ENTERING THE LISTS. Politics, as Bukowski famously observed, is like trying to screw a cat in the ass, so let's take a little break from intellectual bestiality to consider normally politics-intensive Matthew Yglesias' post on some critics' idea, digested here by McPaper*, of the top albums of all time.

As MY suggests, these lists are always "a bit off." Consensus has no role in matters of the heart, and judgments on music, especially pop music, are all about love. Now, nearly everyone has a soft spot in his heart for the Beatles, so any pop fan will probably find a spot for them in his top-whatever. So whenever two or more are gathered in the name of rock, the Fab Four are probably the easiest call for the top slot.

If you've ever read the Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop results, you'll notice the individual critics' ballots are usually a little eccentric, even perverse, but the consensus always comes out more or less normal, albeit cranky. Each of us imagines his own private headphone Valhalla, but group lists are about the commons, where the speakers are pointed out the windows.

This is easier to accept if music has been both a private and public passion for you. I used to go to the Cherry Tavern in the East Village, get a pitcher (usually with friends), and go to the jukebox and play "Revolution #9" from the White Album, sometimes more than once, sometimes until the bartender shut it off. "Whatsamatter?" I would say. "You don't like the Beatles?"

As for my top ten, it goes a little something like this:

1.) Exile on Main Street, The Rolling Stones
2.) Kings of Basement Rock, The Penetrators
3.) Live Rust, Neil Young
4.) Never Mind the Bollocks, The Sex Pistols
5.) A Hard Day's Night, The Beatles
6.) John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, John Lennon
7.) Smiley Smile, The Beach Boys
8.) The Velvet Underground with Nico
9.) The Residents' Commercial Album, The Residents
10.) We're Only In It For the Money, The Mothers of Invention/The Portsmouth Sinfonia (tie)

But then, that's just me. Or you.

* Hope this doesn't get me into any trouble with any major corporations.

DERBWATCH, CONTINUED. The port is spilled, the pipe gone out, poor Tom's a-cold and Derbyshire is raving:

"We construe civil marriage to mean the voluntary union of two persons as spouses, to the exclusion of all others.”

Do you, by God! Then you are construing it in a way it has never been construed before. I see nothing in your "construal" to prevent me from marrying my sister, for example. Is this actually OK in the state of Massachusetts?

Oh dear -- Derbyshire in extremis has fallen back upon the Man-on-Dog defense (not based on any judgment on Sister Derb's looks, but on the expanded definition by Senator Santorum, famed explicator of M-on-D).

This is indeed the last refuge of a dumbass. The expansion of our freedoms has taken us to places of which the Founders never dreamed: the abolition of slaves, the enfrancisement of women, the liberation of "Ulysses" et alia. To point to a line not yet crossed and cry, well, what about that one? is to misunderstand the progress of mankind upon which our very nation is predicated.

Well, he could always go back to China. I understand they have pretty good ballet.

WSJ WRITERS ARE VERY DIFFERENT FROM YOU AND ME. "What planet are these people living on? No normal person in a supermarket checkout line frets over whether the clerk has health insurance." -- James Taranto, Best of the Web.

DERB LETS THE SIDE DOWN. After discharging some of his negative energy by harshing at length on a transgendered opponent, John Derbyshire returns to Goodridge with a couple of conundrums.

"1. If 'gay marriage' is legalized, will prisoners be able to marry their cell mates? If not, why not?"

Well, outside coerced unions, which are invalid anyway, why not indeed?

"2. In many jurisdictions, a marriage can be annulled if it has not been consummated. What, exactly, constitutes 'consummation' of a gay marriage?"

Oh, pussy-bumping, ass-fucking, oral sex, penetration with dildoes and/or other sex toys, etc., etc., one imagines (even if Derb can't).

Really, old stick, can't you do better than that?

WELL, THEY ARE FRENCH. Lileks discovers new enemies of Our Way of Life: the Cirque du Soleil.

Ah, crap: married to pretentious European symbolism, that’s what. When you see a bunch of guys in cardinal-red waistcoats and powdered hair running around the lip of the stage swinging censors, you know Western Civ’s going to take it in the shorts tonight.

I don't envy the guy. All that money, that nice house, that nice family, and all he can do is bitch about the service at department stores, the evil traitors in our midst, and the sub-sub-theme of a Vegas casino attraction.

FIRST RESPONSE. I've been sitting here waiting for John Derbyshire, the proudest hater of homosexuals east of the Pecos, to respond to the Massachusetts ruling. Students of dramatic construction will appreciate his first sally, which is in response to some confused "speculating" by the equally repulsive, but much less amusing, homophobe Stanley Kurtz, as to what legislative measures the ruling might mandate.

Derb, bless him, behaves like a patrician made suddenly livid, but possessing sufficient mannerliness to mask his true feelings with an icy hauteur until he has some priv-acy, whereupon he will kick a footman or something:

Stanley: You observed that: "It’s also possible that only full gay marriage will do, according to the Court, and that the legislature will be ordered to bring it about."

Could you, or some friendly reader, please instruct me as to where, in the Massachusetts State Constitution, there is a clause authorizing the judiciary of that state to "order" the legislature to legislate in a certain way?

"Could you, or some friendly reader, please instruct me as to where..." Oh, that's very good. One can almost feel Derbyshire's barely-suppressed tremors of fury, masked by his long ermine cape against which, expelled by tension, his butt-plug flies, making a small thud like a tennis ball striking a drapery.

ANTI-SEMERICANISM?. Because of his actions in the 70s and 80s, I must consider Natan Sharansky a true hero. Unfortunately, the Sharon government he now serves seems to have demoted him to the less exalted role of propagandist.

Though the subtitle of Sharansky's recent Opinion Journal piece, "The inextricable link between anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism," was probably not written by him, neither is it at variance with the text -- to say the least:

Despite the differences between them, however, anti-Americanism in the Islamic world and anti-Americanism in Europe are in fact linked, and both bear an uncanny resemblance to anti-Semitism. It is, after all, with some reason that the United States is loathed and feared by the despots and fundamentalists of the Islamic world as well as by many Europeans. Like Israel, but in a much more powerful way, America embodies a different--a nonconforming--idea of the good, and refuses to abandon its moral clarity about the objective worth of that idea or of the free habits and institutions to which it has given birth... [astonished italics mine]

There are many mad presumptions at play here. For starters, Sharansky really seems to think that having the same set of opponents is grounds for spiritual brotherhood (which would have been news to Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt).

One might also vigorously question the notion that there can be no reason to oppose the actions of either the U.S. or Israeli governments outside the ancient tribal enmity of anti-Semitism. (Sharansky throughout conflates opposition to Israeli policy with anti-Semitism -- "hatred that takes as its focus the state of Israel" -- but these days this non-sequitir is so pro forma it hardly needs comment.)

Worst of all, it seems never to have entered Sharansky's thoughts that either the U.S. or the Israeli government could be capable of acting against its own moral interests. Is it really anti-Semitism (or whatever the weird hybrid proposed by Sharanksy should be called -- anti-Semericanism? anti-Ameritism?) to oppose Bush's feckless war or Sharon's Palestine-As-Prison Project? Are these not offenses to the ideals of Jefferson and Herzl, and do they not mock the very idealistic catchphrases ("light unto the nations" and "shining city on a hill") that Sharansky cites?

One can see the purpose of this shthick: to more strongly yoke, at a time of some tension between Israel and the U.S., the fortunes of one to the other in the court of public opinion. Sharansky even closes by making much of the disparity between America's might and Israel's ("...the United States has been blessed by providence with the power to match its ideals. The Jewish state, by contrast, is a tiny island in an exceedingly dangerous sea..."), evidentally to more strongly suggest that, as the two universally-hated kids on the block, we should stick together -- meaning that the stronger party will physically defend the weaker, and the weaker will say flattering things about the moral superiority of the stronger.

Who knows how well it will work, but whatever merits it has as spin, it is worthless as analysis.

NOTORIOUS HOMO-HATER REVEALS SECRET BRITNEY OBSESSION! Keep up the hate speech, John -- whenever I need to cite an example of conservative bigotry, you always have a fresh, steaming pile all ready for me. But please keep your strangulated, if-only-we-could-make-her-a-nice-girl crypto-porn out of it. Last thing I need when I'm watching Britney is the mental image of you in a lab coat...

NED FLANDERS' HOLIDAY FILM ROUNDUP. "Don't they care what they show kids?" Oh, go watch your singing vegetable tapes, you fucking doofus.

P.S. I know, Julia, even lefties can love Veggie Tales, but I used all my best right-wing-nut signifiers last week and have to deploy the weak stuff until reenforcements arrive. Say this for me, though: I haven't gotten down to the easy Ann Coulter laughs yet. Forbid it almighty God!

NUKED. The $87 billion Iraq reconstruction bill is the big-ticket item on which people are understandably focused. But the Bush Administration has many other ways to use our money to fuck things up. The energy bill they're about to ram through Congress gives between $16 and $20 billion in tax breaks to "producers of oil, natural gas, clean coal and nuclear energy."

Apparently the production of nuclear reactors is a dying craft, and its impoverished adherents require federal funding to keep this dark art alive. Not to worry, their plutonium rods will outlive us all.

Oh, yeah, the bill also authorizes Wildlife Refuge drilling. And for Corn Belt states, huge ethanol subsidies!

It's a good thing money grows on trees. Now if only we had more trees.

WHY THEY HATE EVERYBODY. "(Sometimes I swear that if a European hits his thumb with a hammer when no one’s around, he shouts GODDAMN JEWS!)" -- James Lileks.

Elsewhere on the page: put-downs of Michael Moore, Ted Rall, Howard Dean, and the French.

See, this is why I don't write about the guy as much as I used to: what would be the point?

YOU TAKE MY MEANING? McDonald's, you may have heard, is mad because Merriam-Webster has put "McJobs" in their dictionary, defining it the way anyone who has ever heard the word automatically and instinctually defines it -- as shitty, dead-end service jobs.

Mickey D's minions have hit the press hard with its complaints ("a slap in the face to the 12 million men and women blah blah blah"), and of course WSJ's OpinionJournal, flagship of scumbag bosses worldwide, has risen to its defense. OJ claims that M-W "misdefines" McJobs, because people do move up from burger flipping to better work. No figures at all are offered in defense of this statement, but plenty of can-do corporate-speak is: "ladder into the American workplace," "Ditto for opportunity," etc.

There is something piquant, and more, about McDonald's and the Journal's attempt to explain to the many, many people who use the word McJobs appropriately that they should be using instead as a positive term -- like McDonald's does in its jobs-for-the-handicapped program! (Turn that frown upside down, fella! You're on a ladder to the American workplace!) Kinda makes you feel like you're committing a hate crime or something if you even say the word, now, doesn't it?

And if we don't respond well to this friendly persuasion, well, both McD and OJ remind us that the term McJobs is a licensed trademark -- hint hint, see lawyer.

Does anyone else see something slightly sinister in this attempt by a corporation and its goons to change the universally accepted meaning of a word? It's one thing to work your company's image, but it seems to me that the way to remove an unflattering connotation from your nomenclature is to improve your own performance in that regard.

Instead, Mickey D (hey, am I allowed to call them that? Is it, like, racist?) goes running around the English-speaking world yelling, " McJobs good! Say it! McJobs good!" I suppose we'll find out soon if they're rich enough to pull it off, and if we're feeble-minded enough to have it pulled off on us.

If so, I expect that in the near future, Maaco or Jiffy Lube will aggressively attempt to change the popular understanding of the term "rim job."

SHORTER INSTAPUNDIT UPDATE: Ted Rall getting published in the Village Voice means all you stinking hippies want Americans to die. Conversely, you can't pin Misha's ravings on me just because he's on my blogroll. My "bad apple" theory of political life applies only to mainstream vehicles like what you hippies read, not to the Rolling Stone of the 21th Century.

(I guess I can't read the New York Times anymore since they started running David Brooks. That would make me a neo-conservative!)

SHORTER INSTAPUNDIT: This'll show Tom Tomorrow! See, warbloggers aren't the whiners with bad wrists -- Tom Tomorrow is!! Heh indeed! P.S. Ted Rall sux.

(editor's note: using the "Shorter" format on this cracker asshole really is like sticking a pin in a balloon.)

NOT THEIR LITTLE GIRL ANY MORE. Betsy Hart at NRO tells us that Jessica Lynch's I'm a Soldier, Too is a load of Howard Dean propaganda. Hart makes other mystifying statements, which Soundbitten admirably deconstructs.

Not mystifying at all is this new animus against Lynch. While more sentimental conservatives, like those at RonaldReagan.com, at least appreciate Lynch's service to her country ("The young soldier may not have engaged in any Sgt. York-style feats of daring -- but she's a hero, nonetheless"), the movement's Kulturkommando think she's nothing but trouble. Some, like Mona Charen, have been denigrating Lynch for months because she's a poster girl for female participation in America's armed forces, which to Charen et alia is just another liberal scheme to destroy America.

Others, like Hart, seem to be responding to a more recent need within their little community. Remember when conservatives were defending Lynch's heroism against "crackpot" debunkers? That was before she was able to speak for herself.

Now that's she has, it's apparently time for the story of the plucky little soldier from Palestine, WV to turn into something a little less flattering.

MR. SULLIVAN'S PLANET. In his latest article, Andrew Sullivan tells us that America is divided between those "baby boomers" who "see everything" through the "prism" of Vietnam and are destined to lose the entire south and the next Presidential election, and regular people like himself.

Taking care to be fair and balanced, Sullivan admits, after reproducing a long, incendiary and (if you know anything about the source) anomalous screed from Democratic Underground, that "Free Republic... is sometimes just as outrageous in the other direction as Democratic Underground."

Yes, he's talking about that Free Republic, at which members commemorate Lincoln's Birthday by toasting John Wilkes Booth, and would likely beat hell out of Sullivan if he stumbled upon their trailer park. (Representative post from a recent Freeper board: "...most queers aren't neat and pretty like tha' teevee shows either. Might as well stereotype them as lazy, self-absorbed, perverted, and living in pig sty apartments that reek of chain smoking and overfilled trash cans -- because that's what a lot of them are and that's where a lot of the queers live. Or better yet, why not take a tour of the AIDS wing of a large metropolitan hospital and set it to a laugh-track...")

Oh, and Sullivan thinks that Bush might lose "if he nominates a real extremist to the Supreme Court or backs a Constitutional Amendment against gay marriage." Yeah, that'll alienate his base, alright.

I used to wonder what planet Sullivan was from, but now I'm thinking in terms of galaxies.

P.S. Sullivan also says, "[Dean's] from Vermont, one of the home bases of what's being called 'the Starbucks Metrosexual elite.'" "Called" by whom besides Sullivan?

MILOS FORMAN WAS RIGHT. Larry Flynt claims to have nude pictures of Jessica Lynch, and to have procured them soley to keep them out of circulation, and thus spare from further degradation the Iraq War's most famous POW, whom Flynt feels has already been exploited enough by the Bush Administration.

I don't believe him, but you have to admire the showmanship. Some men will enjoy even the idea that the photos exist; some who do not enjoy the idea will still wonder if the photos exist; others will decry the whole concept as violently as if the photos exist. Thus Flynt has associated himself with a pornographic scoop that does not exist. Whotta demon!

I prefer this kind of buncombe to the kind dispensed by more diligent shapers of public opinion, and not only because it involves porn. While Roger Ailes and his drones, for example, methodically enforce their own version of political correctness among the serfs at Fox News, Flynt steps up like P.T. Barnum with an outrageous public claim that deftly mixes equal parts of concupiscence and sanctimony. One offense to reason and decency smells of the carnival tent, and promises at least a little cheer with the cheat; the other smells of Wite-Out and expensive cologne, and bores mercilessly into the skull, not caring to stop and tickle anyone's fancy along the way, lest they fall off-message.

Flynt's approach is, dare I say it, more American, and Ailes' more Orwellian. There is after all a difference between bullshit and Newspeak.

BOOTS ON FIFTH. I spent my lunch break today at the Veteran's Day Parade. I'd heard this event is always sparsely attended, and I was prepared to be depressed by the sight of aged warriors hobbling up Fifth Avenue as gaggles of seniors feebly clapped. But while this year's Parade certainly won't set any attendance records, that didn't seem to matter, because the vets were rocking. Didn't matter that St. Patrick's and Gay Pride are bigger and brassier. The vets had their parade. They hoisted the flag, worked the rifle, and styled their peacoats and camo with brio. Even the old ones had some spring in their step; even the ones bearing the POW-MIA flag had an upright and energized bearing.

I'm sure they'd have preferred huge, cheering throngs, but fuck it -- they've been through a lot worse than a weak house. Though many of the NYPD sawhorses held back naught but November air, and what applause we spectators raised died fast in the concrete corridors, the marchers waved and smiled and, when they recognized a brother on the sidelines, saluted.

There were representatives of all the services (I think -- didn't see any sailors), and of particular squads and special interests. There was an equal-rights group that flew the Pride flag next to Old Glory. There were guys carrying rifles as if on point, and others who slung them carelessly over their shoulders. There was a group of Bronx Vietnam vets who looked like they got back yesterday. There were Veterans Against The War, chanting BUSH LIED, PEOPLE DIED -- I wonder if the guys down at the New York Post who bitched today about poor V-Day attendance caught this act, or showed up at all. And there were high school marching bands playing the American military's greatest hits (including "Onward Christian Soldiers"), baton twirlers, and honor guards.

It wasn't all high spirits and happy faces. The POW-MIA flags, once an urgent distress signal for men presumably left behind, now seems a bitter reminder that soldiers know well whom they can and can’t count on. One improvised "float" featured a bamboo tiger-cage with tattered fatigues hanging in it. On the side of an armored vehicle read this legend: NEVER AGAIN WILL ONE GROUP OF VETERANS ABANDON ANOTHER.

It struck me that while the Parade does honor the fallen, it also honors the folks who came back from our wars, who must feel not only proud but lucky. These guys sure seemed to feel that way -- lucky to be alive, to hear and feel their boots tromping on safe concrete, to smell the tang of autumn. Having never served (too young for Nam, by the grace of God), I feel lucky, too; and I acknowledge that these guys, and their absent friends, may have bought me some of that luck.

HEADLINE OF THE WEEK. "Kidman To Keep Kravitz Romance Private," TeenHollywood.com.

FUTURE SCHLOCK. This recent piece of Virginia Postrel gush is about the new architectural template for Home Depot stores. Postrel posits that the "higher aesthetic expectations" of "urbanites" have led to this design marvel, and backs it up with a passage from the Engineering News-Record and a photo.

The News-Record does concur that "shoppers are flocking to buildings that are navigable, organized and well-maintained." The photo, however, forces me to make an observation: the buildings, if this is a reliable example, are butt ugly.

Now, to a Dynamist, I'm sure this is judgment is incomprehensible, or comprehensible only as a pathetic dying yawp from the withering tribe of The Future's Enemies who cannot see heaven in a box of steel, stone, and glass, however ergonomically sound.

But fuck it. I say they're eyesores and I say the hell with them.

P.S. I also think Philip Glass and Blink-182 are clearly inferior to the dusty, low-tech creations of Beethoven and Iggy and the Stooges.