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.

Next time you’re thinking of telling a tedious anecdote about how “crazy” your family gets during “the holidays,” ask yourself: Am I from Austria? In the March 1958 issue of Folklore, Maurice Bruce relates that “Saint Nicholas’ Eve—the fifth of December—is celebrated in the Styrian valleys of Austria with performances of the ‘Nikolospiel’. The white-bearded Saint Nikolaus, dressed in splendid robes and complete with mitre and crosier, enters each house in order to fill the children’s shoes with small gifts.

“Behind the good saint hovers the black, shaggy, goat-horned figure of the Krampus. Cloven hooves and a long tail are conspicuous features of this roaring, prancing Satyr who rattles the chains that hang from his wrists, and brandishes a bundle of birch-twigs which he wields with more energy than discrimination. . . . His habit of throwing naughty children into the wooden tub which hangs at his back, and thence into the nearest stream, earns him deep respect.”

You’ve got an alcoholic uncle who didn’t vote for Obama. Austrian kids have to put up with the village pederast dressed as the villain from Legend. “The birch—apart from its phallic significance—may have a connection with the initiation rites of certain witch-covens.” Terrific. There are also those delightful “Krampuskarten,” greeting cards whose verses “stress the importance of good behavior if one hopes to . . . escape the attentions of Krampus.”

St Nikolaus schickt Dir die Schuh’,

Krampus läszt Dich heut in Ruh’!

WEILST BRAV WARST!

That means something like, “Congratulations, you didn’t get carted off in a bucket.” Now for the bad news. The Krampus lives, and he’s graduated to more loathsome punishments for naughty boys and girls. Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage (2008), directed by Michael Campus (clearly a corruption of Krampus), is just such an ingenious torment. After this, you will beg for the birch-switch.

In case you’ve never been to a shopping mall, Thomas Kinkade is the Painter of Light™, which is what Lucifer would call himself if he had a PR firm and patent office at his disposal. Kinkade is famous for painting idyllic scenes using proprietary opalescent pigments that respond to the tender touch of a dimmer switch. Edward Hopper he is not. His online gallery lists such categories as “bridges,” “cottages,” “gardens,” “lighthouses,” and “gazebos,” which are “always the center of attention at big family events. And they’re also ideal for those relaxing lazy mornings with the newspaper and coffee. These images remind us that gazebos provide shelter from the elements and soothe us with their charms.”

I hear gazebos are also swell for conducting a Black Mass. Christmas Cottage is no stranger to deals with the devil: How else did Michael Krampus get Peter O’Toole to act in this direct-to-DVD miscarriage? (He plays young Thomas Kinkade’s artistic mentor; his platitudes make Jack Handey’s sound positively Emersonian.) Apart from starring in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), O’Toole appeared in Becket (1964) and The Lion in Winter (1968). He even played Jeffrey Bernard (1999)!

You don’t have to be an art lover to hate the Painter of Light™ and his gingerbread hellscapes, but it helps. You don’t have to be a film buff to hate The Christmas Cottage; you just have to be a human being. This is essentially It’s a Wonderful Life updated for our crummy times. We’ve got to have a giant bake sale / bikini carwash / treasure hunt / bachelor auction to save the skate park / endangered salamander habitat / Goondocks / Grandma’s house from evil real estate developers! Except that in this case it’s far less interesting than that: Maryanne Kinkade (Marcia Gay Harden), the Blessed Virgin Mother of the Painter of Light™, is about to be foreclosed on.

What will become of the Christmas Cottage?

At this point, you could feed a million ant farms with the treacle dripping out of your screen. Who will save us? The real Thomas Kinkade couldn’t paint his way through a picket fence, but the titular hero of this film (Jared Padalecki) sweeps into Placerville, California, in a goddamn motorcycle sidecar, then paints a mural that blows everyone’s mind and saves Christmas. Oh, really? The only town I know of that was ever saved by beautiful murals is Philadelphia, and I don’t think I saw any paintings in here of Benjamin Franklin fist-bumping Mumia Abu-Jamal.

In terms of sheer contempt for reality, the most wonderful character in this movie is Thomas Kinkade’s deadbeat father, a cartoon character in a leisure suit who speaks in Esperanto and throws cherry bombs at emotional moments. You keep wanting him to save everyone with a blue movie called Christmas Frottage, à la Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008), but instead he learns a valuable lesson or something. Then, we can only assume, he goes back to a lucrative career in copper-wire theft.

Let me put it this way. Imagine that you’ve just been given the worst greeting card ever—a hideous mélange of red doilies and green crêpe paper—and you’re sitting there nodding and smiling and staring at the lapidary sentiment: May your holiday wishes burn you with the fire of a thousand suns. Now imagine you have to keep on faking it for 103 minutes. Sounds pretty awful, doesn’t it? Maybe—but the Painter of Light™ has to keep on faking it until he dies. There are some fates worse than the Krampus. Just don’t walk toward the light.

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.

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?”