"GOD, YOU'VE MADE A POWERFUL ENEMY." Hugh Hewitt issues a warning to Tom Hanks:

Tom: Careful now. The Saturday Night Live skit was great fun, and the ""It's only a movie," works. The pull quotes from this story do not:

Hanks said objectors to The Da Vinci Code are taking the film too seriously, telling the Evening Standard: "We always knew there would be a segment of society that would not want this movie to be shown....

...It is difficult to use the "it is only a movie" argument when mixed up with "dialogue is good" and "creepy censors want to shut us down" arguments.

The almost universally liked Hanks doesn't need to get into the theological debate that Dan browns likes to fan. Stick to the obvious --it is an absurd piece of invention that makes for a fun thriller-- and all will be well...

...and if ya don't, me and my blogger buddies will write a densely-worded essay about how theatre seats chafe our fat asses.

Many nuggets of comedy gold here. First, the overblown concern over a fucking Ron Howard (syn: stupid) movie; then, the notion that Hewitt can shake the very caliphs of Hollyweird with the force of his blog, a delusion known in the business as Sidney Applebaum Syndrome.

There is also a weird poignance about conservatives who are mesermized by Hollywood. As it is the place they hate most in the world -- more even than Paris, or the human heart -- one would think they would just avoid the subject altogether, as it is obviously irredeemable (at least until Der Tag, when Roger L. Simon is named Minister of Truth) and naught but blight on the land.

Some of them can't keep their hands off, though. Witness John Podhoretz's strange column on "American Idol." I kept waiting for the metaphor, or at least the punch line, to emerge. Finally in horror I realized that John son of Podhoretz, Decrier of Kultur Filth fils, was talking about "American Idol" because he rilly liked "American Idol"; also, that the column wasn't as bad as much of the current, politicized rightwing bunk about TV and movies, because "American Idol" is such a piece of shit that it doesn't qualify as culture, and deserves to be discussed in the debased terms of politics.

It suggests a possible solution to all the conservative culture crap currently stinking up our discourse: let the Medveds and Mathewes-Greens and all other such professional misapprehenders exclusively use sub-cultural objects such as "The Apprentice" and "Herbie: Fully Loaded" as teething rings. As they are capable of seeing, or perhaps fated to see, political portents on every moving object, the specific objects to which their attentions are directed should not matter to them or us.

As the old saying goes, politics is show business for ugly people, and my new corollary is: blogging is politics and show business for the mentally retarded.

MORE CIVILITY DEBATES, PLEASE! I am even more short of time these days than usual, so I have to thank Kathryn J. Lopez for saving me some. I was actually thinking of taking a look at Ramesh Ponnuru's The Party of Death. But this excerpt, quoted by the NRO den mother, made clear to me the folly of that course:

The party of death should not be confused with a conventional political party: It has members (and opponents) within both of America's major political parties, although it is much stronger today among Democrats than Republicans. The party of death has unwitting allies, too, just as it always has. Someone who reluctantly supports euthanasia to spare the dying from further suffering surely does not intend to advance a comprehensive agenda to undermine the protection of human life. Yet that is the effect, however modest, of her support.

We are sometimes told that polite conversation avoids the topics of sex, religion, and poltics. Some would say that a book with this subject matter breaks all three rules. They might go on to worry that calling one side of the debate a "party of death" will raise the temperature still further.

We all have close friends and beloved relatives—I certainly do—who support legal abortion, or euthanasia, or both. Maybe we supported these things ourselves, once. I did. Maybe some readers still do. I hope that this book speaks to them with an honesty that does not seek to wound, but with a love that dares not refuse the truth. If the thought of belonging to a party of death disturbs them, perhaps they can be moved to leave it.

Lopez seems to think that this answers any Sullivanian charges of intolerance against Ponnuru. To her and to Ponnuru I say:

Not all stupid cunts belong to one political party. There are Republican stupid cunts and Democratic stupid cunts, though most stupid cunts, my objective investigation has shown, happen to be Republicans. Indeed, you might be a stupid cunt without thinking yourself one, merely by saying stupid, cuntlike things.

We are sometimes told that polite conversation avoids the term "stupid cunt." Such stupid cunts as think this will naturally charge me with raising the temperature of this debate, the cunts.

We all of us know personally several stupid cunts. Some of us are married to them. Some of us (including myself, I confess) have been a bit stupid and a bit of a cunt on occasion. I got over it, of course, but others persist in being stupid cunts for some reason.

I hope this blog reaches those persistently stupid cunts, and that they understand that I have no desire to wound in calling them stupid cunts, and feel nothing but deep Christian love for every stupid, cuntish one of them. And if they feel badly about me calling them stupid cunts, then they should just stop being such stupid fucking cunts.

UPDATE. This post is dedicated to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

I KNOW YOU ARE, BUT WHAT AM I? I see that in the blogger playground, a bully got a wedgie and his friends cried no fair.

And that's pretty much it.

SLOW TIMES AT PRATT INSTITUTE. Terry Zwigoff did very well with Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World, but has a rockier time of it with Clowes' Art School Confidential. The new movie devotes a lot of time to fleshing out a thinly-disguised Pratt Institute. The makers have a strong feel for, and opinions about, the setting, and must have found it great fun to delineate some of the types such places attract. I was encouraged by the arrival scene – there’s the barefoot neo-hippie chick! There’s the beatnik! There’s our hero, Jerome the suburban Picasso manque! – and I would have been satisfied if they just set these stereotypes bouncing off one another with some verve.

Alas, immediately the campus slacker is enlisted to describe more stereotypes, and for the most part the ‘types never get a more vivid reading. That still might have worked. There are worse cinematic failings than glibness. When ASC is fast, it’s fun. Jerome’s failed romantic encounters, and some of the desperate follies of the would-be art stars, give some easy laughs. But there’s not enough energy here to keep the balloon aloft for long.

It may be that Zwigoff and Clowes are too in love with their material. People familiar with this scene – and I have some small knowledge of it -- can sit around in a bar swapping funny horror stories about it for hours, but it’s not enough to hang a movie on unless you can convey some of the insane momentum of dream-maddened people completely devoted to their ego trips and illusions.

Zwigoff moves too slowly for that. He’s not the most high-octane sort of director anyway, but he might also have been weighted down by the grander theme of the film, which has to do with the toxic residue of failed ambition. A few scenes are fully devoted to this, and though they’re even slower than the rest of the movie, they’re much more interesting. Jerome’s visit to Professor Sandiford’s home, with a clenched wife, a scotched deal, and a pathetic monologue ending with a sexual advance, has a nice dank smell of failure about it. Better still are the scenes with Jim Broadbent as the appallingly maudit Baconian lush who becomes Jerome’s confidant, and who sets in motion Jerome’s downfall, or triumph, depending on how you look at it.

They’re good scenes, and another, better movie might have been built out of them. Or the filmmakers could have gone the other way and made American Pie: Art Camp. As it is, we have a failed campus comedy with a few stretches of splendid desolation.

UPDATE. Some morons, of course, think the movie is about politics. But I guess that type never thumps a melon without observing that conservatism made it ripe, or liberalism made it green.

WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE WHITE PEOPLE? If I only read conservative publications, I would imagine myself a very privileged honky indeed, for I would be convinced that all the rest of my people lived in white ghettos and spent their days running gauntlets of racial abuse by the Dark Ones.

But then, these are the same people who go on and on about how homosexuals may one day break bigots' fists with their noses (just the same trick the miscegnators used on Bob Jones, adds historian Stanley Kurtz).

Can't these people just enjoy the many economic, social, and governmental advantages whiteness unfairly confers? I know I do!

AND IF SHE WAS INTO FAT GUYS, THEN I COULD TOTALLY DO THAT THING WHERE I DRAW A MOUTH ON MY STOMACH; AND IF SHE WAS A SIMPSONS FAN, SHE WOULD TOTALLY GET IT AND LAUGH. AND THEN I WOULD MAKE MY MOVE. As usual, this is the stupidest thing ever written, and will remain so until Goldberg writes something else.

"KILLIN' PIGS AIN'T KOSHER, SARGE!" "CAN THE WISE LIP, SLIBBERBERG!" Andrew Klavan wants Hollywood (conservative for "somebody else") to make movies that praise our War Against Whatchamacallit:

We need films like those that were made during World War II, films such as 1943's "Sahara" and "Action in the North Atlantic," or "The Fighting Seabees" and "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," which were released in 1944...

...Though many of these pictures now seem almost hilariously free with racist tirades against "sauerkrauts," and "eyeties" and "Tojo and his bug-eyed monkeys," they were also carefully constructed to display American life at its open-minded and inclusive best.

Every roll call of Hollywood's U.S. troops seems to include a Ragazzi and a Donovan, a Hellenopolis, a Novasky, and a wisecracking Roth. "Sahara" even throws in the black "Mohammedan" Tabul, a Sudanese ally. This may have been corny, but it was also more or less realistic, and it depicted the war as a conflict between our lovably mongrel melting pot and the despicable Axis ideal of racial purity.

I really don't see what the problem is. The Fightin' Keyboarders have a film unit -- put them on the job.

I'll help! I've seen All Through the Night a few times, and have always wanted to work in that genre -- not on some silly modern version, but one in the old-fashioned style.

Okay, you mugs, here's the scenario:

Bugs Johnson, noted intenet wise guy, is taking a stroll around his subdivision with his colorful sidekick, Pixels. Bugs is no better than he should be -- he sells unlicensed assault weapons to local sporting enthusiasts -- but he's a good egg and won't do business with illegal immigrants. "I love this dirty township," he tells Pixels as they head over to the Park and Ride to make a drop.

But out of the 7-11 lurches one of Bugs' customers, "Protein" Goldstein, a curly-bladed dagger sticking out of his back. "Who done this to ya, Protein!" cries Johnson, cradling the man in his arms. Protein holds up five fingers, then expires. "Shalom, Protein," says a visibly moved Bugs. "When ya see Jesus, try not to act too surprised."

Pixels wants to get away fast -- the local security force has Bugs' number and would love to pin the caper on him. But Bugs knows what Protein's gesture was about: "Fifth columnists -- liberals!" He and Pixels dash into the 7-11 to grill the proprietor. "Listen, Gunga Din," cracks Bugs, "either you make with some names or I turn your sacred cow into ground chuck!" In a comical interlude, they spin the man by his turban till he exposes the perpetrator: Makos Mamamakoulis, whose souvlaki stand is actually a front for high internet treason.

Unable to go to the security force, Bugs and Pixels try to convince other local yeggs to help them nail Mamamakoulis.

"Listen, you yeggs," says Bugs, "This feta-munchin' Greek geek and his fellow-travellers are gonna blow this beautiful scam we call America sky-high!"

"Aw, that's baloney, Bugs," says "Crazy Dave" Horowitz, the local school's custodian. "As long as these liberals let me alone -- "

"Ah, but that's just it, Crazy Dave," says Bugs. "They won't let ya alone! They'll tell ya you're crazy, intolerant, and wrong! They'll use statistics, logic, even sarcasm!"

"Sarcasm!" says "Ole Perfesser" Reynolds. "Indeed?"

"Now you're gettin' it, ya hot-blooded Italian!" cries Bugs. "Alright, ya melting pot of mugs! I'm gonna kick me some liberal keyster! Who's with me?"

The crowd swings Bugs' way. "Sure and I'm with ya, me Bucko!" cries Peggy McNoonan, a clog dancer with a heart of gold. "If it's a donnybrook these doorty liberals want, they we'll be givin' it to 'em, yerra!"

"Pour some coffee down McNoonan's throat and let's shake a leg!" cries Bugs, and the gang rushes off to their computer desks...

(Alright, Klavan, ya wiley whatever-you-are -- over to you!)

I MISS RUSSIA. At Tech Central Station, Lee Harris asks "Why Isn't Socialism Dead?" His short answer is that stupid people are stupid and Lee Harris and his buddies are smart. In long form, there is much elaboration on the point that "capitalism is mankind's only rational alternative," and a lengthy analysis of some ancient socialists' theories, though the relevance or popularity of these dead letters among the rabble of Venezuela and Bolivia -- whose support for quasi-socialist states seems to have stimulated Harris' essay -- is not proven here.

Harris concludes that socialism is beyond the reach of capitalist rationalism because socialism is a sort of religion:

...even a hundred proofs of failure are insufficient to wean us from those primordial illusions that we so badly wish to be true. Who doesn't want to see the wicked and the arrogant put in their place? Who among the downtrodden and the dispossessed can fail to be stirred by the promise of a world in which all men are equal, and each has what he needs?

The myth, thus described, does sound familiar and indeed religious, though Marx and Sorel were well behind Jesus Christ in promoting it.

Harris postulates a "myth gap" between socialism and capitalism, and proposes that capitalism produce a "transformative myth of its own." He does not say who would be best suited to this task of myth-production. Maybe he expects the Parallax Corporation to farm the job out to analysts in Bangalore.

He certainly seems unaware that one sort of capitalist myth has been promulgated for over a century by our own entertainment media, via movies, music, glossy magazines, videos, etc., which have offered the world countless enticements to the splendors of a market economy, with resounding success wherever it has been encountered -- or rather, wherever their promise has been even slightly realized by a substantial number of the population; it tends to be less successful in places where the people despair of gaining these blessings by ordinary means, e.g., Venezuela and Bolivia.

Harris' ignorance of this observable reality is perhaps understandable, as modern conservatives are bound by blood-oath to consider the Western media treasonously unhelpful. Besides, it better serves the professional purposes of right-wing pundits to portray themselves as messengers of the capitalist Good News to Modern Man.

They don't seem especially qualified, though. In the same edition of TCS, Harris' colleague Pejman Yousefzadeh talks down the notion that CEOs are criminally overpaid. Shareholders alone should make that decision, he argues, and accuses those who disagree of "scoring... political points by tapping into people's frustration and envy."

Yousefzadeh argues well on capitalist terms, but I doubt his argument will make deep inroads among those whose "frustration and envy" are excited by the ever-escalating profits of global capitalism's top dogs -- especially in a time of rising gas prices. (I don't believe many of the disaffected in this case are students of Marx or Georges Sorel.)

I am in some sympathy with Yousefzadeh. I am no socialist, and I understand his logic, dreary as it is. But in his capitalist calculus he has included no place for the human factor. Yousefzadeh is as convinced as Harris that his way is the only rational one, and expects invocation of the iron law of his philosophy -- to each according to what he can get, from each according to what we can get out of him -- to sate the punters, or at least shoo them away.

For years this has worked fine for them, and may do so for years to come. Here is one reason why I sort of miss the old Soviet Union. They were wrong, of course, but the threat of their existence offered a screen and bank against the predations of capitalism within our own side of the Iron Curtain: so long as the global dominance of capitalism was not a settled matter, even in the Age of Reagan its avatars were compelled to throw the working people of this country a bone every now and then, lest we lose our Cold War resolve. The welfare state was accepted as a necessary evil, and even in hard times we got our government cheese and food stamps and extended unemployment benefits.

Once Russia was reduced to another rapacious capitalist state, though, all bets were off: the Welfare Queen was dethroned, America became a happy hunting ground for consumer loan sharks, and downsizing evolved from a cyclical to a constant threat. Security vanished, productivity rose. The U.S. became what it had been in the Gilded Age: a sandwich of striving pressed between the desperate poor and the arrogant rich.

Between the socialists, whose faith in the people is unshakable, and the capitalists, who faith in themselves is ditto, stand I, equipped only with cynicism. Spiritually it seems by far the best bet.

MY FIRST BLEG. Dear readers: What the fuck?

SIX BLIND MEN OF HINDUSTAN. Remember that wild speech Ned Beatty gave in Network?

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, Reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels...

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today....

Of what or whom does that make you think? Here's what it makes The Anchoress think of:

Then you hear him make his speech, and what seems “familiar” becomes recognizable as the sort of simplistic, happy-talk, one-world rhetoric we hear today, by people like Angelina Jolie and Sheryl Crow and other attendees of things like the World Economic Forum in Davos or the Clinton Global Initiative or folks who shill for the UN on any given day.

This did take me by surprise at first -- Arthur Jensen makes her think of Angelina Jolie? -- but eventually I came to understand her point.

How odd to think, though, that there are (at least) two distinct visions of the Great Menace, each arousing the wrath of a particular political constituency: To some of us, it's berserk international capitalism, but to others, it's the U.N. For some of us, it looks like Rupert Murdoch; to others, it looks like George Soros. Some of us see the menace in the commodification of water; other are much more worried about...

Son of a bitch. I almost forgot that they were nuts.

But here's my real point: It's funny that such a wide variety of people hate some version of global conspiracy -- and how that menace's appearance changes, depending on who's denouncing it.

SPOKEN WORD. I love the way they talk. People, I mean. Here a lovely random find of a message board ca. 1999 on colloquial speech, mostly British but with American contributors:

At the start of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" by George Harrison, you'll hear him say "hey up." Northern England style "let's go."

Fuck me! I never knew that.

In the piney woods down here (relatives of the georgia penal colony recruits) they say "he showed his ass" when someone gets mad or acts rude...

A dialect word I learned from a climbing mate from Nottingham was "nesh" = to complain overly about being cold. My mum was stationed in the potteries during the war and remembers people there being "starved with cold." Then of course there's the ubiquitous "it's brass monkies," "Brass monkey weather" etc. And finally "A lazy wind" = one that can't be bothered to blow round you...

My father, the collar [minister], would refer to a smidge, a dolp, and a wham for any small amount of anything. My crooked cousins was a "Slick as spit." My mother's cooking was piling (in that she cooked a lot)...

I was always amused by a Liverpool expression. "I'll gerroff at Edge 'ill" Edge Hill station was the penultimate station on the RR line from London to Liverpool Lime Street. There also being a large number of catholics in the town, to get off at Edge Hill meant you intended to use Coitus Interruptus...

we called necking on the riverbank "watching the submarine races" and "getting mud for my turtle" when I went to Michigan State in the 60s...

Glasgie farewell = the action of applying ones forehead forcefully to anothers nose. Birmingham/Irish screwdriver = hammer...

That contributor also tells us, "Loose your bottle = It is the ultimate insult in the services, but is actually quite hard to define."

Lancaster, Pennsylvania is LANN-KASTER.

No, no, brother, I've been: it's "Lang'c'ster." And some entries are poems all by themselves:

My dad, to this day, calls the Pope, the "Holy Pappy in Rome"

Yonder is a loving word, LeeJ, some old songs make good use of it.

Somewhere Sean O'Casey is smiling.

These things stick in the mind, hopefully like cloves that flavor our own speech. I had a North Carolina girlfriend once, and her mother had no end of lovely expressions. She once referred to spoiled fish as smelling "right boo-booey." Could that be from the French "boue," somehow? In any case I consider myself improved by having heard it. Also by hearing my old Italian landlady say of meeting her husband, "He look at me anna I fell like a pear." And, Texican this, "he got a wild hare," variously "wild hair up his ass" -- or "wild hare" up same -- never have got that straight.

This post is in tribute somewhat to Editor Martin's Rusticor, which has here been too long neglected, and which contains a spiffing analysis of an old engraving captioned with a 19th-Century British slang poem:

Spree at Melton Mowbray: or doing the Thing in a Sporting-like manner (Quick work without a Contract, by Tip-Top Sawyers)

Coming it strong with a Spree and a spread,
Milling the day-lights, or cracking the head;
Go it ye cripples! come tip us your mauleys,
Up with the lanterns, and down with the Charleys:
If lagg'd we should get, we can gammon the Beak,
Tip the slavies a Billy to stifle their squeak.
Come the bounce with the snobs, and a [?] for their betters,
And prove all the Statutes so many dead letters.

Marty and I used to read together from Partridge's A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, and retain from it as a catchphrase, "the female pudend: low."

Really, though, this post is a tribute to the English language as it has been lathed by common speech. I am strong for the dictionary and good English grammar; as a teacher of remedial English and as a writer, I cannot endorse and could not abide a lawless verbal state, and admire the architecture of a proper sentence. But even the soundest structure should be filled and faced so that a person can live in it comfortably; otherwise, it's just a hangar or a prison. Our Information Society does not require human comfort -- it only requires the achievement of talking points -- but the human spirit does, so the genius of language is more likely to come from the bottom up than vice-versa. The miracle is that, even in this age of spin, the air remains full of raw material -- patois, argot, Spanglish, rap, etc. Well before it's printed, it's spoken. All you have to do is listen.

STAY IN THE PINK WITH CIGGIES AND DRINK. I'm sure there are all sorts of thing wrong with this study, but still it gladdens my heart:

Health-conscious Americans may want to reach for a plate of fish and chips or a pint of ale after digesting the results of a new study.

Older British citizens are far healthier than their U.S. counterparts -- even though twice as much is spent on health care per person in the United States annually. That's according to a study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The study mentions that "The Americans tended to be overweight and the Brits too fond of alcohol," says National Geographic, which includes a lovely photo of Prince Charles hoisting a pint.

The subjects are older even than me, and must certainly recall a time when health-hectoring was nothing like what it is today, when bangers and mash and toad in the hole were considered nourishment, when men drank Guinness For Strength. It also must include '60s people, so them what wasn't poisoning themselves with Bleeding Watney's Red Barrel might have spent a long run in some early, environmental production of Withnail & I.

I am not one to disdain medical science, Lord knows, nor do I reflexively reject the obvious data on behaviors and physical condition. But I have spent several weeks in England, usually among the sort of people who subsist on fried foods, strong drink, and Players cigarettes. They were not always the most appealing specimens, by American standards, and their skin often had the color and consistency of trifle, but they were cheerful despite the lousy weather, cold flats, and allegedly oppressive Welfare State. And very few of them belonged to a health club, or ate organic foods.

We are speaking anecdotally, which is to say out our ass. It may be that the better-educated component of English study group, less likely to spend their evenings in the boozer eating crisps, or some other statistical outlier affected the results. But I will say that my own narrow experience suggests that the Brits did well to give the Puritans reason to come over here to work out their program of self-denial.

ARTOTROGUSES AND GLORIOSUSES. Deflection of a popular joke about oneself by owning to it -- as John McLaughlin once did by appearing in Saturday Night Live's parody of his own show -- is an honorable tradition, and carries benefits for both the mockers and the mockee.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work if your sense of humor is so underdeveloped that you have to explain, at length, that you possess one -- especially when this is among the evidence offered.

I think Captain Ed misses the chickenhawk point. It isn't that non-combatants should be disqualified from commenting on military matters. It's that a non-combatant who engages in chest-thumping, star-spangled, locked-and-loaded bellicosity and cute military affectations (like calling blog buddies "deployed" and forming a "Northern Alliance" of warbloggers) is like an Air Raid Warden who thinks he's George Patton -- or a suburban nerd who acts like a rap star -- or anyone whose presumption is out of key with his circumstances: that is, an inviting target for ridicule.

Plautus knew all about it, but try telling that to the Everything Has Changed crowd.

UPDATE. But I would think that, being WaPo's Internet clown of the moment. I will enjoy this while it lasts (nine hours, thirty-five minutes), and pretend that when local mothers pull back their children at my approach, it is because they fear the lash of my tongue, and not because of the posters on the telephone poles.

SPLIT PERSONALITY. The Ol' Perfesser seems to be saying that conquering tyrannies for their petroleum resources is a good idea. Do you think it strange that a guy who is constantly mocking "No Blood for Oil" types approves, indeed recommends, blood for oil?

The Perfesser has never been a stickler for consistency, but this is rich even for him. A clue to the cause may be seen by a scan of the Instapundit page at this writing. That exercise usually reveals a vast plain of right-wing boilerplate interrupted only by the odd gay-rights token and an "Indeed" or two for filigree. But look at the Instaday so far:

• Bush is soft on Mexicans
• In rape trials, chicks get all the breaks
• Bloggerz rool, MSM drool
• 2006 version of "Whip Inflation Now"
• Stephen Colbert is the new Michael Moore

I perceive drift. God knows a steady job of recycling Republican talking points while insisting he's not-a-conservative would wear on any man with a conscience, but I always assumed Reynolds has none, and suspected that his Janus act meant he'd already been nanotechnologically engineered into a robot lawyer incapable of cracking under the strain of self-division.

But the strain is telling now, and I can guess why. All American conservatism is in a weird, feeble state these days. Its operatives run nearly all American government, yet the American people are not content. The big thinkers of the movement are having a hard time figuring what went wrong; some blame Bush, but it comes not easily to them. They are growing fractious and divided against themselves, too -- sometimes, as with the Perfesser, in the schizophrenic sense, but also schismatically.Look at the imbecilic Crunchy Con and South Park Con sects. Look at Arnold Kling, who thinks the fucking American Enterprise Institute is too far off the reservation ("Maybe the AEI is getting ready to play a role in the Hillary Clinton administration"). These are surely portents of end times.

The canaries in the coalmine, of course, are those conservative spokesmau-maus already halfway to Bellevue. Take Eleven-Star-General Ralph "Blood and Guts" Peters, always excitable to the verge of incoherence but now, alas, over the edge. He begins his latest screed against Mescans with expected froth against "the intellectual porn of left-wing fantasies" that "nationality was an artificial construct" -- but ends with a rant against the global economy! "There's a worrisome divide between the multinational executive who retires with a $400 million farewell smooch (and who naturally supports globalizing trade)," muses the General, "and the worker maxing out a credit card to pay for a tank of gas." Well, yes. But who's the enemy, General? Them there dirty hippies, or Larry Kudlow? Maybe it's both -- a new Buchananite synthesis, pitched to veterans who have run out of Lithium! Time for a new National Review blog!

Maybe I'm just sensitive today, but I really think they're cracking up. Keep your eyes peeled for outbreaks of Dancing Mania.

NO END OF HISTORY. Just finished A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman’s history of Western Europe in the 14th Century. Tuchman wrote beautifully and can make any half-attentive reader feel like a history buff for a couple of days at least. I still found parts of it slow going. To supply human detail to her great, turbulent tapestry, Tuchman takes time to explicate several particular intrigues and power struggles. Many of these are rich, as when Jean de Montfort, Duke of Brittany, kidnaps his houseguest, the Constable of France, over a ridiculously small matter:

…Laval cried, "What are you doing? Do not harm my brother-in-law, the Constable!"

"Mount your horse and go from hence, Monfort answered him. "I know what I have to do"… At that moment another of Clisson’s party, Jean de Beaumanoir, hurried up in anxiety. Monfort, who hated him too, pulled his dagger and, rushing upon him as if possessed, cried, "Beaumanoir, do you wish to be like your master?" Beaumanoir said that he would honor him. "Do you wish, do you wish to be just like him?" the Duke cried in a fury, and when Beaumanoir said yes, Montfort screamed, "Well, then, I will put out your eye!"…

The resolution of the case takes months and scuttles a planned invasion of England. I do get a kick out of it, but these clowns were pulling this sort of shit all the time, and after a while it’s just depressing.

Of course, all Europe seems to have been treading the same muddy, bloody circles throughout: ginned-up wars are prosecuted by companies of knights who freely pillage every town in their way, including those in their own country; popular uprisings, driven to the last extremity by this disastrous mismanagement, go berserk and are suppressed mercilessly; the Church flits the papacy from Rome to Avignon and back, taxing the hell out of the people to funds its follies, causing more knightly expeditions and a general dissipation of the Faith. And of course there was the Plague.

It is a blessed relief to get to the epilogue, and the first stirrings of something more like what we recognize as civilization. (I don’t think I realized before what a boon to society was the formation of standing armies.)

Survey-course history, of the sort some of us got in school, is mostly reassuring, in that we are led along thick lines (albeit smudged in places) from the primordial muck to the relatively enlightened present. Americans have a further advantage in that we’ve compressed a lot of action into the last few pages of history, which gives it vigor and a sense of propulsion; even in the Howard Zinn version, we can imagine that another growth-spurt of enlightenment might be up around the corner. But I get a chill whenever I am forced to consider that humankind can slog weary decades through muck before recovering its instinct for higher ground, and that such instincts, under duress and disuse, may be bred out of both animals and men.

THE WONDER IS, HE HATH ENDURED SO LONG: HE BUT USURP’D HIS LIFE. I am in some sympathy with James Wolcott, who has tired of "The Sopranos":

…Sunday the Sopranos temporarily abandoned Vito to his antiquing and fobbed off an episode partially involving Christopher and associate flying to LA to pitch a film idea to Ben Kingsley poolside at what looked like the Bev Hills Four Seasons… Having The Sopranos slop over into Entourage and Ricky Gervais's Extras starfuckiness made a show already afflicted with acute self-consciousness go even more meta on us.. When Hollywood stars played themselves on I Love Lucy, they weren't catering to cynicism about celebrity and autographing it with their own smirk; they presented genial versions of themselves. I prefer those antics to the hip jadedness that's become de rigueur today and winks at the audience as it winks back. All that winking has degenerated into a spastic tic.

I understand Wolcott’s unease with the current Soprano malaise, but (perhaps because I am not a Vanity Fair type of scribe, to say the least) I have a different interpretation of events.

From the beginning "The Sopranos" has had two major streams. On the one hand, there is the grotesque crudity – the source of many cheap laughs, which is what I think bothers Wolcott about the Kingsley/Bacall storyline, and which also gains most of the water-cooler talking points and tabloid ooh-aahs. Hacked-off heads, surprise deaths, etc.

In opposition to this baseness, there is something larger and more dramatic -- operatic conflicts, behaviors, and emotions. The crude stuff is also outsized, in a grand guignol sort of way, but the latter is the meat of the dramatic interest, because even in this debased age we are still more interested in characters than in splatters, if only slightly so.

True, these characters will go far beyond what most of us would ever dream of doing in the course of business. We expect that from Mafiosa, and if Tony’s crew just killed for fun and profit, it would be a very different show. But often it’s not about business, but about septic souls crying out for vengeance, recognition, or what passes in their peculiar lives for closure.

The Cifaretto/Pie-o-my story line is a great example of this: because Tony lives in a world where sudden violence is common, it’s no big deal when he kills Cifaretto for, essentially, making Tony face who he really is. The filmmakers go out of their way (even availing a dreamlike insert) to equate the stripper girlfriend Ralph murders with Meadow Soprano; and Pie-O-My is, in the show’s terms, a larger version of the baby ducks that kicked this whole thing off. One might say that Ralph Cifaretto dies for Tony’s sins. The quoditian violence is fun, but vengeance against self-knowledge is "The Sopranos"’ aglio e olio.

This is still the case in Season Finito. But, as Wolcott observed, things have gone a bit more sour. As the gears of the show wind down, and we lose dramatic velocity, we are being led – purposefully, I think – toward the natural result, not of the cartoonish violence –- that can and will go on forever, as it has – but of the pathetic disposition of the human cases to which our attention had been previously directed.

Take, for example, Paulie Walnuts’ recent crisis over the identity of his mother -- which leads, as it always does with these people, to a senseless act of violence. In this case the act is linked (by use of bridging shots of foliage) to Tony’s momentary feeling of well-being after he gets home from the hospital.

That is, I think, a very instructive segment. We’ve been watching Tony in therapy for years now. It has been amusing to watch him reduce his alleged therapeutic insights to things his narrow mind can understand – the Art of War, the "circle jerk of life." But I think the show’s creator, David Chase, has from the beginning been after bigger game than the comic juxtaposition of gangster ethics with movie stars, writers, academics, rappers, doctors, politicians, etc.

That particular fish-out-of-water gag was old when Billy Wilder used it in Ball of Fire -- but back then, Wilder’s time being what it was, the gangsters were the butt of the jokes. A lot has happened since then, and in "The Sopranos," the gangsters have usually had the edge. Nowadays there’s always a reason to think the straights have it coming. But eventually any viewer will come to think, at some point, that the hoods have gone too far. The Hollywood freebie schtick in the Kingsley episode chafes Wolcott, maybe because he is familiar with that scene and feels that Betty Bacall getting socked in the jaw isn’t funny.

It is and it isn’t. Chase has gone out of his way to link the Mob to just about every aspect of modern society, in an obvious social critque. ("Niggers!" the family man cries when his vehicle is jacked, followed by Tony admiring a Polaroid of his latest hot car.) But I don’t think that means Chase is shrugging to us that the Mob run things and whattaya gonna do –- because big-S Society is not really what the show is about.

Chase dropped a fat clue in the episode involving Charles S. Dutton as a traffic cop reduced by Tony’s pique. Tony tried to buy his psychic way out of the consequences of that cruelty; Dutton refused. That was the same episode (I believe) in which Tony wound up belt-whipping Peter Riegert’s corrupt politician, who had been Tony’s cats-paw in the affair.

By his own lights Tony is justified, and because we’ve been living with him so long, we sort of take his point of view (the politician was fucking Tony's old girlfriend, after all). That’s the power of character identification.

But even as we sympathize, we have to know that Tony's point of view is insane. How long can we keep in sympathy with him? When, as he once predicted for himself, Tony’s "dead or in the can," what will we feel?

Do you remember the episode in which Dr. Melfi sends Carmela to a shrink, who turns out to be an Old Testament Jew who swiftly advises her to take the children and get away from Tony, and refuses to treat her further? I thought of that moment during the current season opener, in which Carmela is childishly delighted with a new car Tony has bought her. It is astonishing to see such a strong character so reduced in the home stretch of a story.

Consider also last week’s agon of Artie Bucco – sort of a fool, but a fool out of Lear, whose privileged position as a noncombatant feeder of the troops and childhood friend to Tony allows him surprising latitude for truth. When Artie mourns in front of Tony the folly of his father’s simple idealism, and then cooks his maliciously-killed rabbit – "Some people don’t like rabbit!" – from a recipe out of his father’s old notebook, clearly we are not being led toward just another fun permutation of the life of a funny mobster-hanger-on. Even the joke of Nuovo Vesuvio turning into a coupon joint is not cheering. Against the impression the show’s previous success has given us, we are led toward an emotion that must (if we are still human) have been present under our laughter and even our sympathy all this time.

That emotion is disgust. The Sopranos and all their works are disgusting. You know it, I know it. Chase probably knew it all along, but now he is hustling whatever chickens have not yet come to roost into the death-coop at last. So now is the perfect time for Tony Jr. to implode, for Vito’s absurd gay-mobster story line, for Christopher to wear out what was left of his welcome -- and, I suspect, a lot more unsettlingly tawdry business to come, which will only seem out of key because the key has suddenly been changed.

This is the blight these mooks were born for. It is not a tragic fall, but an appropriately pathetic collapse. I am put in mind of the end of the ill-received Don Giovanni in Amadeus, when the demon clumsily tears down that upstage drape. It is not pretty and the house may not react favorably, but it is exactly right.

NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT. John J. Miller talks about a Neil Young song he hasn't heard (and "Rockin' In The Free World," which he says he heard, but obviously doesn't understand). Then he talks (and talks) about a movie he hasn't seen.

Warren Bell may be parodying all those previous "a mean liberal was mean to me" stories. But how would one tell?

Over in the logical fallacy department, Tim Graham tells us that the Washington Post is proved "thoroughly liberal" because its theatre critic detected anti-Reagan sentiments in a Tony Kushner play, and that Paul Weitz is the voice of Hollywood.

I understand that National Review pays these guys money.

SEMI-REGULAR "I MAKE FUN OF LILEKS BECAUSE I AM AN AWFUL, AWFUL MAN" SEGMENT. Ladies and gentlemen, our Top Ten Thousand Laker:

She ate all her apples and declined the fries. I studied the bag, which reminded how McDonald’s always gets the graphics wrong. Maybe they connect with someone, but nearly every single example of McDonald’s graphics leaves me dead. Example from today:

(Thoroughly unremarkable marketing graphic)

Welcome back, 1977! The big quotes, the horrible roundy-edge coffee logo with the unnaturally conjoined U-M – it all shrieks Carter-era design.

Helpful hint, miss: see that thing on top of your portfolio? It’s called “a handle.” Give it a try.

That bastard Carter sans'd our serifs! And, whore -- no online portfolio for you! Is reserved for matchbooks!

(Steps forward, removes Elvis wig, addresses the audience)

I am actually a big fan of Ancillary Lileks: the celebrations of silly detritus, the found objects from dead popcult plus commentary, and so forth. This sketch was inspired by The Left and his uncivil speech. I don't approve of it, and I don't approve of what I just did.

(writhes; second, large and inhuman head emerges from first)

Fuck that cracker asshole! Fuck Lileks! Blood, blood and death to you!

(hissing, spitting, cloud of smoke, finis)

CHRIST NOT MAN IS KING

TELLING A HAWK FROM A HANDSAW. Crazy Jesus Lady is tugging sleeves again, offering unsolicited advice to the Bush Administration. As usual, her monologue includes ripe, flavorful Noonanisms that gladden my wicked heart:

Mr. Snow's White House press briefings are going to be nice to watch. The press does not want to appear to be ungracious and oppositional. They have an investment in demonstrating that the tensions each day in Scott McClellan's press briefings, with David Gregory's rants and Helen Thomas's free-form animosities, were the fault of Mr. McClellan, not the press.

I have no idea what she means. That the press will exalt Snow to slur McClennan? The idea is not to get a story, or even to make Bush look bad, but to lay obloquy at the doorstep of Scotty McClellan? "McClellan delenda est!" snarls the sleeping White House reporter in his pinstriped pajamas, clutching fiercely his saluting John Kerry doll...

But more striking than the mental hiccups is the reasoning. Three foci proposes Noonan for her unwitting freelance clients, and two of them involve getting the President to better explain the actions of his Administration -- the idea being that everything's great but the rabble aren't getting the message.

Point one is "Renew attention to Afghanistan. The American invasion of that country had the support of the world... Talk about what's being done, and how, and why." So hey, how's it going over there?

The Army's chief of staff said Wednesday that he was frustrated by security lapses at Bagram air base in Afghanistan that led to the loss of potentially sensitive data, and that the military must learn how to be more careful with new technology.

Weeks after revelations that flash drives carrying sensitive and classified information have turned up for sale in a bazaar outside Bagram, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker said the Army was trying to improve how soldiers used and secured flash drives.

annnnnd...

Mariam Rawi, a member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), has told the forum that despite Afghanistan receiving billions of dollars in aid, little has been done to address the country's lack of health services.

"(Afghanistan) is a land that is facing (a) health disaster worse than (the) tsunami," Ms Rawi told a lecture at the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre in Adelaide.

"Seven hundred children and 50 to 70 women die on (a) daily basis due to the lack of health services...."

annnnd...

Australia warned Thursday of a high threat of terrorist attacks in the Afghan capital during celebrations marking the overthrow of communist rule by mujahedeen fighters...

The U.S. Embassy in Kabul posted a warning Thursday advising Americans to limit their travel in the next two days due to the holiday and two bombings Tuesday on the road leading to Kabul's airport, which wounded two people...

annnnd... scene. Though you can go back to the well and get corkers like this just about anytime. Curse that Em Ess Em!

Item number two is our wonderful economy, about which The People are not sufficiently sanguine. CJL tries a couple of angles of explanation: first, "Americans, a deeply savvy lot, never want to tell a politician he's doing well on the economy because their applause may lead him to feel he can shift focus to, say, colonizing Mars." (Pffft, yeah, like that'll stop him!)

Then -- and with this passage, the buzzing of a fly or a distant car horn may have suddenly shifted the Crazy Jesus Lady back to our temporal sphere -- "The biggest complaint I hear now from people who email me from all parts of the country is that they're being worked to death, longer hours at the office, can't see the kids. Gas prices are up and up, etc..."

Well, yeah. While even the hated MSM laud our "hot" economy, the punters are none too pleased with how things are going financially. As I've said before, higher productivity numbers mean that people who have jobs are working harder than before, and my uneducated guess is that most of those accelerating rat-racers aren't just laying up extra scratch for a Cayman Islands vacation or a summer home. We're a hardworking people, but in the face of wages and job security that are each going in the wrong direction, who wouldn't wonder why he has to run faster just to stay in place, and suspect that profits benefit from his sweat more than wages?

(Forgive my belaboring the point a moment, but this really is the hardest thing for conservatives to understand. They say things like this: "Pointing out the market's marvels will not console the worker who lost his job to a machine or a foreign worker. To him the process remains vicious and absurd. 'Why cut my job to save a few bucks?'" -- and then console the poor stiff by pointing out that "Job security no longer means fighting to keep the same job for 30 years, it means keeping ourselves marketable." Oh, well, great! I'm different from a 14th Century peasant, because I also have to go to night school! Get a further reality check here.)

The third CJL talking point shows that she is but mad north-by-northwest: when the wind is southerly, she can racebait like a champ. Americans are skeptical about Mexicans working on American soil. The results of the poll are inconclusive -- respondents seem to be responding more to drift in U.S. policy than to xenophobic impulses -- but a less generous reading warms the cockles of Buchananite hearts.

CJL recalls what a split between the Bush family and Pat's pitchfork brigade did in 1992, and hopes that, if she flings herself hard enough against the White House barricades, the Great Man will miraculously walk out and lift her lips to his ear, and take the populist bait. It may be, then, that she buried her lede. She may imagine that she is communicating in a code based upon the Rule of Three, with the first two ridiculous ideas as mere cover. Maybe such a code has been prearranged, and the boys and girls in the West Wing are now reducing it to simple words that the Commander in Chief can understand. We'll see soon enough.

GREETINGS FROM OUR NATION'S CAPITAL II. Thanks for all the well-wishes, folks. No horrible news to report from NIH. I'm still clinically interesting, though, so I'll be back.

Someone mentioned the Dada show at the other wing of the National Gallery -- I got that one in, too. The Dada movement was so successful, as PR and as a polestar for its initiates, that to this day it impedes my view of the actual work. For example, if I had only seen his work here, and hadn't also seen his great retrospective at the Met last year, I might not think much of Max Ernst -- interesting, talented, I might judge, but too much of a clown. Maybe this works against conceptual art more than other kinds, but for dummies like me the Dada brand has the same blinding power as Prada or Versace. (Interestingly, the ones who most easily override this effect, like Grosz and Arp and the unnamed genius layout artists of the Dada publications, are more graphic artists than fine artists. In a visually cheapened environment, good illustration always cuts through.)

The curators were very clever to break the exhibition into sections pertaining to each big Dada scene (Paris, Zurich, etc.), which emphasizes the Dada phenomenon over the art, and to provide lots and lots of signage. This sort of justifies its presence in a DC Mall museum: as soon as you enter the first gallery of grim World War I footage, you can tell this is teaching exhibit suitable to the Smithsonian (I know NGA isn't part of it, but close enough), and at least as these kids feast their eyes on all the weird images they'll be made to know it means something; later, when they're older and if they're interested, they can go a little deeper in.

In this spirit, it was a real pleasure to watch the performance of Antheil's Ballet Mechanique -- now, that's one guy I seriously doubt gets any more substantive -- with a gaggle of Catholic high-school kids, who were visibly amused by the goofy sound effects and dynamic shifts, and visibly bored by those passages unpunctuated by same. Nothing fades faster than last century's wisecracks.

UPDATE. Let me clarify a little. I am neither pro- nor anti-Dada; I love some of the artists, and I may like the rest better when I see more of them. (On the strength of his showing at the National Gallery, for example, I'd certainly like to see more Rudolf Schlichter.) But as the Gallery does a service, I guess, to the historical memory of Dada, I think it does few favors to the artists themselves, encouraging us to read their offerings as artifacts rather than as artworks.

I had a similar problem with last year's East Village USA show at the New Museum. Live artistic movements provide energy and community to artists; dead ones are just millstones round their necks. Who wants a Dada study? It reminds me of a kid I saw once at the Tate, copying in his sketchbook some ridiculous squiggle by Tracey Emin. (Maybe he was just making a statement; a few days earlier, a couple of guys had come to the Tate, stripped to their skivvies, and bounced on Emin's Bed yelling "I am Art!" until someone carried them away.)

Maybe part of the issue is the rejection of aesthetics built into the Dada manifesto. I've always looked at it as a brilliant McGuffin that gave some talented people, who'd been stultified by the standards of their time, license to break free. Enlightenment is always in front of us, but some of us need a guy to sell us a mantra. The fuse that lit the Soy Bomb is burnt out, and it is left for each of us to find (to paraphrase the poet Lee Hazlewood) his own brand new box of matches.