AN OLD FART WITH HIS PALL MALLS. I heard a bunch of people today who said they read Kurt Vonnegut when they were young. So did I, tons of it. It's easy to form the impression from this experience that Vonnegut, who passed Wednesday, was a YA author: simple prose, outlandish premises, and what seemed to me then a clever fatalism that fit well with my other early and ill-digested experiences of literary despair. It's easy to forget that Vonnegut's best-known works were written from a mature perspective; he was a 47-year-old World War II veteran when he created Slaughterhouse-Five.

But I picked a copy of Jailbird out of the dollar bin a few years back, and was surprised and delighted to be reacquainted with his prose, which is indeed simple, but also sturdy enough to support all kinds of fantastic conceits -- Tralfamadorians, Ice-9 and so forth. It also supported a world view which was not, in retrospect, so much despairing as accepting, and at times wise.

Not that Vonnegut didn't recognize the absurd and unjust -- he just saw the humor in them. And his wasn't the common kind of black humor, either, with which most of us seek to neutralize our outrage when it becomes too much to bear. In fact, the absurdities and injustices that were his great subjects -- war, world annihilation, the plight of unrecognized innocents, and the decay of age -- called for something much larger than the gesundheits with which we normally brush away our little glimpses of these things. It required an epic imagination, which Gore Vidal noted in his post-mortem remarks: "He was imaginative; and our generation of writers didn't go in for imagination very much."

I see what he means: while James Jones, for instance, gut-punched his way through the feelings that the War left him with, Vonnegut wove fantasies from them -- fantasies of what might be behind the worst things in human experience that made them, well, part of the human experience. A Nazi in the afterlife, for example, from Happy Birthday, Wanda June:

It was almost worth the trip--to find out that Jesus Christ in Heaven was just another guy, playing shuffleboard. I like his sense of humor, though--you know? He's got a blue-and-gold warm-up jacket he wears. You know what it says on the back? "Pontius Pilate Athletic Club." Most people don't get it. Most people think there really is a Pontius Pilate Athletic Club.

He then figures that he should get a warmup jacket ("we got very good tailor shops up here") bearing the name of the man who killed him. This is utterly fantastic, but that a Nazi might react this way to Christian forgiveness is very easy to believe.

Much later, when age oppressed him, Vonnegut wrote books like Jailbird, in which an old man who, despite his best intentions, finds himself a convicted Watergate felon, muses on the grand caprices of fate as he watches a dog at play:

I observe how profoundly serious Nature has made her about a rubber ice-cream cone -- brown rubber cone, pink rubber ice-cream. I have to wonder what equally ridiculous commitments to bits of trash I myself have made. Not that it matters at all. We are all here for no purpose, unless we can invent one. Of that I am sure. The human condition in an exploding universe would not have been altered one iota if, rather than live as I have, I had done nothing but carry a rubber ice-cream cone from closet to closet for sixty years.

He may have been brought to this understanding because of the outrageously grim twists in his own fortunes, but his epiphany comes from a dog with a rubber ice-cream cone. This is absurd but, I think, more dignified than most absurdism. It is an insight into the universal via the particular, which is the business of first-rate writers.

THE MILLION-MAN SCRUM. Sick as I am of the whole Imus business, I feel it necessary to address this:

And, in a particularly sinister misinformation campaign, key leftists are now trying to portray Imus as a conservative! That's despite his endorsement of John Kerry in the 2004 presidential race and past tirades against the Bush Administration from a decidedly leftist perspective.

With, naturally, an InstaHeh.

Whatever else we can say about Imus, I don't thing we can say he's particularly partisan. I'm surprised so few people (well, Digby, but he's exceptional in so many ways) have recalled this 1996 Radio and TV Correspondents' Dinner, at which the I-man said stuff like this in the presence of President Clinton and his wife:

...the President was at Camden Yards doin' play by play in the radio with John Miller. Bobby Bonilla hit a double, we all heard the President in his obvious excitement holler "Go Baby!" I remember commenting at the time, I bet that's not the first time he's said that. [Turns to President] Remember the Astroturf in the pickup?

Then, some gags about Whitewater. A bunch of conservatives got their equally-offensive lumps, though none of them was President and placed directly in his line of fire. Since his Billy Sol Hargis days, Imus' patch of media turf has ever been wild outrage, and whether you find him, as Digby does, a "spoiled, petulant bully with an incoherent worldview" or an amusing diversion is a matter of taste.

But now the guy is just another ball contended for in that million-man scrum that is our discourse. It had to come to this. In the blogosphere, people embroiled in scandal eventually become mere signifiers for one political team or another. 'Twas ever thus. It even happened in the big Trent Lott affair of '02, recalled fondly by blog triumphalists as a bi-partisan victory for sweet reason, but in fact just another bone of contention, as I remarked at the time:

Trial balloons were floated, bearing the idea that liberals were insufficiently outraged by Lott's remarks, based partly on Tom Daschle's mild, collegial reaction, and, perhaps, on faith that the Right's zone-flooding strategy would, by sheer force of volume, render outside opinion irrelevant. "Either the Democratic Party is appallingly inept, by dropping the ball on this issue, or it's appallingly cynical...I guess 'inept' wins either way," mused InstaPundit. "Where's the New York Times?" cried Andrew Sullivan. "Howell Raines is so intent on finding Bull Connor in a tony golf club that when Bull Connor emerges as the soul of the Republican Senate Majority Leader, he doesn't notice it."

Word was also spread that Lott was never a friend to the Right at all: He was a weak and inefficient Senate majority leader who had effectively given the hated Clinton a pass in his impeachment trial. "He is only for the status quo," wrote Arthur Silber, "stunningly lackluster and uninspiring...tin ear and vacuous mind" In fact, after the GOP's victory in 2002, Capitol Hill Blue reported, "a Republican consultant I know threw up his hands in disgust" (pause to digest this counterintuitive image) "and said 'Christ, this means we'll have Trent Lott as the leader again.'" One wondered how Lott got the job in the first place--till Robert George told us (via another blind Republican quote), "Trent Lott survives because the ex-frat boy puts on a good kegger."

As always happens when conservatives are in high dudgeon, comparisons to Clinton were hauled out. Quoth National Review's Rod Dreher, "Ol' Trent is just following the example of his fellow Baby-Boomer Son of the South, William Jefferson Clinton." A parody at Transterrestrial Musings had Lott, in his BET appearance, announcing that, as "Bill Clinton was the first black president," he was "the first black Senate Majority Leader." Get it?

Things haven't improved since then. In the pro-am pundit community, Imus will be torn at until the game gets old, and then someone other object will serve.

This is not meant as a defense of Don Imus, but as a reminder that the real discussion is about something entirely different.

HONKY, PLEASE! Libertas on the Don Imus case:

“Nappy Headed.” I had no idea that was a slur. No idea whatsoever. Do you know how many times I’ve heard that term used affectionately or comedically between black people in movies or on television? Thankfully, I’ve never called anyone “nappy headed,” because I didn’t know what it meant. But how am I supposed to know it’s yet another “N” word when no one tells me? How am I supposed to know it’s offensive when black people use it all the time as a punch line?

Also: "I’m used to the double standard that allows black people to call each other what they want." And: "Or, is it African American guy? Or Afro-American guy? Or People of Color?"

I feel bad for the guy. I grew up in a white working-class neighborhood where the preferred word for black people was "niggers," yet somehow I eventually figured out how to deal respectfully with people of different races. It helps to be more interested in people than in preserving, indeed cultivating, one's outrage over Political Correctness, rap music, etc.

I guess Culture Warriors don't find that trade-off worthwhile. Their loss, I'd say.

WELCOME WAGON. The moratorium on Elizabeth Edwards criticism has been cut short because she publicly disapproved of her neighbor, one Monty Johnson. Hear, for example, The Anchoress:

Elizabeth Edwards seems to have embraced her inner Rosie. A few weeks ago, we had Rosie O’ Donnell lecturing us on how using a word like “terrorist” de-humanizes terrorists. O’ Donnell apparently has never figured out that when she says things like “Christian Fundamentalists are as dangerous as Muslim Fundamentalists” she’s “de-humanizing” a lot of people, too. And now, this Edwards woman - a true Rosarian, it seems - is characterizing someone as “rabid, rabid Republican” and suggesting that it’s perfectly fine and good to dislike people you’ve never met - to decide before you’ve ever tried to meet them that you would not be civil (I assume she means “civil” when she says “nice,”) to them.

There has been a bit of coverage on Johnson, including this corker from the Carrboro News, which includes a photo of his domicile, which features a boarded-up window and is strung with barbed wire. As a paranoid, I approve of Johnson's approach -- if not the Bush/Cheney sticker -- but I can imagine why Mrs. Edwards is troubled by his proximity. In another interview, Johnson says, "[Edwards] claims to be for the poor people... He don’t care about us. I see him jogging. He doesn’t pull over and say, 'How are you doing?’" This is hardly surprising as, in addition to giving out several interviews denouncing Edwards, Johnson has also been seen stalking government agents on his property with a gun.

Again, as a paranoid I approve of Johnson's Cold Dead Hands approach to gummint interference; I may move to his neighborhood myself someday, as it seems tailor-made for folks with my attitude toward society and indeed socialization. But I can also see how Mrs. Edwards, who has a husband running for the Democratic Presidential nomination (and children as well), would be apprehensive about having a belligerent, armed rightwinger living across the way. The Anchoress may see this as unChristian, but I see it as common sense.

THAT JOKE ISN'T FUNNY ANYMORE. The front page of Sunday's New York Post was devoted to this story:

I DUMPED HILL FOR OBAMA '08
City Hotel Man Opens the Door to Dem Upset

April 8, 2007 -- Bryant Park Hotel doorman Gregory Smith campaigned door to door for Bill Clinton in 1992, he voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton in both her Senate elections - but last week he went online and gave $25 to Barack Obama for president.
He says he has dumped the Clintons for the upstart Democratic senator from Illinois, whom he calls "a needed breath of fresh ideas and openness."

The doorman told The Post that Hillary Clinton's flip-flop on the war and her earlier coyness about her presidential ambitions have turned him off her - probably forever...

You can read the whole thing, but it all boils down to this: a doorman changed his choice of Presidential candidate. I know about Breslin and the gravedigger, but come on. The election is many months away. The conventions are many months away.

It has long been the conventional wisdom that we "gotta love the New York Post" for its ludicrous front-pagers -- "Headless Body in Topless Bar" and all that. I respect the tabloid writing style, and the Post editors who come up with fresh, snappy heds on a daily basis. But for me the Post's cuteness has long since worn off.

The turning point may have been this front page, in which the French and German Ambassadors to the U.N. were shown as weasels, to demonstrate the paper's contempt for those Ambassadors' lack of susceptibility to Colin Powell's U.N. slide show, which was alleged to prove that Iraq was hiding WMDs in smudgy boxes identified as mobile bioweapons labs. I suppose it might have been mildly amusing if you really believed that Colin Powell was telling the truth, and hated the French and the Germans enough to find Der Sturmer caricatures of them clever. But you have to admit that the joke hasn't aged well.

Chacun à son goût and all that, but to me this sort of thing falls into the same category as Don Imus' gag about the Rutgers Women's Basketball Team. I strongly disapprove of his suspension -- let a hundred stink-weeds bloom, so that we may not be spared knowledge of what we have become. And, in the name of the Republic, leave those who find this sort of thing funny free to laugh their fool heads off over it. It's just not my thing.

UPDATE. My editor has corrected me as to the specific object of Imus' slurs in this instance.

SELLER'S REMORSE. Michael Ledeen notes the latest mayhem in Iran, blames unnamed liberals:

But, just like women stoned to death in Iran, or the mass starvation of the people of Zimbabwe, these horrors are greeted with the silence that racists reserve for the less-than-humans who behave in an uncivilized way. Their unspoken attitude is, well, what can you expect of these untermenschen?

And anyway, it's all Bush's fault.

The Ole Perfesser concurs:

"UNTERMENSCHEN:" He's right. That's how they seem to think.

UPDATE: Reader Ted Clayton emails: "Perhaps you could specify who "they" refers to. "

As you can see from reading the linked item, it refers to those allegedly-progressive Westerners who refuse to hold non-Westerners to the same moral standards applied to, say, America and Britain. That should be obvious to, well, anyone who's paying attention.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Drew Kelley writes: 'I am shocked, shocked, to find prejudice among our "best and brightest'." The descent of the "progressives" into racist double-standards is an old story, but it's still one that bears pointing out now and then.

I'm sick of this shit. First, conservatives called for the invasion of Iraq, with the welfare of the Iraqi people one of their flimsier pretexts. And since the whole DemocracyWhiskeySexy business went south, it's conservatives we most often hear talking about what a disappointment the Iraqis have been.

General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters, for example, has said he wants an end to "'peace, love, and understanding' silliness" in Iraq, and cites as a better model for pacification "the Mau-Mau revolt, in which the British won a complete victory -- thanks to concentration camps, hanging courts and aggressive military operations." And, he has also said, "if Iraq's Arabs choose to backslide into the regional addiction to corrupt governance, it's a lick on them, not on us."

John Derbyshire has said that while he supported the invasion as a "psychic shock to the whole region" -- which "It would have done, if we’d just rubbled the place then left" -- he came to realize that "we have submitted to become the plaything of a rabble, and a Middle Eastern rabble at that."

Another rightwing erstwhile warfan, Crunchy Rod Dreher, now says that "I hate that a single drop of American blood was shed for these people."

John Podhoretz says "If the Sunnis and Shiites really go at it, it's hard to see what exactly we can do to get them to stop."

Even Rich Fucking Lowry, author of the notorious "We're Winning" National Review cover story, has said that "The problem with Bush’s freedom rhetoric is that it appears to not be true... All around the chaotic and violent Middle East, human hearts are yearning for many things, but freedom isn’t high on the list."

Yet Ledeen and the Perfesser persist in saying that those of us who predicted that their invasion would result in a shitstorm are the ones who look down on the Iraqi people.

I'd say they suffered from guilty consciences, if there were any indication that they had consciences of any sort.

UPDATE. Commenters point out that The Good Glenn got there first with more. How could I have forgotten the Perfesser's "more rubble, less trouble"? I guess that's why Greenwald is at Salon and I'm wearing a cardboard belt.

ACE O. SPADES, HETEROSEXUAL. The blogosphere is a gold mine for writers. I don't mean you can make a ton of money doing this -- I mean it in a figurative sense, which is the only sense in which most writers, online or off, will ever see much gold of any sort. That is, you can observe certain human behaviors under glass -- the glass of your monitor, in this case -- in much the same way Ibsen used to observe the behaviors of that scorpion her kept in a beer mug on his desk.

Let us follow the tail-swishings of one Ace O. Spades:

5:03 pm: Mr. Spades declares a member of Monty Python who is leftwing unfunny. "Now, I didn't want to go into all that, because even as I pump up John Cleese as the greatest performer and writer on Python, it turns out he's a bit of a New Age left-liberal space-case prick himself. Still, he's not as loud about it..."

9:00 pm: Terry Gilliam isn't funny either! "Terry Gilliam Renounced His American Citizenship Due To Bush's 'Brazil'-like Persecution of Charismatic Rebel-Terrorists... Brazil? Fey, precious drivel. Boring. Not funny, and I don't care how many people insist to me that it is funny... 12 Monkeys. Okay -- that movie I liked a lot. No compaints on that one. Still..."

4:14 am: Wonkette isn't funny, they're only pretending they are -- their japes at Michelle Malkin and Karl Rove were, despite all appearances, deadly serious, and they only pretended they were funny because they were bad at the investigative reporting for which Wonkette is known. Plus they're gay: "boychiks pretending to be 15 year old high school girls... creature of indeterminate gender identity... for a guy who's had more cock in and out of him than a Purdue regional distribution center, you'd think he could manage to lay off the constant gay/transexual 'jokes' for five minutes... This too-gay-even-for-Showtime act is growing thin," etc.

Mr. Spades admits that he was wrong about the Belgian BBQ tax story that had previously incensed him, which means he was "punk'd," which is not the same as being gay.

5:28 am: Ace considers an actress' appearance on Letterman, and a related link, which he's pretty sure is a joke, but which has "naked pics. A lot of naked pics. And a movie of naked chicks which is, yes, officially pornographic." Rosie O'Donnell joke appended.

1:08 pm: British hostages released. "It's about time Feminists invested themselves into knocking the nuts off our enemies for a change."

1:40 pm: New Die Hard movie coming out! Things will blow up! "Presumably John McClane will see through this scam early on, to reassure the few liberal members of the audience that we're not questioning their patriotism."

2:25 pm: Grisly Australian murder story repeated. "Wonkette's about to run a picture of Karl Rove toting the bloody head under his arm, suggesting it's a good tip while tossing in a couple of exclamation points to demonstrate they're not quite vouching for its accuracy." Because Wonkette is serious, and gay.

2:54 pm: Lengthy discussion as to whether Serenity is better than Star Wars. "Dorks" appears in headline, so no fair making fun.

7:28 pm: Essay on Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser link about how guys don't like for women to ask about their position on abortion. No data or even anecdotes about such queries cited, but Mr. Spades is incensed:

If moonbattish political conformity is important to a woman, so much so that she really isn't interested in getting to know a guy unless he voted for Mondale whenever he's had the opportunity (if he changed residences in 2002 just to vote for Mondale in his last Senate bid, bonus points!), then, hey, it's better to find these things out early...

It may be superficial to ask about politics as if that's the measure of someone's character, but 1, to a liberal, your politics are indeed the sum and entirety of your character...

...BTW, the answer to this question is always, "Yes, she's a One Week Wonder; they all are." Maybe not just a week, maybe a Golden Fortnight; maybe not even a full week. But yeah. Pretty much... Rosie O'Donnell...

...most guys are quite a bit more conservative than women, and when a woman says she wants a really liberal guy for her man she's usually thinking "I'd like nice gay shopping buddy that will occassionally cuddle with me, like I've seen on television"...

...which is something they'll never think about Mr. Spades, by God! Now, if only he could get one of them to have sex with him, he might not have to spend so much time writing about Firefly, Star Wars, and Rosie O'Donnell.

Thank God he can't climb out of that mug.

TOO CHILDISH-FOOLISH FOR THIS WORLD. The Ole Perfesser plays The Ole Foolosopher, striking what I suppose passes among conservative propagandists for a contemplative attitude. As we have come to expect from such people, the tone is wounded, and the approach entirely self-justifying.

First, after noting that yet another of his stories has turned out to be full of shit, the Perfesser prints a note from some guy telling him how great it is that the Perfesser stooped to correct the item. Then he muses:

Well, a polite email always counts for something, especially in the blogosphere these days. As I note in the FAQs, I don't promise never to link to things that turn out not to be wrong (no blogger could do that) only that I'll try to correct the error if I find out about it. Rein's email is certainly nicer than some I received about the Ware story, though I think I got about as many from Dartmouth alumni complaining -- correctly -- that I shouldn't have called it Dartmouth University in my New York Post column. Well, nobody's perfect.

So not only is the Perfesser a real sport to print the sort of retraction he is constantly demanding of newspaper editors; he's also not responsible for all those other, interesting-if-true tales that he just leaves lying out there -- like dirty hippies beating up a soldier -- for, though they advance an alternative version of reality that exactly conforms with the Perfesser's own, they are innocent mistakes, like getting a name wrong. And those impolite bloggers (not anti-civility, just on the other side) who think otherwise can be dismissed with a hearty "heh."

Incivility bothers the Perfesser a great deal. After hailing James Taranto's Matthew Dowd damage control, the Perfesser presses his knuckles to his brow and ponders:

I've never felt that degree of attraction to, or affection for, Bush -- you never saw the kind of praise for him here that you once saw for him elsewhere. Mostly, I've just felt vaguely sorry for him, and hoped he'd manage to do a decent job under difficult circumstances. On the other hand, I haven't had the same over-the-top response to disappointment with him, either. But I try to keep the political and the personal separate, something that seems increasingly old-fashioned these days.

"I try to keep the political and the personal separate" -- brother, is that rich! Because the whole schtick of these rightwing blog kingpins is about reducing politics to lifestyle choices and personal tics.

There is, for example, Jim Lileks, who has reinvented himself as a 21st Century Babbitt. (In today's episode, he hollers about the damned artists and hoteliers who have ruined his beautiful Roger Smith Hotel, as if the many midtown lodges that draw customers with arty touches were responding to orders from the Third International rather than the demands of the market.) Column after column, Lileks presents conservativism as something that arises less from argument and assessment than from a longing for the Goode Olde Days, when men were men and matchbooks were matchbooks and nobody talked with a filthy mouth, proving that, if Lawrence Welk were plying his trade today, he'd spend most of the show talking about the life-affirming philosophy represented by Champagne Music and the Beatles' spiritual debt to Josef Stalin.

There is Ann Althouse, now in the final, gruesome throes of dementia, for whom all issues are literally all about Ann Althouse, and the most convincing side of any debate is the one that sends her the most mash notes.

And there is the Perfesser. As we sometimes demonstrate here with the Ole Grey Perfesser Test, he is a fairly doctrinaire conservative, with just a little socially-liberal trim added to differentiate him from the currently overstocked pool of Bill O'Reilly impersonators. The Perfesser tumbled early to right-wing market realities: for example, that while Rush Limbaugh's politics was a factor, it was his self-presentation as a callous, self-satisfied douchebag that reminded suburban burghers enough of themselves that they made him a god. But the crafty Perfesser has aimed slightly higher: between newsy bits, he rattles on about high-end coffee-makers and hand dryers and cars, portraying himself very convincingly as exactly the sort of shopaholic dink he wants to draw to his site. They're a demographic bonanza, after all -- moneyed, acquisitive, and fundamentally insecure.

This persona requires another innovation on the Limbaugh formula: while Rush's white dreamers of disenfranchisement relate well to authority, the Perfesser's target auditors are a little more urbane and feckless. So while rightwing politics must stay in the mix -- one cannot dispense entirely with authority, nor with the narrative of liberal betrayal, lest the audience drift away -- it must be a cooler version of rightwing politics, less beefy-faced and sweaty, more accomodating to people who, in the depths of their soullessness, really just don't give a shit about anything except their own personal comfort and primacy.

In answer to that need, the Perfesser and his peers embed their rightwing talking points in a creamy, formless mess that we might call I Can't Believe It's Not Politics. Its apotheosis is -- was, I guess I should say; who takes this shit seriously anymore? -- the "Anti-Idiotarian" concept, which held that old ideas of "Left" and "Right" had lost all relevance, and the real litmus was now whether you agreed with the Perfesser's right-wing ideas, or were an idiot. This is politics with no fuss, no muss -- that feeling of resentment the Perfesser's hehs and indeed have stirred in you are all the sign you need that you're in the right church.

When the heavy lifting involved in reasoning and comparing has been done away with, the politics goes down smooth, so long as the host maintains an entertaining line of patter. And so their readers increasingly perceive politics as something that has to do with Ann and Glenn and Jim and their affection for them. Any other relevance of politics to their lives would be a drag to think about.

Well, they have a right to make a living too, I guess. But let us not pretend that they aren't making the political personal, nor that this is an improvement.

NOSTALGIE DE LA BOUE. Dean Esmay is yelling at the Arab guy at his website:

It's very hard for me to look at American Muslims, or Muslims in general, or anyone who considers themselves "liberal" or "progressive" or "humanist," who claim to stand for freedom and human rights and then attack everything America has done and tried to do in Iraq over the last four years...

Furthermore, anyone calling himself a "liberal" or a "humanist"--Muslim or not--is in my view faced with a stark choice:

You either sit around pretending that a vicious, murderous, fascist "insurgency" that routinely cuts people's heads off and shoots children in the face blah blah blah blah blah...

Wow, it's just like the old days! Bombing Iraq as the real, classical liberalism! Also takin' me back: Saddam-statue-style warblogger hubris:

The fact is that the naysayers claimed we weren't really striving for liberation. We were. They claimed we'd install a new puppet dictator. We did not. They claimed that we wouldn't really try to set up a democracy. We did. They claimed there would be no legitimate elections. The Iraqis had three national elections in a row, all certified as legitimate by international observers, not even counting the local elections that were held before that.

They claimed we'd do everything possible to get out of the country "before the next elections"--they claimed that before the 2004 elections and again before the 2006 elections. It didn't happen. Now these same people in many cases are cheering for a Congress that's trying to force us out of Iraq even though the war supporters consistently say "no, that would be morally and strategically wrong."

Time after time the naysayers have proven themselves both morally and intellectually incoherent, and yet they never have the introspection to acknowledge this.

That's right, liberals who aren't really liberals -- gaze upon the success that is Iraq and gnash your teeth!

It's nice to know someone's keeping the old standard aloft. Sometimes I worry that people won't believe me when I tell them such people ever existed.

L'ENNUI. Welp, haven't been posting much, let's see if there's a TV review at National Review Online... ah, here we go:

Through the drama, a national dialogue takes place on the issues of love and marriage, family, abortion, and faith or lack thereof...

The show has explored what it really means to love another person, moving beyond mere sexual desire. The show’s writers have managed to make interesting and lasting relationships, even if we wish they had also made the characters married.

At least the characters are generally moving toward marriage. And the show, despite the fact that it does away with nearly all sexual mores, does seem to acknowledge that a happy marriage is somehow the desired end of romance...

...It is never suggested that fatherhood has turned unconnected, selfish, womanizing men into responsible fathers...

...while she admits that unexplained miracles do happen, she never allows that a higher power was behind them...

Here’s an idea, Lords of TV: How about just one, rippin’ hot hospital chaplain who offers the patients hope?

The review is about "Grey's Anatomy." Not that it matters.

I could have written about this meditation on "a conservative view of culture" based on the Texas A&M bonfire (sample: "Of course, in both a marriage and the bonfire tradition, such a self-conscious, analytic process leading to an intensity of experience signals the loss of unself-conscious piety, of an intensity that arises from the loss of self"), but you know what? Life is too fucking short.

ROCK THE CASBAH. Peter Suderman applauds an Iranian antiestablishment rocker -- as do I! (Also I disapprove of shitting on a burning flag, except if it's done tastefully as part of a cutting-edge "reimagining" of Dialogues of the Carmelites or something! There, that'll put an end to those posts!)

Then Suderman goes for the big picture. First there is the expected moment of gibberish:

Where's Williamsburg's sneering hipster outrage when you need it?

Oh, Peter. Williamsburg is played out, man! Greenpoint is where it's happening!

But wait:

Not surprisingly, I tend to think that Islamic totalitarianism—the kind that seeks nukes, denies the Holocaust, and bans indie rock (among other things)—is one of the central challenges the world faces in coming years. I often suspect, however, that a large part of the solution will simply be the passage of time, as the younger generation grows into power and, unwilling to give up Western rock music or cell phone flirting, rejects a lot of the extremism we see now. I suppose it's almost the opposite view of D'Souza, in that I tend to think that Western culture and technology, whatever problems they definitely have, will ultimately be a civilizing, moderating influence on Islam, at least in the next generation.

Ah, we are not so different, you and I. Now can you tell your colleagues to stop praying for war with Iran? I'd much prefer to win the Iranians over with booty calls and The Decemberists.

While my good friend Pete and I wait for our decadent culture to reverse centuries of religious mania (he in Iran, me in America -- just like Stalin and Gus Hall!), some of the brethren are more excited by the dream of using American comic-book movies to excite our citizens into jihad. Victor Davis Hanson diagnoses a "liberal furor over 300" -- and implies that the film's critics would have preferred success for Oliver Stone's Alexander, a film that was fulsomely panned by just about everyone on the planet (including me). Hanson then dissects the merits of 300 as if it were a CIA leaflet dropped from helicopters to sway a populace, citing its relevance to contemporary events and his own classicist daydreams. You would never imagine, reading his analysis, that 300 is an action movie consumed with popcorn and soft drinks by citizens with disposable income and a desire for well-ordered thrills.

Some people will never figure out that American culture does its work in the world not as a propaganda for America's policies, but as food for the world's appetites. You may argue that it is junk food, but it is undeniably tasty, and it comes in a multitude of flavors to suit a multitude of tastes. Soviet teenagers certainly spent more of their black-market kopeks on bootlegs of Exile on Main Street than on The Wealth of Nations. Like George Clinton said, free your ass and your mind will follow.

Still, give Hanson credit for stirring the Ole Perfesser to drop one of his more amusing culture bombs:

Part of it is that the movie industry -- or at least the critic section thereof -- is stuck in the 1970s, when moral ambiguity and angst used to be groundbreaking and novel. Now they're overdone, predictable and boring.

Moral ambiguity and angst haven't been novel since Doctor Faustus, if they were then, though the Perfesser is right to intuit that some of us (though not the lords of the "movie industry," surely) prefer the age of The Godfather and McCabe & Mrs. Miller to the age of The Hills Have Eyes 2. But that is a matter of taste, not a problem of politics.

UPDATE. Premiere critic Glenn Kenney is also on the case, and better. I didn't know before I read Kenney's post that Hanson actually contributed to (and presumably profited from) a piece of 300 ancillary marketing -- because Hanson didn't mention it. Well, when you're intellectually corrupt, I guess the other kinds of corruption just naturally follow along.

TANTRUM. Ann Althouse's recent webcam performance has been, I think, widely misapprehended. To say she "loses it" in the video, as C&L does, is technically correct but misleading. That is, we may also say that a badly-brought-up child who throws a tantrum has "lost it," but this implies that the child is thoroughly and helplessly victim to his own passion, when experience teaches that kids milk their shit-fits in hopes that they will cause the relevant adults to change the rules in their favor.

Professor Althouse's whole online career, as has been tediously documented here, may be seen as one long series of tantrums, thrown to remove from herself the responsibility of making logical arguments on behalf of her crack-brained ideas. She constantly commits the most egregious offenses to common sense -- as when, after ceaselessly decrying political correctness in others, she decided Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic remarks made his movies retroactively ungood -- and, when challenged, says that her opponents just like to argue ("link only for the things they disagree with"), that their "political vision... feels like depression," and other such non-sequiturs.

In other words, as soon as things start going any way other than her own, Professor Althouse resorts to behaviors usually seen in the as-yet-unsocialized. So let us not deceive ourselves that the Professor was showing us anything new when she blew up at Garance Franke-Ruta. Her video tantrum only looks different from her written ones because, confronted with a live commenter whose words she could not delete, Althouse resorted to a more physical form of her usual schtick -- that is, yelling and making faces.

And she got what she wanted -- Franke-Ruta backed down like Alan Colmes with a shy bladder. I think that's too bad, but I suspect that even if Franke-Ruta had come roaring back, Professor would have done something else as evasive -- sticking her fingers in her ears and singing "Yellow Submarine," perhaps.

And the same people would notice, and the same people would fail to notice.

AN OLDIE BUT NO-GOODIE. Think I'll drop by that New Criterion blog. After all, they got a fancy Latin name... they can't be too much like the mouthbreathers I usually consort with...

Why America Hates New York

[Posted 12:37 PM by James Panero]

'Forty Days in the Dessert'? The 'Immaculate Confection'? The possible New York Post headlines here are endless (and yes, I know the difference between the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth.) But one thing is clear. From Piss Christ to The Sensation Show, America hates New York for cheap art-world stunts, and for good reason. Check out the following notice that just came over the transom...

Piss Christ and Sensation! How did he miss Karen Finley? Must have been edited for space.

He's angry at a Jesus made out of chocolate, by the way. Oh wait, I forgot the best part:

And why have I yet to see a custard Mohammed?

Blasphemous and soft on Islam! I hope Panero storms this exhibition, throwing Holy Water and screaming "The Power of Charles Johnson compels you."

On the bright side, at least America hates New York again. Thank fuck! I was really tired of them pretending not to.

FOGGY MOUNTAIN BREAKDOWN. The L.A. Times has a story about how Democrats get more famous musicians to play at their fundraisers than Republicans get. This should be no shock to Republicans, as the Party of acid, amnesty, and abortion has long been the natural home of all us godless artists.

The Ole Perfesser, however, reacts to the news as if he has just seen a passel of bluecoats comin' over the ridge:

ANOTHER REASON WHY REPUBLICANS should cheer the music industry's troubles, and perhaps help them along by repealing the DMCA or something. As I've suggested in the past, though, I think their reflexive tendency to side with big business has gotten in the way of smart politics.

Not enough musicians like the GOP. Let's punish them with frivolous legislation!

As previously mentioned here, the Perfesser seems not to know the difference between art and propaganda. We might try explaining it to him by using his own work as an example -- take your own short films of car interiors, Perfesser, or your thoughtful essays on how much hotels charge you for internet access -- surely these are not political in purpose, but pure expressions of those few vestiges of humanity left in that shallow grave we call your soul!

But then again, why bother?

P.S. Since the recent box-office triumph of 300 was supposed to mean that Americans want to be ancient Spartans, does this latest development mean that Americans now wish to be anthropomorphic turtles? (Favorite Libertas line: "If white men kill darker men in this story, it’s not because of their color, it’s to stave off their slavish culture, just as we must do today." Wow, maybe that will be the Sean Bell officers' defense.)

SHORTER ACE O. SPADES: Giuliani shows signs of beginning to consider to pretend to almost support my positions. Yessss!

RIGHT-WING NUTS SAY THE DARNEDEST THINGS, #452,885. "Here, morality is not being used as a lens through which to view the facts, but rather as a hammer that can smash the inconvenient ones." -- The American Thinker on (not that it matters) so-called global warming.

(Me, I use morality as a lint-brush to de-pill my bedspread. Hat tip to the deranged housefrau wearing a breastplate made of old brooms and declaiming lines from Saint Joan. The whole thing is insane, but I'm all about the piquancy of clumsy metaphors and the sweet taste of low-hanging fruit. You may have at the "Thinker," and his claim that liberal alchemists are trying to hypnotize us, in comments.)

UPDATE. I'm so lazy today I forgot to check: one post earlier, Jean D'oh writes:

So, you know...if the big boys of Global Warming aren’t really taking the issue seriously,,,if they find it so unserious as to allow the issue to be used as a political wedge or a rabble-rousing sound-bite, and that’s all...well, then I don’t have to take it seriously, either.

(Original rendered in bold, italic, flaming type with a car horn blaring "ah-OO-ga" in the background.) This is not about global warming so much as about styles of denial. Their reason for denying the credibility of global warming theories, however much its expression changes from post to post, is simply that people they don't like are advocating them. Maybe some GW advocates ought to appeal to them by wearing American flag pins and talking smack about Chavez, and thus save the world from catastrophe.

ANOTHER NAME TO CROSS OFF THE MacARTHUR GRANT SHORT-LIST. The Ole Perfesser starts out reasonably enough:

WHY CD SALES ARE PLUMMETING: The music industry blames piracy, but other factors -- from the ability to just buy the songs you like, and not a CD full of filler, to competition from other things like games and the Internet, to the fact that releases tend to suck more than they used to -- seem more significant.

Then -- who knows? -- maybe a nanobot got stuck in his brain:

It occurs to me that the media sectors that are doing badly -- movies, music, newspapers, TV women's shows -- seem to be the most highly politicized, while the sectors that are doing well, like games, aren't. I'd be interested to see more analysis on that subject.

The Perfesser, of course, is constantly predicting that the wave of the future is homemade websites that gas about politics.

There's an old notion that genius is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time. Of course, like other signs associated with genius -- inflated self-esteem, for example -- it is often misattributed.

Still, I must agree that it would be interesting to see "more analysis" of the concept that people are buying fewer Christina Aguilera CDs because of their political content.

LONESOME RHODES SPEAKS! National Review maintains its audio soapbox for Presidential candidate Fred "Ah got me a deep voice an' ahm on the TV" Thompson. His latest is about the global warmin', which Ole Fred is agin:

Nah, I guess we shouldn’t even be talking about this. The science is absolutely decided. There’s a consensus.

Ask Galileo.

I did ask Galileo, and he asked if Jonah Goldberg is still Editor-at-Large of National Review. I said that he was, and Galileo handed me this Goldberg column:

The head of the Inquisition was a Galileo supporter, who hoped to get the whole thing over with quickly by just giving him a formal reprimand. Unfortunately, rabble-rousers and opportunists turned the heat up. The trial is very complicated but the result was that Galileo got house arrest, which is where he did all of his research anyway. He was permitted to correspond with any scientist he wanted and he wrote the Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences while under the Man’s thumb.

...The Church had the same problems of any major political institution and other challenges unique to being the Catholic Church. It had to contend with politics and intrigue and in-fighting and cravenness. But it also had legions of people fighting for truth and fairness in a difficult time beset with bizarre politics. Marxists, like Bertold Brecht, and liberals, like all of your (non-Marxist) college professors, seized upon the notion of a monolithic and superstitious Church because the aim was to discredit the Church specifically and religion in general. Religion with its faith in the unprovable and the perfection of the hereafter is, and always has been, the greatest threat to those who believe we can perfect the here and now through “scientific methods.”

So they arrested him! They still let him have a pencil and paper, even though people who supported Galileo were like totally Marxist. At least it wasn't like Oz! You remember that show? It was rilly funny. Oh, look, a donut.

Thompson's bizarre citation of Galileo perfectly fits this tween-election period, which is all about denying reality. Gun nuts support the virulently anti-gun Giuliani and the NatRev claims a pro-science mantle for its opposition to scientific consensus. By early 2008 the careerist rat bastard Giuliani will be hoisting rifles over his head at NRA photo ops, and National Review will be loudly declaiming the scientist-homosexual alliance. You read it here first!

I DON'T NEED NO DOCTOR. Having, in the previous post, treated the famous rightwing psychologists Dr. Krauthammer and Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser, I figured I would go for the trifecta with Dr. Neo-Neocon. Here she talks about the recent anti-war demonstrations, making the time-honored conservative argument that people who don't support the war are all a bunch of smelly old hippies (aka the argumentum ad patchouli):

The protesters are nostalgic for the heady days of the 60s, when hundreds of thousands could be mobilized for the street theater of the time. They may forget that, when the draft ended, so did most of the protests. Or perhaps they don’t; maybe that’s what’s behind the call by some of them to resume the draft.

Anybody got cellphone pix of the "Resume The Draft" posters from that demo? No? Then what the hell is she talking about? (Charlie Rangel, one assumes; I'm sure he's gratified to be referred to in the plural form, and will ask for each of his votes to count double henceforth.)

It is generous of Dr. Neo to attribute to all these weed-addled hippies sufficient long-term memory to recall the 60s. But the fact is, they wouldn't really need it, having more recently seen this:

The February 15, 2003 anti-war protest was a coordinated day of protests across the world against the imminent invasion of Iraq. Millions of people protested in approximately 800 cities around the world. According to BBC News, between six and ten million people took part in protests in up to sixty countries over the weekend of the 15th and 16th; other estimates range from eight million to thirty million.

Even the January 27, 2007 demo might have been as much as a half-million strong, per the Wikipedia -- traditional news sources tend to estimate these things very low, as I recall from the 2004 Republican Convention protest, which looked more like 500,000 people to me than the lowball estimates of 100,000. But even 100,000 is still good for a bunch of aged, irrelevant Flower Power types, no?

Also, mightn't the fact that there had just been a large demo a few months earlier, and the sitting of an allegedly anti-war Democratic majority in Congress, have something to do with the relatively low turnout last week?

But there's no point in posing these questions to Dr. Neo, who, like her colleagues, dispenses her judgments of liberal insanity from a dreamland very much like the old Soviet Union, where dissidents could expect a negative diagnosis with or without a proper examination.

Boy, they give out doctorates like bubble-gum cards if you have the money now, don't they?

SHORTER DR. MRS. OLE PERFESSER: I diagnose liberals as crazy by their bumper stickers. Top that, Krauthammer!