END OF THE LINE. Dean Esmay* spreads the good news: electricity up in Iraq --

Little noticed this month was the news that Iraq's electricity production has set a new all-time high in September of around 6,860 MW, including 2,000 MW or more of non-public generation (p40), illegal under Saddam (because like any good national socialist despot, he outlawed private generators). Oil revenue also set a new record of $3.79 billion (p39).

Sounds like paradise. Of course, it's a matter of perspective -- the Detroit Free Press reports:

Four and a half years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, it's never certain when the power will arrive, just that one electrified hour will come in the morning, another at night. U.S. reconstruction officials say that on average, electricity is available 10 hours a day, but Akhbal, 48, doesn't know anyone who gets close to that much.

Before the war, Baghdad residents got 16 to 24 hours of power a day, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington research center. Brookings said that in September residents got 7.6 hours...

City blocks often have two or three small operators running generators that power dozens of homes and shops for a few hours a day. Hundreds of multicolored wires from the generators to customers are lashed haphazardly to every available pole and sometimes even trees.

Well, private generators, that's good, right? Magic of the market and all that, especially compared to Saddam's socialist power plan. The Iraq authorities intend to privatize everything, and that will lead to Vegas-bright lights to Mesopotamia soon enough.

Don't be so sure. Iraq gets nine percent of its juice from Turkey -- whose power people indicate they will cut the flow if their government sends troops into Northern Iraq to fight Kurdish terrorists. Still, not to worry -- more electricity is coming via business interests headquartered with our traditional allies, China and Iran.

U.S. authorities still speculate Baghdad will have full power by 2013. This hardly seems an educated guess, given that the presumed sources of energy are as jerry-rigged as the city's private generators.

Meanwhile it seems Iraq's best power consumers are getting all they need, as war fan Matt Sanchez reports:

FOB Sedgwick, in the middle of nowhere and not far from the Syrian border, had running water, electricity, a gym, air-conditioned housing and enough bandwidth to run an encrypted computer network and phone system.

Our troops, I assert patriotically, deserve all this and more. I do spare a thought for the locals, though, who seem to be at the end of a very long line for basic services.

*UPDATE. By which I of course mean Dave Price by way of Dean Esmay -- thanks to Martin Wisse for the clarification.

COLD SHOWERS FOR EVERYBODY! It's Friday -- and at National Review Online, you know what that means: time for sex hatred! The surprising dud in the bunch is Jonah Goldberg, who emits one of those No Guardrails thumbsuckers about how Madonna and Pamela Anderson (!) are turning girls into prostitutes with the help of the Democratic Party. He even writes "What matters is the signal such people send." As usual with Goldberg, this is the stupidest thing ever written, and will remain so until Goldberg writes something else.

The hapless K.-Lo. fares little better, submitting what seems to be a synopsis of a botched interview -- maybe the Margarita Hut had a generous buy-back policy -- with the authoress of a book called Girl Gone Mild: Fashionably Long, Overexplanatory Subtitle. From the precis, we may judge that insofar as the book has a point (besides serving as a rightwing front-group party favor), it is that some young women will not wear thongs, dammit, despite what Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi may think. "Today, more and more sensible young women are bridling when they hear 'bitches' and 'hos' on the radio," she writes. Very good! How do they react when they hear "bear my baby whether you want to or not, subhuman?"

As often happens in these dimwit competitions, the prize goes to a newbie: legacy pledge Ryan T. Anderson, "an assistant editor at First Things," who says that a skit the Princeton frosh are required to attend "amounts to little more than mandated indoctrination in liberal sexual ideology." Anderson fails to describe the "Sex on a Saturday Night" sketch, so I had to go read another rightwing kid's review, and even through that cloudy prism could see that the skit is a typical bit of agitprop telling the youngsters that date rape is bad. Does Anderson have a different POV? No, he says:

You can tell incoming freshmen that date-rape and other sexual assaults are illegal without subjecting them to an hour of sexual skits, innuendo, “coming-out” scenes, gay kisses, and other nonsense that some students don’t want to be forced to sit through.

I hear ya, kid. Similarly, Crest toothpaste didn't have to sell its product by putting commercials on "Will & Grace." They could have just told people how darned good for them Crest was. Turns out people prefer their selling messages to come with racy humor. Who knew?

Anderson spends the rest of the article complaining that liberals make jokes about him and his buddies. Normal people learn to shrug this kind of thing off, but for wingers snide comments are hate-speech or bad-touch or something. "Professor [Lee] Silver’s attack wasn’t really aimed at Professor [Robert George]; it was aimed at the students," Anderson claims, because a laff on a prominent conservative buffoon sends students "a message about which points of view are acceptable and which are unacceptable."

One always hears this from young conservatives who were subjected to just such allegedly soul-crushing mockery (Anderson is a Princeton grad), yet somehow managed to retain their contrary opinions into adulthood. How did Anderson do it? Maybe he passed long nights POW-style in his dormitory cell, scratching "God and Man at Yale" on the wall with a piece of purloined charcoal. In any case, is it true the overwhelming majority of students helplessly adopt every piece of nonsense their professors put in their heads? Because if so, I'm going back to college, and looking for a teaching job at an all-girls' school.

BEYOND DEMOCRACY. Umpteen-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters tells us Pakistan proves that most military coups are A-OK, especially as compared to the vile alternative, democracy.

Aficionados of the General's prose will appreciate his opening:

WE simplify the problems of others. It's bad enough when we do it to family and friends, but it can be fatal when we simplify the problems of the developing world.

"Bad enough" to simplify the problems of family and friends! We're in for some very tough love.

The generally accepted line is that all civilian leaders are good, while military coups are always bad. Like most such generalities, it's often wrong.

Our prejudice is on display again as Benazir Bhutto, a feudal landlord posing as a democrat, returns to Pakistan.
In the West, Bhutto is popular because she's a civilian - and that's about it. Her champions merrily overlook the pestilential corruption, social polarization and pandering to extremists that marked her two terms as prime minister.

We and the General have come a long way since he likened the newly-democratized citizens of Iraq to a "kid" who had to "ride the damned bike" of democracy "and fall down a couple of times" without too much U.S. interference, lest we become an "overly protective parent." Now the citizens of Pakistan, who saw a great deal more of the bike before Musharraf put it away than have the Iraqis, cannot even be allowed the presence in their government of a former elected leader. For one thing, she has too much "charisma":

Charisma will always be with us. It's human nature to be drawn to a dramatic speaker who struts artfully upon the political stage, telling us that all of our problems are the fault of others and that, if he receives our vote, we'll all soon live in paradise.

To be fair, the General is prepared to let politicians strut, if not caper nor gambol, in the U.S., where "checks and balances... restrain the worst men who reach the White House." And he is willing to admit that "Most coup-makers then botch the job of governing," but adds, "just as the civilians they overthrew failed before them," in case we were warming toward the idea of elective representation.

Feeling his point made, the General ends with a grand speculative leap:

Given the inability of non-Western societies to build effective government institutions, it may be time to rethink our faith in the state itself as the answer to their needs.

I can't wait for the follow-up. What will replace the state? Surely not the United Nations. Maybe Blackwater, but the General hates them. I guess that leaves space aliens or, more likely, an international brotherhood of military dictators who will erase all meaningless boundaries and continent-hop with arms and instruments of torture, ready to do the business of pacification that feeble politicians messed up in that poorly-remembered age when democracy was thought to be on the march.

I do hope the General will revisit the subject now that Bhutto's return has inspired a deadly public attack. Amateurs! he must be thinking. A few well-trained snipers could have done the job much better.

THE BARREL HAS NO BOTTOM. Oh Jesus: the Ole Perfesser thinks he's found video evidence against the evil MSM -- in a clip from Fox fucking News. Text is dismissive of the First Amendment and quotes a reader: "Maybe the media is just trying to make normal people understand how the Haditha Marines feel?"

This goes way beyond the normal COINTELPRO. It's like they used a Klan rally to discredit the SNCC. It's like they used Michelle Malkin to show that the liberal media is against SCHIP. It's...

Shit, I got nothing. Normally when they assault common sense, I can shake off the sting quickly enough to describe it, but I have to admit it will take me a while to adjust to this latest and most spectacular unreason. They have created a perfectly closed system, in which their operatives create outrages under their own aegis and then blame them on their opponents. 2 + 2 = 5 is easy to dispute, but 2 + 2 = 5 and How Dare You Say So outdoes Orwell. I once observed that they treat 1984 as an instruction manual, but I have to admit this latest improvement strains my rhetorical abilities. I'd like to think it's a fluke, but their recent desperation suggests otherwise. Maybe it's time to take up semiotics -- but that way madness lies. So I'll stick with garden-variety logic until something better comes along. I welcome your suggestions.

SHORTER JONAH GOLDBERG. Because why? Because.

Really, that's it. Goldberg's anti-abortion essay is, as usual with him, the stupidest thing ever written, and will remain so until Goldberg writes something else.

The "reasonable doubt" bit is my favorite. Leave it to Goldberg to compare the uterus to a gas chamber. But of course the women who would be forced to carry Goldberg's exonerated fetuses to term have only a mechanical function in his imagination. If pro-life panderers "just don't seem as bad" to him as pro-choice ones, it's because he's convinced that with the former no one gets hurt. Those apertures who enable his fantasies just don't count.

Bonus fun in the Goldberg's self-congratulation in The Corner:

The conventional wisdom is that being pro-life requires dogmatism and certainty. I don't think that's the case. At least not any more than being pro-choice requires dogmatism and certainty. Rather than analyze and dissect this point — i.e. tell — I thought it would be more honest to simply explain where I'm coming from, i.e. show.

There is something almost touching about this. First, he implies that he could offer a "very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care" if he wanted to. He seems to think his dreary article is some sort of tone-poem expressive of his deep, personal reaction to the subject. Maybe he put on Coldplay and drank half a Zima whilst he composed it. "This is it," we may imagine him whispering to himself, "This is the one I'll be remembered for..."

I'd feel sorry for them if they weren't fucking up our country so badly.

SURROUNDED BY ENEMIES. The Ole Perfesser:

READER PAUL STINCHFIELD WRITES that he's unhappy PC Magazine's list of their 100 favorite blogs includes only political blogs that lean left. Well, he's right unless you count Drudge as a blog (Drudge doesn't) but the PC Mag folks say the list is subjective, and a list of favorites can't be wrong, so long as those blogs really are their favorites. I guess it just tells us where they stand politically.

But hey, it's "PC" Magazine, right?

What a strange, passive-aggressive sentiment. First, the only straight-up liberal politics blogs on the list are Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and (I suppose) Wonkette. Drudge is accompanied on the list by Perfesser fave Buzz Machine, which, like many of the named sites, treats new tech, but also lards in plenty of conservative political ramblings. Not much of an edge there.

There are a few environmental blogs listed, and one of them has at this writing a picture of Al Gore without devil horns photoshopped on his head. Also one of them is about black people. Secret-agenda wise, maybe you could read those in. Overwhelmingly, though, the list is all geekery and screen-sports for young urbanites with disposable income: meta-comics, gizmos, restaurant reviews, fashion and entertainment snark.

Maybe the thinking here is that any blog not overtly conservative is liberal. Rightwing blogs of the sort the Perfesser favors increasingly take the default position that liberals are "Americaphobes," the New York Times is a treason mill, and America is not fighting enough wars. If you subscribe to this dire worldview, you may well believe that bloggers who prefer to engage in fun and games instead of continually sounding the tocsin against leftist perfidy are, in the time-honored phrase, not with you but against you.

As I have observed before, for these people the personal is indeed the political. I wonder why they didn't choose to flip it around, though? Why not claim the tech blogs are conservative, since progress is good and all good things are conservative? Comics blogs could be conservative too, since comics are fun and conservatives are all about fun. Come on, fellas. It's not like this sort of thing hasn't been done

Maybe they aren't feeling as confident as they once did, for some reason.

NO JOB TOO LOW FOR THE KULTURE KOPS. S.T. Karnick, culture scold frequently employed by National Review and occasionally treated here, has his own blog. Despite stiff competition, it may be the most pathetic culture-war specimen in Christendom. While Libertas, for example, occasionally leavens its ravings against godless Hollyweird with useful information about the filmmaking business, Karnick's blog merely judges crappy pop art by the standards of your crabby grandmother: that is, he finds most current TV shows too "gloomy," which he seems to consider a moral failing.

Sometimes he is more ambitious and hilarious. Another of his tropes is "the feminization of the American male," which he finds everywhere, including -- get this -- the Disney boob-baiter The Game Plan starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Quoth Karnick:

The earnest aspect of this film is actually quite interesting and perhaps rather surprising, as it is actually part of the trend of feminization of the American male noted on this site last week. Unlike the similar 2005 film The Pacifier, a delightful comedy in which Vin Diesel plays a superspy action hero who changes a family of spoiled suburban kids (for the better) much more than they change him, in The Game Plan the hypermuscular former wrestler known as The Rock is subjected to a cultural reeducation into the superiority of femininity.

Johnson's character, Joe Kingman, is initially narcissistic, arrogant, egotistical, and selfish both on the field and off. Only after dancing in a ballet and being reeducated by his eight-year-old daughter, his sister-in-law, and the daughter’s dance teacher does he finally win a Super Bowl ring.

In today’s culture, women even make the best football coaches.

The filmmakers make it all as convincing as possible, and as noted earlier the movie is fun to watch, but it is definitely weird to see The Rock crumble in this way. Still, I suspect audiences will enjoy it and it will continue to do well at the box office.

And they will surely assimilate the message without realizing it.

[cue sinister homosexual music, and Roy's annoying redneck caricature] Citizens! Does y'all smell what The Rock is cookin'? Faggification, thass what! Whoever heard of a football player takin' ballet, 'ceptin in real life which don't count! Shoot! Gittin' so's yuh cain't even count on rasslin' stars! I reckoned The Rock were the new Haystacks Calhoun, but he more like a Gorgeous George! Hoo-ey! I'ma get my entertainment from reg'lar fellas like that Tom Cruise fum now on!

Please, folks, don't ever tell Karnick about Sitting Pretty, the 1948 comedy in which Clifton Webb's Mr. Belvedere sissified an entire red-blooded American family ("And chew each mouthful 27 times!"). He'll work a brand-new theory of boomer decadence out of it.

MORE DEEP THOUGHTS. Jonah Goldberg loves the World War III fantasy game too much to quit:

One common — and absolutely correct — response to the suggestion that we should have taken care of the Soviets in 1946 is that we couldn't because the American people were too exhausted from the war. That's true, but it leaves out an important point. The American people were also exhausted by the New Deal, which had kept the American public in a de facto state of war for nearly an entire decade before the real war even started. The relentless exhortations, the scarcity, the propaganda: these things began long, long, before Pearl Harbor and even before Roosevelt was promising voters he would keep America out of another European war.

That bastard FDR! Too bad we can't send Fred Thompson back in Goldberg's time machine to show Americans what real leadership looks like.

Goldberg is clearly trending John Birch. It's only a matter of time before he starts alerting us to the pernicious effects of fluoridated water.

MORE WARGAMES. On the bad decision not to follow World War II immediately with World War III (the hot kind, not the Norman Podhoretz kind): Jonah Goldberg can't let it alone --

Imagine if we could go back in a time machine and explain to Ike & Co. the consequences of containment: The mountains of corpses, the trillions of dollars, the gulags, killing fields, the military industrial complex, the balance of terror. Does it seem unreasonable to think that maybe Ike & Co. might have concluded that a bit more rollback or, conversely, a bit more diplomacy in 1953 (as Churchill recommended) might be the wiser course?

Why stop with a time machine? Why doesn't Goldberg imagine himself, not only transported back to the dawn of the Iron Curtain, but also equipped with superpowers? Then he could beat up Stalin, and wear a fancy costume.

Alas, Goldberg wavers toward the end:

Here's where I am coming from. I think the best possible policy toward Red China is regime change. Ditto North Korea. Ditto Iran. But, right now, the costs are just way too high to even consider forcibly removing those regimes.

I would speculate that, somewhere on the time-space continuum, conservative pundit 3Xreagan665a is bitterly denouncing Goldberg's shortsightedness. But this would assume that we have a future.

UPDATE. Commenter John Emerson breaks the code: Eisenhower was a commie! There is nothing so powerful as truth, and often nothing so strange.

IT'S NOT PERSONAL, IT'S JUST BUSINESS. Tigerhawk thinks the quote from Monty Burns on the Lawyers, Guns & Money masthead is a blasphemy against the sacred tribe known as businessmen:

In the entertainment industry's conception of business success you often see this sort of idiocy -- bad guy businessmen are a staple of prime time television -- but then the entertainment industry is famously left wing.

Yeah. No one ever heard of a greedy businessman before Jane Fonda and the Viet Cong took over Hollywood.

Avarice has been a staple of comedy from the days of Plautus, and when a business class began to emerge in the West, writers such as Ben Jonson and Moliere saw no reason to exempt them from portrayals of greed and prevarication -- after all, they were after money, weren't they? By the time Mark Twain got around to lampooning shysters and Gilded Age grifters, the criminal possibilities of "legitimate" business were already well-established subjects of mockery.

This may be news to Tigerhawk, who in the comments can only trace the lineage of this trope back to "The evil business man, from the nefarious banker in 'It's a Wonderful Life' to J.R. Ewing to some virtually every other episode of 'Boston Legal'..." (That hippie bastard Frank Capra!)

The state of arts education in this country is truly pathetic. And some of our fellow-citizens understand human nature still less than that. Tigerhawk says that "the vast majority of people I know [in business] think deeply about the rights and wrongs of the tough decisions they have to make literally every day." Yeah. Maybe after a massive layoff or offshore move, a CEO will think about its impact on his (former) employees -- preferably while he's helping his Communications Director draft a statement about it, so that his feelings of sorrow might seep evocatively into the prose, and convince the business press and company officers that he has "agonized" -- a cleansing ritual that gestures respect for the old moral codes. Then it's porterhouse at Ruth's Chris, baby! Because old what's-his-name's loss, and that of all the other what's-his-nameses, is the company's gain, which is why the deed was done. Because businesses don't thrive on random acts of kindness nor on Christian love -- they thrive on profits and growth. If it can be done the easy way, well and good. If not -- (traditional guttural sound accompanying the slow drawing of one's finger across one's neck)

If "thinking deeply" were all you needed to be a decent human being, this world would be a fucking paradise.

These facts are so stunningly obvious to those of us who have been alive more than a couple of seasons, you'd think even a rightwing blogger would know them.

LIBERTARIANISM EXPLAINED. "I've always wondered why someone doesn't buy cheap wood furniture and glassware by the cargo container, rent out safety outfits, and let people whack the hell out of stuff with big hammers."

Have you been reading Megan McArdle lately? There's a lot of stuff like this. It may be time to subject her blog to the Old Grey Perfesser Test, starting from the bottom of the current page:

09 October 2007 9:10 am: Reporters shouldn't go on junkets. They might see something that will change their minds.

09 Oct 2007 09:40 am: Bryan Kaplan calls out critics of multiculturalism, and I agree: liberals who do not approve of the status of blacks, women, and gays in that period before the 1960s known as the Victorian era are very silly.

09 Oct 2007 01:32 pm: Here's a cool oddity!

09 Oct 2007 03:58 pm: I don't like to pick fruit! What's wrong with people!

09 Oct 2007 05:12 pm: I understand conservatives are harassing a little boy. Well. I guess it's okay if Graeme Frost gets some health care, but he certainly shouldn't be able to leave a Park Avenue mansion to his children.

09 Oct 2007 06:41 pm: Here's another weird thing!

09 Oct 2007 09:04: Angry Bear points out that American homeowners' share of the equity in their homes is decreasing, and does so reliably under Republican Administrations. I agree that government housing subsidies are the problem.

09 Oct 2007 10:45 pm: City dwellers don't want to be crowded by ugly buildings. Tragically, they use regulations to achieve this, when they should be using the magic of the market to allow themselves to be crowded by ugly buildings.

10 Oct 2007 12:27 am: Democrats exploited Graeme Frost by using him to promote the cause of health care for people like Graeme Frost.

10 Oct 2007 07:54 am: I like Radiohead.

10 Oct 2007 08:52 am: Drivers and pedestrians do not understand me and my bicycle.

10 Oct 2007 09:05 am. Glenn Reynolds has shamed me: when it comes to Graeme Frost, I guess I'm just a big softy.

10 Oct 2007 09:40 am: How do you eat your Reese's Peanut Butter Cup?

10 Oct 2007 10:01 am: Cool science post!

10 Oct 2007 11:56 am: "Take Your Husband to Work Day." Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

10 Oct 2007 12:16 pm: I'm not done fighting with that home equity guy, which gives me a chance to show off my econ chops.

10 Oct 2007 06:43 pm: This medical term is weird.

11 Oct 2007 07:59 am: So long as the magic of the market is not involved, I can make jokes about sacred institutions.

11 Oct 2007 10:59 am: Government subsidies are bad except for when they are good to my Mommy.

11 Oct 2007 12:11 pm: Democrats are so superficial, supporting Hillary Clinton like they all do. It must be because she's a woman or something, because her positions are certainly not popular 'round my way.

11 Oct 2007 12:41 pm: I mean I don't support Hillary Clinton and I'm a woman.

11 Oct 2007 02:26 pm: How could people possibly misunderstand my previous posts on Graeme Frost?

11 Oct 2007 02:57 pm: I am one of the 162 people in D.C. who wish even more of my neighbors had guns.

12 Oct 2007 09:50 am: Every conservatarian does at least one column about how conservatives are under-represented on college faculties, and how it's the liberals' fault; I guess it's my turn. But mine has an anecdote!

12 Oct 2007 11:33 am: I'm busy.

12 Oct 2007 11:46 am: Though I was wrong without really being wrong about Iraq, I hold out hope that I will be proved right without really being right.

12 Oct 2007 12:52 pm: Hey, they changed the rules for TiVo! Great, because I have TiVo!

Conclusion: McArdle is Ann Althouse for the youth market.

ALL DELIBERATE SPEED. A novel approach to the claim that Giuliani was responsible for a decline in abortions in New York City, from John Podhoretz:

And there is one way in which it is probably very slightly acceptable — very, very slightly, though — for Rudy Giuliani to make such a claim. And that has to do with the atmospheric change in New York City under his tenure. The alteration of the city from the crime drop and from welfare reform was so profound that it is difficult quite to capture the effect. It was felt everywhere over time, and it wouldn't be too sentimental to describe it as a restoration of normal patterns of life that had been disrupted over decades. To the extent that the disruption helped engender a spirit of hopelessness in many quarters — and a corresponding inability to imagine that there was a future that would be any better or different from the present — it certainly contributed to behaviors of hopelessness and an inability to imagine a future. That is, I think we'd all agree, one of the spiritual causes of abortion...

For 30 years, they've been telling the anti-abortion movement that Republican rule would lead to the end of abortion. No doubt the evangelicals were envisioning something more spectacular than this trickle-down approach. But maybe they'll go for it. If the Giuliani bandwagon gets full traction, their alternative will be to bolt the party and reveal the minority status of their Moral Majority. Let us pause to consider the dilemma of megachurch millionaires forced to choose between God and earthly power. It's Monday and we could all use a laugh.

ALTERNATIVE HISTORY. They do indeed Think Big on the right: From Orrin Judd to Mark Steyn to Peter Robinson, an argument is transmitted as to whether we should have attacked the Soviet Union right after the Second World War. The National Review correspondents seem to lean, albeit grudgingly, toward the conclusion that it would have been a bad idea.

Most of us are grateful that we got through the Cold War without a nuclear cataclysm; these people see it as a missed opportunity. And they are determined not to miss another. Much as they admire George W. Bush's moxie, they think we aren't going fast enough now. A good standard for supporting political candidates would be to pick the ones who will keep these guys as far from power as possible.

UPDATE. As usual, Jonah Goldberg makes everything worse. "The benefit of a hot war is you tend to know when it's over," he says, "and it ends a lot quicker." Yes, he actually thinks global conflagration is preferable to tiresome old diplomacy. He also makes the same connection I made earlier between the right's speculative war with the Soviet Union and their desire to expand the current conflict into World War Whatever -- only he thinks it's a great idea. Can't K-Lo give them an afternoon off to play paintball or something?

BIG AL'S NOBEL. I expect conservatives will grouse and reminisce on the days when Peace Prizes were given to men who had actually put people to the sword. That just makes it more fun. I wish the current laureate were a better writer, but as long as they're giving these things for good intentions, why not Gore? It'll give him and Kissinger something to laugh about at cocktail parties.

A few people have asked me about Doris Lessing. I am embarrassingly unacquainted with her work. What do you think? Of her, I mean, not my ignorance.

LITTLE MISS CAN'T BE WRONG. John Derbyshire starts a weak National Review thread about how modern art is bullshit, and how brave he is to say so. As usual, Richard Brookhiser feebly offers resistance.

This tedious reminder of their Philistine leanings yields one blessing: acquaintance with a new culture warrior, one E.M. Zanotti, who contributes:

There seems to be a degradation of the concept of art that starts around the Enlightenment. Naturalism was a rejection of the spiritual art that came before it, then Impressionism and post-Impressionism are the beginnings of the interpretive approach to art. Modernism and post-modernism are the results of decades of hanging on to the idea that the standard of beauty is subjective and based on one's own vision of the world combined with a message about the rejection of anything eternal. Somewhere along the way, it became less about making a visionary artistic statement, and more about making a statement that was "counter-cultural" (the Dada movement, for example) and meant to shock the collective consciousness and open the minds of those who viewed it to new and wondrous avenues of thought (like contemporary art)...and what fit this qualification often garnered an artist fame in his own community and an increase in his paycheck. I suppose some might argue that that, in itself, goes toward proving that art is consciously fraudulent. Rothko and Warhol and others that recognized that art has a patently commercial aspect to it might just agree...

To condense: first came forced perspective, which was wicked, then pictures of people who were not saints, which was very wicked, then pictures of people who were not saints that didn't look like photographs, which was double-plus wicked, and then, fifty years before Theodore Roszak, a "counter-culture" of jokers and bicycle wheels, which ruined everything by increasing the artist's paycheck.

That's some tasty culture warring! You can find more at Ms. Zanotti's website. Among the choicer bits: rage at rock t-shirts with Arabic logos ("Sid Vicious might return as a zombie just to protest this"); rage at Bruce Springsteen ("What does seem funny, though, is that Springsteen has actively campaigned for people who support more government, not less"); rage at a female passenger who showed modest cleavage on an airplaine ("Nobody said we have to tolerate stupidity"), which morphs into rage at Britney Spears ("Nobody on Monday was complaining that the mother of two children was writhing around on a stage"), then into rage at the "porn culture" ("As we grew steadily more individualistic after the social revolutions of the sixites..."); and rage at some Hollywood movie ("Ironically, Italy is far closer to the Middle East than America has ever been").

Actually, having panned through three months' worth of her tripe, I can tell you unequivocally Ms. Zanotti is an idiot, which explains her inclusion on the National Review culture-cop roster. Look for her negative review of some movie with boobs or bad soldiers soon!

MIXED MESSAGES. Gateway Pundit notices Iranian dissidents declaring "Wish we were Columbia students." Haw haw, but a noble sentiment, even if the Ole Perfesser hehindeeds. But then GP asks, "Are you sure you want that, kids? It may be quite a culture shock." His link points to Free Republic, which we can assume means that whatever the Freepers want is even more freedom-loving than the Iranian protesters could get behind (at least, that is the most charitable interpretation). Let's see what the Freepers think:

Why should I care what a foreign country does to homosexuals?...

Guess that explains the low sales of Barbra Streisand CDs over there...

Why should I care what a foreign country does to homosexuals?
Nobody can be all bad, not even Amanutjob...

Didn’t say kill them but we don’t have to follow the Ancient Roman and Greek belief in accepting such sexual deviance as normal. The practices of gerbiling, fisting, rimming, and felching are not acceptable and the outcome is a lifestyle with a lifespan on par with IV drug users, which is another behavior that should not be tolerated. Sexual deviance, whether homosexual of pedophilic is not behavior to be condoned or accepted any more than theft, rape, or whatever form that is not in the interest of a stable society. The vast majority of male homosexuals seek sex with little boys. The “gay” parades used to always have Nambla representation — only recently has this part of the “gay” lifestyle become less acceptable....

yeah actually you have a point with the greeks. i had a landlord for 1 month who was this big obese married man who all of a sudden turned gay for me. worst month of my life, i almost did jailtime because of the final outcome of this pig. it also cemented (very biased) why the turks and greeks don’t get along. anyways it’s a month i don’t want to remember but he’s lucky he’s alive...

So, what I guess Gateway Pundit is saying is: Iranian dissidents should refrain from supporting American academic freedom until it is brought into line with the Gateway Pundit/Free Republic attitude toward homosexuals, i.e., disgust and homicidal hatred.

Refresh my memory: what makes us better than our enemies?

PS: For clarification as to what GP's pals at Free Republic think of gay people, try this search.

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.