InstaPun***K.Com

Sunday, May 11, 2008

A Mother's Day Tribute to:

Liberal Moms
of the Future

They're going to be so NEW. And cool!

EQUALITY. We're into the new NEW feminism now, the post-Hillary, post-modern, post-love generation of git-up-and-go professional mothers to be. They'll be up on all the pre-nuptial agreement laws, time-off for post-partum murderous fantasies therapy, breastfeeding-till-puberty fashion statements, daycare-reimbursement rights, car-seat regulations, divorce-the-bastard-to-death self destructiveness, single-mother-I-get- the-house-and-everything- else-but-a-father litigation, my-kid-can-do-no-wrong denial, and post-doctoral, Michelle Obama, permanent, pissed-off hard-on about how-much-my- life-sucks-now politics. A breakthrough. Thanks to the fearless pioneers of the last half of the twentieth century, tomorrow's kids will have moms who know what men and phones are for (although the order of those should probably be reversed if priority is important).

Who could possibly have foreseen an age in which women would get "push-presents" just because they're maybe possibly capable of becoming mothers someday, and, well, basking in literally unbounded admiration just for the fact of their belonging to the superior female sex? Who could ever have anticipated the attractive distance and ennui of Michelle Obama?

Oops. maybe one guy foresaw it:

"Gloria is a very young soul--" began Mrs. Gilbert eagerly, but her nephew interrupted with a hurried sentence:

"Gloria'd be a very young nut not to marry him." He stopped and faced her, his expression a battle map of lines and dimples, squeezed and strained to its ultimate show of intensity--this as if to make up by his sincerity for any indiscretion in his words. "Gloria's a wild one, Aunt Catherine. She's uncontrollable. How she's done it I don't know, but lately she's picked up a lot of the funniest friends. She doesn't seem to care. And the men she used to go with around New York were--" He paused for breath.

"Yes-yes-yes," interjected Mrs. Gilbert, with an anaemic attempt to hide the immense interest with which she listened.

"Well," continued Richard Caramel gravely, "there it is. I mean that the men she went with and the people she went with used to be first rate. Now they aren't."

Mrs. Gilbert blinked very fast--her bosom trembled, inflated, remained so for an instant, and with the exhalation her words flowed out in a torrent.

She knew, she cried in a whisper; oh, yes, mothers see these things. But what could she do? He knew Gloria. He'd seen enough of Gloria to know how hopeless it was to try to deal with her. Gloria had been so spoiled--in a rather complete and unusual way. She had been suckled until she was three, for instance, when she could probably have chewed sticks. Perhaps--one never knew--it was this that had given that health and _hardiness_ to her whole personality. And then ever since she was twelve years old she'd had boys about her so thick--oh, so thick one couldn't _move_. At sixteen she began going to dances at preparatory schools, and then came the colleges; and everywhere she went, boys, boys, boys. At first, oh, until she was eighteen there had been so many that it never seemed one any more than the others, but then she began to single them out.

She knew there had been a string of affairs spread over about three years, perhaps a dozen of them altogether. Sometimes the men were undergraduates, sometimes just out of college--they lasted on an average of several months each, with short attractions in between. Once or twice they had endured longer and her mother had hoped she would be engaged, but always a new one came--a new one--

The men? Oh, she made them miserable, literally! There was only one who had kept any sort of dignity, and he had been a mere child, young Carter Kirby, of Kansas City, who was so conceited anyway that he just sailed out on his vanity one afternoon and left for Europe next day with his father. The others had been--wretched. They never seemed to know when she was tired of them, and Gloria had seldom been deliberately unkind. They would keep phoning, writing letters to her, trying to see her, making long trips after her around the country. Some of them had confided in Mrs. Gilbert, told her with tears in their eyes that they would never get over Gloria ... at least two of them had since married, though.... But Gloria, it seemed, struck to kill--to this day Mr. Carstairs called up once a week, and sent her flowers which she no longer bothered to refuse.

Several times, twice, at least, Mrs. Gilbert knew it had gone as far as a private engagement--with Tudor Baird and that Holcome boy at Pasadena. She was sure it had, because--this must go no further--she had come in unexpectedly and found Gloria acting, well, very much engaged indeed. She had not spoken to her daughter, of course. She had had a certain sense of delicacy and, besides, each time she had expected an announcement in a few weeks. But the announcement never came; instead, a new man came.

Scenes! Young men walking up and down the library like caged tigers! Young men glaring at each other in the hall as one came and the other left! Young men calling up on the telephone and being hung up upon in desperation! Young men threatening South America! ... Young men writing the most pathetic letters! (She said nothing to this effect, but Dick fancied that Mrs. Gilbert's eyes had seen some of these letters.)

... And Gloria, between tears and laughter, sorry, glad, out of love and in love, miserable, nervous, cool, amidst a great returning of presents, substitution of pictures in immemorial frames, and taking of hot baths and beginning again--with the next.

That state of things continued, assumed an air of permanency. Nothing harmed Gloria or changed her or moved her. And then out of a clear sky one day she informed her mother that undergraduates wearied her. She was absolutely going to no more college dances.

This had begun the change--not so much in her actual habits, for she danced, and had as many "dates" as ever--but they were dates in a different spirit. Previously it had been a sort of pride, a matter of her own vainglory. She had been, probably, the most celebrated and sought-after young beauty in the country. Gloria Gilbert of Kansas City! She had fed on it ruthlessly--enjoying the crowds around her, the manner in which the most desirable men singled her out; enjoying the fierce jealousy of other girls; enjoying the fabulous, not to say scandalous, and, her mother was glad to say, entirely unfounded rumors about her--for instance, that she had gone in the Yale swimming-pool one night in a chiffon evening dress.

And from loving it with a vanity that was almost masculine--it had been in the nature of a triumphant and dazzling career--she became suddenly anaesthetic to it. She retired. She who had dominated countless parties, who had blown fragrantly through many ballrooms to the tender tribute of many eyes, seemed to care no longer. He who fell in love with her now was dismissed utterly, almost angrily. She went listlessly with the most indifferent men. She continually broke engagements, not as in the past from a cool assurance that she was irreproachable, that the man she insulted would return like a domestic animal--but indifferently, without contempt or pride. She rarely stormed at men any more--she yawned at them. She seemed--and it was so strange--she seemed to her mother to be growing cold.

Richard Caramel listened. At first he had remained standing, but as his aunt's discourse waxed in content--it stands here pruned by half, of all side references to the youth of Gloria's soul and to Mrs. Gilbert's own mental distresses--he drew a chair up and attended rigorously as she floated, between tears and plaintive helplessness, down the long story of Gloria's life. When she came to the tale of this last year, a tale of the ends of cigarettes left all over New York in little trays marked "Midnight Frolic" and "Justine Johnson's Little Club," he began nodding his head slowly, then faster and faster, until, as she finished on a staccato note, it was bobbing briskly up and down, absurdly like a doll's wired head, expressing--almost anything.

In a sense Gloria's past was an old story to him. He had followed it with the eyes of a journalist, for he was going to write a book about her some day. But his interests, just at present, were family interests. He wanted to know, in particular, who was this Joseph Bloeckman that he had seen her with several times; and those two girls she was with constantly, "this" Rachael Jerryl and "this" Miss Kane--surely Miss Kane wasn't exactly the sort one would associate with Gloria!

But the moment had passed. Mrs. Gilbert having climbed the hill of exposition was about to glide swiftly down the ski-jump of collapse. Her eyes were like a blue sky seen through two round, red window-casements. The flesh about her mouth was trembling.

And at the moment the door opened, admitting into the room Gloria and the two young ladies lately mentioned.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

Yeah, he knew something about Princetion, and even Yale. But what the hell did he know about iPhones, text-messaging, and girl power? Women invented all that stuff. And future babies will thank them forever. Especially when they figure out how easily their moms could have ditched them in that incredibly uncomfortable and vanity-assaulting ninth month.

Happy Mother's Day to all the old-fashioned mothers out there. We love you. Oh yes we do. You we absolutely revere and treasure. Because we know you never thought about killing us to keep your career, your figure or your boyfriend.

Nobody under the age of 40 can be really sure of that anymore. Moms.

WICKED. Try listening to the audio file as if it were a fetus talking to the neo-Mom of the graphic above after she'd decided to, uh, "end the pregnancy" for the good of all concerned. Would Gloria care? Would Michelle? Would the current Princeton female graduating class? [Text your answers to 656.98.9877.]

That's the basis of our heartfelt thank you to the real mothers who don't need push-presents or all the convenient empty clap-trap of post-modern narcissism. Which has always been there. It just never used to be regarded as a virtue.

Friday, May 09, 2008

Your Friday Folly

TGIF. The inspired diggers over at HotAir found this terrific clip of Hillary Clinton acting out the final scene from Sunset Boulevard. It's too good to pass up, even if the only value-added we can provide is the easy-to-find clip of the original scene.

Here it is:

But who, we wonder, is the dead guy in Hillary's pool? You know, the murdered guy who narrates the whole pitiful story.

Has anyone checked on Bill's whereabouts today?

Never mind. We're sure he's fine. But, uh, what about that Mark Penn fellow?

Just asking.

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Life Unlikely

NOTHING'S AS SIMPLE AS IT SEEMS. Okay. So this is interesting. From a lot of different angles.

ET contact odds 'extremely low'

The odds of intelligent life arising on another Earth-like planet are low, a British scientist has calculated.

He argues that humans evolved via a series of four "critical steps" - the likelihood of all of which occurring on one planet is less than 0.01%....

Professor Andrew Watson has published his findings in the academic journal Astrobiology.

"Complex life may be a rare phenomenon, observers rarer still," he wrote...

"We now believe that we evolved late in the Earth's habitable period, and this suggests that our evolution is rather unlikely. In fact, the timing of events is consistent with it being very rare indeed," he says...

Previous models are founded on the rationale that intelligent life on Earth emerged from a sequence of unlikely "critical steps".

Prof Watson identifies four - the emergence of single-celled bacteria; complex cells; specialised cells allowing complex life forms; intelligent life with an established language.

He estimates that the probability of each of these "critical steps" occurring in relation to the lifespan of Earth is no more than 10%.

Thus, the chances of intelligent life on any given Earth-like planet is tiny - less than 0.01% over four billion years.

Let me count the problems with this bohunkus analysis of cosmology. I'm not just having fun here. I'm demonstrating some of the principal problems with official science the way it's practiced in academe. The official logic is silly but important.

Let's start with the most disingenuous part of the story: "Previous models are founded on the rationale that intelligent life on Earth emerged from a sequence of unlikely 'critical steps'" [Italics added] The word 'rationale' is in this case a synonym for 'assumption.' An assumption that's suspect on several counts.

First, the universe is immensely vast, which means that even the unlikeliest events are, in sum, inevitable. Eventually, somebody does win the Powerball Lottery. All it takes is enough trials. Our universe provides an almost infinite number of trials. Which means there's a pretty big population of Powerball winners when you start multiplying billion-to-one odds by umpty-quintillion ticket buyers.

No matter what the odds are against life on earth, there are probably billions of planets where similarly 'unlikely' events have taken place.

Second, the assumption implies that the vastness of space somehow matters in terms of ET contact. There are two reasons to doubt this. There's Arthur C. Clarke's admonition that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Which scientists routinely discount in every specific question they look at. Why? Because they can't conceive that someone out there could be smarter than they are. Not possible. They sort of insist that everyone else would apply their logic to any situation they can imagine. The fact is, we have no way of knowing the process or technology by which a vastly superior civilization might discover that we exist and come for a visit.

The other reason is that there's something unique about earth we already know about, something that sets us dramatically apart from 99+ percent of other planets. The moon. (Despite science's insistence that it understands everything important about the universe, it still can't explain definitively where the moon came from.) It is a stabilizing factor in our planetary orbit and rotation. It keeps us from flipping and rolling and having the high old time we'd no doubt prefer if we were the planetary teenagers Carl Sagan warned us not to be. Without the moon, and its exact size, rotation, and periodicity, there's no chance there'd be life on earth. The nature of the moon's relationship to the earth, and the sun, makes us a glowing signal to anyone out there looking for advanced life in the universe. We're a kind of neon sign to anyone who has the 'magical' technology to sift through galaxies in search of likely loci of life.

Beyond this, the root assumption still sucks. The four 'unlikely' phases of the development of life on earth have the flavor of Zeno's Arrow. In a proper logical context, life seems incredibly unlikely to the believers of neo-Darwinian evolution. Four big steps are required, each of which is prohibitively improbable. Provided you think it's all caused by mutation and adaptation. With no intelligence involved.

Uh oh. Intelligent design. The great non-theory of the non-scientific. Fuck off. If intelligence is possible as an attribute of organic life forms, it's also a pre-existing potentiality -- call it a built-in property of the universe itself, like leaf shapes and cranial brain location -- and maybe it drives relentlessly toward manifesting itself. If so, that would change the odds the Brit scientist is "rationalizing." No more Zeno. In this case, the universe is teeming with intelligent life and the odds are very different from what the experts would have us believe. Change the assumption, change the odds.

Why are they so resistant? The scientists, I mean. They're not behaving rationally at all. On the one hand, they chafe at the idea that a change in a few constants of physics would result in no universe at all. They tell us the fortunate circumstances that underlie this universe mean only that that all other combinations of physical laws are also being tried out in universes unseen. On the other hand, they insist that conscious intelligence is a freak by-product of an entirely accidental process and means nothing, while they simultaneously argue that it just might be the rarest thing in the universe. What happened to the infinity of everything being tried?

I think it's called having your cake and eating it too. Their very particular arrangement of probabilities makes them (purely by coincidence, mind) the smartest beings in the universe. Hmmmm.

Not buying it. Too many credible stories about UFOs and USOs. If any of them are true, the scientists are full of shit. Which isn't that much of a reach. Let's face it.

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

InstapunkYTwed508

YouTube Wednesday

You see. It's all been a Broadway number. Are we having fun yet?

YTW. No, we're not going to keep talking about Hillary and Obama. YouTube Wednesday is about distractions, not current events. Although we couldn't resist this one, which will be ancient history by tomorrow, so we have to do it today.

That's it. Done with the candidates. Honest. For example, how could one get more high-toned and above it all than promoting some Physics Phun?

Oh. You prefer no-toned and below it all? We got that covered too.

Okay. That was kind of ucky. We admit it. Makes us want to take a bath. You know. Get really clean. That's what the "Devil's Pool" is all about. If you're evil enough, you can paddle around inches away from the tallest waterfall in the world. InstaPunk contributors spend every single day of summer there every year.

Too sinister? For good people, maybe. That's probably why our genius American environmentalists are fully prepared to ban water altogether.

They might even get away with it. Unless Bengal cats find out about it.

You don't know about Bengals? Get with it, folks. Most of the cats you're seeing these days in cat food commercials are Bengals. They're, uh, intensely interactive with every environment. Camera show-offs too. And kind of scary. Like seven pound leopards.

They won't let us embed this one. But you have to see it. Here.

But clumsy. For some reason, they just don't care about heights. When they fall, they don't even land on their feet. That would be caring. About heights.

Actually, you can keep YouTube Wednesday going indefinitely if you just follow the Bengals...

Now, isn't that better than all the political harping and carping you're getting everywhere else today? You know it is. Bengals make lots of speeches. But they absolutely never make any promises and they never ask for your vote. They pretty much do whatever they want to. Follow their example as long as you can. You've got till maybe January or February to squeeze it all in.

Get busy.

P.S. Couldn't resist. One more. It's kind of like peanuts. Hard to stop.

But we're GOING to stop. Right now.

Be Calm

MORNING. It's clear that CountryPunk and, obviously, TruePunk overreacted to last night's election results. As to their gratuitous slamming of McCain, I can only assure you that I have sent them both stern emails reminding them of the unfailing admiration we have always had here for the Republican presidential nominee:

Time Out
Ear to the Ground
InstaPunk Is Always Right
Where's the Dark Matter?
The Superior Conservative
McCain for President
Pressing the Point
A Surge McCain Doesn't Support
No Republicans Left in the Race
Six Is a State of Mind
McCain Reacts Angrily to NYT

Well, there's more, but you can see that we've been in the bag for McCain from the very beginning. Sort of like Hugh Hewitt and Dean Barnett were for Mitt Romney. But that doesn't mean we're incapable of being objective. We love the guy to death, but we can still speak from a certain distance. Just like Hugh and Dean said they could.

It's all going to be okay, people. Truly. It's absolutely not the case that Mr. McCain is some kind of loose cannon, egomaniacal, rude, arrogant, just-plain-nasty closet liberal control freak who thinks government should be limited except when people behave in ways he doesn't approve of. That's not who he is at all. He would absolutely talk to Rush Limbaugh if he didn't already know that Limbaugh is a treacherous, uneducated, and largely malicious distraction from the, well, sanctity of the ongoing dialogue between the American people and the mainstream press, which has always been so supportive of patriots like, uh John McCain.

I know from some of your emails that you're concerned I might be withdrawing my declaration of support for the Arizona senator's bid for the presidency. Not a chance. I understand the objections. CountryPunk has a parochial view. TruePunk is just crazy. But we all always knew that.

Why would anyone think it's reasonable to expect a Republican nominee to subscribe to all Republican positions? Isn't it enough to be vaguely pro-life? Why can't a Republican kinda sorta believe in Global Warming and the need to pulverize the entire global economic system to make it one percent cooler? Who wouldn't want to turn the American southwest over to an ethnic minority that would rather be Spanish than Indian if it means laying a more persuasive legal claim to lucrative lands developed by Anglos? And is it really so bad to have spent seven years undermining and sniping at a president who dared to undertake an attack on enemies who'd been bombing us for a decade before he took office? Of course not. That's just understandable maverickousness, common in Washington as a head cold.

I really want to be clear about this. Especially now that we know Obama will be the Democratic nominee. How should I put it? I want to be precise. Here's my best attempt:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH! WE CAN'T ELECT OBAMA. WE JUST CAN'T.

Does that clarify matters for you?

I thought it would.

President Obama

The Trans-Racial, Trans-American, Trans-Human Candidate. Cool

DONE AND DONE. I don't know how CountryPunk knew the race was over before the first votes were reported, but he did. Now I have two tasks. One, to acknowledge that Obama will be the nominee of the Democratic Party, and two, to renounce any possibility of my support for John McCain.

America wants to reap the whirlwind. So be it. You want an angry young man for president? Have him. Just be aware that the best way to judge a man is to know his wife. Michelle Obama is no Jackie Kennedy. She's a good looking woman to be sure, but she's also a bitter, whining harridan who probably makes her husband as miserable as he will make us. I cringe at the thought of her being the hostess of state dinners. But we survived Rosalynn Carter and we'll survive the pissed-off, victimized Princetonian, too.

Now for McCain. My fleeting hope was that he was actually a politician. He isn't. He's just an arrogant asshole. His decision to speak to La Raza -- in clear defiance of the conservative base of his party, which believes in the rule of law and disdains race-based extortion -- is both unconscionable and incredibly stupid.

It's the last part that's so dismaying. Politicians routinely do unconscionable things. But they normally do them to satisfy the people who have worked and sacrificed and gone the extra mile to get them elected. John McCain is yet another of the new breed of western Americans who are willing to betray their country for the sake of Spanish architecture, Mexican food, and cheap gardeners. Only it's not that cheap. It's that the braggart of the Straight Talk Express is actually in the pocket of all the special interests who are willing to do anything to keep the flow of illegal low-cost labor flowing into the United States, law and cultural integrity be damned.

Forget the hero of the Hanoi Hilton. The John McCain of 2008 is corrupt. So corrupt that his debts to the illegal immigration promoters outweigh even his desire to be president of the United States. That's a big fucking debt.

We're all on our own now. Do whatever you want. The United States is lost. Run a third-party ticket for Ron Paul. Run a fourth-party ticket for Mike Huckabee. Stay at home and give Obama the biggest congressional majority any president ever had. The Democrats will have their day now.

And I have just stopped caring. Go to hell. All of you. Pretend that the Islamists don't want to kill you. Maybe they'll relent and give your wife and daughters an anesthetic before they cut off their clitorises. Pretend that Iran doesn't really plan to nuke Israel. Just remember to act surprised when it happens and Obama initiates a new round of talks to deal with the implications. Pretend that the Iraq War is nothing but a drain on American resources and explore the cornucopia of consequences when we abandon them for the tenth time in twenty years.

I. DON'T. CARE.

Me? I love Obama. He's so coolly eloquent. Isn't that the height of statecraft? Sure it is.

Whatever. I don't know anything. I thought the Republican Party would have the balls to defend their own president, who accomplished an absolute goddam miracle -- preventing another major domestic terrorist attack for more than seven years. But no. They don't even want to appear on the same podium with him. Fuck them. They don't deserve anybody's vote. Give the damn Democrats every single seat in the House and Senate and then see how quickly you want to throw them out of office. HINT: When they decide all your paychecks should go directly to them first, so they can decide how much you're not allowed to spend on Big Macs, spinner wheels, rodeo tickets, smokes, hookers, tattoos, cheesy lingerie, Southern Comfort, ten-gauge ammunition, and RVs. That'll settle your hash. Oh. Excuse me. No, it won't. You'll happily trade all that for FREE healthcare.

Assholes.

Thanks a lot, John McCain. There's more than one kind of traitor. There's the kind who talks when he shouldn't. And there's the kind who sells out the whole damn country because he's too smug and rich to remember what his country is even about.

And thanks, Obama. We need you. In a strange, fucked up way, we need you. We really do. Let's just hope the lesson you're there to teach us doesn't kill us. It probably won't. But not because you won't be trying.

Have at it, weed.

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

False Dawn

Well, it's at least more poetic than the "light at the end of the tunnel" cliche.

HOPE VS. REALITY. Led by Rush Limbaugh and other inveterate optimists, Republicans are starting to believe they might actually win the 2008 presidential election. The increasingly dirty infighting between the Clinton and Obama campaigns reminds them of 1968, when the Dems ripped their own party apart at the Chicago convention and couldn't heal the divide in time to beat Richard Nixon. Perversely, the extreme left wing of the Democrat Party is bolstering the analogy by promising to "Recreate '68" at the 2008 Denver convention.

But sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel really is an oncoming train. That's very probably the case this time. It's a terrible year to be a Republican, "maverick" or not. What the Republicans should remember about 1968 is just how close the Democrats came to winning -- even though they were the incumbent party of the White House and both houses of Congress, who had presided over an incredibly unpopular war, huge budget deficits, escalating inflation, and an ugly generational confrontation that seemed at times on the verge of armed civil war. Yet the FDR coalition of big government petitioners and identity panderers fell only a couple hundred thousand votes short of electing a sitting Vice President who was inextricably linked to every policy that had engendered such national chaos. The lesson to remember? Republicans aren't Democrats. If they fail to make or keep popular promises, they get fired. Think Ford and Bush 41. When Democrats fail to perform (always) -- and even when they spend months sawing at each others' throats -- they can still unify a lot of voting blocs on a single Tuesday in November.

The Democrats will come back together by November, regardless of how intramurally bellicose they sound right now. And it's highly likely that they will defeat McCain in the general election. But not for the reasons most of the pundits are citing. The analogy year, if you must have one, is 1976. The candidate who is closest to Obama in recent American history is Jimmy Carter, a total outsider who capitalized on the nationwide -- and utter -- disgust with the entire Washington, DC, establishment to seek the presidency based on nothing but vague promises that we could trust him to make everything better. So we elected the first engineer president since Herbert Hoover, with remarkably similar results.

Call it what you will. Denial. Flight from reality. Romantic fantasy. It all amounts to the same thing, an election that is decided on almost deliberately superficial terms. Carter had that impossibly wide and friendly smile. Nobody noticed the hard little eyes of a martinet micro-manager. Obama has his rhetorical style, so empty that it's majestically weightless in the heights it attains. Nobody wants to notice the Carterlike solitude of the man within, a remoteness we confuse with greatness, the untouchability we'd all feel in retrospect for the persons of Lincoln and Washington. And JFK. Which is who so many Americans want him to be. So desperately that they're willing to make up all the points of similarity out of whole cloth. Never mind that he hasn't the wit, the indescribable common touch, the gift for self-deprecating humor, or the steely inner confidence to surround himself with better brains than his own. We want another JFK -- the one of our myths and imaginings -- and we're sick to death of DC mediocrities and the messiness of the world and the complications of being the most powerful nation on earth when all we really want is a pleasant weekend with no one bugging us. For a change.

And there's another thing. We're completely spoiled. Since Ronald Reagan somehow solved the unsolvable economic woes of the Johnson-Nixon-Ford-Carter years, we've had a quarter century of very nearly unbroken prosperity, punctuated by the merest handful of mild recessions. All politics aside, the difference between the Clinton economy and the Bush economy has been mostly the media coverage. But now we've had our first real oil shock since Carter, and we're not going to stand for it, dammit. Make it stop. All the youthful voters everyone's so happy to have join the electorate have never known real privation of any kind. Why are they so energized? They're bored with the mundane dreariness of prosperity as usual. Bored. They have the most dangerous form of nostalgia -- ignorant yearning for a glamorous time they've heard about but never experienced. They think they'd have been heroes of the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War protests, the unofficial coup by rock and roll that's fueled all their hero worship of dead and decaying rock stars. They want to have that glorious feeling of being excited. About something. Anything.

That's what McCain is competing with. Despite his energy, he's an old man. His time has passed. The stars are aligned for one of America's periodic irrational outbursts, the election of a president whose only real qualification is that he's different from the norm. And that would be Obama. All hail the comforting illusion.

Conservatives have carped a lot about McCain as the Republican nominee. Threatened to stay home because it would be better to have all the liberal foolishness enacted by (and blamed on) a Democrat than a renegade liberal Republican. Fine. All I'll point out is that when the November tantrum occurs and the Republicans are crushed in Congress and the presidential election, where will you stand on the blame game then? Would you be happier to have the slaughter blamed on a genuine conservative (if you could actually find one) or a truculent old bastard who split with his own party faithful on at least three of their top ten issues? What candidate would better enable the Republicans to rediscover their core identity, principles, and balls as a party when Carter, er, Obama, comes up for reelection in 2012? Conversely, what candidate offers us a better chance in 2008 to prevent the election of another Jimmy Carter? Is there something better than a cantankerous old real-world survivor to run against a chimera? You tell me.

To answer these questions honestly, though, you'd have to admit that Republicans really are staring at catastrophic defeat in the fall, barring some miracle nobody could reasonably foresee. Can you do that?

Monday, May 05, 2008

Yell it in the "Live, damn you! LIVE!" voice, not the "Spriiing Breeaak!" voice.

CINCO DE MAYO! It used to be the most cynically patronizing holiday on the American calendar. Now it's like another St. Patrick's Day, only without all the class and solemn dignity of March 17 to get in the way of the drinking. Sigh.

I'm not the first to notice this: If things are so bad in your country that you have to look for work in a different country, you might want to temper that expatriated national pride a smidge.

Unless you want to argue that America took all the parts of Mexico with good jobs. That economic success is primarily a function of geography rather than society. That's too dumb to state outright, but if you only allude to it, never getting more specific than a hinted-at accusation that America took something from Mexcio, you're in business. You'll know you've gotten away with it when your audience at the reconquista rally gives you the slow, thoughtful "how true" nods.

So cynical, Brizoni. And so out of the blue. For heaven's sake, why?

Clearly, I'm not in the Cinco de Mayo spirit. The phone card/money wiring kiosk (which I like because everyone in there is honest enough to not even pretend to care about speaking English) was out of giant Virgin Mary tapestries. How am I supposed to celebrate this High Holy Day without one? And I just found out Corona beer isn't even Mexican. Did you know that? It's bottled in Minnesota or Whitesylvania or thereabouts. Weak. Who wants American worms wriggling around in their booze? And they have this new variety called "Corona Extra"? Extra what? "Extra" lack of melanin at the brewery? "Extra" Lawrence Welk played over the intercom?

I'm just feeling, like, disillusioned with the whole enterprise, man. Maybe my own celebratory setbacks are why I'm all existential about today. Independence sounds fine and good for any country, so I guess I'm happy for Mexico. But... you know... I hesitate to even think it... look what they've done with it. They've made kind of a... you know... a corrupt little cesspool of misery for themselves down there, haven't they? I don't see what there is to celebrate.

I guess it makes sense that their Independence Day has only the vaguest lip-service to freedom and all the other important nation stuff. In its place, you get ranchero music (known by the state of California to cause birth defects and reproductive harm) loud enough to blow out the part of the brain that feels shame at being from Mexico.

Sorry. I'm just cranky. Which of course means there no truth to be found in any of this slander. Enjoy your cerveza, esse! Arriba! Santa Anna! Cesar Chavez! All that.

UPDATE: Looks like my last column from the road got lost in the, um, mail. It's a thermodynamic miracle of wrong guess after wrong guess. Each of them was shown to be exactly wrong, mere days after I wrote. You'll see it tomorrow.

InstapunkPassingElves

Passing of the Elves

What Pat Buchanan forgets. They will miss us. And remember us.

AN OLD FAVORITE. Good old Pat Buchanan, so beloved by cro-magnon conservatives, has suddenly tumbled to the alarm raised long ago by Mark Steyn's America Alone. In a column called "The Way Our World Ends," Pat says:

An Augusta, Ga., group, The National Policy Institute, has meshed the figures on fertility rates with the continents and races on Planet Earth -- to visualize what the world will look like in 2060.

In 1950, whites were 28 percent of world population and Africans 9 percent, a ratio of three-to-one. In 2060, the ratio will remain the same. But the colors will be reversed. People of African ancestry will be 25 percent of the world's population. People of European descent will have fallen to 9.8 percent.

More arresting is that the white population is shrinking not only in relative but in real terms. Two hundred million white people, one in every six on earth -- a number equal to the entire population of France, Britain, Holland and Germany -- will vanish by 2060.

The Caucasian race is going the way of the Mohicans.

Arabic peoples, 94 million at the birth of Israel in 1948, outnumbered seven to one by Europeans, will rise to 743 million in 2060, a tenfold increase, and will be 75 percent of the white population.

Fleshing out the NPI picture is the U.N. population survey of mid-2007 that points to the 21st century disappearance of Western Man.

By 2050, a fourth of all the people of Eastern Europe will have vanished. Ukraine will lose one-third of its population. Russia, 150 million at the breakup of the Soviet Union, 142 million today, will be down to 108 million. Such losses dwarf what Hitler and Stalin together did to these countries.

Geez. Pat seems disturbed all of a sudden. The Aryans are going away. What does it all mean? I admit I haven't read Steyn's response to Buchanan, so I'm probably risking a repeat of his points, but I'll chance it anyway. Because the meaning is incredibly important, and it's something all you damn imbecile Paulistas (and you know who you are) should pay attention to along with the cro-magnon Republicans.

What it means is this: Thank God for the British Empire and the aggressive American interventionism of the twentieth century. That's right. In the scenario being described by Buchanan, the only chance the world has to avoid a thousand-year dark age is whatever the newly ascendant populations can remember and imitate of what they learned from their experience of western colonialism and imperialism. For example, India has a shot at holding together as a society and an economy in this scenario because of the Raj, which embedded law very deeply into their culture. So might some of the middle eastern muslims -- if they can prevent their homegrown religion from requiring them to behead each other into bedouin medievalism.

The disappearance of Europeans and their American descendants will threaten a lot of things: Christianity's openness to science and its ongoing contribution to individual consciousness and personal responsibility, the liberal political tradition of republics and democracies, the systems of capitalist economics, and the concept of art as a cultural force independent of politics and religion, endowed with a mission to criticize both. If any of these traditions survive, which is debatable, it will be because the survivors remember and honor what they learned from those who have departed, regardless of how traumatically they learned it.

Without the survival of these traditions, the world will be plunged into unutterable chaos and violence. Nuclear weapons will be used until there are no more weapons. Tribes will turn upon one another, totalitarian systems will devour and exterminate the tribes who undermine order, and the population figures will change dramatically again, but always lower. And there will be no more Jews to push science, law, business, art, and entertainment forward. The slippery slope will be an accelerating backward slide into irreparable misery.

So. Pat. Now that you understand the "new population bomb," do you still think it would have been best for America to sit smugly at home while the dark side of European intellectualism essayed its first attempted suicide of full human consciousness? Or was it perhaps better somehow that before we sailed to the Grey Havens we did as much as we could for a full century to share our vision of a world in which all men and women could be free to pursue happiness as they conceived it?

I don't like the thought of my own traditions and ancestry passing away from the earth. But I do believe we made a contribution. It will be up to the survivors to determine whether that contribution was a footnote or a legacy. I'm also glad that we made a worldwide effort to achieve the latter.

Pat? He's probably grimly hoping for the former. It's called vengeance. Something a son of Nixon (i.e., elves bred down to orcs) would know more about than anybody else.

Pat's pissed.

I'll be thinking other thoughts during the final recessional hymn.

Elbereth, Gilthoniel, silivren penna miriel...

Sunday, May 04, 2008

Philadelphia's Liberty Medal: A
Hometown Nomination for Once

Sid Mark, The Voice of Philadelphia for more than 50 years.

NOD TO THE PAST. The criteria for Philadelphia's Liberty Medal sound lofty:

The Liberty Medal is awarded annually by the National Constitution Center to men and women of courage and conviction who have strived to secure the blessings of liberty to people the world over.

Yeah, they gave it to Nelson Mandela once. But last year they gave it to Bono. They've also given it to Sandra Day O'Connor and Kofi Annan. There seems to be some latitude here, some give and take in what constitutes courage, conviction, and the blessings of liberty. Which is as it should be. Sandra Day O'Connor never stood in front of a tank. Kofi Annan never served a day as a political prisoner and has probably eaten in more four-star restaurants over the years than Frank Sinatra.

Which brings me to my point. Why can't the Liberty Medal be granted, for once, to an actual Philadelphian who has performed a huge service in communicating the blessings of liberty to the city where constitutionally guaranteed liberty began in the first place?

It's a truism of art and writing and music that "before you can be universal, you must be local."

I'd be willing to bet there are thousands if not millions of people like me, who grew up listening with their parents to "Friday with Frank" and "Sunday with Sinatra," hosted by Sid Mark on WWDB (and now WPHT) in Philadelphia (and syndicated to other stations throughout the country). What did we learn? That there was a special poignancy to the lives of the World War II generation, which garnered Tom Brokaw waves of acclaim when he acknowledged it belatedly, but which we children of that generation learned firsthand by hearing Sid Mark respond week after week to Sinatra classics with an impeccable sense of how every song sounded when it was released and what chord it touched in its audience. The Brokaws somehow seem to forget that the Greatest Generation also came home after the war and rebuilt the world even though they were in all probability suffering from what is today called Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder.

My dad was. He endured nightmares for years. But Friday night was a ritual. We gathered in the den and turned on the FM radio. It was Sid Mark time. The songs Sid played spanned 20 years, from the pre-war Tommy Dorsey era to the beginnings of the Rat Pack and beyond. It was a time machine that helped us youngsters learn what our parents had been through. Both my parents adopted, at one time or another, the pose that Sinatra wasn't even the best Big Band singer, despite all the screaming bobby-soxers. I heard both my parents seriously argue that Dick Haymes was a better vocalist than Sinatra and that Sinatra's career should have ended after this disastrous recording of Ol' Man River.

But it was Friday night, and Sid was playing the songs, and my sister and I were little and full of questions -- besides being intoxicated by the sound of Sinatra -- and so this family time also became a history lesson. My prejudiced father hauled out his Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Teddy Wilson, and Coleman Hawkins LPs to prove to us that Sid Mark's description of America as one vast Sinatra audience was incorrect. The very first time I fell in love was at the age of six when I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing "The Man I Love," and the very first time I knew there was a racial divide in my country was when my Dad showed me the Ella/Gershwin album cover -- Ella was not white, slim, or gorgeous the way women who can sing like that automatically are to little boys who have beautiful blonde mothers. "Forget the picture," my dad said. "Just listen to the way she sings. That's music. Sinatra is an ugly little guy too. And you like him."

I did. Me and how many countless others who learned about him from Sid Mark. More than my parents did. In fact. my first rebellion was realizing that Sinatra was better than Dick Haymes and every other Big Band singer. I realized that he was singing my own parents' lives, the parts they couldn't admit, the pain and wistfulness and sorrow they could never acknowledge, along with the upbeat determination that kept them going, and dancing, even when they must have wondered what the hell was going on. It was as if the real appeal of Sinatra to adults was a secret -- they pretended he wasn't an arterial necessity; he was just historical and because he was connected to every successful jazz musician, composer, and arranger, he was safe. When he let loose with his "three o'clock in the morning," "when I was seventeen," or "strangers in the night" bits, the parents mixed another cocktail and fell silent.

Truth is, what I learned from Sid Mark and his Sinatra shows was that my parents and their generation had real and incredibly deep passions in their lives. That was the knowledge that enabled me to bridge the Generation Gap of the sixties. I understood that mine wasn't the first generation to have been powerfully motivated and transformed by music. A tenuous bridge was constructed which survives to this day. Yeah, my dad couldn't get the heroin jazz, or the rock and roll, or even the bee-bop. But long after the war that forced and anguished his character, he HAD to listen to the one man who ensured continuity and whose genius phrasing somehow contained an entire generation of experience.

Without Sid Mark, my parents would have been a blank to me, the way so many parents are a blank to their kids today. Thanks to Sid, there were moments in my childhood when I felt at a cellular level what it was to be my parents when they were young, in danger, and fighting like hell for their lives. I'm absolutely damn sure I'm not alone in that. Is this a service which helps to "secure the blessings of liberty"? Yup. And then there was "Watertown." Which only Sid ever promoted and proved to me that Sinatra AND Sid were eternal. Sid Mark is a national treasure.

I think that. But then I'm not a Philadelphia politician.

P.S. The audio file has been Sid Mark's close to every Sinatra broadcast for 50 years. It's burned into my soul. My Catholic friends who confidently expect me to confess the one true faith at the last second had better bring this recording with them to my deathbed.

Friday, May 02, 2008

A Friday Folly

TGIF. I found this via Jonah Goldberg at NRO, who got it from 'Debby, the Odd Link Gal,' who found it here. The thumbnail description is this:

"Food Fight is an abridged history of American-centric war, from World War II to present day, told through the foods of the countries in conflict. Watch as traditional comestibles slug it out for world domination in this chronologically re-enacted smorgasbord of aggression."

The site also contains a complete synopsis and spoilers. Decide for yourselves if you want to experience with or without a full briefing.

I think it's fun to just watch it and guess what's going on. But that's me. And, yeah, I know, a couple parts are in dubious taste, but it's Friday. Lighten up.

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