Lessee, Civil War? Loss. Vietnam? Loss. Iraq? Maybe We Should Let the Elitists Call the Next One.

David Brooks, "The Fighting Democrat" NYT, November 5

And thanks, I think, to Philips for sponsoring a week of free TimesSelect.

Once upon a time, the Democrats were the majority party, but then came the 1960s and many middle-class whites like Jim Webb drifted away. Webb served heroically in Vietnam and came back disgusted with the liberal elites who reviled the military and, as he wrote in 1997, “were trying to destroy the foundations of American society.”

Once upon a time some right-wing pundits could be counted upon to write interesting columns which challenged the reader whatever his political persuasion. This was, of course, some time before David Brooks filled as much of that description as he's capable of.

Can I ask again, without boring however few of you are left, just what the freakin' deal with the Sixties is with these guys? For David Brooks, born August 11, 1961, it can only be remembered, if at all, as a decade of clarinet lessons, orthodontist visits, and an introduction to the Multiplication tables, yet he can't help but write about it as if it robbed him of a) Ozzie, b) Harriet, or c) both. If he must write about it as an adult it would be nice if he'd bother to learn something, like how Once Upon A Time the half-dozen or so Negroes who were allowed to vote in the South, just a little, were all Republicans, and how they didn't drift away but were hurled bodily by the Goldwaterites.

Webb, on the other hand, may think what he likes about a decade he lived through, but I'm going to climb out on a limb and guess that Jim Webb, US Naval Academy '68, son of a career Air Force officer, admirer of Massa Robert, opponent of them Civil Rights carpetbaggers, was not exactly your average trade unionist forced to turn Nixon Republican because you couldn't tell the boys from the girls in those days.

He began to see an America riven by a social divide. On the one side were people like himself: tough, independent, hard-working traditionalists who know how to shoot, fight and endure; and on the other side were what he has at various times called the “drug-drenched,” “sex-enshrined” narcissists, who cower in their parochial elite enclaves and pass judgment on everybody else.

See Voltaire's prayer.

Webb named his son after Robert E. Lee, and wrote a book, “Born Fighting,” which is a full-throated defense of “Rednecks. Trailer-park trash. Racists. Cannon fodder. My ancestors. My people. Me.”

No, really, a full-throated defense of racism is apparently an admirable thing, provided it's at the service of some Manichaean fantasy about poor oppressed White Southern Protestant Sons of Robert the Bruce.

As Andrew Ferguson noted recently in The Weekly Standard, he took white Protestants — who have always been the villains in movies from “M*A*S*H” to “Remember the Titans” — and he described them as an oppressed minority group. And their oppressors were the highly educated liberal snobs from New York, Washington, San Francisco and L.A.

Always, since M*A*S*H. Yeesh, what a sentence. And it really is a shame Brooks is so unfamiliar with the more esoteric film fare of that era, like Clint Eastwood's overlooked Dirty Harry flicks, or the careers of Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, and that guy who used to be governor of California, or the little-known James Bond franchise. I guess he missed The Siege and Rules of Engagement. For that matter, I understand the villains of The Passion of the Christ were other than white Protestant males.

“For the last 50 years,” he wrote in “Born Fighting,” “the Left has been doing everything in its power...

Which is considerable.

"to sue them, legislate against their interests, mock them in the media, isolate them as idiosyncratic, and publicly humiliate their traditions...”

Christ Almighty, this is the sort of thing that gets praised as "a straight-shooter speaking his mind" in the likes of the Weekly Standard. I wonder at what point it will occur to these people that the reason everything they touch turns to shit, the reason they get pushed around by elitist collectivist narcissist terrorist apologists, to the extent that they do, is that being wrong at the top of your lungs will only take you so far.

Jewish culture produces a lot of lawyers, Webb has argued, but Scots-Irish culture produces fighters,...

And drunks, and pederastic priests. I love this game. The Chinese are inscrutable. Negroes are very good at basketball. Mexican food is spicy. This shit was in the New York Times.

and he has spent his life defending the interests and values of these manly, individualistic, brawling populists.

And I say it again. I will gladly stake David Brooks to an entire race weekend in the infield at Darlington, provided that he agrees to speak on the glories of Scots-Irish populism at the next NAACP convention.

He’s criticized affirmative action and women in combat.

Oh, do tell. (He's called affirmative action "state-sponsored racism", by the way, and apparently with a straight face. )

He at one time opposed the Vietnam memorial, which seemed to rebuke the warrior virtues.

Yup. We don't hear about that little sample of the manly, individualist, populist code triumphing over snobby Eastern elitist tastes these days, do we? Seem a photo of Vietnam vets reaching out to touch that godawful Soviet-realist sculpture people like Webb forced the government to erect as a tribute to their tooth-deprived hillbilly aesthetic?

“Watching the white phallus that is the Washington Monument piercing the air like a bayonet, you feel uplifted,” he said. But the “degrading ditch” of the Vietnam memorial seemed to do no such thing.

Okay, I admit it. I went through this whole thing just so I could use that quote.

And we may be about to learn if the party of Nancy Pelosi can make room for the Jim Webbs of the world. We’ve already learned that the party of George Bush and Tom DeLay did a terrible job making room for its own mavericks and moderates.

Yeah, and it's a shame your column had gone on so long there wasn't room to name any, David.

Jim Webb is a Republican running as an Opportunist. They only interest any Democrat could have in him would be in using him to take over committee chairmanships, excepting maybe the schadenfreude of watching "Presidential hopeful" George Allen, Jr. suck the gas pipe. But then there's plenty of schadenfreude available these days, Dave. You can barely scrape the damn stuff off your shoes in some spots.

This election is about the desperate need to turn out the Den of Thieves in the Capitol. "Democrat" is just the only means available to do so. That's still the party of Toothless Acquiescence to the Iraq War, the looting of the Treasury, and the Rape of Civil Rights. One more Webb or Lieberman or Crazy Zell signing on means nothing; those people are, simply, so wrong about things that "reality" will take care of them sooner or later. And patience is a virtue we elitists have had long practice of. You can wake me when the Democrats are finished throwing Bush administration officials in the slam and have moved on to putting Ken Starr and Dickie Scaife in the docket. In other words, don't threaten me with how long I might have to hold my breath, Mr. Brooks. I've already been doing it for decades.

End Times

This cheery recommendation from Amazon:

Meat Loaf is back with Bat Out Of Hell III, the long-awaited third record in the Bat Out of Hell trilogy.

Frum Here to Moronity

Via Roy, David Frum's Hypocrite Gambit in defense of Some Unnamed Hypothetical Christian Fundamentalist Leader who becomes the target of unsubstantiated charges of, oh, let's imagine a monthly crank-fueled Bonerfest with his poolboy. I started to leave a comment over there, but it went on so tediously it had to become a post. First, Frum lets us know that, of course, The Left is having a field day:

On much of the left, the reaction is gleeful delight: See! He is no better than anybody else!

Pssst. Dave. Anyone to the left of Amy Sullivan already thought that, assuming they feel like being generous, and anyone to the right, and religious, is supposed to think that, too.

Consider the hypothetical case of two men. Both are inclined toward homosexuality. Both from time to time hire the services of male prostitutes. Both have occasionally succumbed to drug abuse.

One of them marries, raises a family, preaches Christian principles, and tries generally to encourage people to lead stable lives.

The other publicly reveals his homosexuality, vilifies traditional moral principles, and urges the legalization of drugs and prostitution.

Which man is leading the more moral life? It seems to me that the answer is the first one. Instead of suggesting that his bad acts overwhelm his good ones, could it not be said that the good influence of his preaching at least mitigates the bad effect of his misconduct? Instead of regarding hypocrisy as the ultimate sin, could it not be regarded as a kind of virtue - or at least as a mitigation of his offense?

After all, the first man may well see his family and church life as his "real" life; and regard his other life as an occasional uncontrollable deviation, sin, and error, which he condemns in his judgment and for which he sincerely seeks to atone by his prayer, preaching, and Christian works.

Yet it is the first man who will if exposed be held up to the execration of the media, while the second can become a noted public character - and can even hope to get away with presenting himself as an exemplar of ethics and morality.

How does this make moral sense?

Here's a tale for you, David.

I used to be a semi-regular viewer of Bill Buckley's Firing Line, but somewhere in the first Reagan administration I began to feel that either Buckley was losing it, or the strain of defending a supposed purist Conservative administration which was proving to be among the most venal and least competent in US history was becoming too much. The last show I remember watching was a program on or around the '84 Democratic Convention in San Francisco, and Buckley jocularly posed a moral conundrum for the panel: "Could one construct a conceivable moral universe in which the moral force of Mother Teresa was subservient to that of Sister Boom-Boom?"

Older readers may recall that Sister Boom Boom had gained a measure of fame by 1984 for having run for mayor of San Francisco, and that her fifteen minutes were extended by the Democratic Convention by the Bay. A quick Googling of "William Buckley" and "Sister Boom Boom" reveals, unexpectedly, that Bill was still milking the former head of the Nun of the Above ticket for the Roman Catholic snicker quotient at least as late as 1998, or fourteen years after anyone outside of San Fran had given her another thought. Make of that what you will.

Anyway, Buckley's mock question was met with derisive laughter, and I seem to remember uttering three words as I walked over and snapped the teevee off (remotes weren't that big in those days, kids):

"Alan Turing, motherfuckers!"

Because, of course, the answer to this "absurd" moral equivalence is so sophmoric that anyone reduced to laughter at the very thought is either an illiterate or a hopeless bigot. I didn't even have Christopher Hitchens' book on Ol' Agnes in my arsenal in those days. If you couldn't imagine a possible moral universe made better because homosexuals lived a life free of persecution, shame, psychiatric intervention, or tax-free religious denunciation, and if, conversely, you couldn't imagine a possible universe in which promulgation of a false and antiquated belief system was responsible for any number of historical ills, then you weren't paying attention to the real universe you were hypothetically moving through.

So that's the simple answer, David, not that it couldn't have occurred to you if you'd tried, not that it would change that brain-dead commentary of yours if it did. The question needs to be put the other way: what, other than your claims of moral superiority, would possibly make the dishonest man the exemplar in your example? Nothing. Which side can be demonstrated to have done real harm to real individuals? Yours. And isn't courage still a moral virtue, or did that one dive down the rabbit hole right after honesty and integrity?

We don't know what more Alan Turing might have accomplished had he not been driven to suicide by the forces of law and "morality". We don't know if the proverbial cure for cancer might have been lost along with some kid imprisoned, lobotomized, or hounded to an early grave somewhere. We don't know the cost of treating people as pariahs for no good reason, the costs of leaving children in foster care, or worse, rather that letting Those People adopt, just as we'll never know the full costs of slavery and racial discrimination. But we do know that sometime, somewhere, some imbecile former speechwriter will be sure to praise a hypothetical white Southerner for recognizing his mistake while ignoring the people who suffered at his hands.

We know something else. We know the morally superior preacher of Frum's invention wasn't working as a male prostitute to earn enough money to spread the Word of God; he was living in tax-free splendor while hiring man meat on the side. How convenient. How moral. How Republican.

Belt Up

Star photo by Heather Charles

The lead story from yesterday's Indianapolis Star:

Pull 'em up, head of IPS says

Task force being formed to propose rules on appropriate dress
By Andy Gammill andy.gammill@indystar.com
November 2, 2006

Indianapolis Public Schools Superintendent Eugene White is calling for strict new rules he hopes will force girls to cover their midriffs and boys to pull up their sagging pants. White has marching orders waiting for a new dress code task force: Spruce up students' appearance. "It's going to be a new look in IPS in 2007," White said. "I think the parents on that task force know what they want to see." His main targets are students who wear inappropriate clothes, such as the pants worn by teen boys that seem to sag lower every year, he said.

Answers to your immediate questions:

• Yes, there is an election coming up in Indiana next Tuesday. Yes, many of us are aware there's a war going on, though increasingly that information is available only to those with an internet connection, a degree of curiosity about the world, and a long-term memory.

• No, our local youth did not suddenly catch up with fifteen-year-old fashion trends; they've been dressing like that just as long as children from Chillicothe to Caspar have.

• Yes, I'm as dumbfounded by the story, the timing, and its placement as you are.

Okay, as a 50-year-old white male, part of the Star's obviously preferred demographic, I guess this is supposed to make me feel a) solidarity with people who are threatened by Negro fashion choices and b) relief that the fine African-American gentleman who runs those inner-city schools is doing something about it.

Sorry, no sale. Take another look at that picture. That was the best they could do. Remember, Roman youths started wearing their togas like that just before the Fall.

[About that demographic thing: about three years ago the Star began adding Regional (read: white suburban) sections to its daily output. The composition was roughly 80% school/high school athletics/feel-good educational stories, 20% town board sewer construction debate tablings. The Star is now gearing up for separate Carmel and Fishers (read: extremely white Upper-Middle to Upper Class Suburban Republican Hellholes to my immediate north) editions. The inner city gets squat. It's the same with teevee sports coverage (less so with educational coverage, since that is mostly reserved for news, like weapons found or students molested or 16-year-old motorists who use roadside trees instead of brake pedals). Starting several years ago the major Indianapolis media suddenly decided that their mission to inform included all but dropping coverage of traditional high school sports competition taking place in the actual city where they published/were licensed in favor of taking helicopter jaunts to wherever white girls were playing seasonally-adjusted softball. It is now virtually impossible to find sports results for Indianapolis city schools unless one happens to be state-ranked or advances in a tournament. This despite the fact that, as Jonah and others have assured us, poor people all own big-screen teevees, so they can watch the news, and most have indoor plumbing with flush toilets, so they also have use for the Star.]

In the interest of unbiased reportage the Star also dedicated four whole column inches to a sidebar noting that "other schools in the area" also report some of the same clothing issues (paging Claude Rains!), but noted in the story that "outlying areas" report that clothing issues are under control. Just like news coverage of locker room sexual assault. That sort of thing goes on the inside of the second section, and when the sheriff says action will be taken in a couple days, we take him at his word and move our attention elsewhere.

And here's another interesting fact I would have learned from a longer sidebar, except I'm married to an IPS teacher so I knew it already: all of these troublesome clothing choices are already in violation of the dress code enacted in 1999. The superintendent didn't need to call a press conference, and he doesn't need to appoint a Task Force (to include "faith-based representatives"--I'm thinking of applying for the Satanist slot) to "solve" the "problem"; all he needs to do is to tell principals to enforce the existing code if they aren't already. Of course, then you don't get your name in the paper, and the white suburban demo which pays nothing in local taxes toward the operation of your district but does control access to how you get portrayed in the media, imagines you're Doing Something and doesn't ask Why It Took 18 Months. And with media assistance they'll never have to wonder why you redrew school boundaries this year in such a way that gang and neighborhood rivalries exploded in several schools and are still being brought under control, because they've never heard about it. Next year, we hope, those fights at least will look much neater.

Finally, I'm through asking for a link to the studies which show running high schools like prisons improves the education process. I'll settle now for any evidence they're even good prisons.

Lessons

Our story begins last Friday, with my Poor Wife and I watching the local news. The CBS affiliate starts off its broadcasts with a teaser of Tonight's Top Stories. It's a sentimental favorite of mine, for a number of reasons. It's the Top Eight Stories because it's Channel 8, an idea so remarkably free of cortical event (Channel 6 has weather at :06, :16, :26, etc., of the hour) you have to wonder if they're trying to attract the "pets who can operate the remote" demographic; it began a year or two back when 8, once the venerable news leader in the market but now fallen behind the even more idiotic NBC affiliate, went into full panic mode and paid some consultant several large for something called the "Working News Hour" concept, in which news hairdos walk around the studio and newsroom while trying to read and avoid furniture; because that idea lasted about eight months before they mostly sat back down again; and, particularly, because it's a quick way to see just how screwed up what used to be called "news judgment" really is these days, in convenient ordinal form.

(In fairness, this is the only local channel with a daily segment reporting on Iraq.)

So, we're sitting there at the end of our 1551st week of marriage, sort of, and one of the Top Stories concerns "a 16-year-old student who was robbed at gunpoint" outside my wife's school. I give her a look, and she gives it back. She knows nothing about it.

Now we're both on alert, my wife because she naturally wants to know the story, and me because I'm unusually sensitive to what I consider to be the racist local media portrayal of our city school system over the past thirty years. We don't have to wait long; it was the first or second story.

The toss is something about how a local mother is demanding Indianapolis Public Schools do more to protect students after her son was robbed at gunpoint, and not for the first time. My antenna began to twitch. Then it's over to the field reporter, the field in this instance being the outside of the school, where we learn...well, we actually learn very little besides the fact that Channel 8 has decided to see how much sensationalism they can milk from the story, plus the added minor detail that the robbery occurred "outside the school" only if by that you mean "somewhere else in the state". In fact, he was robbed--let's add "allegedly" to that--at his vehicle parked on a side street. Bzzzzzt! Our lead now amounts to a mother's demand that the school patrol the streets? With what, exactly? Perhaps this is a job for, I dunno, the police? Let's hear what they have to say. I'm sure a savvy reporter would have sussed out this basic tenet of our civic life. Bzzzzzt! Nothing from the police. I feel the start of a tic coming on. We close the remote with "officials at the school were unavailable for comment," with the hint of sneer that always accompanies that statement, despite the mitigating circumstance that it's 5:00 on a Friday. If you imagine that school administrators are still sitting in their offices at that point, waiting for phone calls from reporters, you...well, you're mistaken, that's what.

The exact viewing sequence gets a little fuzzy here, because my wife had the remote and her natural inclination to change the channel every fifteen seconds was magnified by her devout belief that she 1) can suck up every last detail of a story from all three channels if she switches fast enough; and 2) that the coverage on some channel other than the one she's watching will be any different than what she's already seen. I do recall watching another remote, this one from a different side of the building.

At some point, though, we get the story from the young man himself, speaking at his home with his mother in the background. He says he had a bad cold (remarkably free of symptoms, now; probably the excitement) and went to the nurse around noon and got a release from school. He left by a side door, and when he got to his car he was jumped, relieved of his money, jewelry, and car, and left in fear of his life. His mother adds that he was robbed twice at his previous school before being given a transfer for safety's sake. By now we have been informed that the young man is "a nationally-known rap artist", and there's some suggestion that jealousy is the motive.

Bzzzzzt! Bzzzzzt! Bzzzzzt!

The kid is carjacked, and so far we've seen the outside of his school and the inside of his house. No police? No discussion of the potential threat to the rest of the motoring public? Just a kid claiming he was robbed because he's a nationally-known rap artist? When was the last time they checked the batteries in the bullshit detector over there?

My wife sees the Saturday morning news on 8 (and no doubt every other channel), and reports that the robbery now took place in the school parking lot, and there's no mention of the car being stolen. So in one rather swift action we have 1) placed the criminal activity on school grounds; and 2) removed the carjacking and the responsibility to report a major felony to the authorities. Hmmm.

Only problem is, this is almost certainly bullshit, as there is a severe shortage of parking spaces, such that only seniors get a lottery chance at one. There's no special Nationally Known Rap Act section. The area is patrolled.

Naturally this was the end of the story arc as far as the locals were concerned (it never did turn up in the newspaper). And somehow my wife missed the phone call relay that was supposed to inform her of the special teachers' meeting they called about it, so she missed that, too. She did learn that the school found out about the incident because an assistant principal was returning to the building and saw four young men dash out a side door at a high rate of speed and run off up the street. He gave chase and caught them hiding in a vehicle, presumably the one which was later stolen on the news. It was our respiratory-challenged young rapper and the posse he'd rounded up after the stick-up. Maybe that's what cured his cold. Maybe that's why the school ducked comment.

She gets this story later. In the meantime she's grilling her Seniors about it. (It's art, remember; her students aren't garden-variety high school wiseasses, they're self-aware cynics.) You've got to watch the video, they tell her. Finally she relents and lets them use her computer (the unblocked one) to call up the clip.

"Look! Momma sure had time to get her hair done first!" says one. I love my wife's students.

Someone points out the mysterious white man sitting in the living room the whole time. Lawyer? PR man for nationally-known rappers? Who is this guy? How'd this story wind up on that evening's news with no police involvement?

Lesson two, straight ahead:

"What's the deal with that?" my wife asks them. If you were robbed, would you call your mother? Wouldn't you call the police?"

The look of wonderment on her face as she told me the story was more of the "why didn't I see this coming?" type than shock at the response:

"Every last black kid in that class said No," she tells me.

Shut The Fuck Up

Lock and load. And I do mean load.

Okay, so my first inclination was to write "John Kerry is an asshole" a half dozen times and be done with it. How does someone turn a one-liner into a paragraph? Why is Kerry even attempting jokes? Why hasn't he fired his staff? Better yet, why haven't they fired him?

Then I took a brief nap before dinner, and came back downstairs to find my wife had the "News" with Brian "Get the Hell Out of My Garbage Cans" Williams on, and I decided to write "John Kerry is an asshole, but why is this NBC's lead story?" eight or ten times and be done with it.

But I knew that wouldn't do, so after dinner and the Trick or Treaters were done I sat down to take a look at the Corner. And after all of about twenty seconds I made up my mind to write, "John Kerry's an asshole, this shouldn't be NBC's lead story, but what is the friggin' attraction of making a huge deal of your obviously ginned up outrage over your own willful misunderstanding of something somebody you don't like said? It's like they make no distinction over there between speaking to people and disciplining pets. But then I might have had to quote K-Lo, and I'm trying to quit.

I had pretty much decided that instead I was going to ask how it is that Laura Bush can say something she actually means (or, perhaps more accurately, that they've decided she means) which is in fact genuinely insulting and not be the lead story on NBC "News" with Rocky Raccoon, but something possessed me to check in with the Powerline Boys. And, of course, Hineyrocket never fails to disappoint:

It seems clear that the roots of Kerry's blunder--like so much else where Kerry is concerned--go back to Vietnam. It was an article of faith among liberals (and many others) at that time that the Army consisted largely of the poor--kids who couldn't get into college and thereby obtain a deferment. It was also an article of faith that non-white Americans died in disproportionate numbers in Vietnam. That turned out not to be true, and I confess that I was astonished to learn, only within recent years, that there was no such ethnic disproportion in the Vietnam dead.

Which idea gets the official Powerline Military Advisor Seal of Approval from Generalissimo Dafydd ab Hugh, the Audie Murphy of the PlayStation 2.

So, then, okay. I should have known. Let's try this again:

1. The closest either of you fucks ever got to military service was watching shit blow up at the local Googleplex. It doesn't require you to keep your opinions to yourselves. But coupled with your military jock sniffing it should at least require you to stop and think one minute before you slam those who actually served. (The Generalissimo throws in Jimmy Carter, John Murtha, and Max Cleland for good measure, and it probably just didn't occur to him to suggest that John Glenn's spaceflights were faked.)

2. You don't know shit about Vietnam, and my suspicion is you care even less, except when it's time to trot out any of several volumes of Right Wing Vietnam myths. And this is one of them. From HistoryNet.com:

CASUALTIES BY RACE: ENLISTED MEN

Of all enlisted men who died in Vietnam, blacks made up 14.1 percent of the total. This came at a time when blacks made up 11 percent of the male population nationwide. However, if officer casualties are added to the total, then this overrepresentation is reduced to 12.5 percent of all casualties. Of the 7,262 blacks who died, 6,955, or 96 percent, were Army and Marine enlisted men. The combination of the selective service policies with the skills and aptitude testing of both volunteers and draftees (in which blacks scored noticeably lower) conspired to assign blacks in greater numbers to the combat units of the Army and Marine Corps. Early in the war (1965 and 1966) when blacks made up about 11 percent of our Vietnam force, black casualties soared to more than 20 percent of the total. Black leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., protested, and President Johnson ordered black participation in combat units cut back. As a result, the black casualty rate was reduced to 11.5 percent by 1969.

CASUALTIES BY RACE: OFFICERS

During the Vietnam War, the Navy and Air Force became substantially white enclaves - enlisted and officer casualties were 96 percent white. Indeed, officer casualties of all branches were overwhelmingly white. Of the 7,877 officer casualties, 7,595, or 96.4 percent, were white; 147, or 1.8 percent, were black; 24, or 0.3 percent, were Asian; 7, or .08 percent, were Native American; 104, or 1.3 percent, were unidentified by race.

We get all that, did we? It wasn't "an article of faith" that African-Americans died in disproportionate numbers. It was a fact. A fact that shamed President Johnson so much that he took action. Blacks still died in higher proportion to their percentage in the population, even when we add in the officer corps to which they were basically excluded. It was a war which made extensive use of helicopters and of bombs and defoliants dropped from planes. And the ARNV had the ability to shoot them down. And the pilots who died were white, because all officers were white. For the terms of the argument it gives an entirely false picture to dilute the number of African-American causalities that way, but even so, blacks died in greater proportion than their percentage of the population.

And which, one is tempted to say, demonstrates again the real commitment to Our Troops among the White Cavaliers of the 101st Keyboarders™.

And again, if you knew anything about it you'd know this. College deferments were ended in 1968, because of the unfairness of the system. That's why George W. Bush ended up at the front of the TANG line, and why Danny Quayle pushed a typewriter in the Indiana Guard. Because they couldn't just keep taking classes.

Really, boys. You got a mulligan. You didn't deserve one, but you got it. You got an opportunity to watch someone else do your fighting again with the same lousy result. It's way past time you stop lecturing people who know more than you do. And it's time to admit to yourselves that making shit up is just increasing the amount of shit you find yourselves in.

OH YEAH, I FORGOT: If Mr. Hineyrocker had dropped by Memorial Hall at Harvard he might have noticed that of the 407,000 US military deaths in WWII, 697 were Harvard students. Of the 58,000 dead in Vietnam? Twenty-two.

Parson Weems Does Selma

Kathleen Parker, "When good men look away, " October 25

Seeing Christopher Dickey's review of Doug Marlette's novel Magic Time reminded me I let last week's little gem from Parker slip away. It wasn't really worthy of attention on its own terms--to my knowledge that's pretty much the same thing as saying "it was a Kathleen Parker column"--but it's an interesting sociological document just the same.

In brief, Marlette's novel concerns a Mississippi-born journalist working in New York during the first Gulf War. When terrorists blow up an art museum he's drawn back into the Mississippi Burning of his youth, when his activist first love was among the four people killed in a church bombing. Parker:

Visiting history through Ransom's eyes, we see the affinity between those who murdered civil rights workers and those who blow up art museums. Or fly airplanes into buildings. Both are fueled by resentment and nihilism; both wrap themselves in a mantle of religion.

Same story, different sheets.

Great line; I wonder if she thought of "Same sheets, different day" first and rejected it as too rude for the delicate digestions at Townhall?

I've now read half a dozen actual reviews of the book and none of them treats the terrorist story as anything more than a catalyst for the main plot, but who knows, maybe Parker is right. Or maybe not:

Marlette is especially riveted by the "Good German phenomenon" -- how good people can avert their gaze from horror. How did decent people look the other way when Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney, young men in their 20s, were savagely beaten and shot to death?

Those questions inevitably lead to others. Forget what Jesus would do. What would Allah do?

I dunno. Whaddya want them to do? They've reportedly been watchin' human idiocy at work for a long time, so they're probably beyond peeing their sheets over it.

This is the lesser of our two sociological themes here, though I'm not sure it's the minor one in the grand scheme of things: the remarkable rewriting of WWII as a cartoon battle of Good Mouse vs. Bad Cat. Fascism is now Stalinism, Chamberlain an animated stick figure who single-handedly capitulated to the Nazi Holocaust, before Sir Winston, Pope Infallible I of the Neocon Church, jumped up to save the day. And we might look back with some nostalgia at the early days of the fiasco of an occupation in Iraq, when the warfloggers invented an entire German resistance movement ("The Werewolves") out of a single murder and some graffiti, in order to explain a few minor glitches in the Bush administration plan. Okay, that last was a bit of overstatement. Strike "plan".

Now as to "Good German". Marlette may indeed be interested in the phenomenon; he may even make use of it in the fictional Delta of the mid-60s. But tell me what alternative history Parker's been smoking? "Good Germans" did not avert their gaze from horror. They were active participants. They danced around the bonfires of "foreign" books. They smashed the shops, burned the Synagogues, and beat Jews to death on Kristallnacht. They heiled their lungs out and bought up the souvenir tee shirts at Fuhrerfest '33. They ratted on relatives, friends and neighbors for thoughtcrime. They drove the trains to the concentration camps. They flocked to the cinema. They sent their children to breeding camps, or into the Hitlerjungen, and when the wind was right they could smell the ovens, twenty-four hours a day.

The religious fanatics who wage war against the West are no less certain of their cause than were the Ku Klux Klaners who bombed black churches and believed that the Jews were destroying their civilization....

Southern white Christians abdicated their moral responsibility and demonstrated their cowardice and complicity by allowing Klansmen to hijack their religion and terrorize blacks in the name of their Jesus. If Muslims want theirs to be taken seriously as the religion of peace they claim it to be, they will have to marginalize and condemn those they insist have hijacked their religion.

Otherwise history will judge them as we have judged our own. In the final analysis, good people do not turn away.

Drat, I knew I'd leave something off that list. How 'bout "the idea that Nazi Germany (and by extension Italy?) wasn't a Christian nation"?

I mean, if you're going to condemn a billion people stretching from North Africa to the Philippines, isn't it fair to ask how history will judge the Good Christians who conducted two World Wars, enslaved millions, and practically wiped out the entire native population of the Americas? Or is this another case of history beginning when we say it does?

Regardless, I'm not going to take lessons in geopolitics from someone who either doesn't know her own history of a mere forty years ago, or picked it up in a work of fiction, or chooses to rewrite it. The idea that racism and segregation thrived in the South because the basically decent people let a few hot-headed Klansmen run amok is beyond ludicrous; it's an insult to the incredible courage and perseverance of the Movement. Klansmen may have been involved in many of the most-remembered attacks of the era, but it wasn't the Klan that attacked marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge; it wasn't the Klan that rioted at Ole Miss or blocked the school door in Alabama. It was ordinary decent Christian citizens who refused service to Nigras at hotels and restaurants and public restrooms, and ordinary Southerners who poured molasses on the heads of lunch-counter demonstrators or stabbed them with lit cigarettes. It was the Episcopal Church in Alabama which turned away its own clergy from services. It was John Edgar Hoover who pored over tapes of Dr. King's sex life but refused to warn him about credible death threats the Bureau turned up. It wasn't the Klan which dutifully questioned King's "ties to known Communists" in the New York Times, or the Herald Tribune, or grilled him on in interminably on Meet the Press. It's not the Klan which has erected statues of Nathan Bedford Forrest in every public park in Dixie.

Yes, of course, there were some brave Southern whites who spoke up, and many more who remained silent out of fear. Events like the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, and the bombing of 16th Street Baptist, opened a lot of eyes. But to suggest that most simply turned away from a system they knew was wrong, rather than being active supporters of segregation, just flies in the face of of the brave struggle for civil rights, a struggle by and large fought by African Americans. Ms Parker, maybe it's time to switch to non-fiction. In your reading and your columns.

Happy Birthday

Frances Ann Lebowitz
born October 27, 1950

Is An Idea Officially Past It's Sell-by Date Once Jonah Goldberg Has Adopted It?

Jonah Goldberg, "The Great Paradox of Political Economy: A big-picture look." October 25

Stephen Colbert: Are there monkeys as smart as you?

Peter Agre: I'm sure there are quite a few, quite a few.

Colbert: Oh really? Do they give a Nobel prize for throwing your own feces?

Agre: That's the Economics prize, I think.

No, they don't bother with editors at NRO--is there anyone left in the marketplace who's concerned about reputation?--but you'd still imagine that "A big-picture look" would just feel wrong to anyone who reads at a tenth-grade level. "That's Jonah Goldberg," we imagine some NRO staffer instructing the new intern. "He's our big-picture looker-atter."

Of course there's little enough danger we would be dealing with The Big Picture anyway. Instead it's another episode of Pop Statistics From Some Right-Wing Publication I Was Reading in the Crapper, seasoned with the brief Right Blogostan viral infection of a couple weeks back, the Things Are Better Than Ever Because Poor People Have Cell Phones idiocy:

To understand how subjective poverty in America is, one need only recognize the fact that most rich people from a century ago would be considered poor by today’s standards, and today’s poor would be considered rich by the standards of 1900.

Although, leave it to Jonah to take a misapplied mundanity and turn it into a sweeping vista of pure stupidity. This is how we understand how subjective poverty is in America. Because only in America has technological progress marched forward. Because it is a distinctly American trait that our socio-economic measures are biased against the Right.

In 1900, 2 percent of homes had electricity, and 1 out of 10 homes had flush toilets. Today, pretty much all of them do. In other words, the tangible goods that defined wealth have been democratized.

No, Dillweed, in other words in 98% of localities in the continental United States you can't build, sell, or rent a house without indoor plumbing. It's a cultural advancement, such as it is, and not a technological one; yours is the side which argues that property rights ought to include renting a house with no toilets and letting the market decide. In 1900 most city streets were full of horseshit, much like your columns are today. Typhoid Mary was working as a cook. It's not like some sudden technological breakthrough took the scales from everyone's eyes. Zoning laws, health inspections, public sanitation, standardized safety regulations...these things required a change in public outlook, not a wait until there was enough profit in it for someone to invent a solution.

Maybe we just weren't forceful enough about this before. Okay, on the simplest level: are you saying you'd rather be an inner-city dwelling busboy working double shifts in 2006 than be John Pierpont Morgan soaking in your solid-gold bathtub in your private rail car in 1902, with a nubile bathing attendant on either side or you, because the latter couldn't buy the Complete Season I of Scrubs on DVD?

It's tautological. It's utterly meaningless to treat some hypothetical person as if he/she were stuck in one exact moment in time and were screaming to get out. It's just the flip side of the old joke about the kid who tells his parents he wishes he'd been born in 1776. "Why, son?" they ask. "Because I wouldn't have to study so much history." Yes, poverty is relative. The rest of the world already gets it.

And goddammit, Jonah, you're a middle-aged man. You may not remember a world before cable, but you might dig back and recall the personal computer or the home video system. Were people at the time saying, "Shit, I don't want this crappy 128K thing" ? No, they were rushing to get their hands on the latest technological marvel. It's fucking relative.

The very idea of people living their lives based on technological advancement is barely a hundred years old. Mass urbanization began in this country in the first two decades of the 20th century. Long-term food preservation by canning is scarcely older. We now feed many more people using smaller and smaller plots of land. As a result, we now have many more people. We've compensated for this party by our choice of crops, particularly corn. And corn requires enormous amounts of nitrogen. And we supply that nitrogen--plants can't take it directly out of the atmosphere--by industrial processes which use enormous amounts of energy. And that energy comes from fossil fuels.

Okay, okay, you don't care, because a) you've got an iPod nobody in 1973 could have bought at any price and b) your standard response to any sort of limit on technological development is to close your eyes, plug your ears, and insist that technology will solve every problem technology faces, because otherwise there wouldn't be a Star Trek. And that's fine by me. I just mean to point out here that you're telling, at best, half the story from the perspective of the small-town Jaycee civic booster. There are drawbacks and limitations to technology. Nuclear weapons. Thalidomide. 8-Tracks.

Now, I'm not as phlegmatic about the other unspoken part of this argument as I am about scientific illiteracy in a science-fiction fanboy, or about modern man congratulating himself for his great perspicacity in being born recently. And that's the fact that much of the improvement of life for the poor, or Lucky Duckies, if you will, is a result of political action, the sort of political action your lot opposed at every turn until it comes time to pat yourself on the back for it. 40 hour, 5 day work weeks. The end of child labor and unsafe working conditions. Rural electrification. Programs to end smallpox, rickets, and many other disease and nutritional deficiencies in poor children. Unleaded gasoline is a government mandate, not a technological breakthrough, and as a result (and the mandated elimination of lead in paint) there's much less lead poisoning in children than fifty years ago. And, of course, the New Deal and Great Society programs which have reduced poverty and provided access to medical care for the poor. Of course we still have an abysmal child mortality rate, and poor nutrition, and the least cost-efficient healthcare, and the most overpriced prescription drugs, and a shameful discrepancy in public education between rich and poor, but the last twenty-five years of retrenchment have given you the opportunity to blame all that on the children who suffer it. Let 'em eat cake. Let 'em watch teevee. Let 'em sprout gills. Right, fat boy?

What a sad, bumptious, unconcerned little fellow you are, Jonah Goldberg. What an unintentional argument against every sort of privilege you claim as a right. What an antidote to American exceptionalism! The more you crow the more we're reminded that crow should be your steady diet.

Spam Poetry Friday

A disturbed coup. I can Hold your ancestors
Evenly, surely.
Kindly help me out with this transfer.
There's no earthly reason why you should.

OK, you win.
Time for a change.

I want you
Ye pointed thing,
Dyslexic weapon,
Spongecake, dressmake.
A elusive, javelin--freewheel! Parachuting institutional.
Drop 10 pounds in 7 days!


Bentham and profligacy
Hey there HELP.

Gnat elastic--airtight.
It's scissor and Bizet--Hey!
caries try proliferate; account access is limited.
new password: weep.

Free and
Gliding
Web-footed
or
Kabaddi.

Adult material
Barbecue Tools
finished cleaning lawn
I NEED YOUR URGET ASSISTANCE.

OK.

You.

Win.

Rush to Judgment Day

Sure, leave it to the Republicans to come up with an attack ad featuring the mild-to-moderately mentally deficient, whom it's impossible to attack and ridiculous to try to rebut. They told the one guy there this was about human cloning, fer chrissakes. And he swallowed it. How do you argue with that?

Well, we did a little research. First, all four of those people became American citizens at birth. Not a one of them bothered to apply for citizenship in utero. And none of them is either from Missouri or has a permanent residence in Missouri. Not sure why that's important, but Michael J. Fox was born a Canadian. In each case it's fair to ask why.

Now, Jeff Suppan, he's a baseball player. I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but professional baseball players are the stupidest athletes in the world. It's a scientific fact. The guys with triple-digit IQs become baseball nerds, like George Will. Kurt Warner's a quarterback. They're usually a bit smarter than the average ballplayer, but not after eight or ten concussions. Jim Caviezel, the actor, is well-known for playing Jesus both on and off screen, and Patricia Heaton has been conveniently identified in the graphic as having graced the long-running sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond. Quite a tribute to your celebrity there, ma'm. The guy from G.I. Jane didn't need a mnemonic device.

Several doctors and other experts noted off the record that the four appeared to be heavily medicated in order to appear more normal. "Look, they're all standing or sitting more or less straight, although they did have to prop poor Kurt Warner against a wall, and they're not gesticulating wildly or passing out pamphlets or calling out to be raptured or anything. I'm pretty sure that's for effect," one told me.

We're not calling anybody's sincerely held beliefs into question here, oh no. It's just that giving all those Parkinsons, and Alzeheimer's patients, victims of spinal cord injuries, and countless others the hope that Jesus will be here soon to toss all the medical professionals who tried to cure them into the Lake of Everlasting Sterno just raises expectations that, in the end, will only be cruelly dashed.

Where'd Everybody Go?

David Brooks, "Thinning The Herd"
David Brooks, "Where the Right Went Wrong," review of Andrew Sullivan's The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back,
New York Times October 22

The source of our amusement, this time: the man who's written three books which divine your political leanings according to the relative prevalence of crabgrass on your lawn now tries to tell us there's no such thing as the Religious Right:

As any number of historians, sociologists and pollsters can tell you, the evangelical Protestants who now exercise a major influence on the Republican Party are an infinitely diverse and contradictory group, and their relationship to these hyperpartisans is extremely ambivalent.

Free $28.95 Surf and Turf at the Chambersburg Red Lobster with equal or greater purchase (limit one) for:

If [Sullivan] had spent more time with the people he describes as fundamentalists, he would have found that this category has no meaning.

'Member when the non-existent Religious Right dragged Bush back from Crawford to express his ambivalence about the Schiavo case?

Many [evangelicals] disagree with him (and me) about gay marriage. Many people do believe that truth is revealed, and that one must work one’s way toward it. And yet to divide the world between fundamentalists and autonomous free thinkers is to create a dichotomy that distorts more than it reveals.

Red Stater, remove thy beer goggles:

As insular Democrats know little about what life is like in flyover country, so insular Republicans know little about how people think in the suburban Northeast, where blue New York Times delivery bags dot the driveways each morn.

Thanks for the 47th tour of your souvenir concert t-shirt drawer:

“The conservatism I grew up around” Sullivan writes on the second page of the book, “was a combination of lower taxes, less government spending, freer trade, freer markets, individual liberty, personal responsibility and a strong anti-Communist foreign policy.” His heroes were Thatcher, Reagan, Solzhenitsyn, Havel, Hayek and Orwell.

Solidarity with our oppressed furry brothers:

I know only two self-confessed Oakeshottians in Washington — Sullivan and me. And yet Oakeshott’s modesty can never be the main strain in one’s thinking, though it should always be the warning voice in the back of your mind.

Michael Moore, high caloric intake of:

The people who are most destructively closed-minded in America are people like Donald Rumsfeld ,Ann Coulter and Howard Dean , and they are not exactly religious nuts. [original punctuation preserved]

Humor, Most Unintentional from a man who got every detail wrong about Franklin County, PA and found a byline at the Times waiting for him as a result:

As Robert Lang, the superlative suburban specialist at Virginia Tech, notes, when people mess up a project in an office park, there are consequences. But Donald Rumsfeld never gets fired. Jerry Bremer and Tommy Franks get medals.

Obligatory Burke reference, (1600 words in):

Conservatives need to relearn the lessons of Burke and Hayek — that the world is complex, and efforts to transform it will have unintended consequences, most of them bad. But if American conservatives give up their optimism and their universal creed, they will once again be a small sect at the fringes of political life.