Well, Yes And No

Jacob Weisberg, "Down with People: Blame the childish, ignorant American public--not politicians--for our political and economic crisis." February 6

SLATE recently adopted the new Comment technology that's so popular on the internets, which led me to consider, one idle hour, swapping my regular time-wasting for a career of replying to every single one of their items, "I agree. But the opposite is also the case."

Lemme ask ya: what do you say about a piece that notes about Senator/ Spokesdick Scott Brown that he "has signed a no-new-taxes pledge and called for an across-the-board tax cut on families and businesses. But [he] doesn't want government to spend any less money: He opposes reductions in Medicare payments and all other spending cuts of any significance." which follows that immediately with "I don't mean to suggest that honesty is what separates the two parties." And then:

Increasingly, the crucial distinction is between the minority of serious politicians in either party who are prepared to speak directly about our choices, on the one hand, and the majority who indulge the public's delusions, on the other. I would put President Obama and his economic team in the first group, along with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Because to me you left the issue of honesty behind at the first mention of politicians (not to mention confounding it beyond belief by suggesting there are serious politicians in both parties, and being reduced to claiming Ah-nuld as the Republican standard-bearer). Which I don't intend as a crack, but as a sharp instrument inserted under the flap of the argument for a peek inside. If we're going to use honesty as the standard the conversation is dead before it begins, because no one would recognize it if it ran naked down the street, and because once it's brought up the Little, White sort is guaranteed to be equated with the Big variety: the fact that John Kerry or Michael Dukakis engaged in photo ops while campaigning for national office cancels out attacks on their service to this country or the use of blatant racism by their opponents. But both sides do it!

Republicans are more indulgent of the public's unrealism in general, but Democrats have spent years fostering their own forms of denial. Where Republicans encourage popular myths about taxes, spending, and climate change, Democrats tend to stoke our fantasies about the sustainability of entitlement spending as well as about the cost of new programs.

Jeez Louise, what does it take to get a paid observer of the nation's politics to, y'know, observe? The Democrats, with the help of the Obama administration and historic majorities in both Houses, just managed to defeat national health care, a major plank of their platform back in Aught Eight, after first trying to convert it into Not National Health Care, Except in the Sense that Insurance Companies Will Get Everybody's Money. And they defeated it because the majority in one House in particular objected to "busting the budget" such that they might, at some time in the future, actually have to start thinking about defense appropriations rather than rubber-stamping them after the second reading and before a four-day weekend. I'm pretty sure even Slate covered this.

So, forget for a moment that "The People Are Stupid!" is--however justified--a think piece published by an outfit most famous in American letters for having brought together the best minds from both ends of the American center, plus a Scotched Englishman, and finding absolute agreement about our vital interest in finding and destroying Iraq's nuclear arsenal. We can't get through the article itself without trotting out--I'm not saying one party is the more dishonest!--this malarky about the modern Democratic party as the socialist progeny of Eleanor Roosevelt and Saul Alinsky. What sort of stupidity are we bent on exposing here, again?

The usual way to describe such inconsistent demands from voters is to say that the public is an angry, populist, tea-partying mood. But a lot more people are watching American Idol than are watching Glenn Beck, and our collective illogic is mostly negligent rather than militant.

Well, let's at least note here that some negligence might be indistinguishable from "getting your news from Slate", or, to be fair about it, just about every other mass-market news source which employs this "don't actually say anything without reminding the reader that 'both' sides are equally at fault. Meaning all except FOX.

After which it's the public's fault for not seeing things clearer, or reading between the lines, or something.

Two things, here, and that's the first one: when has the Press been held accountable? It didn't just cheerlead for the Iraq war while embedded; it colluded with the Bush administration in the run-up. Was that due to the public stupidity demanding immediate military action? The polls didn't say so. The business press was still fellating Goldman Sachs as global markets tottered, and it got right back to work as soon as that sweet guvment Viagra took effect. Was an ignorant public demanding that? Is that the same ignorant public which found discussions of Enron, or the details of health care, "too boring" or "not sexy enough", according to the people who get to explain away all their news decisions that way?

Three ('88, '00, '04) of our last six Presidential elections turned on such utter imbecility as to make the National Enquirer blush; at issue at the time, in order: the S&L bailout, then the largest in history, and the direct result--hell, the goddam linchpin--of Reaganism; the Presidential candidacy of a man too butt-ignorant to organize a group of caddies; and the disastrous results, domestic and foreign, of the back-room deal that gave him a first term. I'm sorry, did you notice those getting wide coverage? Maybe they were squeezed in there somewhere between Willie Horton and Windsurfing. Or tank rides and Love Story. The Press wants every story to be a Shit Storm, and it wants every story to be trivial--or the New Pearl Harbor--so it doesn't have to take sides. It's funny, y'know, teachers get rained on constantly because their students can't read, but the Press has no responsibility to an electorate which somehow imagines Octomom to be a story of national import, or Iran one of the world's foremost nuclear powers.

The second thing is this: the opposite of stupidity always winds up approaching 100% congruence with the writer's own opinions (that is, the ones he holds today). The sustainability of entitlement spending? We've managed to sustain war spending for the sixty-five years since the last war we declared ended. Once in a generation somebody'll get around to muttering about military or historical decline, while sounding like they hope nobody heard, and while meaning that We'd better fucking amp up the Defense spending if we wanna keep pushing countries with no air force around. Where th' fuck were you when the Congress was authorizing a war without declaring one, agreeing to fund it off the books, and cutting taxes at the same time, Mr. Weisberg? Oh, right. Rooting for it. Now you're suddenly excused from the consequences because you noticed them seven years later? Stupid public!

The charitable interpretation is that Brown embodies naive optimism, an approach to politics that Ronald Reagan left as one of his more dubious legacies to Republican Party.

No. That's not charity, it's a Get Out of Jail Free card. And it's a mark of you Reagantots, right and left, that you imagine there's any Reagan legacy other than talking tough about deficit spending before blowing the national paycheck, the kids' college fund, and ever' las' stack of seed corn on Space Shields, Invisible Bombers, and Aircraft carriers--none of which we had any real need for--and raking in the resulting political benefits. And it still works, in no small measure because people keep repeating crap about "Reagan's legacy" as though it wasn't the clear delineation of a well-earned historical decline, but just a little by-gum Patriotic excess. Which is just, well, stupid.

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Grumble Grumble Grumble

Did the levees get topped? Or did

the Tops get levied? Details at 11.

• So how come the first thing Obama gets right in thirteen months is his Super Bowl prediction?

• Seriously, I knew the Colts were in trouble early in the week, when everyone (else) started picking them as a semi-lock. Distinct "Rumsfeld news conference, circa April 2003" vibe.

• My friend Gary:

"Oh, well, at least The Who was great!

Wait. Never mind."

• My Poor Wife: "They should have hired a Who cover band."

• We're grumbling, so if there's any singer anywhere who should absolutely stay in the pocket it's Queen Latifa. But otherwise, let's replace "The Star Spangled Banner" with "America the Beautiful", already. And let's replace American Idol singers with dead air. Th' fuck? I understand why FOX did it in the championship round, but how does CBS wind up with an over-matched country singer?

• Why CBS should not get to broadcast another Super Bowl, even unto the seventh generation:

Katie Couric, to Drew Brees: Did you save New Orleans? Or did New Orleans save you?

• #2 was Lillian Gish:

James Brown: "Dwight Freeney has the most talked about ankle coming into this year's Super Bowl."

• Seriously, we're happy for Nawlins, but the rest of you freeloaders on the Feel-Good Express can go fuck yourselves. Especially the Press which, let us recall, had to be shamed into backing off the Looters! Looters! Looters! coverage, and just consider what it takes to shame the Press. I actually heard somebody say "Don't want a hand-out, just a hand up", which was a great Public Service Announcement tagline in the 70s, but is a wormwood, gall, and broccoli rabe omelette after we managed to bail out GM, Goldman Sachs, and the Bush-Reagan-Friedman Theory of Benign Rapine, and deny even as much health care as the insurance companies would allow to Ward Nines throughout the country, scant weeks ago. Stow the fucking piano music. Katrina was the proximate cause of a disaster built of decades of greed, racism, and a facile Exceptionalism that's supposed to excuse anything and everything the Haves wanna rain down on the Have Nots. It'd be one thing if this was an aberration caused by the Saints turning up on the holiest day of the secular Calendar. But if you're more comfortable retelling the story of Job than reporting facts, maybe you boarded the wrong career bus somewhere.

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F*cking Id*ots

MARY-JANE McArgle-Bargle, on being called to account for the fiscal meltdown of Colorado Springs:

If you can't understand why a libertarian is against your program, start with the possibility that they might not think it is a true public good. That way you don't need to jump straight to the ludicrous conclusion that opposing your new boondoggle means they logically must also want to rip down the guard rails on the highway.

Look, Miss Gault: we already know you're an inconsistent Objectivist. We know this because you're an Objectivist.

Sure, you love road signs, merchantability laws, and the invasion of small countries when you perceive them to be necessary for the continued protection of the fruits of your superiority, or the production of iPhones. You want a medal for that? As well give Jonah Goldberg a D.S.C. for having something better to do than back up his fighting words about Iraq/Afghanistan/Iran/Syria/Yemen/Hollywood. This is precisely the point: you get to argue that whatever government activity you don't like violates the universal assurances given by some tenth-rate novelist, secure in you knowledge that rational people will protect you from the loss of any personal benefits, or the imminent advance of real chaos. When you do happen to get called on it--meaning when you do bother to respond---it's "Why, of course I'm not opposed to stop lights!" despite the fact that either a) you are; or b) you managed to reach middle-age, or approximately fifteen years after sensible people have tossed Atlas Shrugged on the kindling pile, without it ever occurring to you that everyone believes exactly the same about himself, the only distinction being where one imagines "the necessary public good" to end: stoplights, security regulation, universal healthcare, or free iPhones. Choose one. Although I must say that the idea that libertarians make decisions based on the public good--implying that in the future you'll be arguing facts, rather than blessing your readership with the benefits of your metaphysical certainties and your grand-mama's Roosevelt hatreds--sounds promising.

Mr. Brooks: we have suggested before than when these Sociology 101 spells hit you lie down with a cold compress. This is for your good as well as ours. But please, for God's sake, stay th' fuck away from sports! which includes rowing, polo, croquet, usury, and any other athletic diversions of your class. If you need to know why, have someone lash you to the four-poster this weekend and read aloud every word George Eff Will has ever written about baseball.

Jack Shafer:

Shriver the word cop is every bit the oppressor that he imagines Emanuel to be.

Finally! Someone brave enough to take on the PC police for only the 400 millionth time since Slate made the internets worth reading.

No decent person—not even Rahm Emanuel—wants to deny the marginalized their dignity.

It's not his fault that most people believe this is best accomplished by not denying them their dignity.

All right-thinking parents discourage their children from grossly misusing the word. But declaring every conversational use of retarded and beating up on public figures who use it colloquially won't bring new dignity to the people upon whose behalf Shriver advocates. Instead of normalizing attitudes and perceptions, Shriver's scolding tactics shove everybody outside his circle into a crouch, begging for his forgiveness.

Well, only because Shriver was obligated, in this PR world, to accept an apology (for a slight that wasn't aimed at him, but at people who received no apology); we'd be much better off if this sort of thing engendered the opprobrium of everybody who didn't work at Slate rather than some phony mea culpa played out for the Press. But the apology isn't at fault. The real crime is that because he issues an apology he's automatically absolved of being a first-rate asshole while, conversely, some id*ot on the internet is allowed to claim the whole thing is a big tsimmes cooked up by the professionally aggrieved. (Meanwhile, Sarah Palin, whose only contribution to the disabled is lugging her Down's Syndrome baby around as a Right-to-Life trophy, gets a mere mention, despite the fact that her Facebook intervention was purely political and self-serving.)

The point that seems to have been lost in all this is that the President's Chief of Staff called someone a retard. Not only would I not allow a child of ten to use the term; if he was still using it after age twelve I'd have him locked away for good, not because it's rude, but because he was obviously a hopelessly perpetual juvenile and the market's already flooded. Rahm Emanuel is fifty.

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Things I Don't Understand, Pt. Seven Billion

Erik Nelson, "The Perfect Double Bill: Zombieland and Road to Utopia". February 2

I THINK I've lived a little too long/ On the outskirts of town…. There are few moments as personally satisfying as this, which, of course, I find more than a little disturbing, in that it means a lifetime's worth of helping the Universe in its ongoing efforts to beat every last jot of irrational hope (if that's not oxymoronic) out of me has failed, or missed a spot; it really must be harder than it looks to be a Buddhist. Anyway, Nelson not only praises Bing & Bob here, but later throws Artie Shaw into the bargain.

[The Road pictures] were defining moments of the 1940s, an era that seems impossibly remote today. The Greatest Generation is remembered for storming Omaha Beach, not laughing at jesters of the republic like Abbott and Costello or Fred Allen. It seems Preston Sturges is the only comedic film artist of that era who has made the jump to those fly-in-amber Criterion box sets.

It's not exactly Nick Drake returning from the grave to chart, after I'd spent twenty years pressing his stuff into the hands of intelligent listeners who'd been too young to join the throngs which ignored him when he was alive, but for some reason it perks me up, despite the fact that the world never learned anything from that Volkswagen commercial.

So here's what I don't get:

If it's a culture crime that a decade of comedy has simply vanished from memory, a simultaneous witness for both the defense and the prosecution is Bob Hope. Here's an American comedic legend who quite simply was not funny -- at least publicly -- for 50 long years, a creative desert entered the day that principal photography was completed on Frank Tashlin's "Son of Paleface" in 1952, and left by Hope's death in 2003. This very public lack of discernible humor not only doomed Hope to critical oblivion, but may have impacted the reputations of many of his contemporaries as well.

But still.

Because, as someone who thinks 92.6% of the films which can truly be called Great are in black-and-white, I'd like to know who's watching any of 'em. Who's talking about The Thin Man? His Girl Friday? Ball of Fire? The Devil and Miss Jones? Okay, Ivan (who ain't trading no samizdat, Mr. Nelson, and in fact may be the only honest man on the internets).

I grew up with the worst of Hope--not just those phone-it-in-from-waaay-long distance teevee specials, but his vocal support of a jungle war that kept his name in Variety for something other than Call Me Bwana. But I knew at the same time that Hope had an unmatched sense of timing, at least in talkies, at least until he grew fat and comfortable and chummy with Presidents. Yeah, he coasted for thirty years or so; you get that option when the audience allows, which doesn't mean you have to take it. I just find it a little difficult to accept that today's audiences are still turned off by his middle-to-old-age reputation, which resides in that same musty corner as everything else that occurred before the vast majority of them was born. I can't think of anyone under 30 in my extended family, or my neighborhood, who could be made to sit still for a Road picture, or a screwball comedy, or an episode of The Honeymooners or The Dick Van Dyke Show, for that matter. Although if someone turned them into cartoons…

And I don't know why this is, exactly. Not lack of wit, or intellect; more like a proprietary sense about CGI, and a consumerist streak that borders on Stockholm Syndrome. Yeah, time marches on. Yeah, yeah, Ted Turner cornered the market. That doesn't explain why every other channel shows an endless Roadhouse loop. Y'know, the Silents don't speak to me much, either, but I made the effort to see The Passion of Joan of Arc, Metropolis, Greed, and Napoleon, and I'd count it as a personal failure, not excuse it as a cultural artifact, if I were anything less than a huge fan of Buster and Charlie. This is the cultural equivalent of the old Red Barn question: farmers say they paint barns red because that was the color the Merchantile stocked; the retailer said he stocked it because that was the color farmers asked for. You're excused if you don't really like this stuff. You're not excused for thinking Judd Apatow is the greatest comic genius ever if you didn't look first. Or thereafter, but that's another story.

Obligatory clumsy segue to Indiana politics: So "Dan Coats to challenge Evan Bayh" becomes the latest headline-borne example of how careless political writers are with minor details (Coats has essentially said he wouldn't resist having his name placed in nomination, which may be as good as a wink to a blind camel, but it's not the fucking same, is it?). So in the space of a couple weeks we've gone from the Massachusetts election, to the Indiana Republican party deciding that made Fidel Bayh vulnerable, to them "proving" it with a Mike Pence poll, to every legitimate Indiana Republican contender immediately declining to run or talking his wife into getting temporary cancer--unless you count John "Concealed Weapon" Hostettler as legitimate--to the party somehow dredging up the only Indiana Senator since sleeve garters with an emptier legislative resume than Bayh himself. Sometimes you can get the vague impression that none of these people really means what he says. And despite the potential contest of Chamber of Commerce Hairdo vs. Mr. Beige-on-Beige Interior, it's actually started off pretty well, from an entertainment point of view, with state Democrats officially welcoming Coats back to Indiana (he's been living in Virginia), and the GOP making noises about running against "Mr. and Mrs. Bayh," which I hope they will, as it'll be a little hard for ol' Ev to blame that one on Leftists.

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Why I Won't Be Bothering To Fisk Brooks' Bizarro "Rise Up, Oldsters, And Throw Off Your Oppressive Social Security And Medicare Benefits" Column

cat_named_zoe at Sadly, No!:

"You kids get on my lawn!"

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Go Self-Report Yourself

Rob Stein, "Abstinence-only programs might work, study says". February 2

NICE timing, by the way. Was there some desperate call made to Douthat Friday afternoon? "Ross, listen, we had the big roll-out planned for Monday, and goddammit, Guttmacher is fucking us! Guttmacher. G-u-t-t-m-a-c-h-e-r. Yeah, I know you've never heard of it. When's that stopped you? They used to be part of Planned Parenthood, Ross. Yeah, baby killers. Listen, try to remember not to say it that way.

"We sunk $4 mil in this thing, Ross. Now Couric's doing one of her touchy-feely routines. Says the numbers prove kids also need to hear about condoms. Yeah, Liberal baby-killers, Ross. Whaddid I just say?

"Anyway, remember when we decided you'd try an' get your copy in for Monday? When everyone's too busy reliving the weekend to bother with it? Well, it's down to you to get the talking points out there before Tuesday. You know, 'Liberals hate Bush', 'Bloggers go apoplectic', 'States rights'; the usual. I'm emailing you the list. If we can find him we'll get Brooks to do the science for you. We know you won't let us down, Ross. Graded on a curve, I mean. You never do."

Sex education classes that focus on encouraging children to remain abstinent can persuade a significant proportion to delay sexual activity, researchers reported Monday in a landmark study that could have major implications for U.S. efforts to protect young people against unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

Only about a third of sixth- and seventh-graders who completed an abstinence-focused program started having sex within the next two years, researchers found. Nearly half of the students who attended other classes, including ones that combined information about abstinence and contraception, became sexually active.

The findings are the first clear evidence that an abstinence program could work.

Let's be clear here. I believe the goal of public education is education. And judging purely from the near-universal inability of anyone connected to the mass-market Press to figure out a simple study, place it in context, roughly judge its face-value reliability, catch its limitations, and report those accurately instead of hammering them into the most convenient news narrative, I'd say our problems are too profound for us to be pretending we can effect behavioral modification with waterboarding, let alone without.

No, Mr. Stein; researchers did not "find" that fewer students in an abstinece-focused program began having sex compared to other groups. That's what the students told them, and though I admit this is ethically preferable to a full pathology exam after euthanizing them, it still must be admitted it falls somewhat short of empirical certainty. I'm surprised this escaped your notice in over twenty years on the science/medicine beat, Mr. Stein.

[Now might also be a good time to point out that when these same three researchers did an almost identical Federally-funded study in 1998 they concluded that "Both abstinence and safer-sex interventions can reduce HIV sexual risk behaviors, but safer-sex interventions may be especially effective with sexually experienced adolescents and may have longer-lasting effects." That, by the way, was the 16th google entry for "Jemmott Fong abstinence studies", and twelve of the fifteen ahead of it were reports of yesterday's announcement. Took 0.30 seconds, and about two minutes to work my way down to it.]

Over the next two years, about 33 percent of the students who went through the abstinence program started having sex, compared with about 52 percent who were taught only safe sex. About 42 percent of the students who went through the comprehensive program started having sex, and about 47 percent of those who learned about other ways to be healthy did.

Now, here's an odd thing, to me at least: the abstract listed five groups, none of which could exactly be described as a "control", which would have entailed giving half the group sugar pills and telling them they could have as much sex as they wanted without fear of pregnancy or disease. Perhaps we can stipulate that sex is popular. But when it comes time to report the results it's "abstinence" vs. "everybody else". Hmmm. Did the condom group enjoy sex more? Were the bunch taught Healthy Life Styles 33% more likely to use vegetables, or did they come down with botrytis half again as often?

The point there--okay, the point was cucumber jokes, but besides that--is that we appear to have $4 million worth of Bush-era study designed to test whether Politically-correct workarounds to objections about abstinence education could demonstrate efficaciousness. Not only are the results self-reported (see Hawthorne Effect), but by trying to skirt/overcome the squabbles of domestic politics ("The intervention does not contain inaccurate information, portray sex in a negative light, or employ a moralistic tone. It is not designed to affect condom use." Guaranteed slam dunk with the religious right, in other words) it manages to provide a 72 point Abstinence Works! headline while shifting the actual ground of the debate about half a zucchini length.

Look, I'm not saying anybody fudged the data (though I am saying it's curious when your work doesn't expand upon the almost identical test you ran a decade earlier, but rephrases the question instead). I'm saying it would be easy to run this program in a way designed to get the responses you wanted, which should be reason enough for a reporter with 20 years on the science beat to hold off the suspension of disbelief. I'm married to a public school teacher, not that that's required to understand the scope of the problem. But let's talk about getting the question right. It isn't about facing the music; it's about who's calling the tune. Problem: sexually-transmitted diseases. Solutions: Don't have sex. Have zero-risk sex. Use a condom: 80-95% efficient. (Problem: understanding fractions.) Problem: pregnancy. Solutions: Don't have sex. Have zero-risk sex. Use contraception. Use emergency contraception. Terminate pregnancy. Read Doctor Hibbert's So You've Ruined Your Life pamphlet.

Science! Education! Information! Who do you suppose opposes that approach. Doc Jemmott?

"There are populations that really want an abstinence intervention. They are against telling children about condoms. This study suggests abstinence programs can be part of the mix of programs that we offer."

Y'know, Doc, if being part of the mix was the problem you'd be $4 million poorer. The Abstinence Now, Abstinence Tommorow, Abstinence Forever! people aren't reading your study and saying, "Yes, we need to make sure our programs don't contain misinformation, portray sex in a negative light, or take a moral tone. Then they'll be effective!" They're saying, "See! Abstinence is scientifically proven to work!" Took all of seven Stein paragraphs before that one popped up. Now it's back to ramming their ideas through every school board in flyover country.

And here's the thing: anti-abortion types protest Roe for forty years, but pretty much stay mum on contraception. Don Wildmon boycotts NYPD Blue, Saturday Night Live, and Madonna, but he doesn't have much to say about soap operas. "Scientific creationism" becomes "Intelligent design, a really, really scientific theory that has nothing to do with Western monotheism, honest". These people know all about working the margains, and not overstepping in public. They know there's no problem teaching children about abstinence. They know the problem is teaching only abstinence, and with claiming that "works". They'll get away with whatever they can get away with, and steal the rest when no one's looking. Yes, a lot of these people are against telling children about condoms. And a lot are against dancing, biology, and showing female skin above the eyebrows or below the cheekbones. What else is new? The goal of permanent sexual infantilism, the one kink with God's Seal of Approval, does not and will not vary. They've got every opportunity to fund the mentoring of 662 minority students, or every last one of 'em, if they're so concerned, and to work for social and economic justice, health care, and decent educational opportunities to help solve the underlying problem. And if you'll excuse me, I'd like to get out of the way before that stampede hits.

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If You Don't Stop That You'll Go Leading The Blind

Ross Douthat, "Sex Ed in Washington". February 1

LET'S pretend you are some Midwestern schmuck recently awakened to the sad light of another February, the month when Manic Depression and Seasonal Affective Disorder shake hands on some metaphorical summit. And every year some obsession or other volunteers to hike up and try pushing them off. And fails.

And just to grab an example out of the rarefied air up there, let's say this year it's rope. You like rope. As a yout you did some climbing and rappelling in manilla diaper and single-brake-bar-and-carabiner rig (if you go now to a site tracing the history of such contraptions you find that's where it starts, which is like flipping through your family's cherished album of memories and finding the Montgolfier Brothers attended your fifth birthday party). Though in those days your half-psychotic, half-Eagle Scout pal Laughing Boy took charge of all the ropes, so you could relax and concentrate on not shitting yourself.

Anyway, this fascination with the romance of rope is all out of proportion to your actual use of the stuff. You hike, and backpack; you use it around the yard; you lash the occasional piano or unruly neighbor child to the bed of your truck. You know, at most, a half-dozen knots, but you keep a couple pieces of paracord on your desk for practice. But for some reason indicative of continual mental deterioration--not that anyone's bothering with indicators at this point--you've decided that your rope collection needs whipping.

Whipping a rope means securing the ends with twine to some other agent to prevent unravelling. This can also be accomplished, in the case of man-made fibers, with the application of heat, which is how every piece of rope I own is now secured, but that was pre-obsession. I know how to whip with twine, or thread, but it turns out the method I know, and can manage, barely, isn't optimal. In other words, it won't feed the winter wolf. So I goes to my local internet to learn how to do a proper whipping, which would be French whipping, if tied, or needle-and-palm whipping if sewn. And this, at long last, is our point. Go ahead and try this yourself [Caution: googling "French whipping," particularly without the quotes, might not be completely workplace compliant, though if you're worried about that whaddya doing here?]. It'll return pages of instruction, with stop-motion animation or video in the bargain. Go ahead and try to follow one. Any of 'em. Try two, or three, or six. If you manage anything roughly approximating a finished-looking French whip you beat me by several virtual furlongs.

And maybe you did, but the lesson is--and it would be better made to the Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction--that knowing how to do something is distinct from being able to tell someone else how to do it in something approximating words.

Then there's Ross Douthat talking about sex education.

I think I said this last time, but I've been trying to swear off Douthat. I suppose it's possible some sadist at the Times--but I repeat myself!--got wind of that and assigned Douthat to do something with Ess Eee Exx in the title, or maybe this was a more generalized marketing ploy.

And here's our first question: is this not the ninth year of the 21st century (don't quibble)? What is the fucking "conservative" obsession with Sex Ed still doing here? It's like railing against the necking opportunities presented by drive-in theaters. One thing--maybe the only thing--to be said for the Freudian hegemony of the last century: people who spouted off like this were generally diagnosed, not given Op-Ed columns.

Liberals hated almost everything about George W. Bush’s presidency, but they harbored a particular animus toward a minor domestic policy priority: abstinence-based sex education.

I assume someone somewhere is keeping track of the number of times Douthat uses this "Liberals hated every jot of the Bush administration, and especially X" ploy. I recall at least five, even though I use a brain emetic immediately after reading him.

The abstinence effort accounted for about a hundred million dollars in a trillion-dollar budget, but in the eyes of many critics it was Bushism at its worst — contemptuous of experts, careless about public health and captive to religious conservatism.

Somehow it never occurs to these guys that hacking up lines like "only a hundred million dollars or so" whenever it's convenient is what virtual Liberals really hate about "conservatives". But while we're at it: contemptuous of experts, check. Careless about public health, check. Captive to "religious" "conservatism"? That's like the drum major being hostage to the band.

So last week’s news that teenage birthrates inched upward late in the Bush era, after 15 years of steady decline, was greeted with a grim sort of satisfaction. Bloggers pounced;

And here Linkmaster R waves at Jill at Feministe. Which leads us to ask, "Well, why shouldn't she pounce?" as well as opining that the country would be a lot better off if everything that was said at Feministe had the sort of psychic reverberation Douthat attributes to it here.

But our larger point--and we're not stopping just because we've made it about fifty times in the year he's been at the Times, is, th' fuck is some thirty-year-old with a bad teenage beard who is, at the core, a fucking blogger, i.e., who cannot write, confuses "linkage" with "evidence", and who is incapable of producing a column which is not an unwitting sketch of the interior of his own skull, in the way Thurber struggled mightily with the microscope for a semester of biology before producing a drawing of his own eyeball, doing spitting out blogger like it's a disease? Bloggers pounced! Didn't the Times hire this bozo so there'd be someone at Op-Ed meetings who knew what HTML stands for? Bloggers pounced! Jesus Christ, find an article in today's Times somebody didn't pounce on. Isn't Douthat supposed to be the guy who understands this?

On CBS News, Katie Couric used the occasion to lecture viewers about the perils of telling kids only about abstinence, and ignoring contraception. The new numbers, declared the president of Planned Parenthood, make it “crystal clear that abstinence-only sex education for teenagers does not work.”

Did the Times just re-up this clown? Is it too late for a contract stipulation that prevents this sort of thing--the declaration of rhetorical victory based on who disagreed with you--or even just reduces it? Here's Katie "Rainbow Parties" Couric at the link Douthat apparently thinks you won't click on, or pay attention to:

"Is it a blip or the start of a disturbing trend?"

"The reasons aren't clear, but it came amid an increase in funding for programs that taught kids only about abstinence and nothing about contraception."

"We should teach our kids to say no to sex. Some will listen ... but others won't. So, they also need to know how to protect themselves."

That's a lecture? Or is it the culmination of forty years of "conservative" insistence that anything said on the evening news they didn't agree with was crytpo-Commie proselytizing? Is it really too much to ask of a Times Op-Ed perp of whatever stripe that he be able to recognize what is common, reasonable, and sane, and which is motoring straight and true down the uncontested middle of the highway of public opinion, and at least describe it as such? Say it again: how th' hell do you get out of Hahvahd without recognizing the distinction between this sort of thing and Thought?

In reality, the numbers show no such thing. Abstinence financing increased under Bush, but the federal government has been funneling money to pro-chastity initiatives since early in Bill Clinton’s presidency.

Or the difference between this and calculus, or history, or English? "The numbers" show precisely that; what th' hell else could they show? They don't prove the contention; if the Moose didn't tell you that, the Katie did. If the distinction between "funding pro-abstinence programs" and "funding strict abstinence-only programs while requiring total silence on anything approaching contraception" is lost on you, then I think the blame goes beyond Hahvahd to the entire Ivy League, the East Coast, and Western Civilization. And it does not exactly bode well for any sort of education.

If you blame abstinence programs for a year’s worth of bad news, you’d also have to give them credit for more than a decade’s worth of progress.

To what do we attribute logic-free education?

More likely, neither blame nor credit is appropriate.

what a magnanimous attitude to take, considering the question before us is the utter failure of your own position.

The evidence suggests that many abstinence-only programs have little impact on teenage sexual behavior, just as their critics long insisted.

By pouncing.

But most sex education programs of any kind have an ambiguous effect, at best, on whether and how teens have sex.

Which, oddly enough, is almost exactly the effect Math classes have on whether and how teens add, and the effect English classes have on how they speak.

Predictably, the rare initiatives that show impressive results tend to be defined more by their emphasis on building social capital than by their insistence on either chastity or contraception.

Or their insistence in labeling them, respectively, "God's work" and "Evil Liberal child pandering".

A 2001 survey published by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, for instance, found that “most studies of school-based and school-linked health centers revealed no effect on student sexual behavior or contraceptive use.” The exceptions included an abstinence-oriented program with a strong community-service requirement, and a comprehensive program that essentially provided life coaching as well as sex ed: participants were offered “academic support (e.g., tutoring); employment; self-expression through the arts; sports; and health care.”

'Course that isn't quite what the linked study, a sort of survey of the field, actually said (is anyone supposed to click these links and read 'em, Ross?). In the former (it reports that students were given "classroom health lessons", not abstinence education) students who were also enrolled in a community service program self-reported less sexual risk-taking; the latter, which is an intensive, multi-year after-school program targeting minority students which has showed promise, involves, and we quote, "staff…almost bec[oming] surrogate parents". You are cordially invited, Mr. Douthat, to come to Indiana and address our Governor on the benefits of spending money on this, or any other form of public education. And best of luck.

None of this renders the abstinence-versus-contraception debate pointless.

Right. It's the utter uselessness of your attempted moral indoctrination that handles that.

But we should understand it more as a battle over community values than as an argument about public policy.

Y'know, my memory ain't what it once was, so correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it your fucking side that Federalized the argument in the first place? Wasn't it yours that insisted Abstinence Only was apodictically certain to prevent all the Evils of Teen Sex? So you pick a fight, and you get beaten to a pulp because, after all, when God's on your side you don't have to train, right? And you lift your head off the canvas at the count of 8 and say, though bloody chicklets, "Hey, why not call it a draw?"

[Note: I was three-quarters of the way through this when I learned that Scott had done it earlier, and needless to say, better.]

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Damn! That Shoe Pinches When It's On The Other Foot.

David "Can't We All Just Get Along?" Brooks, "The Populist Addiction". January 26

OUR story so far: last summer my tiny pruning scissors broke--well, they broke long before that, more or less by design, when the plastic teeth on the plastic cam of the plastic lock went The Way of All Plastic--meaning I guess it's more accurate to say I finally got tired of wrapping a rubber band around the blades to keep them locked on random occasions, and decided that since I was headed to the garden-slash-hardware store up the street I'd buy a new pair, except they didn't have any, which I figured was no problem since I was going to Lowe's, except they didn't have any, so I went to Target and found the last pair that could conceivably be called "Small".

It's possible that the Blister-Pak tried to warn me--we have a chilly relationship, Blister-Pak and I--but it wasn't until I--need I say finally?--got the thing open that I learned that the fine Finns at Fiskars had decided I'd like a knife blade and Lilliputian tree saw to go along with it, and that the perfect place for those implements was the otherwise unused backs of the scissors blades. Which, if you're still following this, you might realize meant that my lifelong habit of stashing such an implement in a pocket of my work pants was now out of the question, unless I wanted additional, ad-hoc access to those pockets, and/or massive blood loss.

So I wound up having to use the sheath the Finns had thoughtfully provided, after first thoughtfully splashing "Fiskars" across the thing in 128-pt embroidery. This did not actually improve the odds of my wearing a sheath, which is really only a couple rungs up from Blister-Pak on my list to begin with.

We coexisted like the two Koreas for a couple months, but seasons change, and so did I. Came time to clean the gutters, and I figured that if I'd put up with looking like a Hollywood Mescalero this long I should just go Full Metal Village People and get a small, belt-accessorizing tool carrier to save trips up and down the ladder. And besides, I was going to Lowes.

And I got one, in black leather, which turns out to have an added benefit whenever my Poor Wife and I play Handyman's Butt-Crack and the Bored Teacher With a Snow Day, except I wasn't supposed to mention that. But while I was there I noticed--I think for the first time---the selection of camouflage tool belts, tool carriers, cell-phone holders, drill cozies, and the like. And by now it's like a flood: camouflage hats, camouflage gloves, camouflage visors with headlights; I haven't checked but neither camouflaged shovels nor lawn tractors would surprise me. Would you hire a camouflaged landscaper? By the hour? I mean, the odds are that if the majority of these guys are hiding from anything it's ex-wives.

And I got to thinkin', y'know, there oughta be a term for this, like the much-needed Metrosexual or Cougar. Maybe we should have a contest. I was gonna suggest "Cammohag", but I know how sensitive some of you are.

This, of course, is the sort of populism David Brooks gives an even wider personal berth than "Red Lobster Republicans" or "Exoburb Yachtsmen", or whatever else it is he's contributed to the language.

Politics, some believe, is the organization of hatreds. The people who try to divide society on the basis of ethnicity we call racists. The people who try to divide it on the basis of religion we call sectarians. The people who try to divide it on the basis of social class we call either populists or elitists.

Two guesses which one will emerge from this column unscathed.

These two attitudes — populism and elitism — seem different, but they’re really mirror images of one another. They both assume a country fundamentally divided. They both describe politics as a class struggle between the enlightened and the corrupt, the pure and the betrayers.

"It's not like the Golden Age of Reagan," you might hear a little voice saying, "when all the corrupt betrayers aligned like Jupiter and Mars."

Both attitudes will always be with us, but these days populism is in vogue. The Republicans have their populists. Sarah Palin has been known to divide the country between the real Americans and the cultural elites. And the Democrats have their populists. Since the defeat in Massachusetts, many Democrats have apparently decided that their party has to mimic the rhetoric of John Edwards’s presidential campaign. They’ve taken to dividing the country into two supposedly separate groups — real Americans who live on Main Street and the insidious interests of Wall Street.

Y'know, back when Wall Street was our unquestioned Savior, it seems to me that you attributed this attitude to everyone with a D after his name. So I find the implied trendiness there a mite suspicious, but not so suspicious as that careful "Palin has been known" deal. Yeah, and US magazine has been known to fluff celebrities.

It’s easy to see why politicians would be drawn to the populist pose. First, it makes everything so simple. The economic crisis was caused by a complex web of factors, including global imbalances caused by the rise of China. But with the populist narrative, you can just blame Goldman Sachs.

Okay, first, a goddam inflatable sex doll for Trans-Global Laissez-Faire Capitalism is accusing someone else of pushing economic jejunicitousness? Second, it's interesting to me how the Republican party endorses executing prisoners with a mental age of twelve, but when it comes to massive corporate fraud their immediate instinct is to file an amicus brief for the Twinkie defense.

Second, it absolves voters of responsibility for their problems. Over the past few years, many investment bankers behaved like idiots, but so did average Americans, racking up unprecedented levels of personal debt. With the populist narrative, you can accuse the former and absolve the latter.

Okay, so which group got let off the hook, and which had usury "regulations" which already made Mafia loan sharks blush tightened further around their vitals? And I know I've said this before, but the addition of this "Sure A, but B!B!B!B!B!B!" to the Forensic Debaters Stylebook under "Things Reasonable People Say" bears some serious looking into, with an eye to criminal charges.

Third, populism is popular with the ruling class. Ever since I started covering politics, the Democratic ruling class has been driven by one fantasy: that voters will get so furious at people with M.B.A.’s that they will hand power to people with Ph.D.’s. The Republican ruling class has been driven by the fantasy that voters will get so furious at people with Ph.D.’s that they will hand power to people with M.B.A.’s. Members of the ruling class love populism because they think it will help their section of the elite gain power.

1) I thought the Dems just jumped on board after Brown; never let internal consistency get in the way of a boffo construction, huh? 2) I don't have a research staff, but damned if I can find where you evinced anything approaching caution about this Republican proclivity--including "while George W. MBA President Bush was riding high"--before it became patently obvious that the lunatic fringe you thought followed your lead now controls your party, and the laissez-faire rhetoric was a beard for unfettered rapine on a scale previously unimagined.

So it’s easy to see the seductiveness of populism. Nonetheless, it nearly always fails. The history of populism, going back to William Jennings Bryan, is generally a history of defeat.

That’s because voters aren’t as stupid as the populists imagine. Voters are capable of holding two ideas in their heads at one time:

Dear Lord. What's this based on--the helpful young thing at some Midwestern airport information kiosk you asked for directions once when you couldn't get a direct flight? Jesus, Brooks, buy a fucking vowel. Or, hell, read your own fucking column. Like the one last week that limned Obama's reasoned approach to the nation's business. Complex thought's doing him a lot of good with the voting public, ain't it?

For fuck's sake. Look at what we eat. Look at what we watch. Look at what sort of chronic infantilism persuades people to buy whatever juvenilia is being dangled in front of them this week. Look at the intellectual history of your own party, Mr. Brooks, over the last forty years. The single compliment that might be paid the other party over that span is that it took more nuanced positions and was more willing to compromise, before it took one look at the polls and ran screaming down the hall looking for the Exit.

Most "voters" don't; those may be the smart ones. Those that do get to choose between two parties, a distinction which can only really be made based on bumper-sticker sloganeering, after which you use the results to infer complexity of thought?

I'm not saying people are stick-your-finger-in-a-light-socket-to-see-if-the-power's-on Stupid. But I live among them; I see how they decide state and local issues, how readily they adapt advertising bullshit as their own thought, how uninformed, intellectually lazy, or just plain too busy surviving to bother much with complex analysis if they were inclined to do so. Which they aren't. And those are the honest ones. Lack of intellectual rigor is a very different thing from principled anti-ideology.

By the way: th' fuck put you in charge of deciding what is and isn't political stupidity? I seem to recall we just exited a decade when you were wrong about everything, then excused it by saying that at least you were less of a hidebound ideologue than the other people who were wrong about everything.

In fact, this country was built by anti-populists. It was built by people like Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln who rejected the idea that the national economy is fundamentally divided along class lines. They rejected the zero-sum mentality that is at the heart of populism, the belief that economics is a struggle over finite spoils. Instead, they believed in a united national economy — one interlocking system of labor, trade and investment.

If I might just mention here--we've already dealt with your serial lionizing of Hamilton as some modern investment banker by noting that on the day he met up with Burr there wasn't a single smokestack in the Americas--whatever else they believed, these men did not live in a world where a couple of crooks could plunge the globe into financial crisis.

The populists have an Us versus Them mentality. If they continue their random attacks on enterprise and capital, they will only increase the pervasive feeling of uncertainty, which is now the single biggest factor in holding back investment, job creation and growth. They will end up discrediting good policies (the Obama bank reforms are quite sensible) because they will persuade the country that the government is in the hands of reckless Huey Longs.

Which you were fine with when they were your Hueys. Until you got hit by that ricochet.

I've got more sympathy for the fleas you woke up with than I do for your predicament, Mr. Brooks. And repeated attempts to solve it by insisting on your own blamelessness? Well, it might have a chance of working. If you were blameless.

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Riley™ Brand Balm Of Gilead. Act Now And Get A Second Allusion Free! (Just Pay Separate Shipping & Handling)

OUR Uncle Kvetch, at Roy's:

[Roy] I'm beginning to think this game isn't worth the candle. [/Roy]

I'm with you. What with Mr. Hope & Change revealing himself to be the Clinton redux I suspected he was all along, and with the less-awful party poised to go down as only they know how -- viz., with a 50-foot bellyflop into an empty swimming pool, and with the prospect of a President Snowbilly or Aw-Shuckabee getting less absurd by the day, I'm feeling an ever-greater need to disengage myself from this whole pathetic spectacle and leave it to the pathetic people who inhabit it. But that would mean no longer enjoying the high-octane snark of Roy and those of his ilk, and snark is one of my basic food groups.

What to do?

Which, mind you, doesn't prompt me to offer advice, fer chrissakes, but to consider that I've been trying to answer this since the '68 elections, and if anything I'm further asea. "Become a Midwestern suburban schlub, yell at the teevee, and grow your own pot in the basement," well, it doesn't work for everybody.

Yesterday Brave Indiana blogger Doug Masson pointed us at Oliver Willis' "The Liberal Blogosphere Goes Fox News," a remarkable document, assuming you need to be reminded that the argument never fucking ends, or changes:

"Oh, if only everyone to the Left of me would agree to see things my way purely out of fear of a Republican planet, what a bright shiny place this world would be. Instead, they're ruining it for everybody!"

Or maybe my mind's playing tricks on me. Could'a sworn, though, that I heard this 1) through the slow-motion Health Care cave-in; 2) in the run-up to Surge II: Smack Down in Smack Town; 3) after the Nobel speech; 4) as both President and Candidate Obama reneged on FISA; 5) about Tim Geithner, and pretty much everything Tim Geithner has done; 6) as Candidate Obama shamelessly pandered to the anti-choice Right after securing the nomination; 7) excusing the 98% Centrist Democratic field that spawned him, except for Hillary Clinton, who was pilloried for being a Centrist; and 8) enough other times that I could have made it a Top Ten list if I'd bothered to think before typing. Come to think of it, the only time it stops is when the people such types don't agree with are in power, at which point it's just ducky to rail against our corporate imperial masters, at least until we get close enough to an election for Amy Sullivan to lecture us on how to behave in church.

So, lemme just ask ya: Who's in charge here? Who asked for the nomination? Who's supposed to be courting whom? I've got a lot worse to say about that other "major" political "party", but at least it doesn't stint on the lip service to its base, come Hell, high water, or a brick wall Reality facial.

Y'know what else? Spare me th' fucking "Well, those are the positions he took as a candidate" routine, and the attendant "It's the voters' fault if they thought he'd suddenly transform into Howard Zinn" crap. It was the President's stanchest supporters I heard trawling that Mystical, Post-Inaugural Metamorphosis during the campaign (and when those of us who had read his positions pointed them out, what I heard was The Sounds of Silence). Ditto that "Sure, Democratic Presidents don't do enough for their base"--wait for it!--"but…." Acknowledging the facts ("by God you'd better!") doesn't grant you license to ignore them from then on out.

(Incidentally, nice job of defining yourself, Barack Obama, and, by extension, Joe Lieberman, as "center-leftists". When I need Ronald Reagan's opinions I'll ask him.)

Let's try this another way. Suppose that you love country music, and as a young person decide it's the career path you'd like to follow. You have, more or less, two choices: try to insert yourself into the star machinery, at whatever cost to yourself and your self-esteem (maybe none, maybe considerable), or you can do what you want to do from day one, and hope to get recognized for it at some point (probably the only possible path in this day and age if you happen to have been born ugly). Barack Obama wanted to be a star. He's not exempt from critics pointing out he's flat. That goes with the fucking territory. He's obliged to play for applause. He's also obliged to sell a persona. He chose "Really Thoughtful, Well-Spoken Guy Who Considers All Sides of the Issue Without Regard for Ugly Partisanship". This alone calls his judgment into question, not to mention the depth of his understanding of the Reagan Presidency. This was the absolute wrong fucking choice at the absolute wrong fucking moment. It was precisely the time for the anti-Reagan. There's no protecting him from the fallout of that choice. Go argue with the Republicans who claim he's the first Commie in the Oval Office.

Which brings us to that other party. And, as is so often the case, there's a near-perfect example of our point to be found among the cornfields and the steel mills, the limestone quarries and the Linens 'N Things of the great state of Indiana. We mentioned last week, after the Brown victory (damned Leftists!), that there was a sudden groundswell of sump water over a potential challenge to Evan "Damn Leftists!" Bayh by Congressional Choirboy Mike Pence; this was followed by a poll showing Pence leading a theoretical head-to-head matchup. We asked, at the time, what Under God would possibly keep Pence from running, under the circumstances. After all, Bayh's vote is 1% of the Senate total, and (Gentle Reader, hold onto something!) he's pretty much, oh, Howard Zinn with a $500 haircut to the Hoosier Republican laity. And we answered: that shitpot full of money he's been sitting on rather than helping actual Democrats in the actual Indiana. And yesterday Pence announced he wouldn't run, since his expectation of enormous secular power in the Kingdom of the next Republican majority in the House is so great. Meaning that the entire episode played out so we could get one half-truth once it ended. In other words, par.

(By the way, actual Republican functionaries in Indiana--at least the ones who aren't secretly whipping themselves in supplication, or in a men's room, at this hour--know that Bayh's a not-so-closeted Republican. But they also know he's capable of just about anything where money's involved, so they try to keep him on his toes now and again.)

In other words, furthering the cause of True Conservatism, of which Mike Pence is said to be the purest-hearted champion, is less important than holding onto your own fucking perks, even when the Son of a Castroite is in your sights.

So, to return to the real world, Whaddya do when Reason has been dealt out of the hand, and you're escorted from the casino for kibitzing? Wish the fuck I knew. What I do know, though, is this: the Republican party--and the base it manages to cater to, at least in words--is just as fucked as always, and more fucked than ever. Whether this President decides, belatedly, to fight 'em, or just continues to collude, the die is cast. I am at heart a humanitarian; I would sincerely regret seeing my neighbor devoured by wolves, or governed by Mitch Daniels (more than he already is). But what's the prospect of Palin 2012? What th' fuck do they do with the ongoing Reagan-Bush disaster? Cut taxes? What taxes? Figure out how to toss what's left of the working class on the street, and what used to be the middle class into poverty? For a while even Reagan understood he couldn't risk invading even half-assed countries with a depleted military, though you always knew the itch was there and he'd overstep in the Middle East at some point. There are only so many Grenadas, or reasons to send Armadas to 'em. One more military blunder and we'll be fortunate to find the troops to defend Sault Ste. Marie. You don't fix healthcare, the economy follows, and your soft power is tottering, too, not that Repugs care much for that. Sure, Oliver, I admit that a Republican majority means we'll be relaxing pollution standards so they can maximize profits before the Big Flood; who's to blame for letting them up out of the muck in the first place? We've got a party that can't govern, and a party that's afraid to, and both have had a shot in the past decade and chose to keep things just the way they are. I got nothing left to cheer about, so it sure ain't gonna be your custodianship. And, really, I've got little left to fear from a resurgent GOP that I won't get from the "Center Left", except up a different orifice. The American public has decided--in no small part with help from a tenth-rate actor with memory bubbles--that it will have to drown before it recognizes moisture. You can send in the therapists, or send in the clowns. I think regular readers know my preference.

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We'll Be Right Back

MORE Sports news (in my defense, it's pretty hard to ignore it when Your City, however dumpish, is Super Bowl Bound, Baby!): Colts To Rest Starters This Sunday. Huge Mistake or Colossal Blunder?

Yesterday I intended to mention that Manning is the only man in NFL history to have quarterbacked his team to a league championship despite being coached by Tony Dungy; today some unexpected dark-humorist at the Racist Beacon highlighted the fact that every team the Father Confessor of Pro Ball leaves makes it to the Super Bowl the following season. I say, forget the homo-bashing; never trust a former athlete who doesn't gain weight.

Second, Steve Politi of the Newark Star-Ledger with that rarest of rarities, the interesting Tweet:

Love this: Tailgating Colts fans, trying to shut up the chanting Jets fans, respond with "Jer-sey Shore! Jer-sey Shore!

It's damn near impossible to ignore this sort of thing, not that I want to. The Hoosiers went undefeated in '75 and '76 when I was at IU, and I remember how difficult it was to forget basketball and get back to concentrating on sex and drugs.

One thing professional fuhball does, better or more efficiently than almost anything else, is connect you with the rest of America, or with that virtual America which requires constant reassurance that its choice of carbonated beverage, counter-persperational stick, or brokerage firm is the one preferred by most other virtual Americans. And makes you sexier. In other words, the real America.

For one thing, it's always amusing to see what expertise multiple millions of dollars will buy you. Cialis™ Brand PDE5 Inhibitor, for example--fine local product, by the way--will direct you, via boilerplate, to its ad in Golf Digest. How much did Lilly pay for that advice, do you imagine, when it had to be staring them in the face at every Board meeting? Was there ever any discussion about Going Viral? But my favorite, for sentimental reasons dating back to Operation Arc Light, are the military recruitment, I mean, military lifestyle adverts, the latest of which--it's either the Army or the Post Office; who really listens?--promises that after all the parades held in your honor when you get back home--which time isn't specified--you'll have your choice of careers: Astronaut, Stock Car Pilot, or Dynamic Corporate Order Taker Who Doesn't Have To Wear Camouflaged Pajamas During The Daytime and 8000 Miles Away From Anyone You'd Need To Camouflage Yourself From, Aside From Your Fellow Soldiers, Occasionally.

How interesting is it that anyone with a truckload of cash can make anything sound reasonable? The military gave up on people actually serving their country by signing up thirty years ago; now the fact that they advertise like pheromone-scented body gels is simply taken for granted. Like, say, that Hero's Welcome.

I know, I know; this is not exactly a revelation. Still, that After the cheering has died down… routine raised my gorge a bit. First you get the wholly artificial "We're not spitting on our returning War Heroes like those hippies did" routine; then it's used to lure cannon fodder because, for one thing, none of the 18-40 year olds so busy patting themselves on the back for their patriotic spirit will stop long enough for a perpetual two-year hitch. If it wasn't for the Networks stopping every so often to pat themselves on the back for tossing to some Guardsman spending Super Bowl Fortnight risking his ass to salvage our domestic political bluster you'd almost forget we were at War. Wouldn't you?

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Sports Rap With Da Dawg

• Our National Anthem, that one-point-five octave 17th century drinking song limning a war we lost, was sung at the opening of last night's NFC Championship game by some wanker from FOX's American Idol. In Nouvelle-fucking-Orléans. Seventy-thousand people accepted this as the natural order of things.

• The reason my third favorite moment of the playoffs so far was the Colts win over the Jersey Jets has little to do with fandom, and almost everything to do with the fact that the goddam citizenry booed a 14-0 team because it rested its starters through two meaningless games.

• Which, by the way, led the NFL (Motto: All The Competence of the NASCAR Competition Committee, Applied To Sports!) to make grumbling noises about "the integrity of the game" while simultaneously "affirming" that the Colts did nothing wrong, unethical, or even questionable. Someday archaeologists are going to have to explain how dozens, even hundreds, of our fellow citizens could be driven into the nation's streets, public parks, and dirt tracks to protest a possible 5% improvement in the health-care system that was bankrupting them, but blatant, self-serving fabrication flies like a weather balloon over the tundra.

• Speaking of NFL rules, it would seem to behoove them to either 1) let the refs in on them or 2) let the rest of us in on the Double Golden Top Secret Rule Book they actually work from. (The latter is not a crack, nor a figment of my imagination; alone among major sports, the league keeps the exact rules given its refs a secret). They passed The Brady Rules to protect quarterbacks, then let Brett Fah-vu-ruh get shellacked, apparently on the grounds that the Saints were doing it strategically rather than tactically. And yes, the Colts got away with one, too, although it wasn't much of a hit, so far as you could tell from the only replay shot CBS had, which seemed to come from the Blimp. I'll be glad to trade the penalty if we can have the ref move off the ball when he was supposed to on that quarterback sneak, rather than standing over it while the Jets completed their substitutions. And for the life of me, how do they keep missing replay calls? I'm not sure where they saw the interference, let alone a catchable ball, on that OT call against the Vikes, and the following reception call is difficult to explain, though we have to allow that they've now fucked with the rules to the extent that the fan has no real idea what does or doesn't constitute a catch.

• But then, ye gods, can someone who knows the game explain th' fuck Minnesota was doing on that last series? I don't care who your kicker is, displaying beatific plerophory at the thought of a 51 yard attempt is religious insanity. And I know you'd displayed an inability to hang on to the football that rivaled George W. Bush's inability to find an exit door, but sheesh. We're spoiled in Indy, but the Colts would've run two plays in the time it took you guys to get up to the thirty-five and run up the middle for a loss.

• Which brings up an attendant point: how come the Colts do the hurry-up/ no huddle so much better than anyone else? When Miami had a little success with the Wildcat early in the season, half the league started direct snapping. The Colts have been doing this for ten years.

• Speaking of ten years, my second favorite moment of the playoffs has been when the Colts-Ravens announcers (Dan Dierdorf and Greg Gumble, IIRC) riffed on Manning's "happy feet", which was the CW knock on the man for nearly a decade. Ooooh, look, he's moving his feet in the pocket! He's afraid to get hit! Shifting your weight quickly from foot to foot in the pocket is apparently the one cardinal sin in all of sports mechanics and a Tell bigger'n Boris Becker's tongue. Dierdorf allowed as how maybe that sort of talk was now, oh, disproven. No, Dan, that sort of talk is now, officially, idiotic. Disproven is what it was at the time. But props to you guys for bringing it up in an industry where the shelf life of the average expert comment is twenty seconds.

• My favorite playoff moment, though, comes courtesy our local media, one division of which went around sticking microphones in the faces of Jets fans in town for the game, asking them how Indianapolis compared to New York. Really. I'm not sure what they expected; maybe "Nice clean place you got here" or "Where do you hide the attractive hookers?". I was left to ponder whether, if the Pope ever comes to town, they'll ask his entourage how that Robert Indiana "LOVE" sculpture compares with the Pietà. And one guy says, "Are you kiddin' me? [my Poor Wife recalls this as "Have you looked outside?"] This place is a dump!" Which was not just hysterical in its own right (it had the distinct vibe of Bush being interviewed by that Irish journalist who unexpectedly asked him questions, except with the roles reversed) but doubled the amusement when they went back to the anchor desk and at least one of the hairdos was visibly upset about it. Though my guess is if the guy'd said, "This place is a dump, but lemme tell ya, you've got some first-rate reporters here," it would've gone down like mint tea with honey.

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Friday Olio: Not Funny

• Kee-rist, why do I know there is something out there called (something like) The Co-Co Army, and how is it anyone could possibly care what Conan O'Brien does? He got shafted by NBC and Leno. And as a result he walks off with a king's ransom. Find someone with real problems to care about.

It might be different if he was funny, but as far as I can tell, some suit told him in 1993 that they saw him as an edgier Steve Allen, and it stuck. I've never seen the man when anything he did didn't come with calculation marks all over it. It's like watching SNL, circa 1976, and learning that Belushi has demanded they do nothing but Bee skits.

• I happened upon Letterman last night while I was trying to find something to accompany bicycling. He was busy slagging Carson Daly and Jay Leno. Not funny slagging, either; just meanness. Which I'm all for, except what possible reason would anyone have to be rude about Carson Fucking Daly? It's like starting a feud with the woman at the grocery store who refills the lotto ticket dispenser.

Look, David, we'll always have Clover Power, and it's not like I've been part of your audience the last fifteen years or so, but th' fuck? If you're not even going to try to be funny at least let the audience smoke dope openly so we'll know why they're howling at this shit.

• This reminded me that last weekend my neighbor forced us to take home his copy of The Hangover, the comedy sensation of the summer, and, being not merely a vocational salesman but a congenitally avocational one, prefaced the handoff with "Do you guys wanna go home and laugh your asses off?" I was tempted to respond, "Hey, I've got The Comedians of Comedy on disc. Want me to bring that over so you can stare uncomfortably at Zach Galifianakis' stand-up for two hours?"

I didn't, and it would have been unfair--he's not unintelligent, for a Republican, and a very funny guy--he might even know Galifianakis' stand-up, and it's possible I will laugh my ass off at The Hangover, although it's also possible I will finish reading the Great Works of Western Civ first, since I have only about 5000 to go.

I said this before, but you go through their rather extensive DVD collection and there's every piece of wildly popular trash of the last twenty years. I'm long past trying to understand this, but it does have the saving grace that, as middle-class Middle American Republicans they're supposed to hate Hollywood with a passion, and they're the ones keeping it afloat. (And, again, while the aesthetic portion of my attitude dates to being a high-school know-it-all, my one practical lesson, which scarred me for life, is the fault of George Lucas, the general population of Indianapolis, and my dick, not necessarily in that order. I squired a remarkably Amazonian Bible College freshman to a first-run showing of Star Wars, at her request, and the hooting, clapping, hissing, booing, and foot-stomping of the crowd, which suggested it had more in common with the slack-jawed audience of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds, or possibly the hayseeds of the 20s who thought William S. Hart and Tom Mix were actually killing actual Injuns, or that players who walked off-screen could be located in the appropriate wing, than it did a crowd of people which had recently lived through a rash of political assassinations, the forcible and violent defense of Jim Crow, and the public disgracing of a petty thug and felon who was simultaneously their President, left me speechless. I'd'a walked out within ten minutes, but my dick decided to stay. The number of times I have ventured into a public theatre since then without first confirming that the flick in question was subtitled you can count on any other appendage.)

• Not only that, but for some reason, probably my Poor Wife's remote habits, I not only know that Tiger Woods is in rehab--and if you can rehab "being a wealthy, attractive celebrity who likes to fuck" then I guess the nation's Strategic Celebrity Rehab Capacity is a tad excessive--but that he's been allowed to bring in help to clean his toilet, something lesser celebrity poon-hounds apparently are forced to do for themselves. How fucking hard is it to clean a toilet? How fucking far gone do you have to be that you simply must have someone else do it? Isn't that goddam pendulum supposed to swing back at some point, and some generation of American citizens, force-fed this crap from infancy, to take umbrage?

• And local news last night, of the Channel 8 variety, took forty minutes to get to anything that might possibly have resembled news, because they were busy doing live remotes from a Colts Pep Rally. I believe those of us who didn't care to attend were allowed to take an extra period of study hall in the cafeteria. At any rate, the one bit of "news" they did cram into the first half-hour was the exciting word--it excited them no end, at any rate--that ion-battery producer EnerDel is set to open a new plant in Hancock county, creating 500 new jobs, and all thanks to Mitch Daniels and Indiana's business-friendly environment, according to the EnerDel mouthpiece 8 quoted.

Well, they seem to've left out a couple of small details. Like the fact that zoning hasn't been approved, not that the rights of local governments would stop the Bantam Menace from fluffing the story at a presser. Jes' to help move the process along, y'know. Or that EnerDel at this point seems to be largely floating on a sea of Federal loans and grants. Or that the last deal resulted in fewer jobs than promised. Or that there's apparently no financing secured for the new one. Or, y'know, that Indiana's business-friendly environment has had it hemorrhaging jobs the past two years at a higher-than-national average. Success! Jobs! More corporate political contributions so we might be running campaign ads from this April to November, 2012!

There's not even any sense that they should try to hide this stuff anymore, which leads me to believe Depressing The Fuck Out Of Anyone With Reading Comprehension has always been Job 1.

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