THE MISANTHROPOGYNIST. I have been reading with pleasure Mencken's "Defense of Women," which seems to have been written as a deliberate outrage and would, with greater contemporary circulation, probably still do the job today.

Like most things written about women by men, the book is mainly about men, but unlike most other authors so disposed, Mencken seems to be aware of it. His playful premise is that women are in every meaningful way superior to our gender, but have been obliged by our mulish resistance to the fact, and by social customs designed to enforce our groundless ascendancy (the word "levantine" occurs frequently), to exercise authority by subterfuge, primarily via marriage.

Already there's plenty to howl over, but Mencken goes on his merry way. The things at which most men excel, he asserts, are mere bagatelles:

A man thinks he is more intelligent than his wife because he can add up a column of figures more accurately...and because he is privy to the minutiae of some sordid and degrading business or profession, say soap-selling or the law. But these empty talents, of course, are not really signs of a profound intelligence... it takes no more sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world, or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law, than it takes to operate a taxicab or fry a pan of fish.

Imagine Kim du Toit or Glenn Reynolds getting a load of this! But no self-respecting feminist could go for it quite, either. For one thing, Mencken was implacably at odds with the suffragette (the book was first published in 1918), whom he described as "a woman who has stupidly carried her envy of certain of the superficial privileges of men to such a point that it takes on the character of an obsession, and makes her blind to their valueless and often chiefly imaginary nature." While he admits that women would soon enough "shake off their ancient disabilities" and emerge "as free competitors in a harsh world," yet "some of the fair ones, I suspect, will begin to wonder why they didn't let well enough alone."

Well, I don't know about that. But what I like about this, besides the great writing, is Mencken's detachment from the ordinary terms of debate. A good deal of reason and unreason was then (as now) being employed on the topic, and Mencken just staked out his own territory and had at it. He speaks approvingly of Havelock Ellis, but in general seems not to mind what anyone else has to say on the subject, prefering to make his own judgments based on what history and observation showed him. His instinct seems to be that his own reason was authority enough, and though most of us would disagree with a large part of it, in his case the analysis is at least coherent and compelling.

Mencken is shamelessly rhetorical and his style bears him along more reliably than his reason; he's frequently disingenuous and even self-contradictory, but in a way that would leave anyone trying to pin him looking pedantic. I think that's why so many intelligent people get a kick out of him, but also why anyone who identifies too closely with him inevitably looks foolish. Columns by the awful R. Emmett Tyrell, for example, used to run with a byline picture that aped a famous Mencken photo, and Tyrell's contraction-averse style still imitates the cadences of the Baltimore master, albeit stiffly. Even the initialized first name seems a forlorn sort of tribute, as it does, doubly, for P.J. O'Rourke, another professional contrarian whose obvious striving for the mantle of misanthropist-in-chief renders the homage somewhat pathetic.

All good writers make good examples, but as we were cautioned by the old Hai Karate ads, you have to be careful how you use them. It's never a good idea to try and be the "new" anything. (Look at Jet, a band that seems to want to be the new Black Crowes, an ambition that mystifies me.) From Mencken it might be best to take the lesson that it never hurts to take the lofty perspective once in a while, especially at a time when the political weblog scene more and more resembles a giant scrum trying, with grunts and curses, to push consensus one way or the other.

SHOT BY BOTH SIDES. Michael Totten is a pro-war type who till recently identified himself as a liberal. Some people think about him the way I think about "Democrat" Orson Scott Card -- as a living straw man who serves mainly as an "even the liberal" decoy to make real liberals look bad.

Who knows. David Horowitz and Roger L. Simon love the guy, and they're fairly satanic. He wrote in the Wall Street Journal that, essentially, liberals don't know anything about foreign policy. To the extent that he has a public profile, it seems based on his criticism of liberals.

But I forebear to judge. Totten, however, didn't, and recently declared himself an Independent, pushed, he said, by the "heretic-banishers" who are "purging non-conformists." Unsurprisingly, he mentions Orwell.

No sooner has Totten thrown off the yoke of orthodoxy when he notices the famous Club-for-Growth ad castigating "tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading... Hollywood-loving, left-wing" fellow citizens. It offends him. "Over-the-top Bush-hatred is matched by over-the-top Dean-hatred," he declares. "...the right's new bigoted ad disgusts me."

But a lot of Totten's commentators -- legacy pledges, one imagines, from his even-the-liberal days -- don't understand why he's so upset. "Whoa!" writes one, "A lotta you girls need to take a deep breath. This is political theatre, not the Nuremberg laws." "To those on the left," declares another, "saying anything that is politically incorrect but is too close to the truth is over the top."

Now, I haven't dug too deep into Totten's oeuvre, and at first glance he seems like a smart enough guy. But I find it interesting and, to use a badly overworked modifier, ironic, that the minute he declares his independence, and steps out his front door to breathe the sweet air of freedom, he runs smack into the new neighbors, who think everyone who reads, eats, and drinks like him is a menace to their way of life.

Whether that's ironic-sigh or ironic-hardeharhar-serves-ya-right I'll leave to one side for right now, but I do think it's a good picture of the state of our discourse at present.

WE TRULY LIVE IN AN AGE OF WONDERS. Well, at least now I can stop worrying about the dangers of smoking.

UPDATE. Some people think farmed salmon is still safe. I'm ignoring them. I don't want it to be true! I want my friends to come find in me in some low seafood dive, and grab my arm, crying, "You're killin' yourself with that stuff!"

ROSE'S TURN. What a lot of bullshit has been written about Pete Rose lately. The relevant part of the Hall of Fame's mission statement says that it seeks to honor "those individuals who had exceptional careers." If Rose had used babies for batting practice, he would still meet this requirement.

George Will, naturally, talks the most outright nonsense about Rose, offering this deathless example of a hack who thinks he's found a "contrarian" angle:

His dwindling band of defenders responds that it is unfair to judge Rose not by what he does but by the way he does it. Yet regarding repentance, the way you do it is what you do.

The putative point of this streak of rhetorical puke is that Rose should behave more penitently -- perhaps, in Will's imaginings, by travelling barefoot to the grave of Bart Giamatti -- to preserve the fiction that baseball cares deeply about the conduct of its players.

This and other such moral posturings share the childish premise that current residents of the Hall, and the brotherhood of baseballers generally, would be sullied by Rose's company. What a laugh this would get from Ty Cobb and other immortals who were in life a good deal more rapacious and destructive than Rose. What a laugh it would draw from the many steroid abusers in MLB, if they had a sense of humor, or less pharmacetical damage to their facial muscles.

Well, baseball's fan base is aging, and filled at this stage with a bunch of maudlin, would-be Billy Crystals blubbering over The Mick and The Babe and The Catch as superstitious Irish grandmothers once blubbered over saints and sacred relics. Such like may value tent-meeting hysteria and bathos over clear-eyed justice, but that doesn't mean I have to.

I love baseball, and I insist it needs no romanticizing -- its traditions, its place in American history, and the achievements of its players are what they are, large in actual fact, not because publicists pumped them up; no Field of Dreams mists are needed to make them interesting and worthy of respect. The current ginned-up show of moral outrage is an embarrassment, and the Rose ban absurd.

UPDATE. A commentator to this post has kindly informed me of Rule 21, which mandates ineligibility for a player caught betting on his own club. Them's the rules, and since this is baseball we're talking about, not something trivial like politics, I have to agree Rose should stay out.

Also, while in the past I have simply taken down my posts when in the sober light of morning (or afternoon) they seemed less than convincing or coherent, I'm just leaving this one be, as a monument to my own incompetence.

I still don't like Will's more mystical assault on Rose, and in another context I might argue that the rule is bad and should be changed. But Rose accepted the terms by playing in the League and didn't abide by them, so that's that.

YEAH -- ANYONE CAN DO IT, AND MOST OF IT IS CRAP. "And it inspired me to the realization that blogging is a lot like producing techno..." -- InstaPundit.

PUSSY. An article by Jed Babbin is introduced on National Review Online's front page with the tag "Air marshals are making us safer." The graphic says "Safer with AFMs." The article is entitled "Thank Your FAMs." There is, of course, nothing in the article demonstrating that air mashals have done anything at all except draw salary, but we are told why we should believe that they have: "But fortunately for us, and our economy, the skies are safe -- despite what terrorists may think." You don't think like one of those terrorists, now, do you?

More interesting than the alogical approach (which is rather common at NRO) are the purposefully butch insertions Babbin uses to bolster his non-argument. The thing is parfaited with Cheneyspeak, which attempts to convey masculinity by emulating the simple babbles of childhood. Thus Babbin refers to terrorists as "bad guys," and to American forces as "our guys"; grouped by speciality, American intelligence agents are "our intel guys," while troops trained in special operations are "spec-op guys."

The FAMs "get it," meaning "our guys know you can shoot a whole bunch of holes though the skin of an airliner without anything really bad happening," and at one point Babbin asks his subject "what message he'd pass along to the bad guys, baiting him for a growly, macho message." To be fair, Babbin does not use the phrase "big time," or go "HOO-ahh" at any point.

If want more of this kind of thing, you can go here and read Babbin on how his terrorist-attack survival methods are better than those of his effete liberal neighbors, because his "pal," a "a retired SEAL senior officer," forwarded him some advice from Red Thomas, who has "seen it all, and trained the young ’uns to fight..." The article is from last February; I wonder if Babbin still has his "go bag" of water-purification and other post-apocalyptic necessities stashed in his car.

Babbin's article, by the way, includes a picture of himself. He looks like a total pussy.

SHORTER MAGGIE GALLAGHER. This college kid I met hasn't given much thought to fatherhood, demonstrating that homosexuals are selfish destroyers of everything we hold dear.

STATES' (LAST) RITES. As is well known, our formerly solvent nation is running a record $374.2 billion deficit -- in contrast to the $230 billion surplus Clinton left us with in 2000.

But the states aren't doing much better. Not that they're getting less money from the Feds: While in 1998 the Census Bureau reported $25.3 billion in "federal government grants and other payments" to U.S. state governments ($29.8 billion went to California), in 2002 that rose to $36.2 billion for the states (and $41.6 billion to California.)

Yet state budgets are still a mess. Conservatives like to leave California as the only visible object-lesson of state spending run amok, as it had been piloted by a hapless Democrat before the telegenic Wolfcastle putsch. But Republican governors like Mike Huckabee of Arkansas and John Rowland of Connecticut are asking for tax increases to bail their asses out, reports the Christian Science Monitor, which also says we're currently seeing the "Deepest State Deficits in 50 Years."

The problem, says CSM, "is that tax revenues are way down and costs are exploding, particularly in healthcare, which represents 30 percent of state budgets." This has led to some heartwarming scenes, such as this one reported by AP:

Linda Garner of Columbus wrote [Georgia Governor Sonny] Perdue recently after the state terminated her quadriplegic daughter's benefits when she turned 21. The daughter, Melissa, was struck by a drunk driver when she was 6, and relies on a ventilator.

Perdue's reply to her was sympathetic but, after carefully explaining the state's budget difficulties, it offered her no help.

Costs are going up and revenues are going down, but no one wants to look like a tax-and-spend liberal so people get screwed. And until things gets to the Huckabee-Rowland stage, games are played to try and hide the damage for one more season. From a hilarious story in the Applebee (WI) Post-Crescent, optimistically titled "State Tax Burden Down in 2003":

The study found Wisconsin’s total tax burden was 33 percent of personal income in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2003. That’s down from 33.7 percent in 2002, 34.4 percent in 2001 and 37.4 percent in 2000.
The total tax burden is a combination of all federal, state and local taxes Wisconsin residents and businesses pay.
“That’s encouraging,” Wood County Supv. Donna Rozar said. Her county decreased its property tax levy 12.3 percent this past year, but offset about 50 percent of that loss with a half-percent county sales tax, she said. [italics mine]
“I think we’re an overtaxed people,” she said.

Total taxes down 0.7 percent! Happy days are here again! And you have to love the property tax-sales tax shuffle.

Clearly this country is, at every level, financially fucked. Yet no one from the President down to the lowliest Town Supervisor wants to face up to our impending bankruptcy. For one thing, they have jerks like this saying that the states are only suffering now because they "went on a spending binge in the 1990s," presumably on such frills as ventilators for crippled teenagers. For another, they have voters howling for reform on the cheap.

So the various government agents, excepting those who have yet to run out of bullshit, juggle and fumble like bankrupt housekeepers, hiding the credit card bills and turn-off notices from the spouse and kids, hoping to get through one more day.

Meanwhile, half a world away, we teach democracy.

PLAYING TO THE CHEAP SEATS. "My hankering for Dean is therefore a little like Bill Kristol's." -- Andrew Sullivan.

(Sound effect.)

(Rimshot!)

Yes, I'm goin' for the easy laffs, friends, because alicublog has just been nominated for the "Best Humorous Blog" Koufax Award. Nominees were restricted to leftish sites, which is as it should be, as we are all about speech codes and political correctness.

A blue ribbon panel will soon winnow the 3,429 nominees in this category down to a select few, so I will celebrate now and hopefully sober up before it comes time to drown my sorrows.

Thanks to all who supported me, and remember, if I am not among the finalists, take it out on your loved ones, not the voters.

DEAD HORSE. A guy at Tacitus talks up Seabiscuit, a movie he liked so well that he's sorry he saw it on his "decent home theater set-up" instead of in a theatre.

I can see why he liked it -- which is not to say that it's good. I saw the thing last year. A bad feeling came over me at the opening credits, when the voice of that guy who narrates PBS history specials came on over some sepia-toned stills. Did I just pay 10 bucks to watch Ken Burns' American Stories on a big screen? I wondered.

Thereafter came a story about misfits banding together and keeping their dreams alive -- kind of a cross between Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Flashdance, only not as subtle as either. Here are some quotes from Seabiscuit, and yes, these paltry examples are representative of its eloquence.

As for its visual storytelling, I will remember forever a scene in which Chris Cooper, charged with matching a jockey to his horse, regards Tobey McGuire fighting off a bunch of guys, then turns to regard Seabiscuit fighting off a bunch of guys, then faces forward and broods on the metaphor a-forming in his mind. To be fair, he did not then snap his fingers, widen his eyes, tear off his cap and light out to tell Mr. Howard, but he might as well have.

All the acting and craft elements were dandy, but the story was so hectoring on its points as to be insulting. The sad thing is, I am very susceptible to the idea of America as a land of hope and opportunity that offers even to the damaged a path to glory and redemption. But a witless repetition of cliches on the subject just makes me want to snort.

Which, come to think of it, kind of explains this weblog.

MORE OLD BUSINESS. It has been 54 days since I wondered aloud at Andrew Sullivan's description of Howard Dean as "from Vermont, one of the home bases of what's being called 'the Starbucks Metrosexual elite.'" So I went to Google to see if anyone on the Web has actually used that term in relation to anything except Sullivan's use of it.

Chirp. Chirp.

Odd, I thought the guy knew a lot of bloggers.

A GIMME -- WITH AN EXPLANATION. Tan, wretched and ready Andrew Sullivan is celebrating his return to workaday life with a long post about the NYT's alleged distortion of Bush's gay marriage statement.

The post has absolutely no significant new information and mainly repeats a previous Sullivan charge, made to shore up the insane idea that Bush is somehow sympathetic to gay marriage.

Two can play at that game, Sullivan: why waste our readers' time and our own, when we can just waste our readers'? I herewith repost what I said about Sullivan's bullshit last month.

[Sullivan reports:] "One small problem: the president did not say that ['I will support a constitutional amendment which would honor marriage between a man and a woman...].' He said: 'If necessary, I will support a constitutional amendment...' In the context of religious right demands for immediate support for the FMA, that's a big difference."

In other words, though Bush has told the world that he's dead against gay marriage -- not even Sullivan denies this -- since he'll only use the FMA to stop it if he really needs to, the Times account is "what amounts to a lie about Bush's position"...

I wonder: were I to send Sullivan a letter, stating, "I want you dead, Sullivan. If necessary, I will kill you myself with my bare hands," he would fail to report it as a death threat, on semantic grounds.

Sullivan's so full of shit, I'm beginning to wonder is he's really gay.

Beats workin'.

OL' BLOOD 'N' GUTS' FINAL SOLUTION. I am a dedicated follower of General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters (last sighting here), and look forward to each new column as eagerly as if it were a new Lockhorns installment.

His most recent column, though, has me worried. Not that it is stylistically off the mark -- it is in some ways the apotheosis of his style. But I fear he may have shot his wad.

The column opens with a graf of breathtaking logical inversion:

It's fashionable in left-wing circles to describe anyone who admires America as a fascist. But the real totalitarian threats of our time come from the left. And no public figure embodies the left's contempt for basic freedoms more perfectly than Howard Dean.

First a grotesque mischaracterization of a mischaracterization (us dirty hippies call tough-talking law-and-order types fascists, General -- people who "admire America" we call saps!), then a sweeping and undemonstrable historical generalization, closing with an outrageous slur against Dean and all Democrats that actually mirrors the liberal name-calling Peter first complained about! It's so wrong it's beautiful, like Beavis & Butthead with battle decorations.

Peters claims that Dean supporters are against free speech because they "try to intimidate other presidential aspirants by surrounding the cars delivering them to their rallies and chanting to drown out their speech... These are the techniques employed by Hitler's Brownshirts." I'm not sure what real-world events, if any, he's referring to -- the
Washington Post did report that Dean supporters chanted outside a Gephardt speech; Gephardt's people were obliged to close the windows, and his spokesperson called the act "a little bit disrespectful," which hardly summons up visions of Kristallnacht. (I can't find any reference in actual news to the car thing, which may exist only in one of Peters' brain-bubbles.)

Then Peters compares Howard Dean to Hitler, Goebbels, Big Brother, Lenin, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev.

All good fun, but you see the problem, don't you? The election is ten months away, and Peters has already gone to the money shot. After you've repeatedly compared a candidate and his followers to Nazis, what else is left? Maybe you could compare them to evil space aliens who are a hundred times worse than Hitler -- or Saddam Hussein. But nothing else quite has that Hitler zing.

Now Peters is stuck with the Hitler parallel. He may try to find another metaphor -- comparing Dean to a dung-beetle, say, or an artichoke, or a stagecoach -- but Peters' gift is not so much for creative writing as for monomania, and he will revert. And after a few months of screaming Hitler at the Democrats, Peters will sound like your typical Free Republic poster talking about Lincoln.

The General has given good froth for a few seasons, but it may be that -- like that other great General, Coriolanus -- he has o'erreached.

DON'T FEED THE TROLLS, DOC. Rachel Marsden is harshing on Howard Dean. (Thanks, Kevin, for the link.) It's mostly the sort of ad hominem bilge (Democrats are "sex-starved, party-deprived" "new age hippies" who have "run out of beer money") that all right-wing pin-ups from Coulter on down use establish their media profiles.

But even ambitious up-and-comers must do their grunt work at the Mighty Wurlitzer, and Marsden takes time to assist in the now widespread misrepresentation regarding Dean's "comments... about not wanting to pin the blame for 9/11 on poor Osama bin Laden."

What Dean actually said, even as excerpted by the vile Washington Times, is very sensible: "I've resisted pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found... I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials."

If you think about it for more than two seconds (as I know a few of us have), it shows a healthy respect for, and confidence in, our system of justice. Of course, thinking is frowned upon in the current media environment, and our outrage merchants have found Dean's comments an easy layup in the game of Gotcha, and have egregiously manipulated them.

This quickly pushed Dean into an unfortunate attempt at clarification: "As a president, I would have to defend the process of the rule of law. But as an American, I want to make sure he gets the death penalty he deserves."

AP helpfully adds that "The former Vermont governor said he was simply trying to state in The Concord Monitor interview [the original source of the first quote] that the process of trying bin Laden needs to be fair and credible." But it still sounds like backtracking: if you don't want your comments to prejudice Osama bin Laden's trial, why say you want him dead?

In the short term, Dean got the politically convenient headlines he probably wanted ("Dean: Death to Osama" -- CBS News). But you know that, once the usual suspects are convinced that the original tsimmis has been played out, this second quote will be labelled another Dean flip-flop, further proving his volatility, unreliability, insanity, or whatever. (In fact, one or two fever-swamp opinion leaders have already done so.)

This may turn out to be a worthwhile trade-off for the Doc. Dean probably remembers how bad Mike Dukakis looked when CNN's Bernard Shaw asked him, during the 1988 Presidential debates, if he would not be tempted to favor the death penalty if someone raped and murdered his wife. Dukakis, clearly blind-sided, hemmed and hawed like a second-string high-school debater with a bad flu. Maybe Dean figured a small expression of righteous indignation, however flawed, might disabuse voters who had been manipulated into thinking that he was soft on bin Laden.

The problem, as I see it, is that Dean's kill-Osama gambit doesn't address his original statement -- it addresses the misinterpretation of that statement. He's playing on his opponents' terms. He might seem more aggressive than Dukakis here because he's using aggressive language. But in the long term, the other guys could turn it all around and say that mad, red-faced Howard has been only been aggressive in defending himself.

He should have just said, "Yeah, I believe in jury trials and the American people -- you got a problem with that?" Then let the trolls tear themselves to shreds. (I'm sure that within days you'd have a nest of commentators explaining to the American people that they are not fit to serve on a bin Laden jury. That would be worth any number of "Death to Osama" headlines.)

I like Dean and applaud his success. So I'd hate to see him pecked to death on stuff like this. Dean's obviously confident enough in his views -- else why run for President? I hope he can communicate that confidence more strongly in the future.

BOOK CHAT. Aren't you tired of politics already? I sure as fuck am.

Been reading a bunch of John O'Hara stories. This guy sold a lot mid-century, and it's easy to see why. Alice in Wonderland said, "What's the use of a book without pictures and conversations?" and if O'Hara didn't provide pictures (though his descriptions of settings are often rendered in clinical detail), boy oh boy did he provide conversations. No matter how dim or introverted, his characters fill their quote marks like senators on a filibuster. During one story particularly, "Andrea," about a long-term affair between two chronic unmarriageables, I kept thinking Shut up! Shut up and get to the punch line already! The punch line, alas, is usually dreary and unsatisfying.

Every once in a while, though, he rings a bell. Gore Vidal, who summed him up in 1964, thought O'Hara rang it in "The Trip," which I haven't read. I heard the bell in "Flight," which starts with an old playwright taking a spectacular fall on an icy sidewalk and, before he (unexpectedly) dies from his injury, having a long, pertinent conversation with his ex-actress wife, and an equally pertinent monologue, addresed to his dead son in a dream:

If you lead a completely useless life, but do it with style and die young enough, you're quite likely to be remembered with more affection than the man who has a record of accomplishment. But the secret is to die young enough. If you think you're going to live to a ripe old age, it's better to pile up a record of accomplishment of some sort. It may be bridge-building, or money-making, or butterfly-collecting, but it has to be something. People don't like to see longevity wasted on a do-nothing. And as a rule, it isn't...

Vidal thought O'Hara's writing overly improvisational, without a strong sense of direction. But the most skilled and dogged improvisers do develop a knack for bringing it all back home, as they say.

Also read most of George Gissing's "The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft," a made-up collection of journal writings by a Grub Street hack who has found leisure to pen some arty occasional pieces in his old age. (Gissing wrote "New Grub Street," the novel that gave him a brief vogue in his own time and also in the late 1990s, based equally, one imagines, on his experiences as, well, a Grub Street hack.) It's mostly pretty dreadful -- the wheezes of a petty bourgeois playing at Thoreau -- but I find it instructive sometimes to read bad writing from a previous era. This one's sort of like "Tuesdays with Morrie" from the turn of the last Century, with treacly amateur naturalism, imbecile social analysis, and breast-clasping swoons over ancient literature ("But I am thinking of the Anabasis. Were this the sole book existing in Greek, it would be abundantly worth while to to learn the language in order to read it") that remind me of the insufferable David Denby after he took a course in the Great Books.

Speaking of vintage crap, I've also been leafing through "The Spike," the 1980 novel by Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss about a Woodwardesque reporter who learns that the CIA was right about everything and that the American government is worm-eaten by Soviet moles (reaching as high as the Vice-Presidency) who yearn for a CCCP takeover. This piece of shit follows the Ludlam-Drury playbook, with villainous collectivists ("'All we need to do,' Barisov continued, 'is to help a few people -- journalists, junior officials -- to follow their own instincts'") that would make Ayn Rand blush, and softcore porn that would make anyone blush ("His hands were already moving over her slim, exquisitely molded body... Before he was sure she was ready, her deft, slender fingers pulled him deep inside her"). But the political impetus is stark and obvious: hippies and liberals are pawns of the Reds and those with some integrity left must be turned toward the light so that America can finally do something about Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia! Well, it worked, of course, and we see its bitter fruit falling around us now. Never underestimate the power of bad fiction.

There's more, but aren't you tired of art already?

2004's NEW CONVENTIONAL IDIOCIES -- FIRST TWO IDENTIFIED.
#1: Voting for Democrats is treason.

In the waning days of 2003, General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters looked forward to the year ahead with these comments:

2004 is going to be a year of decision in the War on Terror. As our presidential election approaches, the terrorists remaining at large will sacrifice their last reserves in an effort to dislodge President Bush, freedom's great crusader, from the White House.

The terrorists will seek to convince American voters that the War on Terror is failing, paving the way for the electoral victory of a weakling and allowing them to surge back into vacuums created by an American retreat.

Their last, desperate hope will be to hit us so hard that we elect a coward in place of a hero.

We are so used to hysteria from the General that it is easy to miss the meme bobbing in the ocean of froth: that the Democrats are the Party of Terror, their field workers suicide-bombers and hijackers, and their election the fondest hope of those who wish us all dead or enslaved.

Close enough to a charge of treason, and I expect they'll aim closer still next time. Meanwhile the New York Post is working #2: Running against Bush is treason, thusly:

The [Democratic] party's nominee -- and this includes those who aspire to the nomination -- must understand that the whole world is looking at this campaign.

Looking for signs of confusion, of weakness -- of a lack of American will.

Or for signs of strength and seriousness of purpose.

And so the Democrats must conduct themselves accordingly.

They must be adults, in other words.

Now, standing against Bush, in the old, polite custom of British elections, would seem to be okay, but to disagree publicly with his war policies is... well, see #1.

Boy, that was quick. One would think there's be nowhere to go from there, at least in a southerly direction. But don't bet on it.

ANOTHER TEST of a feature which may be jejune and ultimately futile, but which is also constantly improving, and that, my boy, is the secret of success:

"CONSERVATIVE MOVIES" CONT. In comments to the previous post, a careful reader points out that Brookhiser said "most conservative" rather than "best conservative" movies, a small but not irrelevant distinction.

Giving Brookhiser and those guys some slack (probably undeserved, but New Year's resolutions are still fresh in my mind), it may be that they realize a work by a gay Marxist like Visconti could evince a world view that conservatives might embrace. (I wonder what Brookhiser thinks of "The Damned," though.) A work of art presents a world view, not a bill of political particulars (unless the artist is particularly tendentious and cloying, or a satirist). I like Evelyn Waugh, for example, not because I buy his personal Tory bullshit, but because books like Decline and Fall and Scoop take a mordant view of the follies of men to which I strongly relate. They're also funny and well-crafted. What's not to like?

Also, when NR types talk about conservatism in the abstract, they define it so broadly that nearly anything fits. That's especially true of Goldberg when he starts talking about Burke, as in this passage from a dissection of (believe it or not) "Animal House":

But for the purposes of this discussion -- and for modern conservatism generally -- the most important aspect of Burkean thought is his view of tradition and change. Burke recognized the need for reform (the lack of it, he believed, forced the American colonists to revolt) and he did not fear change... But he thought haste in the realm of reform led to even greater injustice than deliberate inaction... Burke simply didn't trust the problem-solvers. No single individual is smart enough to impose changes on society willy-nilly.

Well, if that's conservatism, sign me up! This is cool-kid conservatism's version of "big-tent" Republicanism. One might call it Jeff Foxworthy Conservatism: if you're in favor of prudence and against heedless reform, y'all might a conservative!

It's a way of making the movement attractive to people who balk at its strictures on, to take one glaring example, gay marriage, which is why we find gaycon Andrew Sullivan throwing props to Neil Boortz -- the guy wants a ban on gay adoptions, but he hasn't specifically called for homosexual heads on pikes, so they're Burkean brothers, y'see.

This kind of woolly thinking has led to the ridiculous, forced phenomena of "South Park Republicanism" and "Crunchy Conservatism." And it's probably why they see validation of their world-view in movies that they like.

It's all good fun, as my mother used to say, until someone loses a legislative agenda. And it may be why many conservatives, historically tight with a buck, are relatively phlegmatic about the big-spending Bush adminisitration. Never mind the hypocracy and the ruination of our economy -- we said fuck you to France, how cool is that? Pass the popcorn.

comments please

CAN I PLAY TOO? Richard Brookhiser, having tantalized his fellow Cornerites by pronouncing Visconti's "The Leopard" "one of the two best conservative movies," finally breaks the spell by pronouncing Satyajit Ray's "The Music Room" the other.

I've never seen "The Leopard," but I love "The Music Room," which is about a declining Indian rentier who persists in giving a lavish fete in his crumbling music room, even though he knows the expense will bankrupt him.

It is always hard to know what is going on in the minds of Cornerites (loud explosions and snatches of Wagner, one imagines), but perhaps Brookhiser has here displayed an intuition of the current, very conservative Administration's financial management style.

Another contributor nominates "Mrs. Miniver," perhaps because it's the sort of thing old folks like to watch. Jonah Goldberg, of all people, has some intriguing suggestions.

I've seen a few sessions of this parlor game, and I don't know why no one ever brings up "River's Edge." It's about a bunch of nihilistic teenagers, one of whom kills a girl just because he's wasted and, apparently, doesn't know what else to do with his unchannelled energies. The only meaningful authority figure is a boomer-era teacher who congratulates his own generation because "we stopped a war, man!" The teacher's airheaded idealism is sometimes countered by a values-obsessed nerd (the Ben Shapiro role), whom everyone tells to shut up. If this doesn't fit your typical talkative conservative's world-view, I don't know what would.

I like that movie, and I like Whit Stillman's "The Last Days of Disco," which seems to me a cultural conservative's wet dream.

Well, that was kind of fun, but I think I'll go back to my usual standard, y'know, quality: how well a work of art puts over whatever ideas it happens to have.

comments please

THE BLINGOISIE. When you're very young, you run across nose-pickers who are obsessed with bling, who as they grow older suffer or thrive in direct proportion to the amount of bling they have acquired. Simple folk, God bless them.

Some of these guys, though, are slightly less simple; they need not only money, but also reassurance that everyone else in the world (or at least in their class) is just like they are. They mock the notion that there are any values beyond bling. They clap for people who tell them that yes, they're right, bling is the thing.

Thus are they spared the horrifying realization that, despite all their education and pretentions, they remain to this day nose-pickers with an adolescent spirit of entitlement and values that, however smartly they have been tricked out, are essentially barbarian.

These people are called Dynamists, or, if you want to be sloppy about it (and why not? everyone else is), libertarians, or if you want be accurate about it, assholes.
(Thanks for tip, Matt Yglesias.)

comments please

YET ANOTHER TEST.

comments please

THE OLD BLACK FLAG. UPI reports bombs delivered to the European Court of Justice and Europol in Den Hague, to the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, and to Romano Prodi, Chairman of the European Commission. All the parcels share a common starting point in northern Italy, and investigators suspect an anarchist group operating thereabouts.

Some bombs came with interesting appurtances:

Italian media reports said the letter[-bomb] bore a sender's address in Bologna, and the name of Emile Henry, a French 19th century anarchist bomber who tossed a bomb into the crowded Cafe Terminus at the Gare St. Lazare railway station in Paris, killing several people. His motto was "There are no innocents"...

The book sent in the packet bomb was Gabriele d'Annunzio's erotic novel "The Child of Pleasure." D'Annunzio, an admirer and supporter of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, is a literary hero of the Italian extreme right...

UPI reports that "conspiracy-conscious Italians" think someone's trying disuade Prodi from running against Berlusconi when he leaves the Commission. The IHT entertains speculations about the old Red Brigades, and an anti-EU federation called "Euroopposizione." AP says that "An Italian group calling itself the 'Informal Anarchic Federation' took credit for setting two additional time bombs that exploded outside Prodi's house on Dec. 21, causing a small fire."

What to make of this? Setting to one side the decoy theories, it looks like some crazy fuckers are out to do mischief, and they may have gathered under the old black flag.

As chronicled by Barbara Tuchman in "The Proud Tower," the original Anarchists were genuine dead-enders. Around the turn of the last Century, their followers slew no less than six heads of state, including President McKinley. The Anarchists were not spurred by specific grievances against individual regimes, but by hopelessness bred by the elephantine indifference to their plight of all the government that they knew: "They came from the warrens of the poor," wrote Tuchman, "where hunger and dirt were king, where consumptives coughed and the air was thick with the smell of latrines, boiling cabbage and stale beer... where death was the only exit and the only extravagance and the scraped savings of a lifetime would be squandered on a funeral coach with flowers and a parade of mourners to ensure against the anonymity and last ignominy of Potter's Field."

I think it is reasonable to assume that the living conditions of the current letter-bombers are much better than those of their forebears. And at the risk of sounding insensitive to the intellectual attainments of paupers, it seems only a college man would stick D'Annunzio into an exploding package.

So why bomb? One can with a small effort come up with reasons, positive or negative, for any seemingly unreasonable act, but I think that shows more about the speculator than the assailant. I'm beginning to wonder if we're really going to figure out where Timothy McVeigh was coming from. Or Al-Qaeda. Or the Basque separatists, rich as their history may be, who recently put a bomb on railroad tracks in Spain. Or whoever tried to bomb Musharraf. Or the Hamilton County Courthouse. Or Poso, Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. Not to speak of Iraq.

It does appear that an alarming number of people are putting their faith in explosives these days.

comments please

Q.E. FUCKIN' D. "Goodness... another one. I suppose Ms. MacKinnon isn't 'real' either, just like Orson Scott Card was dismissed as not being 'real'." -- guest-blogger Macallan at Tacitus.

The subject is a couple of putative Dems who have publicly stated that they're voting for Bush. Card has been dealt, so to speak, with. Here's a little background on Ms. P. Amy MacKinnon, the latest alleged apostate:

March 24: "My husband is accompanying troops on the front lines, so that we on the home front can vicariously share in the fight with our soldiers... He will use his pen to empower the weak, very often, mute Iraqis who may reclaim their collective voice in a reporter's story... He, like the daring soldiers with whom he now shares tight quarters in a tank heading north through Iraq, is doing our country a noble service. He is presenting us with the truth." MacKinnon's husband is Jules Crittenden; Romanesko links to a story that mentions him under the teaser, "Crittenden wrote about drunk, vomiting U.S. soldiers."

September 25: "I had rationalized my working for a pro-choice legislator by emphasizing all of the other issues we did agree on..." (The guys at Free Republic really liked this one!)

December 18: "The feminist movement gave birth to my generation and it was our legacy to have it all... But as so often happens, the ideals of a generation clashed with their reality." Meaning, MacKinnon, now with three children, wants a "part-time reporting job," a gig hard enough for us single fellas to get, and argues that her experience of "meals, diaper changes, school buses, doctor's appointments, billing cycles, and -- most important -- bedtime" should be seen by editors as a selling point. "So, yes," she explains, "I could understand the importance of the newspaper's deadlines." And all it took was three fucking kids!

So what have we got here? A sob sister with a desire to succeed in journalism, a grudge against feminist baby-killers, and a penchant for Peggy Noonan-style gush. Clearly her best bet is to try and beat Meagan Cox Gurdon to syndication.

Was this woman ever going to vote for any Democrat in 2004? Not a chance in hell. Should we mourn her loss? Well, if we could win without longtime Democrat Strom Thurmond, we can win without her.

comments please

I.T. UPDATE. Still working on the comments feature. Its contributor has run out to buy a puppy. (Volunteer labor -- you know how it is.) We'll attend to all problems at the next big meeting.

comments please

APOLOGIES TO CHRIS WREN. I guess it had been too long since Professor Reynolds pulled out his old "Conservative? Me?" schtick.

This current McGuffin is a USA Today McArticle that refers to the Prof as "right-leaning." As is more and more frequently the case these days, the Professor allows his henchpeople to do the dirty work:

Right-leaner? I guess supporting the war makes you a right-leaner despite your stances on ANYTHING else. Sigh.

Some folks just have to push everyone into right or left labels.

Sigh. Just because I go through a bale of weed each day, dress like Jerry Garcia ca. 1973, have a "HESGONE" vanity license plate, and listen to American Beauty every single morning, people call me a Deadhead. Go figure.

Take any week's worth of the Professor's scribbles and, if you seek his conservatism, look around you.

Take this week: Europe-bashing, Sully-sucking, librul-media-bashing, librul-bias-alerting, DU-trawling, and a tribute to the global spread of Christianity.

And that's just the day after Christmas.

For every lonely pro-sex or free-the-weed reference the Prof posts, there are a couple dozen Left-slagging and Right-rousing items at least. With of course the usual wretched filler.

The only question is whether the Professor is lying to us, or to himself.

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I GUESS WE JUST HAVE HIGHER STANDARDS. Hey, guys, remember when we all agreed that trawling the fever swamps for conservative nutjob quotes was declasse? Well, Mickey Kaus is doing it. Of course, there's a difference -- he's agreeing with a nut:

Hmmmm. .... Update: Freeper "Shermy" had the same reaction, word for word! [It's a one word reaction-ed Word! He had one more "m"-ed There you go. Overwriting.] 7:39 P.M.

See, this is why we have to unilaterally and preemptively invade the offices of Slate and convert them by force to our way of life.
(Thanks roger for the tip.)

comments please

WHAT A CARD! A while back I (and a host of others) marvelled at the Right's new favorite "Longtime Democrat," science fiction writer Orson Scott Card, who tells how he's disgusted with "his" Party's new-fangled ways -- which became new-fangled, judging by Card's beliefs (anti-abortion, pro-Vietnam War), about thirty years ago. Now, via Pagan Prattle, I learn that on gay rights Card may be even too far Right for most Republicans.

Card's 1990 article "Hypocrites of Homosexuality" has, one must admit, a first line worthy of David Sedaris:

When I was an undergraduate theatre student, I was aware, and not happily so, how pervasive was the reach of the underculture of homosexuality among my friends and acquaintances.

The only problem is, he's serious. Card tells us that gays give their "highest allegiance... to their membership in the community that gave them access to sex," and that their presence will cause "destruction of the Church" (in Card's case, LDS), and thereby must be banished, unless they are willing to reform.

Fear not, level-playing-field types, because Card has a keen eye for heterosexual behavior, too. Young people "will be better and happier if they have no memory of sexual intercourse with others to deal with when they finally are married." (What do Mormons use for this, I wonder -- Rohypnol, or chloroform?)

Also, "the Lord even guides the sexual behavior of those who are married, expecting them to use their sexual powers responsibly and in a proportionate role within the marriage." (Card regrettably fails to provide a detailed description of this role, though I imagine it looks pretty much like this.)

Still, it's mainly homos that exercise Card. "Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books," he decides, "...to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society's regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society."

There's a lot more, including the usual complaint about being called a homophobe for his religious beliefs. (He also complained of this to Donna Minkowitz, who has more crackpot Card quotes.) What's most hilarious about all this, of course, is that Card was quoted, at length and with great approval, on the war by Andrew Sullivan -- which, given Sullivan's sexuality and position on gay rights, is rather like defending one's feelings on, say, public transportation with a quote from Adolf Hitler -- so discordant as to be absurd.

I wonder how much further word of Card's lunacy will have to spread before he will be retired as a GOP operative. If this persists, we may have to get Harlan Ellison to masquerade as a Republican.

comments please

CHRIST ON A CRECHE. Peggy Noonan is telling us about bad people again, this time the folks who want to ban nativity scenes:

They think that if only people would stop being religious, we wouldn't have religion around roiling people's emotions and making them violent. (If you say to them, "Man is prone to violence, and one of the things that tends to make his heart gentle is faith in God," their eyes widen in shock: That couldn't possibly be true!)

Ms. Noonan meets such interesting people, and says such interesting things to them. I wonder if she also sees leprechauns, and asks them where they keep their pots o' gold.

Her solution to anti-crechism is "to fill the public square with the signs and symbols of faith. It is not to banish them from the schools, it is to teach them in the schools... display a menorah and explain what it is... to display a crucifix or a cross and explain what it means to Christians. And, yes, the answer is to show a Koran and explain what it is." The kids should also sing Christmas carols and "other religious songs that are not Christian."

I'm all for it! The children can lift their voices in tribute to Buddah, and Zoroaster, and Lord Mahavira, and Gaia. And in the spirit of true ecumenicanalism, we can tell them about the worship of Satan, and crank some Black Sabbath.

Later comes my favorite line from the whole exercise:

"So I took Mary into the house, and she lived for three years in a closet. "

So that's what happened to her. Ms. Noonan also talks about the wonderful panoply of religious artifacts visible in her neighborhood, just down the road apiece from me in Cobble Hill, unmolested by the atheists who apparently all live on Park Avenue in the dark borough of Manhattan. "May the world in 2004 be more like Brooklyn," she concludes, "and may its arguments over religion and the public square be solved the Brooklyn way."

Here I must agree. Just a short distance from the madonnas and menorahs are several very nice gay bars, which coexist harmoniously with Mary Star of the Sea and the other neighborhood places of worship. If Ms. Noonan is okay with those, I'm okay with the little religious theme park she wants to set up. Just so long as she doesn't use my tax dollars to pay for it. Compassionate and conservative -- what a solution! Why, I'm feeling more Brooklyn already!

comments please

TEST. Well, as the Warden says in A Clockwork Orange, these new, ridiculous ideas have come at last:

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LOVE ME, LOVE ME, LOVE ME, I'm a liberal, says the Christian Science Monitor's "Are U A Neocon?" quiz in response to my answers. (Okay, I made the title up, but basically it's an egghead version of one of those Quizilla things.)

The questions pertain to pre-emptive strikes, the Axis of Evil, the defense/domestic political balance, and other hot topics. The possible results are Neo-Conservative, Isolationist, Realist (!), and Liberal. So I guess me, Wolfowitz, and Pat Buchanan are all livin' in a dream world!

I got a kick out of the Monitor's descriptors for each result. Liberals, for example, "believe political solutions are inherently superior to military solutions." Gosh, how will we ever win elections with goofy ideas like that!

But the fix is in: look at the liberal examplars:

Historical liberal: President Woodrow Wilson
Modern liberal: President Jimmy Carter

Geez, why didn't they just use Percy Dovetonsils and Alan Colmes?

Thanks to Jim at Rittenhouse for the tip.

SOLDIERS' PAY. From Phil Carter's very thoughtful weblog, a Washington Post story on how the Army's using a little-known maneuver to keep soldiers on duty for longer than they expected:

According to their contracts, expectations and desires, all three soldiers should have been civilians by now. But Fontaine and Costas are currently serving in Iraq, and Eagle has just been deployed. On their Army paychecks, the expiration date of their military service is now listed sometime after 2030 -- the payroll computer's way of saying, "Who knows?"

The three are among thousands of soldiers forbidden to leave military service under the Army's "stop-loss" orders, intended to stanch the seepage of troops, through retirement and discharge, from a military stretched thin by its burgeoning overseas missions.

"It reflects the fact that the military is too small, which nobody wants to admit," said Charles Moskos of Northwestern University, a leading military sociologist.

We pay our servicemen shit; it's so bad that Wisconsin is contemplating chipping in to make up the difference between its native sons' and daughters' military pay and a living wage! And now we're holding 'em over by special request.

To be fair, an across-the-board pay raise is in the works. But it ain't much. Yes, I know that in time of war (however nebulously defined), troops may expect to be held over. But since everyone over in Iraq loves us (a highly-placed source tells me, and everyone), you'd think we'd need fewer rather than more troops.

DID YOU EVER FIND BIGS BUNNY ATTRACTIVE WHEN HE'D PUT ON A DRESS AND PLAY A GIRL BUNNY? I see the notorious homophobe John Derbyshire has proposed a "sexy-but-not-pretty" poll for males. (He ran one about women some months back. Derbyshire, by the way, is a grown man who writes books about math.)

When I read this Derb post about the male poll (ahem), I assumed his aim was to give the ladies in the audience some share of the frisson he'd enjoyed fantasizing about Ellen Barkin et alia in the previous poll. I see by his previous post, though, that he had something different in view:

Bates seems to illustrate the male side of the "pretty but not sexy" business I raised in a column some months ago. I always thought him an extremely attractive man, and supposed that if I were a woman, I would have some serious fantasies about him. Yet on the odd occasion I have raised this topic with women, I have got blank stares in return. "Alan Bates? No, nothing special. Why would you think that?...." It's an aspect of the Mars-Venus thing. Women generally have no clue what kind of woman men find attractive, and vice versa

Two things:

• Saying you would fantasize sexually about someone only under certain conditions means you're already fantasizing about him.
  
• Fantasizing about someone and then going around asking your girlfriends if they think he's cute means you want to marry him.

How long can Derb bang on that closet door before it collapses?

A LITTLE SANITY FROM MR. VIDAL. I've got the Sunday-morning political shows on TV now. They look a little dumber than usual to me, partly because they're in their year-end what's-it-all-mean mode (which races the shouting heads through a gauntlet of economic to military to legal issues so quickly that their normally reductive analyses become practically incoherent), but mostly because I read Gore Vidal's Washington, D.C. yesterday.

That book, published in 1967, was the first of Vidal's historical fictions (to be followed, in production if not in sequence, by Burr, 1876, Lincoln, et alia), and establishes the themes that run through its successors: the ethics of power, the struggle (not altogether unfriendly) between the self-made and the patrician, the uses of the press, the degeneration of political culture, and, of course, the author's Epicurean view of natural relations between men, and between men and women. (This last is really the underpinning for the political drama: Vidal sees us as selfish creatures who, when we strive for the good as opposed to the merely convenient, do so almost by accident, as a means of attaining something better when the pursuit of power, for whatever reason, ceases or never begins to satisfy.)

The plot, such as it is, runs some ambitious Washingtonians through the Roosevelt and Eisenhower administrations. Blaise Sanford runs a paper, James Burden Day is a perennial Senator; their children and charges marry, have affairs, choose careers, and plot; one of these, Clay Overbury, becomes an immensely successful politician, while another, Peter Sanford, runs a magazine, at first desultorily and later with a grudging sense of purpose.

There are, naturally, good and bad people in the book, or rather good and bad forces with which the characters align themselves. Though this is clearer when seen through the prism of his later writing, in Washington, D.C. Vidal already hints at the less propitious course: when the natural appetite for power is ungoverned by good sense or at least countervailing appetites, enormous follies result that wound the purpose of the nation. In this book, Red-baiting is the most egregious example (brief appearance by hissable McCarthy); today, of course, Vidal sees in the creepy confluence of Christian Fundamentalism and neo-imperialism a likely fatal assault on the remnants of what was once a pretty good Republic.

In 1967, there seemed less of a crisis. Though many of the people in Washington, D.C. are trying to influence the course of government, they at least possess some sense of priorities, and the tone, carried by bitchy conversations, is often breezy. (One of Vidal's stylistic signatures is his ability to sustain drawing-room dialogues without letting his constant, simultaneous translation of intent deflate them.) The main characters are basically serious people playing for serious stakes, but each also has a strong sense of himself, which has the effect of making them all seem rather cynical. Even Overbury, on his surface the most pedestrian of glad-handlers, has private thoughts about people and power that would credit a habitue of Versailles; even Day, who suffers rather more than the others from the necessity of corruption and ambiguity in his line of work, and at times behaves foolishly because of it, tends toward the long view, though in a few flashes that view is very grim indeed:

Burden looked out the window. They were on an unfamiliar road with houses to the right and left, each with its high television anttena drawing from the air crude pictures and lying words. Oh, detestable age! he thought, hating it all...

Padded payrolls and illegal campaign contributions were the usual crimes, momentarily embarrassing to the legislator involved but seldom causing much damage. Americans had always believed that their representatives were corrupt, since, given the same opportunity, they would be, too. As it was, the common folk daily cheated one another, misrepresenting the goods that they sold and otherwise conducting themselves like their governors...

Vidal writes popular, not literary, fiction, though some of us think it is literature because it is built sturdily enough to be read out of season, and because it offers a detailed image (drawn by, as Vidal never tires of telling interviewers, one who knows well the lay of the land) of its time and place. It is interesting that, despite the palpable world-weariness of his view, Vidal keeps churning it out (Peter Sanford turns up again in The Golden Age, published only a few years ago), and also continues to produce long essays on the state of this nation from his villa in Italy.

I don't know how many of us who were not born into Vidal's circumstances, and lack his apparently constitutional imperviousness to bullshit of all sorts, could completely adopt his mordant detachment without giving up entirely on politics, and maybe life. But some people serve as good examples to us even if we we can't go the final mile. Vidal gets a lot of shit for his lonely defense of America as it was, and seems to take pleasure in the low character of these assaults. Here is a description from one of his essays on his appearance on one of those shouting-head shows I was watching:

I was once placed between two waxworks on a program where one of the pair was solemnly indentified as a 'liberal'; appropriately, he seemed to have been dead for some time, while the conservative had the vivacity of someone on speed. For half an hour it is the custom of this duo to 'crossfire' cliches of the sort that would have gotten them laughed out of the Golden Branch Debating Society at Exeter. On air, I identified the conservative as a liberal and vice versa. The conservative fell into the trap. 'No, no!' he hyperventilated. 'I'm the conservative!' (What on earth they think those two words mean no one will ever know.)

I'm glad he's still around. It means that we're not completely nuts, yet.

COWBOYS AND HOLSTEINS. Scrolling through the Mad Cow news I found that there is such a thing as a Disaster News Network, devoted to really big and bad events. If you're feeling too happy sometime, give it a visit!

Anyway, from their coverage of the U.S. case, I learned that the USDA has fingered a Canadian cow -- "one of a herd of 74 cattle shipped from Alberta to the U.S. in August 2001" -- as the true culprit. And that other nations are in a bit of a panic about U.S. beef now:

If the sick cow is confirmed to be from Canada, the U.S. might possibly retain its "disease free" status. By Saturday, the U.S. had lost 90 percent of its beef exports because of its first case of mad cow disease.

More than two-dozen foreign nations have banned the import of U.S. beef, though USDA officials have insisted the meat is safe.

This seems like an area where the opinion of the rest of the world does have some bearing on how well the U.S. performs economically. I wonder if the nations that threw up bans are at all influenced by the USDA trend toward less rather than more regulation.

Frontline recently examined the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) meat inspection system that the USDA adopted in 1998, and reported, "Previously, federal meat inspectors had been limited to visually inspecting carcasses in processing plants; the new system placed the responsibility for developing a comprehensive safety-procedures program on the companies themselves, and required that they conduct scientific testing of bacteria levels in the meat. The inspectors are to monitor the companies' compliance with their own plans." (emphasis added)

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and seems to have no direct bearing on the Mad Cow case. But at a time when EU countries are hot for standards on food, particularly beef, they may observe our tendency to let large producers run their own inspections, for example, and be less inclined to give us the benefit of the doubt.

The trend 'round these parts is anti-regulation, goodness knows. Stories like this one about the international regulation of banana imports make us laugh. But if circumstances make it easy for us to flip off foreigners when it comes to matters of war and peace, that may not be so easy when it comes to matters of buying and selling.

UPDATE. Sisyphus Shrugged has more and, naturally, better.

FUCK GATT, FUCK NAFTA. Matthew Yglesias thinks Bob Herbert is wrong to worry about the exodus of American white collar jobs to India:

Say we changed things around and more Americans made more money, more Indians made less money, and all people everywhere had to pay somewhat more for their software. How is that really better? Because it's better for Americans?

Short answer, Matt: Yes. I'm very happy to see consumers worldwide pay a few more pennies so our own economy doesn't fall into the toilet.

The threat to U.S. jobs is real and I wouldn't mind a little protectionism right about now. I know it's unfair, and my sympathies go to the subcontinent, which has been doing a good job of attracting business -- but I live in America and want our citizens to prosper first.

This is not about agricultural subsidies, where a few pennies' worth of fluctuation means starvation for a number of people. Yes, I know that tech activities affect the ability of India and other countries to meet their financial obligation, and that the fiscal health of the U.S. also relies upon global trade. Those are big issues, but first things first: our race to the bottom is getting a little too close to the finish line, and it's time to reverse course.

So fuck NAFTA and GATT. However well these have been managed to benefit American businesses, they're a net loss for American workers. Yet even the Democratic presidential candidates (with the rousing exception of Dennis Kucinich) act as if they were part of the Bill of Rights.

You want to know how Democrats can win in 2004? Here's a great, yawning need that the do-nothings in the GOP and the DLC are only making worse. Howard Dean, step up and win.

MERRY CHRISTMAS.

Angels from the realms of glory
Stars shone bright above
Royal David's city
Was bathed in the light of love

Jesus Christ was born today
Jesus Christ was born
Jesus Christ was born today
Jesus Christ was born

Lo, they did rejoice
Fine and pure of voice
And the wrong shall fail
And the right prevail

Jesus Christ was born today
Jesus Christ was born
Jesus Christ was born today
Jesus Christ was born
And we're gonna get born now

-- Alex Chilton

GUNBLOG DIPLOMACY. A typically bright and provocative post at CalPundit asks why Iraq war supporters have not been more distressed by the lack of WMD evidence after the fact. All the responses have been interesting, but one by "Ben" datestamped December 23, 8:29 am seems to boil the cons' case down most aptly:

...The war in Iraq (as I saw it) was primarily about 9/11. (Before anyone screams about "no direct connection between Saddam and OBL, etc.", please realize that I don't care about that). As a matter of US national security, we must remake the Middle East, one nation at a time. This can be done through a combination of diplomacy, economics, war and whatever other tactic advances the cause. Iraq was as good a place to start as any other (and probably better than most for the reasons outlined above).

Iraq was also about sending messages to our other enemies in the Middle East. Hopefully, they will now understand that their bad acts draw a respons from us that will lead to bad consequences for them. Such an understanding on their part will encourage the peaceful resolution (on favorable terms) of issues with our other enemies. In other words, this makes continued terrorism and war sponsored by other rogue regimes less likely.

(Sidebar to alert Amygdala and others that this was an exceptionally well-spoken post and does not violate our covenant against trawling.)

I'd like to thank Ben who, despite the multisyllabic and compound-sentence cloud cover, tells it like it is. Be aware, folks, that this country really is embarked on a course of blowing the shit out of countries in order to send messages.

In support of our drug policy, for instance, we might occupy Amsterdam, London, and other cities famous for their off-message policies of more-than-zero tolerance.

In support of our pharmaceutical policies regarding AIDS, we might attack South Africa, which first imported generic HIV drugs contrary to Big Pharma's wishes.

And once we ram that Defense of Marriage Act through, Belgium and the Netherlands will feel our wrath!

Our policies, the best minds of our generation have determined, are best promoted by military force. It ought to work as well as it did for the Romans. And maybe even as long!

YADDA YADDA, GOVERNOR! "Good news, Lenny! We reversed your conviction!"

"What? Are you putting me on with that? (whistles) Man, that's -- lemme see that paper --"

"See, it says here Governor George Pataki just wiped your New York bust."

"Wow. I mean, (whistles) groovy but talk about a day late and a dollar short -- what, are they gonna reanimate my corpse and let me host the MTV Awards now? 'Good evening ladies and gentlemen... ah, I know I look a little moldy, but screw it, so does Keith Richards!' (throws down paper) Ah, shit, I wouldn't want to do that lousy gig anyway. All those little schmucks sucking up to record executives in their $500 Dolce & Gabbana t-shirts, sick red eyes, tap-dancing on the parquet floor... I'd have to explain the bits to them, I'd have to bring out a newspaper like Mort Sahl..."

"Oh, but the kids are hip now, Lenny!"

"Hip, get the hell outta here -- they think wrestling's legit, are you kidding me with that? And they have this American Idol thing, makes Pat Boone look like Little Richard. Clay Aiken, are you jerking me around -- Johnny Ray could kick his ass! (mimes smacking someone around; sings to the tune of 'Cry") 'If your suh-WEET-heart -- doesn't KNOW -- you're schtupping some guh-UY -- (speaks) POW! POW! C'mon Clay, clean yourself up, we're going to Rock Hudson's place to do show tunes for Nancy Reagan!' Man. At least back in the old days I had a really tight little crowd, you know, and they were kinda square, sure, guys dressed like rabbis, girls in bas-mitzvah dresses and three inches of makeup waiting for some high-class dyke to rescue them -- always looking at the bar, you know, some skinny chick drinking Jim Beam straight, eye contact, head nods, (falsetto) 'Nigel, I'm going to the powder room,' chick comes back three days later with Mattachine Society pamphlets, (coarse voice) 'Nigel, bubby, the patriachy is over, leave the Miles Davis records I loaned you with my roommate or we're all gonna come over there and set your African tribal masks on fire.'"

"Lenny, come on. They did you a solid here."

"Solid? What solid? This Governor, he's from what, Peekskill? You ever been to Peekskill? I knew a magician did a gig there, he pulled a rabbit out of his hat, they burned him as a witch! When they want a bonfire for the homecoming dance they set a bum on fire and throw him into the cornfield! Look at the guy, a major schlub, he should be dropping the handkerchief at a tractor pull, never mind Governor. You think he's heard my bits? Forget about it. If they had a Cardinal like Sheen nowadays, this wouldn't be happening. But now they got this schnook from Bridgeport -- I mean, you ever been to Bridgeport? -- ten minutes after they make him a Cardinal, they find out he was running a whorehouse for little boys. (Father Flotsky voice) 'Y'say Father O'Reilly gave yez communion and it tasted like a really big finger with paste comin' out tha end? Mother a' Mercy! Here's ten grand, keep yer dirty mouth shoot!'"

"But Lenny..."

"You think I don't know what's going on? I'm dead forty years and they pull this? Politics, baby -- nothing but politics. Guys have been working blue for forty years, but it's all bullshit -- I mean you turn on cable and it's like all the comics are like that cop at my trial -- 'Ah, he said cocksucker, your honor, and then he said Jackie Kennedy hauled her ass to save her ass, and then he said motherfucker' -- I mean it's like they know the words but they don't know the music, man, or why it was necessary to say those words in the first place."

"Lenny, I can't argue with you, and you know what? The way things are going in this country, they'll probably reverse this decision pretty soon anyway."

"In the shithouse for good this time. Forget about it."

XMAS MAILBAG. At The Corner, Jonah Goldberg is posting letters about the death of Howard Dean's brother Charlie, who got whacked in Laos in the early '70s. One is from an "NRO reader in California" who claims to have known the Dean boys back in the day, and tells a heartbreaking story:

Charlie was a popular guy (much more outgoing than Howard), a McGovern worker, University of North Carolina, preppie… no chance he went into the CIA from that background... However, I am not going to criticize Howard for the controversy this week about listing Charlie as a possible POW. Charlie’s death was a terrible tragedy, and I know it had a huge impact on Howard... Any of us might wish that our brother died on a mission with some purpose, rather than just an ill-advised adventure, even if we know (as Howard himself has said many times) that the CIA theory is wrong. This theory perhaps lurks in Howard’s heart... To this day, the emotions must make it difficult for him to think or speak clearly about Charlie.

I'n't that nice? Don't you wish you had friends like this? Run well as a Democrat for President of the United States, and you'll find many such friends you never knew you had.

This has inspired me to share with my own readers a note I recently received on the subject of George W. Bush. I have as little reason to doubt its veracity as Goldberg, drunk as he is, has to doubt his own correspondent's.

You shouldn't be so hard on ol' W. He suffered greatly at Harvard. He pretended not to care about what people thought of him, but often expressed his hurt in quiet ways, like having guys who pissed him off blackballed in their chosen fields. There was this one brilliant business student, on scholarship I believe, who got much better grades than W but found himself unwanted by every employer he contacted after graduation. I suspect he went to his self-inflicted death never realizing the pain he'd caused our President-to-be.

Poor George never really got over the ribbing he took in school, which affected his relations with others for years. I recall talking with him in the executive offices of the Texas Rangers after Rafael Palmeiro got himself traded to Baltimore. "Mexican bastard never liked me," he said. "Well, I know a doctor down in Maryland that'll fix him up." I couldn't say for sure whether Rafael's erectile dysfunction had anything to do with this, but I do know that W would laugh maniacally whenever one of those Viagra commercials came on the TV.

This is not even to mention the time, right after the 1992 elections, when I came to the Texas Governor's office and found W stabbing a pillow with Saddam Hussein's face glued to the front.

When George stopped drinking, we all thought he'd turned a corner, but alas, we came to realize that he'd only replaced Scotch with horse tranquilizers, heroin, codeine, OxyContin, and some experimental drug his father's friends in the CIA shipped to him from Langley. "I tole that book-readin' bitch I'd give up the grain and grape," he'd tell me as one of his servants injected the light brown fluid into his spine, "but I never said nothin' about stoppin' this medicine for my 'stress'!" Then he'd wink at me, or rather, his eyelids would flutter spasmodically before he passed out.

So if ol' W says and does some things that don't quite make sense, I suggest you cut him some slack, lest he take a personal dislike to you, too.

Sincerely,
An alicublog reader from Texas

PUTTING THE "JESUS FUCKING CHRIST" BACK INTO XMAS!Pandagon's Jesse (God that sounds like Herlofs Marte to me, maybe because he'll be burned at the stake someday) has keen eyes, and has noticed what a lot of us perhaps willfully failed to see: that the Xmas illo at National Review is pretty bizarre.

Hey, you should have seen it before they changed it: