SEX MAD. I go away for a couple of days, and I find the folks at National Review have been talking about Cosmo and Barbies. Even a short recess will make this stuff even more hallucinogenic. It's like I left what I thought was a mildly dysfunctional family and came back years later to realize they were really the House of Atreus.

So I'm having a little trouble wrapping my head around it, but I will say this about the Kathryn J. Lopez column, which seems to blame feminists for way-to-bring-out-the-animal-in-your-man articles. Between the old days and the new, not much about human nature has changed. People will take the main chance every time it is offered to them, absent morality. Though it's clear that Americans have fewer restrictions on them when it comes to sex and sexual expression, it's much less clear that they are any more or less moral than once they were. The kind of guy who thinks of a woman as "a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment" because she let him fuck her would have, a hundred years earlier, thought that way about her if she showed him a bit of ankle.

The new way gave us more chances to screw, and also new chances to screw up, and so many people have. That's what happens with everything pleasurable in America, it seems. And it's very interesting that in the country where citizens most strongly prize their personal freedom, so many of us are drunks, junkies, overeaters, and/or sex mad. It's one of the things I sorta like about the place.

Of course we have our Puritanical side as well. We see it still in smoking bans, drug wars, and other such nannyish pursuits. But it has generally been on the decline for a long time. Its zenith was in the days of the Volstead Act -- the legal prohibition of a previously widely-enjoyed right. Not so many people think that was a great idea anymore. And I'm sure the few that do think it was a good idea, and would like to bring it back, must feel as oppressed by the contents of the wine and beer aisle in the supermarket as Lopez feels by the smutty mags at the checkout.

Lopez faults feminism for its part in the promotion of birth control, because it led to Cosmopolitan and all these other sexed-up artifacts of our modern life, which she believes are harmful to women. Let's tally it up: once, women only had to worry about unwanted childbirth, frustration, shame, ostracism, and ruin; now they have to worry about ways to bring out the animal in their man. That's some trade. Anyone who wants a do-over is welcome to join a cult -- or, in Lopez' case, remain in one -- and have it themselves. As the wonderfully American expression goes, it's their life.

UPDATE. I should add: if Lopez is really looking to form an anti-sex coalition, why does she start with an appeal to feminists, who are probably not inclined to take her seriously, rather than with an appeal to her fellow wingnuts? In today's edition of Rupert Murdoch's New York Post we find this:

GOOD news, horny New Yorkers!

We're the No. 1 destination in the US for tourists from other countries, and you know what that means, right?

Fresh international meat!

Come to think of it, maybe it isn't just an unwillingness to talk to her own kind. Maybe Lopez senses that the Post's repulsive reduction is, in its way, just as anti-sex as she is. Maybe, being a conservative, she thinks that if sex is exploitative, it is thereby redeemed.

UH... From Wake Up America:

Jesse Jackson Shows Hypocrisy By Calling Blacks, Niggers

Uh....

The portion shown in the original video was where Jackson had said that Barack Obama was "talking down to black people". What wasn't shown was the remark made after that.

The full remark was, "Barack...he's talking down to black people...telling niggers how to behave"...

This brings back up a situation in 2006 when Michael Richard's, who played Kramer on the popular Seinfeld television comedy show...

Uh... uh...

Is it hypocritical for Jackson to have tried to get movies, books and the entertainment industry, as well as the general public, to ban the use of a word that he, himself, utilizes?

You really can't imagine that someone living in America doesn't understand the difference between a white guy saying it and a black guy saying it. Then you see Michelle Malkin and a whole bunch of others saying the same thing, and you realize there are only two possible explanations: 1.) They have never been around any black people; 2.) They do know the difference, but are fond of tendentious, circular logic puzzles -- e.g, "You say you're against prejudice, but that makes you prejudiced against people who are prejudiced," or "You say you're for human rights, but you didn't want to invade Iraq" -- that shield them from the mundane reality in which the rest of us live.

In this case Jackson's unfortunate promotion of a ridiculous hate-speech ordinance makes it easier for them, but no less transparent.

Just to prove my own hypocrisy, I'll say the correct explanation is 3.) They're full of shit.

APOLOGIES. BEEN BUSY. Will try to get back later today. Meantime there's a bunch of stuff here you might enjoy.

NEW VOICE POST UP. Odds & sods -- Phil Gramm, Bernie Mac, etc. What? Hell yeah, it's worth reading! You read this, didn't you?

BEYOND SATIRE. It's pretty depressing* that some liberals don't get that the New Yorker Obama cover is satire. That conservatives don't even know what satire is would also be depressing, were they not ever and always blind to even the simplest aesthetic concepts.

I mean, Jesus:

IF OBAMA LOSES, THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM WILL BE that it was because sleazy rightwingers portrayed him as a Muslim terrorist sympathizer.

When that happens, show 'em this New Yorker cover and remind 'em that The New Yorker is not generally regarded as a right-wing publication.

The Ole Perfesser then follows by sneering, "but it's satire!" as if satire were some ridiculously effete and rarefied concept which he couldn't possibly take seriously, like "conscience" or "humanity." That any piece of communication has value other than as propaganda probably doesn't even compute with him; his robot brain just perceives the images, goes "Beep beep, consistent with Obama TPoint 7A, promote to morons," and moves on.

Jonah Goldberg, as usual, is even worse:

Of course, if we ran the exact same art, the consensus from the liberal establishment could be summarized in words like "Swiftboating!" and, duh, "racist." It's a trite point, but nonetheless true that who says something often matters more than what is said — and, obviously, that satire is in the eye of the beholder.

Goldberg is very fond of categorical imperatives when it comes to nearly everything, yet he imagines satire to be "in the eye of the beholder," rather than the clinical term artists (and, indeed, anyone who graduated from a decent high school) know it to be.

It's understandable that anyone whose sense of humor misfires as often as Goldberg's would be motivated to confuse definitions relating to humor, in hopes that this may provide cover for him next time he really fucks up. What I wonder is: do his, and the Perfesser's, and all the other idiots' readers really think the same way? Do they also look at the New Yorker's frequent joke covers and, instead of laughing or scowling or any other human response, think, how can this be spun for my political candidate?
'Cause if they do, having to sell John McCain is the least of their problems.

*UPDATE. Sigh. Tom Tomorrow just tipped me to this comment from Drum's site, which reads in part, "Is your objective another Crystal Night, and trains of jews, gays, minorities, and other non-Aryans headed for the ovens?... This is not satire. It is race hate, religious hate, and political hate. It is an invitation to violence, lawbreaking, and cultural war." I'd like to think it's a plant, but alas, given what I've been hearing, it may be legit. Can't we let the conservatives be the crazy ones for a little while longer?

UPDATE II. Okay, this is more like it: minutes before defending the Obama cover, Megan McArdle humphs that August Pollak's lampoon of her proves that "the left has no sense of humor" -- at least, that's what her commenters and I think she's saying; it's one of her more mysterious, impenetrable constructions. Commenters, with all the philosophical heft libertarians traditionally bring to such topics, discuss the nature of humor ("Most humor relies on the propagation of general truths with a twist of absurdity thrown in") and Megan McArdle ("Megan knows that waiting for the iPhone and being a refugee are not the same experience"). Thank God someone's working to restore the balance of the universe!

THE REAL END OF COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM. If you're wondering what Phil Gramm was thinking with that "nation of whiners" crack, let me suggest that it may just be part of a new charm offensive from the right, at least if these bits from the weekend's New York Post are any indication.

"The baby boomers... have once again spoken. What they have said is, 'Waaaaaahhh,'" says Monica Hesse, who reads a Pew study showing boomers "worry that their income won't keep up with rising costs of living" and "that things don't look too good for their kids." They sound like most Americans of whatever age, but Hesse responds, "Oh, the drama! Oh, the anguish!" A separate study "found that boomers have never been happy," so there's no need to pay any attention to them now -- only Hesse does, and at column length, because "the rest of us are doomed to study them, analyze them, wave shiny objects around for them," though by what coercive mechanism she doesn't say. "BUCK UP ALREADY!" she shouts, or she may have to write another column about them, instead of one about "The Google Ogle Defense" ("'Orgy' might be a popular [Google] search term not because it's a popular practice, but because it's not. How do all those limbs fit together, anyway?"), or "Things that are 'awk-ward,' according to a group of University of Maryland students hanging out on the campus quad," or other topics of national importance. Trend reporting seems like an easy gig, even when the economy's in the toilet and some fossils are bitching about it.

Younger people get it -- at least the ones in Iraq, reports movie reviewer Kyle Smith, who pimps LiveLeak, "a destination spot for short war films that are awesome or disgusting, depending on your viewpoint." Smith's own viewpoint is clear: "LiveLeak is doing a much better job presenting the facts than, say, the latest foamy-mouthed drivel about corporate masters of war from the formerly popular actor John Cusack." The lead featured item at LikeLeak at this writing is "Man Shows Unique Ability To Put Hands Into Cauldron Of Hot Fat," but Smith seems to be talking about stuff like this:

...a clip of gunship attacks set to the metal song by Dope called "Die Mothe - - - - er Die." The video wasn't gruesome, though, since the enemy was well off in the distance and disappearing tidily under puffs of white smoke. One of the troops is overheard saying, "This was great. I need a cigarette. This was like sex." And a few more shocked grad students get some fuel for their eroticization-of-violence papers...

Actually it sounds like "Jackass," except instead of injuring themselves Johnny Knoxville and Wee Man kill other people from a distance. Smith believes "the primary message fired-up young men are likely to take from [these films] is that fighting for your country is a lot cooler than the mainstream media make it out to be. " One wonders why the Army hasn't dispatched teams of movie-makers to Iraq to do fan-film versions of Halloween and Saw, casting the natives as terrified teenagers, and release them with titles like Be Kind Re-enlist.

The gem of the bunch is of course by Umpty-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters. The General's been on a roll lately, and his opening here is a classic: "We all have irritants that make us want to reach for the revolver." Don't I know it! But what gets the General in a killin' mood is bumper stickers -- "One per car is OK, but anything more is public masturbation"; get it, maggot? -- people who call dissent patriotic, and Barack Obama. The dissent fans misquote Jefferson, who was of course against dissent, as shown by his accommodating attitude toward the Alien and Sedition Acts; as for the "last refuge of a scoundrel" thing, though the General admires Samuel Johnson ("I've got a huge two-volume replica edition [of Johnson's Dictionary] -- it's so heavy you could bench-press it"; real he-man writin'!), he reckons the Great Cham was just blowing smoke. "I'd rephrase the line," announces the General, "to read: 'Attacks on patriotism are the last refuge of the coward.'" Get some REMFs on it most ricky-tick, and then fetch the General a copy of the Constitution and a blue pencil!

But you know what really chafes the General around the chaps? Obama and that "Hope" bull-hockey. "Hope is the opposite of audacity," says the General. "It's passive, an excuse for inaction. Medicating ourselves with fuzzy hopes, instead of rolling up our sleeves and fixing things, has wasted countless lives and entire cultures..."

So, to sum up: Don't hope, don't complain, and enjoy your free war videos. It's the new conservative message! They must really be counting on those Diebold voting machines.

A LOATHSOME DUTY, PART 2. As conscience dictated in the case of Mark Steyn, I must offer my sympathies to Harry's Place, whose proprietors are apparently being sued by Mohamed Sawalha for their interpretation of a statement by him.

Not being a student of Arabic, I don't know that their interpretation is correct. But Harry's Place noted, however incredulously, the British Muslim Initiative's response to it. If they're wrong, they've certainly made it easy for anyone who can read the language to figure it out.

Harry's Place is a nest of racial obsessives -- sort of Little Green Footballs for people who can process complex sentences -- but the proper reaction to their interpretation would be a countervailing interpretation of one's own, not the hammer of the Law, the use of which in this case may lead disinterested viewers to suspect that the object of the suit is not to shine the light of truth, but to intimidate opponents. Maybe that's how they do things in Blighty, but not 'round here.

SAVINGS AND LOAN SCANDAL II -- THIS TIME IT'S PERSONAL! More good economic news! Another mortgage lender goes down -- and an Administration factotum blames the whistleblower:

The director of the Office of Thrift Supervision, John Reich, blamed IndyMac's failure on comments made in late June by Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.), who sent a letter to the regulator raising concerns about the bank's solvency. In the following 11 days, spooked depositors withdrew a total of $1.3 billion. Mr. Reich said Sen. Schumer gave the bank a "heart attack."

"Would the institution have failed without the deposit run?" Mr. Reich asked reporters. "We'll never know the answer to that question."

Mr. Schumer quickly fired back.

"If OTS had done its job as regulator and not let IndyMac's poor and loose lending practices continue, we wouldn't be where we are today," Sen. Schumer said. "Instead of pointing false fingers of blame, OTS should start doing its job to prevent future IndyMacs."

Speaking of factota, the usual suspects rush to support Reich's spin. If only Charles Keating or Herbert Hoover had such a blogosphere to work with! True, it's a hard sell, but, like anything else for Republicans these days, worth a try.

UPDATE. The Ole Perfesser seems to have caught the memo, but not the enthusiasm: "Problems with the bank aren't Schumer's fault, of course, but publicity-seeking is a well-known Schumer flaw, and subjects like this call for a degree of discretion that he seems not to have demonstrated." Maybe he was pulled off-message by Schumer's evident willingness to fight back. I'm not overly fond of my senior Senator, but it's nice to see him show a bit of spine. Maybe he and his colleagues should try it more often.

UPDATE II. An L.A. Times blog says the accusation against Schumer is "an important angle in the IndyMac failure that may get lost in ominous headlines tonight and tomorrow." I don't see how, with the Wall Street Journal giving it prominent play and the rightbloggers shopping it aggressively.

OFF LINE. Instaputz deftly sketches the progress of the Atlantic Monthly from Julia Ward Howe and Nathaniel Hawthorne to Megan McArdle reporting on her iPhone campout ("I imagine this is what it feels like to be a refugee"). Worse is yet to come, though, when the Apple Store people ask McArdle for her papers:

While I was buying the iPhone, they pulled me aside for a credit review. Since I have good credit, this was shocking--and humiliating. For a middle class American, telling your two friends in the store that the AT&T folks are having second thoughts about giving you credit feels a little like confessing that you're a criminal.

McArdle shows some sympathy toward some people with bad credit -- she's known journalists and folks just out of grad school, apparently, who have had such problems -- but she ends with this:

Of course there are irresponsible profligates who borrow money they've no intention of repaying...

The worst part is that the profligates are immune to the shame (or seem to be). It's the decent people, the ones who were overtaken by events, who cringe when the store clerks motion them aside.

This puts me in mind of characters from Nelson Algren, Charles Bukowski, and The Life of Oharu; also, of real people who passed in despair from caring anymore whether they were playing by rules that, experience seemed to show, never gave them a chance to succeed on even the simplest terms, and who stood in line not for iPhones but for food and shelter.

It may seem in bad taste to mention such people in a blogosphere largely devoted to middle-class problems. Still, it's worth considering that they exist, and in greater numbers than a romp through these precincts would suggest. If your frame of reference consists entirely of the relatively fortunate, then you may naturally consider all credit problems to be the result of wickedness or, at best, poor choices to which you owe no sympathy. From a libertarian perspective, certainly, there's no reason to feel any differently. Which is one good reason why, even in a country that loves liberty, libertarianism hasn't caught on, and won't until citizens outside the citadels of privilege wholly lose their acquaintance with misfortune. And though most of our public discourse since the Age of Reagan suggests otherwise, that is not even close to happening.

SAY ANYTHING. From last week, but new to me -- a pamphlet by Hugh Hewitt called "A Letter to a Young Obama Supporter." Three-quarters of it flatters the YOS:

Because of your passion for the planet and your interconnectedness, you have already profoundly shaped the debate over climate change. Now you are poised to perhaps decide the 2008 presidential election. You are very engaged in the election, and leaning — by a large majority it seems-towards Barack Obama. Yet as with so many other things, your generation is very open to new information and arguments, and not at all self-conscious or stubborn when it comes to changing your mind when new perspectives arrive. So it seems that many of you will be keeping an open mind until you actually check a box or pull a lever.

Yes, Hewitt is getting you cozy, nubile voter. He also says that he knows other "well-informed young people with great parents and promising futures" just like you, and is "thrilled that so many young activists are interested in the campaign"; it's "a sign of political renewal and a rebuke to the cynics." As for the YOS' intended, he is "unconnected to the bitter political struggles of the last 15 years," "a brilliant, almost hypnotic speaker" (Wait -- did his hand just touch your thigh?), whose "success is a testament to the country’s long, uphill struggle to deliver on the promise of the Declaration of Independence’s radical statement that all men are created equal."

Now the gear shift:

It is entirely possible to be proud of the country for nominating Senator Obama, even as you work hard to defeat him...

It starts to dawn on the youngster that this isn't the sort of encounter it had seemed just moments earlier.

Indeed, he lacks even the barest minimum of life experiences needed for the job. Though his intentions will be good, his failure in the Oval Office is a near certainty because he is simply not ready - cannot be ready-to be president, and the failures that will certainly follow his taking the oath of office could - indeed, almost certainly would– devastate the country.

Hewitt closes with some bold-face questions -- "Is Barack Obama anywhere near ready to be President of the United States in a time of war and economic uncertainty?... What if he’s not and he wins anyway?" -- which we may suppose represents his technique for closing the deal.

All in all, not a bad effort from the author of If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends on It. But I still prefer the original.

HOW BULLSHIT WORKS, PART 56,309. Rightbloggers have discovered a Photoshop forgery of an Iranian missle launch, done by that Government to make itself look more powerful, presumably:



The bloggers' outrage, as it was when Adnan Hajj's altered war photos were exposed in 2006, is split between the offending parties and the shadowy "MSM," some outlets of which incuriously published the fake. Stop the ACLU is mad that the Main Stream Media isn't giving bloggers credit for discovering the fraud; Blackfive saw a more sinister MSM desire to "tailor anything to fit their narrative" -- in this case that America's enemies are 33% stronger than they really are.

Much less covered in those precincts (The American Thinker was a rare exception) was another bit of "fauxtography" from Fox News last week:

Below is a screenshot of Fox & Friends featuring the photo it used of Steinberg, with the original photo on its left. Comparing the two photos, it appears that the following changes have been made: Steinberg's teeth have been yellowed, his nose and chin widened, and his ears made to protrude further.

Fox News hadn't said much about this one before Bill O'Reilly recently retorted that the New York Times had once published some unflattering cartoons of him. Of course the doctored picture of Steinberg (and another, of Steven Reddicliffe) weren't drawn caricatures, but portraits offered as true representations of their subjects' appearance.

Experience, not to say common sense, teaches that we should always be alert to the possibility that war photojournalism may misrepresent the true situation, whatever its source. With some sources, though, you can't even trust the file photos.

NO CAPISCE. Crooks and Liars wonderfully covers the wingnut drive to make Obama's call for foreign language education into a class "snobbery" issue. Amazing how they all suffer the same delusions at once, and so near the event: you'd think they were on some sort of mailing list.

Since Crooks and Liars is more about analysis than pathology, it did not include in its roundup the ravings of The Anchoress on the subject. Like her colleagues, she tumbles from a gross mischaracterization ("telling Americans how much better people in other nations are!") to incoherent rage ("Americans did not need to speak French to save that nation... twice. Americans did not need to speak German to save the lives of our vanquished German enemy," etc). But she also adds this delightful bit:

I'm all for people, especially when they're young, learning other languages. I'm doing a Rosetta Stone in Italian right now, myself.

Obama endorses an activity in which The Anchoress is currently engaged, and The Anchoress rails at his effrontery in endorsing it. We should not be too surprised. Very few top rightwing bloggers actually live in trailers, wear clothes from the bins of the 99 cent store, and subsist on hamhocks and Crisco; in fact they are as likely as not to display elevated tastes, as seen in the Ole Perfesser's frequent consumer reports on high-end products. Nonetheless, they're quick to set aside their top-shelf cocktails, artisanal cheeses, and boutique coffees to declaim on the snobbery of Democrats. What a racket! It almost makes me wish I'd thought of it first and had no conscience.

UPDATE. In commments JohnEWilliams points out a beautiful related story from Rumproast: "Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild calls Obama an 'elitist' on CNN." Sometimes I think they do this kind of thing as an inside joke.

RUN THROUGH THE JUNGLE. At first I thought Infinity-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters was going somewhere else with the title "INTELLECTUALS LIE, THE POWERLESS DIE" -- you know, toward a Treason of the Clerks sort of thing, in which the evil intellectuals of a particular nation sell out their particular people to a particular evil. The giant face of Mugabe that appeared with the article in the New York Post suggested that the General had tracked down some Zimbabwean professors who had enabled the dictator by teaching Women's Studies or something.

Turns out the General is just on a rampage against writers in general. Doesn't matter whether it's Paul Begala or Christopher Hitchens -- in the General's view, no fancy-pants scribble-boy is worth the sweat off a rifleman's ass:

THE greatest lie intellectuals tell us is that "the pen is mightier than the sword." That's what cowards claim when they want to preen as heroes...

While intellectuals wrestled with compound sentences, Darfur degenerated from selective oppression to savage anarchy...

Regiments of professors and pundits have bemoaned China's gobbling of Tibet for half a century...

Only when better men acted did the surviving victims of one of the world's worst dictatorships glimpse freedom...

There was a good reason the assassins of 9/11 attacked the targets they did, rather than steering those planes into Columbia University or Harvard Yard: They knew that the potency of the intellectual is illusory, that it dissolves at the first shot...

Later, "No elegant phrase has ever stopped a bullet," "a sword will cut off the writer's head," etc.

Really, that's pretty much it. Politics doesn't enter into it; anyone not a soldier is an ineffectual, puking pussy. This represents a new and promising frontier for the General. As we have seen, he has in the past been content to attribute unmanliness to Democrats and liberals, as part of a propagandist's job-o-work. Now it looks as if he has gone freelance, and answers only to the law of the jungle. Before long he'll spend his columns explaining how easy it would be for him to kill us all with the end of a rolled-up newspaper or a bottlecap, and his signature line will be "The horror, the horror."

ALLLIES. Iraq says, we hate to be inhospitable, but get out. The U.S. says, fuck you; John McCain seconds.

The Charleston (S.C.) Post and Courier editorializes: "The growing confidence of the Iraqi leadership is a clear sign that progress is being made and an end is in sight." The Wall Street Journal appreciates Maliki's "confidence" and is charmed to see him "playing hardball" like a big boy, but eventually has to firmly remind him that the grownups are talking: "Despite Iraq's impressive security gains, Iran can still do plenty of mischief through its 'special group' surrogates," it says, and counsels (or maybe we should say "notifies Iraq of") "a significant long-term U.S. presence."

Ed Morrissey will grudgingly allow for timetables, so long as they are not the treasonous Democratic kind ("Democrats wanted timetables for withdrawal in order to surrender in Iraq"). If he wants a Republican timetable, I'd suggest this one.

HYSTERIC WATCH. Victor Davis Hanson:

At first I thought the standard Obama warnings about crowd fainting when he started speaking were just peculiar, as was the bit about oceans receding and the planet healing. Then I noticed he has plans to move his speechmaking at the convention to a large outdoor arena, to allow the 'people' the right to hear him en masse. Now he negotiates to address Berliners in Kennedy/Reagan style (but weren't they already presidents?) in front of the Brandenburg Gate? Next? No doubt the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

At National Review, at the moment, you can see Obama compared to both Hitler and Jesus. Surely this must be some kind of first.

EMAIL DOWN due to some NetSol nonsense. Try me at royedroso074@gmail.com meanwhile.

THE PERSONAL IS THE POLITICAL. These days, when a conservative buffoon likes something, he will rush to tell you that the thing he likes is itself conservative -- even if it's something apparently non-political in nature, like a rock song, chase movie, TV show, or music video.

They don't limit this bizarre ideological narcissism to the popular arts, either. I've heard 'em say that their favorite wine varieties and football teams are conservative. But this one from a National Review correspondent may be my all-time favorite so far: it's about how men crying at It's a Wonderful Life is conservative.

The author's explanation for this breathtaking assertion does not convince, but I'm just surprised that he bothered to explain it at all. Soon they'll just start using "conservative" as a synonym for "good," e.g., "he makes a really conservative pot of chili," "I got a conservative deal on this muffler," "It's all conservative," etc. No one else will know what they're talking about, but so what? That's pretty much the case now.

HOW THE MIGHTY HAVE FALLEN. Obama suggests national service for the young. At National Review Jim Geraghty talks about the "Obama Youth," etc.

I'm wondering about the President using federal funding to coerce schools into requiring community service for middle and high school students. Community service is (often) a noble act, but Obama appears to be very close to echoing John Kerry's Orwellian call for mandatory volunteerism. Notice it's always those who are old who are calling for mandatory time and energy commitments of the young.

Later, Geraghty offers a veiled comparison of Obama to Hitler. This reminded me of something, so I went online and found an excerpt from William F. Buckley's Gratitude: Reflections on What We Owe to Our Country, in which the founder of National Review argues for something very similar, powered by incentives and "sanctions":

It is feared by many opponents of national service that the use of state power in whatever form, even in a voluntary program, is nevertheless an effort, even if half-hearted, in that direction: an effort to change the human personality, and for that reason to be resisted categorically... Milton Friedman, my hero, was quoted as finding in national service an "uncanny resemblance" to the Hitler Youth Corps.

This last occasions only the reply that by that token, all youth programs, including the Boy Scouts, can be likened in the sense that they have something in common, to the Hitler Youth program, plus the second comment, that because Hitler had an idea, it does not follow that that idea was bad. (Albert Speer is said to have reflected, soon before his death, that it was a "pity that Adolf Hitler disliked Picasso.")

...Some libertarians will never agree with the Founding Fathers that a responsibility of the polity is to encourage virtue directly, through such disciplines as service in the militia, reverence for religious values, and jury service -- the kind of thing Prime Minister Gladstone had in mind when he proposed "to establish a new franchise, which I should call -- till a better phrase be discovered -- the service franchise." Opponents of national service must establish, to make their case, that national service, unlike the state militia, or jury service, or military conscription in times of emergency, is distinctively hostile to a free society.

Funny, just a few weeks ago they were blubbering over the sainted Buckley. Now he's a liberal fascist.

I'm not keen on either Buckley's and Obama's proposals myself, but I'm less worried about them these days, thanks in large part to the influence of the Boy Who Cried Hitler. I suspect most normal people would react similarly.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP. Jesse Helms this time. The impulse to speak well of the dead is fine, but I was stuck by the brethren's defensiveness about Helms' civil rights record, especially in view of their late and much celebrated reassessment of Strom Thurmond and Trent Lott in 2002. We might just say that those were different times -- that is, Thurmond and Lott were after an election, and Helms is before one.

UPDATE. Fixd tiepo, thanx boney.

UGLY BEAUTY. Before attending Die Soldaten at the Armory Saturday night, I hadn't been to an opera in years. I usually plead budget, but I could always get rush or standing room tickets at the Met. Frankly, lacking much background in the form, I've chosen to cultivate a lazy indifference instead of a taste for it, to my discredit.

Die Soldaten got through to me, though, perhaps by brute force. For one thing, there's the 110-piece Bochumer Symphoniker blasting away at the obviously difficult 12-tone Zimmermann score. Then there's the grim story -- girl forsakes lover to make an advantageous marriage within the warrior caste; madness, rape, murder, desolation result -- with its class tensions and sexual panic starting at red alert and proceeding to full-on Sturm und Drang. And there's the Robert-Wilson-Meets-Pirates-of-the-Caribbean staging in the Armory's gigantic Drill Hall, with the actors spilling from an extra-wide stage down a 220-foot runway, along which the entire audience is sometimes slowly locomoted on railroad tracks.

It's all a bit much -- at one point the music is supposed to suggest thunder, and I was a little confused: hadn't the percussion-heavy score been thundering all along? And the everything's-awful modernism is pretty relentless: look, here's a ceramic bog -- I wonder how it looks on the side of the stage where the chorus is taking a piss! But the excess is mesmerizing, and often makes brilliant theatre: a rape scene in which assailant and victim are multiplied by supernumeraries who enact it in a savage ballet along the length of the runway; a bathhouse suggested by garishly-lighted holes; the slow march at the end of Marie's father into the distant floodlights, and of Marie the other way toward the frigid mountains of exile.

And all the singing and acting is great. If the music purposefully evokes ugliness, craft and commitment make it beautiful. In a scene featuring Marie, her sister, and the Baroness, their voices made me think of exotic birds trilling in a jungle above the roars and grunts of the other beasts. As Marie, Claudia Barainsky makes a physically specific progress from schoolgirl to climber to outcast; as her lover, Claudio Otelli nurtures his desperation into a sort of semi-catatonia that looks harmless to his intended victims and terrifying to us. And that band -- excuse me, orchestra -- is really tight.

Muscially I'm pretty unsophisticated, and an evening of serialist opera wouldn't normally be on my to-do list, but for me this production made great sense of the unaccustomed sounds. I don't know how much Die Soldaten educated me, or if I'll be better able to appeciate La Bohème or Schönberg or anything else because of it, but I'm certainly more inclined to pay attention.

UPDATE. A dissenting opinion from the Washington Post. "The vocal level was that of a respectable regional production" -- wicked burn! Clearly I have a ways to go before I know classical music well enough to be snobby about it; having fond memories of the days when I was that much of a n00b about everything, I will cherish every moment.