For The Umpteenth Time, I'm Sorry Your Mommy, Your Holy Mother, And Some "Celibate" Pervert In A Dress Forbid You To Have Sex, Even With Yourself

George Eff. Will, "Demon Denim". April 16

REALLY, Demon Denim. That is the piece. The whole piece.

Writer Daniel Akst has noticed and has had a constructive conniption. He should be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He has earned it by identifying an obnoxious misuse of freedom. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, he has denounced denim, summoning Americans to soul-searching and repentance about the plague of that ubiquitous fabric, which is symptomatic of deep disorders in the national psyche.

And which goes a restrained 600 of its 725 words before name-dropping Edmund Burke, and makes its case without ever relaying what Clemenceau said to Woodrow Wilson. Apparently "Rejected" is not a category WaPo is contractually allowed to apply to its stableboys' copy. And by the way, if you do make it through the first 692 words there's a sort of coda of Obviousness, like licking your way through some godawful Tootsie Roll Pop to get to the coprolite in the center:

(A confession: The author owns one pair of jeans. Wore them once. Had to. Such was the dress code for former senator Jack Danforth's 70th birthday party, where Jerry Jeff Walker sang his classic "Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother." Music for a jeans-wearing crowd.)

Youth is wasted on the Young. Snobbery is wasted on Snobs.

Before we go any further, let's mention something about that Akst piece which George Eff Will missed, probably due to a congenital problem: it's funny. Not roaringly funny, no, but funny, certainly as funny as something published in the Journal and dedicated to its notion of the innate superiority of rich people could be expected to be. And it's far from a conniption, George. Conniptions are rarely funny, and never in defense of the conniptionee's sense of What Is Or Isn't Done. Conniption is a dish best served from under the rock that's just fallen on you. Albert Brooks' nest egg routine in Lost in America is funny. Dick Cheney's reaction to, well, virtually everything, is not.

This is our clue that Will is not simply engaged in some sort of anemic leg pull. He runs--that's not quite the word--with the worst feature of Akst's piece: the insistence that Demon Denim is popular as some sort of Trendy Liberal Hypocritical Lincoln-Navigator-to-Whole-Foods Faux-Radical solidarity with the Sons of the Soil employed by phony Pinko CEO types like Steve Jobs as a badge of authenticity, and mindlessly adopted by the masses because their Lefty Hollywood Idols told them so, without their realizing they're helping to promote Socialism.

And Will treats all this like it's some sort of revelation, or rallying cry of Freedom, for chrissakes. Which would be bad enough in the first place, but coming from a guy who for three decades has employed patently anachronistic neckware as a visual shorthand for his protest against the Modernist excesses of the middle of the last century, and who enthusiastically backed not one but two US Presidents who pretended to be cowboys, in full ranch get-up, it's just, well, rich.

Denim is the infantile uniform of a nation in which entertainment frequently features childlike adults ("Seinfeld," "Two and a Half Men") and cartoons for adults ("King of the Hill"). Seventy-five percent of American "gamers" -- people who play video games -- are older than 18 and nevertheless are allowed to vote. In their undifferentiated dress, children and their childish parents become undifferentiated audiences for juvenilized movies (the six -- so far -- "Batman" adventures and "Indiana Jones and the Credit-Default Swaps," coming soon to a cineplex near you). Denim is the clerical vestment for the priesthood of all believers in democracy's catechism of leveling -- thou shalt not dress better than society's most slovenly. To do so would be to commit the sin of lookism -- of believing that appearance matters. That heresy leads to denying the universal appropriateness of everything, and then to the elitist assertion that there is good and bad taste.

And here's another thing about humor, or even employing the form of humor without even bothering to attempt to deal The Funny: it has to connect with people, even if that connection is "Boy, what a weirdo". Nobody in America dresses down out of concerns about Social Leveling; hell, I doubt two in ten could define the term, and they'd just laugh at you if you did it for 'em. You're a fucking hothouse flower, George, and, if I may say so, your bloom is looking a little spent. Was poshlost taste any better back when no gentleman would leave the house without his hat, or his spats, or unless his body servant had powdered his wig correctly? No. It was thirty decibels or so quieter, is all. (By the way, and I'm not recommending this to you, George, but if you spend some time among Our Most Slovenly--this would be one reality program I'd watch, come to think of it--you might note that while denim is employed by young males it is largely absent in the middle-aged colored; if you wanna see people dress, go downtown.)

Denim is the carefully calculated costume of people eager to communicate indifference to appearances. But the appearances that people choose to present in public are cues from which we make inferences about their maturity and respect for those to whom they are presenting themselves.

We? Who besides you? The guys in HR? If Americans are wearing denim everywhere, even somewhere where you spotted it (if at all, of course; this is, at its center, an homage) then they obviously don't believe it's a sign of immaturity or disrespect. In fact they obviously don't think about it at all.

This is not complicated. For men, sartorial good taste can be reduced to one rule: If Fred Astaire would not have worn it, don't wear it. For women, substitute Grace Kelly.

First: Fred could wear anything, just as he is one of the greatest interpreters of Gershwin despite a four-note vocal range. Neither should be urged upon everyone else based on his model. It is, by the way, always amusing to hear latter-day experts touting the tuxedo--and no one's ever worn one of those like Fred--as some sort of "classic" men's apparel when it began as a sort of shockingly casual alternative to full morning dress.

Second, and this has nothing to do with anything except that in a lifetime of keeping a quote book I'd never run into this one: Judy Garland apparently believed Her Future Royal Highness Princess Grace stole the Oscar™ Judy should have won for A Star Is Born. And she was asked, sometime later, whether she thought Grace Kelly was a nymphomaniac. "She would be," Judy said, "if they could figure out some way to calm her down."

You Swing Like A Girl. Or So We've Heard.

Condimelda Rice, "My Weekend on Tiger's Trail". April 13 via Wonkette

FIRST, any day that begins with the headline:

Drinking Led To Sword Fight Death, Charges Filed

in your local paper, even if your local paper is the Indianapolis Racist Star, which could probably run something similar every day or two if it wished, is not a day to be boldly stared at across a small space, at least not without a lot more coffee than I've had by 7 AM. Perhaps, even, not without the same level of alcohol consumption which last weekend led Christopher Rondeau, 37, from intoxication to incarceration. Well, that and what were described, either in journalese or the court papers, or both, as, respectively, "a Japanese samurai-type" and a "Japanese sabre-style infantry" sword. Rondeau is being charged with murder in the death of his uncle, Adolf Stegbauer, 69, and with the reckless homicide death of Franziska Stegbauer, 77, Rondeau's grandmother, who tried to break up the fight, apparently without knowing the appropriate spells.

Plus I'm laboring under sleep deprivation brought on by a thirty-hour bout with computer glitchiness that turned into a full-fledged meltdown last night, though my NASAesque system redundancy seems to've saved the day, or stopped the bleeding. I'll let you know for sure after the full Nuke n' Pave on the internal hard drive.

I am, in fact, still transferring recent files--of which there are a lot, since I naturally was in the middle of a big project and had shit scattered everywhere--to their redundant redundancy location while typing with the other hand. But I couldn't bring myself to abandon Condimelda for one more day.

I'VE admitted, on these very internets, that my Poor Wife and I enjoy the PBS Lawrence Welk Show package, though just in case there's someone out there who could possibly misunderstand that, for "enjoy" read "very occasionally stare at in slack-jawed wonder for up to three minutes at a time, depending on how long ago we've eaten." It's a sort of perilous exercise in teevee anthropology for us, except it's the rare anthropologist who can't explain a single fucking thing about the strange alien culture he's immersed himself in.

But that's it; you consider, even briefly, that the elements in your very marrow are the product of the life and death cycles of not one, not two, but three stars, of a vastness of Spacetime beyond Vast, beyond even Rod Serling's or Gene Roddenberry's imaginations; that the remarkable, if not miraculous, chain of events which preceded the first stirrings of mammalian evolution on this planet took 3.5 billion years, give or take a billion; that hominid evolution can be measured back more than 4 million years, and our own genus over 2 million; that the odds of a particular sperm implanting itself in a particular egg are roughly one in 225 billion, that human beings speak 5-10,000 different languages, depending on who's counting, that everyone living on this continent came from somewhere else, and that if a lorry driver in New York c. 1926 had made a left turn rather than a right your grandfather and grandmother would never had met. It is beyond all reason that we find ourselves here at this very moment, or that doing so we speak more or less the same variant of proto-Indo-European filtered through Greek, Latin, Norman French, High German, and Old Frisian, just for starters, enough at least for purposes of misunderstanding. So how is it you can turn on the teevee and find people who might as well be from Mars?

I mean, you would not watch this program. You would not wear clothing in colors normally reserved for the sugariest of children's breakfast cereals. You would not listen to this stuff unless you had been trapped within earshot by falling boulders or a collapsing ceiling, and then only until you had finished gnawing your own arm off, and you certainly wouldn't dance to it under any circumstances, particularly if it meant abandoning your walker and oxygen bottle. In short, nothing about the program makes sense under any conceivable mental framework. Even Gene Roddenberry's. And it was on teevee for thirty years.

Not to mention it was hosted by a guy who was born in North Dakota, but who, seventy years later, still spoke English as though he'd been raised by wolves in the Black Forest and rescued scant months ago.

And the PBS packages, being PBS, have to cover the old commercial breaks, which they accomplish by bringing back such of the "Welk Stars" as are still able to follow a teleprompter and can be spared from Branson that week. This is not a crack, by the way; America's Entertainment Destination for people who do not actually care for entertainment includes a 160-room Welk Resort Hotel, and those 160 rooms include free Wi-Fi. And these "Welk Stars" are uniformly nauseatingly chipper, and not just in the mode of the professional "entertainer", mind you; they relate the stories of their post-show lives which, without exception, mix grandchildren, golf, and either "performing" at a Welk Theatre in Branson or San Diego, or just keeping in touch with other members of the "Welk Family", plus your choice of crushed corn flake or Durkee's™ french-fried onion crust. I suppose it's possible there's some former Family Member somewhere who drinks to excess and spouts off about what a cheapskate and bluenose his old boss really was. Sure, none would ever make it on camera. But when you watch the ones who do, the ones whose pasted-on smiles show no sign of disappearing the second the red light goes off, and you bet anyone who ever possessed a negative thought in his life would have jumped out a window by his second rehearsal surrounded by these mutants.

And here's the thing: let us, arguendo, take Mormons as the Whitest People on the Planet. And if I asked you to name five, excepting any who've been arrested for polygamy or child abduction, you'd likely say, "Mitt Romney, Ken Jennings, and three Osmonds". Unless you're, like, a big fan of The Jets or somethin'. Anyway, that's four stiffs plus possibly the coolest guy on the planet who's never released an album. From the very heart of Waltz-Time, Church-Basement Potluck Supper America. So how, exactly, does one go about finding vast, free-range herds of these people who seem never to have experienced social intercourse with anyone different from themselves, or sexual intercourse with anyone at all? (Okay, sure, they appear to breed. I'm not convinced.)

WHICH brings us to Condolezza Rice, born November 14, 1954, Birmingham, AL, onetime classmate of one of the four African-American girls who'd die in that city's most notorious--but far from only--white supremacist terror bombing, and her article about...golf. And not just golf, but golf at The Masters, Augusta, GA, where, forty-five years after the 16th Street Baptist Church met sixteen sticks of dynamite, Condi Rice still cannot play, now because she's a women, although she could caddie. Prior to 1990, that's 1990 A.D., C.E., 1990 eighteen years ago her skin color would have been enough.

And, y'know, that's between Secretary Rice and her conscience. I'm not an African-American woman, let alone one who grew up in the Jim Crow South. If Condi Rice and her mother chose that second week in April, 1968, to commiserate with Roberto De Vicenzo (whom she calls "Robert") for the possible language barrier that resulted in him signing an erroneous scorecard (how do they make "3"s in Argentina, anyway?) at a Whites Only club just 130 miles and a few anguished hours away from where they'd buried Dr. King, well, it was their business.

No, I never had to deal with Jim Crow. I do do a little writing, or typing, and I believe I can safely say that if this is indicative of how Condi's mind works we are extremely fortunate to have escaped the Bush II years as well as we did.

If you clicked the Wonkette link you've seen some samples, including:

As the time approached, my assistant Anne said, “They want to know who you want to follow.” Borrowing language from Anne’s generation, I said, “Duh?

Okay, but if she didn't understand you it's probably because you left off the be-otch.

Look, again: there are probably people in the audience at either Welk Theatre--and that's astonishing enough, really--who shout out requests for "Zip-a-Dee-Do-Dah", or "How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?", or, for that matter, "Old Black Joe". But where do they come from? How does one of them become Secretary of State?

Think you can take more?

• I had decided that if Tiger did not win, I would champion the cause of Phil Mickelson (met him at the White House and he’s a really nice guy); Stewart Cink (met him in Atlanta and he’s a really nice guy); or Anthony Kim (haven’t met him but I like his swagger).

• Upon arrival, Augusta took my breath away with its physical beauty.

• A golfer hit his ball over the green and they needed a foot (a human foot) to hold down the rope and produce space for his chip. My foot was there and I happily stood on the rope.

• But you know that Tiger will be there to do it right the next time.

• In the end, it was Angel Cabrera and justice for Robert De Vicenzo.

Okay, back to trying to salvage a hard drive, secure in the knowledge that it could be much worse. I could be trying to salvage our international reputation now that Condi finished with it.

Back Home Again

SO yesterday, while I was waiting for Turner Classics to return to its non-Religious Spectacle schedule--it's not that I don't see the appeal of the Holy Works of JudaioChristianity presented as vaudeville; it's just that along about the twenty-seventh hour it starts to grind--I picked up the Sunday Racist Star.

It's not surprising these past weeks to open the Racist Star and find yourself staring at Fishers (IN) resident Marcus Schrenker, the Amelia Earhart of financial advisors, the man who caught the Media's rapidly-shifting attention by attempting to fake his own death with a plan which, from all appearances, hatched from the half-remembered plot of a Brady Bunch episode. Shrenker, in fact, actually turned into a jilted pre-teen sometime mid-flight, and he's been periodically returning to the local news since The Crash by whining, claiming it was all a big misunderstanding, and--surprise!--blaming drug abuse. Prescription drug abuse. This, of course, is the worst of it in my book, and ought to be met with stiff and swift Federal justice, preferably at the closest suitable tree. Stealing from widows and orphans is one thing; turning on the waterworks after you're caught is another. But above all we need a warning on every prescription bottle announcing "It is a violation of Federal law to blame your misdeeds on this product." Score some fucking coke, Cap'n Schrenker! Where's your élan now, eh?

This is why I haven't written about this mope; well this, plus the fact that the only difference between "Ace" Schrenker and 98% of the population of Fishers (IN) is that he had a pilot's license.

The Racist Star sees it differently, and in the absence of any further rambling, tearstained, spelling-, grammar-, and logic-challenged declarations of his innocence in the matter of, and I quote, "what really happened on 1-11-2009," one of its assignment editors decided that getting to the bottom (warning, as always, if you really have to read the thing you've got twenty minutes before the Racist Star starts expecting you to pay for it) of Why People Trusted Marcus Schrenker was as good a 1500-word excuse to kill trees as any, or at least any the Star had at the moment. Thus a front page, below the fold, novella which managed actually to say less than its subhead, Experts say those who project wealth, success are too easily trusted.

Really. And where have those experts been? Busy warning Lindbergh to lock his windows?

And, again, I wouldn't have been reading the thing if I hadn't been sitting with a tubesock full of microwaved lentils trying to convince my back to go along with the morning's program, but it was worth reading for the mention of Cap'n Schrenker at his 10-year high school reunion, passing out business cards with the above picture of him, the unindicted co-conspirator in the slinky, off-one-shoulder number to his right, their plane, and their Lexus. Their Lexus. Really, at that point do you need an expert to tell you there's something beyond hinky with the whole operation? Are we this far gone as a society down the Reagan-fueled celebration of pure self-aggrandizing stupidity? Okay, we are. But I still think there needs to be an investigation as to why no one at that reunion bothered to inform the authorities.

This did, however, provide the article's one bright spot, when my Poor Wife suggested that for their fifteenth reunion his classmates blow that picture up, cut the heads out, and charge people $20 to get their pictures taken poking their faces through the holes. I love you, Mojo.

[Okay, so in addition there's the story--which naturally passes without comment--that in repeatedly pestering his landlord over niggling problems in an effort to avoid paying rent, Cap'n Schrenker had called in OSHA to test the building's air quality because someone had been smoking. Reader, try getting OSHA to inspect the unlit pit of rusty razor blades and 2x4s with nails in them your boss installed to keep people from pilfering office supplies.]

A fucking Lexus. Thank god overexposure has mitigated my vertigo.


I AM BECOME PRONOUN, Destroyer of Copy watch: I followed this up by reading another tale (same short shelf life) of alabaster Hamilton County, the ongoing court battle over the guy from Jersey who used a Hoosier baby-farming operation, the Hamilton County courts, and a couple of well-timed Hey! Look Over There!s to legally adopt twin girls born to a surrogate mother, sired by anonymous arranged spermatozoa from the West Coast, where the stuff is primo. The mother flew in from South Carolina specifically to give birth and to swear before the court that this Melinger character was the biological father.

It's no real surprise to the keen observer of Indiana politics--or me, either--that the state, and its fastest-growing center of White Republican wealth and Lexus ownership, would become the Midwest leader in Baby Ranching *. After all, you don't get to be the Nation's Third-Worst State Legislature by wasting any effort on children after they're born. Unless Planned Parenthood is involved. Nor is it surprising to find an attendant flood of amphibian tears regarding the Only Family the (now four-year-old) Little Girls Have Ever Known trumping repeated violations of black-letter law, since Justice must be tempered with Mercy, and an up-to-date credit report. No, the only thing that stifled my intemperate yawning was the fact that I had read, in successive stories, the following sentences crafted by people who do that for a living and, presumably, passed by other people who are paid to check for such things:

But when Mike Kinney, a dentist from Roswell, Ga., began questioning Schrenker's handling of his funds after he noticed some money missing, he said Schrenker berated him for bothering him with calls.

and:

Moores called for a federal investigation of Litz and his company and said his business amounted to felony "child selling," which he disputed.

And look: I understand there's some modern confusion about pronouns agreeing with their subject in number and gender, since I myself have been asked--on these very internets--whether "I believed all doctors were male" simply because I'd used the third-person masculine singular as the neuter, rather than falsely employing the third-person plural. That's understandable. But writing a sentence where multiple pronouns compete in some sort of Vince McMahon Texas Cage Match for whatever antecedent happens to be lying around is unpardonable. You might type one without catching it, but there's no explanation for missing it in the editing process twice. Sheesh, my Poor Wife's family gives clearer directions.
________________
* Just speculation at this point, since we don't seem to keep records.

"Making Fools Of Everyone"? What, The Bush Administration Wasn't Enough For Them?

Mort Zuckerman,"Iran is Making Fools of Everyone". April 8

OKAY, now, in case you're wondering what I was doing at The Huffington Post, I've been trying to stay current on this ShamBoozle guy, or whatever it is, the one who punched a hooker, and I knew that the HuffPo, as it's known to aficionados, was the best place to go. 'Cause there's something fishy there; you don't get a real sense of the guy's physicality on teevee, but my guess is that in a fight a hooker in any weight class would have cleaned his clock, and then given him a what-for once he was down, not that little ketchup-packet-exploded-in-my-face muss job. Maybe she was just unfamiliar with his work. Although I can't imagine the ShamBoozle guy not wearin' that on his sleeve, particularly after a couple of shooters. In fact, if he doesn't travel with a dozen pre-autographed head shots I'm a poor judge of televised character.

Oh, and the latest Joachin Phoenix news, of course. He's morphed into Billy Bob Thornton, who apparently was rude to a disc jockey or something. Imagine! This is the sort of thing that gets you a panel job on ABC's This Week with The Biased Liberal Media, Brought To You By Petroleum.

Turns out they cover politics over there, too. By giving column inches to neocon would-be insiders who already have their own magazines to blather in, thank you very much:

Even as it lies about its closeness to acquiring nuclear missiles, it continues to menace the political order throughout the Middle East, pressing on with rocketry and rearming Hamas and Hezbollah. And that mischief is nothing to what it will do if it is allowed to become a nuclear power.

Y'know, I think this is exactly what has been missing from our debate over "the Middle East": someone screaming Apocalyptic nonsense so unfounded it would give Richard Perle pause. Okay, two seconds pause.

And look, I bow to no one when it comes to respecting the political opinions of someone who made billions in real estate, and who is personally responsible for taking The Atlantic Monthly, the highly respected literary, cultural, and political institution, giving it a social disease, then passing it along to The Gutter Press at real-estate-sharpie prices. I understand he's worked wonders at US News as well, which has now reestablished itself as the newsweekly favored by high school debate teams. (I was not a high school debater. A girl in my class was, though, and she looked like Patty Boyd, except with prodigiously precocious mams. So I helped with her filing system.)

Anyway, if it wouldn't inject too much reality into the thing, would it be possible to start saying "Israel" instead of "the Middle East" when we mean "Israel" and not "the Middle East"? I mean, I know you don't get called on this sort of thing in public much, Mort, but it really is transparently obvious, just like we all saw in that latest Lebanese fracas which side y'all's cosmic jokester God gave the biggest battalions. You wanna defend every hardliner position of the last sixty years from 6000 miles away, fine. But it's sixty years. Can we at least stop pretending that this has not been the dominant approach all that time, with the result that you are right where you are today, hoping if you scream loudly enough the fear-mongering will convince America to fund the next sixty?

And I believe it was Albert Einstein, or else Albert Brooks, who noted that the definition of insanity is imagining you'll get a different result by doing the same thing over and over again, except with more megatonnage.

Nuclear Iran will be a threat to US national security, worldwide energy security, the efficacy of multilateralism and the Non-Proliferation (NPT) Treaty.

Three questions, Mort. One: could you tell us, in rough terms, at what level "Nuclear Iran" becomes a threat to the US? When it has ICBMs? When it has enough fissionable material? How does that work? It's like saying a guy holding a stick will become a threat to the two guys with rifles trained on him if he's ever allowed to start sharpening it. Two: how does Nuclear Iran threaten worldwide energy security in a way Reality Iran, which has the third largest oil reserves in the world, the second most powerful military in an area which holds 56% of known reserves, and is now, thanks to your neocon buddies, and their previous insistence on the Henny Penny Theory of Nuclear Disarmament, let's say highly influencial with the ruling Shi'a majority in Iraq, which has the world's fourth largest reserves, does not? Three: did you exercise all due caution and shave yourself before you wrote "threatens the Non-Proliferation Treaty?" Personally, I'd a' been laughing so hard I wouldn't have touched any sharp objects for a week.

Having defied the world so brazenly, it might become overconfident enough to believe its conventional or proxy forces could operate without fear of serious reprisals from the US, Israel, or any other power.

Ditto for "brazenly defying the world" but sure; it might just slip the mind of the Iranians what Great Satan & Son really think of 'em, and what either one would do if the lights happen to go out for a minute.

Fundamentally, a nuclear Iran represents a unique threat. The fear of mutually assured destruction has long restrained other nuclear powers. There is a real risk that Iran is not rational, that driven by its mad hatreds it will act in ways that are irrational, even self-destructive.

Mort, Mort, Mort. You went to Hahvahd, right? You "edit" a "major" national magazine, correct? (Hey, what's up with Joachin Pheonix? Do you know?) You've heard of research, right? Fact-checking? And you just choose to ignore them? I'm just trying to survey the property here.

Mutually-assured destruction is a 70s buzzword, Mort. It may date to the 60s; we spent so much effort exaggerating the Soviet threat in those days it's impossible to say when that theoretical construct actually became a reality, if ever. But MAD, as the headline writers called it, doesn't apply to other than the late stages of the Cold War, and perhaps to India/Pakistan. Certainly not to the Middle East (or are we pretending that Israel doesn't have a couple hundred little hummers stashed away?). Retaliation might, but nothing's changed there, except that today, Israel or the United States might well become overconfident enough to imagine they could respond to an Iranian nuclear peashooter by irradiating everything between the Caspian and Arabian seas without fear of Russian or Chinese response. I like to think we've at least reduced that possibility in the US recently, but then I'm an incurable optimist.

No fifth-rate power can embark upon a nuclear weapons program in the early 21st century and reach the level of global nuclear threat. It's too big an undertaking, and it's too closely watched by the real global nuclear powers who, unlike yourself with the State of Israel, actually have their own meat on the line (okay, sorry. Cheap shot. They also serve who stay in the New World, buying Low and selling High and cheating widows and orphans). This is why the North Korean business is, while not exactly risible, certainly a transparent con-job; the Chinese, at whose sufferance Kim gets to play International Man of Crazee, would shut the thing down themselves the minute it rose to the level of Potentially Becoming a Minor Threat. We know this. The Chinese know we know this. Even Kim knows it, which is why he's allowed to play that Michael Dunn character from the old Wild Wild West. Iran's never going to become a match for Israel's nuclear stockpile, let alone the United States' (okay, let's rephrase that; never say never. The circumstances required for Iran to be able to develop a full-fledged, even-Israeli-sized nuclear arsenal, unimpeded, are so dire that Iranian nukes would be a minor worry).

We must press harder to concert four measures:

1. an arms' embargo; 2, a ban on exports to Iran of gas and other refined products to cripple their transport; 3, a global boycott of the entire banking system of Iran, instead of helping them as European banks are; and 4, a prohibition on Western countries supplying spare parts to the oil industry.

Yes', by all means', let's' have 1, an arms' embargo; 2/a really good reason to alienate the Iranian people that has every possible chance of a devastating effectiveness unless, say, some other country develops the ability to refine petroleum, or somebody coughs or something^3*the world get in line behind our proven global economic leadership ø and 4# a good excuse for oil prices to zoom above last summer's levels, now that we've got our economy straightened out an' all.

And really, aside from the fact that the underlying rationale is bogus, that none of these suggestions would work, even if they could be implemented, which they couldn't unless the threat was real, and the fact that the biggest danger we face in the world today, and into the future, is the result of our responding over the past sixty years to each and every threat, most of them imaginary or delusional, by spending ever greater amounts of treasure and reputation appeasing the most insane among us. Thanks for contributing, Mort.

Sorry I'm Late, But In My Defense I Don't Watch Fox Sunday, For The Same Reason I Don't Schedule A Weekly Showing Of Titicut Follies.

If you enjoyed Titicut Follies, the Internet Movie Database

recommends Don't Look In The Basement! and Body Double.

SO, President Gingrich would have taken out that North Korean missile on the launching pad for fear that the wily Oriental devils might use three nuclear weapons to de-electrify the US back to the Stone Age. Which includes your car! says Newt, mindful that, thanks to his party, by the time the North Koreans have three nuclear weapons most Americans will be living in theirs. Gingrich added that the Obama policy, presumably including the continuation of the Six Party Talks, diplomatic efforts at the United Nations (demanded by the understandably honked-off Japanese), or, frankly, doing anything whatsoever that includes talking rather than unleashing lasers, robots, or or robots with lasers, a fantasy foreign policy.

It struck me, watching the vid, that Newt Gingrich talking to Chris Wallace is precisely one gamete away from being two guys taking big in order to impress their waitress at Denny's.

And that gamete is Wallace's; Newt's already sitting in a booth, imagining her naked, as witness his "If I was the fuckin' President, I'd show those North Korean fucks what a fuckin' bomb is, I tell ya. Say, darlin', what time they let you leave here?" I mean, you'd like to think that the average Denny's customer has more sense than that. Excepting, of course, that they are eating at Denny's. The real question here is, Which is the most delusional? Newt Gingrich thinking he could stop a North Korean missile on the launch pad, Newt Gingrich conducting an interview in Klingon, or Newt Gingrich thinking he could be President? Okay, the latter.

You'd think that if nothing else had rid us of this maroon in the last twenty-five years gravity would have done the trick. Really, how many bad ideas, demonstrations of professional incompetence, and revelations of personal repugnance can you carry around before you sink directly into the Earth's core? The man is a two-bit huckster. I realize that this is perhaps a little easier to see for those of us who do not automatically assume that anyone granted acceptance into the undergraduate program at Tulane must be some sort of unimaginable Super Brainiac or Something, but, c'mon. I know he's just fleecing Republicans, and I know they've been fleeced by stupider and more venal men, and, lately, women, but for how long?

Look: you got nothin', okay. You've been hoist by your own massive antique petard collection. You've reverted to Clenis™ syndrome, though I don't think "reverted" is quite the right word. Your national political figures are the product of decades of inbreeding, and they keep grabbing at the tiller of a ship that's already sunk while trying to avoid the wrath of a corpulent, racist, drug-addled pervert straight outta A Face in the Crowd. Maybe, just maybe, when you have to go outside the current party structure to try to find someone with enough brains cells for a mathematical possibility of their firing in sequence, you could look for someone who isn't desperately diving for the bottom in his attempt to lose a second-straight Republican nomination without ever managing to enter the race. I know Gingrich is a pathetic excuse for an historian, but he'd have to be suffering severe blackouts as well to have forgotten the administration of George W. Bush this quickly, however many reasons he and his party have to wish to. The OK Corral President wound up negotiating with North Korea from a position of weakness, five years after he threw out diplomacy as insufficiently testicle-exposing. And yet, somehow--somehow!--here we are again. Could someone at least attempt to explain why it didn't work last time?

Gingrich is certainly capable of actually believing this stuff. He's also proven capable of lying about it for whatever temporary political gain he imagines he'll reap, and which generally amounts to "none". As I've said before about the last guy who talked tough about North Korea while asking Americans to wet their pants over the issue: you'd think the party of Bronze Age Superstition would be the first to toss these guys overboard when every omen came up Bad. I know, I know an accurate assessment of the non-threat of North Korean ICBMs is out of the question; these are the people, after all, who marched us off to a couple trillion dollars worth of war-y goodness on the grounds that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to push an imaginary button, despite the fact that it would have meant he had six seconds, roughly, before being converted, for a microsecond, into a fine red mist. These are the people who screamed for us to do something about the Russian invasion of Georgia, fer chrissakes. Even those who might be capable of rational thought understand it can't be spoken of. But that doesn't mean you have to go Full Freaking Nuts every time there's a new issue of the New York Times.

Nah, really, all I'd like is if just once one of these chickenhawk warriors would act as if his Deep and Abiding Love of Country wasn't permitted to hibernate whenever there was a Democrat in the White House. Sanity's too much to ask.

Uncredited Appropriation: The Eighth Habit Of Highly Effective People

READER, let us suppose that you are the Superintendent of a large urban school district, the largest in your, let's say Midwestern, state, and one which has suffered for years from bad PR, inadequate funding, the lasting effects of de jure racism that lasted well beyond Brown, and forty years of being used as a political football, plus the usual litany of social problems; let us imagine it as a place where former Secretary of State, Four Star General, and Five Star Liar Colin Luther Powell came to town just to trounce your graduation rate, something he felt was so deserved he didn't bother wiping the figures off after he pulled them out of his ass. Let's call you Dr. X.

And let's say that some--critics, naysayers, bloggers--suspect you may be a little more concerned with your own reputation than is strictly necessary from the standpoint of effectiveness. Let's imagine, too, that one of these critics--pecksniff or dirty hippie, perhaps--has some sort of familial relationship to a teacher in your district, and that she (or he! this is hypothetical!) is a hard-copy sort, and prints out much of what is communicated to her professionally by email. And that one day on top of this stack is found a page headed:

Success Classics Top 50 Books

Here are 50 books recommended by Superintendent Dr. X to put readers on the path to success.

And your critic's attention is drawn by the brightly-colored bold font, plus he tends to curiosity, though not snoopishness, and the list is in plain sight, so he takes a seat--it's the dining room table, not his wife's office--and starts to read, and he doesn't get very far:

The Art of War/ SunTzu
The Art of Worldly Wisdom/ Baltasar Gracian
The Way to Wealth/ Benjamin Franklin
Ragged Dick/ Horatio Alger

[the Reader wishing an authentic experience may substitute for the forward slash the author's name being placed as far as possible on the opposite side of the page, far enough to require actual turning of the head and the attendant losing track of what line you were on, if not forgetting what the hell you were doing altogether.]

Okay, we've stopped; we imagine seeing Horatio Alger on a recommended reading list for any reason other than historical curiosity or mild, somewhat nostalgic leg-pull would stop a great many people. So while we're stopped let's mention a couple of things. One: in an academic setting, even a Failing Urban Public School, the basic form of a bibliography is fairly well established, and nowhere does it involve putting the title of the work on one side of the page and the author's name on the other. And two, if possible, could you find someone whose typing skills have been updated since the new century began? We will, later, go online for the full list, only to find the thing has been tabbed into an electronic version of Jumble™, the Scrambled Word Game™.

Okay, back to the list. I'm sorry, but the idea that someone in 2009 would recommend reading Horatio Alger for the inspiration doesn't just surprise me, it makes me a bit, well, suspicious. And let's note here that the idea of recommending a teacher or staffer read Ragged Dick somewhere where students might get a look at the title just beggars belief. Is there some subtle nuance of characterization and plot in Ragged Dick that recommends it over and above Phil the Fiddler or Paul the Peddler or Ben the Luggage Boy, Mark the Match Boy, Nelson the Newsboy, or Frank Fowler, the Cash Boy? And what th' fuck is a Cash Boy? Surely not what the modern reader imagines, however hard he tries not to? Then there's The Art of War, which signals we're right on the cutting edge of 80s pop psychology squish.

Look, maybe I have a character flaw, one not shared by Joe the Hotel Boy or Tattered Tom, the Street Arab. But I glance back down the list, and the Superintendent of this unnamed urban school district seems to be recommending to his staff that in addition to boning up on Ragged Dick, they consume a large, surprisingly neatly-round-numbered quantity of Self-Help treatises aimed at inspiring the mid-level insurance salesman to greater heights of actuarial accomplishment while, whenever possible, picking his pocket for seminar fees. Tony Robbins! Zig Ziglar! Jack Fucking Welch! W. Clement Stone! And I grow even more suspicious. This man has not read all these books he recommends. And the point of the exercise is rather lost on me, unless he was just subtly urging his typist to acquire computer literacy and she misunderstood and cc'd the entire workforce. I can understand an educator might read Lincoln on Leadership, but why not read The Living Lincoln and gain even broader insights into the man? Why The Art of War instead of The Analects? Why 50 books? Why not ten, or two, or one, fer chrissakes? Taken at face value it seems incredibly insular, and something other than discipline specific which, if you were familiar with Indianapo large urban school districts, probably wouldn't surprise you.

But we don't take things at face value, and quit getting ahead of me; ten seconds pasting four random titles into The Google (as it happens, I could have just typed "50 Success Classics") turned up the actual author of the list, one Tom Butler-Bowden, who peddles his commentaries on them, famously enough, it appears, that sticking your own name on top of the list seems rather foolhardy, and simply recommending Mr. Butler-Bowden, or Tom the Annotator, in the first place would have saved a lot of typing and nearly as much tabbing. Here, for the record, is the entire list in someone else's fractured format:

1. Horatio Alger Ragged Dick (1867)
2. Warren Bennis On Becoming A Leader (1989)
3. Frank Bettger How I Raised Myself From Failure To Success in Selling (1947)
4. Kenneth Blanchard & Spencer Johnson The One Minute Manager (1981)
5. Edward Bok The Americanization of Edward Bok (1921)
6. Claude M Bristol The Magic of Believing (1948)
7. Andrew Carnegie Autobiography (1920)
8. Chin-ning Chu Thick Face Black Heart (1992)
9. George S Clason The Richest Man in Babylon (1926)
10. Robert Collier Secrets of the Ages (1926)
11. Jim Collins Good To Great (2001)
12. Russel H Conwell Acres of Diamonds (1921)
13. Stephen R Covey The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989)
14. Michael Dell Direct From Dell (1999)
15. Henry Ford My Life and Work (1922)
16. Benjamin Franklin The Way To Wealth (1758)
17. Timothy Gallwey The Inner Game of Tennis (1974)
18. Robin Gerber Leadership The Eleanor Roosevelt Way (2003)
19. John Paul Getty How To Be Rich (1961)
20. Les Giblin How to Have Power and Confidence In Dealing With People (1956)
21. Baltasar Gracian The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)
22. Earl G Graves How To Succeed in Business Without Being White (1997)
23. Napoleon Hill Think and Grow Rich (1937)
24. Napoleon Hill & W Clement Stone Success With a Positive Mental Attitude (1960)
25. Tom Hopkins The Official Guide to Success (1982)
26. Muriel James & Dorothy Jongeward Born To Win (1971)
27. Spencer Johnson Who Moved My Cheese? (1998)
28. Robert Kiyosaki Rich Dad, Poor Dad (1997 )
29. David Landes The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998)
30. Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz The Power of Full Engagement (2003)
31. Roger Lowenstein Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist (1995)
32. Nelson Mandela Long Walk To Freedom (1994 )
33. Orison Swett Marden Pushing To The Front (1894)
34. JW Marriott Jnr The Spirit To Serve (1997)
35. Margot Morrell & Stephanie Capparell Shackleton's Way (2001)
36. Donald T Phillips Lincoln On Leadership (1992)
37. Catherine Ponder The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity (1962)
38. Cheryl Richardson Take Time For Your Life (1998)
39. Anthony Robbins Unlimited Power (1986)
40. David Schwartz The Magic of Thinking Big (1959 )
41. Florence Scovell Shinn Secret Door to Success (1940)
42. Thomas J Stanley The Millionaire Mind (2000)
43. Brian Tracy Maximum Achievement (1993)
44. Sun Tzu The Art of War (4 th century BCE)
45. Sam Walton Made in America (1992)
46. Wallace Wattles The Science of Getting Rich (1910)
47. Jack Welch Jack: Straight From the Gut (2001)
48. John Whitmore Coaching For Performance (1992)
49. Richard Wiseman The Luck Factor (2003)
50. Zig Ziglar See You At The Top (1975)

[N.B. Dr. X's list of recommendations had them in a different order. Not to mention widely spaced.]

Okay, so we freely acknowledge a difference of opinion here. Some people think The Business Model is applicable to everything in Life, including education and other expenditures for the public good, whereas I think those people are full of shit. I'm sure there's actually much of value to be found in that list; I myself would pay top dollar to hear what Jack Welch had to say just before the hangman sprung the trapdoor. The problem is that in quantities it would take Hercules to clear out it seems less than worthless, unless you're looking for a way to get hollow people to pay you for other people's advice, and they pay by the piece. As we say in the Art biz, Money is how people with no talent keep score.

And I don't think I'm naive, or particularly cosseted for a Midwesterner, but the older I get the more childlike my wonder at how people will fucking lie to your face just, apparently, for the sense of achievement.

It's A Bird! It's A Plane! It's A Desperate Attempt To Cling To One's Cold War Pathologies Regardless Of Cost (To The Taxpayer Or Foot Soldier)!

THE good news, kids, is that Miller Lite Presents ABC's This Week With George Robert Stephanopoulos, Brought To You By Citgo, the erstwhile This Week, has heard what you're sayin', and dug it, man, and has enshrined two of the younger generation of hip, younger generational interwebnets-savvy youth: David Frum, of newmajority.com--there aren't any spaces, or capital letters, and the "." is pronounced "dot"; it's real flip-your-wig stuff!--and "blogger", which is short for something, Zsa Zsa Arianna Huffington, and boy are her opinions out there! I'm tellin' you. She used to be married to a gay man!

So Youth is Served at the very Covered Walkway to the Portals of the Passenger Elevator to the Mezzanine Floor of the Citaldels of Power. They're from the Internet! That'll stick it to The Man! Not to mention that at long last the Sundays will be acknowledging that the "Conservative" Insider White Male has an opinion too, and it deserves to be heard. So I guess all the kids will stop twigging or twisting or sextaping, or whatever it is they usually do rather than attend church, and "kick back" for a freewheeling hour of talking heads television involving white people from two of the three major sexes debating issues from that morning's New York Times headlines, from perspectives ranging from Still Ambulatory Professional Ass-covering Canadian Wingnut Disasters all the way to Almost Touching the Center.

Ah, but fans of Pseudo-19th Century Tory Global Warming Denial Crypto-Bircherism needn't worry; there's still the G2 Summit. Yesterday's opener:

Geo. Stephanopoulos: George, let's begin with North Korea; that is the news this morning. Clearly the North Koreans seemed to know what they were doing with this timing of, uh, this launch as the President's giving a speech on nonproliferation and...

[Okay, sorry, I wasn't gonna interrupt, but th' fuck is it with this Oooh, Scary Timing! shit? Is it supposed to have a point? Isn't it true that We knew they were planning the test? Isn't it easier to, like, write a speech than launch an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile of Untold Death and Destruction, especially when, as in the case of the North Koreans, there are any number of holds involved while you re-glue, or touch up some spackle, or spray that expanding foam stuff into a hole somewhere? What is the point? That CommieNaziIslamoTerrorists are so bent on world domination that they won't scruple to ruin a President's speech, or disrupt mass transit schedules? It was right before Holy Week, too. Maybe they were trying to screw up Opening Day for Major League Baseball and forgot to convert for the international date line.

And here's something you weren't going to learn on MLPABC'sTWwGRSBtYbC: the South Koreans just had to scrub a test of their missile, which, unlike the Evil, Bloodthirsty, and Famine-Racked Realm of the World's Worst Elvis Impersonator, is, like, totally designed for the peaceable purpose of putting some more badly-needed junk in temporary orbit.]

...the whole action/reaction cycle here seems to house a ritualistic quality to you. North Korea violates UN resolutions and another one is passed.

[Since we've started borking, or whatever the kids call it: I actually thought for a moment there the "ritualistic action/reaction cycle" George Robert was referring to included the comically hysterical overreaction in the United States to the flaccid provocations of a tenth-rate, second-generation little Hitler in bad sunglasses. But no. The "ritualistic reaction" is to pass another toothless UN resolution, right, Mr. Will?]

Geo. Eff Will: Yes, it's surreal; beyond ritualistic. There's nothing like a ballistic missile to take your mind off Wall Street bonuses.

[Shows how much I know. I thought you would still be trying to hide the cynical exploitation of ginned-up threats to distract from the massive failure of your apodictic ideology. Y'know, like you did for the last eight years.]

In 1960, 50 years ago, since when Jack Kennedy...

[Jack?]

was running for President he said in the life of the next Presidency [sic] there will be 10, 15, maybe 20 nuclear powers. As President he said maybe by 1975 there'll be twenty-five.

[Okay, so unlike Will I don't have a quote boy on the payroll; Kennedy, as quoted by Arthur Schlesinger in A Thousand Days, said, in March of 1963, "ten instead of four by 1970"--I'm not sure how many Presidencies that is--and maybe 15 or 20 by 1975. Maybe he said 25 elsewhere. He was, of course, speaking of what might happen without a Non-Proliferation treaty. It might be pointed out that China was not among the four as Kennedy spoke, wouldn't officially join them until almost a year after his death, although we knew they were bound to soon enough.

We might also note that since the NPT was signed in 1968, every new member of the Nuclear Club (non-signators all, except the on-again, off-again North Koreans) has owed the technology, directly or via Pakistan, to the West. Which means:]

Geo. Eff Will: The Non-Proliferation regime has worked until now; and now it's breaking down.

[Just in case you weren't paying attention, or you were but can't believe exactly what you're hearing, this means that NPT, which was opposed at the time by the same Right-wing Pro-Apocalyptic faction which George Eff Will now imagines is cunningly hidden from us by his bowtie, worked, so long as the only one violating it was us, or our surrogates, in defense of large, happy, democratic regimes such as Israel, South Africa, and Pakistan, which we had to arm because we armed India, which we hoped would nuke the Chinese for us. But once this cozy little arrangement got away from us (Who could have Known?) it became a crumbling edifice which demonstrates the inherent philosophical failure of that very Head-in-the-Sand Liberal International Do-Gooderism Will's Strangelovian predecessors warned us about forty-plus years ago, just before the period where Will now says it worked. So they were right twice.]

And kids, look, this show is actually funnier than Saturday Night Live, or The Hills, or that singing dachshund on the YouTube. Will was led to point out the fallacy of the whole "Community of Nations" claptrap, which gave Liberal Blogger Eva Arianna Huffington just the opening she had been preparing for in her dreams as she slept through the discussion up to that point:

"But [a Community of Nations] is an aspiration, and ve haff to keep verking towards it, dollink..."

Wait, that's not the funny part. To which Will--that Jimmy Fallon of yours wishes he could be this funny--interrupted to say:

"I would just remind you that when Woodrow Wilson said to Clemenceau..."

I'm tellin' ya, I went into the kitchen and fixed a cup of coffee just so I could spew it. It was, by the way, the last peep we heard from Liberal Blogger Magda Arianna Huffington on the subject.

Or, y'know, maybe she was quiet so that her fellow Internet Youthquaker Frum could get his turn to say that, while International Non-Proliferation efforts, like all internationalism in general, was a Liberal Pie-in-the-Sky Pipe Dream of Delusion that could only lead to Unintended Consequences, all of them bad, which was why Liberals support such things in the first place, in the event We did make such a mistake the US would have to be prepared to guarantee the defense of Israel, which, as its long record shows, would be the first to unilaterally destroy the hundreds of nuclear warheads it officially denies having, because of its perfect record of acceding to international norms on this and every other subject.

Or maybe that struck her dumb, which would be understandable, but my take was she didn't need any help.

Yes, within two-point-five minutes of the top of the discussion we had veered from North Korea, speaking of veering, which has the somewhat proven ability to launch ginormous Roman candles out into the Pacific, somewhere, to poor defenseless Israel, which can only respond with US-assisted accuracy to a distance of 4000 miles, to Iran, which can't do any of that, or make its women behave. And yet somehow--you tell me--that's the discussion. The country which responded to the Vast International Communist Global Domination Conspiracy, which was once bristling with hydrogen warheads, particularly when you used our accounting system to tote 'em up, now wets itself in terror because the Herve Villechaize of International Diplomacy, a man who is wholly dependent on the Chinese, launches a board with a nail in it over the ocean. Nobody--certainly not Liberal Blogging Sensation Jolie Arianna Huffington--says Vat th' fuck? let alone "What exactly do you plan to do about it now that, given free rein, your people proved we can't invade a tenth-rate military power with no nuclear weapons and keep our army or our budgets intact?" Nobody. Clemenceau references are too fucking scary, apparently.

Epilogue: The rest of the day's dog cuisine featured the New York Times periodically finding slightly different ways to claim the Entire World was thinking of nothing else beyond imminent trans-Pacific nuclear annihilation, followed by the later announcement that the North Koreans had actually been trying to launch a payload into orbit (O, silly man in sunglasses!), and had Failed Miserably. So I guess things worked out well all the way around; piss your pants in the morning and laugh it off by nightfall. Lil' Kim was now said to be telling his people that the Successful People's Democratic Satellite was now in orbit and broadcasting away. Dear Lord, is there no end to the lies people in Communist countries have to endure from a transparently disingenuous Press?

Don Marsh's Dating Tips

#6 Red: It's the Color of Romance.

Racist Star photo/Matt Kryger

SAD internet obsessives may recall a few mentions of Marsh Supermarkets, an Indianapolis-based regional grocery chain. In particular we've asked how it is that "normal", everyday Americans--let alone supposed beneficiaries of her fancier educational establishments, such as Meganjane McArdle-Galt--could follow a weekly regimen of grocery/drug store visits without understanding, and likely screaming about, the vast gulf between the high-school text version of How Your Economic System Works they're regularly fed--or regularly feed others--and the grade-school-playground shenanigans not just baldly pulled on them, aisle after aisle, but rubbed in their faces, in the name of Retail. Although with Meganjane we figure it involves "having The Help do the shopping".

One could not shop at Marsh for the better part of a month without understanding that the portion of Free Market Theorization which involves the Customer--namely, that the Business tries to please him by providing the product, or the choices of products, he votes for with his dollars, at the Lowest Possible Price--is in reality so far down the list that it qualifies as a sick joke. What determines 90% of what's on your grocers' shelves is vendor relations; either how much money national brands spend on advertising, or (and this was clearly of more importance at Marsh) what they're coughing up in terms of ducats, freebies, skybox invites, kickbacks, and free golf clubs, and what brand of golf clubs, in exchange for shelf space. My local Marsh has six framed head shots of the management team above the office window. The only time you ever see any of them is when they're out schmoozing some sales rep. If you see one engaging an actual customer in conversation it's either a friend, relative, or someone with some golf clubs to give away. You can't even get those guys to run a cash register for five minutes at Holiday time while one of their preternaturally cold-sensitive cashiers gets treated for chilblains.

Couple this with the fact that these guys know, or imagine they know, exactly what makes you buy something, how items sell in each and every shelf position in the store, the exact amount of aisle space, in millimeters, they can take up with "special" displays before people begin hurling jumbo bottles of ketchup at the apparently abandoned children who are taking up the rest of it. The last time You, the Customer, were given the slightest thought was back when they were scouting the real estate, and even then they were only interested in how much you paid for your house.

I've detailed some of the results at Marsh: the disappearance of national brands; the rapid transmogrification of a brand of deli products from The Greatest Ever Produced to Something We've Never Heard Of; the day I--then forbidden the dark and Arab delights of coffee, turned again into the tea aisle for my regular purchase of Twinings Prince of Wales, only to find a) English Breakfast, b) Earl Fucking Grey, and c) 72 cubic feet of flavored chais. Tell me, please, what sudden Free Market outpouring of Hoosier New Age Aquarian consumer demand was behind that one.

The other spur for bringing up Marsh was that, beginning in 2005 or so, its business problems (generally blamed, in the local press, on "outside Big-Box competition with its Unfairly Lower Prices"), which led to it seeking, in order, a White Knight, a Soiled Knight, a Desperate Suitor, an inheritor of vast larders of cash even more gullible than the Marshes, and, finally, a capital-investment firm willing to take the thing off their hands. It was during this time that the Big Secret leaked out: that the descendants of those Marshes who had founded the thing in the 30s, taken it public in the 50s, managed to survive the national-chain invasion of the 60s, and started one of the first convenience-store chains were lying so thick on the ground at company headquarters that you could walk across 'em, like the dead at the Somme. And a couple hundred of them were bailing out with parachutes made of million-dollar bills.

Full disclosure: a certain portion of my attitude, not large, is probably also due to the fact that Don Marsh, second-generation patriarch of the clan, is not merely a right-wing extremist--which is only to be expected--but an extremely loud one. He took the operation over in the late 70s, spent the 80s and 90s buying up regional businesses--an ice cream producer/retailer, a caterer, convenience stores, restaurants, and opening a pharmacy operation and various "concept" groceries designed to compete with various Vague Economic Threats like Cub foods or natural food stores. All this, of course, made Don Marsh an Heroic Reagan Entrepreneurial Achiever, and, like apparently every other one of those geniuses, the minute business conditions changed he was cooked.

So Marsh finally locates a buyer in leveraged-buyout specialist Sun Capital, and Central Indiana rests easy, secure in the knowledge it has seen the last of Don Marsh sniffing Larry Bird's or Peyton Manning's jocks in his own commercials. Until this week.

Indianapolis Racist Star, March 31:

The new owner of Marsh Supermarkets has hit the former CEO with a lawsuit, claiming Don E. Marsh improperly spent millions of dollars of the Indianapolis grocery chain’s money to pay for a luxury lifestyle before he retired in 2006.

Claiming the grocery executive spent as much as six months of every year traveling for pleasure, the lawsuit contends the former CEO ought to reimburse the grocery chain an unspecified amount for breaching his 1999 employment agreement with Marsh Supermarkets.

Indianapolis Racist Star, April 1:

According to the lawsuit, Don Marsh made personal use of the corporate jet for hunting trips, business meetings and jaunts to the four family vacation condominiums at Aspen, Colo.; La Romana, Dominican Republican [sic]; Naples, Fla.; and Saugatuck, Mich.

In addition to the Macy's 2005 parade, the lawsuit says, the CEO used company money to pay for his son's family excursions in 2004 and 2005 to Africa and New Zealand at a total cost of $149,000.

The CEO also attended what were called executive outings in Alaska that the lawsuit claims were fishing trips that involved few employees and cost $100,000 or more per outing.

According to the lawsuit, the CEO often flew on the company jet "to take female employees on vague business trips to places such as Chicago or New York City" and New Orleans, where he sometimes "spent significant amounts of money at various department stores.''

And it's been a rough week overall, but I gotta tell ya, when you live long enough to hear Don Marsh use "out-of-state venture capitalist group" as a pejorative, every day is just a little sunnier.

Echo Chamber

WE'RE always a day behind on Daily Show/Colbert viewing around here; the first run is on too late for my Poor Wife, especially for the nine months of the year that Indiana is on Newfoundland Time, plus she's a read-until-lights-out type. So it was yesterday evening when we saw Monday's quickie Colbert appearance of Slate's Emily Yoffe, erstwhile global climate change denier, now the world's leading non-expert authority on a psychological disorder that doesn't exist*.

And I'm reasonably sure it was Emily Yoffe, because we've been watching old Larry Sanders Shows recently, and Mimi Rogers is much better at faking sincerity. And I don't think Scientologists go around touting psychological disorders, even the risible or indefensible. But it might have been. Both women have that hyperthyroid stare and pasted-on public smile, either of which taken alone is more disturbing than a little narcissism, and which manage to escape the easy public opprobrium of professional yentas by merest historical chance: because Phrenology, Mesmerism, and Anthropometrics evolved into the study of emotional traits instead of physical features. I don't want to get into a long historical discussion here, so let's just say the money was better, and it's proven slightly more difficult to laugh off.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder! I suppose we should be grateful that it's difficult nowadays for these people to get a license to hack the offending area of the brain loose and suction it out through the nose, or hook the afflicted up via jumper cables to old Army field telephones. NPD--of course it's a fucking acronym--was added to the Psychological Liturgical Calendar in 1980. Before that we had to make do with saying, "Jeez, she's stuck up!" or "Boy, what an asshole!" Another sparkling example of how modern psychology, like the old Soviet system, solves problems you wouldn't have otherwise.

And 1980 does not really come as a surprise to us, since contemporary psychology and Reaganism go together like Pam Anderson and Whatever Loud and Talentless Tattoo Model She's Presently Dating. Prior to Reagan, psychology was just about at the point of admitting that the two things it did well--the two things it did at all--namely, running behavior tests on captive college freshmen and keeping people locked up indefinitely, with or without trial, were really of use only to the people who periodically re-wrote entry-level college psychology texts.

Yes, it was a great time to combine Authoritarianism, Small-Town Snoopery, and a supple and utterly valueless willingness to trumpet any sort of public behavior that promised to put you back in the majority. It was in the 1980s that we decided that the sort of people who might actually benefit in some way from the machinations of modern psychology would actually be even better off turned loose on the streets to fend for themselves. This was, I think, merely fortuitous, in that the Reagan administration was just trying to trim the books of any federal spending that appeared to help people who weren't donors. This was also the time when we expanded the disposable incomes of the well-off, and convinced them via Public Service Announcement that their surly teenagers were like two fried eggs on drugs. This fortunately kept us from having a lot of spare psychologists hanging around with nothing to do, and over the past twenty-five years has made Making Young People Less Inconvenient a growth industry to match Producing Unarmored Combat Vehicles, Unfettered Near-Banking, and Herbal Supplement Informercials.

But the thing that got to me about Ms Yoffe's reverse-Scientologist performance Monday night was the urgency with which she pushed John Edwards as the poster-boy for this pseudo-disorder. He outed himself by having an affair! she insisted, before babbling on about his hair-combing proclivities. The Slate piece goes even deeper into non-clinical diagnosis by rank amateur:

John Edwards outed himself as one when forced to confess an adulterous affair. (Given his comical vanity, the deceitful way he used his marriage for his advancement, and his self-elevation as an embodiment of the common man while living in a house the size of an arena, it sounds like a pretty good diagnosis.)

Yes, yes it does, and I'd like to offer my congratulations, except you just congratulated yourself enough for both of us, and the rest of the globe.

Lessee, we've got A) inability to distinguish the trivial from the serious; B) willingness to swallow silly propaganda pieces provided they reinforce your own point of view; and C) spouting Class Traitor nonsense that doesn't survive a minute's reflection. Is "Journalist" an analytical category yet?

So we've turned to Yoffe's actual piece while our concern over whether a Colbert booker got fired over her appearance is still fresh. And there's Edwards, still being pushed to the fore, still having his marriage analyzed by long distance by a careerist scrivener who's never met him or his wife, whose diagnosis is confirmed by the subject himself, which seems a smidge self-defeating, if not a confirmation of the whole thing as a sort of late-20th century materialist version of a round of slumber-party OUIJA. And that paragraph ends with the classic philosophical conundrum:

And what other malady could explain the simultaneous phenomena of Blago and the Octomom?

To which we are brave and ignorant enough to answer, well, that might depend on if you mean "Blago" and "Octomom" personally, or the massively stupid fifteen minute's entertainment either provided the easily amused. But in either case we'd like to offer the possibility of "Stupidity", "Venality", and "News coverage that unceasingly dives for the Bottom while the Bottom unceasingly recedes". There. Didn't have to pretend I knew what made either of 'em tick, didn't have to pretend I gave a shit anyway, and didn't have to read any pop psychology texts.

A small theme has developed; let's count the politicians who get mentioned here, and ignore, for the moment, the fictional characters from The Sopranos, The Wizard of Oz, and The Wall Street Journal. Edwards the Poster Boy. Blago the Hairdo. Ah-nuld the Insufficient Budget Squeezer. And, of course--surely you didn't imagine otherwise?--Clinton the Dick.

It's interesting: we start off using this junior-high analytical category on Wall Street, but that disappears before the opening paragraph is over. Then we bring in four politicians, none of whom has any noteworthy connection to, or power over, the economic meltdown--except the one who's being blamed for the perpetual constitutional and crackpot tax-cutting religious parties cluster-fuck that is California's--and we haply have some Op-Ed guy from the Wall Street Journal and Dr. Chuckles Merkwürdigeliebe Krauthammer standing by to help with the sidewalk psychoanalysis. Not a mention of the major political party which turned the Myth of Narcissus into a parable for Eternal Economic Reflected Sunshine. Hmmmm. Though now that I think about it, it is damn near impossible to find a single Republican who fits the bill, aside from that guy in Cali they elected without realizing his was quoting from his own movies.

For that matter, nothing about Botox and Boob Lifts, nothing about Religion, nothing about People Who Pretend Expertise Where There Is None Just To Get On Teevee. Hardly surprising. Hey, Ms Yoffe: I promise not to analyze your marriage via the aether if you'll promise to publish an honest photo of your shoe closet.

__________

* or does, but fuck it; these are the people who told me, as a youth, that "while Marihuana is not physically addicting, it is psychologically addicting," Psychological Addiction being a category unknown until the previous Marihuana is Addicting business had proven, oh,absolute bullshit is the scientific term, I think, and carrying all the philosophical weight of any other concept made up on the spot to cover Your Venal Lying Ass. These same people will be happy to tell you that You Like Sex Too Much, provided you've demonstrated a willingness to be gulled that completely. It is probably true that a large number of people consumed by "narcissist tendencies" have some difficulty maneuvering through Life, in no small part because such maneuvering generally includes pleasing some employer or other supervisor who's at least as narcissistic as you. We note that this is also the case with people who are inordinately fond of Twinkies, or Jesus, and nobody ever suggests that Haley Barbour would be President otherwise.

By the Way, Sixty Years After Hiroshima A Guy Standing In Front Of A Blackboard Covered With Arcane Formulas Does Not Really Inspire Confidence

Nicholas Dawidoff, "The Civil Heretic". March 25

SUNDAY was busy; we've got the neighbor's animals to look after while they join in the mass Hoosier migration to the swamplands of Florida, which I'm pretty sure Juan Ponce de Leon named The Land of Flowers for the same reason Erik the Red called it "Greenland": to separate real-estate suckers from their gold. You're heading to sunny climes just as the weather gets nice here. By the time it reaches an average daily temperature here matching the one you've escaped to--two months, tops--you'll be cowering indoors with the AC up full blast. Yes, the ocean and the beach are invigorating for as many as forty-eight hours provided you manage to get through them without second-degree burns, which I guarantee you my neighbors will not.

So it wasn't until yesterday evening that I finally dug down through the Sunday Times pile and came face to face with Freeman Dyson, those titular blackboard scribbles, and the boilerplate note that he "infuriated environmentalists".

I had, in fact, read much of the piece the previous Thursday, and if someone can explain to me what's up with the Times publishing its Sunday Magazine cover story four days early it will probably go a long way towards understanding how it could have imagined hiding the online David Brooks and Maureen Dowd would increase paid subscriptions. So I was already aware that the infuriated environmentalists featured on the cover were the species who write stinging emails and subject their targets to well-timed WTFs in "Chat rooms [and] Web threads". Which--I'm just playing a hunch, here--are not the best locations to contact an 85-year-old mathematician, or to gauge the reactions of the "Environmentalist" community at large.

They are, however, good places to find anonymous people hurling shit anonymously, as you may have heard. Which, of course, is right in the best traditions of modern journalism.

We think we know enough about academics and academicians to understand that some discipline-poaching octogenarian eminence insisting that the overwhelming consensus in someone else's field is Just Plain Wrong probably draws fifty good-natured smiles to every instance of outrage. But then we also know that academic rifts can be as vicious as a reality show. And we don't object to that any more than we object to Professor Dyson's opinion. It's just that by and large we conclude that that front-page outrage is, well, a journalistic invention.

And we don't quite understand it, really; does the Times imagine its Sunday Magazine readers wouldn't take to a cozy feature story about a still-kickin' 85-year-old physics legend without a phony Intellectual Celebrity Feud! hook? Because the whole frickin' article goes out of its way, roughly every 75 words, to paint Professor Dyson as Otherwise A Liberal Dreamboat Emeritus. He's an Obama man! He opposes nuclear weapons! His Christianity is more a Guide to Living than a system of belief! He's tolerant of the Lower Classes, and opposed to Star Wars. Though, somehow, this did not lead to "Freeman Dyson Pisses Off Right-Wing Munitions Magnates" ending up as the cover sub-head.

Professor Dyson can go on believing whatever he wishes, and best wishes for him continuing to do so for another thirty years, assuming either that Princeton isn't underwater at that point, or that the superannuated are more naturally buoyant. I happen to be a Global Climate Change Heretic myself, of a sort: I think mass drownings are something the human race has got comin' to it, though this doesn't mean I don't support every effort being made to avert catastrophe, including the liberal use of volcanoes and sacrificial Global Warming deniers found to be on corporate payrolls.

Nah, his opinions are okey by me. What the piece made me wonder about is why Noam Chomsky or Ward Churchill never appear on the cover of the Times Sunday Magazine with an examination of how either enrages the Right. (Chomsky did get to play 20 Questions with Deborah Solomon in 2003; she went so far as to read the blurbs on the back of his most recent book, or, in other words, two solid weeks of research.) And I was thinking about this while searching for the cat food next door ("in the garage" the note says, without mentioning which pile it was hiding under) when it hit me: you can't really make that big a deal out of someone infuriating the Right when that's the default setting.

Look, Kid, I'm Sorry To Have To Tell You This, But If You Think Nobody Cares About You Now...

Andy Gammill,"Students Give Lawmakers a Bleak View of IPS". March 28

THIS was front-page Saturday stuff in the Racist Star (meaning, again, that you can read it in the next twelve minutes or watch it disappear into the pay-per-view archives), and it's been smoldering and re-erupting at Casa Riley ever since; let's take it from the top:

Margrette Lowe wants state legislators to understand that they have given her a raw deal when it comes to her education.
She and a dozen other Tech High School students met with eight lawmakers Friday and painted a bleak portrait of their district: Many teachers don't care; the district doesn't offer the challenging classes commonly offered elsewhere; and some students receive such bad guidance that it can affect whether they graduate.

Indianapolis Public Schools students have to fight to get what is considered basic in many communities, said Margrette, 16.

"For the past 11 or 10 or 12 years, through every single class, we've always had to go around asking teachers for extra help or extra work or extra projects or extra mentors," she told them, "just so we can get what is considered as basic education."

In a heartfelt outpouring that surprised lawmakers, the students drew attention to administrative problems in IPS and inequities in teachers, facilities and school environments between their district and suburban ones.
Students told how they weren't allowed to take an Advanced Placement U.S. history course that is standard at most schools. One boy said his brother might not graduate because he didn't know he had to make up geometry credits.

IPS' low test scores and high dropout rate are well known, but Friday's meeting was an urgent plea of raw emotion from college-bound students who said they weren't getting an education equal to that of their suburban peers.

Make no mistake about it; the complainants have our utmost sympathy here, and if we happen to feel that "Students Dislike Teachers" is not exactly news we'll recuse ourselves. The problem here is that we have a loose thread or two to pick, and once we do so the whole thing winds up on the floor and the story's standing there in its boxer shorts.

As I say, the thing kept flaring back up all weekend. My Poor Wife, the one with the expert knowledge, first wanted to know Who booked the meeting? Who chose the students? The story, at least, gives the impression that this was a sort of command performance; are state legislators in the habit of taking children out of class? At the very least one imagines somebody from the Tech administration would have attended, but none comments, or even refuses comments. We do hear from Mary Louise Bewley, who did attend, and who is IPS Superintendent Eugene White's designated mouthpiece for stories he doesn't want his name anywhere around (as well as those times when he's left early for Spring Break):

The students raised real concerns, said district spokeswoman Mary Louise Bewley, who attended the session. But the picture isn't as bleak as they made it seem, she added.

"I think a lot of positives came out of today's session," she said. "I think we already have some solutions."

The AP class, for example, shouldn't have been canceled because IPS can offer such courses via computer when classes can't be scheduled, she said.
Most alarming was students' perception that many teachers did not care about them or their education, Bewley said.

"I'm sure there are isolated instances where they have teachers that aren't caring," she said, "but I think the majority of their teachers do care."

Damn loose threads...look, we're glad to hear that Ms Bewley thinks that Teachers Who Care still constitute a majority, however slim. We think her concerns show that she'd make an excellent candidate, should she decide to get into the actual education side of Education, and we hope that she's spending her vacation week examining the resumés of all the cashiered administrators littering the halls of the IPS administration building for other caring individuals with time on their hands. Which reminds us: before we grab a dustpan and broom and start dealing with the cotton fillament...

Why th' hell was the meeting on a Friday? And the Friday before Spring Break?

Oh, do not get ahead of us! We have a tiny inkling about that which'll turn up later.

Ms Bewley was at the meeting; Ms Bewley has the answer about the AP History class. Ms Bewley is therefore presumed to be aware that this is a guidance counseling problem--and therefore an administration fuck-up--regardless of how little a large minority of teachers cares for the little bastards. Same with the brother lacking geometry credits. The grand academic overview of a student's career is the business of the school and the district administrations, not the people known as "teachers", whose job involves , uh, teaching.

Another Riley flare-up here, as this caused me at some point to relay my own guidance counseling stories. There aren't many of them, since there wasn't any guidance or counseling to speak of.

And that's in a middle-class, suburban, mostly white establishment, though long before we as a nation started to get really manic about testing little Connor and Melissa to death lest they wind up at a state school. I went to see a counselor the summer before I changed junior highs; he managed to enroll me in the wrong math course, which I, district neophyte, had no way of knowing until months later, and which resulted in my being a year behind in math studies. I got called in twice to see a high school counselor: the first time as an incoming sophomore, except it wasn't my counselor, it was the new basketball coach who was using his office as an excuse to interview all his new players. The second time was late in my senior year, when whoever it was informed me how sorry he was he'd somehow forgotten to make sure I signed up for the National Merit Scholarship test the previous week.

The guidance office was widely known around the school, among teachers and students, as what became of teachers who couldn't teach, or, in one case, as where they sent the woman who couldn't go an entire class period without a cigarette, whose desk drawer was a notorious spot for glomming free smokes during her regular, King-sized absences.

So, y'know, you kids have my sympathy, but I'm holding onto to my sense of amazement.

Oops, there's another hot ember, as Mr. Riley reacts to something Ms Too-Feminist-To-Be-Called-"Mrs. Riley" says by replying that, again, he learned fairly early that he could read ahead in class textbooks and go to the library study halls, convocations, and after school and read to his heart's content without any guidance from anybody. To which The Expert he married replies--and rightly so--that The System doesn't work that way anymore, that nowadays children need every bit of Official involvement, and every last credit they can get, to compete for schools and scholarships. Which prompts Riley--whose colossal ignorance is largely self-taught--to remark that the complaints themselves, sadly, sounded too much like bright students in urban districts who've been forced to adopt the very attitudes of the people who have been keeping them in underfunded programs since the Klan ran Indiana, and Whoosh! it's a flashover. Somebody call the Student Fire Brigade! Oh, right; they're busy elsewhere:

March 28, 2009

North Central is preparing its pool and natatorium for an April opening



The nearly $14 million project has stirred much debate about taxes in the township



By Gretchen Becker


gretchen.becker@indystar.com

Water filled the new pool at the North Central High School natatorium this week as officials began testing the facility and planning its unveiling next month.

To begin the testing, three garden hoses slowly spilled water in to cover tiles on the bottom of the pool, said Phil Smith, Washington Township Schools director of operations. Then a 2-inch pipe was used to add more. Thursday, the J. Everett Light Career Center firefighting students used fire hoses to fill the pool to its brim.

Damn, and on the very same day. Curse the luck.

Four locker rooms -- two for physical education classes and two for the swim teams -- with plastic lockers instead of metal ones, which can rust from exposure to pool chemicals.

A wet classroom, for students in their swimsuits.

Walls and ceilings designed to endure harsh natatorium conditions.
Measures to ensure high air quality.

25-yard lanes and a diving well, or 50-meter lanes, depending on how it's set up, Smith said.

It's an Olympic-sized pool -- just like Carmel and Fishers high schools have -- and will let North Central host large meets. All NCHS students will use the pool for physical education classes, and the Washington Township Swim Club also will use it....

The $13.8 million natatorium became a symbol of the debate about tax reform in Indiana in 2007, when Washington Township residents fumed about double-digit increases in property tax bills. Homeowners began complaining in May 2005 about the district's decision to proceed with the renovation.

The district is in the midst of renovating its football stadium, a $5.7 million project to repair bleachers, improve the press box and replace 50-year-old locker rooms.

'Cos nothin' says Education like a spacious new pressbox.

I've lived in Indianapolis proper for thirty years, and I was born and raised in its suburbs. If you were to write me some snail mail, or send me a box of origami cranes, you'd send it to Indianapolis. I vote for the mayor of Indianapolis and for representatives on its City/County Council. My US Representative's district includes most of Marion County and all of the IPS district. And my tax dollars went to filling that fucking Olympic-sized pool. I've never bought those Tech students so much as a pencil.

Wow, I didn't realize loose threads burn so fast. The Indiana State Legislature shows up right at the exact moment when they're sure no teacher or school administrator will be available for a week to answer any of this and they bleed all over the fucking floor about the poor students who suffer in an underfunded program mostly because the property taxes from wealthy Indianapolis districts go to their "own" schools, not every school in the city, thanks to the system put in place by--you did get ahead of me, didn't you?--the Indiana State Legislature, the same organization which rubber-stamped Mitch "The Education Governor" Daniels' across-the-board cuts in education in the name of artificially balancing the budget and getting re-elected. Gosh. The same Legislature that approved the consolidation of Marion County while preserving its de facto segregated school systems when these kids' grandparents were in school.

And thanks for orchestrating a front-page effort to blame teachers for the hated Indianapolis Public Schools and its well-known distaste for the skinned and scorned it must try, however futilely, to educate, just as teachers complete another full year of working without a contract and begin making noises about "working the contract" instead of putting in extra effort for a district that doesn't give a shit about them. Save me from Holy Coincidence, St. Teresa!

"To have to beg for rigorous courses and qualified teachers is not something a 17-year-old should have to do," said Sen. Teresa Lubbers, R-Indianapolis, chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee. "What I heard them saying was the most legitimate thing in the world to ask for"....

Reached a few hours after she left Tech, Lubbers said she hadn't been able to stop thinking about the comments.

And thanks for taking time out of your busy evening of empathy in the face of sudden discovery in the inequities in public education in Central Indiana to take a call from the reporter writing up the story for Saturday's deadline.

And look: Teresa Lubbers, R-Indianapolis, is not just the chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee, or a seventeen-year-member of that body which her party has controlled all that time. She's also the wife of Mark Lubbers, arguably the most powerful and best-connected Republican insider in the state, a man whose career dates to his work for Governor Bob Orr in the early 80s, and who was Senate campaign manager for Dick "Nixon's Favorite Mayor" Lugar, the man who set up that fabulously successful exercise in pocketing white votes for a generation in the first place.

We have to admit that we sincerely hope this was just an exercise in public hypocrisy; the idea that Teresa Lubbers, et. al., were actually that ignorant of what they and their party has been doing to public education in poor districts for the last forty years is probably more knowledge than anyone should bear.