THE LATE, GREAT JOHNNY CASH. There isn't much to say about his passing. I will say that I kept thinking of a couple of his songs all weekend. "Pickin' Time" is about his family's experience as sharecroppers in the deep South. It's either his father's or his mother's voice in this bit:

Ev'ry night when I go to bed
I thank the Lord that my kids are fed
They live on beans eight days and nine
But I get 'em fat come Pickin' Time

But the song that really kept coming up was one I know better from Ry Cooder's version, but was one of Cash's early hits. It's a song about how the joy of music is available to anyone who can feel it in every motion he makes. The subject is a shoeshine boy that catches the author's eye. Given the time and circumstances, we have to assume the kid is black. He has nothing but his shoeshine kit and a song in his heart, and pops his rag on "the windy corner of a dirty street" with gusto and as if things were better than they were.

The song makes me think about all the lousy jobs I've had, and about how whenever things were really tough a song would pop into my own head, whether I was loading a truck or delivering a package or bussing tables or even (and this really is a reach, but I swear it's true) working the keys as a writer. It's as if melody and rhthym were gifts from God that made life, even dull, lead-footed, quotidian working life, something that we should be happy to have received.

I think Cash knew what the kid was about, and never forgot it through the many years of his career, swallowing pills, playing for prisoners, stomping his feet, running with the devil, getting right with Jesus, and stroking that old pine box as if a bigger answer than any man knew could be coaxed out that way:

Well, I sat down to listen to the shoeshine boy
And I thought I was gonna jump for joy
Slapped on the shoe polish left and right
He took a shoeshine rag and he held it tight
He stopped once to wipe the sweat away
I said you're a mighty little boy to be-a workin' that way
He said I like it with a big wide grin
Kept on a poppin' and he said again
Get rhythm when you get the blues
Hey, get rhythm when you get the blues
Get a rock 'n' roll feelin' in your bones
Get taps on your toes and get gone
Get rhythm when you get the blues

MY KARMA IS 0. At Hit & Run Nick Gillespie praises Plastic: "It may not have made money," he says, "but it's great that it's around."

I can't tell you how refreshing it is to hear a libertarian praise something that hasn't been rewarded by the market. It was also a pleasure to be reminded that Plastic is still going, if not going strong, and still good. And the current edition of Plastic contains this bit:

A national survey by Oxford Health plans found that one out of six Americans who receive paid vacation are unable to use it, nearly one-third of employees work through lunch and 19 percent reported feeling obligated to work even when sick or injured. Whether such numbers reflect workers' anxiety or a stronger work ethic, experts worry about the physical and psychological ramifications while policymakers argue over proposed solutions.

Hands up -- who here believes (will you wait till I've asked the question first, please, Mr. Kudlow?) that these numbers reflect a "a stronger work ethic" among American drones? While anecdotal evidence is notoriously shaky, I think it's pretty damn universally observable that most workers don't love their work, and do it primarily if not solely to get paid. Despite what TV commercials tell us, this is not, for most of us, a world of endless options. Kids get born, houses get mortgaged, and before you know it that dream of being a pro skateboarder soon's you raise enough seed money temping is nothing but a rueful memory. And that's speaking of the folks who had a dream in the first place. So you go to work.

Again, this seems self-evident -- a life lesson, not an economic hypothesis. So it's remarkable how gullible (well, willfully self-deceiving is probably more like it) the Wall Street Journal was on the same issue this past Labor Day, taking workers' mildly positive responses to survey questions about their jobs as proof that Americans are work-lovin' happyfaces. Look: how comfortable would you be telling complete strangers that you spend a third of your week doing something with which you feel no connection and, best case, hope to get out of someday or, worst case, have learned to endure by running the theme music from Monday Night Football in your head every time you feel like screaming? Are you the kind of person who will share his private griefs and disappointments with a guy on line at the RiteAid? Most of us aren't. So if Mr. Clipboard asks me how I like my job, I won't say I despise it even if I do (and I don't! Really! I love my job, folks! And you know me, I wouldn't lie about that to swell folks like you!).

No, we don't like to work, and if we don't avail every opportunity to do less of it, it's because we're either politicking our way to a promotion or scared shitless we'll be fired -- which, in our current "jobless recovery," is not an unreasonable fear.

A BAD DAY MADE WORSE. This morning I perused several 9/11 tributes online, and so far every single one of them has been crap -- unfocused, incoherent, alternately maudlin and belligerent. This is not surprising. The topic is huge, and might defeat even a real writer, not to speak of the special-pleading pygmies who pass for geniuses on the Web.

Many of these pieces start out as tributes to the fallen and the heroic of two years back, but wind up (sooner than later in most cases) as assessments of the current War effort. There is anger but, interestingly, outside those few reliable stokeholes of rage that ever and always spew naught but cinders and ash (and you have to hand it to Misha: it takes a special talent to devise a layout that makes Free Republic look like GQ), most of the anger is not directed at the guys who flew the planes into the WTC, or at Osama "Forgotten But Not Gone" Bin Laden, but at Americans insufficiently on-board with the Bush program. Three excellent cases come conveniently packaged in today's New York Post.

"There are unmistakable signs that many in the nation's elite are forgetting," says John Podhoretz. ("Elite" apparently refers not to children of famous writers who mysteriously wind up with plush editorial gigs, but to people who don't believe what Podhoretz believes.) Brookhiser bitches about the "carpers" and "self-haters" who "have been a feature of New York life for decades." (He dreams, one guesses, of a City stripped of its Mailers and malcontents, and a day when unelite Podhoretzes and Kristols will run the works.)

But my favorite is Ralph "That's Colonel Peters to You, Maggot!" Peters. "In the War Against Terror, no other power or organization can defeat America," barks the Colonel. "But America remains dangerously capable of defeating itself." Some sissy-marys would "like a nicely wrapped-up Hollywood ending, thanks," but "Wars do not necessarily conform to the victor's desires. Outcomes surprise." (Who knew, for example, that Saddam's WMD were not sitting on a launch-pad ready and waiting for the dictator's go-code?) And "we shall never see a final victory over terror in our lifetimes." (At last: our no-exit strategy!) So all you "intellectual classes," "'opinion-makers,'" and "Democrats," suck it up. We're in this to the finish -- literally!

It's obvious why these memorialists' targets are Americans, not residents of a hostile state. This is a War on Terror, or on Militant Islam, or on Islamofascists, or, to put it more succinctly, "a pathological ideology that still holds a whole region of the world in its grip." But those aren't people, they're abstractions. Our leaders occasionally stick to a face on them -- now Bin Laden's, now Saddam's. But currently there is no credible Public Enemy #1.

Today the anniversary of a living nightmare stirs our rage. But on whom can we turn it? Some people in situations like this meditate and pray for peace. Some people smash chairs and punch walls. And some grab hold someone they never much liked anyway and scream, "This is all your fault!"

HALF A ROLL IS BETTER THAN NONE. People ask why I don't have comments, or a blogroll. Well, for one thing, I figure if you want to tell me what you think, you'll take the trouble to write to me (just like in the good old days of wax seals, quills, and pistols at dawn!) or scathe me in your own blog. Let my little fame be spread widely if not thickly. Anyway, why should I support your squawks with my hard-earned web hosting fees? That's the sort of Bullshit Libertarian I am!

Also: I think even my most communitarian readers will admit that most on-premises commentary either starts as crap or devolves to it. Interestingly (and remember, you didn't hear this from me), some of the group gripes at Free Republic are more interesting than what you see in the usual vaccs or ratemymusic daughter windows. Within the winger community there are many cadres and schismatics, and their internecine slugfests can turn into donnybrooks a la Donovan's Reef, crashing through walls of logic and spilling into tide pools of paranoid conspiracy.

The only problem with those exhilirating spectacles is, those people are nuts -- starking, staring splitters of insanely fine and even insubstantial hairs. If you want to see sane people talking, you may find that at sites like CalPundit, where the topics are always meaty and draw an intellectually appetitive and often eloquent crowd. That's where the old dream of web community yet lives, and I salute its enablers.

But whom does Alicublog draw? I don't know. Never put in a Counter -- prefer to write as if no one is reading; question of epistolary discipline. I do know that what winds up on these pages is mostly dark mutterings, sometimes sardonic, on occasion comedic, and seldom general enough to facilitate roundtable discussion. I like to think I follow my subjects down rabbit-holes of extrapolative logic too narrow and winding for crowds to comfortably follow. Is that selfish? Should I not instead lay the floor open for a massive Maoist group criticism? ("Comrade Edroso is guilty of the crime of obscurantism! The Dixie Chicks are a topic great enough for all workers to share, yet Edroso would pound it into a nugget that would not last one hour in the furnace of the Collective Waste Processing Plant!") Sorry, comrade. Though I care what you think (do correspond! I shall read your letters in the light of the piazza!), I can't bring myself to lay the doors of my mansion wide open just yet.

(As to the second reason: I'm just hella lazy. Me and my 98-pound sidekick, Dial-Up Modem, muscle our way into Blogger, lay the incendiaries, and vamoose -- not leaving much time for redesign.)

That said, I will commend you to some spiffy weblogists who give me some fun and edification, and might do as well for you:

Roger Ailes. The Hunting and the Snark. Possessed of an attitude shittier (in the best sense) than mine, and more sharply on point.

Very Very Happy. Ailes pointed me here, to a superb post at a generally very keen site. And it's all good. Sample quote: "Holy hell, I can hear Luskin's erection. And I'm half a continent away from him."

Busy Busy Busy. Custodians of the "Shorter" format. My only complaint is that they should post more frequently. So many fools be blogging!

Fables of the Reconstruction. A reliable pisser. Nota bene: I give any poster of Victorian porn ten extra points.

Cursor. Not commentary (much) -- links. A pointer site, in the old pre-bust jargon. And chances are they'll be here, pointing powerlessness to truth, after the bust has gone nationwide (ETA: a coupla months).

Eschaton. Because he's/she's there.

Jesus' General. Super spotty posting -- but if you've never gone, go. He is especially eloquent on how Clinton damaged his "little soldier."

Orcinus. Prisoners incarcerated with G. Gordon "Will" Liddy used to say, "Better not mess with Liddy -- he knows something!" Orcinus knows quite a bit. Former Black Ops, or just an especially keen observer? I bow to his compound sentence structure.

Like Father Like Sun. He has spent his days capering with fools at the New York Sun when he should have been shaking all East Anglia with the thunder of his genius. But 'sokay. Plenty more where that came from.

Sasha Castel. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong BUT: sometimes capable of very sound advice.

A GREAT COUNTRY OR WHAT? (CORRECT ANSWER: WHAT?) "Already, actors Tom Hanks, Cybill Shepherd and Martin Sheen have spoken out against Arnie [Schwarzenegger]'s campaign," reports WOKR-TV in Rochester. But now it's serious, the station reports: Arnold has been dissed by The Dixie Chicks.

"He is a great film star," admitted DC Emily Robinson. "But I find his idea to run for governor absolutely insane. America should be governed by people who have a clue."

How weird this country has become. Political protests against a film that hasn't even opened. An actor running for California Governor on a platform so free of substance (and crammed with happythink pronouncements like "I want to become an expert in all education") that it tramples the already low bar for candidate accountability into the dirt. And now performers from nowhere near the state that candidate intends to govern making headlines by weighing in.

We're fighting in Iraq to ensure the "triumph of democracy," the President says. Well, maybe the Iraqis will make a better job of it than we have.

NINE-ELEVENMANIA! This comes, predictably, from the New York Post, but, less predictably (indeed, almost refreshingly for students of advanced inanity), in a restaurant review:

Church & Dey, with a knockout third-floor view over Ground Zero, would be a disgrace anywhere. But at a site indelibly scored by horror and heroism, it borders on scandal...

Church & Dey's disregard for even minimal standards demeans all who have given their best at the World Trade Center site -- from the 9/11 rescuers to those striving to create something new and inspiring there...

It is a blemish on the Millenium Hilton, whose owners and staff are due all credit for the hotel's rebirth. It's an insult to the restaurant's own hard-working employees, some of whom worked there on 9/11 and whose return was fraught with anguished memories...

See, it's not just pinko Democrats who soil the memory of 9/11. It's also those who poorly prepare wild mushroom compote mere yards away from the site of an upcoming Republican photo opportunity!

I'm gonna spend tomorrow night at the fucking movies.

TREMORS. I guess 9/11 is getting close, because the gibberish vendors are hauling out the industrial-grade traitor bait.

Tacitus, for example, tells us how "domestic opposition can lend moral support to America's enemies," in that charming, I'm-just-sayin' manner that has made him a beloved figure in American letters. By the way, spot the motif in this passage:

Remember the pro-French Jeffersonians and their, er, staunch patriotism as whipped up by Citizen Genet back in the 1790s? Remember the Confederate hopes for a Democratic victory in the 1864 election? Remember Aguinaldo's hopes for a Democratic victory in the 1900 election? Remember the Vietnamese communists' expressed appreciation for the antiwar movement in the 1960s? Remember the Soviet endorsement of Western movements for nuclear freeze and disarmament? Remember Saddam Hussein's statement of support for the 18 January ANSWER protests this year?

Democrats! Democrats all -- including the filthy Francophile Jefferson! (No mention, interestingly, of the America Firsters.)

One hardly needs to read Brendan Miniter's OpinionJournal peroration any further than its grand title, "Where Were You? And where do you stand two years after Sept. 11?" Sounds like a HUAC Chairman grilling a witness. The body copy is more poetic (well... are there any such words as "poetastic" or "poetasterrific?"). "Someday someone will ask you that perennial question of historical events," Miniter sententiously starts, and one's ears perk -- what might that perennial question be? Hope it's the Riddle of the Sphinx -- I know that one!

But it turns out this "someone," who sounds suspiciously like Raymond Massey in "Things to Come," has more than one question to ask from his lonely promontory in the Asgardian wastes of the future: "Were you willing to control your fear and make the sacrifices necessary to defeat the terrorists and their murderous ideology?" Moreover, "Were you willing to leave the United Nations in its moral confusion and confront the enemy in his sanctuaries?" Yes to a, no to b? Depart from me, ye wicked, into everlasting darkness!

Here, too, Democrats are pictured as out of step with regular Americans: "Howard Dean says the Iraq war was based on a lie and that there are now more terrorists there than when Saddam ruled. Wesley Clark claims America is failing in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. Other Democrats running for president have launched similar attacks. These are the words of those who would offer us the middle ground between good and evil." [emphasis mine] In this bad-editorial-cartoon world Miniter has created, we may picture this middle ground as an alley, behind the church and abutting a speakeasy, where truant Dems loiter, deaf to the entreaties of the Preacher, and thus drift into ruinous contact with libertine dictators and scarlet anchorwomen.

Fear not, there are prescriptions: "...we must also move toward rebuilding the civil institutions that ensure the strength of our republic. In the schools we must rescue civics from the social-studies teachers who teach anti-Americanism." (That again?) "In the public square we must fight to preserve the right of religious expression. Within our churches we must demand that our religious leaders lead..."

Demand that our religious leaders lead! One envisions Miniter hauling Father Flotsky up the nave for pulpit-pounding lessons. "Shake your fist thus, priest," instructs the columnist, "for he leads best that maketh a baleful noise unto the Lord."

It'll just get worse, I'm sure. But I do note that the hooey-meter has gone up and down in off-season, so perhaps it were best to batten down the hatches till the patriots (is there such a word as "patriotaster"?) have blown their respective wads.

UPDATE 9/10: Tactitus says, "Roy Edroso is annoyed that all the examples I give of domestic opposition lending support to the enemy are of Democrats. Well. So they are." Yes, the record is clear: Democrats have been aiding and abetting the enemy since the 18th Century. How is it that the heads of Jefferson, Jackson, FDR et alia didn't end up on spikes overlooking the Potomac? Must be an eternal-evil, LOTR thing.

While I appreciate and indeed often share T's Hatfield/McCoy approach to American politics, this is probably a good time to say out loud that just because a foreign power, even a belligerent, sees some gain for themselves in an American policy development does not mean that such a development constitutes "support to the enemy" in any but the most uselessly pedantic sense. This country currently engages in trade with China -- evil, evil China! -- and is probably the only force preventing the Palestinians from obliteration. Is Bush then guilty of giving aid and comfort to Wen Jiabao and Yasser Arafat? (Well, some people probably think so, but...)

Disregard this if T is joking. And he well be, for all I know. I am notoriously bereft of a sense of humor.

GODWIN'S LAW BE DAMNED. CalPundit links to Quaker in a Basement (o roll dem blogs!) on Republican legislators' plans to enforce "intellectual diversity" in Colorado schools via gummint action. These plans were allegedly inspired by David "Tell the Black People to Stop Staring at Me" Horowitz.

As I noted back in ought-two (scroll down to November 14), Daniel Pipes has floated a similar plan, by which "outsiders (alumni, state legislators, non-university specialists, parents of students and others)" would "take steps to create a politically balanced atmosphere, critique failed scholarship, establish standards for media statements by faculty and broaden the range of campus discourse." This, Pipes reasoned, is made necessary by a preponderance of "American Academics Who Hate America" -- and the need is made more pressing because "we are at war."

CalPundit and the Quaker are good on the legal problems with this approach (not to mention its rank hypocracy), but a strong word should be raised about the moral issue of sending flying squads of "outsiders" to monitor and correct ideological balance in colleges and universities. I know we've been cautioned by various Basil Fawltys not to mention the War but this really is perilously close to Nazi shit:

The first indications of an emerging cultural policy in Germany were barely noticed by the general public. On April 13, 1933 the German Student Association posted a twelve point "Proclamation" at the entrance doors of the Univerity of Berlin, demanding from the universities a greater sense of responsibility toward the German race, the German language, and German literature...

And:

The Nazification of Germany in the 1930s did not happen overnight. A key part of this Nazification process was the campaign called "Gleichschaltung" -- which means "getting everyone in step." The Nazis announced that a proud, new, patriotic Germany was being born out of pain and danger... For a decade from the late '20s to the late '30s, communists, radicals, progressives and Jews were targeted in the universities and other institutions -- and so were many who defended them. The emergence of a "new normalcy" in the late '30s was a prelude to wider war and greater horrors.

Bringing up the bad boys of Berlin is a blogger no-no, a blowing of one's cool in a hypercool medium. And of course the Nazis weren't asking for diversity, while Pipes and Horowitz seek only a limited outside intervention in the affairs of academia. And it's not the Student Affairs Bureau that would administer the plan between concert bookings and theme nights in the cafeteria. Besides, there's speech codes, and that was the other side. And Horowitz is Jewish, etc.

But fuck it. I say it's fascist and I say the hell with it.

FAT CATS. "U.S. Report: 1 in 4 Pets Obese." -- CNN. At first I thought it said, "1 in 4 Pets Obsess," and I thought, so now it's come to this.

Actually I still feel that way. This is the sort of headline that drives some of us crazy. Oh boy, we think, next they're be providing obstetric service to snakes, and they we realize, they already do.

Well, to echo the warden in A Clockwork Orange, these new, ridiculous ideas have come at last. But this rope is a little easier to let go of than some. No doubt in the near future most people will consider paunchy pooches a newsworthy outrage nearly equal to those is-your-child-safe scare stories on the local news. Lead paint chips today, tabby treadmills tomorrow! And maybe it's a good thing. Not many years ago, as was pointed on in the aforereferenced New Yorker story (which is quite good, but I can't find it online -- it's by Burkhard Bilger in last week's issue, find it if you can), animals were left to sicken and starve, and gradually we came to feel sufficiently for our animal friends to provide them medicine and shelters. Animal wellness is already a common theme on boxes of Purina Cat Chow, and now it's a big media story. Maybe this is the next step in our evolution.

We are told that it is right and noble to stand athwart history, yelling "Stop!" but the future is rushing in from all directions and we have to pick our shots. It is a strange thought for an old liberal, but this story may be a sign that the new breed (of people, I mean) is becoming more humane, so to speak, than ever we thought to be, and as long as no multibillion dollar government plan is in the offing (cut to some future President holding up a dog tag and announcing veterinary coverage that is yours at whelping and can never be taken away, while a translator goes "Woof, woof, woof, woof"), I guess I can let this one slide.

REMEMBRANCE DAY. Lileks today:

This reminds me of a gentle tut-tutting I got from some guy on a webpage I stumbled across post 9/11 -- he was just so... bemused at how I’d lost my grasp on reality. I had been describing my reaction to the men who’d kill my daughter for the glory of Allah: give me the gun, show me the cave. The author of the piece suggested I would be perfect for the role of the WW2 black-out warden who scolds people for half-closed windowshades.

Why, it’s almost as if I thought we were at war, or something.

Oooh, I gushed, jumping up and down in my poodle skirt and cradling my "Gallery of Regrettable Food" to my chest, he noticed!

My official position is that everyone's entitled to a personal, even a personalized, reaction. My own personal reaction in those days was that we had gone through something terrible and hysteria was not helping. It still sort of reminds me of when Harry Carey Jr., crazed with grief at the savage murder of his girl, went running at the Comanche in The Searchers and got himself killed. I don't think the Duke loved the girl any less because he didn't follow suit.

Well, that was then, and this is... then, I guess. We're ramping up to the Memorial and encouraged to get mad. At whom? The Talented Mr. Bin Laden? I have no love for the surviving "Islamic fascists," and if I worked myself into a grand mal seizure over them I imagine it might momentarily banish my disappointment that we have conducted our struggle against them haphazardly, leaving thousands dead, a fat albatross of a ruined nation in our hands, and murderous would-be viziers stoking oil-fires of resentment against us. But that would bring no victims back to life, no honor to their memory, and no solution any nearer.

I think the worst thing we could do to the folks Lileks wants to murdalize is put their ignorant, feudal, vengeful, priest-ridden, savage way of life into the past tense, forever. I have a hunch that in the long run it will take more convincing than killing. Call that bleeding-heart traitorousness if you like. I prefer to call it what we did back when we used that strategy against the Soviet Union: victory.

If you think shaking fists at the cave-dwellers will speed that event, God go with you. If you prefer to shake your fist at me for showing insufficient respect for your shaking fist, have fun. Ignorance is my only real enemy, and I know it is too weak to prevail.

THE RACE IS ON. Last night's Democratic Presidential Candidate Debate draws the expected results: dismissive, "who cares?" snot-blowing from right-wingers, who still think disdain is a strategy, and from conservatarians, who are perplexed that no challenger has come out strongly against public roads, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and other such extraconstitutional abominations.

Myself, I thought it was refreshing to see seven people who didn't like President Bush on TV together. (Has there been some sort of federal law against that since 9/11?) And, as a proud partisan, I enjoyed even the lame cracks on W, including Gephardt's "miserable failure" mantra.

Some random notes:

None of the candidates seemed barking mad. Well, Kucinich was... astringent I think is the best word, his gaunt face pained as he roared truth to powerlessness. But though his jihad against NAFTA is strong medicine, it's no more so than Pat Buchanan's, and we all respect him, right? Everyone else was pretty avuncular, including Moseley-Braun, which was suprising, since the righties are always unleashing the vilest invective against her (black, female, and not a complete tool? Into the briar patch with you!).

Bob Graham is running for Vice-President. He's too old and dull for the top job, but his offering is clear: put me on the ticket, and I'll have my goons stop Jeb's goons from stealing a second election. It ain't a bad case. I just hope he doesn't get bored pretending to run for President.

Joe Lieberman really is the candidate from, to paraphrase Doctor Dean, the Republican wing of the Democratic party. But it was impressive from a tactical viewpoint to see such a centrist handling the (I imagine) largely union-educrat audience so well. On Free Trade, for example, he proclaimed his concern for exploited workers worldwide so passionately that I almost didn't notice he was really saying that he wouldn't do a damn thing to help them. That's the kind of savvy you get from working the hustings for decades, and I came away admiring his professionalism, if nothing else about him.

In fact, it was interesting to see how well all the old dogs (Graham partly excepted) performed. The format suits them more than the new school. Kerry is good at smoothly reframing questions to suit his own talking points. When Gephardt's voice rose in a denunciation of Bush that suddenly segued into reminder that he (Gephardt) had worked with BILL CLINTON to GROW THE ECONOMY, I was as aware of the efficacy of the ploy as I was of its transparency.

I don't know if it's a New Mexico thing, but the mix of Spanish and English subtitles and announcements threw me. I appreciate that it must have driven the Peter Brimelow types crazy -- imagine the xenophobic Brit wincing as EX SENADOR DE ILLINOIS appeared under CMB's big, black face! But it seemed like an empty, tokenish gesture. Isn't that was SAP is for? Also, all the candidates more or less endorsed the idea of amnesty for illegals. I would say, in their place: No, amnesty is for people who have done something criminal. I would decriminalize coming to America -- but hold all residents, from the oldest to the newest, to the same standards of law.

Hold your pace, John Edwards. The race has a long way to go and the middle of the pack is a good place to be. But if you get there, it'll be without my help.

IN MY DAY, WE DIDN'T HAVE CAPS TO BUST! I know we asked the last person denouncing Britney and Madonna in a column to turn off the lights when he left. But there's Grandpa from The Boondocks -- I mean, Stanley Crouch -- still sitting in the dark, cursing it. Someone get a flashlight and give Grandpa a hand.

His every -- what, third? Fourth? -- column is about some bad thing on MTV that he hates and why decent people must band together and crush it. This time it's black performers who act like they want to kill you, and female performers who act like they want to fuck you.

"The black thug evolved into a hero because he went against what were dismissed as white middle-class values," sayeth Stanley. "And the prostitute was projected as the liberated woman because she was willing to strut her stuff against all conventions and follow her glands wherever they led her."

You have to admit that he sort of makes some mild, old-man-on-the-porch sense about the ludicrous (or Ludacris) gangsta fronting in hip hop. But it's nuts to ramble about it in a newspaper column, as if it were of any import whatsoever: it's like writing an angry column denouncing pistachio ice cream as an abomination before God.

(Wait, didn't Jim Lileks write one of those? Oh, you follow me, guys -- it's my theme for most of these columns: people who still think the personal is the political, and thereby diminish them both.)

You know, I bet that Crouch guy actually hangs out with black people. But he certainly can't have had any meaningful exposure to females! I mean, I've known some horny chicks, but none who could be said to have "followed her glands."

But that's alright, Gramps, think we got the formula:

• hip hop -- performed by blacks, enjoyed by whites, therefore bad for blacks.
  
• "slut chic" -- indulged by girls, enjoyed by boys, therefore bad for girls.
  

GO BACK TO THE ADIRONDACKS! "New Yorker" R. Brookhiser responding to one of his asshole buddies at National Review Online: "The quotations you cited represent a strain of NYC anti-naturism. But many Gothamites require the country as a place of refuge."

Correction: some Gothamites can afford the country as a place of refuge.

For the rest of us there's Central Park. Prospect Park. Tompkins Square Park. Riverside Park. Flushing Meadows Corona Park...

Not so bad, actually. Beats the hell out of the "refuge" offered by NRO, anyway.

TOUGH. You always expect a little degeneration when an indie (or Insta) fave graduates to the bigtime. But even by the low intellectual standards set by his flagship, the most recent Glenn Reynolds column at msnbc disappoints. A nine-one-one pre-anniversary column consisting mainly of quotes from the malignant Wolfowitz and one of the young men sent to labor on behalf of his delusions! Has the man no shame? Has msnbc no editors?

Of course the combatant is surly toward "those of you who question the righteousness of this conflict." Put in his unfortunate place, any of us might be pleased at the service he was doing the wretches among whom he'd been placed, and take it to mean that the cause was therefore just. You might obtain a similar effect in Bosnia, Liberia, the Ivory Coast, Ghana, et alia ad nauseum. Which implies that the U.S. Army is now the Peace Corps with bullets and authority for house-to-house searches. It is, as Ward Bond told Jeffrey Hunter in The Searchers, a bitter thing to say, but does this kindness by itself authorize our great and continuing investment of blood, treasure, and national prestige?

We're constantly asked to excuse (and that's the right word) this mad adventure because of the collateral anti-damage. This is portrayed as the "tough" approach. Bullshit. It's the usual domestic "What About the Children?" nonsense applied to foreign policy issues. It would be comical to see the usually hard-eyed Bush Administration, whose "No Child Left Behind" is a notorious dodge stateside, inviting sympathy for the children of Iraq, were this last-ditch pretext for occupation other than pathetic.

I grow weary of humanitarian pretexts and posttexts for foreign interventions. Clinton's Haitian and Bosnian adventures, similarly tricked-up as they were, had more believeable geopolitical rationales -- and if their outcomes, in one or the other case, have proved less than satisfying, at least those failures have been less expensive, and marginally more useful, than the current Iraqi albatross.

Speaking of geopolitics, what's the news from our pals in Saudi Arabia? What? F-15s in Tabuk? Shall we ignore them? What about the children?

RETURN OF THE NAIVE. Andrew Sullivan is aghast that people are calling his President a liar. "...when you start using the term "liar" promiscuously in public discourse, you make such discourse increasingly impossible," says Sullivan. "The term should be reserved only for a conscious and deliberate statement that you know is untrue as you speak or write it. It's rarer than you might think."

Isn't this a bit rich coming from a guy who grew his little bit of fame by publicly denouncing many of his fellow citizens as traitors? How carefully did Sullivan think about the prudence of his claims before he smeared them all over the Blue States?

But I should ease back on him. During that long month in which he cooled his clay feet in P-town, I had forgotten the relevant thing about Sullivan: trying to hook his thoughts one to another, or follow his train of thought past the first station, is like trying to reconstruct a shattered mummy. Best just to wave the vile dust away from one's nostrils.

AND PROUD OF IT! Vice magazine nudnik Gavin McInnes at Buchanan's AmConMag optimistically predicts a conservative renaissance among Young People Today. His evidence is thin ("...only 12 percent of our readers would dare call themselves conservatives -- but that is at least twice what it was five years ago..."), but the case is really sunk by this passage:

Like Toby Young in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People or Peter Brimelow in Alien Nation, we were new immigrants who couldn’t understand why Americans were so determined to favor PC posturing over simple facts.

Bragging on Toby Young as part of your intellectual arsenal is like going to a gunfight and proudly announcing that you have a butter knife.

MORNING IDIOCY. Been too busy to post; the nephew is in town to start college. He's a fine lad and has been granted permanent exemption from any cracks I might make about the Youth of Today.

I got up early and looked around the Web. Much moronism on display, but mostly of the silly, mendacious, and pathetic varieties, not the instructive sort of idiocies upon which this journal feasts.

What do I mean by instructive idiocy? Here, I just found this at The Corner: a trifle that links to a "Broken Windows" Wilson piece called "Cars and their Enemies." The Corner bit is called "Why the Left Hate Cars."

These guys seem to be serious -- at least, serious in the sense of not kidding. "Cars are about the joyous sensation of driving on beautiful country roads; critics take their joy from politics," runs one stupefying Wilson passage. Another: "Cars are about privacy; critics say privacy is bad and prefer group effort. (Of course, one rarely meets these critics in groups. They seem to be too busy rushing about being critics.)"

And so on. Say this for old BW, though: he doesn't try to pin it all on the Left. In fact, he specifically states that the allegedly antiautomotive view "is by no means one that is confined to the political Left." He does conflate all principled objection to car culture with socialism and Luddism, but at least when he says "critics" he uses the word more or less properly.

The Corner guy, on the other hand, uses it to mean the other side of the aisle in all things. By this view, if you aren't on the Right, you not only (as these guys never tire of asserting) hate America -- you hate Chevys and cheeseburgers and everything else holy and decent.

The nation faces several crises and difficult choices, and credentialed conservatives are still busy with the you-guys-are-no-fun argument. Not a good sign.

WHAT, ME WEIMAR? In the most recent issue of The American Prospect (in articles not available at their website, unfortunately). the TAPpers talk about liberal language and image issues. This is meat and drink to me, but the articles made me a little queasy, particularly "Framing the Dems" by cognitive scientist George Lakoff, who compares the conservative and progressive (big word at TAP these days) worldviews to family models, the "strict father family" and the "nurturant parent family." To underline the point, the editors put in pictures of Robert Duvall as the Great Santini, and Bill Cosby as lovable Cliff Huxtable.

Lakoff makes some good points, but I'm not crazy about family analogies in politics because the analogy inevitably extends (though Lakoff makes little of it) to parents and children. I don't wish to be cast in either role, frankly, especially when social scientists are doing the casting.

Deborah Tannen is a little more on the mark in examining Frank Luntz' linguistic tactics for Republicans. She objects to Luntz' read on the appeal to female voters. Based largely on Bill Clinton's success with the ladies (electorally, I mean), Luntz calls for Republicans to "empathize" with distaff citizens. "Understanding may be all that a woman is looking for when telling her husband or boyfriend about something that frustrated her during the day," Tannen retorts. "But when they go to the polls to elect a leader, women as well as men are not electing a soul mate but a public official..."

Right on, sister. When we talk about politics, it's a good thing to examine the contents of the snake oil our adversaries peddle. But when we start working too seriously on our own formulae -- or counter-formulae -- we run the risk of further debasing our politics, which in the long run does everyone a disservice.

The real sad thing about the California recall is not that it may go badly for our side (by which I of course refer to the candidacy of Gary Coleman). It's that the recall is a circus, politics as entertainment. So too the whole Roy Moore/Ten Commandments fiasco, now being exported to Mississippi. Politainment may amuse bored reporters and disgusted voters, but it should make fans of representative government nervous. Because though a lot of politics is about putting on a good show, it's also about finding consensus and keeping the Republic healthy, and we seem to be veering quickly in the goofball direction.

It's the silly season for sure, but it looks sillier by the minute, and in case you haven't noticed, the country has a lot of real problems. We're not whistling a happy tune, we're whistling in the dark, and the marketability of the tune is beginning to matter less and less.

UNCLE ROY, WHAT'S A "STRAW MAN"? Fetch Uncle Roy down the jug and hit this to get Instapundit telling a tale out of school, or rather out of the Moonie Times. The alleged exchange is between 9/11 TV movie auteur Lionel Chetwynd and, it would seem, a brain-damaged person:

Still, the murmurs of pretty much blanket disapproval I'd been hearing from colleagues about Chetwynd's doing the movie did come to a head during one truly absurd exchange:

Question: "You did contribute to [Bush's] campaign?"

Chetwynd: "Yeah, the limit was $1,000...Would it make a better film if I'd given $1,000 to Gore?"

Question: "Yes."

"Chetwynd: "Why?"

"Question: "Because it would show less potential bias."

The questioner was absolutely serious...

"OH, THAT LIBERAL MEDIA" chortles the Perfesser.

Let's assume, nephew, that Chetwynd actually met and spoke with this Mallard Fillmore caricature. An amusing anecdote, but what the hell does it demonstrate or portend? It's sort of like my own anecdote:

The overweight Republican dusted off his top hat with the sleeve of his tuxedo jacket and, moving his fat cigar to one side, sneered to me, "Most days, I tell outrageous lies to the American people because it bamboozles them into keeping my pals and I rich and powerful. But on special days like today, I do it simply to further damage an already enfeebled democracy. Moow-wah-ha-ha!"

What! You doubt the veracity of my tale? Can you prove it isn't true? And, by the way, my anecdote shows that Republicans smoke cigars, wear fancy duds, and feast on the misery of the workers. Boo-yah! Advantage: flash fiction as journalism!

DOPE, GUNS, AND FREEPING IN THE STREETS. Atrios has flagged this Free Republic discussion of Arnold's old Oui interview (in which he cheerfully flaunts his casual sex and drug use). I have long harbored a morbid fascination with FR, and so try to stay away from it, lest I get sucked forever into their vortex of anti-logic and magical thinking. But this module's too good to resist.

Sample post:

All I'll say about this is that if Bill Clinton had done the things he did prior to 1977 and reformed his act, I'd never have given him the trouble I did.

Bill Clinton was, is and always will be a diseased brain infested likely traitor and felon.

The posting of this article is unfortunate. I can only shake my head that anyone would think it relevant today.

I made some terrible choices in my youth. I congratulate you if you didn't.

In the Nixon era, Ron Ziegler used the curious locution "mistakes were made" to minimize whatever Administration fuckup he was compelled to explain. Well, now we have a new usage for conservatives who want to excuse behavior that, had it been displayed by their enemies rather than their friends, would cause them to spew tidal waves of abuse: "Terrible choices" have been made.

All over this board, in and among the usual Hillary Clinton fan fiction, you'll observe VRWC factota, usually steadfast against moral relativism in all its forms, experiencing similar, sudden, and glorious conversions to this laissez-faire socially-liberal view -- with exceptions made, of course, for "diseased brain infested likely traitor and felon" Clinton. Love the sin, hate the sinner!

Of course, I'm joking, as in reality this is all Bullshit Libertarianism -- that popular stance adapted by those to who believe in freedom where, when, and for whom it suits themselves (see Carey, Drew). Too bad. If these guys were really listening to themselves, they might undergo a real conversion -- not in politics, perhaps, but in their attitude toward those Commie preverts who do things they wouldn't do except when they did which they wouldn't do now...

KELLY'S HEROES. Funny, when you read Instapundit these days on Britain, it would seem that all the Scepter'd Isle is livid with outrage at the BBC over the Kelly affair. Here's a ripe example of his coverage:

...The Beeb, which just can't seem to avoid sexing up weapons stories... ANOTHER UPDATE: Roger Simon is comparing the BBC to Nixon and to The New York Times...

He also observes that "The Guardian is all over this one." The Guardian, which actually originates in Blighty, is indeed all over the BBC story, and here's a fairly typical excerpt:

[Defense Minister Geoff] Hoon also acknowledged that the BBC report had led to a major political crisis for Prime Minister Tony Blair and that his government was under tremendous pressure to disprove the BBC's allegations that Blair had exaggerated the risks of Iraq's weapons before the war...

The BBC's allegations -- and the high-profile inquiry being led by Lord Hutton, a senior appeals judge -- pose the worst crisis for Blair in his six years in power, with the latest polls showing that many Britons question his credibility.

Regular IP readers who have heretofore assumed that Blair was as big a hero in Anglia as in Crawford, TX might want to wipe their exploded heads off their monitors now. The BBC may well be having credibility issues, but they're nothing compared to those of the Prime Minister. (Unless of course you believe that, as promulgators of the international liberal media conspiracy, the Beeb is actually more powerful than Blair...)

All goes to show, you can get a bogus idea of international events from even the more widely-puffed weblogs. Come to think of it, drop the "international."

WESLEY WILLIS R.I.P. Wesley Willis, paranoid schizophrenic songwriter, has passed on. A moment of silence, please, for the author of "I Whupped Batman's Ass." Hopefully Daniel Johnston can pick up the slack.

A SMALL THING BUT STILL WORTH NOTING. In a post about cellphone disruptions during the recent blackout, Professor Reynolds comments, "A reader emails that Verizon wireless was up throughout the blackout, unlike other companies. Bravo!"

Someone tell the Professor that Verizon badly botched the NYPD's emergency cell communications that day. The union with which Verizon has been tussling for months suggests that the telecom's personnel cutbacks might have had something to do with it.

Wouldn't surprise me -- Verizon is the worst public utility company with whom I've ever had the misfortune to do business: sloppy, expensive, and rude. But I'll say this for them: they're very good at guerilla marketing, as witnessed by the abovementioned, probably planted message.

IMMORTAL GREEKS. Jon Landis' reflections on Animal House in the New York Times are slightly surprising. I've long disliked Landis -- whenever I saw him on TV during his trial for supervising the stunt in the 1983 Twilight Zone movie that killed Vic Morrow and a couple of kids, he always had this shitty what's-the-big-deal grin on his face. But he did direct Animal House, and that buys considerable slack. And he said some good stuff in the Times:

• He went out of his way to credit Doug Kenney, Chris Miller, and Harold Ramis for writing the picture. The first two, particularly, don't get enough credit for their National Lampoon work, and the NYT namecheck is a nice gesture.
  
• He said he was trying to make in Animal House his own version of the old-fashioned college pictures with Rudy Vallee and Jack Oakie. That's a good reference, shows scholarship, and may direct some heretofore clueless Blutarsky fan toward silent comedy. (Landis included Buster Keaton here, too, and must have been thinking of the film College, one of my personal favorites.)
  
• Landis has an insight that hadn't even occured to me over many years of loving Animal House. He says:
  

  Why do people romanticize the military and romanticize college? You're 18, and you're out of the house. There's a great line in Animal House: 'We can do anything we want. We're college students!' In addition to everything else, the movie somehow captures that sense of youthful exuberance and excitement, of being out there in the world.

  
  This adds to my enjoyment of this film, and serves as a useful reminder that, to a large extent, the adventures of Bluto, Flounder, Pinto et alia are not only (or even primarily) antiestablishment nose-thumbing, but constitute an ingenious conflation of the bildungsroman and picaresque traditions. Which is to say, maybe the boys of Delta House remain popular (whereas the boys of Van Wilder and other, similar entertaiments never became so) because they resonate with the eternal. We may not all be frat boys, but we all know the attraction of getting out of the house, and of killing Niedermeyer's horse. Figuratively speaking, of course.

WINNING ISN'T EVERYTHING... I repeat myself, but isn't it a great indicator of conservatism's basic unseriousness that many of its leading lights are plumping for the apolitically ambitious Arnold Schwarzenegger?

"Schwarzenegger Comes Through!" gushes NRO third-stringer Peter Robinson over Ahnold's transparently Golden-Bear-baiting, non-Bartlett's-contending soundbites (e.g., "Before you promise anything to anyone right now, I think stop. Stop, stop, stop with the spending"). Based on such feeble evidence, Robinson compares Schwarzenegger flatteringly to Ronald Reagan. One is tempted to answer: No, Reagan's feeble-mindedness is caused by Alzheimer's, not steroid abuse, and the Gipper had an at least moderate range of interests (movies, politics, horses, Barnaby Jones), whereas Arnold Schwarzenegger has, judging from his behaviors, a genuine interest in Arnold Schwarzenegger and not much else.

Robinson, say this for him, plays it cagey and leaves his accounting of the Reagan/Schwarzenegger link murky: "The most important parallel between Schwarzenegger and Reagan? That's still developing," Robinson admits; but "when Reagan was elected president in 1980, there was no consensus on what should be done -- but there was a consensus that something had to be done." Well, Ahnold will do something, all right. Invite Rob Lowe and a few "friends" to the Governor's mansion for a sleepover, perhaps, or push through a bill mandating for himself a better seat at the Oscars. But other than that, what? Only his publicist knows for sure.

I am guessing that the real Reagan/Schwarzenegger "parallel" is simply that Ahnold is in movies and can win. Perhaps this is enough. That conservatives would like to lay siege to any Democratic redoubt is unsurprising -- but it's downright alarming to consider the price they're now willing to pay for victory. We knew (via the 2000 election and the 2001 campaigns) that they would employ any means to win, but that they would employ such a flawed vessel as Schwarzenegger shows a definite lowering of standards.

Mere weeks after the massive shitfit pitched by the Right over the Supreme Court's anti-sodomy decision (and amid its lingering cultural fallout -- see Robinson's fellow bench-warmer Tim Graham's bitching about TV gays), the new Great Right Hope is pro-gay, pro-choice, and otherwise not especially on board with the Roger Chillingworth wing of the movement. Poor Judge Roy Moore! As he risks his career for a statue of the Ten Commandments in Alabama, those who should be his natural defenders lavish their attention on a Tinseltown muscleman.

Elsewhere at NRO, Bruce Bartlett bites his nails over "Big-Government Conservatism." It seems to perplex BB that such a lovely, reactionary fellow as W would forsake true conservative principals just to win voter approval with handouts of public money. How I would love to see W reading (or having read to him) Bartlett's piece, and to hear his contemptuous laughter!

At home, as in Iraq, the illusion of victory seems to be enough for these guys. It is fitting that they now prostrate themselves before a showman.

WELL, THEY CALL ME THE CLEANSER, BABY. From the Washington Post:

GANGRE, Kenya -- The women of this village call Francise Akacha "the terrorist." His breath fumes with the local alcoholic brew. Greasy food droppings hang off his mustache and stain his oily pants and torn shirt....

But for all of his undesirable traits, Akacha has a surprisingly desirable job: He's paid to have sexual relations with the widows and unmarried women of this village. He's known as "the cleanser," one of hundreds of thousands of men in rural villages across Africa who sleep with women after their husbands die to dispel what villagers believe are evil spirits.

As tradition holds, they must sleep with the cleanser to be allowed to attend their husbands' funerals or be inherited by their husbands' brother or relative, another controversial custom that aid workers said is causing the spread of HIV-AIDS. Unmarried women who lose a parent or child must also sleep with the ritual cleanser.

(Thanks to Ken MacLeod for the link.)

The Post says at least some women in rural Kenya are now refusing to take part in this dangerous barbarity, and good for them. But, shallow fellow that I am, I still can't get over that such a line of employment even exists. Also, check out the Post's description of the job qualifications:

A cleanser is typically the village drunkard or someone considered not very bright.

That reminds me: I really need to update my resume.

Looking at the slothful chick-magnet musicians of my acquaintance, it seems there's a touch of the universal here. Perhaps when a well-brought-up young lady of our own time and place chooses to couple with a snaggletoothed wastrel, clubfly, or drummer, she is actually responding to a deep-seated cultural imperative, and will leave the encounter cleansed of something -- illusions, perhaps, or her wallet.

I also enjoyed the town's name, which seems to have been created by Evelyn Waugh.

STILL MORE PROOF THAT JONAH GOLDBERG IS AN ASSHOLE: He doesn't like Vermont. Apparently they have hippies there, and somebody yelled at him.

LET'S SEE, WHERE'D I PUT MY STRAW MEN? Today Instapundit spends hundreds of words trying to stick an embarrassing interpretation to a single phrase spoken by Ed Asner.

(So many standout self-parodic features appear in this single Insta-incident that I have gone italic mad!)

Among the techniques availed by the Perfesser is snippets of commentary from his stooges, mostly saying that Asner probably didn't mean what IP thought he might have meant, but is still a big jerk who smells bad anyway.

This really blows away IP's standard disclaimer that he's not a conservative. Only a died-in-the-wool winger would get this worked up about Ed Asner.

(My original question was going to be, "What is it with conservatives and Ed Asner?" But I'll just leave it at "What is it with conservatives?")

Well, fuck 'em. Ed Asner rocks. He was Lou Grant. Also did a great turn in Rich Man, Poor Man ("I am in hell, making Parker House Rolls"). And he was going to be in that banned Harlan Ellison New Twilight Zone episode as a racist Santa Claus before CBS intervened.

By the way, Alan Alda's a pretty good actor, too.

JUST IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING: This is how I come out in Quizilla's What Leader Were You in a Past Life Test:



Funny, I don't remember being asked about the disposition of six million Jews. I most certainly would have answered, "Let them run the banking and entertainment industries!" I think my Spartan lifestyle threw the Quizmasters.

Thanks to Sasha Castel for the link. Achtung, baby!

THE GIULIANIFICATION OF BUSH. I see by the Chicago Tribune (via Alterman) that Bush's Pentagon wants to cut the pay of American soldiers in Iraq. This put me in mind of our late, accursed mayor Giuliani, who rode to glory on the backs of City cops and then fucked them over on pay raises.

Of course, Giuliani used the NYPD ill in many ways. Here's an interesting case revealed in New York Newsday last month:

Last week, City Comptroller William Thompson Jr. released his "Claims Report 2001-2002." Buried in parentheses amid the pie charts and bar graphs, was a line that said the city paid out $141.7 million in claims against the Police Department in fiscal 2001 - $63 million more than before or since.

The reason was a class action suit involving 7,000 citizens. Cost to the city: $50 million.

The case involved the strip-searching of 65,000 people for such minor first offenses as littering under former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's "quality of life" crime crackdown.

This massive payout is one major reason for the massive deficits that plague us still. (The others, including Hizzoner's largesse to large local businesses, would fill several columns.)

Yet the country worships "Rudy" as a savior, and doubtless Bush expects similar on-the-cheap veneration. To a large extent, it's a cultural thing. Cops and soliders identify with the Republican crackdown vision, and are, it seems, more easily flim-flammed than, say, hospital workers when it is quietly announced that they will not be compensated for their part in the new order. And the public is easily brought on board with the NYPD Blue, Third Watch, Law & Order narrative of tough leaders guiding tough civil servants through a world of skels.

These bastards have it worked good and proper. Come the Republican Convention in New York next year, the cops will, no doubt, efficiently pen protestors far from the media eye. They will be paid far less than they deserve or even require for doing so, but they will do it, and be part of the whole, carefully managed spectacle of muscular righteousness the Republicans have planned.

And some people call us useful idiots!

BLACKOUT NOTES. A little deprivation is good for the soul. I'm just not used to sharing it. Not on this scale, anyway.

My walk from Midtown West to Williamsburg was delayed for a variety of reasons until 7:30 pm yesterday. The atmosphere up around those parts was at first survivalesque, then carnivalesque. The street-choking mobs near Port Authority in the first hour were purposeful and dour (especially when we got a load of the closed doors and scant chance of escape), but once we started to radiate back into the neighborhoods, a cheerful determination took over. I talked to one friend through the window of a stalled bus, another on the street as he made his sweaty way to his girlfriend's place in the West 40's. (It never ceases to amaze me whom you run into, and how, in the City.)

Far West in the more Puerto Rican environs, bright acceptance was the rule. In a NYCHA building west of Tenth Avenue, they were hauling food down from the useless fridges for barbecue, and chatting amiably in the darkened stairwells as they conveyed themselves or their hobbled relations up and down. The kids were happy as shit, playing ball in the yards and screeching merrily to one another, like the gathering darkness was a pleasure to anticipate and the blackout a holiday. I can't imagine this town without Spanish people. I think the rest of us would have killed each other by now without them.

As I made my way dowtown in the last moments of sunlight, streets, sidewalks, and stoops had become social centers, sometimes with lawn chairs and frequently with coolers, or just piles, of drinks. Guys hauled bags of ice ("Cost me five bucks!" one guy yelled. "You wouldn't believe the line!"), at least half yapped on cell phones or stood diligently tapping the keys, trying to get through. At Rudy's on Ninth, where I stopped for a beer (knowing this would all be a little easier with one at least under my belt), the warm, stinky dimness reminded me of bars I'd frequented when A/C was not so ubiquitous: in the languor of the barflies, content on their stools, I felt again the old New York of pleasure amid squalor and lack.

I made my way through Times Square in the first hints of gloom, thinking only, I don't want to be here when it's really dark. But that was silly of me in retrospect. The big dead electronic billboards were something to see -- those vast panels of desire looking a little dull, frankly, without all the juice coursing through them, like constructions for a trade show before the crowds showed. But the people were -- well, cool would be the best world, were this not August -- they were damp and sizzled a little, not angrily, but complacently, like carriage horses waiting for custom around Central Park. I saw the now-storied sidewalk loungers, their nice shirts matted with sweat, their hair disarrayed, their name-brand shoes stretched uselessly before them, as they parked their haunches on backpacks, on newspapers, or just on concrete, and looked surprisingly resigned that their hotels or trains home were out of the question. They chatted and laughed as if their bus had been briefly stuck in traffic, or as if the ferry to their weekend house had been delayed by a storm and there was nothing to do but have another drink (of bottled water, in most cases) and make conversation with fellow-sufferers.

Further downtown, darker still. The clots of pedestrians were thick and took advantage of every available byway -- sidewalk, temporarily empty street, park, traffic island. Some sought assistance. A well-dressed man stood proudly at the edge of Sixth Avenue, holding five or six twenty-dollar bills fanned out in front of him. A cab miraculously stopped for two older women with shopping bags, who hobbled with delighted laughter toward it and toppled, still laughing, into the back seat.

Traffic was tentative. Cops in thin plastic reflective ponchos waved flashlights. One bicyclist, a chubby black guy in overalls and a tank top, skidded to stop for a sudden lurch of sidestreet traffic. "DUDE," yelled a cop, "THERE'S NO LIGHTS. TAKE IT EASY." The biker yet angled his front wheel for a break in the traffic. "IF YOU GET HIT," the cop loudly advised, "SANITATION'S GONNA BE A LONG TIME PICKING YOUR ASS OFF THE STREET."

As I got further down I thought of my cats and checked several of the open delis for comida del gato. Supplies were dwindling and lines were long. Sometimes Coleman Lanterns lit the stores; in one case at least, a parked car shone hi-beams through the glass front. Mister Softee trucks were everywhere, and had long lines. On Houston, in an amazingly stinky and hot bodega, I got the cat food, and some Gatorade and a Luna Bar to keep myself going. By then it was very dark. The Lower East Side was all it usually was, but with the revelry now mostly (though some boites were lit by candlelight, like sets from Gangs of New York) on the street: on Ludlow, blocked to traffic and nearly pitch black, residents straggled or sat in the streets with six-packs and howled and bayed and sang. You had to step lively to keep from toppling over them.

Crowds gathered on Delancey for access to the Williamsburg Bridge. A fat, black female cop, with a proper mesh vest emblazoned TRAFFIC, yelled into the night, "GOING OVER THE WILLIAMSBURG BRIDGE? WAIT RIGHT HERE." So we stood attentively like schoolchildren, waiting for the signal, and were conveyed through a sideways-waving gauntlet of cops to the walkway. The path across was dark and crowded. I passed several couples talking energetically, earnestly, and wondered if not a few of them had never before had this chance for uninterrupted and (it must be said) romantic talk before, and what might come of it. I kept peeping also over my shoulder (for the traffic moved quickly and almost in a mass) at Manhattan, in the moonlight and harborlight an awesome sight, the festival glow of its windows and streetlamps dead (but for one full-blazing building midtown and I'm still wondering which one it was). It looked gray and vast, like a rock formation exquisitely carved.

At the far end of the Bridge volunteers from the local Hasidic ambulance service deferentially handed out tiny cups of water. Some journeyers dunked their heads in a gush of water from an open hydrant. On my block I noted a crowd cheering around a lantern-lit bodega. A middle-aged woman in a short, frilly black dress was humping a gray folding chair to music from a boombox. At the corner, some youngsters burned scrap wood in a metal garbage can.

My own corner store sold me a beer, still cold, and I trooped up my dark, dark steps, gripping the railing and counting the flights, till I got to my own lightless piece of the City. I turned on my lantern, fed my cats, and sprawled on the bed. Through the open window came a light breeze, distant cries of roving groups of citizens, and firecracker explosions.

Around 3:30 the next afternoon we got power out my way. But of course, though they don't know it (though maybe they do, now, a little bit), the people had the power all along.

WE WILL FLEE THE NUCLEAR WINTER ON OUR SEGWAYS! Whatshisname (God, I hate linking to him) points us to Schwarzenegger's official site. "Where's the campaign blog?" is the only question Whatshisname advances. What I want to know is: where's the part of the site where the candidate tells us, oh, what he would do as Governor of a large, debt-ridden state?

(Of course a weblog would be more likely to appear at the site, as the ill-spoken Arnold could use PR specialists to invent for himself a voice that is free from gutteral friction, careless misuse of basic English, and meaning -- which last is, while do-able, a slightly harder trick in the "policy paper" format.)

I wrote this because the bile was overflowing and I couldn't help myself. I do realize that we Americans are now totally detached from our government, and that elections of Governors and elections of Star Search winners are more or less the same to us.

The funny thing is, Dick Morris seems to realize this, too, though, less unusually, his further analysis is less acute. "Why are voters so cynical, apathetic and downright surly?" the disgraced consultant writes. "Count the reasons. In 2000, the supposedly nonpartisan United States Supreme Court voted, almost along party lines, to deny the voters a chance for a recount in the presidential election..." Of the California debacle he adds, "Voters know that the political system is fundamentally corrupted by special interests and their campaign contributions. They realize that Gov. Gray Davis can no more cut the budget or close tax loopholes than could one of a Roman galley's slaves steer the boat."

Sounds about right. Despair will lead to desperate measures, and voters, like malcontented children, have good reason to believe that they will only be attended when they misbehave.

But that isn't what Morris means at all."Is there a salvation for our democracy?" he asks. "Yes. It will come through the Internet."

Omigod.

"...Dean campaign spread virally through the 'Net..." blah blah blah "...the free communication of the Internet will create an alternative to top-down manipulation..." blah blah blah "flow of information" blah blah "This is a revolutionary era we are entering." Blah.

Almost as reliable as Algren's classic formulation about places called Mom's and card players callded Doc is the (I should hope) by-now universal maxim that anything that has to be revolutioned by "the 'Net" is doomed already.

"The 'Net" was supposed to revolutionize music. Music now sucks. "The 'Net" was supposed to revolutionize publishing. Literature now sucks. (At least it hasn't been completely digitized, though. Remember hypernovels?) The only areas of human life web communications have improved are special-interest community building (which, while very nice, tends to militate against consensus politics, not for it) and access to porn (also very nice, but -- well, just very nice).

Sad, no? Reynolds and Morris, two reputable pundits, look at Conan the Barbarian's candidacy and ask, hm, what's the technology angle? I guess that's why they're both so chipper in these parlous times: in their view, as long at the iPods and Blackberries are running, Western Civ is advancing.

HIATUS, SORTA. Between these projects that I'll tell you about later, I haven't had much chance to get up in here and dish out karma. I shall return. Meantime check me out as guest columnist at Katie Lukas' Funny That, a daily review of the comics appearing in the New York Daily News. If that ain't meta, I'll kiss your ass.

ELECTION IN PROGRESS. I see the Administration has called out the good cop to announce a continuation of our moratorium on nuclear testing. This barely needed mentioning, as our avowed enemies of the moment crouch in caves fiddling with gelginite and whatnot, and hardly call the question as to whether America's WMD are sufficient -- we can kill anybody we need to, at any time.

This is a signal to no one but the American electorate, meant to convey that we are not totally nuts, at a time when more than a few citizens might be wondering about it.

Why would anyone else care? Russia is hardly at issue, especially given Putin's recent overtures toward an international moderate Islamic organization (yes, such things exist -- someone tell Den Beste!).

It might be argued that this move shows that the Bushites take the North Korean threat less than seriously. That would be a good argument. The Holy Ghost of the Axis of Evil is getting soothing words from Condi Rice, which will only surprise those who imagined that the tinpot despots of NK were as dangerous as was advertised in the President's long-forgotten war-fever speeches.

Meanwhile Homeland Security is generating income for some folks peddling ass-covering methods and devices by which security firms may demonstrate to clients that they are duly diligent in the matter of local terrorism. "On one side of the Jack Reardon Civic Center on Tuesday," reports the Kansas City Star of one such, "you could buy the HRI Hot Suit, perfect for braving a 600-degree fire after a terrorist strike. The cost: $80,000, which covers a package of three suits with supporting equipment."

One might wonder about the Saudis, but these days there hardly seems any point to that, does there? The folks at NRO's Corner have been as complaisant on that score of late as they have been on the pro-choice candidacy of the Terminator in California. (Even the reliable scold Lopez, having dropped a sour note on Ahnold at one point, later nollied it with some on-message boosterism.)

Election in progress! Turn off principles before merging with the one available lane.

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.

SPRINGER OUT, SCHWARZENEGGER IN. Somehow I don't think this is what the Founders had in mind by check and balances. We have had some celebrity guest leaders, but at least Congressman Davy Crockett had some relevant work experience (most notably killing a b'ar when he was only three) before entering the legislature. And Max Frost could sing!

Schwarzenegger.com asks us to wait a bit for a statement, but there is much verbiage at the "Arnold4Gov" site, unsurprisingly short on policy details, though we do learn that the candidate loves America and that he "earned his first million not in movies but in business," by which I assume is meant the business of bodybuilding, unless he had a dry-goods store or something that I haven't heard about.

Arnold will have to start articulating soon. I expect mush, given what his consultant George Gorton has been telling the press ("When Arnold walks into a gym, these guys come up to him and tell their stories," Gorton told the Washington Post. "They'll say, 'I used to be a 90-pound weakling, but then I read your book and saw your video and whatever.' Arnold's like a god to these people.")

Mush may work. Whoever wins, I can't imagine anyone expects the victor to fix Cali's budget problems, so what the hell? Might as well have a good time on the way down the drain. One wonders how long these circuses may last without bread.

WAY TO GO, BISH. I normally don't trouble myself with the internal affairs of large, superstition-based organizations, but I am pleased at this new Episcopal bishop, if only because his appointment has set John Derbyshire to crying "For shame! For shame!" Next Derb will, one hopes, walk barefoot a la George Fox through the streets of Concord, crying "Woe unto the bloody state of New Hampshire."

EITHER WAY YOU LOOK AT IT, YOU LOSE. According to the Ole Perfesser, even when we're right, we're wrong. After approvingly quoting a few of the elect on the Administration's penchant for unconstitutional detentions, he claims that

Sadly, the Bush Administration's best friends in all this are those who have repeatedly cried wolf, and who now cast Bush as Hitler, thus discrediting the more serious civil libertarians who raise valid concerns like these.

"...and who now cast Bush as Hitler." Ted Rall is Bush's best friend?

Actually, who can tell who the Perfesser is talking about? Wesley Clark? Nat Hentoff? To what wolf-crying does he refer? At what point did it become prudent to complain about the Patriot Acts? After it was too late, apparently.

Funny, this guy is always writing about the Left's hatred of Bush. But he'd rather put his name to an outrageous and illogical statement like the one quoted here than side with a liberal on anything.

LESS THAN AUGUST. Columnists are often at their most revealing in silly-season thumbsuckers. Here's a passage from Dave Shiflett, "a member of the White House Writers Group," on Americans at the beach or some damned thing:

It is true that some fellow citizens have taken the Super Size craze a bit too seriously, growing to the size of fully adult manatees, to the point of having difficulty staying above ground in areas where the sand is not thoroughly packed. The larger point, however is that chunking up must now be considered an act of civil disobedience. In the current context, eating that extra éclair is a heroic act.

I'm cheating a bit, but not much, by not showing first Shiflett's run-up to this bizarre statement. He starts by castigating the anti-smoking law of the despised Bloomberg before hailing gluttony as a blow against the empire. See, first they banned smoking in bars -- clearly their next step is to padlock the freezer case at the Stop 'n' Shop.

The thing is, I sometimes have thoughts like Shiflett's, too: I hate Bloomberg's smoking ban (hell, I hate Bloomberg, with his depraved little "It's fun to play Mayor!" grin), and I can sympathize with anyone's annoyance at our therapeutic society. No one likes being told what to do, and some of us really don't like. (That's the secret of my success, certainly.) But within seconds of having them, I usually have this corollary thought: Congratulations, you're the one millionth writer to whine about "health nazis" and how they ruin everyone's good time. Here's your rattle.

Someone ought to render that service to Shiflett. It is genuinely weird to see a grown man (assuming Shiflett is grown) going out for a stroll on the boardwalk and observing of every expression of human pleasure he comes across that it is a "targetted activity" that some flying squad of blue-noses wants to ban. Well, yes, I suppose it is, but so what? When they come for the beer wagon, let me know.

You'd think the activities that are not targetted would please Shiflett, but no:

If we are going to go after rib eating, tobacco smoking, and beer drinking because they are drains on the health-care system, why not also clamp down on other behaviors that make people ill and cost lots of money, such as certain sexual practices?

Haw haw! That's tellin' them airy fairies what wants to take away our eclairs!

Here's why I can't be a conservative: I do not believe that the Surgeon General is the modern equivalent of the Grand Inquisitor. I would rather have sex than eat eclairs. And when a conservative columnist writes something that's supposed to be fun, like a beach blurb in August, I usually find it painful to read.

ATTENTION WHORES. "Web Hookups Blamed for Rise in AIDS" reads a headline out of the National HIV Prevention Conference and based on the new CDC numbers. You know, I do believe that a lot of the stuff people in this medium are saying about weblogs -- the kind of triumphalism I'm always dismissing -- is really based on the immense flood of traffic drawn by people's need to connect on more primal levels.

Even here I am happy to be linked, as 'twere, to like-minded blatherers -- I'm always pleased to be cited, answered, blogrolled. I believe the internet is really driven by a hunger for connection, and if you just look at the political weblog piece of it, you're missing the bigger picture. Behind most of the allegedly political, ideological, and journalistic impulses given for the weblog phenomenon are several millions of lonelinesses looking for surcease, a sign that someone feels as we feel. I strongly feel it when I scrawl (or post to) the comments sections of allegedly political weblogs -- that canker of isolation begging the balm of electronic contact.

This doesn't negate the good sense spoken by some of us, or even the nonsense spoken by others. But I think it should provide context for the exorbitant claims sometimes made for this little patch of public discourse. The desire to be heard (or to share on a grosser, in the Elizabethan sense, level) drives so strong that we should take it with a grain of salt, or sense.

It ill becomes me to say so, but if you haven't figured it out already (and you probably have), I'm a bit of an attention whore. I would suggest that most of the opinion vendors hereabouts tend that way, too.

"We are arrant knaves, all of us; believe none of us; to a nunnery, go!" Hamlet had that much right.

ORLANDO FURIOSO. Lord. Had to work this Convention in Orlando, and my preliminary response is, Orlando blows.

Well, that's grossly unfair, of course. I mainly saw the Convention Center and a Kinko's about 15 miles from it (and the infinite stretches of swamp grass, highway, and tourist trappings in between), and some other hotel bar where the art director and myself repaired for thrills (finding none) during our few free hours. As I am at present dead beat, I will just bullet-point you a bit of what I observed:

• Cabbies in Orlando could teach their NYC brethren something about thieving. Most routes were circuitous, most quotes outrageous. One driver offered to confirm his quote while driving to the destination! (We quickly pulled him over.) I can see this shit in New York or any other great, traditionally larcenous metropolis, but Orlando? Home of Mickey and Shamu? Small wonder the late Presidential election was so easily ganked here.
  
  
• In the Convention Center sodas cost $2.50. And the soda machines have credit card readers. I bought Mountain Dews with a credit card. I felt like Naomi Klein.
  
  
• But having experienced the vastness of the Orange County Convention Center, I begrudge Americans less their reliance on cars. The place comprises the equivalent of several football fields (10? 20? I cannot say), and having traversed these many times in the course of my various duties, and awakened after my few hours of allowed sleep with charley-horses, I began to hunger for the motorized carts availed by the more fat-assed among the attendees. America is big! Who knew?
  
  
• Everyone was very friendly, which I had expected, as I do make infrequent trips to America from the den of vice and intelligence I call home. But it was comforting to be reminded that the Bush-loving rabble are at bottom decent, well-meaning, sociable souls. It gave me hope that they may be right where they seem wrong, or if indeed wrong, then correctable.

More later, but I must reacclimate. God how I missed my City! My flight back took me over Manhattan. Ground Zero, which I had never observed from that height, looked like the space where one puts the battery panel on a laptop: flat, slightly irregular, asking to be filled.

TEE HEE. Gotta love this, via Google News:



Waiting for the usual suspects to blame the picture placement on the liberal media.

WHERE'S ROY? Sorry for the long absence. Weblog etiquette seems to require that we put up Out of Office messages when we're away. Most of the top bloggers do that, anyway, before they fuck off to some paradisical retreat paid for by the blood of the workers. I have always been a silently-slip-away sort, and I regret any resulting confusion or concern (fat chance).

I'm in Orlando on a job for my unnamed employers. I've spent most of the past three days running around the Orange County Convention Center. I can't stay long on the Mac right now (have to go get some tech support on a shitty Dell laptop) but I will get back to you soon about the fascinating, ugly place.