GREETINGS FROM OUR NATION'S CAPITAL. Sorry for the delay in posting, but for this year's edition of Edroso Faces Mortality, budget considerations have forced me to take lodging at a Days Inn in Arlington, VA, which does not have computers available for use by guests. I'm entering this from a clinic waiting room at the National Institutes of Health, Building 10, where I am about to have something called a Dopamine Test. I'm not sure what it is but it sounds bad. Of course, one time they pumped me full of glucagon to make my heart race, then pumped me full of clonidine to slow it down, so this could hardly be worse, unless it involves a catheter. I hate those things. (Last time one of the doctors wanted to give me a test in which a camera -- a very small one, I was assured -- would be sent up my urethra. They couldn't get an anaesthesiologist, so this guy wanted to just do a local and go on ahead. Though a mere layman, I surmised that cramming a camera up my cock with nothing but a little Campho-Phenique to dull the pain was something to be avoided at all costs, and promised to get it done by my own doctors as soon as I got back home. (I still haven't, though. You rush to schedule such a procedure for yourself!)

I have so far had the usual revolting solutions, injections, and scans, but also a bit of liberty. Some of it I have spent traipsing the Mall. The high point so far, not likely to be topped, is the "Cezanne in Provence" show at the National Gallery. I'm not only ignorant but pig-ignorant of Cezanne, but I think this show, despite the absence of didactic signage, taught me a lot about him. The show is mostly landscapes, ranging from youthful effulgences like the Chestnut Tree and Basin at the Jas de Bouffan (in which a stunning lake of peach signifies the sunlit portion of a dirt path) to the severe abstractions of his old age. (A quote by Cezanne implies that deterioration of his eyesight enforced this approach -- he seems to have been resigned about it. Has someone written about the effect of optical disorders on great artists? I still remember an old medical ad that asked whether El Greco painted as he did because he was a genius or because he had astigmatism.) It was wonderful to see how many ways he could make foliage -- dabs, diagonal streaks, little impasto'd chips. Maybe because I'm simple-minded, it never ceases to amaze me that some little dark-green line in a pale-lime cloud of oil can make such an obvious mass of leaves, or that the table in The Cardplayers, which I took completely at face value for two minutes, is just a mass of burnt umber. This is mastery as observed by the children it makes of us.

Nuclear Medicine has paged me. More later.

THIS IS WHY I TRY TO SLEEP IN ON SUNDAYS. On "Meet the Press" I saw a clip of President Bush delivering an oration with that fervency and straight-forwardness that his supporters love and which we have not seen in a while. He was defending Donald Rumsfeld. No wonder Bush is polling so low. When he defends the Iraq experiment he sounds like he's reading boilerplate, but he gets all hot talking about Donald Rumsfeld.

Then Mike Leavitt from Health & Human Services came on "The McLaughlin Group" to tell us that the problem with U.S. health care is that too many people are getting sick.

Speaking of health care, posting may be light over the next week as I am off to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD to submit myself for examination pertaining to my mutant tumor-suppressor gene. Ah, well, it could be worse.

AND DON'T GET ME STARTED ON LITTLE DOT. I love the internet! How else would I have learned this breaking news about my dear old childhood friend Baby Huey:

Plans are now afoot to bring Huey back a la "Barney and Friends" in a live-action children's program. He recently appeared in a direct-to-video feature "Baby Huey's Great Easter Adventure" and also appears on Fox Family Channel's "The Harveytoon Show" and in "The Harvey Magazine."

When I was a child I took Baby Huey in stride, but now I realize that I was taking pleasure in the antics of a giant, retarded cartoon duck. With his primitive speech ("Duh-uh, he play good!"), his sudden, tearful rages, and his troubled family relations ("Huey's impatient and ill-tempered Papa usually finds himself at the receiving end of Baby's well-intended gestures," spins the Harvey website), Huey could keep a clinician occupied for years. And he wore a diaper! What could be more politically incorrect? Suck Harvey Comic dick, South Parkers!

Bonus points: the Baby Huey movie was directed by Stephen "Flounder" Furst, stars Maureen McCormick, Joseph Bologna, and Tiffany Taubman as Li'l Audrey, and draws this lovely IMDB comment:

Quite admittedly, this isn't the best movie in the world. But the fact that it's so camp-ish makes it better than if it had seemed terribly serious in nature. Then again, the only reason I have seen this movie so many times is that I am such a huge fan of David L. Lander (who is positively adorable here), and the inclusion of other classic TV stars is fun (if not a little sad that this is the best material some of them can get). My sister said of this movie after watching it, "It's bad, but in a good way." Very true. I love most of the music in here (but try not to laugh at a giant baby duck singing a heart-felt song about not belonging anywhere)...

Now I know what to pair with They Call Me Bruce at my next big double-feature party, assuming Netflix gets on the fucking ball.

Plus which, if there's any market for this at all, I'm sure Harvey will go for my proposed Cursin' Curtis, the Mongoose with Tourette's Syndrome™:



It's little more than a concept now, but with the help of David Mamet I think we might just have something.

'E KNEW ALL THE TRICKS... DRAMATIC IRONY, METAPHOR, BATHOS... Who can take Taranto (who can take Taranto!) and semioticize (semioticize!) until the room is piled with bullshit right up to your eyes... here's Jeff Goldstein on traitors (that's you, me, and us):

Which is to say, in the absense of some provable metaphysical Truth, many in the media or on the anti-war left (and right) have come to believe that there is a relativity to truth that justifies the use of rhetoric and persuasion in any way necessary to reach the desired end of convincing the public of the rectitude of their particular narrative.

In other words, liberals stick up for themselves because they're depraved. Rhetoric and persuasion -- the last refuge of a scoundrel!

(We often use mockery, too. Not that Goldstein would notice.)

SHORTER JIM LILEKS: Dance critics don't know as much about dance as right-wing radio hosts do. What, you think I'm some kind of puritan? I went to a museum today!

AND I SWEAR THAT I DON'T HAVE A GUN. As a qualified fan of the Second Amendment, I'm always surprised when gun nuts turn to New York as an arena for their obsessions. It's about the crappiest 2A argument imaginable: Our City's famous crime drop was largely based on confiscation of guns. And isn't social utility -- "an armed society is a polite society" -- the strongest, or at least the most popular, argument those guys have?

Thus I am pleased to hear of the great gun giveback in New Orleans, mandated by an NRA lawsuit, and some of the humorous details pertaining thereunto:

Some gun owners found the weapons were evidence in a crime and not eligible for release. Others did not have the proper paperwork...

Police Superintendent Warren Riley said police had legitimate reasons for confiscating weapons.

"We took guns that were stolen that were stashed in alleyways. If we went into an abandoned house and a gun was there, absolutely we took the weapons," he said. "Obviously there were looters out there. We didn't want some burglar or looter to have an opportunity to arm themselves."

All due respect to those who reflexively question police motives in witholding firearms, but I applaud the officers' reticence. In civil society, where you and I presumably live, a gun is usually not diddy's shootin' arn mounted over the fireplace, nor an exact equivalent of speech, but a portable deadly weapon obtained with a view toward use. Lord knows that in a semi-lawless jurisdiction, good people may wish to have them, and I would like to see them better able to do so, but I also see no earthly reason why they should not be required to own up to their possession.

So I'm not a purist. At least I'm not as anti-gun as Ronald Reagan.

FIRST AMENDMENT "USE IT AND LOSE IT" ARGUMENT OF THE WEEK: Christopher "Glug Glug" Hitchens, talking about the Plame case at Hugh Hewitt:

There's been a terrible collapse of, and surrender of, the 1st Amendment in the last few years, and it's very largely the fault of a press that's lost all sense of proportion in its determination to get Karl Rove.

There is no zeal like that of a convert, but I'm amazed that anyone as proud of his intellect as Hitchens would be willing to mouth stark absurdities such as this on the radio. I guess he figured that, on Hewitt's show, no one would notice.

CHINA SYNDROME. Chinese President Hu Jintao has come to see President Bush. He stopped off in Seattle first:

Mr Hu was all business at the start of his tour. Dinner at Bill Gates' house in Seattle, followed by a cafe latte with Howard Schultz, chairman of the Starbucks chain of coffee shops, then on to the Boeing plant, before moving to the east coast, with an itinerary that includes a speech at Mr Bush's alma mater, Yale.

This is not surprising. China is our valued business partner. Per this interesting story in China's People's Daily,

In 2005, bilateral trade between China and the United States rose to 211.63 billion U.S. dollars, an increase of more than 86 times over 1979, when the two countries established diplomatic relations.

China has become the third largest trading partner and the fourth largest export market for the United States, which in turn, is now China's second largest trading partner, with bilateral trade rising 27.4 percent annually between 2001 and 2005.

"Bilateral trade" is a polite term. "...in 2005, China's surplus with the United States surged more than 43 percent, to a record $114.7 billion, compared with $80 billion the prior year and $28 billion in 2001," reports the New York Times via CFO magazine. China sends us goods and services, made cheap by their gigantic and modestly-paid workforce, and we send them lots and lots of dollars.

This is not the sort of thing that roils conservatives much anymore, though a few get a little more exercised about Google, which a few days ago pathetically excused the censored version of its product it has exported for use in China. "It is not an option for us to broadly make information available that is illegal, inappropriate or immoral or what have you," said Google's Eric Schmidt.

One almost wishes he'd said, "Murdoch did it first." (And still does.) But Murdoch and Schmidt are not the only ones who cross a rather muddy culture gap to grab market share in China; while clothing wholesalers do not generally deal with censorship issues, they do benefit from the Chinese approach to labor relations.

As, one may say, we all do. We perhaps fear what might happen to our economy if we applied to our trading partners the sort of rigorous behavioral standards we occasionally, and selectively, apply to Arab dictatorships. Of course, it may be that we have reasons to fear in any case. But we ease our consciences a bit with the thought that it is not our decision in any case, but that of our business classes and their political enablers, who long ago won an argument about the primacy of the free market, and so have been allowed to work their will in he world unobstructed by noisome regulations, or even a second thought.

UPDATE. They seem to come up every time the President meets with folks like Hu: fantasies that our government will send a "message" to the tyrants -- a pro-democracy one, that is, rather than "Keep them cheap shirts and blouses a-comin'!" Are these fantasists trying to fool other people, or themselves? I could spend a lot of time wondering, if I had time to spend.

WHAT I WAS DOING 17 YEARS AGO. Found on YouTube:

Clearly things went downhill after that.

I don't know the etiquette of these things, but I have to thank EuckyCheese for getting this out in the open.

MULTIPLE PULITZER-PRIZE LOSERS SPEAK! This year's Pulitzer Prize winners are traitors, complain many conservatives in no danger of ever winning one (some of whom take time to graphically demonstrate why.)

Others complain that Pulitzer laureates are insufficiently respectful of powerful Republicans. "We'll have more to say about this year's Pulitzers as time goes by," darkly mutter the guys from Power Line, whose Time Blog of 2004 award must be looking awful lonely on the mantlepiece these days.

You hear it every year. It is a mystery. They brag constantly on the superiority of that alternate universe they call the blogosphere, yet piss and moan about the Pulitzers as if Joseph P. personally broke their prom date.

As usual here at this hardcore libertarian blog, my solution is market-based: Why don't these whiners just set up their own journamalism awards? They could call them the Coughlins.

OLD, YES. BURNED-OUT, YES. BUT I CAN TELL YOU THAT THE MEMORIES ARE STILL THERE. Hey look, Spencer Tracy's speech from the end of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner has been published on the web! It's even longer and more tedious than I remember. The faux-crusty attempt to show what a good, tolerant liberal he is -- man, that hasn't aged well at all. Some of the lines surprise me -- "The anti-Americanism now infecting so much left-liberal (and some conservative) thinking" I don't quite recall, but maybe he was thinking of the kids who embarrassed him at the drive-through or something.

Anyway it doesn't play as well on the page as on the stage, but I'm sure we'll see plenty of public readings of this hooey in the near future. With such muscular liberals as Michael Ledeen supporting it, it's sure to be a big hit among the blogeoisie.

SHORTER ROSS DOUTHAT: I'll still jerk off to Jennifer Aniston, but it won't be the same.

I HAD TO GIVE MYSELF AN EMERGENCY BAPTISM WITH BEER. Sister Mary Anchoress has hiked up her habit and hopped on that South Park bandwagon. Good news, Catholic-school classmates: pooping on Jesus is a-ok with the penguin if it makes the Anchoress look tolerant:

The “pooping” was designed, I’m sure, to see if some of the religious and right-winged folks who lionized the series last week (like me) would pop blood vessels this week - these Libertarian boys are still sly enough to make sure they push the right buttons! But I think they didn’t give folks on the right, and some religious folk, enough credit. We’re not babies, and we don’t spend all of our time crying victim and carrying on about “hurtful” messages and “mean-spirited” words. That’s a different gang of folk...

Different gang of folk? Does she mean the one that helped her write the first part of the same post?

(Please note: Comedy Central is owned by Viacom, which also owns MTV, which is doing THIS because it’s okay to mock Catholics and the Crucifixion. They don’t pose a threat.)

The THIS that riles the Anchoress is a "full-page advertisements depicting Jesus, wearing a crown of thorns but descended from the cross, enjoying a television program."

So right after bitching and moaning, she says her kind doesn't bitch and moan. Maybe ecstatic visions are affecting her short-term memory.

Coming next: the War on Whitsuntide!

UPDATE. Why do I get the impression that these people don't actually laugh at South Park? From the stiff way they write about it, they seem not to enjoy its jokes per se. If your reaction to a cartoon is, "Me, I was just happy to see someone, anyone, in the pop culture world confront some of the fundamental issues raised by the Cartoon Jihad for a mainstream American audience," I wouldn't consider that a rave. (Raving, maybe.) Is everything politics to them?

UPDATE II. I suppose I needn't link to the millions of extant examples of Catholics being all free-speechy and unwhiney, but this one is just too appropriate.

WHO THREW THE IMMIGRANTS IN PEGGY NOONAN'S CHOWDER? PARTE DOS.

One night [after 9/11], about 11 p.m., I was walking home with friends, going north on the wide, dark highway, and we came upon a woman, a thick middle-aged woman, dark skinned and dark haired. She was with a baby in a stroller. She was, I think, not the mother but the grandmother. They were there alone, in the darkness. Affixed to the stroller was a hand-lettered sign, and on the sign were these words: "American You Are Not Alone -- Mexico Is With You." All alone and she came out with that sign, at that time. I have tried to tell that story in speeches and I can never make my way through it, and as I write my eyes fill with tears...

...of laughter, Peggy? Please say they were tears of laughter, provoked by the sight of new Mexican ambassador Juanita la Loca, offering America the protection of Mexico, and perhaps a bag of peeled oranges!

No, the Crazy Jesus Lady is still Crazy and Jesus and Lady, and now she's on about immigrants, in this case Hispanics who recently marched gleefully in New York while other ethnic stereotypes labored:

In fact, I did not see a single Asian in the march. They were all working, in the shops and on the street. They had no intention of letting yet another New York march get in the way of business. And you know, the marchers seemed to sense it. They didn't spend long in Chinatown. As far as I could see they didn't make it to Little Italy, either.

Actually I understand the Italians didn't march because they were all in jail. Or was it church? I do remember that the blacks were washing their cars -- oh wait, shit! That was the Puerto Ricans!* How did this march ever get started?

In the main CJL wants to tell us Routine Twelve, aka The Responsible Republican Position That Is No Position at All: "I think those whose primary concern is preserving the Hispanic vote for the Democratic Party, or not losing the Hispanic vote for the Republican Party, are being cynical, selfish, and stupid, too." The solution being a furrowed brow, an insistence on "continuing a system of laws" (which has obviously not worked and thus means the status quo), and another round of Johnny Jameson.

Things were no different in the days of Pegeen's immigrant forebears, as is shown by a recent black-and-white two-reeler that has mysteriously come into my possession:

East Side, New York. Someone plays "She's the Daughter of Rosie O'Grady" on a concertina. Camera pans up from kids playing skelly and stickball in the streets, along the blackened bricks of a tenement, to the window of the Noonans' two-room apartment. We enter as PA NOONAN holds forth to MA NOONAN and their brood of 19 children:

PA NOONAN: Can yez believe it! They're givin' our jobs t'a doorty Eye-talians! An' thim livin' roight down oor strait! Ha, but tonight -- (Holds a paving stone in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other) we'll giv 'em a party, complete wit' Oirish confetti! (Drinks deeply).

MA NOONAN: (Eyes rolled back in her head) Yerra, 'tis a power o' sorrow surely! Holy Mary, mither a' Gawd, pray fer us sinners...

(Six babies cry at once. MOIKE, a fellow-bricklayer of PA NOONAN's, comes into the apartment.)

PA NOONAN: Moike, ye stink loik a brewery, ye doorty beast!

MOIKE: Is it me, is it? I t'aught it was a diaper. (Quietly) I'm after sendin' the guns to Michael Collins an' the' boys. Sure an' Oirlan' will be a Republic afore Spring, I'm t'inkin, if we spill enough innocent blood! Here's yer cut o' the loot. (hands him money.)

PA NOONAN: Saints be praised! Now I c'n buy more whiskey! An' git Thomas Nast t' do me por-trait!

MA NOONAN: Now, Pa Noonan, ye should lay that money up. We c'n be good citizens now, I'm thinkin', an' be Senators and Presidents and maybe even socially-conscious fellas as sings on th' grammaphone.

MOIKE: (pointing out the window) Look, Pat! Chinkees!

PA NOONAN: (runs to window, roaring) Ye yella bastards'll niver take jobs from proper Americans such as oursilvs!

(They heave everything but the money and the whiskey out the window as the music swells.)

* It is well-established, of course, that the Polish thought it was Sunday.

CULTURE WAR FOR DUMMIES. Here's a complaint at The Corner that an advertising campaign for a bank is "warm-and-fuzzy liberal hocus-pocus." The parody version that follows defies rational analysis.

UPDATE. The item has been pulled and updated since I first saw it. In case they pull it again, here's a screenshot.

The new wording is marginally less incendiary, but amazingly they left the parody ad. I doubt that whatever equivalence it is meant to demonstrate could be expressed in words; I suggest the author try interpretive dance.

In other world news, the Ole Perfesser suggests that the MSM is lying to you about Cheney getting booed on Opening Day. Nobody ever yells "Yankees Suck" or "Jeter is a faggot" at Fenway, either -- I mean, you never hear it in the broadcasts.

SHORTER MATT WELCH: So long, suckers!

LONGER ROY EDROSO*: (* That's me, joy-poppers.) With all due respect, Welch has considerable credits as a journalist, and demonstrates keen intelligence on a daily basis, so when he writes something like this reassessment of his 2001 thinking --

“What do warbloggers have in common, that most pundits do not?” I enthused. “I’d say a yen for critical thinking, a sense of humor that actually translates into people laughing out loud, a willingness to engage (and encourage) readers, a hostility to the Culture War and other artifacts of the professionalized left-right split of the 1990s…a readiness to admit error [and] a sense of collegial yet brutal peer review.”

Man, was I wrong.

-- I have to ask: are you 12? Because the blogosphere was observably as big a bunch of bullshit in 2001 as it is now. Many of us who are certainly no smarter than Welch were pretty clear on this as far back as March 2002:

...witness the puffery (self-administered and otherwise) exhibited by the various "war bloggers." These are mostly right-wing operatives who every day spew great clouds of Bush Administration rah-rah (much of it devoted calling Noam Chomsky et alia some variant of "poo-poo head"), heavily scented with plugs for one another's sites and chest-pounding assertions that war blogs have saved America from being overrun by antiwar demonstrators. Therein politics is ostensibly the raison d'etre, but everything at these blogs ultimately devolves into a pissing contest: What a traitor this guy is! I get more hits than you, you're just jealous! Boy, that Rachael Klein is a dish!

(Rachael Klein, some of you may remember, was a Berkeley sex columnist whose work was sometimes used by internet dorks when they wished to portray themselves as fun-loving regular guys.)

I mean, was it not obvious to anyone who had attained a Deep South age of consent that the big names of the scene -- Den Beste, Reynolds, Goldberg, and so forth -- were posturing blowhards whose collective lack of talent was in a perpetual race to the bottom with their collective lack of common sense?

Remember crap like this?:

The only thing that would even remotely mollify American Jacksonians would be a clear indication that the people of France and Germany had themselves repudiated the leaders responsible for this. If French and German voters clearly indicate that they hate what happened, and dump all of the leaders responsible, and put a lot of them in jail, and if the new governments there clearly state that those who did it were indeed renegades, and apologize, then America's Jacksonians would then permit relations at a somewhat cooler level to continue.

Ngnnyah. And some people thought he was "the Thomas Paine of our age."

In times of high stress (like right after a massive terrorist attack), these guys sometimes expressed thoughts and feelings that were similar to those experienced by intelligent people. This did not make them intelligent.

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad the genuinely talented Welch has found a job in one of those squaresville MSM outlets, where he will presumably be recompensed for his loss of cred with cash. And when it comes to disillusionment, better late than never. But I still don't get how smart people (along with the bazillions of fools) got taken in by this scam. Hell, even when I was taking Internet Bubble money, I kept wondering when I was going to get caught.

OUTTA TRACTION, BACK IN ACTION. Thanks a lot to everyone who responded to my previous post about Mom. The death of a parent can make a person re-examine his value system. I'm not sure I can get too interested anymore in the puerilities that were once the stock in trade of this website. Maybe I should devote more of my time to holy shit a National Review nerd talking about Kids Today!

Torino's Winter Olympics showed what's the matter with kids: Many are rude, narcissistic, and spoiled to the gills.

Man, NatRev has long lead times! Maybe I should send them my review of Brokeback Mountain.

The Olympics once represented the best of America's best man- and maidenhood. Bob Richards: reverend and decatholoner. Rafer Johnson: sprinter and pioneer. Peggy Flemming: girl next door. Each etched deference, teamwork, and stoic heroism -- we, not me.

Three solo-event athletes offered as examples of "teamwork"! Long lead times and no editors!

Long story short, some Winter Olympians fucked up and the reason is a "culture... as toxic as Love Canal" in which "Self-esteem trumps the Golden Rule" and "Obscenity floods film." "By contrast," says the author, Curt Smith, at his own website, "Nixon's still The One -- the most enduring American of our time." He may have shit on the Constitution, but he never once grabbed his crotch.

I expand my thanks to include such purveyors of low-hanging fruitiness, for reminding me that it's always Crappy Hour somewhere. Like Mom used to say: "What is he, stupid?"

THE FACTORY GIRL. She was born in 1922 in Hartford, Connecticut. Her family moved to Canada when she was young. We never quite got why, nor do we know why at age 15 she left her family to live with her Aunt Jo in Bridgeport. Evelyn didn’t like to talk about her past. We figured she had her reasons.

But she did come to Bridgeport, which was then a factory town full of jobs. Though Evelyn had only an eighth-grade education, she actually found work as a payroll clerk at Harvey Hubbel and then IGA Rubber, I think. It is easy to imagine her among the thousands clocking out at 5 pm of a weekday, walking with the crowd from the industrial district near the Housatonic River up to Main Street. Some days I suppose she grabbed a bus; on nice days maybe she walked home to Aunt Jo’s. I’m sure sometimes she stopped at Sol’s for a drink with friends. People liked her. She had the sweetness that often comes out of hurt.

She was 34 before she trusted a man enough to marry him. He was a handsome fellow with brown eyes and tightly-waved hair – I bet some of her girlfriends called him a greaser. He was about Evelyn’s age, and had been to the war, and then had knocked around Bridgeport at different jobs without ever really lighting on a career. His own father had a little success, but the son didn’t seem to have the same drive, or luck. Still, he was a good man, he worked hard, he dressed nicely, and he had a beautiful smile. They married, and quickly had a son.

They moved to a little house on the North End. They had a daughter, and I believe that was just what they wanted: a little boy and a little girl. Maybe that was when she was happy.

Evelyn stayed home while her husband worked, or looked for work. She got pregnant again. Her husband got a job driving trucks for General Electric. On his days off he re-sided their little house, worked in the little yard. He’d always worked hard, but now he seemed to work harder than ever, sweating more than a man should. One night he got up to go to the bathroom and it was only a few steps from their bed to the toilet but he couldn’t make it. He fell like a tree, and she couldn’t get him up.

Evelyn took her children to the funeral. She sat with them as her husband’s relatives came to the house and took food from the kitchen table and tools from her husband’s basement workbench. Her baby was stillborn. They dug up the cemetary plot, a little coffin was placed on the coffin of her husband, and the dirt was poured back into the hole.

Evelyn made sure that her living children were alright. She enrolled them in St. Patrick’s, a working-class Catholic grammar school with separate entrances for boys and girls, an asphalt recess yard, and nuns. She car-pooled with other parents to bring them to and from school. Every day she fed her children three meals appropriate to what she had been taught about nutrition. Each dinner contained one portion of meat, one portion of starch, and one vegetable. Sometimes she included a little bowl of salad. "Eat your salad," she told her children. "It digests your food."

Her children were different from other children: less secure, easier to tease. The best Evelyn knew to do for them was to make sure they had nothing to be ashamed of. She dressed them meticulously, and made God-damned sure that they did their homework and minded their manners. Adults appreciated this more than children did, but at least her kids knew they were right about something, and that helped them, to a greater or lesser degree, through their days.

While her children were at school Evelyn cleaned her house methodically, vacuuming the curtains, standing on chairs to dust the cabinets, pushing her mop deep into every corner and twisting it fiercely. She was still cleaning when her children got home. They heard her iron hiss and fizz as she worked it into the ironing table she had set up in the living room, as sunlight streamed through the little rectangular windows of the side door. They watched her mend clothes on a Singer sewing machine in the kitchen, and heard the dark hum of the motor when she pushed the plastic lever with her knee. And they saw her rubbing her skull at the kitchen table every month as she studied the bills.

She always managed. When her husband’s Social Security and Veterans’ Administration benefits weren’t going to make it, Evelyn worked part-time at some of the places that had employed her when she was a single girl. She didn’t take the bus or walk now, though; she drove; downtown Bridgeport had become lawless and scary. She didn’t stop at Sol’s for a drink either. She would have her drink on weekends, when old friends would come to her house and sit at her kitchen table and drink and play pinochle and sing old songs. Or she would have it at night, when the kids were in bed, and listen to sad country music on the record player. I don’t know where she picked up country music, but it seemed to suit her.

Her children got restless and talked back sometimes, but they never became bad kids, nor bad adults. The daughter lived with own family down the road; the son went to New York, and didn’t visit as often as Evelyn liked. The house was always clean. Friends came over sometimes with bottles and chips, and Evelyn took pleasure from that until the friends either died off or couldn’t get around much any more.

By then she couldn’t get around too well either. Her daughter visited often, cooking for her when she couldn’t handle it herself, and finally taking her into her own home. Evelyn’s son started coming to see her more frequently, but there was not much time left. And then time was gone.

Not all the gaps in this story are due to interests of space. There is a lot I don’t know about her. As I said, she didn’t like to talk about the past. I have just a few facts to work with, and some of them are shaky. The only thing that I am quite sure of is that she loved my sister and me. It may be the only thing in the world that I am sure of.

Here is a strange thing about that: I thought that when she died I would feel, besides the obvious sorrow, a very specific loss, the loss of her love. But I don’t feel that. I guess her love for us is something that has a life outside of hers. She had made it with her own hands, and she built it, as they used to build things in those old factory days, to last.

Good job, Evelyn.

SERVICE ADVISORY. Family business; posting will be infrequent till further notice. The blogs in the left margin (the ones that still work, anyway) are good company.

90-PERCENTER.

Drudge's expose of a wacko environmentalist looking forward to the end of humanity through massive plagues was telling to me. In the long run, right-wing fundamentalism and left-wing fundamentalism end up in the same place.

This is so wrong in so many ways that only Andrew Sullivan could have come up with it.

First of all, Professor Pianka's notion that (per the source) "the Earth would be better off with 90 percent of the human population dead" is one that any intelligent human being will understand and, at times, share. Don't you bright young things feel this way at least occasionally? No? Well, read more English literature, then.

Misanthropy aside, Sullivan attributes without evidence a "left-wing" political POV to a single, eccentic herpetologist, and uses him to demonstrate an equivalence between "left-wing fundamentalism" and the millions of Fundamentalist Christians who think that the authority of the U.S. Government is secondary to that of their favorite imaginary beings as interpreted by TV preachers.

Why does Sully-Bear do it? My current guess is that he thinks moderation will come back into fashion and, having ridden the gay-conservative thing into the ground, he wants to stake out his new territory with a lot of pull quotes. (God knows Roger L. Simon and Michael Totten have vacated those premises, if they ever occupied them.) Plaguing both their houses is easy and fun. You can even insist strongly on your own rights as a gay citizen, so long as you also reach out, concerning same-sex matters, to conservatives of good will -- such as Pope Benedict XVI:

Yes, he reiterates the official doctrine about the exclusivity of heterosexuality for the God-given state of matrimony. But the logic of "Deus Caritas Est" can be read to include gay love as well, and lose none of its power.

I picture Rodney King asking "Can't we all get along?" while he's getting his ass beat.