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February 16, 2011 - February 9, 2011

Sunday, April 25, 2010

MAY 20? Why wait a month? Muhammad sucks now.

Kurt Westergaard, who drew the now-classic bomb-turban Muhammad, best gives voice to our proper outrage.


Of course, too many of them fail this test. One day's not gonna be enough to smack some gratitude into these idiots. Insulting Muhammad needs to be a way of life. It needs to be a part of everybody's everyday routine, like checking email, or putting dishes in the sink. We need to carve out a few minutes as a matter of habit each day to let these idiots know we do not bow to thugs and losers. No matter how sharp their curved swords, nor how loud their foreign-sounding jibber-jabber.

To this end, we've started a little spin-off blog. Daily Muhammad will mock the worst world religion once a day, every day, until a suicide bomber makes a wrong turn at Albuquerque and nukes Mecca. And a few days after that, too.

Stand up. If anything matters to you, stand up. And stay on your feet.

Friday, April 23, 2010

FULL PARTISAN DISCLOSURE. I wrote a couple of days ago about the need for a "humor resistance," but perhaps I should have broadened it to a "life resistance," because laughter is not the only medicine for what ails us. I also noted, just yesterday that I was glad to see George Will had returned to the fight with considerably less snootiness than he was displaying a year ago. I was pleased that he compared NJ governor Chris Christie to a "burly baseball catcher." His metaphor seemed positively homespun.

But I was unprepared for what I heard this morning on Philadelphia SportsTalk radio (WIP). Host Angelo Cataldi had an interview with -- surprise! -- George Will, whose baseball book Men at Work has just been rereleased ten years after its initial publication. I've written before about the leftwing bias that seeps into WIP commentary, and so I was surprised again when Cataldi praised not just Will's baseball writings but his political punditry. Then I found out other things I didn't know. Men at Work is the bestselling baseball book ever written, surpassing the success of Roger Kahn and Roger Angell (E.B. White's son), who both wrote lyrically and brilliantly about the national pastime in the days before the NFL became the 800-pound gorilla of American sports. I knew George Will was an accomplished student of the game, but I guess his blind allegiance to the pitiful Cubs blinded me to his greater allegiance to the game itself. My bad.

I'll get back to Will a bit later, but I have to describe the additional shocker that was the catalyst for this post. Just a few minutes after I heard the WIP interview, I stumbled across Charles Krauthammer's latest WAPO column. It's about -- drumroll, please -- baseball. Specifically, the great man's love of the hapless Washington Nationals. There is something wistful and determinedly self-therapeutic about his fondness for baseball's worst team:


I'll overlook the Philly libel (although I'll have more to say about it anon), because he has a larger point which he articulates eloquently:


I think he's groping toward several points here, which is why he seems to contradict himself fatally in the space of a couple paragraphs. If baseball isn't about "red-faced ranting," why the slams against baseball fans in New York and Philadelphia? His attraction to the Nationals is a kind of nostalgia, as if he's watching some team from the innocent American past play against the win-at-all-costs present. He's found a personal refuge from the vicious politics in which he's immersed every day in the nation's capital. And he's actually afraid of what will happen if the Nationals start to get good:


Answer? Baseball. At some level, he knows that, else why reference the anachronistic ritual of thousands of fans singing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" during every seventh inning stretch. He's on the verge of remembering something he needs to remember but that is hard to remember because of where he lives and what he does. Baseball fans are the closest thing there is to the Tea Party phenomenon, and they suffer from the same mostly unfair slanders, some of which Krauthammer has thoughtlessly repeated. Permit me to use Philadelphia as an example.

Yes, there are boo-birds. But they are a tiny percentage of the fans who follow the team. Something like the few glunks who show up at tea party rallies with racist signs. They cannot compare to the outpouring that followed the death of broadcaster icon Harry Kalas, who filled the ballpark with mourners. He was ours and no one threw beer or punches. Time for some math, which is especially relevant in Philadelphia's case because the past few years have reminded even WIP sports analysts that their city is, and always has been, a baseball town as much as a football town. The Eagles always sell out their seats, which at eight games per year, amounts to less than half a million well-heeled asses in the stadium. The Phillies, on the other hand, sold out 72 of 81 home games last year, for a total of about 3 million in season attendance or six times what the Eagles get each year.

And, as has been abundantly pointed out elsewhere, the Philadelphia Phillies have lost more games than any professional sports team in history, over 10,000. The truth is that baseball loyalties run very very deep and are local in a way that the NFL can only envy. WIP hosts experience a constant stream of Philly residents who root for other NFL teams, most notably the more successful Steelers and the hated Dallas Cowboys, and they have a practice of hanging up on them with formulaic epithets. This is not the case with baseball. On the contrary -- and I've observed this in early games this season in Washington, Florida, and Atlanta -- the transplanted Philadelphians in these cities are so numerous in their jerseys and caps that their cheering for the Phillies sometimes rivals that of the home team's fans.

Baseball allegiance is a lot like patriotism. Its intensity may ebb and flow, but it is always there, an inviolable component of personal identity. Philadelphia has been so vilified as a locus of thug fans that no Philadelphia team will ever become America's team. The Phillies fans who sometimes outnumber National fans in the National ballpark are Philadelphia born if no longer resident there. They "cling" to their team because they cannot do otherwise, like all the armchair ladies with their cigarette coughs who watch (or listen to) every inning of every game all season long, year after year, win or lose. They call into WIP, too, and they know their baseball. They worry, and they may criticize, sometimes harshly, but they never give up rooting for their team.

Interestingly, George Will knows this too. In his WIP interview he reminisced about his stint in graduate school at Princeton, where he used what free time he had to attend games at the Polo Grounds in New York and Connie Mack stadium in Philadelphia. He stressed that the element he found most inspiring was this very localness, the sense that the team was of the city and its neighborhoods, a family affair. His words resonated with me because the first major league baseball game I ever saw was at Connie Mack stadium, a complicated and antique structure that made it hard for a kid to see what was going on for all the pillars and overhangs in the way. But I saw Dick Stewart (also affectionately/derisively known as "Dr. Strangeglove") blast a titanic grand-slam homerun to win the game. Which is why the clip from "The Natural" above is like an instantaneous wormhole to my childhood. Dick Stewart was a Phillie. I was a Phillie fan, born and bred. We won. I was there. That slicing line drive into the right field stands was part of my destiny. I was a kid.

You see, there's a huge difference between baseball and football. I've written before about the role football plays in the seasoning and toughening of American youth, which is a great secret strength of our country, but baseball has other, perhaps more important virtues. Krauthammer is flat wrong to call it a "boring" game. It's slow, complex, and cerebral all right, but it's not boring. It is, rather, like life itself. You get out of it what you put into it. Its complexity is infinite, and despite what contemporary NFL advocates claim, its complexity is an order of magnitude beyond football's. Football is, like the military, all about building an intricate machine in which perfection is defined as human cogs executing perfectly under fire. Only one quarterback in the NFL has the freedom to call his own plays. Baseball's complexity, like the game itself, is an artistic synthesis of individuals serving the team with individual knowledge, skill, and, yes, wisdom. Every fielder on a baseball team is responsible for calling his own response to the batter's response to a pitch. Every baserunner the same; if his judgment fails, no first or third-base coach can save him. Every batter the same; when he gets a green light, he's on his own when it comes to guessing the pitch and avoiding a strikeout or double play. A great baseball team is never a machine. It's a hybrid -- much like America -- of separate persons who come together by taking advantage of and compensating for the strengths and weaknesses of its members.

Every pitch is an infinity of possibilities. There is no clock. There is no need for any game ever to end. That all games do end in the major leagues (little leagues have a mercy rule) is a testament of competence the NFL does not require. In football, the clock ticks down mercifully to an inevitable end.

Krauthammer is afraid of what happens to his peace of mind if the Nationals become a contender. He's been in Washington too long. Baseball is American life. That's why he's drawn to it, whether he knows it or not. It can be jovial and easy and tolerant as he is presently finding so healing with his Nationals, or it can be a slow, chesslike war, with ordinary fans playing their part with startling effectiveness, as when the despised Phillies fans turned the at-bat of pitcher Brett Myers into a series changing event against ace C.C. Sabathia in the World Championship 2008 season. The supposedly neanderthal Philadelphia fans knew that making the infallible Sabathia waste countless pitches on a pitcher might break his spirit. When Myers drew a walk, the fans reacted as if it were a homerun. Which in a way it was. It's a phenomenon called baseball.

Something like a Tea Party. The time comes when it's not enough to be an audience or a bystander. The masses suddenly have their part to play and they play it, intelligently and effectively.

One final point before I go. The NFL keeps advancing and changing itself, so that the game today resembles the game of yesteryear not at all. Baseball, on the other hand, is cyclical, like the American spirit. (The clinching reason I wanted to do this post.) Right now, the Phillies have the hottest pitcher in baseball. (Current ERA, Zero-point-something ) Last week, after win No. 3, WIP began soliciting nicknames for their brand new star, Roy Halladay. Callers were pretty fond of the obvious "Doc Holladay." Hosts were skeptical and kept advancing reminders of pitchers past like Steve Carlton, resulting in a bid for "Ace Holladay."

But I'm an old guy and so I thought once again of the video up top. The man's given name is "Roy." He's an old-time ballplayer. He can't stand to lose. He arrives at the ballpark before anyone else and leaves after everyone else. Unlike some of the current enthusiasts, I don't expect him to be untouchable all year. But it's clear he will fight to win every game he's in. I'm thinking of him, atavistically, as "The Natural." Roy Hobbes, after all, started out as a pitcher until he got derailed by a bizarre maniac.

I'm also thinking here of the difference between the book and the movie. In Bernard Malamud's novel, Roy Hobbes threw the pivotal game (not as in pitching it but deliberately losing it). In the movie, he won the pivotal game. Something about a difference in worldviews? We're seeing a difference in worldviews right now. The difference Krauthammer is trying to deal with. Maybe he should abandon the easy comfort of not caring about winning and start rooting for, well, the roots of America's pastime: the beauty of loyalty and principle represented by a community force that refuses to surrender to all the temptations to quit.

Supporting South Park:

WHATEVER CAN WE DO (WRINGING OF HANDS)?  Let's ALL do it. Face it. It's pretty easy to take sides in the South Park-Comedy Central fracas. Some people are congratulating them on their bravery. Easy. Some people are damning the cowardice of Comedy Central. Easy. Others are saying let's stand up and support Matt Stone and Trey Parker. By, uh, saying we support them and maybe signing a petition. Easy.

Has it occurred to anybody that this vast thing called the Internet is the automatic answer? If we believe so much in free speech and not being intimidated by muslim thugs, we have it absolutely in our power to turn the tide. Uh, We are the World. If every "brave" proponent of free speech in the United States posted his own image of Mohammed, thousands and thousands of them, there would be too many of us to kill. We'd be an avalanche that would make their sorry jihadist threats puny by comparison. They can't kill us all.

Want to show your support for Matt Stone and Trey Parker? This is exactly how easy it is. Well, you've got to have some minimal PhotoShop skills, but other than that it's just a balls call.

So here you go, Hotair. Here you go, InstaPundit. Here you go, Ace of Spades. Here you go, Big Hollywood. Here you go, NRO. Here you go, all you free speech advocates, all you irate columnists and bloggers on the right who ache for the dead Dutchman and wish there were something, anything, you could do to prove your courageous solidarity with the two flippant assholes who are South Park.

It really is this easy. Didn't realize that? Maybe it's a punk thing.

P.S. I have no idea how to contact other sites except for Hotair.com. Anybody who knows how is urged to do so. I'm deadly serious about this, but my ability to execute is almost zero. Check in, as you can, to let us know whom you've contacted...

To be crystal clear, I'm asking all of you to contact the whole world, not just the sites I've named here, although they're the first priority. Whether we agree with them or not, the Stone and Parker newens are still punks, and they are putting their lives on the line. I'm sure some of you can cite the chapter and verse in the Punk Testament which makes that OUR business as well. Please get to work.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

FILE CATEGORY: ALWAYS RIGHT. Just over a year ago, I posted the video above and predicted that conservatives who kept bucking the admittedly overwhelming Obama tide would eventually catch the ear of the American people. How's that prediction working out for me -- and you? I think it's time for a snapshot view of what conservatives are talking about right now, which I offer with the suggestion that you try to remember how likely or unlikely such conversations would have seemed early in April 2009. Remember: back then, even conservatives were in retreat, wondering if their ideas had been slain in the Obama wave and just how much compromise would be necessary to retain a voice in future policy-making.

For example, everyone here knows I generally like The Corner at The National Review. But it seems to me that I was the only conservative who got his dander up at Corner poster Jim Manzi, who's an archetype of the super-intellectual, nominally conservative appeaser of liberal elites and their technocratic causes. I specifically took issue with his pompous stands on global warming and torture, which were riding high even in conservative circles back then. In fact, I called him a dolt in two posts directly related to the 'escalator' post referenced above.

So imagine my surprise at reading this post at The Corner today:


My my. Do I detect a near punk tone of voice in the April 2010 edition of The Corner?

Are moderate rationalists and intellectual conservatives beginning to discover a need to start climbing that down escalator? Well, maybe. Here are a few links you'll have to look up and read for yourselves. They aren't all by former or temporary apostates. But they're all indicative of a new ballsiness, a refreshing confidence that the war being waged against us might actually be won and that it's less important to bash the so-called 'dummies' amongst us than to focus on the catastrophe being inflicted on us by the self-anointed smart ones.

A year ago, George Will was spending an inordinate amount of time looking down his nose at Sarah Palin. Today he's touting the promise of NJ Governor Chris Christie, who suddenly doesn't look so much like a Sopranos plug-ugly as a "burly baseball catcher" who's playing hardball in the most heavily taxed state in the union. He's even celebrating the big man's new monicker, The Trenton Thunder. He's right and I'm glad to have George Will back on our side.
 
The folks over at Hotair have been merciless with everyone they consider a "Birther." But today they had the grace or fairness or epiphany, or whatever it was, to link this very sensible summary of the Obama birth certificate mystery. I will not carp at past excesses. I congratulate them instead for acknowledging that even conservative positions can have, uh, nuances.

National Review print editors also surprised me today. I've been wondering since the inauguration how long it would take our best and brightest to realize, finally, that Barack Obama isn't really a likeable guy, but an arrogant prick. Something so obvious generally takes the best educated among us a lifetime to perceive. They've done it  in less than a year and a half. (I forgive the unnecessary slap at Palin; they can't help themselves when it comes to Ivy League snobbery.)

Now Mona Charen has always been made of sterner stuff. But read this and ask yourselves if you thought you'd be reading something like it a year after Obama's first Roman spring.

And ask yourselves if you'd have believed that an ordinary citizen would rise up and smack an MSM columnist in quite this dismissive and triumphant a way.

Then plow through all four segments of this annihilation of anti-capitalist propaganda being promulgated in the public schools. This rebuttal video has succeeded in getting its target ejected in multiple public school curricula.

Keep walking up the down escalator, my friends. I'm thinking that's what Hugh Hewitt had in mind with this appearance on MSNBC.


But I question his judgment nonetheless. I think, like the rest of us, he has to learn that this is a war, not a college debate.

Right now, though, I'm feeling hopeful. Maybe even Hugh Hewitt can join us at the barricades with a cutlass in his teeth. Eventually.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

THE FRANKLIN INSTITUTE IS COOL. The times we live in. Mrs. CP found this, no doubt because we have a red-tailed hawk family that nests in our yard year after year. We watch them fly in with the nest makings for days every spring, but we never get to see what's showing on the Internet now -- the live 24/7 process of hatching eggs and caring for the young.

People talk a lot about the downside of technology's virtual thrills, but that's only part of the story. I'm amazed that this supposedly unreal and soul-destroying electronic universe can leap the gap between our bay window and the natural drama unfolding invisibly a hundred yards away.

The race of mankind has its faults, to be sure, but it is also capable of extraordinary wonders.

A SNIP OF THE GIPP. You've probably seen this already since it's featured on several sites. (My own hat tip goes to Jonah Goldberg.) But I'm struck by the contrasts no one seems to want to notice. It's actually a live performance. Reagan is out of breath at the end because he's just finished the climactic action scene. What do I notice? James Dean -- the "rebel without a cause" who made self-destruction a generational fad -- seems like a squeaky shrimp next to Reagan, and (if you're fair) he's the lesser actor in the piece, or more accurately, the over-actor in the piece. There can't be too many acting gigs harder than live teleplays, which are an impossibly contradictory combination of stage acting (live and broad) and film acting (small and detail intensive). Dean is regarded as the vanguard of antihero film actors, but here he's too broad for the venue, while Reagan is, well, the one I keep looking at. Odd, eh?

I'm NOT saying that Reagan had more acting talent than Dean. I'm saying that when I hit "play" I expected to cringe at Reagan in such a challenging circumstance and found myself cringing at Dean instead -- actually having to look away at times. Reagan, on the other hand, looks like a, uh, pro. And surprisingly good looking. He's the one who looks like a movie star. He was 43 when this was made. Maybe that was the peak of his cinematic attractiveness.

Reagan as a pro. That's what's interesting. As I look at Obama, I keep thinking "amateur." I'm not the only one. Ed Morrissey at Hotair has a feature called "Obamateurism of the Day." But who isn't an amateur at being president? It's not like there's anyplace where you can learn the job ahead of time by being a "practice president." But there are presidents who seem to know, instinctively, how to do the job. In the twentieth century, I know of three: FDR, JFK, and Ronald Reagan. Of these, the one with the fewest unforced errors (er, dumb screw-ups) was Reagan.

And James Dean was long dead and buried before Reagan took on his biggest role. What is talent, who has it, and how do we measure it?

Just some thoughts on a snippet of show biz errata.

FDS. Our perennial prodigal checked in via email to insist that you all drink in this exercise in French statecraft. Or, in a typical tour de force of Brizoni understatement rendered word for word:


I'm tempted to cheer, but conscience compels me to acknowledge that this past weekend, I subjected the stepdaughter to the following Edith Piaf song because I believed she was losing her native sense of romance. Which would be an XY-gen tragedy. Love is still the wine that drinks our souls and savors their flavor.


You know. Full disclosure. I hate the French but I love them more. C'est la guerre.

Even though Brizoni's absolutely right on this one.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

NEWER AIN'T ALWAYS BETTER. Mrs. CP wasn't feeling good yesterday, and so we put her on the couch in the media room and turned her loose on the "On Demand" menu. To my dismay, she chose to watch on Comcast's "Fearnet" list the 1986 movie Manhunter. I should have known better. I can't watch movies as many times as she can, and I thought I was going to be bored by the star-making vehicle for William Peterson and Michael Mann. I wasn't.

It's the best movie ever made about serial killers, including the Silence of the Lambs trilogy (quadrilogy?) that followed from the same source material. I thought I was going to be put off by all the highly stylized sets -- white, white, white with darkness implied -- and the Miami Vice style of barely audible musings instead of dialogue. I wasn't.

I confess I haven't seen the remake (Red Dragon), but I know it had Anthony Hopkins instead of Brian Cox [corrected] as Hannibal Lecktor, and having seen Manhunter again, I believe Brian Cox was more scary, sinister, and real-world creepy than Hopkins's Katherine Hepburn impression.

What makes it all work so well is the twin premises of 1) Peterson as a hunter who truly gets into the head of his quarry and feels all the attendant pain, and 2) a portrayal of the killer that is human, sensual, and as close to sympathetic as it's possible to get with a monster. There's an eerie sexuality to the Red Dragon's scenes with his girlfriend, Joan Allen. You can actually feel the eros of his vicarious satiety when he arranges for his blind lover to feel the body of a sedated Bengal tiger, even as he shrinks from any contact with his cosmetically reconstructed cleft palate. The serial killer as a fatally damaged human being, not a twisted cartoon superhero.

The music also drives it all home; hence the YouTube clip above.

But it's a dangerous time for conservatives to be understanding about violent crimes. So forget I said anything. But if you want to watch the movie, I'm not stopping you.

MAYBE SOMEBODY PUT ME UP TO THIS. I'm just listening to Rush Limbaugh lamenting the fact that his "stack of stuff" contains none of the usual lighthearted items. He's right. For weeks and months now, the news has been all bad, discouraging, depressing, and even tragic. Maybe it's time for a resistance movement of sorts.  We can't make ourselves a gulag before the government does it through force of law, can we? Which is why I was actually pleased that a Washington Examiner editor came forward to defend Obama's golf outings, for which he's been getting some harsh press of late.

No, I'm not going soft on Obama. I'm getting tough on secular Calvinism, which has to be the worst of both worlds. An excerpt from Stephen Smith's Examiner column:

 
The piece goes on to point out some additional relevant golf trivia, including Eisenhower's 800 rounds during his presidency -- and the fact that our only 20th century presidents who didn't play golf were Hoover, Truman, and Carter. It figures.

Golf has been getting a bad rap recently, largely because of Tiger Woods and, unfortunately, conservative disapproval of Obama root and branch. But I'm thinking Rush Limbaugh won't criticize Obama on this count because he's a devoted golfer himself of the kind the aforementioned P. G. Wodehouse wrote about in a story called, "A Mixed Threesome." As narrated by the Oldest Member (who has given up golf), a successful businessman toys with playing golf as a diversion but finds nothing worthwhile until he hits his first outstanding drive:


Actually, Wodehouse is the real reason for this post. I'm recommending him as an anodyne for the poisonous mood we all feel ourselves tempted by these days even if we don't succumb to it entirely. Golf excels not as a game so much as an alternative universe that takes away the cares of real life by substituting its own humbling and ecstatic realities in their place. Which is a fine and healing thing. P. G. Wodehouse's stories about golf, on the other hand, are the armchair version of exactly the same phenomenon. No need for an expensive bag of clubs, lessons, greens fees, or caddy tips. For the price of a book, you really can get absolutely, completely away from it all. And you don't even have to like or play golf. It's still funny.

Does that sound good about now? You bet it does. Here's the book to buy. (Available from 44 cents up.)


Fact is, P. G. Wodehouse was a genius. Britain's last great novelist, Evelyn Waugh, declared that he had learned everything he knew about writing dialogue for his wicked satires from the gentle soul who wrote about golf, dimwit lords, and their terrible, intimidating ladies. The good news is that if you like the golf stories, that's just the beginning. You have almost a hundred hilarious and completely diverting novels to read, and there's not a mean bone anywhere in the lot. Properly rationed, that could last you through an Obama presidency to the year 2016.

You'll know right away. People either fall immediately in love with the timeless Wodehouse universe or they just never get it at all. Which are you?

You're also welcome to nominate your own flavors of "humor resistance." We have to find some way to keep laughing, don't we?

MADITUDE. If you're good, you can distill all problems to one problem and make it stick. I can. My problem is Charles Krauthammer. I know he's the smartest man in the room, and I actually have this hope that off camera he's Denzel Washington in The Bone Collector, with his own Angelina Jolie to make his life better. But on camera, he's all I need to see that our country is slowly dying.  He's become the one famous person I want to meet. All I want to tell him is that I admire his intellect and his ability to keep sitting in that third chair on the Brit Brett Report. That's it, I swear. The National Review tracks him like a bloodhound chasing down a murderer. Here's their latest report:

Krauthammer's Take.

On President Obama’s remarking of the Tea Party movement that “You would think they would be saying thank you”:

I think it was Obama with his usual condescension — except he ratcheted it up to Code Orange into snootiness — where he looks down his nose at the gun-and-god crowd, the lumpenproletariat, as he sees it. And he ridicules them because they're not grateful enough to him.

And look, it's quite obvious what he’s talking about. He thinks that they are stupid because they don't recognize that he hasn't raised their taxes.

The point is the movement began a year ago before there were any hikes in taxes, but it was a prescient movement: it understood — and it wasn't really that hard to see, although a lot of the press entirely overlooked it — that if you’re going expand the government hugely (as he has) you’re going to have to end up raising taxes. There‘s no other way.

That's why we’re all talking about a VAT.

He’s assuming that these people are paranoid or agitated because they are expecting that taxes are going to rise. We just had the chairman of the Federal Reserve, who’s not exactly a member of the Tea Party, say exactly that. In order to sustain our economy, we’re going to have to raise taxes.

So it's a fact. And I think it is in his character to ridicule — this is a man on the day he won the Democratic nomination said that day would mark a day on which the earth began to heal and the oceans recede. So he does not have a low opinion of himself.

On Bill Clinton’s comparing the rhetoric preceding the Oklahoma City bombing to that of the Tea Party movement:

I think it's disgusting. It's a replay of what he did — his administration did — after Oklahoma City. Remember, that happened shortly after he got crushed in the mid-term elections, the Gingrich revolution, that he began his comeback by exploiting Oklahoma City and implying — and having his minions imply — that it was a result of Newt and Rush and all the agitated, angry white males, as it was called by the media at the time. This is a replay.

When there was dissent in the Bush years, he was called a Nazi, Cheney a war criminal, and there was actually a play on the assassination of George Bush — you didn't hear a word from him or others about agitated language.

When a Republican is in power, dissent is the highest form of patriotism. And when a Democrat is in power, dissent is near treasonous and a call to mutiny and insurrection. This is really disgraceful.

On the increasing talk of VAT:

Well, here is the syllogism. If you enact Obamacare, it follows as the night after the day that you have to have a VAT, and the reason is if you legislate yourself, as we just have done, into European levels of entitlements, you are going to have European-level taxation — or you will end up with Greek levels of debt.

And the easier option, ultimately, is going to be the VAT. It's not going to be today. It won't even happen after the 2010 elections, but I assure you if Obama is re-elected it will all of a sudden be a big issue and a big proposal of Democrats.

Which is why I can't watch the news anymore. I'm supposed to be reporting the key stories and insights to all of you, and all I can see is Krauthammer in his chair, declaring himself over and over like Marvin from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

I have to shake it. I know I do. I will. I promise.

Maybe tomorrow.

Monday, April 19, 2010

THE REMAKING OF WRITING CONTINUES. Before Instapunk, there was Writing America Down, the Delphi Forums, and places called Shuteye Town and Shuteye Nation.

Before all of them, there was a book: The Boomer Bible.

This book was published in 1991 by one R.F. Laird, but the book itself claims to have been written by an army of punk writers from South Street in Philadelphia.

Its Dedicatory page is dated April 19th, 1981, 29 years ago today. It reads:


Over the last year, a far smaller group of people, punks of a different sort, have endeavored to bring this monumental work to the internet. As a shadowy reflection of the South Street Punks, they fastidiously labored to enter every word from the three major Testaments of the printed Boomer Bible into an online database. Along with the thousands of verses, they created a linking system to track the book's Intercolumn Reference (ICR), which is a key component of the book's content and structure.

Today, as we reveal to the world a fully cross-linked and searchable digital version of The Boomer Bible, we want to recognize the efforts of the "TBB Team," who are largely unknown to each other. Several are commenters on this site, but others remain in the shadows.


This is just the beginning. The Book of Harrier Brayer, a hyperlinked version of the Table of Harrier Days, the two Prefaces, and any remaining pieces will soon be added.

The team also hopes to create advanced tools for readers to better explore and understand the book. A multi-step ICR thread-following interface, an advanced search tool, and an iPhone / iPad app are all being considered, along with other possibilities. If you have suggestions, please post them. If you have skills in these areas and want to help further the process, please post a comment and I (Lake) will contact you.

The Boomer Bible has finally come to the Internet, where it belongs. The labor of the punk writers of South Street is now both everywhere and nowhere, a superposition of states made of electron pulses and packets stretching over the entire Earth. We hope that this effort inspires longtime readers of the book to return and discover new avenues of thought. We hope that new readers are empowered to explore this complex, multi-dimensional, and unique work that represents the mind of modern man and a new universe of consciousness-expanding possibility.

With the support of R.F. Laird and the compliments of the "TBB team," please enjoy for free, at least temporarily...

The Boomer Bible. Liberated at last from the printed page.

UPDATE VIA INSTAPUNK/hs. I'm told this will work if you want to honor the TBB Team:

I hope it does.

LAKE'S UPDATE. Thanks to IP for his update. Now it's time for mine. The Boomer Bible does not stand alone, even in our new multi-dimensional incarnation. It has a deep context, a complex backstory, and an entire mythology built around its core.

What is the importance of The Boomer Bible? Why should people be interested in a 20-year-old book that is now going out of print after having sold just under a hundred thousand copies? There are multiple reasons.


Unlike all his forebears in the world of fiction, he tells us who he is, where he comes from, what he believes, so that the reader can plot his own course without the fake objectivity of the prevailing Hemingway model of 'modern' fiction: "I control the horizontal and the vertical..." is a princely claim of many writers. This is the one time it's true without being dictatorial.

More importantly, everything said above can be proved with links to what's already on the Internet. Use the IP search function. (Use your imagination.) Use the Wayback Machine. More will be provided than you can imagine in the months ahead, but you can get at least a tantalizing glimpse. Do it. Right now you can find ruins of a unique multimedia phenomenon. When else are ruins the precursor of advanced civilization? Precisely.

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