YOUTH CULTURE STOLE HIS CHAINSAW.

If you did not know that Kanye West was the singer of the background music, by the quality of the lyrics and beat, you might think that a fourth grader was spewing rhymed obscenities...

Ah shaddap Gramps -- also known as Victor Davis Hanson, who in his latest essay regales his readership with the kind of kids-today yap that used to pad out middlebrow magazine essays. Only instead of blaming permissive parents or the Bomb, Hanson blames aesthetes:

Once classical canons of artistic, literary, or musical expression were torn down, and once those classically trained rebels who ripped them apart have passed on, we are left with the ruins of trying to shock what is perhaps beyond being shocked...

In other words, once you have rebelled against hexameters, quarter notes, or realistic representation, and after you have rebelled against that rebellion with crucifixes in urine, obscenity-laced rap, and peek-a-boo nudity on stage, what are you left with? The 20th-century rebels who knew what they did not like have been replaced by the anti-rebels who don’t know that there was ever something against which to rebel. Again, we are left with the 21st-century of Lady Gaga giving birth to a blue sphere, Miley Cyrus probing body orifices with a foam oversized finger, and Kanye West humping on a motorcycle while reciting obscene nursery-rhyme ditties.

I think general idea is that the Moderns ruined everything, but it's hard to be sure; the rebellion against "hexameters," for one thing, would seem to mean most poetry after the ancients -- when Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter, was Party in the U.S.A. the inevitable result? Also, if culture fell when "realistic representation" ceased to be an aspiration, where does that leave Agamemnon? It's less representational than Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Maybe everything really went downhill after ring shouts and cave paintings.

I wondered why Hanson was even bothering with this Andy Rooney schtick, and then found to my horror that he thinks it has something to do with Obamacare.

Why would a culture that canonizes a Kanye West, Miley Cyrus, or Lady Gaga have the discrimination to determine whether their chief executive tells the truth or lies? Obamacare is a great program in a way that West, Cyrus, and Gaga are great artists, in a way that more iPads will mean more geniuses.

Well, in a way he's got a point -- would stuff like Hanson's even be tolerated if we hadn't been inured to it by decades of absurdism?

Next week: The curse of Instagramsci!

UPDATE. In comments, Dr. Hunky Jimpjorps: "It's like one of those Oliver Sacks patient histories: classics expert Victor H. has woken up every day since about 1964 to be shocked anew by the existence of pop culture."

Also, for newcomers, here's the referent for the title.

UPDATE. Whetstone, in comments: "Oh, horseshit. Ask someone who actually pays attention to contemporary popular music—rather than just railing about whatever YouTube video happened to pop up on PJ Media—whether there are 'hierarchies.'" It's one of the institutionalized absurdities of the Culture War that guys like Hanson believe pop culture represents some refutation of values. Pop fans actually have much more rigid formal demands than high art fans at this point; in the dimmer ones, they're made even more rigid by sentimentality, and if you don't believe me get a load of this Star Wars dork who's also a National Review writer -- though I warn you, you may throw your action figures away after reading it. Sample: "And why would Disney go to the bother of globe-trotting in search of future celebrities if not to brazenly drum up publicity? If that’s true, it totally worked, with Exhibit A being the article you’re reading right now." Next she'll do a story where she realizes actors don't make up their own lines.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about two events last week -- the filibuster vote and the Iran deal -- that seem to have thrown the brethren for a loop. They'd gotten used to just piling abuse on Obamacare, and I think they genuinely believed they'd never have to work hard for a dollar again. No wonder they're pissed!

Not that they haven't quickly developed some tropes for the occasion, but they're kinda lame. For example, after referring to the "Obamacare train wreck" -- man, that one never gets old --  Doug Powers of the Michelle Malkin site refers to Obama's attempts to seat judges on the D.C. Court of Appeals, which the GOP filibusters was blocking, as "court stacking." This comes straight off the Republican Party boilerplate, which would embarrass Powers if he had any pride, but worse that that, how's that supposed to motivate voters? Maybe they think it sounds enough like "court packing" that some elderly voters will get outraged and storm the voting booths in 2014, thinking they're turning out for Wendell Willkie.

UPDATE. On the Iran tip, I missed this bit from Power Line's Paul Mirengoff, claiming that Obama and Kerry "grant concessions to regime that don’t like America because they themselves don’t like America all that much" and want to surrender it to Islamic fundamentalism, which totally rocks. Mirengoff cites as back-up the fact that after serving in Vietnam, Kerry said he thought the war was a mistake. (Mirengoff, uncontaminated by experience of combat, presumably thinks it was great.) Most Americans seem to share Kerry's opinion, which means they also don't like America, which is why they reelected the America-disliking Obama in 2012, which leaves Mirengoff to wait patiently, as a representative of the Saving Remnant, for Jesus to reincarnate Reagan and reclaim his people. At least that's the charitable explanation; it may just be that Mirengoff's an idiot.

FORCED INTO HEALTH CARE: A MOTHER'S LAMENT.

Joining John Birch and Joe McCarthy in the pantheon of conservative martyrs is Nicole L. Hopkins' mom, who is forced by the Kenyan Pretender to have free health care via the hated Medicaid -- disguised as Washington Apple Health, "the mawkish rebranding of Medicaid in Washington state," but everyone will know she's reduced to taking poor-people medicine, especially since she complained about it in the Wall Street Journal:

"How has it come to this?" she asked in one of our several talks over the past few weeks about what was happening. When she was a working mother and I was young, she easily carried health insurance for our whole family. "How have I fallen this far?"... 

"I just don't expect anything positive out of getting free health care," she said. "I don't see why other people should have to pay for my care, whether it be through taxes or otherwise." In paying for health insurance herself—she won't accept help from her family, either—she was safeguarding her dignity and independence and her sense of being a fully functioning member of society.

I sincerely do not get this. If Uncle Sam decided to send me food stamps, notwithstanding that I have a job, I wouldn't look for a national newspaper to amplify my cries of outrage. This is not because I am a moocher or a socialist, it's because I'm not nuts. Free food? Thanks, Obama!

But Mom is outraged, her daughter says, that she's been "in effect, ordered to take a handout." Well, we've all got our problems. Maybe don't use it, I guess? What am I missing here?

UPDATE. At RedState, Some Guy takes a study showing no significant change in measured health outcomes over two years of Medicaid to mean that nobody who was sick got better under treatment (bet Some Guy got his MPH at Trump University), and suggests we just get rid of the damn thing and put all paupers on the Pay or Die system. Well, at least Nicole L. Hopkins' mom would be spared some indignity.

HIS PERFECT RECORD OF WRONGNESS IS INTACT.

I've been living in DC for a couple years now, and I don't talk about it much because, well, you know me -- if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything! Kidding, slightly. Our Northeast neighborhood is pretty chill and friendly, except for the white people, and DC certainly has world-class museums and a couple nice bars. But let's be frank: This is no New York. For example, the entertainment "corridor" to which we are closest, the fabled H Street, is a joke. Most of the venues are pitched at kids -- that is, the brown-nosing little climbers who throng DC's "corridors" on weekends -- and since DC's small scale allows rapacious developers to completely overwhelm whatever strip they choose to devour, it has made the street into a Disneyland of crap. Last year some schmo invested what looks like at least half a mil to erect a shiny, art-directed new joint here that sells -- I swear to God -- cheesesteaks and flavored ices. It's a Bennigan's bohemia.

I could go on, but why should I -- Isn't the fact that Andrew Sullivan prefers DC to New York proof enough for you? Apparently he has a long thing about it in the Times of London, to which I'm not going to subscribe but the bits that have been quoted are probably all I should read for my heart's sake:

Every journey to any other place in the city is a battle of wills with everyone else; no one ever steps aside or evinces the slightest shade of civility on the pavement. There are no queues, just teeming masses of selfishness and hostility...

Picture Sullivan pausing to contemplate the muse of centrism on a Midtown sidewalk and getting knocked on his ass by people who have to get to fucking work. It improved my day!

If you think you’ll find intellectual stimulation you’re thinking of another era. The conversations are invariably about money or property or schools.

What else would one talk to Andrew Sullivan about? They were trying to do you a favor, schmuck. Or maybe themselves -- just imagining Sullivan trying to talk about art, for example, makes me cringe.

If you bring up any political subject you are engulfed by a smug liberal consensus that borders on outright bigotry and brutal intolerance towards dissent.

"Oh, so you're that asshole Andrew Sullivan, huh? Well let me tell you something...." -- Overhead at the 92nd Street Y. After years of having his ass kissed, Sullivan probably ran into people who don't care who Andrew Sullivan is. No wonder he fled.

Oh, Sullivan earlier referred to DC as a "Second Brooklyn." This is probably based on brunches in the Heights with Martin Amis. "And over there, Andrew, is where Norman Mailer used to live." "Rather small, isn't it? Have I mentioned my DC apartment? 1500 square feet of a school classroom I got for a steal in 1991?" "Many times."

AAAAANNNNND... SCENE.

My thanks to mortimer2000 in comments on a previous post for alerting me to this job listing:

Bestselling author and columnist, Jonah Goldberg, writes on U.S. politics and culture as a fellow at AEI. One of the most prominent conservative political commentators today, Goldberg frequently appears on television and radio shows, and his syndicated columns are circulated widely across the United States. Interns will conduct research on a large range of policy-related topics to assist Mr. Goldberg with his columns, lectures, and media appearances. The ideal candidate will possess strong research and writing skills, as well as a demonstrated interest in U.S. politics, culture, and the media. 

Job Location
Washington, District of Columbia, United States 

Position Type
Intern 

Salary
0.00 - 0.00 USD

Doesn't that suggest a scene --

JONAH and K-LO in the NR breakroom; JONAH thumbs through a pile of resumes.

JONAH. (through a mouthful of Hot Pockets) Lookit all these resumes from old guys! (pulls one out) "Mark Gauvreau Judge." God, why can't they get their moms to get them jobs! Losers. (wipes mouth with resume)

K-LO. (sniffs) Something smells -- (gasps, stands) Mother of Christ! Jonah, not again! (gags, pulls her wimple across her nose and mouth) Do you have Satan inside you?

JONAH. Better call a exorcist, K-Lo, 'cuz I just shotgunned a can of these.

JONAH holds up an empty tube of French's French Fried Onion Rings, and simultaneously farts, knocking over a ketchup bottle and two wastebaskets. K-LO flees.

JONAH. If ya can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Hey, I should put that in the ad! (pulls a resume marked BEN SHAPIRO out of the pile, reads aloud as he writes on the back with eyeliner pencil) "Candidate must have high level important eh-pee-see-mo-lotical discussions with his boss,  Jonah Goldberg." (wraps one of his hands with the resume, talks to it) So, you went to Harvard, huh? (shakes hand wrapped in resume, speaks in a falsetto) "Yes I did, Mr. Goldberg, I'm a very smart man and I'm 40 years old and I write for free on the internet." (normal voice) Oh, I see. Well, tell me, Mr. Harvard Man, can you tell me what is happening now? (farts, knocking down a set of venetian blinds. Sirens are heard in the distance.) "Oooooh, Mr. Goldberg, you made a very bad fart!" Is that so? Well perhaps they didn't teach you at Harvard that HE WHO SMELT IT DEALT IT! "Ooooh noooo!" Oh yes! "Ooooh noooooo!" Oh yes! (JONAH pushes the resume-draped hand between his legs) Ha! "Ack! Oh no! P.U.! It stinks in here! Lemme gooooo!" No! "Lemme gooooo! Lemme --"

TWO FIREFIGHTERS in Hazmat suits burst in and lay hands on JONAH.

FIREFIGHTER. Methane levels are beyond the safety limit, sir! We're taking you out of here!

JONAH: LIBERAL FASCISM!

He lunges and grabs an industrial-size bag of Tostitos Hint of Jalapeno Chips as they carry him away.

OTHER THAN THAT, PERFECT ANALOGY.

James Taranto, comparing Obamacare to the Iraq War:

One of the strongest critiques of the Iraq effort--as this column acknowledged in September, in a different context--is that it took hubris to suppose that the U.S. could simply export democracy to a distant land and expect it to have a quick, benevolent and transformative effect on the entire region. That was frequently characterized as the "neocon" view. If so, isn't ObamaCare the perfect example of "neocon" hubris in domestic policy?

Because it's hubris to think you can implement a national health care system -- just ask most of the civilized world -- whereas invasions are always cash money.

Taranto also addresses the Katrina-Obamacare analogies that have been a key element of current wingnut schtick, and attacks Joan Walsh for saying most of the dead in Katrina were black; in one estimate, they were only 44%, "well short of 'most,'" says Taranto, and in another they were 51%, but Walsh is still wrong because "it was a bare majority." Plus which, three-fifths of 51% is 38%.

Taranto also accuses Walsh of racism against white men. I can see why this would upset him.

AND THEN DE BLASIO MADE OUT WITH SUKHREET GABEL AND KILLED YANKEL ROSENBAUM.

Bob McManus at City Journal:

History may not repeat itself, but sometimes it whispers warnings. The wise will pay heed. 

Whether the ice-rink shooting at New York City’s Bryant Park, an arduously restored urban jewel at 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue, was an aberration or a harbinger remains to be seen. But the gunplay prompted unhappy recollections of the not-so-distant past, when the enclave was known as Needle Park and the New York Times described it as “a cesspool of crime and vice” only sporadically patrolled by police, if at all.

...memories linger of a time when New York had truly lost its way, when it couldn’t summon the will to resist dysfunction or even articulate a right to self-defense—to say nothing of self-respect.

Soon Bill de Blasio will be mayor...

Bill de Blasio is six weeks from inauguration as Mayor, but he's already on the hook for a mini-crime wave and junkies from thirty years ago. Is it right that one man should have such power?

Things like Bernie Goetz on the Downtown No. 2 train, on Dec. 22, 1984—the night he opened fire on four black teenagers who he said were menacing him with a screwdriver. The episode touched off a debate on race, crime, and the right to self-defense that seethed for years. Nobody was neutral on Bernie Goetz. He was the man who refused to be victimized, or he was a racist gunman—pick one. Goetz did eight months on Rikers Island, then drifted off into semi-obscurity. But there he was last month, smirk and all, back in court on a minor drug-peddling charge. He’s no longer a threat of any sort, just a timely reminder, as the debate over the future of Pax Giuliani in the age of de Blasio gains energy.

If Bernie Goetz sees his shadow, we get four more years of John Lindsay.

Things like Sonny Carson, an architect of the racist boycott of a Korean grocery in Brooklyn that shamed the city for six months in 1990—an event that then-mayor David Dinkins couldn’t bring himself even obliquely to criticize. Ugly stuff, not to be repeated. But there was the beyond-bitter entertainer Harry Belafonte, channeling Carson in a Brooklyn church the Sunday before Election Day. Conservative political contributors Charles and David Koch, he said, are “white supremacists . . . men of evil . . . [similar to] the men who would belong to the Ku Klux Klan.” Americans are entitled to their views, of course, even haters in their dotage. And this outburst would have scant significance—except that soon-to-be-mayor-elect de Blasio sat smiling as Belafonte sputtered on. Much as Dinkins, with his silence, encouraged Carson’s racist rants.

You see the connection: Carson instigated a boycott of Korean delis, and Belafonte talked shit about two of the richest men in America. It's practically the same thing.

Now, some pathologies never go away, which doubtless explains the city’s just-concluded Banksy carnival—the media celebration of an anonymous, high-end graffiti vandal who may or may not be a competent artist, but who sure knows how to turn a buck off defacing property. Banksy, a Brit, recently returned home after a month in the city creating “art” that sold for six figures (perhaps boosting de Blasio’s argument that some people just need taxing.) It was all harmless fun, except that the city has been there, done that, and doesn’t need a return trip...

The good news is the new wave of graffiti will be done by rich British performance artists, so no one can call conservatives racist when they complain.

The reviews are in:

And yet 74% of them voted for de Blasio. Must have a... Death Wish.

Tune in a few weeks from now, when the increased imminence of Mayor de Blasio causes 9/11.

UPDATE. Commenters are performing at a Broadway level. "Boy, they'll jump at any shadow, huh?" says Batocchio. "But it stands to reason, since shadows are black."

Many notice the commenters at McManus' page who, unlike our own, tend to destroy rather than restore one's faith in humanity with their gibberish about "Liberals and Black race pimps," etc. "It's not exactly like a bathroom wall," notes Hob, "it's like a cross between a bathroom wall and the letter column of some mimeographed Klan zine..."

"Let me know when the full DeBlasio effect has kicked in so I can take the Acela and go wilding on reactionaries," says Cato the Censor. You and me both, comrade! Time to get some jumbos and cheap rents back up in this bitch.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Obamacare keep-your-plan fix and how, rightbloggers insist, it can't possibly work. All players in this game -- insurers, rightbloggers, and Obama -- are doing everything they can to get the most they can out of it; but while the insurers are trying to supplement their already massive payday, and rightbloggers are trying to win future elections, Obama seems to be trying to get a national health care system to work. How he became the villain in all this will be a fruitful study for future generations, if we have any.

IN WHAT SHOULD BE THE NADIR...

...of the current wingnut skreefest over Obamacare, the legal expert who told Bush he could torture prisoners says Obama's insurance fix is unconstitutional. Can't someone just give Yoo a "screams of pain" relaxation tape and send him away, preferably to Den Haag?

That should be the low point, but this is the kind of situation in which the brethren are actually expected to earn their wingnut welfare with a higher order of bullshit, on the double! So they're more energized and, if such a thing can be imagined, less scrupulous. Here's today's brow-slapper from Megan McArdle:

Some of the left-wing commentators I’ve seen seem to be under the impression that health insurers make fabulous profits...

Whereas one quick look at tar-paper shacks that house these humble businesses will show they're merely scraping by.

And this just in -- Roger L. Simon demands Obama resign over Obamacare: The headline begins, I swear to God, "Was Benghazi Not Enough?" My question is: If incompetence is a reason to resign, why is Simon still running PJ Media?

OKAY, YOU CAN KEEP YOUR SHITTY HEALTH CARE PLANS. HAPPY?

I didn't think so. Charles C.W. Cooke:

Looking wounded and, at times, even broken, President Obama this afternoon addressed the ongoing disaster that is the implementation of his healthcare law. "I will work with Republicans and Democrats to make this work better,” the president announced generously, before moving quickly onto familiar territory and explaining that he would in fact just direct the executive branch to ignore the law...

Once again, Obama explained that he had no idea that the website’s was going to be so calamitous. Once again, he carefully chose his words when explaining why he promised something that was so clearly undeliverable. “You can’t blame me, I thought that the law would work!” he appeared to be saying. Rambling at times... 

...Obama’s expansive and inchoate comments were gifts for an opposition that has long characterized him as being out of his depth and unaccustomed to the real world.

This has two of the three essential ingredients for a wingnut Obamacare story: An assertion that, six weeks into enrollment, the program has already failed; and a portrayal of Obama as simultaneously a ruthless master criminal and a simpleton who can't run anything.

What's missing is the heretofore-traditional feigned concern for citizens who would be forced to transfer from their current plans to something with so much more coverage that it would suffocate their freedoms. Obama's latest plan removes this possibility, and they're really going to miss it. It had gotten to the point where the brethren were complaining Obamacare was forcing new plans on a "historically black college" (and what high-fiving must have gone on over this opportunity to show harm by overcoverage to black people! Who's a racist now, Kenyan Pretender!). Now they're reduced to prosecuting a crime without victims. Expect more yelling.

Obama better fix that fucking website, though.

CHEAP SHOT, NOT SORRY.

Shorter Jonah Goldberg: I'm okay with living in a social media panopticon because you can't Instragram a fart.

UPDATE. Some commenters go to the source, read Goldberg's essay (about how it's great that behaviors can be recorded forever on the internet and employers and schools can use them against you, because character), and come back gagging. "Jonah," asks BigHank53, "you do understand that the Enlightenment was not, in fact, primarily concerned with self-expression?"

For me the most fartworthy aspect of the essay is Goldberg's assumption that if something you did gets you in trouble with a prospective employer or school, it must reflect your bad character, so you had it coming. I doubt Goldberg has ever heard of Hispanics United of Buffalo, Inc. v. Ortiz, a case in which five employees were fired for complaining about their jobs on Facebook, or any of the many other cases like it, but one of the morals of the story is that employers will penetrate as far into their employees' private lives (and that of their prospects) as society will let them, and cheering for further intrusion as a character-building exercise is... well, exactly what I'd expect of him.

#DEBLASIOSNEWYORK WATCH

Chicago's bond rating was downgraded by Fitch; Michael Haltman reacts:

If this is the potential future fate for a city controlled by a democratic machine, what will happen in New York City now that it will be led by Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio and his socialist beliefs?

Fitch didn't mention socialism, but you have to learn to read between the lines in #deblasiosnewyork! (Linked by the Ole Perfesser, natch.) Meanwhile, Samuel Gonzalez of The Last Tradition:

In the past few weeks since the election of Bill de Blasio New York City has suffered an increase of gun violence.

The criminal element in the city have been given a unofificial green light to carry their guns as a result of de Blasio's promise to abolish Stop and Frisk.

I didn't know street criminals followed politics so closely. That free library at Occupy Wall Street really had an impact.  Also:

So de Blasio faces a crisis even before he's taken his oath as mayor. He either carries through with his campaigne promise to dismantle Stop and Frisk or he renigs on his pledge and leaves it in place.

A typo? Sure, that's what Fred Hiatt said.  And at The American Spectator, Paul Kengor:

New Yorkers have elected their first Red Diaper Baby Mayor to go with their first Red Diaper Baby President, who they likewise gleefully elected in landslides. 

So, to repeat my friend’s plea: “What the HELL is going on???”

The answer: Communist brainwashing in our classrooms! Don't blame Kengor, he's doing his part:

Many times I’ve given a speech titled “Why Communism Is Bad,” often sponsored by the excellent Young America’s Foundation. Frustrated college students, captive to the likes of the aforementioned Maoist, beg me to come to their campus: “S.O.S. Please help!”

From Cambridge to Berkeley, millions of college students blinked out cries for help to Paul Kengor from their reeducation centers, yet New York still elected the Red and Black Menace! Weep, eagle, weep!

UPDATE. In comments, Slocum:

As a university professor who actually does run his class like a reeducation camp, including vicious guards... I really wish these right-wingers would stop diluting my brand by using the reeducation camp trope to talk about the time Backwards-Baseball-Cap Bobby had to hear that women don't typically make as much as men for the same work in a sociology class.

SUCCESS IS NOT AN OPTION.

Shorter Megan McArdle: It's impossible to fix the Obamacare website. I should know -- employers put me in charge of a website once, and I was up all night swapping floppy disks.

Here's my favorite part:

Adding bodies is even more problematic; you have to spend time showing the new people how the system works, and then more time managing all the interactions between the extra people. Think of the difference between trying to arrange girls’ night out with a few friends, and trying to throw a sit-down award dinner for 200, and you’ll get some idea of the ways in which adding people can actually slow things down rather than speed them up.

Astute analogy, Hostess with the Mostest. In Megan McArdle's America, anything more complicated than a podcast goes into Why Bother territory, at least if it has Democratic cooties. Thank God she wasn't around for the construction of the Hoover Dam.

UPDATE. In comments, Dr. Hunky Jimpjorps: "That's funny, I can think of a time when Megan McArdle was all for throwing manpower at a problem, back in those mystery days in the pre-Obama before-times." To be fair, that was in furtherance of a much more important goal than national health care -- that is, fixing it so all those lucky anti-war people would no longer be right.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the recent election and how bummed it made the brethren. It's extra-long!

Here's an outtake I'll share with you late-night Real People -- from the Washington Times, "A side of Cuccinelli voters don’t get to see; reluctant politician fan of ‘Rapper’s Delight’":

After record millions spent on TV advertising in Virginia’s governor race, Republican Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II finds himself in the unenviable position of knowing there’s a side to him voters haven’t experienced. 

Portrayed by his opponents as a rigid social ideologue, he nevertheless can rap his own rendition of the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” and is an unapologetic Monty Python fan.

Funny, I'd thought his whole approach to women's issues was kind of a "is your wife a goer" hommage.

UPDATE. In comments: To the news that Cuccinelli loves  "Rapper's Delight" and Monty Python, Haystack reasonably adds, "Him and 100,000 other annoying fratboys." Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard thinks Cuccinelli's favorite joint is actually "Raper's Delight." And smut clyde reacts to Walter Russell Mead's prediction, noted in my column, that "the real middle class will be driven out of the city bit by bit" under de Blasio: "Leaving behind the *spurious* middle class, who can recognised by the tell-tale trait of not agreeing with Mead. But the departure of the real middle class will make room for all those True Scotsmen."

...AND WHEN I WOKE UP, I WAS ON THE FUNDAMENTALIST-BIGOT SIDE OF A VOTE TALLY. WHAT ARE THE ODDS?

Erik Loomis notes that True Son of Liberty Rand Paul voted against ENDA. Well of course. For the libertarians, Scott Shackford of Reason:

Libertarians who believe that hiring policies – even discriminatory ones -- fall under the First Amendment’s “freedom of association” provision may end up getting lumped in with the religious right on this one (not that this is a new thing).

Poor, put-upon fellows, always getting lumped in with the people they always vote with! Look on the bright side, bros -- maybe this vote shows Paul's getting the courage of his convictions back, and will call for the overturn of the Civil Rights Act. Dare to dream!

NOBODY GOES THERE, IT'S TOO CROWDED.

Blah blah blah:

Historically, progressives were seen as partisans for the people, eager to help the working and middle classes achieve upward mobility even at expense of the ultrarich. But in California, and much of the country, progressivism has morphed into a political movement that, more often than not, effectively squelches the aspirations of the majority, in large part to serve the interests of the wealthiest. 

Primarily, this modern-day program of class warfare is carried out under the banner of green politics...

Before we go on, let me note a few things: First, this author, Joel Kotkin, is an alleged urbanist who seems to hate city people: Some years ago he was predicting that sad, city-bound blue states would wither and die while the fecund, corn-fed red-staters would rise to rule.

He's still at it, though in a grumpier and more defensive tone, telling readers that everyone's running screaming from California because it's so horrible and green. The population's only rising a little, so soon you Left Coast hippies will be eating the dust of population gainers like Washington, D.C. -- whoops, we mean North Carolina -- um, still not quite the idea -- ah, yes, here we go: North Dakota, the new Republican paradise, thanks to fracking no long settled exclusively by people on the run from society/the law!

Yet in real life, Cali's political health is vastly improved under Jerry Brown. After the disastrous tenure of Rainier Wolfcastle, Brown engineered a budget surplus and the business interests are happy. He's also merrily passing liberal social policies and telling Republicans to go call a cop if they don't like it.

And it appears the state is with him: He not only gets decent approval numbers for himself -- currently he's at 49% -- he has also managed to get them for tax-hikes-to-pay-for-shit-we-need, which is something Republicans regularly tell us can't ever happen as long as there's one pauper to take food stamps away from instead.

Does Kotkin acknowledge this? Sort of:

Sadly, the opposition to these policies is very weak. The California Chamber of Commerce is a fading force and the state Republican Party has degenerated into a political rump. Business Democrats, tied to the traditional industrial and agricultural base, have become nearly extinct, as the social media oligarchs and other parts of the green gentry, along with the public employee lobby, increasingly dominate the party of the people.

Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed! Inevitably comes the tear-stained, fist-shaking you'll-be-sorry story, of the sort we saw when Bill di Blasio won:

This may constitute an ideal green future — with lower emissions, population growth and family formation — for whose wealth and privilege allow them to place a bigger priority on nature than humanity. But it also means the effective end of the California dream that brought multitudes to our state, but who now may have to choose between permanent serfdom or leaving for less ideal, but more promising, pastures.

You fools are throwing away a great opportunity to become North Dakota on the Pacific! Sure, the creative destruction that comes with fracking is having some unfortunate social effects in ND, but least they're not serfs! Enjoy your world-class culture, dining, and enslavement, San Francisco parasites!

Really, this kind of thing will make sense when Love Canal becomes a tourist attraction.

FINALLY: A USE FOR LIBERTARIANS!

Moving away now from the New York City mayoral election results -- with sincere thanks for all the laffs! -- I direct your attention to my favorite aspect of the Virginia governor's race: The suggestion by some of the brethren that Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis was planted by the Democrats to fix the election for McAuliffe. The Washington Free Beacon:

A donor to the Democratic Party of Virginia and bundler for Barack Obama funded a political action committee that provided Virginia Libertarian gubernatorial candidate Robert Sarvis with a crucial campaign contribution that helped get him on the ballot.

Whoever heard of someone contributing to more than one party? Why, it's like betting on more than one team at a time -- too complicated to be real!

Polls suggest Sarvis didn't affect the outcome, but they would, wouldn't they? Let's hear from the unskewed! Stephen Green at PJ Media:

But let’s not forget my Libertarian friends, who delivered 7% of the vote to phony-balony Libertarian Robert Sarvis. Thanks to them, McAuliffe was able to win with a 48% plurality.

Jonathan S. Tobin at Commentary:

Democrats had a huge financial and demographic advantage in Virginia as well as a divided GOP and a false flag Libertarian candidate that might have taken votes away from the Republicans.

False flag -- Tobin's taking lessons from Alex Jones, it seems. And ever-lovin' Jeff Godlstein:

First, we have to remember that not everyone follows politics as closely as we all do — and yet they would probably tell you that they are politically well-versed, reading the Washington Post, where both conservative George Will and “conservative” Jennifer Rubin were busy writing “a pox on both their houses” columns that, as was the case with Rubin, saw her endorsing the “Libertarian” candidate who it turns out was largely bankrolled by an Obama bundler, and who couldn’t get the support of libertarians Rand or Ron Paul, likely because his support of legalizing marijuana was about the only thing libertarian about the guy...

Wheels within wheels, sheeple!

The beautiful thing about this conspiracy and cover-up is that it implicates Gary Johnson and the libertoids at Reason, including Nick Gillespie, writing for liberal media truth-concealer Time magazine. No, wait -- the beautiful thing is that Cuccinelli apparently thought Sarvis was such a menace that he brought Ron Paul to Virginia to scare off some more moderate voters on the eve of the election. (After the fall, Paul blamed it on the kulaks.)

Actually, the really beautiful thing is this: I've been telling you good people for years that libertarianism is basically a niche brand of conservatism -- a political Converse to their Nike. Libertarians protest this isn't so, but conservatives know it is. And nothing shows it more clearly than the way conservatives celebrate the libertarian movement when it works for them, and flip out when it doesn't work to their advantage. You can't get mad at a dog for biting you -- unless it's your own dog.

SAVOR THE MOMENT.

Since de Blasio's Communist putsch, I feel as if conservative commentators, whether sad or enraged, are just sending me gifts. At AIM, Cliff Kincaid is still crying about a media conspiracy -- which now apparently includes Rupert Murdoch:

If you think Barack Obama has gotten a free ride from the press, consider the case of Bill de Blasio. 

The New York Post revealed at the last minute that the Marxist frontrunner for mayor of New York City visited Communist Russia in 1983. But the paper’s bizarre cover headline, “Back in the USSR,” complete with a hammer-and-sickle, seemed to make a mockery of the discovery. 

International communism, which claimed more than 100 million lives, is not a laughing matter, nor just the subject of a 1968 song by the Beatles.

The reason the Posties "seemed to make a mockery of the discovery" is because none of them was dumb enough to believe it would make the slightest bit of difference; calling de Blasio a commie in 2013 has about as much resonance as calling him an Albigensian. They're just throwing boob bait to out-of-town wingnut true believers. While Kincaid suspects counter-counter-revolutionary tendencies, I'm sure most of them are just adding a few more guns to the dens of their McMansions and lighting an extra candle to Joe McCarthy.

UPDATE. Jonah Goldberg phones it in:

But for those of us born and raised in pre-Giuliani New York, he can also conjure images of Charles Bronson in Death Wish, the gritty vigilante flick that symbolized the city in that era...

Hollywood may have exaggerated the extent of New York’s Stygian gloom, but you can only exaggerate the truth. And anyone who lived in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s can recognize that while Death Wish may have been a caricature, like any good caricature it captured the likeness better than the subject would have wanted.

If you need to explain the quality of Goldberg's writing to anyone, remember this: Rather than describe his own actual experiences, Goldberg mentions a shitty old movie. Which he also can't be bothered to describe.

In case you weren't already assuming this, Goldberg also can't explain why New Yorkers would embrace a candidate like de Blasio. Here's his running jump:

A city with a better memory would still surely be liberal, but it would not be defrosting someone like de Blasio.

If only New York had been taking its gotu kola, it would have elected Christine Quinn.

[di Blasio] would be impossible without the successes of the Giuliani administration (and Bloomberg’s willingness to sustain them), just as Giuliani would have been impossible without the accumulated failures of his predecessors.

This is like saying that the socialists couldn't have won in Spain were it not for the years of Francoist repression that came before. Which, come to think of it, is a pretty good analogy!

AS IF YOU NEEDED ANOTHER REASON TO VOTE FOR HIM...

(h/t Josh Marshall) Go, New York comrades -- avenge Stalin, Lenin, Billie Boggs, Larry Hogue, and me! I can't be with you, but after the victory's won and the city collapses I will visit and toast you all in crack and Champale.

UPDATE. The really crabby ones are going in for that you'll-all-be-sorry-someday bit. Daniel Greenfield:

And next time one of the innocent victims of Stop and Frisk is pounding your face into the sidewalk with one hand while digging through your pockets with the other, wave to the pair of beat cops sitting in the window of the coffee shop. And they'll wave back without getting up. Because you voted for this. And you're getting what you deserve...

I think a bum sneezed on this guy once and he shit himself.

And that experimental art gallery, the one with collages of world leaders made out of broken glass as a statement against capitalism? It's a burnt out abandoned building again. The owner who used to want 10 million bucks for the building would give it to you in exchange for paying the tax bill.

Hallelujah!

But you won't take it. You voted for De Blasio, but you're not that stupid. No one buys real estate in De Blasio time.

The fuck they don't! That's when the pros buy. Buy cheap, sell dear. What kind of a capitalist are you?

Oh, Greenfield also predicts there'll be terrorist attacks because of di Blasio:

They say ten thousand people died. But a hundred thousand were affected by the gas pouring through the subway tunnels all the way down to Times Square. Some of them may die. A lot of them have scarred lungs...  

The NYPD could have stopped them. It would have stopped them under Giuliani and Bloomberg. But the terrorists were smarter than you. They waited for De Blasio time...

He closes with de Blasio voters trying to fly out of town but being blown out of the sky by Ay-rabs ("But you shouldn't complain. This is what you voted for..."). The whole thing demands to be read aloud in an Angry Masturbator voice.

UPDATE 2. Fire up the tumbrels!

MY EYES... ZE GOGGLES DO NOTHING!

The election's not till tomorrow,  and one should never count one's chickens etc., but let's start early celebrating the reign of Mayor de Blasio just because it makes wingnuts so mad.

I want to focus a minute on their Big Bill's a Red thing, which they seem at one point to have thought would stop the juggernaut. Wall Street Journal:

Bill de Blasio Should Ask Me About the Sandinistas 

The New York mayoral candidate still fondly recalls a regime that I fled in terror for my life.

Yelling at di Blasio for "fondly recalling" the Sandinistas makes as much sense as yelling at someone for saying he liked The Motorcycle Diaries.

Twenty-five years is a long time, and people change. But on this subject, Mr. de Blasio has made clear that he has not.

Clearly! He's always demanding people call him El Caudillo and brandishing a machete.

Cliff Kincaid at Renew America:

The media whitewash Obama-backed Marxist candidate

...Incredibly, De Blasio says he still supports the Sandinistas and remains influenced by liberation theology, which was manufactured by the old KGB to dupe Christians into supporting Marxism.

Tell it to Pope Francis. National Review's resident pencil-neck Jay Nordlinger:

The man who will probably be our next mayor, Bill de Blasio, is almost a perfect leftist. He and his wife even honeymooned in the Castros’ Cuba. This reminded me of Pierre Trudeau, of whom it has been said, “It tells you everything that he honeymooned in the Soviet Union"...

Here is an uncomfortable question, liable to be damned as McCarthyite by those who don’t want to address it: If the likes of Trudeau and de Blasio were born under Communist dictatorship, what would they do in their adult lives?

Those of us over a certain age will recognize the tropes, including the "So how about that, Mr. Smarty-Pants Communist?" bit at the end that just assumes de Blasio's Communism (he's just like that Trudeau, you know), done with confidence that it'll get the citizens pulling their chins and going, "Say, 'de Blasio' does have sort of a Red sound to it!"  Ditto Deroy Murdock:

... the ad reinforces the fundamental mythology that fuels de Blasio’s campaign: The filthy rich refuse to pay what they should in taxes, and must be shaken down to benefit poorer New Yorkers, whom these dandies have stiffed.

It’s a truly touching narrative — worthy of Charles Dickens or perhaps Karl Marx.

We got rid of the Commies, and it's only a matter of time before we get rid of literature and empathy too. Then the conservative revolution will be complete!

But as de Blasio has racked up the points, even Kincaid has had to catch on that his red-baiting was getting him nowhere -- "But there's more to this story than Marxism, which most people think is a dead ideology that has no relevance today," he sighs -- and switch to the new attack line about di Blasio inviting hoodie-hood boys to bum rush the show and take your daughter to Plato's Retreat.

It looks like that's not working, either.

Quick, there's only a day left -- someone tie de Blasio to Obamacare!

UPDATE. I was kidding about Obamacare, but on Twitter Mike Di Paola informs me that the New York Post's Bob McManus actually went for it in August with "De Blasio's Big ObamaCare Problem." di Blasio had complained about the winnowing of New York's hospitals (e.g. St. Vincent's), and McManus informed him that it was his own fault, and Obama's, because

New federal, state and local laws and regulations — soon to include ObamaCare, with a vengeance — are vaporizing the financial incentives for unneeded and extended hospitalizations, for example. Hospitals are now sharply penalized for such practices. 

The changes have slashed patient populations — and so pushed many financially marginal institutions straight over the edge. (See above, Long Island College Hospital.)

Meanwhile, both the government and insurers have been heavily incentivizing “wellness initiatives” — quit-smoking and diet programs and so on — meant to dramatically cut hospitals out of the picture.

Trying to improve healthcare ruins everything! There are also some ravings about how di Blasio wants hospitals to stay open so he can funnel phoney-baloney jobs to his pals at SEIU, but really, it's just the typographic equivalent of someone throwing whatever rock, mudball, or candy wrapper he can find at a target he can't hit.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the latest Obamacare outrage -- that some people had their old policies cancelled, an event that could not have been foreseen unless you had been paying attention to the news when the ACA was passed three and a half years ago or at any time since. I'm thinking they have these things on a rotation schedule -- next week, I'm told, Routine 12 will be that your new Obamacare plan will have fewer providers than the one you have now. The week after that, it'll be that the laminate will wear off your plan ID card more easily than your old one. Eventually, it'll be "Benghazi" and "skree." 

VOX POPULI.

Our guest today is Greta Frost, who says she's angry that President Obama took away her health care plan that she was very happy with. Greta, can you tell us what happened?

Thank you, Dana. Well, I work as a cashier at a diner and we were all getting along quite fine without a health plan until Darla, one of the waitresses, got a goiter and the hospital costs got so much she had to move to a shipping container over by the rail yard and now the only kind of bath she can get is in the sink in our Ladies' Room. So I went shopping for a group plan, but since so many of the workers at the diner are young and believe all that Obamacare nonsense they didn't want to go in on it, so I put together an application with some ladies here in Durham who like to get together and watch Modern Family every week.

We got a policy from a company called ClarioCare, which was a division of Shepard's Heating and Cooling, and while $310 a month sounds like a lot of money, it was much better than what the others were charging, and I found that it suited my needs. Naturally there were some things they couldn't cover, like my hysterectomy. And I understand that, they're a business, they have to make money same as we all do.

But they were there for me in other ways. For example, last year I cut my finger pretty bad on a slicer at work, and they shipped me next-day air a big box of Band-Aids, or I should say Curad strips. When I wrote back and told them that the Curad strips didn't stick very well to my skin, they wrote right back to apologize and explained that all their Curad strips had got soaked in Hurricane Sandy, and they sent another big box of Curad strips and a tub of Elmer's Glue-All. So I felt like they were really looking out for me.

Well, last week I got this letter from ClarioCare and I was fit to be tied because it said thanks to Obama, not only were they going to get rid of my policy, but they were getting out of the insurance business altogether to concentrate on heating and cooling and also real estate, and they sent me a free invitation to a seminar about that as a parting gift. I appreciated the gesture but what I did not appreciate was Obama taking away this insurance plan that I was very happy with. If I cut myself again, or, God forbid, get cancer, who's going to send me Curad strips? So I haven't even been to that Obamacare website which I hear doesn't work anyway, and I'm not going to call them on the phone or send in any forms. Instead I'm going around to all the talk shows that the nice people from that Foundation want to put me on, and tell people my story, and I'm sure once they've heard it, they'll agree that the answer to all our health care problems in this country is health savings accounts and tort reform.

SO CLOSE.

Wall Street Journal:

The great American jobs machine is faltering, and it is time for Washington to pay attention. Participation in the workforce is falling, the pace of job creation is anemic, and long-term unemployment remains stubbornly high. Many newly created jobs pay less than those that disappeared during the Great Recession, so real wages are stagnating, and median household income is no higher than it was a quarter of a century ago.

I can't tell you how long I've waited for these fuckers to acknowledge this!

...Part of the problem is the weakness of the current economic recovery. During the Great Recession, the labor-force participation rate declined. But even after the downturn ended in mid-2009, the rate continued to decline. It has fallen more since the recovery began than it did between December 2007 and June 2009. The aging of the U.S. workforce explains only a fraction of this worrisome development. Something else is going on.

Preach it, brother! Things haven't just been getting shittier since the recession; they've been getting shittier for decades as the employment scene has shifted from jobs ordinary people could make a living at to jobs you need two of, or a college education to obtain.  This scarcity and the attendant pressures on people's lives are transforming the country into a neo-feudal state. I'm just glad the Journal is catching up...

In the early 1960s, labor-force participation among men ages 25 to 64 began a slow steady decline from 95% to about 84% today, a trend masked by the surge of women into the labor force. But women's participation in the labor force peaked in 2000 and has since declined by two percentage points. Unless men re-enter the job market, prospects for the resumption of vigorous growth in the U.S. labor force are dim.

Blink. Blink.

So... they think the money itself isn't what's important; what's important is that more of the people earning what little there is of it should have penises.

Oh, well; maybe a few more generations of this shit will... actually, no.

UPDATE. I wonder if Kay Hymowitz has caught up with this. She's one of our preeminent anti-feminist scolds, but back in 2007 she was telling us how great the creative destruction of manufacturing jobs had been for America, and decried "the mechanical repetition endured by the men and women who bolted thingamajigs to widgets on the assembly line." Ah, here she is in 2011, telling us "today’s labor market prizes female strengths more than male strengths" and "younger women... have shown they can easily be men’s equals, and possibly even their superiors, in the knowledge economy." But is she as happy as she had been four years earlier that foreign slaves have taken over the widgets and thingamajigs from Americans, allowing women to rise? Recall that, in the interval, Obama was elected and Men's Rights nuts became an important Republican constituency, and take a guess:

Beginning in the middle of 20th century, not coincidentally the same historical moment that great numbers of women were moving into the workforce and becoming economically independent, the universal assumption that men were essential to family life started to erode. Divorce and single motherhood began to rise; even today, though divorce rates have declined, 40% of American children are now born to single mothers... 

This existential theory, stressing the loss of men’s primary social role, is impossible to prove with any certainty.

Heh.

But there is some evidence that unmarried men are less motivated in the workplace.

The bitches-ruin-everything racket must be some sweet, easy money.

UPDATE 2. In comments, my guests wonder what economy the Journal editors are looking at. "On planet WSJ," says Derelict, "those high-paying jobs are hanging on the lowest branches, just waiting to fall into the outstretched scrotums of anyone who can piss high enough up the wall." Haystack nicely encapsulates their argument: "In order for there to be more jobs, more men have to find jobs." And Chris V82 asks, plaintively, "So tell me, exactly, what I have to do with my penis to get a new job. Do you want me to cum on your face? I'll do it, as long as I get some extra vacation days."

Also, Dr. Hunky Jimpjorps alerts us that at Instapundit, the Ole Perfesser "heh-indeeds that this is just another sign that men have Gone Galt! in the face of feminism and shills his wife's book." Since crackpot conservative themes often get a trial run on the Perfesser's pages, it looks like the New Thing for the Right Wing is glibertarianism plus Men's Rights advocacy. If you don't think these two groups would get along, you haven't been paying attention.

THIS HERE'S A ZOO AND THE KEEPER AIN'T YOU/AND I'M SICK OF IT, I'M SICK OF YOU.

The Wall Street Journal is really pissed Bill de Blasio is cruising into the New York mayoralty:

Occupy City Hall

...The Occupy movement that in 2011 pitched street camps in the U.S. from Wall Street to San Francisco posited a tale of two Americas and class resentment unseen for many decades. The movement faded, but if the opinion polls are right, New York voters are about to elect the Occupy movement to run America's largest city.

As with Obama, no election is legitimate if the Democrat wins or is expected to.

The Big Apple is on the verge of electing a man whose explicit agenda is the repudiation of the conservative reforms achieved by a generation of city leaders from both parties, which transformed New York from a terrifying urban joke into the nation's municipal crown jewel.

Thereafter, we get a reading from The Gospel According to Rudy and scary puppets labeled "Living Wage" and "Rent Control."

But not once does Journal address the question of why New Yorkers are prepared to vote for de Blasio -- except for this pathetic specimen:

Bill de Blasio, the Democratic nominee, is leading Republican Joe Lhota by more than 40 points. Conventional wisdom holds that this is happening mainly because New Yorkers are "tired" of Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Losing access to 16-ounce cups of soda is insufficient reason for what is likely to happen to New York.

I've been in exile a couple of years but I can say this with confidence: The soda thing isn't why the citizens are turning toward de Blasio. (For one thing, de Blasio supports the soda ban.)

If New Yorkers are tired of Bloomberg, it may be because between him and Giuliani they've had nearly twenty years of crackdown government and they're sick of it. It doesn't help that Bloomberg acts as if he's just as sick of them. Last week, for example, he altered the terms of the Met Museum's lease so that they can charge a flat fee (if you can call $25 flat), which may end the possibility of cheap admission to one of the world's great museums in one of the world's great cities -- where many residents can't afford it (and Joe Lhota doesn't seem to care about that either).

The Journal also complains that de Blasio "has held no real job," but after three terms of a guy who's a massive business success and treats his constituents like kitchen help, that's not much of a knock.

Polls show that citizens are divided over stop and frisk, but the Journal might take a hint from the fact that a clear majority of them are willing to throw it over and even risk a return to the horrors of CBGB and Mean Streets if it means an end to a corporate governance model that's always warning it can continue to provide good services only by selling out the city's patrimony. If they can also get a thumb in the eye of the suck-up press that enables it, so much the better.

I'm two hundred miles away but if de Blasio wins I'm gonna party.

UPDATE. Oh, as if I needed another reason to celebrate, Ron Radosh at PJ Media:

Whether you call it the new Popular Front uniting unabashed Marxists, revolutionary activists, and liberal Democrats, as [Sol] Stern does, or a “new New Left,” as [Tom] Hayden does, it threatens the well-being of our entire country. We may not live in New York City, but we cannot ignore what is happening there.

Yeah, when you watch TV shows set in New York, you won't be able to relax -- you'll be thinking, "The whole thing is run by commies!" Plus when you go there on business, you'll have to worry about squeegee men nationalizing your wallet.

UPDATE 2. Har, hellslittlestangel in comments, "The Journal doesn't give Giuliani enough credit. Thanks to his reforms, murder rates are at their lowest since the 1960s in the entire country." And tigrismus on the Journal's gripe that de Blasio "has held no real job": "The Journal author wrote this in rivets." Hey, be nice: There's a good chance whichever factotum wrote that editorial does cardio kick-boxing on his lunch breaks.

Also amusing: Wingnuts hung up on the fact that de Blasio expressed admiration for the Sandinistas, for God's sake, instead of the Contras as a true Reaganite would. "Bill de Blasio remains a fan of burning synagogues and persecuting Jews," babbles Daniel Greenfield  at FrontPageMag. "So it seems a fair question: Is Bill de Blasio still a Sandinista at heart?" asks Matthew Hennessey at City Journal. Must be tough having to go out at Halloween dressed as Daniel Ortega and find nobody's scared of you or even knows why they're supposed to be.

Try something else, fellas -- hey, did you know his wife is black? It may come to that, or to the shctick Paul Mirengoff thought was killer at Power Line back in August:

Public Advocate Bill Di Blasio is running because he doesn’t think there’s anyone sufficiently Progressive in the field. He rides his bicycle through the hip Brooklyn brownstone belt trolling for voters and needs no prompting to tell you that he’s Italian and his wife is African-American.

Yeah, why would anyone in New York go for a guy who rides a bike in Brooklyn? That's like eating pastrami without mayonnaise.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the dysfunctional Obamacare website, which rightbloggers assure us can never be fixed. Of course, the same people also think they're going to win back the nation with Twitter, so I don't know how much tech cred to give them.

GROWING UP IN PUBLIC.

The Lou Reed story is sort of like one of those horrible satires where someone who has no business being a rock star gets made into one. Like Dylan, when Reed sang he was mostly hitting the penumbrae of blue notes. But when Dylan sang ballads, he was at least dry and efficient; Reed was so shaky he sounded like a put-on. Or he would have, were it not that the songs he was singing -- Sunday Morning, Here She Comes Now, Pale Blue Eyes -- were so good they didn't need beautiful voices, though it helped if you knew that the guy warbling them was their creator.

Reed made sure you knew, and this is another way his story differs from Expresso Bongo or The Idolmaker: More than most, Reed made his own way. Oh, he had a lot of help -- managers and producers and, my God, Andy Warhol. But the biggest contributor to Reed's success was popular culture, and his own ability as an artist and a vendor of his own art to work it to his advantage. People talk about how out-of-place the Velvets were in their time, but really they were only slightly ahead -- leading edge, as it were. Reed, a former song-plugger, saw a quake island emerging from the roiling 60s scene on which he could plant his flag. A lot of people wanted to be dark and transgressive in those days, but not too many thought of doing it with a band that played in discotheques. I believe if Reed had taken the cultural temperature of his time and found it unpropitious for what he was doing, he wouldn't have gone back to doing The Ostrich; he might have become a novelist and played in the garage on weekends. Or maybe the other way around.

But once he saw his opening he grabbed it, and every advantage that came after. He basically dared the rock world to ignore him, and of course they couldn't. This more than the East Village adventuring is what I think helped make Reed the New York stand-in he turned into; he got so good at the staring contest he was able to get RCA to put out Metal Machine Music. On Red Seal, yet!

We all know the big hits and funny stories ("I have a New York code of ethics...in other words, watch your mouth"), and as one who labored in the feedback mills of the old Lower East Side I'll always hold the clangorous Velvets in my heart. But now that he's dead I'm thinking of the modest, affecting songs Reed produced as a mature artist, things like My Friend George and What's Good -- just solid, beautiful things, like pop songs except much better. And especially the songs that are strange, but not the ones that could have been expected to provoke outrage or vicarious thrills and are all most people know about him -- I mean Coney Island Baby strange, where all the daring was in the willingness to reach deep into experience and risk embarrassment by being poetic about it. You aren't going to play anything like that or My House or The Kids if you care at all whether people are going to laugh at you. You do it knowing they're the ones who should be scared.

That's the kind of tough guy Lou Reed was, and what's really sad about his death, along with everything that's always sad about death, is that we now have one less of them, because we need all we can get.

UPDATE. In Neil Gaiman's 1989 interview with him, Reed's in a relaxed mood, and cops to "the Lou Reed persona" as "something I use to keep a distance." That should be obvious, but I don't remember him ever saying it out loud before that.

Now, it's not like Reed stopped playing Lou Reed and beating up interviewers: Get a load of the shit he gives this poor guy from Spin in 2010 ("I don't want to get into this stupid subject with you. You brought it up. You shouldn't have. We had a good conversation, and now we're done...").

Time has put the Lou Reed persona into perspective. It's a cliche that the most sensitive people put up the hardest fronts. People tend to assume putting up a front is a tragic reaction formation, and there's something to that. But if you learn to fight back out of fear, that doesn't mean you have to give up all your moves when you become enlightened -- so long as you know what you're doing.

From the beginning in his work, Reed exposed his feelings, some of which were obviously very raw. (In the Gaiman interview, he says, "Periodically I do something older and I suddenly realize 'God -- listen to what this [song] is about. I can't believe that I said this in public.'")  It's one thing to do that from, say, an academic sinecure in a cozy collegetown, and another to do it in New York, where if you show anything like weakness (and many morons do think feelings, and honesty about them, are weak) you can expect some emotional criminal will take a jimmy to it and see what he can get.

The act you adopt to cope with that kind of scene can fuck you up -- look at Mike Tyson. But I think Reed at least eventually had a good relationship with his persona, that is, he had more control of it than it had of him. He must have, to let himself be used as a signifier for ooh-scary-gritty-New-York in that stupid Honda commercial where he says "Don't settle for walkin,'" and then go out on the street without hiding his face in shame. He could do it because he was carrying the act lightly but with confidence, the way a toreador flaunts his cape; such a thin little thing, yet you can wield it with great power to keep fools in line and occasionally pick up some easy money from Madison Avenue.

I mention all this because if you know someone from New York, you may know the act. New Yorkers aren't really hard people, at least not the way you think or the way they want you to think. But they are busy with things to do, and need their space.

PANDERING.

Matt Lewis at The Daily Caller:

This summer, I interviewed Dr. Helen Smith about her book Men on Strike...

I know, off to a bad start already. But wait, as the kids say, it gets better:

Her premise is simple: More and more American men are making the conscious decision to avoid the drama and heartache that comes with relationships. It’s just not worth it, they say. 

The Japanese word for this is “Mendokusai.” How do I know? It turns out this same phenomenon is taking place amongst young people of both sexes in Japan. Not only are many forgoing marriage, they are also skipping... sex. It’s just not worth it, they say.

Number one, there's a huge gap between "I don't want a relationship" and "I don't want to have sex." Number two, the Japan study to which he refers is mostly bogus. But when you're dealing with American conservatives, facts are the least of it. Lewis laments:

Could there be a connection between what Dr. Helen is documenting here and what’s happening in Japan? Japanese culture and American culture are, of course, a world apart, but technology has made that world smaller. And, in fact, technology might just be the common denominator... 

Interestingly, in her book, Dr. Helen also argues that online porn is replacing the need for American women.

Oh well then: A reference to technology, and an assertion by Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser. What more do you need? The angst extrudes -- Erstwhile sex scold Rod Dreher:

How can an entire country lose the will to reproduce itself, which is to say, the will to live?

Glenn Beck's The Blaze:

WILL THIS NATION’S ‘CELIBACY SYNDROME’ CAUSE IT TO ‘PERISH INTO EXTINCTION’?

At Legal Insurrection, neo-neocon:

When nearly all is permitted (sexually, that is), the prospect of sex loses its forbidden fruit aspect and becomes more ho-hum.

Speak for yourself, honey. But let's not miss the big picture here: Conservatives are beginning to reverse their usual pattern, and are complaining about other people not having sex instead of other people having it. It's kind of a breakthrough!

Alas, there are holdouts. From the Patriot Action Network:

The latest 'trend' that has been called for this is that young men and woman are not having meaningless sex, premarital sex or leading the value of sex being the key to their lives... 

The news is saying this is a bad thing...but in the big picture, is that the truth? 

What isn't being reported, is the transformation that is happening with the young... Many are becoming Christians.

Eventually someone from the central office is going to have to come around and hip this guy to the new realities. I predict conservatives will shift over time from nagging paupers to get married to nagging them to have sex. It'll give them something positive to offer voters. I mean, it's not like they can offer them clean air or water.

UPDATE. Comments are always the best part of alicublog but in this case our gloss squad have outdone themselves. Some are understandable bemused by professional slut-shamer Rod Dreher turning into a sex cheerleader. "When Crunchy Rod is asking us to fornicate, the End Times are upon us," observes DocAmazing. But philadelphialawyer rightly points out that Dreher and his colleagues at The American Conservative are addicted to gloomy "the death of" stories -- and that their prescriptions are, for people who profess a concern for our humanity, weirdly inhuman:

For example, folks should have children not because they want to, not because they enjoy children, or because they think they would be good parents, or because society is accommodating to child raising, but because society, particularly Western society, oh screw it, let's just tell it like it is, because the Great White Race needs them to... 

In other words, people should make highly personal decisions which directly impact their life for the good of the collective... And yet they will turn around and accuse "the left" of suborning the individual to the mass, of being purely utilitarian, of running roughshod over individual conscience, and so on.

Or as Spaghetti Lee puts it, "Fuck like your country depends on it!" Meanwhile trex delineates Matt Lewis' logic model:

I like to call this fallacy "The Transitive Property of Cryptids" or "The Six Degrees of Loch Ness Monster:" 

1. Dr. Helen says men are avoiding relationships.
2. Kids in Japan are avoiding sex.
3. Technology exists in both cultures
4. Women use technology look at porn
5. People look for other forbidden things with technology
6. Loch Ness Monster

WATERLOO, COULDN'T ESCAPE IF I WANTED TO.

J. Christian Adams at PJ Media:

Ted Cruz Won

Tell us about it, Mr. Adams.

Deal-making and compromise have pushed the country toward fiscal catastrophe. Only Cruz and his supporters stood fast, and Americans noticed.

I'll say they have! The debacle even seems to have more kindly disposed the people toward the ACA. But how is this good for Ted Cruz?

Second, now is the time to wreck Obamacare. Some in the GOP think they can win a couple of elections over the next few years and unravel the program once the GOP gains the White House. This ignores the shrinking attention span of the body politic. It also ignores the fact that many in the GOP are part of the problem. 

So, you can't count on the ADD American People, the Democrats, or the Republicans: What's left?

What about support to delay Obamacare’s implementation? That’s a ploy to save Obamacare. 

Pay attention who is calling for a delay. Partisans like Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), John Stewart, Wolf Blitzer and Robert Gibbs know a delay today means preservation tomorrow. That’s why they support it. It is the modern Rope-a-Dope. Muhammad Ali famously employed his Rope-a-Dope to delay the fight, wear down, and eventually knock out his opponents. Focusing on Obamacare’s delay, and not its destruction, is an effort to preserve Obamacare.

They're just late to the party: The Tea Party Republicans already tried to save Obamacare by delaying it a year weeks ago. They couldn't do it, yet Obamacare miraculously persisted. Some people think that's because it's a federal law, passed by Congress and signed by the President, but to Christian it's clearly a form of witchcraft.

Some in the GOP were annoyed by Ted Cruz leading the fight to defund Obamacare. They claimed that if Cruz didn’t muddy up the debate, the failures of Obamacare would have been cleanly on display during the program’s rollout. Right. 

The failures have only gotten worse now that the shutdown is over. 

So have at it. Let’s see if they’re right. 

The failures of Obamacare couldn’t be worse. Obamacare has become a punch line, a joke, a catastrophic catastrophe, squared. So have at it. Prove that a shutdown-less environment could lead to killing off the program. Go win the narrative you said you could win.

This actually sounds, in a whining way, like an admission of total defeat -- that even if the world understands Obamacare to be a failure because the website doesn't work, it will still go on making America socialist or whatever. In closing Christian grows still more cryptic:

But we may learn that the Cruz-led fight focused the nation on the failures of Obamacare in a way that no pundit or consultant will be able to match. If the Cruz-less narrative fails to win the field and end Obamacare, then Cruz wins yet again.

So, the nation gets a health care program, and Ted Cruz gets to tell people he tried to stop it. Another such victory... but let that wait until Obama or somebody proposes a national minimum income. Then we can do this all over again.

UPDATE. In comments, Spaghetti Lee:

This is like Reverse Wingnut Zeno's Paradox or something. 

The trend in this instance may be traced to Jonah Goldberg's post-collapse invocation of the "it just doesn't matter" scene from Meatballs. Goldberg seems unaware that the happy denouement of that film was created by screenwriters, not fate.

TODAY YOUR LOVE, TOMORROW THE WORLD.

What the...

Jay Z’s American Fascism

Remember those stories about how NWA was going to turn your kids into foul-mouthed murderers? David P. Goldman has revived the formula for PJ Media -- with an extra shout-out to liberal fascism!

Who would have believed that a performing genre (it is a stretch to call it “music”) dominated by convicted and confessed criminals, brutally misogynistic, preaching and practicing violence, would come to dominate American popular culture?

Someone who's ever seen Jimmy Cagney shove a grapefruit in Mae Clark's face, that's who.

Violence is not only a legitimate form of expression: it is the only manly form of expression, as in his rap “D.O.A.”...

One should not conclude from this that Obama favors criminal violence, but rather that the popular response to Jay Z’s evocation of felonious rage is so great that Obama finds it convenient to exploit it.

Jay Z appeals to the same kind of rage that Hitler and Mussolini exploited during the interwar years. Never in the postwar period has the United States had youth unemployment in the 25% range for over half a decade...

Despite some demurrers -- inserted, no doubt, to keep the men in the white suits off his tail -- Goldman's clear implication is that Jay Z is Obama's Ernst Rohm, enforcing the Kenyan Tyrant's big takeover with an Ooga Booga Army of brownshirts.

Religion can't compete, because the kids aren't going to church anymore, says Goldman. His best advice to fellow conservatives is to heed the example of the Orthodox Jews' stubborn resistance to modernity:

It is an extended war of attrition to recreate a conservative majority from the grass roots up, in the face of a truly evil effort to exploit the rage and frustration of young Americans. It will last the rest of our lifetimes and more.

Maybe Goldman can give this as a speech at the 2016 GOP Convention. I bet it achieves some real movement at the polls!

For a competing but equally valid conspiracy theory, check out Michael T. Snyder on how Jay Z's mobbed up with the Illuminati. Obama isn't mentioned, but Hillary is -- it's a long game!

UPDATE. Famous rapper Jay B has one of the many normal-person reactions in comments: "Jesus Christ, I guess the last 35 fucking years of conservative race panic over 'rap' flew past this guy, seeing how he's just now heard about this new fangled rhyming ghetto thing. He takes on literally the only rap artist that my mom knows about and who seems to rap with about the same amount of rage as the average mall walker and still, even after all this time, tries the ol' 'if you can call it music' bullshit. It's like this was beamed in from 1988. Someone should sneak him a copy of It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back, he might never go outside again."

THE GULL CAN'T HELP IT.

Midway through Charles C.W. Cooke's latest jet of froth (short version: People hate the Tea Party only because liberals are mean) comes this gem:

When the history of this period in American life comes to be written, historians will almost certainly come to see the hysteria prompted by the rise of the Tea Party as akin to the “Red Scare” of the 1950s — except, that is, that there were actual Communist traitors in America.

This reminds me of the bit in Costa-Gavras' Z in which a fascist general, under prosecution for the murder of a leftist politician, is asked by a reporter if he feels himself to be a new Dreyfus. "Dreyfus was guilty!" cries the general.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...closing out our shutdown coverage with the rightbloggers' post-mortem. Among the painful lessons learned: It most certainly wasn't anything they did.

Didn't have room to include the resurrection of an oldie but goodie from Investors Business Daily:

Obama Following Alinsky Script In Shutdown Showdown

Among the President's Alinskyisms, per IDB, was ridicule, which in the conservative script is never merited by ridiculous behavior, nor found funny because it is funny, but only employed by leftists as a communistic technique and approved by fellow travelers:

During a Maryland speech last month, Obama cited New Hampshire state Rep. Bill O'Brien's remark that ObamaCare is "a law as destructive to personal and individual liberty as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850." 

"Think about that. Affordable health care is worse than a law that lets slave owners get their runaway slaves back," Obama quipped. "I mean, these are quotes. I'm not making this stuff up." 

That calculated stink bomb was met by a chorus of gasps and boos from the largely black audience.

Those people even laugh at "quips" differently than whites/conservatives!  Clearly the answer is more tricorners and knee-breeches.