TODAY IN THE ARTS. See what you're missing, not reading National Review's The Corner? There Kathryn J. Lopez sent me to CNSnews for

Smithsonian Christmas-Season Exhibit Features Ant-Covered Jesus, Naked Brothers Kissing, Genitalia, and Ellen DeGeneres Grabbing Her Breasts

WARNING: This story contains graphic photographs of items on display in an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery.

It is a thing of beauty. Reporter Penny Starr copiously details the outrages. Her descriptions are pretty good:

One of the paintings in the exhibit is “O’Hara Nude with Boots,” from 1954, by Larry Rivers. O’Hara was an American poet (1926-1966). The painting depicts O’Hara standing nude and the exhibit description says Rivers was O’Hara’s “sometime lover.”

But those she wisely excerpts from the catalogue are even better:

Broadly modeled on Goya’s dystopian Saturn Devouring His Children, Caja’s painting depicts his friend and muse Charles Sexton engaged in an act of self-cannibalism. Literally painted on Sexton’s ashes after his death from AIDS, Charles Devouring Himself, like Caja’s Bozo F---s Death, an image of a heavyset clown engaged in anal intercourse with a grinning skeleton, hit that sweet spot, so often historically associated with drag queens, between pathos and aggression.

I've got my trip all planned, but the idea is to get CNSnews' wingnut readers worked up about these homosexual doings put out where children can see them. In our Nation's Capital. At Christmas!

It isn't a Christmas show per se, though, it's a three-and-a-half-month show that just happens to run through Christmas. (It's also running through Hanukah, so Michael Savage can get in on this if he wants to.) But the vicissitudes of scheduling are no excuse. Picture it: The Petersons come from Oshkosh to D.C. for the holidays. They're tripping down the Mall, and suddenly spy the National Portrait Gallery. Portraits! If the kids didn't like going through metal detectors and standing in line for a glimpse of the Constitution, maybe they can be edified by majestic oils of Washington and Jefferson. They get in there and John Wayne Gacy is sodomizing a skeleton and that lady from TV is feeling herself up. Even a whole afternoon at the Air and Space Museum won't wash that out of their brainpans.

I applaud Starr for her honesty in pointing out that the exhibition is financed by sponsors rather than by taxpayers, but Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute finds a loophole:

"If the Smithsonian didn't have the taxpayer-funded building, they would have no space to present the exhibit, right? In my own view, if someone takes taxpayer money, then I think the taxpayers have every right to question the institutions where the money's going."

"Think about the Washington Post," he said. "They don't have to publish every op-ed that they get, right? They own the platform. In this case [the Smithsonian Institution], the taxpayers own the platform and so the taxpayers should decide what is presented on that platform."

In fact, what do we have statist curators for, anyway? Turn these apparatchiks out and let the people decide what goes and doesn't go at the National Portrait Gallery! Then we can have room after room of giant TVs playing Dancing with the Stars and Fox News, and if there must be sodomy, let it be as practiced on the adult cable channels and Cinemax.

It was getting a little slow on the culture war front; I'm glad to see they've still got it in them.

THE TERRORIST HAS WON. Of the many conservative commentators who think the new WikiLeaks dump is absolutely immoral and simultaneously proves we should change U.S. foreign policy to suit their prejudices, there may be no riper example than James Carifano at National Review:

The administration can, however, do two things to repair the damage wrought by WikiLeaks. First, it can embrace a foreign policy that our adversaries fear and our friends respect. Nobody gets more cooperation than a winner. For starters, the president should dump the New START treaty — its one-sidedness makes the U.S. look like a lousy negotiator in the eyes of the world… and a patsy in the eyes of the Russians. He should also reject out of hand calls to gut the defense budget and just flat out declare that America will stick it out in Iraq and Afghanistan until the job is done. And while he’s at it, he could stand up to China and stop extending the hand of friendship to regimes interested in a world without freedom or America.

I haven't read them all, but I don't see why the leaks demand the death of START -- because we called Putin Batman, maybe? Russia's international wheeling and dealing as revealed by WikiLeaks is neither a shock nor out of character. I'm guessing Carifano just considers the docs a good news hook to promote the planned Republican obstruction of the treaty in Congress.

As for the allegedly necessary result of leaving defense out of the budget cutting we heard so much about during the recent electoral campaign, there's the fig leaf for the small-gummint Tea Partiers to wear when they excuse the Pentagon from the bloodletting. Rand Paul, your come-to-Jesus moment has arrived!

"Stand up to China" is just an old-fashioned rightwing non-sequitur, as we are in it up to our eyeballs with that totalitarian regime on a bipartisan basis. Ask Rupert Murdoch.

Carifano also claims "the leaks could well get people killed" and wonders how Assange sleeps at night. That's gratitude for you! WikiLeaks is pure gold for these guys, since their customary free-associative style applies as well to its revelations as to anything else -- if Assange next leaks medical records from our various diplomatic outposts, I bet Carifano will find in them an indictment of government health care -- and gives their deranged conclusions added publicity to boot.

They should be sending Assange tokens of appreciation. He is, after all, providing them a crisis, and being good Alinskyites they aren't letting it go to waste.

UPDATE. Looks like they're softening toward Assange:

Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, tells National Review Online that the WikiLeaks controversy shows how the White House is keeping Congress in the dark on foreign policy...

Although he agrees with calls for the [WikiLeaks] perpetrators’ prosecution, he’s not convinced that Rep. Pete King’s suggestion that the government label WikiLeaks a terrorist organization is feasible. “I wouldn’t get to the point of classifying WikiLeaks as a terrorist organization,” Hoekstra says. “I don’t think under our current framework you could do that. You may be able to get them under espionage, but it’s difficult.”

WikiLeaks' services to the nation are noted. In a few more weeks they'll put Assange up for the Medal of Honor.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:

To a guard, after tearing the heel off one of his shoes:
“I don’t want anybody else to stand in my shoes.”
— Richard Carpenter, convicted of murder, electric chair, Illinois.
Executed December 19, 1958

I've been on their Twitter feed awhile, but it only just occurred to me to add Last Words of the Executed to the blogroll.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the latest from WikiLeaks and the rightblogger response, which I suggest is more pleased than their patriotic complaints might suggest. Everyone seems to get something out of WikiLeaks; I'm beginning to wonder if the government hasn't set it up to distract us from our real problems.

HAPPY BLACK FRIDAYSGIVING. Sorry to have been so far off the grid, again, but this time I wasn't having a wire shot up my penis. I went to New Hampshire by bus -- not to evade our fascist TSA overlords, but because it was cheap -- and am on holiday with my good friends Martin & Zara. Yesterday we ate a giant turkey that came out of this:


The terror of conducting this potentially injurious procedure gave me a great appetite, and I ate enough for two men, which is too bad because I have only one digestive tract, which buckled under the strain. I hope to be back on solids soon.

This being Live Free or Die territory, I also went off to the range and shot off guns -- a 9 mil and a shotgun:


Suck on that, Washington establishment.

P.S. I know The West Wing was wish-fulfillment, but really, what kind of a Thanksgiving are you having when you feel compelled to post this:


"Read all eight of Reagan’s Thanksgiving proclamations here." Then, some football, three hours of Luftwaffe documentaries, and then to the writing desk to fire off some sharp correspondence regarding one's elected representatives.

SHIT FLOATS. The Washington Post has hired Commentary's Jennifer Rubin to fill its Ben Domenech Chair for Wingnut Blogging. I said in August that Rubin was "fast becoming the worst hack on the internet." I like to think this was what clinched it for Rubin.

The Rubin atrocity that prompted my comment was a doozy -- she claimed that the President of the United States' "sympathies for the Muslim World take precedence over those, such as they are, for his fellow citizens" (for Commentary writers, real patriots only allow Israel to come before the United States) -- but she has delivered many others:

• Regarding the "Ground Zero Mosque," Rubin told us 3,000 Americans were killed at the Burlington Coat Factory at West Broadway and Park Place, and that by supporting it the Left was "advertising its own intellectual crack-up and unfitness to govern."
• When Mel Gibson was famously recorded screaming at his girlfriend to blow him, Rubin said, "by golly, it sounds like… well, Obama."
• During last summer's flotilla massacre, Rubin created a forgiving new definition for self-defense: "When the Israeli commandos were set upon as they were lowered from a helicopter, they acted to defend themselves." (That's why, if armed men break into your home and you shoot them, they walk and you go to jail, like in Charles Bronson movies.)
• And there's always the old Obama-isn't-"down-to-earth"-if-you-know-what-I-mean-(pushes-in-nose) schtick.

The secret to Rubin's success is that she just spins everything and anything so that it will sound heartening to her fellow conservatives. Back during the 2008 campaign, she was happy-clapping about "the difficultly many Democrats will have in moving on to support Barack Obama" (pushes in nose) and suggesting "McCain can capitalize on this by outreach to the aggrieved [Hillary] Clinton female voters (or by putting a woman on the ticket)." She started predicting Obamadamerrung -- "the Obama team is lawyering up, the Senate will be sued" -- in... January 2009. She just sputters hyperbolic insults -- for example, when Obama attempted to negotiate with Iran, she called him "a cold-hearted technocrat obsessed with engaging a loathsome regime."

So whenever things go wrong for the Democrats, she's vindicated, and whenever they go right... well, they never go right. Even when Obama sent more troops to Afghanistan, which you'd think would warm her black little heart, her response was, "Obama never did say 'victory,' and that is telling. It's not his thing."

In short, the woman's so full of shit I'm surprised she doesn't explode. Her fans across wingnuttia will enjoy reading her as they scream about how they can't trust the WaPo.

MO' MONEY, MO' PROBLEMS. Jim Geraghty sees the flaw in that poll showing most Americans un-outraged by the new TSA screenings: It includes people who don't fly at least once a year, presumably because they are obliged to drive, take Greyhound, or hitchhike on their rare travels.

Are we surprised that those who will rarely or never experience the pat-downs are less opposed to them? Like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, for these folks, a TSA agent reaching where he shouldn’t is an entirely theoretical manner.

The smug bastards! I bet they're throwing off the support for extending the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy, too. What do the rich think of those cuts, that's what we should be looking at.

Someone will soon invent a polling service that only questions top earners, and will become very rich.

TV PARTY. My sublet has a TV, which is a blessing and a curse. In my experience, when granted a monitor the TV abstainer will start on substance and eventually work his way down to crap. So it's been for me; I started on TCM but soon hit the harder stuff. Not Dancing With The Stars, yet, but I have seen some of that show with the two fat people. It's alright, but they have some serious catching up to do with Roseanne and Dan.

My current favorite form of crap is Two and a Half Men. I watch it in reruns and first-run whenever I can. It's taken Larry David's commandment for Seinfeld -- "No learning" -- from a sneaky sophisticate's joke on sitcoms to its logical conclusion: A smooth and popular comedy about pathetic dysfunction enabled by unearned privilege.

Horndog Charlie has a glorious life in Malibu bought with jingles, and has been putting up his absurdly maladroit brother and his horrible kid for eight years. If they all lived in a double-wide and scavenged deposit bottles, this might be a documentary. But money makes it funny: The characters' various ineptitudes cause comic embarrassments instead of life-threatening crises.

Everyone snipes at one another, and no one ever leaves, though in real life Alan would probably be rotating in and out of SROs and periodically pleading his brother for a sofa and a shower from a pay phone outside a shelter, and the kid (now pretty well grown, but still chubby and stupid) would be in protective custody. Alan's and Charlie's mother is a true gorgon, and most of the other women on the show are bunnies outsizedly lusted after by both. (Charlie has the means to both get and get rid of them, but when he's actually emotionally interested in one, he is incompetent to commit, while Alan simply winds up paying more alimony.)

Married… With Children had a similarly miserable outlook but was played broadly, overlit and theatrical, a live-action Punch and Judy show (I've always thought Peg and Al would make a great Mere and Pere Ubu); Two and a Half Men is played more coolly in a traditional sitcom format, like The Mary Tyler Moore Show. In other words these people, in TV terms, are supposed to be real. And despite all their advantages, they're deeply unhappy. Their greatest pleasure is to insult their alleged loved ones with zingers that convulse the laugh-track and leave themselves bitter and wounded. If I were tasked with creating a time capsule to explain our low age to our feral survivors, I would have to include a boxed set of Two and a Half Men.

Also saw the John Lennon American Masters show on PBS. I'm allergic to hagiography, and there's a strong vein of it in this bio; the drugged- and drunk-up parts of his life, for example, are treated somberly as darkly romantic effusions of his artistic personality, which I can certainly get with but which removes the comic pathos that might really humanize him. (They relate the famous LA tampon incident, for instance, but don't include the punch line: Lennon saying to a waitress, "Don't you know who I am?" and the waitress replying, "Yeah, you're some asshole with a Kotex on his head." Too deflating, I guess.)

Nonetheless it's good to hear so much about the guy at work -- much of it from musicians and other collaborators, and some from tape track run-off that hints at his methods ("It has to be a little laid back because he's watchin' the wheels, he's not drivin' the damn truck"). Especially for someone with so much else to occupy his thoughts, Lennon worked very hard and seriously on his music, and I'm grateful for any glimpses I can get of how he did it.

And though I'm sure Yoko Ono, keeper of the flame, held a heavy club over this production, I'm glad this bio helps cement the acceptance of her stuff from the Lennon years as something more than a sideshow. When I was a teenager walking to downtown Bridgeport to buy any John Lennon single that came out, I'd play the Yoko b-sides almost as much as the Lennon songs. They sounded super groovy coming out of the tiny, maxed-out speaker of my picnic player. (Of course I was also a big fan of "They're Coming to Take Me Away Ha-Haaa!" and its backward b/w. In fact I still am.) Whatever else she was and is, Ono had the balls to assert her bizarre idea of rock and, as Lennon astutely observed when he first heard the B-52s, the world caught up with her. Fuck Albert Goldman.

UPDATE. Some fine TV partying in comments; Kia does close analysis on Hoarders ("...gradually you begin to realize that the piles of crap are actually keeping the husband out of the house by the grace of a wise and powerful subconscious intuition... Do I have a life? Well, not much of a life. Why do you ask?" I hear ya, sis).

WORST ENDORSEMENT OF THE MONTH. At National Review:

Today on Uncommon Knowledge, Prince Hans Adam II of Liechtenstein answers the charge that, if he were an American, he would be a member of the Tea Party movement. "Well, yeah I have to accept that."

Prince Hans Adam II of Liechtenstein! (In the tape, by the way, interviewer Peter Robinson refers to him as "Your Highness" rather than as "Citizen" or "Ruling Class Scum.") They aren't making grassroots like they used to.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the TSA tsimmis. As I mentioned before, while I'm pleased that conservatives are standing up for their civil rights, they seem far less interested in those of people who do not resemble them. How far we've come, though, from the time when Peggy Noonan complained about airport security in 2008 and Scott Johnson of Power Line sighed, "Better to bash Bush from the perspective Noonan imputes to the weary travelers at Gate 14 than to help readers understand Bush's predicament as a politician constrained by the consent of the governed... . Included in the actions that Bush has taken to prevent a terrorist attack on the United States since 9/11 are those Noonan mocks in the column." Johnson is now much less inclined to defend the President of the United States on airport security grounds. Something has changed -- must be a new respect for civil rights!

UPDATE. For some reason I'm reminded of this.

PRE-EMPTIVE STROKE. At Reason, Brian Doherty is telling his fellow libertarians to give new Senator Rand Paul a break. He's only one man:

In terms of passing laws or shifting the Senate in his direction, Paul is not going to get much done by trying to operate as a one-man Tea Party in a minority party. Though he may become a filibuster machine, which given his outlier status means the Senate will have lots of cloture votes to shut him up...

As a legislator, it would be silly to expect much out of Rand Paul, either as a minority party freshman or even as the majority party freshman he may well become in 2012.

This Doherty attributes to the nature of the Senate, where even an illuminated hero like Paul cannot stampede his colleagues to reason with a "Cross of No Gold" speech, but must grub for votes. And when he inevitably fails to shake the walls of Congress with the libertarian thunder of his genius, guess who will then be to blame:

Paul is a Republican who thinks of himself as a Tea Party man. But whether we like it or not, or certainly whether he likes it or not, he is linked in the public mind with libertarianism. While significant differences in style and emphasis exist between him and other libertarians, his general political vision is as radically libertarian as anything the modern Senate has seen.

Thus, any dumb thing Paul says or does, any deviation from small-government principle, will become a public brick against libertarianism. And in an MSNBC world, sticking to his principles will be a weapon used against libertarianism as well...

...When the nation as a whole is paying attention to a libertarian as hardcore as Rand Paul (and he's not even that extreme—he told ABC’s The Week that he’s OK with a $2.4 trillion dollar government as long as it doesn’t spend beyond its means trying to be a $4 trillion government), I fear that most Americans will find they do not like what they see. An inefficacious senator risks becoming an extremist laughingstock.

He's damned if he does, damned if he doesn't, trapped in a world he never made, etc. So don't expect too much from him. (If only Obama could get that sort of pass from leftists!)

But there is hope:

So if Rand Paul ends up getting nothing done and failing to win mainstream respect for the ideas he stands for, what good is he?

If he can use cable news and the Internet, and skillfully exploit the predictable crisis on the horizons arising from the out of control spendng, inflation, and debt he decries, Paul can become the Tea Party leader he wants to be. Thus he might influence and inspire future politicians who will seek, and perhaps win, congressional primaries, whether or not the powers that be in the media or the party hierarchy like it.

The choice is clear: Paul should quit halfway through his term, take a job on Fox News, and star in his own reality show.

JUNK SCIENCE. Back in my increasingly distant youth, I often heard it said that the domestic interventionist policies of Theodore Roosevelt (now widely denounced as a socialist) only really caught fire with the American public when Upton Sinclair's The Jungle nauseated them sufficiently with its descriptions of unhygienic food handling that they were willing to accept the statist Pure Food and Drug Act.

Sinclair's novel also revealed savage inequities in the treatment of working people, and the author hoped this would touch readers' consciences; but the travails of a bunch of sweaty and possibly communist immigrants did not interest Americans of the middle class nearly as much as the possibilty that they might find shit in their vittles.

Now there is a great tsimmis over new and more invasive airport security measures. Dave Weigel says that Republicans, who were in power during the creation of the TSA, have always been kinda sorta against the agency -- or at least "a rump of congressional Republicans" were, presumably not including those whose districts profited from the newly beefed-up airport security industry. And Lord knows there were always plenty of prominent conservatives demanding to know why real Americans had to take off their shoes when all the Gummint had to do was start profiling Arabs.

But now the spectacle of little girls being patted down by screeners has freshly inflamed America's outrage, and citizens worried about having their junk touched are newly energized in opposition to this intrusive behavior.

Good for them. It's always nice to see people recognize that they have civil liberties, however late in life it happens. It's just too bad that drug war casualties, indefinite detainees, victims of criminally overzealous prosecutors, and other unfortunates whose rights are routinely trampled will never find themselves anywhere near the front of the complaint line now headed by middle-aged outrageaholics who suspect TSA employees are leering at them.

Americans usually can't be bothered about violations of civil liberties because they think they only happen to other people. The only way to convince them otherwise, it seems, is to hit them in or around the gut. What they lack in empathy they make up for in queasiness. The problem with using the ick factor as a spur to heightened consciousness, though, is that it doesn't get us high enough.

SERVICE ADVISORY. Apologies for the light posting. I'm down to D.C. for the annual medical Disneyland tour. My time has been eaten by a battery of tests and doctor visits, some tourism and socializing, and bouts of insomnia, mortality contemplation, and vacant staring at cable television. The highlight so far: today's cystoscopy, which went something like this:



I kid. The facility and care are everything one can expect from the National Institutes, and I do not seem to have any stones. But the procedure was performed with only local anesthetic (administered with what seemed to be a glue gun); this made insertion less traumatic than I expected (it was sort of like peeing in reverse), but did not alleviate the highly unpleasant sensation of wires being pushed up into my bladder, much less the somewhat worse sensation of a noble though doomed attempt to penetrate my ureters. Well, you hang around NIH long enough, sooner or later they let you on all the big-kid rides. Now if I could just stop pissing blood.

Tell you more later. Time to do some drinking.

UPDATE. Thanks, all, for the good wishes. The red tide has receded.

UPDATE 2. You're all so good to me, sob. Someone suggested pain medication. They did give me an anti-spasmodic, but shortly after taking the first dose I got a terrible abdominal cramp that sent me running back to the doctor, who assured me that this, too, would pass, and it did. Sometimes the only way to learn the side effects of a procedure is to experience them. (I'm still not sure whether my racing pulse and sleepless night were caused by my F-DOPA injections, and neither was my endocrinologist.) Consider it part of my contribution to medical science.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, following the development of the Arrogant Obama theme in rightwing discourse. Though there are laughs along the way, there really isn't much variation -- mainly it's like the sputtering of an old engine that refuses to totally give up, or fluctuations in the vocal strength of The Angriest Dog in the World. Whether it shows mania or admirable stick-to-itiveness on their part (or mine, for that matter) is a matter of perspective.

I did miss a few late entries, like one from the Sipsey Street Irregulars, one of whom approves the ridiculous Jonathan V. Last article about Obama's alleged narcissism, observing that "Narcissistic Personality Disorder is insufficient grounds for claiming a "diminished capacity" (insanity) defense" and rejoicing because "that means he can still be hung after the war crimes trial subsequent to the civil war he starts." Another of the Irregulars, you may remember, once called for true sons of liberty to break the windows of Democrats. One of the problems of pop psychology is that you don't always know the credentials of the practitioners.

ARMCHAIR PSYCHOLOGIST, HEAL THYSELF. As we have seen, a rightwing cottage industry has emerged in damning psychological profiles of Barack Obama. Many of its analysts are or claim to be psych professional, but at this level qualifications are not a requirement. Now Jonathan V. Last is here to tell us the President, unlike Presidents before him, is a narcissist.

It’s revealed in lots of little stories. There was the time he bragged about how one of his campaign volunteers, who had tragically died of breast cancer, “insisted she’s going to be buried in an Obama T-shirt.” There was the Nobel acceptance speech where he conceded, “I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war” (the emphasis is mine). There was the moment during the 2008 campaign when Obama appeared with a seal that was a mash-up of the Great Seal of the United States and his own campaign logo (with its motto Vero Possumus, “Yes we Can” in Latin). Just a few weeks ago, Obama was giving a speech when the actual presidential seal fell from the rostrum. “That’s all right,” he quipped. “All of you know who I am.” Oh yes, Mr. President, we certainly do.

Despite Last's helpful italics and characterizations, these incidents make neither a definitive case nor a feature-length article, so Last piles on more. As an author Obama once changed the direction of a book he was writing, and thus Simon and Schuster "got burned for a few thousand bucks." When his fame rose he changed his agent, much like that other monster of ambition, Bruce Springsteen. Also he left his job at the University of Chicago sooner than they would have liked.

Worst of all, Last tells us at length, he was deluded enough to think he could be elected President of the United States.

"Yet you don’t have to delve deep into armchair psychology to see how Obama’s vanity has shaped his presidency," says Last, before further wearying the cushions of his own psychology armchair. Obama has bragged on his abilities and used his reputation to political advantage. He used Lincoln's bible at his Inauguration and Lincoln's china at the luncheon. His palaver about the end of the Cold War does not match that of Jonathan V. Last. He doesn't delegate much.

Were Obama a captain of industry rather than a Democratic President, I suspect this would all be presented as evidence of his Randian dynamism, and the article would be a cover feature for Forbes rather than another chunk of boob-bait in the Weekly Standard. But, to indulge in a little armchair psychology of my own, we've reached a stage in the group psychology of the Right where even accepting the Nobel Prize (with becoming modesty, though excerpted here to give a contrary impression) is offered as proof of Obama's unfitness. They have some nerve calling anyone else nuts.

ALTHOUSE ATTACKS! Ann Althouse didn't like what I said about appreciating the privileges into which one is born:

He's reacting to a program that in which government officials are prodding adult citizens to think about how privileged they are. The analogy to a parent-child relationship comes so easily to the left-wing mind.

And what kind of families — back in the olden days — encouraged their kids to think about how lucky they were to be white? Only racist parents would have said anything like that.

Close reading is not one of her strengths. My mother told me to be grateful for my advantages. Recognition that white people have it easier, on average, than black people in this country did not require parental instruction, but could be deduced by observation.

I will answer some of her commenters' questions addressed to me, not in her combox but here, as you are much more likely to actually listen:

How would you like to be black, and growing up in Africa, Edroso?

Compared to what? Assuming that it's better to have been born than not born, which may not be a fair assumption, that condition would beat non-existence and I would make do. But in gaining the material benefits that make life easier, being born white in America is, by any reasonable measure, a huge leg up.

So is having a Protestant work ethic a "privilege"?

Well, it's not like there aren't drawbacks to whiteness. For example, it can seduce some people into believing they are responsible for cultural traditions they did not themselves invent.

Can you imagine cracker ass Edroso getting drafted? You think he's a sissy crybaby now? Can you imagine the coniption fit he'd have? He'd be pulling his white privileges out of every orific of his body.

My reaction would mainly be astonishment, as I am deep into middle age. But if in a few years things get so desperate that they're drafting oldsters, I'll probably be grateful for the three hots and a cot.

Of course, I never got any of that white privilege, not being white, but for some reason I was still expected to score 400 points higher on the SAT than people of other ethnicities to get the same result. Should I have been contemplating that as well, Roy?

All contemplation can be rewarding, though as this complaint supports rather than contradicts my point, I think the challenger might better spend his time reading.

THE MAGIC OF THE MOVIES. "America has had a big change! We've had a big election -- how will it effect Hollywood? Will there be a big change?" You people owe me big time for actually watching Roger L. Simon and Lionel Chetwynd discussing this in a PJTV video so I could transmit their message in a less unpleasant format.

Simon suggests that, in the wake of the election, conservative screenwriter Chetwynd should now be running a movie studio. This appears to be a joke, but Chetwynd responds, "Though there's a logic. In a logical world -- one would think that, you know, they famously once said that even the Supreme Court reads the polls, that the people in Hollywood who do control Hollywood and control half of our destinies and the films we see would look at what's going on in this country and would say, you know what, maybe it's time to perhaps spread our net towards the right of center and those people…"

…instead of producing Communist propaganda like Faster, Saw 3-D, and Megamind.

Chetwynd then attacks Danny Boyle, who made a quick crack at an opening about the Tea Party, as "an Irishman" who only knows "four blocks of Manhattan and a couple restaurants in West L.A., making statements about America, completely secure that the audience would embrace him, and in fact Variety reported it approvingly as far as I can tell. They don't change!" Expect Boyle's treatment of his own comment to be produced by a consortium of Hollyweird types and rejected by the American people.

Then there's a a loving remembrance of Sam Goldwyn and those guys, who are compared favorably by Chetwynd to traitors like Steven Spielberg, who "belong to the great artistique community in the clouds," which is why nobody goes to Spielberg movies. But Simon reasons that even the Spielbergs will be affected by what he considers the "potentially revolutionary election for the entertainment industry," which will motivate filmmakers to finally get The Joe McCarthy Nobody Knew on the Silver Screen.

Chetwynd is willing to be somewhat optimistic, only because he sees a lot of "hedge fund money" (apparently a new development) coming in from "politically committed" backers for alternative entertainments, and these worthies will steal the lunch of modern moguls who "disdain what the American electorate has done" and are as bad as the pictures of Janeane Garofalo, Keith Olbermann, and Bill Maher they then show to reignite viewers' righteous indignation.

Simon wants us to know that cultural revolutions take time, but he and Chetwynd assure us they'll be keeping track. Subscription button at right!

If you haven't had enough of this sort of thing, their colleague Bill Whittle is still offering Declaration Entertainment, where the scripts are developed by You, the Citizen Producer! So far they've given us only videos performed by Whittle himself, like What We Believe, Part 5: Gun Rights ("The philosophical substrata for gun ownership is something most gun owners understand in their bones," he says, "they don't need to be told anything I'm about to tell you," which you have to admit is a hell of a come-on), but like the guys said, these things take time.

TODAY'S OUTRAGE. Oh Jesus:

Motifs of the American flag have become a regular addition to Google's artistic repertoire celebrating patriotic holidays but today's Veterans Day doodle has sparked a measure of controversy.

In the past Google personified its doodle with red, white and blue letters but the addition of an Islamic crescent moon-looking "e" has all the Internet abuzz.

Actually it's the tail of the "e" at the end of the logo:


I suppose I should be grateful that even some commenters at Free Republic and Godlike Productions are giving this the raspberry, but wait till Jim Hoft sees it. (h/t P.A. Godat.)

At least we can count on the mainstream press to... oh hello, Charles Hurt of the New York Post:

With his feeble flame of "hope" thoroughly doused here in the United States by last week's elections, President Obama has set out around the globe in search of throngs still enthralled by his flowery rhetoric...

So that is why your president is halfway around the world instead of being here in the United States to celebrate the sacrifices American soldiers, sailors and airmen have made around the world to keep the real, still-burning flame of freedom alive.

The President is on a government mission to Indonesia, when he should be home saluting veterans. "And the White House wonders why so many people think there is something foreign about this guy," says Hurt.

This is actually crazier than the Google thing, but it's the everyday kind of crazy rather than special-occasion crazy, so people are less likely to notice.

THE WRONG MAN. One of the advantages of this sublet is that it comes with cable, and gives me the opportunity to catch up on some old movies. The Wrong Man was on TCM last weekend.

I love it, but this is probably the least enjoyable of Hitchcock's films. The photography and editing rhythm have a kitchen-sink dullness that seems influenced by television. (Hitchcock did not disdain trends -- he even made a 3-D movie -- and may have felt, in the wake of the success of Marty, that it would be okay to go more naturalistic than usual.) Though the tightening of the screws on the hero, a musician wrongly arrested and nearly convicted of robbery ("Oh, this looks bad for you, Manny"), quickens the pulse, it's a less exhilarating than depressing experience. We're even denied the pleasure of watching for Hitchcock's traditional cameo, as he appears in a sententious prologue to tell us that the story is real.

Hitchcock seriously restrained himself with this one. Usually there's something like fun going on in his movies -- sweeping camera movements, incongruous humor, an unexpected change in rhythm or point of view. In The Wrong Man, there is that amazing moment when Manny is put in a cell and the camera swims, and the quiet hysteria of the group of women when he's "identified," but other than that, there are none of Hitchcock's trademark bravura touches -- it's all small things that show how screwed Manny is, like his apparently uninterested attorney (great performance by Anthony Quayle) doodling at the defense table, and especially the way people look at and talk to Manny. Henry Fonda collaborates in this -- quiet, earnest, remarkably well-behaved. Even when his wife goes mad, she's quiet.

It isn't a question of the material or the setting -- even the physically-restricted Lifeboat has scenes, like Gus' amputation, that are practically operatic in their handling. The effect of Hitchcock's restraint is to shift the focus from the strangeness of the usual paranoid scenario and onto its believability. Now the caprice of fate is not a magical intrusion on reality, but reality itself: bleak, unrelenting, and pitilessly unjust. Suddenly the little English boy who was famously influenced by a few minutes in jail is giving us the grown-up version of his nightmare.

ALL THE BREAKS. Amy Alkon is upset that a program in a Canadian city is asking honkey citizens to "acknowledge your white privilege" as a consciousness-raising exercise. Alkon calls this a "Vile Racist Campaign Against Racism," and seems to believe it's going to have "children grow up thinking they're bad people by virtue of their skin color."

Actually, I find it useful to contemplate my white privileges, and any other privileges into which I was born, like being a citizen of the richest country on earth, and did not obtain for myself. In fact, when I was growing up, it was customary for adults to remind children of such luck as they had inherited, like the food we had and "people starving in other countries" didn't. This was meant as a spur to gratitude and humility, and to not being such a whining little shit. I guess things have changed. Everyone's a victim now, even (perhaps especially) the most privileged among us.

Alkon is also mad about this:

I'm also opposed to sexism in offering opportunities -- like this recent example by Maria Shriver:

...an event in Long Beach sponsored by first lady Maria Shriver to provide free medical, financial and educational services to low-income women.

So, if you're a low-income man, screw you, go eat out of Dumpster? Nice! Sorry, but isn't feminism supposed to be about equal treatment for all, not special treatment for people with vaginas?

Of course, there are plenty of gender-blind programs, such "Socialist Security," but Alkon is opposed to those, too. Considering her keen nose for injustice, I assume she finds such programs unfair to the Randian supermen who can take care of themselves -- The System unfairly taxes them and, adding insult to injury, gives the proceeds to paupers!

If this lottery ticket in my pocket comes through for me, I certainly hope I won't spend that much time complaining.