Thanks, But You've Done Enough Already.

Report Urges Overhaul of the War Powers Law

By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON — Two former secretaries of state, concluding that a 1973 measure limiting the president’s ability to wage war unilaterally had never worked as intended, proposed on Tuesday a new system of closer consultation between the White House and Congress before American forces go into battle.

Their proposal would require the president to consult senior lawmakers before initiating combat expected to last longer than a week, except for covert operations or rare circumstances requiring emergency action, in which case consultation would have to be undertaken within three days.

Congress, for its part, would have 30 days to approve the military action or, if it declined to do so, could then order it ended by disapproving it.

YEAH, thanks, but 1) we already have an absolutely Constitutional system governing this, called, well, the Constitution; the fact that we don't use it has spent almost a century lying on the doorstep of that same legislative body we now propose to let solve the problem. Again. 2) We've now spent almost five-and-a-half years--well over six if you'd like to begin admitting to yourselves that he fucked up Afghanistan, too--getting the most direct object lesson possible, short of the actual rape and pillage of our own shores, about the President as Commander-in-Chief. And we've spent almost two years with a Congress which was elected, about as specifically as one could be, to fucking do something about it. And again, as luck would have it--Reality sure has a way of smacking everything touched by James Addison Baker III and/or Warren Minor Christopher smack dab in the kisser, don't it?--that same body just yesterday, with great, trans-partisan care of the sort we're promised a whole new era's worth of just ahead, slammed the fucking door on punishing, investigating, or even bothering to glance at, a Presidential crime wave so plain. so invidious, and so thorough that I've spent the past few waking hours asking myself just what the fuck Bill Clinton could have done with Monica Lewinsky that would have begun to approach a single twenty-four hour period with this crew. So far I've come up with "Given her to Prime Minister Hashimoto with a note apologizing for WWII", but I'm not sure even that qualifies.

Now Warren, Jim, I understand you feel seriously about this issue, or you'd have never bothered to hog valuable camera time in a country that can't possibly still realize, let alone care, that you're still drawing oxygen. And you know me; I'm all about the solutions. So I scribbled down a, well, modest proposal here. Go ahead and use it without attribution, if you like:

The James B. S. Riley Simplified War Powers And World Peace Initiative Act

The duties of the Commander-in-Chief shall be construed as requiring that he or she, or, in the future, he/she, physically lead the troops of the United States into any military action, foreign or domestic, he, she, or he/she orders under Article II of the Constitution of the United States, while riding a big white steed. And carrying a big motherfucking flag. Amen.

This should have the attendant benefit of reducing our military budgets rather drastically.

Now, you two get out of the sandbox and let the younger cats shit all over it for a change.

Well, That's Certainly A Grilled Rib-Eye With Porcini Mushrooms, Spinach Salad With Chick Peas And Feta, And A Dove Dark Chocolate Piece For Thought.

Reuters: "Study Shows Value of Food Diary in Losing Weight".

THIS shows you precisely why a little education is a dangerous thing: elitist that I am, I've been keeping a food roman à clef, where everything I ate appears slightly disguised, but not enough that insiders wouldn't recognize them. Plus I had a really good twist ending planned. I think Viacom may be interested.

Fortunately, Roy reprised this two-year-old NRO wonder from wingnut back-bencher Melinda Ledden Sidak--who, assuming her most-Googled work isn't just a pure timecard job, spends most of her days baking cookies, mixing cocktails, and hoovering the collection of exotic-animal-skin rugs before hubby gets home--which reminded me, at the edge of despair, that whatever hardships the possessor of A Little Learning faces, it still beats hell out of 21st century galloping Tory megalomania.

I have a confession to make. It’s about an embarrassing habit that has earned me the sneers and pitying glances of sommeliers and right-thinking people from Europe to the Caribbean. You see, I love to drink Big California chardonnays. Big, fruity, buttery, oaky, in-your-face, so-over, 90s-style chardonnay.



And I refuse to apologize for it.


Let's begin by asking ourselves why this is important. The answer may surprise you: it isn't.

But it is personal, for a number of reasons. One, I've been educating myself about wine for thirty years, since the day I was handed a wine list and asked to make the selection for a big-shot dinner, and I had absolutely no idea what I was looking at. Second, I've been a curmudgeon even longer than that, and while the easy faux-curmudgeonliness of the wingnut right generally rolls off my back, it, like anti-evolutionism, anti-intellectualism, and Driving With Your Goddam Cell Phone Plastered To Your Ear should, on general principles, be publicly denounced and humiliated from time to time, even though the intended target is sure to miss the point. Three: if I've learned anything at all in that time about wine it's that the perennial question about crappy, barely-merchantable products--namely, is the greedy producer or the idiot public most to blame?--is fairly easy to answer where wine is concerned: it's the idiots, and especially American idiots.

We're going to try to get through this with little or no Wine Talk, especially coming from someone who makes no claim of real connoisseurship. So let's begin by saying that, in general, this sort of "I'm an aggressive dumbass, and you can't stop me!" approach has its place, and that place is in the infield watching a NASCAR race. Reverse snobbery is an exponentially-worse intellectual transgression than regular snobbery, because the real snob is required to learn something first.

Then there is the business of believing, or appearing to believe, that the History of the World began when your mother's contractions started coming a minute apart. Being that these days when the temperature tops 70º, but fails to break 88.5º, I am subjected, whatever my preference, to the company of a five-year-old male and, frequently, his seven-year-old brother, and their long-winded expositions on what they find "hilarious", I have come to suspect the education system is to blame for this. Specifically, the pre-analytical child is barraged with facts, which he is taught to regurgitate as readily as he does red-dyed bars of pure sugar flavored with some chem-lab substitute for cinnamon. The thing he does not learn, from what I can see, is that those facts came from someone else, who, at least at this point, knows more about the subject than he does.

And so to Ms (pardon; the offense was fully intentional) Ledden Sidak, whose age we are unable to determine by indifferent internet search, but who lends us a clue right off the bat by presuming an ubiquitous, wildly popular, and much-maligned style of California Chardonnay which gained prominence in the 1980s belongs rather to the following decade, when, one must assume, she is most likely to have first come into contact with it. This is compounded by egregiously suggesting (facile curmudgeonliness, again) that all disputatiousness was a simple matter of a shift in elitist fashion, as though the world's premier white wine grape were a boy band, or a pair of leg warmers.

Now, a brief word about wine talk: it's ludicrous, sometimes embarrassing, and it's been pwned since Thurber (there is, somewhere in my collection, a vintage [sorry] cartoon rendering of two spike-haired, safety-pin-bedecked Punks seated at a Bistro table as one says to the other, "It's a naive domestic glue, but I think you'll be amused by its pretensions."). But there's no other way to talk about physical taste. Try to describe a steak. It's jargon. It's poetic. It also can carry very specific meaning. It takes a lot of experience to use well. Ms Ledden Sidak does not. Big, fruity, buttery, and oaky might all apply to California chardonnay of the particularly blowsy sort she prefers (though I'd use a lot of care with "fruity") but all have become trite through over-application by the ill-informed, something which is not much improved by that "in-your-face".

I have nothing against professions of love for the style, though they won't come from me, but, first, it would have been better to acknowledge that difference of opinion exists and is firmly grounded, by adding, well, "blowsy", or "boarderline psychotic", or something to suggest you appreciate that not all opinion in the world is to be judged by whether or not it's yours. Propounding a particular style of wine, particularly one from so noble a grape as Chardonnay--especially given that "nobility" in a grape denotes its ability to take many, sometimes subtly distinct, forms and remain successful--is a neophyte's foolishness. Simple discrimination and pep-rally enthusiasm are not accomplishments. They're not even the beginning of understanding. Listen, the true connoisseur doesn't care if you put ice in the damn stuff, and two olives, if that's how you like it. He'll probably bristle if you tell him you're right and he's the prisoner of the oenological PC police, though.

We can't go on without a word about "oaky".   Sorry.  I have a friend who worked for many years in the best wine store in town, and to this day one cannot say "oaky chardonnay" in his presence without first making sure he won't hit any furniture as he falls. If you break it to him gently and while seated, he may recount the time when, one busy and exasperating Saturday, the umpteenth customer asked him for a "really oaky chard", and he suggested buying the cheapest bottle in the house and putting a twig in it. Wine is not supposed to "taste" "like" oak. Or of oak, except in particular circumstances which would include the fact that one is tasting it too young, before the imparted oak has had a chance to harmonize with its surroundings. You're supposed to be tasting wine. This attitude is apparently a by-product of the American discovery of Food, circa 1975, after which a nation whose primary culinary influence is three island nations known almost exclusively for boiling everything until the flavor is safely removed, decided, by the Inverse Law of Idiocy, that everything on one's plate, or in one's glass, should have a flavor capable of stunning a mid-sized dog. Chipotle-Mango Mayonnaise this! motherfucker.

Chardonnay always has seemed to be a very loaded sort of wine compared with other varieties. People think they know something about you the instant they hear you order. The central stigma in the U.S. is its alleged association with affluent political liberals. The term “chardonnay-sipping,” usually is paired with other derogatory compound phrases such as “Volvo-driving,” “brie (or sushi)-eating” “running shoe wearing” and less colorful epithets like “snob” and “sissy.” In this formulation, by the way, chardonnay sippers always live in “leafy” neighborhoods.

Rule #2: just because other people are stupider than you, it doesn't make you smart. Especially when they're the people who share your political allegiances and sense of humorlessness.

Recently, I have tried to break out of my wine rut. My husband and I vacationed on the French island of St. Bartelemy, enjoying delectable food and warm sunshine. There was only one problem with our otherwise perfect holiday in paradise. There was not a single bottle of California-style chardonnay to be had at any price.


Sheesh, the ocean was nearby. Why didn't you walk into it?

Oh, we tried. The chardonnay grape is the basis for many famous French labels such as Chablis, Pouilly-Fuisse, and Montrachet. We tried many an expensive bottle to try to feed our nasty habit, to no avail. Each one of them to our palates seemed watery, or acidic, or too tart. One afternoon, we even set off on a desperate mission to a huge warehouse literally stacked floor to ceiling with wine. The nice French lady who helped me seemed dumbfounded when I asked if they had any California wine among the thousands of bottles surrounding us. “But….thees is a French island!” she asked, bewildered.

Okay, first, "thees is a French island!" is not a question, and, second, I'm guessing that when you replied, "But I vant zee American zhard-o-nay," it didn't help matters.

Lesson--where are we?--three. Zee fucking Mow-ra-chay, from a good vintage and producer, is the goddam epitome of the sort of wine you claim to like, but without the two kilograms/liter of oak chips. French wines are naturally more acidic than California wines (which have a severe problem with over-ripe, acid-shedding grapes).  Acidity provides the wine with a backbone (and, in the lack, is why California Chardonnays are so often flabby). It's a good thing. The wine may be "tart" to someone expecting, maybe, a Diet Pepsi, and its naturally lower alcohol may seem "watery" to someone expecting a Jack Daniel's, which, incidentally, is nearly as sweet as that Pepsi, suggesting that American palates, generally educated by the mass market, might benefit from a long-overdue weaning. Greater acidity and less "alcohol burn" make them much better accompaniments to food, which is where, generally, wine should be consumed, not as a cocktail with a faux-Continental flair which one then poor-mouths as not American enough.

Later, when I explained to the proprietor of one of the island’s finest restaurants about my inexplicable craving for California (or Australian—they do it well too) chardonnay, he offered his sincere condolences.

I'll bet.

We decided to stick to pina coladas and beer for the rest of the trip.

Why stop there?

Upon our return, we could hardly wait to open a frosty (yes, we like our wine incorrectly and unfashionably cold, too) Rombauer Carneros chardonnay, which we buy by the case and often to the exclusion of everything else other than the occasional splurge on a Kistler or Newton. For those of you who share my leanings, you absolutely cannot do better than Rombauer. How fitting that such a sexy, muscular and swaggering chardonnay should have been created by a winery founded by a former fighter pilot. No watery French swill here.

By the Great Horned Satan and his leafy, tree-lined streets, lady, the reason you like it frosty (wow, I'm shocked) is that home cryogenics numbs the fucking excesses and hides the lack of acidity. Why don't you learn to take it like a man? Although I suppose Koerner Rombauer, stud fighter jock from the California National Guard might miss the fellatio.

The Finer Points

James B. S. Riley
Global Powders & Notions, LLC
General Delivery
Indianapolis, IN
July 8, 2008

M [redacted]
c/o The Anchor Desk
W [redacted] TV News
Indianapolis, IN


Dear [redacted]:

I trust I have waited a decent-enough interval before addressing this, assuming "decent" still carries the broad sweep of meaning it did before you, your profession, and the industry where you ply it helped coarsen American discourse, manners, and tastes in "entertainment" beyond what was previously considered theoretically attainable, and has not, instead, been relegated to cases of Janet Jackson's nipple jewelry turning up While Children Are Watching. In fact, considering the amount of air time regularly invested in telling me to dress in layers during the cold months, or maintain necessary hydration in warm, not to mention which of the latest scientific breakthroughs in cosmetic surgery is Right For Me this week, it would be nice if you could devote a little of the time remaining, after your in-depth consideration of Today's Issues, to keeping me abreast of what's left of etiquette, if anything, specifically, in this case, how long I should wait before urinating on Jesse Helm's grave. Am I still required to wait until the widow has gone home? So much seems up in the air anymore. Would consulting any of the hundred hours your network dedicates every week to filming drunken half-wits screaming at each other, or, worse, dancing, be of any help?

So, apologies for any unintended affront, but I wanted to express something of the absolute friggin' astonishment I felt this past Fourth of July when you, and your fellow newshounds at the other local stations, pulled yourself away from thinly-disguised exhortations to your fellow citizens to buy up the remaining stocks of brightly-hued 1/4-ton sticks of dynamite still available at any of the many fine retailers who fill your coffers each June thanks to the World's Third-Most Corrupt State Legislature, and keep shooting them off until their stocks were exhausted, long enough to do what felt like a ten-minute obit of former Senator Jesse Helms, despite the fact that his connection to Indiana might be subsumed under the heading "Snubbing Ryan White's Mother After His Death". Which, oddly enough, garnered no mention. I do suppose that he, like our local troglodytes, was consuming oxygen up to the last, but that's the next best connection I can come up with, and were I you I'd try for scientific confirmation before running with it. 

Now, I am aware that "Truth" and "panegyric" go together the same way "Church service" and "Igniting One's Flatulence" do, so I was not expecting much of the former (though I did expect the amount of time spent on Helms' "service to his country" be commensurate with some reasonably-objective definition of "service", or else its applicability to viewers in your Market, which, after all, produces very little tobacco and had integrated most of its public schools several weeks before Helms was first elected to the Senate). And, as usual, I got it, though I am grateful that you got around to mentioning his opposition to the Martin Luther King Birthday Holiday, which now serves as a sort of touchstone of how the outright race-baiting Republicans of an earlier, more backward, time could get a tad unreasonable on occasion, and Thank God those days are over.

No, the thing which most surprised me was that your own report referenced, quite early on--about fourteen and three-quarters minutes before the King Holiday came up, by the seat of my pants--"his battles with what he called 'liberal elitists' ". It's a fine little swerve there, and seeing as how the man was already a-moulderin' I suppose you needed to find the least offensive thing that ever came out of the old reprobate's ugly, twisted maw and treat it as though it might have had some tiny claim to veracity if you qualified the hell out of it. So I suppose you're to be complimented for it, but I've been too excited to sleep since that scumbucket hurtled screaming to Hell, not that I could have with all the fucking fireworks going off all weekend, thanks again, and I'm still a bit jumpy.

But what I would like to do is to inform you, in the spirit of the piece, that I have personally battled forty years with what I call the "infantile sexuality, seething racism, inborn crytpo-Nazism, and microcephalic intelligence of the American Right", and that, should you have reason to cover my own demise, I'd appreciate it if you saw fit to get the quote right.


Regards,


James B.S. Riley

Feel Free To Use "Thanks To The New York Times, I Got 35% More Lawn Care Done Sunday!" New York Times.

Zev Chafets, "Rush Limbaugh Is Just Getting Warmed Up."

Whatever Now Inhabits "Maureen Dowd," "An Ideal Husband."

[NOTE: I am about to type a simple declarative sentence, in English. It is fully formed in my head, but not actually laid out word-for-word, as a man my age, even the consummate thrill-seeker such as myself, cannot laugh in the face of The Risk of Debilitating Stroke. If you are reading this, and the first sentence of the next paragraph ends abruptly, or the rest of the page runs /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// all the way down, kindly dial 911. Okay:]

THERE is a column on the Op-Ed page of the Sunday Times which consists of Maureen Dowd dispensing the marriage advice of a Catholic Priest.

Whooo-ooo! Damn! That is, like, the keyboard equivalent of summitting K2 by the Polish Line.

There is nothing left to be said, really, except that climbing down off Maureen Dowd must be at least as treacherous as climbing on, should not be attempted without a belay, and one has to ask what sort of desperate thrill junkie would attempt it twice.

Well, there's the quote of kindly, crinkly, creepily fixated Call No Man Father Connor, who advises the connubially-minded young woman to check her mate's friends, and this advice is channeled through Dowd, who, if she had any friends, would have been forcibly prevented from getting anywhere near a typewriter for at least the last decade. We are now so far beyond asking why the Times kills trees for this shit that every concept attached to the idea has become a meaningless sound, like when you were a kid and repeated "bubblegum bubblegum" over and over and over until the ground melted away beneath you.

And here's the thing: in many respects the Limbaugh piece is worse. I don't say this because I don't like the man politically; I am, truth to tell, almost completely indifferent to him. The rather flaccid Left Internet scandals he's engendered have been singularly uninteresting, despite the fact that, like all right-wing blowhards, he simply can't help showing himself as a hypocritical asshole with religio-Daddy issues, stunted sexuality, and a barely-disguisable contempt for a bumptious audience he imagines himself smarter than. The only time I ever gave Limbaugh more than a moment's thought was when they announced his ESPN gig, which, on the one hand, I found outrageous, but which, on the other, aroused a certain curiosity, just not enough to actually watch an NFL pregame show. First, I wondered if Limbaugh could possibly really know football, as the hype insisted--this was answered almost immediately, and in the negative. Second, I wondered what th' fuck the man was thinking? If he didn't really know his shit, did he think he was going to bluff the sports audience the way he bluffs the dentition- and genetically-challenged AM burpfest aficionado? He apparently imagined he could, and, further, that he had a sort of crossover career in his headlights, like he was Amy Grant with blubber, the way Coulter would also imagine she did about eighteen months later, circa the Time cover. It is, after all, the same group of sycophants telling these witlings they're funny.

Anyway, I think Limbaugh was disabused of that notion rather quickly, and I think his McNabb comments were calculated to get him off the air, quickly, and with some small measure of PC Police Brutality mixed in so he could return to his audience trailing Clouds of Glory. The casual football fan knew McNabb was playing hurt, and had been since the previous season, knew the notoriously fickle, make that evil Iggles fans had turned on him for failure to win A Ring, and knew that he was being reassessed by the sometimes brutal and frequently brutally short-sighted sports media. And Limbaugh  knew exactly what was going to happen when he played the But What I Said Wasn't Racist card, which is the oldest card in the "conservative" deck, or at least the most dogeared.  He waved goodbye to The Rush Limbaugh Variety Hour, New! This Fall on NBC, and went back to Jethroville, and, apparently, back to work on his advertisers with a blowtorch and a pair of pliers.

Besides, Al Franken had already dealt Limbaugh out of the game, hadn't he? Wasn't there a sense in which, after the Chickenhawk Brigade and the pilonidal cyst, that Limbaugh was as dead as Mission Accomplished? Sure, he's still got an audience. Hell, millions of Americans would vote to repeal the 22nd Amendment so they could vote for Commander Codpiece again. Does that make him Not A Ghost? And Franken did it before the oxycontin business, which, if I may say so in the guise of something of an expert, is one of the really Who Gives A Fuck Limbaugh stories. I mean, oxycontin? We have entered the Elvis It Was Prescribed Medication Zone, which, for the benefit of any amateurs out there, is Extraordinarily Lame. Cosmically lame. Claiming you were sleeping with a pre-op transexual because you're afraid to show your dick to a real woman lame. This is drug abuse for people who don't even know what drugs are. At least Elvis was taking real drugs, even if he was in denial.   I don't know anyone who'd take oxycontin for kicks without washing it down with a frozen margarita or three, which you'd never do with real painkillers unless you had a four-inch-impacted-bolus-in-the-large-intestine tolerance built up. Oxycontin is the fuckin' sissy bike of the broad American pharmaceutical highway, and, furthermore, no one obtains and continues to feed an addiction to Prescription Drugs in post-Reagan America without trying. I feel about Rush's drug problem what Marx thought of Engles' mistress: I don't care about the hypocrisy, it's that it's so fucking common. (Though, of course, it fits the man, and his Reaganism, just like discovering cigars after they'd become a temporary craze, then running around acting like you're leading a parade.)

And this is the thing about the Chafets piece. It gets around to The Oxy Problem precisely as deep into the piece as you'd expect, and then praises Limbaugh for not ducking it, as though he would ever have agreed to the piece without realizing it was coming. It studiously avoids calling him on any of his public inanities or factually-challenged loutisms, tours the 24,000 square-foot main house at his apparently largely self-designed Graceland-by-the-Sea in Palm Springs without sniggering, allows him to explain away his Little Versailles salon by saying he's no Francophobe (musta been some other hillbilly pillhead on AM radio goin' on about "Jean" Kerry in the last election), lets him tapdance around racist attacks on Barack Obama without calling him on any he's already made, let alone his track record. A small tin can gets tied, briefly, to the tail of Big Ego in the person Sean Hannity's superior Obama baiting. It is, in short, precisely what one could predict of a Times Sunday Magazine piece on the Free Willy of American poshlust politics: a "mold-breaking" faux-fair profile notable for its having removed its dentures before sitting down.

Tell me, when do they actually write the liberal hit-pieces they're so famous for?

Two other points. One: Limbaugh's just getting warmed up? It would be nice to hear what that entails, and what he plans to do once he's really going again. He's actually allowed to say that George W. Bush isn't a real "conservative", which really, really, underlines how good an idea it would be to at least get these things fact-checked by someone familiar with the internet. The Republican party is a shambles. Isn't the stinking corpse of Rush Limbaugh lying on top of the drain? Two: how many times do I have to hear how funny Limbaugh is before someone coughs up an example? It's apparently more than the six or so Chafets uncorks, since the best he can come up with is the official Limbaugh show Black Guy Who's Permitted To Criticize Obama (stop! I can't breathe!), and the "tongue-in-cheek grandiosity" of his calling his empire "Excellence in Broadcasting". Correct me if I wrong, but when supposed self-deprecation is wholly indistinguishable from self-aggrandizement, it can be a tad difficult to spot the humor, no?

AFTERTHOUGHT: The piece also notes his Buckley connection, and the fact that a lot of the "college-educated" types currently at NatRev secretly listened to Rush as teenagers. Which explains a lot. Everything, in fact, except whatever happened to the "college-educated" part.

Commercial Break

Sigh.

Everybody Comes To Matt's:

To make an analogy, anti-miscegenation laws were a horrible injustice but it wasn't "cowardice" of the politicians who favored civil rights to avoid running around the country losing elections left and right over the issue throughout the 1950s and 60s. You want to ask a politicians to take some risks on behalf of a controversial cause, but not so many risks that they lose. Backing the California referendum would have been pure cowardice -- surrendering any opportunity to advance the cause of gay equality in the name of political expedience. What Obama's doing is clever, hard-nosed practical politics.

OKAY, so I was educated in the last century, but back then they taught us that an analogy, while not actually requiring an analogue grounded in some sort of shared reality, was at least not weakened by the occurrence; in other words, we'd like to know what politician was running around the country winning elections by leaving miscegenation out of his call for civil rights. Or name us a white Southern politician who actually ran on the promotion of civil rights and/or an end to segregation, whatever the extent.  We'll spot you Richmond Flowers, if you'll agree to tell us what happened when Bear Bryant offered his son a football scholarship.

The fact is that no one had to mention miscegenation in connection with civil rights, and no one could avoid the issue just by not talking about it. "Civil rights" was just another name for miscegenation to large groups of voters.

And the other salient feature of the "debate" is that it was settled by the Court, and not by politicians.

To sum up: were people running around the country losing elections by crusading against anti-miscegenation laws? No. Is that because they felt "miscegenation" was a millstone around the neck of voting rights, employment opportunities, access to justice, and other, more "palatable" rights issues? Maybe some, but--as the commonly accepted wisdom runs these days, except when it chafes to admit it--"those people" didn't vote for you anyway. LBJ famously announced he'd signed over the South to the Republican party along with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Were there some civil rights "liberals" who nevertheless actually believed the right to marry the person of one's choosing was in fact something different from "civil rights"? Yes. Just as there are today.

So then, let's look the elephant in the eye before the room fills up with bullshit. Is there some figure we can point to, extend the thanks of a succeeding generation to, or put on a stamp, maybe, for his contribution to the advancement of civil rights by virtue of shutting up about interracial marriage? We'll take those crickets to be chirping "No".  The mere fact that someone can cough up "miscegenation laws" as an example of the accomplishments of the Civil Rights movement is a tribute to the people who rejected gradualism and legalistic hair-splitting.  Martin Luther King's birthday is observed as a national holiday. Roy Wilkins' is not.

Enshrining a distinction between "civil unions" and "marriage" is cowardice. It is pandering without a John. Whose vote does it change? It holds out the promise of mere fence straddling while permanently backhanding gays and lesbians as an expedience with no foundation, not to mention the fact that scant weeks ago Senator Obama was said to be sailing towards the Presidency on the pacific waters of New, Engaged Voters, not on his ability to submarine bigots with doubletalk. Say it again: it's bad enough that you're asked to justify this sort of thing over and over again: Iraq war budgets, FISA flip-flops, AIPAC reach arounds, and Stupid Lapel Pin Tricks. What's much worse is that you seem so eager to oblige.

Plus, Hair Totally Ruined American Musical Theatre For A Decade.

It's really good that Senator Obama wished that bad Mr. Sixties into the cornfield.

GOD help me, I didn't read the Lapel Pin speech. It didn't even occur to me; for one thing, the only way I'm getting through the next four months is by not confronting the very real possibility that what should be the single greatest instance of widespread political clarity connected to a U.S. Presidential election since 1932 had, perhaps even before I started paying attention to it, devolved into a choice of which party, and whose candidate, is less beholden to the crackpot narrative of American current events, and which side is a skosh less mendacious in its pursuit. I can't be betrayed by the Democratic Party, because I left it in 1978, or about six years after it kicked me out. I don't think much of the Presidency; the last President I'd have even wanted to have lunch with died a decade before I was born, and the one since then who did the most for the country also mired us in Vietnam. Roosevelt and LBJ are the twin poles of the massively expanded Presidency that began with Wilson, and they are, respectively by their rarity and their tale of best intentions gone screaming to Hell, on greased rails, initiating, in the process, the Third Great Awakening of Dumbass Bronze Age Superstition, thanks a lot, the argument for its curtailment. The best thing we could do with the Oval Office is shrink it, say, to the size of an Indy-car cockpit, or, even smaller; something approaching George W. Bush's grasp, but maybe still observable without special optics.

I happen to believe that, the matter being settled anyway, it's much less important that Barack Obama will apparently say anything or reverse any stated position to get elected President than it is that so many self-described Progressives with internet access will excuse whatever that might entail. (It may be nearly as troubling that Senator Obama is getting the worst campaign advice of an actual candidate since Michael Dukakis without anyone seeming to notice, but I'm not really an inside baseball type.  Fun fact: Dukakis was leading at this point in the race.) I spent no small amount of time last evening reading post after post and comment after comment praising the man's wholly gratuitous (and whoringly gratuitous) plan to fund employment discrimination by religious organizations, on the grounds, I guess, that they're really nice once you get to know them. This morning I saw the man praised for telling a reporter who asked him to twist the knife he stuck in Wes Clark's back the day before--or to apologize to John McCain in case any blood got on McCain's shoes--that he (Obama) thought it was beneath him to be asked the question again. Swear to God. It turns out that the Left Blogosphere, as an alternative to Big Media, consists of the same goddam trumpet section playing in a slightly different register. Yes, it's the silly season; yes, this, too, shall pass. But so too has the golden opportunity to force the Democratic nominee to take, and hold, positions more closely resembling those of, well, actual Democrats, unless they've all lost their minds. Instead they spent the time arguing just what sort of racist Geraldine F. Ferraro is.

Anyway, I don't know what possessed me to read the thing, but, Oh brother:

Meanwhile, some of those in the so-called counter-culture of the Sixties reacted not merely by criticizing particular government policies, but by attacking the symbols, and in extreme cases, the very idea, of America itself - by burning flags; by blaming America for all that was wrong with the world; and perhaps most tragically, by failing to honor those veterans coming home from Vietnam, something that remains a national shame to this day.

All righty, then. I'd pretty much forgotten the Dirty Hippies and their filthy Excesses ruined America for the Rest of Us bit, not because I'm magnanimous, but because my memory's shot and he's screwed up so many times since then. So let's rewind, Senator. (By the way, if this is over with, why do you keep coming back here?) Did you actually study political science at Columbia, or did everything you know about the subject come from Ronald Reagan? I asked yesterday who it was who'd questioned your patriotism; now it's time for you to explain who you're throwing shit at, and why. Don't ask me why I didn't stand and cheer as the parade went by. Ask the people who supported that war where the parade was in the first place. Maybe instead of asking why we hippies aren't out celebrating war, we could ask why you who could do something about one aren't busy trying to stop it, or prevent further needless slaughter and the accumulation of more "patriotic" symbols on more graves. Fuck you, Senator. The friend of a friend of mine left his legs in that goddam jungle. The people who cared for him--for the rest of his unnaturally-short life--were mostly dirty hippies, sir, the same people who'd opposed the war before he left and argued into the night about his intention to go. Hold your own fuckin' parades. Demonstrate how proud you are to live in a country where mouthing empty platitudes is more important than being smart, or being honest. Oh, and thanks for answering the question. Patriotism is that vital wellspring of emotion we all should fake, and some of the other us should die for.  Got it.  

"How's The Head?" "Still Bleeding." *

I'M from Indiana, in case that's not abundantly clear, specifically Indianapolis, a state and a city where a massive, collective inferiority complex is on display like bluegrass in Kentucky or bluebells in Texas. This used to sit like a light wool sweater on a crisp night, all snuggly and bemused against the outside world, the close-fit knowledge, warmed to body-temperature, that something in the soil yet had spawned George Ade, Booth Tarkington, Theodore Dreiser, Kurt Vonnegut, and Claude Akins.

I doubt I need to tell you this has not fared well in the current age, unlike, say, teevee-set dimensions, marijuana potency, and women made of plastic. The entire state, excepting The Region, and the Amish, was sold one night to souless international corporate entities like Mitch Daniels. Surprisingly few people realized. Whimsy, gentleness, and humor--where understood--have no place in those types' lexicon, and self-deprecation ranks just above "satire" and just below "eroding real estate values" on their Turn-offs List. Beginning in the late 70s sometime you couldn't swing a cat in these parts--not that I ever would--without hitting something which claimed to be World Class in the Making. We're building Indy's first Five-Star hotel! We're The Amateur Sports Capital of the World! It actually saturated things to the extent that Indianapolis Public Schools once claimed to be building a world-class school system, presumably from baling wire, an Amiga 1000, and a set of Collier's Encyclopedia copyright 1960 (missing Volume 12, KRA-MAF). It is, perhaps, fortunate that such occurances are accompanied by the absence of anything resembling humor, or choking deaths might have skyrocketed.

This was probably excusable in its day; after all, someone was paying Barbara Walters $1 M (in bicentennial dollars) to read aloud, and people were hailing Gene Roddenberry as a visionary. Why not fucking cash in under the circumstances? Never mind that the whole exercise somehow required the creation of a quasi-government entity with taxing powers but no accountability, electoral or otherwise. We're goin' to Mars! dude. Stop bitchin' about the uniforms! Of course this revolting set of circumstances would then be seized upon, and improved--the same way the discovery of gold on the West coast improved relations with nearby indigenous peoples--by a generation which had no conception of things ever being any different, leading to the current mouthpiece of the Capitol Improvements Board ("Cosa Nostra") explaining to his taxpaying audience recently that Indianpolis' positioning itself as The Amateur Sports Capital of the Solar System was pretty much just a placeholder until we could land a Super Bowl.

This, then, is the view from The Crossroads of America, a state which now be trippin' to the extent that the We're Relevant To The Political Process! crapola hasn't fucking let up, not in light of the immediate aftermath, when our voting for Hillary Clinton gave the nomination to Barack Obama, and not in the eight weeks after, as Senator Obama's hopeful and sincere campaign ads compete for time with Mitch Daniels' scared-shitless, baldfaced-lyin' ones.  The local teleprompter readers can't fucking get enough of We're Relevant To The Political Process! which is brought up every time one or the other candidate's plane flies into Indiana airspace. (Although, to be honest, they're having a difficult time working up much McCain enthusiasm, for obvious reasons, of course, but also because another Republican win puts this shit to bed for another forty years.) It never occurs to anyone to ask just how much money these people have, or why, or how much it would take to get them to go away, at least for a decent interval.

Now, just so's you don't think this is simply familiarity-bred contempt, my feeling is that the proper response of any state which has voted Republican for the last forty years, in fact any which went (unequivocally) to George W. Bush twice, is not the generation of artificial excitement and self-congratulation over giving some thought to not electing another one while there's still a Republic left; it's to recuse itself in shame. It's the only real response.

I say all this because--okay, it's only the latest excuse--with my Poor Wife at the controls yesterday I sat through three different reports on Obama's I Will Not Stand For People Questioning My Patriotism, And To Prove It I'll Start Wearing A Flag Pin speech, and every one of the three was introduced by a talking hairdo saying, "Today, Barack Obama responded to questions about his patriotism." One waited for an explanation of who had questioned Obama's patriotism, or on what grounds with full knowledge of the futility of the exercise, just as one waited for some context to explain why a retired Major General who had himself run for the office would supposedly say military service disqualified one from the Presidency. One could wish either, or both, had just left it at Kiss My Ass. One could wonder why anyone would want to be President. One could do worse than to say read Glen Greenwald.

________

* dimly remembered comic strip from my youth.  The set up is one character saying to the other something along the lines of "That was a brave thing you did, facing a surly mob and saying, 'Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.' "  Second panel wordless, as the two look at each other, then the money shot.

Or Maybe Bush's Codpiece Is A Charm Against Falling Objects

CROOKS and Liars, via aimai:

NBC’s David Gregory chimes in at the end of the segment and drops a question on [Obama’s Senior Foreign Policy Advisor Susan] Rice that was pulled directly from Karl Rove’s playbook:

Gregory: “Hello, Susan.  While we are talking about the prospect of nuclear terrorism, which is what is behind the concerns of North Korea and Iran.  I have a broader question for you and really for Senator Obama.  Why is it, does he believe that America has not been attacked in  this country by terrorists since  9/11?  And does George W. Bush, President Bush deserve credit for that?”
Rice: “I think what we have to acknowledge, David, that we haven’t been attacked but we are nonetheless less safe as a sequence of the policies of this  administration has pursued.  Our standing in the world is at an all-time low.  Al Qaeda is more dangerous now in Afghanistan and Pakistan than it has been.  Our intelligence community is warning they are reconstituting and more deadly to U.S. forces than Iraq.”

Of course, Gregory is incorrect, there HAS been a deadly terrorist attack in the U.S. since 9/11 — the anthrax attacks that killed 5 Americans ring a bell to you? It’s interesting that so many seem to forget this factoid. Speaking of anthrax and Bush failures, you’ll be happy to learn that $5.8 million of your tax dollars were just awarded to Steven Hatfill in his lawsuit against the Bush Justice Department. Hatfill is an Army scientist who was deemed a “Person of Interest” in the anthrax attacks, but was eventually ruled out as a suspect in the Bush administration’s botched investigation. Hatfill’s lawyer placed partial blame on the media for not questioning the Bush administration’s motives in targeting him and for reporting leaked disinformation they could not substantiate.

It occurred to me that this would make a good one of those blog-tag pyramid things: get five people to answer Gregory's question, and they each get five more, and so on, but then I realized I've have to do some work.

Instead, let's just mouth off about it, which should be enough to put the whole canard to rest anyway, the internets being our avenue of self-correction. Yes, it's true that Gregory's question was DOA, which the Hatfill deal, announced the same day, underlines. It's also true that Hatfill--how many of the Press gaggle could have ID'd him before last Friday?  How many now?--reminds us that for dampened-pants America and her Press, the anthrax attacks stopped being terrorism once it became apparent that Saddam Hussein hadn't personally posted the letters (it took Judy Miller and the WaPo a bit longer, but then, it took them a few extra months to actually give up on the Hussein angle, too).

[Excuse the indulgence, but this is one of those stories I'd be willing to undergo fifteen years of dialysis for just to live long enough to hear whatever fraction of the truth eventually gets released. I realize the FBI is hampered, post-Hoover, by its inability to close cases by simply gunning down suspects and calling it a shootout, but I find it very difficult to accept that they seriously entertained the notion that there was a foreign source for the attacks after the first of those risible DEATH TO AMERICA DEATH TO ISRAEL ALLAH IS GREAT letters turned up, unless they suspected a blind (and a good one; remember the misspelling of "penacilin"?). Five years later they'd announce (to the WaPo!) that the previous description of the anthrax as "weaponized" was in error; instead, the unknown perp had just meticulously removed all the stems and seeds. This was curious, seeing as how the Gee must have been the source of the original misinformation, and seeing as how, to the unlettered internet loudmouth the procedure for identifying the weaponizing agent looks pretty straightforward. Not to mention the fact that the two reporters write

Such processing or additives might have suggested that the maker had access to the recipes of biological weapons made by the United States in the 1950s and 1960s.

betraying--or portraying--an innocence of the Army's own admission that the process had continued for decades after Nixon "ended" it. ]

I do apologize for the above; the closer you get to these spooks the more likely you are to inhale something, and it always makes you sound like it was nitrous. At any rate, if Senator Obama announces he'll appoint Glenn Greenwald or Joe Conason to head a blue-ribbon panel he's got my vote. 

Okay, so it's also the case that the "no domestic attack" bit is a canard. The Bush administration, and the American citizens which voted it back into office in 2004, expressly threw caution, international law, and rational practice to the winds in taking "the fight" to "the terrorists", so the subsequent attacks in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and Spain, e.g., are to some extent their failures, just as some internet nit-picker might note the 9/11 attacks had been preceded by a warning about some guy named bin-Laden. I am, for example, unaware of a single military historian who claims that Eisenhower's great achievement was that he didn't let the Battle of the Bulge happen twice.

No, if Gregory is justified in asking the question of Rice in terms of Obama's response to a trope, he's clearly off-base in suggesting it as a fact requiring some sort of counter (enough so that one imagines, given his unfortunate and untimely death at his desk, hearing the whole of Inside Washington lionize him for his meticulous preparation). And this is the thing that struck me on further reflection: the self-satisfied assumption of al-Qaeda and International Terror, Inc., as Determined To Attack U.S. on a regular, if not daily, basis, until the whole place is a pile of bricks and twisted steel. Where the hell does that come from, and how does it wind up in the mouth of a "newsman"? It's a surrender to the comforts of hyperreality. It demonstrates a complete lack of appreciation for how complicated the attacks of 9/11 were, how unexpected their physical results (it took considerable study just to explain how the Towers fell; try to convince an engineer the result could have been anticipated), and how successful their political aim--it's terror, Dave!--considering that pants-pissing over possible attacks or negotiatin' with terrists is still a Republican (and H. Clintonian!) rallying point. Future attacks there may be, god help us all, and it's also possible that the Islamic division of SPECTRE would blow shit up inside our borders on a daily, even hourly basis, if it could. But if we got our heads out of comic books, spy thrillers, and our own asses we might at least analyze the threat in a reasonable fashion. Though that would sorta take the advertising quotient and sales potential out of the thing, not something we're especially known for doing.

Fun With Monogamy, Vol. MCCXLV

WE are, you may know already, regular viewers of Jeopardy! chez Riley, which out of convenience has evolved frequently to include the end of Wheel of Fortune, in which the Winner of that day's competition gets to solve one more puzzle for a fabulous prize, determined by yet another wheel spin. And this week there's some sort of tag-team competition going on, with two contestants in the place of one, and the two gentlemen solved the Prize Puzzle, and the envelope was opened to reveal they'd won a pair of Buick Enclaves!, which Buick describes as a "luxury crossover vehicle", and which I described, from the accompanying promotional video, as probably among the Top 15% of ugly vehicles on American roadways, no small achievement.

ME: A pair of Enclaves! There oughta be a collective noun for that.

PW: How about "Effrontery"?

Doghouse Riley's Real-Life Do-It-Yourself Project File™

Project: Mosaic-topped potting bench

Materials: 2x4 treated lumber, 3/4" plywood, 1x4 construction-grade lumber, carriage bolts, deck screws, exterior nails, construction adhesive, exterior paint, urethane, assorted sandpaper, ceramic tile, exterior grout, sealer, moulding

Tools: circular saw, power drill, sander, hammer, paint brushes, grout float, margin trowel, sponge, terry-cloth towels, magnifying glass, mosquito repellant, tweezers, assorted bandages, bacitracin, tetanus vaccine

Estimated time: 6 years

Estimated cost: $7000, labor included

Instructions: 2002: build potting bench at wife's insistence, paint. Later, in response to her "Shouldn't you do something about the (rain) water standing on the table?" resolve to do nothing about rain water standing on the table. 2003: replace tabletop, paint, urethane. 2004: urethane. 2005: urethane, repaint to match new garden decor, urethane. 2006: urethane, decide to tile top as more permanent solution to weathering, buy tile, leave lying on bench. 2007: pharmaceutical testing. 2008: resolve, post-arthroscopy, to clean up mess. Replace tabletop, repaint, decide to actually get tiling done this time, decide to try mosaic, on the grounds that increasing the time required to finish the project by a factor of 12 will similarly increase the likelihood of its completion. Peruse grout aisle at local Lowe's. Discover, not surprisingly, that grout aisle, like every other aisle in the store, is dominated by the company which shows the greatest degree of quality control in selecting and distributing perks to Lowe's executives. Select color ("platinum") and exterior, sand-positive grout. Get home and use magnifying glass to decipher print on container; discover it's still gibberish, but that product must in fact be mixed with a proprietary liquid and not water, which must have cost the executives at the grout company at least a dozen extra hookers. Return to Lowe's, only to discover that the hole where said liquid is supposed to reside--several feet and a couple products separated from the huge selection of colors which are actually useless without it. Find Lowe's employee to confirm that shelf hole does mean they're out of the product, and not just that it's stored twenty-five feet above and no one wanted to get it. Also learn that unavailability is common, due to color and liquid mixture being packaged in one of those 6 hot dogs/ 8 buns relationships. Drive to next-closest Lowe's, find item in stock. Learn, additionally, that I had fallen for Standard Do-It-Yourselfer Ploy, where smaller, "Come On" packaging of tint was married to Stupid All-In-One bucket, exorbitantly priced and including convenient sponge and rubber gloves, "convenient" in the sense that they were right there in the bucket and I didn't have to go into the garage to get any of the countless examples I already owned, and which I was now required to purchase at pain of starting all over again. Smash tiles with hammer, begin lay-out process. Decide first idea doesn't work, start over. Reject second effort, begin third. Live through two weeks of torrential downpours and concomitant clean-up. Return to project to discover every piece ("tesserae") must be removed and tabletop cleaned again. Make aesthetic decision that whatever the next one turns out it be is The Fuckin' Design No Matter What. Complete. Rig tarp over table to wait out predicted rains. Return, glue down ever last motherfucking piece ("tesserae"), which goes pretty smoothly, assuming you like mind-numbing operations that take two days. Let dry. Mix grout. Apply diagonally using float. "Cut" excess to assure cleaner surface. Discover that there is very little excess. In fact, there's not quite enough grout to cover the entire project, despite the fact that the size of the color component suggested twice what was needed.  As a result, endure wife, who never, ever, reads directions, asking, "Did you read the directions?" Decide to wait and see. Clean with vinegar/ water solution after 30 mintues. Clean again one hour later. Dismantle rain fly. Inspect next morning. Decide that hairline gaps present aesthetic problem, albeit small, and that small untiled area in front will collect water. Realize at about this time that lack of moulding on front of table makes grouting problematic at best; return to Lowe's for moulding plus large-sized colored grout ("platinum") originally avoided as "too much". Employing "go home, use magnifying glass" method, learn that this grout mixes with fucking water. Cut moulding to fit; nail and glue in place. Mix small amount of grout, apply. Worry that color doesn't match. Ponder covering entire tabletop again just as unpredicted rain starts. Throw tarp over table. Return in 30 minutes, clean with vinegar/ water. Return in one hour, clean again, just as unpredicted rain begins pouring. Curse wife. Allow new grout to dry 12 hours. Return for inspection, decide color match is acceptible, decide to take picture to accompany hilarious "Do-It-Yourself" blog post. Retrieve green paint from basement for moulding. Decide to touch up back-splash for picture to cover remaining grout stains. Discover paint is, in fact, a slightly different green used in a different project. Repaint entire backsplash, and moulding. Tidy up bottom shelf of bench by removing unsightly materials to ground behind bench, forgetting it has been freshly painted. Take picture. Run to kitchen to rinse paint out of shirt. Resume pharmaceutical testing.

That's all there is to it! As always, readers are urged to send in pictures of their own completed projects, and the winner could receive a prize package consisting of whatever's left of my stash. But don't count on it.

Shut Up

David Brooks, "The Bush Paradox." June 24

YES, yes, yes; everything bad, everything false, phony, or self-aggrandizingly stupid in modern American culture--we're speaking of its innovations, here, of course, and not the grinding stupidity, acquisitiveness, and brute violence the whole race is heir to--traces directly to Barbara Walters or Gene Roddenberry. However, this should not be confused with their perfection. which is the work of Ronald Wilson "Dutch" Reagan, or, more precisely, of Ronald Reagan Inc., and its hydra-headed subsidiaries, including the telecommunications industry, the Republican party, and David Brooks.

Brooks' point here--I am not, nor could I make this up--is that the very same "qualities" of George W. Bush (which, we may note, people such as Brooks used to tell us were misapprehensions, or the phantasms of Bush-derranged minds) which led to our failure in Iraq (which people such as Brooks used to tell us was an illusion, or the phantasms of Bush-derranged minds) is what led him to make the "courageous and astute" decision--against all advice to the contrary! mind you--to go with The Surge, which has now proven so wildly successful. History is cyclical! One day you're down, the next you're a VH-1 star! Shut up and finish your umbles, war critics!

The cocksure war supporters learned this humbling lesson during the dark days of 2006. And now the cocksure surge opponents, drunk on their own vindication, will get to enjoy their season of humility.

I read this thing without even bothering to consider its rebuttal, which, to be sure, is simply enough as to be effortless: Basra. Mosul. Which demonstrated just who's who and what's what, in case anyone, say a leading Presidential contender, believed otherwise. The popular notion in the United States, a country not known for the reasoned, well-informed military punditry, that the addition of 20,000 troops plus a new doctrinal approach has fundamentally changed anything in what's left of Iraq is as misguided as all earlier declarations of Victory, or its slightly-retarded cousin, Victory in Six Months Time. We've thrown in with the Sunni, where expedient, something the earlier, "humbly deferring" Bush (really, it's a quote) refused to do; we are now in control of not more than half of Iraq's provinces. And it's not even a devil's bargain. There's no corresponding Sunni support for Iraq's Shi'a government, or "government", and violence in Diyala, e.g., may, or unquestionably is, simply being delayed so Bush can ride back to his "ranch" with his, and Brooks', illusions intact, at least in so far as public consumption is concerned.

Of course the government could just be lying its ass off to make a bad situation look better, or what we might describe with regard to the Bush administration as The Default Setting.

Even so, it's not exactly pretty, and insisting that Sunshine, Lollypops, and Rainbows are up, respectively, 23, 84, and 61% is a touch, let's say, macabre. Juan Cole on the new "record low" body count:

But over 500 a month dead in political violence is appalling enough. The Srebenica massacre in 1995 killed 8,000. At the average rate of death in Iraq this winter and spring, a similar massacre will have been racked up in 2008. In the Northern Ireland troubles over 30 years, about 3,000 people died, and it was widely considered a bad situation. That death toll is still being achieved every 6 months in Iraq according to the official May statistics.

So let us repeat for those who don't seem to have been listening, including Times columnists who said, circa December 2005, that maybe they needed to have a bit of a rethink on this whole Iraq Success Story, then went silent until they judged it safe to pop back up and say Told Ya!: you were wrong, so astonishingly wrong about Iraq that it is beyond question that your assumptions, your predictions, your certitudes and your guarantees had nothing whatsoever to do with Reality, and everything to do with the blind faith that the tiniest involuntary muscle twitch of the American right was not just correct, not just philosophically justified, but Divinely inspired. You were not proved wrong about Iraq in the fall of 2003; you were proven clinically, certifiably, and cynically, to boot, the victim of megalomania profundus. This was not a slow leak, to be patched at leisure. The balloon popped, the bucket had no bottom. You put everything on Black, and you lost. You do not get to come back five fucking years later and say, There! I told you Black was going to come up! and demand your winnings, respect for your (latest) version of events, or that we now accept a share your humiliation. No sireee, as we say in the Land of real Appleby's customers; you're done, long since, and you have no standing at any point to return to the debate, let alone shape it.

Nah, y'know, I wasn't thinking that at all. I was thinking about how flappers and jitterbugs, hepcats and Beats and longhaired freaks could all, at some point, simply fade back into the crowd scene when their moment in the spotlight was over, but the trendy Reaganauts of Brooks' generation have doomed themselves to repeating sophomoric profundities over and over to a diminishing audience, as if Sisyphus had to endure, not just eternal worthless labor, but the humiliation of everyone laughing at him as his rock kept getting smaller and smaller, without his seeming to notice.