EASTERN PROMISES. How did a director known for gut-busting horror become one of our great handlers of actors? In the beginning, when Cronenberg was transforming humanity for fun and profit, he didn't need much acting. But when he ascended into big-time filmmaking, Cronenberg inverted the perspective, focusing on human resistance to monstrosity. This had the rare effect of making his work both more marketable and more mature. In The Fly, even before his lab misfortune, Jeff Goldblum's Seth Brundle seemed eager to slip the surly bonds of mere humanity, and the film might have been another sly comedy of the New Flesh, but Cronenberg let love complicate his story, and the adventure became an agony, and even something close to a tragedy.

Lately Cronenberg has been escalating the moral stakes of his stories, and putting a greater burdern on his actors. He's been lucky with his actors, for the most part. In Eastern Promises, Cronenberg brings back Viggo Mortensen, the moral border-crosser of A History of Violence, as the tranformational hero. He is the Russian mobster who translates between the "good people" of London, portrayed by Naomi Watts and her part-Russian family, and the monsters of his mob, bossed by Armin Mueller-Stahl, whose depravity is indicated by his incapacity to express any feelings beyond contempt and anger. Mueller-Stahl's son, played by Vincent Cassell, has inherited the anger, but no talent for contempt -- petulance and insolence are the best he can manage. Mortensen has the contempt at existential levels, which may be why the boss virtually substitutes him for his real son -- a dangerous move for all concerned, as it happens.

The mob dynamics are fascinating, which may be why Cronenberg shows a lot of them, even though the action is supposed to be in the interplay between Mortensen's crew and the normals. The McGuffin is a baby left behind by a dying mob slave. The Londoners wish to save and redeem the baby; the mob boss wants whatever will best protect him, which may require its death.

That "may" is part of the problem. There is some dramatic merit, especially in the beginning, in keeping the necessity of the baby's death an open question. For one thing, it allows Mortensen's character and Watts' to interact on something other than strictly adversarial terms. Unfortunately, while Mortensen is superb, showing both the scars on his soul and the soft spots still remaining, Watts is just terrible. Her only identifiable character traits are those that have been announced by the other actors. (Are she and her BFF Nicole Kidman part of some bad actress sorority? Do they practice bugging their eyes and smiling slyly together?) This underrealized attraction leads to a silly motorcycle baby-chasing climax, which is even more ridiculous than it sounds.

I think Cronenberg saw in this story a way to further explore the moral divide examined in A History of Violence. But with a mob as thoroughly (though entertainingly) black and damned as this one, a heroine who is only pretty and well-intentioned, and a man standing between whose whole life is invested in not showing his true feelings, you don't have a moral divide, you have a moral silhouette. This may be why so much energy goes into the set-pieces, including the brilliantly choreographed bathhouse fight scene. They're fun to watch, but in the end they're just bloody filigrees. It may be that, in giving his actors more to do, Cronenberg has fallen into the trap of letting them do too much of what should be his job: inventing a reality that offers more resonance than scene-study exercises.

INDIE CRED. Tee fucking hee:

Brian is/was Ezra’s roommate. Sommer is Matt’s friend. Ezra is staying with Matt here in NYC while we are all up here for the Clinton Global Initiative. Alex and I are friends, as are Alex and Megan. Matt and Ezra and Megan went shooting together on Yom Kippur (bad Jews!), along with Dave, who is throwing a joint birthday party with Brian later this week. Also, Megan and Matt work together. And I used to work with Matt and still work with Ezra. And I think we are all Facebook friends.

Mithras:

High School Never Ends, It Just Changes Location

Liberalism's future Maureen Dowds and Tom Friedmans hash out their personal differences. You know, they'll still be miffed about stuff like this - and still think it matters - 30 years from now. Assholes.

It was bound to happen: as blogging became professionalized, dinks from good schools took pride of place.

Which is not to say that it isn't worse than it's ever been: Somehow I can't imagine Russell Baker and Murray Kempton filling column inches with lengthy chortles over their revels at Studio 54.

For you the punters, I believe the choice is clear. You can invest your time with these credentialed feebs, or hang out with the real people. Here is a photo taken from my writing "desk." It is not posed or nothin'.



Just be thankful I didn't include a picture of my bathroom. Wait; here is a picture of my bathroom:



And I just cleaned it. Finally, here is a picture of me and my buddies in the hood:



If you respect yourself, respect the scene, and respect the Fantastik with Bleach, I'm sure you will eschew those callow wonks and give instead your custom to rough customers such as myself. Honestly, what would you rather read? Something like this:

Sameer Lalwani looks at some of the stories behind the stories out of Burma. I think he's particularly smart on the role of new technologies.

Or something like this:

...Thence heav'd I the Maid acrosst the Table and ventur'd her Legs, which were Akimbo, untill they were Luxated; but at her Pudend found a Suppuration unknown to me, for all my Years of Learning; so vex'd, I rotated her and had my Way Anally. This Orifice was withal less than Hygenick, but there I understood the Nature of the Filth.

We offer this sort of thing every day, sometimes in modern English, and with links to Media Matters. We also have merchandise. Your way is clear, joy-poppers. This is the only blog that matters.

BORN TO LOSE. I don't think I have the gas to go to Shea and partake in Willie Randolph's "new season." Maybe if my lungs need clearing I'll go on Sunday and boo. I thank God that my years as a Mets fan and a Democrat have inured me somewhat to this kind of disaster. Still, Jesus Christ. They blew a 7-game lead in two weeks. I was stunned at first by Willie's sangfroid in the slump, but now I think his team was so freaked- and worn-out that he didn't dare spook them any further. I wonder what he thinks now. Poor Paul LoDuca seems to think he's going to pull the team into the playoffs by his teeth. Maybe he should pitch relief.

I believe Harvey Keitel speaks for all of us:



UPDATE. On the plus side, the O's have just tied the Yankees in the ninth on a triple by... Jay Payton. Sangfroid is over -- time to warm up the schadenfreude!

YET ANOTHER CODA. This sort of relates to the previous two posts: In the latest installment of their "debate," Andrew Breitbart engages in a B&D fantasy concerning David Ehrenstein:

If I could go back in time, I would go back to your childhood to beat up the boys who beat you up as you started grappling with your homosexuality. I'd go into your past to erase the "hate crimes" that now cause you to blame political conservatism for your deepest wounds. I want to breach the time/space continuum to find out what those young hoodlums were thinking when they went after you...

...at the end of the film, it's 2014 and I see that you and your partner have been nabbed by Chomsky-quoting al Qaeda fanatics who are getting ready to behead you in an abandoned auto factory in Michigan for the sin of brunching in Dearborn.

But the moment before they chop your heads off -- in the nick of time (just like in the Republicans' favorite show, "24," which we are grateful you guys allowed us to have) -- the good guys, in this case the U.S. Marines, bust through the doors to save you both. At this point, I will have drafted a powerful soliloquy for your character. It'll be a cinematic epiphany in which you show remorse for tilting at white, straight and conservative windmills...

Crumbs, Mary! Why don't you just kiss him already?

MY FAVORITE FOLSOM STREET COMMENTER SO FAR. The Folsom Street thing is still going strong. Among the hundreds of chest-thumping Christers expressing their outrage:

"'Gay' activists disingenuously call Christians 'haters' and 'homophobes' for honoring the Bible, but then lash out in this hateful manner toward the very people they accuse.” My own experience with these people led me to conclude that while Christians profess to “love the sinner and hate the sin” the extremists of the Angry Gay Left “love the sin and hate the sinner.” Responsible gay leaders should speak out against the poster, but they will not, fearing the vicious attacks from the hatemongers of their own community.

Before (and after!) he was Jeff Gannon, the author was gay-escort/wingnut/"reporter" James Guckert -- GOP press pool shill by day, "Bulldog" by night! Now he spends a large amount of his time denouncing "homosexual jihad against Republicans," which apparently includes exposing homosexual Republicans:

Larry Craig did not invent the toilet culture for which he has been accused. Gays did. Not only did gays invent anonymous rendezvous –- the practice is a significant part of the homosexual subculture.

Whereas Gannon/Guckert's encounters were the opposite of anonymous -- he got the names and the credit card numbers!

Much as I love the original, isn't it about time someone remade Advise and Consent?

UPDATE. Fixed the faulty proper name of Gannon/Guckert.

NIHIL OBSTAT. At Beliefnet, Rod Dreher is mad 'cause some leather folk made a poster for a leather event that imitates the famous tableau of the Last Supper.

Dan Savage has the absurdity of this well-covered. In a way, I can't get too outraged about the outrage or the outrage over the outrage. This is fine intramural sport for all of us with time on our hands, and the worst I can say about it is it helps keep Bill Donohue employed.

Slightly more annoying and instructive is Dreher's follow-up, in which he tells us that while a lot of conservatives denounced Ann Coulter when she called Edwards a faggot, liberals never return the high-minded favor. He invites liberal Christians to perform an appropriate auto da fe, and denounce some liberal foibles in the spirit of post-Folsom comity. Dreher seems not to have noticed that there is a whole, credentialed flock of self-proclaimed liberal columnists who spend many of their column inches on such exercises. As Gavin observes:

Among the many variants of this style is that of the nominally liberal columnist (such as Thomas Friedman or Richard Cohen) who finds himself continually forced by events to repeat conservative talking points and express disdain for his fellow liberals -- message: "This hurts me more than it hurts you." When executed well, this routine can be repeated weekly for an indefinite number of years.

It's a marketable schtick. But demands that others emulate it without pay are rather rich, especially coming from someone whose anti-gay animus is obvious whenever he mentions homosexuals.

This is the sort of thing that gives moderation a bad name.

A CLOCKWORK BREITBART. The L.A. Times has engaged David Ehrenstein (film nerd) and Andrew Breitbart (culture warrior) to discuss Hollywood and the War on Whatchamacallit. (First two parts up now.) We have gone round this particular mulberry bush many times before, but Breitbart's ravings are proving classics of the genre.

Most notable are Beitbart's mood swings between professions of conservative cultural impotence and professions of conservative cultural power. On the one hand he accuses "the politically correct architecture of the creative process in Hollywood," where "pro-victory voices are reflexively ridiculed, cold-shouldered and made pariahs of on the party circuit [! -ed.]," of "reverse McCarthyism" (Watershed! They're against McCarthyism now!). On the other, he declares that "my side has talk radio, best-selling books, top-rated cable news shows, blogs, Op-Ed columns and even the presidency to make our points," and that "millions of other American filmgoers" share his politics and find their needs ill-served by Hollyweird, despite record box-office figures.

At one point, perhaps a rare moment of equilibrium in his brain chemistry, Breitbart turns introspective on behalf of the Movement: "Yet the conservatives who defend and, to a great degree, prosecute this war [? -ed.] have only themselves to blame for not putting enough emphasis on popular entertainment, and refusing to get bloody in the trenches of Melrose and Vine," he says, before (alas) reverting to form and calling on Ehrenstein as a "gay expert on gays in cinema" to help him with a Hollywood "diversity" project.

There are many different ways to relieve a creative urge, and those of us who toil both in blogs and in other formats must be careful not to shoot too much of our wads on internet prattle. That's why I continue to hold out sympathy and hope for guys like Jason Apuzzo, whose rages against the Hollywood machine are punctuated by efforts to make the sort of movies he wants to see.

But as Breitbart's case shows, the pure culture warrior finds making actual culture a "bloody" business and beneath him. His talents are instead devoted to concocting syrups of outrage thick enough to suspend bombast-fragments like "heroin-addled reality star," "self-congratulatory award show pronunciations," and "Gulfstream-flying, eco-warrior billionaires" for the delectation of undiscerning goons. The hard work of pursuing a coherent idea from start to finish -- whether in a story, script, or even a blog post -- is for the gloopy ones, while the oomny ones use, like, inspiration and what Bog sends.

It seems clear that our culture warriors are not engaged in a war for culture so much as a war against it.

HOMAGE TO SHERLOCK HOLMES AND PHILEAS FOGG. Megan McArdle on some silly Times story on women who are uncomfortable dating men who make less money than they do:

Speaking as the Emissary From Your Thirties, you know that amazing guy who just got back from Africa and tells hilarious stories and dates, like, everyone you know? The one your best friend quit her job to go to Tuvalu with? The one who's been working on a really titanic novel for four years that he never quite finishes, and can't seem to hold down a long-term job? His dating prospects start heading rapidly downhill by his thirtieth birthday. By his late thirties, his studio apartment is getting very lonely at night. If he does get married to a woman more successful than he is, it's likely that their relationship will be controlling, resentful, and involve enduring quite a lot of contempt from her friends and family.

But it has nothing to do with money. [? -ed.] Men with some measure of success in their chosen fields have no problem finding spouses. And successful women have no cause to complain, either. After all, they have a bevy of unsuccessful but charming men to choose from, who will be more than happy to date them if they can overcome their biases. The unsuccessful men, on the other hand, are pretty much frozen out.

This is why I keep a cat.

McArdle's post is an odd mix of libertarian harshness and romanticism. On the one hand, it features a market explanation which seems to strike her as just. But the talk about loneliness and diminished prospects comes from some different kind of moral tale, perhaps a pamphlet or a children's story. One would hardly guess that our society is filled with people who, by her standards, are moral and economic failures. McArdle does acknowledge the existence of poor folk in a previous post on the same subject, but there the language reverts to econo-nerdspeak:

There is a growing male/female education and income disparity. But it is occurring several rungs down the SES ladder from the precious princesses in the story, clipping off price tags and hiding shopping bags lest He realize that she shops at Prada. This problem is afflicting mostly poor women, particularly black and latino women, who have seen their earnings prospects improve dramatically relative to those of the men in their communities.

In this demimonde, women suffer from the "problem" of improved earning power, while in the surface world we have companionless loser males with their Soup for One dinners and unfinished novels, clinging forlornly to precious memories of Tuvalu. It seems win-win, or lose-lose, depending on your perspective.

For all its confusion, this analysis clearly posits marriage as the ultimate prize. I wonder if the many citizens who fall in and out of marriages, and in and out of economic stability, see it that way. No doubt many of them do -- which is why they keep trying -- but some may have determined that life's a bit messier than that. If the prospect of penury and an unattended deathbed disturbs them, so too might the prospect of a job they despise and a "controlling, resentful" relationship. One of the glories of a free society is that we may pick and choose our regrets. In econometric circles, where marriage, income per capita, and procreation are exalted data-points, this does not signify. But if you have found some happiness in this world despite your lack of resemblance to the ideal, you may know what I'm talking about.

UPDATE. Jules Verne character name corrected; thanks, Anon.

FIRST AMENDMENT UPDATE. Ahmadinejad speaks at Columbia. Much protest. Much coverage, largely negative (The New York Daily News headline: "The Evil Has Landed"). The Republic endures.

Just the other day National Review was telling us that "Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia has nothing to do with freedom of speech." Today at NR, Michael Rubin:

Lee Bollinger's introduction didn't make the news [in Iran]. But then again, why should it? Ahmadinejad's state-controlled press does not support such concepts as free speech and free expression.

I've noticed that, whenever they fail to cut off someone's mike, they murmur something like this about free speech as if it were some small consolation.

FTW. Mark Steyn complains about Fred Thompson's characterization of America's goals in World War II:

FDR didn't take America to war in 1941 with the "disinterested intention of liberating others". He took America to war not to end the Holocaust or free Belgium or build a democracy in Japan but for reasons of hard-headed national self-interest. All the rest was the happy consequence of victory. Likewise, America didn't topple the Taliban because it was suddenly overcome by a burning desire to see more women legislators in the Afghan parliament: That, too, was a happy consequence of a war waged for selfish reasons.

This is an interesting admission because many, many conservatives automatically discount the idea that opponents of the Iraq war might also be putting America's welfare first and foremost, and accuse us of other loyalties. In fact Steyn himself does this regularly. In 2003 he discounted antiwar protestors as "enthusiastically subscribed" to the proposition that "whatever the problem, American imperialist cowboy aggression is to blame," and earlier in 2007 he characterized the "Slow-Bleed Democrats" as more interested in embarrassing Bush than in winning "America's war."

Hatred of America, or of Bush, has been always been their default explanation for the astonishing fact that some Americans disagree with them, and as the number of dissenters increases Steyn begins to think that the war party just hasn't explained it properly:

An awful lot of Americans see Iraqis waving purple fingers at the polls and shrug, "Nice. But not worth dead Americans." To sell this struggle to the electorate, you have to frame it in terms of the national interest. It has to be a war consistent with American ideals but fought for selfish reasons.

The Administration actually did present a compelling, self-interested causus belli -- remember "one vial, one canister... to bring a day of horror like one we have never known"? But it turned out to be bullshit. The Happy Iraqi stuff was just the sweetener. The current Iraq explanation boils down to we're here because we're here.

Like the new-edition Steyn, I care much, much less about other countries than I do about this one. That's why I retroactively endorse America's go-slow approach to the Cold War, which left hanging an awful lot of Soviet subjects who might have been more quickly liberated -- or incinerated -- by a more aggressive strategy. I think it's terrific that Israel provides a homeland for the most persecuted race in the history of the world, but I mainly support it because its existence suits America's interests. I think it's neat that Nelson Mandela went from prisoner to President of South Africa, but for me the money shot was the establishment of a viable democracy in a continent riddled with kleptocracies. Our interests demand a world that is increasingly less likely to blow up in our faces, and the hornets-nest we have aggravated in Iraq seems to me a giant step in the wrong direction.

Go ahead and call me selfish. Patriots have endured worse.

UPDATE. Much contention in comments as to whether our support for Israel suits American interests. I think a better policy toward Israel would be helpful, but withdrawing support would be catastrophic, and whatever reasons obtain, we have enough catastrophe as it is. The subject will be worth revisiting.

THE DREAM IS OVER. Hog on Ice starts out yelling about the taser kid Andrew Meyers, and ends up yelling about how conservative bloggers can't get any play:

This is why the right-wing Blogosphere is dead and moldering but Markos Zuniga, who can barely write his name, is a multimillionaire. Compared to Zuniga, Malkin and Reynolds are obscure, marginalized, and pretty much impotent, and Pajamas Media...well, don't get me started.

We owned the Blogosphere a few years back, and we made stupid decisions and pissed it away. We went from omnipotent to irrelevant. And we have a national election coming up, we can't begin to match the left's Internet fundraising and informational horsepower, and we're doing absolutely nothing about it. We're not going to change any time soon, either. The scarier things get, the more every successful conservative obsesses on protecting his little rice ball. No one is forming new alliances or making any serious effort to consolidate conservative media power. And for damn sure, we are not going to have any Andrew Meyers.

Back in 2003, when Megan McArdle was talking about the wingersphere Mr. Ice mourns as a "very advanced, processing brain," it may be that hundreds, even thousands of bloggers took it seriously, and thought they were part of something larger than themselves, which would in turn make them large. It was to be the sort of utopia that conservatives -- whom I'm told are not big on collectivism -- can allow themselves to imagine: one in which individuals can avail a limited barrier to entry and make contributions that will both feed the borg and expose their own talents, thereby lifting them to glory or at least economic self-sufficiency. It was, in other words, punk rock for nerds.

Well, McArdle is now credentialed by The Atlantic. Hers would seem to be a typical careerist path; the odds on her success were never slim, but blogging gave her a nice promotional boost. Mr. Ice himself is an author, a harder row to hoe in any case. His blog no doubt helps him move his product. For a happy capitalist, that should be enough -- well, never enough, but sufficient to the cause.

Yet the great dream lingers -- in Mr. Ice's case, as ashes in the mouth, but for many others, younger or just less easily discouraged, it is tastier and stimulates the appetite. The sheeple who don't even know who Scott Thomas Beauchamp is will be shaken from their false consciousness by an invincible juggernaut of Citizen Journalists holding aloft the banner of Truth, and there'll be kegs enough for everyone at the afterparty.

Fond hope! Alas, reality is more strictly tiered than that. The ubiquity of the internet feeds into the conservative idea of unlimited opportunity, but when it comes to real dollars and influence, there are never more than a few spots open, and these usually go to graduates of "good" schools who have worked a time-honored career path. The addition of a blog credential to the CV helps, no doubt, and there may be a few affirmative-action hires of pure bloggers, but the great upheaval in which some of the brethren believe is not to be. To the extent that they are useful to wielders of real power, the Citizen Journalists will be quoted, stroked, and used as a force-multiplier for disinformation campaigns in need of some extra muscle, but when the hurly-burly's done they'll be put back in their box.

Writing's tough enough, and making a living at it even tougher; trying to topple power structures or build new utopias on top of that seems like a waste of time better spent cleaning up a sentence.

DERANGEMENT SYNDROME. "Why are you writing so much about Hillary Clinton? I don’t want to. I’d rather not, really. But she is everywhere in the news... Funnily enough, she is everywhere IN the news and NOT in the news." -- The Anchoress.

She also says the Hillary/Hsu story is undercovered. In other news, the Ole Perfesser is on his 300th bad Hsu pun.

I'm not a big fan of Clinton, but that's a lot of attention for someone who's supposed to be unelectable.

ARTS ROUNDUP. As long as I'm being arty-farty, I shall continue with the arts and the farts, with random observation from recent intake:

A Midsummer Night's Dream in Central Park. Pepys was right: it's a pretty stupid play. But it's sure-fire outdoors with good actors on a warm night. The lovers are the weak link, and for all their energetic ripping of ladies' garments I would have preferred some equally energetic tearing away of lines. Maybe Martha Plimpton's Helena was my problem. I had only seen Helena played as a mope before, and while Plimpton's tartness brought energy to her interminable lines, it lost the sympathy and sweetness that is the character's secret weapon. The twinned morganatic pairs were much better -- Keith David's Oberon, done up to look like Screamin' Jay Hawkins, was stolid and poetic, which suited because Oberon has great poetry and David has a great voice, and David's heaviness gave Oberon's fourth-act tenderness ("Her dotage now I do begin to pity") great power. And Shakes in the Park never stints on the clowning, so the rustics got to ham it up and keep us groundlings awake. Loved the goth fairy children, too, but next time, can we please have Mendelssohn?

Steal This Movie. I have to say it's fun to see the two leads from "Grounded for Life" as major hippies. But Vincent D'Onofrio's Abbie Hoffman is very like Vincent D'Onofrio's Law 'n' Order guy with long hair, denim, and drugs: I kept expecting him to arrest somebody. This item succeeds mainly as a posthumous curio, inspiring wonder that once upon a time one could sneak into the Stock Exchange and throw around dollar bills. Though I'm sympathetic to well-rendered nostalgia, I would have preferred that this movie follow the discursive method of Steal This Book or Woodstock Nation, which weirdly anticipated the style of blogs. (I would have especially appreciated the cinematic rendering of "God, I'd Like To Fuck Janis Joplin.") Then, for a pleasant change, we could have thousands of posts about how Vincent D'Onofrio is Fat.

Eugene O'Neill: Collected Shorter Plays (Yale University Press). Hadn't read them in a while and had a hankering. The Glencairn plays are like short stories for the stage, little projects with which the student of Professor Baker found his stage-legs. They're slight, stiff, disarmingly easy to get down, and clearly based on personal experience. It's amazing to contemplate that, two years after the last of these pleasantly stagey affairs, O'Neill wrote The Emperor Jones -- and, two years later, The Hairy Ape . It's as if O. Henry had suddenly become -- well, Eugene O'Neill. Where did this poet come from? Whence the grand scale? It's been decades since I read the Gelb biographies, but my forgetful guess is that, once he got a sense of his own stage power with the Provincetown Playhouse productions, O'Neill felt confident enough to start appropriating literary influences. It wasn't theft because it didn't sound like anyone else's stuff; the themes may have been cribbed from German Expressionist playwrights, but the argot of the Glencairn plays grew organically into the great soliloquies of Jones and Yank. This is a nice reminder that the development of any popular artist relies on the slipstream of influences that surround him, but if he is to get very far he must also contrive to bring along something that is wholly his own.

OLD MAN BLUES. It disturbed me, while downloading Loudon Wainwright III's Strange Weirdos, to confront the sidebar information that other purchasers of this merchandise also favored the soundtrack to "Grey's Anatomy." So it's come to this: Plush Pop for Then People. But I love LWIII and hoped he would drop a few barbs in the syrup nonetheless.

The songs shamble along, displaying LWIII's command of his writerly gifts -- crisply observed detail, wordplay, fluent appropriation of various styles, and juxtaposition -- without inspiring anything but vague appreciation for obvious talent. The production gives his songs musical settings that are technically appropriate to the themes, but this has the effect in most cases of double-underlining the point and writing notes in the margins. The one big exception sounds like a fortunate failure of the producer's energy: apparently no one knew what to do with "Lullaby," so they just made it sort of pretty, which beautifully sets off the opening: "Shut up and go to bed/put some pillow under your head/I'm sick and tired of all of your worries/shut up and say goodnight."

Unfortunately, after a while the songwriter runs out of energy too. I am forced to say that this happens throughout Strange Weirdos. For the first time that I've noticed, LWIII's maudlin streak isn't leading to anything interesting. On the title song, "It starts with a sentence that might last a lifetime" is very promising, but the next line, "Or it might all just go down in flames," betrays the promise.

It's always instructive when the best song on a weak album is the cover. Usually it's because the artists are relieved at last to cluster their talents around a dead certain winner. Peter Blegvad's wonderful "Daughter" gets a professional, respectful treatment from the band, and you can hear that respect in LWIII's voice, too -- along with everything else the song demands: awe and amusement, protectiveness and a premonition of loss.

I love LWIII's voice. I even love the arch tone in it, which may be a matter of necessity because LWIII so often sounds arch. It's most obvious when he tries to be bluesy or to "rock," or do anything besides sing the damn song. (This is the occupational hazard of an ironic romantic trapped in a musical idiom that tends to exacerbate romance -- the form being "singer/songwriter, late 20th century," which he still is in 2007.) From the perspective of Strange Weirdos, I begin to think that LWIII's propensity to strike poses with his voice is an admission of discomfort with the formats in which he's found himself -- or maybe even in the forms he's chosen for himself. Now he is an Adult Contemporary for real, his latest vehicle tooling smoothly like a refurbished roadster along highways outside major cities, the stranger side of his talent rattling contentiously under the hood.

Whenever he has dared to be his own weird self, though, he has been brilliant. "The Man Who Couldn't Cry," as weird as Daniel Johnston but with the coherence of great poetry, is the eternal, shining example. He's managed the trick many times, and once is enough to make you a genius in this game. He's capable of it even in his fussy old-man mode. "The Last Man on Earth," from 2001, is a superior version of Strange Weirdos's middle-age lament, "Doin' The Math." The newer song, done as a creepy L.A. lounge blues slide, is kinda funny but stews too much in its own resentment. "The Last Man of Earth" is cleaner, plainer, a throwback to the young strummer LWIII used to be. It has jokes, too, but most of them have a sharp tang that quickly pushes off any hint of self-regard. You don't have to relate to his condition: you can simply hear it. The recorded version is, alas, fussy and marred with underlinings, but I had the good fortune to hear him do it solo-acoustic on TV, and there the climactic passage had the force of a sharp slap:

Kids used to say their prayers at night
Before they went to bed
St. John told us that God is love
Nietzsche said he was dead
This thing we call existence
Who knows what it all means?
Time and Life and People
Are just glossy magazines

That last couplet, like the solitude of the hero in "One Man Guy" and other high achievements of ironic romantics, is a selfish dirty trick. Which is what keeps me listening to him.

MORAL EQUIVALENCE WATCH. Eric from Classical Values (hehndeeded by the Ole Perfesser) doesn't understand "How the hell did sex get put on the f---ing left?" After failing to mention the decades-long Family Values crusade of the GOP, he writes:

I don't think it is rational for Republicans to declare war on sex and to appear to embrace erotophobia, because of their traditional 'leave people alone' philosophy, but there's not a damned thing I can do about it except write posts like this. As to the Democrats, they see sex not as a form of freedom to be embraced, but as something to be manipulated to gain power.

This last assertion seems to come from thin air; the only thing in the article that relates to it at all is Eric's admission that conservative "erotophobia" presents an opportunity for Democrats.

Like much of the gibberish considered here, this offers a clue to conservative thinking. Consider this Classical Values post from the morning after the 2006 elections:

Thus, my concern is that even if this election was not about the war, there will be a major push to make it appear to be.

But in logic, if the election was about the war (which I do not concede that it was), why is it necessarily Bush's war? Why should the Democrats who voted to support it (and who claimed that there were WMDs) get a pass?

For a certain breed of Republican, the only thing that is ever bipartisan is their own mistakes.

SHORTER ROSS DOUTHAT: Conservatives were great until the liberal media started paying attention to them. Then they went crazy.

LOYALTY TEST. The folks at Family Security Matters sure like to think outside the box. Last month they posted (then withdrew) an article suggesting Bush declare himself President for Life. Now, with Iraq inflamed because Blackwater privateers mowed down some of its citizens in Najaf, FSM's Nick Guariglia suggests that firms like Blackwater are "amongst the most efficient humanitarian organizations in business."

Guariglia's method is a marvel and we'll get to it shortly. For now, the money quote:

But are these chastised “war profiteers” any more or less amoral than, say, a cardiologist who addresses, and thus profits from, the treatment of heart disease? Or a clean-up conglomerate which rebuilds towns devastated by natural disaster? Is not the continuity of disease, plight, and disaster in the financial interest of these parties? Why would a war theater be an exception to the rule, the one realm in which this code of conduct does not apply?

Unfortunately Guariglia's correlatives to the cardiologist and the conglomerate are mainly "cleaning up" in the larcenous meaning of the term, as can be seen in Matt Taibbi's "The Great Iraq Swindle." Sample outrage:

The system not only had the advantage of eliminating red tape in a war zone, it also encouraged the "entrepreneurship" of patriots like Custer and Battles, who went from bumming cab fare to doing $100 million in government contracts practically overnight. And what business they did! The bid that Custer claimed to have spent "three sleepless nights" putting together was later described by Col. Richard Ballard, then the inspector general of the Army, as looking "like something that you and I would write over a bottle of vodka, complete with all the spelling and syntax errors and annexes to be filled in later." The two simply "presented it the next day and then got awarded about a $15 million contract."

The deal charged Custer Battles with the responsibility to perform airport security for civilian flights. But there were never any civilian flights into Baghdad's airport during the life of their contract, so the CPA gave them a job managing an airport checkpoint, which they failed miserably. They were also given scads of money to buy expensive X-ray equipment and set up an advanced canine bomb-sniffing system, but they never bought the equipment. As for the dog, Ballard reported, "I eventually saw one dog. The dog did not appear to be a certified, trained dog." When the dog was brought to the checkpoint, he added, it would lie down and "refuse to sniff the vehicles" -- as outstanding a metaphor for U.S. contractor performance in Iraq as has yet been produced.

It gets worse: when, over the objections of the Bush Administration, the Custer Battles security firm was brought to trial and found guilty by a jury of this outrageous fraud, the judge set the verdict aside, agreeing with the Administration that "Custer Battles could not be found guilty of defrauding the U.S. government because the CPA (the now-defunct Coalition Provisional Authority) was not part of the U.S. government."

For good reason, very few people outside their immediate families have a high opinion of these firms -- you can read more contractor horror stories at American Conservative magazine, among other places. Aware that he's got nothin', Guariglia falls back to debaters' tricks:

To weave in and out of applying intentionalist ethics – questioning the motives of employed defense workers –– and consequentialist standards -– questioning their performance -– is inconsistent. (As if one would be inclined to favor something they adamantly oppose in principle if only it were conducted more competently.)

I think it is safe to say most of us are above this mode of argument. It wouldn’t impress even a novice ethicist.

This is why people hate intellectuals: millions are egregiously stolen, and Guariglia grades a strawman's college paper. When this approach fails and deadline beckons, there's always gibberish:

When do-gooders speak surprisingly that corporations, providing a needed service through the selling of that service, actually collect revenue – oh no! – thereby continuing to provide that service, it is an odd criticism of something that best be left not criticized. It recalls the old Marxist fib that suggests history is only the tale of calculated material pursuit, not the narrative of human emotion, pride, fear, and irrationalism.

In his defense I would suggest that Guariglia cannot possibly believe this nonsense. He is making the best -- his best, anyway -- of a bad job. As the works of the Bush Administration plainly collapse into chaos, better-credentialed conservatives get a pass to work the "mistakes were made" hustle. But the noobs and small fry still have to make their bones: none of them will move up in the organization as a small-circulation David Brooks. So they take a contrarian angle, defending even the most egregious failures with rhetoric honed in impromptu debates with hippies on the quad. It doesn't have to convince anyone: the hopeless effort itself shows loyalty sufficient to keep the soldier on the payroll. When things blow over, maybe he can get a job blogging for the Atlantic.

SHORTER DAVID FREDDOSO: I am never, ever going to get laid.

Further evidence may be found in Freddoso's article about New York City:

Ah, New York! My host was just being gracious when he asked me, “What do you miss most about living in The City?”

I replied instantly without even thinking about how rude it was: “I don’t.”

And I really don’t. I’ve been back all of three times since I left in 2001. But The City has a way of seeping into one’s bowels and staying there for years. That’s my excuse, anyway, for telling off that kid yesterday who was panhandling in Union Square, wearing nicer clothes than I own. It’s why I step in front of people at street-corners, keep my eyes straight ahead, and walk as though there’s a tribe of screaming cannibals on the block behind me.

He spreads sunshine wherever he goes. Here he is working on his sneer. My guess is that he really, really likes P.J. O'Rourke and thinks a shitty attitude translates automatically into scintillating, contrarian prose, which is like getting drunk and belligerent five nights a week and thinking that makes you Bukowski.

VERITAS. At The Atlantic Online, Ross Douthat does another post about how no one teaches Dead White Males in skool anymore, and receives a fair amount of What The Fuck Are You Talking About in comments, among which my favorite is this:

Multiculturalism as presently constituted is not a threat to the cultural heritage of the liberal arts. The fact that the university is being reformed as a set of pre-professional schools and the students are all majoring in Communications rather than English Lit is. This cannot realistically be blamed on mean old French post-structuralists or tenured radicals.

These days restraining orders keep me off campus, but even among us townies it is an observable fact that our society values knowledge solely as a way of making money, and with the cost of a college education (and of the service of loans for it) through the roof, it's a wonder anyone in the United States reads Shakespeare anymore except to mine quotes for his Chamber of Commerce speech. I went to college in the 1970s, and was mainly required to take drugs and produce a few legible papers. Perhaps I shouldn't have gone to school at all, and toiled at manual labor instead. Wait a minute -- in the decade after my graduation I worked mainly as a messenger, busboy, waiter, or day laborer. Maybe if I'd read more Milton I'd be writing for The Atlantic Online today. Damn Toni Morrison! Who's Toni Morrison, by the way?

If the cultural thirst of undergrads is but poorly slaked by the brackish water of popular culture, I am surprised to hear Douthat complain of it. He has written extensively on Knocked Up. If any of his pieces on it describe the line of succession from Feste or Toby Lumpkin to Seth Rogen, I have missed them. He seems mainly interested in how the film might get kids to oppose Planned Parenthood, which shows some sort of education, but one only distantly related to the Humanities.

And in his very next post he celebrates the ascendancy of football over baseball! The man is clearly a philistine who can't even understand that Dane Cook is a particular, not a universal. What are they teaching in schools these days?

SHOWTIME. Michael Ledeen takes in a Toby Keith concert;

It's great to get out of the Washington culture of narcissism and spend some time with the rednecks, a.k.a. real Americans. And it's simply great, as the encores end, and a downpour of red, white and blue confetti covers the crowd, to see Toby say "don't ever apologize for your patriotism," and then lift the middle finger of his right hand to the skies and say, "F*** 'Em!"

Which, after a week of disgusting anti-Americanism in Washington, nicely summed up our feelings.

You ought to try it. Does wonders for the spirit.

Oh, if only his colleagues would take him up on it.

JONAH GOLDBERG: (through a mouth full of hot dog) CURRSSY VUV VUH RID WUHN BLUH!

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: He is a modern Simonides singing of Thermopylae! With the biceps of a Greek god!

JONAH GOLDBERG: And the hair of a young David Hasselhoff!

PETER SUDERMAN: I find his vulgarity so liberating that I don't even mind the large number of children in attendance!

STANLEY KURTZ: Not to worry, Peter! This shows a healthy uptick in white procreation!

CLEM: Which one a' you funny boys got Cheeto dust in mah beer?

Then they can blame the ensuing beatdown on antiwar protestors.