LOWERED EXPECTATIONS. I admit to disappointment that the President didn't start his speech with the news that 2,200 Marines were coming home at the end of the month and would not be replaced. In fact, I had hoped that he would have a WELCOME HOME banner and maybe a glass of non-alcoholic champagne. For many Americans this is the money shot, and good news no matter how you slice it, as is the possibility that 3,500 soldiers will also come home without relief by Christmas.

The speech was not mainly about the drawdown, but about the surge-related progress Bush is claiming in Iraq. The surge, we now see, was not meant to end the war but to continue it. Though the intrigues of Sunnis, Shiites, and our own Government in Iraq -- and elsewhere -- are complex, the President portrayed the contest as a simple one between the forces of freedom and Al Qaeda, and the pacification of some areas as part of a linear progress from tyranny to democracy. The advantage of this narrative is that it is simple; the disadvantage is that it extends into the distant future. Bush bluntly reminded us that our occupation of Iraq would continue after he is out of office. It is a sobering thought, but there are the troop withdrawals and stories of newly-re-liberated Iraqis to take some of the sting out of it.

The President clearly hopes the American people will accept this modest package because it promises, in the old Nixonian phrase, peace with honor. Bush's closing with a dead-soldier anecdote tips his hand: our blood and treasure cannot have been shed in vain, and with patience it will not be. Bush and his supporters, who once dismissed comparisons of Iraq and Vietnam, have of late adopted them, with the provision that the sad ending of that conflict will be rewritten with this one.

For political purposes, this is not meant to erase some imagined Vietnam stigma -- there is no sign that America seethes with regret over that -- but to erase bitter memories of the Administration's own malfeasances: the fallacious case for war, the early declarations of victory, and the dispiriting violence that came after.

With war support at a low ebb, Bush bought a bit of breathing space with his surge, and in that space sealed the exits. Now he tells us that since we cannot get out, we can only go up.

We've come a long way from the toppled Saddam statue and strewn flowers of early days. Who would have thought then that the restoration of some order to neighborhoods our invasion plunged into chaos would be offered as proof that we were on the right track?

HUMOR. I thank Kevin Drum for designating alicublog "funny," but I worry that any joy-poppers who accept his steerage will be disappointed to find the laughs here sparsely placed, like raisins in an overvast bowl of political bran. I should really shed this sackcloth and aspire to the more exalted role of internet buffoon. Having no antidepressants handy, I will dig this penknife into my leg and, as the bad thoughts recede, practice my comic technique:

Q. How do you confuse Jonah Goldberg?
A. This country sucks.

No wait, I told it wrong.

UPDATE. Q.E.D.

SHORTER KAY S. HYMOWITZ: Libertarianism is an imperfect form of conservatism.

Most Wall Street Journal essays on libertarianism you don't even have to read, and this one is no exception. Hymowitz agrees with libertarians that all good things come from magic capitalism: for example, the stupid progressives who demanded workplace safety regulation should have just waited 80 years for America to lose its manufacturing base, and everything would have been alright. But she finds the unwillingness of libertarians to regulate morality and sexuality to be... unlibertarian:

Libertarianism did not have to take this unfortunate turn. Ludwig von Mises himself warned that the attempt (of socialists) to undermine the family was a ploy to strengthen the state. Hayek, too, grasped the family's role in upholding the free market. Coming of age in Europe around the time of World War I, he stressed the state's inefficiency but also warned, more generally, of the limits of human reason. "Hayek's economics was rooted in man's ignorance," Mr. [Brian] Doherty writes; so were his political views, which included both an enthusiasm for freedom and a Burkean respect for customs and institutions.

It is difficult to say why this aspect of libertarianism has faded away...

Maybe because outside the social studies classroom, Hymowitz' "Burkean respect for customs" means enforcement of moral codes better suited to a 17th century Pilgrim encampment than to the society we actually inhabit. And the Libertarian Party has no need to appease Religious Right yahoos to gain votes, because they rarely have any hope of being elected. In fact most libertarians vote for parties other than the LP, which probably best explains the existence of Hymowitz' essay. She knows libertarians like free markets, and hopes to weaken their attachment to the free minds part of the equation sufficiently to shore up that old Reagan coalition for one more election.

That she thinks the Ole Perfesser is a libertarian shows just how misguided she is.

HARDCORE. I have fond memories Canada's Subhumans, whose "Fuck You" and "Slave to My Dick" were party staples back in olden times. I certainly did not know this:

In 1983 [Subhumans founding member] Gerry Hannah was in the news, but not as a musician. Always involved in political issues, including environmentalism - one of his nicknames was “Nature Punk” - he linked up with a group of political activists called Direct Action, whose frustration lead them toward armed struggle. Among other actions, the group blew up an environmentally unfriendly hydroelectric substation on Vancouver Island and bombed the Litton plant near Toronto, which manufactured parts for the American cruise missile, a “first strike” nuclear weapon. Canadian authorities eventually arrested the group, known in the press as the Squamish Five, and Gerry was sentenced to ten years in jail. He was released after serving five years.

In 1995, Gerry and Brian reformed the dormant band for a western Canadian tour...

Blew up a power station and bombed an aircraft plant? Five years in prison? Reformed the band for a western Candian tour? I can't even approve of that. (The violence, I mean.) Sigh. I am officially a poser.

The Subhumans are still at it. Playing music, I mean. Here's a tune from their 2006 album -- or, for old times' sake, you can hear their 1996 remake of "Fuck You."

911PALOOZA! Jim Lileks celebrates Nineeleven by telling us Bogie and Jayne Mansfield would have been on his side and you Commie punks can have James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. Then he predicts that someone will make a shallow joke about him -- but it's the wrong shallow joke! Poor fellow hasn't been right about much of anything:

It seemed right away like it would be a big war, three to four years – Afghanistan first, of course, then Iraq, then Iran.

Instead, it's been a short five-year occupation and no boom-boom in Iran. Sigh. It's amazing what power tortured English Lit grad students exercised over President Bush and a mostly Republican Congress.

Norman Podhoretz also looks back in anger, adding Nixon, who "did not sound an opposing call to fight on to victory," to his list of traitors, along with McGovern, Archibald Cox, and the Internet, which has enabled "virtual demonstrations" as an "all-too-effective substitute" for real ones -- there have been plenty of those, but to admit that would give the Internet a pass and vitiate Podhoretz' shadow thesis that everything went to hell after Making It fell off the best-seller lists.

Melanie Phillips goes for discarded Andrew Sullivan talking points:

The liberal West, which worships at the shrine of reason, does not understand that ideas can kill. As a result Britain, Europe, America, and Israel have all left the battleground of ideas undefended, allowing the advance of falsehood and hatred. Worse still, our intelligentsia and media often act as an Islamists’ fifth column.

If "undefended" means "defended by such as Melanie Phillips," I can sort of see her point.

Around the time of the original attacks, I recall, there was a lot of talk about getting the people who actually sent the planes. The list of targets quickly expanded well beyond that, of course. Six years later, conservatives paint bull's-eyes on everything outside their own shrinking sphere of influence. A grim anniversary, indeed.

SAME SHIT, DIFFERENT DAY. At National Review, Donald Kagan compares anti-war Democrats to Civil War Copperheads and British Hitler appeasers, himself and his fellow neocons to abolitionists, and Bush to Lincoln and Pericles. This is listed among NatRev's responses to the Petraeus interview, and I suspect it sets the tone for forthcoming conservative articles on the subject. A quick look around their precincts bears out this theory: the battle order of the day will not be a defense of the General's charts but a denunciation of Democratic treason.

It is worth noting that today's session was mainly about a plan for withdrawal from an occupation which is disapproved by citizens of the occupying country as well as those of the occupied country. But neither the Democratic leadership nor the Republican Administration perceive a political benefit to themselves from a quick exit. So they talk about timetables and drawdown and leave it to their operatives to spin the analysis to their advantage.

It's as if they were engaged in some sort of game in which the preferred strategy is running out the clock, even though the clock goes to the first Tuesday in November 2008, at least. Of course, some strategists are still thinking about the long bomb.

SHORTER MARK STEYN. People aren't going for our war narrative the way they should. I blame trial lawyers. Maybe if we keep saying "World War Four" they'll come around.

JEAN JAURÈS WAS A VERY, VERY BAD MAN. Volokh conspirator Ilya Somin asks "Why The Debate Over Socialism Isn't Over." Oddly, he waits till the end of his post to note that "I use the term 'socialism' to refer to government control of all or most of the means of production, not to more moderate departures from the free market, such as welfare statism or government regulation of industries that remain privately owned." For blogospheric purposes this seems to take the juice of out the whole thing, though many of Somin's commenters miss that bit and rave as if straight-up socialism still had a chance in the good old USA.

There have been a few elected Socialists in America. One, Jasper McLevy, was mayor of my old hometown, Bridgeport, from 1933 to 1957. All my dear old mother remembered about him was his policy on snow removal from city streets: "The good Lord put it there, the Good Lord can take it away." That's mainly what Wikipedia remembers about him, too.

You may wonder why a pretty big American city countenanced a Socialist mayor, however denatured, for so many years. Bridgeport was a working-class town that had several large factories which employed many working men and women (Mom was one of those) who wanted for themselves and their families what the labor leader Gompers prescribed: "More." (And in the Depression, when McLevy first took power, that meant "Enough.") The blue collar Bridgeport electorate, and my Mom, didn't give a shit who stood for them so long as he stood firm. That's why they liked McLevy. He embraced the New Deal more forthrightly than his Democratic opposition (which he denounced as "a group whose only interest is to exploit the wage-earner to the last ounce"), put in civil service reform and a Housing Authority, and engaged the capitalist enemy, so to speak, by working with factory owners to rehabilitate the city's finances. He was a roofer before he got into politics and he was less concerned with doctrine (his attachment to socialism was sentimental and Bellamite) than he was with sound management and protecting his constituents from those who would screw them. His 1938 slogan was "Don't let the raiders raid you." Everyone knew what he was talking about.

America has treated socialism the way it treats everything else: as something to be assayed and extracted according to the rigors of common sense. A quick glance at our history will show that some socialist ideas -- trade unionism and social insurance among them -- got traction with working people and were (once moneyed interests had no other recourse) woven into our capitalist system. The rest was chaff.

These are part of our lives now. As for the countries that Somin brings up in his denunciations, they haven't had so good a social laboratory as we. "Hugo Chavez's political success in Venezuela is an example of how some of the most disastrous socialist policies can be successfully sold to the people if combined with nationalism," he writes, "a lesson first taught by Hitler and Mussolini." I assume Somin did not trouble himself to consider the social and economic chaos out of which any of these polities birthed their tyrants, nor how these crises might have been averted.

So he reverts to the method of South Park schoolteachers: the umpteenth replay of "Hitler Was a Very, Very Bad Man," with Hugo Chavez and Kim Jong Il inserted in the lead roles. He wonders why "we have not yet completed the task of driving a stake through [socialism's] heart." He might ask Cartman, or any citizen who has seen in our era capitalism redefined as an ever-worsening deal for the non-rich. The Democrats, for all their faults and foibles, seem more interested, as the redistributive notions some of them are peddling show.

Conservatives often wonder why we don't join them in their nonstop pep rally against Communism, Socialism, etcetera. They say, and seem to believe, that it is because we are actually Communists, Socialists, and etceterists. I'm sort of an etceterist, myself, by which I mean I'm against all forms of political correctness, including Somin's. It warms my heart when Americans show interest in health care policies associated by conservatives with socialism -- not because I am a socialist, but because it shows a shrewdness in our people that ranting lectures about socialism cannot dispel. In a real marketplace of ideas, the idea of national health care would provoke not waves of bluster, but a serious counterproposal. Maybe if we sweat 'em a bit more, we'll get it.

HOW WOULD BIN LADEN VOTE? This old game got a boost from OBL's recent mentions of Noam Chomsky, American politics, and Chomsky. Of course, in my own home version, the winning objective correlative to the bin Laden project is the sort of apocalyptic nonsense that folks like Rod Dreher spout about our ungodly modern society. In fact, one of the things I usually assume right-wing and left-wing types mutually dislike about jihadists, along with the murder of innocents, is their millenarian call to Come to Allah and revert to a new Dark Age with a Muslim rather than Catholic orthodoxy. But I acknowledge there are fringe players who would approve of such an arrangement.

In the wake of a different culture wargame, having to do with Hillary Clinton's evocations of African folk wisdom, Daniel Larison says that many modern American conservatives aren't really traditional conservatives at all:

...many conservatives, when pressed, will say that their conservatism is really just a mild classical liberalism, their declared religiosity is balanced by a strong enthusiasm for religious pluralism and their idea of valuable cultural production is the film adaptation of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. While busily exporting the "now much-talked-of system of liberty," to borrow a phrase from Patriarch Anthimus' Paternal Instructions, we create no enduring cultural life worth mentioning. There is some kind of culture out there, of course, but most of it will not be of any lasting significance because one of our main values is utility and our impulse is for building things for the present, not for posterity or eternity.

Larison's link is to a Chronicles rant by Clyde N. Wilson about how the 20th Century "strangled" American culture with "war, industrialism, Yankee pragmatism, and polyglot immigration," leading to "young white men, the heirs of two thousand years of Western civilization, [who] adopt baggy pants, earrings, backwards baseball caps, and primitive music because that is the nearest thing to a cultural expression that their American environment has ever exposed them to."

Wilson ends grimly:

Everything that America has produced in literature and music of enduring cultural value since the mid-20th century has come from Southerners who were raised in an environment that was still incompletely conquered by Yankee pragmatism. Whether our Southern bit of cultural residue will survive for much longer, and whether it can possibly do so without political separation from the American Empire, are questions that will probably be decided in the present rising generation..

Political separation from the American Empire... it seems to me the South tried that one before.

I don't think Larison longs for a deity to put our political affairs aright. (Wilson I'm not so sure about.) I do worry about anyone who thinks his disapproval of American culture is a relevant point of discussion in political affairs. Culture is not an object of reform except accidentally, and history shows very few positive outcomes from the desire to make it one. It's one thing to purify a drinking water supply, and quite another to purify arts and letters.

A SICK FEELING. Having been highly uncharitable in a previous post, it pleases me to notice there is a sane discussion of health care costs at Dean Esmay's site, at which I am accustomed to hear only ravings. The post is inspired by one by Marc Cooper about a weird discrepancy Cooper observed in his medical bill between what the insured and the uninsured might be charged for the same procedure.

As some commenters notice, an uninsured individual might by various means get a break on his higher price. But the large numbers attached to medical procedures stir sober feelings among nearly all of them, and many have personal reminiscences that inform their tone.

I lately noticed myself the growing concern with health care as a policy issue, and I think this discussion gives a clue as to why that is. Anyone who has looked at a medical bill with his name on it and compared the cost to what he pays for the other necessities of life might experience a memorable moment of terror, even if he is at the moment protected by the blessing of insurance. Health care coverage is, for a lot of us, contingent on employment, and in this groovy entrepreneural era we have learned to think of job security as a joke. Having carried post-employment COBRA payments myself, I know how the nervous feeling increases as one drifts further from the corporate zone of protection. I've gone without coverage, too, for long stretches, but that was back when America and I were younger; we are both greatly changed.

In general, I think this has a lot to do with the recent decline in Republican vote counts. Scandals, bad war management, and other factors aside, the GOP has been pushing its Ownership Society message for a good long time now. Americans have gloried in self-reliance since well before Emerson blew "a whistle from the Spartan fife." But when the numbers run so high against so many, when bankruptcy laws tighten and the possibility of washing the slate clean and starting over in another town is rendered laughable by computer-assisted tracking data, when a mortgage can so easily become the instrument of a working family's catastrophe, even a Spartan may begin to feel that the fix is in.

THEY LIVE. This is the first GOP debate I've watched, as opposed to relying on transcripts. Tell me: are all of these things animated Ralph Steadman cartoons? Maybe the glaring police-interrogation lights amplify the animal freakishness of these people, but damn. After hearing National Review compare Huckabee to Kevin Spacey, I wasn't prepared for the squint-headed, bug-eyed monster that actually raves under that name. And nearly all the rest of them are just tubes of meat that, when squeezed, emit a display of polished teeth and psychotic ravings.

The only human beings on the stage are Ron Paul and John McCain. McCain, God bless him, carries on a noble campaign for his own idiosyncratic version of insanity, which I admire because his is a recognizably human affliction, inculcated by years of torture followed by years of having to consort with greedy politicians who were certainly his inferiors. His quiet lunacy is very different from the noisy, slavering power-madness evidenced by the rest of these guys. He's like King Lear standing among (but not of) a pack of Pavlov's dogs.

And Paul, of course, stepped out of the 18th Century to defend the Constitution from these nuts. The Fox News scumbags sigh and giggle, but you can tell they're pissed that they foolishly allowed a debate to take place in New Hampshire, where a free man will always command an audience's respect.

The rest are humanoid pus:

Duncan Hunter: We treat our torture victims too well. Someone should drive a stake through this one's heart and bury him in unconsecrated ground. Thank God his spot-welded body, movie-monster eyebrows, and Queeg-like manipulation of his pen remove him from serious consideration.

Mitt Romney: Heh, heh, heh. Heh, heh, heh, heh. Civil liberties are nothing compared to my desire to be become a real boy! He's like a robot who, between 1994 and 1996, tried to follow his dream of becoming America's first animatronic Baptist preacher; didn't make it but, when called upon to pretend interest in the affairs of us puny mortals, often falls into the old evangelical cadences.

Tom Tancredo: Waterboarding? Torture? Where'd you get that? Oddly, when you close your eyes, he sounds like Spalding Gray with hydrophobia.

Rudolph Giuliani: You forget that, while people were criticizing me for flaunting my mistress, I cut taxes 37 times. I think even Fox has given up on him. His head is swiftly turning into a memento-mori AS YOU ARE, I WAS -- AS I AM, SO YOU WILL BE dessicated skull. Someone obviously told him the jig is up about 9/11 -- now he brags endlessly about what a prick he was running New York. Listen close, death's-head whorefucker: no one in Bumfuck -- and, you know, all America is Bumfuck -- gives a good goddamn.

And... oh, fuck this shit. I'm never getting out of the boat again. Next time I'll read the transcripts and lay out pictures of the Isely Brothers and pretend that's what they look like.

UPDATE. The National Review guys are devoted to denying reality. Andy McCarthy enjoys that the incredibly sleazy accusation by Chris Wallace that Ron Paul defers to Al Qaeda drew applause, but seems to have been out of the room when the crowd rallied to Paul's defense. Kathryn J. Lopez seems to think the New Hampshire crowd's obvious disgust with the malignant Giuliani is a baseball thing. Okay, K-Lo, have it your way: fuck the New York Yankees, fuck Rudolph Giuliani, and fuck you.

UPDATE II. Ron Paul is winning the Fox phone poll; Sean Hannity is looking around for a civilian whose head Fox will allow him to gnaw in frustration. I have reformed my views: the whole world should see how these people operate.

NEW REALITIES. Jonah Goldberg joins his National Review colleague Jonathan Foreman in denouncing anti-American action movies. He says Shooter is leftwing "porn." (Funny, I though porn was our porn.) By way of illustration, he mocks the movie Network:

Ned Beatty could absolutely be a Montana Senator running his own private army of CIA goons and oil-pipeline engineers all around the world! And when asked about it, he'll deliver a stemwinder of a lecture that could have been written by Trotsky! It could happen! Really!

Jonah Goldberg in 2004:

Network is still an astoundingly relevant and good movie.

It may be that Goldberg's tastes have changed. But when did he ever have taste?

DIGGIN' A CHINESE DITCH. Jules Crittenden puts on his big-thinkin' hat:

The thing about China is, no one ever tells China “no.” Not in language China understands. I don’t mean the losers in Cambridge with “Free Tibet” bumper stickers who also do not care to see U.S. power exerted anywhere in the world. I’m talking about parties China might pay attention to. The United States government, the market forces the United States. China would respond well to “no.” Just look at the hoops China is jumping through over a little bad publicity. Money is important to China...

According to the US-China Business Council, China's total FDI [Foreign Direct Investment] inflows for 2006 were $69.5 billion. China's not the only party to whom money is important.

Crittenden mocks the "losers in Cambridge," but his own response to Chinese intransigence and illiberality is to assert that "I don’t think I need cheap Chinese crap that much," and fantasize about war ("The Thing About China is that we are bound to have a war with them... it could be a small war. It could be a big war..."). What makes his resistance any more valuable than that of any other loser -- whom we may define for all relevant purposes as anyone with control of less than a few million dollars?

I don't like China any more than Crittenden does. Maybe if we both write letters to Rupert Murdoch we can turn this thing around.

A LESSON FROM MR. CRAWFORD. Caught The Mob last week on Turner -- a slightly cheesy but tight little 1951 crime pic in which Broderick Crawford plays a cop who goes undercover as a dockworker to solve a case. It's very butch entertainment, with Ernest Borgnine and John Marley as goons, Richard Kiley and Matt Crowley as wiseguys with secrets, wonderfully cruddy cityscapes, and hopelessly flat female characters. At one point the cops trace a car by attaching a slow drip of some sort of liquid to the chassis: they ride a good distance behind the suspect, shining a black light on the road to follow the otherwise invisible trail. I can imagine a theatre full of 50s boys goggle-eyed at this high tech police work.

I fixated on Crawford. Most physically heavy actors who work well on film -- Zero Mostel, Victor Buono, and Oliver Hardy come to mind -- seem light on their feet, but Crawford never did. His weightiness made him a hard sell as a leading man. As did his mug: cruel mouth, small eyes, fat cheeks, broken nose. (Crawford described it as "the face of a retired pugilist.") But he had a surprising expressive range as an actor -- check him out as the professor of medicine in Not as a Stranger, where his toughness plays as stoic wisdom.

And he gives a neat little acting lesson in The Mob. As the cop, Crawford seems at first like a bit of a stiff, a conscientious lifer who just wants to do right by his job and his girl. His usual gruff voice seems a little cowed and worried. Then circumstances necessitate his transformation into a belligerent drifter. He walks into a dockside flophouse with his hat pulled down, one hand dug into his pocket, the other swinging a crummy valise, and the rolling gait of a guy used to having nowhere to go. He regards every person and object that falls under his gaze with weary insolence. He talks to the desk clerk and the bartender as if he expects nothing and wants everything. Olivier couldn't have done it better. He couldn't have done it as well.

As a teenager I saw Crawford give a rather lax performance at the Westport County Playhouse as the Coach in That Championship Season. The Playhouse had notoriously short rehearsal schedules and, from what I'd heard about him, I doubt Crawford threw himself into his work. Why would he? He'd been doing TV for decades. He knew the game. So he hit his marks and said his lines. At the end, though, standing down left with the trophy clutched in his hands, he listed to one side and fixed his eyes -- those tiny eyes, nestled in creases -- at the third row. He suddenly looked like three hundred pounds of dead meat. "Basketball," he rasped, "is no longer the white man's game." The audience laughed and his aging players took pictures. Up till then Crawford seemed a little off; now he seemed a million miles away. "I got you, Coach," yelled the photographer. The pile of meat stirred; a sigh. "Yeah." I can still hear it: The low string on a cello, frayed and woolly.

YOU FIRST! "Like J.H. Kunstler likes to say, we are wicked people who deserve to be destroyed." -- Rod Dreher.

In the post before that, Dreher nods approvingly to folks who think Al Qaeda and the Aborigines have it all over us godless humanists.

I used to think Dreher turned against the War on Whatchamacallit because of some late spasm of Christianity. Now I'm convinced it was because he despaired of a Christian revival, and hopes for fundamentalists of whatever stripe to come make us godly. This was sometime a paradox but now the time gives it proof, to quote that Shakespeare play that one of Dreher's anti-humanist heroes likes to bring up.

SKILLZ.

LACK OF SKILLZ.

A few liberal readers have taken offense to my suggestion that the "left" doesn't object to anonymous cruising for gay sex in public places...

First, I deliberately used "left" instead of "liberal" in the relevant sentence. But then I did revert back to liberal for most of the rest of the column. I probably could have been more exacting in the distinction...

Maybe I'm a product of my times, having grown up in New York City in the 1980s, but gay cruising in random places, specifically bathrooms, most certainly was part of the gay rights agenda...

I haven't paid that much attention to the issue in recent years, but I still don't seem to recall a lot of liberals expressing their disgust with bathroom hook-ups when Jim McGreevey's tale was revealed...

It seems fitting to say goodbye to summer '07 with Jonah Goldberg feverishly wrestling a rubber doll to keep it from fucking him in the ass.

NANNY STATUS. Ann Althouse worries about John Edwards' mandatory health care plan:

So, the mental health check is mandatory too? Why does he not even realize how bad that sounds? He's so warmed up about the generous benefits he's promising that he doesn't even hear the repressiveness in his own statements. I'm sure he won't be able to deliver on these promises. I'm just wondering about a person with so little sensitivity toward personal freedom.

Mandatory enrollment in a cradle-to-grave government scheme -- why, that's the stuff of totalitarian dystopias.

I do share Althouse's concern, though. Under this plan it's a coin-toss as to which of us would be locked up first: My anti-social attitudes sound a clear warning bell, as do the Professor's passive aggressive episodes.

I think it's a sign of how crucial the health care debate has become that Edwards is even proposing this. There is little danger for a Democrat in upping the ante this way. (Althouse may see this, too, hence the "I'm sure he won't be able to deliver on these promises" hedge.) And, were Edwards to carry this theme through to the general election campaign, I don't see a Republican getting much traction from claims that the Democrats want to put you in a nuthouse -- especially if Giuliani is the candidate. (Ron Paul might be safe, though.)

The political order of the day is a sort of selective nannyism. In security matters, Americans have already swallowed the idea that the innocent have nothing to fear from preventive detention, enhanced surveillance, etc. As health care climbs the charts as an issue, it may be that citizens will also decide that the sane have nothing to fear from mandatory mental health exams. Your average American is as convinced of his own sanity as he is of his own innocence, and with as much justification.

For amusement purposes, I hope this sort of thing keeps up. I would suggest the Republicans warn the people that a poor mental health grade might deprive some of them of their right to bear arms. Then the Democrats can wheel out James Brady to declare that Republicans want guns in schools. Then the Republicans can tell us that the Democrats' prescription for the mentally ill will be what Janet Reno gave the Branch Davidians. Then Al Gore can come out and explain that freedom doesn't mean much when you're drowning under twenty feet of melted polar icecap...

A few laughs on the way to preventive detention is all I ask.

UPDATE. Concurring Opinions suggests that the totalitarian angle on Edwards' plan is bullshit. I would have checked it out myself if I weren't having so much fun.

DA, DA, WE ARE McLOVIN! Attention comrades! Choose wisely your Labor Day blockbuster! At National Review, comrade Lowry assures us that Superbad is affirming of conservative moral values, while comrade Foreman finds The Bourne Ultimatum "one of the most anti-American movies made since the early 1970s." So enjoy approved tits and swears and avoid double-plus-ungood shoot-'em-up! Enjoy also your popcorn ration.

Ultimatum director Paul Greengrass' previous film United 93 was highly praised by NatRev's culture war review board. (Peter Suderman said, "Asking why this film was made is like asking why we go to funerals... We do it because we must," a pull-quote for the ages.) Greengrass' descent from patriot to traitor has been swift, but he should not despair. In 1999, Brad Bird was excoriated in the New York Post for making The Iron Giant, which had a nice Soviet robot in it. When he made The Incredibles, though, Bird was declared rehabilitated.

Of course Greengrass may still have to worry about the cultural journalism skills of Don Surber:

Based on my experience, women raising boys without fathers and urbanization are ending the hunting tradition. Disney and Warner Brothers certainly did not help the cause by depicting hunters over the years as shoot-em-up yahoos.

Even Bambi and Bugs Bunny aren't safe! I suggest Greengrass take a look at the long-awaited screenplay by Roger L. Simon and Michael Ledeen if he values his citizenship.

ON TOUR WITH OLD BLOOD 'N' GUTS. Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters has been sending dispatches from Iraq to the New York Post, and they are a delight. Here are some of Peters' most recent "I'll-remember-this moments":

Scrawny Iraqi police recruits chattering like excited birds as they marveled at the tattoos on a Marine weightlifter's torso: A flesh-and-blood metaphor for muscular, over-the-top America and our relationship with malnourished, bewildered Iraq.

Here's what our stateside poets miss: the opportunity to make metaphors of scrawny occupied peoples. Kipling might have appreciated the chance, but I expect he would have made more of it.

Peters continues in this expansive vein:

We were standing in Iraq's Atlanta, discussing Sherman. For one of those lightning instants when you grasp something beyond words, we both felt the timelessness of war and soldiering.

The glory that was total war, the grandeur that was Reconstruction. Well, five years after it was taken, Atlanta didn't have reliable electric service either.

Sitting in a plywood-partition office in a combat outpost with an American captain and an Iraqi Provincial Security Forces general as the Iraqi "complied" with the captain's request for three bids from local firms to deliver gravel to a dirt motor pool before the rains began.

Eager to close a deal that wouldn't do his own retirement savings any harm, the general laid down three pieces of paper. They were identical, except that one specified $800 per truckload, a second $750 and a third $700.

It was obvious that the bids were all from the same source and that the drill was simply to do things in the peculiar way Americans expected.

Who says they don't know how democracy works? Wait'll they get internet access. They'll be selling our own weapons back to us.

An old sheik, who had done nicely under Saddam, reminiscing about the days of no-nonsense law and order when he could drive safely on the spur of the moment from Fallujah to Basra. As the polite old man continued telling stories, it became heartbreakingly obvious that much of the post-liberation fighting between Iraqis and Americans had been the result of confounded expectations on both sides.

Living so long under Saddam - and previous stern regimes - men such as the sheik simply couldn't comprehend our rules or assumptions or philosophy, nor did we grasp the accommodations Iraqis had made with the concept of "laws."

We began by shouting past each other, and ended by shooting at each other.

This piqued my interest, till I read on and found Peters was speaking of Americans and Iraqis in general, and not of himself and the polite old man.

Peters closes with a long, funny description of one of Saddam's old palaces, during which he remembers that he hasn't said anything bad about liberals yet. "But maybe we could organize a tour that would take them to a few of Saddam's palaces," he says, "then to see the squalor in which most Iraqis live." I suppose we all have some idea of both pictures, and look forward to the day when both the palaces and the squalor will be eradicated. But I see we are almost done building a new palace in Baghdad, while the Army Corps of Engineers projects that Iraq will get sufficient power services sometime in the next decade. Also, I doubt even Peters could vouch for the security of our tour bus. So I'll pass on the offer, and continue to rely on Peters' dispatches, which are very revealing in their way.

ART TRIALS. Well, I did my best with Clive James' Cultural Amnesia, but after 500 pages I had to set it aside, not out of fatigue but out of irritation. The writing's not the problem. In and among the dozens of essays, each dedicated to (but not necessarily about) a major figure of the 20th Century (and sometimes others), James reliably produces insights that have both force and delicacy, as with this bit on Pound:

Pound vaunted his ability to form explanatory relationships, but it was the very thing he could never truly do, even though, like any other paranoid psychotic, he tried to all the time. Nevertheless he had the talent to demonstrate that to go mad for detail might yield something, whereas to go mad for generalization leads nowhere... he thought that he could judge an empire by the metallic composition of its small change, just as he thought he could extract the meaning of a Chinese ideogram by the way it looked. In both cases he was too far from the mark for sanity. But if he didn't get the picture, he could at least see it...

When he likes his subjects James is even better: "Montesquieu can delay his judgement on Tiberius: a forebearance that not even Tacitus can show... Tacitus, as much fascinated as repelled, had his sense of irony exhausted by a satanically gifted individual. Montesquieu, less emotionally involved, saw a point about Tiberius that extended to all mankind." If you can't get with this sort of material, he also writes elegantly about Dick Cavett and Tony Curtis.

The book isn't all about art, though. James' 20th Century is a slaughterhouse, so by his lights Hitler, Goebbels, Stalin, Mao, Pinochet and other such like must be considered, as well as artists who either opposed or collabrated with them, or were their victims. On these subjects, too, James can be forceful and even subtle: Goebbels, for example, "was the preeminent Nazi advocate of Total War... but he was also a realist in a surreal world, the madhouse he had helped create." On Nadezhda Mandelstam, whose husband was executed by Stalin, James is even poetic:

Akhmatova encapsulated the anguish of millions of devastated women when she wrote: "Husband dead, son in jail: pray for me." But a romantic she remained, still believing in the imaginative validity of a love affair beyond time. In Hope Abandoned, Nadezhda was able to say firmly that her friend was mistaken. Love affairs beyond time were impossible to take seriously when violent separations are the stuff of reality. With real life so disturbed, the nature of romanticism had been changed. In the new reality, all love affairs were beyond time.

James is so good at finding such aesthetic kernels in the tragedies that came with totalitarianism that I was prepared and even eager to hear a lot more of them. Alas, I did, and the kernels lost their savor soon enough. Part of it perhaps could not be helped; the horrors of the century may have been unprecedented, but they certainly begin to resemble one another over long stretches of description, and after the thirtieth or fortieth outrage I wished an editor had gently told James that we get it already. When Dante went to Hell he took Virgil, and you need a guide at that level to keep the infernal circles from closing into a blind spiral on you.

James' solution is to place the artists -- or, when they won't serve, polemicists -- in the context of relevant totalitarianisms. Did they perform admirably? Ernst Junger, despite being "incomparably the most gifted writer to remain on the scene" -- that is, in the Reich, though never quite a collaborator -- "no amount of horrifying truth could induce him fully to admit that he made a mistake. His way out of such an admission was to blame the style of the times; i.e., to console himself that everyone was at it..." If you think that's harsh, see what European Reds like Saramago get:

When Democracy finally arrived in 1974, Saramago didn't trust it. Saramago had good reason to suspect that justice would never come by reasonable means. But when it showed signs of doing so, he did nothing in his discursive writings to justify his position the only way it could have been justified... but it was wholly untrue to go on claiming that the far left offered an alternative in itself. The price of sticking to such a proposition was to restrict his own frame of reference to the size of his study. There was a world elsewhere in which the common people, all over the planet, had been massacred by the millions...

You soon see there is no Third Way with James. Authors who don't get the message are failures on that basis, despite the merit of their prose. James does not quite descend to the sort of Konservetkult nonsense we regularly lampoon here because he is a true critic with a rigorous standard: as with Pound, the ability to see the object is some recompense, but to get the picture is what art should be doing, particularly when the picture is of an oncoming holocaust. This is an arguable point, and certainly not the same thing as the blind weighing and sorting of the propagandist, but weighing and sorting is done and sometimes to an absurd degree:

In the long view of history, Brecht's fame as a creep will prevail, as it ought to. An unblushing apologist for organized frightfulness against the common people whose welfare he claimed to prize above his own, he was really no better than Oswald Mosley and a lot more dangerous. Brecht's fame as a poet will depend upon a wide appreciation of what he could do with language, and there lies the drawback: because the more you appreciate what he could do with language, the more you realize how clearly he could see, and so the more you are faced with how he left things out. You are faced, that is, with what he did not do with language.

What Brecht did do with language James never addresses, but you can pick up his plays and poems and enjoy them, I would say, even if you are not an apologist for Stalin.

This sort of hectoring eventually wore me down, but I am still getting some pleasure out of riffling it, because now I can desultorily enjoy James' lovely anecdotes, textual analyses, appreciations, and even some history lessons, without having to fidget in anticipation of another session of his grim tribunal.