--City Journal
--Crain's NY Business
--Daily News
--The Forward
--Gotham Gazette
--Page Six
--New Yorker
--New York Observer
--New York Magazine
--New York Newsday
--New York Press
--New York Sun
--New York Times
--Wall Street Journal
--The Villager
--Village Voice
--Al Ahram
--The Atlantic
--Boston Globe
--Chronicle Higher Ed
--Chicago Tribune
--Columbia J. Review
--Commentary
--Dissent
--The Economist
--Financial Times
--The Guardian
--Jerusalem Post
--Kurdistan Observer
--LA Times
--London Review
--Me Three
--Mother Jones
--Le Monde Diplomatique
--N+1 Magazine
--National Review
--The Nation
--New Criterion
--New Humanist
--The New Republic
--NY Review of Books
--NYT Book Review
--Paris Review
--Reason
--San Fran Chronicle
--The Telegraph
--Three Penny Review
--Times Lit Supplement
--The Times of India
--Vanity Fair
--Washington Monthly
--Washington Post
--Weekly Standard
--Anne Applebaum
--Martin Amis
--James Bowman
--David Brooks
--E.J. Dionne
--Michael Dirda
--Maureen Dowd
--Thomas Friedman
--Malcolm Gladwell
--Christopher Hitchens
--David Horowitz
--William Shawcross
--Mark Steyn
--Andrew Sullivan
--Jonathan Yardley
--Leon Wieseltier
--James Wolcott
--Arts & Letters Daily
--Alibris
--Apple.com Trailers
--Armavirumque
--Back-In-Print
--Bibliomania
--Chud
--Curbed
--Drudge Report
--Sci Tech Daily
--Gawker
--Gothamist
--IMDB
--InstaPundit
--Media Bistro
--Nerve
--New Yorkish
--The Onion
--Plagiarist
--Plastic
--Savage Love
--Slate
--The Smoking Gun
--Spike Magazine
--Wonkette
--Whatevs
--WSJ Opinion Journal
BOOKS:

-- Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, by Christopher Hitchens {First drafts of history, second thoughts on received wisdom, versatile meditations on great works of literature -- all by a man who can write about anything.}

-- The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse {The Rise and Fall of the "Black Shorts," and the best of Bertie and Jeeves. You'll need Wodehouse in your life eventually. Start here; you've 89 or so more to go.}

-- The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, by Isaac Deutscher {Magnificient biography finally back in print, along with Volumes II and III. But better start before the revolution -- and Deutscher's conscience -- was betrayed.}

-- Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S., by Jeremy Leven {A sorely forgotten modern classic. Leven has since swapped the galley for the camera, directing such keepers as Don Juan Demarco and The Legend of Bagger Vance. Satan has relapsed.}

-- Colossus, by Niall Ferguson {Why the U.S. can't hack neo-imperialism, much to Niall's chagrin.}

-- Reflections on a Ravaged Century, by Robert Conquest {Don't even try to have an opinion about the twentieth century without reading him.}

-- Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh {One of the funniest books, ever. Shrinks the remainder of the "innocent abroad" genre to the vanishing point.}

-- Put Out More Flags, by Evelyn Waugh {Lapidary prose on the frisson between the wars. Basil Seal riding low before he rides again; Auden and Isherwood lampooned as "Parnsip and Pimpernell."}

-- The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh, by E.W. {Nasty, brutish and short, in short form.}

-- The Origins of Postmodernity, by Perry Anderson {Terrific writer from the London Review of Books and New Left Review, who ought to be more famous than he is, tackles lucidly the abstruse bloodhound gang -- from Habermas to Jameson -- of Theory.}

-- Saul Bellow: Novels 1944-1953: Dangling Man, The Victim, and The Adventures of Augie March, [Library of Congress Hardcover Edition] {Look: it's his world, we all just live in it.}

-- The Counterlife, by Philip Roth {How Portnoy learned to stop complaining and write a brilliant postmodern novel.}

-- Rise of the Vulcans, by James Mann {Probably the only low-blood pressure source on Bush's brain trust. Valuable for charting the progression of neo-neo-conservatism, and how Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz contravened, and then dismantled, the Kissinger realpolitik foreign policy machine.}

-- Money, by Martin Amis {Forget Bonfire and Psycho. It took the English author of The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America to effectively chew up the Reagan era -- largely by reminding us that it was also the Thatcher era. A fine lesson in history repeating, too: Di and Charles were TV's original Ben and J. Lo; the Self-on-Massi sex tape is where Paris (if she can read) might have learned her stuff; and the cavalier cash flow in this soft-boiled checkbook who-dun-it tale rivals that of any West Coast dotcom monkey a decade later.}

-- The War Against ClichŽ and Experience, by Martin Amis {If Amis kept on doing what he did in his award-winning collection of critical essays, James Wood would lose more hair. It's saying quite a lot that his non-fiction exceeds his fiction. Experience is by far the best memoir to appear in the last decade: a more muscular Speak, Memory, it's a midlife nostalgia trip pureed out of chronology, though somehow more cohesive than a stream-of-consciousness hodgepodge. Guaranteed to pluck at the coronary sinews for anyone dealing with the loss of a father.}

-- Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis {A comic genius on academia, Amis is the pitch-perfect representative of postwar male rage. None of that Angry Young Man, stuff, though. His apoplexy is hilarious at any age. The faces: "crazy peasant," "sex life in ancient Rome," "shot-in-the-back." Moo, by Jane Smiley, The Straight Man, by Richard Russo and everything by David Lodge seem impossible without this Platonic key ring to rule them all, and on the campus, bind them.}

-- The Letters of Kingsley Amis, edited by Zachary Leader {Pay close attention to the letters to Philip Larkin -- together with Larkin's Collected Letters (try eBay, sorry), these constitute the documentation of one of the most rewarding and hilarious literary friendships to date. Amuse yourself by guessing the exact page number where Kingsley abandons Communism.}

-- The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, by V. Nabokov {I'm way underqualified, with my mean years on the planet, to state critical opinion. Still in larval adulation, which I understand is a longterm afflication. Read Anthony Lane's review in Nobody's Perfect. And M. Amis on Nabokov in toto in the prenominate War Against ClichŽ. And get a dictionary.}

--The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, edited by Leon Wieseltier {The style is dated and stilted, but the insights are not. Especially worthwhile: the Orwell essay, the Mansfield Park burn, and "The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time" (i.e. "What Do They Know of America, Who Only the Upper West Side Know?"}

-- The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, by James Wood {The bling to Dale Peck's blah.}

-- A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace {Self-indulgence and the consequences of a missing-in-action editor never had it so good. The state fair, cruise ship and TV pieces are the best. But also read the Lynch essay: it'll make you want to re-watch Blue Velvet, which you can conveniently buy below.}

-- Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin (edited by Anthony Thwaite) {Poetus mirabilis and, after Auden, the occupant of a near empty Hall of Metrical Wonders in the Postwar Anglophone wing of the museum. Master ironist and curmudgeon you least want to bludgeon.}

-- Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, by Margaret Macmillan {A dryly told account of global dust-settling after what was then myopically known as "the Great War." Explores the follies of Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau, which helped bring about WWII.}

-- Doomed, Bourgeois, In Love: Essays on the Films of Whit Stillman, edited by Mark Henrie {Discreet charms of the bourgeoisie given the scholarly treatment by the kinds of New Criterion-y people who liked Grosse Pointe Blank because John Cusack's assassin refused to unionize. Don't let the pedantry taint your judgment of Stillmania, though.}

-- Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi {A beautiful paean to Western literature from an Eastern scholar living under Islamic statism; the Gatsby trial and Jane Austen dance chapters are particularly enjoyable.}

-- The Persian Mirror: The Elusive Face of Iran, by Elaine Sciolino {For those with short odds on the next war of choice.}

-- Nobody's Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker, by Anthony Lane {He needs to stop it with the creepy drooling over Natalie Portman, but Lane is still the best around for losing it at the movies.}

-- The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl {Adult stories, less like his childrenâs stuff than what O. Henry would have been like if his ironic plot twists had involved wife-swapping, cannibalism, or turning infants into superhuman bee-monsters. Might be fun for the kid who never reads, actually.}

-- The Chicago Manual of Style, by the University of Chicago Press Staff {and the ghost of Allan Bloom.}

-- The Brothers Karamazov, by F. Dostoevsky, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky {Incest! Murder! Theodicy!}

-- Collected Non-Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges {A prose impresario short-winded enough to keep beside the toilet -- especially if your john is in a labrynith that transcends spacetime.}

-- Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by John Shepard {Stories narrated by John Ashcroft, John Entwistle, Nazi rocket riders, the creature from the black lagoon, and others.}

-- My Life and Hard Times, by James Thurber {Think of David Sedaris, in turn of the century Columbus, Ohio. And without the gay schtick, or even a pretense at respect for his family.}

ALBUMS:

-- You Are the Quarry, by Morrissey {He's back! And almost paid off the deficit incurred by Maladjusted. A few gripes: "America Is Not the World" never fulfills the promise of its title. It's an unwieldy blunderbuss, not a rapier -- and the use of "hamburger" as synecdoche for our national obesity problem is a new hackneyed low for the Oscar Wilde of the microphone. "I Have Forgiven Jesus" ultimately works, but I can't help but feel that that one was just too easy.}

-- Weightlifting, by The Trashcan Sinatras {Remember them from your college radio daze? A brisk homecoming track, appositely named "Welcome Back" ("Everyone survived / Everyone's alive!" -- well, thank goodness) kicks off this highly accomplished return to musicmaking for an alt-pop band that shouldn't have stayed away so long.}

-- Strange Bird, by Augie March {With a name like Augie, it has to be good. It is. Analogs fail me.}

-- Evergreen, by Echo and the Bunnymen {Best 80's Band Comeback Album. No contest.}

-- Mermaid Avenue, by Billy Bragg and Wilco {A fucking classic. Ukanian bloke Billy Bragg manages to capture the rhythms of dustbowl Americana better than Dylan -- the obvious disciple/witch doctor to perform a Woody Guthrie resurrection -- ever could do. All lyrics by Guthrie, music by Bragg and Wilco.}

-- Don't Try This at Home, by Billy Bragg {Most people who hear Mermaid Avenue invariably want more of the man who brought it to them. This is Bragg's most "accessible" solo album, though not without the politics that's defined his career. "Accident Waiting to Happen" is a punk snarl against cultural fascism.}

-- Galore, by Kirsty MacColl {May this earth angel charm the knickers off the winged principalities. MacColl died a few years ago in a boating accident, but I can only imagine how well-attended her funeral must have been by the number of musicians who borrowed her Celtic nightingale voice. This album consists mainly of covers, but that's more than all right for someone generous enough to never ask for top billing, despite consistently stealing the show.}

-- These Are the Vistas, by the Bad Plus {"Smells Like Teen Spirit," the jazz standard. No kidding. Comes off not just better than you'd expect, but brilliantly.}

-- SMiLE, by Brian Wilson {Reviewed here. Check to the right.}

-- The Soft Bulletin, by the Flaming Lips {And the hard singing voice to take, but worth it anyway.}

-- It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, by Public Enemy {More complicated rhymes and denser loops than have been on the radio before or sense, plus the guy with the big clock.}

-- Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?, by the Unicorns {Morbid, tinny, wildly innovative and beautiful.}

-- Loaded: Fully Loaded Edition, by the Velvet Underground {Funny, Lou Reed doesnât usually look this happy. Must be Laurie Anderson's doing.}

-- Traitor In Our Midst, by the Country Gazette {What you always thought bluegrass was supposed to sound like.}

-- The Modern Lovers, by the Modern Lovers {Speaking of Lou Reed, remember the guy with the guitar who gets shot in Something About Mary? Imagine that guy redoing "White Light/White Heat," but with lyrics about aging with dignity and eschewing drugs. That sounds like a snark, but itâs actually the SAM guy, and John Cale produced.}

-- The Queen Is Dead, by The Smiths {I can't believe you don't own this already. The summa of the Moz/Marr collaboration.}

-- The Boatman's Call, by Nick Cave {The Prince of Darkness may have been afraid to board a plane after 9/11, but this "New Testament" sound is proof of moisture's sustainability in Hell. "Into My Arms" is sweet enough to play your girlfriend on Valentine's Day, leaving the oldie-but-dreary "Deanna" to blast at her when she dumps you.}

-- No Cities Left, by The Dears {The lead singer cried when Morrissey asked the band to open on the "You Are the Quarry" tour. That kind of gone-to-pieces sentimentalism can only lead one place: straight down. Get 'em while they're new and good.}

-- The Boy With the Arab Strap, by Belle and Sebastian {Might as well order that black V-neck sweater, Rimbaud's Collected Poems, while you're at it. "Theoretical" bisexuality not a requisite, despite what angry twee detractors say.}

FILMS & TV:

-- Before Sunset, directed by Richard Linklater {The sequel that doesn't feel like one. Why thirtysomethings who chat are more interesting than twentysomethings who do likewise. Some sluggish moments, but all made up for by a luminous final scene that made me fall in love with Julie Delpy once more. Bet it made Anthony Lane "spill [his] Sprite" again, too.}

-- Collateral, directed by Michael Mann {Tom Cruise has always been a hard-working, as opposed to naturally gifted, actor. This part was his pension come early. Michael Mann is the Richard Avedon of the moving Los Angeles image. And Jamie Foxx ain't too shabby, either.}

-- The Unbelievable Truth, directed by Hal Hartley {Surreal-ish debut from a master indy filmmaker and satirist. Yes, that is Edie Falco as the diner waitress.}

-- Henry Fool, directed by Hal Hartley {Hartley's masterpiece. Probably the only movie about writers that's ever worked. Barton Fink, anyone?}

-- Metropolitan, directed by Whit Stillman {Downwardly mobile 60's college jet set. Making a film about this demographic is like trying to play matchmaker to a Republican leper in Northampton, Mass. That the dialogue (and it's all dialogue) stays liquid-tongued is a monument to Stillman's talent... dare I say, genius?}

-- Barcelona, directed by Whit Stillman {Anti-Americanism when it was more funny than scary. The "subtext" speech belongs in Bartlett's. The DVD commentary is, as someone from the earlier film might say, "priceless."}

-- The Last Days of Disco, directed by Whit Stillman {An assault on 70's cliche in the best possible way -- the anti-54. Also known as Yuppies: A Defense. Chloe Sevigny gives grace to the one night stand, instead of head to Vincent Gallo.}

-- Mr. Jealousy, directed by Noah Baumbach {Who wouldn't hunt down the ex-boyfriends of Annabella Sciorra? Eric Stoltz had fewer difficulties with girls in Mask. Chris Eigeman from the Stillman flicks swaps Mayflower pedigree for facial hair (modelled on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest jacket photo), to varying degrees of success. An underrated romantic comedy, but don't say I didn't warn you: this film may engender awkward relationship conversation. It may also plant supersleuth-stalker seeds in frail men's heads. Or so I've heard.}

-- Blue Velvet, directed by David Lynch {So many epigones, so far from this mark.}

-- Father Ted: The Holy Trinity {BBC TV series about three priests on an island. No, not that kind of series, sicko!}

-- The Office - The Complete Collection (First And Second Series Plus Special) {Creator, writer, director and star Rick Gervais used to manage Suede and now this. That's enough laurels for one lifetime. He can die now.}

-- Arrested Development - Season One {To think that Teen Wolf Too was just glimpse of Jason Bateman's potential.}

07/06/05 - 09/30/05
05/05/05 - 07/05/05
03/31/05 - 05/04/05
2/24/05 - 3/30/05
1/16/05 - 2/22/05
12/3/04 - 1/15/05
9/1/04 - 12/2/04
7/14/04 - 8/31/04
6/23/04 - 7/13/04
 

Thursday, December 2, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Ukrainian Intrigue... When it was later discovered that the influential literary-political journal Encounter, to which Orwell and a handful of anti-Communist academics had contributed, was actually funded by the C.I.A., Labor leader Roy Jenkins quickly applied thumb and forefinger to an incipient progressive flame by declaring, Well, good for the C.I.A.

The compliment is apparently worth repaying, though not by those who think they have "uncovered" yet another case of agitprop with Washington origins. The Guardian has long struggled to resemble an institutional newsletter published by chin-dribbling, electro-shocked paranoiacs, and it holds steady in this effort with a recent insistence that 300,000 oppositionists in Kiev are all Langley-wired drones, not pissed off democrats. Anne Applebaum goes to town:

Versions of this argument -- that pro-democracy movements are in fact insidious neocon plots designed to spread American military influence -- have been around for some time. Sometimes they cite George Soros -- in this context, a right-wing capitalist -- as the source of the funding and "slick marketing." Sometimes they cite the evil triumvirate of the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute and Freedom House, all organizations that have indeed been diligently training judges, helping election monitors and funding human rights groups around the world for decades, much of the time without getting much attention for it.

Next up: Muqtada al-Sadr and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi are also Foggy Bottom Boys, looking to undermine nation-building in Iraq and bring back the more "containable" puppet Saddam Hussein. In fact, if you read Leo Strauss' Natural Right and History upside-down, in blacklighting, in front of a mirror, on Rosh Hashanah - It. Reveals. All. --MW [#]

Kerik New Homeland Security Honcho... I saw this guy on Dennis Miller last week. For some reason the phrase "chunks bigger than you in my stool" comes to mind, as does "New York exceptionalism." The latter holds because only would this great city produce a man who looks like a walking maproom of undisclosed teamster gravesites, but also knows the zip code for Umm Qasr.

Senate confirmation is supplanted by a steel-cage peony pruning match against Richard Armitage. --MW [#]

Making It Periodically Inconvenient to Grab a Paper Down At the Corner Store: Priceless... The BBC reports on a new Israeli credit card in the works that won't allow transactions on the Sabbath. This ten-million shekel business is expected to pull in plenty of ultra-Orthodox Jews who don't believe in shopping during God's day - and who apparently lack the willpower to just stay not buy anything. What does it mean when your currency is more devoutly dedicated to religious dogma than you are?

The cards might also never work in stores that open during Sabbath hours. Visa: it's everywhere G-d wants you to be. --ND [#]

Ballard Ear... The politicized end of the world is hardly new to art. Slightly more original is that event's actuation by, or origin in, the United States: a chiliastic locale whose existence obviates its invention, and where the difficulty lies only in selecting the ultimate countdown formula from an apothecary of conditional poisons. Postindustrial pollution: an old stand-by, to be sure. Nuclear holocaust: still good, but less viable since the '80s. Man-made epidemia: Yup, yup. Third world hegemony backlash: very en vogue. Outlet mall teenage anomie: eBay and Amazon are making this less relevant, but we'll do lunch, babe.

After all, how could we not be the sovereign roulette square upon which everyone is stacking his eschatological chips? Notable exceptions include the recent English films 28 Days Later and (parody) Shaun of the Dead, both of which were modeled on -- American zombie flicks. But in the realm of literary science fiction, we find ourselves still cresting a trend of the "postmodern" novel - infinite in jest as well as messianic left-wing sirens about the big curtain call - that presumably only an actual apocalypse can ever bring to a halt. Then again, maybe not.

Britain's J.G. Ballard once wrote a book called Hello America. Now, if pressed to decode the value-weighted "gist" of that book without having read it, you might find all the data you need in the previous sentence. The two cited countries bear a grammatic-critical relationship, with Britain as the subject, America the direct object, and any number of transitive verbs not very nice indeed. Would it surprise you, for example, to hear that the Ballardian U.S. has become a continental sewage dump which 22nd-century Europeans set out to explore like hazmatted Everest junkies? Or that the Manhattan skyline - let us tread carefully here - has been blotted by a "200-storey OPEC Tower which dominate[s] Wall Street, its neon sign pointing towards Mecca"? The arid West gets the elemental treatment (always a J.G. hobbyhorse), with Las Vegas turned into a half-submerged Atlantis of wading fluorescent kitsch, "a violent mirror reflecting all the failure and humiliation of America." (Yeah, I lost a bundle last time I was there, too.)

We're well beyond D.B.C. Pierre's Booker win, so I should think that none of the above is especially disturbing in retrospect, save perhaps a vague "prescience" about the NYC petro-Babel and its portentous eastward gaze (although capitalism and religion are always yoked allegorically in something very much like this; look at Auden.)

Up for grabs, however, in the What-The-Fuck department is Ballard's latest book -- of quotations. Yes, quotations, which some twit called John Strausbaugh at the New York Times is good enough to review this week.

It had to happen eventually. A fantasist and cult doom peddler would earn himself a Bartlett's of portable prophecies and gnomic runes about man's inhumanity to man at the service of oppressive of bourgeois technology. The surprise is that this fantasist and cult doom peddler would be the one given such an honor.

You may remember the Ballard novel Crash, if for no other reason than it deprived you of a necessary and decorous right to use the clichÚ "car wreck" in describing its moral and stylistic content. The film adaptation, which could only have been directed by David Cronenberg, made James Spader creepy for life and non-vanilla sexual fetishes on the silver screen endurable only at foot level.

Why Ballard above, say, Asimov or Heinlein or LeGuin, for a Book of Quotations is unclear except to Mr. Strausbaugh.

Why do British writers so love predicting the future? Maybe it's because their culture is so thick with the past.

That's strike one, right there.

But it can't just be British.

Where Mr. Clarke is the high priest of sci-fi's faith in the human intellect manifest in technology...

Strike two. (Has he even read 2001: A Space Odyssey? If HAL was a sign of "faith," then what does Clarkean agnosticism look like?)

And not just British and pessimistic, but polemic:

Mr. Ballard saw the World Trade Center attack as a kind of brutal intrusion of the imminent future into the present. "The attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 was a brave attempt to free America from the 20th Century," he opines.

Opines. Thank God for that. I was afraid he states it as fact.

"The deaths were tragic, but otherwise it was a meaningless act." And in another passage: "The horrific newsreels are effectively the greatest disaster movie to date. ... My fear is that in due course the 'remake' of 9/11, with the ultimate in special effects, will inspire Americans to more than revenge."

We need a quote book for this stuff? I'd rather pick up a copy of The Onion.

He is not usually so callous. In 2001, he remarked: "Americans are highly moralistic, and any kind of moral ambiguity irritates them. As a result they completely fail to understand themselves, which is one of their strengths."

And that's three. Good night, everybody! --MW [#]

Wednesday, December 1, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Domo Arigato... This week's New York Times Magazine is better than usual. The cover, featuring a child assembling an airbrushed, smiling photo of himself, suggests it's going to be dedicated to another bout of upper-class handwringing about giving children everything without ruining them. There's some of that, but the magazine is mostly about toys.

In particular, the focus on this awesome new gizmo called Robosapien. This is the toy we all wished existed when we were children -- a programmable "robot" that's complex enough to fool with for days, simple enough to understand in a few minutes of play, simple enough to sell for $99 but sophisticated enough that nerds are already cracking it open and sautering new parts onto its shell. Its creater clearly knows what he's doing. Example:

Robosapien has 28 hidden functions that do not appear in the manual. For example, you can shut the robot down, and "when he dies," as [creator] Tilden put it, "the last word he says, and it's the only English word he has right now, is 'Rosebud' -- which is from Orson Welles's 'Citizen Kane.' If you remember, you wait the entire movie, and you find out Rosebud was the name of his favorite toy. So just imagine the poetic symmetry. Just before Robosapien dies, he has a dream of another toy."

And then there's the interview with the guy remodeling F.A.O. Schwarz where the NYT asks if his ideas don't amount to a "postmodern joke"... --ND [#]

The Burned Slate, The Ignoble Savage, Big Brother in the Machine... A map without Utopia, Oscar Wilde once wrote (or, more utopianly, said), isn't worth glancing at.

A fine sentiment so far as it goes, but just how far has it gone and to what human peril? Classic works of literature abound in the study of those visually feasted upon maps, however frayed and edge-seared they may have been.

Of course, "Utopia," pace Thomas More, was rarely the point. "Dystopia" was. Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, We, Darkness at Noon, Fahrenheit 451... the list is probably endless given that the dire prophecies of those volumes - always in some manner dealing with the societal regulation of books and information - have all but faded from Western imagination with the terminus of what Robert Conquest dubbed the "ravaged" last century. Go Middle East, young man! for the new deadly strain of Captive Mind Syndrome.

Though maybe not farther east (and not any closer to the middle) than Harvard. Sociobiology has long been thought of as absolutism's inward-turned hurrah. How sinister to finally, successfully enslaven mankind in the prison of the double helix, chain him to his own ineluctable self. (Was not the most haunting sentence in Orwell's masterpiece O'Brien's interrogation room line to Smith: "The word you are trying to think of is solipsism"?) Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker wrote a terrific book debunking the bad dystopian nonfiction that has plagued the theory of genetic determinism -- which is really more accurately described as genetic probablism. Now The Chronicle of Higher Education charts the uses and abuses of high school-level biology in the great parables on human bondage of a more statist vintage.

Novels about science, scientists reading novels, novels on tape. Truly is this the age when a Leavis-Snow kerfuffle looks like some quaint old non-war once waged by Oceania... --MW [#]

Bidden Fruit... After the consensus was reached on a heliocentric model of the universe, someone had to go and ruin the relio-scientific comity but suggesting that PCs were better than Macs.

Whew. Thank Christ that one's now settled, too.

I'm typing this on a brand new 17-inch G4 Powerbook, as my old laptop, reliable but slow like Orwell's Boxer, headed for the glue factory that is Craigslist.

This is the second of two new toys this week, and I say new because my iPod died about three weeks ago and was promptly sent back to Apple for repair. They didn't repair the thing, however. They replaced it. So technically what I got back was "new," as immediately indicated by the only un-hip message this beloved company of brushed steel and Lucite futurism has ever sent me: "Do not steal music," said the cellophane wrapping. Uh, right.

Anyway, I'd been told by one of those sunshiney customer service representatives, whom I'll call "Trish" (because she'd call herself that if she had it all to do over again), that not only was my iPod happily doppelganged, but the engraving on it was redone as well - overseas.

Sure enough, there's my older sister's heartfelt sentiment burned into the back of iDeux (sorry.) Ah, so this is what globalization has amounted to: Echo and the Bunnymen in my ear on the 6 train.

For those of you not sure about what to buy this Festivus, I suggest all Apple-related void-filling products, and also smug cynicism in softdrink form to help prevent any blogging recipients of your magnanimity from sounding like Andrew Sullivan talking about his dog or Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons talking at all.

Thank you. (Epur si muove.) --MW [#]

Monday, November 28, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Zander, the Eh... "Daroosh is dead and I am king, / Of everywhere and everything." Yeah, yeah.

Alexander can't even conquer New York, and this at a time when the major competition at the Cineplex deals in sexually ambiguous Ph.D.s and natty talking marine flora named "Bob."

Are meat-and-potato heterosexuals even allowed to appear in films anymore, asketh the red states?

Meanwhile, Matt Drudge, either immune to petty internet taunts or just blind to the gossip he prefers not to see trumpeted in Courier Bold, offers this front-page link to the epic flop of the season (and you'll note not just the headline, but the toga-raising bylines as well):

Alexander the (not so) Great fails to conquer America's homophobes
By John Hiscock in Los Angeles and James Burleigh

Wonkette and Gawker sit on their hands and bit their underlips with clickable frenzy.

Hitch is unimpressed. It's about the colossal battlefield reality of the Macedonian, not his supposed bedroom activities. --MW [#]

Sunday, November 27, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Metal Detection and the Mattress that Killed a President... I just ran across this essay on Google while searching for something else. Amazing to think that something as inconsequential as mattress springs could influence history so profoundly. In his brief time in office, Garfield fought corruption and patronage with great success. After his assassination, the still-healing republic was stuck with President Mustache. --ND [#]

Thursday, Thanksgiving, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Vaclav Havel to Ukraine: Keep it Up!... Is there anyone besides Putin and the Kiev regime who are on Yanukovich's side? Give it up, boys. Not even Republican US presidents take a "neutral" stand anymore.

The names of the candidates, although disturbingly similar (Viktor, meet Viktor), bear a phonetic telos about the curtain call on the End of History. Martin Amis once said that by looking into someone's face you can "make out the area of waste and fatigue, the moonspots and bone-shadow you're bound to get if you hang out in the twentieth century." The same goes for names.

Yanukovich is a hard pronunciation, a bad guy's twentieth century name. That's the name of some 300-pound Rubashovian gorilla: shaved head, black leather uniform, truncheon dented from heavy use, torpidly laughing his way out of some grim czaroid oubliette after extracting a "confession." Yushchenko is all susurrating opposition. That's a fricative name. Very soothing. Very democratic-reformist. Very... Velvet. (People often mispronounce Vaclav by Anglicizing it. In Czech, it's "Vahts-lav").

In other words, it's later than the Ukraine thinks. A century ago another train was pulling out of the station, only to have its lurching warm-up speed decelerate into an anticlimactic halt. A conductor saw someone sitting defiantly on the platform, someone who was wanted on that train. What was the hold up? It took Trotsky and Brest-Litvosk to figure it out.

Well, not this time. 300,000 people in the streets says it all. --MW [#]

Wednesday, November 24, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Hip... The ineffable je nais sais quoi, the gin in the Campari, that tortured allure that's not always sexual but often is... What is hip? If it's anything close to ironic, then a former New York Times reporter attempting to pin down a history of this shrugging apotheosis of pop - that, my friends, is decidedly hip. Or just lame. Whatever, Ben McGrath of the highbrow-hip New Yorker swoons for John Leland's new monograph, which, if you ask me (and why would you? - I'm squareness itself) could sink or swim on concept alone.

Not to be confused with The Birth of Cool, the hornblown subtitle to a recently released folio named for a certain Jazz Olympian, Leland's book smartly has Miles burn brighter than the great Wynton Marsalis, and for reasons that, man, don't even bother trying to read about.

Still, I think the author has too much fun with himself. I'm with him on Melville, Whitman, James (as in Jesse, not Henry), Dylan (natch), Baker and Pryor... but I just can't subscribe to the cult of Bugs Bunny.

The rabbit "made his debut in circumstances of grave danger, calmly seeking enlightenment, as any hipster would... Staring down the barrel of a gun, he uttered his first words: 'Eh, what's up, doc?'"

All right: if anything then, it's Mel Blanc who deserves the laurel here, especially since, by animating his wised-up nihilism instead of embodying it, he renounced the very street cred he'd inevitably have coming to him: a gesture of echt-hipness, you better believe.

While you're at it, check out this hilarious adieu to current New York City "hipsterdom." --MW [#]

Granta Celebrates 25th Year... Or silver jubilee, as our Atlanticist chums like to say... Martin Amis's long-lingering screenplay for Northhanger Abbey is included, as is a previously unpublished short story by V.S. Pritchett. --MW [#]
Chicken Kiev... The Ukranian government is looking very unhappy as protests continue for a third day, only increasing in size and scope. (Although not all protesters are for the opposition now.) No matter which way events turn, a strike in some segments of the Ukranian economy looks certain, and a violent crackdown still possible. But the momentum seems to be on the side of the pro-European opposition. Which leads to the question: if the EU someday extends to Ukraine and the Baltic states, will tomorrow's humorists refer to Russia as "Europe's Canada"? And will such jibes finally provoke a Washington-Moscow nuclear exchange? --ND [#]
Urban Legends Come True ... We've all heard the one about the person in a foreign country who is drugged and has his kidneys stolen by rogue doctors. But in Columbia, they've gone one step further and abducted an unborn baby by C-section. I really want to say something cynical -- even snarky -- but frankly, I can't think of anything that could make this creepier, unless the stolen infant kills his dad and marries his mom. Which, since they caught the baby-thief, looks unlikely at this point. --ND [#]
When Deadlines Approach, Thanksgiving Week, 2004... Drum roll, please.

Winner of the most cringe-worthy consecutive sentences in a broadsheet's Arts Section:

"Then comes the moment when we Meet the Parents. Brother, talk about Christmas with the cranks!"
(Stephen Hunter, film review of Alexander in the Washington Post)

What would have happened if an overworked Capitol copy-editor had fallen asleep on the job: "Then we get a load of Mommie Dearest! Jesus, talk about Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S.!"

Winner of the most flaming lede paragraph that Icarus has been instructed to fly south of it:

"As one might conclude from following the career path of Scott (Joanie Loves Chachi) Baio, cute rarely ages well. It seems like only yesterday that restaurants were staking their popularity on menus packed with such adorable dishes as macaroni and cheese and s'mores, served in Brobdingnagian renderings of Richie Cunningham's rec room. Can it be that it was all so simple then?"
(Hal Rubinstein, restaurant review of Lure Fishbar in New York Magazine)

Translation: "New Yorkers' taste in food has changed considerably over the last five years. Or so Elaine Stritch tells me."

Tune in next week for another exciting edition of When Deadlines Approach... --MW [#]

Al Pacino Thinks He's Jewish Again... It was bound to happen sooner or later. Operation: Shylock Revisited. It took four hundred-plus years to get the first black man to play Othello on the screen (a couple hundred to invent the screen, admittedly), so one would think a genuine Chosen Person could tackle Shakespeare's most 'controversial' (a.k.a. 'anti-Semitic,' 'nastiest,' 'colorful,' 'swarthiest,' 'I-wonder-where-he-summers') role...

Fresh off his Golden Globe win for making every wingless mortal in America wish Roy Cohn had been circumsized a few more times ("They say unkind things about me in The Nation? -- Fuck The Nation!!), Pacino continues to chew epic scenery on the dime of a common, if often sticky, characterization mix-up: Jewish or Italian?

But going by the hoo-wah!-decibel delivery intoned all over this trailer for The Merchant of Venice, one thing's for sure about the pound of flesh this paisano-ganif will be extracting: ham -- it's all ham. --MW [#]

Monday, November 22, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Here Come Da Judge - and a Million Other Nasty Things... Well, at least he didn't Google the end of the world like he did the status of public intellectuals. But juridical jack-of-all-trades (and master of at least one) Richard Posner does again what Alan Derschowitz does with dramatically less IQ and infinitely more whininess: writes about that which he knows some.

Posner the Legal Pragmatist endorses the black market sale of babies with the kind of supercool rational panache that libertarians long for when they endorse the free market use of sweatshops. But Posner the Doomsday Prophet, according to Jeffrey Rosen, lands like a dud nuke.

I have no way of measuring the strength of Judge Posner's calculus of catastrophes - which take the shape of terrorist immolations, asteroid pulverizations and Terminator-esque enslavements of humanity - except to ask if "cost-benefit analysis" is really the first priority when considering global death, or a series of oh-shit scenarios not far removed from terrestrial and existential finality.

Posner's on to his own shortcomings and more or less admits them in the course of this new book, which was inspired (and here's the most rewarding thing in this review) by Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. Usually it's the wonkishness that begets the fiction, not the other way around. But I suppose we had this reverse order science-culture "resonance" amassing for a while now...

Be sure to look for The Dersch's Da Vinci Code of Jury Selection in fine bookstores this spring... --MW [#]

Sully's Shady Diagnosis on Bush II... During media-friendly administrations like the previous one, in which press releases were issued on especially good chief executive hair days, there's still a lingering itch to gain deeper "access" into the inner sanctum and assign hidden causalities to the choices the president makes in assembling his staff. Who got hired, and why? Who got fired, and why? Could we have seen this coming? Yet during extremely closed-off and reticent administrations like the present one, in which press conferences are seen as burdensome means of informing the nation that it's now at war, that itch becomes an unsatisfiable compulsion.

So like historians who prefer slender reductionist volumes on the First World War or, say, the mercantile indispensability of peat moss in the development of modern civilization, journalists prefer their politicians' heads examined quickly, comprehensively and authoritatively.

Andrew Sullivan gets up to this in his latest examination on the Bush cabinet reshuffle, a piece ominously titled, "The Coil Tightens" (where "How I Learned to Start Worrying and Explain the Solipsism" was too long by New Republic standards.)

He seems to have the goods on everyone, from Ashcroft successor Alberto Gonzales to the wondrously-named new Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. In short: they're all sycophantic Bush leaguers. Spellings was actually conceived in the canary corpse-littered coal mines of Karl Rove's id in the early 1980's; and Gonzales is one of a handful of Latino right-winger JD's that this post-PC POTUS favors for career advancement. Is it even ironic anymore to think that a Republican would appoint the first Black female - and, if you get your lobes real close to the Washington grapevine, potentially gay - Secretary of State? Sullivan apparently thinks that in this White House, the acceleration of affirmative action after re-election is just another re-election trick.

The appointment of high-profile Hispanics and blacks is not accidental. Bush managed to squeeze his share of the African American vote from 9 percent in 2000 to eleven percent earlier this month. By appealing to anti-gay attitudes of many older blacks, he is hoping to peel off some more in the future. Ditto with the Latino vote. Karl Rove knows that symbols can and do matter and that if the Republicans can maintain their grip on white born-agains, and chip away at the Democrats' ethnic bases, then a real realignment is possible.

So then why the Gonzales appointment and the Rice promotion after November 2nd? Mission accomplished; rainbow coalitional gestures received loud and clear. Can't we safely sell out the minorities now? And a realignment isn't just possible - it's here. But hang on a minute... Wasn't the dumping of the bigoted holy-roller John Ashcroft a replastering of that selfsame chip on the Democrats' ethnic bases? Many "older blacks," homophobic or not, went enthusiastically and repeatedly for Bill Clinton, who, although a more closeted queer-baiter than Bush, went so far as to use the encompassing phrase "straight or gay" in advocating the expansion of social rights in his '96 DNC acceptance speech. That kind of talk could have upset Harlem, you know. And Bill was practically our "first black president," as the media loved to patronizingly remind African-Americans of all actuarial standing for eight fun-filled years...

The consensus echoed by Sullivan is that when Bush isn't projecting diversity outward, he's collapsing intellectually inward and upping the number of yes-men (and yes-women) in his unshakably North Korea-like Ministry of Nods.

Many presidents have a kitchen cabinet, or a coterie of White House confidants who balance out a broader selection of official cabinet appointees. But Bush, in his second term reshuffle, has essentially conflated the two. In his first term, he was praised for bringing in heavy-weights who clearly had more experience or clout than he did. He even made some imaginative appointments, putting Alcoa chief, Paul O'Neill, in the Treasury, or relying on Dick Cheney's network to pad out the staffing. That doesn't seem to be happening again. Fierce loyalty is a prerequisite for serving Bush, as O'Neill and Colin Powell found out. Loyalty matters far more than being right or being competent. That's why Rumsfeld is staying and Powell is leaving and O'Neill is regarded in the White House as something only slightly less poisonous than a reporter from the New York Times. And that's why the paradox of Bush's new mandate is that his renewed confidence has led him not to reach out, but to coil ever tightly within.

Excuse me, but praised by whom? I seem to recall Bush being lampooned in 2000 as a foreign policy dolt promising to "surround himself" with veteran brainiacs from his father's era. And are disloyalty and competence mutually inclusive qualities in an advisor? It's difficult to imagine someone like Colin Powell would willingly have imploded his own diplomatic career by presenting crap evidence before the U.N. Security Council, unless he too bought, if only grudgingly, the "slam-dunk" theory of another recent Bush "resignee." Or was Powell honorbound to stick strictly to the script when the audience was anyone other than Bob Woodward?

Either the consequences of Iraq or the tranche post-retirement "insider" memoirs made it an axiom of popular discourse that Bush favors the people who line up to agree with him. The yawning non-item used to be that he was such a fucking fool as to always require his mind made up for him - who's to say he doesn't prefer the peremptory players with whom he agrees?

The truth is we have no idea what gets said between adjacent jogging partners George and Condi, or what meek or not-so-meek hands of opposition are raised in tense Oval Office discussions about Iraq or Iran or Al Qaeda. These kinds of "coil-tighening" insights never do rise above the level of speculation or an attempted x-raying of a lead-encased war room.

And even when Dubya begins to make overtures towards the "unity" thing and thinks out loud about putting a few Democrats in his bullpen, it's still more of the same lame monopathology at work:

The rumor last week was that Bush was going to ask a Democrat to be his agriculture secretary. Senator Ben Nelson has apparently been offered the job. After a brief buzz about a possibly expansive and bipartisan tilt to further appointments, a reality check was in order. Nelson is from Nebraska. Were he to resign, the Republicans would have a good chance of picking up another Senate seat, and inching toward a filibuster-proof Senate. What looked like an attempt to reach out was, in fact, a bid to seize even greater control. The vise tightens. And the path narrows.

Right. The Republicans win the most decisive victory in the history of their party, but if they can only nab one more Senate seat... and from the elite liberal state of Nebraska, no less. --MW [#]

Red Ukraine, Blue Ukraine ... In another bit of east-west snarkery, Ukraine has been in a tug-of-war between the pro-Russian incumbent and pro-European Union opposition candidate. There were already several allegations of fraud, a momentum-shifting television debate and an alleged poisoning attempt. Now, after exit polls showed the pro-EU candidate with a lead of three to twenty percentage points (what's the MOE on those?), they're declaring the incumbent the winner after all by a margin of three points, leading to protests in the streets. The Guardian must have a Prozac dispenser next to the office water cooler by now. --ND [#]
And Eat Your Heart Out, Bono!... The U.S. convinces the Paris Club to forgive 80% of Iraqi debt. "How to Dismantle a Nuclear Bomb" takes a back seat to how to evaporate national principal.

And wipe that smile off your face:

France, Germany and Russia had resisted American efforts to forgive so much debt, arguing that Iraq, with the second-largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia, had the capacity to repay if given enough time.

Hold it a minute. There's oil in Iraq? --MW [#]

Something You Can't Feel But Can Download... The new U2 album. Here. Almost enough to make you wanna run out and buy a black iPod. --MW [#]

Sunday, November 21, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

The Right You Don't Mind... The problem with libertarianism, says the frequently miscategorized conservative P.J. O'Rourke, is the movement's least comprising wing which looks to "privatize the sidewalk." I use the word "movement," by the way, because the word "party" just won't cut it any self-conscious discussion of an coalescence of dogged individualists, and because you know exactly what P.J. is euphemistically alluding to when he uses the word "problem." Trade and military isolationists, gun nuts, Minnesota militiamen, no-government Ayn Randian loonies - what is it that puts them all in ponytails and one-man stage adaptations of "The Paranoid Style in American Politics"? And why do they always assume that human nature is rational and good, as opposed to irrational and bad and best left as untampered with as possible?

I'm certainly not the one to be answering these questions. But if you've ever driven by the impressively designed Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., you've found it difficult to assert that libertarianism is not currently the most vogue or influential "alternative" ideology in America, or that it fails to exert such influence in holding to account the theory and practice of consensus politics in America. (Now if only these guys could find a presidential candiate of higher caliber than Harry Browne or Michael Badnarik...)

Libertarianism's flagship magazine, which I've noticed has grown in circulation as well as respectability in the last five years, is called, plangently enough, Reason, and for evidence of what I'm talking about, check out this latest piece by Boston Globe columnist Cathy Young. It's about Japanese internment during World War II and racial profiling in general. It's also one of the most refreshing and cant-free surveys of a civil liberties nightmare that's just a mouse-click away on the "free minds, free markets"-friendly world wide web. --MW [#]

Things One Doesn't Often See ... I always thought it was the special province of American officials to look silly doing things they wouldn't normally do. Perhaps Bush's diplomatic skills have been underrated if he can persuade a former KGB strongman to don a Chilean poncho at a trade summit. --ND [#]
Plum Gig... How nice it must have been for Robert McCrum - a name that could have appeared in any Bertie-and-Jeeves story to identify the enabler of imminent leisure class disaster - to write the latest, and what many are calling the best, biography of P.G. Wodehouse.

Less of an occasion for "espieglerie" would be to read this review of McCrum's book by Frank McCourt, whose lachrymose memoir, How I Grew Up in Ireland Covered In Me Da's Vomit*, won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction (and might have been worth a PEN award for fiction, as a number of Limerick contemporaries have coughingly suggested.)

An oath should be solemnly sworn from now on: "I will not mention Wodehouse's embroilment with the Nazis unless I plan on giving same at least 1/10 of the moral discussion that Orwell gave it."

This is bad, mmm-kay:

Berlin, for instance. He did broadcast for the Nazis, his tone, as usual, jocular. He lived well and had his German admirers. How can we believe he didn't know the damage he was doing, that he was a Nazi pawn? In psychological terms, was he the supreme escape artist of all time? All around him, before, during and after the war, the world was going to hell in a bucket. He took a look, probably uttered a "fie on it" and retreated to the Drones Club, to Blandings Castle, to those gorgeous mornings when Jeeves shimmered into Bertie's bedroom with the restoring beverage.

And that's exactly how it happened, eh, Frankie-boy? Not much of a feast of reason and flow of the soul in that paragraph, which scants on the encoded ironies the creator of Psmith employed in his notorious broadcasts, or the soft-boiled satiric 'awareness' of fascism the creator of Sir Roderick Spode and the 'Black Shorts' demonstrated.

And escape artistry adheres to the field of magicman vaudeville, not psychology, ya glib-tongued, tuppence mediocrity.

*Actually, the book was called Angela's Ashes, and the name I gave it I shamelessly stole from The Onion, just like McCourt shamelessly stole from Dickens and probably Amnesty International. --MW [#]

Saturday, November 20, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

The Two-Character Playwright's Other Character... Michael Frayn's "personal director" is Michael Blakemore, a self-effacing and brilliant manipulator of the stage who's probably more than a slight reason for the success of "Democracy," which, in its decapitalized form, that other English word-genius Ian McEwan once called "the people's pornography." Sounds about right. Fun article. --MW [#]
The Party of Self-Criticism... I don't think it would be fair to assume that eight neuralgic years of Bill Clinton forced the erstwhile party of opposition to get tough on the one group it could most consequentially get tough on: itself. A lot of across-the-aisle rapier-plunging was going on in those eight years, as the most expensive presidential library in history is quite keen on reminding us. However, somewhere along the way, conservatives also managed to acquire a taste for self-judgment and self-criticism, for which they're seldom credited.

When one of their own fouls up, Democrats - who, it may be helpful to remember, once had everything to lose and little to gain - opt for the desultory couch trip and talk of healing as though it were a man-made 'process' and not an organic inevitability. Perhaps taking a negative lesson from this, Republicans learned to huddle for fifteen minutes before unanimously deciding that the distance of a barge pole is still way too short between themselves and, say, a stupid, Jim Crow-nostalgic like Trent Lott. Thus the irony of compassionate conservatism comes at an expense well worth paying sometimes. To hear David Brooks and John Podhoretz tell it, it's Tom DeLay's turn to miss the memo on the new reactionary hand-shake, and the House Majority Leader could well find himself persona non grata in a party that will evidently leave a few children behind after all.

Now, while no one can claim that the current president makes it a matter of policy, let alone principle, to openly disavow the unwanted on his payroll, he does -- how to put this? -- work in mysterious ways. Witness the less-than-ceremonious exits of John Ashcroft, Colin Powell and George Tenet -- a few good men who received a few kind words and maybe a pat on the back or two before being jettisoned into the crepuscular realm of 6-figure memoir contracts. That they had some say in their departures is up for speculation, but what is not worth arguing over is that it was the boss who always, always filled out the pink slips.

This, I think, adds to the difficulty in summoning much pity or encouragement for an Establishment Left that thinks of itself as the Lyon of 'resistance' in a Vichy-fied red state dominion. Or that resorts to defending its love of a liberal America by envisioning midnight border hops into socialist Canada - a plan that might objectively be worthwhile during any administration. Indeed, for all the panicky hyperventilation taking place over the kind of 'base' George Bush will have to reward for his continued reign of terror, it's worth asking exactly which chorus John Kerry would have been heeding in January were he the one with earned political 'capital' to begin spending. A party whose mainstream can't even lose a presidential race without exhibiting symptoms of manic depression is probably not up for the challenge of hunting Al Qaeda, fixing Iraq - or, come to think of it, fixing Medicare, paying down the deficit or doing much of anything that doesn't involve some serious in-committee headrest.

But now apparently the healing process can wait, too. The patient has to get worse before he can get better. Primal scream therapy is recommended. Let's see... Mouth-breathing imbecility is one good about which every Karl Rove target is becoming a trade isolationist; abortion will no doubt be illicit by 2008; the poor will get poorer at a rate faster than they had been getting poorer since Adam Smith had a neat little idea; and everyone 18 and older with a now-worthless social security number will be lying dead in military fatigues in some sand-swept garrison in the Middle East.

That's it, let it all out.

And should none of these things come to pass? Well, by then it won't matter because - Hillary will be in charge! No, no! Howard Dean! Actually, you know who isn't so looking bad these days? John Kerry.

Yeah, that's the ticket. --MW [#]

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon  
Mo' Money, New MOMA... You're probably not around to read this today. You're probably engaged in some tortuous human-medium performance artistry of your own, standing in line to get into the new and improved MOMA. For free. Today. This is before Glen Lowry - who's gotten himself spoken of in even lower-decibel tones of awe and admiration - starts charging $20 a pop for pop art and stuff. (Those Saville Row bills aren't going to just pay themselves, you know.) But in case you came down with the flu, or wound up back in Long Island City, or, like some poor schmucks I know, are hanging around for the TimeWarner repairman to show up, here's a link to the new calendar of exhibitions for New York's returned culture-nodular pride and joy. --MW [#]
I.R. Mess... I don't know if there's much in Bush's second term agenda I could have gotten behind, but his hints at tax reform were one possibility. I'm not saying that moving to a national sales tax would have been a great idea. But the tax code is a loophole-ridden mess with big breaks for undeserving industries and plenty of ambiguity for those with wealth to exploit. A flat tax rate exempting income below a certain threshold -- say the payroll tax ceiliing -- with no or very few deductions could have been the greatest experiment in domestic policy in decades. It may not have made life better, but it would be a risk I would have been happy to take.

But to my disappointment, (and Andrew Sullivan's), all those noises about throwing down some serious reform have been scaled back. According to the Washington Post, Bush is thinking about a modest recalibration, adding new deductions for business and investment income at the expense of deductions for state and local taxes and the business deduction for health care benefits.

Now, I'm all for the right wing theory that if you help out business, all boats rise, provided you have a centrist like Clinton keeping just enough regulation to make business honest. But this is foolish. It amounts to a tax increase in the states and localities with high taxes in return for a giveaway to the ones with low taxes -- in other words, a blue state-red state transfer. More curiously, it will break the back of the corporate health care system, leavning many more uninsured. If that happens, this tax code could be the best thing that ever happened to the Americans hoping for government health care. Hello, President Clinton, and isn't it nice to have the First Husband back? --ND [#]

"Violent Relations" Dept... Chirac just can't stop saying strange and inscrutable things in public. Now he's urging a "fairer" international order based around the United Nations. So I guess we're reallocating the five security council votes to China, India, Indonesia, the United States and Brazil. Up that birth rate, Europe. You aren't getting any younger. --ND [#]

Tuesday, November 15, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Jihadis Tremble. Burquas Fly. Hope Survives.... Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky went looking for that nefarious 'pipeline' in all the wrong places... And Gore especially must be getting old to have missed this.

I've always said that Lynne Cheney reeks more of sex than Laura Bush. Now we know. Matthew Arnold dissertation and moral values, indeed. --MW [#]

Mullah Strangelove... Well, Iran and Irony both start with the same two letters... And now, in the same month that The Atlantic's favorite son James Fallow "war-games" potential US responses to Iranian nuclear escalation, we find that the febrile mullahs are playing it cool when it comes to getting fissile. (It's all a pantomime, of course. They're still going to press for a nuke, but this puts them that much closer to impossible 'face-saving' maneuvers with which to bait the international community later on.) But there's got to be something in the Persian water supply: a country that seems to be the only place where great works of Western literature are still being read; where some of the '79 embassy hostage-takers* now want very much to be Occidental tourists and reformers; and where and Khomenei's grandson begs to see the 101st Airbone coming to change his country's regime, yet another historical irony drops its veil:

European diplomats said Bush's reelection helped the negotiations by limiting Iran's options. Had Democrat John F. Kerry won, Iran might have tried to play for time or probe what policy shifts a new administration was considering, they said.

Not quite sure I buy that, but the important thing is that European diplomats do.

(* This ought to snag Mark Bowden a National Magazine Award: The soldiers flashed big smiles at us and nodded approvingly. And right there in front of the Death to the USA sign, in front of the faded banners denouncing "The Great Satan," one of the Revolutionary Guards raised his thumb high into the air and said in halting English, "Okay, George W. Bush!") --MW [#]

Ker-Powell... Hardly news. You can expect the RNC coaxing to begin coaxing him for a presidential run in 2008, even though he's repeatedly tossed the possibility of seeking elected office. Rice gets State, which is the way it should be. She's been a mediocre National Security Advisor because she's a tough-cookie confrontationalist, not a small-mouthed strategist. Her loyalty to Dubya is a handicap in a cloistered environment, but as his more eloquent and scholarly face to the world, it'll be an asset. I'm not sure if she's the first doctorate to ever hold this office, but this is a woman who's battled bigotries hard and soft growing up in Dixie, stared down Stanford faculty and students in Alto, and reminded a whiny Boris Yeltsin just how low temperatures could drop even in a post-perestroika in White House. She'll be better than Albright in this capacity, and less of a willing media doyen than her immediate predecessor (finally Bush gets to unite his inner sanctum, if not the country.) So... Hadley gets Condie's old job, and I'm assuming Rumsfeld will stay put, as will Wolfowitz. It almost goes without saying that Powell's departure means Armitage's a ghost, too. --MW [#]

Friday, November 12, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Yeah, Um, Thanks for the Memories. And Now For Something Completely Different... If you blink, you'll miss the part where King Abdullah mourns the passing of Yasser Arafat in this sawed-off eulogy from today's NYT. Abdullah's piece really clocks in as a MoveOn.org-like plea for the future of Arab-Israeli negotiation, and it's probably for good reason that any royal tears over the dead chairman are thoroughly staunched in the first paragraph: "This was the guy who tried to kill my dad" and all that...

Much of the media has been over-kind to Arafat, who, to his dying day, was suborning the murder of Israeli civilians and agitating for the annhilation of the Jewish state. Try to keep from swallowing your tongue when reading that Arafat was the 'only one' to bring the plight of Palestinians to international attention, and remember that the evidently non-existent Edward Said -- who was to Arafat as a hyperion to a satyr -- denounced the terrorist leader of the PLO, knowing his frustrations would only mount by lack of any worthy political alternative. (According to George Stephanopoulos, the preferred Rabin hand-shaker in '93 was Said himself. Clinton couldn't get the good professor to do it.)

For a real perspective on the late Arafat, check out HonestReporting.com's bio. Soft on encomiums, hard on truth, which should never be seen as a demoralizing or offensive force in any humanitarian struggle. --MW [#]

Thursday, November 11, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold... Michael Scheuer can't exactly be called a fan of the Bush administration. Writing as 'Anonymous,' he published a bestselling book this year entitled Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror, which is a title to inflate Niall Ferguson's Cassandran balloon to bursting point.

The Atlantic this month excerpts an amazing letter Scheuer drafted for the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, arguing that a top-down overhaul of the CIA wasn't necessary: the problem lay in top-heavy arrogance, stupidity and stonewalling.

The longest point of indictment is also the most infuriating:

May 1998-May 1999: The CIA officers working Bin Laden at Headquarters and in the field gave the U.S. government about ten chances to capture Bin Laden or kill him with military means. In all instances, the decision was made that the "intelligence was not good enough." This assertion cannot be debated publicly without compromising sources and methods. What can be said, however, is that in all these cases there was more concern expressed by senior bureaucrats and policymakers about how international opinion would react to a U.S. action than there was concern about what might happen to Americans if they failed to act. Indeed, on one occasion these senior leaders decided it was more important to avoid hitting a structure near Bin Laden's location with shrapnel, than it was to protect Americans. Two other points: the truth has not been fully told about the chance to militarily attack Bin Laden at a desert hunting camp being used by wealthy Gulf royals; and our best chance to capture Bin Laden—-an operation which showed no U.S. hand, risked no U.S. lives, and was endorsed by senior commanders of the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg—-was cancelled because senior officials from the Agency, the Executive Branch, and other Intelligence Community components decided to accept assurances from an Islamic country that it could acquire Bin Laden from the Taleban. U.S. officials accepted these assurances despite the well-documented record of that country withholding help—-indeed, it was a record of deceit and obstruction-—regarding all issues pertaining to Bin Laden between December 1996 and May 1998. The makers of this decision ignored the extensive documentary record that showed nothing but uncooperativeness from this Islamic country. [Bolds my own.]

And now we get to read in today's NYT that George Tenet is commanding $35,000 a pop in speaking fees, with the proviso for each lectern-mounting that everything he says be 'off the record.' This was the man who not only referred to the presence of WMDs in Iraq as a 'slum dunk' case to the president of the United States, but a year before that was heard to wonder if the hijackers of 9/11 had anything to do with those weird Arab enlistees in a Miami flight school...

Instead of adding a 'sanctity of marriage' amendment to the US Consitution, we might think about tacking on a no-bullshit bureaucratic accountability one. Epidemic in this and nearly every administration is a resistance to the pink slip. If the quandary is over 'saving face' or performance of the delicate eggshell-traipse that obtains in Cabinet appointments and the filling of exigent national security posts, there's a simple solution: if your workplace stigma is a body count, you're fired. --MW [#]

Why 'Insurgents' Isn't Even Euphemistic... So: American and Iraqi military have uncovered evidence of a 'hostage slaughterhouse,' where foreign aid workers and members of the newfangled Iraqi National Guard, were brutally and methodically murdered on film. Would it be demanding too much to say that this is not the activity of a 'rebel movement' or a national insurgency, but the collusive psychopathology of peasants and gangsters? It's no longer a matter of dressing up terminology to adopt some pathetic and impossible media stance of neutrality or objectivity -- as if what's happening in Iraq were classifiable objectively as a 'war,' let alone, to anyone with a brain and a conscience, a morally ambiguous one. Euphemism is one thing, but inaccuracy is another: the euphemism in this case would be to describe the followers of Zarqawi as 'complicated loyalists;' complicated because their allegiance to Saddam Hussein is one of convenience and not of core belief. 'Insurgent,' apart from its technical defintion as implying a non-belligerent disavowal of civil authority, also requires that the existing civil authority or government be recognized as legitimate and, therefore, worth having a grievance with. But the Fallujah thugs do not recognize the emerging government in Iraq. For them, Saddam's fall is still occurring in slow motion, and their role is to furiously rewind the tape to prevent his regime's ultimate topple. Insurgency also would indicate an embryonic revolutionary force, which in this case, is incarnate in the democratizing and liberalizing targets of the so-called 'insurgents.'

Laziness and desensitization are never allies of language, so much so that those other antagonists of tongue, cliche and truism, are what the preceding observation amounts to. But in the midsts of reading about daily setbacks and torments in the cause for a free Iraq, we should be asking ourselves what will happen the next time a genuine insurgency does spring up in some bleak and choking corner of the world, where a noble revolution from below is attempting to take hold? How will the US view such a phenomenon -- or the insurgents that are its prime movers -- after all doubt has been stripped away from this serious and worthy war term? --MW [#]

Odds on New Bond... Ewan MacGregor is the 9/4 favoritre among William Hill bookies. Here's the full list. You'll note that at 100/1 is Tory MP and enfant terrible of The Spectator, Boris Johnson, who was profiled in an excruciatingly bad Vanity Fair piece by Michael Wolfe a few months ago. --MW [#]

Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Yasser Arafat Is Dead... And the chances for a viable Mideast peace process are renewed. New York Times, Washington Post, Jerusalem Post, Guardian. --MW [#]
I Was Just Going To Say, 'Eight O'Clock?' You Are a Legitimate Phenomenon!... There's an interview with Bill Murray in this month's Esquire that anyone within the radius of a lounge lizard's swinging microphone to my level of fandom should read.

One other thing Bill Murray won't do: He won't say what he whispered to Scarlett Johansson at the end of Lost in Translation.

"I guess the answer is, there's somethin' that makes it impossible to tell," he says. "But I'll tell ya a good story about it. I'm gettin' on the ferry at Martha's Vineyard, and some guy yells out from across the way, 'Bill, what'd ya say to her?' Everyone hears him ask, and I pause for a second with my mouth open and start to speak. And as I start to speak, the foghorn sounds, about a twenty-five second blast, and I just" -- Murray starts moving his lips silently -- "I acted out like I was saying something really sincere, and the crowd laughed so hard. It was great. I couldn't have bought that moment."

Can't you just see him doing that, too. Judging from the trailer for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which I hope turns out to be better than the trailer, foghorns feature regularly with Bill these days... And by regularly, I mean exactly twice. --MW [#]

The Flawed Stuff... I long ago stopped being awed by the availability heuristic. Uncle. The cosmos won. Whether this particular psycho-objective gag was more heavily weighted on the psyche or on objective reality, I didn't know and could not bring myself to care because it wasn't the consistency or intrinsic nature of the phenomenon that impressed me so much as the examples it had seen fit to brandish in my lifetime.

So it was that last night I was reading an old Kingsley Amis essay, entitled "The Cockney's Homer." You can probably guess the subject from those three words alone, although the literary preoccupations of the genius who authored them and the subsequent piece of criticism may help you along in the struggle. It's about Charles Dickens, and about him Kingsley writes the following:

It is clearly right, as Mr V.S. Pritchett among others has recommended, to swallow Dickens whole, fantasy, vulgarity, weak motivation, improbabilities and all, if one can. But can one? My own experience in reading Dickens, and I doubt whether it is an uncommon one, is to be bounced between violent admiration and violent distaste almost every couple of paragraphs, and this is too uncomfortable a condition to be much alleviated by an inward recital of one's duty not to be fastidious, to gulp the stuff down in gobbets like a man. What, for me, cancels out all that humour, all that movement, all that triumphant concentration on external details, all that magnificient variety, is the ubiquitous, obsessive repetition, the inability to leave anything, good or bad, alone -- what Saintsbury called 'that damnable iteration.' Sometimes this method produces cumulative effects of great power, as in the chain of references to the whiteness and regularity of Mr Carker's teeth; much more often, in my view, it fills the reader with an exasperated ennui. It was a splendid idea to introduce, in Mrs Dombey's death scene, the ticking of the physicians' watches; it was maddening folly to introduce it three times. The same characteristic produces the aura of insubstantiality which can afflict even the more successful minor portraits. They are not so much too flat as too small; their one or two leading traits reappear too often, and reappear unchanged, and go on reappearing.

If you excised the, erm, reappearing word "Dickens" from the preceding, along with other corpus-specific allusions to characters and their fates, you would have, I think, a serviceable mad lib for analyzing everything so intoxicatingly wrong with exactly one modern novelist, who, conveniently enough, has repeatedly avowed Kingsley's classic novelist as his textual idol.

Here is Michael Dirda in today's Washington Post:

I couldn't stop reading [I Am Charlotte Simmons] -- who could? This is Tom Wolfe, after all -- but that didn't prevent me from regarding the author's premise, characters and views as hardly more than an ill-tempered, Mrs. Grundy-like rant against reckless youth and this immoral modern age. Tom Wolfe can make words dance and sing and perform circus tricks, he can make the reader sigh with pleasure before his arias of coloratura description, he can do just about anything in these pages with words, including exaggerate, distort and rant.

I should confess that Dirda thinks I Am Charlotte Simmons is more worthy of a Zolan inspiration than a Dickensian one, but the same lineaments of a pain-in-the-ass master storyteller are in here, too.

I remember thinking that Bonfire of the Vanities, for all its misguided deep-sucking from the troughs of urban excess and soft-boiled bigotry, was understandably the "event" book of the 1980's, the apex of a triangle whose bases were the Introduction to Liar's Poker and, if you'll pardon even deeper flaws than soft-boiled bigotry, American Psycho. And though I couldn't get through A Man in Full -- which is okay given that Wolfe threw in the towel at the same point I did -- that scene with the "saddlebags" sweat stains appearing on Charlie Croker's shirt was an exquisite work of verbal portaiture.

Yet Kingsley's points about Dickens apply equally well to Wolfe. He doesn't know when to shut up or stopping shading in. And the linguistic virtuosity -- which I'll call onomatoprosody -- doesn't so much corscuate as corrode when laid on as thick as Wolfe loves to lay it on. The trouble is, when justice is said and done and all the votes are tallied, eppur si muove. And still the pages turn, too.

Looks like I'm in for another, what?, seven hundred pages of laughing and smashing my head against the wall in equal measure. Thanks, Tom. --MW [#]

How Falluja Will Be Won... Left out of the more facile generalities of the "Powell Doctrine" (née the "Weinberger Doctrine") is the use of advanced technological weaponry unavailable in the day of, say, Noriega's Panama. Tech Central Station -- the Guns n' Ammo for regime-changers -- has a nice round-up of some of the cooler materiel our troops (and, one would hope, the brave and mostly Kurdish Iraqi forces) will be using in the retaking of Falluja this week.

Apart from the annhilation of infrastructure, I hadn't, until now, heard a very defensible reason for not employing an aerial bombardment of the evacuated city at the greatly reduced risk of American and Iraqi casualties. It's a matter of engagement that anyone on the ground is a likely enemy to our guys. Falluja is -- or was -- home to Abu Zarqawi, the most wanted man in Iraq. And this battle is being described as the most massive and signficant sortie since the initial invasion... So why couldn't a bombing campaign kill a larger number of terrorists more effectively? Well, of course it could do, but there's the cost of reconstruction that makes ironic clause one in the first sentence of this paragraph. And anyway, the ground campaign is reported to be moving "ahead of schedule." The problem, however, is that the planning for such massive urban combat, as well as the global reporting of same, gives the enemy ample time to pack up and flee, leaving, as one thug today tells the NYT, only half of its forces to remain and fight -- a mere gesture of cohesion and jihadist mettle, one would guess. What happens to the other half is a lot like what happens to cockroaches when a light is switched on. Their living to die another day isn't salubrious for the coalition or for the people of Iraq, and my sincere hope is that Falluja, even if only a Pyrrhic material victory, is a far greater educational one in the automatic design and execution of these counterattacks, which ought to become increasingly of the "surprise" variety, on fortified residential neighborhoods.

But how inevitable is US-Iraqi success in this effort? Well, the A.P. reports that three relatives of Ayad Allawi, one a 75 year-old cousin with no political or governmental affiliation, have been kidnapped by members of 'Ansar al-Jihad,' yet another gang of psychopaths running low on taxonomic originality, I see. Their demands, made at the threat of beheadings of all three relatives? The release of all Saddam-nostalgic detainees in Iraq and -- the staying of the siege on Falluja! --MW [#]

Well, Good For Her... I've taken some swipes at Maureen Dowd over the past few months, though I still do respect her and suspect that beneath that lowest-uncommon-denominator approach to holding this administration to account beats the heart of a sinewy, no-bullshit editorialist. (I did reprint some of her Lewinskygate stuff on this site; I think it's her best work.)

Now comes Senator Zell Miller's nasty and stupid remarks on Don Imus's show (later, even more nastily and stupidly, reiterated on "Hannity and Colmes") that Ms. Dowd is a "highbrow hussy from New York City." I put those six words under inverted commas because the rest of the sentence is less nasty and stupid and actually quite arguable: "The more Maureen Loud [sic] gets on 'Meet the Press' and writes those columns, the redder these states get. I mean, they don't want some high brow hussy from New York City explaining to them that they're id iots and telling them that they're stupid."

Indeed they don't, though the same might be said of an anachronistic, semi-redeemable Foghorn Leghorn showman of Southern contrarianism.

Maureen's snarkiness needs trimming in her paid pieces, but in soundbite form it serves her well:

"I'm not a highbrow hussy from New York. I'm a highbrow hussy from Washington. Senator, pistols or swords?"

From Page Six... --MW [#]

What's It All About?... Wayne Llewellyn, the president of distribution at Paramount, is blaming the commercial failure of the Alfie remake on... need I even pause for suspense? The President of the United States!

"It could be the mood of the country right now. It seems to be the result of the election. Maybe they didn't want to see a guy that slept around."

Yeah, a mediocre triumph of sexism and sentimentality sure was the order of the day back when Clinton was in office. Raise your hands, class, if you think a joke about Mr. Llewellyn's targeting the wrong bush is inappropriate.

I actually took in Alfie over the weekend, thinking I might make it the first time in a 48-hour period in which I saw two great, winning comedies in the same theatre. (Sideways was the other one; check to your right for a review of that soon.)

No such luck. Jude Law is charismatic and talented and all that, but he's still eclipsed by Michael Caine, whose original performance comingled the affectless lothario with a brutish prole mentality, giving the character at least a latent class consciousness that Mr. Llewellyn might say we don't take too kindly to in these-a here Red State parts. The first Alfie, which came out in 1966, was a study in true amorality, and so rightly harsh in consequence for its protagonist. Yet, as I said, the womanizing -- as opposed to the abasement or abuse of women -- is kept in check in the '04 version by a lame schmaltz factor that culminates in Alfie's getting out-classed in his own chill game, with one of the worst Oprah endings of any guy-friendly chick flick I have ever seen. I guess a heart is supposed to have grown three sizes that day or something. And that's about as Freudian or complex as the conflict gets. (A female friend, and by no means a diehard feminist, told me she'd been hoping the growth on Alfie's dick turned out not to be benign after all. So much for the loveable cad routine.)

But in lieu of exhibiting a dark and daring subversive glimpse into male sexual psychology or the unsnuggly side of male-female relations after women's lib (and what a film that might have been), this 'update' deals in the same flavorless cliches that now define the once fearless genre of British romantic comedy. Call it Shit, Actually. Then pick up your Nick Hornby and feel challenged again.

Now if only Jude Law were just a little better looking... Wayne might have really been on to something here. --MW [#]

Safire on Arafat... More or less on target, but he's very unfair to the British prime minister.

Now here comes Tony Blair to Washington. In Iraq, the gutsy Brit stands shoulder to shoulder with the U.S., at considerable political co"st at home; Bush owes him plenty. Blair needs a big favor to get the Bush-haters in Britain off his back, so welcomed Bush's re-election with "the need to revitalize the Middle East peace process is the single most pressing political challenge in our world today."

Translated into undiplomatic English, that means: Let's you, me, Vladimir Putin and Kofi Annan get together and tell Sharon to re-offer the old Barak-Clinton deal to whichever Palestinian will listen. Then the Muslim violence will stop all over the world. Step 1: appoint a big-name special envoy to deliver the ultimatum.

Just imagine: this suggests that if there had been no stiff-necked Israel, we would never have had the bombing of Pan Am 103 by Qaddafi, no massacre of 10,000 Sunnis at Hama by Hafez al-Assad, no poison-gassing of 5,000 Kurds at Halabja by Saddam, no continued unpleasantness in Chechnya, or that incident in Lower Manhattan. Just lean on Israel and we'll solve "the most pressing political challenge in the world today."

Does it really suggest that? Hasn't Tony Blair been stumping for a Mideast peace deal since before 9/11? And if the leader of the Labour Party is as politically savvy as Safire suggests, how could he ever imagine a Bush firesale on bankrupt Democratic deals? --MW [#]

Greatest Thing Since Bathtub Gin... Well here's a happy little lede you don't read everyday in the NYT: "The first coffee of the day is a make-or-break moment. A robust, flavorful cup can clear the mind, cheer the soul and boost self-confidence. A watery, bitter brew almost guarantees gloom."

Yes. I want one of these gurgling home espresso machines. How do I install a PayPal button to let you buy me one? --MW [#]

Tuesday, November 9, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Praise Da Lord!... I suppose even the high blood pressure scribblers at The Nation will manage to find a bleak ulterior motive behind this, but guess who won't be coming to dinner anymore at the Bush White House?

SpongeJohn SquareAshcroft! (And TV's Don Evans!)

And a fine thank-you-kindly after all that donkey work the evangelical right did to re-elect this president. His top Bible-thumper in law and order has bid us adieu, claiming, "the objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved."

That marble statue at the Justice Department will be flashing tit faster than Tara Reid on a Red Bull-ecstacy milkshake.

A definitive win for the forces of sophistication and secularism everywhere. I think it was that great atheist Bertrand Russell who wrote:

Been working so hard
I'm punching my card
Eight hours. For what?
Oh, tell me what I got
I've got this feeling
That time's still holding me down
I'll hit the ceiling
Or else I'll tear up this town
Now I gotta cut

Loose, footloose
Kick off your Sunday shoes
Please, Louise
Pull me offa my knees
Jack, get back
C'mon before we crack
Lose your blues
Everybody cut footloose!

--MW [#]
Spitfire... I was one of those cable subscribers made twitchily uncomfortable by watching Jon Stewart tear Tucker Carlson a new one on the latter's own show. I don't watch Crossfire regularly (I got the Stewart clip off the web), and I don't know or care too much about Tucker Carlson. He seems like the kind of puffed-up, bombastic rightie you tried to avoid at college, albeit in possession of a noticeably lower quotient of dogma and nastiness. (This was the guy who had to convince himself that the fraternity hazing rituals were not made longer and more painful because of the bow-tie. Feel for him.) And I remember reading an Esquire piece he did disavowing the current Republican president, which I thought was fairly brave of any telegenic 'poster child' of the Republican Party. But you still know the general type, especially if you graduated from someplace on the Northeast Corridor: copy of Brideshead Revisited in one hand, dry martini in the other, salmon-colored Polo tennis shirt, crease-ironed khakis (defiantly called 'chinos') and cordovan hush puppies tapping furiously on the ground as the bearer of all of the above claims homosexuality is anathema to modern conservatism.

Well, I'm sitting here watching Crossfire right now, and I have to say: Tucker's not good on TV, but he's not nearly as bad as that reanimated frog sitting and spitting opposite him. Paul Begala is a face and personality made for radio, and why even a progam dedicated to partisan feces-hurling would employ him is beyond me. It's that weird admixture of despair and frenzy that's given the soggy left punditry its reason for waking up -- or just staying up -- this week, and I've yet to see a better expression of this than in Begala's arm-flailing, what-we-lost aggressiveness at the roundtable. Remove the conservative coefficient from this equation -- Tucker tries hard to balance his opponent in pathos and looniness -- and Begala is the perfect specimen to be packed up and shipped out to DNC labs for analysis. What went wrong with the Party is being broadcast five days a week. Who knew?

I'm a newbie to this stuff, so someone please tell me: was the guy always this fucking stupid, or is four more years of Bush just more of a strain than he can bear? He actually just said that Barbra Streisand is a "learned woman" after hearing her refer to conservative Bush-voters as "witches" (Hollywood stopped warning against the detectable Freudian dangers of projection a long time ago, one would think.) Begala then read a quote from Thomas Jefferson (!) to fish an historical allusion out of the warbling banshee's bullshit. (Yes, and what would the author of the Declaration of Independence have made of the antiwar left's gloom and doom over the overthrow of a tyrant with zero regard for life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness? Or over the fact that his shameful ensconcing was one of the sloppier American-faciliated results of the gasping demise of British Empire?)

I remember disliking Jon Stewart for his righteousness and the way he refused to be "interviewed" rather than be given airtime to rant. I feel indebted to him now. We have US and Iraqi soldiers dying today in the most ambitious attempt to recapture a major terrorist stronghold in Iraq, and it comes down to this. If the bar for political discourse were set any lower, we'd have to start digging to surmount it.

It's almost enough to make you want to move to Canada. --MW [#]

Monday, November 8, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

The Evolution of Anti-Evolution... Today CNN mentions a suit for the removal of a sticker on Atlanta-area biology textbooks warning that "evolution is a theory, not a fact." The suit is stock ACLU-Scopes chimp stuff and won't be A- or even B-list national news unless a really wacky verdict comes back.

But what makes this sticker intriguing is not that it denies evolution or even says anything that anybody who gets scientific method would dispute. Evolution IS not a fact, but a theory. Like, say, gravitation. It wasn't long ago that the new Chicago science building was inaugurated with a speech announcing that new physics would be concerned with nailing down universal constants to the sixth decimal point; that everything was more or less known, and all that was left was refinement of accuracy. Then a German patent clerk blew Newtonian theory to bits. The same happened less dramatically to Mendelev's periodic table

Darwin's basic idea has been expanded and altered by biologists and still leaves a lot unexplained. The gradual process of survival of the fittest can't explain developments that have no obvious use under partial development, for example, such as bats' membraneous wings. When Darwin is finally revised into a form that explains pretty much everything, it will probably look very different from the original theory.

The upshot: are there any science books that wouldn't benefit from a sticker like this, warning students not to accept scientific theories as fact, but as carefully-crafted rules that predict the outcome of carefully controlled events? Wouldn't that prompt a renaissance of interest in science among students who's like to go into this sort of metaphysical quibbling?

Science and religion are both smarter when skeptics are casting doubt on their most treasured precepts. I say keep the sticker on the textbook. I also say put it on Genesis, Leviticus, and everything that comes after the Acts of the Apostles. --ND [#]

The Bush Language Instinct... Hey, anybody remember when the first President Bush couldn't string a proper sentence together to save his life (or his presidency)? What a difference retirement and distance can make. Check out this BBC interview, in which Pa discovers a verbal felicity even he didn't think he had. Must have 'grown' or evolved since '92. See that? A Bush has vindicated a Chomsky theory.

I also learned something new (though mercifully, auspiciously under-reported) about Michael Moore: the Profiterole Prophet fled Florida faster than an uninsured FEMA worker once he discovered that -- ta da! -- there was absolutely no voter fraud happening in the Sunshine State this year. (Well, at least not the kind you can unlock by sticking a camera in a frightened senior citizen's face.)

And I agree with George that the "values issue" is a shibboleth, whether concocted by the NYT, Karl Rove, or shit-canned pollsters who've wasted no time indeed in finding a new way to earn that undeserved living of theirs... This election was about war and leadership intangibles: choosing between the image of someone who can't defend himself half as well as he can the country, and the image of someone who knows and can articulate everything wrong with the former, but looks like an awful poseur in the role of preferred corrective. The far more telling indices are not what fly-over country got up to, even if in record numbers, last week, but what the blues did. Bush was up from 2000 in places like New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and it wasn't because any of these places hate gays, love assault rifles, or think fetuses are entitled to 401K plans. --MW [#]

Mischa Barton Voted for Kerry... Apparently. Hollywood's gotten the jump on mandate-induced liberal rage. Haven't seen an episode of The OC, but my little sis went to high school with this morsel. You know those existentially tortured lefty Upper West Siders. --MW [#]

Friday, November 5, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

The Autumn of the Self-Admiring Pragmatist... Colin Powell is gone from a second Bush administration by every estimate, not least of which the Secretary of State's own. To call him the 'odd man out' in this White House is to speak generously of someone who, since day one, has been not-so-quietly grumbling about George Bush's (and Dick Cheney's and Paul Wolfowitz's) foreign policy, while being made to exploit his own public likeability and tropism for good press for the purpose of executing it. In this issue of Foreign Policy, Hitch has a well-laid profile on Bob Woodward's favorite go-to guy at State, and some of the deceptively cautious and shore-hugging measures Powell has advocated as a diplomat and statesman throughout his career. It's really a shame Paul O'Neill had to go and name his memoir The Price of Loyalty. The title is far apter for the imminent retiree, who never met a mode of consistency (or do I mean dogmatism?) he didn't love. --MW [#]
Siege of Falluja... American, British and Iraqi forces are gearing up for a raid on the insurgents' hornet's nest. Aside from hopefully stomping out the forces of jihad and wahhabism, this assault will prove whether the US-trained Iraqi soldiery is yet up to the challenge of defending its own country. You'll recall operations like this were being carried out -- albeit on the smaller scale and with much less exigency -- all throughout Afghanistan in the lead-up to national elections there. One bristles at CIA-redolent euphemism at times like these, but 'housecleaning' seems to be the order of the day prior to major democratic events in Mideast nation-building. NYT, Guardian... --MW [#]
Voter Fraud in Florida...Maybe... There have been all kinds of conspiracy theories floating around about electronic voting machines. So I figured, hey, I work with statistics for a living -- are these things helping Bush?

So I cobbled together some county-level data on race, population, age and 2000 voting result for my controls, plus a dummy (1/0) variable for whether the county used electronic voting machines this year. I got data for Ohio and Florida. And my results were what the theorists expected -- almost.

Ohio came up clean, but the coefficient on E-voting Florida counties came up significant above the 1% level. That's a pretty robust result, suggesting that George Bush earned about 2.5 percentage points less of the vote share in counties with electronic voting machines.

There are two ways to interpret this. 1. E-voting is actually more fraudproof than other balloting methods. 2. The electronic machines were hacked, but not by Republicans.

This result is preliminary. I'll keep playing with the data and see if anything else pops out. Also, if anybody knows where I could get county-level data on religious affiliation and sexual orientation, send it my way. --ND [#]

Thursday, November 4, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Whoops. Forgot to Get to the End, There... Just when I thought it was safe to pull the potzer quote par excllence (Oh, lordy, it's infectious!) from Dowd's column today, I realize I should probably finish the damn thing before making such a call:

Just listen to Dick (Oh, lordy, is this cuckoo clock still vice president?) Cheney, introducing the Man for his victory speech: "This has been a consequential presidency which has revitalized our economy and reasserted a confident American role in the world." Well, it has revitalized the Halliburton segment of the economy, anyhow.

Paging Mrs. Clinton: 2008. Remember. Halliburton, Halliburton, Halliburton. It's fun, and it works! --MW [#]

How Can a Billion NYT Readers Be So Dumb?... Her Excellency, the MoDo:

[The president] doesn't want to heal rifts; he wants to bring any riffraff who disagree to heel.

Forget the content. Close your eyes. Relax. Are you relaxing? Good. Let the cool, anti-prosodic waves of hamminess wash over you like a fizzing oceanic whitecap.

Ahhh. --MW [#]

The Edwards' Bady Day... The same day her husband's race for the vice presidency folded, Elizabeth Edwards was diagnosed with breast cancer. Hopefully, this will be a situation where being coupled with the nation's foremost malpractice lawyer is helpful. --ND [#]
Kurds for Bush... Another place where Bush blunders are outweighed by the moral justice of removing Saddam: Iraqi Kurdistan. According to the Baghdad-based Kurdish newspaper Hawlati, Kurds would have voted overwhelmingly to elect the foreign head of state that they feel brought a decisive end to their decades-long struggle against a genocidal fascist.

"Bush saved us from Saddam, the dictator who killed two of my sons. That's why I'll be very glad if he stays on as president," commented Arif Faqe Rasheed, 71, who sells lottery tickets in front of Sulaimaniyah's cinema. Arif's fellow-vendors nodded in agreement.

Courtesy of the indispensible Kurdistan Observer. --MW [#]

Wednesday, November 3, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Arafat Very Ill... In the last week before the US presidential election, two imminent deaths became the potential axes on which would pivot two of the biggest second term decisions for George W. Bush: a Supreme Court nomination, and how to confront Arab-Israeli conflict. Chief Justice Rehnquist is seriously ill, and so too is Yasir Arafat, whose own condition is still undiagnosed. Parisian doctors think maybe a viral infection, which is a fast and easy killer for the elderly (he's 75.) The BBC has a handy gallery of possible successors waiting in the wings -- well, all except Marwan Barghouti, who's serving 5 consecutive life sentences in an Israeli prison.

Even the vile Tariq Ali thinks a chance for some kind of US-brokered peace accord in the Middle East was more feasible under Bush 2 than under Kerry 1. What the president does with this inevitable PLO leadership vacancy will determine the nature of that accord. --MW [#]

Bush's Victory... All over but the shoutin'. Bush has been re-elected president, and, after what many detractors see as a crushingly incompetent and disastrous first four years, he has done it with a substantial chunk of the American popular vote.

For my own part, I was hoping Bush would win the popular and lose the electoral. I realize that only in the echoing clerestories of irony would this result have been appreciated. And I was sure that those who faithfully lined the streets of New York and Washington in blood-curdling protest to denounce a theft of the world's top job when Al Gore wanted it, would not be returning for a replay this year. Part of the smug joy a pissed off pro-war leftist gets to have every once in a while, I guess. Also a way of having it both ways by voting conscience and hoping poetic justice. Kerry was going to win with a big handicap. He was inheriting Bush's war legacy, like it or not, and even granting him an eighth of his domestic agenda, he'd have still been the president who got hired for international clean-up duty and national stewardship.

Anyway, time to move on and all that. I don't expect Bush-haters to rally around the incumbent and support him the way disaffected conservatives were just going to have to grow up and support Kerry. But I'm glad our press won't be keeping their powders dry for some time to come. We need high standards and the same low tolerance for bullshit that made this race look so damn near close for the president up until the very end.

What we decidedly don't need is the increasingly useless William Saletan, who rants his way through the first draft of history in Slate this morning. For an online magazine that seemed to have been typing out copy with crossed fingers these past weeks, high dudgeon doesn't even begin to describe this this pissy cri de coeur, which more or less calls all Bush voters gluttons for idiocy and Kerry voters too sophisticated by half. Democratic self-pity is always uncomfortably amusing to watch, but just 12 hours after many Republicans were yanking their forelocks about how their guy lost the show horribly and all by himself, one wonders if the stupid-scarfers aren't the more grown up lot of the electorate to begin with. Time to wipe the Slate, boys. You got the election wrong. You even got your own internal plebscite wrong. We misunderestimated you, too. --MW [#]

Tuesday, November 2, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Nobody Gets the Bin Ladin Tape... Al Jazeera has posted a full translation of the now-famous Bin Ladin tape. When I first heard about this latest in the Osama film series, I played the same game as every pundit in America: how does this affect the election? Is Bin Laden endorsing Kerry? Or is he trying to appear sympathetic to Kerry in order to help Bush? Is this video a sign of desperation, or is his reappearance a sign of arrogance and renewed health? And what will Americans make of it?

I do not believe this tape was intended to send any sort of message to Americans at all. It's so loaded with hammery and bad fact-checking that no American will take it seriously. Instead, I believe it is aimed at the Arab street, and Bin Laden is addressing Americans purely as a rhetorical device.

If we are to take this at face value, then we're to believe that H. W. Bush is responsible for the Patriot Act and used it to help install his son, in hopes of installing a Saudi-style dynasty:

[A]ll of a sudden [Bush Sr.] was affected by those monarchies and military regimes, and became envious of their remaining decades in their positions, to embezzle the public wealth of the nation without supervision or accounting. So he took dictatorship and suppression of freedoms to his son and they named it the Patriot Act, under the pretense of fighting terrorism. In addition, Bush sanctioned the installing of sons as state governors, and didn't forget to import expertise in election fraud from the region's presidents to Florida to be made use of in moments of difficulty.

And then there's this gem. Can somebody please tell me what person in his last moments of life on Sept. 11 took the time to write out this "testament"?:

Finally, it behooves you to reflect on the last wills and testaments of the thousands who left you on the 11th as they gestured in despair. They are important testaments, which should be studied and researched. Among the most important of what I read in them was some prose in their gestures before the collapse, where they say, "How mistaken we were to have allowed the White House to implement its aggressive foreign policies against the weak without supervision."?

I believe this video is not intended for America, but is a rhetorical stratagem to shore up Al Qaeda's perceived moral credibility in an Arab street that is increasingly divided by chaos and murder of innocents in Iraq, not only by the American military but more brutally by the kidnappers and insurgents. It is an attempt to seem reasonable and wise, to Bush's anger and determination/arrogance. This video will not influence our polarized election much at all. It was not meant to. But it will look to Arabs as though whatever the outcome of the election, the next president will be selected in response to Bin Ladin and not because of the periodic mechanics of democracy. And by placing responsibility "not in the hands of Kerry, nor Bush, nor al-Qaida" but "in [our] own hands," Bin Laden is telling the Arabs that whatever Americans are killed in the next four years, he is not to blame. To every Arab convinced by this message, we brought death upon ourselves. --ND [#]

Friday, October 29, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Can the Koreas Ever Be Reunited?... I dunno. This is North Korea. This is South Korea. --ND [#]
The Tuesday Forecast... Wonks still think the Iowa election markets are more accurate predictors of what's about to happen than polls. Well, the markets have given up. In recent days, the two contracts predicting very small victories for each candidate have surged mightily, while the probablility of a Bush landslide has dropped like a stone. Today, things got even stranger as the narrow Kerry victory edged out the narrow Bush. That means the market's expectations are now, in order from most likely to least: narrow Kerry victory, narrow Bush, landslide Bush, landslide Kerry. --ND [#]

Thursday, October 28, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Conspiracy to Make Fox and CBS Look Tasteful, Respectable... NBC and ABC are both planning 9/11 miniseries. How bad can it be? NBC's series will be screenwritten by the author of Speed. --ND [#]
Curse No More... I'm not sure Boston has been as crazy as it was last night since the American Revolution.

Up until the very last moment Kieth Foulke threw an easy underhand to first base for the last out, I was convinced something would stop the Red Sox -- a two-out rally, a terrorist attack, the second coming of Christ, something.

I'm sure I wasn't the only one expecting such a thing. When they actually did win the game, the entire city erupted in a Daltreysque primal scream followed by high-fives and embraces with total strangers, more screaming, and finally streamed out into the streets, where pedestrians high-fived each other and screamed some more while cars raced down the road, horns blaring and passengers hanging out of windows or sitting on roofs, only legs dangling throught the skylight to keep them from tumbling to the pavement.

At Fanueil Hall, people were boisterous but peaceful. Only one gentleman, who lit a NYY hat on fire in the center of a crowd, was confronted by the police. I proceeded -- still screaming at strangers when the mood struck -- to Park Street with my friends, who were headed home on a different train, and decided it would be fun to go to Fenway. After all, nobody wanted to provoke the police, so things there would probably be almost as peaceful there as in North Boston, right? I packed onto a train filled with college students who had the same idea. The train quickly filled with marijuana and clove smoke, despite MBTA officials at each stop yelling into the crowded train to please not burn anything.

Kenmore Square and the area around it was unhinged. Traffic was at a standstill at Beacon Street, where a crowd of Dominicans were waving flags and dancing in the intersection. A block away, some guys were launching fireworks from the roof of their SUV.

I tried to walk through the chaos to Brookline Ave, but one thing I hadn't counted upon was that the police had closed off major roads not only to motor traffic but to pedestrians. Every officer in thirty miles must have been in the city, and they had crudely fashioned nightsticks made out of pieces of wood cut at appropriate lengths.

After a bit of walking around some side streets, I finally got to Brookline Ave, where a mob was chanting, "Show your tits!" at a third-floor apartment of obliging ladies. Their neighbor was strewing individual sheets of the Boston Herald into the crowd, who leapt to grab them, why, I don't know. It's fortunate I stopped for a few minutes to buy a cheap $10 world series shirt off a guy on the corner, because as I started to walk up the avenue I was met by a crowd of pepper-sprayed fans rubbing their eyes with police behind them, urging everybody the other way. Last time I checked, pepper spray was used to disperse crowds, not to drive them teary-eyed and angry back into the heart of the riot, but if the fuzz weren't concerned about Boyle's Law of Mobs, then that's their business. I did some more side-street walking until I wound up on Peterborough Street, which I knew quietly connected to Brookline Ave. Halfway up the street, I encountered a small gang of college kids who had found a cherry picker somebody had left on. (I can't imagine somebody took the time to hotwire it.) The college kids were idly swinging the robotic arm around in a reckless manner while yelling, "Who's going up? Who's going up?" as if anybody would be crazy enough to ride in a mechanical basket directed by drunken maniacs. The incident ended when a guy stepped up to the control, crowing -- "Watch this shit!" -- and swung the robot arm toward the sidewalk until it was pressed against a foot-thick concrete city lamppost. They guy held the motor down, the engine straining until the lamppost cracked mightily and tilted very much like a felled tree. The college kids dispersed into the night, making the universal cry of college students making trouble everywhere: "Oh shit! Oh shit! Oh shit!" It is one of my core beliefs that anybody who gets a chance to commandeer a cherry picker during a time when every police officer in thirty miles is very busy has an obligation to do something irresponsible with it. I didn't feel the same way about the less creative souls down the street who were trying to flip and ignite a BMW convertible, and mentioned them to a police officer in passing. I'm sorry if this lowers your opinion of me, but flipping cars is so last decade. But a cherry picker -- now that's using your brain! By the time I got around the unhinged masses and police maze to Brookline Ave, got into my apartment and crawled into bed, it was 2:30 am. A large coffee will help me get through my day at work, but I"m sure I'll be groggy tomorrow. But even with the risk of getting pepper sprayed and the certainty of exhaustion, I'm glad I went out of my way to see Boston in full chaos. The Boston Globe reports that the discussion about statues at Fanueil hall is not about whether to commission them but how many players they can and should fit into the memorial. Today's Globe had the simple headline "YES!!!" on the front page. I believe that exclamation points, like spouses, are only appropriate one at a time, but I'm willing to accept that the Globe's judgement was clouded by joy. Everybody in Boston is wound up. The feeling is not likely to disperse anytime soon.

Two Thous-and Four. Clap, clap, clap-clap-clap. --ND [#]

The Rapture... Christmas comes early for the end-of-days fundies. To recap:

1. Red Sox win World Series
2. Yasir Arafat about to die
3. William Rehnquist about to die
4. Castro falls (down)
5. Superman dead
6. Missing weapons cache in Iraq
7. Philip Roth writes philo-Semitic novel
8. Upper East Side ballerina writes philo-sodomite memoir
9. Leon Wieseltier calls above memoir "erotic masterpiece"
10. Mrs. Wieseltier not heard from in days
11. Katherine Harris run over by car in Florida
12. 58,000 missing absentee ballots in Florida
13. Pope probably already dead, held up and animated by wobbly coat hanger
14. Ben Affleck career over
15. Ashlee Simpson career over
16. Donald Trump career just getting warmed up
17. Andrew Sullivan voting Democratic
18. Christopher Hitchens voting (metaphorically) Republican
19. POTUS beats out Gollum, Doctor Octopus, Leatherface, Daryl Hannah for "top film villain"
20. Next POTUS possibly JFK

Now you tell me. --MW [#]

Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Sullivan gives up... and endorses Kerry, albeit with great reluctance. --ND [#]
And speaking of swinging both ways...The president opposed any gay couple rights before he was in favor of them. This can't possibly help the president politically. What is he thinking? --ND [#]

Tuesday, October 26, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Division Division ... Polling goes meta this week, as CNN/Gallup find exactly equal percentages of respondents -- 48% -- consider Bush a uniter and a divider. --ND [#]
How Many Possible Disappointments Can One City Handle?... The Boston Globe, shrill and moody enough during normal times, is flagrantly violating that rule about knocking on wood when gloating about good things to come. What's going to befall Boston in the next week for karmic comeuppance? Four more Bush Years? A World Series humiliation? Riots? A terrorist attack? Clam genocide? There's a little too much going on here for a city that settled into complacent middle age sometime around the Civil War: More than a hundred thousand fans are expected to descend on the city this weekend to watch some crew races. A playoff game kicks off on Saturday evening at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro as the New England Revolution soccer team begins its postseason. Less than 24 hours later, the same field will host a marquee matchup between two undefeated football archrivals as the New England Patriots try to notch a record 18th straight regular season victory. And, oh yeah, a team called the Boston Red Sox is playing in the World Series at Fenway Park about a mile away from the home of a guy who is in the final stretch of his bid for the presidency. --ND [#]

Friday, October 22, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

And the Mood Sours... The revelry outside Fenway Park last night was uglier than I realized. An Emerson College student was killed, probably by a "non-lethal" police anti-riot weapon that fires beanbags. This is the second student to die celebrating the success of a Boston sports team, after an SUV backed into a crowd after the Patriots won the Super Bowl. Unfortunately, this one will raise the ugly specter of police brutality -- and the police were probably just doing their job. --ND [#]
How the Election Will Play Out... Having read polls and pundits obsessively all year, I'm going to make my call on the presidential election right now. Barring something on the scale of a terrorist attack or an unexpectedly vicious smear, Kerry will get Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Oregon, New Mexico and Michigan, while Bush will get Florida, West Virginia, Nevada, New Hampshire and Missouri.

Granted those assumptions, Bush must get Iowa and Wisconsin both to win. Switching one of those Kerry states over -- any of them -- improves Mr. Bush's chances considerably. If you don't like my assumptions, figure out your own scenario.

Note: If you give Kerry Iowa and New Hampshire and Bush Wisconsin and New Mexico, you get an electoral tie. Let's all pray that doesn't happen. --ND [#]

Thursday, October 21, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Thanks, But No Thanks... The Guardian encourages non-Americans to send letters to Americans urging them to vote for Kerry; Americans express their annoyance; the Guardian insists it was all just a little joke and would people please leave them in elitist peace now, thank you. --ND [#]
More Baseball Coverage... From today's Boston Globe: Thousands of Yankee fans had left the stadium early, including Yogi Berra, the Yankees legend famous for his phrase ''It ain't over till it's over," who quietly departed before the seventh inning. --ND [#]
Boston Feels the Love... The Red Sox just returned from a 3-0 deficit to win the American League championship and a berth in the World Series. To make the largest successful comeback in baseball playoffs history, AND have a shot at the elusive World Series, AND to do so by infuriating the New York Yankees, whose dominance has sublimated into metaphor an inferiority complex about faded regional importance that ranges from shipping to publishing to the Statue of Liberty... Boston is a big mess right now.

I watched the game in Somerville, and my bus home from Harvard Square never arrived after more than an hour of waiting. The streets were filled with students and bar goers, running through traffic slapping the cars -- which were all honking gleefully -- screaming Neil Diamond lyrics. I eventually shared a cab home with three complete strangers who wouldn't have spoken to me had the city not been plunged into something between the LA riots and Christmas.

In Kenmore Square, at the epicenter of the Fenway Park bar scene, my roommates reported fans so wound up that the police were using pepper spray or tear gas on the crowds, which were tearing off their clothes and climbing the "Believe" billboard. They also report seeing them load what looked like tranq guns being loaded, but couldn't be sure.

Now the question remains: will the National League tomorrow offer up a match with the Cardinals, who have beaten the Red Sox twice in the World Series since 1918, or Houston, which would make for an interesting Texas-Massachusetts showdown in the presidential election as well as the baseball field?

Sweeeeeet Caroline. Oh-oh-oh. --MW [#]

Sunday, October 17, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Sharon's Nixon-in-China Move... A surprising volte-face from a lifelong conservative usually gets brought up by liberals looking to prove a point about just how out of it most conservatives are. If so-and-so plaster saint of the right breaks rank to call an idea of his galere silly, then surely the entire reactionary latticework is mere moments away from crumbling. Ariel Sharon is now giving the American and Israeli left their fall-guy for the cause of Palestinian statehood: himself. Not budging an inch from his plan to remove every last settlement from the Gaza Strip, Sharon has being called "stubborn" and "disgraceful" by fellow Likudniks who wonder what became of their messianic prime minister. Check out this BBC report -- you heard me, BBC report -- depicting Sharon as a regular Rock of Gibraltar when it comes to reducing the decades-long dominion and size of his own country. (Not that the removal of Saddam Hussein helped vaporize the intifada and give him the political leverage to do any of this, of course...) --ND [#]

Saturday, October 16, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Sullivan's Battle... Blog hierophant Andrew Sullivan is getting beaten up by many of his readers for stating the morally self-evident: there's nothing wrong with John Kerry's reference to Mary Cheney in response to a debate question about homosexuality. Cheney is openly -- and one would imagine, proudly -- gay. Her father and mother are acceptant of her, while the vice president's boss conducts a pharisaic and cynical campaign against people just like her. There's a shameless inconsistency here and good of Kerry to have pointed it out. For what it's worth, I think Andrew is vindicated by the fact that the final question in Wednesday night's debate pertained to both candidates' wives. No one now hears Gary Bauer bemoaning this rather clear allusion to the sexual company John and George prefer to keep. Instead, it's the lesbian daughter that ought to be locked in the cellar like the unmentionable family secret. This is quite a lot of things all at once, but most plainly very stupid Republican politics. What is gay marriage but the ultimate tribute paid to ethical conservatism? If the right really wanted to be savvy in broadcasting to their values "base," they'd point out that the big, dark scandal laying siege to the Cheney household is that dear Mary is pushing 35 and still hasn't found a wife yet. People are beginning to talk, you know. --MW [#]

Friday, October 15, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

John Edwards Loses His Shit... And I lost mine at "Chim chim cheree!" The Onion: "Let's work together to pave the way for a big, bright, beautiful fucking future for America, all right? So all the world can once again say, "Hey, where's that warm, golden glow coming from? Why, it's coming from the U.S. of A., where cocks are thick, tits are perky, and sunbeams shine out of everyone's asses!" --MW [#]
Kerry in Vietnam... If Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had got a jump on things, if they had thought Kerry was actually going to silence the tribal caterwaul of Howard Dean during the Democratic primary, you'd be hearing about firefight "re-enactments" heating up along the Mekong Delta by now. As it is, we have to make due with a bestseller and a handful of TV ads... But just to show there are two, three, eighteen sides to every story, the erstwhile enemy forgives that whole domino theory thing from a few decades back and, courtesy of "Nightline," weighs in on just how in-the-shit Lt. Kerry and crew were on that fateful February day in 1969... --MW [#]
Tsvangirai Acquitted of Treason... The biggest thorn in dictator Robert Mugabe's side has been acquitted of charges of trying to have the Zimbabwean "president" assassinated. --MW [#]

Thursday, October 14, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Disney, Hanna-Barbera Endorse Nader... Ralph Nader has been thrown off the Pennsylvania ballot after several of his petition signatures -- including "Mickey Mouse" and "Fred Flintstone" -- were demonstrated to be fraudulent. --ND [#]

Wednesday, October 13, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Beyond the Arab Melting Pot... Or non-melting pot, as it were. Ever since Sy Hersch broke the Abu Ghraib scandal in the pages of the New Yorker and made passing reference to a cultural anthropologist by the name of Raphael Patai, amateur and expert scholars of Orientalism have had their "gotcha" on Iraq. Finally -- and about time, too! All that talk about the "Arab street" wasn't quite reductive and condescending enough to get the epigones of Said riled up. And though that phrase -- "Arab street," not "epigones of Said" -- was redolent of some romanticized unending Bedouin bazaar it was at least in heavy rotation by the right people, the antiwar Cassandras leary of uncorking more virulent strains of anti-Americanism by an "inflammation" of this conceptual boulevard. But Patai, a Hungarian Jew, lifelong Zionist and candid chronicler of the sensibilities of the East... A-ha, now here was a object worthy of a red siren take-down. A Bernard Lewis without the Jedi mastery of subject or the pulse to actually retaliate. And what can his 1973 book The Arab Mind have been but a less politically correct Rage and the Pride -- especially with a crankily sweeping Allan Bloomesque title such as that? The volume was described by Hersh's sources as being an intellectual chapbook or "bible" for trigger-happy neocons (one imagines an inventory of must-haves for the impending confrontation with Saddam: "101st Airborne, check. Shock and Awe, check. Schematic of the Mesopatamian amygdala, check.") Yet judging by the fracas The Arab Mind's late dusting off has generated, the book, which I haven't read, seems more like sociology from concentrate. You know the routine: certainly not chauvinist or racist, but too far-reaching in aim, distilled and pat in places, useful in others. After all, we now have it on inside authority that the Arab world is in fact afflicted with many of the same pathologies as non-Muslims like Patai diagnosed decades ago. And the good news is that these pathologies are no more "innate" than the dogmas of religion themselves -- they're conditional, and largely brokered on the totalitarian nature of Arab regimes. In a new edition of the book, Norvell B. De Atkine's preface tries to redeem Patai from the petty smears of those who willfully missed his point and went for the histrionic soundbite over the thoughtful consideration. --MW [#]

Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

Entire Supreme Court to Retire, Die... Well, how else to explain a docket that lets them all phone it in AARP-style? They're going to hear Rudy Moore's snoozy no-brainer case over the constitutionality of putting the Ten Commandments up outside a U.S. courthouse. This is like a fucking CBS line-up. I'd better see some seersucker suits on the interpretive nine this fall. And be sure to look for mid-season replacement: "The Right to Own Property: Passe or Inalienable?" Check your local listings. --MW [#]
And Speaking of BusinessWeek... Now they're giving serious coverage to a bond-fund manager who claims the government is overadjusting the consumer price index downward to make inflation seem smaller and the government rebound healthier than it acutally is. The main points of his criticism, as outlined by BW, are absurd -- it's necessary to make adjustments for quality in computers, for example, for reasons that are just too damn boring to be worth explaining. What's important here is that BusinessWeek is giving these theories consideration. Can you imagine if, for example, the National Review ran a cover story titled "Afghanistan: Was it All About That Gas Pipeline?" If Bush doesn't move quickly to reclaim some fiscal credibility, somehow, he's going to be in a tight spot with his base. --ND [#]
Gal Friday (Not to Mention Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday...)... I take back every unkind thing I've ever said about New Jersey. "Oh yes, Howard. Liza? She's beautiful, sweet, very enthusiastic. All natural." There was a pause. "Yes, she has a 4 o'clock available. At the Hilton." --MW [#]
Richard III... Ben Brantley thinks the 4-foot-5 Peter Dinklage does A-OK. It's the set design and free-wheeling direction at the Public that has him worried. Oh, and Richard III is a lot like Bush. Could this review even be published without that analogy? --MW [#]

Monday, October 11, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

The Errata... Slate had to ask whom novelists were voting for this year. (Tune in next week when we'll find out what Noam Chomsky's doing with his tax cut!) The only surprise is that four aren't for the guy you'd expect. Then again, I haven't read anything by those four, so I use "expect" shamefully stereotypically. But this scintillating tidbit comes courtesy of Jonathan Franzen, who unblindfolded himself and stopped meditating in a straddle split over two folding chairs long enough to answer a question from the big, bad middle-brow media. This isn't particularly amazing for the shock value of the second sentence. I can't tell if it's ironic or literal. I just thought Oprah would enjoy seeing her gadfly sound like a below-average fucking fool:

Kerry, of course. He's the candidate whose defeat Osama Bin Laden (if he's alive) is praying for. I trust him not to pour additional gasoline on the fires that Bush has set overseas. Also, since he's a Democrat, I trust him to exercise a modicum of fiscal sanity and to show a little compassion for the unlucky. Also, his wife is hot hot hot. She'd be a first lady for the ages.

Oh, those wily postmodernists. What cozy little involutional homes they live in, where keeping Osama safe by electing Kerry is actually a slight against Osama and the moral thing to do. Or wait: is it tongue-in-cheek outrage at the expense of the Bush people who first suggested a vote for Kerry is a vote for Osama? Ugh. Dizzy. Lost... in... the fun... house. Need... plodding... Grisham prose... to keep head... from... ex-... ploding. --MW [#]

Feel That Bathos? Tom Must Be Back... "I would argue that there is another, equally egregious intelligence failure when it comes to Iraq - one that is still bedeviling us right now: It is our complete ignorance about the P.M.D.'s of Iraq - the people of mass destruction, the suicide bombers - and the environment that nurtures them."

And people groaned watching John McCain refer to Saddam himself as a weapon of mass destruction. (For the record, Mahdi Obeidi does the same in his riveting book, The Bomb in My Garden, a first-hand account of Iraq's nuclear weapon program.) It's not that I don't think we ought to understand what drives suicide-murderers in Baghdad and beyond -- it's that I think we already do understand it. So does Thomas Friedman, because he says as much later in his editorial: "What we know is that the suicide bombers have killed and maimed hundreds of Iraqis, many of them waiting to join the police or army, and in doing so have done more to block U.S. efforts to reconstruct Iraq than any other factor."

Why would any human detonator seek to play the one card he's got against his fellow countrymen looking to join the army or the police? To call this a question that answers itself is to waste a sentence. Either these killers are native-born Iraqis nostalgic for their deposed dictator, opportunists keen on installing a sharia-based theocracy in his absense, or foreign infiltrators mortally opposed to democracy for one of the first two reasons. We know many Syrians, Iranians and Saudis flooded the country before there was even a hypothetical chance to guard Iraq's borders, because Saddam enlisted immigrant mercenaries prior to the falling of the first coalition bombs in March, 2003 (see again Obeidi's book for on-the-ground confirmation of this.) And we also know Saddam had his admirers who were unconvinced of the futility of his regime, as American tanks charged toward the capital. And Abu Zarqawi was good enough to leave a laundry list of his grievancies and allegiances, which we gladly picked up from him last January.

Now, contrast these forces against the transparently saleable Mahdi Army, which has lately realized what many troublingly forged "partners in peace" once figured out, that more is accomplished through politics than through terrorism. Sadr is a meglomaniac with only his own self-regard to actuate his rampages, and this was proven not just by his proclamations as a religious-cult leader, but also by the localized indiscriminateness of his targets. He stayed in Najaf and he killed coalition soldiers, American engineers and contractors, and Iraqi civilians thought to be cooperating with the occupation. Anyone, in other words, he could get his hands on to demonstrate his clout. Friedman's bombers, though clearly not motivated by a self-apotheosizing Shiite doctrine, are similarly knowable by their quarries and how systemic yet strategically chosen they are. To prevent the formation of a homegrown national security establishment is to prevent a fully manifest liberated Iraq. It's also to keep unemployment high and thus contribute to a mounting civil despair. And to take down UN and Red Cross is to show just how concerned one is with helping Iraqis rid their country of interventionist infidels. Are most civilians amenable to such goals? Do not even the occupation-wary and fed up want to be able to work and shop in peace without the threat of cars exploding in their faces? And what kind of a populist threat is it to rally for the return of Saddam Hussein or his tyrannical counterpart?

The cliche about winning "hearts and minds" falls flat when dealing with the so-called "insurgents." Rather than asking ourselves the self-evident -- what is it they really want -- we should be asking ourselves what it is we and our new Iraqi allies want; namely, to try and win these hearts and minds, or to fight them with other anatomy, like tooth and nail.

Of course, the decision is in Friedman's own phrasing of the dilemma: P.M.D. (He's good enough to define the theme from which this acronym variates, otherwise any woman above the age of 13 might have cause to be offended.) Weapons of mass destruction are not negotiated with or educated or placated into disarming themselves. They're taken apart and rendered ineffectual. Is it going too far to suggests that people of mass destruction shouldn't be dealt with likewise? --MW [#]

Muqtada's Capitulation... Who says there's nothing good to report from Iraq? Members of the Mahdi Army have begun turning over their stockpiles of weapons to American and Iraqi security forces today. Amazing to hear the Shiite "rebels" now that they've yielded rebellion in the face of overwhelming odds. One man said he's cashing in a Kalishnikov rifle for $150 (an above-market price) to start a sandwich stand -- he'd been unemployed, my guess is since the invasion. Others are just obediantly following their cleric's orders, claiming that Sadr knows best (phonemic pun not intended.) He certainly thinks he does, since it's almost certain this good will gesture is designed to garner sympathy for a long-shot campaign for political office. One wonders if the warlord candidacies in Afghanistan informed his logic (and if he realizes that warlords control roads; they seldom launch attacks against an occupational military.) Still, this and the accompanying article's shirttail -- "Iraqi members of The New York Times staff contributed reporting for this article" -- are the best things I've heard all day. --MW [#]
The Best Magazine You Probably Don't Read... Outside is quickly becoming my favorite magazine. Nominally a specialty interest magazine for outdoorsy types, its title's broad mandate has led it away from just mountain climbing and boat-paddling; its scope encompasses all the best travel and adventure nonfiction being published today, and for every harrowing survival story by an amateur, it's got several articles by top writers for The New Yorker and The Paris Review that those magazines are too stogy to deal with.

But I've gotta say: this magazine really outdid itself with their recent "sex and sin" issue, with a cover that sends up Maxim. It's a collection of short, gem-perfect essays on forbidden pursuits, ranging from drinking and riding inflatables on Walden Pond to chewing coca in South America to juvenile taxidermy. This is the stuff of great literature. What has the New Yorker skinned and stuffed, ever? (Not counting James Thurber's comedic sensibility.)

(Links require free registration.) --ND [#]

Never Mind the Poll Hacks, Here's the Stock Tickers... The Iowa Markets have spoken: Kerry won the second debate. The probability estimated by those who had money riding on it had Bush favored over Kerry 74-26 right before the first debate. It then dropped to 60-40 a few days after. Right now, the market has settled with a Bush lead of 56-44; still inclined to Bush, but by no means certain.

Still more interesting, the four vote share contracts have converged, so that the probability of Bush winning handily, Bush winning narrowly and Kerry winning narrowly are all within a couple points of each other; only the Kerry win with >52% of the vote is keeping Bush's overall probability up. The market really has no idea which man will be the next president.

And speaking of presidents and markets, BusinessWeek has been driving itself nuts trying to figure out which stocks will do well under Bush, which under Kerry, and, therefore, which they should buy. (Part 1 and part 2.) Nor is BusinessWeek particularly up on Bush as a business president. It's one thing to quibble about small businesses, but if this big magazine of big corporations is losing faith in a Republican, who does he have left? (Well, the marriage protectionists.)

At any rate, what do I think you should buy? Split roughly evenly between "Kerry" and "Bush" stocks. If there's one thing that drives markets crazy, it's uncertainty. Any decline in the loser's sectors after election day will probably be less than the gain in the other sectors. While not a sure thing, this is the best strategy I can think of and the one I've been using to pick my investments. --ND [#]

Christopher Reeve Dies at 52... I remember thinking when that awful series Lois and Clark came out, where the hell was a younger Christopher Reeve when you needed him? Dean Cain's expressionless golem mug must have been some leisure suited LA acting coach's advice for conveying the harried, sexually frustrated reporter and the immortal flying space alien. And Terri Hatcher's Lois... she should have been permanently blacklisted by Pulitzer for not being able to spot the obvious on that show. (Investigative journalist, indeed.) All its unmercifully long run on television did was heighten the contrast between the schlock Supe and the real thing.

Reeve played that mythic role to perfection, and looking back, there's no one else who could have done it. This has in it in the makings of a "classic" performance, irrespective of how benday dotted the material, when all the alternative marquee names seem hypothetically bleak, untrue, unjust, un-American way-ish. Who else could have stopped the give-the-inspectors-more-time chatter at the UN General Assembly like he did? And that was in the worst sequel. And nuclear disarmament didn't become a foregone conclusion because of the snazzy blue spandex and red cape -- I've seen delegates from the Straits of Megellan neighborhood who come close to that couture, and they accomplish nothing.

A tragic irony of hindsight is that it was the physical versatility of Reeve's acting that made Superman so gosh-bang-wow believable. He slumped, he grouched, he nerded it up for the Kent bits; he rose, he announced, he commanded, he became an uber-somebody for the Man of Steel bits. And yet, more amazing than the leaps and bounds, the lineaments of that same extraordinary orphan with the weight of the world -- literally, if you factor in the gravitational coefficient -- on his shoulders were detectable throughout. Could Russell Crowe give us a Kryptonian more human than human? Or, for that matter, could Nicolas Cage -- once considered the heir to the crystal throne? My favorite line in the whole franchise: a kid has just fallen off the wrong side of the railing at Niagra Falls. He plummets towards his frothy doom, when you-know-who swoops down and rescues him. In the sturm und pop of John Williams' accompanying score, you can hear a woman in the crowd say, "Of course he's Jewish." Probably the most "behind the scenes" exegesis of character and the whole damn comic book industry Hollywood was willing to expend in the eighties. (Michael Chabon picks it up from here.)

So he saved Earth time after time, and look how Earth thanked him. The last few years were painful to watch and also to hear about, so there's part of me that's glad the suffering is finally over with. There's a larger part of me that's glad the denial of the indefiniteness of his condition is over with, too. What Reeve did for stem cell research and the cause of ameliorating spinal cord injuries should never be underestimated, but the price at which much of this came -- the wincing public relations optimism and the borderline self-pity -- shouldn't be, either. Mortal after all. How such a primitive planet will break your heart. --MW [#]

The Hermeneutic of Getting On... Okay, I'm going to be coy with you this morning. Here's a sentence from a recent review of an old critic's new book. I've left out that critic's name, as well as the publication in which this review appears, because they're both unnecessary. You can easily place them, right?

"Jealousy dies with love, but only with respect to the former beloved. Horribly a life-in-death, jealousy renews itself like the moon, perpetually trying to discover what no longer interests it, even after the object of desire has been literally buried." A critic who writes this well has a right to instruct us, even imperiously -- but the best thing about __________ is that he would be disappointed if we did not resist.

You bet your nous you can. "...Jealousy renews itself like the moon..." Who else writes like that? "A critic who writes this well has a right to instruct us..." What other newspaper unquestioningly brings the ambrosia and vino to a yawning patriarch's post-coital chamber like that?

If I have to fill in the blanks, you probably shouldn't click here. --MW [#]

Green, Libertarian Parties United By Fringe Status, Jail Time... Green and Libertarian candidates David Cobb and Mike Badnarik were arrested for crossing a police line outside the debate last Friday. Would Nader have the guts to do something so vulgar? No. In my eyes, Ralph is now a third party even among third parties. --ND [#]

Saturday, October 9, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

New York Times on Zarqawi... If you please:

After Sept. 11, Mr. Zarqawi was believed by senior American officials to be working closely with Ansar al-Islam, the Kurdish group based in northern Iraq that was formed to attempt to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Got that? Ansar al-Islam: a Kurdish group formed to ouster Saddam Hussein. From this miserable sentence in a "week in review" article on the Zarqawi threat, you'd never know that Ansar al-Islam is a Wahhabist terrorist cell whose avowed aim is to bring jihad and Sharia law to one of the only functioning democratic regions in the Middle East. Nor would you guess that these bin Ladenist knock-offs were formerly known as Jund al-Islam, an coalescent organization which consisted of personnel and resources from Hamas and al-Tawhid. The latter group bears suspiciously one half of the name of Zarqawi's present "movement" in Iraq, Tawhid wa'al-Jihad. "Tawhid," often incorrectly translated as "unification" or "unity," actually means "uniqueness" or "monotheism," as it refers to the singularity of God. Indeed, Jund al-Islam has conducted a brutal campaign against those it deems wayward from the path of "pure Islam," including alleged "polytheist" Sunnis (and of course atheists, Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Sufis, Shiites, you name it.)

Reconstitued sometime after 9/11 as Ansar al-Islam, this receivership for theocratic gangsterism (by definition, then, not strictly Kurdish) has a history of imprisoning, maiming and killing scores of Kurds, one of whom was the very brave PUK leader Shaukat Haji Mushir. In Februrary of 2002, Mushir was lured to a meeting ground in Halabja, under the pretense that a few Ansar members were looking to defect from the organization. Not so much. They instead ambushed him and five of his comrades and brutally slaughtered them all. An even bolder Ansar assassination attempt was later made that same year on PUK regional prime minister Barham Salih, without whom, it's safe to say, Kurdistan would not be what it is today, though probably would be at some much lower level of willingness to serve as a dogged territorial ally to American forces in Iraq.

To describe Ansar al-Islam in such yawningly neutral terms as Don Van Natta, Jr. does above is to do something indefinably worse than libel a people who have bled for decades to rid their country of Saddam Hussein in favor of a real alternative, not some 7th century wasteland where death is fetishized and life is dismal and primitive.

For a "fair and balanced" reading, have a scan of Human Rights Watch's website. Then spend your weekend telling your friends how the New York Times was too lazy and stupid to do some real investigative legwork during this heated domestic election season... --MW [#]

UN Vote Monitoring... What's gone on today in Afghanistan is a good case for UN monitoring of all democratic elections, including those in the United States. An uproar has been reduced to a grumbling murmur because an international commission has given its splotchy thumbs up to widespread conduct at the polls. Given the overwhelming physical threats Afghans have faced to get this far, it's amazing that a soluble purple liquid is the only stain on this monumental election. --MW [#]
Liberty Changes Habits... All the Afghan opposition candidates have boycotted the Afghanistan election because the indelible ink meant to prevent people from voting multiple times is, unfortunately, delible. Warlords pissy about voter fraud: Hegel's got nothing on Dubya. --ND [#]
Moore Stupidity... Proving once again that the louder the bleat, the weaker the comedy, Michael Moore thinks it's "satire" to be offering college students clean underwear and noodles for voting Democratic in the presidential election. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The joke in there is as stale and heavy as Moore's own underwear, but it doesn't change the fact that if he actually made good on this promise, he'd be a criminal. Hey, Mike: if you want to get people to vote your way, offer them tax cuts like everybody else. --MW [#]
Turning Now to Pakistan... Musharraf is trying to do the predictably unconstitutional and retain power as both president and army head. Meanwhile, South Waziristan is where the ISI thinks Osama might be living (if he's living at all.) --MW [#]
Australian Early Election Results... Howard is going to handily win re-election. --MW [#]
Putin's Nostalgia... It seems a little distorted, since it's not so much a return to Politbureau-style Sovietism that he craves as his own fascist dictatorship. The country that produced the author of Lolita now has mock toilets into which a "youth movement" can toss undesirable literature in effigy. Banning books again, are we? Ah, well. Russians can always emigrate to Iraq if they want publishing flexibility... Watch for Reading Onegin Openly in Baghdad, coming this spring. And remember: "Too much democracy can be bad for you." --MW [#]
Bush's Environmental Figures... All depend on whether what you exhale can be considered a pollutant. I'll defer to the experts here and say it can be, like cow farts. Timothy Noah in Slate. Frankly, I'm amazed that after last night's vigorous green self-defense, the Sierra Club hasn't hacked into the NYT's website and splashed, "Oh no he didn't!" across the front page by now. I don't know enough about Bush's environmental record, but I do know most people agree it's shit. --MW [#]

Friday, October 8, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

"Want some wood?"... Nic needs to get a TV already. Bush did look a hell of a lot better tonight than he did last Thursday. More assured, more confident and even more eager to engage his opponent, which I didn't think possible given how rebuttal-happy he was when he had no cogent rebuttal. But sink, Bush did not do in Round Two. I think Kerry won again, because Kerry is by far the more forsenically adroit on his feet, and what he lacks in a personable quality, he makes up for in a command of facts and way of delivering them that's pacifyingly statesmanlike. Too pacifyingly. For all his effort to look and sound like his favorite dead president, he strikes the eye and ear as Wilsonian, if anything historically executive.

But Lord knows what methamphetamine Karl Rove rubbed on his boss' gums tonight. Bush was vibrant and goofily charming in that way that makes people want him to give up Jesus for a Heineken with them. He made the points about Iraq and Kerry's own flawed, self-contradictory policies for it that you've always wanted him to make. He conceded there were no WMDs, but insisted that Saddam Hussein was still too dangerous to leave alone precisely because of his ambition to acquire them. He suggested that it's not so much a flip-flop as a sad paradox to make one's case for regaining international credibility by belittling extant alliances and conjuring others. When Kerry said he'll bring in Germany and France to help rebuild Iraq, two guys in the audience--one in lederhosen, the other with a baguette under his arm--should have stood up and told him best of luck.

There was no Bush-spin involved in the citing of the damning ISG report, which substantiated what its Kay-led predecessor claimed: that only by removing Saddam could we definitively know what kind of weapons program he had. By Saddam's own admission, secrecy was at a premium in order not to lose "face" or expose vulnerability to Iran. So much for why he acted as if he had something to hide, and why everyone from Bush and Kerry to Chirac and Putin believed this to have a more ominous explanation than it did.

Bush earned some currency by saying that had Kerry been in charge, so too would Saddam be right now. Kerry's lame response to this was that it was not "necessarily" true, which is necessarily not astute if it's self-evidently true that the world is safer and better with Saddam behind bars.

Smart of Bush not to confuse Osama and Saddam in front of an audience that would have surely clicked their tongues at him for it. And doubly smart of him to finally point out the obvious: that Iraq was no "distraction" from the broader war on terror, but a specific theater in which to wage it. The nexus theory is right, unless you think Mr. Zarqawi is lying when he says he's been in Baghdad longer than coalition servicemen. (And unless Barham Salih was just being coy when he asked, in October of 2001, why Ansar al-Islam had chosen that particular time to up its level of activity in Kurdistan.) That other theory of an axis -- "of evil," "of misguided knaves," "of not-nice chaps who leave a number of things to be desired," whatever -- is also right, when you consider that while Iraq and Iran could never work out their beef in the interests of supply and demand, North Korea has been quite happy to peddle its only product on an open market to whomever is interested in buying it. This is a concatenation of something more alarming because it's state-administered, not just state-sponsored. Bush handled the questions of Iran and North Korea well: he explained why they're remaining within the purview of multinational negotiations (because they can, unlike Iraq.) And he shot a hulking one at Clinton, who together with "ambassador of peace" Jimmy Carter, gave Kim Jong Il the wiggle-room to mine plutonium from his light-water nuclear reactors in 1994. Bush might have also added that the same thing which actuated Saddam's lust for nukes actuated Khamanei's lust for them. Now that the former won't ever get them, the latter may not want his as much. This would certainly explain Iran's willingness to even come to the table about its program and be more forthright as to the extent of its progress. The days of intriguing with a hostile neighbor are done.

Carriers of dual citizenship who cast longing glances toward that prescription drug heaven to the north can't have missed the value in saying that foreign policy is not a popularity contest. However, the "global test" has in fact taken the form of compulsory diplomacy and has involved the United Nations. Is the appointment of a steely pragmatist like Lakhdar Brahimi the kind of demarche that go-it-alone utopian neocons dream up? And if Bush has been a petulant child, then for the sake of Security Council equity and comity, what kind of developmentally arrested diagnoses can be made of other world leaders? Would US likeability have stopped their countries from profiting off of a corrupt oil-for-food program that gave Saddam as much money as he wanted, at no sacrifice to the grim publicity he needed to end Iraqi sanctions and, inevitably, get his "last lines of defense" up and running again? Bush might have alluded to the six-week deliberation between Colin Powell and Dominique de Villepin over whether "and" or "or" determined the fair preconditions for the use of force in Resolution 1441 -- that might have shut Kerry up for good on how we "rushed to war." More like crawled, really. The notorious "drumbeat" was on a skinless snare.

I also counted from Bush a gratifyingly infrequent resource to "free," "freedom" and "hard work" as phatic filler for what you and I offer as "uh," "like" and "you know." "Liberty changes habits" may be vague, but it sounds much more thoughtful than the old stand-by homilies. Oh yeah, and it glories in the ancillary benefit of being true.

All told, Bush finally held himself to account to a tough room, a well-represented microcosm of the country. He was straight and persuasive, and gave those swing voters who will probably vote the intangibles a few tangibles to help coax them in his direction. --MW [#]

"I own a timber company?"... Advantage, marginally, to Bush. The president was back on the stick tonight, at least on the radio. (He may have looked like hell again, as far as I know.)

Any voter who turned away from a night out or baseball will feel reassured that the president hasn't turned Nixonian on us in four years. He was affable, biting, and managed to surprise me once or twice. (For example, his environmental ideas. He stumbled over them a bit before spitting them out, but they're all good. Why has he been dicking around with all this deregulation and not making love to the Sierra Club with these policies that would more than make up the differences?)

Toward the end, Bush's rapid-fire exposition on policy wore Kerry down. Kerry didn't sound intimidated, but he did sound tired, and his answer to the closing abortion question, which almost rocketed over the left field wall, blew foul in a long, hard gust of wind.

I finally heard Kerry emote tonight. It was about two Hollywood elites with nervous diseases. Hey, great. Tax the rich, then give them catastrophic health care with the money!

Also, did anybody else think it sounded absurd when Kerry said he would "tell you straight up"? J to tha Kizzay! Who does he think he is?

But Bush didn't accomplish the one thing he now needed to do: reduce Kerry. Kerry did gain. It's not enough for Bush to assure us that he's the same dude he was four years ago, only more knowledgable. At this point, he needs to destroy Kerry. And if Bush easily wins a "most improved," he still failed to pin Kerry with a net loss in presidential qualities. Kerry sounded about the same as he did last time, but even that was reassuring -- hey, he's consistent after all! Furthermore, many of Bush's attacks rang hollow. I don't know how those undecided Missourians felt, but Kerry's explanations of his positions seemed to cast Bush as a truth-twister. (A lot of the reception probably depended on visuals. Did Kerry keep smiling, or did he look peeved?)

I don't expect a debate held on a Friday night to have a large effect, especially such a close one. But the media feedback will probably give Bush a small boost after this. He earned it. --ND [#]

No Representation Without Taxation... Why does the Boston Globe always run these touchy-feely stories about oppressed groups that aren't actually oppressed? Today it's a brave lawyer struggling to get Puerto Rico national voting rights. Sorry, pal, this isn't injustice. Puerto Ricans get everything that comes with citizenship except representation and taxes. That's a great deal, and they know it. They've voted down statehood several times. And now this guy wants a Boston judge to impose it upon them? Sorry, dude, we're busy with the whole marriage thing up here. Try the Ninth Circuit folks. --ND [#]
The "Black Bar of Soap"... Mickey Kaus has the right understanding of the weapons report. It vindicates Bush's interpretation of the intelligence, at least partially -- I'd like to think our intelligence services can do better than the misinformation of a second-tier dictator, but there's no doubt Hussein was trying to leave the state of his WMD programs in a strategic ambiguity -- yes to Iran, and no to the UN. It doesn't damn Bush's policies -- whatever moral status those had are unchanged. It just means our intelligence is as bad as Iran's. --ND [#]
Our Man in Senescence... In the movie Quiz Show, which occupies one of those tenebrous points on the timeline when America was said to have "lost its innocence," Martin Scorsese plays the bushy-browed, tired-blooded C.E.O. of Geritol. When confronted by the possibility of being hauled before a Congressional committee on rigged television contests, the too-cool-for-school sponsor of "21" tells his young federal investigator the following: "The public has a very short memory, but corporations -- they never forget." The actor in the second clause of that observation might have easily been substituted by the word "governments." For close to half a century, the United States has been doing dirty deeds on the sly and on the cheap, and possessing a degage adulterer's attitude toward being "found out." Governments never forget that the slap on the wrist, the plea bargain, the fall-guy were all invented to prove that a carton of milk in August has a longer shelf-life than public outrage. So the beamish JFK was posthumously pardoned for his sloppiest mess, the Bay of Pigs; Nixon had to wait only fifteen years to be pardoned "spiritually" for the burglary that destroyed him politically; Kissinger still doesn't have to answer questions about Cyprus, East Timor or Chile; and Clinton's only preoccupied with pharmaceutical factories that churn out Viagra, and now nitrogen pills. Something very much like this axiom of reflexive American cheek-turning is at work in a wondrous Slate interview with Howard Hunt. If you shook every John le Carre novel you owned hard enough until the crises of faith and moral complexities fell from the pages, you'd have all you ever needed of surrogates for the megalomaniacal crackpot Hunt. Here is (barely) living proof that giving a CIA agent just a few decades of "distance" between himself and the wet-work obviates the need of Robert Novaks to do any secret sharing -- the agent is too glad to oblige.

Slate: I still don't understand how you get involved in Watergate later. Through the CIA?

Hunt: I had been a consultant to the White House. I greatly respected Nixon. When Chuck Colson [special counsel to Nixon] asked me to work for the administration, I said yes. Colson phoned one day and said, "I have a job you might be interested in." This was before Colson got religion.

Slate: How long were you in prison for the Watergate break-in?

Hunt: All told, 33 months.

Slate: That's a lot of time.

Hunt: It's a lot of time. And I've often said, what did I do?

Slate: Did you get a pardon?

Hunt: No. Never did. I'd applied for one, and there was no action taken, and I thought I'd just humiliate myself if I asked for a pardon...

Slate: How do you feel about Chuck Colson?

Hunt: He failed to come to my assistance, which would have helped Nixon and me.

Slate: Do you hold anyone responsible for Watergate?

Hunt: No, I don't.

Slate: And you didn't apologize?

Hunt: No. It never occurred to me to apologize.

Slate: Should Nixon have resigned?

Hunt: No. --MW [#]

Holidays In Hell...If you're looking for a place to take the kids, here's some places to avoid. Click here or here or here. --ND [#]

Thursday, October 7, 2004 - snarktip@snarksmith.com

ISG Report... The rationales for going to war against Saddam Hussein were as follows: 1. His regime was in the process of cultivating WMD that could directly threaten Middle Eastern neighbors and indirectly threaten the United States; 2. His regime was sponsoring and suborning terrorism; 3. His regime was totalitarian in nature and one of the worst violators of human rights in the present day. The Iraq Survey Group report, conducted by the CIA, was released yesterday. Its findings prove that the first rationale was false. Saddam's regime posed no imminent threat to neighboring countries or to the United States with regards to the development of weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological or nuclear).

The report also indicates that Saddam's main goal was the lifting of UN Security Council Resolution 661, which established trade sanctions against Iraq at the close of the Gulf War in 1991. Saddam wanted the sanctions lifted for the primary purpose of renewing an advanced unconventional weapons program, which he deemed (from prior experience) as a necessary military safeguard in any future confrontation with Iran. By 1999 Saddam was "well within striking distance of a de facto end to the sanctions regime, both in terms of oil exports and the trade embargo." By this time, due to his careful circumvention of sanctions loopholes and numerous lucrative dealings with international corporations (including those in United States), Saddam began to see the United Nations as a "paper tiger." Punitive trade measures did not, for instance, stop him from illegally profiting off the 1996-implemented Oil-For-Food program, which had been designed soley to alleviate the suffering of Iraqi citizens. That program failed in its intent, as "the Regime devised an effective diplomatic and economic strategy of generating revenue and procuring illicit goods utilizing the Iraqi intelligence, banking, industrial, and military apparatus that eroded United Nations' member states and other international players' resolve to enforce compliance, while capitalizing politically on its humanitarian crisis." In other words, all revenue from allowed sales of Iraqi oil went to the enrichment of Saddam Hussein, while he additionally profited from a successful public relations depiction of Iraq as a sanctions-racked, victimized country.

Saddam was also engaged in the manufacture of Al Samoud II missiles, which, because of their long-range capabilities, were in clear violation of UN Security Council Resolution 687. And the ISG report further concludes that biological and chemical research facilities, where human subjects were continually experimented on, went undeclared by the Regime in an effort to avoid detection by UN weapons inspectors in 2002. This was a violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1441.

Read the ISG for yourself, here. --MW [#]

 
ENDNOTES, REVIEWS & NOTICES
The Final Solution  
A Tiny Receptacle for a Thrilling Tale: Michael Chabon Reins Himself In and, Finally, Delivers What He's Promised
by Nic Duquette

When I was an undergrad, the school-funded left/liberal/progressive tabloid ran a page two editorial offering cheerful, banal tips on relieving end-of-semester examination stress. The editor gave it the unfortunate title, "The Finals Solution." That the article was largely an endorsement of Austrian beverage Red Bull didn't help. Of course, the editor, a cookie-cutter ultraaggrieved liberal, was aghast at what he'd done. Only mutual Bush-hatred kept the team together.

Like the poor undergraduate's editorial, Michael Chabon's new The Final Solution sandwiches an epic tragedy between two whimsies, although in this case the author fully knew what he was doing. Chabon has made his reputation with the excellent (but uneven) Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which examined Holocaust-fleeing New York Jews who create a Superman-like comic book hero to enact their fantasies and dreams. He also inspired and guest-edited the McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, a well-intentioned retro experiment in genre fiction. In the foreword, he lamented the ascendance of "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story," the grade-B Joyce knock-offs one quickly flips past in every single New Yorker, sighing at the probable timber count. The collection of intentionally genre tales wanted to be Bill Watterson and came off Warhol, but the intentions were good. And it clarified the thesis of Chabon's manifesto.

The Final Solution finds a voice for Chabon's genre-as-literature approach to writing books, and it works. Its style is joyfully breezy in a distinctly Victorian way. The main character is straight out of Doyle, while various inhabitants of the local vicarage/inn are wholly Dickens. Overlaid over this is the joy in seeing a book that IS new and modern, but picks from the best of what made this era of Victorian novels great and adds generously. The main character, an old, retired detective of advanced age who is never named, is clearly Sherlock Holmes, and the title reflects a double meaning in this sense. It's a play off "The Final Problem," the story in which Doyle attempted to kill off his character at a waterfall; it also suggests, as is obvious from Holmes' bouts of dementia, that this will be his last case.

But there's also an undercurrent of despair. The title also references the Holocaust, and the mystery concerns the pet parrot of a nine-year-old German Jew who is a refugee in England, a parrot which recites mysterious strings of numerals. And the descriptions of Sherlock Holmes encountering moments of mental frailty, even speaking during a case as if his friend Watson were by his side (and not, implicitly, long dead), are tinged with sadness.

I'm not giving out much plot detail because there is not much book to describe. With illustrations and a pretty stout typeface, this novella still struggles to fill one hundred thirty pages; at seventeen dollars, it's not the best deal going in hardcover. But it's undeniably Chabon's best work to date, a minor gem that suggests very big things to come. How big? Really big. Tom Hanks movie adaptation big. Superhero big.

Closer  
Larry & Anna & Dan & Alice: Closer, But No Cigar
by Michael Weiss


"Did you swallow his cum?"
"Yes."
"How did it taste? How did it taste?!"
"It tastes like you, but sweeter!"
"Thatâs the spirit. Thank you. Thank you for your honesty. Now fuck off and die."

If Mike Nichols and Patrick Marber are to be understood, all couples may not eventually have an exchange like the foregoing, but itâs perfectly plausible that at least one will. This is bad news. People talk. Amy Sohn writes a column in New York magazine, example begets phenomenon... Next thing you know, men are the new masochists, women are the new sadists, and everyone is subsisting without therapy. This may be the most unsettling notion in a film that purports to be jam-packed with them. Thereâs plenty of strange love going around, yet the only doctor in the house is a dermatologist -- and heâs the one asking about the cum.

Closer is adapted from Marberâs play about a tidy constellation of star-crossed lovers -- two guys and two girls to be exact -- who get around to sleeping with each other in every hetero permutation of their number. The film opens on Dan (Jude Law) walking toward Alice (Natalie Portman) on a crowded London street. A ballad-overlain, slow motion sequence frames their ambulatory courtship as if to declare this a major moment in the history of kismet. Which of course it is -- for Dan and Alice. A biscuit more languorous of pace and we might have reasonably expected to see a handshake by the end credits. Fortunately, plot intervenes. Alice, a direction-befuddled American ãwaifä (her word and best you mark it), steps off the sidewalk and gives an oncoming taxi the pleasure of running into her first. Our dehypnotized hero rushes to her side, is greeting by a semi-conscious ãHello, stranger,ä and with the snap of a jump cut (get used to this), weâre back in hypnotic business. Thus a quietly budding relationship erupts in bloody and contused climax (get used to this, too).

Itâs unclear whether staging Dan and Aliceâs formal introduction in a hospital waiting room was an act of foreshadowing, labored idiosyncrasy, or just a way of giving the two a shared ain't-we-sweet? anecdote for talking the rest of the cast into bed. A few immediate hints, however, told me right away just what Dan was up against in the shape of Alice. With her dyed orange locks and retro-funky jacket (blue suede, yak hair trim: Paul Wellerâs duds in Antarctica), I got the awkward sense Iâd been down this swooning rabbit hole before. Wasnât Alice the adorable nightmare that gave Jim Carrey such agita in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Beautiful, charming, and like everything mixed together in her probable medicine cabinet, highly contraindicated. The thinking manâs crush of the season is the advertised damaged good, so let it never be said that we couldnât see this coming. Alice unselfconsciously rifles through Danâs suitcase looking for cigarettes while heâs out getting coffee. She gleefully marvels at the corners cut off his fish sandwich, which sandwich is wrapped in foil, beneath which foil would not be where any sensible person would keep his cigarettes. Alice, in other words, is a snoop. And she is the worst kind of snoop: the one who thinks sheâs being endearing and cutely bold when sheâs scarily detonating personal boundaries with strangers. Hello, indeed.

But hold it right there. This was the moment for our good samaritan, returning to witness Aliceâs unlawful bag-creep, to polish off his magnanimity with a paid ER bill, a few cautious words about the sinistral nature of British traffic, then high-tail it the hell back to work, tout court. We are not without sympathy for the Earl Grey routine of Danâs existence. He writes obituaries. His current girlfriend is a linguist. OK, that says it all to me, too. But he really needed to trust his better judgment on this one. Looking like Jude Law practically guarantees future curbside damsels, many even prostrating themselves into varied and interesting positions of distress for Danâs benefit. And did I mention that Alice is a stripper?

I havenât read Marberâs play, but Iâd imagine the pole-dancing conceit was just as yawned-over then for what it was, is and always will be: the worst first-shelf tenderizer a clumsy writer can reach for when faced with a tough piece of sirloin. ãLook how fragile. How confused. Save her.ä Yeah, yeah. That and a Mastercard still wonât get you sex in the champagne room. Youâll have to wait til quittin' time to take the strippers home in Closerâs mimetic universe. Many were the moments (clear heels! clear heels!) that left me wondering when the subject of Annaâs graduate degree was going to come up.

A lot of ink has been spilled over Queen Amygdalaâs unwillingness to show skin in her flicks, and much of it (the ink) over how cumbrous this makes tackling the role of a g-string nymphet. In the most unforgettable scene in the film, in a strip club, deft camerawork and the ponderous eclipse of Clive Owenâs damnably big head are all that not only keep Natalie Portmanâs reputation in tact, but Sharon Stoneâs as well. To her credit, I was never quite sure whether Aliceâs body or words writhed and slivered with greater forensic suasiveness. This scene -- like its counterparts in real life strip clubs, or, you know, so Iâve been told -- is a game of one-sided role-playing, with Larry (Owen) as the wounded and pathetic pounder on the transactional fourth wall. Injury and pathos are necessary preconditions for his summoning of alpha strengths, as we later learn, but for now all Larry wants are answers. Anna (Julia Roberts) has left him for Dan who has ditched Alice for Anna. To Larry, Alice is revenge itself. Try telling her this: ãIâm not going to be your revenge fuck,ä she says. Sorry, what was that about an MBA in two years? The game is too well underway, but Alice canât leave coital determinism well enough alone. ãLying,ä she tells her neurasthenic, cash-hemorrhaging client in a rare bearing of soul instead of crotch, ãis the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off -- but itâs better if you do.ä

Well, with wisdom like that itâs hard to argue for reconciliation, monogamy or even less voulu modes of deception and betrayal (the lipstick-stained shirt collar comes to mind.) ãLook closer,ä you may recall, was the magic eye-like enticement for seeing American Beauty, a sclerotic satire whose vast reserves of clichŽ and falsity were actually quite detectable from miles away. (A vigorous ãnailingä of modern suburbia eludes us still.) Now imagine the inherent danger in writing specifically, exclusively about desire. What abraded, brambly warrens of clichŽ and falsity would you want to avoid? The big one seems self-evident: wardrobe malfunction. You must never dress up your theme as something higher or nobler than it is. In the telescoped coming attractions and going repulsions of celluloid, any attempt at this quickly degenerates into sentimentality or unwitting farce. Itâs an indicator of promise, then, that a film about desire should be motivated more by human distance than proximity. Closer is an ironic title for a movie that aims to drive a wedge between every pair it involves, and though most of the filmâs turmoil is cleverly cooked up out of sight, during tumescent off-camera periods of absence and longing, weâre meant to believe that the charactersâ emotional alphabet ranges beyond an elementary ãaä to ãcä -- affection to contempt. Thereâs a weepy meltdown or two, some all-purpose chatter about abiding loyalty and virtue, but make no mistake: potions that are drunk of siren (and satyr) tears are done so because intoxication is a fix for these people. Listen again to their dialogue:

ãI slept with someone in New York -- a whore.ä
ãWhy did you tell me?ä
ãBecause I couldnât lie to you.ä
ãItâs fine.ä

ãI donât want to hurt you.ä
ãWhy are you?ä
ãBecause Iâm selfish and I think Iâll be happier with her.ä

ãI treat you like a whore?ä
ãSometimes.ä
ãWhy would that be?ä

Itâs as if David Mamet and Woody Allen had a self-parody contest. Who talks like this? And by the way, the one who gets treated like a whore is the one who finds it okay that her partner recently slept with a bona fide practitioner; Anna's not exactly been Suzy Homemaker while Larry's been away, as the ãwhy would that be?ä cuttingly and too coolly demonstrates. These words, however, peal with froideur and moral nullity. The actors look silly or uncomfortable speaking them. Larry wants to know where and how Anna and Dan did it in his apartment. Anna, after insufficiently little needling, tells him. In detail. Is this ãedgyä scriptwriting or the standard lingo of a faddish new paradox in cinema: the unfolding of the psychosexual mellow-drama? People capable of such detachment, such cultivated menace under the exigencies of adultery and break-up, are not likely to be too bummed about adultery and break-up to begin with. ãItâs fine.ä Thereâs your replacement hiding under the bed. Actually, more like relaxing. Lock the door on your way out, please. Itâs not you, itâs me. Whatever.

If Larry and Anna and Dan and Alice were portrayed as happy voluptuaries, thatâd be one thing. But theyâre not. Theyâre portrayed as understandably flawed, regular people who donât deserve what happens to them. All presumed entitlements to self-pity, manifest in frequent convulsions of how-could-you narcissism, are completely rubbished by the ridiculous fugue states of communal fucking to which these characters inevitably recur. When Danâs with Anna he intuits, and then acts shocked by, the fact that sheâs recently slept with Larry again. More convincing would have been Danâs shock that Anna hadnât recently slept with Larry again (ãAre you feeling all right, honey?ä). Thatâs just the kind of gal Anna is. Sheâs supposed to be conflicted and tortured, yet unlike most people who legitimately fall under that category, she never lies -- putatively out of respect for her homme du jour, an admirable insistence that he know the truth about his up-to-the-minute competition. This is conflict and torture, all right: the kind that gets resolved by ordering a Diet Coke with a double bacon cheeseburger.

In a way, Iâm glad it's Mike Nichols who initiates the countdown sequence of our mutual assured erotic destruction. His resume reads like a commissioned Freudian study on stimulation and its discontents, and his findings never shy from indictment. Whoâs Afraid of Virginia Woolf: the 50âs. The Graduate: mom. Carnal Knowledge: give me a break. The Birdcage: Republicans. Angels in America: AIDS and Republicans. Closer finally comes clean and tries to pin the blame where it belongs, squarely on ourselves. This might have worked, too, had the elected representatives of a wide pathology been more representative and less narrowly pathological.

Sideways  
In Vino Gravitas: Alexander Payne's Knock-Out New Film Sideways
by Michael Weiss

I promised myself I wasn't going to do this, but...

An oblique way to view the 2004 election is through the lens of American cinema, and more specifically, through its depiction of the Red State/Blue State divide. For the most part, Hollywood has also been guilty of swinging from representative extremes. If one considers the way it chooses to present any place external to the megapolitan culture-domes of New York and Los Angeles, another polarity soon becomes apparent. Sometimes the marquees are lit up with unstinting hagiographies of self-sacrificing small town heroes, the misadventures of era-hopping, twanging retards, or the sweaty courtroom travails of enlightened Grishamite litigators. Other times, it's curtain-to-curtain lynch mobs, Gospel-mouthing Dixie housewives, or truckfuls of slack-jawed Klansmen who think Jim Crow was a liberal plot of Reconstruction.

Now consider how damned refreshing it was when Alexander Payne picked up a camera in the mid '90s. Here, finally, was someone who was establishing a reputation for not condescending to what Philip Larkin once condescendingly called the 'vast deserts of bigotry' that define American life between the coasts. Under Payne's smart storyboarding, there were complexities and intellectuals refinements springing up all around fly-over country, so much so that one might actually consider landing there someday. Psychic torment in Omaha unrelated to the closing of a Wal-Mart? The hell, you say.

Not that the virtue of originality alone is enough to redeem art, but thankfully Payne made sure his films were also some of the acutest satires to be stamped on celluloid in decades.

And that's saying even more than it's saying given that his debut film, Citizen Ruth, was a comedy about one woman's funny embroilment in the abortion debate. If you can imagine Dead Man Walking: The Musical, you can see what kind of out-of-the-gate risks Payne was willing to take on as an unknown filmmaker. A rather well tapped cell within the honeycomb of 'American values,' which we're again hearing so much about, fetus flushing as a subject didn't seem doable without encountering serious problems. A dreaded but unspoken infamnia, as it became in the Godfather II; a yawning, party-stopping plot device, as it was used in the bad Manhattan-set Alfie remake -- sure. Yet for two hours, in Nebraska, abortion is tricky business indeed. At the very least, one expected cookie cutter homilies and ethical fault lines to be drawn the second the opening credits began to roll. How pleasant the discovery, then, that in Payne's Midwestern world pro-life and pro-choice extremists act with equal ugliness as agents of opposing politics but identical priorities, more worried about how their activism struts and preens than about the born or unborn humanity they endeavor to protect. And Laura Dern's strung-out, opportunistic Ruth isn't exactly portrayed as a cervical Joan of Arc... In fact, I can't remember a single unflawed or morally reliable character in the whole black comedic shebang, which, by any chromatic standard of comedy, ought to have had its audience reaching for a warm blanket of consensual reassurance. But nope. We were more capable than that, and Alexander Payne knew it. Citizen Ruth might have more credibly borne the tagline that was used by a later auteurist, albeit overrated, 'issue' film: No one gets away clean.

Or, while we're at it, unexamined. This set a CV precedent. Payne's follow-ups were two very brilliant movies, Election and About Schmidt, and they were just as immune to cant and sentimentality even though the budgets and frames of reference expanded widely. If you had to isolate Payne's major talent, you might say he's got a way with insinuating seamlessly the unexpected or unpredictable, as though ironic novelty were just another cliché in movies. In Election, it was the idiot jock -- nature and John Hughes' answer to the talking sphincter muscle -- that turned out to be the most affable and well-meaning character. (When you think about it, they do exist, don't they?) Then there was Matthew Broderick's mediocre schlub teacher... Neither we nor him could have predicted what latent but entitled strains of amorality he would have activated by a manipulative and freakishly annoying overachiever, the kind of female high school student Wes Anderson would make Jason Schwartzmann date instead of bury in a shallow grave. And, if for no other reason to rejoice over it (despite there being plenty), About Schmidt did two seemingly impossible things. It de-Jackified Jack, and it made seeing Kathy Bates naked a laughing matter.

So if from such heights of collar-loosening awkwardness and winning idiosyncrasy, a buddy road trip comedy seems like a tumble into the mundane, you should probably run right out and see Sideways, pronto. It's Payne's latest, and I think best, film to date.

Keeping with his sub theme of muted surprise-springing, Sideways is the first Payne film not set in Omaha. It's set in California. It's also the first film ever to take the ultimate red state revenge by toying with blue state stereotypes, yet not snidely or maliciously sending them up. This is almost Golden Rule filmmaking and the temptations for sadism Payne averts are practically evangelical in magnitude. You think I'm kidding? Within the first five minutes, the parodic arsenal has already been hauled out for what any heartland director could use for a cheap, bobo-busting good time: from the morning coffeehouse pop-in (complete with a spinach croissant order), to the New York Times crossword puzzle, the Xanax-medicated clinical depression, and -- perhaps the most lambent blue flag of all, not to mention a running conceit of Sideways -- the arch connoisseurship of wine. "Soupcon," "flutter of nutty cheese," "transcendent." As pertains to hooch talk, these are Yankee fightin' words, building toward some violent and nasty climax that, mercifully, never does come. (I can't have been the only one in the theatre to feel a mere wedge of brie away from a Kerry mandate.)

The wonderful Paul Giamatti plays Miles, a recently divorced sadsack intellectual and borderline vine-drunk with a novel that'll maybe get published soon. Miles is also the best man at his best friend Jack's (Thomas Hayden Church) upcoming wedding, and Sideways is the chronologue of the two's last hurrah bachelors' spree, which of course doesn't turn out the way they'd expect. But this being a Payne comedy, it doesn't always turn out the way you'd expect, either. And you've seen the trailer and know the playbook for this type of film inside-out and everything.

Miles and Jack hit the North California highway together in search of great wine and good golf, and, since Jack is a washed-up actor and the Oscar to Miles' (less fastidious) Felix, an easy pre-marital lay or twelve. Enter Sandra Oh and Virginia Madsen, Stephanie and Maya, both very bright and sexy and mavens for fine varietals, particularly when put to the service of casual courtship.

The danger inherent in a movie set around the consumption of a pretentious drug of choice is that the drug will become a pretentious metaphor for human characteristics. And here again, Payne delivers in making the only scene to get within cork-popping distance of realizing this danger the best scene in the whole film. It involves the self-hating and amorously reluctant Miles, de-escalating from a disastrous double date he didn't want to go on in the first place, was too distracted and morose to have enjoyed, and nearly terminated halfway through with a drunken phone call to his nice ex-wife.

Once Jack and Stephanie go off to fuck (sorry, it's not 'make love' to listen to their noises), Miles is left alone with Maya, someone he's superficially known as a waitress for a few years but would not have dared to ask out without Jack's ego-blind prodding. They're lounging on beaten-up patio furniture and it's clear to all that Maya wants Miles and will let him have her if only he can make the first move. He gets the conversation right, but the tone of it and the attendant body language unbearably wrong. He's giving a languid and detailed explanation, at Maya's prompting, of his one true love: pinot. It's a fragile grape, see, and its full potential is not easily brought to bear; pinot only flourishes under the most exact and clement agricultural conditions and... well, it's not hard to see what Miles is really driving at here. Giamatti even looks, as Wodehouse would say and as would be apropos in a film about wine, like a man poured into his clothes who forgot to say when. Yet despite his best efforts to not let Maya get physically intimate with him, she does just that anyway. He misses his mark, failing to respond after she covers his hand with her own: the international sign for "kiss me, you fool" and a gesture registered on Giamatti's face with as much soulfulness as should be legal without a tenor saxophone in his mouth. (By the way, Maya's speech about why she loves rose, which ends, "...and I guess because it just tastes so fucking good," is the hottest thing a woman has done on screen since Scarlett Johannson sang "Brass in Pocket" in a pink iridescent wig.)

Without giving too much else away, you'll be happy to know that Miles does not come away with an all-better-now, happy egg exterior from his revitalizing affair with Maya, which gets off the ground after the stated bumps and fits. Nor does the free-wheeling and frat-scrupled Jack come away unscathed or irreparably mangled from his romp with not only Stephanie, but a chunky restaurant waitress who's a fan of his long-gone soap opera stardom, as well as, erm, other things...

For all its corkscrew comic staging, Sideways ultimately does what Alexander Payne knows how to do pretty effortlessly by now: break your heart without bleeding the thing dry, and tease and challenge the brow without the beating that thing into submission. His work, like a fine you-know-what, improves remarkably with age.

Modest Mouse, Good Music For People Who Like Bad Music  
Good Music for People Who Like Bad Music: the new Modest Mouse album is better than their old stuff, but it still sucks.
by Nic Duquette

I've only heard one other Modest Mouse album, The Moon & Antarctica, the one those who like the band still consider their best. I got it to round out my seven CDs when I joined the BMG music club, which you'd think would suggest mainstream appeal as well as indie success if it got on that list, right? I was a little uncomfortable with the cover art -- cerulean hands shaking in the sky over a grey moonscape surrounded by lavender? Are these people fucking colorblind? But I put the CD in and listened to it doggedly, waiting for the purchase to pay off. I finally gave up. Yeah, it was different from everything else, but the discovery was as joyless and draining as crunching through a linear algebra problem. I thought the problem was me. Then I saw Modest Mouse touring in support of the Flaming Lips. I'm still unsure whether Issac Brock was toxically drunk, but I sure wished I was. They were terrible. When your singing is worse than Wayne Coyne's, you have a problem.

So I was suprised to hear Modest Mouse with a great single on Boston radio. "Float On" was as deliberately different as anything else they'd done, but with a thumping drumbeat and U2 guitar line that also allowed it to be a catchy tune. Wow, I thought. Maybe these guys don't suck after all. Maybe they just needed time to find themselves.

Nope. I haven't been led on so badly by a good single since I bought Smash Mouth's Fush Yu Mang on the theory that the whole album would be full of cheaply-produced fun like Walkin' on the Sun. (It wasn't. I gave the CD away.)

Good News for People Who Like Bad News is good for eight minutes. After a brief horn bit, it starts with The World At Large, which is as good as Float On. Float On is up next. Then it goes into forty minutes of the same old crap -- layered vocals that try to sound ominous, poorly place guitar harmonics, songs that are more clever than they are good and more unpleasant than they are clever. To Brock's credit, the songs show more economy than on Moon, the track order is more varied, and his voice has grown by leagues. But it doesn't matter with songwriting like this. Example: there's one track that's fifty-eight seconds of some voice mumbling about digging your grave. It's titled "Dig Your Grave." That's great, Issac. Cute.

And the cover art sucks again, too. This time it's olive and hot pink.

I bought it on sale for $12, so I guess I'll keep it for the first two tracks. But I wish I'd just bought the single on iTunes.

Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE  
Taken for Lost, Gone and Unknown for a Long, Long Time: SMiLE and the resurrection of Brian Wilson

Let's get the hatchet work out of the way right now: As the New York Times pointed out, not in a review but in an editorial (!), the voices on Brian Wilson's new record aren't those of the classic Beach Boys. Of the original Wilson brothers, two are dead and one has aged four decades. Mike Love is in oldies-circuit purgatory. The new lyrics on Good Vibrations are a little annoying. And sometimes the digital recording lacks warmth. Okay? You're right on all these points, Times. (Unfortunately, the opportunity to view the Times' niggling concerns is not a free link.)

But this release is about the composition, not the recording. The recording is gorgeous. The composition is even better. Smile is a towering masterpiece, as unique, moving, grand, fun and towering as Rhapsody In Blue or Copland's Rodeo. It deserves to be in the classical canon with those pieces as well as on those innumerable Rolling Stone "five thousand greatest albums of all time" lists that pop up every six months.

Several negative reviews have compared this album to the counterfactual Beach Boys album that was never finished. But not only did the composer have a psychological collapse, but the other Beach Boys didn't even care for the material, Good Vibrations notwithstanding. The old Heroes and Villains sounded like a cartoon funeral dirge. This new one is an epic six-gun shootin' laugh-out-loud miniopera. It's gorgeous.

Any exposition on the virtues of this album would require several listens and as many paragraphs. I don't have the time for that now; I have a day job. If you don't want to take my confidence on faith, there's a low-quality streaming version of the album here. Whether you rush to the site or to Best Buy, though, trust me; this is a rare album you ought to listen to as soon as possible. --Nic Duquette

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel  
Magic for Grown-Ups: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel
by Nic Duquette

Susanna Clarke's debut novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel, is the rare book that manages to elevate its allusions to metafiction without teasing Delillian self-reference. But just as it's a story of two magicians bringing the long-lost art of magic back to England, it's also a novel that wheels hundreds of geriatric genres back into the sunlight in an unexpectedly exciting and readable new form.

I won't even try to summarize the plot of Strange and Norrel, which at eight hundred pages still overflows its banks into dozens of footnotes before filtering back down into some immense underground resevoir of the author's imagination. Since the plot concerns the unexpected return of magic to an unprepared world, the novel has been called Harry Potter for adults, and Bloomsbury, Rowling's publisher as well as Clarke's, has certainly been hyping that blurb as much as it can -- the company has such high expectations that it started a US division solely to publish the book, and its first print run is rumored to be 250,000. Not bad for a first novel.

Clarke claims to have begun her novel in 1992, well before Pottermania, but it seems unlikely she was completely uninfluenced by Rowling's success. Still, the comparisons between the books are superficial. Clarke does not play to adolescent fantasies of suddenly discovering one has secret powers, and her writing shows much mroe craft than Rowling's. The book doesn't steal from Rowling much, at least not as much as it does from Dickens' charicatures, Jane Austen's comedies of manners, Tolkien's exhaustive fantastical backstory, C.S. Lewis's religious allegory, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream as reinterpreted by Neil Gaiman, dark and druggy reality-bending (Lovecraft?), historical fiction, war narrative, and dozens of other, distinctly British subgenres which seemed to have disappeared meaningfully from the landscape with the passing of their authors. They all can be felt in the undercurrents of Clarke's book. Indeed, Lord Byron even appears as a minor character.

This novel probably isn't quite the masterpiece it's being hyped as. No character escapes caricature, but Clarke's elastic language manages to keep the same motifs fresh and exciting for almost 800 pages. In the tradition of the old novels it emulates, the beginning of Strange and Norrel is dull and the acceleration is not fast. But I'm finding fault simply for the sake of providing a balanced review. This novel ranges wide over every scrap of writing that's ever been read and forgotten about and borrows a little here, a little there, creating its own rules as it goes and never quite showing its hand. I won't be sure whether it's a good novel or a great novel until I reread it. But unlike most novels of this length, I plan to someday.

The Less Deceived: John Kerry and the Postwar Tragedy of Vietnam
by Michael Weiss

The suspension of Joseph Ellis from the faculty of Mount Holyoke College occurred during the summer before my final year as a Dartmouth undergraduate. I remember a roundtable discussion in my senior History seminar. The professor, who also happened at that time to be the elegant feminist chair of the History Department, remarked that it was especially silly of such a bright and circumspect scholar as Ellis to fabricate war stories about Vietnam. Was this done, my prof asked, to give Ellis a patina of macho authority or a heroic first-person credibility in the evaluation of his subject? And if so, why? Ellis surely knew by 2001 -- and had secure enough a railing on the tenure track to be able to say by then -- that the real heroes of his generation were those who had actively avoided military service from 1962 to 1972. True, the draft made such avoidance an even more heroic feat, but conscription only works as an excuse for actuating disgraceful foreign policy if you believe the phrase "conscientious objector" to be a hollow euphemism for "draft-dodger." And then there were those who went willingly into the breech, as the current Democratic candidate for president did and as he and his base of contemporaries, many of whom sat out the war themselves, never tire of reminding us.

The clarifying and semi-apologetic clichŽ of Sixties peace activism ran that one was "anti-war, not anti-soldier." This is a delicate moral dichotomy to navigate, as no war can be fought without soldiers and not even the most conformist, duty-bound soldier is immune to having thoughts of his own about the war he's fighting. To claim otherwise is to elevate the rational separation of command and duty to a mind-numbing, near totalitarian level, not to mention spit on the graves of men like Wilfred Owen and Ron Ridenhour and turn a deaf ear to women like Jessica Lynch. (Michael Moore will tell you these are the only people worth listening to on matters of bellicosity.)

So it followed for careful critics of the Vietnam War that American troops had been deceived-bullied and coerced into doing the bidding of an imperialist government looking to conquer Southeast Asia. The domino theory as a check on Soviet expansionism was, in updated parlance, "sold" to them as sound policymaking, just as WMD and the imminent threat of Saddam Hussein is now said to have been sold to our troops in Iraq as their chief reasons for being there.

In his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, John Kerry claimed membership to this corps of deceived Vietnam veterans, a clearly "bipartisan" organization since quite a few ex-soldiers who continued to believe the cause of fighting Communism in Indochina was a just one were nevertheless inclined to admit that, given the option to do it all over again, they would not. They were now, to borrow a phrase from a haunting Philip Larkin poem about another form of victimization, the "less deceived."

What troubles me about John Kerry and the current trumpeting of his Vietnam record is that, judging by his theatrics at the Democratic Convention and the comments he's made elsewhere on the stump, he'd gladly leap at the chance to fight this deceptive war all over again. It's his role in the one we're waging now he's not so sure about.

I don't know anyone who would claim John McCain is one to shy from brandishing his military credentials. To be sure, his tenure in Vietnam served as the ethical backdrop and much pointed-to elephant in the room of his presidential bid in 2000, a year when "character" was in desperate need of return to the White House. Yet McCain's reflections as a Navy pilot and POW never failed to register without a thank-God-that-hell-is-over-with sobriety of tone, the absence of which would be excusable for someone under the psychic strain of justifying a hell as gruesome as the one he went through. McCain never repudiated the war that kept him locked up for half a decade in a third world martial jail. Whatever you think of his politics and however curious you may be of the unspoken moral contradictions he continues battle, one thing about the Arizona senator is clear: his stoicism is non-negotiable. Yet such is not the case for McCain's across-the-aisle colleague, who came home to become the most eloquent anti-war veteran and then forgot his eloquence.

One month ago we were given to hear the following: "John Kerry, reporting for duty."

A big smile and a winsome delivery and I can't have been the only one left wondering, what does he mean, "Reporting for duty"? I thought he had reported already and come, at great agony and medal-shirking pathos, to regret it. And are not the hard lessons learned from that experience the foundations of Kerry's smarter-than-Bush policies for postwar Iraq? Whence the revisionist call to arms for an ended battle? This is either the guilty conscience escaping from an ex-protestor, or the mumblings of a time-lapsed delusional afflicted with post-traumatic stress syndrome. In any event, we have gone from the less deceived back to the deceived, and all in the convenient span of a national election cycle. History, as Joseph Ellis should have known better, often repeats itself in the worst possible way.

Consider how much credit has been paid by the sanguinary and suddenly retro-hawkish left to Kerry's willingness to sign up for service. Typically this credit has been paid in contrast to George W. Bush's reluctance to even leave the state of Texas in the sixties, much less don a National Guard uniform when doing so might have really meant something. Bill Clinton's unmistakably face-saving act of self-effacement at this year's convention gave us a new catchphrase in a season already glutted with them. "Send me!" cried John Kerry, repeatedly. Ah, but that all depends on what the definition of "me" is...

Kerry has boasted of having been convinced to enlist in 1966 by no less of a figure than William Bundy, a personal friend of the family and Lyndon Johnson's assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs (also brother to McGeorge Bundy, national security advisor under both Kennedy and Johnson). The younger, still-living JFK was evidently wonderstruck by all things redolent of Hiannisport at that time, and most likely he felt an expectation to live up to the legacy of his slain icon and monogrammatic twin. Though it's no compliment to even a na•ve 22 year-old that all it took to transplant him from New Haven to the Mekong Delta was a single dorm room bull session with one of the least wise, but most escalationist, "wise men." And this was before Kerry gave a class oration at his Yale commencement in which he spoke critically of the war he was about to join:

"What was an excess of isolationism [in American foreign policy] has become an excess of interventionism... We have not really lost the desire to serve. We question the very roots of what we are serving."

Wait a minute. That sounds unambiguously like someone who sees the folly of shouldering a rocket launcher against the forces of Ho Chi Minh. The "roots" to which Kerry alluded, however, were not to be questioned for very long; he shipped out shortly after delivering this speech. (Indeed, if one wished to uncover the genesis of his now-infamous "flip-flop" on the issues, this oration and the act that followed it would be a good place to start looking.)

It'd be nice if Kerry preferred to brag that he's grown up a lot since those days of anxiety of political influence, or at least spoke more unequivocally about what kind of influence Vietnam had on him. If being harangued into fatigues by a mediocre ideologue is proudly still a suasive high-water mark, then should anyone with higher standards than those of the Anybody But Bush camp be demanding a Kerry-picked group of advisors to extricate us from the present "quagmire" in Iraq? And should the sitting president be gleefully assailed for saving his own ass when, as Kerry also indicated in his Senate testimony, many young souls still stuck in the jungle were desperate to do likewise?

This brings us to the larger point about the debate over Vietnam in this election: namely, why it's being had at all. Apart from the periodic recrudescence of an event said to have been the existential "death of American innocence," what does this historic war have to do with present one - and I don't just mean in Iraq but around the world, being prosecuted against the agents of theocratic fascism? The V-word is as non sequitur in the current discourse as the words Hohenzollern or Hapsburg or kaiser would have been in the one of 1939. Ask yourself: should a plebiscite of World War I veterans have been necessary to determine US involvement in World War II? If so, would we have appreciated its results, knowing what we now know about Hitler's ambitions, and knowing then the enervating impact the Great War had had on its participants?

If epaulets were the sine qua non of foreign policymaking, we would not have to worry about the exploitation of the Vietnam War by a candidate for the presidency of the United States. There would be no Vietnam War to discuss, just as sure as there would be no United States.

Perhaps that other popular catchphrase of the year has nailed the sentiment precisely. It's time to move on.

Bright Young Things.  
Sniffing the Exhalation of Their Own Herd: Bright Young Things
by Michael Weiss

Stephen Fry's made an accomplished career for himself as the favored footman of the English Society of the Funny W. Wilde, Wodehouse and now Waugh. The televised and cinematized class comedy has never had it so good than under Fry's witty guidance, and so it's a real pleasure that he chose for his directorial debut Evelyn Waugh's novel secondo, Vile Bodies. (The film's title, Bright Young Things, borrows the book's working title.)

Fry knows his source material thoroughly and, in a way, Waugh's book is the perfect fizzing quinine cocktail for the man who brought Jeeves and Oscar to life to throw back. It's as if everything Fry admires about the literary ethos of Wodehouse and Wilde -- the injunction to do some serious living by living as unseriously as one can -- has been carefully stitched into the hairshirts of notoriety that both writers were forced to bear in their careers. Wodehouse learned how war could effectively wipe the smile off someone's face when he danced to the music of Nazi time; and of course Wilde became the sexual martyr of two centuries when the release of his personal repression extracted the venom of repressiveness in a society that had recently celebrated him.

So too goes the party-stopping gravity in Waugh, who differs, however, from his contemporary and from his predecessor in one very crucial respect. Waugh discovered the killjoy from the moment he put pen to paper. His fiction was never without a moral tonic or saving grace to punctuate all the silliness and espieglerie, as Fry's superficially frothy but deeply solemn film illustrates in ways Waugh's book could not have done. One is reminded of just how unhappily this comic tale ends. The events which bring the gramophone to a screeching halt include the lunatic's death of Agatha Runcible, who was easily the heart and soul -- or, given the universal penchant for substance abuse, nostril and liver -- of the BYTs. In the book, Agatha's demise is mentioned en passant as part of a larger epilogic pastiche, but Fry, perhaps recalling his portrayal of Wilde's saturnine beginning-of-the-end stint as a hard laborer, has Agatha languish longer in the sanatorium before kicking the bucket. Played to the hilt by the wonderful newcomer Fenella Woolgar, Agatha's early pathos as a clueless madcap is given color and depth of humanity in these scenes without making her seem simpering in that Angel-of-Death-cometh way a lesser director might have indulged. And speaking of angels, there's good old Melrose Ape, a shrill banshee of American evangelism who heads up a touring group called the "Angels of the Glad New Day," downy young girls all dressed in white and all straight out of Lewis Carroll's wet dream.

Played by a hilariously marmish Stockard Channing, Mrs. Ape exists to bring a puritanical dudgeon to a hard boozing, coke snorting society party. Not realizing that her cute little entourage would turn out to be more minatory than darling, the hostess of this soiree cuts things short after hearing her guests decried as a bunch of Godless barbarians ("Bright young people is what they call you -- well! One out of three ain't bad, I guess!"). This is a sentiment Waugh, with his creeping Catholicism, can only have shared about his own characters, and herein lies his genius at not burdening his light stuff with moralization. He ventriloquizes rather than sermonizes his judgments through the vessel of this thundering beast of a woman -- an ape, all right. Though her gospel may be Waugh's, the bigger joke comes at the expense of a more loathsome species than the proselytizing zealot: the visiting foreigner with nasty things to say about one's countrymen. Waugh made the glorification of English tradition the counterpoise to his satire of that tradition, if not his whole raison d'ecrire. (And is there anything more traditionally English than trashing Americans?) Fry cleverly inserts a throwaway line in the same vein: the Canadian publishing tycoon Lord Monomark implores a "Mrs. Simpson" to return at once to the States. (It's another credit to the filmmaker that he does not underestimate his audience's grasp of pre-Camilla royal scandal, or try to "update" his movie with modern references.)

In contrast to the other Funny W's who also dabbled in the transatlantic special relationship, Waugh sensed early on that the flute-clinking frivolity that was the Anglo-American Jazz Age, with its shared syncopation and fondness of generational argot, came at too high a cultural price. This was a man who named his first book Decline and Fall, which might have convinced even the least teleologically-minded reader of its author's take on the fin de siecle and what that wheedling infant, the centenary nine, was about to do to God, King and Country. In case the point was missed there, it was surely hammered home in the sequel, where half the bon vivants were disgraced or killed off domestically, and the other half were sent overseas to die on the battlefield. (See also one of his best written books, Put Out More Flags.)

Published in 1930, Vile Bodies was set in a future nearer than Waugh himself knew was imminent. It ominously prefigured the onset of another world war and even more ominously spoke of it in tones redolent of the what-does-it-all-mean intellectual histories now being written about what was then unironically and myopically called the "Great War." Added to the notion of Fergusonian overstretch, of which World War I may have well been the culmination, are more metaphysical adjectives to give shape to the event that produced the machine gun, the tank and the chemical weapon, not to mention the gemini twins of nationalism and internationalism. "Hygenic." "Unifying." "Ethically maturing." Orwell, in his classic essay, "My Country, Right or Left," remembered admonitions by WWI veterans as a schoolboy: War was a "good thing," it "made you tough," "kept you fit." And as if not to let the charnal stench of a globe on fire appear the mere extension of epochal waste that preceded it, we're now told that millions marched into death in 1914 because kaisers and prime ministers needed some way of curing the incipient anomie and slackness of will depleting their empires. Neurosis as a casus belli -- was the twentieth the century of Freud or what?

Waugh was at once luridly attracted to and repulsed by this spiritual clearing-house rationalization for war, the Sword of Honor trilogy being his most obvious evocation of such. It defined his sadomasochistic relationship with modernism, and it surely -- and not unrelatedly -- stoked his fascination with fascism. The kitsch of that ideology could summarily be described as "Everything old is young again." But not quite the same, Waugh might have added, and did do: Bright Young Things is a wistful irony.

The "bodies" in question here might have started out as members of a self-indulgent metropolitan set, but they most likely wound up as something even more vile than that: corpses. Fry taps into this dead serious undercurrent of the text, which is not quite "under" enough to be labeled subtext and which at moments hazards into the realm of sentimentality. By film's end we see a tearful Miles Malpractice, once the gay belle of the ball, lamenting his criminalized homosexuality and fleeing England as a wanted man (not in the way he might have enjoyed, either.) Fry intelligently refuses to let his Edwardian wastrels get away with getting away with it all. Blithe, narcissistic and reckless, but in possession of absolutely no idea how the world will only let them down in the end; this encapsulates our heroes in the fugitive and bubbly Acts I and II of the film, which yield occasionally to foreshadowing of the morose and world-historical Act III. The characters remain developmentally arrested, the movie grows up.

In one memorable scene, a rustic cab driver lectures the protagonist Adam Symes (or Fenwick-Symes as he's actually called and would actually be called in a more "proper" era) on the excesses of the youth generation. What this country could really use is another war, says the gruff prole. Nothing like the "sound of guns and the smell of gas" to clean up the mess of decadence sweeping the land. "It all sounds so disgusting, dunn'it?" "Yes, the sound of gas and smell of gundpower does sound disgusting," replies Adam. In another context this would be a pitch-perfect Wildean riposte. If only this were Half Moon Street. If only Adam were being withering instead of just unaware of the real question -- a question he, and the zeitgeist for which he is spokesman, must perilously answer at a later date.

Together We're Heavy  
Overweight: Polyphonic Spree's Together We're Heavy by Nic Duquette

I liked the first Polyphonic Spree album, but more for the possibilities it suggested than its inherent merits. I love baroque sunshine-with-sadness pop like Pet Sounds or The Soft Bulletin. I have a bootleg of Smile. So when I hear twenty-odd Texans are running around in choral robes singing happy anthems, I get excited. Since the first album was essentially a demo that made good, Together We're Heavy is the first chance we have to see what the Spree can do with a real studio and a real record contract. Promisingly, their sound is robust, thoughtful and not as busy as last time, and the songs aren't as repetitive, which shows that they're at least thinking about their weaknesses. Unfortunately, the songwriting's ambition exceeds its accomplishment. If repetition could make their first album wearing, it also could let the lyrics' uncynical joy rise above the simplistic writing. The hooks in these songs are strong, but with six of the ten tracks running over five minutes long and frequently with gradiose sectional changes, it's hard to get absorbed. Brian Wilson had similar limitations, but "Good Vibrations," candidate for greatest song of the pop era the PS are ripping off left and right, barely exceeds two minutes in length. Compare to the ten-minute "When The Fool Becomes A King," which features operatic intensity exceeded only by embarrassing self-reference that becomses self-parody. (How creatively bankrupt do you have to be to reuse the chorus from your UK-hit debut single in a ten-minute epic?) Don't get me wrong: if they don't fall apart under the burden of their big band payroll, the Polyphonic Spree have a great album coming down the pipe sooner or later. This one is not it.

A Ghost Is Born  
Good Egg: Wilco's A Ghost Is Born
by Nic Duquette

I'm not surprised that Wilco's new album has been damned with faint praise from hip reviewing establishments; the ending is just terrible, as the penultimate track, "Less Than You Think" is a three minute song that is unlucky enough to be saddled with twelve minutes of noise. (Jeff Tweedy supposedly was trying to simulate the migranes that turned him to drugs, but it sounds more like an amplification of the high-pitched whine industrial fluorescent lights used to make years ago, with some other stuff dubbed in and mixed to the bottom.) Then the last track, "The Late Greats," is two and a half minutes of forgettable melody and painfully bad lyrics. No wonder Pitchfork hipsters have triggered their inevitable cool-backlash. (It's amazing Radiohead have staved it off for so long.) It's unfortunate that Tweedy decided to end this album so badly, because the first forty-five minutes are as strong as anything Wilco has ever recorded. This is what you get when you drive out a flamboyant keyboardist while experimenting with noise rock; something that's minimalist as it is anarchic, as warm as it is mechanical. Like if the Velvet Underground really had cut an album in a "closet." Spiders (Kidsmoke)is the core of the album, ten minutes of bizarre noise jamming, piano hook and understated synth that's surprisingly seductive, no matter how many critics think it's indulgent or dull. The other tracks are organic but tight, atonal but inviting. This album synthesizes so many elements of what's come before that it all sounds fresh; instead of wedding influences together into a chimerical fantasy, like YHF (you could almost hear the critics salivating to compare that one to the two least likely albums in the classic rock canon they could think of), A Ghost Is Born sums the entirety of rock music history seamlessly and humbly. Furthermore, Tweedy's new mastery of his voice is unexpected and lovely. This album is not perfect or cohesive, and the choice the listener will have to make between concluding the album with fifteen minutes of suffering or the power button mean this one will never be on anybody's top tier. But the good parts are as good as anything Wilco's ever done; maybe even better.

Camera Obscura: Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11
by Michael Weiss

One of the funniest and most affecting skits on Michael Moore's short-lived NBC series TV Nation featured black actor Yaphet Kotto trying to hail a cab in Manhattan. The only other fare he was competing against was a white ex-convict done up in a Simpsons-worthy caricature of what a don't-fuck-with-me jailbird should look like. Taxis invariably flitted by the Emmy award-winning Homicide star only to stop half a block down to pick up the ex-con. If this weren't enough -- and it never is with Michael Moore -- the farcical ante was then upped by lowering, as it were, the racist bar all the way to the ground. Yaphet was given accessories to make him appear less "menacing": first a bouquet of flowers, then a box of chocolates, finally a swaddled baby. Still, the poor guy just couldn't get a cab.

This was about as well-executed as a Michael Moore documentary fragment got or probably will ever get again. Humorous, uncomfortable to watch and educational not in the least.

Was there ever a greater sociological clichŽ about New York City propagated through local news channels and awful stand-up comedy routines that needed less proving than the one about bigoted taxi drivers? And to have this hammered home to a national television audience by a "rebel and his mic," as the tag-line for Moore's first film once read... Well, if this was rebellion, what must playing it safe have looked like?

Still, given what Moore has been up to lately, it's nice to reminisce about a time when he actually had a point about something relevant and could present it with the barest scrap of intellectual and moral authenticity.

This is a slight exaggeration. Moore has always found a real challenge really unattractive. He prefers cooking up paradoxically unimpressive films of what might be termed, in this post-Chomskyan epoch, manufactured dissent. And there's nothing chic about this particular strain of "radicalism" which, for all its one-liners and burlesque animation sequences, still sells itself as policy review.

There's no second guessing in a Michael Moore documentary despite the fact that a political documentary is, by convention if not by definition, an exercise in second- and third- and fourth guessing. Moore has repeatedly claimed his films are more like audio-visual Op-Ed pieces than documentaries. The trouble with this apologia is that, as Geoffrey O'Brien points out in his Fahrenheit critique in the New York Review, as an op-ed writer, Moore falls flat on his face; his points are occluded by hamfisted prose and a hyperactive pace that could the content of any high school poetry contest a run for its money. He's much more effective as a cinematic bricolageur, which is why you'll never hear him say the White House tried to impede the publication of Dude, Where's My Country?

Much of this has to do with attention span and with passive reception of information. Moore's ideal audience is already in a state of high dudgeon; it's impatient to take down a guy like George W. Bush, but it's even more impatient to have its motivation for doing so descried by the loudest, shrillest voice it can find. This is not to grace a "visceral" or emotive response to global affairs with the benefit of mindfulness--it's just to rile the gut even further and stoke the limbic system more intensely. Why else would so many film critics trash the homework and data representative portions of this film but extol its power to leave an audience feeling "shaken." This is Fahrenheit, all right. But it's higher than the film's allusive degree of 451, and the temperature has been rising a long while before the projectors rattle into action.

Yet the contradiction in Moore's seemingly populist style is that he sees himself speaking truth not to power, but to blinkered servility. Otherwise the condescending kindergarten tone of voice would have to go, and the odd (in both senses of that word) thesis would demand complication by antithesis or cross-examination.

Moore revels in assuming even his most loyal audience is energetic but stupid -- too much of the latter to edify itself unless dragged marmishly to the blackboard and have its nose rubbed in the lesson plan. (Remember: We're the culture with the ear-to-ear grin on our face denoting nothing between those two ears. See David Brooks' NYT piece on Moore.) Either that, or -- you'll pardon the sardonic benefit-of-the-doubt technique in which our man specializes -- Moore is more energetic but not quite as stupid himself, and it's in the spirit of egalitarianism that he anticipates our need for a semi-literate Cliffs Notes to current events.

He is a veritable genius, however, in his ability to synchronicize the volume of his chorus with a relevant public angst. What will he think of next? The answer is whatever we think of first. Each successive instance of a Moore J'accuse has taken on more than a hint of the crowd-pleasing element. Each film grows exponentially crowd-fellating, in fact. Why else maintain, as he was right to do, that his Oscar acceptance speech two years ago was received more approvingly in the Shrine Auditorium than the media persisted in claiming? He has more of the mob on his side than the mob or the media would like to believe.

So when the Big One who done good from Flint arrives as the man of the hour in Hollywood, the rest of the script pretty much writes itself. To paraphrase Moore's entire political philosophy without oversimplifying it: Wealth, power and prestige always bear an inverse relationship to truth, justice and the UN Security Council way. Stereotypes of conservatism are objective; your worst suspicions of authority are irrefutable facts by virtue of having remained your worst suspicions for long enough, well past the Stupid White Men statute of credible repudiation.

Yet the most "convincing" sections of Fahrenheit 9/11 are excellent examples of the Blake line: "A truth that's told with bad intent, / Beats all the lies you can invent." For a film that rests so much of its case on interpolation, it's a genuine, un-Moore-like irony that interpolation is exactly what damns this film as a bloated self-satire. (If he opted instead for the mockumentary genre, Moore would find a more hygienic and rewarding role as a kind of bastard child of Oliver Stone and Fellini. Give Moore a soundstage and he can wait for Godot, Guffman, Ralph Nader, Wesley Clarke, whomever to his heart's content and the quarrel between the truth and him will end there.)

Proof of presidential misconduct is splashed across the screen in this movie in eureka-shots of excised passages of declassified records that have been treated liberally with black magic marker -- always a sign of someone up to no good. And yet what is Fahrenheit itself but a 40's newsreel-velocity pastiche of excised passages and blackened-out records of recent American history?

We're shown Donald Rumsfeld happily shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in 1983 (or rather re-shown it, as this grainy piece of gotcha evidence had been circulated on the Internet for over a year now.) Bad, morally nullifying stuff, to watch the current Defense Secretary make archival nice with public enemy number one. But never mind that as special envoy to Iraq during the Reagan administration Rumsfeld was obligated to negotiate with Saddam lest he commit a hostile act of state against a American ally. It should nauseate (not to mention implicate) us all now to even have to refer to Saddam as an ally in the past tense or to watch this sleazy piece of Washington deal-making with a genocidal bastard. But does Moore care to go to the videotape of Kofi Annan doing the same thing and to a greater extent, under the veil of multilateralism, just a few years ago, after the first Gulf War and after Saddam had become a transcontinental byword for psychopathic brutality? Of course not. The suggestion is that diplomatic competence on Rumsfeld's part in 1983 de-legitimizes his war-making capacity in 2003. Never mind that incompetence back then might well have inaugurated an even earlier "drumbeat" to war with Iraq. Would Michael Moore have preferred a confrontation with Saddam when Iraq was embroiled in its own "quagmire" against Khomeinist Iran? Saddam didn't lack weapons of mass destruction at that point on the timeline, nor was he afraid to use them within and without his own borders. Should the U.S. have invaded rather than coddled Baghdad twenty years ago to spare the humanitarian crises that any student of Baathism could have predicted would occur? And how might a preemptive war of choice have inflamed Arab opinion of a military-industrial superpower that was not then the only nation on earth worthy of such a title? Important questions, but not important enough for Michael Moore. Five seconds of incrimination beats a few minutes of investigation.

You also wouldn't know from what's presented in the course of this 122 minute sideshow that the current Defense Secretary, whatever his shortcomings, has at least partially reduced the moral deficit incurred by American realpolitik by his direct involvement in the overthrow, capture and imprisonment of his former hand-palpating dictator buddy. (Edging your way to the head of the statecraft learning curve is at best an example of inconsistency and at worst one of hypocrisy to Moore). Or that as a member of the Ford cabinet with the same job as he holds now, Rumsfeld and a White House chief of staff by the name of Dick Cheney spent their days plotting to subvert the architect of client-state foreign policy and the man arguably most responsible for America's geopolitical blunders in the Middle East: Henry Kissinger. Or did the Carlysle Group call all the shots in Saudi-US comity before George Bush, Sr. was even head of the Central Intelligence Agency? Once again, tricky stuff -- too tricky for Moore to wade through. The logical threads to his arguments never do find more definitive punctuation than pseudo-provocative, cowardly ellipsis.

And what exactly was proved by exhibiting the worst elements of our armed forces reveling in the destruction of Iraqi homes and the murder of innocent civilians? Would Moore have it that this level of sadism is systemic in the US military and that -- to update his post-production material by a few months -- the insane torturers of Abu Ghraib occupy majority status on the frontlines as well? If so, it would have been brave of him to come right out and say this. Instead, a malignant tissue is magnified a thousand fold to represent a wasting, pathologic organism. But then the mood switches and this visual is juxtaposed to an image of the same patient, now healthy and robust. We get a Flint, Michigan mother sharing her pain in a languorous uninterrupted scene, after learning that her enlisted son has been killed in a black hawk helicopter crash in Iraq. Certainly, Moore doesn't think this cut-down boy was ever blasting the Bloodhound Gang while civilian rooftops burned, or turning giddy at the prospect of pillage and destruction. This can't be the same guy who's there to "comfort" the grieving mother and help her redirect her suffering into righteous rage at the Bush administration, can it? Anti-war is not anti-troops, after all. At least Moore accords his audience this single opportunity to decide something for itself: which is the more exploitive of his depiction of American soldiers?

Moore knows that Fahrenheit is full of distortions, lies and frenzied, look-here-but-not-here sleights of cinematic hand. He admitted as much by plying the trade of non-fiction and then boasting about his zero tolerance policy towards criticism or hostile questioning. A slightly more sinister shade of this syndrome of guilt-paranoia was offered up earlier in the blockbuster season by Mel Gibson. Thanks to Mike and Mel, we now know the telltale signs of auteuristic bad faith: the entering into defense mode from the storyboarding phase; the unwillingness to carry the debate out of the cineplex and into the public forum; and the kind ofattention to select detail that would make Richard Hofstadter roll over in his grave.

It occurred to me halfway through watching Fahrenheit 9/11 that what distinguishes this movie from The Passion of the Christ is Moore's total lack of devotion to his particular gospel. Imagine what that smug grin of his must have undergone in the hours upon hours spent editing his precious masterpiece. What footage might have caused those fleshy jowls to avalanche in a rictus of opposed self-judgement? Or are we to believe there never was anything on the celluloid that Moore deemed unprintable for reasons of lending credence to counterpoint? Believe that, and wait a year or two... Michael Moore will tell you another one.

Dress Your Family in Denim and Courduroy  
Comical Chic: Dress Your Family in Courduroy and Denim
by Nic Duquette

His most recent offering is more uneven than previous collections, although its highlights show the polish of an experienced craftsman. His humor is less dependent on homosexuality-based jokes with fluorescent sell-by dates and instead plays on human cruelties as heartbreaking as they are funny. His wit is colossal. His fame has led to self-consciousness that is by turns annoying and artful. I could be talking about the Eminem record that came out a few years ago, but it's David Sedaris who's cleaning out his closet now. Sometimes the anguish is too much for Sedaris to deliver, particularly in the first half of the book; but it's relatively light, breezy anguish -- think Eggers without structural games -- and it sets the stage for some of Sedaris's finest essays yet, from his highly uncomfortable time working at a maid service to his plans to remodel Anne Frank's hideout into the perfect apartment -- before sputtering to a close. Unfortunately, the darker tone worries me about Sedaris's career plans; the book is classified as ESSAYS, with no HUMOR cross-listing. Furthermore, the new biography inside the dust jacket begins "David Sedaris is a playwright..." and relegates his humor work to the bottom of the paragraph. Playwright my ass. Let's all hope Sedaris is not becoming ashamed of humor.