MORE BULLSHIT about how Tom Brokaw et alia are fighting for Saddam from General Ralph Peters. A sample:

Far too many journalists refuse to acknowledge the truth about their role in this age of endless news cycles and global access to reportage. Even when reporters don't make up the news, they make the news by selecting what they report.

Stop the presses -- Stories Revealed to Have "Angles"! Nuttier still is the notion of a "role" for the press, which Peters later expands with "the media must face up to the responsibility that goes with their influence." Dig below the permafrost of the General's hauteur and you'll see a fairly old-fashioned view of those who express views contrary to that of the state. Perhaps the General thinks the New York Times is run like Stars & Stripes. (Of course, not even George Patton could get Bill Mauldin kicked off S&S back in the day, so maybe the General has a different journalistic model in mind -- one that predates John Peter Zenger.)

BALLOT INITIATIVES FOR ME, BUT NOT FOR THEE. Few political boundaries can withstand star appeal. Already conservative backers of Governor Wolfcastle are making pre-emptive excuses for his upcoming term.

Mickey Kaus:

You want a tax increase if cutting the budget isn't enough to close the deficit? Schwarzenegger's the man for that too. As a nominal Republican, he is in a position to attract at least some Republican votes for a budget package that includes both taxes and cuts.

Quick, class -- what is the single issue that Wolfcastle ran on? Tax cuts! Very good! Well, in the immortal words of the Alleycats, nothing means nothing anymore.

More interesting is Kaus' suggestion that Wolfcastle move to "amend the state Constitution to get rid of the paralyzing requirement that two-thirds of the legislature approve any budget." If the two-thirds rule has any logic at all, it is that it makes it harder for larcenous political coalitions to hijack a budget. If Wolfcastle were to muscle this provision out of the state Constitution, it would not be for the benefit of the state's economy, but for the benefit of Two-Term Arnold.

A more breathtaking scam is proposed by David Frum. "Schwarzenegger won’t be able to change California," he deadpans, "unless he changes the way in which California is governed." Frum then proposes the death of Cali's easy ballot initiatives. "These constitutionally protected programs take priority over everything else the state does, including things that are less glamorous but more important... Schwarzenegger knows this well: after all, he entered politics with his own poll-tested budget proposal..." [emphasis mine].

If Arnold makes a terrible botch of things -- not an unimaginable event -- look for Frum to endorse an end to California's terribly unhelpful recall provisions.

MEME-ORIES LIGHT THE CORNER OF MY MIND. The golden days of the Fifth Column seemed to have passed. Things had been quiet along the traitor-baiting front, and conservatives had been content to portray liberals as, say, sex-fiends or as sissies, rather than as enemies of the state.

Now Bob Bartley comes running out of the woods hollering Hoo-ah! Let's do it again!:

...having won overwhelming public support, [Bush]now faces home-front guerrilla assaults as well.

The latter problem is the serious one. With press coverage starting to balance the good news and the bad, we're coming to understand that on the ground in Iraq the guerrillas are isolated. The Baathist remnants and Arab militants have nothing like the external sanctuary and superpower support that sustained the North Vietnamese and anti-Soviet Afghans. For the moment terrorists can still ambush Americans and assassinate pro-peace Iraqi leaders, but exhausting them is only a matter of time and patience.

Which of course is where the home-front guerrillas come in.

I think I may have heard a couple of other guys saying that liberals were giving aid and comfort to the enemy by saying mean things about Bush, but at the time I thought it was flashbacks. Can the eminence gris of Opinion Journal guide wingers back onto this particular warpath? I'll be watching with interest, and my passport handy.

NEO NUDNIKS. I must quickly fling some scorn on the New York Times Magazine's "Neo-70s" issue, which promotes the harebrained idea that because some 21-year-olds are wearing bro caps and bellbottoms, we are "doing" the 1970s again -- except without the sex, the drugs, the fun, or the talent.

Leading this badly misguided clue hunt is a stupefyingly bad essay by James Traub (registration required, dammit). This dweeb moved to New York the same year I did, but remembers the old days only as a series of muggings and murders, and says of our current, homogenized era, "If that was Yuppified, I'd take it" (in response to the only dissenting voice in his story, described only as "an aging hippie"). 70s New York, theorizes Traub, was Martin Scorcese; 90s New York is Neil LaBute. Yet still he defends that great lattefication! "The bourgeois bohemians, in David Brooks's pungent phrase," gushes Traub, "have turned areas that were no-go zones when I first came to New York into outposts of boutiquedom."

Then, after some obligatory Rudy-kissing ("New York got its swagger back: Giuliani rode high in the saddle..."), Traub begins to notice a problem -- businesses are leaving. (It would seem that, in the Traubian vision, all that is New York hinges on the migration patterns of banks and brokerage firms.) And without the big, big money, where will we get latte consumers? "The question," Traub says, in a sentence the hopefulness of which degenerates in an almost beautiful way, "really comes down to whether the city can not only attract but also keep all those bright, eager, ambitious people who flock here, despite the high taxes, the restrictive regulations, the sky-high real-estate prices, the poor schools, the deteriorating services."

I thank Traub for a good laugh there, but my gorge rises again at his suggestion (delivered quickly, as if the author had suddenly noticed the near-fulfillment of his word count) that our city's solution may be "more theater, more cafes, more bookshops." (Hey, kids, let's put on some Neil LaBute!) "Let the bankers leave for Stamford; we'll make do with the radio-car drivers, the bartenders and the graphic designers."

You fucking Yuppie dipshit. You and your asshole friends drove our rents through the roof -- now who can afford to open a theatre? And even if we had access to a theatre (or a dance studio, or a film collective, etc), how could we afford to do anything other than the most explicitly commercial work, the cost of living here being what it is? You made this nightmare for us, and now you're willing to wave it off and decree that a cultural renaissance is in order. Tell me, when you came here (maybe on the same train as me), did you begin immediately to brown-nose the Times' management? Then you probably have a nice financial package to insulate you against the worsening economic times. So you'll forgive the rest of us -- "the radio-car drivers, the bartenders and the graphic designers," not to mention the actors, writers, musicians, etc., for not sharing your sangfroid. I'll say this, though: if the murderers, junkies, squeegee men, et alia do come back, I'll kiss the motherfuckers if they manage to drive you and everyone like you out of my city.

GUN NUTTINESS. Instapundit suggests that an alleged drop in the American murder rate (I say "alleged" because his source is the Washington Times) shows that "liberalized handgun-carry laws" aren't a bad thing. An arguable point, but instead of developing it, the Ole Perfesser decides to gild his lily by gloating over an increase in gun crimes in Britain "despite a near-complete handgun ban."

I'll say this for the Second Amendment folks -- they aren't selfish: they want gun rights not only for themselves but for everyone, including those who don't want them at all.

If the idea here is to assert that the more guns you have, the less crime you have, I have to ask if the Perfesser has ever heard of a small community called New York City. Here we have experienced huge drops in the murder rate several years running. It may surprise the Perfesser to note that this was not achieved by handing out service revolvers to the citizenry. Quite the contrary:

The NYPD gun strategy uses felony arrests and summonses to target gun trafficking and gun-related crime in the city. NYPD pursues all perpetrators and accomplices in gun crimes cases and interrogates them about how their guns were acquired. In a proactive effort to get guns off the streets, the NYPD's Street Crime Units aggressively enforce all gun laws.

Also, "New York City has some of the most restrictive local licensing requirements for Federal firearm dealers in the country."

By the Perfesser's logic, we should be drowning in our own blood, and our few surviving citizens begging him and his hayseed brethren to throw us a cache of weapons to stop the violence.

I am willing to accept that, as a citizen of a great metropolis, I'm not always sensitive to the ways and means of folks living in the vast Central Suburbs. I just wish they'd show us the same consideration sometimes.

ADDENDUM. Somebody has responded to this bit with mild, Vermont-style demurrers on gun rights in general. I had imagined that my earlier essay on the subject was so widely known that it didn't need mentioning, but I see now that I was deluded. I'm pretty cool with the Second Amendment. I don't think gun laws are necessarily good or bad -- I think the good ones are good and the bad ones are bad. What's a good gun law? Roughly, one that doesn't interfere with your right to bear arms or the legitimate government function of keeping the commons safe (i.e., free of crime sprees and casual violence). I swear this Venn diagram shows a lot more overlap if you look at it from a disinterested POV.

MOVIE NIGHTS. I've been called a crank, and can't deny it, but I'm a crank like Dennis Hopper was an asshole in Out of the Blue. "You think I'm an asshole!" he roared as he poured his own beer over his head. "Alright! I'm an asshole!" Then he showed that he hadn't poured the entire beer over his head. "But," said Hopper, "I'm not a fucking asshole!"

I am not a fucking crank, and so enjoyed School of Rock this weekend. It has no characters to speak of, and nothing is at stake; all the plot complications are laughable, as are the Lessons in Life. (Fancy Jack Black telling anyone that rock isn't at least partly about sex and drugs.)

But the movie is a crisp bit of product with a great idea in the middle. Actually I think you have to have a bit of crank in you to fully appreciate it. (I'm not talking about meth, but I suppose that would help too if you could sit still long enough to watch the thing.) Because the idea that kids today need to be schooled in the art of rock is very cranky. It's epiphanic for greybeards such as myself when Black asks what the kids like and they uniformly cite unspeakably lame contemporary radio staples -- and Black cries, "What are they teaching you in this school?" and draws up a flow-chart of rock history. Robert Christgau couldn't have cranked it up better.

The movie panders L.A.M.F., but surprise, it's me and mine that are being pandered to. About time! So I raise my goblet of rock to it.

Also saw Lost in Translation, aka Antonioni for Dummies. Murray and Johansson are cute, but I wonder how the movie would have worked if everyone they loved or came in contact with hadn't been such morons.

JONAH GOLDBERG'S ANALYTIC METHOD REVEALED. "Surely, spending a billion dollars to turn around one criminal is too much, even if it would work. No one's proposing spending a billion dollars per prisoner, but the point remains the same. "

THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT NEEDS NO SNAPPY HEADLINE. "A White House official I spoke to was particularly pleased by the increased hiring of temporary workers, which he sees as a good sign about robust economic growth to come." -- Ramesh Ponnuru, NRO.

CAL GOP SCRAMBLES FOR COUNTERSCANDALS! Via the Right's most reliable apparatchik, this story about Carl Reiner (!) on Chris Matthews (!?) is headed down the media stream:

What Reiner said, with a kind of comfortable, humorous familiarity, was "Shfartze-negger"...

Reiner returned to a modified, less-offensive version of the pronounciation later in the conversation, but what remains recorded for all to hear is kind of ugly. The first half of "Shfartze-negger" is the Yiddish version of the N-word. The second, appended to the first half with humorous irony, was apparently intended to mean what it sounded like.

So, if I understand this correctly, the guy thinks Reiner called Schwarzenegger a nigger.

Sorry, try again.

A CULTURAL DISADVANTAGE. Speaking on Rush Limbaugh's idiotic comments about the Philly QB, Jay Nordlinger makes this interesting statement:

I’m reminded of something that I’ve discovered in recent years. I work in Conservativeland, and I’m used to speaking freely. I’m used to not having to abide by a speech code or any other restriction of political correctness. And then sometimes I leave Conservativeland, and continue to speak freely--and sincerely--and then find that I startle people. They’re not used to hearing it.

Well, that's right, we're not. The Mother of All Dittoheads goes out in front of millions of sports fans and says -- freely, certainly; sincerely, who knows -- that McNab hasn't been "that good from the get-go. I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. I think the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well." And those of us who are not convinced that a pro-Negro conspiracy, aided and abetted by the liberal media, has foisted an unskilled quarterback on the unwilling Eagles, are startled.

Meanwhile another Limbaugh, David, tells the world that liberals are "waging an undeclared war on Christianity." The book's cover is graced by a lion, apparently comparing the plight of American Christians to that of the biblical Daniel. Piquant as I find the thought that Ted Kennedy, the ACLU, and a handful of others have got the Prince of Peace and his millions of adherents on the ropes, I cannot take it seriously for a second -- even after no less keen an observer than Ann Coulter has told me that Limbaugh's book "makes you cry for your country" and "wonder how much longer America can survive liberalism." In fact, I cry with laughter, and wonder how anyone, in a land bejewelled with churches, and led by a President who talks about Jesus all the time, could believe such hooey.

I am equally mystified by the invitation by Ned Flanders (aka Rod Dreher) of the Dallas Morning News (registration required) to weep for conservative journalists. In the "overwhelmingly secular" atmosphere of newsrooms, Flanders tells the huddled, shivering conservative scribes, "you will have to distinguish yourself by the strength of your writing and reporting." Not like those liberal journalists, who merely have to commit sacrileges for their paychecks. (Flanders, by the way, preceded his Dallas stint with plum gigs at the New York Post and the National Review, so I'd say he's wearing his persecution remarkably well.)

You'd think that after all the time I've spent in Conservativeland, merrily mining such profound observations as the abovementioned for this site, that their free-thinking ways have not rubbed off on me. Yet, when I see an underperforming black professional athlete, I don't assume he is employed merely as a token; I remain unconvinced that Christians are about to be holocausted by the Democratic Party; and I marvel that an industry dominated by Fox News can be called unwelcoming of right-wing reporters.

Must be a cultural thing.

MAGGIE, NOT A GIRL OF THE STREETS. Sometimes I wonder if my political writings are, like all my other writings, merely manifestations of a deep neurosis that might be better vitiated by therapy or antidepressant drugs. Then I read Maggie Gallagher and think, well, if they let this nutcake publish, surely there must be a place in the sun for me, too.

Gallagher is annoyed by boomers that don't act their age. You know, 50-year-olds with nose rings, grandparents who don't want to baby-sit, and the like. (That's really her point. This is how people get the impression that writing is easy!)

Well, some 50-year-olds look better with piercings than others -- I think Susan Sarandon with a nose ring would be cute, whereas some younger actresses, like Brooke Shields, would be an eyesore. But hey, no accounting for taste, and who the hell cares? Normally I might let Gallagher slide off into the bin of harmless crankage. But some of her deficiencies range beyond mere annoyance.

As previously noted here, Gallagher is a tireless agitator for social revanchism, who seeks to "defend marriage" by making divorce more difficult and gay marriage nearly impossible.

Outwardly her grumblings seem like the harmless, playful discharges of negative energy one gets from old people in folding chairs on many suburban lawns. Her whole rap on youthful behavior in unyouthful people is about decorum, not right and wrong, as even she admits ("this is not so much immoral as deeply depressing").

But you have to wonder why someone with her serious social agenda spends so much time criticizing behaviors that, however unseemly, hurt no one. One guess is, Gallagher seeks to shame her opponents into doubt, and thence to conversion. She perhaps figures that we libertine hordes are so simple-minded, having cut all our high-school and college classes in favor of weed and wild sex, that we can be easily teased into compliance -- that, shown as if by a mirror how awful nose rings look ornamenting our grizzled visages, we will retreat from all such youthful enthusiasms with such shock and revulsion that it will send us ass-over-tip into the land of beaming breeders, obscenity-free cable, and regnant heterosexuality in which Gallagher resides.

Or maybe she's just nuts. Yeah, let's go with that one.

DEFINING DEMOCRACY DOWN. A very strange post from Peter Robinson at NRO's The Corner. He admits he "goofed" on a political matter -- and that's weird in itself, because these guys will usually only cop to error on matters of much less significance.

But the rest is weirder. Robinson, it seems, originally thought McClintock had won last week's California gubernatorial candidates' debate. But, he now admits, that was because he had only heard it on the radio -- now he knows better, because people who saw it on TV have told him that Schwarzenegger looked "relaxed" and "in control."

He also said he was wrong about WIlliam Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" being a better book than Stephen King's "It" -- he had originally read them both in page proofs, and had not then realized how much better the typography and cover design of the King book would be.

Kidding. Now, I am aware of the old Nixon-Kennedy anecdote -- the people who heard the debates on radio thought Nixon did better, but the TV watchers preferred Kennedy. This speaks to a long-lived but still rather childish idea that the thing "won" by Kennedy could be considered a debate in the old-fashioned sense, e.g. a contest of ideas and their articulation, when in fact that event, though rhetorically and intellectually still leagues ahead of our modern pifflefests, helped define debate down as a riskier sort of campaign stunt -- it might go badly, the other guy might interfere, but whatever happens you'll still get your talking points and image projections across to millions of likely voters.

You may think Bill Clinton looked better wandering around that Oprahless talk-show set than George Bush I in 1992, but that speaks to Clinton's campaign team's marketing skills, not the candidate's abilities as an advocate and public servant.

Still, Clinton did hire the team, and execute the strategy and that counts for something. And one could grant Robinson that point if he'd made it. But instead he gives us this:

Now, I still think very highly of McClintock. And every scrap of news I can glean from the Schwarzenegger camp confirms my suspicion that Arnold has exactly zero idea what he’ll do when he becomes governor of this great state next week. I remain convinced, in other words, that a candidate’s message counts. But a candidate’s temperament and personality count, too. As they watched the debate, voters seem to have been looking for someone with whom they’d feel comfortable, sensing, correctly, as far as I can tell, that the next governor will need both presence and good humor to deal with the mess he’ll find in Sacramento. By the time the debate ended, Californians had decided they like Arnold.

Despite my misgivings about the man’s program, I can’t say I blame them.

Two things here. First, who knows what Arnold's actual temperment and personality are? He's an actor, remember? In fact, all the other candidates on that stage are actors of a sort, too -- conceivably better than Schwarzenegger, at that.

Also, I agree that presence and good humor are appealing qualities. But if those are the trump criteria for a candidate -- and Robinson is strongly suggesting that they are -- then why not Senator Tim Robbins, or Congressman Johnny Depp?

Because it will come to that. The Republicans are at present better than the Democrats at fielding celebrity candidates -- I keep hearing that Dennis Miller will start riding the elephant soon. Eventually, the Dems will wise up and start running movie stars, too. Then I expect we'll hear less talk from Robinson about how, while ideas are important and all that, you can't blame citizens for choosing a telegenic cipher.

I only hope I can hang onto my righteous indignation when that happens, because as much fun as it would be to see Tom DeLay strain for spotlight as Congressperson Sarandon hogs the camera, it probably won't be so great for the Republic.

NO, "DUDE," IT'S WHAT YOU WOULD DO IF YOU HAD ANY GUTS. "As Jimmy Kimmel, a comedian on ABC-TV, put it: 'People throw the term "politically incorrect" around a lot, and normally it's a lot of bluster, but Vice truly is un-p.c. Their brand of humor is what I would do if there were no "standards and practices" on TV.'" -- New York Times September 28. (Thanks Margaret for the tip.)

IN LIEU OF THE BLOODY SHIRT... My nephew started college in New York this month, and stays with me on school days. He is a fine young man, and I hope college gives him not only a good education in forensic science, but also in the ways of the world.

Therefore I hope no such killjoys as this are lurking in our Statehouse:

[Virginia] Delegate Robert G. Marshall, who last spring denounced James Madison University's "SexFest 2003," is now demanding answers from another state school: Virginia Tech.
Mr. Marshall said Virginia Tech misused taxpayer funds last week when school officials allowed Virginia Tech TV to tape on campus a "Sex Talk Live" show during which students discussed sex.

Apparently the kids discussed and, to some extent, handled sex toys and contraceptives. That doesn't even sound like fun, let alone an outrage. Nonetheless, Marshall is mad:

"Virginia parents do not send their children to Virginia Tech to take part in [sexual] titillation," said Mr. Marshall, Manassas Republican.

Of course they don't, you stupid redneck -- but sexual experimentation has been part of the college experience since time immemorial anyway. Hell, my college dorms looked and smelled at all times like a cross between Animal House and The Harrad Experiment.

I am grateful for many reasons that I do not live in the Confederacy (though I do miss its barbecue and most of its people, whose generosity and excellent manners would, or should, shame us Yankees to blushes), and one of them is the stronger motivation and propensity their politicians have for waving, in lieu of the bloody shirt, the cum-drenched dildo. Of course, we have such jackasses up here, too, but we blow them off more easily -- when they tried a similar stunt at SUNY New Paltz, the Chancellor basically told them to fuck off.

I'm sure many of the Virginia kids' parents don't like the idea of a sex fair. I doubt they much cotton to that there evolution neither, but I assume the college will continue to teach it, because that is their responsibility.

I mean, if the schools don't teach our kids how to use ass-beads, who will?

THE GOVERNMENT WE DESERVE. Tech-tank director Sonia Arrison wonders whether Governor Schwarzenegger will be good for Silicon Valley. Well might she wonder. The sources in her article venture predictions no more trustworthy than the aching bones of a hillbilly weatherman:

"He is a pro-growth, pro-business, low-tax guy and this is what the Valley thrives on and needs," says Chris Alden, entrepreneur and founder of Red Herring magazine.

Red Herring? Say, didn't they go out of business? (Actually, the magazine was reanimated, albeit in web-only form, this month -- perhaps the Arnold election convinced its backers that a strong market for bullshit was in the offing.)

Michael Mahoney, a managing director at EGM Capital, a hedge fund that focuses on technology and telecommunications, agrees. The Valley appears convinced, he says, that Arnold "will get the state back on the right track with regard to finances and regulation."

But how? Arrison's sources caution against taking the fiscally prudent statements of Schwarzenegger advisor Warren Buffett too seriously. "Warren Buffett speaks for Warren Buffett," says "a Republican venture capitalist who recently hosted a huge Arnold fundraising dinner." Really? Then what's Arnold employing him for?

The true value of these prognostications is perhaps inadvertently revealed by another commentator:

James Hong, founder of the Internet dating site HOTorNOT.com, echoes a concern that many were willing to say only off the record: "I don't think he has exposed enough of his viewpoints on some of the issues that I think are important to us."

No shit. Schwarzenegger has in this campaign been a near-perfect cipher, and his fans, accustomed to projecting their hopes and dreams onto his lumpish visage, continue to see in him just what they want to see. This goes double for the internet guys Arrison cites. Remember, it wasn't long ago that these schnooks were cheerfully ushering us into the "New Economy," without warning (or even awareness) of the trap door and steep drop at the other side of the threshold. Now I'm supposed to listen to them on politics?

THERE'LL ALWAYS BE A BILKO. Further proof that the Brits have better taste than we (at least in culture -- I won't vouch for their food): this new Radio Times U.K. poll, in which residents of the Scepter'd Isle voted "The Phil Silvers Show" the best TV comedy show of all time.

How dya like that! as Doberman might have said. Apparently the adventures of Sgt. Bilko were re-run in Britain for some years after the show disappeared from U.S. syndication (I recall seeing a few episodes as a boy). Still, it's noteworthy that the Brits' memories reach back even that far. We have a museum for stuff like Silvers' show over here, yet only TV scholars (and boy, there's a funny concept, huh?) even know who Silvers is anymore.

Maybe Bilko reminds Brits of Jonson's "Volpone." Or maybe they like him because he suits the traditional European view of Americans -- crass and avaricious to the point of insanity, but energetic and amusing in the throes of our greed. Maybe the show stirs half-vengeful, half-fond memories of the "overpaid, oversexed, and over here" Yank servicemen of WWII. Or maybe the bureaucracy of Bilko's Army still has resonance for the notoriously bureaucrat-bound British. After all, "Yes, Minister" also made the list.

The win-place-show was Bilko, "Seinfeld," and "Fawlty Towers" -- not bad! I blush to admit I haven't seen many of the UK offerings that placed (though I have fond memories of the hilariously sour "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin"), but nearly everything I recognize is choice.

Now could you blokes send us a few decent rock bands, please? And take back your DJs.

DO I STUTTER? Brendan Miniter wants to infuse the dreary social studies cirricula of our schools with good old-fashioned American history. So do I. Of course, Miniter feels the best way to achieve this lofty goal is to repeat GOP fundraiser anecdotes about people who "warned against singing patriotic songs like 'God Bless America'" in the days following 9/11. "Heroes? Pooh!" Miniter imagines such unpatriots saying about traditional history instruction, "Nationalism? Bah! Western civilization? You've gotta be kidding!" So much for consensus-building.

Miniter's piece is rich in sneers at "liberal educators" and "Social-studies theorists," as is the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation-funded document toward which he steers his readers. This document's contributors all have impeccable educrat credentials (CV sample: "Jonathon Burack, a former secondary school history teacher, has for the past 20 years produced secondary school history curriculum materials... He demonstrates the pervasiveness of postmodern cultural relativist epistemology in our nation's schools..."), but I suppose if you're right-wing, you can be forgiven even an education degree.

While these folks favor the same confrontational approach as Miniter ("The keys to Rome are being turned over to the Goths and the Huns"), they are very solicitous of the Bush administration, even though the No Child Left Behind Act signed by our "education President" ignores social studies altogether. "This was not meant, heaven knows, as a hostile act," contributor Chester E. Finn assures us. "The authors of NCLB are patriots..."

The swipes at multiculturalism and "moral relativism" are familiar, ceaselessly repeated, and tiresome, more an incantation than an argument, but if you can make it to the passage by J. Martin Rochester, charmingly titled "The Training of Idiots," you're in for a treat. Rochester blames ahistoricism and its fallout, including our depressingly low voter turnout rates, on "America-Worsters," and prescribes that "we need to create fewer doubters and cynics."

Fewer doubters and cynics! How is this to be achieved -- extra sessions of the Breakfast Club? Sorry, Principal Vernon, but if you want less doubt and cynicism in schools, you shouldn't be yelling at teachers -- you should be yelling at our political class, which has done far more to inculcate our young with these characteristics than any diversity program.

FEEL-GOOD MOVIE OF THE YEAR. On the entertainment front, I finally caught "American Splendor" last night. A friend had complained to me that the movie doesn't give enough attention Harvey Pekar's real innovation -- the quotidian, working-class life stories in comic-strip form. Those are excellent, of course, and the most interesting of them aren't about Pekar at all -- they usually start with Harvey running into a buddy, and the buddy telling a long story. (My favorite, drawn by Gary Dumm, is about a guy who accompanies his pal to a job interview, decides to fill out an application himself because he's bored, sets the interviewer's trash basket on fire and still gets the job, and quits after one day -- "They wanted me to be a human screwdriver. Fuck that! The next day I went over the wall.")

But the movie's about Pekar. His biographical details are old news to many of us, though it is fun to see them fleshed out on screen. (The scenes of Pekar and Crumb giving birth to the "American Splendor" books are catnip to aging bohemians like me.) The small, private agonies and ecstacies of the old crank, though, are the real meat and drink. Paul Giamatti plays Pekar gnarled -- his default facial expression is a sneer. To me, this seemed like an act at first -- like Pekar's hollering prole routine seemed on Letterman. But when I got used to it, it was perfectly charming. His sneer, it turns out, isn't contempt, but disappointment, with himself and the world (a disappointment made understandable by the wonderfully cruddy Cleveland locales). But sometimes he's not disappointed. Things go well with the books; he finds love; he beats cancer; he takes pleasure from his peculiar friends and from the little stories they give him.

I think it's a good thing to be reminded that you don't have to be a grinning, positive-thinking idiot to get something out of life. The movie's being marketed as an offbeat thing ("Weird, different, fascinating!" says Moviechicks), and some of the unusual real Harvey/movie Harvey film tricks point that way, but at bottom it's about a real guy who manages to do alright without being like Rocky or Rudy or any of those fist-pumping clowns. You could call it a "feel-good" movie, in the old usage favored by Hollywood blurb writers. I don't see that one in movie ads anymore, come to think of it; they're more likely to advertise their entertainments as a "thrill ride" -- great synergy for the afilliated theme-park attractions, I guess. I don't like rides, but I don't mind feeling good.

DEM TWO. I only know yesterday's Democratic debate from its transcript, and so cannot offer commentary on John Kerry's haircut or Wesley Clark's podium manner or any other such details of importance in accredited commentators. But the text is not embarrassing, nor even too dispiriting.

Not that the candidates aren't a little silly. With so many participants, these debates currently resemble open auditions for a junior college production of All the King's Men, aspirants for which have been mischievously told that Willie Stark was modeled on John F. Kennedy. Even relying on the transcript, I can see each player strutting and fretting his or her sixty seconds upon the stage, and hear the grinding of gears as the moderators, more spineful than most such I've experienced, redirect a candidate's attention back to the question at hand.

One has to love the evasive answering techniques on display. No one, but no one, directly addressed the "Free Trader or Made in America" question. And rightly so, because it's a very unfair question. But still, since when do politicians need a good reason to wriggle, and since when do I need a good reason to enjoy their wriggling?

WILLIAMS: Beginning with Congressman Gephardt, it's the subject of trade. Do you wear the label "free trader" or "Made in America"?

GEPHARDT: I'm for a progressive trade policy and I will be a president who will lead not only America but the entire world toward a trade policy that will help every business and every worker in the world. That's what we need.

That doesn't just fail to answer Williams' question -- it fails to answer any question.

Lieberman got a few more jokes in, even one playing on the word "fucked." What would Tipper Gore think? More importantly, what Lieberman's really about? A lot of that culture-scold thing he works so assiduously on the hustings falls away at these debates. It's refreshing, and his relaxation shows a keen awareness that nothing at this stage of the campaign means much of anything, a trait which must be admired. It may be that Judgmental Joe dons and doffs the hairshirt as easily as an actor dons and doffs a costume. That would be a relief. Well, his old man did run a package store.

Dean seems a little rattled ("These days I feel my need to restate practically every position I have based on all the things these guys have said about me in the last three or four weeks"). But who wouldn't be? When you're the frontrunner and you've got nine challengers, one of them a late entry with military props, you have a right to some prickliness. Frankly I'd like to see him punch through that hoarse, Jerry-Brown-vintage faux-outrage and show some real anger. You're supposed to be Jed Bartlett, for Chrissakes! Smoke a cigarette or something.

I do find it remarkable that, regarding global trade issues, most of the candidates have staked out an ideological corridor that one might call "mend NAFTA, don't end NAFTA": renegotiate existing treaties so that the global little guy gets a fairer shake. That sounds pretty middle of the road, which is to say, possibly acceptable to a majority of voters. And that's weird, because we tend to think of these issues in apocalyptic terms -- global enslavement vs. anarchy. It's downright soothing to imagine that we might find our global trade routes smoothed by legislation, not littered with molotov cocktail debris. Probably a false hope, but hey, a guy can dream.

I still think the old dogs have the pole position, and if a time-traveller zipped in here now and told me it was all Kerry, I wouldn't be at all surprised. But it's September 2003. Who knows? Moreover, who cares?

I must add that I am pleased at the figure Revered Al is cutting these days. The most cheerful, if not the proudest, vote I ever cast was for Sharpton when he ran for Senate in the 1994 Democratic primary. What a wonderful thing it was to answer "Sharpton!" when my friends asked how I voted, and what entertaining responses I got! If you're a little further down my list this year, Rev, it is not due to lack of affection, but to the nagging fact that in the national crisis we now face, we need the sturdiest beam possible to hold off collapse.

THE SONG IS OVER. The great Tom Lehrer -- author of The Vatican Rag, MLF Lullaby, and Poisoning Pigeons in the Park -- went back to academe a long time ago, but I was still unnerved to hear (via an especially good Altercation this a.m.) that Lehrer is too pissed off to write any of his masterful satirical ditties about our current condition: "'I'm not tempted to write a song about George W.Bush," quoth the master. "I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them."

Lehrer is of course of the old school, with attitudes formed in a time (perhaps really just a brief historical respite) when America didn't start wars, we finished them (and opposed to the current vice-versa), and people were still inclined to laugh bullshit off the national stage.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it isn't just anger that prevents Lehrer's Bush song cycle. In the aforementioned interview he has a lot of smack to say about modern comedy ("The people who go to comedy shows are kids that don't know anything, I think, and so you have to make jokes about your girlfriend or your family or that kind of thing -- only make them as vulgar as possible"). Well, yes. There's no point in satirizing something if no one knows what you're talking about, or even, perhaps, what satire is.

I may be mistaken but I detect a bit of sadness in Lehrer's responses. Not maudlin sadness, but the world-weary sort ("I have become, you might call it mature -- I would call it senile -- and I can see both sides..."). This may be the natural state of aged satirists, as the late careers of Twain, Swift, et alia also demonstrate. You watch the Big Show long enough and certain patterns of behavior, mostly brutal and self-defeating, emerge; sooner or later, you get tired of pointing them out to people who came in late. Or decide that it would really be a shame to reveal these plot twists to them, and thus spoil a brash and diverting (if somewhat tawdry) entertainment.

Maybe I'm just projecting here.