NERD CENTRAL STATION. Oh Christ, the Perfesser turns a book review into a dating seminar for his buds. General consensus: Bitches won't give manly mens a break! Here's my favorite chump:

As a 48-year-old never married single man still in decent shape, successful and now retired, and having weathered the "feminist" cultural storm still raging since my teens, I can tell you that even your having read Norah Vincent's book, you STILL have no idea of the anger, the hatred, the vengeance and the pain so many otherwise attractive and available women are afflicted with. It is an epidemic of conflict and self-distortion that begins and ends with an impenetrable sense of entitlement, based on a false sense of victimhood, and for which not just any man but every man must pay forever for the restoration that's never good enough.

The "feminist" demand runs from fathers to brothers to sons and husbands, to their friends and acquaintances and chance encounters; it is endless. "I am woman, hear me roar" has produced a psychological wasteland that would put Sherman's march to shame and into which any man who travels does so at his peril....

That's why God made Astrolube, buddy.

Reynolds gets his missus in on it, leading to a discussion so stupefying that I found myself making a little Dada exercise out of scrolling down the page and reading lines at random, which vastly improved the experience. My favorite so far:

And if your 'drift' is that I'm greg kuperberg, I'm not. I already told you that I'm a female attorney.

Runners-up:

Rather than thinking like prostitutes, I believe these women you describe are thinking like anti-prostitutes.

and

Since her death, I've made it a point to look for another Filipina.

Perfesser Reynolds' last linkee sees that thread differently: "When we last checked, there were 108 venting males on her site. Don't women want men expressing their feelings? Could it be that women only want their men expressing some of their feelings, if so many had to wait so long for this one lone chance to let fly?" I wonder if he's single, or involved in a committed relationship with the mummified hitchhiker in his smokehouse?

Suddenly all those jokes about keyboard kommandos and Mom's basement have become horribly, horribly real.

MAD MAILBAG: EPISODE ONE. Busy again, so I invented a new category that allows me to recycle other people's work and make it look like I did something. Hehndeed!

As a break from the tedious forensic work of isolating the central fallacies in wingnut columns, we go straight for the cheap laffs with Mad Mailbag -- celebrating comment-box crackpots and their prose-poetic descriptions of the alternative universes in which they dwell.


Today's winner comes from Winds of Change, in a response to Armed Liberal's MLK day complaint that liberals don't get King right.

As a quick scan of sites like Roger L. Simon's and (pre-hejira) Michael Totten's shows, the usual fan base for pro-war sorta-usedtobe-whatever-liberal guys like AL consists of conservatives delighted to hear smack spoken by an insider against the hated liberals.

But some in the crowd are not convinced that the former fellow-traveller has truly repented; and when the audience has thinned out, they step to the podium and, as the speaker is packing up his papers, lean over and whisper in his ear:

Armed Liberal said in post #6: "While I think that the Left has foolishly abandoned both the moral center and style of discourse used by Dr. King, I'd bet that it would resonate still in the right voice. I'm looking for that voice..."

Armed Liberal, I hope that you never find it. Because three are some people who are responsive to that voice. They are Christian, conservative and the backbone of the pro-life cause.

The Left, which the voice that you are looking for would serve, is committed to "choice". When all the oily rhetoric about "choice", "quality of life" and so on comes to a practical point, it is the point of a hypodermic needle piercing the heart of a viable human foetus, to inject it with potassium chloride, to kill it. A voice for the Left is a voice that facilitates the slaughter of helpless human beings.

I think that what you want is a Saruman the White, using the finest words to get people to agree to the worst actions.

I hope you never find him.

With friends like these, who needs glassy-eyed stalkers?

P.S. I also propose a codicil to Godwin's Law: any political argument availing wizards, wookies, elves, necromancers, or persons named Something The Something is prima facie bullshit.

LATRINE DUTY. It's not all major essays and heavy thinking here at alicublog. Sometimes basic maintenance has to be performed. I am here to tell you, first --

First [Hillary Clinton's] husband decides somehow that he is an African-American by claiming to be the "first black President" because he comes from a broken family.

-- that Captain Ed is full of shit: Clinton never seriously portrayed himself thus; it came from Toni Morrison.

Second, they haven't begun to dismount that Brokeback Mountain hobby-horse yet -- but they have moved from the anger stage to bargaining, experimenting with a manly, non-gay way to appreciate the film --

To come down from the mountain, and settle down into gay domesticity is not an option for them, because it would rob them of their dignity as men... and it would transform them into gay men -- a queer kind of quasi-male our society is willing to tolerate, and even to chuckle over and smile at, the way people chuckle over and smile at the funny sissies on Will and Grace. But neither of the cowboys could allow such an insult to their pride and dignity, and thus their only escape was to return to the isolation of the mountain, where, by themselves, they could achieve what even the most gay tolerant society could not give them -- a sense of manliness...

Butch it up as much as you like, girlfriend -- it's still hot man-on-man action to me!

UPDATE. Clinton joked, people choked! See comments.

THESE "LIBERAL FRIENDS" OF MINE! I keep asking but no one can tell me...

Most of my friends are liberals. This series is the conversation I wish that I could have with them. I wish they would let me finish my train of thought before interrupting. I wish that they would consider my arguments, rather than try to bury them in rhetorical put-downs.

...how do guys like Arnold Kling acquire, let alone keep, these "liberal friends" when they express such obvious contempt for them?

I mean, what would the conversations be like?

KLING: See the Colts game?
LIB FRIEND: Damn, I knew they'd fuck it up. They've been riding for a fall.
KLING: Oh, well, you would say that.
LIB FRIEND: Whattaya mean?
KLING: (pulling out charts) As this graph indicates, you have a tendency to claim prescience after the fact.
LIB FRIEND: After the fact? I wrote you an e-mail two days before the game that said the same thing.
KLING: I wish you'd stop interrupting me.
LIB FRIEND: I'm sorry. What were you going to say?
KLING: That your childish behavior is attributable to a deep-rooted psychological malady.
LIB FRIEND: Yuh don't say. (knocks him down)
KLING: You also have a propensity for violence.
(Cue theme for the "The Odd Couple," blackout)

I don't see how anyone with any self-respect would put up with that kind of treatment. Many there's an escort service in D.C. that handles it. Didn't I read about it at Wonkette?

Or maybe it's just bullshit. Yeah, let's go with that.

I'LL NEVER FORGET WHATSHISNAME. If you though "Bring Back Birdie" was a bomb, wait 'til you get a load of "Bring Back Reagan," now playing at OpinionJournal:

When Rep. John Shadegg jumped into the race for House majority leader last week, he called himself a "Reaganite" who would bring back the Gipper's vision of limited government...

It's telling that now, five years into the second Bush presidency, conservatives are still looking for the next Ronald Reagan to champion their ideas in Washington. Even as Reagan and the current President Bush have similar presidential records--fighting wars of ideas around the globe and running federal deficits at home--Reaganism is the party's philosophy, with its belief in small government, low taxes, forceful conservatism, a strong military and the view that this country is a shining example for all the world.

Several of this article's ideas are humorous -- for example, the notion that "wars of ideas" has been redefined since St. Ronnie's time to include carpet bombing, prolonged and unwanted occupation, and the secret detention of American citizens -- but only one is interesting: that conservative apparatchiks still count on invocations of Reagan to sanctify their latest predations.

Does that shit work anymore? Reagan is widely admired, true -- but so is Bill Clinton. This poll has the Glimmer Twins at one and two -- ahead of Lincoln! -- with younger voters prefering Bubba.

Clearly these findings have little to do with historical reality, and much to do with aspiration and self-identification. People who grew up in the 1980s tend to overvalue Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark; likewise, those who grew up with Reagan, when approached by the opinion collector, think not of the evil GE shill sticking a hose into the Treasury and throwing the other end to his corporate buddies, but of their carefree youth. Same with Bubba Blowjob.

So as they prepare the Republican makeover, professional bullshit artists will naturally avail heavy quantities of Spirit of Reagan. They may be right. Not to get too deep into it, but our country is sunk into a peculiar, new state that we might call psuedo-romanticism, best symbolized by the gestural, yellow-sticker support our citizens reflexively give to a war in which few of them believe. We are awash in bunting, but bankrupt of ideals. Ask your neighbor which American value he prizes above all others, and he'll probably hesitate (or name the dollar menu at McDonald's). What do we stand for? Greater earning power than you get in Kenya? All-you-can-eat shrimp? Supposedly preserving freedom for others at the expense of our own?

St. Ronnie may be a great icon for such a time. Or it may be that he's outworn his welcome. Seeing for the millionth time his wizened, hard-smiling visage in OpinionJournal, I was reminded of the Joker in Batman. As our values become more formless and free-floating, the shock of the new must be constantly applied to keep this rumbling corpse of a Republic tottering forward.

If Reagan turns out to be as welcome at the Republican relaunch as any other senile grandfather, things will get weird. What other corpses and near-corpses are available? Nixon? Ford? Bush I?

In that case, prediction: the lighting rise to power of Kurt Busch!

PLUS ÇA CHANGE.

Should the United Nations be reformed? Or dissolved altogether?

That became the question of the evening at the first night of the Liberty Film Festival as the audience was treated to the LA premiere of "Broken Promises: The United Nations at 60"...

However, while the documentary dismantles the UN's credibility, it calls not for abolishment, but reform. And as you can probably guess, that's not what most of the audience at a conservative film festival have in mind -- and they didn't even wait until the end of the film to make that clear.

When one of the film's interviewees declared that "we can't fight these problems [terrorism, etc.] on our own," one audience member piped in with "The Marines can!" which was met with applause.

After the film, in a rather unusual move, radio talk show host Tammy Bruce was given the podium before the filmmakers. While praising the film as a good first step, Bruce challenged the idea of reform, declaring the UN to be part of the problem.

Not one to shy away from verbal excess (what radio host ever is?), she compared reforming the U.N. to trying to reform the Nazis, declared that un-reformable "Jew-hatred" is at the heart of the U.N., and said the U.N. "keeps righteous nations like Israel and the U.S. from being able to do what they need to do."

-- "Dateline Hollywood: Compromising Art or the Art of Compromise?" Ryan Zempel, Townhall

In the early 1960s, when Judelevicius wrote Gyvasis Sekspyras, Soviet critical views of Shakespeare were still officially regulated by the strain of ideology proclaimed at the First Soviet Writers' Congress of 1934 and synthesized in 1936 by A. Smirnov, whose Shakespeare: A Marxist Interpretation had neatly bound up the dramatist's entire oeuvre within the confines of socialist realism in a way that both limited the range of permissible readings and outlined an austere program for Soviet literary criticism in general. In a 1965 article entitled "Literature and the Arts in Captive Lithuania, " Jonas Grinius outlined this "totalitarian encirclement" as it affected Lithuanian writers. Foremost among the requirements of works of both academic and imaginative works produced in the Soviet era, Grinius explained, was that of historical optimism. Other prerequisites included the demand that all literary material be interpreted according to the dialectical and historical materialism preached by the Communist Party, always concerning itself with some aspect of the class struggle and depicting evil characters with the supposed traits of the bourgeoisie. Rimvydas Silbajoris has specified an even more basic limitation on the Soviet Lithuanian literary critic: he must not interpret using aesthetic criteria, but exclusively through the lens of sociology; and he must assert "the supremacy of a single ideology over the multifaceted and ideologically self-determined inner world of the artist."

--Patrick Chura, "Hamlet" and the Failure of Soviet Authority in Lithuania

SHORTER PERFESSER REYNOLDS: After we completely fuck up this planet, me and my buddies will just get in our rocket ships and leave it all behind.

THE LOW POINT:

"When Mrs. Alito walked out of the room, I thought of Mary Jo Kopechne."

When they open the Hack Hall of Fame, Roger L. Simon gets in on the first ballot.

GOLDBERG: THE EARLY YEARS. Jonah Goldberg talks today about his school days and all the feminists he -- well, let him tell it:

Moreover, many of the dedicated feminists I knew and befriended (and, yes, dated) sincerely believed in the cause...

The mind reels! Here's a little number we at The alicublog Comedy Hour like to call "Young Goldberg and His Feminist Date":

IMA LIBERAL: Jonah, my eyes are up here.

JONAH: (cracking that adorable, crooked grin) I was looking at your hands. You have nice hands -- really nice hands! (laughs, sprays cracker crumbs)

IMA LIBERAL: Ghod. So, what movie did you want to go see?

JONAH: Are you sure you want to go to a movie? Because I'm gonna pay for your ticket, and you'll be forced to sit right next to me in a dark room. Isn't that a signifier for the patriarchy or something?

IMA LIBERAL: Ha ha. No, Jonah, that would be fine.

JONAH: I bet you think you're speaking for all women when you say that. That's pretty arrogant, don't you think?

IMA LIBERAL: Okay, Jonah, you made your point.

JONAH: Oooh, the thought police are trying to silence me because I'm not being politically correct!

IMA LIBERAL: What is that weird voice you're doing?

JONAH: Bluto! Hey, what did the feminist say to the lesbian! Nice hands! Ha ha ha ha -- oh shoot, I'm out of chips! (suddenly "black," waves chips bag) Yo, go git me some mo' chips, bitch!

IMA LIBERAL: What the fuck is wrong with you?

JONAH: Relax, I'm joking. Jeez! Can't a guy tell a joke? You feminists are really touchy! You must be having your period. (pointing at her) Woody Allen used that in "Annie Hall" so if you get mad it's hypocritical!

IMA LIBERAL: Listen, Jonah, this is too weird. I'll see you. (leaves)

JONAH: (to the audience) The part of "Ima Liberal" was very thinly drawn, which shows that liberals like Edroso don't respect women as much as I, who only wanted to take her to a movie and, maybe, if things worked out, hold her "hand." (Snorts, farts, and throws confetti like Rip Taylor.)

GET R-READY! THE WOR-RLD IS COMIN' TO AN END! This New Criterion review of the journal N+1 starts okay, and the author, Stefan Beck, even manages to be funny ("If 'boredom is a moment of danger,' I just fell out a fifth-story window into an abandoned mineshaft full of quicksand"). What the hell, N+1 deserves a few knocks.

But at the end Beck reveals a tendency, shared by all the more hardcore kulturkampfers that nest at the New Criterion, to grab a sandwich board and play the Get-Ready Man:

...it seems inevitable that n+1 will recede from view... It will fail less because of its obnoxious hype machine than because, as the world’s troubles become more dire and more immediate, nobody’s going to turn to the Kunkels for the answers. A civilization declining within and attacked from without can’t afford to ponder its fate in the same glib, nugatory way that it ponders “trends in network comedy.” So nobody will turn to n+1. They’ll just wonder, one hopes, why they ever made such idols of Progress and Thought—without a moment’s attention to where they were going or what, if anything, they were thinking.

Years ago, when David Letterman was funny, he had as a guest on his show G. Gordon Liddy. Liddy obviously cared little for his host, and throughout the interview fixed him with icy stares and gnomic responses suggesting that he was far too wise and advanced to be trifling with fools like this. Letterman reacted with nervous laughter and defensive mutterings of "ooooh-kaaay" until the very end. After he asked Liddy what he thought his own legacy would be, and Liddy replied, "My legacy will be what everyone's will be -- a diet for the worms," Letterman turned to the camera and said, with a big grin and in his best announcer's voice, "There you have it, ladies and gentlemen: G. Gordon Liddy says, tomorrow we'll all be dust."

I credit folks like Beck for taking art more seriously than the usual Zhdanovite clowns, but Jesus Christ, guy, if you feel that way about things, why bother writing about such ephemera, unsuited as both the object and the analysis are to the New Sparta our times demand? Why not go make munitions, or hang yourself?

FAMOUS RIGHTWING BLOGGER SENDS THIS ONE OUT TO THE LADIES:

...Ladies like to play games. One of those games apparently is playing hard to get on the phone. Now, to be sure, men like playing games as well and since men are not oftentimes as verbal as ladies like them to be, games don't even have to be played to (inadvertently) mess with a lady's mind. But the traditional male compulsion to remain relatively Stoical and silent along with the fear that the ladies are wrapping us around their lovely fingers with "will she call me/will she not?" phone games compel us to be relatively shy in the conversation department...

Want to have a few of us break out of our shells? Then stop playing games!...

This is my plea: Help us help you...

Send that boy a blow-up doll.

Oh, and get this:

If this post doesn't excite the hate mailers, nothing will.

UPDATE: Okay, so not much hatemail. But I probably should clarify a few things . . .

Admiringly squibbed by credentialed wingnuts, yet still in the "hotpants and harangues" stage of his socio-sexual development. I hope the fame compensates for the anguish of these, his teenage years.

JEFF GOLDSTEIN DEFAMES HIS COUNTRYMEN. Despite conservative tubthumping for our super-wonderful, jacked-up economy (Here comes another millionaire! Feel your per-capita income going up!), consumer confidence is lagging. Jeff Goldstein offers this analysis:

Yet still -- with unemployment below 5% and the DOW threatening 11000 -- many economists at odds with Bush’s economic philosophy insist that Americans are somehow worse off, that their jobs are a inauthentic, that their situations really are far more dire than they themselves are able to understand.

Which is why for years now, I suspect, the health of the economy has not polled well among the American public, many of whom continue to recognize that though they are doing just fine, others must necessarily be suffering greatly—because this is the dour economic news they receive day in and day out from people like Krugman...

...The result is, Americans -- a compassionate people -- are often concerned about this phantom suffering of others in the abstract, and will react less confidently to the current state of the economy based on how they believe others are suffering under it, even while they themselves note (often with some degree of secret shame) that they seem to be doing just fine.

I have a pretty low opinion of my fellow citizens' intelligence, but I never would have imagined them easy marks for the hypnotic powers of Paul Krugman. Especially with everyone else drowning out Krugman's incantations with cries of "strong economy."

Also, I have lived amongst Americans for a long time, and I have never known one to minimize his financial status -- in fact, I have heard more than one claim to be "doing great!" when he was in fact two paychecks from a barrel overcoat. Americans are proud of their treasures, however many credit cards and mortgages are paying for them. When your average American buys a new car, for instance, he rides it slowly, almost insolently past his neighbors; he blathers on to strangers about it; the only person he hides it from is the collection agent.

Is Mr. Average American really so whipped by firewalled Times columnists that he feels "secret shame" at his big house, car, and alarm system? Why, Goldstein makes him sound more like some kinda goddamn grape-boycottin', guilt-trippin' liberal than a real American! I advise him to apologize forthwith if he wants to keep his place. Remember what happened to Andrew Sullivan!

JUST LOOKING IN. I'm awful busy this morning, but if it's laughs you want, you can go here and watch Ross Douthat condemn abortion by comparing zygotes to bums. No, really:

If I shoot a mother of four, it's a much greater tragedy than if I shoot a friendless bum, and you'd probably want to give me a much stiffer prison sentence. But it doesn't mean the mom should have the right to life and the bum - or the fetus, the embryo, or the zygote - shouldn't.

The rest of it's pretty funny too.

Stray thought: Given all we've been told about how Jesus made Chronicles of Narnia a hit, does its replacement at #1 by Hostel mean that America has decided it prefers serial killers to Christ?

LONGER MALLARD FILLMORE:


... so why would I go watch fags?

(Remember when conservatives were at least pretending to like gay people? Why were they doing that, I wonder? Just to see how much bullshit they could get away with? Anyway, ol' Mallard demonstrates that things are getting back to normal; next week, Chantel will jack his car, and Mr. Noseworthy will ask Mallard if he's ever been to Harlem, and Mallard will be all like, "Are you kidding? I can't stand my own black skin!")

UPDATE. Some interesting subtextual analysis in comments. I would add that, in this series, Mallard exhibits the loathing of public events and contact with fellow human beings typical of suburban conservatarian dweebs.

There really is No Such Thing as Society when you smell bad and can't fit in a theatre seat.

SHORTER TIM GRAHAM: Pat Robertson is a liberal plot.

SO MANY RETARDS, SO LITTLE TIME. God, the web's infested with brain-lice today.

I expected the usual idiots to exploit the recent dead-miner unpleasantness as a victory of blog-borne news over old, worn-out, no-longer-cool MSM (though I notice Pajamas Media, the Perfesser's hobbyhorse, reported the story on January 4 this way: "In an extraordinary twist of fate, 12 miners caught in an explosion in a coal mine were found alive late Tuesday, more than 41 hours after the blast").

But I must credit the New York Post's Ian Bishop with going beyond the call of idiocy, under a headline that sounds like a collaborative effort by Evelyn Waugh and Nathanael West: "SIMPLE FOLK VENT THEIR OUTRAGE AT THE BIGSHOTS" --

Residents were rightfully serving up blame by the bucketful. Mine executive Ben Hatfield was an easy target — and so was Gov. Jim Manchin.

The local talk-radio stations — both of them — were lit up with calls whacking the gov.

Where was their Rudy Giuliani? irate listeners wondered...

The locals feel that they're saddled with the brother of Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, whose hand-wringing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina last year made her a national joke.

At least Bishop refrained from using quote marks. Even credulous Post readers might find it hard to imagine heartbroken backcountry folk in their moment of anguish crying out for Rudolf Giuliani or cursing the name of Kathleen Blanco.

Meanwhile, I suppose you all heard about that poor woman whose ventilator was turned off because she couldn't pay for it, and who subsequently died. This is the sort of thing that outrages normal people, but gets the glibertarians enthusastically re-tucking their shirts and clicking their pens. Andrew Sullivan's third string :

While here the critics are mostly on the left, the argument parallels closely what you'll hear from opponents of assisted suicide on the right: revulsion at the prospect that terminal patients might make decisions about when to end their lives on the basis of "economic considerations." I'm with Landsburg: It seems mad not to allow economic considerations to play a role—that's not heartlessness so much as the ethical equivalent of refusing to let your genitals do the thinking for you.

There's an argument: if you support the right to die, you support the right to be killed! As for the "genitals" bit, there are some depths to which my analysis will not sink.

God, that was depressing. I could use some real laughs... but Lileks is too generically hippie-hatin' today, only recovering the higher notes of his madness with the climactic "Wal-Mart, for example, probably won’t stock the Swedish jeans. I think that says it all"; Crazy Jesus Lady is just gently scolding the dolls around her tea-table, and what's the fun in that?

Thank heaven for Altmouse!

WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF THAT? This New Orleans native tells National Review's readers that if they don't want to save her city, they are being just like those baby-killing liberals:

But the utilitarian mindset -- that someone is valued only to the extent that they are useful to someone else -- is not limited to Katrina politics. It pervades the mindset of those who see human lives themselves as valuable only if they are useful -- those who seek to use human embryos as spare parts for embryonic-stem-cell research, those who seek to use fetal parts from aborted babies, those who seek to euthanize the disabled because they are of no use to anyone.

And if we can apply the utilitarian mindset to human lives so easily, it's no wonder that we do the same to a beloved American city like New Orleans...

We're back home now experiencing the surreal in-between of an expectant mother of a high-risk pregnancy. New Orleans experienced a watery tomb, but now she awaits rebirth in an expectant womb. Let's choose life for the new New Orleans. Just because we love her.

I applaud the author. True, her analogy is insane -- but it may be effective in her purpose. She knows that while her conservative readers are incapable of any sympathy at all for resourceless, unconnected, full-grown humans, they jes' loves them a fetus; and by portraying the city as immersed, not in the waters of Lake Ponchartrain, but in amniotic fluid, she may get them to provide more support and less of the usual bullshit.

It may be she doesn't even believe this nonsense, and spews it only because she loves her home so much that she is willing to make herself look like a moron in order to gain it a little help. If so, New Orleans should build her a statue.

Myself, I plan a cyber-tour of the conservative precincts, featuring pictures of me with my close friend & personal savior Jesus Christ, and His message: "Roy shall be with me in Heaven, but meantime he needs your cash contributions. Don't make me send a plague; give generously now. Say, doesn't he look kind of like a fetus, all curled up like that around his empty bottle of JD?"

TENURED RADICAL. It turns out Professor Althouse, pioneer of the no-but-I-saw-the-trailer school of film criticism, has more ambitious aesthetics than I ever realized.

For one thing, she doesn't believe in the representation of historical figures in fiction films:

What a big drag! I especially loathe the biopic. This year, we're supposed to care about Truman Capote and Johnny Cash -- I mean a pretentious actor impersonating Truman Capote or Johnny Cash... Why can't we just see actual footage of Ray Charles? It's disconcerting to imitate his mannerisms. Since there's plenty of film of the man, why not make a documentary?

She definitely doesn't believe in it if said historical figures did bad things:

[Mark David Chapman] should never be mentioned, never given any attention, and no film should ever be made about him. I don't care how much the filmmakers think they are expressing disapproval, when a movie is made about a person, he becomes, in some sense, a hero. No one should ever see that man realize any part of his dream of linking his name to Lennon's. The news was reported when it happened. You can look it up if you want to know who did it. Now, the media should black out his name, forever.

And they shouldn't have made a movie about the woman who shot Andy Warhol, either...

If there were any chance that this "Chapter 27" thing is a great screenplay along the lines of "Taxi Driver," I might make an exception. But you know damned well it's not. The moviemakers are just trading on Lennon's fame and trying to grab what they think is a built-in market of people who are interested in him. We should shun them.

(I wonder if she knows that Taxi Driver was partly inspired by the diary of George Wallace's assassin, Arthur Bremer. Maybe Paul Schrader gets a pass because the Professor didn't grow up twisting to "Segregation Today, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever.")

This is all pretty far out, but today Professer Althouse makes her boldest statement yet:

Spare me your made-up characters and stories and tell me whatever you have to say about the world you observe.

V.S. Naipal did say that fiction is dead -- but now that a blogger with a large fan base has lined up against it, I guess we might as well stop writing stories and novels, and give our cultural heritage over to travel sketches.

At which the Professor is quite good, by the way, and to which she should stick.

GOOD-BAD BUT HE’S NOT EVIL. In A History of Violence, a gentle man living in smalltown America turns out to have a violent past, which he has to settle with violence. This is classic American movie stuff -- Out of the Past, Shane, and Unforgiven come speedily to mind. What might David Cronenberg have to add?

He subtracts more than he adds. The biggest change is in the central character. His forebears in the genre suffered qualms, waxed philosophical. Tom doesn’t do that. He isn’t quite a cypher, but moral anguish isn’t part of his makeup. He isn’t obviously tortured by the past --when he tries to talk to his wife about it, he doesn’t have much to say. At first I thought he might just be inarticulate – a doer, not a talker. It turns out there isn’t anything to talk about. His second life is the one he wants: his first life he thought he’d "killed," When he can’t easily turn the past away, he goes back to do the job right.

In fact, the old Joey and the new Tom are very similar – taciturn, observant, economical with his emotions and gestures. The good one’s voice, we find out, is slightly airier than the other one’s. I’ve been thinking about that a while. Is this a sign of enforced gentility – like a hard man being gentle around children? Or is it just as much acting as he’s capable of? (The character, not Viggo Mortensen, who is really, really good.)

Tom’s only problem, besides the obvious, is his family. They aren’t cooperating. In fact, they’re starting to challenge him. You can guess how he might react to that, though it’s shocking when he does.

There’s a lot going on at the edges that I still haven’t got straight. All the other bad men are unmistakable – when they come onscreen, even in the elliptical beginning, you get a bad feeling about them. Much is made of the moment when the serial killers stare down the local bully, a poser out of John Hughes. Real evil is heavy. So how did Joey get away with his act for so long? Is there some way in which he has really changed? If he hasn’t, does it matter, so long as he has the will and opportunity to be good?

I honestly don’t know whether Cronenberg missed an opportunity to make things clearer, or if, in his estimation, it just doesn’t get any clearer than that. What do you guys think?

ALL IS WELL. Captain Ed covers the Fiesta Bowl pretty much the way he covers Iraq:

6:53 - Last quarter, and the Irish can still come back, but they'd better play better than the first three if they're going to do it...

7:13 Samardziaj finally pulls one in and puts the Irish back into the long game...

7:22 - Gotta run. Granddaughters trump the Irish. It looks like the Irish may be ready to score, and I'll be listening on the radio. Thanks for hanging in there with me!

To be fair, he didn't tell us that if we failed to stop the Buckeyes in Tempe, we would wind up fighting them in St. Paul.