SURGE WORKING! THROW MORE INSULTS! As many of us know, and anyone with an internet connection may learn, the Empire State Building lights up in different colors for special events, ranging from religious holidays such as Christmas to celebrations of organizations such as the Poly Prep Country Day School.

Guess what? Jack Meoff of the Ace of Spades Beer Hall and Anime Collectors' Society is outraged that ESB will go green for the end of Ramadan.

This is a disgrace. Have you capitulated to the Caliphate already, New York?

Is the Big Apple now to be known as the Big Fig?

Pussies.

It's at moments like these that I wish the bloated self-regard of these mouth-breathers had some basis in reality. As previously covered here, hatred of New York is spreading like diaper rash among these blog booboisie, and if they had the sort of influence they think they have, they might reanimate this hatred, mostly dormant since nineeleven, among the entire flyover community. Then, perhaps, the yokels would stop sending their sons and daughters to us, and thus reverse the long upward trend in our population, our rents, our lameness, and our average body fat.

Alas, the Spades show is a niche entertainment at best. But we will make do. The units they have managed to activate -- e.g.:

I think Jack M. made a good comment in that it is pro-islam propaganda in a city that was targeted by islam at least twice already. This is why often I want to tell NY and New Yorkers to piss off. You want to allow this -- then don't come crying to the rest of the country when they blow you up again. Also, this is a judeo-christian country.

-- are sufficiently full of the poison that, should they so much as touch another outlander (unlikely for Spades readers, I know, but someday someone may, in an unguarded moment, offer them a high five), the effect should spread to the victim's entire extended famiy.

Spread the word, soldiers! New York is full of Muslims and we ain't even torturin' em! Hell, we make purty lights fur 'em! Don't it make yuh wanna rethink that Williamsburg condo you was a-hankerin' fer? Spend yer nest eggs on a fallout shelter instead! 10-4!

PINS & DICKS. At the Wall Street Journal Eugene Volokh tries to get some more mileage out of Obama's non-wearing of the flag pin, saying it means that Obama doesn't love America any more:

Wearing a flag pin is not supposed to be an explanation or an argument, just as "I love you" is not supposed to be an explanation or an argument. It's supposed to be a traditional statement of affection, powerful because it's cliché...

Yet if you used to say this and then you stopped, the symbolic message is pretty powerful. And that's true even though many people say "I love you" without meaning it (just as there are some who wear the flag pin but are just opportunists, not patriots). Even if this abuse of the phrase weakens its symbolism, an outright renunciation of the phrase retains its symbolism just fine.

The metaphor is rather weak, as one of the commenters observes:

If I were to constantly tell my wife that I love her, and meanwhile were to seek the favors of other women and hang out in taverns rather than with her and my daughter, my wife would not believe my words.

Wearing a flag pin isn't like telling your spouse that you love him or her. Unless you are a U.S. servicemember, or Captain America, or attending a naturalization ceremony, wearing a flag pin means you are a dick.

From the guy who fired Brad from All-American Burger in Fast Times at Ridgemont High to Fox anchors to the creeps who run for office to American Dad!, the flag pin has proved a reliable symbol of dickitude. Seldom have I seen an otherwise normally-dressed guy wearing a flag pin and thought, oh, isn't that sweet, he's telling America that he loves her! No, long experience has taught me that the pin-wearer wants something from me: either my vote, or an unearned advantage for whatever song-and-dance or sales pitch he's about to spool out. Or he wants the other Republicans in the room to spot him, so they can huddle privately and exchange stories about how they dicked someone over. Or he wants to pass for a dick so the other dicks won't gang up on him. Which makes him a dick.

Like most generalizations, this one is not foolproof, but coupled with common sense it is close enough to get you through most days. What Obama was trying to tell us with his gesture was simply that he is not a dick. It's not probative, but it's a step in the right direction. If he should go to work at Captain Hook's and take out a robber, he's got my vote for sure.

THE SURGE IS WORKING! Yesterday I was encouraged to learn that a street-corner slashing incident was turning people off to New York City. Today I found myself on lower Broadway, where the average age of pedestrians at 1 pm was roughly 20 -- a further sign that soon all downtown Manhattan will become part of the NYU campus, dotted here and there with communal living facilities for junior editorial assistants -- and prayed the meme was catching fire. And it may be! Walls of the City takes very badly the news that our citizens by and large do not pack heat: "New York City has made it legally impossible for your 'average', law-abiding citizen to carry [a gun] on his or her person. Welcome to 'modern' society, everyone... ain't it grand?" Somewhere a Second Amendment supporter is deciding that his young'un will attend Kansas Agricultural Land Grant College instead of Columbia. One less! One less!

Even more encouraging is the revelation that the slasher is a former model. When it gets around that even our sultry mannequins are going berserk, we won't be able to reel in the most abject suckers with a signing bonus and Friends: The Next Generation.

I envision the new Eli Roth movie: Fashion Week. Dewy innocents lured to tents in Bryant Park, there to be eviscerated or drowned in bronzer. One day a Chelsea bottle service club will close, and that will be the thin end of the wedge. Spread the word, and dream of a day when we may beat our condos into crackhouses.

WE GIVE THEM MONEY, BUT ARE THEY GRATEFUL?/NO, THEY'RE SPITEFUL AND THEY'RE HATEFUL. Since they're supposed to like Germany and France now that Merkel and Sarkozy are in, conservatives have of late been short of allies to yell at. Luckily Scott Kirwin's wife ran into a New Zealand girl who clued her to the astonishing news that a lot of foreigners don't like the United States. This gives Mr. Kirwin, a contributor to the Dean Esmay site, a new spot on the map at which to throw his verbal darts.

First he calls the girl a "trollop" and threatens, "Perhaps a little American Isolationism - our default state - is called for." He may have reflected that his threat would bear more weight if he cited his diplomatic credentials, because he updates to brag on his mad inferior-people skillz:

I am currently exposed to people from all over the world at my job. I work with two people from Beijing China. Even though I am fuming about what's happening in Burma and Darfur, and haven't forgotten the fear that Chinese students at my university felt after the Tiananmen Square massacre, I don't bring up these topics with them - nor do I mention the continuing oppression of Falun Gong. This is partly because of working together, but I also don't hold them responsible for any particular action of their government.

Maybe it's just that he's had more practice suppressing his rage at the Chinese, because shortly thereafter Kirwin denounces New Zealand, saying that its people hate the United States because they are a tiny and jealous country that "has spent most of its time since independence under European-style socialist governments." In one poetic flight, he muses on the vulnerability of the kiwi to predators:

For millions of years the kiwi thrived in its isolation. However today it is endangered by introduced predators including stoats, dogs, cats, weasels - and just about anything else that is fast enough to catch it. Only human intervention has saved the flightless bird from extinction.

He compares this to New Zealand's vulnerability to Muslim terrorists, announcing in bold type that "The weasel is a greater threat to the kiwi than to the eagle."

I'm guessing the dog would be government-run health care, the cat gangsta rap, and the stoat a player to be named later.

As for the weasel, it has, at least in its metaphoric form. been very little seen in New Zealand. No matter: the threat of terrorist attack against a disagreeable ally is not meant to sway the ally, but to provide a comforting revenge fantasy to enraged wingnuts. At least Randy Newman was honest enough to cut out the middleman.

WELL, I'VE DONE MY PART. Rachel Lucas, reacting to a local crime story:

So, yeah. I’m gonna go ahead and continue to be pissed off and judgmental for a while.

And will remember never to go to NYC without packing heat, even if it’s illegal (because New Yorkers are so fucking enlightened and evolved that they realized long ago that handguns are nothing but compensatory substitute penises for poorly-endowed redneck morons, and not necessary for civilized people in a civilized city like New York).

I hope she is as good as her word; we have too many idiots as it is. Whether she just stays away or gets locked up for playing Charles Bronson with a panhandler, it's all the same to me.

And if she can encourage other idiots to stay out of New York (her comments suggest she has), so much the better. For too long I have worried that our relatively modest crime rate was drawing too many such like into our overcrowded, expensive polity, but perhaps -- the right-wing blogosphere being, as we are constantly reminded, the true voice of the people -- this marks a turning point. Maybe all the teeth-gnashing, fist-shaking white people will stay away -- indeed, maybe such as have moved here will be spurred to flee, and the rest of us can finally get back to crack, heroin, squatting, cold lampin', turnstile-hoppin', and other pre-Giuliani pleasures we enjoyed before their invasion.

More encouraging signs -- Thrown for a Loop writes about my earlier Mets post:

But to claim the Mets have a claim to suffering in some special way (this year aside) displays the sort of self-centeredness and entitlement that makes people hate New York.

I hear ya, buddy -- please spread the word! New York's a terrible place! Abandon your condos and deflate our rents! Eschew Radio City Music Hall and depress our credit rating! Stay in the suburbs and let Gotham be Gotham! God take Miss Lucas to His mercy, and leave New York for us to hustle in!

UPDATE. Ace of Spades takes up the cause! From the comments: "Why I left NYC last week for good. The city is filled with psychos and moral cowards. This behavior isn't suprising in a city where everything is someone else's problem. Disgusting." It's a juggernaut! Time to dust off my squeegee.

THIS TIME FOR SURE. Victor Davis Hanson:

One thought in this context. It is of course true that the surge is working and our soldiers are far more sophisticated than in 2003. But in all the places one visits, there are reminders everywhere — pockmarked walls, rubble, memorial photos in bases — of all those killed during the worst ordeal between 2003-6. When one walks through these former battlefields, there is an eerie melancholy, a ghostly archaeology, a sense that now unnamed and largely anonymous Americans paid the ultimate price in those years to allow the opportunities we witness today. And that’s why we must continue and finish the job they started.

Charlie Brown no longer needs Lucy to pull away the football. He will drop back to punt and fall on his ass unassisted.

DUH DUH. DUH DUH, DUH DUH. DUH DUH, DUH DUH, DUH DUH, DUH DUH... Y'all know me, how I earn a livin'. Well, not a living, chump change really, but my fingernails on the blackboard should have convinced you of my seriousness anyway. I be a roving hunter of media buffoons. Mine's a small craft, but I am hella mediagenic in this grizzled guise of a crusty fisherman. Once I performed the works of the immortal Bard and couldn't buy a bag of farts, but we'll not speak of that.

Some bigtime operators are incensed that the White Whale Limbaugh is under attack by David Brock and a flotilla of Congressmen. Let me scratch my fake beard and speak plain: I don't like to see no creature ganged up on, and like it still less when the power of the state is invoked. I don't truck with no Fairness Doctrine. I am a simple man, as shown by the jaunty angle of my cap and my guttural dialect.

But when such powerful media voices rise to defend the mighty Leviathan even as their own junior death squads continue their merciless siege of one lowly soldier who spoke ill of their beloved Iraq occupation -- well, I have to spit evocatively over the side of my boat. They have no call to be cryin' foul. Their Mighty Wurlitzer has already made the seas run red with blood. I'll not put on a lifejacket again.

Farewell and ado to ya, fair Spanish ladies. Farewell and ado to ya, ladies of Spain. [writhes, spits blood] Yeeeargh! Yeeeargh!

UNTERMENTION. James Lileks mourns the demise by legislation of old motel signs on the highway. I am not unsympathetic. But:

...we give these people a smooth serene road, carefully designed to bring them from one planned community to the next with a minimum of visual friction, and the spoilers put up loud contentious honking signs that reeked of the Almighty Dollar. You know, ugly godless totems like this:

[visual of old matchbook motel sign from the author's collection]

Well, we showed them.

Our signs our primitive; the lawmakers must act. Jeebus. This is what annoys me to no end about the 60s, to cram it all into a tidy convenient decade; the overculture and the underculture ganged up on the great Middle, for different reasons but with equal gusto. The Middle was Crass, in the eyes of the overculture; Phony, in the eyes of the underculture. Now here we are a half-century later, and people will build websites detailing the few remaining examples of postwar roadside architecture, documenting the survivors, eulogizing their demise.

No one organizes a petition to save a building the underculture built, because they didn’t build anything. Ah well. Onward Garden Soldiers.

One thing sticks out: underculture? What's he mean? There's no referent in the preceding text. In the context of a thousand Lileks Bleats, this may mean hippies and beatniks -- you know, they hate phonies, it was in The Catcher in the Rye. And they never built anything but yurts and the Burning Man; they were all about tearing things down, smashing the state etc. Presumably these hipniks, fronted by a crying Indian, collaborated with Lady Bird Johnson to remove neon from the highways, leaving Lileks to shake his fist at the countryside.

Maybe it refers to the earlier part of the essay, in which Lileks talks about how great it would be if we could put more people in prison.

The middle class always gets it in the neck in Lileksland. You'd think they'd organize into a voting bloc or something.

THE WOUND AND THE BOW. In the new Vanity Fair Tom Stoppard writes about his perception of rock music:

I have no understanding of music, none at all. Much as I love the noise it makes, I can stare for hours at a guitar band and never work out which guitar is making which bit of noise. Also, my brain seems incapable of forming a template even for sounds I've heard a hundred times. You know how it is at rock concerts when half the crowd starts to applaud the first few notes of what's coming? My brain is like a two-year-old playing with wooden shapes: sometimes I'm still looking for the right-shaped hole when the lyrics finally kick in, and it turns out to be "Brown Sugar." Me and music.

This corresponds to a suspicion I had about Stoppard when I saw his play Rock 'n' Roll in London last year (review here). The allusions to rock felt a bit academic and sterile to me, and now I learn that the author suffers from a kind of rock dyslexia.

I sympathize; though the rock is strong with me, I have almost no feeling for poetry and, as regular readers will know, cannot render a simple human figure convincingly. Nor am I skilled in the domestic arts: both my apartment and my finances are an unholy mess. Now that I think of it, I can't do much of anything, despite my education and experience. A more efficient society would have left me on a hillside to die. Oh well.

Luckily Stoppard has a sense of humor about his affliction:

With another play, Arcadia, the drug was the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want," and since that play ends with a couple waltzing to music from an offstage party, I wrote the song into the ending and stayed high on that idea till I'd finished. It was inspiring. When, in rehearsals, it was pointed out to me that "You Can't Always Get What You Want" isn't a waltz and that, therefore, my couple would have to waltz to something else, I was astonished, uncomprehending, and resentful.

He might have substituted "I Got The Blues." But none of this should keep you from seeing Rock 'n' Roll on Broadway if you get the chance. It opens next month and Brian Cox, Sinead Cusack, and Rufus Sewell, all brilliant, are coming with it. In some cases, raw talent and professionalism can lift a man above his disabilities.

WORKING AUTHOR. A bum lady came into my subway car on the L today. Her clothes were dirty and her hair looked as if it had been cut with a steak knife, but she was very energetic and her eyes had a mad gleam. She offered us the Story of her Life. She handed out photocopied sheets of lined paper with the Story scrawled in a loopy hand. It read:

Story called My Life by marilyn pierce When I was 5 Years old, My father had tied me to the bed in he rape me, And gota gallon of gasoline in pure it all over my body and set me on fire that left me with 1st degree burns on my body When I was 6 Years old, my mother had thrown me out of a third floor window to my death. When I was 9 Yrs old, she had thrown me in front of a car in try to kill me. When I was 23 Years old, I was rape in got Pregnant. When I was 25 Years old, I was rape in got Pregnant. When I was 28 Years old, I was rape in got Pregnant. When I was 31 Years old, I was rape in got Pregnant. That why I thank God for all he has done for me in my babies, that why I am a survival through it all, may God bless you in your family

I gave her a dollar, as did four or five other people. At the next stop she went to the next car, where I presume she did the same thing.

Success in the literary game takes an awful lot of hustle.

IF YOU HATE US, YOU JUST DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE SAYIN'. The mishegas over Obama's non-wearing of a flag pin seems to have made "patriotism" the word of the day for conservatives. Their contributions are mostly simple jingo howls on the order of Dean Esmay's, "Yes, Virginia, there really are deeply unpatriotic people. Deal with it." The Armed Liberal goes for the long form, regrettably to the same effect. After an extended metaphor in which, it appears, people who criticize the Bush Administration are abusive parents and America their whimpering child-victim, Armed Liberal declares that liberal intellectuals like Matthew Yglesias who go for a less table-ponding style of patriotism

are fundamentally missing what it is that Middle Americans see in America. And in doing so, they do two things - as the 'shapers' of our culture, they mis-shape it in fundamentally damaging ways (thank God for hysterisis), and they isolate themselves increasingly from the mass of American people who are grateful for the patrimony America has given them, and who are willing to contribute to the future.

Perhaps that's why children are so out of fashion in certain circles...

The fit is so strong upon AL that he doesn't stop to explain how, if Middle Americans see patriotism clearly as he does, liberals "mis-shape" American culture "in fundamentally damaging ways." If no one's listening to them, what's the big deal?

This latest round of patriotic talk does not relate to anything tangible upon which patriotism is based. In another post AL quotes at length from one John Schaar, who talks about principles and commitments (and, of course, the unpatriotism of others), none of which suggests what might cause the lump in one's throat at the sight of the flag or the sound of the anthem. He who feels it knows it, as they say, and I think anyone randomly hauled in off the street might better express it.

That expression might not include a detailed citation of historical events and documents -- though his grade-school social studies teacher would be pleased if it did -- just things observed and participated in: a small-town Memorial Day parade, a picnic out by the barn, a blues club where they served 40 ounce beers and a cup if you wanted it, a waitress telling about her recently deceased dog in Nashville, a couple of chubby, giggling ladies in pantsuits hustling one another into a male strip club on the old Tenderloin in San Francisco ("C'mon, gal, we're goin' in!"), sand-surfing the Great Dunes in Colorado, hundreds of firefighters standing in dress uniform outside a comrade's funeral service in Greenpoint... every encountered person and event unique as a snowflake, all part of America, not identified with a foreign land or even a world community so much as with a place large enough to contain such variety and still be called home. Even if the subject were not a Constitutional scholar nor a professor of history, he might instinctively connect that richness of experience to the freedoms that made it possible and the struggles endured to keep it so. That may be what the flag and the anthem stir in him.

At a time when a dispiritingly large majority of Americans think the country is going in the wrong direction, you'd think our conservative friends would try to promote the blessings of patriotism, and cheerfully invite all of us to share in them. Yet they're focused on making people afraid not to display patriotism -- as if patriotism were something one could be hectored and bullied into. They seem to have a depressingly low opinion of America.

BARKING. Hur-ray, hur-ray, hur-ray! Step right up and see scenes from the Folsom Street Fair! Not for the squeamish or the faint of heart! Parents, take heed of the content warning! Butt-whippings, cock-sucking, dildo-shoving, and Dem-o-crrrratic advocacy! Just a pitcher from life's other side! You say you saw our Trans March ex-hi-bi-tion. You say you thought you'd seen it all. But you ain't seen nnnnothin' yet, folks! To see all the grrrrrisly details, follow the instructions for unblurring the ex-pli-cit photos. We brrreakin' taboos here, folks! The pictures they don't want you to see! Provided for ed-u-ca-tion-al purposes only! Stay as long as you want, bookmark it for a later date, and remember, if you're outrrrrraged it's not voyeurrrrism!

Ace of Spades is roused to action:

Oh: Reminder, this was largely sponsored by Miller Beer. And Miller Beer representatives did in fact wear leatherboy outfits in their booths.

So, there you go. I drank the beer, but I think I might switch to Coors Light. I'm not big on boycotting but I'm sick of this disgusting double-standard where corporations are allowed to pump money into shit like this but won't pony up a dime for anything tainted with conservatism, because that would be "controversial."

I'm sure if Mr. Spades ran some pictures of him and his butchly-pseudonymed buddies beating each other off, Old Milwaukee would throw them a few bucks.

HAIRCUT BY RING LARDNER JAMES LILEKS. March, 1997:

My regular barberette, B., was out today, and in her stead, to my astonishment, was last year's stylist, M. - a cheerful young woman...

We had a good talk - that's one of the main reasons I go to her. I can't stand awkward conversation while I'm getting my hair cut... given how animated I get on certain subjects, it's good we don't talk politics, or I'd get a scissor-point in the eyeball...

Hollywood, after all, convinced us all that the mentally ill are just rebels, difficult people, no more or less sane than the rest of us, sanity being a socially constructed invention. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" - a great movie - probably did more damage to the mentally ill than all the lobotomies and shock treatments combined...

April 1, 2004:

...today I got a Madge. A fifty-plus haircutter who still had a hint of Winstons in her voice. You don’t want a wash? We don’t have to do a wash. I’d say more, but I just realized there’s a column in that, and I have to write a column tomorrow. Enough to say that it was a great cut, and I left feeling that wonderful I’m too sexy for my head feeling you get after a good haircut...

I know this paints me as a buffoon of the tenth magnitude, but I don’t care what France thinks, and I wonder why some are so eager to seek their approval...

June 3, 2004:

Never get the same stylist twice. Never. The last one was a classic Madge in the old wisecracking Lark-smoker beautician mode. This time I got someone who had learned some odd things at the Stylists Academy. There were moments when I wondered just what, exactly, she was doing. The shampoo, for example: at some point it just veered into some odd thumb-based scalp massage. I don’t like to get my hair washed by other people anyway. I generally prefer that strangers keep their hands out of my hair. Particularly if they’ve spent the day with their hands in other people’s hair...

Lenny Bruce was celebrated for offending the right people, and this enshrined the act of offending as some sort of brave stance against The Man, The Grey-Flannel Suited Establishment, the whole Ike-Nixon Axis of Medieval, the straights. Gotta offend the straights or you’re not doing your job...

June 13, 2006:

Then it was my turn. I almost asked the stylist if she remembered when the hallway was a dead end, but thought better of it. Yes or no, there’s really nowhere you can go after that...

Drove home. Two squad cars outside an apartment building. The conclusion to the afternoon’s story, perhaps. Fixed myself leftover pizza...

June 26, 2006:

The haircut was quick and cheap, and this time I had a well put-together stylist who did not seem to give off waves of regrettable but largely unexamined backstory. I read an article in the Weekly Standard about the Ahmadinejad letter. The stylist wanted to talk, but for once I didn’t. Because I have a bad feeling about this, as George Lucas wrote...

December 22, 2006:

My stylist was unpleasant. Usually I get a cheerful lass with a balloony bosom (displayed for all to see, so we can marvel at the tattoos) but this time I got a sullen minx who radiated indifference and self-regard... I made the first tentative offering of small talk, which was backhanded away with a grunt. Fine; I’ll just sit here, then, recalculating the tip.

Do you use scissors? she asked.

I had no idea what she meant. I mean, I did, inasmuch as she had scissors in her hand like every other person who’s ever cut my head, and I had entered into the transaction with the assumption, however unvoiced, that scissors would be involved anew, but I didn’t quite understand, and asked her what she meant.

Do you use scissors? On your hair?

No, I don’t, I said, carefully, but the people who cut my hair do?

That satisfied her. Pissed her off, too, but it satisfied her. (Later my wife explained that she was asking if I would rather have a razor cut, because now they’re offering to cut your hair with a razor....)

Spare me the emails about how I shouldn’t have tipped her at all! It was a decent enough cut, and she has to make a living. I just won’t use her again. I’m North Dakotan that way. I’ll show the little snit what I think, and tip her exactly what the custom demands...

July 19, 2007:

I failed to undertip Little Miss Sullen, the hair stylist I keep getting at the chop-shop where I get shorn every third fortnight; usually she’s a miserable little scowling pill, but this time we didn’t talk at all, and things went well...

...at least I didn't forget Bleat Radio Theater. This is an odd one from the 50s, from CBS Radio Workshop. It’s a “humorous” Cold War “parable” set on a planet populated by vegetables...

October 4, 2007:

Went to the Mall Wednesday night to get hairs cut; had a daffy stylist with a bosom tat and a fractured patter that made me wonder what she was doing to my head. Without my glasses, I can’t tell. She did a great job, but she also dumped half the snipped hair down my collar, and I walked around the mall itching and twitching...

Outside the sun was low, the weather warm; it felt like a summer day. I remembered what my stylist had said about the weather: it’s too cold, I want it to be cold. And I twitched and itched some more and headed to the car. Soon enough, dear...

OH YEAH, THE METS. I only watched the first inning of the last game, a rare case of self-restraint. I'd been thinking of going to Shea. Maybe I should have, though I don't know how I could have stood it. The Daily News reports:

Deafening chants of "Let's Go Mets" rocked the big house in Queens an hour before the opening pitch.

The carnival mood - fueled by the Mets' dramatic win a day earlier - quickly turned to deathly silence as the Marlins pounded ace Tom Glavine like they were the ones battling for a playoff spot.

When the club first hired Glavine in 2003, I fretted that it was just another bizarre Met donation to the knacker's yard of expired talents. But after a bad start he played gutball reliably. He was the natural choice to bring it home Sunday. The pathetic response of the rest of the team was, alas, expected -- if you can't get more than one run in the first with Dotrell pitching that badly, what good are you? -- but Glavine hadn't started that badly since 1989. His face in the dugout afterward showed the exquisitely private agony of the big-game pitcher, jaw tight, eyes ablaze: how could I fuck up that bad? But he got no balm from the Shea faithful but a shower, nay, a hailstorm of boos.

Which was exactly as it should have been.

The reverse mojo enjoyed and suffered by Cubs and (til recently) Red and White Sox fans is historic. But Mets fans never needed a history of suffering. We were inoculated and immunized against the usual side-effects of futility by their awful first season -- hence their ironic early cognomen, the Amazin' Mets. Like potholes and crime, suffering is part of the Mets' DNA.

This made their "Miracle Mets" World Series win in 1969 enduringly singular -- not like any Yankee Series win, but a battered fist punched upward through despair. I still remember a WOR-TV promo of the time that played "The Impossible Dream" and showed the grizzled visage of Casey Stengel on the line, "That one man, scorned and covered with scars." It was about redemption for the underdog, as was "Ya Gotta Believe!" a few years later. Even in defeat, the Mets had become a belief system. The Yankee ascendancy that followed was fine for those who worshipped at that cathedral, but Mets fans remained lower-church Believers, praying for the return of the Miracle.

The 1986 team was allegedly it -- a harbringer of a butched-up National League dynasty in New York. But then came Strawberry's pre-season fistfight with Keith Hernandez (the only recorded case, a local sportwriter observed, of Strawberry hitting the cut-off man), then Straw swinging through an Orel Hershiser fastball in the NLCS, and then a deep miasma of Isringhausen, Jeff Kent, Saberhagen, Bobby Bonilla, Bobby V in a fake mustache, Kenny Rogers walking in the winning run in the 1999 NLCS, Timo Perez overrunning his base and Derek Bell pulling up lame at the wall in Game 1 of the 2000 series, Art Howe, Mo Vaughn's fat ass, etc.

We supp'd full with horrors then, and came to Shea ready to jeer. I saw "Captain" John Franco, the last World Series-winning pitcher on the team, greeted with cries of "OH NO!" when he came in from the bullpen. I saw grown men draped in vintage Mets paraphenalia dramatically jerking the thumbs-down from the upper deck. With no Miracle on the horizon, we still attended our lower church, but mocked the ceremony and splattered the celebrant. Yankee Stadium was never like this. Though we were acquainted with glory, we were used to ignominy, and when that was all we had we reveled in it. We knew how to lose.

In this same period, New York itself eschewed loserdom. It was Giulianified -- safe, and rich, and beloved of the nation. Even the Yankees (spit) gained fans in most major markets; during the regular season you could hear their bellowing in stadia from Seattle to Baltimore. No one loved the Mets except us. Our stadium was a toilet and our team was shit. We didn't give a damn. Shea was for locals. Families spread out on the cheap seats. When the season-ticket jerks fled for the suburbs in the fifth inning, we took their seats. Shea in its way preserved a piece of New York from before Giuliani time, where victory was not expected and you could express a negative opinion of management without getting thrown out.

The New Mets were our next great chance. Even last year's NLCS had a silver lining: fate had been cruel but the team was tough and local hero Willie Randolph had brought them a long way. Next year would be worth waiting 'til. Well, we saw how that worked out: a big-town beginning followed by a big-time collapse. "Jose Jose Jose" followed by Shinjo-level booing. Glavine out after one-third. Willie standing dull-eyed in the dugout. We began to see that our Mets were not what our mythology demanded -- neither a Miracle nor scorned nor covered with scars. They were overpaid journeymen shamefully bereft of the fuel we fans had thought they shared with us: hope.

The other day I saw some newspaper columnist giving us grief for not giving Glavine a gentler sendoff. Fuck him and fuck you. We are not like other fans, however long or short their period of suffering. We are the children of '62: born to lose, contemptuous of quit. We are impervious to dynastic bullshit and will cheer lustily for the Tribe to extend the Bronx goons' endlessly edifying ringless streak. And come April, from every section we'll let you hear how we feel, long and hard. We are not impressed by the new Shittyfield you offer us. We want blood. We want a manager who will bestir himself to get thrown out every once in a while. We want players who will dive for a grounder. We want a team worthy of our exquisite suffering. We want a Miracle.

ADVICE FOR CULTURE WARRIORS. Here's one of the reasons I have Daniel Larison on my blogroll:

Conservatives definitely should make more documentaries, but they should do so because they actually want to be filmmakers and want to tell stories. They should do this because they have a talent for doing it, which ensures that they will be doing the work that best expresses their particular gifts. Conservatives should not make documentaries just because that’s what leftists do and we need to counter their propaganda arm with one of our own. As much as it may stun certain folks to read this, left-wing politics prevails among actors and artists for the same reason that it prevails among most journalists: it is a kind of politics that initially fits very well with the kind of work that these people do, and these professions attract people who already tend to share these beliefs.

Unfortunately I found this March 2007 nugget via a deep link from a less canny Larison post, in which he focuses more intently on the problems faced by conservatives who want to do more than just shake their fists at Commie Hollywood and the news media, and less on their opportunities. Are there no Limbaughs? Are there no Liberty Film Festivals? More to the point, are there no Scaifes and Murdochs to finance them?

In both posts, Larison hits the point that a life in the arts is not conducive to raising a family, which object conservatives exalt. Just so. You're not usually going to find your eiron among family men -- except in sitcoms. In fact, I would say that the ironic role of the paterfamilias in your average sitcom from The Life of Riley onwards comes from the tendency in late American life to integrate all the necessary aspects of a community into a consumer experience. Theatre being a niche experience anymore, we have had to replant our truth-telling outsiders, however clumsily, in the middle of our suburban fantasies. In fact, you might say that the whole "anti-American" tendency of American popular art in the past several decades has been a reaction to that uneasy fit...

But that's what comes of reading too much of The American Scene: that way lies madness and Reihan Salam. (Warning to posterity: link evanescent.) So forget it and we'll make it this: trying to write or film or act or sing anything is a hard job, and making it pay is much harder. You have to make sacrifices, including doing jobs you don't want to do and living like you don't want to live. If you have the stomach for that, you might get somewhere, but it will probably take longer than your childish hopes and dreams have led you to expect. The payoff may take years -- indeed, it may never happen. Internalize that, and then let me know how badly you want to drag your ideology with you into glory.

This post is written at the finish of another damn class I've taken to try and realize my own dreams. I've been at this game a long time and the brass ring doesn't look much closer. I don't know as I've acquired much of anything in its pursuit except guts. But maybe guts, as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman once said, is enough.

A POOR EFFORT. There are tropes that come up in every schoolyard political discussion. Like "You liberals say you're against tyranny, so how come you didn't like when we took out Saddam?" You can ignore them, or muster the patience to answer them briefly. Or you can do like Jonah Goldberg who, offered a T-ball shot at an ancient libertarian comeback, swings his wiffle bat wildly, trips on his shoelaces, falls on his ass and smacks himself in the crotch:

I have zero desire to launch another Corner-exhausting debate on drug legalization. I will note — since many readers still seem unaware — that I am in the minority here at NR and the magazine has officially favored an end to the drug war for a very long time. For the record, it's my view that drug legalization (note: I'm for the gradual decriminalization of pot) will create more, not fewer, moms like the one discussed below. It's also my view that the constant leap to "What about alcohol!?" is not as boffo an argument as many readers believe it to be. Saying alcohol is really bad for people and ruins lives has obvious validity, but it doesn't advance the ball very far down the field by saying that therefore other substances that ruin lives should be made legal too. I think there are very strong arguments for drug legalization. The argument that we should be consistent and ban alcohol too is not one of them in my book.

I think he must be paid by the word because this is a very long way of saying, "Aw c'mon." Also, if someone among his colleagues or family really cared about him, he would tell Goldberg that phrases like "doesn't advance the ball very far down the field," "into the weeds," "it's late" and "I have to walk Cosmo" etc. don't embellish his arguments as well as he thinks they do. He should switch to "I'm drunk" or "fuck you," which have worked very well for me.

MORE ARTISTIC ADVICE FROM PEOPLE WHO CAN'T WRITE ENGLISH PROPERLY. It's Jules Crittenden's turn to yell about treasonous Hollywood. The central thesis, as we have shown at stultifying length in regard to its previous applications, is a non-sequitur, so we will devote ourselves here to the more obvious secondary signs of Crittenden's incompetence when addressing any subject more subtle than a car alarm:

The point has been underscored this week by “The War,” a documentary that for all its shortcomings has performed a great service, bringing to light previously unseen combat footage. That footage demonstrates what combat veterans and combat photographers know, but many filmmakers and ordinary Americans, innocent of that variety of carnal knowledge, do not appear to fully grasp. The most extraordinary things can be quite ordinary, the most unbelievable events playing out in matter-of-fact fashion. Without drama. Without irony.

They're really cute, if incomprehensible, when they get all aesthetic. Artists all over America will be interested to know that "the most extraordinary things can be quite ordinary." It's a pity Hemingway, Celine, James Jones, et alia, aren't around to hear this lesson: they might have then endeavored to raise their feeble efforts to the exalted level of TV documentaries.

It may also be impossible for actors to feign the subtle expression of faces of men in combat, intent on their business, or in the extreme, utterly expressionless, evocative of the void. You can’t fake those eyes.

Yeah, and what was with that Daniel Day-Lewis pretending to be a cripple in that movie? He's not crippled! I saw him walking around at a gala once.

And of course, that old culture-warrior favorite:

Disclosure: I haven’t seen this movie, and don’t intend to spend my money on it.

But he will tell you his opinion of this film he hasn't seen. What a racket! Let's us liberals start a website where we analyze things we haven't seen. I'll start with the Complete Works of Balzac. It's great!

Summation: Artists can't get war because war is real, man. That's why we Citizen Journalists avoid all art. Yet we still have plenty of advice for you art fags. Bloggers -- is there any problem they can't solve?

EASTERN PROMISES. How did a director known for gut-busting horror become one of our great handlers of actors? In the beginning, when Cronenberg was transforming humanity for fun and profit, he didn't need much acting. But when he ascended into big-time filmmaking, Cronenberg inverted the perspective, focusing on human resistance to monstrosity. This had the rare effect of making his work both more marketable and more mature. In The Fly, even before his lab misfortune, Jeff Goldblum's Seth Brundle seemed eager to slip the surly bonds of mere humanity, and the film might have been another sly comedy of the New Flesh, but Cronenberg let love complicate his story, and the adventure became an agony, and even something close to a tragedy.

Lately Cronenberg has been escalating the moral stakes of his stories, and putting a greater burdern on his actors. He's been lucky with his actors, for the most part. In Eastern Promises, Cronenberg brings back Viggo Mortensen, the moral border-crosser of A History of Violence, as the tranformational hero. He is the Russian mobster who translates between the "good people" of London, portrayed by Naomi Watts and her part-Russian family, and the monsters of his mob, bossed by Armin Mueller-Stahl, whose depravity is indicated by his incapacity to express any feelings beyond contempt and anger. Mueller-Stahl's son, played by Vincent Cassell, has inherited the anger, but no talent for contempt -- petulance and insolence are the best he can manage. Mortensen has the contempt at existential levels, which may be why the boss virtually substitutes him for his real son -- a dangerous move for all concerned, as it happens.

The mob dynamics are fascinating, which may be why Cronenberg shows a lot of them, even though the action is supposed to be in the interplay between Mortensen's crew and the normals. The McGuffin is a baby left behind by a dying mob slave. The Londoners wish to save and redeem the baby; the mob boss wants whatever will best protect him, which may require its death.

That "may" is part of the problem. There is some dramatic merit, especially in the beginning, in keeping the necessity of the baby's death an open question. For one thing, it allows Mortensen's character and Watts' to interact on something other than strictly adversarial terms. Unfortunately, while Mortensen is superb, showing both the scars on his soul and the soft spots still remaining, Watts is just terrible. Her only identifiable character traits are those that have been announced by the other actors. (Are she and her BFF Nicole Kidman part of some bad actress sorority? Do they practice bugging their eyes and smiling slyly together?) This underrealized attraction leads to a silly motorcycle baby-chasing climax, which is even more ridiculous than it sounds.

I think Cronenberg saw in this story a way to further explore the moral divide examined in A History of Violence. But with a mob as thoroughly (though entertainingly) black and damned as this one, a heroine who is only pretty and well-intentioned, and a man standing between whose whole life is invested in not showing his true feelings, you don't have a moral divide, you have a moral silhouette. This may be why so much energy goes into the set-pieces, including the brilliantly choreographed bathhouse fight scene. They're fun to watch, but in the end they're just bloody filigrees. It may be that, in giving his actors more to do, Cronenberg has fallen into the trap of letting them do too much of what should be his job: inventing a reality that offers more resonance than scene-study exercises.

INDIE CRED. Tee fucking hee:

Brian is/was Ezra’s roommate. Sommer is Matt’s friend. Ezra is staying with Matt here in NYC while we are all up here for the Clinton Global Initiative. Alex and I are friends, as are Alex and Megan. Matt and Ezra and Megan went shooting together on Yom Kippur (bad Jews!), along with Dave, who is throwing a joint birthday party with Brian later this week. Also, Megan and Matt work together. And I used to work with Matt and still work with Ezra. And I think we are all Facebook friends.

Mithras:

High School Never Ends, It Just Changes Location

Liberalism's future Maureen Dowds and Tom Friedmans hash out their personal differences. You know, they'll still be miffed about stuff like this - and still think it matters - 30 years from now. Assholes.

It was bound to happen: as blogging became professionalized, dinks from good schools took pride of place.

Which is not to say that it isn't worse than it's ever been: Somehow I can't imagine Russell Baker and Murray Kempton filling column inches with lengthy chortles over their revels at Studio 54.

For you the punters, I believe the choice is clear. You can invest your time with these credentialed feebs, or hang out with the real people. Here is a photo taken from my writing "desk." It is not posed or nothin'.



Just be thankful I didn't include a picture of my bathroom. Wait; here is a picture of my bathroom:



And I just cleaned it. Finally, here is a picture of me and my buddies in the hood:



If you respect yourself, respect the scene, and respect the Fantastik with Bleach, I'm sure you will eschew those callow wonks and give instead your custom to rough customers such as myself. Honestly, what would you rather read? Something like this:

Sameer Lalwani looks at some of the stories behind the stories out of Burma. I think he's particularly smart on the role of new technologies.

Or something like this:

...Thence heav'd I the Maid acrosst the Table and ventur'd her Legs, which were Akimbo, untill they were Luxated; but at her Pudend found a Suppuration unknown to me, for all my Years of Learning; so vex'd, I rotated her and had my Way Anally. This Orifice was withal less than Hygenick, but there I understood the Nature of the Filth.

We offer this sort of thing every day, sometimes in modern English, and with links to Media Matters. We also have merchandise. Your way is clear, joy-poppers. This is the only blog that matters.

BORN TO LOSE. I don't think I have the gas to go to Shea and partake in Willie Randolph's "new season." Maybe if my lungs need clearing I'll go on Sunday and boo. I thank God that my years as a Mets fan and a Democrat have inured me somewhat to this kind of disaster. Still, Jesus Christ. They blew a 7-game lead in two weeks. I was stunned at first by Willie's sangfroid in the slump, but now I think his team was so freaked- and worn-out that he didn't dare spook them any further. I wonder what he thinks now. Poor Paul LoDuca seems to think he's going to pull the team into the playoffs by his teeth. Maybe he should pitch relief.

I believe Harvey Keitel speaks for all of us:



UPDATE. On the plus side, the O's have just tied the Yankees in the ninth on a triple by... Jay Payton. Sangfroid is over -- time to warm up the schadenfreude!

YET ANOTHER CODA. This sort of relates to the previous two posts: In the latest installment of their "debate," Andrew Breitbart engages in a B&D fantasy concerning David Ehrenstein:

If I could go back in time, I would go back to your childhood to beat up the boys who beat you up as you started grappling with your homosexuality. I'd go into your past to erase the "hate crimes" that now cause you to blame political conservatism for your deepest wounds. I want to breach the time/space continuum to find out what those young hoodlums were thinking when they went after you...

...at the end of the film, it's 2014 and I see that you and your partner have been nabbed by Chomsky-quoting al Qaeda fanatics who are getting ready to behead you in an abandoned auto factory in Michigan for the sin of brunching in Dearborn.

But the moment before they chop your heads off -- in the nick of time (just like in the Republicans' favorite show, "24," which we are grateful you guys allowed us to have) -- the good guys, in this case the U.S. Marines, bust through the doors to save you both. At this point, I will have drafted a powerful soliloquy for your character. It'll be a cinematic epiphany in which you show remorse for tilting at white, straight and conservative windmills...

Crumbs, Mary! Why don't you just kiss him already?

MY FAVORITE FOLSOM STREET COMMENTER SO FAR. The Folsom Street thing is still going strong. Among the hundreds of chest-thumping Christers expressing their outrage:

"'Gay' activists disingenuously call Christians 'haters' and 'homophobes' for honoring the Bible, but then lash out in this hateful manner toward the very people they accuse.” My own experience with these people led me to conclude that while Christians profess to “love the sinner and hate the sin” the extremists of the Angry Gay Left “love the sin and hate the sinner.” Responsible gay leaders should speak out against the poster, but they will not, fearing the vicious attacks from the hatemongers of their own community.

Before (and after!) he was Jeff Gannon, the author was gay-escort/wingnut/"reporter" James Guckert -- GOP press pool shill by day, "Bulldog" by night! Now he spends a large amount of his time denouncing "homosexual jihad against Republicans," which apparently includes exposing homosexual Republicans:

Larry Craig did not invent the toilet culture for which he has been accused. Gays did. Not only did gays invent anonymous rendezvous –- the practice is a significant part of the homosexual subculture.

Whereas Gannon/Guckert's encounters were the opposite of anonymous -- he got the names and the credit card numbers!

Much as I love the original, isn't it about time someone remade Advise and Consent?

UPDATE. Fixed the faulty proper name of Gannon/Guckert.

NIHIL OBSTAT. At Beliefnet, Rod Dreher is mad 'cause some leather folk made a poster for a leather event that imitates the famous tableau of the Last Supper.

Dan Savage has the absurdity of this well-covered. In a way, I can't get too outraged about the outrage or the outrage over the outrage. This is fine intramural sport for all of us with time on our hands, and the worst I can say about it is it helps keep Bill Donohue employed.

Slightly more annoying and instructive is Dreher's follow-up, in which he tells us that while a lot of conservatives denounced Ann Coulter when she called Edwards a faggot, liberals never return the high-minded favor. He invites liberal Christians to perform an appropriate auto da fe, and denounce some liberal foibles in the spirit of post-Folsom comity. Dreher seems not to have noticed that there is a whole, credentialed flock of self-proclaimed liberal columnists who spend many of their column inches on such exercises. As Gavin observes:

Among the many variants of this style is that of the nominally liberal columnist (such as Thomas Friedman or Richard Cohen) who finds himself continually forced by events to repeat conservative talking points and express disdain for his fellow liberals -- message: "This hurts me more than it hurts you." When executed well, this routine can be repeated weekly for an indefinite number of years.

It's a marketable schtick. But demands that others emulate it without pay are rather rich, especially coming from someone whose anti-gay animus is obvious whenever he mentions homosexuals.

This is the sort of thing that gives moderation a bad name.

A CLOCKWORK BREITBART. The L.A. Times has engaged David Ehrenstein (film nerd) and Andrew Breitbart (culture warrior) to discuss Hollywood and the War on Whatchamacallit. (First two parts up now.) We have gone round this particular mulberry bush many times before, but Breitbart's ravings are proving classics of the genre.

Most notable are Beitbart's mood swings between professions of conservative cultural impotence and professions of conservative cultural power. On the one hand he accuses "the politically correct architecture of the creative process in Hollywood," where "pro-victory voices are reflexively ridiculed, cold-shouldered and made pariahs of on the party circuit [! -ed.]," of "reverse McCarthyism" (Watershed! They're against McCarthyism now!). On the other, he declares that "my side has talk radio, best-selling books, top-rated cable news shows, blogs, Op-Ed columns and even the presidency to make our points," and that "millions of other American filmgoers" share his politics and find their needs ill-served by Hollyweird, despite record box-office figures.

At one point, perhaps a rare moment of equilibrium in his brain chemistry, Breitbart turns introspective on behalf of the Movement: "Yet the conservatives who defend and, to a great degree, prosecute this war [? -ed.] have only themselves to blame for not putting enough emphasis on popular entertainment, and refusing to get bloody in the trenches of Melrose and Vine," he says, before (alas) reverting to form and calling on Ehrenstein as a "gay expert on gays in cinema" to help him with a Hollywood "diversity" project.

There are many different ways to relieve a creative urge, and those of us who toil both in blogs and in other formats must be careful not to shoot too much of our wads on internet prattle. That's why I continue to hold out sympathy and hope for guys like Jason Apuzzo, whose rages against the Hollywood machine are punctuated by efforts to make the sort of movies he wants to see.

But as Breitbart's case shows, the pure culture warrior finds making actual culture a "bloody" business and beneath him. His talents are instead devoted to concocting syrups of outrage thick enough to suspend bombast-fragments like "heroin-addled reality star," "self-congratulatory award show pronunciations," and "Gulfstream-flying, eco-warrior billionaires" for the delectation of undiscerning goons. The hard work of pursuing a coherent idea from start to finish -- whether in a story, script, or even a blog post -- is for the gloopy ones, while the oomny ones use, like, inspiration and what Bog sends.

It seems clear that our culture warriors are not engaged in a war for culture so much as a war against it.

HOMAGE TO SHERLOCK HOLMES AND PHILEAS FOGG. Megan McArdle on some silly Times story on women who are uncomfortable dating men who make less money than they do:

Speaking as the Emissary From Your Thirties, you know that amazing guy who just got back from Africa and tells hilarious stories and dates, like, everyone you know? The one your best friend quit her job to go to Tuvalu with? The one who's been working on a really titanic novel for four years that he never quite finishes, and can't seem to hold down a long-term job? His dating prospects start heading rapidly downhill by his thirtieth birthday. By his late thirties, his studio apartment is getting very lonely at night. If he does get married to a woman more successful than he is, it's likely that their relationship will be controlling, resentful, and involve enduring quite a lot of contempt from her friends and family.

But it has nothing to do with money. [? -ed.] Men with some measure of success in their chosen fields have no problem finding spouses. And successful women have no cause to complain, either. After all, they have a bevy of unsuccessful but charming men to choose from, who will be more than happy to date them if they can overcome their biases. The unsuccessful men, on the other hand, are pretty much frozen out.

This is why I keep a cat.

McArdle's post is an odd mix of libertarian harshness and romanticism. On the one hand, it features a market explanation which seems to strike her as just. But the talk about loneliness and diminished prospects comes from some different kind of moral tale, perhaps a pamphlet or a children's story. One would hardly guess that our society is filled with people who, by her standards, are moral and economic failures. McArdle does acknowledge the existence of poor folk in a previous post on the same subject, but there the language reverts to econo-nerdspeak:

There is a growing male/female education and income disparity. But it is occurring several rungs down the SES ladder from the precious princesses in the story, clipping off price tags and hiding shopping bags lest He realize that she shops at Prada. This problem is afflicting mostly poor women, particularly black and latino women, who have seen their earnings prospects improve dramatically relative to those of the men in their communities.

In this demimonde, women suffer from the "problem" of improved earning power, while in the surface world we have companionless loser males with their Soup for One dinners and unfinished novels, clinging forlornly to precious memories of Tuvalu. It seems win-win, or lose-lose, depending on your perspective.

For all its confusion, this analysis clearly posits marriage as the ultimate prize. I wonder if the many citizens who fall in and out of marriages, and in and out of economic stability, see it that way. No doubt many of them do -- which is why they keep trying -- but some may have determined that life's a bit messier than that. If the prospect of penury and an unattended deathbed disturbs them, so too might the prospect of a job they despise and a "controlling, resentful" relationship. One of the glories of a free society is that we may pick and choose our regrets. In econometric circles, where marriage, income per capita, and procreation are exalted data-points, this does not signify. But if you have found some happiness in this world despite your lack of resemblance to the ideal, you may know what I'm talking about.

UPDATE. Jules Verne character name corrected; thanks, Anon.

FIRST AMENDMENT UPDATE. Ahmadinejad speaks at Columbia. Much protest. Much coverage, largely negative (The New York Daily News headline: "The Evil Has Landed"). The Republic endures.

Just the other day National Review was telling us that "Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia has nothing to do with freedom of speech." Today at NR, Michael Rubin:

Lee Bollinger's introduction didn't make the news [in Iran]. But then again, why should it? Ahmadinejad's state-controlled press does not support such concepts as free speech and free expression.

I've noticed that, whenever they fail to cut off someone's mike, they murmur something like this about free speech as if it were some small consolation.

FTW. Mark Steyn complains about Fred Thompson's characterization of America's goals in World War II:

FDR didn't take America to war in 1941 with the "disinterested intention of liberating others". He took America to war not to end the Holocaust or free Belgium or build a democracy in Japan but for reasons of hard-headed national self-interest. All the rest was the happy consequence of victory. Likewise, America didn't topple the Taliban because it was suddenly overcome by a burning desire to see more women legislators in the Afghan parliament: That, too, was a happy consequence of a war waged for selfish reasons.

This is an interesting admission because many, many conservatives automatically discount the idea that opponents of the Iraq war might also be putting America's welfare first and foremost, and accuse us of other loyalties. In fact Steyn himself does this regularly. In 2003 he discounted antiwar protestors as "enthusiastically subscribed" to the proposition that "whatever the problem, American imperialist cowboy aggression is to blame," and earlier in 2007 he characterized the "Slow-Bleed Democrats" as more interested in embarrassing Bush than in winning "America's war."

Hatred of America, or of Bush, has been always been their default explanation for the astonishing fact that some Americans disagree with them, and as the number of dissenters increases Steyn begins to think that the war party just hasn't explained it properly:

An awful lot of Americans see Iraqis waving purple fingers at the polls and shrug, "Nice. But not worth dead Americans." To sell this struggle to the electorate, you have to frame it in terms of the national interest. It has to be a war consistent with American ideals but fought for selfish reasons.

The Administration actually did present a compelling, self-interested causus belli -- remember "one vial, one canister... to bring a day of horror like one we have never known"? But it turned out to be bullshit. The Happy Iraqi stuff was just the sweetener. The current Iraq explanation boils down to we're here because we're here.

Like the new-edition Steyn, I care much, much less about other countries than I do about this one. That's why I retroactively endorse America's go-slow approach to the Cold War, which left hanging an awful lot of Soviet subjects who might have been more quickly liberated -- or incinerated -- by a more aggressive strategy. I think it's terrific that Israel provides a homeland for the most persecuted race in the history of the world, but I mainly support it because its existence suits America's interests. I think it's neat that Nelson Mandela went from prisoner to President of South Africa, but for me the money shot was the establishment of a viable democracy in a continent riddled with kleptocracies. Our interests demand a world that is increasingly less likely to blow up in our faces, and the hornets-nest we have aggravated in Iraq seems to me a giant step in the wrong direction.

Go ahead and call me selfish. Patriots have endured worse.

UPDATE. Much contention in comments as to whether our support for Israel suits American interests. I think a better policy toward Israel would be helpful, but withdrawing support would be catastrophic, and whatever reasons obtain, we have enough catastrophe as it is. The subject will be worth revisiting.

THE DREAM IS OVER. Hog on Ice starts out yelling about the taser kid Andrew Meyers, and ends up yelling about how conservative bloggers can't get any play:

This is why the right-wing Blogosphere is dead and moldering but Markos Zuniga, who can barely write his name, is a multimillionaire. Compared to Zuniga, Malkin and Reynolds are obscure, marginalized, and pretty much impotent, and Pajamas Media...well, don't get me started.

We owned the Blogosphere a few years back, and we made stupid decisions and pissed it away. We went from omnipotent to irrelevant. And we have a national election coming up, we can't begin to match the left's Internet fundraising and informational horsepower, and we're doing absolutely nothing about it. We're not going to change any time soon, either. The scarier things get, the more every successful conservative obsesses on protecting his little rice ball. No one is forming new alliances or making any serious effort to consolidate conservative media power. And for damn sure, we are not going to have any Andrew Meyers.

Back in 2003, when Megan McArdle was talking about the wingersphere Mr. Ice mourns as a "very advanced, processing brain," it may be that hundreds, even thousands of bloggers took it seriously, and thought they were part of something larger than themselves, which would in turn make them large. It was to be the sort of utopia that conservatives -- whom I'm told are not big on collectivism -- can allow themselves to imagine: one in which individuals can avail a limited barrier to entry and make contributions that will both feed the borg and expose their own talents, thereby lifting them to glory or at least economic self-sufficiency. It was, in other words, punk rock for nerds.

Well, McArdle is now credentialed by The Atlantic. Hers would seem to be a typical careerist path; the odds on her success were never slim, but blogging gave her a nice promotional boost. Mr. Ice himself is an author, a harder row to hoe in any case. His blog no doubt helps him move his product. For a happy capitalist, that should be enough -- well, never enough, but sufficient to the cause.

Yet the great dream lingers -- in Mr. Ice's case, as ashes in the mouth, but for many others, younger or just less easily discouraged, it is tastier and stimulates the appetite. The sheeple who don't even know who Scott Thomas Beauchamp is will be shaken from their false consciousness by an invincible juggernaut of Citizen Journalists holding aloft the banner of Truth, and there'll be kegs enough for everyone at the afterparty.

Fond hope! Alas, reality is more strictly tiered than that. The ubiquity of the internet feeds into the conservative idea of unlimited opportunity, but when it comes to real dollars and influence, there are never more than a few spots open, and these usually go to graduates of "good" schools who have worked a time-honored career path. The addition of a blog credential to the CV helps, no doubt, and there may be a few affirmative-action hires of pure bloggers, but the great upheaval in which some of the brethren believe is not to be. To the extent that they are useful to wielders of real power, the Citizen Journalists will be quoted, stroked, and used as a force-multiplier for disinformation campaigns in need of some extra muscle, but when the hurly-burly's done they'll be put back in their box.

Writing's tough enough, and making a living at it even tougher; trying to topple power structures or build new utopias on top of that seems like a waste of time better spent cleaning up a sentence.

DERANGEMENT SYNDROME. "Why are you writing so much about Hillary Clinton? I don’t want to. I’d rather not, really. But she is everywhere in the news... Funnily enough, she is everywhere IN the news and NOT in the news." -- The Anchoress.

She also says the Hillary/Hsu story is undercovered. In other news, the Ole Perfesser is on his 300th bad Hsu pun.

I'm not a big fan of Clinton, but that's a lot of attention for someone who's supposed to be unelectable.

ARTS ROUNDUP. As long as I'm being arty-farty, I shall continue with the arts and the farts, with random observation from recent intake:

A Midsummer Night's Dream in Central Park. Pepys was right: it's a pretty stupid play. But it's sure-fire outdoors with good actors on a warm night. The lovers are the weak link, and for all their energetic ripping of ladies' garments I would have preferred some equally energetic tearing away of lines. Maybe Martha Plimpton's Helena was my problem. I had only seen Helena played as a mope before, and while Plimpton's tartness brought energy to her interminable lines, it lost the sympathy and sweetness that is the character's secret weapon. The twinned morganatic pairs were much better -- Keith David's Oberon, done up to look like Screamin' Jay Hawkins, was stolid and poetic, which suited because Oberon has great poetry and David has a great voice, and David's heaviness gave Oberon's fourth-act tenderness ("Her dotage now I do begin to pity") great power. And Shakes in the Park never stints on the clowning, so the rustics got to ham it up and keep us groundlings awake. Loved the goth fairy children, too, but next time, can we please have Mendelssohn?

Steal This Movie. I have to say it's fun to see the two leads from "Grounded for Life" as major hippies. But Vincent D'Onofrio's Abbie Hoffman is very like Vincent D'Onofrio's Law 'n' Order guy with long hair, denim, and drugs: I kept expecting him to arrest somebody. This item succeeds mainly as a posthumous curio, inspiring wonder that once upon a time one could sneak into the Stock Exchange and throw around dollar bills. Though I'm sympathetic to well-rendered nostalgia, I would have preferred that this movie follow the discursive method of Steal This Book or Woodstock Nation, which weirdly anticipated the style of blogs. (I would have especially appreciated the cinematic rendering of "God, I'd Like To Fuck Janis Joplin.") Then, for a pleasant change, we could have thousands of posts about how Vincent D'Onofrio is Fat.

Eugene O'Neill: Collected Shorter Plays (Yale University Press). Hadn't read them in a while and had a hankering. The Glencairn plays are like short stories for the stage, little projects with which the student of Professor Baker found his stage-legs. They're slight, stiff, disarmingly easy to get down, and clearly based on personal experience. It's amazing to contemplate that, two years after the last of these pleasantly stagey affairs, O'Neill wrote The Emperor Jones -- and, two years later, The Hairy Ape . It's as if O. Henry had suddenly become -- well, Eugene O'Neill. Where did this poet come from? Whence the grand scale? It's been decades since I read the Gelb biographies, but my forgetful guess is that, once he got a sense of his own stage power with the Provincetown Playhouse productions, O'Neill felt confident enough to start appropriating literary influences. It wasn't theft because it didn't sound like anyone else's stuff; the themes may have been cribbed from German Expressionist playwrights, but the argot of the Glencairn plays grew organically into the great soliloquies of Jones and Yank. This is a nice reminder that the development of any popular artist relies on the slipstream of influences that surround him, but if he is to get very far he must also contrive to bring along something that is wholly his own.

OLD MAN BLUES. It disturbed me, while downloading Loudon Wainwright III's Strange Weirdos, to confront the sidebar information that other purchasers of this merchandise also favored the soundtrack to "Grey's Anatomy." So it's come to this: Plush Pop for Then People. But I love LWIII and hoped he would drop a few barbs in the syrup nonetheless.

The songs shamble along, displaying LWIII's command of his writerly gifts -- crisply observed detail, wordplay, fluent appropriation of various styles, and juxtaposition -- without inspiring anything but vague appreciation for obvious talent. The production gives his songs musical settings that are technically appropriate to the themes, but this has the effect in most cases of double-underlining the point and writing notes in the margins. The one big exception sounds like a fortunate failure of the producer's energy: apparently no one knew what to do with "Lullaby," so they just made it sort of pretty, which beautifully sets off the opening: "Shut up and go to bed/put some pillow under your head/I'm sick and tired of all of your worries/shut up and say goodnight."

Unfortunately, after a while the songwriter runs out of energy too. I am forced to say that this happens throughout Strange Weirdos. For the first time that I've noticed, LWIII's maudlin streak isn't leading to anything interesting. On the title song, "It starts with a sentence that might last a lifetime" is very promising, but the next line, "Or it might all just go down in flames," betrays the promise.

It's always instructive when the best song on a weak album is the cover. Usually it's because the artists are relieved at last to cluster their talents around a dead certain winner. Peter Blegvad's wonderful "Daughter" gets a professional, respectful treatment from the band, and you can hear that respect in LWIII's voice, too -- along with everything else the song demands: awe and amusement, protectiveness and a premonition of loss.

I love LWIII's voice. I even love the arch tone in it, which may be a matter of necessity because LWIII so often sounds arch. It's most obvious when he tries to be bluesy or to "rock," or do anything besides sing the damn song. (This is the occupational hazard of an ironic romantic trapped in a musical idiom that tends to exacerbate romance -- the form being "singer/songwriter, late 20th century," which he still is in 2007.) From the perspective of Strange Weirdos, I begin to think that LWIII's propensity to strike poses with his voice is an admission of discomfort with the formats in which he's found himself -- or maybe even in the forms he's chosen for himself. Now he is an Adult Contemporary for real, his latest vehicle tooling smoothly like a refurbished roadster along highways outside major cities, the stranger side of his talent rattling contentiously under the hood.

Whenever he has dared to be his own weird self, though, he has been brilliant. "The Man Who Couldn't Cry," as weird as Daniel Johnston but with the coherence of great poetry, is the eternal, shining example. He's managed the trick many times, and once is enough to make you a genius in this game. He's capable of it even in his fussy old-man mode. "The Last Man on Earth," from 2001, is a superior version of Strange Weirdos's middle-age lament, "Doin' The Math." The newer song, done as a creepy L.A. lounge blues slide, is kinda funny but stews too much in its own resentment. "The Last Man of Earth" is cleaner, plainer, a throwback to the young strummer LWIII used to be. It has jokes, too, but most of them have a sharp tang that quickly pushes off any hint of self-regard. You don't have to relate to his condition: you can simply hear it. The recorded version is, alas, fussy and marred with underlinings, but I had the good fortune to hear him do it solo-acoustic on TV, and there the climactic passage had the force of a sharp slap:

Kids used to say their prayers at night
Before they went to bed
St. John told us that God is love
Nietzsche said he was dead
This thing we call existence
Who knows what it all means?
Time and Life and People
Are just glossy magazines

That last couplet, like the solitude of the hero in "One Man Guy" and other high achievements of ironic romantics, is a selfish dirty trick. Which is what keeps me listening to him.

MORAL EQUIVALENCE WATCH. Eric from Classical Values (hehndeeded by the Ole Perfesser) doesn't understand "How the hell did sex get put on the f---ing left?" After failing to mention the decades-long Family Values crusade of the GOP, he writes:

I don't think it is rational for Republicans to declare war on sex and to appear to embrace erotophobia, because of their traditional 'leave people alone' philosophy, but there's not a damned thing I can do about it except write posts like this. As to the Democrats, they see sex not as a form of freedom to be embraced, but as something to be manipulated to gain power.

This last assertion seems to come from thin air; the only thing in the article that relates to it at all is Eric's admission that conservative "erotophobia" presents an opportunity for Democrats.

Like much of the gibberish considered here, this offers a clue to conservative thinking. Consider this Classical Values post from the morning after the 2006 elections:

Thus, my concern is that even if this election was not about the war, there will be a major push to make it appear to be.

But in logic, if the election was about the war (which I do not concede that it was), why is it necessarily Bush's war? Why should the Democrats who voted to support it (and who claimed that there were WMDs) get a pass?

For a certain breed of Republican, the only thing that is ever bipartisan is their own mistakes.

SHORTER ROSS DOUTHAT: Conservatives were great until the liberal media started paying attention to them. Then they went crazy.

LOYALTY TEST. The folks at Family Security Matters sure like to think outside the box. Last month they posted (then withdrew) an article suggesting Bush declare himself President for Life. Now, with Iraq inflamed because Blackwater privateers mowed down some of its citizens in Najaf, FSM's Nick Guariglia suggests that firms like Blackwater are "amongst the most efficient humanitarian organizations in business."

Guariglia's method is a marvel and we'll get to it shortly. For now, the money quote:

But are these chastised “war profiteers” any more or less amoral than, say, a cardiologist who addresses, and thus profits from, the treatment of heart disease? Or a clean-up conglomerate which rebuilds towns devastated by natural disaster? Is not the continuity of disease, plight, and disaster in the financial interest of these parties? Why would a war theater be an exception to the rule, the one realm in which this code of conduct does not apply?

Unfortunately Guariglia's correlatives to the cardiologist and the conglomerate are mainly "cleaning up" in the larcenous meaning of the term, as can be seen in Matt Taibbi's "The Great Iraq Swindle." Sample outrage:

The system not only had the advantage of eliminating red tape in a war zone, it also encouraged the "entrepreneurship" of patriots like Custer and Battles, who went from bumming cab fare to doing $100 million in government contracts practically overnight. And what business they did! The bid that Custer claimed to have spent "three sleepless nights" putting together was later described by Col. Richard Ballard, then the inspector general of the Army, as looking "like something that you and I would write over a bottle of vodka, complete with all the spelling and syntax errors and annexes to be filled in later." The two simply "presented it the next day and then got awarded about a $15 million contract."

The deal charged Custer Battles with the responsibility to perform airport security for civilian flights. But there were never any civilian flights into Baghdad's airport during the life of their contract, so the CPA gave them a job managing an airport checkpoint, which they failed miserably. They were also given scads of money to buy expensive X-ray equipment and set up an advanced canine bomb-sniffing system, but they never bought the equipment. As for the dog, Ballard reported, "I eventually saw one dog. The dog did not appear to be a certified, trained dog." When the dog was brought to the checkpoint, he added, it would lie down and "refuse to sniff the vehicles" -- as outstanding a metaphor for U.S. contractor performance in Iraq as has yet been produced.

It gets worse: when, over the objections of the Bush Administration, the Custer Battles security firm was brought to trial and found guilty by a jury of this outrageous fraud, the judge set the verdict aside, agreeing with the Administration that "Custer Battles could not be found guilty of defrauding the U.S. government because the CPA (the now-defunct Coalition Provisional Authority) was not part of the U.S. government."

For good reason, very few people outside their immediate families have a high opinion of these firms -- you can read more contractor horror stories at American Conservative magazine, among other places. Aware that he's got nothin', Guariglia falls back to debaters' tricks:

To weave in and out of applying intentionalist ethics – questioning the motives of employed defense workers –– and consequentialist standards -– questioning their performance -– is inconsistent. (As if one would be inclined to favor something they adamantly oppose in principle if only it were conducted more competently.)

I think it is safe to say most of us are above this mode of argument. It wouldn’t impress even a novice ethicist.

This is why people hate intellectuals: millions are egregiously stolen, and Guariglia grades a strawman's college paper. When this approach fails and deadline beckons, there's always gibberish:

When do-gooders speak surprisingly that corporations, providing a needed service through the selling of that service, actually collect revenue – oh no! – thereby continuing to provide that service, it is an odd criticism of something that best be left not criticized. It recalls the old Marxist fib that suggests history is only the tale of calculated material pursuit, not the narrative of human emotion, pride, fear, and irrationalism.

In his defense I would suggest that Guariglia cannot possibly believe this nonsense. He is making the best -- his best, anyway -- of a bad job. As the works of the Bush Administration plainly collapse into chaos, better-credentialed conservatives get a pass to work the "mistakes were made" hustle. But the noobs and small fry still have to make their bones: none of them will move up in the organization as a small-circulation David Brooks. So they take a contrarian angle, defending even the most egregious failures with rhetoric honed in impromptu debates with hippies on the quad. It doesn't have to convince anyone: the hopeless effort itself shows loyalty sufficient to keep the soldier on the payroll. When things blow over, maybe he can get a job blogging for the Atlantic.