FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

One of my favorite cover versions. What's yours?

• I saw a mean, funny David Klion tweet about Bari Weiss, showing the crowd at Chautauqua, N.Y. to whom she presented her "New Seven Dirty Words" speech to be mostly hella old, with the caption "The voice of a generation." Weiss, promoter of the Dark Interweb or whatever it was called (boy, if we have movies in the future about life in the late-'10s, won't that be a lazy signifier!), is a nightmare, of course, but when Klion's commenters pointed out that Chautauqua audiences tend to be older (though I see they have the Gin Blossoms coming in -- celebrating their 25th anniversary, eek!), I felt maybe it had been unfair of me to laugh. But then I saw a description of her speech in The Chautauquan Daily:

So while Carlin’s “7 Dirty Words” have lost their luster and invaded the mainstream, Weiss proposed a new set: the I-word, H-word, the other P-word, E-word, J-word, R-word and D-word.

Imagination, humility, proportion, empathy, judgment, reason and doubt.

???

Being an American only requires a commitment to a set of ideas, she said. In other parts of the world, these factors (race, gender, ethnicity) confine people, but not in America.

“The antidote to identity politics is imagination,” Weiss said, “a moral and political imagination that allows us to feel the spark of that electric cord, even today.”

Be black and get on the wrong side of a cop and you may well feel the spark of an electric cord, motherfucker! Then she brings in Laura Ingalls Wilder -- a big fave among libertarians -- and what a shame it is that someone took her name off a children's book award just because she said things like "There were no people, only Indians lived there" and "the only good Indian is a dead Indian." "The arbiters of culture," mourns Weiss, "are convinced that she deserves to be censored for 19th-century morals based on morals we hold dear today." I guess it's beyond hopeless to explain to wingnut grievance-mongers like Weiss that someone deciding not to associate with someone else (particularly a dead someone else) isn't censorship. Thereafter comes the Greatest Hits -- Evergreen College, Halloween at Yale, "no guardrails," "Weiss said she was uncomfortable by the euphemisms her pro-choice, feminist cohorts spread — that abortion is 'like a hip-replacement' or an appendectomy," etc. Well, suffice to say I no longer feel bad about laughing at Weiss -- in fact, I think mockery is far too good for her.

• Rightwing tantrums over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have practically become a convention, and Meghan McCain's conniption was a lovely example of the form. While we have no similar tape of Roger Kimball's voice growing increasingly hysterical, and though, unlike McCain, he has access to a thesaurus, his rant at the American Spectator seems to boil up from a similar well of ancient enmities. He, too, professes to believe all social democracy results in Venezuela and people who want a more equitable distribution of America's plentiful resources are "children of all ages" who "whine and rant," and even resorts to a cryptic daddy-spank threat: "the fact that calls for socialism are once again crowding the airwaves reminds us that folly is a noxious hardy perennial that prudent gardeners need to be eternally vigilant to spot and extirpate." I can see Kimball proposing Prudent Gardeners to a perplexed Trump mob as a name for the new Brownshirts. But the surest sign that Kimball is letting the little lady get to him is this primordial splurt:

There are, after all, many salubrious processes that produce unpleasant by-products as part of their activity. You see it in manufacturing, you see it in biology. You eat the steak, it nourishes you and makes you strong, but it also results in odiferous and potentially toxic by-products.

Capitalism is the greatest engine for the production of wealth that the ingenuity of man has ever devised. But after it achieves a certain level of prosperity, it regularly excretes characters like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, beneficiaries of capitalism whose contempt for its strictures is equaled only by their ignorance of its tenets.

I predict this dive into Kimball's dreamlife will do little to stop her rise, though it may get him some fan letters from conservatives who are into scat.