Stinky heads to the vet to check on the progress of his thyroid treatment in an hour; can't be fed, can't go out, and the yowling about that has stopped, meaning he's figured out Something is Up and he's probably hidden himself under the basement stairs and I'd better start trying to get him out.
Instead, dedicated to Corndog and the emailed vitriol he received for his ruthless attack on Anne Murray, here's the long-awaited first installment of the idea I had when that "Top 100 Hits of the Year You Graduated from High School" thing first started going around. I didn't listen to Top 40 radio when I was in high school. Sixth grade! I thought. That's when I was most attuned to radio tastes. Let's look at Nos. 1-10 and see how long that lasted:
1. The Ballad Of The Green Berets, Sgt. Barry Sadler
Oooh, two seconds into the first round and a straight right finds his nose! He's out! This one is over before it begins! Wait...wait...he's struggling to his feet...
But he's on Queer Street from here on out. Two positive things about this: one, it's a snappy answer to all those people who think, or pretend to think, that hippies ruled the universe in the 60s. Second, Sadler (actually billed as Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler, and a genuine Green Beret), imagined he was going to become a singing sensation, so I bet there's a cover of "Yesterday" out there somewhere begging for re-release.
2. Cherish, Association
California turtleneck-dickie folk, treacly enough to give you diabetes, only marginally redeemed by the fact that in their first hit, "Along Comes Mary," the Mary in question was Mary Jane.
3. (You're My) Soul And Inspiration, Righteous Brothers
Without checking the discography, I think we're nearing the end of the divinely-inspired melding of the "Little Latin Lupe Lu" guys and the "Tossed on the Fish Wrap Pile After the Beatles Arrived" Phil Spector. It's hard to believe they argued. This is probably my least favorite of their hits together, but man, that was a helluva comet while it burned.
4. Monday, Monday, The Mama's and The Papa's
I don't think they used apostrophes. Never liked 'em, except for Cass' pipes, though I later came to appreciate John Phillips production a little.
5. 96 Tears, ? and The Mysterians
In late '66, now in seventh grade, our music teacher was the worst maniac I ever took a class from (he died two years later of a brain tumor). He set aside one day for the class to bring in its favorite songs, and naturally somebody brought this garage band classic. At the "Ooooh!" near the end I thought he appeared to be having a seizure. I think his intention had been to harangue us into next week about our musical tastes, but it wound up overwhelming him and I just remember him sputtering for the rest of the semester.
I took "Bob Dylan's 116th Dream", and the line, "They asked me for some collateral and I/Pulled down my pants" landed me in the principal's office. Which was okay, actually, because he scratched the hell out of the album when he ripped the tonearm off it, and my Mom made 'em buy me a new one. Anyhow, Love's "My Little Red Book" beats this all t' hell.
6. Last Train To Clarksville, The Monkees
I cannot bring myself to loathe these guys, especially considering that in the history of prefab pop music they're head and shoulders above anything else, from the Bobby Rydell-Frankie Avalon teen idol days through the American Idol quagmire. This, their first hit, is not their best and is far from their worst, but the scientifically measured point at which dumb but well-crafted pop is supplanted by mindless shake-yer-ass is six drinks, at least for me.
7. Reach Out I'll Be There, Four Tops
After the two geniuses, Marvin and Smokey, and Eddie Kendricks' falsetto, the Tops were the best thing Motown had goin', but they always got the b-material. My guess is Levi Stubbs refused to sleep with Barry Gordy.
8. Summer In The City, Lovin' Spoonful
John Sebastian is one hell of a songwriter ("beach boy" and "hoi polloi" is a rhyme worthy of John Hiatt), and this is the band at the height of its powers, before limited musicianship and excessive good-timey-ness caught up with them.
9. Poor Side Of Town, Johnny Rivers
Does anybody remember Johnny Rivers, except maybe for "Secret Agent Man"? He was a rock-and-roll Zelig, from go-go Chuck Berry cover specialist to teen idol/Gene Pitney type balladeer, to psychedelica, to retro rocker; when I finally lost track of him completely in the early 70s he was a sort of proto-John Denver hippie lite. This is one of the ballads, competently done, over orchestrated, but with his fine soft soulful Southern voice.
10. California Dreamin', The Mama's and The Papa's
Again with the apostrophes. Aw, well, their first hit, probably their best.
NEXT: Where the hell are all the English blokes?
(From Help! [1966]:
Scotland Yard Man: How long do you think you'll last?
John: Great Train Robbery, ay? How's that one going?)
Friday, April 21
Thursday, April 20
Like Trying To Resuscitate Pork Chops
Peggy Noonan: "Y'know that steely-eyed, religious, High Noon, straight-talkin' cowboy of a flyboy of a President I've been lionizing for six years? Well, he's taken it a bit too far. Of course, that's just his personal stamp."
Peggy reveals that while other Presidents have also put their personal stamp on the office--and backs this startling insight up by actually naming several of the more recent ones--none has ever tried this by being completely disengaged from reality before. (This leads, by the way, to one of those amusing Psych 101 experiments, where Noonan describes the same precise trait as benign toleration or sadism, depending on whether it was Reagan or FDR who exhibited it.)
The more I read Noonan on a regular basis, as opposed to when somebody's link made me curious enough to rubberneck at the scene of the accident, the more I find that my favorite moments are not the ecstatic religious hallucinations, but the more natural, down-to-earth, sitting-around-the-hearth-completely-insane moments when she spews some orthodox "conservative" history she hasn't bothered to check:
Well, the rules of engagement in Iraq, at least initially, were said to be the most stringent US troops ever fought under, and somebody issued those instructions. The Desert One forces were there to rescue 52 American hostages, and they, not the hostages, were expendable. That's the point behind those rules; the minute they fired on a crowd those hostages would have been dead. As it was, despite a failed military operation all 52 eventually came out alive, thanks in no small part to President Carter's restraint, and only slightly delayed thanks to your boy Ron.
The Iraq rules of engagement, in contrast, look suspiciously like an attempt to invade a country without making it look too much like war, or at least one that civilians might get caught up in. There's a real distinction between what a commando force might have to endure on a mission and the average soldier does on a day-to-day basis.
Back in the day I used to ask the screaming rightists I knew whether they'd have rather seen the hostages killed, but that was at a time when people took a single position and tried to be consistent about it. Today's "conservative" would rather the military operation failed, the hostages executed, and then everybody rescued by Ronald Reagan. At the head of his own squadron of tanks.
Peggy reveals that while other Presidents have also put their personal stamp on the office--and backs this startling insight up by actually naming several of the more recent ones--none has ever tried this by being completely disengaged from reality before. (This leads, by the way, to one of those amusing Psych 101 experiments, where Noonan describes the same precise trait as benign toleration or sadism, depending on whether it was Reagan or FDR who exhibited it.)
The more I read Noonan on a regular basis, as opposed to when somebody's link made me curious enough to rubberneck at the scene of the accident, the more I find that my favorite moments are not the ecstatic religious hallucinations, but the more natural, down-to-earth, sitting-around-the-hearth-completely-insane moments when she spews some orthodox "conservative" history she hasn't bothered to check:
He [Bush] is not, like Jimmy Carter, a man who seeks to gain a sense of control by focusing on details. He would not, as Mr. Carter did at Desert One, instruct the leaders of a high-risk military rescue mission not to shoot on any Teheran crowds if they move against the mission. (See Mark Bowden's recounting of that failed endeavor in this month's Atlantic.)
Well, the rules of engagement in Iraq, at least initially, were said to be the most stringent US troops ever fought under, and somebody issued those instructions. The Desert One forces were there to rescue 52 American hostages, and they, not the hostages, were expendable. That's the point behind those rules; the minute they fired on a crowd those hostages would have been dead. As it was, despite a failed military operation all 52 eventually came out alive, thanks in no small part to President Carter's restraint, and only slightly delayed thanks to your boy Ron.
The Iraq rules of engagement, in contrast, look suspiciously like an attempt to invade a country without making it look too much like war, or at least one that civilians might get caught up in. There's a real distinction between what a commando force might have to endure on a mission and the average soldier does on a day-to-day basis.
Back in the day I used to ask the screaming rightists I knew whether they'd have rather seen the hostages killed, but that was at a time when people took a single position and tried to be consistent about it. Today's "conservative" would rather the military operation failed, the hostages executed, and then everybody rescued by Ronald Reagan. At the head of his own squadron of tanks.
Wednesday, April 19
Olio: Hoosier Edition
• The city of Kokomo, which is not a Caribbean island but is an under-appreciated euphemism for sexual intercourse, has been ordered to pay $11,000 in attorney's fees for the legal representation of 16-year-old Kokomo Western High School student Ryan Nees. Attorney William Groth had taken the case pro-bono.
Nees made national headlines last year when he sued the city under Indiana public access law for its refusal to hand over its email list. He had subscribed to the city newsletter, and shortly thereafter began receiving campaign messages from Mayor Matt McKillip. Kokomo lost that case earlier this year. Nees said he actually favored keeping such lists private, but that if one party had access to them for political purposes, other parties should as well.
Never one to ignore public concerns, America's Third-Worst State Legislature™ promptly amended the law to keep email lists private. An amendment to the bill which would have prohibited political use of such lists was...defeated.
• The four juveniles detained in the Johnson County Little Columbine case will not be tried as adults. Johnson County Prosecutor Lance Hamner, who originally jumped at the chance to announce his office would seek to try the four in adult court, while simultaneously missing the opportunity to inform the public the four were special education students, told the Star the decision was based on the just-returned psychological evaluation of the boys and their criminal histories:
Incidentally, I had an email exchange with Paul Bird, the Star reporter who wrote or co-wrote most of its coverage. Specifically, I asked him why it took nearly three weeks before the information that the boys were special education students came out. I was not particularly blaming the paper, and my email mentioned that the prosecutor, the sheriff, and the Center Grove principal had all failed to mention that fact while fanning the initial flames. Mr. Bird wrote back to tell me that information had been in the original story. I wrote back to him saying that I had copies of the original story, the later online update, and the next day's longer coverage, and it wasn't in any of them. I think at that point he misplaced my addy.
• Meanwhile, on Monday local teevee news caught up with the story that Indianapolis Public Schools ordered the elimination of forty-two percent of the teachers at one high school, and 35 percent at another. None of those teachers was informed whether they'd have a job next year. Channel 8's Leslie Olsen (who my wife says is the best of the locals by far) says that IPS has tried to keep the story quiet.
Or until Tuesday they did. The spur apparently found someplace tender, as Channel 13 was reporting at first that layoffs might not be a large as feared, and then that someone downtown had used the wrong figures and the numbers were out of whack.
We'll see. Official pink slips must reach teachers by May 1.
Olsen actually took a swipe at tackling the issue head-on on Tuesday, when she covered "teacher complaints" that IPS administration was bloated at a time when teaching staffs were being skeletonized due to budget cuts. Olsen engaged in a little faux-balance, reporting that the state education website showed administrative positions down slightly from last year, but the fact is that new Superintendent Eugene White has added several layers of insulation around his own office, and nobody's been talking about cutting that by forty percent.
It's a massive cluster-fuck in an already troubled and impoverished system, and a prime example of how the real problem in public education, pace John Stossel, can generally be traced to its administration, and that to control by elected officials, not convenient bugbears like the International Teachers' Union Conspiracy.
Naturally I'll have more to say about this, but for now another mention of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Small Schools Initiative, which the outgoing superintendent signed IPS up for whole-hog beginning this year. IPS was by far the largest, and the only major urban school district to do so in all its high schools at once.
It's predicated on the idea that dividing large schools into smaller "learning communities" allows teachers to get to know students better and be more attentive to individual needs. It's an $11.3 M project locally, administered by something called the Center of Excellence in Leadership of Learning at the University of Indianapolis.
Okay so far, except for that Operation Infinite Justice moniker. But first of all, the money doesn't go into the classroom. Students won't see a penny of it. It goes for training and conventions and junkets, and the administration of the program. For this we completely reorganized our high schools from one year to the next, which resulted in horrible turf wars at my wife's school, which was said to have been the best-implemented of the bunch.
And it's interesting that now that we're facing an increase in class sizes nearing 50% in a lot of cases, the U of I professor who heads the boondoggle program says that research indicates larger high school class sizes can still work within the small school framework if class sessions are longer. Which you'd think sorta defeated the idea behind "small learning communities", even if you weren't wondering why they didn't just propose making classes longer in the first place, or why a professor of education doesn't seem to know that class time is a matter of law and not amenable to instantaneous change just to keep someone's reputation from taking a hit.
• Oh, and our voting machines are so fucked that school board ballots in 150 precincts will have to be counted by hand. Marion County Clerk Doris Anne Sadler, who has now presided over three screwed-up elections, but, on the plus side, is pretty hot for a County Clerk, tried to explain how this problem, unlike all the other problems which have cropped up statewide during testing, was not the fault of software provider ES&S (Motto: "We're Not Diebold, We Just Have Interlocking Directorates"). Unfortunately, my Gibberish is a little rusty. It sounded like she was saying the school board races were too complicated for the software, and that there would have been the same problem with the old lever machines. Either that, or she was asking for some Valium in Esperanto.
Nees made national headlines last year when he sued the city under Indiana public access law for its refusal to hand over its email list. He had subscribed to the city newsletter, and shortly thereafter began receiving campaign messages from Mayor Matt McKillip. Kokomo lost that case earlier this year. Nees said he actually favored keeping such lists private, but that if one party had access to them for political purposes, other parties should as well.
Never one to ignore public concerns, America's Third-Worst State Legislature™ promptly amended the law to keep email lists private. An amendment to the bill which would have prohibited political use of such lists was...defeated.
• The four juveniles detained in the Johnson County Little Columbine case will not be tried as adults. Johnson County Prosecutor Lance Hamner, who originally jumped at the chance to announce his office would seek to try the four in adult court, while simultaneously missing the opportunity to inform the public the four were special education students, told the Star the decision was based on the just-returned psychological evaluation of the boys and their criminal histories:
"In these cases, none of the kids had any significant juvenile record," Hamner said.
Although the psychological profiles are confidential, the information in them would impel a court to retain the cases in the juvenile system, he added.
Incidentally, I had an email exchange with Paul Bird, the Star reporter who wrote or co-wrote most of its coverage. Specifically, I asked him why it took nearly three weeks before the information that the boys were special education students came out. I was not particularly blaming the paper, and my email mentioned that the prosecutor, the sheriff, and the Center Grove principal had all failed to mention that fact while fanning the initial flames. Mr. Bird wrote back to tell me that information had been in the original story. I wrote back to him saying that I had copies of the original story, the later online update, and the next day's longer coverage, and it wasn't in any of them. I think at that point he misplaced my addy.
• Meanwhile, on Monday local teevee news caught up with the story that Indianapolis Public Schools ordered the elimination of forty-two percent of the teachers at one high school, and 35 percent at another. None of those teachers was informed whether they'd have a job next year. Channel 8's Leslie Olsen (who my wife says is the best of the locals by far) says that IPS has tried to keep the story quiet.
Or until Tuesday they did. The spur apparently found someplace tender, as Channel 13 was reporting at first that layoffs might not be a large as feared, and then that someone downtown had used the wrong figures and the numbers were out of whack.
We'll see. Official pink slips must reach teachers by May 1.
Olsen actually took a swipe at tackling the issue head-on on Tuesday, when she covered "teacher complaints" that IPS administration was bloated at a time when teaching staffs were being skeletonized due to budget cuts. Olsen engaged in a little faux-balance, reporting that the state education website showed administrative positions down slightly from last year, but the fact is that new Superintendent Eugene White has added several layers of insulation around his own office, and nobody's been talking about cutting that by forty percent.
It's a massive cluster-fuck in an already troubled and impoverished system, and a prime example of how the real problem in public education, pace John Stossel, can generally be traced to its administration, and that to control by elected officials, not convenient bugbears like the International Teachers' Union Conspiracy.
Naturally I'll have more to say about this, but for now another mention of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Small Schools Initiative, which the outgoing superintendent signed IPS up for whole-hog beginning this year. IPS was by far the largest, and the only major urban school district to do so in all its high schools at once.
It's predicated on the idea that dividing large schools into smaller "learning communities" allows teachers to get to know students better and be more attentive to individual needs. It's an $11.3 M project locally, administered by something called the Center of Excellence in Leadership of Learning at the University of Indianapolis.
Okay so far, except for that Operation Infinite Justice moniker. But first of all, the money doesn't go into the classroom. Students won't see a penny of it. It goes for training and conventions and junkets, and the administration of the program. For this we completely reorganized our high schools from one year to the next, which resulted in horrible turf wars at my wife's school, which was said to have been the best-implemented of the bunch.
And it's interesting that now that we're facing an increase in class sizes nearing 50% in a lot of cases, the U of I professor who heads the
• Oh, and our voting machines are so fucked that school board ballots in 150 precincts will have to be counted by hand. Marion County Clerk Doris Anne Sadler, who has now presided over three screwed-up elections, but, on the plus side, is pretty hot for a County Clerk, tried to explain how this problem, unlike all the other problems which have cropped up statewide during testing, was not the fault of software provider ES&S (Motto: "We're Not Diebold, We Just Have Interlocking Directorates"). Unfortunately, my Gibberish is a little rusty. It sounded like she was saying the school board races were too complicated for the software, and that there would have been the same problem with the old lever machines. Either that, or she was asking for some Valium in Esperanto.
Tuesday, April 18
War Is Too Important To Be Left to the Trekkies
Y'know, some days I just pace next to the keyboard and wonder, "What comes after insanity?"
Here's Paul "The Zeppo of Powerline" Mirengoff on "Those Griping Ex-Generals":
Noted historian Dafydd ab Hugh, military advisor to the Powerline Boys, whose personal records in that regard are, oh, somewhat lacking? No, I hadn't heard of him either, I'm proud to say. But somebody Wikied him:
What comes after insanity? And why aren't any of these fucks in uniform (other than those spiffy Star Fleet Academy jobs)?
In case you haven't been keeping your own box score, let's begin by running down the Old School Clintonistas these brilliant strategists see fit to slime because they disagreed in public with Donald Rumsfeld:
Marine General Anthony Zinni, former C-in-C of CENTCOM, a man with two masters degrees, and special envoy to Israel and the Palestinian Authority in 2002.
Marine Lieutenant General Gregory Newbold, Director of Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff 2000-2002.
Marine Lieutenant General Paul Van Ripper, former Director of the Command and Staff College, and the commander of the Iraqi side in the Millenium Challenge wargame. He won. Or he would have if they hadn't called time out.
Maj. General Charles Swannack, former commander of the 82nd Airborne in Iraq.
Maj. General John Batiste, former commander of the 1st Infantry in Iraq.
Maj. General John Riggs, former director of the Objective Force Task Force.
Maj. General Paul Eaton, who ran the Iraqi security force training 2003-04.
Got that? The commander of the motherfuckin' 82nd Airborne has been dismissed by some third-chair high school oboist from Red Wing.
Let's start with Powerline. Believe me, if anything, Mirengoff has actually made Lizard boy sound reasonable. 1) Promotions to general officer are approved by the President. They are not "appointees", and while no one--not even those who know something about it--will deny the importance of politics at the highest reaches of command, it's not the simple-minded partisanship these boys can't seem to see beyond. I couldn't find an easy source for biographies of the above, but Zinni made general during the Reagan administration, and Van Ripper before Clinton, so far as I could tell. If these men are "Clintonistas" you'll note from the above that the Bush administration did not exactly shunt them off to desk commands. Mediocrities, and sometimes raving lunatics, may rise through the ranks. Complete idiots remain colonels. 2) Nice ellipsis over the part where Rumsfeld is the appointed political overseer of the DoD, and not the Grand Generalissimo. Let's try to put this in terms a shyster hack could understand. Bringing in an experienced attorney to manage your law firm would be one thing; appointing a paralegal to do so would be another. Rumsfeld may be our longest-serving Secretary of Defense. He is also, without question, our worst. New Ideas are not virtuous by reason of being new, and when they fail it's the people who warned against them who get to do the crowing.
That meme apparently comes from somebody reading somewhere that generals are always prepared to fight the last war, probably in a Nebula-nominated graphic novel. This is carried to the height of interspecies-sexual absurdity over at the suspiciously-named-under-the-circumstances Big Lizards:
We've been sucked into some sort of wormhole here--if you'll pardon the use of "suck", "hole", and a potential hermaphroditic interspecies breeding experiment in the same sentence--linking to a region of the universe that is remarkably dull, if not unexpected. We may keep refighting WWII in political terms; that's a problem for politicians. But to say we refought WWII in a military sense is not even true for Korea, which resembled a Napoleonic land war with WWII naval batteries, massive interdiction bombing, and jet fighters. Without question Vietnam was disastrously led at both the strategic and political levels, but that was due the hubris of a major power fighting a ragtag, ill-equipped foe, not to outmoded tactics. It was all high-tech and overkill and a failure to understand the opponent. Find me a guerilla or jungle war in the Second World War that was fought like Vietnam. First, you might want to learn something about the latter. (Interesting, though, that once it becomes politically expedient we're willing to blame the US military, and not Dan Rather, for Vietnam.)
And the crapola about "mass bombings, invasion by massive, centrally commanded divisions" is just a ham-fisted attempt to paint things in monochrome. It's not even true as a generalization about WWII--the word "blitzkrieg" springs immediately to mind, or Merrill's Marauders, the lightning overruns in North Africa, the early German panzer attacks on the Eastern front or the early American landings on Japanese-held islands. Mass force was used against massed force, on the Eastern front, on D-Day. It had to be. And American forces in particular have always been known for the initiative shown by lower-ranking officers, even enlisted men.
This is not to impugn the idea of lightning force in the modern age. It's just to say it is an argument, not an invention, which Rumsfeld made in public, and as we've pointed out many times it just happens to be a convenient MO when one wanted to go to war on a strict timetable and avoid conscription. That it worked against a tenth-rate Iraq army which was already demoralized was no miracle. That it failed to secure the objective after, as could have been predicted by minds half as knowledgeable as those seven above, is indisputable. "I doubt six months," said the Prophet of the New Era.
Is there any history lesson, military or otherwise, more potent than the warning to learn from one's mistakes? The Army, in fact, did precisely that after Vietnam. There was a great deal of soul searching, and no refusal to look at the facts without sentimentality and excuse-mongering as we continue to be treated to from the Right (and from far behind the front lines). But we have an army which does not choose its emperor, and just like Vietnam the failure in Iraq is a failure of leadership. Any idiot can see it. Some idiots choose not to.
Here's Paul "The Zeppo of Powerline" Mirengoff on "Those Griping Ex-Generals":
Dafydd ab Hugh has an excellent post about the retired generals who have lambasted Defense Secretary Rumsfeld recently. Dafydd notes that the generals in question are (1) mostly, in effect, Clinton appointees and (2) "old school" generals who object to Rumsfeld's pet theories of pushing towards smaller units, more unit independence, much greater reliance on Special Forces, and a reorganization of units to be self-sufficient rather than specialized. As to the second point, Dafydd compares the griping generals to "vice presidents at General Motors or IBM who furiously denounce splitting those companies into self-reliant business units instead of the normal corporate divisions they've had for twenty years." He also notes that "the fact that an old general dislikes the new style of warfare is not a refutation of that style. It just [the general] is 'Old School.' But Old School is not necessary the best school." You should definitely read the whole thing.
Noted historian Dafydd ab Hugh, military advisor to the Powerline Boys, whose personal records in that regard are, oh, somewhat lacking? No, I hadn't heard of him either, I'm proud to say. But somebody Wikied him:
Hugh is most noted for writing fiction in media franchise, including several novels for the Star Trek franchise. He also wrote four novels associated with the game Doom . However he also did some short fiction . His most noted story, "The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His Larinks, A Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk", received Hugo Award and Nebula Award nominations. It concerns sentient animals and inter-species sex.
He and his wife Sachi currently run a right-leaning blog, Big Lizards
What comes after insanity? And why aren't any of these fucks in uniform (other than those spiffy Star Fleet Academy jobs)?
In case you haven't been keeping your own box score, let's begin by running down the Old School Clintonistas these brilliant strategists see fit to slime because they disagreed in public with Donald Rumsfeld:
Marine General Anthony Zinni, former C-in-C of CENTCOM, a man with two masters degrees, and special envoy to Israel and the Palestinian Authority in 2002.
Marine Lieutenant General Gregory Newbold, Director of Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff 2000-2002.
Marine Lieutenant General Paul Van Ripper, former Director of the Command and Staff College, and the commander of the Iraqi side in the Millenium Challenge wargame. He won. Or he would have if they hadn't called time out.
Maj. General Charles Swannack, former commander of the 82nd Airborne in Iraq.
Maj. General John Batiste, former commander of the 1st Infantry in Iraq.
Maj. General John Riggs, former director of the Objective Force Task Force.
Maj. General Paul Eaton, who ran the Iraqi security force training 2003-04.
Got that? The commander of the motherfuckin' 82nd Airborne has been dismissed by some third-chair high school oboist from Red Wing.
Let's start with Powerline. Believe me, if anything, Mirengoff has actually made Lizard boy sound reasonable. 1) Promotions to general officer are approved by the President. They are not "appointees", and while no one--not even those who know something about it--will deny the importance of politics at the highest reaches of command, it's not the simple-minded partisanship these boys can't seem to see beyond. I couldn't find an easy source for biographies of the above, but Zinni made general during the Reagan administration, and Van Ripper before Clinton, so far as I could tell. If these men are "Clintonistas" you'll note from the above that the Bush administration did not exactly shunt them off to desk commands. Mediocrities, and sometimes raving lunatics, may rise through the ranks. Complete idiots remain colonels. 2) Nice ellipsis over the part where Rumsfeld is the appointed political overseer of the DoD, and not the Grand Generalissimo. Let's try to put this in terms a shyster hack could understand. Bringing in an experienced attorney to manage your law firm would be one thing; appointing a paralegal to do so would be another. Rumsfeld may be our longest-serving Secretary of Defense. He is also, without question, our worst. New Ideas are not virtuous by reason of being new, and when they fail it's the people who warned against them who get to do the crowing.
That meme apparently comes from somebody reading somewhere that generals are always prepared to fight the last war, probably in a Nebula-nominated graphic novel. This is carried to the height of interspecies-sexual absurdity over at the suspiciously-named-under-the-circumstances Big Lizards:
All generals have been in the service for decades. For decades, we have refought World War II -- in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Bosnia, and Kosovo... by which I mean using more or less the same tactics (mass bombings, invasion by massive, centrally commanded divisions, and so forth). Those at the warfare styles to which these generals were long accustomed.
We've been sucked into some sort of wormhole here--if you'll pardon the use of "suck", "hole", and a potential hermaphroditic interspecies breeding experiment in the same sentence--linking to a region of the universe that is remarkably dull, if not unexpected. We may keep refighting WWII in political terms; that's a problem for politicians. But to say we refought WWII in a military sense is not even true for Korea, which resembled a Napoleonic land war with WWII naval batteries, massive interdiction bombing, and jet fighters. Without question Vietnam was disastrously led at both the strategic and political levels, but that was due the hubris of a major power fighting a ragtag, ill-equipped foe, not to outmoded tactics. It was all high-tech and overkill and a failure to understand the opponent. Find me a guerilla or jungle war in the Second World War that was fought like Vietnam. First, you might want to learn something about the latter. (Interesting, though, that once it becomes politically expedient we're willing to blame the US military, and not Dan Rather, for Vietnam.)
And the crapola about "mass bombings, invasion by massive, centrally commanded divisions" is just a ham-fisted attempt to paint things in monochrome. It's not even true as a generalization about WWII--the word "blitzkrieg" springs immediately to mind, or Merrill's Marauders, the lightning overruns in North Africa, the early German panzer attacks on the Eastern front or the early American landings on Japanese-held islands. Mass force was used against massed force, on the Eastern front, on D-Day. It had to be. And American forces in particular have always been known for the initiative shown by lower-ranking officers, even enlisted men.
This is not to impugn the idea of lightning force in the modern age. It's just to say it is an argument, not an invention, which Rumsfeld made in public, and as we've pointed out many times it just happens to be a convenient MO when one wanted to go to war on a strict timetable and avoid conscription. That it worked against a tenth-rate Iraq army which was already demoralized was no miracle. That it failed to secure the objective after, as could have been predicted by minds half as knowledgeable as those seven above, is indisputable. "I doubt six months," said the Prophet of the New Era.
Is there any history lesson, military or otherwise, more potent than the warning to learn from one's mistakes? The Army, in fact, did precisely that after Vietnam. There was a great deal of soul searching, and no refusal to look at the facts without sentimentality and excuse-mongering as we continue to be treated to from the Right (and from far behind the front lines). But we have an army which does not choose its emperor, and just like Vietnam the failure in Iraq is a failure of leadership. Any idiot can see it. Some idiots choose not to.
Monday, April 17
Shit Still Floats
David Brooks, "The Good Fight, Done Badly," April 16; "Rumsfeld's Blinkers," March 16, The Paper of Record
I've been wracking my brain--in the sense that in my youth we called taking a bad hop in the testicles "getting wracked"--to find a fitting metaphor for Dave's latest column, for the shallow and dishonest analysis of endlessly shifting surfaces. Like last week's bizarre denunciation of sociological explanations (from David Brooks! Using Tom Wolfe!! as a paragon!) we again find Our Mister Brooks jumping off from pop novelizations (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit) and pop sociopsychoanalysis (The Organization Man) to land on another weird world of his own manufacture, one where Richard Nixon and George W. Bush--and Donald Rumsfeld, his ostensible target--are anti-establishment rebels:
I've spent thirty-five years arguing with these people, only to discover too late I'm a frog in a beaker and the water temperature has been going up imperceptibly all these years. Conservatives, in the days when I didn't automatically surround that with quotes, were people who clung to notions about half useful and half crackpot, in which, as is usual in such cases, the crackpot predominated. Suddenly they're people who leap from supposition to supposition contradicting, even denouncing, positions they held as recently as two hours ago, a pace of reinvention that would have given the young David Bowie vertigo.
George W. Bush, rebel-in-chief! Here's Brooks' capsule description of the Anti-Organization Man:
Sounds like the flyleaf of every Bush biography ever written, don't it? George W. Bush, Slothbuster! The man whose hostility to stultifying organizations and contempt of slow-moving bureaucracy caused him to fire Donald Rumsfeld when:
Sorry, I should have suggested you try to focus on the same spot with each revolution of the head. They say it cuts down on the nausea. Try to catch your breath. I feel a couple of triple toe loops and a flying camel comin' on.
It's instructive that when Brooks was writing a month ago his starting point was Cobra II:
Our time frame here, by the way, was the week of March 24, 2003, and the "smart pundits" who were predicting "the U.S. was not in the midst of a conventional war, but was in the first days of a guerrilla war," include Michael Kelly and David Ignatius.
Cobra II may be a top-five best seller, but it'll never reach anything like the audience which last week heard about the growing list of retired general officers calling for Rumsfeld's head. So last month Rumsfeld was arrogantly ignoring sharp-eyed pundits who saw the truth on the ground, but this month, with the more general and more generally correct understanding that the real criticism comes from competent military minds, he's just suffering from a character flaw, highly valuable under most circumstances but unfortunately misplaced here.
Allow me to return for a moment to David Ignatius and the late Michael Kelly, because their inclusion stunned me (unlike, say, the predictable absence of any anti-war pundits who'd been crying quagmire all along). I don't know of an unlocked door in the corridors of WaPo archives, so all I could get was the short summary of Ignatius' piece, which includes the following:
These aren't Cassandra-like utterances about an insurrection of many years duration. They don't even qualify as punditry. It's more like straight reporting, and anyone paying the slightest attention knew on Day Two that the failure to take Basra (and be greeted as liberators) did not bode well. We are talking here (as Kelly no doubt was about Najaf) about unexpected, and possibly catastrophic, threats to US lines of communication that developed as we sped towards Baghdad. Everybody knew about this.
Really, if you're careful you can boil a frog slowly before he escapes, but I've never heard anyone suggest you can plop one down in a bucket of horseshit and convince him it's a nice warm pond. There's no mystery to why we didn't go into Iraq with sufficient troops, just as there's no mystery why we didn't just send more after David Ignatius informed us of the dangers of war. We didn't have them, we don't have them now, and raising sufficient numbers means a draft. Even if we accept that the conduct of the war was all Rumsfeld's fault, the decision to go to war wasn't, and that was the real mistake. If anybody can find an example of Kelly or Ignatius warning us about that ahead of time, I'd appreciate an email.
I've been wracking my brain--in the sense that in my youth we called taking a bad hop in the testicles "getting wracked"--to find a fitting metaphor for Dave's latest column, for the shallow and dishonest analysis of endlessly shifting surfaces. Like last week's bizarre denunciation of sociological explanations (from David Brooks! Using Tom Wolfe!! as a paragon!) we again find Our Mister Brooks jumping off from pop novelizations (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit) and pop sociopsychoanalysis (The Organization Man) to land on another weird world of his own manufacture, one where Richard Nixon and George W. Bush--and Donald Rumsfeld, his ostensible target--are anti-establishment rebels:
Athletic, heroic, he never met an organization he didn't try to upend. He made it to Congress in the early 1960's and challenged the existing order. He was hired by Richard Nixon and quickly reorganized the Office of Economic Opportunity, slashing jobs and focusing the organization. He wrote to Nixon that he would upset the education bureaucrats and destroy "their comfortable world."
As his career went on, he took his streamlining zeal to the Pentagon, and then to G. D. Searle & Company, where he dismissed hundreds of executives, spun off losing businesses and streamlined the bureaucracy.
Rumsfeld's style appealed to political leaders who were allied with the corporate world, but hostile to self-satisfied corporate fat cats. Nixon loved Rumsfeld, and George W. Bush, the rebel in chief, quickly hired him.
I've spent thirty-five years arguing with these people, only to discover too late I'm a frog in a beaker and the water temperature has been going up imperceptibly all these years. Conservatives, in the days when I didn't automatically surround that with quotes, were people who clung to notions about half useful and half crackpot, in which, as is usual in such cases, the crackpot predominated. Suddenly they're people who leap from supposition to supposition contradicting, even denouncing, positions they held as recently as two hours ago, a pace of reinvention that would have given the young David Bowie vertigo.
George W. Bush, rebel-in-chief! Here's Brooks' capsule description of the Anti-Organization Man:
At about this time, smarter and more daring young men were also entering the work force. But these renegades rebelled against the organizational mediocrity they saw around them. They may have looked and dressed like all the other corporate cogs, and they tended to go into business like the others. But inside they were hostile to stultifying organizations, and contemptuous of protective, slow-moving bureaucracies. They saw themselves as anti-Organization Men, as bureaucratic barbarians who would crash through the comfy old routines and wipe out corporate sloth.
Sounds like the flyleaf of every Bush biography ever written, don't it? George W. Bush, Slothbuster! The man whose hostility to stultifying organizations and contempt of slow-moving bureaucracy caused him to fire Donald Rumsfeld when:
Unfortunately, we've learned that though Rumsfeld is a perfect warrior for peaceful times, his virtues turn into vices during wartime. War is nothing but a catalog of errors, and in fluid, unpredictable circumstances, the redundancies of the World War II style of organization actually make sense. When you don't know what you will need, sometimes it is best just to throw gigantic resources at a problem. You can adapt later on.
Rumsfeld the reformer never adjusted to the circumstances of wartime. Once the initiator of new ideas, he now strangles ideas. Once the modernizer, he's now the dinosaur. Amid the war on terror, he has unleashed a reign of terror on his subordinates.
Sorry, I should have suggested you try to focus on the same spot with each revolution of the head. They say it cuts down on the nausea. Try to catch your breath. I feel a couple of triple toe loops and a flying camel comin' on.
It's instructive that when Brooks was writing a month ago his starting point was Cobra II:
The officers on the front lines saw the same thing the smart pundits saw, and in more detail. But Rumsfeld and Franks stifled the free exchange of ideas, and shut out the National Security Council.
Our time frame here, by the way, was the week of March 24, 2003, and the "smart pundits" who were predicting "the U.S. was not in the midst of a conventional war, but was in the first days of a guerrilla war," include Michael Kelly and David Ignatius.
Cobra II may be a top-five best seller, but it'll never reach anything like the audience which last week heard about the growing list of retired general officers calling for Rumsfeld's head. So last month Rumsfeld was arrogantly ignoring sharp-eyed pundits who saw the truth on the ground, but this month, with the more general and more generally correct understanding that the real criticism comes from competent military minds, he's just suffering from a character flaw, highly valuable under most circumstances but unfortunately misplaced here.
Allow me to return for a moment to David Ignatius and the late Michael Kelly, because their inclusion stunned me (unlike, say, the predictable absence of any anti-war pundits who'd been crying quagmire all along). I don't know of an unlocked door in the corridors of WaPo archives, so all I could get was the short summary of Ignatius' piece, which includes the following:
U.S. strategists had assumed that in their race toward Baghdad, they could initially bypass many of the smaller towns and cities of southern Iraq. As Marine Staff Sgt. Brian Koenig put it, relaxing in the shade of his amphibious vehicle parked along the road north toward Nasiriyah and Baghdad, each U.S. combat team has a "bypass criterion" that allows it to focus on the biggest battles, and leave the little ones for later.
Similarly, a tough battle was being fought for the city of Basra, with Iraqi forces showing stronger than expected resistance. Some analysts had expected Basra to be a cakewalk for the coalition, because its largely Shiite population dislikes [Saddam Hussein]. Basra will doubtless fall soon, but probably not in the act of anti-Hussein insurgency some American planners may have expected. The danger is that it will feel like a defeated city, rather than a liberated one.
These aren't Cassandra-like utterances about an insurrection of many years duration. They don't even qualify as punditry. It's more like straight reporting, and anyone paying the slightest attention knew on Day Two that the failure to take Basra (and be greeted as liberators) did not bode well. We are talking here (as Kelly no doubt was about Najaf) about unexpected, and possibly catastrophic, threats to US lines of communication that developed as we sped towards Baghdad. Everybody knew about this.
Really, if you're careful you can boil a frog slowly before he escapes, but I've never heard anyone suggest you can plop one down in a bucket of horseshit and convince him it's a nice warm pond. There's no mystery to why we didn't go into Iraq with sufficient troops, just as there's no mystery why we didn't just send more after David Ignatius informed us of the dangers of war. We didn't have them, we don't have them now, and raising sufficient numbers means a draft. Even if we accept that the conduct of the war was all Rumsfeld's fault, the decision to go to war wasn't, and that was the real mistake. If anybody can find an example of Kelly or Ignatius warning us about that ahead of time, I'd appreciate an email.
Saturday, April 15
Joys of Monogamy #73
My Poor Wife had to go set up a student show early this AM. She had a cuppa and took off around 7 (in this as in most other things we're complete opposites; I need at least 90 minutes to reach a consensus that I'm awake and functioning). I saw to it the cats' needs were met, had my toast and tea, started a load of laundry and spent an hour or so cleaning up from yesterday's storms (four cells passed us in 24 hours, including the biggest hailstorm I've ever been in, ten minutes of flying golfballs). Then I took two aleve for a naiscent headache and lay down for a bit with the heating pad on my grousing back. I heard her drive up. I stayed in bed for a minute. The phone (sister, Easter dinner) got me up.
Got downstairs with the help of the handrail. Couldn't find my wife. Finally located her in Larry's room.
"I was wondering where you were. I just heard you drive up."
"I've been home for forty-five minutes. You were upstairs snoring."
"Liar. I don't snore, and I'm tired of you saying that."
"I already fixed breakfast."
"Now I know you're lying. I would have heard the smoke alarm."
Got downstairs with the help of the handrail. Couldn't find my wife. Finally located her in Larry's room.
"I was wondering where you were. I just heard you drive up."
"I've been home for forty-five minutes. You were upstairs snoring."
"Liar. I don't snore, and I'm tired of you saying that."
"I already fixed breakfast."
"Now I know you're lying. I would have heard the smoke alarm."
Um, No
Andrew Sullivan:
Far be it from me to minimize the contribution of people of faith, and of faith itself, to the Civil Rights movement, but despite the addition of multiple denominations, Jews and Muslims, atheists and agnostics, this is just another easy substitution of King hagiography for actual history. "You cannot understand the movement without understanding it as a fundamentally religious phenomenon"? All we can do is try.
Apart from a single praeteritio, we'll ignore what both Sullivan and Douthat ignore with motives opposite to mine: the slave holders of the 19th Century and the segregationists of the 20th had their own churches and quoted the Bible quite expertly. But let's begin with the easy part: the Civil Rights movement did not begin with Martin Luther King, Jr. And while it's true that the Abolitionist movement opposed slavery as a sin. there was no opportunity to oppose it from a legal standpoint; the Constitution was clear, and the Congress enacted a gag rule prohibiting anti-slavery legislation. Once the issue reached the level of civil war the abolitionists pushed for a military solution to slavery, and at its end a legal one in the 14th and 15th Amendments. With the re-installation of legalized racism at the collapse of the Reconstruction, and the second wave under Wilson, came the rise of the NAACP, which led the battle for civil rights for five decades, seeking legal redress through the courts, culminating in the Brown decision of 1954. I don't understand any of those to be fundamentally religious propositions.
It was the NAACP that organized the Montgomery bus boycott (Rosa Parks was the local chapter secretary). The state of Alabama responded by effectively banning the organization. The ban was later overturned by the Supreme Court, but in the interim the local churches, the closest thing to free black organizations in the segregated South, and of which King and Ralph Abernathy were the two most prominent leaders, took up the slack.
Out of that success came the Southern Christian Leadership Council with King at its head. The NAACP wanted to pursue legal solutions to segregation; the SCLU, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, favored direct confrontation. King and Ralph Wilkins battled for years, though they aided each other as well. The NAACP's approach fell out of favor for its slow, legalistic, and some felt overly solicitous of white America, approach.
Non-violence for Dr. King was a political method, not a religious tenet, a distinction he made explicit in interviews. The part of the movement he led wasn't Gandhian by creed, but rather by pragmatism. SNCC later advocated violence in self-defense, and later as part of revolutionary violence.
So, no, Andrew, I don't have to conceded the movement was fundamentally religious in order to understand it. In fact it's just the opposite. Religious conviction, and people of faith, were a fundamental part of a movement which was about civil rights for the disenfranchised. It was not a fifteen-year revival meeting. It was a 150-year slog through ugly and violent repression.
Sorry, too, but the bipartisanship of the movement is somewhat overplayed. It's true that both Republicans and Democrats fought on both sides. It's true that Dr. King was carefully non-partisan. But to say the movement "never became a vehicle for one political party to win elections" in King's time is a latter-day sugar-coating, largely of Republican party actions. The movement was used as a negative factor to gain votes. The Eisenhower administration did all it could to distance itself from Brown, for fear that the Republican party would be seen as the party of integration. Eisenhower, who supported voting rights but was personally opposed to integration, sent troops into Little Rock in support of the rule of law. He didn't send in the Airborne when Arkansas closed all public schools a year later.
After LBJ dared risk the wrath of racist voters by doing what was right, Goldwater sealed the deal in '64 by kicking Southern blacks--who had been voting Republican when they could for a hundred years--out of the party in order to attract the racists to his side, a process which would be completed under Reagan. The suggestion that "people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton used religion to buttress a partisan machine" is a prime example of the willful failure to understand the history, as well as an insult to people's intelligence. African-Americans don't vote overwhelmingly Democratic because they've been hoodwinked by a couple of Republican bugbears, and furthermore, they understand what is meant when people suggest they do. The movement may have lost its force after thousands risked and sacrificed much for important gains, but it hasn't lost its moral authority. We just have one party full of professional deniers these days.
I should address a point made by Ross Douthat about the intersection of religion and politics. Ross equates what the Republican party has been doing for some time with the civil rights movement. He argues that just as the civil rights movement was inspired by faith, so too is the religious tenor of the current GOP. Surely, you can't praise one and dismiss the other? Here's what I'd say. The civil rights movement was indeed a fundamentally religious phenomenon, and you cannot understand it without understanding that. It was also multi-denominational and included Democrats and Republicans. Its core religious principle was non-violence, and it drew enormous inspiration from Gandhi. It included Jews and Muslims, Catholics and Protestants, atheists and agnostics. And it never, in King's time, became a vehicle for one political party to win elections. Never. And in so far as it subsequently did, in so far as people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton used religion to buttress a partisan machine, what was left of the civil rights movement lost moral authority. And deserved to.
Far be it from me to minimize the contribution of people of faith, and of faith itself, to the Civil Rights movement, but despite the addition of multiple denominations, Jews and Muslims, atheists and agnostics, this is just another easy substitution of King hagiography for actual history. "You cannot understand the movement without understanding it as a fundamentally religious phenomenon"? All we can do is try.
Apart from a single praeteritio, we'll ignore what both Sullivan and Douthat ignore with motives opposite to mine: the slave holders of the 19th Century and the segregationists of the 20th had their own churches and quoted the Bible quite expertly. But let's begin with the easy part: the Civil Rights movement did not begin with Martin Luther King, Jr. And while it's true that the Abolitionist movement opposed slavery as a sin. there was no opportunity to oppose it from a legal standpoint; the Constitution was clear, and the Congress enacted a gag rule prohibiting anti-slavery legislation. Once the issue reached the level of civil war the abolitionists pushed for a military solution to slavery, and at its end a legal one in the 14th and 15th Amendments. With the re-installation of legalized racism at the collapse of the Reconstruction, and the second wave under Wilson, came the rise of the NAACP, which led the battle for civil rights for five decades, seeking legal redress through the courts, culminating in the Brown decision of 1954. I don't understand any of those to be fundamentally religious propositions.
It was the NAACP that organized the Montgomery bus boycott (Rosa Parks was the local chapter secretary). The state of Alabama responded by effectively banning the organization. The ban was later overturned by the Supreme Court, but in the interim the local churches, the closest thing to free black organizations in the segregated South, and of which King and Ralph Abernathy were the two most prominent leaders, took up the slack.
Out of that success came the Southern Christian Leadership Council with King at its head. The NAACP wanted to pursue legal solutions to segregation; the SCLU, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, favored direct confrontation. King and Ralph Wilkins battled for years, though they aided each other as well. The NAACP's approach fell out of favor for its slow, legalistic, and some felt overly solicitous of white America, approach.
Non-violence for Dr. King was a political method, not a religious tenet, a distinction he made explicit in interviews. The part of the movement he led wasn't Gandhian by creed, but rather by pragmatism. SNCC later advocated violence in self-defense, and later as part of revolutionary violence.
So, no, Andrew, I don't have to conceded the movement was fundamentally religious in order to understand it. In fact it's just the opposite. Religious conviction, and people of faith, were a fundamental part of a movement which was about civil rights for the disenfranchised. It was not a fifteen-year revival meeting. It was a 150-year slog through ugly and violent repression.
Sorry, too, but the bipartisanship of the movement is somewhat overplayed. It's true that both Republicans and Democrats fought on both sides. It's true that Dr. King was carefully non-partisan. But to say the movement "never became a vehicle for one political party to win elections" in King's time is a latter-day sugar-coating, largely of Republican party actions. The movement was used as a negative factor to gain votes. The Eisenhower administration did all it could to distance itself from Brown, for fear that the Republican party would be seen as the party of integration. Eisenhower, who supported voting rights but was personally opposed to integration, sent troops into Little Rock in support of the rule of law. He didn't send in the Airborne when Arkansas closed all public schools a year later.
After LBJ dared risk the wrath of racist voters by doing what was right, Goldwater sealed the deal in '64 by kicking Southern blacks--who had been voting Republican when they could for a hundred years--out of the party in order to attract the racists to his side, a process which would be completed under Reagan. The suggestion that "people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton used religion to buttress a partisan machine" is a prime example of the willful failure to understand the history, as well as an insult to people's intelligence. African-Americans don't vote overwhelmingly Democratic because they've been hoodwinked by a couple of Republican bugbears, and furthermore, they understand what is meant when people suggest they do. The movement may have lost its force after thousands risked and sacrificed much for important gains, but it hasn't lost its moral authority. We just have one party full of professional deniers these days.
Thursday, April 13
Wednesday, April 12
Yes, It's Shooting Fish in a Barrel, but if It's Good Enough for the Vice-President...
So I see that Lileks is being vexed by the guy who's fixing his "water feature":
First, "water feature" is the worst sort of jargonese. Like "plant material" and "thunderstorm activity" it doesn't even rate as jargon; it's hair-splitting done by professionals (landscape designers and teevee weather forecasters, respectively) who operate on the periphery of science but don't do any themselves. And it gets picked up via the tube, which for my money makes it worse than the incessant misuse of "parameter" we endured half a generation ago, which at least was based on misunderstanding what you read.
Second, aren't "water features" played out yet, even among habitués of Target? Don't get me wrong; I have a couple of friends with gorgeous outdoor fishponds, and we considered putting in one ourselves a decade ago before realizing there's nowhere on the property that gets enough sun. But good Lord, the casual viewer of HGTV has now seen 2,120 of the things installed, and there must be enough artificial waterfalls across American back yards to negatively effect salmon fishing.
I know, I know, kicking at Lileks is often akin to arguing with Andy Rooney, but here's the thing: Rooney, at least, is a genuine curmudgeon. His problem is he's about 50% shy of the needed intelligence to pull it off in public. And yes, I turned curmudgeon sometime before I got my driver's license. But you cannot do it while simultaneously enthusing about battery-operated toilet brushes or a child successfully coloring within the lines for once. The only time Lileks manages a convincing sneer is when he's talking shit about someone who works for a living.
Which is, I think, a metaphor for his other career. He's got new graphics on the site; lo and behold, it's a series of comically anachronistic Fifties era domestic illustrations. Stop, you're killing me.
TUESDAY APRIL 11 2006
The Water Feature contractor came today. He’s the new guy. Just signed on to the team. Burly mofo, too. I think that’s his new name for the duration of this episode of contractor clusterfargery. (Boy, I’m not swearing as much as possible, eh? The Water Feature does that to me.) But he’s a genial guy, so I’ll call him G. Burlymofo. He took a look at the project, and since it’s hard to tell what’s wrong by looking at dirt and a pile of rocks, I filled him in on my suspicions: insufficient water in the lower tank, and /or a fatal leak somewhere. Keep in mind that the contractor told me a few weeks ago that his new guy pegged the problem without even examining the site: not enough water! Apparently that was a different new guy than G. Burleymofo, because he was agnostic on the issue of water volume.
He said he’d have it up and running the next day. I smiled and said he didn’t have to say that. Really.
“There’s no reason we can’t,” he said.
Sigh. I wanted to give him a volume I have in the archives downstairs, a book about Strange and Curious Things science can never explain.
First, "water feature" is the worst sort of jargonese. Like "plant material" and "thunderstorm activity" it doesn't even rate as jargon; it's hair-splitting done by professionals (landscape designers and teevee weather forecasters, respectively) who operate on the periphery of science but don't do any themselves. And it gets picked up via the tube, which for my money makes it worse than the incessant misuse of "parameter" we endured half a generation ago, which at least was based on misunderstanding what you read.
Second, aren't "water features" played out yet, even among habitués of Target? Don't get me wrong; I have a couple of friends with gorgeous outdoor fishponds, and we considered putting in one ourselves a decade ago before realizing there's nowhere on the property that gets enough sun. But good Lord, the casual viewer of HGTV has now seen 2,120 of the things installed, and there must be enough artificial waterfalls across American back yards to negatively effect salmon fishing.
I know, I know, kicking at Lileks is often akin to arguing with Andy Rooney, but here's the thing: Rooney, at least, is a genuine curmudgeon. His problem is he's about 50% shy of the needed intelligence to pull it off in public. And yes, I turned curmudgeon sometime before I got my driver's license. But you cannot do it while simultaneously enthusing about battery-operated toilet brushes or a child successfully coloring within the lines for once. The only time Lileks manages a convincing sneer is when he's talking shit about someone who works for a living.
Which is, I think, a metaphor for his other career. He's got new graphics on the site; lo and behold, it's a series of comically anachronistic Fifties era domestic illustrations. Stop, you're killing me.
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