HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE. James Lileks reports from an Alaskan cruise about some damn kids who sang badly ("'Y.M.C.A' – a song about anonymous sex, incidentally") in a fucking karaoke bar. Later he goes to a tavern populated by waxwork dummies.

He leaves out the part where Rod Serling explains what happened to Lileks when he took the pig mask off.

GOOD OLD BOYS. The deaths of Antonioni and Bergman came to me as a double whammy from a great distance: I haven't watched their films in years, but both made a lasting impression on me. The astute Terry Teachout had a less than optimal experience revisiting Wild Strawberries in 2003, and it may be that either or both of these giants might look punier to me upon reconsideration than they did in my youth. But my memories of both director's films are clear and happy and I more or less trust them. It may be that I am less prone to disappointment than Terry, or more childish about old loves -- I enjoy Jason and the Argonauts on pretty much the same terms today as I did when I was a child; take that for what it's worth.

As for John Podhoretz' bizarre denunciation of Bergman in today's New York Post, I can only assume the 1970s were so traumatic for him that he feels it necessary to bear his grudges into the realm of excruciatingly bad taste. He certainly seems angrier at those of us who enjoyed Bergman's films than he is at the director himself, declaring that we think art "wasn't supposed to be easy to take or pleasurable to take in. It was supposed to punish you, assault you, scrub you clean of impurities." Well, The Virgin Spring ain't Star Wars, but there is more than one kind of pleasure, and Bergman's Medieval parable, rough as it may be, is well-built, stunningly photographed by Sven Nykvist, and deeply satisfying in its resolution. I don't think you have to be a snob to enjoy it, or to enjoy Max von Sydow's battle with the optical printer at the end of The Passion of Anna, or the recognizable conjugal truths of the contentious couple in Scenes from a Marriage.

For that matter, Antonioni's famous bleakness can be pretty funny, as in the first scene of The Eclipse, in which the most active member of the menage a trois is a rotating fan. I had many reservations about The Passenger when I saw it in re-release a few years ago, but I was never bored: even the misfired pairing of Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider was fascinating, and that last, long unbroken take at the end is exhilarating whether you think the film has earned it or not.

Rank them however high or low you like, but they applied themselves to their visions energetically and consistently and with undeniable craft. That's no small achievement.

HOW BULLSHIT WORKS, PART 5,858,351,117. Psst -- liberals are calling themselves progressives because they want to bring back eugenics via global warming and stem cell research. Pass it on! And if anyone asks, you didn't hear it from me!

(Oops -- almost forgot the glibertarian angle.)

MUST-FLEE TV. I finally watched one of those vlog things. Jesus Christ. Jonah Goldberg and Peter Beinart on comedy? If bongs had floated up into view, that would at least have provided an excuse.

For the record:

Goldberg acknowledged that Jon Stewart is "funny," but "what a lot of liberals are not appreciating is, come a Democratic President, Jon Stewart is going to be pretty funny about Democratic Presidents." Then who'll be laughing, traitors?

Goldberg: "On the whole humor is still much more helpful for conservatives than it is for liberals" because humorists are "equal opportunity guys and I have a couple of friends who are in the comedy business" who are of the fabled "conservative... actually libertarian" tribe, which Goldberg further qualifies as "Giuliani-type."

Goldberg: "People like Michael Moore or Al Franken don't help liberals all that much" because Franken is "dour and dark and kind of nasty," whereas Rush Limbaugh is a big ball of sunshine.

Not content to wait for Jon Stewart to make fun of future Democratic Presidents, Goldberg warns that "Jon Stewart can get into trouble... when he tries too hard to make the left-wing bloggers happy." So when I laugh at Stewart, America scowls? Thank God I don't have cable.

Goldberg says "I don't think it necessarily speaks particularly well for liberals they keep having to recruit comedians to do their arguing for them." I don't know, I thought Slappy White's keynote address at the 1992 Democratic Convention was pretty awesome.

"Humor right now still is in many respects in terms of the way we live our social lives more of an asset for conservatives," reiterates Goldberg, using as examples himself ("I win a lot of points with audiences"), Limbaugh, and noted right-wing funnyman Dave Chappelle.

On the whole Goldberg seems to think liberal humor is creaky and preachy ("going after televangelists and preachers is so old"), while attacks on "political correctness" are as fresh as springtime.

Beinart pretty much gawks at the camera and goes "muh muh muh muh" at intervals.

No wonder Republicans are crapping out of the YouTube debate.

SHUT UP AND SING. TBogg has a lot of fun with this Rockanomics site. I can't say I'm in complete agreement with his assessment. The proprietors are clearly mad, but so what? Music is for everybody, even and perhaps especially the disturbed. Neither the "house band" nor The Right Brothers (whom they closely resemble) are my style, but they don't sound any worse than a lot of other old-fashioned bands. I don't relate to "Open Season," but I don't relate to "Cop Killer," either, and they both rock pretty hard.

The bloggy parts of the site are expectedly tedious, but the parts that have music... have music. My standards are blessedly low, as are the standards of rock and roll itself. Goethe's dictum that there's nothing worse than active ignorance doesn't apply to rock. As a sprat I had my "California Uber Alles" and "Beat on the Brat." These are not works of measured analysis, but cool tunes.

The state of arts education being what it is, I have to applaud anything that motivates people to play. Long-term it may even have a civilizing influence on them. I've seen more than one anti-social type redeemed by immersion in a useful craft. Why might it not work on anti-socialist types?

But that is all to one side; the lively arts need no justification outside themselves. We shouldn't let the odd Horst Wessel Lied sour us on Euterpe. Her charms are for us all.

ATTENTION COMRADES! Previous meme "Scott Thomas does not exist" is no longer operative. Please to substitute "Scott Thomas Beauchamp is a bad man" or "Scott Thomas Beauchamp is Oliver Stone" or "Scott Thomas Beauchamp is a semiotic construct" or "We'll get Scott Thomas Beauchamp fired" or whatever damn thing you can think of.

UPDATE. Comrades show initiative! Conservative commentator tells Beauchamp to " get busy watching your back." I've heard of dolchstosslegende, but I thought it was supposed to go the other way round.

UPDATE II. "Scott Thomas Beauchamp is a bad writer" is apparently the libertarian angle. Armed Liberal quotes a soldier who says if we insist on acknowledging the existence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, our soldiers will never become "a new Greatest Generation" (i.e., useful propaganda for Republicans). Hollywood is blamed. Filmed in der back!

UPDATE III. The libertarian response continues via Jane Galt, who offers a few puzzling restatements of the anti-anti-Beauchamp POV ("Well, everyone who's talking about this is evil"), hems and haws, then, perhaps sensing the quagmire rising about her (and that's another bad thing about us, we use words like "quagmire"), declares:

But as I say, my passing interest in the entire thing, which is animated almost entirely by the fact that I have spied some of the editors involved at cocktail parties, is not very great; somewhere below the neighbour's termite infestation, but above my urgent need for curtain rods and bookshelves. This will almost certainly be my last post on the subject.

Thence, of course, follows another post, in which she talks about famous frauds and the difficulty of fact-checking, which would be a relevant addition if the news were that Beauchamp had been shown not to exist, instead of, well, what actually happened.

This is a customary reframing of events: point out the ridiculous reactions of a number of well-regarding idiots, and you become a "TNR defender." Thereafter, if the New Republic drops a gum wrapper on the sidewalk, so to speak, you will take the fall, at least in the Second Life inhabited by such people.

AFTER THE FARTING: JONAH GOLDBERG CONSIDERED. At National Review, Jonah Goldberg says liberals are hypocrites. Oh, one asks wearily, pre-emptively shielding oneself from the spray of cracker crumbs that will accompany the reply, how so? Because

Liberals in the 1990s argued – sometimes with nuance, sometimes starkly – that the bright line for intervention was genocide... I am open to [John Derbyshire's] prediction that genocide may not be in the offing if we leave Iraq. Ultimately, none of us knows. But what I find fascinating is the growing acceptance among liberals – who are often quite strident about the need to intervene in Darfur, for example – that even if our departure results in genocide, that’s not reason enough to stay... For liberals to have supported Kosovo or who now agitate for intervention in Darfur on the grounds that America should put steel in the words “never again” to suddenly say that genocide largely caused by the US is irrelevant is astounding to me. And it won’t be forgotten. The next time liberals want to stop mass slaughter in country X where we have no interests, it will be pointed out to them that they abetted slaughter in Iraq when our vital national interests were involved.

In other words: liberals like to say they care about genocide, but they obviously don't, because they want to leave Iraq, which stands poised at the brink of genocide (or maybe doesn't, he isn't sure) thanks to the efforts of Jonah Goldberg et alia.

Goldberg is a little like a hostage-taker who, when seized after a ten-hour standoff, wants everyone to know that the hostage negotiator's arguments were really intellectually inferior to his own.

And I'm sorry, but whatever you think of the Kosovo intervention, Iraq makes Kosovo look like we gave everyone in Serbia ice cream and then flew them to heaven in a private jet.

I have a better way of preventing genocide in our client states, and stage one involves the removal of Jonah Goldberg and his colleagues from spheres of government influence via the election to government office of non-retards.

PLEASING THE AFFILIATES. "THINGS ARE JUST AS MUCH FUN AS EVER over at Protein Wisdom," blurbs Ole Perfesser Reynolds. I go over to the recommended site and see a long post by one of the second stringers (PW proprietor Jeff Goldstein being engaged, perhaps, in one of the long bouts of anomie that seem to naturally follow the logorheic fits for which he is known) making jokes about Amanda Marcotte's vagina. I sometimes wonder if the Perfesser and I are seeing the same internet.

I also see one of the Perfesser's pals hauled out to say stuff like "Like some modern opponents of globalization and free trade, the Nazis viewed economics as a zero-sum game between nations." I guess Godwin's Law is just for the little people, or had perhaps been overturned. Now I'm doubly eager for the Second Amendment revival to reach my town, so I can compare my opponents to Hitler while brandishing a gun. Who knows? The Perfesser's life may turn out to have been a net plus in the end.

BABY STEPS. "The Takoma Park city council has unanimously approved a resolution urging Congress to go forward with impeachment proceedings against President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney."

Lotta people working in or for the Federal gummint live in Takoma Park.

One such voter writes:

I’m telling you, it was straight out of Norman Rockwell’s 'Freedom of Speech' in that council meeting tonight. It was really, really good, I was very proud of us.

This looks kinda like an Instapundit post, doesn't it? Hehindeed.

MY YOUTUBE DEBATE. I have a better computer now, and will abuse the privilege by posting YouTube videos.

I've already told you fuckers The Penetrators of Syracuse, New York were gods, and here is the proof:



Whassamatta -- as the janitor told my friend Simon when he recoiled at the taste of angel dust in the joint the janitor had given him -- you don't like it? Okay, down the road I'll provide a Lester Bangs-style essay on the band that will at least confuse you. For now I'll just leave you with a few, harmless words... just a bunch of letters scrambled together, but their meaning is very important...

• The Bobby Fuller Four
• Willie Dixon
• Gunfight at Carnegie Hall
• Metallic K.O.
• Marcel Proust
• Reader's Block
• Andre Breton

But soft, the matin grows nigh! Adieu.

BELIEF SYSTEM. Don Surber reports on Rasmussen reporting that liberal bias rules the news -- sorta:

The current survey finds that 30% of American adults believe the Associated Press has a liberal bias and only 12% believe it leans the other way. Local television news is viewed as having a liberal bias by 30% and a conservative bias by 17%. MSNBC is seen as being a bit more to the left—33% say it has a liberal bias and 13% say the opposite. For CNBC, 29% say it has a liberal bias and 14% say a conservative bias.

Thirty-seven percent (37%) say local television stations deliver news without bias while 36% say the same for the Associated Press.

Hold on: Only 30/30/33/29 percent see AP/local/MSNBC/CNBC news as liberal-biased? After decades of conservative propaganda to that effect? I would have thought the notion would by now have as much support as the existence of angels (79 percent per FOX News), but the current numbers are closer to the 37 percent support FOX found for belief in astrology.

Someone's not getting his money's worth.

In case you're wondering what I mean by propaganda, you can find a good example in Surber's own post:

My pet theory is that as they rise in stature and income, the muckedy-mucks at AP start attending more upscale parties, where the Old Money Socialists and the Scholarly Professors push a political agenda that holds since American institutions are not perfect, they must be replaced.

Who wouldn't be moved by that? I can see it myself: the red velvet curtains, the crystal chandeliers, the mahogany furnishings; the Old Money Socialists in their wide-lapel suits and Pierre Trudeau haircuts sharing a glass of baby's blood with the gowned and mortarboarded Scholarly Professors; and the AP men of rising stature and income (the stature- and income-deprived AP men having been dispatched to comb John Edwards' hair) standing by with steno pads, asking how they might better effect the destruction of American institutions with their wire reports.

And I never get invited to those parties.

UNHINGED. Ann Althouse reacts badly to Greg Sargent's brush-off with a huge, intemperate post that accuses Sargent of quoting her accurately and includes genuinely spooky passages like this:

Now get up off your ass and write a real response to me. I'm sick of these cranked out non-responses that pretend you've suffered no real attack. You have!

Then she demands an apology. How long before Sargent finds a boiled rabbit in his kitchen?

UPDATE. Comments are rather hot. I have to say I cannot endorse cracks on Althouse's appearance. All women are beautiful, for one thing, and Professor Althouse is decidedly not an exception.

I was raised for the most part by a single mother, and am perhaps oversensitive on that account to this sort of thing.

HOT AIR. Roger Scruton makes a case for conservatives as stewards of the environment based largely upon hatred of liberals, represented here by Mao, György Lukács, and other such like. As is typical in such arguments, Scruton uses "little platoon" environmental successes -- like the disposition of a dump in his small Virginia town! -- as an example of how the whole problem can be solved.

It is almost embarrassing to have to point this out, but America's large-scale successes against its large-scale pollution problems have been overwhelmingly won through the use of state power, as with the late-20th-century regulation of air quality in Los Angeles. When people started blowing black snot, LA didn't ask polluters to please think of the children -- county supervisors enpowered pollution control officials to create regulations suggested by scientific research. State officials got in on the act, and eventually so did the Feds. Car and gas companies got the message and began retooling to meet both regulations and regulatory threats. (So much for Scruton's claim that "Environmental movements on the Left seldom pause to consider the question of human motivation.") Neither urban California nor America became as a result unproductive Sovietized wastelands, but healthier places to live.

Scruton wants to portray the effects of industry on the environment as if they were theoretical issues, leading to such humorous sentences as "First, the damage done to our environment is connected in many people’s thinking, and to a great extent in reality, with the activities of business," and to his association of environmentalism with "the cult of the victim." Mises, Burke, and Hayek are mentioned; the current Administration's notorious politicizing of science is not.

The article is merely a pernicious fantasy dressed up with grad-school citations. I wonder if even Scruton thinks it serves any purpose other than filling a need for a "conservative" position on an important issue. They have to have one, I guess, and apparently all it needs to do is criticize what liberals have been doing, not matter how successful they have been.

GET YOUR WAR ON. TBogg sees and raises on the "Generation 9/11 vs. Boomers" narrative that conservatives are starting to push.

I often wonder where such ideas originate, particularly when they relate to absolutely no verifiable facts. I wouldn't be surprised if this one were based upon a stray finding from a recent New York Times poll, which sees the young'uns "leaning left" in many areas, but adds:

But when it came to the war, young Americans were more optimistic about the outcome than was the population as whole. Fifty-one percent said the United States was very or somewhat likely to succeed in Iraq, compared with 45 percent among all adults.

Maybe some ambitious worker in the Ministry of Truth gleaned from this factoid an opening: if the kids are more inclined than their elders, if only by six percentage points, to believe that the Iraq adventure will prove successful, this point of difference might be marketable. Young people famously prefer to dress, rock, and recreate themselves differently than do the old folks: maybe they can be encouraged to see war boosterism, too, as a hallmark of youth.

By this theory, the Weekly Standard and little-read blogs are only a start, and the campaign will follow through in more popular arenas:

• AST Dew Tour Iraq -- the sands of the Mesopotamian desert come alive with the sounds of FMX racing.
• Jackass Baghdad -- Johnny Knoxville walks into an IED.
• And, of course, Qube TV.

If that doesn't work, there's always the draft.

THE NEW MAGISTERIUM. Thers had this first:

Newsbusters discovers that production of the show "24" (heretofore hailed in rightwing circles as double-plus good) is going "carbon neutral," and Kiefer Sutherland is doing a global warming promo.

Newsbusters commenters immediately start downgrading the show.

Thers' analysis is very astute -- their list of beliefs that render one unacceptably "liberal" expands in new and nuttier directions all the time. I would only add, as is my tedious wont, that this is exactly what you can expect when people start thinking about "culture" as something aligned with their political agenda: they recreate little Inquisitions in their minds, and the pleasure centers that should be receptive to such treats as "24" become subject to their review.

Little children are taught right and wrong, and it follows they will learn to disdain certain childish pleasures, such as screaming in public or late at night. But as adults we are expected to evaluate our training; sometimes this means making new rules, alas, but in the main adulthood is about finding sensible exceptions to the strictures of social life (e.g., screaming is acceptable when exhorted by a DJ or orgasm). We don't grow up by sealing off pleasures but by maximizing them intelligently. This development also affords grown-ups the ability to appreciate mixed blessings. Fat Russian novels can be hard to read but rewarding to finish. Disillusionment may deprive us of the joys of childish faith, but we may find new ones in a mature exploration of our beliefs and of the world around us. And we can enjoy the work and even the company of people with whom we happen to disagree.

These guys apparently missed a step.

A heathier approach to the news is found at fansite Blogs.4Bauer's "24 ways that Jack is carbon neutral":

1. Every day he eliminates at least one carbon emitting life form.
2. Cordite is safe for plant life.
3. The Jack Sack, among it’s other amazing properties, absorbs carbon dioxide...

If this be conservative, it's the sort of conservatism I can get behind.

HATE WILL BRING US TOGETHER. Rod Dreher:

In my Dallas Morning News column today, I defend Pope Benedict's recent official statement describing my church as "defective," and Protestant churches as not churches at all...

I end by saying I'd rather be on the side of those Christians and non-Christians who are willing to tell me respectfully that my beliefs about God are wrong, instead of those who would say, for the sake of diplomacy, that nobody can say what's true about God. At least the former know what's really at stake.

This changes my understanding of ecumenicalism: it's about churches united not by common beliefs, apparently, but by a common enemy, the dreaded agnostics -- some of whom aren't even being diplomatic about it -- into a sort of Coalition of the Willing. Though the partners consider each other defective, and even not churches at all, they will yet convene to smite the heathen.

Should these combined forces succeed in overcoming agnosticism, I look forward to their afterparty, which should be very rowdy. (I say "look forward" in a rhetorical sense, of course, since I will thankfully be dead by then.)

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.

Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, and Spike Milligan having a bit of fun in 1972. All the "Last Goon Show" clips at YouTube are well worth it; this one gives Milligan a star turn.

There is no overestimating the Goons' effect on... well, everything.

THE WAR AT HOME. At the Weekly Standard, Dean Barnett speaks to some fine young men in the military, and that's always nice. Less nice is the angle of his story, entitled "The 9/11 Generation: Better than the Boomers."

In the 1960s, history called the Baby Boomers. They didn't answer the phone.

Confronted with a generation-defining conflict, the cold war, the Boomers--those, at any rate, who came to be emblematic of their generation--took the opposite path from their parents during World War II. Sadly, the excesses of Woodstock became the face of the Boomers' response to their moment of challenge. War protests where agitated youths derided American soldiers as baby-killers added no luster to their image...

But now, once again, history is calling. Fortunately, the present generation appears more reminiscent of their grandparents than their parents.

Huh? What can this possibly mean? That more young people are serving their country now than in the Vietnam era? As has been pointed out by the Heritage Foundation (!), vastly more Americans went to Vietnam than have served thus far in Iraq, and I doubt the age difference between the two populations is so vast as to support Barnett's judgment by volume.

Many of the Vietnam attendees were of course forced to "answer the phone" by the draft. Maybe Barnett counts that against them.

The only Boomer boogeyman cited in the story, besides the unnamed Woodstock hippies, is John Kerry. Non-Boomer Charles Rangel also takes a hit. Both have exemplary service records.

That Barnett couldn't get a story about young servicemen into the Standard without this meretricious frame is -- well, I was going to say hilarious, but as I've been writing about it I've come to think that the better word is creepy. These days the dead-enders can't content themselves with even a simple portrait of courage and valor in the U.S. Armed Forces without a heavy dose of hatred toward their domestic opponents. When they say "Iraq" and "the enemy," they're thinking about Democrats. That's their war now.

ME, OR YOUR OWN LYING EARS? Talking Points Memo has uncovered footage of Rudolph Giuliani stirring up the NYPD at a 1992 rally. This is old news to longtime citizens, but it's nice that outlanders have been treated to this glimpse of Giuliani's approach to group dynamics.

Those fans of reasoned discourse, the Ole Perfesser and Ann Althouse, have leapt to Giuliani's defense. Perfesser Reynolds is typically gnomic, but Althouse goes in for heavy deconstruction:

I've watched it. He's not "screaming" "bullsh*t." Nor has he "come unhinged" (as TPM puts it)...

Shouting is not "screaming."

...it's a normal and useful word. I'm sure cops appreciate it. Using it doesn't make you crazy, and I'm positive TPM doesn't think it does. TPM is simply trying to hurt Rudy's chances with conservatives so he won't get the nomination and get his chance to win over liberals...

First, a report on how the cops "appreciated" Giuliani's speech from Sydney Schanberg:

The police were angry at the first African-American mayor of New York, David Dinkins -- in particular his proposal to create an independent, all-civilian review board to examine citizen complaints about police rudeness and rough behavior. The word "nigger" was heard loudly several times from the crowd. A number of protest signs called Dinkins a "washroom attendant." Giuliani in his remarks at the protest, which was organized by the police union, whipped the crowd to even fiercer heights by reciting a list of Dinkins’ policies and, after each one, starting a chant of "Bullshit! Bullshit!" About 1,500 of the demonstrators eventually stormed onto the Brooklyn Bridge and tied up traffic there for an hour...

As to Althouse's semantic argument, that is best understood within the closed system of modern conservative analysis. In that rarefied field, it is liberals who scream -- or, more classically, "shriek" -- and make other unmanly sounds, while conservatives speak only in a deep voices swathed in homespun, which is why Fred Thompson is Giuliani's primary competition for the Republican nomination.

Their arguments are easier to understand in their own special language. Translation to simple English usually wounds them terribly.

I WISH I WAS IN BAGHDAD! HOO-RAY! HOO-RAY! An inspirational tale from Iraq dead-ender Michael Yon:

An Iraqi Colonel was generous enough to offer that he believed it to be just a mistake that “God is Great” was left off the flag that was used on the slides. But the Iraqis all agreed that nobody was going to sign anything that displayed an Iraqi flag without the phrase “God is Great"...

Seeing “God is Great” written on the Iraqi flag might provoke some to protest “Why did we come here just to stand up a country who would write such things on their flag?” But I sat there in that meeting, which was completely civil and professional, and I thought about another flag, the one flying over South Carolina. Some people call that flag “heritage,” while others call it “hateful,” “painful” and “demeaning.” And today in that meeting, I thought about the descendants of slaves who are now top military commanders in the American Army, and in that moment I knew that Iraq could make it.

I think that Yon has hit upon a winner: selling the Allah Akbar flag to conservatives by comparing it to the Stars and Bars. Will the folks at, say, Little Green Footballs go for it? Well, he's already got a taker at National Review.