SHORTER MATT WELCH: So long, suckers!

LONGER ROY EDROSO*: (* That's me, joy-poppers.) With all due respect, Welch has considerable credits as a journalist, and demonstrates keen intelligence on a daily basis, so when he writes something like this reassessment of his 2001 thinking --

“What do warbloggers have in common, that most pundits do not?” I enthused. “I’d say a yen for critical thinking, a sense of humor that actually translates into people laughing out loud, a willingness to engage (and encourage) readers, a hostility to the Culture War and other artifacts of the professionalized left-right split of the 1990s…a readiness to admit error [and] a sense of collegial yet brutal peer review.”

Man, was I wrong.

-- I have to ask: are you 12? Because the blogosphere was observably as big a bunch of bullshit in 2001 as it is now. Many of us who are certainly no smarter than Welch were pretty clear on this as far back as March 2002:

...witness the puffery (self-administered and otherwise) exhibited by the various "war bloggers." These are mostly right-wing operatives who every day spew great clouds of Bush Administration rah-rah (much of it devoted calling Noam Chomsky et alia some variant of "poo-poo head"), heavily scented with plugs for one another's sites and chest-pounding assertions that war blogs have saved America from being overrun by antiwar demonstrators. Therein politics is ostensibly the raison d'etre, but everything at these blogs ultimately devolves into a pissing contest: What a traitor this guy is! I get more hits than you, you're just jealous! Boy, that Rachael Klein is a dish!

(Rachael Klein, some of you may remember, was a Berkeley sex columnist whose work was sometimes used by internet dorks when they wished to portray themselves as fun-loving regular guys.)

I mean, was it not obvious to anyone who had attained a Deep South age of consent that the big names of the scene -- Den Beste, Reynolds, Goldberg, and so forth -- were posturing blowhards whose collective lack of talent was in a perpetual race to the bottom with their collective lack of common sense?

Remember crap like this?:

The only thing that would even remotely mollify American Jacksonians would be a clear indication that the people of France and Germany had themselves repudiated the leaders responsible for this. If French and German voters clearly indicate that they hate what happened, and dump all of the leaders responsible, and put a lot of them in jail, and if the new governments there clearly state that those who did it were indeed renegades, and apologize, then America's Jacksonians would then permit relations at a somewhat cooler level to continue.

Ngnnyah. And some people thought he was "the Thomas Paine of our age."

In times of high stress (like right after a massive terrorist attack), these guys sometimes expressed thoughts and feelings that were similar to those experienced by intelligent people. This did not make them intelligent.

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad the genuinely talented Welch has found a job in one of those squaresville MSM outlets, where he will presumably be recompensed for his loss of cred with cash. And when it comes to disillusionment, better late than never. But I still don't get how smart people (along with the bazillions of fools) got taken in by this scam. Hell, even when I was taking Internet Bubble money, I kept wondering when I was going to get caught.

OUTTA TRACTION, BACK IN ACTION. Thanks a lot to everyone who responded to my previous post about Mom. The death of a parent can make a person re-examine his value system. I'm not sure I can get too interested anymore in the puerilities that were once the stock in trade of this website. Maybe I should devote more of my time to holy shit a National Review nerd talking about Kids Today!

Torino's Winter Olympics showed what's the matter with kids: Many are rude, narcissistic, and spoiled to the gills.

Man, NatRev has long lead times! Maybe I should send them my review of Brokeback Mountain.

The Olympics once represented the best of America's best man- and maidenhood. Bob Richards: reverend and decatholoner. Rafer Johnson: sprinter and pioneer. Peggy Flemming: girl next door. Each etched deference, teamwork, and stoic heroism -- we, not me.

Three solo-event athletes offered as examples of "teamwork"! Long lead times and no editors!

Long story short, some Winter Olympians fucked up and the reason is a "culture... as toxic as Love Canal" in which "Self-esteem trumps the Golden Rule" and "Obscenity floods film." "By contrast," says the author, Curt Smith, at his own website, "Nixon's still The One -- the most enduring American of our time." He may have shit on the Constitution, but he never once grabbed his crotch.

I expand my thanks to include such purveyors of low-hanging fruitiness, for reminding me that it's always Crappy Hour somewhere. Like Mom used to say: "What is he, stupid?"

THE FACTORY GIRL. She was born in 1922 in Hartford, Connecticut. Her family moved to Canada when she was young. We never quite got why, nor do we know why at age 15 she left her family to live with her Aunt Jo in Bridgeport. Evelyn didn’t like to talk about her past. We figured she had her reasons.

But she did come to Bridgeport, which was then a factory town full of jobs. Though Evelyn had only an eighth-grade education, she actually found work as a payroll clerk at Harvey Hubbel and then IGA Rubber, I think. It is easy to imagine her among the thousands clocking out at 5 pm of a weekday, walking with the crowd from the industrial district near the Housatonic River up to Main Street. Some days I suppose she grabbed a bus; on nice days maybe she walked home to Aunt Jo’s. I’m sure sometimes she stopped at Sol’s for a drink with friends. People liked her. She had the sweetness that often comes out of hurt.

She was 34 before she trusted a man enough to marry him. He was a handsome fellow with brown eyes and tightly-waved hair – I bet some of her girlfriends called him a greaser. He was about Evelyn’s age, and had been to the war, and then had knocked around Bridgeport at different jobs without ever really lighting on a career. His own father had a little success, but the son didn’t seem to have the same drive, or luck. Still, he was a good man, he worked hard, he dressed nicely, and he had a beautiful smile. They married, and quickly had a son.

They moved to a little house on the North End. They had a daughter, and I believe that was just what they wanted: a little boy and a little girl. Maybe that was when she was happy.

Evelyn stayed home while her husband worked, or looked for work. She got pregnant again. Her husband got a job driving trucks for General Electric. On his days off he re-sided their little house, worked in the little yard. He’d always worked hard, but now he seemed to work harder than ever, sweating more than a man should. One night he got up to go to the bathroom and it was only a few steps from their bed to the toilet but he couldn’t make it. He fell like a tree, and she couldn’t get him up.

Evelyn took her children to the funeral. She sat with them as her husband’s relatives came to the house and took food from the kitchen table and tools from her husband’s basement workbench. Her baby was stillborn. They dug up the cemetary plot, a little coffin was placed on the coffin of her husband, and the dirt was poured back into the hole.

Evelyn made sure that her living children were alright. She enrolled them in St. Patrick’s, a working-class Catholic grammar school with separate entrances for boys and girls, an asphalt recess yard, and nuns. She car-pooled with other parents to bring them to and from school. Every day she fed her children three meals appropriate to what she had been taught about nutrition. Each dinner contained one portion of meat, one portion of starch, and one vegetable. Sometimes she included a little bowl of salad. "Eat your salad," she told her children. "It digests your food."

Her children were different from other children: less secure, easier to tease. The best Evelyn knew to do for them was to make sure they had nothing to be ashamed of. She dressed them meticulously, and made God-damned sure that they did their homework and minded their manners. Adults appreciated this more than children did, but at least her kids knew they were right about something, and that helped them, to a greater or lesser degree, through their days.

While her children were at school Evelyn cleaned her house methodically, vacuuming the curtains, standing on chairs to dust the cabinets, pushing her mop deep into every corner and twisting it fiercely. She was still cleaning when her children got home. They heard her iron hiss and fizz as she worked it into the ironing table she had set up in the living room, as sunlight streamed through the little rectangular windows of the side door. They watched her mend clothes on a Singer sewing machine in the kitchen, and heard the dark hum of the motor when she pushed the plastic lever with her knee. And they saw her rubbing her skull at the kitchen table every month as she studied the bills.

She always managed. When her husband’s Social Security and Veterans’ Administration benefits weren’t going to make it, Evelyn worked part-time at some of the places that had employed her when she was a single girl. She didn’t take the bus or walk now, though; she drove; downtown Bridgeport had become lawless and scary. She didn’t stop at Sol’s for a drink either. She would have her drink on weekends, when old friends would come to her house and sit at her kitchen table and drink and play pinochle and sing old songs. Or she would have it at night, when the kids were in bed, and listen to sad country music on the record player. I don’t know where she picked up country music, but it seemed to suit her.

Her children got restless and talked back sometimes, but they never became bad kids, nor bad adults. The daughter lived with own family down the road; the son went to New York, and didn’t visit as often as Evelyn liked. The house was always clean. Friends came over sometimes with bottles and chips, and Evelyn took pleasure from that until the friends either died off or couldn’t get around much any more.

By then she couldn’t get around too well either. Her daughter visited often, cooking for her when she couldn’t handle it herself, and finally taking her into her own home. Evelyn’s son started coming to see her more frequently, but there was not much time left. And then time was gone.

Not all the gaps in this story are due to interests of space. There is a lot I don’t know about her. As I said, she didn’t like to talk about the past. I have just a few facts to work with, and some of them are shaky. The only thing that I am quite sure of is that she loved my sister and me. It may be the only thing in the world that I am sure of.

Here is a strange thing about that: I thought that when she died I would feel, besides the obvious sorrow, a very specific loss, the loss of her love. But I don’t feel that. I guess her love for us is something that has a life outside of hers. She had made it with her own hands, and she built it, as they used to build things in those old factory days, to last.

Good job, Evelyn.

SERVICE ADVISORY. Family business; posting will be infrequent till further notice. The blogs in the left margin (the ones that still work, anyway) are good company.

90-PERCENTER.

Drudge's expose of a wacko environmentalist looking forward to the end of humanity through massive plagues was telling to me. In the long run, right-wing fundamentalism and left-wing fundamentalism end up in the same place.

This is so wrong in so many ways that only Andrew Sullivan could have come up with it.

First of all, Professor Pianka's notion that (per the source) "the Earth would be better off with 90 percent of the human population dead" is one that any intelligent human being will understand and, at times, share. Don't you bright young things feel this way at least occasionally? No? Well, read more English literature, then.

Misanthropy aside, Sullivan attributes without evidence a "left-wing" political POV to a single, eccentic herpetologist, and uses him to demonstrate an equivalence between "left-wing fundamentalism" and the millions of Fundamentalist Christians who think that the authority of the U.S. Government is secondary to that of their favorite imaginary beings as interpreted by TV preachers.

Why does Sully-Bear do it? My current guess is that he thinks moderation will come back into fashion and, having ridden the gay-conservative thing into the ground, he wants to stake out his new territory with a lot of pull quotes. (God knows Roger L. Simon and Michael Totten have vacated those premises, if they ever occupied them.) Plaguing both their houses is easy and fun. You can even insist strongly on your own rights as a gay citizen, so long as you also reach out, concerning same-sex matters, to conservatives of good will -- such as Pope Benedict XVI:

Yes, he reiterates the official doctrine about the exclusivity of heterosexuality for the God-given state of matrimony. But the logic of "Deus Caritas Est" can be read to include gay love as well, and lose none of its power.

I picture Rodney King asking "Can't we all get along?" while he's getting his ass beat.

WHAT, ME WEIMAR? Today at NRO Elizabeth Fisher makes culture war on... Dadaism. You might have thought that this antique movement, whether or not you find any potency left in it, was all just good fun and sometimes good art. Wachet auf! For Fisher, Western Civ's wounds bleed afresh every time you enjoy a Max Ernst collage. Behold Dada's dark agenda:

What Dadaism represents is the origins of 21st-century moral relativism.

If a work can be called “art” simply because its author claims it to be such, then there is no such thing as art. If anything can be art, then nothing is. And this principle has a broader application: If anything can be true (or moral, good, right, etc.), then nothing is. Rather than a servant to society, the artist has become a spoiled child, creating arbitrary distinctions that only he can decipher. Dadaists, the original brats, considered their audience only as a group to be shocked or irritated. Dadaists do not deserve to be called artists; at best, they are propagandists, but more accurately, exhibitionists.

Nothing quite matches the hilarity of one of NRO's professional anaesthetes calling anyone else "propagandists," but that Duchamp's urinal is the wellspring of her rage is also very rich.

We've well noted here the tendency of the Right's vulgarians to reduce art to propaganda for whatever crack-brained school of conservative bullshit they favor. On the low end we have of course the South Park Republicans, who think farting loudly is an identification of political affinity. Fisher seems to be of a more high-minded sort -- that is, instead of Cletus in a beret, we have Brandine in a Roman toga, shouting "Van-eetus, Cletus!" and blaming renegade art, and enjoyment thereof, for our great Slouch Toward Gomorrah.

Don't wear yourself out too much laughing. When they start talking like this, you know what the next step is.

SHORTER PEGGY NOONAN: The suckers have caught on to our bullshit! Lie harder!

HOW TO READ JEFF GOLDSTEIN. I guess the Shorter Goldstein in this case (as in so many others) would be "I'm not nuts, you're nuts." (Use Albert Brooks' reading in Real Life for the full effect, or affect.)

To bring you up to speed, Goldstein's first response to news of a possible Al Qaeda bio-attack plan was (his creative linking seems to indicate) righteous anger at the possibility that British foreign secretary Jack Straw might honor a Muslim cricket player.

But his central theme, my team of rant-parsers has determined, was that the civilized world faces real dangers, and that we should make clear to the Islamofascists that, regarding bio-war attacks, we would with "NO options of[f] the table" "do everything we need to do to prevent them before they happen." (Italics and random capitalization Goldstein's, of course.)

I don't find this too unreasonable -- by the excitable Goldstein's usual standards, it's practically a lullaby -- but Tbogg caught the hysterical tone and mocked it.

Well, to each his own. But Goldstein's response helps explain why Tbogg, and so many of us these days, can't resist teasing the guy: because he often reacts in such an amusing way:

...[Tbogg] and his fellow Iraq war critics have started to pretend that the threat from al Qaeda doesn’t exist, and instead spend the majority of their time poking their sticks into the sides of those who aren’t quite so sanguine about al Qaeda’s intentions.

This is almost plaintive: Goldstein only wants to save America, why are we making fun of him? Maybe Goldstein noticed that, too, and quickly butched back up to the belligerent sophistry that is his stock in trade:

Of course, the irony here is that you’d think this would work the other way around: the Bush Kultists, so confident in their flight-suited superhero’s power to cowboy up and protect us all from harm with his nuclear-strapped utility belt and army of super soldiers, would fear nothing from the feeble and impotent robed bluster of a tiny network of bearded hyper-fundamentalist Islamist cranks.

Goldstein, bless him, is channeling Kipling: It's Dubya this, and Dubya that, and "Dubya, you're on drugs!"/ But it's "Mr. Bush will save us" when Al Qaeda sprays th' bugs!

He portrays the liberal point of view with a quote: "hell, when that man says he’s gonna invade a country, by God he does it—none of this feckless, furrow-browed Jimmy Carter bullshit!" Attribution is missing -- maybe it's Joe Lieberman?

It goes on and on like this, one delirium tremen following another. The gist seems to be that liberals like Tbogg don't have a sophisticated, italicized germ-warfare plan -- "Hey, I can understand that," says Goldstein, "Sometimes children like to close their eyes and go to their happy place."

As it happens, I have a germ warfare plan every bit as interesting and useful as Goldstein's. I plan to run out among the screaming hordes, grab the most attractive woman I can find, and tell her, "It's now or never, baby! Let's die smiling!" I will repeat as needed. If I don't find a taker by the time the spores reach me, I'll start beating off, and try to keep it going until my lungs dissolve.

I have now done just as much to "inspire confidence in the seriousness of a good portion of our electorate" as has Jeff Goldstein. And in this instance I also managed to refer to my cock before he did!

WE CAN BE HEROES, JUST FOR ONE DAY. Via Atrios and Blogoland, I see that Hugh Hewitt believes he's on the front lines of the War on Terror because he sometimes visits the Empire State Building -- and compares his own valour favorably to that of a Time correspondent newly back from the actual Iraq.

I lived in New York during both the 1993 and 2001 World Trade Center attacks. I live here still. Where do I go to get my Purple Heart and military pension? 'Cause if the Minnesotan Hewitt is a combatant, I must be a Colonel at least.

CORREX. Apparently Hewitt lives in California, not the Land o' Lakes. Due to his frequent guesting of Lileks I assumed he lived down the road from Jasperwood, where they and the Big Swede and the Old Dutch and the Little Egypt hung out every Saturday night, consulting with cigars and negotiating with artisanal spirituous beverages.

So maybe Hewitt's danger pay is earned in border watch over the Reconquistadores. Now I see him suspiciously eyeing the gardener. Does he really need all that fertilizer to keep the hydrangea blooming?

DESTRUCTIVE CRITICISM. As Ann Althouse might say, watching whole movies is a big drag! Why not just watch the trailers -- and then (this is the bloggy part) write reviews of them?

The trailer for the new Flight 93 movie is out. Feel free to comment on it below.

The trailer looks fine, and I very much like the way it ends, with one of the passengers saying - with respect to their impending bull-rush on the terrorists: "We have to do it now, because we know what happens if we just sit here and do nothing."

Yes, it's Jason Apuzzo, veteran poster- and trailer-reviewer. He approves the trailer, but pans lead actor Charlie Sheen -- not for his performance in the film (which Apuzzo hasn't seen it and says he doesn't want to see) but for his comments on 9/11.

In wingnut land this is what they "cultural criticism." Usually I assume these guys don't even know what culture is, but today I think they know what culture is, despise it for its humanizing properties, and want to make us all hate and avoid it, and flock instead to their propaganda and uplift (still in production, but I understand Warren Bell has optioned several Chick Tracts). What do you guys think?

BEING A SPORT. This, from the Tenement Museum, is awfully sweet. Nothing against the musical bits, but I've turned them off so I can just listen to New York (actually, an incredible simulation!) at my desk.

I especially like the kids in the playground. I've lived adjacent to New York public school playgrounds a few times in my life -- I live near one now. It's nice to start your day with a warm breeze of glee coming in the window.

If I were living away from New York, I think hearing these sounds would give me a terrible pang. Maybe for people in that position, the Museum should offer obnoxious alternative sounds -- like tofu-bucket drummers in the subway, or these guys -- to make you glad you left. I'd probably still feel a pang anyway. (Thanks, Flavorpill NYC.)

P.S. I don't usually tell you about fun web things like this because I'm a miserable son of a bitch.

GENE, GENE, YOU'RE YOUNG AND ALIVE. Last night PBS ran the Ric Burns/Arthur & Barbara Gelb documentary on Eugene O'Neill. I think it's a little thin. Of course, considering the great mass of O'Neill's output, and of his definitive biography (also written by the Gelbs and filling two fat volumes), maybe any film shorter than Strange Interlude would have seemed so to me.

But I really think this one is more reductive than it needed to be. It's very long on the O'Neill mystique -- the dreamy kid, the hophead mom, the sea, the suicidal despair -- with phrases like "for Jamie, it was a sentence of death" and "back to the seedy rotgut saloon of Jimmy the Priest's" pronounced sonorously over ghostly daguerreotypes and fuzzy pictures of bare trees.

I'm all about the poets maudit, but this is laying it on a little thick. O'Neill was indeed miserable, but so miserable that he's sort of hilarious. The young-O'Neill Gelb book, Son and Playwright, is full of can-you-top-this stuff like Eugene drinking his own urine out of a bourbon bottle -- hardcore, man! Even after the drinking stopped, you get scenes like (in Son and Artist) Carlotta standing over a crumpled, Parkinsonian O'Neill in the snow and declaiming, "How the mighty have fallen! Where's your greatness now, little man?"

Neither of these anecdotes are recounted in the documentary. Nor is the one about Russell Crouse begging O'Neill to shorten Ah, Wilderness! because, with star George M. Cohan's added stage business, the "comedy" was running so long the stagehands were getting overtime every night. (O'Neill's solution: cut one of the intermissions.) O'Neill was important and gloomy but he was also a man of the theatre, and he had a sense of humor.

Anyway, as must naturally happen in a telling thus weighted, Long Day's Journey Into Night becomes the documentary's centerpiece, framing device, and leitmotif. The framing guides us toward a defining paradox: that after all those strenuously expressionistic plays and Pulitzer Prizes, O'Neill's greatest work was in one sense his least ambitious -- a distilled essence of his life in New London with his mother, father, and brother, and of the pain that was born there and only died when O'Neill did, that came out of his soul as naturally as sap runs from a tree once he found the courage to release it.

There is a noxious hint of the therapeutic in this analysis. Long Day's Journey is certainly an artistic triumph. (Anyone who has never read it should go read it now. Really, it's an emergency.) I'm sure it was also a personal triumph for O'Neill, in a way, but so what? I'm as interested in the real O'Neill as anyone, but centuries hence, we can't expect program notes about Gene's hard luck to convince Romulan ZD75 and his wife Zebop that Long Day's Journey is worth watching. The play will have to make its own case -- and probably will.

I was also bugged at the implication that the ghosts of O'Neill's past were also the agents of his apotheosis into a real artist. More than one commentator suggests that if not for that play, we might not be bothering with O'Neill at all now.

I don't know about that. It's true that the appeal of plays like The Great God Brown and Mourning Becomes Electra will never be as universal as that of O'Neill's family drama, partly because of its amazing craft, but partly and maybe mostly because it is a family drama. As one of the commentators says, whatever kind of family you have, you can still see yourself in it: cataclysmic as the lives of the Tyrones are, they are also the lives of a father and a mother, a husband and a wife, and sons and brothers. Long Day's Journey got a head-start on "lasting" fame (at this writing, 50 years and counting) in part because it was written -- we must assume unconsciously -- in a form that would become familiar to and beloved of all Americans: that of a TV sitcom. If the language and emotions are a little elevated for modern audiences, they can still relate to the arguments between Archie and Meathead -- I mean Tyrone and Jamie.

Most of O'Neill's other plays are much harder to get to. They are conscious (not to say self-conscious) attempts to recreate ancient tragic forms in American vernacular. To enjoy them you have to have some taste for the declamatory, the outsize, and the outrageously ambitious. In a way I like them for the same reason I like Sam Fuller and Oliver Stone -- if we're to have bullshit, let it be (in the immortal words of Tommy Stinson, lecturing on Golden Earring) bullshit that is really bullshit, like this delirious police interview after the death of Billy Brown:

CAPTAIN: (comes just into sight at left and speaks front without looking at them--gruffly) Well, what's his name?

CYBEL: Man!

CAPTAIN: (taking a grimy notebook and an inch-long pencil from his pocket) How d'yuh spell it?

Tee hee. But it's not all laffs. Though The Great God Brown is on the whole a little, shall we say, cumbersome, it has attributes of greatness: some dazzlingly poetry, great stage moments, haunting characters. Most importantly it is clear in its purpose. You learn quickly what the central metaphor is, and O'Neill by God sticks with it. That may be his greatest gift as a playwright: clarity in conception and ferocity in execution. There is no wavering about his plays: they have the certainty of tragedy. Whether or not they have the other necessary components, we'll leave to history. It hasn't been that long, anyway.

You're not going to get this sort of thing from, say, David Chase. You won't get Marco Millions, but you won't get The Iceman Cometh, either. I think that's too bad, but I'm a dreamy sort, a little in love with death... (Go, for the love of God, you mad, tortured bastard! -- Ed.)

JESUS HATES YOU. The Crunchy Conservative blog is in its what-is-to-be-done phase. The Crunchies were previously examined here. At that time, I thought of them as latter-day friends o' Jesus in a VW micro-bus -- only with more money and expensive tastes: grooving to the infinite on an IKEA altar with granola eucharists served fresh from a Crate & Barrel monstrance. So after a few laughs I ignored them.

I peeked in again today. All these weeks of being mocked even by their conservative colleagues seem to have raised the Crunchies' choler, because now they have thrown off their cheery Godspell threads and are questioning this "freedom" thing with which the heathens amuse themselves. Bruce Frohnen:

I find particularly striking Chris's statement that "that the free market is, like democracy, only as good as the people who participate in it"... Frank Meyer, father of fusionism, himself noted, not just that virtue requires freedom, but also that freedom requires virtue.

Burke said "intemperate men cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters." And no institution, no matter how well crafted, can alter that.

So, does that mean we the unchurched (and thereby unvirtuous) only think we're free? I guess when the God-boys teach us true freedom, we will be deluded still, and imagine that they are oppressing us. Later, Crunch Daddy Dreher himself quotes some nut who thinks that, in this godless age, homicidal Muslims sorta have a point. Dreher, ever the reasonable sort, tries to make this sound less mad:

I don’t think Spengler is saying that a culture must either apply the hammer to all heretics, or sign its death warrant. None of us wants to live in a culture that punishes those of minority faiths, or no faith at all. Is he saying, though, that it’s a law of nature that once a culture grants permission to apostasize without (serious) consequence, it has already started down a path to self-destruction?

"None of us wants to live in a culture that punishes those of minority faiths, or no faith at all" -- how can he be sure? After all, some of these guys want to follow St. Benedict into monasticism -- presumably with enough of a budget to keep the neo-monks in Priuses and organic toothpaste for as long as it takes Moloch to fall. Our very presence they find corrupting. Their only conflict seem to be over whether to abandon us to our sin, or to try and live among us as a corrective influence.

I guess these are the kind of Christians who smile at you on the street and then imagine you roasting in hellfire. And then smile for real.

UPDATE. Why don't they all just move to Disney's Celebration? Oh right -- the gay thing.

THE BOTTOM OF THE BARREL: Charles Murray, co-author of the popular conservative book Niggers are Stupid, makes a new offer to the American people: we give up all government assistance, including the accursed Social Security, and once a year he will give each of us ten shiny new thousand-dollar bills.

When future scholars (if we have any) look back on this era, perhaps they will consider this a watershed event: the moment when conservatism became so discredited that its disciples had to pay people off to adopt it.

THE TRUE BELIEVER. After just a week, Ben Domenesch has lost his WashPost blog for prior incidents of plagiarism. Go here, and to surrounding posts, for schadenfreude; elsewhere you’ll find more, but not better. From Domenesch himself we have that familiar blogospheric trope, the long, belligerent nolo contendere followed by a brief apology. The grapes of many of Domenesch’s co-religionists are very sour indeed.

As previously observed here, anyone can do Domenesch’s job as poorly as he did, and when the new guy steps in I’m sure there will be the usual chest-beating all around.

I do find it interesting that the sword Domenesch gave his enemies was plagiarism. I can understand – barely, and not to say approvingly – why an undergraduate might plagiarise on a term paper under deadline pressure, on the assumption that the student sees the paper as a mere nuisance to be gotten through, not as a representation of himself. I guess I’m not enough of a careerist (look at me, I’m wearing a cardboard belt) to understand why a professional pundit – an idea man, as it were -- would so egregiously lift whole passages and claim them as his own.

I am tempted to attribute Domenesch’s offense to a lack of interest in the work of writing. It may be that he saw his star rising fast and ceased to care whence came the fuel he shovelled into the restless engine of his ambition*. Pollyanna that I am, though, I think he may have stolen for a higher purpose. He may have really believed that his success was part of the success of his movement. He might not have cut corners to exalt himself, but to save America from the depradations of its enemies – who were, by logical extension, his enemies too, at whom he railed this week as the flames consumed him, "I take enormous solace in the fact that you spent this week bashing me, instead of America." This is not the language of a Grub Street hack, but of a true believer.

* I don’t normally cite my hommages, but in this instance I probably should note that this turn of phrase references William Herndon’s famous assessment of Lincoln.

TIME, TIME, TIME THAT YOU LOVE. This is supposed to be Spring, but it's freezing around these parts. Further chronometric disorientation is provided by Marty Langeland at Dum Luk's, with a lovely essay on the non-existence of time.

AGAINST ORDERS. Every couple of years I haul out the Lester Bangs comp Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung for pleasure's sake. With each reading a little more melacholy accrues. Not so much over his early demise -- that's sad, but Bangs was in a way lucky (as Greil Marcus' pretended message from beyond the grave suggests) to be spared what we got after the deluge.

Bangs, as you may know, was the great chaos theorist of rock music. In the early 70s he glommed onto the nuttiest music he could find. He pleaded the case for Iggy back when Iggy was a joke. He championed the Godz because they were so totally fucked up, and after declaring mellow-rock king James Taylor "marked for death," he softened toward the guy just on the grounds of general fucked-upness ("Just look at him on the cover of One Man Dog, out in a canoe with his mutt, wearing a necktie even which is a cool move at this point in time. Or those pictures of him at the McGovern benefits, in an oversize sportcoat..."). When he loved artists, like Lou Reed and Richard Hell, he rode their asses mercilessly just for the snap- or smash-back; he asked Reed questions like, "When you recorded Berlin, did you think people would laugh at it?" Who would ask Reed anything like that now?

Bangs didn't want catharsis, he wanted agon, because he knew rock and roll was, or was supposed to be, the irritant from which came the pearls. Of course, too much can be made of this. One has to be careful about celebrating any life that was so quickly washed away by Darvon and Romilar. Self-destruction is not cool. Well, no, it is cool, actually, much cooler than spa treatments and star treatment certainly, but once you adopt that yardstick you find that that the life by which you measure it gets smaller every day, until it's roughly the size of a cemetary plot. Which is why Iggy himself finally had to turn against his own personal tide and stop beating his brains, beating his brains, with liquor and drugs. And maybe why I got the feeling, riding one night in another van full of gear out of town and hearing on the radio news of Kurt Cobain's death, and hearing all around me people asking why, and hearing a voice in my head asking "why not," that I myself got the idea to get out of the game.

Still, this paradox obtains: moderation can get out of hand. Everything in our public life has tended toward an increase in order for a number of years, and while we all enjoy the benefits, and are lectured on several bases that going even a hair in the other direction would most hurt the most vulnerable among us -- the poor, the weak, the children -- we have to acknowledge that this civic rehabilitation has not been without cost. To stay with the topic just a little, if you think concerts are as good now as when people were getting routinely fucked up, you're dreaming. I am tempted to cite Bill Hicks ("You think the Beatles weren't high when they made 'Yellow Submarine'? They had to scrape Ringo off the ceiling for that one!"). But I am averse to the argument from authority. I would only suggest you look at the record, or at the records.

I remember when you couldn't go to an outdoor classical concert in New York without hearing the announced name of the corporate sponsor booed lustily by the crowd. (This was well before you had to have a pass to get onto the Great Lawn to see the likes of Dave Matthews.) I was reminded of this by Bangs' essay about a 1977 Tangerine Dream concert at Avery Fisher Hall (!!), at which event spectators screamed obscenities at celebrity DJ presenter Alison Steele the Nightbird -- and we liked Alison Steele! Bangs himself, on assignment and cough syrup, treated the event as an occasion for psychedelic ramblings, judging the unruly crowd and his hallucinations superior as subjects to the music (though of that he was neither unmindful nor ineloquent). "So finally, picking up my coat and lugging my clanking cough-syrup bottles, I push my way through the slack and sprawling bodies -- out, out, out into the aisle. As I am walking up it, I am struck by an odd figure doddering ahead of me, doubled over in ragged cloth and drained hair. I don't trust my Dextromethorphaned eyes, so I move closer until I can see her, unmistakably, almost crawling out the door... a shopping bad lady!" Again, one can make too much of it, but that sounds like a pretty good show to me.

Just today I picked up this message from my old pal Lach:

I went out this week to a local music venue (doesn't matter which one, that's not the point) and was asked for ID at the door. Now, this alone pisses me off as I don't drink. If I order a whiskey, ID me, but why do I have to be 21 to hear a singer/songwriter perform? Anyway, what happened next astounded me. The door guy wanted to swipe my license through an electronic reader and download the information into the scanner! What the fuck?!? Did you know NYS licenses carry info like your social security number, address, tel. no., etc? Identity theft potential aside, what an extreme invasion of privacy just to hear music. The bar manager said that the police pressured them into using the device...

Giuliani, that fuck, knew what he was doing when as mayor he strictly enforced the City's ancient cabaret laws, and Bloomberg, that cunt, knows what he's doing, too, with this shit. Order's a popular electoral gambit. People squawk when you hit them up for tax money, but applaud your sense of responsibility when you dig your entrenching tool into the pleasure centers.

When you read, as any ordinary internet trawler will, fulsome odes to the iPod and the pay-per-view concert, please try to keep in mind that things were once way more fucked up. And seriously consider whether that means they were worse.

DON'T DREAM IT, BE IT. "While Saletan cites my 'Here Come the Brides,' he doesn’t talk about the most potentially stable form of multi-partner union: a man and two bisexual women. That union does reduce jealously, and also points to the potentially powerful bisexual constituency for multi-partner unions."

Stanley Kurtz has obviously given this a lot of thought. After a couple of shoulder-rubs and some white wine, I bet we find him living full-time in his summer house, following the ways of Gor.

KEVIN BACON IN ANIMAL HOUSE, PART 3,498: You might add this to the Ole Perfesser's list of failed anti-war predictions: we didn't predict producers of Iraq TV comedy programming would be gunned down in the streets.

When this kind of thing happens in The Netherlands, of course, it means the country is going to hell.

Remain calm! All is well!

GENIUS, I TELLS YA! The appointment of Ben Domenech is a brilliant if cynical move on the Washington Post's part. On the evidence of his first posting, the Red America blog will contain the sort of Fantasy Football you can get at a million other crappy rightwing blogs: Republicans are shown to rool, while Democrats are posited to drool. There is even that staple of the rightwing blog, the Questionable Anecdote (about how liberals don't understand their own film references), and a clove of conventional wisdom (some Republican legislators spend as much as Democrats!) to give the dish a soupcon of high-mindedness.

Any one of a million conservative bloggers could have written the same thing every bit as badly. But because it appears at the Post site, right at the heart of the Death Star, it becomes important, at least to those who share Domenech's politics. "The moonbats will go nuts, I promise you," exults Michelle Malkin. "WaPo Surrenders to the VRWC!" cries Jeff Goldstein, fist clenched and raised. Etc. It's pretty much like when The Clash appeared on "Fridays" and Joe Strummer had a mohawk and a boombox.

Now all those timewasters who spend their days mega-dittoing Michelle and Glenn and Eugene et alia will flock daily to Red America to see Ben Sticking It To Da Strawman. And the Post gets credit for their traffic, and can tell its advertisers that the Post's reach is broader than ever, and innoculated against any mass-defection, in the coming Bloggy Revolution, of such rubes as still read newspapers.

As little as it takes to enrage them, it takes so much less to make them happy.