Lance Mannion

Shadow boxing

Real men don't care if other men are gay.  They don't think about it much, don't worry about it.

A real man may, however, on occasion, worry that other men will think he's gay.

Or, as the great moralist and philosopher Sam Malone would put it, a real man doesn't care if other men think he's graceful.  He just doesn't want to get a reputation for being too graceful.

The fear here isn't that other guys will think he's queer but that they'll think he's a sissy.  The two terms get mixed up in a lot of people's heads but they really don't mean the same to men.  A sissy isn't a guy who likes guy.  A sissy is a guy who is afraid.  Sissies are weaklings and cowards, and weaklings and cowards are dangerous to other men.  You can't bring down a mastadon, storm a castle, hit a beach, or rush into a burning building with a weakling and a coward by your side.

If you're a sissy, or if the guys think you're a sissy, other men won't trust you.  They won't want to have you around because they can't depend on you.

Worse, if they think you're a sissy, some of those other men will decide you are easy prey.

But by and large men are easy-going characters, inclined to give each other the benefit of the doubt, especially since we all want to be given the benefit of the same doubt, and so the topic of other men's sexual proclivities almost never crosses our minds.

Because of this, most men know to be suspicious when another man starts carrying on about the fags.

Since it's a topic most of us would rather avoid---a game of quien es muy macho all of us can't afford to lose---anybody who starts it is going against the code.  Going against the code is not something we like to do.  It feels, well, unmanly.  You have to wonder, then, about another guy who goes against it.  What's his problem?

Well, it's easy enough to guess.

Gay bashing is, in addition to being a hate crime, quite often a self-hate crime as well. 

These are things we know about each other.  Guys who talk a lot about sex aren't getting any.  Guys who brag about how tough they are, are scared.  Guys who talk obsessively about money aren't movers and shakers, they're thieves and suckers.  Guys who boast about what great athletes they are, you don't want on your team.  Guys who hate women feel whipped and castrated.  And guys who go and on about the fags are probably fags themselves.

If they're not, then they're really, really, really scared that they are.

These are guys who have mixed up sissy with queer, and since they probably know whether or not "it" moves when they are around men and so shouldn't have any worries on that score, then what worries them is something else they must know about themselves---they're sissies.  Weak, scared, and not to be counted on when the going gets tough.

The raging homophobia of the Right these days is so obviously a cover for fears of latency and inadequacy that it's laughable.  Or it would be laughable except that apparently there are enough closet cases and enough cowards out there that the Republicans can induce mobs of them to go to the polls and vote their self-loathing.

And that it's a national movement to teach thousands and thousands of teenage boys and girls to hate themselves.

Which brings us to this guy, Alabama State Representative Gerald Allen.

Allen has introduced a bill to ban books written by gay authors or that contain gay characters from the state's schools and libraries.

Amanda Marcotte over at Pandagon has no trouble laughing Allen off the stage for being an illiterate know-nothing.

[T]he "homosexual agenda" to destroy America book by book goes back a long, long way. Shakespeare's love sonnets may seem like simple poems written to a young man, but we all know his real intent was tearing down a nation that didn't exist yet. Even Sappho's seemingly innocent love poetry to women is part of the long-standing homosexual agenda to destroy America, even though she had no way of even knowing the landmass it would exist on was there. And of course, she was out to get Christianity, too, even though that didn't exist yet, either.

But I'm too astounded to laugh.  It's just stunning to watch another man boldy demonstrating to the whole world that he's a raging closet case and a complete sissy.

It appears that plenty of Allen's fellow legislators have him figured out too and want nothing to do with his weirdness.  Amanda reports:

Luckily, it seems like Alabama legislators realized that they didn't want to even be present at a debate that might feature an argument about whether or not cross-dressing to avoid harassment like Viola was just too gay or what have you, since most of them refused to even show up and vote on this turd of a bill.

I'm inclined to think that what most of them refused to show up to do was stand next to a man this confused about himself.

(Mac Thomason blogged about Allen back in December when Allen first began peeking out his closet door.  Shakespeare's Sister has found a county commissioner in North Carolina who has even more complicated issues with his own sexuality.  And, an update correcting an omission caused by a bout of amnesia, Coturnix has a series of posts on the femiphobia he sees behind the Right's many pathologies, including their gay bashing, power worship, and hysterical desire to dominate.)

Like I said, real men don't worry about homosexuality, let alone obsess so much over it that they can't even stand the thought that other people are reading about it.

There are, however, one class of real men who do worry about it.  Athletes.

Athletes are and have to be terrified of being weak.  In some sports---boxing, football, basketball, hockey---just the appearance of weakness can be devastating.  It marks you as easy prey.  In team sports a guy who is weak and cowardly is dangerous.  Imagine being a running back having to depend for protection from angry linebackers on a blocker who is afraid of taking a hit.

Most athletes are neither well-educated nor particularly sensitive.  So of course they confuse queer with sissy.

Now imagine being a gay athlete.

A particular kind of athlete.

A boxer, say.

A gay boxer.

You're a gay boxer, in the late 1950s, early 1960s, and you're opponent starts calling you queer.  In front of the whole world.  You're a good boxer.  No, you're a very good boxer.  You're one of the best of your time, one of the toughest, one of the most successful.  A guy all the other fighters have to beat if they want to get anywhere.

Those guys are coming after you hard already.  It's dangerous to be a fighter as it is.  More dangerous to be a champ with everybody out to take you down.

Imagine now that all those guys coming after you think you're a sissy.  Weak.  A coward.  How scared of you are they going to be?  You need them to be scared.  You need them to worry every time they get in the ring with you.  Their fear is your protection.  If they stop being afraid of you, you're in trouble.

On top of this, like everybody else around you, you confuse queer with sissy too.  You can't admit you're gay because it would be admitting you're a coward, you're a weakling.  How are you going to stand in the ring with all those guys looking to clobber you, thinking to yourself, I'm weak, I'm scared?

So this opponent of yours, calling you queer at the weigh in, taunting you in the ring, you can't let him get away with it, you can't let him expose your weakness like that.

You got to shut him up.

Which is what you do if you're Emile Griffith, it's 1962, you're fighting Kid Paret, and Paret keeps calling you maricon.

You shut him up, do it the best way you know how.  You hit him hard.  You hit him a lot.  You got him up against the ropes, he's done for, but you keep hitting him.  You hit him 29 times, fast and hard, without him being able to throw a single punch back.

You hit him until you scramble his brains and kill him.

Midway through the 12th, Emile stuns Benny with a short right. Benny reels into a corner, eats another hammer, then another. His head and shoulders slump. The only way to nail his jaw now is with uppercuts, and so that's what Emile begins to hurl -- or rather, that's what hurls out of Emile, an eruption of fury so mechanically precise that it seems to come from an engine house in hell rather than from the realm of human kinetics. At last Benny tilts, but the turnbuckle keeps him from collapsing, from saving himself, and now begins the terrible tick-tock of his cranium, left-right-left-right-left-right, combinations bursting from Emile faster than eye and brain can process.

The ref! Where's the ref? Who's the ref? Ruby Goldstein, a victim of his own expertise, a respected pro who knows this sport so well that he knows Emile's not a big finisher, knows Paret's a chronic possum, knows the Hispanics in the house will riot if he stops this fight just as their possum's about to pounce. Goldstein is caught flat-footed as 18 punches land in six seconds -- 29 consecutive unanswered punches in all -- bouncing brain against skull again and again. Eyes puffed shut, blood oozing from his nose and his cheek, Benny slithers down the ropes, at last, as Goldstein grabs Emile and his cornermen run to wrap him too.

That's from an article in Sports Illustrated, Shadow Boxer, by Gary Smith.  I'd call Smith my favorite living short story writer except that short stories are presumed to be fiction and Smith is a journalist.  But read Shadow Boxer and tell me you didn't read a short story better than any that's won an O.Henry lately.

But they seem like such nice guys

At Hullabaloo, Digby, whom I'd call our Tom Paine if the folks at Tom Paine weren't already channeling for Tom Paine, writes with his usual fire and dash about Republican staffers on the House Rules Committee "rewriting Democratic amendments to make them sound as if Democrats are trying to protect sexual predators."

Yeah, I know.  More Republican limbo dancing.  How low can they go?  How low can they go?

Children, Digby calls them, juvenile deliquents.  Babies.

The Republicans' excuse for what they're doing is that Democrats have said mean things about legislation the Republicans have proposed.  Republicans need to be mean, sneaky, vicious, dishonest cheats because Democrats have this nasty habit of hurting Republican feelings by telling the truth about what Republicans are up to.  The Rules Committee chairman flat out sniffled, probably wiping his runny nose on his sleeve as the tears rolled down his cheeks, "We don't like what you said about our bill." 

Digby isn't sympathetic.

Oh boo fucking hoo. The Republicans are in total control. The Democrats can sit around all day long and call them a bunch of fascist nazi bastards and it doesn't mean anything. And they still can't stop whining.

The problem is that these people don't really want to achieve anything. They are both in love with being victims and insist on being right. And they want everyone to acknowledge they are both right and victimized. What a bunch of big babies. It's not enough to win, the other side must completely capitulate --- and apologize.

While catching them in the act of throwing bricks through the school windows and spray painting "Nancy Pelosi is a s----" on the walls, to get even with the goody goody Democrats who tattled on them to the voters, Digby quotes Slate's Timothy Noah:

The fact is that the GOP doesn't have an agenda. It has impulses: to cut taxes, to increase Pentagon spending, and to mollify the Christian right wherever possible. Does it act on these impulses? Of course. But what mostly gives the party appeal to the electorate is its ability to scream and yell while seldom being granted the opportunity to ban abortion or eliminate the Securities and Exchange Commission or declare war on France. It stirs things up satisfyingly, while never requiring anybody to pay the price.

I snatched this quote for my notebook right away, pocketing it for the day when I get around to writing a post on how ridiculous it is that the Republicans have the reputation as "the party of ideas."   They've had two ideas for 60 years.  Death to all enemies abroad.  Death to the New Deal at home.

But I was dismayed when I read all of Noah's column and discovered that he wasn't really criticizing the Republicans.  He was only acknowledging a few of their faults because it's a rhetorical trick he's been well schooled in.  Admit one side isn't a choir of angels to lessen the blow when you accuse the other side of being a legion of devils.

What Noah's all hot and bothered about is that the Democrats persist in defending the filibuster.

I have a problem with the "nuclear option," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's threatened alteration of Senate rules to prevent filibusters against judicial candidates. I believe it doesn't go far enough...

As Norman Ornstein has pointed out, the filibuster is fundamentally a "conservative instrument," because it's usually liberals who want the government to do things and conservatives who want it not to do things. More recently, Jonathan Cohn observed in the New Republic that the Democratic fixation on saving the filibuster is a poor substitute for selling the party's policies to a voting majority...

Noah doesn't quite fail to notice that the Democrats have already sold their ideas to a majority.  More people voted for Democratic senators in 2004 than voted for Republican ones.  The Republicans increased their majority in the Senate despite this, because little Southern States each get as many Senators as big Northeastern and West Coast states.

(They increased their majority in the House because Tom DeLay got Texas to cheat.)

Noah acknowledges this fact by quoting from a column in the New Yorker by Hendrik Hertzberg in which Hertzberg lays it out: 

[T]he present Senate is the product of three elections, those of 2000, 2002, and 2004. [That's because one-third of the Senate faces re-election every two years.] In those elections, the total vote for Democratic senatorial candidates, winning and losing, was 99.7 million; for Republicans it was 97.3 million. The forty-four person Senate Democratic minority, therefore, represents a two-million-plus popular majority—a circumstance that, unless acres trump people, is at variance with common-sense notions of democracy.

The Democrats are right, the people agree, and the Republicans don't care!

They're not about to let the voice of the People stop them from doing anything.  The filubuster is one of the few means the Democrats have of actually enforcing the will of the People.

But to Noah such a defense of democracy is undemocratic and it has to stop, in the name of democracy.

It's a clever argument—the antidemocratic nature of Senate representation creates a phony Republican majority that Democrats are justified in thwarting. But the perfect is the enemy of the good. The Senate ought to be eliminated, but it's a pretty good bet that it isn't going to be. That being the case, why not reach for the low-hanging fruit? I feel confident that if the Democrats had a Senate majority, Hertzberg would agree with me that it's time to democratize the Senate as best we know how.

This is the kind of high minded wonkery that values an ideal over a practical necessity. 

The ideal being defended, though, is not really democratic processes that filibusters thwart.  The principle Noah wants Democrats to go to the wall for is the reasonableness and bipartainship of liberal pundits.

More than they care what is really going on, the liberal pundits care about appearing to be good men and good women, who by their definition are people who are open to persuasion from all sides.

They go about their business of sounding reasonable and open-minded to themselves as if the country was not being run by the likes of Tom DeLay, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush.

They continue to write their reasonable and open-minded thumbsuckers as if the base of the Republican Party was still composed of small government, fiscally conservative libertarains instead of the Radical Reactionary Christianists, unreconstructed Southerners, white supremicists, and greedy plutocrats.

They persist in their open-minded, reasonable advocacy of appeasement and surrender as if Lincoln Chaffee, Chuck Hagel, and John McCain were in charge of the Senate

Their only politics is that of a schoolteacher lecturing a kid who has just been beat up by a bunch of bullies on the playground.  "If you play nice, they'll play nice."

Noah writes:

There's no denying that if we abolished the filibuster now, Republicans would have an easier time winning legislative victories. As things stand now, Democrats hold three more than the necessary 41 votes to block foolhardy legislation proposed by Republicans. Without the filibuster, they'd be seven votes short. The GOP agenda would become the law of the land.

But what agenda would that be? Privatizing Social Security? That's opposed by a significant proportion of the president's own party. Establishing a flat tax? Never going to happen.

Never?

Why?

Because the People are agin it?

The Republicans running the country now are pretty much the same crowd who impeached Bill Clinton even though 60 per cent of the country thought they were out of their minds for doing it!

Henry Hyde, leaving Congress not in disgrace as he should have seven years ago, but elegized as a beloved elder statesman, remembers his own part in that attempted coup with pride.  Even though the impeachment revealed him to be as egregious an adulterer as Clinton and a bigger hypocrite---"A youthful indiscretion," he called his long running affair with a younger, married woman, which he carried on when he was older than Clinton was when Monica flashed her thong.---Hyde implied in his swan song that he thinks that all that was wrong with the Impeachment was that Clinton survived it.

These people do not care about the will of the People!

They have no respect for the democratic processs or even the Republican process.  When they admit that the People aren't on their side on an issue, they dismiss the People as corrupt, stupid cattle who have been brainwashed by the liberal media and too many video games and claim that the people's failure to recognize the rightness of the Republicans is justification for the Republicans shoving what's good for them down their throats.

They don't care that most Americans don't want George W. Bush screwing with their Social Security.  They're convinced that if they keep spinning it enough ways they'll be able to fool enough of us eventually.  But even if they don't, hey, they have 55 Senators.  They control the House.  They can do whatever they want.

As Digby's post shows, they already do.

It's over a year until the next election.  The People's memories are short.  The Republicans learned an important lesson from 2004.

They can screw everything up royally and still increase their majorities.

Noah doesn't see the Republicans' government by impulse, while exhibiting all the impulse-control of two year olds, as being as big a problem as the Democrats reliance on filibusters to keep the GOP toddlers' impulses in check.

Let them throw a few temper tantrums, Noah advises.  What's the cost?

A few radical judges who will overturn Roe v. Wade, cripple the government's ability to protect the environment from industries made reckless by greed, overturn the Voting Rights' acts?

Piffle.

The mugging and eventual murder of Social Security?

So much bother.

The important thing is to be fair.

The filibuster is one of three significant obstacles to the principle of "one man, one vote" imposed by the Supreme Court on state governments but strangely absent at the federal level. The other two are the Electoral College and the representation scheme of the Senate itself, both of which grant power to the states as political entities at the expense of the national electorate. Of the three, ridding ourselves of the filibuster ought to be the easiest, because it isn't written into the Constitution. All it takes is a Senate vote on a rule change.

Good.  We can have the satisfaction of knowing what fair-minded, reasonable geeks we are as the bullies sit on our chests and pummel us bloody, consoled by the knowledge that when they finally let us up we can run to teacher and tell on them.

After which, of course, they'll feel really, really bad.

That'll show 'em.

Not the lesson the nuns had in mind

Quick trip to the supermarket at lunch time to buy some staples.

When I reached the car and unloaded my cart I disovered the birthday card I'd picked out for my niece at the bottom of the cart.  A glance at the receipt confirmed what I was afraid of.  The clerk hadn't rung it up.

I'd shoplifted the card.

For a second or two I was tempted to let myself off with a stern warning and a half-hearted promise to pay up next time.  But I knew I'd feel crummy, not to mention cheap, driving away with a stolen $2.69 birthday card.  Nevermind the bad karma I might pass along to my niece.

Damn.

I headed back inside to do the right thing, knowing the whole way that doing it would not make me feel good.  I wouldn't feel honest.  I wouldn't feel righteous.  I wouldn't even feel at ease with my conscience since I was already feeling guilty for having even considered not paying for it.

I was pretty sure, too, that in the time I'd been outside the store, the place had gotten so busy that I wouldn't find a clear path to a register, I'd be stuck standing in line behind twelve women buying a week's worth of groceries each, all of them planning to pay with a check.

I lucked out.   There was only one person in line at the express checkout and, amazingly, she was several items under the twelve items limit.  I was in and out in no time, the card truly and legally mine.

But I'd been right.  Doing the honest thing hadn't made me feel good.  All I felt was annoyed with myself.

I was annoyed with myself for not having put the card up for the first clerk to see it to begin with.

I was annoyed with myself for not giving in to the temptation to leave without paying for it.

I was annoyed with myself for being tempted to leave without paying for it.

And I was annoyed with myself for feeling grumpy about doing the right thing.

I don't go to confession, haven't since I was a kid, but I wonder, if I did, what would I tell the priest?  What part of the above was a sin?  Would he absolve me of any of it since I don't feel remorse just annoyance?  What would be my penance?  Five Hail Marys and an Our Father, probably.

This is not what the nuns promised would happen when they taught us to listen to our consciences.

My niece better love her card.

Bloggin' baseball

I've stated---averred, asserted, claimed, boasted, bragged, argued, enthused, insisted, expatiated, joked, jibed, quipped, announced, implied, rejoined, and even flat out said (Lance Mannion, proud graduate of the Franklin W. Dixon School for Writers.  "The best of the best!" enthuses tall, dark-haired, eighteen year old Frank Hardy.  "Ditto!" exclaims his younger brother, blond, impulsive Joe Hardy.  "And gosh what good eats they serve in the cafeteria!" quips their chubby, good-natured friend, Chet Morton.)---the smartest bloggers are Mets fans.

Amazingly---Get it?  Amazingly?  The Mets are known to fans and sports pages headline writers as the Amazin's?---Amazingly, the only one who has ever challenged me on this is another Mets fan, Roy Edroso.  Roy has pointed out that the fact that we are Mets fans argues persuasively against any claims of superior intelligence.

But Roy is a crank and a pessimist who doesn't believe that the glass is half full, that Freedom in on the March, that we're winning the war against terra, that a George Bush-created economic boom that will make the Clinton era look like the 1970s is just around the corner, or that the Mets will win the division, let alone the NL pennant.

So I feel free to ignore everything he says and continue in my belief that we Mets fans are the elite of bloggers and the rest of you are a bunch of pikers.

Trouble is, there is weighty evidence against me.

Smart bloggers who, inexplicably to the point of, in my humble opinion, weirdness and perversity, root for other teams.

The Heretik boasts of loving the Yankees, which as far as I'm concerned is the baseball fan equivalent of boasting you voted for George W. Bush.  But since Joe is on the side of the angels in every other way that counts, I guess I can forgive him his attachment to the Devil's favorite team.

Matt Welch is an Angels fan.  Shakespeare's Sister roots for the Cubs.  The Poor Man is a Red Sox fan, although he's not proud of the fact.  Mac Thomason is a Braves fan, and has a whole nother blog to prove it.  At Lawyers, Guns and Money Rob Farley follows the Mariners and Scott Lemieux follows, well, nobody, in particular.  His former team, the Expos, have been, bless them, like Bottom the Weaver, translated, and Scott hasn't been able to transfer his loyalty to their new incarnation, the Washington Nationals.  He's considered signing on as a Mets fan, but so far, despite my urging, he hasn't been able to believe, as the late great Tug McGraw said you gotta do.

I'm pretty sure Susan roots for the Phillies, because she grew up in Philadelphia, but I might be making assumptions.  I know another smart blonde from Philly who roots for the Phils, in spite of her better judgment, and maybe I'm unfaily lumping all smart blondes from the City of Brotherly Love into one grandstand.  Whatever team she roots for, though, she is definitely a baseball fan and she's trying to arrange a bloggers night out at the ball game.

She's thinking June, the Yankees' double A club, the Trenton Thunder, taking on the Birmingham Mets.  Ah, the beauties of minor league ball!  As someone who lived for four years in the bleachers at Fenway Park, I'm here to tell you, the minor league games I've seen, Triple A in Syracuse, Single A down here,  are every bit as much fun---maybe more fun---as watching a game at Fenway.  Possibly even more fun than watching the Cubs play at Wrigley, an experience beloved sabremetrician and baseball magus Bill James doesn't rate as high as a lot of folks would and I'm surprised he hasn't been hanged in effigy from the roofs of one of those brownstones over on Waveland. (Via Scott, who has lots more from an interesting interview with James.)

Ok, more of the view from the cheap seats:

Susie reviews Management by Baseball, by her friend, Jeff Angus.  In his book, Angus applies the wisdom of successful baseball managers to the problems faced by the other kind of managers, the ones who wear suits, and I don't mean Connie Mack or Kindly Old Burt Shotten.  Managers in the business world.  Susie's verdict: Great! Buy it!

Matt Welch, in celebration of Jackie Robinson Day, makes a very satisfying sabremetric case that Robinson was one of the five best second basemen ever to play the game.  Matt shows how Robinson ranks ahead of some awful fine infielders, including one of Matt's own favorites, Ryne Sandberg.  Sez Mr Welch:

Conclusion? To my mind, Jackie Robinson, in addition to everything else he did, was clearly one of the five best second basemen to ever play the game of Major League Baseball. And three of the four men ahead of him -- Collins, Hornsby, and Lajoie -- never had to compete against brown men, let alone black. J.R. didn't just break one of America's ugliest barriers while enduring the kind of poison we can't begin to contemplate, he kicked everybody else's ass while doing it.

Inexcusably, in discussing Robinson, Matt failed to link to my post, Roger Kahn talks about Jackie Robinson.

Bastard.

Meanwhile, Edroso takes in his first Mets game of the season.

Domoni produces more proof that MLB owners are evil and minor league ball is what real fans pay to see.  Also, he recently bought tickets from a scalper for the first time.  He's ambivalent about the experience.

And, an older post but a good one, Shakespeare's Sister tells the story of the day when he was back in college, playing ball, before an injury ended his realistic hopes for a major league career, her dad met Satchel Paige.

Old Pop Mannion completes another trip around the sun

My dad, Pop Mannion, has never worried about age.  Or never let on that he's worried.  He's always said, whenever another birthday has rolled around, "What does the fact that the earth takes 365 days to revolve around the sun have to do with me?"

The earth's travels through space may not matter to him, but every April 27 they matter to Mom Mannion, their 6 kids and matching daughters and sons-in-law, and their 14 grandchildren.

It gives us another chance to cheer loudly and long for Pop!

Happy Birthday, Dad!

Love, Lance, the blonde, the 11 year old, and the 9 year old!

For a sampling of the long and storied history Pop Mannion and I have shared see:

The day old Pop Mannion finally tied one on.

We're living in the 1950s here.

And:

I'm being followed by a moon shadow.

The Big Fix

This is my favorite passage from the TMFTML post I linked to yesterday:

Every article you've seen in the news lately about bloggers refers specifically to a certain subset of bloggers: Let's call them polibloggers. These are the angry white guys who crapped their pants in fear when the Twin Towers came down and decided that the new climate of intolerance-masquerading-as-patriotism would allow them to give voice to the blatant racism and hatred of the lower classes that they were previously forced to keep in check due to societal norms and basic politeness.

It's a given that the people most terrorized by the terrorist attacks on 9/11 were right wing columnists, pundits, and bloggers.  Children who lost parents in the attacks have faced life since that day with more courage, hope, mercy, charity, and forebearance than these cowardly lions who have been scaring themselves witless every day since by pulling their own tails.

"Oh, it's hard believe me, missy,

When you're born a Right Wing sissy..."

Wait.  Where was I?  Oh yeah.

It wasn't hard to terrorize them, since I'm afraid there's no denyin', they were just some dandy lions to begin with.  That's why they are attracted to the Right.  They love the love of power and the willingness to rain down, at least the willingness to wish out loud for, death on all enemies that has become the hallmark of Right Wing rhetoric.

Enemies being anyone who scares them, which is to say anyone who is not them.

Their basic cowardice has been exposed day in and day out since 9/11.  Most of them are young and none of them have enlisted to go fight the enemies they want dead, dead, dead.  And although many of them are working journalists---Jonah Goldberg, Michelle Malkin, for example---you don't see them rushing off to Bagdad to report on the war like the man who ought to have been their hero and role model Michael Kelly, the editor of the Atlantic who died covering the early days of the invasion.  You'd think that even if they're too chicken to fight, the least they could do would be to spend a month or so in Iraq to bring back all the good news they claim the rest of the media is failing to tell us about.

But it wasn't just the already yellow-bellied young conservative types who were so frightened by 9/11.  Some liberals, many moderates, a whole slew of people who espoused no particular politics on September 10, 2001, became unhinged by fright.  Dennis Miller is one example.  Roger L. Simon is another.

Simon is the writer of an enjoyable series of detective novels starring the ex-60s activist Moses Wine.  The first book in the series, The Big Fix, was made into a movie starring Richard Dreyfuss and it was, like the book, not great, but pretty darn good.  I liked both.  I've liked the other Moses Wine books I've read too.  They're lighthearted, funny, smartly written, and full of interesting characters.  I think only two things have kept Moses Wine from being as popular as Robert Parker's Spenser or Jonathan Kellerman's Alex Delaware.

When I say Simon's mysteries are smartly written I mean that the story proceeds from paragraph to paragraph in a logical and coherent way, with no glaring inconsistencies in characters' behavior and no outrageous plot devices suddenly being dragged in to save the writer from himself---that is, unlike a lot of thriller and mystery novelists, Simon avoids over-plotting himself into corners he can only get out of by writing in previously non-existant windows, doors, and convenient air shafts to escape through.

The commas and periods are all in ther right places and the sentences parse.

But the prose doesn't sing.

Bad writing, of either kind---pedestrian or ungrammatical---doesn't disqualify genre novels from popular or even critical success.  In fact, many thrillers and mysteries seem to succeed because they are badly written.  These are the books readers and critics usually refer to as "great reads."  They mean books that they can skim without missing anything.

But Simon's prose isn't bad.  It's just a bit bland and that is a failure in the kind of mysteries he writes which are aimed at readers who admire Parker, Chandler, the various MacDonalds---Ross, John D., and Gregory, who for some reason left the first "a" out of McDonald---which is to say readers who read mysteries along with all kinds of other books, as opposed to most genre fans who know what they love and stick with it exclusively.   Readers who put down a history, a biography, a book of poetry, or a novel by Dickens to pick up The Long Goodbye know what good writing sounds like, music, and they want to hum along.

Like I said, Simon's prose doesn't sing.

Well, mabye it would be better to say that it does, but it's Vic Damone.  Parker's Dean Martin, Chandler's Joe Williams, and MacDonald, John D., is, needless to say, Sinatra.

Elmore Leonard's Lou Rawls.

The other problem Simon has had in breaking into the top tier is taste---he has too much of it.  Tact, too.  He can't be vulgar enough.  He holds back on the kinky sex and graphic violence.  But he's not writing Agatha Christie style Murder Among Nice, Staid Dull People Living in Cozy Little Villages Where Just the Mention of Sex Causes Grown Men to Blush and Women to Feel a Little Faint Who Done Its.  He's writing Tough Guy Working the Mean Streets and Getting Laid A Lot When They're Not Getting Beaten to A Pulp pulp style murder mysteries/thrillers.  There are rules, and Simon doesn't follow them.

There could be a third problem getting in the way of increased popularity.  He doesn't write often enough.  I've been pleased to see that he's picked up the pace over the last ten years, but genre fans demand a least once yearly fixes from their favorites and Simon hasn't delivered consistently.  Which might be a vicious circle problem for him.  If he was more popular he would be moved to write more often and if he wrote more often he'd be more popular.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

I believe Simon started his blog as a fairly standard writer's blog.  He posted about writing, his books, the problems and tricks of the trade.  That's how I remember his blog anyway.  That's why I used to read it.   I don't remember much politics creeping into it, before 9/11.

I can't tell from his books what Simon's politics were before 2001.  He was disenchanted enough with 1960s style radicalism to satirize it angrily.  But he also satirized capitalists, yuppies, suburbanites, and other members of what constituted the Republican base before the election of Bill Clinton radicalized the Party.

I'd guess that Simon himself was experiencing the all too typical drift from youthful idealism to middle age premature old fogeyism that his hero, Moses Wine, seemed to be suffering, with the same sense of self-disenchantment and regret that Wine has.   I don't know if he'd moved so far right that he was actually voting Republican, but he was definitely more sympathetic to conservative values than he had been and I wouldn't be surprised to find out that he was a Republican.

I wouldn't be surprised if he'd stayed a loyal Democrat either.

Whatever he was, he sure didn't seem to be the hysterical looney he's shown himself to be since 9/11.

But up until just before I began writing this post I would have said that all that had happened to Simon was that he got an awful fright on 9/11 and came unglued.

I think that's true.  But a lot of people did.  It took many of us a while to calm down enough to start thinking clealy about what needed to be done, and it was in that period that the Bush Leaguers made their big move.  But people like Simon never calmed down, never came to their senses.  In fact, they grow more and more hysterical by the day.

Not surprising as they've had to watch as their hero President botches the war that was supposed to save us all and makes a hash out of everything else he puts his hand to.  If you are scared to death it can't be much of a comfort to have to rely on George W. Bush to protect you.   And if you are so scared that like a terrified sailor in a storm at sea you can't bring yourself to let go of the mast even though you can hear it cracking and splintering and you know your best chance is to run for the lifeboats now you will start screaming at everybody trying to pry you away and drag you to safety that No, the mast is strong, the lifeboats are leaky, the first mate manning the nearest boat doesn't know what he's doing, he's an effete crypto-French snob who didn't really win those medals he got for navigation and seamanship and bravery!  Only the Captain can save us, and you're all wrong about him being incompetent and the one who ran us aground on these rocks, mutiny, mutiny, mutiny!  You will all drown and you deserve it, now leave me alone, dear God, leave me alone, I don't want to die, I don't want to die!

But now I wonder if something else hasn't happened to Simon.

Popularity.

Simon's right wing ravings have won him the audience and the fandom his mysteries never could.

He's famous.

He's more famous than Robert Parker, or so it must appear to him every morning when he reads his comments and emails.

But popularity has its drawbacks.

It's addictive, for one thing.  It's awful to feel it slipping, even a little bit.  You experience withdrawl symptoms.  You get desperate to get it back and then increase it so that you won't have to worry about any slips in the future---except that it's the fact of the slip, not the amount or the meaning, that tortures you.  You can have had a million fans yesterday, but if today you discover you are down to only 999, 900, those hundred lost fans suddenly become the most important people in the world to you.

People are this way about most everything they prize---money, love, fame, sex.  Once addicted, you can never have enough.

Along with his new popularity, Simon has to deal with the exact same temptation he'd have faced if he'd continued with his novels and won as big an audience through his writing as he has through screaming for the blood of liberals and Muslims.

Fans---as opposed to mere appreciators and likers and enjoyers.  Fans aren't even merely lovers.  They are obsessives.---Fans of anything like what they like and that's all that they like and woe be to the object of their devotion should that object attempt anything new or different.

Fans of genre writing are even more demanding of the same old thing.  They want each new book to be just like the last one, only more so.  It's very hard to slip something different by them.  It takes great strength of will and seriousness of purpose and very few genre writers possess either.  This is why over time even the best of them sometimes devolve into parodists of themselves.  (Read The Green Ripper by John D. MacDonald, if you can stomach it.)  They try harder and harder to give their audience what it wants and at the same time top their last trick, and then one day, they attempt the quadruple back flip without a net and they fall.

They become hacks.

Simon found himself with an audience all of a sudden, an audience he enjoyed having and which he became desperate to keep.  Trouble was it was an audience of frightened, bloodthirsty Right Wing loons and what they liked about him was the fear, bloodiness, and Right Wing lunacy that 9/11 had brought out in him.

To keep his new fans happy and coming back, Simon has had to deliver the same goods over and over again while at the same time keeping it fresh and exciting.  So he's done what desperate genre writers do all the time.  Whatever worked well the last time out, they do again only they double it.  The explosions get bigger, the body counts get higher, the sex turns kinky and then kinkier.

Simon could not achieve the popularity he'd have liked with his mysteries partly because he could not give in to readers' expectations of blood, gore, sex, and violence.  He had too much artistic integrity.

But now as a blogger he's become what he steadily resisted being as a novelist.

A hack.

Related blogging: Scott Lemieux, riffing on a post by Matt Welch, finds Simon and Dennis Miller, among others, guilty of "The Horowitz Fallacy." 

These are types, sez Scott, "who believed a lot of indefensible things when they were leftists [who since] becoming right-wingers [have been] projecting their old beliefs on something called 'the left' and trying to beat the strawman constructed from their ex-selves to death."

And James Wolcott catches Simon suffering from incontintence in more than just his rhetoric.

Fair glove, weak bat, great skillet

Scene: spring training camp, March, 1960.  Tigers manager Jimmy Dykes talking to reporters.

[Dykes] launched into the hymn that every manager has sung every spring since some prehistoric Berra took his first cut with the shinbone of a dinosaur---Detroit's pitchers will be better, the batters stronger, the outfielders fleeter, the infielders niftier.

"How's your first baseman?" he was asked.

"Bilko?  Fine, he can move around there all right.  Be kind.  Write something nice about him."

That's easy to do.  Stephen Thomas Bilko has been coming up to play first base for one club or another since the dawn of history.  He has hit as high as .360 in the top minors and as low as .220 in the majors.  There are 235 sweet-natured pounds of him.  He needs to feel wanted.

When he was with Cincinnati he shared an apartment with three other players.  Steve did the cooking.  He is a wonderful cook.  His roomates appreciated him and sent him a Mother's Day card, but the Reds sent him to Los Angeles, who sent him to Spokane.

           ---from "Advice to a Rookie" by Red Smith.  In Red Smith on Baseball.

Morning Gazette--Obligatory blogger navel-gazing edition

I've been at this seven months now and I have yet to do a Why I Blog post.

A fact about which most of you are saying right now, "Thank God," while the rest of you are suddenly sitting bolt upright in chairs, your spines stiffening in horror at the possibility that that's just what I'm about to do, shove a Why I Blog post in your face.

Fret not!

I can't tell you why I blog because I've got no clue why.

This is the answer I gave to Shakespeare's Sister when she asked her readers how they got into the blogging biz.

No friends. No life. A late night, half a bottle of tequilla, and a sudden curiosity about whether or not it was possible to find naked pictures of Ann Coulter on the web. Suddenly, without warning, I was reading Josh Marshall and Atrios and Avedon Carol and saying to myself, "They made his son president???? How did that happen? That coke head? Impossible! Something must be done! I know! I'll bet the whole mess came about because nobody asked for my opinion. I'll fix that. Now nobody will have to ask!"

A long way 'round to admitting what I already said.  I got no clue.

But I came across this post at The Minor Fall, The Major Lift this morning.  TMFTML has been thinking, in between doses of Xanax and swigs of vodka and grapefruit juice.

I've been thinking lately about blogging; more specifically, what the fuck is it for? And, to start, I think we need to identify our terms. Every article you've seen in the news lately about bloggers refers specifically to a certain subset of bloggers: Let's call them polibloggers. These are the angry white guys who crapped their pants in fear when the Twin Towers came down and decided that the new climate of intolerance-masquerading-as-patriotism would allow them to give voice to the blatant racism and hatred of the lower classes that they were previously forced to keep in check due to societal norms and basic politeness. You know the type: They spend hours going over memos and are conversant in "font sizes," whatever the fuck those are. Why is it that these guys get all the attention, when much more interesting things are happening amongst the arts and media bloggers?

There are about 10 true things in that graph, many more in the whole post, but the key truth is that the regular, analog media, when it deigns to notice blogs, focuses on the polibloggers, whom the media mainly loathe, fear, and despise---except for Wonkette, who they hope and pray will add a web cam to her page real soon and won't they be surprised when they find themselves spying on Greg Beato brushing his teeth---and when they have to admit that there are other types of blogs doing business on the virtual main street, they dismiss them as lots of lonely people writing about their cats.

That's where the ubiquitous Friday cat-blogging joke comes from, a joke that really needs to be retired because the reference is long forgotten and it's turned into the thing it was meant to satirize, lots of people proudly showing off pictures of their cats and asking the rest of us to find them adorable.

I hate cats.

I'll understand if you now feel you have to stop reading my page on principle.

Although it will just confirm my opinion of cat lovers as self-deluded masochists.

Think your cats will give up anything offered to them free by people who hate you?

But back to blogging.

What TMFTML wrote about the media's obsession with the narrowest form of blogging, and the fact that what the media wants from even those bloggers is for them to go away, reminded me of a post by Chicago Tribune columnist and tireless blogger Eric Zorn from last month in which Eric caught a bunch of old guard media blowhards being forehead-slappingly wrong about blogs, one of them even comparing blogging to talking on CB radios and all of them dismissing blogging as a fad that must pass as soon as possible.

Eric, responding to the most dullwitted of the blowhards, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg, riposited, and how long have I been waiting to use that five dollar synonym for replied:

Steinberg is, in fact, very much mistaken. His patronizing and clueless rhetoric (“a blogger -- someone who keeps an online diary… unvarnished and unedited”) notwithstanding, this format, this medium, is here to stay.

Some of the terminology may change and some of the genres may splinter off and form more distinct identities, but I’m absolutely sure that, 30 years from now:

• Every major media outlet (even the lumbering old Sun-Times) will have seamlessly incorporated the blog format into its offerings.
• Web logging will be so ubiquitous and diverse that we will no more try to count the number of blogs in existence than we would today try to count the number of “printed things” in the world.
• Steinberg will still be predicting that the fad will end any day now, and his sons will be mocking him for it in their blogs.

And Eric's post reminded me of this post by Terry Teachout, which Terry headlined "Memo From Cassandra."  Terry is one of the web's great blog boosters, often out-cheerleading even the likes of Jeff Jarvis.  Terry has been to the mountain top and seen a land flowing with milk and honey but no ink, anywhere.

Terry cheerfully looks forward to the day when the written word, in all genres and disciplines, is delivered and consumed digitally.  No more pencils, no more books, and possibly all teachers' dirty looks visible via webcams.

I think he's more right than wrong, although I think books are here to stay for a lot longer than Terry does, because reading is still fundamentally a sensual experience.  People like the feel of books in their hands when they read.  They enjoy touching the paper to turn the pages.  These are among our earliest sense memories and we would hate to give them up, we'd miss them, and the only way around that is to make sure that a generation or two grow up without them, which means taking the picture books out of the hands of little children.  Never going to happen, my friend.

But Terry is right about other things, including the need for artists to create and maintain their own blogs, not just for the crassest form of self-promotion, but because, as Terry argues, in the not to distant future, that will be the best way for artists to develop and reach audiences:

I’ve said this before, but it can’t be said often enough: the mainstream media aren’t especially interested in serious art, and such interest as they do have is diminishing daily. If you’re looking to big-city newspapers to start reviewing more literary fiction, or to PBS to telecast more ballet and modern dance, or to your local radio station to continue carrying the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday broadcasts, you’re kidding yourself. They don’t care. Which leaves you with two options. You can sit around complaining about their indifference—or you can do an end run around them and use the new media to reach out directly to your audience, both existing and potential.

And Terry's post reminded me that among my regular and semi-regular readers I count at least three artists with web sites and blogs.  Four, if you include The Heretik.  Joe's a poet and he posts many of his own poems on his page, but I don't think he thinks of The Heretik as a poetry blog.  The other three are Doug Truth, who's a painter---that's one of Doug's paintings, Firehouse, at the top of the page--- Matthew Hutchinson, a classical guitarist, and Enchanting Juno, a knitter.

Juno might be more comfortable describing what she does as a craft and herself as a craftswoman, but all the examples of her knit work she's posted look like art to me.

And of course many of you are writers, like Jaquandor, who is writing a novel, and Trish Wilson, who just had two more stories accepted for publication, way to go, Trish!  Tom Watson's wife, Beryl Watson, is a painter, but I don't know if she reads my page.  I don't know if she even reads Tom's page.  Wives are unpredictable that way.  That's one of her paintings there on your right.   Beryl doesn't have her own web page yet, but Tom promises to get to work on fixing that.

And I know many others of you are musicians and artists of all different kinds.  But I don't think of your blogs as being the kind that Terry has in mind.  If I'm wrong, or if I've missed important links to your work on your pages, please let me know.

But it's this post by Juno that Terry's post also reminded me of, and it brings this post of mine back to its starting point.  Juno's entry is headlined "Why?"  As in why blog and why read blogs?  Questions Juno sees as two versions of the same question.  Read her whole answer, but the key for her is one word---people.

People outraged, people falling love, people enjoying, venting, mastering skills, remodeling kitchens, reading, learning, changing, marriages beginning and ending, children being born or, so tragically, lost.  People discovering their lives, and themselves, risking themselves by exposing something to a stranger and gaining something in the process - knowledge, perspective, agreement, discussion, a greater sense of self.

So you can relax.  This hasn't been a Why I Blog post at all.  It's been more of a Why They Blog post.

It can be turned into a Why You Blog post or a Why You Read Blogs post or a Here Are Some of My Favorite Blogs post.  Just put it in the comments or post on your blog---or somebody else's blog.  Put it in the comments section at Instapundit, what the heck.  Confuse the devil out of him.---and send me the link.

(Related reading:   I couldn't work this into my scheme here, but this post by Chris Nolan at Politcs from Left to Right, on the old where are all the women bloggers meme, makes some excellent points, not just about the women blogger question but also about the analog media's bloggerphobia.)

Captain Jack will get you high tonight

Another night of insomnia, another dumb quiz.

But I liked the results again.

Which character from Pirates of the Caribbean am I?

Who else?

Captain Jack Sparrow

Which POTC Character Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Actually, I was expecting to come out Will Turner---yes, me and Orlando Bloom, separated at birth.  I look exactly like a young Errol Flynn too---and I was afraid I'd turn out to be the fussy, stuffy, jilted and always outfoxed naval officer Norrington.

But there's one magical question and I answered it correctly.  You'll know it when you come to it, if you're sea-worthy.

We're rascals and scoundrels, villains and knaves.

Drink up me 'earties, yo ho!

We're devils and black sheep, really bad eggs!

Drink up me 'earties, yo ho!

I love that song. Now!  Bring me that horizon!

Buckle your swashes!

Out in Hollywood, where life is cheap and sin walks naked through the streets, or would walk naked, if anyone out there ever walked.  Where sin drives naked through the streets.  Out there they've figured out what everyone who saw Fellowship of the Ring figured out thirty seconds after Legolas appeared on screen:  Orlando Bloom is a movie star.

A particular movie star.

Errol Flynn.

Actually, he's more like Flynn's nicer, more gentlemanly, better behaved kid brother, which is the part he played in Pirates of the Caribbean, where he seemed to be auditioning for a remake of Flynn's star-making vehicle, Captain Blood.

So the bold, original thinkers who run their studios with all the vision of frightened rabbits who trying to escape a predetor keep running straight down the side of the road for half a mile before it occurs to them to duck under the hedge that's been right there beside them the whole way, have tabbed Bloom as a swashbuckler and apparently do not plan to let him star in any movie without a sword in his hand any time soon.

Fine and dandy.  But never let it be said that the bold, original thinkers out in Hollywood see a forest when they can find a tree to focus on, which they then run into full tilt, again and again and again.  Afterwards they blame the forest for having trees in it and order in the lumberjacks to have it clear cut.

They'll keep casting Bloom in swashbuckling epic after swashbuckling epic until a string of box office bombs convinces them that their lack of imagination is all Orlando's fault and he's packed off to make movies in Spain.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest comes out next year, and a third Pirates movie in 2007.

Bloom does seem born to buckle a swash with the best of them, but he needs to develop more of a sense of humor if he's going to cross swords with the likes of Flynn, Tyrone Power, Douglas Fairbanks, and Stewart Granger, and live to tell the tale.

He's capable of it.  He showed a sly, deadpan humor as Legolas in Lord of the Rings and even as the stalwart and overserious Will Turner, straight man to Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow, he had flashes of wit and the devil may care attitude that all swashbuckling heroes must have in the face of impossible odds.

But then along came Troy.  All he was given to do in that one was pout and look pretty.

But that's all Brad Pitt and Eric Bana and the starlet we'll never hear of again who played Helen had to do, as well.

Troy was made by people who thought that the main attractions of swashbuckling epics are great legs, bare chests, and big swords, which, for some people I expect to hear from in the comments, is the case.

So Bloom pouted and posed and waved his big sword around and looked very pretty, prettier than the soon-to-be-forgotten starlet playing Helen but not as pretty as Brad Pitt, and the movie bombed.

Now he's in Ridley Scott's Crusader epic Kingdom of Heaven.  From the stills and the trailers it doesn't appear to me that he's pouting all the time or that all he's required to look is pretty.  In fact he looks pretty grubby.  He waves a big sword around but it doesn't look like he's having a good time.  Of course, he's on a Crusade and the Crusades weren't anybody's idea of a rollicking high times.  They were pretty grim, and grubby, affairs, and that's what everybody in the trailers and stills is busy doing, looking grim and grubby.

Bloom looks grim.

Liam Neeson looks grim.

Jeremy Irons looks grim.

The starlet playing the love interest, whom we'll never hear of again, looks especially grim, probably because she's thinking to herself, I can't believe they hired the same costume designer who managed to erase all traces of character, beauty, grace, and sex appeal from Natalie Portman in the Star Wars movies to dress me!

Edward Norton's in it, although I can't find him in any of the pictures or trailers, but I'll bet he looks the grimmest of them all, seeing as how he's playing a leper.

David Thewlis doesn't look grim.  But he never looks grim.  He looks debauched, like a Roman emperor who's been orgying for three days straight and is just waiting for his head to stop throbbing before he dives back in among the dancing girls.

All the way through Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban I was thinking of Thewlis's Professor Lupin that if I were a parent of a student at Hogwarts the fact that he was a werewolf would be the least of my worries about him.

But, bad as it is that the powers that be in Hollywood seem determined to deny Bloom the chance to show the high spirits of his swashbuckling forebears, they also seem to have missed or are deliberately ignoring the fact that Bloom's natural fan base is the kids who saw him in Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean.

They know he's a heartthrob, but they don't care that the hearts that are throbbing most violently beat in the training-bra clad chests of 13 and 14 year old girls!

What was Troy rated?

R.

What's Kingdom of Heaven rated?

R.

Meanwhile, on a related theme:

Johnny Depp.

Excellent, of course.  And he was quite the surprise as a swashbuckling hero in Pirates of the Caribbean, wasn't he?

Like everyone else, I got a great kick out of the way he played Captain Jack Sparrow as Keith Richards.

I have to wonder, though, about what he's up to in Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

He's starring as Willy Wonka, which is great.

But why has he decided to play Willy Wonka as Mary Tyler Moore?

(For your further blogging and dancing pleasure:  George is working his way back into shape at A Girl and a Gun and he's posted a nice appreciation and biographical sketch of Errol Flynn.  George doesn't say, but I wonder if his post was inspired by the recent release of this.  Doggone it, I've got to get around to putting up my Amazon Wish List here.  Oh well.  There's always the tip jar.  Rattle, rattle.)

Sunday go to meetin' post card

New Hurley Reformed Church.  Founded 1770.  Rebuilt 1835.

Oh ye people of faith of little faith

April 24th is Justice Sunday.

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council [which is organizing Justice Sunday], said the goal of the event is to get the "Christian community" to help rein in "the last bastion of liberalism, the federal courts" and put an end to filibusters of conservative judicial candidates.

The feature attraction will be a videotaped speech by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist "rallying churchgoers to protest the filibuster tactic."

As you've heard often enough, Frist thinks that the filibuster has to be banned so that Democrats don't use it to discriminate against "people of faith."

This is true.

The Democrats want to discriminate against people of faith.

People whose faith tells them that gay people are perverts and sinners who should not be allowed to marry, adopt children, teach in schools, join the military, hold jobs at companies at which work other "people of faith" who might be offended by having their own prurient curiosity about other people's sex lives stimulated by daily association with fags and dykes.

Whose faith tells them that women have no useful contribution to make to the world except for the ones they can make with their wombs or at the stove or behind a vacuum cleaner or the wheel of a minivan.

Whose faith tells them that torture is wrong except when it's used by Americans against brown people or when brown people hired by Americans torture other brown people.

People whose faith tells them that brown people here have gotten uppity and need to learn to develop "character" and stop depending on the Federal government for such Unconstitutional handouts as voting rights and anti-discrimination laws and other protections imposed upon an unsuspecting and innocent nation by traitorous "activist judges."  And every time conservatives use that phrase it should be pointed out (Mr Brooks!) that it was not invented after Roe v. Wade.  This is Tom DeLay on judicial activism.

I blame Congress over the last 50 to 100 years for not standing up and taking its responsibility given to it by the Constitution. The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that's nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn't stop them.

50 to 100 years?  Roe v. Wade was decided 32 years ago.  Griswold v. Connecticut, which established the right to privacy DeLay derides came down in 1965.  Prayer was banned from the public schools 40 odd years ago.  Go back 50 years and what are we talking about?

Brown v. Board of Education.

Railing against activist judges came into common parlance as a favorite circumlocution of the Segregationists during the Civil Rights Movement.  It was re-invigorated by the Boston busing crisis.  It is code for The damn liberals want to force us to associate with the Negroes! and it is a battle cry for racists as well as anti-abortion types, who, the trial of Eric Rudolph should have made clear, are not always different people, as David Neiwert explains in his in-depth look at Rudolph's Manifesto.

Democrats want to use the filibuster to discriminate against people whose faith tells them that whenever science contradicts the superstitions and Biblically inspired nonsense of their faith, science should leave the building.

Against people whose faith tells them that whenever any facts taught in schools contradict the nonsensical teachings of their faith, facts should leave the building.  Abstinence education, anyone?

Against people whose faith tells them that not only is their faith the one and only true faith but that it is the American faith, that America is a faith-based organization, and that a group of 18th Century liberal rationalists who barely believed in a Diety and who distrusted organized religions and despised what they called Methodism by which they meant what we call Evangelicalism and wrote into the Constitution a ban against any state establishment of religion still somehow managed to create a Right Wing Christianist theocracy.

And against people whose faith tells them that the faiths of other people who don't believe exactly what they believe do not count and that Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Catholics, and liberal Protestants should say Evangelical prayers in their schools, and accept Evangelical religious symbols on their courthouse lawns, and live without complaint in a country where Right Wing Evangelical prejudices, follies, and heresies are not just spouted by their politicians but are written into the laws of the land, and whose faith tells them that people who have no particular faith might as well be Martians for all they should expect to feel at home in this country.

There is, of course, no good reason to get rid of the filibuster.  The Republicans in the Senate pretty much do whatever they want already, filibusters are hard to organize and keep going, the number of judicial appointees who have been rejected is embarrassingly small (if you're a Democrat, but it even embarrasses some Republicans), and on top of that getting rid of the filibuster is in the long run self-defeating, for besides the fact that the intellectual and legal qualifications of  judges who are appointed only because their nominations didn't have to risk a filibuster will be suspect in the minds of lawyers and other judges, the Republicans, as John McCain has pointed out, will not be in the majority forever, and when the Democrats take back control it will be by a small enough margin that a liberal Democratic president who doesn't have to worry about filibusters can appoint the hated activist judges with 51 vote majorities.  (See Billmon.)

There are only two reasons for persisting.  One is spite, which should not be underestimated as a motivating force in a Party controlled by Tom DeLay and George W. Bush---where Bush got his reputation as a nice guy, I have no idea, since anger and spite seem to be his predominate emotions even in dealings with his own father and daughters.

The other is that Frist knows that Bush is planning to nominate someone for a judgeship who is so unqualified, so reprehensible, so divisive that he, as Majority Leader, will have a desperate enough time mustering a bare majority nevermind the votes necessary to break a filibuster, some person of "faith" whose faith is in a vengeful, spiteful, discriminatory, small-minded, merciless god that will only "save" those people of faith who best match him in vengefulness, spite, discrimination, small-mindedness, and lack of mercy.

Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore anyone?

There is what could be called a third reason, but I think it's a sub-set of the second reason---a judicial appointee of the likes of Moore would be nominated only to placate the Religious Right, or energize it if the Democrats put up enough of a fight, and Frist needs the Right Wing Christian vote to make it through the primaries if he runs for President in 2008, which he appears to be planning to do, so he will have to champion that nominee whoever he is.

I'm not predicting it will be Moore---another possibility for an appalling nomination, even more appalling than Antonin Scalia to Chief Justice, would be Clarence Thomas to Chief Justice.  Nominating Thomas would be wonderfully almost beautifully cynical because then the Republicans could paint the Democrats as both racist and anti-Christian and Scalia would still be Chief Justice since Thomas is basically a ventriloquist's dummy perched on Scalia's knee.  Scalia's ego would rebel against this, but Karl Rove's ego is bigger.  But I think the fight Frist is anticipating is over someone more like Moore and there are good, cynical reasons for nominating Moore.

St Roy, as Mac Thomason likes to call him, is a hero to the Radical Religious Right for the reason he is totally unacceptable as a Supreme Court Justice, he is a person of faith who believes his faith trumps the Constitution and the authority of the Federal Government; and Moore stands a good chance of becoming Governor of Alabama and as Governor he would be in a good postition to make a run for the Presidency.   He couldn't win the nomination, let alone the White House, but his being in the fight would take lots of necessary Right Wing Christian votes from candidates like Frist and Rick Santorum, probably throwing the nomination to John McCain or Chuck Hagel.  (More likely McCain, if Erik Loomis is right.  Erik thinks Hagel has no chance of winning the nomination.)

If Frist's reason for eliminating the fillibuster is the second one, then it is as Richard Cohen says, cynical, unprincipled, hypocritical, and pretty damn cowardly of him, .

Whatever the reason, equally cynical, hypocritical, and unprincipled has been the rhetoric of the Republicans pushing with Frist to get rid of the filibuster.  It's almost awe-inspiring to listen to them condemn the filibuster because in the past it was used by racists to thwart Civil Rights legislation---these are people of faith whose "faith" would have had them joining in those filibusters against Civil Rights, who have inherited their "faith" from the Segregationists, who are carrying on their fight under the cover of opposing judicial activism, as John Perr's graphic charting of The Conservative Theory of Evolution makes clear.

Note the key position of "Hillary precurser" Eleanor Roosevelt in the chain.  Remember when people were making fun of Hillary for her supposed communing with the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt?  Well, it's not Hillary who was seeing ghosts.  If you want to understand Right Wingers' automatic loathing of Hillary, don't stop with examining their sexism and reactionary hatred of 1960s style liberalism.

They look at Hillary and they see a ghost.

They are haunted by Eleanor Roosevelt, as they deserve to be.

Acknowledgements and recommendations for further reading:   Thanks to Coturnix and Pam for the link to PERRspectives and thanks to Nance for the link to Cohen's column.  Thanks, also, to Scott Lemieux for the heads up on the David Brooks column on Roe v. Wade, which, by the way, Scott demolished, probably while watching TV, eating a sandwich, folding laundry, and talking on the phone to his mother all at the same time, it's become that easy to demolish a Brooks column.  For liberal bloggers it's the equivalent of playing scales, a useful warm-up exercise.)

Mac Thomason followed the Rudolph trial closely and is enjoying keeping tabs on the miracles, preachings, and pilgrimages of St Roy as he works his way toward official canonization.

Jason Chervokas lays out the egregiously anti-democratic and anti-Constituional nature of the tactics, plans, and goals of Frist and the man for whom Frist is fronting, George W. Bush.

The Heretik has been keeping track of Frist's efforts to blow up the Senate in a series of posts under the heading Armageddon on the Potomac.  Pam, in keeping with the same apocalyptic spirit, has a wild post called Are the political Endtimes near?, which is where I swiped the DeLay quote from. Thanks again, Pam.

Pessimist at the Left Coaster also covers the anti-filibuster movement. Mucho gracias, Avedon Carol, for the link, who also points the way to this post by Chuck Currie on real People of Faith who aren't happy with Frist and his small-minded and exclusionary definition of faith.

Colbert King has a column in today's Washington Post fuming at the attempt by Right Wing people of faith to hijack Christianity, while Shakespeare's Sister argues that the hijackers should not be called Christians but Dominionists and points out that they have a "long history a history of sexuality and gender oppression".

As well as not calling them Christians, we should not even call them Evangelicals either, since they do not represent all Evangelicals, many of whom are liberals in their politics and theology, as you can see by browsing through the magazine Sojourners or by reading Editor-in-chief Jim Wallis' column, Filibustering People of Faith.  Registration required, but it's quick.

Shakespeare's Sister also has a post relating how Senate Democratic Minority Leader, Henry Reid, has called President Bush on fibbing about not supporting Frist's attempt to go nuclear.

And you should visit the Park Service's webpage for the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site.

Tho' I'm no Catholic

Tho' I'm no Catholic
I listen hard when the bells
in the yellow-brick tower
of their new church

ring down the leaves
ring in the frost upon them
and the death of the flowers
ring out the grackle

toward the south, the sky
darkened by them, ring in
the new baby of Mr. and Mrs.
Krantz which cannot

for the fat of its cheeks
open well its eyes, ring out
the parrot under its hood
jealous of the child

ring in Sunday morning
and old age which adds as it
takes away. Let them ring
only ring! over the oil

painting of a young priest
on the church wall advertisng
last week's Novena to St.
Anthony, ring for the lame

young man in black with
gaunt cheeks and wearing a
Derby hat, who is hurrying
to 11 o'clock Mass (the

grapes still hanging to
the vines along the nearby
Concordia Halle like broken
teeth in the head of an

old man) Let them ring
for the eyes and ring for
the hands and ring for
the children of my friend

who no longer hears
them ring but with a smile
and in a low voice speaks
of the decisions of her

daughter and the proposals
and betrayals of her
husband's friends. O bells
ring for the ringing!

the beginnng and the end
of the ringing! Ring ring
ring ring ring ring ring!
Catholic bells---!

                           ---William Carlos Williams. "Catholic Bells."

Benedict XVI

I've written about my high school girlfriend's father.

If you read that post you probably inferred that I didn't like the guy.

Good call.

But the truth is, apart from admiring his ability to terrorize me, I didn't feel all that strongly about him, because I didn't know much about him.  He kept himself to himself and all I knew about him from his own lips---as opposed to what his daughter felt like telling me when she was mad at him---is that he admired Winston Churchill.

But there was one other thing about him I knew.  It was his attitude towards religion, and I didn't much admire him for that.

He was not a religious man.  He did not go to church.  He had convinced his wife to stop going and his kids were not raised in any religion.  I think the only time they went to church was on Christmas eve, and they went to the midnight candlelit service at one of the vaguer Protestant churches just to sing the carols.

Which would have been fine with me, except that he had very strong opinions on how religious other people were supposed to be.

Simply put, he thought that if you were going to go to church you should be a holy roller.

There's a certain contrarian logic to an idea like this.  What's the point of claiming to be religious if you don't follow the rules of your religion?  This is a tough one for liberal Catholics. (Bill Altreuter has dealt with the struggle Catholics face between faith and conscience.  Scroll down when you get there.)  If you don't accept the hard line from Rome, you aren't by the Church's own teachings truly Catholic, and by your own beliefs you aren't either, because that's what it means to be a Roman Catholic, you follow the line that comes down from Rome.  So, then, why are you there at Immaculate Conception every Sunday?  Why don't you go down the street to St Andrew's Episcopal or United First Methodist?

But this is not what my girlfriend's father was getting at.

He meant that a less than fervent, conservative, hell-fire and brimstone, sinners in the hands of an angry God kind of faith was weak, contemptuous, and ultimately sinful.

In other words, in every way but one he was a devout, reactionary, authoritarian Christian, except that he had a special dispensation from having to attend services and, well, actually believe in God.

His answer to why a liberal Catholic shouldn't convert to the Church of England or to Methodism would have been, Because those aren't real churches.

Yet he despised Catholicism and sneered at Catholics.  He thought we were a religion of superstitious, idol-worshiping peasants, an attitude he passed along to his daughter, by the way, although she expressed her opinions more tactfully.  Despite his contempt for us papists, he thought that Vatican II had been a big mistake.

I didn't understand this back then.  Why does he care? I asked my girlfriend.  She didn't really know. 

What I came to realize as I got older and ran into more people of his type, and particularly when I saw a whole bunch of them running the country back in the 1980s, is that his "religion" was just another expression of his Republican politics.  What he liked about religion was its power to keep the lower orders in line.

I've been reminded of him lately, reading various conservative pundits gushing over the reactionary authoritarianism of Benedict XVI.

Roy Edroso has some examples.  So does Wolcott.

I like that refrain, "I'm not a Catholic but---"

Well, if you're not a Catholic, why do you care?

And I'd also like to know, if you're not a Catholic, what are you?  Where do you go to church?  How often?  What very strict form of religion do you practice?

Answer came there none.

I suspect they are like my girlfriend's father. They don't go to church themselves, but other people should!   What they like about the new Pope is what they like about religion, both are good for keeping the lower orders in line.

Won't they be surprised.  If John Paul II, a charismatic man and an actual hero, couldn't manage it, how do they think this guy, who has less popularity in Europe than George W. Bush, will do it?

Intellectual lightweights that they are, they probably aren't thinking.  A month from now they won't even remember what they wrote.  Right now they're just making use of the opportunity to spout their usual party line while rewarding it with the new Pope's imprimatur.

Those of them who are thinking, aren't thinking using facts.  They're out of practice, of course.  Facts have been their enemies for so long that they've even given up cherry picking.  They pull it all out of the air.  One of the things they're pulling out of the air is the amount of power they attribute to the Pope.

They seem to think his authority is as unlimited as that of the Czar of all the Russias.

A few stern words from Benedict and we'll all snap to, run the gays out of town, knock up our wives three or four more times, burn down the abortion clinics, and never, ever, ever again vote for a Democrat.

What has been dismaying to me has been reading liberal bloggers who seem to have the same idea.

There have been any number of posts by liberal bloggers demonstrating terrible ignorance about what it means to be Catholic and how the Church works.

It's amazing how many liberal bloggers seem shocked to find out that the Pope is Catholic.

I don't know what their views are on the business bears have in the woods.

Ratzinger was John Paul's strong arm man.  But he didn't make doctrine as a cardinal any more than he will make it as Pope.  He was an advocate.  His job was to argue.

(Matt Yglesias takes a brief look at one of Ratzinger's arguments on Relativism.)

People are reacting to things he has written in defense of Church teachings as if he had thought up those teachings.  Those are the Church's positions on those issues.  Ratzinger believed in them because he was a prince of the Church, a job he would not have gotten if he was more of a Unitarian or a Quaker or an atheist professor of biology at a major American univerisity.

He believes what he is supposed to believe if he is really a Catholic.

I've read posts and comments on posts where the writer seems to find this both perverse and completely without precedent.

I've read posts that confuse the Church's stand on evolution---it happened, that's how God did it---with Intelligent Design---it happened just the way it says it did in Genesis, but not that part of it that sounds like the Big Bang, the Adam and Eve part, only we have "scientific" explanations for why every physical fact about the earth contradicts that.  I've read a post where the writer, objecting to something Benedict wrote, exclaimed, "This belief has no biblical basis," apparently ignorant of the fact that Catholicism is not an evangelical religion.  Catholic teachings are not Biblically based.  Catholics are taught that large chunks of the Good Book are fairy stories and that much of the rest of it is allegory and symbolism that has to be carefully interpreted and explained.  This is why there is a long, distinguished history of Catholic intellectualism, while there is virtually no intellectual tradition behind the American evangelical movements.  (The magazine Christianity Today exists to try to change that.  They're having a tough time.  But see this article on the issue the blogger who complained about one of Ratzinger's arguments having no biblical basis was attempting to deal with.)  This is why there are creatures called Jesuits and strange, mysterious places called Georgetown, Villanova, Boston College, Notre Dame, Fordham, Marquette, and Loyola.  This is why it doesn't matter as much as the conservative pundits and liberal bloggers think who the Pope is or what kind of person he is.

The Pope does not make doctrine.

Clearly he influences it.  His major influence is through the appointment of cardinals, and that's one reason John Paul II was such an ambivalent figure.  I remember theologians worrying about this when he was elected.  They were concerned because he was so young for a pope and if he lived as long as he could be expected to, 20 or 30 years, he'd be able to replace the entire College of Cardinals.  Which he pretty much did.

What are there, 3 who weren't appointed by him?  One of them, ironically, was Ratzinger.

This is why it is a waste of energy to direct anger at Benedict personally.

If it hadn't been him, it would have been another reactionary authoritarian because those are the only kind of men John Paul II gave a red hat. 

And can we please stop with the Pope Ratz remarks?

Ratzy.  Ratman.  Joey Ratz.  I smell a Ratz.

They're not clever, they're not funny, and they're insulting to your Catholic friends.

One thing Liberal Catholics learn very early in life is how to pretend not to mind all the anti-Catholic sneers of their more sophisticated non-Catholic friends and colleagues.

I have a large repetoire of nun and priest jokes that I developed mainly as a way to make my friends shut up when they started Catholic bashing.

Here's something else to keep in mind.  The Pope is not the Church.  He doesn't have anywhere near the power over hearts and minds that he thinks he does or that you're attributing to him.

I don't like this guy.  I'm heartsick that he was chosen.  I think he will be very bad for the Church here in the United States, which will hurt the Church everywhere else.  But he's my pope!  He sits in St Peter's chair.  He is the representative of my Church and my Christ, and as poor a stand in as he is, when he is wearing the ring he is two entities more and greater than himself.

The worst priest is still a priest.

Criticize his theology, criticize his actions, but do it in a grown up way and try to remember that there are people standing next to you to whom the Pope matters in a way that a run of the mill bad politician doesn't.

And, by the way, as Steve Gilliard says, he wasn't a Nazi.

Unless he's been faking it all along and he's our Gorbachev, Benedict will be bad for the Church not because he'll make it more conservative.  It can't get any more conservative.  He'll be bad because he won't realize that that conservativism is driving people away from the church.  Some authoritiarian pundits seem to think that people have been leaving the church because it's not tough enough.  But that's what they think about everything, that people are in love with power and the bullies who have it.

But many claim that they actually hope Benedict will chase people away.  They say it will make for a smaller, but purer church.

Fine.  Who they think will be saying their masses when the last priests die off and how those empty collection plates will pay to fix the roof and heat the building they don't say.

It won't matter to the rest of us, down the street at First Methodist and St Andrew's Episcopal.

Or at St Francis of Assisi American Catholic Church.

Sideways interrupted

Looked like thunder storms were moving in tonight so we turned off the computer.  The 3rd grader's learning about electricity and he insisted.  He insisted on turning off all the lights and unplugging everything but we caught him and stopped him before he unplugged the TV and didn't miss Law and Order.

I was glad to see Bernie Kerik get his comeuppance by proxy, because it sure seems as though the real one's gotten away with things pretty neatly.  So have the folks in the Bush administration who were trying to make a thug, con man, extortionist, embezzler, adulterer, liar, and petty crook the head of Homeland Security.   What were they thinking?  Takes one to know one?

Too bad the Law and Order Bernie character had to kill Judith Regan and Jenna Jameson in order to get jail time though.

ith the computer off I was prevented from coming through with the rest of my review of Sideways.  You were all holding your breaths, weren't you?  I'm working on it now.  Meanwhile, if you want to read some good movie blogging, I've got good news.

George is back at A Girl and a Gun.

Weird thing about the blog community.  You read someone's page, you get to feeling you know them, they're almost like friends, some of them.  Of course, it's an illusion.  People are more than their webpages.  (Some of us are less.  I barely exist in the analog world.)  We feel friendly toward them, but when something happens to them that causes them to stop posting for a while, suddenly it becomes clear what strangers we are to each other.

George stopped posting for a couple of weeks and I wondered why.  And I realized I didn't know him to ask him.   I don't know his last name.  I don't know where he lives.  I don't know anybody who knows him.  Having his email address might have helped, except that it turned out he wasn't near his computer to check his email.

I realized that it's possible for people I've come to think of as, not friends, but colleagues who make life in this virtual office interesting and pleasant to disappear without my ever knowing why.

So I think we should all make sure that there is at least one other blogger who knows who we really are, what's really going on with us, and who can get out the word when something happens that takes us away from our computers.

While I'm on the subject, anybody know what's going on with Jack O'Toole?

Anyway, George is back and he reports that his page had lots of visitors while he was away, which means that lots of people were looking for him.  No surprise, if you've visited A Girl and a Gun.  He has a post explaining what happened to him.

Go get your movie fix from him while I work on my second Sideways post.

Sideways viewed sideways

We watched Sideways last night.  About 20 minutes into it I was thinking that if anybody sticks me with the Caesar's bath meme---5 things your friends think are the cat's meow that you wouldn't cross the street to see. Visit Scott, Lindsay, and Roxanne for examples, but don't get any ideas!---I'd have put Sideways on my list.  It started off pleasantly quirky enough but I couldn't see any reason for all the fuss back at Oscar time.

But the farther north Jack and Miles drove the deeper into it I was drawn and by the time Sandra Oh made her appearance I was squirming in agony and by the end of the movie I was seriously and profoundly miserable.

I don't know if that's a thumbs up.

I didn't just identify with Miles to the point of being on the verge of weeping with self-loathing, by the end I was convinced I even looked like Paul Giamatti.

This happens to me at movies a lot.  I've come out of cowboy movies walking bowlegged.  After Singin' in the Rain I danced down the street.  I was pretty good too, waltzing down that lane to a happy refrain, the sun in my heart and ready for love, ask the blonde.  Nobody wants to go from looking in his own mind like Gene Kelly to looking like Paul Giamatti.  Nobody wants to go from looking like Martin Short to looking like Paul Giamatti.  Paul Giamatti doesn't want to look like Paul Giamatti.  His mother is probably ambivalent on the subject too.

So that's it, from now on, nothing but Brad Pitt movies for me.

Except for Fight Club.

The blonde could not understand why I found the movie so painful or identified at all with Giamatti's character, which is either an unusual instance of pity overcoming her reflexive blunt truthfulness, a signal that it's time for couples therapy, proof that I really did fool her that time I came dancing out of the theater looking like Gene Kelly, or another reason why therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind.

There was a time when I would have come out of that movie thinking I looked like Thomas Haden Church and there is at least one woman somewhere in the Midwest who would have liked to do to me what Sandra Oh's character does to Jack with her motorcycle helmet, for similar reasons.

On the other hand, maybe I'd have gone in swaggering like Thomas Haden Church and still come out thinking I looked like Paul Giamatti, having felt as if I'd been given a nightmare vision of my future.

Either way those days are long gone and the memory of them and the realization of youth's passing added to the forced look into the mirror made Sideways a misery-making experience.

But the shock to my vanity and my quarrel with time aside, I'm not sure that on its own merits it was a great movie.  In fact, the fact that I took it so personally is something I hold against it.  I didn't feel free not to identify with Miles.

I have a personal pantheon of great little movies---intensely realistic, small scale comedic character sketches that do the job of short stories and novels and drama by making us sympathize and pity and love other human beings.

This is not the usual job of movies.

Somebody must have earned a doctorate writing a dissertation on how the movies are exercises in narcissism.  Movies are escapist entertainment and one of things they help us escape from is ourselves.  They do this by giving us alternate selves to identify with and love.  In the usual Hollywood product we're meant to care about only two characters, really.  The hero and heroine.  All the other characters exist only to make us appreciate and love those two, the surrogate us-es.

This is true even in great movies filled with wonderful character roles, like Casablanca and It's A Wonderful Life.

(Action movies give us only a hero to identify with, the love interest is there only to help us love him, which is one of the creepy things about action movies.)

My list of great little movies includes Big Night, Secrets and Lies, The Dead, The Station Agent, and Nashhville, which is not small in scale but is still like the others in giving us no single character to root for but a lot of characters to care about.

You come out of those movies---I do, anyway---not feeling like the hero or heroine but looking at the people around you and finding among them characters from the movie and your heart goes out to them.

Sideways comes close to being one of these movies.

Now I'm going to do a very blogger-ish thing.  It's the Cub Scouts bowling night.  I've got to run.  So I'm going to post this with a promise to finish up this idea in another post.

How Josh Marshall of me is that?

Better Josh than Paul Giamatti.

Less safe for work

Those who can

"There is, thank God, no teacher meter, and there never is going to be one.  A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student's grandchild."---Wendell Berry.

Nance reports on a successful open house day at her daughter's school.   Her daughter is thriving at the new school and Nance had no complaints about Kate's teacher.

She did, though, have a few observations about the way parent-teacher interactions have changed since she was in school.

When I was growing up, my parents knew who my teacher was, and had at least one conference with him or her in the course of the year, but otherwise, they had their jobs, the teacher had hers. No news was good news. I brought home my papers; if they looked good and there was no note accompanying them, everything was fine.

Compare that to today, when we know our children's teachers the way we know...our hairdressers? Our therapists? Somewhere in there, anyway. If the teacher is good -- something my parents could count on -- your frequent meetings are pleasant. If not -- something more of my friends report -- well, let's all have root canal together, eh?

For reasons I'm in no mood to get into right now, my interactions with teachers at my sons' schools have been far more intensely personal than it's been with my barber.   I've never had a therapist, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of the teachers I've had to deal with over the last few years know me and know my family better than many other people's shrinks know them and theirs.    So my experience is a lot different than most parents' and whatever I have to say about school and teaching has to be taken with a grain of salt.

Still, my sense of things is that our parents were wrong to trust our teachers to know what they were doing!

I'm on record stating my belief that most teachers aren't very good at their jobs.  I believe this because most people, whatever they do, aren't very good at their jobs.  The world only survives and functions because in any office, on any factory floor, at any shop, among any crew or team, gang, outfit, unit, squad, band, or string there are at most three people who really know what they're doing and who end up doing the work of ten.

The difference between an excellent school and a good school is that the excellent school has 10 great teachers on a facutly of 60, while a good school only has 5.

Teaching is very hard, to paraphrase the president.  To do it well requires a combination of brains, experience, learning, enthusiasm, energy, and love that is almost impossible for ordinary mortals to muster and sustain.  Some teachers manage to be excellent at the job for a few years, but only a few years.  Then they burn out.   Most of the best ones who last aren't great year in and year out.

On top of all this, a teacher who is great for one type of student can be a disaster for another type.  And to be a great teacher you have to have good students.  Not necessarily brilliant ones, just ones who can respond and grow, and those two abilities are not parceled out to every one and it's not unusual for teachers to find themselves facing an entire classroom of dullards.  When that happens, the best teachers become mediocre very fast.  Let it happen three years in a row and those teachers may lose their chops for life.

This was always the case, even back when we were kids.

But one thing I have learned in my strange, unfortunately idiosyncratic interactions with the educational establishment is that there are problems turning up in classrooms that are far beyond most teachers' ability to handle and beyond most parents' ability to recognize or sympathize with even when it's their own kids who are having the problems.

And back when we were in school teachers didn't notice or care about these problems.  When they couldn't ignore them, which is what they did most of the time, they dealt with them, without knowing what they were dealing with, through corporal punishment, lots of red ink on papers, detentions, keeping kids back, and shunting them off to vocational schools.

Throughout history I think that most teachers have only bothered to teach a few skills---how to shut up, sit still, color inside the lines, and watch the clock, that last one, of course, by accident.

And I think they've not just been content with this, they don't even know there is more teach anyone.

Still, when Nance went on to write, "I know the meme of the moment says that parents are the true pains in the ass, and it's the talk of the teacher's lounge.  I hear less about the very common phenomenon of lousy teachers," I felt a call to come to the defense of teachers.

I wrote in Nance's comments:

There are far more pain in the neck parents than there are bad teachers, although I think there are fewer great teachers. I think Boomer and Gen X parents have expectations that our parents didn't have, and that it's mostly an effect of vanity and insecurity---we think our kids are brilliant because they're our kids, and we're worried because during the school year our kids spend more quality time with their teachers than they do with us.

I think you're always on safe ground when you attribute a problem in life to the vanity of Baby Boomers.

And it probably is true that we have higher expectations of teachers than our parents did, partly because we think our precious little darlings are much more brilliant than our parents thought us---and we think this because they thought we were brilliant and filled us with a sense of self-love and entitlement never seen in a single generation since the one born to the French aristocracy circa 1730-1740 marched up the scaffolds in 1789.  We are wonderful, therefore we must be more wonderful parents than our parents were, therefore our children must be more wonderful than we were!  QED---and partly because we are smug, over-educated assholes who can't get past the "fact" that we are, almost certainly, smarter and better educated than the people teaching our kids.

Jesus, imagine being some poor twenty-five year old education major, the first in her family to go to college---which isn't uncommon among teachers because teaching is still one of the first rungs up from the working class into the middle class---and having to tell two 40 year old Ivy educated lawyers that their little darling is flunking math.

Nance replied:

Lance, I think our boomer-parent expectations of teachers have less to do with our own vanity than our own memories. Remember, those of us in our mid-40s or so were the beneficiaries of that quaint old-school belief that the only suitable careers for women who insisted on working were as secretaries, teachers or librarians. How many of our teachers, if they had been born 30 years later, would have chosen teaching, and how many would have gone to law, business or med school?

At first glance, Nance's point is plausible.  In fact, my agreement with it is implicit in my comment, in my aside where I wrote that I think there are fewer great teachers now than there used to be.

But after thinking it over, I've decided it doesn't wash.

For one thing, Nance is making us all about 40 years older than we are.  If you're in your mid 40s now you were in grade school in the late 1960s, well after the time when women began entering the work force en masse.

(White, upper class, college educated women, that is.  Working class and poor women have always been in the work force.  What was I saying about Baby Boomer vanity?  We're so vain we don't even think about the fact that a lot of us did not go to college and do not work in offices, and that many of us who do fetch coffee and take dictation.)

When President Lyndon Johnson wrote anti-sexual discrimination language into his Civil Rights laws he was reacting to a phenomenon that was well under way.  It had begun in the late 1940s.  Actually, it began almost as soon as the country was up and running, but it wasn't until after World War II that women began entering the professions in significant numbers.  But by 1964 or so women who wanted to become doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs were becoming doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs.   LBJ wasn't moving to allow women into the work force.  He was helping to protect the ones who were already there.

Some smart women were still "settling" for teaching careers, I suppose, but there were enough who weren't that the talent dearth should have been making itself felt when most of the Boomers were in grade school and definitely by the time the first Gen Xers entered kindergarten.

There's a class issue at work here that I should analyze in a separate post.  It's similar to the one in the argument that the reason there's a nursing shortage is that many women who would have gone into nursing are becoming doctors instead---which ignores the fact that nursing has always been essentially a working class job, and medical schools never were and still aren't filled with the children of the working class.

Teaching has always been a job for the lower middle class.  Upper middle class women who couldn't become lawyers and doctors and Indian chiefs didn't settle for teaching.  They settled for marrying lawyers, doctors, and Indian chiefs.

More important than the class issue, however, is the talent factor.

Talent isn't an amorphous, adaptive, and generally applicable thing.  You have a talent for something.   And if you don't have a talent for teaching, you can have a 200 IQ and yet you will fail at the job, miserably.

Smart women who became teachers because they couldn't be doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs were probably bad teachers.  Brains don't make a good teacher, talent does, but, getting back to my point before, it's talent plus brains, plus experience, plus energy, plus enthusiasm, plus love. 

You can't be a good teacher unless you want to teach.   And wanting it isn't enough, either.  You have to love it.  You have to love the work and love your students, even the ones you can't stand.

The number of human beings with those qualities is very, very, very small.  Always have been, and when the teacher pool included a whole lot of thwarted professional women, the number of people with those qualities probably wasn't very much higher, while the number of people who taught who did not want to teach and who therefore couldn't be good at the job because they'd have been personally miserable while on the job must have been much higher, therefore increasing the number of bad teachers.

I believe that people develop and recognize and embrace their talents fairly early in life, and that kids who have the talent and the love to be teachers know it about themselves by the time they're in high school, just as young poets, young painters, young inventors, young scientists, and young doctors know it about themselves.

I'm sure it happens that a lot of young women become lawyers, doctors, and Indian chiefs who would be much happier and much more successful if they'd become teachers.  The class pressure that keeps the children of the upper middle class who have a talent for fixing cars from becoming mechanics probably keeps many of them from becoming teachers too.  "You want to teach kindergarten, Amber!  But you're so smart!  You'd make a much better corporate attorney."

This works on a lot of young men too, with the added pressure of gender expectations.

Teaching is women's work, you know.

So I think that the teacher talent pool is drained more by young men who'd be good teachers not even considering it than it is by young women who wouldn't have been good teachers no longer being forced into it by having no chance at another career.

But there are just as few of those young men as there are of the young women like them.

There just aren't that many people who can do the job.

Those who can, do.  Those who can't, don't teach.

As few as there are, though, I'll bet there are more good teachers than we know.

Parental vanity blinds us all, no matter our generation.

For the first time since they've been in school, both our sons have good teachers at the same time.

I was worried when the school year started, though.

The 9 year old got off on the wrong foot starting third grade.   All of a sudden he was having trouble at things that had been a breeze for him before.  For one thing, he was struggling with his homework.  It was taking him forever to finish what looked to his mother and me like simple assignments.  He complained about how much it hurt for him to have to write so much!  After watching him for a while we decided that he was having small motor problems.  His brother has them and we thought it was running in the family.

I went to his teacher with my concerns.

She was brusque.  "Oh he's just daydreaming and dawdling."

His teacher is older, approaching 60, and definitely old school.  She is tough, picky, and hard to please.  When she said that to me I was convinced that she was either a burn out or one of those old-fashioned types who hadn't bothered to educate herself about things like learning disabilities.

I kept my temper, but I was insistent, and she agreed to keep a closer eye on him but I thought just to shut me up and make me go away.

That night I watched the 9 year old do his homework.  I watched him more critically than I had been watching him.

I was shocked.

He was daydreaming.

He was dawdling.

She had been keeping an eye on him, and she had his number.

School hadn't gotten tougher for him.  He'd gotten lazy.

A few adjustments, a couple of stern lectures, a lost privilege or two, and, guess what?   The problem cleared itself up.

His teacher is tough, she is picky and hard to please.  She's old-fashioned.  She has a sneaky sense of humor and a heart of gold.  The 9 year old loves her.  And she loves him.

She loves all her students, even the ones she can't stand.

The last time somebody made this joke was 1978

I hear the Cardinals are meeting in Rome this week to elect a new pope.

I thought they were meeting in Pittsburgh to beat up on the Pirates.

Really, if you're going to pick the next pope, shouldn't you know more about miracles than what you learned from being on the losing end of one?

On the eighteenth of April, in seventy-five...

...hardly a man is now alive

Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, "If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,--
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm."

Then he said "Good-night!" and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war;
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon like a prison bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.

Meanwhile, his friend through alley and street
Wanders and watches, with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the barrack door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the measured tread of the grenadiers,
Marching down to their boats on the shore.

Then he climbed the tower of the Old North Church,
By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the sombre rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade,--
By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town
And the moonlight flowing over all.

Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,
In their night encampment on the hill,
Wrapped in silence so deep and still
That he could hear, like a sentinel's tread,
The watchful night-wind, as it went
Creeping along from tent to tent,
And seeming to whisper, "All is well!"
A moment only he feels the spell
Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread
Of the lonely belfry and the dead;
For suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On a shadowy something far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay,--
A line of black that bends and floats
On the rising tide like a bridge of boats.

Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.
Now he patted his horse's side,
Now he gazed at the landscape far and near,
Then, impetuous, stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry tower of the Old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely and spectral and sombre and still.
And lo! as he looks, on the belfry's height
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns.

A hurry of hoofs in a village street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet;
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.
He has left the village and mounted the steep,
And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,
Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;
And under the alders that skirt its edge,
Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,
Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.

It was twelve by the village clock
When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.
He heard the crowing of the cock,
And the barking of the farmer's dog,
And felt the damp of the river fog,
That rises after the sun goes down.

It was one by the village clock,
When he galloped into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, black and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon.

It was two by the village clock,
When he came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,
And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning breeze
Blowing over the meadow brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket ball.

You know the rest. In the books you have read
How the British Regulars fired and fled,---
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farmyard wall,
Chasing the redcoats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,---
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

---Paul Revere's Ride.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.     For old Pop Mannion who read it to us a thousand times.