EVERYBODY'S GOT A DREAM. Jim Lileks, having recently given us what his fellow analists call a "fisking" to a Garrison Keillor column that was three times length of the column, does something similar with Obama's Berlin speech. Lileks informs us that "'World citizen' is used as a badge of empathy that carries no responsibilities... it dilutes actual national citizenship, which naturally takes second place to World Citizenship." Also, Obama said the 9/11 viictims were from all over the world, but "most weren’t from all over the world. Most were Americans. Which makes sense, since the attack was explicitly aimed at America, not The Globe." In the unedited version, Lileks tells us that the Hudson River isn't really a river but a tidal estuary, America is a republic rather than a democracy, and the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy nor Roman nor an Empire.

This is the sort of tendentious crap in which Lileks has become a specialist. Something about Obama really brings it out in him, though. When he gets to the global warming part he actually writes, "Obama may have heard of the Dust Bowl..." Heh, just maybe! I really expected him to reproduce some Dust Bowl matchbooks to demonstrate his superior authority.

It goes on like this forever, and the point, such as it is, is that Obama's appeal to idealism is laughable to hard-bitten cynics like Jim Lileks. Of course that's just me being tendentious, as Lileks and his comrades have their own Shining City of the Hill, but theirs is built on endless wars, tax breaks for the wealthy, and hatred of homosexuals: it's a vastly more butch kind of idealism, which they believe, with reason, makes it easier to sell.

So they compare Obama's speech to "We Are The World" as a pointed mockery, because that global event took place during the Age of Reagan, and takes them back to a happier time when the fruitier sort of idealism was a mere sideshow, an indulgence to distract feather-haired fools while the grown-ups shoveled money from the National Treasury to their friends in the private sector. They have another old guy running for office now, and if he doesn't sprinkle fairy dust as effectively as the original, this can be blamed on the media's refusal to cover him: voters must take on faith that McCain will restore the natural order of the 1980s. Outside the land of dreams, this doesn't look like such a hot idea, but as long as we stick to symbology, it might just work.

A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE. My long-term readers may wonder what has become of some of my former favorite figures of fun in whose grills I am less up than once I was. Sometimes I wonder the same thing.

When I heard the Catholic Church has decided that the 60s made their priests fuck little boys, I was put in mind of that early adopter of the POV, Rod Dreher. He's brought me great joy over the years. For several months, though, Dreher hasn't been blogging much, apparently on the orders of his employers at the Templeton Foundation. He is still authorized to spread the Good News in major media, as with this Washington Post op-ed, in which he tells again how he removed his family from Catholicism and the "loosey-goosey moral teaching in Roman parishes" to the Orthodox Church, with its "seriousness about sin... the long liturgies, the frequent prayers, the intense fasts... Men love a challenge, and that’s exactly what Orthodoxy gives them."

This sounds like something from an artisanal tour of the World's Finest Religions, which suggests to me that Dreher is still the Crunchy connoisseur, judging morals by mouth-feel -- as does his slam on the "dreary parish life" found "often among the ethnically-oriented older parishes that see themselves as little more than the tribe at prayer." The locals don't know what they've got, it seems, and that's why they need professional converts like Dreher to curate the icons and bring in celebrity guest cantors.

So I wandered out to see what's been doing with Old Crunchy. I see he is on Twitter, addressing the sacred ("Progressives tear down taboos around sex, and are shocked when men turn into beasts") and the mundane ("I've been off sugar & starch for a month now -- never felt better").

He appears also to have become embroiled in a controversy over pseudonymous postings at an Orthodox site, which activity, it is suggested, runs afoul of his Templeton strictures. If there's anything to this -- and I'm not about to take the word of religious maniacs on anything -- I am in sympathy with Dreher here, not only because he's already been savaged on this account by the likes of Robert Stacy McCain and Dan Riehl, who hate him for his deviation from traditional wingnut doctrine. Dreher's inability to stop talking is to me his most charming feature, though (perhaps because) it leads him into buffoonery. And if his problem is that he couldn't refrain from blogging even after his masters cautioned him, that just endears him to me all the more.

While I was on this memory trip I looked in on James Lileks, another onetime alicublog mainstay. Along with his column and his Bleats, Lileks now contributes to Ricochet, a clearinghouse for high-toned wingnuttery. Lileks' dispatches there are what you would expect: Snarls at liberals, including those reportedly within the Muslim Brotherhood -- "does he believe," Lileks says of James Clapper, "these liberals won’t make common cause with the 'conservative' wing the moment they got their hands on all the levers?" And he's got a point -- isn't that what liberals do in the U.S. Congress?

So he remains politically engaged, but in short bursts. Back at the Bleat, from what I can see, he mostly leaves off national news and contents himself by explaining how "the rot" pervades his day-to-day life, often evinced by the insufficient helpfulness of clerks and laborers. Here's a recent example: A deliveryman wouldn't drag some fabric rolls into a store for some nice ladies.

“What a jerk,” one of them said. “I understand he can’t help for legal reasons, probably, but he was just so unpleasant.”

Stop and think about that: can’t help for legal reasons. The modern assumption: if you do anything outside the tightly defined parameters of your job, and something happens – say, you swing around an enormous roll of fabric and knock over a dressmaker’s dummy, and it’s scuffed – there will be LAW INVOLVED, or at least something in your file that recounts the regrettable consequences of your decision to cast heed to the breeze and help two women drag the stuff from the curb to the store. He couldn’t even take the items off the pallet.

I was waiting for the more specific Big Gummint corollary -- something about labor unions or OSHA, or how customer service has declined since FDR tried to pack the Supreme Court -- but then Lileks mutters:

Or he just didn’t want to. He didn’t have to and he didn’t want to.

Maybe that just makes it worse. This Bleat also contains Part III of Lileks' war with insolent bicycle shop employees: "Nothing like a bike shop to remind you how the economy would look if capitalism was abolished and pot legalized."

Now for the button, thanks to commenter Halloween Jack: A return visit to Annie Jacobsen, not a member of our regular cast past or present but a guest star, who in 2004 freaked out over Arabs on a plane, who turned out to be not terrorists as Jacobsen feared, but musicians. For this misapprehension and the notoriety it brought her, Jacobsen was rewarded with gigs at Pajamas Media and the Los Angeles Times.

Jacobsen is now promulgating a new terror-in-the-skies story, this one having to do with the Roswell UFO incident. Per Time:

What really crashed near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, was not an alien ship, nor was it a weather balloon as previously speculated by many, according to Jacobsen. In fact, she says, it was a Soviet spy plane. And it was controlled by disfigured adolescents, two of whom survived the crash.

So those photogenic corpses weren't aliens after all -- they were Commies! Even better: They were mutants created by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele on Stalin's orders to look like aliens and thus throw America into turmoil. Son of a gun -- Jonah Goldberg was right!

LIFESTYLE CONSERVATISM. Like Megan McArdle's defense of being wrong, described in the previous post, the latest Lileks Bleat confronts reality with a rubber sword and a victory flag.

What sticks in his craw is a Times thumbsucker on the increase in unmarried women. Lileks cannot dispute that women who don't want to be married don't have to be, and some may even be happier on their own. But simple pursuit-of-happiness grounds are as nothing compared to Lileks-grade nostalgia! "To my parent's generation," he says, "divorce for no good reason was proof of moral failure." They also thought nuclear radiation was harmless, Jimbo. (Also, they would have considered a fellow with your fussiness about breakfast sausages and old matchbooks to be, erm, a mite tetched.)

And then comes that last refuge of a propagandist: prose poetry!

It's a consequence of the triumph or Romantic Love, I suppose; if you don't mesh at the elemental level, something's wrong. The notion of simply inhabiting the same road as you move towards the horizon isn't enough; you must both be fascinated by the same things. I prefer the model where one person is interested in the flowers that grow by the road, and the other discourses on the history of pavement, and you both speculate on the birds in the boughs above. But that's just me.

This is the sort of thing that makes me sorry I learned how to read.

Like McArdle's plaint, this is all about being right when you're wrong -- defending an indefensible premise (in which you're too invested to back off) by any means except logic, which has already been failed you. To this end, Lileks even avails the old trick of speculating, what if the thing I'm ranting about were actually something entirely different? ("Or would a Times piece by this author about surging rates of marriage -- especially among the young -- somehow communicate a sense of dread and regret, of oppurtunities lost?") This is known among nerds as a "thought experiment," and among regular people as bullshit.

Finally, though, one is left wondering: Why are the private beliefs and behaviors of other citizens so annoying to Lileks? Probably because what was once said of the left wing is now demonstrably true of the right: for them, the personal is the political. The marriage habits and bedroom behaviors of others obsess them; they obsessively judge the political content of movies, TV shows, and so forth. I guess when your politics are shown to be disastrously inapt for the country, what else have you got left?

UPDATE. For a more seriouser look at the single-gal issue, see here.

EXTRA HELPING OF GRATITUDE. In my end is my beginning. After my Lileks pre-Thanksgiving throwaway, I find myself returning to the subject as the Mailer of the Mall of America lets fly a stinging denunciation of... Happy Feet. You know, that cartoon with the dancing penguins.

To be fair, the Art Police at Redstate got there first, and it appears Fox News has attacked the cartoon as well (leading to an interesting meditation of "the conservative crusade against cartoon characters" at The Carpetbagger Report).

But there is a categorical difference between the right-wing Zhdanovite squads and Lileks. The first group are mere sentinels of wrongthink; the stiffness of their reports shows that they don't have any real interest in or enthusiasm for the lively arts -- they are here on a political mission from which aesthetics can only distract, so they shoot first and have epiphanies later.

Lileks, on the other hand, loves all kinds of artsy-fartsy stuff and even allows himself to show off his erudition in matters of form and content. Jimbo knows architecture ("...I sat in the grass and consulted a small cigar, reading an interesting piece about a local architect who’s come up with a new paradigm for pre-fab housing. Is this the future of architecture? The article asked. Short answer, from me: nope"). Jimbo knows aesthetics ("Because they’ll all be white. Because they’ll all have an Apple logo, which already has that high-tech cool aura. Because they will look like they were designed to work together. In other words, aesthetics count"). Jimbo knows not so much about theatre, which he keeps mispronouncing, but he can see eternity in a matchbook. He has some kind of feeling for the arrangements of sounds and shapes that beguile him; he knows, albeit dimly, that art is not just audio-visual medicine for the restoration of his ichor, nor a series of propaganda opportunities which can be wrenched in the right direction if we can sneak our people into some high-level appointments in the artsifartsy industry.

So though he sometimes puts on the rusty armor of the culture warrior (which fits him so badly even he must recognize it), usually when a work of artsifartsiness conflicts with his own notion of the Way Things Ought to Be, he does not pretend to be talking about art: He goes straight to sub-urbane dad mode:

So now we have to apologize for serving fargin’ fish sticks, eh. Hell with it. Veal daily from now on. Veal for breakfast. Veal-O-Bits swimming in whale blubber.

I remember when animals were used as stand-ins for humans, to shed light on human behaviors and foibles; now animals are stand-ins for creatures more ethically advanced than humans. (See also, The Ant Bully. Or rather don’t; that movie said it was okay to be an individual as long as you were part of a collective, and no one ever had competing goals or ideas. Muddle-headed twaddle...)

When someone as proud of his verbal skills as Lileks starts spitting rank foam like this, a charitable interpretation is possible. In this case, I think he is trying to protect art from himself. When directly discussing even so modest a specimen as Happy Feet, he will not betray any signs of cultural authority, which might deceive some innocent souls into a misunderstanding about art; he will rave and shake his fist and instantaneously sprout elbow patches and a big blue vein on his big pink forehead, so that only fellow fist-shakers will be caught up in his spell, and the innocent will walk away, little realizing how close they came to corruption! It's kind of noble in a way, like Cagney at the end of Angels with Dirty Faces, Bill Hurt at the end of Altered States, Jeff Goldblum at the end of The Fly...

Hell, I don't know. Maybe he's just nuts. But coming back from Thanksgiving, it struck me that some of the folks I consider and treat as nuisances are actually something to be grateful for. Could I have, by myself, come up with a character like The Ole Perfesser, or the Crazy Jesus Lady, or Ann Althouse, or Lileks? It doesn't matter -- to me they are characters now. I realize, for example, there is a real person named Glenn Harlan Reynolds somewhere out there in the sticks, but though I know his writings, I don't know him: his words suggest the shape of a character, upon whose motivations and behaviors I am privileged to speculate. Maybe, with a little luck and ambition, I can detach these characters from their humble real-life avatars, and find for them some small measure of immortality. They certainly deserve it, after all the pleasure they've given me.

CARRIERS. James Lileks was tweaked for his part in the great Save Christmas From Liberals scam by James Wolcott, and now responds at great length. This is described by the feeder-streams as a "Fisking," the etymology of which is meant to imply that the rebuke went straight up Wolcott's ass, though in this case I am put more in mind of fists ragefully pummelling the heated air of a home office.

Llieks' defense of Lileks consists mainly of accusations of elitism ("coastal types who think the rest of America truly gives a shite whether Lindsay Lohan lost her Blackbird at a party last week" -- well, I guess that lets me out), and of misapprehension by elitists of the mystery of the Bleat, whose author is not, he asserts, a crazy man "who wants to tamp the thick bristling wad of God down everyone’s throat with a miter," but a sensible fellow patiently working the microfiche machines to prove that sometime after the Second World War newspapers started running "Season's Greetings" ads, Entertainment Weekly started running sacreligious imagery, and James Wolcott started making fun of Jesus. "I don’t think people in the Evil Coastal Godless Baal-Loving Media hate Christianity," he writes. "I’m sure some hold it in disinterested contempt, the way they view NASCAR and Simplicity dress patterns" etc.

So it is really just more ornate guff about our lack of resemblance to Lilek's little slice of suburban heaven, with a fresh overlay of self-pity. People like Wolcott have James Lileks all wrong, as the author's numerous comical renderings of the way his critics see him are meant to show. He's no Jesus freak; just a guy who wants to show you an old radio program and ask if you don't find it interesting that back then they talked about God in an approving manner, while today floorwalkers reel and James Wolcott watches birds.

All good fun for Wolcott and Lileks and me. Of course, the context is that, throughout the land of Citizen Journalists, it is reported that Christmas is to liberals as garlic is to vampires. The Citizen Journalists are industrious in their propagation of this myth; you can even see it peddled on movie discussion boards. The idea is a great deal newer than "Happy Holidays," but its dissemination, enabled by technology and a horde of unpaid assistants, has been miraculously swift and thorough, and I wouldn't be surprised if it quickly attained Classic status, like the Burl Ives snowman or the Ballad of Foster Barton.

Lileks may not be aware of the trend of which his writings are a prominent part, but given that he can pick up from a great distance New Yorkers' interest in Lindsay Lohan's Blackberry, this seems far-fetched. I do take him at his word that he doesn't want to bring Jesus into my Winter Holiday. The job he and his comrades are doing isn't quite that inclusive.

UNIFIED THEORY OF LILEKS. They call it the "Eureka Moment" -- the epiphanic insight that takes the intellectual odds 'n' sods one has been glumly trying to piece together and instantly pulls them into a nice, tight bow.

I had mine during today's Bleat, In Which Father Lileks Again Contemplates Children at Play

Then they watched "Barbie Swan Lake," a computer-animated movie that’s all the rage in the tot set. Kelsey Grammer is the bad guy, and his motivation is simple and utterly Blofeldian -- he wants to take over the world. Why? Like that's ever worked. And if you could take over the world, what the hell would you do with it? I know, I know: if you’ve secured control of one hemisphere through necromancy, you’re always going to wonder whether the other hemisphere will challenge your rule, so might as well go for the gold. But it would be easier to just rule a small part and guard your power so you could repel any attempts to puncture your domain.

See also, North Korea.

Even now, to contemplate this fragment stirs my laughter -- but it is Olympian laughter, the laughter of the Gods! Much like the laughter, at the end of Peckinpaugh's Convoy, of Dirty Lyle -- who laughed to see the Rubber Duck resurface at his own funeral, because he knew then that there is no death!

Today's Bleat by itself didn't bring me to clarity -- many Lileks playdates, many trips to Target, many italicized toddler drolleries, led to this Moment. But it was the straw that both stirred the drink and broke the camel's back.

Reading the passage for the first time, I was put in mind of friends who are parents and devote large blocks of their time to their children. As they are intelligent, sensitive people (yeah, I do know a few), they fully enter their children's worlds and follow the simple logic, uninformed by brutal adult experience, of their games. It can be charming to observe -- but only because you know they will come back from such adventures whole and sane.

Not everyone can, apparently. Think how many hours Lileks has spent engaged in this sort of conversation with Gnat:

If you have five Hello Kittys, you’re sad because you don’t have six. And that’s not right.

I have nine Kittys.

Okay, you have nine Kittys, and you’re sad because you don’t have ten. But some kids don’t have any.

Can I have ten Kittys for my birthday?

And so it goes...

Some adults can come out of these mind-warping sessions and, after a faceful of cold water or a snootful of rye, fully rejoin the grown-up world. But Lileks' boundless devotion has drawn him in too deep for that.

Now, whenever he tells his readers that Kim Il Jung has been explained by Barbie, I will be inclined to sympathies rather than rage. I always half-knew that it was some psychological malady of the less offensive type -- not the pure evil that works through such earthly forms as Jonah Goldberg -- that animated his ravings. Now I am sure of it.

As soon as I figure out what's wrong with the rest of these assholes, I can close down this weblog.

UNTERMENTION. James Lileks mourns the demise by legislation of old motel signs on the highway. I am not unsympathetic. But:

...we give these people a smooth serene road, carefully designed to bring them from one planned community to the next with a minimum of visual friction, and the spoilers put up loud contentious honking signs that reeked of the Almighty Dollar. You know, ugly godless totems like this:

[visual of old matchbook motel sign from the author's collection]

Well, we showed them.

Our signs our primitive; the lawmakers must act. Jeebus. This is what annoys me to no end about the 60s, to cram it all into a tidy convenient decade; the overculture and the underculture ganged up on the great Middle, for different reasons but with equal gusto. The Middle was Crass, in the eyes of the overculture; Phony, in the eyes of the underculture. Now here we are a half-century later, and people will build websites detailing the few remaining examples of postwar roadside architecture, documenting the survivors, eulogizing their demise.

No one organizes a petition to save a building the underculture built, because they didn’t build anything. Ah well. Onward Garden Soldiers.

One thing sticks out: underculture? What's he mean? There's no referent in the preceding text. In the context of a thousand Lileks Bleats, this may mean hippies and beatniks -- you know, they hate phonies, it was in The Catcher in the Rye. And they never built anything but yurts and the Burning Man; they were all about tearing things down, smashing the state etc. Presumably these hipniks, fronted by a crying Indian, collaborated with Lady Bird Johnson to remove neon from the highways, leaving Lileks to shake his fist at the countryside.

Maybe it refers to the earlier part of the essay, in which Lileks talks about how great it would be if we could put more people in prison.

The middle class always gets it in the neck in Lileksland. You'd think they'd organize into a voting bloc or something.

CHANGING SHIFTS. I'm trying to correct my sleep habits, and so can no longer stay up till 3 am waiting for James Lileks to walk the halls in a nightshirt and stocking-cap, holding his arms out in front of him and wailing "Buy War Bonds." So I checked out that buzz.mn thing he does in the daytime.

Here he reports that the film Leatherheads was not made in Minnesota because the state didn't offer the filmmakers a big enough tax break. Lileks seems on the verge of complaining about corporate welfare before recovering himself and targeting instead the Hollyweird non-interlopers: "Why them, and not every other company that wants to set up shop here? Is it just because they’re pretty?" (Answer: What other company that wants to set up shop there? Wastelands R Us?)

Next post, still-steaming Lileks makes fun of Renee Zellweger's face. Fortunately there are hippies onto whom he can offload his rage: Lileks commences a series of photo-posts about some 1970 protest, within which he promises readers will find "a lovely irony." And what is the irony? That hippies smell! Haw haw! And that the stupid hippies were protesting one chain restaurant but not another. Moral: complaining is useless, unless you can get a newspaper to pay you a hundred thousand dollars a year for it. Then it's awesome.

Daylight doesn't do much for him or me. Back into the shadows!

UPDATE. Oh, wait; I can read Bleats when I wake up! Here we go: "I’ll gladly hand over six Carnegie libraries for three 60s coffee shops." I'm going back to bed.

A JOG 'ROUND THE ASYLUM. While I enjoy The Poor Man's Wingnutty Awards, honoring moronism of the highest order, in these sluggish midsummer days I prefer the simple pleasures of garden-variety stupid.

Jim Lileks complains that liberals make jokes about Lynne Cheney being gay, which he finds so tired and dull that he must go on about it for three paragraphs. At least, it starts like that, then quickly veers into "As if there’s anything about wanting a lower marginal tax rate or a 500-ship Navy that says thou must also castigate the sodomites," and Hillary is against gay marriage so there. It's a great, self-pitying muddle -- why do those homosexuals insist on making me feel uncool when I just bought a guitar amp? But this often happens when Lileks comes in contact with teh gay. In this golden oldie, for example, gay folk do him a similar disservice by insisting on marriage, which Lileks seems to think involves a legislative four-way with him, his wife, and his widdle girl. "No matter how much I may support gay rights," he sighs, "in the final analysis my belief that my daughter needs a dad brands me as a reactionary." And that's just not right! Lileks, eternal victim of the sneers and japes of homosexuals, reminds me of this guy. (After that, the long incoherent roar about the Roberts' family clothes and how some guy in the Washington Post doesn't appreciate proper shirts and ties -- "I stand up straighter... I feel obliged to be more respectful" -- is more concordance than any of us needs.)

In an otherwise unreadable essay about how Terrorists are Bad, Caleb Carr offers a gem regarding the London attacks:

...Early polls suggest that the majority of the British public has been sharply and tragically reminded of what its true interests and who its true friends are, whatever the momentary shortcomings of this or that government or administration in London or Washington. Is this only a temporary reaction to outrage? Perhaps, but this much is certain: While we in the West, in our efforts to defeat al Qaeda's terrorist network, occasionally elect unwise or even duplicitous leaders and courses of action, there is no lack of wisdom so profound (to paraphrase the often duplicitous FDR) as that produced by fear...

If, as Carr's prose assures, the reader has drifted off when he approaches this section, he will awaken in a logical thicket: if Carr thinks it's so great that Britons have been scared into righthink by the bombings, why speak so badly of fear so soon after? Carr must have been writing on deadline, for rather than go back and fix the passage, he goes on about " ignorant protestors and careless celebrities" who "do the terrorists' work for them." That'll distract 'em! Getaway, Carr!

Meanwhile congratulations Jeff Goldstein on causing the balloons to drop with the 10,000th blogpost to date on how liberals are losing the war and killing our soldiers. Boy, the President is rightwing, both houses of Congress are rightwing, most governors are rightwing, all the cool kids are rightwing -- we are assured every day that liberals are a dying, impotent, spore of mold in the dustbin of history -- and yet somehow we determine the course of the World War Whatever with our mere words (which no one reads)! Let us gather in Berkeley, people, and sneer for peace!

UPDATE. Goldstein says I "alter" his "terminology." Yeah, I'm the Reader's Digest of the Left. But have I misrepresented him? In comments he seems to say that I have (hope I got that part right; I am notoriously unable to read clearly). Well, let's see: his post refers to Democratic Party leaders Ted Kennedy, Carl Levin, "Dick" and "Howard" (I think he means Durbin and Dean, but I may be wrong), and bases their ignominy on the investigation of wrongdoing at Guantanamo, and proclaims, in all caps, that THE LEFT LIED AND LONDONERS DIED! That covers an awful lot of ground, and seems to imply (again, tell me if I'm reaching here) that vocal concern for reliable reports of prisoner abuse provides "rhetorical cover" for terrorists, which in turns kills Londoners.

And all this is based on a terrorist's relative saying the terrorist wanted to get back at us for Gitmo. I guess we better not say anything that pisses off terrorists.

UPDATE 2. Goldstein points readers to a site where they can buy "Liberals Lied, Londoners Died" t-shirts. Clearly no reasonable person seeing the shirt would think it was aimed at liberals en masse. And a person wearing a YANKEES SUCK t-shirt might be referring to Oliver Wendell Holmes and Titus Moody.

GRUMPY OLD MEN. At OpinionJournal Daniel Henninger devotes an entire, lengthy column to how there's so many swears on the TV these days and in his day they had Rod Serling and nobody used swears. Really, that's all it's about. A web outlet of the mighty Wall Street Journal is now running copy that sounds as if it originated with your cranky grandmother while she was off her meds, then was run through some kind of language software with the "pomposity" setting turned on High.

Meanwhile in Jasperwood Lileks complains of ennui, which is interesting considering what he wrote the day before. That session started promisingly enough, with a happy reverie about old-fashioned newspapering, "when movies regularly showed newspapers as things that spun like propellers before stopping at a jaunty angle," and the papers had great headlines like KILLER GETS DEATH, which Lileks repeated, again in all caps, adding the gloss, "Off to Old Sparky within the month." He seemed as happy as a teenage boy with a jar of Vaseline.

But then a housewife in a commercial behaved in a manner Lileks found insubordinate. This got him screaming BITCH, again in all caps, and reeling into a Kim Du Toit-style monologue:

it’s something I notice in ads: Guys Dumb, Girls Competent and Patiently Enduring Guys’ Thickheadedness. In the bad old days, in the era of spinning newspapers, it was the other way around -- the frails were dizzy flighty creatures who required an iron infusion of masculine common sense. Now the guys in ads all act like boys in a state of eternally attenuated adolescence, and they require partners who channel their inner Mom to whip them into shape.

He then announced he would amplify on this theme in his next installment. This morning I leapt out of bed and ran to my computer, only to learn that Lileks is too tired to write anything for us except one of those half-hearted Family Circus re-enactments. Little bitch.

Refresh my memory: aren't conservatives supposed to be the hip, fun kids?

AN ESPECIALLY BAD DAY. God knows, there's always a lot of stupid shit on the internet, but sometimes the computer screen seems like a window into an old-fashioned lunatic asylum.

Lileks unleashes wrath he previously reserved for Salam Pax and Michael Moore on Patrick Stewart. When in this sort of five-hours-without-a-cigar fury, Lileks doesn't argue, he chews pet peeves till his teeth squeak. For example: Stewart is in the theatre, that effete, hairspray-smelling makework program for enemies of American common sense ("Noted: the future of humanity shall consist not in getting this place right but watching angry Pinter screeds about that wretched meat we know as our own flawed species.."), whereas Lileks is "about seven Atkins-assisted days away from a six-pack" and wrestles alligators for a living, when not advising our Commander-in-Chief on matters foreign and domestic (Have the burger without the bun, Sir; you'll be energized and hostile all day long!) and pwaying games wif his widdle dawter.

Half the ravings lament that the man who played Picard on the TV does not share Lileks' world-views, and then the other half is devoted to detailing the unworthiness of this, this actor to advise the President on interplanetary foreign policy. Jesus Christ. Someone give him a breadstick.

Further down the sludgestream Clifford May does the "imminent" routine again. I thought we'd seen the last of this one -- noted that Bush didn't use the word "imminent" to describe Saddam's attack on the West, but he did use so many scare tactics, including imagery such as "one vial, one canister... could bring a day of horror like one we have never known," that he might as well have. But May has a new angle:

Here's one straightforward way to express it: When a knife is raised and pointed at you, and you block the thrust -- that's not pre-emption. That's self-defense, a common sense response to an imminent threat. By contrast, pre-emption is when you recognize that someone means you harm, glimpse a knife -- and take action before seeing the weapon poised for an imminent strike.

Someone should tell May that if one is a paranoid lunatic, such moments of recognition come rather easily, even if the knife is as imaginary as Saddam's WMDs. Frequently the paranoid will blame another party for his confusion: death row inmate Scott Panetti, for example, blames an alter-ego named Sarge, while Bush blames one named Faulty Intelligence.
Fascinating behaviors, all of which should be observed far, far away from the cutlery drawer.

Speaking of the clinically insane, Peggy Noonan blames 9/11 on the real Axis of Evil: Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, and Whitney Houston. Her friend Mickey Kaus declares we must not set a bad, breast-exposing example to "young, angry Muslims," who may decide to attack Rhythm Nation for its prurient dancing girls. In which case it will all be Janet Jackson's and Justin Timberlake's fault. Just as Joel Grey and Liza Minnelli caused the Holocaust.

I can tolerate the presence of such sad cases, but Lord it's awful when they start screaming.

CRAZY LIKE A FOX NEWSMAN. I used to make fun of Jim Lileks a lot, till my focus inevitably and happily drifted. My thought back then was that the guy was nuts, and his dire visions of nuclear death for New York and so forth still read like Bremeresque ravings found in motel drawers after killing sprees.

But Lileks has calmed. From the evidence of his most recent column, he would seem to have shifted his job description from the Jeremiah of Jasperwood to good-natured Republican hack.

He has developed, for example, a sunny side attitude toward the risible candidacy of Arnold Schwarzenegger, supporting the former Mr. Universe because he is "more likable and trustworthy than the alternatives... he’ll bring new voters to the polls." He sounds like an excitable Jaycee pimping his high school football teammate for County Executive. He adds, "We saw this in Minnesota with Jesse." I never noticed Lileks calling the surly Minnesota governor "Jesse" before -- either he and Ventura recently bonded over a secret stash of Battlestar Gallactica figurines, or the prairie pundit has begun adopting icons as journalistic pets. Talk of "Jack," "Bobby," "Rudy," or "Jesse" is a sure sign of incipient hackdom -- see any Pete Hamill column for details.

Then Lileks gets to that gay bishop, and suddenly he's channeling Maggie Gallagher. "It has nothing to do with Rev. Robinson’s sexual orientation," he assures. "The guy left his wife and kids to go do the hokey-pokey with someone else... 'I want to have sex with other people' is not a valid reason for depriving two little girls of a daddy who lives with them, gets up at night when they're sick, kisses them in the morning when they wake."

In just a few tear-stained cliches he's got the soccer moms on board with the Derbyshire wing, all the while maintaining plausible toleration! Is this the work of a madman? No, my friends, this is the work of a crafty wordsmith angling for the A. M. Rosenthal Chair, which is always well-padded, at some bigger daily than that he currently serves. All he has to do now is minimize the trips to Target and desperate declarations of fealty to his widdle girl, and tone down the keening pitch to which his longer pieces usually escalate, and he's a cinch the next time great Rupert has an opening.

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.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP about the Santorum Surge and how evanescent I expect it to be. To give you some idea why, here's a quote from James Lileks -- yes, that James Lileks -- on Santorum: "Santorum's remarks are not a recipe for electoral success in the 21st century." And he said it in 2003. If that's what Lileks thought in 2003, by now Richard Viguerie must be going, "Christ, not that Jesus freak bullshit again."

On the other hand, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin have said nice things about him, so Santorum may expect significant support from the has-been grifter wing of the party.

OH WELL. You know what? I thought. I should see what Jim Lileks is doing. After all, life is full of surprises. Maybe it'll be like running into someone I went to college with and seeing that he's way cooler than he was when I knew him -- I might then be forced to think whether I had misjudged him, or whether people can change more than we normally think they can; either way it will lead me to an improving contemplation of the human condition. Surely that can't be bad.

As for the reading to the class: it’s the school’s annual Readathon, and I was a “celebrity” reader for my daughter’s class and a first grade class. Fifth-graders are tough. They know everything. Top of the food chain, ma. One kid was sitting back with his arms crossed over his chest, wearing what appeared to be Oakley sunglasses, challenging my remarks on the difficulty of climbing Everest. K2 was harder, he said, and yes. he’d read the book I was about to read.

At this point you want to walk over and DI the guy until he sits up straight and looks away and says SIR YES SIR, but that battle: long lost. Adults are not Elders, or creatures worthy of respect; they’re just slower, lesser creatures who have authority because they’re older, and there’s no reason other than that. I don’t believe in ancestor worship, but I do remember having respect for grownups. They were not my “friends.” They occupied a completely different realm...

Oh, never the fucking mind.

UPDATE. In comments, lots more interest in Jimbo, child behavior, and A Wrinkle In Time than I expected. Well, I should have expected the last -- this crew has a serious representation of sci-fi nerds. (I was never that way myself; I was always more of a nerd without portfolio.) And Lileks is an endless source of pleasure even when he's not fantasizing Fargo engulfed by barbarian hordes.

But those damn kids? HMDK, for example: "I agree with your point and despise Lileks, but I also hate snotty spoiled kids. You'd think that'd make me conflicted. It doesn't. Turns out: I have plenty of hate to go around." Oh well I appreciate that. But as for kids, my default reaction to their occasional impudence is 1.) recognition of my jacked-up-shit former self, reincarnated in better clothes; and 2.) a gently-delivered message that if you miss this, kid, it's your loss. YMMV but I haven't been shivved by the little hoods yet.

HE HASN'T CHANGED A BIT. Emerging from the Vale of Old Matchbooks: Jim Lileks! How I've missed him! What's up, Jimbo?

My nine-year-old daughter looked at the front page of the paper, and her eyes grew wide:

The president said “ass”?

What th-- he's actually doing this? The President swore in front of my widdle girl? It's like the Clenis, only PG!

Also, Gnat managed to make it to nine without running off to join a gang? She has guts; must get 'em from her mother.

She swallowed the A-word, because it is, after all, the A-word.

My admiration for Miss Lileks' nerve grows by the minute. What a picnic is must be at that house. Swallow your ass, young lady! Boy, when she gets to Bryn Mawr the fur, so to speak, is gonna fly.

I nodded; he said that. She was silent for a while, digesting the information. Presidents, after all, are part of the great Pantheon of Authority, standing over the school principal, teachers, the pastor, police, and perhaps the mailman. To consider them using bad words reordered everything.

"Where were you when the President said the A-word?" asks Mike Huckabee, roaming the audience with a microphone as the super reads A-DAY: THE END OF THE INNOCENCE.

Barack Obama is probably the last guy you’d think would introduce “ass” into the mainstream political discourse. It’s like Spock announcing he wants to “knock boots” — a expression both crude and banal coming from someone renowned for dispassionate cool.

Well, Jimbo, Obama was working from the original Harlan Ellison script, before that bastard Roddenberry softened it up*. Does that make it easier for you to understand?

But the idea that the president should confine himself to polite terminology is one of those antiquated chocks that prohibit true, honest expression, and if the post-Boomer culture has taught us any-effin-thing, it’s that authentic people use earthy language, authentically, and only the spats-and-monocle crowd blah blah blah

Oh no, Jimbo -- surely not the beatnilks-dirtied-up-my-TV routine again? Alas, it is: And you can read the rest to find out how the beats, led by Barack Obama, Bill Maher, and Helen Thomas, destroyed civility -- and, even worse, impeded traffic:

The hero isn’t the man who invents the traffic signal, it’s Ratso Rizzo who crosses against the light, bangs on a hood of a car that dares to nose into the intersection, and yells “I’m walkin’ here!”

Just for reference:



If you've ever laughed appreciatively at Ratso's reaction, in Lileks' world, you are Ratso, one of those 70s New York skels whom he fears will crawl out of his home entertainment center at night and Death Wish his family. That's why he keeps a go-bag at the ready, so they can escape to the tall pines and join with the guys in the tricorners, with whom he will set about remaking America out of old Sears catalogues, back into a land where no pauper can interrupt the majestic parade of gas-guzzlers.

Well, at least it's good to know he can finally stop thinking about 9/11 for a while, even if it's only to think about ass.

* If coffee isn't doing it for you this morning, try Ellison's hilariously acerbic "introductory essay" to The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay that Became the Classic Star Trek Episode. "There's only one reason I'm doing this book: Fyodor Dostoevsky..." I bet he knows how funny he is, though.

UPDATE. I should note that the illo snatched 'n' patched above is the work of famous rock star Tom Tomorrow.

UPDATE 2. Not being a blowhard like me, commenter Christopher extracts the nub: "This sort of pre-emptive whining of 'I know you're going to call me a pussy for not getting the joke, but I'm not, damn it!' combined with 'You guys think you're so cool but you aren't!'"

HAPPY HALLOWEEN. Right-wing nuts celebrate by holding flashlights under their chins and telling us the dead speak to us just like on the Teevee and foolish atheists will fry in hell. I celebrate by staying the hell away from the Parade and little kids, and watching Count Floyd. Whatever you do tonight, make it extra scarey. Awwoooooooooo!

UPDATE. Oops, forgot the HOLLYWEIRD IS MAKING OUR LITTLE GIRLS INTO SLUTS WITH COSTUMES! evergreen. James Lileks grabs a paddle but his heart doesn't seem to be in it. His daughter is, what, five now? I'll bet she's already telling him he's full of shit. "I'm going to Drusilla's, dah-dee. Don't wait up." "You'll sit here and eat your low-carb dinner first, young lady!" "Oh that birdseed is for manorexics like you, dah-dee. I wish to be zaftig and fierce!" I'm not sure how it ends: I like Lileks going "Sputter, sputter!" and ruffling his newspaper, but him tying the child to a chair and torturing her with old matchbooks works, too. Or this woman could show up at the door, and Lileks could say, "Aren't you a little old to be trick-or-treating, miss?" and then we bring in the fight choreographer.

SHORTER HUGH HEWITT: The Star-Tribune is making Lileks get up off his ass! Cancel your subscriptions!

I don't get it. They're always bitching about how evil liberal reporters twist the news. Now one of their favorite operatives has a chance to bring fair 'n' balanced coverage to whatever the hell goes on in the Twin Cities, and they're complaining.

Maybe Jimbo can camp out in front of a madrassa and wait for someone to look at him cross-eyed. Hot copy, that!

These guys always want everyone else to work harder; let's see how they like it.

(Also, Hewitt says, "Imagine The New Yorker asking E.B. White to manage the restaurant listings." I say, imagine E.B. White writing endlessly about his trips to the hardware store and the cute things his widdle girl says, and trying to get that past Harold Ross.)

UPDATE. Lots of good commentary but Nancy's is the best.

UPDATE 2. Jimbo's fan club says covering news is demeaning, MSM is for fags, Lileks is being censored, and a bunch of other really stupid shit.

Again, I don't know why Lileks and his fellow he-men aren't tickled to have him transformed into a real live newshound -- such a hardboiled profession, and it goes so well with a fedora! Why would they prefer he remain in his ivory rec-room, spinning out deepthink on Why I Like Pie and such like?

I guess because his new job will require some actual work -- e.g, the lifting of phone receivers -- and contact with people who are not store clerks, on premises that are not Target or Chuck-E-Cheese. As with their pet war, they only like the rough-and-tumble parts of life when there's a nice, thick plexiglass screen between them and the reality.

Someone told me the guy's salary is just a few COLAs from six figures. And I'm supposed to cry bitter tears because he has to get up and walk around? Fuck him.

GENERAL DERANGEMENT SYDROME. In Britain, "a story based on the Three Little Pigs fairy tale has been turned by a government agency's awards panel as the subject matter could offend Muslims." You can guess how I feel about it, and I can probably guess how you feel about it.

You may also guess how James Lileks feels about it too, but with him you can never guess far enough. He interrupts his rant to make this observation:

All the brave people waiting for things to get really bad so they can put on their V for Vendetta masks and upload YouTube videos of themselves writing graffiti on stop signs will roll their eyes and shrug their shoulders at this, because A) it’s just more wingnut hyperventilation, B) the people who get exercised have a deeper agenda, which probably involves deportation and gas chambers, and C) it’s just pigs, man...

Dig hard into your memory banks, lefty friends, and see how many people you can recall meeting who remotely match this description. They may safely be said to barely exist. I'm sure Lileks knows this, but he isn't really talking about these near-imaginary people. He's talking about you and me. Because we didn't wake up the morning and say, "I must protect America from this dhimmitude." You and I are not being criticized for our imagined support of the idiots on the children's book award committee, but for not caring so much about foreign idiocy as about the local variety. Which makes us graffitists who use beatnik slang.

We might call this the McArdle Maneuver, or attach it to a law of wingnut nature: any argument against any outrage will inevitably expand to encompass their ancient grudges, regardless of relevance.

Someone should clue Lileks et alia that the repetitive use of non sequiturs doesn't make them Cato, it makes them incoherent.

SEMI-REGULAR "I MAKE FUN OF LILEKS BECAUSE I AM AN AWFUL, AWFUL MAN" SEGMENT. Ladies and gentlemen, our Top Ten Thousand Laker:

She ate all her apples and declined the fries. I studied the bag, which reminded how McDonald’s always gets the graphics wrong. Maybe they connect with someone, but nearly every single example of McDonald’s graphics leaves me dead. Example from today:

(Thoroughly unremarkable marketing graphic)

Welcome back, 1977! The big quotes, the horrible roundy-edge coffee logo with the unnaturally conjoined U-M – it all shrieks Carter-era design.

Helpful hint, miss: see that thing on top of your portfolio? It’s called “a handle.” Give it a try.

That bastard Carter sans'd our serifs! And, whore -- no online portfolio for you! Is reserved for matchbooks!

(Steps forward, removes Elvis wig, addresses the audience)

I am actually a big fan of Ancillary Lileks: the celebrations of silly detritus, the found objects from dead popcult plus commentary, and so forth. This sketch was inspired by The Left and his uncivil speech. I don't approve of it, and I don't approve of what I just did.

(writhes; second, large and inhuman head emerges from first)

Fuck that cracker asshole! Fuck Lileks! Blood, blood and death to you!

(hissing, spitting, cloud of smoke, finis)

CHRIST NOT MAN IS KING