THREE FOR THE FUNNY. Politics, ugh, so discouraging. I want to do something fun. Not in real life -- on my stupid blog! So here's the mission: name three unjustly neglected film comedies. And by "comedies" I mean funny, not necessarily life-affirming goatsongs or anything like that.

I propose:

Slither. This caper film is sort of the comedy version of those 70s paranoid thrillers. Riddles wrapped in engimas. Ominous black vans. Nerve-jangling musical stings. Except they all end in laffs. James Caan's Dick Kanipsia, who walks out of prison into a poorly managed big-money scheme, is a ridiculously diffident hero -- maybe stupid is a better word -- whose journey, artistically speaking, is to figure out that he's finally had enough of this shit. The pace is shambling, with lots of ridiculous digressions (e.g., discussions of the family connections of the various Polish characters). And the climax is one of the all-time great cinematic non-sequiturs. Nothing meta about it -- just a good time on the film company's dime. Slither was indie before there was indie.

A Guide for the Married Man. I take a very strong position on 60s sex comedies, the best of which are so intoxicated by the sexual promise of the era that they achieve delirium. There are cases to be made for the deranged misogyny of How to Murder Your Wife, the SoCal surrealism of Lord Love a Duck, and of course the all-around strangeness of the films of Rock Hudson, Doris Day, and Tony Randall, the Mercury Players of the Priapean Age. Guide covers all the bases and then some as it follows Walter Matthau's attempt, goaded by a Mephistophelean Bobby Morse, to cheat on Inger Stevens. The dramatic stakes are purposefully reduced to Topic A essentials: Matthau's motivation is absurdly slight -- no bitterness, no discomfort even, just a craving to get with what he's convinced everyone else is getting. He's so charmed by Morse's apparent authority that he's oblivious to his more sinister agenda ("And you know how I feel about Ruth"). Morse's lessons, conveyed in celebrity blackout sketches ("That reminds me of a guy...") are the 60s Hollywood equivalent of Godard's alienation devices. I think they're much cleverer than Godard's. What Matthau takes as helpful hints, the viewer will see as rancid jokes on the American way of sex-life. As in all these movies, equilibrium is restored, but with a little more bite than usual: Matthau learns nothing but fear and compliance with old social norms. Guide will remain the capstone of the genre until some genius makes the Lockhorns movie.

A New Leaf. Here's Walter Matthau again (I love Walter Matthau), this time in a spectacularly bad wig, an aging playboy who has run out of money and has to find a rich wife. Though without funds, Matthau retains a high opinion of himself, and is oblivious to most external realities -- as the scene in which his accountant tries to convince him of his bankruptcy ("Just what are you trying to say?") demonstrates. When the fact finally penetrates his thick skull, he drives past Manhattan's palaces of plenty, mournfully crying "Goodbye!" Then he finds his chance: a botanist flush with cash but completely lacking in social graces, or even skills, played with adenoidal vigor by our auteur, Elaine May. Matthau, who is at first utterly uncharmed by May ("She has to be vacuumed every time she eats"), plans to marry, then murder her, but May is a holy klutz and cannot be killed. Eventually this wears Matthau down, and they reach an accommodation that may be something like love. The rich-boy humor is much better than that found in Arthur: the world of wealth is not, as in that film, a nest of vipers from which the hero insulates himself with drink, but a silly if stylish counter-reality that he cannot bear to leave, something more like the fantasies of old screwball films than the vulgar villainy seen in our present social comedies. You could say that about A New Leaf in general: it has a lot of that 30s sparkle, with just a spritz of 70s cynicism for body. The public has never developed a taste for it. It's for connoisseurs.

UPDATE. Speaking of connoisseurs, our commenters bring some exciting dishes to the potluck, some known to and even reviewed by me, some surprising (Ishtar, really? Conventional wisdom sucks). I am happy to see a groundswell for Albert Brooks, and would add Modern Romance, a comedy of solipsism that makes "Seinfeld" look like "Friends," and Defending Your Life, the first and most successful of the later, positivist Brooks films.

Premiere's Glenn Kenny schools us that Godard got his schtick from American comedy rather than the other way around. Julia of Sisyphus Shrugged nicely encapsulates the moral of A New Leaf. And SamFromUtah clues us to the Lockhorns trailer, which gives me hope for the American cinema.

AS YE SOW... Using the word "scream" for words on paper is usually a conservative trope, but I think we can fairly characterize this New York Post headline as a real screamer:

'BLAME U.S. FOR 9/11' IDIOTS IN MAJORITY
'PLOTS' THICKEN IN SHOCKING POLL
By ANDY SOLTIS

November 24, 2007 -- Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government had warnings about 9/11 but decided to ignore them, a national survey found.

"Blame U.S. For 9/11"? Seen from a less hysterical angle, the poll result seems like a merely uncharitable reading of the findings of the 9/11 Commission ("'the system was blinking red' during the summer of 2001...")

"Ignore" is a strong word for the government's inaction. Maybe the poll respondents were insensitive to the difference between mishandling and ignoring. If so, this may be attributed to a growing lack of faith in the government -- as we have seen elsewhere.

Government isn't the only institution that's rapidly losing credibility, as the Scripps-Howard summary suggests:

At a time when the price of crude oil has neared $100 per barrel, 81 percent of Americans also said it was "somewhat likely" or "very likely" that oil companies conspire to keep the price of gasoline high.

"It shows that the oil companies are not trusted by a lot of people," said Tyson Slocum, director of the Energy Program of Public Citizen, the consumer watchdog organization founded by Ralph Nader.

Record-breaking quarterly profits stir the pot, too.

"People look at the huge profits and put two and two together," he said. "'Those high prices I'm paying are fueling those profits.'"

Why the decline in benefit-of-the-doubt? It's interesting to look at Scripps-Howard's 2006 summary of a poll that foreshadowed these trends:

The survey also found that people who regularly use the Internet but who do not regularly use so-called "mainstream" media are significantly more likely to believe in 9/11 conspiracies. People who regularly read daily newspapers or listen to radio newscasts were especially unlikely to believe in the conspiracies.

It is suggested that these malcontents are affected by truther websites. But that hardly explains the high oil, Kennedy assassination, and UFO conspiracy credulousness.

Of course, if you want to read about what rascals lead us, and how everything they tell us is bullshit, there are plenty of other popular web outlets that do the job.

I am usually unconvinced by triumphalist claims that online alternative media will trounce the MSM dinosaurs. But I am beginning to suspect these stupid things are at least having an effect -- that the daily internet hammering of institutions has in fact helped poison the outlook of many ordinary citizens who have heeded the call and unmoored themselves from the consensus wisdom of the Main Stream Media. But the Scripps-Howard poll suggests that this effect isn't taking the shape that the blogosphere's rightwing cheerleaders like to predict -- unless their purposes are even more sinister than my black little heart can conceive.

Of course you can look at it the other way, and say our institutions are so thoroughly rotten that bad faith is the only possible response.

Not for the first time I am reminded of the Journal-Affiche.

COME ON, GOP CLASS-WARRIORS: WALK THE WALK! The Washington Times is spreading the word that the Democrats are "the party of the rich." The source is a "study" by Michael Franc of the Heritage Foundation -- though I can only find this, which seems to closely track Fred Siegel's Commentary rant, which was treated here earlier, and only works if you restrict yourself to the sort of "political demography" that shows rich people concentrated in blue states, and ignore the median incomes of Republican and Democratic voters. You can dig through the study that started it all, or see Tom Hilton for a good roundup of sources.

In other words, this WashTimes/Heritage thing is a con job, but still a tonic for the troops. Confederate Yankee whoops, "A bit hypocritical for them to label themselves the party of the poor as they carefully sip overpriced bistro coffee to keep from spilling it on the leather interior of their late-model European sedans." Way to class-war, comrade! Maybe he'll join the WashTimes in questioning the Dems' go-slow approach to tax reform:

A "stopgap" bill authored by Mr. Rangel to tax hedge-fund compensation at 35 percent as regular income rather than the current 15 percent capital-gains rate, which passed the House Nov. 9, appears to be going nowhere with Senate Democrats.

Here's a political opening if they're serious: Confederate Yankee and Sun Myung Moon can up the ante and call on Republican Presidential candidates to push the 35 percent rate. Then we'll see who's the party of the working man!

SCIENCE VS. POLITICAL SCIENCE. Having read the William Saletan articles about how black people have lower IQs than white people, and having noted the gleeful agreement of rightwing honkeys that black people have lower IQs than white people, I can say this:

I expect that the march of science will continue to uncover many wonders of the human mind, toward the end of improving all our lives, which is of course what science is for. That will lead along some thorny paths. For example, it looked for a while as if embryonic stem cells were the best way to go in solving a number of medical problems. Now it seems science may have found a less controversial alternative.

This has led some political types to complain that because science did not get there fast enough, its practitioners were bent on the destruction of human life. Such judgments are not surprising, considering the source, because in politics, history is only a series of anecdotes to be exploited for propaganda purposes, whereas science supposes a continuum of educational events, sometimes called experiments, to be used as building blocks toward a better life. There is such a thing as pseudo-science, but the free exercise of the scientific method over time obliterates such fallacies. Politics is much less reliably self-correcting. In fact, many political actors are deeply invested in sustaining ancient errors if they think it will help them retain power.

The historical record leads me to suppose that as cognitive scientists continue their work, they will sometimes come up with findings that politicians can exploit, but they will also learn things that do us all of us a great deal of good. So the IQ debates are a good thing as science. As politics, they are more or less useless except as fodder for racist cranks.

Which can also be a good thing. I am sneakily pleased to see conservatives excited by the current state of play, and encourage them to sing out loudly about it. Let them tell the world that their favored candidates' positions on race show that they agree that black people are less intelligent than white people. Let them tell the world that affirmative action is useless because black people are genetically incapable of benefiting from it. Eventually they will get around to discussing the genetic inheritances of Barack Obama. What a forum that will be, with Andrew Sullivan and John Derbyshire explaining that the most attractive features of Obama's platform come from the white side of his brain!

We may get a new government out of it, and conservatives can use their leisure to play with calipers and brains of varying races. Win-win, as far as I can see.

IT'S TRAD, DAD. It's never a good idea to get conservatives talking about music.

Gangster rap is crap. Yes, there are some interesting bits and pieces. Yes, there is buried amidst the steaming piles of rationalized b.s. a few trace elements of sociologically interesting ore. Sure, it takes some technical savvy to do it. Uh huh, right, right, right.

It's still crap. Here's how I put it last year in a column about Kanye West...

It's the holiday season so I'll spare you. Anyone who thinks "sociologically interesting ore" is any kind of reason to listen to music has a tin soul. Oh, he also gets around to the indecent dances young people are doing today.

The fracas is built around David Brooks bemoaning the passing of Led Zep and Ed Sullivan, and pimping a restoration via Little Steven platoons teaching Schools of Rock. A National Review correspondent cannot resist the call of the Konservetkult:

I think Brooks and Van Zandt are actually staking out a conservative position here: the importance of common culture, defining it and promoting it...

The problem is that America's cultural and political elites don't have the will, popular capital or sense of need to identify or promote any kind of Americal cultural canon in any area of liberal arts whatsoever.

But get those kids cranking "Born to Run" on the quad again, and Western Civ is saved.

This is the sort of thing that sends me back to the classics.

TO BRIGHTEN YOUR HOLIDAY. Courtesy of Dr. Helen, the mother of all awful-liberals yarns -- not told by one of those legendary taxi drivers, or even Alan Bromley, but in my judgment outstripping them all:

My sister and brother-in-law are D.C. area residents and wear their politics on their sleeves. I quit arguing with them some 20 years ago when they stated that Reagan was responsible for the Yellowstone Park forest fires. I realized then I could not have a rational discussion with them.

The problem I have with this stuff is that my brother-in-law starts yelling. Who wants to converse with someone who’s attracting attention from all the other diners in a restaurant. I finally decided that he doesn’t really want a reasoned conversation. He just wants to shout down anyone who disagrees with him, so why bother?

So far, so what, you may be thinking: we've seen better in any old Dr. Helen comments thread. But hang on -- the guy's just getting warmed up:

My dad is as mean as a snake. All 8 of his kids bear the scars and deal with them in different ways. The last time I saw him was 5 years ago at the rehearsal dinner for my younger brother’s wedding. He was picking on my niece, and she not being used to that treatment slapped him in the face. I told my Dad to knock it the f—k off. He took exception and we started a fistfight in the restaurant. My dad was so bent out of shape that somebody stood up to him that he didn’t show up for the wedding, and I gladly stood in for him, next to my Mom, in all of the wedding pics.

I cherish Christmas with my family: A day with the estrogen poisoned females of my clan; children yelling and grubbing for the bounty that comes with the crass commercialism of the holiday; the ever present fear that my brother, four Christmases banished from the family for alcohol related lunacy, will crash his drunken, six foot, four inch body through the front door and spray the room with lead. Ah, Christmas! I strap an Officer’s Compact Colt .45 into a pancake holster on my hip in case the door comes off its hinges at the party, pack up my hastily purchased gifts, and I wade into this thing called Christmas. Ho, ho, ho, who wouldn’t go?

And now the kicker:

Through the years of Republican bashing followed by Kumbaya sing alongs (I kid you not), I have found the best strategy is to simply keep my mouth shut.

Surely you see the genius of it. Instead of trying to seed little quotes and anecdotes throughout the story to preserve the political through-line, our author veers into seemingly unrelated tales of spectacular family violence, and at the climax, with a last sneer of contempt for the enemy, retreats into Norman Bates muteness...

Wait -- what? These paragraphs are separate anecdotes?

Well, maybe it's like Casy says -- maybe a Dr. Helen commenter ain't got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to every Dr. Helen commenter. Maybe the individual miseries of the poor wretches who come to Dr. Helen's door for a bowl of soup and maybe some rational emotive behavior therapy are hopeless by themselves, but together they gain stature, dignity, and hilarity.

May all of you enjoy a Thanksgiving free from fistfights, gunplay, and Kumbaya. Unless, of course, that's your idea of a good time.

UPDATE. "Guys," says commenter Craig, "that block quote from Dr. Helen is four different anecdodes from four different respondents. Don't try to mash them all up."

Admitted and addressed in the original post. (See the last three grafs.) And what's wrong with mash-ups? Larry Lessig would approve!

CONTEXTUAL READING. Ed Driscoll thinks you should stop reading the New York Times, but notes that he has just linked to two Times stories. Cognition doesn't get much more dissonant than that, even among fierce opponents of Blue Statism who nonetheless spend all their time in the bluest territories.

I read the New York Post most every day, largely because it is cheap and easy to read even before coffee. I would find it insulting to be told that I should give it up because I am bound to encounter writing in it with which I am inclined to disagree. That is all of its charm.

Driscoll quotes in defense of Times avoidance Rush Limbaugh, who says, "I found myself questioning the accuracy of the paper based on my own knowledge. I too often wondered, ‘Hmmm—is that true?’” Fancy being turned off by that! Just today I read the Post TV critic Linda Stasi in high dudgeon:

Speaking of changing the face of late-night TV and black men, in a move worthy of Michael Richards, in another skit, [Frank] Caliendo channels Charles Barkley but does so without changing his skin color or donning a wig! Every other character wears wigs and makeup. Caliendo has said on radio that TV stations freak out when they see a white man in black face. Talk about racist! Would they expect Eddie Murphy to play a white guy without changing his skin color? But here we've got poor Caliendo doing an exact impression of Barkley, but sitting there in his big, pasty face and beige hair. It's ludicrous and the worst type of reverse racism: politically correct racism!

Stasi's bizarre outrage over a lack of blackface ("worthy of Michael Richards"!) brightened my day, not because I agreed with it, but because it reminded me of the mad variety of human existence. That Stasi was declaiming it, not from a ward for the mentally ill, but in the pages of a popular newspaper, merely sweetened the jest.

You miss a lot by only reading things with which you may expect to agree.

THE GREAT ROCK 'N' REIHAN SWINDLE. Reihan Salam is very high (as is his colleague James Poulos*) on an essay by Kevin Barnes, a rock star who hit the jackpot, sees no need to apologize for it, and thus decrees that there is no such thing as selling out. I am somewhat in sympathy with Barnes, less so with the American Scenesters. The tradition of complaining about complaints that one is selling out is a venerable one that extends from time immemorial ("Better to be a rich man's dog than a poor man's saint") to Black Francis. Barnes is merely flicking off, with more style than most, some impediments to his enjoyment of success; he is not paid to be a deep thinker, and may be excused from that noxious responsibility.

Salam and Poulos*, though, are supposed to be some sort of intellectuals. Yet they take at face value, for example, the rock star's claim that "the pseudo-nihilistic punk rockers of the 70’s created an impossible code in which no one can actually live by." I guess it's possible that they have never read Emerson, but they might have phoned a friend; ambivalence about conformity goes a hell of a lot further back than 1977. Poulos* seems to misread his own subject, who states

It's impossible to be a sell out in a capitalist society. You're only a winner or a loser. Either you've found a way to crack the code or you are struggling to do so. To sell out in capitalism is basically to be too accommodating, to not get what you think you deserve. In capitalism, you don't get what you think you deserve though. You get what someone else thinks you deserve. So the trick is to make them think you are worth what you feel you deserve. You deserve a lot, but you'll only get it when you figure out how to manipulate the system.

This is not quite coherent (whence come the "too accommodating" sellouts if selling out is impossible?) but it at least hints at some awareness of the difficulties of making a living, which is admirable in a young rock star. Salam thinks it "an insightful meditation on the ethics of commercial life," and Poulos* reads this into it:

The smart today are those who can contextualize themselves as fleeting market actors without despairing, who can maintain, without resolving it, the contradiction between writing ‘authentic’ music and selling it obviously inauthentic corporations. The agony of resolving the contradiction on terms that sacrifice one or another benefit goes away, and Barnes’ manifesto seems to suggest that, with a little practice, we can more perfectly eliminate the big uptick in anxiety that has been our modern tradeoff for trying to minimize agony.

In both tone and content, this is much arty-fartier than what Barnes provides, and more evasive. What Barnes portrays as stark choices in an unsympathetic world -- "you're only a winner or a loser" -- Poulos* describes as a Jedi mind trick. He talks about minimizing "agony" and "despair," but doesn't explain how to do it if you don't have a big recording contract... or a prime slot on the punditocracy fast-track.

One of the advantages of youth is that it keeps the possibility of failure remote. It may be relatively easy for 20somethings to "contextualize themselves as fleeting market actors," assuming they have enough liberal arts education to comprehend those terms, because they are inclined to expect early returns on their generous self-assessment. But even for the young and confident, getting the market to agree is no snap. Though they may find the droopy-drawers non-conformity of ancient punks irrelevant, they may also find that the reality with which they are eager to conform is out of their reach. Despite the optimistic claims of the digerati, not everyone can be a rock star or a pundit; your MySpace music page or blog competes with thousands of others, and over time your may be forced to reckon with the odds.

History is not the only thing written by the winners. They write pop psychology, too. Salam's and Poulos'* concordances to Barnes' essay comprise a self-help tract for educated kids who, despite their natural vigor, are vaguely haunted by early warning signs that the future may not be all they have been trained to expect. These hauntings, Salam and Poulos* tell them, are a Marxist humbug; think positive. Contextualize yourself, eliminate the uptick in anxiety, and find your inner rock star. The possibilities are endless, not only for you but for America:

Because the world is profoundly unfair, those of us born into the US middle class are extraordinarily fortunate, and I tend to think we thus are almost obligated to task risks in pursuit of happiness. The very poor face different constraints, and my hope is that we one day construct the kind of enabling state that will give all Americans, and hopefully all people, the freedom to do the same.

Napoleon Hill couldn't have put it any better.

*UPDATE. Being insensitive to the singularities of their respective styles and new to the Safari "tabs" feature, I confused Salam' and Poulos' contributions in the original. Thanks to Mr. Porrofatto for the correction.

MULLAHS, MALKIN, AND MTV. Michelle Malkin:

I’ve often wondered what it would take for MTV to clean up its act. Now, we know. The aging music network wants Middle Eastern eyeballs, and it’ll do anything to cater to its audience–including toning down raunchy content and covering up scantily-clad hostesses. If it were America, the libs in charge of MTV would consider this caving in to Neanderthal social conservatives. In the Middle East, it’s considered doing smart business and paying cultural respect...

No, no, no, Ms. Malkin, you don't understand how liberal subversion works. First we offer the sheeple a seemingly innocuous cultural product featuring bright lights, vivid personalities, and pretty colors. Then, once we have their eyes and ears, we sneak in calculated outrages. Social conservatives push back, but the battle is already lost; soon even the imams are getting with the program.

This is what's known in the business as Boiling the Camel. Before you know it, the Middle East is frigging and fruging and balling and all that -- their culture rotted away from the inside, their will to fight sapped, their dream of 72 virgins vitiated by random hook-ups and rampant materialism.

If liberal subversion brought our great nation to moral ruin, why should Arabia not also fall prey to its deceptions? Now that MTV has inveigled its Trojan Horse past the gates of Mecca, why should we not expect tits, swears, pimp rolls and phat beats to come tumbling out when the time is ripe, and to similarly disastrous effect? I'm beginning to think Malkin is losing her faith in culture war.

STOP THE PRESSES. In other top stories, Visine announced its intention to "get the red out," and Allstate declared that consumers of their insurance products would be in good hands.

The story is mainly about a Giuliani mailing and actually contains dissenting quotes from a 9/11 family group. Maybe Murdoch is sending the Giuliani camp a signal, and Judith Regan can expect Bernard Kerik to show up at her place with flowers and/or rubber gloves.

CELEBRITY JOURNALISM. For their inaugural Newsweek columns, Markos Moulitsas and Karl Rove provide innocuous partisan rah-rah. Moulitsas tells us that the Party in power can be successfully attacked for their bad governance, and Rove tells us that Hillary Clinton can be beaten by a Republican who will "create a narrative that explains [his] life and commitments." Stop the presses!

Rove, of course, is not likely to give away strategic secrets for such small honoraria as Newsweek can provide, as his hilarious suggestion that the GOP nominee "aggressively campaign for the votes of America's minorities" makes clear. Moulitsas has far less of a king-making reputation to protect, and his simple litany of Bush failures, tied together with a familiar pro-government message ("If Americans want willfully ineffective government, they'll have a Republican Party desperate for their votes"), adds nothing to it.

If Newsweek is willing to waste money on talents outside their normal hiring pool, how I wish they had shown some of the foolhardy moxie of "60 Minutes" some years back, when the popular show brought aboard P.J. O'Rourke, Molly Ivins, and Stanley Crouch as commentators. This experiment, you may recall, was suspended after eight weeks following an outcry from viewers who felt that Andy Rooney was providing quite enough guff for one hour.

Why couldn't the magazine have picked, say, Gavin MacLeodMcNett* and Jeff Goldstein? After a few weeks of Gavin's investigative reports and Goldstein's semiotics, enraged mobs would be burning piles of Newsweek in the streets, and the victory of citizen journalism over the MSM would be that much closer.

No, they're too clever for that. If I have learned anything from the failure of Newsweek (and Time and U.S. News and World Reports and The Watchtower) to publish any of the hundreds of carefully hand-lettered essays I have submitted over the years, it is that the Main Stream Media is/are a crafty beast that will not cede power willingly. Our best hope is to continue ratcheting up the level of psychic violence on our blogs, poisoning the discourse sufficiently that by the 2012 election, the hot new thing will be columnists who stalk ex-girlfriends and use lots of swears.

Oh, who am I kidding? They'll just call the current columns "Dingleberries from the Turd Blossom" and "It's Kos, Kocksuckers!" thereby giving President Giuliani a media issue to help distract attention from his War in the Ukraine.

*UPDATE. He isn't the guy who played Murray on "The Love Boat"? Another week begins in bitter disappointment.

RACE TO THE BOTTOM. Behold my Blog Readability Test Score:


You'd think I'd be drawing bigger crowds.

Supergenius Jeff Goldstein gets the same rating. I can safely say that fewer education dollars were expended to raise my discourse to the level of a carnival barker's.

Found via the effete snobs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.

FREE RON SILVER. Hey, remember how politically engaged performers were supposed to "shut up and act"? New reality: Hollywood conservatives must be rescued from their celluloid closet --

While Democrats enjoy very public support from Hollywood's top actors and musicians, who often hold lavish events for their favorite candidates, Republican supporters in Hollywood try hard to keep their political views quiet.

"They learn very quickly, if they know what's good for them, to donate to the Democratic Party," said Andrew Breitbart, co-author of "Hollywood, Interrupted." "If they were to donate to the Republican Party, they would be exposed to career-ending ridicule, period."

This is such nonsense that even Don Surber can't completely climb aboard:

Curl’s story is amusing. Hollywood conservatives are backing Rudy Giuliani. He listed Adam Sandler and Kelsey Grammar as Rudy contributors. Well, neither man seems to have suffered much in his career. Sandler keeps making movies despite bomb after bomb. And Grammar continues to get show after show despite a personal life that is as chaotic as a Paris Hilton — or dare I say, Rudy?

Nobody really believes this stuff, do they? You might as well complain about the paucity of liberals at Blackwater.

A SUCCESSFUL OUTREACH PROGRAM. I thought at first that Eugene Volokh's complaint against Howard Dean's seemingly innocuous pro-Jew statement ("The Democratic Party believes that everybody in this room ought to be comfortable being an American Jew, not just an American; that there are no bars to heaven for anybody...") was just weird:

Now I think I understand the message Dean is trying to convey. Many American Jews (the audience here was the United Jewish Communities' general assembly) are uncomfortable with many traditionalist Christians' expressed views that only Christians can go to heaven...

Yet in fact I take it that many Democrats, who are traditionalist Christians [??? -ed.] , do believe (whether quietly or loudly) in salvation by faith alone. The Democratic Party has, to my knowledge, taken no votes on the subject, and the Party hasn't made this part of any platform...

So how then can Dean assure Jews, or anyone else, that "The Democratic Party believes ... that there are no bars to heaven for anybody"? He can assure people that he believes in this; he can surely declare his own theology even if the Democratic Party shouldn't declare one of its own. He can assure people that the Democratic Party stands for civil equality without regard to religion, or make similar secular commitments (assuming that is indeed the official position of the Democratic Party) [?????? -ed.]. But he can no more make assurances about the Democratic Party's stand on salvation through works than he can about its stand on transsubstantiation or Papal infallibility.

But after a while I came to understand the brilliance of Dean's statement, and Volokh's post helped me to see it. First of all: "traditionalist Christians"? (The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto uses the same term in discussing the address.) This may be a redstate/bluestate thing, but though I know a lot of Christians, I don't know any who identify themselves as "traditionalist." Looking around the web, I find the term used more often to describe other people (like Mel Gibson's dad).

I do find a few self-identifying TCs online. Like this group, which proclaims that "Living in a highly sexualised society takes its toll on us even as Christians" (and pitches itself to "Anyone who is dealing with any form of sexual addiction"). And a commenter at a Newt Gingrich site, who says "Bottom line for me: [Ayn] Rand was a lapsed Jew and anti-Christian, who had multiple affairs... You can imagine that is a major problem for an ordained Traditionalist Christian clergyman, like myself..." At The Conservative Voice we see a friendly review of a book that "explains how traditionalist Christians see the Culture War" -- one "in which a President of the United States, with help from a slick attorney, gets a bill passed through Congress that has federal agents remove children from their traditionalist Christian homes and families to stop the children from learning 'intolerance' that leads to 'hate crimes' and 'terrorism.'" And here's a fellow who proclaims "I think the West would be a much better place if it returned to traditionalist Christianity," and goes on a tirade about "Idealists" and "pseudo-atheists" and says "I think the West needs an Orange Revolution." (Heh.)

I realize there are a lot of Fundamentalists out there. But how many of them identify with this particular bunch? And how many of those are at all open to, much less part of, the Democratic Party?

Conservatives looking for some of that old Christian Coalition magic for 2008 will of course beat any bush in their search. But it would seem that the "traditionalist Christians" Volokh and Taranto seek to pit against the Jew-loving Dean are not as numerous as they might imagine -- and to the extent that they do exist they are, to use the charitable word, fringe.

If you're a Christian, how do you feel about being associated with these people? If you're a Jew, how do you feel about Republicans complaining that the Democratic Chairman has taken an erroneous "stand on salvation through works" on your behalf?

So: At a time in which conservatives are doing their damnedest to proclaim the widespread existence of "liberal anti-semitism," Howard Dean embraces the Jews, and Volokh and Taranto publicly complain on behalf of Christians who, for the most part, are unaware that they should be offended.

I don't think the Democrats have done much smart lately, but I can't see this as anything but a net plus.

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW. Regular readers will know how annoyed I am by American mopings over putatively conservative art. But I will happily make an exception for British Conservative MP Ed Vaizey's "Modern Art is Rightwing" at the Guardian, if only for its head-exploding potential:

Contemporary art is highly individualistic. It is about freedom of expression, the chance to make one's mark and to speak with a distinctive voice - all characteristics of the right, rather than the left. Contemporary artists are entrepreneurs in every sense of the word. The Brit Artists of the 1990s have turned themselves into brands, selling a luxury commodity to a group of discerning purchasers. The Damian Hirst skull, retailing at £50 million, could not remotely be described as a leftwing statement, except in the sense that, like many projects of the left, it is massively over-priced and a colossal waste of money (only kidding Damian)...

Contemporary artists are busy making money, just like any other capitalist in Britain, or the developed world, today. The contemporary art market is just that, a market where people invest and even people like Hugh Grant can make money. The Frieze Art Fair is a huge trading floor - although its enlightened founders, Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp, recognise their corporate social responsibility by securing an acquisition budget for Tate Modern...

I'd like to think the essay is satirical, or at least tongue in cheek. The idea of Damian Hirst as a conservative icon is positively Shavian. It may just be that British politics is stranger than I can comprehend. Nonetheless I hope our homegrown morons take it up for debate. It would make Roger Scruton and Roger Kimball bite the stems off their pipes. And if it gets Rod Dreher to support Hirst's Virgin Mother, I will gladly endorse Mr. Vaizey's candidacy the next time he stands. (h/t Joshua Holland)

ARGUMENT FROM ANECDOTE: 2-PLAYER VERSION. At the Wall Street Journal, Peter Berkowitz does one of those numbers about how Bush's critics suffer from a "Hatred" worse than any hatred expressed toward any President before him. He makes his case largely by assertion, bolstered by stories about silly liberals acting silly. For example:

To get the conversation rolling at that D.C. dinner--and perhaps mischievously--I wondered aloud whether Bush hatred had not made rational discussion of politics in Washington all but impossible. One guest responded in a loud, seething, in-your-face voice, "What's irrational about hating George W. Bush?" His vehemence caused his fellow progressives to gather around and lean in, like kids on a playground who see a fight brewing.

Reluctant to see the dinner fall apart before drinks had been served, I sought to ease the tension. I said, gently, that I rarely found hatred a rational force in politics, but, who knows, perhaps this was a special case. And then I tried to change the subject.

But my dinner companion wouldn't allow it. "No," he said, angrily. "You started it. You make the case that it's not rational to hate Bush." I looked around the table for help...

Finally, another guest, a man I had long admired, an incisive thinker and a political moderate, cleared his throat, and asked if he could interject. I welcomed his intervention, confident that he would ease the tension by lending his authority in support of the sole claim that I was defending, namely, that Bush hatred subverted sound thinking. He cleared his throat for a second time. Then, with all eyes on him, and measuring every word, he proclaimed, "I . . . hate . . . the . . . way . . . Bush . . . talks."

It's like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, only with worse catch-phrases. Later, "several of my progressive colleagues seized upon my remarks against giving oneself over to hatred. And they vigorously rejected the notion."

I am in sympathy with Berkowitz. Just the other day, I was lunching with several prominent and well-respected conservative figures from politics, the arts, the sciences, and the clergy. I playfully suggested that Bill Clinton hadn't been too bad of a President. A noted radio commentator hissed like a viper and his eyes rolled back in his head. A Bush speechwriter shook his fist in my face and told me that Clinton had raped his wife and killed his cat. I looked for assistance from a former Secretary of State known for his moderate politics and leadership in the First Gulf War. The others fixed their demonically glowing eyes on him (except for the radio commentator, who was still occupied with his fit). The Secretary stretched his face grotesquely till his eyes were mere slits and finally choked out: "Clinton... very... bad... man." Then he urinated copiously on himself as the other guests cheered and exchanged high-fives.

If you don't believe me, you're obviously suffering from some kind of Derangement Syndrome.

BLATHER, RINSE, REPEAT. The Perfesser is in his fifth year of declaring victory in Iraq:

"We are winning" isn't the same as "we have won." But it' a cruel blow to those who've had a lot invested in the notion that we've lost, something that's even been noted on the left. If things continue to play out as they are, Iraq will be stable, and its people will remain deeply unhappy with Al Qaeda, and those -- in Iran and Saudi Arabia -- who have backed its violence and the effort to keep Iraq chaotic and deadly. It'll be for the next President to take proper advantage of that, if he or she is smart enough to.

The cost of the war is heading toward a trillion or higher, and has made Iraq a basket-case state similar to the other new and violently achieved "democracies" of our age which are showing very few of the sort of resources that got America up on its feet after its own revolution. Except, of course, Iraq's political realignment was not at all internally generated. Somebody suffered a "cruel blow," alright.

As previously observed here, even the cheerleaders are not pretending to maintain their old interest in promoting democracy in Iraq anymore. So they, and we, are left with what is called victory now: a relatively quiet occupation. Reduced American casualties are wonderful, of course, but bound to be temporary, as the invasion of Iran is imminent. Thence will come new expenses of blood and treasure, more strewn rose-petals and toppled statues, another lengthy insurgency which nobody could have predicted, another surge, another round of chest-thumps, and, ultimately, another invasion of someplace else.

The American people are sick of this shit, but who cares what they think? They don't know the cost of admitting error. For the Perfesser it might mean the loss of some advertising; for the Republicans, even more ignominious defeat; for Hillary Clinton, a critical loss of stature and high seriousness against her antiwar opponents.

If they're not concerned with democracy anywhere else, why should they stick their necks out for it here?

THE GENIUS OF THE PEOPLE. W. Kiernan points us to a Roger Scruton piece of kulturkampf in the American Spectator. It is another of those bowtie thumbsuckers about how we ain't got good culture no more. Scruton makes the signal mistake of comparing his subject with something about which he clearly knows nothing: humor.

Works of art, like jokes, have a function. They are objects of aesthetic interest. They may fulfill this function in a rewarding way, offering food for thought and spiritual uplift, winning for themselves a loyal public that returns to them to be consoled or inspired. They may fulfill their function in ways that are judged to be offensive or downright demeaning. Or they may fail altogether to prompt the aesthetic interest that they are petitioning for...

If you were thinking of trying the one about the priest, the rabbi, and the armadillo who walked into a bar on Scruton, forget it:

Good taste is as important in aesthetics as it is in humor, and indeed taste is what it is all about. If university courses do not start from that premise, students will finish their studies of art and culture just as ignorant as when they began.

What, to Scruton's mind, is good taste in humor?

Imagine a world in which people laughed only at others' misfortunes. What would that world have in common with the world of Moliere's Tartuffe, of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, of Cervantes' Don Quixote, or Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy? Nothing, save the fact of laughter. It would be a degenerate world, a world in which human kindness no longer found its endorsement in humor, in which one whole aspect of the human spirit would have become stunted and grotesque.

Did this Man of Letters miss that much of the humor in his cited artworks is at "at others' misfortunes"? Cervantes, for example, has kept them rolling in the aisles for centuries by having his senile hero smacked, brained, imprisoned, and humiliated at regular intervals. And Moliere had great fun with bigots, which Scruton may understandably have blocked out.

No; Scruton knows enough to qualify his statement: "people laughed only at others' misfortunes." Okay: so if we insert some "endorsement" of "human kindness" into the otherwise irredeemable laff-fests, I guess we then have works of art. By that standard, your average Adam Sandler movie qualifies, and Catch-22 and The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes do not.

You may think I'm being too flip about Scruton's lofty aspirations. Try reading the rest of his essay. We are, he proposes, living in "a degenerate world, a world in which human aspirations no longer find their artistic expression," because some of us like Warhol and Andres Serrano. Of course, very few people only like stuff like that, to the exclusion of Old Masters and such like, but by this point Scruton is done with qualifiers: to enjoy things he doesn't enjoy is to lack good taste, which is to lack aesthetic judgment: "By espousing what is deliberately unlovely and unlovable, you make judgment ridiculous, my judgment as much as yours."

What Scruton mourns is a critical deck marked in his own favor. There are critics, of course, despite Scruton's assertions -- thousands of them, good and bad. They have been with us for a long while, and many of them in ages past disappovingly Scrutonized works that have nonetheless lasted unto our own time. For one, Samuel Johnson thought Tristram Shandy, being "odd," wouldn't do. The Great Cham spoke; who should dispute? But the book was kept alive, in part by centuries of countervailing criticism, but mainly because people kept reading it, and continue to read it, for pleasure.

That's what good culture has in common with good jokes -- the persistence of their pleasure. Scruton loathes "democratic culture, which is hostile to judgment in any form, and in particular to the judgment of taste," but in the long run democratic culture has been a pretty good bet -- indeed, it's the only bet there is. The merely faddish and temporal tends to wash out; we're not still roaring over Weber and Fields routines, for instance, nor do we mount Sardou Festivals. What persists is mostly fine. And if generations of Scrutons hammered us to appreciate, dammit, the genius of some long-dead, high-minded, but unlovely artist, he might preserve a thin academic niche, but he would not get the approbation we still give to Figaro -- a property which, Scruton must have forgotten, began as the sort of outrage he now disdains.

None of this is to plead against standards -- far from it -- but to inveigh against Scruton's. I'm no goddamn ray of sunshine myself, but I would blow my brains out if I thought things were as bad as he portrays them. I notice that the cultural life of the West has persisted through long and frequently inhospitable centuries, and I cannot believe that all art has now come to a dead end because some people like looking at Brillo boxes. Were my idea of beauty that narrow, I would seek the fault within myself first. I would take some time off, ingest drugs, and maybe turn my hand to making some art myself, before calling it a day for Western Civ.

Oh, hang on -- I have done all those things. In that case, I heartily recommend them!

DOWN AT THE CORNER/FAR FROM THE SLUMS/JONAH AND THE WINGNUTS ARE PLAYIN'/READ AN ESSAY AND FLAP YOUR GUMS. Jonah Goldberg has some fun with Hillary Clinton's gender-card play:

I'm sick of your lies Lowry. This is nothing but an unfair criticism. I don't want to say you're anti-Semitic, but if my name wasn't Goldberg, I'm not so sure you would be attacking me this way. You're practicing the politics of pile-on, the blogging of bullying, editing of intimidation.

I confess that before I followed the thread back, I thought maybe someone had called Goldberg a neoconservative.

Meanwhile, John Derbyshire wonders

And incidentally, when did "having sex" become the standard colloquial expression for coitus? Does anyone else dislike it as much as I do? It makes it sound like an operation—like having a haircut or having root canal... I wonder how we got stuck with it.

If Derbyshire thinks "having sex" is limited to coitus, I'd suggest that he take another look at the style guide.

He's also upset that a provocative ad appeared in his Playbill at a recent performance of the opera Norma. "I don't mind soft porn," he says, "But... the Met?" Guess he's never seen Salome.

For added misery, Stanley Kurtz declares that he finds as much "fun" in a 7,000-word New Atlantis essay on Facebook et alia as he does in a Brad Paisley video. Not for the first time, I find his judgment suspect.

WHY WE SNARK. Megan McArdle pleads for comity:

My point, which I stand by, is that calling someone a [censored] does not, in fact, advance the debate. I can think of no circumstances under which someone who is concerned about appearing too feminine will be moved to change his views because you called him a big, fat nancy-boy. Even if it were true, the effect of insulting someone on this level is never to cause them to reexamine their position; instead, it energizes them to seek out reasons that you're wrong, and moreover, a huge jerk whose other ideas are probably equally moronic.

And so on, "anger is something that we're currently a bit oversupplied with," come on people now, smile on your brother.

You have to remember that with these guys, civil discourse is always a one-way street. Just the other day McArdle characterized her bleeding-heart opponents as practitioners of what Julian Sanchez calls The Care Bear Stare ("They'd line up together and emit a glowing manifestation of their boundless caring, which seemed capable of solving just about any problem"). It's a perfectly fine insult, implying that people who disagree with her are moony-eyed dopes who just want to wish problems away. How it's supposed to "advance the debate" is hard to figure.

The post to which McArdle's plaint is a follow-up had to do with a reaction to an appalling 2003 essay -- brought back into the spotlight by Kevin Drum's Golden Wingnut Awards -- by one Kim Du Toit. Called "The Pussification of the Western Male," the essay is chock-full of such Nietzschean aphorisms as "You know the definition of homosexual men we used in Chicago? 'Men with small dogs who own very tidy apartments.'" Read the whole thing, and I think you'll agree that Du Toit is as likely to "reexamine his position" in response to reasoned counterargument as a dog is to stop licking his own balls.

But on McArdle's side of the DMZ, Du Toit is considered a major thinker. He's on the Ole Perfesser's blogroll. His essay has been celebrated by several top rightwing bloggers. He's right up there in the pantheon with Steven Den Beste.

Du Toit's essay richly deserves the often impolite mockery to which it has been subjected. But its essential crappiness is not the only reason why it got such a razzing -- just as a desire to raise the discourse is not the only (or even the real) reason why McArdle rushed to Du Toit's qualified defense.

One big reason why making fun of conservative bloggers is, in some quarters, a popular pastime is that they've been so inflated for so long. After 9/11, when irony was alleged to have died and Republicanism was decreed a unipolar superpower, "warbloggers" and "anti-idiotarians" began dreaming of domination. They were going to take down the MSM, reduce the Democrats to a rump, and remake America and the world in their own, suburban image.

While wimpy-assed liberal columnists deferred meekly to the War Party, mainstream conservatives praised and elevated their digital proteges, and such gibberish was published as would make Mencken blush. To argue with it was to be shouted down as a traitor, a Fifth Columnist, a pre-9/11ist. All a sane man could do was laugh.

Now the bloom is a little off the rose. Iraq's a looted shell, Arabia is not yet the 51st state, and the citizens are asking for health care. The mad mostly remain mad, but they're trying -- more modestly, of necessity -- to shift the grounds of debate. A more muscular occupation replaces dreams of Iraqi democracy, Iran offers new hope of revivifying bloodshed, and the next crop of Republicans promise not to embroil themselves in scandals and patronage.

When we laughed at them before, they were roaring so loudly they couldn't hear us. Now they can't help but notice. And they want us to stop. After all, we're only hurting ourselves! I may indeed bust a gut, but that's a chance I'm willing to take.

UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT. Some guy at Ace O'Spades:

Looks like the Saturday night box office estimates are in and while Lions for Lambs basically doubled its take from Friday, $6.7 million in box office is only good for 4th place.

A distant 4th place: Bee Movie grossed $26 million, American Gangster $24 million, and Fred Claus $19 million.

Memo to Hollywood…we don’t hate America as much as you do. Want to make some money? Make a movie where Americans are the good guys and the terrorists are the bad guys. It’s not like there’s a shortage of stories that fit the bill.

So he's beating up "Hollywood" by comparing the grosses of Lions for Lambs to those of... Bee Movie, American Gangster, and Fred Claus. Of course I don't read the trades, so maybe these last three were products of the Liberty Film Festival rather than Hollywood. Still, for purposes of clarity, maybe he should cited the record-breaking performance of Indoctrinate U instead.

UPDATE. Hollywood really drives them into paroxysms of beautiful-loserdom: the Ole Perfesser calls this YAF yakfest "an underground society of Hollywood conservatives." Oh, so underground. Like for instance, did you know that Dennis Miller is a Republican? Wow, I bet when the liberals find out about that, they'll make him stop being funny ten years ago. And so's that guy who does 24! Guess that New Yorker article about Surnow's conservatism wasn't just a misprint.

Let me amend my previous statement -- it's not just Hollywood that makes them whine like lonesome puppies, it's every institution they have been taught to hate. Like the New York Times -- here's John Derbyshire projecting in Cinemascope:

One of the abiding mysteries of the New York Times is why the PC enforcers who patrol the rest of the newspaper are somehow kept out of the Science sec[t]ion...

Now here's another Times science reporter, Amy Harmon, telling us that—good grief—"genetic information is slipping out of the laboratory and into everyday life, carrying with it the inescapable message that people of different races have different DNA"...

Is the Times Science Editor married to somebody really important? Does he know something about the Times ownership clan they would much prefer not be made public? If neither, how does he get away with this?

The Times publishes an article it could not have published were it the sinkhole of liberal censorship Derbyshire imagines, and his response is that the exception proves the rule. It's like observing the recent behavior of Pervez Musharref or Britney Spears and saying, "Wow, that is so not them."

THE TIME OF HIS TIME. The quotes offered in the New York Times obituary of Norman Mailer are such a poor introduction to readers who have no experience of him that I am compelled to type out a section of Why Are We In Vietnam?, published in 1967, in which the narrator, Texas teen D.J. Jethroe, tells about an encounter with his hardass father, Rusty:

Yeah, Rusty's a competitive prick, you know, he played for TCU, third All-American AP 1930, 1937, like back in there! look it up! and he was showing D.J. something few years ago on the back lawn of the Dallas ass mansion we inhabit, father and son -- details on request, pen pal! -- and he demonstrated to me I could not run around him. Well, of course D.J. did just that for a while, he ran the fucking ass off and around Rusty cause D.J. at thirteen had a presumptive hip dip halfback's butt about as big as Scarlett O'Hara's waist and he could use it like a double pin universal swivel, and Rusty had acquired a considerable amount of dead ass sticking his brave plunger up all blindly into the cunt-refined wickedness of Hallelujah's sophisticated rumps and vaginal radar rays masers and lasers. I mean, he was like the Charge of the Light Brigade, not so light, and she was one with all those Houris and fakirs and Cossacks and Turks up in the hills who wait to pick each zippy point of meat-nip and therefore know where to cut on down on the Light Brigade and cut off a piece of that charge for themselves. O Kuklos, great god of the seasons, bring back the fox trot, cause D.J.'s embarrassed to tell what's next, how, he, thirteen-year-old swivel ass flunkout in classics at the time, was running Third Team All-America TCU tackle Rusty Deathrow's middle-aged dead ass into the Dallas lawn fertilizer when D.J. made a fatal misestimate of reckoning -- he felt sorry for his dad. He let him tackle him just once. Just once -- right in the dry linty Dallas old navel of Texas. Rusty was so het up, he flung D.J. and -- mail in your protests -- he bit him in the ass, right through the pants, that's how insane he was with frustration, that's how much red blood was in his neck, and man, he hung on, he nearly lifted D.J. up in the air with his deathly teeth -- he would have if he hadn't been a deacon at St. Martin's. That poor D.J. He was a one-cheek swivel ass running on one leg for the next ten minutes while Rusty tackled him whoong! whoong! over and over again. Trails of glory came out of head each time he got hit. "Randy," said Rusty, afterward, "you got to be a nut about competition. That's the way. You got to be so dominated by a desire to win that if you was to squat down on the line and there facing you was Jesus Christ, you would just tip your head once and say, 'J.C., I have to give you fair warning that I'm here to do my best to go right through your hole'"...

Critics generally prefer Mailer's more disciplined books like The Executioner's Song and Harlot's Ghost, in which Mailer's madness is a thrumming engine set safely deep inside the work, sending energy steadily up into the well-ordered prose, with sudden power surges occasionally electrifying the surface. In passages like this one, we see what Mailer was like when nothing was stopping him. It's the first Mailer book that grabbed me, and I still like it. There's glory in it as well as absurdity; it's compelling and not quite convincing; it is colloquial without being conversational. It is inventive to a fault.

Why Are We In Vietnam was his fourth novel. He followed his blockbuster debut, The Naked and The Dead, with a couple of difficult books that were hard to like, maybe even hard for him to like. At the same time he built a career as a public intellectual, or a public nuisance, depending on how you looked at it. He made himself available for ten rounds on any subject: theatre, poetry, drugs, race, technology, female sexuality, what have you and whether or not he knew anything about it. More often than not, at the end of each bout he would climb bloody and exhausted from the canvas and raise his arms in victory.

The way I read it, Why Are We In Vietnam has its roots in The White Negro, in which Mailer commenced a labored, often farcical mission to comprehend black culture, not as a separate reality, but wholly into his own Jewish-American, Harvard- and World War-educated, high-falutin' and bar-brawling perspective; having encompassed so much, he thought he could contain that, too. James Baldwin, among others, spanked him soundly for it, but Mailer had his teeth in his subject, so to speak, and would not let go. Ten years later, Mailer created D.J., inheritor of a distinct culture and surfer on the shock-waves of the 60s, a slicker and a cracker who also imagines himself to be a black disc jockey: the fullest literary flower of Mailer's grand cultural reclamation project.

Writing that book seems to have calmed him a little. This time, after declaring himself victorious, Mailer had the good sense to get out of the ring (for the most part and the time being), and he embarked on a more fruitful literary enterprise. Tom Wolfe had pioneered new journalism, but Mailer saw what it was missing: Norman Mailer. He made himself the central character (aka Aquarius) and attended an anti-war protest, political conventions, a space launch. He got some good books out of it.

Journalism, even a la mode, couldn't hold Mailer, but it did focus him and give a new, cumulative force to his expansive talents. History removed the onerous obligations of fiction by providing him with characters and a plot. Had Mailer invented Spiro Agnew, he might have been tempted to overdraw him; seeing Agnew before him, he was content to observe that his eyes were like slits in the turret of a tank, and that tells us enough. When stirred, as he was by the Democratic Convention floor in Miami and the Siege of Chicago, to the operatic, Mailer takes care to begin at the quotidian base, then build his way up to a soaring aria:

The Ampitheatre was the best place in the world for a convention. Relatively small, it had the packed intimacy of a neighborhood fight club. The entrances to the gallery were as narrow as hallway tunnels, and the balcony seemed to hang over each speaker. The colors were black and grey and red and white and blue, bright powerful colors in support of a ruddy beef-eating sea of Democratic faces. The standards in these cramped quarters were numerous enough to look like lances. The aisles were jammed. The carpets were red. The crowd had a blood in their vote which had travelled in an unbroken line from the throng who had cheered the blood of brave Christians and ferocious lions. It could have been a great convention, stench and all -- politics in an abbatoir was as appropriate as license in a boudoir. There was bottom to this convention; some of the finest and some of the most corrupt faces in America were on the floor. Cancer jostled elbows with arcomegaly, obesity with edema, arthritis with alcholism, bad livers sent curses to bronchiacs, and quivering jowls beamed bad cess to puffed-out paunches. Cigars curved mouths which talked out of the other corner to cauliflower ears. The leprotic took care of the blind. And the deaf attached their hearing-aid to the voice-box of the dumb. The tennis-players communicated with the estate holders. The Mob talked bowling with the Union, the principals winked to the principals, the honest and the passionate went hoarse shouting through dead mikes.

This has the quality of a fine Hogarth or Gillray cartoon: monstrous, vulgar, arguably overdrawn, but with the humanity behind the metaphors preserved.

Mailer did not then cease to scrap, as Gore Vidal could tell you. He didn't entirely cease to be ridiculous, either. He ran for Mayor of New York, presided over the public collapse of the New York intelligentsia chronicled in Town Bloody Hall, tried to hatch a "Fifth Estate" of what would much later be called citizen journalists, championed and helped win parole for an imprisoned writer who then killed a waiter.

But he kept writing. He took up novels again, and if they were not always successful, the long exercise of his talents certainly showed in them. If you dig through any of his work, you will find evidence of his gifts. I recently encountered his very long Evergreen Review essay on Last Tango in Paris, "A Transit to Narcissus." It is full of ripe 70s Mailer hogwash: e.g., "[Maria Schneider] is every eighteen-year-old in a mini-skirt and a maxi-coat who ever promenaded down Fifth Avenue in that inner arrogance which proclaims, 'My cunt is my chariot.'" Ugh. Yet when Mailer talks about the effect of retrofitting Brando's improvisational style to the film's original script, one thinks: oh, wait, he knows what he's talking about.

An editor might have got us to the money shot more quickly. But Mailer was long since past the ministrations of editors. He aimed high -- who else had the nerve, in our earthbound era, to seek to explain Jesus and Hitler? -- and was perhaps dizzied by the thin air encountered in his journeys. He was smart enough to know this was happening, but what was the alternative? His energy and ambition were obviously boundless: he thought big, wrote big, did everything big. If he sometimes found a vehicle or medium that channeled his energies, he could be grateful for the improving effect of the ballast and still be painfully aware that something was holding him back. To wish he had shown greater wisdom about the use of his power is to presume that you would know better what to do with it. Nobody knew how to be Mailer but Mailer.

SHOP TALK. The only trade fairs I have willfully attended were the New Music Seminar and the CMJ, and I recall them as small hells of self-promotion. As blogging has even more competition, lower barriers to entry, and fewer commercial opportunities than music, I can only imagine that a Blog World Expo would be even worse. The participants certainly look like less fun than, say, GWAR and Henry Rollins. I can see the logic for exhibitors, though: might organizations like this be why the Ole Perfesser is constantly going on about some new skillet or juicer?

But I concede that, as silly as it is to approach blogging as a business, it may be even sillier to approach it as a means toward elevating discourse. Take Hindrocket's account of what he saw at the Expo:

About half the participants in both panels were liberals; these are the people who had me thinking I had passed into a different world, and entered a sort of bubble inhabited only by leftists.

The first panel went off, inevitably I suppose, on Iraq. What was striking was the dogmatic nature of the liberals' assertions about what is happening there. Things aren't getting better; things can't possibly get better; the facts don't matter, it's tautological...

I'm pretty sure the number of people who think the facts don't matter in Iraq is quite a bit less than 70%, and I'm also pretty sure that a political movement that explicitly declares its indifference to reality is in trouble.

He had to go to Vegas to write that? Well, the year's almost over, so I guess it was time to tap out the Power Line distance-learning budget. alicublog's was tapped out on the morning of New Year's Day with a few calls to 900-BIG-BUTT.

(BTW, this Blog World post contains what must be the line of the day: "Blacks in America have become the perfect laboratory for the consequences of annihilating traditional sexual mores. At 70% illegitimacy, they have destroyed civilization at the molecular level.")

HE'S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU. Via (the award-winning, until the inevitable Supreme Court reversal) Sadly No, I see Gay Patriot is complaining that somebody wouldn't go out with him because he's conservative.

We've seen this sort of thing before. It is embarrassing to have to tell these "classical liberals" this, but: there is no Constitutional right to get laid.

Believe me, if there were, Ron Paul would win in a landslide.

AUTHENTIC WESTERN GIBBERISH. While other war fans talk about how great things are going in Iraq, Daniel Pipes contemplates the expected collapse of the Mosul Dam and draws interesting conclusions:

Yet, were a catastrophic failure to take place, who would be blamed for the unprecedented loss of life? Americans, of course. And understandably so, for the Bush administration took upon itself the overhauling of Iraqi life, including the Mosul Dam. Specifically, the U.S. taxpayer funded attempts to shore it up by with improved grouting, at a cost of US$27 million. The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has, however, judged these efforts mismanaged and ineffective.

I don't see why they don't just paint it and put a cross on top of it. But Pipes continues:

Mosul's dam replicates a myriad of lesser problems in Iraqi life that have landed in the lap of Americans (and, to a much lesser extent, their coalition partners), such as provisioning fuel and electricity, working schools and hospitals, a fair political and legal system, and an environment secure from terrorism.

Since April 2003, I have argued that this shouldering of responsibility for Iraq's domestic life has harmed both Americans and Iraqis. It yokes Americans with unwanted and unnecessary loss of life, financial obligations, and political burdens. For Iraqis, as the dam example suggests, it encourages an irresponsibility with potentially ruinous consequences.

A change of course is needed, and quickly. The Bush administration needs to hand back responsibility for Iraq's ills, including and especially the Mosul Dam. More broadly, it should abandon the deeply flawed and upside-down approach of "war as social work," whereby U.S. military efforts are judged primarily by the benefits they bring to the defeated enemy, rather than to Americans.

If only Ray Nagin, Kathleen Blanco, George W. Bush, and "Brownie" had thought of this! They didn't build the damn levees, just as the U.S. didn't build the damn dam; why should they take any responsibility for what happened/will happen when they/it collapsed/collapse?

Like other conservatives, Pipes supports our continued occupation of Iraq. But he just wants us to use it as a base for "rollback" (i.e., war with other Middle East states), get the oil, and provide a "benign presence" during the "years, perhaps decades" it will take Iraqis "to learn the subtle habits of an open society." He believes we shouldn't waste our time trying to fix things while we're there, asking bluntly, "how many Americans or Britons care deeply about Iraq's future course?"

Pipes is of course a lunatic, but I must admit I find his approach refreshingly honest and even coherent compared to that of the many dead-enders (no links, go to just about any rightwing rag and fish around) who still tell us how our bombing, invasion, and occupation of Iraq was, and continues to be, for the Iraqis' own good.

Indeed, the dead-enders seem to be edging reluctantly in Pipes' direction: at the time of the 2005 Iraq election the National Review editors were gung-ho for export-grade democracy, but now many of them are downplaying it ("The Arab world doesn’t have a great grasp of what democracy is" -- Jonah Goldberg; "Our problem in the war on terror is less the absence of democracy than the absence of strong states" -- Rich Lowry, etc). And recent events have forced similar admissions from the same people as regards democracy in Pakistan.

Maybe, if they get time for it, they'll all start talking about the need for a strongman who will keep the Iraqi people in line no matter how crappy their conditions are. Pity we hung the last proven practitioner of that craft.

CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED. Contextual reading, or non-reading, taken to new heights today by Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal, writing about Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Clarence Thomas:

By now, "To Kill a Mockingbird" is wholly folded into the political life of the country. It is safe to say that most Democrats would consider the book to be an iconic testament to their legacy, liberalism's greatest achievement. One imagines that Harper Lee would agree with this.

Which statement is rendered odd by his next one:

But as with Justice Thomas's famously sphinx-like demeanor during oral arguments at the Supreme Court, there has been nary a peep in more than 40 years about the book's meaning from Miss Lee (it would sound absurd to refer to her as Ms. Lee).

Well, as long as we're speculating about the political beliefs of a closed-mouthed writer who said she wanted to be "the Jane Austen of south Alabama," why not go whole hog and suggest that, despite her presumed esteem for "liberalism's greatest achievement," she would also be a Clarence Thomas supporter?

First, it would sound absurd to Henninger to use attach "Ms." to her surname -- look, she's halfway to being conservative already! And Henninger points out that she defended (as any sensible person would) the use of the word "nigger" in her book, which seen a certain way supports Henninger's case, as this is a word with which conservatives are historically comfortable. Finally, Thomas grew up black and poor, and referred to his own hearings as a "lynching"; as Thomas was a party disinterested in the outcome, we may take his word for it.

Henninger determines:

We may assume that Harper Lee composed her remarkable story about the unjustly accused and gunned-down Tom Robinson so that some day a Clarence Thomas could rise from Pinpoint to the nation's highest Court.

The "a" is a neat dodge. But the clear suggestion that Lee was working, however unconsciously, to put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court is about as valid as a suggestion that, in writing The Cradle Will Rock, Marc Blitzstein was working to make Jimmy Hoffa head of the Teamsters.

Near the end, Henninger seems to intuit that he has not made himself sufficiently explicit, and adds:

Today a black man is running for the presidency. Perhaps the campaign is too long and perhaps Barack Obama is too young and too inexperienced to be president. Consider, though, the current knock on Mr. Obama. It is that he won't attack Hillary with sufficient aggression, that he is too gentlemanly, even too "professorial" in demeanor. Presumably his critics would prefer the slashing tongue of a hip-hop performer than the self-contained Barack Obama, who epitomizes middle-class black achievement. Well, 15 years ago they preferred something other than the conservative middle-class black man sent to the Supreme Court.

Conclusion: liberals are so racist that they don't even want Barack Obama to run for President, and would prefer Ludacris or Busta Rhymes.

Henninger's piece is a classic example of Konservetkult criticism. He doesn't deduce Lee's view from her work, but uses shopworn conservative memes as shims to maneuver her into the correct position.

RESSENTIMENTAL JOURNEY. Michael Yon took a perfectly nice photograph of some people putting up a cross in Iraq. But his fellow war supporters can't really enjoy it -- it just stirs their ancient anger at the mean ol' MSM:

The Hypocritical Silence of the MSM -- Babalu Blog.

It’s a story you not see in the supposed mainstream press. It’s a story you’ll never hear about except in derisive tones, on Err America. It’s a happening that will never get any recognition from the Democrat run Congress. It’s something you’ll never hear the democratic party presidential candidates talk about. It’s something you won’t hear Ron Paul talk about. It’s a story that you’ll never hear from the any of the people who have been screaming for our capitulation and our withdrawal in that region. -- Bits Blog.

Rand Simberg thinks Yon should win a Pulitzer for this photo. Frankly, that honor should have come two years ago. Instead, they gave it to a gaggle of Associated Press photographers, one of which, Bilal Hussein, was later arrested with a known al Qaeda terrorist and remains in jail. -- Confederate Yankee.

If it had been taken by a wire service photographer it would be on the cover of newspapers all over the country. -- Tigerhawk.

Some on the other side, who - overwhelmed with images of burned flags and screaming mobs - may have forgotten the humanity of the Iraqi people (people we let down once before, and who had reason to distrust us and our commitment) may see these Muslims and Christians raising a cross together, in a language of brotherhood and gratitude, and say, “but…but…all those people are bad people…” -- The Anchoress.

Think how it must be to go through life like that: to see a heartwarming picture and have the bitter thought instantly leap to your mind that people are being unfair to you. That's what makes them what they are, and why when you say "culture," they say "war." It gives new meaning to the aesthetic concept of negative space.

NOTHING MEANS NOTHING ANYMORE. If you aren't a Republican with an eye on continuing control of the White House, and maybe even if you are, Rudolph Giuliani's acceptance of Pat Robertson's endorsement might strike you as bizarre. Robertson famously blamed 9/11 on America's godlessness. You might think that the sheer, eerie discordance of Mr. 9/11 standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the evangelical equivalent of a Truther would outweigh any political benefits that might come from it.

Pundits zipped right past this natural response, though, and went straight for the who's-hot, who's-not angle. Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post:

The endorsement will definitely slow Romney's momentum with social conservatives. Romney had recently secured the backing of conservative stalwarts Paul Weyrich and Bob Jones III -- endorsements that seemed to strengthen his bid to become the electable conservative alternative to Giuliani. Romney had made no secret of his desire for Robertson's endorsement and has to be disappointed this morning.

Of course, right-wingers who have long been heavily invested in Giuliani and his finessing of religious issues are making the most of it. And of course non-supporters are incensed.

But no one seems shocked. Despite what human nature would suggest, the endorsement seems normal, if a little rich.

And that's the mad genius of it. For months we've been hearing about Giuliani's problems with the evangelicals. His conservative supporters have been openly citing his insincerity on the issue of abortion as a plus -- something that gives him wiggle room over a long campaign. This endorsement suggests there's something to that.

For years people like Robertson have been saying that abortion is murder. Murder! Now Robertson is endorsing the least believably anti-abortion of all the Republican candidates based on his concern about "the blood lust of Islamic terrorists," which certainly wasn't uppermost in Robertson's mind six years ago, when it was most apparent.

Robertson has always been a fraud, but to maintain his position, such as it is, he used to have to hold a hard line on his alleged beliefs. Now I guess he doesn't see the need. Indeed, by accepting his endorsement, Giuliani is sending a signal -- just the latest among many -- that he doesn't see the need, either.

They're both right. Giuliani is leading among Republican nominees based not upon the relevance of his experience -- does America really need someone who can jail squeegee men or crack down on dancing in bars? -- but on his reputation as an unrelenting prick. (As Kevin Drum observed, "And of all the GOP candidates on offer today, which one is most obviously prepared to kick moral decay's ass? I don't even have to say it, do I?") Republicans are drawn to him because they know they share his attitude, and can pray that his policies, despite all evidence, will match their own. The other Party's nominees are led by a woman who -- well, see previous.

For a long time we Americans have expected our leaders to be full of shit, particularly when they came from the opposing side. Now we appear to expect it even more, even when they're on our side. It is brutally just that this should be made clear by an endorsement from a supposed man of faith.

MONEY SHOT. At Commentary, Fred Siegel says the Democrats are the new "party of the rich." How you stand on this assertion depends on whether you are more convinced by demographic analysis that suggests that, while richer states tend Democratic, "richer voters within states support the Republicans," or by anecdotes about "Democratic fund-raising events in the Park Avenue homes of investment bankers." I say it's all good: any new interest group the Democrats can claim is fine with me. And I look forward to guys like Giuliani and Romney hunkering down in their overalls, preferably while eatin' a mess o' catfish, talkin' about their opposition to bankers and big business.

HOW THE MIGHTY HAVE PRATFALLEN. By the time you read this, Kevin Drum's All-Time Wingnuttiest Blog Post Contest will probably have closed. But even if you can't vote, it's worth visiting to read the nominees.

It's also worth remembering that most of the finalists, and even their nominated work, have been praised to the skies by the big-name conservatives. Some of them rode this praise to mainstream success. Ben Domenech blogged for the Washington Post. Steven Den Beste has written for the Wall Street Journal, Ann Althouse for the New York Times. John Hinderaker, aka "Hindrocket," was one of Time's Bloggers of the Year. Hell, a few breaks one way or the other, and Pam "Atlas Shrugs" Geller would have had that Time cover instead of Ann Coulter.

All the hot air in recent years about the blogosphere being the next big thing inflated these worthy contenders to their current Hindenberg proportions, making them all the more satisfying to explode, especially for those of us who knew them when. Stay tuned to alicublog for future nominees.