NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about rightbloggers' 9/11 reminiscences. They were downright nostalgic. Among the outtakes:

In a long essay, Roger Kimball informed us that "many illusions were challenged on September 11. One illusion concerns the fantasies of academic multiculturalists, so-called." Kimball named some of these multi-cultis, though he apparently couldn't think of many living ones: "Figures like Edward Said and Susan Sontag, Harold Pinter and Noam Chomsky continue to bay about the iniquity of America, the depredations of capitalism, and so on," said Kimball, but thanks to 9/11 and the great success of our subsequent wars, "the spurious brand of multiculturalism that encourages us to repudiate 'dead white European males' and insists that all cultures are of equal worth may finally be entering a terminal stage."

Kimball cited no evidence for this alleged turn toward monoculturalism, but he did let readers know how deep his contempt of multiculturalism ran: he reproduced a 1910 assessment of the typical native of Afghanistan as "unscrupulous in perjury, treacherous, vain and insatiable, passionate in vindictiveness... by breed and nature a bird of prey," and pronounced it "refreshingly frank." One wonders why America bothers to liberate such people.

Much of the essay's remainder was devoted to snarls against the liberal media et alia, who in Kimball's view "had been waiting for a repeat of Vietnam" in Iraq and Afghanistan, which hope "the Bush administration disobliged by giving them a conflict in which America was in the right and was winning." Though Kimball's reminiscences reach back to the Periclean Age, they stop well short of the present, in which Americans are sharply divided as to the efficacy of those wars. Maybe multiculturalism is making a comeback.

UPDATE. I tried insofar as possible to avoid all the 9/11 X ballyhoo, for a couple of reasons. First of all, with due respect to the very good writers who have tackled the subject, I have not read a blessed thing this month that has illuminated 9/11 -- as history, as event, as a social or political phenomenon or anything else that would make such an account worth reading.

People have said good things about New York magazine's Encyclopedia of 9/11, and it's a nice approach, but I mainly learned from it how information workers, some of whom were kids when the towers fell, have risen to the challenge of writing something linkworthy about 9/11. Irony is dead! No it's not! Well it sort of is and sort of isn't! And this is not to speak of other reminiscences that egregiously stink. ("Without 9/11... I would not have started blogging; I would not now be a journalist." As if the attacks weren't tragic enough!)

Between the people who wrote about it because they or their editors felt they ought to, and the people who wrote about it as a therapeutic exercise (and who seemed to think, as the people on reality TV shows do, that therapy works better if it's done in public), 9/11 X just dumped a more dross onto what was already a mountain of it.

Maybe you've seen something really good, but before you recommend it to me, please ask yourself: Is this just a clever bit of magazine prose for which the MacGuffin is 9/11? Basically if it isn't Voltaire on the Lisbon Earthquake I don't want it.

All honor, though, to alicublog commenters on the less exalted topic of my column and its subjects. Angry Geometer, for example, offers an unexpectedly convincing endorsement of Don Surber's Hibernian hate-on:

I think it's no coincidence that they're the only ethnicity, aside from American Indians and Vikings, that are deemed worthy of sports mascotdom. The reason is because they are terrifying. Besides, we saved their soda bread eating asses in Dubya Dubya Eye Eye, so Bono should shut up if he's not also going to mourn Chappaquiddick, the real Irish 9/11.

On a more meta note, Jeffrey Kramer observes, "Every time we toast the Founders for creating an open, tolerant society dedicated to equal protection under law, we gain five Freedom Points. When we collect fifty Freedom Points we can trade them in for a secret prison camp for torturing Muslims."

ART BRUTE. Kia has pointed me to the Roger Kimball stemwinder "Why the art world is a disaster," which uses an expired art show at Bard College as a launchpad for rage against -- well, plenty, including yuppie naming conventions and high tuitions (no arguments there) but mainly contemporary art. Kimball is an amusing writer, and I would rather have this sort of thing done amusingly than tediously, as is the custom with rightwing cranks, so credit where credit is due.

The thinking is less interesting than the writing -- moneyed philistines corrupt art, it's all politically correct, lobby signage and catalogue copy is shit, etc. I share Kimball's distaste for many of the current big names he cites (Cindy Sherman is fine by me) and for much of what gets shown nowadays.

But I stopped nodding at this:

...it has been a long time since shock value had the capacity to be aesthetically interesting—or even, truth be told, to shock. Decades ago, writing about Salvador Dalí, George Orwell called attention to, and criticized, the growing habit of granting a blanket moral indemnity to anything that called itself art. “The artist,” Orwell wrote,

is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word “Art,” and everything is O.K. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are O.K.; kicking little girls in the head is O.K.; even a film like L’Age d’Or [which shows among other things detailed shots of a woman defecating] is O.K.

Kimball does not pause here, but I had to. Bunuel's L'Age d'Or? L'Age d'Or is lovely. I still view it with pleasure, as do many others, and it's 77 years old -- certainly old enough for its modishness to have subsided. If it still shocks, and I think shock is the least of it, it is for its genuine, audacious inventiveness, not for what once may have been seen as cheap thrills. (BTW, I don't recall the crapping scene -- does memory fail, or did Orwell have the Director's Cut DVD?)

Orwell may be forgiven his disgust, bless his proletarian soul, but it's a little weird that Kimball lets it pass. Maybe he's never seen the movie. Or maybe he has passed a point of no return, after which anything lively and irreverent, notwithstanding its merits or vintage, is to be condemned as part of some era-spanning conspiracy against good taste. And past that point is pure crankishness. No wonder he's so angry. He's no longer responsive to the artworks, but only to the Dylans and Heathers and Marieluise Hessels and Leon Botsteins and all the others who have made the world, in the immortal words of Doc from West Side Story, a garbage can.

This modern world is full of shit masquerading as art, so you, too, might think that criticism is a waste of time. But as Ted Sturgeon said, ninety percent of everything is shit. And I think Sturgeon was understating the case. Still, if you cease to look, you won't see, and there's none so blind as that.

A few weeks ago, while biking in Brooklyn, I happened upon a show of photographs by John Barnard. This show, too, is closed now. The subject was local nannies, mostly black, caring for their little white charges. Thematically this would seem to be agenda-driven, too, but if you can't get past that, you'll never know whether the artist did. Most of the photographs weren't so hot, alas, but a few were really fine. My favorite, as I recall it, showed a muscular woman in jeans and a shirt who had slung a toddler over her shoulder to carry him into a fenced playground filled with ugly plastic slides and tubes. All was dark but the child's face, blankly regarding the camera. It wasn't Atget or Weston, but it was worth contemplating and remembering. And all I had to do was look.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

One of my favorite cover versions. What's yours?

• I saw a mean, funny David Klion tweet about Bari Weiss, showing the crowd at Chautauqua, N.Y. to whom she presented her "New Seven Dirty Words" speech to be mostly hella old, with the caption "The voice of a generation." Weiss, promoter of the Dark Interweb or whatever it was called (boy, if we have movies in the future about life in the late-'10s, won't that be a lazy signifier!), is a nightmare, of course, but when Klion's commenters pointed out that Chautauqua audiences tend to be older (though I see they have the Gin Blossoms coming in -- celebrating their 25th anniversary, eek!), I felt maybe it had been unfair of me to laugh. But then I saw a description of her speech in The Chautauquan Daily:

So while Carlin’s “7 Dirty Words” have lost their luster and invaded the mainstream, Weiss proposed a new set: the I-word, H-word, the other P-word, E-word, J-word, R-word and D-word.

Imagination, humility, proportion, empathy, judgment, reason and doubt.

???

Being an American only requires a commitment to a set of ideas, she said. In other parts of the world, these factors (race, gender, ethnicity) confine people, but not in America.

“The antidote to identity politics is imagination,” Weiss said, “a moral and political imagination that allows us to feel the spark of that electric cord, even today.”

Be black and get on the wrong side of a cop and you may well feel the spark of an electric cord, motherfucker! Then she brings in Laura Ingalls Wilder -- a big fave among libertarians -- and what a shame it is that someone took her name off a children's book award just because she said things like "There were no people, only Indians lived there" and "the only good Indian is a dead Indian." "The arbiters of culture," mourns Weiss, "are convinced that she deserves to be censored for 19th-century morals based on morals we hold dear today." I guess it's beyond hopeless to explain to wingnut grievance-mongers like Weiss that someone deciding not to associate with someone else (particularly a dead someone else) isn't censorship. Thereafter comes the Greatest Hits -- Evergreen College, Halloween at Yale, "no guardrails," "Weiss said she was uncomfortable by the euphemisms her pro-choice, feminist cohorts spread — that abortion is 'like a hip-replacement' or an appendectomy," etc. Well, suffice to say I no longer feel bad about laughing at Weiss -- in fact, I think mockery is far too good for her.

• Rightwing tantrums over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have practically become a convention, and Meghan McCain's conniption was a lovely example of the form. While we have no similar tape of Roger Kimball's voice growing increasingly hysterical, and though, unlike McCain, he has access to a thesaurus, his rant at the American Spectator seems to boil up from a similar well of ancient enmities. He, too, professes to believe all social democracy results in Venezuela and people who want a more equitable distribution of America's plentiful resources are "children of all ages" who "whine and rant," and even resorts to a cryptic daddy-spank threat: "the fact that calls for socialism are once again crowding the airwaves reminds us that folly is a noxious hardy perennial that prudent gardeners need to be eternally vigilant to spot and extirpate." I can see Kimball proposing Prudent Gardeners to a perplexed Trump mob as a name for the new Brownshirts. But the surest sign that Kimball is letting the little lady get to him is this primordial splurt:

There are, after all, many salubrious processes that produce unpleasant by-products as part of their activity. You see it in manufacturing, you see it in biology. You eat the steak, it nourishes you and makes you strong, but it also results in odiferous and potentially toxic by-products.

Capitalism is the greatest engine for the production of wealth that the ingenuity of man has ever devised. But after it achieves a certain level of prosperity, it regularly excretes characters like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, beneficiaries of capitalism whose contempt for its strictures is equaled only by their ignorance of its tenets.

I predict this dive into Kimball's dreamlife will do little to stop her rise, though it may get him some fan letters from conservatives who are into scat.

YEAR-END TOP TEN THINGS NO ONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT.

Who doesn't love year-end listicles? If you're done with mine, you can take in Roger L. Simon on PJ Media's "The Most Underreported Domestic News Stories of 2013":

As in the title of Bernie Slade’s 1978 Broadway hit Same Time, Next Year, the great underreported, or really unreported, story from 2013 is the same one it was in 2012 and for three years or more before that. But unlike in Slade’s sexy comedy, nobody’s having any fun, at least not now.

OK, take two: This time speak for yourself and get to the point. Try it again -- Roger L. Simon on "The Most Underreported Domestic News Stories of 2013":

...In a world where every phone call, email, text message, Tweet, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook post, YouTube, Vimeo, LinkedIn link, Google + post, blog post, semaphore, morse code, Braille, and probably burp has been recorded digitally for posterity and beyond, nobody knows what Barack Obama even got in freshman English.

Blink. Blink.

...Obama’s unseen college and graduate school records (Occidental, Columbia, Harvard Law) are only one part of the Mystery of the Shrouded POTUS – another is the Khalidi tape, its possibly anti-Israel contents locked in a vault at the L.A. Times – but those academic records are certainly a significant part.

Paragraph after paragraph of this, including "Yes, I realize a few pols have done well in school. Clinton and Jindal were Rhodes scholars, so we can assume good grades (although one wonders if Bill, ahem, cheated)." The very best part:

Does this matter? I don’t know – and that’s the point.

We'll assume this moment of apparent clarity was an accident.

Oh, there's more: Here's Roger Kimball's entry in "The Most Underreported Domestic News Stories of 2013":

One of the most underreported domestic stories of 2013 was the eclipse of tolerance as a prime liberal virtue and its enrollment in the index of unpermissible reactionary vices.

And the rest is about Duck Dynasty.

Now, it might seem odd to say this story was “underreported"...

Snnrk. Hundreds of words later:

This is a story that is underreported because we are a long way from facing up to its implications. There are several reasons for this. For one thing, our society oscillates between a breathtaking latitudinarianism about...

Get the hook! The next act is Ed Driscoll -- "MSM LIES" kinda covers it. Then J. Christian Adams tells us "the most significant underreported story of 2013 is the left’s launch of the Democracy Initiative," which Mother Jones, exempt for the moment from MSM LIES, describes as a bunch of unions and non-profits working together to "build a national, coordinated campaign" to pimp causes they support, something that has never happened before and certainly not on the right with the Koch Brothers in the Library with a candlestick. The next...

You know what? Let's go look at BuzzFeed. It's still holiday season, and who needs the aggravation? (h/t Jesse Taylor)

IT WAS A GOOD DAY.

For "Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall"; for the idea that it's not un-American to work together and share the bounty; for saying in the face of originalists, "while these truths may be self-evident, they've never been self-executing"; and of course for the LOL Opposition:

And oh yeah, for all the happy black folks in D.C.

Yeah, it was a good day.

UPDATE. The lulz keep a-comin': National Review's first-string bowtie Roger Kimball:

...The tone that he set: What was it? Reading through the speech (I will be honest: I couldn’t bear to listen to it live, I just couldn’t), I was haunted by an echo. The speech reminded me of something, of someone. Who was it? Woodrow Wilson? Yes, in part. But there was another ghost in the wings... 

Got it: “Peace in our time,” the president said, “requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity; human dignity and justice.” 

Now, I am as keen on tolerance and opportunity, human dignity and justice as the next gun-toting bitter-ender. But “peace in our time”? Where have we heard that before? Who was the last politician to strut across the world stage proclaiming “peace in our time”? Why, Neville Chamberlain, of course. He stepped off the plane that brought him back from his meeting with Adolf Hitler on September 30, 1938, and the crowd cheered as Chamberlain told them about his meeting with the German führer...

Similarly, Obama used the words "I" and "me" a lot, just like Marshal Petain.

UPDATE 2. Wrote a little something about the speech for 2paragraphs.

UPDATE 3.  Commenters including Ron Thompson point out that Chamberlain actually said "peace for our time." The quote is so commonly misrendered that I would be inclined to give Kimball a break for using the wrong version, and even for not checking out what he probably assumed was a devastating coincidence before using it -- after all, he's only hurting himself.

However, smut clyde, tigrismus, and others inform us that Benjamin Disraeli and John F. Kennedy used "peace in our time," which means by the ancient conservative law of I'm Rubber You're Glue that they are now both retroactively Hitler. I hope Kimball's happy now!

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW. Regular readers will know how annoyed I am by American mopings over putatively conservative art. But I will happily make an exception for British Conservative MP Ed Vaizey's "Modern Art is Rightwing" at the Guardian, if only for its head-exploding potential:

Contemporary art is highly individualistic. It is about freedom of expression, the chance to make one's mark and to speak with a distinctive voice - all characteristics of the right, rather than the left. Contemporary artists are entrepreneurs in every sense of the word. The Brit Artists of the 1990s have turned themselves into brands, selling a luxury commodity to a group of discerning purchasers. The Damian Hirst skull, retailing at £50 million, could not remotely be described as a leftwing statement, except in the sense that, like many projects of the left, it is massively over-priced and a colossal waste of money (only kidding Damian)...

Contemporary artists are busy making money, just like any other capitalist in Britain, or the developed world, today. The contemporary art market is just that, a market where people invest and even people like Hugh Grant can make money. The Frieze Art Fair is a huge trading floor - although its enlightened founders, Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp, recognise their corporate social responsibility by securing an acquisition budget for Tate Modern...

I'd like to think the essay is satirical, or at least tongue in cheek. The idea of Damian Hirst as a conservative icon is positively Shavian. It may just be that British politics is stranger than I can comprehend. Nonetheless I hope our homegrown morons take it up for debate. It would make Roger Scruton and Roger Kimball bite the stems off their pipes. And if it gets Rod Dreher to support Hirst's Virgin Mother, I will gladly endorse Mr. Vaizey's candidacy the next time he stands. (h/t Joshua Holland)

WELCOME, ROSEANNE, TO THE INTELLECTUAL DARK WEB.

You guys know how I feel about this stuff: Until you're ready to protect fast food and daycare workers from being fired for their social media speech, I'm not here from your blubbering over celebrities like Roseanne.

That's not a rhetorical offer, by the way, but a sincere one. I don't give a shit if the Hitler Channel wants to run Roseanne's Heil Hitler Racist Comedy Hour, where its sponsors and supporters can be noted and shunned, so long as ordinary citizens can flip off Trump and put it on Twitter without getting fired for it.

But they can't. So fuck her.

Even the usual suspects have, for the most part, looked at the facts and decided this was not the fake free speech hill they wanted to lie on. Rod Dreher, as you might expect, runs with the pack but can't even do that right:

“But,” you say, “that’s all the NFL owners are doing with the mandatory National Anthem rule: protecting their business interests.” You have something of a point, but the comparison is faulty. A quiet political protest is not the same thing as calling a black person an ape. Colin Kaepernick’s pig socks are in that ballpark, certainly, but the NFL kneelers on the whole aren’t wearing pig socks.

Like Moses, Kaepernick is denied entry to Dreher's promised land because of his pig socks.

It is a sign of civic health that someone who is making a fortune for a TV network can still lose her position when she indulges in disgusting rhetoric like that. Some things you can’t say in public without consequence. Where we draw that line will always be under contention, but we ought to all agree that Roseanne Barr crossed it.

I'll bet Dreher thinks the Beatles should have been driven from our shores after John Lennon said they were more popular than Jesus.

Others among the brethren find new ways to embarrass themselves -- Anthony Scaramucci, the erstwhile Trump mouthpiece who encourages people to call him "The Mooch," complained of being discriminated against as an Italian-American ("When I was called a human pinkie ring and a goombah while in the @Whitehouse that was deemed acceptable comedy. Double standard"). That's even better than when mobster Joe Colombo's Italian-American Anti-Defamation League went after The Godfather.

And rightwing pencil-neck Roger Kimball does the ooh-such-po-li-ti-cal cor-rect-ness simper-strut at The Spectator:

Uh oh. Was the tweet in bad taste? Indubitably. Was it racist? Yep. Was it the worst thing ever in the history of civilization? According to ABC, which hosted her new, extremely popular show, the answer appears to be, Yes: nothing so awful has ever besmirched the escutcheon of humanity.

You liberals act like racism is the very worst thing in the whole entire world but what about World War II, or that time a black guy glared at me?

Yes, it was in bad taste. So what? There was a time when bad taste was not a (professional) death sentence. Under the reign of political correctness, that time has passed.

Does one of you have the patience to explain to Kimball for me the difference between, say, the race jokes in Blazing Saddles and calling a black lady a monkey?* Best part:

I do not watch television, so I never saw Roseanne Barr’s show. I understand, however, that it was a breath of fresh air, not so much conservative as simply independent.

Percy Dovetonsils doesn't sully himself with idiot box emissions, but knows this show must be good because Trump likes it and the star is a racist.

UPDATE. *I thought everyone knew this, but apparently there are law professors who don't know, or affect not knowing, that calling black people monkeys is like Racism 101:

Yes, the problem of likening humans to apes, an interesting variation on the age-old resistance to the notion of evolution. We are primates, all of us, the same order as the apes. Bush was "Chimpy McHitler," and let's not forget that time Trump sued Bill Maher for joking that Trump was the son of an orangutan.

Speaking of law perfessers: "ABC hands midterms to Trump, GOP," says Instapundit Glenn Reynolds. Maybe they can get Tim Allen to call Michelle Obama a coon and get fired -- that'll really excite the base! Then they can all tell us that lots of different people are compared to raccoons, isn't that what Michelle Wolf did to Sarah Huckabee, you're the real racists, etc.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

One of the great gifts the missus has given me is an appreciation of this giant.
What Chandler said about writers and style goes double for singers.
• In the Friday newsletter (not to late to sign up!) I mention these oddly-promoted PJ Media stories:

I told readers I wouldn't worry about the actual content of these things, the blurbs being so delightful, but later snuck off and read them anyway. Roger Kimball's is a long yawn about how no matter what the kids think socialism is Venezuela. After a few grafs of that and some historical padding Kimball gets here:

So, what is the emotional motor of socialism? In a word, benevolence. 

That may seem counter-intuitive. Isn’t benevolence a good thing? 

That depends. Benevolence is a curious mental or characterological attribute.

He’s an intellectual, see! He sloshes around in this for a while, then:

The sad truth is that theoretical benevolence is compatible with any amount of practical indifference or even cruelty. You feel kindly towards others. That is what matters: your feelings.

I can see, in the abstract, what the appeal of this might be: Why someone might want to call anyone who wants the state to relieve the afflicted a feeling-centered SJW, but wants with it some intellectual credibility. And here's some wiener in an ascot and horn-rims saying it in purty words ("The intoxicating effects of benevolence help to explain the growing appeal of politically correct attitudes about everything...").

But who’s the market? In the age of Trump, why would anyone bother? Just say, as Trump did about the death toll in Puerto Rico, that it has nothing to do with you because you're smart so whatever went wrong with those losers must have been their own or someone else's fault. In the immortal words of Elvis Costello, pretty words don't mean much anymore.

• As for Richard Fernandez, ermahgerd the lede:

Any directed tour depends on prior knowledge of the scenery so it can be introduced as it comes into view. A guided tour into the unknown is impossible by definition. What has kept pundits from accurately predicting what comes next in these years of turmoil is that they were surprised by developments like everyone else. 

The result is that the Narrative is now burdened by a tremendous accumulation of events whose significance no one can quite understand. The liberal response to this jumble of mysteries...

AAAGH STOP I'LL CONFESS. Fernandez has always been tough to follow, but you can usually track his intent through chunks in the spoor. And for a while that method serves here, too:

Europe appears to be unaccountably in the midst of what the media vaguely describes as a drift to the "extreme right." Even Sweden, long the iconic "moral superpower" of the left, is developing a distinct right-wing list.

The libs are concerned with the rise of crypto-Nazis. How childish, when the real problem is political correctness! On and on Fernandez goes about the "censorship" experienced by -- let's look at where his link goes; ah yes: experienced by Alex Jones and other assholes.

And what's worse is what the censorship is doing to our minds: "The willingness to self-censor speaks volumes about how important it is to preserve the paradigm." Soon our children will come home morosely dragging their bookbags and, after the mandatory prayer to Soros, murmur, "Teacher says I shouldn't talk about lizard people and try and sell the other kids supplements."

Let's look at his close:

But the Narrative, however powerful, cannot remain unchanged forever. If the liberal world order does not break up along left-right fault lines then it will fragment under the regulatory schemes aimed at carving it up into fiefdoms It may in the end prove impossible to determine in which direction the "arc of history" bends. #TakeItBack? There's nothing to take back. The future we imagined on September 11, 2001, and the one promised by Barack Obama in 2008 were not what we wound up with. Maybe that is all for the best. About the only thing we can confidently predict is that tomorrow will surprise us.

This is gibberish. I'm sorry. If you've done some reading of rightblogs you'll have some idea of what they mean when they refer to The Narrative, but when it comes to cases all it really means is Stuff Said By People Who Are Not Me. Like The Federalist’s Stella Morbito, who recently harrumphed that "a stranger coming up to you assuming you share his views" is "annoying, not to mention disrespectful," Fernandez eschews the consensus reality of us littlebrains. But what he offers as an alternative is just a thicket of allusions, quotations, and bosh. I charitably assume that he hopes with his wordstorms to attain something like the effect, or at least the status, of poetry. But his writing sucks. It really, really sucks.

BIRTHER -- WITH AN EXPLANATION. We have officially entered the age of the crypto-birther. Andrew McCarthy livens the pages of National Review -- where birtherism was allegedly debunked but, we can see by now, is merely the birthplace of its new cover story -- with new schtick. The first part of McCarthy's con job -- a yap about how Barry wouldn't let us call him Hussein even though he's a big fat Muslim, what a liar -- is almost like a primer for the New Birtherism: it's not the (we're not saying it's a) crime -- it's the cover-up! And then, the literal nut graf:

The editorial desire to put to rest the “Obama was born in Kenya” canard is justifiable. The overwhelming evidence is that Obama was born an American citizen on Aug. 4, 1961, which almost certainly makes him constitutionally eligible to hold his office.

Almost certainly! But -- QUESTIONS REMAIN! Later, "This certification is not the same thing as the certificate," etc.

Some of the brethren hear the dog-whistle loud and clear: Marathon Pundit, while affecting distance from the conspiracy ("I believe that Obama was born in Hawaii"), nonetheless is convinced by McCarthy's penetrating analysis to demand, "Okay, Barry, cough it up. Let's see your birth certificate."

See, he's not one of those nuts: he has the good sense to quote the magazine that rebutted the birthers before going birther himself.

You can have the bow-tied twit version from Roger Kimball who, while declaring himself "sick of the Obama birth certificate wheeze," gets quickly to the "and yet, and yet..." His alleged concern is Obama's mendacity -- proven by third-hand accusations that Obama inflated his resume regarding his job at Business International Corporation; why, he was merely a "junior copyeditor"! -- which leads Kimball to assert that Obama has "consistently misled the public about his personal history." I mean, if a man will lie about his first job out of college, what won't he lie about?

I think Doghouse Riley said it well in comments to the last post on this:

"Full of shit" doesn't cover it. The phrase suggests a world in which being full of shit would be contraindicated, where anyone of sound mind would avoid it, in which "shit" would lie in opposition to "gold," or "delicious snack cakes," or, metaphorically, Facts, and where one would try one's damnedest to avoid being filled with shit... That is, it's a real-world phrase, and Real is not the world these people inhabit, and hasn't been for a long time.

They're hard at work on a sort of homemade mind trick that will allow them to simultaneously denounce and disseminate fraudulent information. It's thoroughly transparent to normal people, but at least it will help hold the thicker fellow travelers who are either embarrassed by birtherism or wondering why the White People's League hasn't stormed the White House with a rope.

UPDATE. Someone named Mark Joseph has turned this nonsense into a Zen riddle: "The only thing weirder than the Birthers are the anti-Birthers, who blame the Birthers for being conspiracy theorists yet actively feed the conspiracy by refusing to call for President Obama to release his birth certificate." This is very symmetrical, and suggests the obsessively concentric artworks sometimes created by mental patients. He also claims "most Americans" are "beginning to wonder why the president doesn't put this one to rest once and for all" -- a fond hope, certainly, which regrettably comes without polling data -- and compares Obama to Mark Sanford. Do these guys even know any normal people?

LICENSE TO SHILL. Just in case you were wondering how the Culture War's higher-ed front was going, Roger Kimball provides an update:

The old Marxist strategy of “increasing the contradictions”—a strategy according to which the worse things get, the better they really are—is a license for thuggery. It excuses all manner of bad behavior for the sake of a revolution that will (so it is said) finally transform society when all the old allegiances have finally collapsed. If one or two tottering institutions require a little push to finish them off, so be it. Shove hard: You cannot, as comrade Stalin remarked, make an omelette without breaking eggs.

As with anything to which the word “Marxist” applies, there are at least eighty-seven things wrong with this strategy. Morally, it is completely irresponsible. Intellectually, it depends upon a fabricated “contradiction” to confer the illusion of inevitability. In real life, the only thing inevitable is the certainty of surprise.

Nevertheless, as one looks around at academic life these days, it is easy to conclude that corruption yields not only decay but also opportunities. Think of the public convulsion that surrounded the episode of Ward Churchill blah blah blah blah...

Then he goes on for hundreds of incendiary words about how bad liberal professors are, and ends by threatening their tenure ("An arrangement that was intended to protect academic freedom and intellectual diversity has mutated into a means of enforcing conformity and excluding the heterodox").

In other words, after a long explanation of the bad Marxist way of getting things done, Kimball pretty much tries the same thing himself. Evidently he means what he says about a "license for thuggery," but also believes that he possesses such a license. I wonder where he imagines he got it from?

CHEW ON THIS AWHILE.

Sorry I've been off the grid due to some "vacation" related bullshit, but will fill the tank tomorrow with some fresh/hot -- including a few grafs on this moronic New Republic thing, "Liberals Are Killing Art: How the Left became obsessed with ideology over beauty," my response to which, based on years of bitter experience with actual kulturkampfers, is basically WTFingF. For the moment I will only mention that author Jed Perl cites absolutely no allegedly art-killing liberals of the present time that you've ever heard of,  and that his first references are to Robert Hughes' Culture of Complaint (1993) and Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination (1950), which basically makes me want to say, why don't you and Roger Kimball go back in time and fuck each other on a pile of old New Criterions?

Meantime, please enjoy this image courtesy of @randlechris:

This douchenozzle has a future at Galt's Gulch Square as a Ross Douthat impersonation.

UPDATE. Perl's thing is full of stuff like this:

What is certain is that in our data- and metrics-obsessed era the imaginative ground without which art cannot exist is losing ground. Instead of art-as-art we have art as a comrade-in-arms to some more supposedly stable or substantial or readily comprehensible aspect of our world. Now art is always hyphenated. We have art-and-society, art-and-money, art-and-education, art-and-tourism, art-and-politics, art-and-fun.

So when, in centuries past, young rich men and ladies were sent or taken on the Grand Tour so they might poetaste of the Arts in a properly luxe setting,  it wasn't because art had already been commodified to hell in Europe and America, it was because these poor toffs had been zapped by mind-rays through a crack in the time-space continuum with the poison of our own data- and metrics-obsessed era, and turned into proto-hipsters and -feminists for the duration.

The whole question is so painful and so difficult that I have frankly hesitated to tackle it.

O better you had forborne, Percy Dovetonsils! Now you must suffer to be wedgied in effigy by the corrupt liberal artsmeisters of Obama's America.

UPDATE 2. To go on a bit more about it: Perl mentions some Alex Ross comments on Valery Gergiev and Richard Strauss (see whetstone in comments for some explication) and, instead of accepting the implicit challenge to discuss the relationship of art and politics, Perl lets us know these comments have given him the vapors ("I suppose it is the casualness with which that freestanding power can now be dismissed..."). From this and some more antique criticism Perl extrapolates all sorts of mad ideas that are allegedly shared by liberals like a secret handshake ("It is also, so I believe, a grave mistake to imagine that because art has so often been placed in the service of governments or religions that it is somehow essentially a medium through which political or social or religious beliefs are to be conveyed...").

One reason beyond the sloppy reasoning that I have so little patience for this nonsense is that there are plenty of people out there who really do believe -- and say so, out loud and in your face -- what Perl says liberals believe, that the arts are a mere tool of politics -- and they're busy doing it -- like Rick Santorum with his Christian movie studio. "Politicians didn’t change the culture," cried Santorum, "the popular culture changed America," and he aims to change it back with movies. I've turned over hundreds of examples of this sort of thing; as if that weren't enough, there are oceans of evidence that capitalism has done far more to transmogrify the arts than any other non-aesthetic impulse; yet Perl thinks it's "the liberal-spirited critic" who is to blame.

UPDATE 3 (8/10/14): In Update 2 I referred to Perl as "Lund" throughout -- not sure why. I have corrected that.

"FOR HAVING CREATED NEW POETIC EXPRESSIONS WITHIN THE GREAT AMERICAN SONG TRADITION."

Well, no one can say they don't know this Laureate's work. (Actually I'm sure there are some bowtied Roger Kimball motherfuckers for whom it might as well be Onyx or Kevin Gates.) But what might the Nobel Committee mean?

From the beginning (well, near the beginning -- it's strange to think that songs like "Blowin' in the Wind" and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" are essentially Dylan's juvenilia) he had an unfair advantage over other poets as a rock 'n' roller; not only did he have the poet's traditional advantage -- relief from the burden of explanations -- he also didn't have to sound serious, either. Part of the joy of Dylan is the extent to which he just seems to wing it in the time-honored, whimsical tradition of close-enough-for-rock-'n'-roll. (You might say Little Richard got there first, and Dylan might agree with you.) I think this looseness is where a lot of his lyrics come from -- like this, my very favorite Dylan couplet ever, from "Million Dollar Bash":

I looked at my watch, I looked at my wrist
I punched myself in my face with my fist

That is so stupid it's sublime. And that's just my particular favorite -- bear in mind, millions of allegedly half-literate teens were in 1965 singing aloud, "You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal," probably as in love with keening sound of CEE-ullllllllll as with the words. Some of them were even singing, "But the second mother was with the seventh son." Mind, that was the same summer as I Got You, Babe and I'm Henry VIII, I Am.

But Dylan wasn't just fooling around. If you take the time to think about that line about being invisible with no secrets, it turns out the metaphor is even more vivid and effective. (I'm still not sure about that seventh son, though.) I'm convinced Dylan saw from early on that hipster obscurantism was not only fun and profitable but also something with which he could go hunting for the Real Thing. Some go after it thundering and blundering, but Dylan chose to sneak up, casual-like, looking like he didn't care till it was time to throw the knife. Just because you didn't want to seem serious didn't mean you couldn't be serious.

Maybe he read and took the point of Ellen Willis' 1967 critique of his "silly metaphors, embarrassing cliches, muddled thought; at times he seems to believe one good image deserves five others," etc. Maybe he figured that out himself. Maybe the motorcycle crash had something to do with it, or the bad scene after Woodstock, but his imagery and inventiveness became muted, prematurely autumnal. It took me years to figure out that he wasn't just filling measures on "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest"; I didn't get why Judas was laying out tens for Frankie to pick from, and why Frankie was unable to choose -- they're all ten dollar bills! -- until I started to have dreams like that too, and to think more seriously about death. Dylan was 26 when he wrote it.

Over time Dylan has come to seem much less weird, partly because we've gotten used to him and because he's been festooned with honors and become a Cultural Figure, but also because the more mastery he got over his songwriting, the more it came to resemble the work of the other masters in his field -- good American Songbook stuff, love songs and stories. (He sees that too, hence Shadows in the Night.)

But he didn't shave himself to fit that mold. Rather he pushed it out, gently, to suit himself. I remember how shocked and thrilled I was by "either I'm too sensitive or else I'm gettin' soft" -- holy shit, it's quarter to three and there's no one in the place except Bob Dylan! If his love songs didn't have the economy of a Jimmy Van Heusen song, that was okay; one of the benefits top being of the New Breed was that you were expected to be undisciplined, a little shaggy and bloated like a fat couch at a hippie house. ("If You See Her, Say Hello" = 234 words. "All the Way" = 130.)

Dylan took advantage of his allowance; some of his songs feel like director's cuts avant la lettre. "Idiot Wind" (639 words!) is like a scenario for a Sam Peckinpah movie no one could possibly finance. But along the way he learned to be sparing when needed, too, as in "Make You Feel My Love," one of the Dylan songs closest to the old tradition. The song is a plea; the lines are spare with short words, to carry the plaintive feel; the emotions are raw to the point of embarrassment.  And it sneaks up on you like Dylan sneaking on the muse. See how it goes from something almost mundane to something majestic in just the first two verses:

When the rain is blowing in your face
And the whole world is on your case
I could offer you a warm embrace
To make you feel my love 

When the evening shadows and the stars appear
And there is no one there to dry your tears
I could hold you for a million years
To make you feel my love

 I'm not sure if this is what the Swedes meant by "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition," but it does the trick for me.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the strange reaction to criticism of Trump's blood-and-soil speech in Warsaw.

I knew the brethren had turned a corner (or, rather, gone 'round the bend) when Roger Kimball pronounced Trump's speech inspired by Pericles. That's even funnier than George W. Bush as Churchill. (Maybe confused Trumpkins will demand a production of Shakespeare's Pericles Prince of Tyre with Trump in the lead -- and no stabbing this time!)

Meantime Rod Dreher has added yet more evidence that, as I mention in the column, what he likes about "The West" has nothing to do with what you or I would recognize as liberty:

Me, I believe that we must defend Western civilization. But what does it mean to defend a West that has become “preoccupied with pleasure-seeking, selfishness, and living for the moment”? Which West are we defending? Are we defending the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment West? Or are we defending the older civilization more consciously rooted in Christianity?...

I find it very hard to defend Western culture, in this sense. But I find it vital to defend Western civilization. The way I do this is by promoting knowledge and love of the best of Western civilization — which stands in contrast to our decadent contemporary Western culture...

If only we could get rid of dirty pictures and bad books! I know -- let's have a bonfire!

...What does this have to do with us and Trump? Here’s a flawed analogy, but one that I hope is useful. I believe that Trump is akin to a bad Renaissance pope.

[Blink. Blink.]

However morally corrupt he may be personally, and however decadent or otherwise deficient his understanding of the culture and civilization he represents, it is still possible to reform from within. The radicals of the left will seek to extirpate us. Therefore, we have to stick with Pope Donald, because at least under him we have a chance of recovering our roots and making them bloom.

Suddenly Dreher realizes this puts The Left in the role of Martin Luther.

That’s a deeply flawed analogy because Luther and the Reformers thought it was they who were protecting the real tradition. So maybe it’s more like a case of defending the King of France against the Revolutionaries. As rotten as the system was, the Revolutionaries represented something far worse. At least within the ancien régime, conservative reform was possible. Similarly with Tsarist Russia vs. the Bolsheviks.

Tsar Donald is a badly flawed man, and his imperial court is an embarrassment … but who else is there? Every time I reach the point of no return with him, the left reveals its hand, and its contempt for ordinary people and what they love, and compels me to consider the alternative.

Sorry, serfs, Chapo Traphouse wants to put you in the gulags, so learn to love living in shit!

Anyway, we on the Right need to have serious conversations...

Ugh, when do you start?

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

One of my favorite tunes, of which I was reminded
by this terrific interview in the Detroit Metro Times.
•  Rod Dreher's talking Spanish Civil War and guess which side he's on:

I didn’t intend to argue about who was right and who was wrong in that war. Personally I believe the better side won … but that there were no good sides.

Translation: Bothsides, but I gotta go with the fascist dictator. Which is no shock if you're seen Dreher moon over the current crop of European fascists such as Marion Maréchal-Le Pen (and her Auntie Marine) and Viktor Orban ("It seems to me that the Orban government correctly understands that the culture war is a war of imperialism and subversion fought by other means by nations and private actors [Soros] who wish to defeat traditionalists"). To make it look good, Dreher does a little hedging, pointing out that Franco Was A Very Bad Man, but inevitably tips toward the Throne and Altar authoritarian because the Civil War was "incredibly brutal on both sides" and Jesus is the tie-breaker.

Keep in mind that mainstream conservatives like David Brooks take this guy seriously and escort him into polite company. Which has been and remains the way with modern conservatism. Get a load of Roger Kimball, the very model of a rightwing intellectual, hoity as well as toity, getting down with wingnut clown Charlie Kirk:

This is why, when people wring their hands and go, "oh William F. Buckley Jr. would never have gone along with this," I just laugh. Like his pal Reagan was any less of a moron.

•  The conservative movement is in love with Blonde Chicks with Big Glasses like S.E. Cupp and Tomi Lahren, so naturally National Review had to have its own: Katherine "Kat" Timpf, whose attempt to promote herself with a victim narrative I covered some weeks back in my newsletter (and I am unlocking that issue for you because that's the sort of Robin Goodfellow I am -- but you should still subscribe!). Her shtick is silly-liberal-snowflake stories -- and here's her latest:

Being Bigger Than the Person You’re Asking Out Deemed Title IX Violation 

A student at the University of Missouri was found to be in violation of Title IX in part because he asked another student out on a date and is physically larger than she is.

If that "in part" made you suspicious, congratulations. Further into the story:

To be fair, the document does report that the male student had also been pestering the female student for dates and wasn’t leaving her alone — which is, obviously, unacceptable — but the fact that his physical size was enough to constitute a violation-worthy power imbalance is absolutely ludicrous.

Pestering? Wasn't leaving her alone? Hmm -- sounds like him being more physically powerful than her isn't the only issue here. Amanda Marcotte and Andrew Fleischman do us the favor of reading a filing by the guy's lawyer: He sent her romantic Facebook messages, she asked him to stop; he switched to paper notes left with her dance teacher, including one containing "apologies and a confession of 'love' for her." This went on for months with no encouragement from her before the poor woman went to the authorities. Timpf's column -- "updated" once, so I can only imagine how bad it was before -- is like an Olympic victim-blaming routine, e.g.:

The way in which this kind of thinking hurts men is obvious: They risk violating a law, and potentially being punished for it, over what every sane person could agree is normal human behavior.

I predict Timpf will serve as U.N. Ambassador in the Honey Boo-Boo administration.

JUST BLOW ME.

I suppose you guys have seen the sad stories of saps snipping their swatches over the Nike ad with the Bad Man in it -- which subject is treated at greater length in my subscription newsletter *--  but in future, when I look back on this week's outrage, I shall always first recall, not the reaction of President Trump, but how it was handled by the Conservative Pets twitter account:

Doggos and ressentiment -- it can't miss! Except Nike seems not to be suffering from the wingnut tantrums over Kaepernick, so this one joins previous conservative blubber-boycotts against French wine, the Dixie Chicks, Germany, Starbucks, Kellogg's, et alia, that went nowhere, but over which wingnuts beat their chests. And, as with those failed boycotts, conservatives are still declaring victory, confident that their followers don't actually follow the market or read the papers and won't realize that their oafish opposition doesn't mean shit to a company that markets to young people rather than to aging rednecks who only buy athletic gear to burn in YouTube videos. 

You can tell how badly the boycotts are doing by the Wall Street Journal, which engaged Adam Kirsch to lament "The Destructive Politics of Pseudo-Boycotts," taking care to remind us that it's a bothsides problem because, while rednecks burned their shorts without hurting Nike sales, liberals boycotted The New Yorker's festival because white nationalist Steve Bannon was headlining -- and got Bannon disinvited, which just goes to show how awful boycotts are. There's even a paragraph about the Montgomery bus boycott in the thing, which suggests to me Kirsch was prepared to file a more favorable column until the sales figures came in.

But the top propagandists are still throwing Hail Marys. I went above and beyond by watching a Ben Shapiro video on the subject -- or at least as much as I could stand. Within the first 10 seconds I heard this: "Nike in a viral piece of marketing decided it was deeply necessary to reward Colin Kaepernick." Whatever they're paying his ghostwriters should have gone instead to ESL classes. Shapiro also knocked Kaepernick's athleticism -- "He was a garbage quarterback, he's one of the lowest rated quarterbacks in the NFL," quoth "Crossfit guy" Shapiro -- and reported Kaepernick was protesting "police brutality or some such nonsense." By the one-minute mark, when Shapiro brought up that hardy wingnut perennial, Kaepernick's pigs-as-cops socks -- "there's legitimately pictures of pigs with cop hats on them!" --  his adenoidal, mosquito-on-meth burble was giving me a migraine and I had to bail. I guess that's the secret weapon with which Shapiro DESTROYS liberals. 

The clearest sign that it this is all bullshit is conservatives like Thom Loverro of the Washington Times, Jim Geraghty of National Review, Stupidest Man On The Internet Jim Hoft et alia pretending they care about Nike running sweatshops. I mean, even Trumpkin Reddit forum r/The_Donald has a page called "MUST WATCH. Very Powerful NIKE Sweatshop Documentary" -- previously these guys were only interested in sweatshops as a source for mail-order brides. When you find wingnuts agitating for workers' rights, you know you've hit rock bottom. 

Meantime, I see conservatives have taken up another sports issue -- Serena Williams getting docked a game at the U.S. Open for arguing with an umpire -- and are uniformly siding with the ump. Think it's because they're astute connoisseurs of tennis? Here's a hint: "Whining Serena Williams is tennis’s Hillary Clinton," says rightwing pencilneck Roger Kimball. "Funny How Serena Has Trouble With Referees Only When She's Losing," says Adam Rubenstein at The Weekly Standard. And if you want a good look at the conservative id, check the responses to this MAGA choad's Serena Williams tweet (sample: "I do not take anything Williams says seriously. Her own sister was murdered by the Crips street gang... yet she did the Crips Walk after winning a tournament"). I can see all of these assholes holding an old loving cup like the Coach in That Championship Season and moaning "basketball is no longer the white man's game." 

* that's right, folks, now that the Village Voice is dead I must bring my begging bowl to the web, and offer you premium content wholly distinct from my alicublog stuff for just seven bucks and month and seventy bucks for a year via my newsletter, Roy Edroso Breaks It Down. Apply within. 

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the controversy over a 1991 press booklet that described Obama as "born in Kenya," which rightbloggers have taken up as proof that Obama wanted people to think he was a foreigner.

I noticed on the pixel trail that, while nearly all the folks pumping this story insist that they, personally, believe Obama was born in Hawaii, a large percentage of their commenters talk old-fashioned birtherism (e.g., "so sick that they are going to let this illegal President stay in the white house"). But why not? The subject is a magnet for conspiracy theorists of all stripes, and as long as you're entertaining the idea that an ambitious American politician would want to portray himself as ineligible for the Presidency, you might as well also talk about Barry Soetoro's fake birth certificate and plot to firebomb the U.S. from within with Bill Ayers.

Once upon a time these guys were a fringe, of the sort that any political movement would need to lose if it were going to be taken seriously; now, they're an important part of the Republican base.

One of my favorites from the story is Rosslyn Smith of The American Thinker, who had many angles to offer, including this:

The political left has a long history of using plays, movies, and TV series to push their agenda because dramatic media showcase their agenda items to good effect. Many audience members get so wrapped up in the images, characters, and action that they don't stop to think about the huge dose of political propaganda being served on the side. This is one reason why the left talks so much of narratives. The political right, on the other hand, completely dominates the emotionally cooler medium of talk radio...

So: Leftists hypnotize the American people with Glee and Syriana while conservatives stay aloof in the cool, Apollonian heights of The Rush Limbaugh Show, talking about where Barack Obama was born. This is the most convincing evidence I have yet seen of the existence of parallel universes.

UPDATE. Among the many sterling comments to this post, wjts gets extra credit for answering the tendentious questions asked by afterbirther Roger Kimball. My favorite:

Why can’t we see a certified copy of his birth certificate?
Because there's a problem with your wireless connection.

LAFFS. This Slate article about the literary efforts of three Maxim associates is so much funnier than I expected that I must, in gratitude and wonder, share. The author, Dan Chiasson, turns some delightful phrases -- e.g., "Itzkoff's promise to 'consider the torturous path that any piece of copy had to follow before it ever appeared in print' might well mark the all-time low-water mark for the quest narrative..." -- and the careers of the authors on view say more about the collapse of literary culture than a thousand Roger Kimball essays ever could.

I am especially grateful to be made aware of Felix Dennis, who has led a fascinating life and now builds a poetry career for himself out of money and balls. Good for him! If his hoary verse fails to raise his literary profile, they will at least damage Tom Wolfe's.

NOTA BENE. To those of you who may have stumbled upon this regurgitation of some Terry Teachout pieces at OpinionJournal: please note that Teachout is not, in the main, the right-wing hatchet man that the OJ editors have therein portrayed by selective quotation. It's sad what you have to do to sell books, particularly to the True Believers. Teachout's blog About Last Night is still very much recommended; it does the art of criticism proud. He does let tip his ideological hand sometimes, but one of my other favorite critics, the lefty Michael Feingold, does so even more egregiously. And, unlike bluenosed asswipes like Roger Kimball, Teachout has well-developed aesthetics, rather than mere snobbery, on his side. Besides, anyone who sees Stanley Crouch for the fraud he is deserves our support.