IN A LIFE IN WHICH I'VE SEEN AND HEARD MANY CREEPY THINGS, IT TAKES A LOT OF MAKE THE HAIR ON THE BACK OF MY NECK STAND UP, but now I am officially creeped out. I admit I haven't given too much thought to Michael Schiavo's lawyer, George Felos. I wrote him off as simply another cell in the vast pond scum that covers the surface of what is called "the legal profession." Then a passing comment at another site caused me to search out his book. I found it first on Amazon, but the reviews there were suspect so I decided I couldn't form an opinion from those. Then I went to the site of his "publisher," Blue Dolphin, reasoning that they would put forward Felos' book in the best possible light. Perhaps they do. Here's the top quote on the page, Litigation as Spiritual Practice (Blue Dolphin Publishing)

Such a deep, dark, silent blue. I stared as far into her eyes as I could, hoping to sense some glimmer of understanding, some hint of awareness. The deeper I dove, the darker became the blue, until the blue became the black of some bottomless lake. "Mrs. Browning, do you want to die ... do you want to die?" I nearly shouted as I continued to peer into her pools of strikingly beautiful but incognizant blue. It felt so eerie. Her eyes were wide open and crystal clear, but instead of the warmth of lucidity, they burned with the ice of expressionlessness.

Got that? Did you grok the black of the bottomless lake of shameless shyster's drooling lunacy? In my ignorance, I had supposed that you needed to demonstrate higher rational functions to be admitted to the Florida Bar. Ah, such a fool am I.

Just in case that purple gem of putrid prose didn't convince you, here's another paragraph from the excerpt Blue Dolphin proudly displays:

Continued...

ONE OF THE SMALL ECONOMIES about living in New York City for years and relocating to Southern California is to be had in clothing costs. If one of your jobs in New York was being a men's fashion editor for a magazine, you find that you don't buy clothes so much as have them.

In any case, I dumped clothes by the cartload before I moved, and I still had far too many when I arrived. Since I don't ski, the usefulness of items that would put Nanook of the North into a sweat during January in Greenland are pretty dubious when every day can be a day at the beach. As a result, I've been pretty much out of the clothing shopping cycle for years and I find it, to say the least, refreshing.

In Laguna Beach if you hold two pairs of shorts, a couple of swim suits, a few Hawaiian Shirts and two pairs of jeans for "formal occasions," you're pretty much done. But "wear happens" and I've noted that my Levis have been getting -- even for Levis -- fairly grotty in the last couple of months. Yesterday, I decided they about to be redefined as "rags," and I so set off to purchase my first new pair of jeans in at least six years.

Since I'm a hit-and-run shopper I did what any American male in search of jeans-to-go would do, I turned left into the parking lot of the first Gap I saw and sauntered inside confident of my mission. Unlike my wife who tends to shop like a wild gazelle grazes -- a nip here and graze there and, presto, six different designer shopping bags -- I knew what I wanted. I also knew how much I was going to spend. Unlike my wife who never really spends any money on clothes, but only "saves" money on clothes. [ Me: "You look great in that new outfit with the shoes and the hat. How much did they cost?" Her: "Would you believe I saved over $800 on this? How great is that?" Me: "That's really great."]

I firmly believe that if you have to spend more than 15 minutes in a clothing store, you don't need what you think you need. My list was short. I wanted one pair of five pocket denim jeans, blue, crisp, and coming in at no more than $50. The Gap was the place for me.

Fool. Yes, fool. For if you want to find a pair of crisp, new blue jeans in trendy deco SoCal, you'd better pack a lunch, because you are about to find yourself trapped inside an episode of "Shop Trek."

It's not that you can't buy some new jeans at the Gap, it is just that you can't buy any new new jeans.

Yes, it would seem that sometime in the last six years, the American people have become so fat and so happy and so inordinately lazy that they no longer want to put their own wear, sweat and stress into their Levis. Nope, it seems

Continued...

It's the little things that can really underscore a nation's greatness.

Even during a year in which the United States knocked over an insane despotism in the middle of the Middle East, bracketing Iran and putting airfields and planes about ten minutes from Syria, it is still the small things that make me gasp with admiration.

Even during a year when the whines and blather of an intensely hateful opposition of anklebiters and pseudo-intellectuals infesting mass media and the petrified forests of academe. predicted economic doom, and the society responded with unexpected growth, the sinew and strength of America is expressed in the minuscule.

Even during a time when a run-up to a Presidential election has been more entertaining than free popcorn and tickets to the debut of Snow White and the Eight Dwarfs down at the Bada-Bing, it is the lesser items of American life illuminate the greater truths.

Item from today's news:

Burger King Corp. is joining the low-carbohydrate parade by offering Bunless Whopper hamburgers and, soon, salads featuring steak, chicken and shrimp.

The Bunless sandwiches, which will be available nationwide beginning Tuesday, will come in plastic salad bowls, with knife and fork.
--- Burger King to Market Bunless Whoppers

Again, the American microcosm reveals the American macrocosm. Ponder that item for a mere moment. Meditate on the deeper truth that is revealed in the simple and mundane mantra, 'Bunless Whopper.'

And what is that truth? It is as clear as a $4 bottle of spring water. What the birth of the 'Bunless Whopper' tells us without question is that the United States of America has at last achieved the most ancient dream, not only of humanity, but of life itself.

Yes, America has finally arrived at the alpha and omega point of life on earth. Today we stand at the top of the long, hard and deadly climb from the primeval soup. Today the free world, the first world, the Crown of Creation and cradle of democracy is home at last with the Bunless Whopper; each one served 'in plastic salad bowls, with knife and fork.'

We have in America, right now, what all other cultures and nations and empires have dreamed of since before the dawn of time. We have, finally, created a society that produces

Way-Too-Much-Food (TM)

. After aeons of the nightmare of Never-Enough-Food we now awake into the brave new Bunless Whopper World. We are the kings and queens of the Global Food Court, and our national sport is double dipping at the salad bar as we supersize everything from soup to nuts.

In fact, we are now so firmly established in the way-too-much-food universe that we are about to pass through a chronosynclasticinfandibulem into the alternate universe where a kid at the cash register says, 'Would you like to downsize these fries?'

I know, I know, They will tell you that people in America go to bed hungry every night. And They will be right. They will tell you, because They live to tell you, that you must think of "the starving children of Appalachia" (urban or rural), and so you will because you always think about what They so compulsively must tell you.

But, at the same time, the same 'They' are also going to tell you that you, or others like you, or others that you may know, or may see on the street (but seldom at a bikini contest on the beach) are much too fat. They will tell you that people, especially 'the children,' ('They' love to drag in 'the children' at every opportunity.) are getting too obese, and by God the government needs to step in and 'do something.' This 'something' will invariably be a host of new regulations written by Them and directed at large corporations to tell people more about the fact that 'way-too-much-food will make you way-to0-much-fat.' A message that really hasn't been sufficiently promulgated by the nation's book, magazine, newspaper, radio, and dietary supplement companies.

After the new regulations 'telling people what is good for them' have zero effect at halting way-too-much-food intake, They will make their next move. They will, 'for your own good,' make some laws to limit 'way-too-much-food.'

Following rapidly on the heels of these new laws that They will make 'for your own good,' will come a raft of studies, convocations, symposiums, and finally the really big gun, the class-action law suits directed at the deepest pockets around.

Bribed experts from academe will blather at $500 and hour plus expenses in hundreds of courtrooms. Morbidly obese victims without number will waddle in front of morbidly clueless juries without peer in an effort to suck morbidly huge settlements from the coffers of companies who have produced way-too-much-food for decades. Judges busy digesting way-too-much-lunch will drowse on their benches for months and years at a time. Discovery motions will uncover mountain ranges of documentation going back decades that prove, PROVE, that McDonalds' executives knew the Big Mac has six grams too much secret sauce for the heart of average American who wants to hoover up ten meals a day and live to 120. They will be found guilty of a conspiracy to feed people way-too-much food for way-too-little money. (The top restaurants that charge $20 a bite in Los Angles, New York, and DC will get a pass so that power lunching may continue.)

And when it is all said and done and run up to the Supreme Court, and the checks are cut, the only Americans who will then be getting far-too-fat will be the members of the Trial Lawyers Association, the tools of Expert Academe who have shilled for them,and the politician with his hand out "lookin' for a new friend."

Way-too-much-food will have been judged to be, in the final analysis, un-American for poor people and little children. It's the American Way.

YESTERDAY I WROTE ABOUT "The Big Pinata "Today in the Wall Street Journal Peggy Noonan writes about the big box store in "Patriots, Then and Now -- With nations as with people, love them or lose them."

Because we do not communicate to our immigrants, legal and illegal, that they have joined something special, some of them, understandably, get the impression they've joined not a great enterprise but a big box store. A big box store on the highway where you can get anything cheap. It's a good place. But it has no legends, no meaning, and it imparts no spirit.

Who is at fault? Those of us who let the myth die, or let it change, or refused to let it be told. The politically correct nitwit teaching the seventh-grade history class who decides the impressionable young minds before him need to be informed, as their first serious history lesson, that the Founders were hypocrites, the Bill of Rights nothing new and imperfect in any case, that the Indians were victims of genocide, that Lincoln was a clinically depressed homosexual who compensated for the storms within by creating storms without . . .

You can turn any history into mud. You can turn great men and women into mud too, if you want to.

And it's not just the nitwits, wherever they are, in the schools, the academy, the media, though they're all harmful enough. It's also the people who mean to be honestly and legitimately critical, to provide a new look at the old text. They're not noticing that the old text--the legend, the myth--isn't being taught anymore. Only the commentary is. But if all the commentary is doubting and critical, how will our kids know what to love and revere? How will they know how to balance criticism if they've never heard the positive side of the argument?

Those who teach, and who think for a living about American history, need to be told: Keep the text, teach the text, and only then, if you must, deconstruct the text.

When you don't love something you lose it. If we do not teach new Americans to love their country, and not for braying or nationalistic reasons but for reasons of honest and thoughtful appreciation, and gratitude, for a history that is something new in the long story of man, then we will begin to lose it.

SEVEN YEARS AND 2.2 BILLION MILES IN THE MAKING

Saturn's peaceful beauty invites the Cassini spacecraft for a closer look.... NASA TV/webcast coverage of Cassini's arrival at Saturn begins June 30, 6:30 pm Pacific time. Check this page frequently for mission updates.

My up-close and personal relationship with Saturn is brand new. Sure, I'd seen the pictures and the "artist's conceptions" all my life. I'd read the stories, both science and fiction, and I believed. I had faith. I had faith that Saturn existed and that it had the rings that made it the single most miraculous object in the solar system, save Earth -- which may also be, except for our belief and faith in numbers, the single most miraculous place in the universe.

But my belief in Saturn and its rings was just that, "belief." After all, I had never actually seen Saturn -- only pictures and paintings. Saturn to me was only hearsay. That all changed a month ago thanks a friend with a passion for astronomy and actual possession of a serious telescope, coupled with a moonless night at the edge of the pacific here in Laguna Beach.

With the events of the last year, I've often taken to mouthing a phrase picked up from someone else to give people a snapshot of my current take on our world in 2004. It goes, "I try to become more cynical every month but lately I just can't keep up." It's so arch, so deftly faux-ironic yet yielding a bouquet redolent with a whiff of the flaneur and just a smidgen of edge. It's a fine whine of recent vintage that's just about as toxic to the truth about my inner life as a fresh, chilled pitcher of Jonestown Kool-Aid.

We often take up catch-phrases like the one above and use them as an Etch-A-Sketch display of our souls; our means to signify ourselves to others without really having to engage them. If we do it too much, who we are fades out of sight to others and we are like the sailor on the far horizon flapping out semaphore code about our inner self. Then we become distressed when others only see the code and not the man in full. But it is of our own doing and sometimes we get so far inside the code that we can't step out of it, step closer into the light, stand and unfold ourselves. Sometimes, it takes something the size of a planet to knock us out of orbit and back down to the surface of the planet we inhabit.

I needed a planet, and for my sins, I got one.

My friend and I had had one of those solid guy meals composed of a good wine and a choice of pizza. Then we went outside on the terrace where a shrouded shape stretched up against the backdrop of ocean and night. His house is on the edge of the town overlooking the beach and the sea so it affords, except for the part of the sky taken up by the house, a fair chance of seeing what's up there.

Light pollution is a problem I suppose since we are surrounded by a busy highway and a town whose other houses and street lights stretch up the hills around and behind, but the seeing is better than it would be in, say, my last home in Brooklyn Heights. Besides, it didn't have a serious telescope pointed up at heaven. Telescopes are popular in New York, but they are seldom pointed up.

The evening haze had peeled off the sky and there was no moon. I looked out at the sea as he took the covering off the telescope and went through the rituals required to prepare the instrument. If this had been a decade or so ago, there would have been a long period of lining the telescope up, but this is the computer/GPS age and it was merely a matter of him entering some figures into a keypad and pressing "Enter." The instrument hummed and swung across the sky through a small arc and stopped.

He bent over the eyepiece and moved the focus knob, then he stepped aside and let me take a look.

I pressed my eye against the mounting and saw.... well, I saw a pale, yellow smudge in the center a dark circle. Then I moved my thumb and forefinger just a bit and in an instant the smudge became a sharp, golden shape. And then, because it had rings, what the shape was became known to my mind -- the planet Saturn. Real time. Real sky. Real life.

Saturn seen at last not as a picture taken by someone else and printed in a magazine or a book; an image passed on and fobbed off as the real deal. Not a drawing or a painting, a sketch or a story, but Saturn itself. And not Saturn with a ring around it, but Saturn with multiple rings that you could see with your own eye; Saturn streaked with colored bands of gas that wrapped across the surface of the planet. Saturn see with the naked eyes. My eyes. Right there in the exact center of the sky.

There's a time when you start to approach the near side of fifty when you begin to suspect, if you've lived a reasonably active life, that you don't have as many "Firsts" in front of you as you have behind. When you pass fifty and close on sixty, you're sure of it. That's probably what compels a lot of people to travel compulsively about the world -- the thought that if you can move around a lot, you can somehow pile more "Firsts" into your experience and somehow extend your "Life List of Things To Do Before...."

This can work, but more often than not you are simply seeing things that are new versions of other things, but not Firsts. Firsts are rare because once you've had them, everything like them that comes along later are simply seconds; sometimes better than the Firsts, but seconds all the same, and you make you peace with that.

First love, first car, first child.... these are the pearls of great price on the string of your life and that's why you remember them and cherish them. And you use them up, one at a time. Although they came in a cascade at the start, they become more rare as the road winds on. When you get one, especially when you don't expect it, it makes you take a break by the side of the road to make sure you remember and value the gift.

The moments after Saturn first swam into focus were like that. Absent repeating some varieties of dubious experience, I'd thought I was immune to actually feeling something intellectual that can only be described as a physical thrill, but I was wrong.

As I gazed on Saturn I felt everything I had ever read, or seen or thought about the planet come racing back out of places in my mind long discarded or left behind with a jolt. The books read in childhood, the films seen, the cornball space operas like "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet" or "Space Patrol" that were the most essential part of my childhood's television hours, all the fact and the fantasy, the lectures and the lessons in which Saturn figured came tumbling up out of my memory at a rate of speed I hadn't thought possible. And my body felt as if something had across two billion miles and run an electrical charge right down the center of my spine.

I imagine this is what people mean when they talk about a conversion experience.. a sharp, clear moment when faith becomes real, becomes concrete. If your god has become science, there's nothing like a big hit of real science to make you rethink what you think you know about God.

It's easy to say, "Well, of course Saturn was really there. Everyone told you it was and showed you the pictures for decades. Did you think they were kidding you? Did you think it was all some sort of nifty mural painted on a black backdrop and that sooner or later it was all going to be turned around to see that, well, we were just kidding?"

Of course not, but it does remind me that the essence of science, the foundation of all our knowledge that is as sure and certain as we can make it, rests on the simple act of going where we need to go and seeing for ourselves. If we can't see for ourselves, we then set to work figuring out how to make instruments and theories and technologies that allow us to, ultimately, just see for ourselves. In the end, that's what makes us who we are -- the smart monkey that figures out how to see for itself, that follows the path that tells us that, if we can only look out far enough and in deep enough, we'll finally see for ourselves the proof of the miracle, and understand that miracle enough to know that its worth hanging around to see more of it unfold, day after day and night after night. After all, what are we looking for down all the years if not the place when we cease to believe and come to know? A lot of people like to believe that we'll know after we die, but a lot of other people would rather have the information just a bit sooner.

Tomorrow night, Earth's spacecraft Cassini is going to fly through the rings of Saturn. This is going to be broadcast live on television. It will be a long, slow program. There won't be a lot of drama. The dialogue will be stilted, formal, technocrat. It won't be up for an Emmy. I wouldn't miss it for the world.

===
Pointer: For current broadcast details for both television and web broadcasts plus news and other items concerning Cassini, check this web page at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory

AT SOME POINT LAST WEEK, caught between the online Scylla and Charybdis of the Democratic Underground and the Free Republic, I began to understand that common humanity in general, myself included, was not going to be advanced no matter what the resolution of the Terri Schiavo matter. Indeed, it didn't seem to matter what your opinion was, you were going to be -- as these things go now in America -- dragged into the mire along with the rest of the country. Once it became clear that there would be no reprieve for this woman, but that the sentence of death-by-starvation-for-her-own good was set in stone, the entire country was condemned to be tainted by the unfolding spectacle.

Continued...

IT SEEMS LIKE ONLY YESTERDAY that the Vincente Fox, the President of the Oligarchy of Mexico was lauding his border-busting constituents for being willing to do jobs in America "not even blacks want." Wait. It was yesterday. Today, however, we see a kinder and gentler face of the Mexican government. A series of postage stamps that illustrates the the immense respect and sensitivity of Mexico to negroes the world over.

Here's some samples of their usually worthless postage stamps which will soon be the most highly collectible items among philatelists of the Klu Klux Klan.

Is it too much to hope that the United States issues a similar tribute using, say, Gordo and Speedy Gonzales?

ILLEGALS SWARM OVER WHITE HOUSE FENCE TO APPLY FOR OTHER JOBS 'NO AMERICAN WILL DO:' "In a symbolic gesture of the new White House attitude, Mr. Bush offered to dump other loyal staffers in exchange for more positive press coverage as well as Congressional action on some of his policy initiatives." -- ScrappleFace: Card Departs, Bush Offers to Fire Other Staffers

IN THE INSANE DARKNESS, SMALL CANDLES GLOW BRIGHTER: Man Gets Birthday Wish, Church Ceases to Exist

"In just a matter of hours, classical works by Homer, Ovid and Vergil disintegrated, Europe was overun by Moors and is now under a theocratic dictatorship, works by Michaelangelo and other artists vanished, the slave trade resurrected, his wife ceased to be, and 2000 years of unsaid prayers went unanswered.

He said he wished the Catholic Church never existed."

Funny and not in the peculiar sense.

[HT: The Anchoress]

AS I WAS QUITE RUDELY REMINDED YESTERDAY, it is possible for people to dump you according to how you vote. Especially if you were once 'one of them.' I've been at some odds to understand this since that is certainly not my default state, but today I found this sensible explanation by a woman who has experienced the same thing. Unlike my emotional confusion about this phenomenon, she has the advantage of being a trained therapist: Condescension and leaving the political fold

Attacks. Name-calling: "imperialist," "colonialist"--and, in one rather memorable case, "Dan Quayle lover," although I certainly hadn't breathed a word about any passion for him. Many of my friends were noticeably cooler to me after these exchanges, and a couple of old friends actually severed our relationship (permanently, so far).

There are a host of reasons this happened, I suppose. But at the time I didn't see it coming, and it was extremely shocking and disturbing to me. But now that I've had some time to think about it, I think that I actually would have gotten a better response from them if I'd skipped the "I've always been a liberal Democrat" intro. Because there are few things more hated than an apostate, a turncoat, a traitor.

Someone who leaves the fold is much worse than someone who was never in it. There's a special rage reserved for those who have rejected the ideas that others hold dear. I don't think I ever said anything condescending to any of these people, but time and again I they told me I was being condescending.

But when I thought about it, I realized that this perception of condescension was inevitable and unavoidable. After all, I was saying "I used to believe 'A,' but now I believe 'B,'" and I was addressing people who continued to believe "A." Under the circumstances, how could they fail to see me as condescending, whether I was really conveying that attitude or not?

An angle I'd not considered which, added to the fact that your very presence reminds them of political realities they would choose to forget, explains a lot of otherwise inexplicable behavior.
====

Elsewhere at the same site 'Neo-Neocon' is also conducting a longer analysis of what it means to change political horses in mid-life: A mind is a difficult thing to change: Part 3--Beginnings. Recommended.

THE ATTENTION GIVEN TO THE PLIGHT OF THE DISABLED IN AMERICA made me recall this essay I wrote last September: Visit to an Old Friend. More at the link. A part of it reads,

Be. Here. Now. Remember that phrase?

He's here but not here now. It's two decades, two wives, two daughters, and many more than two strokes later. He's here now in this residence hotel for the aged and the infirm in a San Francisco neighborhood doesn't change with the years. He's waiting for me in his wheelchair, in the sun, his brother by his side. He's only 59 years old with God only knows how many years ahead of him.

He might still want to play the piano, but his hands won't answer him any more. They can't it. They'll never do it again. The hands no longer answer when he calls them. He's learned not to call.

Now his hands can barely lift a spoon or maneuver a cup to his lips. His speech is slurred and slow. You can see the end of the sentence fade from his mind before he gets to the middle. Still, in fits and starts, in moments and sparks of expression, you can see him emerge from inside his prison and then sink back in. You find yourself looking for those moments. You glide over all the others.

We meet and we go for a walk and a roll with his brother in the San Francisco afternoon. We come back and take a table in the Indian restaurant under the series of rooms are now his last home. We work our way through the lunch buffet. And we talk, mostly about the past since the past is where he's most at ease.

The fence we built on his ranch/commune. The day the two dogs we owned from the same litter killed the chicken. The stoned, comic film we were going to make with large vats of spaghetti in the first scene. Wives we had and girls we knew. The old songs. The handsome collection of pot plants on the deck that was taken away by the local police. The concerts. The marches. All the old moments, more than we could say in the few hours we had.

YOU'D THINK Publishers Weekly would have writers who could see unintentional humor in bad headlines instead of being impressed with their own cleverness. You'd be wrong: Not Biden His Time: Senator Random to Hook Up

A SHORT NOTE CONCERNING the financial benefits to Michael Schiavo that will accrue from the death of his wife.

I've seen numerous comments that the money given to Terri following various settlements has been dissipated in paying for hospice care and legal bills over the years. I have no way of knowing how true that is, but I suspect that it is, in the main, the case. I also note that the defenders of the man who now has to rank as the worst husband in America since Bill Clinton never tire of pointing out that "he turned down a million dollars " to transfer Terri's guardianship to the family. Again, I have no way of knowing how true that is, but if he did it was a shrewd move and, as we observe Michael Schiavo in his television appearances, we can see he is a shrewd man.

What I do have some sense of is how much money Michael Schiavo stands to make if, and only if, his wife dies. It is, for a man, with a fresh new wife and two children, substantial. Having worked as an editor for Houghton Mifflin and as a literary agent, I have some sense of the price the publishing and media worlds would put on his story. It will be significantly more than 30 pieces of silver.

Continued...

ONE YEAR OLD: The Mighty Middle : "The real political fight in this country is not between the right and the left, but between reason and fanaticism; between the living and the brain dead."

If you go, be sure to click the banner and watch the video.

It�s Easter Sunday and we are two and a half years into the war. Good Friday evening was one of those nights when, in Southern California, the weather and the combine to create what are rightly called "balmy conditions." Balm, as in a kind of salve to the soul and the skin. The air is warm but not too warm. The skies are clear and the stars seem closer. My wife and I had just seen some current comic book confection at one of the 20 screen multiplexes that are so numerous in this area that you can see the same movies 15 times within a ten mile radius.

We sat by a large sandstone and marble fountain in the stone circle between the vast theater and the vaster parking lot. It was date night and the beginning of Spring Break for the schools of Orange County. All around us kids from 11 to 18 were whooping and laughing and forming clusters of friends. They were dressed according to the upscale Goth-Surfer/Balkan Refugee dress-code common to the kid culture here on the coast. Most were too young to have tattoos or piercing, but you could see some were already planning where those lifestyle statements would go. They were slim, energetic and heedless of the future. In short, they were just reasonably rich kids in America in 2003.

We are two and a half years into the war, but the war is not and will probably never be these kids' concern. It isn't even something they consider outside of, perhaps, a few classroom exercises of dubious intent or merit. There is no reason they should consider war, nor do I wish that upon them. It isn't, in any real sense, their war. War isn't being asked of us or the affluent kids of Orange County, nor does it seem likely to be. Besides, war isn't what they're into.

They're into creating their own layer on top of our culture of cool. Their variation would be, as these things are these days, a kind of slap-dash cultural collage. It would have a bit of the Beatnik, a Hint of the hippy, a shred of the Skateboarder, an ounce of Outlaw, a portion of Punk, a hunk of Hip-Hop, and, because we were on the California coast, more than a soupcon of Surfer. It would be a melange of the old and outdated that would assert it was unique and brand new. When they were done cooking up their "culture of cool" they would all agree among themselves, "Ain't it cool?"

Their parents, as parents now do, would sigh and pour another drink or drop another Ambien, and hope that their children would get through this phase without a drug arrest, a school suspension, a permanent piercing, or a lethal accident on the highways or in the ocean. It was all they asked of them. We were two and a half years into the war and none of the kids of Orange County would fight in it unless they asked for it. All of the parents in Orange County knew their kids were crazy. After all, they were teenagers in high school. Few thought any of their kids were that crazy.

Less than 20 miles south of where we sat last Friday, there was another kind of youth culture. I saw it for a day last January. You don't see it very often around here because it doesn't hang out at the malls. You can't see it from the freeways because its center is far back in the hills. It has its own malls and towns and sporting and educational complexes. It doesn't deal in "the culture of cool." It deals in the culture of carnage. It's the Camp Pendelton Marine Base.

There are many young people here, some the same age as the kids at the malls to the north, but none of these young people are kids. There's something about daily training with tanks, rifles, heavy machine guns and artillery that puts your childhood as far behind you as the kids at the malls have their childhood still in front of them. Instead of worrying if their dad is going to pay for the new mag-chrome rims for their Escalade, this youth culture worries about the state of readiness of their Apache attack helicopters.

The culture of Camp Pendelton isn't cool in the way political fundraisers today feature hip-hop groups and background music from the golden age of Fleetwood Mac. The culture here despises the culture of cool. The culture here is composed of deeper, abiding and more fundamental things: God, Country and The Corps. There are a lot of people in America and elsewhere that would like nothing better than to deconstruct this culture into oblivion, but, as courageous as they might be in proclaiming this elsewhere, they don't seem to be showing up at the gates or on the grounds of Camp Pendleton to press the issue. They wouldn't because, according to their worldview that arises from spending decades as adolescents, the Marines are just so uncool. Aren't they?

The young men and women that come to this culture do not, we are told, come in the main from the affluent suburbs of America. They come from the ghettos and the working class parts of the country. They come to get a leg up and a ticket out of their origins. They come because they see the Marines as either a career or a means to an education that leads to a career. Most have had little given to them because they come from families with little to give. Some come to prove themselves. Some come because members of their family came before. Some come because the only other path open to them led to a cell. Some even come out of a deep faith and a deeper sense of duty. Not all that come will be accepted, but none come because it is cool. Before they came they too were once kids in America. They got the big and repeated message that the military in America these days is uncool. They knew it was uncool and they came anyway. Some because they had no other choice. Many because they didn't care about being cool if being cool meant being a kid forever.

There aren't many rich Orange County mall rats that come to the Marines out of high school. Rich kids no longer have this calling. Instead they wander on in their extended childhood though college. Then they drift into the arena where all they will have will be a six-figure income and a few "great moments at work." They will learn, if they do not already know, how to play golf and how to drive themselves deep into "middle management." In time, they will form one or two or more families in one or two or more cities or suburbs. Their roots will be shallow, but they will take lots of interesting two-week vacations to comfortable enclaves in Europe or pacified third-world countries. Towards the end, they'll spend a lot on cruise ships where they will be treated 'like royalty.' They'll acquire real estate and hope for "a nice appreciation ride." They will have little to show that they existed but that will be all right. They will use the word 'cool' in conversation and evaluation well into their seventh decade. One of the central social anxieties of their lives will be being discovered being or doing something that their peers will say is "uncool."

In short, they will be such cool Americans that, two and a half years into a war, nothing will be asked of them. That would be, you see, very uncool.

Twenty miles south at Camp Pendelton, everything is being asked of the Americans there. It is asked for in Iraq daily and paid there daily. Our very cool media's job is clear. It is to tell us in hundreds of big and little ways daily of how uncool it is to ask everything of someone. Our media is very cool indeed.

Our media is by default not a "liberal media," but a melange of many businesses and institutions that are staffed by generations of the coolest of the cool in our aging culture of cool. Our media, as every MTV-addled mall rat learns by age 5, is where the really cool jobs are. Rock star or record producer, movie star or director, reporter, anchorman, editor, publisher, video-game designer, web-monkey, DJ, photographer, pundit, columnist -- the positions go on and on and everybody knows, EVERYBODY knows, that the media's where the cool people are.

If you have a job in the media you go to the cool parties. You live in the cool towns driving the cool cars. You eat the cool foods in the cool restaurants where everybody knows your name and you get the cool table next to what passes for this week's cool celebrity du jour. You subscribe to the cool magazines and if you haven't had your picture in one yet, your turn is on the way. You have the cool summer place. Your haircut is cool. Your computer is cool. Your friends are cool. Even your dog is cool. You wear the cool clothes, and you are absolutely up-to-the-nanosecond on what is cool now and what will be cooler tomorrow. And you also know that that which is not of the culture of cool is uncool.

What is uncool today, two and a half years into the war, is, of course, the war. War's been uncool to these eternal cool kids and their kids since about 1962 and, except for a brief six month period after September 11, 2001, war is uncool now. War's uncool because, well, it is "unhealthy for children and other living things" goes the party line in the culture of cool. This war is especially uncool because it is being run by uncool people and the uncoolest President ever. But really, war is uncool because it is one of the big things that threatens to undo all the great parties and smooth lifestyles promised and delivered by the media-made culture of cool. And how does war threaten this? War, real war, actually asks something of the people of a nation as a whole people. It asks them to sacrifice their blood and their treasure and their cool attitudes and their endless summers. It asks, in the parlance of the Marine Corps, that "all give some and that some give all."

The American culture of cool has become a nation apart, an alternate-America that looks to the real America as merely some mechanism set up to deliver the many features and benefits of America to the culture of cool without question, by divine right of media. This culture is not into giving back anything they have taken from the culture at large. The culture of cool is not a giving culture, it is an taking culture. Anything it chooses to have is taken in and used to improve the lot of those within the culture of cool. That which is not cool it seeks to either use or destroy depending on whether or not it advances the culture of cool and the lifestyles of those that exist within it. It sees itself as the real soul and real intelligence of America, even as it actually rides on the broad shoulders of America like some strangling old man of the sea that, once taken up, refuses to get down. It sees itself as the engine responsible for making the culture of America continually new, even as it only recycles one empty cultural container after another through the battered green bins of its rigid internal codes and fashions to pop them out as 'new, improved and even more impossibly hip.'

Regardless of the shiny gift wrap of the cool advertising and marketing agencies that have taken to spotwelding vintage rock and roll and the latest pop or sports sensation's face onto their shabby garage sale goods, we seldom see, hear, or read anything today that is not either a remake, a sequel, or an allusion to the cool things of yesteryear. The same holds true for the politics of cool. This is confirmed in a brief review of the lamentable Democratic primaries of this year. During the months of this excruciating ritual, what was once a proud and progressive party offered up nearly a dozen cardboard candidates. When it was all over, the party chose the one candidate that sounded the most like, looked the most like, and sported the haircut and even the initials of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Camelot Redux because JFK was, as the culture of cool constantly reminds us, the coolest President ever.

John F. Kerry is, in many ways, the perfect candidate for today's graying culture of cool. He snowboards at sixty. How cool is that? He goes to great parties with hip-hop stars. Too cool. He's got lots of money that he didn't earn. So cool. He can hold opposite positions on difficult issues and lie about it with a straight face. Very cool way of getting out of middle management into upper management. He can fight in a war and throw another man's medals away. Cool career move. He can promise 10 million jobs to the 8 million unemployed. Super cool to make more jobs than workers. If he can tax those jobs that have no workers, he can probably cool out the deficit. He can talk to and cajole the alienated country of France into amour encore. This is extremely cool since it makes renting summer villas in France and trips to Paris acceptable again. Besides France is the coolest country in Europe as every member of the culture of cool will attest. His Africa-born white wife is so cool she calls herself an "African-American." Most of all, Kerry is cool because he thinks the war is uncool and is saying so in a cool kind of way. Even more than that, the members of the culture of cool know that Kerry will never ask anything of them. And the culture of cool is not a giving culture, but a taking one. If Kerry would only learn to play the saxophone he would be cooler than JFK.

Yesterday I saw a photograph fresh from the war in Iraq. There are many photographs from Iraq these days. It's an uncool country in an uncool part of the world where American soldiers are fighting and dying to cool it out. It's uncool to be a soldier there, but it is very cool to be a photographer, so we have a lot of photographers and a lot of photographs. Some taken by being on call to and hanging out with the people who are killing Americans. How cool is that?

The photograph was taken in a hanger at a military base. It shows a group of young, uncool American Marines kneeling in a tight circle on the ground in prayer. Prayer. How totally uncool.

When you look closer at the photograph you notice that extending out from within the circle of kneeling and praying Marines are the legs of a dying or dead comrade in arms. Probably a very young comrade, not too distant in age from the kids laughing and playing in front of the multiplex on a balmy night in Orange County a world away.

How uncool this man was to die for his country and his comrades. How uncool is the effort to liberate a country mired in the morass of the middle ages, when you could just stay home and play video games. How uncool to take the war to an enemy that has sworn to kill Americans wholesale and has done so. How very, very uncool.

Now this Marine will never have a shot at working in the mail room of a movie studio, a record company, or a publishing house. All this Marine has now as he recedes into death are the prayers of those Marines who trained and fought beside him. That and a military funeral and a folded flag given to his family. Prayers. Funerals. Folded flags. These things are very uncool as the media-made captions on these photographs will seek to remind you. Very uncool.

At the same time that this Marine lay dying in Iraq, the current senior spokesman for the Democratic Party, Senator Ted Kennedy (a man whose cool, credibility and courage are equal in measure) was busy condemning the effort that cost this uncool Marine his life by waving the bloody shirt of Vietnam under the nose of the nation. His words and image were duly broadcast across America by all his life-long compatriots in the culture of cool. It's a shirt faded and frayed by many decades of constant handling, wringing and waving, but the bloody shirt of Vietnam has a lot of buttons, patches, fringe, and embroidered flowers on it. It's vintage clothing. Ain't it cool?

The power of reason, the top of the heap.
We're the ones who can kill the things we don't eat .
Sharper than a serpent's tongue,
Tighter than a bongo drum,
Quicker than a one-night stand,
Slicker than a mambo band.
And now the day is come.
Soon he will be released.
Glory hallelujah!
We're building the Perfect Beast .
        -- Don Henley

The Blog is in the Bias

An offhand comment at an online forum I sometimes frequent noted that political blogs, presenting themselves as unbiased in order to criticize the bias of the mainstream media, were actually the most biased form of media around. Blogs biased? Inconceivable! The statement elicited virtual nods all around as if the participant had discovered the spherical nature of the Earth.

This is the sort of statement that always gives me pause. Could it possibly be that an intelligent person, reading through the endless variety of political blogs available, would come to the conclusion that blogs present themselves, as a group, as an unbiased medium? I've read many thousands and I've yet to discover one. To aim a spotlight on bias in the media does not, it seems to me, wrap the handler of the spotlight in the noble robes of balanced fairness. Quite the opposite.

Indeed, the signal strength -- beyond all others -- that blogs bring to the multi-media festival of the 21st century is their clear and present bias. Show me a blog without an easily discernible bias and I'll show you a link farm formed by a Commodore 64 running untended in a basement closet since 1988 on a 300 baud dialup line with a full frontal ASCII interface. An unbiased blog? There is no such animal.

The bias makes the blog. Without bias there is no reason for a blog to exist and, if one does exist, it's readership can be counted on the digits of a one-legged three-toed sloth. The force of the blog flows from its bias.

For good or ill, blogs are a force to be reckoned with on the national and international scene. What remains to be seen is whether or not blogs, as a medium -- or better still "a multi-medium of the multitudes" -- can build upon this position, bootstrapping themselves into ever widening spheres of influence. This is, as is the manner of blogs, already happening on an ad hoc basis. It will continue to happen at an accelerating pace. But it can be accelerated through applications of capital, organization, planning, and most importantly, intent.

CamoCasters of the Airwaves and Newsstands

Before the consolidation of newspapers that took place across the last few decades of the 20th century, a signal strength of print journalism was, taken on a title by title basis, that it was neither fair nor balanced. Instead, these newspapers dealt in a specific bias and looked to readers with similar feelings to seek them out. Pro-union, anti-union; Democrat, Republican, Socialist, Communist -- all these and more made for a heady brew at newsstands in city and town.

Continued...

General Barnicke: Where have you been soldier?
John Winger: Training, sir.
Soldiers: Training, sir.
General Barnicke: What kind of training?
John Winger: Army training, sir.
Soldiers: Army training, sir.
-- Stripes

Yes, "Army Training!" as seen in the small film @ Boots & Sabers: Artillery 101.

[via Donald Sensing's "Take it from an old artillery guy – this is not the way to fire a howitzer." @ One Hand Clapping ]

Go where desertion is no crime --
Where loyalty is dead
Where sad disaster gives no pain;
There is the Copperhead.
Go where foul scorn is heaped upon
Our noble boys, who go
To stand a wall of fire between
Us and our traitor foe:
Go where bold Grant's revilers are --
Where Burnside is defamed;
Where Banks and Butler -- noble names! --
In scorn alone are named:
Go where patriotic pride,
Honor, and Truth are dead --
Where our success brings but despair;
There is the Copperhead.
-- From "Where is the Copperhead? "
Harper's Weekly, September, 1863

VICTOR HANSON, being interviewed by Hugh Hewitt, mentions in passing, "If you go back and look at the Summer of 1864, when people were calling for Lincoln's impeachment, the Copperhead movement..."

Copperheads? That sounds familiar and the poem above has a certain, shall I say, resonance. How familiar and resonant? Well.... read on.

Continued...

IT IS SO SILENT HERE that the softest of noises can wake me. This morning it was the rush of wings and mutterings from the two doves that seem to have taken up residence in the foliage outside my bedroom window.

It was just after first light, 5:45 by the red numerals on the coffee pot in the kitchen. I took the pot and filled it with water, put in the beans, and started the device. As it whirred and chuffled away, I walked out onto my deck that looks out over the brindle hills and down to the Pacific a mile or so away.

The sea seemed ruffled in large smooth circles, slate in the fading shadow of the hills but, as it rolled out towards the horizon, shading up into a charcoled blue, then to a gray blue haze at the horizon rising up into rose that gave off abruptly into clear and fresh blue.

Hanging just above the line of rose was the full moon gleaming gold in the exact center of all that I could see.

I watched it slide down the sky for some time, then I went back into the kitchen for coffee. When I came out to look again, it was gone.

Unexpected beauty rising in the center of all you can see. Take your eyes away and then look again and its gone. But the day goes on and the light rises around you and you know, with an abiding faith, that beauty will surprise you again when you least expect it, out of the dark on a rush of wings. There are many ways of this world and that one is not the least of them.

I thought for a moment about turning on the news to see what had transpired in the rest of the world while I slept. I decided against it. Held halfway between a death and a life, between Good Friday and Easter, I'd already learned the news of the day.

(from The Eternal City)

FOUR DAYS AGO, I noticed a small news item that told me the virus had found another host. It is a clever virus, wise enough to mutate but still remain the same. It thrives in oppressive states and lately has found the means to thrive in an oppressive state that appears to be not oppressive but democratic. As I said, it is a clever virus.

"Struggling to remain at the cutting edge of anti-semitism, Canada is issuing, or, rather, re-issuing, politically correct passports for its Israel born Jewish citizens: Canadian Jews born in Jerusalem are having their passports recalled in order to erase the word "Israel" from beside the name of the Jewish State's capital."

Not really the sort of thing you'd expect from one of the West's liberal democracy, is it. But the virus is very clever because the virus is very old.

Anti-Semitism is our most ancient spiritual virus. It is the oldest known virus that attacks, replicates within, and then destroys the human soul. The existence of Israel masks the existence of the virus in many infected souls, institutions, and, yes, liberal democracies by renaming itself as Anti-Zionism. This is especially clever since the renaming has survived the political movment it refers to. Through the renaming of this ancient disease as a “political problem,” many people now become infected through their friends, families, at their schools, from their community, church, or nation, or from exchanging infected fantasies with infected ideologues. (This is especially evident in the increasing support given to the virus by the Left here and abroad.) By changing the name of the disease it has become possible for many to deny that they have contracted the virus. This facilitates the current outbreak. Yes, it is a clever virus and this eerie shape-shifting is one of its oldest methods of perpetuating itself. A contemporary Christian might say it is one of the oldest "Faces of the Enemy." It is what it is.

The origin of the virus is unknown, but many suspect the area to be Bablyon and Sumur with an early leap across borders into Egypt. It was later transmitted through not-so-casual contact to much of the

Continued...

IN THE END, it is never a matter of law, but a matter of what you believe. It is clear that Americans today have two sets of beliefs. The first group believes:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The second group believes:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Government and their Laws with many legislatable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Which one you believe determines who you are. And you must choose.

--or --The American Booksellers At Play in Foggy Bottom

[Yesterday�s exchange about the liberalism that infects publishing put me in mind of a series of items I wrote more than 13 years ago about the state of publishing when I was much more engaged with it. I went to the online attic where a lot of these things are kept and managed to pull a few out of the old dusty packing crates and smuggle them past the ghosts. A few struck me as still germane to today�s publishing environment -- even more so because so little has changed -- except the names of the usual suspects. Don�t think it's dated. This is probably a whole lot like what will happen this year.]

One of the favorite places for the American Booksellers Association (ABA) to hold a convention is Washington D.C. This city of hard-core inept government somehow attacts one of the most inept businesses in the private sphere. It somehow calls them home. Perhaps it makes publishers, by contrast, feel smart and efficient. I don�t know. It is a city of large examples of neo-Federalist and Fascist overbuilding nestled next to one of the worst black ghettos in the world; a city where the very streets and tempo speak of a certain benighted mindlessness; a city careful to close all its museums and most of its shrines on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend; and now a city of thousands of dazed bookstore owners pulling shopping carts along the streets as they head towards the annual show of most of the 57,000 books we will publish this year. Yes, this year. 57,000 brand. new. books.

The mind reels, then pauses, then leaves the body as it enters the convention center, pushes past the large banners proclaiming 1987 to be "The Year of The Reader!� Hope, always hope. Give us a reader, any reader. We gots the books if you gots the time. And thirty dollars.

You enter the bottom floor exhibit hall. The first thing you notice is that Simon & Schuster, Morrow, and a few other heavyweights are on THE BOTTOM FLOOR! This pisses these folks off plenty since they are "heavy" and here they are stuck on the bottom floor which is mostly little publishers. Button at Morrow books:"I (heart) the American Book Cellar Convention." These big pubs are piqued because here they are out of the big time upstairs.

But where are the books?

Not really that visible. Simon has a lot of videos, a lot of failing audios, and a lot of covers blown up, glued down to plexiglass and back lit. These are supposed to be the stars, the big books, the ones all America is dying to read. Hard to make out the titles. They blur.

Pick up a catalog and move on.

All around you are booksellers with full size shopping carts jamming every freebie they can get their hands on. Posters, buttons, stuffed animals.....Simon is publishing CATMOPOLITAN, a slavish bid for the cat market, a send up of some magazine, and booksellers can duck behind a large six foot blowup of a cover, stick their faces in a hole and get a free Polaroid of themselves as the cover cat of Catmopoliton. A thrill, a real thrill! There�s a line.

Morrow's booth...swarming with people but to no discernible propose. Get a catalog. Try to focus on titles. Useless. No books in evidence. No nothing in evidence. Turn the corner. It is Zebra books...the walk-away winner for high schlock...this year a bit down from their usual high marks for real tackiness. They've installed a guy dressed in Louis the 14th duds playing classical guitar. Not at all the cheap Jackie Susan stuff we've come to expect from Zebra. Ignore catalog, walk on.

The autograph rows of heated, excited booksellers looking to get a free book autographed by someone they've vaguely heard of but there none the less. Upstairs we hear the dulcet tones of Joan Baez. She's here to promote "Have Guitar, Will Travel" or some such autobiography. Alas for Joan, Judi Collins is also her promoting her book. Fall 1987 will be the Battle of the Divas for sure.

Move upstairs. A MUCH LARGER ROOM. About ten football fields in area. Solid with publishers, videos, tapes, display stands, tee shirts, bookmarks, novelties, cards,posters, on and on in a numbing procession. Stuff the bag with a catalog and move on. Run into someone you vaguely know. Get their name from their badge. Chat. Move on. Where are the books?

Very few real books visible. Tucked away behind the banners, the free offers, the catalogs and order forms, the video monitors showing Dan Rather commenting on Ernest Worell who's got a calendar, got a commercial, got a movie coming out, got a special on HBO, buy his book, please? Dan Rather on a loop repeating an inane report over and over again for four days. More booksellers, more crammed shopping carts, coffee from a cart the color and taste of weak tea. Move on. More encounters. More brief conversations.

"Seen any books here?"

"Yeah, saw one two rows back. Probably gone now."

"Seriously, seen anything you might want to read?"

"Maybe four titles but I can't think of what they are right now."

"Keep a list. Let me know."

Grab a catalog, shake a hand, move on. Down endless rows. Some booths crammed with people. Other's next door with only a woebegone and terminally bored rep sitting on a chair wondering why they got into this business when

Continued...

They've made their cultural casket. Now they will die in it.

AS GOOD FRIDAY APPROACHES THE DEATH OF TERRI SCHIAVO is now only a matter of time but not of chance. Death is, for most of us, a matter of time and chance. But this death has, as all know, nothing of chance in it. It is something chosen for her by a husband and a legion of judges. They have all had their say. They have given or read depositions and testimony. They have looked at and argued the law. They have rendered and affirmed their decisions. This week they will all have their way with her.

At this point, watching the slow killing of her has become nearly as disgusting and excruciating as listening to those who are rooting for it with increasing bluntness. This sentiment from the always crass Chris Matthews is one of the "milder" versions: "The "her" in her, the personality, is basically an ink-well. It's basically a bottle of ink now.... " Elsewhere, commentators of all kinds have been at odds to stress "What a tragic and sad thing this is... I do so feel for the parents..." before launching into another report or an interview with another death expert that all comes down, in the end, to, "Kill her."

It matters little that, as we are constantly reminded by the statisticians of death, "this sort of thing goes on all the time." By dint of circumstance, this one death of this one woman has become other than a statistic -- it has become specific, up-close, and personal. Because of this specificity, because a "procedure" common to our culture has taken a name and a face, it has also become mythic. And faced with the brute power of myth and the meaning it contains, it is little wonder that most of us would choose to turn away; to examine the parochial and dismiss the profound. We will, it seems, always prefer the shallows to the depths.

Continued...

"Soft Power"

Wikipedia notes: "This article would benefit from a thorough revision." Volunteers of America ?

A DECAFFEINATED MIND IS A TERRIBLE THING to use on the news. Scanning the headlines this morning I came across "Mexico Detains Man Thought Tied to Terror." On the first pass, the story brought me to a dead stop since I read the headline as "Mexico Detains Man Tied to Terror Thought."

Then again, I may just be having a moment of precognition. I think.

CAN THE MOST HUMILIATED WIFE in American history really rise to the Presidency? In this therapeutic age, why the hell not? After all, there's nothing of the hindu in Hillary and, therefore, no sign she's about to climb on top of the Democrat's funeral pyre in a

Continued...

YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED the quotation feature at the top of this column. Quotes are a common element of blogs. The feature here at AD pulls a quote at random from a large file I've collected over the years and displays it whenever I update the page.

One quote in particular caused Amy, in the comments about Michael Schiavo's Song to ask,

Your quotation: "A woman is just a woman, but a cigar is a smoke..." I don't think I got it right, and you don't leave comment space for your quotations...drives me nuts... But here's the thing.... a good woman can make you smoke - before and after sex. A cigar can't do that.

For reasons I won't go into here, this is another of the strange conjunctions of circumstance that have cropped up around here lately.

As for Amy's question, I agree about the smoking sex. Still there are many times in a man's life when a cigar is to be vastly preferred to a woman, and this evening is one of them. So I choose to, this day, celebrate cigars over women by lighting up one of my three surviving H. Upmann Connoisseur No.1's Cubans, and settling into some Kipling -- who knew a lot about women and even more about cigars.

Continued...

WHILE PRESIDENT BUSH continues to field inane questions from the likes of Helen Thomas, and appear here and there about the land armed with standard soundbites, it falls, as it often does, to Britain's Tony Blair to articulate in a deeper and more meaningful way just what the stakes are in The First Terrorist War. Today 10 Downing released the transcript of Foreign Policy Speech I; the first of three speeches Blair will make on this issue in the near future: "In the second he will outline the importance of a broad global alliance to achieve our common goals and in the third he will say how the international institutions need radical reform to make them capable of implementing such an agenda."

This is an excerpt, but I commend the entire text to you as the definitive answer to "Why we fight:"

There is an interesting debate going on inside government today about how to counter extremism in British communities. Ministers have been advised never to use the term "Islamist extremist". It will give offence. It is true. It will. There are those - perfectly decent-minded people - who say the extremists who commit these acts of terrorism are not true Muslims. And, of course, they are right. They are no more proper Muslims than the Protestant bigot who murders a Catholic in Northern Ireland is a proper Christian. But, unfortunately, he is still a "Protestant" bigot. To say his religion is irrelevant is both completely to misunderstand his motive and to refuse to face up to the strain of extremism within his religion that has given rise to it....

This is not a clash between civilisations. It is a clash about civilisation. It is the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace and see opportunity in the modern world and those who reject its existence; between optimism and hope on the one hand; and pessimism and fear on the other. And in the era of globalisation where nations depend on each other and where our security is held in common or not at all, the outcome of this clash between extremism and progress is utterly determinative of our future here in Britain. We can no more opt out of this struggle than we can opt out of the climate changing around us. Inaction, pushing the responsibility on to America, deluding ourselves that this terrorism is an isolated series of individual incidents rather than a global movement and would go away if only we were more sensitive to its pretensions; this too is a policy.� It is just that; it is a policy that is profoundly, fundamentally wrong.

Democratic Caucus, circa 2005

"SHREIK THERAPY" as defined by Richard Baehr in "The Democrats sign up with the anti-Semites " @ The American Thinker:

Continued...

DEVOTO @ bitter sanity casts a cold eye at the costs of never really paying for Vietnam:

That's why the Vietnam protests, and their heirs in this decade, have such a disconnected feel about them. They're not contemplating the possibility of defeat. When America is defeated in war, the only result is a little embarrassment. America feels bad for a decade or so. The consequences of defeat - the massacres, the death camps, the loss of sovereignty, the loss of the common person's freedom - these things happen to someone else. Then, the Vietnamese and Cambodians. Here, these things will happen to the Iraqis and Afghans, not to mention the emerging Iranian and Arab democrats. They'll be crushed. But we won't have to think about it too much.

Until the real consequences, this time, break over our heads, years or decades later.

The lead-in to this is even more damning in ways you might not care to think about. Devoto doesn't post often, but is always worth reading.

FROM WAXY: A movie with a long, but well worth it, download time.

IT'S TIME TO PLAY "FISH. BARREL. BANG!" in our afternoon series, "Inside Blogball."

I admit I haven't spent a lot of time with OLIVER "Like Kryptonite To Stupid" WILLIS LATELY, but then I haven't spent a lot of time with Cecil, the Seasick Sea Serpent lately either. In general, I find that dim children pretending to be smart are a chore. In fact, it is usually boring to spend time with anyone that, having a modicum of intelligence, likes to pretend they are smarter than they are. I fear that Oliver, like his namesake Hardy, falls into this latter category. Oliver Hardy's schtick, you might recall, was one of playing the ever-so-smart top banana to Stan Laurel. He always came a cropper.

Oliver Willis salutes this grand tradition daily on his strangely popular website. Travel there and you will see this bold banner waving over all:

Continued...

FOR YOUR SENIOR NERD MOMENT OF THE DAY: Pi to 1,000,000 places

Via Solarvoid

FILE UNDER: "You Just C a n n o t Make This Stuff Up"
"Akono, who is from Cambodia and is married to a British man, plans to go on a hunger strike from April 14 in protest against the continuing war on terror.

" 'I want to do everything I can to make sure my child has a secure future,' said the pregnant activist."

Full story Here.

[Via Chrenkoff]

IN SOME WAYS I REGRET being so obsessed with the Death-Shyster of Florida, but the more I read of the excerpts from his book, the weirder he becomes. In this choice morsel we have to consider that much of his work has been an acid flashback:

Felos writes that although he experienced his "initial spiritual awakening in my early twenties, I had spent the last few years of my mid-thirties backsliding." (47)

Described as "a superconscious experience," Felos writes, "I was drunk with God" resulting in the inability to walk on his own without the assistance of others. "My predominant expression was laughter and a grin just short of it." (49) "I had imprinted upon me the purpose of life -- God-realization -- and in the knowing of this purpose came instant fulfillment. Although to some I reckon the above sounds like metaphysical gobbledygook, I will attest there exists a Universal Consciousness that not only can be experienced by us but is us." (50)

"I lost the boundary between the idea of myself and the world around me and gained immeasurably. Subject and object merged, and in some way I experienced the essence of each thing my consciousness touched. I felt the joy of grass as it grew and sense the genetic code by which it manifested into physical reality. In ecstasy I became the solemn grace and beauty of a tree and new the freedom of the passing clouds. I don't speak metaphorically." -- Litigation as Spiritual Practice by George Felos (Blue Dolphin Publishing, 2002)

George, George, George, you can't kid a kidder. You been messing around with the mystery molecule and you got some 'splaining to do.

How do I know? I must, in the interests of full disclosure, reveal that as a member of the University of California at Berkeley's Class of 1967, that -- beginning sometime in 1964-1965 -- I too had occasion to "feel the joy" and "became the solemn grace and beauty" .... I too "don't speak metaphorically." I too was, here and there, off and on, stoned out of my mind of LSD. In my case, my experiences with the drug took place, for the most part, before it was declared to be illegal. I even appeared (or should I say "tripped" )on a CBS television documentary done at the time with others of my ilk. (An amusing story but for another time.)

This sort of thing faded with my youth and the age, but I still remember it well. I don't know what your experience with LSD is or is not, but take my word that what you are reading above is a classic example of the kind of stoned, loaded blather common to those years and that experience. What many of us took away from such experiences was that love was good, beauty was all around us, and life was precious. With Felos is seems to be the case that, to quote T.S. Eliot: "We had the experience but missed the meaning."

THE EDITORS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES WEIGH IN TODAY ON JUSTICE SCALIA as the next chief justice. They're a'gin him. This makes him, of course, a perfect choice. It was a standard issue Times editorial, smooth as a baby's bottom, until just towards the end when it rode right over a large pothole at high speed.

Many of the most central principles of American constitutional law - from the right to a court-appointed lawyer to the right to buy contraception - have emerged from the court's evolving sense of the meaning of constitutional clauses. -- That Scalia Charm

I don't think many would argue that a right to a lawyer is a "central principle," but I have a great deal of difficulty putting the purchase of pills, condoms and diaphragms smack dab in the center along with it. I'm sure that to many people who work at the New York Times children are either irrelevant to their lifestyle, or would seriously crimp their career path, but surely that's no reason to make their avoidance a "central principle of American constitutional law." Or perhaps I just haven't been reading the Times enough to keep up on the code. Could it be that "the right to buy contraception" is the new code phrase for "the right to have an abortion." No, that's far too cynical. Isn't it?

The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.
....

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood --
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
    -- Eliot, East Coker, Four Quartets

AS CONGRESS MOVES INTO RECESS FOR THE HOLIDAY THAT CELEBRATES THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE OVER DEATH, Peggy Noonan has some pragmatic advice for it: 'Don't Kick It'.

But in the end, it comes down to this: Why kill her? What is gained? What is good about it? Ronald Reagan used to say, in the early days of the abortion debate, when people would argue that the fetus may not really be a person, he'd say, "Well, if you come across a paper bag in the gutter and it seems something's in it and you don't know if it's alive, you don't kick it, do you?" No, you don't.

So Congress: don't kick it. Let her live. Hard cases make bad law, but let her live. Precedents can begin to cascade, special pleas can become a flood, but let her live. Because she's human, and you're human.

Issue whatever subpoena, call whatever witnesses, pass whatever emergency bill, but don't let this woman die.

Like you, I have no power as an individual over the fate of Terri Schiavo. She has now gone beyond being another human being in a dire circumstance to an emblem of a larger issue, that of the culture of life versus the culture of death. If it is true, and I more and more believe it to be so, that each of us has a purpose, great or small, in the vast tapestry of life, Terri Schiavo has come to hers. If it were possible for me to know her will in this, the lesson she holds for me would be simple and clear. But it is not possible to know her will, so the lesson she teaches is something I must find in myself. To do so, I have to go back to the beginning of my re-learning about life.

Continued...

ALAN BROMLEY proposes some bold new Gitmo rules--

Continued...

 
"HEY KIDS, WHAT TIME IS IT?" Why is this woman smiling and why doesn't her son have a marker on his grave? [See video at link]

Antiwar views grow, but war protests don't

"Last weekend marked the three-year anniversary of the war's start, and according to press reports, tens of thousands of people around the world took to the streets to protest. In New York's Times Square, the number was estimated at 1,000. In Chicago, 7,000 people turned out."

The spin here is that: "Going into the streets can be a sign that people feel there's no other way to be heard," he says. But in this war, he adds, the polls speak loudly."

Yeah. Right. Next?

PORRETTO OF Eternity Road, at the top of his form in "The Convergence Is Complete":

Over the millennia, men have killed one another in uncounted millions. It's not new, or particularly noteworthy, that one man should want to kill another -- not even that a husband should want to kill his wife, whom he's sworn before God and man to protect. What is new is the accelerating approval and support for such a desire among the "intellectual elite," including judges appointed to do justice, defend the innocent, and protect the helpless.

Europe is deeply mired in this trend. The Netherlands is the standard-bearer for "assisted suicide," and for the deliberate execution, with medical concurrence, of inconvenient babies and oldsters. The horror stories are legion -- so many, in fact, that the horror of them has begun to create calluses over our emotions. One can only hear about so many such villainies before stopping one's ears.

Europe is also the rallying point for the condemnation of the death penalty. The lives of men who've maliciously and unjustifiably destroyed the lives of others are therefore valued more highly than the lives of the helpless and utterly innocent.

America has been a bastion against this sort of viciousness...until now. European thinking -- utilitarian valuation of the "quality of life" of helpless persons by third parties -- has reached these shores and formed a beachhead. The abortion wars, as serious as they've been, were only a preliminary, a shelling of our moral defenses to soften them for a decisive breakthrough.

LET ME SEE IF I UNDERSTAND THE STATE OF THE LAW IN FLORIDA TODAY.

In Pinellas Park, Florida , there's a man that has gotten the entire legal establishment of the state to help him starve his wife to death, and has arranged for the police to arrest anyone that's trying to bring her food or water. This man is running around free and getting a lot of attention. He has a judge working hard day and night to make sure that his wife will die.

In Homosassa, Florida a man named John Evander Couey, has confessed to abducting and killing a nine year old girl. He is in jail and under suicide watch to make sure he does not die.

In Collier, Florida, Michael Lee Swails, has been put in jail charged with starving his cattle herd.

In Florida today, I score it:
Wives get to die because their husband says so.
Child killers get extra attention so they can't just kill themselves.
Men who starve cattle go to jail.

I'm just not getting this. I'm not getting it at all.

Beneath my sea, my tongue was tied by lies
That said I loved you not when love lay still,
And that false tongue denied your clearer eyes
That saw that love will always conquer will.
But now, as our first year in time has turned
To moments honed from diamonds, now I find
My love for you refracted and returned
In samite nights beside you in that blind
Dark within which only one light burns.
Which is your love, and in such love I sleep
The deeper sleep of one to whom Love turns
When, gasping like some being from the deep,
I first was flung upon your wave-smoothed strand,
And shown beneath your present sea my future land.

IF YOU'VE NEVER DONE IT and would like to know what it is like to let someone die, what follows is a true story.

Continued...

"Hell, I'd wear a purple tutu and ride a pogo stick coast to coast if it'd get Bush and Cheney impeached." -- Kevin Hayden @ Body and Soul

SET THEORY VIA MARK STEYN: "Spot the odd one out: 1) mass starvation; 2) gas chambers; 3) mountains of skulls; 4) lousy infidel pop music turned up to full volume."

Continued...

On the other hand, perhaps not so much progress has been made in Brunette Liberation after all.

Posted on 2006-03-18 by tinabeena93: blondes are stupid brunettes are smart

"blondes are stupid brunettes are smart
hey waz up this is tina & alyssa we are brunettes and we think that blondes are stupid
yah herd meh"

Click to Enlarge

"Yesterday we noted that nostalgic feminists had met at the Florida State Capitol in an attempt to revive the moribund Equal Rights Amendment."
-- OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today

[Image pointer via the always interesting Coyote Blog ]

NOTE TO SELF: Given the local situation of the last few weeks, is it really a good idea to have Marc Reisner's last work, A Dangerous Place : California's Unsettling Fate as bedtime reading? Probably not, but with only one copy left at Amazon, maybe you can eBay it and cash in before the big one. Better insist on PayPal.