STOPPARD'S THIRD WAY. I got to see Tom Stoppard's new play, Rock 'n' Roll, at the Duke of York's. Rock ‘n’ Roll adheres to the usual Stoppard formula: a dramatic conflict corresponding to some actual social/political/aesthetic/scientific conflict of the 20th Century. The combatants in this case are Max, an Oxford prof Communist loyalist, and Jan, his former student, a Czech reverse-refugee dreamer. Each of them plays a little part in the decline of Soviet empire from 1967 to 1990. We know from long experience how Stoppard feels about Commies, but we also know that he's been trying to define more specifically what he hoped would be, and then what he hoped had been, saved from Communism. This time he goes in a very unexpected direction.

Through the inglorious Soviet decline, Max clings to his Marxism and his tenure, becoming "the last white rhino," contemptuous of all "bed-wetters" who can't accept the pitiless logic of dialectical materialism. This (seemingly) includes Jan, who leaves Oxford, and Max, unexpectedly and (seemingly) without motivation to return to his native Prague. Despite his philosophical talents, Jan adopts a kind of hippie mysticism based on rock music -- which puts him among, but not of, the reformers who rally behind Dubcek and Havel.

This reduces, not too unfairly, to a good old head-vs.-heart dust-up. Max is a thoroughgoing materialist, and longtime Stoppard fans can already hear the boo-hiss coming there. When his wife is fighting cancer and her body is cut to pieces, Stoppard forces Max to admit that he loves her with his mind -- implicitly because he has no ready access to what we capitalists would call our hearts. And of course he is deaf to Jan's rock music.

But Stoppard is, as usual, generous with his wrong-thinking characters. He gives the old Bolshie credit for intellectual consistency, for human decency, and resiliency, the ability to hold fast not only when the going gets tough, but when it gets ridiculous. In fact, as other characters flip among identities as the times dictate, Max's stubborn streak becomes rather attractive.

Jan, meanwhile, gets beat up by the occupiers, but hangs on to his music-love and even makes speeches about it. Jan is given some character-deepening foibles, too -- though on the right side of history, he suffers injuries to his spirit that, while topically administered by the Government, originate in his weak and unthoughtful character. He is not heroic at all, just persecuted, and his emergence into the sunlight of freedom is a redemption by grace rather than by merit.

I could swallow most of this, happily and with a yum-yum, but something bugged me very much throughout. When Stoppard uses Fermat's theorem or the Third Law of Thermodynamics to carry his case, I can accept his presentation, conditionally, so long as the drama is sustained. But rock 'n' roll is something I know about, and nearly every reference to it in the play -- every musical quote, every panegyric of Jan's, and especially the end in which (I shit you not) Jan’s final triumph comes at a fucking Mixed Emotions-era Rolling Stones concert in Prague -- felt totally false.

Now, come on. If it were anyone else symbolizing the triumph of the human spirit with gummy old Mick and Keef playing a stadium show, I’d say he was kidding. But Stoppard doesn't know enough about the subject to kid -- at least, his writing doesn't show it. I didn't feel any of the divine madness or spiritual sap-rising that was being attributed to rock music. I don't think Stoppard really felt it either. He probably liked the idea of rock music. But rock and the idea of rock are two different things. If Stoppard knew that, Rock 'n' Roll would be a different play -- and Stoppard a different writer. So, in the long run, maybe it's just as well that they aren't.

GUEST BLOGGER MARTIN AGAIN. How surprised we were to find the London pubs shuttered or putting up their stools at 11 p.m., when we left the Duke of York theatre and wended our way back to our neighborhood, desiring to discuss Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll over a pint of bitter. Because of this unfortunate circumstance we reluctantly joined the queue outside the Roxy, a dance club on Rathbone Place. Soon we passed the velvet rope and descended into a space packed shoulder to shoulder with well-scrubbed young things bopping to popular music. We took our drinks and studied the scene, which was not in any way our kind of scene, as would become more comically apparent the longer we hung around. I spied a nice-looking bird dancing alone, and I bid Roy to engage her. Off he shimmied into the mix. I, meanwhile, sought out the loo and then jockeyed at the bar for an interminably long time to place another order. After searching the crowd for some time I rejoined my friend, who now encouraged me, in a shouted and several times repeated exchange, to dance some. I don't like to be a wet blanket, so I danced. Nearby a group of young women and one bloke were arranged in a loose circle, dancing -- that is, sort of shuffling their feet and kind of moving their hips and shoulders, arms bent, hands in loose fists. I inserted myself into the circle. I raised the roof. I did the eagle rock. I did the pogo. I limped to the side like my leg was broken, shakin' and twitchin' kind of like I was smokin'. I threw my hands high in the air and partied harder like I just didn't care. I said, come alive girls, get on your feet, to the rhythm of the beat to the beat, the beat, to the double beat-beat that makes you freak, to the rhythm of the beat that says you go on, on and on until the break of dawn. I succeeded in dispersing the circle. The dude tried to force his girlfriend to dance with me, but she shrank away in disgust. Then I accidentally knocked a beer bottle off a ledge and it broke at her feet.

Before the play, we dined at a restaurant across the street from the theatre, which must only survive on its location. Outwardly it looks okay, like any middle-of-the-road bistro. My meal was amazing: a grey, fatty cutlet of sirloin steak served alongside microwaved frozen vegetables and chips.

The play was nice. "Niiice!" That's what my little girl, Esme, says about things she likes, while stroking them. Esme is the name of a major character in the play. I am happily reassured that I pronounce her name correctly. So many people say "Es-mee" I began to doubt that it's actually "Ehz-may." I should see more plays.

Today we took in the Tate Modern. The building itself shows up its collection on the whole, although there are some standout pieces. Balthus' Sleeping Girl alone made the trip worthwhile. The photography on display was singularly boring: large-scale photos of massed consumer goods in a U.S. supermarket, unremarkable people standing around doing nothing, suburban European houses, etc.

After traversing the Harmonic Bridge to the steps of St. Paul's, we cabbed it out to Brick Lane in Spitalfields, a refreshingly less tony district than what I had heretofore seen, and after walking up and down to see all the options, we allowed ourselves to be diverted by a friendly steerer promising a 20% discount on our meal into a Bangladeshi/Indian restaurant, which measured up to my expectations for curry in London.

Cheers! I am the one Roy sometimes refers to as "editor Martin," though I'm not sure why. I haven't been anyone's editor, let alone his, for many years. I have come to London to sightsee and take the culture. I simply adore culture, and I have been satisfied to find it in evidence everywhere I turn. My companion I'm sure will give a full account of the serious objects of cultural interest we've encountered, with his usual considerable insight. I shall be content to comment upon the trifles and mundanities that preoccupy me.

Immediately I was struck by how well turned out Central Londoners are, almost without exception. The young people are all dressed in the height of fashion, as if they expect at any moment someone could come along and photograph them for an indie-rock album cover. The professional men wear nicely cut dark suits or jackets with thick, Windsor-knotted ties. The women of the city are demurely chic. Both sexes seem to favor square-framed eyeglasses. What I've observed is beyond mere urbanity. I am a frequent visitor to and former resident of New York, and in no quarter there have I seen such a uniformly sharp throng on the streets.

When our self-directed walking tour yesterday took us past the place, a loop played in my mind of Chevy Chase's voice: "Look kids, Big Ben, Parliament ... Big Ben, Parliament ..."

I liked the portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. Becuase I can't always recognize British historical figures by their faces, it was fun to respond to a portrait and then walk up to read the name. For example, I looked at one and thought, that fellow looks intensely serious and very proud. It was Sir Issac Newton.

ON HOLIDAY. Notice the way I said that? Don't I sound British? That's because I'm in London for a few days with editor Martin and, pretentious shit that I am, will mix local colloquialisms into my natural argot til I am given a good sound thrashing by yobs, which should be any moment now.

Our first day was spent walking around central London, which had to be got out of the way because Martin's never been here before, whereas I have, often on business. So we went down from Bloomsbury to Trafalgar to the Embankment etc. I pretended not to be excited to see them again, so Martin would feel like an uncultured ass. But I was excited, and took pictures, with which I may plague you later.

One art highlight so far: the BP Portrait Awards show at the National Portrait Gallery. I'll tell you more about it later as I don't have my notes with me, but I will say now that it was wonderful to see some of that boldness we associate with new British artists allied with decent rendering skills.

We're going to see the new Stoppard tonight, which unfortunately coincides with the Selfish Cunt show at Spitz. If I had any taste at all I'd ditch Stoppard for the thrill of having a painted twat snarl at me while drum machines throb. I am an uncultured ass!

But one who's very happy to be here. Time now for my morning IPA.

DON'T THEY KNOW, IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD. Why, look, the Perfesser gives us a tip on a guy who gives us a tip on another guy: "Bruce Kesler says you don't know Jack. But he thinks you should."

"Jack" turns out to be a nut of the pipe-puffing, philosopher-quoting sort, who whipsaws between despair over the decadent West and hope for its continued dominance over the Islamic hordes. His essay becomes a dramatic contest between these mania, and I read it eagerly to see which would win. At first it seems the "Lickspittles and vassals of the elites" and the "soccer thugs and soccer thugs in-waiting" will prevail (or rather, destroy each other or themselves but in any case piss away our patrimony), resulting in "Eurabia" and "Muslim Oxford." Then Jack realizes that "Europeans have among the nastiest histories of brutality, barbarism and genocide on the planet" -- and that "it is unwise to assume that these characteristics can be bred out of peoples so quickly, no matter what the doddering elites and their court jesters in the MSM seek to portray."

So we slaughter the wogs and wind up on top, yes? Here the crystal ball grows cloudy -- that is to say, the writing becomes inpenetrably dense: "Eurabia may well emerge. It is, however, our expectation that upheavals far worse than anyone is currently forecasting lie ahead for Europe and America in the intervening years." However?

Over at OpinionJournal, another guy says liberals are doomed to irrelevance because they're not having enough babies. Someone gave this guy a teaching job at Syracuse University, yet he seems to think voting choices are heritable racial characteristics. Maybe this categorical confusion comes from hanging out with "Eurabia vs. the Decadent West" types.

You know what's too bad? By the time I got to Lileks staying up late for Dick Clark's Rockin' Apocalypse, it had all begun to seem normal.

I HEARD ABOUT THE NIGHT CHICAGO DIED, YET THEY STILL HAVE TWO BASEBALL TEAMS. I've often wondered what the Giuliani fetishists think Giuliani actually did on September 11, besides his job as defined by law and custom. Today The Anchoress gives us a glimpse: had Giuliani been elected Senator the year before and gone to Washington,

Giuliani would not have been in the middle of NYC, and that city would have died under the ministrations of the ineffectual Mark Greene [sic].

Yes, the woman actually believes that without Rudy at the helm, we citizens all would have said, "fuck this, I'm outtie," and moved to Schenectady. Or, given her crackpot Catholicism, maybe she thinks a giant red hand would have come out of the ground and, to the sound of pitch-shifted laughter, pulled us into Hell.

If they were just wrong, if they were just dishonest, they wouldn't bug me so much. But these people seem to have learned everything about life from Gigantor cartoons.

SHORTER MARIO LOYOLA. The millions of Americans who think Iraq was a mistake are hippies, and George Bush can win them over by calling them hypocrites. (But in a funny way, because hippies love that.)

(I must say I'm enjoying the whole Republican meme to which Loyola is contributing here -- i.e., that there's nothing wrong with Bush that can't be fixed with better bullshit and universal forgetting.)

SHORTER JIM LILEKS: Say what you want about Joe McCarthy, but lay off Mickey Mouse, ya damn beatniks! You make this world a garbage can!

(Despite Jimbo's negative review of someone else's review, Putney Swope is a treat -- more surreal than vulgar -- and I recommend it highly.)

UPDATE. Photo at right shows Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, and Arthur Miller fucking with the squares' heads.

SUNDAY MISCELLANY. I sighed at the picture of the 1986 Mets in today's New York Post. Has it really been 20 years since I passed out in front to the TV during Game 6? Now they look like the Beer-League Champions of 1998. Sic trans-fat gloria mundi. Remind me to get my cholesterol checked.

The current team was apparently inspired by the old team's presence and example: Lastings Millage told the Post that after the pre-game tribute "I was ready to run through a brick wall." And he had a great game. Intangibles, my friends. Speaking of which, Wally Backman told the Post that the Diamondbacks "fucked" him on that managerial offer in 2004. Glad to see the years haven't taken off his edge.

Speaking of old, belligerent drunks, I'll be hauling my aged ass to London in a few days, and I'm looking for pub recommendations. In previous visits I've always gone wherever's been nearest, and it's usually worked out okay. But now, with the power of distributed citizen journalism at my disposal, I hope to eschew Firkins and such like and take my pints and pasties at blogger-approved locals. I'm not interested in darts and quizzes so much as good ale, comfortable seats, and pleasant surroundings.

Finally, with this story I begin to see the need for airport profiling. If I see a 59-year-old white lady in a Rolling Stones T-shirt at JFK, I'm going Peggy Noonan on her ass. A pack, not a herd!

SHORTER OLE PERFESSER: The boys sorta got outta hand with these here "minorities," but that's what happens when the government is always bending over backwards for niggers.

REYNOLDS' UNIVERSAL ROBOTS. A few posts back, when I quoted Motörhead ("That's the way I like it, baby, I don't want to live forever"), I was aware that not everyone sees things that way. Perfesser Glenn Reynolds, for one, looks forward to a near-future in which exist "individuals with powers that would have been until recently regarded as godlike." The Perfesser has elaborated:

Yes, it's possible to draw parallels between the Christian idea of The Rapture -- and, even more generally, between religious ideas of transcendence generally -- and the notion that, once human technology passes a certain threshold, roughly that described by Vinge and other Singularity enthusiasts, human beings will potentially enjoy the kind of powers and pleasures traditionally assigned to gods or beings in heaven: Limitless lifespans, if not immortality, superhuman powers, virtually limitless wealth, fleshly pleasures on demand, etc.

Oddly enough, I was reading Çapek's R.U.R. around the same time, which put me into a fugue state, and resulted in this:

2079

(A midwestern American town. Citizens, like the ones we know today, but with hyperextended thumbs and gently sloping brows, gather in a town square surrounded by barbed-wire and kill-droid guardians, in a high state of excitement)

ACE II: (mounting a plinth) Citizens! We are juiced today by the hyperpresence of the greatest robot lawgiver in our nation-state! Throw your citizenguns in the air like you just don't care for Perfesser Glenn Harlan Reynolds!

(Applause, shrieks, citizengunfire. ACE II descends and the PERFESSER mounts the plinth. He moves somewhat stiffly, being a nanotechnologic replication of his former pre-Singularity self; but his plasticine body is covered in roomy, luminescent grey cloth, and his head -- actually a titanium CPU -- is encased in a bullet-proof glass globe, upon the front of which is projected a lifelike image of his face from his pre-transhumanist days, and on top of which, like Happy Hooligan's hat, rests a small solar generator. His voice issues from a small speaker near what used to be his throat.)

THE PERFESSER: (With a gentle, whirring sound, his arms raise) Citizens! Heh! (giddy general response: "Heh!") Indeed! ("Indeed!") Hear me! (With a gentle, whirring sound, his arms descend; the crowd grows still) I am come to tell you that World War XXVII goes well, and the Free Market still rules! (whistles, cries of "hehindeed") Only a few statists remain in six or seven unsuburban spider-holes. And the statist stronghold of Madison, Wisconsin, I hehindeed to tell you, is today a Patriot Zone! (Cheers, gunfire) We heard the good news this morning from Ann Althouse, who will share it with you today.

(ACE II hands the PERFESSER a medium-sized globe, within which flickers an electronic representation of the face of ANN ALTHOUSE, rendered in psychedelic colors)

ALTHOUSE GLOBE: What a hoot! Partisan peoples running around, then they splashed like Jackson Pollock all over the walls and floors. They were so depressive! Why would I care about them! My toes were all tingly! I saw a pretty butterfly.

(The ALTHOUSE GLOBE makes a sputtering noise. The PERFESSER's arm rises; the crowd applauds; The PERFESSER's arm wobbles, which the crowd takes as a sign to be still)

THE PERFESSER: This news is very hehindeed, but we still face challenges from the Islamocommifascistevilstatistsquareds. (boos, screams, beach balls tossed) I am told that last night Kimkushkiba rockets landed just outside the Freedom Zone. (His voice slowly rising as ACE II turns his volume knob) Citizens, you know what we must do: increase production of iBrains threefold! And of Cafesodasplurges even more! And blog! Blog! Forever blog! (The crowd cheers lustily) For it is blogging, and coffee drinks, and technology, and most of all the Free Market that will destroy our enemies, as it did in the days of Winston Dubya and Reagan Hayek! Thank you, Good Night, and HehIndeed!

(The PERFESSER is helped from the plinth to enjoy the favors of robowhores, as the citizens scream, do the Electric Slide, and shoot each other with their citizenguns.)

2197

(The same midwestern American town as before, but somewhat the worse for wear. Citizens wear crudely-stitched flannel shirts and shapeless leggings, and gather around the PERFESSER, whose body-stocking is now of a faded pink, and stands erect only because he has had an iron bar implanted in his back. His face-image flickers but dimly in his head-globe.)

CITIZEN 1: (holds a stick shaped like a microphone at the PERFESSER) Perfesser! You say we beat Islamofish! That no true me think! Bomb bomb bomb all the time! Me sick alla time and wife she dead!

(Other CITIZENS roar, and point at the sky, each other, and the PERFESSER blocks of wood shaped like handguns.)

CITIZEN 2: Me sick too! Me iBrain no make tune no more! (crying) Me only know one tune no more! (tunelessly wails) "Put body, put body in motion! Put body in lo-co-co-motion!" (snarls, eyes gleaming at the PERFESSER)Uck uck uck! Me hate 'im! It sugg! IT SUGG! IT SUGG! EAT MY SHORT YOU KILL KENNY! EAT MY SHORT YOU KILL KENNY!

(Crowd yells and waves its wooden guns)

THE PERFESSER: (his voice tinny and faint) Citizens, citizens. The Free Market is the answer to your problems. Hehindeed. What is your manufacture? Where is your technology?

CITIZEN 1: Technol'gy? Technol'gy? (Pulls his flannel shirt up by the chest) We smesh together ol' clothes! Cause me got sewing machine, we pedal with feet! Cause no electric! Cause all bomb! Me make wood gun to fight, an' me fight you! You no good! You no good!

(Citizens hurl their wooden guns at THE PERFESSER, who topples, but whose face maintains its rictus grin.)

THE PERFESSER: Where are my robowhores? Bring me my robowhores!

2230

(The same midwestern American town as before. The air is full of blue smoke. The PERFESSER is in the same spot and prone position as before. His plasticine body has flattened and is covered by filthy pink rags. The speaker that was near his throat has been ripped away. The glass globe that served for his head is cracked and unlighted, and to the front of it is taped an ancient photograph of Gordon Ramsey. The solar generator hat tilts almost to the ground, hanging by a few thin wires. Some wild boys, naked and filthy, run up to him. One holds the PERFESSER's former voice-box, and waves it at him tauntingly.)

BOY: Ea' myshort! Faggit funna funna! Fagga ea' myshort!

BOY 2: Skree!

BOY 3: Body in motion! Body in motion!

(The PERFESSER, with his last dying electrical charge, thinks: I have no mouth. And I must heh indeed.)

NEEDED: A BLOGGER COMMONPLACE BOOK. Tbogg provides the first precept:

No one is going to get a blogging Pulitzer for being the fastest to post what they just saw and heard on the TV.

I love that guy.

UPDATE. The nut whom Tbogg is advising does not appreciate the help; nor does he appreciate all those "Brave, Tough, Strong Warriors of the Left" who laugh at his bogus terror alerts. He says that "this country needs a divorce, or at least a trial separation period," from the Left.

Loyal commenters roger that: "Really, Ace, the left and right in this country severely need a divorce. That, or we're gonna kill the bitch." But there are a surprising number of dissenters, some with a good deal of moxie:

Funny how the bedwetters never seems to live in New York, LA, Chicago, whatever.

It's always some loser in Bumfuck, Nebraska who's afraid the swarthy brown man is gonna drop da bomb on him at the In & Out Burger on Main.

To steal a bit from Maher, New Rule: If you're going to wet the bed from every alleged terror plot, you must live within five hundred miles of civilization.

If only my trolls were that funny! But Mr. Spades should probably take heed: this weird, morose state can't be good for him or his co-religionists. Even Jim Lileks, a pants-pisser from way back, is sick of it: "Frankly, I’m weary of dismay. I’m tired of feeling like tremulous Belgium in the latter thirties. We need to buck up. To paraphrase: we need to barg the farg up."

That's the spirit, Jimbo! Barg the farg up, you farging schmarg! And you too, Mr. Spades -- stop apost-hating Andrew Sullivan, that's for Lamont moonbats, the GOP's a big tent! Have a nice big bowl of Patrioats, and turn your attention to the real enemy: common sense!

UPDATE II. He's taken my advice!

CHEAP JOKE FOR THE WEEKEND. Damnum Absque Injuria (new to me, but apparently a Perfesser fave -- and, like the Perfesser, the sort of "libertarian" who can pretty much take or leave Constitutional rights) has some yucks with conspiracy theorists:

Recently we’ve read that 38% of Americans polled believe the U.S. government is withholding information about UFOs proof of the existence of intelligent life from other planets, and 36% think 9/11 was an inside job... Is there any question so wacky that one-third of the population will not answer it in the affirmative?

Wait a second. What's Bush's approval rating again?

PERUBLICAN ALERT. Not to be too optimistic, but it appears that folks are warming to the Democratic Party, while they remain highly disapproving toward George W. Bush.

Naturally, Republicans cry for a do-over.

Wizbang announces that "we need two effective parties in America." For the Democrats to be effective,

Once the hysteria of discovering they are no longer in the majority, but actually in a condition which may fairly be described as a tailspin, the Democrats will have to decide if they are willing to do what it takes to survive.

And what would that be?

The Democrats need a center of focus, to understand what really matters.

I am new to Wizbang, and thought this might be the prelude to a yoga, Rosicrucianism, or colon-cleansing pitch. But there was no follow-up, new age or otherwise, so I assume the author just likes putting the words "Democrat" and "center" together, as if this magical confluence will summon up, Golem-like, an Army of Liebermans.

Oh, and Democrats have to stop their constant attacks on George W. Bush. And for the Republicans to be effective, they also have to stop their constant attacks on George W. Bush:

Republicans, for their part, were only too happy to take the gains which Dubya made happen, only to shun him the moment the MSM claimed he was not effective.

Let us pause to enjoy the mental image of Rick Santorum, his eyes glassy and arms outstretched, in zombie-like submission to the commands of Bill Keller.

The Republican Party also suffers, says Wizbang, from its "Extremists" -- and also from its "moderates," and from its "leaders" as well. Whew -- what's that even leave? Dubya, who "has done more for the United States of America and its citizens, than most Republicans and the Democrats put together."

To sum up, the Democrats -- who, here on planet Earth, may actually luck into some Congressional gains -- are portrayed as hapless losers in "freefall," while George W. Bush, polling at 36% approval, is the Republican Party's only hope, and must be prevailed upon to protect the GOP from the extremists, moderates, and leaders that would drag it down.

I still think the GOP can pull it off if they scream NINE ELEVEN! and FAGS GITTIN' HITCHED! loud enough, but it is nice to see their advocates and apologists so panicked for a change.

WHISKEY! DEMOCRACY! SEXY! BULLSHIT! NYT:

“Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy,” said one military affairs expert who received an Iraq briefing at the White House last month and agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity.

“Everybody in the administration is being quite circumspect,” the expert said, “but you can sense their own concern that this is drifting away from democracy.”

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it is always good to see frauds exposed, and this unraveling might have a salutary shock effect on the American voter, and cause him to question his fearmasters. On the other hand, the state of our education and intellectual life being what it is, the American voter may not remember how we got into Iraq in the first place, and Bush might go on TV tomorrow and blame it on some recently-dead celebrity like, say, Bruno Kirby.

"Sadly," the President may tell them, "the lovable Ed Furillo of 'City Slickers' and Young Clemenza of 'The Godfather Part II' were not the only roles Bruno Kirby played. He was known to his terrorist minders by his secret Islamiciscisc... Islamsis... Islama-ci-sist name, Yabba Dabba Doo. As Bruno Kirby, he enjoyed a great reputation as both an actor and as an expert of Arab-American relations, and unprecendeted access at the highest levels of government. But as Yabba Dabba Doo, he was devoted to undermining and embarrassing the United States of America. When we invaded Iraq, our actions were based on his recommendations, and thousands have lost their lives, or their political viability, as a result of that tragic deception.

"The loved ones left behind in both America and Iraq may take some comfort that justice was done on August 8th, when Yabba Dabbo Doo was taken down by a team of Navy Seals posing as leukemia.

"We must make sure that America is never again caught unprepared for this kind of deception. I have issued an Executive Order establishing a new cabinet-level office, the Department of Sincerity Assessment, which will consist of teams of psychics like they have on TV. These psychics will be able to tell who is telling the truth, and who is lying, or has a terrible secret. Cold cases will be solved, and tragic errors avoided. And unique plot twists will keep audiences coming back week after week."

Or something like that. Maybe he'll just go on TV dressed like Obe Wan Kenobe and say, "We are not the droids you're looking for." Or hold up a swinging watch, or sprinkle pixie dust on us. What the hell: we voted for him twice, how smart can we be?

JESUS, FREAK! Crunchy Con Rod Dreher has started talking about what a mess that Iraq is. We were "rolled" by the Shiites, he says: "They played us for useful idiots...I hate that a single drop of American blood was shed for these people," adds Dreher, whose Christianity apparently stops at the water's edge, "But what happened, happened."

And part of how what happened, happened was crap like this, written by Dreher in the run-up to war:

We’re already moving toward Baghdad in our war against Iraq, one I believe with all my heart is just and necessary. We don’t know how long it will last, or what the fallout will be. When the smoke clears, I am afraid that one home-front casualty will be some friendships.

With America preparing to blow the shit out of a bunch of people on the other side of the world, for Dreher the clear and present danger was arguments with his anti-war buddies.

At least Dreher had an exit strategy: "There’s simply no point in talking to most antiwar people, left and right, because they’re lost in a fever swamp of emotionalism." Comity problem solved! Unfortunately for the Iraqis, they couldn't wish us so easily into the cornfield.

Now that the place is a hellhole, does Dreher regret his support for the Maximun Leader in 2004? Well...

...my heretical thought is not, "Maybe I should have voted for Kerry," though that might be true. My heretical thought is that no matter what my reservations were about Bush either time I voted for him, they were overcome by my single-minded focus on the Supreme Court.

And get this -- he's not sure he wouldn't do it again! Even knowing what was to come of it, and despite all the American (if no other) blood spilled.

Ladies and gentlemen, your Moral Majority Redux: willing to permit the needless deaths of as many non-American non-embryos as it takes to keep women from getting abortions and gay people from getting married.

And they say Allah attracts a rough crowd!

UPDATE. Like Clouseau's crime scene investigation in The Return of the Pink Panther? ("What wax? AAAAAH!"), Dreher keeps finding new and more amusing ways to display idiocy. In a new post, he lambastes the Republicans for playing a "confidence game" in which "all they have to do is keep banging away on the public's fear that the Democrats would be worse." As if to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, Dreher finishes:

[The Republicans] deserve to lose. They really do. But I don't think the country deserves the Democrats, at least not the Democrats we have now.

One reaches this level of self-unawareness only after years of patient non-study, or immediately following a strong blow to the head.

A PLEASANT SURPRISE. Hey, Professor Althouse has delivered a stern rebuke to parents who use homeschooling as religious indoctrination! "The beauty and freedom of this country does not include the right to deprive children of schooling," she says. And boy is she hard on parents who make their children memorize Bible texts to the exclusion of other subjects!

Actually when I said "Bible," I meant "Koran." But I'm sure the professor would agree that the principle is the same.

UPDATE. Her commenters seem to think it's all about Islam and some epochal struggle ("the battle is joined - the one that England's already lost"). What a hoot!

BUT SOME ARE MORE GODWIN THAN OTHERS. Iranian PM Ahmadinejad was on "60 Minutes" last week. Media scold Bernard Goldberg reports:

...And how unfortunate it was that 45 million Americans don't have health-care insurance. "That," [Ahmadinejad] said, "is very sad to hear." You just know that every liberal tuned in to "60 Minutes" was nodding in agreement...

In fact, instead of seeming like a modern Hitler (a not unreasonable comparison, given that one wanted to exterminate all the Jews while the other wants to wipe Israel off the map), Mr. Ahmadinejad came across as, well, a fairly typical, run-of-the-mill liberal.

Compare Bush to Hitler and you're a nut; tell the world that a Hitleresque dictator is a "run-of-the-mill liberal" approved by all American liberals within the sound of his voice, and we run that baby on page one.

It's been a long time since overestimating their degeneracy was even possible, but they still manage to surprise me sometimes. A tribute to my childish faith in human nature, perhaps.

TODAY'S PHILISTINE. Lindsay Beyerstein plans to read The Tin Drum. Tim Blair implies that, because the book's author used to be a Nazi, Beyerstein is therefore an anti-Semitic semite.

I've read a lot of Shakespeare. I must be a monarchist.

It is amazing that these people learned to type words into computers without ever having learned to read.

FANTASY, CAMP. Tbogg directs our attention to a Citizen Journalist who thinks baby-killing needs a public defense. He also thinks colloquy, being an antique device, should be written like a Gor novel:

The gentle soul -- how I respect her! -- will begin by pointing out how many innocents have died in the recent wars, and especially the children, who are the most obviously innocent. She will point out figures for Iraq, for Afghanistan, for Lebanon, and ask: "How can you justify this? These poor children, who might have been good men, good women, lain in the cold earth?"

We have all had the conversation that far, have we not?

Well, maybe all of us who have a hitch-hiker tied up in the basement.

Another Citizen Journalist posts this provocative statement at a fellow Journalist's website:

If this were WW2, we wouldn’t be worrying about the feelings of Muslims, or castigating ourselves as racists for attempting to defend ourselves. We’d be girding our loins to defeat the Ragheads just as we battled the Nips and the Krauts to an unconditional surrender.

Admit it — you winced at my last sentence, didn’t you? That illustrates the depth and breadth of the problem we now face.

When taken to task by one of our own commenters for this display of "testicular lunacy," he responds, "At least we’ve got the testiculars with which to be lunàtic" -- manhood, in the Citizen Journalist universe, being proved by ready use of racial slurs, on the internet and under a pseudonym.

Following the rule of three, I looked this morning for a capper, and went directly to Ace of Spades. I know he wouldn't let me down. Sure enough, I find him lecturing an imaginary Arab (no use of the term "Raghead" here -- where are your balls, man?) who, in Mr. Spades' roleplay exercise, has objected to British racial profiling that harasses him despite his innocence. Mr. Spades is unmoved except to hot rage:

What did you guys think was going to happen? Did you think we were just going to let your fellow Muslims kills us, with only the smallest amount of help from you in stopping them, forever?

Did you think we would never decide "It is you who are causing the problem. It is you who should bear most of the inconvenience/'humiliation' from the problem"?

What you've been taking as "weakness" and "stupidity" was just a naive, idealistic hope that if we treated you well enough you would stop. You didn't. The naivete and idealism are giving way to cold hard ugly realities forced upon us by your soft support of terorism...

The outrage you'll now be directing at us should have been directed at the terrorists and terrorist-inciters and terrorist-supporters among you five years ago.

But it wasn't.

So now here we are.

How ya like them apples?

This routine is best imagined with Jon Wayne of Texas Funeral fame ("Mr. Egyptian, yer a goddamn liar!") reading the text aloud to a dusky-faced scarecrow.

As previously noted here, the latest Arab-Israeli clusterfuck has got our Citizen Journalists moody and restive. Sold out by Bush's cease-fire, and denied the invigorating bloodbath they had come to expect, some turn on one another; others go out back to see how those robot brides are coming along; but the most entertaining ones wait upon that candy-colored clown they call the sandman, and report his visitations as if they were real.

VISION THING. Boy, that Liberal Media sure is tricky -- letting former Bush apparatchik Michael Gerson go on for thousands and thousands of words in Newsweek! If any of you fellers figure out how this advances the LM's Islamocommie agenda, please let me know, 'cause I'm stumped.

Gerson was once a Bush speechwriter, and like Peggy Noonan is trying to tell the new breed how it's done. His peroration is meant to convince the public to stay the course, terror-wise, despite their obvious desire to go another way.

Gerson acknowledges that the people are no long singing "Glory, Glory, Hallelujah" with W and the boys. But guess whose fault that is?

The President, says Gerson, is a visionary -- "Every element of the Bush doctrine was directed toward a vision: a reformed Middle East that joins the world instead of resenting and assaulting it." Condi Rice is the midwife stoically enduring the new Middle East's "birth pangs" (though if I were the Middle East right now, I'd be wondering where the fucking epidural was).

And you crappy little people are harshing their new paradigm:

First, the nation may be tired, but history doesn't care. It is not fair that the challenge of Iran is rising with Iraq, bloody and unresolved. But, as President Kennedy used to say, "Life is not fair"...

Some commentators say that America is too exhausted to confront this threat. But presidential decisions on national security are not primarily made by the divination of public sentiments...

Or, to put it in the visionary Bush's own words, who cares what you think? Gerson goes further, proposing a "new compact between citizens and their government":

Americans have every right to expect competence and honesty about risks and mistakes and failures. Yet Americans, in turn, must understand that in a war where deception is the weapon and goal of the enemy, every mistake is not a lie; every failure is not a conspiracy. And the worst failure would be a timid foreign policy that allows terrible threats to emerge.

In other words, you have a right to your expectations, and we have a right to do whatever we want without your goddamn belly-aching. This is a "new compact," indeed, as applied to the citizens of a Republic, though it is familiar enough to conscripts, battered children, and such like.

Having thus cuffed his audience, Gerson believes they will sit quietly while he fills the middle section of his address with W's Greatest Hits. Democracy in the Mideast is "messy" but "no one has a better idea." We must "draw a line." "Liberty improves life." Democrats practice "McGovernism." Etc.

And now for the wow finish:

The response of many Americans to all of this is ... up in the air. And, unfortunately, the demands of history may just be beginning, requiring more engagement, more sacrifice, more promotion of democracy, more foreign assistance to raise failed states where dangers gather. Setting out this case will fall to presidents of both parties, in calm and crisis—and making it will always be difficult in a weary hour. But necessity, in the end, makes a stronger argument than the finest rhetoric. And from London to Lebanon, history is proving that peace is not a natural state; it is achieved by a struggle of uncertain duration. In that struggle, the cynical, the world-weary, the risk-averse will not inherit the earth.

Wow! I'm juiced, aren't you? We're locked in a struggle that will never end! Let's crank some Twisted Sister and get down with some dismal necessity!

(I love the little knock against "the finest rhetoric." As long as he's lowering our expectations of the government, I suppose Gerson has a right to lower our expectations of himself, too. Though I must say he needn't have bothered.)

I imagine Gerson and all these guys, the moment the latest terror incident broke, running to the tank and finding there was nothing left but bitter dregs, too noxious to be made palatable even with the Coke syrup of patriotic sentiment.

So they're serving it up raw: weary struggle and blind obedience, and "cynicism" is the new treason.

This new model does not require formation-flying displays, the National Anthem, or invocation of the Founding Fathers. In fact, such things would tend to mess up the routine. We are no longer talking about our hopes, but about our apprehensions. We are no longer encouraged to celebrate our infinite possibilities, but ordered to accept our lack of choices. And democracy is not a gift with which America is blessed, but a sort of chemotherapy that America must wearily roam the earth administering to other nations.

I'm a New York City smart-aleck, yet I think more highly of this country than the Republicans do! I never thought I'd say this without irony, but I really think they've lost their patriotism.

UPDATE. See Kung Fu Monkey's related thoughts about FDR and Churchill versus piss-pantsed us.

SHORTER BRENDAN LOY: I didn't hang up on the Democratic Party -- the Democratic Party hung up on me!

(Presumably Loy will now double not vote for Ned Lamont. No doubt by November the voting machines will allow that.)

AN ECHO, NOT A CHOICE. The U.N. resolution on Israel-Hezbollah brokered by the Bush Administration (and France!) is answered at National Review's The Corner with disgust, anger, and despair. Editor K J. Lopez takes a moment to direct us elsewhere: "THE BLAME-BUSH INSTINCT: Anchoress has had enough...."

Momentarily forgetting what sort of people I was dealing with, I expected The Anchoress would address Bush complaints such as those at The Corner. But she is instead angry at liberals, whose complaints are "...adolescent spouting off, backed up by nothing more than 'feelings,' 'caring,' and hysterical, dramatic angst."

The Israel situation roils the belly-juices of the Internet's killingest voices. TigerHawk asks, "What will it take to militarize the United States? What will it take to militarize Western Europe?... We will almost certainly need conscription..." He asks his patrons for their input. Along with the traditional talk of "ragheads," Verdun, and ammo, readers fault Bush for "poor communication," a "compassionate nation building approach," and his reliance on Condi Rice. But the President is not without his defenders: "I swear I am going to vomit if I read one more Islamofascist apologist blame any current event on Bush or on Iraq."

Little Green Footballs is also skeptical of the cease-fire -- because the UN and them Frenchies are involved. Bush is barely mentioned, and only in comments, mostly approving ("This is a bush poker strategy at its' best!") -- the main page is mostly given over to investigations of liberal media treason.

"This is a great victory for the forces of evil," says Don Surber. At Surber's sidebar you can still open his posts entitled "Bush=Truman" and "Bush's plan works."

But let us be fair: many of these people are turning to a Democrat: Joe Lieberman. Conservatives, most of whom do not live in Connecticut, rush to support him against Ned Lamont and whatshisname, the Republican guy. Jeff Jarvis, Andrew Sullivan, and David Brooks want to see Lieberman on a national ticket. (The Perfesser is not averse.)

In other words: Things are going very badly, and the only solution is to step up our support of the people who made it so.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT. Some highly-placed crackpots have already started telling the world that Ned Lamont is bad for post-airliner-plot America because he is against the war in Iraq.

To them I issue a challenge: Pray this day, on one side of one sheet of paper, explain how our half-assed war in Iraq helped to foil the airliner plot.

The length stipulation (borrowed from Winston Churchill) is placed to restrict your output to names, dates, and events relevant to the topic, and to reduce your opportunity for patriotic gassing.

Warning: if you turn in anything as sloppy and poorly-reasoned as this...

If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England...It will strengthen them, and they will strike again.

...we will have to mark you down "Republican," and you will run serious risk of expulsion from the Senate.

(Or not. The nation is not a classroom, or if it is, it's more like one from the first half of Lean on Me.)

SEVEN COME ELEVEN, SNAKE EYES WATCHING YOU. I see the news outlets are flooded with accounts of the the dog that did not bark. It is particularly weird to watch long morning news reports on non-events. The newsreaders furrow their brows and project a sense of urgency, and keep repeating the same thing: basically a variation on their usual mantra, be afraid be afraid be very afraid, be afraid be afraid be very afraid...

I also notice that the various rightwing blogs "report" on these events by repeating the stories of the hated MSM, adding as a garnish their own signature lunacies. Ace of Spades, for example, dabbles in numerology:

9/11

3/11

7/11

...?

How about 8/11?

I know 7/7 doesn't work, but mustn't stand on ceremony when you have people to kill.

It's funny that, when confronted with even reports of a foiled terror incident, someone who calls himself "Ace of Spades," and leans heavily on his butchness, retreats into Kabbalistic gibberish.

Michelle Malkin is near-hysterical that more people don't share her ceaseless concern with terror in general and Muslims in particular. If we were all constantly at the same fever pitch of racial and danger awareness as she, though, how would that help? My understanding is that the current plot was defeated by police work and intelligence gathering, not gangs of "truth squads" examining wire photos for modifications.

I'm supposed to go to London in a few weeks with Editor Martin. I see no reason to postpone or re-route. Terror only works if you're terrorized.

You know I'm born to lose, and gambling's for fools; but that's the way I like it, baby, I don't want to live forever.

"THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY HAS LOST ITS WAY" CRY THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY'S MORTAL ENEMIES. The defenestration of every Republican's favorite Democrat has brought much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Ace of Spades in enraged that Lamont came out last night against lobbyists. Some months ago Mr. Spades professed outrage that Democrats were taking money from lobbyists. Now an insurgent has promised to clean house, and Mr. Spades is madder than ever. There's just no pleasing some people.

At RedState, Mark Kilmer, hoping Tacitus will give him an "A" in Rhetoric, intones, "The Democrat fringe has its scalp, and now it wants a stack of casualties... The nuts have a grip on that Party." His colleagues are presumably too busy celebrating the defeat of not-conservative-enough Republican Joe Schwartz to notice.

"Lapdog Lamont... pet poodle, Ned Lamont," says Dean Esmay in an apparent attempt to portray the "incoherent, spitting hatred" of the majority of Connecticut Democratic voters. (Esmay previously on this subject: "tool of crypto-fascist slimeballs," "despicable desire to abandon the people of Iraq to fascism," "friend to vicious hatemongers," "gzigshhs," "skopryts," and "potrzebie."

My very favoritest, though, is Brendan Loy, who after many years as a Democrat (well, "many" if you count from the days he "marched around the schoolyard in fifth grade chanting 'Jerry Brown! Jerry Brown!'" -- Loy is in his mid-twenties) has decided to abandon his Party because it failed to return a Democrat he liked -- or should I say, the only Democrat he liked.

Here is how Loy reacted to the last Presidential election result:

I gotta say, I’m not all that upset with the result. Yeah, I wanted Kerry to win. But I’m not convinced, like so many of my Democratic bretheren, that the country is now officially going to hell in a handbasket. I’m also not convinced a Kerry presidency would have been better. I though the odds were slightly in its favor, which is why I voted for Kerry. But I think Kerry had a decent chance of being a colossal failure, and Bush has a decent chance of being a surprising success. So I’m not exactly crying in my beer over the result...

Meanwhile, I look forward to watching the Loony Left implode in utter confusion over the result.

I'm sure the Party will miss Loy's youthful enthusiasm.

UPDATE. Jay Brida in comments: "There's also a longing for the good old days for FDR, JFK, Truman... Christ, compared to the guys running the Dems these days, those guys were fucking Marxists... Could you imagine what the Loys of the world [would do] if, say, Nancy Pelosi even thought that we should be giving federal money to writers?"

If the Netroots really do clean house, there'll still be a place for the Lieberman-or-death types in the Perublican Party.

SOMETHING'S HAPPENING HERE, BUT YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS, DO YOU, SCOTTY RESTON? The central narrative of Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of American Consensus seems unimportant once you've finished the book. That's what makes it so damned interesting.

Not that the story of the 1964 Presidential race isn't richly told: in fact, it is so crammed with details -- the pursing of Eisenhower's lips as the Goldwater team commandeers his farm for a commercial; the "single, white-gloved hand" Lady Bird Johnson used to silence hecklers on her Southern tour; the campaign-staff haggling that almost scuttled Reagan's last-minute TV address; Johnson's belly excitedly thumping his 47-by-47-and-a-half-inch podium in the home stretch -- that it could comprise a separate book. You can almost smell the sweat of the cramped jet cabins, feel the sudden panic of blindsided aides, and hear the tidal shifts in the roars and mutters of the big crowds.

But that story doesn't really begin till about halfway through Before the Storm, and even when it's fully launched, the stuff on the margins overwhelms it. The real story is the epochal coalescence of the American Right that launched Goldwater's Presidential race (literally, in Perlstein's telling) and proved too fractious and polarizing to sustain it -- but not to sustain itself.

Perlstein carefully lays the groundwork, starting with Clarence Manion, who channeled his rage at the Commies in Washington into a direct-mail and independent broadcast machine that prefigured the juggernauts that rule our political landscape today, and touching on every conservative coeval from the respectable (Bill Buckley) to the crackpot (Robert Welch) as they were drawn into a common orbit. Goldwater was their lodestar for a while, but his pull turned out to be insufficient -- especially as, in Perlstein's telling, Goldwater was as likely to exert push as pull. It was their exile, their absolute dismissal by the custodians of American "consensus," their sense of being right when everything was wrong, that really brought them together -- and conservative moneymen, sensing a chance in hell to roll back the forces of organized labor and creeping socialism, exponentiated their force. They swept up, sometimes chaotically, hundreds of small, like-minded groups -- Young Republican chapters, Citizens' Committees, anti-Communist and anti-Civil Rights ad-hocs -- to create a force that was strong enough to turn the country. But first they had to learn the badly-needed lessons of national defeat. And what seemed to the political world an end became a beginning.

This broad summary neglects the internecine struggles among that force that Perlstein notes meticulously; they give authority to the book, and difficulty to the reader. (At one point Goldwater asks, "Who the hell is So-and-So?" and I didn't know either, though he had been introduced to me at length.) There are betrayals, noses put out of joint, and grudges -- all on the Goldwater side; Johnson bullied everyone on his side into his own form of consensus. But the path was forged and followed.

Perlstein is apparently a liberal himself -- indeed, he explained in the Boston Review, in a painstaking, discursive style similar to that of Before the Storm, how Democrats might take the lessons of his learning -- but plays sufficiently fairly with the conservative warriors that the Brothers Judd and Bill Buckley, among other rightists, have praised the book.

This is probably good historian's hygiene, but Perlstein clearly admires the early conservatives' nerve, cunning, and persistence, and scoffs openly at the know-it-all liberals who misread them (he even describes Steve Allen as a "particularly smug liberal"). Scotty Reston, Arthur Schlesinger, Richard Hofstadter -- they were as clueless as Steverino, believing that their universe was too settled to be shaken. Perlstein is more naturally sympathetic to committed outsiders who are told they can't, but do.

He's not the only one. The book was recommended to me by some Lamont backers, whose man has scored a victory in Connecticut tonight. Maybe they think they're onto something similar. Are their Netroots the equivalent of Manion's Robotype machine? More to the point, perhaps: are there liberal versions of the New Deal-hating business moguls that sluiced Barry's way, and can the Iraq fuckup (or any of the current Administration's other fuckups) enrage and animate crowds the way the Civil Rights movement enraged and animated the future custodians of our current consensus? It may be that the "storm" prefigured by the Goldwater campaign only blows one way, and Perlstein will have to settle for providing interest rather than instruction.

NO SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY. We must be getting close to pulling out of Iraq: the New York Post today stacked up two articles explaining that the situation is hopeless, and that this is all the Iraqis’ fault.

John Podhoretz has inherited his father’s annoying habit of numerating wars that do not exist. Podhoretz fils explains that “This is the Third Iraq War, and the most striking aspect of it is that it doesn’t involve us.” The American troops currently stationed there might think differently, but only because they’re not seeing the big picture: Podhoretz says this Third Iraq War, in which we are not involved, “may be the one we’re going to lose.” Gasp, a paradox! Clearly, these/this Iraqi war(s) exist(s) on such an exalted philosophical plane that your average dogface couldn’t be expected to understand.

Podhoretz fully acknowledges a coming civil war in Iraq, but judges that it has nothing to do with us invading the country, bombing the shit out of it, and substituting for its corrupt but functional leadership a plywood shack of pseudo-governance. No, it’s only happening because the Sunnis are “crazy.” The evidence is that “they seem determined to start a civil war they can only lose.” The idea that desperate men in desperate circumstances might resort to extreme measures appears not to have occurred to Podhoretz, who, despite his deep involvement in World Wars II-IV and Iraq Wars I-III, has nonetheless managed to keep his cool.

Ultimately the message is that, “If the Sunnis and the Shiites really go at it… if Iraq wants to commit suicide in this manner,” it’s not our fault or even our concern: “the answer ultimately lies with the Iraqi people.” So the country may descend into even more hellish violence and misery – but Mission Accomplished, because we won Iraq Wars I and II at least, and two out of three ain’t bad!

Below Podhoretz, Rich Lowry, a war fan from way back and author of National Review’s now-legendary WE’RE WINNING cover story, now chides his Commander-in-Chief for ever thinking he could democratize these bloody wogs in the first place: “The problem with Bush’s freedom rhetoric is that it appears to be not true.” Now you tell us!

According to Lowry, Middle Easterners aren’t ready for freedom or democracy – it has something to do with “the Fall” of Adam and Eve, whose sin affected Arabs much more than it did us white people. But though Bush is dead wrong, Lowry says, “this doesn’t mean that Bush should abandon the liberalizing thrust of his foreign policy.”

Why not? Why persist in such a course if you don’t believe it can work? Shh, don’t disturb the analysis! Properly constructed and given time, it will so confuse the electorate that they will not realize the ignominy of our failure and the foolhardiness of our plan. Maybe we’ll even have our troops march backwards out of Iraq, so it won’t look like withdrawal. By the time people figure out what’s happened, we’ll be at war with Syria and/or Iran.

That will be a true victory – and, for this lot, the only kind that counts.

EASY RIDERS. This Times article about guys who stop working is very funny in places. For example, there is the case of Alan Beggerow, who maintains his life of ease by convincing his wife to work so he won't be forced to do just any old thing. A former warehouseman, Beggerow allows as how he would accept employment as a professional author.

If I had Mr. Beggerow's skill with the ladies, my novel would be coming along a lot faster. Or maybe it would be indefinitely delayed.

The article's bloviations about trends which Mr. Beggerow and his fellow slackers allegedly represent adds greatly to the humor. Work evaders are described as "unmoored"; a sociologist surmises that in this our modern age "men don’t feel a need to be in a career," etc.

Was I kidnapped in the middle of the night and taken to a planet where everyone is a college professor? Because in the world I used to live in, most people work because they have to, not as a journey of personal fulfillment to be pursued or interrupted according to shimmerings of the zeitgeist. And when they don't have to work -- when they have enough money to get away with it, or find a sucker to support them -- they stop.

Funny as the article is, though, it has been topped by the analysis of Dr. Mrs. Perfesser, who thinks these easy riders are slacking as an expression of male resentment toward feminists ("Why should we be surprised that men are opting out of their masculine role as provider when 'experts' and feminists have been trashing this role for years?").

As is her custom, Dr. Mrs. P has some entertainingly crazy commenters:

It's high time MEN got the easier, more rewarding side of things.

Working is stressful, unrewarding, and takes years off of your life. When you come home to a partner who has done about 3 or 4 hours of work when you've done 8 or 9, plus commuting, and to kids who run and cry to your partner for every need whim and desire, it's apparant that the worker is undervalued...
(Not my PERSONAL experiences, but others I know. I intend to make my life my own.)

I love that final note. Next up:

What a rotten generation you must live in.

An interesting Psychological Phenomena has been occuring here in leafy suburbia; when the wife relaunches a carreer after on average 11 years off, because her "clock" has given her "Babies Rabies", and now Mr. "Provider" is "between jobs", All the SuperDad performance in the world doesn't make up for the feelings people are surprised they have when he does an excellent job as "Mr. Mom" and she as "Ms. Stud, the Provider"...

He reports (or should I say, "Reports") on five bitches of his acquaintance who tried to be "Ms. Stud" and got what was coming to them. Others are content to wait upon the verdict of history:

Look, Moslem cultures have real contempt for females: THAT is a major problem. Our western culture does not as of yet have that level of contempt for males, but bet everything you own and everything you will ever own that we are headed in that direction.

Before long the commenters are talking to people who aren't there:

So yes, Mrs Athanasius, the first move is open to the women and that movement should be in the direction of picking up what members of your gender have abandoned--your authentic vocation. If they do not, the consequences are clear. When the social experiment we are currently in collapses, by virtue of the experiment, the men will be coarser then they ever were, the women will be subjugated and constricted to a level never seen before...

And:

Mommy, you whore, I'm through.

I wonder if Dr. Mrs. Perfesser gets psychiatric clients this way. If so, at this rate the Perfesser will be able to take it easy soon enough.

VALLEY GIRL. Here's a Cathy Seipp article in her best Althouse-for-Angelenos tradition. She tells us that "[Mel] Gibson probably can be fairly described as right-wing," except by the Los Angeles Times, in which case it is a "non-sequitur." Then she tells us "knee-jerk anti-Semitism is now far more commonly found on the Left than on the Right," a charge she defends with exactly two anecdotes, one in which the Leftist blood libel is about "tourism" (there's an angle Der Sturmer missed!) and another in which a guy in a coffee shop blames Israel for the first Gulf War. (The guy's liberal credentials are "a blond ponytail" and involvement with a film crew, two members of which disagree with him; presumably they are not liberals, as no further ponytails are mentioned.)

There is also mention of "commenters at some lefty blog" deriding a previous Seipp article -- presumably commenters to my own post, because who else would bother? As you may recall, that earlier Seipp story was all about how Los Angeles liberals are obsessed with their area codes -- an accusation supported, again, by anecdotes, and one piece of on-record testimony: that of the famous ultra-liberal Mickey Kaus. This classic ended with the line, "And if the rest of those liberal [area code] 310 elites can’t get in touch with the rest of us, their elections will continue to be as lost as their area codes."

A good laugh all around. Seipp, however, thinks we were just laughing to keep from crying:

I can always tell when these things hit home because the lefties start flailing about with odd accusations — in this case that I’m one of those “gated conservatives” (Silver Lake’s a gated community?); that the West Side is “actually quite conservative” anyway (I guess so, if you define “quite conservative” as “overwhelmingly registered Democrats”); and that, of course, I have no liberal friends.

The truth is that because I live in L.A., most of my friends are liberal, just like if I lived in Rome most would be Roman. Unlike those tolerant Lefties, I don’t limit my friends to people who share my political opinions.

If Seipp is able to have friends who are liberals, while Lefties "limit [their] friends to people who share [their] political opinions," one of the following corollaries must obtain:

1. Liberals and Lefties are not the same thing, and Lefties cannot be friends with liberals because Stalin said no or something.
2. Liberals and Lefties are the same thing, and Seipp, by some osmotic process, is able to be friends with liberals without liberals being friends with her.

Which is it? I eagerly await your deranged comments.

CONSERVATIVE BLOG STRATEGY EXPLAINED: "I would, for a price, go sit in a movie theater crowd and cue the flow of laughter on the subtler jokes. I would, for a price, eat in a restaurant and make slightly audible favorable comments about the menu and, with a co-worker, contribute a pleasant sound of conversation and even make up gossip about fictional characters to give the other diners something to eavesdrop on. Or maybe I should just start a business, designing jobs like this and selling businesses on the notion that they need fake patrons to improve the attitude of the real patrons." -- Ann Althouse

ANCIENT ENMITIES. Jeff Jarvis is upset that Columbia J-School Dean Nicholas Lemann called out bloggers who herald the demise of the hated MSM. For starters, Jarvis says no blogger has ever argued such a thing:

[Lemann's] strawman king: that bloggers believe they will replace journalists. I don’t know a single blogger who says that with a straight face.

In general Jarvis is right: it's mainly mainstream media figures themselves who make such pronouncements. Like Peggy Noonan ("The MSM rose because it had a monopoly. And it fell because it lost that monopoly"), Newsweek's Howard Fineman ("A political party is dying before our eyes — and I don't mean the Democrats. I'm talking about the 'mainstream media'..."), and of course the unnamed (and perhaps unnamable) journalists quoted by the Ole Perfesser.

In fact, factoring out the bottom-feeders, the only mainstream blogger I can find overtly predicting the imminent death of the MSM is Jeff Jarvis:

If I owned a newspaper, I’d sell it, wouldn’t you? If I were Yahoo, would I buy it? Maybe only Yahoo and Google could consolidate the advertising marketplace to make big media work still.

...What we’re seeing, I’ll say again, is just the dinosaurs huddling against the cold of the internet ice age. The poor, old, lumbering beasts have to stick together.

Jarvis liked his dinosaur line so much he repeated it for a Washington Post discussion, which perhaps counts as another MSM-on-death-of-MSM cite. (And come to think of it, didn't Jarvis used to write for TV Guide?)

Jarvis' main point is that journalism has been and will be deeply affected -- not to say herded onto the ice caps -- by the new breed of "citizen journalists":

I so wish I had seen [Lemann] instead imagine the possibilities for news when journalists and bloggers join to work together in a network made possible by the internet. I wish he had seen journalism expanded way past the walls of newsrooms and j-schools to gather and share more information for an informed society...

We live, as ever, in flux, and tomorrow never knows, though Jarvis' blog creditably follows the trends and notes the markers of journalism's digital future.

But let us cut the crap. The general trend of our media criticism, online and off, is and has been for some time neither technological nor futuristic but political -- a concerted attack on the famed "liberal media," a hydra-headed beast so insidiously powerful that it has managed to deliver the White House to its Democratic overlords in all but seven of the past ten Presidential elections.

Such attacks go back to Spiro Agnew -- at least in the popular imagination; or, if one takes the long view, to Robert Welch. In either case, they far precede the golden dawn of blogspot.

When Jarvis' more modern citizen journalists have attacked the MSM, they have done so with charges that seek to discredit its liberal-identified reports -- successfully, as with Rathergate, or less so, as with Haditha. We are a long, long way from the Trent Lott affair, and the bipartisan citizen-journalist comity it supposedly represented (though some of us, I override modesty to admit, knew better even then).

The key involvement of Hugh Hewitt in Jarvis' expanded discussion and citation of the point is an indicator of this: Hewitt is a cheerful Republican operative, author of books with titles like If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends on It, whose interest in the subject of new media is not, to say the least, limited to a search for Higher Truth.

This connection stems from Lemann's own softball New Yorker profile of Hewitt last year, in which he described Hewitt as an "unlined, inquisitive-looking, forty-nine-year-old with an amiable but relentless manner." Lemann goes on: "Hewitt is definitely a Republican, but he is no mere mouthpiece... he has no problem presenting himself as an active, loyal Republican -- so why won't people who work in the mainstream [media] own up to views that surely affect their work?" Watching Hewitt go to work on liberal apparatchik Dana Milbank (!), Lemann notes that "Hewitt does not, like Bill O'Reilly, become righteously indignant -- he's never confrontational, always friendly -- but he is persistent..."

Lemann conveys Hewitt's liberal-bias-conversion experience: "On Election Night in 2000, Hewitt told me, there were cheers in the [PBS affiliate KCET] studio every time a state went for Gore" -- though Lemann does acknowledge that Hewitt's colleagues at KCET remember it differently, as of course they would, being PBS affiliate employees who are not Hugh Hewitt. Lemann ends by observing that Republicans have "a wonderfully efficient message machine," and that "Democrats aren't going to beat them merely by streamlining the delivery of their message" -- whatever that might mean.

Assuming Lemann's liberal bias -- and how could we not? -- what a unusually, indeed strangely, generous portrayal this is; on a par with Time's Ann Coulter cover story. Given the hysterical terms of our current culture war, it seems almost suicidal; and, indeed, that is how it was taken.

Immdiately after its appearance, the New Yorker softball was gratefully acknowledged by Hewitt himself -- though Hewitt's archives are farblonjet since his Townhall absorption, we still have on record conservative website Powerline, which said, "The New Yorker has a profile of Hugh Hewitt by Nicholas Lemann, a liberal writer I admire. The profile apparently is not available online, but Hugh has reproduced the first and last paragraphs. They support his overall assesment -- 'a very fair but hard hitting piece.'"

In the days following that valentine, though, conservative journal Weekly Standard reported, "There is a new high priest in the dean's office on the seventh floor [of Columbia's Journalism School] - -Nicholas Lemann... Lemann began his [career] scribbling for a New Orleans alternative weekly..." Noting Lemann's arduous pursuit of a spot on the Harvard Crimson, the Standard remarked, "Lemann will need the same persistence if his legacy as dean is to be something other than a footnote in the history of the decline of American media power."

That piece was written by Hugh Hewitt. Citizen Journalist Mark Tapscott called it "fascinating and important." Citizen Journalist Austin Bay said "Lehman really has no answer for embedded ideology and narrow points of view." Many, many, many, many, many other Citizen Journalists (partial list) agreed.

In recent remarks on the Jarvis argument, Hewitt is more charitable toward Lemann, but still hoists a battle flag that precedes Blogger, RSS, and iPods:

Dean Lemann doesn't want to personalize the debate, and he's right not to. It isn't about his personal views or my personal views, but about what can objectively be said about MSM objectivity. Dean Lemann believes in the ideal and is trying to resurrect it. I believe the ideal never existed, but that even its best days are far behind us, and that the idea of MSM objectivity today is preposterous.

You want to know about the relationship of new media to old? Don't think of Markos; think of Spiro. And of countless wishy-washy types who thought they were being fair, but were merely being rolled.

UNSTOPPERED. I stopped paying attention to Tom Stoppard’s plays in the 80s. I’d like to say it was because I hadn’t time for the introductory seminars they increasingly seemed to require, but in fact it was because I figured I’d gotten the gist of him already -- sensible, witty people vs. nihilistic wreckers who are sometimes also witty; civilization either implicitly or explicitly in the balance – and I didn’t feel the need.

I have just read Stoppard’s Arcadia, which conforms to my horrible prejudice, but which I also enjoyed immensely. The play is split between an early-19th-century and a modern setting – in the early bit, Lord Byron lurks in shadow while a young prodigy seeks to harmonize the rigors of Newtonian physics with her budding love of life; in the modern bit, scholars squabble over their predecessors’ artifacts for position, recognition, and feelings of righteousness. The seminar we missed before the curtain was about math, statistics, chaos theory, etc., but the characters catch us up as best they can.

The historical forces implicated this time are the Enlightenment and the “Romantic Sham,” as it is put by Hannah, the play’s pivotal modern figure: “…a century of intellectual rigor turned in on itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius. In a setting of cheap thrills and false emotion… the decline from thinking to feeling, you see.”

In an ordinary stage comedy, this would be the set-up for a come-down – hot leading man melts cool heroine! -- but Stoppard’s admirable perversity has ever been to side with coolness over heat. So Hannah and her droll maybe-fiancee Valentine are shown to be on the right track, while her opposite number, Bernard, is shown to be not only an impulsive Byronic, but also a cad (Stoppard’s villains are always cads – cads, or bounders, or both) -- and objectively wrong to boot! (Again, a requirement for Stoppard villains whenever he can possibly manage it.)

So not much has changed – or had changed by the time he wrote this. (His new play, Rock and Roll, is in London now.) Except, while Stoppard was seemingly resigned to the victory of moral relativism in Jumpers, in Arcadia he is more optimistic. For an old crank, he takes surprising pleasure in technology -- it allows Valentine to develop the prodigy’s stillborn ideas on a computer. Also, it aligns with Hannah’s thoroughness in chasing down the truth, which is portrayed as an expansive, pro-human gesture – while the volcanic Bernard, despite his Romantic gush, is shown to be more or less anti-human. There you go – Stoppard the techno-triumphalist! I surprised he doesn’t have a blog,

Still, I like it. Shavian didacticism in the cause of theatricality is no vice. I was at first infuriated at all the math talk, but was won over as it developed into a poetic parallel to Hannah’s thinking. Hannah is never exactly torn (between Bernard’s rasher way of thought and life, and Valentine’s quietism, it’s clear where she’ll end up), so her conflict is never quite dramatic, but like Stoppard she is passionately interested in abstract things, and some of her heat – or slightly-less-coolness – rubs off on the viewer, or reader. It ain’t catharsis, but what is these days?

Also, Stoppard is funny, really funny, in a (to some of us) irresistibly British way. Take this 19th century exchange between Lady Croom and her landscape architect, who has devised for her estate, in the fashion of the times, a “hermitage”:

LADY CROOM: And who is to live in it?
NOAKES: Why, the hermit.
LADY CROOM: Where is he?
NOAKES: Madam?
LADY CROOM: You surely do not supply a hermitage without a hermit?
NOAKES: Indeed, Madam --
LADY CROOM: Come, come, Mr. Noakes. If I am promised a fountain I expect it to come with water. What hermits do you have?
NOAKES: I have no hermits, my lady.
LADY CROOM: Not one? I am speechless.
NOAKES: I am sure a hermit can be found. One might advertise.
LADY CROOM: Advertise?
NOAKES: In the newspapers.
LADY CROOM: But surely a hermit who takes a newspaper is not a hermit in whom one can have complete confidence.

When you write that well, I guess you can make it about anything you like, can't you?

EMERGENCY! EVERYBODY TO GET FROM STREET! When Michael Totten refused to say that his old pals in Lebanon should be happy to get blown up, I was encouraged. But at last National Review has found someone who'll go where Totten wouldn't: "Lebanon-born Walid Phares":

Lopez: Is there really any hope that the Lebanese, in the long run, will understand why Israel had to bomb [them]?

Phares: First, consider what the Lebanese want. They are under tremendous pressures today, and they have multiple opinions about what has been happening to their country over the past decades...

I have to stop a moment. God, do I love that opening! My countrymen are faced with all sorts of dilemmas: which child to fall on top of when your house is blown to bits is just one of them.

...Simply put, they don’t see the link between the air strikes and their being able to get rid of Hezbollah once a cease fire takes effect. Many Lebanese we speak to, including politicians, social and spiritual leaders, NGOs, etc., tell us that they don’t understand what the relation is between taking out bridges in northern Lebanon or blowing up a manufacturing plant in Mount Lebanon and the disarming of Hezbollah.

Most Lebanese aren’t naïve; they try to understand the process, but no one is explaining it to them...

Maybe the Israelis will drop copies of this interview on Beirut before the next air strike. I can imagine, when the bombs hit, the last words of nearby non-combatants: "Well, you know, they make a good point."

UPDATE. Apparently Israeli psy-ops are "sending text messages to mobile phones and voice messages saying their war was against Hezbollah and not the Lebanese people." UR NT WHO I WANT 2 KILL! H'Z'B'L IS! DUCK!!!! ROTFLMAO!!!

I HAVE A BAD COLD AND I'M TIRED, SO I'M GRATEFUL THAT THIS POST WROTE ITSELF FOR ME:

If I were a Democrat, I'd support Joe Lieberman next week...
-- Andrew Sullivan

I wonder if it's too late for Lamont to put this in his advertising.

P.S. If I were a Republican -- hey, wait a minute: I am!

BUT THERE I GO, CONFUSING ART AND POLITICS AGAIN. A lot of really awful stuff has been written about the Mel Gibson episode, so I guess Ann Althouse was bound to get in on it:

My point is that what [O.J.] Simpson (presumably) did doesn't change the meaning of the achievements that made him a big star. Gibson, on the other hand, has revealed something loathsome about his mind that affects our interpretation of the works of art that sprang from that mind. In particular, it changes "The Passion of the Christ," which had to be defended at the time of its release from charges that it is anti-Semitic.

I've criticized Ann Althouse's lava-lamp aesthetics before, but this idea -- that works of art can be retroactively invalidated by the misbehavior of their creators -- is less entertainingly psychedelic.

I wonder if Professor Althouse has ever read and enjoyed H.L. "Prehensile Kikes" Mencken, Philip "Too Many Fucking Niggers About" Larkin, the Mussolini propagandist Ezra Pound, the Nazi collaborator Celine*, the Stalinist Brecht, or any other great artists whose personal views she does not endorse. If so, how can she still enjoy them, knowing of their thoughtcrimes?

Gibson's nowhere near their league, in my book, and I was only lukewarm on his Jesus movie, seeing less anti-Semitism in it than belligerent self-pity. But though his public downfall is well-deserved and hilarious, I wouldn't let it touch my view of his art, any more than I would refuse to drive a Volkswagen because of its associations with the Third Reich.

UPDATE. Great comments. Aimai pinpoints the Althouse issue:

...If she'd defended the original work on its artistic merits she wouldn't have to retract -- but she specifically defended it on its political merits as 'not anti-semitic.' Now she has to give up one or the other pose.

Usually, people who misuse works of art as identity bracelets, protest signs, bulwarks against indecency, etc., never discover their error (though they may over time develop contempt for art because it doesn't do very well what they think it's supposed to do). The Gibson incident offers a rare chance to see these people directly confronted with the folly of their approach. Althouse feels betrayed; this internet genius actually gets the question right, but can't shake off the political analogies (or Woody Allen, liberal defiler of youth). Watching him struggle with this is great fun -- like watching a monkey trying to figure out a violin. (In fact he gets so worked up that, in the end, he has to think of Andrew Sullivan in order to get his mind off it.)

If we had decent arts and humanities curricula in our high schools, this wouldn't be happening.

*I take GeoX's point that there is no evidence of what we'd consider collaboration by Celine, though the French did find him guilty of it.

BAY OF PIG.

I really, really, really hope this administration has a good plan to take advantage of Castro's — tragic! That's right tragic! — demise. Undoubtedly, there are 20 kajillion old plans sitting on a shelf somewhere. But a little democracy-spreading on Castro's grave would be a welcome change of pace considering the news these days. No, I don't want any invasions or whatnot, but maybe some walking-around money and some threats would work nicely. It's not my job to work out the details. It's my job to hope that someone else has — very late on a Monday night.

It is my custom at this point to say "This is the stupidest thing Jonah Goldberg has ever written, and will remain so until he writes something else" -- but actually I don't know if he can top this one. It's so catastrophically dumb that, when I showed it to some single-celled organisms, they rolled their nuclei at it.