CATASTROPHIC INSURANCE. I've been wondering why this Administration seems so eager to fuck up Social Security. Ancient animus against FDR? Fulfillment of an old Skull and Bones fraternity prank? Plain evil? But I think I have found a clue.

Attend Stanley Kurtz at Policy Review. He is concerned with underpopulation in the West. He worries about cultural pollution of the West from outside (Theo van Gogh is mentioned) if we don't get those rates up. But there are serious obstacles -- "Secularism, individualism, and feminism," as Kurtz has it. They have reduced childbearing to "a matter of sheer choice." And given the choice, many of us have opted out.

This won't do for Kurtz. As he sees it, we can either have modernism or we can survive. This is "an ultimate choice between feminist hopes of workplace equality with men and society’s simultaneous need for more children."

After considering various economic incentives to advance procreation, Kurtz seems to agree with Philip Longman, author of The Empty Cradle, that "the endless downward spiral [of population] cannot be reversed without a major social transformation." The hope is that people will be driven into accelerated childbearing by social forces.

Here Kurtz turns hopeful. If the safety net is shorn away, citizens may adopt a frontier memtality that forcibly shifts reliance away from society and back to the family. "What will happen if the economy and the welfare state shrink significantly?" he asks. "Quite possibly, people will once again begin to look to family for security in old age — and childbearing might commensurately appear more personally necessary... Widespread contraception, abortion, women in the workforce, marital decline, growing secularism and individualism — all seem here to stay. Looked at from a longer view, however, the results are not really in."

Gaze upon Kurtz' repopulationist utopia:

It wouldn’t take a full-scale economic meltdown, or even a relative disparity in births between fundamentalists and secularists, to change modernity’s course. Chronic low-level economic stress in a rapidly aging world may be enough. There is good reason to worry about the fate of elderly boomers with fragile families, limited savings, and relatively few children to care for them. A younger generation of workers will soon feel the burden of paying for the care of this massive older generation. The nursing shortage, already acute, will undoubtedly worsen, possibly foreshadowing shortages in many other categories of workers. Real estate values could be threatened by population decline. And all these demographically tinged issues, and more, will likely become the media’s daily fare.

In such an atmosphere, a new set of social values could emerge along with a fundamentally new calculation of personal interest.

Well, at least it wouldn't "take a full-scale economic meltdown." But things have to get bad. Our "sheer choice" must be sheared away from us -- and if it takes a little prevarication, talk of "saving" a system the mad doctors of the Right have already decided has got to go, well, you can't make an omelette without piercing a few ova.

These people are mad and must be stopped.

UPDATE. Mouse Words gives Kurtz a closer read, from which he does not benefit.

OH, PHRED... MUST I REMIND YOU THAT WE'RE GODLESS? Roger L. Simon:

Still, Wretchard does have a point when he describes the left's (conceited) blindness in making an alliance with irredentist Islam.

Do me a favor, will you? If you read something stupider than that quote today, please post it in comments. I have a bet with someone.

(Disclaimer: I did move recently, so I may have missed the memo announcing our alliance with irredentist Islam. In which case I must ask: does this affect our 401K plan?)

...AND, AFTER THE PRESS CONFERENCE, WENT HOME AND COVERED HER NAKED BODY WITH GOLD COINS LIKE ZASU PITTS IN GREED. Carly Fiorini has hit the road. At Sisyphus Shrugged. Julia demurely clears her throat and pays tribute to the Wall Street cover girl's legacy:

Carly Fiorina, the Chairman and CEO of HP (whose grand [and hotly-contested] strategy to change HP corporate culture by merging outside their core business and firing a really lot of people turned out, surprisingly, not to be a particularly effective way to effect synergy or raise profits) has joined almost twenty thousand other former HP and Compaq employees in being found to be in excess of requirements by the board in the wake of the merger...

She leaves in the comforting knowledge that even though profits never went up, at least nearly twenty thousand fewer people are feeding their children and paying taxes out of operating costs.

We are less eloquent than Julia, so for our own tribute to Ms. Fiorini (and closing film reference), please imagine Daniel Day-Lewis in a wheelchair barking "Cunt... cunt... cunt.. cunt... congratulations!"

YOU POOR, CRAZY FREAKS -- IF ONLY I COULD REACH YOU! Ann Althouse: "I know you people on the left aren't reading this, but if you were, I would tell you: the right is laughing triumphantly."

Having informed me that I am not reading what I am reading, Althouse goes on, as is her wont, to harsh at length on liberals, forcibly injecting from time to time a tone of sorrow-not-anger that is belied by the words they accompany. For example:

Another reader disagrees that "the right is laughing triumphantly":

I think people on the right are also horrified at just how left the left has become when people like you and Jeff Jarvis and Instapundit are labeled as conservative or hard right, and are unable even to read what you have to say.

When people who are professors at NYU start believing that David Corn of all people [is a] Karl Rove plant at worst and betraying their own side at best - and thus seek to ostracize him - they've gone all unhinged.

I mean, if they can't read you guys, the centrists, and think even the left is betraying them, and this wave of thought is becoming more and more status quo, how can anyone actually on the right have a conversation with them? They've made themselves unreachable and untouchable.

I concede that plenty of people on the right agree with me that it's terribly sad.

Am I totally illiterate, or did Althouse's correspondent basically say that conservatives are "horrified" that we liberals are "all unhinged" and not worth even talking to? This is only the same thing as finding our plight "terribly sad" if you're being sarcastic, as in, "It's really too bad that you're such a fucking psycho."

What a weird, passive-aggressive schtick. The appeal escapes me. Maybe it's about getting to call people names without having to accept that you're calling them names. Also, if one of the loonies disagrees with you, you don't have to answer his point. Because he's loony, y'see.

I suppose it's one way to deal, but it makes dull reading after a very short while.

THE WORLD AS WILL AND IDEA. A good deal of this Ann Marlowe piece is devoted to the sort of weird attribution of personal traits to political movements that mark one as a comer in the New New Right: e.g., wearing a Bush button is "punk rock," Democrats are "smugly self-righteous, prissy and joyless," etc.

The article purports to be a review of The Neocon Reader, but fails to seriously discuss the book's contents -- with one notable exception, James Q. Wilson's "Broken Windows" essay:

Wilson's title refers to a theory that if a window in a building is broken and left unrepaired, all the windows in the building will soon be smashed, and his article is frequently credited with sparking the new approaches to urban order that led to the revival of New York under Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

What is not so often recalled from Wilson's article is that the novel idea of placing officers on foot patrol did not actually reduce the crime rate; it only reduced citizens' perception of the crime rate. But that was enough. That turned out to be what urban vitality was
about.

There's much more, but no references to any actual declines in the City's crime rate -- though these did come -- nor to the role of increased arrest rates (misdemeanor arrests in the City went up by 70 percent in the 1990s; felony arrests rose nearly as much). To hear Marlowe tell it, the perception of a crime drop by itself, the "feeling of public safety that allowed neighborhoods of poor and working-class people to flourish," as Marlowe puts it, caused the City's "revival."

Marlowe calls Wilson's essay "exemplary of neocon thought." If neoconservatism means a serious expectation of concrete results from public relations gestures, she may be right. A mindset that attributes our crime drop to good feelings, rather than to police work or demographic factors, could easily envision a democratic revolution in Iran brought about mainly by our good wishes. And it is not too much (or too little, depending on your point of view) to expect that when these wishes are finally effected by brute force, this mindset's sufferers will continue to believe that the will of the conquered nation's people was always with them, and that the little shove our armed forces gave to history was no more important than the tedious police work that accompanied the revival of New York.

Marlowe is much more specific in matters closer to home: in denigrating the hipness of present-day Berlin, she compares it unfavorably to "the East Village in the 1980s." Why of that decade, one wonders, and not the present time? I would guess because Marlowe remembers the East Village of those days, as I do, and knows that the upscale shopping and dining district the area has become does not generate the, to use her words, "cultural ferment and creativity" it generated in the days before our City was, to use her word again, revived. It's an instructive dodge. When you're pushing the power of ideas, it is helpful to ignore the collateral damage.

IT'S JUST A MOVIE, KATE MARIE. This Friend of the Perfesser, Kate Marie, complains that the cartoon Mulan II... well, you might think I'm trying to make it sound worse than it is, so let her tell it:

I just watched Mulan II (I have two young girls), and -- I kid you not -- "my duty is to my heart" appears to be the explicit message of the film (as it was in the Princess Diaries II). In the immortal words of Ryan O'Neal at the end of What's Up, Doc? -- that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. If you want a succinct and hilarious refutation of the idiotic notion that one's duty is to one's heart, watch the "Be Like the Boy" episode of The Simpsons.

Duty is a category which is by definition separate from "heart." It represents all those things -- family, tradition, state, law -- which have a claim on us that transcends personal affection and selfish desire. For goodness' sake, what does our generation make of Antigone? ("Antigone? Huh?" -- never mind.)

At the end of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (and in the finale of Martin Scorcese's film adaptation), the story's protagonist, Newland Archer, watches from a bench as his grown son enters the home of the woman blah blah blah...("blah blah blah" added)

Yes, this woman is actually subjecting her afternoon child-quieting videos to strict moral-aesthetic analysis. And not just the "How many swears in Ray" type of analysis you find in newspapers -- real, arcane wingnut analysis, of the sort we like to cover here.

It can be useful to examine the moral underpinnings of a work of art, but this is fucking Mulan II. Comparing it to Antigone and Edith Wharton is a little like demanding that your local school board candidates each state and defend their positions on global nuclear regulation or the Law of the Sea.

There has been a contingent of scolds doing this sort of thing for over a decade. One of its early practitioners, Melanie Kirkpatrick, plagued the Wall Street Journal in the 90s with similar kernel-picking exercises. Here's one of her classics, in which she faults Paul Rudnick's AIDS comedy Jeffrey for not being more about duty and honor. She thought the play's model should have been Camille.

This would seem an unusual recommendation to an author of light comedies, but you have to remember that, for a certain type of person, even pop art is not at all about pleasure -- it is about morality, or rather, that modern, debased version of morality called Values.

What horrible lives such people must lead, seeing dark messages everywhere -- in children's entertainments, in TV shows, in popular songs. Sounds like paranoid schizophrenia without the relief of upswings.

Kate Marie has two young daughters. I pray she isn't trying to scare the Mulan out of them a la Piper Laurie in Carrie: "First comes Mulan, then comes moral ruin!"

SHORTER JUAN COLE: Here are several proofs that Jonah Goldberg doesn't know what he's talking about, starting with his own astonishing admission that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

SHORTER JONAH GOLDBERG: I don't know what you're talking about.

SHORTER MICHAEL TOTTEN. Me and Chris Hitchens are like that (crosses fingers). I helped him talk down an inexplicably angry Iraqi.

WHY WE FIGHT. Above and beyond duty is Comrade Shawn Macomber, National Review Online Film-Criticism Warrior Unit, in review of Assault on Precinct 13 remake treason! Comrade Macomber not content to scorn bad morals and swearing, loose women of new film! No, Comrade also explain mission of Film-Criticism Warrior Unit:

Removing the sap from our action movies should be a matter of national pride. After all, it's been well documented that Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, and other various tyrants have had a predilection for American action movies. (Although a certain Iraqi dictator won't be seeing Assault on Precinct 13 unless the Red Cross brings it to him on DVD.) Who knows who is watching now? We wouldn't want anyone to start thinking we've gone soft.

Is maybe joke? Comrade, is in National Review -- only reference to Animal House signals joke! Sometimes not even then!

TENURED RADICAL. Professor Ward Churchill says (more or less) that the victims of the WTC attacks were yes-men for a murderous regime, and that this vitiates his sympathy for them. This prompts calls for the professor's dismissal, most notably by Governor Bill Owens.

The Ole Perfesser has apparently judged that Churchill is more useful to his cause as a negative example than as a celebrity scalp a la Dan Rather. In two high-profile essays, while maintaining plausible deniability on the free-speech thing, he drags Churchill across the whole of academia (excepting, presumably, the sleepy southern sector of it that supplies his own paychecks) -- in hopes, it would appear, that the stink will rub off, and that common folk thus alerted will rise up and do something about them pointy-heads.

At MSNBC, the Perfesser writes

Academics are supposed to be skeptical and questioning, even about their own societies. But there's a big difference between being skeptical -- which requires actual thought -- and being adversarial, which requires only contradiction. What's more, the doctrine of academic freedom -- which goes well beyond the general freedoms of speech encompassed by the First Amendment -- is supposed to be about freedom for individual academics to think, well, freely -- not about the freedom of academic institutions to escape scrutiny from the outside world.

While I'm told law professors like to split hairs, I don't think mere love of craft is driving the Perfesser to be so specific here on the distinctions between adversarial and skeptical, and between "the doctrine of academic freedom" and First Amendment rights. I suspect he is looking for (or, rather, offering to his better-placed comrades in the commentariat) loopholes. By such means, one can call for a professor to be expelled for what he teaches (provided it is "adversarial" enough), and have a high-sounding answer ready for any Constitution-based challenges that might come up.

The Perfesser probably needn't have bothered. After all, the coming generation clearly think the First Amendment goes too far; if such like believe the doctrine of academic freedom goes even further than the notoriously libertine 1A, the targeted reader may feel comfortable dispensing with the whole concept of academic freedom, and not worry if some Constitutional liberties happen to get thrown out along with it.

At Fox News, the Perfesser embellishes and amplifies. In this telling, academia's great offense to normalcy is changed from adversarialism to "cleverness" and "being contrary," perhaps to prevent Fox's readers from having to look up the word "adversarial." The Perfesser also says that "America's campuses are not free-speech zones, but among the most pervasively censored environments in our society." Just like a tenured radical -- I bet he's never worked in a modern corporation: Try taking one of those patented heh-indeeds over underage sex Reynolds gets away with in his little ivory tower, and repeating it around the water-cooler! You'll be up on harrassment charges in no time.

But in his innocence (feigned or genuine), the Perfesser still portrays his own world as so dangerously "politically correct" that it must be reformed -- but not on anything so retrograde as free speech grounds. The Perfesser likes some forms of administration-mandated behavior surveillance -- "Harvard President Lawrence Summers has joined in, calling for his university to embrace patriotic values and get more in line with mainstream Americans," he notes encouragingly. Just some kinds of wrong thinking have to eliminated.

Which would those be? Why, the elitist ones, of course: what place has elitism in an instutution of higher learning? One can see the torch glimmering in his hand as the Perfesser points out to the pointy-heads that he has a whole army of citizens behind him who will happily supply them with a list of permissible attitudes and subjects for discussion:

Not surprisingly, people who would rather be clever than right, who confuse oppositionalism with originality, who hold ordinary Americans and their beliefs in faux-aristocratic contempt, and who do all of this with an unshakable degree of self-righteousness, are not likely to be especially popular.

And if you have long hair and dark sunglasses, that's double-plus-ungood. If you're wondering what sort of end result one might expect from this sort of thinking, read A Canticle for Leibowitz. Or history.

"SERIOUSLY, WHAT DO YOU SEE IN THAT GUY?" "HE MAKES ME LAUGH." From Dirty Flower:

“LAS Vegas” hottie Nikki Cox has broken off her engagement to Bobcat Goldthwait and is now dating another comic, Jay Mohr. Cox and Goldthwait dated for five years after meeting on “Unhappily Ever After.”

The mysteries of the human heart just got a little more impenetrable.

SHORING UP THE BASE. (N.B.: I now have a phone line, of sorts, so as John Henry said, I reckon it's time I did some work.)

Andrew McCarthy takes a full page in National Review Online to make sure he hasn't offended the all-important Confederacy Fan bloc. In responding to a Southern Appeal author who does not share his lenient attitude toward that bastard Lincoln, McCarthy does come close to a Sister Souljah moment ("I do think Lincoln is the hero of the Civil War, just as I think President Bush will be remembered as a hero of the current war"), but mainly tries to convince the Southron that "we have a lot of common ground," and heaps praise on Confederate soldiers. That ought to keep them Rebels in the tent a while! Up next: Jonah Goldberg denounces Chevy Chase for making jokes about Franco.

(Actually Goldberg already seems to be on culture watch this week: The Arts & Letters Daily has rejected one of Goldberg's manuscripts, which means ALD is "sliding to the left," which means ALD is "predictable." Maybe next he'll send William Bennett and Michael Medved over to ALD's offices to lean menacingly against the doorjambs and flip coins.)

WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE UNAVOIDABLE DELAY. WE WILL BE MOVING SHORTLY. "Aren't you feeling euphoric?" asks Andrew Sullivan. Well, no -- I still haven't got phone service in my new apartment. All politics is local.

The human waste products called Verizon Customer Service assure me they will take care of business tomorrow between 8 a.m. and the vernal equinox. Then, and only then, Andy, will we know whether freedom has won! Meantime I'm like a fish out of water, or a Lileks without a 7,000-pound home entertainment center and a barrel of Olestra snacks to fuel the "commentary."

Still, in those small moments of electronic access I have been able to snatch, I have seen some corkers. I note with pleasure that the cultural commissars of National Review and professional Ned Flanders impersonator Michael Medved have turned on Million Dollar Baby. The chronic inability of such types to distinguish between the actions of dramatic characters and the contents of position papers is, like Wimpy's chronic inability to pass up a hamburger, a reliable laugh-getter, but in this case connoiseurs of their follies may also contemplate the piquant dilemma of their followers. Can they accept their beloved Clint Eastwood as an agent of the commie pinko Left? Will they, with tears in their eyes, burn their Dirty Harry DVDs? Will their blogospheric enablers up the ante by reporting that Clint spent years in Yurrup working with a feller who might just as well have been a Marxist? (Lookit the fella! Looks jes like Castro! Or Ward Chuchill hehindeed!)

(Speaking of the Ole Perfesser, the aforelinked post is now officially the stupidest thing ever written, and I know that for a fact because moving gave me an opportunity to review the previous title-holders: my book reports from sixth grade, and my journals from the late 70s. Reynolds is by now so deep in the tank, whip-tailing his faux logic in whichever direction he thinks will make the maximum number of Democrats look bad, that his brief mention of the "idiotarian" coinage came as a shocking reminder of his old poses: when was the last time the Perfesser gave an even halfway decent impersonation of an independent thinker?)

I see also that folks are still ringing bells over the Iraqi election. Closer to home, of course, voting is not seen as a panacea, or even a cea. Here in the Apple, Gifford Miller and Freddie Ferrer, two men who want to unseat New York City Mayor Richie Rich and his delightful dog Dollar, have suggested that the gigantic boondoggle-slash-stadium Hizzoner wants us all to pay for should, like other large public expenditures, be subject to a referendum. Eric Fettmann of the New York Post is outraged: "But the biggest problem with the Ferrer-Miller approach is the notion that this is something 'the people' should decide," writes Fettmann. "That may do well for two men duking it out for the Mr. Populist label, but it's irresponsible governance... If the stadium should be decided by referendum, why not place every issue before the voters?"

Why have referenda for anything if not for this? The City itself admits the project will at minimum require a $300 million investment, leading to $21 million in annual debt service paid by us suckers. But in this case I suppose Democracy is not very Whiskey or Sexy if the moneyed interests stand a chance of losing.

SERVICE TROUBLE CONTINUES. I have moved, but my phone service will not be installed for five years -- er, six months -- er, till Thursday. Meantime I must forage for internet access, so posting will continue light till week's end.

Just as well, as I have little to say about the topic of the moment, the Iraqi election. This is, like the "Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!" post-invasion moment, a time of edifying events and spectacles -- a Saddam statue toppling in the former case, ink-stained fingers in the latter -- offered as proof that everything is going according to plan, and taken as an opportunity to call anyone who disagrees with this assessment losers.

Of course, that first round of upbeat liberation imagery was followed by bombing, looting, graft, torture, etc, and who knows what's coming now. Whatever happens, we can count on our Administration to learn and change nothing. Perhaps the sanest course now is the one recommended by our wisest elders: hope for the best and expect the worst.

PLEASING THE AFFILIATES. I welcome our new advertisers, Dirty Flower, a fun daily read w/pictures, and whoever is selling Steve Hicks' book -- which I freely admit (in that orgiastic spirit of disclosure currently sweeping the opinion racket) I have not read and probably never will read.

For a simple soul such as myself, raised in a tract house and accustomed to dwelling in slums, all this yak about how the Left has been taken over by postmodernism -- "switched to themes of anti-reason, double standards, and cynicism," as the advertiser puts it -- has no relevance. In my frequent discussions with other liberals, I have never heard one defend or attack a POV by announcing that language is a mere construct. Neither have I heard one say, "Who are we to say what's right and wrong?" -- at least not since the last Alan Bromley article.

I take words very seriously, not only as a professional but also as a moralist. That's why propaganda is the main subject of this site. Stray offenses to reason annoy me, but coordinated, wholesale perversions of reason piss me right the fuck off.

And if it's monolithic anti-rationalism you're looking for, the Right is just where the action is these days. You can read my back numbers for evidence, or we can just pick us a fresh one off the poisoned information tree that we call the blogosphere. Ah, here's some ripe Daniel Henninger:

Mr. Bush's inaugural speech should put to rest the notion of a monolithic American "right." It set off a nice fight on the right among realists, internationalists, libertarians and neocons. (Liberals and the left are simply "against Bush" so it is hard to credit their arguments beyond brute obstruction.)

Still, I encourage you to click the Hicks link. It will gain me some little money, and it may gain you some pleasure, if you're of a certain turn of mind (the destination is an Amazon review page, and here is a sample of the commentary: "I only wish Michel Focualt would have saved us all the trouble by blinding himself with his pens rather then writing such garbage and serving as the flase profit of 'post-modernism' which I see as nothing more then the raw lust for power"). You may even become interested in the book, and read it and tell me about it, which may get me to read it. I have prejudices, but I can be persuaded. That's how we reality-based folks operate.

SERVICE ADVISORY. Posting will be light to nonexistent over the weekend, as I will be moving from one Brooklyn nook to another. This sort of thing used to take me less time. I grieve that I am no longer a hanky-on-a-stick type. But the way things are going, there's always the chance that I will be again.

At this writing comments are also down, though I'm sure they'll be back before I am.

Meantime please feel free to avail all the other wonderful outlets available in the blogosphere! Like this:

I'm not a close student of the history of intelligence gathering, but it seems to me that the use of sex to extract information -- in all sorts of way wasn't invented in Gitmo and that nothing of the sort happened under, say, Eisenhower's command. Prudishness and squeamishness is not automatic cause for concluding that the people involved are dishonorable. Again, I can't say I love that we're doing this. But it doesn't seem like something to bang my fist about either.

I have to hand it to Goldberg. If I worked on it for a thousand years, even if I kept my drinking hand free the entire time, I couldn't come up with anything like that.

SHORTER JIM LILEKS. Time was, when The Simpsons made sport of Christians, I found it funny. Now when they do it I am reduced to sputtering rage. Obviously, they have changed, just like the traitorous Democrats who will not fight Hitler.

DOWNERS FOR DOLLARS. Comments in the past day or two show that we have no dearth of animal vitality 'round these parts. So I have a project for you.

I was in a Hallmark store today and noticed the CD rack. Among the Swingin' Sinatra and Night Jazz discs was a compilation called Walkin' On Sunshine! Tunes to Brighten Your Day. The tracks included the eponymous Katrina & The Waves kicker and a bunch of bouncy-fun tunes meant to imbue the listener with pep.

Now I can understand that. Music hath charms, and I can imagine some of Hallmark's patrons picking up Walkin' On Sunshine! to cheer up their gloomy-gus friends, or themselves. Hey John -- It's your birthday! Shake You some Booty! xxx Marla etc.

But it struck me that people also listen to music to make themselves more miserable. It was till recently a country music tradition to mourn a dead relationship by pumping quarters into a jukebox stocked with George Jones and Patsy Cline songs, and drink Pabst Blue Ribbon and shots till your friends carried you out of the bar. Sinatra made whole, desperately unhappy albums with titles like Frank Sinatra Sings for the Lonely and When No One Cares ("and the phone never rings/the nights are endless things").

These are drinking albums, but I would also say that you were expected to take hard drugs that could induce a deathlike state before listening to The Idiot or Tonight's the Night. The common thread is this: someone is depressed and, along with getting shitass drunk or swallowing several Nembutol to depress himself further, ingests musical downers to accelerate the progress of the dark bus till it crashes at the end of Lonely Street. At which point he dusts himself off, takes some Tylenol, and resumes his life, his agony purged. (Or gets a ride to the morgue.)

This would seem a widespread and long-lived human phenomenon. Why then don't the companies that make compilations to Brighten Your Day, Relax Your Friends At Dinner Parties, Give You The Confidence to Wear That Ridiculous Fedora etc, make one or two CDs that are engineered to make the listener more unhappy? Such companies are nearly nameless, so it can't be out of concern for brand image. Is there a law against it? Do they fear they may be prosecuted if someone takes a header and Songs for Swingin' Suicidalists is found on his iPod?

Me, I think if you're going to buy someone a snotty alterna-card of this sort, or this, you might as well go the whole hog and provide some maudlin audio accompaniment. A guy I was in a band with once went through a devastating breakup, and his roommate gave him a bottle of bourbon and a bunch of Conway Twitty. It seemed the thing to do.

Here's an opportunity for some enterprising and morally corrupt souls to grab a niche! What shall we put on our compilation? And what shall we call it?

UPDATE. Excellent grey-sky session in the comments! You guys are like way eclectic.

It's true, as Jeremy says, that some "sad" songs have a little wink in them that takes out the sting. Tunes like "You're Not Drinking Enough" or "Auf Wiedersehn" are actually sly ways of getting around depression -- tricking it, cheating it, playing up the petulance or bombast so you can pretend it's a pose you're controlling, not a heartache that's controlling you. (Loudon Wainwright III's "Mr. Guilty" actually doubles up on that strategy: an I'm-sorry song that's so transparently fake, it's chillingly funny. LWIII is a neglected national resource.)

And, Harry, that may be why I didn't think of the blues: those guys hurt but they seldom wallow like most weepers wallow. Maybe I haven't been listening to the right stuff but blues songs seem to me less about sadness than survival -- a coping mechanism that became beautiful, like The Consolation of Philosophy. (Though now that I think of it, "How Many More Years" is pretty fucking bleak.)

But one man's mock is another man's maudlin, and all I would add are these:

• "Tourniquet," Marilyn Manson
• "I'm Free From the Chain Gang Now," Jimmie Rodgers
• "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore," The Smiths
• "Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry," Frank Sinatra
• "That's the Way Love Turned Out for Me," Ry Cooder
• "Dink's Song," Dave Van Ronk
• "I Told a Lie to My Heart," Hank Williams
• "Time," Tom Waits
• "After The Ball," Joan Morris
• "A Case of You," Joni Mitchell
• "Pardon Me, I've Got Someone to Kill," Johnny Paycheck

Boy, it's hard to stop once you get started...

NERDS. Jim Geraghty wants to know why "lefty bloggers" are not attacking the Motion Picture Academy for failing to give Fahrenheit 911 an Oscar nomination. "I just find it interesting that web personalities who one would think would be big Michael Moore fans are collectively shrugging their shoulders over this," he says. The Ole Perfesser indeeds, and Roger Simon takes the idiocy to breathtaking levels by suggesting that Million Dollar Baby, Sideways et alia got the top slots instead because "Most people in Hollywood now see, although maybe they won't admit it, that democracy in Iraq is extremely important."

Others have offered reason-based responses, but let me just add that only nerds with wads of toilet tissue in their underwear think the universe ebbs and flows according to their political tastes.

Jesus Christ. Imagine needing the comfort of popular approbation so badly that you would voluntarily comb through movie award nominations in search of comforting zeitgeist pellets! Yet these guys do it all the time. They sit around figuring out which movies are conservative. Hell, they'll even tell you what sorts of paintings and unread-gift-books are conservatively correct.

As their mania accelerates, I expect they will start identifying conservative desklamps, picture-frames, hubcaps, and brands of dental floss. Maybe they should start a tab at National Review Online called "What's Right, What's Blight!" I will offer the first squib:

TALL COFFEE CUP LIDS VS. FLAT COFFEE CUP LIDS: Time was, sober, utilitarian flatties dominated the conservative crowd's coffee cups. But since Rod Dreher boldly busted out the cup-crown for his morning soy lattes, righteous righties 'get' that these hubristic waves of plastic cresting their java perfectly match our Administration's national-greatness rhetoric. So skim those tired toppers right onto the ashheap of history, and re-educate your coffee cart guy to start stocking America's Coffee Cup Lid!

UPDATE. James Wolcott has mo' and, as usual, better.

ACTUALLY, HE PROBABLY DOESN'T KNOW WHAT HE MEANT, EITHER. Jim Robbins at The Corner:

With respect to the Nazis, Hannah Arendt noted that they were as frank as they were mendacious -- that no-one should have been surprised by the Holocaust because the Nazis had been talking about such things for years. Western liberals dismissed it all as rhetorical. The same was said about the things the radical Islamists have been writing about for decades. (emphasis added)

"Western liberals dismissed it all as rehetorical"? Who's he talking about? Harry Hopkins? Lillian Hellman?