DID YOU MISS ME? A stomach virus plus computer problems equalled a longer than usual layoff from blogging here at alicublog, so some small inanities, like this moron who only recently discovered that Randy Newman thinks bad thoughts, went unattended. Sorry.

HOMAGE TO DUSTIN DIAMOND. Actually this David Brooks column isn't too, too terrible, but I had to notice this right-wing tic:

So when a Republican starts a perfectly normal conversation about the glories of his powerboat, snowmobile, combine or hemi, the liberal is likely to screech out something about the ozone layer.

Have you noticed that nearly every conservative characterization of everyday liberals involves screeching? There's the "santimonious [sic] liberal screech," for example, and the "whacko lefties screech." This guy claims that "the whine of the North American liberal can often be mistaken for the sound of a screech owl." Another one says "You say 'Republican' to a liberal gay activist, they'll make a face or screech or whine or say, 'Republicans cannot be good'" (though, in this case, it seems possible that the author attributes his subject's screeching to gayness rather than liberalism). Ann Coulter notes all the things "that would cause a liberal to screech."

And so on. See here for more. I guess it has something to do with the portrayal of leftism as less than manly, an electorally useful gambit in the Bible and Ethanol Belt States. (Congresscritter Evans wants to give more money to schools -- 'cuz that's where screechy types like him likes to hide, while us real men is out playin' football and makin' ethanol!). I can understand this kind of idiocy among the hoi polloi, but isn't it odd that the bespectacled, wimpish Brooks feels the need to play along? Maybe it's his way of telling his fellow conservatives, "I may have manicured nails and the speaking manner of a small-town theatre critic, but at least I don't screech!"

POTS & KETTLES, PART 7,595,044. David Brooks talks about a Presidential candidate who came from wealth and privilege yet affects the demeanor of a regular Joe. He "doesn't worry about having a coherent political philosophy," and "when you actually try to pin him down on a policy, you often find there is nothing there."

OK, you knew as soon as I said "David Brooks" that the column wasn't about our tough-talkin', silver-spoon-chewin', free-spendin', tariff-placin'-then-revokin' President. It's Howard Dean that's a phony! Whereas our Dear Leader believes in things. Like nation building. Of course, he believes different things about it at different times, but -- boy, that Dean, he's a crazy fucker, huh?

Sigh. This sort of thing makes me miss the moral clarity of Walter Duranty.

SHIT IN A CORNER, PART 3,429:

HEY THERE, BIG SPENDER [Jonathan H. Adler]
At a time when libertarians and economic conservatives are already grumbling about Republicans' profligate spending, what does the Bush Administration do? Think up new big-ticket spending items for a second term. Is KArl Rove trying to make such voters stay home in 2004?

(italics mine)

Yeah, those 300 votes might cost the GOP Nevada. Again!

EARLY CHRISTMAS PRESENT: Jesse Pandagon's "20 most annoying conservatives of 2003." Check especially the Jonah Goldberg comic, and the origin of Roy's Rock. (Thanks, Atrios from whom all blessings flow.)

LIT CORNER. I picked up some old books for a song (well, 50 cents apiece) at a sale. Fascinating specimens. One was Gene Fowler's bio of Jimmy Walker, the Roaring Twenties mayor of New York, called "Beau James." With Fowler I was previously acquainted; I'd read his cheapy bio of Jimmy Durante, "Schnozzola," and the Walker book follows a similar pattern: anecdotes and witty sayings bridged by historical data seemingly recited from imperfect, but compulsively perfecting, memory -- the polar opposite of those meticulous 800-page biographies that win the Pulitzers. Fowler seems to have been pals with both Durante and Walker, and with Damon Runyon, whose style he shares a bit. That this style also intrudes into the "quotations" of his subjects only adds to the charm, if not the versimilitude. Here's a Walker tale, via Fowler:

Whenever Jim shaved he used 'Champagne' toilet water, his only perfume, as a lotion. He paid six dollars a bottle for this dressing, which he also used after a bath. One of his servants seemed unable to buy the toilet water for less than ten dollars a bottle.

Jim was not the man to quibble about expenses, but somehow he had set his mind upon six dollars as a fair price for his favorite toilet water.

"I wonder," Jim said to the servant one day, "if we might strike a bargain, you and I? I'm going to raise your salary on the condition that you find a place that sells the toilet water for six dollars a bottle."

The servant qualified for the wage increase. "You know," Jimmy once said to his friend Johnny O'Connor, "if someone stole Brooklyn Bridge I'd be the last person in town to miss it. But when someone gyps me on toilet water, I feel that I am being more used than usual."

Does this sound stenographically accurate? Who cares?Walker had style, and so did Fowler, and if one owed some of his style to the other, I don't care to know of it. We're always hearing about how eloquent Bush is, but are offered very flat champagne (or toilet water) as evidence. At least Fowler had the decency to gussy up his subject so that we might believe him to be as smooth as advertised. Not truth, then, but legend, and we who revere "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" know what choice to make.

I also got an 1899 edition of Norris' "McTeague." This of course is the source material for von Stroheim's ill-fated "Greed," and for William Bolcom's opera (libretto by Arnold Weinstein and Robert Altman!). I can see why grand stylists are attracted to this property, even though the novel's pitch is tuned to the first faint notes of naturalism coming then out of Europe. Norris seems to have caught the Zola bug bad. Every squalid flat is rendered down to the last rusted coathook and battered chair-rail, and all relations are inevitably reduced to their grubby essence, often with disdainful and sometimes horrified commentary by the author, as in this passage detailing the quack dentist McTeague's infatuation with the childlike Trina:

The poor crude dentist of Polk Street, stupid, ignorant, vulgar, with his sham education and plebean tastes, whose only relaxations were to eat, to drink steam beer, and to play upon his concertina, was living through his first romance...

Ugh. Before McTeague first kisses Trina while she is anaesthetized in his dentist's chair (!), his inner struggle is rendered thusly:

He was alone with her, and she was absolutely without defence. Suddenly the animal in the man stirred and woke; the evil instincts that in him were so close to the surface leaped to life, shouting and clamoring... it was the old battle, old as the world, wide as the world -- the sudden panther leap of the animal, lips drawn, fangs aflash, hideous, monstrous, not to be be resisted...

Double ugh. One sympathizes with Eugene O'Neill's old man, who, after seeing his son's "Beyond the Horizon," asked him, "What are you trying to do, send the audience home to commit suicide?" For there is something purposefully ugly about the early attempts of American writers to not only grab hold of the truth as they saw it, but to thrust it under the nose of the bourgeoisie.

And yet... along this muddy track the novel proceeds single-mindedly and gathers great force and even beauty. One can see where Dreiser got it from -- the ham-handed, club-footed narrative style that, seemingly by brute force, draws readers in and carries them down into the muck. Mencken, that great champion of these authors, once said of the oratory of Warren G. Harding, a very different kind of writer, that it reminded him of "a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it." I wonder if Mencken, whose aversion to poetry is legendary, might not have admired something of idiotic barking-dog grandeur in Norris and his decedents as well?

BAD SANTA? I see the ACLU has griped because a minister dressed as Santa Claus was allowed to address a Baldwin City, KS classroom about the meaning of Christmas.

The Topeka Capital-Journal dispatch doesn't give much detail on the talk, though the Lawrence (KS) Journal-World reports that the ACLU has "urged the school district to investigate elementary schools allowing a Christian minister dressed as Santa Claus to discuss the meaning of Christmas, referral of students who appear to need guidance to Christian resources and granting Christian 'missionaries' access to students in after-school programs"

Well, that's the ACLU's job, I guess. And I wouldn't presume to pronounce on this case without more evidence. Maybe the Rev was counselling persecution of homosexuals, say, while under cover of Kringle.

But more and more I figure this is the sort of case where the ACLU ought to just let go of the rope. It's a bitter thing to say, but most cowtown kids have no strong motivation to think and act freely anyway, and trying to protect them from the depradations of organized religion is probably going to work about as well as trying to protect them from Wal-Mart and reality TV shows. Meanwhile complaints like this give wingers and Jesus freaks another chance to bitch about how liberals spoiled their Christmas.

I think the ACLU should take its contingency fund for events of this sort and invest it in copies of The Origin of Species, Babbitt, A People's History of the United States et alia, and send copies to safe houses throughout the Bible and Ethanol Belts, where young people who wish to escape the stifling stupidity of their parents and warders may take refuge. The cultivation of a few free minds might do more for our freedoms in the long run than blanket deChristianization of the public square.

NOT PROFOUND, JUST HELLA CHARMING:

13 Beautiful Women Versus One Hideous President."
Thanks for the tip, World O'Crap. I just don't see how Oliver Willis has been missing this.

SHORTER JOHN DERBYSHIRE. My youngest has been enlisted into some sort of Negro musicale, and I mean to get to the bottom of it. Mayhap some of you have fought or lived amongst the fuzzy-wuzzies. Have you a notion of their dialect? I am interested in a translation of this sinister fragment: "Hakuna Matata."

(I guess it wasn't much shorter, but it was fun!)

FOX NEWS ETHICS EXPLAINED. "There is no presumption of innocence in the court of opinion... The court of opinion can convict anyone on any basis." -- Wendy McElroy, FoxNews.com.

FIRST "CRUNCHY CONSERVATIVES," NOW THIS. That awful man points us to another front organization masquerading as a hipster 'zine (not, though, the one Reynolds works for), which tries to squeeze a few more innings out of the "'South Park' Republican" thing. Key quotes:

Conservatives once defined themselves as “standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’” This antiquated thinking doesn’t suit (if it ever did) young generations who see the future as promising more freedom, more prosperity, and more potential. We don’t want to freeze progress; we want to unbridle it.

And:

The Republicans have a moment here that they could seize. They can dig in with the conservatives and continue to muck about with the peripheral issues; or they can shed the conservative tag, embrace the reptilian “South Park Republicans” and get to work on the fundamental issues: freedom, prosperity, promise.

It should be explained, to those who understandably wish to avoid reading a whole page of this nonsense, that the Popshot author means "reptilian" in a good way. It has something to do with P.J. O'Rourke, who is to this sort of frat-boy federalist as Raymond Carver is to that legion of workshop-haunting, chain-smoking authors who lay up in cabins for weeks at a time to purge themselves of modifiers.

Popshot's take is fairly typical, and typically thin. SPRs believe pop-culture artifacts and leisure-time options constitute a political identity. They are encouraged, for example, to hear "Sean Hannity talking about sex (gasp!) on his radio show or Pejman talking about Grand Theft Auto (whoa!), one of the most violent video games ever made, in a favorable light," taking this to mean that "free market advocates have certainly come a long way."

A long way from where to where, one wonders. If a free-market advocate prefers to live like, say, John Derbyshire, listening to Hank Williams and blissfully solving calculus problems till the sun comes up, what makes him politically distinct from the sexed-up game-boy? For SPRs to be remarkable (and it seems one of their goals is to be remarkable), they would need to offer something that plain old Republicanism can't match. What, besides a shitty attitude, would that be?

Some commentators equate SPR with libertarianism. This seems to me wishful thinking, a sort of Police Athletic League approach to libertarian recruiting: Let's just channel these hooligans' natural energy into basketball and anti-tax initiatives!

It could work, I guess. Assuming most of the SPRs are young, they wouldn't feel much immediate impact from a "starving the beast" approach to government. But that's just a passive association: I haven't seen anyone crying, "As a South Park Republican, I'm strongly opposed to pork-laden Republican budgets and Medicare plans" -- oh sure, maybe in an Andrew Sullivan "it's shameful the way my President spends money on -- oh look! a bird" way, in which the grumble is dutifully made and then ignored as weightier matters (like who's a traitor) are gleefully picked over.

Really, it seems SPRs have only one strong belief: that they should have what they want -- i.e., attention and cool stuff. So do the rest of us, of course, but their want is more mediagenic because of the man-bites-dog angle -- Betcha didn't know that the kid in the Stüssy gear thinks Bush rulez! Hella counterintuitive!

I don't know how long the thing will last. Maybe a while. Punk lasted way beyond any earthly reason; Johnny Lydon packed it in a quarter-century ago, yet we still have kids walking around with "Anarchy" tattoos and mohawks. But of course, to be a punk in the old days was a little more demanding -- what with the social unacceptability and all. Whereas SPR has a remarkably low barrier to entry, as seen by this bit from yet another TCS "Hey Kids, Join The SPR Revolution" article:

Different South Park Republicans often describe themselves as conservatives, libertarians, classical liberals, pragmatists, constitutionalists, or "just your average Joe." However, when election day comes around, they all generally vote for Republican candidates.

As a wise old one said: Do the pose, all you have to do is wear the clothes.

PS: And what would a clique be without way stringent standards? Here's a guy who thinks South Park itself isn't SPR enough anymore.

A WARNING. You know, sometimes I get tired of acting like George Sanders in All About Eve, and when I read something like this...

AND FOR THE LADIES [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
The fun is not all Derb's: There are Rumsfeld and Bush in a Flight Suit talking dolls ("action figures" if you give them to your son for Christmas). Both are sitting with me as I write right now, courtesy of the TalkingPresidents.com folks. So excuse me if I sound distracted.

...I'm less likely to raise eyebrow and martini glass simultaneously and emit some sparkling aperçu, and more inclined to smash an empty rum bottle against a brick wall and yell something about cunt, ass, KY and DP.

Just a warning in case you think "Hey Salam, fuck you" is, like, cutting edge.

CORPOETRY. Coming down the elevator of the glass tower where I work, I overheard one suit say to another with no irony apparent:

"So, what's your read on our take?"

The frissons fly, and we are well advised to keep our eyes and ears open for them.

JULIA, look at the Blogroll and stop crying.

People act like this is an honor. Don't they know how worthless I am?

NUT, INTERRUPTED. TBogg, bless him:

Lileks isn't blogging for the month of December in order to work on his new book, Who Moved The DVD Racks?: An Amazing Trip To Aisle 14 At Target...

And lots more! Onto the blogroll with you!
I was kind of disappointed myself when I visited Lileks' site and saw the CLOSED sign up. He's been in rare form lately, raging at the little brown ones for not appreciating our "visit" (see a nice precis here). I had hoped he would start channeling Kipling ("Take up the Web Scribe's burden!") but I fear his momentum has been broken.

MAKE WAY, CRYBABIES! The New York Post's op-ed editor, Mark Cunningham, has for the first time I can recall (and I religiously read the piece of shit) pushed his way into the spotlight with an op-ed of his own. Don't know how his underlings felt about it, but I note with interest that Cunningham calls the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Maus "Ted Spiegelman," and it is hard to imagine that none of his colleagues noticed the mistake before it went to press.

Cunningham's theme is the pride of place to be given the 9/11 Memorial component of the new World Trade Center. This has been a bugbear of the Post's editorial pages for many months, and getting the top guy involved shows just how pissed they are about it; maybe next week Old Man Murdoch himself will pen a few stanzas, retaining some of his stateside lackeys to lard Americanisms into his text. ("'Don't go there!' By jingo, Smithers, what a corking turn of phrase!")

"The worst thing about putting the memorial first," says Cunningham, "is that it is choosing as the site's core identity -- as a definition of our city, our collective self -- the loss and grief."

One may agree, in principle, that it is no good to let the attacks overwhelm and define our lives. But one wonders: isn't Cunningham the same editor in whose Post pages 9/11 is regularly used as a bloody shirt to be flailed at all opponents, foreign and domestic, at all times and regardless of merit?

Just a few days ago the Post devoted its front page to a "dirty little secret" involving FDNY employees who fell in love with the 9/11 widows they had been assigned to comfort. As the Post will apparently wring dollars from 9/11-related stories no matter how petty and disgusting they are, where do they get room to talk down anyone else's take on it?

In the end, it's about one thing with Cunningham and his whole rag:

"Let us acknowledge that, insofar as we rebuild anything commercial at Ground Zero -- offices or stores -- we tread hard on genuine feeling. Yet rebuild we will, for other needs for that site and its future are more compelling: The need to forge an answer of life...

And the nation and the city must deny that evil its triumph... by reviving the symbol they set out to destroy, honoring the good of commerce - a good that was a central part of so many of the lives snuffed out that day."

Money, in other words. In order to commemorate the fallen properly, we must not in any way cut into the valuable square footage of retail and parking space, rights to which will be shoveled in sweetheart deals to the same moguls who made money on the old World Trade Center. So stuff your "floating trees," cry-babies, and make way for another Gap.

BLOGROLL BEGUN at lower left. I just couldn't go on being a rock, being an i-i-island. That Jim guy from Rittenhouse pushed me too far, see, by bookmarking alicublog "even though I can’t seem to find a blogroll of any kind over there." Lots of people have been that gracious, and whattaya know, nearly all of them are geniuses you should read!

THE BLOGROLL IS MERELY BEGUN, so please allow a few days for me to catch up.

AND YOUR ONLY COMPETITION IS IDIOTS. OpinionJournal gives the floor to Professor Robert P. George, who delivers a long philosophical assault on the Goodridge decision. He pleads for "sexually complementary spouses," which phrase summons the unfortunate image of lamb chops with mint jelly. He also claims that while the Massachusetts judges "usurped the authority of the people's elected representatives" and advocate a view "common in elite circles," there is little hope of passing a Constitutional Amendment outlawing gay marriage. Why so little hope, one wonders, if only usurping elitists would resist it?

Let us not forget where the Professor is coming from. The following is from Reason's account of a speech George gave a few years back to the American Enterprise Institute (!) entitled, "What's Sex Got to Do with It: Marriage, Morality, and Rationality":

Citing an earlier lecture by James Q. Wilson, George explained that it all went bad when individuals, not families, started to choose marital partners. Then came the "tradition-trumping rationalist impulse" of the Enlightenment and pretty soon marriage was a "mere contract," and "sex outside the bond of marriage" was "understood [as] some sort of Constitutional right."

George also informed his hearers that night that "Masturbatory, sodomitical, and other sexual acts which are not reproductive in type, cannot unite persons organically."

There's our opposition, folks. Maybe George has good reason to fret over the chances of his Amendment. The American people don't much go for "elite circles," but they don't much go for raving lunatics, either.

DÖPPELDUMBASS. In this Sunday's New York Post, TV critic Adam Buckman talks about "The Reagans" on Showtime. He castigates CBS for selling off the controversial program, pronounces the miniseries "too tame to have kicked up such a commotion," and "marvel[s]" at "the small minds that raised such a ruckus over it" and "their knee-jerk reaction."

These "small minds" remain unnamed in Buckman's column, but here's a November 5th piece that seems like a pretty relevant example, titled "It's So Pathetically Bad That It's Hysterically Funny":

IT WAS one of the funniest tapes I had ever received from a TV network.

It was a special promo reel sent over early last month for "The Reagans," a miniseries about Ronald and Nancy Reagan -- the very same miniseries that became so embroiled in controversy that CBS finally dumped it yesterday.

I never saw the finished product, but if it were anything like the promo, this four-hour miniseries was about to go down in history as one of the worst made-for-TV movies ever. This tape was so hysterical, I thought it was a joke...

Funny as it all was, it was also seriously offensive. I thought CBS had taken leave of its senses.

Ronald Reagan will always have his detractors, but it seems that right now, at age 92 and suffering from Alzheimer's disease, he is by and large an admired figure, remembered as the man whose infectious enthusiasm restored Americans' confidence in their country following the upheavals of the 1970s - and who also finished off communism...

CBS, however, is looking like a gang of idiots for deciding that now would be the perfect time to air a miniseries attacking this elderly couple beloved by millions.

Maybe CBS got off easy, because I guarantee that, based on its production qualities alone, "The Reagans" would have been one of the most critically lambasted miniseries in many seasons.

No points for guessing that this review of a CBS promo tape of "The Reagans" is by Adam Buckman, and ran in the Post. November 5 Buckman also says that James Brolin's performance as Reagan has "all the emotion of a piece of wood," though November 30 Buckman judges that Brolin's "affable, aloof protrayal of Reagan is right on the mark."

In the newer story, Buckman never acknowledges that he was part of the "bunch of loony, paranoid alarmists" who "made such a big stink" about the show.

To be fair, Buckman never once, in either column, used the word "imminent."

THANKSGIVING MISCELLANY.While the world watched Flight Suit II, I took in much of the Fish at Dallas, and was amazed at how slow the 'Boys looked; even the superpatriotic halftime show, with lots of wildly gesticulating Cowgirls and a giant golden eagle that looked like a Simpsons prop ("From sea to shi-ning sea!") rising from the dry ice, could not rouse the home team from its torpor.

Speaking of shining sea: When I read Patrick O'Brien's Master and Commander last year, I saw Russell Crowe in the lead, and last weekend I saw him again, this time for real, as Captain Jack Aubrey in the movie version. The Crowe/Aubrey I saw in my head was a good deal wilder than the thoughtful Crowe in Peter Weir's movie, and that's the crux of my problem with it. I enjoyed the film, but at times it felt as becalmed as a skiff in the Doldrums, despite a great crowding of lovely incident and detail. H.M.S. Surprise is pursuing a French warship, but most of the screen time is devoted to private crises of conscience, naturalism in Galapagos, and string duets. Couldn't "Lucky Jack" have swashed his buckle a little more? Think what Charles Laughton, who was closer in poundage to the literary Aubrey, would have made of the role! Then it all comes down to one of those modern movie battles cut so choppily and paced so fast that you can't see who's doing what.

All told, a great-looking picture and all hands did their duty, but I prefer Mutiny on the Bounty and the old style of moviemaking that took its cues from stage melodrama. These days its seems all the gasps go to the CGI effects, not to the behavior of the characters (though Maturin's self-surgery was way rad). It's more "realistic," I guess, in a narrow way, but if something's going to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, I'd rather it were actors than nautical models in giant tanks of water.

Finally: I like the way these guys think.