AT THIS WRITING, The last three posts at The Corner are about Barbara Walters, Hillary Clinton, and Oliver Stone. Who says conservatives have no interest in culture?

CLINTON'S PENIS: EVEN GAY CONSERVATIVES DREAM OF IT. You can, if you've the belly for it, read Andrew Sullivan's long snarl against Hillary Clinton, in which he characterizes Monica Lewinsky as Bill Clinton's "latest victim." (Victim of what, one might ask? Well, Sullivan does refer to the former President' "sexual abuse" as if this were a proven charge rather than a pleasing fantasy for conservatives still obssessed with Clinton's cock. And everyone knows that Lewinsky at the time of their affair was only 23 years old -- well below the legal age of consent in whatever alternate universe Sullivan inhabits.)

Or you could just go back in time and listen to how Sullivan feels his own sex life is none of your business.

ARTIFACT AND FICTION. PBS ran the old WWII weeper Since You Went Away tonight. It's a very sweet megaproduction in the old style. I note with interest that David O. Sleznick has a writing credit. His official screen bibliography is limited, but we know that even without a byline he had strong ideas about what went into the films he produced. Hitchcock told Truffaut that the Selznick wanted to punctuate the burning of Manderley in Rebecca with a large, smokey "R" floating above the ruins. (Hitchcock sensibly refused.)

Anyway the pic is a honey. Claudette Colbert's husband goes off to war, is reported missing in action, and CC must guide their budding daughters through heartbreak and mild domestic comedy. The acting is terrific in that big Forties manner that is incomprehensible, I know, to non-fans. (Bogart translates well across the ages because of the cold sweat of existential dread clinging to all his performances, but to youngsters raised on today's far less effusive players, most antique movie stars might as well be the wolf that does "To Be Or Not To Be" and gets hit with tomatoes in that old Warner Brothers cartoon.) The girls alternate between noble restraint and bouts of hysteria that are still raw and disturbing even on TV -- on the big screen they must have really bludgeoned open the lachrymal floodgates. Robert Walker is a doomed young soldier -- funny how the stink of death clung to Walker, even when he was very young and squeaky-voiced and well before he drank himself to death. Old family friends Joseph Cotten and Monty Woolley stop by from time to time to cut the estrogen miasma. Toward the end Cotten even makes some wise-ass professions of love to Colbert that are forcibly steered clear of any discomforting suggestion that either may be seriously considering a romance should the old man's death be confirmed (Cotten is especially good at this -- I searched his eyes during this scene, and he allowed not one flicker of subtext to escape from them).

I must add that at one point Monty Woolley quotes Wordsworth, aptly and without attribution -- not because Selznick wanted people to think he wrote it, I'm sure, but because it was part of the cultural life of the time and if you didn't get it, you should really make a better effort to keep up. Who would do that today? Why not?

John Cromwell does a nice company-man job of directing -- he manages some bravura touches, usually involving a key character with her back turned to the camera -- and generally keeps the train on track. But even to those of us predisposed to give ourselves over to the sentiments, it's hard not to be aware of the salesmanship involved. Despite the core truth of the thing -- that war is hell on the loved ones at home, and the only useful response is faith in the glorious resolution -- we know that despair and discontent are not absent, but merely fended off. A few years later, when all the living were returned to their homes, The Best Years of Our Lives would blow the whistle. Of course that, too, was a stalwart Hollywood product, but I wonder if Dana Andrews sitting in that disused cockpit didn't have as much to do with America's rude, postwar awakening from idealism as Brando on his motorcycle.

On one level, maybe the primary one, Since You Went Away is uplift, and hence propaganda, however kindly meant. Still I enjoyed it, was moved by it, and not only because the war in question was the last one to which I can give unqualified support. Don't tell anyone (I mean, who reads this, anyway) but every sneering and cynical impulse I have toward the manipulation of patriotism is shadowed by affection for the genuine article to which it refers, and the noble feelings it stirs, however shabby the pretenses. The fellow-feeling of American citizens, to the extent that it still exists, is beautiful and very human -- I wish it were still our birthright, and not a privilege granted upon favorable consideration of loyalty test results. Once upon a time it was possible even for artists to share in it, without having to announce or even have reservations and qualifications. I love "The Devil and Daniel Webster" and Young Mr. Lincoln and The Battle Hymn of the Republic. When George Bush lands on an aircraft carrier and talks about America, however, I want to throw up.

I came away from tonight's artifact of the old America grateful that even its memory exists, because to remember it is to hold hope, however tenuously, that it may again be realized. But, in the immortal words of Johnny Thunders, you can't put your arms around a memory.

A BRIEF RESPITE FROM INCOHERENT SNARLS. Boy that's some crabby posting I've been doing. Let us turn to happier subjects. There was a short break in the dismal weather that happily conincided with my bike-ride to the teaching job. The streets were nearly empty, the morning sun was cool and kind, and I had enough time to tool around Fort Greene and scope the pretty buildings around its park. Some of the older structures appear to be of wood, and a few have columned porticos. All the scene needed was a fat guy on a porch, sprawled in a rattan chair, shirt pure white, suspenders unsnapped, the cuffs of his pants riding up above the sock-line, cooling himself with a broad paper fan advertising CARSON'S FUNERAL HOME and havin' a Pepsi. Turn a corner, of course, and it's all gas stations and chicken joints. My City is so beautiful sometimes.

Last night I even had a satisfying experience at an art gallery. Pierogi 2000 has an installation by Brian Dewan, a recreated 50s-vintage elementary school classroom with authentic wooden desks, chalkboards, boxy PA speakers and clock, and American flag. Mark Newgarten showed period educational films, blessedly without comment, and Dewan ran a filmstrip of his own devising, a garbled fable concerning a hen and a rooster and their multispecied friends, artful and ludicrous and touching all at once. I could have stood a little more of this and a little less of that, but it's so rare nowadays when the art boys actually come across that I have to stand up and cheer. The exhibition and related shows run through the 23rd.

Coffee break over; everyone back on your heads!

WTF? Dunno how it'll be when you look in, but at the moment Blogger seems only to be showing my archives from March -- removing from public view thousands of words of deathless prose. I'll see what I can do to redress this offense against literature. Not much, I guessing.

UPDATE. All fixed. If this keeps up I may have to adopt some faith in humanity. Provisionally.

HIS OWN PETARD. Go look, if your breakfast has settled sufficiently, at the loathsome Lileks site, and read the Fark commentary he makes sport of, and read Lileks' crabby-suburban-dad commentary, and tell me, am I crazy -- well, nevermind, I am crazy ; substitute, am I wrong -- or is his argument (such as it is) feeble on its own terms? His target (a Canuck who did some actually reporting, as opposed to lengthy jeremiads interrupted by cute kiddy anecdotes, then went into PR, then took a pay cut to get back into the journalistic game) makes a lot more sense than he does. Lileks' case consists mainly of sneers. "All hail the 10,000 foot view!" he jibes. "From there everything looks so green and lovely. From this Olympian perspective, helping the homeless is more imporant than worrying about property taxes." Taken from the crabgrass POV, any attempt at perspective will of course seem ridiculous -- don't those Grubstreeters understand that I have a cute little girl to ferry around to malls, and that it's hard enough explaining my video games and Simpsons DVDs to her without having a filthy unemployed guy with a garbage bag on his head show up to blow my whole paternal trip?

How did we breed this hellspawn anyway? Are there nuclear reactors near Minneapolis? Or does the wind whistling through the wheat or corn or soybeanstalks or whatever the fuck they raise out there stir madness in their souls?

DIFFERENT TIMES.Well, they got Raines. His most noisome former employee, though ecstatic, insists the "battle isn't over." No, not till Sulzberger sells the New York Times to the noisome former employee's current boss.

With Joe "Whitewaterloo" Lelyveld stepping in, we can safely predict these developments at the paper:

• Seventeen-name bylines.
  
• An eight-month-long, front-page investigation of Hillary Clinton's book tour.
  
• Further resignations at the Sports desk when a reporter allegedly filing from Shea Stadium turns out to have actually watched the game on TV. (Suspicions will first be aroused when WB network reports a 25 percent ratings lift on the night of the game.)
  
• Guilty White Liberal Out; Gutless White Liberal In.
  
• Maureen Dowd still sucks.
  

COUPLA WHITE GUYS. Someone writes to The Corner to explain why affirmative action is bad for persons of the minority persuasion:

What I always wonder about is whether the "diversity" applicant gets all giddy because they have that singular requirement. "Woo hoo, I could get this job because I'm Black (or Asian, etc.)"! And when they get it, do they then wonder if that is indeed the reason? Can't say I'd feel too comfortable in that job...

Well, with black unemployment rates over 10 percent in the Bush economy, I'd say their comfort levels would be wobbly in any case. These days a lot of people need jobs, asshole, and needing a job is not the same as needing a haircut -- if you let it go, instead of looking mildly unfashionable, you'll look evicted and emaciated. If deliverance from impoverishment involved some kind of government get-over, I'm sure even an enlightened ofay such as yourself would avail it.

Elsewhere where the Kleagle soars, James "Get Down" Lileks sniffs contemptuously at a cartoonist's in-jokey shout-out to Aaron McGruder, author of world's-angriest-black-children strip The Boondocks: "One of the strips that made people’s eyes cross had a white character signing an angry letter 'Aryan McCracker, Whitesville USA.' Ho ho! I remember looking at that and feeling very, very tired. Turns out it was a little private joke with Aaron McGruder, who does Boondocks. Get it. Aryan McCracker, Aaron McGruder? Got it. But if you don’t know that, well, it kinda looks like Rastus Washington, Nigraville, or Kikie Yiddovich, Hymietown."

It makes one ashamed to have forgotten the long history of persecution white people have had to suffer. Aaron, apology to Jimmy this instant! And we will now watch a film to sensitize us to the plight of Jimmy's people. It's called 'Birth of a Nation.'"

To help keep white hope alive, make donations to either of these horrible sites, either at their Tip Jar, or at their Cracker Barrell.

(Deep breath.)

For the record, I am of Caucasian extraction. And I'm not into wiggerish poses and whatnot. But some outrages are so blind-deaf-and-dumbass that my inner Freedom Rider goes Hulkshit.

THE KIDS ARE, IN THE MAIN, ALRIGHT. Matthew Yglesias responds to Kevin Drum's posts (geez, maybe I should expand my circle of imaginary friends?) about whether or not The Kids Are Alright. They agree that they are, but MY points to unsettling data showing that most of us old farts think kids now are worse than ever.

No further linkage needed: I'll just break this down old-school, pro- and con- stylee:

Oldsters who think the kids are not alright are motivated to a large extent by jealousy. 'Twas ever thus, but kids today have it pretty damn sweet in terms of lifestyle choices. The sexual revolution is a settled issue (the libertines won). The odd Columbine aside, pursuance of an alternative lifestyle is free and easy to an extent not even imaginable to my generation. I see youngsters gothed-out, punked-out, prepped-out, and gay to the max, and while they may be crying bitter tears inside, I see little evidence that they're getting their asses kicked on a daily basis, which is what outre teens and preteens would have had to expect back in the day. (I speak only from a Blue State perspective; I expect in the Red Zone life goes pretty much as it did in the 19th century, only with SUVs and professional wrestling added.)

Plus they have wicked cool technology to play with. Tech is fine, even grown-ups like it, and these chillins is growing up at the zenith of its golden age.

Naturally any class of people observing a separate class that has it good where they had it bad would feel resentful, and most people of whatever age have a hard time recognizing that trait in themselves. So the default judgment for fossils is that the kids are irredeemably spoilt. Add to this tendency the number of naysayers who just don't approve of the lifestyles the youngers are free to avail, and you can easily explain the hostility now directed against them.

On the other hand: it is also true that the young are more poorly educated than their forebears, both by schools and by experience. They don't know much about history, which is to say they don't know much at all. And I'm constantly amazed by the sense of entitlement among young people of my acquaintance. Even if a good or a service was available to me as a kid, it was not a sure thing that I would be granted it, whereas it is today inconceivable that any family that can by any means afford it would deny their kinder cable, video games, rad clothes and accessories, etc.

This is not an indictment of the kids, but of the materialism of our age. There still seemed to be, in my youth, a general feeling that to overindulge the young materially was to do a disservice to them, whereas today none but bitter pundits take that tack (and I cannot believe that, if Bill O'Reilly has -- shudder -- spawned, his offspring are not more splendidly arrayed than Solomon in all the gadgetry and couture our civilization has to offer).

This does not make young people worse in themselves, but breeds in them a false understanding of causality. It is good for the young to expect love and respect as their due, because within their family units (and, if it is not totally fucked up -- and I'm not saying ours isn't -- their society), it damn well should be. But to expect the wealth of the earth as theirs by right is nuts. And the ahistoricism of the new breed, inbued by shitty schooling, removes from them any sense that human life is cyclical, that what goes up must come down, and that what they experienced today may not necessarily obtain tomorrow -- in other words, you can't always get what you want.

As the present oldsters (our wealthy and powerful avatars, anyway) lays axes to our economy, how will our juniors cope with the resulting diminishment of reasonable expectation? One shudders to think.

Finally, I call it a wash and vote in favor of the up-and-comers. I have two nephews, one entering college, another entering high school. They are great kids, and I defy anyone to tell me otherwise. And I'm amazed at the small-souledness of folks who actually have kids of their own (doesn't everyone, these days?) and still say theirs is a lousy generation.

WHAT'S RUNNING THROUGH MY HEAD. "Joe McCarthy's Ghost," The Minutemen. "Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts," Bob Dylan. "The Groover," T Rex. "Pictures of Matchstick Men," The Status Quo. "Workin' Cheap," Waylon Jennings.

Sometimes in sequence, sometimes all at the same time.

Sometimes it's fun to have a rich inner life, especially if you can't afford an iPod.

A DOG'S BREAKFAST. In this morning's gibberish, endorsed by the Ole Perfesser, one Frederick Turner proposes that liberals (or is it boomers? Hard to tell here) are as "full of fear" as citizens under a Soviet tyranny, except the tyranny is not of the government but of their own wrong and evil ideas. Key words: Berkeley, new class, British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Stalin's Moscow, Eustace Tilley. Words appearing in quotes: "scary," "going along," "coming out of the closet," "pukka," "The Big Chill." He also calls Michael Kinsley a George Bush supporter.

"It's not what you know, but who you know, so the greatest terror is to be shunned by the in-group," says the author of these knock-kneed nellies. "And this is where the fear comes from." Yes, far more brave to support the tiny, lonely voice of truth coming from the little-known and underfunded Republican Party.

While Turner is incomprehensible from the admittedly narrow perspective of common sense, he is clear as a bell to students of the particular kind of propaganda in which he deals. This specimen follows Storyline 1D: "Liberals are all nervous nellies with bad constitutions, like in "Mallard Fillmore," and conservatives are fearless seekers after truth." In this case, as frequently, Storyline 1B ("Liberals run everything and keep us down") is availed as a sub-theme. 1D and 1B would seem not very compatible with one another -- how did such abject weaklings take over a mighty nation? But these guys habitually ram them together nonetheless.

Personally I liked these guys better when they were bitching about Eisenhower and fluoride in the water.

MORE ON THE WATER ENGINE. Editor Downs is on the hydogren car case, and forwards this bit from Mother Jones, May-June 2003:

Using existing technology, hydrogen can be easily and cleanly extracted from water. Electricity generated by solar panels and wind turbines is used to split the water's hydrogen atoms from its oxygen atoms ... According to the administration's National Hydrogen Engergy Roadmap, drafted last year in concert with the energy industry, up to 90 percent of all hydrogen will be refined from oil, natural gas, and other fossil fuels--in a process using energy generated by burning oil, coal, and natural gas. The remaining 10 percent will be cracked from water using nuclear energy.

A recent MIT study also points out that we're a long way from an emission-efficient method of producing a practical hydrogen car engine.

On the other hand, the Administration is talking about earmarking funds for hydrogen power research -- interestingly, "through partnerships with the private sector," not with spoilsports like MIT. So the current means of extracting hydrogen energy could be rendered moot. I'm not a science guy, to say the least, and don't know the state of the tech. I could spend some time with these guys and find out more, getting to the bottom of headlines like "Air Liquide Signs Hydrogren Contract with Chevron in the United States," but life is short. Our President talks out his ass about a lot of stuff, so I'm inclined to disbelieve him, but I suppose this could be an exception.

What I would like to know is what kind of mileage and speed this 1972 hydrogen car got. The government showed some interest in that project, too.

SPEAKING OF GENERAL CANARD #37: Andrew Sullivan goes on about how liberals who support affirmative action think black people are stupid. In support of this slur, he quotes one of his better-known fellow-nuisances:

Mickey Kaus once described those liberals who simply assume the permanent neediness of minorities as "Bell Curve Liberals," people who would never admit it but have internalized the notion that minorities are simply dumber than the majority.

That's an interesting term Sullivan is appropriating, seeing as he's always been a big booster of the grotesque, race-baiting "Bell Curve." His official bio proudly states that, as editor of The New Republic, Sullivan " stirred controversy with... the first publication of Charles Murray's The Bell Curve..." And every once in a while he hauls the book out in support of himself, e.g., "The convergence of a global economy, a technological surge, and a meritocratic education system have all contributed to an inexorable and irreversible transition to greater inequality. his was the point most memorably made in Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's much-maligned and misunderstood book, 'The Bell Curve.'"

Let's see. Sullivan likes "The Bell Curve," yet explicitly associates it with "people who... have internalized the notion that minorities are simply dumber than the majority." What do you suppose he's trying to tell us?

I HATE POP-UPS SO MUCH that this is what I'm gonna do:

• Never patronize another credit-card company, discount travel agent, or boner-pill merchant of any kind, ever.
  
  
• If I do ever patronize any such businesses, in the part of the application where they ask where I'd heard about their services, I'll write, "I counted all the pop-ups according to industry and found yours had the fewest pop-ups per user of all comparably-priced boner pill merchants."
  
  
• If I find out who invented this shit, I will make a brittle and humorous statement about them in my weblog, which is read my millions of my imaginary friends.
  

End emission.

THIS MORNING'S WADE THROUGH THE FEVER SWAMP. The Ole Perfesser has a long'un about Iraq etc. Unlike those evil bastards at the Times he's always harshing on, the Perfesser does primary research: "My waitress at dinner was a Kurd, who reported that relatives in Northern Iraq (she hadn't been back for a couple of years) say that things are much better since Saddam's fall." Indeed. Heh. More butter over here.

He also recycles General Canard #37 -- that liberals are really condescending to the people about whom they claim to care. "We want a peaceful, free and prosperous Iraq," forthrightly states the Perfesser. "Claims that Arabs are somehow incapable of that sort of thing seem a bit dubious to me, especially when they come from people who call themselves 'progressive.'" Then, elsewhere in the same article, he talks about the Arabs as if they were retarded children. "As Osama says, people (especially Arab people) tend to want to back a strong horse," he quoth. "So it's important to look strong." And get a whiff of this:

Both Iraq and Israel are currently tests for the Arabs. If they can't achieve a reasonable degree of peace and freedom here, if they sink back into theocracy and thuggery, then it's going to be easy for the rest of the world to give up on them -- as the "progressives" already have -- and say "what can you expect from the wogs?" as it turns a blind eye to another generation of dictators' brutality.

I'll admit he's crafty -- by dropping that "as the 'progressives' already have" in the middle, he draws careless readers away from the clear implication that we may righteously consider Arabs to be shiftless wogs if they don't do like we tell them to. Crafty, however, is not the same thing as right, or even coherent.

POGO MEETS PEANUTS AT A RAVE. Click through some episodes of this comic strip. It's hot, young, and underdiscovered. When you read about it in Vice this summer and have yet to stake your cred, don't come bitching to me.

P.S. Don't tell Perfesser Reynolds -- it'll just upset him.

JACK'S CASE. My dear old friend Eva, who reviews theatre for Public Access Cable, invited me to see, on her comps, the Joyce Johnson play "Door Wide Open" at the Bowery Poetry Project, based on Johnson's letters to and from Jack Kerouac. Eva seemed to think I'd be into it.She remembered that as a young'un I had been enamored of On The Road and The Dharma Bums. I had, of course. But then I graduated college, and after availing deepest bohemia for a seeming eternity or two myself, for a long time I failed to see what was so hot about him, my memory of his prose being poisoned by the shabby streams of consciousness his example had unloosed among the zillion latter-day, junior-league Jacks by whom I was surrounded.

I was in a mildly more receptive mood tonight. A few months ago I caught Pull My Daisy on PBS, and through that tiny window took a fresh look at the Beats. Ginsberg I could never forsake. The loopy grandeur of his poems, with their little towers of Naropa and Newark and Lower East Side bric-a-brac building bravely toward heaven, touches me still. And I recall a reading he gave in Tompkins Square Park, at the height of The Troubles in the late 1980s, where he threw back at the kids that idolized him the epithet Die Yuppie Scum: "Look at me. I'm wearing a tie. Am I a Yuppie?" All class, that guy.

Kerouac in the film interested me afresh. He had a blundering presence, especially beside the epicene Larry Rivers. Listening to his voice-over, I could not get over the feeling that he was putting us on. He sounded too much like Fred Ward in Henry & June, playing the regular-guy Ahtist touched by Da Muse. What was this guy really about? I would have looked at his books again if I'd had them. Did he really have something, or was he the dress-down equivalent of Chum Frink in "Babbitt," selling the old "spill-o'-speech" to a more rockin' crowd?

The play at its start made me anxious, and I was glad that tight seating forced us to the bar, where I could drink Bourbon and lean my head wearily on my fist. The thing was done as a reading, with a younger and an older Joyce Johnson stand-in off to one side while a young man, who in speech and manner resembled George Clooney doing Frank Sinatra, read the Jack bits. Jack as an up-and-comer and Joyce as an up-and-come-into were boring as hell. I liked Amy Wright as older Joyce (I had seen her several times off-Broadway years ago, and to now witness her once-gawky stage presence softened and made elegant by age sold me the memory-play angle), but the two young players projected no electricity past their lecterns. Worse, the pacing was flat and the lighting somnambulizing, and the Kerouac epistles fell like marijuana-scented mash notes to the stage. I loved the music by David Amram -- yes, that David Amram, whose accompaniment on piano, gourds, and flutes was beautiful throughout -- but my heart sank when I noticed that there would be two acts.

But toward the end of the first act, around the time "On the Road" took off, things got better. Jack loosened up -- only to fall apart, as the play/recollection would have it, but the Jack-actor became more vivid, more human, and the words, as written and as read, began to make sense. As an author of love-scribbles Kerouac had been tiresome; as a drowning poetry star trying to explain himself out of his self-sprung trap, he was electric. And the young Joyce, lashing back at last at her ill-treatment and playing less the lovestruck executive secretary, showed some life as well. The second act was even better, notwithstanding a maudlin coda.

Afterwards I thought, isn't it odd that the young, confident lovers were boring, but the embittered, conflicted fellow-travelers following the caravan of Beat unto its apocalypse were interesting? But no, no it isn't. We appreciate, or claim to, the life-affirming sweep of the Beats, and of course their big "yes" is very exciting and supplies some sparks -- but what became of the tinder to which those sparks was set is more interesting, at least when you've achieved an age greater than that of the young post-Beatniks gathered at the Bowery Poetry Project to witness this evening's event. "Yes" gets you to the door of life, but once you pass through there are a thousand wet blankets waiting to descend upon you, and you have to come up with a more nuanced strategy to keep going -- especially if you want to keep that little spark of "yes" alight. Kerouac, after some entertaining struggles, went home to live with his mom. I won't say that Joyce Johnson's mordant postscripts are as inspiring, or even as valuable, as Kerouac's death-plunge. Yet her careful reflection of his glory finally made Kerouac real to me again.

Was his failure preordained or preventable? Older Joyce makes a comment about this in the play. In Kerouac's case, I think the point is moot -- unless you want to believe that a rage to live is nothing but a folly to be avoided, and I'm not prepared to go all the way down that bleak alley -- not yet, anyway. Is Jack's case less edifying than those of great novelists who negotiated their way through a thousand disappointments and ended with some calm and quiet in old age? Well, what cases would those be, in America? Twain? He died raging. Hemingway? Blew his head off. Fitzgerald? Dead, drunk. Washington Irving, James Fennimore Cooper? I like those guys, but given the farther shores our literature has managed to reach via the aforementioned parties (and many left unmentioned), Irving and Cooper might as well have never gotten out of the blocks.

A lot to chew on there, and quite some time to pass before it's digested. I will say that Kerouac is more impressive to me now than when I walked into that theatre. As is anyone who tries anything like what he was trying. Assuming, perhaps unfairly, that there is anyone.

LILEKS ON WOMEN:

"Tonight we blame a friend of my wife's, a charming lass -- no, she's not a lass. Nor is she a colleen, a frail, a skirt, a broad, a womyn, a twist, or any other synonym. Nor is she a gal. 'Person' doesn't do the job -- please. When we're all shave-skulled automatons in white jumpsuits we will all be Persons. Not until. We really need a new gender-specific word for people who come over to pick up something, stay for two hours chatting with your wife and delighting your child, leave you with a stack of reading material, and listen to you expand on the politics of David Lynch on the way down the stairs."

One word? How about "woman"? (Or, if we have room for a few modifiers, "terrified woman buttonholed by lunatic while trying to escape friend's house"?)

James Lileks -- a man's madman!

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH. "San Francisco Fed Chief Says Vegas Economy Performing Well" -- Las Vegas Sun. Seven come eleven, snake eyes watching you.

THROUGH BEING COOL. Over at The Corner they're still talking about young conservatives, and posting their missives, in which the Tory tykes tell how hip they are. Sample: "By the way, I was a skateboarder for most of my life. I never wore a blue blazer. It was all of my rich girlfriends, who were extreme lefties, that belonged to the Country Club." Rawk on, dude!

Their obsession is understandable. This conservative redoubt, chaired by Jonah "Check out my Simpsons references" Goldberg, is increasingly devoted to redefining Cool in its favor. And why not? They have the country's politics in a headlock, and so have leisure to worry about whether the kids think they're alright.

Let 'em. Youth culture (see entry below) is wholly manipulated and corrupt, and it hardly matters by what guerilla marketing channels the underaged are approached. Truth and bullshit can each be as easily dressed in rad gear. A fixation with fashion is appropriate for posers, though unsuitable to higher minds.

One's experiences teach the lessons that form one's politics. So long as suburbanites devoid of any higher interest than cheaper gas for their SUVs and lower rates for their second mortgages comprise the bulk of the electorate, it is these concerns that will determine our future course. Bush is manipulating both these aforementioned factors to his advantage, and his triumph or defeat will rest on the persistence of their success unto the next electorial showdown. Our politics then are guided not by great issues but by the cynical calculations of well-placed spinmeisters.

How cool is that?

MUSCLEBOUND INDIE ROCKER SPEAKS TRUTH. A friend forwarded an excerpt from a Henry Rollins interview, taken by Michael Dean for a book he's working on and which will no doubt be worth reading, as is this Rollins fragment:

To do what you want to do, you have to be very tough. Especially in this day and age. Not tough like being insensitive, you have to be tough like Miles Davis who protected his art. He was very protective of that thing that he had, he was like a swan -- it's this very graceful creature but if you mess with it, it gets very pugnacious...

I think these days a lot of bands who do their first tour on a Privo bus with shiny new gear are missing out on a lot of things that will keep them in the game after the blush is off the rose. Because you never maintain your popularity -- everyone has an arc. Or ebbs and flows. Guys like Neil Young, they just keep making records and it's never like an up or down thing, it's like a high-tide, low-tide thing. He's just going to keep making records whether you buy them or not. Neil Young makes records. That's what he does... And those bands that were hydrogrown through the Clear Channel thing, they have no roots to the ground so when push comes to shove, they have no anchor.

I used to think Rollins was kind of silly, but these are not the words of a silly man.

SEE YA LATER, BOI. Matthew Yglesias is delighted that Avril Lavigne's "Sk8er Boi" will soon be a major motion picture. He loves Avril, and there I let him alone; de gustibus non disputandum est. But I have a couple of preemptive peeves against the picture.

First, there's the song. A nice piece of radio fluff, but what kind of movie will it make? A stuck-up girl (did ballet, dontcha know) turns down a boy in baggy pants, and winds up a single mom while the eponymous poser becomes a superstar, slammin' on his guitar. My sympathy is with the girl, of course, and I think it's a little creepy that the most noteworthy thing about the boi is that he's popular and rich. Doesn't anyone believe anymore that a heart can broken by anything other than a missed seat on a gravy train?

What seems like more of a problem is the pictoralization of a pop tune. It's rare enough to get that right in a video, let alone a 90 minute feature. I recall the video of the Kinks' "Come Dancin'." A nice tune, and the video has some nice bits, but one scene forever embodies the tendency of filmmakers to crush the life out of a good musical moment. In the bridge of the song, when the "Palais" that was the arena of the older brother's teenage romance, is no more ("The day that they tore down the Palais/my brother broke down and cried"), there's a nice Davies Brothers moment -- Ray sounds sad, and Dave smashes out power chords. It suggests sorrow, futility, and rage. In the video, we see at that moment the younger brother jumping gleefully on his bed, thrashing air-guitar on his tennis racket. It's rhythmically correct, but runs so contrary to the musical moment as to take all the meaning out of it.

When "Sk8er Boi" is all done up nice and Hollywood with James van der Beek and Hillary Duff, or whomever, can we really expect any better?

A NUCLEAR ERA, BUT I HAVE NO FEAR. Way back during the last State of the Union address, the President promised a billion-and-change to develop "hydrogen fuel technologies" that would lead -- here comes the concrete example beloved of speechwriters -- to the development of "clean, hydrogen powered automobiles." This was, as reported by Environmental News Services, the first mention by Bush in a SOTU of environmental issues.

I thought at the time it was a feint, in the midst of a war-ginning speech, to show that he was not all about blood and thunder. (As to the money, well, recent developments demonstrate that Bush is awful free with a public buck.) But it's beginning to dawn on me that the President had a larger agenda.

Pete Domenici (R, NM, and chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee) is promoting a bill to revive the nation's moribund nuclear energy industry. You may, or may not, remember the "No Nukes" movement of a couple decades ago that effectively shut down the proliferation of nuclear plants, partly by convincing insurers to charge sky-high rates on such facilities. Well, Domenici's bill would lower that hurdle by limiting the nuke-makers' liability, and even partially funding the development of plants with taxpayer money.

It is to be remembered that the hydrogen for the Bush car would almost certainly come from nuclear reactors.

Here's where the environmental angle comes into play. There is a lingering fear among sentient humans of nuclear plants leaking radioactive waste, blowing up, and generally Chernobyling. The Republicans are countering the anti-nuclear meme with one more current and cheerful: the promise of decreased reliance on petroleum. As the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) nicely puts it:

In this false future, the nuclear power industry becomes an environmental savior... unless checked, the nuclear power industry will receive "clean air" credits under both state and federal legislation, which will help bolster its unbalanced books. It will produce hydrogen for clean vehicles, while producing more tons of radioactive waste with no viable disposal method...

You can read the White House's case for its "Freedom Fuel" initiative pretty much intact at Science Blog. NIRS is good on the counter-argument, as is this recent Village Voice article, which states that "Scientists have not yet designed a nuclear facility whose safety and efficiency trumps that of gas or coal."

Of course, that puts the anti-nuclear crowd in the position of arguing, however indirectly and unwillingly, for gas and coal, and we all know how dirty they are. That's worth a billion-plus in PR right there -- especially when you consider that select Friends of W will benefit from nuclear power protections. Cynicism, the ever-reliable Virgil in the Inferno of contemporary politics, suggests that the transfer of profits from Halliburton's fossil fuel cost centers to its nuclear ones will be fairly seamless.

I'm still trying to figure how the other touchy-feely talking point of the 2003 SOTU, AIDS in Africa, makes money for Bush backers while softening his image, but I imagine an answer will come soon enough.

CHUM FRINK. As a professional writer who has labored long in corporate vineyards, I have a special affection for, and identification with, T. Cholmondeley (Chum) Frink, the repulsive PR/ad man in Sinclair Lewis' "Babbitt." Frink, wrote Lewis,

was not only the author of "Poemulations," which, syndicated daily in sixty-seven leading newspapers, gave him one of the largest audiences of any poet in the world, but also an optimistic lecturer and the creator of "Ads that Add." Despite the searching philosophy and high morality of his verses, they were humorous and easily understood by any child of twelve...

Of course Frink is revealed in the end to be a self-loathing drunk.

So I am delighted to find that there is a prog-rock group called Chum Frink, and especially delighted that nowhere on their web site do they explain their name. Such restraint in the world of rock is rare and admirable.

CONTEMPT FOR THE PUNTER. I'm not the only ranter around who thinks his own bad customer service experiences are worth reading. Patrick Hayden is angry at his high-speed access provider, Speakeasy, for ripping him off. I'm not surprised. As recounted here, I got fucked over by NorthPoint (Outta business! See ya!) and Verizon (Service doesn't really work with Macs and screws up your operating system and mail agent! See ya!), in ways that were slightly different from those described by Hayden but fundamentally similar in that they reflect a growing trend of what I'll call contempt for the punter.

To reiterate, so many service companies make their long green from big clients that they don't think much about customer satisfaction down at the sub-millionaire end of the demo. Like a lot of things businessmen don't really care about, they respond to perceived problems in that area by sprinking some money and programs in places where trade magazine reporters might notice them, all the while leaving the basic problem -- systems designed to extract maximum money with minimum customer benefit -- untouched.

The "We don't use last names" response Hayden got from Speakeasy's rep is hilarious. And I expect that, should that piece of shit company remain in business (or become a wholly-owned part of some mega-corporation, as I suspect its owners are hoping), they will eventually institute a CRM program meant to address the problem -- meaning the customers' reps will give out last names, and lots of soothing baby-talk, but no better service.

As it happens, JP Morgan Chase appears to have fixed the problem they caused for me the other day. I say "appears" because in my discussions with them they left themselves enough rhetorical wiggle room to leave me on edge as to whether this problem is fixed for good, for a day, or what.

YOU'VE GOT QUESTIONS, WE'VE GOT ANSWERS. "SO WHY DO I CARE ABOUT THE NEW YORK TIMES STORY?" Because the movement for which you are an operative has always had it in for the Times, and the Blair mess (and the attendant Bragg pseudo-scandal) provides the proverbial shit that brings the proverbial happiness to the proverbial pig. "So why do many people consider [newspapers] more reliable than blogs?" I guess it will be a year or two before the average American is so stupid that he can't tell the difference between a major newsgathering organization with bureaus all over the world and deskbound link-peddlers with catchphrases, so I'll save my explanation for then.

CURSE CONT. These days I find it a lot easier to get spitting mad at institutions than at politicians, even. Chase's unhelpfulness mirrors a pattern I've found in many utilities and services. People complain and complain about customer service, and the companies dump billions into CRM and related training and technologies as a "response" to these complaints. They also drill into into their reps' heads that customer service is important, which mainly translates to some increased touchy-feeliness in their scripts -- how often have you heard a rep assure you that it is his or her goal to provide you with "outstanding" (or "excellent") service?

But there's not a lot the reps can do, because it is too often in the interest of the institutions themselves to prevent you from getting what you need.

Think about free-magazine deals. Once you've taken the free magazine, the company has a vested interest in keeping you from cancelling the automatic subscription that's supposed to kick in sometime afterward. They'll put you on hold forever, lose your trouble ticket, offer you some other premium -- whatever it takes to keep you from registering a final and irrefutable cancellation. Suddenly the nice people who gave you a free magazine turn into greedhead sharks.

With big companies it's subtler. First off, you're usually over a barrel: you need a key service rendered, and your only leverage is a threat is to pull your business. But what if they don't care? What if their income mostly derives from much bigger clients -- and an eternally-replenished pool of little fish like yourself? You can go on and pull out -- and endure the massive hassle of transferring providers (usually with fat fees tied on the end). Or you can stand and fight -- and realize that, however many assurances you get that the rep is doing all he or she can, the system is hard-wired to give you as little as it can get away with.

Jules Feiffer had a gag years ago about trouble with the phone company: "You can always take your business to one of our many competitors." Ma Bell was a monopoly then. Well, today we have phone companies out the ass -- and they all act more or less the same. They'll offer you free minutes, hours, cell phones, anything -- and when the going gets tough they'll stonewall you and dare you to fall off the vine, because who needs your piddleyshit patronage when their major scrilla is coming from giant corporate accounts and their own endless mergers and acquisitions?

There are all kinds of good arguments against the consolidation of everything, but the best one I know is that it leaves increasingly fewer vendors with any vested interest in the satisfaction of us peons. When everything on earth is owned by Gog and Magog, try getting an extra phone line put in before September.

They'll probably instruct their agents to break out the phone sex ("Welcome to Magog! It's my goal today to make you cum all over my tits!"), but in the end you still won't get your money shot.

A CURSE. My bank has fucked me up in a major way with an EFT transfer. My bank offers no explanation, and no remedy, for its malfeasance. My bank is JP Morgan Chase, and a more repulsive flock of usurious vultures, with a lower regard for all but its most affluent customers, has never been witnessed. A black curse on their filthy heads.

UPDATE. Chase "made good," as they say, but I'm waiting to see if the effects are permanent before lifting the curse. I will, however, keep my bone rattle and vial of goat's blood handy, just in case.

THE LIMITS OF UTILITARIANISM. At the New York Post this weekend (can't be troubled to find the link -- every access of the Post's files unleashes a reek, and I can't bear it today), author Eric Schlosser talks about his new book, "Reefer Madness," which considers the nuttiness of the drug war.

At one point he brings up the strain drug convictions put on the prison system, and the resulting overcrowding and inhuman conditions.

"Why should we care?" asks the interviewer.

Schlosser makes the perfectly reasonable answer that prisoners thus treated present, when released, an even more intractable problem for the general population than before.

Call me a dreamer, but it would have been nice if Schlosser had responded along these lines: "You should care because you're a human being, asshole."

IT NEVER RAINS IN CALIFORNIA, BUT GIRL, DON'T THEY WARN YA... Kevin Drum is having trouble sleeping and is depressed. I have hectored some web characters about this sort of thing in the past, but Drum is a True Son of Liberty and so I write to offer comfort rather than causticism. That's how rabidly partisan I am.

The news is making Drum unhappy, it seems, not personal, professional, or economic pressures. So my first counsel is perspective. On the latter three counts, I myself regularly hit the trifecta of misery, so for me our parlous political situation is just one damned thing after several others. If he has mental leisure to be depressed about the gang of nuts and sleazebags running our country, he might take that a favorable sign.

There are any number of far wealthier, far more comfortable, and far more highly-placed folk out there who, deprived of any sane reason for singing the blues, fret over the state of European architecture, or of their subjects' lungs. Fortunately Drum has good sense to accompany his penchant for melancholy, and he may take comfort that his expressions of concern are found by enlightened correspondents such as myself to be based in some sort of reality, not in the vaporous nightmares of our latter-day Ludwigs.

Should the strain of seeing plain the depradations of our time become too much for him, he may wish to avoid the news altogether for a small space. I evaded newsprint for most of the Carter Administration and part of Reagan's, to good personal effect, before my restless curiosity overrode my instinct for self-preservation. We would miss his sensible observations of the current scene, but he could just post cat pictures in the interim. Everyone likes kitties -- everyone with any sense, anyway.

Above all, Drum must keep at arm's length any sense of mission. We do what we do because something drives us, but that something is usually either decreased seratonin levels or the gift of gab, not a charge from God. Only the Blues Brothers could accept such a mission with happy results.

When all else fails, devolve into madness. Works for me!

Get well soon, Calpundit.

UPDATE: Now he says he's feeling better. From the yawning pit of hell, I salute him. Now get out there and counter some absurdities!

THE STORY GOES AWAY. Matthew Yglesias points to Josh Marshall, who says the below mentioned DeLay issue is journalistically moot because it's a dog-bites-man story -- DeLay is a notoriously "hardball" type of operative, so no one finds it surprising (or, by that narrow defintion, newsworthy) that he may have misused the resources of a Federal agency in pursuit of a partisan vendetta. Marshall also says that "it's not simply a partisan or bias issue," though I seem to recall an ocean of ink devoted to allegations that Bill Clinton had his operatives shut down LAX so he could get a $200 haircut.

Marshall also brings up the in-some-ways-similar example of Trent Lott, which is all the segue fodder I need. "At least in the first few days, no one gave the Lott situation much attention because pretty much everyone knew that Lott was fairly unreconstructed on racial issues," says Marshall. "(After all, only three years before, his close ties to a white-supremacist group had been widely reported in the Washington Post and other papers.) So it really wasn't such a surprise that he thought this way."

This seems to go against Marshall's point rather than for it, and maybe he's suggesting that the DeLay case, like Lott's, may catch-a-fire over time.

I doubt that. As I wrote copiously about the Lott takedown, Crimson cons/and doves of teel/worked together to cut the Trent Lott deal because each side got something out of it. The liberals got to pile on a noisome conservative, and the conservatives got to show that they do too hate prejudice, so there.

While there are a few conservatives out there in the electronic hustings who view askance the whole Homeland Security trip, I don't see enough percentage for them in a Lott-style takedown of DeLay to motivate a show of outrage.

Blogospheric pressure is thus weakened, and absent, as shown, Big Media interest in the case, the story goes away.

This is a profoundly cyncial analysis, but these days, in so many cases, those are the only kind that make sense.

DELAW'S DELAY, THE INSOLENCE OF OFFICE. MSNBC pokes light fun at Tom DeLay for saying kaddish at a memorial for a Challenger crew member of the Jewish persuasion. Tee-hee -- super-Christian Tom speaks Hebrew!

To be fair, a slightly more substantive discourse follows about the role of evangelicals in the Israel-Palestine road map thing. All very edifying, in an official-wisdom sort of way, but what shocked me was that no mention was made of a large crime in which the powerful Christer seems to be involved -- namely, involving the Federal Department of Homeland Security in the pursuit of Democratic Texas House members, and the destruction of public records pertaining thereunto.

There are all kinds of ways to parse this, in a "What Liberal Media?" kinda way, but I'm focusing mainly on the "Hella Dumb Media" aspect. DeLay is like Michael Jackson to them. We tag Jackson, these days, for one thing: being a freak who likes little boys. There's more to him than that, for good or ill -- I think his recent bankruptcy claims are pretty interesting, especially considering the convoluted economics of the music business -- but when the editors and producers are lining up their programs, little boys are what Jackson's all about, and anything else would, in their view, muddy up the story.

For MSNBC, DeLay is Mr. Jesus Redneck, and there's a lot to that, but it's downright weird to me that any late-breaking story involving him would totally eschew the Homeland Security angle. I seem to recall that coverage of everything former NJ Senator Bob Torricelli did in recent months mentioned his "allegations of ethical breaches" -- in fact, when he was recently appointed special master of a Honeywell chromium cleanup, ETL (Even The Liberal) Newsday saw fit to bring them up long, long after they were a public issue.

What's up with that? Is any mention of Republican crookedness in states run (formerly or presently) by Bushes automatically downplayed by our (cough, cough) liberal media?

DANCING ABOUT ARCHITECTURE, BLOGGING ABOUT POLITICS. Neil Young mouths off about Bush in the Guardian (link found via Atrios), which collaboration will make him subject to Vidal/Mailer/Vonnegut treatment in Right-Wing World soon enough, I'm guessing.

The Brit interlocutor says that Young "has never been a political songwriter, unless you count his 1970 hit single Ohio." At first this seems absurd. Hello? "Southern Man"? "Alabama"? "Rockin' in the Free World" (and the rest of the Freedom album? The long rants in Journey Through The Past ("They think they're Roman Senators... and they're full of shit!")?

But maybe the Brit is right on another level. The line between the personal and the political in Young's stuff has often been very porous, but that doesn't make him much of an advocate. He's a crank with several bees in his bonnet, and every so often his personal grudges line up with political ones in an almost accidental way. Sometimes it's a Safeway cart or a Coupe de Ville that tickles his muse, sometimes it's George Bush.

That's why his politics, such as they are, don't follow a steady trend-line. He did defend Reagan, but that doesn't seem to have been a political statement in anything but appearance. "I don't know Ronald Reagan," he said in an interview, "but I have this feeling about him that this is a personal thing... It pisses me off to have anybody ALWAYS attacking, always putting down the leaders. My brother does the same thing."

This makes him a flake to some people who want things predictable -- like David Geffen, who sued him for his stylistic flip-flops, to use a favorite word of political observers, on records like "Trans" and "Everybody's Rockin." I saw Young during that period -- he kept crossing up the buckskinned fans at the Coliseum by playing electonic music between renditions of songs from Harvest, and they all started filing out of the place when he launched into his rockabilly set. I don't doubt Neil Young loves his fans, but he's obviously too committed to going his own way to allow that love to keep him in one place very long. That may be why so many of his songs are about travelling, and about lost love.

Political writing, of the sort we often attempt on these pages, is best when the terms are clear and the facts are straight. So it's usually a little embarrassing when artists interject themselves into that world, because their thinking is a little too free-range. But so what? No one with any sense will rely on even the most astute political art-makers for a convincing argument -- if I quote Brecht to you in defense of the labor movement, that's a filigree, not a proof point. From artists you might get images, metaphors, and turns of phrase that effect the way you think and feel about the world. And that may sustain and inspire you when you argue, under whatever debating society rules you choose to accept, about politics.

It's not bad to be reminded that behind all the online arguments are a bunch of people who go to movies, listen to songs, may have missed a car payment or lost a loved one or had a few cross words with God. That neither invalidates nor bolsters any particular argument, but it may remind us that the endlessly scrolling texts and talking points are not all our correspondents comprise, and instill in us a little merciful perspective.

Now to work up another bellyful of bile for the next fool I come across in my obssessive blogreading!

Or maybe not.

THIS JUST IN: ASSISTANT CONTRIBUTES CONTENT TO CEO MEMO! WHERE'S THE OUTRAGE? Andrew Sullivan continues jihad against his former employers, making a mountainous molehill out of a Times story reported from the Florida Gulf Coast. Turns out the bylined author relied on reporting from a freelancer, but didn't acknowledge it.

In terms of inside baseball, this is maybe a big deal, and the reporter should be censured. But the point is, someone did make the scene and take the notes -- the story would appear to be sound, though the attribution isn't.

The Blair scandal was about making shit up and publishing it as observed reality. Whether a name was left of the credits is not nearly so big a deal -- it sucks for the freelancer, sure, but freelancers get screwed all the time, as boy don't I know. Does it change your perception of the story that the reporter had unaccredited help?

Sullivan's been looking to get back at Raines for a while, and it would be churlish to deny him the golden opportunity presented by the Blair case. Still, I'm getting a little sick of it. It's a good thing that people are paying attention, but Sullivan and the rest of his crew seem a lot less interested in getting the Times to maintain its high journalistic standards than in discrediting it.

When the Times starts running the kind of crap Deborah Orin regularly vomits up onto the "news" pages of the New York Post, I'll worry about it, but till then it's a non-story to me.

A GOOD NIGHT. The Mets pulled out a one-run victory over the Braves tonight. Art Howe may be starting to earn his salary. He played a lot of pitchers tonight, and pulled them each at the right time, including the starter, Trachsel. Weathers put in a particularly gutsy performance in the eighth. And Benitez gave a great show in the ninth, balking to push a Brave into scoring position and nodding in acknowledgment of his transgression, instead of blowing smoke out of his ears like he usually does in tough spots. Shinjo saved the game by throwing out the balk-advanced runner at the plate -- boy, it's good to have him back. Howe grabbed a smiling Benitez afterwards and gleefully shouted something at him -- something along the lines of, "You'll take it, right?" I'm guessing. Bobby V probably would have made Benitez do laps or something.

I believe this was the Mets' first game of the season against Atlanta. Last year the Braves regularly mopped the floor with the Amazin's, but this game didn't look like a fluke at all. That fat lady hasn't even cleared her throat.

MAD MAG'S DEVIL'S BARGAIN. Bee-zarre column I just read called "The Reality of Sex Today" (what -- it changed?) from Maggie Gallagher -- I got it in the NY Post but can't find it online, so maybe I'm not the only one who thought it was over the top.

In the piece, Gallagher references sodomy laws (and Andrew Sullivan!) before devolving to what at first seems like her usual Junior Anti-Sex League stuff, but which quickly veers into deep and choppy waters.

Addressing Sullivan's "We are all sodomites now" idea, Gallagher concedes that sodomy may be well and good for some (and makes the point so mildly that a careless reader might miss the novelty of even this mild hint of toleration from one of America's leading judgment queens), but eventually all non-procreative sex must lead to "what men and women really want: a real sexual union, incarnating love, which makes man and woman one flesh." And that ain't cocksucking and cuntlapping in Maggie's book. Non-procreative sex "does not exist," she says, because once guys and gals start fooling around, vaginal intercourse is as inevitable as death and taxes. "How can normal men and women abandon themselves to sexual desire," she writes, "and expect at the same time to rigidly and ruthlessly exercise self-control to avoid what is for men and women the ultimate act of sexual union?"

Notice what she's avoiding here, besides sanity: the subject of gay sex. None of these concerns she mentions apply to same-sexers. At first I thought this was merely the result of inattention caused by a rush of crazy-juice to Gallagher's brain, but now that I think harder about it, I'm beginning to suspect it's part of a devil's bargain that she is consciously working on.

Before she gets to her final aria, Gallagher returns to sodomy laws, and makes what for her is probably a difficult admission: "Does society and law have any business regulating the sexual and intimate relationships between men? I don't know. Probably not."

Notice that it's a tentative offer -- of the sort that someone who is negotiating for something might put, as it were, on the table. Notice that we're also talking about men here, and men only.

Gallagher concludes: "Do we have any stake in shaping the meaning and purpose of sex between the men and women who yearn for one another? This I do know. The Supreme Court be damned. Yes."

"Shaping the meaning and purpose" can, given the context, only mean the abolition of abortion rights (at the very least -- she might want Griswold v. Connecticut overturned as well). Now add to this her mildly tolerant overtures toward gay men -- specifically the conservative Sullivan.

Can you not see the horse-trade that the Legion of Sex-Mad Cultural Conservatives has sent brave Maggie forth to broker?

I can see it -- her zaftig frame packed into liederhosen and a St. Pauli Girl blouse, a Valkyrie helmet pulled down to her eyebrows, Maggie whispers to the Lost Boys:

We'll let you guys have sex all you want -- if you help us overturn Roe v. Wade. Our fight is not with you. We have only come for the children.

You read (or co-fantasized) it here first!

FROM THE CHURCH NEWSLETTER TO DOW JONES. This is what they're publishing at OpinionJournal these days. It's not a matter of disagreeing with the guy, an apparent suburban dad ruminating about all those gol-durned R-rated movies his young'uns want to see (but he won't let 'em, except if it's "The Patriot," because there the R is earned by blood, not sex). There's nothing to disagree with. It's not an argument of any kind, and has no point of any kind; nor is it distinguished by any grace of style or of observation. It's just chatter of the sort you might see in a small-town penny-saver. And the great Dow Jones has published it.

Meanwhile I'm wearing a cardboard belt.

YOU CAN LOOK BUT -- WELL, YOU CAN'T LOOK EITHER. At work I can't read Matthew Yglesias, or CalPundit, or a lot of other inspirational bloggers because my company employs Websense to prevent us peasants from -- well, let me quote the Websense website: "Websense can be used to promote employee productivity. For a quick illustration of how much casual surfing of the Internet could be costing your organization, choose your currency and complete the form on the next page."

Dollars and cents vs. quality of life. The judges are all wearing expensive suits. Guess who wins?

Websense cites a category -- "gambling," "sex," "personal web site," etc. -- when one of its constituents attempts to enter a verboten site. Sometimes it's overzealous -- I can't go to Neal Pollack's site, for example, because Websense thinks it's "tasteless" -- a fair cop in any case, but Websense seems to be thinking about Polish jokes.

For a while I was actually able to get around these computer cops by adding the "www" I'd been omitting from the filtered URLs. But they caught on to that. That's the creepy thing (well, one of them) about these services -- they observe, they learn, and they adapt.

I state here for the record that I am no slacker, and I generally approve everything my company does, in spades & believe you me. But these internet handcuffs send, I believe, an unhelpful message: that any time spending goofing around with general-interest reading is stolen from the company, and locking out certain sites is like locking down the computers themselves -- a rudimentary precaution against the natural depravity of human beings.

I object. Any intellectual labor, like physical labor, requires timely breaks to keep the laboring apparatus fresh. Even Republicans will agree with that, I think. If they don't trust us to choose our own means of refreshment, maybe they should just send Party functionaries around at intervals to lead us in jumping-jacks and songs of praise to our Leader.

Well, this doesn't bear too much fretting over -- and I do have work to do. Look, Boss! I'm refreshed!

BACK IN THE DAY. Friend'o'mine gave me a mix CD. It has the Ramones doing "Street Fighting Man." Shit! So so so cool.

Following is the Donnas, doing "Dirty Denim." Reminds me of something Chuck D once said about the Knicks: "Yeah, you good, but you ain't winning no World Championships."

I miss Joey.

IT'S RIGHT WHEN WE DO IT, BUT WRONG WHEN YOU DO IT, and there ain't no more to it than that, all internal tergiversations aside.

THE REBA'ATHIFICATION OF SALAM PAX is near complete. He is gone from the Blogger blogroll. Matt Welch and James Lileks speak no more in his defense. And all because, anti-Saddam as he has been, he did not entirely appreciate (in the flag-waving manner of recent TV Iraqis) the takeover of his country. He reports, firsthand, on the devastation of his surroundings. He works for a group calling itself Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict -- "Who is paying them? And the organization itself appears shady," says NRO. ("He praises the local Communists, who did nothing to liberate Iraq," the NRO operative adds. No shit. Who got the money for that, Dimmy?)

The postwar does not entirely fit the millenarian scenario proposed by the erstwhile warbloggers. "There is absolutely no distribution method. The aid that is coming in gets taken by whomever and sold on the market. You could buy the whole box for 16.000 dinars (a bit more than 16 US dollars by today’s rate)," reports SP. This can't be encouraging news to the many Americans who have been inclined to wonder when the largesse lavished on the official administrators of the world's newest democracy will run off in the form of Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy! approbation unto its oldest. Some might even question the wisdom of this multimillion-dollar expedition. No surprise, then, that conservatives have put him on their shitlist.

Only those of us cursed with an inclination to follow these internecine struggles will notice, probably. But what about the bigger, more domestic propaganda efforts, like the 2004 Republican Convention, slated to be held near September 11 right here, where the planes hit and most of us despise the President? How many web sites will it take to make that work?

A BRIEF REPRIEVE FROM A LITANY OF FAILURES. Alicublog has been receiving props of late, some from longtime favorites and web machers like CalPundit, Tapped, and Ted Barlow, some from guys who are new to me but who obviously know something about pushing words together.

I am flattered, certainly, especially considering the sources. But you can be sure this momentary frisson will not go to my head. Indeed, in this long malaise my life I have many times seen opportunity come and go like a local train suddenly and inconveniently running express, with the conductor thumbing his nose at me as he speeds past. The angels that the Lord sends daily unto me, dressed like the ones in Wings of Desire but less inclined to touch my scalp sympathetically than to beat me with softball bats, will not suddenly change their style of ministration, and neither will my creditors grow less attentive.

And it's only blogging, after all -- not like the sure-fire career path that is rawkn roll!

But I will take my bow and be content.

ANOTHER THING THAT MAKES US GREAT IS OUR AWESOME MODESTY. "Anyway, I think the realism of conservative writing has grown to be more valued in part because realism itself is more valued... You could also say, as many do, that it's not realism so much as ideas that makes for good writing. Since liberalism doesn't have good ideas anymore their writing often seems to be cranky defenses of the status quo or continuation of old discredited policies." -- Jonah Goldberg, NRO's The Corner.

Elsewhere Goldberg and other members of his ass-patting society talk about how stuck up Cornel West is. Apparently West allows words of praise directed toward himself to appear on his website. Why, they must wonder, doesn't he just say them about himself, like real intellectuals do?

I CRIED TILL I LAUGHED. This is classic, and I would know, because I was, like, there, man.

HOUSING SCHLOCK. I've been seeing a lot of this kind of anti-rent-stabilization article lately. I think their point would be better expressed by colloquy:

PROFESSOR: So you see, Citizen, if we allow your landlord to charge you anything he wants, your rents will actually go down!

CITIZEN: Gosh, Professor! It sure sounds counterintuitive. How d'ya figure?

PROFESSOR: Without this socialist and stultifying rent stabilization, the market will be free to create new housing units, and when these units compete for your rental dollar, that'll drive prices down -- just like it did Cambridge, MA!

CITIZEN: Are you sure about that, Professor? My buddy lives up in Cambridge, and he says the rents are pretty steep --

PROFESSOR: I'm sure your friend is just a disgruntled hippie, Citizen, grown soft from years on the dole.

CITIZEN: Why, so he is, Prof! But that ain't me! I'll sign that bill for you now.

LANDLORD: (reading bill) Mamma mia! So I can-a charge anything I want? The rent, she a-goin' up!

CITIZEN: But, Professor, you said --

PROFESSOR: Well, you can't expect these things to work overnight. Patience, my friend!

(Two years later, they meet again on the street.)

PROFESSOR: Good to see you again, Citizen. Still living on Gunplay Terrace?

CITIZEN: Yeah. (Yawns) Sorry, Professor -- between the scuttling of the rats in my walls and the nightly artillery barrage, I hardly get any sleep. There's good news, though -- next month they're putting in a Starbucks!

PROFESSOR: It appears the genius of the market has placed us each in domiciles appropriate to our social worth.

CITIZEN: You still living in my old apartment?

PROFESSOR: Of course.

LANDLORD: And dey all live-a happily ever after! Ciao!

RENT-A-RESISTER. Andrea Peyser writes in today's NY Post of "two lefty activists, teachers with advanced degrees in civil disobedience" instructing "stroller-pushing moms and doting dads... proudly American, politically conservative" in Cobble Hill how to conduct themselves during a planned sit-in at a local firehouse. (Engine Co. 204 is one of those slated by our depraved Mayor Richie Rich to close.)

Peyser's tone throughout is sympathetic, and she even tugs at our sleeves, if not our heartstrings (from my experience of her writing, I don't think she knows where those are, either on us or on her), suggesting that these "proudly American" worthies were heroically placing themselves in harm's way for the good of their children. "Folks here in the most populous outer borough feel as if Bloomberg has taken out a contract on their lives," she writes. "The budding domestic protesters were told to arrange for someone to pick up their children to prevent them from being placed in foster care. These dedicated moms deserve better, Mr. Mayor."

Compare and contrast, class! Here's the selfsame Peyser covering an anti-war demo back in March:

Despite the valiant efforts of a few high school hooky players, college class-cutters, trust-funded artists and vintage radicals -- all graced with enough tongue- and nose-piercings to decorate a season of "Survivor" -- yesterday's so-called "die-in" was dead on arrival... the hundreds of cops who were diverted from real emergencies handled the idiot protesters with grace... Not that they liked it. "They took us away from the neighborhoods for this," complained one plainclothes officer. "Don't they know that it's the people who will suffer?"

"Don't they know that it's the people who will suffer?" I wonder if Mayor Rich will roll this out as a talking point, should the firehouse protest materialize. I wonder also if any of the "vintage radicals" from the earlier story were among the "teachers with advanced degrees in civil disobedience" instructing the Cobble Hill group. And I wonder if Peyser would have been nicer about the anti-war protestors if they were dressed more "proudly America" (e.g., in relaxed-fit jeans, shapeless sweatshirts, expensive name-brand athletic shoes, etc).

I do not, though, wonder how Andrea Peyser got a job at the Post. Despite their gleeful, near-daily pounding of the Times, standards at Rupert's Rag are a limbo stick, and it's really just a matter of how low you can go.

HOWARD BEACH. HOWARD BEACH. I was required to attend an employee testimonial out in Howard Beach. All I knew about the neighborhood prior to this evening was that a group of young white guys had chased a black kid onto the Belt Parkway there in 1986. The kid, Michael Griffith, was struck by traffic and killed. Things were ugly in New York for a while after. I remember heading home late one night around that time on the Lower East Side, and noticing some young black guys coming out of a club. As I walked on, I heard someone behind me say, "Let's get the cracker. Howard Beach. Howard Beach." Nothing happened to me, though there were a couple of incidents in that period that probably began the same way.

As Lou Reed said, those were different times.

Tonight's event was at a big old hall called Russo's By The Bay. It's one of those parkway palaces -- a large, filigreed block of stone with thin red carpet and jacketed valets out front, and ornate rooms inside -- good place for your stereotypical Queens wedding reception. As we drove to the place (the company generously spotted me to a car service), I scoped the streets of the neighborhood. Its boundary was announced by gold lettering on a wooden sign painted sky blue, like you'd expect to see at a yacht club. Strolling the streets were young Italian men, and young black men, and young Hispanic men, all in casual clothes and looking comfortable and happy. When I stepped out of the car onto the red carpet, I could smell the sea.

I was seated at a circular table (#9), surrounded mostly by women who sold goods for the company. They were nearly all black, all very well-behaved, happy to be there but not overly demonstrative. I endeavored to draw them out. I drank the wine that flowed. We chatted, had some laughs. I sat next to a very ample middle-aged woman who'd had trouble with her leg, she explained, and this had caused her weight to increase, though she did a lot of walking in her business. She was cheerful and friendly and I was glad to sit with her and hear her deep laughter, though I occasionally turned my attention to an older white woman, very compact in stature and gesture, who announced forthrightly that she had been in the Holocaust, and her son, a chubby fellow wearing a filthy striped shirt and a straw cowboy hat, who seemed primarily interested in the food.

I stepped out to the red carpet every so often to have a smoke. Other guests of the event came out there, all black women. We conversed mildly, except when they were occupied with the company of their friends. One woman sheathed in several layers of diaphonous black fabric laughed uproariously, standing barefoot and sometimes stamping with glee on the thin carpet. One woman with many, many jewel-like encrustations on her black eyeglass frames complained to me, in a good-humored way, that she had been at the job 19 years and had hardly won any of the prizes given out at these events. I wished her luck. Across the street was an Italian restaurant with its roof peaked and striped to look like a circus tent, and a circular passage inside the doorway inscribed with the words FOOD, FAMILY, and FUN.

The event was MC'd by a local bigwig with a Spanish name who looked and acted like a cross between Kevin Spacey and Tim Allen. He energetically announced a series of awards and gifts from the shallow stage, each punctuated by audio stings from a DJ at the other side of the room. The guests were only mildly attentive. They had to work the next day. So did I, but I clapped and attended very attentively, being in the communications business. I noticed that the woman with the jewel-like encrustations had been called up to receive a small box of something or other. I waved and hollered to her; she waved back with a small smile.

I got in the car somewhere between 10:30 and 11 to ride back to my apartment. The car radio played old hits, some of them from the Michael Griffith era. I watched the city roll by, its lights large and bright and imperturbable.

A PLEA FOR SLACK. I studied this Salon article by Steven E. Landsburg several minutes, hoping there was some Modest-Proposal satirical angle I was missing. But there was not: he really thinks we should "punish" juries that hand down verdicts that turn out to be "wrong" (more on the second set of quote marks in a bit).

The goal, says Landsburg, is to give jurors "incentive to get their verdicts right in the first place." Good verdicts win you a check; bad ones get you a fine (!).

This is wrong is so many ways it makes the head spin, but I will focus only on two:

First, the idea of a "wrong" verdict. Landsburg uses the Lemrick Nelson case to add punch to his argument -- he got away with murder! -- and another involving a wrongly-convicted, DNA-liberated guy, just to show that he's not just bloodthirsty, I guess. The injustices in both these cases would seem clear to any reader. But has Landsburg never heard of jury nullification? Supposing the jury decided to decide "wrongly" -- that is, contrary to the instructions of the court and even of the law -- in the interests of what they perceive to be justice. Fine 'em, I expect Landsberg would say, maybe twice for being bad sports.

But it's not that simple. Say a bank, acting as plaintiff, wants to attach the pay of a guy whose wife is fighting cancer. The law might be on the bank's side, but the jury might say, fuck this, we're cutting the guy a break. If you're Landsburg, this is an easy call, but If you believe, as I do, the jury retains the right to pronounce however it sees fit for whatever reason, then the idea of reward/punishment for juries is an onerous, indeed unconstitutional, imposition on their franchise -- and, in cases like this one, on justice itself.

The second point is bigger. Landsberg's threatened-jury-is-a-motivated jury concept is very close to a depressing trend of our times -- that is, bullying as an acceptable means of "improving behavior." Quite apart from our government's unconscionable behavior at the international level, there is a tendency for the powerful to leverage their advantage over the less powerful, and Landsberg even acknowledges this in his reasoning: "The way to make workers diligent, as every manager knows, is to reward them when they succeed and punish them when they fail... Every assembly line worker in America, every cab driver, every doctor and lawyer and magazine columnist, reaps financial rewards and punishments that depend on his performance." I like the conflation of line workers and doctors -- but we all know which category of worker is more likely to get canned for being a little slow on a given morning.

God dammit, why do we all have to be so efficient anyway? Our society is lousy with efficiency experts, ergonometricians, etc., but it seems to me a much less happy place than it was before these pests came onto the scene.

That may be my wider reason for disliking this idea so much. I don't think we should be looking to regulate more aspects of our lives. I think we should be doing the opposite.

THESE KIDS TODAY. Teen sex is, now and always, news at the Times. According to this report by Tamar Lewin on findings by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, "About 20 percent of adolescents have had sexual intercourse before their 15th birthday."

Given the subject and the source, my instinct is to take the figures less than seriously. But even so, they are shocking.

I mean, I thought the kids had to be getting laid more than that.

When I was 15, if you'd told me that my chances of imminent sex were 1 in 5, I would have jumped off a bridge. I always had to believe they were at least 2 to 1 in my favor, or I never would have got out of my semen-encrusted bed.

But the story gets worse. An AP story in the same paper says this: "One in three boys ages 15-17 say they feel pressure to have sex."

Pressure? 33 percent of these boys actually think that someone is pushing them into sex? At their age, I mostly felt resistance to the idea, especially from the maidens I woo'd.

Of course, among my fellow adolescent males, sex was always discussed, and accounted a great thing -- both by those who professed to be getting it on a regular basis, and by those of us who did not (indeed, could not with any hope of being believed) make such claims. But that wasn't pressure -- that was, to us, mercy. For even the Lotharios among us were not getting nearly enough sex to satiate the great, slavering beast that was -- in my day, anyway -- male teenage lust, and the rest of us were practically shaking with need, ready to explode like cum-bombs.

The only relief we knew from this pressure was the ribald tales, knowing winks, and coarse laughter with which we acknowledged and sympathized with each other's howling horn-dogliness. We were not spurring each other on to reckless sexual behavior, we were coping with the fact that we had no partners with whom to be reckless. (I suppose we could have beat each other off -- and, as I went to a prep school, I assume some of us did -- but, as Lou Reed said, those were different times.)

The article gives the impression that our current crop of youngbloods feel their male bonding rituals constitute some sort of emotional "bad touch." I pray this is a misapprehension by clueless social workers. That's always a good bet.

But what if it isn't? What if the boys are, in fact, such abject pussies? What if kids aren't living in sexual Valhalla as we've all assumed? What if all those movies about precocious libertines, all those rumors about rampant schoolgirl-on-schoolboy blowjobs, were bullshit?

Any opportunity to feel less jealous of the young is welcome. But it would be depressing to believe that the picture of their generation coming out of the paper is at all accurate. I prefer to think that the intensity of adult scrutiny has Heisenberged teenage behavior -- rendered it unreadably sketchy, perhaps with some help from the kids themselves who must be sick of all the poking and prodding.

I mean, people can't have changed that much. Can they?

AS IF MY SELF-ESTEEM weren't bedraggled enough, along comes this.

EQUILIBRIUM. Hey, how ya doin'? Okay? Me? Oh, can't complain. Earlier, I was briefly made angry by this guy, who has figured out on his digital slide rule that conservatives are better writers than liberals (he also says, if I'm reading him right, that conservatives are more fun, more intelligent, and more polite; have better breath, whiter teeth, and stronger erections; and their shit don't smell). Elsewhere, usual suspect Jonah Goldberg wrote, "I believe that in the far-flung future we will live in houses full of woods (real or synthetic) and greens and eat increasingly luxurious meals." Yeah, I thought, if by "we" he means himself and his fellow tenured conservatives; the rest of us will probably only see trees if our concentration camps happen to be located on National Park land.

But I was too busy to keep up my anger over things like this. I am struggling to keep many balls in the air (some of them weighing thirty pounds and studded with razor blades), and that prevents me from paying too much mind to the hoots and gibberings coming from the fever swamps. In fact, these days my best moments come when I am perfectly poised between anger at an unjust fate and anger at morons with modems. At such moments I briefly forget who to be mad at, and am content.

THEIR ARGUMENT. Kathryn Jean Lopez explains it all for you, publishing with approval this NRO reader quote:

I was just watching "The Great Muppet Caper" (last day of the semester) and discovered an overlooked moment of Muppet insight. The gang have just caught jewel thief Charles Grodin red-handed and sweet, earnest Kermit asks, "Why did you do it?" Grodin shrugs and says, "Because I'm a villain." Plain and simple, no "root cause" nonsense. I'll remember that line every time someone tries to tell me we should be more concerned about why "they" hate us.

Let us not forget, as we endeavor to wrest control of the country back from the bellicose idiots that currently misguide her, that we are in fact dealing with bellicose idiots. The bowtied clowns who act all erudite on TV are merely a sideshow for the opinion epicures. The Republican arguments are in the main yahoo bullshit. Whichever one of the Dems picks up the fallen standard in 2004 had better be able to talk to Beavis and Butthead.

I miss Bill Clinton.