WHAT'S OPERA, DOC? Terry Teachout's OpinionJournal complaint against the Ground Zero arts companies selections pretends to be a righteous jeremiad against "culture by committee." The recent theatre, dance, and museum choices are "modest and safe" and "very, very small," says Teachout, when the committee, had they any guts, could have made "the boldest possible declaration of faith in the power and glory of Western culture" by including Teachout's favored candidate, the New York City Opera. "What a disappointment," he cries, rending his garment. "What a wasted opportunity."

Now, any critic whose candidate fails to receive its piece of the funded pie is entitled to a good huff. But c'mon, doc: an opera company?

Don't get me wrong (especially you, Sasha). I respect opera (more by breach than observance) and take Teachout's word that City Opera is a good pick. But let's not kid ourselves: the Ground Zero selections were never going to be about grandeur -- not even the fake grandeur of the hideous neoWTC building design. They were picked for their potential appeal to the area's prime constituencies: tourists and yuppies.

As John Rockwell observes in the Times:

...the very name of the body that made these choices — a "development corporation" — indicates the true rationale behind its selection, and behind the decision to involve arts organizations in the first place. The winners were picked not because anyone gave first thought to their worthiness as art, but because they represented a canny mix of institutions likely to make downtown a better place to live and do business.

The selections are modest because that is what the punters will pay for. The Freedom Center is an unknown quantity, and the Drawing Center unknown, alas, to me; but the Signature, best known for its one-playwright-a-season schtick, and the Joyce are solid and reasonably popular art-brands that will edify without scaring anyone. They are perfectly suitable for Mr. and Mrs. (or Mr. and Mr.) New York Striver who, after a hard week of shuffling papers, don't mind dropping a few bills for the quality art these vendors provide, any more than they would mind dropping a few bills at Dean & Deluca, Kenneth Cole, or Design Within Reach. The stuff goes down easy and has the smell of quality.

You don't even have to know much about art to patronize these establishments. The Signature is practically a missionary enterprise, reviving and (where needed) resuscitating moribund reputations. If they're doing a whole year of this Maria Irene Fornes, well then, honey, she must be damn good.

Museums have the advantage of sitting perfectly still for gawkers from Iowa to tromp through. What they'll see at the Drawing Center will probably be good draughtsmanship at least, and you don't have to be Bernard Berenson to appreciate that. As to the Freedom Museum, well, one can only imagine. They'll clean up in "Remember 9/11" hanky sales alone.

One might wonder how a modern dance company would be more pleasing to the constituents than an opera company. The answer is simple: bodies. Now, maybe you watch dance entirely, and chastely, for love of technique. And maybe old Uncle Roy watches women's gymnastics events on TV because he admires athleticism in all its forms. Please. As a tired businessman observed years ago (in the presence of my friend Bob Schaffer) at some spectacular gyrations in a Pina Bausch performance, "Now that's what I like to see -- bottoms up!"

Art can be grand, but it doesn't have to be, and hardly ever is. If the voice of God comes to Ground Zero, chances are it will be in a much different form than opera. Sorry, doc. The people, through their elected time-servers and jobsworths, have spoken!

AN OLD PRO SHOWS HOW IT'S DONE. They unveiled the Clintons' portraits at the White House today, and there was a rather playful ceremony with Bush and Bubba doing some of their lighter material. I note that Clinton worked this into his remarks:

This is a great country.Politics is noble work.... yesterday, I said, "You know, Most the people I've known in this business, Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, were good people, honest people, and they did what they thought was right. And I hope that I'll live long enough to see American politics return to vigorous debates where we argue who's right and wrong, not who's good and bad."

Regular readers of this site will know that's not how I operate, but I'm not running for anything. John Kerry is, and I hope he was was paying attention. There are worse guys to take rhetorical tips from.

PRO-DEATH REPUBLICAN. It's rare indeed (or should I say "heh indeed") when I admit a debt of gratitude to the Ole Perfesser over t' the U of Tenn. But one of his posts has alerted me to an entertaining character named Clayton Cramer.

The Perfesser, it seems, had written a TCS piece about his desire to have his life extended to infinity and beyond via government-funded research -- said moneys to be taken, one imagines, from boondoggles like Workmen's Compensation. But let us move on -- the Perfesser's own lunacy is a tired subject.

Cramer argues that life is not worth extending. Now, this is a defensible position based on an understanding of human nature. But Cramer doesn't want a shorter life on valid Motorhead "Ace of Spades" grounds ("That's the way I like it baby/I don't want to live forever") -- he wants it because kids today are having all kinds of deviant sex, probably because they can't easily buy guns, thanks to "smart, arrogant, and immoral" judges. And it's only going to get worse:

When I was growing up, there was drug abuse. There were orgies and other forms of casual sex, where people were just used, and feelings got hurt. But that was largely high school and college, not junior high and upper grades of elementary school. I am not sure that I want to live another hundred years, and see the evil that will become the norm.

Perhaps Cramer would be less exercised if the target demographic for orgies were trending older rather than younger. But that seems unlikely. Note the world-weariness of his opening remarks:

When I was 23, I got married. We drove away from the church in our 1979 Pontiac Grand Am for our honeymoon... It is 24 years later, and I am still married to that same woman. Life was fresh and new, full of optimism and hopes.

As you get older, your high hopes and ambitions inevitably collapse around you. The wonders of travel turn into a series of disappointments. Your high hopes for your children come crashing down, especially when you discover the moral ugliness of the culture in which you are raising them.

That paragraph break seems awkward, and I like to think that, in an early draft, two sentences in Cramer's middle section were inverted:

Life was fresh and new, full of optimism and hopes. It is 24 years later, and I am still married to that same woman. As you get older, your high hopes and ambitions inevitably collapse around you.

Doesn't that sound more natural? Then Cramer weeps over the tedium of having to work for a living:

The job that you enjoyed at 23, and 25, and even 28, by 35 or 40 has lost its luster. You do it because you need the money to pay your bills.

People working to make money to live! Forbid it, almighty God! Yet the thought of changing jobs also terrifies Cramer: "Imagine having to do a career change 30 or 40 times over a lifetime! No thank you!" Actually, that's called the New Economy, or the Old Poverty, and millions of us are stuck in it. Maybe we should all just kill ourselves. Between the orgies and the careers, what's left for us?

How did I miss this guy before?

DON'T PLAY US CHEAP. It has been suggested that New Yorkers refrain from showing displeasure at this year's Republican Convention, lest we alienate our good neighbors in the red states. Here's an example of why I can't buy that.

Saturday's New York Post, the Republican pamphlet distrubuted daily here at great expense (one might say "investment") by Rupert Murdoch, ran a story called "Big Apple Salute," referring to the recent Reagan necromonia.

The idea was to show the City's love for our departed Gipper. Most of the quotes, however, come from outlanders, visiting from Wichita, Chicago, and Hillsborough, NJ.

Two actual citizens are cited. One is a fifth-grader on a field trip. "I feel bad for his family," says 11-year-old Melissa Compere. "He was real important and a lot of people loved him. It makes me want to learn more about him."

The other is an adult, presumably, who "was watching the rites at Rosie O'Grady's on West 46th Street because the TV reception in his office was poor."

One can only imagine the strain on the Post reporters tasked with this beat, trying to get regular New Yorkers to talk about their love for Reagan. All they could produce, aside from predictable tourist bleats, is an 11-year-old and a guy who cut work to go to a bar.

But a Big Apple Salute must be made, for, by Murdochian logic, every corner of the Republic must be shown to mourn the Gipper, especially the putative hometown of the rag itself.

The game plan -- and you know, in this Age of Propaganda, there is always a game plan -- is obviously to portray us as fellow travellers aboard the Republican juggernaut, despite our history, despite our character, despite our proud record of 17 straight elections without supporting a Republican Presidential candidate, despite our relatively huge population of artists, educators, gays, blacks, Hispanics, intellectuals, and naysayers, despite everything blazingly obvious about us to anyone who actually knows us.

No thanks and fuck you.

A CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND. I took Editor Martin out to Coney. He's leaving town soon, and he had to see it before he left. It was a cool, clear day, sky pale blue and the boardwalk crowded with the usual Coney folk, which these days is about two-thirds deep-Brooklyn locals of every race taking their raucous ease, and one-third young hipsters and tourists out to catch one of the least gentrified scenes in the City. It's a good mix and everyone was having fun. Well, one hulking Italian fellow, drunk off his ass, took issue with Martin and myself when he thought we'd nicked his plastic chair, but that was easily defused. Anyway, what's a day at Coney without a little street hassle? Like the bumper cars and the kids wrestling good-naturedly on the sand, Brooklyn pleasure must always involve a few rude shocks.

How I wish the doubters of multiculturalism could have seen it. Puerto Rican flags got a pre-parade workout, and after the boardwalk salsa band closed down, a couple of rogue percussionists worked their cowbells and shakers into a merengue beat, moving a fat couple to dance ballroom-style in their t-shirts and shorts. At sunset a few hundred folks in kinte cloth, skull caps, and billowing white robes marched to African drums toward the shore to throw flowers into the water in memory of the Middle Passage. At the boardwalk bars would-be wiseguys pounded Coronas and their own chests. This was no grad-school wishful thinking, no professorial pipe-dream, but the way we live.

Take the Republican Conventioneers on a field trip to Coney. We could all profit by it.

WELL, THEY CAN ALWAYS PATRONIZE THE HOOKERS. An unbylined OpinionJournal piece picks apart the Tony Award winners and declares them hostile to red state Americans. Witches! Homosexuals! Assassins! Puppets! The author wonders if the Republican conventioneers coming in August will be pleased. "We'll happily concede that much of it may be clever," he generously allows. "It may even be, at times, pretty good. But put yourself in the shoes of those on the New York City Host Committee and you can see why they might conclude that this is not the sort of stuff that plays well to our guests from Peoria."

There is no real sourcing in the piece -- "news columns had good sport with Republican plans for the theater," the author claims, with no attributions -- but it seems odd to me that that the three delegates profiled at the RNC's own Convention website all look forward to taking in a Broadway show. They say they want to see "The Lion King", and will presumably not be troubled by the touchy-feely, circle-of-life, diversity message (the profiled delegates themselves seem to have been selected to promote a diversity message); but even if they somehow find themselves at "Avenue Q," "Wicked," or "I Am My Own Wife," I suspect they will still enjoy themselves on grounds of craft, spectacle, and fun, just as people of all sorts have enjoyed "La Cage Aux Folles," "Sweeney Todd," and other Tony winners of which neither they nor the OpinionJournal author may have approved on ideological grounds.

The culture war is a wearying beat.

POSITIVELY OUR LAST CRAZY CORNER REAGAN FUNERAL POST: "I remember someone saying once that RR was the kind of actor who improved the performances of the other actors on the set. I thought of this during the funeral -- during RR's final performance, as it were, everybody else put on a great show."

When I go, I hope I, too, will be remembered as the sort of corpse that made his friends look good.

A COCKEYED DYNAMIST. Reaganfest '04 is nearly over, thank God. This first collective, posthumous effort to muscle history on the old fraud's behalf has seen several very low points, some choice examples of which have been nimbly tagged and bagged by Wonkette. Generally, unreason has reigned, which of course is perfectly appropriate for a Reaganfest.

For example, in her hagiograph, Virginia Postrel says that "the late 1960s and 1970s were a scary time to grow up." That's interesting. I grew up in roughly the same time frame, and though I was depressed and unloved, I wasn't often scared. In fact, like most children throughout human history, I looked forward to the challenges and privileges of adulthood with an unreasonable fearlessness I often wish I had back.

What struck terror into young Virginia's heart? I've had a hard time tracking down details on her childhood, so I suppose Postrel might have grown up on the mean streets of East L.A. or some such, but looking at her I doubt it. She has said that "from childhood, we have developed a sort of advertising literacy," which could be very scary, in a Count Floyd sort of way.

Further down, she explains the horror of youth in the age of tie-dye and denim:

The Soviets were expanding, and the Cold War seemed destined to end in defeat or destruction...

So unlike the age of peace and security in which we now live.

The Saudis could -- and did -- cut off the oil whenever they got mad. People in the northeast froze from lack of natural gas; my father turned our thermostats down to 65, as though it would help...

Is this not the most pathetic tell-that-to-the-young-people-of-today-and-they-won't-believe-you jape you've ever heard? When I was a young girl, we had to wear light sweaters indoors! And that was because we were at the mercy of the House of Saud, with whom we have much better relations now. Why, we can get them to move the price of oil up or down, as needed. And all we have to do in return is help them out with airline reservations.

Prices went up and up, not just on a few things but on everything.

Again, not like now. Of course, it has been suggested that we are not better off than we were -- we just don't feel the effects of our economic distress, thanks to easy credit, which allows us to off-load our horrendous debts onto the next generation. (Now those kids have reason to live in fear!)

I could go on, but why bother. The thing about the cheery "Dynamist" Postrel is that her optimism, like Reagan's, requires a backstory about the collectivist horrors that her creed happily vanquished, so that we'll keep on believing that this is the best of all possible worlds. Of course, this would work better if the world weren't such a fucking mess.

AGAIN, MORE SLOWLY: WHAT. LIBERAL. MEDIA? Every bit I've seen of the Reagan mourning media coverage has been obsequious and flattering to the old fraud in the extreme. This is not noted by the usual bias obsessives of the Right (nor, I expect, will they remember it afterwards), but it is obvious. Even the "media critics" at NRO, hypersensitive to even the faintest slights, have been reduced to complaining about Tom Brokaw's tone of voice, and so devote most of their time to bizarre monarchist and millenarian observations more suitable to that other great Republican, Reverend Moon.

Meanwhile Alterman's showing off his hate mail from Reaganauts enraged by his perfectly reasonable complaints about the Gipper Administration. Sample lines: "We'll die before that godless scum takes our country from us once again! Go and cry with your homosexual friends..." "Call me and I will persoanlly buy you a first class ticket to whatever country you want to go live in." "You sir, are a low down miserable scum bag oppotunist..." "So please, continue to ramble on as the bitter, pathetic idiot your are so that Americans can thank God for giving us a leader like Ronald Reagan." "I see that you still have your communist party membership! You faggot!"

There you have it, folks: our opposition.

(Hey, if Michael Totten gets to pull this kind of shit, why can't I?)

THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING. In today's New York Observer (not in the web edition), Jim Callaghan suggests that those sincerely wishing to stop Bush should refrain from demonstrating in New York during the upcoming Republican Convention. He worries that the Cause will be damaged by TVs bearing to the hinterlands images of "angry youths and assorted lefties, joined by antiwar activists who are against war even after 3,000 people were slaughtered." That last, bloody-shirted bit may have you wondering whether Callaghan is really playing for the other side, but he insists he's only playing devil's advocate: "We all know that Nixon and his felons had provocateurs at the 1972 Republican Convention to make sure that America wouldn't forget that he was the white man's President, the voice of the 'Silent Majority'... Don't discount the theory that the G.O.P. picked New York for the 2004 Convention for the same reason: the prospect of demonstrators behaving badly."

Callaghan seems to forget that New York has played host to hundreds of thousands of anti-Iraq-war demonstrators without serious incident. The net effect has been to remind people that not everyone is on board with this Administration's policies, even in the former home of the twin towers. So well-behaved were they that even reliable Republican propagandists could only fudge the numbers and point to smaller, pro-war demos as a true reflection of the Will of the People.

Crazier still is the idea that Bush picked this site so that ABC could show dirty hippies disturbing the peace. In locating here, so close to the 9/11 anniversary, he obviously wants America to believe -- in the absence of any countervailing visual evidence -- in a New York shell-shocked and agreeable to his Iraqi vengeance, no matter how disconnected that was from the actual attacks. He wants us, in other words, as a prop, mute and serviceable to his purpose. Here's a supporting quote from Mayor/Nanny Bloomberg in Scholastic magazine: "When the Republican convention comes to New York we are going to remember those young men and women who died on September 11 and those that are fighting for us today." It's a good bet that Bloomberg and his comrades expect this line of reasoning to go over as well with grown-ups as it surely did with the pre-teen readers of Scholastic.

The Republicans are fully expecting New Yorkers to play their part in this charade: a local newspaper and subway campaign featuring former Mayor/Clown Ed Koch exhorts us to "be nice" to the visiting Republicans. The idea, articulated in many outlets (including the current Mayor's own news service), is that the sons and daughters of the Oatmeal, Nebraska Rotary Club will drop a bundle here and revivify our sagging economy. Everyone knows where the city's heart is (we haven't electorally supported a Republican candidate since Coolidge), but as the local GOP web site puts it, "the city has been welcoming, from the labor unions with which Republicans have traditionally had rocky relations, to everyday people who want the convention to succeed, if not Bush's re-election bid. The Democrats might hope it is a mismatch on the magnitude of ordering a corned beef sandwich on white with mayo, but officially they support whatever helps the New York economy."

In the days of Catherine the Great, the real residents of Potemkin villages only had to stay out of sight. Now we are expected to do a full-on meet-and-greet, in hopes that we may be thrown a few kopeks.

I expect all good citizens to be civil to such Republicans as fortune sends our way this summer, but civility is not silence. If they don't like demonstrations, if they prefer New York to behave like a hick town bowing and scraping to Wal-Mart, too fucking bad for them.

BLANKER GENERATION. I'm sure there's more than one reason why the death of Robert Quine bothers me this much.

I didn't know the guy, but I would often see him around the East Village back in the 70s and early 80s. He was usually wearing The Uniform: motorcycle jacket, frayed black jeans, and Keds. His minor variation was a nearly bald pate and thick, black-framed glasses. (He also had a splay-footed, schlubby walk, not unlike that of Robert Ludlam, whom I also often saw walking those streets.)

I saw him play with the Voidoids twice: once opening for Patti Smith at CBGB-2, Hilly's ill-fated concert venue on 2nd Avenue (it's now the Orpheum, where I believe Stomp is still playing); once at the Paradise Garage disco, in a rare "new wave" night at which Teenage Jesus & The Jerks opened and drove everyone but me and about a dozen other freaks out of the room. "We're gonna play one more song because we're so great!" yelled Lydia Lunch.

Those of us on that particular fringe thought Lunch was harsh and interesting, but I don't think many of us would have made a case for her as a musician. But Quine actually praised Lunch's guitar playing; in fact, he produced a record for her and played on a few others. Quine had been to the Berkeley School of Music, and he was digging this chick that basically just beat on the strings.

I guess he knew, though, that technique was only worth having if it produced something worth listening to. If it was brilliant but produced something dead, it wasn't as good as something that was brutal but produced something alive. Richard Hell recalls:

Though Bob, of all the “punk” musicians, was the most musically sophisticated (unless you count [Tom] Verlaine who’d come in pretty close), as much so as anybody who ever played in a rock and roll band in fact, he still belonged beyond a doubt to the genre if you want to discuss that issue, by virtue of his anger and his musical values. He wasn’t interested in virtuosity but in feeling and invention.

Maybe that's why the news is especially sad to me. So much of what comes off the musical assembly line these days sounds like a late edition of what has come before -- usually a few months before. It seems nearly every band in America got the blink-182 guitar effects box several Christmases ago; I expect many of them are tired of it, but just can't bring themselves to put it away. It isn't really any easier to be derivative than it is to be original, but originality is a loss-leader and what you invite by indulging it is the heartbreak of rejection. For young people especially, that's a tough one.

It seems amazing then to contemplate that Quine and his mates actually courted rejection, producing something that seemed out of sync with what was considered "good" at the time. To a large extent, they won their battle -- now they're accepted as pioneers. But what equivalent to them now exists? I don't just mean something good -- a higher-class, more "rockin'" version of the same old -- I mean something wild.

I expect some kid somewhere is doing something like that. I just hope we'll get to hear him, or her. And I certainly hope he or she reaches a happier end than Quine.

THIS IS JUST NICE. From 1700: Scenes from London Life by Maureen Waller:

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.

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:

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?

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.

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.

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:

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.

"Having run for the Democratic nomination, Reverend Sharpton brings to our viewers an insider's perspective on Presidential politics," said Gould.

"McEnroe"?

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.

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.

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:

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.

This Jesus was forceful, businesslike and respectful — like . . . well, like a Marine.

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.

A BREAK FROM THE POLITICAL CRAP TO TALK ABOUT SOMETHING REALLY IMPORTANT. From WMC-TV Memphis:

A new movie based on the life of Johnny Cash will be filmed in Arkansas, Memphis and Nashville.

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.

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.

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:

...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.

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?

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...

...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.

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 time will come for us to leave Iraq," says the General, "But it's not here yet." Well, maybe we can hire a sitter.

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:

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.

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:

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.

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.

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:

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.

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":

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.

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:

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.

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?

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.

JUST WEIRD:

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:

...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.

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...

So Burns is the New York Times, and Lisa is Fox News. Or maybe Little Green Footballs.

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:

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.

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.