Boob Tube

This is an Olympic year, a Winter Olympic year, that is; I think the Winter Games should always be followed by an asterisk. I may have more to say about that later.

But in the meantime the excitement is almost palpable around Chez Riley, so it was surprising that something could knock it off #1 on the Anticipation List, but if anything could it's the prospect of John Stossel explaining what's wrong with American public schools. Tomorrow on ABC's 20/20, check local listings. It's likely I'll have more to say about that one, too.

Don't Buy A Hangover Cure From A Guy Who Never Sobers Up

Joe Klein: "How to Stay Out of Power", Time Web Exclusive, Jan. 8

I'M not good at math. Actually, I was good at math, but circumstances and my natural indolence led to a lack of training. When I switched schools in the eighth grade the guidance counsellor mistakenly put me in the regular math class, and since I didn't know anybody I wasn't aware of the problem for months. "Oh," he later told me, "you should have been in the advanced class." That cleared that up. "Oh." You're now a year behind and there's nothing we can do about it. So I wound up taking algebra and geometry in high school in classes full of people who Just Couldn't Get It, and by the time I was free to take calculus or trigonometry I was old enough to realize that neither was likely to get me laid. I suppose my loco parents could have raised holy hell when the mess was discovered, but my stepfather held to the theory that any training for a young man which did not involve the risk of crushing or amputating body parts was suspect. Art, somehow, he was fine with. I think he was attracted to the fumes.

Anyway, as everyone knows, unless you actually need the stuff it's just a time-filler, and my one regret is that I'm thoroughly incompetent when it comes to theorem jokes. Because by now this "How the Democrats can stay out of power" business desperately cries out for an equation, and the best I can do is a title: the "Lieberman Absorption Hypothesis."

This, I know, falls far short, because in addition to the DLC-type critique there's the mirrored Republican Troll Advice Gambit, which more properly belongs to game theory, but they use the same raw data: Democrats, by doing x or ignoring bedrock Red-state value y are consigning themselves to permanent minority status. The main difference between the two is that the latter adds "Ha ha ha" at the end. Both suggest, jokingly or not, that Nascar Dads and Values Voters, two groups whose responses are so well known in advance it's not necessary to do any actual testing, are either dying to throw off their GOP masters, or at least wish they could demonstrate their own serious-minded concern about Issues by occasionally voting for a Democrat who was indistinguishable from his Republican opponent.

But the fact is that Klein's column actually has very little to do with the Absorption Hypothesis; it seems to be there like a tattoo he's not quite embarrassed enough by to cover up yet. The column starts with some sort of swipe at Nancy Pelosi which, honestly, was so lackluster I couldn't be bothered to look up the story to see what he was distorting about it. Assuming that it happened (go ahead, you look it up and tell me), am I supposed to be outraged in our current political climate because a Democrat used weasel words? Damn, Joe, you're threatening to become the Jerry Quarry Celebrity Casino Greeter of punditry. If not Norma Desmond.

Klein reports a weird response from Pelosi that makes me wonder just what context it was yanked from:

When I asked the Congresswoman about this, she said, "Some in the government have accused me of confusing apples and oranges. My response is, it's all fruit."

Except he's the one doing the accusing. I know, politicians change the subject all the time, but you'd think if this were an actual response to the actual lead-off of the piece he'd have pressed for something which at least sounded like they were having a conversation.

That's not the point. This is:

A dodgy response at best, but one invested with a larger truth. For too many liberals, all secret intelligence activities are "fruit," and bitter fruit at that. The government is presumed guilty of illegal electronic eavesdropping until proven innocent. This sort of civil-liberties fetishism is a hangover from the Vietnam era, when the Nixon Administration wildly exceeded all bounds of legality—spying on antiwar protesters and civil rights leaders.

It's funny. All these years I've imagined civil liberties fetishism was a hangover from the American Revolution.

But the "all fruit" assumption doesn't take into account the strict constraints placed on the intelligence community after the Nixon debacle, or the lethally elusive nature of the current terrorist threat. The liberal reaction is also an understandable consequence of the Bush Administration's tendency to play fast and loose on issues of war and peace—rushing to war after overhyping the intelligence on Saddam Hussein's nuclear-weapons program, appearing to tolerate torture, keeping secret prisons in foreign countries and denying prisoners basic rights. At the very least, the Administration should have acted, with alacrity, to update the federal intelligence laws to include the powerful new technologies developed by the NSA.

No, Joe, at the very least the administration should have obeyed the law. And the Doctrine of Elusive Lethality isn't a part of it. Serial killers are lethally elusive. So are domestic terrorists. What, in the course of human events, isn't an excuse for some Wild West justice? I'm ready to kill my neighbor for letting his elusive dog poop on my lawn.

I've got to squeeze in the bit that brought me there in the first place, a mention in the Daou Report of hip-hop "conservative" blogger Sister Toldja's take:

Make sure to note his information on how there is evidence that, thanks to the leaker as well as the reporting of this story in the NYTimes, that the terrorists are modifying their behavior, which obviously hampers our ability to track them.

So here's the amazing proof:

It would have been a scandal if the NSA had not been using these tools to track down the bad guys. There is evidence that the information harvested helped foil several plots and disrupt al-Qaeda operations.


There is also evidence, according to U.S. intelligence officials, that since the New York Times broke the story, the terrorists have modified their behavior, hampering our efforts to keep track of them—but also, on the plus side, hampering their ability to communicate with one another.

Yep, there's your evidence--a journalist says so. And that's always good enough for your right-wing blogosphere.

So excuse me for just waking up, but it seems like only yesterday when we were announcing specific terrorist threats to specific bridges, or generalized threats to shopping malls or Wall Street on specific days, but now, after the fact and presumably with no intelligence operatives at risk, since these were intercepts, we can't, I dunno, name one? Are we now somehow reticent to actually arrest people in this country with links to SPECTRE, or do we have to keep that quiet, too? Jeez, even Dervishes get tired of spinning at some point.

School Work

It's Doom and Gloom Monday here, aka Return to School Day, which comes quite late this year because the geniuses who run things at IPS decided that the first semester should end before vacation began, so final tests ran to December 23, when students were thinking about anything but. That sort of anal compulsiveness is the mark of far too many people who Run Things. Make it come out even! Get it done three days early! Fold it so the corners match! There's a lot of it everywhere, and education is no exception. Which, on the one hand, you'd think might not be the case. You're dealing with teenagers. Is there anything messier than teenagers, in the psychic sense, at least? On the other hand, I suppose there are plenty of people for whom the more officious teachers of their own youth were some sort of totem, in all likelihood sexualized.

I have to admit--please keep this quiet--that I probably defend teachers a bit more than their due, basically because there's been such a steady drum-beat of anti-union, the-sky-is-falling, unlettered nonsense over the past thirty years. Most any discussion that draws a crowd is sure to find at least one Right Wing Talking Point point talker who simply declares, "Public schools are failing" the way he declares that Iraq had connections to 9/11 or the media is librul. It's not long from there to the "unions prevent the best teachers from being rewarded" and the "vouchers would help the Poor" routines. If you can manage to get these people to answer questions you generally find that the last time they set foot in a public school was when they graduated, or if they happen to be parents of public school students they think their school is better than most, except there was one arrogant teacher who Just Wouldn't Listen. The single arrogant teacher is the Hook Man of educational urban legend; childless combatants often refer to the run-in a friend of their cousin had with him.

Of course, teachers are human, and some are spiteful, turf-protecting, petty tyrants. No doubt you matriculated under some. This distinguishes them somewhat from public school administrators in that, in my narrow experience at least, most of the latter are spiteful, turf-protecting, petty tyrants.

You may also be sure that most of the people who complain about teachers and unions would last about ten minutes trying to do the work themselves.

"Vacation" this time around meant moving my wife from her former classroom to one two flights above on the opposite side of the campus. It's the fourth time she's been moved in three semesters, and that doesn't count having to move everything out of the room she was in last winter break so they could work on the heating/cooling (actually bringing air conditioning to her room, only four years into the 21st century). It's an enormous amount of work. She's a pack rat, for one thing, but art teachers have to be. At least five-hundred books. Three-hundred pounds of magazines. Every sort of artists' medium, paper, easels and canvases. Materials that have been scrounged from every sort of local business in order to supplement her budget.

So why exactly was she forced to move yet again? Good question, to which the short answer is the people who run things must be seen as running them. Don't just stand there, do something that'll get you attention.

In the case of IPS this, most recently, meant signing on to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Small Schools Initiative. What IPS did, under a lame-duck superintendent, was to agree to divide every one of its high schools into "small learning communities" each with some particular career focus, on the grounds that having learning populations of 400, rather than 1600 students in one big school, would lead to more teacher-pupil interaction. It is the only large urban district to jump into this with both feet.

(None of the money, by the way, goes into the classroom. It goes to the education school at the university which oversees the project, and from there pays for "teacher training" and seminars and the like. The teacher training last year amounted to people spending meeting hours going through paperwork, for which they were paid their regular salaries. The seminar part included a trip to Vegas--during the last school year--for two of the school's administrators.)

Each community has its own dean, and each has its own section of the building. So the first thing that happened, at the end of last year, was petty squabbling over territory and an attempt to settle personal scores. My wife and the other art teacher in the Magnet program took a double hit here, because the Magnet program is not a part of this Big Scheme, and the regular art department, which is, has a couple of petty-minded individuals who hate the Magnet program for its relatively small class sizes and large space requirements.

Unlike the other teachers, who were present at the meetings and got to vote on various proposals, my wife and her cohort were shut out, represented only by the director of the Magnet program, who was not available to attend every meeting. The first room my wife was sentenced to assigned had no ventilation, despite the fact that her advanced students are working with various solvents known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects. And this point was made plain before the vote. She and I had to spend an evening hunting down and printing out various OSHA regulations to put a stop to that one.

Let's note at this point that her school has three administrators, a Principal and two assistants, one of whom is responsible for Buildings and Grounds. They couldn't be bothered to get involved until this thing became a big freaking pre-teen slumber party catfight of a mess. This is known in administratin' circles as "delegating authority". By the time they were forced to do their jobs it was the end of the school year. My wife had to wait three weeks before she even knew what room she was going to be in this year, which meant that our shed, her office, and the dining room housed boxes of stuff most of the summer. I'll be writing the storage costs off my taxes come next month. The Principal, whose talent runs to getting himself on the local news and finding others to blame for shit, finally reprimanded the assistant principal for the chaos in an email he conveniently accidentally sent to a wide number of people.

They've both been pink-slipped for next year, by the way, which doesn't mean they're fired, but does mean they can be moved anywhere in the system, or maybe nowhere at all.

The latest move came about because the most offensive of the regular art teachers, a woman who reportedly is universally despised, filed a grievance about the room changes, and some functionary from the Home Office came in, talked to no one, and made new assignments two weeks before the semester's end. So that's how we spent our holidays.

I did what I could to help, but a lot of the stuff requires my wife's hands-on sorting. She was putting in eight-hour days. But I was there Thursday morning in time to meet the Nemesis. She came roaring into my wife's new room, demanding to know if that was "her table" she'd spied through the window of the closed door. "It has my purple mark on it!" she declared in a voice I considered altogether improper. She hadn't seen that I was there until I started to walk in her direction. If nothing else that reduced the volume by 90%.

"I had six of those tables and now they're gone!" she continued. My wife explained that this one was hers. It should be noted that these are large pieces of furniture which had been moved by the overworked custodial staff, not boosted by my wife personally. It should also be noted, though it's probably not necessary, that there was no mark, purple or otherwise, on the thing.

It was a little awkward; I certainly didn't want to do anything which would cause my wife any difficulties down the road, and she's more than capable of handling herself, but I knew she was tired and I just didn't like this woman or her boorish behavior. So I took my sunglasses off my hat and put them on as I walked, unthreateningly, over to the two of them. I cocked my head and gave her a Vince D'Onofrio Law & Order look. And then, drawing on my years of experience and circle of college associates, I farted audibly.

She left.

Dear readers, more money is thrown away on Big Schemes than is lost to all the union-supported goldbricking and internet time wasting of every wage earner throughout the globe. We need more people who care, more who know what they're talking about, and more who tighten nuts and bolts, and a lot fewer who dream up big ideas, in Washington or locally. If you know a good teacher and have the opportunity, give her a hug today. I know I will.

I Have Not Yet Begun To Nitpick!

I've had a long week, one which is partly explained by one of the four or five unfinished posts sitting on my desktop, so forgive me for the delay in mentioning The Good Roger Ailes' textbook job of Crossing the T on "Captain Ed", hauling in her colors, and probably necessitating a quick change of breeches. Our English language is chock-a-block with 18th century sailing terms there, Ed. "Pricked and primed" and "touch hole" being just two examples.

It's worth a recap, and probably a Koufax:

1. The "Captain" decides to take a potshot at Kos for daring to quote Patrick Henry. In "Patrick Henry's Dirty Little Secret", Ed reveals that Henry was a chickenhawk! He never served in the Revolution!

2. In response, Ailes relays the story of the Gunpowder Incident, which began on April 20, 1775, in which Henry led the Hanover militia, the first colonists to arrive on the scene.

3. Ed replies with an UPDATE, acknowledging the error while simultaneously warping from the 18th century to the 21st, where the truth is more amenable to willful distortion:

Roger Ailes and CQ reader Duckman rightly point out that Patrick Henry did take part in one engagement, a raid to secure powder a few days after Lexington in May 1775 -- before he received his commission, in fact. Mea culpa. However -- and this is my point -- Patrick Henry's worth to the American Revolution has little or nothing to do with this one uncontested military effort on Henry's part. If that qualifies Henry as a hero in Kos' eyes, then why wouldn't flying two years of defense missions in a notoriously unreliable jet protecting the homeland qualify as well? Especially since the latter person requested a transfer to combat while the former resigned his commission just as the war started to heat up? Rather than "denigrating" Henry, as Duckman says I did, I pointed out that Henry's greatness had nothing to do with whether he served in a combat position at any point in his life, but in the work he did to push for the creation of this nation of freedom and liberty. He used his best skills to the fullest extent to perform great work. That isn't validated by his presence at one single engagement just as it isn't invalidated by his resignation of his commission after the war started -- as I argued.

The nitpickers get one fact right (and I got one wrong, of course) while managing to miss the entire point. Debating war policy based on the worthiness of one's prior service to the nation is a stupid, juvenile exercise, very much akin to measuring genitalia to determine manliness. Try focusing on the policy itself rather than the military experience of those who debate it. [Italics in original]

The Henry canard has been around forever. It has nothing whatever to do with any "chickenhawk" business; the Gunpowder Incident, and Henry's part in it, is widely known to anyone whose knowledge of the history of the Revolution runs deeper than our egregious high school texts. Rather, there are those who comment pointedly on the apparent contradiction between Henry's reputation as a revolutionary firebrand and his remaining as Governor of Virginia rather than taking the field during the war.

The idea undoubtedly does violence to the difference between 18th century warfare and that of the modern era. Henry took the lead in raising the militia that one month after the incident would help overthrow the Royal Governor. He was instrumental in raising militias throughout the war--something which meant "at personal expense" in those days. And as a revolutionary leader he certainly stood to be hanged if captured by the British.

But whatever the case of Henry's personal involvement, the Cap'n fouls his own lines in response. Nitpicking is a pathetic enough when your entire argument was resting on that particular nit, but the wise course would be to at least do a little reading before opening your mouth again, especially after you called your opponent's understanding of American history "facile". Henry wasn't "uncontested" at Williamsburg; the Royal Navy was in the harbor, and Governor Dunmore was threatening to destroy the city and Yorktown.

It's also wise not to accuse said nitpickers of "missing the point" and thus draw attention to the fact that you're trying to change it.

It's obvious a little further history can't hurt, so let's examine Chickenhawk, shall we? Its popularity traces to Al Franken's Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot And Other Observations, which took Limbaugh to task for his ever-changing (and never accurate) explanation for his failure to serve in the Vietnam War despite his outspoken support for it since. Franken goes on to name several leading Republicans of the day (1996) who also claimed both deferments and their support: Phil Gramm, George Will, Pat Buchanan, and Newt Gingrich, and added Dan Quayle, who got a coveted slot in the Indiana National Guard thanks to his father's string pulling.

As such that is, and remains, a sort of Patrick Henry argument, although none of the above approached Henry's involvement. It points to a certain, let's say, disconnect between the words and deeds. It raises questions about character. And it became something of a cottage industry afterwards, especially seeing how it's practically impossible to find a real veteran among administration warfloggers.

But it has nothing whatsoever to do with the idea that the military shouldn't be subject to civilian review if those civilians lacked combat experience. Franken was writing while Clinton was President, fer chrissakes.

And then 9/11 changed everything, but some things more than others. Facing a war between Civilization and Chaos apparently required more of us rhetorically and less of us in terms of personal sacrifice than wars of older, reality-based centuries. And Iraq (and the shameless attacks on politicians who actually did serve), put matters in an entirely new light: now the hawkishness preceeded the refusal to serve, and as our manpower shortage became so acute that even the Fighting 101st Keyboarders™ could no longer wish it away, the question, "Why aren't you in uniform?" became rather pointed. Some, like many of the Kippie Chickenhawk of the Year nominees, have better things to do. Others, like the Cap'n and VBen Shapiro have resorted to PsyOps. It's a fitting regiment for those for whom missing the point is something of a cri de guerre, if you'll pardon my French.

Never Mind The Bollocks, Jane, Here's The Real Bollocks

Wednesday was opening day of the short session of America's Third Worst State Legislature™ (Motto: "Kansas? Hah! We were frittering away the public's time and money on religious mumbo jumbo back when they were still wantonly killing Clint Eastwood's family in The Outlaw Josie Wales!"). And as befits a solidly Red Republican controlled state, we're already making WaPo's page A3 for a wholly manufactured squabble about Praising Jesus in story and song to open every House session. Question: aren't you guys the party of Small Government? Used to be we didn't even have a short session. Go home and pray all you want.

Should you happen to read all the way to the end of the Post story you'll find Speaker of the House and Lord High Deacon Brian Bosma delivering this piety:

But Bosma, a lawyer first elected in 1986, said he will not honor calls for defiance.

"Open defiance of the judge's order, I believe, would send the wrong message to every Hoosier and especially every young person, regarding obedience of the law, even laws you may disagree with personally," Bosma said.

which somehow left out the fact that the first call for defiance was from...wait for it...Bosma himself, who listed "ignoring it" as one of two options he was considering after losing in court.

And if you'd read the Indianapolis Star article covering the "Prayer Protest" meeting these pious hypocrites people who respectfully disagree with my religious views just had to put on for the cameras prior to their showy prayer huddle in back of the House chamber before the session began, you would have seen this:

Outside the House chamber, peering through a window at the proceedings and carrying a sign that said "In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen," 15-year-old Praise Jerusha Sharp, Crawfordsville, was among those who objects to Hamilton's ruling.
She took a day off from her private school to make her feelings known. "If they don't start praying in Jesus' name, our country is going to fall," she said. "I've asked (God), and he doesn't like it."

I think we can at least all thank our personal divinities we still live in a country where you are free to name your child "Praise Jerusha" and indoctrinate her to the point of schizophrenia by age 15. Amen.

The local news last night did manage to squeeze into its ten-minutes-out-of-every-half-hour coverage a brief clip of the Rotunda gang chanting, "Jesus! Jesus!" in a way that actually embarrassed me for Christianity. I can't wait for the Satanists to turn up for a good Beelzebub Pep Rally. Besides, they're a lot more telegenic.

There is a flip side to this. Shouting, "Save me, Jesus!" and "In the Name of the Great I Am" (which is apparently something the evangelicals think makes Jews imagine they're in solidarity), is pretty much the least damage these people can do. Maybe we should demand they pray 24/7 and leave us the hell alone. At least they wouldn't be able to pass Rep. Troy "I Fell On the Daylight Savings Grenade for Mitch Daniels and All I Got Was This Lousy Sucking Chest Wound" Woodruff's proposed legislation banning all abortions except where the mother's life is threatened--aka the "Let's spend a few hundred thousand tax dollars defending an empty gesture" Bill, or the proposal to fund Statehouse statues of every President or Vice President who was an Indiana resident, which I'll support only if Dan Quayle is holding a nine iron. That's the news from the sticks, folks. Wish I could send you back to saner climes.

Thursday Household Hints

Grover Norquist, urging lobbying reform [sic], via Michael Scherer in Salon:

"If you put the birthday cake under the sink the cockroaches will find it," Norquist said, in a telephone interview Wednesday afternoon. "Get rid of the cake and you will get rid of the cockroaches."

Not surprisingly Mr. Riley, longtime cuisinier, disagrees: "First, turn the lights on. Step on all the cockroaches, beginning with the fattest, making sure to get every last one. Savor the crunch under your boot. Then put the cake where it belongs."

What's That Smell?

When he catches Newt Gingrich on the news lecturing Congressional Republicans from the DC Rotary Club podium on the need to get out in front of Republican Scandals, Inc., the wizened political observer instinctively grabs both ears to keep his head from spinning all the way around. At my age, whiplash is serious business.

Here's my favorite piece of advice from the man who never fails to have some and never once takes it:

Gingrich, who helped lead the Republican takeover of the House in 1994, called on his party to overhaul lobbying and campaign-finance rules. Both parties have created an environment that allows lobbyists like Abramoff to prosper, he said.

Hoo, boy, it was still a close call on the head-spinning thing. Some older readers may recall that Gingrich was at one time Speaker of the House of Representatives which, under his leadership, handed campaign finance reform the gas pipe. Newt was the first witness at the Oversight Committee's hearings on reform. Among other things, he said the call to campaign finance reform was a "nonsensical socialist analysis based on hatred of the free enterprise system."

They did pass a lobbyist gift "ban" in late November of '95, after Newt's famous handshake agreement with Bill Clinton and his and Dick Armey's attempts to push that boxcar onto the siding thereafter. It was pure political calculation, as demonstrated by the following, first reported in the Atlanta Constitution:

"For anybody not on board now, it's going to be the two coldest years in Washington."

The speaker was Newt Gingrich, a month short of the 1994 elections. The audience was a group of lobbyists and Gingrich reminding them that they owed the GOP for killing a lobby reform that session. In return, he expected campaign cash for his troops -- and lots of it.

The message was received: according to the Center for Responsive Politics: "In October alone ... Republican candidates enjoyed an almost unprecedented $4.2 million edge over their Democratic opponents in individual donations of $200 or more."

Of course no one knew better than Mr. GOPAC that campaign finance was the real ballgame, unless it was the fledgling fixer once nestled in his ample man-bosom, a Texan, name of DeLay.

The Republican-controlled Congress effectively eliminated the limits on lobbyists' gifts in 2003. Who does Gingrich think is responsible for toughening the standards now?

This is a helluva lot more than just another Claude Rains moment, and way beyond being explicable by Newt's desire to be President, though it's obvious he thinks he found an opening. It's a mark of just how far our politics have sunk that Newt Fucking Gingrich can make this sort of speech without being laughed into that Phantom Zone where Superman used to imprison intergalactic criminal masterminds.

Cue the Theme Music

Just as the unfortunate events of 2005 revived Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927" [from Good Old Boys (1974), the first gift I ever gave the woman who was to become my Poor Wife], so should '06 bring back "Mr. President":

Maybe you've cheated,
Maybe you've lied.
Maybe you have lost your mind.
Maybe you only think about yourself.

Too late to run.
Too late to hide, now.
The time has come for us to say goodbye now.
Mr. President, have pity on the working man.

The Other Sixties Mythology

Paul "The Iron Mike Collins of Powerline" Mirengoff: "Forever Young"

I took advantage of the January Thaw this morning to repair part of the garage and the multiple trellises whose partial fall had caused the damage last summer when there was too much growing around it to attempt repairs. I had a horrible earworm which I'm not even going to mention lest some unfortunate among you remember it, but it came about because it had been used in an SCTV skit I'd watched the night before, and for some reason, working in the yard, it came back on me like stuffed peppers. And naturally I was trying to get it out before I had to quit using power tools. So I was thinking about something to write about and the Peggy Noonan post came back to me, and it suddenly dawned on me that she'd attributed the Katrina quotient of Bush's miserable year to "bad luck". And reading through it the first time I thought yeah, you wish the response was bad luck and not bad government, but this time I thought, wait, when things are going well for him, isn't it because Jesus is on his side? How does this work, exactly? When you're cruising along and everything purring it's a mark of your proper religious understanding, but if you pick up a nail and a tire goes flat we're back to Greek mythology.

This, of course, is no original insight, but it's rather obvious that it works for Noonan and her ilk on the political plane as well, and that was still on my mind when I sat down at my desk this evening, though thankfully the song had vanished.

I was closing down some browser windows, which I tend to accumulate, and I came to the Powerline boys still up from the final Ultimate Wingnut balloting at World O' Crap, and just for the hell of it I updated the page. And the first post was Paul "Zeppo" Mirengoff sort of congratulating himself for the response to a post entitled "Forever Young", which apparently dealt with "the danger posed by those who hadn't learned anything since 1974", but which some readers had found insufficiently incendiary, in the Napalm sense:

I take the point. It's difficult to defeat those who are out to destroy us when an influential political and cultural bloc sees those Americans who stand against political and social collectivsim and moral anarchy as the greatest threat to our country.

I couldn't clink the link to the original fast enough after that:

Vietnam and Watergate are seminal events for almost all liberals my age. Vietnam taught them to distrust the use of force by our military, and to despise leaders who aggressively use military force in the name of the national interest. Watergate confirmed that a leader who projects military force overseas for that purpose can be expected to usurp power at home.

Let's begin our response where I always like to: Mirengoff is a 1971 graduate of Dartmouth College. I do wish birthdates googled up as easily as graduation dates for the semi-obscure, but this is enough for our purposes. Intelligent guy, probably graduated from high school around 1967.

So first up, how is it that he comes to imagine Vietnam and Watergate are seminal events (no cracks, now. I've avoided them. You do the same.) ? I'll gladly admit Vietnam--though didn't its seed spill on both sides of the fence?--but Watergate is a curious running mate. If you came of age in the Sixties, and you presumably know enough liberals to make pronouncements about almost all of them, how, exactly, does the battle over civil rights slip your memory? Or the bright lost promise of John F. Kennedy, the Peace Corps, the threat of nuclear annihilation? Are we maybe stacking the deck just a teensy bit here? Watergate as the Lava Lamp of politics?

Well, yes, of course we are, but let's start at the top. I'm about five years younger, so the public awareness of our role in Vietnam rose pretty much right alongside my own increasing awareness of politics. It did not teach me "to distrust the use of force by our military". It did teach me that our military and political leaders lie, boldly and outright, in the service of cryptic aims, and that the commonly accepted narrative of the times is very often bunkum. But that's because they do and it was, and is, and I'd have figured that out for myself as soon as I escaped from my high school history lessons. That "distrust military force" canard is just an argument over Iraq in wolf's clothing. Vietnam was a ghastly mistake, politically, militarily, and spiritually, and it's not going to be redeemed by wrapping it in the Flag, the War on Terror, or the Lava Lamping of history. Supposing we want to make some grand statement of Vietnam's seminal influence, a more accurate one would concern a distrust of politicians sending Americans to die to no good purpose under the camouflage of the sort of Good vs. Evil crusades a political bloc which claims to be defending against political and social collectivism and moral anarchy is so fond of, so long as it has a law school deferment. And if you don't believe most Americans agree with that you need to answer for the curious omission of conscription as part of the War on Terror. The real sorrow here is that so many people didn't learn the real lesson and have been able to cling to a wholly fictive war for thirty-five years.

Watergate, on the other hand--what does Watergate have to do with Liberalism? McGovern had already lost; you could look that up, Mr. Mirengoff, but I'm reasonably sure it made the papers in Palo Alto at the time. And that "confirmed that a leader who projects military force overseas for that purpose can be expected to usurp power at home"? Please. Who's stuck in 1974 now? Watergate was precisely what it was, or at least that part of the iceberg we got to see. Nixon was using the power of the Presidency to spy on political opponents, and he got caught at it. Then, as now, there were some people whose allegiance is to their political viewpoint, not the fundamental rule of law, who apologized for it. In fact, they're often the same people. And the simple answer is, if you want to defeat that mistaken impression then you don't act in precisely that way. It isn't just liberals who are concerned about civil rights, but it is just a certain segment of the nit-witted Right which is willing to toss them on the trash heap so long as it's in their interests.

These "lessons" were rejected by most baby-boomers even at the time of Vietnam and Watergate. And despite the dominance of Vietnam and Watergate-obsessed boomers in academia, subsequent generations have found the lessons even less worth learning....

Many liberals seem not to dispute this. In fact, they acknowledge the "failure" of most Americans to embrace "harsh truths," and see this as further evidence that something is wrong with our country ("what's wrong with Kansas?").

Sure, because your "lessons" are just so much horseshit. Frankly, I've encountered very few Americans who dispute the lessons of Vietnam who have even an inkling of what went on there. But what's the cost of the public amnesia about Vietnam, or the struggle, ever since, to rewrite its history and demonize those who would look at the "harsh truths" of their own country just as we're encouraged to look at the Pure Evil in others? On whose say-so is US international adventurism a sacred trust? Who has exempted it from taking responsibility for its mistakes or paying the price for its miscalculation? You? Forgive me, but a self-serving view of history doesn't win the argument, and the idea that truth is amenable to ballot-box stuffing is just a recipe for further disaster, as it has now proven to be. Woodrow Wilson backhanded Ho Chi Minh at the end of WWI; Truman did it after WWII. Had we upheld what we used to proclaim as our abiding love of freedom and democratic principles then, all those "liberals" who learned your phony lessons wouldn't have seen them as current events. And if we hadn't been propping up the decayed remnants of 19th century Imperialism in the name of those who stand against political and social collectivism, maybe 57,000 Americans who didn't support the war from the comfort of their college libraries wouldn't have died so young.

Ward, You've Been Awfully Hard On The Beaver Lately

Daphne Merkin: "Our Vaginas, Ourselves", The New York Times Magazine

One evening last week I plopped down on the couch with a cup of tea. My Poor Wife was watching some Trashy Culture Is Fun program on Discovery, or The History Channel, or Bravo, and about the time I got situated came the commercial exit teaser, a rapidly spinning neo-retro-faux-Mod montage promising me if I stayed tuned I'd learn the history of the Lava Lamp. I knew what was up, but as usual, I didn't have the remote.

After a brief history of the development of the Lava Lamp (hereafter LL) came the obligatory Everybody in the Sixties was a Hippie and they all Tripped Out staring at Cosmically Undulating LLs in their Crash Pads, excepting the ones who took too much acid and stared directly at the Sun, thus melting their eyeballs. There was the obligatory shot of body-painted young nubiles frugging in a park somewhere. It's always in a park, leading me to believe I've been seeing snippets of the same thirty-second piece of film for thirty-five years now. The only time I ever saw anybody wearing body paint was on Laugh-In, and the only place I ever saw body paints on sale was in the back of Spencer's Gifts, with the other "adult" merchandise like the "Tonight's The Night" nightlight, aimed at married couples who did not speak to each other but still occasionally Had Sex, and the nude calendars featuring morbidly obese women. Wherever the counterculture was gathering in the late 60s, it wasn't in the back of Spenser's Gifts.

Needless to say there weren't any LLs visible in the park footage. So it was followed by a very dark, hand-held Super 8 pan of an actual Hippie Pad, or something, over which the narrator intoned "LLs could be found in every Hippie Pad, or something". And to make up for the notable lack of anything remotely resembling the ubiquitous LL in that shot either, they immediately cut to a still of an actual LL. Not to say they were trying to fool anyone--good thing, too, since the still was of a modern L, not vintage. It isn't supposed to matter. We're just all supposed to be in agreement that in the Sixties everyone under a certain age dressed funny, took drugs, and stared mindlessly at floating blobs of wax. And never mind that the actual spokesman for the actual LL company came on a bit later to say that the combined sales of the 60s, 70s, and 80s didn't match the numbers for the retro-chic of the 90s. Groovy and out.

(The only time I remember seeing a LL was at the home of a grade-school friend, and it belonged to his decidedly non-Hippie parents. It fascinated us for about ten minutes, after which the conversation naturally turned to what might be inside the thing, but my friend got squeamish before we did any empirical testing. The damned things were redolent of the Playboy After Dark circular bed vibe, if you ask me. And aside from getting high and trying to play ping-pong by strobe light--conveniently borrowed from the science lab at school--and a single Jefferson Airplane concert which featured that squirty-looking light show thing on a big screen behind the band, I don't remember much fascination with light at all. Dark was much better.)

Maybe that show was still in my head when this afternoon I sat on that same couch and opened the Times magazine to find Daphne riffing on the latest in vaginal fashions. (You may recall the last we saw of the Is That A Pen Name? Ms Merkin she was singing the praises of the "authentically unhip" Sam Alito, and the other brave souls who dared buck the John Sebastian/Roger McGuinn eyewear hegemony.) You didn't expect me to skip it, did you?

Okay, first, Ms Merkin is a fine writer from what I've seen, and I certainly share her distaste for plastic surgery and befuddlement at the supposed trend of hymen-reconstruction. I'd counsel just ignoring the whole matter myself; you can always go to that awful-plastic-surgery site if you want to wallow. But since the web is the enemy of the Gray Lady, and since there's a "The Way We Live Now" column to be filled every week, I'm not going to quibble. Okay, my sources tell me that pubic depilation as a trend is approaching its mid-teens, and that it is frequently engaged in not, as Daphne would have it, because the natural state is "an aesthetic hindrance to the unfettered male gaze", but for certain tactile benefits. I can only report that as a rumor.

But this...

Truth be told, I always considered myself lucky to have escaped coming of age at the height of the consciousness-raising era, when anatomical self-examination took on the aspect of a collective ritual. Those were the days when women felt obliged to convene in sisterly circles with mirrors and flashlights the better to study their bodies, themselves. Never having been one to enjoy group activities of any sort, the thought of becoming more closely acquainted with my private parts in a public setting seems potentially traumatizing rather than liberating or, God knows, celebratory.

deserves a peek through the moss for an unobstructed view. Ms Merkin (somebody, stop me before I have to type that again) is, presumably, about my age. She graduated from college in 1975 (Barnard, which may explain why she was innocent of the veritable battalions of authentically unhip, short-haired, Buddy-Holly-specs wearin' L7s on Midwestern campuses). She might have been an eight-year-old prodigy, but in the absence of such from her bio, I think something's fishy, and yes, an FCC fine is the least that should happen to me for that one. I'd like to suggest that she did, in fact, come of age precisely in the era of "consciousness raising", and that, in fact, her own consciousness was raised, if required, and that the process had nothing whatever to do with sitting in a circle passing around a mirror and a speculum. It had to do precisely with Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973), a book she seems to want to toss on the cultural trash heap with Steal This Book. I really don't care whether Daphne wants to look Down There or not. But the idea that women realizing their health had for too long been in the hands of "experts" who were largely male and largely clueless and uncaring is not a quaint cultural icon of a bygone era. It's those same experts who were telling women that the clitoris had nothing to do with orgasm. Better we spend every late night watching Girls Gone Wild ads than another generation be lied to by sexophobic guardians of decency.

I didn't ask my wife whether she ever participated in any Pudendum Parties. She went to summer camp. It's enough to note the etymology: Latin pudenda, used as the noun form of the neuter plural of pudendus, the gerundive of pudere, meaning to be ashamed.

Happy New Year*

* offer void for anyone who wants to dictate the terms of "Happy" holiday greetings, plus my goddammed libertarian neighbor who had to celebrate the joyous occasion by setting off ten minutes of fireworks in the street, no doubt terrorizing all the other neighborhood pets as it did mine. Yours is coming. And for Karl Rove, "Scooter" Libby, Tom DeLay, "Duke" Cunningham, Jack Abramoff, Michael Scanlon, James Tobin, and all the others yet to be netted, an extra special 2006 of pleasant dreams, a nice, soft, pillow, and one hour of supervised exercise each day.

Happy Birthday

Don Novello born Jan. 1, 1943