Fantasy Baseball Update -- shield your eyes

Sorry, I know fantasy baseball talk is boring--worse than telling your co-workers what you dreamed about last night. This post is partly to mark the date for myself. I just closed on a trade, giving up Francisco Rodriguez (ace relief pitcher, 23 years old) for Jeff Kent (very good hitter for a second baseman, 37 years old). Not prudent, but hey, I'm going for broke--carpe-ing the diem. I'm in second place now, 9 roto points behind. Let's see if this trade makes the difference by year's end.

It's hard to win a fantasy league without a top-notch saves guy. What I'm left with now is two pretty iffy saves guys, B.J. Ryan, who has been struggling for the Orioles, and Brian Fuentes, who pitches for Colorado (yikes).

But it's also pretty darn important to get some offensive oomph from your infield and your catcher. One thing about this year is, Javy Lopez is far and away the best catcher I've ever had. Maybe I'm reading too much into this fact, but I rose to first place with Javy playing, then faded to second when Javy went on the disabled list. Now Javy is back playing. I've gotten by with a cobbled-together waiver-wire infield all year. Now, Jeff Kent is a big improvement at 2B, and Felipe Lopez and Shea Hillenbrand (other recent trades) are modest improvements at SS and 3B.

Just let my pitching hold together. I traded away pitching for each of those three guys.

Back in the winter I posted that I was going to throw caution to the wind and keep Zack Greinke (young pitcher with dazzling potential) from last year's roster, instead of Derrek Lee (reliable but seemingly boring veteran 1B). I came to my senses and changed my mind about that just in time, which was easily my best move of the year. Derrek Lee has only been the best player in baseball, and Greinke has been pummeled. I wouldn't have predicted either of those things, Lee being awesome or Greinke being terrible, but Lee was the much safer bet. Draft day is a time for safe bets. Now I'm going to take a bit of a long shot.

This has been an enjoyable fantasy season, whether I end up winning or not. But what if I won?!? [dreamy sigh] -- then maybe I could attend to caring for my family and advancing my career, goals which I naturally set aside to focus on this other...

Road Food / Accept No Substitutes

Road Food is a ritual that should accompany every out-of-town car trip, whether alone or with friends: stopping at a convenience store and making a meal out of stuff you can eat in the car--chips and soda, nickel candies like jawbreakers or Jolly Ranchers, maybe a sausage dog or microwave burrito.

Slim Jims are a prime example of Road Food. Where else do you find Slim Jims but at a Grab-n-Go hard by the side of the great American roadway? A variant of beef jerky, with its handy rope-like dimensions, its greasy-stringy texture. a Slim Jim is a snack that inspires action, and positively punishes contemplation. A bracing tonic for a diffident office drone on a three-day weekend.

There are foods that you'll eat in your car that you would never ever consider having in your home. A Slim Jim, for instance, has never crossed the threshhold of my domicile. Nor has any six-pack of Lance's sandwich crackers or cookies, like Nip-Chees or Necots. Cheerwine is another; it's a cherry-flavored soft drink that should only be consumed in a moving car, and preferably within 50 miles of the town of Salisbury, NC, whence Cheerwine originates. (This area encompasses Charlotte, Greensboro, AND Winston-Salem, so it ain't like your options are limited.)

I did once buy two sausage dogs at a 7-11 and bring them back to the Holiday Inn where I was staying with my young children in Orlando. This was wrong on many levels.

Here's a tip: don't try to scrimp by buying the generic Slim Jim substitute. I made this mistake recently. Mushy and bland, with none of the snap that distinguishes Brother James, this Faux Jim got my trip off to an inauspicious start. No, shell out the whole $1.19 for the real article.

I love Slim Jims because they link us to a simpler, more innocent time. Slim Jims partake of the restless pioneering American spirit. They are the modern-day analogue of pemmican and salt pork. They are a food I can imagine eating on a wagon train. I would definitely buy hardtack if Circle K sold it in nacho cheese flavor.

Frogmarch Update: Threat Level Yellow

I got three different e-mails today asking me to sign various online petitions urging the President to fire Karl Rove over Plamegate.

I'm usually a sucker for those (I don't give much money or time, but I am one online-petition-signing mofo) but in this case it just seemed absurd. First, Karl Rove's odiousness aside, firing somebody for ethical/moral failure isn't the type of decision that should be made by holding a finger to the winds . If Bush can't figure out for himself that Rove is ethically crippled, a jillion signatures or e-mails or phone calls won't convince him, nor, in some ideal sense, should they. Secondly, I can't imagine that Internet petitions from JohnKerry.com are greeted with anything but derision by Bush and his inner circle. Also, realistically, what are the chances? When has Bush fired anybody for excessive zeal and loyalty? Plus, as Marshall Wittman so delightfully phrased it, Bush firing Rove would be like Charlie McCarthy firing Edgar Bergen.

It's good that the mainstream news organizations finally smell Rove's blood in the water. Odd that it took so long. Reporters are finally mad at Scott McClellan, whose whole job is to tell them every day that 2 + 2 = 5, and that seems to be acceptable, but when he's caught in a crude deception instead of an artful one, telling them in effect that 2 = 5, that's a no-no. And Matt Cooper and Judy Miller are lousy test cases for press freedom, but if it took a couple of its members being threatened with jail for the DC media social club to get exercised, fine and dandy. It's nice to see the moderate-liberal blogosphere (the Wittmans and Kilgores and Schmitts, the TPMCafe types) in such a state of manic excitement. I hope Mark Schmitt is right that Roveism is truly in decline. I hope this scandal represents a chink in Bush's shell. Let's wait and see, though.

Long Live Suck

For the last two or three years of its life I was devoted to Suck.com. This in spite of my handicaps: I'm not an old-school webhead, i.e. don't know Flash from Java and couldn't pick Marc Andreessen out of a police lineup, and I'm about five years too old to get many of their pop-culture references. I swore by it anyway. Easy to read onscreen, sharp and funny as hell, employing hypertext as a stylistic tool, Suck was the first site to impress me with the charm of Web content per se, rather than text by other means. Its archives are still accessible.

I stumbled across this recent account of the life and loves of Suck. Warning: at 27 laser-printed pages, this is a very long article published on an obscure website, about a long-defunct site that was itself something of a cult favorite. The obsessiveness factor here is quite high.

While I like Ana Marie Cox (aka Wonkette) perfectly well, I got a chuckle from the story of what led Suck's founders to hire her: she used to frequent a discussion board with Chicago-area indie rock heavyweights, and gave as good as she got in the pop-culture debates there. That was her main qualification. A gal with no cred, surviving and thriving in online flame wars among guys with major cred! If that's not a Horatio Alger story for the 90s, I don't know what is.

London, 7 July

Sadness and helplessness. From my safe distance, it feels so much like 9/11, not understanding the seriousness at first, then monitoring the news from work all morning, the rising horror, the phone calls to make sure that a relative is safe: a first cousin in New York four years ago, a stepbrother in London today. Both were okay.

9/11 was more shocking, of course. The scale of the carnage was greater, and the TV images were so shattering. I'd given little thought to Manhattan and none to the World Trade Center, but it suddenly seemed like the central symbol of American aspiration and industriousness lay in smoking ruins. But I actually know London better than I know New York. I've been in Kings Cross and Liverpool Street tube stations numerous times. My private mental picture is more vivid today. And the thoughts of riding a train, feeling the blast, being in a dark tunnel with smoke and heat and panic, are plenty nightmarish.

How little progress we've made in four years.

I tried to comment on a Matthew Yglesias blogpost at TPMCafe, and the damn thing ate my post: Matthew took the opportunity to say that President Bush's remark four years ago urging us to "go shopping" after 9/11 was unfairly criticized at the time by the left. We must get back to our normal routines quickly or the terrorists win.

Well, sure, but think of the things Bush could have said to stand in for "normal" American life: Take a walk in the park. Hug your kids. Get on a plane and go visit loved ones. Make friends with a Muslim person in your town. But instead, Bush characterized us as a nation of shoppers. One day Bush was calling up the National Guard, mobilizing to invade Afghanistan, passing the Patriot Act. The next day he was telling us to go shopping, and assuring us that there was no need to cancel the big tax cuts: they were just the thing in time of war. It was an incoherent welter of slogans and no plans, betraying an unserious approach, failing to call forth the better angels of our nature.

London mayor Ken Livingstone spoke today, I won't bother to find the exact quote, but he addressed the attackers, presumably jihadists, and called London a city of dreams, where people come from around the world to fulfill their aspirations. Including "your" people, from your part of the world. They won't stop coming, and however many you kill, you can never win.

"FULLY employed loser" here, thank you very much

I'm a lifelong fan of Garry Trudeau's venerable political cartoon Doonesbury, but I'm a little troubled by Sunday's strip, in which mainstream journalist Mark Slackmeyer encounters blogger "SlamZ88." Mark asks:

Isn't blogging basically for angry, semi-employed losers who are too untalented or too lazy to get real jobs in journalism?... I mean, if the market really valued what you have to say, wouldn't someone pay you for it?

Needless to say, this attitude pisses me off (pisses you off too, I would think, oh hypothetical blog reader). And I think it exists--I think there are plenty of people in the traditional news business who resent and disdain blogs, using terms similar to these.

I hope I'm wrong--you can look at the strip yourself--but I'm afraid that Mark, the voice of the well-credentialed journalism insider, is the voice of Garry Trudeau. The strip isn't totally one-sided, but it is skewed, and the punchline definitely comes at the blogger's expense. True enough, Doonesbury is not often crudely didactic. And Trudeau does often use characters who do not speak for him directly, and I give him credit in this strip for framing the issue effectively and provocatively in a few panels. On the other hand, if Trudeau wants to satirize the mainstream media, he typically uses Roland Hedley as the vehicle. Mark S. is usually a voice of wisdom, a trustworthy guide to what the author really thinks.

It's a shame that Trudeau seems to miss the whole point of the rise of the lefty blogosphere. Talent and "professionalism" are not the be-all and end-all, they do not perfectly define those who can make a valuable contribution to the public discourse. We've been sorely let down by the professionals, too many times to list, and we're ready to give the amateurs a listen. Journalism isn't rocket science. Sure, it takes critical thinking and hard work, but many people possess those gifts who've never been to J school.

(Characterizing bloggers as lazy is particularly galling. Like them or dislike them, the blogs that have gained attention are the ones that post new content several times a day. That takes work. In other walks of life, that kind of gumption is praised as being entrepreneurial.)

The news networks and the papers of record have terrific news-gathering resources, but they have huge blind spots and institutional biases as well. It's disappointing if the creator of Roland Hedley misses the point that insiderdom can be corrosive to integrity and objectivity. Also, even if we accept the stereotype of the squirrely badly-groomed blogger, it's disappointing if the creator of Zonker Harris can't spare more sympathy for the unemployable self-deluded oddballs of the world. Oddballs can be right too.

The strip pokes particular fun at bloggers' laundry lists of nit-picking debate points, and alludes to the John Bolton controversy: "109 points about Bolton... Who reads this stuff?" As it happens, Garry Trudeau is on the record as being opposed to the Bolton nomination for UN ambassador, so it's not that he has no opinion on the matter or thinks it's trivial, but what apparently gave Trudeau a special platform to judge Bolton is that they were classmates at Yale. Presumably, that Ivy League social connection gives Trudeau a well-rounded non-nit-picking understanding of Bolton.

Well Garry, my man, not all of us have shared a panty raid or beer bong with the guy. We may have to rely on obscure old news stories that we Googled up. Yet Bolton's a public figure, and we non-Yalies assert our right to comment on him.

While we're on the subject, Pandagon had a good post and discussion earlier today about the unfolding Valerie Plame investigation. I'm as happy as anybody to wish Karl Rove hasta-la-vista and don't-drop-the-soap, but what an infuriating commentary on the American corporate news establishment. When I ponder the Plame affair, I come away believing that LOTS of people, hundreds probably, in the Washington press corps knew quite well that a key White House political adviser had burned an undercover CIA operative. That said adviser was likely a backstabbing felon, and arguably a traitor to the interests of US national security. Yet the same Washington press corps, for many months, unanimously, in its careerist ass-covering conventional wisdom, during a presidential election campaign, declined to share that information with the public. Which is a disgrace, and an abject failure of the press to perform its role in the American system. Reason # 23810 for the rise of the blogosphere.

Jesus SMASH!

First of all, an admission: I actually thought last Sunday was Fathers' Day. In fact, as you know, Fathers' Day is this coming Sunday. Just something for you to keep in mind as you read anything else I write.

I've been intending for a long time to comment at length on Jeff Sharlet's Harpers Magazine piece about New Life Community Church in Colorado Springs. The moment has kind of passed. I did comment over at the High Hat Blog about my visit to a megachurch about five years ago. I could relate to Sharlet's arguments about consumerism and exurban migration. As to the millenialism and weird geopolitics -- I got nothin'.

Wait, here's a tangent. My last book read was God's Secretaries by Adam Nicolson, about the creation of the King James Bible. It was pretty good, and incidentally not a devotional book at all, but intellectual history that provides a window into Jacobean England. Anyway, one tantalizing bit of info there was that some of the scholars on the KJ translation committee wanted to exclude the Book of Revelations. They got voted down. Revelations is the source of all manner of trouble and nonsense. The Armageddon, the Rapture--all that stuff is in Revelations, and stands out like a sore thumb next to the Sermon on the Mount and all the rest of the New Testament. Jesus is like Bruce Banner turning into the Hulk in that book. I understand generally how Revelations got written: it was 100 AD and people thought Jesus was coming back the day after tomorrow to overthrow the Roman Empire. But why it has continued to be part of the Biblical canon, I don't really understand. I've never read Revelations, have never heard a sermon preached from it, which is not odd since liberal Protestants and all Catholics basically ignore Revelations, yet the religious right sometimes gives the impression that Revelations is ALL they read. How about somebody doing an edition of the Bible that leaves Revelations right the fuck out?

Here's one particular thing that struck me in the Sharlet article. In my job I hear and read a lot about the joys and struggles of ministers in their careers. I was reading something recently in which a preacher contrasted graduate school (seminary), where you get a fresh start every 4-5 months--new topic, new teacher, new group of peers--with a parish church, where the content is always the same, and the faces are always the same. Soon after reading this, I picked up the Sharlet article, and New Life guru Ted Haggard describes the small-group structure of his church: it's on a semester system, so if people dislike a class or a group of classmates, they naturally get a chance to jump ship after a few months. That's the consumerist approach megachurches take: lots of choices, lots of room for the theology and doctrine to be market-tested and tailored to what people like. Whereas traditional churches tend to operate on the unspoken assumption that you are a Methodist or whatever by virtue of family and civic ties, so your church is your church, and you have to take it as you find it.

The bad news is, these are bad assumptions nowadays--people WILL drive to the next town over, they WILL shop around, etc. The better news for these old-style churches is they have a chance to offer a realer, more familial type of community, which you only get when you are somewhat stuck with people. This preacher I was reading also talked about the emotional whiplash he felt as a young man early in his ministry, how tough it was to go from celebrating a birthday or baptism in the afternoon, then visiting a dying person in the evening. You think Ted Haggard ever does a funeral? Or comforts a dying person? Rarely, I bet. These Colorado Springs assholes, these postmodern gypsies, if they get sick or old they're going to move back home, or close to a family member who'll care for them.

There's a site called Butterflies and Wheels that I've dipped into now and then. Its stock in trade is being indignant over Intelligent Design, etc.: with religious fundamentalism interfering with science. They're smart folks over there--Brits, some of them, don't you know--and more conversant with philosophy and hard science than I am. Stuff I am somewhat conversant with--social science, religion, and critical theory--they're fairly hostile to. I sort of left the comments board of their blog with my tail between my legs. I felt I ended up making content-free arguments in favor of simple civility. Weak tea, not much fun for me. On the other hand, those folks congratulate themselves for going to a friend's funeral and refraining from heckling the eulogy. I'd call that strident. But again, they're smart, and I'll continue to browse there now and then.

Here at Dix Hill I've mentioned that in real life I get to hear some really interesting lectures and panel discussions on theology and medicine. I alluded to a couple of them at B&W and got sneered at, but I'm going to re-present them here. In one presentation, a guy was proposing a methodology for measuring an individual's religiosity. By way of background, this dude works in a program on spirituality and health, studying issues like whether people who profess religion, pray, etc., have better health outcomes. That prayer-and-healing stuff generally leaves me cold, but this guy rolled out what I thought was the best application of critical theory I have ever heard. Knowledge is socially constructed; religion and secularism alike are knowledge systems, held together by the trust their adherents place in them. Religion is best understood not as a checklist of beliefs but a worldview, a lens, a framework. The best measure of religiosity is not fidelity but fluency. The specific content of any worldview, religious or not, is less significant than whether one can articulate it coherently. (As I tried to tell the science/philosophy geeks, "Einstein wasn't a great scientist because of the number of theorems he had memorized.")

In another talk, a public health researcher compared two small Missouri towns that were similar in geography and demography. One town was marked by a stronger religious community: more vital congregations, and (significantly) warmer and more cooperative relations among different congregations. There were some positive public health indicators associated with the more robust religious climate. He did a social capital analysis suggesting that religious institutions create "bridging" social capital that enables resources to be shared and transferred effectively. Admittedly, this was a qualitative study, that argued correlation rather than causation, but it appealed to me as making a case for religion based on its effects. I have forgotten the name of Town A in the study, the high social capital town; sadly, however, Town B, marked by selfishness and distrust, was Hannibal, Mark Twain's hometown.

Anyway, that's This Week in Dix Hill religion.

Military Contractors

NPR this morning had two stories (near the bottom of the page) about bad blood between US Army/Marines personnel, on one hand, and American private security personnel on the other. Last month, a group of private troops strayed into the wrong place at the wrong time, and were detained by regular Marines. These men report being kneed in the back, kicked in the balls, and abused by their Marine captors in numerous other ways both physical and verbal. (In its official denial of the story, a Marine spokesman said these Americans received the same humane and respectful treatment as all detainees in US custody--which made me laugh out loud.)

Obviously, these two groups are supposed to be on the same side, but communication and coordination are poor between the uniformed military and private forces. And it's not hard to see why a Marine would be resentful of the situation where private security guards receive 5 times the pay for work similar to what he (the Marine) is doing: roughly equal in status (these contractors aren't just doing laundry and serving meals, they are doing "mission-critical" work in many cases), and if anything probably lower in personal risk (which is a relative statement--no American in Iraq is safe).

The main source for the NPR story is an ex-Marine who left his job as a firefighter to go to Iraq in the employ of Zapata Engineering. He's completely upfront about his reasons for taking the job--$$$$--and he's retained a lawyer in the wake of his run-in with the Marines. The US government has banned him from further employment in Iraq. The Marines are flatly denying the charges these detainees are making, and Zapata flatly denies the military's claim that the Zapata guys fired on a military position first. This really doesn't sound, all in all, like a simple misunderstanding by like-minded people in fundamentally friendly organizations.

Chris Hedges, writing about our troops in Iraq:

The young soldiers, trained well enough to be disciplined but encouraged to maintain their naive adolescent belief in invulnerability, have in wartime more power at their fingertips than they will ever have again. They catapult from being minimum wage employees at places like Burger King, facing a life of dead-end jobs with little hope of health insurance and adequate benefits, to being part of, in the words of the Marines, "the greatest fighting force on the face of the earth." The disparity between what they were and what they have become is breathtaking and intoxicating.

The disparity recurs on the other end, when the soldiers muster out and return home to a mundane job with low pay and dim prospects. This Zapata employee was a firefighter, but it must not have paid a middle-class income, because he jumped at the chance to go to Iraq as a mercenary. I know the Army and Marines and National Guard are having terrible trouble meeting their recruitment quotas of 18-year-olds, but I bet that the private security firms have a lot less trouble hiring. There's the money, obviously, plus I believe there are plenty of 35-year-old former soldiers who are itching to get back in the action. Making an unscientific judgment from the military vets I've known, it seems that military service in the all-volunteer era creates a class of folks whose only skills are tough-guy skills. The only jobs they're qualified for, and the only jobs that stimulate them the way active military duty did, are jobs as police officers or firefighters.

And this has repercussions, incidentally, for the profession of law enforcement. Some young men today are advised that military service is the ONLY appropriate preparation for a job as a police officer. Again, I'm going on media images and my limited experience, but it seems domestic US law enforcement is much more military-like than it used to be. Cops don't wear neckties and brogans or carry nightsticks. They wear Kevlar and combat boots and carry M-16s.

As Matthew Yglesias observed recently in a completely different context, the wholesale replacement of government employees with contractors, ostensibly to reduce government and control expenses, is a ruse pioneered by Republican administrations and validated, unfortunately, by the Democrats under Clinton. Not only is the government not saving money this way, but they (the Republican-controlled Executive Branch) are rewarding a GOP-friendly company, and ensuring that some of the tax dollars going to fight the war, will ultimately flow into GOP campaign coffers.

I'm talking myself into being an advocate for a national-service draft. Be all you can be? Learn computers? My ass. When I think about it, the notion of the military as an avenue of upward mobility, or a place for young people to obtain marketable skills, is a bit troubling. De-professionalize and, by all means, de-privatize the military. (Reason # 103194 why I will never hear the words "Senator Dix.")

Fathers' Day

I'm racing the clock to get this post up while it still IS Fathers' Day--

My oldest daughter (code name Xaviera) put on a Caitlin Cary CD in the car the other morning. I like C.C., though I suppose she's corny. She has this wise, maternal singing persona, and in some songs she's actually giving advice to a lovelorn friend. "What Will You Do" has her commiserating with the co-dependent wife or girlfriend of a self-destructive tortured artist type of man. Of course you love him, but he's a trainwreck and you need to protect yourself, is the gist of the song. Cary is not exactly the voice of Grrl Power, but she's not a doormat, either, and in the end she seems to land at an eyes-open, road-tested, jaded-but-hopeful appreciation of men. Can't live with him, can't live without him. That seems true and satisfying to me.

There's a classmate of Xaviera's, call her Charlotte, who carpools with us some mornings. Charlotte is painfully shy--some days we can hardly get a word out of her, and she misses school every now and then with headaches or stomachaches that seem anxiety-related (even her mother thinks so). Her parents are divorced, and her father is not a big part of her life. I'm not always sure whether being with our family adds to her anxiety or not. We're pretty boisterous, especially on the days when I drive the kids. I'm less organized, so there is more yelling "hurry up" and general display of bad temper. My car is smaller so the kids are more cramped. I have a CD player so there's likely to be loud rock music. I might steer with my knees for a moment while I drink coffee and fumble for a CD.

One day my middle girl Yolanda rolled down the car window and stuck her arm out while we were riding. Charlotte was alarmed ("Never stick your arm out like that!") and I said, a little sheepishly, "That's right, honey, not so far out," but the truth is I let stuff like that slide, much more than my wife does. So Charlotte doesn't bother to show alarm any more.

A kid needs a Dad to bend Mom's rules and let them stick an arm out the window occasionally.

(Before anyone makes any outraged comments or e-mails, I would like to hear you marshall some evidence, even anecdotal, of anybody losing an arm due to hanging it out the car window.)

It's odd that I choose Charlotte as the case that argues the value of a father, a masculine influence in a child's life--there's another boy we know, younger kid, who is the type that craves male attention and who, every time he sees me, attaches himself to me like a barnacle. Charlotte may very well not even like me. Yet I'm just cocky and reckless enough to think I'm the kind of influence Charlotte needs. Put it this way: If my influence doesn't kill her, it will make her stronger.

This is my reflection on fatherhood this year. My wife and I had a big fight over Christmas because I allowed one of the children to do something unsafe. I won't specify what it was--no harm was done, but I did make a big error in judgment. Hopefully I learned a lesson, but that continues to be the dynamic in our family: She will err on the side of overprotectiveness, I will err on the side of recklessness.

Yet kids' lives need a dose of physicality and recklessness and loudness and devil-may-care attitude.

Here's to you, Dads. You're the guy who lets them stick their arm out the car window. You're the guy who let them climb onto the porch roof. You're the guy who says with a chuckle that french fries can technically be considered a vegetable.

You're the guy. Don't go changin'. Listen to your wife, of course, but don't go changin'.

Aw crap. Fathers' Day plus one.

Who Died and Made You Elvis?

Hello. Just wanted to drop by and say that this is a good post by Amanda at Pandagon. The love of good music is a perfectly good foundation for patriotism.

If you're ever feeling disillusioned about your identity as an American (or as a red-stater relative to the blue states), think of the music. Jazz, blues, country, and rock are maybe America's greatest lasting legacy.

I have a friend and mentor who is a sociologist, but with a sense of humor, and he has some favorite jokes about the uses and misuses of social science and statistics. (He likes to tell about the man who drowned in a lake whose average depth was six inches.) I came across a funny statement a couple of days ago: if current trends continue, by the year 2019 one-third of the earth's population will be comprised of Elvis impersonators. Think about it: in 1954 there were no Elvis impersonators. Today there are tens of thousands. Sociology in action.

Now Reading

American Stories by Calvin Trillin. A collection of his New Yorker writings from the 1980s. Out of print, I see; I got it at Nice Price Books, a used book and CD store.

If you don't know, Calvin Trillin does human-interest stories, in the best possible sense. He writes a lot about food, and about travel in the U.S., and he's quite interested in murder, but when he writes abut murder (a few of these pieces are about murder cases, and the title of another of his collections, Killings , says it all) he does so without an iota of luridness. No hardened criminals, and few entirely-innocent victims, just workaday Americans whose lives took an unfathomable catastrophic turn, and Trillin dispassionately dissects each case to see how family or neighbors managed to rub each other so very wrong. Sometimes we never learn the culprit's identity, just about the atmosphere and chain of events that makes murder thinkable.

I enjoy the heck out of Trillin and gobbled up this book like candy. He's not flashy, but he picks great subjects (or at least, the right subjects for him) and as he explains in an afterword to this collection, he gives a lot of thought to the beginning, middle, and end of each story. Most of his subjects are little-known, but he has revealing takes on some quirky celebrities: Ben & Jerry of ice cream fame; the magicians Penn & Teller. (No murder cases in these.)

There's always a central turning point, delivered very drily and offhandedly, when a fairly humdrum bourgeois life turns weird. Trillin often writes in the first person, so his humdrum midwest-Bourgeois persona adds to the effect. In one story, Trillin has an old friend, an ex-preacher and longtime newspaper editorial writer, who decided to return to his hometown in Kentucky, to open a small dinner theatre and farm a bit, and how curious it was when a federal grand jury indicted him for growing marijuana. By this time we know Calvin Trillin--family man, bit of a nerd--and the thought of his being friends with a drug supplier is incongruous to say the least, but it opens us up to wanting to learn how one becomes a middle-aged ex-Baptist-preacher eastern Kentucky pot farmer.

Safe, comfortable, totally interchangeable

Here is the latest in the New York Times's Class Matters series. It's about "relos," corporate ladder climbers who bounce from job to job, area code to area code, subdivision to subdivision, every two to four years, never really putting down roots anywhere in particular. I think Peter Kilborn captures this milieu so well, I'm reminded of Ruth Shalit or Stephen Glass--I mean, some of these quotes are almost too good to be true.

I have a friend who fits the relo stereotype--six moves in 15 years, by my count. I sincerely admire the guy: he's a planner, a goal-setter, the most focused and successful person I know, on his own as well as society's terms. But "rootless" is an apt word. At times he seems like a human resume'. Like Mr. Relo of the NYT piece, he experienced a corporate merger, and not only survived (which is more than a lot of workers can say) but thrived in the aftermath. My friend is more attuned to corporate cultures than geographic ones: Chicago, Houston, Baltimore are pretty much the same to him.

Raleigh-Cary is a sweet spot for relos. We have the magic combination of good jobs, good schools, and reasonable housing prices. The problem with relos, though, is they're not citizens. They don't really live here, they're just touching down briefly on their marvelous life journey. They're most concerned with low taxes and the value of their house--the rest of the community be damned. These people shouldn't get a vote. The bit in the NYT story where Ms. Relo lobbies against school redistricting? She knows she may be leaving in a year, yet she wants to hoard the best schools for her family and their kind. She should butt the hell out.

Review of Reviews (RevRev)

Well, here was the thing: In the same weekend, the same two books about stock car racing were reviewed in the New York Times and in the Raleigh News & Observer. The reviews contrasted in ways that were not terribly surprising yet irresistable to my neurotic Flyover State self, hence this post. The NYT review by Jonathan Miles irritated the conservative Tennessee blogger Instapundit, and while I hate siding with Instapundit on anything, it IS curious that before undertaking to write about NASCAR, Mr. Miles is at such pains over whether NASCAR is fit (as in, not too distasteful) to write about:

For a certain segment of the population, Nascar's raid on American culture... triggers the kind of fearful trembling the citizens of Gaul felt as the Huns came thundering over the hills. To these people, stock-car racing represents all that's unsavory about red-state America: fossil-fuel bingeing; lust for violence; racial segregation; run-away Republicanism; anti-intellectualism (how much brain matter is required to go fast and turn left, ad infinitum?); the corn-pone memes of God and guns and guts; crass corporatization; Toby Keith anthems; and, of course, exquisitely bad fashion sense. What's more, they simply don't get it... Cover your ears, blue America. The Huns are revving their engines.

The Raleigh N&O review is by Scott Huler, a good feature writer and former N&O staffer, who has written a book about NASCAR himself, and in the Raleigh paper could confidently assume that his reader needs no introduction to the subject. Huler gives thumbs up to Full Throttle: The Life and Fast Times of NASCAR Legend Curtis Turner, but a mild pan to Sunday Money, an account by Sports Illustrated writer Jeff MacGregor of a year on the NASCAR circuit.

The problem is, at the end I don't really know the subject of MacGregor's book. MacGregor practices what might be called the American Magazine Style, in which every object is worthy of comment, the comment often more important than the object.

Mr. Miles in the NYT likes Sunday Money (the one NASCAR book a non-Hun might want to read) and compares MacGregor's approach to Tom Wolfe, Mr. American Magazine Style himself--which is apt, considering Wolfe's Esquire profile of Junior Johnson is still probably the pinnacle of NASCAR lit. MacGregor's sojourn with the ballcap wearers of NASCAR Nation is a 21st century counterpart to Wolfe's long strange trip with the Merry Pranksters--calculated to scare and titillate the Eastern establishment.

As I blogged once before, NASCAR tries to have it two ways: honoring its disreputable Appalachian roots, yet aspiring to be the perfect modern marketing vehicle, sleek and squeaky clean, high-tech and family friendly all at once. Personally, I'm turned off by the marketing side of it but am fond of the scruffy side, represented by Curtis Turner and Junior Johnson. My regard for NASCAR got a big boost when I learned that Junior Johnson (a superstar of the sport) had to take a year's hiatus at the height of his career to serve federal prison time for bootlegging. My affection wanes, though, as NASCAR adds races in Dallas and Miami and Los Angeles, leaving behind historic small tracks like Rockingham and North Wilkesboro.

I think Jonathan Miles is right to say that NASCAR has a looming identity crisis, an "Elvis-comes-out-of-the-Army moment." NASCAR is in the process of establishing a Hall of Fame, and I heard somebody on the news the other day, probably Bill France, arguing that the Hall needs to be located in North Carolina because of NASCAR's roots here. Well, Bill, you sure didn't bat an eye when you abandoned Rockingham.

"Shut Up and Get On the Plane"

Sorry for the lack of blog lately. I made a few false starts at posting, but life has just been damn busy.

I bought myself a couple of CD's last weekend at Nice Price Books. One was an old familiar one, Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps. The other was a newish one I've been wanting to hear for a while, the Drive-By Truckers's Southern Rock Opera. I had no idea that the DBT album makes direct reference to Neil Young (by way of Young's relationship with Lynyrd Skynyrd).

I listened to Southern Rock Opera, read Gary Mairs's thoughts about it, and now need to give it another listen. For one thing, I'm slightly hung up on the paradox that the Drive-By Truckers may simply be better than Lynyrd Skynyrd, the band they are paying tribute to. For another thing, while I share the Truckers' dismay at the knee-jerk political demonization of the South, the kneejerk response to demonization, i.e. that Southerners are good folks albeit misunderstood, leaves me cold as well. Maybe the lyrics of a rock song just aren't going to resolve this one for me.

The album appeals to me most as a meditation on manhood, duty, and violent death. There was a New York Times piece the other day about NASCAR (this may be the subject of another post soon) and one of its arguments is that death on the highway is a more major feature of life in the South than in other parts of the country. This album certainly is haunted by vehicular mayhem, routine car wrecks as well as Skynyrd's fatal plane crash. Good-hearted duty-driven traveling men who meet their fate stoically.

Basic Cable

For an evening spent vegging out watching broadcast TV, yesterday evening was pretty good. Three shows in a row touched me for different reasons.

My kids like Nanny 911--my four-year-old says we need the Nannies to come to our house: "I'm out of control!" Try harder, kid. I normally just tolerate the show. But last night, instead of the usual spoiled-rotten kids and insipid parents, they featured a couple who (I think I have the numbers right) have adopted 32 children. Nine have grown up and moved away, leaving 23 boys living in this house. Some of the kids have been adopted from abroad, where they faced neglect or abuse in nightmarish orphanages. Some of the kids are disabled, with problems ranging from ADHD to cerebral palsy. What's more, the dad himself is disabled (wheelchair-bound), so the mother is an absolute workhorse. The whole nanny squad goes to the house, not to correct the boys' behavior but just to give this mother a few days' break.

They were plucking the heartstrings for all they were worth: handicapped kids and refugee kids, making a mural for their mother, writing and performing a song for their nannies... Did I get choked up? What, am I made of stone? Let's just say something got in my eye. My wife was out of the house--if she'd been watching she'd have been a puddle. One mitigating element in the schmaltzfest was contemplating what kind of person adopts dozens of children. On some levels, this mother was pathological--it damn near took a whip and a chair to get her to leave the house, and in a creepy way she seemed to enjoy the rest of the family being dependent on her. In the end, though, I see that household teeming with life--lots of chaos and some frustration, sure, but plenty of happiness. And it's easy to imagine those boys in bleak and isolated situations if not for that half-crazy mother. And when the Nannies are at their breaking point but the teenager with cerebral palsy steps up to his Big Brother role... something got in my eye.

(Next week Nanny 911 will feature a household where the kids are acting out after the death of their father. I wonder if the charm of run-of-the-mill bratty kids has been exhausted, and now the show is going for kids who due to melodramatic circumstances are bratty-for-a-reason. Some of the air must be coming out of the reality TV balloon. The home-makeover shows seem to be making a similar move: nowadays only people who've been struck by tragedy are eligible.)

Then my kids went to bed, and I switched over to public TV, where the American Experience had an hour-long doc about the Carter Family. I knew the broad outlines of their story, but really want to read and learn more now. It's just heart-rending, the clash between the magic the Carters had together as a musical group, and the marital discord, eventually rupture, between A.P. and Sara Carter. They made world-changing music against a background of profound unhappiness. A.P. was the engine of ambition that drove them; he was combing the mountains for new songs, drumming up record dates, etc. Sara, the possessor of a one-in-a-million singing voice, really got no satisfaction from public performance, and would have preferred to stay home on Clinch Mountain. She did it for the money, and out of a sense of duty, until she couldn't stand to do it any longer. The program really brought the Carters to life, and showed them as rural but modern people grappling with momentous changes, in history and in their own lives, in a courageous way.

After that, a re-run of a Johnny Cash retrospective interspersing TV clips of Johnny's performances with commentary from people who knew him: some contemporaries of Johnny's, some younger followers like Rodney Crowell and Marty Stuart. God, do I love Johnny Cash. The show contains a late-50s Cash performance of "Big River" that's just indelible, and Marty Stuart has a great spoken-word essay about it, where he classes Johnny with Hank Williams: singers with whom we can "hear every cigarette in their voice." The performances of "Man in Black" and "A Boy Named Sue" (Johnny bellows at the camera, "Now you're gon' die"--I've seen it before and I still almost wet my pants) have got to be some of the most spine-tingling minutes in television history.

If it's Friday, must be Culture Wars

Actually, I don't know if it's just me, but the debate over religion-in-politics seems to be coming to a head recently, so I have a number of things to comment on.

David Brooks's latest strawman argument is that liberals are up in arms (or would be if they only knew) that Abraham Lincoln prayed and tried to discern God's will before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. The NYT letters page is full of great dope-slap replies, all to similar effect: political leaders are welcome to pray privately on a decision. They just can't express or justify or limit discussion of the decision on grounds that it's "God's will." I don't mind that Bush prayed before deciding to take us to war. But when he (to Ariel Sharon) or his military officers claim that our invasion is divinely sanctioned, I mind.

Two other things. One, if there was ever a decision to pray over, Emancipation was it: a momentous, unprecedented moral course correction. A "no atheists in foxholes" kind of thing. Lincoln, as Brooks knows but won't say clearly, wasn't particularly pious--if HE prayed over it, it was big. Brooks is asking us to equate freeing the slaves with appointing a judge to the Third Circuit Court. Two, Lincoln's choice was defined for him in political terms, by events and by economic and religious pressure groups on both sides He saw a course of action, he felt it was right but knew it would be hugely difficult, and he prayed for resolve. And of course, there was plenty that was practical, not absolute, about the Proclamation. It freed only slaves in the South, not the North; it was timed right after a midterm election; etc. If it was a prayerful decision, it was only in a very narrow sense.

With a spate of op-eds in March and April warning of a "Christian jihad," John McCandlish Phillips (who was an evangelical in the New York Times newsroom, a thing rarer than an albino alligator) protests that evangelicals are being unfairly caricatured by the liberal punditocracy. His case would be stronger if he even mentioned Terri Schiavo or the nuclear option or anti-abortion legislation, instead of leaving us to think that this anti-Christian sentiment came out of nowhere. He finishes with a tangent about religious language in government--"ceremonial deism," in the Bush Justice Department's phrase--that's rather disingenuous. Issues like right-to-life are about a lot more than that. Also, while I'm ambivalent about stuff like the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, things were a lot different in 1789, when the spectrum ran from Anabaptist to Anglican and "God" pretty much covered everyone equally, than today, when Americans include Muslims and Hindus and believers and non-believers of many stripes.

Phillips also completely misrepresents Paul Krugman's views of suposed liberal bias in academia. Krugman, in Phillips's account, says that belief in God makes one unable to do valid scholarly work. I read that Krugman column, and that's not what it said at all. It pointed out, rightly, that the GOP leadership is hostile to academic freedom, to scholarly work that reached conclusions that were politically incorrect for GOP ideology. If you have a scholarly bent, and academic freedom is a priority for you, conservatism is announcing that it doesn't want you.


***


We got into a discussion of religious fundamentalism vs. the science of evolution over at PeoplesForum yesterday, and I found myself in the position of the beleaguered conservative in the discussion, which I hate. Let me expand here. Yesterday's chat focused on a recent Salon interview with Richard Dawkins. I posted a while back about Kenneth Miller of Brown University. Miller is one of the leading authors of high-school biology textbooks in the US, so his interest in the evolution-creationism debate is pretty damn concrete. Unlike Dawkins, sitiing in a hotel suite in his "crisp white shirt and soft blazer," uttering provocative bon mots to the delight of Salon readers, Miller goes to lobby the Kansas State Legislature, he goes to offer expert testimony in Georgia, and he speaks to audiences of divinity students in North Carolina. He gets his hands dirty, so to speak. He's not a bomb thrower, he's an infantryman. Miller is no less committed to the struggle over creationism than Dawkins, and he will get a lot more accomplished. For what it's worth, Miller was very much on my mind when I was criticizing Dawkins.

My beef with Dawkins, in sum, was that he lumps all religious folks together under the most unflattering label. The funny thing is, in some of his comments Dawkins comes so close to what I believe. Dawkins describes the wonder that scientists take in the natural processes that they understand so well, with terms like "almost transcendental" and "quasi-religious." Well, take off the weaselly modifiers and you have my view. I think Dawkins's problem with religion boils down to (1) the idea of divine intervention in nature or history, and (2) the notion of an afterlife. Well, I'm an agnostic on those things myself, yet I identify (a little uncomfortably) as a Christian. Religious categories are not as simple as a checklist of doctrines one affirms or denies. These are culture groups, somewhat fluid but somewhat persistent, which is why it's easier to speak of a Catholic child than it is to speak of a Keynesian child.

The Ludic Kid had a post yesterday about Dawkins, and I'm guessing that I'm one of the Dawkins "revilers" he's picturing. I didn't mean to come off that way. I'm no expert on the history of American evangelicals, but I'm pretty sure the Kid is leaving out some things in his analysis. The 1960s, Billy Graham, the shrinking economic pie, the fraying Protestant consensus--I suspect those things deserve a mention.

This shit makes me angry, too, this rampant yahooism. For one thing, I worry for my kids and the kind of education, the kind of economy, the kind of country they're going to grow up to. But I'd like to invoke the spirit on Tom Frank and say, progressives are not going to get far treating our opponents as idiots or children. I agree, Ted Haggard is not persuadable, but Ted Haggard's (the megachurch movement's) power is organizational. He's got 10,000 worshippers (or whatever, maybe more). You suppose 10% of them are persuadable?

The answer to so much about the predicament of the American left, I'm more and more convinced, is to organize. Nothing is going to change quickly. The great successes of liberalism in this country, like civil rights and the labor movement, took decades to build. That's got to be our time frame.

In general, there are quite a few voices on the left whom I respect, but who are pretty clueless about religion, particularly as it's actually practiced. I read Atrios, uh, every day like clockwork, but every time he comments on religion I want to throttle him. He just gets things wrong, and while he's usually humble in the face of a subject outside his expertise, he'll mouth off about religion with no compunction. He's done it recently, about Barbara Bradley Hagerty of NPR (not as bad as Atrios says) and this Baptist church that expelled members for voting for Kerry (well, that's bad, but there must be a whole lot more going on there than we can learn in a 40-second TV news clip, plus there is already some backlash against that church and there may be more to come).

I'm still working my way through the issue of Harper's that Ludic and Mr. Obscurity have been praising. The Gordon Bigelow piece was very enlightening, and all new to me. (That old crone Cora Nelson, who taught me Econ 101 freshman year--probably a Baptist! No wonder I got a C-minus!) The piece on the Colorado Springs megachurch is by Jeff Sharlet, whom I read regularly at The Revealer, and I think I can say something about his account compared to my own reading and experience. More later.

Speaking of Jeff Sharlet, here is a review he wrote of a new biography of Jonathan Edwards, that sheds a little light on the history of evangelicals in this country.

Private Geography

Dorothea Dix Hospital is a state-run inpatient mental health facility in Raleigh. Founded in 1856, its several red brick buildings sit on top of a hill. Over the years, many a North Carolina child has been threatened with being "sent to Dix Hill" if he couldn't regulate his behavior.

For ten years I lived within a stone's throw of Dix Hill, in the Boylan Heights neighborhood adjacent to the hospital grounds. In the early and mid-1900s, Boylan Heights was rather intimately connected with Dix Hospital. Dix nurses and orderlies were likely to live in the neighborhood. Halfway houses and other, less formal assisted-living arrangements eased some patients' re-entry into the community. As Boylan Heights gentrifies, the relationship becomes less intertwined. But Boylan residents value the Dix campus greatly, as nearby green space and for recreation value. A city greenway with a hiking/biking path runs along the near side of Dix Hill. I went running or dog-walking there regularly. During the summers my wife and I picked blackberries there. There is an open grassy area with a picnic shelter, and behind the shelter the hillside rises with a stand of oak trees, some of the biggest old trees in the city. On snowy days, rare though they are, people would come from far and wide to sled on Dix Hill. My children were introduced to sledding there.

It sounds awful to say your neighborhood is bordered on one side by the state mental hospital, and on another by the maximum security prison--which Boylan Heights is: Central Prison, kitty-corner from Dix Hill, is the Big House, home to North Carolina's Death Row. But I found it was no problem living next door to these places. Central Prison's security was formidable, as you'd expect, and if not for the faint sound of loudspeakers (announcing Lights Out or whatever; I could never make out any words), you could forget the prison was there. With Dix, you occasionally read of security lapses, patients wandering off, but I never worried, since the few times I'd encountered patients (supervised, out for a walk usually) they weren't threatening: quite the contrary, they tended to be blissed out of their gourds on meds.

I was very fond of the neighborhood, still sort of grieve having to move away, and I have nothing but good memories of Dix Hill. It's a significant and distinctive landmark in my adopted home city, and I'm amused by the irony of the Bedlam associations, the boogeyman function Dix Hill has for native Tar Heels. So I claimed its name for my blog.

Dorothea Dix Hospital is scheduled to be closed in two years. in 1856 Dix Hill was a good out-of-the-way site for a sanitarium. Today it is a prime piece of real estate, 300 acres with a view of the Raleigh skyline, and there is intense interest in how it's going to be developed. Dix Hill has resonance for students of public policy as well: for changes (not necessarily for the better) in mental health treatment, and as a major crossroads in Raleigh's city planning. I may have more to say about those public developments, but I wanted to write up what Dix Hill means for me.

She Used to Do the Pony, She Used to Do the Stroll

Here Be Monsters has an excellent post on the story (cough) of Jennifer Wilbanks, the runaway bride in Duluth, Georgia. What a country! What a news industry! Those were minutes and brain cells that we'll never get back.

According to HBM, one of the New York City tabloids says that in the South, an unmarried woman of Wilbanks's age is presumed to be "insane, in prison, or gay." I laughed out loud to read this. Ms. Wilbanks didn't sound desperate for a husband, from what I could tell. The wedding was going to be pretty lavish, the groom is from a prominent family in that town. Everybody around her was so happy FOR her, they just took for granted that she was happy herself. Wrong-o. Personally, I find pre-wedding jitters to be a believable and serious thing. The couple of people I've known who have honorably backed out of a church wedding after the invitations have been mailed, I rank as some of the bravest people around. I would sooner bolt at that point rather than face the music. I was sure all along that Ms. Wilbanks had bolted; it was the likeliest explanation.

What I don't quite understand is why the families were so publicity-hungry, even after the whole emergency turned out to be a big misunderstanding (to be charitable--"hoax" would be uncharitable). Why is the groom appearing on Sean Hannity, of all shows? Why is the father of the groom "forgiving" Wilbanks on ABC, NBC, and CBS simultaneously the other morning (separate taped interviews, but his face was on three channels at the same instant)? Why is the bride's uncle standing up in front of the TV cameras saying that Jennifer had some issues the family wasn't aware of? No shit, Uncle Sherlock. I think, if not shame, at least reticence is called for by the principals in this situation. Just go inside and pull the shades. The cameras will go away pretty soon.

The groom is willing to give her another chance. That doesn't make him a saint; it's what he should have done. They'll go through worse things in the course of a marriage. I hope it works out for them in the end, but in any case, the family should just make a brief written statement to the Duluth paper. Remember when we and the TV networks made utter fools out of ourselves over a jittery bride? Well, briefly, here's how that turned out...

Final thought on the subject: You know why the Duluth authorities are pissed and considering throwing the book at the bride? Not because of wasted manpower, not because she's trashy. They're embarrassed because they treated the groom, who was decent and blameless through the whole thing, as a murder suspect.

a Frank bulletin

When I posted about Tom Frank a while back (here), I remarked that Kansas didn’t really deal with electoral strategy per se. Well, Frank makes up for that deficit in the latest edition of the New York Review of Books. I don’t think he breaks any new ground in NYRB (and was Zell Miller’s conversion really much of a net gain for Bush?) but he can be forgiven for saying I told you so, because Kansas foreshadowed a lot of what happened in the ’04 presidential race.

Incidentally, Bernard Henri-Levy had an interesting take on Tom Frank (either summing Frank up or explaining him away) in an interview at the Atlantic Monthly’s website:

[Frank] wondered whether it was a surprise that so many Americans were ready to vote against their economic interests. To vote against one's economic interests means ideology—-means politics. It is the very definition of politics. If people voted only for their economic interests there would not be politics. What [Frank] was surprised by, and in a way discovered, is that America is becoming a place of strong political debate.

So Bad, It Might Be Good

Prime-time White House press conference? That's never a sign that things are going smoothly on Pennsylvania Ave. Karl Rove must have been desperate to get those pictures of Dubya and Prince Abdullah holding hands off the airwaves. I watched a little of last night's tableau. I'm sure Bush hates doing a press conference, but I can't objectively assess whether he's had a good performance and achieved his aims with the thing, or not. Most people obviously don't see what I see: a guy getting inappropriately pissed off, at a bunch of people just doing their jobs, whom he (Bush) invited there to ask him questions in the first place. Maybe the conference did him some good, I sure can't tell.

GW Bush, Donald Rumsfeld ("Are we getting our ass kicked in Iraq? You bet."), Tom Delay, Bill Frist, Das Ahnuld, John Bolton, and more of my least favorite people, have all had a bad week, and that's good. Too good to believe, and so I won't believe it yet, not until Social Security is safe and the danger of a troglodyte getting lifetime tenure on the Supreme Court is past.

Being more of a rhetoric kind of a guy than a policy kind of a guy, in the flurry of bad news for the Pubbies I've been particularly transfixed by the Beltway sleight of hand by which the GOP has tried to redefine the term "nuclear option" as a threat from the Democrats. This is even more brazen than the White House's efforts to strongarm the media into calling them Social Security "personal accounts," rather than "privatization," the commonly accepted term of long standing.

Reality is, Trent Lott coined the term "nuclear option" for the threat of the GOP's eliminating the Senate filibuster on judicial nominations, and it's been perfectly well understood as the biggest mashie in the Republicans' golf bag. But Frank Luntz must be giving them an earful how the n-phrase is killing them in the polls.

As an aside, you think the Goopers do a collective headslap thinking of the Trent Lott debacle of two years ago? That Strom Thurmond birthday toast was a killer, less for the stain of racism it put on the GOP (eh, what's one more) than for the elevation of featherweight Bill Frist to the post of Senate Majority Leader. Say what you will about Lott, he would not paint himself into a corner the way Dr. Frist consistently does.

I don't see how a meat-eating Republican can go along with this namby-pamby stuff, these word games. How can they strut around Capitol Hill like committee room tough guys, then turn into wussies when they encounter the soccer moms? Embrace your inner bully, wingers. Besides, I thought the GOP was the party of national strength. They're real comfortable talking about the actual nuclear option, yet they get all squeamish about the parliamentary one? What, have they turned into Jackson Browne all of a sudden?

Most of all, I guess I hate being instructed in proper vocabulary by Dubya and his ilk. Listen, Mr. Preznit, don't tell me how to operate the English language, and I won't tell you how to fuck up the country.