COYOTE INSURANCE. Says Lileks: "Yesterday marked the third Memorial Day since 9/11 to pass without a terrorist attack on America. Spin the war however you like; that has to count for something."

You know that old gag, right? This sharper comes in and demands money. "What for?" asks the mark. "Protection against coyotes," says the sharper. "Are you crazy? There's not a coyote for miles around here!" says the mark. "See what a good job I'm doing?" says the sharper, holding his hands out, aaaannnd... scene.

Maybe the Iraq War has kept Tony Danza from doing another TV series. That alone might swing me toward Bush.

I mean that in an unserious, Michael Totten way, of course. As you all know, I hate this fucking country and want to see it defeated by militant Islam, which totally rocks. That's why I'm voting for John Kerry: I look forward to the moment at the Inauguration when he says, "So help me God," and suddenly a plane smashes into the Washington Monument and the Democratic members of Congress whip off their false heads and reveal themselves as hairy, dark-skinned, turbaned terrorists, gibbering "Allah Akbar" and throwing anthrax around like Rip Taylor.

If the war in Iraq has, by some mysterious mechanism, protected us from terrorist attack, maybe a war against Syria will save us from high gas prices, outsourcing jobs, global warming, Mr. Tooth Decay, etc. What the hell, it's worth a shot, right?

Also, Lileks is delighted that store clerks in a Minneapolis Gap recognized him as a writer. They "had been whispering about something there being a writer upstairs," he heard. Don't sweat it, Jimbo -- you should hear them when there's a black man in the store.

IMAGINARY FRIENDS. You have to give credit to alleged centrist Michael Totten. He is a much cannier Bush operative than those full-throated ravers who have no need or desire for protective coloration. Take his recent attack on Pat Buchanan, who decries the allegedly feminist ideas he thinks the Bushies are trying to impose on devoutly Muslim Middle Easterners.

Pitchfork Pat is clearly nuts, railing against the promulgation of the "60s revolution that devout Christians, Jews, and Muslims have been resisting for years." But he happens to use the word "imperial" in his anti-sex rant. Totten grabs this and uses it as a stick to beat the Left:

Take out the word "godly" and Pat Buchanan sounds like a tin-foil hat leftist… He actually used the language of the left to say people like me are possessed by the devil… No one does better than Pat Buchanan in fusing the worst of both into a unifying and idiotic morass.

I think there are a few liberals in my audience. Who here supports Pat Buchanan? Who here has ever supported Pat Buchanan? I didn’t think so. So how are we mobbed up with him? The use of the word "imperial"? Here’s Totten in a previous incarnation: "Syria should be a member of the Axis of Evil. It is, after all, an imperial Arab Nazi terrorist state."

What? You say Totten was using the term in a very different sense? What are you, some kind of moral relativist?

When you get tired of this, you can go see Tacitus (scroll to May 30) pretending he was open to a Kerry Presidency until he learned that the Senator from Taxachusetts didn’t think a preemptive Israeli strike on Iran was a good idea.

I have enough fake friends in real life without the internet variety.

MEMORIAL. I know you all think of me as a hardened New York wise guy, and I love you for it, but I have my sentimental side, and so attended a Memorial Day parade, not in the big city, but in a small Connecticut town. A large segment of the populace turned out for the event. They lined the streets seated on lawn-chairs, curbs, and the grassy knoll of the town square, at the crest of which an old monument to the victory at Gettysburg -- brass statue, stone pillar -- was adorned with wreathes on thin wire stands, left by local VFW posts and dotted with paper poppies.

Some held small, stiff muslin flags mounted on thin sticks. Others held styrofoam coffee cups (the parade started about 10 am). Nearly everyone seemed to meet someone he or she knew coming down the sidewalk. The town is small enough that this is a genuine social event. Here and there teenagers clotted together, but they would be approached by adults that they kmew -- parents, friends of parents, teachers -- and would receive them warmly. That done, the boys in Slipknot and Method Man t-shirts and gigantic blue jeans would go on making time with the cheerleaders who were taking a break from their march duties. The cheerleaders, like most of the young girls, wore plenty of makeup and seemed energized by the prospect of their public display. I observed a couple of these chatting with a lad who cheerfully threw fun-snaps at them, which assault they protested unconvincingly.

Every local civic group seemed to have a place in the parade. Primacy went to the veterans, especially the WWII vets, walking majestically if sometimes with halting step in their ill-fitting uniforms and smart, peaked garrison caps. There were police and fire battalions, the latter sometimes represented by antique fire trucks (including a Ford F-800 "Big Job," and a Seagrave with a wooden grille). There were marching bands of varying ages and levels of expertise, one of which played "Stars and Stripes Forever" so poorly it came out as a forlorn dirge, but we clapped because it was the best they could do. The cheerleaders and drum majorettes ran their paces with great concentration. Then came soccer teams, youth groups, local beauty queens, and various random gaggles of citizens, waving and scanning the crowd for friends. At last a few police cars with lights slowly and silently strobing signalled the finish, and the audience dispersed to their homes and barbecues.

It was delightful. No one had to underline the themes of sacrifice and service. The parade passed, as it had for years, as it will certainly pass next year, observed in the same manner, with trucks and tunes and flags and coffee. This is memorial enough. What the blood of the fallen has purchased is well known, and it is left to us to celebrate, without portent or pomposity, their wonderful gift.

ONE OF THE GIANTS OF MODERN CONSERVATIVE THOUGHT. Jonah Goldberg:

I've been very impressed with the fluency a lot of these [liberal] folks do have with their intellectual traditions... That said, all of this kind of reminds of when Nixon declared that it was obvious to him the world is overpopulated because wherever he went he saw huge crowds.

Moments earlier, Jonah Goldberg:

... for reasons I can only assume are coincidental I saw more people with broken arms around London over a few days than I have in the preceding couple years. Is there a reason so many Brits are busting their wings?

Why do I pay attention to what Goldberg writes when he can't seem to do it himself?

YOU'S A EDUCATED FOOL. Culture scold James Bowman writes yet another long sneer at pop-culture studies, treating dismissively a host of comically-named tomes treating the deeper meanings of The Sopranos, Sex & The City, etc. Though Bowman does express some admiration for one such work that suggests The Simpsons is pro-family, on the rest he employs eye-rolling phrases ("purports to give a philosophical analysis," "unadulterated jargon of real-life scholars," "the more feminist the analysis, the less lighthearted -- and readable") to communicate his customary message: that professors, like artists, are fools to look for deeper meaning in absurdities.

Meanwhile over at NRO, we get not one but two articles about how the Kate Hudson vehicle Raising Hell represents an overdue reinterpretation of eccleasiastics in modern society. They don't use that kind of language, of course (consider their audience) -- theirs goes more like this: "...audiences will fall for Pastor Dan specifically because he is just like a typical pastor -- likeable. Likeable, and strong, and funny, and, yes, sexy."

Pastor Dan is played by the guy who did the radio show on Northern Exposure, and here's Megan Basham, the author quoted above, describing his courtship of the Kate Hudson character:

In one scene, shortly after they meet, Dan asks Helen if she'd like to go out sometime. When she shakes her head no, he starts to leave. But then, realizing how blind she is, he turns back and glowers, "It's because I'm not one of those model, club-hoppin' guys right? So you don't think I'm sexy?" Embarrassed and not knowing how to respond, Helen stands frozen until Dan marches back toward her, leans in, and growls, "Let me tell you something little lady, I am sexy. I'm a sexy man of God, and I know it."

If you think that's sexy, you'll cream your jeans over Tony Perkins in Crimes of Passion.

This sort of thing happens anytime something pops up in a book or movie or trend that could be interpreted, by minds obsessed with such things, as an endorsement of conservative politics or mores. (See Mark Gauvreau Judge on Swing Dancing for a particularly lurid example.) I don't see how this is any sillier than monographs about TV shows. Maybe James Bowman can explain it sometime.

STRANGE INTERLUDES.This is how the Crazy Jesus Lady portrays to the world the inner monologue of New Yorkers:

I should get a new dress for the graduation at the Saks sale. They could blow up the Lincoln Tunnel. Meg would love one of those little Chanel knockoffs from the street vender. If New York is bombed while we're in Boston, where will we stay? If Boston is bombed while we're at the graduation, how will we get home? Bring cousin Holly's number in northern Connecticut. Pick up mascara.

Allow me to offer an alternate version:

Ugh, I should have stopped with the third bourbon last night. Looks like it's gonna be cloudy. Should I splurge for a bacon and egg sandwich? Oh, go ahead, live large. What's in the paper? That dead Julliard girl, the Mets blew a big lead, and the usual terrorism bullshit. Maybe grab some OJ too. Alright, let's see what's on the web. OpinionJournal's always good for a laugh. Wow, another column by that brain-damaged hag? Lot of nervous energy this week. Must have stopped taking her pills. That reminds me -- where'd I put the Advil?

OH, THOSE KRAZY KULTURE KOPS! "Without passing judgment on the movie as such, it's clearly based on the usual false assumptions..." Well, you know you're in Culture-War No-Man's-Land when you hear crap like that. This one comes from The Corner, where Mark Krikorian explains that though he hasn't seen A Day Without a Mexican ("it's not being shown anywhere I can get to" -- the tunnels radiating from his bunker don't extend to the local cineplex, I guess), he still has lots to say about it, including this: "The very premise of the movie is thus blood-and-soil nationalism of das Volk (or rather, La Raza), which is only socially permissable when advocated by approved ethnic groups." Wow! Maybe he saw the trailer.

But equally blind are they who will not see. An alicublog reader tipped me to World Magazine, a journal that pre-digests current events for squeamish Christians. Their arts coverage comes in slabs stamped "Cultural," and one imagines editors screaming across the newsroom, "Support for gay marriage is going up -- we need three more slabs of Cultural, stat!" Their reviewers have seen the movies they discuss, but with a sharp eye for non-evangelical content and a blind one for everything else. Of Troy, Marvin Olasky writes that "Bradd Pitts" is "too likable" as Achilles, and that the film should have focused on Hector -- presumably because Olasky finds Hector more clean-cut. (Olasky also cautions that in Troy's bed scenes "illicit sex is made to look good.")

Music also comes under review by my new favorite pop critic, Arsenio Orteza. He chides Prince for his "low" content, which features "many sexual allusions, both explicit (e.g., 'Gett Off') and implicit (e.g., 'Little Red Corvette')." ("Little Red Corvette" is implicit? Not the way Amatullo sang it in "The Kids from Fame in Israel"!) Orteza concludes that "For people who speak no English, Prince remains a legitimate thriller" -- judging from his prose style, Orteza is indeed qualified to make this judgement -- "For many English speakers, however, Prince's obsession with sex will connect him to Messrs. [Michael] Jackson and [Kobe] Bryant in ways that no amount of sales or pleasure can eclipse." I think I disagree -- what specific amount of sales or pleasure are we talking about here?

The Beatles are alright, per Orteza, but only if that line about Christ in "The Ballad of John and Yoko" is a spoof on Lennon's "Bigger than Jesus" crack, not if he's "taking Christ's name in vain." In which case the Beatles are objectionable, just like everything else, it would seem, except bluegrass, which Orteza likes because it's "colorblind, sex-blind, [and] age-blind" (the unfortunate result of all that moonshine, one imagines). And you have to love how Orteza describes Bob Marley & The Wailers' "world view":

Explicitly: that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are worth getting up, standing up, and fighting for; Implicitly: that smoking marijuana is a sacrament and that slain Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie is the Messiah.

Suddenly it all makes sense!

At World even baseball must be reduced to Cultural: "Baseball fosters the right mentality for sustaining a war on terrorism," explains Gene Edward Veith. It also embodies "the trials and disciplines of free enterprise." And another thing: "We lose wars when we on the home front lose our will or our heart or our courage—even while our troops win on the battlefield. That is how we lost the Vietnam War..." What's that got to do with baseball? Don't ask Veith, who seems to have entered some sort of trance: "The news cycle is an up-and-down, good news/bad news roller coaster... When the Bears are doing badly, Soldier Field is deserted. But Cubs fans still pack Wrigley Field, even in the bad years, and they persevere." It takes a lot for me to say this, but I'd rather read George Will's baseball shit.

UPDATE. Tbogg amplifies admirably on Krikorian's willful cluelessness.

MONEY, HONEY. Rightwing "It" Girl Michelle Malkin is enraged by Wonkette and her recent find, a low-paid Washington functionary named Jessica Cutler who let Republicans fuck her up the ass for money. Among Malkin's plaintive cries against both: "Skanks," "promiscuous," "raunchy," "female Beavis and Butthead," "sex-drenched infamy," and "members of the media elite."

And then there's this:

Cutler, who aspired to be a journalist, spouted: "I'm sure I am not the only one who makes money on the side this way: How can anybody live on $25K/year??" When I was 24 and making less than that, I did it by eating Spaghetti-O's, Ramen noodles and Swanson pot pies for dinner; driving a Toyota Tercel with no air conditioning; and sleeping on a $30 futon. I did it the way most parents teach their daughters to succeed: through hard work, thrift, faith and perseverance.

Malkin's parents are a doctor and a schoolteacher. When Malkin was 24 she was married to a Rhodes Scholar who apparently works for the Rand Corporation. According to her bio, in '94 Malkin was working as an editorial writer and weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News.

Them Spaghetti-O's musta tasted alright with a nice Chablis.

At that very same time I was living in New York City (surely as expensive a jurisdiction as LA) and working as a freelance writer, and made maybe six grand more than what Malkin claims to have made. (The following year, Malkin was named Warren Brookes Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., so her prospects were obviously infinitely better than mine). I wasn't hooking, either (not for lack of opportunities!), nor did I consume a more exalted diet than Ms. Malkin did. And though I sure did work hard, and had to be thrifty, I had no faith or perseverance to speak of.

But I'll say this: I sure as shit couldn't afford a car with or without A/C -- I'd have had to take major dick up the ass for that! Almost certainly Republican dick.

But I didn't, and till now I never had cause to feel morally superior about it. In fact, given the severe mark-up in rents and other cost of living indicators since then, I marvel that Malkin does. That whole "poor but pure" argument makes much more sense if one is actually poor.

POST UPDATED because I can't handle numbers too good. Malkin was 24 in '94, not '84, as I previously wrote. By that time I had left the dispatching business and had entered the humiliating world of freelance writing. Not surprisingly (though depressingly from my perspective) I wasn't making much more in '94 than I was in '84, but I suppose the extra six large could have been what kept me from working the entrance to the Holland Tunnel.

When I was 24, I was working as a busboy and would have considered $24K a princely sum.

DOCTRINAL MATTERS AS EXPLAINED BY THE PENGUINS. Re the Oklahoma City Bombers, Kerry expresses the traditional, Cuomoesque argument against the death penalty: "Dying is scary for a while, but in the end, the punishment is gone," so life in prison might be a more convincing threat.

So NRO's Rich Lowry, offscreen, asks, "Do you believe in hell? He seemed to say on MTP that the only punishment in dying is the act of dying itself. But if you are a faithful Catholic like Kerry don't you believe someone like Tim McVeigh, an unrepentant mass murderer, is in for an eternity of punishment?"

They're really working this Catholic thing, aren't they? When I was in the Church, though, back in the metal-ruler era, we were specifically cautioned by the nuns against assuming that anyone was in Hell -- or in Heaven, for that matter, excepting the Saints, who were in for sure because the Pope said so.

This message was illustrated by anecdotes of sudden, unforeseeable death suffered by children just like ourselves, meant to convince us that we could be saved or damned in an instant, and that we had better make sure that instant came before we were run over by a bus or suffocated in a sand-pit, and not after. Repent, in other words, before it's too late.

So the idea that the worst human being might be saved at the last moment strikes me as very Catholic. See also the Good Thief.

I would ask if Lowry is Catholic, but it doesn't matter -- that guy could be talking about what it's like to be Rich Lowry and he'd still be talking out his ass.

AGAINST INTERPRETATION. Every so often OpinionJournal has to publish someone's tedious poli-sci journal article and call it an "Extra." This week Zachary Selden gets the nod. He argues that the foreign policy adventuresomeness that we call "neoconservative" is not weird and phenomenonal, as some imagine, but old-fashioned and American, and based on "a set of policies that flow from two ideas that resonate deeply in American public opinion."

There's a lot to cavil here. The first of the abovementioned resonant ideas, for example, Selden says "is often credited to Woodrow Wilson, but in some ways its roots stretch back into the 18th century. It is founded on the moral assertions that have been part of American political thought since the early days of the republic. Chief among them is the idea that individual liberty is a moral absolute and that a system of governance that enshrines individual liberty is morally and practically superior to all others." Europeans can't understand all this, Selden sniffs: their "constitutions tend to place a greater emphasis on social harmony than on individual liberty."

Looked at a certain way, this is unobjectionable. But the culmination of Wilson's dream was not the establishment of a perpetual, roving gang of democratizers, but of the League of Nations -- in which cause he was at least grudgingly supported by a good many of those social-hamonist Europeans, but scuttled by his own people. In fact, Wilson failed precisely to the degree that he tried to promote American ideals to Americans. By the time we get to Iraq -- hell, by the time we get to Panama and the Philippines -- the connection between our love of liberty and our feckless foreign adventures seems not only severed, but hacked to pieces.

And this is why windy policy dissertations like Selden's frustrate me (along with the big words, of course, and compound sentences). They're all about the big ideas which allegedly animate our political actors. Frankly, in most cases I see something a whole lot less philosophical going on -- unless you consider "I got mine, don't worry about yours" a philosophy.

It may just be my ignorance, but I don't see much of any coherent idea, let alone a grand Wilsonian schema, behind the actions of this Administration. I see Bush buffeted by peddlers of crank ideas whose patrons managed in early days to squeeze through the portals of power and grab a place near the President ear. I see, in the wake of the 9-11 attacks, a tendency to go with what Cheney and the wise men suggested, and Cheney and the wise men slapping their best and brightest on the back and whispering, "OK, kid, you're on." And, of course, the usual graft, fraud, ass-covering -- and, above all, deep faith that Americans will fall for any old horseshit you care to peddle if you wrap it in a flag and drawl over it like John Wayne. (Selden's view is that Americans have been moved off their usual anti-interventionist dime by 9-11, but it was no preordained thing that they would be moved to fight Iraq -- that was pure salesmanship.)

I respect erudition in any field, but Selden's article strikes me as justification after the fact. The Founding Fathers had great, free-wheeling intellects, and wrote a lot more than their puny descendents, so it is not hard to find something in them to use as justification for any old scam you want to pull. How many times have right-wing nuts used Andrew Jackson's "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it" as a historical imprimatur for their fight against whichever branch of the government happens to piss them off?

FORCED TO ACKNOWLEDGE AN UNPLEASANT REALITY. Xax has been offline for many weeks, and I don't know when it will come back, so I have replaced it on my blogroll with Something Awful. You probably know about them already, but I figure it's good to have an "eject" button handy that will take you from the moaning and groaning that goes on here to a very funny place.

CRAZY ON THE COUCH.I have to say I was taken aback by the ill-concealed rage in Crazy Jesus Lady's latest, an account of E.L. Doctorow's speech at Hofstra and his comeuppance. Normally she speaks of her many enemies in a dismissively gentle tone, as though it were more Satan's fault than theirs that they have been led unto sin and therefore damned. But she calls Doctorow "Fast Eddy," talks ahout his "boorishness,' and claims that Doctorow "manages to produce many books nobody reads in the computer age while still using a quill." (I think she means Doctorow uses the quill, not the non-readers. That's how mad CJL is -- she can't even properly place her modifiers!)

Why such spasmodic rage? One idea is suggested by a gag the New Yorker pulled at Crazy's expense in April. In one of their "Hundred Days" multiple-choice questions about current events, they asked readers to match bits of commentary on Bush with their authors. Four of the five selections were devastatingly negative ("worst President ever") and authored by people like Richard Reeves and Michael Kinsley. One, though, went like this: "A steady hand on the helm in high seas, a knowledge of where we must go and why, a resolve to achieve safe harbor. More and more this presidency is feeling like a gift." And this was the Crazy Jesus Lady's.

CJL has been well-compensated for her speechwriting and is praised in wingnut circles for her columns and books. Insofar as her world extends, this would seem a sufficient Valhalla for a loyal operative. But you can tell by her occasional cracks about "intellectuals, academics, [and] local clever people who talk loudly in restaurants," that Crazy is no less affected than others of her sort by that primitive jealousy stirred by the success of credentialed types who sneer at all that is holy and Republican yet somehow, inexplicably, are allowed by the Lord to enjoy good reviews and tenure. For all her faith that the Lord will one day bring her home, she would yet like to make a stop along the way at Montparnasse, and there be made much of. Alas, the nobs think her a outre Pollyanna, and she must settle for the approbation of think-tank nerds and other Crazy Jesus Ladies and Gentlemen.

How it must sting to be excluded and then mocked for her own exclusion. So the Doctorow booing must have come as a waterfall of balm to her scourged ego. In her ecstasy of vindication, she may have forgotten to behave toward Doctorow as a Christian; but that's why the Lord made confessional booths.

JUST WEIRD:

If you have heard the hits "My Baby Loves Lovin"', "Beach Baby", "United We Stand", "Gimme Dat Ding", "Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)" and the unforgettable Coke commercial "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke," you have definitely heard Tony Burrows... Tony Burrows is listed in the Guiness Book of records as having had the most records in the charts at the same time under different names.

BTW, did you know that Albert Hammond wrote "Gimme Dat Ding," and "It Never Rains in Southern California" AND "The Air That I Breathe" AND "Free Electric Band," among others?

It is something to contemplate that so many of the cherished songs of my youth were manufactured by a small gang of studio hacks.

CULTURAL ANALYSIS: AN EXCITING NEW CAREER OPTION FOR REPUBLICAN OPERATIVES. Jens 'n' Frens explains a Simpsons episode:

...Burns, upon discovering (as he did in at least one previous ep, but never mind that) that he's unpopular, decides to buy out all of the town's media. Lisa is publishing her own paper, though, and continues through a certain amount of harassment. At the end she gives up, but everyone else in town starts their own newspapers.

The mainstream media aren't all run by the same person, but until a few years ago, they were all run by the same New York City/Washington DC mindset. As I've said before, the liberal media haven't been getting any less liberal, but more conservative alternatives have grown around them -- most notably Fox News, but also a multitude of independent bloggers...

So Burns is the New York Times, and Lisa is Fox News. Or maybe Little Green Footballs.

Well, if they'll buy Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau, they might buy this, too.

IF YOU DRINK, DON'T GOOGLE. IF YOU DRINK AND GOOGLE, DON'T POST. Matt Welch does some contrarian schtick that goes badly awry:

I know it must be pretty to think that liberals = free speech, and conservatives = duct tape on lips, but that's a cliché that has long outlived its axiomaticism... A Google search on "free speech" and "National Review" yields 32,400 results; one on "free speech" and "Los Angeles Magazine" produces 207 (there are 481 "free speech" results on NRO's site alone).

Testing Welch's methodology, I googled "Hitler" and "Jews" -- 507,000 hits. Then I googled "George W. Bush" and "Jews" -- only 172,000.

So let's not hear any of this axiomaticism about Hitler being against the Jews! Why, he talked about them all the time! He certainly approved of them way more than that Bush guy.

I'm sure National Review Online editor Jonah Goldberg -- an admitted and tireless crusader for censorship, by the way -- is happy about Welch's confusion. He may be allergic to free speech, but free publicity is something else again.

POLITICAL WEBLOGGING CAN BE DEPRESSING. Here's Andrew Stuttaford explaining that, when people use the term "Taliban wing" to describe social policy meddlers, that's just silly, but when he uses the term "health mullahs" to describe our social health policy meddlers (a group I'm not in love with either), that's an appropriate use of rhetoric.

More and more often when I sit down to fill one of these little blogger screens I feel like one of the monkeys in the prologue to "2001," joining in the shrieking and jumping up and down and general primitive social aggression.

One alternative might be to approach analysis seriously and politely, which in the current environment would be like delivering a long lecture on the Good and the True while undergraduates stick matches into my shoes and light them, hold up fingers behind my head, and make fart noises.

Another would be to just pack it in, disappointing literally dozens of fans.

I wonder if you guys ever feel this way.

LITERARY QUOTES FOR A WARM MAY NIGHT.

Thus he was forced to endure the importunities of the young-old man, whose drunken state obscurely urged him to pay the stranger the honor of a formal farewell. "We wish you a very pleasant sojourn," he babbled, bowing and scraping. "Pray keep us in mind. Au revoir, excusez et bon jour, votre Excellence." He drooled, he blinked, he licked the corner of his mouth, the little imperial bristled on his elderly chin. He put the tips of two fingers to his mouth and said thickly, "Give her our love, will you, the p-pretty dear..." Here his upper plate came away and fell down on the lower one... Aschenbach escaped. "Little sweety-sweety-sweetheart," he heard behind him, gurgled and stuttered, as he climbed down the rope stair into the boat.
--Thomas Mann, "Death in Venice"

I wer programmit then from how I ben when I come in to Cambry. Coming in to Cambry my head ben ful of words and rimes and all kynds of jumbl of yellerboy stoan thots. Back then I ben thinking on the Power of the 2 and the 1 and the Hy Power what ben whoosing roun the Power Ring time back way back. The 1 Big 1 and the Spirit of God. My mind ben all binsy with myndy thinking. Thinking who wer going to do what and how I myt put some thing to gether before some 1 else done it. Seed of the red and seed of the yeller and that. Hart of the wud. Now I dint want nothing of that. I dint know what the connnexion were with that face in my mynd only I knowit that face wer making me think diffrent. I wernt looking for no Hy Power no mor I dint want no Power at all. I dint want to do nothing with that yellerboy stoan n mor. Greanvine wer the name I put to that face in my mynd.

I cud feal some thing growing in me wer like a grean sea surging in me it wer saying, LOSE IT. Saying, LET GO. Saying, THE ONLYES POWER IS NO POWER.

Ther come in to my muynd then music or the idear of music I dont know what it wer if I try to hear it now I cant only I know I heard it then. It wer as much colours as it wer souns only if I try to see the colours now I cant. The souns and the colours they be come a moving and I thot I could move with it.

--Russell Hoban, "Riddley Walker"

Now, my Friend, can Prophecies, or miracles convince You, or Me, that infinite Benevolence, Wisdom and Power, created and preserves, for a time, innumerable millions to make them miserable forever; for his own Glory? Wretch! What is his Glory? Is he ambitious? does he want promotion? Is he vain? tickled with Adulation? Exulting and tryumphing in his Power and the Sweetness of his Vengence? Pardon me, my Maker, for these aweful Questions. My Answer to them is always ready: I believe no such Things. My Adoration of the Author of the Universe is too profound and too sincere. The Love of God and his Creation; delight, Joy, Tryumph, Exultation in my own existence, 'tho but an Atom, a Molecule Organique, in the Universe; are my religion. Howl, Snarl, bite, Ye Calvinistick! Ye Athanasian Divines, if You will. Ye will say, I am no Christian: I say Ye are no Christians: and there the account is ballanced. Yet I believe all the honest men among you, are Christians in My Sense of the Word.

--John Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, September 14, 1813

The Ampitheatre was the best place in the world for a convention. Relatively small, it had the packed intimacy of a neighborhood fight club. The entrances to the gallery were as narrow as hallway tunnels, and the balcony seemed to hang over each speaker. The colors were black and grey and red and white and blue, bright powerful colors in support of a ruddy beef-eating sea of Democratic faces. The standards in these cramped quarters were numerous enough to look like lances. The aisles were jammed. The carpets were red. The crowd had a blood in their vote which had travelled in an unbroken line from the throng who had cheered the blood of brave Christians and ferocious lions. It could have been a great convention, stench and all -- politics in an abbatoir was as appropriate as license in a boudoir. There was bottom to this convention; some of the finest and some of the most corrupt faces in America were on the floor. Cancer jostled elbows with arcomegaly, obesity with edema, arthritis with alcholism, bad livers sent curses to bronchiacs, and quivering jowls beamed bad cess to puffed-out paunches. Cigars curved mouths which talked out of the other corner to cauliflower ears. The leprotic took care of the blind. And the deaf attached their hearing-aid to the voice-box of the dumb. The tennis-players communicated with the estate holders. The Mob talked bowling with the Union, the principals winked to the principals, the honest and the passionate went hoarse shouting through dead mikes.

--Norman Mailer, "Miami and the Siege of Chicago"

When you find a man living on the ragged edge of his consciousness, pent in to his sin and want and incompleteness, and consequently inconsolable, and then simply tell him that all is well with him, that he must stop his worry, break with his discontent, and give up his anxiety, you seem to him to come with pure absurdities. The only positive consciousness he has tells him that all is NOT well, and the better way you offer sounds simply as if you proposed to him to assert cold-blooded falsehoods. "The will to believe" cannot be stretched as far as that. We can make ourselves more faithful to a belief of which we have the rudiments, but we cannot create a belief out of whole cloth when our perception actively assures us of its opposite. The better mind proposed to us comes in that case in the form of a pure negation of the only mind we have, and we cannot actively will a pure negation.

--William James, "The Varieties of Religious Experience"

I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, believe none of us. To a nunnery, go.

--William Shakespeare, "Hamlet"

MEET-UP 2. I came back to the event and found a dozen nice young people sitting around cross-legged, drinking white wine, and talking about classes at the New School. It was obvious that no one was going to get laid.

Fortunately there were some beers left in the fridge, and these I freely availed. My suggestion that we exercise our Second Amendment rights on behalf of the Kerry campaign -- or at least affix "KILL BUSH" stickers to public spaces throughout the midtown area during the Republican Convention -- fell, this website's government monitors will be disappointed to hear, on deaf ears. Finally I left before I was made to leave. All in all a successful evening by my pathetic standards.

MEET-UP. A friend for whom, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,the word "well-meaning" was invented in 1347 by Thomas Usk, invited me to a Kerry "Meet-Up" this evening on Avenue C. It was very odd to find myself in a well-scrubbed triplex with a terrace overlooking a terrain wherein, some years earlier, friends of mine copped heroin, and where I was on one occasion chased by riot cops. The hostesses were perfectly nice women who radiated positive energy as if it were an organic fragrance from the Body Shop; I felt rank with the odor of despair by comparison. Their early guests were well-turned-out young people, some with children who clomped stairs and bawled as John Kerry addressed us (and thousands of other positive partiers across America) by speakerphone. We listened respectfully as the candidate stammered and confused verb tenses. Among the adjectives he used for the Bush Administration was "childish," and I notice Kerry, for all his thickness of tongue, is occasionally given to these perfectly apt usages, and that these are the ones his enemies hammer most mercilessly.

Everyone was cheerful and politically astute, which as you may imagine made me feel alienated. So I left. But I may go back. I donated $20, after all, and am only half drunk.

WORD. "I'm tired of having my patriotism questioned by people who think Thomas Jefferson was a sitcom character... why the fuck should I be forced to treat their opinions as if they were equally as valid as my own? You wouldn't ask a six year old how to tune a Lamborghini's engine, so why should you care about the political opinions of people who can't point out their own goddamn country on a map?... I don't give a shit what some semi-literate Midwestern retard who's never been more than two hundred miles from home and whose idea of intellectual exercise is watching "Jeopardy" thinks about the intricacies of Islamic theology as it relates to the metaphysical notion of jihad. Fuck him."

Onto the blogroll with Zen Archery.