Monthly Archives: January 2013

Maybe I Got a Bum Calendar

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But on all the ones I can find hereabouts, what we can call the violent phase, or at least the publicly violent phase, of the Civil Rights Era didn’t really get going until the late 1950s and of course the early 1960s.  True, Emmett Till was murdered in 1955, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott was 1955-56.  Both of those events sparked enormous public interest and outrage.  Eisenhower sent the federal army to Little Rock in 1957.

So the author of this piece is partially correct that during the period she seems to focus on, 1950-63, the existence and enforcement of, and the struggle against, racial segregation was beginning to occupy a much greater bandwidth (sorry for the anachronistic use of the expression) in common American awareness than it had until that point.  Across Black America, of course, it had never not occupied stage center.  What with two world wars and a Great Depression sandwiched between them, however, most of the country outside the old Confederacy just had other problems to think about.  However poorly it speaks of human nature in general, when your own children are inadequately clothed for an Upper Midwest winter, you’re just not likely to spare a whole lot of energy thinking about the oppression of some child several hundred miles away.  As cruel as it may be to say it, but worrying about “social justice” is a luxury for societies who can feed, clothe, and house themselves.

On the other hand, Brown v. Board of Education (actually, it was the second round of that litigation that became famous) was a case from Topeka, Kansas.  Not exactly Spanish-moss Mississippi, in other words.  And that case wasn’t decided until 1954.

So there’s a bit of a problem with presenting the — I hesitate to call it “dominance,” but then I’ve never paid any attention to the beauty pageant scene, and I do understand that with the possible exception of a mafia turf war, it can be one of the more vicious venues of human interaction — of the old Confederacy as some sort of regional or even supra-regional conspiracy to whitewash the racial poisons of the place.  According to the author the run started in 1950, but by any reasonable standard the civil rights fireworks as something splashed across the news on a nearly daily basis would not have begun until the latter half of the decade at the earliest.  The Freedom Riders came in 1961.  Medgar Evers was murdered in 1963.  The Selma-to-Montgomery march was in 1960.  Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered in 1964.  The 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed in 1963.  Wikipedia has a pretty comprehensive time line of the civil rights era, and looking at it you can see that while things were by no measure quiet during the 1950s, they didn’t really begin to hot up until the later part of the decade.

In short, the time frames for the two developments this author wants to correlate just don’t match up.  Post hoc ergo propter hoc may be a hoary logical fallacy, but pre hoc ergo propter hoc is goofy.  And according to this article the Southern girls’ run pre-dated the mass consciousness of the Civil Rights Movement by a half-decade or more.  More to the point, time line or no time line, how do you present contestants from one-fifth of the pool winning fifty percent of the time as being a quasi-conspiracy of Southerners to gloss over events in the South without some pretty massive assistance from contest judges from around the country over the course of fourteen years?

And of course the run died out in 1963, which would have been shortly after the time things really started to get very publicly ugly.  To the extent that the effort behind seven Southern girls winning the Miss America crown in fourteen years was some sort of effort to distract public attention from what was going on in the South or as some kind of loopy compensatory behavior, it has to be counted one of the least successful P.R. efforts in history.

As stated, I’m probably the last person on earth who’s fully competent to opine on the dynamics of beauty pageants and what makes them go, but if I were looking for a plausible explanation of why girls from one specific part of the country did disproportionately well over a period of time, I’d refer the gentle reader back to Florence King’s Southern Ladies and Gentlemen, a book which, while hilarious as all get out and certainly more than a little tongue-in-cheek, still has a hard kernel of truth at its core.  And the world it describes strikes me as nearly a perfect petri dish for beauty contest champions as anything conceivable.  [Every time I read her (no doubt made-up) example of a wedding announcement garbled together with tobacco price quotations I nearly wet myself.  It’s that funny.]

One of the more tiresome aspects of public discourse outside the South is how everything relating to what is happening or has happened inside the South is, however strenuous the effort, somehow tied back to Keeping the Black Man Down.  It’s as if nothing else ever happened, and everyone bent his thoughts, hopes, and efforts solely to one objective.  I’m quite comfortable that for some people, some places, some of the time, that was true.  But then in all places, at all times, and with all large issues, there have been people who made that issue the core of their existence.  OK.  But trotting out the stick-to-beat-the-South with every time you’ve got some otherwise empty newsprint to fill up is tedious and not terribly enlightening any more.  On the other hand, if the New York Times is reduced to running articles demonstrating how beauty pageants are the most-recently discovered mechanism for perpetuating White Supremacy in the South, then surely they can’t be far from the bottom of the barrel.  What’s next, a solemn piece on “Racial Politics and Traffic Control Devices in the South, 1948-67”?

Gimme Flo King and ornate piercin’.

Like Father, Like Son

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Algore, Jr. recently sold his failing lefty television network to the oil (and blood) drenched Islamofascists, through their media arm, Al Jazeera.  They paid $500 million for it, one-fifth of which went to the Chief Tree Hugger.  That’s right:  Ol’ you-need-to-recycle-your-toilet-paper Al took nine figures of hydrocarbon dollars.  Had to close the deal before the end of the year of course, in order not to get popped by the increase in capital gains taxes.  (Oh dear, had he not read the memo from his fellow vice president, Orator Biden?  It’s patriotic to pay your taxes in the greatest amount possible.)

This article from the National Review asks why Al Jazeera would pay that kind of money for a bust brand.  Given the tiny viewership and lackluster performance, why would anyone pay that kind of money?  The author asks us to cast our minds back to Al Gore, Sr., also erstwhile senator from Tennessee. 

While in office, Al, Sr. took a bribe gift of a herd of cattle from a Soviet spy-master named Armand Hammer.  Being of an entrepreneurial bent, Al, Sr. sold the herd.  Time after time after time after time, to lobbyists who never seemed to manage to remember to get down to Tennessee to pick up their new livestock.  Al, Sr. was a key player, it seems, in finagling the Libyan concession for Hammer’s Occidental Oil.  Was it just a coincidence that, with its oil wealth flowing into the corporate hands of a Soviet spy-master, Libya ended up a Soviet client state?  Surely a coincidence and nothing more.  Al, Sr. also proved his worth to Hammer in keeping J. Edgar Hoover off his neck.  After losing his senate seat, Al, Sr. ended up as CEO of Hammer’s American coal operations . . . at $500,000 per year, in the 1970s.  Al, Sr. had given good service, and bless ol’ Armand’s heart, we was willing to pay for it.  And did.

 Zubrin asks what has Li’l Al done for the oil sheiks.  Al, after all, has been the biggest bore big toe in the environmental movement, tirelessly campaigning against the evils of carbon-based energy sources.  But as Zubrin is impolite enough to point out, what the enviro-nazis have succeeded in doing is only crippling the exploitation of oil in the Western non-OPEC world, and in Al’s case, the United States in particular.  The embedded chart at the link shows that world growth in oil production since the early 1970s has been nearly exclusively from non-OPEC, non-U.S. producers.  OPEC of course shifted its long-term strategy in those years from production to constriction of supply, for the express (and successful) purpose of keeping prices as high as possible.  Constriction of a fungible commodity works only if you keep competition off the market.  Enter the Western tree huggers.  They’ve been extremely successful at keeping oil from stable, democratic countries off the market.  That may be changing now.  With the tar sands of Canada and horizontal drilling in the U.S., combined with massive new proven reserves of natural gas, the hegemony of the Islamofascists may be entering its final period.  If you don’t think the Islamofascsts recognize the threat to their revenue stream, witness the Saudi effort to subsidize the “green” movement in Canada and its attacks on Canada’s new-found oil wealth.

Zubrin does some rough calculation on what has been the total cost to the West of OPEC’s artificially-maintained oil price structure.  As one might expect, it runs in billions.  If you went back and ran the numbers forward, from 1973 to the present, and converted everything to present dollars, I’d be surprised if it weren’t well into the trillions of dollars.  In addition to lifestyles for the elite of the Islamofascist world that are beyond the comprehension of the ordinary mortal human, all that extra money has sustained decades of consistent efforts to destroy Western civilization, both culturally, politically, and militarily.  The West, with its traditions of small “l” liberalism, personal opportunity, equality before the law, openness to change from within, and secular government, has paid for the privilege of being attacked politically, culturally, and physically by a group of people whose hatred for every last one of those Western traditions is boundless.  We see how monstrous was the Nazis’ fining the Jews for the costs of cleaning up after Kristallnacht, how they added insult to injury and crowed about it.  The enviro-nazis see nothing objectionable in the same process playing out over decades.  [By the way, do these quasi-pagan tree huggers think for a moment they and their animism would be tolerated in a world run by the Islamofascists?]

Thus Al, Jr. has, whether such was his intention at the outset or not, given good service to those who aim for the destruction of American society.  Li’l Al once contemplated the ministry; actually took some courses in theology.  Does he not understand that the “Arab Street” means precisely what they say when they label the U.S. as the great Satan?  Is he truly ignorant of how they propose to, and actually do, attend to Satan’s adherents when found in their midst?  Has he ever seen a video of some wretched woman being stoned to death for a moment’s weakness with a man she loved?

I would ask whether Al’s conversion to eco-fascism has convinced him of the necessity of bringing down America.  Except I don’t think any such “conversion” ever occurred.  Famously, just one of Al’s houses — the place in Nashville, not the nine-bathroom mansion in California — uses more electricity in one month than the typical family of four uses in an entire year.  He flies all over hell and half of Georgia in his carbon-spewing private jets.  Al, in other words, believes in the “fierce moral urgency” of minimizing his carbon footprint to exactly the same extent the Medici popes believed in forsaking the world’s sinful wealth.

We can take goofy but sincerely held faith off the table in accounting for Al’s actions, in short.  That leaves us with (i) simple greed, or (ii) something more sinister, namely an earnest desire to harm Western civilization in general and the U.S. in particular.  Of the two, I plump for the former, if only because the latter is so monstrous that I decline to accept it as a motive for the actions of a previous senator and vice president of the U.S. unless consistency of action leaves no other credible explanation.  We have the example of his daddy, who was thoroughly corrupt and utterly indifferent about whether his corruption furthered or hindered the goals of our enemies.  And Junior’s service to OPEC isn’t the only example we have of his willingness to sell out America for cash.  Has anyone forgot ol’ “no controlling legal precedent” Al and his fundraisers with the monks . . . where the cash was coming from, and known to be coming from, front organizations for the Red Chinese military?  Has anyone forgot the Clinton administration’s transfer of missile guidance and other technology to Red China, over the express objections of the Pentagon and the Dept. of Commerce?

The problem with greed is that when unbridled it corrodes all other sensibilities.  Ditto lust.  Algore’s boss Clinton was willing to drag the presidency through the slime, to jeopardize the stability of American government, just to get his knob polished by some intern.  In the quest for campaign cash, Clinton and Gore were both willing to give Red China, a country which makes no pretense of its intentions about America’s and its own relative places in the world’s pecking order, decades’ worth of technological progress in areas extremely relevant to altering those relative places.

The only weakness in my preference for greed over conviction in explaining Gore’s actions is that depending on how you read it, it has trouble explaining the ex post payoff.  Al’s been doing this for years, after all, and while he’s certainly been selling indulgences with all the zeal of an anti-Pope, I’m not aware of any direct, continuing relationship with the Islamofascists.  The OPECkers can’t imagine that his enviro-nazi street cred will have been enhanced by this last deal, so you can’t paint the payoff from the buyer’s perspective as being in respect of future affirmative services to be performed.  Are they buying his silence?  What if Algore were to come out and admit that the “science” behind his movies, his campaigns, his presentations, is all gun-decked?  Maybe that’s the payoff, then:  Not payment for previous services rendered, as in his father’s chairmanship of his client’s/patron’s coal company, but for future silence about the charlatanism of the enviro-nazi movement and where the money for it is coming from.

I like that explanation best of all.  Back in the Dark Ages, when one petty potentate liquidated another’s holdings, in lieu of just slitting his throat outright, the standard prophylaxis was to tonsure him and put him in a monastery.  The new monk was like as not glad to escape with his life, and the new master was spared the necessity of worry over a resurgent claimant.  We don’t have monasteries any more, but tainted money can serve just as well.  The Islamofascists pay Al and his cronies a half-billion (and by the way, the folks who got the other $400 million do not profit from any of my assumptions relative to Al and his motivations; I’m fully willing to believe the worst of them in regard to their feelings about the U.S.) and buy his silence about the enviro-nazi movement.  What’s to prevent Algore from reneging on his bargain, though?  That’s easy:  He’s still got money to be made, peddling indulgences.  The curious thing about the sale of indulgences was that no matter how transparently fraudulent the sale was, and how obviously iniquitous the seller, to the true believer it made no difference.  And whatever Al’s true thoughts may be, no one can doubt the genuine fervor of his dupes.  They may be outraged over the towering cynicism of his betrayal, but they’ll keep on paying.  Just like they always do.

And the Islamofascists?  They’ve already bought the Canadian “green” movement.  Now they’ve at secured a right of first refusal on the American franchise.

An Argument Re-Tread From the Bush Years

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No, I’m kidding, in truth.  This opinion piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung contributed by Bernard-Henri Lévy is so comically opposite to what the Europeans chanted from 2003 onward that if I hadn’t actually read the thing I’d have doubted that anyone could be so sanctimoniously hypocritical.

Yet it is even so.  This homily comes from same tribes that, during all the long years America with a very small group of supporters fought the Islamofascists and their state enablers in Iraq and Afghanistan, shot out their lips and shook their heads, saying:  We were just in it for the oil.  Now that exploration concessions in Mali for oil, gas, gold, uranium, diamonds, other gemstones, and other spectacular wealth are jeopardized, those preachers of the Gospel of Peace now remind us of our “duty” (BHL’s own words) to intervene.

Why?  Here are the reasons advanced:

1.    It will hinder the formation of a terroristic state in the heart of Africa.  Not, mind you, that it’s presently a terror state.  But it might become one if this particular band of Islamofascists takes over.  And it would be in the “heart of Africa,” you know, right across vital trade routes and astride a principal reserve of . . . I’m not sure what, but it’s sure to be vital to the peace and prosperity of . . . well, France at least.  Now, Iraq actually providing assistance and sanctuary to the guys who’d brought down the Trade Center after we’d made things hot for them in Afghanistan, and actually sending senior officials to sniff around for sources of uranium, and actually playing hide-the-ball with UN weapons inspectors, and actually rattling sabers around a part of the world that controls a huge proportion of the world’s supply of petroleum, without which pretty much every nation outside sub-Saharan Africa will go belly up within weeks — none of that justified the U.S. in taking down Saddam . . . because he hadn’t done anything recently yet.

2.    The military resistance of the rebels France is attacking (no, seriously: BHL actually gives the resistance of the groups France is attacking as justification for the attack), including their ability to shoot down military aircraft, proves that we’re dealing with a proper “army of criminals.”  A proven criminal sitting atop modern aircraft, armor, and artillery in Iraq was just fine with France, however.  And while we’re talking about organized criminal activity, what about the U.N. and its oil-for-cash program, in which close family members of senior U.N. officials were getting thoroughly greased?  And what about France’s billions of Euros in trade with Iran, trade which has allowed that country to continue merrily on its way towards achieving the nuclear ability that will finally enable it to wipe Israel from the map, as it has formally announced to be its policy?

3.    The intervention is justified because it frustrates the actual goals of the loonie in charge of the rebels, which is nothing less than throwing in together with other Islamofascist lunatics across Africa, establishing an “axis of crime,” the destruction of which without military intervention would be “nearly impossible.”  An axis of crime, huh?  This comes from the same mouths which ridiculed the notion that Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and several others too odious for words might be an “axis of evil.”  Evil is OK with BHL, it seems; what one must avoid is crime.  Now is that clear enough for you stoopid American cowboys?

4.    The intervention strengthens the notion of an affirmative duty to butt in of protection, already so nobly vindicated in Libya (yes, he really says that too; he seems to overlook that in 1986 we had to fly our FB-111s around France to put Khaddafi back in his sandbox because France refused us overflight for the mission).  It is a step forward for all those who believe that democracy doesn’t end where terror begins.  Apparently BHL hasn’t been reading the news from Libya recently.  Whom, exactly, did France protect in Libya?  Cui bono?  That war was a war for oil if ever there was such, and the rebels against Khaddafi were scarcely a bunch of refugees from a Vermont town meeting.  Now they’ve taken over and what have we seen established?  Oh, that’s right: another Islamofascist terror state (see point 1 above).

5.    Lastly the intervention confirms the pre-eminent role of France, which fights for democracy (as in Libya, apparently).  This is a fight which we most recently saw France waging in Algeria in the 1950s and 60s, in Vietnam in the 1950s, and across all Europe from 1792 through 1815.  I hadn’t realized that “emperor” was a democratic office.  Talk about a self-referential proof.  I once years ago heard someone observe that since marxism believes itself to be an inherently liberating ideology, all wars to spread marxism are inherently wars of liberation and therefore just; thus it is impossible for a marxist state to fight an unjust war.

BHL frets over the difficulties of building a country without a state, a nation without government or army.  I thought “nation building” was per sé imperialistic, impossible, bigoted, and oppressive.  Or is that only when done by the United States?

You know, I’m just going to go ahead and ask BHL and those of his ilk when was the last time a people flourished under French rule or guidance.  Since the days of Louis XIV France has descended on its neighbors far and near and plundered them to their corsets.  With the exception of Panama (which as Barry Goldwater observed we stole fair and square) and a few square miles of island which we picked up off Spain, and Hawaii, wherever Americans have gone all the United States has ever asked is that we be allowed to set up a stall and do business on terms no less advantageous than others.  There’s not been a single place we’ve taken over that has not been the better for it.  As Colin Powell observed, for more than a century, whenever we’ve invaded the soil of another country, the most we’ve ever asked is enough ground to bury our dead.

Let us not forget that France has raised to a fine art undercutting every effort the United States has attempted to rid the world of butchers.  To see one of that country’s most prominent public hand-wringers intellectuals piously sermonizing on what a solemn duty France has to go marching in to defend its mineral concessions maintain good order and common decency is just a bit over the top.  I’m not buying it.

One of the several larger questions of why the difference between French reaction to Libya and Mali on the one hand, and Syria, and Iraq, and Iran, and Afghanistan on the other — other than that France had money on the table in Libya and has it in Mali (one should never underestimate the ordinary motives of avarice in accounting for French actions) — is that by intervening in Libya and Mali France is not interfering with the designs of anyone who can reasonably be expected to harm Israel.  France and the French have a long and rich tradition of Jew-baiting; of all Hitler’s collaborators in exterminating the local Jewish population, the French have a very strong claim to be ranked the most enthusiastic.  Mali’s too impotent and too distant from Israel for it to be a meaningful threat.  And by toppling Khaddafi to empower the Islamofascists, France actually put a more violently anti-Israel faction in place.  Does BHL share that hatred of Jews and a Jewish state in the Middle East?  I’m not aware that he does, but his arguments make him at the very best a useful idiot waving a flag alongside the parade of those who do.

If We Had More Computers, All Our Problems Would Go Away

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At least that’s what we’re told by Those Who Know Better.  E-filing of tax returns is going to save the whales, or the baby seals, or the Chesapeake Bay, or something like that.

Turns out what it does is enable massive tax fraud, by taxpayers, scam artists, and e-filers.  Gee, who could have seen that coming in a system which removes any sort of paper trail, any wet signatures, any verification, in fact, that anyone in the system is actually who that person purports to be?

For myself, any communication I undertake with Uncle Sugar in respect of my or my firm’s taxes is not only done on paper, but via certified mail, return receipt requested.  Sure enough, each year for the past three years I’ve got a letter, along about February, from the Social Security Administration, telling me I haven’t filed my W-3 and W-2s for the next preceding year.  And each year I pull out my file copies, together with the return receipt showing the date on which they received them, make copies of everything, and send it back along.  This past year, I even shoved a cover letter in, and as I explained to them, “anticipating the letter I expect to receive in February, 2013,” went ahead and enclosed copies of the 2011 forms as well.  Do I expect it will have done any good?  Scarcely.

The money quotation from the linked article:  “In sum, e-filing helps the IRS with audit selection, costs the Treasury billions through fraud, and transfers many costs of tax administration to you.”  Which makes it the quintessential government program.

Because It Worked So Well Last Time

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Let’s see, the last time we went trotting in behind France to meddle in the internal affairs of an African Islamist country, providing (at first) only “support,” was . . . Libya.  How’d that work out, again?

If I were the U.S. ambassador to Mali, I reckon I’d tape my resignation letter to my office door and hop the next plane out.  The last guy in that position didn’t do too well, and we still don’t know the circumstances under which his mission ended.

Once Again, I Find Myself Hopelessly Confused

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You see, I thought bombing the wogs when “no compelling national interest was at stake” was something done only by Republicans, and was therefore (i) inherently racist (of course, that’s pretty much a 1:1 correlation for anything they do, isn’t it?), (ii) imperialistic, (iii) done solely to further the corporate interests of their donors (most of which donate disproportionately to the other party, but we’ll overlook that), (iv) the result of irredeemable bigotry and cultural myopia, (v) doomed to failure, (vi) unless done during times of continued budget surpluses a “war on the credit card” and therefore incontestably financially irresponsible, and/or (vii) did I mention racist?

And here we’ve got nice, enlightened, socialist France pasting bits and pieces of wogs all over the landscape.  In Mali, for example.  And now we find that, over three years after he was captured, France goes all general quarters on us and tries to free up some Secret Agent Man who’d been abducted in Somalia.  With about the same degree of success that the United States enjoyed at Desert One.  And now the French are pretty much admitting that they believe the victim has been slaughtered and his corpse and those of the soldiers killed in and after the rescue attempt are going to be paraded in public, much like happened when Clinton tried the same thing in Somalia. 

Once upon a time having two Western powers humiliated in such a fashion, by the same groups of filthy bastards in the same penny-ante place and under similar circumstances, would have resulted in exactly one and only one form of response.  The joint would be removed from the list of known inhabited locations on the planet.  The Western powers, including but not necessarily limited to those directly concerned, would have reduced the place to a howling desert and left the surviving locals to figure out what hit them.

Our ancestors understood many things we’ve apparently forgot.  The fact that all men are created equal does not mean that all societies and all states are created equal.  When our co-equals band together and behave poorly, they must be suppressed.  Means of suppression that are not violent do not function.  Peacefulness, respect for another’s culture, and so forth are post-suppression phases of the relationship.  Further, there are cultures and traditions which have no place in a modern world.  Gen’l Napier understood as much when his program of suppressing the burning of widows in India was greeted with whines of “but it’s our tradition . . . .”  His reply (according to his brother):

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”

Somalia has elected to follow the path of piracy, plunder, murder, and rapine.  Their people have tolerated and to a great degree welcomed into their midst the actual pirates.  Other than occasional bleats of how awfully unfair it all is, the West has done . . . well, not much.  Now mind you, in Somalia there actually are important national interests of the West at stake (contrast Mali; what, precisely, is fundamentally at stake for France or anyone else?).  These filthy bastards are interdicting one of the most important sea lanes in the world.  Countries have gone to war — declared war — for less.  Add to that the simple fact that pirates are enemies of the human race, and have been acknowledged to be such for centuries, and there is no longer any reason to permit the continued existence of a place called “Somalia” in any other than a purely geographic sense. 

Every one of their harbors should be mined.  Every watercraft — down to and including kiddies’ water-wings — must be destroyed.  Every building in every corner of the land must be destroyed.  Their fields must be rendered infertile for the foreseeable future.  Any dams, waterworks, sewage treatment plants, bridges, electrical generation capacity . . . anything capable of encouraging humans to remain in any particular location must be destroyed.  Their cattle must be driven off or slaughtered.  Every one of the people who offers the least resistance must be treated as being one with the pirates and dealt with as they are.  The survivors must be removed to other parts of the world, there to amalgamate themselves and gradually lose their identities as a nation of pirates and plunderers.

Our new Enlightened Leaders seem to have forgot that the world is a violent, vicious place, has always been such a place, and will forever remain such a place unless and until those peoples and societies eschewing that mode of existence decide no longer to tolerate the continued existence of those who embrace it.  Period.  The novel thing about the UN when Roosevelt and Churchill conceived of it was not the Great Big Council of Nations thing; that crap had already been tried with Wilson’s League, and everyone was cleaning up the wreckage of the peace-keeping job it had done so well against Germany, Japan, and Italy.  No, what made the UN’s organization unique was precisely the promise of violence against aggressors.  And by the way, the UN was not put in place to go ride herd over two ethnic groups merrily slitting each other’s throats in some godforsaken place around the corner from the back end of nowhere.  It was put in place specifically to curb violence between states, and to suppress aggressor states, rogue states, through the threat of collective, overwhelming, physical violence against them.  Sanctions had not worked against the Axis powers; what reasons existed then or exist now to suppose that sanctions will work against the Somalians?  It wasn’t sanctions that caused Khadaffi to drop his nuclear ambitions.  It was witnessing what happened to Saddam in Iraq that wrought his change of heart.

But all this is of a piece with Dear Leader’s (and Hollande’s) fundamental anti-Westernism.  Vigorous measures must be taken only when they will have minimal chances of success and only when their success will achieve little but failure will work great harm.

All of which is to say:  Expect to see more, rather than less, of this.  Also expect to see the NYT and the rest of the off-balance sheet Democrat party operatives play up the fearlessness with which Dear Leader sends up a recon plane for the French to guide themselves to their own destruction.  We will hear how intrepid Dear Leader was, how noble his intentions, and how morally refined he is.  And no one will publicly ask why it should be done this way, or what of lasting significance was to be accomplished.

[Update:  15 Jan 13:  And the dear Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung helps to figure out why France is in Mali.  Gold.  Copper.  Uranium.  Petroleum.  Natural gas.  Diamonds.  Other gemstones.  In recent years Mali’s been granting concessions to exploit its natural resources.  The jihadisti are of course interfering in that profitable little business.  When the U.S. went back in 2003 to finish the job it had funked in 1991, and turned out of power a thug who’d used chemical weapons on his own people, who was giving every impression of actively pursuing not just further chemical armament but nuclear weapons as well, and who had welcomed with open arms senior terrorists involved in the planning and execution of the deadliest attack on U.S. territory since 1941 . . . well, we were told that was just some War for Oil.  As if we couldn’t have got all the oil we wanted from Iraq simply by lifting all the sanctions and letting Saddam rock and roll.  Folks, France in Mali is what a war for pelf looks like.  Why is the UN officially blessing France’s war for resources in Mali, when its members roundly condemned the U.S. for getting rid of a viper?  Mali’s not in a position to go after Israel.  Iraq was, and is.]

Recently Stilled Echos

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Among my less harmful fetishes is an interest in what can generally be described as the tangible remnants things which once were but no longer are.  By way of example I find myself intrigued by the traces of old road-beds that can be discerned as I drive down modern highways.  If you see two parallel lines of trees, fifteen or twenty feet apart and meandering through a field, there’s a good likelihood you’re looking at what was once a road (it might also be a creek, but the tree lines in those cases tend not to be terribly parallel and more importantly their distance apart will fluctuate).  Old bridge abutments tacked onto bluffs and leading into nothing but air catch my eye.  As you drive down I-81 through the Shenandoah Valley there is visible along a particular stretch of it what was obviously an old railroad; you can see the embankments and there’s even the remnants of a stone-built viaduct.  For the same reason I especially recall a weekend trip the wife and I took up the Mohawk River Valley years ago.  There are scattered the old portions of the original Erie Canal, mostly stone built or, in the case of some buildings, brick.  But there they are, just out in the middle of what’s pretty much nothing.

What do I think about when contemplating them?  Mostly I think about all the people who built them, who used them.  What sorts of people were they?  Where did they come from?  Where did they live?  Where were they going, on those long-ago trips, and what must the world they travelled through have looked, sounded, and smelled like?  What would it have been like to drive down that little country lane, decades ago (and of course back then the places through which those roads went would have been even emptier than they are now), on a crisp fall day, listening to the horse’s breathing and the crunch of the wagon wheels on the rocks?  What glorious fun must it have been to lie back on the roof of an Erie Canal barge, in the bright sunshine, with the sound of the water around the bow and the creak of the tow-line leading to the horse on the path?  What did the water in the canal smell like?  Were their trips successful?  Did they get the price they needed for whatever it was they were carrying?  What concerns did those people carry with them, what hopes for the future?  When they thought in terms of, “Next year I’m going to . . . ,” what kind of a world did they imagine for themselves?

The same movements actuate in me a fascination for collections of letters and oral histories of events long past.  Another of my fetishes is the Great War, and there the two curiosities merge.  Harry Patch, who died in July, 2009, was the last living known survivor of the Western Front trenches; among other hell-holes he fought at Third Ypres.  Frank Buckles, who died in February, 2011, was the last American to have served in Europe in the Great War.  They were 111 and 110 years old, respectively. 

I recently finished reading a book, Britain’s Last Tommies, which is an update published in 2009 of a book that first came out in 2005, when there were several (a dozen or so) still living.  The compiler/editor, Richard Van Emden, has made something of a career specialty of collecting oral histories of the Great War.  The book’s got recollections by a bunch of “lasts,” including of course Patch.  Emden’s got some of the last surviving Old Contemptibles, who shipped overseas in August, 1914 (and some of whom were captured in the retreat from Mons, spending the balance of the war in prison camps).  He’s got some of the last survivors of Gallipoli (I recall reading the obituary of the last one of all, an Aussie, in The Economist several years ago).  In several places Emden (how ironic is it that someone named “Emden” would take it upon himself to preserve the last living memories of precisely British soldiers?) has gone back into the Imperial War Archives to validate, or in some cases, correct, his subjects’ memories.  What’s amazing is how few corrections there are.  I can’t recall precisely where I had lunch two days ago, and these boys are calling forth impressions from 90-odd years before.

I also have, somewhere on the shelves, several collections of letters written by soldiers of both sides during the war.  Most of the writers are enlisted, and many of them were what we’d all recognize as just ordinary guys.  They weren’t especially learned, or prosperous; in fact, quite a number of them make reference in their letters to things that clue you in that their fathers and grandfathers before them had hacked a living from coal seams and that’s what these soldiers did before the war and expected to go back to afterwards.  Quite apart from the substance of their letters is the fact of how literate they were.  Paul Fussell points out in The Great War and Modern Memory how Pilgrim’s Progress represents a cultural reference point and analytical structure across all ranks of the British army during the war.  Everyone from general officers down to the grunts splashing around on the duckboards continually phrased their impressions in terms of that work.  But Bunyan wasn’t, by far, the only specifically literary reference to be found.  Nor were the ordinary soldiers confining themselves to ready-made references.  The material is just very acutely observing, very well crafted and evocative letters.

One thing is quite certain, though:  There is no way at all you would ever get a sampling anything like it from modern Americans of any background or educational level.

Appropriately, Harry Patch appears on the cover of Britain’s Last Tommies.  Through the marvels of PhotoShop they’ve taken a silhouette of a simple soldier, laden and struggling through the mud, and reduced it to fill in the pupils of one of his eyes.  I like the image; his were the last living British eyes to have beheld the troglodyte world he survived.  If you could have shaken his hand you would have touched the hands which scooped out the soup of Flanders long ago.

And now they’re gone, all gone.  Nearly a hundred years on, have we learned anything which makes less likely a reprise of the whole blood-soaked shambles?  I think not.  Sarah Hoyt’s got an interesting post (which I’ve previously linked) on how the facile intellectuals of the 1920s, unwilling to confront the darkness within human nature — and thus within themselves — that had puked up these terrible four years, instead ascribed the tragedy to the one form of organized human existence in the world that actually stands a chance of minimizing the risk of a repeat.  And then they set about undermining, de-legitimizing that form of co-existence for the next 90 years.  We just re-elected a feller to the White House who signs up for that nonsense lock, stock, and barrel.

Dear Women of America: Thank You Not at All

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In an earlier post I allowed that sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander.  The women of America overwhelmingly voted for this charlatan because . . . well, because someone who supported the other guy suggested you might take ownership of your genitals and what you do with them, instead of out-sourcing the costs to the rest of us.  In that post I mused over the likely geo-politico-military consequences of Dear Leader’s second term.  I specifically pondered the question of what avoidable disasters were going to befall us, and whether my three sons — who will be coming of age starting towards the end of Dear Leader’s successor’s term in office — were going to pay with their blood and limbs, if not their very lives, for this one man’s hatred of his country.  And I announced that, after thinking it over, I would vote for any person of any party, irrespective of what he or she promises to do to your uteruses and how it’s promised to be done, if that person could offer me reasonable hope that I would not one day be handed a neatly-folded triangle of a flag and thanked, on behalf of All Americans, for my precious boy’s service to his country.  You all voted single-issue based on what might possibly, maybe, if you believe MSNBC’s talking heads, could happen if the guy who suggested you ought to pay got a hearing from the other guy; I’m going to vote single issue based on what are the announced intentions of the bloodthirsty despots whose interests Dear Leader has promised to further.  To paraphrase Genl Napier, we will each vote our issues.

That was back before Dear Leader unmasked his batteries, and nominated confirmed anti-Americans, dedicated pro-Islamofascists, and explicit Jew-haters to three of the most important positions in the federal government.  Understand:  These guys aren’t going to be running the NHTSA or the Soil Conservation Administration.  If these three ass-hats bollocks-up the show (and by the way, what you and I will regard as a disaster these guys may well be viewing as a desired outcome . . . we actually are at that point that such questions are not self-evidently lunatic), the result is nuclear war in the Middle East, and we’ll be lucky to keep it confined there.  Recall, O Gentle Reader, that in May, 1914, there was no reason to suppose that the next scuffle in the Balkans would be anything other than just that — a scuffle among people who’d been slitting each other’s throats, poisoning each other’s wells, and stealing each other’s sheep for centuries.  Remind me how that worked out, again?

As hard as it is to put toothpaste back in the tube in domestic policy, it can be done.  Chile did it, and whatever Chile can do I refuse to accept that America cannot.  But in foreign policy events truly are immutable.  You simply cannot undo the results of Munich in September, 1938.  When the U.S. humiliated Britain over the Suez in 1956, that rang a bell that could never be stilled.  Eisenhower’s blowing off Ho Chi Minh when he tried to contact him (this was way back when Ho was just some local politician) and communicate about the constitutional structure of his country — Ho apparently greatly admired the U.S. Constitution, and was interested in discussing with the Americans how it might be adapted to his little homeland — set a course the results of which are still playing out.  For example, does anyone really think that John Kerry would be anything other than a sun-burned trust-fund baby were it not for his treasonous activities with the Winter Soldier outfit during the Vietnam War?  For that matter, where would anti-Americans like Dear Leader himself be without the intellectual and social heritage of the pro-Communist underground that suddenly went mainstream during that war?

We have yet to see the final results of the Islamic Brotherhood’s taking over the North African and Levantine littoral, a power-grab warmly greeted and actively encouraged by Dear Leader and the three men on whom he’s counting to knock America off its high horse once and for all.

So thank you, American women, for having voted this traitor into office.  I hope your guilt-free and publicly-subsidized whoopie is worth it to you.  Because it will be your sons too who die so that you didn’t have to pop for your birth control.  And by that time you’ll be too old to breed any more.  Maybe you and I will see each other at the cemetery on a Sunday afternoon, cleaning the bird shit off our boys’ headstones.  I’ll be the one looking at you like it’s your fault.

Thank you very little.

Another One Who Didn’t Get the Memo

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January 10, 1834, John Dalberg-Acton, later 1st Baron Acton, is born.  He seems to have been widely acknowledged as one of the most learned men of his day, although now he’s known (at least in the English-speaking world outside England) for a fairly simple observation embedded in a letter.  Read in its context you can’t help but wonder what he’d have made of TurboTax Tim Geithner, or Eric “Gun Walker” Holder, or . . . well, about any number of people prominent in all levels of government:

“But if we might discuss this point until we found that we nearly agreed, and if we do agree thoroughly about the impropriety of Carlylese denunciations and Pharisaism in history, I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the negation of Liberalism meet and keep high festival, and the end learns to justify the means. You would hang a man of no position like Ravaillac; but if what one hears is true, then Elizabeth asked the gaoler to murder Mary, and William III. ordered his Scots minister to extirpate a clan. Here are the greatest names coupled with the greatest crimes; you would spare those criminals, for some mysterious reason. I would hang them higher than Haman, for reasons of quite obvious justice, still more, still higher for the sake of historical science.”

 Poor boy.  He just didn’t live long enough to achieve enlightenment.  He probably thought that some musty ol’ written constitution, cobbled together by a passel of Dead White Males, actually meant what it said and said what it meant.  He had no idea of emanations and penumbrae.

Poor Wonderful Me (or Something Like That)

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At first brush with this post by a formerly-famous writer (who also happens to be a lawyer now), I was strongly tempted to . . . well, certainly not to blog it.  But what the hell, it’s pulling massive traffic over at its site, and she’s a lawyer and according to her, a native New Yorker, and one can’t spend all one’s time exploding the myths of the gun-grabbers, the Fabergé lefties, and corrupt politicians.

The author, Elizabeth Wurtzel, wrote a book a number of years ago, Prozac Nation, which I never read and have no intention of reading, but the cover of which I vaguely recall.  Had something to do with growing up a depressive, and struggle against same.  I’m going to assume that she counts herself a survivor, for which she does deserve a large attaboy.  Who knows how I’d have dealt with that sort of thing.  Would I have swallowed a pistol? 

She was 26 when Her Big Book was published, and it did her phenomenally proud.  Made her a pile of cash and very highly sought after. I won’t say her success ruined her, because there may not have been much there to ruin, but she does seem not to have seized on the rungs of whatever personal ladders up which that book placed before her.  To the extent that her post is about anything, that seems to be as close to it as can be stated.  She’s gone from keeping away from rats on Manhattan playgrounds to the rarefied atmosphere of world-class lawyering, yet inside whoever is Elizabeth she’s still hunkered down on the fire step, afraid to go over the top and actually conquer some territory of inner adulthood. 

Mlle Wurtzel (can’t help it: her name appears to be a variation on Wurzel, the German for “root”; I could never think of Gen’l Schwarzkopf as anything other than that feller Blackhead) laments – or is it celebrates? – that she’s fetched up at age 44 unmarried, no children, no stable relationships, no assets, and no moorings.  Honestly, it’s hard to tell whether she’s bragging (O! the sacrifices of nobility: “In a world gone wrong, a pure heart is dangerous.”) or whining (“Women who have it all should try having nothing,” after which she recites a litany of what she doesn’t have).  Her tone alters between daytime television-style confession porn (can’t keep her legs crossed; the very title of her piece describes her life as a one-night stand) and passive-aggressive demands that we pity her in her triumph (she recites all the eminent Harvard alumni in whose company she’s mentioned).  Both off-putting in their very own special ways. 

La Wurtzel works for David Boies, out of whose ass, if anyone’s, the sun of high-end litigation shines.  As Wurtzel notes, Boies was the guy who took down Bill Gates (probably did Gates a world of personal good, too, although Bill might not understand it yet).  He’s still able to come up with gems of advice to a woman, alone and unarmed, and who’s come up dry in trying to get the police to protect her from a violent lunatic: leave tonight.  Whew! that was a tough call; you’d have to go to David Boies – or to any hack refugee from the love docket with fraying cuffs and a gammy client trust account – for that kind of insight.  No; I do David an injustice.  He did precisely what any good and loyal boss would do for an employee.  From Wurtzel’s narration it sounds like he got on the horn, called in some favors, and got her out of a potentially dangerous situation.

[Aside:  The redneck in me can’t help but observe that having David Boies in one’s corner in such a situation is great.  Having David Boies and a .45 cal. Model 1911A1 on your nightstand is better by a quantum order of magnitude, and in fact with the latter you needn’t the former at all.  Wait. Oh, that’s right.  In New York City there are about nine people who have the former, and damned near none who are permitted to have the latter. Maybe . . . uh . . . maybe Liza might consider . . . not living in New York City?  Naaahhhhh.  By the way, the URL of the link says something along the lines of “wurtzel on self-help”; I’d have thought arming oneself for self-defense was Step A in any intelligent plan for self-help.] 

Whatever other hiring and retention practices Boies may indulge, I’m just going to go out on a limb here and suppose that they don’t include hiring or keeping around the actively daffy, the frivolous, the lazy, the poor planners, the unfocussed.  Which makes intriguing Wurtzel’s characterizing herself as enjoying – defiantly so, in fact – those attributes and others even less reassuring from an employer’s perspective.  I’ve had more experience than I care to in dealing with employees.  People with skeletons in their closets do not, after a certain age, make good employees.  They just don’t (in fact years ago I saw, in some advice-to-the-career-minded column by someone who certainly seemed to know what he was talking about, the injunction to get over whatever inner turmoil you have by age 35).  I’m not so sure, in other words, that Lizzie’s not drawing the long bow, as the English say, either with us or with her boss.  Given that her boss has made himself very wealthy indeed by rapidly divining the true natures of others and has kept her around four years now, I’m going to guess that it’s the Gentle Reader who’s the mark in this game.  What’s her game, then? 

Judging purely from her text, which is of course all I have to go on, she gives a very strong impression of someone who wants to be told how wonderful she really is.  But here’s the catch, sweety-pie: You’re trying to prove how wonderful you are, through all the wonderfully shallow and eventually irrelevant things we Americans are supposed to worship these days.  That, and by “confessing” to how superior her priorities and principles are than the sadly empty “untruths” told by the rest of us to ourselves.  The English would understand the nature of your error.  You’re trying too hard; you’re like Wilhelmine Germany – just not good form (around here we have another expression for it: “tacky”).  The essence of being wonderful is that others perceive it on their own.  Even if you in fact are (I’m also willing to assume that somewhere down there is an Elizabeth who is in fact as wonderful as she believes herself to be), when you call attention to it the shiny rainbow bubble bursts. 

(a) Libby is beautiful.  I’ll grant her that.  The picture she’s got pasted up on the post pretty well settles the point.  Assuming that picture was taken in the recent past, that still puts her at 40+ and damned hot.  She’s still in the same shape she’s always been; even fits into her old 501s.  But it’s not enough for her to be beautiful.  No: She must also be wanton, in a very controlled, purposeful, principled way . . . and of course only with the right sorts of people.  Understand, though, that she’s not balling her way to self-esteem, like the high school girl who’s on the cheerleading squad but isn’t the captain.  No, she’s going through life with a “pure heart,” “refusing to compromise.”  She lays up with whom she pleases and doesn’t even bother sufficiently with them to keep track of where they are.  Does she even remember them?  At least her competing queen of confession porn, Chelsea Handler, can be funny about it (for a few paragraphs, in any event).  Our Lizzie believes “in true love and artistic integrity . . . as absolutely” as she did in ninth grade.  Isn’t that just noble of her?  But she’s Big Enough to realize that “functional love includes a fair amount of falsity . . . and integrity is mostly a heroic excuse to avoid the negotiating table.” 

(b) Libby is successful.  See?  I wrote a Really Successful Book.  I get talked about on the same page as Eliot, Thoreau, and Emerson.  I could pop for a daily heroin habit.  I made a lot of money as a writer, doing what I loved, exactly as I pleased.  And I chose to shoot it up a wild hog’s ass.  I work for David Boies, and he thinks enough of me that I feel I can call him up and he’ll tell me to get the hell out of a place where I might be found strangled. 

(c) Libby is brilliant.  She decided at age 6 that she was going to Harvard and dammit, she went out and did it.  Again, props to her for that kind of detemination.  Her high school history teacher didn’t understand what he didn’t understand about Wurtzel (O! the poor rube; she must have been a peach to have in class).  She writes and had been writing professionally by the time she went to college.  In her late 30s she went – out of “curiosity,” no less – to law skool, just ‘cause, you know.  But not just any ol’ law skool was sufficient to set the right object for our Eliza’s quest; she’s for Yale, from which she graduates at age 40.  That’s important, you see, because at an age where all those distressingly conventional women are starting to fret about sags, spreads, and wrinkles, she’s launching her second, simultaneous, career with an e-mail.  No shooting out reams of résumés and sitting beneath a receptionist’s sneer and making propitiatory grimaces for her.  She just pops off an e-mail to David Boies and then magisterially so far forgets about it that she’s taken entirely by surprise when he – personally, no less – asks her if she’s still interested. 

(d) Libby can make her own way in the world.  True, she’s managed to squander almost everything she’s made, jumping at all manner of bright, shiny objects (including her friends and bedmates, from the sound of it). But she’s standing on her own, unlike the “prostitutes,” which includes every woman who is married and who doesn’t . . . well, I’m not sure what a married woman is supposed to do, or be, and not be a whore.  Seriously, growing up in New York City, a supposedly cosmopolitan, sophisticated place, she’s not able or willing to accept that every person’s life is his or hers to live, with its own stressors, opportunities, commitments, and compromises, and that for some women and their husbands, it’s very much a mutual choice.  And a sacrifice for each of them individually and both together, for that matter.  But the Noble Elizabeth is above compromises (she tells us so, so we can take that on faith).  Of course, she’s so brilliant that she can’t see that in fact she has compromised. She’s living illegally in someone’s cellar, terrified that some lunatic is after her.  That is apparently not a compromise; she must really want it.   As mentioned above, I have difficulty accepting that David Boies is going to keep someone on the payroll who can’t see any clearer than that. 

(e) Libby’s so famous that strangers – peons putting together public relations flyers and such riff-raff – still gossip about her.  In fact, she finds “so much I never knew about myself!” (isn’t that exclamation point just precious?) online, in what Other People write about Her. 

(f) Libby’s so sophisticated that she’s positively jaded.  “Happiness is the untruths we tell each other and ourselves . . . .”  Well.  The Awful Weight of the World an’ all that shit, I suppose.  “I am harsh and defeated, and I never thought I would describe myself in either way. The list of things I can’t be bothered with goes on forever. The list of things that bother me goes on forever.” 

[Aside: Just like Beach the butler Suffered From His Feet, and just as the Lining of His Stomach Was Not All that He Might Wish the Lining of His Stomach to Be, so Elizabeth’s pearls-before-swine prose seems to cry out of a thorough treatment of Wodehouse.] 

(g) Libby is concerned.  Used to be that cities were where “the professional class” could congregate and enjoy each other’s sophistication.  Now there’s all this awful money running the joint and no one respects the creativity of folks like Elizabeth because anyone sitting around in his pajamas can write Stuff just like she can without all this “infrastructure” to support “great talent.”  [N.b.  She omits an examination of to what extent the conscious policies pursued by NYC government might have contributed to the bipolarity of the city’s economic strata.]  By “infrastructure” she appears to mean doormen and folks to carry things from the taxi to the elevator.  Piracy and technology have sounded some sort of death knell for creativity (that must be news to the engineering guys working with design teams on four separate continents on the same systems and components, at the same time, and all without ever laying eyes on each other).  By “creative” she doesn’t seem to include the guy who figures out how to keep a small company afloat through a business downturn so fifteen families get to have Christmas that year after all.  But let that pass.  Most people who “think they are practicing law are actually making binders,” which go into storage, unread, produced purely as a device to bill the snot out of the client.  I don’t have the drive space fully to unpack and trash that statement, so I’ll just observe that this is yet one more example of someone who lives in Manhattan having a vision so narrow it can fit a stereoscopic view through a keyhole. 

(h) Libby is honest.  Pathologically so.  Nearly as much so as Kim Kardashian, one suspects.  And what a sacrifice it’s been for Her.  “Maybe I should have been wiser.  But the only way I could have was to have been a completely different person, along the way probably becoming a different writer, most likely a lousy one.  I am fortunate to have been well paid for an almost pathological honesty, and the only way I am able to write that way is by being that way.  It has been worth it—of course it has been—because there is a higher price attached to rare attributes than common ones.  But there is a lot of good, workmanlike journalism that I could have, should have, and would have done if anyone ever thought of me.  I established myself as someone much too precious. And, honest, I don’t pretend to like people I don’t and I can’t pretend to respect people who don’t deserve it. Still, my financial life might look about the same no matter what, because I chose to write about an uncompromised life in New York City in these times, and the only way to be that person is to never have it all work out.”
Libby doesn’t seem to understand that she is, notwithstanding whatever talent and drive she might bring to the table, at bottom just another schmoe stumbling through life, uncomprehending.  For all of her learning she has yet to learn some really simple stuff.

Just by way of sample: No one has this thing figured out.  Not David Boies, not any or all the luminaries whose company in the brochure she finds to gratifyingly flattering.  When St. Paul allowed that we see though a glass darkly, he wasn’t correct in only a theological sense.  The rarity of human connectedness is so precious that you rejoice that it has been vouchsafed you, at all, even a little bit, with this other person, and you make a conscious decision that you are not going to allow the imperfections to rob you of even a little of your tiny bit of magic.  You will do this even if the vagaries of trying to keep a roof up and food on the table mean you can’t practice that intimacy other than with a text message in the middle of the night that I was out trying to find some place that sells Teflon tape at that hour and saw something that I knew would make you laugh.  The fact that there might not be a “correct” answer to any given life conundrum does not mean that there are not demonstrably wrong answers to those same dilemmas.  Not every one gets to be happy in life.  Even for the seriously wounded the experience of others’ beauty, innocence, and wonderment offers a glimpse of what might exist, what can exist, on the other side of the glass which shuts us off.  If you quit being so goddam full of yourself you might notice poetry, beauty, and philosophy all about you, and you can enjoy the little sparkles, glimmers, and flashes of it without losing your sense of the farcical, without “compromising” on your skepticism. Sometimes things and people really are as they seem.  There really do exist folks who’ll coach a bunch of tiny kids basketball for years in succession, and will buy a uniform and warm-ups for the kid who’s so excited that his daddy “just got out” and he’s going to come to the game today; and who’ll model how a grown-up man behaves when daddy blows it off after all.  Even if you are doomed to an existence shut in your own world, a world of your own making and the awfulness of which consists chiefly of the necessary consequences of your own stoopid decisions, others, even others closely around you, are not so doomed, are not obliged to be so doomed, are not lesser mortals for not being so doomed, and you are not entitled to resent them for it.  Making lemonade from lemons is one thing; pretending that having buggered up your existence through improvidence and flightiness is something to be proud of – in print, no less – is trying to polish a turd.  The former draws respect for never giving in; the latter gets you the kind of comments that Wurtzel’s post in fact has been getting.

Perhaps there is another Elizabeth Wurtzel out there, one who is not so tiresomely self-absorbed and so unobservant of the world around her.  I rather think there is, because I question whether anyone as inwardly non-functional as she portrays herself could have done what she has. The other day I was in a store, and I saw a cartoon posted behind the counter. It was one of those e-card thingies, with a picture of a mother comforting a distraught child.  “I’m so sorry you’ve discovered the world doesn’t revolve around you.  Here; have a nice tall glass of Get Over It.”  Whoever runs into Lizzie in some bar next week might stand her a couple of shots.  Do the ol’ gal some good.