Measuring Out My Life In Tablespoons

NOW then. Just to make sure you're up to speed, this guy Michael Jackson died. He'd been an entertainer of some sort. Okay, you got me; I know a lot more about Jackson than that. He was originally the 9-year-old leader of a family musical ensemble called The Jackson Five. My sister was young enough, and musically indifferent enough, to have been part of the target audience. We ought to note right here that the only thing which actually prospers under the leadership of a nine-year-old is a kickball team, provided the other team is similarly led. The Jackson Five were a sort of musical Osmonds. They were discovered by Diana Ross, a woman with a keen eye for fucking Barry Gordy, and were the beneficiaries of the best material Motown could cough up after chasing off Holland-Dozier-Holland. We are reminded, once again, that there are people with knowledge of, even talent for, the music business who will nonetheless inflict the adenoidal screechings of a nine-year-old on the public just to make a buck.

At some point in the late 70s Jackson made some sort of "comeback" as an adult, or "adult", as it turned out, with Off the Wall, which seemed to me one of those periodic exercises in mass, hype-assisted wishful thinking that never bode well. Okay, so it actually sounded to me like someone had paid Quincy Jones an enormous sum of money to orchestrate the incidental music from some failed mid-70s lone-wolf-cop show as the lushest possible disco-pop accompaniment to someone's persistent case of the hiccups. This ushered in an unfortunate era where white guys spoke in public about a record's "dance beat", something which apparently happens when you do enough blow. It is, by definition, a metric which recapitulates the responses of large masses of 18-24-year-olds who are a) in public; b) drugged; and c) dancing, because they're too immature to sustain the sort of interpersonal relationship that would have them home having sex instead. Either a pop record is supposed to have a dance beat, or it isn't; it seems more than odd to reward one for making a binary choice, and, once you do, it seems less than honest to ignore Brazil. Nothing against any of this. It's just that I happen to be a white guy (couldn't tell, could you?) and I gave up dancing, or "dancing", the minute regular fucking entered the picture.

Then, of course, came the MTV deal: they'd agree to play black music if Jackson would agree to become as white as possible. Dear God, could no one stop this? The poor guy had few human qualities, if any. How many Child Star stories do ya gotta hear? (If nothing else, wasn't hiring John Landis to direct a video enough of a cry for help? How many personal and professional train wrecks has this guy overseen?) He turned himself white! and people--if that's the proper collective noun for Oprah--actually reported this as the result of vitiligo, as though they'd missed the fact that he'd gotten Debbie Reynold's nose in the sort of time-lapse sequence that used to change Lon Chaney, Jr., into a wolf. He hung out with Brooke Shields. His best friend was a chimp. He married Lisa Marie Presley. What more did you need?

And that's before the sleepovers became public knowledge. Look, this guy at one point had more money than Exxon, and this crap was public knowledge--to the extent that the public couldn't escape it if it tried--so is there no concern whatsoever about how fucking bad off are we? Didn't anybody care a fucking lick about him (until he died. right.)? How could you imagine that someone that crazy wasn't being taken for everything he had that wasn't bolted down? I spent a week trying to avoid all that as much as I could, and the thing I thought was really telling was how 98% of the pictures of Jackson used as splash screens and cover illustrations were twenty years old. Okay, sure, panegyric's fine in its place, but who is this supposed to be kidding? People too young to know better? They're the ones who really need to see what happens to people when they achieve this "dream" of unlimited funds and everyone around them is afraid to tell them no. And when their every whim is indulged until half their ear has to come off to make a new nose. Maybe it'll lead 'em to figure out the financial markets someday. Phony fairy-tale innocence sure won't. And maybe that's the point.

I DON'T know if it was just me, but it seemed as though every third time I was inadvertently subjected to Jackson necrophilia the past two weeks there was an undercurrent of abject embarrassment, as though a few news hairdos had finally begun to smell the cesspool they're up to the nostrils in. And not in that "whoa, here's somebody's take on how crazy insane all this coverage is" way, which always manages to ascribe the crazy insane coverage to the public's insatiable appetite for content-free crapola, not The Media's delight in shoveling it, but in a way that suggested a man who suddenly realizes he'd left home without trousers every day for the last thirty-years. Not, of course, that any of 'em is likely to do anything about it. I know! We could use only the finest ingredients, and bake fresh daily! But to me the real nadir was the "Do celebrity doctors prescribe dangerous drugs to their rich patients?" routine, a remake of the one that eventually followed the death of Elvis. Whitewash his kink, and ours while we're at it! A guy dies with seventeen major central nervous system depressants in his system, and an impacted bolus the size of a bocce ball, it's not the fault of the prescription. It's the fault of his need for drugs, which he happened to be wealthy enough to get professional assistance in scoring. Like America, pushed to the wall, suddenly confronts the idea that everything is for sale, and has second thoughts! Of course Jackson, unlike Elvis, didn't go around pretending to be a karate-choppin' Federal narc, so the whole thing's been a little less frantic, but there's still the distinct aroma of This Celebrity I Imagine I Knew Personally Because I Bought His Records Once Couldn't Have Been A Drug Addict So It Must Be Medical Malfeasance. When, of course, the real answer is just the opposite: if you'd quit being a hypocrite about it, and let these guys--and everyone else--some a little harmless weed like normal human beings they might still be alive. The long-way-'round to perpetual infantilism didn't do either one of 'em any good, dears.

I was also driven to distraction when, at some point, the question of how anyone would remake Sunset Boulevard got trapped in my head. Sheesh, Norma Desmond would have her own talk show these days. And does.

Aw, well. Let the dead bury their own dead. I just wanted to mention it, in case anyone out there spent the week wondering when I'd reply to William Saletan's suggestion that the Vatican turn pro-wank, not, as it turns out, as an offer to compromise what they have to power to control, or because this would lead to fewer abortions, which Saletan and his majority say they want, but because it would lead to greater efficiencies in their joint efforts to solve our vast underpopulation problem. Well, it turns out there really is such a thing as too much masturbation in a week's time.

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Plus Some Of The Full-Time Members Reported Hearing Sniggers

LIFE presses, interrupting our plans to libel Sarah Palin--more of an experiment to see if it's theoretically possible to do so than a sense that she needs any help--but we wanted to help disseminate the story of the minority children whose Day Camp had paid a Philadelphia area swim club for the privilege of swimming there one a week, only to find themselves tossed out when their fully-developed tans so early in the season shamed the regulars, who are merely red of neck.

Which is, of course, a terrible, terrible thing to inflict on children, but fortunately the president of The Valley Swim Club was there to make his dirty, uh, duty, clean, uh clear:

"There was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion … and the atmosphere of the club," John Duesler, said in a statement.

Fortunately the children got a new place to swim out of the deal. God knows it's guaranteed to be a better one.

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The Slow, Sad, Downhill Run To The End Of Days, Brought To You By Applebee's™. Applebee's™. Real Burgers For Real Heroes.

• So I'm watching local "news" last night--this is all my fault--and came in in the middle of the story of the local woman who entered and won a pair of ducats in the Michael Jackson Memorial Freakshow Lottery--the email announcement of which was described as her receiving a "thriller" of her own--only to have her excitement disintegrate like bad rhinoplasty when--and this is precisely the way the story was reported--"she learned the $570 airfare to get to LA wasn't in the budget".

Okay, so my Poor Wife and I are used to staring open-mouthed at each other about six times per half-hour broadcast, but I think this one set the duration record.

• Palin announcement may be good news for Mitch Daniels! sez Channel 8's political "reporter" Jim "I Don't Think Hillary Clinton Having A Shot And A Beer Is Going To Play In Indiana" Shella, while using the broadest possible interpretation of something Ed Rollins muttered on morning teevee to insist a "strategist" has "said" that Daniels is running for President. Of course, this is Indiana, where the "Gawrsh, here's a Hoosier that's famous" impulse is so strong that we claim, tout, even, not just John Dillinger, but Charlie Manson, Jimmy Hoffa, and Mark Spitz; anyone, actually, who's spent more than two nights in a hotel here. But what really took this from the realm of Cornfield Wanking and into the realm of, well, Cornfield Fellatio, was this: "combine his ability to maintain a billion dollar surplus with the fact that potential party leaders including Palin and South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford are fading from the national scene and the governor's stature as a Republican leader is sure to grow" [emphasis mine].

Imagine, dear Reader, a world in which you got to establish the metric by which your performance would be judged, and that, furthermore, having miraculously met your own standards, you were judged fit to be President. I'm guessing that, as seductive as this sounds, you would give up such a world provided you could exchange it for one where you got to choose who gave you blowjobs in public. This is the principal difference between you and a politician.

And look: let's suppose the special legislative session Daniels engineered in order to rub out a 2% school funding increase (over two years) he might otherwise have been "forced" to accept had voted that increase despite his veto power. "Daniels fought to preseve a billion-dollar surplus!" "Daniels preserved a $750 million-dollar surplus!" $500 million! $2 million! He struggled against the odds! It's the same goddam story no matter what happens, because it's no story at all, or because it's as much of a story as "Cheer claims to get clothes their whitest!" That is, it's something no normal adult would say unless someone was paying him to. The truth is complex. Our pundits are simple, or simply venal.

• And I'm simple, too, with simple wants, like, if you're going to send a field reporter out to cover the July 4th teabagging event taking place in a socialist public park, and she's doing the remote somehow while standing in front of a guy holding a sign, and the sign says "Obama Show Us Your Birth Certificate", have her turn around and ask the guy a question about it. Just one. Just once.

• Finally, the Racist Star online gives pride of place to the story that public schools Superintendent Dr. Eugene "Cufflinks" White will be turning down his pay raise until teachers get a new contract. They've been working without one for two years now, the lousy featherbedding socialist trades unionists.

So White will be struggling by on his $188,000 base salary, plus the $12,000 in bonuses that snuck through an organizational meeting of the School Board last week, until the new contract is signed. And it's the (temporary) refusal which gets the headlines. Go figure.

Y'know, I get no pleasure at all from saying it, but the only question left is whether we're too stupid and too greedy to save ourselves, or whether we're not worth saving because we're so stupid and so greedy.

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Let's Talk About Your Little Problem

OKAY, first: I had to undertake a brief AM grocery-shopping excursion before the Glorious Fifth of July Gee It Was Drizzling on Saturday So Let's Fire Off Quarter-Sticks of Dynamite Until 2:45 AM Monday Morning festivities, or, as I like to call it, Why The Fuck Aren't You In Iraq Since You So Enjoy Shit Blowing Up? And, to my surprise, there is apparently a CD collection, I'm guessing from Rhino, of Top 40 Hits From the 60s, 70s, and 80s Which Set Off Homicidal Rages and Spree Killings. And they were playing it. I heard, in succession, "Baby I'd Love You To Want Me", perpetrated by Lobo (and not to be confused with "Baby I'm A-Want You", as executed by Bread, because those involved should be tortured separately); "Spinning Wheel", from Blood Sweat and Tears, about whom one cannot possibly say too little; and "You Light Up My Life" by the Acne Statin Ramblers.

Now, surprisingly, this sort of thing doesn't bother me nearly as much as you'd imagine, because I learned a simple trick: I like to imagine that the programmer was some disgruntled Luddite who knew his asshole of a boss would have to listen to this shit for six hours. What I can't understand is this: who th' fuck is it who feels compelled to whistle along with this crap? In public? And--I am not making any of this up--it was three separate individuals, one per song. It's probably superfluous to add that none could find the key or even relegate himself to a choice of one; I think the ii, the VI, and the remarkably inventive iv of V were featured, respectively, though the particular, and peculiar, applications of random flats, augmentations, and frankly weird glissandos would have made any of 'em difficult for their own mothers to identify.

There would still be plenty of time to ease [Palin] into the national spotlight, to bone up on the issues, and to craft a persona more appealing than the Mrs. Spiro Agnew role the McCain campaign assigned to her.

Thus Ross Douthat, a man who works one day a week and can't decide which day that is.

Please, somebody, explain to me how anyone who'd subjected himself to a single one of the four-hundred-thousand displays of Sarah Palin's substantial ignorance of any and every political issue that cannot be reduced to a bumper sticker could insist she just needs to go home and bone up some? Look. The Bush II thing was perhaps understandable; GOPologists figured he'd been selected for his name recognition. By the time his idiocy was fully recognized he was already the nominee. Palin was a gimmick. Sure, no one could really have predicted the swift chain of events that led to her convention appearance, a mere forty-eight hours later, as an embattled culture warrior. But anyone who'd watched George W. Bush's first speech to Congress seven-and-a-half years earlier could have predicted the artificial hysteria of the reception. That much you're stuck with. But how does a party--even one in disarray--let this stuff go on even after the votes are counted? Sheesh, Jimmy Carter had to go build houses for the poor before anyone'd talk to him, and he was the President. Palin is apparently a draw, but isn't it more important that you have something to raise money for, other than Losing at the Top of your Lungs? And if the Party regulars have no choice in the matter, surely the right punditocracy does.

Except it doesn't; except it's even more afraid of the red-meat Right than the Democrats are, or pretend to be. Remember how fast Nooners recanted her "dead-mic" remarks?

If Palin were exactly what her critics believe she is — the distillation of every right-wing pathology, from anti-intellectualism to apocalyptic Christianity — then she wouldn’t be a terribly interesting figure. But this caricature has always missed the point of the Alaska governor’s appeal — one that extends well outside the Republican Party’s shrinking base.

In a recent Pew poll, 44 percent of Americans regarded Palin unfavorably. But slightly more had a favorable impression of her. That number included 46 percent of independents, and 48 percent of Americans without a college education.

That last statistic is a crucial one. Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.

Says the Hahvahd grad who wound up on the Times Op-Ed pages as the apex of a seven-year career spent giving people his opinions. We ask again: has Ross ever been west of the Alleghenies? How much time has he spent around people without a college education without placing an order? Reverse snobbery is just as bad as real snobbery. A college education is a good predictor of your earnings potential; it has little if anything to do with intelligence and practically nothing to do with wisdom. But the suggestion that we'd be no worse off handing the rudder of the USS Liberty over to people who can't find Canada on a map or pronounce the name of a restaurant without adding a possessive is either pure bunkum or a cherished night-night story clung to in adulthood out of fear of examining the reality too closely. Palin isn't leading some new class revolt, and if she were Ross Douthat would be the first person who'd break out in hives. She's polling (for whatever that is worth, in 2009, namely, jack shit) under 50% among the one national constituency where her utter obliviousness, tasteless self-aggrandizement, and artless catchphraseology has a chance of scoring points, and she's gonna have to do a helluva lot better than 48% to overcome her reputation with everyone else. Good God; the stench of those supermarket tabloids I have to pass every time I want to buy something is an argument for their popularity, too, but do you really want to be governed by a coalition of celebrity stalkers and snake handlers?

Here are lessons of the Sarah Palin experience, for any aspiring politician who shares her background and her sex. Your children will go through the tabloid wringer. Your religion will be mocked and misrepresented. Your political record will be distorted, to better parody your family and your faith. (And no, gentle reader, Palin did not insist on abstinence-only sex education, slash funds for special-needs children or inject creationism into public schools.)

Please. The Kennedys have been tabloid fodder for fifty years, despite having the opposite background of the Working Class Hockey Mom from the Middle American Tundra, and despite all their elected officials being male. Their Catholicism was misrepresented too, and Douthat himself seems fine with the idea of using published threats of excommunication as a weapon against Catholic politicians, despite the misrepresentation of doctrine that represents. Such mockery and misrepresentation plays to a house in which 70% of the audience claims to be Christian, by the way; all those bombs hurled at Palin sure find their way to her arsenal quickly enough. (And no, good columnist, she didn't insist on abstinence-only sex ed or creationism in biology class, she merely expressed her support for them as a candidate. And yes, the special-needs budget of Alaskan public schools nose-dived under her watch).

Since Palin? She didn't get 10% of what Bill Clinton got in 1992. And if it hadn't been for the tabloid-worthy exploits of her extended brood, and the merriment at the expense of her obvious fucking unsuitability for the Wasilla Town Council, let alone the office she was running for, how exactly would you have defended her? You'd'a been forced to talk about what Republicans were saying about her, in private. And Ross? Better late than never.

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Tilt

photo courtesy Okie Week.

LISTEN, it's not as if you weren't warned. If the visionaries (McLuhan, Warhol) were just a little too comfortable with the whole thing, enthusiastic, even, and if the genuine prophets of doom made comedy albums on Columbia (Dear History Channel: You can't interrupt weekend Nostradamus marathons for one solitary hour of Firesign Theatre?); if the original Star Trek would be seen at the time, and understandably, as Just More Shit from the Shitbox (it was an age when grown men did not have the luxury of perpetual juvenility); well, how did you miss that fact that the first Million Dollar News Anchor couldn't speak English? (Didn't Nostradamus predict that?:

And a Weader will awise in the centa of da wowld,
And jab the hairy Reasoner in the Eye.
In her mouth there will be fiery spheres of marble,
And she will show the world a New Madonna and the Real Twavolta.

[historians have generally assumed that Nostradamus dragged his sleeve through the fresh ink at the end of that last line.] )

Of couse, if one Bawbwa wasn't enough to get the message across, what th' fuck did people who listened to Brokaw think they were hearing? Then we ewect (sorry, it's catching) a C-list actor who wore more makeup than Bette Davis, because he was "real", and because "he could communicate", something he had never been celebrated for when emoting was his actual job description. From there it growed like Topsy, if Topsy had had acromegaly. The guy who said "trees cause polution", "facts are stupid", and "shut up and eat your ketchup" was praised for his straight talk; the guy who sold drugs to finance his South American death squad gun-running scheme is now hailed as History's Greatest Patriot; the guy who quadrupled the Federal Debt buying every piece of high-tech military crap, with or without an imaginary need, is now the Godfather of Small Government. And, beginning January 21, 1981, when, after less than 24 hours in office, Ronald Reagan negotiated the release of the Iranian hostages, the party which flies the banner of A Return to the Golden Age when Right and Wrong Were Clearly Understood has attempted to do so by basically Lying About Everything. And not in the partisan, hyperbolic, sense; the ensuing decades have proven over and over that there is literally nothing whatsoever Republicans will not say, and nothing which they can say which will not be reported as the voice of the loyal opposition. Which, as we might have expected, included those times when they were undeniably in control of all aspects of government, and involved presenting their tiniest political resentments as hypertrophic grievances.

Which brings us to Sarah Palin, at least long enough to say, Fuck it, she's your problem if you want her. I'm on my last leg, literally, and, frankly, I've seen enough. Perhaps it is a sign of progress that a bad actor with bag of clichés and a room-temperature IQ hasn't gotten away with it the way Reagan did. Or maybe that's just good luck and a timing born of the slow realization of what that first sportscasting moron wrought. At any rate, it's time for all those New Voters to step up and put an end to this crap.

And it occurs to me that the proper place to start is that cult of the demi-personality the Clotheshorse from Wasilla is able to manipulate despite her obvious mental incapacity. As if having genuine one-time celebrities who were the butt--literally, the butt--of jokes five minutes earlier lionized because they happened to die through unauthorized lethal injection isn't damaging enough to a nation's psyche, the Associated Press eulogized Billy Mays as "a pop culture icon". This has to be regarded as the sort of omen for a culture that mass amphibian birth defects are for an ecosystem. The guy sold crappy household products to shut-ins. He wasn't the first. There's a possibility he was the loudest. If this merits a front-page Times link then I see no reason why Sarah Palin shouldn't be the next President of the United States. Followed by Larry the Cable Guy. Or David Beckham. Just don't blame me. I've developed an immunity to feces-born pathogens over the last twenty-five years. By necessity.

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It's Not Your Grandfather's Special Double-Reverse Counterintuitive Contrarianism. It's Got Half The Calories And None Of The Charm.

Troy Patterson, "Fireworks Suck: They really do." July 1

AT one point Patterson quotes George Plimpton, disapprovingly:

Do you remember Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief, their union symbolized by a great crash of fireworks outside their balcony overlooking the harbor of Monte Carlo? The only thing wrong with that scenario, it has always seemed to me, is that any normal couple would be out on the balcony enjoying the fireworks, and not inside tumbling around on a bed.

Now, I used to enjoy Plimpton, in suitably small doses widely spaced; he is, after all, partly responsible for Edie, the urban Wisconsin Death Trip, as well as a man who here is Just Plain Wrong, beginning with the idea that Cary Grant and Grace Kelly were, in reality or on the screen, ever anything remotely describable as "normal people". Still, one wishes they'd print the thing out and line the puppy cages at Slate with it, so that some of them might figure out how one goes about actually being contrarian.

I swear to God I clicked on this thing just to see how Slate could manage to screw up both one of my mostest cherished pet peeves and the smoking gun of "bi"-partisan political venality and sorry-assed quasi-libertoonian dedication to "freedom" in America's Third-Worst State Legislature™. And was not disappointed.

Regular readers will no doubt have already memorized the progression: until the previous decade the only legal fireworks in Indiana were sparklers. Then, suddenly, in an era of increasing concern over product safety and regular rivers of crocodile tears over "family values" and "the sake of the children", there's a bill to legalize fireworks in Indiana. Legalization has two constituencies: large-scale importers of Chinese explosives, and people who share the mentality and, generally, the self-control, of eleven-year-old males. It takes the requisite three or so sessions to build up enough graft to overcome "resistance"--I said it's the Third-Worst State Legislature, not the third stupidest--until a "law" is passed, one which had the subtlety of your average Marlboro addict and more hypocrisy than a Southern Baptist convention after lights out. It required--get this--citizens who wished to purchase fireworks to buy a license, which granted them permission to set their little bomblets off in designated fireworks areas only, to which they had to attest, or else swear they were taking the things out of state before lighting up, or that they were themselves fireworks dealers. And you thought Prohibition was ignored with impunity.

After five more years and continued graft buildup the legislature decided to "remove the hypocrisy" it had itself installed, as cover, and Let The Freedom To Terrorize Your Killjoy Tory Neighbors Just Like 1776 Ring. They removed the licensing fee, and the requirement that you be within hailing distance of a possibly responsible adult, and they upped the dynamite equivalence from 1/8 to 1/4 stick--Freedom!--this, mind you, right in the middle of the popular Everybody Piss Your Pants Over Terrorist Attacks campaign. And just to show the proper level of nostalgia for the Old Ways, they hypocritically added "permissible hours" for the detonation of these blasts in once-quiet neighborhoods throughout the state: until 11PM every day of the year except "Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, and New Year's Eve", when they add an extra hour for the sake of patriotism, somber reflection, and maintaining the proper respect for the Gregorian calendar in a changing world.

And this, mind you, from the same legislative body which regularly increases the number of hours children must attend school, and which prides itself as the champion of hard-working little people who pay taxes, and who, presumably, have to sleep occasionally between shifts, if they're lucky enough to have any. Plus, even though these restrictions do not overrule local zoning or noise ordinances, they are generally understood as doing so, and routinely reported that way by local teleprompter readers, who, of course, also serve as honorary junior retailing associates. (In Indianapolis, for example, it is illegal to play music in your own home which can be heard from fifty feet outside it at any time of day; but, somehow, 150-decibel blasts at the edge of your property are now okey-dokey if you stop soon enough after midnight that the cops can't get there first.)

This is all you need to know about the process; in fact it may be all you need to know about the United States of America, circa early 21st century. It's from a Letter to the Editor published in the Indiana Business Journal shortly after the new "law" went into effect:

The National Council on Fireworks Safety congratulates the residents and lawmakers of Indiana for the recent changes in the state's fireworks laws. The availability of legal fireworks discourages the use of illegal items.

In the Grand Tradition of salmon that doesn't turn pink in the can. Of course Freedom Isn't Free, and this particular chunk came with a 5% fireworks tax, which saved the day, since somebody woke up the State Fire Marshall at the last minute and he muttered some objections until they gave him a part of the proceeds for "training purposes". Here, Chief, this is for your favorite charity; we're sure you can handle getting it there on your own.

And yet somehow--probably because of--just this sort of thing, we get this from the Merry Slatesters:

Let me be clear: I have no truck with firecrackers or bottle rockets or Roman candles or anything else that one might set off in one's cousins' backyard. Those are pretty fun, especially if you happen to be in any of the magnificent states where that particular type is banned by law at that particular moment. Doing dangerous stuff in your cousin's backyard is an important element of American folk culture. Those firecrackers are handsomely humble.

Meanwhile, the professional fireworks display is an exercise in pomposity, aggression, triumphalism, and hubris. The pyrotechnician—and, more importantly, his patron—intends to ornament the night sky beyond the powers of God himself. He means to inspire awe for little purpose other than to demonstrate his power. The first great fireworks nuts in the Western world were Peter the Great (who put on a five-hour show to celebrate the birth of his first son) and Louis XIV (who, with a specially equipped sundial, used them to tell time at Versailles). Fireworks are imperialist and, as we used to say in school, hegemonic. That they are popularly believed to be populist entertainment does not say much for the populace.

Okay, did someone reverse the meaning of "have no truck with" overnight, or did Patterson decide the first half of that sentence should go to war with the second, or is it one of those trick reverse-slide contrarian yodels only dogs can hear? At any rate, next time kindly ask someone who's been there. I lived within a mile-and-a-half of the really big fireworks display here for about a decade, and I'll tell you this: it happened once a year, on the Fourth, and it shut off exactly on time. It was a constant booming for, like, ninety minutes. It didn't begin with sporadic firing starting in May, when the shit went on sale, and there never was an impromptu 3 AM encore after the ordinance handlers had downed fifteen corn brews and some sugared 2-year-old whiskey. It didn't trail off into August, and nobody--to my knowledge--had to bribe the Fire Marshall to get him to look the other way. Never found the remains in my yard or on my roof. It's certainly never really inspired me to question the cortical function of my fellow citizens, at least not in the way three hours of sssssssss...bang....ssssssss...bang....ssssssss...bang....every night for two months does. Maybe professional pyrotechnics really suck, but, unlike Howie Mandell, they're not on five nights a week. And just stop for a minute and consider what your world would be like if the five biggest idiots on your block did Howie Mandell impressions at jet-fighter noise levels all hours of the day and night, just because the surgical glove and industrial-strength amplified kazoo industries bought off your lawmakers.

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Flat Joint

It's a shame his sharp-eyed former Honorary DEA agent father-in-law

didn't survive to investigate Michael Jackson's doctor.

IS it just a coincidence that the past seven days, when Creepshow America threatened to reach a critical mass, began with still more "revelations" about its onetime Pope (how is it even possible to further reveal Richard Milhous Nixon? Oh, my, he was a racist? Smelling salts, stat!)? I know I'm repeating myself, but in a country where Gallup reports 109% of the populace claim a belief in God and thrice-weekly church attendance, where 80% doubt the foundations of modern Biology, and 65% check their horoscopes at least twice weekly (the last a more reliable statistic, by the way, since it's the one that jibes most closely with the cracked pitcher of corn beer of observed public behavior), shouldn't there be some supermajority-inspired internal brake on tempting God like that? Hell, I'm no true believer, but if you got me on the witness stand there's no way I'd completely rule out a connection between Dick Cheney being given yet another shot at the public forum he disdained when he was an actual newsmaker and children being scalded in horrible kitchen mishaps.

Could we at least aim for some consistency? Your new toaster warns you not to take it with you into the shower; The "History" Channel warns you, respectively, that it has no responsibility to leaven any of its sixty-seven part Nostradamus series with the rationality of the intervening centuries, and that its coverage of Nazi concentration camps may be objectionable to some viewers (though in a perfect world, they'd warn you a) the guy sitting next to you on the bus tomorrow morning might actually believe this shit; and b) scenes of the Nazi holocaust might actually not be objectionable to some viewers, and their votes count too). Of the two, of course, the toaster manufacturer is attempting to limit legal liability, and so is more thorough, more careful, and more accurately reflective of the mentality of the public at large than are the purveyors of public information, or "information", who pretty much just try to pre-empt the sort of person who might mail them some anthrax spores. Which, odds are, would be inhaled only by people in the mailroom or the secretaries of the underlings and henchexecutives of the intended target, so what th' hell? I've noticed--as I'm sure you have--despite my habitual attempts to simply avoid the television during these wall-to-wall carnivals that some Jackson family member--even the despicable Joe--will pop up with absolutely no warning whatsoever, and no concern for the millions of viewers who might be eating, casting a horoscope, or begetting some latter-day Tristram Shandy.

Maybe it's time the dead started showing us a little respect. It's damned sure the networks won't.

And maybe it's time that religious freedom came with an analogue to plagiarism or tendentious speech: if you claim an abiding respect for the wisdom of illiterate Bronze Age provincials, yet tempt the Evil Eye, you ought to be liable for damages.

Of course it's not all bad news, by which we do not mean the comic relief of pathetically wrong-footed Republico-Christian sex bloopers and the premature pundits who rushed to excuse their amour fou before the ugly details could find the fan. The Iraqi people are welcoming somebody as liberators, finally, which the networks took as their cue to start noticing the violence in Iraq once again. Minnesota now has two Senators, just like North Dakota, though why you or I should be concerned when it obviously wasn't I can't say. And--the Republic is Saved!--the World's Third-Worst State Legislature™ passed a two-year special session budget ("With just seven hours to spare!"), a mizzable crapload which will continue the fiscal Balkanization of urban school districts while merely underfunding most of the rest, thanks to a complete cave-in by Indiana's Republican-Democrats. The budget will provide Governor Mitch "The Bantom Menace" Daniels with the continuing $1 billion "surplus" he needs as a booster seat for his Presidential campaign chair, while continuing the process of infrastructure neglect and corporate giveaways which will suddenly be "recognized" only after he's gone away. (This, of course, despite the fact that back when he had hold of the national budget joystick the Bush administration was describing a budget surplus as the stolen wages of hard-working taxpayers being banked for no-good spending schemes.) The good news there is that the local hairdos are through issuing hourly scare bulletins about the imminent shutdown of the State Park System--which would have been abandoned to Nature, evidently; this was the scariest thing they could think of--and will now begin talking about what is actually in the bill that was passed. (My personal favorite: Channel 6 regaled the credulous with a story of how Our Tax Generating and Gainful-Employment-Providing Casinos Will Be Forced To Shut Down! which not only seemed to take every single one of its "facts" straight from the Gaming Industry's lobbying brochure and unlimited buffet for two coupon, but which ended with a wholly gratuitous ten seconds of some virtual blackjack dealer with the cantilevered 46EEE bosom of the terminally juvenile video gamer's dreams. Then back to the female co-anchor.) Not that discussing the boring old particulars'll go on very long, or get any deeper than the Mighty White River in August. Or interrupt any of the "Michael Jackson is from Gary!" stories coming from people who'd just as soon deed Gary to Illinois for $1 otherwise.

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Corn Pone-ography

SO Fred Dumbo Thompson resents the one-sided treatment Republicans receive from The Librul Media when they're caught with their dicks in a wringer, or an Argentine. This, of course, immediately raises two questions:

What exactly has he been paying attention to over the past fifteen years, if it's not the world? and

Fred Dumbo Thompson is still alive?

Fred's point-by-litany: Spitzer, Blago (either he believes that's Blagojevich's last name, or else One Take Fred didn't want to chance it), McGreevy, Kilpatrick, Mrs. John Conyers [sic], William Jefferson, Rangel, Murtha, Roland Burris, John Edwards, Bill Clinton. Yuh see any pattern he-yur? Fred asks, rhetorically and with only six extra syllables.

Okay, so we haven't even said anything nasty about Michael Jackson--yet--which ought to prove beyond all doubt that we don't speak ill of the unplanted dead, but ol' Fred's riper'n' the back room of that Kosher butcher shop used t' be over on Westfield Boulevard, so at this point it's somebody else's fault he's not on the other side of the grass. It is, of course, easy enough to point out that some of us could actually identify everyone on the list and maybe cough up a list of their misdeeds, or alleged misdeeds (we're sure Fred, who was a pretend prosecutor before he was a pretend Presidential candidate, wouldn't convict anyone without a fair trial) thanks to The Media; s'easy enough to ask what political figure in American history got as much bad press as Bill Clinton's johnson, or which in the past five years reached Blogojevich levels; some of us might even recall that "Mrs. John Conyers" was christened Monica. More partisan observers of Fred's bipartisanship might be heard to suggest that list would barely cover a decent week back when his party was in power, or that it responded to ethics charges against Tom DeLay by changing the definition of ethics. (There are, of course, many sound reasons not to belong to either party; not having 'Gary Hartpence' tossed at you by some dipshit who imagines it's some sort of Magic Rhetorical Ninja Throwing Star is one of the best.)

Instead, we'd just like to know two things. One, what conceivable news environment exists where the unexplained disappearance of the governor of one of These United States would not be "news"? Particularly when accompanied by a series of conflicting explanations, and non-explanations, from the man's staff and family? And that's leaving out the part about how it was his Republican opponents in South Carolina who were apparently responsible for the truth leaking out. How can anyone in 2009 America--even someone who's been deceased for much of the 21st century--suggest that a politician + sex story plays out in partisan fashion? Maybe one could get covered up that way, but once it feels daylight the 24-hour carnival is on.

Two, if the Sanford story really is a (bipartisan) scandal of John Edwards, et. al., proportions, why did we see such a concerted effort to minimize the effects as soon as the story broke? We haven't seen the likes of the Republican stampede which took place the moment another Clinton cock-sniffer grabbed an express flight to Hypocriteville since the Bush II administration took control of Federal oil and mineral leases. If it's so fucking bipartisan that it's unfair to bring it up, might we enquire as to why you don't even wait on the facts before waddling in?

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Tales Of Bald-Headed Minoxidil Salesmen

Ross Douthat, "The Way We Love Now". June 28

I TRIED, really. I watched as much as I could of this bloggingheads [note: abridged New York Times version; I couldn't bring myself to link the whole thing] "debate" between a guy who thinks all abortions are murder, and one who thinks only some are, while the rest are just icky. Will they be able to reach a compromise? Only 62 minutes and 45 seconds will tell, apparently.

Which leaves me out; I think I might've made 10% of that, but, in my defense, I did go right past the time where William Saletan actually utters the word "icky" the way a triage nurse skips a broken femur to get to a sucking chest wound.

His "opponent", Steven Waldman of Beliefnet, is the posterboy for Early Onset Monochromatic Vision Syndrome by Proxy, or, in this case, by Talking To Yourself for Thirty Years. The discussion of paying women to carry pregnancies to term includes his caveat if the money was too good some might get pregnant just to cash in; but he seems to endorse the idea of payments "if society wants to reduce the number of abortions". Which, of course, raises the question of why we should expect "society" to do something that the most ardent opponents of abortion have proven themselves unwilling to do over the past four decades.

And Waldman's prescription for compromise for his fellow Presumptive Uteri Landlords? Give up contraception! Yeah. Thanks for meeting us halfway, Steven. (Sometime after the suggestion that people making the Catholic-approved argument that contraception=murder simply, quote, "get over it" we will ask, with straight faces on both sides of the split screen, whether "pro-choicers" can accept the moral complexity of the issue.)

The damned thing is actually titled "Two Men, No Uteruses", and while we'll leave alone the use of the less-preferred plural form, the idea that this sort of mock-flippancy absolves all concerned from any responsibility for participating in White Guys Talk About Reproductive Rights, Episode 824 Million, is on display here in its full radiance. We're not sure you can actually be more arrogant that to imagine your "new ideas" (translation: new chunks of dead hossmeat, freshly whipped) hold some sort of sway over Constitutional processes just because your President has hosted a seminar. But if it's possible, advertising your White Maleness as though doing so defangs the criticism that you're the last constituency with standing is what manages it. I simply refuse to understand how this sort of thing comes about. No one in his right mind could imagine this is a search for compromise on abortion rights; it's an exercise in whether some anti-choice guy'll buy Salentan's argument that he should "agree to" first trimester abortions (or some time frame; Saletan's tapdancing made it impossible to gauge exactly when the cutoff date was). Not only is the discussion free of women, choice supporters, or moral doubt, it's also free of any compunction for the rest of us to listen. This is one of those matters, like WWI, the Crusades, or Late Night with Jimmy Fallon where everyone even remotely involved deserves censure. If anyone out there makes it all the way to the end, let me know how they solved it, won't you?

What I was trying to do (I knew it was doomed to failure) was get the taste, smell, and overwhelming urge to write about it out of my head after I ran smack dab into Douthat last night. (I thought we'd solved this "Does he publish on Monday? Or Tuesday?" business in favor of the latter, so I was innocently checking the Times last night when "Douthat: The Way We Love Now. Have modern American couples let anxieties about children, mortgages and success destroy their passion and romance?" struck me full in the face. I have no recollection of clicking through, though I know I did, and I have no idea what th' fuck he said, except that he was riffing on a couple of throwaway magazine articles, that Jon and Kate or whatever their names are made several "celebrity" appearances, and that the whole issue of "Romance" suddenly exonerates Republican philanderers (as it does for Brooks, too), even for dedicated Clinton cock-sniffers who once insisted that looking at Playboy was the moral equivalent of adultery. (That marvel of what used to be called a "think piece", back when you could say that about the profession of journalism without breaking up for the first fourteen takes, should replace Gandhi or Chuck Berry or somebody on the CD the next time NASA cons us into sending off a billion-dollars worth of space junk boldly seeking life outside the Solar System and outside the confines of the life expectancy of the human species. Any malevolent, silicon-based amphibian lifeform out there would take one listen to Ross and decide there was nothing on Earth they could possibly use.) Along the way we get divorce rates (high for the sort of toothless idiot Ross has likely never seen, but which, until recently, he imagined as a fertile field for bi-annual vote harvesting; low for the sort of self-centered elitist Rat Race contestant Ross--and Brooks--always seem to haul in as villains, somehow), out-of-wedlock childbirth, and more celebrities behaving badly, plus a ever-present hint that everyone who took part in the Cultural Revolution in the Unfortunate Sixties almost immediately regretted it. And it ends, as best I can recollect from those moments before I banged my head on the floor, with the suggestion that we might want to try hybridizing lower-class nymphomaniacs with high-achieving, sexless lawyers, accountants, and Op-Ed columnists, just to smooth things out a little.

Oh, sorry, I didn't mean "Op-Ed columnists" there; Douthat has been, one hopes happily, married for almost two years now, and this, accompanied by his highly developed moral sense and a vast knowledge of human sexuality culled from Newsweek's exhaustive coverage of the Sexual Revolution throughout his lifetime, excuses turning prime Times real estate into an Advice for the Lovelorn column. What I meant, of course, was that we need to marry off security-seeking ice queens to public moralist Republican office holders. So that Ross won't have to do any more solo tapdancing. That sorta thing can lead to leotard catalogues.

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See, This Is Why We Can't Have Anything Nice. Because You Won't Stop Humping Its Leg.

Ted Anthony, AP: "For Generation X, a really bad day". June 26

The man-child named Michael Jackson and the luminous girl known as Farrah Fawcett-Majors jumped into our consciousness at a plastic moment in American culture -- a time when the celebrity juggernaut we know today was still in diapers. When they departed Thursday, just a few hours and a few miles apart, they left an entire generation -- a very strange generation indeed -- without two of its defining figures.

"These people were on our lunchboxes," said Gary Giovannetti, 38, a manager at HBO who grew up on Long Island awash in Farrah and MJ iconography. "This," he said, "is the moment when Generation X realizes they're grown up."

Uh...

It was a long time coming. Cynical, disaffected, rife with ADD, lost between Boomers and millennials and sandwiched between Vietnam and the war on terror, Gen X has always been an oddity. It was the product of a transitional age when we were still putting people on celebrity pedestals but only starting to make an industry out of dragging them down.

Uh...

Its memorable moments were diffuse and confusing -- the Ronald Reagan assassination attempt, the dawn of AIDS, the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. It had no protest movement, no opponent to unite it, none of the things that typically shape the ill-defined beast we call an American generation.

These were the people who sent to the top of the charts a song called "We Don't Need Another Hero," then figured out how to churn them out wholesale, launching the celebrity obsession that is now an accepted part of American cultural fabric.

Meaning they were also, presumably, the same people who sent "Holding Out for a Hero" to the exact same chart position a scant twelve months earlier. Could you just stop it? Please?

And that was personified nowhere better than in the two people who died Thursday.

Okay, one, I don't know the graphic representation for the sound you make when you stick out your lower lip and fan it rapidly with your index finger while going "bluh bluh bluh", but kindly insert that here. Two, that's it? Nowhere better than Her Generation's (not yours) Answer to Betty Grable, and The Craziest Celebrity of All Time by a Factor of Six? (And crazy sad, not crazy inventive, at that. Incidentally, since we're in for a dime already, the Bathing Beauty dates to Mack Sennett's stable of adolescents, and the Blonde bombshell to Jean Harlow. Grable was a zero, then a wartime pinup, then a zero again. She was not the genesis of anything but Betty Grable jokes.) If I'd have known this was coming I'd have urged Kurt Colbain and David Foster Wallace to try dying on the same day, just so we could have had a better class of celebrity to endure the incontinent faux-adoration of.

In keeping with our unplanned theme of the week, You write about junk culture for a living! If you'd like to ponder its Deeper Meaning you're welcome to, though personally we'd prefer you didn't. But ponder it, or don't. Pondering yourself pondering it is not the same thing. In fact it is the opposite thing.

The modern Mindless Cult of Celebrity is at least as old as Valentino, and the organized caterwauling at early death is at least as old as, well, Valentino. It may come as a shock to someone who believes the world changed, forever, when he dirtied his first diaper, but there were people even then--innocent of teevees and Twitterings, if you can imagine it--who found this sort of thing grotesque, troubling, alarming, disgusting, laughable, anything but "a shared experience you either loved or hated, but took part in". Day of the Locust? Sunset Boulevard? The Last Tycoon, The Great Man, La Dolce Vita? The Sweet Smell of Success, which points us to the power wielded by celebrity-dragger Walter Winchell, practically unimaginable in today's terms. Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, GraphiC, Confidential all made a living at "dragging down" celebs. It generally stopped at the exact point where studio hush money began, but you might want to brush up on the bios of Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle. Isn't a passing familiarity with this stuff some sort of minimum requirement at the AP, or is it enough to remember who or what was on your school lunch box? And how, exactly, is it that the high-viscosity sludge that passes for conventional wisdom manages to posit both the Angry, Discordant, Hippie-and-LSD-laced Sixties and a happier, simpler, eight years later when everyone gathered around the idiot box to love or hate Farrah Fawcett-Major's nip-nips? You think Aaron Spelling was something everyone took part in? Or disco? For that matter I distinctly remember my parents being somewhat less than enthusiastic Motown groove-thing shakers.

And so y'know what? If you've got to invent this Generation shit, then this one, like the previous one, has no fucking excuse for not knowing the difference. Just fucking take responsibility for this stuff, on your own. Quit trying to fob it off on your imaginary cohort, stop treating it as the inevitable result of those technological advancements that had the good taste, and good fortune, to occur while you were around to be aware of them. Crap culture has been with us at least since people left the farms, quit playing the piano in the parlor or the banjo on a stump, and started consuming ready-made pap. For just as long there have been people complaining it was all dreck. We know this because it must be. And we know you know it too, for the same reason. So, please, go have a private drink and toast the dear departed, or, more likely, toast yourself toasting them, and try being solemn about it for once.


Okay, just kiddin'. Really, though, could y'all try to bring this one in in less time than you spent on that People's Princess none of you knew a fucking thing about? Like the man said, it'd gratify some people, and astonish the rest.

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Actually, The One Thing That Surprises Me Is That The National Review Didn't Just Feature Him On The Cover Instead Of My Man Mitch

John Dickerson, "Heartless: The disturbing glee at Mark Sanford's downfall". June 24

THIS, then, has become our theme of the week: You work in political journalism! If you are not personally responsible for the Attention Deficit Disorder and the Scatology and the hypocritical Small Town School-Marmishness you have at least acquiesced in exchange for a paycheck, quite possibly for your entire career, since it describes the Press in general for at least a quarter-century. At the very least you might lay off the shocked finger-pointing and sad head-shaking when typical Press behavior is on display. Compared to you guys the American Psychological Association is a model of transparent motivation and self-criticism.

Take that back. Compared to you guys everyone else is a model of transparent motivation and self-criticism.

If Why didn't the President talk about Iraq? is a sick joke, coming from two major Bush administration lapdogs, Won't someone consider that Mark Sanford is a human being? is scribbled on the latrine door. And not just any latrine, but the Worst Toilet in Scotland. Roy makes the case more eloquently than a thousand Slate monkeys ever will, but without the suggestion that challenges to the human heart should trump political concerns in cases where Beltway insiders think they should. Disturbing glee? Only if you were also disturbed this morning when you noticed a large yellow ball of fiery gasses in the eastern sky. C'mon, Dickerson. It's Slate! It's the home of the Special Reverse Twist Counterintuitive Contrarianism masquerading as Just Common Sense. At what point in the distant past did You All Are So Heartless! Think of the Children! become as stale and phony as the Sexual Hijinks du Jour it supposedly disdains? Excepting that the Sexual Hijinks in question are generally of the Factual sort, often with added Hypocrisy of the "loudly campaigns and votes to prohibit just this sort of behavior" variety, whereas the "Oh, his Poor Family" routine is at best a (standard) argument and at worst a barely-concealed attempt to deflect a problem. And just because someone's crying--literally or figuratively--doesn't mean he's not a crocodile.

Mark Sanford is no longer missing, but he's obviously lost. The South Carolina governor's press conference was excruciating: apology, followed by self-flagellation, followed by apology. It was like watching a man light himself on fire. I thought about his kids mustering up the courage to watch it on YouTube some day. I thought about his wife having to suffer the anger and the loss. Perhaps even worse, she's also going to have to endure the armies of pity and the people like me trying to guess at what her feelings are.

So what th' fuck compels you to?

The scandal has ended Sanford's national political career. If the affair wasn't enough to do in Sanford as a presidential candidate, his erratic behavior was. He may be forced to resign as governor. Even if he stays in office, Democrats will figure out how much to exploit the scandal for their advantage.

Okay, again, this is news like The Dawn is news. You can't help speculating about a woman you don't know in the slightest, but Democrats are cruel jackals with a whiff of carrion in the breeze. Fucking choose one.

The personal impact of the Sanford affair is more gripping than the political. Sanford has done a horrible thing to his wife and family and friends. He seemed to know and feel this more profoundly than other politicians we've seen go through this familiar apology exercise before. That doesn't excuse him. Not that he was asking that anyone excuse him. He seemed to be trying to take all the blame, as he should. Some might think his explanations were excuses. To me they seemed like a man confessing the details of a crime.

Albeit one who had but two choices: face the cameras, or resign and try to hide out. Sanford chose to go weepy. He chose to make it about his "failures" and his staunch Christianity. He could have made it about the unique legal responsibilities he'd actively sought from the people of South Carolina, without anyone holding his precious family hostage, and then flaked on. And if he had, he would have resigned. There's a distinction between "confessing the details of a crime" and turning yourself over to the police to face the music, John.

The snap judgments failed to acknowledge a grain of the fundamental human carnage we were witnessing. You can laugh at Sanford, as you can laugh at a video of a wrecked Amy Winehouse falling all over her house. But at some point, even though they did it to themselves, you have to feel sorry for them as human beings. You can do that, I think, and not be a fan of adultery or drug use.

So, it didn't occur to you while you were typing that Amy Winehouse has never tried to throw anyone else in jail for public intoxication?

stopped for a moment to even nod to it. My thoughtful colleague William Saletan and Andrew Sullivan were exceptions.

"Liberal" Republican Pundits Longing In The Wake Of The Total Collapse Of Their Party To Find A Closet Big Enough To Crawl Back In for Sanford 2012!

Maybe there are others.

But finding them wouldn't advance my point.

Maybe people expressed these views in private conversations. But in the e-mails and Twitter entries and blog posts I read in the aftermath, Sanford's human ruin was greeted with what felt like antiseptic glee. The pain he's caused, the hypocrisies he's engaged in, seemed like license to deny him any humanity at all.

First that big glowing ball in the sky, now callous indifference by email and Twitter! Has the world turned upside down?

Sanford's fumbling efforts to explain how he's tried to rescue himself with his faith offered some people an opportunity to make fun of his religion, as if a confused, lost, flawed person were the right spokesman for anything.

So unfair, especially in light of the fact that the professionally religious--such as Mark Sanford, pre-last Thursday--never, ever, ever seize on anecdotal occurrences to advance their agenda. It's like they're being forced to fight with one hand tied behinds their backs, really.

People tend to think the most awful thing about a person is the most true thing.

Some do, no doubt, not that this comes as a revelation. Personally, I believe the most awful thing that comes out about a person in public life generally serves the same purpose that hush puppies serve for a pack of baying dogs.

They also apparently think it's the most true thing about his or her associations. So an e-mail arrived asking, "[I]s there any Republican not sleeping around?" Maybe Sanford should have been a presidential candidate. He apparently represents an entire party and an entire religion.

Not to mention the fact that this unfair tar job comes from The Party That Likes To Kill Little Babies. Well, at least we got to your real complaint before time ran out. So, no, John, you're right; one fallen hypocrite with Presidential aspirations does not represent the entire party and the entire religion. I think the actual question is whether the five-hundred forty-seven we now have lined up might begin to suggest a pattern.

One more John Dickerson quote, before we spend the rest of the day swapping salacious emails:

There are a couple of ways to get out of saying what the truth is. One is to say, well, I've got to get back to the business of the country. The problem is, he's not the president, he can't say that. He's also on recess. And the other thing is to attack your attackers, so they have attacked the media for going after him on this story. It's a legitimate story, though, and he's not coming up with the answers that he called for when President Clinton was in a similar fix.

That'd be Dickerson on CNN, July 6, 2001, taking about Representative Gary Condit. Ah. Simpler times.

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Questions For Discussion

Mike Allen, politico.com:

A couple of surprising words were missing from President Barack Obama’s 55-minute news conference on Wednesday: “Iraq” — and “Afghanistan.”

Also MIA: “Korea,” “Pakistan,” “soldiers,” “surge” and “war” — as well as the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.
The omissions were partly a result of the short attention span of the press, which did not ask about those topics after the president did not mention them in his opening statement.

But the silence on those subjects also provides a striking illustration of one of the singular differences between Obama and his predecessor.

Whereas President George W. Bush invoked his status as wartime commander in chief so often that it seemed like a crutch, Obama has much more of a domestic focus, and resists rhetorical calls to arms like “war on terror.”

Matt "Yardbird" Cooper, The Former Atlantic Monthly:

It tells you something that neither Afghanistan nor Iraq came up at the president's press conference. The United States is simultaneously prosecuting two wars in the Muslim world and neither merited a question of the president. It's the surest sign of how quickly attention shifts and flits from one topic to another and how surefooted the White House needs to be in a fluid news environment. Iran might have gotten one question a few weeks ago. Now it dominates the news conference. The collapse of the American automotive industry didn't come up either, nor did rail safety after yesterday's accident or hate crimes, which so dominated the news cycle after the shooting at the Holocaust Memorial. Nothing lasts.

So given the changing world, how did Obama do both in terms of style and substance?

1. Is Mike Allen's standing to criticize the tone and content of our national debate equal to Maury Povitch's? Or less than? Try to include recent vocabulary words, such as "mumpsimus", "coprophilia" and "corporate demirep" in your essay.

2. Do you think the revelation that "Things Change" occurred to Matt Cooper before he became Scooter Libby's buttboy, during the two or three seconds when he was contemplating whether he would be like to be the buttboy of some guy called Bubba or sing his lungs out, or shortly thereafter, while he was washing his undies?

3. The First Amendment to the US Constitution prohibits the abridgment of a Free Press. Given that none of the Founders, other than Ben Franklin, is known to have had a sense of humor, do you still think it's possible this was intended as some sort of Age of Enlightenment leg-pull that got lost in translation?

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