Dear Reader(s),
Ass, And You Shall Receive
“What do you think of the word ‘ass’ on the cover?” So asked Rich Lowry, our esteemed leader.
These are the sorts of high level consultations I am party to these days. Ramesh Ponnuru is consulted on the arcana of entitlement reform, the Byzantine reasoning of the Supreme Court, the moral intricacies of human life and death. Rick Brookhiser is sought out for his encyclopedic knowledge of the American founding and the doctrinal imperatives of modern American conservatism. I, on the other hand, am the go-to guy on ass probity (and, given my recent G-File on Robert Wone, ass-probing).
I guess I’m getting ahead of myself. The next issue of National Review has a great cover with Obama dressed as one of the characters from the comic book/movie Kick Ass. Lowry, a man of adamantine moral fiber and oak-like commitment to public decency and editorial high-mindedness, wanted to know if I thought such profanity was okay.
I voted yes on prop A – though I did suggest that the A-word be put in quotation marks. As I noted the other day in a column, Johnny Carson once quoted Jimmy Carter’s use of the term (“I’ll whip his ass,” Carter said re Teddy Kennedy). Carson figured that the NBC censors couldn’t stop him from quoting the president of the United States accurately. I figured NR, which hews to a higher standard than the syphilitic degenerates who staff NBC’s standards and practices department, could just put the word “ass” in quotation marks and then explain the quotation marks in an editorial paragraph. But I was overruled.
Then Rich and I started to discuss what could only be described as NR’s previous “ass” issues (“You mean the ones where you’re on the cover?” – The Couch). He suggested the controversial William F. Buckley piece on Abercrombie & Fitch’s “porny” catalogs. I retorted that I never liked the Don Rumsfeld “pin-up” cover because it showed the secretary of defense waving his money-maker at the reader. But then, of course, the most definitive ass issue of NR had to have been the one in which WFB suggested that HIV-positive people have their status tattooed on their buttocks in order to warn off potential victims. It wouldn’t be public branding or anything like that, just truth-in-labeling. Something less than “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here,” but you get the picture.
Better Dead than Read
Now, of course, I could talk about the ass-themed National Reviews all day. And then I could wax eloquent on boobs in The New Republic and pricks in The American Prospect, but that bit about Bill Buckley seems a good place to switch courses.
I was on a panel this week for the Bradley Foundation. I was honored to do it, and as the only non-politician on the panel not to have received a coveted $250K Bradley Prize, I have my fingers crossed that some day I’ll have one fantastic weekend in Vegas fully funded by, arguably, America’s most prestigious conservative foundation. I kid, I kid.
Anyway, one of the points I made was that this notion that conservatism and populism are at odds (the question for the panel) is overdone. “Oh, Lord, look at all the yahoos! Why can’t we go back to the days when conservatives played chess and wore charming smoking jackets?”
The way to translate these statements is usually: “Why can’t conservatives go back to being inconsequential commentators instead of people who win elections?” That is the entire argument behind Sam Tanenhaus’s The Death of Conservatism – a book whose thesis was disproved upon contact with the atmosphere. It all goes back to an argument Ramesh and I first made in NR years ago. Liberals use dead conservatives to condemn living ones. Here’s John Dean from a few years ago — who, simply by virtue of his reputation allows me to maintain the ass theme a bit longer — claiming Barry Goldwater’s memory to beat up living conservatives: “For more than 40 years I have considered myself a ‘Goldwater conservative,’ and am thoroughly familiar with the movement’s canon. But I can find nothing conservative about the Bush/Cheney White House, which has created a Nixon ‘imperial presidency’ on steroids, while acting as if being tutored by the best and brightest of the Cosa Nostra.”
I wonder: When Rand Paul came out with his comments about the Civil Rights Act, did John Dean, the devoted Goldwater conservative, leap to Paul’s defense? I must have missed that.
Anyway this is a longstanding gripe of mine (see here and here, for instance).
The simple point is that the use and abuse of dead conservatives to ridicule living ones is overwhelmingly a function of bad faith. Either they haven’t read them, or they have and they’re just lying. There’s also the Tito Puente factor. As Bill Murray says to his Tito Puente-hating girlfriend: One of these days, “Tito Puente’s gonna be dead, and you’re gonna say, ‘Oh, I’ve been listening to him for years, and I think he’s fabulous.’”
Oh, Bessie, I Can’t Say No To You . . .
Speaking of Stripes, the thing about Indonesians that I love is the stories that they tell. Like the time when . . .
An 18-year-old Indonesian man says he was seduced by a cow, and that’s why he was having sex with it.
A neighbour caught Gusti Ngurah Alit allegedly wooing the farm animal on Sunday, the village chief on the resort island of Bali said, the Times newspaper in Johannesburg, South Africa reported Friday.
“He was caught by one of the residents standing naked while holding the back of the cow,” village chief Embang Ida Bagus Legawa said in the newspaper.
Alit said he didn’t see an animal, he saw a beautiful young woman.
“She called my name and seduced me, so I had sex with her,” the man told the newspaper.
On This Day The GOP held its first convention in 1856.
Germany asked France for terms of surrender in 1940. (France replied, “We’re already typing them up.”)
The Watergate burglars were arrested in 1972. (John Dean claims he responded: “As a Goldwater conservative, I am appalled.”)
O. J. Simpson was arrested after his famous car chase in 1994. (That reminds me of Helen Thomas’s favorite joke. “Q: What do Jesus and Nicole Brown Simpson have in common? A: They were both killed by the Joooooooose.” It works better when you say it aloud and blend “Jews” and “Juice.”)
Can’t See the Oil for the Trees
In case you missed it, I wrote a bit about oil and energy this week. Here’s me in the NY Post, here’s me in NRO, here’s me at the Enterprise Blog. By the way, speaking of the latter, please do come by the EB as often as you can. I’m supposed to be helping out with traffic and buzz and what not, and it would do me a world of good if a mob of readers charged the place like caddies swamping the Bushwood pool.
It’s in the Hole I’ve kept it a secret for a while now, but a couple weekends ago, I went golfing with lawyer, Irish folk singer, and NR contributor Shannen Coffin. As I expected, I was just as awful as I was the last time I golfed, eight years ago. Shannen, meanwhile, is merely not great. The funny part is that out of charity, we capped the maximum number of strokes per hole. The result was that even though I probably shot something like a 200, I ended up just barely losing to Shannen. Not bad considering that I am the world’s worst two-armed, two-legged golfer.
I will concede that I get the appeal of the game. But I don’t get the appeal of it on crazy-hot days. Why you would want to spend a day in the D.C.-area’s tropical heat trying to hit a two-inch-wide ball sitting on top of a 25,000-mile-wide ball is beyond me.