SOUTH PARK REPUBLICANS 2.0. Back in '03 Brian C. Anderson told the City Journal that the kids were alright, that is to say, increasingly right-wing. In support of this contention he offered several paragraphs of quotes from South Park, with gleefully unexpurgated use of the words "fuck" and "ass," and posited (on the alleged authority of Andrew Sullivan) a coming breed of "South Park Republicans" who were sticking it to the Man GOP-stylee.

Arizona State undergrad Eric Spratling says the definition fits him and his Republican pals perfectly. “The [SPR] label is really about rejecting the image of conservatives as uptight squares -- crusty old men or nerdy kids in blue blazers. We might have long hair, smoke cigarettes, get drunk on weekends, have sex before marriage, watch R-rated movies, cuss like sailors -- and also happen to be conservative, or at least libertarian.” Recent Stanford grad Craig Albrecht says most of his young Bush-supporter friends “absolutely cherish” South Park–style comedy “for its illumination of hypocrisy and stupidity in all spheres of life.”

Whee, sounds like fun, if you've led a particularly sheltered life. Now Anderson's got a book about SPRs coming out on Regnery, and has supplied a taste via OpinionJournal. But in this venue the conservative kinder come off a great deal more strait-laced:

"Today's university is without morals or guiding principles, except one," [Harvard junior Jordan] Hylden contends: "to follow in all things the ideal of 'to thine own self be true.' Individual desires, whatever they are, are affirmed, and the denial of these desires, by yourself or by another person or group, is the greatest possible evil"...

Helping students resist such pressures are a growing number of vigorous student religious groups, preaching moderation. College campuses nationwide have seen a "religious upsurge" over the last decade, the Christian Science Monitor reports...

The upperclassman leaders of these groups can set examples for younger students, as Princeton senior Renee Gardner, leader of Crossroads Christian Fellowship, tries to do with student drinking. "There's certainly pressure on most students involved in the typical social scene to drink to excess," says Miss Gardner, whose conservative values proved no bar to her joining one of the top Princeton bicker clubs. "I've chosen -- as have many Christian friends -- to abstain from drinking in those contexts, not only to make it simpler for us to avoid blurring the line between acceptable and unacceptable levels of drinking, but also to make others feel more comfortable who might not want to drink."

Anderson does cite a biologically-young "conservative libertarian" ("Say what you will about us, we like to party!") but immediately assures us that "for some conservative students, especially those from religious backgrounds, the bedlam can be unsettling."

What happened? At the outset of this manufactured phenomenon, South Park Pubbies were full of fun and games, all very "Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!" ('Member that one?) Now they sound like YMCA types out of Sinclair Lewis.

Here is my theory. If one is painting a picture of These Young People Today for the edification of adults, one must shade the likeness according to the perceived needs of the times. In the early 60s, popular magazine writers ballyhooed the Kennedyesque idealism of the younger generation; in subsequent years, as young people became both more obsessively covered and more fractious, and thus more frightening to their elders, these accounts went out of their way to show that adults had nothing to fear from Flaming Youth; well do I recall all the 70s spreads portraying twentysomethings coming to Jesus (with pictures of hot chicks in immersion-baptism-soaked shirts), and the yuppies of the 80s and the technerds of the 90s.

Now the right-wing alternamedia have invented their own avatars of youth, but where once the inventors posited a new breed that was as hip as any previous lazy stereotype, a need may have been felt to amend the image to suit the new reality -- that is, the second Bush Administration, with whose deficits and endless war and "ownership society" aspects a partying, cursing junior auxiliary would not be so natural a fit.

So now the South Park Republicans are turning away from drink and dirty words, and toward Jesus. Fine with me. Bring on the full-immersion baptisms!

FIRST "CRUNCHY CONSERVATIVES," NOW THIS. That awful man points us to another front organization masquerading as a hipster 'zine (not, though, the one Reynolds works for), which tries to squeeze a few more innings out of the "'South Park' Republican" thing. Key quotes:

Conservatives once defined themselves as “standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’” This antiquated thinking doesn’t suit (if it ever did) young generations who see the future as promising more freedom, more prosperity, and more potential. We don’t want to freeze progress; we want to unbridle it.

And:

The Republicans have a moment here that they could seize. They can dig in with the conservatives and continue to muck about with the peripheral issues; or they can shed the conservative tag, embrace the reptilian “South Park Republicans” and get to work on the fundamental issues: freedom, prosperity, promise.

It should be explained, to those who understandably wish to avoid reading a whole page of this nonsense, that the Popshot author means "reptilian" in a good way. It has something to do with P.J. O'Rourke, who is to this sort of frat-boy federalist as Raymond Carver is to that legion of workshop-haunting, chain-smoking authors who lay up in cabins for weeks at a time to purge themselves of modifiers.

Popshot's take is fairly typical, and typically thin. SPRs believe pop-culture artifacts and leisure-time options constitute a political identity. They are encouraged, for example, to hear "Sean Hannity talking about sex (gasp!) on his radio show or Pejman talking about Grand Theft Auto (whoa!), one of the most violent video games ever made, in a favorable light," taking this to mean that "free market advocates have certainly come a long way."

A long way from where to where, one wonders. If a free-market advocate prefers to live like, say, John Derbyshire, listening to Hank Williams and blissfully solving calculus problems till the sun comes up, what makes him politically distinct from the sexed-up game-boy? For SPRs to be remarkable (and it seems one of their goals is to be remarkable), they would need to offer something that plain old Republicanism can't match. What, besides a shitty attitude, would that be?

Some commentators equate SPR with libertarianism. This seems to me wishful thinking, a sort of Police Athletic League approach to libertarian recruiting: Let's just channel these hooligans' natural energy into basketball and anti-tax initiatives!

It could work, I guess. Assuming most of the SPRs are young, they wouldn't feel much immediate impact from a "starving the beast" approach to government. But that's just a passive association: I haven't seen anyone crying, "As a South Park Republican, I'm strongly opposed to pork-laden Republican budgets and Medicare plans" -- oh sure, maybe in an Andrew Sullivan "it's shameful the way my President spends money on -- oh look! a bird" way, in which the grumble is dutifully made and then ignored as weightier matters (like who's a traitor) are gleefully picked over.

Really, it seems SPRs have only one strong belief: that they should have what they want -- i.e., attention and cool stuff. So do the rest of us, of course, but their want is more mediagenic because of the man-bites-dog angle -- Betcha didn't know that the kid in the Stüssy gear thinks Bush rulez! Hella counterintuitive!

I don't know how long the thing will last. Maybe a while. Punk lasted way beyond any earthly reason; Johnny Lydon packed it in a quarter-century ago, yet we still have kids walking around with "Anarchy" tattoos and mohawks. But of course, to be a punk in the old days was a little more demanding -- what with the social unacceptability and all. Whereas SPR has a remarkably low barrier to entry, as seen by this bit from yet another TCS "Hey Kids, Join The SPR Revolution" article:

Different South Park Republicans often describe themselves as conservatives, libertarians, classical liberals, pragmatists, constitutionalists, or "just your average Joe." However, when election day comes around, they all generally vote for Republican candidates.

As a wise old one said: Do the pose, all you have to do is wear the clothes.

PS: And what would a clique be without way stringent standards? Here's a guy who thinks South Park itself isn't SPR enough anymore.

ANOTHER CULTURE WAR CASUALTY.

Remember that "Intellectual Case for Trump" made by Mytheos Holt at The Federalist a few weeks back? If you saw it, surely if nothing else Holt's tale of how he turned out a racist chick when she let him "probe her ideology" stays seared in your brain. Did you know that was only Part One? Yeah, I blocked that out too, but Part Two has arrived and it's even stupider. A lot of it is about how liberals got bored with free speech and now they're Hitler -- but God help us, Holt also has a Culture War angle:

For decades, the institutional Right has ceded American culture to the Left, in spite of many voices who pointed out ample areas where the Right could carve out a countercultural movement against leftist domination, or even co-opt some of modern culture for itself.

Not sure what "voices" have advocated a "countercultural movement" as Holt provides no link -- but the voices urging conservatives to "co-opt some of modern culture for itself" we have heard; they're the guys who write articles like "How Star Trek Explains The Decline Of Liberalism" in rightwing rags, and who come up with concepts like "South Park Republicans" to make their sponsors feel au courant.

Holt is true to the template -- he even devotes a paragraph to a South Park episode recap! -- and tells us that the problem with conservatism is that it has become infested with "young fogeys" who are no fun at all, which is why all the cool conservatives are flocking to Trump: "Trump is many things, but a fogie he is not." Trump makes liberals mad, see, just like us cool dudes make our parents mad; he's "taking his cues from his time as a pro-wrestling heel personality," and when all those WWE fans get old enough to vote they'll vote for him, or maybe for Triple H -- he's pretty awesome too.

Eventually Holt gets to the inevitable "choc-o-muts ice creams is conservative" list:

The Right doesn’t have to conjure up its own art from scratch. It can and occasionally has co-opted modern entertainment as well. After all, don’t films like Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” series make the most powerful statement about the tension between chaos and civilization since John Ford? Don’t Nietzschean fairy tales like “Breaking Bad,” “House of Cards,” or even “True Detective,” not to mention most video games, utterly brush aside the Left’s fantasies about Rousseauistic, universal human goodness?

Boring a girl at a party with a rant about how your favorite TV show means Social Security sux is the revolution, comrade -- I mean bro!

These people are always going on about Saul Alinsky -- and The Frankfurt School and the Long March Through The Institutions and all those other wingnut equivalents of the Illuminati -- so naturally they think culture is not something to make, or even to appreciate and enjoy, but something to "co-opt."

UPDATE. Sorry, I can't leave out this bit from Holt's essay about Bill Clinton yelling at the Black Lives Matter guys and how it shows liberals went fascist:

In this, they break from the past in many respects. Bill Clinton himself revealed how significant this shift was when he challenged Black Lives Matter. Clinton was advancing a policy argument in defense of his approach to crime in the 1990s, in the face of protesters who would hear none of it. His arguments were based on the facts, where the BLM protesters’ signs were based on the equivalent of brand loyalty to a cultural movement. No matter how correct Clinton’s case was, it inevitably fell on deaf ears.

No, you read that right: he's really saying BLM's protest signs lost an argument with Bill Clinton. I'd say the signs were at a serious disadvantage; maybe they should have used dry-erase to reduce response time.

I GUESS THAT "SOUTH PARK REPUBLICANS" THING IS REALLY DEAD AFTER ALL. At the Voice today, a column on the White House Correspondents' Dinner and resulting mishegas. The Dinner doesn't usually interest me except for comedy purposes. This weekend's event, however, got rightwingers to talk about how Not Funny it all is now that treason occupies the White House. And as you may imagine, conservatives insisting something is Not Funny is as hilarious as any other figure of unearned and unjustified authority insisting something is Not Funny. But don't worry: soon they'll go back to telling us that conservatives are all about punk rock and South Park. Which will, of course, be even funnier. Conservatism, it turns out, is like The Aristocrats: a joke that gets more obscenely hilarious as it goes on.

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD YOU SEE THE DARNEDEST THINGS. Crunchy Conservatives, South Park Republicans -- these kids today and their ephemeral political fads! Now at Tech Central Catspaw we have Nick Schulz filing a trademark on "Ambivalent Conservatives."

This is a single-issue craze, having to do with gay marriage. According to Schulz:

A curious thing happens when talking to younger conservatives about gay marriage. While many of them think same-sex marriage is in some ways an incoherent notion, I haven't come across any who think that gay marriage will not at some point be permitted. What's more, many of them are not particularly distraught at the prospect.

Isn't that nice? They're not like their Bible-thumping elders at all. They just find you and your same-sex partner's loving commitment to one another "incoherent." And they don't doubt that you will be able to marry "at some point" -- hopefully after they've risen to a high enough position at the American Enterprise Institute or in the GOP that they don't have to keep writing fence-straddling bilge like this about it for fear of being outed as a namby-pamby.

Schulz goes on to clarify his ambivalence:

...[AmbiCons] call themselves conservatives; but they are more comfortable saying that, while they certainly aren't exactly what you would call for gay marriage, they don't have much stomach to be against it, either... Jonah Goldberg of National Review captured some of this ambivalence when he recently wrote, "Whether you're for it or against it, many of us just don't want to hear about it anymore"...

Maybe it was the magic name Goldberg that knocked the scales from my eyes, but when I read this bit I suddenly saw what Schulz and his wholly lily-livered gang was up to.

As the anti-gay shock troops have been saying, gay marriage is now, will-you nill-you, a pressing issue. The weddings are happening, the courts are working, and it seems the FMA is coming, too. If you offer opinions for a living, or even as an avocation, on this one it's time to put up or shut up. (And let me state here for the record that I support gay marriage, gay polyamory and polygamy, straight polyamory and polygamy, and "mixed doubles." On straight marriage, however, I remain ambivalent.)

It's evidently easy to get young, ambitious conservatives to endorse the bombing of Iraq on the flimsiest of pretexts, but it is hard to get them to mount up with the queer-crushin' brigades, at least in public. That's because these milky lads, susceptible as they are to pressure from the big boys at the think tanks and party conferences and internet "journals of opinion," are also prey to peer pressure. "Lots of younger conservatives think of themselves as tolerant, freedom-loving and possessing metropolitan sensibilities," says Schulz -- and of course they do, because this is how any modern young person wishes to think of himself, and be thought of.

That's why the Bush Youth have been pushing South Park Republicanism -- it accentuates the "kick ass" part of the rightwing thing (Bomb shit! Make mad scrilla! Be P.InC.!) while playing down the less-popular Biblical strictures. Gay-bashing, even for one's boss, is just not rad.

Is it any wonder that these striplings, who are used to having it all -- conservativism and cred with their peeps -- balk at having to don, even momentarily, the white hood? What will Joe AmbiCon's gay friends say? Worse, what will his girlfriend say the next time he tries to fuck her in the ass?

AmbiConservatism is, alas, the best they can do. And a sorry spectacle it is. They do not acknowledge, even glancingly, the plight of gay citizens facing a wave of bigotry, asking instead: what about our needs? AmbiCons are made "uneasy"; they are left "scrambling for a political position they can articulate and be comfortable with." Sound like hell, doesn't it?

Actually, it sounds like gutless accomodationism by a bunch of punks who reflexively put party over principle, because the former is everything to them, and the latter nothing. They make Andrew Sullivan look like John Brown at Harper's Ferry.

If there's any doubt of this, it is dispelled when Schulz endorses Jonathan Rauch's gay-marriage Missouri Compromise -- a new version of the FMA with slightly more wiggle-room than the current one. There's no hope of passing it, of course, but like a new fashion speedily adopted, it may temporarily alleviate feelings of worthlessness.

Unjustly in this case.

WHAT, ME WEIMAR? Today at NRO Elizabeth Fisher makes culture war on... Dadaism. You might have thought that this antique movement, whether or not you find any potency left in it, was all just good fun and sometimes good art. Wachet auf! For Fisher, Western Civ's wounds bleed afresh every time you enjoy a Max Ernst collage. Behold Dada's dark agenda:

What Dadaism represents is the origins of 21st-century moral relativism.

If a work can be called “art” simply because its author claims it to be such, then there is no such thing as art. If anything can be art, then nothing is. And this principle has a broader application: If anything can be true (or moral, good, right, etc.), then nothing is. Rather than a servant to society, the artist has become a spoiled child, creating arbitrary distinctions that only he can decipher. Dadaists, the original brats, considered their audience only as a group to be shocked or irritated. Dadaists do not deserve to be called artists; at best, they are propagandists, but more accurately, exhibitionists.

Nothing quite matches the hilarity of one of NRO's professional anaesthetes calling anyone else "propagandists," but that Duchamp's urinal is the wellspring of her rage is also very rich.

We've well noted here the tendency of the Right's vulgarians to reduce art to propaganda for whatever crack-brained school of conservative bullshit they favor. On the low end we have of course the South Park Republicans, who think farting loudly is an identification of political affinity. Fisher seems to be of a more high-minded sort -- that is, instead of Cletus in a beret, we have Brandine in a Roman toga, shouting "Van-eetus, Cletus!" and blaming renegade art, and enjoyment thereof, for our great Slouch Toward Gomorrah.

Don't wear yourself out too much laughing. When they start talking like this, you know what the next step is.

THE CRACK-UP CONTINUES. The next time Jonah Goldberg does the bit about how conservatives "tend to be more dedicated to their principles" than to the Republican Party, we should recall the alarmed-meerkat response at National Review's The Corner to the indictment of Tom DeLay. From the moment K.Lo sounded the tocsin to this writing, there has been much nervous chatter, including meta-analysis of a reporter who announced the news in a manner offensive to people who are conservatives first and Republicans only coincidentally.

A few Cornerites remain stuck too hard on their own trip to join the party. Stanley Kurtz freaks the fuck out that Neil Young is making the President look bad on CMT, the George-Jones-who's-that-but-we-do-have-lotsa-Toby-Keith country TV station. I have observed Kurtz' insanity before, and it seems only to have gotten worse. "CMT is owned by Viacom, the same company that owns MTV and VH1," raves he, "Up to now, they’ve been reasonably separate operations. But it’s beginning to look as though the cultural left has decided to use CMT to try to proselytize the South." This is millimeters from Little Green Men territory. Kurtz should be forcibly restrained.

Whither the usual right-wing reasonables? Here's Richard Brookhiser telling us how liberals are going anti-Semitic. He saw some kaffiyehs at the Washington march, apparently.

Looks like I was onto something yesterday. To paraphrase The Confession: Hayek, wake up, they are going mad!

UPDATE. Kee-rist, the Cornerdwellers further descend! Jonah Goldberg whips out his iTunes: "my #1 iTunes tune is Fee by Phish (181 plays), followed by Solsbury Hill by Peter Gabriel, Into My Arms by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and then several songs by the Pietasters and then The Kinks and The Who." Compare this collaboration between Goldberg and his youthful intern ("What're you listening to? I can hear 'em through your headphones. They're rilly good! What's their name?") with the last Norbizness joint and ask yourself: what was that South Park Republican thing about again? Then scroll up for John J. Miller ("'Zero,' by Smashing Pumpkins -- all me, dude") and ask yourself: if I shoot into this computer monitor, will I hit the guy who wrote this? And if not, what good is the internet?

Then Iain Murray takes the sensible position that Google Print oversteps copywright law but, perhaps troubled by the unaccustomed feeling of solid ground beneath his feet, leaps off into a funnycon non sequitir: "That sort of approach, cutting corners with people's rights in order to reduce inconvenience to your operations, is, I think, the sort of thing that governments tend to do. Google needs to act more like Amazon and less like the EPA." Haw haw! See, Google's a megacorporation lookin' to make buttloads of money, and the EPA is -- haw haw! Ted Kennedy shore is drunk!

The pharmaceutical companies must have developed an aerosol form of Lithium by now. Wouldn't this be the best place to try it out?

RETRO FIT. You have to pity the leftover 80s Republicans. People no longer tolerate the cigars, zoot suits, and swing dancing with which they once attempted to insert themselves into American culture, and the attempted transition to South Park Conservatism never quite took. Many of them now brood in their condos, riffling dog-eared P.J. O'Rourke and Tom Wolfe books and dreaming of what might have been.

Give credit then to libertarians Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie: where we behold only a pathetic scene, they see a market opportunity, and following the Time-Life method of repackaging old crap for new profits seek to re-sell the old crapcom "Dallas" as the Le nozze di Figaro of the Reagan Revolution.

"Dallas" wasn't simply a television show. It was an atmosphere-altering cultural force. Lasting nearly as long as recovering alcoholic Larry Hagman's second liver, it helped define the 1980s as a glorious "decade of greed," ushering in an era in which capitalism became cool, even though weighted with manifold moral quandaries...

After a long hip parade of unironic countercultural icons such as Luke of "Cool Hand Luke" and Randle Patrick McMurphy of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Dallas" created a new archetype of the anti-hero we loved to hate and hated to love: an establishment tycoon who's always controlling politicians, cheating on his boozy wife and scheming against his own stubbornly loyal family. But no matter how evil various translators tried to make J.R. and his milieu... viewers in the nearly 100 countries that gobbled up the show, including in the Warsaw Pact nations, came to believe that they, too, deserved cars as big as boats and a swimming pool the size of a small mansion.

I have no trouble believing that the gangster brand of capitalism practiced in much of the old Soviet bloc is inspired by shitty old TV shows. It takes nerve to brag about it, though.

For obvious reasons I prefer to think of these things as diversions rather than as a cultural signposts. Maybe in years to come we'll look back at "The Sopranos" as part of a magical time when we all decided, the hell with it, America's really just a large criminal enterprise so let's get ours while the getting's good. And at "American Idol" as when American popular music began to really, really suck. Maybe that explains our culture in general these days: the cynicism of the audience has caught up with that of the advertisers.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Warm Leatherette's the killer but I always liked the flip side too

•   I unlocked today's edition of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, which is about the Biden campaign worker who got in trouble for calling Republican "fuckers" and how she had the right idea and rather than apologize she and all of us should tell the pearl-clutching pissants to eat shit, take their nomenclature and like it. I always opposed them because I thought they were wrong and even crazy, but between Trump nihilism, COVID denialism, and QAnon cultism, they've mutated into a clear and present danger. David Atkins got grief for talking about "deprogramming" Republicans ("We have to start thinking in terms of post-WWII Germany or Japan. Or the failures of Reconstruction in the South") but when their major media outlets and elected officials are transparently trying to get the election results overturned -- not because their fraud claims have any merit, but because those results show that their voter-suppression tactics are starting to lose their potency and their minority rule may be coming to an end -- it's clear a Rubicon has been crossed; if they're willing to defy both democratic principles such as consent of the governed and objective reality, they are not in any sense a loyal opposition, and the absolute least we can do is acknowledge that and stop cooperating with the absurdly hypocritical standards by which rampaging Republicans are treated like entertaining scamps while mild incivilities from Democrats are treated like war crimes. Fuck that and fuck them.  

•   One good thing about Kyle Smith's (roundly mocked) stupid column about Joseph Epstein's (roundly mocked) stupid column about how Jill Biden shouldn't use her "Dr." honorific is that it exposes more people to what a piece of shit Kyle Smith is. You can find several references to Smith's career as a culture-war creep at the New York Post and National Review by searching his name at this site. Among the highlights: Smith venturing into theater criticism solely, it would seem, so he could yell at Will Ferrell for unpatriotically making fun of George Bush ("Is it too much to ask for Hollywood's leading comic actor not to use the deaths of our troops in combat for a giggle?"); the logical culture-warrior conclusion to years of rightwing rage-wank over Lena Dunham, entitled (amazingly) "Lena Dunham’s Ultimately Conservative Message"; and Smith explaining that while Republicans enlist in the armed services for noble reasons, Democrats only enlist to disguise the fact that they hate America.

Smith's absolute nadir, though, came when New York's Shakespeare in the Park did Julius Caesar and made Caesar a Trump look-alike, leading conservatives to the insane conclusion that the venerable theatrical institution was calling for the President's assassination; Smith went further still, exulting that the theater got some of its funding cut and that "Lefty Actors Are Beginning to Fear Donald Trump," as if that were something anyone who pretends to care about culture as opposed to culture war would be happy about.  Well, everything else conservative has degenerated; I guess it's only natural that they culture warriors would, too. 

YOU KIDS GET ON MY LAWN! I see that Michael Gerson has a column about how Obama is the guy who really started the culture war. To Gerson, culture war is working out a way for non-observant employees of Catholic organizations to get birth control while Republicans try to keep it away from everyone, no matter who they work for.

But those of us who've been watching the war for decades know it's not about who Alinskied who, but really about wish fulfillment. Case in point -- Roger L. Simon:

Are Liberals the New Squares?

They've been working this angle since "South Park Conservatism," and it never gets over. And this one isn't going to break the streak:

I mean – do you think Deborah Wasserman-Schultz is hip? This is one of the meanest things I’ve ever put in print or online, but that’s the girl who was standing in the corner at the sixth grade cotillion and you said, “Oh, no. Do I have to dance with her?”

I can see a Simon reader asking "what's a cotillion?" and, after Simon's patient and dreamily nostalgic explanation, asking "Who's Deborah Wasserman-Schultz?"

But give Simon credit --  he seems to have figured out that selling Mitt Romney and Grover Norquist as hipsters is a losing proposition, so he comes up with ringers:

Of course, most can’t countenance this. They continue to believe that government spending is cool, that it is a good thing (how square is that?), but out of the corner of their ears they are beginning to hear a different song: 

Libertarians are the cool guys.

Alas, he never explains this; I like to imagine he was thinking this shot of the Potsie and Fonzie of Freedom would render all argument moot:

The libs don't know, but the Heartland Institute understands.

Surely no actually youngperson will go for this, so you have to wonder who Simon's audience is. The answer: Conservatives of a certain age who remember when the girls thought Alex P. Keaton was dreamy, Nancy Reagan had taste, and Poverty Sucked -- that is, when they were cool. They can't even pretend anymore, but they can sure sit around the klavern and tell each other how not cool the new jacks are. Which is kind of sad, because cool is something that it's only cool to obsess over when you're a kid. 


(I do hope Simon stays on this track, though, and tells us next week he's seen Girls and thinks Mamet's kid looks pretty now that she's stopped dressing like a tomboy.)

PBS REPUBLICANS. At OpinionJournal, Naomi Schaeffer reports on the State Department's CultureConnect program, which sends "cultural ambassadors" like Frank McCourt and some Sinatra interpreter of whom Ms. Schaeffer seems enamored to places like Iraq (and Venezuela!) for the old hearts-and-minds gig. "'It gives us a vehicle for people of good will to connect,' says Patricia S. Harrison, assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs," blah blah blahs Schaeffer.

Of course, the venue being what it is, Schaeffer must have thought her chances of publication would improve if she stuck this in:

But there is another sense in which it is important to send artists like [opera singer Denyce] Graves and jazz musician Wynton Marsalis (another of the program's ambassadors) to Muslim countries. Though one hesitates to say there is anything reasonable in the impression that these young people have of America as the Great Satan, it is certainly true that the parts of American culture that get through to these countries are often crude, sexually explicit and lowbrow. Ms. Graves notes, "I see what's being imported in terms of American culture, and it's not a fair representation of who we are. I have cringed at what people think is American, but if you don't have a chance to visit, all you have is what's being said to you."

What she's talking about, of course, is the stuff most Americans really attend to: hip-hop, action movies, etc.

That's interesting. American pop culture is famously influential and profitable around the world. Foreigners willingly seek it out. Where they are prevented from experiencing it by mullahs, dictators, or poor TV transmission, they will even go underground to have it. Remember the black market rock concerts of the old Soviet Union?

These people aren't going to all that trouble for a PBS special. No, they want a big glassful of the same Moloko Plus we lucky Americans live on. Junk culture is what other people "think is American" because it is -- certainly more so than the grand opera Ms. Graves has been sent to "ambassador" to the underserved.

To get around this glaring anomaly, Schaeffer implies that the rowdy, bad stuff everyone listens to and watches is actually a elite invasion of culture, rather than the thing itself:

Indeed, one needn't go as far as Pakistan to find religious people who see American culture as a potentially destructive influence. Plenty of religious communities in the U.S. are disgusted with offensive rap lyrics or installation art like the elephant-dung painting of the Virgin Mary.

Yeah, that's what's sweeping the country, folks: Mobb Deep and Chris Ofili. Nice try, but it's what CultureConnect is selling that's the elitist alternative stuff, of the sort seen during Public Television fundraisers. Opera? Jazz? You see them selling out the Meadowlands? No, you see them in the boxed sets that come with the tote bag.

What makes this doubly weird is that, in and among the like-minded screeds against our goldurned culture that run tiresomely off the conservative conveyer belts, we have of late heard many gloats about "South Park Republicanism," an alleged conservative Great Awakening fueled by smutty, irreverant humor.

This may reflect a genuine divergence of opinion, but with this as with most discordant notes issuing from the Mighty Wurlitzer, I think it's more about having it both ways. For in the view of dedicated propagandists, what's the point of having a culture at all if you can't use it to stroke friends and flail enemies simultaneously?