(Even) Better Answers for Mitt Romney

10) They'd already put down a court deposit for summer-league basketball.

9) You know kids. If one goes, then they'll all have to go.

8) It's a religious thing. Historically, we Momons do not fight. We ambush.

7) They're gay.

6) Jeez, if one was wounded he'd wind up in a VA hospital.

5) C'mon. That's for losers.

4) We've considered this matter prayerfully, as a family, and decided to be hypocrites about it.

3) Hey, look! An adorable puppy!

2) Two words: pilonidal cyst.

1) I think the answer's obvious, isn't it?

Happy Birthday

Jean Piaget
August 9, 1896--September 16, 1980

Happy Birthday

Joseph Arrington, Jr.
August 8, 1933--August 13, 1982

Chaucer! Rabelais! Balzac!

BLOGGING probably will be light this week as I continue to pile up natural disasters in the kitchen and prepare to become a beta-tester for AT&T Uverse. Had anyone told me twenty years ago that I'd actually give money to AT&T in order to spite a corporation I hated even more (Comcast) I'd have asked them to quit bogartin'.

I did want to mention bumping into Dr. Elizabeth Kantor, Ph.D, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature, on the Booknotes channel. Turns out that Phyllis Schlafly, she of the Dori-Ann Gray hairdo, invited all ten authors from the Politically Incorrect series to speak to a group of young conservative scholars from around the country at her Eagle Forum.

Several of the eager Republican matriculae appeared jet-lagged, despite the fact that they were on the east coast. Or maybe it was the fact that they suddenly found themselves hearing a lecture on a school subject and not a diatribe about Radical Islam or Feminism (not directly, anyway) or Science, three of the other topics in the Politically Incorrect series (yes, I realize that Science is a field of study--as Feminism and Islam, Radical or otherwise, might be as well--but not for these kids). I came in near the end of Dr. Kantor, Ph.D's, talk, so I'm not sure how long she went on, but as she seemed to have but one idea her speech may very well have been reversible anyway. She'd go on for a minute about Shakespeare, or Beowulf, sounding for all the world like a respectable, if slightly bored, junior college lecturer, and then without warning a sudden torrent of MarxistFeministPCProfessorsDeadWhiteMales would top the causeway and drench the audience. It's too bad that viewer choice of camera angle is not available with basic cable, since the director never showed--in the time I was watching--whether the flurry of buzzwords woke the happy throng or not.

Okay, as always, its possible to win these arguments without much effort, though it never shuts anyone up. DeadWhiteMales are not an endangered species, though if they were why we should restrict our concern to the explicitly Anglo among them was never explained. Yes, Time did eventually stir even the remarkable accumulation of dust on college English departments in the last century. Does this prevent one from enjoying Sense and Sensibility? Dr. Kantor, Ph.D, believes that the role of literary studies is to browbeat students into accepting a particular line of moralistic reasoning based on a, well, flatly peculiar reading of some of the Canon topped with the whipped cream of a completely untenable connection to modern American Movement Conservatism. All this requires the Great White European Males of the 20th Century--Mann, Proust, Joyce, Nabokov--be brushed aside (so maybe that explains the English Only sign). All the lockstep Marxist-Trotskyist-Feminist-PoMo-Chomskian brownshirts in the world haven't eliminated the Great Books approach, as evidenced by the fact that Dr. Kantor, Ph.D's book is for sale, even if the Exclusive Hardback Not Found In Stores only sets you back a buck. To adopt an argument from The Politically Correct Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, what the hell is the Western Canon afraid of? Aside from the fact that its purported defenders turning Chaucer into a 21st century anti-Feminist, or signing on Milton as a sponsor of the Chicago School of Economics do it a hell of a lot more damage than someone asking about the West's domestication of Women, I mean?

Instead, I wanted to mention what happened when they turned the mikes on for the crowd. A dewey-eyed young woman stood up and asked which Shakespeare play she should read to fulfill her obligation to The Culture?! I somehow managed not to guffaw so loudly as to disturb my Poor Wife's upstairs slumber. To her credit, Dr. Kantor, Ph.D., managed to stifle her own laughter long enough to spit out the Four Tragedies, then regained enough composure to add The Taming of the Shrew, a tell so obvious I was immediately reminded that George S. Kaufman once proposed a standing rule that anyone looking at Harold Ross' face was cheating.

The First Twenty-five Names in the Phone Book

Michael Ignatieff, "Getting Iraq Wrong." New York Times Magazine, August 5

The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgment of a president. But it has also condemned the judgment of many others, myself included, who as commentators supported the invasion. Many of us believed, as an Iraqi exile friend told me the night the war started, that it was the only chance the members of his generation would have to live in freedom in their own country. How distant a dream that now seems.

NAH. That just seems like the decision to get a particularly regrettable tattoo in the throes of a bad romance a couple of seasons back. What seems like a distant dream is Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, or the dewey promise of the United Nations after the most horrific conflict in human history. Strangely enough, their being co-opted by liberals who intended to "spread freedom" to all the countries they hated is still fresh in the mind, even though I wasn't yet born when the process took off.

Having left an academic post at Harvard

Did you say Harvard?

in 2005 and returned home to Canada to enter political life, I keep revisiting the Iraq debacle, trying to understand exactly how the judgments I now have to make in the political arena need to improve on the ones I used to offer from the sidelines. I’ve learned that acquiring good judgment in politics starts with knowing when to admit your mistakes.

Uncounted thousands of deaths, but Professor Ignatieff picked up a homily. So I guess it wasn't all bad.

In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm.

Well, that's Harvard for ya...you can feel the quality of the nonsense.

I’ve learned that good judgment in politics looks different from good judgment in intellectual life. Among intellectuals, judgment is about generalizing and interpreting particular facts as instances of some big idea. In politics, everything is what it is and not another thing. Specifics matter more than generalities. Theory gets in the way.

Michael Grant Ignatieff. Born May 12, 1947. Awakened from profound coma, early 21st Century.

The attribute that underpins good judgment in politicians is a sense of reality. “What is called wisdom in statesmen,” Berlin wrote, referring to figures like Roosevelt and Churchill, “is understanding rather than knowledge — some kind of acquaintance with relevant facts of such a kind that it enables those who have it to tell what fits with what; what can be done in given circumstances and what cannot, what means will work in what situations and how far, without necessarily being able to explain how they know this or even what they know.” Politicians cannot afford to cocoon themselves in the inner world of their own imaginings.

Y'know, simple mathematics suggests there's a battalion of lesser politicians for whom that description is an even worse fit that it is for Churchill, but I don't know why you'd bother compiling it. I guess Churchill the theoretical construct is a lot more valuable than Churchill, the sainted war leader who was wrong about practically everything else in his political life, and usually at the service of his own imaginings.

As a former denizen of Harvard,

Did you say Harvard?

I’ve had to learn that a sense of reality doesn’t always flourish in elite institutions. It is the street virtue par excellence. Bus drivers can display a shrewder grasp of what’s what than Nobel Prize winners.

Good Lord. Talk about your ivory towers. It's cab drivers, Doc. That way they can write your column for you. You're not allowed to talk to the bus driver.

The only way any of us can improve our grasp of reality is to confront the world every day and learn, mostly from our mistakes, what works and what doesn’t.

What're you, climbing back down the academic ladder now, Doc? Let us know when you make it to kindergarten. I understand that's where the real learning takes place. In the meantime, there's something somewhere about learning from history. I'll look it up and get back to ya.

Yet even lengthy experience can fail us in life and in politics. Experience can imprison decision-makers in worn-out solutions while blinding them to the untried remedy that does the trick.

No. Please. You've done enough already. Do not encourage the search for untried remedies that miraculously solve the disasters we've created listening to your earlier suggestions.

Having taught political science myself,

Really? Where?

I have to say the discipline promises more than it can deliver.

As I recall it, I picked up this little tidbit about twenty minutes into my first Poly Sci 101 lecture. Maybe it's time to take the world out of the hands of the terminally credulous and let the spitball-throwers in the back--the ones who felt that smokin' a doob and layin' a little pipe was at least equally important in the grand scheme of things--take over. They can't do much worse. And then you could, y'know, go find yourself somewhere. Somewhere farther away than Canada.

A sense of reality is not just a sense of the world as it is, but as it might be. Like great artists, great politicians see possibilities others cannot and then seek to turn them into realities.

Well, for one thing, yuck, and for another, we continue to learn from the work of great artists while we continue to view them as flawed human beings, a goodly number of whom we would not allow to babysit, let alone start wars. We seek to understand not just the work but how it came into being. There's not a whole lot of time in the Arts for knob-polishing some dead guys in order to turn your present inventory over a little faster. That is left to the political scientists. In politics it is permissible, even encouraged, to say something like, "George Bush is standing up to terrorists," or to compare him with that gold-painted bust of Churchill you admire so. In the Arts one lets out with a "Patricia Cornwall is the new Tolstoy" at peril of one's career. Unless one is happy to remain in public relations or has a Salon column.

To bring the new into being, a politician needs a sense of timing, of when to leap and when to remain still. Bismarck famously remarked that political judgment was the ability to hear, before anyone else, the distant hoofbeats of the horse of history.

We have now roared past the 800 word mark, and we're discussing cavalry tactics. I could swear the title said something about Iraq. Will all of this be on the quiz? Is this going on much longer? Some of us would like to experience a little more of life while we're still able.

Improvisation may not stave off failure.

Do tell.

The game usually ends in tears. Political careers often end badly because politicians live the human situation: making choices among competing goods with only ordinary instincts and fallible information to go by. Of course, better information and factual criteria for decision-making can reduce the margin of uncertainty. Benchmarks for progress in Iraq can help to decide how long America should stay there. But in the end, no one knows — because no one can know — what exactly America can still do to create stability in Iraq.

Nine-hundred and fourteen.

Okay, I apologize. I'd read all the way to the end before I did that, and it was cruel to subject you to such a chunk of--I'm not kidding--the first third. I suspect that you might be treated elsewhere to a couple of pull quotes about Iraq, namely:

[M]any of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgment but by indulging in ideology. They opposed the invasion because they believed the president was only after the oil or because they believed America is always and in every situation wrong.

or

The people who truly showed good judgment on Iraq predicted the consequences that actually ensued but also rightly evaluated the motives that led to the action.

without a full appreciation that the payoff of Dr. Ignatieff's 2500 words, a stunning professorial version of "sure they were right and I was wrong, but I saw one of them compare Bush to Hitler", was preceded by four pages of gibberish, but not one word explaining why he put his Liberal Academic imprimatur on torture in 2004, long after the worst America-hating Leftist could back his knee-jerk opposition with plain evidence. We've suggested before that it was time for a new version of Godwin's law for this, but the difficulty is that anyone playing the You Lefties Made A Lucky Guess card already lost the game four years ago and still doesn't realize someone turned out the lights.

So again, Professor, since you appear to be the last man in the Americas to hear the response: there were plenty of voices cautioning against the rashness and the insane presumptions and the interminal commitment of the Iraq Adventure who did manage to observe the proper rites while addressing their superiors in the Bush administration and its academic enablers. They were ignored, too. And even granting you pardon for your emotional attachment to the pre-post-Sadam Iraqis and its horrific results--and we don't--we have to ask how a political science specialist, a professor of international stature, could, to chose just one example, have slept through 150 years of US-Latin American relations. Or how the editors of the Times Magazine could imagine the rest of us had slept through the last four years.

Fun With Monogamy, Volume CXLIII: Pain Edition

Considering the chasm between our relative positions, last week's discussion about the ethics of snapping a flash picture of your spouse from eighteen inches away when he doesn't know you've got the camera ended remarkably quickly.

MY Poor Wife had some minor surgery at the beginning of the week. Mole removal. (Her whole family's warty or gelatinous or something, plus they spent roughly 1954 through the Bicentennial in the sun; there's always something hanging off one or another of 'em. I fully expect to be told one day that PW is hopping a plane to Texas because Brother Dave is having a phantom twin removed. "He started biting," she'll say, or explain that David just couldn't stand the snoring anymore.)

Anyway, everything except the bill was benign, thank goodness, but she came home with five stitches and some oxycontin.

"They gave you hillbilly heroin?" I ask, somewhat incredulously.
"It's more like polyester heroin," says the PW.

I should mention here for the sake of her continued employment that this was made all the more amusing by the fact that if you asked her to pick the heroin on a multiple choice test reading:

a) Mexican Brown
b) Panama Red
c) Jack White

She wouldn't be able to do it. She just hangs around in bad company.

(This reminds me. She'd gone to the doctor, and in addition to taking a few slices off her she gets her introduction to the somewhat specialist appeal of colonoscopy next month. And in trying to talk her into it her doctor said--seriously--"you'll get really good drugs". Amazing. These are the same people who locked up the really good drugs thirty years ago and tried to put everyone else on the wagon, and now they're holding them out the way they used to give kids lollypops after a round of vaccinations.)

I know I've mentioned The Game once or twice. I was actually reminded of The Game's origins this week; they're generally shrouded in fog. But I remembered for some reason that it grows out of something the critic John Simon wrote about his--if I recall correctly--high school classmate Julian Beck, who would amuse himself at a performance of Oklahoma!, say, by loudly proclaiming, "It's okay, but it's no Hamlet," and then doing precisely the opposite at Hamlet the next evening. I believe it's my longest-running tagline. The proper execution is to make the items being rated as rationally indistinguishable as possible. Watching The Girl Can't Help It, for example, one would say "Well, Jayne Mansfield's all right, but she's no Mamie Van Doren." Beck's original, saying Gielgud is no Keanu, is permissible but generally avoided.

The game was born out of this. I'd do the gag. The PW would respond, "And she's no Charles Van Doren." And from there you note that she's no Charles Evans Hughes, or no Mies van der Rohe, or no Dr. Joyce Brothers (obscurantist connections are permitted, up to a point, but anything showy is frowned on, mostly by her). This continues until one or the other is out of ideas. It gets pretty competitive at times.

At some point The Game branched into more linear competitions, naming actors named Robert or movies with "Clock" in the title, or somesuch. The most important rule of The Game, though, is that it has to arise spontaneously and organically. You cannot challenge the other person to a game of The Game. It must begin as if by accident.

My all-time favorite was the Earthtones competition, which probably started with James Brown, or morphed from Aretha, some soul-stirring evening, and traveled through Brown to Green to Amy Tan, Kate Moss, and Herb Shriner. It seemed to go on forever, until I won by pulling Rodney Peete from somewhere.

I hadn't really thought about it before, but I guess The Game usually involves the Arts in some broad sense, either because of its (forgotten) origins in The Theatre or because we watch too much teevee. And so it was when Gregory Peck movies suddenly took off on Tuesday afternoon. I'm not quite sure exactly how that started, although Peck came up because Bergman died, which caused me to pull out the Season One SCTV discs to find the Bergman parody Whispers of the Wolf, which led to John Candy (RIP) in The Babe Ruth Story, and Joe Flaherty's incredible Peter O'Toole impression, and then his Peck in the SCTV "Taxi Driver, the Series" ("You...talking...to me?") and somehow, a couple hours later, we were trying to top each other naming Peck films.

I rarely offer advice, except to people who I know won't take it, but there's this: there are few better things to base a marriage on than a good running gag. It's certainly not sex, which, I've come to realize with the passage of time, was just God's way of trying to get me to smoke cigarettes when I was young. Believe me, at some point, provided medical science doesn't kill you first, you will reach the point of prostate health where it feels like you're wearing a cock ring on the inside. Unless you aren't equipped with a prostate, in which case, as I understand it, the Court has ruled you're too unstable to be thinking about sex at all, unless your husband orders some. Forget tantra. Work on gags. That's what kept Gilligan's Island on the air all those years, not Ginger. Or Mary Ann. Or Alan Hale, Jr. if you'd rather. We're open-minded.

Anyway, we found ourselves playing Peck movies, and, frankly, we did poorly. To Kill a Mockingbird. Twelve O'Clock High. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. They came slowly; a hot day and a too-large lunch, maybe. I actually tried to bluff my way around Spellbound when I couldn't think of the title. The Game does not admit bluffing, but I did it with a smirk so the PW knew I wasn't trying it seriously, and it bought me enough time to come up with Mackenna's Gold (The Game, naturally enough, is gentlemanly; it's required that you express admiration when your opponent executes some fine shot piece of shot-making, but in this case she knew I just remembered Julie Newmar skinnydipping). Moby Dick came out, and MacArthur. We both knew we were leaving a whole range of things on the board that just wouldn't come to either of us. She got Roman Holiday. I got Cape Fear. She chips in Duel in the Sun.

And I couldn't resist repeating Scott C.'s line, for which there needs to be an internet monument somewhere, and which I'd already repeated to her once: "They crawl toward each other, gut-shot but still flirty..." And she started laughing until tears came into her eyes.

"Oh, God, I forgot," she gasped. "I think I busted a stitch."

Things I Say Just To Keep The Little Voices Happy

I WAS standing in line the other day at the Modern American Supermarket--ironically, one of the best arguments I know of for starving yourself to death--and I was, as usual, being vexed, though I'd picked the best cashier-bagger combination the place has to offer. Because when the employees aren't testing what little patience you possess after fifteen minutes of being assaulted by the cleverest packaging some of our finest minds can design to obscure the barely-merchantable crap inside, some customer, with or without the aid of a cellphone, is.

The young woman in front of me had either escaped from the Express Line due to someone claiming her rightful spot at the front, or her physical exhaustion was so complete she could not manage the remaining twenty feet to get there. Whichever it was, the resulting energy savings had freed her from all earthly considerations including Time and Space Itself. Her six items were spaced, singly and regularly, across the entire available area of the mechanical grocery conveyor, and she and her cart remained stationary as the belt moved and she perused some People clone for some tidbit of some Paris news which hadn't come over her car radio on the way over. I am congenitally irritable but, I like to think, by a harnessing of will comparable to the highest levels of the martial arts, also considerate and forgiving. I try to have my selected items on the conveyor as quickly as possible, little plastic divider placed thoughtfully behind for the next happy consumer, date, payee, and signature affixed to check ahead of time. I try to grab non-sackables like milk or kitty litter as they pass the scanner, freeing the bag guy to concentrate (or not) on his task. I bag my own, happily and vigorously, when the bag guy is unavailable due to his chatting up his cousin on the next aisle. I'm seething inside, but you probably wouldn't notice unless you looked close, and I sure wouldn't hold you up.

This is rendered impossible when the person in front of one simply refuses to move until prompted a second time by the cashier for some method of payment, and one is always tempted to turn to the person behind one in line to propose a wager that the living statuary in the vanguard will take a minimum of one-hundred thirty one-Mississippis to deposit change (paper first, then coin), receipt, unused coupons, used Kleenex, glasses, breath mints, and cell phone in their various and proper slots before the cart moves again. I console myself with the knowledge that anyone who'd bet the Under on that is so simple that my conscience would bother me for days.

Anyhow, I was stuck fifteen feet behind the conveyor so long that I actually glanced at the periodicals gracing the endcaps, and I noticed Vanity Fair, the thinking person's celebrity rag. There was a nice oral history of the Simpsons, and David Halberstam's last (? !) piece, so I bought it.

The Simpsons piece contained the following:

Even conservatives have come around. "It's possibly the most intelligent, funny, and even politically satisfying TV show ever," wrote the National Review in 2000. The Simpsons celebrates many...of the best conservative principles: the primacy of family, skepticism about political authority....

Okay, maybe you recognized it, or maybe you jumped before I did. I avoid any Goldberg mention of the Simpsons like someone with a shellfish allergy avoids paella. I try to keep an open mind. It wasn't until that "skepticism about political authority" that I fully acknowledged we were once again, unmistakably, rooting around the waxy colored flakes at the bottom of the crayon box.

Jonah! I might have put the "skepticism" bit together with "in 2000" a little quicker, but the downhill slide at my age is inexorable. I briefly wondered how many Simpsons references he'd already worked into his skeptical assessment of the major anti-war critics O'Hanlon and Pollack's--who, of course, are not technically politicians, but who, of course, are technically worse--Op-Ed piece.

How does a piece of Goldbergian flatulence wind up as an example of "conservative thought?" Why is the NRO imprimatur--especially by Y2K Anno Domini--enough to bestow "conservative" cachet? The author presumably had to read enough of the piece to collect the quotes. Was that not enough of an excuse to identify Jonah as a Cheeto-flecked wanker utterly devoid of pop-culture discrimination? Does "even Cheeto-flecked wankers..." add any less of a point than the fact that Goldberg burped it up on NRO? Like I say, it's a nice little oral history, and Jonah sinks from sight after a paragraph. But what's the friggin' point? The Simpsons isn't a blatantly partisan political show. Would we say, "even conservatives like Bill Maher" just because Jonah had written, "well, readers may correct me if I'm wrong about this, but I occasionally find him funny?" It's actually hard to separate this sort of thing from "noted liberal war critics O'Hanlon and Pollack". We can't seem to tell the truth anymore, regardless of how much or how little it means. "Conservatives" were the dominant party in Congress for 2/3 of the Simpsons' first twenty years. They've held the White House for all but eight of them. Red State values dominate the map. Eighty-six percent of Americans believe Jesus is cosmically interested in what they see on teevee. Still The Simpsons has been on for two decades. Maybe Liberals just own lots of teevees. Maybe it's fucking immaterial what "even conservatives" watch, especially as explained by total morons.


Fortunately it was time for my nap.


It did remind me to mention, however, that the other night I was flipping vegetatively through late-night teevee fare when I landed on a local access tape of a seminar for small business people conducted by a guy who works in security for a check-printing company. It was surprisingly entertaining, and I was sticking around for an update on identity hacking when he started talking about pens. Specifically, about a major school test publisher looking for a replacement for the #2 pencil.

They were looking for an ink which would fill in those multiple-choice circles in an instant, saving the time it takes to color them in sufficient for grading by optical reader. The ink, of course, had to be erasable. But they wanted one which was erasable for the duration of the test and permanent thereafter.

And he was curious about why they'd need it to be permanent. Surely the possibility of students getting ahold of answer sheets and changing their answers was very slight?

It's not the students we're worried about, they told him. And they intimated that this was a very large problem nationwide and growing worse.

And I immediately thought about the remarkable, some might say unbelievable one-year test-score improvements shown by some of Indianapolis' plethora of new charter schools. But then, I'm skeptical about non-politicians as well. Especially right before nap time.

Foote Notes

THANK you kindly, John DeVille, for providing the excellent Civil War bibliography, from which I'd make special pleading for Potter's Impending Crisis and Vidal's Lincoln, and to which I'd add The Civil War Battlefield Guide, from The Conservation Fund, because they deserve the money, and because it's a nice collection of battle maps and short essays on the major battles, and Garry Wills' Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, because it's a friggin' great book and because it's hard to imagine a better appreciation of the great man's language and intellect. And oddly enough...

Shelby Foote's trilogy, which is not good history, but is a damn fine read. I'd read bits and pieces of the first two volumes as a dedicated war-gaming slacker in college, picked up the set at some point and read it with relish, just noting some of the problems I'd already been warned about. But then I picked it up again a few years back and read straight through, and I was, let's say, somewhat mazed by the remarkable congruence between the ahistorical and mythological materials he includes and the Lost Cause romanticism that bubbles up from below the surface over and over. Maybe I've just grown less forgiving about that sort of thing in the last thirty years. I think he did well not to footnote. Still, there are much less entertaining ways to spend several weeks, and one comes away with a classic, Kings and Battles, standard American understanding (that is to say, Dixiecentric, the only time I can think of when history was written by the losers) of the war.

As for Lincoln in '64, if I left the impression of thinking he faced no real re-election worries I hope I did so in the same way Darwin emphasized gradual change over enormous periods--more as a rebuttal of the misuse of facts than a dogmatic belief. The war did turn bloody and wasteful--make that bloodier and wastefuller--that year, and no one can deny that Atlanta assured Lincoln's victory. But neither can anyone claim his defeat was a forgone conclusion without it. Lincoln knew the war was won militarily. He'd discussed Reconstruction plans in the fall of '63. He also knew that the war's opponents might gain control of the government, and he'd pledged to supporters that he'd make an all-out push for military victory in the event he had but months left to serve. Suggesting by extension that George W. Bush "knows" victory has been achieved, and has merely to figure out how to get this information "over" to an ignorant and war-weary public would be an egregious lapse in an armchair military historian; coming as it does, as a cynical partisan ploy involving more sacrifice and death on the part of the military it is damned infamy.

Sadly...Uh...

HTML Mencken, at the Labs, digs up some Hewitt on the wireless, swapping war stories with Mark Steyn:

HH: Victor Davis Hanson often comes on and reminds people about the summer of 1864. Prior to that, Lincoln was in terrible shape, politically. The war was stalemated. He found a commander and turned it around quickly. Do you think we might be in that same situation a year from now?


MS: Well, I think this is slightly different in that when you’re fighting the Civil War, you know, you’re up against an enemy that are, you know, in that case, your fellow Americans. And you kind of more or less know what the rules are. A lot of the problems we’ve had in Iraq, and in this broader struggle is that faced with an enemy that is depraved, we sometimes recoil from ruthlessness.

Apologies in advance; I've caught a bad case of summer indolence, which has prevented me from trying to find a copy of the broadcast, or looking up whether I've dealt with the Hanson quote before. Steyn's stammering response sounds curious, and I'd like to know if the live version answers whether he's massively uninformed or was simply dumbstruck by that question from Hewitt.

(However easy and obvious the answer seems, I'm trying not to prejudge. Which reminds me that I'm growing ever more perturbed that my faultless civility never comes up when people talk about the dire straits of partisanship we sail these days. To give you just one example, I'd like to wish John Roberts a speedy recovery, and a long and healthy life, immediately following his resignation.)

We'll begin with Steyn, and damn the charges of bullying the defenseless or Canadian. First, if the brutality of that war, not to mention the large-scale terrorism that both preceded and followed it, do not immediately come to mind when the subject is brought up, you do well to fumble and stumble. Bleeding Kansas? Morgan and Cantrill? Ft. Pillow, the March to the Sea? The Klan? Surely public instruction about the American Civil War isn't as intentionally smudged north of the border as it is here? At this point we'd be glad to vote Flummoxed by his Host's Pure Ignorance, except for two things. One, this exchange between Hewitt and a Hypothetical Intelligent Canadian Guest:

HH: Victor Davis Hanson often comes on and reminds people about the summer of 1864. Prior to that, Lincoln was in terrible shape, politically. The war was stalemated. He found a commander and turned it around quickly. Do you think we might be in that same situation a year from now?


HICG: (Cough, cough) Jeez, Hugh, have you or Hanson ever read your own history?

would result in very few invitations to return. Second, Steyn doesn't just cover up the whack from the 2x4 of Idiocy he's just received (as pure instinctual recoil, that "I think this is slightly different" is worthy of Willie Pep); he moves swiftly into the They're Not Fighting Fair routine, or, as we might term it, the 'If I Pretend Not Just Ignorance of the Whole of Military History, But of the Very Notion of Making Distinctions Itself the Debate Must Move to the Cloud of My Choosing' Gambit. We'll just close the door quietly on our way out.

So let's move on to HH, or possibly just through him. First, with apologies to Tom Lehrer, it is sobering to consider that by the time he'd reached this comparable point in the Bush Presidency, Lincoln had been dead for 2-1/2 years.

Second, let's address this history a tad (pardon). For all I know Hanson may still be coming on and saying this, but he started saying it in the summer of 2003, when it amounted to what it sounds like a faint echo of today: a pep rally speech for Bush supporters as the undeniable failure of the war fell into the general consciousness and the 2004 election season began. Hewitt's weaselly syntax--"prior to that", "was stalemated", "found a commander"--are a sort of tense memory of the original reason for Hanson's deceptions. I think bullets are appropriate:

• The South was defeated on July 4, 1863, when Grant took Vicksburg, and Lee was defeated at Gettysburg.

• Anyone who studies the Late Rebellion beyond 9th Grade History or Shelby Foote's semi-historical romance novels must come away in awe of Lincoln's meteoric rise from rank military amateur to accomplished strategist and tactician in a matter of months. By Antietam (September, 1862), Lincoln had Lee figured out. He knew Lee would have to cross into Northern territory, and he knew he'd be defeated there. This is clear from his communications with his successive commanders.

• "Stalemated" is not a word I'd use to describe the situation in 1864, nor any other time; Grant was doing in the East precisely what Lincoln had been urging on every commander since Burnside: make Lee's Army the target, grapple him and refuse to let go. "Hold on like a bulldog and chew & choke" he wrote to Grant in August of '64, when he was supposedly in such a panic over re-election.

• If you are going to use "stalemated" you can't use "found a commander" and "quickly turned it around" in the same breath. (You can, of course, do so when accuracy is not your aim; Davis was promising, without saying, that the flaccid Sanchez' replacement would be a real stud, the same way Hugh now fluffs Petraeus, oral sex being one of the few areas in life with a natural resistance to changes in fashion.) Grant was in command for all of 1864. In fact, let's use this as an excuse to strip away some of that "found a commander" romance: Lincoln was well aware of Grant's abilities long before he brought Grant east; he'd have to have been unconscious not to be. (His letter to Grant after Vicksburg is a remarkable document. He admits to having been confounded by Grant's wheeling at Big Black, but he had appreciated, even anticipated, all Grant's earlier moves, this despite the fact that Grant's actions below Vicksburg were the most audacious generalship of a war mostly known for high-level bungling.) Lincoln had good reason to believe that Burnside, then Hooker, then Meade, were capable of doing what he clearly told them needed to be done. And, of course, he kept making changes until that was accomplished. Compare George W. Bush.

• As for the politics of the thing, well, Bush did win reelection. See where that got him, and us. Lincoln, meanwhile, certainly benefitted from Sherman's late-summer presentation of Atlanta. But he'd won re-nomination earlier, and, most importantly, was a consummate coalition-builder among his other talents. He'd operated the war for two years after losing majorities in the Congress. In 1864 he ran--historical Fun Fact ahead--as a coalition candidate (the Union Party), not a Republican. Compare George W. Bush. Compare Hanson & Hewitt's bluster about military history with their complete silence on that.

• "Do you think we might be in the same situation a year from now?" Hugh Hewitt, Summer, 2007.

"We are near the end of such a pivotal summer ourselves, the type that defines not just a presidency, but an entire nation for generations to come." Victor Davis Hanson, Summer 2003.

Insert Giant Teabag Joke Here

$35.99 for a rented Colonial costume, but not one cent for tribute!

I'VE mentioned before how the Indianapolis Star was where I learned to read, and that in those days the only difference between it and the John Birch Society was the latter didn't have a comics page. My recollection of those days is that 98% of the Letters to the Editor which involved national or international affairs, and 60% of those that didn't, referenced Quemoy and Matsu, or Communist infiltration of the City Council, or the fluoride compounds the writer blamed for the cacophony in his head. The percentages might have been a little higher. I didn't actually read the Letters column all that often.

Still, I read it often enough--for a while, in my teens, it was a perverse delight--that I suspect it explains why today I can't approach an entire day's output at The Corner, or several hours worth of The Malkins, without fortification, and rarely even then. It's not that I had an unhappy childhood. It's that, for good or ill, I eventually grew out of it, yet the A Nuclear First Strike is Preferable to Enduring Repeated Commie Slurs on the Fine Character of Chiang Kai-shek crowd is still there, barely altered. It's slightly unnerving, like walking into your old grade school and seeing that all the water fountains are two feet off the ground.

When the Star passed from the Pulliam family to Gannett there was a seemingly remarkable reduction in the number of letters referencing Alger Hiss or the Last Testament of Peter the Great, although a number of the writers seemed to have developed a personal relationship with Jesus Christ around that time.

As it happened I was glancing through the Op-Ed pages last week when I felt this nostalgic tug:

In my 43 years I have not seen the government fix one problem. In fact, all it does is create more problems and lay heavy tax burdens on our backs as the final solution. The government has gotten us into this current property tax crisis where people are foreclosing on their homes.

Wally Dellenbach

Which, to my surprise, was quoted and answered by Dennis Ryerson, the Star's Editor and Vice President, in his Sunday column.

Ryerson took us on a little travelogue, except he did the driving instead of employing a cabbie, and showed us the Good Things and Necessary that government does: police and fire protection, community health, schools, parks, streets and highways. The only thing wrong with that is that it should need to be pointed out to Mr. Dellenbach in the first place. (Okay, the other thing wrong is it doesn't flat call Mr. Delllenbach a liar, but, hey, this is Old Media we're talking about.)

Okay, make that three: this is the sissy answer. Mr. Dellenbach is already in favor of the police and fire protection he receives, the public green where his children romp, the hospital he can rush the baby to when it swallows the Sore Loserman button it found under the sofa cushions. Mr. Dellenbach already discounts such things. He believes the things which benefit him but offer little opportunity for someone in a poorer section of town to get something for free, other than prison food, are legitimate functions of government whose bills should be borne happily by everyone else. The incompleteness of this view has rarely been challenged in that portion of his 43 years Mr. Dellenbach has been reading or listening to the news.

And eight of his formative years were spent with a man in the White House who routinely told bullshit anecdotes about government waste while he tripled its size. Ryerson takes the same approach: government does good things, things the public demands, it's just wasteful.

Exhibit A is the Indianapolis Central Library fiasco, wherein--we'll labor to be brief, with the usual results--an appointed board decided it could manage a multi-million dollar construction operation itself, thereby saving the cost of a construction manager right up until the time the new garage/foundation started, oh, collapsing into an enormous heap of substandard concrete work, resulting in a mess that will probably never be fully untangled but will result in several lawyers retiring better than they'd hoped. For those of you keeping score, this was not the work of the current board, which was disabused early of the idea it could pass on added costs to the public. It has tried to work its way out of it by budget cutting. Even so, when you wind up with a five-year construction delay and a $50 million cost overrun, taxpayers are going to foot the bill, no matter how much is recovered through the courts.

Poor or wasteful government? Waste of an enormous amount of taxpayer dollars, to be sure. "Better" government would have avoided the problem. So would "better" inspection, and "better" actions on the part of the contractors. Or "better" oversight by the City-County Council. Tell me how we get these things, Dennis. Please.

The joke here is that Ryerson knows the doubling of property taxes on his demi-manse isn't due to the library fiasco, or the expense of superfluous township government offices (for the record: the former was planned and approved at the tail end of thirty-five years of solid Republican control, while the latter was left in place at its beginning, when the city annexed the county, as a fiefdom-and-segregation-perpetuating payoff to the voters who would make that control possible. This is the party which--in public, anyway--loudly proclaims its devotion to the principles Mr. Dellenbach espoused at the beginning of this thing). Like the rest of us, Ryerson's on the receiving end of the elimination of the business inventory tax, enacted by the same Republican-controlled legislature, and signed by the same Republican governor, who fought and defeated the Democratic Indianapolis mayor's attempts to abolish township control. One does not have to be a particular fan of Bart Petersmith to acknowledge that. I do so not out of partisanship, but because, while I have no real answer to greed, stupidity, cupidity, hubris, graft, or political patronage, I do have an answer for the ideology that put them in power in the first place. Unfortunately it can't take effect until November of next year.

Sorry, there are actually two jokes. That same Sunday, three sections north of Ryerson's column, his political columnist, who's been doing his unlevel best to pin the whole mess on local government from the moment the first wealthy white person hand-lettered had the maid hand-letter a protest sign, wrote a column designed as a Clip-N-Send-In protest (including dotted-line-and-scissors graphic! No, really!) where the undersigned vowed to keep a close eye on Marion County politics (and this time, we mean it!), and which included five bold Wherases. My personal favorite, just for the pure poetry of the thing, being #3:

Whereas the importance of state and national matters notwithstanding...

and to which I can only reply I'd like to know how much we spend annually on road repair so that once-bright reporters can turn into hacks fifteen minutes earlier each morning. Oh, and I hope no one checks whether "Ura Toole" actually lives in the county, and pass along that she's sorry she didn't do a better job of cutting on the lines.

In Defense of Peggy Noonan. Plus, Prime Florida Real Estate at Bargain Prices!

Peggy Noonan, "I Love America, But The People One Is Forced To Share It With, I Mean, Honestly!" Where Else? July 27

OKAY, so Tom Hilton and D at LG&M have already worked this over sufficiently; I thought it might benefit from the perspective of someone who's been griping about declining service since the Ford administration and who believes the proper response to public cell-phone use is a marihuana-induced psychotic episode, followed shortly afterwards by a grand jury finding of justifiable homicide.

In short, Ms Noonan, the advantage you not-very-crypto-monarchists believe you carry into such conversations bounce off me like rubber guns bounced off George Reeves. Because not only am I a curmudgeon emeritus when it comes to service, I actually know, and, yes, associate with people who do that for a living. Really. Freely, too.

Wait. I'm sorry. You said something about my making an assumption you don't know and/or associate with the Timeclock Classes? Allow me to introduce Exhibit A:

It's funny. In a time of recession, you'd think salespeople would be more aggressive, because so much might hinge on the sale--a commission, a job. In a time of relative wealth, you'd think they might be less aggressive. But the opposite seems true.

Which is the sadder commentary here--that she knows nothing of anyone who actually works for a living, or that she's oblivious of the well-publicized fact that this particular Gilded Age has been balanced on the backs of the bottom 50% of the workforce? For that matter, how do you reach your mid-50s and not seem to understand the rudiments of the economic system?

I walk into a shop on Madison Avenue daydreaming, trying to remember what it was I thought last week I should pick up, what was it . . .

"Hi! Let me help you find what you're looking for!" She is a saleswoman, cracking gum with intensity, about 25 years old, and she has made a beeline to her mark. That would be me.

"Mmmm, actually--"

"We have summer sweaters on sale. What size are you?!" Her style is aggressive friendliness.

In another shop, as soon as I walk in the door, "How are you today? How can I help you?" Those dread words.

"Oh, I'm sort of just looking."

"I like your bag!"

"Um, thanks." What they are forcing you to do is engage. If you engage--"Um, thanks"--you have a relationship. If you have a relationship, it's easier for them to turn you upside down and shake the coins from your pockets.

It is like this in all the shops I go in now, except for the big stores (Macy's, Duane Reade drugstore), where they ignore you.

Maybe they just know you there, Pegs...

That's just a joke. I mean, just because a sizable portion of your own net worth came from lying about the Clintons, just because you've been known to pal around with the likes of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, or appear on FAUX News, just because you once said you thought gardeners were "retards with spades", and that attitude obviously carries over to anyone you feel occupies a less exalted station that yours, or doesn't share your personal religious mania, is no excuse for anyone to be rude to you in return, and it's certainly no reason for some two-bit blogger, even if he is an avid gardener, to suggest that large sums of money would probably wind up in the mailbox of any restaurant worker, illegal alien preferred, who could prove he'd spit in your pinot grigio before you drank it. Care to hear about today's specials?

There are strategies. You can do the full Garbo: "Leave me alone." But they'll think you're a shoplifter and watch you. Or the strong lady with boundaries: "Thank you, if I need help I'll ask." But your reverie is broken. Or the acquiescent person: "Take me under your leadership, oh aggressively friendly salesperson." But this is bowing to the pushiness of the Gilded Age.

Look, Peg, let's just start with some simple math. When salespeople fire broadsides at customers the moment they enter the doors the odds are that that's what they've been instructed to do. Following instructions is, generally, something required of employees whether there's a recession on or everyone owns his own railway car.

There's also a small chance that such boorishness is the result of a personality defect in the clerk. Incontinently cheerful people tend--as do Republicans and the supposedly midlife-converted laity--to believe that their aggressiveness is entire justified by some sort of Cosmic Algebra. It is, god knows, a common enough disease in the service industry these past few decades, Peg, but we run into a problem right off the bat. Unless your New Best Friend also happens to be the owner, her boorishness is getting a pass from a supervisor even if it's not expressly ordered. Bad management, in other words. (We would assume that gum crackling pointed in this direction, but frankly, Peg, we're not sure this particular incident actually occurred in what others around you are apt to call "reality".) It's a concept which is as foreign to your ilk, enamored as you are of the megalomaniacal CEO, the dictatorial school principal, or the stark raving Acting President, provided they are sufficiently martinettish. At any rate, there is someone in that store (or "store") who is presumably responsible for customer satisfaction, and who might actually discuss the matter with you. Not that you and I combined can push back this particular tide.

Because, y'see, Peg, there is a Higher Truth involved in the maneuver, and fighting off possessors of Higher Truth is a thankless task, as you would know if you were forced to actually read your stuff. (Ironic, ain't it?) This vexatious familiarity is, in fact, what has been largely passing for service since sometime in the 70s, by my reckoning, and so it's more than likely that the manager in question has grown to adulthood knowing nothing but. It's also likely that he believes that acknowledging every customer at the door is a deterrent to shoplifters--yes, that horrible suspicion you imagine is allayed by "playing their game", except it isn't, and they'll suspect you or not, as they see fit. Plus you're already on camera, so who gives a shit? You might try actually answering people as though they're people, and telling them something approaching the truth--"Thanks, I'm just shopping," say. You'd be amazed at how the common folk respond to English, even if they don't speak it very well due to all that gum.

But there's more to say about this than "You're full of it," Peggy. I strongly suspect a connection between overly-familiar salespeople and the whole Entrepreneur as Hero business, and you know who I blame for that, Peg. Over-familiarity is frequently--let's make it "directly" --correlated with a sort of lazy, cost-cutting, no real training approach to service. Look around you sometime while you're shopping (I'm trying to maintain the illusion that you actually do your own shopping Peg; give me some credit). Gushy salespeople are always off somewhere gushing with someone else when you need one. They generally have poor product knowledge, since they get by on charm, and as a result they'll sell you anything, anything, especially the crap the boss has decided they should push at you because they're overstocked. I'm not sure how you can reach middle-age and not understand this, unless you live in whatever small town it is Wal*Mart hasn't taken over. If I need hardware advice, I don't go to Lowe's, I go to the Mom & Pop operation across the street. And yes, there is a Mom & Pop Hardware two blocks from my Lowe's, and they've stayed in business all these years because there are plenty of other people who realize this. I sure don't go to my local Marsh "Where Quality Is A Slogan" Supermarket for prime cuts of meat. The butcher's five miles away, and worth the trip. I go to the big boxes for convenience and selection, and if they happen to have a squad of cheerful people on duty I smile and tell 'em, "I'm just looking, thanks." And it works every fucking time. With them. Not with the Christians who pound on my door to let me know they know something I don't, or the cell-phone Yuppies chattering away instead of watching where their personal Panzer is heading, or the people who insisted that George W. Bush was the Second Coming of the Lord of the Dolphins. Especially them.

Happy Birthday

Philip Proctor
born July 28, 1940 (Goshen, Indiana)