Mel Brooks

Matthew Yglesias says of Jonah Goldberg:

… holding captives in secret where they’re hung by shackles from the ceiling and occasionally beaten to death is fine by him, but efforts to curb smoking are “liberal fascism.” And now this line of thinking seems to have completely taken over the right.


The difference: dark foreigners are hung from ceilings, whereas white Americans are kept from smoking. Which reminds me of what Mel Brooks said about stepping into a manhole versus getting a paper cut: if the first happens to you, it’s comedy; if the second happens to me, it’s tragedy.
(I think the Brooks quote was about cutting your finger, not specifically a paper cut, but it’s the same idea.)
update,  TPM quotes a reader who jogged by the big gathering of angry people in Washington today:

Interestingly not a lot of American flags but a lot of other flags including the yellow don’t tread on me flag. 

I had a similar thought when I saw a photo of one of the demonstrators, a guy carrying a modified American flag: the old 13-stars-in-a-circle flag but with a “II” in the middle to indicate that the Tea Party movement is like the second American Revolution. Basically, an American flag wasn’t good enough for this guy; he wouldn’t settle until the flag had been made into an emblem of the Tea Party movement.
I’m indifferent to flags unless they represent something I find hateful (the usual suspects: Third Reich, Confederacy). But I think it’s worth noticing that you can no longer predict what flag the flag wavers will be waving. For decades we’ve heard them talk about America-love as the one supreme virtue, and about the American flag as the supreme expression of this virtue, and now their love has frittered itself away. These days they’re into novelty items. That’s a big change.
I don’t claim to know the reason, though I guess many of my fellow liberals would point to the election of a black president; my preferred explanation, for which I have no evidence, is just the schlockification and t-shirt-ization of modern life. 
Another TMP reader is quoted:

Some in the crowd appeared to be low functioning zealots suffering from serious mental illness and/or undisguised racial hatred. However, most of the people who marched by my vantage point appeared to be rather earnest but misled members of the lower middle class who were just regurgitating Fox News memes concerning imagined threats to America.


Okay — lunatics and dumb people. But where are the venal con men

A reason to get married

If my wife bought me a magazine, I could write stuff like this:

He’s tall, trim, with shaved head, a confident demeanor, wearing a dark turtleneck, kind ‘a funny and Yale Law School. Cool. Co-o-o-l. Or maybe even wow!

Then again I get to blog about people who played redshirts on Star Trek 40 years ago, so the hell with it.
(Yeah, I heard he sold the magazine, but apparently on terms that allow him to continue driveling. update, David Weman says in Comments that Peretz has now bought the magazine back. So, okay then.)

You talking about Chappaquidick, son?

Huck memorializes Ted Kennedy:

He would be a very fortunate man if his heroic last few months were what future generations remember him most for.

Ed Kilgore at TNR is mad because of what Huck alleges in the runup to that sentence, namely that President Obama wants sick old people like Ted Kennedy to go home and die so the government won’t have to pay for their operations. 
All right, but about my favorite sentence. Huck is gifted with words and has a good churchgoer’s streak of cattiness, so I suspect that the remark quoted above was designed to bounce off the one Ted Kennedy memory that his audience holds dear above all others.

Pauline Kael and Charles Murray


She’s the stooge for a rhetorical gimmick that is one of the right’s second-level favorites. Charles Murray hauled the gimmick out during a recent discussion when he referred to “Pauline Kael Syndrome.” The idea is that she was the movie critic for The New Yorker, so therefore in 1972 (the year of Nixon’s great landslide) she must have said the following:


“How can Nixon have won? No one I knew voted for him”


But she didn’t. She said the following:

“I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.” 


“Sort of the same thing, I know,” Charles Murray says hopefully. Sort of exactly not. Yes, either way you get somebody who doesn’t know too many people who voted for Nixon. But in the true quote, she realizes that this is not a normal state of affairs. In the doctored quote, the one the right has been batting around all these years, she’s living in a fool’s paradise — “How could Nixon have won?” She comes across as ditzy and conceited, off in her own little world of insular vanity. Which pretty much sums up the right’s view of liberals and “cultural elites.” As a gimmick Kael Syndrome is only one item amongst the right’s arsenal, but the gag grows from a key element of their world view. 

I know the true text of the quote because Murray was good enough to quote and cite Prof. John Pitney, who sent him an email to straighten him out.

Next-to-last point: Kael did a lot of sensing of Middle America while she sat in theaters and screening rooms; I always liked that side of her, and the baiting of respectable liberal opinion. In some cases I think she was on to something, in some cases it was just fun to watch her. But that business cut no ice with anyone who wasn’t reading The New Yorker. For all the rest of the world knew or cared, Kael might as well have been some well-meaning soul with big earrings and a long turquoise scarf.

To sum up. Anybody who knows anything about Kael knows that she realized the world was not the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She spent decades reminding the Upper West Side of this fact. Of course, most people don’t know much about Kael, but they’re willing not to talk about her. The exceptions are either undergrad film students or fellows of the American Enterprise Institute.

So, reflecting on Charles Murray and the rockhard integrity of his mental processes, I will now introduce my final point:

If you’re going to quote somebody — especially to make a point about that person— you ought to know something about her. 

This is pretty good

Another phishing mail. I like the detail, and the “k” on Kasper.

Dear G-mail user,
Your e-mail has emerged as a winner of £500,000.00 GBP (Five hundred
thousand British Pounds) in our on-going Google Promotion. Your Winning
details are as follows: Computer Generated Profile Numbers
(CGPN):7-22-71-00-66-12, Ticket number: 00869575733664, Serial
numbers:/BTD/8070447706/06, Lucky numbers: 12-12-23-35-40-41(12). Contact
Mr Graham Benfield, for more details through the contact below:
Mr Graham Benfield,

Email: [ redacted]@gmail.com

Sincerely,

Mr. Kasper Simpson.

Overheard: the power of Frank Miller

It’s the end of summer and the students are back, and tonight packs of them are ranging up and down St-Laurent Blvd, making noise outside the cafes and bars. So are white tow trucks with the lights going on top of their cabs, because for some reason each truck has three yellow alarm lights planted up there in a row, like sirens. Either the sirens or the trucks’ horns are making a racket. I don’t know what any of this is about.  

One bunch of kids just passed, maybe 20 in all, all of them wearing white t-shirts with something on them I can’t see. Girls mainly, but with the boys making the most noise and doing some chant leading.
They actually tried a call-and-response of “What is your profession?” The response wasn’t much, but the call was formidable: the boys put some air into it. Beats me what the response could have been: not “Spartans,” since no teams by that name are found around here. McGill’s football team is the Redmen, but now I say the hell w/ it. [ update, Actually the response in 300 is “warriors,” isn’t it? Maybe that’s what the kids tried to say. ]

Great first sentences



The Providence Journal flags its corner of the ongoing story that is Sarah Palin. (I broke off the second sentence and stuck in “etc.”)

update, Last I heard, the Senate Finance Committee was not going to allow the death-counseling clause to stay in the bill, reason being the scare about “death panels,” which, as I understand it, was started by Sarah Palin with a Facebook post. Taken all in all, I believe this could be called driving the debate. Not bad for somebody I say is a wash-up.

On the other hand … this health care debate is so off-balance it seems like anyone can land a punch against the Democrats. Which isn’t good news either.

update 2, When the conventional wisdom sucker-punches you.  Joe Klein slips in this by-the-way toward the end of his new column: “it was government action — by both Obama and, yes, George W. Bush — that prevented a reprise of the Great Depression.”

So we’re agreed that the fall ’08 situation really was that bad — that, pre-TARP, the economy was heading for cardiac arrest? Don’t want to challenge Klein, just checking. It’s kind of a scary thing to face up to, even in retrospect. How glad I am to be invested in a mutual fund.

update 3, Arthur Frommer is the nervous type. He sums up the Arizona situation: “According to the Phoenix, Arizona, police, people with guns including assault rifles do not need permits in Arizona, but can simply carry such weapons with them, openly and brazenly, when they gather to protest a speaker at a public event.” It just reels the fucking mind. (Sorry, Uland, but this is a preoccupation I have.) update 4, Talk about wedge issues. Open-carry-for-Obama may be up there with NAMBLA as an “I get off the bus now” moment for the general population. There are some things that no idea can justify.

update 5, My senator is five years younger than me.