The man in the pillory at the Royal Exchange is standing on tiptoe. It is not a position he will be able to maintain for long, but for the moment it eases his discomfort as his neck is wedged into the "wooden ruff" and his arms are twisted at an unnatural angle into the holes at either side of his head. He is aware of the excitement of the heaving crowd before him, of those jostling for a position at the front, but he keeps his eyes shut tight. Any second now and the mob will release their arsenal of filth and brickbats as thick and fast as hail at his defenseless body... Involuntarily he cringes against the imagined stones injuring his face and head, damaging his eyesight, pounding his legs and the small of his back. There is a dreadful moment of pause. Something soft brushes his cheek. It is as if warm snow is descending upon him. He dares to open his eyes a fraction, then opens them fully in amazement. The Londoners are pelting him with flowers.The man in the pillory is Daniel Defoe, who had been sentenced for publishing a satirical pamphlet called The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, which had made some harshly intolerant churchmen look foolish. Defoe would go on to father the English novel with Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders.
Tuesday, June 08, 2004
THIS IS JUST NICE. From 1700: Scenes from London Life by Maureen Waller:
IRISH WAKE. Dignified as the funerary proceedings (and the posthumous ass-licking by the Liberal Media) have been, I say there's no event, including the death of a President, that cannot be rendered hilarious by National Review Online.
Jonah Goldberg, who at any given time seems 2/3 of the way through somebody's Irish wake, responds to claims that Clinton was more popular than Reagan with this: "...the fact that Clinton's numbers were so high is a testament to the fact that Clinton desired to be popular more than he desired to be effective" (italics his).
In other words, Clinton's popularity is due to a character defect -- just like everything else about him! In support of his absurd idea, Goldberg says Clinton did only "a few bold or semi-bold things." He doesn't mention gays in the military or national health care, which is odd, number one, because it's a spectacularly stupid omission, and number two, because a few years ago Goldberg was gloating that these two Clinton policy initiatives "largely created the Republican Juggernaut in 1994."
For pure laffs, though, this D'Souza memoir (via KJL) of a meeting between Reagan and Mother Teresa is the best I've heard all mourning:
Jonah Goldberg, who at any given time seems 2/3 of the way through somebody's Irish wake, responds to claims that Clinton was more popular than Reagan with this: "...the fact that Clinton's numbers were so high is a testament to the fact that Clinton desired to be popular more than he desired to be effective" (italics his).
In other words, Clinton's popularity is due to a character defect -- just like everything else about him! In support of his absurd idea, Goldberg says Clinton did only "a few bold or semi-bold things." He doesn't mention gays in the military or national health care, which is odd, number one, because it's a spectacularly stupid omission, and number two, because a few years ago Goldberg was gloating that these two Clinton policy initiatives "largely created the Republican Juggernaut in 1994."
For pure laffs, though, this D'Souza memoir (via KJL) of a meeting between Reagan and Mother Teresa is the best I've heard all mourning:
He was convinced when he returned from the hospital that he had a limited amount of time to achieve his ambitious agenda. Yet his goals were not only political but also personal. With Cardinal Cooke, who came to visit him, Reagan struck a spiritual note: "I have decided that whatever time I have left is for Him." The late Mother Teresa, who visited the White House that June, told Reagan, "You have suffered the passion of the cross and have received grace. There is a purpose to this. Because of your suffering and pain you will now understand the suffering and pain of the world. This has happened to you at this time because your country and the world needs you." Reagan was speechless...Well, who wouldn't be?
Monday, June 07, 2004
THE NICE OLD MAN WHO LOOTED OUR TREASURY. In the late 1970s I lived in the East Village and worked as a busboy. I made less than ten thousand dollars a year, but that wasn't so bad because I was getting food stamps, and my rent was only $125 a month. When I had health problems, I went to the public clinics -- $5 got me in the door.
Envious? You should be. Not of my life, of course -- I wouldn't wish that nightmare on anyone. No, you should envy America as it was for a little while, after the Great War and before Reagan.
Because back then, we all got a little more slack. One did not have to work day and night to break even. There were lots of people who kept small families in modest homes on a single income, believe it or not. The idea that the Mom and Pop of a family would both be working and still have money trouble -- sometimes bad money trouble -- was absurd.
If you stumbled, the government would help you up -- after all, that's what we pay taxes for (as people used to say quite a lot, back when they were in fact getting something from their taxes besides foreign wars). Easy access to benefits meant not only that you didn't have to starve, but also that you didn't have to worry too much. Life was good.
That was the post-war West. Then Reagan came in, and the slack got considerably taken up.
Many of us got some tax relief -- though ordinary earners got less of this (and had some of it taken back by other means) than the more wealthy, who cleaned up. Entitlements petered out, and public service agencies were replaced by your dwindling savings account and the credit card companies -- just like welfare, except you have to pay it back at 26% interest! Our current leaders may not like the resulting, massive personal bankruptcy rate, but at least (I imagine them laughing to themselves), they don't have to pay for it.
In the Reagan era you were hooted off the carpet if you sought money for milk and bread -- but you had much better luck if you had a business plan. Entrepreneurs were lionized for their grit and determination, even if they bent the rules a little (this thinking seems since then to have developed into a full-fledged alterative culture, of which the Enron generation represents the highest stage of development). Entrepreneurs became the new avatars of American individualism, and people talked seriously of electing boardroom clowns like Lew Lehrman and Donald Trump to high office.
All this was sluiced and greased by an enormous hemorrhage of public funds. This now-chronic superdebt, which only abated under Clinton and is of course being run up again, necessitates drastic actions just to keep us out of the global poor house. So we sell an increasingly large chunk of our debt to foreign speculators. And we stress productivity -- the mantra of the age, the leading indicator of leading indicators for Reaganite economists. We work harder and harder every year to maintain this "economy" -- which word was once a plain descriptive term for a large abstraction, but is now apparently the name of some cruel bitch-goddess that must be served and offered sacrifice.
Reagan did that. With a smile and a shoeshine he turned off the spigots of slack. Today very few of us head home when we hear the five o'clock whistle; either overtime is semi-mandatory for us, or we don't have a job. DVD players are cheap, but milk costs $4 a gallon. We worship money and success, yet prate about values. All this is his legacy. You can thank him for it if you like.
Envious? You should be. Not of my life, of course -- I wouldn't wish that nightmare on anyone. No, you should envy America as it was for a little while, after the Great War and before Reagan.
Because back then, we all got a little more slack. One did not have to work day and night to break even. There were lots of people who kept small families in modest homes on a single income, believe it or not. The idea that the Mom and Pop of a family would both be working and still have money trouble -- sometimes bad money trouble -- was absurd.
If you stumbled, the government would help you up -- after all, that's what we pay taxes for (as people used to say quite a lot, back when they were in fact getting something from their taxes besides foreign wars). Easy access to benefits meant not only that you didn't have to starve, but also that you didn't have to worry too much. Life was good.
That was the post-war West. Then Reagan came in, and the slack got considerably taken up.
Many of us got some tax relief -- though ordinary earners got less of this (and had some of it taken back by other means) than the more wealthy, who cleaned up. Entitlements petered out, and public service agencies were replaced by your dwindling savings account and the credit card companies -- just like welfare, except you have to pay it back at 26% interest! Our current leaders may not like the resulting, massive personal bankruptcy rate, but at least (I imagine them laughing to themselves), they don't have to pay for it.
In the Reagan era you were hooted off the carpet if you sought money for milk and bread -- but you had much better luck if you had a business plan. Entrepreneurs were lionized for their grit and determination, even if they bent the rules a little (this thinking seems since then to have developed into a full-fledged alterative culture, of which the Enron generation represents the highest stage of development). Entrepreneurs became the new avatars of American individualism, and people talked seriously of electing boardroom clowns like Lew Lehrman and Donald Trump to high office.
All this was sluiced and greased by an enormous hemorrhage of public funds. This now-chronic superdebt, which only abated under Clinton and is of course being run up again, necessitates drastic actions just to keep us out of the global poor house. So we sell an increasingly large chunk of our debt to foreign speculators. And we stress productivity -- the mantra of the age, the leading indicator of leading indicators for Reaganite economists. We work harder and harder every year to maintain this "economy" -- which word was once a plain descriptive term for a large abstraction, but is now apparently the name of some cruel bitch-goddess that must be served and offered sacrifice.
Reagan did that. With a smile and a shoeshine he turned off the spigots of slack. Today very few of us head home when we hear the five o'clock whistle; either overtime is semi-mandatory for us, or we don't have a job. DVD players are cheap, but milk costs $4 a gallon. We worship money and success, yet prate about values. All this is his legacy. You can thank him for it if you like.
Sunday, June 06, 2004
A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING THAT WAS ACTUALLY FUN. Awards shows are one of my weaknesses, but I often miss the Tonys. I go to the theatre so rarely that I don’t know what’s at stake, and I figure if I wanted to feel left out I’d go to a family reunion. This year I’ve been watching, though, and it’s been a pleasure. Hugh Jackman is an adroit and personable host -- he even high-kicked with the Rockettes, and made a comical show of being winded from it. The pace is brisk, even the winners (alternately weepy and hysterical) keep it up. The speeches are more articulate and often surprising, as when Bryan F. O’Byrne turned his into an ad for his show. But the whole thing was great advertising for theatre in general. The production numbers were fun. There was even a Roger Miller song! (And a few of the usual award-show howlers: LL Cool J brought out Carol Channing, and in the audience theatre newbie Sean Combs stared at her like he didn't know who she was.) What a pleasure to watch a special event that really was.
Saturday, June 05, 2004
COME BACK TO THE HUSTINGS, AL HONEY! It has been my pleasure, nay, my glee, to vote for the Reverend Al Sharpton every time he appears in a Democratic primary. But now (via Wonkette) I fear he may have gone Hollywood on us:
When I first heard the news I'd hoped the Rev would be doing economic commentary along the lines of his magnificently muddled response to Peter Jennings' question about the Federal Reserve in a Democratic debate earlier this year. He will be engaging in his new role, I'm sure. But we really need him up there at the various lecterns of electoral pretense, speaking gibberish to power. The grim pleasures afforded by our less overtly buffoonish candidates make too thin a gruel without him.
Let us hope the Reverend imagines this a springboard from which to launch a Mayoral run. (I'm already pledged to Freddy Ferrer, but I could be persuaded.)
Reverend Al Sharpton will join CNBC's political team of contributors and commentators covering the upcoming Democratic and Republican National Conventions, it was announced today by Cheryl Gould, Vice President, CNBC and supervisor of CNBC's political coverage. In this role, Sharpton will share his insights and perspectives on "Capital Report" (T-F, 7-8 p.m. ET), "Dennis Miller" (M-F, 9-10 ET/PT) and "McEnroe" (debuting Wednesday, July 7 at 10 p.m. ET, airing M-F, 10-11 p.m. ET/PT) as well as other CNBC weekend programming."McEnroe"?
"Having run for the Democratic nomination, Reverend Sharpton brings to our viewers an insider's perspective on Presidential politics," said Gould.
When I first heard the news I'd hoped the Rev would be doing economic commentary along the lines of his magnificently muddled response to Peter Jennings' question about the Federal Reserve in a Democratic debate earlier this year. He will be engaging in his new role, I'm sure. But we really need him up there at the various lecterns of electoral pretense, speaking gibberish to power. The grim pleasures afforded by our less overtly buffoonish candidates make too thin a gruel without him.
Let us hope the Reverend imagines this a springboard from which to launch a Mayoral run. (I'm already pledged to Freddy Ferrer, but I could be persuaded.)
CONDITIONAL RESPONSE. Roger L. Simon (the "L" is for conservative) wonders why liberals who were so exercised about the murders committed by the Pinochet regime aren't complaining about the crimes committed by the Saddam Hussein regime.
As a credible spokesperson for the entire left, let me say that the crimes of Saddam Hussein were a very bad thing. Any disagreement, fellow traitors? Good.
The Nixon Adminstration, of course, assisted Pinochet in his bloody overthrow of the elected Allende Government and the Ford Administration was practically complicit in some of the ensuing Pinochet-era "disappearances". I don't recall anyone suggesting that we invade Chile, take over, and install a more democratic government. That would hardly make sense, since we had done so much to ensure the opposite result.
As for other points of comparison, I have a hard time keeping straight the various rationales for the Iraq invasion -- WMDs, stabilization of the region, freedom for the Iraqi people -- so I'll wait until they get that sorted out before treating it further. I will say that Simon's former comrades do show some consistency in objecting when the Government engages in foreign adventures that make no fucking sense.
As a credible spokesperson for the entire left, let me say that the crimes of Saddam Hussein were a very bad thing. Any disagreement, fellow traitors? Good.
The Nixon Adminstration, of course, assisted Pinochet in his bloody overthrow of the elected Allende Government and the Ford Administration was practically complicit in some of the ensuing Pinochet-era "disappearances". I don't recall anyone suggesting that we invade Chile, take over, and install a more democratic government. That would hardly make sense, since we had done so much to ensure the opposite result.
As for other points of comparison, I have a hard time keeping straight the various rationales for the Iraq invasion -- WMDs, stabilization of the region, freedom for the Iraqi people -- so I'll wait until they get that sorted out before treating it further. I will say that Simon's former comrades do show some consistency in objecting when the Government engages in foreign adventures that make no fucking sense.
Friday, June 04, 2004
A DOG FROM HELL. Saw the Bukowski doc, Born Into This. Rather a shambles, but worth an afficionado's while. It puts a little cement into the cracks of his life story.
Since he came into his own in middle age, Bukowski's younger days have been poorly documented, except by himself, and no one tells his own story quite straight. It was then a special pleasure to see one of his old post office colleagues, enjoying what appears to be a middle-class California retirement and sounding like a Brooklyn wiseguy out to pasture, tell how Bukowski's bad clothing, "heavy features" and thuglike bearing made him hard to get to know. He also says that the great author referred to his then-missus "in a derogatory way that men sometimes talk about women." (He notes that, when he finally met her, he had to agree that Bukowski's wife did have a fat ass. "I mean," he adds generously, "if you like 'em big...")
But the colleague agreed that Post Office, which describes events he must have witnessed, is "true to life." And another guy in the film talks about seeing an ordinary Joe, on an L.A. bus in the 60s, laughing his ass off at a Bukowski piece in Open City. (This is the hippie journal Bukowski calls "Open Pussy" in his stories about it, and it is a howl to see his byline on its mangey, off-the-pigs pages.) This made me wonder momentarily: why isn't Bukowski better known, better read? His descriptions of the struggles of men and women, and of men and men, and of the "gut-wringing machine" that endeavors to take hold of nearly everyone in this society, can't be too far out for ordinary Joes to appreciate.
But of course there are impediments: a lot of dirty words and dirty scenes, of course. And the bleakness, or what could be taken for bleakness if you don't or can't believe that happiness is mostly a fleeting, accidental, and poetic thing.
There's more archival footage of Bukowski in Born Into This than I'd ever seen before. In one of the clips he says that love is like the fog that gathers on the fields at dawn before the sun burns it off. Seen one way, this is a bleak, even morose, way to look at it. But to the poetic mind, the fog is no less beautiful for being evanescent. And, of course, it always comes back.
Since he came into his own in middle age, Bukowski's younger days have been poorly documented, except by himself, and no one tells his own story quite straight. It was then a special pleasure to see one of his old post office colleagues, enjoying what appears to be a middle-class California retirement and sounding like a Brooklyn wiseguy out to pasture, tell how Bukowski's bad clothing, "heavy features" and thuglike bearing made him hard to get to know. He also says that the great author referred to his then-missus "in a derogatory way that men sometimes talk about women." (He notes that, when he finally met her, he had to agree that Bukowski's wife did have a fat ass. "I mean," he adds generously, "if you like 'em big...")
But the colleague agreed that Post Office, which describes events he must have witnessed, is "true to life." And another guy in the film talks about seeing an ordinary Joe, on an L.A. bus in the 60s, laughing his ass off at a Bukowski piece in Open City. (This is the hippie journal Bukowski calls "Open Pussy" in his stories about it, and it is a howl to see his byline on its mangey, off-the-pigs pages.) This made me wonder momentarily: why isn't Bukowski better known, better read? His descriptions of the struggles of men and women, and of men and men, and of the "gut-wringing machine" that endeavors to take hold of nearly everyone in this society, can't be too far out for ordinary Joes to appreciate.
But of course there are impediments: a lot of dirty words and dirty scenes, of course. And the bleakness, or what could be taken for bleakness if you don't or can't believe that happiness is mostly a fleeting, accidental, and poetic thing.
There's more archival footage of Bukowski in Born Into This than I'd ever seen before. In one of the clips he says that love is like the fog that gathers on the fields at dawn before the sun burns it off. Seen one way, this is a bleak, even morose, way to look at it. But to the poetic mind, the fog is no less beautiful for being evanescent. And, of course, it always comes back.
THE NEO-CATHOLICS. I've commented before on the Catholic fetish among some right-wing operatives. I note that many of these members of the Opus Duh are converts, like Lew Lehrman, who flipped after losing the New York governorship to Mario Cuomo in 1982 (I mean "flipped" in the sense of going over; Lehrman had clearly flipped in the other sense long before that.)
Another such is Duncan Maxwell Anderson, "president of High Tor Media, Inc., a book-packaging company based in New York." Why this functionary was awarded a key spot in a Friday New York Post editorial page is a mystery known only to Murdoch, but I for one am glad of it, else I would have missed some extraordinary morsels of religious mania, of which, as a connoisseur, I can never get enough.
First, this Catholic of 15 years berates Catholic Cardinals for exhibiting unmanly compassion for Saddam Hussein. Anyone aware of the teachings of one J. Christ, Esq., might think love for even the least of our brothers is part of the deal. But Anderson, as a new Catholic -- a neo-Catholic, one might say -- has a different vision of the so-called Prince of Peace:
Another such is Duncan Maxwell Anderson, "president of High Tor Media, Inc., a book-packaging company based in New York." Why this functionary was awarded a key spot in a Friday New York Post editorial page is a mystery known only to Murdoch, but I for one am glad of it, else I would have missed some extraordinary morsels of religious mania, of which, as a connoisseur, I can never get enough.
First, this Catholic of 15 years berates Catholic Cardinals for exhibiting unmanly compassion for Saddam Hussein. Anyone aware of the teachings of one J. Christ, Esq., might think love for even the least of our brothers is part of the deal. But Anderson, as a new Catholic -- a neo-Catholic, one might say -- has a different vision of the so-called Prince of Peace:
I am a Catholic convert, baptized 15 years ago this Sunday. Growing up seeing the greeting-card Jesus — a hapless-looking, bearded man in pyjamas — I didn't "get" Christianity. What changed everything was the day I saw a 16th-century painting of Jesus after his resurrection. He had just blasted his way out of his own tomb. He extended his pierced hand to Abraham, to rescue him and the other patriarchs from Limbo and bring them home to heaven.Brecht famously joked that if the government and the people disagreed, the government should throw out the people and get a new one. Clearly the neo-Catholics think what's needed is fundamental change right at the top! A little Gibson gore, a little WWE 'tude, and we've got a Jesus for the New World Order -- one that shoots first and heals lepers later.
This Jesus was forceful, businesslike and respectful — like . . . well, like a Marine.
Thursday, June 03, 2004
A BREAK FROM THE POLITICAL CRAP TO TALK ABOUT SOMETHING REALLY IMPORTANT. From WMC-TV Memphis:
Good as Phoenix is, I don't know if he can pull it off. There's a great stillness in the middle of Cash even at his most manic, like a big stone at the bottom of a raging river. I think they maybe oughta find some half-starved retard out in the hills and have him lip-synch. And get Hans-Jurgen Syberberg to direct.
Cash was really terrible in his own film debut, "Five Minutes to Live." Anybody see his other movies?
A new movie based on the life of Johnny Cash will be filmed in Arkansas, Memphis and Nashville.All props to Joaquin, but I think they shoulda got this guy. Some years back he and D. J. Mendel, a genius with whom I used to play in Lancaster County Prison (the band, not the facility), put together this bizarre performance, in which Cucuzza alternated between unearthly cool and blazing-eyed mania, pausing between numbers to grab fistfulls of pills out of his pocket and throw them into his mouth. I think he caught some of Johnny there, in an expressionist way.
It stars Joaquin Phoenix as Cash and Tennessee native Reese Witherspoon as his wife, June Carter Cash.
The movie will chronicle Cash's life from 1955 to 1968, a period that includes his Sun recordings in Memphis and his battles with drugs and alcohol.
Good as Phoenix is, I don't know if he can pull it off. There's a great stillness in the middle of Cash even at his most manic, like a big stone at the bottom of a raging river. I think they maybe oughta find some half-starved retard out in the hills and have him lip-synch. And get Hans-Jurgen Syberberg to direct.
Cash was really terrible in his own film debut, "Five Minutes to Live." Anybody see his other movies?
OUT FOR A SMOKE. Crazy Jesus Lady is freeform today -- young people are stupid liberals, Europeans should bend the knee to Rome, etc. -- but at one point in her unmoored ravings, she lights on the topic of smoking:
And it has never occurred to me, nor to anyone I know for that matter, that the smoke-stopping Nannyism of, say, Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg had anything to do with the Rights of Man and the Third International. Some granola types might egregiously wince and fan their faces when I light up. I just assume they're crunchy conservatives.
Politicians make up a tiny percentage of the population. I don't know how many Democratic officeholders back smoking bans and I'm only interested enough to get the names of the ones I can help vote out of office. I do know that none of the Lefty friends with whom I spend the evenings aborting developed fetuses and drinking toasts to the Devil supports smoking bans. Not one.
Oh, and contrary to another deluded generalization popular in your tribe, we also don't believe in restricting ourselves or anyone else to "politically correct" language, either. You stupid fucking cunt.
...as we all know, the banners of cigarettes are on and of the left, and the resisters of the banners are on the right... Why did the left change its stance on what it calls personal freedom regarding cigarettes and cigars? What was the logic? And please, if you are on the left, would you answer this question for me?Listen, Crazy Jesus Lady: I'm as Left as they come. I'm talking entrails-of-the-last-priest Left. And I smoke. I'm down from a pack to half a pack a day, with major regressions. One day I'll quit, either by ceasing to smoke or by dying. Meantime I smoke when I write, after meals, when I'm waiting for a bus, between takes -- oh, the list is endless.
And it has never occurred to me, nor to anyone I know for that matter, that the smoke-stopping Nannyism of, say, Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg had anything to do with the Rights of Man and the Third International. Some granola types might egregiously wince and fan their faces when I light up. I just assume they're crunchy conservatives.
Politicians make up a tiny percentage of the population. I don't know how many Democratic officeholders back smoking bans and I'm only interested enough to get the names of the ones I can help vote out of office. I do know that none of the Lefty friends with whom I spend the evenings aborting developed fetuses and drinking toasts to the Devil supports smoking bans. Not one.
Oh, and contrary to another deluded generalization popular in your tribe, we also don't believe in restricting ourselves or anyone else to "politically correct" language, either. You stupid fucking cunt.
MORNING JOG AROUND NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE. Andrew Leigh interviews Roger Simon, and uncovers this pause-giving news: "At present [Simon is] also co-writing a screenplay with Michael Ledeen, a foreign-policy expert and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who is also an NRO regular. Simon is keeping the project close to his vest, and will say only that it is a thriller related to the war on terror." I hear the Left is retaliating with a action picture co-scripted by John Kenneth Galbraith and Spike Jonez.
Cathy Siepp provides her own blog seminar with more coverage than these things usually get. Either no one said anything interesting, or she doesn't take very good notes (I'm guessing both). Quote of the day: Mickey Kaus says, "If I'm on the left, the left is in big trouble." Suddenly I'm full of hope for the 2004 elections.
Of course, wander into The Corner and it's the usual monkey-cage-at-underfunded-zoo scene. Stung by a report that Bush is losing the "country folk," Jonah Goldberg races in with fresh anonymous letters of support, one of which actually begins with "I reckon"! I wonder which of them sent it -- Jeb, Jethro, or Granny? (Actually I think it was concocted by a committee of hacks hired by Milburn Drysdale.)
Ah. A morning visit to these guys is as bracing as a tour of Bedlam.
Cathy Siepp provides her own blog seminar with more coverage than these things usually get. Either no one said anything interesting, or she doesn't take very good notes (I'm guessing both). Quote of the day: Mickey Kaus says, "If I'm on the left, the left is in big trouble." Suddenly I'm full of hope for the 2004 elections.
Of course, wander into The Corner and it's the usual monkey-cage-at-underfunded-zoo scene. Stung by a report that Bush is losing the "country folk," Jonah Goldberg races in with fresh anonymous letters of support, one of which actually begins with "I reckon"! I wonder which of them sent it -- Jeb, Jethro, or Granny? (Actually I think it was concocted by a committee of hacks hired by Milburn Drysdale.)
Ah. A morning visit to these guys is as bracing as a tour of Bedlam.
Wednesday, June 02, 2004
WHITE MAN'S BURDEN #383,966. Recently the President said that "people whose skins are a different color than white can self-govern." A noble sentiment. Does General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters disagree, I wonder, or does he just have a slightly different interpretation?
"The time will come for us to leave Iraq," says the General, "But it's not here yet." Well, maybe we can hire a sitter.
At great expense, we put an entire country into rehab. While the Kurds are already clean and sober, if Iraq's Arabs choose to backslide into the regional addiction to corrupt governance, it's a lick on them, not on us...I guess it could be said that the General, like the President, does believe the Iraqis can govern themselves, since he speaks of their coming republic with hope. But what sort of a government may we expect from the disoriented, alcoholic children Peters portrays? Will it be like Lord of the Flies? Over the Edge? Animal House? Full House?
...the Iraqis don't yet know how they'll view our efforts in the end -- it will take them years to sort out their emotions and conclusions...
Iraqis have experienced revolutionary, disorienting change... Still confused and frightened, they don't quite know how they feel about themselves, our troops or their country's future...
Baghdad will soon have its own nascent government -- and it's not necessarily a bad thing that we didn't get our way in choosing its leaders. We're in danger of becoming an overly protective parent. We need to let the kid ride the damned bike and fall down a couple of times.
"The time will come for us to leave Iraq," says the General, "But it's not here yet." Well, maybe we can hire a sitter.
Tuesday, June 01, 2004
DEFINING RELEVANCY DOWN. Dean Esmay was pissed that some clown depicted U.S. soldiers as Nazis, so he showed an odd little cartoon depicting an anti-war protestor running away after stabbing a U.S. serviceman in the back. Some good people have found this a bit much. Esmay, being a reasonable, moderate fellows, responds with insults:
As we get closer to the election I expect this threshold will drop even more. Get ready for it: "If you think Jesus doesn't speak through George W. Bush, you are beneath contempt." "It is morally objectionable to propose a national health-care policy." "How dare you come here to this little citadel of freedom, this polling booth, and stab our troops in the back by attempting to vote for John Kerry!"
Actually I think we're there already.
if you think our troops are Nazis, baby-killers, terrorists, etc. you're an anti-American jerk who's stabbing our troops in the back by emboldening our enemies and demoralizing our people.Later, in comments, Esmay lowers his threshold of contempt:
I don't think we went to war based on lies, and I think you have to be a pretty hateful person to think we did.I knew that "Bush=Hitler" people were considered beyond the pale by right-wing -- excuse me, moderate types. But now, it seems, doubting Bush's veracity in the Iraq run-up makes one "hateful" as well.
As we get closer to the election I expect this threshold will drop even more. Get ready for it: "If you think Jesus doesn't speak through George W. Bush, you are beneath contempt." "It is morally objectionable to propose a national health-care policy." "How dare you come here to this little citadel of freedom, this polling booth, and stab our troops in the back by attempting to vote for John Kerry!"
Actually I think we're there already.
JESUS FREAK. Julia/Sisyphus Shrugged directs our attention to Andrew Sullivan's NYT review of the new Tony Hendra book. She has already called bullshit on Sullivan's bizarre notion of sexual guilt (a 14-year-old boy is seduced by a grown woman, and Sullivan blames the lad), but being a partisan hack I was more entranced by this bit:
How did a man known for left-wing screeds and biting satire come to write a book that -- I'm not exaggerating -- belongs in the first tier of spiritual memoirs ever written?Yeah, how the hell did a liberal (with a sense of humor, no less) come within waving distance of the One True God? I mean, it's tough enough for us who are without sin and perpetually casting the first stone.
COYOTE INSURANCE. Says Lileks: "Yesterday marked the third Memorial Day since 9/11 to pass without a terrorist attack on America. Spin the war however you like; that has to count for something."
You know that old gag, right? This sharper comes in and demands money. "What for?" asks the mark. "Protection against coyotes," says the sharper. "Are you crazy? There's not a coyote for miles around here!" says the mark. "See what a good job I'm doing?" says the sharper, holding his hands out, aaaannnd... scene.
Maybe the Iraq War has kept Tony Danza from doing another TV series. That alone might swing me toward Bush.
I mean that in an unserious, Michael Totten way, of course. As you all know, I hate this fucking country and want to see it defeated by militant Islam, which totally rocks. That's why I'm voting for John Kerry: I look forward to the moment at the Inauguration when he says, "So help me God," and suddenly a plane smashes into the Washington Monument and the Democratic members of Congress whip off their false heads and reveal themselves as hairy, dark-skinned, turbaned terrorists, gibbering "Allah Akbar" and throwing anthrax around like Rip Taylor.
If the war in Iraq has, by some mysterious mechanism, protected us from terrorist attack, maybe a war against Syria will save us from high gas prices, outsourcing jobs, global warming, Mr. Tooth Decay, etc. What the hell, it's worth a shot, right?
Also, Lileks is delighted that store clerks in a Minneapolis Gap recognized him as a writer. They "had been whispering about something there being a writer upstairs," he heard. Don't sweat it, Jimbo -- you should hear them when there's a black man in the store.
You know that old gag, right? This sharper comes in and demands money. "What for?" asks the mark. "Protection against coyotes," says the sharper. "Are you crazy? There's not a coyote for miles around here!" says the mark. "See what a good job I'm doing?" says the sharper, holding his hands out, aaaannnd... scene.
Maybe the Iraq War has kept Tony Danza from doing another TV series. That alone might swing me toward Bush.
I mean that in an unserious, Michael Totten way, of course. As you all know, I hate this fucking country and want to see it defeated by militant Islam, which totally rocks. That's why I'm voting for John Kerry: I look forward to the moment at the Inauguration when he says, "So help me God," and suddenly a plane smashes into the Washington Monument and the Democratic members of Congress whip off their false heads and reveal themselves as hairy, dark-skinned, turbaned terrorists, gibbering "Allah Akbar" and throwing anthrax around like Rip Taylor.
If the war in Iraq has, by some mysterious mechanism, protected us from terrorist attack, maybe a war against Syria will save us from high gas prices, outsourcing jobs, global warming, Mr. Tooth Decay, etc. What the hell, it's worth a shot, right?
Also, Lileks is delighted that store clerks in a Minneapolis Gap recognized him as a writer. They "had been whispering about something there being a writer upstairs," he heard. Don't sweat it, Jimbo -- you should hear them when there's a black man in the store.
IMAGINARY FRIENDS. You have to give credit to alleged centrist Michael Totten. He is a much cannier Bush operative than those full-throated ravers who have no need or desire for protective coloration. Take his recent attack on Pat Buchanan, who decries the allegedly feminist ideas he thinks the Bushies are trying to impose on devoutly Muslim Middle Easterners.
Pitchfork Pat is clearly nuts, railing against the promulgation of the "60s revolution that devout Christians, Jews, and Muslims have been resisting for years." But he happens to use the word "imperial" in his anti-sex rant. Totten grabs this and uses it as a stick to beat the Left:
What? You say Totten was using the term in a very different sense? What are you, some kind of moral relativist?
When you get tired of this, you can go see Tacitus (scroll to May 30) pretending he was open to a Kerry Presidency until he learned that the Senator from Taxachusetts didn’t think a preemptive Israeli strike on Iran was a good idea.
I have enough fake friends in real life without the internet variety.
Pitchfork Pat is clearly nuts, railing against the promulgation of the "60s revolution that devout Christians, Jews, and Muslims have been resisting for years." But he happens to use the word "imperial" in his anti-sex rant. Totten grabs this and uses it as a stick to beat the Left:
Take out the word "godly" and Pat Buchanan sounds like a tin-foil hat leftist… He actually used the language of the left to say people like me are possessed by the devil… No one does better than Pat Buchanan in fusing the worst of both into a unifying and idiotic morass.I think there are a few liberals in my audience. Who here supports Pat Buchanan? Who here has ever supported Pat Buchanan? I didn’t think so. So how are we mobbed up with him? The use of the word "imperial"? Here’s Totten in a previous incarnation: "Syria should be a member of the Axis of Evil. It is, after all, an imperial Arab Nazi terrorist state."
What? You say Totten was using the term in a very different sense? What are you, some kind of moral relativist?
When you get tired of this, you can go see Tacitus (scroll to May 30) pretending he was open to a Kerry Presidency until he learned that the Senator from Taxachusetts didn’t think a preemptive Israeli strike on Iran was a good idea.
I have enough fake friends in real life without the internet variety.
Monday, May 31, 2004
MEMORIAL. I know you all think of me as a hardened New York wise guy, and I love you for it, but I have my sentimental side, and so attended a Memorial Day parade, not in the big city, but in a small Connecticut town. A large segment of the populace turned out for the event. They lined the streets seated on lawn-chairs, curbs, and the grassy knoll of the town square, at the crest of which an old monument to the victory at Gettysburg -- brass statue, stone pillar -- was adorned with wreathes on thin wire stands, left by local VFW posts and dotted with paper poppies.
Some held small, stiff muslin flags mounted on thin sticks. Others held styrofoam coffee cups (the parade started about 10 am). Nearly everyone seemed to meet someone he or she knew coming down the sidewalk. The town is small enough that this is a genuine social event. Here and there teenagers clotted together, but they would be approached by adults that they kmew -- parents, friends of parents, teachers -- and would receive them warmly. That done, the boys in Slipknot and Method Man t-shirts and gigantic blue jeans would go on making time with the cheerleaders who were taking a break from their march duties. The cheerleaders, like most of the young girls, wore plenty of makeup and seemed energized by the prospect of their public display. I observed a couple of these chatting with a lad who cheerfully threw fun-snaps at them, which assault they protested unconvincingly.
Every local civic group seemed to have a place in the parade. Primacy went to the veterans, especially the WWII vets, walking majestically if sometimes with halting step in their ill-fitting uniforms and smart, peaked garrison caps. There were police and fire battalions, the latter sometimes represented by antique fire trucks (including a Ford F-800 "Big Job," and a Seagrave with a wooden grille). There were marching bands of varying ages and levels of expertise, one of which played "Stars and Stripes Forever" so poorly it came out as a forlorn dirge, but we clapped because it was the best they could do. The cheerleaders and drum majorettes ran their paces with great concentration. Then came soccer teams, youth groups, local beauty queens, and various random gaggles of citizens, waving and scanning the crowd for friends. At last a few police cars with lights slowly and silently strobing signalled the finish, and the audience dispersed to their homes and barbecues.
It was delightful. No one had to underline the themes of sacrifice and service. The parade passed, as it had for years, as it will certainly pass next year, observed in the same manner, with trucks and tunes and flags and coffee. This is memorial enough. What the blood of the fallen has purchased is well known, and it is left to us to celebrate, without portent or pomposity, their wonderful gift.
Some held small, stiff muslin flags mounted on thin sticks. Others held styrofoam coffee cups (the parade started about 10 am). Nearly everyone seemed to meet someone he or she knew coming down the sidewalk. The town is small enough that this is a genuine social event. Here and there teenagers clotted together, but they would be approached by adults that they kmew -- parents, friends of parents, teachers -- and would receive them warmly. That done, the boys in Slipknot and Method Man t-shirts and gigantic blue jeans would go on making time with the cheerleaders who were taking a break from their march duties. The cheerleaders, like most of the young girls, wore plenty of makeup and seemed energized by the prospect of their public display. I observed a couple of these chatting with a lad who cheerfully threw fun-snaps at them, which assault they protested unconvincingly.
Every local civic group seemed to have a place in the parade. Primacy went to the veterans, especially the WWII vets, walking majestically if sometimes with halting step in their ill-fitting uniforms and smart, peaked garrison caps. There were police and fire battalions, the latter sometimes represented by antique fire trucks (including a Ford F-800 "Big Job," and a Seagrave with a wooden grille). There were marching bands of varying ages and levels of expertise, one of which played "Stars and Stripes Forever" so poorly it came out as a forlorn dirge, but we clapped because it was the best they could do. The cheerleaders and drum majorettes ran their paces with great concentration. Then came soccer teams, youth groups, local beauty queens, and various random gaggles of citizens, waving and scanning the crowd for friends. At last a few police cars with lights slowly and silently strobing signalled the finish, and the audience dispersed to their homes and barbecues.
It was delightful. No one had to underline the themes of sacrifice and service. The parade passed, as it had for years, as it will certainly pass next year, observed in the same manner, with trucks and tunes and flags and coffee. This is memorial enough. What the blood of the fallen has purchased is well known, and it is left to us to celebrate, without portent or pomposity, their wonderful gift.
Friday, May 28, 2004
ONE OF THE GIANTS OF MODERN CONSERVATIVE THOUGHT. Jonah Goldberg:
I've been very impressed with the fluency a lot of these [liberal] folks do have with their intellectual traditions... That said, all of this kind of reminds of when Nixon declared that it was obvious to him the world is overpopulated because wherever he went he saw huge crowds.Moments earlier, Jonah Goldberg:
... for reasons I can only assume are coincidental I saw more people with broken arms around London over a few days than I have in the preceding couple years. Is there a reason so many Brits are busting their wings?Why do I pay attention to what Goldberg writes when he can't seem to do it himself?
YOU'S A EDUCATED FOOL. Culture scold James Bowman writes yet another long sneer at pop-culture studies, treating dismissively a host of comically-named tomes treating the deeper meanings of The Sopranos, Sex & The City, etc. Though Bowman does express some admiration for one such work that suggests The Simpsons is pro-family, on the rest he employs eye-rolling phrases ("purports to give a philosophical analysis," "unadulterated jargon of real-life scholars," "the more feminist the analysis, the less lighthearted -- and readable") to communicate his customary message: that professors, like artists, are fools to look for deeper meaning in absurdities.
Meanwhile over at NRO, we get not one but two articles about how the Kate Hudson vehicle Raising Hell represents an overdue reinterpretation of eccleasiastics in modern society. They don't use that kind of language, of course (consider their audience) -- theirs goes more like this: "...audiences will fall for Pastor Dan specifically because he is just like a typical pastor -- likeable. Likeable, and strong, and funny, and, yes, sexy."
Pastor Dan is played by the guy who did the radio show on Northern Exposure, and here's Megan Basham, the author quoted above, describing his courtship of the Kate Hudson character:
This sort of thing happens anytime something pops up in a book or movie or trend that could be interpreted, by minds obsessed with such things, as an endorsement of conservative politics or mores. (See Mark Gauvreau Judge on Swing Dancing for a particularly lurid example.) I don't see how this is any sillier than monographs about TV shows. Maybe James Bowman can explain it sometime.
Meanwhile over at NRO, we get not one but two articles about how the Kate Hudson vehicle Raising Hell represents an overdue reinterpretation of eccleasiastics in modern society. They don't use that kind of language, of course (consider their audience) -- theirs goes more like this: "...audiences will fall for Pastor Dan specifically because he is just like a typical pastor -- likeable. Likeable, and strong, and funny, and, yes, sexy."
Pastor Dan is played by the guy who did the radio show on Northern Exposure, and here's Megan Basham, the author quoted above, describing his courtship of the Kate Hudson character:
In one scene, shortly after they meet, Dan asks Helen if she'd like to go out sometime. When she shakes her head no, he starts to leave. But then, realizing how blind she is, he turns back and glowers, "It's because I'm not one of those model, club-hoppin' guys right? So you don't think I'm sexy?" Embarrassed and not knowing how to respond, Helen stands frozen until Dan marches back toward her, leans in, and growls, "Let me tell you something little lady, I am sexy. I'm a sexy man of God, and I know it."If you think that's sexy, you'll cream your jeans over Tony Perkins in Crimes of Passion.
This sort of thing happens anytime something pops up in a book or movie or trend that could be interpreted, by minds obsessed with such things, as an endorsement of conservative politics or mores. (See Mark Gauvreau Judge on Swing Dancing for a particularly lurid example.) I don't see how this is any sillier than monographs about TV shows. Maybe James Bowman can explain it sometime.
Thursday, May 27, 2004
STRANGE INTERLUDES.This is how the Crazy Jesus Lady portrays to the world the inner monologue of New Yorkers:
I should get a new dress for the graduation at the Saks sale. They could blow up the Lincoln Tunnel. Meg would love one of those little Chanel knockoffs from the street vender. If New York is bombed while we're in Boston, where will we stay? If Boston is bombed while we're at the graduation, how will we get home? Bring cousin Holly's number in northern Connecticut. Pick up mascara.Allow me to offer an alternate version:
Ugh, I should have stopped with the third bourbon last night. Looks like it's gonna be cloudy. Should I splurge for a bacon and egg sandwich? Oh, go ahead, live large. What's in the paper? That dead Julliard girl, the Mets blew a big lead, and the usual terrorism bullshit. Maybe grab some OJ too. Alright, let's see what's on the web. OpinionJournal's always good for a laugh. Wow, another column by that brain-damaged hag? Lot of nervous energy this week. Must have stopped taking her pills. That reminds me -- where'd I put the Advil?
OH, THOSE KRAZY KULTURE KOPS! "Without passing judgment on the movie as such, it's clearly based on the usual false assumptions..." Well, you know you're in Culture-War No-Man's-Land when you hear crap like that. This one comes from The Corner, where Mark Krikorian explains that though he hasn't seen A Day Without a Mexican ("it's not being shown anywhere I can get to" -- the tunnels radiating from his bunker don't extend to the local cineplex, I guess), he still has lots to say about it, including this: "The very premise of the movie is thus blood-and-soil nationalism of das Volk (or rather, La Raza), which is only socially permissable when advocated by approved ethnic groups." Wow! Maybe he saw the trailer.
But equally blind are they who will not see. An alicublog reader tipped me to World Magazine, a journal that pre-digests current events for squeamish Christians. Their arts coverage comes in slabs stamped "Cultural," and one imagines editors screaming across the newsroom, "Support for gay marriage is going up -- we need three more slabs of Cultural, stat!" Their reviewers have seen the movies they discuss, but with a sharp eye for non-evangelical content and a blind one for everything else. Of Troy, Marvin Olasky writes that "Bradd Pitts" is "too likable" as Achilles, and that the film should have focused on Hector -- presumably because Olasky finds Hector more clean-cut. (Olasky also cautions that in Troy's bed scenes "illicit sex is made to look good.")
Music also comes under review by my new favorite pop critic, Arsenio Orteza. He chides Prince for his "low" content, which features "many sexual allusions, both explicit (e.g., 'Gett Off') and implicit (e.g., 'Little Red Corvette')." ("Little Red Corvette" is implicit? Not the way Amatullo sang it in "The Kids from Fame in Israel"!) Orteza concludes that "For people who speak no English, Prince remains a legitimate thriller" -- judging from his prose style, Orteza is indeed qualified to make this judgement -- "For many English speakers, however, Prince's obsession with sex will connect him to Messrs. [Michael] Jackson and [Kobe] Bryant in ways that no amount of sales or pleasure can eclipse." I think I disagree -- what specific amount of sales or pleasure are we talking about here?
The Beatles are alright, per Orteza, but only if that line about Christ in "The Ballad of John and Yoko" is a spoof on Lennon's "Bigger than Jesus" crack, not if he's "taking Christ's name in vain." In which case the Beatles are objectionable, just like everything else, it would seem, except bluegrass, which Orteza likes because it's "colorblind, sex-blind, [and] age-blind" (the unfortunate result of all that moonshine, one imagines). And you have to love how Orteza describes Bob Marley & The Wailers' "world view":
At World even baseball must be reduced to Cultural: "Baseball fosters the right mentality for sustaining a war on terrorism," explains Gene Edward Veith. It also embodies "the trials and disciplines of free enterprise." And another thing: "We lose wars when we on the home front lose our will or our heart or our courage—even while our troops win on the battlefield. That is how we lost the Vietnam War..." What's that got to do with baseball? Don't ask Veith, who seems to have entered some sort of trance: "The news cycle is an up-and-down, good news/bad news roller coaster... When the Bears are doing badly, Soldier Field is deserted. But Cubs fans still pack Wrigley Field, even in the bad years, and they persevere." It takes a lot for me to say this, but I'd rather read George Will's baseball shit.
UPDATE. Tbogg amplifies admirably on Krikorian's willful cluelessness.
But equally blind are they who will not see. An alicublog reader tipped me to World Magazine, a journal that pre-digests current events for squeamish Christians. Their arts coverage comes in slabs stamped "Cultural," and one imagines editors screaming across the newsroom, "Support for gay marriage is going up -- we need three more slabs of Cultural, stat!" Their reviewers have seen the movies they discuss, but with a sharp eye for non-evangelical content and a blind one for everything else. Of Troy, Marvin Olasky writes that "Bradd Pitts" is "too likable" as Achilles, and that the film should have focused on Hector -- presumably because Olasky finds Hector more clean-cut. (Olasky also cautions that in Troy's bed scenes "illicit sex is made to look good.")
Music also comes under review by my new favorite pop critic, Arsenio Orteza. He chides Prince for his "low" content, which features "many sexual allusions, both explicit (e.g., 'Gett Off') and implicit (e.g., 'Little Red Corvette')." ("Little Red Corvette" is implicit? Not the way Amatullo sang it in "The Kids from Fame in Israel"!) Orteza concludes that "For people who speak no English, Prince remains a legitimate thriller" -- judging from his prose style, Orteza is indeed qualified to make this judgement -- "For many English speakers, however, Prince's obsession with sex will connect him to Messrs. [Michael] Jackson and [Kobe] Bryant in ways that no amount of sales or pleasure can eclipse." I think I disagree -- what specific amount of sales or pleasure are we talking about here?
The Beatles are alright, per Orteza, but only if that line about Christ in "The Ballad of John and Yoko" is a spoof on Lennon's "Bigger than Jesus" crack, not if he's "taking Christ's name in vain." In which case the Beatles are objectionable, just like everything else, it would seem, except bluegrass, which Orteza likes because it's "colorblind, sex-blind, [and] age-blind" (the unfortunate result of all that moonshine, one imagines). And you have to love how Orteza describes Bob Marley & The Wailers' "world view":
Explicitly: that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are worth getting up, standing up, and fighting for; Implicitly: that smoking marijuana is a sacrament and that slain Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie is the Messiah.Suddenly it all makes sense!
At World even baseball must be reduced to Cultural: "Baseball fosters the right mentality for sustaining a war on terrorism," explains Gene Edward Veith. It also embodies "the trials and disciplines of free enterprise." And another thing: "We lose wars when we on the home front lose our will or our heart or our courage—even while our troops win on the battlefield. That is how we lost the Vietnam War..." What's that got to do with baseball? Don't ask Veith, who seems to have entered some sort of trance: "The news cycle is an up-and-down, good news/bad news roller coaster... When the Bears are doing badly, Soldier Field is deserted. But Cubs fans still pack Wrigley Field, even in the bad years, and they persevere." It takes a lot for me to say this, but I'd rather read George Will's baseball shit.
UPDATE. Tbogg amplifies admirably on Krikorian's willful cluelessness.
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
MONEY, HONEY. Rightwing "It" Girl Michelle Malkin is enraged by Wonkette and her recent find, a low-paid Washington functionary named Jessica Cutler who let Republicans fuck her up the ass for money. Among Malkin's plaintive cries against both: "Skanks," "promiscuous," "raunchy," "female Beavis and Butthead," "sex-drenched infamy," and "members of the media elite."
And then there's this:
Them Spaghetti-O's musta tasted alright with a nice Chablis.
At that very same time I was living in New York City (surely as expensive a jurisdiction as LA) and working as a freelance writer, and made maybe six grand more than what Malkin claims to have made. (The following year, Malkin was named Warren Brookes Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., so her prospects were obviously infinitely better than mine). I wasn't hooking, either (not for lack of opportunities!), nor did I consume a more exalted diet than Ms. Malkin did. And though I sure did work hard, and had to be thrifty, I had no faith or perseverance to speak of.
But I'll say this: I sure as shit couldn't afford a car with or without A/C -- I'd have had to take major dick up the ass for that! Almost certainly Republican dick.
But I didn't, and till now I never had cause to feel morally superior about it. In fact, given the severe mark-up in rents and other cost of living indicators since then, I marvel that Malkin does. That whole "poor but pure" argument makes much more sense if one is actually poor.
POST UPDATED because I can't handle numbers too good. Malkin was 24 in '94, not '84, as I previously wrote. By that time I had left the dispatching business and had entered the humiliating world of freelance writing. Not surprisingly (though depressingly from my perspective) I wasn't making much more in '94 than I was in '84, but I suppose the extra six large could have been what kept me from working the entrance to the Holland Tunnel.
When I was 24, I was working as a busboy and would have considered $24K a princely sum.
And then there's this:
Cutler, who aspired to be a journalist, spouted: "I'm sure I am not the only one who makes money on the side this way: How can anybody live on $25K/year??" When I was 24 and making less than that, I did it by eating Spaghetti-O's, Ramen noodles and Swanson pot pies for dinner; driving a Toyota Tercel with no air conditioning; and sleeping on a $30 futon. I did it the way most parents teach their daughters to succeed: through hard work, thrift, faith and perseverance.Malkin's parents are a doctor and a schoolteacher. When Malkin was 24 she was married to a Rhodes Scholar who apparently works for the Rand Corporation. According to her bio, in '94 Malkin was working as an editorial writer and weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News.
Them Spaghetti-O's musta tasted alright with a nice Chablis.
At that very same time I was living in New York City (surely as expensive a jurisdiction as LA) and working as a freelance writer, and made maybe six grand more than what Malkin claims to have made. (The following year, Malkin was named Warren Brookes Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., so her prospects were obviously infinitely better than mine). I wasn't hooking, either (not for lack of opportunities!), nor did I consume a more exalted diet than Ms. Malkin did. And though I sure did work hard, and had to be thrifty, I had no faith or perseverance to speak of.
But I'll say this: I sure as shit couldn't afford a car with or without A/C -- I'd have had to take major dick up the ass for that! Almost certainly Republican dick.
But I didn't, and till now I never had cause to feel morally superior about it. In fact, given the severe mark-up in rents and other cost of living indicators since then, I marvel that Malkin does. That whole "poor but pure" argument makes much more sense if one is actually poor.
POST UPDATED because I can't handle numbers too good. Malkin was 24 in '94, not '84, as I previously wrote. By that time I had left the dispatching business and had entered the humiliating world of freelance writing. Not surprisingly (though depressingly from my perspective) I wasn't making much more in '94 than I was in '84, but I suppose the extra six large could have been what kept me from working the entrance to the Holland Tunnel.
When I was 24, I was working as a busboy and would have considered $24K a princely sum.
DOCTRINAL MATTERS AS EXPLAINED BY THE PENGUINS. Re the Oklahoma City Bombers, Kerry expresses the traditional, Cuomoesque argument against the death penalty: "Dying is scary for a while, but in the end, the punishment is gone," so life in prison might be a more convincing threat.
So NRO's Rich Lowry, offscreen, asks, "Do you believe in hell? He seemed to say on MTP that the only punishment in dying is the act of dying itself. But if you are a faithful Catholic like Kerry don't you believe someone like Tim McVeigh, an unrepentant mass murderer, is in for an eternity of punishment?"
They're really working this Catholic thing, aren't they? When I was in the Church, though, back in the metal-ruler era, we were specifically cautioned by the nuns against assuming that anyone was in Hell -- or in Heaven, for that matter, excepting the Saints, who were in for sure because the Pope said so.
This message was illustrated by anecdotes of sudden, unforeseeable death suffered by children just like ourselves, meant to convince us that we could be saved or damned in an instant, and that we had better make sure that instant came before we were run over by a bus or suffocated in a sand-pit, and not after. Repent, in other words, before it's too late.
So the idea that the worst human being might be saved at the last moment strikes me as very Catholic. See also the Good Thief.
I would ask if Lowry is Catholic, but it doesn't matter -- that guy could be talking about what it's like to be Rich Lowry and he'd still be talking out his ass.
So NRO's Rich Lowry, offscreen, asks, "Do you believe in hell? He seemed to say on MTP that the only punishment in dying is the act of dying itself. But if you are a faithful Catholic like Kerry don't you believe someone like Tim McVeigh, an unrepentant mass murderer, is in for an eternity of punishment?"
They're really working this Catholic thing, aren't they? When I was in the Church, though, back in the metal-ruler era, we were specifically cautioned by the nuns against assuming that anyone was in Hell -- or in Heaven, for that matter, excepting the Saints, who were in for sure because the Pope said so.
This message was illustrated by anecdotes of sudden, unforeseeable death suffered by children just like ourselves, meant to convince us that we could be saved or damned in an instant, and that we had better make sure that instant came before we were run over by a bus or suffocated in a sand-pit, and not after. Repent, in other words, before it's too late.
So the idea that the worst human being might be saved at the last moment strikes me as very Catholic. See also the Good Thief.
I would ask if Lowry is Catholic, but it doesn't matter -- that guy could be talking about what it's like to be Rich Lowry and he'd still be talking out his ass.
AGAINST INTERPRETATION. Every so often OpinionJournal has to publish someone's tedious poli-sci journal article and call it an "Extra." This week Zachary Selden gets the nod. He argues that the foreign policy adventuresomeness that we call "neoconservative" is not weird and phenomenonal, as some imagine, but old-fashioned and American, and based on "a set of policies that flow from two ideas that resonate deeply in American public opinion."
There's a lot to cavil here. The first of the abovementioned resonant ideas, for example, Selden says "is often credited to Woodrow Wilson, but in some ways its roots stretch back into the 18th century. It is founded on the moral assertions that have been part of American political thought since the early days of the republic. Chief among them is the idea that individual liberty is a moral absolute and that a system of governance that enshrines individual liberty is morally and practically superior to all others." Europeans can't understand all this, Selden sniffs: their "constitutions tend to place a greater emphasis on social harmony than on individual liberty."
Looked at a certain way, this is unobjectionable. But the culmination of Wilson's dream was not the establishment of a perpetual, roving gang of democratizers, but of the League of Nations -- in which cause he was at least grudgingly supported by a good many of those social-hamonist Europeans, but scuttled by his own people. In fact, Wilson failed precisely to the degree that he tried to promote American ideals to Americans. By the time we get to Iraq -- hell, by the time we get to Panama and the Philippines -- the connection between our love of liberty and our feckless foreign adventures seems not only severed, but hacked to pieces.
And this is why windy policy dissertations like Selden's frustrate me (along with the big words, of course, and compound sentences). They're all about the big ideas which allegedly animate our political actors. Frankly, in most cases I see something a whole lot less philosophical going on -- unless you consider "I got mine, don't worry about yours" a philosophy.
It may just be my ignorance, but I don't see much of any coherent idea, let alone a grand Wilsonian schema, behind the actions of this Administration. I see Bush buffeted by peddlers of crank ideas whose patrons managed in early days to squeeze through the portals of power and grab a place near the President ear. I see, in the wake of the 9-11 attacks, a tendency to go with what Cheney and the wise men suggested, and Cheney and the wise men slapping their best and brightest on the back and whispering, "OK, kid, you're on." And, of course, the usual graft, fraud, ass-covering -- and, above all, deep faith that Americans will fall for any old horseshit you care to peddle if you wrap it in a flag and drawl over it like John Wayne. (Selden's view is that Americans have been moved off their usual anti-interventionist dime by 9-11, but it was no preordained thing that they would be moved to fight Iraq -- that was pure salesmanship.)
I respect erudition in any field, but Selden's article strikes me as justification after the fact. The Founding Fathers had great, free-wheeling intellects, and wrote a lot more than their puny descendents, so it is not hard to find something in them to use as justification for any old scam you want to pull. How many times have right-wing nuts used Andrew Jackson's "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it" as a historical imprimatur for their fight against whichever branch of the government happens to piss them off?
There's a lot to cavil here. The first of the abovementioned resonant ideas, for example, Selden says "is often credited to Woodrow Wilson, but in some ways its roots stretch back into the 18th century. It is founded on the moral assertions that have been part of American political thought since the early days of the republic. Chief among them is the idea that individual liberty is a moral absolute and that a system of governance that enshrines individual liberty is morally and practically superior to all others." Europeans can't understand all this, Selden sniffs: their "constitutions tend to place a greater emphasis on social harmony than on individual liberty."
Looked at a certain way, this is unobjectionable. But the culmination of Wilson's dream was not the establishment of a perpetual, roving gang of democratizers, but of the League of Nations -- in which cause he was at least grudgingly supported by a good many of those social-hamonist Europeans, but scuttled by his own people. In fact, Wilson failed precisely to the degree that he tried to promote American ideals to Americans. By the time we get to Iraq -- hell, by the time we get to Panama and the Philippines -- the connection between our love of liberty and our feckless foreign adventures seems not only severed, but hacked to pieces.
And this is why windy policy dissertations like Selden's frustrate me (along with the big words, of course, and compound sentences). They're all about the big ideas which allegedly animate our political actors. Frankly, in most cases I see something a whole lot less philosophical going on -- unless you consider "I got mine, don't worry about yours" a philosophy.
It may just be my ignorance, but I don't see much of any coherent idea, let alone a grand Wilsonian schema, behind the actions of this Administration. I see Bush buffeted by peddlers of crank ideas whose patrons managed in early days to squeeze through the portals of power and grab a place near the President ear. I see, in the wake of the 9-11 attacks, a tendency to go with what Cheney and the wise men suggested, and Cheney and the wise men slapping their best and brightest on the back and whispering, "OK, kid, you're on." And, of course, the usual graft, fraud, ass-covering -- and, above all, deep faith that Americans will fall for any old horseshit you care to peddle if you wrap it in a flag and drawl over it like John Wayne. (Selden's view is that Americans have been moved off their usual anti-interventionist dime by 9-11, but it was no preordained thing that they would be moved to fight Iraq -- that was pure salesmanship.)
I respect erudition in any field, but Selden's article strikes me as justification after the fact. The Founding Fathers had great, free-wheeling intellects, and wrote a lot more than their puny descendents, so it is not hard to find something in them to use as justification for any old scam you want to pull. How many times have right-wing nuts used Andrew Jackson's "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it" as a historical imprimatur for their fight against whichever branch of the government happens to piss them off?
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
FORCED TO ACKNOWLEDGE AN UNPLEASANT REALITY. Xax has been offline for many weeks, and I don't know when it will come back, so I have replaced it on my blogroll with Something Awful. You probably know about them already, but I figure it's good to have an "eject" button handy that will take you from the moaning and groaning that goes on here to a very funny place.
CRAZY ON THE COUCH.I have to say I was taken aback by the ill-concealed rage in Crazy Jesus Lady's latest, an account of E.L. Doctorow's speech at Hofstra and his comeuppance. Normally she speaks of her many enemies in a dismissively gentle tone, as though it were more Satan's fault than theirs that they have been led unto sin and therefore damned. But she calls Doctorow "Fast Eddy," talks ahout his "boorishness,' and claims that Doctorow "manages to produce many books nobody reads in the computer age while still using a quill." (I think she means Doctorow uses the quill, not the non-readers. That's how mad CJL is -- she can't even properly place her modifiers!)
Why such spasmodic rage? One idea is suggested by a gag the New Yorker pulled at Crazy's expense in April. In one of their "Hundred Days" multiple-choice questions about current events, they asked readers to match bits of commentary on Bush with their authors. Four of the five selections were devastatingly negative ("worst President ever") and authored by people like Richard Reeves and Michael Kinsley. One, though, went like this: "A steady hand on the helm in high seas, a knowledge of where we must go and why, a resolve to achieve safe harbor. More and more this presidency is feeling like a gift." And this was the Crazy Jesus Lady's.
CJL has been well-compensated for her speechwriting and is praised in wingnut circles for her columns and books. Insofar as her world extends, this would seem a sufficient Valhalla for a loyal operative. But you can tell by her occasional cracks about "intellectuals, academics, [and] local clever people who talk loudly in restaurants," that Crazy is no less affected than others of her sort by that primitive jealousy stirred by the success of credentialed types who sneer at all that is holy and Republican yet somehow, inexplicably, are allowed by the Lord to enjoy good reviews and tenure. For all her faith that the Lord will one day bring her home, she would yet like to make a stop along the way at Montparnasse, and there be made much of. Alas, the nobs think her a outre Pollyanna, and she must settle for the approbation of think-tank nerds and other Crazy Jesus Ladies and Gentlemen.
How it must sting to be excluded and then mocked for her own exclusion. So the Doctorow booing must have come as a waterfall of balm to her scourged ego. In her ecstasy of vindication, she may have forgotten to behave toward Doctorow as a Christian; but that's why the Lord made confessional booths.
Why such spasmodic rage? One idea is suggested by a gag the New Yorker pulled at Crazy's expense in April. In one of their "Hundred Days" multiple-choice questions about current events, they asked readers to match bits of commentary on Bush with their authors. Four of the five selections were devastatingly negative ("worst President ever") and authored by people like Richard Reeves and Michael Kinsley. One, though, went like this: "A steady hand on the helm in high seas, a knowledge of where we must go and why, a resolve to achieve safe harbor. More and more this presidency is feeling like a gift." And this was the Crazy Jesus Lady's.
CJL has been well-compensated for her speechwriting and is praised in wingnut circles for her columns and books. Insofar as her world extends, this would seem a sufficient Valhalla for a loyal operative. But you can tell by her occasional cracks about "intellectuals, academics, [and] local clever people who talk loudly in restaurants," that Crazy is no less affected than others of her sort by that primitive jealousy stirred by the success of credentialed types who sneer at all that is holy and Republican yet somehow, inexplicably, are allowed by the Lord to enjoy good reviews and tenure. For all her faith that the Lord will one day bring her home, she would yet like to make a stop along the way at Montparnasse, and there be made much of. Alas, the nobs think her a outre Pollyanna, and she must settle for the approbation of think-tank nerds and other Crazy Jesus Ladies and Gentlemen.
How it must sting to be excluded and then mocked for her own exclusion. So the Doctorow booing must have come as a waterfall of balm to her scourged ego. In her ecstasy of vindication, she may have forgotten to behave toward Doctorow as a Christian; but that's why the Lord made confessional booths.
Monday, May 24, 2004
JUST WEIRD:
It is something to contemplate that so many of the cherished songs of my youth were manufactured by a small gang of studio hacks.
If you have heard the hits "My Baby Loves Lovin"', "Beach Baby", "United We Stand", "Gimme Dat Ding", "Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)" and the unforgettable Coke commercial "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke," you have definitely heard Tony Burrows... Tony Burrows is listed in the Guiness Book of records as having had the most records in the charts at the same time under different names.BTW, did you know that Albert Hammond wrote "Gimme Dat Ding," and "It Never Rains in Southern California" AND "The Air That I Breathe" AND "Free Electric Band," among others?
It is something to contemplate that so many of the cherished songs of my youth were manufactured by a small gang of studio hacks.
CULTURAL ANALYSIS: AN EXCITING NEW CAREER OPTION FOR REPUBLICAN OPERATIVES. Jens 'n' Frens explains a Simpsons episode:
Well, if they'll buy Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau, they might buy this, too.
...Burns, upon discovering (as he did in at least one previous ep, but never mind that) that he's unpopular, decides to buy out all of the town's media. Lisa is publishing her own paper, though, and continues through a certain amount of harassment. At the end she gives up, but everyone else in town starts their own newspapers.So Burns is the New York Times, and Lisa is Fox News. Or maybe Little Green Footballs.
The mainstream media aren't all run by the same person, but until a few years ago, they were all run by the same New York City/Washington DC mindset. As I've said before, the liberal media haven't been getting any less liberal, but more conservative alternatives have grown around them -- most notably Fox News, but also a multitude of independent bloggers...
Well, if they'll buy Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau, they might buy this, too.
IF YOU DRINK, DON'T GOOGLE. IF YOU DRINK AND GOOGLE, DON'T POST. Matt Welch does some contrarian schtick that goes badly awry:
So let's not hear any of this axiomaticism about Hitler being against the Jews! Why, he talked about them all the time! He certainly approved of them way more than that Bush guy.
I'm sure National Review Online editor Jonah Goldberg -- an admitted and tireless crusader for censorship, by the way -- is happy about Welch's confusion. He may be allergic to free speech, but free publicity is something else again.
I know it must be pretty to think that liberals = free speech, and conservatives = duct tape on lips, but that's a cliché that has long outlived its axiomaticism... A Google search on "free speech" and "National Review" yields 32,400 results; one on "free speech" and "Los Angeles Magazine" produces 207 (there are 481 "free speech" results on NRO's site alone).Testing Welch's methodology, I googled "Hitler" and "Jews" -- 507,000 hits. Then I googled "George W. Bush" and "Jews" -- only 172,000.
So let's not hear any of this axiomaticism about Hitler being against the Jews! Why, he talked about them all the time! He certainly approved of them way more than that Bush guy.
I'm sure National Review Online editor Jonah Goldberg -- an admitted and tireless crusader for censorship, by the way -- is happy about Welch's confusion. He may be allergic to free speech, but free publicity is something else again.
Sunday, May 23, 2004
POLITICAL WEBLOGGING CAN BE DEPRESSING. Here's Andrew Stuttaford explaining that, when people use the term "Taliban wing" to describe social policy meddlers, that's just silly, but when he uses the term "health mullahs" to describe our social health policy meddlers (a group I'm not in love with either), that's an appropriate use of rhetoric.
More and more often when I sit down to fill one of these little blogger screens I feel like one of the monkeys in the prologue to "2001," joining in the shrieking and jumping up and down and general primitive social aggression.
One alternative might be to approach analysis seriously and politely, which in the current environment would be like delivering a long lecture on the Good and the True while undergraduates stick matches into my shoes and light them, hold up fingers behind my head, and make fart noises.
Another would be to just pack it in, disappointing literally dozens of fans.
I wonder if you guys ever feel this way.
More and more often when I sit down to fill one of these little blogger screens I feel like one of the monkeys in the prologue to "2001," joining in the shrieking and jumping up and down and general primitive social aggression.
One alternative might be to approach analysis seriously and politely, which in the current environment would be like delivering a long lecture on the Good and the True while undergraduates stick matches into my shoes and light them, hold up fingers behind my head, and make fart noises.
Another would be to just pack it in, disappointing literally dozens of fans.
I wonder if you guys ever feel this way.
LITERARY QUOTES FOR A WARM MAY NIGHT.
Thus he was forced to endure the importunities of the young-old man, whose drunken state obscurely urged him to pay the stranger the honor of a formal farewell. "We wish you a very pleasant sojourn," he babbled, bowing and scraping. "Pray keep us in mind. Au revoir, excusez et bon jour, votre Excellence." He drooled, he blinked, he licked the corner of his mouth, the little imperial bristled on his elderly chin. He put the tips of two fingers to his mouth and said thickly, "Give her our love, will you, the p-pretty dear..." Here his upper plate came away and fell down on the lower one... Aschenbach escaped. "Little sweety-sweety-sweetheart," he heard behind him, gurgled and stuttered, as he climbed down the rope stair into the boat.
--Thomas Mann, "Death in Venice"
I wer programmit then from how I ben when I come in to Cambry. Coming in to Cambry my head ben ful of words and rimes and all kynds of jumbl of yellerboy stoan thots. Back then I ben thinking on the Power of the 2 and the 1 and the Hy Power what ben whoosing roun the Power Ring time back way back. The 1 Big 1 and the Spirit of God. My mind ben all binsy with myndy thinking. Thinking who wer going to do what and how I myt put some thing to gether before some 1 else done it. Seed of the red and seed of the yeller and that. Hart of the wud. Now I dint want nothing of that. I dint know what the connnexion were with that face in my mynd only I knowit that face wer making me think diffrent. I wernt looking for no Hy Power no mor I dint want no Power at all. I dint want to do nothing with that yellerboy stoan n mor. Greanvine wer the name I put to that face in my mynd.
I cud feal some thing growing in me wer like a grean sea surging in me it wer saying, LOSE IT. Saying, LET GO. Saying, THE ONLYES POWER IS NO POWER.
Ther come in to my muynd then music or the idear of music I dont know what it wer if I try to hear it now I cant only I know I heard it then. It wer as much colours as it wer souns only if I try to see the colours now I cant. The souns and the colours they be come a moving and I thot I could move with it.
--Russell Hoban, "Riddley Walker"
Now, my Friend, can Prophecies, or miracles convince You, or Me, that infinite Benevolence, Wisdom and Power, created and preserves, for a time, innumerable millions to make them miserable forever; for his own Glory? Wretch! What is his Glory? Is he ambitious? does he want promotion? Is he vain? tickled with Adulation? Exulting and tryumphing in his Power and the Sweetness of his Vengence? Pardon me, my Maker, for these aweful Questions. My Answer to them is always ready: I believe no such Things. My Adoration of the Author of the Universe is too profound and too sincere. The Love of God and his Creation; delight, Joy, Tryumph, Exultation in my own existence, 'tho but an Atom, a Molecule Organique, in the Universe; are my religion. Howl, Snarl, bite, Ye Calvinistick! Ye Athanasian Divines, if You will. Ye will say, I am no Christian: I say Ye are no Christians: and there the account is ballanced. Yet I believe all the honest men among you, are Christians in My Sense of the Word.
--John Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, September 14, 1813
The Ampitheatre was the best place in the world for a convention. Relatively small, it had the packed intimacy of a neighborhood fight club. The entrances to the gallery were as narrow as hallway tunnels, and the balcony seemed to hang over each speaker. The colors were black and grey and red and white and blue, bright powerful colors in support of a ruddy beef-eating sea of Democratic faces. The standards in these cramped quarters were numerous enough to look like lances. The aisles were jammed. The carpets were red. The crowd had a blood in their vote which had travelled in an unbroken line from the throng who had cheered the blood of brave Christians and ferocious lions. It could have been a great convention, stench and all -- politics in an abbatoir was as appropriate as license in a boudoir. There was bottom to this convention; some of the finest and some of the most corrupt faces in America were on the floor. Cancer jostled elbows with arcomegaly, obesity with edema, arthritis with alcholism, bad livers sent curses to bronchiacs, and quivering jowls beamed bad cess to puffed-out paunches. Cigars curved mouths which talked out of the other corner to cauliflower ears. The leprotic took care of the blind. And the deaf attached their hearing-aid to the voice-box of the dumb. The tennis-players communicated with the estate holders. The Mob talked bowling with the Union, the principals winked to the principals, the honest and the passionate went hoarse shouting through dead mikes.
--Norman Mailer, "Miami and the Siege of Chicago"
When you find a man living on the ragged edge of his consciousness, pent in to his sin and want and incompleteness, and consequently inconsolable, and then simply tell him that all is well with him, that he must stop his worry, break with his discontent, and give up his anxiety, you seem to him to come with pure absurdities. The only positive consciousness he has tells him that all is NOT well, and the better way you offer sounds simply as if you proposed to him to assert cold-blooded falsehoods. "The will to believe" cannot be stretched as far as that. We can make ourselves more faithful to a belief of which we have the rudiments, but we cannot create a belief out of whole cloth when our perception actively assures us of its opposite. The better mind proposed to us comes in that case in the form of a pure negation of the only mind we have, and we cannot actively will a pure negation.
--William James, "The Varieties of Religious Experience"
I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, believe none of us. To a nunnery, go.
--William Shakespeare, "Hamlet"
Saturday, May 22, 2004
MEET-UP 2. I came back to the event and found a dozen nice young people sitting around cross-legged, drinking white wine, and talking about classes at the New School. It was obvious that no one was going to get laid.
Fortunately there were some beers left in the fridge, and these I freely availed. My suggestion that we exercise our Second Amendment rights on behalf of the Kerry campaign -- or at least affix "KILL BUSH" stickers to public spaces throughout the midtown area during the Republican Convention -- fell, this website's government monitors will be disappointed to hear, on deaf ears. Finally I left before I was made to leave. All in all a successful evening by my pathetic standards.
Fortunately there were some beers left in the fridge, and these I freely availed. My suggestion that we exercise our Second Amendment rights on behalf of the Kerry campaign -- or at least affix "KILL BUSH" stickers to public spaces throughout the midtown area during the Republican Convention -- fell, this website's government monitors will be disappointed to hear, on deaf ears. Finally I left before I was made to leave. All in all a successful evening by my pathetic standards.
MEET-UP. A friend for whom, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,the word "well-meaning" was invented in 1347 by Thomas Usk, invited me to a Kerry "Meet-Up" this evening on Avenue C. It was very odd to find myself in a well-scrubbed triplex with a terrace overlooking a terrain wherein, some years earlier, friends of mine copped heroin, and where I was on one occasion chased by riot cops. The hostesses were perfectly nice women who radiated positive energy as if it were an organic fragrance from the Body Shop; I felt rank with the odor of despair by comparison. Their early guests were well-turned-out young people, some with children who clomped stairs and bawled as John Kerry addressed us (and thousands of other positive partiers across America) by speakerphone. We listened respectfully as the candidate stammered and confused verb tenses. Among the adjectives he used for the Bush Administration was "childish," and I notice Kerry, for all his thickness of tongue, is occasionally given to these perfectly apt usages, and that these are the ones his enemies hammer most mercilessly.
Everyone was cheerful and politically astute, which as you may imagine made me feel alienated. So I left. But I may go back. I donated $20, after all, and am only half drunk.
Everyone was cheerful and politically astute, which as you may imagine made me feel alienated. So I left. But I may go back. I donated $20, after all, and am only half drunk.
Friday, May 21, 2004
WORD. "I'm tired of having my patriotism questioned by people who think Thomas Jefferson was a sitcom character... why the fuck should I be forced to treat their opinions as if they were equally as valid as my own? You wouldn't ask a six year old how to tune a Lamborghini's engine, so why should you care about the political opinions of people who can't point out their own goddamn country on a map?... I don't give a shit what some semi-literate Midwestern retard who's never been more than two hundred miles from home and whose idea of intellectual exercise is watching "Jeopardy" thinks about the intricacies of Islamic theology as it relates to the metaphysical notion of jihad. Fuck him."
Onto the blogroll with Zen Archery.
Onto the blogroll with Zen Archery.
THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT. The CDC survey that purports to show our kids screw, smoke, and drink less than previously (but may be getting a little chunky) draws a straight-up libertarian response from the Reason Hit & Run crowd: "So now that the kids aren't fucking, smoking, and drinking as much, what's left to complain about? Well, they may be eating too much."
Meanwhile Ezra at Pandagon puckishly observers that the kids might not be getting laid because they're too fat.
Being an embittered old man, I take it to mean that kids today are abject pussies, and sit in front of video monitors all day, cramming Twinkies down their chutes, because they don't have the moxie we had when I was boy.
Soon, no doubt, Peggy Noonan will tell us that the manly example of George Bush has reformed the formerly degenerate youngsters. Claremont Institute hacks with a strong position in corrupt youth will demur, perhaps suggesting that the well-bred farm youth of the Red States skewed the survey (though I can't help but notice that the Texas kids were getting laid more than the New York kids; the longhorns also have the edge in suicide attempts; maybe I should move there). Maggie Gallagher will want to know why more children aren't getting married.
I only hope these kids aren't too dumb to lie to survey takers.
Meanwhile Ezra at Pandagon puckishly observers that the kids might not be getting laid because they're too fat.
Being an embittered old man, I take it to mean that kids today are abject pussies, and sit in front of video monitors all day, cramming Twinkies down their chutes, because they don't have the moxie we had when I was boy.
Soon, no doubt, Peggy Noonan will tell us that the manly example of George Bush has reformed the formerly degenerate youngsters. Claremont Institute hacks with a strong position in corrupt youth will demur, perhaps suggesting that the well-bred farm youth of the Red States skewed the survey (though I can't help but notice that the Texas kids were getting laid more than the New York kids; the longhorns also have the edge in suicide attempts; maybe I should move there). Maggie Gallagher will want to know why more children aren't getting married.
I only hope these kids aren't too dumb to lie to survey takers.
DO YOU SMELL WHAT THE REICH IS COOKING? Are the writers getting worse at National Review Online, or am I just developing a more sensitive nose for their bullshit? I hadn't noticed Colleen Carroll Campbell before today. She seems the tritest sort of Anti-Sex League harpy, here celebrating a book for its stop-the-presses message that real life isn't like Sex and the City. Among her tendentia:
Also, is "EuroPress Review" by Denis Boyles a regular feature? If so, is it always as crazy as today's? Boyles speaks of "the pornography [the Washington Post] takes such pride in publishing." I thought at first he was talking about a new Calvin Klein photo spread, then realized he meant the Abu Ghraib pictures:
Obviously the plum gigs at NRO are at The Corner: low word-counts, proofreading optional, and readers do your research for you. From the straining evident in Campbell's and Boyes' columns, it would seem low-grade writers audition for those sinecures by seeing if they can make a stink that can be smelt all the way from NRO's ill-read back pages.
Among many Chicagoans, the researchers found marriage on the decline, polygamy and domestic violence on the rise, and "transactional" sexual relationships -- meaning those forged purely for pleasure -- replacing "relational" ones.People having sex for pleasure? It's worse than we thought!
Perhaps most striking to feminists may be the revelation that, rather than empowering women, the rejection of traditional sexual mores seems to have limited their choices of committed partners and even endangered their welfare... So it seems that the feminist ideal of postponing marriage as long as possible leaves women with fewer choices for desirable mates, or any mate at all.It suddenly hit me that all those imbecilic sound-bites uttered in the earliest days of women's lib by pandering comedians and flailing politicians ("Those bra-burning kooks -- half of them couldn't land a man anyway") are still good as gold to today's wingnuts, particularly of the female anti-feminist variety. The only major change is the addition of a sense of victimization -- the claim that millions of innocent women were compelled to lives of misery by Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan. It is quite a spectacle when high priestesses of the Church of Personal Responsibility throw themselves in front of the altar and cry I couldn't help myself! The feminists forced me to taste my own menstrual blood, and after that I just couldn't get enough transactional sex!
Also, is "EuroPress Review" by Denis Boyles a regular feature? If so, is it always as crazy as today's? Boyles speaks of "the pornography [the Washington Post] takes such pride in publishing." I thought at first he was talking about a new Calvin Klein photo spread, then realized he meant the Abu Ghraib pictures:
Publishing yet more photos of S&M excess does nothing but titillate and excite the passions. Out there someplace are a group of sad souls aching for more such leaks, because hitherto forbidden pleasures they bring. We call those people "the editorial board of the Washington Post."Of course, a lot of people have been trying to wish Abu Ghraib into the cornfield, but this combination of righteous indignation and clinical insanity is a lulu even by their standards.
Obviously the plum gigs at NRO are at The Corner: low word-counts, proofreading optional, and readers do your research for you. From the straining evident in Campbell's and Boyes' columns, it would seem low-grade writers audition for those sinecures by seeing if they can make a stink that can be smelt all the way from NRO's ill-read back pages.
Thursday, May 20, 2004
SHORTER ROGER L. SIMON. Isn't it crazy how uncivil our discourse has become? By the way, my opponents are all idiots with a willful disregard for the obvious truth.
(The Shorter format was invented by... shit, I forget his name. Great American, anyway, and Busy Busy Busy currently handles the franchise.)
(The Shorter format was invented by... shit, I forget his name. Great American, anyway, and Busy Busy Busy currently handles the franchise.)
VIEW FROM THE RADICAL MUDDLE. The Crazy Jesus Lady reports (or completely makes up) an encounter with a possible swing voter. Like many in the throes of delirium, CJL's poetic sesibility is highly engaged: the swinger "lives in a $250,000 three-bedroom house in a neighborhood that never quite jelled aesthetically... and never quite jelled in human terms either, at least for her. She told me the neighbors seem nice but she doesn't really know them. Which is odd, as she's lived there 22 years... Years ago she still stopped by with a Pyrex dish of baked ziti when new people moved in, but not so much anymore."
Seeing no other point to this exposition, I can only assume CJL is presenting us here with a Dürer allegorical woodcut: where once pyrexed pasta and good fellowship reigned, now neighbors know not one another, as Satan prefers! The swinger lies on a fault-line between evil, rootless cosmopolitanism and sunny, hearty Americanism. CJL has described these two camps before, but with less metaphorical recourse, because her beloved Bush had just "won a war" and America was going the right way; but now even people she knows are tiring of the Leader, and it's time to stand out on streetcorners singing "Throw Out The Lifeline" and holding up lurid pictures of innocence bedazzled by the Dark Lord.
CJL warns us that she had taken no notes, that this is not, properly speaking, an interview, but no warning could prepare us adequately for the Molly Bloom of the Suburbs speechifying that follows:
But if (I say "if") voters are less moronic than this, Bush is fucked.
Seeing no other point to this exposition, I can only assume CJL is presenting us here with a Dürer allegorical woodcut: where once pyrexed pasta and good fellowship reigned, now neighbors know not one another, as Satan prefers! The swinger lies on a fault-line between evil, rootless cosmopolitanism and sunny, hearty Americanism. CJL has described these two camps before, but with less metaphorical recourse, because her beloved Bush had just "won a war" and America was going the right way; but now even people she knows are tiring of the Leader, and it's time to stand out on streetcorners singing "Throw Out The Lifeline" and holding up lurid pictures of innocence bedazzled by the Dark Lord.
CJL warns us that she had taken no notes, that this is not, properly speaking, an interview, but no warning could prepare us adequately for the Molly Bloom of the Suburbs speechifying that follows:
But Clinton -- he was very smart and he had a great economy but he was a bum. Not just the sex but the money and the pardons and Hillary probably walked out of there with a couch on her head! Bush is a better person. He gets in and 9/11 comes and he handles it. He brought respect back. But he's always too eager to get involved in things. He pushes too much. He's pretty impetuous! It was good in Afghanistan, we got rid of those nuts. But Iraq -- I don't know. Iraq is very --w ho knows? Maybe it was too much. Maybe it was the right thing -- but now we've got this antiwar mess and it's 10 troops today and the Israelis and the Gaza strip and fighting and suicide and kids with backpacks and -- what a big mess.Based on these ramblings, CJL offers the President advice, which is useless and need not concern us here, for, if there is any truth to the impression CJL has of her allegedly dear friend, then the candidates' logical response should be to visit the homes of such people and wave brightly-colored baubles, flash bright lights, march Barney out for a song, and otherwise employ tricks designed to win the childlike trust of the simple-minded.
But if (I say "if") voters are less moronic than this, Bush is fucked.
MEDIA CONSPIRACIES EXPOSED! In the manner of wolves instinctively amplifying one another's baleful howls, more wingnuts have joined Professor Reynolds in alerting America to the dangers of a free press. In the New York Post, General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters lays full blame for our military's late, unprepossessing outcome in Fallujah on the goldurned media:
The General goes on:
The main issue, though, is: the media "creates a drag on the chain of command all the way up to the president" how? The General does not describe the means, which I'm sure we'd all find most interesting. By what magical effect did Dan Rather freeze George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld in their tracks? Did the sight of a wrecked convoy in the Hearld-Tribine actually cause the leaders and troops whom Peters has been journalistically tongue-bathing since the war began to suddenly shudder and throw down their arms?
Perhaps the General actually means that the perfidious networks physically used radio waves, in the manner of mad scientists in old horror movies, to disorient our troops. Imagine our fighting men clutching their helmets as curved lines of force radiate across the screen: "Foreign policy feeling... weak..." gasps the GI. "Feel... sudden compulsion to... negotiate a settlement..." While off behind a nearby sandhill, Bin Laden and Ted Turner cackle fiendishly and rub their hands.
I marvel that Peters, an ardent militarist who describes our soldiers in almost godlike terms, and our leaders, reflexively, as neo-Churchills, believes they can be hobbled, much less defeated, by the pictures on the TV.
The media weren't reporting. They were taking sides. With our enemies. And our enemies won. Because, under media assault, we lost our will to fight on.Old Blood 'n' Guts' explanation of this very serious charge is weak from the outset. He refers glancingly to "Al-Jazeera and the BBC," then describes some typical incendiary Al-Jazeera coverage, but says nothing of the BBC version. Seasoned analysts of propaganda will recognize that Peters invoked the Beeb simply to get it associated in the minds of feeble-minded readers (clearly a majority, this being the Post) with the ravings of the rogue Middle Eastern network. (The General also alludes to Al-Jazeera as "the Arab CNN," probably hoping that his readers will remember only that CNN was, in some manner, involved in this treason).
The General goes on:
The media is often referred to off-handedly as a strategic factor. But we still don't fully appreciate its fatal power. Conditioned by the relative objectivity and ultimate respect for facts of the U.S. media, we fail to understand that, even in Europe, the media has become little more than a tool of propaganda.A nice head-pat for the U.S. media, BTW, but I'm sure the General knows, as does his omnivorous publisher, that these days all media is global, and the charges he hurls at Paris today will soon find their way home.
That propaganda is increasingly, viciously, mindlessly anti-American. When our forces engage in tactical combat, dishonest media reporting immediately creates a drag on the chain of command all the way up to the president.
The main issue, though, is: the media "creates a drag on the chain of command all the way up to the president" how? The General does not describe the means, which I'm sure we'd all find most interesting. By what magical effect did Dan Rather freeze George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld in their tracks? Did the sight of a wrecked convoy in the Hearld-Tribine actually cause the leaders and troops whom Peters has been journalistically tongue-bathing since the war began to suddenly shudder and throw down their arms?
Perhaps the General actually means that the perfidious networks physically used radio waves, in the manner of mad scientists in old horror movies, to disorient our troops. Imagine our fighting men clutching their helmets as curved lines of force radiate across the screen: "Foreign policy feeling... weak..." gasps the GI. "Feel... sudden compulsion to... negotiate a settlement..." While off behind a nearby sandhill, Bin Laden and Ted Turner cackle fiendishly and rub their hands.
I marvel that Peters, an ardent militarist who describes our soldiers in almost godlike terms, and our leaders, reflexively, as neo-Churchills, believes they can be hobbled, much less defeated, by the pictures on the TV.
Wednesday, May 19, 2004
AROUND THE WEB.The Poor Man's recent design innovations are nice, but his FAQs for them are even better. Revel in them.
Also interested to see that Rick Brookhiser is still providing adult supervision at The Corner -- in this case, wearily reminding his intellectually pre-teen charges that there is a difference between F. Scott Fitzgerald and a John Held drawing. That he didn't also wade into the Derbyshire/Orwell thing shows that, despite his enthusiasm for the Iraq war, Brookhiser can identify some lost causes, at least.
Also interested to see that Rick Brookhiser is still providing adult supervision at The Corner -- in this case, wearily reminding his intellectually pre-teen charges that there is a difference between F. Scott Fitzgerald and a John Held drawing. That he didn't also wade into the Derbyshire/Orwell thing shows that, despite his enthusiasm for the Iraq war, Brookhiser can identify some lost causes, at least.
SIMPLE, SIMON. Roger L. Simon asks:
Why didn't George Bush enlist Stephen Spielberg to help with Iraq? Because he's a Democrat?No, because he's a fucking movie director. And the mess in Iraq isn't something you can fix with CGI.
INTERNET PORN. Michael Totten, everyone's favorite "liberal" Bush supporter, provides a link to a video of Nick Berg's head being chopped off. Well, I've seen bukkake and erotic vomit (whatever that's called) -- and yuk, but so what? Oh, but Totten's making a point -- our atrocities are not as bad as their atrocities! Keep that bar raised high, Mike!
This kind of shit reminds me of my dear old Mom responding to The Passion of the Christ: "See how much he took," she kept muttering. Mom, bless her, was reacting perfectly to what Mel Gibson was selling: look whatta mess they made of my boy! Which is exactly what Totten and his fellow travellers are up to: turning this alleged struggle for democracy into a blood feud. Those bastards done worse and (no matter what his pussy dad said) we gotta do worse to them!
I'm increasingly amazed by the faith of right-wing nuts in bloodkkake as a means of convincing the electorate.
This kind of shit reminds me of my dear old Mom responding to The Passion of the Christ: "See how much he took," she kept muttering. Mom, bless her, was reacting perfectly to what Mel Gibson was selling: look whatta mess they made of my boy! Which is exactly what Totten and his fellow travellers are up to: turning this alleged struggle for democracy into a blood feud. Those bastards done worse and (no matter what his pussy dad said) we gotta do worse to them!
I'm increasingly amazed by the faith of right-wing nuts in bloodkkake as a means of convincing the electorate.
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
HM. How best to respond to Professor Reynolds' latest rhetorical question?
1.) You tell me.
2.) Shouldn't you edit this question for clarity, e.g.: "How long will a large and active minority allow freedom of the press to exist?" But, then, you're not an English professor, are you?
3.) Where did you get the idea that freedom of the press, as an inalienable right, is something to be "allowed"?
4.) Your notion that freedom of the press "didn't exist, really, until the 1960s" is novel. When may we expect your monograph on this theme?
5.) Fuck you, you stupid fucking hayseed fuck.
Freedom of the press, as it exists today (and didn't exist, really, until the 1960s) is unlikely to survive if a majority -- or even a large and angry minority -- of Americans comes to conclude that the press is untrustworthy and unpatriotic. How far are we from that point?
1.) You tell me.
2.) Shouldn't you edit this question for clarity, e.g.: "How long will a large and active minority allow freedom of the press to exist?" But, then, you're not an English professor, are you?
3.) Where did you get the idea that freedom of the press, as an inalienable right, is something to be "allowed"?
4.) Your notion that freedom of the press "didn't exist, really, until the 1960s" is novel. When may we expect your monograph on this theme?
5.) Fuck you, you stupid fucking hayseed fuck.
IDIOTS ABROAD. David Frum has visited Stockholm, which is a beautiful city. He thinks so too but, having a busy propagandist's brain, twists its elegance and grandeur into proof of Sweden's statist perfidy. The argument, such as it is, is hard to follow, but among the breadcrumby ideas Frum leaves for us are these:
Or maybe he just has the same problem as Tacitus: it's tough to bloviate with a straight face about bad old Europe while you are enjoying its largesse, hospitality, and beauty. But (in the immortal words of Lorenzo St. DuBois) they try, oh, how they try!
The parkland in the central city likewise testifies to the power of monarchs: what is now a treed enclave of museums was once the headquarters of the royal Swedish navy; a few blocks away is the park that was once the garrison of the king’s household troops...Perhaps Frum spent so much of his Washington tenure inside the White House that he didn't have time to run out front and similarly expostulate on the architectural subtext of the 132-room mansion surrounded by concrete battlements that serves as our own seat of executive power.
The shock of the Great Depression put an end to Sweden’s flirtation with what the Swedes call liberalism -- and they quickly reverted to older instincts: an all-powerful and highly centralized state.
And so today as in 1800, a grand aristocracy of career politicians, civil servants, and favored businesses benefit from the system: the prime minister lives in an 18th century palace compared to which 10 Downing Street looks like a cramped little rowhouse...
Or maybe he just has the same problem as Tacitus: it's tough to bloviate with a straight face about bad old Europe while you are enjoying its largesse, hospitality, and beauty. But (in the immortal words of Lorenzo St. DuBois) they try, oh, how they try!
Monday, May 17, 2004
...TRY, TRY AGAIN. OpinionJournal bard Mark Helprin doesn't like the way the war is going, so he suggests what he imagines to be a new approach:
We already have ceded part of Sunni Iraq: What remains is to pick a strongman, see him along, arrange a federation, hope for the best, remount the army, and retire, with or without Saudi permission, to the Saudi bases roughly equidistant to Damascus, Baghdad, and Riyadh.Yeah, it worked so well the last time.
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