FIRST RULE IS/THE LAWS OF GERMANY. My reaction to "Hadji Girl" is: fine, go ahead. I'm a free speech absolutist, and I recognize the Sweater Kittenz tune as a worthy companion to "Nigger Loves His Possum," "Pray I Don't Kill You, Faggot," and the oeuvre of The Mentors, Rapeman, and The Goldwaters. (Not to mention the old shanty "New York Girls," which it thematically most closely resembles.)

In return, I don't want to hear any more shit from these people about Michael Moore, the Dixie Chicks, Checkpoint, "All Things Considered," or anything else relating to their long-standing, phony Culture War. Fair's fair.

I don't expect them to take the deal, or even acknowledge that there is a deal. Culture warring requires a constant state of amnesia. In their way of looking at things, newspaper reporting is stark troop-killing treason, but a Marine prosecuted by Marines for his cheerful song about killing Arabs is proof that some imaginary entity called The Left is out to censor them.

What a failure of imagination that shows. In their younger days, no doubt, they emulated schoolyard bullies, and sucked up to the strong as they pummelled the weak; their adult politics certainly reflect this. But let them put a foot outside their customary arenas of power, into places where words are taken more seriously than fists, and they fumble for recourse into the dimmest recesses of their rucksacks for a tattered copy of the First Amendment, which they blunderingly misinterpret in their own defense; and, once the challenge is forgotten, they stuff the scrap forcefully back, and deride all further mention of it, until they again feel the chill breath of disapproval upon their necks.

The White House, two houses of Congress, most Governorships and a healthy chunk of the zeitgeist in their control, and still they bitch and moan that they are misunderstood. What a bunch of pussies.

SHORTER PEGGY NOONAN: The Democratic Party's excellent chances in Virginia prove that the Democrats are finished.

(Extra contempt added for her closing gush over neo-Duce Rudolph Giuliani.)

WHEN TOMORROW IS TODAY, THE BELL MAY TOLL FOR SOME. In the most recent of their many puzzling habits, NRO's Cornerites have started cheerfully citing people who mention John Miller's "Top 50 Conservative Songs" as evidence of the article's influence, even when those sources consider Miller to be utterly full of shit. Just so long as they spell the name right, one supposes.

The latest such link points us to the Financial Times, and for this I am grateful, as FT makes a few interesting points:

But it’s not such an anomaly to speak of rock and conservatism in the same breath, for as a musical form it is deeply conservative. Male-dominated, resistant to change, endlessly reproducing a narrow range of guitar chords, it lost whatever radical creative edge it had ages ago. One of the greatest rock bands, The Ramones, led by the ardent Republican supporter Johnny Ramone, understood its narrow parameters perfectly. Do the same thing again and again. Wear the same clothes. Rock may advertise itself as rebellion but in fact it values tradition and convention as much as any conservative.

That is why it has become a battleground for politicians. Witness a recent Westminster tussle: no sooner did Gordon Brown reveal in a magazine interview that The Arctic Monkeys “really wake you up in the morning” than David Cameron popped up on the radio programme Desert Island Discs to wax lyrical about The Smiths, Radiohead and REM.

Just so we know that he likes rock but not other, more delinquent forms of pop, Cameron later launched a savvy broadside against gangsta rap as glorifying violent crime. This is the to-and-fro of politics in the iPod age, with rock as the favoured musical shuttlecock. Pete Townshend had better get used to it.

I have only one real problem with this. The bit about "creative edge," obviously meant as a slur, is to me an irrelevance: "edge" is only what fans and critics ascribe to artistry, not a central fact of it. Your basic rock clod might think his favorite young idiot doing a recycled 70's riff and/or pose is edgy, because it amplifies his prior, TV-nurtured ideas of same, whereas said clod would think the genuinely adventuresome Charles Ives not edgy, because he's, like, old and in black and white.

The author is correct that rock as a form is conservative (though not nearly so much so as, say, the sonnet). We must stipulate that we use the term "conservative" here as sane people do (e.g., "At a conservative estimate I'd say you owe me ten bucks"), not in the indiscriminate and incoherent manner of culture warriors. And that sublime changes can be wrought within the most restrictive forms.

But the bit about British politicos throwing around rock names the way monkeys fling feces is best of all. I'm sure all these guys are basically spiritual heirs to the minister spoon-feeding Alex at the end of A Clockwork Orange. If rock signifiers are what the punters want, then signifiers they shall have! The strangeness, to our American ears, of hearing The Smiths used in such a way helps us to see more easily that the hipster imprimatur can be applied by anyone to anything regardless of relevance or consequence. Thus these pudgy, pasty pols apply bands like henna tattoos to their personas, in hopes of seeming more natural when strolling through the rougher electoral precincts.

That's the human comedy, folks, all the way down down to Cameron's impersonation of Mrs. Scum. Of course over time, or if overindulged, this sort of thing has a deleterious effect on the brain, which is why those of us who have grown out of it civic-mindedly try to encourage young folk to do likewise. Regrettably, an increasing number of adults refuse to abandon this childish affectation (indeed, they seem to be indulged in it by think-tanks, editors, and vanity presses). If the proportion of such retards exponentiates much further, we will find ourselves trapped in a large-scale environmental production of Wild in the Streets, only with more torture and worse music.

You may do your part by refusing to become a rhinoceros (or, if your perspective is less literary, a dumbass).

IN WHICH GEORGE CLOONEY FRAMES UP KEN LAY. James Pinkerton tries another liberal-Hollywood essay. It is not so offensive as some such. It is silly, for sure, basically twanging the old saw about social commentary closing on Saturday night, and blistered with bizarre cracks (on Tom Cruise: "And conservatives, for their part, needn't complain: Aren't gays supposed to stay in the closet?").

But Pinkerton acknowledges, first, that Hollywood is observably not turning Americans into Bolsheviks, and second, that Hollywood filmmakers try to make money. For these guys, that's an impressive acknowledgement of objective reality.

Naturally conservative critics think Pinkerton has failed to grasp the seriousness of the cultural situation. Larry Ribstein complains:

Of course Hollywood artists like business – after all, they’re in business.  But they like their own particular type of business. What they don’t like is capitalists – the folks who lord it over the artists, and force them to constrain their vision. 

And so what we get in Hollywood films is an unrelentingly dismal view of money, stock markets, and impersonal market forces...

I should think Americans might find impersonal market forces pretty dismal without any help. But no: because filmmakers "have been trained their whole professional lives to manipulate emotions," they can march sozzle-headed citizens into the jury box to "send capitalists to jail" and "levy huge punitive damages against big capitalist firms." And all because some tycoons tried to constrain their visions!

You will be relieved to hear that, despite these depradations, Ribstein is against "regulation of film content," preferring "more business education, and more awareness of filmmakers' perverse take on business." You can get a bellyful of such education at Ribstein's other blog, where he lists anti- and pro-business films: "Although Citizen Kane and the Godfather movies might be seen as the rare films that show what it takes to build a business," he sighs, "they don’t paint a pretty picture." Among his pro-capitalism picks: Do The Right Thing ("Sal’s Pizzeria feeds everybody and is an important binding force for the neighborhood").

Ribstein at least is clear on his own terms. I'm still puzzling over Professor Bainbridge's conclusion:

The problem with Pinkerton's argument is that he conflates how Hollywood portrays class and how it portrays business. Even if we enter an era of cheap high-quality film making through digital technology, the desire to strike it big evident even among the most left-leaning Hollywood types likely will continue to constrain the way films portray class issues. The same may not hold true for how Hollywood portrays capitalism and business. Filmmakers freed by technology from the need for vast amounts of startup capital may well end up making even more anti-business films than they do now.

Is he saying that, the easier it becomes to make a movie, the more poisonous anti-business films we will have? That doesn't speak well of the free market.

None of these commentators seem aware that films are anything more than propaganda for one gang of nerds or another, but what else is new?

"JESUS CHRIST!" QUIPPED THE LIEUTENANT. "WHAT IS THIS, RUSSIA?" CNN:

Three prisoners at the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have hanged themselves in what is being called a "planned event," the U.S. military has said.

They are the first confirmed deaths at the compound. Prisoners have attempted suicide in the past.

"Two Saudis and one Yemeni, each located in Camp 1, were found unresponsive and not breathing in their cells by guards," said a statement issued by Joint Task Force-Guantanamo on Saturday...

The suicides should surprise no one because the detainees believe they will be held indefinitely with no chance for justice, said Josh Colangelo-Bryan with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents about 200 of the detainees.

"They've been told that while at Guantanamo they have no rights as human beings," he told reporters during a conference call Saturday.

Colangelo-Bryan said one of his clients told him during a visit to the facility in October 2005 that he "would simply rather die than live here with no rights."

Wait for it... wait for it...

"They are smart. They are creative. They are committed. They have no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own," [Commander of Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, Rear Admiral Harry] Harris said. "I believe this was not an act of desperation, but rather an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us"...

Asymmetrical warfare is when one side uses unorthodox or surprise tactics to attack the weak points of its stronger opponent.

Fox News announced it would refer henceforth to such suicides as "homicide suicides," to let viewers know that they were actually attacks on American self-esteem.

UPDATE. If the self-slaughterers "plannned and coordinated" their own deaths, asks Ann Althouse, "doesn't this support the government's theory that these were warriors maneuvering and not individuals despairing?"

Interesting choice of words, Counsellor! One imagines Althouse grilling the corpses about their so-called despair, and explaining to the judge that the defendants' pre-posthumous state of mind "goes to motive."

Thought balloon over a corpse's head: Well, at least now I'm getting a trial.

THEY'LL KNOW WE ARE CHRISTIANS BY OUR LOVE. Michael Berg, father of Nick Berg (whose head Zarqawi cut off), does an Imitation of Christ:

Well, my reaction is I'm sorry whenever any human being dies. Zarqawi is a human being. He has a family who are reacting just as my family reacted when Nick was killed, and I feel bad for that.

In response, the Ace of Spades does an imitation of Sgt. Slaughter:

The moral vanity of these people is disgusting. Attempting to remake themselves into Holy Angels, they instead make themselves into monsters. Does this asshole really think it's an enlightened human response to feel as bad for the death of your son's butcher as for your son's?

He thinks that attitude makes him better than other people?

I think it makes him less than human, personally.

When he dies (which he will, of course, as we all will; no death threat intended), I hope his son slaps this stupid fuck right in the face.

I don't believe in that "love your enemy as yourself" bullshit, either, but I don't get all bent out of shape when other people go for it. For one thing, unlike the shellfish provisions in the Old Testament, it has zero chance of ever catching on.

UPDATE. Comments at the Ace Theological Seminary enhance the hilarity. The money shot:

Christians are explicitly commanded to defend those who cannot defend themselves, and Christ stated quite flatly, numerous times, that on His return He would lead the armies of Heaven and slay the wicked. Berg's disgusting attitude is fundamentally un-Christian. "Not directly comparable?" It's not even in the same ballpark. Not even close.

Pick up a Bible someday, Michael. It's not the pacifist hippie screed you seem to think it is.

Boy howdy, is he right! Who can forget:

They shall beat their swords into plowshares, then hitch them plowshares to 100,000 oxen and rampage through the enemy like crap through a goose!

And:

Suffer the little children come unto me. I'll teach the little punks to kill with the edge of a rolled-up newspaper!

And:

If someone strikes you on the right cheek, smash the fucker good in the other cheek! Then, the heart punch! Do the eye gouge! Do the hammerlock! Do the hammerlock, you turkeynecks!

Though perhaps the commenter and I are mixing up our sacred texts.

TRAVEL UPDATE. I got through the tests, we'll see about results. I also did a little day-tripping while in DC. The Mall is presently overrun by school trip teens and their minders: fleets of tour buses, harried adults holding up colored signs or folders, mobs of gangly yout's in copy-heavy t-shirts and shorts. The National Museum of Natural History, which I visited, seems made for them: the exhibits and signage are simple and bold, designed for durability and easy cleaning. I took in shows about the Sikhs ("Willy Wonka!" cried one yout), early life on Earth, and Lewis & Clark, in which the signage contained many prompts for an audio tour no one seemed to be taking. I'd never thought much about Lewis & Clark before, but it's a hell of a story, right down to Lewis' pathetic and mysterious suicide. It's almost enough to make me read Thomas Pynchon, were life not so brief.

On recommendations from readers, I also took in the Phillips Collection. It was terrific, and there was hardly anyone there. After a few Target Free Nights at MOMA I had forgotten what a pleasure that can be. I sat and looked at Luncheon of the Boating Party for twenty minutes and two people got in my way, briefly. Even the newer paintings -- including a great, untitled Jake Berthot that looks like a bridge in a mist of smudges, and Howard Hodgkin's ebullient Torso, spilling over onto its frame -- pleased grumpy old me. I was compelled to attend artists who had never interested me before, like Dufy and Braque. The artists I already liked, I had all the time in the world for. Even at full fare this felt like an enormous gift.

Also on recommendation, I dined at Dukem in Adams Morgan. The Doro Wot was fine; still, I'd complain about the price (come on, it's stew poured over weird, grey bread, and six bucks is a lot for a bottle of St. George) were it not for the music. It was my first experience of eskista, so I couldn't tell you if it was good eskista or bad eskista, but I loved the sound: guy beating on a drum with sticks, guy sawing on something that looked like a zither, guy plucking at another zither-thing with a cigar-box soundboard attached, and a girl sitting calmly up front and singing in a high, plangent voice. The rhythm was a little unusual to my culturally insensitive ears (I could count the fours, couldn't quite make out the pulse), but the dance team that came out at the end got into it pretty good.

In other world news, I had the TV on while packing for home and watched the reports on Zarqawi. Much talk about a "turning point" in the War, repeated footage of the Iraqi press corps cheering. And, on the other idiot box, the Perfesser accused the press of "spinning war news to make things look worse than they are, and to hurt Bush." I haven't plowed through the blogs to see if anyone was really sad that the guy who sawed the head off Nick Berg (among many others) got what was coming to him, but it's a big wide wonderful world of opinion, so who knows. Maybe after I clicked off, George Stephanopoulos called for a moment of silence.

Well, I got politics in, now I can take a nap.

ANOTHER DAMN SERVICE INTERRUPTION. You really should go with a more reliable vendor. I am in D.C. for three more days of Von Hippel-Lindau-related testing. This time it's an MIBG scan: they shoot me up with radioactive material and watch it glow in my body over two days. Seriously, that's what they do. (Go ahead and make fun of me for it, though -- I promise not to reveal your identities!)

I am typing this at a Kinko's on K Street. (Two guys tried to bribe me as I walked over here.)

I'm staying at the Washington Plaza, a 60s monolith on Thomas Circle. The management is apparently trying to exploit its retro chic rather than its gigantism and isolation in a weird fish-nor-fowl neighborhood. Locals, please tell me if there's anything to do around here beside visit drug stores and fend off bums.

I imagine I'll get in some culture and bore you all with it at some point, but posting should be light till Thursday night.

CYBERSMART : SMART :: ROAD APPLES : APPLES. Semi-popularizer of the South Park Conservative fad, Brian C. Anderson, says video games are good for your brain. Since he's writing at OpinionJournal, he drops the kind of comments that gets right-wingers excited: Dr. Spock is (posthumously) against gaming -- gaming good! Hillary Clinton is against violent gaming -- gaming good, cut off bitch's head! And the Ol' Perfesser likes it, etc.

But even beyond the customary, specious political identification, there is plenty of just plain stupidity in here:

Video games can also exercise the brain in remarkable ways. I recently spent (too) many late-night hours working my way through X-Men: Legends II: The Rise of Apocalypse, a game I ostensibly bought for my kids. Figuring out how to deploy a particular grouping of heroes (each of whom has special powers and weaknesses); using trial and error and hunches to learn the game's rules and solve its puzzles; weighing short-term and long-term goals--the experience was mentally exhausting and, when my team finally beat the Apocalypse, exhilarating.

Anderson seems to have cribbed this notion from Malcolm "Blink" Gladwell, and my response to the knockoff is the same (though less respectful of course) that I had to the original:

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 [computer gaming] 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.

...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...

Yeah, so I'm quoting myself. Busy day. Besides, I fought the Battle of Tompkins Square Park for the likes of you! Get off my lawn!

TRY ONE OF THESE JAMAICAN CIGARS, AMBASSADOR. THEY'RE PRETTY GOOD. A "writer living in Washington D.C." explains why drinking California chardonnay is conservative: contrary to "its alleged association with affluent political liberals," California chardonnay is populist (because "influential wine critic Robert Parker" disapproves), and "sexy, muscular and swaggering," and therefore much better than "watery French swill."

Me, I drink Mumblin' Jack Malt Liquor cause it gits ya cozy.

Lest you think the article was written and submitted for publication on a bet, you can also read this authoress (Melinda Ledden Sidak) on the moral relativism of mothers who work and Bob Dole Viagra commercials, and how people who have unmarital sex should lose their jobs, if you are as big a glutton for punishment as me, which I hope none of you is.

FUCK THAT NOISE. HOW 'BOUT THEM METS? I attended the second game of yesterday's twi-night Mets-Giants doubleheader. The evening was cold and damp and as the matinee had suffered a long rain delay, by the second game the crowd was pruned down to about 5,000 die-hards. But the Mets are doing well -- even two months into the season! -- so the faithful were in good spirits.

At least they were in good spirits when they got away from the ticket window. Management decided the make-up game for Friday's rainout should be part of this already-ticketed event; those of us with Friday tickets had to trade-in for whatever slop was left. ("They oughta just open up the gates and let everybody sit wherever they want!" yelled one mook.)

So we started among the upper deck diaspora, watching the white blobs dashing around and the sheets of rain whirling laterally through the floodlight. Folks were scattered across the red seats. A few couples huddled under soaked Mets beach blankets. (There was no liquid warmth available as Shea had turned off the beer taps between games. What is this league coming to?)

Later, as standards relaxed, we went down to the mezzanine, where the population was more consensed, dry, and convivial. Barry Bonds wasn't in the lineup, but the natural wise-assedness of our tribe prompted many rounds of "Barrrr-rrry" (in the sing-song manner of the old "Darrrr-rrryl" chant, and the "Larrrr-rrry" that traditionally greets "Chipper" Jones at Shea). As we went to extra innings the "Let's Go Mets" chant turned to "Let's Go Home."

We responded to events, too. When Lance Niekro came to the plate, some oldtimer yelled, "Throw him a knuckleball!" When Jose Reyes stole second (always a pleasing sight), we serendaded him with the Jose Song (which some Nats fans claim they had first). And when the Home Run King Presumptive stepped up to pinch-hit, the uncrowd went nuts, and went nutser when Barrrr-rrry grounded out. (I didn't hear much steroid stuff. This is just the sort of treatment we give celebrity opponents. Bonds' return under abuse to his dugout was slow and upright, but he's had a lot of practice. I imagine it is less easy for Kaz Matsui, who for poor overall performance was booed reflexively whenever he shifted his weight.)

Oh, and we won! Lastings Milledge executed a lovely hook-slide to evade a tag at home in the 11th. Big cheers, loud music, and a hasty retreat to the 7 platform.

Plus I got money back on my ticket. And they brought back the Howard Beale tape ("I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell -- LET'S GO METS!"). A good night all in all.

WHAT I SAW AT THE DEVOLUTION. Perhaps attempting to put fire in the bellies of their discouraged constituents, the Corner guys talk about how Disneyland and Scotland have gone communist.

The Scottish thread is particularly rich. "Thatcherism never really penetrated far into Scotland, despite some of her most fervent admirers being Scottish," says Iain Murray. Another guy blames his inability to make money there on Scottish prejudice against the "Yank Capitalist." Cliff May is upset that a "talented and beautiful" Scottish folk musician played a John Lennon song. (No, it wasn't "Lassie is the Nigger of the World.") Derbyshire exhumes Dr. Johnson's famous crack, indicating that patience is exhausted, and invasion is the inevitable next step.

On the other hand, there is this:

As you can imagine, I don't get much help from mainstream media in promoting my music and values...

Boy, can't we all relate! John J. Miller urges you to buy the man's tunes, and those of other "rockcon" artists who speak truth to powerlessness.

I wish them well. I'm a lot more favorably disposed toward this Top Conservative Songs thing now that it's a marketing scam that might get some musicians some play. Swindle, comrades!

WHAT DO YOU CALL JEFF GOLDSTEIN WITH A Ph.D.? (ALERT: inside baseblog)There have been some complaints about disrespectful treatment of Jeff Goldstein. In the aforelinked cases, Goldstein’s use of MLA blather (with jokes, though -- you can tell 'cuz they're in all caps) is alleged to cause his critics jealous outrage that "one of us" has turned to the dark side.

Are Goldstein’s critics really academics? I never got more than a Baccalaureate (in Fine Arts, swish swish, so I didn't have to read much), and I work for a corporation. Tbogg works for a corporation, too. Atrios is a political activist, and we all know they don’t know from semiotics. Majikthise is kinda schoolly, but I’ve had beers with her and she never once spoke of the signifier and the signified. And Jane Hamsher's a movie producer -- they are all self-made types given to ignorant spoonerisms and big cigars, and think college-professor stuff is strictly the bunk.

Maybe we just think the guy's comedy gold.

As alerted, this is all bloggity-blah, so its significance is nil. Still, you have to wonder why Goldstein's seconds are so incensed that people are making fun of some guy known for making fun (semiotic fun, mind you) of some other guys. Even the normally sane John Cole says, "they do not like his politics, so they simply want to destroy him. It is that simple."

Christ Jesu, I never dreamed we had such power! I'ma get me a cool helmet like Ian McKellen's in "X-Men" and destroy all my enemies with the unstoppable force of paste-eater jokes!

P.S. Michael Moore is fat. (Unless that was some sort of Levi-Straussian jest I am simply too unlettered to grasp.)

JESUS IS MY MANAGER, AND HE'S DOING A REALLY SHITTY JOB. Michelle Malkin is excited to hear from USA Today that the Colorado Rockies are a religious cult:

Music filled with obscenities, wildly popular with youth today and in many other clubhouses, is not played. A player will curse occasionally but usually in hushed tones. Quotes from Scripture are posted in the weight room. Chapel service is packed on Sundays. Prayer and fellowship groups each Tuesday are well-attended. It's not unusual for the front office executives to pray together.

Next time they talk to Jesus, they should ask him how to get the fuck out of fourth place in the NL West.

LATEST CONSERVENTIONAL WISDOM: Innocents Slaughtered at Haditha; Rightwing Bloggers Hardest Hit.

For perspective, see here.

The idea of a "morally irrelevant" war atrocity is new, and I hope the Perfesser and his allies get full credit for it.

UPDATE. Anyone remember when Winds of Change was the "liberal" warblog? Get a load of this.

The current post at Winds of Change at this writing is against the Jacobin Terror. Hilarious, under the circumstances.

10.0! In his review (that term being used here in its new, conservative sense -- that is, criticism of a movie he hasn't seen) of An Inconvenient Truth, Holman Jenkins goes about fatuity as if it were an Olympic event, fitting in all the high-degree-of-difficulty routines.

For example, he does a philosophical number, claiming our problem is not so much global warming as Al Gore's existential dread: "In a million years, the time it takes the earth to sneeze, the planet will likely be shorn of any conspicuous sign we were ever here, let alone careless with our CO2, dioxins, etc. Talk about an inconvenient truth."

He also scores high in my favorite conservative event, the equivalence of observable reality with rhetorical whims: "What if science showed conclusively that global warming is produced by natural forces, with all the same theorized ill effects for humanity, but that human action could forestall natural change? Or what if man-made warming were real, but offsetting the arrival of a natural ice age? Would Mr. Gore tell us meekly to submit to whatever nature metes out because it's 'natural'?" More to the point, what if this peanut butter were caviar? I would have gotten this sandwich at a substantial discount!

But Jenkins shows exceptional creativity and daring here:

A remarkable and improbable thing is that, despite presumably devoting decades of study to the subject of global warming, nothing Al Gore has learned leads him to say anything that would strike the least informed, most dogmatic "green" as politically incorrect. He doesn't discover virtues in nuclear power. He doesn't note the cost-benefit advantages of strategies that would remove CO2 from the atmosphere, rather than those that would stop its creation.

Anybody who deeply searches into any subject of popular debate inevitably comes back with views and judgments to shock the casual thinker. Mr. Gore utterly fails to vouchsafe this reliable telltale of seriousness.

You may have missed it, but Jenkins just said that Gore's conclusions cannot be right because they are not the same as Jenkins' presumptions.

I have to applaud. I would also like to take credit for appreciating Jenkins' craft despite our disagreements, but I don't really know that I disagree with him, because he hasn't asserted anything that rises to the level of argument. He just doesn't like Al Gore, and wants to say bad things about him.

Fair enough. A traditional film review wouldn't have been as interesting, probably. Previously I had put down this New Criticism to sloth and arrogrance, but maybe it's really an avant-garde movement. If so, Jenkins is a stylist to watch.

UPDATE. Those of us who are not so cutting-edge might want to settle down with the down-home, old-school fatuity of the Ole Perfesser, who refutes Gore with -- get this -- the new hand-dryer at his gym, which "makes the skin on your hands ripple like it does when you're skydiving, and within a few seconds your hands are dry." This is the end of MST (Main Stream Towels)! I can't wait to see what they have for the bidet.

NEVER GET OUT OF THE BOAT! People sometimes ask me, a semi-name in the world of electronic bile, why I take my sport with the larger, more popular jackasses of the conservative blogosphere (Reynolds, NRO, etc), seldom wandering into the deeper woods a la such intrepids as The Sadlynauts.

Those woods are very scary, my friends. For example, with just a simple click from the (unaccountably) well-regarded Dean Esmay, I became enmeshed in this:

A related subject (DEFINITELY off limits among the PC crowd) is the indication that cultural remnants of communal, tribal African culture persist in American Black culture today. American Blacks managed to survive slavery, Jim Crow and overt racial discrimination by de-emphasizing individual property rights (which were likely to be ephemeral in any case) and by depending on a sort of communal, tribal cooperation that was common to their heritage. Even today, in many black families, less prosperous family members feel entitled to a share of the wealth of those family members who are more successful.

And then there is the "bling" and "signifying" (not to mention the wanton slaughter) at the lower levels of contemporary Black ghetto culture -- hard not to notice how much this resembles the African pattern.

But to speak of such things immediately brands one as a bigot, despite the fact that CULTURE is the focus, not race.

The author's picture adds to the effect.

I can be lighthearted about this (like, if American blacks retain so much of their African heritage, how did the dashiki ever go out of fashion?), but it is astonishing, indeed dispiriting, how much outright crackpottery there is out there.

The big boys are nuts, too, but they disguise it much better, which makes uncovering their unreason something close to an intellectual exercise -- or as close as I like to get.

Also, I convinced a judge that this constitutes public service. Another 300 hours and I can take off this electronic bracelet.

A THOUSAND PARDONS, DORKS! Due to popular demand among the perpetually-aggrieved, here is a belated Memorial Day graphic:


Now let us move on.

(But not before I memorialize my favorite Freeper comment: "I remember they had a dripping bucket logo to celebrate 'water day' right when Terri Schiavo was being dehydrated.")

MOVIE NIGHT. Finally saw Walk The Line. Back when Joaquin Phoenix was announced as the Johnny Cash avatar, I spent a long night explaining to an uninterested bartender why Phoenix was a poor choice. They should have scoured up a backwoods retard to play JC, I drooled. I admired Phoenix from Quills and Gladiator, but I didn't see anything in him that could sound Cash's simplicity.

I was awful wrong. Phoenix is wonderful. He obviously worked like hell on the voice, and did right by it: he not only got the lower register, but also the aching gulf it came out of. When he did "Folsom Prison Blues" for Sam Phillips (and that was a great little performance, there, by Dallas Roberts -- he made Phillips a pedant, a prophet, and a promoter all at once, which Phillips had to have been), Phoenix seemed to be singing in slow motion, digging open with effort a hole in himself to reveal his deepest sorrow. And, drunk as I was when I expressed it in that bar, the filmmakers seem to have shared my feeling about Cash being a retard. The movie Cash can't hardly help himself: he does everything out of blind need. From the start he comes on to June as if he has no social skills whatever, and even after his desire has been purified by abstinence and discipline, when he proposes -- "Muhrry me, June!" -- it's still a raging hard-on that can't brook convention, common sense, or anything else.

There's a lot more to Johnny Cash than a love story, but the love story is great, and who doesn't like a great love story? Much as I admire Reese Witherspoon, though, I don't see this as any kind of pinnacle for her, Oscar or no. Back in her Freeway-Election period, I would have imagined Witherspoon capable of anything. Then came those stupid Legally Blond movies, and I think she's still sort of stuck on that note. Her June Carter is solid but nothing out of the ordinary. I liked her best when she first softened toward Cash -- it may have just been a gap in the writers' characterization, but when she let him into her hotel room (here the framing of the scene helps a lot), it was a welcome glimpse of mystery -- how is it that someone so forcefully pulled together lets herself slip? By and large, though, Witherspoon's June is too formulaically conflicted, according to how bad or good Johnny's coming off at the time. The newspaper headline JUNE CARTER MARRIES STOCK CAR DRIVER is more interesting than most of her performance. Witherspoon needs a quantum casting leap. But who in Hollywood will give it to her?

As for the resolution, I like it fine. It may be a family-Bible resolution, but it's still a resolution. I especially like Cash's Christian handling of his asshole father -- I was annoyed by it, but on the film's terms it made perfect sense, and those, as Charles Foster Kane once observed, are the only terms anyone understands. I understand the charge that Walk the Line is just a form of "effective ventriloquism," and that Cash's life has more riches to yield, but to me the important thing is that it is effective, and its effectiveness is earned from the start to the finish of the film. Movies can do worse, and usually do.

BACK, SORT OF. For the long weekend I absented myself from all responsibilities, including this one. I didn't look at the internet. I went to Coney Island and ate a softshell crab sandwich and drank beer. I should have stayed there. Here is all work and care and arguments with italicized strawwimmyn.

Still, here is where we are, so I will get back to it. But slowly.