HOWARD BEACH. HOWARD BEACH. I was required to attend an employee testimonial out in Howard Beach. All I knew about the neighborhood prior to this evening was that a group of young white guys had chased a black kid onto the Belt Parkway there in 1986. The kid, Michael Griffith, was struck by traffic and killed. Things were ugly in New York for a while after. I remember heading home late one night around that time on the Lower East Side, and noticing some young black guys coming out of a club. As I walked on, I heard someone behind me say, "Let's get the cracker. Howard Beach. Howard Beach." Nothing happened to me, though there were a couple of incidents in that period that probably began the same way.

As Lou Reed said, those were different times.

Tonight's event was at a big old hall called Russo's By The Bay. It's one of those parkway palaces -- a large, filigreed block of stone with thin red carpet and jacketed valets out front, and ornate rooms inside -- good place for your stereotypical Queens wedding reception. As we drove to the place (the company generously spotted me to a car service), I scoped the streets of the neighborhood. Its boundary was announced by gold lettering on a wooden sign painted sky blue, like you'd expect to see at a yacht club. Strolling the streets were young Italian men, and young black men, and young Hispanic men, all in casual clothes and looking comfortable and happy. When I stepped out of the car onto the red carpet, I could smell the sea.

I was seated at a circular table (#9), surrounded mostly by women who sold goods for the company. They were nearly all black, all very well-behaved, happy to be there but not overly demonstrative. I endeavored to draw them out. I drank the wine that flowed. We chatted, had some laughs. I sat next to a very ample middle-aged woman who'd had trouble with her leg, she explained, and this had caused her weight to increase, though she did a lot of walking in her business. She was cheerful and friendly and I was glad to sit with her and hear her deep laughter, though I occasionally turned my attention to an older white woman, very compact in stature and gesture, who announced forthrightly that she had been in the Holocaust, and her son, a chubby fellow wearing a filthy striped shirt and a straw cowboy hat, who seemed primarily interested in the food.

I stepped out to the red carpet every so often to have a smoke. Other guests of the event came out there, all black women. We conversed mildly, except when they were occupied with the company of their friends. One woman sheathed in several layers of diaphonous black fabric laughed uproariously, standing barefoot and sometimes stamping with glee on the thin carpet. One woman with many, many jewel-like encrustations on her black eyeglass frames complained to me, in a good-humored way, that she had been at the job 19 years and had hardly won any of the prizes given out at these events. I wished her luck. Across the street was an Italian restaurant with its roof peaked and striped to look like a circus tent, and a circular passage inside the doorway inscribed with the words FOOD, FAMILY, and FUN.

The event was MC'd by a local bigwig with a Spanish name who looked and acted like a cross between Kevin Spacey and Tim Allen. He energetically announced a series of awards and gifts from the shallow stage, each punctuated by audio stings from a DJ at the other side of the room. The guests were only mildly attentive. They had to work the next day. So did I, but I clapped and attended very attentively, being in the communications business. I noticed that the woman with the jewel-like encrustations had been called up to receive a small box of something or other. I waved and hollered to her; she waved back with a small smile.

I got in the car somewhere between 10:30 and 11 to ride back to my apartment. The car radio played old hits, some of them from the Michael Griffith era. I watched the city roll by, its lights large and bright and imperturbable.

A PLEA FOR SLACK. I studied this Salon article by Steven E. Landsburg several minutes, hoping there was some Modest-Proposal satirical angle I was missing. But there was not: he really thinks we should "punish" juries that hand down verdicts that turn out to be "wrong" (more on the second set of quote marks in a bit).

The goal, says Landsburg, is to give jurors "incentive to get their verdicts right in the first place." Good verdicts win you a check; bad ones get you a fine (!).

This is wrong is so many ways it makes the head spin, but I will focus only on two:

First, the idea of a "wrong" verdict. Landsburg uses the Lemrick Nelson case to add punch to his argument -- he got away with murder! -- and another involving a wrongly-convicted, DNA-liberated guy, just to show that he's not just bloodthirsty, I guess. The injustices in both these cases would seem clear to any reader. But has Landsburg never heard of jury nullification? Supposing the jury decided to decide "wrongly" -- that is, contrary to the instructions of the court and even of the law -- in the interests of what they perceive to be justice. Fine 'em, I expect Landsberg would say, maybe twice for being bad sports.

But it's not that simple. Say a bank, acting as plaintiff, wants to attach the pay of a guy whose wife is fighting cancer. The law might be on the bank's side, but the jury might say, fuck this, we're cutting the guy a break. If you're Landsburg, this is an easy call, but If you believe, as I do, the jury retains the right to pronounce however it sees fit for whatever reason, then the idea of reward/punishment for juries is an onerous, indeed unconstitutional, imposition on their franchise -- and, in cases like this one, on justice itself.

The second point is bigger. Landsberg's threatened-jury-is-a-motivated jury concept is very close to a depressing trend of our times -- that is, bullying as an acceptable means of "improving behavior." Quite apart from our government's unconscionable behavior at the international level, there is a tendency for the powerful to leverage their advantage over the less powerful, and Landsberg even acknowledges this in his reasoning: "The way to make workers diligent, as every manager knows, is to reward them when they succeed and punish them when they fail... Every assembly line worker in America, every cab driver, every doctor and lawyer and magazine columnist, reaps financial rewards and punishments that depend on his performance." I like the conflation of line workers and doctors -- but we all know which category of worker is more likely to get canned for being a little slow on a given morning.

God dammit, why do we all have to be so efficient anyway? Our society is lousy with efficiency experts, ergonometricians, etc., but it seems to me a much less happy place than it was before these pests came onto the scene.

That may be my wider reason for disliking this idea so much. I don't think we should be looking to regulate more aspects of our lives. I think we should be doing the opposite.

THESE KIDS TODAY. Teen sex is, now and always, news at the Times. According to this report by Tamar Lewin on findings by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, "About 20 percent of adolescents have had sexual intercourse before their 15th birthday."

Given the subject and the source, my instinct is to take the figures less than seriously. But even so, they are shocking.

I mean, I thought the kids had to be getting laid more than that.

When I was 15, if you'd told me that my chances of imminent sex were 1 in 5, I would have jumped off a bridge. I always had to believe they were at least 2 to 1 in my favor, or I never would have got out of my semen-encrusted bed.

But the story gets worse. An AP story in the same paper says this: "One in three boys ages 15-17 say they feel pressure to have sex."

Pressure? 33 percent of these boys actually think that someone is pushing them into sex? At their age, I mostly felt resistance to the idea, especially from the maidens I woo'd.

Of course, among my fellow adolescent males, sex was always discussed, and accounted a great thing -- both by those who professed to be getting it on a regular basis, and by those of us who did not (indeed, could not with any hope of being believed) make such claims. But that wasn't pressure -- that was, to us, mercy. For even the Lotharios among us were not getting nearly enough sex to satiate the great, slavering beast that was -- in my day, anyway -- male teenage lust, and the rest of us were practically shaking with need, ready to explode like cum-bombs.

The only relief we knew from this pressure was the ribald tales, knowing winks, and coarse laughter with which we acknowledged and sympathized with each other's howling horn-dogliness. We were not spurring each other on to reckless sexual behavior, we were coping with the fact that we had no partners with whom to be reckless. (I suppose we could have beat each other off -- and, as I went to a prep school, I assume some of us did -- but, as Lou Reed said, those were different times.)

The article gives the impression that our current crop of youngbloods feel their male bonding rituals constitute some sort of emotional "bad touch." I pray this is a misapprehension by clueless social workers. That's always a good bet.

But what if it isn't? What if the boys are, in fact, such abject pussies? What if kids aren't living in sexual Valhalla as we've all assumed? What if all those movies about precocious libertines, all those rumors about rampant schoolgirl-on-schoolboy blowjobs, were bullshit?

Any opportunity to feel less jealous of the young is welcome. But it would be depressing to believe that the picture of their generation coming out of the paper is at all accurate. I prefer to think that the intensity of adult scrutiny has Heisenberged teenage behavior -- rendered it unreadably sketchy, perhaps with some help from the kids themselves who must be sick of all the poking and prodding.

I mean, people can't have changed that much. Can they?

AS IF MY SELF-ESTEEM weren't bedraggled enough, along comes this.

EQUILIBRIUM. Hey, how ya doin'? Okay? Me? Oh, can't complain. Earlier, I was briefly made angry by this guy, who has figured out on his digital slide rule that conservatives are better writers than liberals (he also says, if I'm reading him right, that conservatives are more fun, more intelligent, and more polite; have better breath, whiter teeth, and stronger erections; and their shit don't smell). Elsewhere, usual suspect Jonah Goldberg wrote, "I believe that in the far-flung future we will live in houses full of woods (real or synthetic) and greens and eat increasingly luxurious meals." Yeah, I thought, if by "we" he means himself and his fellow tenured conservatives; the rest of us will probably only see trees if our concentration camps happen to be located on National Park land.

But I was too busy to keep up my anger over things like this. I am struggling to keep many balls in the air (some of them weighing thirty pounds and studded with razor blades), and that prevents me from paying too much mind to the hoots and gibberings coming from the fever swamps. In fact, these days my best moments come when I am perfectly poised between anger at an unjust fate and anger at morons with modems. At such moments I briefly forget who to be mad at, and am content.

THEIR ARGUMENT. Kathryn Jean Lopez explains it all for you, publishing with approval this NRO reader quote:

I was just watching "The Great Muppet Caper" (last day of the semester) and discovered an overlooked moment of Muppet insight. The gang have just caught jewel thief Charles Grodin red-handed and sweet, earnest Kermit asks, "Why did you do it?" Grodin shrugs and says, "Because I'm a villain." Plain and simple, no "root cause" nonsense. I'll remember that line every time someone tries to tell me we should be more concerned about why "they" hate us.

Let us not forget, as we endeavor to wrest control of the country back from the bellicose idiots that currently misguide her, that we are in fact dealing with bellicose idiots. The bowtied clowns who act all erudite on TV are merely a sideshow for the opinion epicures. The Republican arguments are in the main yahoo bullshit. Whichever one of the Dems picks up the fallen standard in 2004 had better be able to talk to Beavis and Butthead.

I miss Bill Clinton.

UES, US, ME. I took my usual Saturday afternoon walk through the Upper East Side today and had all sorts of thoughts about the neighborhood. One of my first jobs in the City was as a waiter in a now-defunct UES bistro called Daly's Daffodil. That place is a story or twelve in itself (ask me sometime about our three-hundred pound night manager, who would get drunk on Bushmill's every night; we used to pop Irish songs on the jukebox at about 10 pm just to get him roaring along with "Danny Boy," and to get the customers to complain about him). I loathed the district then. I hated its obnoxious wealth. (I was poor.) Moreover, I hated the style of that wealth -- still blow-dried and flair-legged, even in the late 70s, a redoubt of Farrah Fawcett-Majors gloss and cocaine-burnished insouciance in the middle of a City that was still sweatily thrashing its way out of financial default.

In later years, still poor, I took a perverse liking to the Upper East Side, mainly because it was out of style. The mass exodus of otherwise sober youngsters to the hipper precincts downtown (and the more spacious digs to the west) left the place in the custody of dowagers with thick makeup, dazed middle-agers in minks and $500 sport jackets who had not fucked off to the suburbs (or were fucking mistresses or rent boys during the gaps in their appointment books), and young preppies who aped their style and got vomiting drunk each weekend in frat bars along First Avenue. I began also to visually appreciate the queer mix of scrubbed brick townhouses and the blank-faced, modernist architectural abortions that tycoons had placed among them in the 60s and 70s, when they thought the zeitgeist would roll like river branches through their canyons for eternity. Everything was just a little stale and out of mode, though washed each morning with money and daubed with Floris cologne. That, in my jaundiced eye, gave it character. And if that wasn't character enough, you could always go to the Germantown enclave and get some boiled meat, liver dumpling soup, and glass boots full of Weiss beer

Now the Upper East Side is still rich, and its residents still strive to present themselves accordingly. Even their goth granddaughters spend a ton on their dour threads. But what has changed is this: so does everyone else. Even the hippest of hipsters in the hippest of hip nabes drops a wad on his or her dishabbile. Style points vary from geography to geography, but the instinct is the same: if I buy this, I will fit. Which was also true back when, in some places, it cost twenty bucks to fit. But when there's a serious investment at stake, fashion becomes desperation. And that sort of desperation is more far-ranging than once it was.

So of course I don't hate the Upper East Side anymore. How could I? It's just like everywhere else, even though it may be easier for its people to be that way than it is for most.

And, as it happens, the City is still sweatily thrashing its way out of financial default. And, as it happens, so am I.

And Germantown is gone.

Sometimes people ask me if I have soured on our City beause it is so changed. Again, how could I? I carry it inside me, with every increasingly heavy step I take.

THEY LOOKED SO ORDERLY IN THE PUBLICITY SHOTS. Seems like only yesterday that happy Iraqis were smiling for the cameras and waving their brand-new American flags. Back then, OpinionJournal's Daniel Henninger overtly compared the post-Saddam citizens to the liberated East Berliners of 1989.

Funny, I don't recall the conservatives calling for a wave of American soldiers to restore order among newly-freed East Germans. Yet today OpinionJournal says that, in Iraq, "something close to chaos reigns. The lack of security is disrupting the most basic aspects of postwar reconstruction... Rampant lawlessness is the No. 1 complaint of ordinary Iraqis, who are grateful for the new U.S. crackdown on crime."

I love that last sentence. We are so grateful, Mr. Democracy Whiskey Sexy Bush People, for our rampantly lawless crackdown!

"We're not -- repeat, not -- longing for a return to 19th-century colonialism," pledges OJ. (Yeah, and I'm not, repeat not, longing for a thick steak and a good bottle of Chateau Haut-Brion, but put them in front of me and watch them disappear.) OJ reenforces its un-longing for 19th-century colonialism by referring casually to Iraqi administrator L. Paul Bremer as "Lord Bremer" and comparing him to Kitchener.

OJ's editorials have taken on a weird, muzzy, almost drunken feeling since it stopped mattering at all whether what they said made sense or not (approximately late March, I think it was). Check out also the aforementioned Henninger as he writes, joshingly, about how "dull" the economy is -- not "dull" as in listless, which was what I at first thought he meant, but dull as in no fun to talk about.

Well, given how that economy is going, and his own comrades' part in making it so, I shouldn't wonder he would find such conversations tiresome. Henninger's own piece is far from dull, though -- in fact, it proceeds with depraved indifference to human life on a rollicking trip through the economic catastrophes of our age -- such as the dot-com bubble, dismissed here with a hearty "so what if much of it failed?" He then pretends that Olympia Snowe is holding up the economic recovery by being a "downer." No, I'm not kidding. Go see for yourself.

Recently we were all talking about the end of this and that -- History, Ideology, whatever. Reason appears to have taken its place at the egress. The rest of us are next.

NOEL REDDING. As a man, as a fan, and most importantly as a guitarist turned bass player, I regret to inform you that Noel Redding, bottom-end guy for the Jimi Hendrix Experience, has passed away.

Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell comprised a splendid rhythm section. It's hard to play that fussy and drive that hard all at the same time. Rhythm players leave space between notes so they'll have room to syncopate their parts -- which can give the illusion that a song is hurtling forward even if it's being played in strict time. Ornate players tend to fill up these musical spaces so much that the song actually bogs down and seems to drag. But some guys can be real hyper on the bass and still push the music. Redding managed that. He had a lot of energy, a great feel for the tunes (and the instrument -- hear how he pits the low, sweet, fat notes against the higher, thinner ones on "Fire"), and a freshness-seal hookup with Mitchell. The last bit is crucial. If you isolated Redding's parts, or Mitchell's, you might think, "Manic, but what's it mean, where's it going?" You would never ask that about the Experience, because everyone was up in everyone else's musical business -- I say "tick," you say "tock" etc. -- only their vocabulary was a great deal more advanced, and manifested more like the overlapping dialogue in an Altman movie.

I could go on all day. But I have rehearsal tonight and a show tomorrow. I'll pay my tributes then.

HUH WHAT? #342,099. "Put aside whether race should be used as a hiring criterion. Even people who support affirmative action don't have to support Raines' approach of refusing to hold blacks responsible for anything, from fake reporting to gang-raping a jogger in Central Park. What Raines did to Blair was cruel." -- Ann Coulter. [emphasis mine]

RUN, RUN, RUN. Wishing to show common cause with my new employers, I participated in the Corporate Challenge in Central Park this evening. It's a three-and-a-half mile run (or walk, as the new rules allow) that somehow generates bucks for charity, and corporate pride -- you turn up with your colleagues in logo-identifying T-shirts and convey your time to a captain, to be posted in some dark corner of the web. I'd last done this years ago, when all were expected to run for an easier 3.5 kilometers (why is everything easier for the Europeans?); I had never so much as stepped on a treadmill before, I drank heavily the night before (and the night before, and the night before...), and ran in high-tops and surfer jams, breaking the tape at 30 minutes flat.

This evening's field was much more crammed than the last one I'd joined; it took those of us proceeding from the "non-competitive area" (the default gathering spot -- I guess you had to demonstrate a subscription to Runner's World or pass a hamstring-to-beer-belly ratio examination to start further up) four or five minutes to even reach the official starting line.

Thereafter the field was still crowded but navigable. I noticed a lot of different and distinct breathing patterns around me: steady pants, wheezes, grunts, and sharp, horror-movie gasps. To further remove my mind of numbing boredom and intimations of death, I checked out chicks' butts. The Corporate Challenge is a feast for ass-men; I wonder if this isn't a large, undisclosed come-on for events like this. Maybe all the strain and sweat is a turn-on too for some -- the TV ads for health clubs, with their crypto-pornographic close-ups of straining torsos, certainly suggest this.

The clock said 36:32 when I hauled myself across the finish. My captain allowed two minutes for starting-line congestion, which I didn't dispute. Even by this conservative estimate I'm in no worse shape than I was back in the day, at least physically, which amazes me, given the time I spend parked on my keister, crunching verbiage.

The real test will be whether I can get my pants on tomorrow.

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK -- PLEASE! NYC's budget woes have got conservatives going after Bloomberg, and good for them, as I dislike our depraved rich-boy mayor at least as much as they do. But they're also starting to run down New York itself -- or, to be more precise, they're reverting to their traditional loathing of Moscow on the Hudson. Brendan "Save Western Civ!" Miniter lets fly a gob of spit headlined "Apple Without Appeal: High taxes are only one reason to hate New York." Makes ya nostalgic, don't it?

Miniter starts by telling us that "except for the very rich, the quality of life in this city is worse than it should be and far below most of the rest of America." That much is true. Part of the reason is that we send a disproportionate number of tax dollars to the Federal Government so that farmland Republicans can ladle them out amongst their constituents. But this reason Miniter leaves unmentioned.

Miniter does mention rent-controlled apartments -- or, rather "rent-controlled or rent-stabilized" apartments. This conflation is mindful, as it gives Miniter's readers the false impression that a large number of lucky New Yorkers are paying $100 a month for suites at the Plaza, and helps put over the conservative howler that this, not the enforced scarcities of large realtors who sit on vacant apartments, is what makes the rent so high. In truth the rent-controlled tenants are dying out or being hounded out, while most of the rent-stabilized apartments, a sizable group, have been around for so long that renters pay something close to market value for them.

Miniter's no better on prescriptions. Consider this:

...the mayor needs to be looking for ways to reduce the cost of living in the city. A good place to start would be to cut taxes and urge the state Legislature to let rent regulation die when it comes up for renewal next month. But it can't stop there. The city needs more housing and business space. The mayor needs to find ways to encourage more construction. That means taking on powerful and entrenched unions and streamlining construction regulations to scrap union work rules...

Let's see: in order to improve our standard of living, we should cut taxes (which, I hate to tell him, means less money for city services that help define quality of life), let landlords jack up rents (which of them will greet the death of rent stabilization by crying, "Good news -- now I can lower your rent"?), build more apartments (out of what, I wonder, that would make them affordable? Cardboard?), and screw the unions (and the hundreds of thousands for whom they negotiate -- whose quality of life, we must assume, will plummet).

There's nothing wrong with being contrarian or counterintuitive, but when Miniter talks nonsense like this and fails to explain how it's supposed to work, he just sounds like some ivory-tower guy shaking his head at us poor sods and muttering, "Don't they know that landlords are a market force, and must be respected?"

As to the rest of the apartments are so small! I saw a rat in the subway! crap, I've long held that the pussies who can't put up with urban life should fuck off to the suburbs and leave the rest of us in peace.

DON'T YOU KNOW WHO I THINK I AM? At the Voice, Daniel King sticks up for Stanley Crouch, fired from JazzTimes right after it published Crouch's stinging rebuke to white jazz critics -- which rebuke, and Crouch's subsequent claims of persecution, are seconded by King, to wit: "And, we should ask, who are we, white editors and writers, who've appointed ourselves guardians of this year's jazz criticism?" Even Amiri Baraka, a frequent target of Crouch's abuse in the past, sticks up for Crouch, as do honkies Nat Hentoff and Gary Giddins.

My true interest in this is as mild as my interest in contemporary jazz. But Crouch's wounded tone is piquant. He isn't such a hot writer, as anyone who has perused his wan Daily News columns can see. But he is an excellent self-promoter. His is probably the best known (and certainly the most widely-circulated) black critic in America. He actually got the New Yorker to run a long piece on him and his impending first novel, Don't the Moon Look Lonesome (a piece of shit, as it turns out), and he is a frequent TV talking head (he was one of that nightmarish platoon of rotating commentators which 60 Minutes inflicted upon a shocked and disdainful public a few years back).

Given the scarcity of his talent, whence came his popularity? In the 1980s, writing for the Voice, Crouch, theretofore known as a jazz critic, came out in support of Reagan's layoff of striking air traffic controllers, which action broke their union and presaged the general collapse of organized labor in that decade. Crouch thereafter cultivated a harsh, right-wing, get-over-yourself image -- tough on race-baiters, tough on rappers, tough on anyone who would ask for anything, even respect, simply on the basis of what he happened to be. This distinguished him, certainly, and per the law of supply and demand, made him a marketable commodity.

Now Crouch, scourge of the air traffic controllers, says, "That a writer of my status and reputation would be dismissed in this way, with no discussion at all, constitutes some serious brand of injustice..."

Isn't that rich? The self-professed "hanging judge" wishes a stay of execution on the basis of his celebrity. To which I say: That's capitalism, comrade! A column in a magazine is not a Constitutional right or a set-aside program. The editors of JazzTimes had as much right to fire you as -- oh, as Reagan had to can the air traffic controllers.

Surely Crouch isn't going soft on us? No, only on himself.

MAYBE THAT'S WHY THE TIMES DOESN'T WANT HIM. Andrew Sullivan reviews Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars. He pulls this quote on Clinton:

"His mind was filled with great plans: universal healthcare, reducing the federal deficit, investments in education and the environment, cutting crime, remaking the welfare system, ending discrimination, to begin with."

Sullivan's reaction: "To begin with? What on earth would be next? A space colony on Mars?"

Has Sullivan ever recognized a joke that wasn't about cheese-eating surrender monkeys?

LOOK TO YOUR HEART. Two items about writing, sort of, one from a defender of liberty (Atrios) and one from an enemy of same (Andrew Sullivan), both wrong-headed.

Atrios disputes Eric Alterman's sensible statement that Roth's The Human Stain, which draws some inspiration from Clinton's impeachment, is primarily a work of art and not a "political" book. (I haven't read this book -- I address here the general principle.) And Sullivan gives another one of his poseur alerts on a piece of writing that actually isn't bad -- though it is literary, which must infuriate the ceaselessly polemical Sullivan.

People of an overtly political persuasion too frequently suffer from a utilitarian syndrome best expressed by the saying, "If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." Too many of them are true and total apparatchiks: what is the use of this poem or that play, they think as they study texts, if it advance not our agenda?

I can get pretty wrapped up in this bullshit myself. But I know there have to be protected areas where politics doesn't penetrate. Politics is a fire that warms some passions, and burns out others. Historically, art has been more often consumed than warmed by politics (sometimes literally!), so practitioners had better beware.

Brecht did great political drama, but he understood that a recognizable depiction of humanity is the best way to get people to pay attention to anything -- which is why his plays command the attention even of bloated capitalists such as ourselves. I wouldn't be surprised if he, and many other artists with propaganda in their hearts, started out to epater the bourgeois, or smash the state, but were seduced or subsumed by the artistic process itself -- by color, by light, by the joy of the materials, by contact with a force that is ultimately more powerful than politics.

Sir Philip Sidney wrote:

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That the dear she might take some pleasure of my pain,
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe...

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:
"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write."

Sidney was talking about a lover trying to make an amorous, not a political, case (well, by some interpretations, anyway), but you see the connection: putting the goal before the process is great for drafting strategy statements and position papers and such like, where you want to get people to act rather than to understand -- indeed, often these days, to act in defiance of understanding. But this doesn't go for love poems, or any other works of art, which should express and seek to share tender feelings, rather than exploit or manipulate them.

CALL ME 'SCHOOL BULLY,' CLOTH-EARS! Today on Instapundit, the Perfesser suggests that a writer should be "warming a cell" because he gave a cell phone to Osama bin Laden in 1996. (I forget -- was the U.S. still pals with Osama then, or was that a few years earlier?) Further down he reliably snipes at the Times, links to an article on "MALE-BASHING in the media, and in public policy," and shouts, "I HAVE A FRIEND WHOSE LIFE WAS RUINED BY ANNIE HALL. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but not as much of one as it ought to be."

Refresh my memory. Why is this man treated with respect? What's the difference between Glenn Reynolds and Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly?

Oh, yeah: Reynolds knows HTML. And talks about cool gadgets he likes. And occasionally makes libertarian-sounding farts that are about 3 degrees cooler than the ones Jonah Goldberg used to emit before the Santorum and Bennett incidents sent him scrambling back to the Old Standard.

I notice even collegial CalPundit has shown impatience with the Perfesser of late ("Even by his usual standards, this piece by Glenn Reynolds last week was remarkably self-serving..."). By and large, though, bloggers treat Reynolds the way Sidney Falco used to treat J.J. Hunsecker.

"IT'S TIME TO GIVE BARBER SCHOOL ANOTHER TRY! AND THIS TIME, I WON'T JOIN A FRAT!" God bless Moe Siszlak.

WE ARE THE WORLD. Matthew Yglesias observes the good sense of Rich Lowry, a usually intolerable writer (my slur, not MY's), in coming out strong against prison rape.

Well, yes. There are so many gags on TV and in movies about prison rape that any unbiased observer would assume it one of our cultural values. It would be nice if that stopped.

Activists like the late Stephen Donaldson have been working this issue for years, but it's important that conservatives are picking up the standard. Even the impeccably rightwing Washington Times is getting with the program -- as these things go, that's practically a groundswell.

One reason it's important is sheer mass -- the U.S. has an appalling and ever-growing number of prisoners, and both rape and HIV are widespread in the pens. Back in my medical journalism days, I reported on gay barebacking and HIV, and I must say that even a glance at the figures shows that prison rapists are more likely than "gift-givers" to become our equivalent of Central Africa's long-distance truckers in making AIDS numbers go the wrong way.

It's also important because prison rape is cruel, in every sense of the word, including the Founders'. We make a very bad habit of excluding large segments of our population from basic human respect. Prisoners are near the top of that list. I often wonder that so many people seem to believe that whatever happens to jailbirds serves them right -- that the old notion of "paying your debt to society" now includes whatever brutality accompanies it. Even the time-honored American tradition of rooting for the underdog seems to be fading away. We are increasingly the land of the foam "#1" finger, and devil take the hindmost.

Here, then, is an opportunity to get a consensus on the right side for once. When prominent scolds (including Democrats like Judgin' Joe Lieberman) complain about the coarsening of our culture, they usually focus on the behaviors of consenting adults, which alienates liberals and conservatives of a libertarian streak. Of course, both liberals and conservatives of whatever stripe are generally convinced that the guys on the other side don't care about people at all, and both camps have kit-bags full of anecdotes to prove it.

This is sad, because I think most of us -- even fans of invective (guess I should include myself, huh?) -- can agree that there is too much cruelty in the world. The notion that we could make common cause on this issue warms my heart.

Later, we can discuss the sugar-coated poison of the tax cut, evil sodomy laws, draconian bankruptcy bills, the shameful lack of a national healthcare system, and the other just plain evil attributes of the scumbags with whom we will now join hands, briefly.

BUT IT'S NO JOKE, IT'S DOIN' ME HARM. I have just returned from Mother's Day in Bridgeport. I had four hours sleep last night, as I had on each of the previous two nights. As I tried to nap on the train home, a little girl five feet away tooted nonstop on a plastic pennywhistle. Please don't be too hard on anything I write from now till... well, who knows.

A HELL OF A VIENNA. Along 10th Street, very far east, I walked behind four middle-aged Puerto Rican guys. A pretty young girl was walking toward them, then shifted her path to walk diagonally across the street. She was wearing a t-shirt and some sort of muslin pants that billowed a bit from her legs but not from her ass, and the thin fabric strained against it each time she stepped.

The four men did not break stride but turned their heads, then their shoulders, with admirable slowness. This is the patience that comes with age,

One of them made a soft noise, which seemed to me not disrespectful but appreciative.

"Go talk to her," the man next to him said.

The man said nothing and his friend repeated it.

They were wearing grey slacks, all of them, different shades of grey, with a slight flair at the cuff that was raffish in an early-80s way, though the slacks were of a roomier cut than they might have favored back in the day. They wore sport jackets -- one of them, worn by the man who had made the noise, was of mustard yellow leather -- and patterned, button-down shirts.

"She a schoolteacher," said the man in the mustard yellow jacket.

"So?"

"We got nothing in common."

I immediately flashed on this Bukowski poem:

and all of us
getting together later
in pete's room
a small cube of space under a stairway, there we were,
packed in there
without women
without cigarettes
without anything to drink,
while the rich pawed away at their many
choices and the young girls let
them,
the same girls who spit at our shadows as we
walked past.

it was a hell of a
vienna.

3 of us under that stairway
were killed in world war II.

another one is now manager of a mattress
company.

me? I'm 30 years older,
the town is 4 or 5 times as big
but just as rotten
and the girls still spit on my
shadow, another war is building for another
reason, and I can hardly get a job now
for the same reason I couldn't then:
i don't know anything, I can't do
anything...

Boethius found consolation in philosophy while under an unjust sentence of death. For rest of us, if we're lucky enough to have it, there's poetry.