MEAN GIRLS. Professor Reynolds and his acolytes are in full splutter over somebody who writes about blogs in the Toronto Star. One should think they'd be grateful that anyone bothers to write about our little hobby -- which probably ranks in share-of-cultural-consciousness somewhere between spray-on hair and Ultimate Frisbee -- yet they snarl at columnist Antonia Zurbisias like dissed teenagers, both at Fort Insta ("Fat, drunk, and Canadian," "fool," etc) and in Zurbisias' in-box ("blousy," "fat and stupid," etc). Small wonder that many of these geniuses' retorts are weight-related -- considering that they find Anne Coulter toothsome, normally constituted women must look positively zaftig to them.

Among the annoyed is the madman Lileks, last noted here for tracking the source of our civilization's "rot" to Guy de Maupassant and dictionary editors. Today he re-adjusts his rot-detector and finds a new fountain of evil: Hunter S Thompson!

And it would be irrelevant if this same spirit didn't infect on whom Hunter S. had an immense influence. He's the guy who made nihilism hip. He's the guy who taught a generation that the only thing you should believe is this: don't trust anyone who believes anything. He's the patron saint of journalism, whether journalists know it or not.

Yes, many's the time I've read the metamphetamine-fueled ravings of R.W. Apple or George Will and detected the sinister hand of Thompson, Patron Saint of Journalists.

Speaking of ravings, Tacitus goes to Europe, seems to miss all the cathedrals and museums, and instead sees only statist ugliness caused by Social Democrats. And he's sure that waitress didn't like him because he's American. The cough syrup wears off and and he allows as how, "despite the griping, I like Europe, and come back at every opportunity" -- to remind the natives, as he does here, how we bailed their asses out in WWII, one supposes. This is in the perplexing tradition of conservatives like Bob Bartley and Ned Flanders who address their European "friends" with obvious and corrosive contempt, then wonder why Europeans don't like them.

For the most part this stuff is really beyond the realm of politics, and into that of abnormal pyschology. But I'm beginning to get the feeling that most of what passes for political discourse is that way these days.

SATURDAY NIGHT MISCELLANY. Saw a couple movies recently. Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is pretty good. The premise is terrific: given the chance to wipe a defunct love from your memory, would you abate your romantic torment by wiping it, or would you allow the experience to teach you something? Kaufman seems to assume that most of us, given the tech, would wipe. That's a canny observation, but he loads the deck too much by making the wipers such morons that they cannot articulate any sound philosophical reasons for doing it. Kaufman has guts, but lacks the dramatic training to acknowledge and exploit his own dialectic. Bad ideas exist for a reason, and the desire to deny experience, rather than work through it, has a lot of resonance these day. Why not give it a fair hearing? Making the wipers mere weed-addled cowards is just too easy.

(Also, wouldn't Jim Carrey wake up if Kirsten Dunst were jumping on his bed in her underwear? I know I would!)

There's still a lot to like. I admire that jealousy is a big idea in Kaufman's films. (The Farrelly Brothers are obesessed with it too; I think it's their saving grace.) I salute that he wants to explore big feelings. Even his hippie-trippy way of doing it (collapsing landscapes, ridiculous techonological McGuffins) is okay with me. But he really is too sloppy about it. If the movie followed its best instincts, Joel and Clementine would have stayed broken up. That's what romantic disappointment is really about -- not saving relationships, but improving survivors. That's why the quasi-reconciliation ending is such a drag, and probably why the studio put it on a shelf for so long.

Also saw Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes -- a total piece of shit, so weak and rambling and wasteful that it made me hate the Jarmusch movies I used to love, and I've been following him since Chang in a Void Moon. How dare he foist these feeble improvisations on paying customers? Even Iggy, Tom Waits, and Bill Murray look like patsies in this. Thank God for Taylor Mead and Bill Rice, who bring some much-needed dignity to the proceedings.

Fortunately I got some brain-balm from an old S.J. Perelman collection, Keep It Crisp. I've tried to enjoy SJP on the page before and failed; though his lines for Groucho are sublime ("Ah, I could dance with you till the cows come home -- better yet, I'll dance with the cows till you come home"), large blocks of his wordplay always seemed to me rather too much of a good thing before. But once you get into a rhythm with him he's wonderful, and not all the pleasures are from surface effects. Among the better items is an invented interview by a sweet young thing of a Broadway wise guy ("A Power Dive into the New Journalism"):

As soon as we were alone, Dexteride's air of reserve vanished. He mixed two ginger-ale highballs, adjusted the Venetian blind so that the sun wouldn't shine in my eyes while I was writing, and seated himself on the davenport by me. I told him our readers wanted to know what he was thinking about Tommy Manville these days. He frowned.

"Hats off to that question," he said seriously. "It's a good one. I'd say that Tommy is a man that is in the prime of his life at present." His eyes twinkled. "Funny thing about age. Now, I place you about eighteen years of age."

"I'll be twenty-three in March."

"Then I'm in the clear, he said, with a deep, full-throated chuckle that was thoroughly infectious. You knew instinctively that this warm, friendly man enjoyed simple things and people, and still there was a wholesome faith, almost akin to idealism, about him. Somehow I saw him standing at the right hand of King John on the Field of the Cloth of Gold as the Magna Carta was being signed. I asked him to outline his personal philosophy.

"I believe the day is coming when it will be possible to tell a person's age from his hands," he said. "I've made a study of the subject over the last few years. Take yours, for instance." To illustrate his theory, he gently manipulated my fingers, showing how excessive writing causes fatigue and how the soft cup of the palm acts as a cushion.

"As a matter of fact," he went on, "a girl with your type hands shouldn't be engaged in your particular type work. You ought to have a little spot of your own, which you could stick around all afternoon in merely a kimona and play with a little poodle or so"...

The inspiration is a certain style of magazine-writing from the War Years, but the gag is out of Restoration Comedy, or maybe Chaucer. Hats off to SJP!

Of course, if you want to survey the work of a vastly inferior modern author, you may read some of my latest here.

THE ANTI-ZENGERS. Boy, OpinionJournal is going absolutely batshit crazy these days. Their lead editorial today comes out against the fucking Red Cross. What's next -- a stinging rebuke to Santa Claus?

Pentagon critics are treating a leaked Red Cross assessment -- first reported in The Wall Street Journal last Friday -- as proof that detainee abuse was widespread in Iraq and that the military was unresponsive to complaints. After reading the report, we think the real story is the increasing politicization of this venerable humanitarian group.

Apparently OJ's mad because the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)'s report on our inhumane treatment of prisoners of war got leaked, and the Red Cross hasn't lied about it to preserve our torturers' anonymity. (It is strange, then, that OJ doesn't take a monent here to also chastise the Journal's reporters for disseminating this anti-disinformation to the public. Maybe even OJ writers get tired of being laughed at.)

The screed closes:

This ICRC behavior poses a serious risk to its relationship with governments around the world, as well as to its special status when there are future revisions of the Geneva Conventions. We hope that some adults inside the organization understand this, because the ICRC's self-inflicted demise would be a real loss for prisoners of regimes that are truly odious.

Nice little international organization ya got here. Be a shame if someone was ta undercut its credibility, if ya know what I mean!

Meanwhile another story in their Arts & Leisure section (you know, one of those dark alleys where conservatives dig through works of art for political talking points) talks about the "incendiary power" of photojournalism as if it were black magic or something. The author, Eric Gibson, approves government suppression of war photos ("Think only of the way that pictures and film footage," he shudders, "actually did turn public opinion against the Vietnam War"), and apprently takes from Abu Ghraib only one lesson ("besides the obvious moral one," he tosses off): that we better do something about that damned new technology -- "another photographic medium that would do the damage this time around: the digital image, snapped on a camera carried in the pocket of an enlisted man or woman and e-mailed across the ether."

OJ apparently finds chaste prom dresses Tony, and freedom of the press Tacky. You'd have to dig very deep to find "journalists" so deeply committed as these to the antithesis of every journalistic principle -- in fact, all the way to the other side of the world.

LEARN TO READ. In defending the indefensible (i.e., himself), John Derbyshire aligns his brutal judgement on Abu Ghraib (i.e., torture all you want, just don’t include sex, consensual or otherwise) with Orwell:

One of the many things Orwell taught us (see, e.g., his essay on Kipling) is that the dirty work of civilization -- the work of policemen, prison guards, soldiers, interrogators of terrorist suspects -- is *dirty*. It's rough work, and won't always meet the standards of my and your personal lives. Someone is doing it on our behalf, though, right now -- not just in Baghdad, but in jails and police stations across America, and honesty compels us to acknowledge their work, and the much greater horrors it helps keep at bay.

I have no doubt Derbyshire is steeped in Kipling ("It’s ‘Tommy’ this, and ‘Tommy’ that, and ‘Tommy, wait outside’/But it’s ‘Special train for Atkins’ when the trooper’s on the tide," and all that), but his understanding of Orwell on Kipling seems poor, if this is the essay he’s talking about:

It is no use claiming, for instance, that when Kipling describes a British soldier beating a ‘nigger’ with a cleaning rod in order to get money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve what he describes. There is not the slightest sign anywhere in Kipling’s work that he disapproves of that kind of conduct -- on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to have. Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.

And so on. Orwell’s appreciation of Kipling was real, but in defending him against the "refined people," he was certainly not defending Kipling’s enthusiasm for "Imperialism as a sort of forcible evangelizing" -- Orwell’s words, which Derbyshire would seem to take as an unequivocal endorsement.

Orwell was sensible of the difference between "the nineteenth-century imperialist outlook" – Kipling’s – "and the modern gangster outlook" -- represented by the Fascism at which England was then at war. Orwell seems to have preferred the former, at least in terms of moral clarity, but he was also well aware that "Kipling does not seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern."

I think a lot of conservatives latch onto Orwell because he talks smack about liberals, and there is certainly an abundance of this in his Kipling essay. (Of course, they tend to elide the inconvenient fact of Orwell’s Socialism, and now that Christopher Hitchens has loosened his own grip of that banner, they generally prefer to get their Orwellism from him.) One would think, though, that moral absolutists such as they would not mistake the sharing of an annoyance with a commonality of interest – unless their only genuine interest is to talk smack about liberals, which seems to be the case.

THE CROSSROADS OF ART, COMMERCE, AND THE BOULEVARD OF BROKEN DREAMS. Snarkmarket has discovered what Maya Lin, creator of the exquisite Vietnam Memorial in Washington, has been up to lately: designing lawn furniture.

Well, time for me to get back to work...

WISH IT INTO THE CORNFIELD, PART #3,451. Andrew Sullivan reads the Times' coverage of the Berg execution, and doesn't like that Berg's family was interviewed -- or, rather, that they said some things that don't line up with the sort of "dulce est decorum est" horseshit in which Sullivan specializes, and the Times printed it:

The family of Nicholas E. Berg challenged American military officials on Wednesday, insisting that the man beheaded by Islamic terrorists in Iraq had earlier been in the custody of federal officials who should have done more to protect him...

The Iraqi police took Nicholas Berg, 26, into custody on March 24 and held him in a jail that he described in the message as managed by Iraqis with oversight from United States Military Police forces. He wrote that federal agents had questioned his reasons for being in Iraq, whether he had ever built a pipe bomb or had been in Iran.

"They can detain him and deny him his basic civil rights of a lawyer, a phone call or even a charge for 13 days, but they can't get him" on a plane, David Berg said.

"Yes, the family's understandable anger should be reported," concedes Sully. "But their anger should not dictate the entire gist of your story." See, it's not newsworthy that the family of the deceased is pissed at the U.S. Government -- or not propaganda-worthy, anyway. Axis of Evil, why we fight, stay the course -- that's journalism, by God!

Sullivan gets multiple unmitigated-gall points for following this up with a letter from his readership: "I just saw the Nick Berg video in its entirety... I really feel extremely bad for Nick's family. I wish I could give each one of them a big hug and say 'I love you' to them." Make sure you clamp a hand over their mouths when you hug them, buddy, or Sullivan might hear something he doesn't like.

SHORTER CRAZY JESUS LADY. New Jersey is becoming a place where politicians don't buckle under pressure from their bishops, and scientists use cloning to cure cancer. Give me the more soulful Jersey of insane, violent mobsters.

SIMONIZING. Having told the world that any one of us would have tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib given the chance ("Who is that nitwit, most of us have been asking? Well, that nitwit is us"), Roger L. "I'm for gay rights" Simon opens the floor, and the usual grunting, roaring, and chest-beating ensues. Simon only deigns to interrupt when a poster named Tano points out, undeniably, that a lot of prominent conservatives have been quite okay with this inhuman behavior. This incenses his host, who chides:

...I don't respond to you for a simple reason. I have no interest in the terms liberal and conservative. They are junk terms to me, factually meaningless... Now some people call me a neocon, yet I vehemently favor gay marriage and stem cell research. It's all boring BS to me. I'm just interested in the facts of a situation. So the minutes a post begins with conservatives this or liberals that, I just skip it...

The perfidious labeller having been dismissed, a less chideworthy Simonite leaps into the fray:

I'm pretty tired of those Iraqis who only know how to whine, criticize, and complain, but never lift a finger to help. It's their future as well as ours that our troops are dying for. But whenever "their" people were maltreated or killed, they condemned the Americans, and rejoiced when the Americans were burnt and quartered. We grieve for our dead and wounded too, but we don't jump up and down when an Iraqi was killed... Don't Iraqis have responsibilities too?

An odd reaction, it would seem: chastising the Iraqis for getting all hot and bothered about an occupying army torturing their fellow citizens. But, brothers and sister, let us not paint this a "conservative" response, for in Simon's world, who's to say what's liberal and conservative? Or whether torture is anathema or just something we all might easily engage in, were we not busy with Hollywood screenplays? Let us cast aside meaningless labels, when all good men are agreed that Kerry was a pussy to serve in Vietnam and so must be kept from the Presidency.

I thought liberals were the ones that were all into moral relativism and shit. Ooops, but there I go again, using those tired old labels.

ALL IS WELL! INDEED! The torture thing really has Professor Reynolds working his Kevin-Bacon-in-Animal-House routine. Among his recent assertions indicating a paucity of locations toward which to run, and at which to hide:

• People who draw our attention to this scandal are just trying to defeat America. You should ignore them.
  
  
• We do stuff like this in our own prisons all the time -- though without the electrodes, dog attacks, simulated rape, etc. Or maybe we do have those things, too. But do I look like I care?
  
  
• One of my buddies says I'm really prolific and another says I need a vacation, so I'm going to watch a stupid movie with my wife, and I'll go on about the flags in it and my wife will go on about how Jessica Alba isn't asking anyone for a government handout, no sir, and suddenly this Abu Whatchamacallit thing that has been disturbing my sleepy afternoons in the faculty lounge seems very far away.

JESUS IS JUST ALRIGHT. Owing to a bizarre set of circumstances, I viewed yesterday The Passion of the Christ. I've seen this thing alternately praised and damned as a phenomenon, but I have hardly seen it reviewed as a movie. That makes sense: the plot is a central narrative of a major religion, and the approach is personal rather than institutional -- more like Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew than King of Kings -- so it was bound to be controversial in terms that have little to do with aesthetics.

I'm not immune to this either. I could see that the craft aspects, including the acting, are all very fine, but outside of that I was aware throughout of the received experience that was coloring my reaction. If you were ever obliged to memorize the Stations of the Cross, as I was as a good Catholic boy, you're going to be pulled in by the story no matter what.

Gibson isn't just telling the story out of the book, though. He uses a couple of devices to interpret it for us. Some of these glosses I found lovely. After denying Jesus three times (and recalling, in flashback, Jesus' prediction of this), Peter has an episode of stunned shame that is very real and moving. And when Jesus has one of his falls on the way up the hill, Mary flashes back on Christ as a toddler, tumbling in the dust outside their home. It's as corny as Griffith and as effective.

There are also a lot of flashbacks that reflect Jesus' message of love and forgiveness, but these are overwhelmed by the behavior of the mob, the priests, and the Romans. Most of the action is about thoroughly unsympathetic people beating the living shit out of Jesus Christ. Popping in a little "love your enemies" here and there doesn't cut much ice when you're watching leering Centurions ripping the skin off the Son of God's back, or sneering priests mocking him as he agonizes on the Cross, all at length and in graphic detail.

In fact, the cumulative effect is that of a revenge fantasy: when Jesus dies and the earth cracks under the temple and the Romans all run away from the storm, there's only one moviegoer reaction that makes sense, and it isn't "Love Thy Neighbor" -- it's "Payback Time." (National Review's Michael Graham, attempting to refute charges of anti-Semitism against the film, wrote, "after the movie, I wanted to kick the crap out of a Roman." I wonder whether it occured to him how that might be taken in Rome.)

I suppose my opinion could be dismissed as that of a bleeding-heart crypto-Christian who is not down with the Church Militant mission of the filmmaker. You could dismiss all criticism in the same way, if the only point of works of art were to reenforce or refute prejudices, rather than to illuminate the human experience.

(ALMOST) NO COMMENT. From the brilliant Margaret at Matters of Little Significance:

Read about John Negroponte, the man who is supposed to be US Ambassador to Iraq.

He is accused of sponsoring terrorism for supporting the Contra insurgency against the left wing Sandinistas, the first ever democratically elected government of Nicaragua. He is also accused of inciting Contra attacks on civilians.

He was confirmed by the senate on May 6: 95-3 with 2 not voting.

Kerry was one of the 2 who did not vote.

My senators, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, both voted in favor.

It is incredible to me that with all that's going on, they still voted to make someone who is notorious for encouraging human rights abuses be ambassador to Iraq.

I hate to say so, but this episode has left me feeling a little Naderish.

OK, SO I’M A PHILISTINE. I finally got to the Whitney Biennial last night. This was my third or fourth WB, and by far the one with the most polymers. I was too stupified to take notes, but I did get a few laughs. One guy pasted matted fur to animal skulls, one of which was attached to a skeletal structure made of plaster and detritus; little wire birds pulled from its guts lengths of Italian Christmas lights, perhaps signifying entrails. In another installation, pixelated clouds moved slowly across a blue screen while futuristic music of the kind Chris Sarandon played for Margaux Hemingway in Lipstick blared from a stereo. This was called Super Mario Clouds.

But in the main it was awful: a collection of goofy items, like a stylized Roman Centurion’s helmet with a fried egg stuck on it; a full-sized, glass-panelled dumpster packed with industrial waste (a towering rebuke to the notion that a good idea will make a good work of art); little rooms filled with lights or plaster dust. The time and money that one imagines was spent on these hideosities were nearly as wearying as their spectrally thin aesthetic effects.

The painting and drawing (with the exception of some ringer Hockneys) was even worse. Most, like Julie Mehretu’s palimpsests, are at first glance interesting, until you realize that whatever deeper mysteries they might reveal upon contemplation are bland and mechanical. One might as well be solving rebus puzzles.

assume astro vivid focus did a big, nice-looking room pasted over with old advertising and hi-life images. In an exhibition filled with renderings that at their best rise to the exalted heights of commercial illustration and interior design, this is at least crafty, and gives some extra seconds of pleasure. But it struck me that a.a.v.f. was taking the imagery at face value – that the whole thing was just a force multiplier for the original effects wrought by admen and graphic designers.

Film and photography were better. Slater Bradley had a nice short with Stephen Hawking’s voice-box thing on the soundtrack, expostulating on the universe, while a home-movie camera scanned the faces in a children’s choir. This made a better effect than the other children’s choir thing, with a skeleton conducting. (This was one of the multi-screen pieces, the idea of which seems to be that it is bad to indoctrinate kids; another filled a room with cow’s udders.) Chloe Piene showed a girl in a tank-top and panties splattered in mud, roaring; when I realized another girl wasn’t going to come in and wrestle with her, I lost interest.

The saddest commentary came from a tour guide explicating some crappy painting to her charges. In a sidebar she mentioned the recent Giorgio Armani show at the Guggenheim, and said, "We’ll see more of this kind of collaboration of art and commerce in the years to come."

WHY DOES VICTOR DAVIS HANSON HATE AMERICA SO MUCH? In the course of minimizing the Iraqi POW thing, Victor Davis Hanson characterizes the Western peoples thusly:

We are "plagued with attention-deficit problems." We are "affluent, leisured and consensual," which means that we are pussies about what other people think of us ("not so much worried about being convicted of being illiberal as having the charge even raised in the first place").

When confronted with graphic war images, the "Western suburbanite" will "change channels and head to the patio, mumbling either, 'How can we fight such barbarians' or ? better yet ? 'Why would we wish to?'"

And when faced with the grotesque spectacle of American servicemen torturing prisoners, instead of shrugging it off, the West "engages not merely in much needed self-critique and scrutiny, but reaches a feeding frenzy that evolves to outright cultural cannibalism."

He also compares our "institutionalized cowardice" unfavorably to the way things are done in, say, Russia. "They really don't care much if you hate them," he swoons. "They are likely to do some pretty scary things if you press them." Nonetheless he does acknowledge that "you wouldn't really wish to emigrate there for a teaching fellowship," which I guess means that we can't expect Hanson to pull a Coriolanus and lead the admirably bloodthirsty Russkies against the weak-kneed West, though the thought seems to tempt him.

When all the Abu Ghraib stuff first came out, I figured on the "Of course this is terrible, but [insert rank neocon absurdity here]" responses, and even the "Of course this is terrible, but it's all the liberals' fault" angle. But this "It's not terrible at all, you Westerners are like-a de woman" thing is more what I'd expect from a secondary villain in an Indiana Jones movies than from a pundit. Is this how far we've sunk? Oh, much lower than this, for sure, but let's not tempt the blues on such a sunny day...

HEARTS AND MINDS, PART 56,957. Oh sweet Jesus. Daniel Henninger says we aren't doing enough propaganda in the Arab world -- and that's why the recent unpleasantness at Abu Ghraib is making us look bad. As ever, he traces the problem back to the perfidious Clintons.

Anybody remember Charlotte Beers? Early in the War on Whatchamacallit, the former Chairman of the Ogilvy & Mather worldwide advertising agency was made an Undersecretary of State by the Bush Administration, and tasked and budgeted with the dissemination of pro-our side messages in Arabia. Beers left the government last year "for health reasons." A few months back she talked to advertising columnist Bob Garfield about her experiences, and here's some of the little that she said:

Nothing would be more dangerous than silence. It's like asking Tylenol to be very quiet when people found out there was poison inadvertently put into their Tylenol packages. They went immediately to the air and every phase of communication to talk about what they were going to do, how it would be handled, and they won a huge round with the consumer groups. We do have some policies that are not popular, and that doesn't mean necessarily that we can make those popular, but we can certainly engage on many other fronts...

The skill it takes to have a brand cross borders is to create a universal understanding, you know, maybe the love of a Coke and the party that goes with it, and so on. And the second thing was to always honor and respect the local customs. And so the lessons that we all had to learn as marketers, to earn the right to sell our brands in those countries is one the United States has to practice. I mean the first thing I did in the first year was bring in people from the private sector to conduct courses in that kind of communication which is about context, and also about the basics of branding, really.

All respect to Ms. Beers, a former client of mine, but does this sound like the kind of thinking that would make a dime's worth of difference in a region that regards us as an occupying force? Branding? A Tylenol scenario? Coca-Cola?

That kind of thing did work once, in the former Soviet Union. The aura of our plenty, our brands, our Levi's and Fords and Coca-Colas, had a powerful effect on people who felt themselves oppressed by their own government, not ours. But we're the Big Daddys now -- scrambling to convince a violently hostile region that our berserkers do not reflect our true intentions. Yet we have precious little Coke or unpoisoned Tylenol to offer as tokens of good faith.

No wonder Beers bailed. It's impossible to sell the sizzle without the steak.

RIFFMEISTERS. I was gonna make this a comment to Norbizness' excellent refutation of the lame Total Guitar Top Riffs list, but why not share with the rest of the class?

Nor is boss, but he takes a few missteps. I have to point out that "Hot Rats" is not a Mothers album, and the epochal "Willie the Pimp" is a Zappa/Beefheart/Jean-Luc Ponty riff, to be more accurate. (Speaking of fiddlers, how about "Diggy Diggy Lo" or "Jole Blon" or "Orange Blossom Special"?)

Whatever you think of the source material, you have to spot, as TG did, AC/DC and their patented off-tempo, pull-against-the-drummer riffing. But while "Back in Black" is alright, I think "Back in Business" is a superior example.

Also, if you put, as Nor does, one Neil Young riff up there, you have to put at least three. Young's secret weapon is the riff-embedded rhythm lick. If "Hey Hey, My My" rates, so must "Cinnamon Girl" and "I'm the Ocean," at least. (I'd drop "The Loner," too, but that's just me.)

Among the obscurities, let me insert "Tough Fucking Shit" by G.G. Allen and the Murder Junkies, "Ain't My Crime" by Motorhead, "Easter Woman" by the Residents, "Celebrated Summer" by Husker Du, and "Tractor Rape Chain" by Guided by Voices.

In the under-your-nose category, where the hell are "Cannonball," "Pleasant Valley Sunday," "Heart Full of Soul," "Victoria," "Satisfaction," et alia?

But folks, as the old Shake 'n' Bake commercial used to go, you can make it good's I can. Speak up!

MY CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO FREE TICKETS. At National Review Online, Andrew Leigh exposes more liberal perfidy among our nation's intellectual snobs. There was apparently only a handful of right-wingers at the L.A. Times Festival of Books, proof of -- well, of under-representation of people who didn't want to be there, one imagines. Within mere grafs, Leigh has to admit, "Okay, maybe it isn't fair to judge a festival by who decides to rent the booths. After all, one presumes that if Regnery Books or NR deigned to rent a booth, they would have been permitted."

And yet he goes on writing.

He even interviews the festival's organizer, who shares with Leigh a long list of conservatives he invited, most of whom declined. Leigh is unfazed. He contacts Regnery. A "publicity representative, who did not want her name mentioned," says she doesn't remember the invitation. The plot thickens!

The piece ends, predictably enough, with a plea for diversity of the conservative kind. "Angelenos are being deprived of one side of a very important debate," Leigh bemoans.

I quite agree, and in the same spirit request that Leigh put me up for a spot on the NRO Post-Election Cruise. While it's true that I have not purchased a ticket, I think the burden rather lies on NRO to accomodate me, since it is they who have so far deprived their guests of "one side of a very important debate," which I am happy to supply for a small fee. Opportunities for intellectual diversity, after all, don't just march right up to you and plunk down $1,549 for admission -- you have to dig for them. I will consent to attend, therefore, if all my expenses are paid, if they can contrive to keep that hag Malkin away from me, and if I can make a naked human pyramid of John Derbyshire, Ramesh Ponnuru, and Stanley Kurtz. I'll be waiting to hear if their commitment to diversity is real.

SHORTER DIANA WEST. All you pro-abortion women stop having fun. Don't you know you're supposed to be humorless? Oh, darn -- now you're making me look humorless, you ghoulish c-words!

MY ENGLISH, SHE NOT SO GOOD. "The first thing is that the pictures [of tortured Iraqi prisoners] really prove that the US is superior to the Baathist dictatorship." -- Johan Norberg.

No worries, Johan -- they have trouble with English in Tennessee, too.

This whole "Yeah, well, the Arabs are worse" schtick may work this time. But what about next time?

NOTA BENE. To those of you who may have stumbled upon this regurgitation of some Terry Teachout pieces at OpinionJournal: please note that Teachout is not, in the main, the right-wing hatchet man that the OJ editors have therein portrayed by selective quotation. It's sad what you have to do to sell books, particularly to the True Believers. Teachout's blog About Last Night is still very much recommended; it does the art of criticism proud. He does let tip his ideological hand sometimes, but one of my other favorite critics, the lefty Michael Feingold, does so even more egregiously. And, unlike bluenosed asswipes like Roger Kimball, Teachout has well-developed aesthetics, rather than mere snobbery, on his side. Besides, anyone who sees Stanley Crouch for the fraud he is deserves our support.

SELF-AWARENESS DERBY. Jim Lileks sez:

...he didn’t strike me as a jolly old soul. But it has to be hard to be happy when one carries around so much bile and rage. It’s tiring. Anger wears you down, especially when your anger doesn’t seem to accomplish anything... You want to live like that? I don’t want to live like that. Because when you see red all the time you miss things...

Was Lileks, like old Scrooge, whisked to another dimension and forced to view his own life at a remove, which spectacle spurred this third-person repentance? No, he's talking about Ted Rall.

I realize it's just an angle -- Jimbo's harshed on Rall so often, even he must be tired of looking up synonyms for "traitor" -- but what do you make of a guy who thinks Democrats are potential terrorists, yet goes on for grafs and grafs about the overproductive bile ducts of others?

One is tempted to use the words "denial," or "projection," but you know what hearty laughter this kind of pop psychologizing draws from conservatives. So how about I just call him an asshole?

WHAT I DID ON MY COFFEE BREAK. I had a few minutes so I went to see if David Horowitz is still a horse's ass. You be the judge:

I guarantee you that conservatives who are in the forefront of the battle of ideas defending this country -- Victor Davis Hanson, David Frum, Robert Kagan to name three -- have never been commencement speakers, officially sponsored keynoters and honored guests of any liberal university. This tells you more than you probably care to know about the commitments of our university officials and the state of their campuses.

You know, that might make a good theme for the commencement addresses I've been asked to deliver at Bob Jones University! (Or perhaps I'll rest that week, and let Michael Moore fill in for me.)

Speaking of equine posteriors, John Podhoretz explains that we leftwards are actually happy Iraqi prisoners were tortured because that makes Iraq more like Vietnam in our warped minds. "They never knew happier days than when they were standing in opposition to their country," he declares. I wonder how he knows so much about us? Maybe he has attended some of our liberal parties, incognito in a wig of luxuriant dreadlocks.

Brothers and sisters, the secret is getting out -- soon the whole world will know that we hate this fucking country and want it overthrown by militant Islam, which totally rocks! There's only one way left to conceal the truth from ordinary Americans: start using bigger words.

THE WEATHER STARTED GETTING ROUGH, THE TINY SHIP WAS TOSSED. John O'Neill, who served with Kerry in Vietnam, announces in OpinionJournal, "I was on Mr. Kerry's boat in Vietnam. He doesn't deserve to be commander in chief."

So of course I immediately read the thing, hoping for bombshell revelations, and was disappointed to view yet again that already-tired litany of Kerry cracks: Kerry was in a book with the American flag upside down on the cover, Kerry testified to military abuses which O'Neill did not witness, Kerry is an evil traitor whose "misrepresentations played a significant role in creating the negative and false image of Vietnam vets that has persisted for over three decades," etc.

And I thought, what a terrible, missed opportunity! Has O'Neill never read a tell-all biography, even in the supermarket check-out line? If he was on the boat with Kerry, why didn't he give us some juicy scenes of two swabbies named John, nose to nose in the hot Southeastern sun?

I mean, they don't even have to be verifiable: as the patented anonymous letter technology availed by many top bloggers has shown, when you're preaching to the choir, no one's going to check your Bible quotations. Besides, having commenced his public career as Nixon's anti-Kerry operative, I can't imagine O'Neill would mind getting his hands a little dirty.

Perhaps O'Neill's dialogue writing is even worse than his polemics, and he is embarrassed by it. Allow me, then, to offer some script doctoring:

Evening on the Mekong. The swift boat PCF-94 drifts silently. On the forward deck, EN3 Washington plays "Purple Haze" on his harmonica. Lt. O'Neill approaches Lt. Kerry on the main deck.

O'NEILL: Skip, what the blazes are we doing adrift at sundown? That jungle is overrun with murdering gooks who'll pick us off for sure!

KERRY: (lighting a joint) Mellow out, O'Neill. I'm just restoring the karmic balance a little. We shoot at them, they shoot at us. Who's to say what's right or wrong, n'cest pas?

O'NEILL: Permission to use my body as a human shield to defend the crew!

KERRY: Do your own thing, man.

O'NEILL races back and forth, the length of the boat, waving his arms.

O'NEILL: When I'm running this ship, things will be different!

KERRY: Damn straight -- I'll be eating foie gras with Bill Paley!

I got a million of 'em, hot cha cha cha cha! Just make the check out to "cash"; plausible deniability is everything in this business.

ANOTHER CONSERVATIVE PARTY ANIMAL. As I have observed before, the commentary pages these days are full of conservatives' reports on liberal parties that the authors frequently and (given how little they seem to enjoy them) inexplicably attend. Now, these are not just parties thrown by liberals, but parties at which attendees are apparently required to roar evidence of their affiliation every couple of minutes, as in this latest entry:

So we hold our glasses of mediocre Chardonnay, pick at little watercress, bread-enveloped triangles, while I long for herring filets and vodka. I mean, we're all Jewish, for God's sake!

Then our host chants the liberal mantra: "Bush has alienated us from the rest of the world. Europe hates us. The Muslims hate us. He's taking us into an abyss!"

The crowd raises their goblets, yelling "Kill Bush."

Help me out here, guys: Who throws these parties? At most of the parties I attend, guests drink not mediocre Chardonnay, but cheap beer, and talk about all sorts of stuff before politics. As these parties are in New York City, most of us don't like Bush, but the subject is little discussed, and I can't recall any occasion on which a host has asked us to raise our glasses in an oath of assassination (though my memory of some of these soirees is admittedly a bit hazy).

The author claims the social indoctrination sessions he describes (and was presumably forced to attend as some sort of community service) took place in Westport -- which he renders "Leftport," several times, which notion of humor may hint at the real reason for his social failures. But get this: he expects to solve that problem by moving from Leftport -- to New York City! Specifically the Meatpacking District. One imagines him, tie flipped over his shoulder, attempting to order a decent Chardonnay at Hogs & Heifers, or pushing Bush literature on the crowd at Florent.

Lotsa luck, buddy.

SEMPER FI. You can tell Tacitus is angry about our apparent pullback from Fallujah: he calls Bush a "good liberal." (Scroll down to "The End." I don't get this no-permalink thing, but it probably has to do with National Security.)

I understand T's fury at the situation, given that he has been supporting the occupation in good faith. Also, alas, I understand his use of "liberal" as a swear-word.

They're rather quiet about it at The Corner. Rich Lowry allows as how the pullback is a bad thing, but also avails an anonymous email that offers an "optimistic" reading of the event: it makes the June 30 handoff more viable. Later Jonah Goldberg waxes indignant that CBS "chose to soften and censor the images of the Fallujah massacre." The most serious complaints at NRO come from Mac Owens -- who, like Tacitus, has done his time in the Armed Services.

General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters, of course, saw the writing on the wall early and was displeased by it. Some days later, as is his pattern, he did a long tribute to America's fighting men and women, asking his readers to call for more troops, even allowing generously that "it doesn't matter whether you're a Democrat or Republican."

Every community has its little constituencies, and former servicemembers constitute an interesting sub-section of the conservative choral society. They are utilized for much the same reason many liberal commentators haul out John Kerry's war record -- the use of actual combatants, active or not, adds ballast to war arguments. Naturally the servicemembers evince a compelling, personal, and sometimes prickly reaction to events in Iraq, but there are not enough of them in the commentariat to the override the "All is Well" message that Bush supporters endeavor to present to the world, even when they are of a mind to do so. Tactitus goes off the reservation sometimes, but he's not working for a major media outlet.

Despite their grumbling, I imagine the former combatants will continue to (to coin a phrase) soldier on in the great cause of defeating Democrats. That's their mission, and they aren't the sort to stand down when the going gets tough. For them, it appears, journalism is war by other means. And despite their occasional grumbles, it is something to observe their discipline under fire.

SHORTER JIM LILEKS: After we kick their ass, American liberals will hook up with Al Qaeda. And it's all my fault because I wasn't right-wing in college, for which crime I now atone by cooking up this psychotic fantasy.

CF. LAST POST. In case you were wondering whether I meant that only Christians are addicted to self-referential insularity, here's Hugh Hewitt, fave of right-wing blowhards, suggesting that new LA Times editorial page editor Michael Kinsley (!) hire or retain, in order, Roger L. Simon, Patt Morrison, Susan Estrich, Laura Ingrahm, Max Boot, Jim Lileks, and Mickey Kaus -- wingnuts all, except Morrison (whom Hewitt proposes to "keep LA's hard left happy") and the feeble Estrich.

"I haven't nominated any African-Americans or Latinos or Asian-Americans," says Hewitt, "but I know the folks Janet has pressed into service over the years just don't have the stuff to attract a crowd."

Then Hewitt says of Kinsley's new bailiwick, "It is so irrelevant that few even bother to complain anymore, or even to read it because it just doesn't matter."

See what I mean?

ELOQUENCE. I've been listening for the three hundredth time or so to Dylan's Slow Train Coming. One might imagine that, with all my harsh words for Jesus freaks, I wouldn't be into it at all. Not so. I have contempt for the idiotic, true, and a lot of Christer blather is worse than idiotic, incoherent, derivative, and absurd, however deeply it is felt.

But I appreciate anything eloquent, and old Bob is crystal clear and compelling in these songs. "How long can you falsify and deny what you feel?" he sings, and I have to listen and nod. "Sheiks walking around like kings," he roars, "wearing gold watches and nose rings/deciding America's future from Amsterdam and Paris," and I have to hear that, too, despite my predilections, so eloquently he does put it.

Dylan has been a star for about forty years. He knows something.

Part of what he knows, being an astute pop critic as well as a pop producer, is that he must help unreceptive listeners like me, too, not just converts, by defusing the political crud that has accrued to much modern J-freak talk ("Karl Marx has got you by the throat, and Henry Kissinger has got you tied into knots"). Note that he isn't betraying his cause here -- only a Ned Flanders would imagine that. He's just hunting where the ducks are. You win followers not by telling them how wrong they are, but how right they might be.

This leads me to one of my longtime semi-guilty pleasures, Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" at the Chicago Sun-Times site.

For a long time I considered Ebert, as Matt Groening did in his "Life in Hell" series, a "TV clown" with "nice sweaters." But Ebert has put in hard work over many years (did you know he co-wrote "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" and "The Great Rock-and-Roll Swindle"?). And, unlike some longtime filmdom hangers-on, such as Rex Reed, Ebert has been serious about what he's doing throughout, and whatever you think about his contemporaneous reviews, his devotion to the art of film is obvious in these long essays on those movies that have excited his deepest interest.

Despite his exalted position as the go-to guy for late night talk show hosts seeking a telegenic movie reviewer, Ebert's "Great Movies" list is pretty idiosyncratic. There are expected choices (Citizen Kane, Some Like It Hot, The Searchers), some more adventuresome ones (JFK, Stroszek, Fall of the House of Usher), and some that seem either premature or plain crack-brained to me (Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Body Heat). But Ebert makes a passionate and (that word again) eloquent case for each. He is as diligent about unearthing, unveiling, and explicating what he considers the sublimnities of Alien as of The Bicycle Thief.

Look at some of what he offers in defense of a film I have always liked but never remotely considered "great," Patton:

Scott's performance is not one-level but portrays a many-layered man who desires to appear one-level. Instead of adding tiresome behavioral touches, he allows us small glimpses of what may be going on inside. Having made a fetish of bravery, he obtains a dog that is terrified most of the time, and affectionately drags the cowardly beast wherever he goes...

The most famous scene is the first one, Patton mounting a stage to address his troops from in front of an American flag that fills the huge 70-mm screen. His speech is unapologetically bloodthirsty ("We will cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks"). His uniform and decorations, ribbons and medals, jodhpurs and riding boots and swagger stick fall just a hair short of what Groucho Marx might have worn. Scott's great nose could be the beak of an American Eagle. The closing shot is the other side of the coin, a graying and lonely old man, walking his dog. Even then, we suspect, Patton is acting. But does he know it?

Here Ebert does what critics from the time of Dryden has been supposed to do but only rarely achieve: make us re-examine something with which we have supposed ourselves familiar, to see the deep, deliberate craft and (sometimes) genius of which our pleasure is built. And that makes us more receptive to whatever new pleasures to which he might alert us

I know Ebert is well-publicized, but I have to believe that his staying power as America's favorite film critic is primarily sustained by his actual effort at his real job.

To get back to Christianity again, I have heard many of its advocates refer to Chesterton, for example, as a kind of private totem, not as a subject or even an object that those beyond their own little club might appreciate. I have read Chesterton's Father Brown stories with great pleasure and, as a former Catholic who is still attracted to Christian morality, I should think these guys would want to engage me, either as an apt target for conversion or as a good and intelligent person with whom to discuss the subject. Yet most of what I see from them is insular, self-directed back-patting. They gather in self-selected communities like Crosswalk, where they talk about coverting overseas Muslims while consigning their fellow citizens to hell.

This might also serve as a lesson to Democrats -- one that they are better situated to avail, given their widespread support and genuine connection with possible constituents. The job, as I see it, is not to "energize the base," as the repulsive modern term has it, but to explain the cause to the unconvinced. This does not, as some might think, require dumbing-down or misrepresentation, but unceasing labor at the task of making oneself clear.

This is not about spin -- this is about eloquence. If you believe what you're saying, and have an interest in communicating it to others, your task is not to sugar-coat or misdirect. Leave that wasteful, self-defeating work to the bastards you're running against. Tell the truth and, by assiduous application, make it shine. The victories, as Dylan and Ebert have shown, will come.

BLACK LIKE ME. Some quotes of the day, from an observer of the new production of A Raisin in the Sun:

Shall we, as black Americans, assimilate and become like white Americans? Can we turn back to our African roots to find the truth of our people?...

When the character based on Lorraine Hansbury breaks out in a tribal dance we didn't just laugh with delight, we hooted and hollered.

The author is Crazy Jesus Lady, who looks pretty damn white on TV and in her Wall Street Journal stipple portrait, but what do I know?

Anyway, she is justly proud to see a lot of new people -- her people, one imagines -- in a Broadway audience: "The audience was alive. It was so moving and got me kind of choked. I thought, Maybe this is like what it was like when Shakespeare wrote, 'You tell him, Romeo -- Juliet no, don't!'" (I assume she wrote "Juliet, no you didn't!" but the typesetters mistranslated, not being as fluent as she in black idiomatic speech.)

But later CJL has less fun at the show. "I was startled," she writes (or, should I say, hollas). "I turned to my friend. 'We have just witnessed a terrible cultural moment,' I said. 'Don't I know it,' he responded." The cause: audience members applauded a character's announced intention to have an abortion. Of course it's a strange reaction under the circumstances, and I would be inclined to endorse (or, should I say, give mad props to) CJL's attentiveness to the play's spirit. But it turns out it's the audience's support for abortion, not its reading of the text, that startles her, and she lashes out (or, should I say, goes off) on the "moral dullards" of whom she was previously deceived into approving just because their skin was the same color as hers.

Finally she has a request for her readers (or, should I say, for her peops):

...see this great play, and when the moment comes that the young woman announces she might end the life of the child she is carrying, that you would sit quietly and think about what that moment means. And if anyone cheers or hoots or hollers [sic], give them a look. Let them see your silence. Lead with it. Help the people around you realize: Something big is being spoken of here. And we know what it is. And it is nothing good.

Heretofore I have spoken of this woman's mad propensity for angry stares at blameless people, but I will refrain now. What do I know of the strain she's under as a black woman in this society?

FROM L.A. TO FALLUJAH. General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters continues to hold the hard line, calling for Wyatt Earp and/or Rudy Giuliani to ride into Fallujah and tame them Ayrab varmints:

If any adult touches a damaged or destroyed U.S. military vehicle, he must be shot. Start with a one-week warning period to get out the new rules. Then execute. The Iraqis playing trampoline on the hoods of our charred vehicles aren't the ones who will build a better future.

As for the juvies, send them to reformatory camps. No exceptions, even if daddy's the Sheik of Araby.

He also wants to shoot looters, natch.

This kind of thing is Peters' raw meat and blood-infused potatoes: witness his 1996 article, "Our Soldiers, Their Cities," on urban warfare:

The future of warfare lies in the streets, sewers, high-rise buildings, industrial parks, and the sprawl of houses, shacks, and shelters that form the broken cities of our world. We will fight elsewhere, but not so often, rarely as reluctantly, and never so brutally. Our recent military history is punctuated with city names -- Tuzla, Mogadishu, Los Angeles, Beirut, Panama City, Hue, Saigon, Santo Domingo -- but these encounters have been but a prologue, with the real drama still to come. [italics added]

The name "Los Angeles" pops out because General suggests training elite street-fighting units in actual American cities:

Why build that which already exists? In many of our own blighted cities, massive housing projects have become uninhabitable and industrial plants unusable. Yet they would be nearly ideal for combat-in-cities training. While we could not engage in live-fire training (even if the locals do), we could experiment and train in virtually every other regard. Development costs would be a fraction of the price of building a "city" from scratch, and city and state governments would likely compete to gain a US Army (and Marine) presence, since it would bring money, jobs, and development -- as well as a measure of social discipline.

Of course, since then Starbucks and gentrification have stolen the General's march, which may be why he is so eager to experiment in Fallujah. If he can't "discipline" American city-dwellers, for the time being he'll settle for Iraqis.

I recommend the whole 1996 article, which has many undoubtedly sound suggestions, as well as this interesting bit of speculative quartermastering: "Eventually, we may have individual-soldier tactical equipment that can differentiate between male and female body heat distributions and that will even be able to register hostility and intent from smells and sweat." I wouldn't be surprised if General Peters already had this capacity.

But there is plenty to enjoy in the General's more recent article. My favorite passage is this:

I still believe that most Iraqis want democracy -- in some adjusted form that gives them a voice in their country's affairs.

Hey, how do we get that "adjusted form" of democracy?

EXCITING NEW IDEAS. Zell Miller, favorite Democrat of people who hate Democrats, proposes that the 17th Amendment be overturned and the right to directly elect Senators removed from ordinary Joes like us. It's nothing personal, Miller assures the populace: "The individuals are not so much at fault as the rotten and decaying foundation of what is no longer a republic." (Link via Atrios.)

I guess that, considering the numerous other Constitutional Amendments that have been proposed by George W. Bush in recent years, we might consider Donald Wildmon's proposed Bill to "nullify the authority of federal courts to make judgments regarding the public display of the Ten Commandments, the National Motto and the Pledge of Allegiance" a moderate gesture, because (as his website proudly announces) "no Constitutional Amendment is needed."

That folks whose power is near absolute are so eager to expand it, even into the roots of our Government, does not amaze me, as I was not born very recently. I do worry that younger people might imagine that this is the normal way of doing things. Perhaps in the future, national party platforms will come with proposed alternate Constitutions, and a pledge to implement them. By then I expect voting will be handled much as it is on American Idol, which may speed passage of Bills, Amendments, Recalls, and Hot-or-Not plebescites.

I'd say the triumph of consumerism has been underestimated.

LIT CORNER: CRY ME A RIVER. I've been reading The Late George Apley, which I understand to be out of print. (That endears it to me, as does the fact that, in the old Modern Library edition I'm reading, the word "role" is printed with a circumflex over the o, thus: rôle.) It's a great pleasure, and makes good use of that old standby of English Lit classes, the unreliable narrator (a device which some of us, e.g. Whit Stillman, have been educated to notice).

This puts me in mind of a more recent, popular unreliable-narrator novel, The Remains of the Day. The more I read the Marquand, the more I'm convinced Ishiguro was inspired by it, though I've never heard that he admitted it.

There are a lot of things I like about Remains of the Day, not least that the author had the nerve to plant toward its end a sure-fire tear-jerking moment, which is utterly lost in the movie version. The butler Stevens has been a complete stick throughout the book, observing from a seemingly distant remove the loss of his father, his beloved Miss Kenton, and the English Empire, with a sangfroid that must seem frustratingly ridiculous to moderns (the Time review of the movie had an appropriately glib title: "I say, Jeeves, bit of a wasted life, what?").

Late in the story the aged Stevens has the opportunity to meet with the long-married Miss Kenton (now Mrs. Benn), and to at last venture to tell her, in the rain at a bus-stop, that he has been unhappy and that he notices her unhappiness as well. Mrs. Benn admits that she has sometimes thought of a better life that she might have had -- "a life I might have had with you" -- but that over the years she has learned to content herself with her lot.

Stevens then tells us:

I do not think I responded immediately, for it took me a moment or two to fully digest these words of Miss Kenton. Moreover, as you might appreciate, these words were such as to provoke a certain degree of sorrow within me. Indeed -- why should I not admit it? -- at that moment, my heart was breaking.

I remember reading that, years ago, seated in a steel chair in the sunny Worldwide Plaza near 49th Street, and bursting into helpless tears. I still sniffle a little to think of it.

And this makes me think: what art makes people cry anymore? There are a lot of old movies that can still make me cry: Broken Blossoms, City Lights, Casablanca, Young Mr. Lincoln, and (perhaps harder to understand, but still it moves me) WR: Mysteries of the Organism.

It's not just old movies, either. Dickens, contra Wilde's great crack about Little Nell, can still set me blubbering. Regard with dry eyes, if you can, the death of Jo in Bleak House. Nabakov used to read that passage out loud to his students at Cornell, and afterwards observe, "This is a lesson in style, not in participative emotion" -- a comment that would not have been necessary if the scene were not literally pathetic.

For that matter, while I feel shielded by years of experience and layers of irony from jukebox weepers like "Teen Angel," Joan Morris' version of the ancient parlor song "After the Ball" still rouses in me some absurd sorrow for the lonely maiden.

Do any new songs do that? Does any new anything do that? I can't imagine a writer of this moment in any medium trying or expecting or seeing the point in making his auditors "get out the handkerchiefs," as they used to say. I suppose some TV shows try for this effect, but I can't imagine that they achieve more than a nodding acknowledgement that what they've portrayed is "sad."

Am I wrong? Do people make "weepers" anymore? If so, what are they?

SHORTER PAT BUCHANAN: You must choose: Mel Gibson, or Satan.

ON THE SIDE OF THE ANGELS. At The Corner, Ned Flanders (under his nom de plume, Rod Dreher) reports via a friend that "there are Canadian Christians who are considering emigrating to the United States out of fear of what's going to become of them given the current trends in their homeland."

(And if they're thinking of coming to the U.S., things must be bad in the Great White North, because, as Flanders himself has reported, "our news media, through heavily biased reporting and analysis, are turning significant numbers of American voters against religious conservatives and are delegitimizing the place believers have made for themselves at the table.")

The source of the panic appears to be Bill C-250, which will add "sexual orientation" to the bases of "hate propaganda," outlawed by Canada's Criminal Code ("Every one who advocates or promotes genocide is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years").

As a member in good standing of the Inner Party, I know it will be uncontroversial among my Satan-worshipping, baby-killing, book-reading circle when I say that the whole idea of hate-speech censorship is entirely bogus, and that adding a new group to the Index is just making a bad thing worse.

There -- with one stroke, I have offered Flanders and his fellow Christers more support than has his NRO editor, Jonah "I do like censorship. I wish there was more of it" Goldberg.

And a lot of thanks I'll get for it, I'm sure

UPPING THE ANTI. Roger L. Simon rags on Kerry's evasive answers about his medals. I don't much fault guys like Simon for piling onto this, and Mrs. Kerry's Audi, and all that stuff -- it's politics, not beanbag, and Lord knows character assassination is about the strongest arrow in the Bushites' quiver right now.

But in spinning out his theme, Simon goes this bridge too far:

Now I was a war protestor then and, as I have written earlier, I have mixed feelings about those (like Kerry) who claimed to have opposed the war in those days and then went. There were plenty of ways, especially for those in Kerry's economic class, to have avoided it, even if that meant moving to Canada to preserve their ideals, which many did. So the message to me about the Senator has always been one of weakness of character (not physical bravery, which he apparently had), of moral confusion. Sure he's entitled to have changed his opinion or to have made mistakes. Everyone has. But in this era, more perilous to our country and the world than any since World War II, who wants someone in the White House who doesn't take responsibility for his actions?

You have to hand it to Simon. Heretofore the Bushites have been trying to neutralize Kerry's wartime experience by focusing on his antiwar comments after the fact. But Simon steals a march and suggests that Kerry's military service is itself proof of his "weakness of character," "moral confusion," and (my favorite) inability to "take responsibility for his actions."

I'm not suprised by much anymore, but Simon caught me off guard here. Maybe we should start handing out awards for this sort of thing.

WISHING IT INTO THE CORNFIELD. Roger Ailes (the non-evil one) points to Corrente, who succinctly addresses the tsimmis over flag-draped coffins:

So why is it OK for Bush to run a campaign ad of rescue workers taking a flag-draped coffin out of the WTC ruins, and it's not OK for our free press to run a picture of a flag-draped coffin coming back from Iraq?

Curiously (or not so curiously, if you're of a suspicious turn of mind), as these ads are making news, we have been treated to a wave of Insta-ganda about how some newspapers have mistakenly shown non-Iraq-related FDCs in their Iraq stories.

The implication would seem to be that all images of FDCs are tainted; and, in the manner of creation scientists, we may discount this seemingly hard evidence of the human cost of our Iraq adventure, and reasonably assume that the casualties did not come home to mourning friends and loved ones at all, but ascended Rapturously into heaven, giving the thumbs-up as they went.

I noted this strategy back in October 2001, when Zev Chafets bade Americans use their channel flippers as "a tool of modern warfare... that obliterates one of the enemy's main weapons with a single click" by steering sentimental viewers away from visuals of war carnage that might soften their resolve. Looks like the playbook has not been much revised since then.

MORE SILVER LININGS. The Red Sox have won a pair against the Yankees, dropping the hubriscious Bombers to 8-10. I think the Yankees will do much better down the stretch, particularly if Mussina and Contreras come around, but after what seemed like months of A-Rod promo, I confess it does my heart good to see them stumble a bit out of the gate.

We Mets fans have been through this many times: our benighted front office regularly drops a bundle on big names like Bonilla, Saberhagen, and Glavine, only to learn (or, rather, not learn) that the best teams are grown, not purchased. The Mets have about $35 million less than Steinbrenner does to spend on players, but if they had an organization like the Yankees have had over the past ten years, that wouldn't look so bad on them.

Mets fans are used to this, but Yankees fans haven't had to face it in quite some time. Longtime Pinstripe followers will bear this whiff of home truth with grace and wisdom, and if it softens the barroom bellowing of some yuppie whose fandom is, like his taste for $20 cigars, based on the notion that nothing but the best is good enough for him, well, we all have to grow up sometime.

My boys don't look too good right now, either, but their pitching is strong (even Glavine's!) and that bodes well. If it all falls to shit, we've eaten enough dirt in recent years that the taste of a little more won't crush us.

"MAN, YOU FELLAHS GOT A WORD FOR EVERYTHING." Thanks, Tbogg, for pointing out this photo funny. Laughter -- the best medicine, barring regime change.

IT'S AN ILL WIND THAT BLOWS NO ONE SOME GOOD. "There are times when I regret leaving NYC for the heartland," sniffs Cornerite Ned Flanders. "This is not one of them." He refers to two obstreperous homosexuals who performed sex acts in a Central Park tree for hours before Emergency Services coaxed them down.

The New York Post's coverage of this event is very nice:

...Firefighters set up an inflatable rescue mattress around the base of the tree, where the pair had left their clothes and a plastic bag filled with what cops called an assortment of drugs.

The Parks Department sent in two cherry-picker trucks. Emergency Service Unit cops ascended in harnesses. Police hostage negotiators recorded their demands: One Diet Vanilla Pepsi...

Both were heard shouting that they have AIDS and that their parents disapproved of them. Both remained uncooperative -- except, and apparently to an extreme, with each other. Even the Pepsi bottle was flung back down.

The two finally boughed out of their misadventure at around 8:30 p.m.

"We thought it was an ecological statement for Earth Day, but it's just transvestites," said Brian Mallard, 26, of Long Island City.

Me, I got pure delight from this story. And I'm delighted as well that events such as this (and the strain, apparently, of "riding the NYC subway daily, and having to live with fear and loathing of the violent, profane and altogether anti-social teenagers who make public spaces here their playpens") keep the annoying Flanders out of town. We have too many rubes in this burg as it is.

In fact, from August 30 to September 2, we will have way too many of them. Perhaps at that time we citizens of Sodom should gather for a massive, public, drug- and Diet Vanilla Pepsi-fueled orgy, and purge the place of these weenies for good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION. I didn't post at all yesterday, partly because the violence in Iraq and Saudi Arabia dispirited me. 68 dead in Basra, four dead in Riyadh, hundreds wounded... it really put me off my feed.

Such atrocities seem to have the opposite effect on Mark Steyn, currently represented by a column called "Mideast Instability? Bring It On":

... The fetishization of stability was a big part of the problem. Falling for the Moussa line would give us another 25 years of the ayatollahs... Washington apparently reached the same conclusion -- that anything was better than the status quo. Or, as Thomas Friedman put it in The New York Times this weekend, "President Bush has stepped in and thrown the whole frozen Middle East chessboard up in the air"...

...If all else fails, then a modified Sam Goldwyn philosophy will do: I'm sick of the old despots, bring me some new despots...

...In Iraq, Libya, Iran, Syria, and elsewhere, the old Middle East is dying, and what replaces it can only be better.

I try to downplay the personal/political axis that animates so much of our discourse these days, but maybe there is a tempermental difference between liberals and conservatives.

ABUSING THE INFOSLAVES. The Cornerites have been beating up librarians and their protective association for opposing the Patriot Act. At one point Jonah Goldberg hauls out one of The Corner's patented anonymous letters, this one purported to be from an actual librarian:

...The dirty secret that no ones wants to own up to about this profession is that it really isn't a profession at all, certainly not in the way lawyers or doctors or engineers use the term. It's more like a trade that any intelligent 20 year old could be trained to do in 6 months... The leftists at the ALA just can't stand that fact that some right wing tax payer would have the gall to object to his or her tax dollars being used to purchase books that they object to (Heather Has Two Daddies, etc.). What they really object to of course is having someone question their "professional" judgment...

One wonders if this is a working librarian speaking. In any case, I'm not sure Goldberg, were he thinking (and what are the odds), would have been so eager to take us down this road.

All of us not suffering from gargantuan self-hatred have some notion that our work is useful, else how could we stand it day after day? (I drink, but that's no recommendation.) Generally speaking, those who are least well-paid (e.g., teachers, soldiers, librarians) are partially recompensed for their poverty with praise for their value to society. If we tell our low-wage info workers that they're just a lot of crybabies who could be easily replaced by high-school graduates, and that their ALA and their MLA and all that is just a bunch of bullshit, what response should we expect? "By God, you're right -- accept my apology and cut my pay"? Or more resentment, a more deeply wounding sense of injustice, and much more resistance all along the line?

I mean, look what such heapings of abuse have done to Goldberg and his brethren. They grow more belligerent and tiresome with each post. Though this may simply be the result of declining mental powers, or of the increasingly stale air in their bunker, I think it may be that some of us have wounded their pride. Maybe if we treated them, and all aggrieved parties, with more kindness, our frail polity might get a chance to heal.

You go first.

ONE OF 'EM LIKES TO PUSH A PLOW/THE OTHER LIKES TO MILK A COW/BUT THAT STILL AIN'T NO REASON THEY CAN'T BE FRIENDS. Here's another thread at Kevin Drum's site about the difference between liberals and conservatives, a theme which increasingly resembles a Jeff Foxworthy routine:

So what we're left with is little more than conservatives who are appalled with liberalism and liberals who are appalled by conservatism. There's really not much of a vision on either side, unless you consider tearing down the last 60 years of social progress a vision.

Well, actually, I think that is the vision... But then, I'm a liberal and by this philosophy I must despise conservatives reflexively. Sigh. You can't win.

I do believe our discourse is brackish, and it does make sense to observe, as one commentor did, that "It is easy to find that core values [for both camps] are remarkably similar: desire for a good life, friends, viable income to support a family, and a place in community." But as long as each side suspects the other of trying to take those things away from it, we're going to have ugly fights. That most of them don't rise to the level of reasoned argument doesn't mean that they all proceed from unreason. It just means that our schools suck and that we are lazy in the brains.

BTW, at the same forum, one of my old bugbears (the idea, not the person) comes up:

I like my liberal friends, but they are most uncurious and not inclined to explore other views.

In the interests of harmony, I will only wonder whether, not assert that, it is a central tenet of conservativism that you can have a healthy relationship with someone you don't respect.