BAD FAITH. Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds opens Daniel Brook's The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America, finds a passage about a gender studies major, and decides the book is about silly elitists being silly.

Like Reynolds, I haven't read the book, but I have a hunch it has more to do with the following:

"Consumer borrowing posted a hefty increase in May, reflecting the biggest jump in credit card debt in six months."

"Ratio of mortgage debt to housing value hits new record."

"According to the College Board, the volume of private loans taken by students has escalated by 27 percent annually since 2000-01, to a total now of $17.3 billion."

"Nearly half of all workers saving for retirement have savings that fall short of the $25,000 mark, according to the 2007 Retirement Confidence Survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute and Matthew Greenwald & Associates... A full 25 percent, meanwhile, said they had no savings at all - retirement or otherwise."

I could be wrong, though -- maybe it's all about a small group of wacky artistes who for some reason don't share their fellow citizens' economic confidence. But common sense is usually a reliable guide in these matters.

SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE! Just when, under the numbing spell of his Target travelogues and widdle-girl colloquia, you forget what you had against James Lileks, he comes up with this:

But it was Friday. And that’s pizza night. So I went to the freezer and pulled out the Manhole of Promise, something I’d found at the grimy grocery store the other day: Geno’s East. I don’t want to get into pizza wars here... But for decades Geno’s has been the Ideal, the very definition of pizza. I had my first in 1975 when I visited a friend in Chicago. He was Italian, too, so he’d know about these things.

You blink and stir, roused by the apprehension that he isn't kidding, and then:

It took 50 minutes to cook. It had a pop-up timer. Assuming as we must the diminished standards that apply to the genre, I have to say: worthy of the name. I almost wept after the first bite -- a thick lake of sauce, aggressive sausage, perfect crust. I had a vision of myself weighing 300 pounds after a year-long diet consisting of nothing but three of these a day, fat and sweating and glistening with grease extruded through the pores, shunned by all except the dogs that gather to lick my fingers after I have finished with the first pass, and I thought: it would be worth it.

Good pizza.

The guy who doesn't think Harold Pinter is so great is having an orgasm over frozen pizza.

You can't reason with people like this. Best to pull out of Minnesota now and let their warring tribes (The tribe of Frozen Geno's East versus the tribe of Frozen Tree Tavern, perhaps) fight it out for supremacy.

UPDATE. Gavin at Sadly No says This Shall Not Stand.

SHORTER JAMES G. POULOS. Better people should starve than be helped by unbelievers, who annoy me terribly.

SOCIAL REALIST. I've said previously that I prefer artful documentaries like Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control to overtly propagandistic ones like An Inconvenient Truth. Some of my commenters in that instance made the sound point that there's a place for films that are in essence propaganda for under-acknowledged truths; my only answer to that was and is that whatever the social utility of such films may be, they don't serve the purpose of art. The preservation of the icecaps may take precedence over the preservation of aesthetic standards, but I like to think we can have both.

I think what Michael Moore does is sui generis and has aspects of both documentary forms. Clearly it's propaganda: Moore lets his opinions and prescriptions hang out. And he's not above pulling the gimp string to lead you to his conclusions. But he makes movies, not animated slide-shows. He talks causes, but he shows effects -- human effects that engage viewers on a level beyond the political.

Roger & Me, for example, is a great ground-level portrait of capitalism gone feral and the resulting disintegration of a community. The vignettes of depraved money-men and deprived citizens, and the gulf between them, comprised more than a object lesson; it was a story to break your heart. To say Moore's Flint, Michigan is a filmmaker's creation -- as much as was Capra's Bedford Falls and Pottersville -- is not to deny the reality of what happened there, but to acknowledge the success of Moore's art.

Up till SiCKO, I thought that Moore had been regressing a bit artistically. There's a lot to like in Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 911, but the issues in each case are so large that the human consequences tend to get ground up by them. Even as I was moved by the anguish of Lila Lipscomb, and enraged by the obliviousness of Charlton Heston, I resented the use of them as ways of bringing it all back home, so to speak, at the climax of those films. It seemed to me as if American gun culture and the Iraq invasion needed so much explanation -- and they got compelling explanations in both cases -- that the people who suffered from them got short shrift. It was as if the scope of Moore's agenda interfered with his stories.

The American health care mess is another huge subject, and SiCKO takes the time to tell us what's wrong with it. But Moore has found an ingenious way to tell his story -- which turns out to be only coincidentally about health care.

There are the expected hard cases and historical background. We learn about people killed or doomed to poverty by our system, and the perverse financial incentives responsible. (And boy, just when you thought there wasn't anything more to hate about Nixon...)

But there aren't a lot of "gotcha" ambush moments. Instead, halfway through the film Moore seems to abandon the litany of despair to go to other countries where we meet people who are well-served by their systems, because their governments acknowledge that health care is a human right. And hearing their stories, and especially observing their lives outside the hospitals and clinics, we come to realize that health care is only part of the difference. What's remarkable (and sometimes infuriating) about these subjects' attitudes is that they take their superior care for granted. They expect more from their governments than we do -- and, the film implies, that's why they have it and we don't.

Even hostile reviewers seem to pick up on this. The claim by National Review's Rich Lowry that Moore is "the Riefenstahl of socialism" is hysterical but telling. Lowry is acknowledging the power of SiCKO's real story -- the story of a civilized world that, in some important ways, has left America behind, not by dint of socialism but by a different understanding of what the old Labourite Tony Benn calls by its right name: democracy.

SiCKO strikes me an inspired bit of Social Realism -- not my favorite genre (being an old-fashioned American, I prefer "me" stories to "we" stories) but at its best (Clifford Odets and Diego Rivera) it's got the force of true art. As to Moore's policy prescriptions, I leave it to him to defend them -- he clearly doesn't need anyone's help. But he did make a very good movie.

THE STUPIDEST THING EVER WRITTEN UNTIL JONAH GOLDBERG WRITES SOMETHING ELSE. Matthew Yglesias points out, rightly, that it was the actions of liberals, not of libertarians, that got the Civil Rights Act passed. Jonah Goldberg adjusts his toga and responds:

What's refreshing about this is that Yglesias is honestly and correctly admitting that liberals have no problem imposing their morality on others via a powerful and intrusive state. I wish that most liberals were as honest...

Liberals and progressives before them wrote the book on social engineering and even the most comstockish Republicans are pale imitators.

To restate, simply: Goldberg and his cheerleader Glenn Reynolds think that ensuring the voting rights of black people is "imposing morality," before which such conservative ideas as, say, making abortion and contraception illegal "pale" in comparison.

In the immortal words of Woody Allen, I don't think his spinal cord reaches his brain.

NEGROPHOBIA. NAACP invites Republicans to debate, only Tom Tancredo shows up. If they can't face down Tavis Smiley, how're they going to handle Osama?

OUR CHANGING WORLD.Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds on the firefighters who are fighting back against Giulianification:

RUDY GIULIANI: Not so much Swiftboated as Dan Rathered?

Between this and the silly stuff about Fred Thompson, Democrats are looking more nervous about 2008 than you'd expect.

A rightwing college perfesser denounces goddamn liberal firefighters! This is truly an age of marvels.

Neither the Perfesser nor his linkee indicates awareness that New York City firefighters do not need Hillary Clinton's help to hate the son of a bitch Giuliani. Background here and here.

Oh, and if anyone is prevaricating about the love of firefighters, it's Giuliani. As is so often the case, fluffers of conservative bully-boys grow most accusatory when they're chin-deep in their own bullshit.

Still, it is nice to see that just repeating the numbers "nine" and "eleven" won't get you into electoral heaven anymore -- not without a fight, anyway. And that's my positive thinking for the week! Enjoy the mood swing while it lasts!

THEY'RE KIND OF CUTE WHEN THEY'RE MAD, LIKE THAT LOLCAT THAT SEZ "GET OFF MY LAWN"! Dean Esmay pleads with readers to help stock his library of snappy comebacks to anti-war questions:

After five years of repeating these facts, I've completely lost patience with doing it yet again for friends like Ali. Would some kind soul please, please, PLEASE sign up for this wiki and provide the documentation so I don't have to do it yet again???

Because I have a life, and problems of my own, and I just can't make myself do it all yet again. For the umpteenth time.

You've swallowed a bunch of Americaphobic garbage, Ali. Saddam was not our guy. We did not arm him. He was not our tool or our puppet. We didn't give him tons of money. And if you show me one more time (as so many have) how Donald Rumsfeld shook Saddamn's hand on one occasion, I'll give you 50 of Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt shaking Stalin's hand.

Because we didn't have anything to do with Uncle Joe during the Second World War. It was like he never existed. We just woke up one morning and found a receipt for Eastern Europe. WTF?

I'm tired of having to answer the Americaphobes. I really am. My patience for it is at an end.

And yet he goes on writing! That shows dedication, or something.

HMMM, MAYBE I'LL GO SEE THAT MICHAEL MOORE MOVIE AFTER ALL. Andrew Stuttaford (usually described as "The Second-Least-Mad One" in National Review's publicity materials) quotes a tipster's news report that "almost one in ten patients in Scottish hospitals is suffering from an infection such as MRSA, a survey suggested yesterday." Stuttaford titles the post "Sicko" (get it?) and his correspondent says that the socialistic Scottish hospitals compare poorly on this score with those in a privatized hospital chain.

I have an even better idea. Let's compare the Scot Soc hospital to our own free-market germ centers:

Groundbreaking Report Shows Alarming MRSA Infection Rates At U.S. Hospitals...

SAN JOSE, Calif., June 25 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Consumers Union called on hospitals today to take more aggressive steps to protect patients from Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections in light of a new study showing that the superbug is much more common in hospitals than previous estimates had indicated. The consumer group also urged states to require hospitals to report their infection rates, including how many patients are acquiring MRSA during treatment.

(That's the differece between us and the Socialists, I guess: we hide, or don't trouble to find out, our MRSA infection rates -- which course of treatment, studies show, instills a feeling of security and well-being in our health-care industry.)

The report released by the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) found that MRSA infections are 8.6 times more prevalent than previous estimates and that the antibiotic-resistant bacteria is found in all wards throughout most hospitals. The APIC study is the first nationwide analysis on the prevalence of MRSA in U.S. healthcare facilities. It is based on data collected from more than 1,200 hospitals in all 50 states...

Hospital-acquired infections caused by Staphylococcus aureus, or "staph," are among the most common and the problem is clearly growing. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 1974, only two percent of staph infections in health care settings were MRSA; by 1995, the percentage was 22 percent; and by 2004, nearly 63 percent of all staph infections in healthcare settings were MRSA...

Good thing Stuttaford didn't see this first, or he'd be telling us that MRSA is really no big deal and that anyone who tells you different is trying to scare you off capitalism.

AND HOW COULD I EVER REFUSE? I FEEL LIKE I WIN WHEN I LOSE. Like all culture warriors, Ross Douhat likes to bitch about smutty pop art ("the next thing you know Aniston is parading naked through the apartment, showing off her waxed . . . well, you know... I think we're crossing a pretty significant threshold with the waxing phenomenon"). But he also has the temperment of a consensus builder, and takes pains to find anti-waxing allies among liberals, as when he praises Thomas Frank and "a left-wing assault on thongs and other pieces of slut-wear."

Working the other side of the street, Douthat is slightly more interesting. To his rightwing brethren, he has even made the sensible suggestion that "cultural conservatives would do well to roll up their sleeves and start writing some entertaining television shows and movies and books of their own. People will watch them, read them, love them, be changed by them..."

Alas, perhaps sensing that such an outcome is unlikely -- at least until the AEI starts giving grants to stand-up comics and playwrights -- Douthat devotes most of his choir-preaching to celebrating signs that the filthy-dirty culture yet contains nuggets of conservative truth, as when he posited "Sex & The City" as a testimony to "the resilience of poor battered old heterosexual monogamy." (One wonders how this revelation would impact Sex & The City tourism. Not much, I expect.)

This is Douthat's approach in his recent essay for the religious-conservative First Things. Rather than summon the faithful to develop conservative cable-TV shows, he tells his readers, first, to admit defeat in the small battle over nudity and obscenity:

Today those battles are all but finished, and the religious side has lost...

The result is the unrestrained and unrestrainable popular culture of today, where every concept, no matter how lowbrow or how vile, can find a platform and an audience...

Small wonder that America’s movies and music and television shows make us enemies in traditional societies around the world—and small wonder, too, that many cultural conservatives, despairing of their country’s future, embrace withdrawal from the world into a narrow, well-defended Christendom, where their families and their faith can be protected from the lowest-common-denominator swill that washes against the walls outside.

But hold, hold, the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, for even among the swears and tits Douthat knows that his Redeemer liveth:

For all its profanity and blasphemy, the new culture arguably takes religious issues and debates more seriously than it used to in a more decent, less decadent era...

True, God has to compete with Paris Hilton and Family Guy for attention. But at least He’s in there fighting.

Thence comes -- along with citations of Samuel Huntington and the Holy Bible -- a rundown of TV shows that Douthat expects to please his co-religionists because they are, in his estimation, morally tethered. For example:

The Sopranos dares instead to explore the terrible banality of evil, depicting ordinary people held prisoner by their habits and appetites who choose hell instead of heaven over and over again, not with a satanic flourish but with an all-American sense of entitlement... The show offers a vision of hell as repetition, ultimately, in which the same pattern of choices (to take drugs, to eat and drink to excess, to rob and steal and bully and murder) always reasserts itself, and the chain mail of damnation—in which no sin is an island, and gluttony is linked to violence, sloth to greed, and so on—slowly forges itself around the characters’ souls...

As far as it goes, this analysis is not objectionable. But why, despite Douthat's use of loaded terms such as "heaven," "hell," and "satanic" (why the small "s"? Doesn't Douthat believe in Satan?), could it not be shared by someone who doesn't go to church, but still believes in right and wrong? What makes it an argument against a John Edwards Presidency -- or anyone else's? What is "The Sopranos" position on abortion, evolution, gay marriage, or anything else that interests the readership of First Things?

I should be giving Douthat consensus-building credit for expanding the definition of "cultural conservatives" to mean "everyone who likes popular TV shows." Only I expect that Douthat has it backwards -- that he takes "everyone who likes popular TV shows" to be "cultural conservatives," and that he also believes that these shows are part of Divine guidance toward a new Great Awakening.

As I have repeated unto tedium, the problem with ideologues who engage the arts is that they do not know what art is. They're like the Six Blind Men of Hindustan: they "see" it as a hammer for smashing their enemies, a barometer for judging the political climate, etc., and their interpretive ecstasies prevent them from appreciating its simple and essential blessings.

RIGHTWING-NUT-READING-POLITICS-INTO-STUPID-MOVIES OF THE DAY. Lisa Schiffren:

The struggle between good and evil, freedom and enslavement is, of course, an eternal literary theme. Still, one can't help but notice the astonishing manner in which Gordon Brown has taken a page directly from Harry Potter — and the just released film of Book Seven, at that. Specifically, Brown's strong desire not to call Islamic terrorism by name echoes the insistence of the head of the Wizard government, the Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge — to refer to their mortal enemy, Voldemort, as "he who must not be named." So, even greater kudos to J.K. Rowling, who understood back in the 90's that the world's youth needed a rousing tale of heroism in the face of evil...

Schiffren, it should be noted, is also the author of this classic 2003 article about Commander Flightsuit subtitled, "Women voters agree: President Bush is a hottie!" In other words, she is stupid for a living.

RAISING THE LEVEL AND TENOR OF DEBATE. The great minds at National Review's The Corner agree: gay people are teh gay. On the Democrats' upcoming GLBT debate, Lisa Schiffren observes that not all of the Party's constituents are down with the gay agenda, and then, seemingly unable to control herself, female-ejaculates: "How do you keep the coalition together when it gets this personal and icky?" One imagines she does not find, say, conflicts over nuclear energy policy "icky," unless the protons are having sex with other protons.

With two (count 'em two) posts Jonah Goldberg outdoes Schiffren, himself, and a think tank working tirelessly for years to develop a new kind of stupid.

First, Goldberg the Political Strategerist:

Whatever the merits of such a debate, isn't the rational hope of every partisan Republican that the candidates pander relentlessly to the audience. If they pander the way they did by at the black debate, there are going to be some precious soundbites left for the general election.

Yeah, folks are already up in arms that the Democrats were nice to black people, and if we get soundbites of them being nice to gay people, that'd be almost as sweet as chock-o-mut ice creams. Maybe one of the gay people should be Muslim! Is Donald Segretti still alive?

Next, Goldberg the Just Plain Asshole:

Not that I'm endorsing it, but how long until some blogger photoshops the Dem candidates into the guys from the Village People? I say it happens by lunchtime, if it hasn't already.

I wonder if, when he sees this sort of thing, William Buckley sighs and thinks of nights at Bohemian Grove with Malcolm Forbes.

UPDATE. Mark Noonan of Blogs for Bush cues the scary music: this debate is all about Dem lust for Chelsea Gold ("greed for the large amounts of ready cash the gay community can dispense for political campaigns"). In a surprising twist, Noonan offers manly man-love to the gay voter:

For my fellow Americans who are gay -- I just advise you how Bill Clinton treated your cause in 1993 after you went flat out for him in 1992. You will be betrayed again, if you are fool enough to back Democrats in 2008. True, we conservative Christians might not seem the logical home for you, but you do know where we stand, we are ready to compromise and we will never, ever betray you. You might want to think about that as you watch the debate, and make your donation and voting choices.

So here's the deal, faggots: you vote Republican, and in return we agree to stun you with a sharp blow to the head before throwing you on the bonfire. You know we're good for it -- whenever we screamed "DIE HOMO" at you, we were always 100% sincere.

NEXT WEEK: THAT JACOBIN BASTARD JEFFERSON AND HIS SO-CALLED "RIGHTS." I see Pejman Yousefzadeh, like many another rightwing idiot in recent days, has become suddenly outraged by that bastard FDR. (Thanks to John Holbo for the tip.) Yousefzadeh's commenters have leapt in, full of Bircher brio ("Roosevelt was good at one thing, political machinations, aided by no limitation on ethics... even before Yalta..."); soon I'm sure the forum will resemble one of those Free Republic President's Day threads where Southrons and other assorted loons traditionally assail that bastard Lincoln.

My instincts tell me that this whole Roosevelt thing has been in the rightwing propaganda pipeline for some time -- that the plan was to start circulating a demonic vision of FDR as soon as there weren't enough Greatest Generation types left alive to refute it, thus removing one more cultural impediment to the corporate glibertarian paradise toward which all their labors are devoted.

But it is surely a tribute to the comic timing of the Universe that this meme was released just as Americans were starting to drift left on social issues, thanks to Republican incompetence. One can only imagine the reaction of citizens who -- having witnessed the unpleasant result of untrammelled conservative approaches to natural disaster, war, and social resources -- open their paper to find the same numbskulls who prescribed that poison medicine now declaring, "You know what was a bad idea? Social Security!"

BTW, I see another homo-hatin', childbirth-forcin', Republican cracker asshole has been caught with prostitutes. O Life Force, keep them cosmic jokes a-comin'!

DREAM FACTORY. I see Reihan Salam has amplified the old "More bad Muslims in thrillers" demand, waving The Sum of All Fears as his bloody shirt. It seems to escape the notice of such people that Hollywood is not a branch of the Federal Government.

No one has been able to explain to my satisfaction why the vast wealth of rightwing moguls cannot address what they imagine to be a crying national need. If Reverend Moon is still averse to moviemaking after Inchon, so much the worse for him. Let the folks who raised $360 million for Bush in 2004 dig a little deeper and finance the movies they want other people to make. Sam Goldwyn used to sell gloves, for crying out loud.

Whatever became of personal responsibility?

UPDATE. I see that Michael Fumento visited World O' Crap and suggested that WOC proprietor Scott, I, and a bunch of others who found him ridiculous "all split a gut laughing when those Twin Towers fell." No, asshole, as a New Yorker I did not find the slaughter of thousands of my fellow citizens humorous. And at first I treated ghouls such as yourself who battened on their deaths as objects of horror. But after a few years I learned to take you less seriously. How long can a man scream epithets in a cemetery before he loses the status of outrage and devolves into a figure of fun?

SHUT UP AND EAT YOUR POPCORN. Andrew Sullivan and Matthew Yglesias have already addressed this latest call for "Hollywood" to make propaganda movies for the War on Whatchamacallit. I feel obliged to add that author Michael Fumento is hardly the first conservative to make such demands. And this bit from Fumento's article helps demonstrate the central fallacy of their reasoning:

If I'm mistaken and there have been movies in which Islamists where the bad guys, please let me know. (If so, I'll bet they went straight to video.)

Maybe Fumento believes there's a Hollywood Central Committee that sends all anti-Islamist films straight to video. In real life, films bypass theatrical release when they can't find the backing for it. People who put movies on screens expect to see a return on their investment.

If the wisdom of the marketplace means anything to conservatives -- and they constantly tell us that it does -- you'd think they'd understand that an absence of war propaganda films indicates that few people wish to bet money on them. Fumento notes that "Hollywood went to war" in the Forties, but that was a time of greater centralization in all areas of American life, with the government at the apex -- not generally a conservative idea of Utopia. Would Fumento enjoy a new Office of War Information with a Bureau of Motion Pictures -- or a new version of the Creel Committee of World War I? Not with a Democratic Administration in office, I'll bet.

So, instead of government-issue rah-rah, we get movies based on Disneyland rides and Hasbro toys. That's capitalism, comrade. If you want Fallujah Diary, get Rupert Murdoch or Richard Mellon Scaife to finance it for you.

SHORTER BEN STEIN: George W. Bush may be a friendless failure, but you have to admit that he helped his buddy evade justice.

(Lots of howlers in this piece of shit -- for a good refutation of Stein's absurd portrayal of the Libby case, see here -- but I especially love this part: "In a simple phrase, once again, [Bush] did the right thing regardless of cost." That "cost," as it always is with Bush, being zero.)

THE FUTURE OF GIULIANI MARKETING. Though they forgot to mention what a great husband and father he is.

SPEAKING OF KULTUR KOPS: "Less than a month after the dedication of the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, D.C., the National Museum of Women in the Arts is opening a new exhibit on Frida Kahlo. She was, of course, an unrepentant Stalinist... This isn't an art exhibit -- it's a shrine, to a woman in the thrall of a murderous ideology."

This latest hackwork is by National Review's John J. Miller, author of "The Top 50 Conservative Rock Songs."

I've said it before and I'll say it again: for these loathsome people, there is no art -- only propaganda they haven't spun yet.

AND IF PRINCESS LEIA MET ME FOR REALS, I BET SHE WOULD REALLY, REALLY LIKE ME. Ridiculous Pseudonym at the Liberty Film Festival site recommends a new film with strong political content:

The films politics are decidedly pro-American, pro-military, and even *gasp* pro-freedom. [The director's] affection for the American military is obvious in every scene they’re in. They are uniformly portrayed as heroic, extremely competent, selfless, and even kind to Arab children. The theme of the film is spoken out loud more than once: No sacrifice, no victory...

...after all the relativist junk we’ve been suffering through, it does mean something to watch the fight for freedom portrayed with valor, good and evil distinguished, and the dreaded-until-needed military industrial complex save the day.

Am I complimenting the film’s politics because I agree with them? Maybe. Regardless, the world view presented in Tranformers is more than just one that I happen agree with, it’s...

No, that wasn't a typo. He's actually talking about that movie based on Hasbro dolls for boys as if it were Letter to Jane.

It may be that Ridic Pseud is playing a propaganda game: say that a sure-fire hit is pro-Bush, and then claim its inevitable success is a confirmation of Republican policies. That's the charitable interpretation. More likely, he's just the kind of guy who watches Citizen Kane with his fists clenched, outraged at its portrayal of big business.

UPDATE. John Rogers, Transformers screenwriter and proprietor of Kung Fu Monkey, tries to explain reality to the Liberty Film Fest guys, a noble if misguided effort.

UPDATE II.Ridic Pseud challenges Rogers and his fellow liberals to make the kind of movies Ridic Pseud wants to see, which would prove their patriotism. Pseud's commenters talk about how all liberals are traitors anyway, and there is an interesting debate about whether evil liberal filmmakers use shots of bad characters wearing crucifixes (aka "The Scene") to corrupt our youth, or whether the actors insist on wearing the crosses, a decision which directors apparently cannot override. One learns so much from these insider reports!

LILEKS GOES SURREALIST. After six post-Nineeleven Fourths of July, prairie content provider James Lileks is tired of fantasizing about dusky hordes coming here to blow things up, so he fantasizes instead about Englishmen going to Africa to blow things up.

There’s probably a statue of Cecil Rhodes somewhere. Who knows what instructive lessons could be imparted if they blew it up with a few hundred complicit Londoners, of course, just to put a period on the point. Surely they know there are a few score scribes in the West itching to pound out a bitter screed about Legacies Coming Home, and the fact that we bloody well had it coming.

I have no idea what this means. Nor am I so sure about this --

The future, however, contain a very big question, and it’s not one we haven’t faced before: together, or apart? Except now the terms have been redefined: “together” implies that we must throw our weight in with a portion of the world that seems intellectually incapable of apprehending the concept of a greater foe, and takes refuge in the dream of “disaffected” or “disenfranchised” physicians disconnected from a greater meme. “Apart” has come to mean we define our culture in opposition to another, and confront it with values we truly believe to be superior, and do so with full knowledge of our own flaws. Yesterday was the anniversary of Gettysburg, a day in which the divisions were horrible and bloody, and had to be hammered out to make the great experiment whole again. Rent apart, we had to work our way back to the whole. This is different. We have to come together, in order that we may stand apart, and defend the things in which we believe.

-- but I think he either means he and his buddies need to win a civil war against us liberals before they can go kill more Muslims, or he and his buddies want us to help them kill Muslims, and when they're all killed, then they'll kill us.

In any event, seldom have I seen a less enticing call for unity. Can't he at least say there'll be cake?