NEVER TRUST A HIPPIE. Now that Iraq is blowin' up real good and professional Bush apologists are putting their backs into the UAE counter-spin (expect a "but I support gay marriage, sort of" post from the Perfesser soon!), it may be that the rightwing mothership is finally heading toward that state once attributed by The Onion to Alzheimer's Ronnie: "Reagan's Condition Upgraded to 'Hilarious.'"

Further evidence of rightwing endtimes: the emergence of bizarre cults, such as Crunchy Conservatism.

CrunchyCon founder Rod Dreher has been extensively treated in these pages: a delicate son of rednecks, Dreher came to Noo Yawk to write (the world's least interesting) movie reviews for the New York Post, proceeded to talk smack about his adopted home at The Corner, fled in a huff to the Promised Land Down Yonder, then started bitching about all the McMansions he had to live amongst.

Over the last few years Dreher has been peddling a line of intellectual fashion called Crunchy Conservatism. It seems to be about some kind of yuppie-ish back-to-the-land movement that wants to feel good about drinking fair-trade coffee while voting Republican and hating homosexuals.

Dreher's new book on the subject is known to me only by its tireless promotions by Dreher's hivemindmates. But if the blog National Review has set up for Dreher -- bookmark it, froth fans! -- is any indication, then we aficionados of conservative lunacy are in for a lovely run of material.

After a cheerfully inclusive beginning -- "I heard from literally hundreds of NRO readers who said, 'Me too!'" says Dreher -- we quickly descend into straight Jesus freakery. "I put much more stock in what amounts to monasticism," says one Caleb Stegall, "in the broadest sense, which includes all of the crunchy virtues Rod discusses and more, though in a very natural and inarticulate way." Good thing he warned us about the inarticulateness, because after an apparently added bellyful of what the monks are fermenting, Caleb comes back with more:

Possessed of abstract natural rights, the developing 18th Century liberalism (whether in its radical continental form or more restrained English/Lockean incarnation) located the individual and his unconstrained will as the fundamental and universal unit of political and cultural order...

In the end, however, the underlying philosophical conception of man, society, and God will trump any specific policy goal or cultural norm.

Sounds like these fellas are less worried about McMansions than they are about their McMansions of the Hill. Mitch Muncy grabs a paddle:

As Caleb suggests, there are larger problems here. All this takes place in the context of the loss of the "end" in Western civilization in general.

I locate the intellectual/historical/political roots of this problem in the fourteenth century (going Caleb one better, historically anyway), with the rise of Nominalism, which is, in a certain sense, an "end"-less metaphysics.

Nominalism! A great rallying-cry for the lumpencrunchitariat! Imagine the appalled faces of the folks who came to Dreher's blog expecting to hear about how it's okay for Republicans to buy organic, and instead got Wachet Auf!

But wait, Bruce Frohnen's still on nominalism:

It seems to me that Mitch, Angelo, and Caleb all are right in pointing to historical roots of conservatism's current malaise. What is the cause? It's the nominalist myth that we can call "beautiful" something that is ugly, and that makes it so; it's the myth that people who are committed to virtuous lives have something important with empire-builders and libertarians who liken marriage to a contract for purchasing lumber or toilet seats; it's the myth that each of us has a "right" to create our own society and reality, as if we were each either a god or something less than a person, with a soul that needs to be fed through social life.

Of course, it's always about fags gittin' hitched with these people. But that's not the only way in which the Crunchies are, even in their weirdness, typical of our times and their torpor.

First, there is the almost visceral aversion to reality: as the Republicans busily hoover up the last bits of money out of the National Treasury, the Crunchy Cons are earnestly arguing about how many Lockean angels can dance on the head of a nominalist pin. As their favored political apparatus shows itself to be nothing better than an extortion racket, the Crunchies argue for even less engagement in its processes -- while still living quite comfortably within its jurisdiction. No wonder these people think Jonah Goldberg is an intellectual: though his thoughts barely deserve the name, he can blow a thick cloud of words such as can shield him and his buddies from both the brightening light and the frantic whistle of an oncoming train.

But mainly, despite all their egregious Godliness and scholarly cites, these guys are cake-and-eat-it-too types who endorse a back-to-the-land code only insofar as its inconveniences are less onerous than the righteous, patchouli-scented glow it affords is pleasurable.

Would it surprise you to learn that these folks think a "family ski trip" is a Crunchy thing to do? (I am confident in assuming that the Matero family did not ride a covered wagon to Bum Mountain, and wear skis recycled from first-growth barrel staves.) Also, watching TV, while not favored, can be okay "if your family can watch TV without losing its soul... Maybe you’re raising your kids to be media critics..."

And through your creed would seem to demand that we all live in tight family clusters and spend Saturday nights singing spirituals with our 20 brothers and sisters, if you really, really want to move away, and stay away, from the Southerly swamps from whence you came, you can do it with an easy conscience. You might get a little lecture from one of your movement's would-be Robespierres (who accuses Dreher, for the sin of moving far from his Paw Paw, of "the language of choice; the language of liberalism"). But talk is cheap; you can throw up your own little cloud of rationalizations, and then get back to your free-range chicken and your fair-trade coffee and natural fibers, confident in the Lord's directive: if it feels good, do it.

Never forget, children, that the root word of yuppie is hippie.

PUSSIES. Christopher Hitchens pats himself on the back -- spilling priceless drops of single-malt, no doubt, then sucking them out of his cardigan sleeve -- for siding with Danish cartoonkind whilst attempting a defend-to-the-death of David Irving -- the legendary Double Voltaire!

Christ, what a -- what's that word the Brits use? Tosser! What a tosser, a right tosser! Has no one told this belligerent drunk that I have already unflatteringly caricatured the Prophet, thus drawing a line in the sand (and, figuratively, around my own neck) for Western Civ?

I'll even go this tosser, this bloody (do they still say that?) tosser one better, and in solidarity with David Irving I will deny me some Holocaust right here on alicublog! Watch me now:

I don't think Hitler could have killed six million Jews. I think it had to be more like, maybe, 5.9 million. Plus, I bet Zyklon B smells nice.

Come an' git me, Austrian motherfuckers! Roy Edroso fears no man!

Some cats got it, some cats ain't: this guy responds to the defenestration of Larry "Bitches Can't Cipher" Summers by announcing that if he were President of Harvard, "any department at Harvard that is not ideologically diverse will lose the right to make hiring decisions. A department that, for example, has systematically excluded Republicans, conservatives and libertarians shouldn't be trusted with the power to make new hires."

Defending free speech with quotas! Bush-league, son. I'm drivin' a Caddy, you fixin' a Ford.

O WON'T YOU BE MY VAGINA? I thought we'd had all our fun with Valentine's Day a few posts ago back, but Christina Hoff Sommers has a late entry (no pun intended).

Sommers offers a fine example of the alternative-reality approach to argument: She says that sexual harrassment is not a problem on campus, but if it were a problem, it would be a problem because of the way kids today celebrate Valentine's Day:

Unfortunately for the AAUW’s case, it is not possible to fix the blame for the excessive sexual exhibitionism on men alone. Many women are conspicuous contributors, particularly on “V-Day.” February 14th is now celebrated on most American campuses, not as Valentine’s Day, but as V-day (short for “Vagina Day” or for “Violence Against Women Day”). V-Day — usually organized by a small minority of ideologically driven women faculty and impressionable and confused female students — has become an annual occasion to deplore all the horrible things men do to women while at the same time celebrating the wonders of female sexual anatomy. For a two- or three-week period, campuses are festooned with close-up images of a specific female body part. Frequently there are sexually suggestive T-shirts, anatomically correct lollipops, obscene chants and sex toy workshops.

Apparently that Penis Day Sommers was rooting for didn't take off. And not even schools with saints' names are immune! No wonder she dumped this one in the post-holiday sales rack.

All I can say is, if co-eds are sucking candy cocks now, maybe I should look into Continuing Ed.

BIG BROTHER CONSERVATIVES. As we have seen, many conservatives made a show at least of free-speech solidarity in the Danish cartoon case. Other prominent right-wingers, however, noticed that the uproar has left freedom of speech lying defenseless by the side of the road, and could not refrain from putting in the boot.

We have previously examined the case of General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters, who denounced the cartoonists as Europeans and arty-farties. Now we have the loathsome Maggie Gallagher, who adds, quite unnecessarily, to her cartoon column this hint of what sort of democracy she feels America ought to be encouraging in Iraq:

Frustrated and appalled legislators in five states are seeking to ban protests at funerals. Sounds reasonable to me. I don't think such a law would be inconsistent with democratic freedom, any more than I believe the First Amendment really does require us to permit flag burning.

And so too I can imagine with much disturbance that (say) a democratic Iraq could choose to ban depictions of Muhammad. It is perfectly possible to protect sacred symbols or sacred moments in ways that do not violate core principles of free speech necessary to robust, democratic life.

The wording's a little tricky -- how much "disturbance" do you think she'd put up with? -- but given that she smooths her path with flags and funerals, I assume that the readiness she expresses at the top of the column "to sign onto the First Amendment absolutist brigade" is merely the prologue to a conversion narrative.

To this Hugh Hewitt adds, "The freedom to publish anything doesn't mean we ought to," his "we" in this case seeming to mean whatever War Emergency Board he dreams of heading up when Bush gets serious about the War on Em Ess Em.

We'll see how they run now that David Irving has been found guilty by an Austrian court of fraud for his Holocaust-denying crap. Already Roger L. Simon is doing the "normally I'm a free speech extremist, but..." thing with the same suspender-snapping sanctimony that usually accompanies his "I left the left or the left left me" schtick.

This could be fun, in a grim kind of way. As the philosophical basis of conservatism is increasingly revealed to be a mere cover for Republican looting of the Treasury, and the "movement" sprouts the kind of millenarian fringe-groups that presages a crack-up, it may be that the authoritarians in the bunch feel they might as well say what's really on their minds and see how the rabble react.

(edited for clarity, believe it or not)

UPDATE. Commenter RobW points out that Irving was nailed for denying the Holocaust, not fraud. Apologies for the slop. Meanwhile an anti-Danish-cartoon guy cites the Irving verdict as a good model for legal protection against blasphemous funnies. Guess when this all shakes out, we'll all end up on the appropriate sides.

PROUST’S WAY. I have a little list of great books that I want to read even though I’m not attracted to them. Call it a self-improvement project, or just a way to get to say I read all these books. I guess there are people who devour books out of pure, indiscriminate pleasure, but I’m not built that way. Rank pretentiousness and self-doubt, alas, will always be part of my motivation. But that’s fine. Some kids go to the Army to learn self-discipline, and some go for computer courses or an alternative to jail and get self-discipline anyway. Who cares what lifts us out of the primordial muck? If I were perpetually following my Bliss, I’d be far too drunk and homeless, not to mention too busy masturbating, to post things like this on the Internet.

The forced march through Great Books is a muddy slog and its progress depends upon exigencies. Bronchitis and bedrest got me through Middlemarch. I’ve tried Ulysses twice, and I expect the third time, tentatively scheduled for this summer, will be the charm. Excelsior!

This winter was Swann’s Way. It took many, many subway rides, with breaks for Invisible Cities, Paul Hemphill’s Hank Williams biography, Nabokov’s lecture on Proust, and several cheap magazines, just to keep me from giving up on the printed word altogether. As with all such problem cases, there was pleasure in the pages but not in the progress, at least at first.

You probably know that large chunks of the book are descriptive to the point of mania, and not just descriptive of people, places, and objects, but of states of mind and even of being. There are long passages that seem to be nothing but monstrous agglomerations of metaphors, technical terms, and prose-poetry. My heart sank when I read, "For there were, in the environs of Combray, two ‘ways’ which we used to take for our walks," and sank further still when Proust compared these "purely material roads" with "the two parts of my brain in which I used to think of them," because I knew I would be asked not only to regard every dog-rose and trick of light that Proust could call to mind, but also their relationship to time and consciousness. That is hard work even without page-long sentences. I prayed for a gun-fight or a shoving match or even an interesting conversation, of which none of the characters then seemed capable, for relief.

Why did I persist? For the reasons I mentioned, but others, too. For one thing, the writing is too good to give up on. Proust is an obvious example of what Raymond Chandler called "writers who write writing," and I prefer the kind who write stories, but Proust’s style is impressive even when it is barely readable. And over the years I’ve figured something out: when someone writes that well, you may be sure he has something bigger up his sleeve than style. I got a hint of this even before the famous madeleine scene, when Proust unloosens the carefully weaving of his first childhood scene:

Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase, up which I had watched the light of [my father’s] candle gradually climb, was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension. It is a long time, too, since my father has been able to tell Mamma to "Go with the child." Never again will such hours be possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father's presence, and which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. Actually, their echo has never ceased: it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that I hear them afresh, like those convent bells which are so effectively drowned during the day by the noises of the streets that one would suppose them to have been stopped for ever, until they sound out again through the silent evening air.

Maybe it has to do with my own stage of life, or of the place I was when I read this, but at the moment of my reading it the world in which I lived briefly stood still and then went in motion again.

So I kept going, and found after a while that Proust’s prismatic rendering of events had a purpose. Nabokov explains it all very well, but even without the technical advice a reader can, if he decides to, get comfortable with Proust’s method and lose at least some of his impatience, so that he can walk through each stretched-out moment, and examine each impacted metaphor, and begin to see things Proust’s way.

I guess it is possible that, by the time I got to the romantic agony of M. Swann, and then to the minature version suffered by Marcel, I would still have have felt those shivers of recognition, even without the long premonition that is the rest of the book. How can I know? "Who, indeed, can say whether, in the event of his having gone, that evening, somewhere else, other happinesses, other griefs would not have come to him, which, later, would have appeared to have been inevitable?" But I am grateful to have been taken there. And now I can say I read it!

POST NON COITUM, ANIMAL NUTS. The morning after Valentine's Day at The Corner, we see what their orgy of antisex hath wrought. K-Pro tenderly cuckoo-calls, "MY VALENTINE'S DAY REGRET is that I don't know anyone who attended a Boston Legal Viewing Party," provoking a too-wit too-woo from a reader:

This is some sort of joke, right? Is this like the sad people who think Emilio Estavez's dad is president? Or are these "viewing parties" common in the big coastal blue cities? The closest thing we have to viewing parties in these parts are frantic telephone calls to make sure our friends and family are watching Brit Hume's ritual Sunday morning disembowelment of Juan Williams.

I thought the viewing party was mildly silly (y'all know what I think about "Boston Legal"), but if someone woke me up on Sunday morning to admire Hume's giant head, I'd seriously reconsider my alliances.

Later K-Pro worries about "Willie Nelson's gay cowboy song." (Her headline is genuinely witty, which shows how rattled she must have been at that point.)

The others are looking at softcore porn -- some favor Michelle Malkin, but an unclothed, flour-encrusted Scarlett Johannson captivates Stephen Spruiell. K-Pro counters huffily, "Am I the only one in here who thinks Red Eye star Rachel McAdams is cool for saying 'no' to the cover shoot?" and adds -- rather superfluously, we hard-to-get players judge -- "As an aside, Cillian Murphy is a dead ringer for Media Blogger Stephen Spruiell," and then (de trop, Mme. K-Pro!), pulls in by the sleeve a reader who has found McAdams' tits somewhere (one is reminded of Nathanael West: "[Doyle] tried, rather diffidently, to leer").

Spruiell's response cannot have emboldened K-Pro: "I do think it's a good thing McAdams declined to appear on the VF cover with Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightly. That would have prevented me from getting any work done today." Here we draw a courteous curtain on K-Pro, though we are put in mind of Tracy Turnblad, rebuffed in an early reel of Hairspray.


Andy McCarthy expresses an interest in bars now that women are drinking more.

I don't know what happened to Goldberg last night, but he's going on about credit card readers in soda machines and trying to tie Dick Cheney to Rock 'n' Roll High School. Well, at least he's got that dog.

Cheney is on many minds; Derbyshire seems to think his man-shooting a good thing: "It was not likely, as in the movie, an excess of competitive zeal. And if it was, who on our side would mind? We want our politicians to be full of competitive zeal."

Elsewhere at NRO, eminence grease William F. Buckley suggests that Hamas be "castrated."

The rest of us were happy with candy, flowers, and consensual sex.

HAVE A RIGHT-WING VALENTINE'S DAY! National Review comforts its dateless readers by making the prospect of sex undesirable.

K-Pro interviews a member of the Junior Anti-Sex League named Jennifer Roback Morse. The comrade has written a dating guide, and you can guess the perspective. "Recreational" sex is bad because "when sex is a recreational activity, my partner becomes a consumer good." Apparently, when Morse engages in recreational activities with friends -- like bowling, say, or frisbee -- she loses all respect for them. She doesn't sound like a fun date, with or without jelly roll.

I suppose all we really need is the money quote:

And make no mistake about it: men do sometimes go over the line and become obsessively jealous, even dangerously jealous. But, one thing is for sure. A woman knows that she matters to a guy who gets jealous.

But connoisseurs will enjoy some of the fine points. For example, the author maintains that "The Left hates sex," though we lefties are "hyper-active about sexual activity" (i.e., have lots of it). Does this seem counter-intuitive or, to use the older word, nuts? Well, it's a female right-wing sex scarapist's prerogative to change her mind: we actually hate sex because we're after something she calls "gender equality," which she doesn't define but scorns on the grounds that the sexes "can never be made fully equal. This is one of the most basic biological facts of our species. You'd think our modern scientific age could accept this."

The only smart sex, Morse concludes, is married sex, so all you single conservative guys enjoy your $100 dinner tab and peck on the cheek!

Oh, but wait, it gets worse. K-Pro actually asks some of her close personal inmates for "conservative love stories," and before you can say, "huh?" we get Myrna Bluth saying John and Abigail Adams' love was right-wing because they were apart so often they seldom had sex, and Christine Rosen saying Henry VIII and Catharine of Aragon's love was right-wing because he exiled her and they never had sex again, and Danielle Crittenden saying Pride and Prejudice is right-wing because there's no sex in it, which makes her mouth "go dry"... one begins to detect a pattern.

Well, now at least when people ask me why I'm a liberal, I'll know what to tell them.

I GOT A FEELING... IT'S GONNA BE... ONE OF THOSE SHORTER LILEKS WEEKS! Today's installment:

Movies are so crass. I much prefer the wholesome, intellectual stimulation of a good video game.

(Happy Valentine's Day to Mrs. Lileks, poor woman.)

Maybe I should take a cue from Amblongus, who suggested in comments that conservatives will soon go beyond reviewing movies they haven't seen, and start reviewing movies that don't exist.

Let's preemptively digest the weekly Lileks!

WEDNESDAY: You ever notice that liberals like to say they "support" classical music, whereas I actually appear on stage at young peoples' concerts? You don't see too many grotesquely overweight Michigan filmmakers in tie-died shirts wearing giant NO BLOOD FOR OIL buttons doing that, my friends! In I Died a Thousand Times Jack Palance has a head like a rock.

THURSDAY: Of course Frank Miller agreed to have Batman fight Al Qaeda. You can just imagine Miller in his split-level home; adoring dog at his feet, adorable little girl on his lap; he's studying an old matchbook and thinking, Islamaliberals would take this all away from me; get me the pen; play some Nick Cave! And his little girl stretches to kiss his massive, shiny forehead.

FRIDAY: You know, the people who are all over Bush's case for strangling that butler are the same people who gave Dick Cheney a hard time last weekend. 'Twas ever thus: Play a little buckshot tag with a buddy, and the anti-violence people (who are actually the ones who are really violent, and I'm talking about their facial expressions as described by me) will take you to their secret torture chambers, figuratively speaking. They'll try the same thing on Bushitler McChimphitlerspittleMoveOn; again they'll fail. I found an old matchbook that has a picture of an old building on it.

Wow, that was liberating.

UPDATE. I may have misjudged Jimbo. He has graciously linked to this post, and not even most of the readers drawn from his world to mine are abusive in comments -- at least so far. My. (Pause to observe a vast horde of souls tumbling toward heaven.)

Okay, group hug over. Everybody back on your heads!

UPDATE 2. OK, some of them are abusing my hospitality. Here is a typical exchange:

"Sir, you are an ant waving his antennae fiercely at a lion."

"Oh yeah? Well, fuck you."

I could delete 'em, but that's a punk-ass move, so I'll just get my Islamofascist buddies to go lean on their way of life.

STILL ONE OF OURS. The Ole Perfesser does his bit for comity, using the recent Coulter affair as a stick to beat "lefties," whom he terms angry, theatrical, prejudiced against white people ("The lefties seem mostly upset about her use of the term 'raghead,' which is racist and offensive, but more or less akin to the term 'cracker,' which doesn't seem to bother a lot of lefties"), and tending to spit on outstretched hands, none of which, it is obvious, belongs to the Perfesser.

Ditto Michelle Malkin. After allowing as how "Ann says many deliberately provocative things," Malkin laces into "smug," "in denial" liberals, and insists "we don't need your prodding."

This approach seems to work for other subjects, too. Dick Cheney shooting a guy is either "a wash or a slight bump up for the administration," says Andy McCarthy at The Corner. "Why? Because the media and the most partisan Democrats can always be relied on to turn opportunity into damage... transparently partisan hyperbole... compare Clinton and Cheney... Dem bomb-throwers etc."

Also at The Corner, Jonah Goldberg brags that conservatives are quite capable of criticizing their own. As well they might be, because at the end of the day even when conservatives err they are still innocent of liberalism, and that is really all that matters.

A VERY MODEST PROPOSAL. "We'd call the words 'United Nations Commission on Human Rights' an oxymoron, but that would be too kind... it's time to create an alternative. The United States should lead efforts to found a new institution devoted to the protection of human rights, and involving eligibility requirements that would limit member states to genuine liberal democracies." -- National Review editorial, February 13, 2006.

The American Organization for International Human Rights and Responsibilities suffered another setback today as it was rebuffed in an attempt to file suit at the International Court of Justice in Den Hague. The Court’s Clerk informed the delegation that it had no standing to sue "The Universities of the World" for "failing to sufficiently diversify" their faculties with conservative professors, as the AOIHRR does not represent any sovereign State.

The delegation briefly demonstrated outside the Court, crying "Shut it down" and singing Twisted Sister’s "We’re Not Gonna Take It," before adjourning for lunch.

Since its inception in 2006, the AOIHRR has failed to attract international support despite lavish funding from Richard Scaife, the Forbes Foundation, and the Unification Church.

After an initial flurry of interest, including an offer from Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to house the Organization "in one of my villas," the AOIHRR lost much of its public support when it became clear that no nations would sign its Charter or send delegates to its frequent "special sessions."

The Organization had high hopes that the government of Iraq would sign on, and spent much of its budget on "incentives" lavishly distributed in Baghdad. But each introduction of a membership bill to the Iraqi Parliament has been thwarted by procedural objections, fistfights, or gunfire.

AOIHRR Secretary-General Michael Ledeen’s announced strategy of "using the power of blogs to shame Western nations into compliance" appears to have been entirely unsuccessful, and even the website Instapundit recently removed its "I’m the AOIHRR" banner without comment.

Many observers say the last straw for the Organization’s hopes was its disastrous "Global Gun Court," held last month in Phoenix, Arizona to prosecute nations whose gun laws the AOIHRR found insufficiently lax. The boisterous event, to which none of 325 named "defendents" sent a representative, was broken up in its second day by local police, who confiscated a large weapons cache. AOIHRR Self-Defense Commissioner John Lott, Jr., is still awaiting trial on charges of inciting a riot, and Phoenix has refused to acknowledge Lott’s claim of diplomatic immunity.

After the Den Hague incident, Ledeen was unavailable for comment, but at the delegates’ luncheon Special Deputy Jonah Goldberg proclaimed that "you can’t break an omelette without laying a few eggs" before initiating a food fight.

CONSERVATIVES REVIEWING MOVIES THEY HAVEN'T SEEN IS THE NEW BLACK. Roger L. Simon explains what's wrong with Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, based on his own ignorance ("I haven't seen Brooks' film") and the talking points of the day ("traditional Hollywood libs like Brooks don't seem to have the guts for satire anymore... The Brooks crowd [all of them] are more worried about seeming 'nice' these days then telling the truth"). Oh, and on "reviews," though if Simon really put such faith in critics, he'd have blown his brains out after Scenes from a Mall.

These guys are getting so used to reviewing movies by their trailers and posters -- and sometimes just by what their ideology demands -- that I wonder if they go to movies at all anymore. Why bother, when the Politburo will tell them what is good and double-plus-ungood?

It gets clearer all the time that culture warriors are actually making war on culture, not for it.

I CALL FOR LILEKS' ASSASSINATION! But I'm doing it with my "usual acidic sarcasm," so you really can't get upset about it.

BTW, does anyone know what the fuck that poolhall story meant? That it's okay to call someone a nigger and run over him in your car, so long as you're pretty sure you'd take him to a hospital afterward?

WORLDS APART. I could have easily dismissed this Althouse schtick with a Shorter. It is classic psuedo-moderate malarkey in the manner of Roger L. Simon and Michael Totten, etc, and follows their formula explicitly:

• standard "I'm a moderate" assertion;
• highly negative characterization of liberals ("looking for heretics," "curl up with your little group of insiders");
• unflattering comparison of liberals to conservatives, who "perceive me as a potential ally";
• several reader quotes about what deluded totalitarians liberals are (and comments which endlessly reiterate this theme);
• mild qualifying statement ("I don't think all the irrational blogging is on the left"), for cover;
• "I find it terribly, terribly sad."

This is such an obvious fraud it hardly bears examination, but Althouse did say one thing to which I am strongly motivated to respond:

What I've noticed, over and over, is that the bloggers on the right link to you when they agree and ignore the disagreements, and the bloggers on the left link only for the things they disagree with, to denounce you with short posts saying you're evil/stupid/crazy, and don't even seem to notice all the times you've written posts that take their side. Why is this happening?

I can speak only for myself. And I will speak as if her comments were directed specifically at me, because one of my New Year's resolutions was to be more egotistical.

Yes, rather than to link to a bunch of people who agree with me, I choose to mock those who maladroitly disagree with me.

The main reason is: it's fun. Don't forget, I'm doing this for free, and there has to be some percentage in it. Ditto for my readers.

I don't see the harm. I am not picking on retards or children here, but grown men and women (some with teaching positions at major universities!) who have offered their thoughts for public delectation in a medium that is widely advertised as "self-correcting."

But Althouse seems to think this is a bad thing. Her argument is that I and others like me should be "engaging" her, with a view toward changing her mind, as if this were a romantic comedy in which she plays the lonely heiress who needs the touch of a real man's intellectual argumentation.

I think she seriously mistakes my mission. I'm not trying to engage, convince, or convert anybody. I figure I'm talking to adults and if they're vacant enough to be swayed politically by a fucking blogger, they're probably not bright enough to get my jokes.

Though I have political beliefs, I'm not a political operative. I'm closer to a satirist. There's less Howard Dean than Dean Swift in me.

I don't write to change the world, but to create one on the page. I write for my own pleasure and illumination, and invite whosoever might also enjoy to come read it. I may not have the largest constituency on the web, but they're a smart bunch and more fun to hear from in comments than a bunch of PoliSci nerds (even the ones who are, technically, PoliSci nerds).

Althouse's misconception about my mission may have to do with the way she looks at the blogosphere, or, more to the point, what her experience has led to her to believe about it. She has been made famous within this tiny world by the linkage and adulation of other pioneer conservative bloggers. Hence, she sees the blog world as a social circle, and writes the way a hostess makes conversation: as a way to keep the party going.

Whereas for me writing is not primarily a social act -- though it sometimes becomes one, usually most circuitously, in the almost grudging, semi-conscious hunt for an audience.

If you don't like that sort of thing, well, then stick with your daisy chains. We who have free souls, it touches us not.

UPDATE. Professor Althouse seems to have read some other writer and attributed his or her sentiments to me. I used to think her misreadings were deliberate, but I now realize I was just chivalrously inflating my estimate of her intelligence.

DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS. I don't have much to offer about the Grammys, other than an endorsement of Sly's decision to walk off the stage (fuck Rick James, he's Sly Stone, bitch!) in the middle of that god-awful, caterwauling, alleged "tribute" to his music, and a reiteration: corporate rock still sucks.

For in-depth analysis you can go to The Corner, where K-Pro shows a picture of some geezer apparently too drunk to lift the skirt of an overweight boudoir-photography customer before trying to eat her out, which KP considers "a pro-life moment." (She also thinks AP's sympathetic treatment of Mariah Carey proves that "their bias isn't just on politics!" while Tim Graham emits a comment on Barack Obama's grammy, and two minutes later returns to sniff it again.)

I imagine a room full of industrial safety wonks sitting around watching the Grammys and saying things like, "That Mariah Carey is a real Level Two!"

WHEN YOU THINK YOU'VE LOST EVERYTHING, YOU FIND OUT YOU CAN ALWAYS LOSE A LITTLE MORE.While I was off looking at softcore pornography, the Corner managed to get even stupider:

MOVIE BLEG [Bill Bennett]:
Has anyone seen, does anyone know of, a movie depicting the war we are in now, the fight against the barbarians? We've had movies about the first Gulf war, and a morally ambiguous fiction about something or somewhere called Syriana -- but anything about our over-four- year- old fight for civilization against the Islamist barbarians, based on fact? Anything? Anyone?

It sounds like something out of one of those Corner parodies.

Why doesn't he just go to the video store?

VIDEO STORE CLERK: Can I help you?

BENNETT: (with great seriousness) Yes. Do you have any films about the war we are in now, the fight against the barbarians?

VIDEO STORE CLERK: Uh, do you mean, like, the war in Iraq?

BENNETT: Yes! Yes!

VIDEO STORE CLERK: Sure. Fahrenheit 911.

BENNETT: (shoulders up around his ears) Saints preserve us! (runs out of the store, screaming)

VIDEO STORE CLERK: It's a living! (canned laughter)

NOW, BACK TO THE IMPORTANT SUBJECTS. Xan Brooks is amusing, and onto something, concerning the new Vanity Fair cover:

...therein lies the problem with this Vanity Fair fleshpot. It is neither arousing enough to sate the masturbators, nor artistic enough to appeal to the aesthetes.

As a masturbator and an aesthete, I say hear, hear! I was eager, not to say anxious, to get a load of Scarlett Johansson naked, if only to establish a more vivid mise en scene for that play I've had running in my head since I was 13, Even Though I'm A Beautiful Movie Star I Can't Keep My Hands Off Roy Edroso. (The production has undergone some changes over the years -- when it opened it was a wispy, sensitive bildungsromance, but now it has more of a Bukowski feel, and certainly more cursing -- and some of America's top starlets have done their best work in the lead role.)

Alas, Ms. Johansson appears to have been made up for the shoot with pastry flour, and to be posing for a Hummel figurine. That such a beautiful woman, unclothed yet, could be made to look unsexy! Now I'll have to recast Even Though I'm A Movie Star... with one of those women I brush up against on the subway.

HE'S JUST SAYING WHAT WE'RE ALL NOT THINKING! I rool. While other blogs just yapped, growled, and heh-indeeded about Mohammedian censorship, I gave the cartoonophobes something to jihad about.

Yet thanks to their Good Old Blog network connections, those fake freedom fighters still get all the attention, while I labor here in obscurity -- probably a good thing, as my fatwa has come through: "Oh, a wise guy?" wrote one Latrell X in a note that came covered in white powder (which our lab has determined to be Desenex); "Why, I oughta..." Here the note ominously trails off.

Ah well; this story, like all blogospheric proclamations of Clash of Civ endtimes, will not last long. Soon the self-soothing that'll-show-those-Europeans gurglings will lull their authors into the next news cycle, which I understand is all about tapping phone calls made between the U.S. and Batavia, New York.

But there is no soothing (self- or otherwise) our old friend Twelve-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters, who, while giving the back of his hand to maniacal Muslims, plants his bayonet in the belly of the real beast -- European godlessness!

The Danish newspaper that first published the cartoons last September was not standing up courageously for freedom of expression. The editors and cartoonists were so oblivious to any reality beyond their Copenhagen coffee bars that they just thought they were pulling an attention-getting prank.

They got attention, all right. As did the papers elsewhere in Europe that reprinted the offending cartoons last week. In the name of press freedom, of course.

The problem is that with freedom comes responsibility, a quality to which Europe's become allergic (nothing is ever a European's fault). Breaking a well-known taboo of Islam was irresponsible. No other word for it.

One of the things we love about the General is his tendency to sprint -- usually naked, frothing, and waving his pearl-handled pistol -- off the reservation: while the Malkins of the world have to make believe (thanks, I believe, to some ancient treaty with the glibertarians) that they care about freedom and stuff, the General just hears the word "Yurrup" and visions of limp-wristed espresso-drinkers start bonking around inside his helmet.

And you know what his problem with these here Yurrupeans is? Not just that they're a little light in the Birkenstocks -- but that they ain't got God ("Today's Europeans consider religious belief as beneath their sophistication"). And without God, you can't have the sort of war the General's been practicing his whole life for: a total, orgiastic, scimitar-versus-bunkerbuster, real rain that'll wash all the scum off the streets.

This is partly why, after a long fun run with the General, I don't quote him so much anymore. He has no agenda other than his own madness, while the usual targets of our wrath are more calculating and dishonest. You will see their freedom flags dip, as their "Support Denmark" flags have already started to do, once we go back to talking about American citizens again. The General, bless him, never shifts tactics.

UPDATE. If you get tired of brainless wreckers like me, one of the very, very few intelligent discussions of this subject is at Sisyphus Shrugged.

THE RETURN OF MICHAEL TOTTEN'S "PROTEST BABES"! The Cedar Revolution continues! I swear to you, there are a couple of real lookers just out of frame here:



OK, I'm kidding. Totten doesn't like Lebanese riots over those Danish Mohammed cartoons and neither do it. In fact, I dislike them so much that I will show solidarity with the forces of free speech by publishing in this very blog my own cartoon of Mohammed waving "hi" to his fans:



I am told it was the bare fact of the Prophet's pictoral representation that stirred the Islamic nuts' wrath, so it should not matter that my Mohammed is not doing anything sinister (or that I can't draw hands, or much of anything else) -- I am one with my Danish comrades in breaking a taboo. That makes me "politically incorrect," the highest accolade in the rightwing vocabulary. God, I feel brave -- every bit as brave as a Fightin' Keyboarder mouthing off about Brokeback Mountain!

I invite these idiots to stop blaming the cartoon controversy on liberal professors, and to cheer my courage. And -- using their own infallible logic -- if they fail to do so, it proves they are objectively pro-censorship!

This blog thing is ever so much more fun than the real world. P.S. Censorship sucks. Just mentioning it on the very odd chance that you didn't realize that's what we all think.

UPDATE. Readers are not impressed with my blasphemy. "I would not give even a paper cut to your neck," writes Mr. I. Kabibble. "Your death can wait until the coming holocaust." So I have upped the ante by amending my drawing so that it shows Mohammed smoking a cigarette:



I also decided that his hand is turned in that bizarre way because he is dancing, which I'm sure must be very offensive. I probably won't make it to nightfall! Give my love to the Danes, especially Claire.

UPDATE 2. Hey, apparently I love freedom more than Condi "for President" Rice. This encourages me to kick it up a notch: Since, hours after my original entry, I have not received any credible death threats, I will try acting all Danish to see if that's the "X" factor in this case.

How does one act all Danish? I dunno, but aren't they almost the same thing as Swedish? I'm just do my John Qualen impression: Heurney fleurny heurney! Heurney fleurny heurney! Oh, Ethan -- Mohammed's he don't a-smell too good, py Yimminy! Heurney fleurny!

UPDATE 3. Nothing from the Islamofascists, but I did hear from one guy who claimed he was going to replace all my furniture with plain, blond wood modular units.

Stephen Green fantasizes that Hollywood will help him make fun of Muslims. Of course, Green makes fun of Hollywood at the same time, so there is little chance that "the writing staff of Will & Grace" will be rushing to join his jihad anytime soon. So he's stuck with Citizen Satirists like me! C'mon, Steve, let's see if we can't git-r-done:



Hyuk hyuk. "Mr. Egyptian, yer a goddamn liar!" We don't need us no arty-farties nohow. Hell, we can animate this and put it in the Liberty Film Festival!

Whoops, here come my assassins. Gotta run!

DUMP YOUR PAJAMAS MEDIA STOCK! I'm no kind of financial reporter, but I do notice the Ole Perfesser pitching to Craigslist:

Perhaps Craigslist should consider a local-franchise model that would incorporate local news content, something that -- as far as I know -- they're not doing. That would still kill off a lot of local weeklies that are nothing but vehicles for classified ads now, but so what? They're doomed anyway. At least it might add something.

Of course, when the Perfesser says "local-franchise model," it's like when he says "Libertarian" -- window-dressing to get the rubes on board for what he's actually selling. And that's the value-add we're all looking for in a classified-ad service: right-wing political bullshit. If this were a good idea, surely Buy-Lines would have picked up Ed Anger's column by now.

I haven't heretofore spoken to the issue of Pajamas Media because why would I: it's a bunch of crappy writers ganged up to exponentiate their crappiness. Their claim to fame is that they're all pioneers in one of the Century's first big fads -- as if there were some merit in being the new Shipwreck Kelly. Smart guys like the Perfesser are hedging their bets by exploiting their notoriety to sell old-fashioned dead-tree products; others will be absorbed into the Republican journalism machine; most, alas, will wind up haunting gin mills and blind tigers, occasionally puffing out their chests and crying Don't you know who I am? Try Googling DeathtoLiberalsWI59, mortal!

Eventually I'm sure the franchise will be bought by Murdoch or Moon or some such, festooned with Page Six "protest babes," and trawled downmarket. Whether that will be counted a victory for blogism in general or PJM is particular, I neither know nor care; among the vanities, this doesn't even rank with the crackling of thorns under the pot.

Still, it is interesting to see the Perfesser pushing it at people like Craig Newmark, especially given what Newmark wrote on Wednesday:

PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISM IS A BIG DEAL: Looks like I can't say this enough, since it's forgotten in both the excitement for citizen journalism and the stress of competition.

Professional journalism involves high standards of writing, fact checking, editing, and research.

Journalism ethics includes "separation of church and state", figuratively meaning that marketing and financial concerns are separate from editorial matters and reporting.

Professional news organizations recognize that we all have freedom of choice when it comes to selecting what news operations, etc., that serve the community best.

A special tip of the hat to the San Francisco Chronicle, which has greatly impressed me with its adherence to ethical standards. thanks!

High standards! Fact checking! Separation of church and state (even as a metaphor)! The doubleplusungood San Francisco Chronicle! Looks like a very bad fit for PJM.

Next stop: Maxim online, for whom the Perfesser can review gadgets.

NOW HERE'S A MAKEOVER I CAN GET BEHIND. From the Washington Post today:

Maybe Will prayed, "Give me lips, God -- I don't care what it takes!"

SHORTER JEFF GOLDSTEIN: You pathetic liberal jerks, I was joking when I said cuff Sheehan to a radiator! You just can't perceive my strenuous and sophisticated humor, you stupid -- hey! I said I was joking! You must have very tight assholes because you are not laughing at my jokes, idiots! Etc.

SHORTER CRAZY JESUS LADY: I am tired of being a wall-flower. I go to be young with the young! Everybody: The Democrats are unhinged! The Dem-- what's that? You need proof of my loyalty? I must denounce Wendy Wasserstein? B-but wait -- I can imply she was right-wing, then there'll be no need... Oh. I'm sorry, comrade: yes, I meant prove she was right-wing.

EASY MONEY. As we have previously observed, conservative culture cops have gotten comfy reviewing films they haven't even seen, so why shouldn't National Review's John J. Miller pick up an easy extra buck at OpinionJournal reviewing the unreleased Curious George movie?

He actually does okay for a while, poking around the famed monkey's biographical data, but Miller knows he has to get to the right-wing money shot sometime, so about halfway down he tells us that "the first book (Curious George) violates our modern codes of political correctness," implying that the film, being a product of Hollyweird, has corrrr-rected that. And those trained to heed the PC dog-whistle lean forward, expecting news of some absurd liberal whitewash.

But Miller reports that, based on his close reading of the movie's trailer, while the original Man in the Yellow Hat was "a gun-toting poacher" who kidnapped George from his African home, he is now "an unarmed naturalist." Also, movie George does not smoke and drink, as did first-book George.

At this point even conservative parents are probably scratching their heads, thinking, Gee, we hates us some goddamn librul PC, but do we really want little Ayn and Whittaker to admire poachers and a cute little monkey who smokes and drinks? It is a children's movie, after all.

"Perhaps these revisions are an acceptable bowdlerization," admits Miller. Realizing with horror that he has hundreds of words to go, he casts about for ways to hurl George at liberal heads. The best he can do is, "Today's Hollywood probably would be more comfortable making the Man in the Yellow Hat an out-and-proud homosexual than an exploiter of the animal kingdom," before concluding that Hollywood shouldn't fool around too much with the classics. How I wish I could show this garbage to the ghosts of Hazlitt and Dryden, and then, after they had stopped whirling and asking God why they had been flung into Hell, arm them with billy clubs (or, failing that, pen and ink), so they could express to Miller their feelings about the perversions he has performed on the art of criticism.

THE SLEEP OF REASON BREEDS BULLSHIT. It's fascinating to watch the birth of an idea, even a competely retarded one. In the American Spectator, Mark Gauvreau Judge posits such a thing as "metrocons," well-read conservatives who disdain rowdy entertainments such as muscle-car rallies.

Folks who share my unhealthy fascination with this sort of nonsense will recall that, in the 90s, Judge was pushing swing-dancing as a conservative credential, and when mass Lindy Hopping did not break out all across America, he retreated to the usual tired culture-war crap for his living, till this new, Gestaltifying idea came upon him.

His fellow derechos are not, so far, having it, to judge by these responses. But I give them no credit for that, because they argue against the metrocon idea for a variety of countervailing doctrinal and political reasons, rather than dismissing it outright as bullshit, or whatever word Father Neuhaus uses instead of "bullshit."

By bullshit I mean, in this instance, that the idea is produced, not by the logic of the true student of human nature, or even of the sociologist, but of the marketing consultant. Like the promoters of Crunchy and South Park variants of conservatism, Judge is just looking for an angle that will make his name in the psuedo-science of conservative taxonomy. It offers nothing to stimulate serious thinking or political action; it is the apotheosis of the old saw, "The personal is the political" -- an adage formulated years ago on the Left, but lately adopted whole-heartedly by the Right.

Judge's concept is not worth even such discussion as I have given it here, but it is genuinely interesting to see how far such useless ideas as his can get in the current environment; The New Criterion deigning to discuss metroconservatism is like the Pope issuing a Bull on the selection of American Idol winners.

We have all seen what happens to some people who enjoy great success without doing anything to merit it: very few of them can simply relax and enjoy their good fortune; they crack up their Ferraris, they descend into drug addiction, they take up Scientology or some other crackpot creed to explain to themselves that there is no giant foot trying to squash them. Conservatives got a big Lotto jackpot with the War on Terror, and have since been laying about the mansion, engaging in increasing dorm-like bull sessions, inventing ever more sophisticated sophistries -- shrinking government while their Congressmen and contributors plunder the Treasury, converting Arabs by blowing them up, and so forth.

Next I suppose they'll be inventing conservative haircuts and ways of wearing their breeches. And after that -- well, we all know how that goes.

SOTU WHAT? There's not much to say about tonight's State of the Union address. As President Bush sees it, there are no Constitutional concerns with the NSA, Gulf hurricane victims need school vouchers, and homosexuals shouldn't be allowed to get married. This we knew. As for the "addiction to foreign oil" bit, I am old enough to remember the promise of hydrogen cars in the 2003 SOTU, so I know it means nothing.

I might ask why the list of countries to which we will inevitably deliver democracy did not include Cuba, but what's the point? Apart from the grisly image of aged and infirm Coretta Scott King embracing MLK with his throat shot open, this speech had no literary substance whatever. Leave it for the dogs to pick over.

SITUATIONAL ETHICS PART 399,045. Hugh Hewitt finds a Democratic Congressional candidate who was mean to a Republican decorated veteran, and asks

Where are the Democrats who should be denouncing this? The ones who, rightly, slammed the comments directed at Congressman John Murtha's service?

Wow, I didn't know Hewitt was against those comments directed at John Murtha! And there's a good reason I didn't know it: because he said something entirely different at the time:

Every Democrat who attempted to charge the Republicans as attacking Congressman Murtha's patriotism was instantly revealed as a fraud...

The wolf is never so disgusting as when he's pretending to be Grandma.

SHORTER CULTURE-WAR NUTS: What! No nominations for Jesus? This is the most left-wing Oscars ever! Giving awards to small movies, rather than multi-million-dollar epics like Marty amd Chariots of Fire? Further proof of liberalism! Real people will boycott Oscars in favor of Justice Monday! Reese Witherspoon's inevitable Oscar is the exception that proves the movie-traitor rule! And that's the trouble with these artist-people -- they politicize everything!

THE POLITICIZATION OF EVERYTHING, PART 988,098: Michael Novak at The Corner:

GO STEELERS! So it's steeltown America on the rise, the rough and the ready, not a rich team but always fighting and always playing smash-mouth, and running hard, and slashing... and I love it that their opponents this year will be wearing the colors of --hard to comprehend this -- Hamas! Couldn't be a better opponent, who will probably be favored. .... Pittsburgh is the city of the Deerslayer, and the American flag, and always the highest casualty rates in American wars...

I guess it could be a joke, but at The Corner how does one tell? (I do smell bourbon, though. Oh wait, that's just me.)

I eagerly await responses from the objectively pro-Seahawks crowd.

UPDATE. Shortly thereafter: "K-Lo suggests that Kiefer Sutherland's win in the SAG awards might be a case of Hollywood finally catching up on the war on terror."

Anyone remember that old Peanuts strip where Violet bragged to Charlie Brown about her "new hi-fi bracelet," leaving CB to wonder, "How can a bracelet be hi-fi?" I think about that one a lot these days.

DONKEY LABOR. I blush to admit that tonight was the first time I had seen Au Hasard, Balthazar. I saw Bresson's L'Argent years ago, and never visited him again, but now I want to see all his movies. I understand this is a common reaction.

The story, such as it is, is probably familiar to you: a donkey's life, and the lives of the people around him, none of which go particularly well, but all of which are ennobled by the telling of the tale. I was amazed, after all these years, to recognize in Balthazar Bresson tropes from L'Argent: concentration on hands and legs, tears that appear without histrionic squeezing ("Don't mock my tears, Gerard"), and a benumbed performance style.

I had heard plenty about the Christian sensibility of the film, and it is unavoidable, but the donkey's role in the proceedings surely is not that of Christ, or at least not that of the exemplary Christ seen in most film treatments (to take the most noble example, Johannes in Ordet). Balthazar is beaten, persevering, and loyal, but his example neither teaches nor saves anyone. Even Anne, who loved him as a child, mostly ignores him after she has taken up with the silly moped gangsters. The drunkard is close in status to a mystic -- barefoot, misanthropic, prayerful, and given a second chance by a mysterious inheritance -- and at times he seems like the most natural companion to Balthazar, even in his superstitious cruelty toward him ("Satan! Jinx!"), but in the end merely falls, with a kind word, off Balthazar's back to his death.

What then makes Balthazar's presence so powerful in the film? Perhaps his necessity. Everyone needs Balthazar, to carry loads, to smuggle, to love (briefly), to perform in a circus, to draw well water. He is the ultimate supernumerary, suddenly and unexpectedly given his own storyline, and his prominence throws a new light on everyone around him. Everyone avails him, but only the audience sees Balthazar's importance, or cares about what happens to him, and only we (along with other beasts of the fields) are around to observe and mourn his passing. If Christ is in this picture, he is only in our reaction.

Balthazar reminds me in some ways of the subservient Schmurz in Vian's The Empire Builders -- but unlike the Schmurz, he does not come to collect his due at the end. (Maybe that would be Mel Gibson's Au Hasard, Balthazar.) He also reminds me, perhaps more appropriately, of Firs at the close of The Cherry Orchard. I think Chekhov wanted to create a moment there that would sharply and suddenly contrast the rich folks' struggle of vanities over the old and new orders, which comprises the rest of the play, with an earthier correlative: an old, enfeebled, abandoned retainer, lying down as if for a moment, but really for the last time, at the post. Maybe Bresson's insight was to build a whole work of art around that: the forgotten party, the "sound of a broken string," and the axes working in the background.

REPUBLICAN POPULISM AT WORK: "Though my sample size (about 30 people) and location (the small towns of Greensburg and Latrobe) were hardly scientific, I think my results were broadly representative of working-class Americans." -- Mark Stricherz

(In case you were wondering, Stricherz' working class thinks abortion is infanticide and has no truck whatsoever with "feminist terms about autonomy, privacy, and rights.")

You see a lot of this sort of thing nowadays: conservatives who, so far as I know, do not themselves labor as stevedores or bare-knuckle boxers, explaining that liberals know nothing about the real people. I am tempted to bring up my own long career in menial jobs, but who would believe me? No one who ever swept floors could believe the cuh-razy things I believe.

HANG ONTO YOURSELF. I watched Boston Legal this week. Most weeks I catch at least a little of it. It's a horrible, horrible show, the apotheosis of David E. Kelley's lurid vision of professional life as an endless series of jacked-up and frequently absurd job crises, the tension of which is inevitably relieved by sexual intrigue (also in an endless series, and jacked-up, and frequently absurd). Most of the players are attractive young people who can barely get their chiseled jaws around the preposterous dialogue.

But Boston Legal stars James Spader and William Shatner, and they make a fascinating spectacle in this shabby little arena. From the beginning, they have seemed to inhabit a different universe from all the other characters. They float through their scenes like 19th-century royals after a good lunch at Maxim's, self-satisfied and serene. They are dimly aware of the other characters' needs and desires, and sometimes are inclined to indulge them for reasons of appetite similar to those that animate the other characters -- professional honor or glory, morality, and sex. But where the other performers sweat this stuff, granting it as much importance as I believe the audience is meant to, Spader and Shatner feel the pangs of motivation as one might feel an urge to scratch or stretch, and react to them with refreshing naturalness and self-possession.

This makes them stand out, and reveals a mystery of the performer's art. Acting is a cooperative venture; even monologuists must engage the camera or the audience, while most players also have to evidence relationships with other players. So the actor has to concentrate on people as well as lines, blocking, and the director's orchestration. Maintaining this divided consciousness is a key part of the job, and when an actor says "I really felt it tonight," he is (usually without noticing) celebrating the fact that he felt it while doing everything else he had to do. (Interestingly, Pauline Kael relates that Orson Welles had just this sort of epiphany, which seems to have been rare for him, during the solo in Citizen Kane in which he wordlessly smashes up a room.)

Good actors can handle all that, but great ones know that there is another focus of concentration that needs to be maintained: the concentration on oneself as a character. The famous hams, of course, concentrate on themselves, period, which is actually almost as good. I thought of this while watching John O'Hurley -- yes, Peterman! -- play Billy Flynn recently in Chicago. He wasn't quite what I had in mind, and his schtick usually tires me, but he seemed so perfectly comfortable with himself and his "That's right, Elaine, the white lady -- yam-yam!" readings that he made me comfortable, too, and pulled me over my general objections.

This is why stunt casting is seldom totally disastrous: assuming the player has not lost the nerve that made him or her a celebrity, that boldness in self-presentation will read from the cheap seats as well as a journeyman actor's conscientious characterization.

(This self-regard is not the same thing, of course, as self-consciousness; self-consciousness will make even a great spirit awkward; the self-regarding man could walk into a scene covered with shit and, after perhaps a brief word of explanation for the stench -- offered for your benefit, not his -- go on as if nothing untoward had happened.)

I think Spader and Shatner have a little more on the ball than O'Hurley, but while their characters have a few shades to them, it is their extreme comfort with themselves that makes them galvanic. The relative slightness of their interest in other people is perhaps a little hammy, but certainly not offensive -- if you were this fascinating person, wouldn't you be more interested in yourself, too?

That Spader and Shatner have one another to re-enforce this routine just exponentiates the effect; I especially enjoy the coda of each show, where they sit out on the balcony with drinks and cigars and stare out onto the skyline while talking out their days -- parallel egos taking a moment to take mutual pleasure in their singularities.

For further reference, see Jose Ferrer in Enter Laughing, or Errol Flynn in anything. But I'm sure you can think of other examples.

THE RIGHT ARE VERY DIFFERENT FROM YOU AND ME. "...my appetite for fisking has abated; it feels like angry break-up sex, and I don’t quite see the point much anymore." -- Jim Lileks. In the words of Curly: Nggggyaahhh. I wonder if the angry, fisky sex Lileks recalls was with this girl, and if that's what he meant by "end hard"? Time to check The Smoking Gun for old police reports.

WONKETTE HAS BEEN HACKED. Just a heads-up. Apparently someone's trying to show us just how unsexy and unfunny real nerds can be. As if we needed reminding!

UPDATE. The unfun and unsexy continues. You can always judge a man by his 70's rant. If it's all breakdown-of-society stuff, with no appreciation for the rampant drug abuse and unprotected anal sex, then it's time to move on to the next party.

THESE THINGS JUST WRITE THEMSELVES. Jonah Goldberg:

Kayne West's Jesus schtick is intended to buy some controversy. He's posing as Jesus for Rolling Stone. I really hope the religious right doesn't take the bait...

Jonah Goldberg, who I guess is not religious, forty minutes later:

A reader makes a good suggestion. If a rock or rap star wants to make waves in an interesting and novel way rather than this clichéd Jesus rip-off, they could always dress up like Muhammed. I don't support it, but that at least would take some guts.

Hey, that's a funny idea. Maybe Goldberg should do it. Oh, wait, his family couldn't afford the lost income etc.

Three minutes later, Tim Graham:

There is a media-bias connection to the Kanye West outrage.

Linked story cites Matt Lauer's outrage in 1997 over a National Review cover showing Clintons as buck-toothed Mistah Magloo Asians. Lauer's outrage makes it hypocritical for Rolling Stone (of which Matt Lauer was once editor-in-chief, right before Howell Raines and Michael Moore) to show a black man wearing a crown of thorns, is the point I'm guessing Graham wants to make. Or maybe there's another explanation -- like psilocybin:

Rolling Stone’s theology is interesting: they’re tongue-in-cheek about Jesus and genuflect under the ashes of dope fiend Hunter S. Thompson.

Graham's also pissed that West says he gets turned on by porn instead of by Canadian elections like normal people.

Meanwhile the publicity for Kanye West spreads like cooties in a junior-high locker room. Advantage: blogosphere! Or hiphoposphere! Or bullshitosphere! Or something, anyway, other than common sense.

UPDATE. It hadda happen! The Ole Perfesser does his bit for the Kanye media blitz; takes time to "yawn," link to Goldberg. What's Roc-A-Fella paying these people?

I'M A STUPID MORON WITH AN UGLY FACE AND A BIG BUTT AND MY BUTT SMELLS AND I LIKE TO SMELL MY OWN BUTT. Jonah Goldberg offers a list of books from a liberal POV "that I personally found interesting or useful." What makes such books interesting or useful to him?

There are certain things you need to look for when measuring the honesty of liberals writing about certain periods. For the Progressive era, they need to admit that civil liberties often mattered very little to the champions of "reform." When it comes to the New Deal, they need to acknowledge that on the specific terms used to justify the New Deal — i.e. ending the Great Depression — the New Deal was a failure (the best recent conservative book on this point is Jim Powell's FDR's Folly). Moreover, they need to acknowledge FDR's numerous shortcomings in terms of personal honesty and intellectual heft. I'm not saying that you have to think FDR was a lying dullard, or that the New Deal was a bad thing, to be an honest historian of the period, but you have to deal with those allegations thoughtfully.

As for the 1960s, you have to admit that at least some of the rebellion was little better than a pose; that fear of Vietnam and not high-minded pacifism was a major motive for the protest movement; and that some of the participants in the 1960s were either damaged people or became damaged because of their participation.

Similarly, I find conservative books most honest when they acknowledge Reagan's numerous shortcomings in terms of personal honesty and intellectual heft, and his failure on the specific terms of the Reagan Revolution -- i.e., to get the government off our backs (though if you think Reagan's purpose was to allow corporations to raid the Treasury, you would be honest in calling Reagan a success).

Also, you would need to admit that at least some of the Gingrich Revolution was little better than a pose; that enthusiasm for a new scam for disentangling suckers from their loot, and not high-minded government reform, was a major motive for the Contract with America; and that some of the participants in the Revolution were either damaged people or became damaged because of their participation.

Such books exist, but the conservatives who write them are usually called liberals.

SHORTER BYRON YORK: The stories conservatives told about Clinton in the 90s were fake but accurate.

THE RIGHT TO GO TO A SCHOOL THAT LOOKS GOOD ON MY RESUME WITHOUT HAVING TO HEAR ANYTHING MY DAD THINKS IS RED. I see an UCLA alumni group is posting a hit list of leftist professors, and offering students money to monitor said professors' activities. Even the usual idiots are a little embarrassed by their co-religionists' project, though they still maintain that lefty bias among college professors is a very serious problem.

I have said it before, and before that, and before that even, but I will repeat it here: what prevents these aggrieved students from transferring to Liberty University, where Jerry Falwell will see to it that they never hear another leftwing prof again? Or to Hillsdale, or Wheaton, or the Claremont Colleges, or any of these schools? You don't even need vouchers! Let the free market rule!

If these people loved education as much as they loved to bitch and moan, this country would be in great shape.

NERD CENTRAL STATION. Oh Christ, the Perfesser turns a book review into a dating seminar for his buds. General consensus: Bitches won't give manly mens a break! Here's my favorite chump:

As a 48-year-old never married single man still in decent shape, successful and now retired, and having weathered the "feminist" cultural storm still raging since my teens, I can tell you that even your having read Norah Vincent's book, you STILL have no idea of the anger, the hatred, the vengeance and the pain so many otherwise attractive and available women are afflicted with. It is an epidemic of conflict and self-distortion that begins and ends with an impenetrable sense of entitlement, based on a false sense of victimhood, and for which not just any man but every man must pay forever for the restoration that's never good enough.

The "feminist" demand runs from fathers to brothers to sons and husbands, to their friends and acquaintances and chance encounters; it is endless. "I am woman, hear me roar" has produced a psychological wasteland that would put Sherman's march to shame and into which any man who travels does so at his peril....

That's why God made Astrolube, buddy.

Reynolds gets his missus in on it, leading to a discussion so stupefying that I found myself making a little Dada exercise out of scrolling down the page and reading lines at random, which vastly improved the experience. My favorite so far:

And if your 'drift' is that I'm greg kuperberg, I'm not. I already told you that I'm a female attorney.

Runners-up:

Rather than thinking like prostitutes, I believe these women you describe are thinking like anti-prostitutes.

and

Since her death, I've made it a point to look for another Filipina.

Perfesser Reynolds' last linkee sees that thread differently: "When we last checked, there were 108 venting males on her site. Don't women want men expressing their feelings? Could it be that women only want their men expressing some of their feelings, if so many had to wait so long for this one lone chance to let fly?" I wonder if he's single, or involved in a committed relationship with the mummified hitchhiker in his smokehouse?

Suddenly all those jokes about keyboard kommandos and Mom's basement have become horribly, horribly real.

MAD MAILBAG: EPISODE ONE. Busy again, so I invented a new category that allows me to recycle other people's work and make it look like I did something. Hehndeed!

As a break from the tedious forensic work of isolating the central fallacies in wingnut columns, we go straight for the cheap laffs with Mad Mailbag -- celebrating comment-box crackpots and their prose-poetic descriptions of the alternative universes in which they dwell.


Today's winner comes from Winds of Change, in a response to Armed Liberal's MLK day complaint that liberals don't get King right.

As a quick scan of sites like Roger L. Simon's and (pre-hejira) Michael Totten's shows, the usual fan base for pro-war sorta-usedtobe-whatever-liberal guys like AL consists of conservatives delighted to hear smack spoken by an insider against the hated liberals.

But some in the crowd are not convinced that the former fellow-traveller has truly repented; and when the audience has thinned out, they step to the podium and, as the speaker is packing up his papers, lean over and whisper in his ear:

Armed Liberal said in post #6: "While I think that the Left has foolishly abandoned both the moral center and style of discourse used by Dr. King, I'd bet that it would resonate still in the right voice. I'm looking for that voice..."

Armed Liberal, I hope that you never find it. Because three are some people who are responsive to that voice. They are Christian, conservative and the backbone of the pro-life cause.

The Left, which the voice that you are looking for would serve, is committed to "choice". When all the oily rhetoric about "choice", "quality of life" and so on comes to a practical point, it is the point of a hypodermic needle piercing the heart of a viable human foetus, to inject it with potassium chloride, to kill it. A voice for the Left is a voice that facilitates the slaughter of helpless human beings.

I think that what you want is a Saruman the White, using the finest words to get people to agree to the worst actions.

I hope you never find him.

With friends like these, who needs glassy-eyed stalkers?

P.S. I also propose a codicil to Godwin's Law: any political argument availing wizards, wookies, elves, necromancers, or persons named Something The Something is prima facie bullshit.

LATRINE DUTY. It's not all major essays and heavy thinking here at alicublog. Sometimes basic maintenance has to be performed. I am here to tell you, first --

First [Hillary Clinton's] husband decides somehow that he is an African-American by claiming to be the "first black President" because he comes from a broken family.

-- that Captain Ed is full of shit: Clinton never seriously portrayed himself thus; it came from Toni Morrison.

Second, they haven't begun to dismount that Brokeback Mountain hobby-horse yet -- but they have moved from the anger stage to bargaining, experimenting with a manly, non-gay way to appreciate the film --

To come down from the mountain, and settle down into gay domesticity is not an option for them, because it would rob them of their dignity as men... and it would transform them into gay men -- a queer kind of quasi-male our society is willing to tolerate, and even to chuckle over and smile at, the way people chuckle over and smile at the funny sissies on Will and Grace. But neither of the cowboys could allow such an insult to their pride and dignity, and thus their only escape was to return to the isolation of the mountain, where, by themselves, they could achieve what even the most gay tolerant society could not give them -- a sense of manliness...

Butch it up as much as you like, girlfriend -- it's still hot man-on-man action to me!

UPDATE. Clinton joked, people choked! See comments.

THESE "LIBERAL FRIENDS" OF MINE! I keep asking but no one can tell me...

Most of my friends are liberals. This series is the conversation I wish that I could have with them. I wish they would let me finish my train of thought before interrupting. I wish that they would consider my arguments, rather than try to bury them in rhetorical put-downs.

...how do guys like Arnold Kling acquire, let alone keep, these "liberal friends" when they express such obvious contempt for them?

I mean, what would the conversations be like?

KLING: See the Colts game?
LIB FRIEND: Damn, I knew they'd fuck it up. They've been riding for a fall.
KLING: Oh, well, you would say that.
LIB FRIEND: Whattaya mean?
KLING: (pulling out charts) As this graph indicates, you have a tendency to claim prescience after the fact.
LIB FRIEND: After the fact? I wrote you an e-mail two days before the game that said the same thing.
KLING: I wish you'd stop interrupting me.
LIB FRIEND: I'm sorry. What were you going to say?
KLING: That your childish behavior is attributable to a deep-rooted psychological malady.
LIB FRIEND: Yuh don't say. (knocks him down)
KLING: You also have a propensity for violence.
(Cue theme for the "The Odd Couple," blackout)

I don't see how anyone with any self-respect would put up with that kind of treatment. Many there's an escort service in D.C. that handles it. Didn't I read about it at Wonkette?

Or maybe it's just bullshit. Yeah, let's go with that.

I'LL NEVER FORGET WHATSHISNAME. If you though "Bring Back Birdie" was a bomb, wait 'til you get a load of "Bring Back Reagan," now playing at OpinionJournal:

When Rep. John Shadegg jumped into the race for House majority leader last week, he called himself a "Reaganite" who would bring back the Gipper's vision of limited government...

It's telling that now, five years into the second Bush presidency, conservatives are still looking for the next Ronald Reagan to champion their ideas in Washington. Even as Reagan and the current President Bush have similar presidential records--fighting wars of ideas around the globe and running federal deficits at home--Reaganism is the party's philosophy, with its belief in small government, low taxes, forceful conservatism, a strong military and the view that this country is a shining example for all the world.

Several of this article's ideas are humorous -- for example, the notion that "wars of ideas" has been redefined since St. Ronnie's time to include carpet bombing, prolonged and unwanted occupation, and the secret detention of American citizens -- but only one is interesting: that conservative apparatchiks still count on invocations of Reagan to sanctify their latest predations.

Does that shit work anymore? Reagan is widely admired, true -- but so is Bill Clinton. This poll has the Glimmer Twins at one and two -- ahead of Lincoln! -- with younger voters prefering Bubba.

Clearly these findings have little to do with historical reality, and much to do with aspiration and self-identification. People who grew up in the 1980s tend to overvalue Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark; likewise, those who grew up with Reagan, when approached by the opinion collector, think not of the evil GE shill sticking a hose into the Treasury and throwing the other end to his corporate buddies, but of their carefree youth. Same with Bubba Blowjob.

So as they prepare the Republican makeover, professional bullshit artists will naturally avail heavy quantities of Spirit of Reagan. They may be right. Not to get too deep into it, but our country is sunk into a peculiar, new state that we might call psuedo-romanticism, best symbolized by the gestural, yellow-sticker support our citizens reflexively give to a war in which few of them believe. We are awash in bunting, but bankrupt of ideals. Ask your neighbor which American value he prizes above all others, and he'll probably hesitate (or name the dollar menu at McDonald's). What do we stand for? Greater earning power than you get in Kenya? All-you-can-eat shrimp? Supposedly preserving freedom for others at the expense of our own?

St. Ronnie may be a great icon for such a time. Or it may be that he's outworn his welcome. Seeing for the millionth time his wizened, hard-smiling visage in OpinionJournal, I was reminded of the Joker in Batman. As our values become more formless and free-floating, the shock of the new must be constantly applied to keep this rumbling corpse of a Republic tottering forward.

If Reagan turns out to be as welcome at the Republican relaunch as any other senile grandfather, things will get weird. What other corpses and near-corpses are available? Nixon? Ford? Bush I?

In that case, prediction: the lighting rise to power of Kurt Busch!

PLUS ÇA CHANGE.

Should the United Nations be reformed? Or dissolved altogether?

That became the question of the evening at the first night of the Liberty Film Festival as the audience was treated to the LA premiere of "Broken Promises: The United Nations at 60"...

However, while the documentary dismantles the UN's credibility, it calls not for abolishment, but reform. And as you can probably guess, that's not what most of the audience at a conservative film festival have in mind -- and they didn't even wait until the end of the film to make that clear.

When one of the film's interviewees declared that "we can't fight these problems [terrorism, etc.] on our own," one audience member piped in with "The Marines can!" which was met with applause.

After the film, in a rather unusual move, radio talk show host Tammy Bruce was given the podium before the filmmakers. While praising the film as a good first step, Bruce challenged the idea of reform, declaring the UN to be part of the problem.

Not one to shy away from verbal excess (what radio host ever is?), she compared reforming the U.N. to trying to reform the Nazis, declared that un-reformable "Jew-hatred" is at the heart of the U.N., and said the U.N. "keeps righteous nations like Israel and the U.S. from being able to do what they need to do."

-- "Dateline Hollywood: Compromising Art or the Art of Compromise?" Ryan Zempel, Townhall

In the early 1960s, when Judelevicius wrote Gyvasis Sekspyras, Soviet critical views of Shakespeare were still officially regulated by the strain of ideology proclaimed at the First Soviet Writers' Congress of 1934 and synthesized in 1936 by A. Smirnov, whose Shakespeare: A Marxist Interpretation had neatly bound up the dramatist's entire oeuvre within the confines of socialist realism in a way that both limited the range of permissible readings and outlined an austere program for Soviet literary criticism in general. In a 1965 article entitled "Literature and the Arts in Captive Lithuania, " Jonas Grinius outlined this "totalitarian encirclement" as it affected Lithuanian writers. Foremost among the requirements of works of both academic and imaginative works produced in the Soviet era, Grinius explained, was that of historical optimism. Other prerequisites included the demand that all literary material be interpreted according to the dialectical and historical materialism preached by the Communist Party, always concerning itself with some aspect of the class struggle and depicting evil characters with the supposed traits of the bourgeoisie. Rimvydas Silbajoris has specified an even more basic limitation on the Soviet Lithuanian literary critic: he must not interpret using aesthetic criteria, but exclusively through the lens of sociology; and he must assert "the supremacy of a single ideology over the multifaceted and ideologically self-determined inner world of the artist."

--Patrick Chura, "Hamlet" and the Failure of Soviet Authority in Lithuania