RIFFMEISTERS. I was gonna make this a comment to Norbizness' excellent refutation of the lame Total Guitar Top Riffs list, but why not share with the rest of the class?

Nor is boss, but he takes a few missteps. I have to point out that "Hot Rats" is not a Mothers album, and the epochal "Willie the Pimp" is a Zappa/Beefheart/Jean-Luc Ponty riff, to be more accurate. (Speaking of fiddlers, how about "Diggy Diggy Lo" or "Jole Blon" or "Orange Blossom Special"?)

Whatever you think of the source material, you have to spot, as TG did, AC/DC and their patented off-tempo, pull-against-the-drummer riffing. But while "Back in Black" is alright, I think "Back in Business" is a superior example.

Also, if you put, as Nor does, one Neil Young riff up there, you have to put at least three. Young's secret weapon is the riff-embedded rhythm lick. If "Hey Hey, My My" rates, so must "Cinnamon Girl" and "I'm the Ocean," at least. (I'd drop "The Loner," too, but that's just me.)

Among the obscurities, let me insert "Tough Fucking Shit" by G.G. Allen and the Murder Junkies, "Ain't My Crime" by Motorhead, "Easter Woman" by the Residents, "Celebrated Summer" by Husker Du, and "Tractor Rape Chain" by Guided by Voices.

In the under-your-nose category, where the hell are "Cannonball," "Pleasant Valley Sunday," "Heart Full of Soul," "Victoria," "Satisfaction," et alia?

But folks, as the old Shake 'n' Bake commercial used to go, you can make it good's I can. Speak up!

MY CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO FREE TICKETS. At National Review Online, Andrew Leigh exposes more liberal perfidy among our nation's intellectual snobs. There was apparently only a handful of right-wingers at the L.A. Times Festival of Books, proof of -- well, of under-representation of people who didn't want to be there, one imagines. Within mere grafs, Leigh has to admit, "Okay, maybe it isn't fair to judge a festival by who decides to rent the booths. After all, one presumes that if Regnery Books or NR deigned to rent a booth, they would have been permitted."

And yet he goes on writing.

He even interviews the festival's organizer, who shares with Leigh a long list of conservatives he invited, most of whom declined. Leigh is unfazed. He contacts Regnery. A "publicity representative, who did not want her name mentioned," says she doesn't remember the invitation. The plot thickens!

The piece ends, predictably enough, with a plea for diversity of the conservative kind. "Angelenos are being deprived of one side of a very important debate," Leigh bemoans.

I quite agree, and in the same spirit request that Leigh put me up for a spot on the NRO Post-Election Cruise. While it's true that I have not purchased a ticket, I think the burden rather lies on NRO to accomodate me, since it is they who have so far deprived their guests of "one side of a very important debate," which I am happy to supply for a small fee. Opportunities for intellectual diversity, after all, don't just march right up to you and plunk down $1,549 for admission -- you have to dig for them. I will consent to attend, therefore, if all my expenses are paid, if they can contrive to keep that hag Malkin away from me, and if I can make a naked human pyramid of John Derbyshire, Ramesh Ponnuru, and Stanley Kurtz. I'll be waiting to hear if their commitment to diversity is real.

SHORTER DIANA WEST. All you pro-abortion women stop having fun. Don't you know you're supposed to be humorless? Oh, darn -- now you're making me look humorless, you ghoulish c-words!

MY ENGLISH, SHE NOT SO GOOD. "The first thing is that the pictures [of tortured Iraqi prisoners] really prove that the US is superior to the Baathist dictatorship." -- Johan Norberg.

No worries, Johan -- they have trouble with English in Tennessee, too.

This whole "Yeah, well, the Arabs are worse" schtick may work this time. But what about next time?

NOTA BENE. To those of you who may have stumbled upon this regurgitation of some Terry Teachout pieces at OpinionJournal: please note that Teachout is not, in the main, the right-wing hatchet man that the OJ editors have therein portrayed by selective quotation. It's sad what you have to do to sell books, particularly to the True Believers. Teachout's blog About Last Night is still very much recommended; it does the art of criticism proud. He does let tip his ideological hand sometimes, but one of my other favorite critics, the lefty Michael Feingold, does so even more egregiously. And, unlike bluenosed asswipes like Roger Kimball, Teachout has well-developed aesthetics, rather than mere snobbery, on his side. Besides, anyone who sees Stanley Crouch for the fraud he is deserves our support.

SELF-AWARENESS DERBY. Jim Lileks sez:

...he didn’t strike me as a jolly old soul. But it has to be hard to be happy when one carries around so much bile and rage. It’s tiring. Anger wears you down, especially when your anger doesn’t seem to accomplish anything... You want to live like that? I don’t want to live like that. Because when you see red all the time you miss things...

Was Lileks, like old Scrooge, whisked to another dimension and forced to view his own life at a remove, which spectacle spurred this third-person repentance? No, he's talking about Ted Rall.

I realize it's just an angle -- Jimbo's harshed on Rall so often, even he must be tired of looking up synonyms for "traitor" -- but what do you make of a guy who thinks Democrats are potential terrorists, yet goes on for grafs and grafs about the overproductive bile ducts of others?

One is tempted to use the words "denial," or "projection," but you know what hearty laughter this kind of pop psychologizing draws from conservatives. So how about I just call him an asshole?

WHAT I DID ON MY COFFEE BREAK. I had a few minutes so I went to see if David Horowitz is still a horse's ass. You be the judge:

I guarantee you that conservatives who are in the forefront of the battle of ideas defending this country -- Victor Davis Hanson, David Frum, Robert Kagan to name three -- have never been commencement speakers, officially sponsored keynoters and honored guests of any liberal university. This tells you more than you probably care to know about the commitments of our university officials and the state of their campuses.

You know, that might make a good theme for the commencement addresses I've been asked to deliver at Bob Jones University! (Or perhaps I'll rest that week, and let Michael Moore fill in for me.)

Speaking of equine posteriors, John Podhoretz explains that we leftwards are actually happy Iraqi prisoners were tortured because that makes Iraq more like Vietnam in our warped minds. "They never knew happier days than when they were standing in opposition to their country," he declares. I wonder how he knows so much about us? Maybe he has attended some of our liberal parties, incognito in a wig of luxuriant dreadlocks.

Brothers and sisters, the secret is getting out -- soon the whole world will know that we hate this fucking country and want it overthrown by militant Islam, which totally rocks! There's only one way left to conceal the truth from ordinary Americans: start using bigger words.

THE WEATHER STARTED GETTING ROUGH, THE TINY SHIP WAS TOSSED. John O'Neill, who served with Kerry in Vietnam, announces in OpinionJournal, "I was on Mr. Kerry's boat in Vietnam. He doesn't deserve to be commander in chief."

So of course I immediately read the thing, hoping for bombshell revelations, and was disappointed to view yet again that already-tired litany of Kerry cracks: Kerry was in a book with the American flag upside down on the cover, Kerry testified to military abuses which O'Neill did not witness, Kerry is an evil traitor whose "misrepresentations played a significant role in creating the negative and false image of Vietnam vets that has persisted for over three decades," etc.

And I thought, what a terrible, missed opportunity! Has O'Neill never read a tell-all biography, even in the supermarket check-out line? If he was on the boat with Kerry, why didn't he give us some juicy scenes of two swabbies named John, nose to nose in the hot Southeastern sun?

I mean, they don't even have to be verifiable: as the patented anonymous letter technology availed by many top bloggers has shown, when you're preaching to the choir, no one's going to check your Bible quotations. Besides, having commenced his public career as Nixon's anti-Kerry operative, I can't imagine O'Neill would mind getting his hands a little dirty.

Perhaps O'Neill's dialogue writing is even worse than his polemics, and he is embarrassed by it. Allow me, then, to offer some script doctoring:

Evening on the Mekong. The swift boat PCF-94 drifts silently. On the forward deck, EN3 Washington plays "Purple Haze" on his harmonica. Lt. O'Neill approaches Lt. Kerry on the main deck.

O'NEILL: Skip, what the blazes are we doing adrift at sundown? That jungle is overrun with murdering gooks who'll pick us off for sure!

KERRY: (lighting a joint) Mellow out, O'Neill. I'm just restoring the karmic balance a little. We shoot at them, they shoot at us. Who's to say what's right or wrong, n'cest pas?

O'NEILL: Permission to use my body as a human shield to defend the crew!

KERRY: Do your own thing, man.

O'NEILL races back and forth, the length of the boat, waving his arms.

O'NEILL: When I'm running this ship, things will be different!

KERRY: Damn straight -- I'll be eating foie gras with Bill Paley!

I got a million of 'em, hot cha cha cha cha! Just make the check out to "cash"; plausible deniability is everything in this business.

ANOTHER CONSERVATIVE PARTY ANIMAL. As I have observed before, the commentary pages these days are full of conservatives' reports on liberal parties that the authors frequently and (given how little they seem to enjoy them) inexplicably attend. Now, these are not just parties thrown by liberals, but parties at which attendees are apparently required to roar evidence of their affiliation every couple of minutes, as in this latest entry:

So we hold our glasses of mediocre Chardonnay, pick at little watercress, bread-enveloped triangles, while I long for herring filets and vodka. I mean, we're all Jewish, for God's sake!

Then our host chants the liberal mantra: "Bush has alienated us from the rest of the world. Europe hates us. The Muslims hate us. He's taking us into an abyss!"

The crowd raises their goblets, yelling "Kill Bush."

Help me out here, guys: Who throws these parties? At most of the parties I attend, guests drink not mediocre Chardonnay, but cheap beer, and talk about all sorts of stuff before politics. As these parties are in New York City, most of us don't like Bush, but the subject is little discussed, and I can't recall any occasion on which a host has asked us to raise our glasses in an oath of assassination (though my memory of some of these soirees is admittedly a bit hazy).

The author claims the social indoctrination sessions he describes (and was presumably forced to attend as some sort of community service) took place in Westport -- which he renders "Leftport," several times, which notion of humor may hint at the real reason for his social failures. But get this: he expects to solve that problem by moving from Leftport -- to New York City! Specifically the Meatpacking District. One imagines him, tie flipped over his shoulder, attempting to order a decent Chardonnay at Hogs & Heifers, or pushing Bush literature on the crowd at Florent.

Lotsa luck, buddy.

SEMPER FI. You can tell Tacitus is angry about our apparent pullback from Fallujah: he calls Bush a "good liberal." (Scroll down to "The End." I don't get this no-permalink thing, but it probably has to do with National Security.)

I understand T's fury at the situation, given that he has been supporting the occupation in good faith. Also, alas, I understand his use of "liberal" as a swear-word.

They're rather quiet about it at The Corner. Rich Lowry allows as how the pullback is a bad thing, but also avails an anonymous email that offers an "optimistic" reading of the event: it makes the June 30 handoff more viable. Later Jonah Goldberg waxes indignant that CBS "chose to soften and censor the images of the Fallujah massacre." The most serious complaints at NRO come from Mac Owens -- who, like Tacitus, has done his time in the Armed Services.

General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters, of course, saw the writing on the wall early and was displeased by it. Some days later, as is his pattern, he did a long tribute to America's fighting men and women, asking his readers to call for more troops, even allowing generously that "it doesn't matter whether you're a Democrat or Republican."

Every community has its little constituencies, and former servicemembers constitute an interesting sub-section of the conservative choral society. They are utilized for much the same reason many liberal commentators haul out John Kerry's war record -- the use of actual combatants, active or not, adds ballast to war arguments. Naturally the servicemembers evince a compelling, personal, and sometimes prickly reaction to events in Iraq, but there are not enough of them in the commentariat to the override the "All is Well" message that Bush supporters endeavor to present to the world, even when they are of a mind to do so. Tactitus goes off the reservation sometimes, but he's not working for a major media outlet.

Despite their grumbling, I imagine the former combatants will continue to (to coin a phrase) soldier on in the great cause of defeating Democrats. That's their mission, and they aren't the sort to stand down when the going gets tough. For them, it appears, journalism is war by other means. And despite their occasional grumbles, it is something to observe their discipline under fire.

SHORTER JIM LILEKS: After we kick their ass, American liberals will hook up with Al Qaeda. And it's all my fault because I wasn't right-wing in college, for which crime I now atone by cooking up this psychotic fantasy.

CF. LAST POST. In case you were wondering whether I meant that only Christians are addicted to self-referential insularity, here's Hugh Hewitt, fave of right-wing blowhards, suggesting that new LA Times editorial page editor Michael Kinsley (!) hire or retain, in order, Roger L. Simon, Patt Morrison, Susan Estrich, Laura Ingrahm, Max Boot, Jim Lileks, and Mickey Kaus -- wingnuts all, except Morrison (whom Hewitt proposes to "keep LA's hard left happy") and the feeble Estrich.

"I haven't nominated any African-Americans or Latinos or Asian-Americans," says Hewitt, "but I know the folks Janet has pressed into service over the years just don't have the stuff to attract a crowd."

Then Hewitt says of Kinsley's new bailiwick, "It is so irrelevant that few even bother to complain anymore, or even to read it because it just doesn't matter."

See what I mean?

ELOQUENCE. I've been listening for the three hundredth time or so to Dylan's Slow Train Coming. One might imagine that, with all my harsh words for Jesus freaks, I wouldn't be into it at all. Not so. I have contempt for the idiotic, true, and a lot of Christer blather is worse than idiotic, incoherent, derivative, and absurd, however deeply it is felt.

But I appreciate anything eloquent, and old Bob is crystal clear and compelling in these songs. "How long can you falsify and deny what you feel?" he sings, and I have to listen and nod. "Sheiks walking around like kings," he roars, "wearing gold watches and nose rings/deciding America's future from Amsterdam and Paris," and I have to hear that, too, despite my predilections, so eloquently he does put it.

Dylan has been a star for about forty years. He knows something.

Part of what he knows, being an astute pop critic as well as a pop producer, is that he must help unreceptive listeners like me, too, not just converts, by defusing the political crud that has accrued to much modern J-freak talk ("Karl Marx has got you by the throat, and Henry Kissinger has got you tied into knots"). Note that he isn't betraying his cause here -- only a Ned Flanders would imagine that. He's just hunting where the ducks are. You win followers not by telling them how wrong they are, but how right they might be.

This leads me to one of my longtime semi-guilty pleasures, Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" at the Chicago Sun-Times site.

For a long time I considered Ebert, as Matt Groening did in his "Life in Hell" series, a "TV clown" with "nice sweaters." But Ebert has put in hard work over many years (did you know he co-wrote "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" and "The Great Rock-and-Roll Swindle"?). And, unlike some longtime filmdom hangers-on, such as Rex Reed, Ebert has been serious about what he's doing throughout, and whatever you think about his contemporaneous reviews, his devotion to the art of film is obvious in these long essays on those movies that have excited his deepest interest.

Despite his exalted position as the go-to guy for late night talk show hosts seeking a telegenic movie reviewer, Ebert's "Great Movies" list is pretty idiosyncratic. There are expected choices (Citizen Kane, Some Like It Hot, The Searchers), some more adventuresome ones (JFK, Stroszek, Fall of the House of Usher), and some that seem either premature or plain crack-brained to me (Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Body Heat). But Ebert makes a passionate and (that word again) eloquent case for each. He is as diligent about unearthing, unveiling, and explicating what he considers the sublimnities of Alien as of The Bicycle Thief.

Look at some of what he offers in defense of a film I have always liked but never remotely considered "great," Patton:

Scott's performance is not one-level but portrays a many-layered man who desires to appear one-level. Instead of adding tiresome behavioral touches, he allows us small glimpses of what may be going on inside. Having made a fetish of bravery, he obtains a dog that is terrified most of the time, and affectionately drags the cowardly beast wherever he goes...

The most famous scene is the first one, Patton mounting a stage to address his troops from in front of an American flag that fills the huge 70-mm screen. His speech is unapologetically bloodthirsty ("We will cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks"). His uniform and decorations, ribbons and medals, jodhpurs and riding boots and swagger stick fall just a hair short of what Groucho Marx might have worn. Scott's great nose could be the beak of an American Eagle. The closing shot is the other side of the coin, a graying and lonely old man, walking his dog. Even then, we suspect, Patton is acting. But does he know it?

Here Ebert does what critics from the time of Dryden has been supposed to do but only rarely achieve: make us re-examine something with which we have supposed ourselves familiar, to see the deep, deliberate craft and (sometimes) genius of which our pleasure is built. And that makes us more receptive to whatever new pleasures to which he might alert us

I know Ebert is well-publicized, but I have to believe that his staying power as America's favorite film critic is primarily sustained by his actual effort at his real job.

To get back to Christianity again, I have heard many of its advocates refer to Chesterton, for example, as a kind of private totem, not as a subject or even an object that those beyond their own little club might appreciate. I have read Chesterton's Father Brown stories with great pleasure and, as a former Catholic who is still attracted to Christian morality, I should think these guys would want to engage me, either as an apt target for conversion or as a good and intelligent person with whom to discuss the subject. Yet most of what I see from them is insular, self-directed back-patting. They gather in self-selected communities like Crosswalk, where they talk about coverting overseas Muslims while consigning their fellow citizens to hell.

This might also serve as a lesson to Democrats -- one that they are better situated to avail, given their widespread support and genuine connection with possible constituents. The job, as I see it, is not to "energize the base," as the repulsive modern term has it, but to explain the cause to the unconvinced. This does not, as some might think, require dumbing-down or misrepresentation, but unceasing labor at the task of making oneself clear.

This is not about spin -- this is about eloquence. If you believe what you're saying, and have an interest in communicating it to others, your task is not to sugar-coat or misdirect. Leave that wasteful, self-defeating work to the bastards you're running against. Tell the truth and, by assiduous application, make it shine. The victories, as Dylan and Ebert have shown, will come.

BLACK LIKE ME. Some quotes of the day, from an observer of the new production of A Raisin in the Sun:

Shall we, as black Americans, assimilate and become like white Americans? Can we turn back to our African roots to find the truth of our people?...

When the character based on Lorraine Hansbury breaks out in a tribal dance we didn't just laugh with delight, we hooted and hollered.

The author is Crazy Jesus Lady, who looks pretty damn white on TV and in her Wall Street Journal stipple portrait, but what do I know?

Anyway, she is justly proud to see a lot of new people -- her people, one imagines -- in a Broadway audience: "The audience was alive. It was so moving and got me kind of choked. I thought, Maybe this is like what it was like when Shakespeare wrote, 'You tell him, Romeo -- Juliet no, don't!'" (I assume she wrote "Juliet, no you didn't!" but the typesetters mistranslated, not being as fluent as she in black idiomatic speech.)

But later CJL has less fun at the show. "I was startled," she writes (or, should I say, hollas). "I turned to my friend. 'We have just witnessed a terrible cultural moment,' I said. 'Don't I know it,' he responded." The cause: audience members applauded a character's announced intention to have an abortion. Of course it's a strange reaction under the circumstances, and I would be inclined to endorse (or, should I say, give mad props to) CJL's attentiveness to the play's spirit. But it turns out it's the audience's support for abortion, not its reading of the text, that startles her, and she lashes out (or, should I say, goes off) on the "moral dullards" of whom she was previously deceived into approving just because their skin was the same color as hers.

Finally she has a request for her readers (or, should I say, for her peops):

...see this great play, and when the moment comes that the young woman announces she might end the life of the child she is carrying, that you would sit quietly and think about what that moment means. And if anyone cheers or hoots or hollers [sic], give them a look. Let them see your silence. Lead with it. Help the people around you realize: Something big is being spoken of here. And we know what it is. And it is nothing good.

Heretofore I have spoken of this woman's mad propensity for angry stares at blameless people, but I will refrain now. What do I know of the strain she's under as a black woman in this society?

FROM L.A. TO FALLUJAH. General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters continues to hold the hard line, calling for Wyatt Earp and/or Rudy Giuliani to ride into Fallujah and tame them Ayrab varmints:

If any adult touches a damaged or destroyed U.S. military vehicle, he must be shot. Start with a one-week warning period to get out the new rules. Then execute. The Iraqis playing trampoline on the hoods of our charred vehicles aren't the ones who will build a better future.

As for the juvies, send them to reformatory camps. No exceptions, even if daddy's the Sheik of Araby.

He also wants to shoot looters, natch.

This kind of thing is Peters' raw meat and blood-infused potatoes: witness his 1996 article, "Our Soldiers, Their Cities," on urban warfare:

The future of warfare lies in the streets, sewers, high-rise buildings, industrial parks, and the sprawl of houses, shacks, and shelters that form the broken cities of our world. We will fight elsewhere, but not so often, rarely as reluctantly, and never so brutally. Our recent military history is punctuated with city names -- Tuzla, Mogadishu, Los Angeles, Beirut, Panama City, Hue, Saigon, Santo Domingo -- but these encounters have been but a prologue, with the real drama still to come. [italics added]

The name "Los Angeles" pops out because General suggests training elite street-fighting units in actual American cities:

Why build that which already exists? In many of our own blighted cities, massive housing projects have become uninhabitable and industrial plants unusable. Yet they would be nearly ideal for combat-in-cities training. While we could not engage in live-fire training (even if the locals do), we could experiment and train in virtually every other regard. Development costs would be a fraction of the price of building a "city" from scratch, and city and state governments would likely compete to gain a US Army (and Marine) presence, since it would bring money, jobs, and development -- as well as a measure of social discipline.

Of course, since then Starbucks and gentrification have stolen the General's march, which may be why he is so eager to experiment in Fallujah. If he can't "discipline" American city-dwellers, for the time being he'll settle for Iraqis.

I recommend the whole 1996 article, which has many undoubtedly sound suggestions, as well as this interesting bit of speculative quartermastering: "Eventually, we may have individual-soldier tactical equipment that can differentiate between male and female body heat distributions and that will even be able to register hostility and intent from smells and sweat." I wouldn't be surprised if General Peters already had this capacity.

But there is plenty to enjoy in the General's more recent article. My favorite passage is this:

I still believe that most Iraqis want democracy -- in some adjusted form that gives them a voice in their country's affairs.

Hey, how do we get that "adjusted form" of democracy?

EXCITING NEW IDEAS. Zell Miller, favorite Democrat of people who hate Democrats, proposes that the 17th Amendment be overturned and the right to directly elect Senators removed from ordinary Joes like us. It's nothing personal, Miller assures the populace: "The individuals are not so much at fault as the rotten and decaying foundation of what is no longer a republic." (Link via Atrios.)

I guess that, considering the numerous other Constitutional Amendments that have been proposed by George W. Bush in recent years, we might consider Donald Wildmon's proposed Bill to "nullify the authority of federal courts to make judgments regarding the public display of the Ten Commandments, the National Motto and the Pledge of Allegiance" a moderate gesture, because (as his website proudly announces) "no Constitutional Amendment is needed."

That folks whose power is near absolute are so eager to expand it, even into the roots of our Government, does not amaze me, as I was not born very recently. I do worry that younger people might imagine that this is the normal way of doing things. Perhaps in the future, national party platforms will come with proposed alternate Constitutions, and a pledge to implement them. By then I expect voting will be handled much as it is on American Idol, which may speed passage of Bills, Amendments, Recalls, and Hot-or-Not plebescites.

I'd say the triumph of consumerism has been underestimated.

LIT CORNER: CRY ME A RIVER. I've been reading The Late George Apley, which I understand to be out of print. (That endears it to me, as does the fact that, in the old Modern Library edition I'm reading, the word "role" is printed with a circumflex over the o, thus: rôle.) It's a great pleasure, and makes good use of that old standby of English Lit classes, the unreliable narrator (a device which some of us, e.g. Whit Stillman, have been educated to notice).

This puts me in mind of a more recent, popular unreliable-narrator novel, The Remains of the Day. The more I read the Marquand, the more I'm convinced Ishiguro was inspired by it, though I've never heard that he admitted it.

There are a lot of things I like about Remains of the Day, not least that the author had the nerve to plant toward its end a sure-fire tear-jerking moment, which is utterly lost in the movie version. The butler Stevens has been a complete stick throughout the book, observing from a seemingly distant remove the loss of his father, his beloved Miss Kenton, and the English Empire, with a sangfroid that must seem frustratingly ridiculous to moderns (the Time review of the movie had an appropriately glib title: "I say, Jeeves, bit of a wasted life, what?").

Late in the story the aged Stevens has the opportunity to meet with the long-married Miss Kenton (now Mrs. Benn), and to at last venture to tell her, in the rain at a bus-stop, that he has been unhappy and that he notices her unhappiness as well. Mrs. Benn admits that she has sometimes thought of a better life that she might have had -- "a life I might have had with you" -- but that over the years she has learned to content herself with her lot.

Stevens then tells us:

I do not think I responded immediately, for it took me a moment or two to fully digest these words of Miss Kenton. Moreover, as you might appreciate, these words were such as to provoke a certain degree of sorrow within me. Indeed -- why should I not admit it? -- at that moment, my heart was breaking.

I remember reading that, years ago, seated in a steel chair in the sunny Worldwide Plaza near 49th Street, and bursting into helpless tears. I still sniffle a little to think of it.

And this makes me think: what art makes people cry anymore? There are a lot of old movies that can still make me cry: Broken Blossoms, City Lights, Casablanca, Young Mr. Lincoln, and (perhaps harder to understand, but still it moves me) WR: Mysteries of the Organism.

It's not just old movies, either. Dickens, contra Wilde's great crack about Little Nell, can still set me blubbering. Regard with dry eyes, if you can, the death of Jo in Bleak House. Nabakov used to read that passage out loud to his students at Cornell, and afterwards observe, "This is a lesson in style, not in participative emotion" -- a comment that would not have been necessary if the scene were not literally pathetic.

For that matter, while I feel shielded by years of experience and layers of irony from jukebox weepers like "Teen Angel," Joan Morris' version of the ancient parlor song "After the Ball" still rouses in me some absurd sorrow for the lonely maiden.

Do any new songs do that? Does any new anything do that? I can't imagine a writer of this moment in any medium trying or expecting or seeing the point in making his auditors "get out the handkerchiefs," as they used to say. I suppose some TV shows try for this effect, but I can't imagine that they achieve more than a nodding acknowledgement that what they've portrayed is "sad."

Am I wrong? Do people make "weepers" anymore? If so, what are they?

SHORTER PAT BUCHANAN: You must choose: Mel Gibson, or Satan.

ON THE SIDE OF THE ANGELS. At The Corner, Ned Flanders (under his nom de plume, Rod Dreher) reports via a friend that "there are Canadian Christians who are considering emigrating to the United States out of fear of what's going to become of them given the current trends in their homeland."

(And if they're thinking of coming to the U.S., things must be bad in the Great White North, because, as Flanders himself has reported, "our news media, through heavily biased reporting and analysis, are turning significant numbers of American voters against religious conservatives and are delegitimizing the place believers have made for themselves at the table.")

The source of the panic appears to be Bill C-250, which will add "sexual orientation" to the bases of "hate propaganda," outlawed by Canada's Criminal Code ("Every one who advocates or promotes genocide is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years").

As a member in good standing of the Inner Party, I know it will be uncontroversial among my Satan-worshipping, baby-killing, book-reading circle when I say that the whole idea of hate-speech censorship is entirely bogus, and that adding a new group to the Index is just making a bad thing worse.

There -- with one stroke, I have offered Flanders and his fellow Christers more support than has his NRO editor, Jonah "I do like censorship. I wish there was more of it" Goldberg.

And a lot of thanks I'll get for it, I'm sure

UPPING THE ANTI. Roger L. Simon rags on Kerry's evasive answers about his medals. I don't much fault guys like Simon for piling onto this, and Mrs. Kerry's Audi, and all that stuff -- it's politics, not beanbag, and Lord knows character assassination is about the strongest arrow in the Bushites' quiver right now.

But in spinning out his theme, Simon goes this bridge too far:

Now I was a war protestor then and, as I have written earlier, I have mixed feelings about those (like Kerry) who claimed to have opposed the war in those days and then went. There were plenty of ways, especially for those in Kerry's economic class, to have avoided it, even if that meant moving to Canada to preserve their ideals, which many did. So the message to me about the Senator has always been one of weakness of character (not physical bravery, which he apparently had), of moral confusion. Sure he's entitled to have changed his opinion or to have made mistakes. Everyone has. But in this era, more perilous to our country and the world than any since World War II, who wants someone in the White House who doesn't take responsibility for his actions?

You have to hand it to Simon. Heretofore the Bushites have been trying to neutralize Kerry's wartime experience by focusing on his antiwar comments after the fact. But Simon steals a march and suggests that Kerry's military service is itself proof of his "weakness of character," "moral confusion," and (my favorite) inability to "take responsibility for his actions."

I'm not suprised by much anymore, but Simon caught me off guard here. Maybe we should start handing out awards for this sort of thing.