liars was just telling me how rare these Neil Young banjo numbers are. But shit, Neil on banjo and Ben Keith? And then Pancho Sampredro on mandolin for "Roll Another Number"? This is truly an age of wonders.

A SOLITARY MAN. James Lileks is outraged by an Atlantic article suggesting, with use of data, that people may now be more attracted to cities than to the burbs. Regular readers will know that I am angered by this trend myself, for rental-market reasons, and pray for urban violence to reverse the flow. But Lileks don't need no stinkin' data, nor does he share my appetite for destruction. Mr. Old Matchbook may be a "city dweller" (an odd claim, given his descriptions of Jasperwood as a wooded realm with a "water feature"), but he rebels against the citified ways of the New Urbanists:

There’s something else about the anti-burb jeremiads that’s never expressed but frequently implied: an offhand dismissal of the need for personal space. If you’re young you don’t need much. If you’re an empty-nester, a condo downtown might be just the ticket. But in the great middle expanse of your life, you not only want to spread out, you want to be left alone, and this is taking on the characteristic of an anti-social sentiment. You should be walking around the dense neighborhood window-shopping and eating at small fusion restaurants. You should be engaged. If you want to watch a quality foreign film, good, but you should not watch it home; you should walk down to the corner theater and see it in a room full of other people, and nevermind that the start time is inconvenient and you can’t pause it to go pee and the fellow in the row behind you is aerating the atmosphere with tubercular sputum. This is how they do things in New York.

This rant contains something I've noticed before about these rightwing guys: their disgust at the prospect of being around other humans. Lileks states that middle-agers "want to be left alone," and even imagines that he is somehow being coerced into watching movies "in a room full of other people" with their "tubercular sputum." No wonder he was so upset when his paper threatened to make him pound a beat! Think of the germs!

I like to consider myself eccentric, even misanthropic. But I don't mind being around people sometimes. I don't think of movie theaters as dens of contagion and forced socialization. Neither am I addicted to hand sanitizers, nor accustomed to think of the poor as disease carriers.

I used to think fear of foreign enemies was what, in this blogospheric age, defined conservatives. Now I'm thinking it's their fear of everyone.

SHORTER PEGGY NOONAN: The Obamas better show some respect or we'll cut off the Affirmative Action program that's allowing them to run for President.

(Extra credit for Noonan's foray into Ebonics:

I wonder if she knows that some people look at her and think "Man, she got it all."

Oh please, please Peggy, keep it up: "Man, that Obama bitch be straight-up wack! I be votin' for Mickey C! He got dissed by the Times, wassup with that?")

NOT ANTI-JIHAD; JUST ON THE OTHER SIDE. Haven't uncovered this particular rock in a while: Gates of Vienna explains "The Case for Temperate Speech" by citing an FBI investigation in St. Louis, prompted by blog commenters who wrote things like "Would be a shame if [a local mosque] were to be vandalized or destroyed. Just a shame I tell you….wink wink STL youth."

Maybe to you and me this seems like the sort of veiled but obvious threat of violence that might reasonably be investigated, and the affected blogs have obviously not been shut down or restricted in any way. But "Baron Bodissey" says:

So why not practice for the days of samizdat that are surely coming our way? What’s wrong with a little judicious indirection?

If the time should come when we are required to dissolve the political bands which have connected us with the existing system, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind will require us to state our case clearly.

In the glory days of the Iraq War I was called a traitor. Yet I never promised insurrection as the Baron clearly has. And Gates of Vienna is still online! Clearly Islamofascism are not as powerful as advertised.

EVERYTHING BUT THE GIRL. I finally got up the nerve to read that New York Times story on McCain. And it is a story, in the old-fashioned sense. As I suspected, the Iseman angle makes it a little sexy, but its shape is practically Jamesian. McCain is portrayed as a tempermental outsider who finds himself enmeshed, against his better instincts, in the graft-heavy world of politics, and struggles against the tidal pull with limited success. The big integrity props he gets from Russ Feingold only sharpen the conflict as McCain finds himself trapped in a world he never made:

At one point, his campaign invited scores of lobbyists to a fund-raiser at the Willard Hotel in Washington. While Bush supporters stood mocking outside, the McCain team tried to defend his integrity by handing the lobbyists buttons reading “McCain voted against my bill.” Mr. McCain himself skipped the event, an act he later called “cowardly.”

The reporters, being reporters, have a bit of fun with the contradictions:

“Unless he gives you special treatment or takes legislative action against his own views, I don’t think his personal and social relationships matter,” said Charles Black, a friend and campaign adviser who has previously lobbied the senator for aviation, broadcasting and tobacco concerns.

But there is also a woman, and that makes the tsimmis and the rush of rightwing pressers to McCain's defense. Even Tucker Carlson has stepped up to say, "I instinctively jump to the defense of anyone whose private life is violated" -- an absurdity, given his Monica Lewinsky pronouncements. It doesn't matter; the blowjob defense is now universal.

People who know how to read demur. Chuckling observes:

In a stunning innovation in Newsspeak, I mean lingusitic cleansing, the New York Times redefined blatant corruption as "confidence in one's integrity" to describe their allegation that John McCain has been fucking his lobbyist and doing her political favors for sex and money.

Note that "political favors" is so ingrained as Newsspeak that it has become almost totally disassociated with its meaning. Poor "corruption's" harshly interrogated letter structure as been linguistically cleansed and now resides in a relocation camp somewhere in the Mideast.

I am in some sympathy with Chuck's take, but spare a kind thought for the Times. The currently common idea that this was a politically-motivated smear is ridiculous; McCain is in a zone where nothing can hurt him, maybe the only such zone he will enjoy this year; who would intentionally smear him now? Even some wingnuts acknowledge this, but portray it as a gaffe by the Times, not a sign of journalistic integrity. Indeed, how could they? For them, reporters not employed by Reverend Sun Myung Moon or Rupert Murdoch are demons motivated only by unthinking hate.

The Times reporters appear to have done the best they could with the facts at hand to write a publishable feature about a Presidential candidate. The stuff about the chick is highly qualified and speaks in context more to McCain's judgement than to his sexual drives. What it is, of course, is very different than what, in the current climate, it has been made for partisan purposes to seem. It's a stretch to say their editors were naive; no one naive gets to that status at the Paper of Record. Still I suspect that the newsmen, buffeted as they eternally are by highly politicized "media criticism," headed toward the only port their profession offered them, and endeavored to produce a story that conformed to what they understood to be journalism. It's just their tough luck that in these parlous times there is no such thing as journalism -- there is only propaganda, either intended or ascribed.

YOU SAY YOU'D CHANGE THE CONSTITUTION, WELL, YOU KNOW, WE'D ALL LOVE TO CHANGE YOUR HEAD. I don't have cable so I couldn't watch tonight's debate. Examining the spoor trail is interesting, though. Here's a National Review Online Corner newbie (but not unknown to aficionados of nuttage):

Both HRC and Obama say they're ready on Day One to be commander-in-chief. That's such an interesting thought. I try to picture HRC saluting the troops. I try to picture Obama doing same. And then I try to picture the troops saluting back. Will they have their fingers crossed behind their backs? I don't have this problem with McCain. Just sayin'.

Civilian control of the military is not a conservative value, I guess. I wonder what other fundamentals of republican government they don't believe in?

NO EASY WAY TO BE FREE.

In the mythology that later came to be created, first by the Liberal opponents of the French and then by Castilian writers, the anti-French risings [in Spain] of May 1808 signaled the emergence of a Spanish national identity. Certainly the Liberals tried to rally support along those lines. The French forces withdrew to areas of Spain they could more easily control, while the Spanish "patriots" summoned to Cadiz in 1810 a Cortes aimed at unifying the national effort. Among its memorable acts were the agreement of a new national charter, the Constitution of 1812, and a decree of 1813 abolishing the Inquisition. When the deputy Augustín Argüelles presented the text of the Constitution, he exclaimed: "Spaniards, you now have a patria!" In reality, there was no patria nor any feeling of national solidarity...

When, after years of virtual civil war, the French eventually withdrew from Spain and Ferdinand VIII was restored to his throne in the spring of 1814, the new king annulled the Constitution, proscribed the Cortes deputies who had voted for it, and restored the Inquisition. He became identified with an older vision of Spain, a traditional way of exercising political power (known as 'absolutism'), and a preference for time-honoured customs, culture and belief. It was a tendency that coincided with dislike for the French, and earned Ferdinand massive popular support.

This is from Henry Kamen's The Disinherited: Exile and the Making of Spanish Culture 1492-1975, which I'm presently working through. Like most history, it reminds me that progress is hard. Spain, in Kamen's reading, was long and obstinately resistant to the Enlightenment trends that went more easily through the rest of Western Europe; its idea of liberalization was to throw out the Jesuits and retain the Inquisition. Spain got farther, eventually, but it was a hell of a slog.

Here in a younger, happier country, we have instruments that give freedom an advantage, but even in this season of hope let us not forget that the struggle in which we are engaged is best measured not in electoral cycles but in generations. There's a lot to like about 2008, but things may yet go badly, and even if they go well there will certainly be trouble down the road.

Naturally we laugh at throwbacks who pray for our failure -- what sensible person wouldn't? -- but let's not forget that they're motivated to work for our failure, too, even when a neutral observer would consider them licked. Their preferred way of governance is justly unpopular, but they have worked their way back from unpopularity before, and still have the machinery in place that got them, and us, to this sorry pass in the first place. Even their stated goal of standing "athwart history, yelling 'Stop!'" is deceptively modest; their real purpose is to drive the whole shebang as far back as possible -- yea, even unto the Middle Ages.

The thing that's called change is at best a pickaxe working at a mountain of ignorance. It's a strange thing for me to be saying, but whatever goes down, try not to be too discouraged.

BIG-TIME NEGOTIATORS, FALSE HEALERS AND WOMAN-HATERS. A bride wants her wedding dress to reveal the tattoo on her back, and does not feel the need to appear virginal on her wedding day. So Rod Dreher calls her a slut.

It takes hours, and a visit from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to make Dreher retract the slur, though he still accuses the bride of "cheap morals" and "bad manners," and calls her behavior "slutty." Big difference.

Dreher frequently reminds us that Christians don't riot, as some Muslims do, when they perceive their values to be mocked. But he never recalls that for many, many centuries, Christians backed by the power of states harassed, exiled, and burned men and women who didn't conform to their prejudices in comportment or anything else.

When we mock Dreher here, we are not always thinking solely of the little fellow in Dallas who shakes his impotent fist at our times and manners. Often we also have in mind the loathsome traditions he wants to bring back to the civilized world, even praising the "order," "unity," and "purpose" of barbarous Islamic societies as a means of attracting us to a Western version with Jesus on top. Imagine a country where men like Dreher have the power to order a stoning.

It took us nearly two millenia and oceans of blood to reduce these savages to a noisome rump. We can spare a little attention to remember why we did it.

SHORTER MEGAN McARDLE. If you're an entrepreneur, you should have a government program to save you from your failures. But if you're just some pauper, bootstraps will do just fine.

I'LL BET. "The prism through which I'd like to view Obama's appeal is Bill Cosby." -- Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal.

THE AUDACITY OF HOPELESSNESS. The playa-hatin' on Obama continues at a pace that will leave many of the brethren exhausted by summer. A sort of apotheosis, or maybe nadir, is reached by Cal Thomas at the Washington Times:

"Hope is a dangerous thing," says "Red" to "Andy" in the 1994 film "The Shawshank Redemption." Red, played by Morgan Freeman, means that Andy, played by Tim Robbins, risks despair if he hopes to get out of prison.

Wait a minute -- didn't Andy escape in the end? And didn't a couple of cons successfully use his breakout method just last December?

This is where mature and experienced adults can steady the enthusiasm of the young and inexperienced. The Washington Post Magazine recently carried a cover story by Jeffrey Birnbaum titled "How lobbyists always win: Dispatches from Washington's relentless growth industry." It is a reminder of how, no matter who is president and which party controls government, lobbyists are part of the permanent class and very little can change without their participation and approval. Numerous "reformers" have come to Washington in the past, promising change. As often happens, they don't change Washington; Washington changes them.

Funny, I don't remember Thomas, or any of his fellow doomsayers, warning us in 1994 that Newt Gingrich's Contract With America was a bunch of bullshit.

The "hope" being sold by Mr. Obama and his true believers is misplaced. Mr. Obama cannot deliver; he cannot save; he cannot improve individual circumstances by redistributing wealth and talking to America's dictatorial enemies. He is selling snake oil.

The problem with this argument is not that the American people don't share his cynicism -- it's that they do. This makes the relatively untried Obama interesting to them, as he seems not to have been a part of the clusterfuck that brought us to our present dolorous state. And Obama has stormed to an unexpected lead in the Democratic Presidential race, which makes claims that he "cannot deliver" seem less like homespun wisdom and more like sour grapes.

For years conservatives have been blasting the negative attitude of the press; now that they're the ones playing the killjoy, telling everybody that it's all a sham of a mockery of a sham, they may be astonished to find that citizens have internalized their previous message, and won't give them any more credit than they gave Dan Rather.

Being a little cynical myself, though, I expect that if Obama gets the nomination, Republican supporters will have recovered sufficiently to go with a more traditional message, and devote their energies to reminding America that Obama is black.

UPDATE. Gerard Vanderleun tells us that Obama is a sorcerer because chicks dig him. I can see why Vanderleun would feel that way.