SEMI-REGULAR "I MAKE FUN OF LILEKS BECAUSE I AM AN AWFUL, AWFUL MAN" SEGMENT. Ladies and gentlemen, our Top Ten Thousand Laker:

She ate all her apples and declined the fries. I studied the bag, which reminded how McDonald’s always gets the graphics wrong. Maybe they connect with someone, but nearly every single example of McDonald’s graphics leaves me dead. Example from today:

(Thoroughly unremarkable marketing graphic)

Welcome back, 1977! The big quotes, the horrible roundy-edge coffee logo with the unnaturally conjoined U-M – it all shrieks Carter-era design.

Helpful hint, miss: see that thing on top of your portfolio? It’s called “a handle.” Give it a try.

That bastard Carter sans'd our serifs! And, whore -- no online portfolio for you! Is reserved for matchbooks!

(Steps forward, removes Elvis wig, addresses the audience)

I am actually a big fan of Ancillary Lileks: the celebrations of silly detritus, the found objects from dead popcult plus commentary, and so forth. This sketch was inspired by The Left and his uncivil speech. I don't approve of it, and I don't approve of what I just did.

(writhes; second, large and inhuman head emerges from first)

Fuck that cracker asshole! Fuck Lileks! Blood, blood and death to you!

(hissing, spitting, cloud of smoke, finis)

CHRIST NOT MAN IS KING

TELLING A HAWK FROM A HANDSAW. Crazy Jesus Lady is tugging sleeves again, offering unsolicited advice to the Bush Administration. As usual, her monologue includes ripe, flavorful Noonanisms that gladden my wicked heart:

Mr. Snow's White House press briefings are going to be nice to watch. The press does not want to appear to be ungracious and oppositional. They have an investment in demonstrating that the tensions each day in Scott McClellan's press briefings, with David Gregory's rants and Helen Thomas's free-form animosities, were the fault of Mr. McClellan, not the press.

I have no idea what she means. That the press will exalt Snow to slur McClennan? The idea is not to get a story, or even to make Bush look bad, but to lay obloquy at the doorstep of Scotty McClellan? "McClellan delenda est!" snarls the sleeping White House reporter in his pinstriped pajamas, clutching fiercely his saluting John Kerry doll...

But more striking than the mental hiccups is the reasoning. Three foci proposes Noonan for her unwitting freelance clients, and two of them involve getting the President to better explain the actions of his Administration -- the idea being that everything's great but the rabble aren't getting the message.

Point one is "Renew attention to Afghanistan. The American invasion of that country had the support of the world... Talk about what's being done, and how, and why." So hey, how's it going over there?

The Army's chief of staff said Wednesday that he was frustrated by security lapses at Bagram air base in Afghanistan that led to the loss of potentially sensitive data, and that the military must learn how to be more careful with new technology.

Weeks after revelations that flash drives carrying sensitive and classified information have turned up for sale in a bazaar outside Bagram, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker said the Army was trying to improve how soldiers used and secured flash drives.

annnnnd...

Mariam Rawi, a member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), has told the forum that despite Afghanistan receiving billions of dollars in aid, little has been done to address the country's lack of health services.

"(Afghanistan) is a land that is facing (a) health disaster worse than (the) tsunami," Ms Rawi told a lecture at the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre in Adelaide.

"Seven hundred children and 50 to 70 women die on (a) daily basis due to the lack of health services...."

annnnd...

Australia warned Thursday of a high threat of terrorist attacks in the Afghan capital during celebrations marking the overthrow of communist rule by mujahedeen fighters...

The U.S. Embassy in Kabul posted a warning Thursday advising Americans to limit their travel in the next two days due to the holiday and two bombings Tuesday on the road leading to Kabul's airport, which wounded two people...

annnnd... scene. Though you can go back to the well and get corkers like this just about anytime. Curse that Em Ess Em!

Item number two is our wonderful economy, about which The People are not sufficiently sanguine. CJL tries a couple of angles of explanation: first, "Americans, a deeply savvy lot, never want to tell a politician he's doing well on the economy because their applause may lead him to feel he can shift focus to, say, colonizing Mars." (Pffft, yeah, like that'll stop him!)

Then -- and with this passage, the buzzing of a fly or a distant car horn may have suddenly shifted the Crazy Jesus Lady back to our temporal sphere -- "The biggest complaint I hear now from people who email me from all parts of the country is that they're being worked to death, longer hours at the office, can't see the kids. Gas prices are up and up, etc..."

Well, yeah. While even the hated MSM laud our "hot" economy, the punters are none too pleased with how things are going financially. As I've said before, higher productivity numbers mean that people who have jobs are working harder than before, and my uneducated guess is that most of those accelerating rat-racers aren't just laying up extra scratch for a Cayman Islands vacation or a summer home. We're a hardworking people, but in the face of wages and job security that are each going in the wrong direction, who wouldn't wonder why he has to run faster just to stay in place, and suspect that profits benefit from his sweat more than wages?

(Forgive my belaboring the point a moment, but this really is the hardest thing for conservatives to understand. They say things like this: "Pointing out the market's marvels will not console the worker who lost his job to a machine or a foreign worker. To him the process remains vicious and absurd. 'Why cut my job to save a few bucks?'" -- and then console the poor stiff by pointing out that "Job security no longer means fighting to keep the same job for 30 years, it means keeping ourselves marketable." Oh, well, great! I'm different from a 14th Century peasant, because I also have to go to night school! Get a further reality check here.)

The third CJL talking point shows that she is but mad north-by-northwest: when the wind is southerly, she can racebait like a champ. Americans are skeptical about Mexicans working on American soil. The results of the poll are inconclusive -- respondents seem to be responding more to drift in U.S. policy than to xenophobic impulses -- but a less generous reading warms the cockles of Buchananite hearts.

CJL recalls what a split between the Bush family and Pat's pitchfork brigade did in 1992, and hopes that, if she flings herself hard enough against the White House barricades, the Great Man will miraculously walk out and lift her lips to his ear, and take the populist bait. It may be, then, that she buried her lede. She may imagine that she is communicating in a code based upon the Rule of Three, with the first two ridiculous ideas as mere cover. Maybe such a code has been prearranged, and the boys and girls in the West Wing are now reducing it to simple words that the Commander in Chief can understand. We'll see soon enough.

GREETINGS FROM OUR NATION'S CAPITAL II. Thanks for all the well-wishes, folks. No horrible news to report from NIH. I'm still clinically interesting, though, so I'll be back.

Someone mentioned the Dada show at the other wing of the National Gallery -- I got that one in, too. The Dada movement was so successful, as PR and as a polestar for its initiates, that to this day it impedes my view of the actual work. For example, if I had only seen his work here, and hadn't also seen his great retrospective at the Met last year, I might not think much of Max Ernst -- interesting, talented, I might judge, but too much of a clown. Maybe this works against conceptual art more than other kinds, but for dummies like me the Dada brand has the same blinding power as Prada or Versace. (Interestingly, the ones who most easily override this effect, like Grosz and Arp and the unnamed genius layout artists of the Dada publications, are more graphic artists than fine artists. In a visually cheapened environment, good illustration always cuts through.)

The curators were very clever to break the exhibition into sections pertaining to each big Dada scene (Paris, Zurich, etc.), which emphasizes the Dada phenomenon over the art, and to provide lots and lots of signage. This sort of justifies its presence in a DC Mall museum: as soon as you enter the first gallery of grim World War I footage, you can tell this is teaching exhibit suitable to the Smithsonian (I know NGA isn't part of it, but close enough), and at least as these kids feast their eyes on all the weird images they'll be made to know it means something; later, when they're older and if they're interested, they can go a little deeper in.

In this spirit, it was a real pleasure to watch the performance of Antheil's Ballet Mechanique -- now, that's one guy I seriously doubt gets any more substantive -- with a gaggle of Catholic high-school kids, who were visibly amused by the goofy sound effects and dynamic shifts, and visibly bored by those passages unpunctuated by same. Nothing fades faster than last century's wisecracks.

UPDATE. Let me clarify a little. I am neither pro- nor anti-Dada; I love some of the artists, and I may like the rest better when I see more of them. (On the strength of his showing at the National Gallery, for example, I'd certainly like to see more Rudolf Schlichter.) But as the Gallery does a service, I guess, to the historical memory of Dada, I think it does few favors to the artists themselves, encouraging us to read their offerings as artifacts rather than as artworks.

I had a similar problem with last year's East Village USA show at the New Museum. Live artistic movements provide energy and community to artists; dead ones are just millstones round their necks. Who wants a Dada study? It reminds me of a kid I saw once at the Tate, copying in his sketchbook some ridiculous squiggle by Tracey Emin. (Maybe he was just making a statement; a few days earlier, a couple of guys had come to the Tate, stripped to their skivvies, and bounced on Emin's Bed yelling "I am Art!" until someone carried them away.)

Maybe part of the issue is the rejection of aesthetics built into the Dada manifesto. I've always looked at it as a brilliant McGuffin that gave some talented people, who'd been stultified by the standards of their time, license to break free. Enlightenment is always in front of us, but some of us need a guy to sell us a mantra. The fuse that lit the Soy Bomb is burnt out, and it is left for each of us to find (to paraphrase the poet Lee Hazlewood) his own brand new box of matches.

GREETINGS FROM OUR NATION'S CAPITAL. Sorry for the delay in posting, but for this year's edition of Edroso Faces Mortality, budget considerations have forced me to take lodging at a Days Inn in Arlington, VA, which does not have computers available for use by guests. I'm entering this from a clinic waiting room at the National Institutes of Health, Building 10, where I am about to have something called a Dopamine Test. I'm not sure what it is but it sounds bad. Of course, one time they pumped me full of glucagon to make my heart race, then pumped me full of clonidine to slow it down, so this could hardly be worse, unless it involves a catheter. I hate those things. (Last time one of the doctors wanted to give me a test in which a camera -- a very small one, I was assured -- would be sent up my urethra. They couldn't get an anaesthesiologist, so this guy wanted to just do a local and go on ahead. Though a mere layman, I surmised that cramming a camera up my cock with nothing but a little Campho-Phenique to dull the pain was something to be avoided at all costs, and promised to get it done by my own doctors as soon as I got back home. (I still haven't, though. You rush to schedule such a procedure for yourself!)

I have so far had the usual revolting solutions, injections, and scans, but also a bit of liberty. Some of it I have spent traipsing the Mall. The high point so far, not likely to be topped, is the "Cezanne in Provence" show at the National Gallery. I'm not only ignorant but pig-ignorant of Cezanne, but I think this show, despite the absence of didactic signage, taught me a lot about him. The show is mostly landscapes, ranging from youthful effulgences like the Chestnut Tree and Basin at the Jas de Bouffan (in which a stunning lake of peach signifies the sunlit portion of a dirt path) to the severe abstractions of his old age. (A quote by Cezanne implies that deterioration of his eyesight enforced this approach -- he seems to have been resigned about it. Has someone written about the effect of optical disorders on great artists? I still remember an old medical ad that asked whether El Greco painted as he did because he was a genius or because he had astigmatism.) It was wonderful to see how many ways he could make foliage -- dabs, diagonal streaks, little impasto'd chips. Maybe because I'm simple-minded, it never ceases to amaze me that some little dark-green line in a pale-lime cloud of oil can make such an obvious mass of leaves, or that the table in The Cardplayers, which I took completely at face value for two minutes, is just a mass of burnt umber. This is mastery as observed by the children it makes of us.

Nuclear Medicine has paged me. More later.

THIS IS WHY I TRY TO SLEEP IN ON SUNDAYS. On "Meet the Press" I saw a clip of President Bush delivering an oration with that fervency and straight-forwardness that his supporters love and which we have not seen in a while. He was defending Donald Rumsfeld. No wonder Bush is polling so low. When he defends the Iraq experiment he sounds like he's reading boilerplate, but he gets all hot talking about Donald Rumsfeld.

Then Mike Leavitt from Health & Human Services came on "The McLaughlin Group" to tell us that the problem with U.S. health care is that too many people are getting sick.

Speaking of health care, posting may be light over the next week as I am off to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD to submit myself for examination pertaining to my mutant tumor-suppressor gene. Ah, well, it could be worse.

AND DON'T GET ME STARTED ON LITTLE DOT. I love the internet! How else would I have learned this breaking news about my dear old childhood friend Baby Huey:

Plans are now afoot to bring Huey back a la "Barney and Friends" in a live-action children's program. He recently appeared in a direct-to-video feature "Baby Huey's Great Easter Adventure" and also appears on Fox Family Channel's "The Harveytoon Show" and in "The Harvey Magazine."

When I was a child I took Baby Huey in stride, but now I realize that I was taking pleasure in the antics of a giant, retarded cartoon duck. With his primitive speech ("Duh-uh, he play good!"), his sudden, tearful rages, and his troubled family relations ("Huey's impatient and ill-tempered Papa usually finds himself at the receiving end of Baby's well-intended gestures," spins the Harvey website), Huey could keep a clinician occupied for years. And he wore a diaper! What could be more politically incorrect? Suck Harvey Comic dick, South Parkers!

Bonus points: the Baby Huey movie was directed by Stephen "Flounder" Furst, stars Maureen McCormick, Joseph Bologna, and Tiffany Taubman as Li'l Audrey, and draws this lovely IMDB comment:

Quite admittedly, this isn't the best movie in the world. But the fact that it's so camp-ish makes it better than if it had seemed terribly serious in nature. Then again, the only reason I have seen this movie so many times is that I am such a huge fan of David L. Lander (who is positively adorable here), and the inclusion of other classic TV stars is fun (if not a little sad that this is the best material some of them can get). My sister said of this movie after watching it, "It's bad, but in a good way." Very true. I love most of the music in here (but try not to laugh at a giant baby duck singing a heart-felt song about not belonging anywhere)...

Now I know what to pair with They Call Me Bruce at my next big double-feature party, assuming Netflix gets on the fucking ball.

Plus which, if there's any market for this at all, I'm sure Harvey will go for my proposed Cursin' Curtis, the Mongoose with Tourette's Syndrome™:



It's little more than a concept now, but with the help of David Mamet I think we might just have something.

'E KNEW ALL THE TRICKS... DRAMATIC IRONY, METAPHOR, BATHOS... Who can take Taranto (who can take Taranto!) and semioticize (semioticize!) until the room is piled with bullshit right up to your eyes... here's Jeff Goldstein on traitors (that's you, me, and us):

Which is to say, in the absense of some provable metaphysical Truth, many in the media or on the anti-war left (and right) have come to believe that there is a relativity to truth that justifies the use of rhetoric and persuasion in any way necessary to reach the desired end of convincing the public of the rectitude of their particular narrative.

In other words, liberals stick up for themselves because they're depraved. Rhetoric and persuasion -- the last refuge of a scoundrel!

(We often use mockery, too. Not that Goldstein would notice.)

SHORTER JIM LILEKS: Dance critics don't know as much about dance as right-wing radio hosts do. What, you think I'm some kind of puritan? I went to a museum today!

AND I SWEAR THAT I DON'T HAVE A GUN. As a qualified fan of the Second Amendment, I'm always surprised when gun nuts turn to New York as an arena for their obsessions. It's about the crappiest 2A argument imaginable: Our City's famous crime drop was largely based on confiscation of guns. And isn't social utility -- "an armed society is a polite society" -- the strongest, or at least the most popular, argument those guys have?

Thus I am pleased to hear of the great gun giveback in New Orleans, mandated by an NRA lawsuit, and some of the humorous details pertaining thereunto:

Some gun owners found the weapons were evidence in a crime and not eligible for release. Others did not have the proper paperwork...

Police Superintendent Warren Riley said police had legitimate reasons for confiscating weapons.

"We took guns that were stolen that were stashed in alleyways. If we went into an abandoned house and a gun was there, absolutely we took the weapons," he said. "Obviously there were looters out there. We didn't want some burglar or looter to have an opportunity to arm themselves."

All due respect to those who reflexively question police motives in witholding firearms, but I applaud the officers' reticence. In civil society, where you and I presumably live, a gun is usually not diddy's shootin' arn mounted over the fireplace, nor an exact equivalent of speech, but a portable deadly weapon obtained with a view toward use. Lord knows that in a semi-lawless jurisdiction, good people may wish to have them, and I would like to see them better able to do so, but I also see no earthly reason why they should not be required to own up to their possession.

So I'm not a purist. At least I'm not as anti-gun as Ronald Reagan.

FIRST AMENDMENT "USE IT AND LOSE IT" ARGUMENT OF THE WEEK: Christopher "Glug Glug" Hitchens, talking about the Plame case at Hugh Hewitt:

There's been a terrible collapse of, and surrender of, the 1st Amendment in the last few years, and it's very largely the fault of a press that's lost all sense of proportion in its determination to get Karl Rove.

There is no zeal like that of a convert, but I'm amazed that anyone as proud of his intellect as Hitchens would be willing to mouth stark absurdities such as this on the radio. I guess he figured that, on Hewitt's show, no one would notice.

CHINA SYNDROME. Chinese President Hu Jintao has come to see President Bush. He stopped off in Seattle first:

Mr Hu was all business at the start of his tour. Dinner at Bill Gates' house in Seattle, followed by a cafe latte with Howard Schultz, chairman of the Starbucks chain of coffee shops, then on to the Boeing plant, before moving to the east coast, with an itinerary that includes a speech at Mr Bush's alma mater, Yale.

This is not surprising. China is our valued business partner. Per this interesting story in China's People's Daily,

In 2005, bilateral trade between China and the United States rose to 211.63 billion U.S. dollars, an increase of more than 86 times over 1979, when the two countries established diplomatic relations.

China has become the third largest trading partner and the fourth largest export market for the United States, which in turn, is now China's second largest trading partner, with bilateral trade rising 27.4 percent annually between 2001 and 2005.

"Bilateral trade" is a polite term. "...in 2005, China's surplus with the United States surged more than 43 percent, to a record $114.7 billion, compared with $80 billion the prior year and $28 billion in 2001," reports the New York Times via CFO magazine. China sends us goods and services, made cheap by their gigantic and modestly-paid workforce, and we send them lots and lots of dollars.

This is not the sort of thing that roils conservatives much anymore, though a few get a little more exercised about Google, which a few days ago pathetically excused the censored version of its product it has exported for use in China. "It is not an option for us to broadly make information available that is illegal, inappropriate or immoral or what have you," said Google's Eric Schmidt.

One almost wishes he'd said, "Murdoch did it first." (And still does.) But Murdoch and Schmidt are not the only ones who cross a rather muddy culture gap to grab market share in China; while clothing wholesalers do not generally deal with censorship issues, they do benefit from the Chinese approach to labor relations.

As, one may say, we all do. We perhaps fear what might happen to our economy if we applied to our trading partners the sort of rigorous behavioral standards we occasionally, and selectively, apply to Arab dictatorships. Of course, it may be that we have reasons to fear in any case. But we ease our consciences a bit with the thought that it is not our decision in any case, but that of our business classes and their political enablers, who long ago won an argument about the primacy of the free market, and so have been allowed to work their will in he world unobstructed by noisome regulations, or even a second thought.

UPDATE. They seem to come up every time the President meets with folks like Hu: fantasies that our government will send a "message" to the tyrants -- a pro-democracy one, that is, rather than "Keep them cheap shirts and blouses a-comin'!" Are these fantasists trying to fool other people, or themselves? I could spend a lot of time wondering, if I had time to spend.

WHAT I WAS DOING 17 YEARS AGO. Found on YouTube:

Clearly things went downhill after that.

I don't know the etiquette of these things, but I have to thank EuckyCheese for getting this out in the open.

MULTIPLE PULITZER-PRIZE LOSERS SPEAK! This year's Pulitzer Prize winners are traitors, complain many conservatives in no danger of ever winning one (some of whom take time to graphically demonstrate why.)

Others complain that Pulitzer laureates are insufficiently respectful of powerful Republicans. "We'll have more to say about this year's Pulitzers as time goes by," darkly mutter the guys from Power Line, whose Time Blog of 2004 award must be looking awful lonely on the mantlepiece these days.

You hear it every year. It is a mystery. They brag constantly on the superiority of that alternate universe they call the blogosphere, yet piss and moan about the Pulitzers as if Joseph P. personally broke their prom date.

As usual here at this hardcore libertarian blog, my solution is market-based: Why don't these whiners just set up their own journamalism awards? They could call them the Coughlins.

OLD, YES. BURNED-OUT, YES. BUT I CAN TELL YOU THAT THE MEMORIES ARE STILL THERE. Hey look, Spencer Tracy's speech from the end of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner has been published on the web! It's even longer and more tedious than I remember. The faux-crusty attempt to show what a good, tolerant liberal he is -- man, that hasn't aged well at all. Some of the lines surprise me -- "The anti-Americanism now infecting so much left-liberal (and some conservative) thinking" I don't quite recall, but maybe he was thinking of the kids who embarrassed him at the drive-through or something.

Anyway it doesn't play as well on the page as on the stage, but I'm sure we'll see plenty of public readings of this hooey in the near future. With such muscular liberals as Michael Ledeen supporting it, it's sure to be a big hit among the blogeoisie.

SHORTER ROSS DOUTHAT: I'll still jerk off to Jennifer Aniston, but it won't be the same.

I HAD TO GIVE MYSELF AN EMERGENCY BAPTISM WITH BEER. Sister Mary Anchoress has hiked up her habit and hopped on that South Park bandwagon. Good news, Catholic-school classmates: pooping on Jesus is a-ok with the penguin if it makes the Anchoress look tolerant:

The “pooping” was designed, I’m sure, to see if some of the religious and right-winged folks who lionized the series last week (like me) would pop blood vessels this week - these Libertarian boys are still sly enough to make sure they push the right buttons! But I think they didn’t give folks on the right, and some religious folk, enough credit. We’re not babies, and we don’t spend all of our time crying victim and carrying on about “hurtful” messages and “mean-spirited” words. That’s a different gang of folk...

Different gang of folk? Does she mean the one that helped her write the first part of the same post?

(Please note: Comedy Central is owned by Viacom, which also owns MTV, which is doing THIS because it’s okay to mock Catholics and the Crucifixion. They don’t pose a threat.)

The THIS that riles the Anchoress is a "full-page advertisements depicting Jesus, wearing a crown of thorns but descended from the cross, enjoying a television program."

So right after bitching and moaning, she says her kind doesn't bitch and moan. Maybe ecstatic visions are affecting her short-term memory.

Coming next: the War on Whitsuntide!

UPDATE. Why do I get the impression that these people don't actually laugh at South Park? From the stiff way they write about it, they seem not to enjoy its jokes per se. If your reaction to a cartoon is, "Me, I was just happy to see someone, anyone, in the pop culture world confront some of the fundamental issues raised by the Cartoon Jihad for a mainstream American audience," I wouldn't consider that a rave. (Raving, maybe.) Is everything politics to them?

UPDATE II. I suppose I needn't link to the millions of extant examples of Catholics being all free-speechy and unwhiney, but this one is just too appropriate.

WHO THREW THE IMMIGRANTS IN PEGGY NOONAN'S CHOWDER? PARTE DOS.

One night [after 9/11], about 11 p.m., I was walking home with friends, going north on the wide, dark highway, and we came upon a woman, a thick middle-aged woman, dark skinned and dark haired. She was with a baby in a stroller. She was, I think, not the mother but the grandmother. They were there alone, in the darkness. Affixed to the stroller was a hand-lettered sign, and on the sign were these words: "American You Are Not Alone -- Mexico Is With You." All alone and she came out with that sign, at that time. I have tried to tell that story in speeches and I can never make my way through it, and as I write my eyes fill with tears...

...of laughter, Peggy? Please say they were tears of laughter, provoked by the sight of new Mexican ambassador Juanita la Loca, offering America the protection of Mexico, and perhaps a bag of peeled oranges!

No, the Crazy Jesus Lady is still Crazy and Jesus and Lady, and now she's on about immigrants, in this case Hispanics who recently marched gleefully in New York while other ethnic stereotypes labored:

In fact, I did not see a single Asian in the march. They were all working, in the shops and on the street. They had no intention of letting yet another New York march get in the way of business. And you know, the marchers seemed to sense it. They didn't spend long in Chinatown. As far as I could see they didn't make it to Little Italy, either.

Actually I understand the Italians didn't march because they were all in jail. Or was it church? I do remember that the blacks were washing their cars -- oh wait, shit! That was the Puerto Ricans!* How did this march ever get started?

In the main CJL wants to tell us Routine Twelve, aka The Responsible Republican Position That Is No Position at All: "I think those whose primary concern is preserving the Hispanic vote for the Democratic Party, or not losing the Hispanic vote for the Republican Party, are being cynical, selfish, and stupid, too." The solution being a furrowed brow, an insistence on "continuing a system of laws" (which has obviously not worked and thus means the status quo), and another round of Johnny Jameson.

Things were no different in the days of Pegeen's immigrant forebears, as is shown by a recent black-and-white two-reeler that has mysteriously come into my possession:

East Side, New York. Someone plays "She's the Daughter of Rosie O'Grady" on a concertina. Camera pans up from kids playing skelly and stickball in the streets, along the blackened bricks of a tenement, to the window of the Noonans' two-room apartment. We enter as PA NOONAN holds forth to MA NOONAN and their brood of 19 children:

PA NOONAN: Can yez believe it! They're givin' our jobs t'a doorty Eye-talians! An' thim livin' roight down oor strait! Ha, but tonight -- (Holds a paving stone in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other) we'll giv 'em a party, complete wit' Oirish confetti! (Drinks deeply).

MA NOONAN: (Eyes rolled back in her head) Yerra, 'tis a power o' sorrow surely! Holy Mary, mither a' Gawd, pray fer us sinners...

(Six babies cry at once. MOIKE, a fellow-bricklayer of PA NOONAN's, comes into the apartment.)

PA NOONAN: Moike, ye stink loik a brewery, ye doorty beast!

MOIKE: Is it me, is it? I t'aught it was a diaper. (Quietly) I'm after sendin' the guns to Michael Collins an' the' boys. Sure an' Oirlan' will be a Republic afore Spring, I'm t'inkin, if we spill enough innocent blood! Here's yer cut o' the loot. (hands him money.)

PA NOONAN: Saints be praised! Now I c'n buy more whiskey! An' git Thomas Nast t' do me por-trait!

MA NOONAN: Now, Pa Noonan, ye should lay that money up. We c'n be good citizens now, I'm thinkin', an' be Senators and Presidents and maybe even socially-conscious fellas as sings on th' grammaphone.

MOIKE: (pointing out the window) Look, Pat! Chinkees!

PA NOONAN: (runs to window, roaring) Ye yella bastards'll niver take jobs from proper Americans such as oursilvs!

(They heave everything but the money and the whiskey out the window as the music swells.)

* It is well-established, of course, that the Polish thought it was Sunday.

CULTURE WAR FOR DUMMIES. Here's a complaint at The Corner that an advertising campaign for a bank is "warm-and-fuzzy liberal hocus-pocus." The parody version that follows defies rational analysis.

UPDATE. The item has been pulled and updated since I first saw it. In case they pull it again, here's a screenshot.

The new wording is marginally less incendiary, but amazingly they left the parody ad. I doubt that whatever equivalence it is meant to demonstrate could be expressed in words; I suggest the author try interpretive dance.

In other world news, the Ole Perfesser suggests that the MSM is lying to you about Cheney getting booed on Opening Day. Nobody ever yells "Yankees Suck" or "Jeter is a faggot" at Fenway, either -- I mean, you never hear it in the broadcasts.

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.

TIME AWAY. Appy polly loggies for the gap in posting. Like the devil, I went down to Georgia, on a long-weekend visit to editor Martin and his family. Their little slice of heaven is best described by themselves, here, but I will say that, contrary to the impression I often give of myself, I always love going down South, where people are unfailingly polite and the pulled pork is like God intended. Down Kingsland way, I also enjoyed Spanish moss, cypress, wisteria, bourbon, and the tannin-brown waters of St. Mary's River.

I didn't look at the internet the whole time, and I guess nothing much changed -- in fact, I see the Ole Perfesser is still calling people traitors as if it were 2003. Or 1954. One of the benefits of making fun of people who never learn anything is that you can go away for a long while and when you come back, they're still idiots.

WHAT CORPORATE-CHURCH DOMINATED MEDIA? Well, Tom Cruise got the "South Park" Scientology episode pulled.

Come to think of it, "South Park" recently buckled to the Catholic League on the bleeding Virgin Mary episode, too. Looks like there are indeed limits to the show's famously limitless irreverence.

You realize, of course, that if Barbra Streisand and Alec Baldwin had tried that kind of arm-twisting, you would have heard Glenn Harlan Reynolds screaming all the way from Bumfuck, TN.

POGUE MAHON. A reader points out that the leprechaun on today's National Review masthead looks gay. Oh, yeah? Well, Allan Bloom was still a fine American, pal!

Anyway, St. Paddy's is celebrated at Nat Rev, as you might expect, by a Scotsman bitching that the Irish are not authentically Irish enough to suit him. (Maybe he's a Crunchy Conservative!) Said Scot also seems to think that "fine, honest, unpretentious Dublin pubs... 'renovated' to look like the fake Irish pubs you might easily find in places such as Frankfurt Airport" are an example of "postmodernism." Really? Sounds like American-style, tasteless capitalism to me -- but of course, except for Dreher's hippies, National Review is in favor of that sort of thing, so the Scot is obliged to use the conservatively-correct swear word "postmodern" instead of the right one. What a horrible way to have to go through life; I hope they pay these poor dolts well.

Oh, and the NatRevvers do spare a few tears for a colleen done doort by the fookin' RA, but only as a lead-in to one of most hilarious Bush blowjobs of all time:

Ah, but here President Bush reveals his moral depth. He grasps how one of the fundamental lessons of Sophocles’ Antigone applies to this case: in a democracy the purpose of the state is to safeguard the dignity of each and every individual.

One likes to imagine Bush tentatively mouthing "Soffi -- soffi -- sofficle --" as his thought-balloon fills with corned beef and cabbage, frosty mugs of O'Doul's, and a leprechaun commanding him to invade Iran.

Finally there's this silly bint, who uses a War-on-Christmas lede to barge into the magazine, then just wastes everyone's time. OK, not entirely -- she does offer a solid contender for the Worst Multicultural Moment Contest:

One year at the Irish fair — to which the Scots also come with their Highland games — I brought along a Hispanic friend. After wandering the grounds watching the dancing, eating grilled bangers, and listening to the music, she remarked, "I didn't realize white people had culture!" And after being transfixed by a hot bagpipe player, she was hooked.

Have I been wrong all these years? Does a St. Patrick's Day parade really reflect white culture? Then Vive la Reconquista! Also, she closes, "In the sense that silly traditions keep the Irish in America from being more than just another pale face, the culture war is won." It is? It's over? Does that mean she and her idiot friends will stop bitching about homos in the movies and such like? I can't wait to check tomorrow and see if it's really true!

Till then, y'all have as authentic or inauthentic a St. P as you like. I don't think I'll have time to get to one of our few remaining Blarney Stones earlier than noon, which sort of defeats the whole self-loathing purpose, but I will taste at some point the Water of Life, and think of you as I do.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY. I see that in the new movie "She's The Man," Amanda Bynes pretends to be a boy. Why hasn't Stanley Kurtz written a column yet about how this will destroy marriage?

UPDATE. Kurtz does post, just to sympathize with fellow nut Charles Krauthammer for having gay friends ("It’s a position many are in").

I'm morbidly afraid of bees myself, but over the years I've pretty much gotten it under control.

ANIMALCULE AND HOMONOCULUS. Just read How The Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis. Riis is of course well under our American skin by now, partly because of the famous photos he took while assiduously documenting the slum conditions of lower Manhattan as a pioneer photojournalist of the late 19th Century. (One of my old bands, Lancaster County Prison, used his photo of Bandit's Roost for the back cover of our first album.) Riis was Danish, and from all I can tell his English is largely self-taught; his prose is stiff, but his style beautifully suits the earnestness of his mission and temperment. Here is a lovely example from his autobiography, The Making of an American, in which Riis, who flailed through several occupations before dragging himself upon the perch of Reformer, describes the issue of a job peddling furniture in upstate New York:

I got home in time to assist in the winding up of the concern. The iron-clad contracts had done the business. My customers would not listen to explanations. When told that the price of these tables was lower than the cost of working up the wood, they replied that it was none of their business. They had their contracts. The Allegheny man threatened suit, if I remember rightly, and the firm gave up. Nobody blamed me, for I had sold according to orders; but instead of $450 which I had figured out as my commission, I got seventy-five cents. It was half of what my employer had. He divided squarely, and I could not in reason complain.

"I could not in reason complain" -- Riis is an accommodating soul, and as he accommodated his employer's needs with his own, notwithstanding the wretched, disadvantageous state in which that bargain left him, in How the Other Half Lives Riis similarly accommodates the outrage of slum misery to what he takes to be the American bargain, that is, assimilation as the price of human dignity. The inhumanity of the tenement was to Riis a result of disorder, and for him the chief disorder was that of the inchoate, pan-European mob that peopled the Fifth Ward and thereabouts:

The one thing you shall vainly ask for in the chief city of America is a distinctively American community. There is none; certainly not among the tenements. Where have they gone to, the old inhabitants?... They are not here. In their place has come this queer conglomerate mass of heterogeneous elements, ever striving and working like whiskey and water in o glass, and with the like result: final union and a prevailing taint of whiskey.

Riis' characterizations of the various unassimilated downtown ethnics are hard on modern ears. Among the Jews, "The old women are hags; the young, houris... thrift is the watchword of Jewtown, and of its people the world over." The "tractability" of the Italian is noted: "he is welcomed as the tenant who 'makes less trouble' than the contentious Irishman or the order-loving German"; also, "as the Chinaman hides his knife in his sleeve and the Italian his stiletto in the bosom, so the negro goes to the ball with a razor in his bootleg, and on occasion does as much execution with it as both of the others together." In every event these people are pictured as childish and prone to anima that overwhelm common sense, and on those occasions when common sense prevails, Riis sees the victory as much over the man's blood as over himself.

It is plain that Riis saw and drew this little world in the simplest terms, and simple also was his diagnosis and his prescription: he saw the slum itself as an agent of dissolution, and had faith (and some evidence) that the reformation of the slum would lead to the reformation of its inhabitants into something more, as he saw it, American. And lo, his work did help to reform the tenements, and good things did come from that.

Sociologically, we have to see Riis now as a primitive who succeeded, as all scientific pioneers do, by means of metaphor -- like the Leeuwenhoeks who found "animalcules" in water and began to dream of their relationship to the larger world. We who value the metaphor itself, and the record of progress of a human mind struggling to fathom the uncomprehended, can get still more from Riis. His chunky prose is a pleasure to me even when it eddies in sloughs of prejudice, and because its author is a good man looking not to slither comfortably along a Bell Curve but to find the harder way to truth, he often transcends the surly bonds of social work, and ascends to literature, carving a path for Dreiser (another blockish writer), Crane, Algren, Di Donato, and many another:

A man stood at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street the other day, looking gloomily at the carriages that rolled by, carrying the wealth and fashion of the avenues to and from the big stores down town. He was poor, and hungry, and ragged. This thought was in his mind: "They behind their well-fed teams have no thought for the morrow; they know hunger only by name, and ride down to spend in an hours shopping what would keep me and my little ones from want a whole year." There rose up before him the picture of those little ones crying for bread around the cold and cheerless hearth -- then he sprang into the throng and slashed about him with a knife, blindly seeking to kill, to revenge.

The man was arrested, of course, and locked up. Today he is probably in a mad-house, forgotten. And the carriages roll by to and from the big stores with their gay throng of shoppers. The world forgets easily, too easily, what it does not like to remember.