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June 4, 2013 - May 28, 2013

Thursday, April 19, 2012

PUNDITRY CAN BE FUN TOO. Here's the thing about metaphors. They have the quality of being reciprocal; that is, they reflect on each other. If a comparison seems off, maybe it's telling you to think about the target supposedly being illustrated by the metaphor differently.

Which is a sly way of saying that I tend to trust my own wild hare ideas even when I don't know where they come from. Things pop into my head. I should let them go, but I frequently don't. Like today. I'm thinking about the 2008 and 2012 elections in terms of The first and second Clay-Liston heavyweight title fights.

Absurd? Obviously. Unless not.

Absurd because everything seems reversed. In 2008 the young man defeated the old man, which tracks with Obama defeating McCain.  But there's another perspective available to anyone who remembers the first 1964 title fight. What we today call the MSM were absolutely in Liston's corner. If the Titanic was unsinkable, Liston was unbeatable. The outcome was a foregone conclusion, Liston a 7-1 betting favorite. Just as the full force of the MSM was behind Obama in 2008.

Beyond that, the course of the fight was remarkably similar up to a point. The media favorite against the young upstart. Who now remembers that the energy and talent of the McCain campaign was all a function of Sarah Palin? She's the one who was unexpectedly unexpected. She drew the crowds, landed all the telling blows, and had McCain actually ahead in the polls when he quit campaigning to see to the bailout crisis.

Cassius Clay beat hell out of Sonny Liston for the first four rounds. Then something fishy happened. The Liston corner, it is now believed, put liniment on Sonny's gloves, which he managed to rub into Clay's eyes late in that fourth round. Katie Couric was not involved, but the upstart was damaged. Word is that Clay wanted to quit in the corner between rounds four and five. Trainer Angelo Dundee wouldn't let him, so Clay fought round five blind.


In 2008, McCain DID quit. He never wanted to be president. He just wanted to have run for president. He got his wish.

Where, in a hugely important respect, the comparison breaks down. Clay recovered his sight and caused Liston to quit in HIS corner before the seventh round. He was the new champion.


Which is where the metaphor enters the realm of reversals, irony, and oxymoron. Cassius Clay seized on his moment in the sun to declare himself a muslim named Muhammed Ali. Instant pariah, an immediate figure of fear and loathing.

So the MSM touted, insisted on, a rematch. The frightening one had to be put in his place, destroyed. Just as the MSM set about annihilating Sarah Palin after 2008. Is there any precedent in our history for such an assault on a defeated vice presidential candidate? No. But she had become the frightening one, a champion of the right who had to be destroyed at all costs.

Boxing felt the same way about Muhammed Ali:


Ah. So Ali was once again the challenger. Ring a bell, Republicans?

Then came the second fight, the rematch.


It has remained controversial through all the years since.


Where my awkward metaphor starts to get interesting. The most likely interpretation is that Liston was a shot fighter and knew it but wanted one last payday. Why it's interesting that the perpetual pessimists at Hotair are suddenly linking articles suggesting that Obama is in far more electoral trouble than the sportswriters of the left would have us believe.


It's hard to be the heavyweight champion. What if Obama would really prefer to be defeated and done with all the hard decisions he must know by now he isn't qualified to make?

What if he's in the process of taking a very elaborate dive? Think about it. He's a dyed in the wool community organizer and his wife is now a full-time jet set vacationer with designer wardrobes and magazine covers galore. If he loses, he becomes an instant world citizen, victim of American racism and historic western imperialism. He can go back to being an ideological agitator, only on a global stage. No more having to be nice to Notre Dame moms and Texas babes in arms.

It's not as if any of his policies or governance were ever aimed at making American life better. His stubborn refusal to move at all toward the center indicates either remarkable stupidity or a political death wish. Maybe, like Sonny Liston, he wants to exit the stage with the perception that he was never beaten, only maneuvered by sinister forces into a phony defeat.

Absurd. I know. But you're all aware I'll light on any excuse to show Muhammed Ali fight footage.

We can leave it at that. But what if this is Romney on a certain Tuesday night in November?


We all need something to hope for. Maybe all it really takes to defeat Obama is a phantom punch. An easy excuse to move on to community organizer sainthood at the U.N. Think about it before you trash me for my mangled metaphor.

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

FOLLOW-UP. The mind is a funny thing. It forgets a lot and then it suddenly remembers a lot. But never everything. Maddeningly.

The other day, I did a post that drew on a book I'd once been assigned in class, Pearl Buck's The Good Earth. I inquired in the Comments whether or not anyone else had read it. Guy T. produced a hilariously accurate review from, of all people, the Oprah Winfrey Book Club:


My first thought was, absolutely correct but not as bad as another book I had to read that year, called...

Which was the first time that memory really kicked in and I realized what an extraordinary experience I'd had with the teacher who'd insisted on such readings. Her name was (something like) Felicia Cooper. She was my teacher for both seventh and eighth grades. She was terrifying but devoted, scrupulously fair, and a truly gifted magistra. And as I suddenly discovered in hindsight, a woman well ahead of her time.

Speaking of time, some backing up is required. This wasn't an ordinary school. It was also ahead of its time, an unlikely product of a combination of people and circumstances that resulted in a miraculous experiment in education.

I'll give you the short version. The public schools in our neck of the woods were terrible. There was a small population of parents -- doctors, engineers, local manufacturing enrepreneurs, and carpetbagger bluebloods -- who knew the difference between education and babysitting and who knew each other from country clubs and such. And there was my paternal grandfather, who was the Senior Warden, Treasurer, and Head of the Board of Trustees of an Episcopal Church. He talked the church into sponsoring a school, funded largely by old money from one of the carpetbaggers, and the school was launched with 26 students in the Parish House of the church. (I was in the first first grade class.) Less than two years later, the presiding bishop had had enough and pulled the plug on church sponsorship. So the backers found an abandoned mansion in the country, bought it, rehabbed it with voluntary parental (and child... I wielded a paintbrush myself that summer) labor, and became a truly independent school. By the time I reached seventh grade, we had seventy students. The majority of our first graduating class was enrolled in private boarding schools. The experiment was working.


Not that there weren't lots of false steps and incomplete successes along the way. We were supposed to be learning Latin and French from first grade on, but the textbooks were the same every year and we never seemed to make any headway, because the approach, for whatever reason, was conversational French, and if you can believe it, conversational Latin. (Year after year of Sextus asking his magister for a stylus.) And there were already no more history textbooks apparently. So like the public school kids, we got Social Studies instead and read about Pablo and Paulina in Paraguay and another brother-sister combination in Lapland with the appropriate "L" first names. And a disastrous two-year dalliance with the New Math that almost resulted in armed revolution by angry parents.

But we had small class sizes, mostly older teachers (retired from the public schools) who were good, bad, and indifferent even if they all sported those old-fashioned black chunk-heeled teacher shoes from the 1940s. Even the not so good ones were sufficiently rooted in the past that book reports were required regularly from third grade on, we had to memorize and recite poems like "Little Orphan Annie," and we had to perform before the whole class in spelling bees and arithmetic flash card competitions.

We also had a vivid sense of the fact that the school was being run on a shoestring budget and that we had to do our part. We had hot dog days and pizza days where we provided the labor, the food went for cash, and the proceeds went into the operating budget. Early on, the continual deficit resulted in an annual Country Fair that conscripted all parents and students into the months long creation of an event that became locally famous, the centerpiece being a car raffle and a startlingly sophisticated auction featuring things like a weekend in some tycoon's Bahama getaway.

But what does any of this have to do with "The Good Earth" and the memories Guy's post awakened in me?

Despite all its good intentions, the school's success boiled down to two secret weapons. There was Mrs. Hennessey, a University of London graduate who was not ancient but couldn't be certified to teach in New Jersey public schools because she didn't have a degree in pretending to teach. She taught the fifth and sixth grades. By this I mean she taught every subject all day long. We wrote a composition every week, at our desks in a double-period timeframe, and she graded every composition down to the last comma and period. Sometimes it was describe the calendar picture and what it makes you think of. Sometimes it was what you did on your summer vacation. Didn't matter. She taught us sentence diagramming too, and if our sentences couldn't be diagrammed, the best summer vacation in the world couldn't save us.

The other, even more lethal weapon was Mrs. Cooper. Sixth graders would ask seventh graders about Mrs. Cooper and they'd just roll their eyes. She was famous for surprise tests, called "Cooper Specials," which took a full hour and included questions about every subject from math to history to literature. She required essays too, but because we did them as homework she was even tougher in her grading than Mrs. Hennessey.

I've been trying to remember how she taught seventh and eighth grades at the same time in the same room, and I just can't. Her one break was a science teacher who'd take one or another grade to a separate room and misinform us about botany and gravity. Otherwise it was all Mrs. Cooper, all the time. And she had her own ideas about science. Once she brought in the innerds of a slaughtered hog (her dad was a farmer), and I can still see what looked like a horrific crime scene spilled onto a giant sheet of brown paper. "These are the lungs," she said, pointing. That may be when I ran to the bathroom and threw up.

It's absolutely true that she could laugh and charm us all, but the image that comes immediately to mind when I think of her is grim, a downturned mouth and lines already etching her youngish face with the travails of life. She was a local, born less than five miles from where I write this, and her husband ran a septic tank pumping business. Looking back, I wonder how that worked out. She often came to school in a beat-up pickup truck. But she was always the picture of modestly tailored authority. She favored long sleeves and it's only at this instant that I wonder about that too.

Sorry for maundering on so long. But, you see, I wanted you to have context for what Guy suddenly made me aware of that I had never realized before, in all these years. She made us read books. I was always grateful for that. But here are some of the books she made us read:


Let me say at the outset that The Good Earth is Thunderball compared to My Antonia. There has never been a drearier, awfuller, more depressing book written than My Antonia, not even by the Russians. Not that Silas Marner and Ethan Frome aren't also in the running.

Which fills me with a kind of serendicitous joy. All the way back in the mid-1960s, I had the first militant feminist teacher, smuggling her cause in under the radar. Not even my chauvinist dad ever suspected that Mrs. Cooper had a private agenda and was working it to the max.

I think all she was trying to teach us was that women are writers too. people too. After all, she had other books on her list as well: Animal Farm, Brave New World, A Tale of Two Cities (unfortunately abridged in the textbook we had available), and almost incomprehensibly ambitiously A Passage to India.

Meaning her novel list consisted of women and (mostly) Oxbridge Brits. I can't remember if Conrad's Lord Jim was in there somewhere, but we also did the required Romeo & Juliet and Julius Caesar. And a ton of short stories in an excellent pair of anthologies, one for seventh and one for eighth grade.

I'm suspicious of the term irony. But I think there is some irony in this wormhole back to seventh grade. I did learn from Mrs. Cooper and Mrs. Hennessey that women can be smart, learned, formidable, and admirable. I learned that women can write. I also learned that I mostly don't like women writers. An opinion all the passage of years has done nothing to change. But my heart goes out to her. She never preached at us. She just exposed us to evidence she was willing for us to assess on our own. I have no way of knowing what specifically motivated her in this regard. It may be that she was simply preparing us in a way no one uses anymore for the fact that our educations were going to involve reading, analyzing, and understanding material that is, well, boring, or at least very remote from our usual interests and preferences.

In that she succeeded. In fact, she succeeded in a lot of ways. She taught us that the classroom is serious business and not always fun or entertaining but still vitally important.

She also was the teacher at the desk who presided over my reading, my discovery, of the single most moving short story I have ever read. It has haunted me ever since. It's called The Scarlet Ibis.

Here's the Wiki entry.

Here's the full text of the story.

If you like, we can talk about it later.

Thank you, Mrs. Cooper. I owe you a lifetime's worth of gratitude. What great teachers invariably do, no matter how they do it. Pure gold.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

EXPLORING. The iPad is both a blessing and a curse. I've been listening to Laura Ingraham in the mornings. Brilliant woman. But so depressing. Today she was fired up about an interview of Ann and Mitt Romney by Diane Sawyer, who was "breathlessly" concerned about the issue of "relatability" of such rich people with the electorate. (She also brought up the ancient story of the dog on top of the car. Christ.) Understandably, Laura was queasy about the Romney campaign's apparent belief that such media-orchestrated muggings can have any positive result. But she was also deft enough to question the marketability with the electorate of Diane Sawyer as a stand-in for the oppressed and offended 99 percent. Me too.


I know the dog story is supposed to hurt, but I keep getting the feeling the libs have outsmarted themselves on this one. Everybody who has a dog knows they love to put their noses in the wind and probably won't get cooked at highway speed. Dogs have some pretty individuated preferences, as we all know. Besides, what I think of immediately when I hear this story is National Lampoon's Vacation:


There's a dog story there too and a grandma story, with Imogene Coca dead on the roof. Awful? Maybe what the libs are counting on. But it doesn't quite jibe with the image of an out of touch billionaire ordering the butler around on a jet set cruise. It kind of evokes an image of an ordinary American family vacation. In a station wagon. Where absolutely anything can happen. As we all know. Meaning real life crazy stuff.

Which reminded me of Laura's meme that Mitt Romney is actually Ward Cleaver and maybe that's okay. I've been mostly thinking NOT, until I remembered this old post on the subject of station wagons:


It's a route to cheering myself up, if not you. Horrible things in the news, big and small, but it helps me to know that in most cases I have anticipated them one way or another. What better feeling when you're bounding down a mountainside, ass over teacup, that you still retain the control of knowing how you got there?

Like when Time Magazine decided to ask questions last week about -- wait for it! -- Mormons, Inc. I took all kinds of heat about this when I raised it in February 2007, suggesting that it was something Republicans should be ready for:


Laura was also bummed by a sight she could witness from her own studio window -- the final voyage of the shuttle Discovery atop a Boeing 747 en route to its last resting place at the Smithsonian. She compared the circling of the plane over the nation's capital to the wheeling of a vulture. For her, as for many people, I'm sure, today's flight was a poignant reminder that the era of U.S. manned space flight is dead. while China, India, and Europe are just getting started.  More of that feeling of bounding down the mountainside while your country is bleeding out. Except that I could at least cling to this July 2005 post (uh, take the link; there's a great IP Photoshop there).


Oddly, Laura was actually cheered by Bill Maher's latest misogynist rant (something about leopards and spots).


As was I. Because it was back in November 2005 that I revealed the truth about Maher's alma mater Cornell, its braindead lefties, and the whys and wherefores of its dark and hateful culture. He's no lord of the political dance. He's a snotty little undergraduate nerd who never got laid and never got over it.


Of course, Laura was encouraged for different reasons. She believes that lefty bile leads inevitably to self destructive acts. The nastiness can't be contained even when it really must be. Like what happened to Bob Beckel last night on Hannity:


Who could have seen this coming? Me.


Oh. And I dealt with Maher in the same post:


I've got lots more, but that's sufficient to prove the point. So I'm feeling better now. Enough better to point you at an actual good and provocative essay in the New York Times Magazine. It's about action movies. You have to read the whole thing. This paragraph is just to show you that we can trust the writer.

You may laugh — in fact, one sign of the genre’s decay is how completely it has devolved into a universal joke. (It’s now just as easy, and twice as pleasurable, to quote McBain from “The Simpsons” mocking Arnold Schwarzenegger as it is to quote Arnold Schwarzenegger.) But as a genre, the American action film featured hallmark stars (Schwarzenegger! Stallone! Willis!) and identifiable tropes (kill villain; make pun about method in which you killed villain), and it produced at least one bona fide masterpiece, “Die Hard.” (If you can’t get behind “Die Hard” as a great American movie, then I’d argue that you hate greatness, movies and America.) And the action movie carried, briefly, as all good genre movies do, the cultural weight of metaphorical significance. Action films meant something. As surely as the film noir communicated anxiety over postwar urban upheaval or as alien-invasion films helped us work out our cold-war agita, the action films of the golden age were a post-’70s, poststagflation collective national fantasy: one in which America was strong, independent, unstoppable and perpetually kicking much butt. Moreover, the best of these films (think “RoboCop”) managed the nifty artistic trick of both embodying and critiquing this quintessentially adolescent dream of dominance — providing us with fantasias of cartoon violence that also served as canny dissections of our lust for cartoon violence. [boldface added]

If you don't want to talk about any of the depressing stuff above, talk about action movies. The best, the worst, etc. You guys need to come out of your funk and participate. I'm not kidding.

CLEANING UP. Nasty things have been said about the Fiat Abarth 500 in previous comment threads. Maybe this will silence the critics:


Oops. I meant this one:


uh, it's going to beat your Camry or Accord. Just so you know.

Now, are we going to talk action movies or what?

Monday, April 16, 2012

THE ETERNAL FEMININE. Yeah, it's been a bizarre week. The left is struggling with its outreach to women, to put it mildly. I won't recap in the usual terms. It's bigger than the Beltway pundits. It was a dogfight that turned into a catfight. The Obama Men thought they could use the Romney Woman to divide all women, but they thought wrong. Always a problem when you're relying on men who insist they know everything important about women. They don't. Liberal Kirsten Powers was offended while conservative Kathleen Parker was dismissive and even scornful. Fox News Hostess Greta van Susteren defended "my firiend Hilary Rosen" while the Obama administration went into overdrive piling up buses to throw Rosen under. Then the lefty backlash began. The libs couldn't let it go, leading to doubling and tripling down on their original point, which culminated in a typically brash and misogyenistic performance by Bill Maher that got everyone's attention.

Then comedian Sarah Silverman seemed to put a cap on it. Abortion is not only cool but casual. She fell short of winning the flag though. The laurels go to decidedy uncomedic, and nominally Catholic, Georgetown University, which has scheduled a lecture series closed to the public presenting to its students not only pro-abortion advocates but a Princeton "medical ethicist" named Peter Singer who argues for infanticide of unwelcome newborns.

Time Out.

The lefties have tumbled into a chasm they don't understand because they're sure they all feel the same way, which is a delusion dating back to the founding of the American feminist movement. And, uh, before. Long long before.

As a kid in seventh grade, I had to read The Good Earth by Pearl Buck. Exciting as it should probably have been (at that age) to read about the generous body of Olan in her marriage with Wang Lung, I remember being perturbed about the image of Olan giving birth in the fields as she continued harvesting fortune cookies (or whatever) and sticking around, regardless, to stuff the little messages into the cookies. And then Wang Lung found some painted strumpet for a second wife and Olan faded into the background with no wonderbra to boost her sagging appeal.

The men of the left who invented totalitarian socialism and marxism have always been men of the east -- Russian, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese. What the eastern leftists did to women was presaged by what they did to Jews. American Communist Jews conspired in the oppression and sometimes slaughter of their own kind. So has it been with the New American Left and women. The first militant American feminists were the girlfriends of Sixties radicals who were tired of being the Olan of the commune. They learned the methods and they applied them. But their masters just snickered and reined them back in.

Women on the left have been sold a terrible bill of goods. They're parade horses, doing one trick after another to prove that they're not horses at all. But they are horses, doing their masters' bidding. Get a job, go to university, fuck your brilliant mentors, get abortions, postpone what your biology tells you you must to do to the last possible second, then drop the babies in the fields of your endeavor and never stop to smell the roses.

In return we will pretend to take you seriously.

But it's all pretend. Time and again the feminist movement has been summoned to play defense for purely male misbehavior because they back the lie that you girls matter as long as you don't get inconveniently pregnant.

Think of what all you've had to swallow to defend the right that is their chief escape from responsibility -- your baby. The whoring of the Kennedys, including the sodden body of Mary Jo Kopechne. The fabled waitress sandwiches of Teddy Kennedy and Chris Dodd. The predation of Bill Clinton, who seduced a teenager and may have done much worse. The renascent career of Eliot Spitzer, Client No. 9, whom all true lefties are cheering on as a successor to the unfortunate Keith Olbermann, who also had, um, problems, with women.

Squat lower in the fields, Olan. Push, strain, squeeze that baby out into the rice field. Kill it if you must. Then run to law school and get ready for your star turn as a defender of Utopia, where all good things will come true for all good people.

Maybe that's why it's better, on the left, to be a Lesbian. I mean, who could blame Hillary, whether you spell it with one "L" or two? Is it a coincidence that Lesbian peons can be trusted not to give you unwanted child support payments? Vive les Lesbians. As long as they work their big asses off...

Soviet communism stole from Jews their cultural heritage. The left has stolen from women their femininity. In a sense, both are eunuchs. Spayed, neutered, reduced to symbolic objects.

Ultimate irony. The left hates capitalism but not nearly as much as it hates the one demographic that might be freest from capitalism. They hate women who don't get paying jobs. Why? Because they are afraid of women who are free to put human values first. And hold their children and husbands accountable to those virtues -- decency, politeness, effort, education, creative activity, good influences, good books, and fun.

The west has treasured such women despite capitalism. It was always the great defense against mercenary progeny.

The east has always regarded women as brood sows. Even Japan still does. The left does too. But brood sows who can be trusted to fuck you and follow your orders without embarrassing you with children.

Where did women go in this post-modern mix? Ah.  Ask Joan Rivers.

My wife loves Fashion Police, and I enjoy it too. But what you learn in watching the fashion highs and lows of celebrities is that women -- in the context of Hollywood and the prosperous ones who are rich enough to be free of ancient cultural biases --  are basically reducible to all the anatomical parts Joan habitually calls them. Which is every (and I mean every) dirtiest anatomical word you've ever heard. What you learn from Fashion Police, Joan Rivers, and her panel of accomplices is that all women are whores engaged in a ceaseless competition to score money from rich men. Actually, the monolithic lefty view, from all the evidence at our disposal.

But...

I once had a Fiat 124.

Got it after I'd had lots of faster cars. Big American V-8s and such. After a Porsche 944 Turbo, which zoomed from 0 to 60 like a scalded, uh, piece of machinery.

The Fiat was my dad's. His last sports car. He'd had a Triumph TR3, a TR4, and a TR6. Loved the TR6. Straight six, gorgeous sound from the pipes. Crisp throws of an upright gearbox. All of them manly, robust, upright, and direct. And then the Spider. Why had he even gotten this thing? Truthfully, he never much cared for Italy or things Italian. Especially since we all nearly drowned on the Leonardo da Vinci ocean liner.

He was older when he bought it. Initially I thought it was the convertible top. All the Triumph tops were construction projects. (same with my Spitfire and MGB.) Fifteen minutes until you were underway. The Fiat top could be raised and lowered with one hand. Zoop, Zoop.

The only easy thing about the car on first blush. Compared to the Triumphs, the driving position was like lying down. The steering wheel stuck up at an odd angle. The gear shift was balky, the clutch stiff, the engine small and slow. And the rear end boasted something like fins.

I'd always disdained to drive it until after the old man was dead. I took it out on the open road as a kind of tribute.

I guess it took about fifteen minutes. The top was down, of course. I got used to being cradled back-leaning in the seat. The steering wheel became, I don't know, I don't have any idea what, just right somehow. The engine didn't have the straight-six soldiering drill of the TR6; it had a mellifluous singing thing going on, like something, well, female being pleasured.

Best sportscar I ever owned. Funny thing. All the bad traits -- balkiness, slowness, etc -- always struck me hard at first. But I learned that when we got underway, all of that would melt away and we would just commune our way though every bend, corner, and straightaway. Loved that car. Because when I was driving it I got the distinct impression it loved me too.

There's no performance statistic in which the MR2 doesn't beat the Fiat 124 Spider. And I don't even miss the Fiat. It's an affair long gone.

Kind of like the way I feel about American women. The Fiat was a lover. The left consists of nothing but hard-bitten whores. Fortunately, I have a wife I love who loves me. I guess that constitutes a kind of immunity.

Friday, April 13, 2012