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.

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.

HUH?



Someone's been reading my mail!

FAILING THE ECLECTIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST. Sasha Castel has posted what I would call a Libertarian Purity Test. Most of the hot buttons are there, from gun ownership to abortion.

It's a great service and has inspired interesting comments. Let me share with you an internal response of my own that, were I actually responding to the quiz, I have a hunch I'd supress for a reason I'll explain later:

While I could give quick agreement to the first five items (yeah, even the guns), on the issue of education I am torn. I want to say yes to an uninfringed right to "educate my children according to my personal values." (I assume everyone does that anyway -- in most cases, with beatings and drunken mockery.) But part of me also feels that a public school system is a good idea, as a means of promulgating the minimal socialization and life skills necessary to keep us from turning into Lord of the Flies West, and that such a system cannot survive without a certain small but real amount of coercion. (Face it -- if school were optional, do you doubt that school attendance would drop to levels that would make the system unsustainable?)

Now, we could argue that point for hours, but I want to focus here on my own reaction. In my heart of hearts I wanted to get all the answers "right." And that's not such a bad thing. Like most people -- really -- I want Certain Inalienable Rights not only for myself, but for others -- everyone else, in fact -- because I understand that my own would not be safe without theirs.

Yet I find myself pulling back on that one issue. And I'm a little ashamed to admit it. Why? Because, let's face it, it's cool to be a libertarian -- so cool that even the guys at NRO pretend to swing that way (especially their resident frat-boy -- except, of course, when he's pretending to be contrarian-authoritarian). Maximum freedom is much more exciting and attractive than the sober, somber, on-the-other-hand-ism of the sort drearily embodied by most Presidential candidates.

Now, I'm going to fade to black on this shot of my hand hesitating over the levers next to Question Six, because what I think doesn't matter so much (no applause, please) as the instinct I described. Is it that I'm afraid of freedom (quick "YES!" from the LP guys), or is it that I'm afraid of purity?

Yes, purity. Let's say it's 1793. We're in France. We took the Tennis Court Oath. So we're old-school and totally down with the Revolution. We have watched with pleasure as all traces of the old tyranny are obliterated -- even the unfortunate but necessary regicide. In for a penny, in for a pound, we say -- no half measures for us. Then they start whispering against our friends. Next it's their heads on the blocks. Next, maybe ours...

This is not a fantasy against liberty, or even against the French Revolution, but against absolutism and its inevitable companion: momentum. What was the big difference between the French Revolution and ours? (Don't say "Frenchmen," please.) I think it was that we had a lot more pushback going against us -- and I don't mean the Redcoats. I mean we appreciated the old order (good, British order!), and the institutions they gave us (and largely maintained afterwards). But we also appreciated liberty, and decided with not a little sadness that circumstances demanded we sue for it, so we had to back away from some of our own best instincts in order to inaugurate a revolution. This made us, in a weird way, circumspect about our new prize of liberty -- whereas the French, bless them, went apeshit.

I'm not suggesting Nick Gillespie and Jacob Sullum will cheerfully wade through bloody gutters come the Revolution. I just mean that something about the Libertarian trip makes me nervous. It's not so much a politics as a creed, of the all-or-nothing sort -- You want the right to anal sex? Well, then you must not interfere with my right to charge dying Africans for water!

In general I think going "all the way" is a great thing on a personal level and a disastrous thing on a political level. But who knows: maybe you know a Messiah somewhere whose program will fix everything if I only follow Him to the ends of the earth. By all means write and let me know.

BALM IN MUDVILLE. The Mets suck so bad, they put the fact on the front page of the Times.

To brighten the day of fans who are true to the Orange and Blue (I know, it's an old song), I commend yesterday's New York Daily News, where the excellent David Hinckley writes about Ralph Kiner, the Hall of Famer and somewhat dim Mets color commentator whose relationship to the English language rather matches the historic relationship between the Mets and success: mostly dysfunctional, sometimes spectacularly so, but glorious and sweet when it works.

PERMALINKS. I think they work now. I got lazy about "republishing." I'm not used to WYSIWYG tools like this -- I code like I do everything else: hard!

GIMME SOME TRUTH. Interesting take on the WMD question from, of all people, Sgt. Stryker, who is generally as hardline on Iraq as they come. He starts out predictably enough:

Not even France claimed that Saddam didn't possess chemical weapons. Their contention was that UN inspectors backed by U.S. Forces in Kuwait (at U.S. taxpayer expense I might add) was enough to contain Saddam. No one on the Security Council then seriously believed that Saddam had disarmed, and I still don't.

But then the worm of doubt creeps in:

Something is not adding up here. Why would the Iraqis fail to account for tons of nerve agents and other chemical weapons, and then in the late 90's secretly destroy them? It would be in Saddam's vested interests to have destroyed any weapons in full view of the world, thus removing our primary cause for invasion. I mean, why comply with the UN accords without telling the UN about it? If Saddam had disarmed in secret, then having done so must go down in history as one of the stupidest, most self-defeating acts in history.

The whole point of the weapons inspectors was not to find banned weapons, but to verify the voluntary destruction of said weapons by Iraq. I'm suspicious that some sort of geo-political game or grand-deception is being played out here, exactly what I'm not sure yet.

It does seem strange, doesn't it? It would also seem strange that, having allegedly amassed weapons that were a clear and present danger to civilization itself, Saddam didn't use any of them as his country was overrun by enemy forces. Wouldn't the invasion of one's capital be an umistakable cue to break out the mustard gas?

I haven't heard a satisfying explanation for any of this, either. Some people, of course, are more easily satisfied, and they appear to be carrying the day, public-opinion wise.

I had dinner tonight with a friend who had been reading through some Lyndon LaRouche stuff. My reaction was, look, even if the guy is onto something, without a sackful of extremely hard evidence, as opposed to instincts and inductive reasoning, he can't ever bring us clarity -- he'll only bring us a heightened paranoia that exacerbates any problem he might have wanted to solve.

It's a sad state of affairs when most people with any brains simply take for granted that the Administration can't be trusted -- more sad, even, than the eagerness of many other people, some with brains, to take whatever this Adminstration says without even the tiniest grain of salt. The way things are going, between a fucked-up economy and a fucked-up Middle East, a lot of people will start wondering how the hell it came to this, and unless someone in a position of responsibility starts dishing out some truth, the voices that will come roaring out of the demos will make LaRouche sound like Hubert Humphrey.

MORNING EYE-OPENER.I shouldn't even be picking on WordNetDaily columnists -- half the time I think the site is composed by a bunch of playful liberals who want to give their buddies something to rage on -- but today's Doug Powers column about the Dixie Chicks really screams to have some air let out.

First, some basic fact-checking. "Sales of [the Dixie Chicks'] CD's have plummeted" since Natalie Maines made her infamous comments about Bush, says Powers. Plummeted? Last week they were number one on the Billboard Country chart, and this week they're number three -- respectable numbers for alleged pariahs.

"For some reason," says Powers, "with musicians and actors, 'artist' is the only career in which you should be allowed to open your blithering yapper free of consequence." This is rich coming from a guy whose career is based on such unfettered use of his own yapper. Why do so many of these spouters get mad when celebrities spout off? Is it the traditional jealously of the scrivening idealogue, convinced of his righteousness yet forced to admit that more people know what Alec Baldwin feels about global warming than he does?

As inevitably happens when conservatives talk about women, things get creepy toward the end:

Maybe the Dixies will understand what I'm talking about when they're waiting tables at Denny's, opining on current events to a customer who will probably respond to them in a way similar to how America did: "Yeah, yeah, whatever. Can we get some more ketchup over here, Natalie."

The Dixie Chicks are learning the hard way that, just like the guy at table 8, their fans just wanted some ketchup. In both cases, it'll be reflected in their tip.

I don't care much about the Dixie Chicks, but guys who think tipping is a way to wield power are assholes. And guys who fantasize about powerful women reduced to serving them burgers should put up a suitable ad at alt.com rather than unveiling their kink in political columns.

(Hm, that worked out my sleep-stiffened technique some, yet I don't feel really warmed up. Maybe I should try jogging.)

JOBLESSNESS AS HOLIDAY. Mr. Downs pointed me to an article from today's NYT, "Jobless and Hopeless, Many Quit the Labor Force," by Monica Davey with David Leonhardt:

PITTSBURGH, April 26 — Worn down by job searches that have stretched on for
months, demoralized by disappointing offers or outright rejections, some
unemployed people have simply stopped the search.

As the nation enters a third year of difficult economic times, these
unemployed — from factory workers to investment bankers — have dropped out
of the labor force and entered the invisible ranks of people not counted in
the unemployment rate...

"There aren't any jobs, just not any," Mr. Jacobs said. "I had been waiting
it out. I thought there was a strong possibility that I'd get recalled to
the plant, or I'd get something else, anything that paid at least $10 an
hour. But it turns out there is nothing. It's a dead-end street"...

Over the last two years, the portion of Americans in the labor force — those
who are either working or actively looking for work — has fallen 0.9
percentage points to 66.2 percent, the largest drop in almost 40 years.

The story isn't a total downer. (Who'd read it if it were? Only those who hate America!) Some of the folks interviewed by the Times have responded to the job dearth by going back to school or starting their own businesses ("Still, Mr. Guido said he was pleased to be back in school, learning about
things he cares about, and relieved to be on campus, far away from the
struggle to find a job...").

I can imagine a lot of readers will look at that and say, "See? Joblessness isn't so bad. You can always get your Ph.D., or become an entrepreneur, with the 50 grand you have stashed in your sock drawer."

But what if you don't have any capital for these kinds of activities, and can't get any? What if you actually, like, need a job? I know these days we all like to think of ourselves as economic superheroes, swimming in options -- look at all the financial services companies who advertise in prime time to that demographically desirable group of Americans that can afford to play around with their money (while the high-interest, last-chance moneylenders advertise late at night, when the economically stressed citizens are insomniacally flipping through the channels).

Still, the need to keep food on the table -- and creditors from seizing your car -- is a present, crushing reality for millions of people. With the stock bubble burst, the job market imploding, and the rate-cutting increasingly desperate and laughable, how many people are actually out there anymore that can say, "Ah, well, no jobs this year -- guess I'll study Engineering"?

From what I've seen and experienced over the past few years, we've got a growing number of people who, with all the will in the world, can't make ends meet, and a shrinking but still considerable number of people who are blocking this fact out -- because who wants to worry about the joblessness bogey-man coming after them?

Human nature being what it is, I suspect this latter group will go denying the problem, until the other group gets big enough to wake them up with a few electoral thunderclaps.

THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT. Now here's something that might just save Broadway:

One scene in the performance, by Spanish troupe La Fura Dels Baus, in which an actress appears to perform oral sex on a man from the audience, provoked outrage.

But co-producer and co-writer Carlos Padrissa hit back: "The production serves an educational purpose. It's good for people to be able to experience maximum freedom"...

[The play] centres on naive 18-year-old Eugenie who is introduced to sex by three tutors. It ends with her arranging for her mother to be gang raped.

Bring it over from London with all speed, lest another Rodgers and Hammerstein revival fill its place.

The show is called "XXX," by the way, and the company's title seems to translate as Fury of the Sewers.

(Found via this site, which is a whole lot more edifying than my usual source material.)

MOMMA DIDN'T RAISE NO GEARHEAD. I got around on my newly-purchased bike a bit today, a sweet Columbia Sports III. The springs in the seat are mighty stiff, and the kickstand (a difficult-to-replace model) was missing, but I got a good price on it, and was told it had just been tuned up. It's in my local shop now, though, because the gear cable popped. Some tune-up. I had to take my old bike, an ancient Robin Hood, in for gear-work every couple of months. Is this normally what happens to old three-speeds? Or do the repairmen just see me coming?

There are so many old, sub-optimal makes like mine on the street, ridden by people who aren't enthusiasts but just want to ride a few miles on sunny days instead of taking the subway, that I wouldn't be shocked to learn the bike-shop proprietors were, by unspoken agreement, practicing a little planned obsolescence in their repairs.

After all, the 1956 Sturmey-Archer manual says that "Sturmey-Archer hubs have been designed and built to give a life-time of trouble-free service on the understanding that regular attention is given to correct care and maintenance as outlined below."

Of course, I could stop scanning Google News every two hours, give up the resulting composition of blistering screeds, and take the time saved to learn the ins and out of Toggle Gear repair.

Which might makes things easier on all of us.

JULIA ROBERTS AS WILL AND IDEA. Good heavens. I just saw half an hour of the movie Pretty Woman. I usually manage to avoid such cultural touchstones during their first run, mostly by what the scientists call natural selection ("A new movie with Julia Roberts or an evening drinking in a dank basement? The choice is clear!"). And when I do catch up with them, I am usually disappointed. I saw, for example, Forrest Gump years after its release and found it a depressingly easy and dim-witted sneer against twenty years of American cultural upheaval -- in other words, pretty much what I expected, which is never the desired result of a trip to the Fantasy Factory.

But this movie is genuinely astonishing. A poor but honest prostitute meets cute and makes nice with a sensitive zillionaire john! How could I have missed it in the coming attractions! I wonder if my old friend Professor Hurley has seen it. I'm sure he would appreciate it. The zillionaire woos the prostitute by letting her drive his borrowed status car (that the pedals are close together make it better for women than for men to drive it, she tells him, because "women have smaller feet -- 'course, I'm a size nine-and-a-half"). He pays her for a night of subdued romantic dialogue and sex. I thought it was a bit much that he got sex, too -- after all, $300 is far less than the authors were paid for the subdued romantic dialogue -- but he makes up for it by paying a further $3000 to take over her life for a week. What a catch!

The john is quietly amused (and, from the wisps of foreshadowing blowing through the early scenes, would continue to be quietly amused) by the reaction of his fellow aristos and associated bourgeois to this diamond-in-the-rough-trade. If I were a deconstructionist, I would call this a landmark in the hard bargain made by the powers that be to lure the masses to the consumerism that still afflicts us all: they would allow a great deal more latitude in the area of sexual fantasy if it could be inextricably linked to money. I wonder if Rick Santorum has seen it. I'm sure every hip-hop artist has.

I couldn't keep watching -- my bile-flap inevitably began to quiver -- but I am content that I got the money-shot, as it were.

Now one of these days I'll see My Best Friend's Wedding and really break it down.

HEH. INDEED. UP YOUR ASS. Poor Andy's going apeshit. His beloved Bush can't -- won't, actually -- squeeze a Trent Lott moment out of the Santorum crisis.

But hark! Perfesser Rocky Top rides in on a white SUV to lay the blame at the foot of the Ay-rabs. He notes the resistance of Muslim nations to a UN homosexual human rights proposal. That's telling Ted Rall!

How sad for both of them. (Let me partially withdraw: I have professed sorrow for Sullivan, but the Perfesser is a bridge -- perhaps several -- too far for me.) Shaking the anti-Saddam fist has been a good gig for the Perfesser, but now our focus is on America, not desert shitholes, and it would seem the President's tepid response to the current contretemps cannot logically be softened by reference to Middle Eastern tyrants whose feelings toward sodomites, it is clear, are not very different from his own.

Dan Savage in the Times (fuck the links) is right: the GOP is not going to distance itself from a position that has stood it well in the hinterlands. They're waiting for it to blow over. And it will, with assistance from Poor Andy's buddies in the Republican Party. He'll fall into line soon enough, I'm guessing. But, romantic fool that I am, I'd be delighted if I were proven wrong.

SYMPATHY FOR THE DUMBASS. The Santorum schmegegge proceeds apace. NRO's Kurtz (again) and Enrich see it as an unnecessary distraction, as who could doubt their tolerance of sodomites? Andrew Sullivan, that's who. And maybe it's because, even though Kurtz says he's against sodomy laws, he must, it seems, add a demurrer to this admission, as here: "I feel I have some understanding of the basis of arguments in favor of sodomy laws. I believe that those arguments contain some sound sociological points, but I do not share their religious presuppositions."

I can understand Sullivan's frustration. He's been good to all these guys, lashing out ferociously against the traitorous Left, but when the GOP has a bigot eruption against gays (indeed, against anyone practicing something more than what George Carlin once referred to as "the old man-on-top-get-it-over-with-quick"), his erstwhile compatriots can only give his own basic humanity a most lukewarm endorsement.

They don't know that the reflexive backing-off gestures they always make when they approach this topic are not just political issues to Sullivan. They're personal. It's as if he thought they were friends, and suddenly some guy started beating the shit out of him and they just stood there saying, "Well, I understand the basis of this beating... it contains some sound sociological points."

Who wouldn't be stung by that? I mean, I can't even acknowledge that Sullivan is human most of the time, and I feel for him.

THE LAST REFUGE OF A NATIONAL REVIEW COLUMNIST. John Derbyshire made a few remarks sympathetic to Darwinism and received the (given his venue) expected angry letters. In trying to explain the scientific method to his hillbilly correspondents, he finally resorts to the wooden spoon, comparing them to analysands and Commies:

I think, in fact, that Creationism is part of the larger phenomenon of "science envy" that has gripped all sorts of branches of human knowledge this past couple of centuries. Science has been so stupendously successful at transforming the physical world, everyone wants to claim scientific status for his pet theory. Marxism and Freudianism, the most prominent pseudosciences of the 20th century, both claimed to be scientific. Likewise literary "deconstructionism," etc. etc. It's all science envy. That's the leaky boat the Creationists have got themselves into.

This is the idiot grandchild of the old liberal saw, "If we do this, we become just like our enemies." (Or, as Harlan Ellison put it, "Lie down with pigs, get up smelling like garbage.") Now, this can be powerful stuff if you're telling sensitive, enlightened folks that killing in response to killing is wrong. But what will Cletus at the keyboard think of Derbyshire lumping him in with the Freudians? Pitchfork Pat, come back!

LIAR'S POKER. I don't think Martin Sheen gets enough credit for his performance on The West Wing. Last night they showed him doing some high-stakes negotiating with the Russian President on the Hot Line. (Boy, that sentence makes me nostalgic.) When the first call, in which the President pretended a unmanned spy plane downed in Russia was only photographing "coastal erosion," fell apart, Sheen looked at the phone and said, "this isn't working," exactly as if he were regarding a defective toaster.

I thought about it today when I read this:

According to US State Department officials, the “blatant and bold” announcement that North Korea possesses nuclear weapons, made to James Kelly, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian affairs, was followed by the threat to test one.

One State Department official said that Mr Li, attending talks aimed at persuading Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear weapons programme, turned to Mr Kelly after making the claim and said: “Now, what are you going to do about it?”

I can see why folks who like him admire Bush's apparent nonchalance. You want to think confrontations like this are supervised by people who don't sweat much. Now that the people we're playing around with are not penny-ante WMD wannabes (or never-weres), but nuclear-equipped hardline Commies, let us hope he and his know more than how to play poker -- let's hope they also know what they're doing.

NO SUCH THING AS BAD PUBLICITY. Well, I see the Dixie Chicks are trying to stretch their winning streak. I can't say as I blame them. Making music is a hard dollar, so if a controversial remark by your lead singer causes an informal boycott of your band that mysteriously fails to make much of a dent in your CD sales, you probably should see it as an opportunity.

Their decision to strip as a means of making their point is probably going to be more effective than anything they can come up with verbally, if their quoted "Prime Time" remarks are any indication. (Would they have gotten so big if they looked like Alabama?) Still, the words will do their work -- alternately belligerent and contrite, they cover all their bases (like the words stencilled on their torsos).

Political commentators like to talk about it, but it was never about the politics. The only thing I can't figure is what Maines was thinking when she made that comment. I'd like to believe that she knew this all would come of it -- that it was a bald crossover move, like I think Evancescence's "controversy" was. Would that be paranoid of me? Or just giving them too much credit?

SPINNING SANTORUM. Stanley Kurtz’ piece on the Senator Santorum affair (weird comments about gays and incest) is very long and does not mention Andrew Sullivan. This is odd for a few reasons. First, it’s odd because Sullivan, for all his hideous faults, is the best-known conservative crusader against anti-gay discrimination (and the attendant sodomy-law concerns) within the conservative movement. It’s like talking about the Democratic Party in the 1990s without mentioning Clinton – a bald omission that makes sense only if by so doing you’re trying to make a point. Or conceal one.

The latter seems to be the case here, because Sullivan has blogged tirelessly on the subject of Santorum of late (perhaps in hopes of instigating a Trent-Lott-style, zone-flooding repudiation of him among the Right). You'd never know this by Kurtz’ NRO article, which is largely about how unfair the NYT’s coverage was, and, by extension (we might say hyperextension), how liberal journalism ruins everything it touches (“But so long as the mainstream media keeps producing the sort of partisan and ignorant nonsense it has deployed in its effort to destroy Sen. Santorum…”).

Kurtz better go tell Glenn Reynolds that he’s doing Howell Raines dirty work.

Trying to spin the statist, pro-sexual-repression gibberish of a Republican Senator into an attack on liberals is a noble bit of chutzpah, but Kurtz is going to have to do better than this.

CAUGHT MY EYE. In the Guardian today: "Tony Blair threw down to the gauntlet to Sinn Fein today with a list of three demands the republican movement must meet if next month's elections are to go ahead... Mr Blair also spelled out a new doctrine for negotiations, stating that from now on 'clarity is our friend. Ambiguity is our enemy.'"

I suppose this is Blair pulling a W -- black and white, with us or against us, etc. There's a key difference between Ireland and Iraq, though -- Ireland has already been invaded, occupied, and pissed off enough to mount armed rebellions.

Of course it's not impossible that the Iraqis will get there sooner than later.

ALT.JESUS UPDATE: METALLIC N.O. 'member how I said Creed wasn't too convincing as a Godband? Apparently the lead singer is being sued for having turned up on a Chicago stage under the influence of too much Caanan-feast juice:

The disgruntled concertgoers allege in court papers that the band's lead singer Scott Stapp was so 'intoxicated and/or medicated that he was unable to sing the lyrics of a single Creed song.

'Instead ... Stapp left the stage on several occasions during songs for long periods of time, rolled around on the floor of the stage in apparent pain or distress and appeared to pass out while on stage during the performance.'

The rocker's condition was clearly a result of an earlier drink or drugs binge...

I think Scott Stapp has several escape routes available. He could:

• Claim his state was due to a surfeit of anti-anxiety medication, taken in anticipation of an adverse ruling in the upcoming Bowers vs. Hardwick challenge and the resulting pain to Baby Jesus;
  
  
• Insist he was bamboozled by yobbos posing as Christians who had convinced him that Foster's Lager was the blood of Christ;
  
  
• Throw himself Swaggart-style upon the mercy of his fans, crying "I have sinned against you!"
  

The obvious question is: would anyone be suing Creed if it were not a Christian band? I'm not suggesting anti-Christian prejudice -- just Creed's obvious vulnerability to such a challenge because they're supposed to be tight with the Messiah.

Or maybe I'm wrong -- I was about to ask, "Who would sue the Stones or the White Stripes on similar grounds?" but, of course, in these times that just might happen. Not because we're a litigious society (although of course we are), but because we're increasingly a pussified one -- neither a band's penchant for, or history of, drug abuse, nor the once substance-friendly nature of rock 'n' roll itself, would prevent some moron from insisting that his rights as a consumer were violated because his bellowing egoist of choice did not come up to snuff due to Bacchic overindulgence.

Because in the commodified era in which we live, even the ancient exemption for rockin' wildmen is denied -- punters arrive expecting product, not anything so spontaneous as a Metallic K.O. Speaking of Iggy, think of the lawsuits he might have endured, were his youthful exploits fast-forwarded to the present day, on the grounds that he got peanut butter on some poseur's velour jacket.

Butt-fuckers trying to run my world indeed.

SERENDIPITY. I'm loving this: see what happens when you transpose a couple of letters in my address: alicublog.blogpsot.com.

What amazes me is, this guy thinks my fumble-fingered runoff is worth redirecting to his site.

UPDATE: Aw, shoot -- it happens with any other blogspot site. Mother was right -- I'm not special!

ANOTHER MORNING, ANOTHER OUTRAGE. Now the malefactor is John Derbyshire, whose theme, insofar as one can be detected, is that liberals are snobs, and thereby spiritually inferior to those charming folks who believe that God didn't make man from no monkey. It is a hilarious argument as, for one thing, Derbyshire's writing (here and elsewhere) is pretty much one long sneer, -- he's ill-suited to attack others for holding themselves superior to their fellow mortals. Also, here's the anecdote with which he defends his tree-hugger bad, knuckle-dragger good dichotomy:

Last year one of my neighbors, an elderly widow who was very kind and helpful to us when we first moved into this street, fell and broke her femur... The nursing home was a lovely place, spotlessly clean and well-run, smelling of floor-polish, fresh-cut flowers, and disinfectant. The staff were cheerful, attentive and brisk. I could not help but contrast it with the place in which my own mother spent some of her last days -- a privately-owned but municipally-supported place in England, staffed by ill-tempered slatternly girls and stinking of boiled cabbage and stale urine. Being taken to our neighbor's room, I noticed here and there discreet, plain little crucifixes on the walls. It was a Christian establishment, run by some evangelical group. Probably none of the staff believes in the theory of evolution.

This touching scene reminds me of the anti-Communist filmstrips we were shown in Catholic grammar school, in which the apparatchiks were always shown with fulsome sneers and (the clincher) smoking cigarettes. If they could have found any way to portray the female Commies as "slatternly girls" without bringing the near occasion of sin to us tender kinder, I'm sure they would have done so.

A lot of the reasoning at NRO these days is at about this level. That's one of the interesting things about the current war-gloat the Right's on. The much-vaunted Iraqi WMD seems, so far, to either be non-existent or available in such feeble conditions and quantities as to make any complaint of their imminent threat comical. The liberation of the poor Iraqis -- which became, in the later phases of the war, the new, cuddlier justification for the conflict-- is, as the ashes cool, beginning to manifest its absurdity: Iraq as a Republican-run human rights inititative that cost about a hundred billion dollars, and killed dozens of Americans and untold Iraqis. (Maybe that's what it takes to get Republicans behind a human-rights initiative: the promise of conquest, and contracts for their friends.) Their argument for the Iraq invasion increasingly boils down to "we won, so shut up." Considering how successful this logic has been, they can almost be forgiven for applying it to everything else. It's certainly easier than thinking.

YOUR MORNING IDIOTS. If it bothers you that Iraqi antiquities were looted, Clifford D. May says at NRO, you hate America. And WSJ Ignoramus Emeritus Robert Bartley don't like that there evolution business none too good ("The Scopes Monkey trial of 1925, the great defeat of the fundamentalists, has in particular come in for reassessment"). Which makes sense, because he's a living refutation of it.

GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS. In the space of a news cycle, a Pennsylvania girl was kidnapped and her parents killed, and the murderer/abductor apprehended. An Amber Alert had been speedily posted, though it doesn't seem to have figured in the arrest. But it has figured in others, including this recent Texas case.

The Amber Alert is a great thing. Throughout the Internet age we've heard talk of using technology to increase community involvement for the common good. This has mostly gone unrealized, but the Alerts really work, and I'm glad we have them.

I hope we can all spare a thought, though, for the Crime Bill just passed by the Senate that would Federalize the Alert system -- because, not willing to let well enough alone, our legislators have included in it over a hundred pages of additional legislation, including some drug and Internet provisions that have nothing to do with rescuing children, and which would invite judicial challenge sooner than later.

Under the proposed law, reports the Modesto Bee, "Property owners, for instance, can be criminally charged if they 'open, lease, rent, use or maintain any place, either temporarily or permanently,' that's employed in drug use." This provision, following an ugly trend, makes people responsible for events over which they may have no control -- which, apart from being patently unjust, also basically turns landlords into cops -- cops presumed to have powers of precognition, at that -- and that's a recipe for discriminatory renting practices, not to mention a further injection of paranoia into a society that's already dizzy with mistrust.

It would be nice if the Bill were stripped of all this crap and devoted entirely to making an already useful system better.

UPDATE: It should be mentioned that, from what I can find, the achievements of Amber Alerts so far are modest -- the best cases I can find (like the one aforementioned) are sketchy, and it's not always clear that the rescues are due to the system. This Oregon report, for example, is called "Boy Safe After Amber Alert Issued," but it may be that the boy in question was located by a scanner report, not the Amber Alert. I still think it's at least a promising idea, but this is all the more reason why we should be conscientious about its development, and certainly shouldn't be using it as an excuse to put all kinds of vaguely-related nonsense onto the lawbooks.

A PASCHAL MYSTERY THAT BEST REMAINS UNSOLVED. As if Easter weren't depressing enough, I have just seen a promo for Fox's "Mr. Personality." I have it on good authority that the masks the men wear do not conceal wens, port-wine scars, or other entertaining disfigurements. And, as this is a network show, the Story of O intimations will certainly go unfulfilled.

I also hear that there will be a "Ms. Personality" as soon as Fox decides from among these premises:

• Boys Don't Cry-style breast restraints replace masks;
  
• All involved parties wear masks, which completely cover their mouths and eyes, making the host's commentary (and the ballroom dancing and hot tub scenes) vastly more interesting;
  
• Masks have beaks stuffed with aromatic herbs to prevent SARS infection;
  
• Masks are entirely dispensed with and half-wits of both sexes merely flirt, gibber, and get it on.
  

WHO SAYS THERE ARE NO ROLES FOR WOMEN? Coming soon: Oscar-winner Halle Berry in X2: X-Men United.

I wonder if Louise Fletcher has a bit role.

A MIGHTY WIND. Saw the new Christopher Guest movie last night. It delivered the expected laughs, thank God, as at this stage the price of a movie ticket is a serious investment for me, and if my breathing and/or thinking muscles don't get a good workout I consider myself royally rooked. The movie's goals are modest in the big-picture sense, and all the attention is lavished on versimilitude and comic engineering. The album jackets, archival footage, tunes, and physical and emotional characterizations (from Christopher Guest's quavering Peter Yarrow schtick to the annoyingly hearty New Main Street Singers) are even better-observed than in This is Spinal Tap.

It wasn't as hilarious to me as Spinal Tap for a couple of reasons .Foremost, rock and roll is just funnier than folk -- more bombastic, and more overtly enabling of lunatics at every level. Now there are some freaked-out folkies in the world, true, but you just don't get the kind of dirt on Pete Seeger and Mary Travers you get on their rock equivalents. And folk music just doesn't have Stonehenge (or cucumbers down the pants).

Also, Guest gambled a bit on his Mitch and Mickey characters. When Eugene Levy came out in his zombie mode, I thought we were in for many cheap burn-out jokes (and there were some, and they were all great). But Mitch and Mickey have kind of a sweet, sad story, and its payoff was really touching (though the coda was properly cynical). Roger Ebert thinks Guest went soft on his characters here and that vitiated the humor. Well, maybe -- Albert Brooks' earlier movies have more yuks than his later, gentler ones (like The Muse and Defending Your Life), and the corrosive Real Life is still my favorite. But in a world full of harshness I can't fault anyone for giving us a little more of the human dimension.

I also have to confess that I have a soft spot for 60s folk music of the cleaned-up and canned variety parodied here. My mother had a live Limelighters album, and a few years ago I got my own copy of it. To hear these well-scrubbed boys wailing their arch rendition of "There's a Meetin' Here Tonight," and imagining a bunch of equally well-scrubbed college students getting their groove on to it in some candle-in-the-Chinati-bottle joint, for some reason gives me great pleasure. It's just so square, but energetic at the same time -- full of hope and promise, and maybe embarrassing precisely for that reason. Rock gives you an out by being cynical. With folk at its worst-best (excluding, that is, the Loudon Wainwrights and John Prines, who have their own, different charm, and of course the antifolkies), you have some guy beating strings on a wooden box and trying to get the crowd to howl along about peace and freedom or some immigrant past he read about in a sociology class. It's silly, but it's also sweet -- not "sweet" in the IBM-ad way (I just made a million off some idiot followers of a shitty band! Sweet!), but in its traditional sense.

So Guest cut 'em some slack. And so do I.

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A MISSPENT YOUTH. A honey, found on Yglesias -- a 14-year-old conservative author published by World Net Daily Books.

There are precedents for this. Richard Brookhiser was 16, I believe, when he started writing for National Review. (I recall an article he did for them on the anti-Vietnam War Moratorium demo in 1970.)

Brookhiser today is indistinguishable from any other right-wing gasbag. Talented as he is, he could have done anything with his life, yet he spends it writing crap like this.

Brookhiser, from the looks of him, is upper-echelon rightwing and well compensated for his work. Still, the sense of waste is palpable. If he had to write, he could have done short stories, screenplays, punk rock lyrics, etc. After some raps in the mouth, turn-off notices, and reviews of various dispositions, he would have been forced into the decision we all must make -- whether or not writing's worth it even without the money -- and thereafter pursued a destiny of his own making. Whether it be foolhardy or praiseworthy, every man should chart his own course.

But Uncle Bill Buckley and a whole host of enablers clapped for little Richard and set him up a child laborer. Today the former Golden Boy is a functionary, a lifer, an assistant minister of culture for the Forces of Darkness. How his parents must weep. And now little Kyle Williams will be railroaded into a similar fate.

I don't know what's worse -- encouraging a kid to become a writer, or encouraging him to become a political blowhard. Neither is an enviable destiny under the best of circumstances, but to have the die cast for you before the age of consent is downright tragic.

Come to thing of it, Yglesias looks a little young for this sort of work himself.

RIGHT LESSON, WRONG COUNTRY. "We must not let future generations down by bequeathing them a legacy of a society that is divided, a national debt that will break their backs, an educational system that churns out parrots and a society that wallows in self-pity and snivels in mortification at the first sign of a problem."

When I saw it on Instapundit my heart leapt. Then I saw that the guy was talking about Iraq.

Divided society, back-breaking debt, lousy public education, and self-pity that won't quit -- ain't that America?

HOMAGE TO CNN.