THE LATE GREAT HUNTER S. James Lileks, Esq., the MacLeish of the Mall of America, thinks the late Hunter S. Thompson didn't do anything worthwhile after Hell's Angels: "It was all bile and spittle at the end, and it was hard to read the work without smelling the dank sweat of someone consumed by confusion, anger, sudden drunken certainties" etc. etc.

Here is something the Good Doctor wrote rather recently, while Mr. Lileks was shaking all Minneapolis with the thunder of his mediocrity:

There is an ever-growing appetite for Violence as Entertainment in this country -- especially among those in the 18-35 demographic that TV is targeting -- that something Dark & Disastrous is going to come of it. There is a good commercial reason why Fox just paid for TV rights to NASCAR, and it is exactly the same reason why every recently built racetrack from California to Maine is designed about 20 feet Wider than tracks were built in the old days, when it was physically impossible for more than three (3) cars to run side by side at 180 mph in the straightaway -- the new & Wider tracks have created the blood-curdling spectacle of four cars running fender-to-fender at top speed.

"It makes the racing vastly more Exciting," say the auto-sport czars. "It dramatically raises the Potential-Disaster factor & whips the fans into a frenzy."

Right. Blood & guts, bread & Circuses, human brains all over the asphalt. The people of Rome demanded more & more Death & Cruelty on their Sunday afternoons at the Coliseum -- until Nobody was left to Sacrifice. They ran out of Victims.

And so will the NFL, the NBA and NASCAR. That is what makes people nervous about the meaning of Dale Earnhardt's death. It is the American Dream run amok. Watch it & weep.

This was the allegedly enfeebled Thompson writing for ESPN in his declining years. The Fear and Loathing books, and the great essays for Rolling Stone, were also part of Thompson's journalistic work. Till he decided that it was all too much to bear he kept on producing, which is what journalists do. Purportedly as a man, and observably as a writer, he was one true, tough son of a bitch, and I will remember with gratitude his work long after I have forgotten my current anger at the mewling pipsqueaks who seek through their flimsy prattle to minimize him.

UPDATE. It's a sad reversal when the New York Post's farewell to HST turns out classier than that of Richard Brookhiser, whose normal function is to wrangle NRO's shit-ass punks when they stray too far from objective reality. "The druggie Jerry Lewis" doesn't even make sense. Tommy Chong -- now there's your druggie Jerry Lewis! Maybe Brookhiser has got into the blotter again.

RETURNING FROM A LONG WEEKEND TO FIND NO ONE HAS CLEANED UP THAT CORNER. "While the networks wasted no time publicizing sexual-harassment charges against Bill Cosby (and don't think that boomlet of coverage had nothing to do with Cosby's tough words about black parenting, no doubt seen as "right wing moralizing")..." -- Tim Graham, National Review Online. Those whose heads do not swim with conspiracy theories may recall very lavish MSM coverage of the Autumn Jackson-Bill Cosby case in 1997. What were the liberal conspirators punishing The Cos for then? Perhaps it was a preemptive strike against "Kids Say The Darndest Things." If so, they should all get medals.

Meanwhile John Derbyshire yells at a bunch of foreign students for not behaving properly in an Amtrak "quiet car" that does not in fact exist. When his error is explained to him, he thunders that "Young Europeans have no manners and no clue how to behave in public." Derbyshire once told an interviewer, "I am not very careful about what I say, having grown up in the era before Political Correctness, and never having internalized the necessary restraints." He seems to mistake being a horse's ass for rhetorical bravery.

TRAGEDY WRIT PLAIN AND SMALL. Saw the Theatre for a New Audience's production of Corilolanus this weekend. The Times calls this "postmodern" but it looked like straight-up Brechtian theatre to me, with actors announcing scenes with apposite phrases from the text scrawled on the grey walls of the box in which it is played, and changing roles more or less in full view of the audience. Most importantly, a good deal of the romanticism has been wrung out of the playing and the concept, the better to expose the play itself to our scrutiny.

From my perspective this seems like an attempt to give the play a fair reading against the difficulties it presents for modern audiences, not the least of which is Shakespeare’s dim view of democracy, at least the Roman variant, which was the only one he knew. (Blog knows I don’t generally approve political interpretations of art, but this is a famously political text.) The Bard uses the phrase "the People" frequently and with obvious contempt: the proles, politically empowered for the sake of temporary peace and stirred maliciously against Coriolanus by their slippery Tribunes, are here even more foolish and dangerous than the "blocks… stones… worse than senseless things" in Julius Caesar, and their unsuitability to power is more crucial to the plot. The parable of the human body with which Menenius defends the Roman system – "The Senators of Rome are this good belly, and you the mutinous members" -- will be familiar to readers of William Camden and Thomas Hobbes. For all its philosophical interest, this isn’t the sort of thing with which most moderns, whatever their politics, can be easily made comfortable.

Very sensibly, the director takes it at face value: she gives one of the key proles a comical hillbilly accent (which he reprises when playing a Volscian of similar station), and the dialects of the Tribunes suggest working-class roots which, however smoothed by political experience, yet feed their resentment of entrenched power ("Doubt not the commoners, for whom we stand, but they upon their ancient malice will forget with the least cause these new honors").

This tidily accomplished, we can concentrate on the noble Romans, and they too are taken at face value: Volumnia talks about her son’s blood-drenched attainments as if they were spelling bee championships, and Menenius the "humorous patrician" is a political fixer whose pusillanimous manner gently cloaks a great heart.

Coriolanus himself is a fascinating case, dramatically. That he lacks the fan base of Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, or even Anthony, despite his sometimes excellent poetry, may owe to the impenetrability that defines him. One friend who saw this production decided she liked him because "he doesn’t kiss ass," but Coriolanus’ obsessive self-determination does not strike me as particularly attractive. His suicidal/homicidal course admits no counter-argument until the rather base hectoring of his mother finally turns him against his own will, and he seems only fleetingly aware that he might be wrong; there are no deliberative soliloquies on the order of "How all occasions do inform against me" or "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" to draw us into his turmoil – in fact, of turmoil he has but little: his best speech ("O world, thy slippery turns!") is purely self-justifying.

Christian Camargo’s performance appears to admit this. When not raging or fighting, he takes in each situation as if it were a dish brought before him that he could relish or sweep off the table as his mood struck him. If he is noble, it is in his inability to be moved by things smaller than himself, and when his fall comes (from his mother’s stronger will), he is not ennobled by it, but unmanned; his performance of the well-known stage direction, "Holds [Volumnia] by the hand silent," is a wrenching grasp of her wrist, and even the other characters react as if he might break her arm.

This is a clear and highly theatrical reading of the play. Whether it is correct is another matter. The only other production I have seen was at the Public, years ago, and I have forgotten who did it. It was fairly traditional, and not as interesting as this one, but it was warmer and wooed us into sympathy with Coriolanus. At the moment, I don’t know really whether the new production has disabused me of a misapprehension of the play or not. I do know that it seems smaller to me now than when I went into the theatre.

IT ALL DEPENDS ON WHAT YOUR DEFINITION OF "IS AN ASSHOLE" IS.
Is everyone in this blogosphere on drugs?

A highly-regarded web operative says former U.S. President Jimmy Carter "isn't just misguided or ill-informed. He's on the other side," and suddenly we're debating the meaning of simple words and phrases, as with this Matt Yglesias commenter:

i must've missed the part where the powerline guy said carter's a jihadist or whatever. i thought the other side was the anti-everything democrats. shows you what I know.

In the context of world politics in a time of war, when you say someone's "on the other side," how the hell is it something other than an accusation of treason?

Meanwhile the aforementioned operative returns to accuse Carter of "aligning himself with America's enemies" and "conspiring with our chief enemy to try to influence an American Presidential election" -- then adding, astonishingly, "We could have called that treason, but we didn't."

This is how the racket appears to work: tar your opponents with terms that unambiguously mean "traitor" -- like "objectively on [Saddam's] side" or "not anti-war, just on the other side" -- and then play dumb ("Barlow proceeds to suggest that I'm calling American liberals terrorists... I'm used to having my posts mischaracterized...").

Heretofore I had blamed poor reading skills, but I'm beginning to wonder if those anti-depressant pills so many people are taking these days are in fact powerful hallucinogens, leading to a massive reality shift I am pharmacologically incapable of understanding.

UPDATE. So many people are on this thing it's getting crowded, so you should probably shove me off and snuggle with The Poor Man's coverage.

DA CAPPO. There was some discussion of Al Capp in comments to a previous post -- and in the context of David Horowitz, no less! Allow me to say that Capp's was one transit from liberal darling (William Faulkner wrote the intro to one of his compilations!) to raving wingnut that I can appreciate and respect. I will explain.

As a political philosopher, Capp was a moron. (Read the 60s-vintage Capp quote here -- it's such damned-hippies boilerplate as would make Michael Totten blush.) I assume Capp didn't get dumber as he went along. But he had a strong feeling about the relationship of the powerful to the powerless, and when he perceived the power flowing from the rock-ribbed Republicans of earlier days to the Great Society crowd, he flipped to the other side.

That doesn't make him right -- merely understandable, if you know how artists sometimes work. When he stopped making fun of General Bullmoose ("What's good for General Bullmoose is good for the USA!") and started making fun of Joan Baez (aka "Joanie Phonie," who upon regarding Dogpatch cries, "Those poor wretches! I'm giving them $1,000,000... in protest songs!"), Capp was no better or worse an analyst of social conditions than he had been. He was simply addicted to irreverence, and took the most obnoxious position he could find. And he was a sport about it; he did a photo shoot with Joan Baez for Time magazine. (The published photo shows Baez singing and Capp wincing theatrically, with his fingers in his ears.)

In the 1960s Capp used to give talks on college campuses -- this while he was mercilessly parodying the whole student movement with SWINE (Students Wildly Indignant About Everything). The kids hated him -- the man who invented the Sadie Hawkins Day their older brothers and sisters had made flesh! -- but Capp kept a-comin', perhaps as much for the collegiate pussy (he pleaded no contest to allegations of sexual misconduct, including an attempted rape) as for the chance to piss off hippies and get paid for it.

In any event Capp didn't indulge in the whiney woe-is-me-I'm-being-persecuted crap Horowitz and his acolytes specialize in. He seemed to like being an outsider; not for him the dogged insistence upon respect that distinguish his far-less-talented progeny. And he kept making funnies, not all of them informed by 60s politics. He kept up the "Fearless Fosdick" strip-within-a-strip, in which the impossibly upright and sexless Fosdick finds his only release in absurd cartoon violence. I personally recall a strip in which Abner's son, brainwashed by TV advertising, begs for a "Junior G.I." war-game kit. "Alright, son," declares Abner. "I'll give yuh the week's food money!" Abe walks into a toy store with a dollar bill but is laughed off -- "You can't even buy a toy dollar with that!" -- and so wanders into an army surplus store, where his dollar buys him a real flame-thrower, with which he causes havoc.

This has more to do with Happy Hooligan and The Katzenjammer Kids than with (God help us) Mallard Fillmore. Capp's 60s comics weren't his best -- go to his 40s and 50s stuff, much of it beautifully collected, for primo Li'l Abner -- but they were comics of the old school. And mourn the days when Li'l Abner and Pogo lived together on the funny pages, and cartoonists understood that if you want to grind an axe in public you'd better make some pretty awesome sparks doing it.

DIDN'T I WRITE ABOUT THIS ALREADY? OR IS IT ALL JUST STARTING TO MELT TOGETHER? Wonkette gave me pleasure (boy, you just read that site and suddenly everything's a double entendre) with a link to Discover The Network, a roundup of "activists for leftwing agendas and causes, radical egalitarians, and opponents of American 'imperialism'" spearheaded by David "Soul Brother #1" Horowitz. They've been at it for months, these guys, and have uncovered the sinister plans of all our top people, from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to Roger Ebert. Way to dig, fellas! They even spotted Susan V. Berresford, who is head of the Ford Foundation, which "was instrumental in funding NGOs responsible for the anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist literature that appeared at the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa." Berresford may have thought she was covering her tracks by giving money to Jews, too, but Horowitz sees all!

Bonus points for listing Rachel Corrie, who is famously dead ("revered as a martyr by the anti-Israel left"). Maybe in the future we'll get listings for Joe Hill and Victoria Woodhull.

UPDATE. Oh yeah, I did write about this. Back then it was called "FOLLOW the Network." They musta focus-grouped it.

F*!@*%G NUTS. When it comes to stretching, Dorinda Bordlee makes Plastic Man look like Bruno S.:

It's time for all of us in the pro-life movement to learn to appreciate the power of political satire. Comedian Chris Rock, slated to host the Oscars this month, is being accused of promoting abortion.

"Abortion, it's beautiful, it's beautiful abortion is legal. I love going to an abortion rally to pick up women, cause you know they are f*!@*%g," Rock said during his club routine.

Whether Rock is pro-life or pro-choice, whether he intended to use satire or really believes what he said, is beside the point. What's "beautiful" is that Chris Rock has exposed a profound side effect of legalized abortion -- the sexual mistreatment of women.

Going through the text as closely as its overpowering smell would allow, I am forced to conclude that the "senior legislative counsel with Americans United for Life" does in fact mean to say that f*!@*%g women is akin to abusing them ("legalized abortion allows men to sexually prey on women"). To paraphrase Gilbert Gottfried, if this is a crime then I should be on Death Row.

Assuming that this article is not something the merry editors of National Review Online obtained with a secret tape recorder and some Rophynol, we may take her at her word and infer many interesting corollaries:

- When Bordlee's "Roe has ruined romance" replaces You are murdering babies, you baby-murderers as the brand statement of the anti-abortion movement, we will see a stark change in their advertising. Expect fewer helpless fetuses on highway billboards, and more commercials showing a woman weeping bitterly in the night because Roe v. Wade made Jim-Bob forget their anniversary.

- As Bordlee's "abortion on demand makes women into sex objects with the full consent of the highest court in the land" meme disseminates, expect a whole new school of NC BDSM stories in which leering Supreme Court Justices preside over gang-rapes. Also, oral, anal, and other copulative variants will disappear from such fiction, as jaded porn consumers turn against depictions of sexual acts that do not lead to abortion.

- Bordlee will become a media critic for BET, and in her first segment will explain that Jay-Z is telling us the uncomfortable truth that men demand abortion so that bitches will not be among the 99 problems from which they suffer.

UPDATE. For more insight into Bordlee's method, check her quotes from this excellent story about the real change in antiabortion strats. Culture war ain't the half of it.

THE "COARSELY COMPULSIVE" VS. THE MERELY COARSE. Now the culture warriors are feasting on the corpse of Arthur Miller and, as carrion birds will, making a sloppy job of it. My Stupid Dog gets the neo-Hegelian Award for denouncing The Crucible not only for its bulging anti-HUAC subtext, but for being crypto-anti-gay. "People who tittered over the sexual proclivities of Chambers, Roy Cohn and G. David Schine," writes the Dogman, "would have instantly recognized Miller's 'Abigail Williams' as a homosexual man in woman's drag."

When conservatives resorts to Queer Studies charlatanism to attack a dead playwright, you know Culture War High Command has thrown up more flags.

Having the most obvious (not to say egregious) political content of all Miller's plays, The Crucible has been the flashpoint for many wingers' funerary wrath. The New York Post even caps its Miller editorial by declaring that "To ignore [Miller's] contributions would be as wrong as to suggest that communism never posed a danger." Some people can't even recognize the word "class" unless it's printed on their airline tickets.

I give a little more slack to Terry Teachout, as he writes very astutely on cultural issues outside the padded walls of OpinionJournal. While I will say that it is odd to find him denouncing the newly-dead in such harsh terms, I will assume based on his record that his distaste for Miller's petentiousness is the clinical judgement of a critic, rather than the groping after available brickbats seen among the goon squad.

I do think he's missing something about the kind words spoken for Miller after his death -- quite apart for, um, a simple regard for decorum, I see in the remarks denounced by Teachout something other than "more stringently politicized critics and playwrights... willing to overlook Miller's limitations because he thought as they do."

Even Teachout acknowledges the "coarsely compulsive power" of Death of a Salesman, at least. Teachout says that power "manages to mask its aesthetic deficiencies" -- as if it were an air freshener or something. But how often nowadays do we get anything "coarsely complusive" in our theatre -- or film, or music, or etc.? I like coarsely compulsive powerful stuff like the Ramones, Celine, etc. And I can easily imagine theatre artists -- who tend to be romantic souls --wishing their work could have the sort of crude impact that "The Crucible," "Waiting for Lefty," and other plays of that sort had in their time, not because they're Commies but because it seems as if it would be exciting.

We can argue over whether, in Miller's case, the gestures were anything more than outsized; contrary to some of my critics, I approve agitprop only as I approve fruit-based sauces for meat: when they are extremely well done. But I think it's a little wide of the mark to assume that the younger playwrights are only speaking well of their fallen comrade because they're liberals. That seems to me more than a misjudgement, indeed a misreading of basic human nature. And once we start doing that, we're onto something that's much worse that bad theatre.

LOVE IS STRANGE. People keep sending white feathers to Jonah "Do These Fatigues Make My Ass Look Sorry?" Goldberg, and he has begun to yelp.

As often happens when a Cornerite is in peril or discomfort, anonymous and cryptonymous emails of support have materialized. Here is my most favorite passage from my most favorite anonymous email:

I can tell you that reading NRO on my laptop in Iraq even as the mortars impacted on our camp or after taking care of wounded soldiers was enough to buck up my morale. Your support and those of other Americans was just as valuable to me as the body armor I wore and the kevlar plating on my ambulance.

For some it was letter from home -- for others, a picture of the girl they left behind. For "Mike," it was Jonah Goldberg and his merry band of timewasters. It was their sorry asses Mike was fighting to cover -- and cover them he did!

To each his own. As the great Thurber said, "Chacun a son gout/is very, very true/but why should we despise/The apples of others' eyes?" Mike, Jonah, and everyone: Happy Valentine's Day!

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!"