AGAINST INTERPRETATION. Senator Durbin:

When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here [at Guantanamo Bay]--I almost hesitate to put them in the [Congressional] Record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . . On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

I'm not much for long quotes, but had to make an exception here. Durbin's remarks been widely excerpted to malicious effect, but not very much reported in full (as they were at DailyKos). To anyone who can read, their meaning should be clear: Americans, were they to learn what the FBI agent reported at Guantanamo, would not recognize those actions as consonant with their values. (Maybe some basic civics is required, too.)

So how, then, did Durbin's remarks come to be so widely portrayed as a condemnation of the American armed forces, or a comparison of the United States to Nazi Germany? Cynical as I am, I wouldn't blame the ability of the American people to read, or even to think straight. They haven't, for the most part, been given Durbin's words to read -- not without outrageous editing and misrepresentation and clouds of hot gas to distort them, anyway.

I fear that, while we are still able to grasp basic rhetoric and plain facts, the shrieking, clanking commentary machine that is always going off around us makes it too hard to hear.

UPDATE. I have been reading my commenters, and they make me sad. Not because they don't see the problem, but because they underline it: you must use a very limited species of language if you are going to tell the truth, otherwise the sense erasers of the Right will seize upon your wrongspeak and negate your whole point.

With all respect, fuck that noise, and fuck the dizzy notion that the Left is the primary purveyor of Political Correctness in this sick, sad era. Fuck that shit in the spirit of Lenny Bruce, Shirley Chisholm, Bill Hicks, Randy Newman, Adny Shernoff, Malcolm X, Mojo Nixon, Jocelyn Elders, Abbie Hoffman, and, sure, while we're at it, Colonel Nathan R. Jessep in A Few Good Men, and Howard Dean. Fuck 'em, in other words, if they can't take a joke. Or the truth. You want to paint the corners, trying to put the truth over in a squiggly way, you go right on ahead. Maybe that's more mature, but it looks to me like playing the other team's game in your own ballpark.

(UPDATED for clarity --like that would help! What do I know about the ephus pitch? Nothing, my friends.)

MIND OF A LUNATIC. I have got to cut back on the cocaine and cough syrup (a combo known to us drug cognoscenti as "bleeding ulcers in your esophagus"). Every TV news show I watch, every paper I read, every blog I accidentally select while surfing for hardcore pornography, seems to have been created by a committee of screeching gibbons and howling, feral dogs.

Hugh Hewitt, for example, reads like a Fafblog parody of himself. First there is the right-wing society page, Larry-King-Meets-George-Lincoln-Rockwell part:

Now the new Chris Muir strip is up. The only reason Muir isn't widely syndicated is MSM bias.

Michelle Malkin is the hardest working, smartest woman journalist without a television show in America. Take, for example, just this one post on Durbin. Which tells you a lot about MSM bias. She celebrated her first anniversary as a blogger this week. May she celebrate her first anniversary as a television host next July. Memo to MSNBC: Ratings with Michelle, or straight-lining with Olbermann?

Why don't you stupid, evil bastards listen to my program recommendations? Further down, Senator Durbin's recent rhetorical device -- easy to understand and inoffensive if your head is not filled with screaming, paranoid delusions -- invites from the radio host and spiritual advisor to Jim Lileks a torrent of abuse ("weasel," "anti-American," "Durbin's statements, and the statements of those defending him, are giving direct aid to the enemy," etc) and more finger-waggin' and fist-shakin' at -- hello, white whale off starboard! -- the MSM:

I can't see any of the bigs coming to the conclusion that the vast, vast majority of Americans have come to, which is that Durbin is a pathetic and repulsive political hack who should exit immediately after a lengthy and detailed apology.

What tracking poll is Hewitt reading? Do you find Senator Durbin a.) a pathetic and repulsive political hack, b.) pathetic and repulsive but not a hack, c.) a repulsive hack with just a soupçon of pathos, or d.) very sassy?

Hewitt also gives you emails of denunciation that you can cut out and forward, but, alas, no paper dolls of the bogeymen inhabitants of his scarifying dream world that you can cut out and burn in a cleansing fire.

Then there's culture scold/restaurant reviewer Steve Cuozzo in the New York Post, who takes off from an understandable disappointment at the "temporary" WTC memorial our political hacks will install near Ground Zero, and careens into a mad fear that StoryCorps -- the perfectly benign oral historians whose booths you may have noticed at Grand Central Station and elsewhere, and who will create the temp project -- may take this appointment as "an invitation to blame America."

Why, besides chemical imbalance, does Cuozzo imagine this? Because StoryCorp's founder, Steve Ismay, is on NPR. And because his programming shows that Ismay is "fascinated" with "grotesque corners of American life." Hey, me too -- why do you think I spend more time on these guys that their own shrinks do? But I must divert my eyes awhile. Maybe this weekend I'll turn my life right around.

TODAY'S CRAZY JESUS LADY IS AS CRAZY, AS JESUS, AND AS LADY AS EVER -- the theme, such as it is, is that PBS does great art and history, but cannot be trusted to do great art and history without Crazy Jesus Lady oversight because what it really wants to do is hurt Baby America. I felt real pangs of tenderness for the brain-damaged old witch when she started peopling her little doll playhouse with famous actors ("Angelina Jolie as Juliet, Kathleen Turner as Lady Macbeth, Alec Baldwin as Big Daddy..."). Don't let her near James Caan with a sledgehammer, that's all I can say.

I must draw your attention to one luscious passage:

Not just Republicans, but Democrats. I doubt you could find a Democratic senator who, forced to announce the truth, standing at the gates of heaven and being questioned by St Peter, would not, on being asked, "By the way, is PBS liberal?" answer, "Of course." Or, "Yes, but don't tell Tom Delay I knew."

The graf is its own little abnormal psychology textbook, but I remain fixated on her notion of Senators brought before St. Peter to answer questions like "Is PBS liberal?" (The correct answer, of course, is, "None of your fucking business, Pope-Boy. Now fetch me a taxi to Hell so I can catch happy hour with Oscar Levant.") And surely CJL must realize that, upon achieving sighting distance of the Throne of Peter, any modern Senator would burst into flame. At least.

IMAGINE THESE LINKS AS THE SCENES OF HORROR AT THE CLIMAX OF THE MAGIC FLUTE, AND AVERT YOUR EYES. The writers of The Corner have been removed to a new address. One imagines it padded, and attended by Union soldiers with soothing rattles and dolls, as in The Searchers ("It's hard to believe they're Right!" "They ain't Right - any more!")

Seriously, they've gotten even worse: Warren Bell is the new Jonah Goldberg! The displaced trickster-god of The Corner alternates between japes such as this --

When The Wall Street Journal runs those pictures (line drawing versions of photos) of people, their longtime policy has been to make the subject look about fifteen or twenty years younger. Don't you think it'd be awesome if they did that with Michael Jackson, showing him as a black guy?

-- and rubber-doll wrestling of the sort described here previously, but infinitely sadder: Responding to the Human Events "Dangerous Books" tsimmis, Goldberg opens, "Jon Chait asserts -- simply for the sake of offering insults -- that the contributors in particular and conservatives in general cannot 'distinguish between seminal works of social science and totalitarian manifestos' simply because both sorts of books show up on the same list. But he must know that, say, Robert George knows the difference between The Communist Manifesto and John Dewey's Democracy and Education...."

How should Chait, or any reader, know this, one wishes to ask, when the article in question makes no such distinction and Bad-Book Judge George published no dissenting opinion? But the rules of the rubber-doll match allow no animated opponents, and Goldberg achieves maximum thrash very well on his own:

Of coursebooks can be dangerous. Everything important, everything with the power to change mens' minds can be dangerous...

I disagree with those who would lump Darwin with Freud and Marx. But I don't think one can glibly say that just because the book was scientifically correct (speaking broadly, we've discovered lots of new things since then) and pioneering, doesn't mean it can't also be harmful. Darwinism certainly led to many horrors and abuses across the ideological spectrum...

Et eccch. After a while the Michael Jackson jokes come as a relief. You know when John Derbyshire and Rick Brookhiser step in as Voices of Reason, things are pretty dire.

While the soldiers are cleaning up shreds of rubber doll in Jonah's corner of The Corner, elsewhere the ravings are nearly as bad:

IF I WERE AN IRAQI I would have every reason to assume American troops will be there as long as it takes, since George W. Bush won an incredibly hard-fought election making precisely this case at great potential risk and cost to himself.

CONSERVATISM STANDS ATHWART HISTORY yelling stop -- and puts you on another road, sometimes a u-turn, sometimes just a different road. But you get somewhere. The Dems would just have you sit and stare at their Bill Pryor/etc. talking points.

LET'S BUILD A GIANT AIRSHIP. Let's face it: The 80s even had the best toys. It was Christmas morning in America.

Et ultima ecch. Or maybe not yet: "Given [your] opinions about the unseriousness of U.S. foreign policy and the value of euthenasia," says John Podhoretz to John Derbyshire (!!!), "you really ought to have voted for Kerry."

Finally -- for this night! And they must reanimate this dead night a hundred times! -- they descend into what I guess among this crowd must pass for porn. Oh dear, I can imagine Buckley muttering as his servant laces him into his leather vest, they'll never get the young people this way.

Hayek, wake up, they have gone mad! Somebody open a window.

MY PLAN INVOLVES A LARGE GOB OF CAMPHOR IN HOT WATER, AND PRAYERS TO ST. JUDE. This interesting Washington Times column asks, with an nearly audible tone of optimism, "Health costs leveling off?" Health costs are not the same thing as health care costs, of course, and sharper eyes than my own probably stopped reading there, but, fool that I am, I rushed forward in search of good news.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports health care costs rose 7 1/2 percent in 2004, well under the 11.4 percent rise in 2002. The BLS also reports cost increases for employers for health insurance per employee per hour worked has slowed even more. From March 2001 to March 2002, those costs rose 11 percent; from March 2002 to March 2004, it rose 9 percent each year. But from March 2004 to December 2004, it rose only 3 percent.

That's encouraging. What, I wondered, forced down the price of a colonoscopy? "...health-care costs are being held down by the marketplace, partly in response to health-care legislation passed in the last four years." Ah, the ol' Invisible Hand! I read on:

For one thing, employers offer and employees are choosing health-savings accounts and high-deductible health insurance in greater numbers. HSAs were given a big boost in the Medicare prescription drug bill passed in late 2003. Indeed that was why most Republicans voted for a bill that included the biggest new entitlement program since Medicare was passed in 1965.

Biggest new entitlement program! Someone got rooked with this deal -- fortunately, it was the American people, those suckers, not the possessors of high-deductable insurance!

Or maybe there's enough losing to go around. Self Employed Web explains: "...rising medical costs push an employer’s health insurance premiums higher every year. As a result, many small businesses don’t offer any medical coverage to employees. And many self-employed people can’t afford coverage. But just as with your homeowners insurance, one way to save money on your medical insurance is to increase your deductible..."

Clients of such insurance could be exposed for thousands of dollars in charges if something goes wrong. But on the bright side, tax breaks are included, and tax breaks make everything better.

Well, I suppose it's a bit much at this late date to hope for a revival of those Cadillac healthcare plans of my youth, where you showed a card and the doctors took care of you for practically nothing -- just as it's a little late to dream of job security, an ever-increasing standard of living, etc. What was the name of that country where we had all that, anyone remember?

Oh, health (care) costs are also being contained by "health insurance policies that encourage healthy behavior." Some of them include gym memberships, apparently.

So the costs are being contained by higher charges for services, and by us trying really hard not to get sick.

Hell, that's how I've been keeping my health care costs down all along!

UPDATE. Some nice parsing of the Times' numbo-jumbo by WatchfulBabbler in comments. BTW, while the Washington Times prescribes Not Getting Sick to those worried about health care costs, John Tierney at the New York Times prescribes Not Getting Old as Social Security reform, citing septagenarian cyclists as proof that the fogeys are parasiting off a "form of welfare." Jesse at Pandagon correctly rejoins that Tierney's geezer Olympians are statistical outliers. What fascinates me is the growing consensus among compassionate conservatives that illness and old age can be willed away through gumption. Pull away the years, and the tumors, by your very bootstraps, slaves!

Naturally the Ole Perfesser concurs with Tierney, perhaps expecting that his own, inevitable transhumanist apotheosis into an immortal robot-lawyer will moot all need for government assistance.

JUST US. I don't know if Michael Jackson is innocent, but I know he was found innocent, and there I intend to let the matter rest.

One of former Mayor Ed Koch's very few attractive habits was this: whenever a famous and contentious trial -- Bernard Goetz's, Larry Davis' etc. -- came to an end, he would say, "The people have spoken," and say no more about it.

That shows an admirable (though, alas, rare) understanding that criminal justice is not the same thing as politics, especially the debased sort of politics we have nowadays. The disposition of an accused citizen's case, and life, is a far more important and delicate thing than the hog-calling contests that decide our political leadership.

I will add that, in this as in every celebrity trial, the ignorant presumption of even intelligent people as to the guilt or innocence of the accused is breathtaking. If I were to divide the world into two types of people (and I sort of do), it would comprise the kind who would rather see the guilty freed than the innocent sentenced, and the other, lesser kind.

SLANDERRIFIC! Smears and spin work in similar ways. In both cases, the important thing is to get the story in play. Useful idiots will then do the heavy lifting for you.

To distinguish Ed Klein's The Truth About Hillary from the other 2,000 Hillary-is-Evil books released in the past year, someone leaked to Drudge the pre-publication money shot that Bill Clinton actually raped his wife, with Chelsea the wicked deed's poisoned fruit -- by which assertion Klein proves that the proverbial barrel has a false bottom, by means of which one can indeed sink lower if one is sufficiently motivated.

That such a slander would find a home at Drudge's place is of course no surprise. But, while the story seems crude, I perceive subtleties in the placement; perhaps, being of the sort that is always looking for the Good in his fellow man, I just wish to regard the story's facilitators as brilliantly evil rather than as simple thugs.

Whoever promulgated this filth seems to have taken the measure of the blogosphere, and judged that, while the more popular wingnuts certainly could not credit this story, they would yet be forced by that compulsive self-indentification which defines their type to prove, even as they discredited the tale, that they hated Hillary at least as much as the next wingnut; and, lest someone think that defending the Clintons from a lie were the same thing as defending the Clintons from such proven crimes as the murder of Vincent Foster etc., they would use the occasion for a vigorous Clinton-bashing. These slurgasms might excite among their Clinton-obsessed readers feelings of nostalgia and gratitude, and would perhaps move them to buy the gosh-darned book jes' to see what the feller was sayin'.

See, there really is no downside to saying anything at all, even the frankly unbelievable, about the Clintons. Except, of course, maybe they'll run out of slurs one day. Maybe these guys have a trade organization set up to prevent that.

Captain's Quarters does a nice job, flattering its readers by declaring that "vitriol" against the Clintons has "mostly disappear[ed]" in recent years (in which case he should maybe tell Arthur Finkelstein he's wasting his time), and concluding that the real villains in this case are anonymous sources and Klein's former employer, Newsweek magazine ("small wonder we end up with Qu'ran-flushing frauds from the magazine now").

Ankle Biting Pundits (tipped by Perfesser Mabuse hisself) are even better. The whole thing, they surmise, is a "trap" to get conservatives to overreact and thereby make Hillary look sympathetic. Besides, Clintons spread dirty stories, not clean-fingered conservatives such as ABP -- as, I guess, this dirty Clinton story is supposed to prove. (PS Juanita told the truth.) Altogether too brief a posting -- but fortunately for us, ABP has commenters, some of whom attack Hillary for being around when bad things were written about her, the fucking martyr ("I wonder how many episodes of 'Oh poor me' we are going to have to endure?? Like her little fainting spell awhile back...").

But my favorite (so far -- this thing is only getting started, and so many celebrated imbeciles have yet to weigh in) is Conservative Cat, who doesn't buy the rape part of the story, but does buy the part where Bill jokes about raping Hillary: "This is evidence of aggravated tackiness, not sexual assault. Not only is tackiness not at all surprising from Bill, we've already spent millions of tax dollars to prove that he is not a credible resource when it comes to stories about his own sexual activities." So this horrible, merely-half-true rape story is -- like so much else, for such people -- all about President Peckersnot. Semioticians and cryptographers will especially go for this haunting paragraph:

So, the only mystery here is why the Clintons would dignify the episode with any sort of rage. Of course, the only rage evidence we have is attributed to an anonymous source, which as we have seen is not exactly the best criterion for accuracy.

Who is trying to make it look like the Clintons are actually angry about starring in Ed Klein's lurid, public rape fantasy? We can't say, but it has something to do with MSM lies! For the Clintons never stop laughing at Ron Brown's death long enough to feel rage!

If, 100 years from now, people aren't getting doctorates in Clinton Studies (a branch of Abnormal Psychology), I will be very surprised.

SHORTER JAMES LILEKS: Why are all those Gitmo prisoners complaining? I had to watch Beyond The Sea! With gospel singers, yet!

SUMMER HOLIDAY #1. I grow weary focusing on the ludicrous when the glorious is all around us, bathed in warm sunshine. Over the coming days I will, among the usual road apple analyses, pay tributes to ten (10) great summer pleasures of the cultural variety, time-tested and road-ready.

Artifact the First:

The Dictators, Go Girl Crazy!

Why aren’t they doing VH1 tributes to The Miamis or the Shirts or Just Water? They used to play CBGB back when, just like Talking Heads and the Ramones and Blondie, and they were pretty good. Well, they weren’t quite in the same artistic or social frame as the punk bands that did become famous, epochal, world-historic and all that. They were just a lot of goofy, trashy fun. Listen to their stuff if you can find it, and you might think, damn, maybe someone could have made something of this.

If the Dictators had to rely on Hilly Krystal, maybe they wouldn’t have gotten any further than a CB’s compilation album, either. But they had some of those back-door connections that, alas, have since been bricked off by that dolorous professionalism which has made all radioland a single conduit of soothing sludge. Around the time Sire Records was desperately giving a here-goes-nothin’ to a bunch of Hilly’s faves, the Dictators were on CBS Records. And when the CBs guys were just idolizing the Stooges and Blue Öyster Cult, the Dictators were playing shows with them.

From the current perspective, it is hard to imagine why grown men would have signed the Dictators. They had a young, suburban, pop-culture-soaked perspective, just as we expect all up and coming bands to have now. But youth and suburbia and pop culture were a great deal different then. Drugs and sex didn’t have to be approached obliquely or ironically. Everyone knew what the kids were up to, and it was mainstream culture’s job to ignore it and kid culture’s job to celebrate and enable it. The old and the new lived in the same space: your parents’ living room was cool if your parents weren’t home and you could get laid and wasted in it while the Strawberries and the Joe Franklin Show were playing in the background. You didn’t have to take things too serious. And you didn’t have to watch what you said about anything.

Now, in the rock culture of that time, you could just hint at this and everyone would get the message and things would be cool. What kept anyone else from making Go Girl Crazy! was – I guess – a self-preservation instinct. Most people don’t do everything they can conceivably get away with, especially not right out the gate; they save up their slack for special occasions when their social selves fail them, after which they will shamefacedly admit that they "fucked up." Then they’ll retrench, kiss a little extra ass, and thereafter try to keep the car on the road.

Go Girl Crazy! betrays no shame or even foreboding of shame. Fucking up seems, to them, a positive virtue. As it happened, the Dictators did have something in common with the CBGB bohemians they stood among but not of: they didn’t give a shit, and they thought they were smart enough to get away with it.

For example: It was one thing for the Stones to do "Brown Sugar." It was an outrage if you listened to the lyrics, but who could make out the lyrics? Besides, Mick had sex with black girls and gave Merry Clayton a job and all those hippies were down with Black Power anyway.

In contrast, the Dictators were whiter than White Castle (fucking look at them) and sang – in an intermittent, absurdly incompetent pseudo-Caribbean dialect -- about having sex with black girls as what it would necessarily be for most guys like them: a grotesque fantasy. "Religion will save you/Civilization’s at hand… Her clothes come from Ghana and she prays to the East/She doesn’t take the white man’s flak/I still drink my soda but I’m getting confused/sometimes I wish I was black."

For some reason you can’t find these lyrics online.

Part also of their absurd will to power is little-boy chest-thumping about being the next big thing ("I knocked them dead in Dallas/They didn’t know we were Jews"), and members of the master race ("First we check to see what you eat/Then we bend down and smell your feet"), and the inclusion of Handsome Dick Manitoba (billed on the album as "Secret Weapon"), a pro-wrestler manque who steps in from time to time to keep things from getting too slick. Handsome Dick is a treasure. He sounds like he just stumbled into the studio after three hours of barking at passing cars and delivers a stirring oration on his ring supremacy ("I don’t care who ya bring in here, daddio! They’re all comin’ undah the thundah of Manitoba!") and key spot vocals in songs like the magnificent "Two Tub Man" ("I’m never gonna watch Channel 13!" – ridiculous solo break – "Edumacation ain’t for me!" – ridiculous solo break).

Why is this better than Brown Ploppy or Drunks with Guns? (Well, maybe it’s not so much better than Drunks with Guns, but we’ll leave that for a possible future posting.) Why is any particular outrage, up-to-the-minute or antique, memorable?

The weaker, but perfectly valid, of my arguments is songwriting. These songs are idiotic, but, as any fan of Uncle Dave Macon or Roger Miller or – oh sure, let’s bring them back into it – the Ramones knows, that’s not the same thing as bad. On the BÖC model of arena rock as fantasized by nerdish non-combatants, Go Girl Crazy! is as good as it gets. Adny Shernoff still turns a phrase as well as any working songwriter. If you can’t appreciate "That’s the price you have to pay/For eating burgers every day," well, you’re obviously suffering from a cultural deficiency.

The other argument, consonant with our summer-pleasures theme, has to do with an even less substantial commodity than songwriting: fun. The great thing about show business is its transparency. If you believe it, as the acting teachers say, they’ll believe it, provided you’re competent. If you’re fucking miserable, you can project that misery into your audience. And if you’re having fun, your objet d’art will be an objet d’fun.

Professionalism is a tricky subject in rock and roll. Acquire too much of it, and you’re not fun anymore. For the Dictators this wasn’t an issue. They had Sandy fucking Pearlman producing. All they had to do was be who they were. It isn’t as easy as it sounds, but somehow they managed. They didn’t punk out, even by the easy route of irony. Well, assuming snotty and ironic aren’t the same thing. And they aren’t. When Handsome Dick sings, "The fastest car and a movie star are my only goals in life," or Adny sings, "I wanna live a rich life/And I wanna die poor," yeah, it’s funny, but they aren’t kidding. Come to think of it, are there better goals? Oh, yeah yeah, community, society, family – no, seriously: what are they?

Shernoff thinks that the Ramones were more successful than the Dics because they were more focused, but sometimes you find gems in wandering that you won’t find in a hard-target search, and the ramblings of Go Girl Crazy! are sort of picaresque – adventures unified by a single, smartass point of view. All the songs, including the numbskull covers of "I Got You Babe" (as sung by a bunch of hypermacho geeks to one another) and "California Sun," are part of the adventure: a quest for the ultimate good time on a major label’s dime. Ridiculous solos. Too much reverb, at times. Giggling asides. Cars and girls. A sopor for the weekend. Growing up. Throwing up. Being the one not to let your sons become. You may choose not to believe in it, but don’t tell me for a second that it isn’t believable. Set me free; I might know better when I’m older.

FLASHBACK. Daniel Henninger re Medical Marijuana: "Liberalism to cancer patients: Drop dead."

Wait. I thought us liberals were high all the time, marching around Washington Square Park carrying FREE THE WEED signs... yeah, that was awesome... so, those were, in actuality, the conservatives? Like, wow.

Wait, wait. "The Supreme Court's liberal bloc -- Stevens, Ginsburg, Souter and Breyer..." But I thought Ginsburg was a big stoner! What? Oh, Douglas Ginsburg, right, yeah, wow.

"...with the support of Justices Kennedy and Scalia..." Hold on hold on hold ON. WHOA. SCALIA. So... wait a minute...

Never mind.

DEFINING VICTORY DOWN. You've probably had your fill of happy-Iraqi stories featuring strewn flowers, smiling children with all their limbs intact, puppies, and almost potable water. So have I, but I was drawn to read the latest example in National Review by the oddly constructed front-page link: "Basrans can almost see the arrival of a better tomorrow."

The author, Steven Vincent, "a freelance investigative journalist and art critic," returns to Basra after a year's absence, and the first change he notices is this:

...I can no longer wander the streets, take a cab, or dine in restaurants for fear of being spotted as a foreigner: Kidnapping, by criminal gangs or terrorists, remains a lucrative business.

Well, this could be good news in a way -- our newly-democratized brothers are becoming entrepreneurial, following the Russian Model of post-liberation economic opportunity.

Now that Saddam's fabled rape rooms are gone, Basran women also enjoy a new status:

As the religious parties flex their muscles, their various sheikhs and imams exert a steady, if unlegislated, pressure on women to cover themselves in hejab. Layla once wore Western-style clothing and a scarf; now she has to add a thin black tunic to appease Basra’s guardians of female virtue. “If you don’t abide by their wishes, they will harass you on the street — or worse,” she complains.

“This has become an Iranian city,” contends Salaam Wendy, a Basra native who recently returned to his hometown for the first time since he fled to Canada in 1986. “In the ’70s and ’80s, you used to find bars, nightclubs, casinos — and no women wore hejab. Today, you can’t even find secular books or music CDs, the religious parties have such control of the city. This isn’t the place I remember.”

Possible upside here, too: unbridled capitalism living side-by-side with a revival of traditional values.

Many of the elected leaders -- though our guide is moved to "put 'elected' in quotes in deference to the cynicism of numerous Iraqis" -- are, to a great extent, "party hacks with zero concept of democracy." Plus, "electricity is still three hours on, three off, and sewage remains a nightmare." Unsurprisingly, given this, many of the Basrans to whom Vincent speaks seem less than satisfied, but Vincent hears more optimistic reports from members of the "more prosperous classes" and some elected -- excuse me, "elected" -- leaders. Also, the weather's really nice in Basra this time of year.

It's getting to the point where the Iraq mess -- or miracle, depending on your point of view -- is such a totem for politically-minded commentators that the actual state of its various districts seems absolutely irrelevant, even to the commentators themselves. Much of the country was blown to shit for specious reasons -- but one day it may be an economic powerhouse! Thus, in our age of endless spin, are the vagaries of life, the unpredictable shifts in the fortunes of the great and small, grist for anyone's mill, the product to be shaped into any sort of symbol one likes. Such products may be admired and even bought, but we should not forget that they are for decorative purposes only.

SHORTER OLE PERFESSER: I'm so mind-bendingly full of shit these days I have to remind people of my fabled "sense of humor."

UPDATE: "...I think that the Singularity is something to take seriously... The main point is that the dangers, in my estimation, don't come from the creation of a godlike (or demonlike) superhuman entity. Or at least, if such an entity exists, the threat won't be because of its intelligence... individuals with powers that would have been until recently regarded as godlike... expand beyond the earth beforehand... Mad! They called me mad!"

He didn't really say that last bit about being mad. But he did gesture dramatically in front of a couple of dynamos, I can tell.

Not liberal, not conservative -- merely transhumanist! Between this shit and his life extension obsession -- and, of course, his awful postings -- what an image of the Perfesser we may piece together: a lawyer who wants to live forever in a world of endless wars.

STADIUM SHOW. New York Mayor Richie Rich got a kick in the ass this week from Mssrs. Silver and Bruno. It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

The West Side Stadium project is in serious trouble now that the Albany bosses have turned against it. The Bloomberg booster section is feeling very wounded. Sighs the Times' Jennifer Steinhauer, the non-vote "call[s] into question whether anyone can build big in New York anymore." She also bemoans the effect of regulations on the Roarkian urge to build, and even drags in the sainted names of Moses and Moynihan -- the former an ur-architect of urban sprawl (whose deserved reputation for fucking up the City has been successfully sloughed onto squeegee men by the City Journal crowd), the latter a lovely, old-fashioned New Yawk pol who was very good at bringing home bacon, and whose ghost may yet pull the planned Penn Station project into reality (which rennaissance was necessitated, of course, by the wrecker legacy of Moses), but whose posthumous opinion of this latest landgrab must eternally remain a mystery.

We do have some enlightened commentary from the New York Press, which has been excellent on the subject:

Whatever the real number of jobs the stadium would create—the Jets claim a dubious 7000—nobody denies that the vast majority will be seasonal, low-paying and without benefits.

Seasonal is the key word here. Even if you grant the project some wildly optimistic projections (35 conventions of three days each, 10 football games, assorted concerts and big ticket events) the stadium will still sit unused and empty almost eight months of the year. When full, the majority of the stadium's economic output is payroll, the majority going to athletes who are unlikely to live in New York full-time. Likewise, most revenue from concessions and merchandise goes to the companies that make them, which tend to be located in the South and Midwest. Money for t-shirts and hot dogs is economic development for Virginia and Pennsylvania, not New York.

As for non-Stadium jobs, the influx of fans and convention-goers just isn't frequent enough to sustain new businesses. The 1994 baseball strike offered stark evidence of this: Sociologist John Zipp studied the impacts of canceled games on retail stores and found that the strike had no significant effect. In fact, in 17 of the 24 cities studied, retail sales increased.

As for the alleged extra income from "events" to be booked under the retractable roof, we are planning to expand the shit out of the Javits Center, an actual, successful venue designed for that sort of thing. (Hey, you think Chuck Schumer talked to Silver about this?)

Remember that when we talk about the West Side Stadium we are talking about a massive tax abatement for the owners-presumptive New Wherever Jets, after a steamrolling process that snatched the Hudson Yards from the real high bidder, Cablevision. This isn't a story of Master Builders brought low by little men, but of power brokers thwarted by power brokers.

This sort of thing goes on all the time in the world of City-soaking corporate juggernauts. Think of Detroit's Comerica Park, built largely with that city's taxpayers' dollars (though not to their profit) at massive expense -- which massive expense just keeps on coming in the form of extra soakage, as reported by Field of Schemes. (FoS is, by the way, an invaluable source of sweet reason on the topic of stadia shenanigans, countervailing the local papers' boosterish bullshit.) To this day Detroit suffers from all sorts of -- what do the freemarket guys call it? Oh yeah -- Unintended Consequences from the Comerica swindle. You think, once ground were broken in this proposed money pit, it'd be different here?

Interestingly, all this crud coincides with some massive early spending by Mayor Rich on his reelection campaign. Our airwaves are flooded with ads showing Real People -- from all walks of life! Of all colors and creeds! Talent vouchers secured! -- extolling the benefits of Bloomberg (the candidate, not the media empire). Some of you readers live here in town, right? How much enthusiasm do you see from actual ordinary people for this guy? What eloquent testimonials have you heard in the streets where these spots were filmed on his behalf?

In a just world, Bloomberg would be worried about assassination, not reelection. But New York is in a bad place right now. There are no fires being lit by any local populists -- how could there be, in a City increasingly populated by transients: rootless careerists, and immigrants who do not plan to stick around -- and so the political center -- not positioned between "left" and "right," but between "this gang" and "that gang" -- however rotten and mushy, yet holds. So you won't see massive uprisings and street demos of citizens hollering for, or against, the stadium in its hour of crisis -- because few believe it makes any difference. On this subject the street is dead. Let the big boys fight it out, we figure; we're busy trying to make ends meet.

We are but spectators at the great board meetings that decide our City's future. Still, given those terms, the recent reversal, and the pique apparent on the Mayor's normally smug face afterwards, was a pretty edifying spectacle.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

FUCK, I'M A LITTLE SHORT THIS WEEK...

SHORTER JAMES LILEKS: Fuck all you musicians who laughed at me in high school. You have failed to acquire bling, whereas I have a dog and a house, you rockstar wannabes with your frigging and fruging! Next, fuck all you arrogant poets who laughed at me in high school.

SHORTER OLE PERFESSER: Amnesty Whatever, fuck with me and some fat guy with a beard and George Bush and I will "fisk" you. There! That proves your irrelevance, Nobel Prize fucks.

SHORTER P.J. O'ROURKE: That Kerry fellow is quite the windbag! Remember me? You don't? Fuck you, I got paid.

SHORTER DANIEL HENNINGER: Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant, Jimi Hendrix... Jesus Fucking Christ, people, do I have to spell it out for you?

SHORTER JOHN J. MILLER: I'm totally fucking nuts.

SHORTER CRAZY JESUS LADY: In heaven, everything is fine/In heaven, everything is fine/In heaven, everything is fine/You've got your good things and I've got mine.

THE APOTHEOSIS OF THE ECHO CHAMBER. Reader responses at OpinionJournal are always a treat, but when the article to which readers respond has nothing to do with the usual conservative boilerplate, they often become transcendent. The Met's Philippe de Montebello offers a nice, if slightly overcooked, explanation of the relevance of museums -- "unlike historical facts and events, works of art exist not only in the present, but also in the past, the past that transmitted them to us... the ultimate assurance of renewal and survival," etc. Lots of uplift, no apparent politics.

Only four replies are posted, but they are choice. One allows that museums are alright "as long as no taxpayer money goes to the support of these institutions, which are valued by a very tiny slice of the electorate, this writer excluded. I now get all the culture I could possibly need from the Internet..." The next decries "revisionism": "Last year I visited a museum in my area where I found a lengthy written account of how the Europeans who came to the New World destroyed the continent with their guns and disease. There was not one mention of anything positive that they brought--not one." She suggests that the offending museologists relocate to "a Third World country that would be more to their liking."

The third recasts the discussion in terms of the Almighty: "Respectfully, regardless of their splendor and craft, artifacts are not sufficient for us to maintain our faith in mankind. Such faith has always been debatable. Christians say it's misplaced; rightly so, I believe. And, respectfully, these artifacts also do not reflect the ultimate assurance of renewal and survival." Guess What does?

Finally, my very favorite:

If everything is art, as seems to be the current contention, then nothing is art. It follows then that everywhere is a museum, so nothing is a museum.

OpinionJournal is in its way a work of art, or at least a piece of work: a fully-realized universe with its own logic, and where the characters are, to use E.M. Forster's terms, round: that is, their behavior is consistent without being predictable; indeed, they are capable of delightful surprises. I am always glad to meet them on the page, and wish that they could be induced to remain there.

"YOU DO HAVE FRIENDS, DON'T YOU?" "WELL... THE SUPER-FRIENDS." At Libertarian glossy Reason, Charles Freund examines the economics of modern movie-going, and implies that movies will soon be a thing of the collectivist past. I guess the Now People will spend their leisure hours blogging in 3-D while seated in chairs that look like giant hands or something.

Freund will remind greybeards of the days when television was going to destroy movies, but the commenters on Freund's post mostly wonder why anyone would want to be around anyone else while consuming their entertainment product:

50" Projection LCD, comfy chairs, full bar, TiVo, Netflix. Why would I want to go to a crowded theater and spend $20 when I can just wait a couple months and NetFlix it? Or Blockbuster, if I'm impatient?...

For the price of movie ticket, a coke and a popcorn in the theater I can go to Circuit City and BUY a DVD to watch at home where there are no lines… I get two arm rests all to myself. I can drink all the beer I want, and I can press pause if I need to pee. I can smoke a damn cigarette. And after the movie is over, there are no flyers for weight loss or pizza on my car. Honestly, I can't imagine why anyone goes to a movie theater unless it's neutral ground for a date or you're just so impatient to see the film that you can't wait for it to come out on disc. ["neutral ground"? – ed.]

It's not that I mind sitting in a comfy chair and watching a movie in a comfy chair, that's all cool -- and I even pay extra to see the movie on a bigger screen than normal with a better sound system. The fact is though, I don't like people walking between me and the screen -- and I enjoy people making any array of noises during the movie even less…The MPAA should focus on a pleasant consumer experience and find effective ways of dealing with patrons that are distracting…

Maybe the world is ready for a restaurant next to a DVD rental place with semi private soundproofed booths, flat-panel LCD's, and waitstaff to bring you food and beverages….

Often I think Libertarianism is something suburban dorks do when they don't have enough get-up-and-go to kidnap, murder, and mummify hitchhikers.

SHORTER OLE PERFESSER: Thomas "My People Suck" Sowell compares black people to rednecks. I agree with some guy that this is a slur on rednecks.

ALL ABOARD FOR FUNTIME. Sorry for the paucity of posts over the past several days. It has been a holiday, of course, whereby we celebrate our fallen men with a short parade and a long weekend. But my standards should stay above those of the common herd. I owe you, the dozens who regularly graze this little patch of internet, nothing less.

Despite my indolence I found something you might like, though: ADCANDY, where enterprising young mind-controllers invite the hoi polloi to enter advertising "slogan contests" for small prizes, and offer the submissions they have collected as consumer data to actual advertisers -- or, as they put it, "ADCANDY provides companies with the opportunity to view original ideas and consumer opinions at a fraction of the cost charged by traditional advertising agencies, market research companies, and focus groups."

This inspired me to submit several slogans to ADCANDY, including the following:

(for a coffee-company competition:)
CINNABON: The only good thing at the airport.
STARBUCKS: Go ahead, smash our windows. A hundred others will take our place!
DUNKIN' DONUTS: Breakfast and a bribe for the cops in every box.
KRISPY KREME: Why wait till noon to go off your diet?
PEET'S COFFEE: Starbucks has enough of your money.

I was particularly excited by their "non-profit" competition:

PBS: You owe us five cents for every Monty Python quote you ever used.
THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY: Brilliant, bad-smelling males of the world, unite!
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY: In lieu of balls, some money would be nice.
ACLU: Join -- when the World Court convicts Jenna Bush, your children might get a few bucks.
THE PEACE CORPS: Justify a lifetime of money-grubbing with a few months feeding little black kids.

But I expect you can do better. So go ahead! They ask for your personal information, but the data-miners with whom they work probably have that already. The least you can get out of it is a frisson of creative non-compliance. And isn't that why we're here in the first place?

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: "Could it be that for every child with an imaginary friend, there has to be an adult with an imaginary enemy?"

Nice in and of itself, but it comes out of the Bill Maher thing and some incredibly stupid shit that a diarist at Red State wrote. Did you know that Bill Maher has the power to curtail Armed Forces recruitment? Shazam! I'm gonna ask Jon Stewart to get me a sports car.

FUN IT WAS. QUALIFIED APPROVAL I GIVE. Saw that big scifi movie everyone’s talking about. I found the dialogue unspeakable and, judging by their performances, so did the actors. Though I eventually rolled with the explanation that Anakin was primed to accept the Dark Side in any case, I was for a long time surprised that even a sullen mope like him could be snowed by such an obvious B-movie villain as Palpatine.

The sets were very attractive, though I was at times uneasy at the patchwork of style influences. Though the Jetson/Piranesi exteriors make some kind of sense, it is hard to see how a techno-Classicist society would produce such sybaritic, Southern California Pre-Raphaelite interiors. Maybe citizens of the artist class were smoking some kind of space weed. I suppose the mid-air water-ballet attended by Anakin and Palpatine is the design touchstone; if you can’t figure out what kind of civilization considers that a hot ticket, you may as well stop trying.

Still, there is one thing that excuses everything else, and that’s a good story. Revenge of the Sith is such a corker of a story that, having absolutely no affection for the genre, the style, the much-beloved and -merchandised characters, or the actors, I became engrossed, cared what happened next, palpably felt the coming of the resolution, and was satisfied at the end. That, as they say, is entertainment; and though Lucas is the opposite of my ideal filmmaker, I have to admit that he has this vital aspect of making pictures down cold. When Kenobe and Anakin chase each other along a toppling oil-rig that is running down a lake of fire toward an abyss, I can easily imagine D.W. Griffith nodding in approval.

Also, though it’s no Donovan’s Reef, it has some wicked cool fight scenes. And I liked the clones and the Wookies and that big lizard Kenobe rode and… oh hell, there goes my cred.

As my regular readers know, I am the sort of dark, ratlike creature who revels in marginalia and sneers at the common herd with their bourgeois reality shows and blow-‘em-up adventure pics (and their Christmas! And their presents with their gaudy wrapping paper!), but I am really glad to have enjoyed a popular film on its first run, especially after running into the stoned kid outside the theatre (a young Ratso Rizzo played by Gino from Bay Ridge) who asked if we had just seen the movie and then bellowed, "It’s really good, right? Youse t’ought it was good? Like as good as the old Star Wars movies? I seen it four times! And I can’t wait to see it again! I got the bootleg, right? An’ it’s so clear – like sometimes you see people getting up an’ they’re shakin’ the camera, but this was just, like, the movie!" (Bootlegs have been like this for some time; obviously this was the first movie he cared to buy in that format.) "But wait’ll you see it in the IMAX! Oh, man." (Gestures indicative of blowing-away) Had he seen it? "No, that’s not coming out till like November."

How can you not feel good about a movie after that?

What it has to do with politics of any kind I can’t imagine.

WHATEVER WORKS FOR YOU, BUDDY. "You could spin this out further and point out that it also makes adaptive sense for women to have a certain amount of difficulty having orgasms, because then they're more likely to seek out a long-term monogamous partner who knows their body well, which in turn dovetails nicely with the general female interest in having only one partner, the better to keep that partner around when the children come along." -- Ross Douthat, The American Scene.

SHORTER JAMES LILEKS: The specter of terrorism, of which I am poet laureate, has been replaced by the specter of Minnesota winters, and springs, and autumns. So cold, so very cold, and not even my imaginary friends from the 1940s can warm me. Soon I will make a run for the border. You'll find the wife and child in my "media center." Mother, give me the sun!

SHORTER CRAZY JESUS LADY: I wish 50s TV police drama stars would smite my enemies, for they are grandstanders. They should not congratulate themselves that way. They should put little cues for others to congratulate them into speeches written by me at $25,000-$50,000 a pop.

ALRIGHT, I'LL PLAY YOUR LITTLE GAME. I got suckerpunched by Kevin at Catch.com with another of them web things. Don't they realize that I weary of human contact? Ah, well, come lads, I'll have a frisk with you:

What is the total volume of musical files on your computer?

At home I have a dial-up connection (tracking links for my posts sometimes makes me feel like the guy who takes 4,000 years to say one word in I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream) and no iPod, except for the one IN MY MIND! So I have only the 20 or so files that came with this generously gifted computer (Butthole Surfers, T Rex, etc.) and 40 or so that I created myself, with which I will not afflict you good people.

What song are you listening to right now?

The iPod IN MY MIND! is playing Lou Reed's Caroline Says.

Last CD I bought?

A Jackie Mason live comedy CD. I had to learn an Israeli accent in five days for a reading and all I could find was Jackie Mason doing Peres and Sharon impersonations. I think I got away with it though.

Five songs you listen to a lot and which mean something to you:

Shopping Bag, The Penetrators. This Syracuse punk band from the 70s was about as raggedy-ass as they come (some of their members are still at it and I hope to write at length about them someday). Their Kings of Basement Rock reissue is pretty great. Shopping Bag starts off as a complaint about a bag-boy job ("When I was a bag boy, I got pushed around/Tryin' to earn some money to bring you all this sound") and then just becomes a rant about The Gong Show ("I seen all them judges and that Unknown Comic/If I ever see him live I'll grab his bag and vomit -- init"). The bellowed chorus -- "Shopping bag! Shopping bag! Spend your life in a shopping bag!" -- is pure moron glee. They sound like they're singing from the bottom of a lake into a Walkman. They are obviously drunk, marginally talented scuzzballs and they are having the time of their life. Which means that I can, too.

Mass Production, Iggy Pop. There is no grandiloquence like Iggy's especially when Iggy is in the grip of David Bowie, Berlin, bad love, bad metaphors, and a speed rush grinding painfully down into dawn.

The Broad Majestic Shannon, The Pogues. It's one thing to be a beautiful loser and another thing to be a beautiful loser who doesn't believe he has quite lost it all, and who offers his proof in glorious, gargle-voiced song.

Perfect Love, The Residents. Ree dee dee ree dee dee, ree dee dee dee dee. Ree dee dee ree dee dee, ree dee dee dee dee. "There's something I must tell you/there's something I must say/The only really perfect love/is one that gets away." Ree dee dee ree dee dee, ree dee dee dee dee. Ree dee dee ree dee dee, ree dee dee dee dee.

I'm Free From The Chain Gang Now, Jimmie Rodgers. The essence of American song is a story, preferably a sad one, preferably simple as water. It makes you feel, despite all contrary evidence, that people are worth listening to.

UPDATE. Oh, I'm supposed to invite people into this, aren't I? OK, the unfortunates are the Mighty Mighty Reason Man (har de har har), Majikthise, and Sisyphus nee Jules.

ASSHOLES AND ORANGES. OpinionJournal on steroid abuse:

Steroids have cooked baseball's results much the same way sleazy accounting practices have cooked stock prices in recent years. In both arenas, fortunes are made on immoral conduct. But beyond the obvious matter of money, what difference does it make when athletes cheat?

This difference: when Mark McGuire juiced himself into the Michelin Man, thousands of employees didn't lose their life savings.

The rest of the piece is a paen to the free market, natch.

NERDENDUM. I guess political analysis of Revenge of the Sith could not be finished till Orson Scott Card -- sci-fi legend, Mormon visionary, anti-homosexualist and fake Democrat -- had weighed in. Lance Mannion handles him well -- with insulated tongs, one hopes. I will say that, having no strong feelings about Jedi or Wookies or Ferengi or whatever they've got going on, this is all just comedy to me. But I must note one of Card's digs at George Lucas:

It’s a terrible thing, I suppose, for a writer to invent a religion and then discover that he and all his friends are on the wrong side of it.

Well, I guess now Card knows how Jesus feels.

JUST EXPERIMENTING. This latest in a long line of self-proclaimed liberal apostates inspired me. I decided to take the plunge and, at approximately 12:10 pm today, became a conservative.

I didn't tell anyone I was a conservative, of course. I preferred "centrist," or "true liberal," etc. Not that I identified myself this way either. Liberals are famously intolerant, and I had enough trouble keeping friends and jobs as it is. Look how such brave dissenters as Michael Totten and Roger Simon had been silenced, deprived of a public forum by the Red Hand! And then of course you had to explain yourself endlessly -- who had time for that?

So I kept it under wraps. When drawn into a political discussion, I used the Jonah Goldberg Variation: "Anyway it's late and I have to go to the grocery store and I don't have time right now, it'll be in the book I'm writing." I did start dropping "heh" and "indeed" into ordinary conversation, but I think I got away with it.

I was treated civilly, yet I seethed, knowing that all my friends would turn into extras from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Donald Sutherland version) if I let slip that freedom was on the march!

Part of me wanted to reach out to them -- after all, what real difference is there between Rush Limbaugh and, say, Bobby Kennedy? But there was obviously no hope of reconciliation. What a bunch of jerks, with their impertinent graphics! My walls were covered, or would be once I took my new conservatism home, with simple, tastefully portraits of Whittaker Chambers and Zell Miller! What was the point in even arguing with them if they were never going to admit that I'm right? Didn't they realize that Jesse Jackson is no better than al-Sadr? And I meant that in a totally centrist, classically-liberal way. No, I didn't leave them, they left me.

So I brooded in my cubicle. On the bright side, I was offered three book contracts and a nationally-syndicated radio show. But I soon tired of that life, and so at approximately 3:35 pm I became a Royalist.

Isn't it true that all our national goals would be better realized with a strong leader at the helm? If we decry the political intrigues, deal-brokering, and pork-barrelling of our time, wouldn't it be better to eliminate all incentive to corruption by placing all power in the hands of a single, infallible Royal Family? If disunity is a plague on America, wouldn't a venerated Head of State, of noble blood, unite us all? And if new mothers named their sons after this monarch -- particularly if he had a suitably exalted, old-fashioned name, like, for example, Roy -- would that not strongly affirm the traditional values which made Western Civilization great?

But I can hear your arguments -- or would, if I were actually arguing with you. The same tired catalogue of complaints. Your time is over -- your tedious town halls, your shopworn electioneering, your whining about "civil liberties" and "trial by jury." Quit hanging onto the past, you stupid hippies!

UPDATE. I have just decided to become a Lipstick Libertarian. You know, porn, pot, endless foreign wars I'm too old to fight. I'm convinced this one will take.

UPDATE. It was just like being a conservative, and the publishers tell me that Brian Anderson has it covered for this season. Nevermind. I'm going back to believing whatever it was I believed.

PERMANENT REVOLUTION. Finally finished Carlyle's History of the French Revolution. At the start I thought myself in for a 750-page Burkean peroration on the folly of Godless democracy. From the beginning Carlyle is Jeremiacally disdainful of the Revolutionary dream:

... Of a truth, the long-demonstrated will now be done: 'the Age of Revolutions approaches' (as Jean Jacques wrote), but then of happy blessed ones. Man awakens from his long somnambulism; chases the Phantasms that beleagured and bewitched him. Behold the new morning glittering down the eastern steeps; fly, false Phantasms, from its shafts of light… For what imaginable purpose was man made, if not to be 'happy'? By victorious Analysis, and Progress of the Species, happiness enough now awaits him… Nay, who knows but, by sufficiently victorious Analysis, 'human life may be indefinitely lengthened,' and men get rid of Death, as they have already done of the Devil? We shall then be happy in spite of Death and the Devil.--So preaches magniloquent Philosophism her Redeunt Saturnia regna.

Sounds like John Derbyshire with poetry, eh? Carlyle doesn’t think much of "Evangel Jean-Jacques" Rosseau ("Theories of Government! Such have been, and will be; in ages of decadence"), nor of Figaro ("thin wiredrawn intrigues, thin wiredrawn sentiments and sarcasms; a thing lean, barren…"), and at times, many times, a reader may think that he considers this Revolution nothing more than a "mad Gaelic effervescence" of "eleutheromania." He mentions America hardly at all, and Pitt only as a Sansculottic bogey-man (L'ennemi du genre humain) or as one who deals with "his own Friends of the People" by "getting them bespied, beheaded, their habeas-corpuses suspended, and his own Social Order and strong-boxes kept tight" -- in the face of the French madness, an apparently wiser course. Lafayette is a sap, and Voltaire a carbuncle-eyed false prophet.

But as Carlyle proceeds more deeply into the (to use one of his favorite words) Cimmerian opera buffa of the Revolution -- the risings, the factions, "sea-green" Robespierre, "People’s-Friend" and "Dogleech" Marat, the Terror, the legislative spasms, the Feast of Reason, the rise of Gilded Youth, all finally "blown into space" by Napoleon -- it seemed as I read that the author had grown more forgiving; certainly not toward the rough treatment of innocents, or even of the guilty, or toward farewells "too sad for tears"; the worst outrages he delineates in the simplest language, for maximum heart-rending effect. Yet even in the worst atrocities Carlyle finds understanding, if only because 750 pages (written twice over*) is an awfully tall mountain from which not to discern a context. The pathetic end of the Dauphin he describes, in an odd premonition of Dickens, "as none but poor Factory Children and the like are wont to perish, unlamented." Even the Terror has its reasons -- the plotting of exiled aristocrats, invasion, starvation, the need for unity -- and, from Carlyle, an unexpectedly gentle epitaph:

It is a horrible sum of human lives, M. l'Abbe: -- some ten times as many shot rightly on a field of battle, and one might have had his Glorious-Victory with Te-Deum. It is not far from the two-hundredth part of what perished in the entire Seven Years War…

But what if History, somewhere on this Planet, were to hear of a Nation, the third soul of whom had not for thirty weeks each year as many third-rate potatoes as would sustain him?… History ventures to assert that the French Sansculotte of Ninety-three, who, roused from long death-sleep, could rush at once to the frontiers, and die fighting for an immortal Hope and Faith of Deliverance for him and his, was but the second-miserablest of men! The Irish Sans-potato, had he not senses then, nay a soul? In his frozen darkness, it was bitter for him to die famishing; bitter to see his children famish. It was bitter for him to be a beggar, a liar and a knave. Nay, if that dreary Greenland-wind of benighted Want, perennial from sire to son, had frozen him into a kind of torpor and numb callosity, so that he saw not, felt not, was this, for a creature with a soul in it, some assuagement; or the cruellest wretchedness of all?

Such things were, such things are; and they go on in silence peaceably…

Oh, have I mentioned that this is among the most gorgeous English prose ever written? And that it defies comparison to anything, literary or political, in our own poor, benighted age -- though, People’s-Friend that I am, I will draw your attention to some Carlyle musings on Revolutionary Journalism:

One Sansculottic bough that cannot fail to flourish is Journalism. The voice of the People being the voice of God, shall not such divine voice make itself heard? To the ends of France; and in as many dialects as when the first great Babel was to be built! Some loud as the lion; some small as the sucking dove...

Folded and hawked Newspapers exist in all countries; but, in such a Journalistic element as this of France, other and stranger sorts are to be anticipated. What says the English reader to a Journal-Affiche, Placard Journal; legible to him that has no halfpenny; in bright prismatic colours, calling the eye from afar? Such, in the coming months, as Patriot Associations, public and private, advance, and can subscribe funds, shall plenteously hang themselves out: leaves, limed leaves, to catch what they can! The very Government shall have its Pasted Journal… Is not every Able Editor a Ruler of the World, being a persuader of it; though self-elected, yet sanctioned, by the sale of his Numbers?…

Placard Journals, Placard Lampoons, Municipal Ordinances, Royal Proclamations; the whole other or vulgar Placard-department super-added -- or omitted from contempt! What unutterable things the stone-walls spoke, during these five years! But it is all gone; To-day swallowing Yesterday, and then being in its turn swallowed of To-morrow, even as Speech ever is.

Sounds familiar, blog-readers, n’cest pas?

(* The burning of Carlyle’s original manuscript is one of the great literary stories. Carlyle said that writing the History over again was like "swimming without water." (The sole web account of that quote describes its circumstances differently than I recall it, but I think most writers will support my version.) Speaking of things only writers would appreciate, this is my favorite part of the story linked up above: "Carlyle was terribly upset about the loss of his work. He was, in fact, on the verge of giving the project up entirely. That night, however, he had a dream, in which his father and brother rose from the grave and begged him to give up writing. He awoke with a new determination.")

SHORTER OLE PERFESSER: NASCAR=White People. Hip-Hop=Black People. Black People get all the breaks.

ADDENDUM. Reynolds' piece refers to a quote from "The New York Times," but the piece he quotes is from the Times Sunday edition's Book Review, which, as any literate person knows (excuse my elitism, Hoss!), is a free-opinion zone. Moreover, the Times Book Review is edited by Sam Tanenhaus, whose biography of paleo-con hero Whittaker Chambers was very favorably reviewed by the right-wing Brothers Judd, and who has written in favor of the Bush Administration in the Wall Street Journal. ("I'm not a conservative," Tanenhaus once told an interviewer, "I'm a man of the Right.")

Of course, if you seek examples of wingnut publications -- from the Wall Street Journal to the National Review to the Washington Times to, yes, the Ole Perfesser hisself -- having fun with "blue state" people, to paraphrase Christopher Wren, look about you.

Is there anyone on the face of the earth who doesn't know that the "not a conservative" Perfesser is nothing more than a right-wing bagman? Christ, what a lot I have to tell him or her.

UPDATED SHORTER OLE PERFESSER: Just 'cause I cook doesn't make me gay, even in Tennessee, so don't call me gay, because I'm not gay, no matter how I hold my fork.

REVENGE OF THE SHIT. Long, long ago, in a blogospheric precinct far, far away, Republican nerdlets re-tucked their shirts to harsh on Commie Lucas on the eve of Revenge of the Sith. He doesn't respect Bush! they cried, light sabres confusedly flashing. He has betrayed the Force, and though it may have been created by him, it truly belongs to us as did the Ring in that other cinematic nerdfest, and we cast it thus into the fires of our wingnut weenie-roast!

Yet their brethren across the nerdiverse still lined up in Darth masks and Leia curls for the apostate's movie.

Springs onto the stage NRO Corner initiate John Podhoretz to pre-empt the fondness of his fellow fantasy worshippers. "Unbelievably bad," he sayeth, "I'm telling you this because movie critics won't," the Commie bastards! Following up he adds: "Evidently 25 years into the Star Wars empire, George Lucas decided he just doesn't like war... Inadvertently, both Lucas and the Wachowski brothers (who wrote and directed the Matrix movies) reveal with their brainless anti-Bushism the essential cowardly vapidity of pacifism." When challenged chapter-and-verse by Star Wars obsessives from the outlands, Podhoretz shrugs and, in the time honored Jonah Goldberg "anyway it's late and I haved to walk the dog" manner, says, "It's almost impossible to wade through all the nonsense on the Web to get to the bottom of this, and to be perfectly honest, I have no interest in doing so."

At first the Council, in the person of Comrade Bell, appears to agree with Podhoretz. But there are rumblings. Film Warrior Mathewes-Green actually praises the Revenge of the Sith! Some Council members seem to ironically corroborate Podhoretz. Then Comrade Bell turns to the Dark Side! "It's a full-blown tragedy," he swoons, "and you will leave the theater with a bit of ache in your heart."

The writing is upon the wall! Mayhap Comrade Podhoretz will be found in his apartments, with Saint-Just and Henriot, a suicidal bullet lodged in his underjaw!

Or maybe these fucking dorks will just gibber about something else until the new Batman movie comes out.

UPDATE.The Golden Pocket Protector goes to this guy:

As a homosexual priest carries out his actions in private, he permanently harms his victims, mostly young boys. In the film, Anakin kills Jedi younglings without remorse. This heinous act is one that no Jedi could even think about. He no longer carries any guilt or shame over his actions. Ultimately, Anakin sucombes to the dark side, becomes Darth Vadar, and the republic is destroyed. As homosexual acts by church priests propagate, the strength and trust in the church is broken....

He might be kidding. With these guys it can be hard to tell.

More nerds here, including some guy who thinks "liberals are now trying to adopt [Star Wars] as their own." Must be some sort of Jedi mind trick.

MISTAH KURTZ, HE NUTS. I thought he'd struck a nadir when he explained to us that Social Security reform would save America by bankrupting it into millenarian Christianity, but Stanley Kurtz just keeps digging down into new sub-basements of absurdity:

Big media’s melting down. Movies are in a slump. Why? The media’s losing money because contemporary secular liberalism is really a kind of religion. Liberals don’t want to make money. They’re out to win souls.

Try to imagine Ted Koppel throwing down his napkin at a four-star restaurant and crying, "This is no substitute for a socialist paradise! I hereby donate all my worldly goods to MoveOn."

Then Kurtz tells us that Ridley Scott (yes, auteur of Black Hawk Down) has made a film which is "the apotheosis of Hollywood’s secular liberalism. Hatred of religion." In the same sense that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the apotheosis of Wicca, one imagines.

Does this guy actually appear on television shows? Does he wear a bib to catch the foam?

BEST DENNIS MILLER SHOW ELEGY. "There was a limit to how much he could do on sheer wits alone."