David Denby has the worst job on earth. As the New Yorker’s other film critic, Denby has the misfortune of competing with the suffocatingly funny Anthony Lane, a stylist and wit who once likened R2-D2 and C-3PO to “a beeping trash can and a gay, gold-plated Jeeves” and wrote that Revenge of the Sith was superior to its predecessors “only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion.” Lane is a tough act to follow. Denby must work with a sneeze guard over his laptop to keep the flop sweat from shorting it out.

Denby is a fine writer, and his criticism is often perceptive and illuminating, but I doubt I’m alone in feeling a pang of disappointment when I see his byline and not Lane’s. I wasn’t surprised, however, to see his name on Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation. It should have been called Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Hilarious, and It’s Upstaging Me on a Biweekly Basis. Denby describes snark as a “strain of nasty, knowing abuse spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation.” The reader soon finds that Denby’s aim is to devalue what he lacks—above-average wit is nowhere to be seen in this book—by conflating it with everything from hyperbolic insult to gossip to jokes that aren’t funny to misogyny to racism. Let’s have a look.

The First Principle of Snark: The “Whatever” Principle. Attack without reason. To illustrate this principle, Denby relates a crack made on the weblog Wonkette the day Teddy Kennedy underwent brain surgery: “[D]octors fixed a clogged artery in his neck. They successfully removed the Jameson bottle.” Denby follows this up with a pious paraphrase of De mortuis nil nisi bonum which also allows that “the senator has lifted a glass now and then.” His disingenuousness is infuriating: Is he inviting us to be outraged by a cheap shot at a cosseted public official? Is that the most convincing example he can muster? No, he also comes to the agonizingly sanctimonious defense of Suri Cruise—an infant, and unlikely to appreciate the gesture. Are these attacks “without reason”? Quite to the contrary, they reinforce a useful sense of shame, by reminding readers that drinking to excess or giving birth to a publicity stunt are aberrant behaviors.

The Second Principle of Snark: The White Man’s Last Stand Principle. Appeal to common, hackneyed prejudices. Denby quotes a McCain ad about Barack Obama: “It should be known that in 2008 the world shall be blessed. They will call him . . . The One.” “To anyone above the Mason-Dixon line,” Denby writes, “it seemed nothing more than a sour reference to Keanu Reeves’ savior character in the Matrix movies. In the South, however, it may have functioned on another level: ‘The One,’ according to Southerners, is a putdown of someone getting above himself and is likely, in this context, to be taken as derision of an ‘uppity’ black.”

If I had to say whether snark or dishonesty posed a more serious threat to “our” conversation, I would not hesitate to pick the latter. For starters, the line is not a Matrix reference. It’s generic religious language composed to ridicule the religious overtones of Obama fever. Even the staunchest Obama supporters of my acquaintance complained about these quasi-millenarian delusions, if only because they set the bar too high. The TV spot Denby suggests may have been a racist insinuation was unambiguous. It is the height of snark, as Denby tries to define it—self-serving mean-spiritedness—to pretend otherwise.

The Third Principle of Snark: The Pawnshop Principle. Reach into the rotting heap of media referents for old jokes, old insults, and give them a twist. There is already a name for this: unfunny. Calling it “snark” dignifies it unnecessarily.

The Fourth Principle of Snark: The Throw-Some-Mud Principle. Assume anything negative said about someone with power is true—or at least usable. Here Denby is either talking about lies, which are already subject to libel laws, or he’s talking about needlessly embarrassing facts. If he’s talking about lies, then we don’t need new terminology for the phenomenon, least of all terminology that trivializes it. Nevertheless, this argument should find sympathetic ears, especially when Denby lashes out at the former Gawker blogger Emily Gould, a stranger to style and wit, who admitted on television that she felt justified in humiliating celebrities with the cash to console themselves. (Gould later wrote a self-pitying manifesto for the New York Times Magazine detailing how an upbraiding by Jimmy Kimmel sent her straight into the mouth of madness.)

The Fifth Principle of Snark: The Reckless Disregard Principle. Ignore the routine responsibilities of journalism. Denby gnashes his teeth at the “habit of never checking the truth of anything” on blogs and media websites. Yet no mention is made of, for instance, the Killian documents controversy (Dan Rather), Vicki Iseman (The New York Times), or the Soap Opera Plot against the Palin family, in which major media outlets tried to convince us, if memory serves, that Bristol Palin had given birth to all the other members of the family while sequestered in a Mexican convent. Once again, Denby confuses snark with libel while omitting significant recent examples of the latter.

The Sixth Principle of Snark: The Hobbyhorse Principle. Reduce all human complexity to carcicature. Here, Denby’s Nine Theses begin to peter out into inanity. Criticizing some aspect of a public figure is tantamount to murder. Never mind that reducing someone to caricature has been known since time immemorial as “caricature.” Is there reason to complain if Angelina Jolie or Madonna are dressed down (so to speak) as misery tourists or Third World kidnappers? If Tom Cruise is characterized as a mentally ill trampolinist? Denby reaches back into the vault to harass the editors of Spy for their campaign against short people, an ill-conceived joke that few other than Denby and Tom Cruise are likely to remember.

The Seventh Principle of Snark: The You-Suck Principle. It’s snarky, according to Denby, to turn on a celebrity one used to adulate. The catalyst—drug abuse, a disastrous marriage, bizarre behavior—is irrelevant. The beautiful needn’t be damned. Denby sees them as fragile Fabergé eggs; it’s his role to see them safely to the end of the race.

The Eighth Principle of Snark: The Pacemaker Principle. Attack the old. You’ll never guess who doesn’t make an appearance here. Hint: He was permanently crippled by his Vietnamese captors and as a result has been slow to set up a Facebook page.

The Ninth Principle of Snark: The Gastronomic Principle. Attack expensive, underperforming restaurants. Is snark ruining “our” conversation, or the conversations of New Yorker staff writers? In fact, Denby approves of this manifestation of his enemy: “Vicious snark is necessary when it amounts to protest against oppression by overpriced dining.” He’s not even kidding. And I’m not even laughing. And neither, probably, are you.

Denby is at his best, or at least his most justified, when wondering what the Internet will do to the concept of reputation. He is understandably horrified by the ease with which petty, unqualified, and anonymous assailants can spread lies about those with the courage or ambition to put themselves in the public eye, whether or not it’s the limelight. The trouble is, much of the chum he dumps in the snark tank is something else altogether. It is, at best, low comedy—at worst, prejudice or brutality.

And Denby frequently tries his hand at what he calls snark, but he’s abysmal at it. He reduces the brilliantly readable James Wolcott to a “the most adept towel snapper in the locker room.” A paragraph later, he scolds Joe Queenan for his facetious suggestion that the blind are lucky because they “get to go through life without ever seeing Shelley Winters.” With film-major pedantry he reminds us that Winters “had love affairs with Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster, and William Holden”; it never occurs to Denby that the joke would have fallen flat were Winters someone celebrated for her ugliness. Should I write Denby an angry letter reminding him that Wolcott has written criticism—of a variety of genres—far more memorable, entertaining, and penetrating than Denby’s? Wouldn’t that be taking the joke a bit too seriously?

Public life, particularly public life in the arts, is not for the sensitive or timid. Most of the people Denby rails against have hides like depleted-uranium tank armor; his is a rice-paper screen painted with mists and swallows. If you are a professional Snarksmith, to borrow the title of my friend Michael Weiss’s website, the only message to read into Denby’s priggish tract is: Keep up the good work.

The most unusual drink I ever took is a mouthful of hot moonshine whiskey, right out of a handsome copper still. I can’t provide any further details about this incident, though, moonshine being the natural enemy of recall. The fact is that however marvelous it may have been, and probably was, I’m thankful I don’t have to drink it every day. After all, variety is the eau de vie.

Seventy-five years ago, the loathsome Eighteenth Amendment yielded to the Twenty-first Amendment, and there was much rejoicing throughout the land as Prohibition took its rightful place in the urinal cake of history. This deserves to be celebrated, like Guy Fawkes Day, with the burning of effigies: May I suggest Carrie Nation? This woman, like some ugly, gargantuan grandmother (she stood nearly six feet tall), was a perfect physical embodiment of the nanny state, and might as well have been the model for Ken Kesey’s Nurse Ratched.

Here’s the Yale Law Review, Vol. 11, No. 3 (January 1902) on Nation’s infamous “hatchetations”:

NUISANCE—COMMON NUISANCE—ABATEMENT.—STATE V. STARK, 66 Pac. 243 (Kan.).—On Feb. 17, 1901, in the city of Topeka, the appellant, with Carrie Nation and six others, broke into and injured a billiard hall in connection with which intoxicating liquors were sold. By statute, all places where intoxicating liquors are sold or kept for sale are declared to be common nuisances. The court held, however, that this fact does not justify their abatement by any person or persons without process of law.

Of course, the “process of law” frequently results in outcomes every bit as intrusive and infantilizing as Carrie Nation’s barroom smash-ups—hence Prohibition. The Temperance crusader eventually took to calling herself Carry A. Nation, going so far as to trademark the name for use as a slogan, and it couldn’t have been more telling. The present-day nanny state presumes to carry a nation like a snugly swaddled infant. We are free to drink alcohol, but not without being scolded for it at every turn; we are not free, as plenty will remind us today, to use a host of other substances.

Even the Wall Street Journal, hardly a “Legalize It” mouthpiece on the order of High Times magazine, has provided a forum for the inevitable Repeal Day arguments. Ethan A. Nadelmann, the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, writes today that “[t]he Americans who voted in 1933 to repeal prohibition differed greatly in their reasons for overturning the system. But almost all agreed that the evils of failed suppression far outweighed the evils of alcohol consumption.” He goes on to write:

Consider the consequences of drug prohibition today: 500,000 people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails for nonviolent drug-law violations; 1.8 million drug arrests last year; tens of billions of taxpayer dollars expended annually to fund a drug war that 76% of Americans say has failed; millions now marked for life as former drug felons; many thousands dying each year from drug overdoses that have more to do with prohibitionist policies than the drugs themselves, and tens of thousands more needlessly infected with AIDS and Hepatitis C because those same policies undermine and block responsible public-health policies.

The obvious objection to this cost-benefit analysis is that it’s a cost-benefit analysis: If a behavior is wrong, it’s wrong regardless of the challenges of prevention. But it’s difficult to argue against a behavior when its attendant problems, the ones that make it seem wrong, are already covered by laws against larceny, child neglect or abuse, domestic violence, and so forth.

Nevertheless, a liberatarian argument for the legalization of, for example, heroin, however persuasive philosophically, is bound to run into trouble with the public. Best for the time being to stick with softer drugs—that is, those which do not produce physical dependency, or death from overdose. Alcohol, which is already legal, can convincingly be grouped with hard drugs. So why doesn’t it seem like one?

The real distinction should be clear to anyone with the intellect of a barnacle. There are substances thought throughout history to produce conversation and camaraderie, and those known to result in nothing but stupefaction. We associate alcohol with speakeasies and flappers and, forgive me, literary types, marijuana with noisy dorms and babbling philosophy majors, and heroin with human amoebas crapping themselves in doorways. One is useful, in its own way; one is relatively harmless; one is patently destructive. It seems to me this might be a better guide to legislation, which is concerned to some degree with social cohesion, than all the medical knowledge in the world.

The Deipnosophistae of Athanaeus, an ancient Greece compilation of gastronomic lore, quotes a certain Astydamas thusly: “If someone constantly fills himself with wine, he grows/ careless; but if he drinks only a little, he grows quite thoughtful.” We’ve all seen this in practice, but it isn’t just the moderation that counts—it’s the substance being abused. Some things just aren’t fit for human consumption, and you will know them by their works: William S. Burroughs, Sid Vicious, and countless other sleepy mediocrities. Bartlett’s is full of the wisdom of wine—less so of weed, I suppose—but I can’t think of too many junkies, crackheads, or speed freaks who had anything memorable to say.

The softest drugs, by my definition, are not only great looseners of tongues but also great equalizers: They keep us humble and remind us that we’re human beings, prone to doing and saying foolish, though not necessarily terrible, things. The opposite of pride is shame, not humility, and the small dose of shame that intoxication yields is more of an inoculation than a poison, if “enjoyed responsibly,” as the saying goes. No wonder the teetotalers are so often megalomaniacs. They wage war not against social ills but against the freedom to acknowledge the fact that we are, in the final analysis, at least as small and absurd as we seem to be.

It’s often said that only the boring fall victim to boredom. A better way of putting this is that there are those on whom boredom acts as a powerful sedative or paralytic, and those for whom even a few parts per million have exactly the opposite effect. The early films of Wes Anderson, a director I’ve come to loathe, introduced us to characters who took life’s lemons and cooked them into crystal meth. The best of these, pace all the Rushmore fans out there, is Bottle Rocket (1996).

I first watched Bottle Rocket, which the Criterion Collection has rereleased in a two-disc edition, on my sixteenth birthday. I had just secured gainful employment at Video Galaxy and was, needless to say, bored—despite the fact that I was separated from an Alexandrian library of pornography by nothing sturdier than a pair of swinging saloon doors. (Circumstances prevented me from getting my driver’s license until the following year, so actual girls were as yet prized above rubies.)

I won’t pretend that Anderson’s debut hit me like a fabulous yellow lightning bolt from the clear blue. Nor did I catch its dutiful homage to Catcher in the Rye in the person of Anthony Adams’s precocious younger sister, Grace; it didn’t dawn on me until Anderson reincarnated Salinger’s Glass family in The Royal Tenenbaums.

But what did Anderson’s delightful protagonists Anthony and Dignan have in common with the joyless solipsism of Holden Caulfield, patron saint of misfits and assassins, anyway? It was an allusion in name only.
Here’s a spoiler-free synopsis for those fortunate to be able to take Mr. Anderson’s Wild Ride for the first time. The movie opens with Anthony (Luke Wilson) “escaping,” with the help of his friend Dignan (Owen Wilson), from a voluntary mental health clinic. As Anthony later tells his sister, “It wasn’t an insane asylum, Grace. I explained to you back then that it was for exhaustion.” Grace: “You haven’t worked a day in your life. How could you be exhausted?” A bit close to home for a guy who had literally worked a day in his life, but that did nothing if not draw me in further.

Dignan presents Anthony with a “75-Year Plan” toward becoming master criminals, suburban Goldfingers woefully short on diabolical schemes. After recruiting a driver, Bob Mapplethorpe (Robert Musgrave), they pull off a minor theft and go on the lam. “On the run from Johnny Law,” Dignan says portentously. “Ain’t no trip to Cleveland.” This kind of dialogue, always in Dignan’s mouth, is Bottle Rocket’s real spark, and crime lit lovers will think of Sam Spade’s line in The Maltese Falcon: “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.” Once you’ve seen Bottle Rocket a few times, it takes incredible self-control not to tell your pals to “rendezvous at the checkpoint” whenever you’re meeting up for beers.

It isn’t Anthony’s love affair with a Paraguayan housekeeper but the gang’s Big Heist at the behest of master criminal Mr. Henry (James Caan) that is Bottle Rocket’s emotional centerpiece. It’s the culmination of a will to escape the pull of boredom at all costs. Earlier, explaining his nervous breakdown, Anthony delivers one of the movie’s most quotable lines: “One morning, over at Elizabeth’s beach house, she asked me if I’d rather go water-skiing or lay out. And I realized that not only did I not want to answer that question, but I never wanted to answer another water-sports question, or see any of these people again, for the rest of my life.” Necessitas non habet legem, and neither, if Anthony and Dignan’s examples are to be trusted, does boredom.

Thus does one of the film’s most minor character become it’s most illustrative one. I mean Bob Mapplethorpe’s sadistic older brother “Future Man” (Andrew Wilson), an avatar of popped-collar douchebaggery such as the world of martinis and Clams Casino has never known. His moniker must be an inside joke among the three brothers Wilson, but it’s suggestive in any case: This is what you run the risk of becoming if you lose your sense of adventure and of the sublimely ridiculous. Rushmore’s Magnus Buchan is a version of this character, someone who lacks the courage or imagination to be anything but a dull brute. Both get their comeuppance and their redemption; as Magnus tells Max Fischer, “I always wanted to be in one of your fuckin’ plays.”

So where did Anderson lose the plot? In the March 2000 issue of Esquire, Martin Scorcese called Dignan “an innocent,” though of course “not in the eyes of the law.” He doesn’t go so far as to say that this special kind of innocence exists only at the movies. Nobody could behave in real life as Anthony and Dignan do without being painfully aware of his protected status as a “dreamer,” which is to say, without being the polar opposite of a dreamer—a cynic.

Bottle Rocket seems to have taught Wes Anderson that there is a market for mannered whimsy, an audience that wants the blueprints for Dignan’s sweet cluelessness, so it can be told, “I could never stay mad at you.” Anderson’s imagination, once working full-bore against boredom, now struggles to fill an insatiable demand for emotional pornography. The most painful thing about Criterion’s new Bottle Rocket is that it includes the black-and-white short on which the movie is based—thirteen minutes that show, like fellow Austinite Richard Linklater’s 1991 Slacker, what kind of entertainment can be made out of the right kind of boredom.

The Thanksgiving season is all about gratitude. But when we're sitting around the table with our families and someone asks what we're thankful for, we usually just say 'my health' or 'our family all being together' or something else that's technically true but not terribly edgy. So we asked some of Jewcy's contributors to tell us what they're thankful for--their guiltiest pleasures. Don't say we didn't warn you.

Stefan Beck: American Chain Restaurants

You never miss a good thing til it's gone. When I lived on the Peloponnese in the summer of 2007, my dining options were limited, as at a bad wedding, to salad, chicken, and beef. By July I would have given Athens to the Turks for a plausible cheeseburger, so I made a bus trip to the Applebee's in Αμπελόκηποι. Anybody convinced of the superiority of continental European cuisine should give this a shot. "Tartare" would be a generous description of the beef, just as "gym teacher's insole" would be a generous description of the bacon. The lettuce was seaweed. The tomatoes were, of course, outstanding.

There are some things we Americans alone do well, and the crappy chain restaurant is one of them. Last summer, after driving the long way from Kadoka, South Dakota, to Casper, Wyoming, I found that every motel in town had been booked solid by the Germans of Russian Descent Convention. Every motel but one-which had literally one room left open. It shared a parking lot with Outback Steakhouse, on the aptly named Miracle Road. It was one of the most welcome and memorable meals of my life, like a Dasani dispenser in the Gobi.

These places get a bad rap. Sure, they're "generic" or "lowbrow"-so what? There's less variation in the home-cooked food of the Greek mainland than there is in the strip-mall hellholes of the United States. And some of them are pretty awesome. Just tonight, for instance, I was at a P. F. Chang's. It's more than worth the "Changover," my term for the inevitable morning-after salt and MSG headache. I've never been to Outer Mongolia, but I bet the "Mongolian Beef" at P. F. Chang's is significantly less likely to give you fatal diarrhea than the real thing. And at least P. F. Chang's has a customer feedback card.

Craig Glazer: Good Times

OK, so I still watch Good Times on late night TV, partly because I'm friends with Jimmie "Dy-no-mite" Walker and also because I still find it funny. Maybe because running Kansas City's Stanford and Sons, one of the top comedy clubs in the country, keeps me up late and his old show tends to air after midnight a lot. Maybe it's because I get a kick out of seeing Janet Jackson playing his little sister. By the way, the star was supposed to be John Amos but he got jammed by Jimmie's enormous popularity as "J.J." Amos never got over it. I know that because Jimmie and I email each other every week and he updates me on the lives of other baby boomer stars from back in the day, like comic David Brenner, who filled in for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show so often. Jimmie started his comedy career on The Tonight Show with original host Jack Parr. But that's before my time. Maybe I like "Good Times" so much because we're both so stuck in the '70s.

Marty Beckerman: Paul McCartney's Solo Years

After the Beatles called it quits in 1970 John begged us to give peace a chance, George explored the immaterial world, Ringo... well, Ringo doesn't count... and the critics damned Paul for singing unbearable, syrupy schlock which offended anyone who was not technically deaf, as well as deaf people who actually read his lyrics.

However, McCartney's solo catalog is the most genuinely ass-kicking of all four, despite its many cringe-inducing flaws. Yes, "Ebony and Ivory" is a more sinister torture than anything that occurred at Abu Ghraib, "Freedom" makes you wish the government would outlaw music, and synth-laden ‘80s holiday anthem "Wonderful Christmastime" inspires thoughts of self-immolation, but McCartney had the lowest lows and the highest highs: "Maybe I'm Amazed," "Live and Let Die," "Band on the Run," "Junior's Farm" and "Jet" rock as hard as any Beatles song, and his acoustic tunes such as "Junk," "Distractions," "Jenny Wren," "Here Today" are deeply peaceful and even poignant.

In a morbid way, Lennon's solo work benefits from his 1980 death because he was unable to ruin his music with awful ‘80s production values and middle-aged nostalgia, but there are plenty of gems-alongside the unforgivable (yet catchy!) abominations-in McCartney's later work: "My Brave Face," "Your Way," "Lonely Road," "Calico Skies," "She Is So Beautiful," "Gratitude," and "No Other Baby." I would never, never play these songs with friends in attendance, and there is no dignity in admitting Paul is your favorite Beatle-actually there is quite a bit of shame, horrible shame-but as a wise man once said: "Everybody gonna dance tonight, everybody gonna feel all right, everybody gonna dance around tonight, woooooooooo." Listen to what the man said.

Lilit Marcus: The View

The View is the worst thing on television, and I'm including According to Jim in that count. Originally concieved as a show where four women from different age groups and backgrounds would discuss the day's major issues from a female perspective, after ten seasons it has devolved into the worst kind of self-parody: the kind that thinks it's high art instead of self-parody. Grande Dame Barbara Walters--who I'll admit is a pioneer, but really needs to retire rather than reduce herself to appearing on this dreck and being pulled into the infighting--loves to insist as loudly as possible that all the show's cohosts (Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, Sherri Shepherd, and Elisabeth Hasselbeck) love each other and make friendship bracelets and braid each other's hair at slumber parties. No one seems to buy it, least of all the ladies themselves.

The reason the show is offensively bad rather than just plain mediocre, however, is Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Depending which viewer of the show you ask, Hasselbeck is either 'the young one,' 'the blonde one,' or 'the stupid one.' A onetime Survivor also-ran who landed on The View when they sought a young conservative to join the show, Hasselbeck is the wife of a D-list professional football player and an adamant, diehard Republican. Lest you think that I, an admitted liberal, hate Hasselbeck simply for her beliefs and affiliations, let me clarify. There are plenty of well-spoken conservatives out there who manage to make their points by using reason instead of yelling. Several of them write for us. But Elisabeth Hasselbeck is shrill, illogical, compassionless, smug, unable to see nuance, and cries and crawls into her boss (Walters)' lap when she doesn't get her way. I utterly, utterly dislike almost everything about her, from the way she almost never talks about her kids in a positive way and yet says her best quality is 'being a mom' to the way that she deflects any actual fact hurled in her direction by saying she's going to Google it later. And yet I cannot stop watching her. Maybe she's fallen from the 'hate' category into the 'love to hate' one. Or perhaps I'm just waiting for the day when one of her cohosts (please, please let it be Joy Behar) finally has heard too much of Hasselbeck's argument that if we let gay people marry each other the next step will be letting people marry toasters and tells her off on live television. I think that's why I keep tuning in every day--because maybe, just maybe, today will be that day.

Max Gross: Adam Sandler.

I admit that Adam Sandler is sort of retarded.

There are plenty of stupid movies out there that have a self- awareness making them somewhat forgivable -- but Sandler doesn't qualify.

For instance, Todd Phillips' movie Old School is almost artistic in how it culls all sorts of college movies and franternity movies and male-midlife-crisis movies into one great big slobby comedy. There's a kind of genius behind it.

Likewise, there's a kind of art behind stoner movies like Dude, Where's My Car? and Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. They're stupid as hell -- but they fit so artfully into their genre, that all you can do is marvel at them.

I don't think the same can be said about Sandler movies. There's really no subtext. The jokes are as simple and lamebrained as watching Curly get hit in the face with a hammer. (Another guilty pleasure of mine.)
But I must admit, I sort of love Billy Madison. And Big Daddy. And I thought that the opening scene of Anger Management was a classic (even though the last twenty minutes sucked). And the fight between Sandler and Bob Barker in Happy Gilmore is one of the most hysterically funny things I've ever seen.

Not all Adam Sandler movies are created equally -- I didn't find Little Nicky particularly amusing. And I absolutely hated I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. And The Waterboy is a dreadfully unfunny movie.
But I defy anyone not to laugh when they see Happy Gilmore headbutt Bob Barker with the memorable line, "The price is wrong, bitch!"

Michael Weiss: Gossip Girl

This serialized Cruel Intentions affords glimpse into what my little sister’s high school years were like at the Professional Children’s School (alma mater of Scarlett Johansson, Mischa Barton and, for about a year, Paris Hilton), except that the characters are richer, nastier and less plausible. I’m a Serena man, or at least I was until it was disclosed in the course of a single, erratic season that she stole the Lindbergh baby and fomented a coup in Uruguay. Nothing is predictable, and a major ripple exists in the bitch-sweetie spacetime continuum. Serena not drinking to impress her dippy emo artist boyfriend? Never fear: by Christmas she’ll be slaloming off mountains of blow in Gstaad with Medusa hair and lipstick applied like Diane Ladd’s in Wild at Heart.

Each episode is sort of a stand-alone pubescent debauch, which is why I laugh whenever someone tells me they haven’t watched the show because they’d have to start from the “beginning.” No one goes to class on the Upper East Side, 15 year-olds start their own fashion lines, and college is just another status symbol for the Betty-and-Veronica female leads to pull each other’s hair over.

Chuck Bass makes this demimonde go round, and although he’s dressed and pomaded like a ventriloquist’s gay dummy, his unexpected heterosexuality goes to eleven. He’s fucked more Maxim cover models than Tony Stark and John Mayer, and he’s collected email passwords and social security numbers for insurance. (I always wanted to be born into a family with a private eye on retainer.) Yet there is a kernel of humanity smothered in that outer husk of sleepy womanizing evil. Bass sticks up for his kith and kin: witness his role in slaying Georgina, Serena’s arch-“frenemy,” and his facilitation, in last week’s Thanksgiving special, of his father and stepmother’s inevitable divorce (he loosed all the secret files on the family to the family).

As for the rest of the ho-hum cast, Dan and Nate should commit thwarted-love double suicide, and Rufus should stay on tour with Collective Soul.

A good measure of how badly someone wants something is how he goes about trying to get it. Fringe political candidates, blocking traffic in their flag-capes and foam Statue of Liberty crowns, don’t really want to be president—they just want an hour in the limelight before returning to their jobs at Circuit City and Jack in the Box. I would hope that gay marriage is taken more seriously than that by its proponents, but so far I’ve seen quite a bit of evidence to the contrary.

As I’ve written previously, I support gay marriage. It would be dishonest to claim that I have much of an emotional investment in it, though; I didn’t wail or gnash my teeth when Prop 8 was defeated on the California ballot. I was disappointed, because the vote meant that a majority of my fellow Californians had not been persuaded by what I think are eminently reasonable arguments. What I did not think, despite the best efforts of the gay marriage lobby, is: I am surrounded by rabid hatemongers.

Americans are a notoriously impatient people. Consider the argument that gay marriage will take us down the slippery slope to polygamy. By implication, polygamy is so strange, so alien, that even the most fearful conservatives acknowledge it’s a long way off. Does this make any sense? There is far more historical, not to mention biblical, precedent for polygamy. Gay marriage is the truly alien concept; it does the movement no good to pretend otherwise. It stands to reason that millennia of taboo and discomfort do not vanish overnight because you waved a “NO ON H8” banner in the Castro. And yet, as any right-thinking person knows, the culprit must be hate!

I’m not convinced, partly because in the absence of any emotional response to the issue I took some time to come around to the pro-marriage side of things. I saw marriage as one of two things: the sanctification of a relationship before God, in which case the state has nothing whatsoever to do with it, or a completely secular practice designed to encourage social cohesion by providing for the welfare of children, as well as of one or both partners. In that case, then why not vote for more social cohesion?

I was surprised when I learned, belatedly, that in California homosexuals can already enjoy, under the name “civil union,” the same financial and social benefits that accrue to other married couples. It really is all about a word! And as a person who cares about language—I object, for instance, to the substitution of “right” for “privilege” in discourse about health care—I can understand the complaint. Why should it be implied by a word that heterosexual marriage is more meaningful than homosexual union?

It shouldn’t. It shouldn’t be implied that any union effected by the state means anything other than tax breaks, inheritance rights, hospital visitation privileges, heath care, and so forth. If it’s sanctification you want, find a church, or get a flute and some incense and play dress-up on your own time—whether you’re gay or straight.

The trouble is that voters who oppose gay marriage on such dispassionate grounds will still be branded bigots. And they won’t like it. And they’ll cast protest votes against gay marriage, because they don’t like to be called monsters on the grounds that they make decisions based on logic rather than emotion, or faith rather than logic, or—take your pick, they don’t like to be called monsters at all.

The prevailing attitude among gay marriage supporters seems to be that if it doesn’t actively bother you, you’re obligated to go along with it, whether or not you think it’s philosophically defensible. Justice used to be blind; now it’s meant to be “chill.” If you have lingering doubts, legal, practical, religious, or otherwise, about something that’s been verboten since the dawn of man, you are an asshole or an idiot, end of story. Here’s a little tip for the gay marriage lobby: Calling people assholes and idiots never persauded them of anything. As an old question has it, “Do you want to be right, or do you want to win?”

Why is cinematic violence so much more disturbing when performed with an everyday object and not a weapon? I don't mean Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with the candlestick. In Gaspar Noé's Irréversible (2002), easily the most violent film I've ever seen, a man's face is crushed like papier mâché with a fire extinguisher. Then there's the pot of coffee in A History of Violence (2005), the oar in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), the pencil in The Dark Knight (2008)-itself a lo-fi homage to the "pen is mightier" gag from the 1989 original. How about the TV in Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) or the bong in Pineapple Express (2008)? I won't mention the outcome of the eyeball-v.-splinter staring contest in Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2 (1980).

Here's a short list, in no particular order, of items used to bring the pain in Quantum of Solace: sewing scissors, crude oil, broken glass, a motorcycle, a telephone, hydrogen fuel cells, a speedboat, an airplane, a long drop, a fire axe, a Bolivian desert, an icy stare. (When Shakespeare wrote of "a killing frost," did he have Daniel Craig's Bond in mind?) These are infinitely preferable to the gadgets of yesteryear, because they only look like weapons to someone with a killer instinct.

This is not to say that Quantum of Solace is disturbing. It's an obscene amount of fun. Like the previous Bond films, it appeals to the ten-year-old boy in you, even if you happen to be a girl; unlike those films, with the exception of Casino Royale (2006), it also reassures you that you're a grown-up, even as you gasp credulously while Bond parachutes into a sinkhole from a burning airplane. The plot involves destabilizing governments and seizing natural resources, just like real life! It also revolves around revenge, a far more grown-up source of narrative propulsion than, say, an improbably named bad guy pointing an improbably named missile at a certain tiny island nation.

Where Casino Royale, in which Bond loses his beloved Vesper Lynd, was a How the Leopard Got His Spots (or, in this case, Naughts) story, Quantum of Solace just shows him doing what leopards do best. "If you could avoid killing every possible lead," M tells him, "it would be deeply appreciated." Alas, she's just not much of an animal trainer, and Bond's fury sends him ranging hungrily over the globe.

The film begins in Siena, picking up roughly where Casino Royale left off, with M and Bond discovering an evil organization called Quantum that has infiltrated the highest levels of government. They discover this when M's personal assistant tries to shoot them. There follows a cracking good rooftop chase, broken tiles flying everywhere, intercut with shots of Siena's famous horse race Il Palio. From there Bond goes to Haiti, England, Austria, Bolivia-don't quote me on the order, because it's all a jumble of blunt trauma, explosions, and cell phone calls. All you need to know is that Quantum, and the late Vesper's Algerian boyfriend, had something to do with Vesper's death.

There's an evil environmentalist-I liked that part-named Dominic Greene, played with lubricious, bug-eyed creepiness by the Frenchman Mathieu Amalric. He dresses and looks like Michel Houellebecq on a tropical sex holiday, but is credibly frightening when he tells a Bolivian dictator that non-compliance will mean waking up with his cojones in his mouth. The Bond Girl, Camille (Olga Kurylenko), wants to make that threat a reality, because the dictator killed her entire family and burned down her house in front of her. Why did he leave her alive? Isn't that the biggest no-no when killing an entire family? If I had to guess, I'd say it was for the sake of the plot.

"Bond had a sharp sense of ridiculous," Ian Fleming informs us in the short story "Quantum of Solace." The same cannot be said of Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis, and Robert Wade, the writers of this film, and for that we ought to be grateful. The negative reactions to Quantum of Solace have been curiously at odds with each other, with some critics calling it "boring," "dour," "lacking in emotional depth," or a Jason Bourne knockoff, and others complaining, in effect, that it isn't boring or dour enough-that it should have been a rumination on revenge rather than a relentlessly violent depiction of it.

Rubbish. It gives real fans exactly what they want: ludicrous adventure leavened with a speck of plot and a vanishingly tiny dash of honest feeling. If you want a rumination on revenge, read "Quantum of Solace," which bears no relation to the movie and consists entirely of a story told to Bond about a cuckolded husband. The title is his interlocutor's term for the modicum of "common humanity" that, once lost in either partner, makes the dissolution of a relationship, and the incredible emotional violence that can accompany it, all but inevitable:

Bond laughed. Suddenly the violent dramatics of his own life seemed very hollow. The affair of the Castro rebels and the burned-out yachts was the stuff of an adventure-strip in a cheap newspaper. He had sat next to a dull woman at a dull dinner party and a chance remark had opened for him the book of real violence-of the comédie humaine where human passions are raw and real, where Fate plays a more authentic game than any Secret Service conspiracy devised by governments.

All very sensitive, very moving. Now aren't you relieved that Quantum of Solace didn't bother about that stuff? Once you've seen the affair of the burned-out yachts on the big screen, I think you'll agree that the comédie humaine is just a little bit overrated.

The sun is rising over the Lake Chabot Marina, in California's Castro Valley, and I've just opened my eyes to find a heavy-set African-American woman slipping fluorescent pink and green fliers under my windshield wipers. She smiles apologetically, and when I smile back, she mouths "thank you" and proceeds down Lake Chabot Road. There are dozens of cars to paper. I go back to sleep. An hour or two later, I clamber out of the Jeep and inspect the fliers.

One advertises Herbalife, a weight-loss program pushed, like Ginsu cutlery, through multi-level or "network" marketing. The other promises that I can "lose 2-8 pounds per week." The contact name and number are identical: This is Vanessa's home business. If only she'd noticed the decals, bumper stickers, and license plate frames on most of these cars: "Marathon Freak," "26.2," "Runner Girl," "Running Is My Prozac," and "Western States 100 Mile Endurance Challenge." These are not people greatly in need of weight-loss nostrums.
I could use that, I think, my thoughts returning to the Crockpot back at my apartment, in which a four-pound pork shoulder is cooking. I'm one of a few people at the Lake Chabot Marina, the starting point of the Dick Collins Firetrails 50, not there in an athletic capacity. I have no interest in running fifty miles. I have a vested interest in not running any miles. I'm merely the hungry, exhausted, and woefully hung-over chauffeur of rookie ultramarathoner Sarah C. Murray, who strives daily to put the loco in locomotion.

At 6:30 AM I escorted her in complete darkness to the starting line. A surprise to see someone report so cheerfully to a torture chamber.

The gloom was punctuated here and there by headlamps like will-o-wisps. The mood at the registration table, at this hour the only oasis of light in the park, was a kind of mocking inversion of my own. I hadn't made time to shower, despite not having managed to sleep, either. Yet here was a flock of merry and chattering loons eager to take wing. Everywhere I looked, a pair of striated legs was being stretched out in elaborate and unpleasant-looking ways. One man appeared to be rubbing IcyHot into his thighs; it turned out to be Vaseline, to prevent chafing.

An alien language was spoken here: "Not plantar fasciitis, I hope?"; "You've done three ultras in two months?"; "I trashed my patella"; "Did my first 100 in September." CamelBaks and bottled-water holsters were strapped on like armor before a battle. I dreamed of a Camel Light and a bottle of something high-proof to usher me back to slumberland. Put plainly, I loathed these people. They didn't register how cold it was, how pointless this was, how much happier they'd be in bed-even were that bed the back of a Jeep. Had I not known better, I might have supposed that they wanted to run fifty miserable miles.

I felt myself forming a philosophical objection to the ultramarathon, a term referring to any race longer than 26.2 miles. Some people accept mortality, embracing and, where possible, encouraging bodily limitations. Tempus fugit, as someone wise once observed: The paunch is coming, the double and treble chins, the thunder thighs, the muffin top. To this species of chronological determinism, the ultramarathoner says, no thanks. Ego fugit. Let time catch up with me. And it's pure hubris.

As a consequence, most ultramarathoners look like the Visible Man science model: bones, muscle, and a pair of eyes to remind you that this was once a human being. Ms. Murray is not among their number. Despite running between seven and twenty miles a day, she pays no special attention to nutrition. Her fuel inheres in beer, soup, and pretzels, a diet fit for hobos and endurance athletes alike. She keeps pace with her metabolism. She looks normal. Appearances can be deceiving.

I've rehearsed Latin aphorisms and Greek concepts, and this is no coincidence. Ms. Murray is not only a running fanatic who won her first marathon (Death Valley, 2007), but also a classicist and archaeologist (pursuing a Ph.D. at Stanford University). She's been to Marathon, where a statue of Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin, the founder of the International Olympic Committee, commemorates the first marathon-as well as the New Balance sneaker company, which commissioned the statue. She runs, coincidentally, in New Balance, women's size 9.5.

Greece inspired her first fifty-mile run, but not because of the feat attested in Plutarch and Herodotus. It was a sixty-kilometer (roughly forty-mile) walk from Korphos, on the eastern Peloponnese, to Mycenae, during which she discovered a Bronze Age site, that sealed the deal. "If I could walk it," she recalls thinking, "I could run it faster." There are echoes in this straightforward act of will of Patrick Leigh Fermor, the British travel writer who walked across Europe in his youth-a trip chronicled in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water-and went on to write two stunning books about Greece, Roumeli and Mani.

I'm not thinking of any of this as I sleep fitfully in the Jeep, then decide to scout a patch of grass in Chabot Park. In forty-eight hours, I've barely slept. Because Ms. Murray is a graduate student and I'm a freelance writer-an "ink-stained wretch," in George Orwell's memorable phrase-we keep different schedules, and I didn't manage to adjust my 4:30 AM bedtime in time for the race. It is with mild annoyance that I approach the marina café five hours into the race, order a cheeseburger, and plant myself on a deck with views of both algae-choked Lake Chabot and the red digital clock recording the runners' final times.

It's the finest cheeseburger I've ever eaten. It renews my commitment to sloth and gluttony. Smothered in onions, pickles, and molten cheese, snug in a nest of potato chips, it reminds me that there are two sources of pleasure in this world: the thing that feels so good when you stop, and the thing that goes on feeling good until you decide to stop. I will always be a fervent devotee of the latter.

But I cannot stifle the awe in which I hold those who choose the former. A little while after the six-hour mark, men begin to attain the finish line. Some have water bottles velcroed to their hands. All have legs chiseled into athletic history. I have something in common with these guys: I too am chiseled from marble. In my case, in the shape of a slob who eats cheeseburgers for breakfast.

Men and women, from the young to the very old, trickle into a victory chute marked off with orange traffic cones. Every flurry of applause yanks my gaze from the book I'm reading without much interest, but there is no Sarah Murray. I perform calculations, first with my cellphone and then, when its battery dies, with my brain. (My iPod, which I'd been using as a stopwatch, has long since crapped out.) What would her mile pace need to be to finish at seven hours? At seven-fifteen? At seven-forty-five? At eight? I watch an old woman remark a skywriter, a bird, a lesbian couple holding hands. I snort when another woman approvingly points out a "Google Bear," left in a stroller, to her daughter. I watch a young boy try to climb the fence surrounding Lake Chabot, to retrieve an escaped soccer ball. He changes his mind; he goes to fetch an adult. "Sissy," I think.

Still no Sarah. I feel concern, then anger. How could she get herself into this? How could she try to run fifty miles without eating a decent meal the night before? Without a hearty, or any, breakfast? Without water? Why doesn't she have high-tech sweat-wicking apparel like the other runners? I contemplate disaster scenarios: Would anybody stop if a runner collapsed of heat exhaustion, dehydration, or hyponatremia? Running fifty miles isn't just stupid; it's dangerous. Too little sodium in the blood can kill you. I begin to wonder if she's given this possibility the thought it deserves.

I maintain calm, and eventually she appears on the paved track. Most of the Firetrails 50 takes place, as its name suggests, on trails-the middle portion of the altitude profile looks suggestively like devil horns-but the first and last stretches are on asphalt. She's been beaten by dozens of runners, but she's alive. Her face is so caked with salt that it looks like she's wearing a Phantom of the Opera mask. She throws the goat as she passes the finish line, at 8:57:06.

But, as usual, I've misjudged the situation. Someone's handing her a tote bag and a bottle of wine. I understand my mistake: an ordinary marathon, which started later in the day, has been feeding the same finish line. The middle-aged women and senior citizens who've been "beating" Sarah for the past two hours aren't even part of her race. She is, in fact, first in her (21-29) age group, first among women who've never run a fifty-mile race before, and fifth among women overall. ("Rookie" appears next to her #169 on the results board, a funny term for someone who can run a greater distance than most people drive without whining about it.) She is thirty-third overall, including men of any age. As usual, she has swung for the fences and crushed it.

"Some girl had a pacer running with her," she says, "so that she could win the rookie title. I had to beat her."
She isn't howling or vomiting or cursing God. She's eager to be driven-my role, as you recall-to a Classics cookout, where our friends have been drinking Anchor Steam and playing leisurely games of badminton for the past few hours. Is she in terrible pain? She gestures guiltily to a fanny-pack full of Ibuprofen, salt pills, and NoDoz. It turns out she's been listening to Classics lectures on her iPod so as "not to get bored." Most runners would fret about the postage-stamp-weight of the device. She washes her face in a drinking fountain, and we walk to the Jeep.

The Bear Flag of the California Republic flaps and flutters above the golden hills of Chabot Lake Park. "There were llamas," she informs me. "There were cows looking at us, like, ‘What the hell are you doing?'" I feel a bit bovine myself. "The aid stations were good, though." The aid stations, according to the Firetrails 50 website, had "water, GU 2 0 Hydration drink, Gu, Coke, Sprite, ice, fruit, homemade baked cookies, hard candy, potatoes, P.B. & J sandwiches, pretzels, Succeed Caps, crackers, potato chips, salt, wonderful volunteers, etc."

No pulled pork.

Returning home through the Castro Valley, we pass a sign for the candidacy (I don't catch the office) of one Hera Alikian. My thoughts return to Greece. Hera, as every classicist worth her salt pills knows, was symbolized by the cow and the peacock. I'm grateful that there's room for both of us to roam the girdled earth, we ruminants who stand in awe, and the peacocks who can't resist showing us up. All I ask, over a cioppino meant for two (not a bite of which is offered to me), is that we keep the hundred-miler off the table-but, then, that's asking a peacock not to strut its stuff.

In his The Culture of Narcissism (1979), Christopher Lasch wrote that “the rise of mass media makes the categories of truth and falsehood irrelevant to an evaluation of their influence. Truth has given way to credibility, facts to statements that sound authoritative without conveying any authoritative information.” Lasch’s examples include “statements implying that a given characteristic belongs uniquely to the product in question when in fact it belongs to its rivals as well.”

Remind you of anything? The presidential candidates between whom we just chose are, as even my most liberal friends freely admit, similar in important respects. Both men spoke frequently of “change,” though only one’s followers reduced it to a creepy mantra, less David Bowie than Spahn Ranch. Both argued for clean energy, Obama tilting at windmills and hybrid cars, McCain asking us to accept the powerful and much-maligned technology already at our disposal. Both sought to address the financial crisis by pouring tax dollars into it.

The differences in their prescribed means were significant but technical, and I hope I won’t sound terribly “elitist” if I speculate that many voters focused on the ends and made their choice on the basis of another factor: marketing strategy. Coca-Cola and Pepsi are made with different “secret formulas,” comprehensible only to chemists, but they end up tasting similar to the casual consumer. Americans are not casual consumers, however, and the ad campaign is all.

What are ad campaigns about if not which of two similar things is cooler? John “Mac Is Back” McCain is undeniably the PC to Barack “Politically Correct” Obama’s Mac. Both function most of the time, crash occasionally, and seem “cool” to radically different demographics. That Obama’s brand of cool has so completely outstripped McCain’s is, at the risk of sounding fuddy-duddyish, worrying.

A friend of mine put the dichotomy well: “I’ve got to say that ‘congressional law professor’ has a better ring to it than ‘shot down five times.’”

No, not to these ears. The corollary of having been shot down five times is having climbed into a ground-attack aircraft five times, despite the risk that, with apologies to Randall Jarrell, you will be washed out of it with a hose. Then there’s the unpleasant matter of what happens when you crash alive behind enemy lines—we’ve heard all about that, though many found it unworthy of consideration—and how you comport yourself in captivity.

Combat vets may snicker at McCain’s “incompetence,” but the rest of us ought to keep in mind that we’d probably pick the toughest law school over a hail of anti-aircraft rounds. As Evan Wright memorably wrote in Generation Kill, “In my civilian world . . . half the people I know are on anti-depressants or anti-panic attack drugs because they can’t handle the stress of a mean boss or a crowd at the 7-Eleven.”

This is not at all to disparage Obama’s impressive educational background, only to argue that courage, honor, and self-sacrifice remain more impressive than educational credentials. The former, by the way, played a large part in John F. Kennedy’s brand of cool, but how much of the “youth vote” has seen PT 109? Obama has a few things in common with JFK. (How much of the “youth vote” knows that Frank Sinatra sang about “High Hopes” for Kennedy’s 1960 campaign? At least that had the audacity of a melody—change you can hum, you might say.) The traits that spring to mind are suavity, a silver tongue, a 10-gigawatt smile, and, yes, credentials.

How did Americans do a 180 on what they find admirable? I place the blame on the marketing geniuses hiding in plain sight: the media. Writers and commentators have aggressively devalued what they either aren’t capable of or can’t demonstrate: courage in extremis. Dissent is patriotic because it’s what we laptop jockeys can pull off without any real risk; risking life and limb can be reduced with a rhetorical flourish to “getting shot down five times.” I have harsh words, too, for those conservative pundits who fawn over the troops or “define torture down” solely because they think it makes them sound tough—if they only knew how transparent that strategy is! Then again, at least it shows that they respect toughness.

It would have been a simple matter to say one prefers Barack Obama but respects John McCain’s bravery and service. But it was difficult to say how many of Obama’s supporters did respect McCain’s bravery and service. N+1’s Mark Greif claimed that the “core conceit” of the GOP convention was that “McCain is already dead,” when in fact its core message was that he’d survived an unthinkable ordeal. Many others pretended to ponder why being tortured was a qualification, shutting their minds to the inconvenient fact of McCain’s superhuman loyalty to his fellow prisoners.

Of course: They knew they wouldn’t have been capable of it. “Just as heroism differs in subtle ways from celebrity,” Lasch wrote, “so hero worship, which esteems the hero’s actions and hopes to emulate them or at least to prove worthy of his example, must be distinguished from narcissistic idealization.” Coolness is no longer a function of what you can scarcely imagine being. It’s an outsize version of what you think you already are.

Losing a Facebook friend or loved one is always painful. You notice that your number has dropped by one, but because you’re friends with so many people you don’t know, or met once at a party, or haven’t spoken with since elementary school, or never spoke with in elementary school, anyway, it’s difficult to identify your defector. The truth will out, eventually, thanks to that People You May Know thing, as long as the person in question hasn’t wised up and gotten off Facebook altogether.

When I saw that it was you, I was shocked. We don’t correspond, and have only hung out once or twice, with our mutual acquaintance. I may be mistaken—asking you directly would be far too “awks”—but I suspect it’s political. I haven’t set my middle name to “Hussein” or posted YouTube videos of Sarah Palin look-alikes being sexually assaulted by moose. Most imprudently, I’ve included in my profile a link to my website, a roiling, mephitic cesspit of hate speech and, uh, food blogging.

If I’m mistaken, I apologize—but I don’t think I am, and what I have to say holds true in any event.

We were promised that Barack Obama would lead us out of the prehistoric wilderness of “partisan politics.” What I’ve seen instead, largely from Obama supporters, is a great deal of disrespect for the opposing camp. That on its own doesn’t bother me. I happen to believe that “partisan politics,” presumably whiner’s code for “partisan rancor,” are what a two-party system demands. No, what I find galling, and disappointing, is the incuriosity of the typical Obama voter.

“Incurious” is a word that has stuck to Sarah Palin like a Homeric epithet, partly because she didn’t have a passport until recently. (Here’s a paradox: The college students sneering at this revelation, the ones with colorful passport stamps from their Wanderjahrs in Bangladesh and Kenya, are the ones shouting loudest that America is in the toilet. Didn’t they learn anything? Perhaps travel’s overrated.) Of course, being curious about “the outside world”—say, having one’s picture taken next to someone in charming local costume—does not mean one is curious about individuals.

When someone like you figures out that I’m voting for John McCain, he instantly knows everything about me. He knows that I yearn for endless war, smog-choked skies, keeping condoms out of Africa, keeping condoms out of America, drowning the poor, raising poultry Bonsai Kitten-style, forcing gays to wear identifying pieces of flair, and abolishing abortion so that unwanted children can be raised in secret CIA janissaries. All this without asking a single question!

Those rare Obama-voting friends who take the time to interrogate me—in a friendly way, I mean, not tied to a chair beneath a hot lamp—find out a few unexpected things:

I voted for Obama in the California primary because I believed at the time that he would make a better president than Hillary Clinton. I don’t uncritically admire McCain, but I’m unmoved by entreaties to vote for a candidate with whom I disagree on so much just because he’s more charismatic and runs a superior campaign. I find Sarah Palin remarkable, appealing, and unqualified. You can’t have it all.

I am not a registered Republican. My vote has nothing to do with party ties. I would have loved that rarest thing, a serious third-party candidate.

I value the environment and clean energy, which is why McCain’s support for nuclear power is so important to me.

I’m not against the poor. I am the poor. I owed no income tax last year, and under Obama’s economic plan would receive a check, funny money he has rather cunningly termed a “tax cut.” This would be no different than Bush’s Economic Stimulus Package, which was also putting a Band-Aid on a brain hemorrhage. Has everyone forgotten that Michelle Obama herself ridiculed that plan thusly: “You’re getting $600—what can you do with that? . . . The short-term quick fix kinda stuff sounds good, and it may even feel good that first month when you get that check, and then you go out and you buy a pair of earrings.” Truer words, etc. I am the poor, and I say keep your charity.

In California I voted against animal confinement and factory farms. It’s a small thing, but it may earn me some sympathy from those readers who have hitherto assumed I shoot puppies for sport.  

Last but not least, because it’s especially relevant to you, I voted to keep gay marriage legal in California. The people who oppose it get married in churches, anyway; they have no business complaining until the government attempts to legislate their religious beliefs as well. As for that “message” gay marriage allegedly sends to children: There’s no law stopping parents from criticizing what they find distasteful in society. In fact, it’s their job.

See? I’m not some party automaton. I don’t hate Obama supporters, though I dislike their religious intensity. I don’t hate Obama, either; I just think he’s a standard-issue Democratic politician, full of good intentions and bad ideas. Why are so few of my friends willing to discuss this with me? Why are Obama’s supporters content to assume that McCain’s are either evil, stupid, or mentally ill? It puts me in mind of what the title character of Kingsley Amis’s Jake’s Thing said about women:

They don’t mean what they say, they don’t use language for discourse but for extending their personality, they take all disagreement as opposition, yes they do, even the brightest of them, and that’s the end of the search for truth which is what the whole thing’s supposed to be about.

Perhaps not true of women as a group, but forgive me if I say it applies nicely to more than a few of my Facebook friends. I wish you weren’t one of them—but, then again, I guess you aren’t.

There’s little to say about l’affaire bear that isn’t already apparent to anyone with the intellect of a toothpick. Even so, I think it deserves more aggressive scrutiny than it’s received thus far.

It’s too bad about that writers’ strike: This debacle could have been a virtually inexhaustible vein of comic gold, on the order of an OJ Simpson or a Monica Lewinsky. In a sense, though, it’s good that it hasn’t worked out that way. The Islamic world has a knack, though it may be a calculated knack, for going berserk about insults—like cartoons, ice cream bars, and teddy bears—that are so out-and-out preposterous that Westerners can do little in response but crack jokes. The time for jokes is over. Note that every atheist tract on the bestseller list in the past year or two contains explicit insults to the so-called Prophet. Why isn’t anyone “protesting” Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens with a gigantic machete? I suppose all those words were too much of a brain teaser for the Teddy Bear Martyrs Brigade; I suppose it was much easier to go after this living caricature of kind-heartedness.

That’s what demands our outrage. When Jyllands-Posten published cartoons insulting the Prophet, it meant to do just that. Gillian Gibbons, on the contrary, is guilty only of trying to bring a single Lite-Brite peg of happiness to one of the darkest hellholes on earth. Of course, it doesn’t matter whether one is guilty of any provocation; a provocation can be manufactured easily enough. Bullies have operated in this fashion since the dawn of time, and likewise there have always been victims willing to pay the danegeld. Consider the reaction of some Western Muslims, reported in The Economist:

Many stressed that the treatment of Ms Gibbons was at odds with a Koranic injunction to treat visitors hospitably. “Sudan’s official response to this incident is the exact opposite of the model that Muslims are supposed to emulate,” said Firas Ahmed, deputy editor of Islamica, a glossy magazine. Musharraf Hussain, a well-known imam from the English Midlands, said Ms Gibbons had set out to help Sudanese children with “great enthusiasm and sincerity” and it was embarrassing for British Muslims to see her being punished for making an unintentional cultural mistake.

Perhaps the hardest question that Muslims in the West face from sceptical fellow-citizens is whether they are prepared in any circumstances to defend the harsh penalties, such as lashing and stoning, which the sacred texts of Islam prescribe, in particular for sexual offences, or blaspheming against the faith.

Tariq Ramadan, an influential Muslim philosopher, has called for an indefinite moratorium on capital and corporal punishment, using elaborate theological arguments to support his view that these penalties have resulted in horribly cruel treatment for vulnerable people, including women and the poor. Scholars in the Muslim heartland do not go far enough when they say the necessary conditions for the application of these traditional punishments are “almost never” fulfilled, Mr Ramadan has argued. Some westerners (including France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, in the days when he was interior minister) taunted Mr Ramadan over the use of the word moratorium: did that mean stoning might resume in the future? But to traditional scholars, Mr Ramadan is clearly going too far. The gap he is trying to straddle is already a wide one, and the story of Ms Gibbons suggests that it risks growing even wider.

There is something almost sweetly naive about appealing to various “Koranic injunctions” to try to influence the behavior of radical Muslims. Anyone with the slightest insight into human behavior knows that the desire to punish very often precedes the justification for punishment, and anyone who can get riled up over a stuffed animal is stuck squarely in the “desire to punish” stage.

It’s an appropriate coincidence that the article quoted above refers to the “gap [Ramadan] is trying to straddle,” because several days ago I read this Telegraph piece on the teddy bear fiasco just moments before noticing, in the obituaries section, that Evel Knievel had died. I felt a slight twinge of disgust when I saw a photo captioned: “Evel Knievel: appealed to America’s love of excess.” Fine, but the excess that America loves is a distinctively American variety, dramatic, individualistic, and wild at heart. The urge to jump a canyon just because it’s there is nothing to be ashamed of. As for the heinous urge to behead a harmless schoolmarm—well, the yawning chasm between Us and Them has never looked deeper or wider. I don’t think Evel himself would have attempted it.

(UPDATE: Gillian Gibbons has been “pardoned.” We’re supposed to be grateful for this, I guess?) 

I just flew in from New York City and boy are my liver, kidneys, and soul (sorry, Josh) tired. I can finally say that I understand what Kingsley Amis, in his profound and subtle vade mecum On Drink, called the “metaphysical hangover.” I may never again leave the safety of my sun-drenched NorCal balcony. I mention this only because it’s a shame that my delightful Magic Mountain-style convalescence should be interrupted by blood-boiling nonsense like this:

What do you make of the following statement: “Asians are gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they’ll be a third. Italy’s down to 1.1 child per woman. We’re just going to be outnumbered.” While we’re at it, what do you think of this, incidentally from the same speaker: “The Black community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” Or this, the same speaker again: “I just don’t hear from moderate Judaism, do you?” And (yes, same speaker): “Strip-searching Irish people. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole Irish community and they start getting tough with their children.”

The speaker was Martin Amis and, yes, the quotations have been modified, with Asians, Blacks and Irish here substituted for Muslims, and Judaism for Islam—though, it should be stressed, these are the only amendments. Terry Eagleton, professor of English literature at Manchester University, where Amis has also started to teach, recently quoted the remarks in a new edition of his book Ideology: An Introduction. Amis, Eagleton claimed, was advocating nothing less than the “hounding and humiliation” of Muslims so “they would return home and teach their children to be obedient to the White Man’s law”.

The heated exchanges that followed were trivialised in the mainstream media as “a nasty literary punch-up”, “the talk of the literary world”, “a spat” between “two warring professors”, and the silence that followed seemed to confirm it as a passing tiff between two high-ranking members of the chattering class.

I see it differently. Amis’s views are symptomatic of a much wider and deeper hostility to Islam and intolerance of otherness.

The conceit of the opening paragraph (“yes, the quotations have been modified, with nonsense here substituted for the original remarks”) is jaw-dropping in its juvenility and disingenuousness, but there is much, much more to object to here. I was reminded of a great passage in Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great—rhetorically brilliant if not entirely convincing from a theological standpoint—in which he holds up the ninth and tenth commandments as examples of organized religion’s totalitarian leanings: “The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey. . . . The commandment at Sinai which forbade people even to think about coveting goods is the first clue. It is echoed in the New Testament by the injunction which says that a man who looks upon a woman has actually committed adultery already.”

The connection, of course, is that Amis’s remarks, spoken off the cuff in an interview, were a confession of an urge, a fact which Ronan Bennett acknowledges but which does nothing to soften his belief that Amis despises “otherness”: “Amis sought to excuse the passage quoted above by pointing out that it was prefaced by the words ‘There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, “The Muslim community . . . (etc)”’.” Later, Bennett notes, “He also confessed to ‘little impulses, urges and atavisms now and then’, which was uncomfortably like a collusive wink to the audience: we all have our little prejudices, don’t we?”

It’s difficult to argue that Amis hasn’t shot himself in the foot, but let’s look at that sentence. I don’t think Amis has admitted to “little prejudices.” I think “little frustrations,” or perhaps pretty big ones, is closer to the truth. Honesty doesn’t get one very far these days, when politicians are so often criticized for, as a friend of mine put it recently, not manipulating us skillfully enough. (What is a “gaffe,” ever, but a failure to control our reactions?) Yet, all Amis is guilty of here is honesty. He has stated in effect that his frustration and impatience with the secularizing impulse, such as it is, in Islam leads him to unpleasant thoughts, thoughts that his rational mind would (mostly) disavow.

In the other corner we have folks like Terry Eagleton and Ronan Bennett pretending that they have never pondered anything so base. Their vantage is not the real world of airport security or subway stop and search, but a liberal empyrean where human nature must be checked at the door. I wonder why, if the transcendent tolerance of Eagleton et al. really exists, we always hear that this or that comment or cartoon risks “radicalizing” the “moderate Muslim.” I’m not in the camp that claims the “moderate Muslim” doesn’t exist, but I’ve always wondered why one thought to be so easily inflamed to violence can be called “moderate.” In a sense, it’s the tread-lightly liberals, deathly afraid of this inevitable “radicalization,” who are most guilty of insulting Muslims. They call them lambs in public, but their secret thoughts couldn’t possibly be more clear.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Clarence Page has written a fascinating column (you can read it here) about the phenomenon of hate crime hoaxes. Ever since the “events”—that euphemism of euphemisms—in Jena, Louisiana, the media have reported punctiliously on a rash of mysterious nooses. They seem to be appearing in all quarters: high schools, college campuses, the workplace. Several African-American commentators have inveighed against making too big a deal of them. After all, common sense tells us that anything that garners attention once is bound to be trotted out again and again by all manner of malcontents and social misfits. Why give them the satisfaction?

The idea that many of these displays are perpetrated by the very people meant to be victimized by them is a more prickly proposition. Page presents a number of disturbing examples:

A student at George Washington University recently complained that swastikas were scrawled on her dormitory door. Thanks to cameras hidden by university police, they have a suspect: The student who filed the complaint. . . .

Last year, for example, Trinity International University near Deerfield, Ill., evacuated some classes after anonymous letters threatened minority students with gunfire. A black female 20-year-old student was eventually convicted of felony disorderly conduct and ordered into counseling for creating the letters. Police told the Chicago Tribune that she had been unhappy at the school and hoped the threats would persuade her parents to let her leave.

Three years earlier at Northwestern University, a student who described himself as biracial admitted to putting anti-Hispanic graffiti on a wall near his dorm room and filing a false report of racial harassment and a knife attack.

In 2003 three black freshmen were accused at the University of Mississippi of writing racial graffiti on the doors of two other black students’ rooms and on walls on three floors of the residence hall. Among their obscenities and racial epithets, their scrawls included a tree with a noose and a hanging stick figure.

Page allows that he is “shocked but not surprised to hear of these episodes.” I’m always a little shocked by shamelessness, but it’s very difficult for me to be surprised. Page notes of one of these instances: “Police hardly had begun their investigation before students and faculty held a rally against racism.” Where have I heard that before?

Oh, right: In 1990, a saboteur broke into the offices of The Dartmouth Review and replaced its masthead quotation, a stirring bit from the Rough Rider himself, with an excerpt from Mein Kampf. Almost immediately, Dartmouth’s president, the late James O. Freedman, organized a massive Rally Against Hate, though the newspaper’s staffers, to return to Clarence Page, “hardly had begun their investigation.” There were several obvious problems with this: Assuming that the editors or staff had been complicit in this, could they have expected it to go unnoticed or unremarked? And was it not a cause for skepticism, or at least a little restraint, that the paper’s editor-in-chief, Kevin Pritchett, was neither blond nor blue-eyed but in fact African-American?

The campus would have none of such objections, and in retrospect there are only two explanations for that. One is that the student body harbored a great deal of hate—for The Dartmouth Review. Well, it’s easy to argue that the paper did its unapologetic best to inflame and provoke. So I find a second hypothesis more credible: The student body wanted to believe that hate, in the outsize, cartoonish form it envisioned, really did exist on campus. In much the same way, antiwar agitators imagine that they’re railing against 1984-style tyranny and not mediocre decision-making; in much the same way, high school students think that a dress code is an abridgment of human rights, and not a sop to harassed and exhausted parents.

I don’t for a moment mean to suggest that hate doesn’t exist; neither, if you read his column all the way through, does Page. I just don’t believe that it exists in any truly threatening form on any decent college campus, and outcry to the contrary serves the hatemonger’s purpose more than it does the progressive’s. The purpose of a noose or a swastika is to suggest and exaggerate a reason for fear: We are here in the shadows, and there are more of us than you think. In fact there are probably fewer than they think, but the media and the “campus activists” do everything in their power to say otherwise. Is the object, in the end, to raise awareness, or to terrorize—and to feel good about oneself at the same time?

A postscript: In the end, the Review did decide that it had identified the culprit, a disgruntled former staffer. The evidence wasn’t enough to file a criminal complaint, but when I contacted the individual in preparing this book, he didn’t respond to confirm or deny the paper’s suspicions. We may never know the truth, but I can say that at any given time the Review is more “diverse” than the campus as a whole, and a lot drunker, and that makes it a fairly dangerous place to try one’s hand at cultural insensitivity.

There seems to me something unseemly, if not downright sinister, in allowing the public to believe its own most outré fantasies. To take the most obvious example of the past decade, it was disappointing that the Bush Administration made no serious attempt to explain why it was invading Iraq, though it could easily have done so just by plagiarizing a few of Christopher Hitchens’s columns. The result was that many of those opposed to the war got bogged down in a quagmire of “blood for oil” paranoia, to say nothing of the still more outlandish theories floating around the murkier margins of the Internet. You go to the antiwar rally with the facts you have, not the facts you wish you had—and chances are you’ll look like an idiot.

We as an electorate are no longer trusted to understand complex arguments. Since we’ve been steeped not in Tom Paine but in disaster movies, the Administration thought it safer to turn our own grotesque imaginations on us with talk of “weapons of mass destruction.” We as an electorate probably think we’ve wised up a bit since then, but Ron Paul doesn’t seem to think so:

Historians and British schoolchildren remember Guy Fawkes as the Roman Catholic, anti-Protestant rebel who on Nov. 5, 1605, tried to assassinate King James I by blowing up the Parliament. Supporters of the Republican primary campaign of the libertarian Representative Ron Paul may remember Fawkes as a wildly successful fund-raising gimmick.

On Monday, a group of Paul supporters helped raised more than $4.07 million in one day—approaching what the campaign raised in the entire last quarter—through a Web site called ThisNovember5th.com, a reference to the day the British commemorate the thwarted bombing.

Many fans of Mr. Paul know of the day primarily through a movie based on the futuristic graphic novel “V for Vendetta,” by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, in which a terrorist modeled after Fawkes battles a fascist government that has taken over Britain.

Many fans? Let’s think this through. Guy Fawkes Night has a fairly simple and unambiguous reason for being: to celebrate a terrorist plot that failed. Every British schoolboy knows the rhyme, which is worth knowing because you get to sing it while burning Fawkes in effigy and setting off firecrackers.

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t'was his intent
To blow up King and Parli'ment.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England's overthrow;
By God's providence he was catch'd
With a dark lantern and burning match. 

By contrast, zero American schoolboys know the rhyme, because it has nothing to do with America. Nor does it, at first glance, have any resonance with an American political campaign. The only way the allusion, if that is really the word for it, makes any sense is if it’s an allusion to the worst movie of 2006. In V for Vendetta, you may recall, the terrorist “Guy Fawkes” is the hero, fearlessly battling a dictatorship that resembles a frustrated teenager’s dystopic vision of the Anglosphere. (Here’s what I wrote about V for Vendetta when I was unlucky enough to see it.) This allusion is clearly Mr. Paul’s intent:

ThisNovember5th.com includes video clips and the text of a speech by Mr. Paul, a 10-term Texas congressman. In it, Mr. Paul declares, “The true patriot challenges the state when the state embarks on enhancing its power at the expense of the individual.”

Mr. Paul has stood out from the Republican field for his opposition to the war in Iraq. In the speech he argues that the fight against terrorism is threatening American democracy.

“The American Republic is in remnant status,” he says. “The stage is set for our country eventually devolving into military dictatorship, and few seem to care.”

There’s cognitive dissonance and then there’s claiming, while participating in the democratic political process, that we’re headed for a “military dictatorship.” This kind of hyperbole is par for the course, but then that’s just my point. The scare tactics, the blatant pandering to our ignorance of anything but terrible pop culture—sounds like more of the same to me.

I understand that About.com has to fill itself with pointless content somehow, but this bit on “Halloween costume safety” has me madder than Jason Voorhees at a wet t-shirt contest. I’m constantly on the lookout for evidence of cultural infantilization; in fact, I considered Michael Bywater’s hilarious and largely overlooked Big Babies one of the most significant books of 2006. (A more sophisticated but slightly less entertaining version of Bywater’s argument can be found in Diana West’s The Death of the Grown-Up.) So I give you About.com’s contribution to the war of attrition being fought against self-reliance, risk-taking, and, well, childhood. A costume must be: 

• flame resistant. Since candlelit pumpkins are popular on Halloween, a flame resistant Halloween costume is very important. Although it is easy to buy a Halloween costume that is flame resistant by simply checking the label, if you are making a homemade costume, be sure to use flame resistant materials.
• easily visible at night, which might include some kind of reflective tape or other bright and reflective materials incorporated into the costume.
• well fitted to your child and not too long so that it can make your child trip and fall, a leading cause of injuries on Halloween. Masks, hats, and other accessories, such as a sword, should also be appropriate to your child’s size.

In addition, to help make sure your child can see and can be seen, you might incorporate a flashlight into your child’s costume.

Homemade Halloween Costumes

Although homemade Halloween costumes seem an inexpensive and fun alternative to store bought costumes, you do need to be sure that they are safe. The “ghost” trick-or-treating in our picture is a good example of a homemade costume that isn’t safe.

The sheet is too long, which poses a tripping hazard, and the face opening isn’t large enough to make sure that the child can see well.

In one sense, this is perfectly harmless advice—perhaps useful, though you’d have to be pretty thick not to think of it yourself. In another sense, it encourages a ridiculous degree of parental anxiety and paranoia. From skinned or bruised knees to being burned alive by a jack-o-lantern, your children are at risk! Don’t make things worse by letting little Heath or Amber wear a homemade costume. Store-bought ones are created in OSHA-regulated factories, and probably look better than your crappy cardboard-box robot, anyway. (And those knobs on the chest wouldn’t be secured with Elmer’s glue, would they? They could easily pop off and present a choking hazard!) As far as irrational fears go, at least satanic panic always had the benefit of being funny, and even a kid could see through the razor-in-the-Snickers horror stories. This safety stuff is just soul-sucking, and I don’t mean in the Lovecraftian sense.

Here’s a fun and instructive Halloween drinking game: Rent Charles Schulz’s classic It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! and take a shot every time the “Peanuts” gang is depicted engaging in high-risk behavior. Good examples include Charlie Brown’s clumsiness with scissors, Linus waiting in the pumpkin patch without appropriate cold-weather gear, the “Flying Ace” piloting a WWI-era doghouse, and Lucy Van Pelt kissing Snoopy without a dental dam. At just twenty-five minutes, it’s the perfect party pre-game. Just make sure you don’t operate any heavy equipment afterward. 

I suspect that many readers will find this article by Mark Morford laughably alarmist. Its argument is that American students are now so dumb that within a generation or two, none of them will be able to perform even relatively simple tasks like operating a TiVo or following the instructions on a Hot Pocket sleeve. Think of the children, missing episodes of “A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila” or dying by the dozens of third-degree cheesy burns! And if that doesn’€™t scare you, how about a future in which these kids are responsible for, say, air-traffic control, structural engineering, and oncology research? Yet the general public continues to shrug and ask, like the ur-nimrod Alfred E. Neuman, “œWhat, me worry?”€ To put it another way, they focus on climate change instead of primate change—the environment, not the rapidly devolving Morlocks who inhabit it. 

It is, in short, nothing less than a tidal wave of dumb, with once-passionate, increasingly exasperated teachers like my friend nearly powerless to stop it. The worst part: It’€™s not the kids’€™ fault. They’€™re merely the victims of a horribly failed educational system.

Then our discussion often turns to the meat of it, the bigger picture, the ugly and unavoidable truism about the lack of need among the government and the power elite in this nation to create a truly effective educational system, one that actually generates intelligent, thoughtful, articulate citizens.

Hell, why should they? After all, the dumber the populace, the easier it is to rule and control and launch unwinnable wars and pass laws telling them that sex is bad and TV is good and God knows all, so just pipe down and eat your Taco Bell Double-Supremo Burrito and be glad we don’€™t arrest you for posting dirty pictures on your cute little blog.

This is about when I try to offer counterevidence, a bit of optimism. For one thing, I've argued generational relativity in this space before, suggesting maybe kids are no scarier or dumber or more dangerous than they’€™ve ever been, and that maybe some of the problem is merely the same old awkward generation gap, with every current generation absolutely convinced the subsequent one is terrifically stupid and malicious and will be the end of society as a whole. Just the way it always seems.

The piece is generally on point, but there are two flaws I’€™d like to consider. The first is more than anything a fashionable tic: The conservative administration is both a pro-war bogeyman and an anti-sex bogeyman, which means it needs an unending supply of slavish, ignorant cannon fodder, but opposes the one means—other than robotics, I guess—by which to get it. This is a classic case of having one’€™s paranoia and debunking it, too. If you’re interested in an infinitely more nuanced approach to the idea that our education system is intentionally flawed, John Taylor Gatto’€™s your man.

My second complaint is more serious, and it has to do with the dangerously seductive concept of “€œgenerational relativity.” I first encountered this idea in a review by Joyce Carol Oates of Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood:

Adult anxiety about youthful literacy is the social conservative’€™s favoured mode of anxiety about other, more alarming predilections of youth, as “€œA Letter to the Rising Generation”€ by Cornelia Comer, which originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, makes clear:

The younger generation, she grumbled, couldn’€™t spell, and its English was “€œslipshod.”€ Today’s youth were selfish, discourteous, lazy, and self-indulgent. Lacking respect for their elders or for common decency, the young were hedonistic, “shallow, amusement-seeking creatures” whose tastes had been “€œformed by the colored supplements of the Sunday paper”€ and “the moving-picture shows.”€ The boys were feeble, flippant, and “€œsoft”€ intellectually, spiritually, and physically. Even worse were the girls, who were brash, loud, and promiscuous with young men.

All this, in 1911!

In David Lodge’s comic novel Changing Places, a British professor from the fictitious University of Rummidge takes over an American’s post at Euphoric State—UC Berkeley, of course—and vice versa. The Brit is briefly caught up in the tumult of countercultural revolution, and there is a priceless episode in which some hippies invite the wrath of the Man by taking over a vacant lot to create a “community garden,” that is, a public nuisance where the great unwashed and uninhibited can indulge in their particular species of horticulture. This episode is told primarily through newspaper clippings, the best of which is “An Eight-Year-Old’s View of the Crisis.” It’s a characteristically hilarious bit of ventriloquism on Lodge’s part, and what a little dummy he gives us:

I didn’t get to see the People’s Garden really, but I could feel that it was beautiful. In the Garden it was made of people’s feelings, not just their hands, they made it with their heart, who knew if they made it to stay, there are hundreds of people that built that garden, so we’ll never know if they meant it to stay.

The police are just ruining their lives by being police, they’re also keeping themselves from being a person. They act like they are some kind of nervous creatures.

— Submitted by Plotinus schoolteacher to Euphoric State Daily

If you find this sort of thing funny, chances are you can understand at least on some level the impulse that prompted conservative pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, and Mark Steyn to lash out at the Democrats for the “poster child abuse” of Graeme Frost, their spokesboy for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Conservatives, particularly those in the Waugh or Amis vein, are likely to be skeptical not only of emotional appeals but also of the idea that wisdom, at least of the practical kind, ever really comes from the mouths of babes. It’s impossible, for instance, to imagine a pundit like Steyn praising the poetry of Matty Stepanek, but when Jimmy Carter gave Stepanek’s eulogy, he said, “We have known kings and queens, and we’ve known presidents and prime ministers, but the most extraordinary person whom I have ever known in my life is Mattie Stepanek. His life philosophy was ‘Remember to play after every storm!’ and his motto was ‘Think Gently, Speak Gently, Live Gently.’”

Is there any harm in celebrating such Oprah-ready sentiments? Probably not. You’re either stirred by them or you’re not, and I doubt that one can change camps, that a Mark Steyn can ever become a Jimmy Carter. Nevertheless, I think the attack by Steyn and others on the Democrats’ use of Graeme Frost was tasteless, not to mention supremely self-defeating. As readers probably know by now, most of the blogosphere’s criticisms hinged on whether Frost’s family was really poor enough to deserve free or subsidized health care: The kids were in private school, for God’s sake! It turned out that the children were on scholarship. Other accusations were met with similarly reasonable explanations.

But suppose those intrepid bloggers had discovered that Graeme Frost was a paid actor, and not a sick little boy? Would it have changed the fact that there are sick children out there who could benefit from subsidized health care? No, but it would have underscored the tediously obvious fact that much of political persuasion relies on theatrics and appeals to the heart over the head. It’s unclear what value there is in harping on this point. People call themselves bleeding-heart liberals not because they’re unaware that they let their emotions master them, but because they’re proud of it.

The sick thing in this case, however, is that Graeme Frost seems not to have been put in the spotlight to persuade conservatives. (What savvy politician would see any use in so transparent a strategy? Did it work with the “Crying Indian” or the “Daisy Girl”?) On the contrary, he was like an irresistible crack rock dangled in front of commentators addicted to shameless drive-time provocation. To borrow a line from Theodore Dalrymple, they are like a “little girl riding her bicycle with her hands outspread, saying, ‘Look at me, mummy,’ in the knowledge that her mother will be appalled and terrified, and will probably scream.” It’s amazing that Ann Coulter hasn’t exhausted everyone’s patience for this sort of thing, but still it persists. So what might have been an occasion to discuss the importance of emotions in politics has just turned into a way for Democrats to perpetuate the rumor that conservatives haven’t got any emotions.

It’s tough, but evidently not impossible, to shoot the messenger and shoot yourself in the foot with just one bullet. And lest conservatives think that these shabby appeals to emotion are strictly a left-wing affair,  I can remind them of at least one sick person they kept the spotlight on in much the same fashion. 

I’ve watched very little TV in the past few years. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not some hacky sack fancier with a “Kill Your Television” bumper sticker and serious concerns about mind control. In Manhattan the service was too expensive, and in Greece there was only one English-language channel, which played Stallone movies, like Tango & Cash, First Blood, and Demolition Man, on endless repeat. (I wonder where Europeans get the idea that we love violence?) A consequence of this sporadic viewing is that whenever I do tune in, I’m blown away by how much worse it’s managed to get in the interim. As abysmal programming goes, A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila is the Marianas Trench.

Cast your mind back to December, when Time’s Person of the Year issue sported a mirrored cover honoring “You”—the You of YouTube, the Me of MySpace . . . . The magazine devoted a page to a 25-year-old named Tila Tequila, who had parlayed the distinction of being a popular denizen of MySpace into something like a career in showbiz. While Miss Tequila pursues numerous avenues of artistic expression—wearing bikinis while down on all fours, for example, and singing thuggishly aggressive come-ons in a twig-thin voice—her only demonstrable talent is for raw self-promotion, and Time politely wondered, “Does she represent the triumph of a new democratic starmaking medium or its crass exploitation for maximum personal gain?” Last night, the dating show A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila (MTV, Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET) arrived to offer a reply. “Crass exploitation,” it giggled, continuing, “Duh!”

A Shot at Love sets 16 men and 16 women in pursuit of the heroine’s affections. Yes, Tila is proud to call herself bisexual. . . . [F]ar be it from me to question the passions that stir Tila’s heart and loins. I’ll leave that to You, the collective author of Wikipedia and its ilk, who has coined the term “MySpace bisexual.” The recreational lexicographers at UrbanDictionary.com bring the utmost delicacy to defining the term: “A girl who makes out with other slutty chicks at parties and then claims to be bisexual because it’s trendy to say so and gets people’s attention on myspace.”

From Ahmadinejad at Columbia to Tequila on TV, why are we solemnly asked to meditate upon questions a mollusk could answer? “Does she represent the triumph of a new democratic starmaking medium or its crass exploitation for maximum personal gain?” Is there even a difference?

I might have overlooked this latest insult to our collective intelligence but for an article in The New Atlantis, “Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism,” which received attention this month on NPR and was condensed in the Wall Street Journal. MySpace.com, the networking site that gave Tila Tequila her fifteen minutes of fame—or should I say shots of fame, since the effects will wear off as quickly and leave as nasty a hangover—caught the attention of the intellectual public, but James Bowman’s essay on heroism, modernism, and utopia, in the same issue of The New Atlantis, is every bit as important. Reading Bowman’s piece returned my thoughts to something I’d just read in Paul Fussell’s brilliant The Great War and Modern Memory (yes, I’m fond of quoting Fussell):

[E]ven if those at home had wanted to know the realities of the war, they couldn’t have without experiencing them: its conditions were too novel, its industrialized ghastliness too unprecedented. The war would have been simply unbelievable. From the very beginning a fissure was opening between the Army and civilians. Witness the Times of September 29, 1914, which seriously printed for the use of the troops a collection of uplifting and noble “soldiers’ songs” written by Arthur Campbell Ainger, who appeared wholly ignorant of the actual tastes in music and rhetoric of the Regular Army recently sent to France.

Granted, Tila Tequila would probably be a hit at a USO show, but her popularity seems emblematic of a widening gulf between soldiers and civilians—though a different one than Fussell identified in the case of World War I. Fussell’s two Britains were the one that had seen trench warfare firsthand and the one that knew it only from the exhibition trenches in Kensington Gardens, which Wilfred Owen called “the laughing stock of the army.” The latter Britain had been misled about the war in many ways: “Few soldiers wrote the truth in letters home for fear of causing needless uneasiness. If they did ever write the truth, it was excised by company officers, who censored all outgoing mail.”

Notwithstanding Brian De Palma’s complaints, Americans have unprecedented access to uncensored news about the horror of war. What many of us don’t seem to have is an interest in the questions, both moral and practical, that this news raises. We grow shallower and more narcissistic as the army’s selflessness is cast in sharper relief. There are times when one can’t help feeling that much of the popular opposition to the war—as distinct from many undeniably well-reasoned criticisms of its conduct—stems from the fact that it offers a harsh and ever-present rebuke to the other America, more concerned with collecting online “friends” and luxuriating in hilariously bad pop culture than with being heroic. Bowman writes:

“Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes,” says the Galileo of that heretical utopian, Bertolt Brecht . . . . He was making a point very much like that of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. We don’t want Tom Doniphan any more than we want Liberty Valance, since both are free men, unconstrained by the laws and regulations of compassionate social engineers. We may have lost confidence in the ability of those engineers to design a perfect system, or even to live up to their own high expectations of humanity, but it is easier to go on clinging to their fantasies as if we believed them to be real than to submit to the despair of admitting to ourselves that life is still for us what it was to our great-grandfathers who believed—or at least pretended to believe—that there was nothing in it more important than being good.

Several days ago I came across this post on the Economist’s “Certain ideas of Europe” blog: “Bye, bye, Europe?” The title and topic called to mind “It’s the demography, stupid,” a New Criterion article by Mark Steyn (later expanded into a bestseller called America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It) which, when I was an editor at the magazine, generated so much traffic in one afternoon that it put the website out of commission for a week. Where The New Criterion’s readership seemed anxious—sometimes almost to the point of a fatalistic impatience—for forecasts about the shrinking of the European birthrate and consequent aging of Europe’s population, Economist subscribers are curiously blasé, if not outright pleased. Here’s a sampling of reactions to the news that “there are now more elderly Europeans than European children”: 

• Why the glum tone? Shrinking populations are good news for environments. Ultimately every environmental problem stems from an excess of people. Unfortunately, growing populations elsewhere in the world will probably obliterate all of the quixotic measures Europeans are making now to cut global greenhouse-gas emissions. But regionally, a long-term fall in population will help overcrowded European countries reclaim space for wilderness and wildlife in lands that have been chopped, ploughed, and engineered into oblivion over the past several centuries.

• [T]he link between population and economic strength can perhaps be overstated. Sweden is doing very well with only 9 million people, and tiny Iceland (pop. 300,000) is one of the world’s richest countries per capita.

• Clearly, the values one attaches to traditional economic growth, nature and environment and power on the international scene determine one’s valuation of the maturing of populations. Since I value the environment and a comfortable way of life, my choice would be to work a bit longer, invest in my education and hope for a gradually shrinking population. Say, a fertility rate of 2 or just below.

• The Russians will be growing people in laboratories by the middle of the century. It’s really not as hard as it sounds. It will be one of those technologies only the Russians could pioneer—like laser eye surgery. I really don’t think I’m a lunatic for making this claim.

Though that last bit does have some intriguing Invasion of the Body Snatchers elements to it—not to mention some intimations of a Philip K. Dick-style derangement—the responses generally show a surprising lack of imagination. The environment? The economy? Is that really all there is to worry us about a people and, more to the point, a culture in decline? Unfortunately not, as the latest from the Netherlands reminds us. Both Christopher Hitchens and Anne Applebaum report that the Dutch have revoked Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s security funding—as in security from murderous Islamists offended by her criticisms. (For more on Hirsi Ali, this interview is recommended.) Applebaum writes:

[I]n 2006, the Dutch government tried to revoke Hirsi Ali’s citizenship over an old immigration controversy, and why her neighbors went to court that year to have her evicted from her home (they claimed the security threat posed by her presence impinged upon their human rights). But although she did finally move to the United States, the argument continued in her absence. Last week, the Dutch government abruptly cut off her security funding, forcing her to return briefly to Holland.

The reasons given were financial, but there was clearly more to it. To put it bluntly, many in Holland find her too loud, too public in her condemnation of radical Islam. She doesn’t sound conciliatory, in the modern continental fashion. Compare her description of Islam as “brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women” with the German judge who, citing the Koran, in January told a Muslim woman trying to obtain a divorce from her violent husband that she should have “expected” her husband to deploy the corporal punishment his religion approves. Hirsi Ali herself says she is often told, in so many words, that she’s “brought her problems on herself.” Now the Dutch prime minister openly says he wants her to deal with them alone.

It’s difficult to discuss European demography and immigration without inviting accusations of racism, but this situation makes it clear that the issue isn’t where you’re from but what you believe. If more newcomers to Europe were like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, full of genuinely courageous enthusiasm for thought and change, we wouldn’t need books like Mark Steyn’s. But, as it stands, she’s a rarity, and one we’ll have to protect at any cost if we’re to have any hope of showing her enemies that we’re serious about defeating them. 

It’s always struck me as odd that even history’s most odious mass-murdering dictators now and then take the time to enjoy a little American popular culture. Adolf Hitler was fond of King Kong and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, as every good Trivial Pursuit player knows. Kim Jong-Il watched but did not particularly enjoy Team America: World Police. Uday Hussein, exhibiting the kind of taste you’d expect from a man-boy who used solid gold toilet seats, called Scarface his favorite.

I would wager that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is more of a books man, and not only because he likes to hang out at the school that Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren once called home. I say this because he seems to have cribbed his latest bright idea from Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Once upon a time, Mr. Ahmadinejad expressed his odious mass-murdering ambitions in calls for the destruction of Israel. Now he wants to move Israel to Alaska—much the same fate, in the view of this heliotropic reporter—which is precisely what happens to the “Frozen Chosen” in Chabon’s novel.

Ahmadinejad condemned “the atrocities of the Zionist regime against the oppressed Palestinian people,” the IRNA news agency reported Friday.

According to the regime’s mouthpiece, the president suggested holding a referendum on the transfer of Israel’s Jews to Europe, Canada or Alaska.

“Let a referendum be held in Palestine. It is our clear proposal to European countries,” Ahmadinejad said during the International Quds (Jerusalem) Day rallies in Tehran.

“Let all Palestinians including Muslims, Christians and the Jews attend the referendum,” he added.

IRNA said Ahmadinejad repeated an earlier suggestion to Europe on the “settlement of Zionists in Europe or in big lands such as Canada and Alaska so they would be able to own their own land”.

Here we have a perfect example of those “views” which, however “challenging” or even “repugnant,” we must “confront” in the name of “free speech.” The hubbub surrounding Lee Bollinger’s invitation of Mr. Ahmadinejad to Columbia—and his bizarre and counterproductive dressing-down of the presumably indifferent lunatic—has mostly passed, but the issue is worth keeping on the front burner. Consider the case of Stanford, where Donald Rumsfeld’s hotly protested appointment to the Hoover Institution has been framed as a free speech issue. In fact it’s a free thought issue, since no one at Stanford will ever have to hear Rumsfeld’s opinions about anything. (The Hoover Institution, for that matter, isn’t even under the control of the university.)

Why bring this up again? Because the Ahmadinejad affair, which says so much about American political culture, says a lot about academic culture, too. If Donald Rumsfeld is the professor everyone hates because he’s a tough grader, Mr. Ahmadinejad is a walking gut course. One could debate Mr. Rumsfeld on a million points, but Mr. Ahmadinejad is the question that has already been answered to everyone’s satisfaction. There is no possibility of moving Israel to Alaska: It’s not worth “dialoguing” about. We know there are homosexuals in Iran, just as we know there aren’t unicorns there: Why “confront” this view? Just look at the triviality of the student response to Ahmadinejad’s presence to see that none of this is really about thinking, less so about acting. It’s about the frisson of the bizarre—a real live madman!—which, sadly, is all that can be said about so much of today’s academic experience.

To help pick up the slack for the new two days, my friend Stefan Beck, an old Daily Shvitz hand, will be guest blogging for Jewcy. (That's right, people. A halfsy and a German are running the show straight on through to the end of Pesach. We're more Jewische. Not quite Goysy.)

Stefan is a former editor at The New Criterion as well as a frequent contributor to the New York Sun and Wall Street Journal. He likes Claire Messud. Marisha Pessl, not so much.

This week, the Shvitz will be guest edited by Stefan Beck. Stefan's a fellow Dartmouth grad and one of the few people I'd call a literary critic as opposed to book reviewer. Sadly, he recently gave up his perma-perch at The New Criterion to be a freelance in Philadelphia. (Somehow Roger Kimball still managed to track him down and assign him work.)

Perhaps most notorious for his fileting of N+1 (rumor has it Ben Kunkel has yet to divert his affectless gaze from the word "Revenge" scrawled in shaving cream on his Boerum Hill shower curtain), Stefan actually likes Camille Paglia and Claire Messud, so so much for saddling these Tory culturati with curmudgeonly reps.

Welcome him as our shabbos goy in check trousers.

Because what Jewcy needs is more Anglophilia along the lines of Wodehouse and Waugh. Yes, definitely.