No, Goddamit.

David Ignatius, "An Iranian Missile Crisis?" Washington Post, April 12

The emerging confrontation between the United States and Iran is "the Cuban missile crisis in slow motion," argues Graham Allison, the Harvard University professor who wrote the classic study of President John F. Kennedy's 1962 showdown with the Soviet Union that narrowly averted nuclear war. If anything, that analogy understates the potential risks here.

If five years of the Bush administration isn't gonna teach you, and if fifty years of crises, missile gaps, atomic-powered bomber gaps, and the International Communist Conspiracy isn't gonna teach you, then perhaps you can stop and think for a minute. The Cuban missile crisis is, indeed, a fine illustration of the "crisis" in Iraq. But its lesson is the exact opposite of how either is being portrayed.

Those Soviet missiles in Cuba were not an offensive threat to the United States. And Kennedy and his minions knew it (and they knew, but couldn't reveal, why they were there--our attempts to assassinate Castro). Think for a minute. How do you use Cuban-based nuclear weapons offensively against the United States? Well, you launch them, of course. But that tips off the US of impending Soviet attack, so not only do we destroy Cuba in a heartbeat, we're launching at the USSR at the same time. Alternately they launch the Soviet missiles first, in which case Cuba is destroyed before it can begin a countdown. (It was, of course, the same with our missiles in Turkey, which we quietly removed after the hubub was over.) If indeed the world was on the brink of all-out nuclear war in 1962 it was the doing of the Kennedy administration, not the Soviets.

Same thing today, mutatis mutandis. There's no superpower arms race as a backdrop; Iran, which has outplayed the World's Only Superpower in Iraq (and whose fault is that?) realizes that both US hard and soft power have been drastically reduced by our little Mideast adventure, and now is the time to create a deterrent force. You don't have to like the Iranians (who does?) to recognize they've got a legitimate concern about permanent US bases on their border. And while we're a generation away (or a draft and five years, minimum) from the possibility of raising a sizeable force to send anywhere (and whose fault is that?) is the perfect time to do it. We've graciously given them that time--uranium bomb technology is relatively easy, but stockpiling the materials takes years. It's the opposite of the plutonium bomb.

Iranian nukes can't be used offensively against Israel, or the US, without the immediate obliteration of Iran. That doesn't make them a non-threat, of course, but the program itself is not the threat. There's five years, minimum, for the world to dissuade them.

On the other hand, the US may have one more bolt in its quiver, though even the Bush administration is now forced to concede it's an airstrike, not an invasion. Bombing never stopped anything but the lives of those unfortunate in their choice of location. Bomb Iran today, they're back in business tomorrow, and the hostility of the rest of the world to its lone superpower becomes the process of reining it in for good.

It's dollars to doughnuts there'll be regime change in Iran (whatever happened to the reverse-domino spread of democracy theory, anyway?) before there's sufficient manpower and materiel for another administration of idiots to threaten anybody with "liberation", US style. Granted, Ignatius urges a Kennedy-like "creative" solution to the question of Iranian nukes, but is there anyone left who expects that of Bush? Forty years later there was plenty of misplaced cynicism about Pearl Harbor, fer chrissakes. Forty years is long enough to have learned that Kennedy was playing for very different stakes than we were told, and to take the Great Brink of Nuclear Annihilation off the list of Fables for Our Time. Even for the romantics at WaPo.

Queer as a Good Five Cent Cigar

Doug Giles:

Also, girls, if you want to celebrate your “freedom” from misogynist’s constructs by smoking a cigar, don’t smoke a .62 ring gauge maduro 8” Churchill. Stay somewhere south of .36. I know you’re not supposed to trust men; but trust me—you’ll look better.

In the 80s I knew a guy who'd been a working cowboy for most of his life, whose trek north and eastward had unfortunately coincided with the inexplicable Urban Cowboy craze, a circumstance which forced him to rid himself of his entire wardrobe. The same thing happened to me when cigars became trendy in the 90s.

So just a word of expert testimony here. In addition to everything else he is, Pastor Giles is one of those full-of-shit, over-ripe frat boys emeritus whose trendoid cigar smoking drove Arturo Fuente prices to roughly that of a tulip bulb in the mid-17th century, whose I-just-read-a-magazine-article connoisseurship and public boorishness with one of the supreme gifts given by nature, handcrafted by man--like using Veuve Cliquot to fill water balloons--cost me a bad and satisfying habit and I'm not forgetting it.

Just to let everyone in on this:

a .62 ring gauge: ring gauge is a measure of a cigar's girth expressed in 1/64ths of an inch. So nobody smokes a .62 ring cigar, which would be, roughly, 1/100 of an inch thick; they smoke a 62 ring. A slip, perhaps; or perhaps Dougie can't keep his ammo distinct from his oral pleasures.

There's another tell here: a 62 ring is a colossal cigar, something that belonged in a freak show in my day, but has become increasingly trendy. There's actually something to be said for a larger ring gauge: a bigger cigar permits more blending of tobacco, resulting in a theoretically more complex smoke. Whether a cigar that's nearly an inch in diameter is an improvement or an affectation, well, opinions vary, but if it tells you anything the Cubans don't make 'em. Anyway, leave it to Giles to be up on the latest male fashions in girth.

maduro: refers to the wrapper color. Maduro is very dark brown, the darkest wrapper generally seen. Dark wrappers are sweeter and stronger. What they have to do with the looks of a cigar, beyond the suggestion of Negritude, is something you'll have to ask the pastor.

8" Churchill. Well, Dougie may be lying about size here again. Cigar names (Corona, Gran Corona, Lonsdale) aren't exactly legal terms, but they're fairly consistent. A classic Churchill is 7" long and a 47-48 ring. I'd suggest that Townhall forbids trade names and he was caught out searching for something propriatary like "Magnum" or "Jeroboam", but then I'm sure he's used "Cohiba" before. So I think the throbbing, piston-like excitement got to him and he closed his eyes and thought of England.

Stay somewhere south of .36. Apparently there's good reason not to trust men, or certainly not men who pass out cigar advice based on how you'll look in the mirror. The area around 36-38 is right about where you see the benefits of a larger ring size. Only a member of the He Man Woman Hater's Club would suggest letting style triumph over substance that way. It's like sayin' Ladies, if you gotta drink straight rye, at least put a little umbrella in the glass.

Social Promotion

I suppose John Stossel will be all over this. The Sunday Times:

New York Rethinks Its Remaking of the Schools
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

The New York City schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein , is once again rethinking the nation's largest school system.

Not yet three years since the Klein/Bloomberg brain trust last overhauled the public schools.

You may recall that when most of us last saw Klein he was bad-mouthing the NYC teachers' union on Stossel's show, screeching about the complexity of the contract, and implying that the failure of the New York state legislature to make consentual sexual contact between a teacher and a student of legal age a crime was the union's fault and a satanic plot into the bargain. The fact that Klein was then in negotiations with the union over the next contract was not made explicit. I'm sure Stossel will be pointing out the Bloomberg administration's record of utter educational failure, probably in his next Townhall column.

He has hired Chris Cerf, former president of Edison Schools, the commercial manager of public schools in 25 states.

And that's not counting the ones that have thrown them out. The jury may still be out on Edison, but that's after a less-than-satisfactory stretch both academically and financially while Cerf was president, and if someone hadn't come in and taken the company back private again they'd be out of business in 50 states. So in all, good choice.

These consultants, often in pinstripe suits and ensconced in a conference room on the third-floor mezzanine of the headquarters of the Education Department in Lower Manhattan, are working with a small army of city education officials, all led by Mr. Klein's chief of staff, Kristen Kane. The effort is being paid for with $5 million in private donations.

Well, how Jim Dandy that makes it for New York. An angel (Klein's buddy Jack Welch, maybe?) made a $5 M pit stop, no strings attached, and now Chris Cerf is back in business changing the face of US education.

"This is entire system reform," Mr. Cerf said over a cheeseburger lunch at a downtown bistro. "This is the most important and urgent thing going on in American public education today. If it can be done well and right here, it will be a national pace car for change."

Chancellor Klein, in an interview last week, said: "I see this as truly an evolutionary restructuring."

And if not, well, I guess Bloomberg can run for a third term. By which time we should have some other Big Ideas. And for those of you driving our last model national pace car for change, please check your mailboxes for an important recall notice.

The Big Idea This Time seems to be giving principals autonomy, provided they meet certain requirements. Klein has proof of the potential for success:

Chancellor Klein often offers an example from Edmonton, Alberta. Principals who once had to wait endlessly for the central office to send painters to spruce up a building were instead given the money to get the job done themselves.

Joel Klein makes $250,000 a year. And now no one who reads the Times will ever again question whether he's worth it.

Isn't it past time for a You Broke It You Bought It policy for politicians? You had the solution three years ago, and that makes you just the guy to fix the mess it caused? And remember, these are the jokers who had to scale back their program to squeeze new principals like sausages out of an academy, some with as little as one year of classroom experience, rather than promoting from within. So now they imagine they can get principals to do their union-busting for them, on a school-by-school basis.

But what I really wanted to do was compare Klein's quote above about how crypto-privatization got hallways painted in Edmonton, or as it's better known, the Paris of the Tundra, with some actual clear thinking:

"Isn't it insane to play 52-pickup another time when structure is far less important, far less consequential, than the daily dealings between teachers and students?" asked Diane Ravitch, the education historian and frequent critic of the administration.

Noting that the city's four-year high school graduation rate of about 53 percent had barely budged during Mr. Bloomberg's tenure, Ms. Ravitch added: "It is hard to see why this number will increase as the result of yet another massive upheaval in the structure of governance."

Then there's Stossel's bête noire, the woman who kept him from teaching for a week by trying to hide the real students:

Randi Weingarten , the president of the city teachers' union, said: "Joel and all his management guru types never talk to anyone who actually does the work — that's what so mind-boggling. Our mission isn't constantly trying to reinvent ourselves into an entrepreneurial model that will get golden globes at the Harvard Business School. How do we help all 1.1 million kids get a decent high school education?"

Amen, if you'll pardon me saying so in close proximity to our public schools. So when exactly does this management guru/MBA President/Sun-tzu shit lie down and die of embarrassment, if nothing else?

Bobo in Chapel Hill

David Brooks, "Virtues and Victims", New York Times April 9

All great scandals occur twice, first as Tom Wolfe novels, then as real-life events that nightmarishly mimic them.

I'm not sure, but I'm guessing this is an example of the patented Brooks humor. Oh, wait, that's Albert Brooks.

And so after "I Am Charlotte Simmons," it was perhaps inevitable that Duke University would have to endure a mini-social explosion involving athletic thugs, resentful townies, nervous administrators, male predators, aggrieved professors, binge drinking and lust gone wild.

Okay, maybe that is David Brooks humor. Or maybe he felt the need to call in some backup: Tom Wolfe, the bullpen ace of the conservative sociology staff.

The key word in the coverage has been "entitlement." In a thousand different ways commentators have asserted (based on no knowledge of the people involved) that the lacrosse players behaved rancidly because they felt privileged and entitled to act as they pleased.

The main theme shaping the coverage is that inequality leads to exploitation. The whites felt free to exploit the blacks. The men felt free to exploit women. The jocks felt free to exploit everybody else. As a Duke professor, Houston Baker, wrote, their environment gave the lacrosse players "license to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech and feel proud of themselves in the bargain."

It could be that this environmental, sociological explanation of events is entirely accurate. But it says something about our current intellectual climate that almost every reporter and commentator used these mental categories so unconsciously and automatically.

Several decades ago, American commentators would have used an entirely different vocabulary to grapple with what happened at Duke. Instead of the vocabulary of sociology, they would have used the language of morality and character.

And several decades ago, whites could simply murder blacks with impunity in many areas of the country. So maybe that's not the best place to go looking for tales of morality laid low.

But beyond that, and leaving aside how easy it is to say and just how much proof Brooks offers, what is this supposed to mean, "the language of morality and character"? Isn't the amply demonstrated racism on the part of some members of the Duke lacrosse team a matter of morality and character? Isn't the abuse of the less powerful by the privileged a moral issue? Is Brooks suggesting that the coverage should run along the lines of "Immoral college students, cast adrift in a world of moral relativity, drink, rape, and say bad things"?

The salient thing Brooks conveniently ignores is what makes this national news: rape on college campuses is sadly commonplace, and rarely more than a local story; rape by members of a prestigious institution's athletic teams is news. The racial component is, unfortunately, the result of racist comments, and later writings, by team members or others who attended the soirée. It would still be news if the victim was white. The "sociological" aspect of the story is just decent reporting. We may whine that under the circumstances it is fit into a particular script without solid evidence, but if so we have to indict 98% of the commentary we're bombarded with every day (not to mention, as Brooks did not, that the character of the "exploited blacks" has also been established with no knowledge of the people involved). Calling what happened that night "rancid behavior" does not mitigate the history of racism in this country, and referring to its acknowledgment as "the current intellectual climate" shows both a lack of sensitivity and a profound wish for a mass mind eraser.

Big time college lacrosse is basically a sport of Eastern elites. If people involved have been mischaracterized as such that's unfortunate, but it's nothing that doesn't happen every commentin' day of our lives. Your Republican party has been at this sort of thing for fifty years, David. I didn't see your column decrying Rita Cosby's "hoodlum voter" comment. I didn't detect any reticence on your part about characterizing the urban poor in the wake of Katrina, or jumping on the looting angle when that still had legs.

The other thing I enjoyed about this was the Wolfe connection. I checked back to Brooks' column eighteen months ago when Charlotte Simmons came out, in which he praised "the thousands of sociological details Wolfe gets right" (though presumably Brooks has no knowledge of the people involved). So I'm not sure why he objects to other commentators illuminating the sociology in this case. Oh, wait. Yes I am.

Friday Saturday Bottom Ten

Via Kathy, ten foods I will not eat:

(I omit political choices and the long list of things I'm not supposed to eat. These are aesthetic choices and personal quirks:)

1. Raw nuts. My sister won't eat them either; something must have spooked us at an early age. Unlike her I will eat nuts in things, use nut flours, crushed nut toppings, creamy peanut butter (I know, it's not a nut), and I whip up a deadly walnut tart for the holidays. But it their unprocessed form, no.

2. Brussels sprouts/cauliflower. I won't even stay in the house with Brussels sprouts. I love broccoli and like cabbage, but not their cousins.

3. Water chestnuts. A deal breaker in Chinese restaurants.

4. Cilantro. The incontinent addition of this stinkbug of the Spice World (oh, sorry) is my capsule comment on what happened to American cuisine when a bunch of trade-school geniuses took over.

5. Kumquats. I ate one once just to be polite to a girlfriend's father. I was nearly impolite to the table setting.

6. Beets. Nope.

7. Cucumber. Once in a while, faced with going hungry or returning the thing I'll go ahead and eat a gyros with cuke-scented sour cream, but nothing beyond an emergency.

8. Clams. Probably the only seafood I won't touch, though I'll use clam juice in cooking. My wife used to drink that Clammato stuff.

9. Blue cheeses. I will eat any other cheese on the planet (except the distinctly American delicacy known as "cheese food product"), including goat cheeses that smell like there's a goat inside, but I never developed a taste for the blues.

10. Fast food, other than pizza.

Happy Birthday

Billie Holiday
April 7, 1915--July 17, 1959

Thanks

For the good wishes and the L-lysine recommendation, which I'll try out this morning, having slept through another day. I can't remember having a canker sore in adulthood, and I think I'd just ignore it if it weren't in such a painful spot. As it is it's not my real problem, which is a more-or-less annual case of swollen glands and diverticulosis, both aggravated by several days of high humidity.

Plus I ran out of yogurt and was too lethargic to go get any more, especially seeing as how I'm now boycotting the new whole-foods store a mile up the road because they installed do-it-yourself cash registers and left customers to figure them out for themselves. So I wind up driving three miles to my regular place, only to get in line behind what had to be a Crunchy Con, even if she didn't know it. A woman, roughly my age, with thirteen different produce items, who was sighing audibly, theatrically, because the elderly cashier and his more elderly customer in front of her weren't moving fast enough. Then the moment this human barricade in front of her opens she remembers an item she didn't pick up, finally returns with it (a grapefruit), then doesn't remember what type it is. Oh, but then she remembers that it wasn't an organic one, because she didn't like the looks of those. She breaks off this conversation to make the bagger take everything out of the bag and redo it alphabetically by color. Then she returns her attention to the cashier, who has arbitrarily chosen pink or white, which price she now objects to, so the guy voids that and rings it up as the one that's five cents cheaper. She didn't know which one it was, but she knew what the price wasn't.

I made it to the parking lot just as she climbed into her Panzer, so I suppose the Crunchies would try to disown her.

The Stossel Record

Bullshit Rides, Ten Cents

John Stossel, "I Still Want To Teach," Townhall, April 5

Last month, 500 angry schoolteachers assembled outside my office. The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) was furious that "Stupid in America," a "20/20" show I did on education, suggested that some union teachers were lazy. They shouted that I didn't understand how difficult teaching was, and chanted, "Shame on you!"

It's interesting that Stossel can be found, weekly, among the jetsam of American political thought that is Townhall, but if Dan Rather speaks at a Labor Day celebration it's a federal issue.

Anyhoo, notice that we can't get past the first sentence before Stossel starts having difficulties with the truth. Outside your office? It's the 22-story ABC World Headquarters. So--what?--John Stossel is in a storefront at street level? Five hundred union demonstrators (the union says 1000, take your pick) just went roaming through the corridors at ABC? What?

And if your column is just that much better by making the attack personal, why not double down and claim the uproar is over you accusing teachers of laziness? Nevermind the UFT site has a 22-page, item-by-item rebuttal (.pdf file) of that sordid show of yours; nevermind that the closest you came to accusing anybody of "laziness" was the misrepresentation of classroom hours/day in the contract, which would include everybody. not a selected few.

Randi Weingarten, head of New York City's union, took the microphone and hollered, "Just teach for a week!" She said I could select from many schools. "We got high schools, we got elementary schools, we got junior high schools!"

I accepted. I even said I'd let the union pick the school. I thought I'd learn more about how difficult teaching is. Above all, it was a chance to get our cameras into schools -- something the N.Y. bureaucracy had forbidden -- so we could show you what was really going on.

Now, here's a little bit of insider information for you--teachers can't just throw open the doors of their classrooms and let news cameras in. It's likely whoever does the real work at 20/20 clued Stossel in on this back when he was trying to set up NYC schools like he managed to do with the DC schools. The lesson here being that New York's administrators are a bit more savvy than their counterparts in the nation's capitol.

Regardless, what does getting your cameras inside have to do with teaching a class for a week? Why should that be a part of the deal?

Like most of our dealings with the union, nothing was easy. It took weeks of phone calls to make any sort of progress. I suspect this will not surprise public-school parents.

And I suspect it wouldn't surprise any teevee producers, either. That rally outside "your office" was exactly four weeks before your column. Is that an inordinate amount of time to arrange something like this? Can I drop by your house with a camera crew tomorrow at 2, Johnny?

Finally, the union picked a school: Beacon High. Unfortunately, it's not a typical public school -- it's "special." Beacon doesn't have the full incentives or flexibility of a private school: It can't go out of business, and it is burdened by bureaucratic rules and a union contract. But Beacon offers a limited form of what the union opposes: school choice. As with a private school, you don't have to go there, and they don't have to take you. Applicants must submit portfolios, and if too few chose Beacon, it wouldn't be able to remain special. To remain what it is, it must compete.

Gee, however could it have taken weeks to make progress negotiating with John Stossel? Offered a mutually-agreed-upon selection of school, he says, "No, no, you make the choice," then he bitches about the choice.

What a remarkably inept piece of legerdemain this is. Forget for a moment whether New York City schools were trying to shuttle the Mustache Express to a "special" school--they're entitled, after he sought out the worst of the city's schools for his "student in the street" interviews. Check out the libertoonian language there, and tell me the value of words which mean something different depending on who you aim them at. Let's take it from the top:

The Beacon School was founded in 1993 by two public school educators. It provides an inquiry-based curriculum focusing on technology and the arts, and says its standards exceed New York State requirements.

Now, I don't know how many "special" schools there are in New York City. It's enough so that there's at least one 256-page paperback offering to help parents choose the best public high schools. And I know that poor bureaucratic-laden, union-infested NYC was the first school district in the nation to offer these "limited choice" schools the education establishment seems to hate so much. So perhaps we can put that one to bed: teachers unions have never opposed school choice; they oppose transferring public monies to private schools.

I'm always amused by the easy libertarian notion of "bureaucracy". Anyone who's ever worked for a large corporation or shopped at a department store knows that bureaucracy is not the sole province of governments; the libertarian position merely voices a preference for jumping through hoops held in private hands. But the really curious thing about the above is how at the beginning of the paragraph Beacon School "doesn't have to compete", while at the end it must compete or go out of business.

So what, exactly, could be the problem with taking up the offer of Beacon? Stossel hand-selected the private academies he touted as success stories.

Recently classes of Beacon students took field trips to France, South Africa, and tellingly, Venezuela and Cuba.

Tellingly, Venezuela and Cuba. Sorry, the free marketplace of ideas has closed.

Beacon has rooms filled with computers, students learn to do PowerPoint demonstrations, and a class I watched had two teachers (one a student-teacher) for 24 students. Ninety percent of Beacon's students graduate, while the average graduation rate for New York City public schools is only 53 percent.

This is a funny objection from the guy who claims that dollars spent and class sizes didn't matter. And yes, Beacon, as a college-prep specialty retailer, has a higher than average graduation rate. So do private schools which, unlike their public "competitors", simply reject students who aren't gonna make the grade.

I guess they didn't want me to look at a normal public school.

And my guess is they don't want anything whatsoever to do with your lyin' ass, and the challenge for you to teach a class, any class mutually chosen, was to show your ass up. Which it did.

I prepped for my history classes. We had more meetings. The school principal had me sit in on a class with a "superstar" teacher. It was supposed to be a history class, but he seemed to teach "victimhood in racist America." On the class door he posted a New York Times column denouncing the president for spending too much money on war. Can we say "left-wing"?

Can we say, "so fucking what?" Maybe you should have paid attention during the lecture on racism; you might have learned something about US history our "educational bureaucracy" keeps from probably 85% of public school students because the truth is "controversial". As for the president and his war spending, that's currently denounced by 2/3 of your fellow citizens, Mr. Reporter. And his general spending practices have been roundly denounced by the right wing that enacted them in the first place.

Then there were more meetings. Finally, four days before what was supposed to be my first day of class, they canceled. Officially, "they" were the public school administrators who said it might be "disruptive" and that it might "set a precedent" that would open their doors to other reporters.

But, unofficially, "they" were union officials who were afraid you'd show them up? Right.

Too bad. Letting cameras into schools would be a good thing. Taxpayers might finally get to see how more than $200,000 per classroom of their money was being spent.

This, by the way, is either an example of how freely Stossel spreads his corporate apologist fertilizer or an example of the dire straits our math education is in. He's made this claim on a national basis--$10,000 per pupil times an imaginary class of 20 equals a $200,000 classroom. But that twenty is purely arbitrary, and $10,000 is high even for New York City, which spends $9300 per pupil in general education; the average per pupil is $11,172 because the average per special education pupil is $32,924. (In case this post engenders another visit from the Stosselians, the link is here.)

Most private schools bear none of the costs of educating students with disabilites. Religious schools are legally exempt from the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and many private schools which do accept some special education students rely on the public schools for specialized instruction. Public schools, of course, must spend whatever it takes to educate every student presented to them. I await the explanation of how private schools, with their track record of rejecting anyone who presents a problem, will not only deal with these students but do so at less cost to taxpayers. By using unqualified, non-union instructors, perhaps?

There really are no words for the hubris of a mediocre teevee talent willing to trash public education for ratings points, for the mustachioed defender of the Poor Forlorn Taxpayer who thinks the cost of Bush's wars is out of bounds. But at a time when the ceiling is about to fall on those who've refused to see the stupidity of the anti-public education agenda of the last five years, I hope one can be forgiven for a brief fantasy of the 20/20 set crashing down on an investigative reporter, one who'll never know that the minimum wage, non-union stagehands hired to cut costs forgot to anchor the thing to the stage.

One Two Three Four

I've slept approximately thirty-six of the preceding forty-eight hours. The remaining twelve or so have been more than adequately filled by the canker sore on my tongue (left side, roughly opposite the second molar) which is throbbing so intensely you can actually see the whole left side of my face pulsing if you look closely enough.

I'm inclined to blame the neighbors' dog for this, just because I can. He hasn't missed any meals. He didn't have to wake up cursing because I was barking incessantly at 10 PM. He's been walked and petted and wrestled with over a slobbery tennis ball, and I've carried his feces up the block in a sandwich bag, something no one has ever done for me.

He's a suburbanite's dog, which is to say he's a purebred, a large breed (Yellow lab), chosen apparently out of some combination of the daughter's pre-teen I'd rather have a pony aesthetics and weird Republican lawn-care dad Romanicism (We're going to breed him! He's going to retriever classes so we can hunt!). Neighbor wife wanted a cat and was outvoted, at which point she should have simply quit doing the laundry that, as a good American Republican suburbanite wife, she does after a full day's work instead of hubby salesman getting any of it done while he sits at home yammering on his cell phone, intact and unbred and faithful retriever by his side.

Actual interest in the dog lasted about nine months, or roughly the time it took him to stop being a puppy and start being a continuing problem. We would have started a pool, but both my wife and myself knew exactly what was about to happen. He's not a bad neighbor; he doesn't bark much, which is why being awakened by him was doubly irritating, and he does all his digging on the other side of their property. He's just somewhat neglected, not particularly bright, and must be presently on his second month without a bath. It's the sort of thing that happens when you a) let Republicans make decisions based on their unrealistic assumptions about the world and b) put them in charge of the maintenance.

The best thing about these semi-annual dogsitting stints is that I get to reclaim whatever of our possessions have made their way next door. This is not actually much of a problem--about 80% of things borrowed will be returned within, say, three months--but there's usually something to reclaim whenever an equinox comes around, and now I've finally got my copy of the Ramones documentary End of the Century back. Which was what I set out to write about, back ten minutes ago when nobody was pounding on my head. G'night again.

Happy Birthday

McKinley Morganfield
April 4, 1915--April 30, 1983

I hear my telephone ringin',
Sounds like a long distance call.

The Crunchy Bunch: As Always, It's a Pleasure To Say Goodbye to You

"We are a movement of arguments and ideas, right?"

--Jonah Goldberg

When all was said, and little or nothing was done, the key exchange of NRO's Crunchy Bunch blog happened at the end of its first week, in this Rod Dreher/Jonah Goldberg exchange:

Re: The Crunchy Third Rail
[Dreher 02/24 01:44 PM ]

To read a terrific explication of a closely related point, turn to the title essay of Wendell Berry’s 1992 book Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays . Excerpt:

The conventional public opposition of “liberal” and “conservatives” is, here as elsewhere, perfectly useless. The “conservatives” promote the family as a sort of public icon, but they will not promote the economic integrity of the household or the community, which are the mainstays of family life. Under the sponsorship of “conservative” presidencies, the economy of the modern household, which once required the father to work away from home – a development that was bad enough – now requires the mother to work away from home, as well. And this development has the wholehearted endorsement of “liberals,” who see the mother thus forced to spend her days away from her home and children as “liberated” – though nobody has yet sent he fathers thus forced away as “liberated.” Some feminists are thus in the curious position of opposing the mistreatment of women and yet advocating their participation in an economy in which everything is mistreated.

The “conservatives” more or less attack homosexuality, abortion and pornography, and the “liberals” more or less defend them. Neither party will oppose sexual promiscuity. The “liberals” will not oppose promiscuity because they do not wish to appear intolerant of “individual liberty.” The “conservatives” will not oppose promiscuity because sexual discipline would reduce the profits of corporations, which in their advertisements and entertainments encourage sexual self-indulgence as a way of selling merchandise.

The public discussion of sexual issues has thus degenerated into a poor attempt to equivocate between private lusts and public emergencies. Nowhere in public life (that is, in the public life that counts: the discussions of political and corporate leaders) is there an attempt to respond to community needs in the language of community interest.

And Jonah surfaces:

Uh, Ok...Maybe, I think
[Goldberg 02/25 04:58 PM ]

...[I]t is flatly not true that conservatives do not denounce promiscuity or try to tackle it. This administration puts real dollars behind its advocacy of abstinence, here and abroad. Christian conservative Churches speak out against promiscuity. Right wing groups launch boycotts, letter writing campaigns and propose legislation for things like the V-Chip. They oppose distributing condoms in schools, precisely because they think doing so will promote promiscuity. Conservatives criticize the popular culture. And so on. Now, they may not do it enough. That's a legitimate argument to make. But it's patent nonsense to say they don't do it. That is not a trivial point.

For completeness' sake we should note that within twenty-four hours of that first post Dreher was saying that "divorced from the context of the long essay the quote doesn't stand up so well," and twenty-four hours after that he was saying Berry "wildly overstates his case."

Wendell Berry, polemicist, agrarian, poet, Christian, farmer, critic of the first Iraq war and the war on terror (and terra), anti-industrialist, social moralist, is a thoughtful and thought-provoking writer, which means Jonah Goldberg has no standing to slag him off and Rod Dreher no right to call on him for support, let alone toss him off the bus at the first sign of opposition.

What became obvious rather quickly on that blog was that what might have made it interesting--the collision of "Conservative" apologetics as practiced at The Corner with the prodigious brick wall between their social moralisms and unbridled affection for Big Bidness--wasn't going to happen. Instead we were treated, if that's the right word, to a mock battle over who gets to keep the logo.

It's a mock battle because Dreher had conceded before it began; his allegiance is to the religious, specifically the Catholic, Right, and he's trying to steer from the back of the bus. What insight Berry might have had into the issue didn't concern him, which is why he could scuttle the thing so quickly and so completely. That big business "conservatism" champions the very moral ills he warns about--that is, basically, sexual immorality--is a matter of "argument and ideas" in the Goldberg sense. What he really liked about the Berry essay was the denunciation of promiscuity.

On the other side stands our Jonah. If Dreher has purposely defanged his argument, Goldberg bites like a man with ill-fitted dentures. "It's not a trivial point," he insists, but he spits up a litany of trivialities. Berry said "conservative" power, not every last erotophobe in the country who pulls the GOP handle, refuses to oppose promiscuity. In response Jonah gives us one example, funding for abstinence advocacy, that's an actual government program (and, we might add, a particularly toothless one; there's not a high probability that preaching abstinence at teenagers is going to reduce the public appetite for porn). That's it? Twenty-five years of Just Say No? The Socialist libertine Bill Clinton, signer of the Defense of Marriage Act, opponent of same-sex unions, and Father of the V-Chip, did as much.

Instead of calling him on it, Dreher apologized for quoting someone so over the top. Onward Crunchy Soldiers, marching as to War, up until we see the Elephant.

Is this the preview of '08 the Doughboy seemed to imagine it was when he wrote (yet again) a couple weeks later that the supposed "conservative" rift was nothing of the sort? I've been saying since '96, when the rabid religionists stopped slavering, supported Dole, and allowed themselves to be pushed off the prime-time Convention podium the first of three times (only Zell Miller broke the rule, his maniac ranting acceptable because he's a Democrat), that the religionists saw '08 as their Big Chance. They were gonna dance with whomever the nominee was in the meantime just to defeat Clinton/Gore. Of course, things have changed, beginning with the popular notion that Bush was a Man of God, and ending with the recent suggestions that He's Not Really a "Conservative" at All.

I certainly didn't predict that the wheels would come flying off the Bush administration quite so spectacularly, or the mass frog marching of the Republican Congress. Whether that, and the best efforts of Tim Russert gives John McCain new hope is a question that'll be answered by money, not logic. But the religious Right is not going to roll over and beg to have its belly scratched the way Rod and his army of Crunchiness did. God, it's only Tuesday morning. I've already spent too much time with Neighbor Dog.

I'd returned to that first week of posts after checking out Check Out Day. As the End drew near Rod gave us a reading list, then added some titles from an emailer which included Aristotle's Politics. God I love reading "conservative" blogs.

The fun was from the day before, with this:

Battle lines
[Rod Dreher 03/30 11:05 AM ]

Things went pretty well with the Washington Post reporter, Hank Stuever, who turned out to be a really nice guy. At one point asked a perfectly reasonable question that I had hoped he might not, because I had to get into something controversial that’s difficult to talk about and which … well, I didn’t hold back, I told all, and I guess everybody will find out when the Style section hits the stands in a couple of weeks.

Anyway, at one point we talked a bit about the hardened battle lines between Left and Right in this country, which is something I decry in the final chapter of Crunchy Cons . I talk (in the book) about trying to think past the stale left-vs-right dynamic that has our political imagination so paralyzed right now, but how hearing some smug liberals in a local bar talk about how satisfying it would be if an Islamic militant drove a truck bomb into a conservative Baptist church in town made me so angry I was ready in that moment to vote Republican until kingdom come.

This, I wrote, is how it happens. How both parties and their partisan machines keep us all stuck on stupid when it comes to voting: they gin up such fear and hatred of the Other that they get us to be loyal to them no matter how badly they’re failing, or lousy their agendas. I told Hank that to look at the mainstream left and right today, one is reminded of trench warfare in World War I, in which two armies expend tremendous firepower and destructive effort to advance 50 yards. It’s dispiriting. “So, how do we break out of it?” the reporter asked. I didn’t know what to tell him. What should I have told him?

Five Weeks in a Balloon. We need to overcome this Left/Right trench warfare, and as an example here's something my cab driver told me I saw in a comment at Kos overheard in a bar. This from a guy who "can't even talk to" liberal members of his own Church. Republican hegemony has been a total disaster, not the least to supposed "conservative" values, but what gets Dreher is what some local says after several Cosmopolitans. I love the pretense that he's a potential swing voter. I'd love to see him confront either the logical conclusions of the supposed Crunchy manifesto (how, exactly, does a "free" economy eliminate the consumer demand for sex, and don't say by true believers thinking good thoughts). I'd like to see, just once, any of these Corner types deal honestly with their opponents instead of sharing "ideas and arguments" in an echo chamber (oh, right, Goldberg did just that by refusing to debate Juan Cole). I can hardly wait for that Style section in two weeks' time. In the meantime, we'll always have Paris. Hilton. that blatant dishonesty above.

Happy Birthday

Donald Eugene Gibson
April 3, 1928--November 17, 2003

"Oh Lonesome Me" and "I Can't Stop Loving You" were written in the same afternoon.