I am helping set up for an art show. Right now I'm just thumbtacking the names of pieces up next to the art, and also standing on very tall ladders to put up decorations. We are still several hours from the fun and free booze—yet it is already better than the entire week at work put together.

If you're in D.C. and reading this in time—two admittedly unlikely propositions—get yourself down to the Warehouse for Arty Gras: 14 artists from New Orleans raising money. We're serving a drink called a Hurricane. I've been assured that it's tasteful.

I'll be here, unless I fall off a very tall ladder.

Update: One of the artists is a woman named Jan Arringo, who fled New York City after 9/11 and, naturally, moved to New Orleans.

that I had an imagination good enough to make this up: I just received an e-mail that contained the phrase:

> IF YOU LOVE JESUS, SEND
> THIS TO AT LEAST 10 PEOPLE, INCLUDING
> THE PERSON WHO SENT IT TO YOU!

Has Christ jumped the shark?

Over at the Corner, Senator Byrd is catching some flack for his opposition to renewing the Patriot Act. He was for it before he was against it, you see. Republican op Tim Chapman lets loose:

Byrd did not support the law only in 2001... He supported the anti-terror measure just a few months ago as well when it was passed by unanimous consent. So he voted for it—twice—before he is going to vote against it.

This new found strain of the John Kerry virus that is infecting the West Virginian...is sure not to sit well with the West Virginia voters this November.

Senator Byrd is a bit more willing to admit his mistakes than most people. Maybe it’s because his mistakes have been so much more heinous than any other living senator. Maybe he’s just too old and too incumbent to care.

Either way, whenever someone shouts 'flip-flopper!' like that, I flash back to the town hall Bush-Kerry debate, when a woman from the mid-west asked President Bush to name a few mistakes he wished he could go back and correct. Bush moved right into defending the War on Terror. Aside from an oblique reference to wishing he’d fired Richard Clarke, he didn’t admit to a single specific mistake. And he wasn’t lying—he didn’t say he never made mistakes—or even being particularly misleading. In fact, he was following one of the cardinal rules of image politics: don’t admit your mistakes, don’t change your mind, and don’t be wrong.

If you admit your mistakes, people will think you’re someone who makes mistakes and they won’t vote for you. If you change your mind, people will think you’re someone who changes his mind and they won’t vote for you. If you ever say, 'I was wrong,' people will think you’re wrong and they won’t vote for you.

If you change your mind about an important piece of legislation, you’ve caught the John Kerry virus, quite possibly a terminal case.

This sort of image politics isn’t just practiced by Tim Chapman: it’s SOP for virtually every hack on both sides of the aisle. But it’s more than just low-brow politics. The certainty of facing attack for changing your mind—something reasonable people do every day—is yet another of the humiliating degradations we heap upon anyone with the temerity to run for office. It’s one of the things that makes the process of getting elected and governing so intolerable, virtually no reasonable person would consider running for anything.

So you think you can contribute to public life in this country. Are you an intelligent and reasonable person? Then Karl Rove and Tim Chapman (or, if you happen to be a republican, Paul Begala and Daily Kos) are going say you’re diseased!

Before I went to Salt Lake, I spent a week in a class at the USDA Grad School called "Human Resources for Administrative Professionals." Coupled with "Processing Personnel Actions," my college transcript is lookin' real pretty.

Oh, well. I have been picking up a few bits of pieces of useful knowledge. This a real place:

China Lake is a small town in the southern California desert, fifty miles from the nearest interstate or railroad. The townspeople are a close knit community, most of whom diligently research ways to make the Sidewinder air-to-air missile more deadly.

China Lake is famous among government payroll specialists for being the first government facility to try something called "pay banding" back in 1980. That's more fame than you might think. It's just not the kind that does anything for the tourist trade.

Who says you never learn anything useful working in Human Resources?

A few months ago there was a decently large celebration to celebrate the opening of an Olive Garden.

The White House's Katrina Response report bugs me. Reuters reports that "the Pentagon should have a clearer role in dealing with disasters such as Hurricane Katrina."

Maybe it's just a knee-jerk reaction from a instinctual anti-military liberal, but come on, guys. It is possible for the federal government to efficiently and effectively coordinate a large interagency, interstate operation. The National Interagency Fire Center in Boise is the premier example. And the disaster that was post-Katrina FEMA says more about the wisdom of putting inexperienced political appointees in charge of such an important agency than about the need to replace said agency with the 82nd Airborne.

To put it another way, I'm afraid Elizabeth Dole's Inaugural Address will sound like this:

And I'd like to thank the men and women of America's armed forces, who fight to defend this nation from it's enemies; who fight to defend this nation from natural disasters; who fight to defend this nation from criminals and gangsters; who fight to defend our roads and trains from the enemy of a lack of maintenance...

Marvel at vast, untamed swaths of the mental terrain of John Podhoretz and Jonah Goldberg:

Podhoretz:
Jonah, I've read Rod's remarkable book [Crunchy Cons by Rod Dreher. Crunchy cons are, at their best, Father Mulcahy from M*A*S*H; at their worst, Reverend Camden from Seventh Heaven.], and I have to say, like any successful polemic-manifesto, it anticipates and tries to answer many of the objections you have raised and will raise to it. Crunchiness aside, Crunchy Cons is the first popular work of our time to take up the cudgel for the Old Right and its anti-Marxist critique of capitalism -- and what's most promising and hopeful about it is that Rod does so without the repugnant anti-republican, pro-Confederate and anti-Semitic strains that properly consigned the Old Right to the ash-heap of history. That being said, Rod's great problem is that, like any effort to find a more authentic and pure way of living, Crunchy Conservatism might become a haven for purists who adopt it because they want to live a Great Experiment -- making them little different from ideological extremists of every bent. It also provides a big-tent excuse for "sanctimommy" parenting, which is not so much about raising your own kids as you see fit but more about finding other mothers and fathers wanting because they're not as austere and controlling as you are. There's a lot of sanctimommying over at the Crunchy Con blog. And don't get me started on the politician Rod praises at the end of his book and for what reason. I won't tell you who it is, Jonah. You'll have to find out on your own and get really, really annoyed. Consider it a Crunchy Con cliffhanger!

Goldberg:
JPod - Even in the early pages I get the sense that Rod was asking himself something like "What will Jonah say about this?" And I do like his effort to conjure some of the Old Right (though we can have an argument about whether Russell Kirk is really a good representative of the Old Right as Rod seems to be suggesting. I've always read Old Right to describe 1930s conservatism, not 1950s conservatism). But if you read the CCblog or Rod's introduction, you will find several examples of Crunchy Con being used synonymously with Old Right, which simply strikes me as an unsustainable position -- no matter which Old Right you have in mind. My guess is that Russell Kirk put on a tie before he brushed his teeth in the morning. From my reading, Caleb Stegall seems to understand that putting a "hippie gloss" (his words) on traditional conservatism is more of a distraction than a contribution. After all, hippieness is often just simply another form of consumerism with political pretension.

Also, just as a point of clarification, what exactly do you mean when you say the Old Right believed in "repugnant" anti-republicanism? I'm not saying I disagree but small "r" republican can mean different things to different people, including among members of the Old Right.

Podhoretz:
Jonah, by using that phrase I was actually referring to the hostility to American-style democracy -- the frank elitism that is probably more a feature of the sort of conservatism espoused by T.S. Eliot and Yeats but was certainly a feature of, say, Allen Tate's thinking. As for Russell Kirk's tie, that's purely a generational thing. My father would not go out of the house tieless even on the weekends when I was a kid, lest he run into someone on the street.

Goldberg:
JPod - Fair enough on anti-republicanism, though I'm sure someone has a problem with it (someone always does).

As for ties, I agree it's a generational thing, but it's not merely a generational thing.

I think Kirk would probably agree: this wasn't just fashionableness. People wore ties and dressed properly at public events not just in our parents' generation but for several generations. I remember when I was a kid people still got dressed-up to go on airplanes. And if you look at pictures of old baseball games, everyone was wearing a tie.

I could take almost every quote and author in the supposedly Crunchy Con oeuvre and make what I think would be a much, much stronger case that instead of putting on hippie clothing a true "crunchy con" should put on a tie and jacket. Rod talks in his opening pages about the comfort his birkenstocks provide and makes it sound like a virtue that he donned them. But Rod's whole argument is that the comfort and ease our consumer culture brings is the enemy of The Good Path.

Rod talks often and eloquently about the permanent things, of custom and tradition, but when they collide with comfortable open toed shoes and loose fitting shirts, guess which one gets defenestrated?

In other words one of the things that has contributed to a declining sense of community is precisely what Rod now celebrates. A common culture where everyone is inconvenienced equally is far more in keeping with the spirit of Russell Kirk than a culture in which everyone indulges in sartorial rebelliousness and self-satisfaction.

Schools impose uniforms, for example, not to make everybody look like a country club Republican but to make poor kids and rich kids feel just a little bit more like equals.

Man, oh man, could I go on but I really must stop myself for now.

Podhoretz:
Jonah, it's true that people used to dress up to go on airplanes. But so what? Why on earth should people have dressed up to go on airplanes? The formality of previous generations was a social norm and therefore a convention. I suppose it had meaning in the sense that it was a way for people to look as much like adults as possible and that our casual-attired ways are an indication of the perpetual pursuit of youth. But the last thing you can say of the Crunchy Cons -- of whom I must say I am most emphatically not one -- is that they are acting like children. They're trying to live a more serious life. Rod's goal isn't to live a more sober life. It's to live a more sacramental life, to infuse the everyday with holiness.

Goldberg:
JP- Of course dressing appropriately is a social convention. But since when is it a more authentic form of conservatism to disdain social convention? You could -- and I would -- make the case that dressing appropriately is part of good manners. You wouldn't go to a funeral in shorts and a tank top, for example. Of course, it's not just clothes. My guess is Russell Kirk would be horrified by public breastfeeding.

Customs, manners, social conventions: this is the sinew and bone of civilization. Rod seems to be in the business of picking and choosing when convenient. Customs he likes: Crunchy. Customs he doesn't: "mainstream conservative" or "mainstream liberal." This will not do.

Here's something for the guys at the CCBlog to debate: birkenstocks are to culture what broken windows are to crime.


Podhoretz:
From a reader:

Oh I LOVE this discussion. I have on my wall at home a framed collection of antique mug shots taken around the turn of the century. Two pickpockets, one vagrant, one fellow arrested for "suspicious behavior," one peeping Tom, and fellow was running a numbers racket. Every one of them is wearing a suit and tie, and three are sporting hats. These fellows weren’t products of a consumer culture; they were from the street at a time when very few people in society—let alone the bottom rung—had any money. It’s only since the country has grown so supremely wealthy that the rich have taken to adorn themselves with rags purchased at Neiman Marcus for exorbitant sums.
As you know, Theodore Dalrymple writes about this all the time. What must it mean to some working in a factory in rural China who keeps what few clothes they have immaculate to go to work and shred a perfectly good pair of jeans for the racks at Bloomingdales? TD was recently interviewed by a Dutch newspaper correspondent and the subject of tattooing came up. Says Dalrymple, "it represented a mass downward cultural and social aspiration, since everyone understood that tattooing had a traditional association with low social class and, above all, with aggression and criminality. It was, in effect, a visible symbol of the greatest, though totally ersatz, virtue of our time: an inclusive unwillingness to make judgments of morality or value."

What struck Dalrymple about this well-dressed, well-spoken interviewer was how indifferent he was to the tattooing trend. The interviewer simply said that it was legal and that even Dalrymple didn’t believe it should be illegal, so why give it a second thought? "What I found so odd about the correspondent were his perfect manners and refined tastes. But so little confidence did he have in the value of the things that he valued that he seemed indifferent to the mechanism of their disappearance or destruction. This is the way civilization ends: not with a bang but a whimper."

Here’s the whole thing: http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_4_diarist.html

Podhoretz:
Okay, Jonah, look down at your neck: Is there a tie there? No fair saying there is if this is a day you're going on TV or giving a speech...

Goldberg:
John - Absolutely not. I spend most of my time in rags with Kleenex boxes on my feet like Howard Hughes. But I'm not the one extrapolating from my consumer and sartorial choices a political philosophy and movement. My definition of ideological conservatism is that it is only a partial philosophy of life, with very little to say about what to wear or what to eat. I don't believe the personal is necessarily political. In the context of this conversation, what I'm wearing is only relevant if one buys into the assumptions of Rod's paradigm which, I think it is obvious to everyone, I am not doing. Yes, I know there are objections to be raised about this point, but I'm going to keep my powder dry and leave it there.

Podhoretz:
Hey, you brought up the tie thing! And then you made it sound as though sartorial choices were an ideological matter by talking about Russell Kirk's wardrobe! And by the way, considering that Russell Kirk once said people like me think Tel Aviv is America's capital, I hope his stinking ties had ketchup stains all over them.

Goldberg:
Yes I brought up Kirk and ties, but solely to rebut Rod's insinuation that Russell Kirk of all people was the Ur-Crunchy Con and to address your praise of Rod as reviving the Old Right. Personally, I've never been an enormous fan of Kirk's, though I respect his contributions to conservatism. Kirk-o-philia is Miller's bag. I'm much more of a Hayekian.

...

My wife just yelled down the stairs (I work in the basement): "You and Pod have to stop! Nobody even knows what you're arguing about!"

So there you have it.

I'm in the main concourse of the Minneapolis St Paul airport. I've been re-booked twice this morning, but I have picked up another $300 airline voucher, bringing my total to $600. A guy who's been on the same two flights as me actually left LaGuardia the day before yesterday; he's up to $900 now, and I'm not sure he remembers where he's supposed to be going this weekend. Maybe he'll end up back where he started in a day or two, with a couple grand. It'll be the financial equivalent of a really good trip to Vegas and the spiritual equivalent of Waiting for Godot.

They're giving an announcement about why my last flight was delayed. Apparently the cargo doors were frozen open. You know, the only unpleasant part of being stuck overnight in Minneapolis is that my jacket was not.

There's a cute guy sitting across from me. (It's a flight to Salt Lake, so of course there are several cute guys.) He's reading a book and looking smart-sexy. A cute guy in an airport reading a book looks smart-sexy. A cute guy in an airport clicking away on his powerbook just looks like a yuppie schmuck. So I'm going to stop looking like a yuppie schmuck, pull out the copy of Hendrick Hertzberg's collected essays I've been working on, and commence with the creating an illusion of intelligence that is my great talent in life.

If I had made fun of Dick Cheney for shooting a major campaign contributor—which I haven't—I would take it all back now. Accidents happen, especially when you're playing with guns. And as Jonah Goldberg writes, "Unless we hear something new, or if Cheney shoots himself in the foot (heh), this story remains all human interest and no politics." So lets talk some real politics: our U.N. Ambassador, John Bolton, has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Apparently a former deputy prime minister of Sweden admired Bolton's anti-proliferation work. It is, of course, almost universally acknowledged that the best thing John Bolton ever did at the State Department's non-proliferation desk was, y'kno, leave. I am not making a joke here—this nomination qualifies as one, and a rather twisted one at that.

I just got an e-mail that ended with

P.S. Did you hear that Dick Cheney shot someone?

To avoid mailing delays, please update your mailing address with the Armenian Finance Ministry.

This morning I wrote that on an envelope, bringing the total number of interesting things I have written as part of my job, after almost a year, to a grand total of exactly one. Or possibly zero, if you don't care about the Armenians.

It's really rather depressing. Other people get to write interesting things. Just this week, The Onion re-printed a fascinating contemporary account of the Yalta Conference:

With the exception of Churchill's loud snoring, the nap proceeded smoothly until Stalin woke up screaming, waking the President and Prime Minister with a start. Both Churchill and Roosevelt attempted to calm the Soviet Premier, who had had a nightmare about wild gorillas surrounding him.

"It sounded like a very frightening dream," Roosevelt said. "To make him feel better, we agreed to let him take control of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria and Eastern Germany. That seemed to make him rest more easily."

Me, I'm just sitting here, on my ass, writing uninteresting things like, "I can take the pie charts home with me this weekend and edit them on my Mac. We can print out the reports on Monday." At lunch I read some more of Hendrik Hertzberg's collected essays. He's been writing interesting things since 1966!

On my way up to the office this morning, I wondered where people stand when they're alone on an elevator. When you have a group of people in an elevator, where they stand depends on how many people are in the group: two people tend to stand on opposite ends of the elevator; three will make a sort of scalene triangle; four or more start lining up in formation. But where do people stand when they're alone on an elevator?

There are philosophical implications to that question. But I prefer to think of it as subject of behavioral science inquiry. Is there something about the layout of an elevator—tall, square; single egress— that causes us to tend to stand in a certain place? Does where people stand reflect their personality? Do poor people stand in a different place from rich people? Do Japanese stand in a different place from Latinos? And what about the gays?

Someone should get ahold of security cameras from different elevators and do a study. The impact on psychology could be enormous.

Personally, I tend to move around, talk to myself, and jump up and down for no apparent reason.

I'm in the middle of a training session right now. It's a new database to handle letters to the Department of Agriculture from Senators, Presidents, and other inflated egos. No big deal.

We're using example letters: just old letters our instructor pulled out of a file somewhere. One of the students from another staff was making jokes about her letter: it was terribly written. 'Regarding' where it should read 'because.'

And I just thought it was pretty damn cool to be in a room that's 95% women and more than half black—two of the traditionally least educated groups of people in America—and see everyone making fun of people with poor grammar skills. Feeling good.

Compared to the number of people who have been killed over silly things—cartoons, soccer matches, Jesus—it's almost encouraging to see people dying because they're too eager to vote. I mean, not really—but being slightly less bad is still progress. Especially in Haiti:

Chaos, Confusion on Election Day


Haitians show off their ID cards in line at a voting station.

Thousands of people took to the streets of Port-au-Prince today, some to vote and others to protest that they couldn't. Many polling stations opened hours late and others were without the proper paperwork, while some ballot registrations were sent to precincts miles away. The largest show of frustration came in [front-runner and former President Rene] Preval's stronghold of Cite Soleil, where the election commission had barred polling stations.

It's an important story, so naturally it's been getting virtually no coverage up until now. In today's Washington Post, Haiti was on page A-15. A-15! A half-page special about what it's like to be a sophomore in high school made A-11, and a story about a judge in Washington State who called for a pro-seesaw cheer at a pre-superbly sentencing hearing made A-7. Hey, I know: let's add a little color to that last one. Let's call up Jean-Claude dabbler and ask if he thinks it was appropriate for a judge to cheer the seesaw!

Update: That should read "pro-Seahawks cheer," not "pro-seesaw." It should also read "Jean-Claude Duvalier," not "dabbler." Not that I'm accusing anyone of being anti-seesaw (except perhaps Jean-Claude dabbler) I respect our great American playground equipment traditions. I'm just saying, you should be careful with your spell check. You never know where it might lead.

I have found the geekiest thing in the universe. It's geekier than the Star Trek wiki. It's geekier than Penny Arcade! It's the "Which Federal Rule of Civil Procedure Are You?" quiz! Holy Bat Pancakes!

YOU ARE 28 UNITED STATES CODE SECTION 1332!

You are not a Federal Rule of Civil Procedure at all: you're the statute that allows the federal district courts to hear diversity of citizenship actions! You were drafted with the idea that an out-of-state party may be unduly prejudiced by appearing in a foreign state. Sometimes people may think that you're strange, and they try to minimalize your effects by requiring an amount in controversy and by being especially strict on the requirements for diversity. Also, attorneys often use you for "forum shopping" and other undesirable behavior. But there's no getting around the fact that you're so darned loveable! Your delightful quirkiness entertains friends and law professors alike, and although others may grumble about your eccentricities behind your back, they're always talking about you, so you must be doing something right. Let's face it, the world could use a few more 28 USC 1332's!

Take note, Emily, Queen of the Unusual Internet Quiz (like this one): I don't know what Rule of Civil Procedure you are, but I'll bet large amounts of money you aren't anything in Title V!


Because Title V is boring. It's the administrative personnel stuff, and I had to study parts of it for work. It's the most boring title in the Code of Federal Regulations, and you know that's stiff competition. The only interesting title is Title IX, which is actually a John LeCarre novel that Dennis Hastert liked so much, he slipped it into the '03 defense appropriations bill.

Some points about television:

• My roommate has acquired one, which means I now have access to television.
• This is unfortunate. I just walked into the living room and watched a few moments of the Tyra Banks talk show, creatively entitled Tyra. Now, there is something in television called a "product placement." The first words out of Tyra's mouth are an excellent example:

  Hey everyone! [audience cheers] Do you all like my new Addidas© Vintage™? [gestures to clothing; audience cheers] They're great. Now on today's show we've got the contestants from the reality show sensation The Biggest Loser with us...

• My friend Cara has much better taste in TV. She lent me a Japanese show called Full Metal Panic, which is the ultimate anime teenage marketing ploy with both 16-year-old schoolgirls who have boy trouble and giant battle robots who have trouble...from other giant battle robots. That's right, both of 'em!
• Even a for 14-year-olds only show like Full Metal Panic makes room for unflattering commentary on American foreign policy:
  

I'm getting more and more involved in my Japanese class. It's quite a shock to reacquaint myself with the sheer amount of work it takes to learn something completely new. I'm having trouble with hiragana, the main Japanese phonetic alphabet (they have two, plus a system of pictograms!) and can't for the life of me memorize simple numbers.

On the plus side, I have discovered the single most fun time of day to say in Japanese: 5:00 PM, or gogo go-ji. Go ahead, say it a couple times. Isn't that fun?

And there's a continual motivation: Tokyo is home to a neighborhood called Kanda. Kanda has 160 bookstores. 160! That's a number I can remember. It's ichi... um... ichi something zero. Damn it.

A few months ago a paper in Denmark called Jyllands Posten published 12 cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammed, despite the fact that the Koran forbids depictions of said prophet. A firestorm was set off, as the Daily Mail reports:

PARIS -- After fiery protests in the Middle East, a near-total Arab boycott of Danish products, a storm of diplomatic protests and death threats against its journalists, a Copenhagen-based newspaper apologized for publishing provocative caricatures of Islam's Prophet, Mohammed...

When a conservative Norwegian magazine reprinted the cartoons early last month, though, the issue took on new life. Anger suddenly reverberated across the Middle East, with condemnation of Denmark and Norway coming from the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and Arab governments.

Naturally, the first thing I wanted to do was see the cartoons. The Daily Mail article described them as "drawn by different artists who portrayed Mohammed in the same broad strokes that many Western newspapers and magazines have come to use as shorthand for terrorists."

A couple of the cartoons are exactly that. For example:

Way to go, Kurt Westergaard. On the other hand, Poul Erik Poulsen's caricature was hardly a caricature:

Wow, doesn't the prophet look bloodthirsty? And then there's Bob Katzennelson—it wasn't Muhammed his cartoon was taking a shot at:

So those are the cartoons that have sparked massive boycotts, protests, bomb threats, recalled diplomats...this is what prompted Bill Clinton himself to wonder "Are we heading to replace anti-Semitism with anti-Islam?" This!

Offensive? Maybe. A violation of Koranic by-laws? Sure. But the new Mein Kampf? What the hell?

We know—know—that this doesn't happen when people make fun of Jesus; nor when people violate the Second Commandment. So if our right to free speech supersedes the highly unlikely claims of a 2,000-year-old book, why in Allah's name is it subservient to the equally dubious restrictions in a 1,400-year-old sequel?

More evidence the State of the Union was mediocre at best: two-thirds of tonight's posts at the conservative magazine National Review's blog haven't even been about the speech. They've been about Maryland Governor Tim Kaine's response, and specifically about his eyebrow. Or as Peter David describes it, "Spock on crack."

So NOW I'm wishing I had a TV.