ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK -- PLEASE! NYC's budget woes have got conservatives going after Bloomberg, and good for them, as I dislike our depraved rich-boy mayor at least as much as they do. But they're also starting to run down New York itself -- or, to be more precise, they're reverting to their traditional loathing of Moscow on the Hudson. Brendan "Save Western Civ!" Miniter lets fly a gob of spit headlined "Apple Without Appeal: High taxes are only one reason to hate New York." Makes ya nostalgic, don't it?

Miniter starts by telling us that "except for the very rich, the quality of life in this city is worse than it should be and far below most of the rest of America." That much is true. Part of the reason is that we send a disproportionate number of tax dollars to the Federal Government so that farmland Republicans can ladle them out amongst their constituents. But this reason Miniter leaves unmentioned.

Miniter does mention rent-controlled apartments -- or, rather "rent-controlled or rent-stabilized" apartments. This conflation is mindful, as it gives Miniter's readers the false impression that a large number of lucky New Yorkers are paying $100 a month for suites at the Plaza, and helps put over the conservative howler that this, not the enforced scarcities of large realtors who sit on vacant apartments, is what makes the rent so high. In truth the rent-controlled tenants are dying out or being hounded out, while most of the rent-stabilized apartments, a sizable group, have been around for so long that renters pay something close to market value for them.

Miniter's no better on prescriptions. Consider this:

...the mayor needs to be looking for ways to reduce the cost of living in the city. A good place to start would be to cut taxes and urge the state Legislature to let rent regulation die when it comes up for renewal next month. But it can't stop there. The city needs more housing and business space. The mayor needs to find ways to encourage more construction. That means taking on powerful and entrenched unions and streamlining construction regulations to scrap union work rules...

Let's see: in order to improve our standard of living, we should cut taxes (which, I hate to tell him, means less money for city services that help define quality of life), let landlords jack up rents (which of them will greet the death of rent stabilization by crying, "Good news -- now I can lower your rent"?), build more apartments (out of what, I wonder, that would make them affordable? Cardboard?), and screw the unions (and the hundreds of thousands for whom they negotiate -- whose quality of life, we must assume, will plummet).

There's nothing wrong with being contrarian or counterintuitive, but when Miniter talks nonsense like this and fails to explain how it's supposed to work, he just sounds like some ivory-tower guy shaking his head at us poor sods and muttering, "Don't they know that landlords are a market force, and must be respected?"

As to the rest of the apartments are so small! I saw a rat in the subway! crap, I've long held that the pussies who can't put up with urban life should fuck off to the suburbs and leave the rest of us in peace.

DON'T YOU KNOW WHO I THINK I AM? At the Voice, Daniel King sticks up for Stanley Crouch, fired from JazzTimes right after it published Crouch's stinging rebuke to white jazz critics -- which rebuke, and Crouch's subsequent claims of persecution, are seconded by King, to wit: "And, we should ask, who are we, white editors and writers, who've appointed ourselves guardians of this year's jazz criticism?" Even Amiri Baraka, a frequent target of Crouch's abuse in the past, sticks up for Crouch, as do honkies Nat Hentoff and Gary Giddins.

My true interest in this is as mild as my interest in contemporary jazz. But Crouch's wounded tone is piquant. He isn't such a hot writer, as anyone who has perused his wan Daily News columns can see. But he is an excellent self-promoter. His is probably the best known (and certainly the most widely-circulated) black critic in America. He actually got the New Yorker to run a long piece on him and his impending first novel, Don't the Moon Look Lonesome (a piece of shit, as it turns out), and he is a frequent TV talking head (he was one of that nightmarish platoon of rotating commentators which 60 Minutes inflicted upon a shocked and disdainful public a few years back).

Given the scarcity of his talent, whence came his popularity? In the 1980s, writing for the Voice, Crouch, theretofore known as a jazz critic, came out in support of Reagan's layoff of striking air traffic controllers, which action broke their union and presaged the general collapse of organized labor in that decade. Crouch thereafter cultivated a harsh, right-wing, get-over-yourself image -- tough on race-baiters, tough on rappers, tough on anyone who would ask for anything, even respect, simply on the basis of what he happened to be. This distinguished him, certainly, and per the law of supply and demand, made him a marketable commodity.

Now Crouch, scourge of the air traffic controllers, says, "That a writer of my status and reputation would be dismissed in this way, with no discussion at all, constitutes some serious brand of injustice..."

Isn't that rich? The self-professed "hanging judge" wishes a stay of execution on the basis of his celebrity. To which I say: That's capitalism, comrade! A column in a magazine is not a Constitutional right or a set-aside program. The editors of JazzTimes had as much right to fire you as -- oh, as Reagan had to can the air traffic controllers.

Surely Crouch isn't going soft on us? No, only on himself.

MAYBE THAT'S WHY THE TIMES DOESN'T WANT HIM. Andrew Sullivan reviews Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars. He pulls this quote on Clinton:

"His mind was filled with great plans: universal healthcare, reducing the federal deficit, investments in education and the environment, cutting crime, remaking the welfare system, ending discrimination, to begin with."

Sullivan's reaction: "To begin with? What on earth would be next? A space colony on Mars?"

Has Sullivan ever recognized a joke that wasn't about cheese-eating surrender monkeys?

LOOK TO YOUR HEART. Two items about writing, sort of, one from a defender of liberty (Atrios) and one from an enemy of same (Andrew Sullivan), both wrong-headed.

Atrios disputes Eric Alterman's sensible statement that Roth's The Human Stain, which draws some inspiration from Clinton's impeachment, is primarily a work of art and not a "political" book. (I haven't read this book -- I address here the general principle.) And Sullivan gives another one of his poseur alerts on a piece of writing that actually isn't bad -- though it is literary, which must infuriate the ceaselessly polemical Sullivan.

People of an overtly political persuasion too frequently suffer from a utilitarian syndrome best expressed by the saying, "If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." Too many of them are true and total apparatchiks: what is the use of this poem or that play, they think as they study texts, if it advance not our agenda?

I can get pretty wrapped up in this bullshit myself. But I know there have to be protected areas where politics doesn't penetrate. Politics is a fire that warms some passions, and burns out others. Historically, art has been more often consumed than warmed by politics (sometimes literally!), so practitioners had better beware.

Brecht did great political drama, but he understood that a recognizable depiction of humanity is the best way to get people to pay attention to anything -- which is why his plays command the attention even of bloated capitalists such as ourselves. I wouldn't be surprised if he, and many other artists with propaganda in their hearts, started out to epater the bourgeois, or smash the state, but were seduced or subsumed by the artistic process itself -- by color, by light, by the joy of the materials, by contact with a force that is ultimately more powerful than politics.

Sir Philip Sidney wrote:

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That the dear she might take some pleasure of my pain,
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe...

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:
"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write."

Sidney was talking about a lover trying to make an amorous, not a political, case (well, by some interpretations, anyway), but you see the connection: putting the goal before the process is great for drafting strategy statements and position papers and such like, where you want to get people to act rather than to understand -- indeed, often these days, to act in defiance of understanding. But this doesn't go for love poems, or any other works of art, which should express and seek to share tender feelings, rather than exploit or manipulate them.

CALL ME 'SCHOOL BULLY,' CLOTH-EARS! Today on Instapundit, the Perfesser suggests that a writer should be "warming a cell" because he gave a cell phone to Osama bin Laden in 1996. (I forget -- was the U.S. still pals with Osama then, or was that a few years earlier?) Further down he reliably snipes at the Times, links to an article on "MALE-BASHING in the media, and in public policy," and shouts, "I HAVE A FRIEND WHOSE LIFE WAS RUINED BY ANNIE HALL. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but not as much of one as it ought to be."

Refresh my memory. Why is this man treated with respect? What's the difference between Glenn Reynolds and Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly?

Oh, yeah: Reynolds knows HTML. And talks about cool gadgets he likes. And occasionally makes libertarian-sounding farts that are about 3 degrees cooler than the ones Jonah Goldberg used to emit before the Santorum and Bennett incidents sent him scrambling back to the Old Standard.

I notice even collegial CalPundit has shown impatience with the Perfesser of late ("Even by his usual standards, this piece by Glenn Reynolds last week was remarkably self-serving..."). By and large, though, bloggers treat Reynolds the way Sidney Falco used to treat J.J. Hunsecker.

"IT'S TIME TO GIVE BARBER SCHOOL ANOTHER TRY! AND THIS TIME, I WON'T JOIN A FRAT!" God bless Moe Siszlak.

WE ARE THE WORLD. Matthew Yglesias observes the good sense of Rich Lowry, a usually intolerable writer (my slur, not MY's), in coming out strong against prison rape.

Well, yes. There are so many gags on TV and in movies about prison rape that any unbiased observer would assume it one of our cultural values. It would be nice if that stopped.

Activists like the late Stephen Donaldson have been working this issue for years, but it's important that conservatives are picking up the standard. Even the impeccably rightwing Washington Times is getting with the program -- as these things go, that's practically a groundswell.

One reason it's important is sheer mass -- the U.S. has an appalling and ever-growing number of prisoners, and both rape and HIV are widespread in the pens. Back in my medical journalism days, I reported on gay barebacking and HIV, and I must say that even a glance at the figures shows that prison rapists are more likely than "gift-givers" to become our equivalent of Central Africa's long-distance truckers in making AIDS numbers go the wrong way.

It's also important because prison rape is cruel, in every sense of the word, including the Founders'. We make a very bad habit of excluding large segments of our population from basic human respect. Prisoners are near the top of that list. I often wonder that so many people seem to believe that whatever happens to jailbirds serves them right -- that the old notion of "paying your debt to society" now includes whatever brutality accompanies it. Even the time-honored American tradition of rooting for the underdog seems to be fading away. We are increasingly the land of the foam "#1" finger, and devil take the hindmost.

Here, then, is an opportunity to get a consensus on the right side for once. When prominent scolds (including Democrats like Judgin' Joe Lieberman) complain about the coarsening of our culture, they usually focus on the behaviors of consenting adults, which alienates liberals and conservatives of a libertarian streak. Of course, both liberals and conservatives of whatever stripe are generally convinced that the guys on the other side don't care about people at all, and both camps have kit-bags full of anecdotes to prove it.

This is sad, because I think most of us -- even fans of invective (guess I should include myself, huh?) -- can agree that there is too much cruelty in the world. The notion that we could make common cause on this issue warms my heart.

Later, we can discuss the sugar-coated poison of the tax cut, evil sodomy laws, draconian bankruptcy bills, the shameful lack of a national healthcare system, and the other just plain evil attributes of the scumbags with whom we will now join hands, briefly.

BUT IT'S NO JOKE, IT'S DOIN' ME HARM. I have just returned from Mother's Day in Bridgeport. I had four hours sleep last night, as I had on each of the previous two nights. As I tried to nap on the train home, a little girl five feet away tooted nonstop on a plastic pennywhistle. Please don't be too hard on anything I write from now till... well, who knows.

A HELL OF A VIENNA. Along 10th Street, very far east, I walked behind four middle-aged Puerto Rican guys. A pretty young girl was walking toward them, then shifted her path to walk diagonally across the street. She was wearing a t-shirt and some sort of muslin pants that billowed a bit from her legs but not from her ass, and the thin fabric strained against it each time she stepped.

The four men did not break stride but turned their heads, then their shoulders, with admirable slowness. This is the patience that comes with age,

One of them made a soft noise, which seemed to me not disrespectful but appreciative.

"Go talk to her," the man next to him said.

The man said nothing and his friend repeated it.

They were wearing grey slacks, all of them, different shades of grey, with a slight flair at the cuff that was raffish in an early-80s way, though the slacks were of a roomier cut than they might have favored back in the day. They wore sport jackets -- one of them, worn by the man who had made the noise, was of mustard yellow leather -- and patterned, button-down shirts.

"She a schoolteacher," said the man in the mustard yellow jacket.

"So?"

"We got nothing in common."

I immediately flashed on this Bukowski poem:

and all of us
getting together later
in pete's room
a small cube of space under a stairway, there we were,
packed in there
without women
without cigarettes
without anything to drink,
while the rich pawed away at their many
choices and the young girls let
them,
the same girls who spit at our shadows as we
walked past.

it was a hell of a
vienna.

3 of us under that stairway
were killed in world war II.

another one is now manager of a mattress
company.

me? I'm 30 years older,
the town is 4 or 5 times as big
but just as rotten
and the girls still spit on my
shadow, another war is building for another
reason, and I can hardly get a job now
for the same reason I couldn't then:
i don't know anything, I can't do
anything...

Boethius found consolation in philosophy while under an unjust sentence of death. For rest of us, if we're lucky enough to have it, there's poetry.

I AM EMBARRASSED TO REPORT I got one wrong in the U.S. Citizenship Test. Twenty-seven Amendments? I thought it was twenty-three. (BTW my fave alternate choice: among the answers for "What ship brought the Pilgrims to America?" was c. Titanic.)

Let's look at the Amendments I overlooked:

AMENDMENT XXIV. Anti-poll tax. Now I am embarrassed.

AMENDMENT XXV. Presidential succession. This came up after Agnew's resignation, then Nixon's. Congress was empowered to create an Act in 1947 that laid out the succession in offices subordinate to the VP's. The bad news is, Rummy's #7.

AMENDMENT XXVI. 18-year-old vote. Fat lot of good it's done us. Though after Vietnam I guess it was necessary.

AMENDMENT XXVII. Congressional raises. This one doesn't go far enough. Had I and my confidant, elementary justice, our way, the Amendment would look more like this.

Most Interesting Amendment: XI. "The action of the Supreme Court in accepting jurisdiction of a suit against a State by a citizen of another State in 1793 provoked such angry reaction in Georgia and such anxieties in other States that at the first meeting of Congress following the decision the Eleventh Amendment was proposed by an overwhelming vote of both Houses and ratified with, what was for that day, 'vehement speed.'" According to the University of Missouri at Kansas City, "The Eleventh Amendment was a response to the Supreme Court's unpopular decision in Chisholm v Georgia, in which the Court ordered Georgia to pay two South Carolina residents a debt the Court found was owed them.  Georgia legislators were so outraged by the decision that the passed a law declaring that anyone who attempted to carrry out the Court's mandate would be hanged with benefit of clergy!" Over time, interpretations of this Amendment expanded to prevent a citizen from citing Federal statutes to sue his own state; this was relaxed a bit in a 1908 case (again per UMKC) when the Supremes determined that "if a state official violated the Constitution he can't be acting on behalf of a state, which can only act constitutionally.  Thus, state officials -- but not states -- might be sued when they violate the Constitution, even when they do so in the name of the state." Later decisions -- even unto the 1990s -- get even murkier ("...Seminole and Printz extended constitutional protection to states sued in their own STATE courts for federal law violations. Clearly, as the Court recognized, this result is not dictated (or even supported) by the language of the Eleventh Amendment.  Instead, the Court concluded that the English common-law notion of sovereign immunity -- reaching even suits against sovereigns in their own courts -- was implicitly adopted by the framers and ratifiers of the Constitution"). In other words, states' rights ain't dead; look for the next comeback tour in a jurisdiction near you.

Fave Amendment: Numero Uno.

WHAT'S TO READ? I spend a lot of time monitoring a small clutch of right-wing sites, but eventually I suppose I will have to establish some more positive blogroll of my own (Ugh! I hate the very sound of the word "blog." Its pronunciation mandates a flaccid facial state, like "blah," or anything in a Shropshire dialect and I don't mean Philip).

For now I will point out a few sites of interest. There's the unclassifiable Mark Shea who calls his site Catholic and Enjoying It! and actually addresses the Caesar v. God issues most of the godly righties overgloss. He likes the abominable Ned Flanders, lately removed from the Bunker to the civic atrocity of Dallas (from whence he sends back to his old stomping ground web pix of his hobbyhorse), but hey, one can agree to disagree when the style and verve run this high.

Speaking of Flanders, the original, fictional one is referenced by this site, one of the "fun" kind I can endorse without hyperglemic shock.

Also Bertram Online is back in session, for some reason with our poor journal on his own list. The content has character.

I would be remiss to overlook Andrew & Sasha, two of the Cool Kids who are for some reason nice to me. To paraphrase Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket, they are silly and foolish, but they have guts, and guts is enough.

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.