14 Time-Related Items to Start ’14 (including Jeffrey Tucker)

I’ve resolved to do less blogging, Facing, and tweeting this year (aside from plugging new projects) but should wrap up this phase of blogging history and transition into the next with a climactic “Month of Time Travel,” that is, items that blend past and future in revealing ways -- like steampunk but less annoying.  Here are 14 short items of that sort to launch ’14.

(It’s a good time to think about time travel, what with this odd research having just been published about combing the Net for evidence of time travelers.  The researchers found nothing, so to enjoy time travel you’ll have to look to fiction, like this altered finale of Star Trek: Voyager someone went to the trouble of editing that excludes the romance between Chakotay and Seven.  Regardless, it holds up well -- really, rewatch the final ten minutes if you haven’t seen it in a decade.)

1. Some will recall this blog started around late 2006, just after GOP lost Congress for turning the Arab world into the sort of unstable region where, hell, Fallujah might well end up controlled by al Qaeda eight years later for all we knew -- but it was still prior to the Financial Crisis, which is when my thinking really began to (subtly) change and I increasingly found myself sympathizing with radicals instead of the quit-your-complaining bourgeoisie. 

To really understand my personal evolution in the preceding years, though, the thing to do may be to read the “Retro-Journal” entries I started writing about a year after the blog launched, explaining everything that had happened since high school up to that point.

2. As if war cheerleaders like William Kristol weren’t reason enough to distance oneself from monstrous neoconservatives (as opposed to libertarians, etc.), just in the past few days (for example), I’ve seen (1) formerly pot-smoking David Brooks lament drug legalization on the grounds that drugs don’t reflect his adult sensibilities (but then, so does paleocon Pat Buchanan), (2) hissy-fit-prone John Podhoretz accuse me of having a “personality disorder” and urging me to “get help” for pointing out (accurately -- and efficiently, given that it was one short Facebook comment) ironic parallels between the thinking of the Unabomber and science-wary David Gelernter, and (3) Peter Wehner write a piece on the future “conservative” agenda (on the site Podhoretz edits) that emphasizes the importance of not being anti-government. 

Why can’t these people just go get their own movement and/or party and stop deforming conservatism, the GOP, and libertarianism?  They’re worse than liberal-tarians. 

3. As you read passages like Brooks’ about government being a subtle, nuanced tool for “tipping the scales” in favor of virtue, do remember that his Orwellian notion of “self”-government actually means giving more power to government agents like these dolts who recently deliberately destroyed rare bamboo flutes (new-made for sometimes ancient genres) during a customs inspection.

4. It’s enough to make even a right-leaning mind greatly sympathize with, say, wacko liberal Bill Maher ranting about LSD back in 2011 (h/t Rob Szarka).  Maybe now’s a good time to admit I’m newly fascinated by the recurring hallucinations of shiny “machine elves” many DMT users have reported -- not that I’m saying they exist beyond our sometimes surprisingy-similar minds.  Nor does the ghostly orb one of my relatives saw on the night another relative died.  Probably. 

5. For a more consistent, across-the-board celebration of freedom than Maher’s LSD rant, though, check out Jeffrey Tucker’s libertarian essay collection Bourbon for Breakfast (thanks to Ooana Trien for the loan). 

Tucker’s arguably something of a “paleo,” with his appreciation of the civilization that preceded our statist wrong turn, but he is a reminder that it’s best to ditch any association that term might once have had with Buchananites and to move forward in an unapologetically anarchist-libertarian fashion.  The Mises Institute veteran and founder of Liberty.me is notoriously one of the happiest-seeming lovers of liberty you’ll encounter.  Instead of just grousing about the government, he celebrates all the little everyday victories we can achieve over unfreedom. 

Unless you have a heart of stone, you will smile your way through essays about things like how to undo the government-mandated low-flow restriction on your showerhead (something just foisted on me a few weeks ago after over a decade of being a tenant who had barely ever had any maintenance done on his bathroom, aside from that time part of the ceiling fell in, and thus not drawn the attention of flow-altering supers).  Without urging readers to break the law (which would itself be illegal), Tucker expresses glee not only at the ease with which you can take a screwdriver to that thing but also the ease with which one company, for a time, got around the regulation on gallons-per-showerhead by simply selling multiple-showerhead attachments. 

Tucker also shares my dislike of shaving cream, having discovered years ago, as I recently have, that you can just as easily shave without it and thereby simplify your life (this may put us both at odds with author Alexander Rose, who convinced me buying expensive fancy shaving accouterments and such was the way to go). 

He likewise tackles the potentially divisive issue of intellectual property not with frowny-faced arguments but with cheers for the ease with which old, otherwise easily-forgotten authors can be kept alive if the copyright lawyers can be kept at bay.  He jokes about the sad but logical outcomes of IP such as professors who forbid students to use the ideas they learn in class (on pain of lawsuit), which would seem to defeat the point of learning.  There has to be a better way. 

He offers frequent proof that optimism about markets and pessimism about government tends to make one prescient, as in 2006 when he wrote (criticizing the whole idea of government “cyber-security”): “If experience is our guide, the government in a position of authority is more likely to be creating viruses and spyware than stopping them.  As for the impact of the law, I vaguely seem to recall some legislation passed a few years ago that made spam illegal.” 

He can draw similarly useful lessons from experiences

Retro-Journal, Condensed Version

Before meeting me DOWNSTAIRS at Doc Waton’s at 11:30am today for birthday brunch, you might want a quick recap of my life’s four rich decades, just so you’re up to speed:

•1970s: sci-fi

•1980s: alternative rock

•1990s: libertarianism

•00s: scientific skepticism, debate

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

1. Time well spent?

2. Next step?

Retro-Journal: At Last, 2007

The circle is now complete. With today’s Retro-Journal entry, the fortieth in a series of forty, I have fulfilled my forty-week mission to recount the past twenty years of my life (just over half my life so far), six months in each weekly entry.

Today, in 2008, theatre-goers flock to see a brooding pop culture icon watching over a dark, divided city of crime and danger: I mean Lou Reed, of course, seen performing his Berlin album, in a concert film out today. And Lou Reed — like the then-divided Berlin about which he sings — is also a good glimpse of both the future and past of this blog, for next month, as the major-party political conventions approach, I turn my attention more fully (albeit in shorter posts) to the theme that gives this site its current slogan, “conservatism for punks,” and to working on the long-delayed book proposal about the same topic.

Both conservatism and alternative rock sometimes seem to those steeped in their details like quasi-ancient phenomena but trace their modern formulations to approximately 1964, not so long ago in the grand scheme of things, I realize as I age, with that year bringing Barry Goldwater’s failed but inspirational presidential campaign and Lou Reed’s collaboration with John Cale, the partnership that would lead a year later to the creation of the band Velvet Underground. The resulting subcultures could learn some useful things from each other.

•••

In March 2007, though, forty-three years later, there came the public announcement from Ron Paul of his plan to run a libertarian-conservative campaign for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party — and that same month, coincidentally, saw the official launch of this blog, which has since covered topics ranging from Paul’s encounter with the Sex Pistols on TV to the overly-complicated timeline of the Terminator movies.

About one month after the blog’s launch, as it happens, I attended one of the CitizenJoe political speech/socializing events — the series written about this week, in the same TimeOut New York article as the Debates at Lolita Bar that Michel Evanchik and I run. And at that fateful CitizenJoe gathering, I met a lawyer (and Democrat) named Koli who introduced herself to me, amusingly enough, by expressing doubt about whether any actual Republicans attended the events. Like that night’s speaker (a Cato expert on the Iran situation), I’m a libertarian, but I’m also technically a registered (and increasingly disillusioned, if such a thing is still possible) Republican, on the grounds that when I registered, lo these sixteen years ago, shortly after moving to New York City, the Republicans were ostensibly the more free-market of the two major parties.

Whether the distinction matters anymore is so debatable that I’ll have to write a book partly on that question. Koli and I may not have settled all the world’s political disputes, but we dated for about seven months — even traveling to Jamaica together for my friends Allan Cohen and Maria Gray’s wedding one year ago this month — and there’s something to be said for that.

I will probably be a bit less social, more hermitlike, in the months ahead (except in so far as you all know where to find me twice a month, per the front page’s right margin), working on the aforementioned book proposal. And speaking of devoting my energies elsewhere, some have asked why I don’t post copies of some of the college-era material I’ve mentioned, using it as a potentially-interesting form of filler. Well, besides the fact that I haven’t gotten around to buying a scanner with which to create Brown Film Bulletin PDFs — and ignoring ambiguous copyright questions surrounding those collectively-written pieces — I’ve found that many of the old Bulletins, and my old Brown Daily Herald columns as well, are so riddled with references to whatever the hubbub on campus that week was that even I now can’t understand them sometimes, two decades later.

You can’t go home again. Well, actually, that I can do — Norwich, CT and my parents still make perfect sense to me. Maybe I should have blogged about the first two decades of my life instead of the third and fourth, but it was all pretty much science, comic books, New Wave music, and the communist menace back in the first couple decades, too, except with a lawn, pets, and easy access to the woods. I have just over one year left in which to cement this fourth decade’s status as the most significant one, so wish me luck. After that, it’s all downhill, of course.

•••

•But in January 2007, when I still retained some of the vigor and hope of youth, I saw David Lynch speak at a Barnes & Noble, hoping for some explanation of the poor quality of his three-hour-long, aggressively repetitive and pointless film Inland Empire. The explanation, I think, is that Lynch was always more a naive “outsider artist” than a complex surrealist. He says Blue Velvet started with him thinking, boy, it’d be neat to have a shot of an ear lying in a field and then ask how that darn ear got there, and that, I’m afraid, is the disillusioning truth about the level of thought that goes into his films. Sometimes they just look cool. Now he’s into transcendental meditation, while the Twin Peaks co-writer who in retrospect was probably crucial in keeping the series coherent, Mark Frost, went on to co-write things like the Fantastic Four movies.

Interestingly, I heard years ago that Lynch is also something of a Reagan-loving social conservative, motivated to make his films in part by the concern that the world is, as I think he once put it, full of strange people doing terrible things. And I suppose that’s sometimes the case. But it’s funny, too, as he’s also aware.

•That February saw strange people talking me into seeing the Ghost Rider movie, which was indeed a fairly terrible thing, but it did have a delightful trailer for Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, written by the aforementioned Mark Frost, at the beginning, which helped — though I never did go see the Surfer movie because it reportedly never showed the mighty, world-eating space-being named Galactus in all his armored glory, despite him being a major plot element — and despite his having waited some 14 billion years (or four decades, if you only count from his appearance in Fantastic Four comics) to appear on the big screen. What a cosmic rip-off.

•March brought one of the biggest Lynch fans I know — my old sophomore college roommate Marc Steiner — and his wife to New York City for the first time, and in one way it was indeed like old times, when we’d often complained about the obscurantists and avant-gardists at Brown, since twenty years later we found ourselves attending a postmodern Richard Foreman play, Wake Up, Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind Is Dead!, with theatre guy and amateur philosopher Richard Ryan and his girlfriend.

Marc’s no cultural conservative, but it was a joy to see how much more willing he was than I to simply tell Richard R. that the whole thing was bunk, a colossal waste of time, and a betrayal of all artistic purpose or meaning. I just sort of regarded the hour or so of pantomime, flashing lights, and cryptic repetitive slogans as Postmodernism 101 — a bit boring but harmless and occasionally hypnotic. Richard R. finds Foreman’s work profound, but then, Richard R. admits he’s drawn to mysticism, while also having studied physics and become a computer programmer, a potent combo.

After that night, I finally felt I could ignore the avant-garde without any residual guilty feeling that perhaps it was “threatening” to my uptight, bourgeois consciousness or something. The avant-garde is simply old hat, I think.

•Mid-March brought a junket to tour the Scottish nanotech industry, the end of March had seen the official start of regular blogging at ToddSeavey.com, and April brought the aforementioned Koli meeting, quickly followed by our first real date, seeing musician Mike Kobrin — who had also been one of the other writers on that nanotech junket and who has just this month relocated to New Orleans, the perfect place for a trumpet player. One who combines a fascination with high tech and a love of traditional music is a cultural balancing act after my own heart, a natural for the Big Easy.

•The end of May saw me ordering a copy of Katherine Taylor’s cool novel Rules for Saying Goodbye, a book that still strikes me as providing a valuable lesson for all those writers out there who, around that time, got into trouble for writing fanciful or fabricated memoirs: Just write a book that resembles your life, name the main character after yourself, and call it a novel — then you can do whatever you want. Be an ex-junkie, get raised by wolves and chased by Nazis, embody left-wing Guatemalan womanhood, make cutting remarks to other members of the Clinton Cabinet while being Secretary of Labor, get probed by space aliens — whatever it is you want to fake, you just call it a novel and it’s OK. No subsequent recriminations on Oprah, no cries of fraud. Remember: being a novelist, as opposed to a memoirist, means never having to say you’re sorry. By contrast, the Retro-Journal is (as far as I know) completely accurate and, as such, a valuable first draft of history.

•June saw my ex-girlfriend Dawn Eden headed off to live and proselytize for Catholic chastity in DC, around the time conservatism was starting to look like a spent force in American politics, the Republicans having lost Congress months earlier, after twelve long years of not downsizing government. Since then, I suppose I’ve hunkered down a bit philosophically, figuring that unless I focus laser-like on BUDGET CUTS AND DEREGULATION, no religious-rightist, hawk, reform-minded liberal, moderate, green, or any other known political species is going to make the tiniest effort to encourage those important things — thus the perhaps growing tone of single-minded anarchism on this blog, which I hope will culminate in some sort of useful, more or less libertarian tome at a time when it’s sorely needed.

And the second half of 2007 would see the blog begin perhaps its most important feature (so far): this Retro-Journal, which has explained in some small way how I got where I am. It was inaugurated on Friday, October 19, 2007, twenty years to the day after the “Black Monday” stock market dip that happened a month after I got to college and that many regarded as heralding the end of the Reagan years, much as the Bush years are now ending in financial uncertainty and equally controversial foreign policy developments (ones that may or may not presage equally positive and world-changing subsequent developments).

Regardless of who wins the presidential election in November, this fall is likely to be greeted by many people as a sort of palate-cleanser, with both the Bush and Clinton dynasties probably receding into history. We don’t know for sure what next year will bring, but only a sadist would deny hoping it’ll be better than the past, and, if the general progress of the human race is any indication, it probably will be, despite all the disasters along the way. Who knows? Perhaps I’ll look back at it all in a retrospective twenty years from now and use this juncture as the starting point when I do so. Excelsior.

Retro-Journal: McCain Wins -- in Late 2006

In late 2006, elections ousted Republicans and put Democrats in control of Congress (since which time Congress’s approval ratings have slipped to single digits for the first time in the history of polling).

That was also the half-year during which I posted my first, experimental blog entry on ToddSeavey.com, recounting my experience of Election Night (though I would not begin blogging on a regular basis for another four months). As it happens, that first ToddSeavey.com blog entry bears a strong resemblance to my first AlarmingNews.com blog entry, posted today (a guest entry, done while Karol Sheinin is on vacation, about how I went from anticipating a Giuliani presidential victory to rooting for Libertarian Bob Barr over the past two exhausting years — and note that the non-embedded link in the middle of it as I write this was not my fault, but whether Karol can fix it from Italy remains to be seen).

•That old TSc entry, fast out of the gate, described how I hoped a candidate Giuliani or candidate McCain might learn from the GOP’s 2006 losses (the latter man sounding admirably chastened and pro-spirit-of-’94 on Election Night ’06).

•The new AN entry, by contrast, describes how, since then, I’ve grown more pessimistic and thus more Libertarian (in a strategic sense, I mean — philosophically, I’ve been my usual right-leaning, anarcho-capitalist self throughout).

Since I’d love it if you read (or reread) both the TSc alpha-entry and the AN omega-entry (so to speak), I’ll keep today’s Retro-Journal entry slightly shorter than usual, though it is the second to last, and I hate to give late 2006 short shrift.

(Don’t feel obligated to read the AN entry if your name is Eric Dondero, though, since that would mean you are a libertarian-Republican activist with a tendency to publicly call people Giuliani supporters even when they never officially were, or weren’t for more than a heartbeat. I wouldn’t want to exaggerate my always-tentative, soon-abandoned, weighing-my-options support for Giuliani, which was really more of a 2006 thing than a primary-season thing for me, despite the admittedly formulaic title of the AN entry. My favorite legacy of the 2008 primaries, really, was and remains the emergence of self-proclaimed young “Ron Paul Republicans,” who I hope will go on to reshape the Republican Party in a profoundly anti-government way, to the great benefit of the entire human race, long after President Obama or, perhaps, President McCain has finished rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic ship of state.)

Next Friday, of course, will be the final Retro-Journal entry, bringing us full circle with a description of early 2007 (the Retro-Journal itself having started in the second half of that year).

But first, a quick, free-associative list of some non-political late-2006 highlights:

•I didn’t know which was more frightening that July: the Scottish horror film The Descent or an ornery karaoke crowd at Winnie’s in Chinatown.

•In a single one-week period that September, I heard (a) one friend read an essay about his ex-fiancee being institutionalized with severe schizophrenia, (b) another friend explain his new 9/11 conspiracy theory newspaper at a party to celebrate its latest issue, and (c) a friend of friends — author Daniel Pinchbeck — seriously explain his belief that the god Quetzalcoatl has spoken to him of the Earth’s impending eco-doom and/or cosmic awakening in 2012, to a rapt, perfectly respectful audience, during his appearance at the McNally Robinson bookstore.

(I heard a much less weird reading there just last night, from the novel All We Ever Wanted Was Everything by Janelle Brown, who’ll be one of our speakers at Lolita Bar on September 3, by the way, “confronting” Pagan Kennedy — and Brown’s book title comes from a song by Bauhaus, incidentally, whose lead singer I looked for in vain on a karaoke song list two nights ago, while doing karaoke with Republicans, hoping I could dedicate a song by my favorite Turkey-dwelling Muslim to the victims of that day’s small terrorist attack in that country — but instead, I was forced to do “Rainbow Connection,” “Plush,” and “House of the Rising Sun,” in effect forming a trilogy about a hero who leaves his swamp in pursuit of a dream, is pursued by dogs who begin to smell him, and ends up in a New Orleans brothel.)

•My parents’ cat Menny passed away, about one year after the loss of their beloved dog of sixteen years, Uber, who with Menny formed a living namesake-tribute to Nietzsche’s Ubermensch.

•I was reminded what a small world it is by an October trip to Austin, TX that, as it turned out, coincided with the Texas Book Festival there, meaning a substantial portion of New York City seemed to be there, engaged in book promotion, including my predecessor as editor of the Brown Film Bulletin (mentioned in early Retro-Journal entries), Dave Kamp, who was talking about his book The United States of Arugula, which describes — in an almost Virginia Postrel-like fashion — how increasing prosperity and culture-mixing vastly expanded American culinary options and improved our palates in just the few decades that Gen Xers like us have been on the planet (a much more optimistic take on things than Austin’s own Richard Linklater would offer in his glum food-industry drama Fast Food Nation just a month later, based on the book by the same title that helped popularize the increasingly common pseudo-scientific notion that industrial agriculture is poisoning us all and destroying communal life).

•I saw the Fixx in concert (something I seem to keep doing, along with linking fourteen of their songs to date) with the Knack, Naked Eyes, and Missing Persons — and, from one odd medley the Knack performed, finally got confirmation of something I’d been saying for years, sometimes to mocking responses: that “Tequila” sounds like the Doors’ “Break on Through.”

•I watched Kyle Smith read from his second book, which was also part of the proto-ToddSeavey.com’s second-ever Book Selection entry — little realizing that while Kyle was in the front of that Barnes and Noble, a camera crew was in the back, not to shoot him but to shoot an ugly reality-show confrontation between singer Lisa Loeb and one of her many dates on the show Number 1 Single, writer Allen Salkin (who went on a few more dates with her after that, though you’d never know it from the way the show was edited to make him look completely rejected and somewhat villainous — but it was all for a good cause: answering the vexing and profound question “Can a beautiful, famous, Jewish, female rock singer whose dates stand a good chance of getting some attention on national TV find someone in New York City to go out with her?”).

But Lisa Loeb is not the star of next week’s climactic final Retro-Journal entry: I am — and that final entry may well prove to be both more conservative and more punk than a girly folk singer from Brown University could handle. Be here on 7/18/08 to find out, as we look back at a lost epoch: the crazy, dimly-remembered wackness that was 2007.

Retro-Journal: Tom Swift, Gonzo, and Drunken Sailors in Early 2006

You can’t help noticing the thin line between hero and bad boy in American culture from the get-go. It’s not just anti-heroes like the fictional Hancock and mostly-non-fictional Hunter S. Thompson, about whom there are movies out this week (I already know the first is good). It’s also the fact that we were quite literally rebels from the get-go: becoming, in rough chronological order, economic opportunists, religious dissidents, religious fanatics, farmers beholden to no aristocrats, revolutionaries, wild frontiersmen, abolitionists, laissez-faire capitalists, cowboys, pop stars, mad scientists, and even would-be global democratizers.

Today is July 4, 2008 and a good time to recall that America is bigger than right and left (weird dialectical categories imported from that troubled, slower-moving continent called Europe). America is perhaps still in need of a coherent philosophy, speaking to the rebel and the bourgeois in each American, without unnecessary tension but also without oversimplification. I’ll mull that in sight of the Statue of Liberty today while (1) listening to the Feelies and Sonic Youth in concert, (2) carrying a copy of the Constitution (complete with the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation) that Avery Knapp gave me before he left New York City, and (3) vowing to get back to work on my long-delayed book, Conservatism for Punks (forgive me if I largely disappear in a couple weeks for a while, like a black-clad vigilante millionaire in the night, if you will).

The need for the book — or at least for some articulation of a philosophy fit for America — was increasingly apparent in early 2006, as successive failures by Bush and the Republican Congress made it apparent that they were better at behaving like an inept, corrupt Establishment than at promoting individualism and freedom, at home or abroad (not that this makes the left look any more appealing — we may simply be trapped between two armies of thugs…for now).

Two years ago, even right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson, sounding increasingly libertarian, was predicting electoral doom for the Republicans, wisely noting that Americans can be forgiving of both hard times and policy errors but not the vague, scandal-induced sense that, as he put it, the politicians are up on the Hill playing poker with the public’s money while the world is falling apart (and, as the catchphrase put it, spending like drunken sailors).

I think the aforementioned Hunter S. Thompson would have appreciated that analysis (especially the gambling reference), as would most writers following in his gonzo-journalist footsteps, such as libertarian-conservative P.J. O’Rourke and some of the people around me at New York Press back in the mid-90s (the Village Voice once called NYPress a bunch of “P.J. O’Rourke wannabes”). Cynics, libertarians, and Mencken-style conservatives tend not to be surprised when corruption and absurdity win out, which is a very different attitude from waving the flag, hoping the government behaves well, and trusting God to guide things to a safe conclusion.

I was always more gonzo than pious flag-waver — and will smile all the more happily at tonight’s fireworks down near Battery Park because of it, knowing full well things could have worked out even more insanely for this society than they have. Incidentally, though I’ve definitely mellowed into more of a Kermit type, my favorite Muppet in childhood was Gonzo, and my parents even called me Toddzo at times.

•••

My parents also read Tom Swift books to me, an early education (in the form of the adventures of a teen inventor-industrialist) in the wonders — and optimism — made possible by science, capitalism, good friends, a solid family, and the desire to fight communist spies. Without these books, many in my generation were destined to grow up directionless, irrational, and amoral. And in January 2006, in Guilford, CT, I got to see two granddaughters of the creator of Tom Swift present their story of growing up in that literary family — and now constantly fending off the Tom Swift ghostwriters who want their share of the glory all these decades later, perhaps exaggerating the extent of their input in what were, after all, very formulaic tales dictated by the editors.

As for me, I now go in for far more sophisticated fare, of course, though perhaps you wouldn’t know it from nights like one in February of 2006, when my friend Scott Nybakken and I went to the apartment of my high school pal Chuck Blake — now moved to New York City to apply his math and computer skills to the financial sector — to rewatch the first Underworld movie and then immediately exit the apartment to see the sequel in the theatre. Teen inventors are fine for kids, but adults need vampires in skintight leather catsuits.

Adults also sometimes need to dress up like Guy Fawkes, and early 2006 not only saw the release of the V for Vendetta movie but found me marking the occasion by writing about anarchism for the Wall Street Journal — in part to underscore the marvelous historical fact that the first book-length defense of anarchism was written by none other than…Edmund Burke, more often thought of as the first modern (eighteenth-century, that is) defender of conservatism. The two philosophies were joined at the hip from birth, in short, though few people today see it that way (certainly not your average Wall Street Journal reader — or editor).

Shortly thereafter, I’d lead a protest outside DC Comics’ offices in defense of the film, complete with V masks supplied by Warner publicity worker Nicole Beaver (now Nicole Partowidjojo) and the participation of longtime libertarian activist Andrea Millen-Rich and the aforementioned Chuck, not to mention innocent-bystander comics professionals Scott Nybakken and Ali Kokmen, facing off against ornery left-anarchists also sporting V masks.

This was not some corporate stunt by DC, though, I swear, but rather a spontaneous reaction on my part to news that left-anarchists (as opposed to anarcho-capitalists like myself) led by “freegan” (i.e., principled, waste-hating eater of garbage from dumpsters) Adam Weissman were going to be protesting against the movie, insisting that the Wachowskis hadn’t made the film as anarchist as the original Alan Moore comic book (a position with which Moore happens to agree, but I’ll protest him, too, if it comes to that, and I just hope the Wachowskis will be there to back me up with what I assume are their considerable marital arts and bullet-dodging skills).

Even the involvement of the future Mrs. Partowidjojo was less a corporate ploy than a result of us knowing each other via Reid Mihalko and Marcia Baczynski, who are the kind of people who go to Burning Man (along with the multi-talented Marah Rosenberg and a growing list of other people I know) and who like to see their friends staging anarchist protests. As for Reid and Marcia themselves, they were getting increasing publicity for founding CuddleParty, appearing on Montel that same half-year to discuss the advantages of cuddling with a roomful of strangers in a safe and non-sexual environment. I’ve still never gone to one of the things — nor to Burning Man — but I admire their entrepreneurship.

Another amusing blend of film and reality that half-year saw my friends Liz Braswell and Scott Shannon throw a baby shower featuring a screening of Alien and a cake with a recreation of the chest-burster scene on it. Way back when Liz and I were at Brown writing for the Film Bulletin, I’d begun comparing childbirth to that scene when explaining the many reasons I don’t want kids — and the joke eventually found its way into Kyle Smith’s novel Love Monkey, which became a short-lived but not half-bad sitcom in early 2006. Interestingly, the subtle difference in tone between book and novel — a shift, I thought, from bemused/nerdy to ladder-climbing/hipster — may have been the first time I noticed that the twentysomethings these days and the culture-products aimed at them are starting to seem a bit more driven and vicious or something than my slacker X-cohort, one more reason we’ll fade largely unnoticed (and demographically minute) into history.

•••

As if the anarchist protest weren’t proof enough that my America is bigger than any one political party or congressional election result, that half-year also found me in Vegas to talk on a panel about science, economics, and the philosophical limits of extrapolation from evolutionary psychology, if you can believe that, thanks to Gerry Ohrstrom and the Association of Private Enterprise Education — and thanks once more to my ongoing use of the research of mine that the Phillips Foundation had funded nine years earlier. As of today, in 2008, I’ve been to Vegas three times, if I remember correctly, and never for the gambling. But even with all the people who are drawn there by a complete inability to calculate probability, you have to sort of love the place. Like the Statue of Liberty, DC Comics, or the alternative rock I’ll be hearing today (the sort of music also beloved by the college pals who I saw at my fifteen-year reunion that spring) — it’s definitely America.

But where was America headed in late 2006? Find out next week, in the pivotal second-to-last Retro-Journal entry!

Retro-Journal: Catastrophe and Jazz in Late 2005

The second half of 2005 was a very different time from today — it started out for me with a trip to New Hampshire to see college pals Laura Braunstein, Christine Caldwell Ames, and Scott Nybakken, and Laura and Christine’s husbands. Hey, wait, that’s exactly the same as today. In fact, I should head to the train in about two hours and won’t be back until late Sunday, so don’t be alarmed if I don’t blog until Monday (and apparently, I’m not the only one visiting New Hampshire today: Obama and Hillary are making a big joint appearance there, too — perhaps giving me one last, unexpected chance to wear my beloved anti-Hillary “Re-Defeat Communism in 2008″ t-shirt).

One Brown alum whose current activities are tied to late 2005 in a more significant way than my own is Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal (to whom I vaguely recall being a sort of writing tutor — Writing Fellows, they called us, assigning us to certain classes whether they wanted us or not but in an often-helpful fashion). Now talked about as a possible McCain running mate, he is, I suppose, a living embodiment of what the near-delusional critic of capitalism Naomi Klein would call free-market “shock therapy” — responding to disasters with market-based reforms (or as she would prefer to call such policy changes, the infliction of free-market torture on a weakened victim).

It doesn’t seem to occur to Klein that perhaps one reason that some places seem to suffer such high body counts in disasters — witness Burma, most recently — is because they have too much government, which not only makes disaster responses less efficient but makes it less likely the inhabitants will have been free to accumulate the kind of wealth that makes it easier for people to escape disasters without simply relying on a centralized response.

As the aforementioned Nybakken has said, we all knew for decades that New Orleans was run by inept and corrupt Democrats and that the place was economically backward and culturally old-fashioned in good ways and bad — “and we all thought it was kind of cute.” Quaint can have a terrible price — as does entrusting our fates to federal bureaucracies like FEMA, whether run by Democrats or Republicans, though the performance of such bureaucracies may vary slightly over time, occasionally achieving technology-based new efficiency, for instance, but generally suffering the same long-term decline into dysfunction of any government bureaucracy, by definition shielded from the ever-growing efficiency of private, competitive markets.

But no matter: the preferred narrative (one the people of Louisiana don’t seem to fully believe, since they went on to make Republican Jindal governor in their post-Katrina housecleaning efforts) in the media became one in which a heartless Republican president let a thousand people die — for a while, based on nothing more than an offhand comment by the New Orleans mayor that was trumpeted far more than the comment’s later correction (as is routinely the case in the news), they even thought he’d callously let 10,000 people die.

No matter that the state had claimed they had the situation under control and that there were procedures in place for determining whether and when the feds could step in without being asked (as Bush had been criticized for doing too hastily after a prior hurricane). Bush vs. black people became the refrain, and I even found myself having dinner with some displaced New Orleans residents who, like some interviewees treated sympathetically in a post-Katrina documentary by Spike Lee, half-suspected evil Republicans and real estate developers of dynamiting levees. Disastrous events, like 9/11 four years earlier, breed ridiculous conspiracy theories, and one is at least initially hesitant to criticize their saddened and confused purveyors too harshly.

The levee-reinforcement plan — the same one in place under Bill Clinton — had always been a decades-long project that would not have been completed in time to avert the Katrina disaster if, say, Al Gore had been in the White House. It was always a gamble — a fairly rational one, though as with many gambles, it didn’t work out — that no storm of that magnitude was likely to occur before the levee overhaul was completed years hence. Of course, there are probably plenty of people who think if Al Gore were president, he’d have exerted such direct and fine-tuned control over the weather by now that storms like Katrina wouldn’t happen. This borders on madness or a return to belief in pagan storm gods, but it’s also roughly what’s spun as scientific consensus in the media these days, so I’d better save that side debate for another time (specifically, November under my current schedule).

But mark my words: the saner, calmer members of our society are ill-prepared for the extent to which eco-doom narratives are going to blend with mystical apocalypse predictions over the next four years as 2012 approaches, given that some mystics have long believed that to be the time of the end of the world — and the Kyoto Protocol on climate change is expiring that year, which not everyone will see as a coincidence the way sane folk like you and I do. Here’s something that really isn’t a coincidence: the cretins who brought us the climate change disaster fantasy The Day After Tomorrow — laughed at by scientists but praised by Al Gore — are already at work on a movie, filled with more disasters than you can shake a stick at, called 2012, and I’m sure the eco-mystics would already be talking more frequently about climate change as evidence of the Mayan god Quetzalcoatl’s wrath were Quetzalcoatl not so much harder to spell and pronounce than Gaia.

•••

Last I knew, there have been no deaths during this month’s Iowa flooding (some fairly shocking video of which can be found on the New York Times website, my boss Dr. Elizabeth Whelan notes, her daughter Christine being an Iowa resident). Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto has argued that FEMA seems to have learned some things from its New Orleans mistakes, making the narrative about Bush’s purported callousness being the cause of the Katrina deaths seem even more ridiculous. But I think James underestimates the paranoia of that sort of Bush critic. They’ll probably simply say he chose to have FEMA do a better job in Iowa because there are a lot of white people there.

I hope it’s clear I’m not callously indifferent to the fate of New Orleans either — indeed, I’m very worried that its recovery is being slowed radically relative to other areas on the Gulf Coast precisely by the fact that (market-friendly new governor notwithstanding) New Orleans has been a disproportionate recipient of federal money, planning, and regulatory interference since 2005. Not that New Orleans is the only place where, in stark contrast to the Naomi Klein narrative, government saw an opportunity to seize even greater power in the wake of the Katrina disaster, in some cases by declaring flooded land held privately for generations to now be “wetlands” suddenly subject to very onerous environmental regulation (read: seizure by the Army Corps of Engineers), as one resident who led a protest against such efforts related to me just last weekend at that Winning Ideas Weekend I attended.

Far from being callously indifferent, I had felt a bit of a bond to New Orleans since traveling there eight years prior to Katrina, doing research on its musical traditions with the aid of the Phillips Foundation — and I wrote about that after Katrina for National Review.com, for TCSDaily.com, and for Spiked-Online.

You’ll find very little in the way of politics in those pieces, so even if you’ve heard all the politicking you can take on the subject of New Orleans, please read the articles.

And on another less-partisan note, let me add that though I nearly always expect government to do a worse job than the market would with the same resources, I do not think it follows that government is always completely ineducable. Indeed, my friend Jenny Foreit, yet another Brown alum and no right-winger, now works for libertarian-leaning Philip K. Howard’s Common Good project (his book The Death of Common Sense was one of the first Book Selections I picked on this blog), trying to find smarter ways to handle law and legislation but without just being shrill anarchists about it like yours truly: Here’s a sample of the dialogue they’ve begun, involving New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg and others, on how to improve government, a subject left and right alike are increasingly interested in — and a subject that the Republican Congress perhaps should have taken a greater interest in before the brutal electoral smackdown they received in 2006 — but for that year, we must await my next two Retro-Journal entries, and in the meantime I have a train to catch.

Retro-Journal: The Ownership Society (and Gotham City) in Early 2005

Things appeared to be going very well from my perspective in early 2005 as Bush began his second term. Consider:

•Bush had unexpectedly seized upon his re-election as an opportunity not to launch another war but to turn his attention to the domestic economic reform libertarians had waited for so patiently, proclaiming his vision of an “Ownership Society,” the centerpiece of which would be privatized retirement accounts, under the Social Security reform plan that he tirelessly toured the country promoting.

•Bush’s Second Inaugural speech was worthy of, well, Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose 2004 convention speech I praised in last week’s Retro-Journal entry. Bush actually expanded upon the Schwarzeneggerian theme of freedom’s progress throughout American history — and Republican Party history — to include Republicans’ founding achievement: ending slavery. Who knew that some people would be calling Bush a willing mass-murderer of Louisiana blacks mere months later?

•Iraq held its first democratic elections, citizens holding their purple-stained thumbs aloft with pride.

•Christopher Hitchens, a living embodiment of political fusionism after my own heart, gave a speech here in New York City, on one of several occasions I’ve seen him talk, and put a leftist critic in the audience — who asked whether democracy can be imposed by force — in his place by saying: I don’t know that it’s ever been imposed any other way, and let me add that without the backing of the French army in North America in the late eighteenth century, no one today would remember the name of Thomas Jefferson. Well put.

•I had given a speech in December 2004 at an event in New York City I co-organized with the libertarian Institute for Humane Studies, in which I explained the potentially cozy though far from perfect place of “Libertarians in Bush’s World” — and was invited to turn the speech into an article a few months later in the NYU Journal of Law & Liberty, its own existence a positive sign for the future. You can download a PDF of my whole pro-Bush case here. (I have nothing to hide, obviously.) It may now read like an eerie time capsule from a bygone, more naive era (much has changed in the past forty months), but I still think it’s a pretty good read — and probably not that many people have read it, so check it out.

(My favorite comment at that IHS/Seavey event, though, was from Michael Malice, who responded to a skeptical question about whether the U.S. is any freer than the Middle East by saying, without even blinking or taking a breath, “Well, we let women read, and kosher is a choice.” It’s moments like that I’m willing to believe his neurons fire faster than my own.)

•Early 2005 was also the half-year in which Michel Evanchik and I became the official ongoing heads of the Debates at Lolita Bar — and though this blog was not fully functional until early 2007, you’ll find its archives contain my mass-e-mailed debate announcements all the way back to the beginning of our reign. If I included every mass-e-mail I sent back then, this would be a much larger site.

•My feminists critics will probably snort at our choice for first debate topic, but I for one was trying to take an analytical look at gender relations, more rooted in science than tradition, around that time, writing a still-unpublished overview of evolutionary psychology some 9,000 words long under the editorial direction of Heidi Julavits from The Believer, who’d soon apparently lose interest in having me revise the piece, instead assign me an almost equally-long book review about death and cannibals and zombies, which I think turned out to be quite riveting, then lose interest in that as well and become electronically unresponsive (not that I’m suggesting for a moment people have to like my stuff).

Don’t trust those hipster venues. Luckily, since I hate to waste any effort, multiple good things have come of my faith-shaking Believer encounter:

(1) I fissioned off a section of the evolutionary psych piece to become a Radar item about monkey crimes.

(2) I cannibalized (ha!) the cannibals-and-zombies piece for a Metaphilm article, and I think it holds up well.

(3) I have recruited my informal advisor on the evolutionary psychology piece, Diana Fleischman, to be one of the three women who’ve sold their own eggs for our panel on that topic next month at the aforementioned Debates at Lolita Bar on July 22, 8pm (instead of our usual first-Wednesday). I hope she we will bring her monkey-loving experience to bear.

•Meanwhile, my favorite comics writer, Grant Morrison (whose second issue of Final Crisis comes out in just five days), released one of his most ambitious projects, multiple interlocking miniseries called Seven Soldiers, starting in early 2005, while DC surprised fans by releasing a twentieth-anniversary sequel to their Crisis on Infinite Earth miniseries: the turning-point comic one-shot (so to speak) depicting the death of Blue Beetle, Countdown to Infinite Crisis. DC appeared to have some workable long-term strategy…much like the Bush administration.

•And you know, as much as we’ve all suffered at George Lucas’s hands over the past decade, Revenge of the Sith, out in May 2005, wasn’t half bad, I’d contend, and the fact it was plainly framed as an anti-Bush and anti-imperialist (duh) commentary didn’t even bother me (though I think most neocons are smarter than Palpatine’s useful idiot Jar Jar Binks, in my experience) — but Kyle Smith’s first words when the advance screening we saw together was over were: “That sucked.” And he’s the professional movie critic, not me (though his paper, New York Post, may carry a book review by me this Sunday, if all goes according to plan, by the way). As of last month, he’s also a dad.

•I went to a libertarian wedding or two around that time (I see the female half of one such wedding, Bretigne Shaffer, is now urging journalists to cover the opening of the new Kelo family house, a sequel to the events of the tragic Kelo Supreme Court decision that affirmed government’s power to take private property and give it to other private agents for mere econ development purposes — which reminds me: I think your comfy sofa would aid my writing efforts more than yours, so I’ll be picking that up on Tuesday, and don’t try to stop me or I’ll lock you up in a small room).

•I also spoke to high school kids in Arkansas about my work at ACSH that June, invited there by now-State Rep. Dan Greenberg, who taught at that state’s Governor’s School…

…and as it happens, I speak to high school kids for only the second time in my life (since being one myself) tomorrow, as part of a panel on the topic “What Is America?” at Bob Chitester and Free to Choose Media’s Winning Ideas Weekend event here. I’ll be summing up America, with an emphasis on industrial and technological progress, in seven minutes. I hope I don’t leave anything out.

Of course, some might plausibly argue that Dan Greenberg and I are the juveniles — not only holding onto faint hope that the Republicans will recover their limited-government principles but also going to see Batman Begins on that Arkansas trip in 2005 and loving it. But we weren’t the only ones: It was clearly a big influence on last month’s Iron Man, and I look forward to next month’s Dark Knight — with much more optimism than I feel contemplating politics, believe me.

Retro-Journal: Four More Years Since Late 2004

The 2004 election was ugly and divisive, but it was much simpler than this year’s, which had myriad primary contenders. The 2004 election also lent itself to a grand narrative of which libertarian aims, contrary to subsequent pessimism, still seemed a part.

•I recall starting out the second half of 2004 seeing a speech by young Kenyan-born libertarian activist June Arunga, who’d toured Africa from north to south for a documentary and — unlike countless other documentarians and activists — showed how free markets could alleviate Africa’s problems, from the snooping omnipresence of Egyptian government to the private-bank-account-pilfering government of her native land — which, like all governments, only pilfered for ostensibly lofty, noble reasons such as constructing a new hospital but of course still drove away wealth and productivity and economic stability in the process, as government action tends to do whether nominally Soviet, Democratic, Bolivarian, or otherwise.

(I felt a bit like I’d ensnared a celebrity when I talked her into joining a mission to the karaoke bar Iggy’s on the Upper East Side earlier this year after a Cato Institute event, though she didn’t sing. I did “Don’t You” by Simple Minds yet again and am still pleased that some curvy blonde pigtailed neighborhood resident named Melanie enjoyed the performance so much, though sadly I have no idea how to contact her to demonstrate my “Sign of Fire,” that being the Fixx song I’ve now concluded works best in karaoke, much as I enjoy doing their song “Stand or Fall,” largely because it contains perhaps the single most pretentious rhyme in rock history: “Empty face reflects extinction/ Ugly skies divide the nation/ Desecrate the population/ There will be no exultation.” I’m grateful to Bob Chitester for getting me into the aforementioned Cato event — and I notice there’s some talk of karaoke happening next week, during the big libertarian event he’s organizing, at which I’ll be on a panel addressing the simple, unambitious question “What Is America?” — thus that picture of my head. I notice I’ll be joined on the panel by a woman from Sweden, so if we all end up doing karaoke, I just may have to perform “Seven Days a Week” by the Sounds, though I’m no Maja Ivarsson — indeed, I think she gives one of my favorite performances of all time here, so it’s a lot to live up to.)

•I remember seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger on TV — himself not yet having abandoned libertarian-Republican policy goals at that time — giving a speech at the 2004 Republican convention that tied together the themes of freedom, U.S. military action around the world, and support for the Republican Party more effectively than any Bush speech had (perhaps tellingly). He traced a short history of the modern world and his own life, from witnessing the repercussions of Nazi and Communist oppression as a child to his hopes for a liberated Middle East today, ending with a litany of libertarian values and telling the world of each of them that if you believe in that freedom, “you are a Republican.”

•At one convention-watching party here in New York City, I met the reporter Steven Vincent — initially approaching him because I thought he might be libertarian novelist/essayist Neal Stephenson — and would hear one year later of his death in Iraq (much as I’d heard a year earlier of the death there of libertarian-conservative editor Michael Kelly, who’d been interviewed for a John Stossel piece back when I worked at ABC News).

Though the conservative and libertarian movements were going through something of an identity crisis then (just as the Justice League was experiencing rape, murder, and other trauma in the darkly epochal miniseries Identity Crisis that year), things didn’t yet look like a certain disaster/crack-up, so I was still able to take some pleasure in seeing the differing and even feuding elements of the movements as a sort of Epcot Center of possibilities rather than fault lines heralding doom.

Indeed, when I went to Rockford, IL to see libertarian Stossel producer Kristi Kendall married that summer, with our fellow libertarian Michael Malice and an ex-girlfriend of his in attendance, I checked to see if the paleoconservative Rockford Institute was hosting any lectures or events that same weekend — then remembered that Chicago is only about a half-hour away if I needed entertainment, and the city was then still home to my friends Jacob Levy, Shelley Clark, and Chuck Blake. But whether hanging with GOP-wary libertarian Jacob or the Chronicles-publishing Rockford paleos, it was all good then — no need to split hairs as long as we were united enough to stop the left, al Qaeda, al Qaeda in Iraq, Michael Moore, and/or an arrogant faux-aristocratic Massachusetts senator married to a woman whose foundation is directly responsible for about half the crackpot unscientific eco-scares I combat in my day job, a terrifying coalition, in short, that could not in good conscience be handed a victory at that juncture in world history, even if that meant reluctantly voting to re-elect Bush.

(Incidentally, Malice returns to the Chicago area for another wedding this weekend, so he’ll miss seeing his punk friend Tibbie X reading this Sunday circa 5 at Bengal Curry, 65 West Broadway — but you should go.)

Even a staunchly leftist friend who’d touted the Howard Dean campaign in her wedding program that year was expressing newfound sympathy for capitalism since making a foray into yarn store ownership and discovering that regulations and taxes really do make it very difficult to do business — and in ways that did nothing to help her customers or employees, either. I gave her a collection of Rand essays.

•••

That year wasn’t all politics, of course, and I also managed to see the Finn Brothers (of Crowded House fame) in concert in Central Park, the whimsical and They Might Be Giants-like band Life in a Blender, 60s action shows like Green Hornet and The Avengers at the Museum of Television & Radio, the delightfully retro-futurist Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (inspiration for my Halloween costume that year), and on a punk-conservative fusionist note (which combined entertainment and politics) a speech by Michael Graves of the punk band the Misfits, a rock n’ roll Republican whose existence confirms that I did not entirely fabricate the phenomenon commemorated in this site’s slogan, above. Like Schwarzenegger, Graves struck a note both capitalist and globalist, emphasizing the idea that America is a magnet for people seeking freedom from government. Precisely.

I also saw the Pixies in concert late that year and loved them regardless of any political ramifications — and I saw that Muppets marathon I mentioned in an earlier Retro-Journal, the marathon that was a sufficiently effective nerd filter that it led to me bumping into a few friends and one woman I’d dated.

As my birthday outing that year, I saw the live-action Thunderbirds movie with a posse that included the tragically obese manager of Victor Niederhoffer’s libertarian Junto discussion group, who has since passed away from a stroke, in his forties. Happier Thunderbirds-related outings that year, though, included a return to the Museum of Television & Radio to see Supercar (another marionette sci-fi show from the creator of Thunderbirds), and a sangria-enhanced viewing of the Thunderbirds-inspired film Team America: World Police (from the libertarian creators of South Park) while on a visit to Austin, TX to see LB Deyo with Scott Nybakken and Christine Caldwell Ames. While there, I met Diana Fleischman, an evolutionary psychology expert who’ll be one of the egg-sellers on our panel of egg-selling women next month at Lolita Bar.

That half-year at Lolita, though, saw me arguing that America is oversexed (and I was not at that time a living counterargument) against CuddleParty co-founder Marcia Baczynski, who successfully persuaded the audience that America may not in fact be having too much sex — but in truth she won largely on the strength of the admirably moderate, non-radical argument that most people are still uncomfortable even frankly discussing such matters.

Bush also won that year.

Hitchens had wanted it, Andrew Sullivan pre-transformation had wanted it, Central European nations (fond of those who topple tyrannies) wanted it, plenty of libertarians wanted it — and for a very short time, it appeared our considerable patience with Bush would be rewarded by an unexpected renewed emphasis on domestic economic reforms such as Social Security privatization after his re-election. As my fellow hawkishly-inclined libertarian Nybakken liked to say, nothing could pozibly go rwrongg.

Retro-Journal: Picking the Lesser of Two Evils in Early 2004

This week, in mid-2008, brought our Debate at Lolita Bar about Bob Barr, seen above with yours truly in an anti-Clinton t-shirt that’s likely to be outdated soon, possibly even today. The same day as the debate, Clark Caldwell of CBS shot a vlog of Barr’s reaction to the possibility of Hillary Clinton as a vice presidential candidate, and Caldwell expects to post a fuller Barr piece next week.

By contrast, in early 2004, libertarians were starting to argue about whether Bush’s reelection would be a disaster or the less evil of the two most likely outcomes. Or less evil and a disaster.

Politics is the art of the possible, and even among radical libertarians, it’s hard to find a candidate who agrees with all my views — I wouldn’t even necessarily vote for myself, since I’m inclined to think a good candidate requires a more thorough nuts-and-bolts knowledge of existing law and regulations than I possess, not having gone to law school. (Even a roomful of avowedly Rothbardian anarcho-capitalists might disagree on, say, abortion or immigration, not to mention the countless topics that libertarians definitely don’t think fall within the scope of law, like art and religion, but about which they certainly have varying private opinions.)

The main idea of libertarianism, though — you might almost say the only idea, so it shouldn’t be hard to wrap one’s mind around even if you disagree — described in a practical, game-theoretical way as opposed to a lofty metaphysical way (since metaphysics invites confusion and creative reinterpretation), is that individuals have strict property rights that should never (or almost never and only in the most dire emergency circumstances) be violated. This is not (at least in the most sophisticated formulations of the philosophy) so that individuals can exist in some metaphysically pristine, inherently morally superior state of independence, like Romantic sculptures representing Freedom placed upon pedestals, but rather so that interference with market processes is minimized: Instead of violence and mob rule and centralized autocracy, individuals trade in accord with their own preferences, each person saying yes or no to a proposed exchange based on whether he thinks he’d be made better or worse off than if the trade did not occur. Repeat ad infinitum and watch individuals’ utility, on balance, tend to increase as efficiency gains are constantly made.

•••

No one is omnipotent or infinitely wealthy in the scenario, but at least all exchanges are ones deemed mutually beneficial by the trading parties, whereas in any non-libertarian arrangement, by definition, people are coerced to make “trades” they do not think will make them better off (such as paying taxes to fund services that could more efficiently be performed privately or that shouldn’t be funded at all) and, perhaps even more tragically, are prevented from making trades they would find beneficial (and that might set precedents for innovative new ways of doing things that open up new possibilities for other observers). Every deviation from a state of secure property rights, then, is a loss for utility/happiness (in a long-term, process-maintenance sense), a squelching of human will and preference — and to the extent a libertarian ventures into the morass of electoral politics, he’s trying to reduce violations of property rights and nudge things toward a property rights regime.

The Republicans deviate from property rights in numerous ways but until very recently had at least sounded as if their long-term goal (though repeatedly delayed by circumstances like the Iraq War), unlike the Democrats’, was a reduction in the size of government and the encouragement of a more market-based society. That’s arguably no reason to see the Republicans as preferable to the Libertarian Party, but with the LP marginal and sometimes needlessly crazy, you can’t blame libertarians for instead playing the game of picking between the two major parties, reluctantly putting up with wrongs like the drug war or distracting religious rhetoric in hopes of steering things in a slightly-less-socialist, slightly more property-respecting direction. Nothing’s perfect (conservatives and liberals usually don’t call their candidates “perfect,” and it’s not clear libertarians are being any more hypocritical by picking some least-bad viable option).

Then, too, some of us long hoped for the spread of “fusionist” thinking, in which conservatism would be yoked to libertarianism in such a way that conservatism is tamed, as it were (sticking closer to free-market principles than to religious or military authoritarianism), while libertarianism gained broader appeal through piggy-backing on a far, far more popular movement. This strategy not only made historical sense, given how much overlap there has been between, say, the staffs of conservative and libertarian magazines and thinktanks, but makes a fair amount of philosophical sense: There is no need to violate property rights to admire tradition (you can even be a religious fanatic without violating property rights, if you insist), while there are countless reasons to think creeping socialism is a threat to bourgeois, Western civilization as we have known it.

On a more practical, immediate level, there really is a significant subset of Republicans and conservatives (very unhappy ones these days) that wants smaller government and laissez-faire economics, while the Democratic Party and the left more generally are largely defined by their desire to maintain or expand government programs, rail against capitalist excess, aid unions with anti-market regulations, redistribute income, etc., etc. Republicans like capitalism but don’t go far enough, while Democrats often see righting the supposed wrongs of capitalism through beneficent government action as their primary reason for being involved in politics.

Now, we may have reached the point where the difference between the two parties is too small to be worth worrying about, but any libertarian who claims to see no historical reason for a natural sympathy for the right over the left is either lying, ignorant, or highly irrational.

•••

None of that means that Bush was necessarily a wise gamble in 2000 or 2004, of course, though his efforts to partially privatize Social Security and Medicare and cut taxes were clearly ones libertarians could respect, as far as they went (which wasn’t far). Whether things that were meant to be short-term deviations from that agenda, such as toppling Saddam, were such egregious mistakes as to warrant tipping the balance of libertarian support in favor of the Democrats is debatable, but it is natural that libertarians first ask “How are the Republicans doing?” when looking to the two parties for tiny glimmers of hope, rather than expecting much good to come from the Democrats — aside from counterbalancing the excesses of the Republicans (and some libertarians were already rooting for divided government and thus a Kerry victory in 2004, while others would despair of the Republicans only later and root for divided government in the form of the Republicans losing Congress in 2006 — and I was still hoping for the Republicans to prevail, come to their senses, and accomplish some sort of useful market-based reform if they won in 2006, only giving up around…now).

We can disagree about strategy and the proper level of optimism or pessimism — and can even disagree about how heavily to weigh different deviations from property-adherence in a complex utility calculus (one in which the value of political allegiances for future reform efforts must itself be weighed, so that today’s idiocy by an ally may be partly redeemed by the ally’s strategic usefulness for more important policy battles ahead). But that needn’t imply some contradiction of basic libertarian principles. The existence of the government (not to mention decentralized property violations such as burglary and, crucially, terrorism) is the real violation of libertarian principle, and all electoral political action is a desperate defensive action. We should not begrudge victims the right to attempt defensive actions, especially ones aimed at decreasing rather than increasing coercion, relative to the other likely outcomes.

In an idealized right/left political world (which is not the one we live in, admittedly), the right has an obnoxious but short list of things it’d like to control — basically, some aspects of sex (that are largely unpolicable anyway) — while the terrifying, blandly totalitarian list of things the left would like to tax, regulate, or otherwise control is literally endless: There is simply no form of human behavior, from telecommunications to medicine to home-building to car manufacture to the use of food coloring, that the left does not see as benefiting from increased regulation. The left is where libertarian hopes, weak at the best of times, go to die. If readers want to do me a favor, in fact, vow never to speak sympathetically of the left in my presence ever again.

At the same time, a certain condescension toward the right is acceptable and indeed is now necessary. Bush does not seem to have been a gateway to small-government fusionism between the right and libertarianism. Perhaps now, four years later, it’s time to make a radical, quixotic statement in favor of such fusion by voting for (ex-Republican, now-Libertarian) Barr, though rational people (and irrational ones) can certainly disagree.

•••

Luckily, though, 2004 wasn’t all politics. Just as I’d seen Human League, Billy Idol, Psychedelic Furs, Paul Weller, and White Stripes concerts in the latter half of the previous year, in 2004 I saw the Fall in concert for a second time — having discovered the amazing band Magnapop (who are a bit like a cross between the Go-Go’s and Dinosaur Jr.) as the opening act when I’d first seen the Fall years earlier. Meanwhile, a growing number of friends were writing books, including Kyle Smith’s Love Monkey and Caren Lissner’s Starting from Square Two. And Lefty Leibowitz founded the Gotham Girls roller derby league, part of the eclectic batch of activities that would leave him too busy to run the barroom debate series he’d created a few years earlier with LB Deyo, who moved to Austin, TX in 2003. That would leave me and moderator Michel Evanchik to run the show starting in 2005 — but before that point, we have a very heated election to relive, in next week’s Retro-Journal installment.

Retro-Journal: Nerd Romance and a Nerd on Trial in Late 2003

Today was the purported unveiling of videotaped alien life (ha!) by some guy who’s been trying to inspire the creation of an office of extraterrestrial affairs in Denver, as you may have read in the “news” — and tomorrow’s the last day of this blog’s Month of the Nerd (assuming the aliens don’t take over — but we nerds would be ready for them, of course).

Five years ago, though, 2003 was the Year of the Nerd, or so I declared at the time, due to the many nerd-pleasing movies that came out then. More about the Year of the Nerd in a moment.

First, I have to note that since the Denver guy has shown a laughable reluctance to let the press record his purported alien — and since he says the footage is a brief grainy infrared night shot — I think it’s safe to say the Denver alien is as phony as the Pacific Northwest tree octopus, a hoax/joke Dave Whitney just brought to my attention — and to which I can only say “Cthulhu ftagn!” (sp?). Actually, as aesthetic nightmares go, I’ve always thought we’re fortunate octopuses and squids don’t fly, so I should shudder at the tree octopus.

While the Northwest’s octopuses may not be in the water where they belong, there’s clearly something in the water in Denver, since this year that city’s not only hosting the major gatherings for the Democrats, WorldCon sci-fi nerds, any press interested in the “alien footage,” and — just this past weekend — the Libertarian Party, it also got (as an embarrassing package deal with the Libertarian convention) talks by 9/11 Truthers and Richard Hoagland, who thinks NASA is concealing evidence of alien civilizations on multiple planets and moons, including Mars, where he famously thinks one unremarkable rock among millions looks a little like a face (you’ve probably seen it — the “face” was even the basis of an X-Files episode, the first one I ever saw, which I hated, leading me to avoid the show for a year, but which, as it happens, X-Files creator Chris Carter himself said was probably the worst episode). The late Carl Sagan once responded to Hoagland by pointing out that with millions of photographed Mars rocks to choose from, one can easily find ones that look like Kermit the Frog or just about any other damn thing you want. People love to spot patterns, even when they aren’t there (e.g., synchronicity, astrology, etc., etc.).

Anyway, Hoagland is also apparently a libertarian or at least wants to abolish NASA’s near-monopoly on space money (and on the truth!!) — and if authoritarianism in space scares him, as it should, he’d be aghast to know that the comedic moon-Nazis are coming soon — to a theatre near you, in the form of the film Iron Sky, as I just learned this week.

•••

Sigh.

1. There’s often a strong skeptical streak among libertarians (e.g., me), but there’s also a strain of what might almost be called staunch anti-skeptics in the libertarian camp, people (often from California, in my experience, arising from the same soil as the Pynchonesque happy/paranoid anarcho-hippies out there) who more or less start from the premise that whatever the Establishment doesn’t want you to believe may be worth giving serious consideration — fluoride-as-poison conspiracy theories, UFOs, a hollow Earth, CIA psychics, Oswald as robot, anything for which there’s zero evidence and no plausibility, basically.

2. In a similar and often overlapping way, I notice there is a split among freedom-lovers between those wanting to live online and those wanting to live off the grid, each m.o. having its uses. (Todd Seavey’s formula: blogging by day, blogging by night, yet no cell phone, no social-networking-sites memberships [sorry to all who've asked -- you can always e-mail], no cable TV — and maybe no TV period once the digital transition occurs, which would be fine, frankly, as I’ve gone through periods without TV before and fared OK.)

There’s a whole hippie-like libertarian wing that mainly wants freedom to do primitive things like drink raw milk (sort of like the libertarian owners of Whole Foods and a couple organic-ish friends of mine). Indeed, a raw milk seller hassled by regulators was depicted rather heroically in the last issue of Reason. Let us hope he doesn’t puke or kill someone. I think for some people freedom and living on a tiny self-sustaining plot of land without any chemical fertilizers just naturally (so to speak) seem to go together, the way that freedom and returning to a decentralized checkerboard of tiny little parish communities across England went together naturally in the mind of century-ago Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton (but more about him in December — put that on your calendar). People’s intuitions seem to split pro-modernity or anti-modernity on a lot of things. Robots for me, please.

3. In a third (and again, highly analogous) split, plenty of libertarians (me included) are arch-materialists, seeing that stance as a pretty good fit with our earthy, capitalist views (and, far more importantly, seeing it as the truth) — but, for instance, the head of the Independent Institute, David Theroux, when I met him in Vegas of all places, denounced strict materialism and argues that things like this month’s Christian-tinged Narnia movie are the perfect recruiting tools for libertarianism (he’s president of the C.S. Lewis Society of California, I now realize), precisely because spirituality, to his mind, leads people to a love of free will and dislike of earthly rulers (he’d go further and argue that materialism is logically incoherent because, to oversimplify his point a bit, determinism supposedly can’t account for freely choosing to believe in things like determinism, an argument that I, of course, find flawed — for reasons deterministically rooted in my neural makeup, for anyone doubting my consistency on this point — and, yes, historical circumstance and genetics also led me to add that last bit — and this one…).

But more about late 2003: having, only months earlier, been dumped by a born-again Christian, I was pleased to find myself dating women who were, in their very different ways, all very unlike a born-again Christian — and each of them a nerd in the best sense of the word, including: a gangly, charismatic, 5′10″, sometimes-Belgium-dwelling PR vice prez who I half-suspected may have been Bryan Ferry’s lovechild, given her mother’s long-ago involvement with that rock star, despite the daughter’s insistence on having been fathered by an expert on spiders; and, early the next year, a personal trainer and freelance science writer twenty years my senior (but also a competitive body-builder).

And I have been lucky enough to date other interesting women since: a scientist, a former White House intern, a disgruntled postal employee, and so on — stopped short of marriage by some tricky obstacle such as, more often than not, my steadfast refusal to have children (be warned). But now we may approach too close to the present and too close to recent wounds for me to say more, so let us turn away from such matters for the remaining three and a half years covered by the Retro-Journal — there is a war to talk about, after all, and the death of conservatism, issues more divisive for libertarians than even the conspiracies, unpasteurized milk, and divine powers mentioned above.

•••

But before moving on to such somber matters — and on this, the penultimate day of the Month of the Nerd — let me recount how 2003, the Year of the Nerd, ended with vindication, in court, of my nerdiness. Thanks to the ever-alert — none dare call him hyperactive — Michael Malice, who overheard (as was then his wont) some TV producers talking about needing guests for their show, he offered himself and me — as plaintiff and defendant, respectively, on the Style Channel’s show Style Court, in which one person accuses another of having a bad wardrobe. I stood accused, on national television (taped in late 2003, aired in early 2004) of dressing like a nerd and played it up a bit on the show, wearing my rarely-deployed glasses and garish Marx Brothers tie (from that brief period in the early 90s when bad ties with pictures were ostensibly a good thing).

Since neither Malice nor I actually cared about fashion (indeed, Malice had his real taste arbiter, punker Tibbie X, along in the courtroom as an advisor), we did what I contend was a masterful job of cramming as many references as possible to things we do care about into what was edited down to a seven-minute segment, done with no retakes. Malice mentioned tropical fish and Virginia Postrel’s libertarian aesthetics tome The Substance of Style, for instance. I mentioned the American Council on Science and Health, the idea of a book called Conservatism for Punks, Star Trek, my mother’s love of the ABC soap opera All My Children (a cute actress from the series was one of the “style jurors,” so I seized a “Hi, Mom” opportunity), philosophy, Looney Toons, the time I went to Limelight in the early 90s with Chris Nugent and Kyle Smith (who was told to “dress it up a little next time” by the doorman), and even the fictional character “Sebastiano,” created by my fellow Film Bulletin writer Andrew Clateman back when we were at Brown (in a poem containing such bold, Nietzschean lines as “If I were Sebastiano/ I would butt my head through the Chagall stained-glass windows, my friend” — and the unrelated interlude, as I recall, “When you’re down and feeling blue/ At the end of the eight-forked path, there’s a Buddha for you”). And it all worked in context. Again: seven minutes.

Left on the cutting room floor, alas, was me saying (in what I still think was a funny and anarchist comment), “Your honor, Michael Malice has no respect for the authority of this style court!” Also cut: Michael (after I got a verdict of not-guilty for sticking to my nerd principles and thus being aesthetically consistent) explicitly endorsing elitism and exclusion, causing the oddly peeved style judge to liken him to a Nazi (and even less plausibly, a communist), leading to the judge and Michael both revealing they’d lost relatives in the Holocaust and to Michael doing an ironic Nazi salute — probably Style Court’s first and last. They also cut some of my lines about The Substance of Style, and afterwards Postrel complained that we didn’t defend her book adequately against the judge’s dismissive comments — and like most of those who criticize Malice (such as the aforementioned born-again Christian, Dawn Eden, who’ll be just fine), Postrel now has cancer, though I do not believe in black magic.

In any case, having been officially vindicated in court five years ago as a principled and thus permissible nerd, I will feel no guilt about spending tomorrow, the final day of my Month of the Nerd and indeed the Ultimate Nerd Day, watching or rewatching all four of May’s major nerd films, mentioned at the start of each of this month’s four prior Retro-Journal entries.

Retro-Journal: War in Early 2003

In the present, it’s Memorial Day weekend, and we think not only of real-life war dead but of Indiana Jones fighting the twin threats of communist totalitarianism and space aliens on the big screen — even as the Libertarian Party convention this weekend confronts the twin threats of big government and the Martian-civilization NASA cover-up (and the 9/11 cover-up), at least according to dismaying early reports from Dave Weigel, who’s been giving on-the-scene coverage of events in Denver on Reason’s blog.

But in the non-fiction world, five years ago, the totalitarian threat on everyone’s mind was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.  That’s not to say there weren’t ample big-screen nerd distractions that year as well.  Indeed, in a mass-e-mail to acquaintances, I declared 2003 “the Year of the Nerd” (much as I have declared May 2008 the Month of the Nerd on this blog) because of its plethora of nerdic film releases, from the prior attempt at a Hulk and the anticlimactic Matrix Revolutions to pleasant surprises like Underworld and Kill Bill, plus the predictably — but Oscar-winningly — awesome Return of the King (on a more personal level, I wrote freelance pieces on various science topics that year and read some ten sci-fi novels, which I swear is not my usual m.o.).

One year earlier, I’d also exacted my nerdy revenge upon Seth Godin by depicting a lunatic character loosely inspired by him in one of the Justice League comics I wrote (something I’ve updated my Retro-Journal entry from two weeks ago to mention and which I’d promised to mention nineteen weeks before that, for those keeping track).

But to get back to the more serious business of war in Iraq: while I no doubt have libertarian acquaintances who, because I’m one of their more hawkish comrades, think they vaguely recall me being in favor of striking Iraq, I was in fact cautiously, tentatively against the idea during the 2002 and early-2003 build-up to war.  I don’t see anti-interventionism as a necessary and direct corollary of basic libertarian principles (or, more important, as a correct position) and think toppling despotic regimes is, per se, a good thing (arguably the perfect expression of libertarianism) — but I’m also a utilitarian and pragmatist with very little faith that something will be well executed just because it “sounds like a good idea in principle” (a point the left has never understood and which the right, in its spare-me-the-details moralism, has now forgotten).  When in doubt about whether a project will yield more benefits than costs, I don’t even think the government should open a new post office, let alone invade a country, so if I were president, I would not have entered Iraq (and was rather nervous, as my coworkers could attest from listening to me react to the Wall Street Journal op-ed page’s increasing drum-beating in the morning, that we were ramping up for a seemingly unnecessary war as early as a year before the fighting started).

At the same time — as the Objectivists, interestingly, tended to argue most eloquently at a Cato conference on war around that time — Saddam was clearly guilty of coercion on a massive scale and had repeatedly violated the terms of his surrender in the 1991 Gulf War (and I might add had tried to assassinate the elder Bush, which in the old days might well have been considered reason enough to go to war, but we’ve become rather timid in some ways about making a big deal out of those sorts of symbolic/personal slights).  Furthermore, incredibly unpopular as it now is to say so (since people so enjoy demonstrating that they can tell the difference between Saddam and bin Laden or Iraq and Afghanistan), yes, Saddam had numerous ties to terrorists including al Qaeda, and you can throw out your dozens and dozens of snide, Bush-bashing, trashy little books from 2003 saying otherwise.  Indeed, the Philippines branch of al Qaeda was actually run out of the Iraqi embassy there, so don’t give me any of that “Secular government!  Religious terrorists!  They could never work together!  Stop the Bush war machine!” protest blather.  We all got plenty of that five years ago.

And so, once the war was underway, I wept not for Saddam and — again, even though I would have advised against the whole venture — hoped it would all work out for the best and go smoothly.  At the same time, I told my friend Dave Whitney that I feared that Bush — from whom all I ever wanted was tax cuts and entitlement reform — was putting all of the right’s credibility on the outcome in Iraq like a man piling all of his hard-won poker chips a foot high on one square (to use an analogy my high school friend John Tewskbury, now a dealer I’ll see at Foxwoods this weekend near my parents’ house, would appreciate), with the result that I might well spend the next several years saying things like “We should privatize the post office” and getting the non-sequitur response (given how poorly leftists reason even at the best of times) “That sounds right-wing — and things aren’t going well in Iraq, so that must be a bad idea.”  And that’s pretty much how things turned out, of course, with the further result that politics is now about little but the war, except when people are so sick of talking about the war that politics is about nothing at all, by which I mean the candidates themselves.

•••

On a more punk note, I saw David Bowie, Ray Davies, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, and others all singing in a single event — ostensibly a concert for Tibet at Carnegie Hall — that half-year, a more peaceful, one-worldy sort of affair but ever so slightly soured for my by my realization part-way through the concert that my ticket money, far from being used to arm an insurgency against the totalitarians in Beijing or something useful like that, was being used to fund a “Tibetan holistic medicine” center somewhere upstate, probably filled with the same sort of vague, unscientific Eastern pabulum that Amherst is hosting in conjunction with something called the Sham Shung Center or something like that in the weeks ahead, according to a mass-e-mail I happened to receive today about it.  Tibet needs help and the world’s sympathy, but spacey, rich New Yorkers do not need homeopathy vials with zen koans printed on the side.

Incidentally, that same month — February 2003 — I saw the Pretenders, Paul Weller, former Young Adults leader Sport Fisher/Dave Hansen (at the suggestion of then Rubber Rodeo-obsessed Michael Malice), and an “outsider music” night, so it was a rockin’ time.  The next month, I’d see the band Television but also ex-girlfriend Emily Wigod (in 2008, newly married) in a performance of Cosi fan tutte, so I try to be well-rounded.  Witness, too, the theatrical adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft short stories that some friends and I saw, the only play I’ve seen to this day in which someone stared in horror open-mouthed for so long that drool ran in a long strand all the way down to the stage.  If that doesn’t say shock and awe, I don’t know what does.

As the first half of 2003 ended, I also saw Nick Cave and Julee Cruise, each frightening in their own way, perform, but what still worries me is that despite all the war and weirdness of that time, the most accurate glimpse of the eventual End Times for humanity that I got came on June 30, when I saw Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines — not so unlike the robot revolt seen in the Animatrix prequel to the Matrix movies released on video that year.  And indeed, there was a lawsuit alleging that both movie series were rip-offs of a single massive novel — in which the Neo-like figure was also a John Connor-like figure — that was never published but was seen in manuscript form by the Wachowskis back in their comic book-writing days and related by them to their producer friend Joel Silver, but I have no position on that controversy and had always assumed Terminator was a rip-off of the “Days of Future Past” storyline from the X-Men comics — in which a time traveler comes back to warn us that giant robot Sentinels will take over in the near future.

But then, my favorite comic book writer, Grant Morrison, thinks the Matrix movies were ripping off his Invisibles comics, so who knows?  Films have eclectic influences, the Matrix films even more so.  Rather than trying to sort all that out, I’ll review Morrison’s Final Crisis comic about the End Times for the DC Universe next week — and in next Friday’s Retro-Journal entry, I’ll turn my attention from war to love, one last time before the Retro-Journal falls silent about such things to avoid reopening too-recent wounds and the like.  But don’t worry — we’ll still have politics.