SIMPLE, SIMON. Roger L. Simon asks:

Why didn't George Bush enlist Stephen Spielberg to help with Iraq? Because he's a Democrat?

No, because he's a fucking movie director. And the mess in Iraq isn't something you can fix with CGI.

INTERNET PORN. Michael Totten, everyone's favorite "liberal" Bush supporter, provides a link to a video of Nick Berg's head being chopped off. Well, I've seen bukkake and erotic vomit (whatever that's called) -- and yuk, but so what? Oh, but Totten's making a point -- our atrocities are not as bad as their atrocities! Keep that bar raised high, Mike!

This kind of shit reminds me of my dear old Mom responding to The Passion of the Christ: "See how much he took," she kept muttering. Mom, bless her, was reacting perfectly to what Mel Gibson was selling: look whatta mess they made of my boy! Which is exactly what Totten and his fellow travellers are up to: turning this alleged struggle for democracy into a blood feud. Those bastards done worse and (no matter what his pussy dad said) we gotta do worse to them!

I'm increasingly amazed by the faith of right-wing nuts in bloodkkake as a means of convincing the electorate.

HM. How best to respond to Professor Reynolds' latest rhetorical question?

Freedom of the press, as it exists today (and didn't exist, really, until the 1960s) is unlikely to survive if a majority -- or even a large and angry minority -- of Americans comes to conclude that the press is untrustworthy and unpatriotic. How far are we from that point?

1.) You tell me.

2.) Shouldn't you edit this question for clarity, e.g.: "How long will a large and active minority allow freedom of the press to exist?" But, then, you're not an English professor, are you?

3.) Where did you get the idea that freedom of the press, as an inalienable right, is something to be "allowed"?

4.) Your notion that freedom of the press "didn't exist, really, until the 1960s" is novel. When may we expect your monograph on this theme?

5.) Fuck you, you stupid fucking hayseed fuck.

IDIOTS ABROAD. David Frum has visited Stockholm, which is a beautiful city. He thinks so too but, having a busy propagandist's brain, twists its elegance and grandeur into proof of Sweden's statist perfidy. The argument, such as it is, is hard to follow, but among the breadcrumby ideas Frum leaves for us are these:

The parkland in the central city likewise testifies to the power of monarchs: what is now a treed enclave of museums was once the headquarters of the royal Swedish navy; a few blocks away is the park that was once the garrison of the king’s household troops...

The shock of the Great Depression put an end to Sweden’s flirtation with what the Swedes call liberalism -- and they quickly reverted to older instincts: an all-powerful and highly centralized state.

And so today as in 1800, a grand aristocracy of career politicians, civil servants, and favored businesses benefit from the system: the prime minister lives in an 18th century palace compared to which 10 Downing Street looks like a cramped little rowhouse...

Perhaps Frum spent so much of his Washington tenure inside the White House that he didn't have time to run out front and similarly expostulate on the architectural subtext of the 132-room mansion surrounded by concrete battlements that serves as our own seat of executive power.

Or maybe he just has the same problem as Tacitus: it's tough to bloviate with a straight face about bad old Europe while you are enjoying its largesse, hospitality, and beauty. But (in the immortal words of Lorenzo St. DuBois) they try, oh, how they try!

...TRY, TRY AGAIN. OpinionJournal bard Mark Helprin doesn't like the way the war is going, so he suggests what he imagines to be a new approach:

We already have ceded part of Sunni Iraq: What remains is to pick a strongman, see him along, arrange a federation, hope for the best, remount the army, and retire, with or without Saudi permission, to the Saudi bases roughly equidistant to Damascus, Baghdad, and Riyadh.

Yeah, it worked so well the last time.

MEAN GIRLS. Professor Reynolds and his acolytes are in full splutter over somebody who writes about blogs in the Toronto Star. One should think they'd be grateful that anyone bothers to write about our little hobby -- which probably ranks in share-of-cultural-consciousness somewhere between spray-on hair and Ultimate Frisbee -- yet they snarl at columnist Antonia Zurbisias like dissed teenagers, both at Fort Insta ("Fat, drunk, and Canadian," "fool," etc) and in Zurbisias' in-box ("blousy," "fat and stupid," etc). Small wonder that many of these geniuses' retorts are weight-related -- considering that they find Anne Coulter toothsome, normally constituted women must look positively zaftig to them.

Among the annoyed is the madman Lileks, last noted here for tracking the source of our civilization's "rot" to Guy de Maupassant and dictionary editors. Today he re-adjusts his rot-detector and finds a new fountain of evil: Hunter S Thompson!

And it would be irrelevant if this same spirit didn't infect on whom Hunter S. had an immense influence. He's the guy who made nihilism hip. He's the guy who taught a generation that the only thing you should believe is this: don't trust anyone who believes anything. He's the patron saint of journalism, whether journalists know it or not.

Yes, many's the time I've read the metamphetamine-fueled ravings of R.W. Apple or George Will and detected the sinister hand of Thompson, Patron Saint of Journalists.

Speaking of ravings, Tacitus goes to Europe, seems to miss all the cathedrals and museums, and instead sees only statist ugliness caused by Social Democrats. And he's sure that waitress didn't like him because he's American. The cough syrup wears off and and he allows as how, "despite the griping, I like Europe, and come back at every opportunity" -- to remind the natives, as he does here, how we bailed their asses out in WWII, one supposes. This is in the perplexing tradition of conservatives like Bob Bartley and Ned Flanders who address their European "friends" with obvious and corrosive contempt, then wonder why Europeans don't like them.

For the most part this stuff is really beyond the realm of politics, and into that of abnormal pyschology. But I'm beginning to get the feeling that most of what passes for political discourse is that way these days.

SATURDAY NIGHT MISCELLANY. Saw a couple movies recently. Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is pretty good. The premise is terrific: given the chance to wipe a defunct love from your memory, would you abate your romantic torment by wiping it, or would you allow the experience to teach you something? Kaufman seems to assume that most of us, given the tech, would wipe. That's a canny observation, but he loads the deck too much by making the wipers such morons that they cannot articulate any sound philosophical reasons for doing it. Kaufman has guts, but lacks the dramatic training to acknowledge and exploit his own dialectic. Bad ideas exist for a reason, and the desire to deny experience, rather than work through it, has a lot of resonance these day. Why not give it a fair hearing? Making the wipers mere weed-addled cowards is just too easy.

(Also, wouldn't Jim Carrey wake up if Kirsten Dunst were jumping on his bed in her underwear? I know I would!)

There's still a lot to like. I admire that jealousy is a big idea in Kaufman's films. (The Farrelly Brothers are obesessed with it too; I think it's their saving grace.) I salute that he wants to explore big feelings. Even his hippie-trippy way of doing it (collapsing landscapes, ridiculous techonological McGuffins) is okay with me. But he really is too sloppy about it. If the movie followed its best instincts, Joel and Clementine would have stayed broken up. That's what romantic disappointment is really about -- not saving relationships, but improving survivors. That's why the quasi-reconciliation ending is such a drag, and probably why the studio put it on a shelf for so long.

Also saw Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes -- a total piece of shit, so weak and rambling and wasteful that it made me hate the Jarmusch movies I used to love, and I've been following him since Chang in a Void Moon. How dare he foist these feeble improvisations on paying customers? Even Iggy, Tom Waits, and Bill Murray look like patsies in this. Thank God for Taylor Mead and Bill Rice, who bring some much-needed dignity to the proceedings.

Fortunately I got some brain-balm from an old S.J. Perelman collection, Keep It Crisp. I've tried to enjoy SJP on the page before and failed; though his lines for Groucho are sublime ("Ah, I could dance with you till the cows come home -- better yet, I'll dance with the cows till you come home"), large blocks of his wordplay always seemed to me rather too much of a good thing before. But once you get into a rhythm with him he's wonderful, and not all the pleasures are from surface effects. Among the better items is an invented interview by a sweet young thing of a Broadway wise guy ("A Power Dive into the New Journalism"):

As soon as we were alone, Dexteride's air of reserve vanished. He mixed two ginger-ale highballs, adjusted the Venetian blind so that the sun wouldn't shine in my eyes while I was writing, and seated himself on the davenport by me. I told him our readers wanted to know what he was thinking about Tommy Manville these days. He frowned.

"Hats off to that question," he said seriously. "It's a good one. I'd say that Tommy is a man that is in the prime of his life at present." His eyes twinkled. "Funny thing about age. Now, I place you about eighteen years of age."

"I'll be twenty-three in March."

"Then I'm in the clear, he said, with a deep, full-throated chuckle that was thoroughly infectious. You knew instinctively that this warm, friendly man enjoyed simple things and people, and still there was a wholesome faith, almost akin to idealism, about him. Somehow I saw him standing at the right hand of King John on the Field of the Cloth of Gold as the Magna Carta was being signed. I asked him to outline his personal philosophy.

"I believe the day is coming when it will be possible to tell a person's age from his hands," he said. "I've made a study of the subject over the last few years. Take yours, for instance." To illustrate his theory, he gently manipulated my fingers, showing how excessive writing causes fatigue and how the soft cup of the palm acts as a cushion.

"As a matter of fact," he went on, "a girl with your type hands shouldn't be engaged in your particular type work. You ought to have a little spot of your own, which you could stick around all afternoon in merely a kimona and play with a little poodle or so"...

The inspiration is a certain style of magazine-writing from the War Years, but the gag is out of Restoration Comedy, or maybe Chaucer. Hats off to SJP!

Of course, if you want to survey the work of a vastly inferior modern author, you may read some of my latest here.

THE ANTI-ZENGERS. Boy, OpinionJournal is going absolutely batshit crazy these days. Their lead editorial today comes out against the fucking Red Cross. What's next -- a stinging rebuke to Santa Claus?

Pentagon critics are treating a leaked Red Cross assessment -- first reported in The Wall Street Journal last Friday -- as proof that detainee abuse was widespread in Iraq and that the military was unresponsive to complaints. After reading the report, we think the real story is the increasing politicization of this venerable humanitarian group.

Apparently OJ's mad because the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)'s report on our inhumane treatment of prisoners of war got leaked, and the Red Cross hasn't lied about it to preserve our torturers' anonymity. (It is strange, then, that OJ doesn't take a monent here to also chastise the Journal's reporters for disseminating this anti-disinformation to the public. Maybe even OJ writers get tired of being laughed at.)

The screed closes:

This ICRC behavior poses a serious risk to its relationship with governments around the world, as well as to its special status when there are future revisions of the Geneva Conventions. We hope that some adults inside the organization understand this, because the ICRC's self-inflicted demise would be a real loss for prisoners of regimes that are truly odious.

Nice little international organization ya got here. Be a shame if someone was ta undercut its credibility, if ya know what I mean!

Meanwhile another story in their Arts & Leisure section (you know, one of those dark alleys where conservatives dig through works of art for political talking points) talks about the "incendiary power" of photojournalism as if it were black magic or something. The author, Eric Gibson, approves government suppression of war photos ("Think only of the way that pictures and film footage," he shudders, "actually did turn public opinion against the Vietnam War"), and apprently takes from Abu Ghraib only one lesson ("besides the obvious moral one," he tosses off): that we better do something about that damned new technology -- "another photographic medium that would do the damage this time around: the digital image, snapped on a camera carried in the pocket of an enlisted man or woman and e-mailed across the ether."

OJ apparently finds chaste prom dresses Tony, and freedom of the press Tacky. You'd have to dig very deep to find "journalists" so deeply committed as these to the antithesis of every journalistic principle -- in fact, all the way to the other side of the world.

LEARN TO READ. In defending the indefensible (i.e., himself), John Derbyshire aligns his brutal judgement on Abu Ghraib (i.e., torture all you want, just don’t include sex, consensual or otherwise) with Orwell:

One of the many things Orwell taught us (see, e.g., his essay on Kipling) is that the dirty work of civilization -- the work of policemen, prison guards, soldiers, interrogators of terrorist suspects -- is *dirty*. It's rough work, and won't always meet the standards of my and your personal lives. Someone is doing it on our behalf, though, right now -- not just in Baghdad, but in jails and police stations across America, and honesty compels us to acknowledge their work, and the much greater horrors it helps keep at bay.

I have no doubt Derbyshire is steeped in Kipling ("It’s ‘Tommy’ this, and ‘Tommy’ that, and ‘Tommy, wait outside’/But it’s ‘Special train for Atkins’ when the trooper’s on the tide," and all that), but his understanding of Orwell on Kipling seems poor, if this is the essay he’s talking about:

It is no use claiming, for instance, that when Kipling describes a British soldier beating a ‘nigger’ with a cleaning rod in order to get money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve what he describes. There is not the slightest sign anywhere in Kipling’s work that he disapproves of that kind of conduct -- on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to have. Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.

And so on. Orwell’s appreciation of Kipling was real, but in defending him against the "refined people," he was certainly not defending Kipling’s enthusiasm for "Imperialism as a sort of forcible evangelizing" -- Orwell’s words, which Derbyshire would seem to take as an unequivocal endorsement.

Orwell was sensible of the difference between "the nineteenth-century imperialist outlook" – Kipling’s – "and the modern gangster outlook" -- represented by the Fascism at which England was then at war. Orwell seems to have preferred the former, at least in terms of moral clarity, but he was also well aware that "Kipling does not seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern."

I think a lot of conservatives latch onto Orwell because he talks smack about liberals, and there is certainly an abundance of this in his Kipling essay. (Of course, they tend to elide the inconvenient fact of Orwell’s Socialism, and now that Christopher Hitchens has loosened his own grip of that banner, they generally prefer to get their Orwellism from him.) One would think, though, that moral absolutists such as they would not mistake the sharing of an annoyance with a commonality of interest – unless their only genuine interest is to talk smack about liberals, which seems to be the case.

THE CROSSROADS OF ART, COMMERCE, AND THE BOULEVARD OF BROKEN DREAMS. Snarkmarket has discovered what Maya Lin, creator of the exquisite Vietnam Memorial in Washington, has been up to lately: designing lawn furniture.

Well, time for me to get back to work...

WISH IT INTO THE CORNFIELD, PART #3,451. Andrew Sullivan reads the Times' coverage of the Berg execution, and doesn't like that Berg's family was interviewed -- or, rather, that they said some things that don't line up with the sort of "dulce est decorum est" horseshit in which Sullivan specializes, and the Times printed it:

The family of Nicholas E. Berg challenged American military officials on Wednesday, insisting that the man beheaded by Islamic terrorists in Iraq had earlier been in the custody of federal officials who should have done more to protect him...

The Iraqi police took Nicholas Berg, 26, into custody on March 24 and held him in a jail that he described in the message as managed by Iraqis with oversight from United States Military Police forces. He wrote that federal agents had questioned his reasons for being in Iraq, whether he had ever built a pipe bomb or had been in Iran.

"They can detain him and deny him his basic civil rights of a lawyer, a phone call or even a charge for 13 days, but they can't get him" on a plane, David Berg said.

"Yes, the family's understandable anger should be reported," concedes Sully. "But their anger should not dictate the entire gist of your story." See, it's not newsworthy that the family of the deceased is pissed at the U.S. Government -- or not propaganda-worthy, anyway. Axis of Evil, why we fight, stay the course -- that's journalism, by God!

Sullivan gets multiple unmitigated-gall points for following this up with a letter from his readership: "I just saw the Nick Berg video in its entirety... I really feel extremely bad for Nick's family. I wish I could give each one of them a big hug and say 'I love you' to them." Make sure you clamp a hand over their mouths when you hug them, buddy, or Sullivan might hear something he doesn't like.

SHORTER CRAZY JESUS LADY. New Jersey is becoming a place where politicians don't buckle under pressure from their bishops, and scientists use cloning to cure cancer. Give me the more soulful Jersey of insane, violent mobsters.

SIMONIZING. Having told the world that any one of us would have tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib given the chance ("Who is that nitwit, most of us have been asking? Well, that nitwit is us"), Roger L. "I'm for gay rights" Simon opens the floor, and the usual grunting, roaring, and chest-beating ensues. Simon only deigns to interrupt when a poster named Tano points out, undeniably, that a lot of prominent conservatives have been quite okay with this inhuman behavior. This incenses his host, who chides:

...I don't respond to you for a simple reason. I have no interest in the terms liberal and conservative. They are junk terms to me, factually meaningless... Now some people call me a neocon, yet I vehemently favor gay marriage and stem cell research. It's all boring BS to me. I'm just interested in the facts of a situation. So the minutes a post begins with conservatives this or liberals that, I just skip it...

The perfidious labeller having been dismissed, a less chideworthy Simonite leaps into the fray:

I'm pretty tired of those Iraqis who only know how to whine, criticize, and complain, but never lift a finger to help. It's their future as well as ours that our troops are dying for. But whenever "their" people were maltreated or killed, they condemned the Americans, and rejoiced when the Americans were burnt and quartered. We grieve for our dead and wounded too, but we don't jump up and down when an Iraqi was killed... Don't Iraqis have responsibilities too?

An odd reaction, it would seem: chastising the Iraqis for getting all hot and bothered about an occupying army torturing their fellow citizens. But, brothers and sister, let us not paint this a "conservative" response, for in Simon's world, who's to say what's liberal and conservative? Or whether torture is anathema or just something we all might easily engage in, were we not busy with Hollywood screenplays? Let us cast aside meaningless labels, when all good men are agreed that Kerry was a pussy to serve in Vietnam and so must be kept from the Presidency.

I thought liberals were the ones that were all into moral relativism and shit. Ooops, but there I go again, using those tired old labels.

ALL IS WELL! INDEED! The torture thing really has Professor Reynolds working his Kevin-Bacon-in-Animal-House routine. Among his recent assertions indicating a paucity of locations toward which to run, and at which to hide:

• People who draw our attention to this scandal are just trying to defeat America. You should ignore them.
  
  
• We do stuff like this in our own prisons all the time -- though without the electrodes, dog attacks, simulated rape, etc. Or maybe we do have those things, too. But do I look like I care?
  
  
• One of my buddies says I'm really prolific and another says I need a vacation, so I'm going to watch a stupid movie with my wife, and I'll go on about the flags in it and my wife will go on about how Jessica Alba isn't asking anyone for a government handout, no sir, and suddenly this Abu Whatchamacallit thing that has been disturbing my sleepy afternoons in the faculty lounge seems very far away.

JESUS IS JUST ALRIGHT. Owing to a bizarre set of circumstances, I viewed yesterday The Passion of the Christ. I've seen this thing alternately praised and damned as a phenomenon, but I have hardly seen it reviewed as a movie. That makes sense: the plot is a central narrative of a major religion, and the approach is personal rather than institutional -- more like Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew than King of Kings -- so it was bound to be controversial in terms that have little to do with aesthetics.

I'm not immune to this either. I could see that the craft aspects, including the acting, are all very fine, but outside of that I was aware throughout of the received experience that was coloring my reaction. If you were ever obliged to memorize the Stations of the Cross, as I was as a good Catholic boy, you're going to be pulled in by the story no matter what.

Gibson isn't just telling the story out of the book, though. He uses a couple of devices to interpret it for us. Some of these glosses I found lovely. After denying Jesus three times (and recalling, in flashback, Jesus' prediction of this), Peter has an episode of stunned shame that is very real and moving. And when Jesus has one of his falls on the way up the hill, Mary flashes back on Christ as a toddler, tumbling in the dust outside their home. It's as corny as Griffith and as effective.

There are also a lot of flashbacks that reflect Jesus' message of love and forgiveness, but these are overwhelmed by the behavior of the mob, the priests, and the Romans. Most of the action is about thoroughly unsympathetic people beating the living shit out of Jesus Christ. Popping in a little "love your enemies" here and there doesn't cut much ice when you're watching leering Centurions ripping the skin off the Son of God's back, or sneering priests mocking him as he agonizes on the Cross, all at length and in graphic detail.

In fact, the cumulative effect is that of a revenge fantasy: when Jesus dies and the earth cracks under the temple and the Romans all run away from the storm, there's only one moviegoer reaction that makes sense, and it isn't "Love Thy Neighbor" -- it's "Payback Time." (National Review's Michael Graham, attempting to refute charges of anti-Semitism against the film, wrote, "after the movie, I wanted to kick the crap out of a Roman." I wonder whether it occured to him how that might be taken in Rome.)

I suppose my opinion could be dismissed as that of a bleeding-heart crypto-Christian who is not down with the Church Militant mission of the filmmaker. You could dismiss all criticism in the same way, if the only point of works of art were to reenforce or refute prejudices, rather than to illuminate the human experience.

(ALMOST) NO COMMENT. From the brilliant Margaret at Matters of Little Significance:

Read about John Negroponte, the man who is supposed to be US Ambassador to Iraq.

He is accused of sponsoring terrorism for supporting the Contra insurgency against the left wing Sandinistas, the first ever democratically elected government of Nicaragua. He is also accused of inciting Contra attacks on civilians.

He was confirmed by the senate on May 6: 95-3 with 2 not voting.

Kerry was one of the 2 who did not vote.

My senators, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, both voted in favor.

It is incredible to me that with all that's going on, they still voted to make someone who is notorious for encouraging human rights abuses be ambassador to Iraq.

I hate to say so, but this episode has left me feeling a little Naderish.

OK, SO I’M A PHILISTINE. I finally got to the Whitney Biennial last night. This was my third or fourth WB, and by far the one with the most polymers. I was too stupified to take notes, but I did get a few laughs. One guy pasted matted fur to animal skulls, one of which was attached to a skeletal structure made of plaster and detritus; little wire birds pulled from its guts lengths of Italian Christmas lights, perhaps signifying entrails. In another installation, pixelated clouds moved slowly across a blue screen while futuristic music of the kind Chris Sarandon played for Margaux Hemingway in Lipstick blared from a stereo. This was called Super Mario Clouds.

But in the main it was awful: a collection of goofy items, like a stylized Roman Centurion’s helmet with a fried egg stuck on it; a full-sized, glass-panelled dumpster packed with industrial waste (a towering rebuke to the notion that a good idea will make a good work of art); little rooms filled with lights or plaster dust. The time and money that one imagines was spent on these hideosities were nearly as wearying as their spectrally thin aesthetic effects.

The painting and drawing (with the exception of some ringer Hockneys) was even worse. Most, like Julie Mehretu’s palimpsests, are at first glance interesting, until you realize that whatever deeper mysteries they might reveal upon contemplation are bland and mechanical. One might as well be solving rebus puzzles.

assume astro vivid focus did a big, nice-looking room pasted over with old advertising and hi-life images. In an exhibition filled with renderings that at their best rise to the exalted heights of commercial illustration and interior design, this is at least crafty, and gives some extra seconds of pleasure. But it struck me that a.a.v.f. was taking the imagery at face value – that the whole thing was just a force multiplier for the original effects wrought by admen and graphic designers.

Film and photography were better. Slater Bradley had a nice short with Stephen Hawking’s voice-box thing on the soundtrack, expostulating on the universe, while a home-movie camera scanned the faces in a children’s choir. This made a better effect than the other children’s choir thing, with a skeleton conducting. (This was one of the multi-screen pieces, the idea of which seems to be that it is bad to indoctrinate kids; another filled a room with cow’s udders.) Chloe Piene showed a girl in a tank-top and panties splattered in mud, roaring; when I realized another girl wasn’t going to come in and wrestle with her, I lost interest.

The saddest commentary came from a tour guide explicating some crappy painting to her charges. In a sidebar she mentioned the recent Giorgio Armani show at the Guggenheim, and said, "We’ll see more of this kind of collaboration of art and commerce in the years to come."

WHY DOES VICTOR DAVIS HANSON HATE AMERICA SO MUCH? In the course of minimizing the Iraqi POW thing, Victor Davis Hanson characterizes the Western peoples thusly:

We are "plagued with attention-deficit problems." We are "affluent, leisured and consensual," which means that we are pussies about what other people think of us ("not so much worried about being convicted of being illiberal as having the charge even raised in the first place").

When confronted with graphic war images, the "Western suburbanite" will "change channels and head to the patio, mumbling either, 'How can we fight such barbarians' or ? better yet ? 'Why would we wish to?'"

And when faced with the grotesque spectacle of American servicemen torturing prisoners, instead of shrugging it off, the West "engages not merely in much needed self-critique and scrutiny, but reaches a feeding frenzy that evolves to outright cultural cannibalism."

He also compares our "institutionalized cowardice" unfavorably to the way things are done in, say, Russia. "They really don't care much if you hate them," he swoons. "They are likely to do some pretty scary things if you press them." Nonetheless he does acknowledge that "you wouldn't really wish to emigrate there for a teaching fellowship," which I guess means that we can't expect Hanson to pull a Coriolanus and lead the admirably bloodthirsty Russkies against the weak-kneed West, though the thought seems to tempt him.

When all the Abu Ghraib stuff first came out, I figured on the "Of course this is terrible, but [insert rank neocon absurdity here]" responses, and even the "Of course this is terrible, but it's all the liberals' fault" angle. But this "It's not terrible at all, you Westerners are like-a de woman" thing is more what I'd expect from a secondary villain in an Indiana Jones movies than from a pundit. Is this how far we've sunk? Oh, much lower than this, for sure, but let's not tempt the blues on such a sunny day...

HEARTS AND MINDS, PART 56,957. Oh sweet Jesus. Daniel Henninger says we aren't doing enough propaganda in the Arab world -- and that's why the recent unpleasantness at Abu Ghraib is making us look bad. As ever, he traces the problem back to the perfidious Clintons.

Anybody remember Charlotte Beers? Early in the War on Whatchamacallit, the former Chairman of the Ogilvy & Mather worldwide advertising agency was made an Undersecretary of State by the Bush Administration, and tasked and budgeted with the dissemination of pro-our side messages in Arabia. Beers left the government last year "for health reasons." A few months back she talked to advertising columnist Bob Garfield about her experiences, and here's some of the little that she said:

Nothing would be more dangerous than silence. It's like asking Tylenol to be very quiet when people found out there was poison inadvertently put into their Tylenol packages. They went immediately to the air and every phase of communication to talk about what they were going to do, how it would be handled, and they won a huge round with the consumer groups. We do have some policies that are not popular, and that doesn't mean necessarily that we can make those popular, but we can certainly engage on many other fronts...

The skill it takes to have a brand cross borders is to create a universal understanding, you know, maybe the love of a Coke and the party that goes with it, and so on. And the second thing was to always honor and respect the local customs. And so the lessons that we all had to learn as marketers, to earn the right to sell our brands in those countries is one the United States has to practice. I mean the first thing I did in the first year was bring in people from the private sector to conduct courses in that kind of communication which is about context, and also about the basics of branding, really.

All respect to Ms. Beers, a former client of mine, but does this sound like the kind of thinking that would make a dime's worth of difference in a region that regards us as an occupying force? Branding? A Tylenol scenario? Coca-Cola?

That kind of thing did work once, in the former Soviet Union. The aura of our plenty, our brands, our Levi's and Fords and Coca-Colas, had a powerful effect on people who felt themselves oppressed by their own government, not ours. But we're the Big Daddys now -- scrambling to convince a violently hostile region that our berserkers do not reflect our true intentions. Yet we have precious little Coke or unpoisoned Tylenol to offer as tokens of good faith.

No wonder Beers bailed. It's impossible to sell the sizzle without the steak.

RIFFMEISTERS. I was gonna make this a comment to Norbizness' excellent refutation of the lame Total Guitar Top Riffs list, but why not share with the rest of the class?

Nor is boss, but he takes a few missteps. I have to point out that "Hot Rats" is not a Mothers album, and the epochal "Willie the Pimp" is a Zappa/Beefheart/Jean-Luc Ponty riff, to be more accurate. (Speaking of fiddlers, how about "Diggy Diggy Lo" or "Jole Blon" or "Orange Blossom Special"?)

Whatever you think of the source material, you have to spot, as TG did, AC/DC and their patented off-tempo, pull-against-the-drummer riffing. But while "Back in Black" is alright, I think "Back in Business" is a superior example.

Also, if you put, as Nor does, one Neil Young riff up there, you have to put at least three. Young's secret weapon is the riff-embedded rhythm lick. If "Hey Hey, My My" rates, so must "Cinnamon Girl" and "I'm the Ocean," at least. (I'd drop "The Loner," too, but that's just me.)

Among the obscurities, let me insert "Tough Fucking Shit" by G.G. Allen and the Murder Junkies, "Ain't My Crime" by Motorhead, "Easter Woman" by the Residents, "Celebrated Summer" by Husker Du, and "Tractor Rape Chain" by Guided by Voices.

In the under-your-nose category, where the hell are "Cannonball," "Pleasant Valley Sunday," "Heart Full of Soul," "Victoria," "Satisfaction," et alia?

But folks, as the old Shake 'n' Bake commercial used to go, you can make it good's I can. Speak up!