Punk Cupcakes, "Punk" in a Book Review

Hey, Jonah Goldberg's anthology Proud to Be Right gets a positive review in the Washington Times, and it alludes to my "Conservatism for Punks" essay.

This may call for celebrating with "punk cupcakes" (pointed out to me by Austin Petersen).  The punk cupcakes are not to be confused with the alcohol-soaked St. Patrick's cupcakes I bought earlier this year or the red, white, and blue cupcakes for sale at the Ron Paul-ish event I went to a week or so ago.

"Conservatism for Punks" Live in DC Oct. 6! (Other Things on Video)

•One week from tonight, you'll find me, Jonah Goldberg, Ashley Thorne, and Helen Rittelmeyer (yes, ’08-’10 ex-girlfriend Helen Rittelmeyer) all on a panel at Georgetown University's White Gravenor Hall, in room 201A under the auspices of the Georgetown Republicans (that's Wed., Oct. 6, 7:30pm, and here are further directions).  Be there.

We (along with nineteen other writers) all contributed essays to the imminent Goldberg-edited volume Proud to Be Right: Voices of the Next Conservative Generation, mine unsurprisingly titled "Conservatism for Punks" and finally explaining what I mean by that phrase (which is also the slogan of this rebooted/in-progress blog).  More on the book when it hits shelves next week.

•In the meantime, here's what might be considered "modernist-indie by a conservative," my friend Hannah Meyers (and at least one contributor to the Goldberg volume, James Poulos, has had a cool indie band, the Handpicked Successors, by the way -- I find it reassuring that conservatives making music don't always sound like country). 

•If (perhaps a bit like ex Helen mentioned above), you prefer your video material to combine religious themes and soul-crushing darkness, you may be pleased to hear the gothy good news that Alex Proyas, director of The Crow, and the fantastic Dark City is tackling Paradise Lost.  If ever there were a dark hero...

•And while I'm noting video achievements, Reason’s Ted Balaker has recently interviewed Adam Carolla, Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) manager Lex McMahon, and pro-capitalist leftist Joyce Appleby.  I'm pretty sure Lex McMahon is the guy who tried to drive Superman out of the WWE.

My Shortest Conversation on the Middle East This Month

GUY WORKING IN PIZZA PLACE: I’m diplomatic.  I’m Israeli.

GIRL CUSTOMER [frowning]: Uh, I don’t think you guys are very diplomatic.

GUY WORKING IN PIZZA PLACE: What do you mean?  Do you know how much we put up with?

GIRL CUSTOMER: OK, I’m sorry.  [to her friend] I get into the weirdest arguments.

ME [exiting with my pizza slice, to Guy]: You tell ’em.

GUY WORKING IN PIZZA PLACE: Ha!  Republican?

ME: Yeah, actually.

(The panel discussion I'll be a part of at Georgetown in DC on Wed., Oct. 6 at 7:30pm will no doubt be more complex, so mark your calendars, but more about that tomorrow.)

Pray for Mojo

All right, with the release of my "Conservatism for Punks" essay (in an anthology of essays that hits bookstores next week), now is a fitting time to reboot the Todd Seavey website.   As befits the conservative/punk theme here, let us start with old, primal things.  To wit: an animal news round-up:

•Woman fends off bear using zucchini.

•Victims of sharks learn to forgive.  As a determinist who is nonetheless a moralist (since incentives such as public shaming can remold people in beneficial ways), I am against granting people blanket forgiveness merely because "it is their nature to be bad" -- as with sociopaths who lack empathy and remorse.  Perhaps, then, I ought not to forgive literal sharks, either. 

•Of course, animals are dimwitted, so slapping a gator in handcuffs -- as was done with one in Florida recently, oddly enough -- does not necessarily serve any productive educational end (though reform was not the goal in this case, I gather).

•By contrast, punishing a marine who killed dozens of ducks with rocks makes sense.

•I am less enthusiastic about arresting a man for fighting in public with a parrot.  Sounds to me like the parrot started it, though some would argue that's like faulting a slave for seizing an opportunity to assault his master.

•Indeed, that might be the opinion of my vegan friend Diana Fleischman, who informs me of an even stranger parrot story: a schizophrenic who walks around carrying a helper-parrot in a cage on his back, trained to talk the man down if he has a serious schizophrenic episode.  I'm not sure which is more insane, though: listening to the voices in your head or the voice of the parrot on your back.  If I were at a moment of maximum crisis -- and lately, that wouldn't be too surprising -- I'm not sure getting advice from a bird would make me feel the world was more rational. 

I guess the system works for the fellow, but I would still advise against creating a system in which, say, tiny robots under a schizophrenic's skin tell him to calm down and follow orders if he starts getting out of line.  I also would not recommend a system in which the CIA keeps watch on schizophrenics to make sure they're OK, perhaps using high-tech listening devices. 

•But to get back to the animals: I was delighted recently to meet Tina Louise (best known for playing Ginger on Gilligan's Island) and learn that she wrote a children's book, What Does a Bee Do? that not only describes bees but the hypothetical consequences of a massive bee die-off (a concern recently due to mysteriously dysfunctional colonies).  Always good to inform while entertaining, as I shall strive to do on this revamped blog (bear with me while the Kinks are worked out).

Weezer, Weiner, Ron Paul

My colleague Austin Petersen notes an “Autotune the News” short featuring NY’s Rep. Weiner, Texas’s Rep. Ron Paul, and Weezer, which isn’t a combo you see every day.

You know, I was in my early twenties when Weezer got big.  They do not seem ancient somehow and so perhaps have pulled off the trick that Bowie, Prince, and R.E.M. were once adept at of seeming continually-emerging, as I believe Dave Whitney once put it.  The lead singer looks like he knows he’s a rock star now, though, which we all know is a betrayal of their nerd roots.  (And how big an influence did they have in making nerdiness a hipness option, if we could quantify it, I wonder?  Historians may record that it was them, Tarantino, and Matrix that did it, yielding much of Brooklyn.)

Freedom from Government, from Crime, from Gangstas, and from Physics

Tomorrow’s Freedom Watch with Judge Andrew Napolitano (first airing 10am Eastern on Fox Business Network) is perhaps our feistiest yet, but even if it weren’t, it sounds like it would be better than certain other judge-related TV shows on the air, such as Outlaw, much as one hates to condemn anything Conan O’Brien executive-produced (I still wish his crime comedy Lookwell, featuring Adam West as a has-been actor who naively thinks he can solve crimes, had survived more than one airing).

Poised somewhere in between these things, I suppose, is the use of Patti Ann Browne as the “gangsta” correspondent on Fox’s late-night show Red Eye.  Brilliant.

P.S. Then again, maybe we all just need another dose of the space funk.  Thus, once more, the opening credits of Space: 1999.

Coifism for Punks (and debate reminder)

Admittedly, not all punks are involved in politics the way they are in my fantasies (likes the ones touched upon in my essay being published in a book out in two weeks — about which more soon).  But it is the case that a punk hairstylist in New York, Staci Child, is the cute lovechild daughter of the man whose current girlfriend is the Australian prime minister.  That’s a couple degrees of separation between the punk and the politics, but it will have to do for now.

For a more direct dose of politics, downtown where punk came from, join us tonight at Lolita Bar for an epochal debate between Wall Streeter Thomas Powers and Beiruter Saif Ammous on the question “Is Macroeconomics a Fiction?” You might just learn how this civilization collapses, or learn nothing at all, or both.

N'Dour-ing the Senegalese Government and P.C.

If you need reminders that music is inherently good, government inherently evil, check out this story about Youssou N’Dour being hassled by the Senegalese government and this story about the South African band Freshlyground being hassled by the terrible government of Zimbabwe (whose ludicrous leader Mugabe was scheduled to address the U.N. this weekl).

On a less depressing note, my friend Bretigne Shaffer has a piece up about the destructive error of calling normal, free, and prosperous people “privileged.”  Never having forgotten my four years of dealing with Marxist, French-theory-addled Brown students, I know how insidious such p.c. labeling can be.

DEBATE AT LOLITA BAR: Is Macroeconomics a Fiction? (plus econ, God, etc.)

From Keynes to stimulus to trade deficits to the algebraic relationship between inflation and unemployment, we hear the fate of civilization decided by people assuming macroeconomic analysis makes sense.

But this Thursday, Sept. 23 (8pm) on the basement level of Lolita Bar (266 Broome St. at Allen St., one block south of the Delancey St. F J M Z subway stop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side), Debates at Lolita Bar dares ask:

“Is Macroeconomics a Fiction?”

Yes: Saif Ammous, economics instructor at American University of Lebanon

No: Thomas Powers, of a mighty Wall Street concern

Moderator: Michel Evanchik

Host: Todd Seavey

The audience will bid on the correct answer at the end. Tell everyone about whom you care.

•••

In related news:

•Richard Epstein vs. Paul Krugman on macro

•NPR with David Boaz on libertarianism (as pointed out to me by Ali Kokmen)

•a critique (pointed out to me by Gerry Ohrstrom) of “locavores,” who were the target of debater Saif Ammous at a previous Debate at Lolita Bar

•the only thing dumber than a defense of labor unions, a defense of public sector unions

And in unrelated news, since yesterday was the official day of prayer for Christopher Hitchens (during which I witnessed neither Rapture nor Rupture):

•I note that he found the strength last week, here at the Cooper Union in NYC, to debate Rabbi Shmuley Boteach (with whom I got to see him mop the floor a couple years ago) on the question of whether there’s an afterlife. Mention that to any Christian halfwits who tell you there are no atheists in foxholes (or with throat cancer). Likewise, I will not be wasting my last moments on Earth calling for last rites, or imagining unicorns for that matter (pardon me, unicorns must exist because they are beautiful and move the human heart).

•If you think religion morally shores up capitalism (whereas in fact it’s the other way around), you might want to check out this report on what Islam-fueled Ahmadinejad thinks of markets.

•Meanwhile, at the Vatican money-laundering operation…

•If it’s booty you worship, note my friend Reid Mihalko’s Sacred Sexuality RoundUp this weekend (I just report, you decide).

•Let us not forget that two of my most blasphemous friends said at the beginning of their appearance on Cash Cab that they were headed to no other destination than Lolita Bar (and at the end of the segment, one “Todd Seavey” is called for the winning answer, Leopold and Loeb).

•Michael Malice, who appears in that clip, is something of an existentialist, but then, so is the comic book superhero the Punisher, according to comics writer Steven Grant, who says:

Heidegger, who took Kierkegaard’s philosophy further, comes even closer to describing the Punisher: Since we can never hope to understand why we’re here, if there’s even anything to understand, the individual should choose a goal and pursue it wholeheartedly, despite the certainty of death and the meaninglessness of action [Note from Todd: That's stupid]. That’s sure the Punisher as I conceived him: a man who knows he’s going to die and who knows in the big picture his actions will count for nothing, but who pursues his course because this is what he has chosen to do.

(One more comics note: when assessing one’s life, I think it is important not to compare oneself to UK director Matthew Vaughn, who directed the funny superhero movie Kick-Ass, is directing next year’s X-Men: First Class about the beginnings of the Prof. X/Magneto rivalry fifty years ago, is friends with Guy Ritchie and Madonna [who is in her own way almost as cool as a punk], is married to and has two children with Claudia Schiffer, and has assembled a squad of ex-Ghurka soldiers to protect him and Claudia against reported stalkers, not so unlike something out of the school invasion sequence from X-Men 2.)

•And much as I enjoy being around my fellow anarchically-inclined folk, I must take a moment to lament the conspiracy-theory folk at that Liberty Festival NYC 2010 thing I poked my head into briefly this past Saturday. Once the talk of poisoning us all with fluoride and using airborne chemicals for mind control started, it was time for me to leave the red, white, and blue cupcakes and John Birch literature behind.

Macro Debaters Have Been Found

All set now for Thursday, which is gonna rule.  More details tonight, blood-alcohol level permitting.

Cobra and Krusty

In the course of complaining about Lady Gaga a week ago, I mentioned her likely appeal to the s&m-inclined, who may be more common among millennials than among prior generations. And only now does it occur to me that maybe this fiercely-devoted but cruel couple, on TV from the time the millennials were born, is what perverted them all.

Speaking of cartoons, it only occurred to me a couple days ago, oddly enough, that maybe I really did cause a joke to be used on The Simpsons.

I wrote in the Brown Film Bulletin circa 1991 that novelist Chaim Potok’s name sounds Klingon, and Krusty the Clown said the same thing in 2003 (in the extra-Jewish episode “Today I Am a Clown”). What with various Ivy League humor writers having ties to the Simpsons writers, doesn’t it seem more likely that they saw a Bulletin at some point (possibly even a copy belonging to my fellow Bulletineer Christine Caldwell, back when she was my roommate and worked with future Simpsons writer Ian Maxtone-Graham at National Lampoon) and half-remembered it a decade later than that this extremely obscure joke was independently invented twice?

Not that the latter is impossible (Chaim Potok does sound like a Klingon name), nor do I want royalties from them or anything, but somehow back in 2003 it didn’t even occur to me to think there could be an actual causal connection rather than a mere coincidence. I must have become less humble over the past seven years…

P.S. This hypothesized chain of comedy-making events is less interesting than Christine’s resume-enhancing script for a sketch about an Axl Rose Christmas album being ripped off by a prominent late-night comedy show (complete with the idea of a Slash Hanukkah album bonus if you call and order now), but that’s a story for her to tell. Show biz people are no good at all.

P.P.S. And speaking of show biz, I still need an extroverted believer in macroeconomics to make the case for macro’s relevance (about seven minutes of comments followed by q&a) at this coming Thursday’s 8pm Debate at Lolita Bar against a libertarian who says macro’s all bunk, so e-mail me if you’re willing and able. Unless you Keynesian/welfare-statist/Krugman types are all chicken, of course. You’re not chicken, are you? (Note: This is the first time I have deployed this tactic for recruitment purposes. We’ll see how it goes.)

Debbie Gibson, Dan Halloran, Carl Paladino, Will Wilkinson, God

•I met 80s pop star Debbie Gibson last night at an event celebrating the release of the documentary 3 Billion and Counting, about how the environmental movement killed tens of millions of people (and caused about 3 billion cases of illness) by getting the insecticide DDT banned and thus fostering the spread of malaria.

That’s not punk, but it’s an even more important topic (and something worth bringing up to the next fragile hippie girl — likely a folk music fan — who talks about the green movement as if it’s superior to Naziism). I did come out of the event with a cool “DDT” t-shirt that is both punkily badass and supportive of a good cause, not unlike the death’s head t-shirt I have that warns about the problem of landmines in Cambodia.

•Not every event combines scientific and economic reasoning in ways that are to my liking, of course: I am informed that today an event billed as Liberty Festival NYC is taking place from 3-11pm at Social Bar & Lounge (Eighth Ave. between 48th and 49th), full of libertarian and quasi-libertarian conservative speakers — including avowed pagan Republican city councilman Dan Halloran — but your twenty bucks cover charge goes to fight Ground Zero workers’ “9/11-related illnesses,” a category that has ballooned, like illnesses attributed to Agent Orange, to include every imaginary and unrelated malady to which any large cohort is vulnerable. Might still be a fun party, though.

•It’s exciting just to see that even in New York City, the believers in liberty are getting more open about it — something I suspected for a couple years just from the increased frequency with which I overhear anti-big-government conversations in bars and restaurants here, compared to a decade ago (and I mean bars and restaurants where the crowd wasn’t gathered by me).

•Likewise, the fact that a tough-talking anti-Albany firebrand, Carl Paladino, is now the Republican nominee for governor here is sort of exciting, even if he gets slaughtered by legacy loudmouth Andrew Cuomo in the general (and despite me knowing one or two people who worked for Paladino’s GOP rival Lazio). It’s exciting simply because I didn’t think New Yorkers had it in them to nominate such an ornery government-basher anymore.

From New York, sadly, I expect things more like the Daily News’s less-than-objective headline about Paladino’s primary victory, which was (roughly): “Meet Crazy Carl! Don’t Laugh — He Might Be Your Next Governor.” Yes, the Paladino campaign has been bizarrely amateurish and undiplomatic at times, but they did mass-e-mail this Buffalo News column that sums up why a bit of tactlessness perhaps shouldn’t matter at this juncture in New York government’s troubled history.

•As any movement broadens and becomes popular, I have long said, it’s bound to get a bit weirder and less ideologically consistent. You have to expect that. Indeed, it struck me years ago, after reading Paul Johnson’s History of the American People, that the first American Revolution, much as we all love it, resulted from such a feverish combo of quasi-libertarian, populist, and rabidly-religious sentiment (people thought King George was in league with Satan, etc.) that in a hypothetical second American Revolution, any movement urgent enough to get Americans off their sofas and out in the street railing against government spending would probably have to involve a certain amount of wild-eyedness.

Specifically, it occurred to me that tapping into explicit American Revolution imagery might be the only way to rouse complacent and statist-inclined New Englanders, my people before my move to New York, from their natural activities — leaf-raking, chowder consumption, and voting for Democrats. Now, everything seems to be going according to plan. Don’t expect it to be perfect. If it all works out slightly better than the Howard Stern campaign for New York governor in 1994, it’ll be a step forward, at least.

•Embracing imperfection means putting up with internal disagreements, of course, and on that front I hope Will Wilkinson will continue to accomplish great things even after reportedly having been scheduled to leave Cato this past week. I have my differences with the “liberaltarians,” but in the end, the only real enemy is government, and like various peoples of Middle Earth gathering against Mordor, we’ll need everything from paleos to liberaltarians in the fight ahead.

Speaking of Middle Earth, in fact, I just saw a cute dwarf couple in a new luchador-themed restaurant near my apartment, so maybe I should have recruited them, too. I wonder if they know Strong Bad.

•On the topic of people who are on my team but have some disagreements with me, I was not happy to see a prominent atheist writer (not Will) actually embracing the (false) view that without God there can be no morality — and he has the audacity to call his new, wholly amoral life philosophy “hard atheism.” Truth be told, though, the most self-consciously amoral person I’ve ever known well was religious, but that is a story for another time, my friends. In the meantime, I’ll just say, along with First Things blogger and former punk Sam Goldman (borrowing a slogan from Margaret Sanger, for good or ill): “No gods, no masters.”

•And speaking of atheists and apostate writers who don’t hew to the party line (of which, of course, we could use more, even at party-line magazines and thinktanks), Monday let us reflect upon Christopher Hitchens, for whom some kindhearted religious folk, knowing of his cancer, have declared September 20 a day of prayer. I was glad I got to see him — and get his autograph — before his illness cut his book tour for his memoir short a few months ago, and I hope he’ll still be with us and doing well in November, when that book, Hitch-22, will be one of my Book Selections of the Month. Pray for that outcome Monday, I guess, if you’re the sort who does that (and this weekend catch Freedom Watch, of course, on FBN).

You Say Tornado, I Say Towering Monuments to the Human Spirit

Even if, as may have happened yesterday amidst spectacularly stormy skies here, the occasional tornado hits New York City — in the broad, technical sense of New York City — I doubt one could ever physically occur amidst the skyscrapers of Midtown Manhattan.

I haven’t bothered to check with physicists (even though one of my best friends was trained as one) or meteorologists (even though there’s one sitting in the office right next to my desk at work) about this, but it seems implausible, even though it would look cool in the opening scene of a big-budget remake of The Whiz.

Speaking of tall buildings, I notice this article about the purportedly tallest skyscraper in “Asia” being built must be based on the assumption that the United Arab Emirates is not part of “Asia.” Surely, that’s cheating. Does modern man not see the ancient commonalities of the Musulman and the Chinaman?

Since Manhattan survived last night’s brief storm, by the way, Manhattans Project, a friendly social gathering of folks interested in politics and/or media, meets again this coming Monday, Sept. 20 (7-10pm) at Langan’s bar-restaurant, club room in the back, if you care to join me.

Yom Komics and Defenders of the Macroverse

If I haven’t collected comics for over a year but I buy just two this week — and show some old issues to a comics editor friend — and then I feel a bit guilty about indulging in the old addiction, can I declare it a Yom Kippur thing?

The meta-nostalgic items out this week that are tempting me to do so are DC Legacies #5 by Len Wein and George Perez, recounting the 1985 Crisis, and a Justice Society of America Special depicting the events of the apocalyptic 90s series Kingdom Come finally beginning to unfold in present-day, with the antihero Magog poised to inspire a dark new generation of rougher, black-clad, punk, cyborg superheroes. It will all end in tears and anti-matter, I know.

Then it’s back to politics and other sophisticated intellectual activities, I swear — like recruiting someone to defend the discipline of macroeconomics in a bar debate on Sept. 23 against econ teacher Saif Ammous, who calls it all a mere fiction, if you know anyone willing to do that. Surely someone out there thinks macro is more real than, say, the Justice League’s evil doppelgangers the Crime Syndicate are, right? If so, send them my way today.

Ayn Rand, Lynda Carter, and Phil Davison

After the ugly business of voting in today’s primary, at least tonight I get to escape to the more philosophical setting of an Ayn Rand Institute convention.  I am not an Objectivist (Rand didn’t approve of utilitarians, altruists, or non-Objectivist libertarians), but I will give Rand credit for, among many other things, the insight that for rationality to become popular with an irrationally-inclined human race, it must be made romantically appealing.

In their different ways, her contemporaries Gene Roddenberry and Rod Serling had the same attitude.  She reportedly wanted Serling to write a movie script for Atlas Shrugged, the book being celebrated tonight, but he, reasonably enough, saw her as a sort of cult leader.  For all her arrogance, she was unpretentious in many ways, admitting to a fondness for Mickey Spillane and Charlie’s Angels.

Speaking of 70s television, I notice that Lynda Carter, famous for playing Wonder Woman, went on to become something of a Troy McClure.  Indeed, you may remember her from such (real) TV-movies as A Matter of Wife…and Death, When Friendship Kills, and She Woke Up Pregnant.

Combining video entertainment and political campaigns, we have the much-watched ranting speech by would-be county treasurer Phil Davison in Ohio, which, like the Joacquin Phoenix documentary, is a reminder that I may be turning into a fuddy-duddy who can no longer laugh at the mentally ill — if that’s his situation.  I’m also not sure I should laugh when, for instance, the usually-dry campaign for state auditor of Massachusetts turns into a big-budget fight complete with campaign jingles.  As Dave Whitney says, even the presidential candidates didn’t do that last time.  Maybe something larger is at stake this time that isn’t immediately clear.