WE SHALL OVERCUM. James Poulos calls himself a "Post Modern Conservative." What's that mean? A quick glance at his recent stuff offers a few clues. First, Poulos sees discontent among young liberals and young conservatives, and proposes a basis on which accomodation between the two tribes can be reached:

The only major gulf between these two groups is defined by the third vector among them of cultural libertarianism, which as I keep repeating is basically the question of sexual ethics. As young leftists recover a wounded common sense about the putative benefits of getting into an S&M relationship with the price-tagged, pleasure-pimped System in exchange for a golden ticket to being Sexually Active, they will grow more truly toward the Right...

If you're having problems navigating the metaphors, he means young liberals will stop wanting sex and then everything will be hunky-dory.

Oh yeah, and there's this:

Well, maybe semen suppressant is still a ways off, but now that we've conquered the period, delaying menopause is the 'natural' next step toward the complete and utter inversion of our sexual natures. Teenage slutpuppets that can't get pregnant and weepy cougars who want to be mommies after all, dammit -- I absolve you, I absolve you. Yes, this is Progress.

I think he's trying to be funny, though maybe in the postmodern world "funny" and "creepy" are synonyms.

This sort of thing actually makes me happy I didn't go for a postgraduate degree.

CHILDHOOD'S END. Every year near graduation time, the seniors at Hendrick Hudson High School in Montrose, New York do a prank. This year they set a bunch of alarm clocks to go off at the same time and snuck them into the school. Now many of the pranksters are up on felony charges because nineeeleven Virginia Tech we're a-scared etc.

You can read about this case in the White Plains Journal News, which also mentions what appears to be a little epidemic of this sort of bullshit:

Three students at Haldane High School in Cold Spring also found themselves in trouble this month after they created chalk outlines of bodies splattered with red liquid to resemble blood. The students were hit with criminal trespass charges, but will be able to participate in the school's graduation ceremony.

An Internet search shows that news organizations across the country are reporting about senior pranks that turned out to be serious busts. In one case last year, armed guards and swarming helicopters responded to a senior prank at an Orlando, Fla., school. The threat? An annual toilet paper attack.

You can also read a thumbsucker about Hudson High in today's New York Times. It's Select, but don't worry, here are the ponderosity highlights:

And it’s leaving everyone mulling over the questions of what’s stupid fun and what’s just stupid, and where you draw the line between reaction and overreaction in a world that’s half “Jackass” and half Age of Anxiety...

...one of those Rorschach tests for an edgy age: Is it a case of kids — and their overly protective parents — who need to face the consequences of their own bad behavior, or is it a reaction way out of proportion to the threat?...

(Pause for another thoughtful draw on the briar, and an oracular clouding of visage)

...You could get both responses, and a sense that maybe the vogue for dumb behavior celebrated on the Internet and in shows like MTV’s “High School Stories” needed some brakes...

No. No, no, no, and no. This isn't a cultural litmus test and it has nothing to do with those wacky shows the kids watch on the teevee. This is just nuts. If every American morning for past six years had begun with a terrorist attack, I might just consider it a forgivable overreaction to be reversed immediately; but with the relative paucity of terrorist attacks since 2001, it's nuts.

It's too seldom mentioned that one of the most obvious bad effects of the War of Whatever has been the pressure it puts on young people -- or, rather, the excuse it gives to the sort of petty tyrants who always like to make kids' lives hell to go absolutely bonkers, as the Montrose authorities have done.

Kids can get suspended these days for their MySpace pages or for holding up a goofy sign. They can get arrested for drawing cartoons. I suppose some of the Hudson High students can expect to be spirited away to one of our secret torture prisons in Syria.

There is an upside to this thing: that, after years of this crap, some kids persist in acting like kids. Maybe their draconian punishments will scare the guts out of them, or maybe they'll just understand more strongly the appropriate message: that the people in charge aren't fit to run a hot-dog stand, let alone other people's lives.

ROCK BOTTOM. The latest trend in rightwing commentary: absolute gibberish. Here's noted god-botherer The Anchoress on some widdle girl whom Simon Cowell failed to insult mercilessly on TV:

I think of this child’s singing as a sword of innocence thrust into the psyche a fierce world world that has forgotten how sharp and bright is it’s guileless tip.

I don't know what's worse: that she mistakes celebrity judges for Biblical villains, or that she mistakes her own prose for English.

Meanwhile at National Review Jonah Goldberg burps out a response to some bullshit about secular voters:

Now, we can certainly argue about how "mass based" Communism was and to what extent its mass appeal reflected or contradicted the religious attitudes of its supporters. But here's an idea. Maybe now that Communism and the various isms in its orbit have been discredited, the attributes which made it appealing may in fact flourish. A couple years ago I wrote a piece suggesting that cosmopolitanism explained much of the passion for Marxism. Perhaps the same case can be made for secularism. Perhaps Communism did us a great favor by partially discrediting, or at least tamping down, the appeal of secularism and cosmopolitanism. As Ross notes, turned toward secularism in the 1990s. Maybe that's because is association with "Godless Communism" crumbled with the Berlin Wall? That might be too much of a stretch. But while I think Communism is in the dustbin of history, that doesn't mean we should sweep it under the rug.

My first impulse was to send a team of grammarians in there, but what would be the sense? There's nothing here worth saving.

I don't see how they can get any worse. Maybe they'll just start uploading mp3 files of their farts.

FORM FOLLOWS FUCKWIT. The new Peggy Noonan column at the Wall Street Journal is too lame to deconstruct -- it's the usual bullshit about how Bush betrayed her and all America longs for a Leader who is exactly like whoever will next pay Peggy to write speeches.

But as I keep angrily declaiming from the brass rail, it is by their usages that ye shall know them. (In my old age I'm turning into a cracker-barrel deconstructionist -- the corruption of language interests me more than the corruption of Senators, probably because it is less obvious and the damage more serious.)

One of Noonan's fave rhetorical tropes is the invented quote -- you know: "I bet this horrible person says to himself I'm a big stupid liberal and I hate the American people and love Satan," that sort of thing. Of course, we all do it, but it can get old very quickly (one tends to lose the distinction between the genuine stupid ideas and the merely attributed ones) and Noonan reeeeeally overdoes it -- in fact she has devoted whole columns to it, as when she channeled the late Paul Wellstone, whose consciousness was clearly incomprehensible to her, but whose usefulness as an object of Republican propaganda she understood all too well.

But this bit from today's column contains that schtick's equivalent of a Triple Lutz:

The White House is exploiting American alarm at uncontrolled borders to get its way. This of course has added to the sense of national alarm. They believe the alarm works for them: If you don't pass our bill we'll never control your borders--yes, "your"--and you'll suffer!

That's right -- in the middle of an invented monologue, Noonan actually stops to comment indignantly at the words she has put in someone else's mouth!

Though Noonan has many distinguishing neuroses as a propagandist, I think this one reflects a common tendency among her whole tribe: the ever-increasing certainty that one's straw men are in fact real people. It's sort of like what happens to some artists and the characters they invent, except, you know, totally evil.

PURTY LADY NO TALK TO CAPTAIN? Captain Ed Morrissey has a complaint about Angelina Jolie and her involvement with the Daniel Pearl biopic. What, the informed reader will ask, is he still sore that they didn't cast Bo Derek? No, it has to do with her interview guidelines:

However, demanding that her answers never get used in any other context, and threatening reporters with restraining orders is not just unreasonable, but outright intimidation. It goes against the entire mission of Reporters Without Borders, and indeed against the notion of freedom of the press. I wonder if Jolie or her Hollywood friends would be as sanguine about these demands had they come from George Bush or Rudy Giuliani. Somehow, I think they'd be the first to demand a rush to the barricades...

Kudos to the reporters that told Jolie where to stick the agreement [!!! -- ed.], and raspberries to Jolie's self-important snit.

Sometimes I think that these guys aren't responding to ideas or arguments at all, but to endocrine storms and uncontrollable rushes of brain chemicals. I think the mere prospect of humiliating a purty gal and liberals in one blog post -- with a Muslim decapitation for added kink -- so excited the Captain that he was willing to spend nearly 500 words trying to achieve it. By the standards of journalism or even common sense, it is a dismal failure; but what of those? The heart wants what it wants.

YOUR MOMENT OF GOLDBERG. Jonah Goldberg notices a citation of sauerkraut being called "liberty cabbage" during World War I. The objective correlative that leaps most readily to his mind is:

a.) His fellow wingnuts' renaming french fries "freedom fries" because they were mad at France.

b.) Woodrow Wilson and the Progressives, because they "were keen on using food as a tool for political allegiance and organization." Also "today's environmentalists."

There's an explanation for this, but to find it you must join Porky in Wackyland.

I was thinking about doing at least one of these every day -- God knows there's always enough material -- but neither my readers nor I should risk that much exposure to Goldberg.

AS OF THIS MOMENT, THEY'RE ON DOUBLE SECRET PROBATION! Zillion-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters must have been a great hand-to-hand combatant back in the day. Just when you think you've got him down, he comes back at you with a surprise.

For instance, take the lede of his latest column:

WONDER what Iraq would look like if we left to morrow? Take a look at Gaza today.

One is inclined to laugh. Civil war and chaos if we leave Iraq? What have the past few years been, rehearsal?

Cornered, the General pulls out his Ka-Bar!

Then imagine a situation a thousand times worse.

Gasp! A thousand times worse? Now I'm scared! But I can't show it, or Peters will move in for the kill with Ten thousand times worse! Hundred thousand times worse! Infinity!

No worries, though -- eventually I'll pass out from the powerful fumes of the rest of his column. To encrapsulate: Arabs are sub-human and incapable of self-government, and our last hope of victory -- this month anyway -- is... (opens the envelope) "As fine an officer as we've got in uniform, Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey." Start molding the statue!

Reading the General for sense is useless; persist if you must for his style, full of ripe analogies such as this:

Four years ago, the neocons fantasized about a post-Saddam Age of Aquarius. Now the Murthacrats insist that, once we bail out, Atlantis will rise from the Tigris and Euphrates.

I begin to suspect that Peters learned his trade -- the writin', not the killin' one -- from old police comics.

BUT-HEAD. Perfesser Glenn Reynolds is leaning against the doorjamb of the British press, playing with matches and saying what a nice place it is and what a shame it would be if it got burned down:

I'm against Euro-style press regulation, of course. But...

Let me interrupt here to mention how little I am enjoying this recent rightwing revival of "I'm against cutting your throat, but... I think your throat should be cut" formulations.

...much of the British press has been even more shoddily political and dishonest in its war coverage than its Ratheresque counterparts here. Lack of patriotism and honesty, plus lack of self-discipline, are likely to lead to calls for regulation. And if it were any other industry putting out a similarly shoddy and corrupt product, the British press would be demanding government regulation, wouldn't it?

I'm sure that government regulation will be worse than press freedom, but...

Etc.

While the Perfesser thinks it only natural that "lack of patriotism and honesty" should bring calls for press regulation, he thinks quite another way about the same sort of thing when it's called the Fairness Doctrine.

I don't like to call anyone a hypocrite, but...

SHORTER JOSHUA TREVINO: The real tragedy of Tony Soprano is that his kids will vote Democratic.

(Next week, Trevino will examine the Rousseauian/Jeffersonian dialectic in "Two and a Half Men.")

COME ALONG. WE'RE GOING TO THE TRANS-LUX TO HISS ROOSEVELT. Today the Wall Street Journal approves Amity Shlaes' attack on that bastard FDR. Highlight of Alonzo L. Hamby's review: "One question that Ms. Shlaes never quite answers is just what Roosevelt should have done to beat the Depression beyond practicing a Coolidge-like passivity." I shouldn't wonder!

Jesus, these fuckers never stop. Next week in the Journal: Magna Carta and FISA -- which was worse?

I'M ALL FOR WOMEN'S LIB, BUT THESE BRA-BURNING KOOKS, HALF OF THEM COULDN'T LAND A MAN ANYWAY ETC. Commenting on a gay marriage/free speech contretemps, Don Surber announces that he is a supporter of gay marriage, which surprised me till he dropped the other shoe:

I have to wonder why I am supporting gay marriage when one group of gays and one federal circuit court contend that “marriage” is a profanity that should not be uttered at work.

Here's a test, friends. You believe in religious freedom, don't you? Good. Now imagine yourself saying, "I have to wonder why I am supporting freedom of religion when some religious people are doing something I disagree with."

Can't see yourself doing that? Neither can I, much as I dislike obnoxious Jesus freaks, because I actually support the principle, and am not just declaring my support of it so I can use it as some sort of veiled threat against people who benefit from it. Yet Surber treats gay rights like car keys he's not sure he should give his kid if he's going to act like that.

In just about any Surber post on stories in which homosexuals are in conflict with anyone else, Surber sides against the homosexuals. (He actually writes things like "You know, I am all for gay rights. Let them marry. Let them serve on juries. Let them vote. All that. But...") He only comes to their defense when he's trying to work a contrarian schtick against Democrats -- as when Max Blumenthal pointed out the irony of anti-gay-marriage Republicans relying on gay men like Jeff Gannon and Matt Sanchez, and Surber spun it that Blumenthal was persecuting gay folk for being conservative. "I wish someone on the left had the guts to call Blumenthal the homophobe he is," sighed Surber.

If I knew someone who said he was my friend but never sided with me except to serve his own unrelated purposes, I'd have to say that fellow was full of shit.

So why does he even pretend? It could be that, like the sad case considered here last week, Surber just wants people to think him tolerant. But I think more highly of him than that. I suspect Surber's true intention, and that of other conservatives who occasionally and awkwardly express support for gay rights, is to modernize the image of the movement -- vote for us, we're no longer bigots!

Now, if all things were equal, I might endorse his strategy -- it's a step up from what we got from these people before, Lord knows. But for me, the overriding principle is that bullshit begets bullshit, and they could actually resist gay rights more successfully from "I'm all for gay rights but" position than from a "grrroot, I hate faggitts" position. In fact, that might even be the main idea.

AU HASARD, CONEY ISLAND. Went down to Coney today. I had my softshell crab at Nathan's, bumper cars, skeeball, wade on the beach, and drinks at Ruby's, as per usual. And I enjoyed also the vicarious company of Coney's faithful, for whom the place is an oasis: the hipsters and tourists, but mainly the poor, who wandered the boardwalk and soaked up the negative ions, clams and corndogs, loud noises, and other cheap thrills. As Puerto Rican Day paraders filtered back to Brooklyn a little circle was formed on the Boardwalk within which speakers blared salsa and drunk Boricuas danced, some as obscenely as possible. Kids screamed on the cheesy rides and wolfed cotton candy and regarded their garish surroundings with obvious wonder, as if this ramshackle amusement park were the greatest place on earth.

I don't know how long any of us will have this opportunity:

Joe Sitt’s Thor Equities bought the Astroland site late last year to level and build a $2-billion Vegas-style amusement-condo complex.

Thor’s theme park would include movie theaters, beachfront luxury condos, a 150-foot waterslide, a multi-level carousel, and first new roller coaster since the Cyclone was built in 1927.

To build his Xanadu, Sitt needs a city rezoning — one that city officials have been reluctant to give, though negotiations continue. Neither Sitt nor city officials would comment on those talks for this article.

As anyone who follows City development might have guessed, the developers have not been idle: a fat strip of amusements has already been torn away. Some sideshows and snack-shops are gone, as are the batting cages and the miniature golf course.

I mourn these, but I am especially sorry to have lost the go-kart tracks. Many of us New Yorkers don't drive, and appreciated the go-karts, outfitted with absurd fiberglas Formula-One shells, as our best chance to indulge in a reckless simulacrum of same. We revved the noisy lawn-mower motors, bounced off the tires that buffered the hairpin turns, and engaged in joyful and ridiculous combat with the other Speed Racers, some of them laughing out loud at the absurdity of it, some fixing a dead-eyed gaze on the scrap of daylight for which they were competing. What's left of our little arena, the late International Speedway, is pictured above.

Other photos of the devastation are available at the Gowanus Lounge. As one of the commenters puts it, "There will be only condos in Coney Island. Thor wants to kill Coney Island, proof is in their fences which their permits proudly proclaim they will only be there for this summer season and will disappear right after labor day. Why make Coney look like crap for the summer season? To drive business away."

I think that's right. Business was a bit slow for a relatively nice Sunday, and the Parade may have been the least of the anti-attraction. Everyone knows the fix is in. When the West Side Stadium was defeated, it was because another corporate behemoth, Cablevision, pushed against it. But there's no well-heeled sugar daddy sticking up for old Coney now. Its disposition is totally in the hands of the developers and the City, which is to say that the developers will win, with some fiddling around the edges as a sop to civic interest -- "a circus, an inflatable slide and movies under the stars."

Well, as Jack Lemmon sighed in Save the Tiger about jockstraps made from the American flag, maybe it's terrific. I don't live at this end of the F train: maybe the community's interests are indeed best served by condos and circuses. The spread of money in this City is relentless, and while Coney would seem at present a bridge too far, who am I, an unmoneyed interest, to dispute the wisdom of real estate? It may be there is jam enough in the housing boom to magnetize wealth into this far-flung neighborhood, and I can't in good conscience hope against it; though my thirty years' experience of local booms and busts tells me that a developer's long-odds crap shoot often ends with the City (that is, us citizens) covering his tab, I must pray for a positive result -- especially since, things being what they are, there's no chance of stopping the game.

I cannot mourn too much. Coney's pleasure palaces of yore, Luna Park and Dreamland, burned and faded from the grasp of those who loved them before I came onto the scene; now I, in my turn, must accept that the Coney I know is also passing away. It may become something like South Street Seaport, or Battery Park City. Or it may become a speculator's loss, like Columbia Gardens in Butte, Montana -- about which I was told by Stephanie Cannon, a Montana native who was my companion on today's outting, and for whom I won a stuffed tiger on the Midway. Columbia Gardens was a children's amusement park dedicated, allegedly in perpetuity, by 19th Century copper king W. A. Clark. In 1973, it was destroyed by the proprietors of the Berkeley Mine in the vain hope that more copper could be extracted from the ground beneath it, and soon became a rancid Superfund site: a pit of fetid water and the corpses of local wildlife.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

YOU AND YOUR RACIST FRIEND.

This long spring, I started reconnecting with old gay friends...

Well, good for you. (The writer is at ChicagoBoyz, a site dedicated to reconciling bullshit libertarianism with conservative bullshitism.)

I've been struck by how many of them have become politicized, beset by BDS.

Why gay friends no like Bush? A thousand voices -- perhaps even the ones in her head -- leap to answer, so the author hastens to explain:

The long history of marriage is of an institution that raises the next generation and transmits the community’s values...

Tempted to go, "Oh, great, here it comes," and run away? Abide yet a while, friends, because God made wingnuts as different as snowflakes, and this one has her own piquant ways. Let us therefore celebrate our diversity, and get a load of this:

It is easier to believe others tempt us than within us are desires we must (and with difficulty) control. To many, the shift from the Old Testament to the New may be theologically one of grace, but is also from the tribal to the universal, from the external to the internal. Whether this is the lesson of the Bible or of the slowly modernizing world, it is clearly one that restrains us in ways that those who see temptation in a right angle can not understand and leads to quite different understandings of guilt. The man’s lust, we believe, not the woman’s clothing, causes rape. This and so much else is the mark of a value system internalized and assumed universal. We think it is right. Sure this assumption of a certain universality may impose upon others, but it is more practical than narrow: it is also the only way that people with varying beliefs can easily live beside one another.

And thanks to Jewish psychologists, we began to find words for this internalization...

I can hear you, through the double glass, screaming, "Please get some of those words the Jewish psychologists found, or even words found by Bratislavian librarians or Eskimo meter-readers, and substitute them for this dreck!"

I apologize. I just wanted to give you an example of the sort of word-fog some educated but very confused people throw up when they are stuck with a dilemma they can't even acknowledge, let alone solve.

The author's real point, made somewhere in the first hundred paragraphs, is that homosexuals should shut up about Bush because he protects them from Muslims. But she finds it at least as important to explain -- with endless slabs of convoluted prose as evidence -- that she is well-read and even a bit artistic. This is meant to signal that she is not a mouth-breathing faggot-hater, but someone who is tolerant -- which is to say, she tolerates both her gay friends' continued existence and her colleagues' continued discrimination against them.

This is usually the case with conservative converts of the sort described by Michael Berube with the phrase "I used to consider myself a Democrat, but thanks to 9/11, I’m outraged by Chappaquiddick." They like to think that, because they broke away (assisted by stark fear) from an old orthodoxy, they have become true free-thinkers. But when issues of discrimination come up, they find themselves compelled to defend their new wingnut friends and their bone-deep prejudices.

In reality they haven't broken free, they've just switched gangs -- and have to live by the new one's code, including the by-law about No Poofters. If they want to face their old friends, they have three options (besides sanity, of course, which is out of the question):

They can swallow whole their new friends' lunacy and bravely assert it to all comers;

They can try a it's-for-your-own-good defense, pleading the necessity to accomodate moderate Muslims or red-state voters until such time as we can afford luxuries like civil rights;

Or they can plead the ties of friendship and remind their old friends of how they used to discuss Henry James until "dawn lightened the windows."

The intractable bigotries of the American Right are offensive to all thinking people, even to those who were traumatized into joining it in 2001. Yet no major candidate in either party will stand up for gay marriage. I think they realize that if they did take up the cause, they would be greeted, not by just the small clutch of angry misfits whose heads swim with homo-hatred, but by them and a much larger group they've convinced to come along in solidarity.

ANOTHER PERFESSER'S PROBLEM. Ann Althouse is forced by weather to actually go into a movie theatre and watch Paris J'Taime, an omnibus film of ten-minute shorts:

So let me while away a few more minutes and say the film anthology was swell. The films were so short that I didn't get too impatient -- my usual problem.

So that's why she hates fiction movies and novels -- she's got the worst case of ADD in recorded history. Even in my childhood years, stoked by sugar and pheochromocytoma, I could sit through a damn movie. In fact they tended to calm my stimming.

And she went to law school? That racket must be easier than I thought! Had I but served Mammon with half the zeal I served Truth and Beauty... but this is about her tragedy, not mine. How come her fellow rightwingers can't get up a drive to provide Althouse with the daily firehose stream of Ritalin required to bring her down to earth? They probably realize that if she ceased to tweak for more than a few minutes, she might realize what a bunch of crap she's been writing, and they'd be shy a baying voice come the next full moon. Fucking enablers.

ON THE OTHER HAND, HE IS VERY SENSITIVE TO DIFFERENCES IN DIGITAL-CAMERA QUALITY. Ole Perfesser Reynolds doesn't much talk about the poor, so he is especially revealing when he does:

Also, on a not entirely unrelated subject, Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. Overall, the world is getting richer, even most of the world's poor. But there are still a lot of dirt-poor people out there, and that raises the risk of disease outbreaks.

I'm not suggesting that Reynolds thinks of the poor exclusively as agents of disease. He also thinks of them as punchlines and, of course, as future rich people.

When you have to tell future generations what Instapundit was, just give them a copy of Babbitt and say "He was like this guy, only without the self-awareness, and with computers."

ART BRUTE. Kia has pointed me to the Roger Kimball stemwinder "Why the art world is a disaster," which uses an expired art show at Bard College as a launchpad for rage against -- well, plenty, including yuppie naming conventions and high tuitions (no arguments there) but mainly contemporary art. Kimball is an amusing writer, and I would rather have this sort of thing done amusingly than tediously, as is the custom with rightwing cranks, so credit where credit is due.

The thinking is less interesting than the writing -- moneyed philistines corrupt art, it's all politically correct, lobby signage and catalogue copy is shit, etc. I share Kimball's distaste for many of the current big names he cites (Cindy Sherman is fine by me) and for much of what gets shown nowadays.

But I stopped nodding at this:

...it has been a long time since shock value had the capacity to be aesthetically interesting—or even, truth be told, to shock. Decades ago, writing about Salvador Dalí, George Orwell called attention to, and criticized, the growing habit of granting a blanket moral indemnity to anything that called itself art. “The artist,” Orwell wrote,

is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word “Art,” and everything is O.K. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are O.K.; kicking little girls in the head is O.K.; even a film like L’Age d’Or [which shows among other things detailed shots of a woman defecating] is O.K.

Kimball does not pause here, but I had to. Bunuel's L'Age d'Or? L'Age d'Or is lovely. I still view it with pleasure, as do many others, and it's 77 years old -- certainly old enough for its modishness to have subsided. If it still shocks, and I think shock is the least of it, it is for its genuine, audacious inventiveness, not for what once may have been seen as cheap thrills. (BTW, I don't recall the crapping scene -- does memory fail, or did Orwell have the Director's Cut DVD?)

Orwell may be forgiven his disgust, bless his proletarian soul, but it's a little weird that Kimball lets it pass. Maybe he's never seen the movie. Or maybe he has passed a point of no return, after which anything lively and irreverent, notwithstanding its merits or vintage, is to be condemned as part of some era-spanning conspiracy against good taste. And past that point is pure crankishness. No wonder he's so angry. He's no longer responsive to the artworks, but only to the Dylans and Heathers and Marieluise Hessels and Leon Botsteins and all the others who have made the world, in the immortal words of Doc from West Side Story, a garbage can.

This modern world is full of shit masquerading as art, so you, too, might think that criticism is a waste of time. But as Ted Sturgeon said, ninety percent of everything is shit. And I think Sturgeon was understating the case. Still, if you cease to look, you won't see, and there's none so blind as that.

A few weeks ago, while biking in Brooklyn, I happened upon a show of photographs by John Barnard. This show, too, is closed now. The subject was local nannies, mostly black, caring for their little white charges. Thematically this would seem to be agenda-driven, too, but if you can't get past that, you'll never know whether the artist did. Most of the photographs weren't so hot, alas, but a few were really fine. My favorite, as I recall it, showed a muscular woman in jeans and a shirt who had slung a toddler over her shoulder to carry him into a fenced playground filled with ugly plastic slides and tubes. All was dark but the child's face, blankly regarding the camera. It wasn't Atget or Weston, but it was worth contemplating and remembering. And all I had to do was look.

SHORTER ANN ALTHOUSE: If I could get to meet Larry David I bet he'd rilly like me.

WARNING: Do not go into the comments section unless you have industrial-strength brainwash (80 proof at least) at hand. Jesus Christ. I haven't speculated so much on what TV stars are really like since I was eight years old. Now I only speculate on figures from antiquity. For example, I think if we brought the Roman playwright Terence back from the dead and showed him Ann Althouse, he'd say, "Remember when I said 'nothing human is foreign to me'? I take it back."

FRAGGING. Like the boys in the Fuhrerbunker during the Fall of Berlin, some of our war fans continue to draft grand schemes for the post-war world even as the buildings topple overhead. At TCS Daily, Robert Haddick revives the rightwing demand that war journalists stop telling treasonous truths, and even adds an interesting twist: if the journos won't serve Uncle Sam out of patriotism, they should serve him out of fear --

According to [Reporters Without Borders'] website, eleven journalists were killed in Iraq in May alone. Since March 2003, total journalist casualties in Iraq are 181 dead, 14 kidnapped, and 2 missing.

The targeting of these journalists, the vast majority of them local Iraqis, indicates that the various factions in Iraq place a high value on controlling the flow of information, and denying that flow to the enemy. What journalists are learning from these chilling facts are that they must only live and travel under the heavily armed protection of a particular faction; there is simply no other way to survive for long in the country as an active reporter of the war.

Naturally that protection will come at a price to be determined by the faction providing the protection...

Cut to Haddick ominously tapping his palm with a baseball bat. He acknowledges that, currently, embedded American reporters are protected by the soldiers among whom they are embedded, but that sort of relationship can't last because "in the future those American conventional combat formations will not spend much if any time fighting in long, drawn-out and controversial counterinsurgency campaigns. Reporters can embed with these units, but they won't leave the barracks very often."

See, we'll be in a new kind of war -- as we always are, in the reckoning of rightwing cranks -- and it will have to do with information and "short, high-speed, and high-intensity combat operations" where no one will get killed, except perhaps that dinosaur of the pre-new-type-o'-war era, the independent journalist, who will have to dig for actual combat stories among "local proxy and militia allies of the U.S.," which folks "are unlikely to have much sympathy for the needs and traditions of Fourth Estate." Haddick does not overtly state the expected fate of this sort of journalist, but he tips it heavily in the closing:

The only journalists that will survive will be those that choose a side. The classic independent war correspondent who once floated across a war will be, literally, dead.

To be fair, Haddick's article is such a mishmash that it is hard to isolate the argument, but his attitude toward journalists who don't toe the line is, literally, palpable.

RISING TO HER LEVEL OF INCOMPETENCE. At her website, Michelle Malkin usually contents herself and her readers with regular blasts of hot, formless spume, like Old Faithful. Alas, in today's New York Post she has stepped above her pay grade, handling a compare-and-contrast structure in much the same way that General Mapache handles the gatling gun in The Wild Bunch: with enthusiasm but no sense of direction.

On the one hand, says Malkin, we have the appallingly young students of the famous Palestinian Jihad Mouse, who learn to celebrate war and suicide bombing; on the other, we have Western children, who are taught to value peace and harmony. If you are familiar with Malkin's work, you can see the problem already: Malkin doesn't know who to root for. She clearly despises the Palestinians, but she also seems to despise the milquetoast tots of the West:

...In New York City, one nursery school dragged 3-year-old toddlers to the office of Rep. Eliot Engel (D-Bronx/Westchester/Rockland), where they sang "It's a Small World" around a 12-foot "Tree of Peace."

The New York Press reported last week: "The handmade tree, crafted by 17 children during pre-school class time, was a statement against American troops remaining in Iraq, and a call to pursue peaceful paths to end all world conflicts...

The children's teacher, Valerie Coleman-Palansky, defended the stunt thusly: "I think it's appropriate for 3-year-olds to know that the world needs to be a peaceful place for everybody to live in and a safe place for everybody to live in."

Perhaps it's time for Coleman-Palansky to acquaint herself with the Palestinian Mickey Mouse. The chant of the little jihadists drowns out the Disneyfied reverie:

"What is your most lofty aspiration? Death for the sake of Allah!"

In case you imagine Malkin's objection is to the intrusion of politics into the classroom, she amplifies:

I have a pet peeve. It goes beyond the antiwar indoctrination rampant in American schools. At the playground and at the mall, I see 5-, 6- and 7-year-olds walking around with pacifiers in their mouths. Kids old enough to feed and dress themselves. Kids old enough to figure out the remote control and cell phone. Standing upright, suckling on brightly colored binkies.

Where are the parents to yank the rubber from their mouths and force them to grow up? When did child pacification usurp the responsibility of child-rearing?

So the problem isn't politics -- it's that American children are soft! They don't need binkies, they need a punch in the gut! They need Barney to stop prancing around like a Kansas City faggot and start barking motivational slogans like, "You had best unfuck yourself before I unscrew your head and shit down your neck."

In other words, they ought to be more like the kiddie killers of Palestine. Malkin probably doesn't even know she's making this point. That's why she and and her similarly unskilled colleagues should refrain from attempting to make points more complicated than "Hulk smash!" or "Pretty flower" until a slot opens up in the writing program at their local Sylvan Learning Center.