MUNICH AS A MOVIE. I’m not much on late Spielberg. Schindler’s List, for example, struck me as three good movies – one about Oskar Schindler, one about Amon Goeth, one about the Nazi persecution of the Jews – smashed together to make the super-duper holocaust spectacular I suppose Spielberg wanted to make.

These movies aren’t bad. Spielberg is very good with his tools and, as well-developed craft seldom comes without passion, he can orchestrate the hell out of scenes and sometimes (as in the Goeth thread) grasp beyond what I imagined to be his reach. But by and large I just don’t think he’s a very deep thinker. Sam Fuller wasn’t a deep thinker, either, but The Big Red One is a whole lot more grown-up than Saving Private Ryan. Fuller had been in the shit, of course, but Robert Aldrich never served, and he made the magnificent Attack!.

So I think this is more a question of artistic temperment, and maybe personal temperment, than biography. Spielberg has a gift for seeing the world through a child's eyes, but when it comes time to process the information, I’m not sure how much more developed than a child he is.

Munich isn’t bad, either. It’s very watchable, especially considering the pains taken to de-glamorize the violence. The acting is first-rate -- I expect people will stop ribbing Eric Bana for The Hulk now. But again I don’t think Spielberg was up to the material.

For Munich, Spielberg seems to have picked up some vibrations from the dark sensibilities of Seventies films. This may seem odd for a director who got famous making "movie-movies" full of references to much earlier pictures, but Spielberg’s a movie buff first and last, and can’t help but absorb the spirit of whatever milieu he’s working in. As I watched it I kept thinking of The Kremlin Letter, The Quiller Memorandum, and Sorcerer. The visuals are bleak, the downturns in fortune inevitable, the mission increasingly absurd. Avner, our counter-terrorist hero, starts as a cipher and becomes luminescent as he accumulates despair.

So far as it goes, this is a creditable approach that might have served, say, Alan Clarke or Costa-Gavras well. Try, though, to imagine Spielberg sticking to a format like this. He just can’t do it, and has to reach out of the moral morass for his nearest equivalent to redemption, the Big Movie Moment that is his stock in trade: the Moment of recognition between Avner and his Arab counterpart (across a bloody street battle), the Moment of personal crisis (cribbed rather tastelessly from The Conversation), several Moments of Mom involving the women in Avner’s life -- his mother, his wife, and Golda Meir -- and the biggest Moment (and biggest mistake), of Thanatopsis, when Avner recalls the climax of the Munich massacre during a physical act of love. (Not the mention the Moment with the radio, which would have made a nice Coca-Cola commercial.)

It says something that the most genuinely eloquent, unforced, and moving moment in the movie is Avner’s reaction to his infant daughter back in Brooklyn saying "Dada" on the phone. Home is where the heart of Munich is. The screenwriters have loaded the story with references to home, and made it the McGuffin for the widening gyre of violence. Maybe this is what attracted Spielberg to the project: E.T. wanted to go home, and so does everyone else, including people who haven’t got one. I suppose Spielberg thought pointing this out would suggest a common ground on which these feuds could be settled, and sharpen the sense of waste and futility of the struggle.

But "home" really is one thing coming from a muppet in a kiddie picture, and another coming from adult commandoes on a blood-hunt. This is not a political but a dramatic observation. In the context of what actually happens in Munich, the endless talk among the counter-terrorists and their contacts of home -- and of morality, ethics, and nearly everything else more exalted than munitions and procedure -- is revealed to be absurd, and the sentimental gestures that inflate the movie are all a con. The team’s Mossad handler is very clear-eyed (not to say correct) about the whole business -- when Avner confronts him about the reciprocal nature of violence, he shrugs, "Why should I cut my nails? They’re only going to grow back again." Did none of the other team members ever consider this point of view, either to adopt or reject, before joining the mission?

Clearly Spielberg doesn’t see it that way; even as characters become disillusioned, worn-out, and dead, the high-minded talk goes on, and there is no sign even by the end that we are meant to find the ceaseless killing as anything other than the result of a tragic misunderstanding among moral, reasonable people who happen to be blowing each other up.

Spielberg took over A.I. as a project from Stanley Kubrick, a man whom Spielberg eulogized, ridiculously, at the Oscars for his "message of hope." Only a cockeyed optimist could see the director of Paths of Glory, The Shining, and Barry Lyndon that way. For a while, Spielberg’s A.I. is creepy and riveting: Pinocchio turned into a nightmare. But he has to reward the Little Silicon Boy’s quest for home, resulting in a science fiction climax of dizzying insanity: time and technology create a DNA-enhanced Mom who will love him. For all the deep feeling that may have produced this, this strikes me as an appalling evasion of life as it is actually lived by human beings, which art was created to encounter as a means to understanding. I wonder if a director’s cut of Munich exists in which aliens solve the middle-East crisis.

MUNICH AS A STRAWMAN. In Munich there is, as I have said, much discussion of morality, Jewish and existential. Everyone has his reasons, and explains them at length. One might wonder, then, why so many yahoos have been attacking the film as pro-terrorist even without actually having seen it.

This pre-emptive attack on the double-plus-ungood is not limited to Free Republic types, though they are its most humorous practitioners. Michelle Goldberg has covered the "neoconservative War on Munich" well at Salon. When word got around that the film was not going to be Starship Troopers with Arabs in place of bugs, these people apparently saw a public-relations threat, and used their pulpits to denounce the film as a matter of politics. This must be a popular duty. If they can depress attendance of a Steven Spielberg film -- well, someone's getting a promotion!

Most of the operatives doing this dirty work have no natural interest in the lively arts, but have a lively interest in propaganda. Correspondents to NRO’s Corner have posted criticism of other people’s endorsements of the film, which said correspondents, of course, had not themselves seen. Warren Bell, who may have seen it (it’s hard to tell), complains:

Ultimately, Spielberg admits he made a movie that asks more questions than it provides answers. My argument is that the questions aren't that hard, and Steven Spielberg is in a unique position as America's most popular modern filmmaker to take a real stand on the side of right and the side of justice. That he didn't is an act of moral and artistic cowardice.

Bell seems to think that artists have a moral (and artistic!) duty to promote conservative talking points; if a director makes a film that "asks more questions than it provides answers," he is a coward. This idea is more Soviet than American.

A new low, though, has been reached at OpinionJournal:

Maybe it has something to do with Mr. Spielberg's curious use of "Jewish" tropes. Again and again in "Munich," the Israelis are seen counting the cost of each kill, down to the last dollar: $352,000 for an assassination in Rome; $200,000 for a bombing in Paris. "Killing Palestinians isn't exactly cheap," remarks one of the members of the Israeli team. A Frenchman in the business of retailing the whereabouts of wanted men praises Israeli squad leader Avner Kauffman (Eric Bana) because he pays "better than anyone." A Mossad officer warns Kauffman not to overspend his budget. "I want receipts," he says.

Yes, you read that right: Brett Stephens suggests that Spielberg and his Jewish co-scenarists are promoting anti-Semitic caricatures.

In the actual film, the quibble over receipts is a humorous, bureaucratic in-joke, a humanizing device. (Some of the squad are shown enjoying wine with meals; I wonder why Stephens didn’t accuse Munich of portraying Jews as drunkards.) Money is not a "’Jewish’ trope, but a terrorist trope: Avner overpays the Frenchman to buy his future acquiescence. And the "isn’t exactly cheap" line is a mordant rejoinder to a Golda Meir quote, "I want to show them that killing Jews is expensive."

Stephens’ elision is baldly slanderous. But why should he care? He had his mission, and he fulfilled it. Being a dark, downer movie, Munich will not be seen by many, while the operators of the Mighty Wurlitzer will spread the word that Spielberg hates Jews and Americans and the proof, trust them, is in a movie you haven’t seen. There’s more than one kind of assassin.

UPDATE. At The Corner, Tim Graham mocks a gathering of prominent critics. "They started with 'Munich,'" he says, "bashing conservative critics who haven't seen it."

2005's hottest trend was reviewing films you haven't seen. This year, I predict, the know-nothings will press even further, vigorously defending the argumentum ad ignorantiam against those arty-farties who actually see the movies they talk about. ("They even discussed obscure movies they liked," marvels Graham. By "obscure" I guess he means films on which he can have no opinion, as the Central Committee has failed to classify them.)

Zhdanov, your children are here.

RACE TO THE BOTTOM. Drew Thornley thinks we shouldn't make a big deal out of American torturers when people who are not American are doing even worse things:

The mainstream American media spent months covering in detail the "atrocities" at Abu Ghraib and continues to give negative press to allegations of inhumane treatment at the hands of American soldiers... Yet the events at Abu Ghraib pale in comparison to the real atrocities that receive little or no attention by the same media, such as the crisis in Darfur, Castro's jailing and/or murder of political dissidents, the May 2005 massacre of public demonstrators in Andijan, Uzbekistan, and the hundreds of "honor murders" committed each year.

Roger L. Simon double-underlines the point:

...there is a deep psychological disturbance in our mainstream media, a kind of willed need to ignore the world around them. It probably was, more or less, forever thus, but modern communications, specifically the internet, have brought this willed ignorance to the surface as never before. And yet the MSM continues in the same direction, even in the face of seeming economic failure.

Maybe it's just me, but I believe the scale and scope of international coverage by the commie-pinko New York Times compares very favorably to that of, say, the New York Post, the Washington Times, Fox News, or even Roger L. Simon.

I'll go out on a limb and suggest that Simon isn't genuinely concerned with the lack of global news in U.S. papers, or he'd be asking why Rupert Murdoch stuffs his rags with puzzles and runaway brides instead of dispatches from Uzbekistan. No, it's year-end greatest-hits time, and Simon's doing his usual Abu Ghraib schtick as a treat to his fans.

The persistence of the Abu Ghraib story isn't just a big-media plot. Even when they are in a positive (or at least forgiving) frame of mind about the Iraq War, Americans don't approve of torturing enemy prisoners. We prefer to think ourselves exceptional --- genuinely better, not just comparatively better, than the world's tyrants and their cowed subjects.

Maybe we're wrong about ourselves. Maybe we're not a shining city on a hill, but merely a better deal for the money, torture- and injustice-wise, than the other vendors on the block. Maybe no deep principle sustains us except staying a little ahead of the competition.

If so, then there's no reason not to get worse -- we have a lot of wiggle room compared with other countries. So what if we spy on our citizens? So what if we detain them without charges? Who's gonna give you a better deal than this? Go see what Fidel's peddling!

I have to applaud Simon's ingenuity in dressing this up as idealism, but I wonder how many people he's convincing besides himself.

AND WHY DO THEY DRESS SO SHABBILY? MUST BE A MORAL FAILING OF SOME KIND. Perfesser Reynolds don't rightly know why poor folks accept bad terms on loans:

But many of the deals offered by a lot of these loan outfits are so bad that it's hard to believe anyone agrees to them understanding what's going on. The interest rates are so absurdly high that merely spelling out the deal would seem to be evidence that the borrower probably didn't realize what was involved.

Quite right. The Perfesser lets lenders compete for his business, and takes the best terms. Why don't the poor do that? They must be very shiftless, indeed.

Next week: the Perfesser suggests that the poor fire their brokers.

SHORTER JOHN O'SULLIVAN: While Democrats labored to keep the black man down, Trent Lott emerged as a quiet hero of the civil rights movement.

PINHEAD'S PROGRESS. When Rod Dreher lived among New Yorkers, he found us morally distasteful, expressing to the OpinionJournal clods his fear that were his son to grow up in here in Sodom, "he will be immersed in a permissive culture that corrodes the moral structure his mother and I will try to build," whereas "For all the drawbacks of the rural South, a man can raise a family there knowing the seeds of faith and virtue he plants in his children's hearts will have a less hostile environment in which to grow."

Just before he finally got transferred to a Dallas outpost of the conservative empire, Dreher applauded a writer who pointed out that suburban sprawl started when liberals tried to make white children go to school with black children -- and implied that he could relate: "I hate the way sprawl looks," said Dreher, "and believe that more intelligent design could mitigate the worst aspects of sprawl. But all it takes is riding the NYC subway daily, and having to live with fear and loathing of the violent, profane and altogether anti-social teenagers who make public spaces here their playpens, to understand why middle-class people get fed up and move the hell out of town to raise their kids."

Dreher's been in Dallas about two years now, and he has a complaint -- seems the folks in God's Country... well, now don't git him wrong, they got plenty of them seeds o' faith and virtue, and he shore likes 'em better than those "subway" people, but they jes' don't share ole Rod's sophistercated view of housing preservation:

Lord, Jonah, come to Dallas. In my part of town, developers are tearing down older houses left and right, and putting up McMansions on small lots. Whenever the people who actually live there object to what this practice, at least in the way developers are currently doing it, is doing to the aesthetic character of the neighborhood, the developers invoke the Free Market, as if it were the Magisterium of the Church. I remember watching on the late local news one night not long ago a developer saying that if people didn't want to buy these kinds of houses, they wouldn't be building them. As if consumer desire was its own justification.

He says the rampant building of houses he finds ugly is not conservative -- "Libertarian, yes, but as you know, that's not the same thing as conservative."

You made your bed, hoss; now die in it.

SHORTER CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT 1994:

"I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you."

HAW HAW HAW! AW HAW HAW HAW HAW! Thassa good one! Yee-haaa!

SHORTER CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT 2005:

"I'm from the government, and I'm here to spy on you and perhaps indefinitely detain you without charges."

That sounds reasonable.

WAIT FOR IT. Now that we have done with the Holiday Formerly Known as Christmas, I fully expect the same humorless cranks who bitched about liberal nonobservance of their Jesusfest (here's a late entry, chastising Google for insufficiently Jesusy gifs) to transfer their rage to Valentine's Day.

...Valentinus was a Roman priest martyred during the reign of Claudius the Goth [Claudius II]. Since he was caught marrying Christian couples and aiding any Christians who were being persecuted under Emperor Claudius in Rome [when helping them was considered a crime], Valentinus was arrested and imprisoned. Claudius took a liking to this prisoner -- until Valentinus made a strategic error: he tried to convert the Emperor -- whereupon this priest was condemned to death. He was beaten with clubs and stoned; when that didn't do it, he was beheaded outside the Flaminian Gate [circa 269].

This is tailor-made for the Defend Marriage crowd. They can lambaste us for hurting the economy with our moonbat boycott of candy hearts; pretend we do not distribute valentine cards because of our fear of giving politically-incorrect offense to the romantically-challenged; and bray "HAPPY ST. VALENTINE'S DAY!" while beating themselves with clubs and congratulating each other on a brave defense of tradition.

At least this will be more novel and thus more amusing than their usual Martin Luther King Day bullshit.

ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN A PLAYWRIGHT? "Charles, didn't you say Ralph was always rather... artistic?" "He was willful, stubborn, and this time he went too far. But he was my brother... I will not have you calling him artistic!"

Stanley Kurtz connects the dots swimming before his eyes, and deduces that Hollywood homos are trying to slippery-slope us from gang-marriage to gay marriage, using their most fiendish device -- cable TV:

There’s one late-breaking element of this debate that I think deserves more attention: HBO’s new polygamy drama, Big Love. Newsweek is touting the show, which is scheduled to premiere in March in the slot that follows The Sopranos. Any chance that Big Love is meant to make a statement on the gay marriage debate?

You got it, bro! Just as Dallas was designed to lure Reagan-era Americans into conspicuous consumption, adultery, and shoulder pads, and Seinfeld fiendishly weakened our collective resolve by implanting facile "observations" into the national psyche, leading to 9/11.

It certainly seems possible. One of Big Love’s lead writers, Will Scheffer, is a playwright.

[Sinister music; isn't that Pinter fellow a playwright?]

Scheffer explored themes of gay male identity in “Falling Man, and Other Monologues.” This article makes it clear that a recent staging of that play was designed to make a statement in the battle over same-sex marriage. So it’s suggestive that Scheffer is one of the two creators and executive producers of “Big Love.”

"A recent staging of that play was designed"! Please, nobody tell Kurtz about Orson Welles' "Voodoo Macbeth" -- he'll think Shakespeare was trying to turn us all into zombies.

Kurtz's upshot is that "polygamy is being used to legitimate same-sex marriage! In other words, gay marriage and group marriage are mutually reinforcing, and both depend upon the larger view that families ought to be whatever people want them to be."

We know that it is now common practice for conservatives to judge works of art without having actually seen them. Kurtz' latest helps to explain why:

They have no idea what art is. The closest thing to it in their universe is propaganda, so they assume art is just a species of that. (Sometimes they're accidentally right, of course, but having no aesthetics, they cannot make informed judgements.) Therefore any work of art that contains something they find viscerally objectionable -- in Kurtz' case, acts of love that do not involve one man, one woman, and (it would seem) one or fewer orgasms -- is analyzed and denounced as if it were a piece of legislation or a policy paper.

So of course many of them no longer bother to watch the things they denounce: why should they bother?

Another reason to be grateful, folks, in this holiday season: that you don't see the world through so pinched a gaze.

OKAY, ENOUGH PEACE ON EARTH, GOOD WILL TOWARD MEN. The Perfesser celebrates Christmas Eve with this:

How ironic,a guy who supports a party that promotes Fannie Mae,Freddie Mac,land-use restrictions,zoning,open space laws,and unions is unable to buy a house in the very Blue area of Northern California.All this from a guy who's got a law degree.What is it about Blue America that hates people that aren't rich??? Attention Markos Moulitsas Zúniga :did it ever occur to many in Blue state America that Houston(that doesn't have zoning) is a lot more affordable than let's say Berkeley,California.Also,Houston residents don't have a state income tax that they are paying.It appears Kos can't afford the very values he promotes,which is regulation of markets which leads to artifically high real estate prices.

We leave the response to Mr. Bobby Dupea:

I'm sittin' here listenin' to some cracker asshole lives in a trailer park compare his life to mine. Keep on tellin' me about the good life, Elton, because it makes me puke.

For further related information, see Supply & Demand, Law of.

AND WE'RE GONNA GET BORN NOW. I am a Christmas crank from way back. As recently as last year I was collecting negative Xmas carols. Old-time edroso.com fans may even remember my 2000 Charlie Brown Christmas parody, now lost to the internet, in which Linus and Good Ol' Roy Edroso predicted with malign glee an oncoming war and the opportunity for satire it would present (Join the old Jim Baker chorus/"Fuck the Jews! They don't vote for us!"/Pundits shake their tiny fists/What a time for satirists!/Hark the hare-brained George Bush reign/Government without a brain!).

The Christmas scam plays to my strong suit, namely intolerance of nonsense. Let's face it, no one knows when Jesus was born, and anyway it would seem, from the way modern Christians observe the holiday, that it has far less to do with Jesus than with Santa and (as with all big events in this country) with money.

So, when the War of Christmas was declared unilaterally by crackpots, I with grim pleasure volunteered myself to the Santa sniper squads. Christmas has become an obvious racket meant to goose Western economies, shove unhappy families together, and force into the general consciousness the image of Jesus, who in our depraved era is no longer the revolutionary bringer of the New Law of Love, but an avatar of reactionary politics. And, by that reading, what a perfect guise in which to bring him to view -- in his infancy, before he could manage any inflammatory talk of exalting the humble!

But while in public I have always blown the raspberry, in truth I have always been a closet Christmas fan. Privately, every season, I have watched It's a Wonderful Life crying like a child, and the Alastair Sim A Christmas Carol blubbering like an infant. ("Forgive me, Fan! Forgive me!") I even take a moment each December 24th to contemplate the meaning of that invented nativity scene: the despised and outcast family that nonetheless brought forth a child who became a Prince of Peace and the Light of the World. Though the wonder Christmas brought me as a child has long since been burnt to cinders, I have yet guarded a tiny flame preserved from its holocaust. But I would not expose it to public view, lest the fart-winds of our discourse blow it out.

This year, I can't say why, when the Christmas season came upon us (was that Thanksgiving? Or Halloween?), I found myself less grouchy about it. The inflatable snowmen and snowflake arches that graced Greenpoint were less noxious to me than they had been. To even the aggressive, obnoxious commercials ("Happy Honda Days!") I had no objection. It may be that, in the course of maintaining this site, I have witnessed so much stupidity, venality, and crassness that the Christmas variant seems too innocuous to guard against. Or it may be a kind of fatigue. Or it may have been something else. Human hearts, even one's own, are a mystery. In any event, I hunched my shoulders less against the pine-scented incursion.

I started shopping early for presents, which allowed me to space out some of my spending on them, and also allowed me to put more thought into my purchases. This is really new; I usually follow my traditional barroom romantic behavior, and get busy at last call to sort through leavings. But now I threw myself into the fray, and got more enjoyment than anxiety from it. I experienced some wonderful commercial-Christmas moments, too, like the skinny back guy in a Santa suit outside Island Cellular in downtown Brooklyn, singing into a karaoke machine to a Caribbean steel-drum soundtrack, "We wish you a Merry Christmas/We wish you a Merry Christmas/We wish you a Merry Christmas/Come get your free phone!" Or the Macy's saleslady who, upon hearing that I didn't know it was a coupon day (I don't really know how to shop), took a coupon she had lying by the register, swiped me a discount, and flashed me a beautiful smile.

Though I hated, as always, the force-feeding of carols via public address speakers, I let myself remember the pleasure those songs gave me as a boy. I even allowed a tiny, metal tree to grace my bedside bureau, hung with little red globes. And do you know? This Christmas is not such a bad thing.

Everything that is inane about it remains so, of course. But unto you I say, that the ridiculous public hijacking of this old holiday by the lowest scum need not keep one from keeping Christmas, or whichever of the cleverly-disguised solstice festivals you prefer. As has been known since long before there was a Christ, the deepest part of winter is a natural time at which to consider the coming invigoration of spring. Even so, as our own government sinks to new depths of rapaciousness, cruelty, and stupidity, it is worthwhile to remember that seasons change, days lengthen, the exalted may yet be humbled, and the humble exalted.

I'll be playing my favorite Christmas carol -- on vinyl, if you please -- when I get up tomorrow morning. Alex Chilton for y'all. Peace out.

NOBODY ASKED ME, BUT... I'm a grimly purposeful type, but now that I'm on a mini-vacation I am going to do some meaningless things and, as one of my pre-New Year's resolutions is to be less charitable toward other people (a profoundly moral decision, you'll agree), I am going to inflict at least one of them on you good people. That would be this blog thing which caught my fancy and to which no one invited me.

Four jobs you've had in your life: Messenger dispatcher, busboy, Subway sandwich "attendant," freelance writer.

Four movies you could watch over and over: Bad Lieutenant, Strangers on a Train, Taxi Driver, Strange Brew.

Four places you've lived: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Bridgeport, CT.

Four TV shows you love to watch: "Two and a Half Men," "Seinfeld," "The Simpsons," "Like It Is." (If only someone would show reruns of "Don Kirschner's Midnight Special.")

Four places you've been on vacation: Chapel Hill, New Orleans, Berkeley, London.

Four websites you visit daily: Instapundit, The Corner, Lileks, OpinionJournal. (The fury of the hour/Anger can be power/You know that you can use it.)

Four of your favorite foods: Pizza, beer, steak, wine.

Four places you'd rather be: Heaven, Valhalla, Nirvana, wherever they gots the 47 virgins.

I hate myself! Next, I'll be writing about movies I haven't seen.

UPDATE. There's some discussion in comments about "Two and a Half Men." I do like Charlie Sheen and the jokes are okay, but I now that I think about it, there's something else about the show that's appealing.

The Sheen and Cryer characters are stuck between two amoral poles -- their awful mother and Alan's surprisingly awful son. (Credit to the creators for making a pre-pub kid so unappealing on a prime-time show.) They're also stuck with each other.

Alan is very aware that he's stuck, and complains about it all the time. Now, if he were the only lead, this show might be as bad at "The War at Home" -- all kvetching. But Charlie's main goal in life is to rise above -- or, to use Mel Brooks' phrase, rise below -- his problems. He's very comfortable ignoring and even exploiting those problems -- like using a gig as Alan's receptionist as an opportunity to turn his brother's chiropractic business (boring!) into a massage parlor. And he usually gets away with it.

What's most appealing about Charlie is that he obviously cares about his family but, also obviously, he determined long ago not to let them bring him down. Thus, the episodes rarely culminate in maudlin lesson-learning resolutions; while Alan works his way into a frenzy, Charlie works his way back to his own lazy horn-dog stasis.

Such moral purity is rare on network television. I can't think of another sitcom character that works quite the same way. It's as if Maynard G. Krebs became fully self-actualized and took over "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis."

WELL, THAT SUCKED. I walked today from Greenpoint over the Williamsburg Bridge, up to 40th Street on the West Side, and back. That's a shade less than what my route to work would be if I weren't off today -- 14 miles all told. And I was just shopping and observing; I didn't have to do any work in between the two treks. My legs ain't exactly feeling youthful.

The sales clerk I dealt with at CompUSA walked in from near Prospect Park. He told me that the Manhattan Bridge wasn't crowded coming in -- "and there are tons of cabs," he added, "Chinatown's wide open." The Williamsburg wasn't bad, either. I note with interest that the citizens steadfastly ignored the bike/walk lane assignments.

I came in late -- a day off is a day off, and I refused to get up early -- but returned around midtown rush hour, which from the looks of things started earlier than usual today, about 4:15 pm. Car traffic was heavy but moving; the sidewalks were clogged, and the usual bear-right patterns transmuted into a more blended arrangement of vortex flows. New Yorkers are awfully good at threading.

Bike traffic appeared slightly up, much of the overage coming from middle-aged gentlemen trying to make those gym sessions pay off. And yes, there were skateboards and scooters. Cab travel was about negotiated settlements, as the drivers were taking multiple fares, so there was a lot of urgent conversation over slightly-opened passenger side windows.

The atmosphere, as it always is here during all but the most dire public exigencies, was one of grim festivity. The ancient struggle between pedestrians and oncoming cars was kicked up a notch. I heard a few people discussing the details of the strike, but most of the related chatter was about how the fuck to get from here to there, and what about dinner.

Of course this crisis has more easily identifiable culprits than does, say, a blackout, and on TV you see a lot of anger toward the union. Tonight's CBS national report featured a commuter who wished Reagan was back to fire everybody, and the Manhattan Institute's Nicole Gelinas, a noted proponent of the "work or starve" theory of labor relations. (I thought they were all supposed to be commies at CBS.) My favorite of these moments came yesterday, when a little guy came up behind a local reporter and brandished a very visible FUCK THE TWU sign.

The shift in the national consciousness from "Good for you, buddy, get what you can" to "If I can't have it, neither should you" occurred long ago, and I doubt there is much public sympathy for motormen who have struck to retire at age 50. But more important than what we peons think, of course, is what the City and the MTA and the TWU management think. I don't know whether a jail term will make Roger Toussaint more agreeable toward binding arbitration, or whether the proposed individual fines of $25,000 a day will convince workers to throw up the struggle. I expect, times being what they are, that the government will try to wear down and possibly break the union; that would take time, but management stands to gain from it, and Bloomberg, a management type, appears down for an siege.

UPDATE. Commenter Chuckling calls New York "the biggest fucking drama queen on the planet." That's very funny because it's very true, and where I think the grim festivity I mentioned comes from. New Yorkers like to brag on their inconveniences. If you can make it here, etc.

Some idiots think we should respond to our crises by moving to the sticks and becoming right-wing. Nothing against other jurisdictions (despite my reflexive use of perjorative terms -- I'm learning!), but folks are still flocking to New York despite our relative inhospitability. Some people apparently think there are higher values than comfort.

STRIKE DAY ONE. I'm off work this week, so I am not feeling the strike much, though I expect to try hoofing into Manhattan tomorrow.

The 1980 strike was easy on me: I walked from East 11th to East 59th Street every working day. That's right, back then low-life bums like me could easily afford Manhattan apartments.

But those days are gone. The City reports that "To find affordable, high-quality housing, workers are moving further from their jobs. As a result, commute times in the New York region are the longest in the nation. The average commute time into Manhattan is 48 minutes." Another commutation study finds "that people appear to be commuting longer distances [in 27 counties near New York City]. Between 1980 and 2000, the proportion of jobs filled by residents of the same county declined in every county except Manhattan (Figure 2)."

So more of us are coming into Manhattan from farther away. The last strike was in April -- a very warm April as I recall.

Well, my share of the suckage is reduced by fortune, but we'll see what we see tomorrow.

DUMBSHOW. The strange thing about the Leader's speech last night was that it contained nothing to elate, inspire, or terrify ordinary people. Bush is at his best when he is looking the proles straight in the eye and telling them, for example, that "it would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known" -- or, on the brighter side, yay everybody, we get tax cuts and lots of domestic spending all at the same time!

But last night's speech sounded as if it were pitched to "opinion leaders." You've heard that term before -- it's what small-circulation political magazines boast of instead of subscription figures, on the grounds that their small audience counts for more with advertisers than a larger, less exclusive one might.

What did he give ordinary Americans last night? Yet another version of his case for war; yet another declaration that he is, if nothing else, more right than his critics. It was slightly more Jesuitical than prior versions, true. But this isn't Debate Club -- this is Sunday night TV, with viewers thinking about going back to work and Christmas. Who turned to his or her spouse afterwards and said, "Well, he certainly re-framed his arguments effectively"?

He even slid through his 9/11 reference. If I were in his place, I'd be running footage on the wall behind me of people falling out of the World Trade Center, with the words HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN? strobing over them. But Bush didn't even slow down or choke up.

I don't think he was talking to the People (as in American People) at all, but to the people with pads and pens who are either predisposed to worship his every fart, or who, striving mightily not to look biased, respond to the change in PR strategy as if it were a substantive policy shift -- e.g., the Washington Post headline, "Bush Brings More Realistic View of War to Forefront."

The more reliable GOP propaganda disseminators, of course, hail the speech as a breakthrough, indeed a case-closer ("Checkmate, Mr. Murtha," declares John Podhoretz). They would of course do that if Bush threw up on his shirt ("visceral approach favored by voters 18-35"). But the logic, or lack thereof, of their arguments doesn't count for nearly as much as their volume, frequency, and reach.

Increasingly our traditional forms of public politics -- speeches, debates, rallies, etc. -- seem like set-ups for the real stars of the show, Spin and Hype. Maybe one day a President will just come on our PDAs or brain-implanted chips and go "Blah blah blah, Hugh Hewitt has the story," and sign off. And maybe we'll be grateful to have had less of our time wasted. 'Cause I have a feeling we'll all be working really hard.

MY WAR ON IDIOCY, HOWEVER, PROCEEDS APACE. Rod Dreher, former film critic of the New York Post and professional Ned Flanders impersonator, tells his fellow anti-aesthetes at NRO why he don' gotta see no Brokeback Mountain to know them critics only like it because it's gay and thus appeals to their insatiable hunger for novelty:

Without quite realizing it--this happened to me as a conservative -- critics become suckers for novelty, especially of the transgressive sort. At its worst, you end up with a theater full of the most important film critics in North America at the 1998 Toronto Film Festival, roaring their approval of the creepy and misanthropic Todd Solondz's film "Happiness," which featured, among other transgressive delights, a comic set piece showing a suburban dad trying to drug his son's little playmate so he could anally rape him (he succeeded). It was one of the sickest movies I've ever had to sit through, but it received rave reviews--and, unsurprisingly, flopped at the box office.

The critics had to be wrong, see, because John Q. Public preferred.. what? Let's look at Happiness' opening week U.S. grosses. The box office champ was Eddie Murphy in The Holy Man, by the noted auteur Steven Herek. The title has the word "Holy" in it, so maybe Dreher interprets this as a victory for his pal Jesus. Also, #2 was One Tough Cop, starring noted Republican Stephen Baldwin. Clearly America was sending Solondz a message.

Yeah, critics are frequently out of step with the People. Like that arty-farty Citizen Kane? Those fairies still think it's some kind of masterpiece, but us normal people know better. Hell, it ain't even in color!

Fortunately we have people like Dreher around to tell us that his opinion and, he includes generously, the opinions of all professional critics, from Manny Farber on down, are no more meaningful than that of any brain-damaged cineplex trawler. That's the kind of conservative he is -- the kind that apparently really needs to identify with the LCD, despite his book-larnin'.

Just don't let the boys know ole Dreher gave thumbs-up to American Beauty. In no time he'll be screaming "But I was suckered by its trangressive novelty!" as they back him up against the fag-killin' wall.

UPDATE. I will point out that Dreher hasn't even seen Brokeback Mountain -- though that should go without saying, as the new schtick in rightwing circles is to mouth off about pictures you haven't watched!

For instance, get a load of this Freeper thread about Munich -- it's almost semiotic: they don't know what happens in the movie at all, but boy do they respond to the signifers "Palestine" and "Hollywood"! (Favorite quote: "I love movies about historical events. I would like to see this, but if it becomes a platform for making excuses for what these terrorist scum did, I'll ask for my money back." Oh, boy, wouldn't you love to be there: "Ah done come all the way down t' the city, leavin' behind mah wife an' kids an' giant TV an' the hitchhiker I was rapin' and torturin', an' ah has to put up with this here moral relativism? Fill mah hand, you son-of-a-bitch!")

And there's always Ann Althouse, who blows a gasket when one of her commenters asks why she's talking so much about (unseen by AA) King Kong:

...I'm not "posting a review." I'm blogging, which means I can write about my thoughts however I see fit. I try to make it interesting for myself and for readers. Dutifully seeing movies and reviewing them -- why would that be better? Because I ought to be fair to the guys who make movies? They don't deserve fairness! They try to con us into going to see junk that we end up not liking -- and they get our money all the time for that.

"Seeing movies and reviewing them -- why would that be better?" And a college professor is asking this question! The next time someone tells you that blogs are the wave of the future, show him that. He may still think they're the wave of the future, but he won't be so happy about it.

UPDATE. Professor Althouse declares me a "silly man," links to a movie timetable in Madison, WI, and issues what I believe is called a bleg ("Any examples of an actor or actress that does nostril-flaring spoofily, for deliberate comic effect?"). A commenter notes that Ellsworth Toohey is a bad guy in The Fountainhead. The blogosphere: is there anything it can't do?

HAVE A GROOVY HATE FUCK CHRISTMAS! Last weekend I went to a Feast of St. Lucia party in Greenpoint. St. Lucia is an Italian saint (there is a church in Carroll Gardens called Mary Star of the Sea) whom the Swedes have adopted as their patron, maybe because her very name means "light," and her martyrdom and feast day fall on the solstice as reckoned by the old calendar; in December the Swedes need every reminder of light and warmth they can get. It is also said that, during a terrible famine in Sweden, Lucia appeared on the bow of a boat on Lake Vannern, lighting its way and bearing food to the people on shore.

We ate smorgasbord and drank and stood around the piano singing Christmas carols (old ones like "Good King Wenceslas," with all the verses). Then at a certain hour, as is the custom, with the room lit only by candles, three girls in long white gowns came among us. One of them, the most beautifully Swedish girl you ever saw, with thin eyes and a blockish nose and long, fine blond hair, wore a crown of seven large candles, all ablaze. We sang "Santa Lucia" and dedications were spoken: to absent friends, to the Lutheran pastor who had died that year, to an end to the war in Iraq.

I was feeling pretty damn warm and Christmasy over this. Let's face it, all cold-clime people need a winter carnival -- even the irreligious. When you aren't particularly God-bothersome, but open to human experience of all kinds, any taste of ritual and transcendence you allow yourself will be especially potent. (Moderation is good for some things, after all.) Though I don't worship Jesus, I observe his values -- can't help it; cultural thing -- and I enjoy being among folks who not only observe but celebrate them.

Then I got home and turned on the WB-11 News, which had yet another story about the War on Christmas. Apparently some library somewhere gave out a "Season's Readings" card and the card was festooned with Kwanzaa and Hannukah greetings, but while the words "Merry Christmas" were also there in "several languages," an English version was not included. This drew condemnation from some local asshole, and from some Catholic League asshole, and from some asshole teenager who said that it was messed up because "I don't read those other languages."

This was followed by a "health report" about a new form of tummy-tuck
surgery.

Then you have all the crap like this. (When Sam Johnson said that bit about patriotism being the last refuge of a scoundrel, he obviously never considered the possibilities of the War on Christmas.)

And for a while, of course, I was saying fuck Christmas, fuck Santa, fuck that bitch Mary who got this whole mess started by pretending it was God who knocked her up instead of the cute shepherd boy, etc.

But of course, on sober (or at least slightly less drunken) reflection, I can see that Jesus, Santa, and the whole charming cast of cartoon characters should not be blamed for the degeneracy of those who exploit them. And, in fact, those of us who are inclined to enjoy any of these Festivus appurtances should be doubly grateful this year.

After all, these War on Christmas nuts are out there bellowing on the steps of cathedrals about how evil we are, while we get to stay indoors wrapping gifts for our loved ones. While the WOC guys are using Santa and Jesus as weapons -- indeed, seem only to know that use for them -- we get near-exclusive use of them as symbols of hope, humanity, and good fellowship. When they watch "A Christmas Carol," they think, I'll bet those dirty hippies would have a heart attack if they saw me watching 'A Christmas' THAT'S RIGHT I SAID CHRISTMAS! 'Carol.' We, on the other hand, actually get to watch the movie, and share in the lushness of Dickens' conception, the hammy charm of Alistair Sim, and the marvelous spectacle of a man brought back to his lost humanity.

They get, because they chose it, a Day of Wrath, leaving Christmas to us. Thanks, morons!

IRAQI GRANNY INVITES US TO HER HOMELAND.

In related news, one wingnut working group has been tasked with indoctri-ma-cating our young on the gloriousness of the Iraq War and democracy at the point of bombardment. Check out these bits from their lesson plan for today's Iraq elections:

PARALLELS WITH U.S. HISTORY--


United States: Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, July 4, 1776 (amidst war).

Iraq: Liberation from Saddam Hussein, April 9, 2003 (amidst war).

Have fun explaining how Pulaski and Lafayette carpet-bombed America's cities in order to liberate us (and our rich maple-syrup fields) from George III. Show woodcuts of French dirigible leveling Boston, and grateful citizens waving wooden limbs in tribute.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION...

3. Do you think it is more or less difficult for a country to form a democratic based constitutional government today than in 1787?

Hella simple now! Consent of the Conquered is easier to secure that the support of a bunch of pesky revoltionaries. There'll be no Shay's Rebellion this time, I can tell ya! The money's good, too!

Still more questions for discussion:

Why do you think voter turnout in Iraq has been 60-65% and the average U.S. voter turnout is much lower?

No electricity, no TV. Duh.

Wars are often controversial: many colonists opposed the American Revolution; Abraham Lincoln resisted enormous pressure to compromise with the Confederacy and allow slavery to continue in order to end the United States Civil War; there was opposition to the Vietnam War. Discuss the war in Iraq in light of the goals of the December 15 election. Are there similar moments in United States history that can help us understand the moment?

...and by the time you get to the end of the question, of course, the students forget whatever hint they may have noticed that many (and maybe most) Americans disapprove of the war. Especially when your PowerPoint presentation flashes the Dirty Hippie icon on the word "Vietnam."

Best of all: class projects!

(K-5) Create a dramatization of voting day in Iraq. Have students take the roles of different persons: Iraqi men and women who come to the polls, Iraqi security forces, American soldiers, terrorists, international observers.

SHAUN as U.S. Soldier: Welcome to voting! Everybody vote for freedom! Come to my voting party!

TIFFANY as Iraqi Lady With Scarf Like In The Picture: I want to vote, Mr. Soldier! I want to play with the purple ink!

DYLAN R. as Ahmed Chalabi: Vote for me and my American friends will give you all ice cream!

DYLAN L. as Terrorist: I keel! I keel!

(DYLAN L. gestures with gun; several students fall dead. TIFFANY screams. SHAUN kills the terrorist and several other students.)

TIFFANY: Mr. Soldier is hot! Thanks Mr. Soldier!

DYLAN R.: Now I am President! Ice cream for everybody!

EVERYBODY: YAY!

TEACHER: I'm sorry, kids, there's no ice cream!

EVERYBODY: Awwwwwww.

TEACHER: Now everybody help clean this up, and Tiffany, you wash off that purple ink before we start Jesus Made Science class.

DYLAN L. Democracy sucks!

Say, this lesson plan may go better than I thought.

THE NEW ANTI-GAY-MARRIAGE ARGUMENT! Now here's one I hadn't heard before:

...The picture is of two people of the same gender in full wedding regalia.

They look longingly into each other's eyes as if to say, "I love you so much, I'm willing to make the state fund our forgery of marriage and enforce its acceptance on everyone else". Though the romance is laudable, there is an immediate sense of offense to one's values. This isn't like the bigoted offense of seeing a person of a different race move into the neighborhood, as it is often portrayed by same-sex marriage advocates. It is easier to celebrate the love of two people. But here there is offense because depending on how much one values the ideals of equal gender participation one might see something very precious and dear being imitated and mocked. Whether that mockery is intentional or circumstantial, it may be best described as the offense a black-man who may have seeing old vodvillian actors who pretended to be black by painting their face with shoe-polish and saying "Mammie, Mammie" to the laughter of the crowd. Surely bringing the offense to the crowd would make one in that day and age a party-pooper also.

Gay marriage is to heteros what blackface is to black folk! I guess that makes ass-fucking the equivalent of a Confederate flag or something. And "Will & Grace" is Birth of a Nation.

Give it three days and it'll be a Maggie Gallagher talking point.

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NO HONOR AMONG JERKOFFS. Original rightwing Australia spin: John Howard and his brave, plucky, white Aussies are the "third pillar in the Anglosphere." Howard "gets it," WOT-wise. Howard is "Bush's soulmate."

Post-Sydney-riot rightwing Australia spin: "It's like Paris Down Under." The yobs at Little Green Footballs weigh in: "Those guys are just beggin' for a Darwin award as they race toward extinction," "What a shame Australia emasculated their citizenry from protecting their lives & property against these middle eastern assholes. This would last about 5 seconds in Texas," etc.

Sorry, Howard, you've been Chiraxed! Now line up for your Axis of Weasels portrait.

If you don't wish to rely on the Pajaosmas link the Perfesser provides -- at which you will hear nothing about the white-pride types who are involved in the riots (probably the version the LGFers got) -- try an Australian newspaper. It may be "old media," but at least it's not complete bullshit.

And spare a thought for John Howard. Being one of these guys' "allies" is about as raw a deal as you can get.