BYE BYE BRANDO. Marlon Brando has died, and I am surprised to see the normally astute folks at About Last Night shrugging him off. They seem to think he was tricky and lazy. Well, what's an actor without tricks? I'm reading Anthony Holden's biography of Laurence Olivier. It underlines Lord Larry's gift for the telling stage gesture, which we might also characterize as trickery (or even by the baser term "schtick") were Olivier not so good at it.

But he was, and so in a different way was Brando. He could be straight-up hammy -- see Bedtime Story and The Missouri Breaks. But one of the most potent tools in his arsenal was a sort of outrageous understatement. I remember the first time I saw The Godfather. For the first several minutes I wondered, what the hell is he doing? Ernest Borgnine, one of the actors originally considered for the role, would have been picking pieces of the set out of his teeth by now -- why does Brando look so absent? Then the genius of it struck me: this guy doesn't need to come on heavy -- he's the Godfather. Let the other guys work.

Which may be why some people think was lazy. Brando fed the preception by publicly denigrating the craft of acting on several occasions. But if you listen carefully to his musings on the subject -- like the ones he gave in his wild Larry King interviews -- and compare it to his work, you might see that Brando didn't handle acting with contempt so much as delicacy. He treated his job lightly, not because it wasn't worth his doing, but because he didn't want the souffle to fall.

On the King show Brando insisted that everyone alive acted to a greater or lesser extent every day. Yet some people are more watchable than others. Technique only explains some of that; the rest is a mystery. I think Brando was respectful of that mystery, but tempermentally unsuited to the quasi-mystical gibble-gabble many actors use to describe it (see "Inside the Actor's Studio"). So he made light of it. He had a very lively sense of humor. On the set of The Score, he called the director, Franz Oz, who had worked on Muppet movies, "Miss Piggy," and once told him, "I bet you wish you could stick your hand up my ass and make me do what you want."

On the occasion of his demise I find myself thinking not of The Godfather or A Streetcar Named Desire or Last Tango in Paris, but of the TV miniseries "Roots: The Next Generation," in which Brando shares a brief scene with James Earl Jones -- no slouch himself.

Jones is Alex Haley, and Brando is George Lincoln Rockwell, the American Nazi Party boss. Haley has come to Nazi HQ to interview the leader for Playboy. Brando's Rockwell is exceedingly flip. Once he gets over his surprise at Haley's blackness -- which seems to affront him because he's been tricked, not because Haley is, by his logic, a subhuman -- he relaxes and explains, with no trace of self-consciousness, that some Negroes are quite intelligent. "Take you, for example," he says, looking dead at Jones. "I enjoy talking to you."

Logically consistent with this, Brando plays Rockwell's contempt for Haley as a black man -- albeit one of the acceptable variety -- by alternately ignoring him and giving outrageous answers as if their offensiveness could not possibly matter. At one point Haley reads from his notepad some damning Rockwell quotes, probing for a response. Brando reaches nonchalantly into a drawer of his desk, pulls out a can of air freshener, sprays it around, and starts giggling. Later, to demonstrate some point, he starts roaring an anti-Semitic parody tune -- "The Jews are through in '72, parlez-vous! /Around their necks we'll tie a bell/and send them all to kosher hell/Hinky dinky... dinky..." He trails off, smiling. "I forget the rest of it."

It all seems very tossed-off and natural. And it makes perfect sense that Haley is sweating profusely by the end.

"Scorches the earth, doesn't he?" Jack Nicholson once observed in a similar context.

COMRADES! IS NOT MAKING FUNNINESS POLITBURO CAN ENJOY! PLEASE TO MAKE LAUGHS AT KERRY! You knew this was coming: the conservatives have turned on The Onion.

In a cloud of hot gas appearing at Oxblog, David Adesnik says,

I love The Onion. I read it every week. But I laugh a lot less at The Onion's political humor than I do at its brilliant send-ups of America's social habits and popular culture.

The reason I laugh a lot less is that...

...because they make fun of Republicans living and dead, and that is by definition not funny! Oh, shoot, that's the short version -- here's a few cubic inches of what's really coming out of Adesnik's pressurized tank:

...is that The Onion's political humor employs the same caricatures and stereotypes over and over again. Moreover, these satirical devices collectively form a coherent ideology that is both extremely elitist and extremely liberal.

To be frank, I have a lot more trouble with The Onion's elitism than I do with its liberalism. Liberalism is a good thing. Liberal ideals, both classical and modern, have contributed immeasurably to American political discourse. Yet The Onion's brand of elitism, when cloaked in humor, has the potential to breed a disturbing sort of cynicism...

You catching this, kids? Humor is bad for you when it breeds a "disturbing sort" of cynicism -- meaning, perhaps, that a sort of cynicism that would make you despair of ever dislodging greedhead, hegemonic Republicans from office -- or, for that matter, being anything other than a drone for the super-rich all your miserable life, diverted from suicide only by occasional tax cuts and lotto fantasies -- would be less disturbing, in fact something to be encouraged.

Thereafter follows "evidence for the points I am trying to make," which consists of Adesnik analyzing Onion columns' humorous/political content, which is what Dante called "the tenth circle of Hell." Later, perhaps, Adesnik will condemn Citizen Kane as an unflattering portrayal of American businessmen.

One expects this from the fever swamps, but here's tie-loosening right-wing party boy Professor Glenn Reynolds trying to get his crew to do the wave over Adesnik's foul tip. "I just wish," mourns Reynolds over The Onion, "they were funnier."

My momma done told me: never take humor advice from a guy who goes "Heh" and writes it out.

Soon word will spread throughout the land. Maybe even Sullivan will stop linking to The Onion, on grounds of Disturbing Cynicism ("Hello? Don't they know there's a war on? Disgraceful. And my lifesize Orwell skeleton agrees"). Tacitus will tell us in choked voice how a comrade-in-arms innocently betrayed their position on Heartbreak Ridge because he laughed too loudly at Jean Teasdale, and many good men were lost that day, my friends (or, rather, you baby-killers), because of their Disturbing Cynicism.

Truth Squads will emerge. "There never was a Reagan Pyramid," theonionlies.com will declare. "Sure, Donald Rumsfeld proposed one, and Bush said they could build it -- but then he explicitly declined to do so. This whole spurious idea has been traced to a 20-something 'artist' from New York -- a blue state -- who walks around with his shirt untucked and reads Langston Hughes."

Let's see: by their reckoning, we have the movies, theatre, literature, popular music, the visual and plastic arts, and now humor. And they have blogs and Bible camp.

Looks like we did good on that trade.

JUST A HEADS-UP. L. Brent Bozell, national finger-wagging champion ten years running, says the message of Fahrenheit 911 is "The Bushes and the bin Ladens plotted September 11 together." Perhaps this thesis is presented in some director's-cut edition I haven't seen yet, but it is certainly not in the film I, and millions of my fellow Americans, saw last week.

This just shows to go you, folks, that just because the anti-Moore types talk about their concern for truth doesn't mean that they won't lie, in some cases (I think this is one) without knowing it, in pursuit of their goals.

Bozell also declares that "To be taken seriously, every liberal today should criticize 'Fahrenheit 9-11' as an affront to journalism and civil discourse." He could have reduced this perscription to three words: auto da fe.

YOUR LATEST SLICE OF NUTCAKE. Kerry likes the poet Langston Hughes -- his "Let America Be America" slogan comes from a Hughes poem, and he contributed prefatory comments to a Hughes collection. Since Hughes was a Communist for a while, this shows, by somebody's idea of close reading, that the Democratic candidate presumptive's campaign theme is "Anger, Bitterness, Cynicism, and Communism." Mike Poterma at The Corner decrees that "Just a couple more steps in this direction, and they will find themselves on the wrong side of a Goldwater/McGovern-level blowout." Patriots everywhere concur.

But before they go after Kerry, they'd better get on the hotline to one of their own. The Crazy Jesus Lady recently wrote an encomium to Lorraine Hansbury's "A Raisin in the Sun." "I love this play," Peggy Noonan gushed. "I've seen it several times..." Hansbury, of course, named her play after a line from a poem by Langston Hughes, so Hansbury, by the prevailing logic, is just as bad as John Kerry.

You all better be careful. A lot of your favorite writers might be just as bad. That goes for Euripides and Kit Marlowe, too.

WHY DOES THE CRAZY JESUS LADY HATE AMERICA?

Here is my fear: that the American people, liking and respecting President Bush, and knowing he's a straight shooter with guts, will still feel a great temptation to turn to the boring and disingenuous John Kerry.

(insert child's long, querulous "whyyyyyyy?")

He'll never do anything exciting. He doesn't have the guts to be exciting. And as he doesn't stand for anything, he won't have to take hard stands. He'll do things like go to France and talk French and they'll love it. He'll say he's the man who accompanied Teresa Heinz to Paris, only this time he'll say it in French and perfectly accented and they'll all go "ooh la la!"... "A return to normalcy," with Mr. Kerry as the normal guy.

Additional content: Peggy likes pretty flowers. She didn't like them when she was reading Kafka and Sartre, but that's all over now. Peggy likes pretty flowers.

She writes from London, where perhaps she was sent for her health.

C'MON. A Corner reader points out that Canadian PM Paul Martin says "Flashman and the Dragon" is his favorite book. "I have to think that anyone who can enjoy a Flashman novel has to have some reservations about our country's multiculti mindset," says the reader. John Derbyshire is unimpressed. "I always think the answers have been tailored by some handler after running a few focus groups, and have nothing whatever to do with the actual candidate's actual tastes," he sniffs.

A focus group told Martin to pick "Flashman and the Dragon"? Wonder who turned Bob and Doug McKenzie on to George MacDonald Fraser.

There is such a thing as too much cynicism.

A LITTLE PERSPECTIVE:

"Everyone says liberals love America, too. No they don't. Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy." -- Ann Coulter.

"If [the Democrats] win this election thanks to a promise to undo the Reagan-Bush Doctrine, those cheering loudest will be the most evil-loving among us." -- Mark Levin, National Review.

"Make no mistake -- The anti-war voices long for us to lose any war they cannot prevent." -- Ralph Peters.

"Fresno residents and community leaders, outraged by an e-mail message in which City Council Member Jerry Duncan wished he had a 'dirty bomb' to kill every liberal in Fresno, called Thursday for his resignation, recall or reprimand." -- Fresno Bee, August 16, 2003.

"…liberals, whom I regard as traitors in this time of crisis…" -- New York Post columnist and belligerent drunk Steve Dunleavy.

"I don’t hate Michael Moore, I pity him - he’s going to die in 15 years of a massive coronary on a cold tiled bathroom floor, awash in the blasts of his emptied bowels…" -- Jim Lileks.

And these are the credentialed types. Moving down to the even shallower end of the pool, we find:

"THIS IS WHY ALL LIBERALS MUST FUCKING DIE!!!!!!!!!!" -- "I Kill Liberals" at the
Hillary Clinton Forum.

"A typical liberal cry baby faggot with no balls. I have been using you as the perfect example of a cowardly liberal cunt… What a pathetic little piece of shit you are. Remember my favorite advice for you liberal traitors: EAT SHIT AND DIE COWARDS!!!!" -- "NeoCon 21" at the MG Politics Board.

"Now there are some pussy-footing preachers who say that if God chose evolution as his way of creation, that's okay. Those people are pussy-footing right into hell. Some of these liberal pussies are right in my own Southern Baptist Convention. They may call themselves 'moderates'…" -- Ronald L. Ecker.

This and worse has been polluting the Internet since the days of Mosaic and USENET.

And I'm supposed to be concerned that someone put up a parody of Goya's Saturn Devouring Her Children starring Bush?

They can dish it out, but they sure do whine when made to take it.

UPDATE. Upon further review, Ecker is a prank. (I should have paid attention to the Roxanne Pulitzer references.) You may substitute any of 428,282 legitimate alternates. Here's a good one -- though I'm not entirely sure the entire site isn't a prank.

BYE BYE, BAGHDAD. It would be too much to say that nothing became our Iraq adventure so much as our leaving of it. Saddam's in the dock rather than the Palace, and that's good (as in "it’s an ill wind that blows no one some").

At the same time, a cautionary note is sounded by our prior liberatees in Istanbul:

President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan pleaded with hesitant NATO leaders today to rush troops to his country to protect officials trying to register voters for coming national elections.

Extra troops promised by NATO should be sent immediately, he said, because violence was disrupting preparations for the vote, set for September, and threatening the country's shaky progress toward democracy.
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"I would like you to please hurry," said Mr. Karzai, whose speech was met with polite applause but no commitment.

NATO presently has about 6500 troops in Afghanistan. There are many times this number of coalition forces in Iraq now, but it's an open question as to how long our allies will want to stick around. Even the Blair Administration is making oddly negative comments about the postwar governance of Iraq.

I'm not sure how much Bush wants to stick around, either. The examples of Kosovo, Haiti, and (most unfortunately) Somalia indicate that we like to go in and kick ass, but we’re less psyched about the mopping-up stage.

Meanwhile the scramble for Iraqi contracts goes on. Members of the Coalition get first dibs, since the U.S. decreed that only countries that supported the war would get reconstruction contracts ("Arabian Oil, Japan's biggest oil supplier, is in early discussions with Iraq's state-owned South Oil to repair and upgrade oil facilities in the south of the country in what would be the first Japanese involvement in the Iraqi oil sector since the 1991 Gulf war." -- Financial Times, June 3). But the handover has some in the Coalition of the Unwilling convinced they’re back in the running:

German firms -- excluded so far from U.S.-awarded contracts as punishment for Berlin's anti-war stance -- are hopeful that the handover of power to the Iraqi interim government will result in lucrative business deals…

In the past, German companies have tried to get involved in business in Iraq as sub-contractors for firms from Kuwait or the United Arab Emirates. Then at least they are not subject to the Americans' goodwill, [Hans-Jürgen] Müller [of the German foreign trade association BGA] pointed out. Since mid-June an office set up by the DIHK in Amman, Jordan aims to put German firms in touch with business partners in Iraq and other Persian Gulf countries. The DIHK also plans to establish a German-Iraqi chamber of commerce.

The new Government of Iraq is preparing for elections. I have little doubt they’ll come off in time. It will interesting to see what choices are then presented to the citizens, and how much say they will have in the disposition of their resources.

ALL AESTHETICS MUST BE PUNISHED! Tim Graham reads about a work of fiction but cannot recognize it as such. Hilarity ensues:

Knopf (publishers of the Clinton memoirs) plan to publish novelist Nicholson Baker's latest work: "Checkpoint," in which the main character really wants to assassinate President Bush. A Knopf flack says "It is not the first time a novelist has chosen fiction to express their point of view about American society or politics." Apparently, his point of view is Bush deserves to die.

In other literary news, Thomas Harris ate a man's liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti, Robert Louis Stevenson turned into Mr. Hyde at night, and Mark Goldblatt is black.

Maybe a deep-seated wish to believe Lynne Cheney's Sisters is autobiographical has globally affected Graham's understanding of dramatic characterization. Or maybe it's the old culture/revolver thing.

POORMOUTHED. Literally, the only interesting thing about Cheney cursing is the weird defenses offered for the Veep's brief bout of coprolalia. Here's a fellow who blames Cheney's outburst on liberal prevarication -- it starts out like this:

But however impolitic his outburst, it's hard to blame him. Lies, distortions, and other types of misrepresentation have become standard rhetorical devices for the disloyal opposition...

...and goes on, and on, like this:

The deeper cause of this cognitive dissonance is postmodern relativism, which makes it too easy to rationalize lies. Thanks to its over-representation in academia and the media, the Democratic Party contains a disproportionate number of people who believe that truth is an illusion, or an imposition of hierarchical power. On the other hand, the Republican Party contains a disproportion of believers in traditional virtues like civility. They have responded to ever-shriller deceits with a constraint that has often disadvantaged them politically. Woe to the Democrats, and the nation, if that constraint disappears. Without civility, we are lost.

If I'm reading this right (if there is a right way to read such a thing, besides quickly, or not at all), Cheney's f-bomb is a wonderful teaching opportunity to discuss the evils of liberalism. But then, what isn't?

And I am loving the idea of Republican civility. You'd think that, with so many countervailing examples widely available, the author would take a moment to try and explain why, those examples notwithstanding, things aren't as bad as they look. Instead, he just bulls on: we are civil, you are moral relativists.

State of the discourse, 2004. How long before it's all just animal noises and explosions?

ANOTHER THEORY SHOT DOWN. Perhaps anticipating that news of the opening grosses for Fahrenheit 9/11 might leave their readership demoralized, the folks at OpinionJournal today supply some soothing pseudo-science to assure the faithful of liberalism's oncoming demise. The idea in Larry L. Eastland's bizarre piece is that the Democratic Party is aborting itself out of existence. He says that liberals have more abortions than conservatives ("The more ideologically Democratic the voters are... the more abortions they have"), and since liberals are likely to spawn liberals, abortions are wiping out future Democratic voters -- in fact, Eastland believes these Missing Voters (yes, the concept is so scientific it rates Initial Caps) turned the tide in the 2000 Presidential Election, and underlines his point with charts tracking the speculated voting patterns of the MVs.

Believe it or not, Eastland's case, despite its highly scientific page layout and capitalization, is not airtight.

First, there's the idea that liberals breed little liberals and conservatives breed little conservatives. Eastland says children "tend to have the same political views as their family." If that were so, then prior to the Roe boom in Missing Voters, wouldn't the left-right division in the electorate have remained more or less constant? Also, I've been hearing for years from right-wing youth recruiters that the young folk have been going GOP because it's smarter, it's hipper, you get better coupons, etc. That's been a big youth-recuiting strategy for these guys. Is Mr. Eastland sure he wants to go with biological determinism on this one? It sends a mixed message.

Neither am I very sure about that polling methodology:

...Wirthlin Worldwide was commissioned to ask 2,000 respondents in a stratified random sample of adults the following question: "As far as you know, has anyone close to you had an abortion?" The emphasis here was on "close to you" in order to bring to mind only those people inside the respondents' circle of socio-demographically homogeneous family and friends.

People do lie about these things, you know. Say you're a Kansas Republican in good standing and you do know someone who (probably in great secrecy and shame, given the cultural environment) had an abortion; might you not tend to compartmentalize such a piece of knowledge sufficiently that you wouldn't admit it even to a pollster? Whereas we liberals might be more likely to boast of it: Oh, yeah, everyone I know has had at least three. We have abortions all the time. And anal sex. Can you put that down on the form somewhere?

Most importantly, though, think about the potential voters that were aborted. Had they been brought to term, they would at best have been but grudgingly accepted, and in many cases just plain unwanted. Many would have grown up under a cloud of insecurity and self-loathing, and so would have tried especially hard to do the correct thing, to conform, to be part of the crowd rather than the outcasts they secretly felt themselves to be.

Isn't that how we get Republicans in the first place?

MOVIE NIGHT. Saw Fahrenheit 9/11 tonight. Somewhere in this shining land, no doubt, someone is disputing the precise dates and conditions of the bin Laden family's post-9/11 flights, etc. Which reminds me of the prologue to Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot, in which Jeane Kirkpatrick, pressed to review Franken's book, blasts the premise on the grounds that no weight figures are provided to support it.

Since the film was made by an artist and a polemicist, rather than a propagandist, the real theme is not Let's Get Rid of Bush Now (though that is a pleasing corollary) but How Disinformation Works, with the Bush Administration as an appalling object lesson. Someone else could have used the Administrations of Clinton, Bush I, Reagan, Carter, William Henry Harrison et alia, as their lesson. Unfortunately for the other team, the artists mostly swing our way, while the propagandists mostly swing theirs. That's just the way it goes.

The flim was okey-dokey, and the little Brooklyn theatre where I saw it was packed, with a huge line waiting outside for the next show -- the Manhattan theatres had sold out hours earlier. I have no idea what police estimates will show, of course, and any box-office figures supplied by evil Hollywood are naturally suspect, and no doubt Professor Reynolds will mention contervailing demonstrations that prove the American people are still with the President on this one. I can only tell you what I saw.

UPDATE. I think the movie is pretty good, but if films were judged, as some have suggested people should be, by their enemies, then Fahrenheit 9/11 would be Citizen Kane: Both Roger L. Simon ("excrescence") and Andrew Sullivan ("vile, hateful propaganda") have condemned it without (by their own admissions) even seeing it.

GOLDBERG'S ANALYTICAL METHOD EXPLAINED:

MY EXASPERATION [Jonah Goldberg]
I woke up this morning thinking I was being too strident in my post about the Times review. After all, I was working on little sleep, a bit of grog and I'd spent a chunk of the day reading the book. So maybe I was too hopped-up. But no, think I'll let it stand.

Posted at 06:59 AM

(See also here and here.)

No wonder conservatives have no respect for the arts. Because they don't put any effort into their writing, they think it must be this easy for everyone.

WORDS, WORDS, WORDS. Values scold Daniel Henninger thinks the recent rash of beheadings in Saudi Arabia "pose a political problem for John Kerry" because Bush calls the beheaders "evil" at every (media) opportunity, whereas the lily-livered Purple Heart awardee Kerry speaks only of ways to bring peace, and thereby fewer beheadings, to the area, which is apparently neither the manly nor the American way to do things:

Conservatives do believe in evil, and liberals either no longer do or they don't wish to allow the idea of evil to be explicit in our politics. I would guess that Mr. Hertzberg's view is shared by most of the people working on John Kerry's campaign. They would never ask Mr. Kerry to say in public that the beheadings are "evil." Or if he did, it would be merely as a tactical concession for the moment to the "moral vocabulary" of the world inhabited by the sort of people who support George Bush.

If only Jimmy Carter had thought of this in 1980! In the midst of the hostage crisis, he could have been trained to clench his fists and roar, in the manner of Donald Pleasance in the first "Halloween" movie, that the Ayatollah Khomeni was "toe-tally eee-vil!" Then the American people might have thought: well, he sure has made a mess of things, but at least he speaks our moral vocabulary!

"Moral vocabulary" seems in this usage to be the equivalent of "paternoster" or "mumbo-jumbo": words meant to chase away fear in the teeth of disaster. Might Henninger have written "marketing vocabulary," and been mistranscribed?

THIRD TIME'S THE CHARM. Crazy Jesus Lady wrings a few more laughs out of the Reagan funeral. I've never before heard anyone make reference to Former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick's "still-saucy or potentially saucy eyes." I can only imagine what the long version of that reminiscence was like. Hopefully when CJL passes they'll crack open her Virgin Mary statue like a piñata and find it stuffed with Lynne Cheney style bodice-ripping stories starring a cadaverous public servant with fire, or at least sauce, in her eyes.

We also get to see CJL imagine herself in mortal peril again. The first such incident I noticed was when she saw two turbaned men taking pictures of St. Pat's, and made a promise (alas, unfulfilled) that the next time this happened she would be "tackling them and screaming for help." In the present case, she had better reason to worry, if U.S. Capitol personnel were indeed screaming "Run for your lives!" It turned out a false alarm, thank goodness, but even fake crises come with life lessons in Noonanland. "This is when a generational transfer of power occurred within my family. My son turned to me and in a tone both soft and commanding he said, 'Mom: Move it.'" Strong men are always coming to the rescue of the Crazy Jesus Lady, but it is touching that in this case it was not Reagan or John Wayne but a presumably real member of her own family who undistressed the damsel and was rewarded for his firmness with "a Japanese beer." (Manhood rites have deteriorated a bit since I was a boy.)

No personal attacks this time, but all in all a fun read.

LONG GONE LONESOME. The Hank Williams doc on PBS was pretty good. They focused on old-timers, mostly surviving Drifting Cowboys, so I didn’t have to hear Bono or somebody like that talk about how fantastic and seminal Hank was.

I can’t be neutral on Hank Williams. In every band I’ve ever played in, I endeavored to get at least one of his songs into our repertoire -- even if only in a horrible grinding noise version. In a bar band I played with a million years ago, we'd stretch out "Wedding Bells" and "Jambalaya" to kill time in our night-long sets, and they were always a blessed relief for us and for the audience. I’d rather listen to Hank's worst songs than most other people’s best songs. Hell, I even like the songs with Audrey in them.

I’m amazed and delighted that Billie Jean Horton is still around. After her death-truncated marriage to Hank, she hooked up with Johnny Horton, and he died young, too, in 1960. She had been a singer, and charted with "Ocean of Tears" in 1960. She looked splendidly old-fashioned, with her flame-red dyed hair and heavy face powder.

I already knew about his back, and his shady homelife growing up, and the Louisiana Hayride and the Opry, and Audrey and the toll of the road and his feeling like he was being "sliced up like baloney" for sale in those awful last years. So I didn’t learn much new, except what sort of fellows he hung out with, and the surviving Drifting Cowboys seemed like the same sort of fellows you see in the background of any country band photograph from the 50s: raw and good-humored and happy to be dressed up nice and doing just what they liked to do. It wasn’t new things I was looking for, anyway. There were several clips of Hank singing his songs, some of the familiar, all of them wonderful. There were two real money shots. One was his duet with Anita Carter on "I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love With You." It was like slow lightning -- tender and sexy and strong enough to tear you out of yourself. The other was a slightly rote performance of "Cold, Cold Heart," a song he introduced as the one that had best kept him and the boys "in beans and biscuits." Hank alternated between a heartfelt expression appropriate to the song and a flickering stage smile that seemed alternately show-biz smug and ineffably sad.

MADE FOR EACH OTHER. Peggy Noonan's Reagan funeral coverage contained a strange, hard swipe at some of her former White House speechwriting colleagues ("wrote the same speech over and over... I think he spent the rest of his time getting haircuts," "National Hack Memorial," "malignant leprechaun," etc). I have been directed (thanks, Bill) to a hostile response to Noonan by one Jack Wheeler ("cheap, inexcusable," "For all her self-promotion, the facts are that she never wrote many major presidential speeches and had quite limited access to the president," "she was never part of the team," etc).

Wheeler is a true find, with a fascinating backstory: according to his bio, "He has retraced Hannibal’s route over the Alps with elephants;  led numerous expeditions in Central Asia, Tibet, Africa, the Amazon and elsewhere, including 18 expeditions to the North Pole;  and has been listed in The Guinness Book of World Records for the first free fall sky-dive in history at the North Pole." His fullsome reaction to Noonan, whom he once called his "friend," is not surprising once you realize that he reacts rather intemperately to women he doesn't like. In an article about Janet Reno called "America's Saddam?" he says that "the depravity of Waco" will, "Unless expunged through public revulsion of Janet Reno... remain an ineradicable stain on America's soul." On Hillary Clinton: "There is no lie she won't tell, no friend she won't destroy, no pledge she won't break, no slander she won't spread, no political dirty trick she won't employ in order to reside in the White House again, this time as the POTUS." Of Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, top of the Abu Ghraib chain of command, he writes that her failure to respond to (unmade) calls to resign proves that "She has taken them like a woman -- whining, making excuses, and complaining that it’s not her fault, that she’s being 'scapegoated.'"

Given his disdain for "the current hysteria over the 'abuse of Iraqi prisoners," it is hard to see why resignation would be the manly course of action. Maybe it's the vitamins; in his spare time, Wheeler stumps for Life Enhancement pills. In this service he authored an odd piece in which he included, with evident approval, this quote from LE icon Sandy Shaw:

I think that as a whole, women in general tend to vote for people who promise to take care of them. They seem to have an assumption of helplessness that may lie in a genetic tendency to produce less or be less sensitive to noradrenaline. For example, look at the Republicans' problems with the so-called 'soccer moms' who are upset that government programs may be taken away. They are unwilling to say, 'I can handle my situation and don't need some government handout.' Just look around -- how many women do you see fighting the system and being truly politically incorrect? We need a lot more women like Margaret Thatcher or Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth [R-ID], but unfortunately they are rare.

Wheeler also approves of Mrs. Thatcher, presumably because she hasn't done anything to piss him off yet.

We can see that Wheeler would make a formidable nemesis for the Crazy Jesus Lady. I only hope they draw this thing out.

ALL MY FAVORITE CARTOON CHARACTERS COME TO LIFE! Lileks works himself into a lather over Opus the Penguin, though he's "reasonably sure" Berkeley Breathed isn't an anti-Semite. Plus: evil & duplicity from Entertainment Weekly, tensor lamps. "I haven't edited this at all," says Lileks. That's a relief.

"Ol' Blood 'n' Guts" Peters says we are worthless and weak for allowing Al-Jazeera to broadcast, especially since the TV station single-handedly defeated us at Fallujah. (Surely you remember the shock-troops of Arab cameraman filming bombed civilian homes, which our G.I.s were forced to view while strapped to chairs with their eyelids peeled back by John Kerry.) The General explains why this "freedom of speech" thing of which you civilians are so inexplicably fond "doesn't export well" outside the Anglophone world: for one thing, in the U.S. of A., "we have libel and hate-crime laws that work." (That's one of the interesting things about hate-crime laws; while a lot of their backers are gentle folk who think they're outlawing racism, others are of the General's sort: people who will clutch at any excuse to punish not only deeds, but thoughts and words as well.)

Meanwhile Professor Reynolds says he's working really hard, contrary to what his frequent posts in the middle of workdays might imply, and shows us a picture of his car in the faculty parking lot as proof. Save it for the tenure committee, Professor. (Hey, I don't see a datestamp...)

Is the moon full or something?

BUGGING OUT. "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters points the way to disengagement. While "We must remain ferociously aggressive in Iraq and around the globe," the General writes,

If our troops in Iraq are stymied by a web of political deals and need to ask, "Mother, may I?" before confronting terrorists, they'll be condemned to lethal inactivity — turned into targets with bound hands. Morale will plummet. And their lives will be wasted...

We owe Baghdad nothing. Nothing. We've already given Iraq an unprecedented chance to build a humane society and a decent government. If, despite our sacrifices, the Iraqis revert to greed, bigotry and tribalism, we'll need to face the reality of yet another homemade Arab failure and "stand not upon the order of [our] going, but go"...

...if the Iraqis lack the guts to stand up for their own freedom, we needn't hang around to watch as the country bleeds to death, unwilling to apply its own tourniquet.

The General is famously outspoken, but I wouldn't be surprised if his opinions here turned out to be the cutting edge of the new reality. After June 30 we will of course still have a lot of troops in Iraq, but already we see signs that the democratization phase of the enterprise is getting less of our direct attention than did the deSaddamification phase. Of course we are less attentive to Afghanistan than before, too, and things are evolving in some interesting ways there as well.

I suspect the Administration is eager to leave Iraq, and will get less shy about showing it.

RAISON D'CROIRE. You know, I hate to "support the side," I really do. I hate to go to events like this one, where I'm surrounded by people who, on some prosaic level, agree with me, because my natural distrust of humanity makes me feel as if the cause must be tainted because I agree with it.

Much of the time all that keeps me convinced of my politics is the obvious inanity of the people on the other side. (No link needed; that's what this whole site is about.)

But often I am encouraged by guys who obviously know what they're talking about, and talk about it extremely well. Here's a good one from Kurt Vonnegut that you might have seen before.

I have seen other writers from the WWII Generation, like Vidal and Mailer, denigrated by young right-wing functionaries who would not, in a just universe, be allowed to clean their blotters. But Vonnegut's piece is pretty well disseminated, and if you haven't had the pleasure, you might get a look at it before the rabble hoots it down.

I know a large part of the conservative argument is that the dumb guys know more than the smart guys. Don't you believe it. Read the stuff, use your brains, and see where it takes you. That is, to use an old discredited term, a sufficiently revolutionary act to turn things around.

UPDATE. There seems to be some misunderstanding, so let me make plain that my inability to feel trust or give comradeship in a good cause is something I regret, and to whatever extent I compare myself to the people doing the good grunt work of getting Kerry elected, the comparison is meant to be unflattering to me.