Now that I've warmed to the task, let me just bite the hand that's hosting me and rip into one of Blogger's Blogs of Note. Curmudgeonry, written with all the pith and wit that inspired its title, is a mess. Omitting the celebrity gossip and childrearing tips (always old chestnuts of Mencken's), here's their latest edition item-by-item:

John McCain's upcoming turn on Saturday Night Live demeans the dignity of his office.
"'The Right gripe for you!'" declares the site's logo, gratuitous NYT-style quotation marks and all. Once you've scanned the sidebars--links to Opinion Journal and the NRO, a masthead identifying among others the site's Bush Country Correspondent and Paleo-con Correspondent--the first paragraph of the McCain article stands to reason. He's a Democrat in Republican's clothing, a spy in the House of Bush who's savoring the opportunity to poke fun at the Pres. Just about what one would expect, if a little skittish.

Then the fun begins. "Hardly anyone on American television does [satire] better" than SNL, which stands alongside Punch (excuse me, "England's venerable Punch magazine") in this regard. As England's venerable satirist Eric Idle asked, "What's the difference between life and a 'Saturday Night Live' sketch? Life doesn't go on forever." There's no point in listing the shows that outstrip SNL in my book; even if we grant its relative superiority, the important question is whether SNL does satire well or whether it's the best of a dull and plodding lot. I'll concede the latter and add that it would have helped Paleo-con Correspondent Daniel Tonn's case if he were able plausibly to compare SNL and, say, Private Eye. But that would have been silly.

Some snarkier jibes at "the budding Arizona Thespian", then a toothless poke at the (unconstitutional) McCain-Feingold Bill. Raise your hand if you feel violated by a restriction on soft money contributions to political candidates. Not so fast, you! Wait until you read the convincing article from PACs & Lobbies provided here.

Yeah, I thought so.

Wait, they think that SNL guests write their own material. Or do they? At this point it's starting to look like they'll say anything for effect.... Oh, and the Gilda Radner character you're looking for is Emily Litella.

Silly Judges Read the Constitution
This here's the real ass-chapper, courtesy of Bush Country Correspondent Amanda Frazier. Seems a U.S. District Court Judge in Louisiana ordered the state to stop funding groups that "convey religious messages or otherwise advance religion"; the Governor's Program on Abstinence was seen to involve many such groups. Abstinence education, stupid an idea though it may be, isn't the issue here; Frazier accurately states that the federal program funding the GPA "provides that '[c]ities, states or organizations that receive the federal grants must use the money to teach abstinence as the only reliable way to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.'" In Frazier's gloss of the decision, sexual responsibility is taken to be an exclusively Christian tenet, allowing abstinence education to be declared unconstitutional under the Establishment clause. Bad, bad, bad. And insulting to non-Christians! Those hypocritical liberals!

Well...not so fast. Take a look at the evidence Judge Porteous had to consider. From the monthly report of the Rapides Station Community Ministries, which received federal funding through the GPA:

December was an excellent month for our program. We were able to focus on the virgin birth and make it apparent that God's desire [sic] sexual purity as a way of life.

The money was allocated by way of the welfare reform legislation passed by Congress in 1996. And Congress shall make no law concerning the establishment of religion. Case closed.

Frazier's piece is so perfectly disingenuous that I've got to drop an L-bomb of my own. The woman's a liar.

Stalinism bad, conservatives say
I'm tired of having this sort of thing shoved in my face as if it were news. Yep, we've known for some time that Stalin killed more people than Hitler (I like Christopher Isherwood's comeback to a similar provocation: "What are you, in real estate?"). He was an evil man, period, and anyone who says otherwise is a fool at best. After the insane risks taken by previous correspondents, Chief Pontificator Justin Smith is surprisingly content to shoot fish in a barrel.

But about that anti-anti-communist bit. Communism is a singular target; many approaches, not all of them perfectly complementary, may be taken to fight it. Smith's attack on Stalinist apologists--one of which he'd be hard-pressed to actually produce, mind you--is well and good. But it's clear to many of us that the Soviet Union was crumbling well before Reagan took office (it was even clearer to folks within the USSR itself--hell, within the Kremlin), and that he was largely along for the ride. Not that Reagan didn't take full advantage of the situation: the Cold War was his primary rationale for undertaking a disastrous and unnecessarsy bout of defecit spending and pursuing a whole slew of policies that a lot of us didn't agree with. I don't want to get bogged down in a description of those policies, but I do want to suggest that even those of us who find communism repugnant can honorably criticize the means by which one administration chose to fight it.

The rest of this rant, especially the whining about WTO protesters, is just lame.

Foul!
That about says it. Justin on Islam: "as practiced by many, many Muslims, it often is in practice a violent religion." As practiced by Justin, English often is in practice the tool of jingoist twits.

I dunno
Where does he come up with these? The titles are spot-on, and then...the text.

This one's all in favor of arming airline pilots. "Do the folks who oppose arming pilots opposing arming anyone on airliners, e.g. air marshalls [sic]?" Nope. Pilots fly the planes, often inconveniently turning their backs to the cockpit door. Air marshals are the ones with the guns who...oh, I give up.

Cogitations and Ruminations on the Toddler as Proto-Totalitarian
Neither the Guided by Voices song nor the Flaming Lips number. If the title alone doesn't make you smile, rest assured that six words into Justin's piece he favors us with "Islamism". Beyond that it's much like Foul!, above, but unintentionally funny if you remember Sartre's "The Childhood of a Leader".

While waiting around, I've tucked in to my favorite journalistic train wreck these days, the New York Press Billboard. I first looked at the site while rubbernecking a spat involving JR Taylor, and he's been true to form in every little screed of his I've read. The game, as I understand it, goes something like this:

1) Pick an undemanding bit--any undemanding bit--of mainstream performance or reportage (before hitting the big time with outfits like NYP and Fufkin, at which he's managed to make himself persona non grata, Taylor reviewed the straight-to-video cinema for Entertainment Weekly).

2) Determine why and how the item in question reveals liberals to be ubiquitous, impotent, dangerous, condescending and beneath contempt. Not to mention hypocritical. Note: Liberals are sneaky. Your objection to an album or article might seem at first to rest purely on apolitical grounds, but never lose faith--any item you review is infected with liberalism to precisely the degree and in precisely the way in which it rubs you the wrong way.

3) Paying exclusive attention to the corrosive liberal propaganda exposed in step 2, write your piece. Remembering all you learned about humor from PJ O'Rourke, the Dartmouth Review and your fraternity brothers, be sure to include plenty of zingers (babies are a safe target) while otherwise maintaining a detached, knowing tone.

My favorite of JR's recent Billboard blurbs is on Ted Williams and John Wayne. In JR's fevered noggin, sportswriter Robert Lipsyte's observation that "Ted Williams was what John Wayne would have liked us to think he was" becomes an attack on Wayne. This misses the point. Williams sacrificed five of the best years of his career in service as a fighter pilot with the Navy in WWII and with the Marines in the Korean War; most people didn't know this until recently and thought of him only as a baseball player. Wayne, twelve years older and a father of four when WWII began, never served a minute; most people think of him as a gunnery sergeant or a cowboy. We'll never know how hard Wayne tried to join the military--after all, Williams was also in his early 30s and married with children when he re-enlisted in 1952--and it doesn't matter much. The military has good reasons for putting 34-year-old fathers low on their list of recruits, and Wayne did a masterful job of leveraging his growing fame as an actor to support the war effort: the man did what he could with what he had. When John Wayne's name is mentioned, none of us thinks of Marion Morrison, the pharmacist's son from Winterset, Iowa who became a middling football player at USC. We think of The Duke, of Rooster Cogburn, of Mike Kirby (and, sure, of Rusty Ryan, too). It's a testament to Wayne's skills as an actor that he became so completely identified with his roles even though he was never a cowboy and never a soldier, and his iconic status makes him a perfect point of comparison when discussing Williams' lesser-known heroics.

So there's no attack here on Wayne, just an acknowledgement that he portrayed on screen the kind of life that Williams had actually led. But just as you think that JR's arrow has flown horribly off-course, bingo, there's the familiar target. Lipsyte, though possibly "maliciously edited," is another in a long line of "petty and stupid" journalists out to trash The Duke's reputation. Along Lipsyte stands Salon's Gary Kamiya, who in his review of "Saving Private Ryan" complacently mentions our preference for "the image of jutting-jawed John Wayne firing his machine gun at a collapsing line of Axis dummies." I've got problems with Kamiya's patronizing tone, and you couldn't pay me to read Salon, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that the image, if not the preference, accords pretty well with most folks' impressions of Wayne. Not that any of us have "bothered to actually watch Wayne's war films"--no, no, not the ones JR's watched, not like JR watches 'em.

And here's the killer: by so hysterically defending his hero against an invented slight, JR does Wayne infinitely more damage than Lipsyte ever could have. Heck, he even resorts to making shit up towards the end of the article. Dwight Evans' remembrance of Wayne's and Williams' meeting, quoted in its entirety, consists of Wayne telling Williams "I just act the parts out, kid, you are the one actually doing it." In JR's smitten ears this constitutes "a touching account of one great American expressing his admiration for another. It was also a moment of immense pride in Ted Williams’ life." Nope. It was a movie star expressing his admiration for John Glenn's wingman and the greatest hitter who ever lived. And the distinction gets starker each time JR bends the truth.

Try to reformulate Lipsyte's quote in a way that would make it acceptable to the sensibility JR parades in his piece and you'll get something like "Ted Williams and John Wayne were heroic Americans, each in his own way." That's his message in this piece, nothing more. So why bother writing in the first place? He probably likes John Wayne. The column could've been edited down to this without any loss of nuance:

I Like John Wayne

Ted Williams and John Wayne were heroic Americans, each in his own way.

So, the name. Seipa is a tiny village in southeast Ecuador. From Cuenca head to Macas (itself a humble little burg, though it was built in grand colonial style in the long-since-abandoned hope that it would serve as a regional capital), then charter a bus to take you the three or four hours' drive along the only road heading east. At the road's end you will be treated to an invigorating view of a ferociously rapid 200-foot-wide-river; your view will be unimpeded by anything as ostentatious as a bridge. If you are expected in Seipa, the mayor--a wry man in his forties wearing braids and a faded blue Willie Nelson t-shirt--will come to greet you. From there, you have only to negotiate your way across the river using a 5' x 4' platform attached to a spare frame of iron pipes and suspended from a length of elephant rope. Pay attention to the smaller rope strung parallel to the supporting line and running a foot off the surface of the platform--you'll need it soon enough. And be careful--the platform is predictably wobbly, the wind can gust something fierce, and if you fall you're done for. At first you will coast: your weight will carry you to within eighty feet or so of the opposite shore. At that point, reach down and grab ahold of the smaller rope and pull yourself the rest of the way.

Not everyone in your party will survive the crossings to and from Seipa. The living among you will walk two miles through the Andean foothills to the village.

At least that's how I remember the journey I took back in 1990. A dozen of us gringos and gringettes were there ostensibly to deliver typewriters and radio equipment to the Shuar who'd established Seipa as part of their recolonialization program (our presence there was hardly crucial to the mission's success--we were in Ecuador as part of a summer program sponsored by my alma mater, and the program's leader had been working with the Shuar for years). After negotiating in good faith a series of treaties with the Ecuadorian government--treaties which granted them sole possession and dominion of a little patch of land in this little patch of a country--the Shuar had been chagrined to notice a sharp increase in the number of "European" settlers in the area. Turns out that the Ecuadorian government was selling plots of Shuar land to homesteaders; Quito and especially Guayaquil were teeming with folks eager to try their luck against The Green Wall.

The Shuar, whose name is also sometimes Westernized as "Jivaro", have long been treated with a mixture of contempt and fear (they have a longstanding reputation as headhunters and -shrinkers, a reputation they still occasionally exploit when it suits their needs). But above all they are thought of by most good citizens of Quito and Cuenca as obstinate, bizarrely accoutred and irredeemably savage barbarians. It came as a suprise to some, then, when the Shuar began raising their children bilingually in Shuar and Spanish, when they developed elaborate print and radio networks to share news and tactics amongst one another, and when they began enlisting young, fertile couples to join together in the establishment of strategically located villages like Seipa. Children seemed to outnumber adults three to one when I visited, although the adults were strong enough in number and body to thoroughly whip our gringo tails in a rain-drenched game of soccer. They were gracious winners and lovely hosts. On the way back, our tour guide caught a gust of wind and fell into the river. His body was found days later and miles downstream.

As it turns out, the Ecuadorian government had reasons beyond the relief of urban congestion for wanting the Shuar out. The Shuar happen to be sitting on oil reserves whose extent no one has conclusively proven, and Euros are infinitely more amenable to the stink, noise and death that attends oil exploration (much of Guayaquil, for instance, resembles the Chicago of Sinclair's The Jungle). And let's not forget that the rush to oil exploration has been prompted largely by Ecuador's desire to meet the IMF's debt-payment schedule. While the oil companies, lead by Petroecuador and the excreble Texaco/ARCO/Burlington Oil gang, have encroached steadily on their territory and done to it things described adequately only in the Book of Revelation, the Shuar's efforts (and those of their neighbors) have been at times astonishingly successful.

The Shuar aren't reactionaries. They're not hostile to modern technology, they've got great taste in country-and-western music, they're close to achieving nationwide bilinguality, for crying out loud. They don't tout, and they don't benefit in the fullest analysis from, the old noble savage routine. They certainly haven't had any qualms about introducing radical changes while fighting encroachment from the Euros and the oil concerns, so their struggle can't be motivated by anything as cliché as the old "defending our way of life" trope. They could, it seems, enter confidently into negotiations with the oil companies; give up a bit of land; gain concessions on the means used to locate, drill for and transport oil; pocket a small fortune; and adjust fairly successfully to their new neighbors. But still they resist.

From where I'm standing, their fight is predicated on two points, each of which is self-evident. One, don't shit in your own nest. Certainly don't shit in anyone else's, especially if you're doing so precisely because your own nest is brimful with the stuff. Two, self-determination is a virtue unto itself. To take the issue as far from the South American jungles as possible: Dostoevsky writes in The House of the Dead, his remembrance of life in a Siberian prison camp, "If it were not for his own private work to which he was devoted with his whole mind, his whole interest, a man could not live in prison.... Without labor, without lawful normal property man cannot live; he becomes depraved and is transformed into a beast...." For an individual, "lawful normal property" may mean a stick to whittle or a home to maintain; for a people, it means the freedom to live as they will on their own land (however fluidly and unboundedly they may construe ownership, and however many other groups of people peacably live alongside them). It is precisely because of their presumed bestiality that the Shuar's claims to lawful normal property were so casually dismissed in the first place; it is because they see so clearly that their very humanity is at stake that they resist encroachment on their territory.

Neighborly courtesy, self-determination and stickin' it to the man. That's why I'm calling this whatever-it-is Seipa.