Scroll down to the fourth-to-last paragraph of this blast of gas, read between the parentheses, spot the illiteracy and tell me that the neoconservative movement doesn't have a bang-up array of talent in it's [sic] lineup....
Once that's out of the way, read the final three paragraphs only if you're in dire need of a laugh. What is this Jonah Goldberg thing, and in whose universe other than Billy Buckley's does such a stupid and poorly written column deserve a name as portenteous as "The Goldberg File"? It all reminds me of the self-consciously loud and tastelessly overdressed twentysomethings I see smoking cigars in pubs: stick a stogie in their hands, and they instantly look like teenagers rather than moguls.

Stumbled on to a review of Roger Sandall's new book on the New Criterion site this evening (o.k., morning) and was reminded of what a smug sack of shit Roger Kimball is. I appreciate a vicious attack on emptily sentimental liberaism as much as the next thinking person, and I always suspect an underlying cynicism in people who claim to walk lightly on the earth when they know that their neighbors are having at it with blowtorches, bulldozers and machetes.
Kimball's good on skewering 'designer tribalism', but the priapic thrill he gets at times--"non-smoking, vegetarian, sex-worshipping, drug-taking, eco-conscious, progressive-thinking pacifists"--is enough to make you run and take a shower (and scroll down a ways) before continuing to read. Whereupon you'll eventually find Kimball's comments on Sandall's "discription" of a T.S. Eliot quote.
Those are minor points, no matter what they might say about Kimball's psyche and the NC's laziness. What really pisses me off is Kimball's not-so-subtle perversion of the argument. All but the final paragraph of the piece fawn over Sandall, going to awkward lengths to introduce material even more blinkered and self-congratulatingly instulting to reason and, well, civility than that ostensibly under consideration (William Henry: "It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose"). The end of colonialism is a tragedy--just as those swarthies were starting to learn English, in one undocumented case they're slipping. The answer to Third-World poverty is total assimilation, skill in math and proficiency in English. Und so wieder.
I'm a white guy from the Chicago suburbs. My father worked at the U of C when I was a child, and I used to read the New Criterion by way of tiding me over until I hit Hyde Park myself. My experience with indigenous cultures--I'll just accept the standard definition--is limited mostly to a childhood friend, a Fox if memory serves, who'd grown up on a reservation and is now a doctor, and some time spent in Seipa, a Shuar village in eastern Ecuador. We were greeted a mile away from town by the mayor, a ponytailed fortyish man wearing a Willie Nelson t-shirt, and along with a few other people we made a harrowing, fatal crossing of a swollen river. Once we reached the village, we sat down with most of the adults and discussed, in Spanish, life in and beyond Seipa. The Shuar live on oil-rich land, and the Ecuadorian government sees them as a problem. So land granted by treaty to the Shuar is being sold unlawfully to unwitting and cramped city-dwellers; as part of their response, the Shuar have undertaken a program to educate all their children bilingually in Shuar and Spanish, and have developed an extensive communications network featuring dozens of facsimile machines, some printing presses, and several radio transmitters.
They've also played up their history as headhunters, although no one could remember the last time that tradition had actually been taken up. Better to avoid conflict through a balance of...what was that phrase Kimball's crowd was so fond of?...a balance of fear than to actually fight.
This stuff isn't hard to dig up--responses like the Shuar's to cultural contact are among the hottest of topics in anthropology today, while Claude Levi-Strauss, the anthro who gets the most ink (bits?) in Kimball's screed, is cold in more ways than one. How much more interesting Kimball's review would have been if he'd considered the fact that many non-Western cultures are fully honoring the spirit of human ingenuity by simultaneously engaging the West and defending their traditions (Realpolitik, anyone?). How much more light he'd be able to throw on things if he'd just once paused to consider the irony of a mash note to Sandall appearing in a journal which has been desperately pleading its relevance for decades now.
But Kimball couldn't care less. He's content to attack the easiest targets, to agree nearly wholesale with the book he's reviewing (how stringent exactly is this new criterion?), to write, in essence, an undergraduate book report tailored clumsily to his professor's perceived interests.
Sixteen years ago, I stopped reading the NC regularly when too many of its writers began to resemble the scholarly equivalents of dogs in top hats. Plus ca change....

Well, hell...guess I had to get that little screed out of my system. Speaking of such, I'm just over my first flu as an adult (103 temp, lost 12 pounds in 2 days, had a horrible fever dream in which GW Bush assumed the presidency); must've left me a bit cranky.
On a sunnier note, the law school had George Ryan over today to talk about the moratorium he's placed on executions in my glorious home state of Illinois. Good on 'ya, George--yer a stand-up guy. I'd always made him for a staid downstate Republican, but he had a nice feel for the audience and got some laughs by dealing squarely with a couple of students who thought they were leading him by the nose. No bigger laughs, though, than when he tripped up and said "I've been in prison for twenty-eight years...public service; I've been in public service for twenty-eight years." Two waves of laughter as we caught the mixup and then wondered how big a blunder it actually was.....

Just got Isolation Drills, the new Guided by Voices album, and as Scott Miller says of a Tobin Sprout-era GbV show, it stomped me concave. I loved the homemade feel of their previous masterpieces (esp. Bee Thousand), the proof they supplied that inspiration, desire, hard work and beer--not money, supernatural skill or even luck--are still the active ingredients in great rock music; they haven't sold out one bit, no matter what some of their more sentimental fans might say. Their previous number, Do the Collapse, felt somehow soggy and overpolished; not being able to bring myself to blame Bob Pollard or Doug Gillard (whose Death of Samantha I dug before I'd ever heard of GbV), I saved my scorn for DtC's producer, Ric Ocasek.

Take the Vapors, give 'em David Byrne (but don't let him write anything) and you've got the Cars--a mediocre pop band with a gangly, warbling frontman. After inflicting Candy-O on the world, Ocasek spent his days wooing Paulina Porizkova (which seems to have been his forte all along--they're evidently still married) and extending, for nearly fifteen minutes, the career of Andy Warhol. Oh, and producing records by better folks than he, two of which I own: the Bad Brains' mighty Rock for Light (glorious songs, glorious performance, sounds like it was recorded in a toilet adjoining Bob's basement studio) and Do the Collapse (solid songs, spirited performance, sounds like the producer wanted top billing).

Anyway, Ocasek's out of the picture, and if this is still the perfect world I've always known it to be, GbV'll make Puffy-sized fortunes and take their place in history with the Beatles, Stones and Kinks.

I've got a sneaking suspicion that this blog thing is really going to take off one of these days, and for once I want in on the ground floor....