WELCOME TO THE WORKING WEEK. I went down to the employee cafeteria for yet another cup of coffee and did the after-you dance with a bald, white-shirted little fellow who was crowding the spigots.

"If I'm in your way," he said cheerfully, "go on and kick me."

I laughed in a collegial and meaningless way and got my coffee.

"Just kick me," he repeated, "I'm used to it."

"Who isn't," I said. Big laughs all around.

"The outlook for jobs in 2003 and 2004 deteriorated slightly from the previous poll as economists factored in the start of war in Iraq and the meagre increase in fourth quarter business investment after two years of decline." -- Forbes magazine, April 1

IF YOU SEE TWO OF THE PREVIOUS POST don't ask me what the problem is (though I have a pretty good guess).

NO SATIRE, PLEASE, WE'RE MINNESOTAN. James Lileks, a huge Simpsons fan since time immemorial, slags the most recent episode. Key complaint: you can't make fun of British people because the Brits are our allies. To make his point, he invents a guy who can see into the future, and places him at the original Simpsons story conference (a device I thought went out with old krauts in Tyrolean hats muttering "This Hitler will be the end of Germany, mark my words"):

"...Well, I'm just thinking -- say we're at war in a year, with Iraq, okay? Britain would be our closest ally, and it's quite likely we'll be hearing all sorts of stories about battlefield valor, as well as casualties. This line is going to look really stupid. I mean, these guys were there for us in the Afghan thing just a few months ago. The Brits love our show. Why kick them in the yarbles they so obviously possess?"

Got that, America? Stop laughing at Guy Ritchie, Simon Cowell, and the Upper Class Twit of the Year. Willing coalitionists are off-limits! And that goes for Eritrea and Mongolia, too. A list of approved humor targets will be issued by Homeland Security as soon as we figure whether the Solomon Islands are in or out.

Jacked-up prairie pundits, on the other hand, are always good for a larf.

REBUILDING, ALWAYS REBUILDING. I see the Mets stunk up the joint on Opening Day, losing to the Cubs, 15-2. Not a promising start for Glavine (8 hits, 5 runs, less than 4 innings pitched). I was nervous about that trade from the get-go; the Mets seldom acquire big names until they're just about washed up. Atlanta sure didn't fight for him. On the other hand, from all reports Mo Vaughn did not trip over his own big fat ass today, so who knows; this year they could go all the way.

NOONAN: NOW FOR A NICE, HOT SOAK IN THE BLOODBATH. Peggy Noonan tells us that an extended Iraq war will be good for us -- despite the greater loss of life: "Easy means fewer dead and less dread." she admits. "But -- a big if somewhat grim but -- there is some good to be gotten from the long haul."

Chief among Noonan's imagined benefits: "The world will be reminded that America still knows how to suffer." (One pictures America as G. Gordon Liddy, holding its hand over a flame.)

American's fighting men and women -- those who are not killed in this cojones-proving stage of the war -- will also benefit: "They are not going to feel when they return that they got all dressed up and the party was canceled."

I've said this in more entertaining and clever ways before, but this woman is nuts.

DIFFERENT WORLDS. Read the quotations from Yasmin Alibhai-Brown Instapundit is using and ask yourself, does she really sound, as he has it, "very, very thin-skinned"?

I think she sounds extremely reasonable, particularly in describing the atmosphere of the program she was on (taken from IP's site):

As I walked in, people in the front rows were already hissing and hooting to undermine me. Geoff Hoon got massive applause immediately afterwards. Obviously delighted, he looked 10 years younger suddenly. . . .

Now I think Question Time has become much better since it started to allow more assertive challenges from audience members -- the old reverence has gone and an excellent thing too. Panellists should be able to deal with the cut and thrust of hot exchanges. But when it tips over into the Jerry Springer mode the programme loses its stature...

It's interesting that Instapundit chose what to quote, and what he posts still does not support his characterization of Alibhai-Brown (to whom he refers as "Ms. Brown" -- bwa ha ha! Them's some funny right-wing yuks!)

Increasingly we live in different worlds, the left and the right: we haven't spoken the same language for some time, but now, we don't even seem to read the same language.

OI'M A YANKEE-BLEEDIN'-DOODLE-DANDY, MATE! Andrew Sullivan's a piece of work, isn't he? Today he's calling out traitors again. In his current dishonor roll, he equates Nicholas de Genova (whose comments at Columbia are, if reported correctly, genuinely anti-American) with The New York Times.

Let's see. De Genova wished for a million Mogadishus. The Times reports news comprehensively, and has never, to my knowledge, wished aloud that Saddam would win so much as a battle. The paper's headline today reads, "Infantry Attacks Baghdad Defense With First Probes" -- subheads: "Slower Pace, Not a Pause," "Armor Advancing," and "Army and Marines Take on Republican Guard to Shape Big Fight." Not a Mogadishu in sight.

Yet Sullivan characterizes this as "a paper whose editors have already assumed -- or can barely conceal the conjecture -- that the war is lost

Yeah, if they were real Americans, they'd be running New York Post-style "Wipeout!" headlines, not this nuanced shit.

The Times has about seventy thousand Pulitzers, bureaus in every corner of the world, and a reportorial and editorial staff that is the envy of every newsgathering organization on the planet. Sullivan ceaselessly complains that they aren't giving him gigs. Bias may not be the reason, Andy.

PUT IN MY PLACE. Sasha & Andrew's Roundtable pointed to this "Which Band Member Are You?" quiz, so I went and took it. The result you see here. I started out as a guitarist and lead singer, but the past few years of holding down the bottom for Lach have apparently mutated my personality. (It's easy for anyone familiar with musicians, or musician jokes, to see which way the test responses would lead, and I must say that had I taken the quiz in my chandelier-swinging six-string days, I certainly would have obtained a different result.)

Like Peter Boyle said in Taxi Driver, a man does a thing and then he becomes what he does. I'm not sure I believe in destiny, but today more than yesterday I do believe in habit.

TRICKLE-DOWN DIVISIVENESS. Fight the real enemy, cries Andrew Sullivan: "The day of reckoning is not just coming for Saddam Hussein. It's coming for the anti-war movement."

Further down, Sullivan advises on "what the anti-war movement must do now if it is to regain credibility." If his ultimate goal is to give millions of his fellow Americans the Saddam Hussein treatment, why would they listen to him?

In Saturday's New York Post, Adam Brodsky writes, "When the big bombs went off in Baghdad on the first night of this war, I felt like beating my chest." He explains: "It tells the world -- in the only language it understands -- that America will defend itself." (emphasis mine)

Intelligent people can disagree about the war on Iraq, but in the war of a handful of American conservatives against pretty much everyone else on the planet, it would appear the sides have been chosen for us. "With us or against us" is having a most ominous trickle-down effect.

THAT TODDLIN' TOWN. My post on Chicago at the Alicublog Archive (soon to be a major motion picture, released directly to Super-8) prompted this response from my filmmaker buddy Steve Baker of Dallas:

I remember being there for a few weeks in the late '70s. I stayed at the
downtown residential "Y" for $4 a night. Very low-budget tourist wanderings
on my part: jazz bars, Polish restaurants, earnest theater, Heileman Old
Style on tap everywhere (pretty shitty beer, actually), and just taking up
the streets and skyline and lake.

I had a feeling that I could like it there very much.

Here in Dallas, a bar opened up recently, calling itself, "The Corner Tap,"
with a subtitle yet: "A Chicago-Style Neighborhood Bar." So with a certain
wary nostalgia, I entered.

Inside, I found a decor that was heavy on neon, post-industrial metal and
glass, with some misplaced retro lamp fixtures that looked purloined from
TGI Friday's. The joint was fairly crowded with a largely yupp-ified bunch,
so I pushed my way to the overly-gelled blonde barkeep, and asked him: "So
what's about this place that makes it 'a Chicago-style' bar?"

"Damned if I know," he shrugged.

A NIGHT ON THE TOWN. We have a "Summer of Sam" dog in our little corner of Williamsburg. (I refer to the dog whose ceaseless barking helped drive David Berkowitz to serial murder, at least in the Spike Lee movie.) At odd times of day or night this animal delivers a series of short, outraged barks that can go on for hours without variation in pitch or volume. The other night he went at it for some time till something went off that sounded like a BB-gun shot and he fell silent. I wondered if maybe that was the end of him.

The dog was still quiet late Saturday night when I went to play bass with the band at some new club in Manhattan. I had to take an amp -- a Randall Jaguar, borrowed months ago when my own rig began to blow farts and I couldn't pay to fix it (still can't) -- and, being hobbled by a sinus infection, eschewed the subway and hauled it in a livery car. I knew, by an instinct honed over long years of rock experience, that my pay from the show wouldn't cover the cost of the ride. It made me think of Chuck Berry in "American Hot Wax," when Alan Freed told him that the payroll for the performance he was about to give had vanished. "Well, rock 'n' roll's been good to me," said Berry, "I guess I'll do this one for rock 'n' roll!" (In reality, of course, Berry always counted out his bread, and probably checked each bill under a blacklight, before setting foot on stage.)

As I walked into the club, a gaggle of young women in downtown nightwear (all accessorized with noteworthy handbags) marched out of it, one of them announcing, "It's just too early! We can come back later!" The place turned out to be a former restaurant, gutted but not appreciably refurbished save for a lacquered little bar. Track lights were screwed into a scarred grey ceiling, and the bands set up at the far end of the filthy, checkered linoleum floor. A handful of people disconsolately wandered the darkened space. Punk and garage tunes played on the crummy sound system. It was like some of the old places I'd played, except the beers cost six dollars and no one seemed happy to be there.

We bashed out a set. I couldn't use my compressor because there weren't enough electrical outlets. I cranked my amp and made do. The bass drum of the small, borrowed kit Billy was beating was inaudible. There were no stage monitors. Lach's guitar sounded like a mandolin run through a boombox. We played, as had the Pinball Wizard, by sense of smell. Nonetheless we found a few grooves and I was drenched in sweat halfway through. But my mind wandered: Too much treble? Somebody's trying to dance, maybe I should push the beat -- too late, they stopped. I wish I'd taken a longer nap. Is this the thousandth show of my "career" yet? Will balloons fall from the ceiling if it is?

The club didn't pay us. Lach tried to slip me a few bucks, but I demurred. In these situations the high road is the only path that bypasses self-disgust.

Just as we were leaving a very tall woman took the dancefloor and jacked her body to "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place." She wore black hightops, black jeans, black t-shirt and black leather jacket; her hair was dyed black and matted and her pale face was kind and tired. Her jeans rode down on her ample hips a bit, displaying a gentle roll of fat. She reminded me of a girl I used to play music with years and years ago. She lived at Westbeth with her father. She was poetic and punkrock and every time I left her place after rehearsal I kissed her goodnight and she was always reclining and soft-featured when I did, but I only kissed her and took off, except for one time at a party, and I didn't see after that except one time years later, when we ran into each other in the waiting room of a discount psychotherapy place where we were both seeing shrinks, and she had several thin scars across both her arms.

I could easily have crashed when I got back home but I had a promise to keep. Earlier that evening I'd run into an old friend at the laundromat, and he'd told me that tonight was the last night of the Right Bank, a venerable bar at which I'd played back in the day. He'd said I should drop by, however late -- and do you know, as old as the claim of the place was on me, I felt it still. So I washed my face and wandered out.

The Right Bank was emptying out when I got there. Those who remained were of a familiar sort -- young hipsters in rockstar jerseys and flared denim jeans, older demimonders in eccentric hats, a cute and popular bartender in a short, polka-dotted vintage dress and dreadlocks and tattoos who was cheerful and theatrical with everyone and was like that all the time, I guessed, except for the hours and days when she could do nothing but cry and take drugs. The few people I knew talked to me about the things they were doing these days. One was doing campy plays in outlying districts of Los Angeles and working her connections to get an advice column in one of the New York papers -- "because the younger people don't know how to be fabulous," she told me as her boyfriend, an apparently recent college grad, buried his face in her neck. "Like for example, they don't know how that you should wear a big hat. There's a new editor at the New York Press, they were snarky for a while. I want to write about how young people try to take over your personality, like in 'All About Eve,' except for real. Do you know what I mean?" That was the only time she, or anyone else there, asked for my response to anything. The room was like a hangar in which small, brightly-colored egoes hovered.

When I got back to my apartment that dog was barking again.

FUNNY OLD WORLD: "Variety reported that [Michael] Moore is working out a deal with Mel Gibson's production company, Icon Productions, to finance 'Fahrenheit 911.'" -- UPI.

There's a pre-production meeting I'd like to attend:

So ya see, Mr. Gibson, Bush is just as much a terrorist as Bin Laden!

I dunno, Mike... maybe it'll make more sense to me in Aramaic!

DOES THIS WORK?

UPDATE: Apparently not. I was trying out enetation's comments feature. Help!

FEELING TOO HAPPY? Here's something to bring you right down from the "World Briefing" section of the New York Times:

Clocks in Israel were moved ahead one hour this morning for the country's version of daylight saving time. But clocks in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip stayed in standard time. Since 1987, the Palestinians have refused to change their clocks at the same time as the Israelis.

An old item at the Darwin Times says that this issue actually came up in 1999, when "Israel insisted on a premature switch from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time to accommodate a week of pre-sunrise prayers." (According to WebExhibits, the Israels decide each year when they'll make their change.) "Palestinians refused to live on 'Zionist Time.' Two weeks of scheduling havoc ensued..."

The Middle East is so fucked, we can't even get these guys to agree what time it is.

DEAR HEARTS & GENTLE PEOPLE: I just got a very nice note from an ideological adversary. That's always disconcerting, as it takes some of the pleasure out of my bedtime fantasies, in which all enemies of freedom roast in Hell.

One of the sweetest people I ever met is now a pretty big-time right-wing writer. I haven't seen him in years, but back in the day he was very civil and patient with my halting attempts to think and speak on politics.

I sometimes think I should be more like that here. And that may be why I've been picking mainly on the blogospheric big boys lately. In addition to being insufferably jacked-up blowhards ("Indeed," indeed!), they're always accusing me and my buddies of loving Saddam, hating America, and murder. Fuck them.

But if I find a new kid on the block talking nonsense, I'll make a point of being sweet reason itself. Till I get called "idiotarian" or "traitor" or such like. Then all bets are off.

DEATH SQUADS II: Just noticed this at Lileks -- there's a picture Salam Pax posted of "the building he says gives him Internet access."

So maybe we haven't heard from SP because someone noticed, and blew it up.

Professor Reynolds! Assemble some of your pro-war protestors outside Jasperwood and yell, "Shame! Shame!"

DEATH SQUADS. I see Instapundit is poised to blame the BBC if anti-Saddam Iraqi blogger Salam Pax is, or has been, killed. Help me out here. SP has been covered to death (so to speak) in the Blogosphere for weeks -- I first heard of him via Lileks. As for his BBC coverage, I have seen only this report, and it had nothing on the guy that I hadn't already read in weblogs.

How then is his peril the Beeb's fault? Maybe there was a BBC broadcast at some point containing something like, "Salam Pax, of 23 Jihad Lane, who likes to take walks, unarmed, around 5 p.m. every weekday..." but I haven't seen it.

It seems very odd that the blogbrethren, who are always bragging about their reach and effectiveness, now claim their extensive coverage of Salam Pax constituted a secret shared by discreet friends until Big Media deigned to notice.

At least Sgt. Stryker should be happy.

FEW LAUGHS GOOD, FEWER LAUGHS BETTER! For a satire site, the Onion is pretty even-handed about its political targets -- why, Andrew Sullivan cherry-picks gags from it for his winger readership all the time. But the war seems to have challenged them in this regard, as one can only make so many jokes about stupid protestors and remain hilarious. So the Onion's recent Iraq-related spread, "Operation Piss Off the Planet," has a lot of items that would seem to mock the Bush agenda.

Your basic Onion fan (like this pro-war but reasonable fellow) says that's life and enjoys the jokes. But someone apparently felt the need to redress the balance, and created his own, more conservatively-correct version called The Lemon -- at least, that's the only excuse I can see for aping the format but, instead of parodying the site (as Mad did), just making sure that most of the jokes were about stupid protestors. (Sample headlines: "FOX news condemned for 'Flagrant centrist bias'" and "Saddam praises news coverage of war"). The obligatory Glenn Reynolds shout-out has followed.

As I've written elsewhere, the Right wants American culture and it wants it bad. I would suggest that doing conservative versions of pre-existing cultural artifacts is not the way to go about it -- just as the efforts of some well-meaning folks to find the "liberal Rush Limbaugh" are equally doomed. Culture is made by artists, not rip-off artists.

I expect we'll see an uptick in stridency all across the board as things get uglier here in Nuthouse America. Say, that was pretty strident in itself. See?

ANOTHER DAY IN ANDYLAND: Iraqi forces are fighting hard in Najaf, and Andrew Sullivan observes: "When you're cornered, this is how you fight. But it is also reminiscent of al Qaeda and other Islamist fanatics. The virus has spread far and wide."

Huh? Their country's been invaded, they fight back hard. This is "reminscent" of any army in the same situation.

Pointing out such non-sequiturs these days invites traitor-treatment, which may be why people generally leave them alone. Here's why I can't do that: I notice that, having declared themselves keepers of the Orwell legacy (to throw us off the scent, one imagines), conservatives are using the fog of war as a cover for Orwellian doublethink of the sort I just mentioned. I think it's important to keep a record of this activity -- so that, in days to come, when these guys present even greater offenses to logic as solid fact, and we are inclined to ask ourselves, "Is the world going mad, or is it just me?" we can at least follow the pixel trail back and say, oh, right, this didn't happen overnight -- they've been softening up reality for some time now; if one weren't paying attention, one would not even notice.

Then we can sleep more comfortably in our cells.

OLD SCHOOL: I see Senator Moynihan is dead. Years ago I read an interview with him in Leaders magazine. The interviewer noted that Americans did not have long historical memories -- which observation seemed an cue for the famously tweedy Senator to lament our philistine ahistoricism. But Moynihan said, "That's right, and a good thing, too!" He explained with an anecdote: while touring Northern Ireland, he'd seen spray-painted across a wall the words "REMEMBER 1689!" This is the date of the Siege of Londonderry, an event significant in the endless sectarian struggles of Ireland. That some "street urchin," said Moynihan, could call this date to mind was not a sign of enlightenment, but of bondage to ancient grudges, and he for one was glad that this was much less the case with Americans.

I admire the subtlety of his reasoning. I also admire that he came from Hell's Kitchen but did not, as so many politicians do, exploit his proletarian roots by presenting himself as belly-scratching "man of the people." He wore nice suits and bow ties and spoke like a professor, albeit a jolly, bibulous one. It is amazing to contemplate that voters anywhere at any time would approve a candidate so clearly their intellectual superior. At the same time, he was as capable of muscling pork-barrel projects (like the planned Penn Station revival) through Congress as any dirty-fingernails type.

He was of the old school -- self-invented, but to his own specifications, not those of an image consultant. His kind gets rarer every day.