HWSS -- How Would Summers Score?

Rich irony for the day: via popgadget comes news of a Harvard's Project Implicit. The project works with web interfaces to uncover biases of various kinds. Visitors can take a number of different Implicit Association Tests on subjects ranging from weight to presidential popularity. The tests are designed to measure bias and preferences (whether conscious or not).

The irony part? One of the tests, in this Harvard-based project, is the Gender-Science IAT which "often reveals a relative link between liberal arts and females and between science and males."

Looking out for the "underchicken"

I'm no fan of factory farming; it's indisputable that animals are treated in a vile and disgusting manner--chicken farming being particularly disgusting. Nonetheless, I do find it laugh-out-loud funny that Al Sharpton is now a spokesperson for PETA's KFC boycott campaign. You can view the video here--and yes, Sharpton does actually say KFC is hoping we "won't care about what they do to the underdog, or in this case, the underchicken." Warning: don't watch it if you want to continue to eat chicken guilt-free. (link via Secede from the Union)

Meanwhile in Yemen...

...while we are making such great progress in our curing-terrorism-through-torture program, a Yemeni judge, Hamoud al-Hitar, seems to be making converts to non-violence through religious debate. Al-Hitar heads Yemen's Theological Dialogue Committee, which sends senior Muslim clerics into prisons to debate the merits (or lack thereof) of terrorism with prisoners. It's a sort of Ben Franklin meets The Christian Science Monitor reports:

Seated amid stacks of Korans and religious texts, Hitar explains that his system is simple. He invites militants to use the Koran to justify attacks on innocent civilians and when they cannot, he shows them numerous passages commanding Muslims not to attack civilians, to respect other religions, and fight only in self-defense.

For example, he quotes: "Whoever kills a soul, unless for a soul, or for corruption done in the land--it is as if he had slain all mankind entirely. And, whoever saves one, it is as if he had saved mankind entirely." He uses the passage to bolster his argument against bombing Western targets in Yemen--attacks he says defy the Koran. And, he says, the Koran says under no circumstances should women and children be killed.

If, after weeks of debate, the prisoners renounce violence they are released and offered vocational training courses and help to find jobs.

Though one wonders if this is just an iron fist in a velvet glove situation, where prisoners say whatever they need to in order to escape punishment, it actually seems to be working. Hitar claims that there have been no terrorist attacks in Yemen since the first set of dialogues, and he has been invited to France, Germany, and London to speak about his successes.

It's worth noting that while theological discussion is making inroads in reducing Yemen's struggle with terrorism, it doesn't appear to be effective in reducing animosity toward America, according to the IPS News Agency:

"U.S. mistakes in the region may inflame Muslim anger and create more extremism and hatred," political analyst Mohammad al-Sabri told IPS. "We cannot convince militants that America is not against Islam while we see the U.S. forces inhumanely abusing prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, and unlimited U.S. support for Israelis against Palestinians."

Sheikh Haza'a al-Maswari, Islah party member of parliament declared at Friday prayers recently that "we cannot tell militants don't terrorise Americans, or don't attack their interests. Those who plant hatred will harvest hatred."

Perhaps needless to say, this is yet another news item that has been buried under the avalanche of reporting about Michael Jackson and Brad and Jennifer. As I said below in the post about the Stop Government Propaganda Act, I think this is one of the most fruitful functions of blogs: writing about neglected stories that belong above the fold. I am certainly given to hand-wringing harangues about the well reported news, and I'm not saying that's a bad thing. We are the culture's smoke alarm at this point. What I am saying is that I think sometimes we can get a bit caught up in the buzz--wanting to talk about what everyone is talking about. Let's not stop there. Let's keep our commitment to unearth and talk about the stuff no one is talking about. (Don't mistake this for a finger-shaking post--most blogs I read do this very thing--it's more of a "keep up the good work" idea I'm trying to express.)

Blue scare

That's what I'm calling it--this current McCarthy era. The LA Times (via Yahoo) has another piece today on Churchill "fighting for his academic life." (In this instance, the reporter seems to have actually read the essay in question rather than borrow O'Reilly's Cliff Notes.) Much of the article is taken up with the issue of Churchill's bloodlines. On the topic of Churchill's politics and writing, there's this:

"One argument that could be made is that his writings and speeches have degenerated to a point where they are representative of professional incompetence," said Paul Campos, a law professor at the university and a columnist for the Rocky Mountain News. "In the same way, a college would not tolerate a member of the history department who said the Holocaust didn't happen."

Campos said even professors should have limits.

"A position that says you cannot fire a tenured professor because of anything he says is untenable--politically, morally and ethically," he said. "And I have had people in positions of power tell me that if this guy can't be fired, they can't support the notion of tenure."

Well, you know what Campos, if this guy is fired for that essay, there is no notion of tenure for a person to support.

I can't even comment. I'm not exaggerating when I say it makes me physically nauseous to read a law professor comparing Ward Churchill to a racist who denies the existence of the Holocaust.

St. Vincent de Palimpsest

The patron saint of bad art's second chance. That is to say, the wurst gallery has an online exhibition of art acquired in thrift stores and reanimated by contemporary artists. It is extremely cool (the site shows the original pieces and then if you mouse over them, it shows the end result), but I need to say my friend Adam was there first with his derigible series (or are they blimps, or are those the same thing--I cannot remember). In any case, it's worth the click.


(via Josh Rubin whose site is also extremely cool)

Keep those passports updated

Scalia is campaigning:

Scalia has been active on the Washington social scene in recent weeks, hamming it up with the political crowd. Some court observers say this may be an effort to counter White House concerns that the brusque Scalia is ill-suited for a job demanding consensus.
. . .
During the presidential campaign, Bush cited Scalia, 68, and Thomas as justices he admired because of their narrow interpretation of the Constitution. Thomas privately has made it clear that he is not interested in becoming chief justice, according to friends and former clerks.

Or should I say he's "doing nothing to discourage the talk." If you're not convinced he's a pig, read Center for American Progress' short list of scary opinions.

Scalia will at least have Reid's vote:

But the Nevada Democrat said that he could support Thomas' fellow conservative, Justice Antonin Scalia, if he were nominated.

"I cannot dispute the fact, as I have said, that this is one smart guy," Reid said of Scalia. "And I disagree with many of the results that he arrives at, but his reasons for arriving at those results are very hard to dispute."

Citing a hunting trip Scalia took with Dick Cheney before hearing a case involving the commission the vice president set up to work on an energy bill, Reid said the justice has some ethics problems.

"So we have to get over this," he said.

Would that we could somehow populate the halls of Congress with more Searchlight, Nevada natives. If only we could count on more incisive, hard hitting Senators like Reid. Such an inspiration for liberal America.

P.S.

Last week Churchill wrote a response to his critics, which I suppose should be titled, "In case you are too dumb to understand the article that is clearly written in plain English." His ending point hits it straight on. We have to be free to discuss these matters. If academics are punished, fired and demoted, for raising these issues, we are in a pretty scary place, folks.

Some people will, of course, disagree with my analysis, but it presents questions that must be addressed in academic and public debate if we are to find a real solution to the violence that pervades today's world. The gross distortions of what I actually said can only be viewed as an attempt to distract the public from the real issues at hand and to further stifle freedom of speech and academic debate in this country.

More on Churchill and academic freedom

Below I mention Bill O'Reilly's hard-on for Ward Churchill. Today someone sent me an LA Times story with a note saying "nothing is ever as simple as it may appear." The story begins:

AURORA, Colo. — A student protest turned into a brawl here Thursday, shutting down a meeting of the University of Colorado board of regents after it agreed to investigate a professor who compared the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to Nazis.

The article takes up three main topics: the protest, the content of Churchill's article, and the question of Churchill's ethnicity (is he an American Indian or one step up from a cigar store replica?). Leaving aside the latter (in part because I am uneducated on the question and in part because I really tire over arguments about who is "authentic" and who is authorized to speak about what), here are some excerpts about the first two:

School officials struggled to be heard as students in the room screamed "Fascist regents!" and "Let the public speak!" One protester got into a shoving match, then a full-blown fight with police. Chaos erupted as students dove over chairs to taunt officers while regents were shuffled out a side door for their own safety.

"What country am I living in?" shrieked one demonstrator.

Gov. Bill Owens, a Republican, later decried the scene as "mob rule" and repeated his calls for Churchill's dismissal. Meanwhile, the state Senate passed a resolution Thursday denouncing the professor's remarks as "evil and inflammatory."

The furor over remarks by Churchill, 57, began last week. He was asked to speak at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., about Native American prison issues. But professors there discovered a paper he wrote after the Sept. 11 attacks titled "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens."

Churchill called those working in the World Trade Center "technocrats of empire" and "little Eichmanns," comparing them to Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi mastermind of the Holocaust. He said the workers were "civilians of a sort."

"But innocent? Gimme a break," he wrote.

Churchill said the "combat teams" that killed nearly 3,000 people "manifested the courage of their convictions." In a taped speech, he said that if the Pentagon wasn't a legitimate target, "I don't know what is."

Outrage ensued, and Monday Churchill stepped down as chairman of the department of ethnic studies, though he retains his $94,200-a-year teaching job. Hamilton College canceled his speech, saying it had received so many threats that it couldn't ensure his or the students' safety.

Churchill, who specializes in Native American issues, has said his writings were taken out of context, and that he meant that if America behaved unjustly it could not expect to be spared from attack.

Sadly, I am so tired I won't give this subject the justice it deserves, but I want to say a couple of things, if only in brief. First, I have read a slew of articles recently about bloggers, articles that praise weblogs for their attention to stories that might not otherwise come to the attention of the general public. But almost all of the articles have some sort of "but they're not real journalists" provisos. Why? Because of tone and a lack of objectivity. Many of my companions online have already pointed out the obvious--we're not pretending to be objective. But the LA Times is, and let's look again at the above article. There's a word choice issue ("shriek," "dove," "taunt," "chaos"...). There's a sentence structure issue ("though he retains his $94,200-a-year teaching job"). There's a framing issue ("after it agreed to investigate a professor who compared the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to Nazis" not "after it bowed to pressure from conservative pundits such as Bill O'Reilly and agreed to investigate a professor who argued that all Americans are culpable for policies that result in starvation and death").

And there's a plain old sloppy thinking, bad reporting issue. I have read Churchill's paper. It's damn easy to find. Type the title into a search engine, and there it is. I would be willing to bet hard cash that the journalist who wrote this article did not. I'm not going to try to defend the essay as a brilliant piece. I think it's pretty problematic in some ways. It's a polemic, written immediately following September 11 (like on the 12th), it is a passionate and angry piece. But it doesn't focus on condemning World Trade Center workers and praising the pilots of the planes. It focuses on sanctions and war, the resulting dead, and our mutual responsibility for supporting a regime that systematically kills middle easterners. Here is a piece:

All told, Iraq has a population of about 18 million. The 500,000 kids lost to date thus represent something on the order of 25 percent of their age group. Indisputably, the rest have suffered – are still suffering – a combination of physical debilitation and psychological trauma severe enough to prevent their ever fully recovering. In effect, an entire generation has been obliterated.

The reason for this holocaust was/is rather simple, and stated quite straightforwardly by President George Bush, the 41st "freedom-loving" father of the freedom-lover currently filling the Oval Office, George the 43rd: "The world must learn that what we say, goes," intoned George the Elder to the enthusiastic applause of freedom-loving Americans everywhere.

How Old George conveyed his message was certainly no mystery to the US public. One need only recall the 24-hour-per-day dissemination of bombardment videos on every available TV channel, and the exceedingly high ratings of these telecasts, to gain a sense of how much they knew.

In trying to affix a meaning to such things, we would do well to remember the wave of elation that swept America at reports of what was happening along the so-called Highway of Death: perhaps 100,000 "towel-heads" and "camel jockeys" – or was it "sand niggers" that week? – in full retreat, routed and effectively defenseless, many of them conscripted civilian laborers, slaughtered in a single day by jets firing the most hyper-lethal types of ordnance.

It was a performance worthy of the nazis during the early months of their drive into Russia. And it should be borne in mind that Good Germans gleefully cheered that butchery, too. Indeed, support for Hitler suffered no serious erosion among Germany's "innocent civilians" until the defeat at Stalingrad in 1943.

There may be a real utility to reflecting further, this time upon the fact that it was pious Americans who led the way in assigning the onus of collective guilt to the German people as a whole, not for things they as individuals had done, but for what they had allowed – nay, empowered – their leaders and their soldiers to do in their name.

Thus the "roosting chickens" in the title: "Globalization: 'Some People Push Back' On the Justice of Roosting Chickens."

Anyway, I am tired, thus the too-long-ness of this post. But despite my less than sharp rambling here, I think you probably understand what I'm getting at: to simply say "compared the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to Nazis" is really a gross misrepresentation of Churchill's argument. Don't get me wrong, he is beyond uncharitable to the dead and wounded of September 11, but his is an argument about individual responsibility for a systemic problem.

All of which adds up to a couple of "no duh...time to go to bed Einstein" points: first, media coverage of the Churchill controversy doesn't even seem to be making the effort to disguise itself as anything other than shrill, biased propaganda. And second, we are in a McCarthy era. Mark my words, Churchill is the canary in this coal mine.

Time out for history

I've been thinking about the Declaration of Independence lately, and last night I reread it and gosh darned if these past four years haven't breathed new life into that document for me. The part that kept sticking in my head was the litany of complaint against King George, which has always reminded me of that point in the seder when you stick your pinky in the wine glass to make drops on your plate for each of the plagues. So here it is, you tell me:

The history of the present King [George III] of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

And so on.

Sound like someone you know? Kind of mind boggling isn't it.

A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Why I resist the postmodern

I was all set to write a post titled "soylent green is nextel" about biodegradable cell phones, but now Chris at After School Snack has me thinking, "no, soylent green is paper." It seems there is a "chef" in Chicago making inkjet maki. The NYT article begins by talking about the paper sushi Cantu flavors and imprints with pictures of raw fish in seaweed, and it degenerates from there:

Mr. Cantu is experimenting with liquid nitrogen, helium and superconductors to make foods levitate. And while many chefs speak of buying new ovens or refrigerators, he wants to invest in a three-dimensional printer to make physical prototypes of his inventions, which he now painstakingly builds by hand. The 3-D printer could function as a cooking device, creating silicone molds for pill-sized dishes flavored, say, like watermelon, bacon and eggs or even beef Bourguignon, he said, and he could also make edible molds out of cornstarch.

Call it "why Baudrillard should not be allowed in the kitchen."

"How would you like your simulacrum, sir?"

"Oh hyperreal, of course."

I'm sorry folks; I'm just a die-hard modernist at heart.

Someone found a box of spines

Okay, I was wrong to condemn the entire party just because Harry Reid grew up in Searchlight, Nevada. I'll acknowledge that I was, shall we say, a bit reactionary. It appears that while Harry was crafting his, ahem, rebuttal, other Senators were really doing the work of an opposition party.

Yesterday the "Stop Government Propaganda Act" was introduced in the Senate. (This is FAS's copy of the Congressional Record. You can also find it at loc.gov, but it's messier). I haven't read through the whole thing myself, and I'm too tired to be willing right now, but at first glance it looks like a damn fine statement. Obviously inspired by the mounting discoveries of the Bush empire's media bribes, it addresses a wide ranging set of infractions including Social Security employees being pressured to back false crisis claims. It's snowball-in-hell legislation to be sure, but I for one, am going to write Lautenberg and Kennedy (who it seems were the originators) and thank them. The thing has bite.

Check this out from the explanatory statement:

When the GAO finds that taxpayer funds are misspent for propaganda purposes, and the agency fails to follow the GAO's ordered actions, our bill would call for the head of that agency's salary to be withheld.
. . .
As we seek to establish democracy in Iraq, let's first remove this taint from our own democracy.

Go Frank!

And can I ask where is the media coverage on this. Um hello? When you type "stop government propaganda act" into yahoo news, you get six hits. One is a decent, if short, Newsweek piece on payola that includes this call to action:

There's likely more to come. While Bush said last week that he wants his departments to cease paying columnists, his administration has doled out $250 million in taxpayer money to private public-relations firms, twice what had been spent before. More of that indefensible largesse will likely turn up in propaganda masquerading as journalism. That is, after all, the point of public relations. The story will emerge slowly because the Democrats don't control Congress and can issue no subpoenas, and because there's so little digging into what goes on inside federal agencies. Why? With daily deadlines and frequent TV gigs, Washington reporters are stretched too thin.

So can the bloggers ride to the rescue, as they did in Rathergate? They offer readers a huge new menu of tasty and often nourishing bite-size appetizers, while keeping what they call the "mainstream media" (MSM) from spitting in the soup [well, that's not really what we call you, but okay]. And the democratic din of thousands of competing voices is exactly what the Founders envisioned when they sought to protect the rights of pamphleteers, who were the bloggers of the early republic.

Okay folks, Newsweek has given us our marching orders. Long live the broadside!! Everyone go post about the Stop Government Propaganda Act now. (When you type that into Technorati, you get 120 hits.)

As an aside, I will admit that I am predisposed to like any piece of legislation that uses the word "puffery" in its definitions.

Documenting the blacklist

It's beginning to smell a lot like HUAC folks.

Tis the season

A gift suggestion from me.

It's all over but the screaming

So they have 58 votes for Gonzales. NYT tells us:

But by mid-afternoon Mr. Gonzales did have the support of at least three Democratic senators, Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut and Ken Salazar and Ben Nelson, both of Colorado.

Mr. Lieberman said he believed that a president should be able to pick his Cabinet team, barring compelling reasons to the contrary. The senator said he had met with the nominee and was satisfied that Mr. Gonzales's allegiance was "to the Constitution and the people of this country," not simply to President Bush.

Mr. Salazar introduced Mr. Gonzales to the Senate and later said he had been reassured by a letter from the nominee in which Mr. Gonzales unequivocally rejected torture.

And a spokesman for Mr. Nelson, David DiMartino, said today that Mr. Gonzales had had a private meeting with the senator and eliminated any reservations Mr. Nelson might have had.

Did they share a cigar? I'm wondering.

There is no opposition party. I love big brother. In fact, I fucking adore him. I want to bear big brother's children.

Can you say "cult of true womanhood"?

From AP today: "Women Provide Emotion at State of Union":

They met just before the speech began: the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq and the daughter of a man killed by Saddam Hussein's regime. They found some comfort in a spontaneous moment that electrified President Bush's State of the Union address.

The two women, both touched by death in Iraq, reached out for each other while lawmakers, military leaders, the president and the nation watched. Their hug inspired the longest applause of the evening.

Bush said the women's locked embrace was a touching moment and an expression of compassion and appreciation from an Iraqi who enjoyed the freedom to vote on Sunday. . . .

Pain etched lines in Norwood's forehead as she held al-Suhail. Norwood finally let go, took her husband's arm and rested her head on his shoulder. . . .

From Godey's Lady's Book (February 1850):

There is a beautiful parallelism between the condition of woman in her domestic life and the character of a nation. She is the mother of men, and the former of their minds, at that early age when every word distills upon the heart like the dew-drop upon the tender grass. There is to that young mind no truth or falsehood in the world but that whose words flow from the mother's lips. There is no beauty in character, nor glory in action, which has not been concentrated by her praise. . . . It is thus that society is formed in its social and moral ideas; and thus its condition must ever present, on a large scale, a parallelism in its moral life to the condition of woman. It is not n matter of fancy, but a great social fact. Edward D. Mansfield.

Groundhog Day, indeed. This is like the Wal-mart approach to gender ("We're rolling back social progress!")

The Rights of the "True Woman":

The right to love whom others scorn,
The right to comfort and to mourn,
The right to shed new joy on earth,
The right to feel the soul's high worth,
Such woman's rights a God will bless
And crown their champions with success.

How dumb is he?

This dumb. (via Bitch. Ph.D.)

The mouse that roared

Giving whole new meaning to the phrase, "monkey on your back," ScienceDaily reports that rhesus monkey testes have been grafted onto the backs of mice and produced viable sperm. Needless to say, the article discusses potential implications for humans, and again, I'm sure I need not mention the frightening images conjured up in this blogger's mind. Andrea and I turned over a few of these. (The images, not the mice.) After running through the obligatory round of jokes ("What makes girl mice walk like cowboys?" "Are those monkey balls on your back or are you just happy to see me" . . .) we realized that this little experiment provides a metaphorical lens through which to view our current political situation.

We're thinking Bush and company are sort of like the mice: tiny and, well, tiny. Desperate for more potency, they are looking for that WMD graft. Wolfowitz and Ashcroft -- they pretty much sewed the monkey parts onto the mouse.

The Dems, on the other hand? They are donor monkeys. Hence Reid's stump speech tonight.

Whence the acronym MOT

Member of the Tribe, that is, for my goyish readers.

I think even the non-Zionist Jewish readers will appreciate Harry's story of one day in the life of an Israeli soldier. Heading back to base, Harry flags down a tour bus for a lift:

As soon as I get on the bus, the tour guide, an Australian fellow throws a warm smile in my direction. He sees my seventh brigade tag and starts telling the group of American tourists my unit's historical significance. I ask him in English where the group is from and he says Long Island, New York. I think to myself this isn't happening and before I know it, regretting it as I begin speaking, I tell him that I grew up on Long Island. He immediately informs the tour group who begin to bombard me with questions.

"Where are you from on the Island?"
"Port Jefferson Station"
"Is that near Port Washington?"
"No, it's near Stony Brook"
"Where did you go to school?"
"SUNY Albany"
"Did you know my daughter Deborah Finkelstein? She was in AEPhi!
"No, I didn't really hang with the sorority girls."
"Do you have a girlfriend?"
"No"
"Debbie would be perfect for you."
"Thanks. I'll keep that in mind next time I'm in NY"

Amidst the rumbling I hear a voice call out, "Oh My Gawd. Harry? Is that you?"

I cringe. This isn't happening. Who could possibly know me on this bus?

"Harry, it's Fay. I play mahjong with your mother every Tuesday!"

Jesus fucking Christ. What are the chances? I needed to get off that bus immediately. I might be smiley and look happy, but eyes are glancing outside to see how much longer I have to deal with this until I get to my army base, which had suddenly become my fortress of solitude.

"So how are you Harry? You look great! So tan! I can't wait to tell your mother I saw you!"

"Thanks. Tell her to send me more chocolate licorice and a few more books. The classics. I feel neglected!" I said jokingly.

"I'll send her the message!" she tells me. Suddenly, she turns around and yells to everyone on the bus...

"I WAS AT HIS BRIS EVERYONE! I WAS AT HIS BRIS!!"

Harry, we all feel your pain. Well, not the bris pain, the mahjong-playing Fay pain. (Story comes via the amazingly named Protocols of the Yuppies of Zion)

Oddly, this really relates in my mind with the last post on the naked juice bar porn palace. I did go to South Dakota once. My family jointly owns ranch land in northwestern South Dakota (truly a scary region I must say). It's been handed down and no one lives there but a tenant farmer and a bunch of soybeans, but I got it in my head to make a pilgrimage one time. En route, I stopped at "hometown" where my dad grew up, and my aunt and uncle gave me a tour of the town. I made the great mistake of asking something like "It must have been tough to grow up here in a Jewish family." No, my aunt explained, there were plenty of Jews. And the rest of the tour was, in fact, the Jew tour, with aunt and uncle pointing and explaining "And there, that family is Jewish. Oh and you see that dentist's office? He's Jewish." And so on. In their defense, I will say that rarely have I felt so very Jewish as when I rolled into Faith, South Dakota in a Honda with my New Yorker friend. Regrettably, we had forgotten our ten-gallon hats. Someone must have alerted the authorities because we actually got a speeding ticket on our way back from the ranch land. ("Hey, get out there, Cletus. There's two Jews in a Honda driving.")

An acronym waiting to happen

Okay, I've decided that I'm just going to post a bunch of utterly silly stuff now to try to cleanse my system of the State of the Union. Sort of like a blogging colonic only more pleasant.

Via The Washington Monthly comes news of the active protest movement in South Dakota: Citizens Against Nude Juicebars and Pornography. Since I work in Chatsworth, California, my first thought is, were such an organization successful here, the entire economy could be in jeopardy. In any case, one of the leaders of this fifteen-member organization, salon owner Maxine Pulse, in her role as spokesperson, cogently articulates CANJP's grievance:

"There's a line between right and wrong, and it seems like anymore nowadays that line has got all jumbled up."

I'm with you Maxine. Get some pasties on those juice waitresses. All those men downing wheatgrass shots and those jambas jiggling. God help us all. Thankfully, state senator Clarence Kooistra is on the case and has legislation in the hopper:

"We do not want the Salem area and McCook County to be known as Sin City, South Dakota," he says.

And here I need to interject and say my father, oddly enough, was born in South Dakota. Happily he escaped before the line got jumbled up. He found the line, in fact, to be quite straight and narrow. "I don't know if people live longer in the Midwest," he would say, "or if it just feels that way."

Harry

Jo Miller read my mind about Harry Reid. I did watch the Democratic response, which, had I not recognized Harry and read the caption on the screen, would have been largely indistinguishable to me from the Republican platform Reid is purportedly rebutting. That is to say, the opening anecdote about Harry's humble upbringing and his family's hardscrabble approach to life (how did he put it, "we never asked for any favors" or something like that?) and their firm, if unspoken values... The bile rises.

Please, mother of god, do not let this be the Democrat's "strategy" (or is that "strategery") for 2008. There are plenty of genuine values in the Democratic platform; there's really no need to pilfer the Republicans' values. But could we just stop talking about family values and religious values??!! Let's talk about populist values and Constitutional values. Why is this not obvious???

I know I've read too much Habermas, but I need to say here that the whole idea of a citizen (rather than just a guy) is that of a person who puts aside their private interests to become a rights-bearing member of the public. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing for the Democrats to think about framing their ideas in terms of values, but for heaven's sake, stop trying to make private choices into public values, and start talking about the god damned Constitution and Bill of Rights. Is there some sort of mass lobotomy movement going on that I don't know about?