Bummer

I ADMIT it, as a guilty pleasure;  I read Gregg Easterbrook's "football" column at ESPN, especially now that he's decided to sneak a little football in every week.

Okay, truth is that I was a little flummoxed when Easterbrook cut his workload a few years back, from "commenting on every game played that week" to "mentioning three or four marquee games, in-between libertoonian 'government waste' snark, This Week in Illogical Movie or Teevee plots, and Reader Mail. Oh, Plus "Obscure College Score of the Week", your sennightly reminder that Pierre Garçon attended Mount Union. The goddam thing is still 7000 words long.

Then there's "Christmas  (now 'Unified') Creep", in which the observation that retailers push the opening of whatever moneymaking idiocy is next on the calendar earlier and earlier, until Xmas starts in September, Washington's Birthday sales occur the previous August, and nobody's sure when Tet is. This is such a wellspring of Funny it's been going on for like five years now, despite the fact that the concept was already ancient back when Easterbrook and I were hippies.

We'll get to that in a moment, Reader. In the meantime, let me just note that this is precisely what I find so incomprehensible about facile libertoonianism. This is precisely the way "Enlightened" self interest works. It's what Capital, large and small, does: it gobbles up whatever's handy, and bulldozes whatever's inconvenient. Old growth forests and common sense are just obstacles. The only difference is that you think ass-raping logic is just kind of amusing, while doing the same to the Gulf of Mexico is defensible.

And don't get me wrong; I'm glad, thrilled, even, that Easterbrook decided to admit Global Warming is real, and largely man-made, a good twenty-four months ago. And, personally, if you really wanna spend time arguing that CFLs are no better than incandescent bulbs, be my guest. Just a) do the rest of us the courtesy to recognize which side you're on, and how strange your bedfellows (see under Hitchens, C.). That Jim Inhofe was on your side should have been enough. And b) if you're smart enough to believe in technology, then you're smart enough to realize what its real track record is. Saying that technical innovation is our best hope for reversing climate change, or ameliorating disaster, is functionally the same thing as saying it doesn't exist in the first place.

Anyway:

These Kids Today! No. 1: The mainstream media are run by graying Baby Boomers. When young, they viewed themselves as extremely open-minded, in addition to being the first generation ever to discover sex. Now their collective attitude toward today's young, the Millennials, may be described with the technical term "harrumph."

Gregg Easterbrook was born in March of 1953, which makes him even older than I. And which should have given him some perspective on the Sexual Revolution, including the fact that it was led by people from the previous generation.

Of course the true timetable, as with civil rights, gender equality, gay rights, and opposition to US military adventurism, doesn't work for today's social moralist (or social immoralist, apparently). Beatnik punching just never caught on.

Over the summer, TMQ noted the MSM have proclaimed a shocking, sweeping trend of "hooking up" that supposedly means out-of-control carnality among those of college age

Okey-dokey. I guess I spent my summer somewhere else. Not to mention wasting the time it took to scan the first eight pages of Google results for "hooking up" in the Dreaded Em Ess Em. (Nice tell, by the way.) Hanna Rosin wrote a piece the Atlantic carried; among the many things she and its publisher, Jay Lauf, are not, is "Boomers".  That was about it; everything else was on YouTube, unless Tom Wolfe got a mention somewhere. I sit through NBC News most weeknights, unless I can get the remote away from my Poor Wife, and if Brian was going on about this I must've missed it.

-- though studies show that sexual activity is in shallow decline among the young.

Though, as always, we might note that "studies of activities among the young" basically tell us what sort of shit lies The Young pull on the people who study them.

Assuming hooking up even exists as some new social phenomenon -- it sounds an awful lot like meeting at parties -- graying MSM editors view it as empty sex without commitment. And sex in a sleeping bag at Woodstock differed how, exactly?

And who said this, exactly? Maybe next summer you could take notes.

I'm all for exposing hypocrisy. Provided we can, y'know, attach it to a specific hypocrite. The real hypocrisy here is someone in my age group pretending that every Boomer was a "hippie", or that "hippie" and "free love" weren't gag lines and "Woodstock" a soundtrack. Maybe it was different in far-out Buffalo, but in the suburban midwest, if you were born in 1953, your coming of age took place in the metaphorical 50s, not Swinging London. I admit that the smattering of proto-hippiechicks at my high school lightened my own journey, but for most people it was backseats at the Drive-In and a clear distinction between Good girls and Easy. I went to one of the five largest high schools in Indiana, and in 1972 it was a big scandal when one of my fellow seniors got knocked up.

Which means that we haven't exactly proved either the hypocrisy or the underlying Hippiedom. Plenty of car Nazis and religious maniacs in my vicinity. Dunno if any of 'em grew up to control the Dreaded Em Ess Em, Gregg, and nice tell. The odds that people at the top of the MSM trade today were incontinent orgiasts are no better than even. I do know that most of the people I know who were, or are, stereotypically hippielike are still rather joyous sensualists, or seem to be, and have always been aware of the frictional play between parenting and admitting the adventures--and the tidal pulls--of one's youth.

It's the fucking religious bastids who're hypocritical about sex, Gregg.

And as for the Dreaded U No Whut, yeah, it sells adolescent sexual fantasies (much like your column sells juvenile cheerbabe T&A) as well as hypocritical outrage that can't wait to see the accompanying photos. This isn't something new. Neither is its hypocritical manipulation. It's just Jobs Creating at work. Try to be a little understanding.

Look, Lady, It's Not The Cheesecake's Fault You're Diabetic

Katherine Jean Lopez and Mary Eberstadt, "Pill Buzz Kill". July 20

READER, we are about to slog through an particularly unappetizing example of Intellectual Movement Conservatism. Which, like its model, the Holy Roman Empire, starts off 0-3 before it ever takes a swing. I'm not particularly a connoisseur of these sorts of carryings-on. I hope you'll forgive my lack of patience.

But just tell me: how could someone be either one of these people? Even for money? How in the world do you grow to peri-menopausalism in the modern age still grousing about The Moral Effects of the Pill? Okay, granted, your favorite brand of Bronze Age superstition says it's immoral. But your favorite brand of Bronze Age superstition says a lot of things. Many are flat-out embarrassing. Either learn to keep it to yourself, or become an Evangelical. Public displays of insanity are positively encouraged over there.

Okay, granted, I have zero empathy for this, and not much more sympathy. I happen to enjoy a good fuck. I was raised a Christian, Protestant division, and we didn't go in for filigreed faith and infallible leaders. The thing I took from Christianity was an individual responsibility towards the Truth. I know, the nuns don't teach you that , but Protestantism's been around since the 16th century. At least acknowledge that. It's not like you have to share Heaven with 'em or anything.

The controversy over the Department of Health and Human Services contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing-pill mandate has been dismissed as one having to do with access to contraception, part of a John Boehner– or Catholic Church–orchestrated “war on women.” In truth, it has to do with religious liberty and the federal government’s forcing religious institutions and individuals to get with its sexual-ideological program, despite conscience objections.

Friends, this spark is the product of rubbing two right-wing sinecures together.

It has also been presented as a “preventative services” women’s-health measure – meaning that the government has officially made fertility a disease, and pregnancy something to be prevented.

Every time you people come up with a snappy retort you go into your Touchdown Dance.

How did we get to this point? Is there a healthier and saner way to look at contraception? There is, and Mary Eberstadt outlines it in her new book, Adam and Eve after the Pill. The HHS-mandate debate may not be primarily about contraception, but it gives us a much-needed opportunity to have a better public conversation about the issue.

Maybe you could ask the public about that.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: “Modern contraception” may be “the central fact” of “our time.” That revolutionary?

"Yes," "indeed". That?

MARY EBERSTADT: Yes, the sexual revolution really is all that. Name one other single social force that has changed so much about life for so many people everywhere on the planet. Besides National Review Online, of course.

Thanks, I'm here all week, if the Hoover Institute keeps writing checks. Don't forget to try the extra-cruelty veal, and refuse to tip your waitress, the parasitical slattern.

Who even talks like this? Fanboys unaware they're revealing nothing so much as their own limited perspectives, that's who. Neither of these women ever drew a breath in Pre-Pill Moral America. Neither has the slightest inkling, let alone concern, of what life was like for a half-billion Indians in 1948, or a half-billion landless Chinese peasants before Mao, or 20 million African-Americans in their own country around the time the National Review was founded to set them free.

Forty to fifty million people worldwide are estimated to have died in World War II, which was the product of a single social force. But this is dwarfed by the idea that somewhere right this minute some slut is giving a blow job without feeling cheap about it. And this woman is about to lecture us on History.

LOPEZ: You note that there are things that could be said in the 1940s and 1950s by sociologists that we now cannot say — unless we seek “to be written off as religious zealots or as the blogosphere’s laughingstock du jour” — on account of “our changed moral code.” Have you been reading my inbox again?

For such a talkative bunch, "conservatives" sure are prevented from speaking a lot. We'll be name-checking Charles "Muffled" Murray in a bit, by the way.

EBERSTADT: I don’t have to, Kathryn — I can already guess what’s in it! Nothing brings out the gibbering hysteria quite like countercultural talk about sex. So let’s put some of it into historical and intellectual perspective.

Reader, close your eyes and imagine five instances of "gibbering hysteria" in our politics. Now open your eyes. How many of them involved "countercultural sex talk"?

Pitirim Sorokin, founder of Harvard’s department of sociology and a towering figure in his time, wrote a book almost 60 years ago, intended for a general audience, called The American Sex Revolution.

Sociology: the Queen of the Natural Sciences.

He argued back then that the revolution would have negative effects across society via an increase in broken homes and general dissolution. He went so far as to argue that the sexual revolution would be the most consequential modern revolution for all humanity, excepting only the totalitarian political experiments.

So? Is "combing post-dated social theory to find someone who agreed with you" some sort of discipline to you people?

Just imagine any Harvard sociologist publishing a book like that today — or any sociologist, period. It would be academic suicide.

So's a sociology degree.

The few hardy souls who do venture into Sorokin’s territory constantly risk becoming pariahs. Witness the unhinged ferocity of some of the attacks on recent work by social scientist Mark Regnerus.

Forgive me, but doesn't Dr. Regnerus have a job? And wasn't the "unhinged ferocity" unleashed by his publishing something?

LOPEZ: Seriously, why are we so obsessed with sex?

No, really. Katherine would like to know. In detail.

EBERSTADT: The revolution is like a big party that a lot of people really looked forward to, but that’s now gotten way out of control. Nobody wants to be the first to leave, and nobody wants to tattle on anyone else — but everybody knows things have run seriously amok. At this point in the evening, we’re like a bunch of drunks reassuring ourselves that everything’s going to be fine tomorrow, even as most people know deep down that it isn’t.

Yes, kids, in eighty years time you're going to wake up and regret all that sex stuff.

Look, I don't know about you, but over the last sixty years this is about all I've heard, especially from the Right. It was your only concern during the first ten years of the AIDS pandemic. I've met a lot of people in that time who enjoyed fucking, but few of them bothered quoting sociology texts in their defense, fewer still were Proselytizing Polyamorists or Philosophical Child Molesters, and none that I recall cited cheap and effective contraception as a blinding light which had shown them the way.

You could read a fascinating sociological study called “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” cited in the book, to prove the point. Or you could just peruse the last few years of tony secular magazines like the Atlantic for writing on relations between the sexes. What are these women saying? Some are giving up on marriage. Some are giving up on men. Some are creating purposely fatherless homes because they can’t or won’t have a man in their life. And all of them wonder aloud about what’s killing romance and sex.

Women never expressed dissatisfaction in the good old days. Because we didn't let 'em speak.

Why are all these educated, enlightened, relatively well-off women so unhappy, in their very own words? Well, one explanation could be that contrary to what they’ve been told to believe all their lives, the revolution and its cheerleading squad, modern feminism, haven’t delivered the human goods

Isn't "in their own words" supposed to mean something like "in their own words"?

LOPEZ: The denial “bears comparison to the deep denial among Western intellectuals that was characteristic of the last great debate that ran for decades . . . the Cold War”? Isn’t that a bit much?

EBERSTADT: Nope. For decades now, sociologists and other experts have built up a library’s worth of evidence about the toll of this human experiment. Yet a great many sophisticated people deny that this record exists and excoriate anyone who so much as points his thumb at it. This is uncannily reminiscent of what happened during the Cold War, when an impressive number of sophisticated people across the West reacted to Communism . . . by attacking anti-Communists rather than Communists.

Of course in retrospect, everyone can see that Communism was exactly what the anti-Communists said it was: an experiment with enormous costs. Nobody disputes that anymore, not even all those anti-anti-Communists who spent their days defending or rationalizing the thing. The point is that as it turned out, a lot of sophisticated people were wrong all along about a pretty important issue that turned out in retrospect to be a no-brainer.

Thank God, too. Imagine if the Chinese Communists owned America.

That’s where the comparison to denial about the legacy of the sexual revolution comes in. Right now, those who might be called the “anti-anti-liberationists” are running the show. In retrospect, though, they’ll be the losers in this debate, just like the anti-anti-Communists were yesterday, and for the same reason: because the facts aren’t on their side.

Nope. All they've got is deliriously wanton carnality.

I think that evolution is happening already, in fact. Just look at the recent article in the New York Times, all about how being married or unmarried is a decisive factor not only in income inequality — married people are financially better off — but also, the author dares to suggest, in children’s overall well-being.

That kind of thinking in the paper of record represents a real turnaround. It means that the evidence assembled by Charles Murray and W. Bradford Wilcox and other tenacious social scientists about the “marriage gap” has finally started to sink in.

Okay, panel, I'm gonna flip all the cards over, which I should have done earlier, say, with K-Lo's smarmy "question" there, or the point at which I started to read the article. Yes, one day we're all gonna wake up--and if my own intuition, plus the work of brave social commentators like Charles Murray, despite it being censored, tells me anything, it's that that day is coming soon--and realize that the last seventy years have been a bad Liberal charade--all the bad parts, that is--and then we'll get back to realizing that Negro children have smaller heads because God wants them to be menials, and Hispanics are built low to the ground because that's where the crops are, and sex will go back to being a chore. And we'll recognize the place for the first time.

This spares you from this:

A typical 1950s housewife, for instance, would have been laissez-faire about food, but likely a Kantian about sex — i.e., someone who thought moral law applied to the latter area, but not the former. Today, say for that woman’s 20-year-old granddaughter and plenty of other people, those same moral poles have been perfectly reversed. That is, many people today are laissez-faire about sex, thinking it is strictly a private matter between consenting adults — but they are simultaneously and increasingly morally censorious about food issues. Just think of the passion behind discussions of the rights and wrongs of buying organic, or being a vegan, or advocating slow food or locavorism, or not buying tuna from certain whalers — etc., etc., etc.

Can'tcha feel the groundswell for getting the taint out of sex, and putting in back in our food, where Grandma knew it belonged?

I Never Imagined I'd Say This, But Could You Please Stick To Baseball?

George Eff Will, "The Beach Boys still get around". June 20

I'M feeling charitable; the massive climate change engendered, supported, and loved by Mr. Eff Will and his ilk has saved me the expense of moving to Arizona for my sinuses. So let's assume a) he didn't write that headline ("Tom Cruise: Still Hollywood's 'Top Gun' ") and b) that whoever did has a couple dozen adopted Special Needs children to feed.

Okay, who let George Eff Will backstage?

Three hours before showtime, Brian Wilson says: “There is no Rhonda.” Sitting backstage at Merriweather Post Pavilion, gathering strength for the evening’s 48-song, 150-minute concert, Wilson was not asked about her, he just volunteered this fact. The other members of the Beach Boys seem mildly surprised to learn that the 1965 song “Help Me, Rhonda” was about no one in particular.

Look, I'm no Beach Boys historian--my Boomer-ass relationship to their music will probably be made clear here later--but Brian Wilson is acknowledged as a composing and arranging pop genius, not a lyricist. I think the lyrics to "Help Me, Rhonda" were in fact written by the song's co-author, the decided non-genius Mike Love, although my exhaustive research, clicking on the Wiki page, proved inconclusive. At any rate, it's a little hard to imagine this news creating mild or any other level of surprise among the rest of the band after fifty years, unless they hadn't realized Brian was touring with them again until he started speaking.

Not that it matters; the sound is everything. Attention must be paid to baby boomer music-cued nostalgia, and no one pays it better than the Beach Boys.

Must this always be said this way? Attention must be paid? Really? As though this great Generational Leviathan insists that Everyone listen to nothing but its incontinently nostalgic soundtrack of 60s Top 40 to Eternity? Codswallop. So far as I know, there's still a Glenn Miller Orchestra touring out there. There are Platters and Coasters and possibly Ink Spots out there, all, like George Washinton's original hatchet, having had the handle replaced five times and the blade six.

Easy nostalgia for money is hardly a Boomer invention. I'm sorry, truly sorry, if it ruins your elevator riding experience, but take that up with the people who peddle shit for money, not people who like to relive the high point of their miserable lives made even more miserable by shit peddlers and their public spokesmen. I'm sorry there were people who were out of sync with it. I sympathize, I truly do; I've been out of sync with pop culture myself since Star Wars. I think if Dick Cheney or Phil Gramm could have gotten laid in the Sixties the world would be a better place today. But not George Eff Will, no. Nothing could have gotten him laid, nor did he deserve it. And we don't deserve listening to him kvetch about it for half a century, either.

Given California’s dystopian present, it is difficult to recall that the Beach Boys’ appeal derived not just from their astonishing harmonies (which derived from the Four Freshmen)

And the Devil, who had all the good harmonies...

but also from their embodiment of a happy Southern California that beckoned to the rest of the nation.

I guess growing up I missed the idea that Good Dumb Fun was a regional phenomenon.

Political scientist James Q. Wilson grew up there, and in 1967, the year after the Beach Boys released “Good Vibrations,” he wrote a seminal essay on the political vibrations that produced California’s new governor: “A Guide to Reagan Country.” Wilson’s conclusion was that Ronald Reagan represented the political culture of a region where social structure nurtured individualism.

And Federal money watered it.

Southern Californians had, Wilson wrote, “no identities except their personal identities, no obvious group affiliations to make possible any reference to them by collective nouns. I never heard the phrase ‘ethnic group’ until I was in graduate school.”

The late James Quinn Wilson, Ronald Reagan Chair of Public Policy and Ethic Identification at Pepperdine University, was born in 1931. Grew up in Long Beach, undergrad at Redlands; are we sure he actually saw any ethnics until he went to the University of Chicago in the mid-50s?

“The Eastern lifestyle,” Wilson wrote, “produced a feeling of territory, the Western lifestyle a feeling of property.”

Though not a strong enough one to give it back to its original owners.

Southern Californians lived in single-dwelling homes and had almost no public transportation, so their movements within the city were unconfined to set corridors. Houses and cars — the “Sunday afternoon drive” was often just to look at others’ homes — strengthened, Wilson wrote, “a very conventional and bourgeois sense of property and responsibility.”

Thanks to the interstate highway system, and cripplingly high tax rates. Fer cryin' out loud. That describes the whole of American life between big cities and rural farms in the 1950, what I believe has been dubbed "Suburbia". Which, in fairness, Ronald Reagan invented.

When James Watt, Reagan’s interior secretary, barred the Beach Boys from playing a Fourth of July concert on the Mall in 1983 because he thought they attracted “the wrong element,” Reagan invited them to the White House. This was almost a generation after the Beach Boys were dethroned but invigorated by the challenge of the British Invasion, particularly the Beatles.

Look, first, say what you want about Ronald Reagan, the man knew how to huckster. But, no. He didn't invite them to the White House "when" James Watt--who happened to work for Ronald Reagan, by the way--barred then from the Mall. He invited them to the White House after Watt's risible right-wing religious kookism was snickered at from the Eastern territories to the West Coast properties.

Boomers must be served, so Mick Jagger, who long ago said, “I’d rather be dead than sing ‘Satisfaction’ when I’m 45,” is singing it at 68.

Zing! See, George, back then he meant it, now he does it for money. This is the difference between Art and Commerce.

In 1966, the 31-year-old Elvis Presley asked the Beach Boys for advice about touring;

"Simple. Next time you shoot at a television, hit Col. Tom instead."

he has been dead for nearly 35 years, but they play on, all of them approaching or past 70, singing “When I Grow Up (to Be a Man)” without a trace of irony. Southern California in their formative years was not zoned for irony.

Speaking of Art and Commerce, this is a band of entertainers who might, might have achieved some minor success individually or elsewhere, who instead achieved major success because one of them was a (seriously troubled) genius. When his talent and vision led him in new directions, there was opposition from other ego-tripping, fame whore members (no names, but two of the initials are Mike Love) pissed that he was fucking with the franchise. Or so the story goes. Thing is, though, that it turned out that only Brian was capable of doing what Brian did. That was then. Without him, the others met with more commercial failure than they had with him. And they resolved the problem by becoming a nostalgia act. More power to 'em. Their audiences are irony immune, at least temporarily. And if any of 'em gives a shit about what James Q. Wilson said, they probably reserve that for office hours.

Dear God, I Think It's Contagious

Dahlia Lithwick, "The Kagan Kids: Why the younger generation doesn't care about the debate over the latest Supreme Court nominee." May 26

JACK Casady is one of the finest players ever to pick up a bass. And he (and Jorma Kaukonen) played with a collection of megalomaniacal gits known as Jefferson Airplane. This is essentially how I feel about Dahlia Lithwick appearing in Slate.

(Unless you were TV Guide, in which case they were The Jefferson Airplane rock combo. The Guiders thought such Way Out monikers had to be explained. Guests: Hal Holbrook, Vickie Lawrence, and The Who rock combo. Special guests The Jimi Hendrix Experience rock combo. Featuring The Procul Harum vocal group. Always with the article, too. The Cream. The Ultimate Spinach. Somehow, though, if The Lettermen were on Sullivan they were just The Lettermen. Apparently the Guide figured sports fans were harder to confuse.)

Anyway:

Every time I've been on a radio show on the subject of Kagan's wardrobe/softball playing/marital status, some twentysomething caller has taken me to school. It turns out, they invariably tell me, that twentysomethings just don't care if their Supreme Court justices are black, white, Jewish, Protestant, gay, or straight. Every day someone under the age of 30 either sends me an e-mail or tweet or a Facebook post reminding me that those of us making a huge big fat media deal about the nominee's race, religion, sexual preferences or marital status are quickly becoming cultural dinosaurs.

Y'know, more than a little of this is because these are the sorts of people who call in, or Tweeter, to shows about Elena Kagan coverage that include Dahlia Lithwick on the panel. Because that's what those people believe, and it's what all their friends say they believe, and so it's what they pretend everyone they'll admit to having in their potential mating pool believes. What're they saying on FOX?

Young people reading Robin Givhan's article on Kagan's scandalously open knees think they're reading something hilarious from their grandparents' stack of dating magazines from the 1950s. When they hear us yelping about racial diversity at the court, they think about the fact that their classrooms are already incredibly diverse and their Facebook friendships span continents. When they hear us shrieking over women's softball, they shake their Title IX heads and figure we're just idiots for thinking straight women don't play sports. And when they hear us whispering behind our hands about whether someone is gay, most of them tell me they think we're just freaking idiots. Just as they embody Barack Obama's post-racial America, they identify almost completely with Kagan's post-gender America—in which womanhood simply isn't defined by skirts, babies, or boyfriends anymore.

Delightful. If true.

But forgive me for being stuck in The Evil Sixties, when another miracle generation, better educated, more open, and tolerant, and less driven by material acquisition than the doomed reptiles that gave it birth morphed into Reaganaut Yuppie Scum. Jebus Magic was supposed to disappear under 19th century scientific advancement, too. I'm not saying we're going to see Ozzie and Harriet III, or Amos and Andy 2025, or the Get The Gays Back Out Of The Military movement. I am saying that perhaps this is a tad overblown. Perhaps people tend, if not to become their parents, to become a lot more like them once they discover the shocking fact that they aren't going to be twenty-two forever.

I'm saying that the racism, sexism, and homophobia in our present politics come from somewhere, and that somewhere is not restricted to AARP members. None of that stuff was invented by anyone living today, no matter how old or unfashionable, nor how undesirable the demographic. The "attitudes" of "millenials" that "pollsters" detect sure haven't prevented Barack Obama from being slimed, or put FOX News out of business, any more than it prevented the Reagan Counterrevolution, any more than "moving beyond old-style politics" salved the presidencies of Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. We will see. In the meantime: if you're Way Beyond crypto-Lesbian bashing by softball photo, then either do something about it, or shut th' fuck up. Apparently the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal aren't really scared of you. The Indianapolis Racist Beacon, for whatever this is worth, thinks the way to attract your spendthrift demographic is to display photos of cleavage models hoisting their favorite alcoholic beverages, not to display their careful respect for multicultural diversity. Tell them about it. Or don't fucking care. The one thing you might quit doing, like as of two years ago, is blaming both sides of the argument for some reason.

It's the goddam real world; just because I have a mortgage doesn't mean I like it any better than you do. But who th' fuck's responsible? The Post and the Journal used that softball photo. This blog didn't greet her nomination with "Yay, Lesbians!" If you think you're smart, then try being wise. If you think the culture is going to turn into the perfect paradise of meritorious, color-blind diversity without someone doing the grunt work; if you think such diversity will be achieved, or maintained, simply because of your superior social views, then you aren't paying attention.

Barack Obama has made two Court nominations. The first was attacked for being a Latina, and the second has been attacked for being an insufficient breeder. And both times he was attacked for making the choice "just for diversity's sake". Is this half his fault?

Both Obama and Kagan have been at great pains to distance themselves philosophically from those crazy "judicial activists" of the '60s and '70s. Yet the president and his nominee are also reaping the benefits of an America that every day becomes more accepting of difference and personal choice as a result of that very same judicial activism. When Obama and Kagan talk about the landmark victories of Thurgood Marshall's era with a nostalgic smile and express their confidence that such battles are behind us, they really aren't wrong. But they also ignore the ways in which the Supreme Court has used the argument that the old intolerance is behind us to upend voluntary desegregation programs and threaten affirmative action in recent years. These open-hearted twenty somethings are proof that integrated schools and affirmative action and gay rights have created a more tolerant nation. But what today's twentysomethings should know—and what one hopes Kagan will remember—is that that this tolerance is partially their own choice, and partially an inheritance they need to fight to protect.

And, Dahlia, I still love ya. But let's add that all of the above need to know that partly through ignorance, and partly through a Texas-like, decades-long effort to camouflage inconvenient truths, the incredibly brave sacrifices made in the name of civil rights and cultural diversity have been reduced to King on a Postage Stamp and Chicks on the Court. Just as Vietnam gets treated as a museum piece no one under fifty should be bothered to look at, the very real lessons are lost on people who insist they're Over It, and too advanced to care. We forget the sacrifices made more than a century-and-a-half ago to end chattel slavery at peril of our mortal souls, and at risk that the whole thing gets rewritten for the next generation by Confederate sympathizers. Old French postcards are quaint; Matthew Brady's photographs are not. If young people are "concerned about the economy" then they're concerned with Hamilton vs. Jefferson, with the First World War, and Plessy v. Ferguson. They're concerned with Wounded Knee, and incontinent militarism, with the transcontinental railroad and the subjugation of women. Or else they're just a few more jackdaws which can imitate human speech. Wi-fi doesn't exempt you from this stuff. You stand where you stand because of the sacrifices of others, and that's not just the people who got marched off to war. And if you don't know, or don't care, then people who do have to keep schooling you until you get it.

And don't get me wrong; it's great that the bright young teenager next door told her Republican father to stuff it. It's great that she won't make overtly racist comments in public (though this hasn't proven she's immune). But, y'know, I'll try to report back in a few years, when she's more concerned with property values than looking good.

Jesus Wept

Matt Bai, "Why Our Politics About Shit I Care Nothing About and Know Even Less, Explained". May 26

SHORTER "Doghouse" Riley, the man who can't even write a Shorter without adding "for once", for once:

"Nothing on earth quite matches reading analysis from someone who claims to have believed that Candidate Obama had banished The Evil Sixties from our political lexicon forever."

"Doghouse" Riley responds: "Unless you can get a bet down that his version of history will come pre-filtered through his own intestines."

Mr. Blumenthal, the Democratic attorney general of Connecticut, is a respected, if somewhat colorless career public servant. Mr. Paul, a Kentucky eye doctor and a Republican, is a doctrinaire libertarian like his father, Ron Paul, the onetime presidential candidate. But last week, both men found themselves unexpectedly sucked into the vortex that pulls us inexorably back to the 1960s.

Y'know, sir, you're forty-one fucking years old. I'm not really sure how you managed it, and I'm metaphysically certain there is no possible explanation for you having done so while still holding that point of view. It's not many people who reach the Big 4-0 without some contemplation of fleeting Youth, of the possibility that they've traversed the healthier half, or more, of their lifespan; without feeling the full force of the Tidal Wave of History pick them up and toss them around like a pop bottle, or without the glance over the shoulder at the young hotshot eyeing their jobs, the one who doesn't know half the shit he should. For that matter, few English speakers make it that far without knowing one, and only one, line of Santayana. I had it here somewhere.

So let's rephrase the question: Why is even the most incidental public mention of the whole panoply of "Sixties" events grounds for the Matt Bais of the typing pool to moan about how "trapped" our politics are? Especially when it's their own profession which is largely responsible, and their own paper which ginned up the Outrage over Richard Blumenthal? (Said outrage would have been equal had he been a non-heroic non-veteran of Iraq War I, Iraq War II, Afghanistan, Kosovo, or a two-day wait for the new iPhone, though, presumably, this would have rendered the argument satisfyingly Contemporary.)

This wrinkle in the political space-time continuum was supposed to have been smoothed out, of course. Barack Obama based his presidential campaign on the notion that the nation needed to step past the cultural chasm of an earlier era, and younger Americans, in particular, endorsed that vision.

And, of course, this had made for smooth political sailing ever since; I'll never forget how Wise Younger Voters came to the rescue of healthcare reform back in Aught Nine.

In both cases, the trite and simplistic debate seems mismatched to the more complex conversations that most Americans are actually trying to have.

Damn! What conversations? Where? We Seniors are always the last to find out about such things.

Listen, the goddam blogosphere erupted about both, and none of us Golden Agers can find the switch that turns the damned thing on.

[T]he controversy, stoked by his Republican opponent, has as much to do with all the 40-year-old emotions around draft boards and deferrals, the lingering bitterness among those who served and the torturous guilt among those who did not, as it does with the straight-up issue of veracity.

Bullshit. The only connection the Blumenthal story has to Vietnam, apart from the coincidence of its historical setting , and the willingness of the Press to lie about it until it's too late, is that the outraged patriotism of so many right-wing combat veterans (who just happen to be stateside while we fight two wars for the future of Civilization Herself) is itself a ginned-up artifact of losing in Vietnam being blamed on spitting Hippies and Walter Cronkite. Of which "torturous guilt among those who did not [serve]" is a sparkling example.

This is all well-trod ground for voters who can easily recall the allegations over Bill Clinton and his draft letter, John Kerry and his Swift boat, George W. Bush and his missing time in the National Guard. But in a country where no one under 50 has ever seen a draft notice, it is increasingly irrelevant; to those Americans, we might as well be having an argument over who sunk the Maine.

No one, evidently; it appears to've blown up accidentally, after which we blamed Spain, declared war (there's a quaint custom for you kids!), and seized a global empire under the pretext. So you're right; I can't understand why anyone would imagine there are any lessons we could learn from that today.

Let's try it this way, Sonny: way back before you were born, and, hence, care, at the end of WWII (just curious: do we care about that one, or not?), the United States (Motto: E Pluribus Unum, which is Latin for "A Great Place to collect a paycheck, buy consumer electronics, and contemplate your navel in print, provided you don't get drafted") and the Soviet Union, late allies in the war against Hitler, began to distrust each other. And with good reason. This led to something called The Cold War, which is a more efficient way of saying "spending untold trillions of dollars on weapons of mass extinction"; it also led to hotter wars in Korea (in which we backed a wretched despot on the grounds that he was anti-Communist, and lost), and Vietnam (in which we backed a series of wretched colonial mandarins and homicidal military strongmen on the grounds that they were anti-Communist, and lost). I'm sorry, could you snore a little more quietly? We also backed a number of proxy wars generally backing authoritarian strongmen on the grounds that the Commies had cornered the National Liberation market, which, anyway, tended to be too anti-Coca-Cola for our tastes. And lost. A lot of this took place in Africa, Asia, and South America. Which are continents, and located elsewhere. You don't have to worry about them.

So why worry about Vietnam? In the first place, and rather obviously, because you've swallowed a load of bilge water about it over the last thirty years, and that bilge didn't get in your sippy cup by accident. It got there because the people who wasted the lives of 60,000 American dead have done their damnedest to cover it up since. And because they're still at it today, and because the twin disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan are examples of their handiwork (or are those Old News now, too?) Because otherwise you might recall that, absent a draft, we didn't have enough troops to do either job, let alone both.

Old news, kiddo? Are taxes, or deficits, part of the serious discussion you'd rather be having? Even the G admits to spending 40% of its take on Defense, which is an anodyne way of saying "a gizmo-loaded military larger than the next fifty armies combined". And that's because they subsume things like veterans' benefits and the interest on the debt for past military impulse purchases under "Other".

And they do this year-in, year-out, so you, and your children, and their children, can keep paying for it. While exercising your God-given right as Americans to remain butt-ignorant of the history, and cosseted in the dryer-warm blankie of phony General Consensus.

Why then, to quote the ubiquitous Bono,

Okay, I take it back. Make it "unless you can get down a bet that sooner or later he'll reference one or more of his Aging Cultural Touchstones in the middle of excoriating other people for being stuck in their own time zone."

is our political debate so stuck in a moment it cannot get out of?

….this all probably has as much to do with our basic human tendency toward moral clarity. As much as conservatives may view the decade as the crucible of moral relativism and the beginning of a breakdown in established social order, there remains something powerfully attractive about the binary, simplistic nature of it all, the idea that one could easily distinguish whether he was for war or against, in favor of equality or opposed.

How interesting it is that "conservatives" are never the ones being instructed to give up their own post-sell-by date attachment to The Evil Sixties, which constitutes, what? 95% of their platform? How interesting that Ronald Reagan, a man whose entire political career was an anti-Sixties diatribe with a grin, remains as fresh today as, well, Bono.

By contrast, war today seems more a question of degrees and limits,

Like "the limits of our pocketbooks, and the degree to which the most high-tech military on earth will be flummoxed by boring old WWI explosives".

while equality seems less about the laws of the land than about disparities in economic and educational opportunities that are subtler and harder to address. The choices of our moment are not nearly so neat or so satisfying as they were a generation ago, which makes them less useful as a basis for one’s political identity, and harder to encapsulate in some 30-second spot or prime-time rant.

Bosh. This stuff is only simplistic because your view is cursory at best. The Pentagon Papers run to 7000 pages. Taylor Branch's History of America in the King Years runs to three volumes. There wasn't anything easy about deciding the government was lying to you, and assembling the case to back it up. And the suggestion that it was some moral snap to toss two-hundred years of racism out on its ear--simple, indeed, compared to the painful ratiocination required today to think about affirmative action while surfing for porn--is odious at best. People went to prison, were beaten, and died for the sake of that easy moral clarity.

Y'know, Mr. Bai, the more I hear this shit the more convinced I become that the real problem is a massive intellectual indolence, and the more I prefer ideological gridlock to trendy and facile disinterest.

I'll Just Go And Have A Tidy First, M'Lord.

David Brooks, "The Broken Society". March 18

HERE'S Brooks' goddam Tell, and I know we've said this a hundred times, but for such an "open-minded" "moderate" "conservative" he sure seems oblivious to practically all liberal thinking beyond his own characterization of its lawn care habits. For all this David in the Lion's Den bullshit, he never seems to namecheck anyone or anything those Liberals at the Times or PBS have tossed his way. In seven years.

Of course, Brooks himself "was" "a Liberal" prior to his conversion to Friedmanomics, but that liberalism seems to be encompassed by that War Is Not Healthy For Children And Other Living Things poster he had in his bedroom before Mater objected.

The United States is becoming a broken society. The public has contempt for the political class. Public debt is piling up at an astonishing and unrelenting pace. Middle-class wages have lagged. Unemployment will remain high. It will take years to fully recover from the financial crisis.

Well, by golly. Y'know, maybe we've failed to point this out before, but public contempt for politicians ("the political class"?) is almost as old as the Republic, and it's returned in spades. St. Ronnie ran--and won--on it twice, and I don't remember hearing a peep out of you. He ran on the Horrors of the Public Debt, too, and then nearly quadrupled it. ("Oh, but he had a good excuse" y'all said.) The goddam debt's been piling up since you were in nappies, Brooks, and the one administration which reversed it met with something less than your full-throated approval, although you did spend a good portion of it talking about full throats. Once it was the Bush II administration's turn to play Incontinent Tax Cutting Is The Solution To Everything, here's which side you were on:

The Bayh Democrats are centrist but not visionary, and they seem to worry more about adding an extra $10 billion to the deficit than about the future of the Middle East. They may have read memos from the Democratic pollsters on the unpopularity of the $87 billion plan, but they don't seem to have read about the Versailles Treaty and what happens when strong nations impose punitive burdens on proud ones.

That's from October of 2003, when, we'll remind you, if we ever stop laughing at that "$87 billion", that "Six Months, Tops" Excursion to End All Excursions had already begun to morph into a multi-$trillion Vietnam remake. Oh, but you had good reasons. I almost forgot.

Of course the Heroic Drunken Marine Warriors of the Bush/Cheney administration came in for a little criticism in June 2004:

The final and most serious argument is that whatever the short-term benefits, the tax cuts have left us with a long-term fiscal mess. When you ask administration folks about the deficit problem, they argue that it isn't caused primarily by the cuts, but by rising health care costs and the aging baby boomers. That's true, but it evades the fact that the tax cuts made the situation worse.

'Course, their subsequent refusal to do anything but obstruct attempts to address rising health care costs have sorta made that situation worse, too.

This confluence of crises has produced a surge in vehement libertarianism. People are disgusted with Washington. The Tea Party movement rallies against big government, big business and the ruling class in general. Even beyond their ranks, there is a corrosive cynicism about public action.

Fuck you. On at least two occasions your column has quoted approvingly the fluff-headed theologizing of MeganJane McGalt. So either there's such a thing as too much libertarianism, or it shouldn't get into the hands of the Wrong Sort. Maybe Rand should have been published in Latin, like the dirty parts of old psychological studies.

As for "corrosive cynicism about public action", well, fuck you again. This sort of thing just never occurred to you between 1980 and 2008, huh? Like Douthat; you guys just didn't realize what your party was up to during all that time. Too many Burke weekends, maybe? At any rate, it's like a Coca-Cola™ salesman saying he didn't realize the stuff contained high-fructose corn syrup.

I know; let's ask the Tories for help!

But there is another way to respond to these problems that is more communitarian and less libertarian. This alternative has been explored most fully by the British writer Phillip Blond.

He grew up in working-class Liverpool. “I lived in the city when it was being eviscerated,” he told The New Statesman. “It was a beautiful city, one of the few in Britain to have a genuinely indigenous culture. And that whole way of life was destroyed.” Industry died. Political power was centralized in London.

The Rabble started wearing track suits, and calling their Betters by their Christian names.

Blond argues that over the past generation we have witnessed two revolutions, both of which liberated the individual and decimated local associations. First, there was a revolution from the left: a cultural revolution that displaced traditional manners and mores; a legal revolution that emphasized individual rights instead of responsibilities; a welfare revolution in which social workers displaced mutual aid societies and self-organized associations.

For cryin' out loud, the goddam virus has jumped the Pond. Lord Blond was born in 1966. He was thirteen fucking years old when Lady Thatcher rode to the rescue.

Not that Britain didn't have a couple thousand years of the Divine Right of Inbred Warmongers ("Can you get your servants to eat rook?") to contend with; not that Tradition is ever any less formidable for being ridiculous on the face of it (at least this one isn't wholly manufactured of Ozzie and Harriet reruns and guided tours of Diamond Jim Brady's private dining car). But, please; try WWI, not Carnaby Street.

Then there was the market revolution from the right. In the age of deregulation, giant chains like Wal-Mart decimated local shop owners. Global financial markets took over small banks, so that the local knowledge of a town banker was replaced by a manic herd of traders thousands of miles away. Unions withered.

The two revolutions talked the language of individual freedom, but they perversely ended up creating greater centralization. They created an atomized, segmented society and then the state had to come in and attempt to repair the damage.

Look, God knows, I'm sorry hippies stole your lunch money, or gang-bonged that girl you had a crush on in homeroom; I'm sorry that, today, you are occasionally forced to deal with surly underlings, unkempt go-fers, tattooed baristas, and coloreds where there didn't used to be coloreds. But the suggestion that this calamitous turn of events came about through some accidentally enshrined, psilocybin-flavored Sixties craze, rather than centuries of righteous struggle which included the social reformations following both global wars of the 20th century and the American Fucking Revolution, in case you've forgotten, is just politically-motivated crapola. And it's particularly ironic coming as part of a "rebuke" to excessively disrespectful Tea Baggers, whose perpetual aggrievedness comes in no small part to their having been fed that crap about elitist left-wingers eradicating the Perfect Social Order that existed for two hundred years previous, back when you were only interested in harvesting their votes. Do you really imagine that we would have gone from 1946 to 2010 without addressing Civil Rights, or gender equality, except for the evil machinations of a few lefty professors? That without the throbbing beat of Race Records the internet today would be a place where Nice Girls and their Beaux did wholesome, patriotic, family-oriented activities instead of having group buttsex? Really? And you think this somehow equates with the past thirty years of multinational corporations running the government, and the global economy, for their own benefit, and fuck everyone else? Y'know, somehow, the more you guys demonstrate a twisted perception of history, the more understandable the Reign of Terror looks in retrospect.

Just Lie Back And Think Of 9/11

Jonah Goldberg, "America Through The Reality Lens". December 16

Can the rest of us afford to live in a society constantly auditioning to make an ass of itself on TV?

Jonah wrote this, did he?

--Kia, in comments at Roy's

WE end this week's Accidental Three-Part Survey of the Evil Sixties as told by the Pundits Who Missed Them Entirely with poor, conflicted Jonah, who, fittingly, isn't even writing about the Sixties, except he is. As always.

I readily admit the public-school nature of my little obsession with birth dates and mini-generationlets. I went to high school in the early 70s, in white, suburban Indianapolis, which is roughly when The Sixties began to arrive in those parts. I was well aware of living in a Time Warp, one in which The Sixties, literal and figurative, were officially over, but the silly, superficial, suburban battles were still to be fought. At the beginning of my sophomore year the township district to our north was informed by the courts it could not expel a student because it didn't like his haircut; word didn't get around quickly enough to prevent one of the assistant football coaches at my school from holding down one of the players and shearing him.

When I entered high school (three-year) the middle-class kids aspired to look and act like the Omegas of Animal House, and the poorer kids aspired to find beer and steal hubcaps. Student Council or Car Nazi. Free to Choose! By the time I left, the four-barrels and glasspacks were starting to be replaced by as-yet-un-airbrushed vans, with the Moody Blues on the 8-Track and the smell of Hoosier ditch weed at the back of the parking lot. Versus the Student Council.

So it's impossible for me not to see James Lileks (b. 1958) as the second-chair-trombone-and-dental-headgear victim of related Prairie marauders, and the co-incidental Thai-stick-and-Alice Cooper soundtrack accompaniment as his version of Sacher-Masoch's furs. It's hard not to imagine David Brooks' (b. 1961) pre-Conversion "liberalism" as a mild summer flirtation with Cheap Trick at Budokan that got out of hand one evening when he cranked the volume to 5 and Mummy had one of her spells; and Douthat (b. 1979) as the home-schooled religious fanatic who probably would have turned out pretty much the same regardless of era, but wasn't exactly helped by the marriage of wingnut politics and backwoods kerosine-drinking theology that occurred around the time of his birth, nor the Starr Report coming out when he was just old enough to look up "fellatio" in the dictionary.

And then there's Jonah (1969), product of an ill-considered wingnut mating experiment and the full-on Reagan "Hip To Be Square" Cultural Reeducation Program. Goldberg--and I don't mean to give the man the benefit of human-feeling he doesn't deserve--seems like the sad sack who would've swung with it if a) anyone had wanted him to join in, and b) if he dared stand up to the brutal, hulking, belt-wielding tyrant waiting for him at home. Or his father, either.

No, I think Goldberg's a Star Wars nerd by default. Of course, everything he is he seems to be by default, but that's another matter. It doesn't excuse what he chose to become, but it at least helps to explain it. He's old enough that as a Teen he probably could have sneaked around to get high without having anyone take particular notice of it, and without having to answer for his Nixonian politics while doing so. (Has he, even now? He'll be bringing up---wait for it!--Tiger Woods, shortly, to argue that Woods could at least "afford" to be a cad, in financial terms; doesn't that easy, middle-aged White Boy libertarianism apply to him, in spades (sorry), and not to his "It's a battle for the very existence of Civilization; sorry I'm earning too much money to take part" credit?) But he had to watch the popular kids, the funny kids, the smart kids, and, really, pretty much everyone else not religiously corseted or suffering from Elephant Man's Disease pair off and hump like teenaged bunnies, freed of the social strictures which would have made his virginity a mark of achievement.

It's difficult, if not impossible, to look at this collection and wonder at the psychic cost of their being allowed to rebel by being Anti-Rebels, of being told They were Smarter Than all those kids who were having fun, to have paid no cost, other than as a dodgeball target or locker stuffee, for navigating that unnatural state of affairs known as Teenagedness. Brooks, Douthat, and Goldberg look upon The Sixties the way Lileks looks upon Burnt Orange Shag Carpeting, as a benchmark of their self-proclaimed personal superiority. They're the easy beneficiaries of the Civil Rights movement who didn't have to take sides when that meant personal risk, but can now cavil about Affirmative Action and Race Pimps while insisting their own hands remain spotless; they're the guys whose public international bellicosity was never tested by compulsory boot camp (and certainly not by voluntary service), but who can throw stones at Vietnam-era protesters; they can serve as paid apologists for the worst excesses of trash capitalism while still bemoaning the sort of low-class sucker who gobbles up worthless dreck, or aspires to join in the general looting. Mr. Pantload?

Culturally, this has been the decade of the reality show. And what do we have to show for it? Not much more than the contestants themselves.

Survey the wreckage. Richard Hatch, the first Survivor champion, was just released from prison (he didn’t pay taxes on his winnings). The marriage of the Octoparents, Jon and Kate, is a shambles. Richard and Mayumi Heene were so desperate to land a reality series, they concocted an enormous hoax, convincing the country their child had been carried away in a balloon. Michaele and Tareq Salahi tried to claw their way onto the sure-to-be-hideous series Real Housewives of D.C. by brazening their way into a state dinner. And alleged wife-killer Ryan Jenkins, a contestant on two VH1 shows, is a stark reminder that fame is not a reflection of good character.

Okay, let's say, to begin with, that I've never watched any of this shit, but I know who all of those people are, thanks to the news, or "news". So let's take it up with them. Now then, I have no idea how many people, or "people", have appeared on so-called reality shows, but surely it's enough so that one Richard Hatch is not surprising. Nor fifty. What is a little surprising is Jonah Goldberg using tax evasion as the mark of Cain.

And I'm from Indianapolis, where in short order, and with no more Reality prospects beyond the reality of trashy consumption and unfettered greed, Marcus "Flyboy" Schrenker, and now Tim "Indiana GOP Bankroll" Durham, have been entangled in the McMansion version of the Balloon Boy Game. As for fame not being a reflection of good character, fer chrissakes. We're reading a Jonah Goldberg column. Is it actually possible to surgically remove self-awareness?

Whose fucking America is it where grabbing for wealth and fame, however mindlessly, however hollow or fleeting, is the highest calling of Our Way of Life? Demanding laissez-faire rapine and then bemoaning the fact that some people just don't know how to behave--this is a sensible approach? And for fuck's sake, that ratio of miscreants to the merely greed-impelled can't be any higher than what we'd find by "surveying the wreckage" of the DeLay-Gingrich Republican Congresses or the Bush Administration. Balloon Boy's parents may be particularly despicable, but so far as I know nobody else lost his life savings in the deal. The Salahis are garden-variety fame-whores; are we to imagine they didn't exist before Reality teevee? Fuck, a decade ago they might've been seeking their fortune writing scabrous yellowsheets about Bill Clinton's sexual proclivities, if such a thing can be imagined.

And look, I know this isn't lost even on you, Jonah, but these are the very same people who, when they were voting for Ronald Reagan and supporting Bush's Mideast Makeover, y'all insisted were the Conscience of America and the Sensible, Hard-Working Voice of Her International Exceptionalism. Now they're tawdy and self-serving and wear too much cologne?

Don’t get me wrong; it’s great television.

So you're still sneaking off to get high and hoping Mom doesn't notice.

But gladiatorial games would be great TV, too.

Christ, Goldberg, they're on G4 at 8 Eastern, replayed at 11. And you didn't seem to think so back when that short-lived American Warriors: Abu Ghraib was the cinema vérité hit of the season.

The elite minority’s general acceptance of racial and sexual equality as important values has been a moral triumph. But not without costs.

Your career, to name one.

As part of this transformation, society has embraced what social scientist Charles Murray calls “ecumenical niceness.” A core tenet of ecumenical niceness is that harsh judgments of the underclass — or people with underclass values — are forbidden. A corollary: People with old-fashioned notions of decency are fair game.

Well, far be it from me to contradict as man with as blameless a track record as Dr. Charles Murray, Ph.D, social scientist--his doctorate's in political science, by the way, and his employer is the University of Libertoonian Think Tank Sinecures, which means he's a "social scientist" in the same way that Newt Gingrich is a "Catholic theologian"--but lemme just ask you--maybe if you two removed the hoods you'd hear this a little clearer--Have you ever seen a Frank Capra movie?

Long before the rise of reality shows, ecumenical niceness created a moral vacuum. Out-of-wedlock birth was once a great shame; now it’s something of a happy lifestyle choice. The cavalier use of profanity was once crude; now it’s increasingly conversational. Self-discipline was once a virtue; now self-expression is king.

And so we return to those Evil Sixties, before which no one ever had sex with the lights on, or for longer than three minutes, and women knew they weren't supposed to enjoy it, which was a good thing, since sodomy laws made that difficult to achieve anyway. And when innocent Authority, trying merely to uphold its God-given charge to keep the races separate, the perverts closeted, and the traffic moving smoothly was tossed on its ear by a bunch of dirty hippies Herbert Marcuse riled up...hell, those Jersey Shore humps wouldn't even know what sex was without Hugh Hefner, unless Douthat's gang had stuffed 'em into our still under-utilized prisons. And so we end the week right where it began. Fucking depressing, ain't it, if you'll excuse the cavalier use of profanity?

Sunday Blogging To The Choir

ROY spotlights a Derbyshire entry at The Corner which quotes "a reader" sounding off on Judge Sotomayor's taking unfair advantage of her gender, heritage, circumstances of birth, and Ivy League credentials, to the detriment of a hardworking white woman from a state school in the High Plains. For the record, on the question of whether she's a figment intended to hoodwink, or merely ten pounds of metaphor in a two-pound bag, I believe she was not intended to be taken as real. On the other hand, I suspect Derbyshire invented the emailer.

Here "she" is, for the record:

Show me a Montana girl of un-useful ethnicity who put herself through law school waiting tables, after being left with two young children when her Army husband was killed overseas, and I'll start oohing and aahing over her compelling story.

So my first response, as I said a Roy's, was fine, another example of how little these guys know about the "real people" they limn; alternately, it's a cautionary tale about packing your mythical heroes with every bunting-draped attribute in the Reagan Anecdote playbook in the belief that doing so makes the case Black and White, you should pardon the expression. The seam side goes down! If it's not the first rule of Rhetoric, it's certainly the one you need the most work on.

Of course, such a person would never ever end up on any President's short-list, no matter if she graduated first in her class at her non-Ivy institution, no matter how extreme the intelligence and dedication and hard work she displayed over the subsequent course of her career. That's simply how the world — and especially the legal world — is constructed today.

Let's pick at a few random loose threads. Our victimized jurist must be white--apparently the bootstrapping African-American judge considers Hispanics a sort of subset of Big Affirmative Action, and is assuaged, or has found her nest feathered sufficiently that her story cannot compel your Derbyshire correspondent--but also female, since we have to pretend we're not simply reheating the same old can of White Male entitlement. This, though, raises the question of why our WWF is not embittered by the pair of White Male Ivies George W. Bush appointed to the Court. Since Reagan appointed Sandra Day O'Connor to the Court (a campaign promise), Republican Presidents have named six Justices, all male (five white, one Clarence Thomas). Reagan had one rejection and one withdrawal, both white males; Bush II nominated Harriet Miers, who was immediately shot down by his own party. Democrats, in that period, have now nominated two women and one white male. So you're gonna resent the nomination of Sotomayor in those circumstances? Peculiar standard.

Part two of her Accumulated Grievance Index apparently requires single motherhood, which she shoulders with gritty self-reliance. Of course the Reagan playbook dictates that she can't be a single mom through popping out lil' responsibilities without benefit of clergy, nor can she be shortchanged by a deadbeat father (Baby Daddy being a dark-hued term, and alimony a form of nanny-state appropriation of one's Hard-Earned Money; this thing is taking a lot of work for a couple of simple paragraphs, unless it all comes naturally). So daddy went missing in the War. Which makes her triply-put upon, since dirty hippies probably spit on his flag-draped coffin on the tarmac, at the expense--as some wag noted at Roy's place--of making our college-educated wife almost singularly unaware of the military death gratuity, VA pension, extended medical and dental care for herself and her children, Defense Department-sponsored survivor benefits, low-cost student loans and grants, as well as work/study programs which would have allowed her to find a less menial job more in line with her career path.

If the conversation would then be turned by people claiming that still, Derbyshire might have a point! however odious, as they themselves had experienced doors closed due to preferences for women or minorities, Riley would have none of it. It's a curious feature of all those ersatz Reagan arguments about that ersatz America he claimed as their previous address and his followers seek to return us all to: each one is distinct and sharply-edged; I think the academics use the term sui generis. Welfare sapped the souls of poor folks, but welfare for multi-national conglomerates created jobs. Smaller government equalled Freedom, except for Defense budgets. Deficit spending robbed our children and grandchildren, except when Republicans did it, so long as they remained popular. It's interesting that the original, legal argument over affirmative action--My test scores were higher!--has now become axiomatic. Meaning it conveniently applies whenever anyone other than a white male is selected for anything, so long as the thing is perceived as having some political benefit. Since when is the Court a meritocracy? We might tout the Court as the nine best legal minds in the country, if we are explaining the thing to preschoolers or feeling particularly perverse that day--surely no one who's read one of Justice Thomas' opinions can really believe it, just to use the easiest example. Presidents aren't required to nominate the best legal mind in the country anytime an appointment comes up, even if that could be quantified somehow. (Jeff Sessions--Jeff Sessions!--now tells us that Court nominees ought to be neutral!) Presidents nominate someone who fits their view of jurisprudence, and, presumably, one with a chance of surviving the confirmation process. You'd suspect that if anyone understood this it would be the American right, which has spent forty years trying to find anyone it can convince with its argument over "Originalism", and is now apparently racing against time to assure the rest of us that it's incapable of understanding anything at all. All I can figure is they're working on some sort of insanity plea.

If the Republicans left in the Senate can mount a purely political challenge and persuade enough Democrats to join in they can block the nomination. If they believe the "reverse discrimation, reverse racism" routine will do that, they're perfectly free to try (and please do). So how is addressing our unspeakable history of racial and gender discrimination unfair even on the face of it? You get your chance to reply.

Well, I mean "unfair in other than in the Reagan Anecdotal sense?" of course. It's a standard which only applies in certain circumstances: academia, Democratic Presidential appointments, anecdotal blue-collar or middle-management hiring practices in unnamed organizations are all subject to charges of reverse racism when white men don't get their way. I don't recall anybody calling Meg Whitman (former eBay CEO and staunch Republican) an affirmative action hire, or the product of preferential treatment for Ivies. I don't remember that when George W. Bush named Ricardo Sanchez commander of ground forces in Iraq one of Jonah's emailers wrote that there must be some Scots-Irish general officer somewhere who'd worked his way through West Point baling hay and now must be crying himself to sleep. I don't remember any of 'em demanding Washington draft a slow white-guy running back. Okay, except for Limbaugh. What I do remember is the bizarro-world crowing that the first Bush II administration was the "most diverse in history" and that anyone who called Colin Powell a liar or Condimelda Rice an incompetent proved that liberals are the real racists.

Whazzat you say? That's different? Sports teams, like business concerns, look only to hire the very best performer at any position? Take it from somebody who watched the Colts try to decide between Payton Manning and Ryan Leaf: there's more to it than that. It's not a matter of who scored what on the Wonderlic, though god knows we're addicted to putting big numbers on un-quantifiable experiences and pretending we've ranked 'em objectively. It's a goddam cliché that teams look for chemistry, that the veteran player who's lost a step may be a better fit than the rookie flash. Why wouldn't a faculty, or a particular field, desire diversity? Supposing your new ("new"--we've been trying to correct four-hundred plus years of injustice for almost forty, now--) geology department head or law school prof is only 98% as good as some rejected white male candidate? Suppose that by showing women, or minority students, that the doors are open you wind up recruiting someone who's 10% better than her testosterone-wielding counterparts?

I'm not saying that we've found the key that unlocks the stall to the Magic Flying Rainbow-Tailed Pony of Reasonableness. I'm saying the opposing argument is a jury-rigged white-male-supremecist argument that succeeds only when it's allowed to set the rules for the debate, and rule on the admissibility of evidence. That side went too long without real scrutiny, and as a result it's gone from Can't Carry a Tune in a Basket to today's profound deafness. Short of photographs turning up of a naked Sotomayor spending a relaxing afternoon at Michael Vick's dog park, she's the next Supreme Court justice. Oppose her how you will. But maybe you could save some of that "creative" energy to come up with a more compelling tale for your party.

Oh, Shut th' Fuck Up

Dean Barnett, "The 9/11 Generation: Better than the Boomers". Weekly Standard, July 30

IT'S already dealt with by better blogs than this one here and here and here and here and no doubt many others; I had an internet-free weekend and I'm still catching up. And one might, in fact, simply invite all the kids in the block over, show 'em that cover, and let everyone write his own critique; there's nothing in Barnett's piece that furthers the argument beyond its title. Or, to be more precise, which makes the argument. (We'd begin with an old favorite, that the Standard's warflogging editor [born December 23, 1952] repeatedly told a CSPAN audience that he "was too young for Vietnam", or that Bartlett's c.v. modestly avoids any mention of his own service. But then, we've always liked to lob a few at the broad side of the barn to warm up.)

In the 1960s, history called the Baby Boomers. They didn't answer the phone.

Over two million Americans served in Vietnam. Two-thirds of them were volunteers. (Compare WWII, where 2/3 of the sixteen million in service were draftees.) Of course they were not all Boomers; the first of those wasn't eligible for military service until 1964. We don't know how many Americans have served in Iraq and Afghanistan (at times it seems like the same 250,000 have simply shuttled between the two), but we know that the National Guard and Reserves account for roughly 40% of the their number, and that their recruitment figures are abysmal, and have been since the debacle in Iraq became clear. So either our standard is "some people showed up", in which case The Boomers wind up lookin' pretty good, or it's "some people didn't", in which case the so-called Nine Eleveners don't. And either way Barnett eats a shit sandwich.

Confronted with a generation-defining conflict, the cold war, the Boomers--those, at any rate, who came to be emblematic of their generation--took the opposite path from their parents during World War II. Sadly, the excesses of Woodstock became the face of the Boomers' response to their moment of challenge. War protests where agitated youths derided American soldiers as baby-killers added no luster to their image.

Okay, the monumental stupidity of the thing has been taken care of elsewhere, and the obvious response--that those who came to be emblematic of the Republican party escaped this "duty" with such frequency that today one may refer to them by a contemporary nickname (that would be "Chickenhawk", Mr. Barnett) and not by appeals to attendance at a forty-year-old concert--is, well, obvious. So let's ask about that "generation-defining conflict" business, shall we? Ready?

Sez who?

Who're you, Dean Barnett, who hasn't put your meat on the line in defense of a war you find vital to Our Very Survival, to tell me how I was supposed to feel about the Cold War or Vietnam? Because you've got a quiverful of third-hand opinions about them?

It is no longer necessary to try to talk sense in response to this. Even if people such as Barnett are too young to realize the truth about Vietnam and too lazy to learn, or too scared to be fully appraised, Iraq has clearly dispelled every last cherished fable about US military invincibility laid low by Fifth Columnists. The Vietnamese were hardened fighters and experienced insurgents, having fought the Chinese, the Japanese, and the French before we volunteered. Compare the mass of Iraqi citizens who at first welcomed us as liberators. The Viet Minh were ultimately supplied by the Soviets, but in the early stages of US involvement they operated a cottage armaments industry to buttress, then replace, their old French weapons. Later their main source of supply was the U.S.--chiefly through black market sales of equipment we'd given our "allies". Compare a U.S. military force driven by a single-minded administration with a rubber-stamp Congress, pulled into a quagmire by improvised devices. If in the former case we were laid low only by protesting hippies, how the hell'd we lose this one?

SOMEHOW the great proxy wars of the Cold War era were fought using very few actual Soviet troops, while the US death toll reached 90,000 in Vietnam and Korea, where we continue to support a large tripwire military presence into infinity, apparently.

For what?

For the sake of domestic politics and the liars who profit from them. One needn't actually crack a history book to understand this stuff, Mr. Barnett. No dominoes fell in SE Asia. Soviet tanks never came across the Fulda Gap. They knew--and plenty of people on our side knew, too--that they could never hope to compete long-term with the economic and military might of the US, and that a post-nuclear world wasn't worth dominating. The Cold War, from a US perspective, was the result of ideological anti-Communists gaining control of State, Defense, and Harry Truman's ears, and using a largely fictitious threat of Soviet aggression to maintain power. Its great accomplishments were the support, even the installation, of brutal military dictatorships in Greece, Turkey, and on Formosa, the propping up of the old Colonial system in Asia and Africa, and, possibly, a two-generation prolonging of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Those weren't issues I personally felt a great urge to go kill someone over. The great "generation-defining conflict" of my day was thermonuclear war. And it was clear by the late 60s, Mr. Barnett, that one did not do anything to respond to, certainly not to lessen, that threat by blindly siding with successive US administrations which fueled the conflict.

It's funny how things work out: in the horrid 60s a common refrain from the Right was that it didn't oppose government do-goodism because it disliked the poor and minorities, but rather because its intellectual superiority allowed it to predict the Unintended Consequences of such acts, which were uniformly unfortunate. Not only has that second sight been lost, (and it seems always to have had a blind spot where banging the table about military action was concerned), the ability to see actual results has abandoned them. It's curious that your Standard types never seem to catch on to this, isn't it? The older guys, the ones who were old enough to go to Vietnam and didn't, lived through it, and lived through the bull market in post-Vietnam excuse mongering, with its Librul Media and POW/MIA bracelets and Spitting on Baby Killers urban legend factory and Soviet-heroic statuary at the base of the "defeatist" Wall. Kristol will live with the impacted bolus of his cowardly lyin' about his Vietnam non-service every day of his life. It may not matter to him. But somebody, somewhere, might have considered the consequences of letting people like Barnett run into it headlong. Mr. Barnett, you are no longer the Reaganaut high-school dweeb getting even with the Stoners who got all the tail by drawing stink lines on their caricatures in your notebook.


Or are you?

Elsewhere in the News: Catholics Find Pope "Too Religious"; Ron Jeremy Wants Porn Producers To Cut Out Gratuitous Nudity.

Peggy Noonan, "Blah, blah, Reagan, blah, Reagan, blah blah: First impressions of the GOP's 2008 candidates. OJ, May 4

This is a piece about Thursday night's Republican presidential debates, but first I would like to note that the media's fixation with which Republican is the most like Reagan, and who is the next Reagan, and who parts his hair like Reagan, is absurd, and subtly undermining of Republicans, which is why they do it.

WHICH is why who does what, Peggers? Google "republican most like Reagan". You'll get a CBS piece about how it's difficult for the current crop to sound like Reagan, meaning optimistic. You'll get Ann Coulter, and a Fox News poll which actually asks the question, but you'll have to decide whether Fox qualifies as "the media" before explaining why they want to undermine Republicans. On the second page there's the Dallas Morning News, a liberal hotbed if ever there was one, and somebody in Albuquerque recapping the debate. Wow. Is anyone talking about anything else?

Say this for the Bush years: At their beginning it was still possible to wonder if there was some fiendish plan behind this sort of thing, some magic pixie dust in the formulation, some tantalizingly evident but maddeningly half-glimpsed trollery at work. Didn't they manage to turn every issue into a bumper-sticker slogan? Right to Life, the Unborn, Reverse Discrimination, Death Tax, Freedom Fighters, War on Terror? Didn't they win election after election that way, despite the obvious Eau de Snake Oil the stuff gave off? But it's now well established as the product of prodigious ignorance and an emotional and possibly chemical imbalance, perhaps, as in this case, exacerbated by injudicious application of strong drink and modern pharmacology. The last Republican Presidential candidate who can even vaguely claim The Media treated him worse than his opponent is Barry Fucking Goldwater.

They should stop it already, and Republicans should stop playing along. They should try instead a pleasant, "You know I don't think I'm Reagan, but I do think John Edwards may be Jimmy Carter, and I'm fairly certain Hillary is Walter Mondale."

See? Q.E.D. In the midst of the worst Presidency since Buchanan, which is my way of trying to be nice about it, the spectre of Jimmy Carter is still supposed to frighten little children in their beds. How badly would Carter beat Bush in an election next Tuesday? How badly would Mondale? Raise taxes? I think he could promise to confiscate all property in excess of $1000 and still carry everything outside of Dixie.

Reagan was Reagan, a particular man at a particular point in history. What is to be desired now is a new greatness. Another way of saying this is that in 1960, John F. Kennedy wasn't trying to be the next FDR, and didn't feel forced to be. FDR was the great, looming president of Democratic Party history, and there hadn't been anyone as big or successful since 1945, but JFK thought it was good enough to be the best JFK. And the press wasn't always sitting around saying he was no FDR. Oddly enough, they didn't consider that an interesting theme.

Okay, look. I'm not saying that Peggy Noonan isn't a remarkable case even when it's a buyers' market in galloping Miss Havishamitis on the Right. Yes, they know the value of a lie, and they're willing to tell one just for the exercise, let alone when they imagine some small benefit. But an adult liar is supposed to exercise some modicum of restraint. These people lie like children, and like children they've run off to some secret womb-like location to lie to each other. And that womb-like structure is Ronald Reagan. And the let JFK and FDR in when they feel like telling bogeyman stories.

What "faith in America" did Reagan "restore"? Certainly not any among his own party; they hate everything about American government--except its ability to bully ten-rate military powers, of course, now called into question--even more vehemently than they did before, and now they hate it even when they're in control. I'm not giving away any secrets by admitting that stuff was always lost on me, that at the time it had, not the feel of Rhinoceros but the vibe of the mega-promoted pop culture phenomenon. Still, I don't know anyone who became a "conservative" because of Reagan. No doubt some people did, just as there's no doubt some admirers of Beethoven out there owe it all to A Clockwork Orange, but that doesn't constitute proof of anything. I know there's a demimonde of thirty- and forty-somethings out there who claim Road to Damascus-type revelation, but their precocious supposed liberalism is never credible nor believable. David Brooks? Glenn Harlan Reynolds? Neither evinces even a passing familiarity with the Civil Rights movement; both have a political cartoonist's take on Feminism. What the hell were they so damned Liberal about in the 70s, anyway? The Reagan Era gave them the opportunity to keep dressing like their Inner Nixon Staffer but feel like they were finally trendy. It changed the things people talk about. So does every new administration.

Then there's the fictitious record of fictitious "conservative" accomplishments of the Reagan Era. Do we really need to intone the litany here? That his "Tear down this Wall!" had about as much to do with the collapse of Communism as his throwing a bottle of hair dye at it would have? Okay, okay, Reagan hated Commies. That was the guiding principle of the government of the United States of America for forty fuckin' years. We knew, absolutely, by the 1970s that the Soviet economy was going to collapse and that they could not sustain their military spending, yet the Reagan administration chose to "outspend" it militarily, for which it is often given undeserved credit. (To be clear about it, we're not suggesting Reagan should have simply ignored the Soviets, only that his wanton spending on Bright, Shiny Objects should not be credited with accomplishing something that was already happening before he was elected. The Soviets didn't bankrupt themselves trying to find an answer for Star Wars.)

We can go on and on, from running the most corrupt administration in history (present occupant excepted), to ignoring Posse Comitatus law, violating the Boland Amendment, and quite possibly the Logan Act (hey, thanks for bringing it up), to cutting and running in Lebanon, the S&L scandal, the War on Drugs Not Being Smuggled By Section 8 Marine Colonels in Administration Employ, to the simple question of why the first President hailing from the "FDR was a tool of the Communists!" end of the political spectrum turned tail the minute he met opposition to his plans to scrap Social Security. That's greatness?

Ronald Reagan's "greatness" is a product of his supporters' wishful thinking. FDR's is not a Democrat Thing. We can acknowledge that the New Deal was a mixed bag, that the Second World War is what eventually lifted the United States out of the Great Depression. But then let us also admit that some major reworking of the government was inevitable with 25% unemployment, farm prices off more than 50% in two years, and a Too Little Too Late administration and Congress tossed on its ear in the '32 elections. So let's note that whatever pummeling it's suffered while being used as a political football, under Social Security (and Medicare) we no longer have 60% of our elderly population living in poverty. The Roosevelt administration was responsible for Federal Home loans, Rural Electrification, the GI Bill, Federal Deposit Insurance, and, by extension to the Truman administration, the School Lunch program and the creation of the Centers for Disease Control. Granting different approaches to the functions of government, this still would seem to top, objectively, "Selling natural resources on Federal lands for two cents on the dollar" and "Declaring ketchup a vegetable".

And granting that there's something admirable, in a Miss Havishamish way, of the continued Republican fealty to the bankers and railroad barons of 75 years ago, we'd like to remind you, Pegs, that FDR proved a genius as a wartime leader. He made correct strategic decisions right down the line. He put the right people in the right jobs. Lend-Lease saved the Allies (over Republican opposition, we could add). His handling of the MacArthur-Navy squabbles in the Pacific was Solomonic. He kept both your boy Churchill's propensity for hare-brained Gallipoli schemes and the British desire to restore their Empire with American blood in check. He made George Marshall Chief of Staff, put Ike in charge of the Channel crossing, even saved the cracked thespian MacArthur, who wound up remaking Japan in a way no other man is likely to have done. He acted on the Einstein letter. He did all that in four years, Peggy; tell me again what Reagan did in eight.

Spring Fascism Outlook

Jonah Goldberg,"The Will of the Uniformed." Found Wherever Shit Still Floats, April 25.

REALLY, there's nothing for it but to quote the first four paragraphs:

Huge numbers of Americans don’t know jack about their government or politics. According to a Pew Research Center survey released last week, 31 percent of Americans don’t know who the vice president is, fewer than half are aware that Nancy Pelosi is the speaker of the House, a mere 29 percent can identify “Scooter” Libby as the convicted former chief of staff of the vice president, and only 15 percent can name Harry Reid when asked who is the Senate majority leader.

And yet, last week, a Washington Post -ABC News poll found that two-thirds of Americans believe that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales’s firing of eight U.S. attorneys was “politically motivated.”

So, we are supposed to believe that two-thirds of Americans have studied the details of the U.S. attorney firings and come to an informed conclusion that they were politically motivated — even when Senate Democrats agree that there is no actual evidence that Gonzales did anything improper. Are these the same people who couldn’t pick Pelosi out of a lineup? Or the 85 percent who couldn’t name the Senate majority leader? Are we to imagine that the 31 percent of the electorate who still — after seven years of headlines and demonization — can’t identify the vice president of the United States nonetheless have a studied opinion on the firing of New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias?

Oh, before we proceed, let me make clear: This isn’t a column defending Gonzales.

Of course it isn't, Jonah. Gosh, none of us expects the half-understood, tenth-generation Xerox mindless partisan drivel you spout to actually mean anything. Since we know by now you've pretty much figured out that anytime you do mean something you'll be retracting it within fifteen minutes.

Oh, and before we proceed, let's make it clear that this isn't a column shooting fish in a barrel. We're not gonna bother making Jonah eat his own words on this one, because, first, they're Jonah Goldberg's words and it's doubtful even he could survive their ingestion, and second, everybody's a hypocrite about polls. Not everybody is a stupid hypocrite about polls, mind you, but we all bask in their warm glow when they're wise enough to agree with us, and talk about how stupid the public is when they don't. It's likely Jonah Goldberg thinks 91% of Americans believe in God, and it's likely he imagines this is something significant. (And Lord, if you think Americans are ignorant about politics...) It's certain he believes Reagan's popularity was genuine and Clinton's debatable. It's Jonah. Who cares?

And this is a country where Paris Hilton is a celebrity, and people who cover Paris Hilton are celebrities, and Bode Miller is a bum for admitting he had a couple of drinks once.

(I just watched Miller winning the Super G title last month. I don't know anything about skiing, except that I've been watching it for forty-five years, but the man, when he's on, is genius.)

It's just that I'd been busy this week. I missed a couple of warnings and casually tuned in to the old Imus slot Wednesday morning to find that Smerconish guy, reportedly on a one-week tryout. The leaky apologies from Steve Capus two weeks earlier become What Has To Pass As a Major Imus Apologist Getting the Slot. Of course, a Big Go Fuck Yourself to common decency and normal brain functioning from NBC News is like a kiss from a beautiful woman. But still, who watches this guy? The target audience is the 75 of 82 people who watched Imus and now feel more put upon than ever?

I caught about five minutes, then checked back in for a couple minutes more, mostly in hope the studio had somehow caught fire. No such luck, but I did manage to miss Camille F. Paglia saying that that maniac shot up Virginia Tech because the hotties didn't come across with some mercy fucks, (and thanks again, Salon for giving our national discourse that soupçon of intellectualisme). And then later that afternoon the Indianapolis Star (motto: "We Were Gun-Totin', Anti-Fluoridation, Commie-Under-Every-Bed Home-Grown Fascist Microencephalics When That Was Considered A Bad Thing") brings me Jonah's latest ruminations.

And my one thought was, "Isn't this over yet?"

Because something is out of whack, and it may be time to take a closer look at those contrails. The natural order of things is this: Teenaged Fantasizes become Craze; Craze dies; Craze revived as slightly comic and generally misunderstood Nostalgia; Nostalgia rapidly leaves same godawful artificial taste in mouth that eating a packet of raspberry Jell-O™ would; Nostalgia is quickly backed away from in hopes that no one was watching. Thus, if you dressed like Fonzie in 1962 you were the Laughingstock of the Pack. Folkies, Hippies, Discomaniacs, Don Cornelius, you name it. If you kept your kit around long enough you'd have the chance to make a fool of yourself when a later generation picked it up as a laugh. Yet this crap--retread 80s Republicanism, something which was a trend only insofar as it could be artificially induced from native racial suspicions and the shame of Tiny Atropied Penis Syndrome--continues unabated. Grown men are paid to mime themselves as chuckled-headed teens. And with the same depth of ideas.