ITINERARY. Well, I did my patriotic duty this morning and voted for Al Sharpton, New York's favorite son. Appropriately, this evening I'm leaving the country. Not for long -- just 11 days in England to play bass for this guy. I'll duck into every EasyEverything and internet cafe I can find along the way to keep you good people apprised on my progress.

IN RUSSIA, ART LOOKS AT YOU! There's some sort of thread (albeit a short, frayed one) at The Kerner, based on an apercu by the madman Derbyshire, claiming that Communist states were "uncreative."

Artists have of course existed at all times and in all places. Herbert von Karajan conducted for the Nazis, and Maurice Chevalier entertained the Vichy governors. At The Kennel, though, they are obsessed with painting the most horrific picture imaginable of the late Red regime, like medieval Catholics ornamenting Hell with new torments -- not only was it a failed economic system, they wrote lousy poetry!

It's as if they genuinely worried that Communism might make a comeback -- odd, when one observes how fulsomely these same guys extoll the health of capitalism.

One might as well ask how anyone could be creative in America. Our unnatural obsession with money, our worship of greedy scumbags, and the negative aesthetic value of the disgusting, demeaning, violent crap with which we gorge our eyes and ears would indicate to any disinterested observer a thoroughly anaesthetic society -- one that not only wouldn't recognize art if it saw it, but would actually be downright hostile to it, sensing on some animal level the threat art would pose to our perfect ugliness and invincible ignorance of anything more exalted than the main chance and the art of the deal.

Still we make art, sometimes. And if we can do it, so could the Reds.

OSCAR III.So far the most majestic entrance is that of Maryann DeLeo, striding to the stage to accept the Doc Short award for Chernobyl Heart. I like her Mom, too, who took off her glasses for the camera. Errol Morris! "I'd like to thank the Academy for recognizing my films!" Tell them about the rabbit holes, Errol.

(I can't help it, I have to load The Chrysler again -- snide horror at Morris, weird speculation as to what the Beautiful People think of the Proles thinking of them, references to their college degrees -- ugh, no more shall I gaze.)

I like the tradition of presenters knocking the Academy President -- it's been going on so long since Robin Williams made Jack Valenti look like Margaret Dumont, now it seems fairly benign.

OSCAR II. Hey, something I saw (Master and Commander) won an award! I'm liking the Rings guy in the neo-Edwardian jacket who (as Art Director) paid lovely tribute to his childhood sweetheart and (as Makeup Guy) paid lovely tribute to the many many people who had to make, apply, and wear his prosthetics. In fact I like all the New Zealanders making good use of their stage time. Maybe I'll move to New Zealand someday. Nowabouts it seems good to consider options.

But here I am, acting like a culture-warring idiot. Must stop that.

I have to say it's weird to see Julia Roberts, who moves like a Dean of Men, paying tribute to Katherine Hepburn, who moved like grace itself. (Though the Barbara Walters anecdote was sweet.) The tribute films so far seem pretty perfunctory -- did they fire Chuck Workman? But no collection of Hepburn clips would look bad. This one made me want to see Rooster Cogburn, for Pete's sake. No -- for Kate's sake. She was a true priestess at the temple of art, God bless her.

OSCAR I. As of 10 pm, this is fun. Crystal loosened up quick. The Oscar Best Picture song schtick was at least as well-written as its previous editions. The Supporting winners are fine actors and acquitted themselves well. Every time they cut to Ken Watanabe, who has a natural "I kill you now" look, I break up. And they're right this minute giving an award to the sublime Blake Edwards, who is hamming beautifully.

I do peek in at The Kroener sometimes and think, how sad it must be to be a right-wing bloviator on Oscar night -- applauding a joke at Michael Moore's expense with no apparent awareness of the fact that Moore participated in the gag, which makes him rather a good sport (it's like hating on Bob Hope, honored here, and taking his self-deprecating humor as a point for Your Side). And freaking out that Messiah Mel is not present. Imagine politics being everything in your life! One almost feels sorry for them. Almost, but not quite.

MY NEW DREAM GIRL:


New York Times:

In a sudden reversal, Britain said Wednesday that it would not prosecute a 29-year-old government linguist who admitted leaking a top secret American request for assistance in bugging United Nations diplomats.

The request was made by the United States National Security Agency during the debate over the Iraq war a year ago, according to the linguist, Katharine Gun, and her lawyers...

Ms. Gun's arrest last March and her assertion that she had acted out of conscience to expose what she regarded as an attempt by the United States to undermine the debate at the United Nations, has attracted broad attention.

Ms. Gun "was prepared to admit that she had willfully violated Britain's Official Secrets Act" in order to get this scandalous behavior in front of the public.

I'm going to England soon. Hopefully I'll have time to ring up Ms. Gun and request a private debriefing.

SPEAKING POWER TO TRUTH. Here's a transcript of Rush Limbaugh talking to some kid about Clear Channel. The kid's pissed that CC has a virtual monopoly on airtime and that his own band has no chance with its stations because their DJs are told to play only approved playlists. Limbaugh says that when he was a DJ, he was told what to play, too.

At this point I halfway expected Rush to commiserate with the kid, but instead he explains that this is how things were, are, will be and, to coin a phrase, are supposed to be:

...it's not the radio stations that are giving you problems although it is a challenge for you, it's the music business at large...

I know you're 16 and you're bright. There's so many lessons here. Economics is one, specific business application is another. First thing I'd like to say, why does nobody complain about the number of Wal-Marts? I mean Kmart complains about it, but there aren't any government hearings...

Clear Channel owns a lot of radio stations, I can tell you they're not all music stations, they don't all play the same music... There's a little bit more autonomy at these Clear Channel stations than people understand. I happen to know this because my show airs on a number of them...

Then he talks about how, when he was a DJ, music companies treated stations "as a bunch of dirt sewers" and "the musicians themselves, their noses were straight up in the air and their heads were in the clouds and they wouldn't deign to walk into a radio station... Now all of a sudden, I'm listening to all these musicians complain about Clear Channel. Why, it's turned out that these musicians are being forced to admit publicly what they need."

I must be getting soft -- fancy even imagining that Limbaugh would ever side with the powerless against the powerful! The kid complains that he's locked out of a living by a virtual monopoly. A sympathetic soul might have told him about Vin Scelsa, about the remaining independent college stations, about satellite and internet stations, etc. Limbaugh instead tells him: isn't it great that now the power is on my side?

COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATIVES, VERSION 2.0. It hadda happen: noted right-wing nut and let's-pretend Democrat Orson Scott Card, whose sad case was examined in this space last December, has weighed in on gay marriage, starting with the treacherous courts that approve it:

...every American who believes in democracy should be outraged that any court should take it upon itself to dictate such a social innovation without recourse to democratic process.... Anyone who opposes this edict will be branded a bigot... Which is the modern Jacobin equivalent of crying, "Off with their heads!"

(Signal difference, Orson: the Jacobins could actually get your head chopped off.)

Marriage Is Already Open to Everyone.

In the first place, no law in any state in the United States now or ever has forbidden homosexuals to marry. The law has never asked that a man prove his heterosexuality in order to marry a woman, or a woman hers in order to marry a man.

Thassa good one. Y'all ever hear the one about the faggot on the garbage truck?

The sex life of the people around me is none of my business; the homosexuality of some of my friends and associates has made no barrier between us, and as far as I know, my heterosexuality hasn't bothered them.

Card has gay friends? (Actually: Card has friends?) I wonder if any of them have read Card's "Hypocrites of Homosexuality":

Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books... to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society's regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.

If they have read this, and they still want to be friends with Card, I have to ask them: are you busy during the Republican Convention? Because I think we can get you a photo op with the President.

THE END OF SOUTH PARK REPUBLICANISM. At first Glenn Reynolds, perhaps sensing that his regular-Southron-guy schtick needed a boost, backed Howard Stern versus Clear Channel, which had pulled his radio show.

Then, in response to the values finger-wagging of James Lileks, Reynolds got halfway back in line. While declining to disown the ribald Stern's content, Reynolds suddenly remembered that Stern wasn't "censored" after all -- he was fired. A good libertarian cover!

Maybe Lileks then called the Professor and had Gnat gibber to him until he cracked, because now Reynolds is apparently down with the official line: he implies that Stern promotes racism.

In this era of Jesus promo films and legislative fag-bashing, I predict you're going to see a lot of this sort of thing. Guys like Reynolds who like to insist they're more fun- and freedom-loving than those Puritanical liberals will start telling us how important it is to keep a clean mouth and a closed mind.

Prime candidate for early conversion: a guy who back in April was telling people to lighten up about Little Green Footballs -- whose Muslim-bashing he interpreted as "raw, unashamed criticism... of such sacred cows as 'religion' and 'culture'" for people who are "just plain sick and tired of bullshit." He praised LGF as "a cornerstone of neoconservative/South Park Republican thought." Now he's shilling for the FMA. It won't be long, I'm sure, till he starts telling us that Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is an Al Qaeda plot to sap our will.

When the Jesus freaks talk about a new Great Awakening, is this what they mean?

DAS CAPITAL, CONTINUED. I had a little extra time in D.C., so I went down to the Mall, mainly to see if the Constitution was still there. It is. But you can't go up the majestic front steps of the National Archives anymore; you have to skulk in by a ground-level side door. Sigh. On the plus side, I was able to query a knowledgeable guard about a few things. He was in many respects your typical Fed guard, working-class and no-nonsense, but very tall and supple, and he gestured with his whole arm toward the objects being described. He asked leading questions ("And at that time, George Washington was president of...?" "And what do you notice about Dickinson? Seven men in from the left") -- or should I say leaning questions, because he tilted over you when he asked them. If he didn't know an answer, he said, "Possibly, it might have been," and if you brought up an old wives' tale about the documents or the facility he took quiet but obvious pleasure in debunking it. I think as a kid he may have wanted to be either a dancer or a teacher, but always had too much sense to put his mama's son on a path to starvation.

He's right up there with the pudgy, deep-voiced, twinkle-eyed fellow with the cane at Westminster Abbey whom I observed patiently informing a mispronouncing tourist, "This is not the Stone of Scahn. This is the Stone of Scoon. Scahn is what you have with jam and butter for tea."

LIVE FROM OUR NATION'S CAPITAL. I'm down in the D.C. area for my semi-annual Von Hippel-Lindau examination at the National Institutes of Health. Don't worry, libertarians, this is a fair, one might even say laissez-faire, trade; the Feds get to study my rare genetic disorder toward the purpose of finding a cure for cancer, and I get treatment if things go wrong. Beside, fuck you, I like big government, and the NIH is big government at its best. The NIH does great work -- NIH-funded scientists just won another Nobel for chemistry -- while your big-pharma buddies were spending billions trying to get one boner pill to sell better than another.

I also like hanging around D.C., though I haven't had much time for it on this trip so far. The neighborhood near my hotel (Calvert and Wisconsin) seemed pretty luxe. When I got in around 9:30 pm, the few people on the street were either jogging or on their way to party at Marguerita-and-vanitas joints of the sort popular across American in the 1980s.

I usually wind up staying in one part of Georgetown or another. Everyone there seems extremely well-off. Yuppies in D.C. dress a little differently than they do back in New York. In New York business dress is a concession to necessity or an assertion of raw power. Here it seems more signficant in the clinical sense: clothes announce niche. There are dogged wonks and nerds in suits that are of excellent material but never hang right from their hunched shoulders; activists in courderoy pants and frayed oxfords; Republicans with flag pins; mysterious white-haired bulls giving off a faint aroma of power, their ties enigmatically ensigned. Women of this class actually dress more interestingly here than they do in Manhattan -- my favorite this time wore an impeccable powder-blue wool coat (!) with matching leather gloves -- and have a greater tendency toward opaque stockings.

CROCODILE TEAR WATCH. Now that the President has, as anyone with eyes to see anticipated, backed the FMA, let us see what the famous liberal Bush supporters are saying:

Roger L. Simon: "We Need a Third Party Candidate! But not that self-satisfied prig Ralph Nader... I feel at a loss. It's going to be a long 2004 for me." (Translation: Gotta make sure my gay friends see this post before I put the Bush/Cheney signs back on my lawn.)

Michael Totten: "Yesterday I took aim at Kalle Lasn, the editor of Adbusters magazine, for cheerleading the mayhem of World War IV. I’m not finished with him yet. His newest editorial is even worse than the last one...." (Translation: If I stay in my happy place, it will go away.)

Actually that last routine is the one currently favored by many in that crowd. Maybe they'll come out of their shells by the time you read this...

At least Sullivan finally got the picture -- for the time being, anyway.

UPDATE 2/25: Simon's lawn signs are already back up, and he's commending Bush for deploring Iran's mullahs. (Never mind his dagger poised at the Constitution -- he expressed disapproval of our enemies! Whotta man!) Totten made a quick negative comment, but his fellow "independents" are now setting him straight in comments, bringing up activist judges and AIDS and other reasoned counterarguments. They probably needn't worry, as Totten defers to someone who basically argues, oh, well, the thing will never pass so we better focus on stopping Kerry, who will invite Osama Bin Laden to pick off random Americans for the amusement of his best friend Jane Fonda.

Or some such shit. I can't even pay attention to these guys anymore. At least the people who are overtly cheering the FMA know what the fuck they're trying to accomplish.

ANIMAL FARMERS. The social scientists at the Washington Times, after praising the holy name of Reverend Moon and sacrificing to him a bottle of single malt, report that evil liberals make conservatives look evil by calling them conservatives. For example:

Throughout the election, news organizations used the term "conservative" to denote the radical, hard-line Islamic candidates supporting the absolute rule of the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and "liberal" to denote the reformist candidates favoring a dilution of the ayatollah's power and a loosening of Islamic restrictions.

Even conservative dumbasses like Andrew Sullivan have some idea what "liberal" and "conservative" mean, particularly in the context of a nation like Iran, but the messhugineh messiah's acolytes stick by their willful misapprehension, and prescribe a punishment:

Mr. [David] Horowitz suggested that Republicans restore truth-in-labeling in politics by reflexively labeling their opponents "Left," "Far Left," and "Radical Left."

Talk about coming late to the party! Folks have been tarring the Democrats as Jacobins/Socialists/Pinkos/Leftists since the 18th Century. And to this day, rightwing operatives from the humblest Astroturf composer ("it's obvious where he stands -- very far left... he sure has an elitist attitude") to the most exalted Propaganda Minister ("When jobs move overseas, poor people there get work... You'd think that the Left, which is supposed to be for redistibuting wealth from those who have more to those who have less, would be pleased...") continue spreading the bullshit.

I understand there are some morons who wish to claim the work of George Orwell as conservative. Maybe these folks mistake 1984 for a how-to book.

DUDE! I get pretty harsh in these posts sometimes, but I surrender the palm to Mark R. Levin at NRO:

John Kerry and the other Democratic leaders are on the wrong side of history, as they were during the Reagan presidency. If they had won the day, and Reagan had failed, the Soviet Union would still exist, as would all the harm and suffering it unleashed, and American security would be far weaker as a result. And if they win this election thanks to a promise to undo the Reagan-Bush Doctrine, those cheering loudest will be the most evil-loving among us.

One imagines him punctuating this jeremiad with a gob of spit. "The most evil-loving among us"! I wonder if I qualify. This week I shall have to poll my friends and compare our levels of evil-love.

You know what's even funnier? This is only Feburary. By summer, Levin will be communicating soley by symbols of the sort used in comic strips to denote obscene and angry speech (snakes, spirals etc). By September his columns will all be non-verbal wav files. And by Election Day, when we open his pages, there will be no writing or sound, but we will receive a mild electric shock.

EAGLE SHIT. Ah, those glory days when Andrew Sullivan licked Ahnuld's asshole because he was an "eagle" who would "[fuse] low-tax conservatism with social tolerance." But now Schwarzenegger has shown his true colors regarding gay marriage:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger waded deeper into the debate over same-sex marriages, directing the state attorney general to take immediate legal steps to stop San Francisco from granting marriage licenses to gay couples.

Schwarzenegger told a cheering crowd at the state GOP convention that "in San Francisco, the courts are dropping the ball."

And what is Sullivan's response? Boy, that Kerry is soft on terror and hey, maybe we should raise a war tax.

I must reiterate: Sullivan's so full of shit, I don't even believe he's gay.

SHORTER WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY. The Iraqis had better be careful with their new Democracy. The 20th century lunacy of one-man one-vote can lead to nightmarish consequences, such as Hitler and Howard Dean.

A NATION OF STONECUTTERS. If you're worried that America's low-employment, high-efficiency recovery will leave a lot of citizens out to dry, relax, says Virginia Postrel. You can make stone counter tops -- a lot of people are getting into that, the editor of that industry's trade publication tells her ("the magazine added 2,000 fabricators to its 20,000 subscribers"). And, Postrel adds, "Equipping a fabricating business can cost less than $30,000."

Surely your unemployed friends have 30 large they can sink into stone counter top businesses -- and if that market turns out to be so flooded with budding entrepreneurs (or desperate former wage-earners) that there are not enough yuppie households to support them all, and their businesses fail, well, they can always do nails.

Our incompetent government thinks there are only about 30,000 manicurists in America, but a pair of trade journals shows Postrel that there are tons more, as their subscribers total over 120,000. As we all know, the more workers there are in any given field, the more jobs there are for late entrants.

Of course, Postrel provides these large numbers to show that there are employment opportunities beyond the humdrum ones many family men and women rely upon to pay the bills. When these jobs evaporate -- and Postrel flatly states that "those workers will not be recalled as the economy improves" -- their former holders will have to realize that "value can come as much from intangible pleasures as it can from tangible goods." Of course, when they come to repossess your car, you may feel differently about it.

But try to remain Dynamistic! Prosperity is just around the corner/There's a rainbow in the sky/So let's serve another double latte/and take home a smaller piece of pie.

(P.S. These sentiments are published in the New York Times, and echoed at the Washington Post, just in case you wondered where the Liberal Media stands on the subject.)

SHORTER DANIEL HENNINGER: If you say bad things about the President, or even listen to them, the boogie man will come and blow you up with a nuclear bomb.

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD YOU SEE THE DARNEDEST THINGS. Crunchy Conservatives, South Park Republicans -- these kids today and their ephemeral political fads! Now at Tech Central Catspaw we have Nick Schulz filing a trademark on "Ambivalent Conservatives."

This is a single-issue craze, having to do with gay marriage. According to Schulz:

A curious thing happens when talking to younger conservatives about gay marriage. While many of them think same-sex marriage is in some ways an incoherent notion, I haven't come across any who think that gay marriage will not at some point be permitted. What's more, many of them are not particularly distraught at the prospect.

Isn't that nice? They're not like their Bible-thumping elders at all. They just find you and your same-sex partner's loving commitment to one another "incoherent." And they don't doubt that you will be able to marry "at some point" -- hopefully after they've risen to a high enough position at the American Enterprise Institute or in the GOP that they don't have to keep writing fence-straddling bilge like this about it for fear of being outed as a namby-pamby.

Schulz goes on to clarify his ambivalence:

...[AmbiCons] call themselves conservatives; but they are more comfortable saying that, while they certainly aren't exactly what you would call for gay marriage, they don't have much stomach to be against it, either... Jonah Goldberg of National Review captured some of this ambivalence when he recently wrote, "Whether you're for it or against it, many of us just don't want to hear about it anymore"...

Maybe it was the magic name Goldberg that knocked the scales from my eyes, but when I read this bit I suddenly saw what Schulz and his wholly lily-livered gang was up to.

As the anti-gay shock troops have been saying, gay marriage is now, will-you nill-you, a pressing issue. The weddings are happening, the courts are working, and it seems the FMA is coming, too. If you offer opinions for a living, or even as an avocation, on this one it's time to put up or shut up. (And let me state here for the record that I support gay marriage, gay polyamory and polygamy, straight polyamory and polygamy, and "mixed doubles." On straight marriage, however, I remain ambivalent.)

It's evidently easy to get young, ambitious conservatives to endorse the bombing of Iraq on the flimsiest of pretexts, but it is hard to get them to mount up with the queer-crushin' brigades, at least in public. That's because these milky lads, susceptible as they are to pressure from the big boys at the think tanks and party conferences and internet "journals of opinion," are also prey to peer pressure. "Lots of younger conservatives think of themselves as tolerant, freedom-loving and possessing metropolitan sensibilities," says Schulz -- and of course they do, because this is how any modern young person wishes to think of himself, and be thought of.

That's why the Bush Youth have been pushing South Park Republicanism -- it accentuates the "kick ass" part of the rightwing thing (Bomb shit! Make mad scrilla! Be P.InC.!) while playing down the less-popular Biblical strictures. Gay-bashing, even for one's boss, is just not rad.

Is it any wonder that these striplings, who are used to having it all -- conservativism and cred with their peeps -- balk at having to don, even momentarily, the white hood? What will Joe AmbiCon's gay friends say? Worse, what will his girlfriend say the next time he tries to fuck her in the ass?

AmbiConservatism is, alas, the best they can do. And a sorry spectacle it is. They do not acknowledge, even glancingly, the plight of gay citizens facing a wave of bigotry, asking instead: what about our needs? AmbiCons are made "uneasy"; they are left "scrambling for a political position they can articulate and be comfortable with." Sound like hell, doesn't it?

Actually, it sounds like gutless accomodationism by a bunch of punks who reflexively put party over principle, because the former is everything to them, and the latter nothing. They make Andrew Sullivan look like John Brown at Harper's Ferry.

If there's any doubt of this, it is dispelled when Schulz endorses Jonathan Rauch's gay-marriage Missouri Compromise -- a new version of the FMA with slightly more wiggle-room than the current one. There's no hope of passing it, of course, but like a new fashion speedily adopted, it may temporarily alleviate feelings of worthlessness.

Unjustly in this case.

DERBYSHIRE ON LOVE. Sweet but creepy, like a romantic ballad sung by Vlad the Impaler.

I wonder how he restrained himself from ending, "All the above does not apply to homosexuals"? NRO must have hired some better editors.