June

I enjoy reading Mitch Berg's Shot in the Dark blog. I followed his bout of underemployment and his more recent success. I can relate, having been underemployed myself for a while. I responded to an Internet ad for a freelance writer with "deep technical experience" and I was selected as one of four writers on a long-term project for a well-known tech company. But there have been delays getting going. Then this morning I got a call from the ad agency where I used to work. They want a part-time copywriter to work on a quasi-technical project that will also last a few months. I can do some of the work at home. Hallelujah! When the other project starts, I can handle both, I figure.

Last Thursday through Saturday, I attended the annual conference of the American Chesterton Society, at the University of St. Thomas. It was wonderful, and I only regret not going to earlier conferences. There were interesting talks on Chesterton and Orwell, Chesteron and Sigrid Undset, Chesterton and E.F. Schumacher, to name a few. But the best thing was the great vibe: people of all ages, from high-school kids taking notes (!) at the talks, up to charming gents in their 80s, and everyone having a good time in a mellow, good-humored way. One custom I particularly enjoyed: beer and wine are free, while bottled water is $1 apiece.

Sunday, I watched the U.S. Open. It was great to see a chubby chain smoker win. The television crew seemed a little unsure of how to handle camera shots showing Angel Cabrera lighting up, but they seemed to decide to go with it, noting at one point that after a good holw, it seemed like a good time for a smoke. They also took note of pictures showing Jack Nicklaus puffing away 45 years earlier when the zopen was held at the same course. What was left unsaid was the sea change in governmental and public atitudes toward smoking that has taken place in the meantime. But they couldn't disparage one of the leaders in the tournament. It was fun to watch.

Posted by Finn MacCool

Blogs and Reading Groups

James Lileks has taken over the buzz.mn blog of the Strib. He overwhelms the other posters by sheer volume, breadth of subject matter, and wit.

The prolific bloggers like Instapundit and Lileks and Captain Ed remind me of the Victorian novelists in their productivity--lots of quality stuff all the time. Trollope, one of my favorite Victorians, wrote every day before going to work at the Post Office, cranking out five hundred words or so each time. He made the mistake of telling us about his output in his autobiography, which did not endear him to the Flaubertian school of critics. Anyway, there is a Victorian work ethic with these bloggers that is an inspiration.

I have been posting again to Dickens and Trollope reading lists on Yahoo. There is one crabby professor from George Mason who forced me off a different Trollope list that she owned because I had the temerity to quote George Will quoting Trollope. That was beyond the pale to her wway of thinking. Other than that individual, I enjoy these reading groups very much. They are mostly composed of not academic specialists, just enthusiasts.

One person I recall who also ran afoul of this crabby professor was a guy named R.J. Keefe. He has a number of blogs, and on one he reviews the book reviews in the New York Times Sunday book section. He does not appear to have or need gainful employment, signing himself R.J. Keefe, gent., of Yorkville, New York. I see that he has a link to the professor, so they must have patched up their relationship.

Posted by Finn MacCool

My Father's Oldsmobile

I noticed a Olds Bravada parked on the street yesterday, the discontinued SUV from the discontinued badge of Olds. It reminded me of the ad campaign from the 90's, "It's not your father's Oldsmobile." One of the TV ads in the campaign featured a grandson of Ernest Hemingway, and the ad somehow linked the Bravada to the novel "Across the River and Into the Trees." I loved that ad. It had a cool-looking guy (actually, he looked a lot like Papa Hemingway). It had an organic connection to offroading; you could take your Bravada across a river and into some woods, although of course almost noone really does. It made me think of the line from the novel, something like "He closed the car door quickly and well," which is a delicously appropriate parody of Hemingway's style, by the master himself. It made me think how much I liked "A Moveable Feast."

I also thought about my father's Oldsmobile. As it happens, my father actually did have an Olds. I think it was a 1955, which we had after the 1952 Buick and before the 1959 Ford wagon. With Dad at the wheel, an unlit Pall Mall hanging from his lip, the family took the Olds across the country in 1957, an epic journey that lives in our memory. So the ad campaign was right on target as far as we were concerned. But on the other hand, wasn't "Rocket 88" one of the early rock tunes? Wasn't that a love song to a powerful V-8 engine? How come Olds didn't come to have the cachet of, say, the '55 Chevy? Too bourgeois maybe. Too close to Buick to be cool.

Speaking of ads with literary associations, the Nissan Murano ran a series of spots featuring "on road adventures," which I thought were conceptually clever. People don't really take their SUVs off road. They buy them for safety and capacity. So the ads showed people doing cool on-road-oriented activities, e.g., buying a cello in a used-instrument shop, or hunting down a first-edition Vonnegut and having the great good fortune to run into Kurt himself, so he could autograph your new purchase. The tone of those ads was pitch-perfect. All of us boomers who grew up with Vonnegut were hit where we lived, unless we had outgrown our youthful enthusiasm, which I had. But the whole idea of flasttering the reader or viewer was great: we know you are the kind of person who hunts down great cellos and first editions. Yea, right. We know that's BS. but we love it anyway.
Posted by Finn MacCool

A Golden Age?

I was thinking how much I enjoy reading blogs. They consitute a golden age of writing and argument, instantly available and free. Part of the pleasure is iliterary--the joy of well-turned phrases. In the phrasemaking department, Lileks writes at a consistently high level. Today, he tackles his Strib colleague Nick Coleman on gasoline prices, and puts in Coleman's mouth some comical bits of inarticulate rage. Last year he described the new Walker Art Center as looking like an "angry robot god." I have used Bleats in my classes to illustrate similes and metaphors.

But the pleasure is also that of argumentation. What can match the back-and-forth of the writers on The Corner, for instance, or the logic of a Eugene Volokh? (Law professors in general make good bloggers.) Who combines humor and logic and fact so well as Tom Maguire on Plamegate or the Duke lacrosse miscarriage of justice? Mark Steyn, of course, is sui generis, although I must say I like him and Lileks better in print than on Hugh Hewitt. Writing gives you the chance to edit and polish. The mots tend to be more juste, less adulterated by the exigencies of the moment.

The other great benefit of blogs is that they provide a perspective usually missing from the MSM. Here are two current examples. The New Yorker this week has a Talk of the Town piece on Rachel Carson. It lambastes the Bush administration for gutting environmental regulations, to favor rapacious corporate interests. But the piece avoids all mention of the great debate about "Silent Spring" and DDT, and how the ban on its use has cost a great number of lives in poor countries because of the resurgence of malaria. Blogs have made the argument that Rachel Carson has indirectly been responsible for thousands of preventable deaths.

The other example concerns another Rachel, the U.S. Attorny for Minnesota, Rachel Paulose. The Pioneer Press today breathlessly reported that Monica Goodling admitted to considering party affiliation in the selection of Paulose. The PP is shocked, shocked to discover politics playing a role in political appointments. But as Powerline noted, there may have been a U.S. attorney appointed by a president of the opposite party, but it's not how things are done usually. More proof that the center-right blogosphere serves as a welcome counterpoint to MSM bias.

Posted by Finn MacCool

Demise of the Right?

The New York Times last Sunday had a big article on "The Right" and its possible demise. Has the paper ever run a piece on the possible demise of the left? I don't think so.

The terms left and right come from the arrangement of seats in the French parliament, so the presumption underlying the terms is that there will always be a continuum of political opinion, not that one or the other side will disappear. The article asserts that the right in America (with no attempt to distinguish among various schools like paleocon, crunchy con, neocon, etc.) is thought by some (the writer carefully dissociates himself from this happy prospect) to have suffered a fatal blow from the deposing of Paul Wolfowitz and the death of Jerry Falwell. That's like thinking liberalism was finished because some Democrat eminence grise like Averill Harriman died and Bill Clinton was impeached. Incidentally, the article says that Bill Clinton was not impeached; that is incorrect: he was impeached by the House, but not convicted by the Senate.

Never mind that Paul Wolfowitz was clearly set up by Europeans in the World Bank who did not care for his distasteful connection to the Iraq war or his emphasis on not conducting business as usual. Never mind that Falwell had not been a significant player in national politics for years.

The article also posits without evidence that the right arose in the 1950s, which as we all know was a terribly uptight period, filled with repressions that were released in the following decade. But if the right did not exist before the 50s, who opposed FDR? What about John Adams? Randolph? Calhoun? For that matter, what about Edmund Burke? I recommend the NYT reporter peruse The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk.

Totalitarian Streaks

I was reading a blog by Rich Broderick, who teaches at a local community college and at the Loft, a Minneapolis literary organization. Wow. He thinks that the new U.S. Attorney for Minnesota, Rachel Paulose, is part of the Bush right wing conspiracy to take over. Part of the proof? Paulose is a member of the Federalist Society. Ann Coulter is also a member, so thr group must be beyond the pale, not really conservative but Jacobin in its radicalism. QED. Didn't that sort of argument used to be called guilt by association? Wasn't that a MCCarthyite technique?

Actually, I do recall something I like about Broderick. Some 20 years ago he wrote a piece about the decline and fall of Control Data that refused to add to the hagiography that surrounded William C. Norris, the company's famously independent-minded first (and almost last) CEO. I saw a more typical piece only a few months ago, after Norris's death. I think it was in The New Yorker. Broderick's piece correctly laid the blame for the company's collapse squarely on Norris. Having spent seven years at the company, I saw firsthand the pernicious influence of Norris's lack of interest in growing the business by paying attention to important trends. Instead, he seemed more interested in his social programs.

Also today I read on SCSU Scholars that the College Republicans at the College of St. Catherine staged one of those "affirmative action bake sales" that seem to rile up the left so much. What I found interesting is not that the usual suspects didn't like the bake sale; they are seeking to silence this different point of view by having the school revoke the group's officlal status. There is a real totalitarian streak, more worrisome to me than Rachel Paulose.

Posted by Finn MacCool

The New Yorker

I've been reading The New Yorker since the 50s. In college, my subscription copy arrived in my mail slot every Friday afternoon, making for an enjoyable start to the weekend. (I had a student subscription, which cost, as I recall, $4 for the year.)

Like many others, I did not like the politicization of the magazine in the late 60s, which filled the Talk of the Town pages with antiwar pieces then as well as now. I also missed the quirky columns on subjects like Ivy League football and trains; these subjects, like nightclubs and boxing, were dropped over time. Still, there remained the cartoons and the ads, although I liked both more in the past. But the occasional piece still succeeds in winning my attention and repaying it, e.g., many of James Surowieki's pieces on finance.

But an article on Hugo Chavez a while back illustrates what is wrong even with the financial or economic stuff. The gist of the article was that oil companies, despite their opposition to Chavez, were finding ways to work with the new leader, showing a realism and flexibility at odds with (and better than) a reflexive conservative dislike for the leftist. What does this view make of the latest news from Venezuela, of further nationalization of oil production in the country. Sounds to me like the reflexive conservative reaction was the correct one all along.

Then there was a piece about an interview with a Hezbollah official in Beirut, around the time of last year's war. Maybe it was before the fighting actually began. The article describes meeting this guy for ice cream and having a civilized chat. What are we suposed to make of this account? That we should not demonize Hezbollah? That they are regular guys and we should get to know them better? That we should discount their pronouncements about death to Jews and Israel as mere posturing? That we should ignore their murder of innocent civilians? Talk about cognitive dissonance! But the piece didn't take up any larger argument, only the narrative of the meeting, leaving us to draw conclusions about the humanness of this guy and, presumably, his fellow members of Hezbollah. I could not do it, knowing what else I know. It was like reading a piece about a Gestapo official in his free time, who shows a friendly and human side at home. In their effort to have a different take, the magazine succeeds only in being willfully blind to reality.

Posted by Finn MacCool

Ben Stein

I enjoy reading Ben Stein, mostly. A few years ago, I always read his articles in The American Spectator. (I liked to buy my copy from the leftwing bookstore in my town; it was fun to see the cashiers register disgust as they took my money.) He wrote about funny things that happened to him while traveling, about his son, about everything. His columns on Yahoo Finance are great also; they contain savvy financial advice from the worldly-wise uncle most people never had. On the other hand, his pieces in the New York Times business section on Sunday are more political. In one he remembered fondly his old neighborhood outside Washington, D.C. where he grew up. Everyone was middle-middle class, except for the family that had a swimming pool (but it was shared by the neighbor kids). Everyone knew each other, and there was a sense of community. Stein contrasts this 1950s scene with his current neighborhood in Beverly Hills, where no one knows his neighbors, apparently, and there is no sense of community.

This contrast Stein relates to income taxes. In the 1950s, under the affable, avuncular Ike, the top marginal tax rate was 90%. Today, with the marginal rate topping out at 39.6%, we have apparently unleashed rapacious isolates who care naught for community, only getting and spending obscene amounts of money. (One column discussed $10 million bar mitzvahs as examples of this wretched excess.) Everyone in Beverly Hills has his own swimming pool. Ben finds it especially unfair that people serving in our military make so little money, at the same time hedge fund fat cats are lighting their cigars with Benjamins.

I remember my father talking about 90% marginal tax rates, and how terrible they were. But I think he also said that wealthy people hired clever tax lawyers to find ways to avoid paying such a high rate. Ronald Reagan once complained that it didn't make sense for him to make more than one picture a year, because of the 90% tax. And of course the Beatles sang of the taxman, who said "that's one for you, nineteen for me." (The top rate in Britain was 95% at one time.) The question is how such confiscatory, rates can foster anything except tax fiddling. How do they build a sense of community? Perhaps the sense of community has other origins besides the tax code. For one thing, if these high rates did not kick in until income was so high that only a few people were subject to them, the rates would have little effect, socially or financially, except to motivate some of the wealthy to flee or cheat. I have the sense that most people were not so affected in the 50s.

We are surrounded by examples of wretched excess, e.g., by professional athletes as well as Wall Street moguls. And I would like nothing better than to double the pay of our miliary; it would be one of the best uses of tax dollars. But I don't want to try to tax everyone into behaving well; that seems quixotic in the extreme. Besides, those $10 million bar mitzvahs must benefit lots of less wealthy people. I know, that's trickle-down economics, but isn't it true nonethless?

Stein seems to have contempt for supply side theories, but I do not recall that he directly argues why these theories are wrong. Why were tax rate cuts in the 20s, 60s, 80s, and 00s followed by increased tax revenues? How are Steve Forbes and Arthur Laffer and Larry Kudlow and the WSJ wrong on all this? How is Paul Krugman right?

I wonder what Stein would find if he went back to his Maryland suburb. Perhaps a sense of community there is alive and well, despite the depredations of Reagan and Bush. I know it is in lots of neighborhoods in the Twin Cities. Perhaps Ben should move back.

Posted by Finn MacCool

English Department Then and Now

I received in the mail the quarterly magazine from the English Department where I was a grad student and TA many years ago. This issue included a tribute to a professor I remember with fond respect: Samuel Monk. He was an 18th-century scholar best known for his book on the sublime, but in person he was charming and down-to-earth. I took a seminar with him the last year I had classes; it was quite demanding, with hefty readings and frequent papers, but I loved it. We met in a small conference room, just big enough for the six or eight students plus Professor Monk. Once we met in his apartment, an occasion when he served sherry, as I recall. He referred to himself as "an old toper" that day. In pointing to his extensive library, he noted that Samuel Johnson was once described as "buffeting his books." Professor Monk allowed as how he could not conceive of buffeting his own books, only of quietly "rearranging" them.

Anyway, in the magazine one of his colleagues, now retired, wrote about his first meeting with Sam Monk. "It quickly became apparent that Monk "had read the collected works of everybody," this professor noted. That tribute struck me with some force, because it seemed so dated. What came to matter was not how widely a candidate had read, but whether he or she saw everything through the correct prisms of race, class, and gender. Reading about the current doings of the department faculty bear this notion out. One professor, for example, was exploring how democracy wasn't all that great an idea.

Posted by Finn MacCool

The Broken Center and Dante

Here's another example of the power of the blogosphere. Father Richard John Neuhaus, on First Things, notes the passing of Nathan Scott, who sounds like a wonderful scholar and critic (who also liked cigarettes and dry martinis, which also earn points in my book). He mentions Scott's book The Broken Center. I check it out of the library of the college where I used to teach. It's stunning. It surveys modern literature's ways of coping with the disappearance of meaning from life, which coincided wqith the abandonment of faith. It finds parallels betwen 2oth century novels and ancient Gnostic heresies. It displays an amazing breadth and depth of learning, and it resonates with my own sense of modernists like Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald.

It also includes quotes from other works that I now want to read or re-read. For example, he quotes from Richard Sewell on the essence of tragic action: "Man at the limits of his sovereignty--Job on the ash heap, Prometheus on the crag, Lear on the heath, Ahab on his lonely quarterdeck...with all the protective covering ripped off."

Perhaps to balance this book about the absence of a center, I have started The Divine Comedy, which perhaps is the literary work that demonstrates the unbroken center par excellence. I am reading Dorothy Sayers' translation, and it is marvelous, although I am finding myself wanting to learn Italian, so I can read the original text.

Incidentally, starting my own blog has made realize again how hard it is to convey as solid English what seemed so intelligent when it was but a fleeting idea. I thought of Eliot's famous description of poetry in this context:

(a) raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating,
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.

"Undisciplined squads of thoughts" applies equally well to writing a blog post.

Posted by Finn MacCool

Living in the Blogosphere

It is easy to be surfeited with blogs. But then I recall my gradual realization in 2001 and after of how ineffably wonderful was this explosion of ideas, attitudes, information, and humor. My world would be strikingly poorer without Lileks, Powerline, Shot in the Dark, Fraters Libertas, SCSU Scholars (to name the local blogs that I read regularly), or Tim Blair, The Paragraph Farmer, the Anchoress, First Things, The Corner, The Belmont Club, Small Dead Animals, Tom McGuire, Scrappleface, and on and on. What riches. (I had a glimpse into these possibilities in 1994 with AOL, the walled Internet garden. But now it's a world.)

And in what unexpected directions I can be taken. Lileks, for instance, was writing about Bob and Ray, which reminded me that my older sister used to listen to them on the radio in New York (along with Jean Shepherd). I caught the tail end of radio humor; after that, it was wall-to-wall rock and roll for me. But the clips Lileks provided brought me back to Wally Ballou, and Mary Backstage, Noble Wife, and the rest--their whole, addicting, satiric take on things.

Another direction: Powerline was writing about Barack Obama's embrace of the comparable worth idea for jobs and wages. They dismissed it as a feminist idea from the 70s. But it reminded me of my time at a subsidiary of Control Data in the 80s. The company had set up a consulting business to help small companies survive. It didn't work very well, mostly because small businesses are unable to pay for much in the way of consulting. The problem was compounded by the company's decision to transfer dozens of HR staffers from HQ to the consulting firm. The only hope that all these people could actually be turned into consultants with tons of billable hours lay in the passage of federal legislation mandating comparable worth pay. The great model was the ERISA law of 1974, which helped employ armies of accountants. A comparable worth law would require the services of HR consultants who would analyze jobs and come up with some numerical value for each. Control Data had taken some job-analysis software developed by the Air Force and enhanced it for internal use. Now it would supposedly become a huge source of revenue--another case of the company doing well by doing good, its favorite public narrative. Alas, the law was never passed, and the dream died along with the consulting division.

Blogs on Writing II

Another blog on writing is that of the Phantom Prof, who enjoyed some notoriety when her cover was blown last year (I think). She had been writing anonymously about her experiences as an adjunct writing teacher at an unnamed university, and she had delicious fun at the expense of the wealthy students who were, it seemed, a bunch of fashionably turned out and spoiled airheads who didn't do the work and whined when they received poor grades. She referred to the stereotypical female as Ashley; I can't recall the name she assigned to the male counterpart. (I don't have her problems; there are no conspicuously rich students at the community college where I teach. They all seem to work, some at two jobs. Lots are immigrants, from places like Somalia, Nigeria, Mexico, Thailand, and Laos.)

Someone figured out that she was teaching at SMU, her identity was discovered, and her contract not renewed. I enjoyed her dishing the dirt on her students. It's typical of college writing teachers in my experience that we are supposed to be nurturing and supportive (and help the college retain students), and at the same time we want to maintain our standards, and we do not like to be patronized or conned or taken advantage of or dismissed as fogeys. A dashed-off essay that obviously took someone as long to write as it took to type is simply an act of disrespect. As a result, we take pleasure in seeing such undeserving students get their comeuppance as at the hands of The Phantom Prof. We also are on guard against students who plagiarize or otherwise cut corners. I get the sense that the English teachers at my school are quite conscientious; we want to help, but we are not pushovers. To protect ourselves, we spell out the requirements and rules for courses in detailed syllabi, someting that was not much in evidence at the community college where I taught in the 70s, or at the university where I was a TA. With this detailed contract, we can pounce when work is late or sloppy or cribbed.


My train of thought is chugging into another station, as I recall an episode that soured me on the great U where I labored decades ago. I had been teaching Advanced Composition, which was required of Journalism and Accounting majors. The course was offered through the Extension Division, in the evening, so I also got many adult students who were working. I discovered the joys of teaching motivated adults rather than bored adolescents: they came to learn, they had pasts and interesting points of view, they were mostly a joy to teach.

But one class also had a student from Egypt, who had, I discovered when I graded his first paper, a limited command of English. He should not have been allowed in the class to begin with. But I did not pull the right levers to get him transferred quickly, the way my colleagues today would. Instead I gave him low grades and made lots of comments on his papers, trying to help him improve. THe next thing I knew, I was summoned to some sort of tribunal: the student had accused me of giving him lousy grades because of his pro-Palestinian political views. He said he was a victim, and I soon discovered that the U loved coming to the defense of a self-professed victim. The case wound up going to a higher tribunal (the details are fuzzy after all these years), but I vividly recall passing around pages from his papers and asking the professors who were sitting in judgment of me simply to read and judge the quality of the writing for themselves. To my astonishment, they refused to make any judgment, saying it was beyond their expertise. Also working against me was the absence of a detailed syllabus that spelled out the requirements and ground rules for the course. Anyway, I don't remember any punishment or censure, so I must have won my case somehow, but it left me thinking the adminstration and professoriat were spineless, PC wimps. I lit out for the territory of corporate America the next year.

Posted by Finn MacCool

Blogs on Writing

As someone who has returned to teaching college writing courses, after 25 years of doing other thngs, I enjoyed reading some blogs by other writing teachers. One, called Teacher. Wordsmith.Madman,is written by a guy who teaches at Carnegie Mellon. He does a marvelous job of poking fun at gaffes in newspaper articles, for instance. But I gave up checking out his blog because of the coarse denigration of President Bush and his policies. I wrote to him once, explaining how I liked his blog but that I also liked well-writtten conservative blogs like Powerline. He responded by jeering at Powerline for what he called its howler of blaming Democrats for a memo about the Terry Schiavo matter. I replied that the blog was speculating about the possible origin of the memo (Iwhich later turned out to be from the office of Mel Martinez), and that when the truth came out, Powerline acknowledged its error. So where was the howler? Should the blog not have engaged in self-identified speculation? That would eliminate a lot of interesting blog posts. Anyway, it wasn't the disagreement, but the overall jeering, sneering tone of the blog that finally turned me off.

Posted by FInn MacCool

Virginia Tech

Roger Kimball expresses my thughts on this horrific event, at Armavirumque, the blog of the New Criterion:

" Of the many things that can be said about the horrible shooting at Virginia Tech today, one thing that we have already heard too often is that the shooting is offers a compelling argument against citizens owning guns. Right on cue, Jim Sollo, representing Virginians Against Handgun Violence, told reporters that "We live in a society where guns are pretty well accepted. There are 200 million guns in this society and obviously some in the wrong hands." Well, yes. And that means? That we should concentrate all instruments of violence in the hands of an increasingly bureaucratic and meddlesome state, thus rendering ordinary citizens even more defenseless?"

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Instapundit links to Extreme Mortman's selection of the dumbest question asked by a member of the White House press corps yesterday:

"A member of your White House press corps asked this question at today’s news briefing with Dana Perino:

Q Columbine, Amish school shooting, now this, and a whole host of other gun issues brought into schools — that’s not including guns on the streets and in many urban areas and rural areas. Does there need to be some more restrictions? Does there need to be gun control in this country?

Um, more restrictions than we have? And there’s no gun control in this country? Do facts matter anymore? How about intelligence? Certainly there’s some gun control somewhere in this country — isn’t there?"

Posted by Finn MacCool

Wolfowitz

Reading the first stories about the accusations against Paul Wolfowitz, I was thinking along the lines of The Corner post, which marveled that Wolfowitz could be so clueless as to hand his critics a 2x4 to beat him up with. But the Wall Street Journal editorial today examines the 100-pages of relevant World Bank documents that Wolfowitz ordered released. The docs show Wolfowitz bending over backwards to abide by ethical rules. But the way the matter was handled, the head of the Ethics Committee told Wolfowitz he had to direct the HR guy about the terms of the promotion for Wolfowitz's girlfriend. That directive, when viewed out of context, seemed to be damning evidence. But when taken in its proper context, it is actually exculpatory.

The original stories are further examples of the old maxim that people believe what they read in the newspapers, except regarding those matters about which they have first-hand knowledge.

Posted by Finn MacCool

Don Imus and Stokely Carmichael

I was listening to Michael Medved yesterday taking calls about the firing of Don Imus. One African-American caller said he was very uncomfortable with the word "nappy." He did not explain why. It occurred to me that the black power firebrand from the 1960s, Stokely Carmichael, used the word in his well-known formulation, "Our noses are broad, our lips are thick, our hair is nappy." He was trying to get American blacks to abandon white standards of beauty and embrace their own physical characteristics. Hence Afros instead of straightened hair, for example. Forty years later, though, his campaign does not seem to have completely succeeded, if the caller to Medved's show is typical.

Also, in the movie "Barbershop," the new competitor on the block is called "Nappy Cutz," if I recall correctly.

Posted by Finn MacCool

The Inaugural Post

After several years of reading and enjoying blogs such as Instapundit, The Corner, The Anchoress, Powerline, Captain's Quarters, Fraters Libertas, and The Daily Bleat, I have decided to bring my bucket of thoughts to the blogospheric sea. I do so with some trepidation. For one thing, these bloggers seem to have a superhuman work ethic. How do they crank out all that good work, all the time, especially the ones with day jobs? But at the same time I am emboldened by their example. Captain Ed, for example, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at a talk by Jonahh Goldberg, said he started his blog to sharpen his writing skills. And James Lileks wrote today that he has long tought a day lost that did not produce some piece of writing. Anyway, here are a few pensees to start.

Blog Name
I thought of calling the blog "Garlic and Sapphires," after a line from Eliot's Four Quartets, but it was taken, although that blog does not appear to be active. Also taken was Cacoethes Scribendi, a line from Juvenal meaning an insatiable urge to write. So I settled on Nunc est scribendum, a play on the Juvenal quote as well as on Nunc est bidendum, which is Latin for "It's Miller time."

Local TV News
In the Twin Cities, the local TV news on Channel 9 could be so much better. It could do more investigative pieces, for example, or more in-depth stories on local political races or legislative issues. Instead, it has a "Wildest Police Chases" mentality, grabbing whatever graphic video is out there, no matter the absence of any local angle. What a waste of broadcast spectrum. On the bright side: they no longer have Janie Peterson doing the weather; she was fingernails-on-a-blackboard annoying. The new guy isa slight improvement, although he is a collection of odd mannerisms. Where is the latter-day Bud Kraehling?

Garrison Keillor
James Lileks and Mitch Berg have weighed in from time to time on the subject of Garrison Keillor. I don't know what led Keillor to turn so nasty toward Republicans. Perhaps Mitch is right that Republicans could be dismissed or patronized as long as they were not in power. Living in a liberal town like St. Paul, I frequently encounter the view that Republicans and conservatives are not just wrong, but stupid. Condescension is a common attitude; those unenlightened unfortunates who do not see the wisdom of the progressive worldview are just not as highly evolved as those who do.

I prefer to recall Keillor's more individualistic style of years past. For example, in the 1980s he had the humorist Roy Blount, Jr., on the Prairie Home Companion show; Blount did a hilarious sendup of various PC sensibilities: he started out with a trio of backup singers intoning "So fine," in the manner of sixties rock groups. First, someone objects to the singers being black (racist), then to their being female (sexist), then to their being young (ageist), so the end result ( as I recall) was three old white guys singing "So fine."

Similarly, when Keillor had a daily radio program on Minnesota Public Radio, he would sometimes poke fun at the earnest types at places like the University of Minnesota who were pushing their multi-culti agenda even back then. But those quirks seem to have disappeared.

I don't listen to his Saturday show much anymore (the Guy Noir sketches are hard to bear, and there isn't as much bluegrass as there used to be when Hotrise was on regularly). But it seems to me that the appeal of the Lake Wobegon monologues lay in the balance or tension between poking fun at small-town foibles and celebrating (albeit hedged with irony) small-town verities and values. Take, for example, the mother who comes to visit her married son (or daughter, I can't remember) in "the Cities." She is puzzled by their sophisticated, well-heeled ways. When they give a party, she heads for the kitchen to help, only to discover the catering crew; she does not have to do any work, which is disorienting. So is the idea of food in the living room. I did not get the idea that Keillor was having fun at the Lake Wobegon mom's expense.

So too with the anecdote about the grown children who return to Lake Wobegon at Christmas and pretend for the sake of the grandparents that the grandchildren are being raised as good Lutherans or Catholics, when the parents are in fact neglecting the religious formation of the kids. I did not see that as anything but Keillor poking fun at the hypocrisy of the parents and perhaps lamenting the loss of religious tradition.

As I say, I don't listen to PHC much these days, but I wonder if that balance is still there.

After 9/11, I was interested to see if and how Keillor would handle this attack on America. He did work it into a monologue: a Lake Wobegon family had a son who was killed in the World Trade Center. But it was as if the building had been destroyed by a tornado or some other force of nature. It seemed beyond Keillor's worldview to say anything about Islamists who want to kill the maximum number of Americans. Perhaps saying anything along those lines would be to get too close to the idea that we as a nation should respond to this act of war by going to war. Which was what the Bush administration did, of course.