THEIR ARGUMENT. Kathryn Jean Lopez explains it all for you, publishing with approval this NRO reader quote:

I was just watching "The Great Muppet Caper" (last day of the semester) and discovered an overlooked moment of Muppet insight. The gang have just caught jewel thief Charles Grodin red-handed and sweet, earnest Kermit asks, "Why did you do it?" Grodin shrugs and says, "Because I'm a villain." Plain and simple, no "root cause" nonsense. I'll remember that line every time someone tries to tell me we should be more concerned about why "they" hate us.

Let us not forget, as we endeavor to wrest control of the country back from the bellicose idiots that currently misguide her, that we are in fact dealing with bellicose idiots. The bowtied clowns who act all erudite on TV are merely a sideshow for the opinion epicures. The Republican arguments are in the main yahoo bullshit. Whichever one of the Dems picks up the fallen standard in 2004 had better be able to talk to Beavis and Butthead.

I miss Bill Clinton.

UES, US, ME. I took my usual Saturday afternoon walk through the Upper East Side today and had all sorts of thoughts about the neighborhood. One of my first jobs in the City was as a waiter in a now-defunct UES bistro called Daly's Daffodil. That place is a story or twelve in itself (ask me sometime about our three-hundred pound night manager, who would get drunk on Bushmill's every night; we used to pop Irish songs on the jukebox at about 10 pm just to get him roaring along with "Danny Boy," and to get the customers to complain about him). I loathed the district then. I hated its obnoxious wealth. (I was poor.) Moreover, I hated the style of that wealth -- still blow-dried and flair-legged, even in the late 70s, a redoubt of Farrah Fawcett-Majors gloss and cocaine-burnished insouciance in the middle of a City that was still sweatily thrashing its way out of financial default.

In later years, still poor, I took a perverse liking to the Upper East Side, mainly because it was out of style. The mass exodus of otherwise sober youngsters to the hipper precincts downtown (and the more spacious digs to the west) left the place in the custody of dowagers with thick makeup, dazed middle-agers in minks and $500 sport jackets who had not fucked off to the suburbs (or were fucking mistresses or rent boys during the gaps in their appointment books), and young preppies who aped their style and got vomiting drunk each weekend in frat bars along First Avenue. I began also to visually appreciate the queer mix of scrubbed brick townhouses and the blank-faced, modernist architectural abortions that tycoons had placed among them in the 60s and 70s, when they thought the zeitgeist would roll like river branches through their canyons for eternity. Everything was just a little stale and out of mode, though washed each morning with money and daubed with Floris cologne. That, in my jaundiced eye, gave it character. And if that wasn't character enough, you could always go to the Germantown enclave and get some boiled meat, liver dumpling soup, and glass boots full of Weiss beer

Now the Upper East Side is still rich, and its residents still strive to present themselves accordingly. Even their goth granddaughters spend a ton on their dour threads. But what has changed is this: so does everyone else. Even the hippest of hipsters in the hippest of hip nabes drops a wad on his or her dishabbile. Style points vary from geography to geography, but the instinct is the same: if I buy this, I will fit. Which was also true back when, in some places, it cost twenty bucks to fit. But when there's a serious investment at stake, fashion becomes desperation. And that sort of desperation is more far-ranging than once it was.

So of course I don't hate the Upper East Side anymore. How could I? It's just like everywhere else, even though it may be easier for its people to be that way than it is for most.

And, as it happens, the City is still sweatily thrashing its way out of financial default. And, as it happens, so am I.

And Germantown is gone.

Sometimes people ask me if I have soured on our City beause it is so changed. Again, how could I? I carry it inside me, with every increasingly heavy step I take.

THEY LOOKED SO ORDERLY IN THE PUBLICITY SHOTS. Seems like only yesterday that happy Iraqis were smiling for the cameras and waving their brand-new American flags. Back then, OpinionJournal's Daniel Henninger overtly compared the post-Saddam citizens to the liberated East Berliners of 1989.

Funny, I don't recall the conservatives calling for a wave of American soldiers to restore order among newly-freed East Germans. Yet today OpinionJournal says that, in Iraq, "something close to chaos reigns. The lack of security is disrupting the most basic aspects of postwar reconstruction... Rampant lawlessness is the No. 1 complaint of ordinary Iraqis, who are grateful for the new U.S. crackdown on crime."

I love that last sentence. We are so grateful, Mr. Democracy Whiskey Sexy Bush People, for our rampantly lawless crackdown!

"We're not -- repeat, not -- longing for a return to 19th-century colonialism," pledges OJ. (Yeah, and I'm not, repeat not, longing for a thick steak and a good bottle of Chateau Haut-Brion, but put them in front of me and watch them disappear.) OJ reenforces its un-longing for 19th-century colonialism by referring casually to Iraqi administrator L. Paul Bremer as "Lord Bremer" and comparing him to Kitchener.

OJ's editorials have taken on a weird, muzzy, almost drunken feeling since it stopped mattering at all whether what they said made sense or not (approximately late March, I think it was). Check out also the aforementioned Henninger as he writes, joshingly, about how "dull" the economy is -- not "dull" as in listless, which was what I at first thought he meant, but dull as in no fun to talk about.

Well, given how that economy is going, and his own comrades' part in making it so, I shouldn't wonder he would find such conversations tiresome. Henninger's own piece is far from dull, though -- in fact, it proceeds with depraved indifference to human life on a rollicking trip through the economic catastrophes of our age -- such as the dot-com bubble, dismissed here with a hearty "so what if much of it failed?" He then pretends that Olympia Snowe is holding up the economic recovery by being a "downer." No, I'm not kidding. Go see for yourself.

Recently we were all talking about the end of this and that -- History, Ideology, whatever. Reason appears to have taken its place at the egress. The rest of us are next.

NOEL REDDING. As a man, as a fan, and most importantly as a guitarist turned bass player, I regret to inform you that Noel Redding, bottom-end guy for the Jimi Hendrix Experience, has passed away.

Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell comprised a splendid rhythm section. It's hard to play that fussy and drive that hard all at the same time. Rhythm players leave space between notes so they'll have room to syncopate their parts -- which can give the illusion that a song is hurtling forward even if it's being played in strict time. Ornate players tend to fill up these musical spaces so much that the song actually bogs down and seems to drag. But some guys can be real hyper on the bass and still push the music. Redding managed that. He had a lot of energy, a great feel for the tunes (and the instrument -- hear how he pits the low, sweet, fat notes against the higher, thinner ones on "Fire"), and a freshness-seal hookup with Mitchell. The last bit is crucial. If you isolated Redding's parts, or Mitchell's, you might think, "Manic, but what's it mean, where's it going?" You would never ask that about the Experience, because everyone was up in everyone else's musical business -- I say "tick," you say "tock" etc. -- only their vocabulary was a great deal more advanced, and manifested more like the overlapping dialogue in an Altman movie.

I could go on all day. But I have rehearsal tonight and a show tomorrow. I'll pay my tributes then.

HUH WHAT? #342,099. "Put aside whether race should be used as a hiring criterion. Even people who support affirmative action don't have to support Raines' approach of refusing to hold blacks responsible for anything, from fake reporting to gang-raping a jogger in Central Park. What Raines did to Blair was cruel." -- Ann Coulter. [emphasis mine]

RUN, RUN, RUN. Wishing to show common cause with my new employers, I participated in the Corporate Challenge in Central Park this evening. It's a three-and-a-half mile run (or walk, as the new rules allow) that somehow generates bucks for charity, and corporate pride -- you turn up with your colleagues in logo-identifying T-shirts and convey your time to a captain, to be posted in some dark corner of the web. I'd last done this years ago, when all were expected to run for an easier 3.5 kilometers (why is everything easier for the Europeans?); I had never so much as stepped on a treadmill before, I drank heavily the night before (and the night before, and the night before...), and ran in high-tops and surfer jams, breaking the tape at 30 minutes flat.

This evening's field was much more crammed than the last one I'd joined; it took those of us proceeding from the "non-competitive area" (the default gathering spot -- I guess you had to demonstrate a subscription to Runner's World or pass a hamstring-to-beer-belly ratio examination to start further up) four or five minutes to even reach the official starting line.

Thereafter the field was still crowded but navigable. I noticed a lot of different and distinct breathing patterns around me: steady pants, wheezes, grunts, and sharp, horror-movie gasps. To further remove my mind of numbing boredom and intimations of death, I checked out chicks' butts. The Corporate Challenge is a feast for ass-men; I wonder if this isn't a large, undisclosed come-on for events like this. Maybe all the strain and sweat is a turn-on too for some -- the TV ads for health clubs, with their crypto-pornographic close-ups of straining torsos, certainly suggest this.

The clock said 36:32 when I hauled myself across the finish. My captain allowed two minutes for starting-line congestion, which I didn't dispute. Even by this conservative estimate I'm in no worse shape than I was back in the day, at least physically, which amazes me, given the time I spend parked on my keister, crunching verbiage.

The real test will be whether I can get my pants on tomorrow.

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK -- PLEASE! NYC's budget woes have got conservatives going after Bloomberg, and good for them, as I dislike our depraved rich-boy mayor at least as much as they do. But they're also starting to run down New York itself -- or, to be more precise, they're reverting to their traditional loathing of Moscow on the Hudson. Brendan "Save Western Civ!" Miniter lets fly a gob of spit headlined "Apple Without Appeal: High taxes are only one reason to hate New York." Makes ya nostalgic, don't it?

Miniter starts by telling us that "except for the very rich, the quality of life in this city is worse than it should be and far below most of the rest of America." That much is true. Part of the reason is that we send a disproportionate number of tax dollars to the Federal Government so that farmland Republicans can ladle them out amongst their constituents. But this reason Miniter leaves unmentioned.

Miniter does mention rent-controlled apartments -- or, rather "rent-controlled or rent-stabilized" apartments. This conflation is mindful, as it gives Miniter's readers the false impression that a large number of lucky New Yorkers are paying $100 a month for suites at the Plaza, and helps put over the conservative howler that this, not the enforced scarcities of large realtors who sit on vacant apartments, is what makes the rent so high. In truth the rent-controlled tenants are dying out or being hounded out, while most of the rent-stabilized apartments, a sizable group, have been around for so long that renters pay something close to market value for them.

Miniter's no better on prescriptions. Consider this:

...the mayor needs to be looking for ways to reduce the cost of living in the city. A good place to start would be to cut taxes and urge the state Legislature to let rent regulation die when it comes up for renewal next month. But it can't stop there. The city needs more housing and business space. The mayor needs to find ways to encourage more construction. That means taking on powerful and entrenched unions and streamlining construction regulations to scrap union work rules...

Let's see: in order to improve our standard of living, we should cut taxes (which, I hate to tell him, means less money for city services that help define quality of life), let landlords jack up rents (which of them will greet the death of rent stabilization by crying, "Good news -- now I can lower your rent"?), build more apartments (out of what, I wonder, that would make them affordable? Cardboard?), and screw the unions (and the hundreds of thousands for whom they negotiate -- whose quality of life, we must assume, will plummet).

There's nothing wrong with being contrarian or counterintuitive, but when Miniter talks nonsense like this and fails to explain how it's supposed to work, he just sounds like some ivory-tower guy shaking his head at us poor sods and muttering, "Don't they know that landlords are a market force, and must be respected?"

As to the rest of the apartments are so small! I saw a rat in the subway! crap, I've long held that the pussies who can't put up with urban life should fuck off to the suburbs and leave the rest of us in peace.

DON'T YOU KNOW WHO I THINK I AM? At the Voice, Daniel King sticks up for Stanley Crouch, fired from JazzTimes right after it published Crouch's stinging rebuke to white jazz critics -- which rebuke, and Crouch's subsequent claims of persecution, are seconded by King, to wit: "And, we should ask, who are we, white editors and writers, who've appointed ourselves guardians of this year's jazz criticism?" Even Amiri Baraka, a frequent target of Crouch's abuse in the past, sticks up for Crouch, as do honkies Nat Hentoff and Gary Giddins.

My true interest in this is as mild as my interest in contemporary jazz. But Crouch's wounded tone is piquant. He isn't such a hot writer, as anyone who has perused his wan Daily News columns can see. But he is an excellent self-promoter. His is probably the best known (and certainly the most widely-circulated) black critic in America. He actually got the New Yorker to run a long piece on him and his impending first novel, Don't the Moon Look Lonesome (a piece of shit, as it turns out), and he is a frequent TV talking head (he was one of that nightmarish platoon of rotating commentators which 60 Minutes inflicted upon a shocked and disdainful public a few years back).

Given the scarcity of his talent, whence came his popularity? In the 1980s, writing for the Voice, Crouch, theretofore known as a jazz critic, came out in support of Reagan's layoff of striking air traffic controllers, which action broke their union and presaged the general collapse of organized labor in that decade. Crouch thereafter cultivated a harsh, right-wing, get-over-yourself image -- tough on race-baiters, tough on rappers, tough on anyone who would ask for anything, even respect, simply on the basis of what he happened to be. This distinguished him, certainly, and per the law of supply and demand, made him a marketable commodity.

Now Crouch, scourge of the air traffic controllers, says, "That a writer of my status and reputation would be dismissed in this way, with no discussion at all, constitutes some serious brand of injustice..."

Isn't that rich? The self-professed "hanging judge" wishes a stay of execution on the basis of his celebrity. To which I say: That's capitalism, comrade! A column in a magazine is not a Constitutional right or a set-aside program. The editors of JazzTimes had as much right to fire you as -- oh, as Reagan had to can the air traffic controllers.

Surely Crouch isn't going soft on us? No, only on himself.

MAYBE THAT'S WHY THE TIMES DOESN'T WANT HIM. Andrew Sullivan reviews Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars. He pulls this quote on Clinton:

"His mind was filled with great plans: universal healthcare, reducing the federal deficit, investments in education and the environment, cutting crime, remaking the welfare system, ending discrimination, to begin with."

Sullivan's reaction: "To begin with? What on earth would be next? A space colony on Mars?"

Has Sullivan ever recognized a joke that wasn't about cheese-eating surrender monkeys?

LOOK TO YOUR HEART. Two items about writing, sort of, one from a defender of liberty (Atrios) and one from an enemy of same (Andrew Sullivan), both wrong-headed.

Atrios disputes Eric Alterman's sensible statement that Roth's The Human Stain, which draws some inspiration from Clinton's impeachment, is primarily a work of art and not a "political" book. (I haven't read this book -- I address here the general principle.) And Sullivan gives another one of his poseur alerts on a piece of writing that actually isn't bad -- though it is literary, which must infuriate the ceaselessly polemical Sullivan.

People of an overtly political persuasion too frequently suffer from a utilitarian syndrome best expressed by the saying, "If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." Too many of them are true and total apparatchiks: what is the use of this poem or that play, they think as they study texts, if it advance not our agenda?

I can get pretty wrapped up in this bullshit myself. But I know there have to be protected areas where politics doesn't penetrate. Politics is a fire that warms some passions, and burns out others. Historically, art has been more often consumed than warmed by politics (sometimes literally!), so practitioners had better beware.

Brecht did great political drama, but he understood that a recognizable depiction of humanity is the best way to get people to pay attention to anything -- which is why his plays command the attention even of bloated capitalists such as ourselves. I wouldn't be surprised if he, and many other artists with propaganda in their hearts, started out to epater the bourgeois, or smash the state, but were seduced or subsumed by the artistic process itself -- by color, by light, by the joy of the materials, by contact with a force that is ultimately more powerful than politics.

Sir Philip Sidney wrote:

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That the dear she might take some pleasure of my pain,
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe...

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:
"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write."

Sidney was talking about a lover trying to make an amorous, not a political, case (well, by some interpretations, anyway), but you see the connection: putting the goal before the process is great for drafting strategy statements and position papers and such like, where you want to get people to act rather than to understand -- indeed, often these days, to act in defiance of understanding. But this doesn't go for love poems, or any other works of art, which should express and seek to share tender feelings, rather than exploit or manipulate them.

CALL ME 'SCHOOL BULLY,' CLOTH-EARS! Today on Instapundit, the Perfesser suggests that a writer should be "warming a cell" because he gave a cell phone to Osama bin Laden in 1996. (I forget -- was the U.S. still pals with Osama then, or was that a few years earlier?) Further down he reliably snipes at the Times, links to an article on "MALE-BASHING in the media, and in public policy," and shouts, "I HAVE A FRIEND WHOSE LIFE WAS RUINED BY ANNIE HALL. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but not as much of one as it ought to be."

Refresh my memory. Why is this man treated with respect? What's the difference between Glenn Reynolds and Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly?

Oh, yeah: Reynolds knows HTML. And talks about cool gadgets he likes. And occasionally makes libertarian-sounding farts that are about 3 degrees cooler than the ones Jonah Goldberg used to emit before the Santorum and Bennett incidents sent him scrambling back to the Old Standard.

I notice even collegial CalPundit has shown impatience with the Perfesser of late ("Even by his usual standards, this piece by Glenn Reynolds last week was remarkably self-serving..."). By and large, though, bloggers treat Reynolds the way Sidney Falco used to treat J.J. Hunsecker.

"IT'S TIME TO GIVE BARBER SCHOOL ANOTHER TRY! AND THIS TIME, I WON'T JOIN A FRAT!" God bless Moe Siszlak.

WE ARE THE WORLD. Matthew Yglesias observes the good sense of Rich Lowry, a usually intolerable writer (my slur, not MY's), in coming out strong against prison rape.

Well, yes. There are so many gags on TV and in movies about prison rape that any unbiased observer would assume it one of our cultural values. It would be nice if that stopped.

Activists like the late Stephen Donaldson have been working this issue for years, but it's important that conservatives are picking up the standard. Even the impeccably rightwing Washington Times is getting with the program -- as these things go, that's practically a groundswell.

One reason it's important is sheer mass -- the U.S. has an appalling and ever-growing number of prisoners, and both rape and HIV are widespread in the pens. Back in my medical journalism days, I reported on gay barebacking and HIV, and I must say that even a glance at the figures shows that prison rapists are more likely than "gift-givers" to become our equivalent of Central Africa's long-distance truckers in making AIDS numbers go the wrong way.

It's also important because prison rape is cruel, in every sense of the word, including the Founders'. We make a very bad habit of excluding large segments of our population from basic human respect. Prisoners are near the top of that list. I often wonder that so many people seem to believe that whatever happens to jailbirds serves them right -- that the old notion of "paying your debt to society" now includes whatever brutality accompanies it. Even the time-honored American tradition of rooting for the underdog seems to be fading away. We are increasingly the land of the foam "#1" finger, and devil take the hindmost.

Here, then, is an opportunity to get a consensus on the right side for once. When prominent scolds (including Democrats like Judgin' Joe Lieberman) complain about the coarsening of our culture, they usually focus on the behaviors of consenting adults, which alienates liberals and conservatives of a libertarian streak. Of course, both liberals and conservatives of whatever stripe are generally convinced that the guys on the other side don't care about people at all, and both camps have kit-bags full of anecdotes to prove it.

This is sad, because I think most of us -- even fans of invective (guess I should include myself, huh?) -- can agree that there is too much cruelty in the world. The notion that we could make common cause on this issue warms my heart.

Later, we can discuss the sugar-coated poison of the tax cut, evil sodomy laws, draconian bankruptcy bills, the shameful lack of a national healthcare system, and the other just plain evil attributes of the scumbags with whom we will now join hands, briefly.

BUT IT'S NO JOKE, IT'S DOIN' ME HARM. I have just returned from Mother's Day in Bridgeport. I had four hours sleep last night, as I had on each of the previous two nights. As I tried to nap on the train home, a little girl five feet away tooted nonstop on a plastic pennywhistle. Please don't be too hard on anything I write from now till... well, who knows.

A HELL OF A VIENNA. Along 10th Street, very far east, I walked behind four middle-aged Puerto Rican guys. A pretty young girl was walking toward them, then shifted her path to walk diagonally across the street. She was wearing a t-shirt and some sort of muslin pants that billowed a bit from her legs but not from her ass, and the thin fabric strained against it each time she stepped.

The four men did not break stride but turned their heads, then their shoulders, with admirable slowness. This is the patience that comes with age,

One of them made a soft noise, which seemed to me not disrespectful but appreciative.

"Go talk to her," the man next to him said.

The man said nothing and his friend repeated it.

They were wearing grey slacks, all of them, different shades of grey, with a slight flair at the cuff that was raffish in an early-80s way, though the slacks were of a roomier cut than they might have favored back in the day. They wore sport jackets -- one of them, worn by the man who had made the noise, was of mustard yellow leather -- and patterned, button-down shirts.

"She a schoolteacher," said the man in the mustard yellow jacket.

"So?"

"We got nothing in common."

I immediately flashed on this Bukowski poem:

and all of us
getting together later
in pete's room
a small cube of space under a stairway, there we were,
packed in there
without women
without cigarettes
without anything to drink,
while the rich pawed away at their many
choices and the young girls let
them,
the same girls who spit at our shadows as we
walked past.

it was a hell of a
vienna.

3 of us under that stairway
were killed in world war II.

another one is now manager of a mattress
company.

me? I'm 30 years older,
the town is 4 or 5 times as big
but just as rotten
and the girls still spit on my
shadow, another war is building for another
reason, and I can hardly get a job now
for the same reason I couldn't then:
i don't know anything, I can't do
anything...

Boethius found consolation in philosophy while under an unjust sentence of death. For rest of us, if we're lucky enough to have it, there's poetry.

I AM EMBARRASSED TO REPORT I got one wrong in the U.S. Citizenship Test. Twenty-seven Amendments? I thought it was twenty-three. (BTW my fave alternate choice: among the answers for "What ship brought the Pilgrims to America?" was c. Titanic.)

Let's look at the Amendments I overlooked:

AMENDMENT XXIV. Anti-poll tax. Now I am embarrassed.

AMENDMENT XXV. Presidential succession. This came up after Agnew's resignation, then Nixon's. Congress was empowered to create an Act in 1947 that laid out the succession in offices subordinate to the VP's. The bad news is, Rummy's #7.

AMENDMENT XXVI. 18-year-old vote. Fat lot of good it's done us. Though after Vietnam I guess it was necessary.

AMENDMENT XXVII. Congressional raises. This one doesn't go far enough. Had I and my confidant, elementary justice, our way, the Amendment would look more like this.

Most Interesting Amendment: XI. "The action of the Supreme Court in accepting jurisdiction of a suit against a State by a citizen of another State in 1793 provoked such angry reaction in Georgia and such anxieties in other States that at the first meeting of Congress following the decision the Eleventh Amendment was proposed by an overwhelming vote of both Houses and ratified with, what was for that day, 'vehement speed.'" According to the University of Missouri at Kansas City, "The Eleventh Amendment was a response to the Supreme Court's unpopular decision in Chisholm v Georgia, in which the Court ordered Georgia to pay two South Carolina residents a debt the Court found was owed them.  Georgia legislators were so outraged by the decision that the passed a law declaring that anyone who attempted to carrry out the Court's mandate would be hanged with benefit of clergy!" Over time, interpretations of this Amendment expanded to prevent a citizen from citing Federal statutes to sue his own state; this was relaxed a bit in a 1908 case (again per UMKC) when the Supremes determined that "if a state official violated the Constitution he can't be acting on behalf of a state, which can only act constitutionally.  Thus, state officials -- but not states -- might be sued when they violate the Constitution, even when they do so in the name of the state." Later decisions -- even unto the 1990s -- get even murkier ("...Seminole and Printz extended constitutional protection to states sued in their own STATE courts for federal law violations. Clearly, as the Court recognized, this result is not dictated (or even supported) by the language of the Eleventh Amendment.  Instead, the Court concluded that the English common-law notion of sovereign immunity -- reaching even suits against sovereigns in their own courts -- was implicitly adopted by the framers and ratifiers of the Constitution"). In other words, states' rights ain't dead; look for the next comeback tour in a jurisdiction near you.

Fave Amendment: Numero Uno.

WHAT'S TO READ? I spend a lot of time monitoring a small clutch of right-wing sites, but eventually I suppose I will have to establish some more positive blogroll of my own (Ugh! I hate the very sound of the word "blog." Its pronunciation mandates a flaccid facial state, like "blah," or anything in a Shropshire dialect and I don't mean Philip).

For now I will point out a few sites of interest. There's the unclassifiable Mark Shea who calls his site Catholic and Enjoying It! and actually addresses the Caesar v. God issues most of the godly righties overgloss. He likes the abominable Ned Flanders, lately removed from the Bunker to the civic atrocity of Dallas (from whence he sends back to his old stomping ground web pix of his hobbyhorse), but hey, one can agree to disagree when the style and verve run this high.

Speaking of Flanders, the original, fictional one is referenced by this site, one of the "fun" kind I can endorse without hyperglemic shock.

Also Bertram Online is back in session, for some reason with our poor journal on his own list. The content has character.

I would be remiss to overlook Andrew & Sasha, two of the Cool Kids who are for some reason nice to me. To paraphrase Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket, they are silly and foolish, but they have guts, and guts is enough.

HAMLET'S NOBILITY. To think I almost missed Matthew Yglesias' contemplation of Hamlet:

So how come when Hamlet is pondering whether "to be or not to be" he thinks it's relevant to ask "whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles / And by opposing end them?" It seems to me he should just be trying to figure our which option is nobler, not which is "nobler in the mind." Putting the question his way introduces a pretty strange circularity into the debate, since it would appear that he's trying to make up his mind about what the contents of his own mind are. Oh well.

There are some excellent comments on this, many as to what word "nobler" modifies. Here's my two cents:

Hamlet's a student, and enjoys the life of the mind more than the other kind. He prefers the company of his school chum Horatio to anyone else's; when Claudius wants to bamboozle him, he calls in a couple of other philosophy nerds. He doesn't seem to have much of a physical relationship with Ophelia -- the awful Kenneth Branagh version's flashbacks notwithstanding. He writes her nice letters and trades gifts with her. (Polonius worries about it, but he's a sentimental idiot, and seems to be in the play only to represent a sentimental point of view -- which is also why he gets killed first, as I'll explain in a minute.)

Hamlet bitches plenty about the unseemliness of the whole affair -- sex, food, ugh -- but for most of the first act, he doesn't mention the fact that he has a pretty good claim to the throne of Denmark -- not even to observe that he'd be cut to pieces if he challenged Claudius for it.

Prior to the Ghost's revelation to him, he actually plays along with the whole royal scam, though on his own snarky terms. Our image of Hamlet is a little skewed by his great poetry. If the Ghost hadn't showed, no doubt he'd have made a few more catty remarks and then fucked off to Wittenberg. He might even have stuffed himself on the "funeral baked meats that did coldly furnish forth the marriage table" -- he does look fat to someone at the final duel, I recall.

But then, the Ghost. The Ghost is a pretty odd device for Shakespeare to start a play with. He went out of his way to show us other people seeing the Ghost before Hamlet did -- so we wouldn't think it was a private hallucination. Of course, the Ghost only appears to the others -- to Hamlet, it speaks. The Ghost is something men of good will and clear eyesight might see, but it takes a Hamlet to divine meaning from it.

The Ghost changes everything. Hamlet's warning to his friends of an impending "antic disposition" is, I think, a double blind. He won't be faking -- but he wants them to think he will be, so that they will stay out of his way. He has just had a life-changing experience, and he doesn't want any of his buddies second-guessing him or trying to stop him as he visibly suffers the sea-change the Ghost has wrought on him. He knows that even Horatio will be amazed at what he sees him doing ("There are more things in heaven and earth..."), and he wants them to step off -- for he has found a new kingdom now, and it is the Kingdom of Death ("Shall I couple hell?").

They won't understand. They don't. It's amazing how little Horatio understands. Hamlet's sort of embarrassing testimonial to him is, I think, an indirect caution: he's saying, look, you're a nice guy, I like you, so don't bother your noble little head too much about this -- later I'll find a skull, and we can bullshit again, though my part of the conversation may seem a little harsher than usual. When Hamlet is dying, Horatio wants to die, too -- Hamlet stops him and tells him to instead "draw your breath in pain to tell my story." I don't think Hamlet, who a little while earlier was rapping about Caesar as a gob of mud, wants immortality or even fame so much as to keep anyone he cares about from following his example.

Because Hamlet's struggle is private, for all the political implications. His behavior suggests an extraordinarily intelligent suicide: first he puts his close friends at arm's length -- not rejecting them outright, just making sure they don't get in the way. Then he blows off his girlfriend. His first direct kill is the author (first as paternal instructor, then as political manipulator) of Ophelia's childish love-games, Polonius. Hamlet says he thought Polonius was Claudius, but there are no accidents in Shakespeare. It's as if he had to stop up the wellsprings of his own humanity before he could get down to some real blood-eyed killing.

He is about to embark on this crucial phase of his elaborate serial-murder/suicide when he gives the speech in question. He talks about conscience, but what is that to Hamlet? What action is he seen to take that is not all about naked self-interest (not interest in his own life, but in his own mind's life, his ideas), but for the offhand shielding of Horatio? (Hamlet only spares his mother because the Ghost commands him to.)

A lot of people think the "To be or not to be" speech means Hamlet is unsure that he's doing the right thing -- that he'll be damned ("What dreams may come") if he goes through with the self-slaughter. The question seems to be answered later, when he takes a cue from a battle march -- "the imminent death of ten thousand men" (I am quoting from imperfect memory here) for a meaningless patch of land -- and declares "my thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth." But this is not so much an answer as an excuse. He looks for excuses everywhere, even in a player's tears for a legendary Hecuba. Hamlet never answers the big questions for us -- only for himself. He even talks of a "spur" for his "dull revenge." Dull like a knife? Or dull like uninteresting -- something so dull he has to talk himself into it?

To even use these sorts of definitions, of course, is reductive. Hamlet speaks verse, mostly. His flights of poetry have intellectual integrity of their own -- but, unlike the poems of jealousy and ambition spoken by Othello and Macbeth, they are very difficult for those of us out here in the audience to apply to the smaller versions of those grand passions from which we ourselves suffer. To what is "To be or not to be" or "O that this too too solid flesh would melt" or "How all occasions do inform against me" applicable in our own lives except suicide?

When I studied drama, we were told that an actor can't just muck around with feelings -- one had to find an intention for actions (and speech is an action) that directed them, gave them focus. If you think of Hamlet as someone who wants to avenge his father, he seems pretty ridiculous (There's Claudius! I could kill him now! But he's praying! Naah -- that's not vengeful enough!). If you think of him as someone who wants to kill himself -- not in the small, pathetic way a world-weary clerk might, but in the fullest, most exalted manner of a world-class tragic hero -- it's a bit easier.

As regards Yglesias' question, I think the nobility refers to the suffering. Hamlet is laying the groundwork for his final exit, and the job is always mentally harder in the planning stages than at the coup de grace. Nobility is a real thing to the student prince -- but, like all high standards, something that can prove most fluid in meaning when you have a fixed goal in mind and the justification just isn't lining up right with the intent. A few scenes earlier, the Everlasting, Hamlet freely admitted, fixed his canon 'gainst self-slaughter, now, it's Conscience doth make cowards of us all -- and conscience seems to consist of worries over bad dreams that might never go away: a child's vision of hell. A few acts later, it won't even be that.

No wonder he seems a little cooler than Othello, Coriolanus, Macbeth, or Brutus -- next to Hamlet's, their respective poetries seem like vivid reports on where their desires have led them. They are partly outside themselves when they speak their soliloquies, commenting on their own actions and emotions, or telling us how much these have made them suffer. But Hamlet, younger and more impetuous (if that's the word) than the other tragic heroes, is making up his mind right in front of us. Which may be why we think so little about what he's making up his mind to do.

OR, TO PUT IT ANOTHER WAY.. Vincent Cannato worries that New York City may turn out a bad choice for the 2004 GOP Convention after all. Well, yes, I think so too, but only if the TV cameramen insist on showing the riots outside the Javits Center or wherever they wind up holding this blood feast.

As expected, the reader comments on the article are entertaining. One Buddy Larsen of Blanco, Texas writes, "Down here in the deep south... Most of us generally disdained the city during it's high crime B.G. (before Giuliani) era... Then Ronald Reagan started drying out the national fever swamp, and as usual the city vaulted out front, concentrating and personifying the good trends, and as a result everybody soon loved New York again... We forgave you, NYC, that disgraceful Hillary back-slide, and when you took (and magnificently overcame) the barbarian surprise attack, then for all America the deal was sealed, even down here in Dixie, New York City became the citadel of America. So. please, don't screw it up all over again..."

I do not know how to reach Mr. Larsen directly, but if he's reading this (as millions do every day!), I would like to tell him: while it is always nice to be appreciated, our self-respect has never been dependent upon the goodwill of rubes. If you think we need to be forgiven our electoral choices, lest we should lose the great emotional (and scant financial) largesse you poured forth after September 11, let me assure you that your self-esteem is grotesquely overinflated. To prosper or even survive in this tough town, we do what we have to do, not what we think would be pleasing to the suburban bacon-cheeseburgermeister.

And I hardly see how you have room to talk, as I understand that, thanks in large part to the actions of your former Governor, Texas is running a little low on funds herself -- many of your municipalities are experiencing surprisingly high property taxes, and the state is considering legalized gambling, higher traffic fines, and even a tax on advertising to address the problem.

But we won't tell you your business or presume to give you advice. Not because we're circumspect, but because we don't give a shit about you. We know you don't really give a shit about us either -- but the difference is, you like to pretend that you do, for some reason, before telling us what a bunch of screw-ups you think we are.

Maybe that's your style -- denunciations masked in honey. It's a good one, as far as such things go; we admire it.

Here's our style: Fuck you.

HA VS. HA. Jonah Goldberg (what, him again?) compains that when Maureen Dowd reports on the Ali G show, she only mentions incidents in which Republicans are made to look foolish. "Annoying and gratuitously cheap," he sniffs. "If her point was that only Republicans look stiff and silly on the show, she's making her self look lame and foolishly [sic]."

Meanwhile, in the same fucking edition of NRO, one Laurie Morrow, ostensibly reviewing a book about laughter, talks about all the funny things in the world she can think of -- "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," anti-French jokes, lawsuits that made FDR and the ACLU look silly...

Congratulations, you figured it out. Liberals think they're never ridiculous, and conservatives think they're never ridiculous. The big difference, though, is that the latter looooove to complain about how self-righteous the former are.

It may just be, however, that Goldberg doesn't read his own magazine, which would be perfectly understandable.

A FREE SOUL. My, Jonah Goldberg spends a lot of time parsing the Bill Bennett case ("I did say that Bennett gambled too much... I do think Bennett did the right thing announcing he will stop gambling. Why? Because he got caught"). I should have thought JG and his ilk would have let this horseman pass by. But no, they worry it like dog worries a small, dead animal.

As previously noted, I couldn't give a shit about Bennett. More interesting to me is Goldberg, the spokesmodel for woo-hoo conservatism, trying to simultaneously play Right-wing scold and rover boy. It's a line he's been dancing along for years now, and it apparently doesn't get any easier. Being the Bluto of NRO's Animal House is a gig he enjoys, but he stiffens up whenever he has to pay obeisance to Niedermeyers like Bennett, Santorum, et alia.

As I have pointed out before, painting conservativism as the fun side of the street is a dicey proposition. As the country's war-fever abates, the Goldbergs would like to be viewed as Good-Time Charlies, as opposed to those dour liberals who make you act nice to black people and so forth. But they are also compelled by tradition (and by watchdog groups glaring over their shoulders) to denounce (for where would conservatives be without their denunciations?) misbehaviors as anti-American (especially if you "get caught"). How trying it must be for them.

As for myself, I'm a horrible person. I smoke, drink, and fornicate. And I thank God I don't have to pretend otherwise for fear of alienating certain constituencies.

THE BIG CON. "Iraqi museums pillaged after the war were looted by organized thieves who knew exactly what they wanted and may have already taken priceless items out of the country, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft said Tuesday....'From the evidence that has emerged, there is a strong case to be made that the looting and theft of the artifacts were perpetrated by organized criminal groups criminals who knew precisely what they were looking for,' Ashcroft said..." -- ABC News.

Alright, you mugs, we're in Baghdad. Now here's the deal. We blend in with the citizens, see, and then, when the time is right, I'll give a whistle, and we hit the Museum! Big Swede, here's your bronzer. Gimpy, if anyone asks, you lost that foot in one of Saddam's torture camps, not a liquor store hold-up. Now, ya all gotta act Iraqi, too. Lemme see ya look terrified... not good enough. (Bunker buster explodes nearby) That's better.

But, Boss, when it's time to hit the museum, da whole stinkin' country will be in chaos! How do we beat all them crazy Iraqis to the swag?

Nuthin' to it, Squirrelly! I just bought me a map of Saddam's secret passageways. Cost me two Hershey bars, but it was worth it! (Exhibits map, which has many dotted lines and x's) This here tunnel leads from Fayed's Chess Parlor right into the Museum! Yeah, turns out the Big Cheese liked to contemplate them antiquities, and how. But he didn't like nobody there with him, see! Why, one time a guard walked in on him, and Saddam fed him into this great big blender specially built for choppin' guys up.

No!

Yeah! And you know who made the blender? Braun, that's who!

Lousy Germans! But, Boss, once we got the loot, how do we get it outta the country?

I got that figured too, Stinky. Turns out these tunnels go all the way outta the country -- to Paris, Berlin and Moscow, even! Then we'll take the haul to the big museums them lousy, stinkin' Europeans got over there -- and they'll pay a pretty penny for this Mesopotamian stuff -- believe you me!

Say, Boss, maybe we'll catch up with that bird Saddam in one of them tunnels -- wouldn't that be sweet!

Don't get your hopes up, Crazy!

Can ya believe it, Boss -- a bunch of mugs like us pullin' off the biggest art heist in recorded history!

Not me, brother -- but some people will believe anything!

THE WAGERS OF SIN, or: Sluts & Slots. Jonah Goldberg seems personally stung by the reports of William Bennett's gambling. No, not stung that America's Scold likes slot machines -- according to JG, he doesn't know the guy very well. No, Goldberg's stung that somebody told the world about Bennett's gambling, and that others are having a good laugh over it.

The pre-eminent cackle here is that NRO's writers can sling sneers with the worst of us, so are ill-positioned to complain that Mr. Virtue has been treated roughly. (Wanna hear about Mrs. Kerry's ambiguous remark? Ramesh has the poop!)

This is really just petty politics, and in the main I could not give a shit. I knew Bennett was an asshole before, and that hasn't changed. Though I do find him a little more interesting now that he has betrayed this Dostoyevskian streak.

As for Goldberg, his column on this is another one of those long strands of taffy he regularly emits, with many weak spots. Best part is when he defends Bennett with Madonna: "Not to put too fine a point on it: She was a slut ... Of course, Madonna can afford her sins. She says she can 'handle' motherhood while at the same time bragging that she's never changed a diaper. Well, Bennett can afford his sins, too." I wonder how Bennett will take this Rich Slut Defense. Come to think of it, I wonder how Madonna will take it.

SNEERED WITH A BEARD. Dennis Miller in the Wall Street Journal:

I empathize with Mr. Mailer in one regard, though. Although he's clearly abdicated the lucid throne, it must be hellish for someone who can still arrange words so beautifully--i.e., "the question will keen in pitch"--to wake up every morning and have it slowly dawn on him that he's effectively been rendered totally irrelevant.

Well, if by "totally irrelevant," you mean holding several Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards, and having to occasionally endure the disrespect of a Monday Night Football color man -- yes, the burden must be awful. But somehow I think the man will cope.

It's interesting that much of Miller's invective is about Mailer being unhip: "more out of the loupe than a jeweler with conjunctivitis," "18-year-olds who mistakenly think Mr. Mailer wrote 'Gravity's Rainbow,'" "kinda hot for a few minutes in the '60s," etc. And the part that isn't about Mailer's low cool factor is just straight-up "but seriously, folks," followed by no seriousness.

That's the problem when you get funnymen to do commentary. They think Friars' Club schtick is an argument. Well, these days it is. (See the Kurtz item below. Or just look around.)

WELCOME TO REALITY. Stanley Kurtz stumbles into a point that I have been making for months:

The blogosphere offers a welcome antidote to the safety and blandness of the academy. But sometimes the failings of the blogosphere show why we developed those academic conventions of respect in the first place. Under the guise of rough and tumble frankness, the blogosphere risks turning into a society of like-minded partisans congratulating themselves on being smarter than all the idiots who see things differently....

Of course Kurtz only got to this place because he wrote something that did not flatter the prejudices of NRO's libertarian-leaning readers, and some of them have e-mailed him the kind of retorts that go over a treat in the land of the Big Snarl.

This stands in hilarious contrast to something Kurtz said last May:

Liberals live for the idea that they're saving the world from the racial, religious, and sexual bigotry of conservatives. Yet, looking at the conservative web, I am continually amazed at the fellowship across all of these potential divides...

This conjures a vision of convivial Free Republic / Reason mixers, the weed-legalizer laying down with the sodomite-hunter. I wonder if he ever actually believed it. Some folks apparently do need to be mugged by reality. As to whether Kurtz will long remember the lesson, I would not lay down money.

THE LESSEN(ING) OF HISTORY. Matthew Yglesias cites a scare-stat at CNN of the sort meant to make citizens cry, "We must have meaningless national tests so we can make believe we're serious about education!"

MY says, "When you think about it: So what? If 40 percent of college seniors don't know the dates of the Civil War and America's still the richest, most powerful country on earth, doesn't this just go to show that it's not very important if a significant minority of the population doesn't know when it happened."

That could be disputed -- you might say that essential historical facts, like "Columbus sailed the ocean blue/In Fourteen Hundred and Ninety-Two," are cultural totems that help bind nations together psychologically. (This is dangerously close to a Peggy Noonan idea, but I'm not disqualifying it on those grounds, believe it or not. Also, Noonan believes in teaching lies as a way of inducing patriotism -- "A person in Hollywood might say, 'Wait, it’s good their love of country isn’t based on a lack of realism.' But I’ve never seen any kind of love that lasted without a little lack of realism" -- wheras the facts are good enough for me.)

Yglesias does have a good point about Civil War education: "What worries me about America's historical ignorance is that there seem to be large numbers of people who don't understand that the Civil War was, fundamentally, about slavery."

Well, yes. And if it might help if the Republican base were down with this program as well. Unfortunately, a trawl through Free Republic shows that many of their heads are in a dissimilar place when it comes to the Lost Cause. ("Hey .. thanks for the reminder. I'll have to go have a beer for John Wilkes Booth Appreciation day... Lincoln was Lenin 50 years early, and a Marxist as well.")

In regard to our historical amnesia, as with much else, you have to ask: who benefits? Recently some folks were comparing the Iraq adventure to the Spanish-American War. Many readers, I'm sure, asked: The What-What War? And if we won, how could it be bad? Even much more recent history is hard for us: We currently have a hit song explicitly tying Saddam Hussein to the World Trade Center attacks.

I'm not paranoid -- I don't think this is all the result of propaganda. I just don't think people are paying attention. Still, the thought occurs to me that maybe we don't teach good history because its results are less reliable than those of ignorance.

MORE FUN WITH STUPID SHIT.



Yeah, but who knew "The Wolf" can't spell?

PHYSIOLOGY FOR FUCKUPS. I got to ride the bike a lot this weekend, as a means of transportation to and from social events, and of course half the time I rode it shitface drunk. Along with the remarkable fact that I am not dead, it is notable that the effort of riding was only slightly more challenging while my body was supersaturated with alcohol than when it was not, and that I expect I received the same aerobic and anaerobic benefit in either case. Also, strong drink relieves both the tedium of urban bike travel over long distances and the fear of collision with the many motorized vehicles that I encountered along the way.

If I ever can afford another gym membership, I expect to have a few belts before each workout session. I find the Nautilis an existential ordeal when sober; surely drunkeness will make the "reps" more tolerable. Maybe I also will fill one of those plastic squeeze-bottles one finds in such environments with vodka and limes. It certainly won't make me smell any worse than the water-guzzling clients. Maybe they'll think it's cologne.

The only trick will be not falling asleep in the steam room.

Hey, how come I can't straighten out my legs?

HOW SPIN WORKS, #5,962. The Perfesser notices this Homeland Security outrage against a Lucent employee, reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Georgia Bureau of Investigation special agent John Lang, who was assigned as a threat analyst to the Department of Homeland Security, saw the memo and decided making note of the information was not enough. He called the gun shop owner and told him about the memo concerning his employee. Wynn was fired...

The Perfessor follows up with the appropriate objective correlative:

Funny that we haven't heard more about this case, while we've heard so many cries of "McCarthyism" when all that was involved was criticism of Tim Robbins.

You don't think it's all political, do you?

I was going to point out that Tim Robbins is a persistent critic of the Bush Administration, which created the Homeland Security Department, but two things occured to me: first, that you surely knew that, and secondly, that we have entered a realm in which even the most obvious facts are irrelevant, so long as prominent propagandists are careful to associate every bad thing that happens with their enemies, no matter how tenuous or even plain absurd the connection.

Of course, you probably knew that too.

So why do I even bother?

Ya got me, pal.

HEIR TO THE LAURELS OF WASHINGTON, JEFFERSON, AND LINCOLN.... From Reuters:

At United Defense Industries, Bush made clear the military is still a top priority. He sat in a computer simulator of a fighting vehicle, touching the controls to fire off a simulated round, making a loud computer-generated explosion.

"That is not a backfire," he said over his shoulder to reporters. He went on to blast two "tanks," watching intently as one burst into flames.

Jimmy Carter used to talk about "a government as good as its people." Unless there are a lot more retarded, sociopathic X-box addicts out there than I know about (and there very well may be), I'd say we're getting rooked.

DUDS LOBBED FROM THE WEST COAST. This guy in California points to this guy in California, in a coordinated attack on New York legend Jimmy Breslin.

Guy #2, one Hinkle, claims Breslin "energetically supported the smoking ban" under which we suffer. Where does he get that? I can't find any citation, and it certainly rings dissonant with the lifelong rover-boy behavior of Breslin himself. (Might Hinkle be thinking of Albany County Executive and anti-smoking zealot Michael Breslin?)

Or maybe Breslin made a joke about it and Hinkle misapprehended. He doesn't seem to get Breslin in the main. In the article Hinkle does quote, Breslin affects to favor a ban on dogs. This is something he's done before, and to those of us who enjoy his work, it is obviously a joke, a way of filling the column inches on lazy days, a bagatelle. Yet Hinkle takes him quite seriously, in fact calls him "demented," says he "went over the lid" (? Is that California slang? Will I see it on sitcoms soon?)

I suspect they're really after JB for his continued production of articles like this, which are not about dogs, but about the kind of people some people treat like dogs.

ARE YOU THE CREATOR OF 'HI & LOIS'? BECAUSE YOU ARE MAKING ME LAUGH. I've been watching The Simpsons all these years and never knew that the Comic Book Guy's real name was Jeff A. Taylor.

WHY WE WRITE. It was a hard dollar today at the pro writing gig. Lots of effort, editing, talking about it, acting on it, and even conflict. And when I got home I sat down and wrote some more.

Not steadily. I can't do this kind of thing steadily. I watched TV, fed the cats, read the paper. Then I sat down and wrote some more.

Afterwards I trawled the web and read other writers, some of whom I don't really like, for political or personal reasons. But all of them who kept doing it kept getting better.

And that's why I keep doing it. Because the thing about it is, if you keep doing it, you get better, whether you deserve to or not.

THE MOTHER OF ALL PHOTO OPS. This Bush trip is hilarious. First, the dramatic arrival in a flight suit. Then the speech, delivered to a thoroughly dependable live audience and bound to transmit the image of a leader whose troops are loyal, and consisting entirely of boilerplate, punctuated by the helpful pull-quotes at the bottom of the screen, to which we have become accustomed and perhaps dependent. The high, singing sound that undertones the silences is thoroughly appropriate, resembling as it does the hum of a great machine.

"These 19 months that changed the world..." No argument there. "These attacks declared war on the United States and war is what they got." They and a few others. "Any outlaw regime..." Well, that's a pretty open writ -- and in some ways an exclusive one, if you come to think of it (as the Saudis have). "Afghanistan, Iraq, and a Peaceful Palestine..." That last country I haven't seen -- when was it chartered? "Al Qaeda is wounded, not destroyed... the enemies of freedom are not idle... we will continue to hunt down the enemy before he can strike... the war on terror is not over, nor is it endless." At last, some news! "Americans, after battle, want nothing more than to return home, and that is your direction tonight." Boy -- talk about givin' 'em what they want! "150 babies were born while their fathers were on the Lincoln." Aww. "The highest calling of history... wherever you go, you carry a message of hope... 'To the captives come out, and those in darkness be free.'"

That last bit is from Isaiah, calling to mind another passage from the same book: "To what purpose [is] the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the LORD: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats. When ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand, to tread my courts? Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; [it is] iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear [them]. And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood."

Spoilsport Tom Brokaw points out that no connection has been established between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein. Surely NBC, like all who are not with us but against us, will be punished.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE. I thought at first this San Diego Union-Tribune headline was for a political column -- but it's actually about the Kentucky Derby:

"Empire Maker is heavy favorite, but Peace Rules bears watching"

THROUGH PLAYING GAMES. Andrew Sullivan gives a nod to Tech Central Station columnist James D. Miller, who says "avoidable information externalities" explain why, contra Santorum, legalized sodomy doesn't pave the way for legalized incest, and that you can accept the former without accepting the latter. On the one hand, he says,

....whenever incest occurs it creates an informational externality that makes it more rational for relatives to misinterpret non-sexual affection for amorous advances. Incest between consenting adults therefore harms society and consequently is not just a private affair.

Whereas:

Homosexuality can also create informational externalities, but these externalities are unavoidable and so do not provide a justification for criminalizing gay sex.

Also, "Criminalizing gay sex... would not reduce the number of homosexuals and would thus not decrease the probability of someone thinking any given heterosexual man was gay," he says.

It's not his purpose I question, but his argument. I don't know anything about game theory, but I don't think that's why I had a hard time following his logic.

People interpret or misinterpret gestures of affection all the time based on their experience, not social codes. In fact, while Miller says that "In a world in which incest is taboo and rare most people won't interpret a hug from a relative as a sign of sexual interest," I'm guessing that it's the rarity rather than the taboo that causes Niece Becky to interpret Uncle Joe's big, warm hug as avuncular rather than lecherous. And there are nieces who would take their uncle's hug as lecherous. Some uncles are, indeed, leching, and some nieces are damaged by prior experiences that would make them shudder at even an innocent, familial touch.

There are potent taboos, as well as laws, against the sexual abuse of children, and given the negative attention given to cases of such abuse in recent years, we can assume these taboos are stronger, not weaker, than before. But that didn't help the Ameraults and Kelly Michaels, whose insane prosecutions on bogus molestation charges were famously debunked by Dorothy Rabinowitz. These colossal "misinterpretations" were not the result of any weakening of the taboos. In fact, you could argue that they were caused by an obsession with them.

Again, Miller's heart is in the right place, but I don't think the slide-rule approach strengthens his case. In a way, I think his approach makes the argument against sodomy laws more abstruse and difficult.

A lot of the Santorum-centric discussion I've been reading has been about the harm to society, or lack thereof, of gay sex. I take that point as irrelevant, because to a large extent societies police themselves on that score.

It's certainly that way here. Few would dispute that American society is more comfortable now with gay people than it was twenty years ago. (That's why this discussion is hot -- maybe why it's taking place at all.) You couldn't say this development was caused by laws or taboos -- unless you were strongly against tolerance of gay people. Then you might argue that the sexual revolution, Roe v. Wade, Will & Grace, etc., were among those "informational externalities" that have weakened the nation's moral fiber and sent us hurtling down the road to Gomorrah. And you might, within that argument, call for strengthening those taboos by retaining laws against sodomy.

In other words, Miller and Sullivan are playing on the Right's turf. They're accepting the premise that morality is, and should be, as enforcible by law as utility, but raising a wan demurrer: that the externality represented by the homosexual state is "unavoidable," and thereby protected from the terms of that premise. Next, of course, someone will argue with "unavoidable," and we're off to the races again.

Like I said, I don't know about game theory, but I do perceive that sodomy laws do not protect as many real people as they harm, and I'm against them. And I'm frankly more respectful of the counter-argument that these laws give prosecutors extra leverage in convicting rapists than I am of most arguments based on anyone's theory. Because at least that argument's happening on planet Earth.

CHANGED MY MIND. I don't feel bad for Andrew Sullivan anymore. The Santorum interval is now apparently over for all good wingers: The Times reports, "Republican Lawmakers Back Senator in Gay Dispute," and records lovely quotes from Sullivan's partner-in-diversity, Tom DeLay ("It is very dangerous to say that whatever you do behind closed doors is your right to privacy... It undermines a lot of moral questions that we have in this country"). Sullivan appears to be down with the program.

Sullivan's prior angst over the Santorum thing has burned out, as seen in these recent and pathetic comments. He is so shit-out-of-luck in his search for companionable conservatives on sexual privacy issues that he commends as "very sane" James Taranto's extremely (and I mean extremely) lukewarm endorsement of gay civil rights. (Sample Taranto quote: "Many religious Americans are horrified by the symbolism of allowing same-sex couples to marry... Simply to sweep aside such concerns, as the advocates of same-sex marriage seek to do, would be arrogant and contrary to the spirit of American pluralism." Taranto also calls Bowers v. Hardwick "a politically wise ruling.")

Andrew Sullivan, who frequently says Democrats are insufficiently attentive to gay rights, is now reduced to running a geiger-counter over OpinionJournal columnists, looking for trace elements of tolerance.

He has also turned his attention to a whole host of other topics, among them the recent Conquest (which makes him giddy), dragons (which make him roar!), and "male hating" feminists -- which makes him what he's always been: a complete tool who, having perfected a good Bircher imitation to curry favor with his radical right audience, affects not to notice when he is rewarded with the back of their hand.

HUH?



Someone's been reading my mail!

FAILING THE ECLECTIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST. Sasha Castel has posted what I would call a Libertarian Purity Test. Most of the hot buttons are there, from gun ownership to abortion.

It's a great service and has inspired interesting comments. Let me share with you an internal response of my own that, were I actually responding to the quiz, I have a hunch I'd supress for a reason I'll explain later:

While I could give quick agreement to the first five items (yeah, even the guns), on the issue of education I am torn. I want to say yes to an uninfringed right to "educate my children according to my personal values." (I assume everyone does that anyway -- in most cases, with beatings and drunken mockery.) But part of me also feels that a public school system is a good idea, as a means of promulgating the minimal socialization and life skills necessary to keep us from turning into Lord of the Flies West, and that such a system cannot survive without a certain small but real amount of coercion. (Face it -- if school were optional, do you doubt that school attendance would drop to levels that would make the system unsustainable?)

Now, we could argue that point for hours, but I want to focus here on my own reaction. In my heart of hearts I wanted to get all the answers "right." And that's not such a bad thing. Like most people -- really -- I want Certain Inalienable Rights not only for myself, but for others -- everyone else, in fact -- because I understand that my own would not be safe without theirs.

Yet I find myself pulling back on that one issue. And I'm a little ashamed to admit it. Why? Because, let's face it, it's cool to be a libertarian -- so cool that even the guys at NRO pretend to swing that way (especially their resident frat-boy -- except, of course, when he's pretending to be contrarian-authoritarian). Maximum freedom is much more exciting and attractive than the sober, somber, on-the-other-hand-ism of the sort drearily embodied by most Presidential candidates.

Now, I'm going to fade to black on this shot of my hand hesitating over the levers next to Question Six, because what I think doesn't matter so much (no applause, please) as the instinct I described. Is it that I'm afraid of freedom (quick "YES!" from the LP guys), or is it that I'm afraid of purity?

Yes, purity. Let's say it's 1793. We're in France. We took the Tennis Court Oath. So we're old-school and totally down with the Revolution. We have watched with pleasure as all traces of the old tyranny are obliterated -- even the unfortunate but necessary regicide. In for a penny, in for a pound, we say -- no half measures for us. Then they start whispering against our friends. Next it's their heads on the blocks. Next, maybe ours...

This is not a fantasy against liberty, or even against the French Revolution, but against absolutism and its inevitable companion: momentum. What was the big difference between the French Revolution and ours? (Don't say "Frenchmen," please.) I think it was that we had a lot more pushback going against us -- and I don't mean the Redcoats. I mean we appreciated the old order (good, British order!), and the institutions they gave us (and largely maintained afterwards). But we also appreciated liberty, and decided with not a little sadness that circumstances demanded we sue for it, so we had to back away from some of our own best instincts in order to inaugurate a revolution. This made us, in a weird way, circumspect about our new prize of liberty -- whereas the French, bless them, went apeshit.

I'm not suggesting Nick Gillespie and Jacob Sullum will cheerfully wade through bloody gutters come the Revolution. I just mean that something about the Libertarian trip makes me nervous. It's not so much a politics as a creed, of the all-or-nothing sort -- You want the right to anal sex? Well, then you must not interfere with my right to charge dying Africans for water!

In general I think going "all the way" is a great thing on a personal level and a disastrous thing on a political level. But who knows: maybe you know a Messiah somewhere whose program will fix everything if I only follow Him to the ends of the earth. By all means write and let me know.

BALM IN MUDVILLE. The Mets suck so bad, they put the fact on the front page of the Times.

To brighten the day of fans who are true to the Orange and Blue (I know, it's an old song), I commend yesterday's New York Daily News, where the excellent David Hinckley writes about Ralph Kiner, the Hall of Famer and somewhat dim Mets color commentator whose relationship to the English language rather matches the historic relationship between the Mets and success: mostly dysfunctional, sometimes spectacularly so, but glorious and sweet when it works.

PERMALINKS. I think they work now. I got lazy about "republishing." I'm not used to WYSIWYG tools like this -- I code like I do everything else: hard!

GIMME SOME TRUTH. Interesting take on the WMD question from, of all people, Sgt. Stryker, who is generally as hardline on Iraq as they come. He starts out predictably enough:

Not even France claimed that Saddam didn't possess chemical weapons. Their contention was that UN inspectors backed by U.S. Forces in Kuwait (at U.S. taxpayer expense I might add) was enough to contain Saddam. No one on the Security Council then seriously believed that Saddam had disarmed, and I still don't.

But then the worm of doubt creeps in:

Something is not adding up here. Why would the Iraqis fail to account for tons of nerve agents and other chemical weapons, and then in the late 90's secretly destroy them? It would be in Saddam's vested interests to have destroyed any weapons in full view of the world, thus removing our primary cause for invasion. I mean, why comply with the UN accords without telling the UN about it? If Saddam had disarmed in secret, then having done so must go down in history as one of the stupidest, most self-defeating acts in history.

The whole point of the weapons inspectors was not to find banned weapons, but to verify the voluntary destruction of said weapons by Iraq. I'm suspicious that some sort of geo-political game or grand-deception is being played out here, exactly what I'm not sure yet.

It does seem strange, doesn't it? It would also seem strange that, having allegedly amassed weapons that were a clear and present danger to civilization itself, Saddam didn't use any of them as his country was overrun by enemy forces. Wouldn't the invasion of one's capital be an umistakable cue to break out the mustard gas?

I haven't heard a satisfying explanation for any of this, either. Some people, of course, are more easily satisfied, and they appear to be carrying the day, public-opinion wise.

I had dinner tonight with a friend who had been reading through some Lyndon LaRouche stuff. My reaction was, look, even if the guy is onto something, without a sackful of extremely hard evidence, as opposed to instincts and inductive reasoning, he can't ever bring us clarity -- he'll only bring us a heightened paranoia that exacerbates any problem he might have wanted to solve.

It's a sad state of affairs when most people with any brains simply take for granted that the Administration can't be trusted -- more sad, even, than the eagerness of many other people, some with brains, to take whatever this Adminstration says without even the tiniest grain of salt. The way things are going, between a fucked-up economy and a fucked-up Middle East, a lot of people will start wondering how the hell it came to this, and unless someone in a position of responsibility starts dishing out some truth, the voices that will come roaring out of the demos will make LaRouche sound like Hubert Humphrey.

MORNING EYE-OPENER.I shouldn't even be picking on WordNetDaily columnists -- half the time I think the site is composed by a bunch of playful liberals who want to give their buddies something to rage on -- but today's Doug Powers column about the Dixie Chicks really screams to have some air let out.

First, some basic fact-checking. "Sales of [the Dixie Chicks'] CD's have plummeted" since Natalie Maines made her infamous comments about Bush, says Powers. Plummeted? Last week they were number one on the Billboard Country chart, and this week they're number three -- respectable numbers for alleged pariahs.

"For some reason," says Powers, "with musicians and actors, 'artist' is the only career in which you should be allowed to open your blithering yapper free of consequence." This is rich coming from a guy whose career is based on such unfettered use of his own yapper. Why do so many of these spouters get mad when celebrities spout off? Is it the traditional jealously of the scrivening idealogue, convinced of his righteousness yet forced to admit that more people know what Alec Baldwin feels about global warming than he does?

As inevitably happens when conservatives talk about women, things get creepy toward the end:

Maybe the Dixies will understand what I'm talking about when they're waiting tables at Denny's, opining on current events to a customer who will probably respond to them in a way similar to how America did: "Yeah, yeah, whatever. Can we get some more ketchup over here, Natalie."

The Dixie Chicks are learning the hard way that, just like the guy at table 8, their fans just wanted some ketchup. In both cases, it'll be reflected in their tip.

I don't care much about the Dixie Chicks, but guys who think tipping is a way to wield power are assholes. And guys who fantasize about powerful women reduced to serving them burgers should put up a suitable ad at alt.com rather than unveiling their kink in political columns.

(Hm, that worked out my sleep-stiffened technique some, yet I don't feel really warmed up. Maybe I should try jogging.)

JOBLESSNESS AS HOLIDAY. Mr. Downs pointed me to an article from today's NYT, "Jobless and Hopeless, Many Quit the Labor Force," by Monica Davey with David Leonhardt:

PITTSBURGH, April 26 — Worn down by job searches that have stretched on for
months, demoralized by disappointing offers or outright rejections, some
unemployed people have simply stopped the search.

As the nation enters a third year of difficult economic times, these
unemployed — from factory workers to investment bankers — have dropped out
of the labor force and entered the invisible ranks of people not counted in
the unemployment rate...

"There aren't any jobs, just not any," Mr. Jacobs said. "I had been waiting
it out. I thought there was a strong possibility that I'd get recalled to
the plant, or I'd get something else, anything that paid at least $10 an
hour. But it turns out there is nothing. It's a dead-end street"...

Over the last two years, the portion of Americans in the labor force — those
who are either working or actively looking for work — has fallen 0.9
percentage points to 66.2 percent, the largest drop in almost 40 years.

The story isn't a total downer. (Who'd read it if it were? Only those who hate America!) Some of the folks interviewed by the Times have responded to the job dearth by going back to school or starting their own businesses ("Still, Mr. Guido said he was pleased to be back in school, learning about
things he cares about, and relieved to be on campus, far away from the
struggle to find a job...").

I can imagine a lot of readers will look at that and say, "See? Joblessness isn't so bad. You can always get your Ph.D., or become an entrepreneur, with the 50 grand you have stashed in your sock drawer."

But what if you don't have any capital for these kinds of activities, and can't get any? What if you actually, like, need a job? I know these days we all like to think of ourselves as economic superheroes, swimming in options -- look at all the financial services companies who advertise in prime time to that demographically desirable group of Americans that can afford to play around with their money (while the high-interest, last-chance moneylenders advertise late at night, when the economically stressed citizens are insomniacally flipping through the channels).

Still, the need to keep food on the table -- and creditors from seizing your car -- is a present, crushing reality for millions of people. With the stock bubble burst, the job market imploding, and the rate-cutting increasingly desperate and laughable, how many people are actually out there anymore that can say, "Ah, well, no jobs this year -- guess I'll study Engineering"?

From what I've seen and experienced over the past few years, we've got a growing number of people who, with all the will in the world, can't make ends meet, and a shrinking but still considerable number of people who are blocking this fact out -- because who wants to worry about the joblessness bogey-man coming after them?

Human nature being what it is, I suspect this latter group will go denying the problem, until the other group gets big enough to wake them up with a few electoral thunderclaps.

THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT. Now here's something that might just save Broadway:

One scene in the performance, by Spanish troupe La Fura Dels Baus, in which an actress appears to perform oral sex on a man from the audience, provoked outrage.

But co-producer and co-writer Carlos Padrissa hit back: "The production serves an educational purpose. It's good for people to be able to experience maximum freedom"...

[The play] centres on naive 18-year-old Eugenie who is introduced to sex by three tutors. It ends with her arranging for her mother to be gang raped.

Bring it over from London with all speed, lest another Rodgers and Hammerstein revival fill its place.

The show is called "XXX," by the way, and the company's title seems to translate as Fury of the Sewers.

(Found via this site, which is a whole lot more edifying than my usual source material.)

MOMMA DIDN'T RAISE NO GEARHEAD. I got around on my newly-purchased bike a bit today, a sweet Columbia Sports III. The springs in the seat are mighty stiff, and the kickstand (a difficult-to-replace model) was missing, but I got a good price on it, and was told it had just been tuned up. It's in my local shop now, though, because the gear cable popped. Some tune-up. I had to take my old bike, an ancient Robin Hood, in for gear-work every couple of months. Is this normally what happens to old three-speeds? Or do the repairmen just see me coming?

There are so many old, sub-optimal makes like mine on the street, ridden by people who aren't enthusiasts but just want to ride a few miles on sunny days instead of taking the subway, that I wouldn't be shocked to learn the bike-shop proprietors were, by unspoken agreement, practicing a little planned obsolescence in their repairs.

After all, the 1956 Sturmey-Archer manual says that "Sturmey-Archer hubs have been designed and built to give a life-time of trouble-free service on the understanding that regular attention is given to correct care and maintenance as outlined below."

Of course, I could stop scanning Google News every two hours, give up the resulting composition of blistering screeds, and take the time saved to learn the ins and out of Toggle Gear repair.

Which might makes things easier on all of us.

JULIA ROBERTS AS WILL AND IDEA. Good heavens. I just saw half an hour of the movie Pretty Woman. I usually manage to avoid such cultural touchstones during their first run, mostly by what the scientists call natural selection ("A new movie with Julia Roberts or an evening drinking in a dank basement? The choice is clear!"). And when I do catch up with them, I am usually disappointed. I saw, for example, Forrest Gump years after its release and found it a depressingly easy and dim-witted sneer against twenty years of American cultural upheaval -- in other words, pretty much what I expected, which is never the desired result of a trip to the Fantasy Factory.

But this movie is genuinely astonishing. A poor but honest prostitute meets cute and makes nice with a sensitive zillionaire john! How could I have missed it in the coming attractions! I wonder if my old friend Professor Hurley has seen it. I'm sure he would appreciate it. The zillionaire woos the prostitute by letting her drive his borrowed status car (that the pedals are close together make it better for women than for men to drive it, she tells him, because "women have smaller feet -- 'course, I'm a size nine-and-a-half"). He pays her for a night of subdued romantic dialogue and sex. I thought it was a bit much that he got sex, too -- after all, $300 is far less than the authors were paid for the subdued romantic dialogue -- but he makes up for it by paying a further $3000 to take over her life for a week. What a catch!

The john is quietly amused (and, from the wisps of foreshadowing blowing through the early scenes, would continue to be quietly amused) by the reaction of his fellow aristos and associated bourgeois to this diamond-in-the-rough-trade. If I were a deconstructionist, I would call this a landmark in the hard bargain made by the powers that be to lure the masses to the consumerism that still afflicts us all: they would allow a great deal more latitude in the area of sexual fantasy if it could be inextricably linked to money. I wonder if Rick Santorum has seen it. I'm sure every hip-hop artist has.

I couldn't keep watching -- my bile-flap inevitably began to quiver -- but I am content that I got the money-shot, as it were.

Now one of these days I'll see My Best Friend's Wedding and really break it down.

HEH. INDEED. UP YOUR ASS. Poor Andy's going apeshit. His beloved Bush can't -- won't, actually -- squeeze a Trent Lott moment out of the Santorum crisis.

But hark! Perfesser Rocky Top rides in on a white SUV to lay the blame at the foot of the Ay-rabs. He notes the resistance of Muslim nations to a UN homosexual human rights proposal. That's telling Ted Rall!

How sad for both of them. (Let me partially withdraw: I have professed sorrow for Sullivan, but the Perfesser is a bridge -- perhaps several -- too far for me.) Shaking the anti-Saddam fist has been a good gig for the Perfesser, but now our focus is on America, not desert shitholes, and it would seem the President's tepid response to the current contretemps cannot logically be softened by reference to Middle Eastern tyrants whose feelings toward sodomites, it is clear, are not very different from his own.

Dan Savage in the Times (fuck the links) is right: the GOP is not going to distance itself from a position that has stood it well in the hinterlands. They're waiting for it to blow over. And it will, with assistance from Poor Andy's buddies in the Republican Party. He'll fall into line soon enough, I'm guessing. But, romantic fool that I am, I'd be delighted if I were proven wrong.