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

Happy Birthday

Walter Crawford Kelly, Jr.
August 25, 1913--October 18, 1973

Speaking of Idiots Speaking of Idiots Speaking

Kathleen Parker, "Intellectually Curious George", Townhall, August 23

AFTERTHOUGHT: John Hinderacker, "Hail to the Chief"

Like clear cola, it's difficult to say who had the idea first here, but it is clear who's got the bigger psychological problem:

But up close, he is a great communicator, in a way that, in my opinion, Ronald Reagan was not. He was by turns instructive, persuasive, and funny. His persona is very much that of the big brother. Above all, he was impassioned. I have never seen a politician speak so evidently from the heart, about big issues--freedom, most of all.

By contrast, Parker is a paragon of rationality:

Bush-bashing for sport has never lacked fans in the blogosphere, but questioning the president's intelligence lately has gone mainstream.

Okay, wait up. By "going mainstream" she means "was mentioned on Joe Scarborough's show." Is it too late to reconsider who's more delusional? No? Okay, it's still Assrocket.

Scarborough wasn't calling Bush an idiot, mind you. He was just quoting that renowned American intellectual, Linda Ronstadt. Recently, Ronstadt had commented on the president's performance while attending an international summit of heads of state.

Man, that must have stung. Especially coming from Kathleen Parker, who is invited to every important international summit, and so would know.

We might take a moment or two to ponder exactly who Kathleen Parker is to be ridiculing someone else's intellectual standing, but as W.V. Quine once said, "Who?"

Instead let us note that Ronstadt made news for calling Bush an idiot over two years ago, so perhaps a better question is, "Far-right mouthpieces bring this up in an election year just as Republicans are trying to distance themselves from The Idiot? Just how big an idiot do you imagine everyone else is?"

Now then, Ms Parker, the rest of us have been at this for awhile, and we've pretty much caught up with all three possible explanations for Bush's idiocy. And yours' is...?

Language barrier.

This theory occurred to me not long ago at an off-the-record luncheon with Bush and a hundred or so of his supporters. I was the guest of a guest, and welcomed the opportunity to observe the president in his natural habitat.

What I witnessed was revealing. Not only was the man fluent in the English language and intellectually agile, he was knowledgeable on a wide range of subjects raised during a 90-minute Q&A. Someone apparently had been slipping intellectual-curiosity tablets into Bush's cola.

Toward the end, one of the guests said, ``Mr. President, I think if Americans could hear you speak the way you have today, you'd have a 95 percent approval rating.''

And then he got back behind the wheel of his cab.

I think that's almost true. Not 95 percent, obviously, but he'd surely have a higher than 30 percent approval rating were he better able to explain what he's thinking. Bush does know; he just can't seem to say.

The question is why?

My theory dovetails with something one of his most acerbic critics, columnist Molly Ivins, once wrote: ``George W. Bush sounds like English is his second language.'' That's because it's true. ``Washington English'' (BEG ITAL)is(END ITAL) a second language for Bush; ``Texas English'' is his first.

When he tries to speak Washington English, which is the way Bush thinks presidents are supposed to speak -- over-enunciating and sprinkling his comments with awkward aphorisms -- he fumbles. He forgets what he's saying because the thoughts and words are not his own.

This is also when his annoying sibilance kicks in. The ``terroristsssssss," he says when ``terrorists" would do. My guess is he over-enunciates to cover his prairie accent, but the effect is, well, sssssstrange.

Y'know, when I first read this I thought it would be the focus of my response. "Texas English is Bush's first language" is in fact more ridiculous than the image of him as a brush-clearin' cowpoke. He's an effete, cosseted, Eastern prep school party boy who moved to Texas to spend other people's money on the chance that might make him rich. His "Texas" has never been authentic. That's not to say it's put on--he's too much of an idiot for that--but it's the adoption of a generic accentualizing which comes in part from being submerged in a culture with a pervasive and seductive ear--Yanks don't have to live in Britain long before they flatten their "a"s--and in part as the argot of the Texas Rich Guy Club, a sort of aural fraternity handshake.

But fuck that. The comment is too absurd to waste time on. Just as an American must pick up the energy and raise the voicing an octave to do an effective generic British accent, so too does the Easterner or Midwesterner simply lapse into a species of laziness to achieve that drawl. It doesn't mean there isn't some attendant laziness behind it.


Let's have a brief review of the Republican responses to seven years of "Bush is an idiot", shall we?

1. "No he's not."

2. "Yeah, he's an idiot, all right. An idiot like a fox."

3. "Okay, he sounds like an idiot, he exhibits none of the intellectual curiosity or competent grasp of the issues we'd like in a President, but he WON!"

4. "Wow, that was the most inspiring speech I've ever heard a politician give."

They're all delusional, it's just that some are more delusional than others (guess who?). Bush is an idiot. He's not an idiot in the old sense of IQ deficiency, and he's not an idiot just in the sense of doing something stupid based on a faulty grasp of reality, the way we can say, "What an idiot" when someone trips over an obstacle the rest of us categorized as "in plain sight," the way all of us are idiots sometimes.

For far too long, and at far too great a cost, his supporters were able to hide the real meaning of "Bush is an idiot" behind those two strawmen. But, damn, unless you get all your news from what the Right still seems to insist are unvarnished sources, you have to be aware that that game has been lost for some time. 9/11 and the attendant incessant public cheerleading gave George W. Bush a pass long after the public had written him off as a thinker. It eventually found the courage to write him off as a match for the office. That is simply how things are.

Now, a lot of people don't want to believe it, even people who've felt, or come to believe, that George W. Bush's values don't match their own, that he's less than honest and less than truthful. Some of them may have accepted the idea that the President is simply not a good public speaker, the Texas-sized line of codswallop you expect us to swallow this week. But it's not the case. Any native speaker of English knows that what's going on when George W. Bush speaks in public is not simple stagefright, ADD, regional speech variation, dyslexia, or a tendency towards Malapropisms. Speech is not merely words conveyed by sound, or we'd all be driving Ford Pintos. Bush communicates a lot of things when he speaks; among those is a lack of intellectual curiosity, an intolerance for difference of opinion, a sizeable inferiority complex and the concomitant rich boy's mean streak in response. "Bush is an idiot" means a lot of things, many of them things which come straight out of his mouth.

It's not surprising to hear that George W. does better when he's surrounded by a group of sycophants. It's to be expected. He's the living embodiment of the Gentleman's C. It's bad enough that it's taken you this long to even acknowledge the problem. Don't make it worse by claiming it's next to groundless.


The Hinderrocker piece was not only too delusional to take seriously enough to make fun of, it was also to similar to his "George W. Bush, Smartest Man in the World" thingie from a while back. I'm not sure what it means when you're willing to do that twice. I am sure what this means, though:

I've sometimes worried about how President Bush can withstand the Washington snake pit and deal with a daily barrage of hate from the ignorant left that, in my opinion, dwarfs in both volume and injustice the abuse directed against any prior President. (No one accused Lincoln of planning the attack on Fort Sumter.) Not to worry. He is, of course, miles above his mean-spirited liberal critics. More than that, he clearly derives real joy from the opportunity to serve as President and to participate in the great pageant of American history. And he sees himself as anything but a lame duck, which is why he is stumping for Republican candidates around the country.

It means that before you went completely around the bend you somehow managed to avoid even a cursory familiarity with your own history and your own times.

Happy Birthday

Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup
August 24 , 1905 --March 28, 1976

In Fairness, They Did Run the "Lifestyles of the Pig Ignorant" Section Up the Flagpole, But Nobody Saluted

Oh Glorious Day [Jonah Goldberg ]

The New York Times has seen the light. All of those barbs about its elitism and catering to wealthy blue state readers finally hit a nerve and they are getting back to hard-hitting journalism for the common man:

The New York Times Names Chandler Burr as Its First-Ever Perfume Critic
Tuesday August 22, 3:21 pm ET

Fragrances Will Be Reviewed In New Column Appearing In T: Style Magazine

''Scent Strip'' Fragrance Column Will Debut on August 27

Issue Has Largest Total Advertising Pages Since 1984
Posted at 7:49 PM

What, exactly, do you say about Jonah Goldberg after you've said "What th' Fuck?" several dozen times? I realize he's incapable of understanding, or valuing, anything which can't be reduced to comic book form or fitted onto a bumpersticker, but What the fuck? Can no one prevail upon him to shut up when he has no idea what he's talking about? Has there ever been an adult more completely defined by the phrase, "Hand over yer lunch money, lardass?"

So perfume is an elitist concept now? How about soap? And for cryin' out loud, did you accidentally excise the part which said the Times was replacing its news section with fragrance reviews? Did you bother to read all four lines anytime between cut and paste? Like "largest total advertising since 1984"? Have somebody explain to you what it's like to work for a profit-making organization. Or why the Times can't limit itself to printing an Arts section consisting entirely of long think pieces on the Kirk v. Picard question. Or why they have an Arts section in the first place. Although, on the other hand, maybe somebody should suggest to Bill Keller he could just beg people to pony up $500 to join Adam Nagourney on the buffet line at the Ramada Inn O'Hare.

PS. How many times a week does Jonah's contribution to the national debate consist of running after some liberal target and throwing rocks at it like he's seen the bigger kids do?

PPS. Remember when we were all New Yorkers? Boy, that was a great couple of weeks.

Group Says New Titanic Deck-Chair Arrangement "Six Months Away, Tops"

Robert Dreyfuss, "A Higher Power: James Baker puts Bush's Iraq policy into rehab." The Washington Monthly, September.

First, a confession: I didn't actually read the piece. I skimmed. It's no matter, because I wasn't intending to critique it. All I wanted to do, after seeing the link to a piece about "James Baker heading a bipartisan group looking at ways to pull our chestnuts out of Iraq" was check out how long it took for Lee Hamilton to pop up.

Answer: It's 1218 words to "Besides Baker, the bipartisan task force is co-chaired by former congressman Lee H. Hamilton..."

It's a ways to go, that, 2/5 of the way through the piece, but I never lost faith. After all, who could imagine "Jim Baker" and "bipartisan" turning up anywhere without the seventeen-term former Congressman from Indiana's 9th District, the House's Hoosier answer to Dick Lugar? Why, it'd be like "Wishy" without "Washy", "Chip n' Dale" without "Alphonse and Gaston", "Effectual" without "In".

Except it ain't funny.

Lee Hamilton chaired the House Iran/Contra Committee, the one that decided following the trail to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush would be bad for morale. He reprised that role as vice chair in Iran/Contra II: Episode 9/11, which means that Lee Hamilton was the ranking Democratic witness to the President and Vice-President of the United States holding hands as they testified together. Though at least this time they actually testified.

Hamilton and Baker have worked together before, as co-chairs of the Baker-Hamilton Commission to Investigate Certain Security Issues at Los Alamos, [that's the real name--really answered all our questions right there, didn't they?] so it's possible we could save some money on stationery. As a result of their investigation, a vigorously moderate finger was wagged at confused security policies which might have led to the scandalous theft of those missing computer hard drives, had they ever been missing, and had that potential missing-ness been caused by theft. And without Indiana's Lee Hamilton providing the bi for the report's bipartisanship, that possible scandal might never have seen enough coverage to fully obfuscate the Wen Ho Lee story, America's L'Affaire Dreyfus. Which, had it been fully exposed, might have set the government and its teevee network co-conspirators back much more than $1.6 M. And who knows what that might have done for morale?

This--I probably needn't tell you--bodes quite well for the showily bipartisan pseudo-solution to the missing results in Iraq, as the absolute necessity of removing our troops while we still can coincides remarkably well with the report's conclusions. Or so one might guess.


Representative Hamilton has kept busy since leaving the Congress in 1999, as a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council and the advisory boards of the Central Intelligence Agency and the US Army, all of which have achieved unprecedented successes during this period.

It's a nice match for Baker, the Bush family consigliere, who ran George H.W. Bush's "anti-busing" Senate campaign in 1970 and his "voodoo economics" Presidential campaign in 1980, before becoming Reagan's first Chief of Staff, with particular responsibility for the Gipper's wildly effective voodoo domestic policies and the voodoo tax reforms of 1981, the ones that had to be euthanized between '86-88, while Baker was Treasury secretary. Baker was Secretary of State in the Bush I administration, thus earning the distinction of being the only holder of that office to engineer a war in Iraq we were subsequently able to get back out of. He has since retired from public life, appearing occasionally in a legal capacity to secure the theft of the Presidency or to further the Carlyle Group's world domination plans, or to join with Lee Hamilton in bipartisan efforts to make the Democratic party look worse than it could do all by itself.

The committee has reportedly been quite close-mouthed about its actions, its members refusing to speak on the record, presumably because the group, which was carefully selected for partially-plausible deniability in helping to start the war does not want to take any credit for its vital role in assuring nothing whatever gets said about the issue until after November's midterms. The target date for their report favoring the phased withdrawals any group of ten schoolchildren could have told you two years ago were inevitable is 2007, or roughly the point at which it can be used by potential Republican nominees of whichever end of the right wing of the Party to beat potential Democrats over the head with. That, of course, is the very essence of bipartisanship. And you can thank a Hoosier for it.


AFTERTHOUGHT: A plan. Sure. We haven't seen it in a while, but remember the "Liberals are rooting for bad news in Iraq" thing? Why--assuming I wanted to hear bad news from Iraq--would I have ever bothered rooting for it? With this group it's always been a cinch of the lead-pipe variety. It would be like anxiously awaiting the end of a Perry Mason episode to find out if his client gets off.

Heppy Both Day (I Bekked a Kekk)

George Joseph Herriman
August 22, 1880--April 25, 1944

Bobo Lit

David Brooks, "Cracking the Shells," August 20

Peyton Place. No, really. Peyton Place, Grace Metalious' Peyton Place, is the subject of Our Mister Brooks' Sunday sermon:

When critics write about "Peyton Place" today, they tend to see it as a premonition of the glorious achievements of the 1960's. Some describe it as an early revolt against the repressive bourgeois order of the 1950's suburbia. But "Peyton Place" was set in a rural town without radio, TV, or much consumerism--with farms and outhouses instead of split-levels. This was the sort of supposedly quaint rural community people in the 1950's were trying to get out of in order to flee to the suburbs.

Others see "Peyton Place" as a precursor to feminism and [CAUTION, David Brooks witticism dead ahead, please stow all beverages:] the baby boomers' invention of the female orgasm, which apparently took place at Woodstock. But Metalious treats their strength and sexuality as obvious features of human society, and clearly rejects the notion that to be a woman is to be a member of a cause or the sisterhood collective.

Questions: 1) Was there actually a time when people took Brooks' pop pseudo-sociology pseudo-seriously? It's really the reason he has a gig with the Times and News Hour? 2) Is there any reason why I should take Brooks (and others) limitless war on the 60s as something other than a personal confession he (and they) never got laid? 3) Does the Times stylebook really specify enumerating decades with an apostrophe (1950's)? And if so, why?

Let's sort out a couple of the ground rules first. It ought to occur to anyone that this sort of game can't be played with art, which, fortunately, Peyton Place isn't. Second, it ought to be played with some regard for internal consistency. Objecting that Mrs. Medalious did not write an 800-page feminist tract is clearly beside the point. It's like objecting that H. G. Wells never wrote an instruction manual for the microwave oven.

Whether there's some biographical tidbit in Brooks' past that explains his psychedelicaphobia, and whether that or anything else might possibly explain why several inches of the New York Times Op-Ed page in August of 2006 is given over to a discussion of Peyton Place remains moot. But Metalious' bio is relevant: daughter of an alcoholic mother (what she would become) and an absentee father, raised by her grandmother in a female-dominated family; showed an early interest in writing but married at eighteen in 1943 when she became pregnant. Her husband enlisted shortly thereafter, survived the war and returned home, like many, to a wife and child he barely knew. They struggled to get by. Eventually he went to college on the GI Bill while she worked for their support. She had two more children. Peyton Place was her second novel, first published; it happened to catch the eye of a reader in a prestigious firm who then happened to get a job with Kitty Messner, one of the few women of that day to found and run a publishing house. The book became a best seller, but it was in the newfangled paperback market that it really took off.

It is that popularity, and not her literary merit, that Brooks' unnamed critics address, and his Bobo blandishments ("After the class consciousness of the late 1930's, and the national solidarity of the 1940's, Americans in the 1950's were inclined to define problems in moral and psychological terms, not as the products of economic or political forces.") don't seem even to have a point. The book didn't sell millions of copies because it defined problems in psychological terms, or because it told a cautionary tale of grey men in grey flannel, but because of its blunt treatment of S-E-X.

It's hard to figure how Brooks could miss that, or how he could tout the "moral terms" of a book which treats rape as an act of violence and an abortion as a life-saving act of humanity while he claims its proto-pop-feminism as the figment of a buncha hippies. But then this is the pop-culture version of the Right's Lessons of WWII series: a prefabricated moral pasted over historical events in cheap paper. Get it anywhere near the light and you can see right through it.

Of course the point of transforming Peyton Place from rank and horny to (Otto) Rank and (Karen) Horney * is the preservation of the Pre-Fab 50s of popular wingnut imaginings. But there's something a bit odd at work:

Tasting affluence, worried about the power of advertising, troubled by pervasive racism, Americans fixated on the power of social pressure, and the way individual autonomy could be inhibited by the judgments of the crowd.

Hmmmm. Tasting affluence, check. I'm not sure just how many Americans worried about the power of advertising; more of an elitist thing, wasn't that Mr. Brooks? Troubled by racism? Go back and read the Times own coverage of the Civil Rights movement from, say the Montgomery bus boycott through the end of the decade. Longer, if you'd like. I believe you'll discover that most Americans, at least as the story editors and headline writers saw them, were more troubled by Negro misbehavior than pervasive racism.


It's interesting as always to note that while the Right has gotten to have it both ways for a quarter-century now it still can't win an argument. But there's the acrid taste of metal being smelted nearby, of new coins hurriedly struck from old, devalued currency, and not just in the denial of 50s racism. It's as if, with the neo-con agenda a pile of cinders, and most of the rest of the "conservative" program smoldering rubble, the "Crowd", once the arbiter of all things moral and reasonable, decent and American, is now the problem, the dumb dead weight holding down the Libertarian Republican who will enact the real right wing program once and for all. And this time we mean it. Maybe Grace Metalious was trying to tell us we needed John McCain.




*Old joke, sorry.