POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, NEW-STYLEE. A perfectly reasonable objection, and good for her, from Michele Catalano, to a new Hollywood blacklist (yes, in so many words) proposed by some guy. "What a soundly terrible idea," she says. "It mocks everything America is about, as well as gives credence to the left's mantra that conservatives and/or Republicans want to crush dissent and block free speech."

As you might imagine, though, some of the comments are hilarious. Here's my personal "Courage of His Convictions" nominee:

There are some actors and directors whose work I simply won't patronize. Michael Moore, Robert Altman, Alec Baldwin, and a few others are on the "won't see no matter what" list, and Viggo Mortenson is on the "won't see except for LoTR" list.

Second place winner: "Like, Robert Altman's a gibbering moron through and through, but I really like the old Combat television show, and I plan on buying the season sets on DVD. I'll probably skip his commentaries, though."

The guy behind AllahPundit writes in with this:

Let me make one more point, Michele. I'm sure you realize that there are more than a few employers in and around New York City who would pass you over for a job because of the political opinions you've expressed on ASV. In my case, I realize it well enough to leave "Allah" off my resume. So you and I, for all intents and purposes, are on an informal, unwritten blacklist maintained by leftist business owners.

So that's why no one puts BLOGGER (11/01-present): Numchuck.com, a journal of random thoughts on terrorism and Buffy ('A must read!' -- Clayton Cramer) on their resumes -- to keep under the radar of those evil hippies who run corporations! We've all been in those interviews, haven't we:

LEFTIST BUSINESS OWNER: As you know, young man, the purpose of Greenbelt Securities is to redistribute our clients' wealth to the black, Latino, and trangendered community.

FREEDOM-LOVING BLOGGER DESPERATE FOR WORK: C-count me in, comrade! More power to the people.

LEFTIST BUSINESS OWNER: (narrowing his eyes) Your voice... I've heard it before... yes... in a .wav file distributed by the Central Committee! (Stands, points, makes 70s Invasion of the Body Snatchers noise.)

Some responses, however, are downright spooky:

If I misuse my Second Amendment rights I LOSE THEM. If I drive irresponsibly, I LOSE THAT RIGHT. Same with every other right Americans have... except one. That one, you can abuse and misuse and willingly use as a tool to damage your country and endanger your fellow citizens- with no comebacks at all, and people will line up around the block to defend your ability to do so.

What do you call a right with no responsibility attached?

The First Amendment.

(Insert Dragnet theme here.)

I suggest these guys use their time more constructively.

ANOTHER MYSTERY SOLVED. I finally figured out that Day by Day comic strip: it's Mallard Fillmore for people who spend more that $30 a year on hair conditioner.

Two reasons to never see it again.

WHAT'S OPERA, DOC? Terry Teachout's OpinionJournal complaint against the Ground Zero arts companies selections pretends to be a righteous jeremiad against "culture by committee." The recent theatre, dance, and museum choices are "modest and safe" and "very, very small," says Teachout, when the committee, had they any guts, could have made "the boldest possible declaration of faith in the power and glory of Western culture" by including Teachout's favored candidate, the New York City Opera. "What a disappointment," he cries, rending his garment. "What a wasted opportunity."

Now, any critic whose candidate fails to receive its piece of the funded pie is entitled to a good huff. But c'mon, doc: an opera company?

Don't get me wrong (especially you, Sasha). I respect opera (more by breach than observance) and take Teachout's word that City Opera is a good pick. But let's not kid ourselves: the Ground Zero selections were never going to be about grandeur -- not even the fake grandeur of the hideous neoWTC building design. They were picked for their potential appeal to the area's prime constituencies: tourists and yuppies.

As John Rockwell observes in the Times:

...the very name of the body that made these choices — a "development corporation" — indicates the true rationale behind its selection, and behind the decision to involve arts organizations in the first place. The winners were picked not because anyone gave first thought to their worthiness as art, but because they represented a canny mix of institutions likely to make downtown a better place to live and do business.

The selections are modest because that is what the punters will pay for. The Freedom Center is an unknown quantity, and the Drawing Center unknown, alas, to me; but the Signature, best known for its one-playwright-a-season schtick, and the Joyce are solid and reasonably popular art-brands that will edify without scaring anyone. They are perfectly suitable for Mr. and Mrs. (or Mr. and Mr.) New York Striver who, after a hard week of shuffling papers, don't mind dropping a few bills for the quality art these vendors provide, any more than they would mind dropping a few bills at Dean & Deluca, Kenneth Cole, or Design Within Reach. The stuff goes down easy and has the smell of quality.

You don't even have to know much about art to patronize these establishments. The Signature is practically a missionary enterprise, reviving and (where needed) resuscitating moribund reputations. If they're doing a whole year of this Maria Irene Fornes, well then, honey, she must be damn good.

Museums have the advantage of sitting perfectly still for gawkers from Iowa to tromp through. What they'll see at the Drawing Center will probably be good draughtsmanship at least, and you don't have to be Bernard Berenson to appreciate that. As to the Freedom Museum, well, one can only imagine. They'll clean up in "Remember 9/11" hanky sales alone.

One might wonder how a modern dance company would be more pleasing to the constituents than an opera company. The answer is simple: bodies. Now, maybe you watch dance entirely, and chastely, for love of technique. And maybe old Uncle Roy watches women's gymnastics events on TV because he admires athleticism in all its forms. Please. As a tired businessman observed years ago (in the presence of my friend Bob Schaffer) at some spectacular gyrations in a Pina Bausch performance, "Now that's what I like to see -- bottoms up!"

Art can be grand, but it doesn't have to be, and hardly ever is. If the voice of God comes to Ground Zero, chances are it will be in a much different form than opera. Sorry, doc. The people, through their elected time-servers and jobsworths, have spoken!

AN OLD PRO SHOWS HOW IT'S DONE. They unveiled the Clintons' portraits at the White House today, and there was a rather playful ceremony with Bush and Bubba doing some of their lighter material. I note that Clinton worked this into his remarks:

This is a great country.Politics is noble work.... yesterday, I said, "You know, Most the people I've known in this business, Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, were good people, honest people, and they did what they thought was right. And I hope that I'll live long enough to see American politics return to vigorous debates where we argue who's right and wrong, not who's good and bad."

Regular readers of this site will know that's not how I operate, but I'm not running for anything. John Kerry is, and I hope he was was paying attention. There are worse guys to take rhetorical tips from.

PRO-DEATH REPUBLICAN. It's rare indeed (or should I say "heh indeed") when I admit a debt of gratitude to the Ole Perfesser over t' the U of Tenn. But one of his posts has alerted me to an entertaining character named Clayton Cramer.

The Perfesser, it seems, had written a TCS piece about his desire to have his life extended to infinity and beyond via government-funded research -- said moneys to be taken, one imagines, from boondoggles like Workmen's Compensation. But let us move on -- the Perfesser's own lunacy is a tired subject.

Cramer argues that life is not worth extending. Now, this is a defensible position based on an understanding of human nature. But Cramer doesn't want a shorter life on valid Motorhead "Ace of Spades" grounds ("That's the way I like it baby/I don't want to live forever") -- he wants it because kids today are having all kinds of deviant sex, probably because they can't easily buy guns, thanks to "smart, arrogant, and immoral" judges. And it's only going to get worse:

When I was growing up, there was drug abuse. There were orgies and other forms of casual sex, where people were just used, and feelings got hurt. But that was largely high school and college, not junior high and upper grades of elementary school. I am not sure that I want to live another hundred years, and see the evil that will become the norm.

Perhaps Cramer would be less exercised if the target demographic for orgies were trending older rather than younger. But that seems unlikely. Note the world-weariness of his opening remarks:

When I was 23, I got married. We drove away from the church in our 1979 Pontiac Grand Am for our honeymoon... It is 24 years later, and I am still married to that same woman. Life was fresh and new, full of optimism and hopes.

As you get older, your high hopes and ambitions inevitably collapse around you. The wonders of travel turn into a series of disappointments. Your high hopes for your children come crashing down, especially when you discover the moral ugliness of the culture in which you are raising them.

That paragraph break seems awkward, and I like to think that, in an early draft, two sentences in Cramer's middle section were inverted:

Life was fresh and new, full of optimism and hopes. It is 24 years later, and I am still married to that same woman. As you get older, your high hopes and ambitions inevitably collapse around you.

Doesn't that sound more natural? Then Cramer weeps over the tedium of having to work for a living:

The job that you enjoyed at 23, and 25, and even 28, by 35 or 40 has lost its luster. You do it because you need the money to pay your bills.

People working to make money to live! Forbid it, almighty God! Yet the thought of changing jobs also terrifies Cramer: "Imagine having to do a career change 30 or 40 times over a lifetime! No thank you!" Actually, that's called the New Economy, or the Old Poverty, and millions of us are stuck in it. Maybe we should all just kill ourselves. Between the orgies and the careers, what's left for us?

How did I miss this guy before?

DON'T PLAY US CHEAP. It has been suggested that New Yorkers refrain from showing displeasure at this year's Republican Convention, lest we alienate our good neighbors in the red states. Here's an example of why I can't buy that.

Saturday's New York Post, the Republican pamphlet distrubuted daily here at great expense (one might say "investment") by Rupert Murdoch, ran a story called "Big Apple Salute," referring to the recent Reagan necromonia.

The idea was to show the City's love for our departed Gipper. Most of the quotes, however, come from outlanders, visiting from Wichita, Chicago, and Hillsborough, NJ.

Two actual citizens are cited. One is a fifth-grader on a field trip. "I feel bad for his family," says 11-year-old Melissa Compere. "He was real important and a lot of people loved him. It makes me want to learn more about him."

The other is an adult, presumably, who "was watching the rites at Rosie O'Grady's on West 46th Street because the TV reception in his office was poor."

One can only imagine the strain on the Post reporters tasked with this beat, trying to get regular New Yorkers to talk about their love for Reagan. All they could produce, aside from predictable tourist bleats, is an 11-year-old and a guy who cut work to go to a bar.

But a Big Apple Salute must be made, for, by Murdochian logic, every corner of the Republic must be shown to mourn the Gipper, especially the putative hometown of the rag itself.

The game plan -- and you know, in this Age of Propaganda, there is always a game plan -- is obviously to portray us as fellow travellers aboard the Republican juggernaut, despite our history, despite our character, despite our proud record of 17 straight elections without supporting a Republican Presidential candidate, despite our relatively huge population of artists, educators, gays, blacks, Hispanics, intellectuals, and naysayers, despite everything blazingly obvious about us to anyone who actually knows us.

No thanks and fuck you.

A CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND. I took Editor Martin out to Coney. He's leaving town soon, and he had to see it before he left. It was a cool, clear day, sky pale blue and the boardwalk crowded with the usual Coney folk, which these days is about two-thirds deep-Brooklyn locals of every race taking their raucous ease, and one-third young hipsters and tourists out to catch one of the least gentrified scenes in the City. It's a good mix and everyone was having fun. Well, one hulking Italian fellow, drunk off his ass, took issue with Martin and myself when he thought we'd nicked his plastic chair, but that was easily defused. Anyway, what's a day at Coney without a little street hassle? Like the bumper cars and the kids wrestling good-naturedly on the sand, Brooklyn pleasure must always involve a few rude shocks.

How I wish the doubters of multiculturalism could have seen it. Puerto Rican flags got a pre-parade workout, and after the boardwalk salsa band closed down, a couple of rogue percussionists worked their cowbells and shakers into a merengue beat, moving a fat couple to dance ballroom-style in their t-shirts and shorts. At sunset a few hundred folks in kinte cloth, skull caps, and billowing white robes marched to African drums toward the shore to throw flowers into the water in memory of the Middle Passage. At the boardwalk bars would-be wiseguys pounded Coronas and their own chests. This was no grad-school wishful thinking, no professorial pipe-dream, but the way we live.

Take the Republican Conventioneers on a field trip to Coney. We could all profit by it.

WELL, THEY CAN ALWAYS PATRONIZE THE HOOKERS. An unbylined OpinionJournal piece picks apart the Tony Award winners and declares them hostile to red state Americans. Witches! Homosexuals! Assassins! Puppets! The author wonders if the Republican conventioneers coming in August will be pleased. "We'll happily concede that much of it may be clever," he generously allows. "It may even be, at times, pretty good. But put yourself in the shoes of those on the New York City Host Committee and you can see why they might conclude that this is not the sort of stuff that plays well to our guests from Peoria."

There is no real sourcing in the piece -- "news columns had good sport with Republican plans for the theater," the author claims, with no attributions -- but it seems odd to me that that the three delegates profiled at the RNC's own Convention website all look forward to taking in a Broadway show. They say they want to see "The Lion King", and will presumably not be troubled by the touchy-feely, circle-of-life, diversity message (the profiled delegates themselves seem to have been selected to promote a diversity message); but even if they somehow find themselves at "Avenue Q," "Wicked," or "I Am My Own Wife," I suspect they will still enjoy themselves on grounds of craft, spectacle, and fun, just as people of all sorts have enjoyed "La Cage Aux Folles," "Sweeney Todd," and other Tony winners of which neither they nor the OpinionJournal author may have approved on ideological grounds.

The culture war is a wearying beat.

POSITIVELY OUR LAST CRAZY CORNER REAGAN FUNERAL POST: "I remember someone saying once that RR was the kind of actor who improved the performances of the other actors on the set. I thought of this during the funeral -- during RR's final performance, as it were, everybody else put on a great show."

When I go, I hope I, too, will be remembered as the sort of corpse that made his friends look good.

A COCKEYED DYNAMIST. Reaganfest '04 is nearly over, thank God. This first collective, posthumous effort to muscle history on the old fraud's behalf has seen several very low points, some choice examples of which have been nimbly tagged and bagged by Wonkette. Generally, unreason has reigned, which of course is perfectly appropriate for a Reaganfest.

For example, in her hagiograph, Virginia Postrel says that "the late 1960s and 1970s were a scary time to grow up." That's interesting. I grew up in roughly the same time frame, and though I was depressed and unloved, I wasn't often scared. In fact, like most children throughout human history, I looked forward to the challenges and privileges of adulthood with an unreasonable fearlessness I often wish I had back.

What struck terror into young Virginia's heart? I've had a hard time tracking down details on her childhood, so I suppose Postrel might have grown up on the mean streets of East L.A. or some such, but looking at her I doubt it. She has said that "from childhood, we have developed a sort of advertising literacy," which could be very scary, in a Count Floyd sort of way.

Further down, she explains the horror of youth in the age of tie-dye and denim:

The Soviets were expanding, and the Cold War seemed destined to end in defeat or destruction...

So unlike the age of peace and security in which we now live.

The Saudis could -- and did -- cut off the oil whenever they got mad. People in the northeast froze from lack of natural gas; my father turned our thermostats down to 65, as though it would help...

Is this not the most pathetic tell-that-to-the-young-people-of-today-and-they-won't-believe-you jape you've ever heard? When I was a young girl, we had to wear light sweaters indoors! And that was because we were at the mercy of the House of Saud, with whom we have much better relations now. Why, we can get them to move the price of oil up or down, as needed. And all we have to do in return is help them out with airline reservations.

Prices went up and up, not just on a few things but on everything.

Again, not like now. Of course, it has been suggested that we are not better off than we were -- we just don't feel the effects of our economic distress, thanks to easy credit, which allows us to off-load our horrendous debts onto the next generation. (Now those kids have reason to live in fear!)

I could go on, but why bother. The thing about the cheery "Dynamist" Postrel is that her optimism, like Reagan's, requires a backstory about the collectivist horrors that her creed happily vanquished, so that we'll keep on believing that this is the best of all possible worlds. Of course, this would work better if the world weren't such a fucking mess.

AGAIN, MORE SLOWLY: WHAT. LIBERAL. MEDIA? Every bit I've seen of the Reagan mourning media coverage has been obsequious and flattering to the old fraud in the extreme. This is not noted by the usual bias obsessives of the Right (nor, I expect, will they remember it afterwards), but it is obvious. Even the "media critics" at NRO, hypersensitive to even the faintest slights, have been reduced to complaining about Tom Brokaw's tone of voice, and so devote most of their time to bizarre monarchist and millenarian observations more suitable to that other great Republican, Reverend Moon.

Meanwhile Alterman's showing off his hate mail from Reaganauts enraged by his perfectly reasonable complaints about the Gipper Administration. Sample lines: "We'll die before that godless scum takes our country from us once again! Go and cry with your homosexual friends..." "Call me and I will persoanlly buy you a first class ticket to whatever country you want to go live in." "You sir, are a low down miserable scum bag oppotunist..." "So please, continue to ramble on as the bitter, pathetic idiot your are so that Americans can thank God for giving us a leader like Ronald Reagan." "I see that you still have your communist party membership! You faggot!"

There you have it, folks: our opposition.

(Hey, if Michael Totten gets to pull this kind of shit, why can't I?)

THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING. In today's New York Observer (not in the web edition), Jim Callaghan suggests that those sincerely wishing to stop Bush should refrain from demonstrating in New York during the upcoming Republican Convention. He worries that the Cause will be damaged by TVs bearing to the hinterlands images of "angry youths and assorted lefties, joined by antiwar activists who are against war even after 3,000 people were slaughtered." That last, bloody-shirted bit may have you wondering whether Callaghan is really playing for the other side, but he insists he's only playing devil's advocate: "We all know that Nixon and his felons had provocateurs at the 1972 Republican Convention to make sure that America wouldn't forget that he was the white man's President, the voice of the 'Silent Majority'... Don't discount the theory that the G.O.P. picked New York for the 2004 Convention for the same reason: the prospect of demonstrators behaving badly."

Callaghan seems to forget that New York has played host to hundreds of thousands of anti-Iraq-war demonstrators without serious incident. The net effect has been to remind people that not everyone is on board with this Administration's policies, even in the former home of the twin towers. So well-behaved were they that even reliable Republican propagandists could only fudge the numbers and point to smaller, pro-war demos as a true reflection of the Will of the People.

Crazier still is the idea that Bush picked this site so that ABC could show dirty hippies disturbing the peace. In locating here, so close to the 9/11 anniversary, he obviously wants America to believe -- in the absence of any countervailing visual evidence -- in a New York shell-shocked and agreeable to his Iraqi vengeance, no matter how disconnected that was from the actual attacks. He wants us, in other words, as a prop, mute and serviceable to his purpose. Here's a supporting quote from Mayor/Nanny Bloomberg in Scholastic magazine: "When the Republican convention comes to New York we are going to remember those young men and women who died on September 11 and those that are fighting for us today." It's a good bet that Bloomberg and his comrades expect this line of reasoning to go over as well with grown-ups as it surely did with the pre-teen readers of Scholastic.

The Republicans are fully expecting New Yorkers to play their part in this charade: a local newspaper and subway campaign featuring former Mayor/Clown Ed Koch exhorts us to "be nice" to the visiting Republicans. The idea, articulated in many outlets (including the current Mayor's own news service), is that the sons and daughters of the Oatmeal, Nebraska Rotary Club will drop a bundle here and revivify our sagging economy. Everyone knows where the city's heart is (we haven't electorally supported a Republican candidate since Coolidge), but as the local GOP web site puts it, "the city has been welcoming, from the labor unions with which Republicans have traditionally had rocky relations, to everyday people who want the convention to succeed, if not Bush's re-election bid. The Democrats might hope it is a mismatch on the magnitude of ordering a corned beef sandwich on white with mayo, but officially they support whatever helps the New York economy."

In the days of Catherine the Great, the real residents of Potemkin villages only had to stay out of sight. Now we are expected to do a full-on meet-and-greet, in hopes that we may be thrown a few kopeks.

I expect all good citizens to be civil to such Republicans as fortune sends our way this summer, but civility is not silence. If they don't like demonstrations, if they prefer New York to behave like a hick town bowing and scraping to Wal-Mart, too fucking bad for them.

BLANKER GENERATION. I'm sure there's more than one reason why the death of Robert Quine bothers me this much.

I didn't know the guy, but I would often see him around the East Village back in the 70s and early 80s. He was usually wearing The Uniform: motorcycle jacket, frayed black jeans, and Keds. His minor variation was a nearly bald pate and thick, black-framed glasses. (He also had a splay-footed, schlubby walk, not unlike that of Robert Ludlam, whom I also often saw walking those streets.)

I saw him play with the Voidoids twice: once opening for Patti Smith at CBGB-2, Hilly's ill-fated concert venue on 2nd Avenue (it's now the Orpheum, where I believe Stomp is still playing); once at the Paradise Garage disco, in a rare "new wave" night at which Teenage Jesus & The Jerks opened and drove everyone but me and about a dozen other freaks out of the room. "We're gonna play one more song because we're so great!" yelled Lydia Lunch.

Those of us on that particular fringe thought Lunch was harsh and interesting, but I don't think many of us would have made a case for her as a musician. But Quine actually praised Lunch's guitar playing; in fact, he produced a record for her and played on a few others. Quine had been to the Berkeley School of Music, and he was digging this chick that basically just beat on the strings.

I guess he knew, though, that technique was only worth having if it produced something worth listening to. If it was brilliant but produced something dead, it wasn't as good as something that was brutal but produced something alive. Richard Hell recalls:

Though Bob, of all the “punk” musicians, was the most musically sophisticated (unless you count [Tom] Verlaine who’d come in pretty close), as much so as anybody who ever played in a rock and roll band in fact, he still belonged beyond a doubt to the genre if you want to discuss that issue, by virtue of his anger and his musical values. He wasn’t interested in virtuosity but in feeling and invention.

Maybe that's why the news is especially sad to me. So much of what comes off the musical assembly line these days sounds like a late edition of what has come before -- usually a few months before. It seems nearly every band in America got the blink-182 guitar effects box several Christmases ago; I expect many of them are tired of it, but just can't bring themselves to put it away. It isn't really any easier to be derivative than it is to be original, but originality is a loss-leader and what you invite by indulging it is the heartbreak of rejection. For young people especially, that's a tough one.

It seems amazing then to contemplate that Quine and his mates actually courted rejection, producing something that seemed out of sync with what was considered "good" at the time. To a large extent, they won their battle -- now they're accepted as pioneers. But what equivalent to them now exists? I don't just mean something good -- a higher-class, more "rockin'" version of the same old -- I mean something wild.

I expect some kid somewhere is doing something like that. I just hope we'll get to hear him, or her. And I certainly hope he or she reaches a happier end than Quine.

THIS IS JUST NICE. From 1700: Scenes from London Life by Maureen Waller:

The man in the pillory at the Royal Exchange is standing on tiptoe. It is not a position he will be able to maintain for long, but for the moment it eases his discomfort as his neck is wedged into the "wooden ruff" and his arms are twisted at an unnatural angle into the holes at either side of his head. He is aware of the excitement of the heaving crowd before him, of those jostling for a position at the front, but he keeps his eyes shut tight. Any second now and the mob will release their arsenal of filth and brickbats as thick and fast as hail at his defenseless body... Involuntarily he cringes against the imagined stones injuring his face and head, damaging his eyesight, pounding his legs and the small of his back. There is a dreadful moment of pause. Something soft brushes his cheek. It is as if warm snow is descending upon him. He dares to open his eyes a fraction, then opens them fully in amazement. The Londoners are pelting him with flowers.

The man in the pillory is Daniel Defoe, who had been sentenced for publishing a satirical pamphlet called The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, which had made some harshly intolerant churchmen look foolish. Defoe would go on to father the English novel with Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders.

IRISH WAKE. Dignified as the funerary proceedings (and the posthumous ass-licking by the Liberal Media) have been, I say there's no event, including the death of a President, that cannot be rendered hilarious by National Review Online.

Jonah Goldberg, who at any given time seems 2/3 of the way through somebody's Irish wake, responds to claims that Clinton was more popular than Reagan with this: "...the fact that Clinton's numbers were so high is a testament to the fact that Clinton desired to be popular more than he desired to be effective" (italics his).

In other words, Clinton's popularity is due to a character defect -- just like everything else about him! In support of his absurd idea, Goldberg says Clinton did only "a few bold or semi-bold things." He doesn't mention gays in the military or national health care, which is odd, number one, because it's a spectacularly stupid omission, and number two, because a few years ago Goldberg was gloating that these two Clinton policy initiatives "largely created the Republican Juggernaut in 1994."

For pure laffs, though, this D'Souza memoir (via KJL) of a meeting between Reagan and Mother Teresa is the best I've heard all mourning:

He was convinced when he returned from the hospital that he had a limited amount of time to achieve his ambitious agenda. Yet his goals were not only political but also personal. With Cardinal Cooke, who came to visit him, Reagan struck a spiritual note: "I have decided that whatever time I have left is for Him." The late Mother Teresa, who visited the White House that June, told Reagan, "You have suffered the passion of the cross and have received grace. There is a purpose to this. Because of your suffering and pain you will now understand the suffering and pain of the world. This has happened to you at this time because your country and the world needs you." Reagan was speechless...

Well, who wouldn't be?

THE NICE OLD MAN WHO LOOTED OUR TREASURY. In the late 1970s I lived in the East Village and worked as a busboy. I made less than ten thousand dollars a year, but that wasn't so bad because I was getting food stamps, and my rent was only $125 a month. When I had health problems, I went to the public clinics -- $5 got me in the door.

Envious? You should be. Not of my life, of course -- I wouldn't wish that nightmare on anyone. No, you should envy America as it was for a little while, after the Great War and before Reagan.

Because back then, we all got a little more slack. One did not have to work day and night to break even. There were lots of people who kept small families in modest homes on a single income, believe it or not. The idea that the Mom and Pop of a family would both be working and still have money trouble -- sometimes bad money trouble -- was absurd.

If you stumbled, the government would help you up -- after all, that's what we pay taxes for (as people used to say quite a lot, back when they were in fact getting something from their taxes besides foreign wars). Easy access to benefits meant not only that you didn't have to starve, but also that you didn't have to worry too much. Life was good.

That was the post-war West. Then Reagan came in, and the slack got considerably taken up.

Many of us got some tax relief -- though ordinary earners got less of this (and had some of it taken back by other means) than the more wealthy, who cleaned up. Entitlements petered out, and public service agencies were replaced by your dwindling savings account and the credit card companies -- just like welfare, except you have to pay it back at 26% interest! Our current leaders may not like the resulting, massive personal bankruptcy rate, but at least (I imagine them laughing to themselves), they don't have to pay for it.

In the Reagan era you were hooted off the carpet if you sought money for milk and bread -- but you had much better luck if you had a business plan. Entrepreneurs were lionized for their grit and determination, even if they bent the rules a little (this thinking seems since then to have developed into a full-fledged alterative culture, of which the Enron generation represents the highest stage of development). Entrepreneurs became the new avatars of American individualism, and people talked seriously of electing boardroom clowns like Lew Lehrman and Donald Trump to high office.

All this was sluiced and greased by an enormous hemorrhage of public funds. This now-chronic superdebt, which only abated under Clinton and is of course being run up again, necessitates drastic actions just to keep us out of the global poor house. So we sell an increasingly large chunk of our debt to foreign speculators. And we stress productivity -- the mantra of the age, the leading indicator of leading indicators for Reaganite economists. We work harder and harder every year to maintain this "economy" -- which word was once a plain descriptive term for a large abstraction, but is now apparently the name of some cruel bitch-goddess that must be served and offered sacrifice.

Reagan did that. With a smile and a shoeshine he turned off the spigots of slack. Today very few of us head home when we hear the five o'clock whistle; either overtime is semi-mandatory for us, or we don't have a job. DVD players are cheap, but milk costs $4 a gallon. We worship money and success, yet prate about values. All this is his legacy. You can thank him for it if you like.

A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING THAT WAS ACTUALLY FUN. Awards shows are one of my weaknesses, but I often miss the Tonys. I go to the theatre so rarely that I don’t know what’s at stake, and I figure if I wanted to feel left out I’d go to a family reunion. This year I’ve been watching, though, and it’s been a pleasure. Hugh Jackman is an adroit and personable host -- he even high-kicked with the Rockettes, and made a comical show of being winded from it. The pace is brisk, even the winners (alternately weepy and hysterical) keep it up. The speeches are more articulate and often surprising, as when Bryan F. O’Byrne turned his into an ad for his show. But the whole thing was great advertising for theatre in general. The production numbers were fun. There was even a Roger Miller song! (And a few of the usual award-show howlers: LL Cool J brought out Carol Channing, and in the audience theatre newbie Sean Combs stared at her like he didn't know who she was.) What a pleasure to watch a special event that really was.

COME BACK TO THE HUSTINGS, AL HONEY! It has been my pleasure, nay, my glee, to vote for the Reverend Al Sharpton every time he appears in a Democratic primary. But now (via Wonkette) I fear he may have gone Hollywood on us:

Reverend Al Sharpton will join CNBC's political team of contributors and commentators covering the upcoming Democratic and Republican National Conventions, it was announced today by Cheryl Gould, Vice President, CNBC and supervisor of CNBC's political coverage. In this role, Sharpton will share his insights and perspectives on "Capital Report" (T-F, 7-8 p.m. ET), "Dennis Miller" (M-F, 9-10 ET/PT) and "McEnroe" (debuting Wednesday, July 7 at 10 p.m. ET, airing M-F, 10-11 p.m. ET/PT) as well as other CNBC weekend programming.

"Having run for the Democratic nomination, Reverend Sharpton brings to our viewers an insider's perspective on Presidential politics," said Gould.

"McEnroe"?

When I first heard the news I'd hoped the Rev would be doing economic commentary along the lines of his magnificently muddled response to Peter Jennings' question about the Federal Reserve in a Democratic debate earlier this year. He will be engaging in his new role, I'm sure. But we really need him up there at the various lecterns of electoral pretense, speaking gibberish to power. The grim pleasures afforded by our less overtly buffoonish candidates make too thin a gruel without him.

Let us hope the Reverend imagines this a springboard from which to launch a Mayoral run. (I'm already pledged to Freddy Ferrer, but I could be persuaded.)

CONDITIONAL RESPONSE. Roger L. Simon (the "L" is for conservative) wonders why liberals who were so exercised about the murders committed by the Pinochet regime aren't complaining about the crimes committed by the Saddam Hussein regime.

As a credible spokesperson for the entire left, let me say that the crimes of Saddam Hussein were a very bad thing. Any disagreement, fellow traitors? Good.

The Nixon Adminstration, of course, assisted Pinochet in his bloody overthrow of the elected Allende Government and the Ford Administration was practically complicit in some of the ensuing Pinochet-era "disappearances". I don't recall anyone suggesting that we invade Chile, take over, and install a more democratic government. That would hardly make sense, since we had done so much to ensure the opposite result.

As for other points of comparison, I have a hard time keeping straight the various rationales for the Iraq invasion -- WMDs, stabilization of the region, freedom for the Iraqi people -- so I'll wait until they get that sorted out before treating it further. I will say that Simon's former comrades do show some consistency in objecting when the Government engages in foreign adventures that make no fucking sense.

A DOG FROM HELL. Saw the Bukowski doc, Born Into This. Rather a shambles, but worth an afficionado's while. It puts a little cement into the cracks of his life story.

Since he came into his own in middle age, Bukowski's younger days have been poorly documented, except by himself, and no one tells his own story quite straight. It was then a special pleasure to see one of his old post office colleagues, enjoying what appears to be a middle-class California retirement and sounding like a Brooklyn wiseguy out to pasture, tell how Bukowski's bad clothing, "heavy features" and thuglike bearing made him hard to get to know. He also says that the great author referred to his then-missus "in a derogatory way that men sometimes talk about women." (He notes that, when he finally met her, he had to agree that Bukowski's wife did have a fat ass. "I mean," he adds generously, "if you like 'em big...")

But the colleague agreed that Post Office, which describes events he must have witnessed, is "true to life." And another guy in the film talks about seeing an ordinary Joe, on an L.A. bus in the 60s, laughing his ass off at a Bukowski piece in Open City. (This is the hippie journal Bukowski calls "Open Pussy" in his stories about it, and it is a howl to see his byline on its mangey, off-the-pigs pages.) This made me wonder momentarily: why isn't Bukowski better known, better read? His descriptions of the struggles of men and women, and of men and men, and of the "gut-wringing machine" that endeavors to take hold of nearly everyone in this society, can't be too far out for ordinary Joes to appreciate.

But of course there are impediments: a lot of dirty words and dirty scenes, of course. And the bleakness, or what could be taken for bleakness if you don't or can't believe that happiness is mostly a fleeting, accidental, and poetic thing.

There's more archival footage of Bukowski in Born Into This than I'd ever seen before. In one of the clips he says that love is like the fog that gathers on the fields at dawn before the sun burns it off. Seen one way, this is a bleak, even morose, way to look at it. But to the poetic mind, the fog is no less beautiful for being evanescent. And, of course, it always comes back.