COCKEYED OPTIMISTS. Roger L. Simon takes comfort that the withering attacks made on him by James Wolcott are signs of "pessimism," which is apparently a bad thing:

It is not therefore surprising that James drips his practiced vitriol on those of us who choose to take an optimistic view of the situation in Iraq. I say choose because I readily acknowledge I am deeply uncertain and worried about the results of this enterprise. Of course, Wolcott, I am sure, in his honest moments is unsure as well from his side. No one knows where this will end. Of course, in the greater sense it will never end anyway, but suppose five years from now--hardly a long time as these things go--Iraq is a semi-functioning democracy and the Middle East turning toward peace. What will Wolcott say then? What will I? Again who knows, but I imagine Wolcott will be grinding his teeth if Bush winds up on Mt. Rushmore. I will just be chuckling to myself at the amazing accidents of history, wondering what their contemporaries thought of the previous denizens of the mountain during their lifetimes.

So, though he says that neither he nor Wolcott can know what turn history may take, Simon can easily imagine and portray Wolcott's refutation by history, not to mention the resultant grinding of Wolcott's teeth and Simon's own Olympian laughter. The reverse situation is not portrayed, nor, I guess, imaginable to him. I suppose you could call this optimism, especially if you are unusually polite.

Immediately after the curtain, Simon's claque praises the great man's classiness and sneers at Wolcott's sneering. "Perhaps the biggest change the blogosphere will make is that 'professional pessimism' will be seen, accurately, as wrong. Factually wrong," says "Liberty Dad." "Good. That makes me smile." (I especially like the poster who accuses Wolcott of "provincialism at its most naked," then declares that "the U.S., and the U.S. alone mind you," can end World War IV.) There's lots of talk about carping, impotence, and the like. No policy discussion here; it's essentially a T-group for boosters over sneerers. Why are you people always tearing down?

I hear frequently from this lot how resolutely they stand against the idea that "the personal is the political." Yet so much of what passes for argument in these forums -- and Simon's is a shining example -- conforms exactly to that hoary notion. The whole obsession with the Main Stream Media appears based on the idea that professional journalists are some sort of rival fraternity whom the scrappy bloggers must take down to avenge the honor of Theta Alpha Indeed for some ancient offense, like Watergate. It's not about whether they're wrong -- though they will take that gift, when offered -- it's about scoring a victory over a hated opponent. Wolcott gets that treatment, too, in the comments. One guy, applauded by the Ole Perfesser, alternately refers to Wolcott as "an established figure in the white hot center of the mainstream media" and "an adorable rottweiler puppy attack[ing] the legs of various leading lights of the blogosphere" -- a formulation that portrays the object of ridicule simultaneously as all-powerful (justifying indignation) and ineffectual (justifying contempt), and typical of the genre.

If the whole thing really came down to whether one were pessimistic or optimistic, I would happily choose the path of Mencken over that of Pangloss. But it doesn't come down to that. Optimism has its uses, but as we have seen, it has its abuses too. Don't just carp about my carping. Tell me why I'm wrong.

SHORTER PETER WOOD. Liberals are like the monster in Robot Monster. How? Because they're stupid and Robot Monster is stupid. You want to know more, a lot more, about Robot Monster? Too bad, because that's how I intend to get through the rest of this dog, and win a bet that National Review will print anything that talks smack about liberals.

HAVE YOU FOLKS CAUGHT ON YET THAT THE REAL THEME OF alicublog IS THE DAMAGE DONE BY PROPAGANDISTS NOT ONLY TO OUR POLITICS, BUT ALSO TO OUR LANGUAGE, INDEED OUR VERY CAPACITY FOR LOGICAL THOUGHT? "...after controlling Congress for most of the past decade and the White House for 16 of the past 24 years, Republicans are bound to start seeming like insiders. " -- Brendan Miniter, OpinionJournal.

SHORTER JIM LILEKS: I'm not a gentleman. (To Emily) Your husband's only trying to be funny calling me one. I don't even know what a gentleman is. You see, my idea of a gentleman (laughs)... Well, Mrs. Kane, if I owned a newspaper and I didn't like the way somebody was doing things, some politician say, I'd fight him with everything I had. Only I wouldn't show him in a convict's suit with stripes so his children could see the picture in the paper, or his mother! No, I would make flash catoons in the manner of JibJab! And what's more, be nice to me, I am suffering from the first of my seventeen annual colds!

FILM COMMENT. Saw Hitler's Hit Parade at the Film Forum tonight. I was expecting a straight showcase of Nazi inspirational pop, like the swing band Charlie and His Orchestra, who regaled Third Reich audiences with songs like the anti-Churchill "The Man with the Big Cigar" ("Who is that man with the big cigar?/He is the friend of the USSR... and he'll get more than he bargained for/That fat friend of the Jew!"). But though there is a lot of swinging music -- much of it excellent -- I was surprised to get instead a poetic montage in the manner of Bruce Conner.

The source material is from sanctioned German entertainment of the period, and some clips are overtly expressive of the party line. One features a sinister fellow informing the audience, through a disdainful grin, that though some musicians have gotten "in the swing" of things, others have gotten "out of step," and had been consigned to "Concert Camps" where they would soon learn to adopt the meter of the Reich. There is also cartoon footage of a prototypical Jew stealing golden leaves from the Tree of Life.

Each of these by itself would be horribly instructive, but the filmmakers, Oliver Axer and Susanne Benze -- a designer and a historian, respectively -- chose to focus on the flotsam of German pop film and music, intercut with instructional film footage (including an obstetrician who tells a grateful husband post-partum, "Don't thank me -- thank your wife's ancestors!") and clips of ordinary German people, going about their business as the Nazis went about theirs.

If the film has a theme, it is social regimentation. Cheerful young Germans exercise in unison, like high school rhythmic gymnasts. (Hitler was the originator of the phrase, "Work hard and play hard.") A cartoon couple of geese approve of its high (goose)-stepping children -- until one comes by sashaying effeminately, and is spanked till its gait is corrected. One splendid passage is centered around a bolero dance number; the dancers, in flamenco costumes, perform with what we might be forgiven for calling German efficiency, slightly crisping and squaring the traditional movements. Axer and Benze intercut with this sequences of animated pen nibs, coffee cups, and cigarettes falling into patterns -- a dream of order that incorporates a (then politically friendly) foreign culture.

Late in the film discordant images -- decrepit, despairing Jews festooned with yellow stars; the public humiliation of a Polish-German couple; slaughtered German soldiers -- begin to appear; the romantic music keeps playing. Only at the very end -- in a section titled, in heroic Nazi style, "Awake, Germany!" -- do we see Allied footage of ordinary Germans forced to confront the reality of the concentration camps.

Going into the movie I was defensively joking about Woody Allen's references to The Sorrow and the Pity and the long string of Oscar-winning Holocaust docs. I'm always on guard against what Manny Farber called the "gimp" -- the easy tug at popular prejudice to create a cheap emotional effect. What might the Nazis have done, had they won the war and inherited the power of the camera, to comment upon our deceased, decadent ways? Nothing like this, probably. Hitler's Hit Parade is so artfully far from propaganda that I can honestly say, if you didn't know who the Nazis were going in, the film would give you an honestly bad impression of them. At a time in which the distinction between truth and lies appears to be growing alarmingly fungible, that's a very high recommendation.

To close less grimly, also saw Broadway Melody of 1936. Moss Hart, of Kaufman & Hart, wrote the story, which figures; his screenwriter, Jack McGowan, seems to have specialized in musical froth, which also figures, and co-scenarist Sid Silvers has a scene-stealing turn as the sidekick of the Winchell manque played by (gasp) Jack Benny -- which doesn't figure at all, but works very nicely. This is assembly-line Hollywood-on-Broadway fluff of the better sort. It would make a nice double bill (assuming, unfairly, that Howard Otway didn't already do it) with 42nd Street -- and sort of does, in Singin' In The Rain, which cribbed the Freed tunes and sprightly air from the Broadway Melody franchise and the big numbers and dark undertones from the Berkeley masterpiece. Like 42nd Street, it has a hometown gamin and a hardened Broadway producer -- but the gamin is plenty resourceful and the producer is her high-school sorta-sweetheart and not as hard as all that; the friction, such as it is, comes from Benny's wiseguy, and to a lesser extent from the producer's hard-hearted backer/lover. (It may reflect a significant cultural change that, in Singin' In The Rain, the source of friction is the pitiless, powerful dame; a reporter as foil would have been absurd in 50s Hollywood as it would have been in... well, Hollywood today.)

Also revisited Kubrick's Lolita. Like Wilder in Kiss Me, Stupid, Kubrick was doggedly exploring the terrain of 60s sex comedy; unlike Wilder, he has no skill at sex comedy of any sort -- the best male sex-comedians dance at the edge of misogyny, whereas Kubrick had long since progressed from misogyny to misanthropy. I can see why he was attracted to Humbert's obsession, but having to deal with the female half of the equation appears to have baffled him: The moments of sympathy for Charlotte Haze seem tacked on like guilty afterthoughts and Sue Lyon is practically exterminated as Lolita -- only her body and brash tone survive. The film is more at home with the absurdity of Humbert, which, like nearly every Kubrick lead role, reduces the actor playing it. James Mason, Kirk Douglas, Ryan O'Neal, Tom Cruise, even the great Keir Dullea: all mere puppets in the hands of the master. The only leads to benefit from the Kubrick treatment were Jack Nicholson and Peter Sellers, who were intelligent and voracious enough to meet Kubrick at his level, and Malcolm McDowell, who was not so bright as they, but simply born to play Alex (and, the rest of his career shows, no one else -- at least none well, but Wells). Still, it's a crafty piece of work, and much better than Adrian Lyne's, which has always seemed to me Lolita as told by the psychiatrist in Nabokov's prologue.

UPDATE. Correx and suggestions from my editorial board implemented.

ARTLESS DODGER. From the Know-Nothings through the Birchers through our current, degenerate crop of neos and nutjobs, one of the many signs whereby ye shall know American Conservatives is their reflexive hatred of the arts and the people who make them. As we have seen, whereas in olden times wingnuts were content to merely blacklist artists, in our day they prefer to manage them, at least in their imaginary universe, presenting themselves as shadow moguls and imperiously demanding that more conservatively-correct entertainments be produced for their pleasure tout suite.

These are for the most part the harmless, Ozymandian fantasies of folks who have much but want everything -- who already run America, and yearn also to rule its dreams. Every once in a while, though, a winger's attempt at aesthetics turns out to be more instructive than usual.

At OpinionJournal, Daniel Henninger spends a whole column in astonishment that some prominent New York City artists recall the 1970s as a Golden Age. For conservatives, of course, the celebration of anything from the pre-Reagan age is blasphemy, but the New York of that time is the stuff of Fred Siegel nightmares. Tourists were killed! Rents were cheap! There were no Home Depots or K-Marts! How could anyone like it?

Of course, the speakers are artists talking about art, and it is easy for any sentient person to understand why they liked the 70s. Speaking as one was vas dere, Charlie, well, where to begin: CBGB, Harrah's, Rollerina, Scorsese, hiphop, Twyla Tharp, concerts in the Park, the Kitchen, Squat Theatre, the Performing Garage, the Times Square Show...

None of these exemplars of the excitement of that period of New York life is mentioned in Henninger's article -- nor does he attempt to make any comparison of them to equivalents from the current era, probably because that would be highly unflattering to his Giulianified Valhalla. Even Henninger must realize that the Ramones, Paul Auster, and Eric Bogosian make the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Candace Bushnell, and Fischerspooner look like utter shit.

Seeing no winning artistic argument for the no-grafitti team, Henninger turns the whole thing into class war, Republican-style -- that is, instead of rich vs. poor, it's elites versus "average Joes." After a discussion of how bad the subways were in the 70s -- comical reading for someone whose current morning L transit is reminsicent of 50s phone-booth-stuffing, though the cars are gleamingly free of spraypaint -- Henninger asks, "But could it be that New York's great weakness... is that its leadership elites are fatally enthralled by a reputation for creative fecundity that has been conjured and kept afloat by the city's artists and writers?" While we puzzle over this vision of a City Government dazzled by the lively arts, Henninger goes further:

Many of the city's most creative people in the 1970s (as now) were high IQ boys and girls from Smalltown who fled to the Apple and had the smarts to survive and thrive in a city beset with drugs, welfare dependency and housing stock distorted by World War II rent controls. Hell has always seized over-developed imaginations. But what attractions hath hell for average Joes who can't cop a "life" in SoHo or Williamsburg? Then as now, they just took hell's hits in the neck, or left. In economic terms, much of creative Manhattan simply "free-rides" on the backs of the workers whose tax payments constrain the bankruptcy sheriff.

One might mischievously ask: is he really saying that "average Joes" are less resourceful than us arty-farties? But I guess we have the unfair advantage of "free-rides." Tell me -- what are those? Where do artists get them? I and a whole list of friends would love to know.

Henninger's "then as now" formulation is also ridiculous. In the 70s space was cheap (yes, despite rent stabilization! How'd that happen?); rehearsal spaces and performance venues were affordable enough to support a lively scene. Today it takes a ton of money to keep a band, dance troupe, or theatre company rehearsed, let alone to open even a small "alternative" space; admission prices reflect this, and limit the audiences for new works.

That Henninger can't get why Fran Lebowitz and Caleb Carr would appreciate the New York of Annie Hall and Dictators Go Girl Crazy! is unsurprising, but I do give him additional gall points for hinting darkly that their appreciation is a bad sign for the future of the City: "Perhaps we should regard the famous Times' commentators yearning for the 1970s as canaries in the gold-plated mine shaft," he writes, and mutters about "endpoints" to great cities and the only hope for New York being for "the city's best and brightest" to "use some of their 'creative' brainpower to blow the whistle on the city's irredeemably corrupt and destructive Democratic politics." (Why the quotes around "creative"? Oh, I forgot -- only markets are creative!)

That art so utterly confuses such as Henninger is just one more reason to love it -- but let us remember that this is just one of its secondary benefits, lest we fall into the same aesthetic muddle as he.

COUNTERINTUITION. I know, I know, I shouldn't, but I couldn't help it: I trawled Free Republic. I was wondering what they thought about the Ukraine.

Apparently what they think is SOROS IS SATAN! The erstwhile Democratic Party sugar daddy's involvement in Yushenko's cause seems to have split the blocheads.

From "Yushenko WINS Ukraine Election":

"At this point, the Soros-funed opposition takes to the streets, threatening crippling general strikes and demonstrations until they seize power DESPITE LOSING THE ELECTION, often engaging in as much fraud as the folks they deposed. The modus operandi is very similar in all three cases. A lower-grade effort was even mounted in Ohio..." -- hchutch

"Even though Soros supported Kuchma does not show his loyalty. He is an atheist with no moral values. He is an instrument of Satan." -- jer33 3

"God help Ukraine, as Yushenko is the very guy that robbed her of all her wealth, this land that used to be the Eden garden of milk and honey. His mentor, your friend George Soros, the self-hating anti-semitic Jew will make sure Ukrainians have only their eyes left for crying." -- frontdeboeuf

From "Soros Preparing Revolution in Ukraine" (from Pravda!):

"Soros, the forerunner of the antichrist." -- MarMema

"Let's see. An international busybody comes to your country to tell you how to run your elections. I think I'd get angry too." -- hedgetrimmer

"Remember, if a Republican businessman did this kind of thing, the liberals would all be squawking loudly about 'imperialistic multinational corporations.'" -- Ichneumon

Etc. When the Washington Times, a publication which the Freepers revere, celebrates the role of international forces including Soros in Yuschenko's victory ("In Ukraine, the U.S. government spent $58 million on promoting democracy in the last two years. European states and various nongovernmental organizations, such as George Soros' International Renaissance Foundation, contributed millions more), comments are relatively quiet. When WashTimes gives the anti-Yushenkovites the floor, comments are livelier ("Does Washington Times is financed from Moscow or what?" asks Lukasz), if less cohesive ("I come from a long line of Kraut killers" -- Destro.

Fascinating, considering the unbridled celebration of Yushenko's victory in mainstream rightwing pubs. What's stronger in the wingnut worldview -- hatred of Russia, or hatred of Democratic contributors? Depends perhaps on whether they're in a conservative (beat the kids) or conservatarian (fuck the wife in the ass, complain about sodomites) sort of mood.

NO BITTERNESS. I have been done the honor of a nomination in the 3rd Annual Koufax Awards. It is in the category of "Most Humorous Blog," which dooms me right off, as I consider the content of alicublog, like that of my life, to be tragicomic at best. None of the other honorees, so far as I am aware, are given to grim, thousand-word exegeses on the decline of our Republic. I am as likely to win this thing as David Neiwert is to be crowned "Last Comic Standing."

When last I checked, over a hundred ballots had been cast in this category and I had received no votes. This is as it should be. All the other nominees are hilarious. The ones I knew when I perused the list have always busted me up, and the ones to which the list introduced me are funnier than Al Gonzales solemnly promising to uphold the Geneva Conventions.

Besides, I am more comfortable with defeat than victory, not only by virtue of experience but of temperment. Even as a child I would refuse invitations to participate in Spelling Bees, always offering the same glum excuse: "So what if I can spell 'affidavit' and Henry Dreher can't -- he has a father!" As a teenager, I would preface all my romantic encounters by reenacting the final moments of Tea and Sympathy. Even now I sometimes impulsively decline change at the grocery store checkout counter, reasoning that I would only waste it on more food. Hence my Democratic registration, my frequent trips to Shea Stadium, and my tendency at the end of the final reel to re-adjust my bowler, twirl my cane, forlornly kick up my heels and waddle down the road as the camera irises out.

Nor am I unaware of the disappointment I have caused weary readers who, looking for a bit of levity in a terrible age and tipped to alicublog by some misguided or easily bribed web eminence, clicked over to find me raving about Social Security or the decline of melodrama, and doing reps on my vocabulary. My reputation for "snark" is based on all-too-brief flashes of mania brought on by alcohol or senile dementia. The late legalistic ramblings of Lenny Bruce were, compared to my work, Rodney Dangerfield on speed at his favorite nephew's Bar Mitzvah. I should be awarded a summons, not a Koufax, unless one has been created for "Most Abrupt Mood Swing," or "Post Most Closely Resembling an Arthur Bremer Diary Entry."

Besides, success would make me insufferable. As anyone who has seen The Oscar knows, once I caught even the merest whiff of the heady liquor in the cup of victory, my inner Stephen Boyd would be unleashed; I would alienate my few friends, start saying things like "Lie down with pigs -- get up smelling like gahbage!" and wind up brokenly, catatonically clapping as stock footage of Frank Sinatra accepted the prize in my stead.

Do me, yourself, and posterity a favor and do not vote for alicublog at the Koufaxes. Do visit Wampum, and check out the nominees you haven't previously read. The Justice Department already has, and you can't afford to know less than they do.

ALL CLASS, THIS GUY. "Given that [Susan] Sontag made the private parts of her life that were professionally or 'artistically' useful and her lifelong contempt for traditional America and its values my first instinct was that her private life should be fair game, particularly in an obituary." -- Jonah Goldberg on Sontag's gayness (emphasis, amazingly, his).

As reasons-to-continue-living go, the chance to one day piss on Goldberg's grave is very modest, but I suppose it will serve.

TORTURED REASONING. The Ole Perfesser sez he's agin torture. But he thinks a public discussion via the Gonzales hearings would only be an "effort to turn this into an anti-Bush political issue" whereby "Democrats can be characterized as soft on terror... and the most likely outcome will be, in essence, the ratification of torture," which would "ensure that there's no useful discussion of exactly how, in terms of incarceration, etc., we should treat potentially very dangerous people who do not fall readily within the laws of war."

The Perfesser's contribution to that "useful discussion" seems to be this ("Yeah, the torture of Al Qaeda guys concerns me less than the torture of, I don't know, innocent people -- but it's still wrong..."). He amplifies with something by Volokh, which more or less echoes his POV, but at much greater length and strongly excepting the "but it's still wrong" part. In fairness, I should mention that he also links to an Eve Tushnet post which eloquently explains the moral problem of torture.

Taken all together, the Perfesser's post seems to mean that torture is a fit subject for bloggers, but not for elected Democrats in Congress. One might call it "objectively pro-torture," but let us leave that sort of argument for more slovenly thinkers, and say rather that arguing against an unambiguous evil -- that is, something that would be equally evil whether you were doing it or whether it was being done to you -- is not something that is politicized by the fact that your opponents are (by default, it would appear) making the argument.

UPDATE. Adding to the Useful Discussion is Mark Levin: "As for those generals who oppose Gonzales for supporting interrogations and detentions of the enemy, I'm sure if George McClellan were alive, he'd sign on with the liberals too." This should go great guns in the winger community, as it follows the admirable models of "If George Orwell was alive him and me would be like this (crosses fingers), I bet," and "If skunks had a college, they'd call it P.U." (traditonal).

THE RIDICULOUS PSEUDONYMS SHOULD HAVE BEEN A TIP-OFF. I heard that Powerline is supposed to be the shit, so I took a peek today.

Here's "Deacon" telling the studiously moderate William Raspberry that if he doesn't like the mess we made in Iraq he should consider that the Civil War -- which freed his black ass -- was messy too. Deacon reenforces the point by stating that "leftists who, by ignoring or downplaying the illegitimacy and criminality of Saddam's regime, are able pronounce the pro-Saddam insurgents 'freedom fighters' defying a brutal foreign occupying force are in essentially the same moral position as those who supported the Ku Klux Klan." What has calling Saddam loyalists 'freedom fighters' to do with William Raspberry? [Michael Dunn at the end of Ship of Fools voice] Nothing, my friend; nothing. [/Michael Dunn]. To be fair, Deacon did use the time-honored device of planting Michael Moore (or, rather, "the Michael Moore left") early in the script, thus excusing, well, anything.

Deacon also reposts a heartwarming Iraqi soldier's report which turns out to be largely bullshit.

"Hindrocket" tells us that a USN sailor who deserted because he didn't want to kill people doesn't get to rescue people either, and thus is a hypocrite. I think I saw this idea previously in an old issue of Green Lantern, with great art by Neal Adams.

The rest is all links, ass-pats, and society news. What a disappointment. (P.S. I'm doing you a favor with all the paraphrasing -- the writing has that leaden-fingered quality common to the genre, which may be what has convinced some people that it is Serious.)

THE POLITICS OF DISASTER. There was a rather remarkable column by Daniel Henninger in the Journal the other day. Its theme -- well, I'm not sure what its theme is. At first it seems like standard-issue conservative religious hooey attached, by reflex, to the recent disasters on the other side of the world. "Religious belief, for those whose belief includes an afterlife, is a kind of comfort that even unbelievers would be loath to deny the survivors of this tsunami," says Henninger. "Not long ago people would offer solace by saying of the dead that he or she 'is in a better place.' I haven't read or heard much religious sentiment expressed in public about what has happened to the peoples around the Indian Ocean or the Arabian Sea." But this idea is not followed upon, and so is probably just a spasm of the sort bred into such authors by prolonged obeisance to Republican Party talking points.

For a while the article looks to be about that old chestnut, information overload. "Two weeks ago, Scott Peterson; last week, the Mosul mess-hall bombing; this week, South Asia wiped out," writes Henninger. "Time was, we'd watch the scenes coming out of Asia 'in horror.' Now, I think, we mostly just watch." I am of the self-examining sort, and do not think I have conflated the Scott Peterson trial with the deaths of hundreds of thousands in an epic disaster; and, widening my purview perhaps unfairly, I can't imagine many others have done so, either.

But this is only a bridge. Eventually Henninger gets to brass tacks. The info overload is revealed to include (or be caused by -- again, the author is unclear) horrors in Iraq. "The world's leading expert on how emotional, data-passed news can obliterate important context is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi," says Henninger. "His homicidal bombings can't kill Iraq's 25 million people, but he knows that images and tales of sudden death will suppress calmer, constructive portrayals of Baghdad's five million people restoring their lives to normalcy."

So, if it means anything at all, Henninger's column is about the image war waged by our enemies -- those pictures of atrocities that we have been told again and again to factor out of our considerations of American policy. But what is the connection with the tsunami and its aftermath? Insofar as I understand him, Henninger wants us to spread democracy as a means toward reducing misery of all sorts in the world. ("Political work is the means the civilized world has for replacing men and ideas that are dumb or dangerous with something better.") A noble goal, say I, though we may differ as to means. But what has this to do with shifting tectonic plates, the resulting angry seas, and the lives thus obliterated? "In the aftermath of 2004's too-numerous unnatural deaths," concludes Henninger, "the only resolution possible is to re-enter the arena of politics and fight the good, slow fight. It's all we've got, and it is enough."

I keep reading that some parties are trying to politicize the disaster. Is this what they're talking about?

UPDATE. Related thoughts at Gadflyer.

SO THAT'S WHAT'S WRONG WITH HIM. "I should add that I owe Michael Lind a lot. The Next American Nation sold me on the value of reading." -- Salam Reihan.

QUAKE HITS S.E. ASIA; MANY WHITE PEOPLE INVOLVED.

Elsewhere at the NY Post, conservatarian Collin Levey uses the disaster, not as an occasion for tears, but as an opportunity to exult -- nay, luxuriate -- in America's awesome wealth-generating power. And because of that mighty dynamism, it doesn't matter to Levey if "America doesn't give as much as a percentage of national income as say... Norway," because we're rich and fuck you and here's some money, bitch.

Levey speaks of our contributions to this disaster relief effort as "foreign aid." Of course, anyone who's been around the block without blinkers made of Ayn Rand books knows that foreign aid is what we use to bribe the rest of the world into compliance with our mighty whims; the tsunami relief is just a public relations expense. But Levey has an similarly optimistic way of looking at other kinds of wealth transfers, too. Take the nannies, gardeners, and guys standing by the highway with bags of peeled oranges. You may think they're being exploited, employed at sub-standard wages by the Bernard Keriks of the world, and driving down the price of American labor. On the contrary -- they are further proof that the system works:

Then, too, our openness lets the world's poor earn money here and then send it home. In many poor countries (e.g., Mexico, India and the Philippines), foreign aid is dwarfed by remittances sent from family members working in America.

That's money -- some roughly $18 billion a year from the United States -- that goes directly to households that need it, from somebody who directly understands their needs. It doesn't flow through government hands, subject to rake-offs and politically inspired diversions to worthless projects.

I hope you were paying careful attention, because this is how Social Security is going to work in a couple of years.

IT'S NOT A MOVIE, PEGGY. In the warm stream of drool that is Peggy Noonan's year-end column, the Crazy Jesus Lady suggests:

...let me say that if Steven Spielberg went to the Mideast tomorrow, announced he was making a movie, and sent out a casting call for males age 12 to 30 he would immediately establish a new Mideast peace, at least for the length of the shoot. Because the only thing the young men there would rather do than kill each other is be a movie star. Hmmmm, a suicide bombing that raises my family's status in the neighborhood or a possible date with Cameron Diaz, let's see... Mr. Spielberg would also get a Nobel Peace Prize. I am actually not kidding.

So how come we didn't do that in 2003 instead of bombing the shit out of them?

HITSVILLE G.O.P. As we have seen, the trend in culture war is toward the managerial rather than the militaristic: while some benighted souls still crudely bash the impure, contenting themselves with condemnation of entartete Kunst, the new breed posit a conservative aesthetic, cite as positive examples current works that seem to fit its guidelines, and bid artists supply more of the same, please.

Even the old culture-warrior Maggie Gallagher is getting with the program -- though she can only follow it up to a point.

In September Gallagher was encouraged by the rightwing doc In the Face of Evil: Reagan's War in Word and Deed, calling it "The must-see movie of the season for zeitgeist watchers." Even this pull-quote did not launch Face of Evil into box-office heaven, but Gallagher remains confident that films like this represent "an unserved market" for people like herself.

In her latest take, Gallagher suggests that Hollywood's current obsession with schmutz is tapped out. "Gay sex, or sympathetic portrayals of pedophilia may still win critical accolades, but the buzz is no longer big box office," she writes. One stops at this: when were guy-on-guy and guy-on-kid films big box office? But Gallagher is on a roll:

Every human heart hungers to be part of a story, to take the disconnected dots of human existence and weave them into a meaningful drama. Yet millions of Americans never, ever see anything of the great aspirational stories of their lives reflected in America's premier storytelling genre, the movies.

Americans are an overwhelmingly religious people, for example, yet the drama of sin and salvation, of divine grace and purpose, is conspicuously absent. Millions of American men and women strive to connect sex, love, marriage and babies into a coherent story for their own life. And yet the particular intense kind of eros that can be experienced only by those so committed to such a connection is almost never glimpsed on television or film. Perhaps Hollywood does not even know it exists.

Now, by changing very few words -- maybe by making "religious" into "spiritual," or denuding the second graf of words reflecting Gallagher's highly particular POV on marriage -- this could be made to resemble the longings of many indie filmmakers and critics. How often have you been implored, in some small corner of Entertainment Weekly or a local free paper, to attend some earnest film about ordinary people, because this is the kind of movie Hollywood doesn't make but should? From Forbidden Games to Sounder to In the Bedroom to The Secret Lives of Dentists runs a thin but unceasing river of smallish films whose makers' point of pride is their relevance to real life.

Hollywood of course prefers noisy pop sludge, and has since it began fighting to lure audiences away from the quotidian dramas of early television, pretty much. If there have been more tits and taboos in the cinema since the MPAA went to letter-coding in 1968, that's because tits and taboos were things you couldn't get from the idiot box in those days.

A variety of factors, cable among them, have had their impact, but movies are still something you have to get out to the house and pay for, and Hollywood moviemakers still tend toward steroidal entertainments as a means of luring us to them. If you want to see ordinary Joes and Janes hashing out Life As It Is Lived, you're asking for niche entertainment. You can get it, of course, at the local art house or on IFC.

So Maggie has a point, but she also has an agenda. The strategy of playing the noble outsider has served conservatives well in recent years -- which is why, even as they control nearly every part of our Government, so many of them still make a decent living bemoaning their oppression by the ACLU. In the Gallagher version, Hollywood is not just something that evolved out of her liking, but a corrupt institution ripe for reform. And she is not content to watch the stuff on PAX or wait for Mel Gibson's latest Romanist epic -- she demands that Hollywood become "the next domino to fall" in the march of freedom.

So in the last ditch, the old Culture Warrior reverts to fixed bayonets. Still, she has played the Culture Manager role better than I expected. The only question is, why does she bother? The multiplexes are liberally stocked with feature-length cartoons that will not offend her, nor any breeder's or brat's, tender sensibilities -- and some of them are even approved by the Central Committee. There is also, as she approvingly notes, a strong Christian counterculture ready to keep her in Veggie Tales and Billy Ray Cyrus till kingdom come.

I think it's because she's not just looking for something good she can watch. She wants us all to watch it. And like it, and tell her we like it. For Managers as well as Warriors, perhaps, the prefix is nowhere near as important as the root. Culture is just another domino, insignificant but for the pleasure to be had in making it fall.

SHORTER JAMES LILEKS. Seeing those poor people devastated by that earthquake makes me think about how much I hate James Wolcott and Democratic Underground.

(PS: Brief excerpt in the comments for those who get pissed when I make them click through to Lileks' site.)

SULLY'S CHILDREN. The pure products of Andrew Sullivan go crazy. Now we have Reihan Salam talking about Holland's problems with unassimilated Muslims, and desperately seeking therein new and exciting meanings to prove himself the rightwing shizznit.

Yet at what a cost to common sense! Salam seems to suggest, by his wringing of a quote by Ian Buruma ("Buruma wrote on Iraq, arguing against 'perfect democracy,' i.e., rigorously secular democracy... he might consider applying it to Holland") that Holland should fight sectarian violence by writing more religion into its Government. Salam doesn't take time to tell how this religification might be achieved -- and that is one of the advantages of his breezy style: it leaves little time to speculate on possible real-life applications of his ideas ("The Chair recognizes the Honorable Member from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints").

Salam ends premonitorally:

That negotiation and compromise were preempted by elite consensus in Holland now seems clear. Democracy failed. To say that it’s only now under threat, now that the exclusion and alienation of an immigrant class has reached a crisis point, is to ignore the deeper tensions.

Which is one reason why the liberal disdain of populist conservatism is misplaced. That secular liberals will seek to defeat populist conservatives in argument is a given. But marginalizing concerns over “moral values,” the approach fatefully taken in Holland and elsewhere in Europe, has had ugly consequences all its own. Be careful what you wish for.

Maybe I'm reading this wrong (it wouldn't be hard) but here Salam seems to compare Holland's religious problems with America's. Taking him at his word that religious violence is widespread in Holland, what would be the American equivalent? Unitarifascists? The Radical Quakers?

Okay, so obviously there's no equivalent among American religious organizations. But there is a group that, while not religious itself, has been so strenuously and negatively associated with religion of late -- as seen in thousands of the-ACLU-stole-my-Christmas stories -- that it would quickly spring to any mind appropriately softened as the kind of clear and present danger Salam is talking about.

Under the circumstances, we may be forgiven for suspecting that the part of the Angry Muslims will be played in the U.S. production of Salam's "Get Religion!" by the Godless Secularists, America's current religious menace of choice. Marginalize "moral values" and you get armed gangs of secularists rampaging through church sales and Bingo nights, and perhaps even assassinating Trey Parker.

Or maybe he means something very different. Who can tell? The way the Sullivanians mangle their words, it's no wonder Roger L. Simon's goon squad thinks Ross Douthat is a liberal.

SHORTER JAMES LILEKS: Jurassic Park is feminist propaganda.

YOUR MORNING MEMO. If you report news from Iraq, you might be a traitor. Pass it on.

AP photogs got a call to cover a demonstation. At that location, two election workers were killed. "So the AP admitted that its photographer was 'tipped off' by the terrorists," says Power Line. "The only quibble asserted by the AP was that the photographer expected only a 'demonstration,' not a murder." Hang 'em high!

Power Line understandably has no comments, but you can hear the voice of the rabble at Roger L. Simon's site: "Many members of our media are anti-American traitors." "Civil liability is something the families of those murdered should be asking about... I don’t think it is too much to expect reporters to have a sense of history..." "Not biased, just on the other side." "Without a Democratic party that would enact policies favorable to the terrorists, the terrorist/AP collaboration would have no effect." "If you are subscribing to a newspaper that carries the AP why not just send a check to Hamas?" Et alia ad nauseum.

Look for Fox to pick up on this, and start showing nothing from Iraq but pictures of soldiers giving dolls to appropriately adorable Iraqi children. Remember: if you didn't see it, it didn't happen.

UPDATE. Lots of gibberish being posted about this. My favorite, from the Belmont Club, seems to suggest that, if AP is allowed to show pictures of war atrocities to students, the Belmont Club should be able to send truth squads of bloggers to debunk them with unsupported allegations. I think they might also be suggesting that AP should support their truth squads financially, or at least provide car service -- but these guys write so badly that it is hard to be sure.