BUT WE'RE NOT GOING TO SIT HERE AND LISTEN TO YOU BADMOUTH THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! In the 1980s, John Podhoretz wrote for the Moonie magazine Insight a film column that featured a little meter, on which he rated the political content of current movies on a left-to-right scale -- presumably to spare his subscribers, even in their unguarded leisure hours, exposure to modes of thought unapproved by Arnaud de Borchgrave.

Excellent training as these ideological cat's-cradles may have been for, say, a potential Ministry of Propaganda functionary, they seem to have left Podhoretz ill-equipped to judge the speech and actions of real people.

In today's New York Post, Podhoretz considers Howard Dean's recent foreign policy speech, and denounces it. The odd thing is that he doesn't overtly disapprove of much that Dean had to say. The Doctor and the Spin Doctor disagree on Iraq, of course, but in the main, Podhoretz admits that "Dean actually sounded rather belligerent" -- that's always a plus wih conservatives, isn't it? -- and that Dean seems "a big fan of American military action in every case he could name except where Iraq is concerned."

Yet Podhoretz ends by saying that Dean "is still the right candidate for a pacifist and the wrong person for the Oval Office." Why? Because Podhoretz doesn't believe Dean means what he says:

...it's a relief to hear that the man who is the most likely Democrat to go on and garner a minimum of 40 million votes in November 2004 understands the importance of our commitment to the military. Or, at least, understands the importance of lip service... as is increasingly the case with Dean, his assertion is a little hard to believe. (Italics added)

And how does Podhoretz know that Dean is a liar? Because he can't find any evidence that Dean isn't lying... and in this case the burden of proof lies not with the accuser but with Dean, because he comes from (cue scary music) New England:

There is no contemporaneous record anywhere in the comprehensive Nexis database to prove that Dean supported the 1991 war against Saddam or U.S. efforts in the Balkans. Given that only two moderate Democrats from New England in Congress voted for the first Gulf War -- Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and then-Rep. Dick Swett of New Hampshire -- I hope I may be forgiven for feeling skeptical about Dean's sudden protestation of his hawkishness toward Saddam Hussein.

In the spirit of this astonishing bit of "logic," I hope I may be forgiven for doubting that John Podhoretz was ever against tying black people to trucks and dragging them to their deaths. And I have proof! I Googled "tying black people to trucks and dragging them to their deaths" and "John Podhoretz," and came up with nothing!

Are we going to let this advocate of tying black people to trucks and dragging them to their deaths pull the wool over our eyes? Let me get my meter!

THE VERY LATEST THING IN TRAITOR-BAITING. Tacitus: "I don't see any Democrat -- save perhaps Wesley Clark -- whose election will do anything but harm the war on terror. There, I said it."

But he makes a little joke in the next graf and in comments ("I'm just doing my best to fulfill the stereotype"), signaling that if you take exception to his statement, you're just being a humorless liberal scold.

Which is kind of like some guy saying in a light, laughing voice that he's going to kick you in the nuts, and then kicking you in the nuts.

Will they fall for it? What won't they fall for?

UPDATE. Talked to T and he says I have him all wrong. As he is a gentleman, I am obliged to believe him. The rest of you may make your own judgments. It may be that I get oversensitive when opponents, however worthy, tell me that my candidates will "harm the war on terror." (Yeah, and that's why I'm supporting them -- I hate this fucking country and want it to lose to militant Islam, which totally rocks!)

DEAR DIARY:

Well, the accommodations are decent. The staff here is curt and sometimes a little snide, but in general they treat me OK. The cell is clean and the food, while unimaginative, is hot and nutritious.

After all those months on the lam, frankly, that's a relief. Life underground was no bed of roses, let me tell you. I had always imagined that, if I had to return to the life of deprivation I knew as a boy, it would be a cleansing experience, sort of like fasting. I told myself that it would revive my natural killer instincts. (Don't laugh. Putting people in a shredder isn't the same thing as hand-to-hand fighting.) Down in the valley, scrambling from house to house, my pistol at the ready -- that's adventure! I figured I might even lose a little of that "palace flab" I'd picked up during the fat years.

I guess that's why I was so glib about the invasion. My people thought I was being brave, but I was really being reckless. I had gotten sick of thinking about how it would go when it all came down, and I wanted to get it over with. Or rather, to get on with it.

Of course, when Baghdad fell, I saw very quickly that I had been romanticizing way too much. My flight was mostly tedious and exhausting. For the first little while I was in shock, and after the boys got killed, I hardly knew who I was anymore. (Maybe that's why I was so hard to catch!)

My natural instincts did come back to me -- but not the ones I'd expected. Mostly I felt fear. I hadn't felt that -- not really -- since I was a child. When I joined the Ba'ath Party, when I became an assassin, I'd said goodbye to fear, because I fully expected to be killed at any moment. But when I was a boy, especially right after I moved in with my uncle, any little thing would scare me: howling wolves, thunderstorms. Now, lying flat under a blanket on the backseats of old cars, my ears cocked for American accents, I felt again the quivering fear of uncertainty.

But that passed, you know, just before they got me. I had a feeling it would all be over soon, and it made things much easier to bear. I wouldn't say I was at peace, quite, but I didn't worry so much.

Now I've just had my first really good night's sleep in a while, despite the fluorescent light that's always on here. Already I'm feeling stronger. This afternoon I think I'll start exercising.

I'm turning my attention to the trial. I feel pretty confident. Whether they hold it in Den Hague or Baghdad, I know the Americans will be running the show. And that's my ace in the hole. Because anxious as they are to dispatch me, they also want something that only I can give them. Wouldn't they love it if I would tell the world that I had weapons of mass destruction out the yin-yang? Or that I was the real mastermind behind 9/11? (Of course it would be very hard to make these things sound plausible, but I'll leave it to their people to invent something -- they're experts at it.) How much would Bush be willing to give me for that -- especially in October? Life in prison would be sweeter than the hangman's noose, especially if my friends can get some of that cash I made off with into the right hands.

And I do want to stick around awhile. There's no telling what the next few years will bring. When the Americans get sick of running my country, when Chalabi and the other puppets lose favor, who knows but that they might not come running to me again? Stranger things have happened. Rumsfeld may yet turn up to shake my hand one more time.

But if it doesn't work out -- eh. All told, I've had a pretty good run for a farm boy. I've done a few things I'm not proud of, but who hasn't? As for posterity, let the world turn a few more times and then we'll see. They want to make my country a laboratory for what they call a Western-style democracy. It's all bullshit, of course, but if my people decide to take it seriously, they'll start thinking about how much oil they're sitting on top of and what kind of power it represents. I assure you Assad and Khatami and the rest of them are already thinking about it. Then the Americans may wind up wishing they had me around to run the torture chambers again.

Well, no sense working myself up about it. The army barber is coming soon to shave me. Perhaps I can get them to give me a TV. If not, there's always writing. Maybe I'll work on an autobiography. Allah knows, I've no end of stories.

ROLE REVERSAL. LA Times:

Last month, the U.S. Labor Department in Washington said that employers added a net 126,000 payroll jobs in October. In all, the economy has added 286,000 positions over the last three months -- the best showing since early 2001.

But 2.4 million more jobs would be needed to regain all the ground lost since March 2001, when the last recession began. When, or even if, those positions will come back is far from clear.

Here's the problem: Many companies like the notion of a jobless recovery. The leaner they can keep their U.S. payrolls -- by using overtime, automating the production process and outsourcing jobs overseas -- the higher their profits.

See, businesses aspire to increase their profits, and if they can earn more while paying fewer people, they will. That's what drives productivity up.

Yet more and more, Bush apologists act as if productivity jumps were caused by increased self-esteem. Here's former GE head Jack Welch -- previously known as a hard-headed businessman -- telling reporters to stop talking down our Tinkerbell recovery:

Not only can millions of hardworking people celebrate -- they should. They've earned the right. That's why we can't rain all over their efforts --their motivation and innovative spirit and can-do attitudes. Those good feelings, as any economist will tell you, are key drivers of company productivity and consumer confidence. The fact is a recovery will be a lot harder if we keep saying "but" about damn good news. (Italics mine.)

"As any economist will tell you?" Sure, maybe after three hours of open bar at an AEI dinner, one of them will slur, "Yeah, it's all a buncha bullshit, who knows what makes the economy work, I sure as hell don't." But does Welch really think that happy thoughts are what squeeze extra juice out of the American worker? (Also, does he think we really "celebrate" increased productivity? Maybe he saw some white-collar slaves slogging to the bar after an 18-hour day to get drunk and pass out, and thought, "Oh look -- they're celebrating!)

Isn't there something screwy here? Liberals -- allegedly airy, unrealistic, pie-in-the-sky sorts -- are patiently pointing out the common-sense fact that increased productivity will not necessarily boost employment, and may actually depress it, while conservatives -- allegedly the tough, practical, businesslike "grown-ups" -- are asking us to clap our hands if we believe.

Q&A.

Q:

The administration's note of disapproval on the upcoming Taiwan referendum and subsequent trade agreements with China struck me as decidedly odd. I thought that for sure that issue would be a no-brainer, on pure ideology... My thoughts on this matter were crystallized by a passage in a column by John Patrick Diggins:

...The American presidency remained almost as indifferent as the public when, in Hungary in 1956, the Red Army turned the Budapest uprising into a bloodbath, and when, in China in 1989, a young man stood alone and defiantly halted a tank in Tiananmen Square...

..., if we are truly interested in bringing democracy to those who want it, then why haven't we been applying that standard across the board, and stand with those opposed to communist tyranny?

A: Money.

Next question, please.

PERSPECTIVE, GUYS. If I read the esteemed Mr. Teachout correctly, and I fear that I do, he believes that the passing of the JenniCam means Internet users have moved on from gratuitous displays of pretty girls with their clothes off to sober little weblogs like, well, his.

When the blogging industry is pulling down $2.5 billion a year, give me a call.

BATTLE OF THE BARKING MOONBATS. Thanks for the tip, Jacob Sullum: Disgustipated by the evasions and tergiversations of the contemporary Right, the American Conservative Union (hey, noted below) have created their own online rag with the rhythmically awkward name of Conservative Battleline Online.

Three cheers for meathead schismatics! But is it as funny as GoPatGo's American Conservative magazine?

Let us compare features of their current issues:

CBO: "The Problem of National Review" is written more in sorrow than in anger ("National Review taught us conservatism in our youth," blubbers the unnamed author), but offers a few nice bits of incomprehensible internecine gobbledegook, e.g., "But would the editor really publicly claim that his goal is to passionately express and defend fusionist conservatism as opposed to providing journalistic objectivity from a moderately right of center position? I think not." Hear, hear!

Bob Barr weighs in, too, but not in his libertarian mode. "No F***ing Way" is a soggy, Cal Thomas-style grumble about all them swears on the TV. Only stylistic filigree: Clinton is implicated ("Clinton and his bevy of contextual lawyers would be proud"), but we don't even give points for that one anymore.

The recent Congressional Medicare rook leads Stephen Moore to declare that "We now have two big government parties in Washington." But old loyalties die hard. Says Moore of one of the Republicans who turned the tide toward financial ruin, "Poor Trent Franks looked like he was white as a ghost when he walked off the House floor. Trent is terrific guy... I have no doubt his conscience is gnawing away at him -- and will do so for a long time." Comes the revolution, comrade, you'll get off with time served (and whiteness of face, of course).

Then there's Mark Shields on.... wait, Mark Shields?

AmConMag: "In Rumsfeld's Shop" uses a brilliant device to strip the bark off neo Rummy: testimony by an actual soldier! "At this point," confides our undercover grunt (actually a Lt. Col.), "I didn’t know what a neocon was or that they had already swarmed over the Pentagon, populating various hives of policy and planning like African hybrids..." But the Lt. Col. learns good! Patriotic bureaucrats are kicked out ("Word was that he was even-handed with Israel"); an "anti-Arab orientation" is held. By nightmare's end, "I now understood that neoconservatism was both unhistorical and based on the organizing construct of 'permanent revolution.'"

Only one problem, conservatively speaking, with the witness: she's a she, Karen Kwiatkowski. What's she doin' in This Straight Man's Army? Say, maybe this permanent revolution thing goes back further than AmConMag imagines...

Big Daddy Buchanan examines Dixiephobia among his erstwhile comrades. "Why the Hollywood Left hates Dixie is easy to understand," writes Papa Pitchfork. "But why do the neocons?" After all, they have one big thing in common: "The neocons are pro-Israel. So, too, are these folks who believe in standing by Israel because the Bible tells them so." Pat aims most of his venom at Charles Krauthammer, who used the term "white trash" and has kind of a big nose, if ya know what I mean (and he called the rebel flag an "American swastika" -- need I say more?). Pat also reveals that he himself belongs to the Sons of Confederate Veterans. East-Coast Irish bully boy and an unrepentant Rebel -- why isn't this man President?

Taki is in a valedictory mood over two old chums -- no racial slurs this month. Try again later!

Conclusion: Honors are easy. AmConMag has the edge (and the head start), but CBO is a comer, and if it picks up on some of that underutilized young conservative talent that's lying around, it might steal a march.

BALANCED BUDGET SOLECISM. Cornerite Tim Graham is pissing on the fresh grave of Sen. Paul Simon. Graham says the claim, inspired by Simon's work toward a balanced federal budget, that the late Illinois Senator was a "social liberal, fiscal conservative," is bogus -- a surprising judgment, but a necessary tactic, I guess, if your job is to talk up those conservatives currently "balancing" our budget into insolvency on behalf of their greedy pals.

Graham's evidence against Simon's bifurcated designation: he had a low American Conservative Union rating ("which is partially on fiscal issues"). And he wanted single-payer health care. Within a balanced budget.

In other words, he wanted liberal programs, but only if they were within the means of the government. If that isn't "social liberal, fiscal conservative," what is?

The real money quote, though, is this breathtaking statement:

To win the battle of defining conservatism, conservatives are going to have to reject the notion that balanced-budget socialism can be defined as “fiscally conservative.” Fiscal conservatism should be defined as a preference for low taxes and strictly limited government.

When people talk about culture wars, too often they mean this: the power to "define," or rather to redefine, heretofore simple and commonly understood concepts by new and usually absurd standards. If the current program of spending rampages, from which the public is occasionally distracted by tax rebates, is what now passes for fiscal conservatism, then they certainly don't make fiscal conservatives the way they did when I was a boy.

And you have to love that syndrome from which Graham thinks we should be protected: "balanced-budget socialism." We'll get right on it, chief, as soon as someone explains what it is.

DIE, NASTY:

WOE IS WE [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
Andy Pettitte is leaving the Yanks for the Astros (NBC just confirmed, too). Weeping can be heard throughout NYC. Wait with anticipation for Rich wisdom on this breaking news.

Posted at 09:29 AM


Well, "K-Lo," some of us are crying -- with laughter! As a fan who's true to the Orange and Blue, I applaud the Astros on their acquisition, and wish the Bosox luck with Curt Schilling. And I look forward to following the progress of Mr. Steinbrenner's "Dynasty" next season. The humbled shall be exalted, and the exalted shall be humbled.

PRODUCTIVITY. What Daniel Drezner takes hundreds of words to misapprehend, Ted Rall makes clear in four panels.

Yes, I know your mommy said he was a traitor. Your mommy is a cracker asshole.

THE MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS. "But I think it would be remarkably short-sighted for those of us on the libertarian end of the conservative movement to underestimate the amount of betrayal that many social conservatives feel... Libertarians often treat social conservatives as useful idiots -- folks who are good to have around because they tend to vote Republican, but not really the folks you want to have sitting at the 'grown up table' deciding social policy."

Let us indulge for a moment the dream-world scenario posited by this approvingly-quoted poster to Andrew Sullivan's site, and imagine a conversation at that 'grown up table' with all hands on deck:

"Come, brother conservative, let us reason together. May we have your input on gay marriage?"

"Romans 1:26-27."

(pause)

"OK, anything else?"

"Well, with all due respect to my gay brethren, same-sex marriage — by itself, and by leading to state-sanctioned polygamy and polyamory — will undermine monogamy [and] initiate a process likely to terminate in the abolition of legal marriage. It will also cause earthquakes and plagues of frogs. Ha! Just kidding. What I really mean is, Romans 1:26-27. Guards, take this man away."

(Guy wakes up in a Log Cabin, the residents of which ask him, "Is it safe to come out yet?")

(MUSIC: Little Rascals outro)

THE DEVIL PROBABLY. Last night PBS ran a little documentary about Galileo and his persecution by the Church -- simplistic and preachy, as is their wont, and Simon Callow is a terrible ham, but overall a decent, compact dramatization. It reminded me of Jonah Goldberg.

Yes, dear reader, I know how strange that sounds -- that, intellectually, Galileo and Goldberg are not even in the same time-space continuum. Let me explain: the PBS show reminded me of, and sent me back to, Goldberg's truly bizarre take on the Galileo story in 1999:

A lovable old scientist is condemned to Hell for refusing to deny the truth of the cosmos (in this case the Copernican notion of heliocentricity... The problem is, it's spin. Ancient, pro-enlightenment, zealot spin.

Goldberg's article does not refute the well-known facts of the Galielo case, but seeks to drive them from the reader's mind with mitigating circumstances. Some of these are just irrelevant and lame: for example, that Galileo's fellow scientists were jealous and really started the campaign against him. (Perhaps, but scientists didn't run the Inquisition.) Others are inversions not only of history, but also of logic:

Galileo's James Carville was no preacher, but a scientist named Schreiner (it helps if you say his name the way Seinfeld says "Neumann"). He fanned the flames in Rome until the Pope felt obliged to call a trial under the Inquisition. The head of the Inquisition was a Galileo supporter, who hoped to get the whole thing over with quickly by just giving him a formal reprimand. Unfortunately, rabble-rousers and opportunists turned the heat up. The trial is very complicated but the result was that Galileo got house arrest, which is where he did all of his research anyway. He was permitted to correspond with any scientist he wanted and he wrote the Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences while under the Man's thumb.

All the hallmarks of Goldberg's wormy style are here: the gratuitous and irrelevant personal slurs, the jarring insertion of hipster language, and the reflexive minimization of injustices suffered by others (Wow, house arrest was like that time I had detention for a week! Least it got me to read Atlas Shrugged).

Interestingly, it is in some ways comparable to the article on Galileo in the Catholic Encyclopedia, which makes a number of similar non-arguments -- here's one interesting variation:

It is in the first place constantly assumed, especially at the present day, that the opposition which Copernicanism encountered at the hands of ecclesiastical authority was prompted by hatred of science and a desire to keep the minds of men in the darkness of ignorance. To suppose that any body of men could deliberately adopt such a course is ridiculous, especially a body which, with whatever defects of method, had for so long been the only one which concerned itself with science at all.

Actually, this rather elegant sophism -- if we support scientists, we are incapable of doing anything that would harm science -- is quite beyond Goldberg's skill-set, but its author does show something of the same passion for the subversion of plain facts.

Of course, the Catholic Encyclopedia author is laboring for the world's greatest wholesale dealer of dogma. When the cause is holy, no obfuscation can be too dense, no twists of logic too tortuous. Goldberg, however, labors for National Review. Eternal salvation is not in the contract. Why then work so hard to promulgate such outright bullshit, when one could, with less trouble and spiritual damage to oneself, simply kick back and shoot spitballs at Al Gore and PETA?

In my brief time scrupling over the political writing of my time, I have often been insulting and short-tempered. This is not so much because I fault the reasoning of my subjects, in most cases, but because there seems to be no reasoning, or reason, in them at all.

But, as my good friend Bob Schaffer has observed, hell has no floor -- things can always get worse. I really believe Goldberg represents -- and he may not be the best representative, but he is the one at hand -- a newer, lower order of propagandist: one who prevaricates because he thinks it's cool.

Think of it. You're born into a prominent right-wing family. You have a facility for language, and can do tricks with it that make the grown-ups clap. No biggie, but positive attention beats negative. Over time, they put you to work in one of the acceptable venues. You shake hands with their former young, with-it guy correspondent, a tedious boomer. Dude, your thought balloon reads, you are way old and I am so not you.

So you're sitting in the office with your feet up and your "colleagues" are all clacking away at stern denunciations of the welfare state and you couldn't give a lukewarm shit. But you can still sling phrases and so, in your boredom, you decide to drop some bombs: for example, a thousand words on how the Church actually did Galilieo a favor. Audacious! Even the greybeards must applaud your chutzpah.

You keep it up. You'll see their bitching about racial sensitivity -- "There is not a college course in the humanities which does not overly dwell on race" -- and raise them: "It's so depressing that 'people of color' has replaced 'colored people.' In a very important sense, the old phrase was better..." Your gloss does not advance any argument, but gives a tingle to every staffer sick of black bellyaching. Boo-yah!

Eventually your method becomes easy: you don't have to outrage any particular constituency -- outrages to common sense will do just as well. You can give off some particularly sloppy dorm-room windbaggery about Tolkein and make it into an article; the whiplash of your train of thought will provide fans with the confused feeling they learned as undergrads to identify with big ideas.

Boredom's a bitch, though, and sometimes you stretch yourself. When the Big Boss lays down the law on A&F's pornographic catalogue, you know what you have to do: establish yourself as a connoisseur of anime and commercial fleshpix while decrying "peddling what amounts to stylized smut." Makes no sense? Dude, sense is like so over.

Well, Western Civ had a good run. I'll be interested to see what's on next.

FUZZY MATH. Brookhiser at The Corner: "Why did Gore do it?... After decades of self-discipline and deprivations, the experience of being repudiated by the voters, especially in a presidential run, has powerful and disturbing effects."

Ahem. Getting more votes than the other guy is not "being repudiated by the voters."

God, they really do hate Gore, don't they? He must have something going for him.

DID YOU MISS ME? A stomach virus plus computer problems equalled a longer than usual layoff from blogging here at alicublog, so some small inanities, like this moron who only recently discovered that Randy Newman thinks bad thoughts, went unattended. Sorry.

HOMAGE TO DUSTIN DIAMOND. Actually this David Brooks column isn't too, too terrible, but I had to notice this right-wing tic:

So when a Republican starts a perfectly normal conversation about the glories of his powerboat, snowmobile, combine or hemi, the liberal is likely to screech out something about the ozone layer.

Have you noticed that nearly every conservative characterization of everyday liberals involves screeching? There's the "santimonious [sic] liberal screech," for example, and the "whacko lefties screech." This guy claims that "the whine of the North American liberal can often be mistaken for the sound of a screech owl." Another one says "You say 'Republican' to a liberal gay activist, they'll make a face or screech or whine or say, 'Republicans cannot be good'" (though, in this case, it seems possible that the author attributes his subject's screeching to gayness rather than liberalism). Ann Coulter notes all the things "that would cause a liberal to screech."

And so on. See here for more. I guess it has something to do with the portrayal of leftism as less than manly, an electorally useful gambit in the Bible and Ethanol Belt States. (Congresscritter Evans wants to give more money to schools -- 'cuz that's where screechy types like him likes to hide, while us real men is out playin' football and makin' ethanol!). I can understand this kind of idiocy among the hoi polloi, but isn't it odd that the bespectacled, wimpish Brooks feels the need to play along? Maybe it's his way of telling his fellow conservatives, "I may have manicured nails and the speaking manner of a small-town theatre critic, but at least I don't screech!"

POTS & KETTLES, PART 7,595,044. David Brooks talks about a Presidential candidate who came from wealth and privilege yet affects the demeanor of a regular Joe. He "doesn't worry about having a coherent political philosophy," and "when you actually try to pin him down on a policy, you often find there is nothing there."

OK, you knew as soon as I said "David Brooks" that the column wasn't about our tough-talkin', silver-spoon-chewin', free-spendin', tariff-placin'-then-revokin' President. It's Howard Dean that's a phony! Whereas our Dear Leader believes in things. Like nation building. Of course, he believes different things about it at different times, but -- boy, that Dean, he's a crazy fucker, huh?

Sigh. This sort of thing makes me miss the moral clarity of Walter Duranty.

SHIT IN A CORNER, PART 3,429:

HEY THERE, BIG SPENDER [Jonathan H. Adler]
At a time when libertarians and economic conservatives are already grumbling about Republicans' profligate spending, what does the Bush Administration do? Think up new big-ticket spending items for a second term. Is KArl Rove trying to make such voters stay home in 2004?

(italics mine)

Yeah, those 300 votes might cost the GOP Nevada. Again!

EARLY CHRISTMAS PRESENT: Jesse Pandagon's "20 most annoying conservatives of 2003." Check especially the Jonah Goldberg comic, and the origin of Roy's Rock. (Thanks, Atrios from whom all blessings flow.)

LIT CORNER. I picked up some old books for a song (well, 50 cents apiece) at a sale. Fascinating specimens. One was Gene Fowler's bio of Jimmy Walker, the Roaring Twenties mayor of New York, called "Beau James." With Fowler I was previously acquainted; I'd read his cheapy bio of Jimmy Durante, "Schnozzola," and the Walker book follows a similar pattern: anecdotes and witty sayings bridged by historical data seemingly recited from imperfect, but compulsively perfecting, memory -- the polar opposite of those meticulous 800-page biographies that win the Pulitzers. Fowler seems to have been pals with both Durante and Walker, and with Damon Runyon, whose style he shares a bit. That this style also intrudes into the "quotations" of his subjects only adds to the charm, if not the versimilitude. Here's a Walker tale, via Fowler:

Whenever Jim shaved he used 'Champagne' toilet water, his only perfume, as a lotion. He paid six dollars a bottle for this dressing, which he also used after a bath. One of his servants seemed unable to buy the toilet water for less than ten dollars a bottle.

Jim was not the man to quibble about expenses, but somehow he had set his mind upon six dollars as a fair price for his favorite toilet water.

"I wonder," Jim said to the servant one day, "if we might strike a bargain, you and I? I'm going to raise your salary on the condition that you find a place that sells the toilet water for six dollars a bottle."

The servant qualified for the wage increase. "You know," Jimmy once said to his friend Johnny O'Connor, "if someone stole Brooklyn Bridge I'd be the last person in town to miss it. But when someone gyps me on toilet water, I feel that I am being more used than usual."

Does this sound stenographically accurate? Who cares?Walker had style, and so did Fowler, and if one owed some of his style to the other, I don't care to know of it. We're always hearing about how eloquent Bush is, but are offered very flat champagne (or toilet water) as evidence. At least Fowler had the decency to gussy up his subject so that we might believe him to be as smooth as advertised. Not truth, then, but legend, and we who revere "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" know what choice to make.

I also got an 1899 edition of Norris' "McTeague." This of course is the source material for von Stroheim's ill-fated "Greed," and for William Bolcom's opera (libretto by Arnold Weinstein and Robert Altman!). I can see why grand stylists are attracted to this property, even though the novel's pitch is tuned to the first faint notes of naturalism coming then out of Europe. Norris seems to have caught the Zola bug bad. Every squalid flat is rendered down to the last rusted coathook and battered chair-rail, and all relations are inevitably reduced to their grubby essence, often with disdainful and sometimes horrified commentary by the author, as in this passage detailing the quack dentist McTeague's infatuation with the childlike Trina:

The poor crude dentist of Polk Street, stupid, ignorant, vulgar, with his sham education and plebean tastes, whose only relaxations were to eat, to drink steam beer, and to play upon his concertina, was living through his first romance...

Ugh. Before McTeague first kisses Trina while she is anaesthetized in his dentist's chair (!), his inner struggle is rendered thusly:

He was alone with her, and she was absolutely without defence. Suddenly the animal in the man stirred and woke; the evil instincts that in him were so close to the surface leaped to life, shouting and clamoring... it was the old battle, old as the world, wide as the world -- the sudden panther leap of the animal, lips drawn, fangs aflash, hideous, monstrous, not to be be resisted...

Double ugh. One sympathizes with Eugene O'Neill's old man, who, after seeing his son's "Beyond the Horizon," asked him, "What are you trying to do, send the audience home to commit suicide?" For there is something purposefully ugly about the early attempts of American writers to not only grab hold of the truth as they saw it, but to thrust it under the nose of the bourgeoisie.

And yet... along this muddy track the novel proceeds single-mindedly and gathers great force and even beauty. One can see where Dreiser got it from -- the ham-handed, club-footed narrative style that, seemingly by brute force, draws readers in and carries them down into the muck. Mencken, that great champion of these authors, once said of the oratory of Warren G. Harding, a very different kind of writer, that it reminded him of "a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it." I wonder if Mencken, whose aversion to poetry is legendary, might not have admired something of idiotic barking-dog grandeur in Norris and his decedents as well?

BAD SANTA? I see the ACLU has griped because a minister dressed as Santa Claus was allowed to address a Baldwin City, KS classroom about the meaning of Christmas.

The Topeka Capital-Journal dispatch doesn't give much detail on the talk, though the Lawrence (KS) Journal-World reports that the ACLU has "urged the school district to investigate elementary schools allowing a Christian minister dressed as Santa Claus to discuss the meaning of Christmas, referral of students who appear to need guidance to Christian resources and granting Christian 'missionaries' access to students in after-school programs"

Well, that's the ACLU's job, I guess. And I wouldn't presume to pronounce on this case without more evidence. Maybe the Rev was counselling persecution of homosexuals, say, while under cover of Kringle.

But more and more I figure this is the sort of case where the ACLU ought to just let go of the rope. It's a bitter thing to say, but most cowtown kids have no strong motivation to think and act freely anyway, and trying to protect them from the depradations of organized religion is probably going to work about as well as trying to protect them from Wal-Mart and reality TV shows. Meanwhile complaints like this give wingers and Jesus freaks another chance to bitch about how liberals spoiled their Christmas.

I think the ACLU should take its contingency fund for events of this sort and invest it in copies of The Origin of Species, Babbitt, A People's History of the United States et alia, and send copies to safe houses throughout the Bible and Ethanol Belts, where young people who wish to escape the stifling stupidity of their parents and warders may take refuge. The cultivation of a few free minds might do more for our freedoms in the long run than blanket deChristianization of the public square.