AU HASARD, CONEY ISLAND. Went down to Coney today. I had my softshell crab at Nathan's, bumper cars, skeeball, wade on the beach, and drinks at Ruby's, as per usual. And I enjoyed also the vicarious company of Coney's faithful, for whom the place is an oasis: the hipsters and tourists, but mainly the poor, who wandered the boardwalk and soaked up the negative ions, clams and corndogs, loud noises, and other cheap thrills. As Puerto Rican Day paraders filtered back to Brooklyn a little circle was formed on the Boardwalk within which speakers blared salsa and drunk Boricuas danced, some as obscenely as possible. Kids screamed on the cheesy rides and wolfed cotton candy and regarded their garish surroundings with obvious wonder, as if this ramshackle amusement park were the greatest place on earth.

I don't know how long any of us will have this opportunity:

Joe Sitt’s Thor Equities bought the Astroland site late last year to level and build a $2-billion Vegas-style amusement-condo complex.

Thor’s theme park would include movie theaters, beachfront luxury condos, a 150-foot waterslide, a multi-level carousel, and first new roller coaster since the Cyclone was built in 1927.

To build his Xanadu, Sitt needs a city rezoning — one that city officials have been reluctant to give, though negotiations continue. Neither Sitt nor city officials would comment on those talks for this article.

As anyone who follows City development might have guessed, the developers have not been idle: a fat strip of amusements has already been torn away. Some sideshows and snack-shops are gone, as are the batting cages and the miniature golf course.

I mourn these, but I am especially sorry to have lost the go-kart tracks. Many of us New Yorkers don't drive, and appreciated the go-karts, outfitted with absurd fiberglas Formula-One shells, as our best chance to indulge in a reckless simulacrum of same. We revved the noisy lawn-mower motors, bounced off the tires that buffered the hairpin turns, and engaged in joyful and ridiculous combat with the other Speed Racers, some of them laughing out loud at the absurdity of it, some fixing a dead-eyed gaze on the scrap of daylight for which they were competing. What's left of our little arena, the late International Speedway, is pictured above.

Other photos of the devastation are available at the Gowanus Lounge. As one of the commenters puts it, "There will be only condos in Coney Island. Thor wants to kill Coney Island, proof is in their fences which their permits proudly proclaim they will only be there for this summer season and will disappear right after labor day. Why make Coney look like crap for the summer season? To drive business away."

I think that's right. Business was a bit slow for a relatively nice Sunday, and the Parade may have been the least of the anti-attraction. Everyone knows the fix is in. When the West Side Stadium was defeated, it was because another corporate behemoth, Cablevision, pushed against it. But there's no well-heeled sugar daddy sticking up for old Coney now. Its disposition is totally in the hands of the developers and the City, which is to say that the developers will win, with some fiddling around the edges as a sop to civic interest -- "a circus, an inflatable slide and movies under the stars."

Well, as Jack Lemmon sighed in Save the Tiger about jockstraps made from the American flag, maybe it's terrific. I don't live at this end of the F train: maybe the community's interests are indeed best served by condos and circuses. The spread of money in this City is relentless, and while Coney would seem at present a bridge too far, who am I, an unmoneyed interest, to dispute the wisdom of real estate? It may be there is jam enough in the housing boom to magnetize wealth into this far-flung neighborhood, and I can't in good conscience hope against it; though my thirty years' experience of local booms and busts tells me that a developer's long-odds crap shoot often ends with the City (that is, us citizens) covering his tab, I must pray for a positive result -- especially since, things being what they are, there's no chance of stopping the game.

I cannot mourn too much. Coney's pleasure palaces of yore, Luna Park and Dreamland, burned and faded from the grasp of those who loved them before I came onto the scene; now I, in my turn, must accept that the Coney I know is also passing away. It may become something like South Street Seaport, or Battery Park City. Or it may become a speculator's loss, like Columbia Gardens in Butte, Montana -- about which I was told by Stephanie Cannon, a Montana native who was my companion on today's outting, and for whom I won a stuffed tiger on the Midway. Columbia Gardens was a children's amusement park dedicated, allegedly in perpetuity, by 19th Century copper king W. A. Clark. In 1973, it was destroyed by the proprietors of the Berkeley Mine in the vain hope that more copper could be extracted from the ground beneath it, and soon became a rancid Superfund site: a pit of fetid water and the corpses of local wildlife.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

YOU AND YOUR RACIST FRIEND.

This long spring, I started reconnecting with old gay friends...

Well, good for you. (The writer is at ChicagoBoyz, a site dedicated to reconciling bullshit libertarianism with conservative bullshitism.)

I've been struck by how many of them have become politicized, beset by BDS.

Why gay friends no like Bush? A thousand voices -- perhaps even the ones in her head -- leap to answer, so the author hastens to explain:

The long history of marriage is of an institution that raises the next generation and transmits the community’s values...

Tempted to go, "Oh, great, here it comes," and run away? Abide yet a while, friends, because God made wingnuts as different as snowflakes, and this one has her own piquant ways. Let us therefore celebrate our diversity, and get a load of this:

It is easier to believe others tempt us than within us are desires we must (and with difficulty) control. To many, the shift from the Old Testament to the New may be theologically one of grace, but is also from the tribal to the universal, from the external to the internal. Whether this is the lesson of the Bible or of the slowly modernizing world, it is clearly one that restrains us in ways that those who see temptation in a right angle can not understand and leads to quite different understandings of guilt. The man’s lust, we believe, not the woman’s clothing, causes rape. This and so much else is the mark of a value system internalized and assumed universal. We think it is right. Sure this assumption of a certain universality may impose upon others, but it is more practical than narrow: it is also the only way that people with varying beliefs can easily live beside one another.

And thanks to Jewish psychologists, we began to find words for this internalization...

I can hear you, through the double glass, screaming, "Please get some of those words the Jewish psychologists found, or even words found by Bratislavian librarians or Eskimo meter-readers, and substitute them for this dreck!"

I apologize. I just wanted to give you an example of the sort of word-fog some educated but very confused people throw up when they are stuck with a dilemma they can't even acknowledge, let alone solve.

The author's real point, made somewhere in the first hundred paragraphs, is that homosexuals should shut up about Bush because he protects them from Muslims. But she finds it at least as important to explain -- with endless slabs of convoluted prose as evidence -- that she is well-read and even a bit artistic. This is meant to signal that she is not a mouth-breathing faggot-hater, but someone who is tolerant -- which is to say, she tolerates both her gay friends' continued existence and her colleagues' continued discrimination against them.

This is usually the case with conservative converts of the sort described by Michael Berube with the phrase "I used to consider myself a Democrat, but thanks to 9/11, I’m outraged by Chappaquiddick." They like to think that, because they broke away (assisted by stark fear) from an old orthodoxy, they have become true free-thinkers. But when issues of discrimination come up, they find themselves compelled to defend their new wingnut friends and their bone-deep prejudices.

In reality they haven't broken free, they've just switched gangs -- and have to live by the new one's code, including the by-law about No Poofters. If they want to face their old friends, they have three options (besides sanity, of course, which is out of the question):

They can swallow whole their new friends' lunacy and bravely assert it to all comers;

They can try a it's-for-your-own-good defense, pleading the necessity to accomodate moderate Muslims or red-state voters until such time as we can afford luxuries like civil rights;

Or they can plead the ties of friendship and remind their old friends of how they used to discuss Henry James until "dawn lightened the windows."

The intractable bigotries of the American Right are offensive to all thinking people, even to those who were traumatized into joining it in 2001. Yet no major candidate in either party will stand up for gay marriage. I think they realize that if they did take up the cause, they would be greeted, not by just the small clutch of angry misfits whose heads swim with homo-hatred, but by them and a much larger group they've convinced to come along in solidarity.

ANOTHER PERFESSER'S PROBLEM. Ann Althouse is forced by weather to actually go into a movie theatre and watch Paris J'Taime, an omnibus film of ten-minute shorts:

So let me while away a few more minutes and say the film anthology was swell. The films were so short that I didn't get too impatient -- my usual problem.

So that's why she hates fiction movies and novels -- she's got the worst case of ADD in recorded history. Even in my childhood years, stoked by sugar and pheochromocytoma, I could sit through a damn movie. In fact they tended to calm my stimming.

And she went to law school? That racket must be easier than I thought! Had I but served Mammon with half the zeal I served Truth and Beauty... but this is about her tragedy, not mine. How come her fellow rightwingers can't get up a drive to provide Althouse with the daily firehose stream of Ritalin required to bring her down to earth? They probably realize that if she ceased to tweak for more than a few minutes, she might realize what a bunch of crap she's been writing, and they'd be shy a baying voice come the next full moon. Fucking enablers.

ON THE OTHER HAND, HE IS VERY SENSITIVE TO DIFFERENCES IN DIGITAL-CAMERA QUALITY. Ole Perfesser Reynolds doesn't much talk about the poor, so he is especially revealing when he does:

Also, on a not entirely unrelated subject, Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. Overall, the world is getting richer, even most of the world's poor. But there are still a lot of dirt-poor people out there, and that raises the risk of disease outbreaks.

I'm not suggesting that Reynolds thinks of the poor exclusively as agents of disease. He also thinks of them as punchlines and, of course, as future rich people.

When you have to tell future generations what Instapundit was, just give them a copy of Babbitt and say "He was like this guy, only without the self-awareness, and with computers."

ART BRUTE. Kia has pointed me to the Roger Kimball stemwinder "Why the art world is a disaster," which uses an expired art show at Bard College as a launchpad for rage against -- well, plenty, including yuppie naming conventions and high tuitions (no arguments there) but mainly contemporary art. Kimball is an amusing writer, and I would rather have this sort of thing done amusingly than tediously, as is the custom with rightwing cranks, so credit where credit is due.

The thinking is less interesting than the writing -- moneyed philistines corrupt art, it's all politically correct, lobby signage and catalogue copy is shit, etc. I share Kimball's distaste for many of the current big names he cites (Cindy Sherman is fine by me) and for much of what gets shown nowadays.

But I stopped nodding at this:

...it has been a long time since shock value had the capacity to be aesthetically interesting—or even, truth be told, to shock. Decades ago, writing about Salvador Dalí, George Orwell called attention to, and criticized, the growing habit of granting a blanket moral indemnity to anything that called itself art. “The artist,” Orwell wrote,

is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word “Art,” and everything is O.K. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are O.K.; kicking little girls in the head is O.K.; even a film like L’Age d’Or [which shows among other things detailed shots of a woman defecating] is O.K.

Kimball does not pause here, but I had to. Bunuel's L'Age d'Or? L'Age d'Or is lovely. I still view it with pleasure, as do many others, and it's 77 years old -- certainly old enough for its modishness to have subsided. If it still shocks, and I think shock is the least of it, it is for its genuine, audacious inventiveness, not for what once may have been seen as cheap thrills. (BTW, I don't recall the crapping scene -- does memory fail, or did Orwell have the Director's Cut DVD?)

Orwell may be forgiven his disgust, bless his proletarian soul, but it's a little weird that Kimball lets it pass. Maybe he's never seen the movie. Or maybe he has passed a point of no return, after which anything lively and irreverent, notwithstanding its merits or vintage, is to be condemned as part of some era-spanning conspiracy against good taste. And past that point is pure crankishness. No wonder he's so angry. He's no longer responsive to the artworks, but only to the Dylans and Heathers and Marieluise Hessels and Leon Botsteins and all the others who have made the world, in the immortal words of Doc from West Side Story, a garbage can.

This modern world is full of shit masquerading as art, so you, too, might think that criticism is a waste of time. But as Ted Sturgeon said, ninety percent of everything is shit. And I think Sturgeon was understating the case. Still, if you cease to look, you won't see, and there's none so blind as that.

A few weeks ago, while biking in Brooklyn, I happened upon a show of photographs by John Barnard. This show, too, is closed now. The subject was local nannies, mostly black, caring for their little white charges. Thematically this would seem to be agenda-driven, too, but if you can't get past that, you'll never know whether the artist did. Most of the photographs weren't so hot, alas, but a few were really fine. My favorite, as I recall it, showed a muscular woman in jeans and a shirt who had slung a toddler over her shoulder to carry him into a fenced playground filled with ugly plastic slides and tubes. All was dark but the child's face, blankly regarding the camera. It wasn't Atget or Weston, but it was worth contemplating and remembering. And all I had to do was look.

SHORTER ANN ALTHOUSE: If I could get to meet Larry David I bet he'd rilly like me.

WARNING: Do not go into the comments section unless you have industrial-strength brainwash (80 proof at least) at hand. Jesus Christ. I haven't speculated so much on what TV stars are really like since I was eight years old. Now I only speculate on figures from antiquity. For example, I think if we brought the Roman playwright Terence back from the dead and showed him Ann Althouse, he'd say, "Remember when I said 'nothing human is foreign to me'? I take it back."

FRAGGING. Like the boys in the Fuhrerbunker during the Fall of Berlin, some of our war fans continue to draft grand schemes for the post-war world even as the buildings topple overhead. At TCS Daily, Robert Haddick revives the rightwing demand that war journalists stop telling treasonous truths, and even adds an interesting twist: if the journos won't serve Uncle Sam out of patriotism, they should serve him out of fear --

According to [Reporters Without Borders'] website, eleven journalists were killed in Iraq in May alone. Since March 2003, total journalist casualties in Iraq are 181 dead, 14 kidnapped, and 2 missing.

The targeting of these journalists, the vast majority of them local Iraqis, indicates that the various factions in Iraq place a high value on controlling the flow of information, and denying that flow to the enemy. What journalists are learning from these chilling facts are that they must only live and travel under the heavily armed protection of a particular faction; there is simply no other way to survive for long in the country as an active reporter of the war.

Naturally that protection will come at a price to be determined by the faction providing the protection...

Cut to Haddick ominously tapping his palm with a baseball bat. He acknowledges that, currently, embedded American reporters are protected by the soldiers among whom they are embedded, but that sort of relationship can't last because "in the future those American conventional combat formations will not spend much if any time fighting in long, drawn-out and controversial counterinsurgency campaigns. Reporters can embed with these units, but they won't leave the barracks very often."

See, we'll be in a new kind of war -- as we always are, in the reckoning of rightwing cranks -- and it will have to do with information and "short, high-speed, and high-intensity combat operations" where no one will get killed, except perhaps that dinosaur of the pre-new-type-o'-war era, the independent journalist, who will have to dig for actual combat stories among "local proxy and militia allies of the U.S.," which folks "are unlikely to have much sympathy for the needs and traditions of Fourth Estate." Haddick does not overtly state the expected fate of this sort of journalist, but he tips it heavily in the closing:

The only journalists that will survive will be those that choose a side. The classic independent war correspondent who once floated across a war will be, literally, dead.

To be fair, Haddick's article is such a mishmash that it is hard to isolate the argument, but his attitude toward journalists who don't toe the line is, literally, palpable.

RISING TO HER LEVEL OF INCOMPETENCE. At her website, Michelle Malkin usually contents herself and her readers with regular blasts of hot, formless spume, like Old Faithful. Alas, in today's New York Post she has stepped above her pay grade, handling a compare-and-contrast structure in much the same way that General Mapache handles the gatling gun in The Wild Bunch: with enthusiasm but no sense of direction.

On the one hand, says Malkin, we have the appallingly young students of the famous Palestinian Jihad Mouse, who learn to celebrate war and suicide bombing; on the other, we have Western children, who are taught to value peace and harmony. If you are familiar with Malkin's work, you can see the problem already: Malkin doesn't know who to root for. She clearly despises the Palestinians, but she also seems to despise the milquetoast tots of the West:

...In New York City, one nursery school dragged 3-year-old toddlers to the office of Rep. Eliot Engel (D-Bronx/Westchester/Rockland), where they sang "It's a Small World" around a 12-foot "Tree of Peace."

The New York Press reported last week: "The handmade tree, crafted by 17 children during pre-school class time, was a statement against American troops remaining in Iraq, and a call to pursue peaceful paths to end all world conflicts...

The children's teacher, Valerie Coleman-Palansky, defended the stunt thusly: "I think it's appropriate for 3-year-olds to know that the world needs to be a peaceful place for everybody to live in and a safe place for everybody to live in."

Perhaps it's time for Coleman-Palansky to acquaint herself with the Palestinian Mickey Mouse. The chant of the little jihadists drowns out the Disneyfied reverie:

"What is your most lofty aspiration? Death for the sake of Allah!"

In case you imagine Malkin's objection is to the intrusion of politics into the classroom, she amplifies:

I have a pet peeve. It goes beyond the antiwar indoctrination rampant in American schools. At the playground and at the mall, I see 5-, 6- and 7-year-olds walking around with pacifiers in their mouths. Kids old enough to feed and dress themselves. Kids old enough to figure out the remote control and cell phone. Standing upright, suckling on brightly colored binkies.

Where are the parents to yank the rubber from their mouths and force them to grow up? When did child pacification usurp the responsibility of child-rearing?

So the problem isn't politics -- it's that American children are soft! They don't need binkies, they need a punch in the gut! They need Barney to stop prancing around like a Kansas City faggot and start barking motivational slogans like, "You had best unfuck yourself before I unscrew your head and shit down your neck."

In other words, they ought to be more like the kiddie killers of Palestine. Malkin probably doesn't even know she's making this point. That's why she and and her similarly unskilled colleagues should refrain from attempting to make points more complicated than "Hulk smash!" or "Pretty flower" until a slot opens up in the writing program at their local Sylvan Learning Center.

TALK TALK. For me the highlight of Sunday night's Democratic debate was when the candidates, spurred by Clinton of all people, began to push back at Wolf Blitzer's ridiculous hypotheticals. I would have immediately sent a check to whoever got up and pushed Blitzer off the lip of the stage -- Mike Gravel, are you listening? -- but I guess we have to take what we can get.

Of course this not-answering can get out of hand, and I winced each time a direct question was answered by an only mildly relevant stump speech. The Times transcript runs about as long as the Unabomber manifesto, and there was plenty of mouth-running, but some genuinely interesting stuff happened.

Edwards' "bumper sticker" comment provided a good deal of blog grist, but it's notable that he didn't try to backpedal or qualify it -- on the contrary, he owned it. I guess he figures that after all the attention paid to his haircut and house, there's no point worrying about being misconstrued.

And he may be right. Maybe for the moment there's less need than usual to fear the rightwing noise machine. They'll still ferociously spin everything into accusations of treason, but even American voters, dim as they are, may at last have seen through that particular grift.

Speaking of grifts, he seems to have worked out a nice deal with Obama; it was fun to watch them shoot professions of admiration and respect at one another, especially as they had to shoot them through Hillary Clinton.

Other observations:

Clinton is full of shit -- she didn't need to read the NIE because she felt "thoroughly briefed"? By George Tenet? -- but that shit is tight: she's the most confident campaigner in either party at present. She may or may not be electable, but it's impossible to say that she can't cut the mustard.

I'm glad Dennis Kucinich is getting some time to talk at these things. While the frontrunners addressed health care with measuring spoons and deferred payment plans, he stepped up and said that people are driven to bankruptcy because of health care costs that are driven by insurance companies, and this has to stop. He also reminded everyone that the if they wanted to stop the war, not voting to fund it would be a good start. The Party will shove him to one side soon, but at least we can pretend for a few months that it's a progressive party rather than the last hope of a desperate nation.

God bless Joe Biden and his righteous indignation over Darfur etc. The poor man is difficult to follow when he is being genial, but extremely lucid in his bursts of anger. Fortunately or not, that isn't the kind of behavioral mix voters trust with the football.

How did Bill Richardson ever get elected to anything?

THE KNOCKED UP NERDFEST IS ON! Top kulturkampfers talk about how awesome it is that a Hollywood comedy will overthrow Roe v. Wade. The usual loons are not so amusing as the dissenters, who want their pro-lifery without tits and fart jokes. Here's National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez:

This is what conservatives in Hollywood should be doing, making funny movies that no one would ever ghettoize as conservative –- really engage the culture.

That said, I walked away from the movie worried about the loser housemate guys who feature prominently in the movie. There’s something way too normal about their loserdom. These guys aren’t Sonny Koufax. If mainstream 20something male loserdom is Ben and friends in Knocked Up, that’s something for we’ve got to think about too. I found myself walking away worried: Is this what a War Against Boys has wrought? It’s just a movie, but after a string of similar big-screen winning losers, I had to walk away a little disturbed.

God, what a lot of fun it must be to go to the movies with Lopez! I bet after Pirates of the Caribbean she spent the whole night talking about the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

I don't suppose it's worth mentioning that Hollywood blockbusters make terrible teaching tools. I mean, when I was a Catholic schoolboy, they loaded me onto a bus and took me to the UA Trumbull to see The Sound of Music. By currently popular brainwashing theories, I should be wearing a three-piece suit, smoking a Meerschaum, and trading Chesterton quotations with a bunch of other dorks. Instead, of course, I became an atheism vaporizer, spreading unbelief to all within the sound of my sneer. Unintended consequences, people!

Next week will be about how Hostel II wins new support for extraordinary renditions.

STEVE GILLIARD 1966-2007. He wrote trenchantly and well, and he pissed off idiots. In person he was agreeable and well-mannered, which made perfect sense to me, though I think it might have surprised his enemies, some of whom have taken this opportunity to make even bigger jackasses of themselves than previously. It's good to know Steve is still making them bray.

MORE FUN WITH CHRISTERS & SODOMY. Ho hum, more fag-bashing from Rod Dreher, who thinks straight people ought to be able to keep homosexuals out of public accomodations if they want. When challenged in comments, Crunchy Rod helpfully explains:

Two points of view were expressed in my post: 1) that there's an offensive inconsistency of gays demanding full access to hetero activities/places (to the point of filing a lawsuit), while also demanding the right to exclude heteros from gay activities/places; and 2) that the idea of creating "safe spaces" is a rhetorical ruse concealing a different agenda.

Similarly, it's offensively inconsistent for women to demand full access to male preserves -- such as barrooms, political clubs, and many other organizations were, once upon a time -- while also demanding the right to all-chick domains such as Curves Fitness Centers, ladies' rooms, etc, from which hiding places they no doubt plot man-bashing jihad! Which explains why Rod's always banging on the bathroom door, yelling, "Honey, you all right in there?"

Maybe these people were born without a common-sense gene.

Bonus hilarity in Dreher's undercover report from a gay youth meeting, full of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom observations like "The trio went on to explain that lesbians could indeed experience sexual bliss through rubbing their clitorises together..."

That's why I don't like hanging out with Jesus freaks. I can't possibly spend so much time talking about sex without having some.

NO, YOU RULE. Why don't I do posts that are just linky-links more often? They're certainly easier than writing (he said, throwing the back of his wrist against his forehead).

Let me say D at LGM has a sharper nose than I for culturewarbling of the rightwing-desperate kind. In this case he finds Nineelevenism convert Neo-Neocon turning her keen political analytics upon... Ferdinand the Bull.

I shoulda had that one. Damn!

FINDING HIS LEVEL. Jonah Goldberg on Fred Thompson:

And Fred Thompson just seems so darn competent. Whether he’s the ideal president or just plays one on TV remains to be seen. He’s certainly typecast himself as the cocksure, wise, hands-on type in almost every movie role he’s had and as the district attorney on Law & Order...

We don’t know the man very well, but we know the character. And as long as he stays in character, it’s unlikely his ratings will drop anytime soon.

When I read this it struck me: Though Goldberg the Public Intellectual is by now a widespread joke, the guy has real promise as a copywriter. The prose is imbecilic, yes, but purposefully imbecilic -- like the yammerings of a carnival barker or the mumblings of a priest who walks condemned prisoners down the Last Mile, it overrides thought and keeps the line moving.

While an obvious embarrassment to the pages of an allegedly serious political journal, it could serve with real distinction as copy for a Thompson pamphlet handed out at fairgrounds, or as the speech with which some local alderman introduces Hollywood Fred at a Kiwanis dinner. Trust me, in my twenty years of paid freelance hackery, I've done much worse.

The thought makes me almost sorry for the guy. I imagine it was the desire of his mother, a down-and-dirty political operative, to see her son rise to a station grander than her own, that forced Golderg into his current role, to which he is clearly unsuited. Perhaps, while pretending to take notes at National Review meetings, he dreams of a life he should have had, churning out cracker-jack copy for cryptofascists, then running out and knocking over mailboxes!

On second thought, if you put Goldberg out in a meadow with a bell around his neck it would probably not alter his level of contentment.

OVER THE BORDER. In a previous post I made light of the immigration question. It's easy to do when so much nonsense has been written about it.

But I wasn't joking when I said that I could understand concerns with the current bill. That's why I'm glad it is being debated in the Senate instead of, say, out back of Fred's Texaco. This is still a Republic, everyone will have an opportunity to see the sausage made, and we may entertain a faint hope at least that the attention of the public will inform, if not enforce, the decisions of our elected leaders.

The voice of the people, however, is not the only and certainly not the loudest in this event. John Derbyshire, lately mocked here, achieved an odd moment of clarity in a recent post, in which he characterized the virtually-open borders position of the Wall Street Journal editorial board:

I thought Ramesh's response to that clip of the Wall Street Journal editorial conference was basically sound.  I'm just amazed that Ramesh stayed so calm all through it.  Me, I was...  well, no, not foaming at the mouth, but gaping in wonder at such a concentration of smug rich-guy arrogance on display all in one place.

What color is the sky in these guys' world?  I've modified a trillion or so pixels scoffing at the Left's blithe indifference to actual human nature, but Gigot & Co. take the biscuit.  It's pretty routine now to mock the WSJ editorial crowd for believing that there is no such thing as a nation, only an economy.  Well, there it is.  You saw it.  That is what they actually, literally believe.  We kick around phrases like "arrogant elites" pretty carelessly, but here they are, out in the open, brazen and unashamed.

Derbyshire is a lunatic, as the rest of the quoted post (like many others by him) amply demonstrates. But he is poignant in moments like this, when he recognizes that the savage god of conservatism which he has so long served does not give a shit about anything but money.

While Derb, alas, is mainly concerned with the declining whiteness of his adopted homeland, those of us who do not share his mania may also acknowledge that among easy-immigration advocates there is a constituency that, while small in number, is rich in capital, and thereby powerful in the debate. That's why our current policy is a mess -- confusion has well-served their purpose, which is to keep the low end of our labor market flooded with cheap workers, as the fate of the Dorgan-Boxer Amendment shows.

Competing pressures add to the confusion. One may argue, as Nathan Newman does here, that other domestic factors do more to depress wages, and that "immigration is a distraction, cooked up by conservatives to take the focus off of their opposition to the minimum wage, their cuts in jobs programs and training programs, and from their ruthless tax policies that have driven inequality." A fair argument, but good luck getting it heard by voters who have been conditioned to worship "free markets," which have been defined over decades to preclude any government action other than tax cutting. What they will more easily perceive is that they are the people who, in the popular Bill Clinton phrase, "work hard and play by the rules" -- and that cynical gaming of illegal immigration makes those rules a joke.

Conservatives have perversely reframed our debates in a number of harmful ways, pitting national security against constitutional liberties, economic competitiveness against environmental safety, and so on. Their double game on immigration -- love the guest worker, hate the Aztlan hordes! -- may be their most poisonous gambit yet, and the short-term damage it's doing to the Republican Party is a sign that the poison is so powerful they can't even control it themselves. Humorous as the short-term effect may be, we have reason to worry about the long term.

HOW NICE FOR YOU. Rod Dreher, speaking in anticipation of loving Knocked Up, the new comedy by the maker of slightly-better-than-average fart-and-swearing-granny comedy The 40-Year-Old Virgin:

I think about how snotty and cruel (but funny) my own writing used to be before I had kids, and I just shake my head. It's fatally easy to make fun of everything when you don't have a stake in it.

I've been reading Dreher since Rupert Murdoch inflicted his worthless film criticism on New York Post readers, and in my experience he has never written an intentionally funny line in his life.

It bugs me when newspaper and internet gasbags rhapsodize on the changes these blessed events allegedly wreak on their consciousnesses, because one almost never sees evidence of these life-altering epiphanies in their actual writing. Take for example this John Podhoretz essay about how 9/11 made him realize "the antidote to horror is love" and drove him to propose to his girlfriend and make a baby tout suite. One would expect this realization to have a major impact on his thinking, yet there is absolutely no sign on this in his work: Podhoretz was a right-wing fist-shaker before, and he is a right-wing fist-shaker today. (To be fair, maybe he saved up all the philosophical stuff for his magnum opus, Can She Be Stopped? Hillary Clinton Will Be The Next President of the United States Unless...)

Similarly, when Dreher was childless he devoted his film criticism to tiresome cultural crankery, and, post-enlightenment, that remains his stock in trade. For all his writing reveals, he might as well have spent his time between assignments in a sealed cleanroom.

I don't think that they're lying about their feelings; rather, I think that the sort of writing they're doing (popularly known as propaganda) doesn't have anything to do with their feelings or anyone else's, except perhaps those of the publishers and think-tank presidents who employ them. In either case, it's just one more reminder not to confuse their work with anything important, and that perhaps none of us is as open to transcendent experiences as he likes to believe.

SHORTER PETER BERKOWITZ: People don't know how smart we conservatives are because they don't read our books, and only know us by the way we run the country, which makes us look like total morons.

UPDATE. Over at The Corner, Jonah Goldberg amplifies:

Peter Lawler asks whether it's really true that Kirk, Strauss and Hayek constitute conservatism's Big Three. That's a toughie and I think the folks with the most interesting answer to that question would be Hayek, Strauss and Kirk themselves. Isn't influence a more diffuse phenomenon? Lots more folks were probably directly influenced by, say, Tom Sowell, George Will and William F. Buckley than those Big Three, but Sowell, Will & Buckley were in turn deeply affected by them.

Or, as the standard English translation has it, farrrt farrrrrt fart faaaarrrrrrt. From what I can see, by far the best Big Three candidates would be Stone Cold Steve Austin, El Duce from the Mentors, and Screech from "Saved By The Bell."

PRETTY UGLY.God bless Michelle Malkin. When I have trouble finding teh crazy she's like a big, screaming lighthouse guiding me to the rocky shoals of psychopathology.

Today she quivers with rage over two slights to our national honor. One is a few years old but, like 9/11, should be Neverforgotten: Mexicans chanting "Osama" during a football match with the U.S. Malkin doesn't get out among sports fans much, does she? Please don't tell her about "Hextall... Get a Porsche!" or she'll be convinced New York and Philadelphia are in a state of war.

This weekend, the "America-haters" were back, says Malkin, and their target was... Miss USA!

Throughout the week-long festivities leading up to the Miss Universe pageant last night, Miss USA, Rachel Smith, was booed and heckled. First, at a national costume event (half-way into the news segment)...

Ms. Smith, who fell during the evening gown competition but recovered gracefully, was subjected to hatred again last night during the Top Five interviews, when hecklers in the audience launched into chants of "Mexico, Mexico" and disrupted her entire interview. The two hosts of the pageant, Vanessa Minillo and Mario Lopez, did nothing to chastise the crowd for the rudeness shown to their fellow American.

At least the hecklers didn't yell "Osama." Or maybe the microphones just didn't pick it up this time.

Meanwhile, as Heather Mac Donald points out, the White House continues to attack opponents of mass amnesty as "nativists."

Yeah, we're the nativists.

One wonders how this drama is recreated in the lurid diorama that is the inside of Malkin's skull. Are the haters ordinary beauty pageant fans -- that is to say, nuts -- who let their enthusiasm for their favorite candidate get out of hand? Or are they hard-bitten jihadists whose plan for global domination includes Zoolander-style walkoffs?

Next week: people who prefer Cheddar to American cheese on their burgers are Britcaseofascists!

MOVIE NIGHT. Saw two late Herzog documentaries at the Film Forum this weekend: Christ and Demons in New Spain and Bells from the Deep. The former is about poor Guatemalans whose Christianity is suffused with ancient paganism, though it is hard to tell whether the Christian or the Aztec Mayan part of their devotions is weirder -- like most people who got their Catholicism from Spain, they are morbidly obsessed with the agony of Christ crucified, but they also perform rituals that involve smoking huge cigars and spitting liquor on each other. The latter is about Russians whose devotions are no less strange, and include throat-singing, faith-healing, a Jesus impersonator, and pilgrimages to a miraculous city that is alleged to exist under a frozen lake.

Both films are discursive and poetic, like reality TV shows made by Luis Bunuel. In both his fiction and his non-fiction films, Herzog is obviously fascinated by primitives, though in his view primitives may be found practically anywhere (in Stroszek they are found in Wisconsin, performing the ritual of chicken tic-tac-toe). Herzog seeks not only to document their rituals and behaviors, but also to approximate the rhythms of their lives. This last feature may be what saves these films from cheap exoticism: these mini-civilizations, so detached from our world that they might as well be on different planets, are for him objects of contemplation and reverence, and he doesn't seek to project himself, or us, into them -- in fact, these places seem unlivably hellish to the likes of us. This is my kind of multiculturalism: a healthy respect, terror, and disgust for all the cultures of the world.