InstaPunk Rules

My boys. The ones who keep trying. My hand is out, but they’re frightened.

WILLIE.2.1-6. Many years have passed. I’m aware that for most of you the number 69 is itself magical. Brings back lost youth and all that. But when youth seems lost, it is lost. I know. I am Harry. I wrote the truth nearly ten years ago. Now you can read it again.

PSONG 59
Father,
2 I have broken you, ignored you, killed you,
3 But you do not fade away; you turn toward me in my dreams as you never did in fact,
4 And I am not shocked or shamed,
5 But matter of fact;
6 We are the same cup, drunk by different faces.
7 Some are poisoned, some are fed,
8 Some are, of course, indifferent or indignant.
9 I have looked into your cup, you into mine;
10 My liquor is older than yours, and younger.
11 What I see in its liquid skin is the world of me,
12 Me a transparent tattoo on its slippery flesh,
13 All evaporating, waiting to be consumed,
14 Pregnant intoxicant mirage.
15 But when I ask you to look,
16 You’d see you, the shimmering skin of a world ago,
17 And there I am only an unreflected memory of mine.
18 Why, then, do you smile in my dreams?
19 Is that my memory again, my wish, my punishment?
20 Or is it the blending, at last, of the dregs of our final draught?

PSONG 60
I could give up sleeping,
2 But for the alarm of morning,
3 Which wants to surprise us awake,
4 With a brand new ancient lesson.
5 Every morning is everywhere,
6 The center of being undraped and unafraid,
7 On display for its satellites.
8 When I was in Rio, I flung open the broad smiling horizon built upon my balcony,
9 And I squinted the darkness away.
10 Today I roll out under the roof of morning,
11 Trusting a sun I can’t see,
12 Imagining the boastful light above the trusses and timbers and shingles of our conceits,
13 But I do not dare to look at the blush of retreating night,
14 That pink behind we all must show,
15 In impotent flight.
16 Darkness always loses courage in the end,
17 And dawn wins every day.
18 So must I,
19 But more slowly now than then,
20 When I was young.

I am still not who you think I am.

You think you can win. Nobody does. All you can hope for is a close fly-by. Which I watch for every day from my balcony. In Rio. Only a handful have the guts. And most of those who do crash.

Don’t send me a card. Send yourselves one instead. Be kind.

I’m frequently accused of being a male chauvinist. Perhaps justly. I don’t think women should be in combat, police officers, firefighters, or Grand Prix drivers. But I don’t think that makes me sexist. I don’t think skinny little Jewish guys should be obsessed with playing one-on-one basketball, either. It’s icky. But that doesn’t make me anti-Semitic. It just makes me opinionated.

My wife, who endures my grumpy observations that there are no female Leonardos, Mozarts or Einsteins, will also affirm that my views are complicated and not one-sided. She’ll tell you I detest the Hollywood tropes on both sides. The cliche that 80 lb Asian women can routinely kick the asses of 200 lb men with military and martial arts training disturbs me because it makes women think that self defense courses can protect them when what they really need is a gun in their handbag. An average out of shape male can break a woman’s jaw with a single punch.

She’s equally fatigued with my resistance to Hollywood insistence that the best computer hackers are women, which is so patently ridiculous that even I find myself tedious on the subject. Just because a woman wears horn-rimmed glasses doesn’t mean she has the driving obsession to burrow through endless layers of machine code to execute tricky, anonymous attacks on every kind of bureaucracy. Mostly, women are the bureaucracy, which is historically, inveterately, depressingly female. It’s the ultimate definition of passive-aggression. And women never aspire to be anonymous. They just settle for it when their need for attention goes unnoticed. But their preferred weapon in that case isn’t computer code but legal documents. Or poison.

By the same token, my wife is tired of hearing me rail at the Hollywood trope that when in danger, women ALWAYS:

— Can’t start a car
— Can’t run away without falling down
— Can’t hang onto a gun they’ve fired without immediately throwing it away
— Can’t be quiet when silence is a matter of life and death
— Can’t ever, ever, EVER do what they’re told without saying, “What?,” “Why?,” Or “Huh?” Just before the machete explains.

Which is all bullshit that consigns women, more than laws or regulations, to second class status. Where they don’t belong.

I don’t dislike women. More than boys, they need and respond beautifully to a good father. When they catch fire, as they often do, more now than in the oppressive past, they are luminous, numinous, inspiring, and ineffable.

Last week, I showed you a girl who sailed around the world and wished I had a daughter like her. Today I’m giving you a raft of Netflix Girls, all of whom I admire and would be proud to claim as progeny.

Wild Eyes: The Abby Sunderland Story. Another teenage girl who had to sail around the world.

Zero to 100. A surfing prodigy. Head-snapping footage of a born natural whose mother had been advised to abort her. (See video above.)

Ballerina. Showed you this a while back. It’s a profession as demanding as the NFL, and at the moment I’m liking it better.

First Position. More ballet. Get over yourselves. Oscar Levant once called ballet “the fairies’ baseball.” Now that ESPN wants baseball and football to be the fairies’ national pastimes, you have some catching up to do.

Sarah Burke. She bulldozed the sport of freeskiing to include women. Then she died pushing the envelope.

Karina Hollekim. Base jumper. Crazy girl.

Ready to Fly. Ski jumping. Women are as fearless as men. Sometimes.

Soul Surfer. Sometimes they’re even more fearless.

This post could be longer. A lot longer. But if I hurry, I can finish the last of the chicken cacciatore before my wife gets home. Just remember. Whatever men say, they know that women can be brave and fierce and spectacularly beautiful in action. As long as they don’t catch you polishing off their chicken cacciatore. Which can get ugly fast. Don’t ever think I think otherwise.

Cleaning up in the social networks. Scary whirling air. Boo. We’re fans.

So we watched the Sharknado sequel, having missed the first one. My wife hates gore, but having started we couldn’t stop watching. Repeatedly, she exclaimed, “I can’t believe I’m watching this movie.” I explained that it was my blog duty to keep up with what’s “trending.” We both laughed throughout. A lot. Blood colored cotton candy.

Imagine my surprise that there could be anyone so humorless as to consider the Sharknado franchise sinister. But here’s the proof (h/t Hotair):

Last year, Flavorwire’s Jason Bailey argued that Sharknado is bad for people who love bad movies. “For those of us with a genuine love for bad movies, who seek out treasures of terribleness,” he wrote, “the Sharknado social media storm was kind of like when everybody discovered rap music via Vanilla Ice.” Bailey made the case that the appeal of so-bad-they’re-good gems like Manos, Miami Connection, or The Room is that they weren’t deliberately manufactured to be bad. Those cult hits came from people who truly believed they were making good art, and the gulf between their visions and the reality of their work was what made them enjoyable. The same cannot be said of the Sharknado films — “a plastic, artificial, manufactured substitute” made with “snickering, ironic snark-viewing in mind,” Bailey wrote.

But that doesn’t get to the bottom of why Sharknado is so pernicious. Imagine that you’re a top Hollywood executive — the kind that calls shots and greenlights projects. If you’re searching for the Next Great Box Office Smash Hit — especially one that’s cheap and likely to put butts in seats — you’d be crazy not to see the cultural phenomenon of Sharknado as an instant money-making opportunity. Hire some washed-out, B-movie stars on the cheap; attach a no-name director; commission a hastily written screenplay; and don’t break the bank on your cheesy, cheap special effects. If it’s half as successful as Sharknado, it’s a recipe for some serious cash money.

But what kind of precedent does that set? If studios succeed by making bad movies, other studios will follow suit. Social media buzz becomes more important to Hollywood every year, and it won’t take many more Sharknados before studios, filmmakers, and writers race to the bottom, creating terrible lowbrow art for the sake of irony (the one thing that we do not need more of these days).

If you read the comments, there are few additional points to be made. My own unique observation is that no other movie could make Snakes On a Plane look, comparatively, like Citizen Kane.

And there’s another link between these two titanic productions. Behold:

As Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes fun is just fun.

Have yourselves a fine day. But keep your eyes peeled for sharks. You can never tell where they might be lurking.

I’d read about it for years, so when it showed up on cable, on the Independent Film Channel, my wife and I watched — not from the beginning — for 20 minutes before bedtime, just to see if it was as interesting as other Scandinavian productions we’d enjoyed. But we’d been spoiled. The English dubbing was as ham-handed as old Japanese Godzilla movies, too loud, oddly Ohio, and offputting.

But we were intrigued enough to find the Swedish original on Netflix. Which pointed up the problem IMDB reviewers had had. Multiple reviews of the IFC version got sidetracked in the same way this one did:

Oskar is lonely. His parents have separated, neither one wants him, he is alone a lot. He hangs around outside in the snowy Swedish night. One night, he meets a kid named Eli (Lina Leandersson) who is about his age. Eli is lonely, too, and they become friends. Oskar is at that age when he accepts astonishing facts calmly, because life has given up trying to surprise him. Eli walks through the snow without shoes… They decide to have a sleepover in his bed. Sex is not yet constantly on Oskar’s mind, but he asks, “Will you be my girlfriend?” She touches him lightly. “Oskar, I’m not a girl.” Oh.

Oh. Some of the reviewers concluded that girl vampire either/or boy vampire was, attractively, somehow the point. Cultural melding metaphor. Except it’s a dead wrong perspective. “I’m not a girl” means “I’m not a girl but a vampire.” The original Swedish version makes this unmistakeably clear. Footage was amputated from the dubbed IFC version no doubt because it would upset the new politically correct Hays Office. It’s a criminal offense to see (for a micro-second) the privates of a thousand year old vampire who is stuck at twelve.

Not highlighting this for any point other than that the theme of the movie is actually a positive view of humankind. The climax is driven by the vampire’s insistence that her human friend share, however briefly, the difference between the human desire to kill and the natural predator’s absolute need to kill in order to survive. They lean into one another out of opposite desires.

The love affair is real. The point of convergence is the urge to kill. The boy, ceaselessly bullied, wants to kill his persecutors. The vampire, ceaselessly pursued, wants to be more than a cold predator in mindless pursuit of prey.

It’s not a slasher film. The violence is sparse but intense and in the end dramatically just. (Also cinematically kick-ass.) The finale is philosophically thought provoking. And the girl Eli is, ultimately, more terrifying than Count Dracula.

I’m still thinking about it two days later. Never gave a moment’s thought to any other vampire movie after the credits rolled.

See for yourself.

Face of the New Media. His name is Jazz Shaw.

I’d like to be going to bed now, but I’m so mad I can’t. The Hotair website is like Paris, a place instantaneously and completely abandoned in August, left to a partially deranged half writer who derives his credentials from the fact that he’s as obsessed with NFL football as the putative site daddy, a Pittsburgh Steelers lunatic from Minnesota named Ed Morrissey.

Sick of it. Sorry. Sick of all the half and quarter writers who actually make Allahpundit look good. Where did this new guy Noah Rothman come from? He actually began a post with a fifty word sentence fragment last week. He can’t construct a logical sentence. But he’s New Media. Mary Katherine Hamm has sentence diagramming and usage problems, although thankfully the last female Hotair writer (Erica something?) has already resigned to assume a much more important position in the Republican hierarchy. I’m sure she’ll muddy the message fabulously going forward.

Still. Everybody on staff in righty American blogs is speeding to the Hamptons for their summertime vacation. (I hear Erick Erickson is going to have a spread as monumental as his waistcoat.) Which means it’s all up to the Ted Baxter types who are left, meaning, ta da, Jazz Shaw. Who has the following posts in a row at Hotair.

Hall of Fame Football.

Slow March to Gun Control.

Ellison’s Vote against Iron Dome.

Rand Paul Busts a Rhyme.

U.S. Spy Plane Evades Russians.

Russia about to Invade Ukraine?

All of which display generic conservative/RINO semi-professional writing with occasional syntactic and grammatical lapses, perhaps better than barely literate Breitbart bigwig John Nolte, but enough to satisfy the comparatively smarter Hotair faithful — until this:

Scarborough Chides the Simple Minded on Israel.

The Hotair faithful suddenly discovered that Jazz was not really Jazz but Old Ragtime, an archaic relic with a big hat and a Teutonic mustache. I wrote him this email about his Scarborough defense:

Brave but obtuse. Joan Rivers was more on point. If NJ was firing missiles at NY, tunneling into NY, NY would retaliate.

I know you media veterans form personal friendships. In the old days (love your mustache) understandable. Now it’s important to see blind ambition for what it is. Scarborough is a latent accomplice in the annihilation of Israel. Sad you can’t see it. Sometimes you make sense.

Go see IP.rflaird.com and Instapunk.com for a period spanning more than ten years. Don’t know any of you guys. How I can be honest.

Regards,
Robert Laird

To which he has not responded. Don’t expect him to. The august of the new right wing media never respond. They’re the august, don’t you know?

I’m NOT Jazz. I’m the punk who’d tear Jazz and various Joe’s a new asshole.

Stock market tanking. Prez playing golf while the world burns. Everybody else talking nonsense as if it were wisdom. Lighten up.

We will get through this. An Instapunk Rule.

My home county is mostly water. Boats, sails, motors, rivers, creeks, ponds, salt water marsh, bay and sea. But I don’t have a daughter or a son. Which, sometimes, is like being all alone on the ocean in a storm.

This one chokes me up. See what it does for you. Whole thing at Netflix.

She’s just us, to the third power.

Here’s what’s funny. All the people on the right with any political savvy are running around saying, “Shhhhhh! Don’t talk about impeachment. It just helps the Dems raise money.”

Dom the gaffemaster made that the opening platform of his WPHT show yesterday, echoing what we hear from National Review and Fox News pundits. Dom is way way superior to Sarah Palin. Like all reflexive conservatives, he was scornful of her call to impeach the Trojan horse in the White House. He beat up all the callers who thought otherwise.

Thing is, Obama should be impeached. Almost everybody knows he should be. As president, he’s become Hugo Chavez and a silent partner of Hamas and the plan for a global caliphate. But in strict political terms, it’s not the right time to make any such attempt. Granted. No trial in a Harry Reid senate could ever convict him.

But talking about why he should be impeached is a public service.

The perfect person to do that is Sarah, who has made no visible move toward future political office. She is a citizen. She is the equivalent of the first Roman Tribune, who was empowered to represent the people at the door of the Roman senate.

Even as I write this, I hear Rush Limbaugh beginning a parallel argument. So I’ll leave the details to him and move quickly to my close.

I’m just saying Sarah Palin has done right to put impeachment on the table. Talk to your friends. Make the case that Obama is not a president but a self-worshipping would-be emperor. We can’t go any farther down this road. And we’re the ones who have to depose him, the party that supports him, and the mass media who ignore his flat lawlessness. Pass it on.

Thank you, Sarah.

Keep talking. When you’re right, you’re right.

Is this relevant? Yes and no. Women are desirable. But not always.

Philly talk radio’s gaffemaster Dom Giordano has discovered that Eric Holder’s Department of Justice is going after the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for gender discrimination in police hiring. Apparently, only 50 percent of female candidates pass the physical requirements while 70 percent of the men do. This must be stopped or changed or rectified or something. So here comes the DOJ.

These requirements need to be gender-adjusted to ensure, you know, equality. TV tries to convince us that women are just as capable cops as men. One of Giordano’s callers from the Philly law enforcement community was matter of fact about the reality. Women, he said, wanted to get off the streets as fast as possible into office jobs. Why the most common descriptor for female police officers has become “secretaries with guns.”

Rightly, Giordano posed the question of female firefighters. If they can’t carry you out of a burning building, why should they be there at all? Political Correctness as a form of negligent homicide.

There may be some women who can do this kind of work. More power to them. But we don’t need gender differentials in the qualifying standards for police, firemen, and military. That’s not equality. It’s criminal favoritism.

A kind of equality to die for. Not a figure of speech.

Smile, baby, smile. Silivren penna miriel. (Trans: Me the silver dagger.)

Already mentioned below my outrage that RealClearPolitics would publish, let alone solicit, such drivel. Before we get started, here’s who the guy is.

He attended Harvard University, where he was on the staff of The Harvard Crimson, and graduated with honors in 1976. He has been a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and has served on the Visiting Committee of the University of Chicago Law School.

Think he’s been a frequent guest on NPR too. Standard Obama Orc. Why would anyone care what he has to say? Only me. Because I can’t let it stand without subjecting it to a flamethrower. Here’s his spine numbing apologia for the worst president in U.S. History. I’m the one in Italics.

*******************

Is Obama To Blame for the World’s Crises?

The world is a hot mess. I always borrow my best lines from TMZ. Pro-Russian separatists shot down a passenger jet over Ukraine. Iraq is under siege from Islamic radicals, the Taliban is rebounding in Afghanistan and civil war grinds on in Syria. True.

Israel is fighting in Gaza. Negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program have come up empty. China is bullying its neighbors. Also true.

When trouble flares up around the world, U.S. presidents get blamed. No shit, Sherlock. We’ve been holding it all together for a hundred years. Funny what happens when dad leaves home and the office for a Vegas hooker. The latest polls show that only about 36 percent of Americans approve of Barack Obama’s handling of foreign affairs — down from 51 percent in May, 2011, after the death of Osama bin Laden. Yeah. Odd, ain’t it. You’ve got that old snapshot of Dad looking intent in his Santa suit by the Xmas tree, but when you finally learn what he was intent on was a stripper dancing by the fireplace, your perspective changes. Especially since you’ve learned by hard experience he’s never been near the Xmas tree since. Not even on the day the tree fell down and killed some of his employees. While he was in Vegas.

Republicans have not been reluctant to place responsibility on him. “Obama has presided over a recent string of disasters that make even (Jimmy) Carter look competent,” wrote Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush. “The world is on fire — and Obama’s foreign policy legacy is in tatters.” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina charged that “his policies are failing across the globe.” All right. Granted that his critics are Republicans and must therefore be wrong, I’m sure we can find a counter-argument. Let’s see. A policy of universal apology to every dictator for everything they’ve done to abuse their people, coupled with a total shutdown of U.S. Operations in Iraq and an announced withdrawal date in Afghanistan, couldn’t have done anything to embolden our enemies and cause them to ignore weak American statements that are never backed up by anything but cheers from Leonardo Di Caprio.

The indictment implies that had the administration been tougher or smarter, Ukraine would be intact, Syria’s dictator would be gone, Iraq would be stable, Hamas would surrender, China would be a gentle lamb and Iran would give up its nukes. No. It implies that the usual behaviors of dictators and tyrants would have been less vicious, reckless, and costly. America has been a century long cop, not a miracle healer. But when the cop puts his gun on the ball washer at the first tee, people get the wrong idea. Assads kill 100,000 rather than 1,000. And Putins grab the whole Crimea and half of Ukraine, not just rivals off the street with Glock-bearing thugs. Also, just maybe, they don’t feel blasé about murdering 300 civilians who were just passing through. What else? With a status of forces agreement forcefully negotiated, Iraq might not be falling apart and crucifying and exterminating Christians, and Iran might not be jeering as they ramp up their nuke program confident of no penalty now or ever. Do matters of degree mean ANYTHING to you, Steven?

Conservatives say Obama thinks he’s king. But they seem to confuse him with God. We don’t think that. Trust me. Only he’s confused that way.

It’s easy to forget that planet Earth has always been a turbulent locale. Really? During the Reagan administration, often fondly recalled as a golden age, there was endless strife hither and yon: civil wars in Central America; Americans taken hostage in Lebanon; a U.S. military barracks blown up in Beirut; and Libyan terrorists bombing a Pan Am plane. Bad things happened back then? Not only hither? But yon too? Shucks, I just plain forgot, Steve. The world always behaves when you’ve got a Repub to tell’em to sit in the corner till they’re ready to straighten up. Of course, a massive and growing navy, Air Force, army, and ballistic missile network working on SDI don’t hurt none when it comes to standing up at the TelePrompTer and saying how very disappointed we crackers be with what youse did yestiddy. Do it?

The Soviets shot down a South Korean passenger jet. South Africa’s minority white government tried to suppress a black revolt. Did the Soviets shoot down a jetliner? Damn. I’ll bet Reagan said it was a sad accident and probably nobody’s fault before he adjourned to one of Nancy’s fancy state dinners. And revolt in South Africa? We all know how much Reagan hated black people. Pullease.

Reagan may get credit for causing the collapse of the Soviet Union, but tranquility didn’t follow. Of course tranquility was the whole point. Reagan was a total failure at that. He settled for getting the quivering fingers of totalitarian nonagenarians off the buttons of the thousands of ICBMs aimed at every American city, town, and hamlet. What an oaf. (Or half an oaf, which is better than none.) It wasn’t long before Iraq invaded Kuwait, Yugoslavia erupted into bloody ethnic conflict, civil war broke out in one African country after another, famine ravaged Somalia, Palestinians rose up against Israeli rule, and Pakistan and India fought a war after acquiring nuclear weapons. Because none of these situations was brewing, stewing, and simmering before Ronnie politely asked Gorby to please “Repaint this Wall, in appropriate Russian colors.”

And the 21st century? It did not turn the world into a serene oasis where America consistently got its way. Awwwwww. It didn’t? Good intentions don’t always lead to perfect results? Why the best parents never try to restrain their children in any way. The 9/11 attacks, the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan are still fresh in our minds. The Russian invasion of Georgia, al-Qaida’s migration into Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, Israel’s war in Lebanon, the civil war in Sudan — those are easy to forget. They are? You’re even better at forgetting than us Reagan sots are. Like, who can forget the time when Georgian rebels brought down that American Airlines 747 with one of the Kardashians on it? Oh. Sorry. Senior moment here. Which probably accounts for why I don’t remember the Al Qaida migration either. I thought the Sun King had Al Qaida pretty much neutralized, wiped out, and waiting submissively at the 19th green. My mistake.

North Korea cheated on a nuclear deal under Bush. Iran took major strides in its own nuclear quest. Thank God they’ve stopped THAT shit. Vladimir Putin gutted Russian democracy. China tried to intimidate its neighbors.

When was this era of harmony that Obama has somehow forfeited? It never happened. And it’s not likely to emerge under his successor. Even at the height of our post-Cold War power and influence, nasty events happened all the time, and we couldn’t stop them…

Yet the belief persists that the difference between a bad outcome and a good outcome is a willingness by the U.S. government to exercise leadership or show toughness or otherwise get involved. Like the way it didn’t matter what we did in WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, or the Cold War. In practice, our interventions often exact a terribly high price for a dismal result. Like three victories, one tie, and a loss, which if I read it right is enough to win a World Cup in futbol. If there are two ways to get a dismal result, maybe we should choose the one that doesn’t cost us thousands of lives or billions of dollars. And giving up more easily is always a good thing too. 440,000 lives in WWII, 60,000 apiece in Korea and Vietnam, and far less than that in Iraq and Afghanistan. Almost like a cop who’s been getting better at walking his beat, right before he retires and turns it over to the ascendant gangs.

We like to think we can easily shape the world to suit our preferences. But as the 19th-century historian Henry Adams pointed out, chaos is the law of nature, and order is the dream of man. I’m sure you like to think a lot of things, but it would be a huge help if you learned how to think in the first place.

***********

Sorry if I’ve been impolite. But I’ve no more use in my life for Harvard Crimson slop.

RCP, I’m about done with you too.

Sell out pretending to be objective in your presentation, and I’m done.

It’s an Instapunk Rule.

All the nicely dressed ladies and gentlemen holding their noses are the “Good Germans” who lived in the environs of Buchenwald and professed to know nothing of what was going on. What’s that smell? It’s the smell of you twisting your brains inside out to hate what is good and love what is evil. A stink you’ll never outgrow. Patton ordered it at Buchenwald. They came in laughing. Not how they left. But he’s dead now. Don’t feel too relieved. You may think you know something about contempt. I assure you you don’t.

I had three posts I was going to do today: one good, one bad, one ugly. The good is done. This is the bad. What U.S. troops who liberated Buchenwald and Dachau found was so bad that military discipline broke down. It was hushed up, but here are the accounts.

The footage above was taken by army troops. Photoshop didn’t exist. No makeup artists had the tools or the imagination to invent such entanglements of massed starved dead bodies in 1945. Yet Youtube still has plenty of disk space for holocaust deniers. Who are legion. Including this gem from a German bishop. Take a good long look at him. This is who you are becoming.

“Quote unquote the holocaust.” And pay attention to his locution about anti-semitism and truth. Is he saying what you thought he said? Play it again. Yes. And if you like this kind of stuff, Youtube has an ocean of it, all in the same superior tone you libs are used to using on Republicans. Enjoy.

I don’t have time for more of this. I have to get on to my ugly post, which is a fisk of an absolute fool harbored by RealClearPolitics of all places. Why it’s going to be so ugly.

Also why I’m tendering my apologies in advance to Abraham H. Miller at National Review for reprinting his column in its entirety. I think Dr. Miller will forgive me. Pass it on to your friends with full credit to the original author.

Progressive Jews, Wake Up

At pro-Hamas demonstrations in U.S cities in recent weeks, anti-Semitism rises up and is heard.

By Abraham H. Miller

In the largely Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Chicago’s Petersen Park, residents last Saturday morning found anti-Semitic leaflets on their way to synagogue to observe the Sabbath. The leaflets threatened violence against the community unless Israel stopped the war with Gaza.

For those progressive Jews who have found solace in the myth that anti-Zionism has nothing to do with anti-Semitism, the events across the globe of the last few weeks have been a rude and discomforting awakening. And so they turned to their final recourse, the belief that America was different.

Sure, there was a pogrom at a synagogue in Paris, but, well, that’s Paris. Muslims and their neo-fascist and leftist allies might walk through the streets of Germany shouting anti-Jewish slogans reminiscent of the Hitler Youth, but, well, that’s Germany.

Then came the pro-Hamas demonstrations in Los Angeles, Boston, and Chicago.

In San Francisco, if not for the police, some 30 pro-Israel protesters would have been brutalized by over 300 people demonstrating on behalf of the genocidal Hamas terrorists.

Sounds of a vicious, leftist anti-Semitism associated with anti-Zionism have long been audible in American society, but Jewish-community leaders, cut from leftist cloth, refused to acknowledge them. I have to wonder if those Jews pushed back on the streets of San Francisco by frenzied haters recognized some of their opponents from joint ventures on gun control, gay and lesbian rights, reproductive rights, and interfaith dialogues.

Those who believe in women’s rights, gay rights, reproductive rights, and human rights have cast their lot with people whose culture violates the basic dignities of freedom. What explains that? Hatred!

Hatred is the great unifier. If you are going to hate anyone, hate Jews, because no one cares. When a naïve foreign-born student at the University of California, San Diego, put up a noose in the library, as a prank on her boyfriend, the administration called for a campus soul searching and held meetings, vigils, and teach-ins. Moved by the inadvertent crisis she caused, the student confessed. The administration, however, was unsatisfied and notified the FBI, calling for her to be charged with a hate crime, all for an act of naï​veté.

But just months later, on the same campus, Jumanah Imad Albahri, a member of the Muslim Student Association, publicly proclaimed her support for killing Jews. The UCSD administration took no action.

Slight the voluble sensitivities of any group on an American campus and you’ll be condemned to sensitivity training and endless bureaucratic harassment. But propose to kill the Jews and you’ll find that the Constitution will be wrapped around you tighter than a piece of cling wrap.

The palpable anti-Semitism visible in recent demonstrations here in the United States has caused some of our progressive community leaders to come out strongly for Israel, but in so doing, they have to showcase their progressive credentials, as if it is necessary to say, take me seriously because I too am a progressive and I support Israel.

Forgive me if I am not awed by progressive credentials, especially knowing that these are the people who helped put this administration in office. Why did the Federal Aviation Administration cancel flights to Tel Aviv, when flights to Ukraine, where a passenger plane actually was downed, continue? Flights to Damascus and Baghdad, active war zones, were never canceled. Why was the Jew-hating, Islamist Turkish president Recep Erdogan once one of President Barack Obama’s most trusted allies in the Middle East? The questions answer themselves.

As for progressivism, gay marriage is not worth putting the lives of 6 million Jews in the hands of an incompetent, indifferent president, whose cultural affinity is with Islam. His Jewish associations in Chicago’s Hyde Park were with rabbis who believed peace was more likely if Israel was on the receiving end of condemnation.

Progressive Democrats do not support Israel in this existential struggle, but the Republicans do. The reality is that progressive Jews are going to have to decide whether they are progressives or Jews, because the term “progressive Jew” is increasingly becoming an oxymoron.

The modern anti-Semitism that now concerns our progressive leaders is an outgrowth of the Left. It was Marx who wrote the vile “On the Jewish Question.” Hitler recruited from elements at the margins of Germany’s economy. There is a reason he called his movement National Socialism and infused it with an ideology of workers’ rights. The distinguished political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset has shown how Hitler’s electoral surge came from the liberal elements of Germany.

Progressive rabbis will probably organize a call for peace, but that is precisely what Israel does not need. Israel needs to destroy the Hamas tunnels, some of which are under Israeli schools and residences. They form part of the command-and-control apparatus of the terrorists. No nation-state can live with rockets and missiles falling from the skies and explosive-laden tunnels underneath its schools.

As for our progressive Jewish communal leaders, I will believe their commitment to Israel when they go to the next interfaith-council meeting and publicly confront their fellow progressives about their boycott-divestment-sanctions hypocrisy. I will have renewed faith in our community-defense groups when they confront the double standards on campus that protect every group but Jews-

In the meantime, their failure to do so only means that, increasingly, American Jews will have to start behaving and thinking like French Jews, because the bigotry of Islam and its leftist allies does not end at Europe’s coast.

— Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati. He has served on the faculty of the University of California, Davis, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Miller is a Jew. I am not. Why I feel free to add my own postscript to all the non-Jewish Americans who are pure sons and daughters of Josef Goebbels. You liberals, progressives, Paulistas, whatever you want to call yourselves, who cannot see the simple truth that Israel is fighting for its life against barbarian fanatics who possess no morality worthy of the name (yeah cut off my daughter’s clitoris and stone her if she gets raped) and almost no consciousness, do not deserve to live yourselves. Look yourself in the mirror with one thought. When was it in your pitifully perverted education that women’s liberation came to consist of the infinite right to abortions for American women and nothing else? Not even makeup, a driver’s license, a degree in Women’s Studies, or an orgasm for anyone else. (Overlooking altogether the right to live through rape or mere imprudent copulation at a frat party.) When? Are you proud of that moment? Could you blog about it for the rest of us?

I sure hope so. Articulating it would be good for you. Because it might be the last thing you try to explain in dead earnest before you are put to the sword by the savages you presently support. Actually, the smart course would be to deny, deny, deny. Call it your Peter moment. I kind of like that.

And as to you who have publicly chanted or even thought “Back to Birkenau,” I wish you a traumatic last moment of life.

Now I have to go foul myself with the writings of a former Harvard Crimson editor named Steven Chapman. Just when I thought Garrett Epps had laughingstocked himself out of the journalistic universe with his fellatial adoration of you know who. No rest for the guys who were actually smart at Harvard way back when.

What I watched last night till thunderstorms knocked out the electric. The Papuans have no need for electric and no concept of romantic love. Cool, eh?

This is a post that could be huge or succinct. I prefer succinct. Sometimes things that don’t belong together in any rational way belong together just because they do. So I’ve assembled some things that belong or don’t with one another. My hope is that they will serve as compound fractures of the bone most people use for a mind.

You see. There is no link.

All any of us get is a moment.

It can be the same moment over and over and over or an instant that lasts forever. Or both.

Maybe why the concept of divinity is embedded in all of us, to be accepted or fought tooth and nail, byte by byte.

Because everything dies or goes away in the end, all brief as flies but the stone stuff…

…and in all the millennia no one has ever been free. Just ask us.

Unless someone or something has been surreptitiously raising the bar of what it means to be human. Or maybe it always was, is, and shall be mere self adornment. Whatever that consists of.

NOTE. Perurambo, Air Disasters, Afternoon of a Faun, and Men at Lunch are available in full at Netflix. In a later post I’ll tell you what all I learned is NOT available at Netflix. It’s an eye opener.

You all love this damn dumb “beautiful game.” Use it. Flop & fake like pros.

What a bunch of idiots. Israel takes stubborn pride in protecting its citizens while the world press creams its jeans lamenting the death of Palestinian children chained to legitimate military targets. As Israel wins the military fight, the press gushes over the depraved dissimulations of terrorists.

The answer is easy. Too easy for Israeli intellectuals, apparently. Inflate your own casualties. Hell. Even Israel likes the farce called futbol. Learn from your own damn phony sport. Fake it. Get your citizens to flop. Film and publish casualties that beggar the Palestinian propaganda. Oh! Look! Another Jewish mother has fallen! Use lots of ketchup. Cherry bombs are great sound effects. Use clips from Michael Bay movies. The alphabet networks will never see through it any more than they see through the flagrant lies of Hamas. Face it. They’re dumb as fenceposts. Please, please don’t be dumber than they are. That would be a crime worse than the existence of MSNBC.

What is this insistence on truth? It has no place in the modern news cycle.

Or even the old news cycle, which is why there’s this.

Where do you come down? Me? I’m all in favor of cheating. It’s worked before.

All’s fair in love and war. Somebody said it. I’m just repeating it.

The last of the best in humor.

A sale I haven’t closed. The other day, I teased my wife about an author she hadn’t encountered, a Rhode Island Jew named S.J. Perelman who wrote a series of essays about the silent movies he had seen as a boy. “Cloudland Revisited” was about a middle-aged, sophisticated New Yorker writer who connived to see the movies of his youth in private museum screenings. The title I teased her with was “The Wickedest Woman in Larchmont.” She was entranced. But I couldn’t find the text for free, and she’s feeling burned by Kindle books we’ve bought and haven’t read. Stalemate.

So I gave up. NOT. Perelman was an extraordinary talent whose style seems more and more outstanding and relevant to me than it did when I first stumbled across his work. He doesn’t just play with words. He’s the Cirque du Soleil of words, tumbling acrobatics and high wire trapezery that leave you breathless. Amazingly, from a guy who went to Brown. Now that’s funny.

Humorists who are literate as opposed to toilet jokers are not a dying breed but a wholly extinct one. For example, a guy who used to be a literate funnyman published this the other day. I showed it to my wife who agreed with my review of “WTF.” If you can’t think or write or be funny anymore, for God’s sake STOP.

It happens to all humorists if they live long enough. It happened to Thurber. It happened to Mark Twain. And it happened to Perelman. The New Yorker stopped publishing his work when the darkness that always hovers descended.

But that was a long long time after his masterworks. Among which is a book I did manage to find online called Westward Ha! It was a curiously conceived project. Holiday magazine was the great travel periodical of its day. In the aftermath of World War 2, some editor got the odd idea that it would be fun to send two lugubrious middle aged Jews — one a sourpuss humor writer and the other the best caricature artist in Broadway history — on a trip around a world suddenly at peace. You know. Glamor. Sex. Sights. Boats and planes. Cool.

The result was a fiasco, obviously. Perelman in impoverished Asian dance halls tangoing morosely with teenagers in braces. Fueled by oceans of cheap liquor and worse food. It was, in short, one of the funniest things I have ever read. Here’s a taste of the first chapter from a source you can see more from.

Goodbye Broadway, Hello Mal-de-Mer

THE WHOLE sordid business began on a bleak November afternoon a couple of years ago in Philadelphia, a metropolis sometimes known as the City of Brotherly Love but more accurately as the City of Bleak November Afternoons. Actually, the whole business began sixteen years ago, as do so many complex ventures, with an unfavorable astrological conjunction, Virgo being in the house of Alcohol. Late one August day in 1932, I was seated at the Closerie des Lilas in Paris with my wife, a broth of a girl with a skin like damask and a waist you could span with an embroidery hoop. I had had three mild transfusions of a life-giving fluid called Chambéry Fraise and felt a reasonable degree of self-satisfaction. Halfway through my imitation of Rudolph Valentino in Blood and Sand, my wife wiped the tears of laughter from her eyes and arose.

“Look, Julian Eltinge,” she smiled, naming an actor who had achieved some transitory fame for his powers of mimicry, “descendez de cette table, salop, et dinons (come down off that there table, sweetheart, and let us feed the inner man).”

Ever the thrall of a pair of saucy blue eyes, I good-naturedly complied and sprang down with a graceful bound, sustaining a trifling fracture of the spleen. There then ensued a long, absurd debate as to which of us would pay the tab. An innate sense of gallantry prevented me from taking money from a woman, but I stifled it and soon we were bowling along the Boulevard St. Michel in a fiacre. In less time than it takes to build a fourteen-room house, we had crossed the Seine, got lost in Passy, and arrived at a quaint Javanese restaurant…

And that doesn’t take into account the Hirschfeld illustrations. Which are as great as his inspired renderings of the biggest stars of his day.

Oh. Yeah. Almost forgot. Perelman was also a scriptwriter for Groucho. Frenemies before the word was ever coined.

If you find yourself intrigued, go to Amazon and purchase a copy of “The Most of S. J. Perelman.” You won’t regret it. It might save your life for a few more months. All we can ask for these days.

Why would this symphony have anything to do with Scottish deerhounds? Apart from the fact that the conductor is obviously a deerhound too.

If you miss Raebert, go here. Truth is, everybody who’s ever met Raebert misses him forever afterwards. Don’t tell Stan Lee or the other guys at Marvel Comics. He turns heads, stops traffic, makes rules disappear, wherever he goes.

Deneen Borelli.

Last night, my wife had to go to bed halfway through Megyn Kelly’s show. “Why does it have to be so interesting?” she asked. I didn’t have an answer for her. All I know is that the Kelly File is the show I now rely on to keep me up to date at a time when I can’t stand to read or watch other news sources without throwing up. She’s become my crib sheet.

Interestingly, though, she’s also having an impact on the shows before and after hers. O’Reilly is in reactionary mode, reverting to a kind of New Deal archaism that seems actually proud of its out of touchness, as if anyone under the age of 70 need not tune in. He’ll be gone in a year or so is my prediction.

Hannity, on the other hand, is upping his game. I’d written him off long ago. After he jettisoned Colmes, he seemed merely self indulgent, tossing that stupid football around and loading up his “panels” with dim bulb Imus sidekicks and country singers who fancy themselves pundits.

But if you don’t turn off the TV immediately after Megyn does her final sign off, Hannity shows up right away. What happened last night. (Sorry, honey.) And, yeah, it’s happened a couple of times lately. He’s actually getting better.

For one thing, he’s not afraid to schedule Mark Levin, once dubbed “The Great One” by Rush Limbaugh before he became a Limbaugh competitor and therefore a conservative nonperson. Just seeing Mark Levin and that intense angry stare of his reignites the fire in my belly and sends me back to the barricades with all weapons loaded.

There’s also my new favorite female warrior, Deneen Borelli. I can’t prove it, but I’m convinced she’s a Hannity discovery. Good on him. What a woman. Smart, cool, unflappable, and beautiful. My favorite candidate to replace the O’Reilly dinosaur when he retires to his estate in Jurassic, Long Island.

Also my Number One reason for staying up after Megyn to watch Hannity. She might show up.

If she’s still fighting, we can do no less. Last night, she appeared to respond to a video clip in which an NAACP spokeswoman viciously attacked her as a traitor to her race and the cause of Civil Rights. She never raised her voice. She’s Shane. Stoic but fast, fast with a gun.

Thank you, Sean. The signal strength of a great executive is not being afraid to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. You are passing that test big time.

Dr. Chase Peterson, dean of admissions at Harvard way back when.

I’ve been having a conversation with my dead dad, staring at the ceiling and asking his forgiveness. I let him down. My life in many ways has been the opposite of his. He always told me, “I want you to do whatever will make you happy. I don’t care if you want to be a garbage man if it makes you happy.” But he didn’t really mean that. He wanted me to be more like him, dutiful, traditional, and polished. He felt pressured by his dad to be an engineer, which he never wanted to be. He thought my better choice would be to become a lawyer, which I believed because he told me I would be so good at it. This gets us through adolescence, after I’d been through his prep school, where I never realized I had any choice not to go to, just as my sister was entering Vassar, where his sister had gone and my sister automatically matriculated after gaining early admission. Between the two of us, at the height of the most competitive period of college admissions ever, the two of us applied to exactly three colleges. (At the time a little less than $50 in total application fees.)

This is not a bragging jag. It’s the backstory for what happened in my life. The family plan was that I would go to Princeton and then to some great law school that wasn’t named Harvard. Because the only academic stricture ever placed on me was that I couldn’t go to Harvard. My father’s first postulate was that Harvard was the worst of the worst, although every other Ivy school was reverenced.

Why it was so awkward that the only two colleges I applied to were Yale… and Harvard. About the same time my sister got her early admission to Vassar, I got a letter from Yale, offering something called a Yale National Scholarship, meaning if I ever ran out of daddy’s money, they’d pay the rest of my way through. You know. Kind of an honorary thing.

My parents were very proud. My prep school guidance counselor was proud. He was a Yalie. But in those days, the moment of truth was April 15th. On that day I received a letter from Harvard offering me an “Honorary Freshman Scholarship” and the distinct possibility of “sophomore standing,” meaning I could graduate in three years instead of four.

The most difficult conversation I had ever had with my dad. “I got into Harvard. I want to go,” I told him on the pay phone in the dining hall. Long silence. “Okay,” he said. “If that’s what you want, do it.” He felt better when he understood the financials of the sophomore standing option. I was sixteen. He figured I would grow out of my folly.

Cut to freshman orientation at Harvard. It wasn’t a few days of feel good stuff the way it is now. It was a meeting of the entering class at Harvard’s ugliest building, Memorial Hall. Just two days before classes.

Never had any occasion to enter it again.

It was the Dean of Admissions who addressed us. Chase Peterson. No one in the gallery who didn’t know who he was. We had all written our application essays to him. He was the Colossus who stood astride the portal of Harvard. It’s all too big to comprehend. When you get accepted you don’t just receive a letter. You get a piece of parchment with your name rendered in beautiful calligraphy announcing that you have been chosen. In those days, the percentage of those admitted to Harvard who went to Harvard was 85 percent. The second best in this metric was Yale at 60 percent. Harvard was dying and going to heaven. Nowhere else could compare.

Chase. His job was to congratulate us, assure us of our superiority, and guarantee our success in the adventure of life. Here’s my best recollection of what he said: “I suppose I should tell you you are the best and the smartest and most promising of all the youth in the land. But I have to tell you the truth instead. We are all gathered here, in a crumbling throwback to the 19th century, to let you know that you are the result of a fairly arbitrary selection process and none of you should feel that anything is assured.”

There was a murmur in the great hall. Unless it was a kind of gasp. Hard to tell about the acoustics of crumbling throwback buildings.

Imagine Chase in the empty chair. Imagine us in the empty galleries.

Cut to a day or two later. By college mail I received a summons to the office of the Dean of Admissions. Oh shit. The Colossus has discovered I’m not worthy. Oh shit.

I made my way to the administration building, a somewhat garish and frighteningly modern edifice opposite Harvard Yard. Sitting in the modern waiting room, you feel that none of Harvard’s gentlemanly traditions will protect you. You’re another unit, another widget easily expelled from the machine.

And then someone else ambled into the waiting room. My prep school roommate. My best friend. The guy who had talked me out of applying to Princeton in the first place and into applying to Harvard because Harvard was so hard to get into and it was, in his mind, where I belonged. His dad had gone there, but Russian Jews don’t have quite the in on college admissions they once did. My friend Howard Levin had applied to Harvard only to honor his dad, desperately wanted to go to Columbia, and added schools like U. Rochester, U. Cincinnati and similar as his mid-range, and then ticked off Boston University as his fallback.

By the time we graduated, Howard had been rejected by every school he applied to except Boston University and one other, which had both wait listed him. The other one was Harvard. He tore up his diploma. Then he spit on it. Four years of work and pain and he wasn’t in college. He had a genius for self pity I’ve never seen equalled.

But late in August, I got a call from Howard. As usual, he started in the middle. “I was getting ready to harikiri myself and go to f***ing BU when the phone rings and it’s Chase.”

“Chase?”

“Chase Peterson. I was the next guy on the waiting list and some Lawrenceville shithead decided he wanted to take a few years off to find himself.”

I was appropriately dignified about his new opportunity. “Holy fucking Christ. HOWARD! What are the odds? We’re both going to Harvard. Four years of hell. And we’re the winners.” He was typically enthusiastic. “It was an accident.” It had been two decades at least since our school had sent two graduates to Harvard. An accident? No way.

And now here we were in the outer office of the guy he had aimed me at and who had somehow reached out to save him. Weird. Which was the title of the personal essay in Howard’s Harvard application.

We didn’t wait long. We weren’t being punished. He was a handsome friendly man. His eyes kept moving back and forth between us. Calm, curious, appraising.

“I didn’t mean to alarm you,” he said. “But I just had to see.”

We reacted in our distinct ways. Howard plucked at his long black hair, obsessively, and I leaned back in Celtic fight or flight mode, ready to say something unforgivable.

“You were roommates,” Dr. Peterson chuckled. We admitted it. He ignored us. “I just had to see the roommates who were the very first and the very last admitted to your class at Harvard.”

Howard and I looked at each other. From both ends, we had exactly the same thought. This is winning a lottery of lotteries of lotteries. And we’re the ones who did it. Fuck the assholes of Exeter, St. Paul’s, Groton and Choate. We got each other into Harvard from nowhere because we decided to. Between us, there was no more than an eyeflash. We both smiled, manfully, giving nothing away.

Chase wasn’t trying to pin us down. He was just genuinely curious. He wanted to see the chemistry between us. And I think he saw a good part of it. Howard and I were always in the business of protecting each other. I think Chase saw that. Something neither of our families ever did. My folks thought Howard was a bad influence. His folks thought I was a ‘Goodbye Columbus’ subplot. Goy.

Howard died at the age of 40. I’ve been missing his friendship all these years. He died long before my dad did. I suppose these days I have to specify that there was nothing gay about it. We were everything male friendship is supposed to be. We talked and talked and talked from our opposite perspectives, Episcopalian WASP and Russian Jew, and we both could read books by the dozen. I saved him from getting expelled and he saved me from Princeton. He promoted Dostoevsky and I promoted Hemingway and Fitzgerald. And we both lashed out in satire that got us in trouble in the school newspaper I edited. We collaborated on some pieces that I defended him for. When we won those fights I turned him loose and he was scathing.

I could see Chase looking from Howard to me and back again. Who wrote the brilliant essay that got Howard against all odds into Harvard? And I could also see that he couldn’t tell. Because friendship is proof against tells.

Okay. I won’t play footsie with you. I wrote the essay. But I’m a writer. Nothing without material. Howard was an original, too big to be able to write about himself. He found me, a dutiful conformist, and more or less launched me on the mission that has both illuminated and poisoned my life.

There was a chapel walkout in our junior year. The moment when the sixties hit our school. The reason I did the first ever EXTRA in the history of my school newspaper. When I became for the first time a commentator. I did not walk out when half the school did. Howard did. He enjoyed doing it. He’s dead now. But there’s still a part of him in me.

I walk out and I stay. I stay and I walk out. Why my dad and I don’t get along in my dreams. But also why I don’t give up no matter how bad it gets.

Thinking he might forgive me eventually. Though I doubt the Levins ever will. You know how those Jews are. Not Sally, not Rachel, not Janet, not Robert, not any of them.

Because they’re only the best friends you can ever have. If one of them is named Howard.

Call me crazy or delusional or sentimental, but I think Chase saw what he expected to see, wanted to see. Abiding friendship.

And, dad, except for your eternal disapproval, I am happy. Better, I know I used my time here to leave something behind that’s better than I am. So I am content. Which is far more important than happy.

Here’s the sad thing. He’s too dead to hear me. I’m the warrior he raised me to be. Just not in the arena he expected. I think he was English. But I’m a Scot. Makes a difference.

btw, ask Chase if he remembers. He’s still alive, me hearties.

P.S. Not all happy endings. Howard opened a dozen furniture stores. I opened a multinational management consulting practice. His mother decided she could write fiction. Life is beautiful. But what of Rachel? What of Janet? Howard died. More than 20 years ago. None of them has ever reached out to me. Everybody knows Celts don’t feel. Which is our edge. We. Just. Don’t. Care.

SALLY: I miss your son Howard every day. I’m also a better writer than you. If you’re still alive, talk to me.

We can do this. We can learn new stuff that changes us.

We keep hearing that our magically brilliant scientists have figured out everything important or are on the verge of same, in every specialty from climate change to cosmology. This past week has been a bit of a deflater for such bombast. I won’t provide you links unless I relent later, but the Climate Apocalyptics have an inconvenient problem with soaring penguin populations in the Antarctic. They’re supposed to be declining and endangered. Instead they’re thriving. And the cosmologists, who already are muttering to themselves about their inability to find the dark matter that makes up 75 percent of the universe, are now reporting that the universe seems to be missing 75 percent of the light that should be here. Dadgummit.

I don’t hold it against them that science is a moving target. I only hold it against them when they overplay their presumptuous, unproven speculations. But I’ve been doing that for a long long time. Here’s a column from Shuteye Nation coming up on 15 years old.

April 17, 2000

The Television Connoisseur

The most eminent media critic of the Shuteye Times.

“Dozing with Dinosaurs” was magnificent educational television.

Those of you who watch for my column know that it is a rara avis. I write only when I am moved by quality of the sort infrequently aspired to by television producers. Thus, it has been some months since I put pen to paper for the Times. The last time I felt tempted, indeed, was in March, when the Evolution Channel mounted its two-hour special called “Excising the Mammoth.” On that occasion, I was profoundly impressed by the overall integrity of the production. Lesser lights might have pandered to the audience by insisting that the attending scientists remove the ice and reveal the actual carcass of the animal. Instead, we were privileged to receive a television treat—two hours of closeup footage of heavily accented Siburians chipping away at an iceberg and the formless shadow it contained.

In the final analysis I demurred, however, because in the closing moments of the special a certain amount of ‘show biz’ did regrettably intrude. I found the reattachment of the amputated tusks mawkish and sentimental. Too, I was repelled by the artifices employed to imbue the transportation of the icebound mammal with suspense—the melodramatic music, the jump cuts intended to suggest that the helicopter might not be able to carry the load, et cetera. Taken together, the lapses culminated in failure to meet my standards.

In a word, I am a stern critic. That is why I am so pleased to be able to tender a fully glowing review of the Evolution Channel’s most recent effort, an epic film bearing the title “Dozing with Dinosaurs.” From first to last, it was magnificent.

I had not anticipated the broadcast with much enthusiasm. Promotional pieces promised an application of high technology to the project which inevitably suggested Hollywood-style exploitation of the topic with computer graphics and other sensational special effects. I was expecting ersatz drama, stage-managed excitement, a determined effort to provoke and retain my interest.

Happily I now confess that I was wrong. “Dozing with Dinosaurs” dared to be true to its subject. For three hours that could have been three years, we saw the life of dinosaurs the way it must have been in reality—dull, repetitive, and featureless. There was plenty of hunting and eating, lumbering and scurrying, hatching and dying, but it simply did not matter. There is nothing to like about dinosaurs. They had no personalities, no engaging qualities. And to their immense credit, the producers did not attempt to suggest otherwise.

I am, of course, untrained as a scientist, and I cannot offer a technical critique of the information provided about the extinct species to which we were exposed in the show. For example, I am ignorant of the means by which the scientists deduced the timbre of baby Raptor chirps, the choreography of brontosaur mating dances, the trans-Alantic flight patterns of pterosaurs, or the ocular architecture of Tyrannosaurus Rex. Nevertheless, I feel I can vouch for the meticulous scientific accuracy of the film for two reasons. First, the scientists kept explaining how much they knew about dinosaurs, and second, if they had been making up their information, it would—at least occasionally—have verged on the interesting.

I make this point only because certain other critics of my acquaintance have expressed a certain dubiousness about what they call the “all-knowing manner” of the scientists interviewed on camera. These critics suggest that if the science of living animals is unable to answer major questions about the lives of sharks, anacondas, and homing pigeons, then paleontologists are perhaps presumptuous in deciding that dinosaurs can be satisfactorily summed up as whale-sized chickens.

My rebuttal, as I have already stated, is esthetic rather than scientific, but it is none the less certain for that. If “Dozing with Dinosaurs” is in any respect the product of imagination, that imagination is scarcely a human one. No fantasy of the human mind could manage to be as devoid of charm, beauty, creativity, and appeal as the wurld of dinosaurs captured on film by the Evolution Channel. It is indeed a masterpiece of public television.

To my list of living animals that are still mysterious to contemporary zoologists I might have added (and know I did somewhere I can’t locate) the oh so familiar white tailed deer, which many of us try hard to keep from killing us or themselves on the nation’s roads.

Why I am taking this opportunity to recommend two documentaries which show the difficulty of “figuring out” what science is chartered with finding out: what strict, objective observation can tell us about the facts of the matter. And what remains stubbornly elusive nonetheless.

The first is the documentary about white tailed deer above. For everyone who lives near farms or in the suburbs, the information provided is relatively new and hopefully helpful in your own private lives. Guaranteed, the list of stuff you don’t know about them is long and fascinating. Most importantly, they really want to live right next to us. Human development of landscapes has propelled them to a 30-fold increase in population within a century. We’re not in their way so much as they, arguably, are increasingly in our way. Watch and learn. We can work this out.

The second is a sadder piece, about a species far less successful, even though it should be an inspiring example of inter-species communication and bonding.

Science is founded on observation. But not everything can be measured. For you quant types, that’s where alarm bells should start going off on the validity of your certainties.

In the end, though, they are both mysteries. A lesson in humility we should find both thought provoking and, well, inspiring.

Ah. Whence the source of the mythology of the unicorn? Everyone who encounters a “white deer” describes the experience as mystical. Haven’t seen one myself. Hope to. Someday.

I identified her online inside of 20 minutes. She’s real. As these things go. btw at Netflix you can get an English translation. If you don’t know Norwegian.

Not like it’s some kind of spouse abuse. We’ve been watching Scandinavian movies and TV series for quite a while now. We like the intellect behind the writing we see, but we’re also baffled by the people being depicted. There’s a lassitude, a dense unwillingness to engage with critical situations and dangerous people that we just don’t recognize. Don’t mean to be abstract. The Scandinavians tend to just sit there when the shit is hitting the fan. Or they go slow in coming to the rescue when rescue is urgently, desperately needed. Even their heroes are always late, plodding, and diffident in the face of impending catastrophe.

Except for Annika Bengzton (pardon the awful French dubbing in this clip), whose show turned us on to all the other Scandinavians. My wife liked The Eagle, which I couldn’t watch because it was so dense and slow and complicated. But we both liked Lilyhammer, an American take on the difference between passive stupidity and action oriented stupidity (the former Norwegian, the latter American). And we soldiered on through Wallander (not the BBC version) together, perhaps for different reasons. She liked the stories. I liked the fact that he hated everyone without ever showing it openly. The last Viking. Gone a’glimmering. I guess it’s fair to say we endured the native language version of the Dragon Tattoo trilogy because we had grown used to Scandinavian inability to recognize emergency and had learned to wait for what they peculiarly conceive of as justice. Which might or might not just happen.

Then I found this one, a maybe horror movie though not really. It put the Scandinavian detachment front and center, to such an extreme that one of the protagonists says barely a hundred words in the whole picture.

There’s a perfect scene which exemplifies everything we grate our teeth about in Scandinavian films. The silent guy, with excellent contextual rationale, tells his partner, “Don’t touch ANYTHING.” Whereupon he leaves the room and his partner immediately starts fiddling with the knobs of a radio set, repeatedly, obsessively, irrationally. There is never any penalty for this kind of disconnect in a Scandinavian movie. Apparently, no one ever expects anyone to pay attention to anything he says. When the bad thing happens there is never an “I told you so” moment. There is only silence.

Inert silence is the Scandinavian default. They’re done in by the modern condition, too many generations of Ingemar Bergman movies and plays by Ibsen and Strindberg.

Except that there’s something underneath all that, a damaged, maybe even amputated, vitality.

Indeed, amputation is a big part of The movie Thale. But for once we’re not subjugated by the Nordic welfare state, even though it rears its head in the most frightening possible way in the climax of the film. Instead, we are returned to the mythic past of a Norway that just barely exists anymore. Whence the Vikings? Whence the Norse passion? Here. On a shoestring budget. The detached are reattached. The past consumes the present. The old ways win.

Glorious.

Yeah. She liked it too.

I actually remember being 13. Does that make me special?

All right. I admit this is a diversion. Since I posted the previous post, large white cars have been driving by the house. They have drilled, stainless steel hubcaps and driver side spotlights. I think the men inside are wearing cheap black suits. So it seems like a good idea to put something else up as the first thing people see. Maybe, if I’m dumb enough, they’ll overlook what I wrote a bit ago.

I told my wife that now I’m well into my sixties I’ve become obsessed with sex. She thinks that’s okay. But there’s no telling what turn it will take. Because I’m old and perverse and far less energetic than Tiger Woods. Why I started pondering History/Discovery/Nat-Geo channel documentaries about Neanderthals.

They’re all obsessed with the same thing these days. DNA. Is there any chance Neanderthals disappeared only because they converged with Cro-Magnons? Or did they just die off because they weren’t smart enough to keep up?

Yeah. I keep watching. But all the shows are about DNA, whether you can get it from bones or Neanderthal teeth, and if you get a positive cross pollination result is it contamination? Would early homo sapiens have had incentive to breed with big clumsy Neanderthals, and if so, why and how? Or is any sign of DNA combination, well, contamination? And why do I keep watching these silly shows that always end with the narrator intoning, “It’s a mystery.”

I have some answers. Now that I’m well into my sixties.

You see, those of us who are that old and had virtuous parents did not have a supply of Playboy magazines to raid in Dad’s bottom drawer. Our whole knowledge of female anatomy came from yellowing copies of the National Geographic. Being from a highly educated, thoroughly Episcopalian, and ridiculously naive WASP clan, I discovered that my sainted grandparents had a 30 year collection of the National Geographic magazine stored in the attic. Eureka!

They have breasts on the Amazon River. They have breasts and buttocks in the Ubangi tribe of Africa. And the Neanderthals have all of that and pubic hair too.

There was no sex education in those days. You took it where you could get it. I must concede that my mother was a Mickey Spillane fan, and I learned a lot by borrowing the paperbacks hidden under the towels on the bathroom shelf. (A lot.) Also, we had huge color-plate editions of the masterpieces on display at the Uffizi Gallery, the Louvre, and did I mention the Uffizi Gallery? Who else do you know whose first intense moment of pleasure was watching Hera create the Milky Way, never mind how. (She was naked when she did it if that helps.)

But National Geographic was always the nuts and bolts of female anatomy. The way they really looked. Which was wonderful.

The photographs were great, though mostly black and white. You want more. Which is where the artists’ renditions of cave women came into play. Don’t know who those artists were, but they captured the ultimate attraction of wild women. They don’t know, don’t care, aren’t concerned at all about being stark naked.

As I said. Funny. The anthropologists can wonder all they want. Truth is, of COURSE Cro-Magnons would have mated with Neanderthal women. Everyone from 13 to 18 would have taken the plunge without a second thought. Probably the older guys too.

Solving the question of whether or not there’s Neanderthal DNA in homo sapiens. Of course there is. Have you ever been to a mall? A mall in Kentucky?

Sorry. Cheap joke. I see Neanderthals at the Christiana Mall outside Wilmington, DE, and Cherry Hill, NJ, too.

There’s also this movie. About a guy from my home state.

I rest my case. Do you get the funny? The academics could have saved themselves years of research and hundreds of hours of documentaries. But that would be against their Cro-Magnon nature. They’re so sapiens.

Cars still driving by… If you don’t hear from me in a few days, do NOT call 911. Wouldn’t be good for your health.

P.S. Okay. Since one of my oldest friends insisted, here’s a link to my first erotic experience ever. Full disclosure: I was 11, which makes it 50 years ago almost exactly. Why I indulge a single time in TMI. Meanwhile, my wife is telling me to watch out for descending ladders from helicopters. Just so we’re keeping everything in perspective here.