Happy Birthday

Jean-Louis Barrault
September 9, 1910--January 22, 1994

Happy Birthday

Virginia Patterson Hensley
September 8, 1932--March 5, 1963

Is America Ready for Self-Governance?

ITEM: Hard-hitting. Factual. Oooh, look, video!

Last evening my local teevee news led off with a delicious CBS pot-au-feu of the Al Jazeera bin Laden tape, the audiotape of the supposed new leader of the supposed al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the supposed President of the United States saying something or other about Terrism, in that order but edited as a single story.

We could, of course, make that confluence our story--60% of Americans may well still believe that Saddam Hussein planned 9/11, but you'd imagine, or maybe hope is the word, that the informed clotheshorses who report the news would know better--or we might note how nice it is to see bin Laden mentioned in the news once again, and, along with Iraq, become the lead story instead of a footnote, and mention what a coincidence it is that there's an election coming up sometime this fall.

Instead, what struck me was how this was reported as urgent news. "Shocking new video of bin Laden!" was the teaser, like Incredible new footage of the Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping ladder, coming up at Six! The suicide videos also rated a mention, despite the fact that they were first seen long ago and were merely part of the package Al Jazeera broadcast. We then moved on to the headshot of the new al-Q in Iraq honcho (it's thoughtful of our evil terrorist mastermind enemies to get updated publicity stills as they climb the corporate ladder), who is heard ululating in the background as the translation of his speech runs next to the pic. But didn't al-Qaeda in Iraq already have a new leader?

Then came the segue to Bush, introduced with, "And while all this was going on..." All this? All what? All the editing involved in putting the story together? A five-year-old video and a tape of unknown if not dubious origin? That's "All This"? Sheesh, I'm thinking a lot of people in Baghdad were wishing those were the major stories of their day.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan is turning into Iraq, but rates no coverage at all. Time for a new PR firm.

ITEM: The Big Weekend Wrap-Up of the Fourth Anniversary of the Two-Week Lead-In to the Anniversary of 9/11

Desperate Republicans! The Amazing Performing Lapdog Teevee Network! Congress Acting Like It Does Things!

Okay, we spent some time, and by "we" I mean the few honest and rational observers left with a public forum not involving the Internets, asking how it was we came to lose the massive international good will after 9/11. So how is it that no one asks how we squandered the domestic good will? It's gone from being a solemn day of national remembrance to something like Circus of the Stars V: This Time We Starved the Big Cats First. There are a lot of things I don't understand, but right up there is the way modern "conservatives" seem unable to separate genuine values and cheap money-making opportunities, even when it counts the most. They should be the ones screaming the loudest about the ABC mockumentary. That they aren't tells you all you need to know, as if you didn't already know it.

ITEM: Scholastic Replaces 'The Path to 9/11' Classroom Guide With New Discussion Materials Focusing on Critical Thinking and Media Literacy Skills.

"After a thorough review of the original guide that we offered online to about 25,000 high school teachers, we determined that the materials did not meet our high standards for dealing with controversial issues," said Dick Robinson, Chairman, President and CEO of Scholastic.

Pardon my critical thinking and media literacy skills there, Dick, but shouldn't those high standards have kicked in sometime before you offered the damn thing to the public? Isn't the proper response now the public exposure and firing of the persons responsible, assuming they aren't named Dick Robinson, Chairman, President and CEO of Scholastic? And can't you work "Hero of the Glorious Revolution of 1994" into that title?

You Want a Menu? You Can't Handle a Menu!

Okay, so this morning I sit down with a cuppa and decide I'm going to peruse a few blogs at the bottom of my bookmarks, and up jumps Laurie Byrd:

This Menu Won't Last Long

Glenn Reynolds has some news about Ruby Tuesdays' new menu and I agree with him -- this one will not last long. They have removed all the healthy choices and even removed the nutritional info on the menu. One of his readers pointed out that Applebee's has an excellent Weight Watchers' menu. I had lunch at Applebee's a couple of months ago and had the Steak and Shrimp Skewers and the French Onion soup from the Weight Watchers menu and both were great.

Okay, I am glad that someone saw fit to amplify Glenn's comments--we just can't shed enough light on the problem of shrinking health-food choices among people who get off their butts long enough to get in a car and drive somewhere so they can sit down again and have someone feed them--but...

Ruby Tuesday's? Isn't that like some fifth-tier TGI Friday's? One of those chains routinely located such that, if you were in the parking lot and felt a sudden urge to view grass, or a tree, or anything growing without the aid of a concrete container, you'd have to get back in the car and waste a quarter tank of gas? Are we talking about the same Ruby Tuesday's? The one whose recent teevee ads touted the culinary inspiration of putting onion rings on top of a cheeseburger? Apparently so all the regurgitative elements hit your digestive tract at once?

It's a freakin' fast-food factory. If you're that concerned about being healthy you might start worrying about what you're eating instead of how much, and how many times the cook has washed his hands this month. Mental incapacitation caused by a fast-food joint altering its menu goes a long way towards explaining why these people are still pissing their pants five years later.

I once remarked, only half facetiously, that in a modern-day American Civil War the North wouldn't need to field an army, just find a way to lower the air temperature in Dixie to 37º F and hold it there for three days until the mass surrender was completed. Imagine what easy pickings these people would be if there truly were terrorists lurking behind every mailbox. Sheesh, altering the pick-up hours inside the lid could cause a stampede in select neighborhoods, apparently.

My Day. How's Your's?

It started with the morning paper telling me, in a tiny sidebar, that hospitalizations due to July 4th fireworks injuries (mostly of children) in this, the first year of Indiana's new What The Fuck, Just Go Nuts fireworks law were almost doubled. In newspaperese this is described as injuries being "on the rise". The brief note also quoted the State Department of Health, which cautioned against drawing any conclusions from the data, saying that it would need at least five years of information before any real patterns emerged. Throwing caution to the winds, like so much burning phosphorus, I drew the single conclusion that the same payoffs which reached the State Fire Marshal found their way to the Health Department, and that the contract lasts five years.

Then this evening I'm decompressing from another visit with Mom, aka Crazy Mom, and a Budweiser commercial comes on. I'd gone into the kitchen and forgot to hit the mute button, and I walked in just as the thing ended with the Budweiser Credo. It had been a while since I'd heard it, so let's all experience it together, shall we?

We know of no brand produced by any other brewer which costs so much to brew and age.

I'm guessing that perhaps, seeing as how you have enough technical knowledge to know what B-E-E-R spells, you understand this to be complete bullshit, something on par with it being legal in this country to label anything trapped in a net "Cod", provided it looks as if it might be able to swim. Are they buying extra-fancy rice to puff up their brew now? Replace the "beechwood" stainless-steel "aging" tanks with plutonium? What?

Or are they adding in the salaries of all the various Busches involved? Plus milage? The most expensive thing about a Budweiser is all the advertising they bought to keep reminding you the stuff is for drinking. But none of that involves the cost "to brew and age", unless by that you include the fact that without advertising, marketing, and arm twisting nobody'd use the stuff to shampoo a dog.

Which would still raise the question "So why does Michelob cost more?" But never mind that now, because this comes on the same day I'd watched a second news cycle about the delayed shuttle launch. Now, once again, even if you believe that 95% of the NASA budget should be diverted into something that actually benefits people who don't rely on that figure for their weekly paycheck, the odds are that you look upon NASA more kindly than I. Perhaps the pocket calculator makes your life easier, or you really, really enjoy your TANG. Even so, I think we all might be a little concerned that unless something of theirs actually blows up with Americans inside, all news from NASA is of the Gee Whiz Ain't This Technology Stuff Great variety. What I'd really like to see is a second counter, just below the Mission Clock, ticking off just how much this particular circus is costing us each minute. 'Course it would need to be a much bigger clock.

I'll bet it's even more than Budweiser.

There's a curious lack of curiosity on the part of teevee "reporters" covering the story; I seem to recall that unless NASA ups its shuttle launch rate by something like 400% and keeps it there for the rest of the decade the space station project is kaput. I'd be happy to provide you with the actual details here, except nobody on teevee thought it was any of my business, apparently.

Instead, I heard one hairdo explain that NASA might be forced to consider relaxing its safety rules and permitting a night launch. Now please explain to me how those words got into his mouth if not courtesy NASA's public affairs director and an open bar. Imagine if your surgeon explained to you that they'd decided to relax their safety rules in the interests of getting your surgery finished on time. This (I imagine you replying) does not constitute relaxation! In fact it constitutes ignoring. Ignoring to a degree which can only be described as No You Fucking Aren't.

But then, your surgeon's safety record probably isn't what NASA's is.

I think they need a credo. Maybe "NASA: Nobody Said We Wouldn't Get Our Hair Mussed."

A little while later my Poor Wife came downstairs and we watched enough of Olbermann that I got to see Richard Ben-Viniste call Tom Kean "a Great American." This, in a discussion of why Kean, co-chair of a 9/11 commission which refused to lay a glove on anyone except New York's 911 operators, is now shilling an ABC mockudrama blaming the whole thing on Bill Clinton's Penis. A Great American who now pockets some Hollywood cash for signing off on the idea that Clinton was too preoccupied with Monica Lewinsky to get bin Laden. That would be the same Bill Clinton whose failed attempt to get bin Laden was, at the time, described as an attempt to get the news off Monica Lewinsky.

Great American? Hell, in my book Tom Kean is a veritable NASA of Americans. He is to this Republic what a free press is. He's the fuckin' King of Beers, too. We salute you, Governor. Up until this week that Commission of yours was like a joke without a punchline.

The Only Show in Town

The more I see doctors the more highly I think of folk healers.

I haven't written about my mother's dementia much, in part because it's grindingly mundane--she doesn't steal cars or knock over convenience stores, which is how I plan to use mine--and in part because it's painful and sad and tough to get much of a lesson from, unless "you need to be patient" is a lesson you'd enjoy hearing over and over, in which case you should take up fishing.

But yesterday was the long-awaitied meeting with the docs at the Center on Aging where she took a three-hour battery of tests two weeks ago. My sister and I had pinned some hopes on their findings soothing the periodic torrents over finances and living arrangements we've been riding out for nearly four months now.

So there's good news and bad news. Only it's the same news.

We're ushered into a conference room with the doctor and a replacement for the vacationing social worker, and immediately I'm pissed because there should be two doctors--a geriatric specialist and a neurologist--and I'm pretty sure I know which one we're getting (the lower-cost-per-billing-hour one) and which one we really need to talk to (the other one). And the, yes, geriatric physician opens with a little patter and a here's-what-I'll-cover speech, then she starts in on Mom's physical ailments, which are not great, really. She's got arthritis; both ankles and one knee trouble her especially, and they prescribe some physical therapy. And here's a handout on Kegel exercises for incontinence....

Okay, let's hold it just a minute. This is the point at which, if I behaved the way the little voices tell me to rather than hiding behind a thin veneer of civility (it's peeling in a few places, BTW) I jump up out of my purple-upholstered conference-room chair and say, in a voice that probably gets the receptionist to dial 911, "This woman is 80 years old! I don't know how long she's been wetting the bed--she never put that in the Xmas cards--but I know it's gone on for a while, and I know she's a product of the American medical factory system, because I'm the one who refills her prescriptions, and because for the last ten years her allopathic adventures, and those of her late husband, in the great gray plains of southern Florida constitute 90% of the conversations we have had in that period, and you tell me that in all that time no one ever fucking mentioned Kegel exercises to her?"

Naturally, I just kept my seat and kept staring at the doc.

Time to move on to the main event--everything's showbiz, ain't it?--her mental diminution. Out comes everyone's copy of a chart and a little soft-shoe about what the doctor who isn't there, but should be, was doing with All Those Tests. And I've got my graph cocked sideways, trying to read with one eye the categories on the bottom of the chart because they've been printed at a 90º angle to the rest of the thing, when the doctor announces that they found neither Alzheimer's nor dementia.

Okay, "stunned" is far to strong a word--for me, not for my sister, for whom it's an understatement--because I understood there could be many another possible explanation. I'm surprised to hear "dementia" fly out the window, because, well, because she's demented. At least in the common sense. And now the doctor's got her hands up, palms out, indicating first where "normal" is located, then where "dementia" falls, and finally the playground in the middle where, she says, Mom is now in residence. We don't know, she says--outnumbering those of us on the opposite side of the table via pronoun--whether she'll slide to the far end of the scale or not. Some do and some don't. In answer to my sister's rather desperate challenge, she tells us that this is a diagnosis made of conjecture, not fact.

My sister's face is, briefly, flashing different colors like a cuttlefish, and she may be developing a tic. And the doctor winds up and lets fly: we think this is all a result of your recent bereavement, we're taking you off the Alzeheimer's medication and putting you on Zoloft, and we're cutting your thyroid medicine in half because that might be part of it.

Ah. That's great news, doc. That's great news, except. I'm thrilled to death you think this is something which might be curable as opposed to something which is not. But I'm thinking that if we bet our respective salaries on the outcome you can shake hands with your new landlord. And the other part is this: I know that the elderly woman to my left here has heard exactly what the dog in that Larsen cartoon hears: Blah blah blah NO ALZHEIMER'S blah blah.

And she did, of course. In fairness, what they did find was moderate-to-severe impairment on almost every component of her cognitive processes, especially so in the matter of managing multi-layered tasks (their examples, tellingly, were driving a car and cooking, neither of which Mom now does, but which are the sort of tasks that might bring a family to that conference room in the first place). But none of that was going to register with Mom. NO ALZHEIMER'S. I don't have that. I told you so.

Let's pause another time. I've used "Alzheimer's" or "dementia" to describe what was going on with my mother, but not in a diagnostic sense, just for ease of explanation. I had to defend myself to her a couple dozen times when she accused me of "saying she has that" (it was always "that"). I had to lecture my sister about the difference between looking up a prescription medication online and understanding what's going on with a patient. I cringed when her lawyer told her she had to start living with the fact. We did not know. Even if we did, what we knew was a word. The popular imagination is always long on imagining. And there was no bigger problem in all that than how my Mom took it. The A-word is about as welcome in retirement communities as a condom dispenser in the Pope's washroom, but it's only one of about 150 forms of dementia, and that's just for starters.

But then NO ALZHEIMER'S. This unleashed a veritable running faucet of improv from Mom, who kept babbling as the doctor went through the rest of the categories on the chart, impervious. It had the makings of a fine comic scene, the doc explaining how the woman next to me was just understandably depressed and anxious, while the subject babbled away about checkbooks and snow shovels. Then the doctor exited so the social worker could go about the real-world tasks of convincing us what we needed to do about it (a five-day-a-week grief counseling marathon Mom nixed), which naturally involved actually trying to talk to the patient now, something which was now next to impossible because she was off in They Won't Let Me Have Credit Cards land. The social worker, I think, finally began to get it, but of course she's just filling-in, and no way is that closing episode gonna get reported back to the MDeities.

Again, don't get me wrong. I trust the judgment. I accept that things are not always worked out on the first attempt, in no small part because we work from the easiest and most likely assumptions. I hope that the change in medication is the answer, and that we get our Mom back some day soon. And I know that the road ahead is just a boulder field and I can't expect anything better. But still, there's this distinct impression that what you get from the medical profession these days is the same thing you get at The Gap, rows of shelves full of ready-to-wears, neatly sized, except that you have to keep trying things on to find something that nearly fits. And so we shall.

Happy Birthday

Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard
September 1, 1868 --December 26, 1930

The Stove-Lid of History

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it - and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit on a hot stove lid again - and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.

-Mark Twain.

I trust you enjoyed Secretary Rumsfeld's history lecture as much as I.

Because I suspect that, like me, you think the only thing which improves being told you haven't learned the lessons of History is hearing it from someone who learned his at the feet of Parson Weems. Not to mention the added enjoyment of hearing a man whose every single public utterance on Iraq has proven to be full of shite criticize a bunch of dead guys for not accurately predicting just what a paragon of evil Adolph Hitler would be in twenty years' time.

The problem for Rummy is that one thing History is good at is debunking the use of history, especially recent history, as hagiography or anti-hagiography. Not even so great a monster as Adolph himself is denied his good points--dynamic speaker, well-organized, easy to turn a smiley-face into. So, once again, an historical defense (if not entirely robust) of the Right Honourable Neville Chamberlain, Conservative PM:

[I apologize for the haphazard nature of the list, and its probable incompleteness, but I've spent most of the last 36 hours reading the apologies, denunciations, and demands for retraction which Right Blogtopia erupted in as soon as a Bush administration official played the Hitler card. Hey, apologies accepted; no need to go overboard. Besides, we understand they're not really your guys. Any more.]

1. Chamberlain didn't have much of a choice. The French had no intention of doing anything but sit behind the Maginot Line, the Russians had signed a non-aggression pact with Germany. Britannia still ruled the waves, but she did not have an army or the money to train and equip one.

2. All of what was given to Hitler in Munich and before was justified--if somewhat dubiously--by the exceeding unfairness of the Treaty of Versailles. (It's curious that one never hears about the lack of basic international fairness leading to the rise of Hitler, just Neville and his damned bumbershoot. For the Right, history always begins when they say it does.) By 1939, when the Germans took Prague, thereby stepping outside the terms of Versailles for the first time, the UK response was more belligerent, if not sufficiently so to our post-war way of thinking. The British did not have a mutual defense pact with Czechoslovakia. France did.

3. There was enormous, and enormously justified, public sentiment against The Great War which is rather conveniently forgotten in a country which arrived for only the tail end of the horrors, and by a Defense Secretary who was mimeographing his signature to dead soldiers' families before he was caught at it.

4. Hitler was seen as a bastion against the greater threat of Communist Russia, something the modern Right in this country ought to be honest enough to congratulate Chamberlain for.

5. Chamberlain, unquestionably, hewed to the Peace line after it stopped being tenable. The Munich Agreement proved to be a disaster, but it was undertaken not as a matter of unilateral airy-fairy daisy-garland manufacture but for reasons which turned out to be drastically misfounded, though not outright fabrications. It should be noted, however, that once Chamberlain's ideas had been demolished by the German invasion of the Low Countries, once events had shown how short his leadership had been of the mark, he had the basic decency to accept responsibility and resign.

Where Aren't They Now?

Anne Kornblut, "Bush Visits Gulf Coast, Stressing Progress," NY Times August 29

In an event with echoes of his prime-time speech in Jackson Square here last September, Mr. Bush spoke in a working-class neighborhood in Biloxi against a backdrop of neatly reconstructed homes. But just a few feet away, outside the scene captured by the camera, stood gutted houses with wires dangling from ceilings. A tattered piece of crime-scene tape hung from a tree in the field where Mr. Bush spoke. A toilet sat on its side in the grass....

Nearby, along the ocean, ravaged antebellum homes and churches dotted the waterfront. The beach from Gulfport, Miss., to Biloxi, was deserted. Debris hung from trees and motels stood shuttered. Blue tarpaulins still patched the roofs of most dwellings. Written in green spray paint on a fence around a home in Biloxi was “You loot, I shoot.”

Oh, that reminds me: whatever happened to that grassroots "Haley Barbour for President" movement? Y'know, when he looked so competent an' all after Katrina? When his insider knowledge and political savvy was raking in the reconstruction funds for Mississippi?

Boulder Words and Timorous Meaning

Oh, the lessons we've learned since then, huh?
[Photo and the phrase "pedophiliac livestock show" via Betty Bowers]

News Item: DA Drops Case in Ramsey Slaying

Yes, I think the case is important, not near as important as the media coverage (what could be?), nor because of any reasons that coverage might have given us. No, I don't think she was killed because some lurking pedophile got the hots for her in a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader outfit; it's a wholly-unlettered stab in the dark, but my guess is that pedophiles prefer children who look like children. What was and is worthy of attention in the Ramsey case is what is has to tell us about the legal system, law enforcement, money, and "tabloid" television (as if there's any other kind) and how they work today. The little blonde girl aspect of the case is the least interesting thing about it.

To begin with let us see if we can dispose of John Mark Karr even faster than the Boulder DA was forced to, after what Colorado Governor Bill Owens called "the most expensive DNA test in history". Not the easy dismissal of "that sounds more like a sick, sorry-assed fantasy than a confession"; how about a few points CNN et al missed while covering the story wall-to-wall:

• The UC journalism professor (Michael Tracey) who had been swapping emails and phone calls with Karr for four years has produced three documentaries about the case, with the cooperation of the Ramseys, all of which strongly supported the "intruder theory" of the murder, and the last of these actually fingered another man as a suspect and claimed he'd gone missing. It turned out he wasn't a suspect and was selling jewelry over the internet.

• Rumor has it that the Boulder DA hadn't contacted the ex-wife (who seemed to alibi Karr) or investigated Karr's past much at all before filing the arrest warrant. Yet he was no flight risk, because of the pending California charges.

• The much-touted DNA testing which supposedly cleared him couldn't have, because there's no such thing as any "foreign DNA" awaiting a match with the "real killer". There is, at best, some defense-attorney-friendly degraded evidence which will never convict anyone, and which will never be linked directly to the crime except in reverse: unless the killer is caught and proven to be a match.

And this much could have been determined with about five minutes' work.

And, again, it's why the case in interesting despite the tabloid factor and the Hey, Look! A Little Murdered Blonde Girl! syndrome. An inexperienced police force made some serious, potentially crippling mistakes that Christmas morning. The case attracted media attention because of its tabloid aspects--this was before the Missing Blonde Girl of the Week became a teevee news staple--and--a first--a large internet following. Shortly thereafter the Boulder DA tried to take over the case from the cops (there'd be open warfare in short order), and hired as an investigator a retired homicide detective who'd first been brought in by the Boulder police but quit because of its focus on John and Patsy Ramsey. That investigator, Lou Smit, reportedly bonded with the couple because of their shared Christian beliefs. He still works for the Boulder DA, Mary Lacy, successor to her one-time boss Alex Hunter.

Then there's the flip-side of this: the way the Ramseys were convicted in the press without trial.

But the Ramseys had two things going for them: money and more money. It bought politically well-connected criminal attorneys and a big-time PR campaign. Tracey's first documentary was basically lifted by A&E for its American Justice series, with no mention that the Ramseys were involved in the production. That program made much of the Ramsey's presumed innocence under the Law, a heartwarming affirmation of our civil liberties until you stopped to ponder that a couple weeks earlier they'd ignored evidence to paint Klaus von Bulow as a murderer despite the fact that he'd actually been found innocent in a courtroom.

Maybe it's best to just ignore anything so stained by yellow journalism, but on the other hand it's worth pondering how all the media resources of the United States can be focused on one small-town murder yet a decade later they're still getting the facts wrong. And a journalism professor with a big financial interest in the case is giving the local DA a new hot lead every few months.

As always, it's at least cheap entertainment to hear some talking hairdo relay the "controversy swirling around Mary Lacy" while ignoring the credulous coverage she was getting just 24 hours earlier from under the very same hair.

Mother

David Brooks, "Nonconformity Is Skin Deep", August 27

Last week we asked--without really expecting, or needing, a response--whether there really was a time when Brooks' pseudo-pop sociology was ever taken pseudo-seriously. This week Brooks does his best to provide an answer.

Tattoos! He's ripping on tattoos! Okay, I know it's August. Just take the fookin' week off, already.

We now have to work under the assumption that every American has a tattoo....that under each suit, dress or blouse, there is at least a set of angel wings, a barbed wire armband...We have to assume that any casual antitattoo remark will cause offense, even to those we least suspect of self-marking.

Really? Madeleine Albright? Debby Boone? Ben Shapiro?

Sure, that's the mere comedy version of hunting quail over seed, but how about this: cause offense? In society David Brooks is careful not to cause offense, however inadvertently, by making a chance remark of the sort of thing he puts in his column every week? David Brooks is concerned that a stray antitattoo remark will dismay his companions, result in some lowering of his esteem on the cocktail circuit or perhaps actual fisticuffs? What sort of antitattoo remarks is he prone to make?

Dear reader, I'm going to risk our friendship here, just to make a point. Although I've known you only a brief time, and I have no idea what's under your suit, dress, blouse, or (more likely) bathrobe, I suspect you might be open-minded enough to learn that I don't particularly care for tattoos.

Whew! Now, those of you who haven't run immediately to Comments, stick around so I can offend you, too. I don't like those Melina Mercouri glasses. I've never liked sandals. Can't abide wing-tip shoes, tie-dye, or those suits that look like they were made from petroleum. I don't own anything plaid, aside from a blanket, and that's in the basement. I've been alienated from every major trend in eye makeup for at least a decade, and I think that woman in the Black Eyed Peas looks like she could use a bath. I don't think I should be able to read your watch from a distance of 50 feet. I don't trust anyone who looks as if he spends more time grooming than reading, and if you smell as though you believe the one thing that improves cheap cologne is using a whole lot of it, and you get on my elevator, I may ask, politely, where you contracted the gangrene you're trying to cover up, even at the risk of causing offense.

And so fuckin' what?

But wait, the middle-aged man is just warming to his task:

Pretty soon you'll go to the beach and find that only the most hardened nonconformists will be un-marked.

And there--though we've had to amputate a bizarre phantom appendage from that thought (we'll get right back to it, promise)--there, I say, is David "Bobo" Brooks, the carnival shill who walks like a Times opinion columnist.

David Brooks was born in 1961, and we promise to stop talking about him as if he were still a high school AV nerd huddled with other AV nerds in the cafeteria as a talisman against roving jock bullies when he promises to stop writing like one. By the time he got to high school, in the latter 70s, this "If you want to be a real non-conformist you'll dress like a normal person" schtick wasn't just patently ridiculous and old hat, it was already part of the public school curriculum. The armies of L7s, Brooks included, were being given daily affirmations on the subject, the same way that today children are praised for swearing to their easily-placated parents that they (the children) won't have sex until they (the parents) have gone to their Heavenly Reward. Or gone blind.

What had really changed by Brook's schooldays was that conformity had a new uniform, a new 8 Track player, and better access to a range of intoxicants beyond sloe gin and 7-UP. Schoolmarms didn't like it. But schoolmarms didn't like the long sideburns and comic books of twenty years previous. You might imagine a pseudo-sociologist would pseudo-recognize the point.

Instead we get this rehash of the weird disconnect with the reality of the 60s which is so instructive of public right-wing arguments in general. The 60s are now an era of simultaneous social conflict and cultural hegemony, with hippies in the role Communists played on the international scene, somehow astride the divide like an evil Colossus and a mouthy minority full of shallow, desperate trend-followers soon to be run off by the real folks.

And just as we knew by the late 50s that the Soviets and the Chinese weren't getting along, yet continued to play International Communism as monolithically intent on world domination, so too must Brooks have known actual people in the day, known each as a writhing mass of contradictory rugged individualism and craven conformity and not pseudo-sociologic ciphers, known or realized shortly thereafter that the whole conformity/rebellion thing was a phony construct, that the social revolutions of the 60s were in fact genuine, for all their susceptibility to mass-market trivialization, that the cracks in American backwoods Calvinism were widening, and that young people were dancing to that racket coming out of their transistors, and having sex with the coloreds, because they enjoyed it, not because some Berkley prof hoodwinked 'em. And, perhaps most disturbing of all, that many people were thumbing their noses at Authority because Authority deserved it.

And this is the David Brooks who's apt to grab any "positive" Gallup poll result about teenagers to insist they are throwing off the shackles of hippie immorality. That brand of conformity doesn't bother him, apparently.

Sorry, I promised you that was just half the paragraph. Behold, the real wonders of self-hypnosis:

Everybody else will be decorated with gothic-lettered AARP logos and Katie Couric 4-EVER tributes, and Democrats will have their Kerry-Edwards bumper stickers scratched across their backs so even their morticians will know which way they voted.

Har har har. Maybe that's the cocktail party antitattoo riff that insulted people. Maybe he didn't inadvertently offend someone with a secret inking. Maybe he just happened to find himself addressing someone with a sense of humor.

The problem is that middle-class types have been appropriating the symbols of marginalized outcasts since at least the 1830's.

e.g. The great "Let's Talk Like Australians" craze of the early frontier.

This is no longer a way to express individuality; it's a way to be part of the mob. Today, fashion trends may originate on Death Row, but it takes about a week and a half for baggy jeans, slut styles and tattoos to migrate from Death Row to Wal-Mart.

Y'know, it just goes to show that if you wait around long enough, huge, rampant African appendages will turn up and get shoved into every orifice of young careless white girls. Death Row? I thought white rockers started the tattoo rebirth in the late 70s, and if "slut styles" and Madonna don't go together like peanut butter and jelly, I'll have a ketchup soda.

And that's the most delightful thing about the whole fad. A cadre of fashion-forward types thought they were doing something to separate themselves from the vanilla middle classes but are now discovering that the signs etched into their skins are absolutely mainstream. They are at the beach looking across acres of similar markings and learning there is nothing more conformist than displays of individuality, nothing more risk-free than rebellion, nothing more conservative than youth culture.

Hey, David. Mr. Keller says you should go pick up the projector in B238.

Happy Birthday

Paul Rubenfeld
born August 27, 1952