HAMLET'S NOBILITY. To think I almost missed Matthew Yglesias' contemplation of Hamlet:

So how come when Hamlet is pondering whether "to be or not to be" he thinks it's relevant to ask "whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles / And by opposing end them?" It seems to me he should just be trying to figure our which option is nobler, not which is "nobler in the mind." Putting the question his way introduces a pretty strange circularity into the debate, since it would appear that he's trying to make up his mind about what the contents of his own mind are. Oh well.

There are some excellent comments on this, many as to what word "nobler" modifies. Here's my two cents:

Hamlet's a student, and enjoys the life of the mind more than the other kind. He prefers the company of his school chum Horatio to anyone else's; when Claudius wants to bamboozle him, he calls in a couple of other philosophy nerds. He doesn't seem to have much of a physical relationship with Ophelia -- the awful Kenneth Branagh version's flashbacks notwithstanding. He writes her nice letters and trades gifts with her. (Polonius worries about it, but he's a sentimental idiot, and seems to be in the play only to represent a sentimental point of view -- which is also why he gets killed first, as I'll explain in a minute.)

Hamlet bitches plenty about the unseemliness of the whole affair -- sex, food, ugh -- but for most of the first act, he doesn't mention the fact that he has a pretty good claim to the throne of Denmark -- not even to observe that he'd be cut to pieces if he challenged Claudius for it.

Prior to the Ghost's revelation to him, he actually plays along with the whole royal scam, though on his own snarky terms. Our image of Hamlet is a little skewed by his great poetry. If the Ghost hadn't showed, no doubt he'd have made a few more catty remarks and then fucked off to Wittenberg. He might even have stuffed himself on the "funeral baked meats that did coldly furnish forth the marriage table" -- he does look fat to someone at the final duel, I recall.

But then, the Ghost. The Ghost is a pretty odd device for Shakespeare to start a play with. He went out of his way to show us other people seeing the Ghost before Hamlet did -- so we wouldn't think it was a private hallucination. Of course, the Ghost only appears to the others -- to Hamlet, it speaks. The Ghost is something men of good will and clear eyesight might see, but it takes a Hamlet to divine meaning from it.

The Ghost changes everything. Hamlet's warning to his friends of an impending "antic disposition" is, I think, a double blind. He won't be faking -- but he wants them to think he will be, so that they will stay out of his way. He has just had a life-changing experience, and he doesn't want any of his buddies second-guessing him or trying to stop him as he visibly suffers the sea-change the Ghost has wrought on him. He knows that even Horatio will be amazed at what he sees him doing ("There are more things in heaven and earth..."), and he wants them to step off -- for he has found a new kingdom now, and it is the Kingdom of Death ("Shall I couple hell?").

They won't understand. They don't. It's amazing how little Horatio understands. Hamlet's sort of embarrassing testimonial to him is, I think, an indirect caution: he's saying, look, you're a nice guy, I like you, so don't bother your noble little head too much about this -- later I'll find a skull, and we can bullshit again, though my part of the conversation may seem a little harsher than usual. When Hamlet is dying, Horatio wants to die, too -- Hamlet stops him and tells him to instead "draw your breath in pain to tell my story." I don't think Hamlet, who a little while earlier was rapping about Caesar as a gob of mud, wants immortality or even fame so much as to keep anyone he cares about from following his example.

Because Hamlet's struggle is private, for all the political implications. His behavior suggests an extraordinarily intelligent suicide: first he puts his close friends at arm's length -- not rejecting them outright, just making sure they don't get in the way. Then he blows off his girlfriend. His first direct kill is the author (first as paternal instructor, then as political manipulator) of Ophelia's childish love-games, Polonius. Hamlet says he thought Polonius was Claudius, but there are no accidents in Shakespeare. It's as if he had to stop up the wellsprings of his own humanity before he could get down to some real blood-eyed killing.

He is about to embark on this crucial phase of his elaborate serial-murder/suicide when he gives the speech in question. He talks about conscience, but what is that to Hamlet? What action is he seen to take that is not all about naked self-interest (not interest in his own life, but in his own mind's life, his ideas), but for the offhand shielding of Horatio? (Hamlet only spares his mother because the Ghost commands him to.)

A lot of people think the "To be or not to be" speech means Hamlet is unsure that he's doing the right thing -- that he'll be damned ("What dreams may come") if he goes through with the self-slaughter. The question seems to be answered later, when he takes a cue from a battle march -- "the imminent death of ten thousand men" (I am quoting from imperfect memory here) for a meaningless patch of land -- and declares "my thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth." But this is not so much an answer as an excuse. He looks for excuses everywhere, even in a player's tears for a legendary Hecuba. Hamlet never answers the big questions for us -- only for himself. He even talks of a "spur" for his "dull revenge." Dull like a knife? Or dull like uninteresting -- something so dull he has to talk himself into it?

To even use these sorts of definitions, of course, is reductive. Hamlet speaks verse, mostly. His flights of poetry have intellectual integrity of their own -- but, unlike the poems of jealousy and ambition spoken by Othello and Macbeth, they are very difficult for those of us out here in the audience to apply to the smaller versions of those grand passions from which we ourselves suffer. To what is "To be or not to be" or "O that this too too solid flesh would melt" or "How all occasions do inform against me" applicable in our own lives except suicide?

When I studied drama, we were told that an actor can't just muck around with feelings -- one had to find an intention for actions (and speech is an action) that directed them, gave them focus. If you think of Hamlet as someone who wants to avenge his father, he seems pretty ridiculous (There's Claudius! I could kill him now! But he's praying! Naah -- that's not vengeful enough!). If you think of him as someone who wants to kill himself -- not in the small, pathetic way a world-weary clerk might, but in the fullest, most exalted manner of a world-class tragic hero -- it's a bit easier.

As regards Yglesias' question, I think the nobility refers to the suffering. Hamlet is laying the groundwork for his final exit, and the job is always mentally harder in the planning stages than at the coup de grace. Nobility is a real thing to the student prince -- but, like all high standards, something that can prove most fluid in meaning when you have a fixed goal in mind and the justification just isn't lining up right with the intent. A few scenes earlier, the Everlasting, Hamlet freely admitted, fixed his canon 'gainst self-slaughter, now, it's Conscience doth make cowards of us all -- and conscience seems to consist of worries over bad dreams that might never go away: a child's vision of hell. A few acts later, it won't even be that.

No wonder he seems a little cooler than Othello, Coriolanus, Macbeth, or Brutus -- next to Hamlet's, their respective poetries seem like vivid reports on where their desires have led them. They are partly outside themselves when they speak their soliloquies, commenting on their own actions and emotions, or telling us how much these have made them suffer. But Hamlet, younger and more impetuous (if that's the word) than the other tragic heroes, is making up his mind right in front of us. Which may be why we think so little about what he's making up his mind to do.

OR, TO PUT IT ANOTHER WAY.. Vincent Cannato worries that New York City may turn out a bad choice for the 2004 GOP Convention after all. Well, yes, I think so too, but only if the TV cameramen insist on showing the riots outside the Javits Center or wherever they wind up holding this blood feast.

As expected, the reader comments on the article are entertaining. One Buddy Larsen of Blanco, Texas writes, "Down here in the deep south... Most of us generally disdained the city during it's high crime B.G. (before Giuliani) era... Then Ronald Reagan started drying out the national fever swamp, and as usual the city vaulted out front, concentrating and personifying the good trends, and as a result everybody soon loved New York again... We forgave you, NYC, that disgraceful Hillary back-slide, and when you took (and magnificently overcame) the barbarian surprise attack, then for all America the deal was sealed, even down here in Dixie, New York City became the citadel of America. So. please, don't screw it up all over again..."

I do not know how to reach Mr. Larsen directly, but if he's reading this (as millions do every day!), I would like to tell him: while it is always nice to be appreciated, our self-respect has never been dependent upon the goodwill of rubes. If you think we need to be forgiven our electoral choices, lest we should lose the great emotional (and scant financial) largesse you poured forth after September 11, let me assure you that your self-esteem is grotesquely overinflated. To prosper or even survive in this tough town, we do what we have to do, not what we think would be pleasing to the suburban bacon-cheeseburgermeister.

And I hardly see how you have room to talk, as I understand that, thanks in large part to the actions of your former Governor, Texas is running a little low on funds herself -- many of your municipalities are experiencing surprisingly high property taxes, and the state is considering legalized gambling, higher traffic fines, and even a tax on advertising to address the problem.

But we won't tell you your business or presume to give you advice. Not because we're circumspect, but because we don't give a shit about you. We know you don't really give a shit about us either -- but the difference is, you like to pretend that you do, for some reason, before telling us what a bunch of screw-ups you think we are.

Maybe that's your style -- denunciations masked in honey. It's a good one, as far as such things go; we admire it.

Here's our style: Fuck you.

HA VS. HA. Jonah Goldberg (what, him again?) compains that when Maureen Dowd reports on the Ali G show, she only mentions incidents in which Republicans are made to look foolish. "Annoying and gratuitously cheap," he sniffs. "If her point was that only Republicans look stiff and silly on the show, she's making her self look lame and foolishly [sic]."

Meanwhile, in the same fucking edition of NRO, one Laurie Morrow, ostensibly reviewing a book about laughter, talks about all the funny things in the world she can think of -- "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," anti-French jokes, lawsuits that made FDR and the ACLU look silly...

Congratulations, you figured it out. Liberals think they're never ridiculous, and conservatives think they're never ridiculous. The big difference, though, is that the latter looooove to complain about how self-righteous the former are.

It may just be, however, that Goldberg doesn't read his own magazine, which would be perfectly understandable.

A FREE SOUL. My, Jonah Goldberg spends a lot of time parsing the Bill Bennett case ("I did say that Bennett gambled too much... I do think Bennett did the right thing announcing he will stop gambling. Why? Because he got caught"). I should have thought JG and his ilk would have let this horseman pass by. But no, they worry it like dog worries a small, dead animal.

As previously noted, I couldn't give a shit about Bennett. More interesting to me is Goldberg, the spokesmodel for woo-hoo conservatism, trying to simultaneously play Right-wing scold and rover boy. It's a line he's been dancing along for years now, and it apparently doesn't get any easier. Being the Bluto of NRO's Animal House is a gig he enjoys, but he stiffens up whenever he has to pay obeisance to Niedermeyers like Bennett, Santorum, et alia.

As I have pointed out before, painting conservativism as the fun side of the street is a dicey proposition. As the country's war-fever abates, the Goldbergs would like to be viewed as Good-Time Charlies, as opposed to those dour liberals who make you act nice to black people and so forth. But they are also compelled by tradition (and by watchdog groups glaring over their shoulders) to denounce (for where would conservatives be without their denunciations?) misbehaviors as anti-American (especially if you "get caught"). How trying it must be for them.

As for myself, I'm a horrible person. I smoke, drink, and fornicate. And I thank God I don't have to pretend otherwise for fear of alienating certain constituencies.

THE BIG CON. "Iraqi museums pillaged after the war were looted by organized thieves who knew exactly what they wanted and may have already taken priceless items out of the country, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft said Tuesday....'From the evidence that has emerged, there is a strong case to be made that the looting and theft of the artifacts were perpetrated by organized criminal groups criminals who knew precisely what they were looking for,' Ashcroft said..." -- ABC News.

Alright, you mugs, we're in Baghdad. Now here's the deal. We blend in with the citizens, see, and then, when the time is right, I'll give a whistle, and we hit the Museum! Big Swede, here's your bronzer. Gimpy, if anyone asks, you lost that foot in one of Saddam's torture camps, not a liquor store hold-up. Now, ya all gotta act Iraqi, too. Lemme see ya look terrified... not good enough. (Bunker buster explodes nearby) That's better.

But, Boss, when it's time to hit the museum, da whole stinkin' country will be in chaos! How do we beat all them crazy Iraqis to the swag?

Nuthin' to it, Squirrelly! I just bought me a map of Saddam's secret passageways. Cost me two Hershey bars, but it was worth it! (Exhibits map, which has many dotted lines and x's) This here tunnel leads from Fayed's Chess Parlor right into the Museum! Yeah, turns out the Big Cheese liked to contemplate them antiquities, and how. But he didn't like nobody there with him, see! Why, one time a guard walked in on him, and Saddam fed him into this great big blender specially built for choppin' guys up.

No!

Yeah! And you know who made the blender? Braun, that's who!

Lousy Germans! But, Boss, once we got the loot, how do we get it outta the country?

I got that figured too, Stinky. Turns out these tunnels go all the way outta the country -- to Paris, Berlin and Moscow, even! Then we'll take the haul to the big museums them lousy, stinkin' Europeans got over there -- and they'll pay a pretty penny for this Mesopotamian stuff -- believe you me!

Say, Boss, maybe we'll catch up with that bird Saddam in one of them tunnels -- wouldn't that be sweet!

Don't get your hopes up, Crazy!

Can ya believe it, Boss -- a bunch of mugs like us pullin' off the biggest art heist in recorded history!

Not me, brother -- but some people will believe anything!

THE WAGERS OF SIN, or: Sluts & Slots. Jonah Goldberg seems personally stung by the reports of William Bennett's gambling. No, not stung that America's Scold likes slot machines -- according to JG, he doesn't know the guy very well. No, Goldberg's stung that somebody told the world about Bennett's gambling, and that others are having a good laugh over it.

The pre-eminent cackle here is that NRO's writers can sling sneers with the worst of us, so are ill-positioned to complain that Mr. Virtue has been treated roughly. (Wanna hear about Mrs. Kerry's ambiguous remark? Ramesh has the poop!)

This is really just petty politics, and in the main I could not give a shit. I knew Bennett was an asshole before, and that hasn't changed. Though I do find him a little more interesting now that he has betrayed this Dostoyevskian streak.

As for Goldberg, his column on this is another one of those long strands of taffy he regularly emits, with many weak spots. Best part is when he defends Bennett with Madonna: "Not to put too fine a point on it: She was a slut ... Of course, Madonna can afford her sins. She says she can 'handle' motherhood while at the same time bragging that she's never changed a diaper. Well, Bennett can afford his sins, too." I wonder how Bennett will take this Rich Slut Defense. Come to think of it, I wonder how Madonna will take it.

SNEERED WITH A BEARD. Dennis Miller in the Wall Street Journal:

I empathize with Mr. Mailer in one regard, though. Although he's clearly abdicated the lucid throne, it must be hellish for someone who can still arrange words so beautifully--i.e., "the question will keen in pitch"--to wake up every morning and have it slowly dawn on him that he's effectively been rendered totally irrelevant.

Well, if by "totally irrelevant," you mean holding several Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards, and having to occasionally endure the disrespect of a Monday Night Football color man -- yes, the burden must be awful. But somehow I think the man will cope.

It's interesting that much of Miller's invective is about Mailer being unhip: "more out of the loupe than a jeweler with conjunctivitis," "18-year-olds who mistakenly think Mr. Mailer wrote 'Gravity's Rainbow,'" "kinda hot for a few minutes in the '60s," etc. And the part that isn't about Mailer's low cool factor is just straight-up "but seriously, folks," followed by no seriousness.

That's the problem when you get funnymen to do commentary. They think Friars' Club schtick is an argument. Well, these days it is. (See the Kurtz item below. Or just look around.)

WELCOME TO REALITY. Stanley Kurtz stumbles into a point that I have been making for months:

The blogosphere offers a welcome antidote to the safety and blandness of the academy. But sometimes the failings of the blogosphere show why we developed those academic conventions of respect in the first place. Under the guise of rough and tumble frankness, the blogosphere risks turning into a society of like-minded partisans congratulating themselves on being smarter than all the idiots who see things differently....

Of course Kurtz only got to this place because he wrote something that did not flatter the prejudices of NRO's libertarian-leaning readers, and some of them have e-mailed him the kind of retorts that go over a treat in the land of the Big Snarl.

This stands in hilarious contrast to something Kurtz said last May:

Liberals live for the idea that they're saving the world from the racial, religious, and sexual bigotry of conservatives. Yet, looking at the conservative web, I am continually amazed at the fellowship across all of these potential divides...

This conjures a vision of convivial Free Republic / Reason mixers, the weed-legalizer laying down with the sodomite-hunter. I wonder if he ever actually believed it. Some folks apparently do need to be mugged by reality. As to whether Kurtz will long remember the lesson, I would not lay down money.

THE LESSEN(ING) OF HISTORY. Matthew Yglesias cites a scare-stat at CNN of the sort meant to make citizens cry, "We must have meaningless national tests so we can make believe we're serious about education!"

MY says, "When you think about it: So what? If 40 percent of college seniors don't know the dates of the Civil War and America's still the richest, most powerful country on earth, doesn't this just go to show that it's not very important if a significant minority of the population doesn't know when it happened."

That could be disputed -- you might say that essential historical facts, like "Columbus sailed the ocean blue/In Fourteen Hundred and Ninety-Two," are cultural totems that help bind nations together psychologically. (This is dangerously close to a Peggy Noonan idea, but I'm not disqualifying it on those grounds, believe it or not. Also, Noonan believes in teaching lies as a way of inducing patriotism -- "A person in Hollywood might say, 'Wait, it’s good their love of country isn’t based on a lack of realism.' But I’ve never seen any kind of love that lasted without a little lack of realism" -- wheras the facts are good enough for me.)

Yglesias does have a good point about Civil War education: "What worries me about America's historical ignorance is that there seem to be large numbers of people who don't understand that the Civil War was, fundamentally, about slavery."

Well, yes. And if it might help if the Republican base were down with this program as well. Unfortunately, a trawl through Free Republic shows that many of their heads are in a dissimilar place when it comes to the Lost Cause. ("Hey .. thanks for the reminder. I'll have to go have a beer for John Wilkes Booth Appreciation day... Lincoln was Lenin 50 years early, and a Marxist as well.")

In regard to our historical amnesia, as with much else, you have to ask: who benefits? Recently some folks were comparing the Iraq adventure to the Spanish-American War. Many readers, I'm sure, asked: The What-What War? And if we won, how could it be bad? Even much more recent history is hard for us: We currently have a hit song explicitly tying Saddam Hussein to the World Trade Center attacks.

I'm not paranoid -- I don't think this is all the result of propaganda. I just don't think people are paying attention. Still, the thought occurs to me that maybe we don't teach good history because its results are less reliable than those of ignorance.

MORE FUN WITH STUPID SHIT.



Yeah, but who knew "The Wolf" can't spell?

PHYSIOLOGY FOR FUCKUPS. I got to ride the bike a lot this weekend, as a means of transportation to and from social events, and of course half the time I rode it shitface drunk. Along with the remarkable fact that I am not dead, it is notable that the effort of riding was only slightly more challenging while my body was supersaturated with alcohol than when it was not, and that I expect I received the same aerobic and anaerobic benefit in either case. Also, strong drink relieves both the tedium of urban bike travel over long distances and the fear of collision with the many motorized vehicles that I encountered along the way.

If I ever can afford another gym membership, I expect to have a few belts before each workout session. I find the Nautilis an existential ordeal when sober; surely drunkeness will make the "reps" more tolerable. Maybe I also will fill one of those plastic squeeze-bottles one finds in such environments with vodka and limes. It certainly won't make me smell any worse than the water-guzzling clients. Maybe they'll think it's cologne.

The only trick will be not falling asleep in the steam room.

Hey, how come I can't straighten out my legs?

HOW SPIN WORKS, #5,962. The Perfesser notices this Homeland Security outrage against a Lucent employee, reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Georgia Bureau of Investigation special agent John Lang, who was assigned as a threat analyst to the Department of Homeland Security, saw the memo and decided making note of the information was not enough. He called the gun shop owner and told him about the memo concerning his employee. Wynn was fired...

The Perfessor follows up with the appropriate objective correlative:

Funny that we haven't heard more about this case, while we've heard so many cries of "McCarthyism" when all that was involved was criticism of Tim Robbins.

You don't think it's all political, do you?

I was going to point out that Tim Robbins is a persistent critic of the Bush Administration, which created the Homeland Security Department, but two things occured to me: first, that you surely knew that, and secondly, that we have entered a realm in which even the most obvious facts are irrelevant, so long as prominent propagandists are careful to associate every bad thing that happens with their enemies, no matter how tenuous or even plain absurd the connection.

Of course, you probably knew that too.

So why do I even bother?

Ya got me, pal.

HEIR TO THE LAURELS OF WASHINGTON, JEFFERSON, AND LINCOLN.... From Reuters:

At United Defense Industries, Bush made clear the military is still a top priority. He sat in a computer simulator of a fighting vehicle, touching the controls to fire off a simulated round, making a loud computer-generated explosion.

"That is not a backfire," he said over his shoulder to reporters. He went on to blast two "tanks," watching intently as one burst into flames.

Jimmy Carter used to talk about "a government as good as its people." Unless there are a lot more retarded, sociopathic X-box addicts out there than I know about (and there very well may be), I'd say we're getting rooked.

DUDS LOBBED FROM THE WEST COAST. This guy in California points to this guy in California, in a coordinated attack on New York legend Jimmy Breslin.

Guy #2, one Hinkle, claims Breslin "energetically supported the smoking ban" under which we suffer. Where does he get that? I can't find any citation, and it certainly rings dissonant with the lifelong rover-boy behavior of Breslin himself. (Might Hinkle be thinking of Albany County Executive and anti-smoking zealot Michael Breslin?)

Or maybe Breslin made a joke about it and Hinkle misapprehended. He doesn't seem to get Breslin in the main. In the article Hinkle does quote, Breslin affects to favor a ban on dogs. This is something he's done before, and to those of us who enjoy his work, it is obviously a joke, a way of filling the column inches on lazy days, a bagatelle. Yet Hinkle takes him quite seriously, in fact calls him "demented," says he "went over the lid" (? Is that California slang? Will I see it on sitcoms soon?)

I suspect they're really after JB for his continued production of articles like this, which are not about dogs, but about the kind of people some people treat like dogs.

ARE YOU THE CREATOR OF 'HI & LOIS'? BECAUSE YOU ARE MAKING ME LAUGH. I've been watching The Simpsons all these years and never knew that the Comic Book Guy's real name was Jeff A. Taylor.

WHY WE WRITE. It was a hard dollar today at the pro writing gig. Lots of effort, editing, talking about it, acting on it, and even conflict. And when I got home I sat down and wrote some more.

Not steadily. I can't do this kind of thing steadily. I watched TV, fed the cats, read the paper. Then I sat down and wrote some more.

Afterwards I trawled the web and read other writers, some of whom I don't really like, for political or personal reasons. But all of them who kept doing it kept getting better.

And that's why I keep doing it. Because the thing about it is, if you keep doing it, you get better, whether you deserve to or not.

THE MOTHER OF ALL PHOTO OPS. This Bush trip is hilarious. First, the dramatic arrival in a flight suit. Then the speech, delivered to a thoroughly dependable live audience and bound to transmit the image of a leader whose troops are loyal, and consisting entirely of boilerplate, punctuated by the helpful pull-quotes at the bottom of the screen, to which we have become accustomed and perhaps dependent. The high, singing sound that undertones the silences is thoroughly appropriate, resembling as it does the hum of a great machine.

"These 19 months that changed the world..." No argument there. "These attacks declared war on the United States and war is what they got." They and a few others. "Any outlaw regime..." Well, that's a pretty open writ -- and in some ways an exclusive one, if you come to think of it (as the Saudis have). "Afghanistan, Iraq, and a Peaceful Palestine..." That last country I haven't seen -- when was it chartered? "Al Qaeda is wounded, not destroyed... the enemies of freedom are not idle... we will continue to hunt down the enemy before he can strike... the war on terror is not over, nor is it endless." At last, some news! "Americans, after battle, want nothing more than to return home, and that is your direction tonight." Boy -- talk about givin' 'em what they want! "150 babies were born while their fathers were on the Lincoln." Aww. "The highest calling of history... wherever you go, you carry a message of hope... 'To the captives come out, and those in darkness be free.'"

That last bit is from Isaiah, calling to mind another passage from the same book: "To what purpose [is] the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the LORD: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats. When ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand, to tread my courts? Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; [it is] iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear [them]. And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood."

Spoilsport Tom Brokaw points out that no connection has been established between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein. Surely NBC, like all who are not with us but against us, will be punished.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE. I thought at first this San Diego Union-Tribune headline was for a political column -- but it's actually about the Kentucky Derby:

"Empire Maker is heavy favorite, but Peace Rules bears watching"

THROUGH PLAYING GAMES. Andrew Sullivan gives a nod to Tech Central Station columnist James D. Miller, who says "avoidable information externalities" explain why, contra Santorum, legalized sodomy doesn't pave the way for legalized incest, and that you can accept the former without accepting the latter. On the one hand, he says,

....whenever incest occurs it creates an informational externality that makes it more rational for relatives to misinterpret non-sexual affection for amorous advances. Incest between consenting adults therefore harms society and consequently is not just a private affair.

Whereas:

Homosexuality can also create informational externalities, but these externalities are unavoidable and so do not provide a justification for criminalizing gay sex.

Also, "Criminalizing gay sex... would not reduce the number of homosexuals and would thus not decrease the probability of someone thinking any given heterosexual man was gay," he says.

It's not his purpose I question, but his argument. I don't know anything about game theory, but I don't think that's why I had a hard time following his logic.

People interpret or misinterpret gestures of affection all the time based on their experience, not social codes. In fact, while Miller says that "In a world in which incest is taboo and rare most people won't interpret a hug from a relative as a sign of sexual interest," I'm guessing that it's the rarity rather than the taboo that causes Niece Becky to interpret Uncle Joe's big, warm hug as avuncular rather than lecherous. And there are nieces who would take their uncle's hug as lecherous. Some uncles are, indeed, leching, and some nieces are damaged by prior experiences that would make them shudder at even an innocent, familial touch.

There are potent taboos, as well as laws, against the sexual abuse of children, and given the negative attention given to cases of such abuse in recent years, we can assume these taboos are stronger, not weaker, than before. But that didn't help the Ameraults and Kelly Michaels, whose insane prosecutions on bogus molestation charges were famously debunked by Dorothy Rabinowitz. These colossal "misinterpretations" were not the result of any weakening of the taboos. In fact, you could argue that they were caused by an obsession with them.

Again, Miller's heart is in the right place, but I don't think the slide-rule approach strengthens his case. In a way, I think his approach makes the argument against sodomy laws more abstruse and difficult.

A lot of the Santorum-centric discussion I've been reading has been about the harm to society, or lack thereof, of gay sex. I take that point as irrelevant, because to a large extent societies police themselves on that score.

It's certainly that way here. Few would dispute that American society is more comfortable now with gay people than it was twenty years ago. (That's why this discussion is hot -- maybe why it's taking place at all.) You couldn't say this development was caused by laws or taboos -- unless you were strongly against tolerance of gay people. Then you might argue that the sexual revolution, Roe v. Wade, Will & Grace, etc., were among those "informational externalities" that have weakened the nation's moral fiber and sent us hurtling down the road to Gomorrah. And you might, within that argument, call for strengthening those taboos by retaining laws against sodomy.

In other words, Miller and Sullivan are playing on the Right's turf. They're accepting the premise that morality is, and should be, as enforcible by law as utility, but raising a wan demurrer: that the externality represented by the homosexual state is "unavoidable," and thereby protected from the terms of that premise. Next, of course, someone will argue with "unavoidable," and we're off to the races again.

Like I said, I don't know about game theory, but I do perceive that sodomy laws do not protect as many real people as they harm, and I'm against them. And I'm frankly more respectful of the counter-argument that these laws give prosecutors extra leverage in convicting rapists than I am of most arguments based on anyone's theory. Because at least that argument's happening on planet Earth.

CHANGED MY MIND. I don't feel bad for Andrew Sullivan anymore. The Santorum interval is now apparently over for all good wingers: The Times reports, "Republican Lawmakers Back Senator in Gay Dispute," and records lovely quotes from Sullivan's partner-in-diversity, Tom DeLay ("It is very dangerous to say that whatever you do behind closed doors is your right to privacy... It undermines a lot of moral questions that we have in this country"). Sullivan appears to be down with the program.

Sullivan's prior angst over the Santorum thing has burned out, as seen in these recent and pathetic comments. He is so shit-out-of-luck in his search for companionable conservatives on sexual privacy issues that he commends as "very sane" James Taranto's extremely (and I mean extremely) lukewarm endorsement of gay civil rights. (Sample Taranto quote: "Many religious Americans are horrified by the symbolism of allowing same-sex couples to marry... Simply to sweep aside such concerns, as the advocates of same-sex marriage seek to do, would be arrogant and contrary to the spirit of American pluralism." Taranto also calls Bowers v. Hardwick "a politically wise ruling.")

Andrew Sullivan, who frequently says Democrats are insufficiently attentive to gay rights, is now reduced to running a geiger-counter over OpinionJournal columnists, looking for trace elements of tolerance.

He has also turned his attention to a whole host of other topics, among them the recent Conquest (which makes him giddy), dragons (which make him roar!), and "male hating" feminists -- which makes him what he's always been: a complete tool who, having perfected a good Bircher imitation to curry favor with his radical right audience, affects not to notice when he is rewarded with the back of their hand.