SHORTER OLE PERFESSER: I praise Barney Frank to suggest a conservatism friendly to homosexuals, and you idiots lap it up, which is why I'm always going "heh." Neither will you comprehend my comparison of political ideas to cars; it doesn't matter whether the product is any good so long as the advertising budget is large enough.

ARTTIME! Let's stay on aesthetics awhile, shall we? This weekend I saw 12 Angry Men on Broadway. It's old-school hardcore, man: No updating, no special pleading, no higher concept than giving the old warhorse its due. The actors come into the dowdy old New Yawk jury room and start indicating a hot day by pulling their shirts, mopping their necks, and loosening their ties, and we're suddenly back in the days of cheap theatre seats and cheaper epiphanies.

The plot -- all-male jury deliberating in the murder trial of some kid of despised ethnicity goes from all-but-convicting to exoneration on the strength of logic and bleeding-heart liberalism -- makes They Shall Not Die look like Ionesco. Thanks to the generous funding of the Roundabout company we have 12 count 'em 12 major characters, all venerable stereotypes given just enough air by the terrific actors to make them worth enjoying if not thinking too much about.

The play stacks the deck shamelessly; the more eager to convict the juror is, the more repulsively misguided he is shown to be. It's agitprop for fair-mindedness, picturing reason surmounting prejudice through democratic process.

This is a ridiculously old-fashioned idea, and to his credit the director, Scott Ellis, doesn't downplay it -- in fact, he leans on it as if it were revealed truth. In the 1957 movie, Henry Fonda played the raisonneur-holdout Juror #8 -- the guy who keeps saying "I don't know" and thus gets everyone thinking more seriously about the case -- and while Boyd Gaines is good in that role, he's not galvanic in Fonda's way, so Juror #8 melts even more deeply into the ensemble, making the solution to the play's problem seem more like the natural outgrowth of American jurisprudence than the instigation of one righteous man. The actors mill around the stage as if each were as important as any other, and wind up clumping together only to face down Juror #10 at the climax of his racist tirade -- a moment underlined by an exceedingly long stage wait. This is high corn, but as well-done as it is well-intentioned, and I loved it. (Of course, I'm the kind of guy who weeps openly at showings of Young Mr. Lincoln.)

At the curtain call, James Rebhorn gave a little speech about the passing of Arthur Miller. There's not much to say about the great man's passing, but I will add that I was surprised to realize I had seen, rarely as I go to the theatre anymore, the last two major mountings of Miller plays on Broadway: one of Broken Glass, one of The Price. The latter is one of my favorite plays. The struggle in The Price is between two middle-aged brothers, one who forsook his troubled family to take what education and ambition could give him as a doctor, one who stayed behind out of a sense of duty and became a cop. Each gets his full due -- Miller even directs in his production notes that a "fine balance of sympathy" must be struck between them -- and each is revealed to have been vanquished, more or less, by his own decisions. Miller, along with O'Neill and Dreiser, helped create the modern idea of tragedy: He understood that though we Americans have been blessed with an extraordinary degree of control over our fates, we are yet its victims, and a man's fall may be more poignant when it is the product of his own will rather than the gods'.

Went also to see The Gates by Christo (and Jeanne-Claude -- mustn't forget her!). By themselves they are not much: steel wickets with short drapes, all bright orange, snaking through Central Park. Such majesty as they have come from their volume -- it is something to see so many of them running over the hillocks and outcroppings of the Park -- and from the public response. There were more promenading citizens than one might expect on a chilly Sunday in Central Park, and as they walked under the drapes they seemed more cheerful and attentive to their surroundings than they might have been otherwise. I don't know if this is worth the massive expense of effort and someone's money (not ours, thankfully), but it was better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. You may quote me.

Also saw a few episodes of "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In" on Trio. I had not seen "Laugh-In" since I was a little boy, and was surprised that it still amused me. The psychedelic factor is minor: the guh-rooviest aspect of the show is the very short film montages used as bridges, which have as much claim to fatherhood of the music-video aesthetic as anything else than has been suggested. The makers of "Laugh-In" knew their own bloodlines well; I remember Dan and Dick making overt reference on the show to Ernie Kovacs' "bathtub blackouts," and the overall esprit d'corps (not to mention the frequent cracking-up by cast members) is not much different from that seen on shows starring Carol Burnett and Red Skelton. So how was it different? Schlatter and Friendly, the producers, saw that the contracting attention spans encouraged by Richard Lester, Jean-Luc Godard et alia were thoroughly consonant with the methods of Vaudeville and burlesque, and that topical references were a good way to keep their formulae fresh, fast, and fragrant. They were also blessed with a game and capable company, including the incredibly cute Goldie Hawn and a couple of hipster Vegas comics whose drug of choice seems to have been highballs (Rowan's face maintained a strong vermillion glow) and whose lounge banter was as much a part of the Sixties as acid, pudding-basin haircuts, and all the other insignia that have gone out of date but are by no means unpleasant to revisit. Styles come and go, but troupers having a good time are always good company.

A NATION OF NAHUM TATES*. Lance Manion challenges my harsh response to what I considered an overwrought moral attack on a children's cartoon by one Kate Marie . He does so at length and with great fairness and wit (God, how exhausting that must be!); one of his passages is so well-turned that Terry Teachout almanac'd it:

First off, following your heart is a really bad idea. This is why we have civilization, so people don't do that.

Hearts are like pirate caves. They are reputedly full of hidden treasures but usually when you open one up a whole lot of bats, spiders, and angry bears come rushing out, and there's no gold.

Now, who can argue with that? But here is Lance's thematic money shot:

…to have this ["Follow Your Heart"] message keep popping up again and again and again and again and again and again and again in children's movies and TV shows is very frustrating to parents… Good parents talk themselves blue in the face trying to convince their kids not to follow their hearts. Followed hearts generally do not lead children into good grades, good company, decent colleges, and stable marriages…

All respect to Lance and my many childbearing friends, but if this discussion were really exclusively about what makes the most edifying kid's entertainments, I would have stayed well out of it. As a non-breeder, I have no more business or interest in that than I have in the best brand of pacifier or busy-box, or the most nutritious strained pea formula.

Even if it were about whether adults should Follow That Dream, I would have let it slide. You all have enough trouble without personal advisement from a broken-down poetaster like me.

I don't care about Mulan II, or that someone thinks it is Not Appropriate -- I guess that's the clinical term -- for her kids. Chacun a son goo-goo. But when she pulls Sophocles and Edith Wharton into it, she's walkin' on the fightin' side of me.

People can go their own way, or to hell (frequently the same path), but I think it's worse than a crime when they abuse the arts -- in this case, whittling it into a moral measuring stick for kidflix -- to advance their dreary agenda. Because they're not just hurting themselves. They're fucking with our cultural currency. And I don't mean making Sean Penn look bad; I mean spreading an idea of art that is so narrow, juiceless and stupid that if enough people come to believe it -- and I fear we are approaching critical mass there -- then you can forget about getting any masterpieces anytime soon, or maybe ever, because no one will remember how or why to make them.

Art, like God, is so much bigger than our notions of it that the more insistent we are that we know its true nature, the more we misperceive it. That's why some of us approach it with a humility and respect that looks foolish to non-believers. If you want to know the mysteries, you don't come into the temple like a squad of cops on a vice raid.

This isn't to say you can't do art with politics (or teaching, or cooking, or physical fitness or a lot of other things), but you better give art first billing. You can do Macbeth as an indictment of the Oil-for-Food Scandal, sure, and if the shoe fits the play will illuminate your point beautifully. But if you're just using Macbeth as a sack into which to stuff your ten pounds of shit, it won't work. Check your own experiences for confirmation.

Bad art is too bad, but what I really can't abide are the folks who are so freaking obsessed with values that they treat the great works of our civilization as lessons in deportment. It is a miracle that Sophocles call still speak to us across the millennia, but the more these nuts succeed in convincing people that Antigone and Creon are just a more hortatory version of Goofus and Gallant, the further the play's mysteries will recede into obscurity.

Nahum Tate ruined Shakespeare for his generation. I'm not inclined to give Kate Marie and her pals too much slack.

* UPDATE. Can you believe I originally put Charles Lamb when I should have said Nahum Tate, Lamb's nemesis? There goes my Pulitzer!

HELL HAS NO BOTTOM. As followers of this million-man rugby scrum called the blogsophere will recall, early this week Juan Cole made short work of Jonah Goldberg's ignorant assault upon him; you may read a good summary here. Instead of running so fast the hounds couldn't catch him down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, as tradition demands, Goldberg faulted Cole for "bullying," then took a "victory lap."

Even by the abysmal standards of online discourse, this seemed rather rich. Of course this is Goldberg, who is always blazing new trails of idiocy. But now Jay Nordlinger weighs in on the debate without referring to its contents at all -- merely invoking Cole, and telling tales of his old alma mater involving Palestinians, a fat liberal woman, and his own moral self-regard, as if these had anything to do with -- well, anything.

These guys get paid, right? Why? I know a bunch of unemployed guys who could discuss the political ramifications of last night's ER episode as trenchantly as they do.

Sometimes I really think I've been projected into an alternate universe where the Enlightment never happened.

SHORTER PEGGY NOONAN: I saw a saint at sunset... No... I saw a saint singing... No... I saw a saint selling seashells by the seashore... No... Yellow is the color of caution... No... Yellow is the color of cowards...

CATASTROPHIC INSURANCE. I've been wondering why this Administration seems so eager to fuck up Social Security. Ancient animus against FDR? Fulfillment of an old Skull and Bones fraternity prank? Plain evil? But I think I have found a clue.

Attend Stanley Kurtz at Policy Review. He is concerned with underpopulation in the West. He worries about cultural pollution of the West from outside (Theo van Gogh is mentioned) if we don't get those rates up. But there are serious obstacles -- "Secularism, individualism, and feminism," as Kurtz has it. They have reduced childbearing to "a matter of sheer choice." And given the choice, many of us have opted out.

This won't do for Kurtz. As he sees it, we can either have modernism or we can survive. This is "an ultimate choice between feminist hopes of workplace equality with men and society’s simultaneous need for more children."

After considering various economic incentives to advance procreation, Kurtz seems to agree with Philip Longman, author of The Empty Cradle, that "the endless downward spiral [of population] cannot be reversed without a major social transformation." The hope is that people will be driven into accelerated childbearing by social forces.

Here Kurtz turns hopeful. If the safety net is shorn away, citizens may adopt a frontier memtality that forcibly shifts reliance away from society and back to the family. "What will happen if the economy and the welfare state shrink significantly?" he asks. "Quite possibly, people will once again begin to look to family for security in old age — and childbearing might commensurately appear more personally necessary... Widespread contraception, abortion, women in the workforce, marital decline, growing secularism and individualism — all seem here to stay. Looked at from a longer view, however, the results are not really in."

Gaze upon Kurtz' repopulationist utopia:

It wouldn’t take a full-scale economic meltdown, or even a relative disparity in births between fundamentalists and secularists, to change modernity’s course. Chronic low-level economic stress in a rapidly aging world may be enough. There is good reason to worry about the fate of elderly boomers with fragile families, limited savings, and relatively few children to care for them. A younger generation of workers will soon feel the burden of paying for the care of this massive older generation. The nursing shortage, already acute, will undoubtedly worsen, possibly foreshadowing shortages in many other categories of workers. Real estate values could be threatened by population decline. And all these demographically tinged issues, and more, will likely become the media’s daily fare.

In such an atmosphere, a new set of social values could emerge along with a fundamentally new calculation of personal interest.

Well, at least it wouldn't "take a full-scale economic meltdown." But things have to get bad. Our "sheer choice" must be sheared away from us -- and if it takes a little prevarication, talk of "saving" a system the mad doctors of the Right have already decided has got to go, well, you can't make an omelette without piercing a few ova.

These people are mad and must be stopped.

UPDATE. Mouse Words gives Kurtz a closer read, from which he does not benefit.

OH, PHRED... MUST I REMIND YOU THAT WE'RE GODLESS? Roger L. Simon:

Still, Wretchard does have a point when he describes the left's (conceited) blindness in making an alliance with irredentist Islam.

Do me a favor, will you? If you read something stupider than that quote today, please post it in comments. I have a bet with someone.

(Disclaimer: I did move recently, so I may have missed the memo announcing our alliance with irredentist Islam. In which case I must ask: does this affect our 401K plan?)

...AND, AFTER THE PRESS CONFERENCE, WENT HOME AND COVERED HER NAKED BODY WITH GOLD COINS LIKE ZASU PITTS IN GREED. Carly Fiorini has hit the road. At Sisyphus Shrugged. Julia demurely clears her throat and pays tribute to the Wall Street cover girl's legacy:

Carly Fiorina, the Chairman and CEO of HP (whose grand [and hotly-contested] strategy to change HP corporate culture by merging outside their core business and firing a really lot of people turned out, surprisingly, not to be a particularly effective way to effect synergy or raise profits) has joined almost twenty thousand other former HP and Compaq employees in being found to be in excess of requirements by the board in the wake of the merger...

She leaves in the comforting knowledge that even though profits never went up, at least nearly twenty thousand fewer people are feeding their children and paying taxes out of operating costs.

We are less eloquent than Julia, so for our own tribute to Ms. Fiorini (and closing film reference), please imagine Daniel Day-Lewis in a wheelchair barking "Cunt... cunt... cunt.. cunt... congratulations!"

YOU POOR, CRAZY FREAKS -- IF ONLY I COULD REACH YOU! Ann Althouse: "I know you people on the left aren't reading this, but if you were, I would tell you: the right is laughing triumphantly."

Having informed me that I am not reading what I am reading, Althouse goes on, as is her wont, to harsh at length on liberals, forcibly injecting from time to time a tone of sorrow-not-anger that is belied by the words they accompany. For example:

Another reader disagrees that "the right is laughing triumphantly":

I think people on the right are also horrified at just how left the left has become when people like you and Jeff Jarvis and Instapundit are labeled as conservative or hard right, and are unable even to read what you have to say.

When people who are professors at NYU start believing that David Corn of all people [is a] Karl Rove plant at worst and betraying their own side at best - and thus seek to ostracize him - they've gone all unhinged.

I mean, if they can't read you guys, the centrists, and think even the left is betraying them, and this wave of thought is becoming more and more status quo, how can anyone actually on the right have a conversation with them? They've made themselves unreachable and untouchable.

I concede that plenty of people on the right agree with me that it's terribly sad.

Am I totally illiterate, or did Althouse's correspondent basically say that conservatives are "horrified" that we liberals are "all unhinged" and not worth even talking to? This is only the same thing as finding our plight "terribly sad" if you're being sarcastic, as in, "It's really too bad that you're such a fucking psycho."

What a weird, passive-aggressive schtick. The appeal escapes me. Maybe it's about getting to call people names without having to accept that you're calling them names. Also, if one of the loonies disagrees with you, you don't have to answer his point. Because he's loony, y'see.

I suppose it's one way to deal, but it makes dull reading after a very short while.

THE WORLD AS WILL AND IDEA. A good deal of this Ann Marlowe piece is devoted to the sort of weird attribution of personal traits to political movements that mark one as a comer in the New New Right: e.g., wearing a Bush button is "punk rock," Democrats are "smugly self-righteous, prissy and joyless," etc.

The article purports to be a review of The Neocon Reader, but fails to seriously discuss the book's contents -- with one notable exception, James Q. Wilson's "Broken Windows" essay:

Wilson's title refers to a theory that if a window in a building is broken and left unrepaired, all the windows in the building will soon be smashed, and his article is frequently credited with sparking the new approaches to urban order that led to the revival of New York under Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

What is not so often recalled from Wilson's article is that the novel idea of placing officers on foot patrol did not actually reduce the crime rate; it only reduced citizens' perception of the crime rate. But that was enough. That turned out to be what urban vitality was
about.

There's much more, but no references to any actual declines in the City's crime rate -- though these did come -- nor to the role of increased arrest rates (misdemeanor arrests in the City went up by 70 percent in the 1990s; felony arrests rose nearly as much). To hear Marlowe tell it, the perception of a crime drop by itself, the "feeling of public safety that allowed neighborhoods of poor and working-class people to flourish," as Marlowe puts it, caused the City's "revival."

Marlowe calls Wilson's essay "exemplary of neocon thought." If neoconservatism means a serious expectation of concrete results from public relations gestures, she may be right. A mindset that attributes our crime drop to good feelings, rather than to police work or demographic factors, could easily envision a democratic revolution in Iran brought about mainly by our good wishes. And it is not too much (or too little, depending on your point of view) to expect that when these wishes are finally effected by brute force, this mindset's sufferers will continue to believe that the will of the conquered nation's people was always with them, and that the little shove our armed forces gave to history was no more important than the tedious police work that accompanied the revival of New York.

Marlowe is much more specific in matters closer to home: in denigrating the hipness of present-day Berlin, she compares it unfavorably to "the East Village in the 1980s." Why of that decade, one wonders, and not the present time? I would guess because Marlowe remembers the East Village of those days, as I do, and knows that the upscale shopping and dining district the area has become does not generate the, to use her words, "cultural ferment and creativity" it generated in the days before our City was, to use her word again, revived. It's an instructive dodge. When you're pushing the power of ideas, it is helpful to ignore the collateral damage.

IT'S JUST A MOVIE, KATE MARIE. This Friend of the Perfesser, Kate Marie, complains that the cartoon Mulan II... well, you might think I'm trying to make it sound worse than it is, so let her tell it:

I just watched Mulan II (I have two young girls), and -- I kid you not -- "my duty is to my heart" appears to be the explicit message of the film (as it was in the Princess Diaries II). In the immortal words of Ryan O'Neal at the end of What's Up, Doc? -- that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. If you want a succinct and hilarious refutation of the idiotic notion that one's duty is to one's heart, watch the "Be Like the Boy" episode of The Simpsons.

Duty is a category which is by definition separate from "heart." It represents all those things -- family, tradition, state, law -- which have a claim on us that transcends personal affection and selfish desire. For goodness' sake, what does our generation make of Antigone? ("Antigone? Huh?" -- never mind.)

At the end of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (and in the finale of Martin Scorcese's film adaptation), the story's protagonist, Newland Archer, watches from a bench as his grown son enters the home of the woman blah blah blah...("blah blah blah" added)

Yes, this woman is actually subjecting her afternoon child-quieting videos to strict moral-aesthetic analysis. And not just the "How many swears in Ray" type of analysis you find in newspapers -- real, arcane wingnut analysis, of the sort we like to cover here.

It can be useful to examine the moral underpinnings of a work of art, but this is fucking Mulan II. Comparing it to Antigone and Edith Wharton is a little like demanding that your local school board candidates each state and defend their positions on global nuclear regulation or the Law of the Sea.

There has been a contingent of scolds doing this sort of thing for over a decade. One of its early practitioners, Melanie Kirkpatrick, plagued the Wall Street Journal in the 90s with similar kernel-picking exercises. Here's one of her classics, in which she faults Paul Rudnick's AIDS comedy Jeffrey for not being more about duty and honor. She thought the play's model should have been Camille.

This would seem an unusual recommendation to an author of light comedies, but you have to remember that, for a certain type of person, even pop art is not at all about pleasure -- it is about morality, or rather, that modern, debased version of morality called Values.

What horrible lives such people must lead, seeing dark messages everywhere -- in children's entertainments, in TV shows, in popular songs. Sounds like paranoid schizophrenia without the relief of upswings.

Kate Marie has two young daughters. I pray she isn't trying to scare the Mulan out of them a la Piper Laurie in Carrie: "First comes Mulan, then comes moral ruin!"

SHORTER JUAN COLE: Here are several proofs that Jonah Goldberg doesn't know what he's talking about, starting with his own astonishing admission that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

SHORTER JONAH GOLDBERG: I don't know what you're talking about.

SHORTER MICHAEL TOTTEN. Me and Chris Hitchens are like that (crosses fingers). I helped him talk down an inexplicably angry Iraqi.

WHY WE FIGHT. Above and beyond duty is Comrade Shawn Macomber, National Review Online Film-Criticism Warrior Unit, in review of Assault on Precinct 13 remake treason! Comrade Macomber not content to scorn bad morals and swearing, loose women of new film! No, Comrade also explain mission of Film-Criticism Warrior Unit:

Removing the sap from our action movies should be a matter of national pride. After all, it's been well documented that Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, and other various tyrants have had a predilection for American action movies. (Although a certain Iraqi dictator won't be seeing Assault on Precinct 13 unless the Red Cross brings it to him on DVD.) Who knows who is watching now? We wouldn't want anyone to start thinking we've gone soft.

Is maybe joke? Comrade, is in National Review -- only reference to Animal House signals joke! Sometimes not even then!

TENURED RADICAL. Professor Ward Churchill says (more or less) that the victims of the WTC attacks were yes-men for a murderous regime, and that this vitiates his sympathy for them. This prompts calls for the professor's dismissal, most notably by Governor Bill Owens.

The Ole Perfesser has apparently judged that Churchill is more useful to his cause as a negative example than as a celebrity scalp a la Dan Rather. In two high-profile essays, while maintaining plausible deniability on the free-speech thing, he drags Churchill across the whole of academia (excepting, presumably, the sleepy southern sector of it that supplies his own paychecks) -- in hopes, it would appear, that the stink will rub off, and that common folk thus alerted will rise up and do something about them pointy-heads.

At MSNBC, the Perfesser writes

Academics are supposed to be skeptical and questioning, even about their own societies. But there's a big difference between being skeptical -- which requires actual thought -- and being adversarial, which requires only contradiction. What's more, the doctrine of academic freedom -- which goes well beyond the general freedoms of speech encompassed by the First Amendment -- is supposed to be about freedom for individual academics to think, well, freely -- not about the freedom of academic institutions to escape scrutiny from the outside world.

While I'm told law professors like to split hairs, I don't think mere love of craft is driving the Perfesser to be so specific here on the distinctions between adversarial and skeptical, and between "the doctrine of academic freedom" and First Amendment rights. I suspect he is looking for (or, rather, offering to his better-placed comrades in the commentariat) loopholes. By such means, one can call for a professor to be expelled for what he teaches (provided it is "adversarial" enough), and have a high-sounding answer ready for any Constitution-based challenges that might come up.

The Perfesser probably needn't have bothered. After all, the coming generation clearly think the First Amendment goes too far; if such like believe the doctrine of academic freedom goes even further than the notoriously libertine 1A, the targeted reader may feel comfortable dispensing with the whole concept of academic freedom, and not worry if some Constitutional liberties happen to get thrown out along with it.

At Fox News, the Perfesser embellishes and amplifies. In this telling, academia's great offense to normalcy is changed from adversarialism to "cleverness" and "being contrary," perhaps to prevent Fox's readers from having to look up the word "adversarial." The Perfesser also says that "America's campuses are not free-speech zones, but among the most pervasively censored environments in our society." Just like a tenured radical -- I bet he's never worked in a modern corporation: Try taking one of those patented heh-indeeds over underage sex Reynolds gets away with in his little ivory tower, and repeating it around the water-cooler! You'll be up on harrassment charges in no time.

But in his innocence (feigned or genuine), the Perfesser still portrays his own world as so dangerously "politically correct" that it must be reformed -- but not on anything so retrograde as free speech grounds. The Perfesser likes some forms of administration-mandated behavior surveillance -- "Harvard President Lawrence Summers has joined in, calling for his university to embrace patriotic values and get more in line with mainstream Americans," he notes encouragingly. Just some kinds of wrong thinking have to eliminated.

Which would those be? Why, the elitist ones, of course: what place has elitism in an instutution of higher learning? One can see the torch glimmering in his hand as the Perfesser points out to the pointy-heads that he has a whole army of citizens behind him who will happily supply them with a list of permissible attitudes and subjects for discussion:

Not surprisingly, people who would rather be clever than right, who confuse oppositionalism with originality, who hold ordinary Americans and their beliefs in faux-aristocratic contempt, and who do all of this with an unshakable degree of self-righteousness, are not likely to be especially popular.

And if you have long hair and dark sunglasses, that's double-plus-ungood. If you're wondering what sort of end result one might expect from this sort of thinking, read A Canticle for Leibowitz. Or history.

"SERIOUSLY, WHAT DO YOU SEE IN THAT GUY?" "HE MAKES ME LAUGH." From Dirty Flower:

“LAS Vegas” hottie Nikki Cox has broken off her engagement to Bobcat Goldthwait and is now dating another comic, Jay Mohr. Cox and Goldthwait dated for five years after meeting on “Unhappily Ever After.”

The mysteries of the human heart just got a little more impenetrable.

SHORING UP THE BASE. (N.B.: I now have a phone line, of sorts, so as John Henry said, I reckon it's time I did some work.)

Andrew McCarthy takes a full page in National Review Online to make sure he hasn't offended the all-important Confederacy Fan bloc. In responding to a Southern Appeal author who does not share his lenient attitude toward that bastard Lincoln, McCarthy does come close to a Sister Souljah moment ("I do think Lincoln is the hero of the Civil War, just as I think President Bush will be remembered as a hero of the current war"), but mainly tries to convince the Southron that "we have a lot of common ground," and heaps praise on Confederate soldiers. That ought to keep them Rebels in the tent a while! Up next: Jonah Goldberg denounces Chevy Chase for making jokes about Franco.

(Actually Goldberg already seems to be on culture watch this week: The Arts & Letters Daily has rejected one of Goldberg's manuscripts, which means ALD is "sliding to the left," which means ALD is "predictable." Maybe next he'll send William Bennett and Michael Medved over to ALD's offices to lean menacingly against the doorjambs and flip coins.)

WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE UNAVOIDABLE DELAY. WE WILL BE MOVING SHORTLY. "Aren't you feeling euphoric?" asks Andrew Sullivan. Well, no -- I still haven't got phone service in my new apartment. All politics is local.

The human waste products called Verizon Customer Service assure me they will take care of business tomorrow between 8 a.m. and the vernal equinox. Then, and only then, Andy, will we know whether freedom has won! Meantime I'm like a fish out of water, or a Lileks without a 7,000-pound home entertainment center and a barrel of Olestra snacks to fuel the "commentary."

Still, in those small moments of electronic access I have been able to snatch, I have seen some corkers. I note with pleasure that the cultural commissars of National Review and professional Ned Flanders impersonator Michael Medved have turned on Million Dollar Baby. The chronic inability of such types to distinguish between the actions of dramatic characters and the contents of position papers is, like Wimpy's chronic inability to pass up a hamburger, a reliable laugh-getter, but in this case connoiseurs of their follies may also contemplate the piquant dilemma of their followers. Can they accept their beloved Clint Eastwood as an agent of the commie pinko Left? Will they, with tears in their eyes, burn their Dirty Harry DVDs? Will their blogospheric enablers up the ante by reporting that Clint spent years in Yurrup working with a feller who might just as well have been a Marxist? (Lookit the fella! Looks jes like Castro! Or Ward Chuchill hehindeed!)

(Speaking of the Ole Perfesser, the aforelinked post is now officially the stupidest thing ever written, and I know that for a fact because moving gave me an opportunity to review the previous title-holders: my book reports from sixth grade, and my journals from the late 70s. Reynolds is by now so deep in the tank, whip-tailing his faux logic in whichever direction he thinks will make the maximum number of Democrats look bad, that his brief mention of the "idiotarian" coinage came as a shocking reminder of his old poses: when was the last time the Perfesser gave an even halfway decent impersonation of an independent thinker?)

I see also that folks are still ringing bells over the Iraqi election. Closer to home, of course, voting is not seen as a panacea, or even a cea. Here in the Apple, Gifford Miller and Freddie Ferrer, two men who want to unseat New York City Mayor Richie Rich and his delightful dog Dollar, have suggested that the gigantic boondoggle-slash-stadium Hizzoner wants us all to pay for should, like other large public expenditures, be subject to a referendum. Eric Fettmann of the New York Post is outraged: "But the biggest problem with the Ferrer-Miller approach is the notion that this is something 'the people' should decide," writes Fettmann. "That may do well for two men duking it out for the Mr. Populist label, but it's irresponsible governance... If the stadium should be decided by referendum, why not place every issue before the voters?"

Why have referenda for anything if not for this? The City itself admits the project will at minimum require a $300 million investment, leading to $21 million in annual debt service paid by us suckers. But in this case I suppose Democracy is not very Whiskey or Sexy if the moneyed interests stand a chance of losing.

SERVICE TROUBLE CONTINUES. I have moved, but my phone service will not be installed for five years -- er, six months -- er, till Thursday. Meantime I must forage for internet access, so posting will continue light till week's end.

Just as well, as I have little to say about the topic of the moment, the Iraqi election. This is, like the "Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!" post-invasion moment, a time of edifying events and spectacles -- a Saddam statue toppling in the former case, ink-stained fingers in the latter -- offered as proof that everything is going according to plan, and taken as an opportunity to call anyone who disagrees with this assessment losers.

Of course, that first round of upbeat liberation imagery was followed by bombing, looting, graft, torture, etc, and who knows what's coming now. Whatever happens, we can count on our Administration to learn and change nothing. Perhaps the sanest course now is the one recommended by our wisest elders: hope for the best and expect the worst.

PLEASING THE AFFILIATES. I welcome our new advertisers, Dirty Flower, a fun daily read w/pictures, and whoever is selling Steve Hicks' book -- which I freely admit (in that orgiastic spirit of disclosure currently sweeping the opinion racket) I have not read and probably never will read.

For a simple soul such as myself, raised in a tract house and accustomed to dwelling in slums, all this yak about how the Left has been taken over by postmodernism -- "switched to themes of anti-reason, double standards, and cynicism," as the advertiser puts it -- has no relevance. In my frequent discussions with other liberals, I have never heard one defend or attack a POV by announcing that language is a mere construct. Neither have I heard one say, "Who are we to say what's right and wrong?" -- at least not since the last Alan Bromley article.

I take words very seriously, not only as a professional but also as a moralist. That's why propaganda is the main subject of this site. Stray offenses to reason annoy me, but coordinated, wholesale perversions of reason piss me right the fuck off.

And if it's monolithic anti-rationalism you're looking for, the Right is just where the action is these days. You can read my back numbers for evidence, or we can just pick us a fresh one off the poisoned information tree that we call the blogosphere. Ah, here's some ripe Daniel Henninger:

Mr. Bush's inaugural speech should put to rest the notion of a monolithic American "right." It set off a nice fight on the right among realists, internationalists, libertarians and neocons. (Liberals and the left are simply "against Bush" so it is hard to credit their arguments beyond brute obstruction.)

Still, I encourage you to click the Hicks link. It will gain me some little money, and it may gain you some pleasure, if you're of a certain turn of mind (the destination is an Amazon review page, and here is a sample of the commentary: "I only wish Michel Focualt would have saved us all the trouble by blinding himself with his pens rather then writing such garbage and serving as the flase profit of 'post-modernism' which I see as nothing more then the raw lust for power"). You may even become interested in the book, and read it and tell me about it, which may get me to read it. I have prejudices, but I can be persuaded. That's how we reality-based folks operate.