And Now For Someone Completely Different

Bill Buckley may have started my genesis to the right, but it was P.J. O'Rourke who nailed the coffin lid shut on what leftism I had left. Hence it was a pleasure to stumble upon his Atlantic Column. If all of the right were as laid-back as P.J., we might be doing better in the polls than running 50-50. Oh, well.

Moore, On

I haven't seen any of M. Moore's films, and don't plan on starting now. Swallowing the rage at seeing just the commercials to "Fahrenheit 9/11" is about all I'm up to right now (indigestion: the Ideologues Complaint). But I've heard a bit, here and there, about his premise, and it seems to center on Saudi Arabia as the true home of terrorists (and doubtless, WMD's). If I'm wrong, you all know where my email address is.


But If I'm right, then riddle me this: if Saudi Arabia is the real enemy, then would Moore support war on that country, in retaliation for 9/11 and as deterrent for future 9/11's? Would he support this war even if George W. Bush were the Commander-in-Chief? Or are these allegations merely a distraction for the fact that he can't stand Bush and can't stand the thought of the U.S. being in a victorious war?


But I fear I am treading old ground again, and with a bit of research, I am right. Here's Christopher Hitchens, sounding off.

What the...?

I have become, in the middle of the summer, a frightfully busy man.


To begin with, I went on vacation for ten days, to Florida. Took my girl down to see the Magic Kingdom and whatnot.


Secondarily, I have to deal with certain family emergencies that will keep me from the home computer.


Thirdly, I have a week-long class later this month, in Bel Air. The things we do for raises...


Fourthly, I have ambitions: a novel that needs revision, songs to record and publish, a side project for my local Shakespeare group, on top of the time requirements involved in maintaining a household and trying to lose some weight.


In short, I've been a bad, bad blogger, and am beginning to wonder if I am determined to remain so. How much effort do I really want to devote to this space? What's the payoff for me? I'm reaching a point in my life where unprofitable time is starting to annoy me. As much as I like and sometimes need this stump to shout from, the time and muse it requires is a drain on my daytime.


So the future of the Notion is in serious doubt. Weep or cheer or shrug, as pleases you.

As We Wind Down...

Work ends today, which means more time to blog shall I have. But for today, it's cleaning, packing, cleaning, and more cleaning. So I will simply add a new blog, Diary of an Anti-Chomskyite, to the linksheet. Is it the height of intellectual arrogance to link to a blog denouncing a guy you haven't read? Yes, yes it is. I'll hit the library, I swear.

Reagan

The earliest memory I have of No. 40 was social studies class in 3rd grade. We used to get those Kidz Pages papers with lots of graphics and very little information, but I read it thoroughly enough to know that the President was Ronald Reagan and his Vice-President was George Bush, and they were Republicans, and they were seeking re-election. Opposing them was former Vice-President Walter Mondale, the Democrat, with his running mate Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to be so nominated. Later that week we had an "election" in our school. We were lined up in front of a computer of the Apple II/Commodore 64 variety and invited to press a single letter to record our vote: "R" for Reagan or "M" for Mondale. Or it might have been "R" for Republican and "D" for Democrat; I don't remember, because I pushed "R".


As my third-grade brain reasoned, Reagan already was President, and the country seemed fine to me. We weren't at war, we weren't all poor, things were okay. Why change?

I got home from school that afternoon and told my parents about the election. My mother wanted to know who I'd voted for. I told her, breezily, not thinking much of the matter.


You'd have thought I'd said that I voted for Beelzebub. Furiously she demanded to know why I had done such a thing. Too late I realized that I'd failed to take into account my parent's opinion on the matter. Too late I discovered that they were both Democrats, and they had a profoundly low opinion of Reagan. For the first time I experienced the mania of a liberal scorned. My father, a far more died-in-the-wool Democrat that mother, calmed the situation down and asked to hear my reasons. I gave them, somewhat tearfully. Mother relaxed and they sat me down and told me about all the horrible things Reagan had done and why they were voting for Mondale. I apologized for my ignorant decision, and we let it go and later laughed about it.


That opinion of the man now eulogized in the press as the Great Communicator was ubiquitous in my house and in the media when I was growing up. Reagan wasn't the Great Communicator then, he was the Vile Halfwit, a man too heartless to accept the obvious morality of the liberal outlook, and too stupid to realize it. He was old, he was out of touch, he believed in (gasp) capitalism, he was a (double gasp) Cold Warrior, who didn't care if the German Green Party didn't like him. He'd won two terms in the White House by tapping into the ignorant opinions of farmers and union guys and southerners and other people who were too provincial to live in New York or California. He didn't leap to the forefront and demand that we socialize medecine when a bizarre new disease popped up among the gay community. He was the beginning of the American Reich. This was self-evident.


One of the great surprises when I was in college was discovering how highly historians rated Dwight Eisenhower amont our Presidents. He was at No. 9 or thereabouts, the last I heard of him. This is in spite of the fact that Ike spent the 50's being mocked by the intelligensia as a golf-playing do-nothing brinkmanshipper. My political science professor informed our class that Presidents always look better in hindsight, and that history will judge them better than their contemporaries. He informed us that this was already becoming true of Reagan, and that it would become true, despite what we might wish to the contrary, of Clinton.


Extrapolate this how you will.

Newsies

I raise now the question I've mentioned in recent weeks: What is News?


As far as I can determine, there are 3 definitions available, one utopian and two cynical:


1. News is information about the wider world that the public ought to be aware of so that they may respond appropriately.


2. News is the propaganda of the ruling classes, of which only a brave few manage to break free.


3. News is the useless drivel of a chattering class of professional ignoramuses (ignorami?), who prune information to suit the worldview they possessed in their sophomore year of college, thus presenting a world favorable to the ideas and people they like.




Which definition you prefer will probably depend on your place on the ideological spectrum, but I think the most insidious of all is 1. (this is undoubtedley the result of my fear of the utopian). Who shall determine what information the public "ought" to know, or what is an "appropriate response"? By what standards shall they make this decision?


You may of course say that it's easy for me to tear apart this strawman. But here's how Webter's defines "news" (via Dictionary.com):

A report of recent occurences; information of something that has lately taken place, or of something before unknown; fresh tindings; recent intelligence.

Inherent in this definition is that this is fresh, recent, or hitherto unknown information is something worth my while to know. But is it? What assurance do I have that the event or "trent" you're telling me about is actually worth the mental space you wish me to devote to it? What perspective informs your decision to inform me of these facts? How can I know that you aren't just wasting my time?


If I've made it sound like spreading news has almost become a hostile act, I am beginning to feel that way. I recognize the perversity of such a position. When someone tells me something, it's bordering on rudeness and paranoia to suspect that information. But it's a function of the omnipotence of NEWS. There it is, every second, every day, saying the same thing until it can find a new thing to say until that gets beaten into the ground. Saying things and saying things and suggesting things and mentioning things and leaving a thousand and one things out. What good is knowing what happened today if I don't know what happened in the same spot fifty years ago? What value has information without perspective?


Ah, but whose perspective? Welcome to the Mobius strip.

This Business of Teaching

I often muse, especially as Final Exams give me the time to, on how wasteful it is for us to attempt to foster education on those that have no wish to attain it. The labor and sweat that one person expends to apply facts and figures that most of them will stubbornly refuse to accept or take seriously, because they aren't there by choice. It seems counter-productive, this expectation that everyone must be made a scholar when so few of them are destined for that role.


All of which might seem to be an argument for Education as the Creation of Enduring Knowledge, but that itself seems but synonymous with Learnin' Fer Dummies. In my fondest hopes, I would like to save learning for those that want it, and let those that want it not make their own way in the world. But to suggest such has merely become a cue for gasps. Why, condemn them to a life of ignorance and poverty? It Can Not Be!


But it is, whether we will it or not. I teach at a private school that sends a substantial number of its graduates to a glorified community college, some because they want to slum off the cost of college for a few years, many because they're too provincial to want anything else and hence deliberately too ignorant to get it. Is it a greater travesty to mark them as the dullards they wish to be, with appropriate consequences in life, or to gussy them up in robes and hand them diplomas earned more by the sleight-of-hand of faculty than their own academic achievement?


I myself and bored with seeing uncouth morons passed off as fine young Christian men and women. The hypocrisy sickens me. I play the game for one week more, and then I come back cruel. Next year will be the Season of the F.

And the New Linksheet additions go to...

The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiller, together with IMAO. Both sights good for plucking up the spirits of us chickenhawks, and providing good fodder for mocking lefties.


What? Just 'cause I'm gonna do other things, doesn't mean everyone else is.

La Nouveaux Ennemi?

Last night I watched part of "Ike: Countdown to D-Day" on A&E. Tom Selleck played the title role, and seemed to do a good job of capturing the cold, hard commanding core that lay behind that million-dollar smile (of course, the purpose of the smile was to hide the core, so I can't be positive that Ike was really like that). But one scene caught my attention: one of numerous conferences between Eisenhower and Churchill, tying down last details for Overlord, in which Churchill bad-mouths Charles de Gaulle: "the man acts as though Vichy doesn't exist, ignores the fact that Jews are being rounded up and put in boxcars. But he guards French priveleges zealously."


How low our ally has fallen in our eyes.


Instapundit linked this denunciation of France by Gerard Henderson in the Australian Sunday Morning Herald. It is harsh indeed, covering the ignominous history of the 20th Century French military (WW1, WW2, Vietnam, Algeria), and makes the charge that the French (and German) economy is actually detrimental to European growth as a whole.


I could actually go farther, and say that, as a military ally, the French have been useless for much of the last 200 years. In point of fact, the last time the French army was up to the task of defending France by itself was the 1790's (if you recall, even Napoleon suffered invasion and defeat). France has never been strong enough for the role she assigned herself, as grand arbiter and Master of Europe. She has tried militarily, culturally, and now economically, to take this role, and every time has come up short of success, and every failure has invited rot, chaos, and collapse. French history is a predictable swing of phoenix and ash.


How Olympian I sound, damning these poor people whom I claim to know from the tales of their ancestors, seeing Clotaire I in Jacques Chirac. Yet it has become a habit for we Americans, especially of late. Our seeming mutual cultural dissonance has since 9/11 and Iraq exploded into mutual contempt. They hate us for our arrogance, our willingness to disregard international opinion, our addiction to great crusades, our inwardness/ignorance, and most of all for our power. We hate them for their arrogance, their blindness to the threat of the age, their inability to escape the worn and usless paths of negotiation with devils, their corruption/cynicism, and most of all for their weakness. It is difficult, without a historian's eye, to tell which of us has the right of it. Are we too naive or are they too jaded, we without enough historical experience or they with too much of it? And are we, with our Girls Gone Wild and our shows about nothing, so far from them as we would like to think?


I cannot say. Even the historian of the future will likely see the question through a glass, and darkly. I can only fall back to the dictum of Machiavelli, who postulated that states begin to die when they cease to grow, to fight.


Whether the one product of la belle payee that I've that the great pleasure to meet over the course of my life would agree with me, I do not know.

Coming to a Conclusion

It's the week before exams, I've got papers to plow through and a thousand other things to do, and I just haven't got the time to do that and write any but superficial blogs. And really, who needs one more voice guessing as to what the next week will bring?


So I'm taking a blogbreak for a while to get some things that I need to get done, done. If the world shakes, I might take notice, but for the moment, I must plow through papers.

Should Have Stayed in Bed, Redux

Mostly on the mend now, but fighting off the virus has left me completely drained. The heat is, of course, not helping. I hope to be back again tommorrow. Bear with me.

Sunk Pucks

My musical tastes tend to evolve in historical fashion. My starting point, the first time I really decided to get "into" pop music, was the early Rolling Stones, back when the thunder of the arena hadn't bleached their simple swagger. From thence, I have simultaneously gone forward and backward: Forward through 60's Invasion and Garage rock through to 70's Punk and now, 80's Hardcore (the move to Fugazi is tempting), backward through older and older blues (most recently I got into Big Bill Broonzy, a contemporary of Robert Johnson) and Jazz. Everything fits onto a gigantic Critical Tree in my head.

That said, I'm not getting a lot of what passes for punk these days. The music is starting to bore me. In the fight between the "arties" (music for creativity's sake) and the "social realists" (music for the revolution) that came in the wake of the Sex Pistols demise in 1978 and the DOA failure of the New York scene, the social realists won, hands down, driving the poor arties to New Wave and other excuses for bad hair. The social realists, meanwhile, insisted on making punk serve the call to arms of the New Tommorrow. The result has been as monotonous as Stalin-era Soviet painting. If a band's not emulating Black Flag, complete with screaming and stuffing every concievable musical phrase into a 3-minute song, they're emulating the Descendents, with trebly melodies and insufferably nasal and whiny vocals. Maybe I'm getting old, but it's all starting to hurt my ears.

Worst of all is the way the genre has marketed itself to oblivion. I refer to the hyphenation. Each sub-sub-sub-genre comes complete with costume, tune template, and ready-made audience. Reality overtakes parody: I used to joke about things like cow-core or emo-oi, only to see them sprout into being. Got a song about your sensitive side? Bang, you're emo, whether you like it or not. Got a riff lifted from Gene Vincent? You're punkabilly or psychobilly. Got a skull somewhere on your record? Welcome to horror-core. This is Glenn; he'll be making fun of you.

The point is, it's become as unlikely to hear something you haven't heard before on a punk record as it is on a Britney Spears disc. Punk, which was supposed to eschew the same old thing, has become the same old thing, dedicated only to cloning itself, with the same clothes, the same sounds, the same preachy solipsistic thug liberalism. Punks are the Teddy Boys of the Left.

The preceding is prologue to me adding Conservative Punk to the linksheet. I do so with a few caveats. The site has yet to really impress me. It defines itself as an antidote to Punk Voter, which is fine as far as it goes, but somehow insufficient. It's not enough to be negative, to define yourself as against the tide. Destruction may lead to creation, but, contrary to all those folk Jon Savage quotes in England's Dreaming, it is not creative in itself. Left to itself, destruction merely frees up space.

In other words, it's well past time for punk to learn how to praise, how to build, how to appreciate. Such things have worn the label of "uncool," for way too long. Snideness and gesture do not sustain: they must be followed up. This is going to require thought and effort, and openminded-ness (real open-mindedness, not the kind that leads you to what you already want to think).

And music. Let's not forget the music. Tell your truth with a smile and a swagger and they'll believe you believe it, and that's half the battle. Thunder in the night forever.

Comfortably Numb

P.J. O'Rourke once described an XTC hangover as feeling like "I was in the other room and I couldn't quite hear me." It's one of those phrases I've thrown in to relevant conversation, confident that most haven't read O'Rourke's early stuff and so I'll get the clever award (this is one of my worst habits, but I'm pretty sure I'm not alone). At any rate, that's largely how I feel today: wiped, hollow, bloodless. Unlike yesterday, however, I can probably make it through the end of the school day, and from thence rush home to enjoy chicken soup and I, Claudius with Derek Jacobi. So that gives me some time to blog.

Should Have Stayed in Bed

I'm not feeling well today, so I'm looking to go home early. Consequently, no big blog today. Perhaps tommorrow I shall tackle the issue of what constitutes news.


For today, one good turn deserves another, so here's a link to Kyle Altis' livejournal. S'true, he and I see eye-to-eye on little (I blame contact lenses). But that's supposed to be what makes communication fun.

When in Cannes

I've been watching a film, The Mission, which concerns the Jesuit missionaries in Paraguay in the 18th century. Like many natives, the women of the Guarani walked about with their breasts bared. Not even Jesuits seemed to make anything of it.


I cannot help but contrast this with the attention granted Alexandra Kerry's mammaries, because she is the daughter of someone running for president, and people seem interested in saying WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?, as though breasts in southern France are some kind of rare and precious sighting. It begs the question of whether the media, by focusing our eyes on what they can manage to find, are able to offer anything which is not irrelevant and distorted.


The same goes for Michael Moore. Under what reasoning is this something that the public must know of? In what way is this surprising? Is this evidence of anything other than the fact that denouncing American governments is popular in France? Can there be a message to take other than the one intended?


Of course, I tread the edge of an abyss named "What is News?" But some abysses are worth exploring.

Commentary

I am aware that the comment feature does not appear to be working. I will try to change that just as soon as I get the time and inclination to wrestle with Scriptylla and Codebydis. Thanks to Kyle Altis for the heads-up and whatnot. I appreciate it, and meant to email you on the subject, but I'm also in the process of switching emails...

14:59:59

Lileks has a delightful set of arrows issued at someone who richly deserves it: the pompous, posing, Hunter Thompson. I stopped reading his cascades of woe some time ago; only someone with his drug intake could read into sporting events the grim fantasies that he does. His earlier writings are interesting because they begin After the Fall, as it were, when the Hippie Eden had already been closed off by the Cherubim. Las Vegas becomes the perfect Nod/Enoch, where the Children of Cain feed off of each other in grotesque spectacles. Taken out of that context, even that early book is nothing but the adventures of two burned-out drug worms, who go looking for sarcasm and find it, whereupon they proceed to get high a lot, rise from their stupor a couple of times, and then drift somewhere else. The Death Wish is palpable; it lies splattered on the pages like one of Ralph Steadman's illustrations.


What fascinates is why so many are willing to believe, based on impression and conjecture, that Thompson's vision of the world is the true one. Is there a degree of surety in despair? Relief in surrender? Can it be that Communists and Hippies and ANSWER-ites want only to have the world and its history rendered simply, a long march to a just oblivion/nirvana?


Peace.

Creating a Paper Trail?

It would appear that Syria is next on our list of targets. The Bush Administration must believe, as I and many others do, that Iran may collapse of its own weight. Going after Syria would also have the advantage of Lebanese liberation, and possible help from our only ally in the region, the Israelis.


Or I could be drowning in a warm pile of conjecture.

A Statement of Philosophy

I alluded on my very first day of publishing this site to previous efforts I have made in keeping an online column. My favorite was a weekly affair I managed for several months in 2000-2001 or thereabouts, called The Reality Principle. Most of my work vanished when the site went down (woe betide those who forget to check their email). Nevertheless the idea itself was useful, as a focus for asking questions about major issues.


To wit: the Reality Principle states that everything which exists does so for a reason, hence it is folly to attempt to undo or alter anything which exists without understanding and addressing that reason. Obvious, no? Yet how rarely does anyone in our culture say so. Liberals and Conservatives alike move to institute great change in a short sequence of time, before the news cycle makes their arguments yesterday's arguments. The gay marriage debate, on which I have written extensively here and here, is a perfect example of scorched-earth, to-the-barricades, apocalyptic-vision debate. It may be that the centrality of the issue warrants such rhetoric. But it's easy to see that it's produced a great deal of hysteria and name-calling, even among those who understand one another.


And that's something of a side issue. How can we intelligently debate a war? How can we consider whether a military effort against a nebulous enemy is going well or poorly, based on what information those fighting the war see fit to provide us? Moreover, how can we have discuss this without appreciating the efforts of anti-guerrilla warfare that have come before: our success in the Phillipines 100 years ago, the British in Malaya, the French in Algeria, the Russians in Afghanistan. We have heard nothing from those whose supposed task is to inform us about this context. All we have heard, and without anything that could be called analysis, is Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam. Whether this represents the fundamental ignorance of our citizenry or our media is open to debate.


My purpose, therefore, will be to write about the reality that is otherwise buried. This is a subjective statement, and I therefore choose to confont my bias. I lean to the right. Doing so satisfies my education, experience, and emotional touchstones. However, I also find that leaning to the right easier allows me to look at truth-on-the-ground, as opposed to Macro-Historical Truth or Progressive Truth. While both sides violate the Reality Principle when it suits them, the Left does so with less guilt and less appreciation. This is a function of their worldview, which tends to look to the past to distinguish it from the promised Future, as a way of demonstrating that the present is too much like the former to be allowed to continue.


But it should not be construed that the purpose of this site will any longer be dinging the Left (though it will probably happen). There are plenty of sites that do that just fine, and on the linksheet they will stay. Henceforth I will be interested in looking for reality, and letting it stand as such.

Hi. It's Hot.

And I have become Captain Obvious. I have also become disheartened at the "scandal" idiocy that seems to have inflamed the national conscience. I could sit here and dig up a historical defense for what we're doing in Iraq, and I could sit here and point out to you that we aren't doing nearly as badly as it would seem. And if you were on the right, you'd accept these views with a "right on, brother," and come away having really learned little that you did not already believe to be true. If you were on the other side, you'd very probably conclude that I was off my rocker, and emotionally incapable of dealing with what is perfectly obvious to you, that everything is falling apart.


Given that, I feel like I might as well say ekke-ekke-ekke f'TANG zurgleebulnffgnr... in all my blog posts. But that's Despair, arguably the worst of all the sins, because it's the enabler of every other one, just as Courage is the greatest of virtues, because it strengthens all the others.


So what I'm going to do is sit in the heat and ponder. And try to turn this site into what I've always wanted it to be, a collection of essays rather than an echo of Instapundit and NRO. This will require me to do some new thinking, and I may be off for a couple of days...


In the meantime, it's hot.