Dear Reader (and overly aggressive spam filters),

I am on a bit of vacation these days, by which I mean I’m working half-assed from someplace nicer than D.C. in August. That doesn’t narrow down my – as of yet – undisclosed location too much, since, outside of Kandahar – where the weather is nicer, for the record – it’s hard to think of someplace more unpleasant than D.C. in August. The whole city feels like a Port-o-Jon in New Orleans during a heat wave after Dom DeLuise paid the price for eating a whole bowl of really bad clams.

Anyway, I’m in Friday Harbor (there, location disclosed!), in the San Juan Islands (where my wife and I were married, and where I killed a man with a salad tong, but that’s a story for another day). It is objectively beautiful here, as it always is during the summer. We try to visit family here every year, and we succeed most years. Two of my sisters-in-law live here year round, and many of my Alaskan in-laws swing by.

On Conformity, Real and Imagined

Whenever I come out to the Pacific Northwest, I am always particularly struck by the studied non-conformity of today’s youth, particularly the slacker culture (now in its third decade, by my calculations). The meticulously perfect “messy” hair, the crocheted hats that are so stylishly un-stylish, the rebellious tattoos that everyone has to have to be cool (including the esoteric Chinese characters that actually read “I am a douche bag” or “I have chlamydia”): These are uniforms for enemies of uniformity, the tribal markings of fierce individualists. I read somewhere that a third of “Generation Next” has a tattoo. I assert that when a third of an entire generational cohort does something “rebelliously individualistic,” it’s called a “fad.”

It’s one of these great cultural contradictions. Looking like a maverick is stylish, but there’s nothing more un-mavericky than actually dressing to look like a maverick.

Want to know who the real rebels are, the people who really don’t care how they look or what people think about them?

Old people.

Seriously, look at that guy wearing shorts with black dress socks and loafers. Look at the 70-something woman barging to the head of the line at the supermarket or just ordering hot water because she brought her own teabags. On NR cruises, you see these older couples walking around with their National Review ID-card necklaces and money belts wandering through Old San Juan or Dublin or wherever. They just don’t care how they look. I’m not saying they look bad. Just the opposite: They look comfortable.

It’s not just clothes. Take my Dad. One time when my wife, a.k.a. the Fair Jessica, and I were visiting my parents, we tried to convince my Dad to try some expensive single-malt scotch that we’d discovered. My Dad commenced to explain that he thought all of that sort of thing was overrated and wildly overpriced. He liked his store-brand blended scotch just fine. We went around the horn on this for a while, and then I tasted his scotch and told him it tasted horrible. He immediately responded drily: “Well, then I’m the luckiest man in the world, because I can’t tell.”

It seems to me this is one of those obvious points that everyone sort of understands but nobody articulates. We hear all of this stuff about how we live in a youth-oriented culture. Advertisers care about young people precisely because they are gullible and impressionable. But what does that mean? It doesn’t mean they’re independent-minded; it means they’re the herd. It’s just that we nudge the herd by telling it “You’re all individuals!”

JournoList vs. Jonahlist

Speaking of herds, I refuse to be cowed into finding just one or two things to love about the JournoList story. Everything about it is great, including the fact that it’s not nearly as big a deal as people are making it. That just adds to the deliciousness. The JournoListers could shrug the whole thing off if they didn’t mind being seen as political hacks. But because they cling to an oversized view of their own importance, they feel they have to simultaneously argue the list was a good and fine thing – because they are very serious people – despite the fact that it was chockfull of hackery. I love how honest mainstream guys like Chuck Todd (a truly decent guy) are dismayed by such an unsurprising phenomenon and how his dismay launched a whole new round of denial. I love how the so-called “reality-based community” sees nothing wrong with trying to shape reality. I love the breezy confirmation of so much that I’ve said and written about contemporary liberalism, to wit: Liberals have settled dogma so they end up arguing about tactics – how to get power, what to do with power, how to crush opposition – rather than principles.

For instance, I wrote this five years ago:

Of course there are arguments on the Left and there are individual liberals with deep-seated convictions and principles. But most of the arguments are about how to “build a movement” or how to win elections, not about what liberalism is. Even the “Get out of Iraq now!” demands from the base of the Democratic party aren’t grounded in anything like a coherent foreign policy. Ten years ago liberals championed nation-building. Now they call it imperialism because George W. Bush is doing it.

A good illustration of the fundamental difference between Left and Right can be found in two books edited by Peter Berkowitz for the Hoover Institution, Varieties of Conservatism in America and Varieties of Progressivism in America. Each contains thoughtful essays by leading conservatives and liberals. The conservatives defend different ideological philosophical schools – neoconservatism, traditionalism, etc. – but the liberals argue almost exclusively about which tactics Democrats should embrace to win the White House.

On a much pettier note, six years ago I wrote this Corner post:

Rereading my Wilson post I noticed that it might seem like I think Napoleon was an obviously bad guy. I don’t know that I believe that. He did put a stop to the French Revolution – surely a favor to us all. As for all the war and invading, I don’t know what to make of that in the modern context. Obviously, when in doubt, I side with the British. So in that sense alone, I’m anti-Napoleon. Also, I’ve developed a soft spot for the Austro-Hungarian Empire thanks to reading a lot of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn over the last year (and listening to my Slovakian father-in-law). So I don’t know. Derb, Rick, other Cornerites? Any thoughts on what we’re supposed to think about Napoleon?

This was during the early days of the nutroots ascendancy and, if memory serves, quite a few lefty bloggers – and a bunch of lefty e-mailers – jumped on me. “See, Goldberg doesn’t think for himself!” “He needs marching orders!” “Conservatives are about orthodoxy!” And other stupid things.

Now I suppose I could have phrased it better, but I think it’s pretty clear that I was merely trying to get a conversation going, in public, about Napoleon! Oh, the violation of trust! The shallowness! Conservatives trying to coordinate their message strategy on the French dictator. What next, asking for talking points on the Defenestration of Prague?

Meanwhile, the same sorts of people (indeed, if I had time to work the Google-machine I’m sure I’d find that it was many future JournoListers) did the same thing in secret, about contemporary politics.

Sorry, I know that was peevishly petty. But that is part of the G-File’s mission statement, right between dog-whistled pop-culture references and Straussian hypnosis. You could look it up.

I do think this points to a broader point about the JournoList (which Rob Long and Mickey Kaus discussed on the Ricochet podcast a couple weeks ago). The conservative JournoList is the Corner (and other blogs like it). Liberal journalists, because they either have jobs in the MSM or are working toward getting them, need to maintain a transparent fiction about their motives and their ideology. Conservatives, meanwhile, just say stuff out loud.

Speaking of JournoList

For some reason, this seems like the perfect image for the JournoListers. The Democratic donkey soaring terrified and powerless high above the reality-based community.

Video Update

If you’re interested, here’s a panel I did over at Reason on the whole libertarian-conservative divide.

Vocab Update

First off, no new wacky vocab this week.

Furthermore, I have concluded, after consultation with many readers and upon deep soul-searching reflection, that I will not weave the $20 words into the warp and woof of the G-File any longer. It disrupts the flow, steps on the punchlines and yanks the reader out of his reverie. Too often it’s about as subtle as a trout in the milk. Instead, I will ghettoize the fancy words at the end of the column, where they can do less damage.

But about last week’s vocab. The one word that really threw people for a loop last week was tripsolagnophile, as in Al Gore is in trouble because of allegations he is a tripsolagnophile. And while Al Gore may well be an alien, he’s not from the planet Tripsolag. Rather, tripsolagnophile means someone eager to get sexual pleasure from a massage. Note: There’s nothing wrong with that, unless the masseuse in question is a) not a whore and b) not your wife.

Another word from last week that flummoxed quite a few people could be found in this sentence: “Our team of sacofricosis-suffering Web monkeys are dealing with this question night and day.” Sacofricosis is an ailment, often referred to in its more harmless manifestations as “pocket pool.” But it can develop into a pretty tacky condition whereby you become, shall we say, an auto-tripsolagnophile and your massage is delivered through a hole in your pocket.

Okay, I gotta go. Even I am disappointed in me.