PROUST’S WAY. I have a little list of great books that I want to read even though I’m not attracted to them. Call it a self-improvement project, or just a way to get to say I read all these books. I guess there are people who devour books out of pure, indiscriminate pleasure, but I’m not built that way. Rank pretentiousness and self-doubt, alas, will always be part of my motivation. But that’s fine. Some kids go to the Army to learn self-discipline, and some go for computer courses or an alternative to jail and get self-discipline anyway. Who cares what lifts us out of the primordial muck? If I were perpetually following my Bliss, I’d be far too drunk and homeless, not to mention too busy masturbating, to post things like this on the Internet.

The forced march through Great Books is a muddy slog and its progress depends upon exigencies. Bronchitis and bedrest got me through Middlemarch. I’ve tried Ulysses twice, and I expect the third time, tentatively scheduled for this summer, will be the charm. Excelsior!

This winter was Swann’s Way. It took many, many subway rides, with breaks for Invisible Cities, Paul Hemphill’s Hank Williams biography, Nabokov’s lecture on Proust, and several cheap magazines, just to keep me from giving up on the printed word altogether. As with all such problem cases, there was pleasure in the pages but not in the progress, at least at first.

You probably know that large chunks of the book are descriptive to the point of mania, and not just descriptive of people, places, and objects, but of states of mind and even of being. There are long passages that seem to be nothing but monstrous agglomerations of metaphors, technical terms, and prose-poetry. My heart sank when I read, "For there were, in the environs of Combray, two ‘ways’ which we used to take for our walks," and sank further still when Proust compared these "purely material roads" with "the two parts of my brain in which I used to think of them," because I knew I would be asked not only to regard every dog-rose and trick of light that Proust could call to mind, but also their relationship to time and consciousness. That is hard work even without page-long sentences. I prayed for a gun-fight or a shoving match or even an interesting conversation, of which none of the characters then seemed capable, for relief.

Why did I persist? For the reasons I mentioned, but others, too. For one thing, the writing is too good to give up on. Proust is an obvious example of what Raymond Chandler called "writers who write writing," and I prefer the kind who write stories, but Proust’s style is impressive even when it is barely readable. And over the years I’ve figured something out: when someone writes that well, you may be sure he has something bigger up his sleeve than style. I got a hint of this even before the famous madeleine scene, when Proust unloosens the carefully weaving of his first childhood scene:

Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase, up which I had watched the light of [my father’s] candle gradually climb, was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension. It is a long time, too, since my father has been able to tell Mamma to "Go with the child." Never again will such hours be possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father's presence, and which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. Actually, their echo has never ceased: it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that I hear them afresh, like those convent bells which are so effectively drowned during the day by the noises of the streets that one would suppose them to have been stopped for ever, until they sound out again through the silent evening air.

Maybe it has to do with my own stage of life, or of the place I was when I read this, but at the moment of my reading it the world in which I lived briefly stood still and then went in motion again.

So I kept going, and found after a while that Proust’s prismatic rendering of events had a purpose. Nabokov explains it all very well, but even without the technical advice a reader can, if he decides to, get comfortable with Proust’s method and lose at least some of his impatience, so that he can walk through each stretched-out moment, and examine each impacted metaphor, and begin to see things Proust’s way.

I guess it is possible that, by the time I got to the romantic agony of M. Swann, and then to the minature version suffered by Marcel, I would still have have felt those shivers of recognition, even without the long premonition that is the rest of the book. How can I know? "Who, indeed, can say whether, in the event of his having gone, that evening, somewhere else, other happinesses, other griefs would not have come to him, which, later, would have appeared to have been inevitable?" But I am grateful to have been taken there. And now I can say I read it!

POST NON COITUM, ANIMAL NUTS. The morning after Valentine's Day at The Corner, we see what their orgy of antisex hath wrought. K-Pro tenderly cuckoo-calls, "MY VALENTINE'S DAY REGRET is that I don't know anyone who attended a Boston Legal Viewing Party," provoking a too-wit too-woo from a reader:

This is some sort of joke, right? Is this like the sad people who think Emilio Estavez's dad is president? Or are these "viewing parties" common in the big coastal blue cities? The closest thing we have to viewing parties in these parts are frantic telephone calls to make sure our friends and family are watching Brit Hume's ritual Sunday morning disembowelment of Juan Williams.

I thought the viewing party was mildly silly (y'all know what I think about "Boston Legal"), but if someone woke me up on Sunday morning to admire Hume's giant head, I'd seriously reconsider my alliances.

Later K-Pro worries about "Willie Nelson's gay cowboy song." (Her headline is genuinely witty, which shows how rattled she must have been at that point.)

The others are looking at softcore porn -- some favor Michelle Malkin, but an unclothed, flour-encrusted Scarlett Johannson captivates Stephen Spruiell. K-Pro counters huffily, "Am I the only one in here who thinks Red Eye star Rachel McAdams is cool for saying 'no' to the cover shoot?" and adds -- rather superfluously, we hard-to-get players judge -- "As an aside, Cillian Murphy is a dead ringer for Media Blogger Stephen Spruiell," and then (de trop, Mme. K-Pro!), pulls in by the sleeve a reader who has found McAdams' tits somewhere (one is reminded of Nathanael West: "[Doyle] tried, rather diffidently, to leer").

Spruiell's response cannot have emboldened K-Pro: "I do think it's a good thing McAdams declined to appear on the VF cover with Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightly. That would have prevented me from getting any work done today." Here we draw a courteous curtain on K-Pro, though we are put in mind of Tracy Turnblad, rebuffed in an early reel of Hairspray.


Andy McCarthy expresses an interest in bars now that women are drinking more.

I don't know what happened to Goldberg last night, but he's going on about credit card readers in soda machines and trying to tie Dick Cheney to Rock 'n' Roll High School. Well, at least he's got that dog.

Cheney is on many minds; Derbyshire seems to think his man-shooting a good thing: "It was not likely, as in the movie, an excess of competitive zeal. And if it was, who on our side would mind? We want our politicians to be full of competitive zeal."

Elsewhere at NRO, eminence grease William F. Buckley suggests that Hamas be "castrated."

The rest of us were happy with candy, flowers, and consensual sex.

HAVE A RIGHT-WING VALENTINE'S DAY! National Review comforts its dateless readers by making the prospect of sex undesirable.

K-Pro interviews a member of the Junior Anti-Sex League named Jennifer Roback Morse. The comrade has written a dating guide, and you can guess the perspective. "Recreational" sex is bad because "when sex is a recreational activity, my partner becomes a consumer good." Apparently, when Morse engages in recreational activities with friends -- like bowling, say, or frisbee -- she loses all respect for them. She doesn't sound like a fun date, with or without jelly roll.

I suppose all we really need is the money quote:

And make no mistake about it: men do sometimes go over the line and become obsessively jealous, even dangerously jealous. But, one thing is for sure. A woman knows that she matters to a guy who gets jealous.

But connoisseurs will enjoy some of the fine points. For example, the author maintains that "The Left hates sex," though we lefties are "hyper-active about sexual activity" (i.e., have lots of it). Does this seem counter-intuitive or, to use the older word, nuts? Well, it's a female right-wing sex scarapist's prerogative to change her mind: we actually hate sex because we're after something she calls "gender equality," which she doesn't define but scorns on the grounds that the sexes "can never be made fully equal. This is one of the most basic biological facts of our species. You'd think our modern scientific age could accept this."

The only smart sex, Morse concludes, is married sex, so all you single conservative guys enjoy your $100 dinner tab and peck on the cheek!

Oh, but wait, it gets worse. K-Pro actually asks some of her close personal inmates for "conservative love stories," and before you can say, "huh?" we get Myrna Bluth saying John and Abigail Adams' love was right-wing because they were apart so often they seldom had sex, and Christine Rosen saying Henry VIII and Catharine of Aragon's love was right-wing because he exiled her and they never had sex again, and Danielle Crittenden saying Pride and Prejudice is right-wing because there's no sex in it, which makes her mouth "go dry"... one begins to detect a pattern.

Well, now at least when people ask me why I'm a liberal, I'll know what to tell them.

I GOT A FEELING... IT'S GONNA BE... ONE OF THOSE SHORTER LILEKS WEEKS! Today's installment:

Movies are so crass. I much prefer the wholesome, intellectual stimulation of a good video game.

(Happy Valentine's Day to Mrs. Lileks, poor woman.)

Maybe I should take a cue from Amblongus, who suggested in comments that conservatives will soon go beyond reviewing movies they haven't seen, and start reviewing movies that don't exist.

Let's preemptively digest the weekly Lileks!

WEDNESDAY: You ever notice that liberals like to say they "support" classical music, whereas I actually appear on stage at young peoples' concerts? You don't see too many grotesquely overweight Michigan filmmakers in tie-died shirts wearing giant NO BLOOD FOR OIL buttons doing that, my friends! In I Died a Thousand Times Jack Palance has a head like a rock.

THURSDAY: Of course Frank Miller agreed to have Batman fight Al Qaeda. You can just imagine Miller in his split-level home; adoring dog at his feet, adorable little girl on his lap; he's studying an old matchbook and thinking, Islamaliberals would take this all away from me; get me the pen; play some Nick Cave! And his little girl stretches to kiss his massive, shiny forehead.

FRIDAY: You know, the people who are all over Bush's case for strangling that butler are the same people who gave Dick Cheney a hard time last weekend. 'Twas ever thus: Play a little buckshot tag with a buddy, and the anti-violence people (who are actually the ones who are really violent, and I'm talking about their facial expressions as described by me) will take you to their secret torture chambers, figuratively speaking. They'll try the same thing on Bushitler McChimphitlerspittleMoveOn; again they'll fail. I found an old matchbook that has a picture of an old building on it.

Wow, that was liberating.

UPDATE. I may have misjudged Jimbo. He has graciously linked to this post, and not even most of the readers drawn from his world to mine are abusive in comments -- at least so far. My. (Pause to observe a vast horde of souls tumbling toward heaven.)

Okay, group hug over. Everybody back on your heads!

UPDATE 2. OK, some of them are abusing my hospitality. Here is a typical exchange:

"Sir, you are an ant waving his antennae fiercely at a lion."

"Oh yeah? Well, fuck you."

I could delete 'em, but that's a punk-ass move, so I'll just get my Islamofascist buddies to go lean on their way of life.

STILL ONE OF OURS. The Ole Perfesser does his bit for comity, using the recent Coulter affair as a stick to beat "lefties," whom he terms angry, theatrical, prejudiced against white people ("The lefties seem mostly upset about her use of the term 'raghead,' which is racist and offensive, but more or less akin to the term 'cracker,' which doesn't seem to bother a lot of lefties"), and tending to spit on outstretched hands, none of which, it is obvious, belongs to the Perfesser.

Ditto Michelle Malkin. After allowing as how "Ann says many deliberately provocative things," Malkin laces into "smug," "in denial" liberals, and insists "we don't need your prodding."

This approach seems to work for other subjects, too. Dick Cheney shooting a guy is either "a wash or a slight bump up for the administration," says Andy McCarthy at The Corner. "Why? Because the media and the most partisan Democrats can always be relied on to turn opportunity into damage... transparently partisan hyperbole... compare Clinton and Cheney... Dem bomb-throwers etc."

Also at The Corner, Jonah Goldberg brags that conservatives are quite capable of criticizing their own. As well they might be, because at the end of the day even when conservatives err they are still innocent of liberalism, and that is really all that matters.

A VERY MODEST PROPOSAL. "We'd call the words 'United Nations Commission on Human Rights' an oxymoron, but that would be too kind... it's time to create an alternative. The United States should lead efforts to found a new institution devoted to the protection of human rights, and involving eligibility requirements that would limit member states to genuine liberal democracies." -- National Review editorial, February 13, 2006.

The American Organization for International Human Rights and Responsibilities suffered another setback today as it was rebuffed in an attempt to file suit at the International Court of Justice in Den Hague. The Court’s Clerk informed the delegation that it had no standing to sue "The Universities of the World" for "failing to sufficiently diversify" their faculties with conservative professors, as the AOIHRR does not represent any sovereign State.

The delegation briefly demonstrated outside the Court, crying "Shut it down" and singing Twisted Sister’s "We’re Not Gonna Take It," before adjourning for lunch.

Since its inception in 2006, the AOIHRR has failed to attract international support despite lavish funding from Richard Scaife, the Forbes Foundation, and the Unification Church.

After an initial flurry of interest, including an offer from Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to house the Organization "in one of my villas," the AOIHRR lost much of its public support when it became clear that no nations would sign its Charter or send delegates to its frequent "special sessions."

The Organization had high hopes that the government of Iraq would sign on, and spent much of its budget on "incentives" lavishly distributed in Baghdad. But each introduction of a membership bill to the Iraqi Parliament has been thwarted by procedural objections, fistfights, or gunfire.

AOIHRR Secretary-General Michael Ledeen’s announced strategy of "using the power of blogs to shame Western nations into compliance" appears to have been entirely unsuccessful, and even the website Instapundit recently removed its "I’m the AOIHRR" banner without comment.

Many observers say the last straw for the Organization’s hopes was its disastrous "Global Gun Court," held last month in Phoenix, Arizona to prosecute nations whose gun laws the AOIHRR found insufficiently lax. The boisterous event, to which none of 325 named "defendents" sent a representative, was broken up in its second day by local police, who confiscated a large weapons cache. AOIHRR Self-Defense Commissioner John Lott, Jr., is still awaiting trial on charges of inciting a riot, and Phoenix has refused to acknowledge Lott’s claim of diplomatic immunity.

After the Den Hague incident, Ledeen was unavailable for comment, but at the delegates’ luncheon Special Deputy Jonah Goldberg proclaimed that "you can’t break an omelette without laying a few eggs" before initiating a food fight.

CONSERVATIVES REVIEWING MOVIES THEY HAVEN'T SEEN IS THE NEW BLACK. Roger L. Simon explains what's wrong with Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, based on his own ignorance ("I haven't seen Brooks' film") and the talking points of the day ("traditional Hollywood libs like Brooks don't seem to have the guts for satire anymore... The Brooks crowd [all of them] are more worried about seeming 'nice' these days then telling the truth"). Oh, and on "reviews," though if Simon really put such faith in critics, he'd have blown his brains out after Scenes from a Mall.

These guys are getting so used to reviewing movies by their trailers and posters -- and sometimes just by what their ideology demands -- that I wonder if they go to movies at all anymore. Why bother, when the Politburo will tell them what is good and double-plus-ungood?

It gets clearer all the time that culture warriors are actually making war on culture, not for it.

I CALL FOR LILEKS' ASSASSINATION! But I'm doing it with my "usual acidic sarcasm," so you really can't get upset about it.

BTW, does anyone know what the fuck that poolhall story meant? That it's okay to call someone a nigger and run over him in your car, so long as you're pretty sure you'd take him to a hospital afterward?

WORLDS APART. I could have easily dismissed this Althouse schtick with a Shorter. It is classic psuedo-moderate malarkey in the manner of Roger L. Simon and Michael Totten, etc, and follows their formula explicitly:

• standard "I'm a moderate" assertion;
• highly negative characterization of liberals ("looking for heretics," "curl up with your little group of insiders");
• unflattering comparison of liberals to conservatives, who "perceive me as a potential ally";
• several reader quotes about what deluded totalitarians liberals are (and comments which endlessly reiterate this theme);
• mild qualifying statement ("I don't think all the irrational blogging is on the left"), for cover;
• "I find it terribly, terribly sad."

This is such an obvious fraud it hardly bears examination, but Althouse did say one thing to which I am strongly motivated to respond:

What I've noticed, over and over, is that the bloggers on the right link to you when they agree and ignore the disagreements, and the bloggers on the left link only for the things they disagree with, to denounce you with short posts saying you're evil/stupid/crazy, and don't even seem to notice all the times you've written posts that take their side. Why is this happening?

I can speak only for myself. And I will speak as if her comments were directed specifically at me, because one of my New Year's resolutions was to be more egotistical.

Yes, rather than to link to a bunch of people who agree with me, I choose to mock those who maladroitly disagree with me.

The main reason is: it's fun. Don't forget, I'm doing this for free, and there has to be some percentage in it. Ditto for my readers.

I don't see the harm. I am not picking on retards or children here, but grown men and women (some with teaching positions at major universities!) who have offered their thoughts for public delectation in a medium that is widely advertised as "self-correcting."

But Althouse seems to think this is a bad thing. Her argument is that I and others like me should be "engaging" her, with a view toward changing her mind, as if this were a romantic comedy in which she plays the lonely heiress who needs the touch of a real man's intellectual argumentation.

I think she seriously mistakes my mission. I'm not trying to engage, convince, or convert anybody. I figure I'm talking to adults and if they're vacant enough to be swayed politically by a fucking blogger, they're probably not bright enough to get my jokes.

Though I have political beliefs, I'm not a political operative. I'm closer to a satirist. There's less Howard Dean than Dean Swift in me.

I don't write to change the world, but to create one on the page. I write for my own pleasure and illumination, and invite whosoever might also enjoy to come read it. I may not have the largest constituency on the web, but they're a smart bunch and more fun to hear from in comments than a bunch of PoliSci nerds (even the ones who are, technically, PoliSci nerds).

Althouse's misconception about my mission may have to do with the way she looks at the blogosphere, or, more to the point, what her experience has led to her to believe about it. She has been made famous within this tiny world by the linkage and adulation of other pioneer conservative bloggers. Hence, she sees the blog world as a social circle, and writes the way a hostess makes conversation: as a way to keep the party going.

Whereas for me writing is not primarily a social act -- though it sometimes becomes one, usually most circuitously, in the almost grudging, semi-conscious hunt for an audience.

If you don't like that sort of thing, well, then stick with your daisy chains. We who have free souls, it touches us not.

UPDATE. Professor Althouse seems to have read some other writer and attributed his or her sentiments to me. I used to think her misreadings were deliberate, but I now realize I was just chivalrously inflating my estimate of her intelligence.

DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS. I don't have much to offer about the Grammys, other than an endorsement of Sly's decision to walk off the stage (fuck Rick James, he's Sly Stone, bitch!) in the middle of that god-awful, caterwauling, alleged "tribute" to his music, and a reiteration: corporate rock still sucks.

For in-depth analysis you can go to The Corner, where K-Pro shows a picture of some geezer apparently too drunk to lift the skirt of an overweight boudoir-photography customer before trying to eat her out, which KP considers "a pro-life moment." (She also thinks AP's sympathetic treatment of Mariah Carey proves that "their bias isn't just on politics!" while Tim Graham emits a comment on Barack Obama's grammy, and two minutes later returns to sniff it again.)

I imagine a room full of industrial safety wonks sitting around watching the Grammys and saying things like, "That Mariah Carey is a real Level Two!"

WHEN YOU THINK YOU'VE LOST EVERYTHING, YOU FIND OUT YOU CAN ALWAYS LOSE A LITTLE MORE.While I was off looking at softcore pornography, the Corner managed to get even stupider:

MOVIE BLEG [Bill Bennett]:
Has anyone seen, does anyone know of, a movie depicting the war we are in now, the fight against the barbarians? We've had movies about the first Gulf war, and a morally ambiguous fiction about something or somewhere called Syriana -- but anything about our over-four- year- old fight for civilization against the Islamist barbarians, based on fact? Anything? Anyone?

It sounds like something out of one of those Corner parodies.

Why doesn't he just go to the video store?

VIDEO STORE CLERK: Can I help you?

BENNETT: (with great seriousness) Yes. Do you have any films about the war we are in now, the fight against the barbarians?

VIDEO STORE CLERK: Uh, do you mean, like, the war in Iraq?

BENNETT: Yes! Yes!

VIDEO STORE CLERK: Sure. Fahrenheit 911.

BENNETT: (shoulders up around his ears) Saints preserve us! (runs out of the store, screaming)

VIDEO STORE CLERK: It's a living! (canned laughter)

NOW, BACK TO THE IMPORTANT SUBJECTS. Xan Brooks is amusing, and onto something, concerning the new Vanity Fair cover:

...therein lies the problem with this Vanity Fair fleshpot. It is neither arousing enough to sate the masturbators, nor artistic enough to appeal to the aesthetes.

As a masturbator and an aesthete, I say hear, hear! I was eager, not to say anxious, to get a load of Scarlett Johansson naked, if only to establish a more vivid mise en scene for that play I've had running in my head since I was 13, Even Though I'm A Beautiful Movie Star I Can't Keep My Hands Off Roy Edroso. (The production has undergone some changes over the years -- when it opened it was a wispy, sensitive bildungsromance, but now it has more of a Bukowski feel, and certainly more cursing -- and some of America's top starlets have done their best work in the lead role.)

Alas, Ms. Johansson appears to have been made up for the shoot with pastry flour, and to be posing for a Hummel figurine. That such a beautiful woman, unclothed yet, could be made to look unsexy! Now I'll have to recast Even Though I'm A Movie Star... with one of those women I brush up against on the subway.

HE'S JUST SAYING WHAT WE'RE ALL NOT THINKING! I rool. While other blogs just yapped, growled, and heh-indeeded about Mohammedian censorship, I gave the cartoonophobes something to jihad about.

Yet thanks to their Good Old Blog network connections, those fake freedom fighters still get all the attention, while I labor here in obscurity -- probably a good thing, as my fatwa has come through: "Oh, a wise guy?" wrote one Latrell X in a note that came covered in white powder (which our lab has determined to be Desenex); "Why, I oughta..." Here the note ominously trails off.

Ah well; this story, like all blogospheric proclamations of Clash of Civ endtimes, will not last long. Soon the self-soothing that'll-show-those-Europeans gurglings will lull their authors into the next news cycle, which I understand is all about tapping phone calls made between the U.S. and Batavia, New York.

But there is no soothing (self- or otherwise) our old friend Twelve-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters, who, while giving the back of his hand to maniacal Muslims, plants his bayonet in the belly of the real beast -- European godlessness!

The Danish newspaper that first published the cartoons last September was not standing up courageously for freedom of expression. The editors and cartoonists were so oblivious to any reality beyond their Copenhagen coffee bars that they just thought they were pulling an attention-getting prank.

They got attention, all right. As did the papers elsewhere in Europe that reprinted the offending cartoons last week. In the name of press freedom, of course.

The problem is that with freedom comes responsibility, a quality to which Europe's become allergic (nothing is ever a European's fault). Breaking a well-known taboo of Islam was irresponsible. No other word for it.

One of the things we love about the General is his tendency to sprint -- usually naked, frothing, and waving his pearl-handled pistol -- off the reservation: while the Malkins of the world have to make believe (thanks, I believe, to some ancient treaty with the glibertarians) that they care about freedom and stuff, the General just hears the word "Yurrup" and visions of limp-wristed espresso-drinkers start bonking around inside his helmet.

And you know what his problem with these here Yurrupeans is? Not just that they're a little light in the Birkenstocks -- but that they ain't got God ("Today's Europeans consider religious belief as beneath their sophistication"). And without God, you can't have the sort of war the General's been practicing his whole life for: a total, orgiastic, scimitar-versus-bunkerbuster, real rain that'll wash all the scum off the streets.

This is partly why, after a long fun run with the General, I don't quote him so much anymore. He has no agenda other than his own madness, while the usual targets of our wrath are more calculating and dishonest. You will see their freedom flags dip, as their "Support Denmark" flags have already started to do, once we go back to talking about American citizens again. The General, bless him, never shifts tactics.

UPDATE. If you get tired of brainless wreckers like me, one of the very, very few intelligent discussions of this subject is at Sisyphus Shrugged.

THE RETURN OF MICHAEL TOTTEN'S "PROTEST BABES"! The Cedar Revolution continues! I swear to you, there are a couple of real lookers just out of frame here:



OK, I'm kidding. Totten doesn't like Lebanese riots over those Danish Mohammed cartoons and neither do it. In fact, I dislike them so much that I will show solidarity with the forces of free speech by publishing in this very blog my own cartoon of Mohammed waving "hi" to his fans:



I am told it was the bare fact of the Prophet's pictoral representation that stirred the Islamic nuts' wrath, so it should not matter that my Mohammed is not doing anything sinister (or that I can't draw hands, or much of anything else) -- I am one with my Danish comrades in breaking a taboo. That makes me "politically incorrect," the highest accolade in the rightwing vocabulary. God, I feel brave -- every bit as brave as a Fightin' Keyboarder mouthing off about Brokeback Mountain!

I invite these idiots to stop blaming the cartoon controversy on liberal professors, and to cheer my courage. And -- using their own infallible logic -- if they fail to do so, it proves they are objectively pro-censorship!

This blog thing is ever so much more fun than the real world. P.S. Censorship sucks. Just mentioning it on the very odd chance that you didn't realize that's what we all think.

UPDATE. Readers are not impressed with my blasphemy. "I would not give even a paper cut to your neck," writes Mr. I. Kabibble. "Your death can wait until the coming holocaust." So I have upped the ante by amending my drawing so that it shows Mohammed smoking a cigarette:



I also decided that his hand is turned in that bizarre way because he is dancing, which I'm sure must be very offensive. I probably won't make it to nightfall! Give my love to the Danes, especially Claire.

UPDATE 2. Hey, apparently I love freedom more than Condi "for President" Rice. This encourages me to kick it up a notch: Since, hours after my original entry, I have not received any credible death threats, I will try acting all Danish to see if that's the "X" factor in this case.

How does one act all Danish? I dunno, but aren't they almost the same thing as Swedish? I'm just do my John Qualen impression: Heurney fleurny heurney! Heurney fleurny heurney! Oh, Ethan -- Mohammed's he don't a-smell too good, py Yimminy! Heurney fleurny!

UPDATE 3. Nothing from the Islamofascists, but I did hear from one guy who claimed he was going to replace all my furniture with plain, blond wood modular units.

Stephen Green fantasizes that Hollywood will help him make fun of Muslims. Of course, Green makes fun of Hollywood at the same time, so there is little chance that "the writing staff of Will & Grace" will be rushing to join his jihad anytime soon. So he's stuck with Citizen Satirists like me! C'mon, Steve, let's see if we can't git-r-done:



Hyuk hyuk. "Mr. Egyptian, yer a goddamn liar!" We don't need us no arty-farties nohow. Hell, we can animate this and put it in the Liberty Film Festival!

Whoops, here come my assassins. Gotta run!

DUMP YOUR PAJAMAS MEDIA STOCK! I'm no kind of financial reporter, but I do notice the Ole Perfesser pitching to Craigslist:

Perhaps Craigslist should consider a local-franchise model that would incorporate local news content, something that -- as far as I know -- they're not doing. That would still kill off a lot of local weeklies that are nothing but vehicles for classified ads now, but so what? They're doomed anyway. At least it might add something.

Of course, when the Perfesser says "local-franchise model," it's like when he says "Libertarian" -- window-dressing to get the rubes on board for what he's actually selling. And that's the value-add we're all looking for in a classified-ad service: right-wing political bullshit. If this were a good idea, surely Buy-Lines would have picked up Ed Anger's column by now.

I haven't heretofore spoken to the issue of Pajamas Media because why would I: it's a bunch of crappy writers ganged up to exponentiate their crappiness. Their claim to fame is that they're all pioneers in one of the Century's first big fads -- as if there were some merit in being the new Shipwreck Kelly. Smart guys like the Perfesser are hedging their bets by exploiting their notoriety to sell old-fashioned dead-tree products; others will be absorbed into the Republican journalism machine; most, alas, will wind up haunting gin mills and blind tigers, occasionally puffing out their chests and crying Don't you know who I am? Try Googling DeathtoLiberalsWI59, mortal!

Eventually I'm sure the franchise will be bought by Murdoch or Moon or some such, festooned with Page Six "protest babes," and trawled downmarket. Whether that will be counted a victory for blogism in general or PJM is particular, I neither know nor care; among the vanities, this doesn't even rank with the crackling of thorns under the pot.

Still, it is interesting to see the Perfesser pushing it at people like Craig Newmark, especially given what Newmark wrote on Wednesday:

PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISM IS A BIG DEAL: Looks like I can't say this enough, since it's forgotten in both the excitement for citizen journalism and the stress of competition.

Professional journalism involves high standards of writing, fact checking, editing, and research.

Journalism ethics includes "separation of church and state", figuratively meaning that marketing and financial concerns are separate from editorial matters and reporting.

Professional news organizations recognize that we all have freedom of choice when it comes to selecting what news operations, etc., that serve the community best.

A special tip of the hat to the San Francisco Chronicle, which has greatly impressed me with its adherence to ethical standards. thanks!

High standards! Fact checking! Separation of church and state (even as a metaphor)! The doubleplusungood San Francisco Chronicle! Looks like a very bad fit for PJM.

Next stop: Maxim online, for whom the Perfesser can review gadgets.

NOW HERE'S A MAKEOVER I CAN GET BEHIND. From the Washington Post today:

Maybe Will prayed, "Give me lips, God -- I don't care what it takes!"

SHORTER JEFF GOLDSTEIN: You pathetic liberal jerks, I was joking when I said cuff Sheehan to a radiator! You just can't perceive my strenuous and sophisticated humor, you stupid -- hey! I said I was joking! You must have very tight assholes because you are not laughing at my jokes, idiots! Etc.

SHORTER CRAZY JESUS LADY: I am tired of being a wall-flower. I go to be young with the young! Everybody: The Democrats are unhinged! The Dem-- what's that? You need proof of my loyalty? I must denounce Wendy Wasserstein? B-but wait -- I can imply she was right-wing, then there'll be no need... Oh. I'm sorry, comrade: yes, I meant prove she was right-wing.

EASY MONEY. As we have previously observed, conservative culture cops have gotten comfy reviewing films they haven't even seen, so why shouldn't National Review's John J. Miller pick up an easy extra buck at OpinionJournal reviewing the unreleased Curious George movie?

He actually does okay for a while, poking around the famed monkey's biographical data, but Miller knows he has to get to the right-wing money shot sometime, so about halfway down he tells us that "the first book (Curious George) violates our modern codes of political correctness," implying that the film, being a product of Hollyweird, has corrrr-rected that. And those trained to heed the PC dog-whistle lean forward, expecting news of some absurd liberal whitewash.

But Miller reports that, based on his close reading of the movie's trailer, while the original Man in the Yellow Hat was "a gun-toting poacher" who kidnapped George from his African home, he is now "an unarmed naturalist." Also, movie George does not smoke and drink, as did first-book George.

At this point even conservative parents are probably scratching their heads, thinking, Gee, we hates us some goddamn librul PC, but do we really want little Ayn and Whittaker to admire poachers and a cute little monkey who smokes and drinks? It is a children's movie, after all.

"Perhaps these revisions are an acceptable bowdlerization," admits Miller. Realizing with horror that he has hundreds of words to go, he casts about for ways to hurl George at liberal heads. The best he can do is, "Today's Hollywood probably would be more comfortable making the Man in the Yellow Hat an out-and-proud homosexual than an exploiter of the animal kingdom," before concluding that Hollywood shouldn't fool around too much with the classics. How I wish I could show this garbage to the ghosts of Hazlitt and Dryden, and then, after they had stopped whirling and asking God why they had been flung into Hell, arm them with billy clubs (or, failing that, pen and ink), so they could express to Miller their feelings about the perversions he has performed on the art of criticism.

THE SLEEP OF REASON BREEDS BULLSHIT. It's fascinating to watch the birth of an idea, even a competely retarded one. In the American Spectator, Mark Gauvreau Judge posits such a thing as "metrocons," well-read conservatives who disdain rowdy entertainments such as muscle-car rallies.

Folks who share my unhealthy fascination with this sort of nonsense will recall that, in the 90s, Judge was pushing swing-dancing as a conservative credential, and when mass Lindy Hopping did not break out all across America, he retreated to the usual tired culture-war crap for his living, till this new, Gestaltifying idea came upon him.

His fellow derechos are not, so far, having it, to judge by these responses. But I give them no credit for that, because they argue against the metrocon idea for a variety of countervailing doctrinal and political reasons, rather than dismissing it outright as bullshit, or whatever word Father Neuhaus uses instead of "bullshit."

By bullshit I mean, in this instance, that the idea is produced, not by the logic of the true student of human nature, or even of the sociologist, but of the marketing consultant. Like the promoters of Crunchy and South Park variants of conservatism, Judge is just looking for an angle that will make his name in the psuedo-science of conservative taxonomy. It offers nothing to stimulate serious thinking or political action; it is the apotheosis of the old saw, "The personal is the political" -- an adage formulated years ago on the Left, but lately adopted whole-heartedly by the Right.

Judge's concept is not worth even such discussion as I have given it here, but it is genuinely interesting to see how far such useless ideas as his can get in the current environment; The New Criterion deigning to discuss metroconservatism is like the Pope issuing a Bull on the selection of American Idol winners.

We have all seen what happens to some people who enjoy great success without doing anything to merit it: very few of them can simply relax and enjoy their good fortune; they crack up their Ferraris, they descend into drug addiction, they take up Scientology or some other crackpot creed to explain to themselves that there is no giant foot trying to squash them. Conservatives got a big Lotto jackpot with the War on Terror, and have since been laying about the mansion, engaging in increasing dorm-like bull sessions, inventing ever more sophisticated sophistries -- shrinking government while their Congressmen and contributors plunder the Treasury, converting Arabs by blowing them up, and so forth.

Next I suppose they'll be inventing conservative haircuts and ways of wearing their breeches. And after that -- well, we all know how that goes.