ASSHOLES AND ORANGES. OpinionJournal on steroid abuse:

Steroids have cooked baseball's results much the same way sleazy accounting practices have cooked stock prices in recent years. In both arenas, fortunes are made on immoral conduct. But beyond the obvious matter of money, what difference does it make when athletes cheat?

This difference: when Mark McGuire juiced himself into the Michelin Man, thousands of employees didn't lose their life savings.

The rest of the piece is a paen to the free market, natch.

NERDENDUM. I guess political analysis of Revenge of the Sith could not be finished till Orson Scott Card -- sci-fi legend, Mormon visionary, anti-homosexualist and fake Democrat -- had weighed in. Lance Mannion handles him well -- with insulated tongs, one hopes. I will say that, having no strong feelings about Jedi or Wookies or Ferengi or whatever they've got going on, this is all just comedy to me. But I must note one of Card's digs at George Lucas:

It’s a terrible thing, I suppose, for a writer to invent a religion and then discover that he and all his friends are on the wrong side of it.

Well, I guess now Card knows how Jesus feels.

JUST EXPERIMENTING. This latest in a long line of self-proclaimed liberal apostates inspired me. I decided to take the plunge and, at approximately 12:10 pm today, became a conservative.

I didn't tell anyone I was a conservative, of course. I preferred "centrist," or "true liberal," etc. Not that I identified myself this way either. Liberals are famously intolerant, and I had enough trouble keeping friends and jobs as it is. Look how such brave dissenters as Michael Totten and Roger Simon had been silenced, deprived of a public forum by the Red Hand! And then of course you had to explain yourself endlessly -- who had time for that?

So I kept it under wraps. When drawn into a political discussion, I used the Jonah Goldberg Variation: "Anyway it's late and I have to go to the grocery store and I don't have time right now, it'll be in the book I'm writing." I did start dropping "heh" and "indeed" into ordinary conversation, but I think I got away with it.

I was treated civilly, yet I seethed, knowing that all my friends would turn into extras from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Donald Sutherland version) if I let slip that freedom was on the march!

Part of me wanted to reach out to them -- after all, what real difference is there between Rush Limbaugh and, say, Bobby Kennedy? But there was obviously no hope of reconciliation. What a bunch of jerks, with their impertinent graphics! My walls were covered, or would be once I took my new conservatism home, with simple, tastefully portraits of Whittaker Chambers and Zell Miller! What was the point in even arguing with them if they were never going to admit that I'm right? Didn't they realize that Jesse Jackson is no better than al-Sadr? And I meant that in a totally centrist, classically-liberal way. No, I didn't leave them, they left me.

So I brooded in my cubicle. On the bright side, I was offered three book contracts and a nationally-syndicated radio show. But I soon tired of that life, and so at approximately 3:35 pm I became a Royalist.

Isn't it true that all our national goals would be better realized with a strong leader at the helm? If we decry the political intrigues, deal-brokering, and pork-barrelling of our time, wouldn't it be better to eliminate all incentive to corruption by placing all power in the hands of a single, infallible Royal Family? If disunity is a plague on America, wouldn't a venerated Head of State, of noble blood, unite us all? And if new mothers named their sons after this monarch -- particularly if he had a suitably exalted, old-fashioned name, like, for example, Roy -- would that not strongly affirm the traditional values which made Western Civilization great?

But I can hear your arguments -- or would, if I were actually arguing with you. The same tired catalogue of complaints. Your time is over -- your tedious town halls, your shopworn electioneering, your whining about "civil liberties" and "trial by jury." Quit hanging onto the past, you stupid hippies!

UPDATE. I have just decided to become a Lipstick Libertarian. You know, porn, pot, endless foreign wars I'm too old to fight. I'm convinced this one will take.

UPDATE. It was just like being a conservative, and the publishers tell me that Brian Anderson has it covered for this season. Nevermind. I'm going back to believing whatever it was I believed.

PERMANENT REVOLUTION. Finally finished Carlyle's History of the French Revolution. At the start I thought myself in for a 750-page Burkean peroration on the folly of Godless democracy. From the beginning Carlyle is Jeremiacally disdainful of the Revolutionary dream:

... Of a truth, the long-demonstrated will now be done: 'the Age of Revolutions approaches' (as Jean Jacques wrote), but then of happy blessed ones. Man awakens from his long somnambulism; chases the Phantasms that beleagured and bewitched him. Behold the new morning glittering down the eastern steeps; fly, false Phantasms, from its shafts of light… For what imaginable purpose was man made, if not to be 'happy'? By victorious Analysis, and Progress of the Species, happiness enough now awaits him… Nay, who knows but, by sufficiently victorious Analysis, 'human life may be indefinitely lengthened,' and men get rid of Death, as they have already done of the Devil? We shall then be happy in spite of Death and the Devil.--So preaches magniloquent Philosophism her Redeunt Saturnia regna.

Sounds like John Derbyshire with poetry, eh? Carlyle doesn’t think much of "Evangel Jean-Jacques" Rosseau ("Theories of Government! Such have been, and will be; in ages of decadence"), nor of Figaro ("thin wiredrawn intrigues, thin wiredrawn sentiments and sarcasms; a thing lean, barren…"), and at times, many times, a reader may think that he considers this Revolution nothing more than a "mad Gaelic effervescence" of "eleutheromania." He mentions America hardly at all, and Pitt only as a Sansculottic bogey-man (L'ennemi du genre humain) or as one who deals with "his own Friends of the People" by "getting them bespied, beheaded, their habeas-corpuses suspended, and his own Social Order and strong-boxes kept tight" -- in the face of the French madness, an apparently wiser course. Lafayette is a sap, and Voltaire a carbuncle-eyed false prophet.

But as Carlyle proceeds more deeply into the (to use one of his favorite words) Cimmerian opera buffa of the Revolution -- the risings, the factions, "sea-green" Robespierre, "People’s-Friend" and "Dogleech" Marat, the Terror, the legislative spasms, the Feast of Reason, the rise of Gilded Youth, all finally "blown into space" by Napoleon -- it seemed as I read that the author had grown more forgiving; certainly not toward the rough treatment of innocents, or even of the guilty, or toward farewells "too sad for tears"; the worst outrages he delineates in the simplest language, for maximum heart-rending effect. Yet even in the worst atrocities Carlyle finds understanding, if only because 750 pages (written twice over*) is an awfully tall mountain from which not to discern a context. The pathetic end of the Dauphin he describes, in an odd premonition of Dickens, "as none but poor Factory Children and the like are wont to perish, unlamented." Even the Terror has its reasons -- the plotting of exiled aristocrats, invasion, starvation, the need for unity -- and, from Carlyle, an unexpectedly gentle epitaph:

It is a horrible sum of human lives, M. l'Abbe: -- some ten times as many shot rightly on a field of battle, and one might have had his Glorious-Victory with Te-Deum. It is not far from the two-hundredth part of what perished in the entire Seven Years War…

But what if History, somewhere on this Planet, were to hear of a Nation, the third soul of whom had not for thirty weeks each year as many third-rate potatoes as would sustain him?… History ventures to assert that the French Sansculotte of Ninety-three, who, roused from long death-sleep, could rush at once to the frontiers, and die fighting for an immortal Hope and Faith of Deliverance for him and his, was but the second-miserablest of men! The Irish Sans-potato, had he not senses then, nay a soul? In his frozen darkness, it was bitter for him to die famishing; bitter to see his children famish. It was bitter for him to be a beggar, a liar and a knave. Nay, if that dreary Greenland-wind of benighted Want, perennial from sire to son, had frozen him into a kind of torpor and numb callosity, so that he saw not, felt not, was this, for a creature with a soul in it, some assuagement; or the cruellest wretchedness of all?

Such things were, such things are; and they go on in silence peaceably…

Oh, have I mentioned that this is among the most gorgeous English prose ever written? And that it defies comparison to anything, literary or political, in our own poor, benighted age -- though, People’s-Friend that I am, I will draw your attention to some Carlyle musings on Revolutionary Journalism:

One Sansculottic bough that cannot fail to flourish is Journalism. The voice of the People being the voice of God, shall not such divine voice make itself heard? To the ends of France; and in as many dialects as when the first great Babel was to be built! Some loud as the lion; some small as the sucking dove...

Folded and hawked Newspapers exist in all countries; but, in such a Journalistic element as this of France, other and stranger sorts are to be anticipated. What says the English reader to a Journal-Affiche, Placard Journal; legible to him that has no halfpenny; in bright prismatic colours, calling the eye from afar? Such, in the coming months, as Patriot Associations, public and private, advance, and can subscribe funds, shall plenteously hang themselves out: leaves, limed leaves, to catch what they can! The very Government shall have its Pasted Journal… Is not every Able Editor a Ruler of the World, being a persuader of it; though self-elected, yet sanctioned, by the sale of his Numbers?…

Placard Journals, Placard Lampoons, Municipal Ordinances, Royal Proclamations; the whole other or vulgar Placard-department super-added -- or omitted from contempt! What unutterable things the stone-walls spoke, during these five years! But it is all gone; To-day swallowing Yesterday, and then being in its turn swallowed of To-morrow, even as Speech ever is.

Sounds familiar, blog-readers, n’cest pas?

(* The burning of Carlyle’s original manuscript is one of the great literary stories. Carlyle said that writing the History over again was like "swimming without water." (The sole web account of that quote describes its circumstances differently than I recall it, but I think most writers will support my version.) Speaking of things only writers would appreciate, this is my favorite part of the story linked up above: "Carlyle was terribly upset about the loss of his work. He was, in fact, on the verge of giving the project up entirely. That night, however, he had a dream, in which his father and brother rose from the grave and begged him to give up writing. He awoke with a new determination.")

SHORTER OLE PERFESSER: NASCAR=White People. Hip-Hop=Black People. Black People get all the breaks.

ADDENDUM. Reynolds' piece refers to a quote from "The New York Times," but the piece he quotes is from the Times Sunday edition's Book Review, which, as any literate person knows (excuse my elitism, Hoss!), is a free-opinion zone. Moreover, the Times Book Review is edited by Sam Tanenhaus, whose biography of paleo-con hero Whittaker Chambers was very favorably reviewed by the right-wing Brothers Judd, and who has written in favor of the Bush Administration in the Wall Street Journal. ("I'm not a conservative," Tanenhaus once told an interviewer, "I'm a man of the Right.")

Of course, if you seek examples of wingnut publications -- from the Wall Street Journal to the National Review to the Washington Times to, yes, the Ole Perfesser hisself -- having fun with "blue state" people, to paraphrase Christopher Wren, look about you.

Is there anyone on the face of the earth who doesn't know that the "not a conservative" Perfesser is nothing more than a right-wing bagman? Christ, what a lot I have to tell him or her.

UPDATED SHORTER OLE PERFESSER: Just 'cause I cook doesn't make me gay, even in Tennessee, so don't call me gay, because I'm not gay, no matter how I hold my fork.

REVENGE OF THE SHIT. Long, long ago, in a blogospheric precinct far, far away, Republican nerdlets re-tucked their shirts to harsh on Commie Lucas on the eve of Revenge of the Sith. He doesn't respect Bush! they cried, light sabres confusedly flashing. He has betrayed the Force, and though it may have been created by him, it truly belongs to us as did the Ring in that other cinematic nerdfest, and we cast it thus into the fires of our wingnut weenie-roast!

Yet their brethren across the nerdiverse still lined up in Darth masks and Leia curls for the apostate's movie.

Springs onto the stage NRO Corner initiate John Podhoretz to pre-empt the fondness of his fellow fantasy worshippers. "Unbelievably bad," he sayeth, "I'm telling you this because movie critics won't," the Commie bastards! Following up he adds: "Evidently 25 years into the Star Wars empire, George Lucas decided he just doesn't like war... Inadvertently, both Lucas and the Wachowski brothers (who wrote and directed the Matrix movies) reveal with their brainless anti-Bushism the essential cowardly vapidity of pacifism." When challenged chapter-and-verse by Star Wars obsessives from the outlands, Podhoretz shrugs and, in the time honored Jonah Goldberg "anyway it's late and I haved to walk the dog" manner, says, "It's almost impossible to wade through all the nonsense on the Web to get to the bottom of this, and to be perfectly honest, I have no interest in doing so."

At first the Council, in the person of Comrade Bell, appears to agree with Podhoretz. But there are rumblings. Film Warrior Mathewes-Green actually praises the Revenge of the Sith! Some Council members seem to ironically corroborate Podhoretz. Then Comrade Bell turns to the Dark Side! "It's a full-blown tragedy," he swoons, "and you will leave the theater with a bit of ache in your heart."

The writing is upon the wall! Mayhap Comrade Podhoretz will be found in his apartments, with Saint-Just and Henriot, a suicidal bullet lodged in his underjaw!

Or maybe these fucking dorks will just gibber about something else until the new Batman movie comes out.

UPDATE.The Golden Pocket Protector goes to this guy:

As a homosexual priest carries out his actions in private, he permanently harms his victims, mostly young boys. In the film, Anakin kills Jedi younglings without remorse. This heinous act is one that no Jedi could even think about. He no longer carries any guilt or shame over his actions. Ultimately, Anakin sucombes to the dark side, becomes Darth Vadar, and the republic is destroyed. As homosexual acts by church priests propagate, the strength and trust in the church is broken....

He might be kidding. With these guys it can be hard to tell.

More nerds here, including some guy who thinks "liberals are now trying to adopt [Star Wars] as their own." Must be some sort of Jedi mind trick.

MISTAH KURTZ, HE NUTS. I thought he'd struck a nadir when he explained to us that Social Security reform would save America by bankrupting it into millenarian Christianity, but Stanley Kurtz just keeps digging down into new sub-basements of absurdity:

Big media’s melting down. Movies are in a slump. Why? The media’s losing money because contemporary secular liberalism is really a kind of religion. Liberals don’t want to make money. They’re out to win souls.

Try to imagine Ted Koppel throwing down his napkin at a four-star restaurant and crying, "This is no substitute for a socialist paradise! I hereby donate all my worldly goods to MoveOn."

Then Kurtz tells us that Ridley Scott (yes, auteur of Black Hawk Down) has made a film which is "the apotheosis of Hollywood’s secular liberalism. Hatred of religion." In the same sense that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the apotheosis of Wicca, one imagines.

Does this guy actually appear on television shows? Does he wear a bib to catch the foam?

BEST DENNIS MILLER SHOW ELEGY. "There was a limit to how much he could do on sheer wits alone."

COMPOUNDING THE ATROCITY. Donald Trump has begun a campaign to take over the WTC site and build a one-floor-higher version of the old Towers:

Mr. Trump's model was designed by his structural engineer, Kenneth Gardner, who quoted poetry at the news conference, apologized to his mother and thanked many people who "made this day possible."

Mr. Trump's comments about the Freedom Tower were not so appreciative. "In a nutshell, the Freedom Tower should not be allowed to be built," he said. "It's not appropriate for Lower Manhattan, it's not appropriate for Manhattan, it's not appropriate for the United States, it's not appropriate for freedom."

But Mr. Trump's proposal is not exactly appropriate for him. He said he would not be willing actually to lease space in the buildings. ("I only go in buildings I own.") Nor would he explain how his towers would be paid for. "Larry Silverstein hopefully can do this," Mr. Trump said, referring to the lead developer of the site. Mr. Silverstein plans to use insurance money from the terrorist attack to develop both the Freedom Tower and 7 World Trade...

Joanna Rose, the spokeswoman for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, said in an e-mail message: "Donald Trump is entitled to his opinion, just like the millions of people who actually involved themselves in the public planning process, which resulted in the master plan."

You might have thought the spectacularly unsuccessful builder would have his hands full, finishing up another season of his "reality" TV show, trying to dig his latest bankrupt property out of the hole, overseeing the Trump video game, and keeping the hundreds of miles of gleaming gilt surfaces in his hideous Trump Tower polished, but you can't keep a short-fingered vulgarian down!

Deroy Murdock is juiced. "If the public applies enough pressure to New York’s powers that be," he writes, "Trump may get the chance to apply the lessons of Wollman Rink to the World Trade Center," and even supplies an address at which we may entreat the Governor to entrust the sacred site to the savior of Wollman Rink.

I can't much care. The original WTC was an eyesore and a monument to waste and fraud. Of course the enormous slaughter that took place there would, in a better world, demand the very best that our builders could come up with, but there was never any chance that we would get it, given the enormous number of crooks, scoundrels, and egos -- now increased by one -- involved with its reconstruction.

TWISTING IN THE WIND. The Ole Perfesser calls Andrew Sullivan an "excitable" "emoter-in-chief" who should write "a bit less about gay marriage." To his credit, the Perfesser did not just up and call him a faggot, but when you have such command of schoolyard code, you don't have to get crude.

What caused this falling-out of Fighter Keyboarders? Sullivan, via the ever-popular reader e-mail device, makes a disturbing comparison of Reynolds' Abu Ghraib coverage to Reynold's Newsweek-Koran coverage. The Perfesser misrepresents this, saying "Andrew Sullivan seems to think that I should be blogging more about Abu Ghraib, and less about the Newsweek scandal." Of course Sullivan's real point is that the Perfesser portrayed the prisoner-torture scandals as just another example of the damned lying librul media, whereas he treated the Newsweek story as... another example of the damned lying librul media.

In other words Sullivan seems to have tumbled to the fact that some of his fellow "Eagles" are not necessarily the plain-spoken all-American advocates for truth -- kinda rough around the edges, but you know how Yanks are! -- that he, in his Americaphilia, once took them for, and might in fact be operatives on the (horreur!) European model, with an agenda, or idee fixee, in service to which they will not scruple to misrepresent or even ignore the truth.

I wonder when Sullivan began to figure this out? During the last election Reynolds suggested that advocates of gay marriage -- one of the issues, remember, that was supposed to unite "anti-idiotarians" -- should pipe down and support Bush, because supporting his opposition -- "the Bush-bashing Gephardt position" -- might "alienate Republicans, even those who are supportive, or at least not opposed to, gay marriage." Sullivan's response then was critical but collegial, as it normally is when people he respects are tin-eared about his marriage crusade. Weren't they fine feathered friends after all, up there in the aery?

So I wouldn't say that the persistent obtuseness of the other Eagles on gay marriage has by itself worn Sullivan's patience -- rather, it may have come from observing firsthand and over a period of months the lengths to which they will go to spin every datum and factoid into a celebration of their glorious cause. On the same page as his misrepresentation of Sullivan, the Perfesser adds his commentary to George Galloway's recent appearance before Coleman and Levin: a long quote from perhaps the only portrayal in the English-speaking world of that encounter as a victory for the Senators. Even the New York Post couldn't spin it that way; even John Derbyshire, the notorious homophobe and Sullivan's bete noire, would not so lower himself. But the Perfesser, that sea-green Incorruptable, answers to an authority higher than common sense.

The Perfesser suggests that he has done with Sullivan now. Doubtless many other Eagles will also take wing. Thus the scourge of traitors, who could spot an enemy of the Republic by his place of residence, finds himself in exile! I wonder whether, when he looks around his depopulated salon these days, Sullivan thinks of Orwell or of Whittaker Chambers.

APPARENTLY I DIDN'T MISS ANYTHING. If the Newsweek fiasco is really "the biggest buzz in the blogosphere... since the presidential election," then this whole blog thing is feebler than I imagined.

It is instructive to be away from the computer a few days and hear about stories like this solely from newspapers and TV. You may get the impression from Glenn "Nice First Amendment you got here, shame if something happened to it" Reynolds and John "This Lie Proves That Truth Is Irrelevant" Podhoretz that a web-based Committee of Public Safety is desperately needed. But once you get away from the monkey house and its constant screaming and masturbating, it all looks like less of a big deal. Call me when the the MSM starts paying attention to stories like this; then I'll get excited.

N.O., THANKS. Apologies for the protracted absence. I was in New Orleans for a long weekend. This was my first visit, and I was tied to a group (long story) so I was mostly tied to the French Quarter and couldn't perform the further-ranging enquiries that I trust I'll get to on another visit, but I will share some short impressions:

- New York has always liked to tear down and renovate, but lately this tendency has become a mania; where once we more or less inadvertently toppled monuments to vanished ways of life, now our civic bulldozers are ever revved and eager to erase anything predating the Giuliani era. So it was nice to be someplace where aged, crumbling edifices are routinely replastered and reopened for business -- including the Cemetaries, where tombs are regularly cracked into, stuffed with new roommates for the dead, and imperfectly sealed up. The crud, the fallen bits of plaster, the sagging balconies, the irregularly hanging French doors, are beautiful in the same way that the smell of rotting flowers is beautiful: more vivid for their decomposition.

- Given that, it is easy to see why voodoo remains a vital part of the City's image and folklore. If communication with the dead is important, you won't take lightly any decision to erase vestiges of their earthly existence. (One practitioner's shop I visited displayed two official mayoral commendations.) I took the time to listen to one initiate -- fat, bland, and cane-bearing -- lecture on his craft. He downplayed the "fear factor" and Hollywood misrepresentations of voodoo, but his stories were purposefully spooky, full of zombies and reversed fortunes. He was very calm and businesslike, and gave his spiel at a rapid clip so as to keep the queue of auditors moving, but his eyes remained brightly alert throughout the performace, as if to remind guests that he was powerful and not above availing his powers then and there if he had to. He reminded me of a middle-class black woman I'd interviewed years earlier, who had erected a row of African ceremonial masks on the facade of her building on the south side of West 49th Street, facing Worldwide Plaza. These were meant, she had told me, to inhibit developers. That the condo part of the Plaza has never been very successful, and the theatre there briefly closed, I would never attribute to her totems, but as they say in the old Jewish jokes, it couldn't have hurt.

- I should have hated Bourbon Street for being so fucking cheesy, but I loved it anyway. First of all, they sell Everclear; y'can't get that back home. Also, any institution that gives work to hundreds of musicians, who play nearly round the clock, is okay by me (and has me checking the real estate classified in the Times-Picayune). But finally, Bourbon Street's spirit of license is indiscriminate and all-embracing. You don't have to be an initiate or a hipster or a pretty person of any sort to get in on it; fat suburbanites waddling unsteadily, plastic cup in hand, toward Hustler Hollywood are as welcome to it as future Trent Reznors. Even a cynical visitor from New York is forced to accept that all that stuff about the good times rolling -- as opposed to being ceremonially placed into the hands of those fashionable few whom local free papers deem worthy -- is sincerely meant. Bourbon Street takes all comers, and only very bad behavior gets you thrown out. Despite the puke-scented evidence, I think this is a good definition of heaven.

AND BESIDES, ORSON WELLES WAS FAT. This item about Michael Medved's recent on-air embarrassment reminded me that I hadn't heard much from the Flanders of Filmdom of late, so I visited his website. While Hollywood-Hatin' remains his hook, Medved seems to have branched out into mixed-use wingnuttery, and his site's collection of MM reviews is paltry and out of date.

Nonetheless it does contain the one review which I believe will represent Medved's peculiar approach to film criticism unto history: "Kangaroo Jack Hijacked to Partisan Agenda?"

Medved says he has no artistic problem with this film -- or, rather, the film ordinary mortals would see on actual screens -- but says it presents a "moral dilemma for conscientious filmgoers" because its story was written by Stephen Bing, "notorious even by the undemanding standards of Hollyweird" for not only behaving beastly to Elizabeth Hurley, but also contributing money to the Democratic Party. Is proof that Kangaroo Jack is no-goodski, despite superficial evidence of viewing experience!

Medved does recognize that "some sharp-eyed reader might assault your reviewer for inconsistency" because he had previously praised The Pianist, a film by a sex-crime fugitive. His explanation is marvelously instructive:

First, Polanski's well-publicized personal problems occurred decades ago, while Stephen Bing's made news merely months ago. Second, Polanski presently pursues no prominent political agenda, while Bing continues to devote much of his life's energy to bashing Bush and all other Republicans. And third, and most importantly, "The Pianist" counts as a serious, substantive, artful -- if flawed -- directorial tour-de-force about World War II suffering, while "Kangaroo Jack" amounts to mildly pleasing piffle about nothing in particular.

Bing demanded DNA testing to see if his girlfriend's baby was actually his; Polanski is accused of the statutory rape of a 13-year-old. But Polanski's is the lesser offense because it happened a big long time ago and because he doesn't wear any buttons with which Medved disagrees. (Doubtless, if Polanski denounces Bush at some future date, Medved will find that The Pianist has suddenly become double-plus-ungood.)

Not to be overlooked is Medved's third point, which suggests a lawyerly approach to the condemnation of films on political-parentage grounds: The Pianist is a good boy, your honor, with a record of service to its community. But Kangaroo Jack is a ne'er-do-well, a jackanapes! So please let the kid-fucker's movie go with a warning, but punish the Democrat's movie severely, and show our constituents that we're tough on thought-crime.

Medved gets bonus points for providing this classic bit of culture-warrior idiocy:

In Spielberg's case, the messages of "Saving Private Ryan" count as so patriotic, even heroic, that you can easily overlook the director's long-standing friendships with Clinton and Gore.

Now, by God, that's entertainment!

CUTTING TO THE CHASE. Here is a new piece by Jonah Goldberg called "What Is a Conservative?" It's crap. Here is the highlight:

I’m not calling the opponents on the right or left Stalinists or Nazis when I say they are totalitarians...

It's all like that. Save yourself the headache.

COP CROCK. Sometimes I wonder if I'm not being too harsh, and sometimes maybe I am, but I can safely say that I will never regret saying that Michelle Malkin is utterly delusional:

When was the last time you thanked a cop? And wouldn't it be nice if, for just a brief moment, the mainstream media would hold a ceasefire in its incessant cop-bashing crusades?

There are good cops, and there are bad cops. But national press outlets, predisposed to harp on law enforcement as an inherently racist and reckless institution, hype the hellions at the expense of the heroes.

Bullshit. The nets show us a bad-cop story only once in a very great while: only the most incontrovertible egregiously bad bluecoat behavior (nightstick-sodomizing, outright murder of citizens, etc) qualifies. (Even Malkin doesn't dispute that the stories she protests are true.) And that's it. Simple brutality charges, an everyday thing in this City and perhaps yours, don't make the cut. The presumption of truth is always with the police; generally, only when film footage inescapably overturns this prejudice do the news outlets give the civilians complainants a little airtime.

And these very brief glimpses into the shadows of law enforcement are completely overriden by the fictional portrayal of cops in the "mainstream media," which borders on deification. Cop shows from the Law & Order franchise to the CSI franchise, and everywhere in between, uniformly portray the boys in blue as paragons of honesty who cut far fewer corners to make a murder case than the average salesman would cut to close a deal. Indeed, cops are portrayed as morally superior to just about all non-uniformed citizens: watch a station-centered cop show like NYPD Blue and compare the skels, victims, and lawyers who drift in and out with the police -- you see a world gone terminally venal, in which only cops can be trusted (which is presumably why they seem only to fuck their colleagues).

The success of the ridiculous CSI shows I attribute to their reassuring underlying theme: that cops are not only immaculate honest and zealous in pursuit of the truth, they are also scientifically predestined to find it. (Someday Minority Report will be done as a cop series, and young people will be shocked to learn that it was originally a dystopian vision.)

I don't begrudge the police this heroic treatment -- though I would prefer, as I suspect they would, that they got the love in their pay-envelopes rather than from mass media. But to say that the MSM is out to make cops look bad is just nuts.

SHORTER JAMES LILEKS: We kicked their asses in the last election, all my pals make fun of them, and yet they persist with their accursed bumperstickers! Ooh, I will parse them, parse them good, the goddamn godless... don't get the wrong idea about me, I'm a tolerant guy... come on out, you atheist whore, so I can spit blessings in your face... here's my videogame! Bye!

HEAD IN THE CLOUDS. I'm getting a little tired of Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point was a neat little book, taken in the narrow context of marketing analysis, but his book-reading for the New Yorker mostly demonstrates how limited his POV is when applied to just about anything else.

For example, last year he suggested -- using a psych paper about successful survivors of child abuse, The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit, and other such data -- that trauma isn't really that big a deal, that in most cases "our psychological immune system[s] will kick in and take away the sting of adversity." On its face this seems an unremarkably homey finding, but Gladwell made so much of our ability to soldier on in the face of horrors that a careful reader would eventually wonder why he thought it worth writing about. The answer, of course, is that in our pyschological age we talk so much about trauma and its effects that a fellow who comes around and says, look, it's not as bad as all that -- especially if he uses scholarly and literary sources -- seems to be bucking some sort of tide. When faced with the overwhelming task of processing and sorting out all the various categories of human suffering that our very advanced information-gathering has revealed to us, it may be soothing to hear an intellectual version of Quitcher Bitchin'.

Now Gladwell works his happy-chappy contrarian angle on the subject of our under-edumacated children. Taking off from Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good for You, he says that the kids' preference for video games and TV over book-learning is OK, because pop culture exercises a certain set of intellectual muscles which, though they are different from the muscles exercised by the study of American History and other such old-timey disciplines, are valid and worth strengthening. "Being 'smart' involves facility in both kinds of thinking -- the kind of fluid problem solving that matters in things like video games and I.Q. tests, but also the kind of crystallized knowledge that comes from explicit learning," Gladwell says, and while he admits that the latter sort of learning might at present be somewhat neglected, he is much more concerned with our inability to see the riches that the former kind might yield.

What Gladwell fails to mention is what specifically is gained by video-game learning, and what is lost in the neglect of what he calls "explicit" learning -- which category of knowledge he somewhat unfairly attaches to the Gradgrindian more-school-less-recess mandates of some modern educational policies. He seems to think that gaming and TV-watching provide some sort of information-absorption and problem-solving skills:

To watch an episode of “Dallas” today is to be stunned by its glacial pace -- by the arduous attempts to establish social relationships, by the excruciating simplicity of the plotline, by how obvious it was. A single episode of “The Sopranos,” by contrast, might follow five narrative threads, involving a dozen characters who weave in and out of the plot...

...[In gaming] players are required to manage a dizzying array of information and options. The game presents the player with a series of puzzles, and you can’t succeed at the game simply by solving the puzzles one at a time. You have to craft a longer-term strategy, in order to juggle and coördinate competing interests...

For what sort of future does this training fit young minds? Perhaps the jobs of CEO and General; but, and I hate to break it to parents, very few of our children are going to get those jobs. In general, the training gleaned from gaming and watching TV shows prepares most of us for more gaming and more watching of TV shows. In this regard we may say our children are well-, perhaps over-educated.

Though I cannot speak to the aesthetics of Doom and Grand Theft Auto, I will say that, much as I love The Sopranos, complicated plotting is the least of its excellencies; and that, while the ability to follow multiple story lines may be admirable and perhaps useful, it would better suit a young person to learn how to tie various story threads into an analysis, a skill that far predates the digital video disc.

It has been my experience as a remedial English tutor that even the brightest students are undertrained in, and often unaware of, the simplest analytic tools -- including grammar, sentence structure, and outlining. These are not nearly so easy to absorb as the skills Gladwell values, but the fact that he can make himself clear in essay form shows that he has himself mastered them, which makes it rather disturbing to me that he seems not to care much that we make so little effort to wrench our kids away from their entertainment modules long enough to learn how to diagram a sentence or tie three supporting details to a main idea.

We are all futurists nowadays, and it is to be expected that the author of The Tipping Point would hope to find some bright, positive New Paradigm in the video obsessions of our young people. But it is a stubborn fact that some sorts of machinery, greasy and earth-bound as they may seem, are yet necessary to our progress, and that this goes for intellectual as well as physical realities. If we don't teach our young citizens to think rather than merely process information, all the video-savvy in the world isn't going to save their sorry asses. As seductive as the Information Age fantasy is, we will never be a nation of managers, magically summoning prosperity with our Blackberrys, without something to manage. Something has to be created first. And to create we need tools. Noun-verb agreement is to my mind a good start. You can do your part by collaring some young ruffian and making him or her learn it.

A BRIEF BUT, AS ALWAYS, AMUSING STROLL AROUND THE BLOGOSPHERE: "If you're like me you see the beatified Che Guevara as a mirage in the desert that is the fashionable Left's conception of human nature." -- Jeremy of Who Knew?

That's really very funny on several levels, but it should be mentioned that there is no "fashionable Left." The new thing is to care passionately, and be right-wing, and to call every Lebanese woman in your camera "babe." (Did you know that the word "snapshot" was originally a hunting term?)

If this gruel is too thin for you, you might go a few degrees further right to Redstate.org, where we learn that man-on-boy action isn't so very bad when performed by a Republican like Spokane mayor Jim West:

Moreover, if, as his legislative record indicates, West is worried about teens having consensual sex with each other, and gays having access to youth at work, it could be seen as skating too close to the edge of hypocrisy that he was seeking out a supposed teen (admittedly, one who clained he was turning adult, or 18, in March) in a gay online forum, and offering inducements including an internship.

"Could be seen as skating too close to the edge of hypocrisy"! A very tolerant attitude, I must say. Of course, this toleration vanishes in comments, as the topic turns to homosexuals who are not Republican officeholders ("Replace 'homosexual' with 'incestuous' or 'pederast.' Now, should we 'tolerate' incest and pederasty?" "Look, I don't 'hate' homosexuals - I think a much better job should be done of educating people to the dangers of homosexuality" etc).

The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

UPDATE. Jeremy asks in comments, what's so funny? Respectfully submitted, respectfully answered:

1.) Any sentence that begins "If you're like me," and is neither ironically meant nor testimonial advertising copy, is prima facie hilarious.

2.) Che Guevara = a mirage in the desert? I guess that means we liberals are crackbrained sufferers from heat stroke, running blindly and desperately toward Che Guevara, who looks to us like Paul Wellstone holding a bottle of cold, cruelty-free soy milk, only to trip over our Birkenstocks in the sand, while Jeremy and his whatever-they-ares are driving alongside us in air-conditioned Hummers, drinking out of Evian bottles and pointing and laughing.

3.) The fashionable Left! "Omigod! Is that the new Nicole Miller hacky-sack?" Besides, I heard we were all Out of Touch with America, which is not fashionable at all.

4.) Better yet, the fashionable Left's conception of human nature! Here Jeremy has us to the life. We stand in a large, white space, striking fashionably thoughtful poses, and after a suitably Pinteresque pause (Pinter hates America, like us; that's why we use his pauses instead of, say, Neil Simon's) one fellow-traveler (a person of color! Can't forget the diversity) announces, "Human nature -- isn't there some way we can tax it?" And the rest of us go "Word to your Mom" and nod in that really annoying way.

I could go on but I may be overthinking this just a bit.

MORAL RELATIVISTS. You want to know how they do it? Here's a good example. A Wall Street Journal writer looks at some confusion over CDC figures concerning obesity and mortality. His conclusion: no one really knows if being fat is bad for you. In fact, no one really knows much of anything -- not when it comes to the dark arts of medicine and climatology:

This is confusing--and that's the point. Science, of its nature, is always confusing. Medicine is uncertain. But public-policy formation in the U.S., especially as concerns health policy or the environment, whether obesity or the melting of the polar ice caps, admits to very little confusion. We claim to know. But in fact we usually don't know.

Contrast the approach of this WSJ guy, Daniel Henninger, with a different sort of assessment of the same basic data: Thomas Maguire takes the few extra steps needed to reveal that the statistical blips do not prove that packing on the pounds is a risk-free activity. The rest of us may come to similar conclusions using what our ancestors called common sense, paired with our powers of observation.

But for conservative functionaries such as Henninger, doing his bit to further the antiEnlightenment, the grey areas of scientific enquiry are proof that science is, after all, just guesswork, no more valid than your guesses or mine if it comes to that, so that the science community's consensus on, say, global warming can be easily ignored if your spritual or political leaders require it of you.

This attitude has long been in effect further down the food chain, of course -- as in this Washington Times laugher, in which evolution is referred to by its old name of Darwinism -- not an institution, after all, but just the ditherings of one guy who was not Jesus! If some folk prefer to "use a little imagination" on behalf of Intelligent Design, who are the labcoats to squawk? But now that the prestigious Journal has taken it up, we may note a change in the weather, so to speak. You're either with them or against them, as always, whether they're right or wrong -- but now, even if you know what you're talking about and they don't have the slightest fucking clue, "against them" is still the wrong place to be -- maybe even more wrong than ever.

SELECTED SHORTS. Saw a few movies:

The Red Violin. This Girard is an odd duck. If I hadn't seen Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould I would have expected something like Diva. Well, while The Red Violin is episodic, it's also got a big old McGuffin to pull you through: artistic inspiration as a barrier-breaking, life-changing motive-force. Plenty of other movies have worked this side of the street -- Lust for Life, Quills, Dr. Zhivago, etc. But using the violin and its sad backstory instead of a single artist-hero makes the trick a little dicier. It's easier to identify with the madness of Kirk Douglas than to imagine oneself risking the wrath of Maoist thugs for the music of John Corigliano. But I was impressed by the clever and highly specific takes on historical eras, especially the opium-addled British Romantics. And I wonder why Sam Jackson doesn't do more roles like this where he can, you know, act. Because he's very good at it.

Wag The Dog. Speaking as a jaded roue myself, I admired the unshakable cynicism, which has given the film life past its heyday as a Clinton joke. I didn't like DeNiro's performance. I'm sick of seeing him tuck the corners of his mouth, especially since watching him do it in that wretched Scorsese ad for American Express; it's become his personal Del Sarte schtick for "I don't know how to handle this emotion, folks." Wasn't Ron Silver available? Dustin Hoffman is more the thing. There's a man comfortable with his solipsism! Props also to Woody Harrelson, who made me think of Thurber's "The Greatest Man in the World."

Hotel Rwanda. The best thing about it is: no arc. Shit just keeps coming, and Don Cheadle just keeps putting on his nice clothes and taking care of increasingly precarious business. The scenes of horror are suitably appalling, but cleverly titrated so that you don't grow too numb to take them in. The madness seems as if it will never stop, and every un-mad moment is only carved out of it by the righteous will and cunning you have seen expended. By the end, even the money-shot restoration of (some of) Rusesabagina's extended family can't deceive you into thinking that the story is really over -- it merely pauses, in medium-long shot, to acknowledge a moment of grace before the film runs out. It's no shock that Terry George also wrote the relentlessly grim The Boxer, but it is a surprise -- a pleasant one -- that he was again given such a big canvas for so muddy-bleak a vision.