Conservatism vs. Religion

For anyone who has a hard time remembering the difference between the Manhattan Institute and the Manhattan Project (I didn’t name either and run only the latter), tomorrow will be especially challenging — on Wednesday, Sept. 17 at 6:30:

•not only will I be hosting the usual third-Wednesday-of-the-month libertarian/conservative creative-people Manhattan Project social gathering at Merchants NY bar/restaurant on 62nd and First,

•but the unrelated Manhattan Institute’s always-interesting and combative Heather Mac Donald will be arguing against belief in God — a wonderful change of pace, coming from a conservative! — in a debate with her fellow conservative Michael Novak, author of No One Sees God, a book intended as a retort to the so-called “New Atheists” like Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris (at the Harvard Club, which requests jackets and ties, at 35 West 44th; RSVP to bookforum[at]templeton.org or 610-941-4050).

I like Mac Donald and wish I could be there myself — but if you go to the one-hour Mac Donald slaughtering of Novak, you can always come straight to Merchants NY afterward and tell me how it went.

Lest it appear I have strayed from the Month of Sex theme again, let me also note that my own pet theory about why belief in God seems so intuitively plausible to many people and is so strangely bound up with notions of sexual ethics (for many believers and unbelievers alike) is that conscience always, inevitably feels a bit like “someone watching you.”  It is one part of your brain evaluating other parts, after all — and people who have a powerful sense of being watched even in their most private moments (or when engaged in their most depraved thoughts) are liable to think they keep experiencing the belief-reinforcing presence of some unseen intelligence.

I hate to sound like a complete reductionist, but someday when they’ve got our entire neural machinery mapped to the last detail (no Mysterian am I), I suspect that mundane looking-over-my-shoulder feeling will end up being a big part of the explanation for the endurance of the God delusion (I think cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter would like this theory on two levels — he once said “recursion is my god,” and he’s friends with one of those aforementioned New Atheists, Daniel Dennett; my friend Caryn Solly has been thinking along somewhat similar lines since surviving a fall off a cliff in Bali a few months ago, apparently).

Or to put this theory in LOLspeak, of course: Ceiling Cat is watching you masturbate (inspiration, fittingly, for the whole LOLCat Bible).

Three other faith-based notes while I’m on the topic:

1. Tracy Quan, the subject of my entry yesterday, sends word of the interesting organization Faith House, which engages in constant ecumenical activities, spanning philosophies as well as diverse religions, like the next step beyond Unitarianism — and on Oct. 11 they’re even honoring atheism.  Of course, I take no special pleasure in seeing people of multiple faiths come together, intermingling their diverse forms of idiocy when they could simply be united by the absence of any faith and the presence of maybe a scintilla of common sense or skepticism for the first time in their useless, superstition-haunted lives, but, you know, if it helps prevent war and bigotry and all that, that’s great.

2. Don’t forget that Sept. 28 (8pm) brings our semi-religious Debate at Lolita Bar about sex between Stephanie Sellars and Anna Broadway.

3. And I see from DarkHorizons.com that the next project from the Pi-man Darren Aronofsky — after his (unnecessary) RoboCop remake — is apparently likely to be…Noah’s Ark.

I could imagine that being really, really awful — and I say that despite having nothing aesthetically against, say, crucifixion movies or Moses movies.  But the Ark story is ridiculous even by religion standards, and that’s saying something.  Aronofsky being quoted as saying that eco-apocalypse themes make it extra timely doesn’t help — though that suggests 2012 as a good release date, alongside the apocalyptic Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle, perhaps.

Maybe they should try to “rationalize” the whole thing by revealing that the Ark can cram in so many animals because it’s a tesseract, a “wrinkle in time” that allows more space to exist on the inside of it than on the outside.  Then they can cast David Tennant from Doctor Who as Noah and get a really interesting crossover-audience thing going on.  I also think it would be cool if they cast Jack Black, Jack Nicholson, or possibly Al Pacino as Ham.  No — Shatner!

Kuntzman, Assmann, Pamela Anderson, and City Life

Having blogged about Barbie yesterday, it’s only fitting that I mention Pamela Anderson today — no, not the fact that she said Sarah Palin should “suck it,” since I’m avoiding commentary on right-left disputes for the next month and a half — but rather the fact that she stripped in front of Ellen DeGeneres, as seen in this clip.

And Pamela Anderson in turn reminds me of the principle that for beauty purposes, one should alter nature as little as possible — don’t let plastic surgeons or fashion magazines tell you otherwise. There was no need for Anderson to get breast implants, and I suspect that one of the reasons so many men find fashion models “beautiful but not exactly attractive” is that the men sense on some instinctive level that most fashion models have had so much work done — even ribs removed to create narrower waists and cheekbones artificially heightened, they say (Or was it teeth removed to make their cheeks seem hollower? I have no idea) — that they don’t register as fully human anymore. Because they aren’t. Likewise, breast implants read as “prostheses” to my brain, as unwelcome as hook-hands. Better flat-chested than that.

At the same time, I think we can all agree that it’s sad to hear that Swedish-British TV presenter Ulrika Jonsson, having had four kids by four fathers, now feels she must get breast reduction surgery for her G-cups. Hello! indeed. A pity that here, too, nature is being thwarted (though I would not want her to be uncomfortable — indeed, I knew a woman who considered breast reduction surgery, but she instead ditched her husband, many of her friends including me, and her country, moving overseas to live in a b&d-oriented relationship with a sci-fi writer, not that I’m suggesting that was the only alternative to breast reduction).

I suppose, though, that treating bodies as fashion accessories is no stranger than treating fashion as an adjunct to politics, as left-leaning designer Kate Goldwater has been doing with her AuH2O line, organizing an AuH2Obama fashion show — and as a fan of Barry Goldwater, who also used that elemental abbreviation for his last name, imagine my initial confusion on seeing the name of that show. I thought a convention of Obamacons or Obama-libertarians was occurring.

•••

But getting back to fashion: I did indeed purchase New Balance sneakers Friday, as promised in that day’s blog entry, and they were so comfy that I wore them out of the store and discarded my decaying Vans in a garbage can on 42nd St. right outside the store. Since I failed to find plain black dress shoes in the time I’d allotted for the task, though, I found myself marvelously unencumbered, New Balances on my feet and only a copy of Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans in my hand (not to be confused with the Fixx song “Subterranean” nor the conspiracy theory that underground lizard men — including Kris Kristofferson and Boxcar Willie — secretly rule the world).

I wonder if, in the first of several coincidences that evening, The Subterraneans inspired the name of the fiction prize once won by the very woman who’d urged me to buy the New Balances, Katherine Taylor — since the Pushcart Prize is intended for Californian writers, and I couldn’t help noticing that the turning point at the center of Kerouac’s novel, as I read it in a succession of Williamsburg bars, is referred to as the “pushcart incident” and involves romantic intrigue among a cabal of (stoned) San Francisco writers (but more about that novel — and beatniks in general — later in the month!) [CORRECTION: Pushcart's national -- I was thinking of Zyzzyva magazine].

•••

In any case, readily mobile, I headed to a rainy Williamsburg — where you’re still allowed in whether your shoes are hip or not, despite what you may have heard — to eat a decent-sized free pizza at the bar Charleston just for ordering a drink (making the place superior to Ruby’s on Manhattan’s West Side, which only offers free hot dogs, great though that is) and then hear the swell and eclectic (in a Roxy Music way, not a totally-crazy-postmodern way) band the Disclaimers, containing two libertarian friends of mine, Dylan Keeler and the delightfully-named and now blue-haired Naa Koshie Allaway, newly returned from the annual Burning Man festival, where, I’m starting to realize, I must know a decent-sized .1% of the annual population despite never having gone myself, whatever that says about my social circle.

Speaking of my social circle, by sheer coincidence, just before seeing the band and their likable circle of friends — and just after reading for a bit at a bar where a young man kept calling to a dog named Gerd hanging out at the place, reminding me that just a day earlier at work I’d learned of the existence of a heart expert named Dr. Gerd Assmann, which struck me as odd — I found myself standing at a fairly empty bar up to which walked young Andrew Muchmore, himself just wandering into the place to kill time before seeing some art and newly moved to New York City, a friend of Diana Fleischman, one of our panelists from the egg-selling Debate at Lolita Bar. Andrew also happens to be one of the surprisingly global-warming-fearing libertarians who have badgered me into reading the IPCC report on climate change, which will now be part of my November Book Selection blog entry.

The name Gerd Assmann in turn reminds me of a writer-editor whose name, as a mutual friend of ours put it, sounds like a Hassidic porn star, Gersh Kuntzman, so now is a good time to let you know that he’ll be one of the reader/performers elsewhere in Brooklyn this Tuesday (Sept. 16, 8pm, doors at 7:30) at Union Hall (702 Union St. at 5th Ave. in Park Slope, $5 cover), as the multimedia lecture group called Adult Education presents a night of readings/visuals on the theme of scandals (Gersh’s explosive presentation will reveal that “Takeru Kobayashi Cheated!” [ADDENDUM: I would be falling down on the job nerdwise if I failed to point out that some say the only way to beat the Kobayashi scenario is to change the rules, though Capt. Kirk wasn't talking about competitive eating, despite his appearance]).

•••

A bit of performance art rounded out my odd Friday, too, as I saw two hipsters beating up a third hipster on the Bedford Ave. subway platform just before heading home (the opponents were soon separated by a train arrival that made two combatants decide to board the train instead of continuing the fight), a reminder that a lot of those sensitive-artist types are in fact the most psychologically screwed up and dangerous people in the City — but they know how to wear ironic horizontal stripes better than we normals do, and that makes them our cultural superiors. (Those free-associating, city-wandering Kerouac narrators have nothing on my strange little world.)

That may be the first real fistfight I’ve observed in the City, if memory serves, and such things must be relatively rare now with our sterling low crime rate — though in the past I’ve seen a lunatic pepper-sprayed, seen a guy toppled by a bouncer with one slap, and had a co-worker describe witnessing a little-reported subway attack by a machete-wielding lunatic. That last incident, around 1994, became part of the moment that I still tend to regard as my least pro-New-York moment.

I’d been wondering for a couple days why the machete-wielding lunatic (who’d hack at a couple people before having the misfortune to discover that the subway’s next stop let on numerous police academy cadets, putting a quick stop to his rampage) didn’t rate press coverage and, frankly, worrying that the lack of coverage meant this sort of thing went on all the time in New York City, when my friend Dave Whitney came to visit from Boston.

As it happened, my apartment doorbell wasn’t functioning (this was my previous building), and I had to walk down into the scary-looking alley where my door was to let Dave in, discovering as I did so that a crazy hobo with inexplicably bloody kneecaps was leaning against a wall nearby and that the nearest garbage can contained a newspaper with an item about a machete-wielding attacker — but as I peered into the garbage can, attempting to keep one eye on the bleeding-kneecaps guy, and with Dave walking across the intersection at 27th and 3rd to meet me, I realized (a) that this piece was about a completely different machete-wielding attacker and (b) that I didn’t dare remove the newspaper from the garbage can, as it was wrapping dog feces. For a moment, I considered moving to another city, but I’m still here, and ever since Giuliani’s election around that time, things are fine.

Barbie Wins in the End

Having taken on the tough targets this week — conservatives, women, gays, prostitutes, Olympic athletes, and Katherine Taylor’s posture — let’s round things out by taking a tough look at girls who like Barbie.  Or rather, let’s read this Barbie-positive story about a man unexpectedly catching a prize-winning fish with a toy Barbie fishing rod.

The thing I love about that story is that it’s a reminder — the sort I feel I see more and more as I age — that the “expert” way of doing something (such as buying some expensive molybdenum-alloy retracting “smart-metal” professional fly-fisherman computerized megarod thingy) is often little superior to doing it the dumbass way.  An acquaintance of mine once rigged up a fragile-goods transportation system for NASA using rubber bands and Tupperware after numerous genius engineers had spent millions on high-tech gear that repeatedly failed to get the same job done.

I love those old guys who wait until the excitable experts are done blathering and then quietly — and sometimes even correctly — mutter, “Ya could do the same damn thing with a dead squirrel and a rolla duct tape, cost you ten bucks ’steada $10,000.”  A lot of currently wasted time in all areas of human life could be recouped by heeding such lessons — and exposing the people who try to dupe us into doing things the hard way.

Katherine's Posture and Todd's Shoes

My friend Katherine Taylor — libertarian, fiction writer, beauty, fashionplate, and recovering slouchy person — has an article in the September issue of Allure (I always figured I’d be in that venue before her, but life is full of surprises) about her battle with bad posture (she looked fine already but is improving nonetheless).

As it happens, my ex-girlfriend Marilynn Larkin — competitive bodybuilder, personal trainer, and now freelance science writer (not to mention de facto beatnik, since she’s just old enough to have been a black-clad, jazz-listening Paris-dweller a few decades ago but doesn’t look it) is (or was) a posture-improvement expert on top of everything else she does, and I probably should have introduced her and Katherine at some point. Ah, well.

•••

On a vaguely posture-related note, Katherine has been giving me advice on buying new shoes, since my ostensibly hip Vans sneakers (there was a massive, hip-looking display for Vans in the little Harvard Square mall with the Newbury Comics in it when I was there two weekends ago) started disintegrating within about a month of purchase — apparently a common problem with this secretly-crappy brand (Katherine’s main advice: you get what you pay for, and pricier shoes tend to last longer, as I think proved to be true once before when I took her shoe-purchasing advice, though I resisted pressure from her to buy a $300 pair with alarmingly frictionless soles and ludicrous pointy toes back when those were in).

I see from the Wikipedia entry on Vans that the company that makes them co-sponsored the original Warped Tour, which featured various punk bands, some of them Vans fans. The Warped Tour also featured my leftist friend Sander Hicks’ band White Collar Crime, as I recall, so I think communism may be indirectly to blame for my shoddy footwear (actually, since the Green Party rejected Sander’s bid to be their Senate candidate for NY a couple years ago, in part perhaps due to his emphasis on the importance of small businesses, I should probably stop calling him “my communist friend,” fun though that his, and start calling him “my leftist-entrepreneur friend,” though that just doesn’t seem to do him radical justice). Punk may also be part of the problem, I concede.

In any case, due to attrition in my always-small shoe collection (I recently discarded a fairly-new plain black pair that developed an actual hole and a pair that had previously belonged to Katherine’s talented and funny singer/actor brother Russel Taylor — not because they were a bit flashy and maroon but simply because they were ever so slightly too small), the dilapidated Vans are currently the only thing standing between me and wandering the streets of Manhattan barefoot, dodging omnipresent broken crack vials (just kidding! that hasn’t been the case since before Giuliani!).

I promise to go shopping tonight, with or without further guidance.

NOTE: Keep reading ToddSeavey.com to learn more about beatniks later this month!

TRIVIA: Russel was in Sea Biscuit, Zombie Prom (with Ru Paul), and many other projects, including the stage version of Disney’s Aladdin, in which he played the parrot, no small feat (no pun intended).

Patriot Day and Olympian Sex (plus the McCain/Ron Paul/Bob Barr Spat)

My liberal ex is no less patriotic for being left-leaning — and was thus delighted to hear about my parents’ decades-long practice of raising an American flag in the morning and taking it down at sunset (I learned some of the rules of proper flag-handling myself during my stint in the Boy Scouts — including the fact that burning is actually the traditional method of disposal, though to some people that probably sounds even worse than the Obama campaign’s purported dumping of some in garbage cans).

And in the interests of national harmony, I’m largely going to refrain from commenting on liberal-vs.-conservative conflict after today (the seventh anniversary of 9/11/01) until November, believe it or not — though I’ll just note before the ceasefire that the feelings stirred by the flag are a reminder why I think something akin to conservative sentiments (traditionalism, ceremony) must likely be part of any sustainable political order, not merely the high-faluting abstractions of liberalism, so susceptible to manipulation by self-interested intellectual elites.

But what about the Olympics, with all its nationalistic displays and country-based teams, do I like them? Not really — a bit too ostentatiously nationalistic for my tastes (and I don’t like sports, which tends to teach people that life must be a contest between winning and losing collectives instead of mutually-beneficial cooperation among individuals).

And in any case, this article suggests the athletes themselves aren’t just thinking about America — but about sex (and replicating some familiar, non-egalitarian patterns in the process, as predicted by evolutionary psychology: the men will mate with most anyone available, while all the women flock to the male gold medal winners, effectively becoming harems to the…alpha-letes, if you will).

•••

Speaking of transcending the right-left divide, Ron Paul announced yesterday that he will not endorse his party’s candidate John McCain (despite what sound like half-hearted efforts by Phil Gramm, who I like, to convince Paul to do so), nor his main opposition, Obama — but instead urges Americans to vote for one of the minor-party candidates, three of whom (including Nader) can be seen onstage with him in this NPR article about the event. A peeved Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party candidate (and ex-Republican) who attended one of our Debates at Lolita Bar a few months ago, skipped the Paul event (though he was one of the four signers of Paul’s pledge to reduce the federal debt if elected and take other Paulian steps). Barr is quoted at the end of the NPR piece explaining why he feels, understandably, that Paul should simply have endorsed his fellow libertarian, Barr.

And that’s not just selfishness talking, if you ask me — it’s a reminder that “bucking the two-party system,” which is all well and good, is not the same as promoting liberty (I’d prefer either of the two major-party candidates to Nader for that reason, for example).

The National Journal was as snide as possible about Barr’s attempt later in the day to get firmer support from Paul, by asking him to become the Libertarian Party v.p. candidate — but even if you view that as a selfish stunt by Barr, I think there is a certain selfless zeal in the existing v.p. candidate’s willingness to step aside. Call it an irrelevant gesture if you like, but then, you can hardly call minor candidates’ efforts self-aggrandizing power grabs in one breath…and then say in the next breath that they’re giving nothing up by bowing out, right?

Anyway, I’m still voting for Barr regardless of what Ron Paul plans to do with his newfound spare time and regardless of who Barr’s v.p. candidate is. At least it’s not Joe Biden.

It is an apt time for minor-party rebellion, though: a prominent dissident Republican in the news, then a prominent former Republican, and now this array of minor-party folk appearing together despite real ideological differences deeper than the two major parties’ — plus a public more conscious than ever before of the danger of the two-party establishment co-opting their vague longing for change.

And I pick Barr. This does not preclude me preferring McCain to Obama — and even more so, Palin to Biden — but I can have a preference in that fight without having to vote for either side in it. So I won’t.

Whether McCain or Obama wins in November, next year seems like it’ll be a great time for talking more frankly and carefully about the difference between real change and change that’s strictly for show purposes, with both major-party candidates having raised certain expectations in that area. The real-vs.-phony dichotomy might prove a much more powerful and educational framework than the right-vs.-left one.

Two Big Teases

I alluded Monday to the fact that one could crudely carve twentieth-century feminism into three phases that were, in rough chronological order, libertarian, leftist, and more or less post-structuralist (that is, refusing to accept any essentialist definitions). One cool move on the part of that third phase, annoying as its amorphousness can be, was the brilliant linguistic ploy of coining the term “sex worker” to cover everything from strippers to prostitutes, thus giving a moral/legal boost to the prostitutes by association, since pretty much everyone loves strippers — not just free-spirited liberals but plenty of Christians and of course our fightin’ men overseas.

Fightin’ men love strippers — strippers are one of the things that make us better than the Taliban (not to mention the Saudis, so uptight and totalitarian that they recently outlawed dog-walking because it might give members of the opposite sex the chance to meet and chat in public — this is the sort of thing that makes one think dog-walking is more universal than religion and stands a better chance of still being with us in a thousand years).

And speaking of the sex worker continuum:

1. In a few days, I’ll post a longer plug for the latest book by prostitute-turned-novelist Tracy Quan — and in the meantime, here’s an article about normal non-prostitute folk engaging in sex-for-goods barter of various kinds.

2. And here’s an alert that tomorrow night, Sept. 11, at 8pm, for $5 you can celebrate America with readings about and from sexually-frank humorist/poet/essayist Dorothy Parker, with one of the readers, Stephanie Sellars — herself now an actress in the online erotic series The Fold — playing Dorothy Parker (that’s at the Billiard Room of the Salmagundi Club, 47 Fifth Ave. between 11th and 12th St., RSVP to 212-255-7740 x4, dinner available at 5:30 before the 8pm reading). She’ll also be one of our combatants on the topic of modern sex at our Sept. 28 Debate at Lolita Bar.

P.S. Did you know Harpo Marx was a member of the Algonquin Roundtable as well? I know he spoke aloud, but it’s hard not to picture him tight-lipped, mugging, and honking a horn at everyone. Why is it only the killer cyborgs who get to master time travel?

Family Guy vs. Superman

Family Guy, which is now about the only thing I watch (and which may or may not still be the subject of a neat paintings exhibit at New York’s Paley Center for Media — can’t tell from their damn website), had a bit with Superman spying on Lois with his X-ray vision, realizing he’d accidentally gotten her pregnant, and thus announcing that he has to return to Krypton for a protracted special mission, so they’d better “see other people.”

What’s really disturbing, though, is that this is almost exactly the plot of Superman Returns.

Now the studio is considering a reboot of Superman that would ignore that film, which may be just as well. Mark Millar, the man behind the dark and stupid movie Wanted, is pitching one version of the Superman story. I think the wisest thing from a marketing perspective might simply be to make the movie feel like a natural sequel to Smallville, which presumably has to end with Clark going to Metropolis at some point.

In keeping with this blog’s Month of Sex theme, though: is it fair to ask whether director/co-writer Bryan Singer being gay may have contributed to the temporary derailing of the franchise? I do not mean for a moment that gay people shouldn’t be telling superhero stories (they certainly do) but rather that a big reason for the misfire of Superman Returns is that the plot, involving things like Lois having an out-of-wedlock child and a duped boyfriend, and Superman spying on her at home, was, as Kevin Smith (himself gay-friendly but frank as well) put it, “supercreepy.”

Might a straight director — simply for aesthetic/instinctual reasons that I’m not labeling morally superior — have been more likely to recognize in the planning stages that Superman was being taken into strange familial territory by this plot? Americans are increasingly tolerant of odd family configurations, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we enjoy seeing our heroes in such predicaments.

Add that to over two hours of quiet, near-humorless, punching-free film, and you get a lot of people leaving the theatre feeling like something vaguely unsettling instead of fun just happened, though I thought it was OK.

(As Smith said in the same live appearance in Red Bank, NJ where I saw him call the film “supercreepy,” he almost wishes now that the 1990s Nic Cage/Tim Burton/Kevin Smith Superman Lives film had come to fruition, even with the producers placing absurd restrictions on the plot such as no flying, no costume, and a climactic fight with a giant spider, because if he’d fought a giant spider, “at least he would’ve thrown a punch.”)

This is by no means an argument against gay directors as a general rule (not even after Batman and Robin), just an interesting and unusual case in which that one attribute among countless others may have made a small difference. (If it were a film with Prince and David Bowie portraying space aliens, by contrast, I might want the director to be gay — and rest assured I would see that film.)

Terminator, Buffy, and the Elektra Complex

Tonight brings the second season of Terminator, which means dainty little Summer Glau beating people up, and in some sense we have Joss Whedon to thank for that, since her main resume item for being dainty but violent before this was his Serenity movie.

That teen-girl-butt-kicker archetype in turn echoes his character Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and she’s as good as any starting point for talking about tensions within “third wave” feminism (for many people, this entry just got a lot less fun fast). Long philosophical story short: feminism is an amorphous thing that may have some good points (despite my ten-point critique of it in a prior entry that generated so many negative comments), but I’m not sure that pretending that girls can routinely beat up boys is its strongest suit.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying Buffy is rooted in some sort of pent-up she-anger directed at males (nor am I suddenly demanding realism or whining about violence — though I think in the long run, feminism’s greatest and most libertarian contribution may be nudging the world ever-farther away from thinking that physical might makes right, and I suppose readers can let me know if that observation is enough to make me a feminist or, once again, merely a jerk, or both, or neither).

Rather, I’m saying that third wave feminism (90s stuff, basically) — unlike the (fairly-libertarian) first wave of feminists seeking equal legal rights or the (leftist) second wave seeking social egalitarianism by statist means if necessary — seems to get a lot of its appeal from the relativistic pretense that there are simply no generalizations one is allowed to make about differences between the two sexes, such as observing that one tends to be larger and stronger than the other.

(Generalizations, which can be very useful and may well be true even when they aren’t, do not commit me to patently-false universal claims such as all men being stronger than all women, which is the sort of straw man [straw person?] claim angry third-wavers tend to pretend they’re up against when they launch their smug, snippy little Response posts; far from the generalizations being universally true, as a few people would be happy to remind me, I once lost an arm wrestling match to a female — an unusually fit one around six feet tall [not Megan McArdle] — but that is, I hope we all agree, beside the point.)

The problem with pretending that women are just as likely to be macho as men is that what starts out as an implicit promise to “let the chips fall where they may” (the simplest phrasing of the attitude that I think all freedom-loving laissez-faire types ought to feel obliged to take toward these issues) tends inevitably to lead to the observation that the chips are, in fact, falling in certain predictable patterns, and when the feminists are disappointed by this, it’s suddenly time to let the second-wave methods (affirmative action laws, etc.) snap back into action, and we all realize we were living in a fantasy land of spirited no-holds-barred competition.

As with the naive formulations of conservatism described in my entry yesterday, what seemed like a set of universal principles begins to look instead like special pleading for a favored subset of the population with shifting, even hypocritical demands (and you were worried my Palin comments wouldn’t lead us back to Month of Sex entries! I live to segue!).

Or to put it more briefly: there is no better way to get your boyfriend to think of you as a second-class citizen than to insist that women love horror movies as much as men — and that he’s a sexist pig if he thinks otherwise — then demand that he comfort you as you cry in the theatre later (that’s purely a hypothetical-metaphorical example, you understand — not meant to suggest there are no female horror fans, as my predominantly nerdy acquaintances well know).

•••

One reason, I think, that men — like Joss Whedon — are so tempted to buy into third-wave feminism faster than men bought into first- or second-wave feminism is simply that living in a world of women who did genuinely kickbox their way through life and never cry would be totally hot. (One of the least-convincing recurring claims of feminism is that we men want women to be weak, fragile, and weeping — when in fact most of us spend a great deal of effort trying to get at least some women we know to stop being weak, fragile, and weeping, as these qualities are not fun but seem pretty hard-wired into a lot of women anyway, despite all the social pressures — especially from men — to be tougher.)

Take the beautiful 1990 hardcover graphic novel Elektra Lives Again by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, which I stumbled across in my old room at my parents’ house in Norwich last weekend (not far from that recently located Sooty the Bear puppet and his magic wand). Elektra, Daredevil’s killed-and-resurrected foe/girlfriend (played by Jennifer Garner in two — two! — fairly forgettable films), is a beautiful ninja assassin, and her story here is a reminder of why we all loved Frank Miller in the first place back circa the 1980s. Instead of the monotone dark shadows of works like his Sin City, this Elektra story is full of big spreads and bright colors like a strained-glass window (fittingly for the Catholic Daredevil).

Indeed, the colorful and topographical-feeling, sculptured-rooftops cityscapes in Elektra Lives Again feel more like the work of Will Eisner, who created the urban superhero The Spirit, than the upcoming Spirit movie probably will, since the movie, by Miller wearing his director hat, appears (from ads and posters) to adhere all too closely to Miller’s own Sin City style of shadows and silhouettes. If Miller wants to do that stuff, maybe he should just do another Sin City movie — or direct The Dark Knight Returns if Chris Nolan ever has a tragic falling out with Warner Brothers.

In any case, I applaud Elektra, Buffy, and Cameron/River for being able to take down whole armies of males in a fight, but — at the risk of sounding like I’m even more feminist than the feminists — machismo may be an unreasonable standard by which to judge women, one more demand that we all (condescendingly) refrain from commenting on reality so that the womenfolk can pretend whatever they like.

And, no, I am not suggesting that men can fly, in case that’s unclear.

Long-Term Risks for Conservatism

Some elite thinkers might think that I sully myself by writing with even the tiniest sympathy for figures like McCain, Palin, or Ted Nugent, as in yesterday’s post. And I admit it’s hard to know when to stay above the fray and when to risk looking like a partisan participant in it — and this problem is one that market-leaning conservatism in general has, for reasons stretching back at least to the Enlightenment but perhaps inherent in the human condition, at least so long as we engage in politics.

To put it another way: you sometimes have to envy the old internationalist communists, thinking (as children of the Enlightenment) that they had the one solution for all times and places. They were disastrously wrong, but precisely because of their universalism they were probably plagued by far fewer doubts — and fewer accusations of “hypocrisy” — than conservatives (I don’t know who that unnamed White House staffer was who supposedly spoke disparagingly of “the reality-based community,” but I don’t think anyone could honestly survey the history of the left and right and say that the left has historically been more deferential to local reality).

But despite the fact that deference to local conditions (including smalltown U.S. customs) is a form of tolerance, history and demographics may eventually make conservatism — still treated as if it’s a universalizing, homogenizing force in the rhetoric of figures ranging from neocons to antiglobalization activists — seem instead like special pleading by a specific ethnic/cultural minority (or rather, a historical majority in the U.S. that will inevitably one day become a minority here, as it is in the larger world).

Palin, for example, appeals to my parents (and to me, and to Megan McArdle’s mom to boot, and probably to a lot of other people’s moms) for reasons having more to do with abstractions like “pluck” than with ethnicity, yet she literally leaves P. Diddy worrying, “I don’t know if there’s any black people in Alaska” (though he has since decided he’d enjoy playing hockey with Palin, so her appeal may be broader than some expected).

And not all black people are P. Diddy, which is just as well — but the point is that old-fashioned cultural appeals (even if we optimistically assume they bring out good, freedom-loving, universally-applicable qualities in people) are rearguard actions in the long run.

•••

Of course, that doesn’t really bother (a) pessimistic paleoconservatives who assume it is their destiny to go down with the good ship Old Republic anyway or (b) neocon/Reaganites who (in my experience) tend to overestimate the power and pervasiveness of their rather narrow (not bigoted, just boring) conception of “normal.” That is, there are a lot of Republicans, some of them among my favorite people, who tend to assume (not literally but metaphorically/aesthetically) that the world is sort of like a large, placid suburb plus a few baffling trouble spots — and thus that cultural inertia will always be on their side (since, for example, “normal people who aren’t crazy” prefer PTA meetings to hacking their neighbors with machetes).

Long term, though, they’re going to need arguments and/or results so convincing that they’ll play in Peoria and in Punjab without hypocrisy or contradiction (go ahead and call me a globalist, but the whole world has to someday see itself as part of the “us” with no or virtually no “them”).

And I’m well aware that’s why some free-marketeers would say we have to bet on some form of liberalism or neoliberalism in the long run (and thus focus on steering liberalism in as free-market a direction as possible instead of fighting liberalism), because Punjab will never buy whole-hog into the package of philosophical ideas and cultural signals that sells in Texas.

And I’m well aware that that’s also precisely why some other capitalists (not to mention plenty of leftists) would say we have to give up on the wider world and embrace the local (let Punjab be Punjab and Peoria Peoria).

•••

But the homerun of course, from a libertarian perspective, is getting the right things universalized and the right things kept local. Some good ideas travel, some don’t. And it’s tricky knowing to what extent the U.S. can still be talked about as if it’s a locality (something that generates a stokable hometown pride) and to what extent it’s not only tactically inept but quite literally rude to do so. Palin seems ordinary to some and like a weirdo from a specific weird state to others, you might say.

To take a semi-personal example of a less economic nature, if I say “Merry Christmas” in a blog post (which I haven’t), it’s sort of a step toward openness, tolerance, and the mainstream on my part, since I’m an atheist and would generally prefer to avoid mentioning the holiday, if left to my own devices — but to some people, the well-intended greeting would make me seem even more parochial than usual, as if I’m just echoing my white, Christian ancestors and ignoring, say, my Jewish and Hindu readers (to take two of my other favorite ancient, mistaken worldviews as examples).

To put all this another way: I wish capitalism really were the irresistible, globe-straddling, nationless, rootless, unstoppable, abstract force that leftist jerks like Antonio Negri think it is, if only so that one could more easily maintain its smooth machinery without inevitably getting tripped up on the lumpier, messier chunks of local and traditional politics upon which the machinery rests (if corporate logos really had a mesmeric and loyalty-commanding power to rival the flag, as the Naomi Kleins of this world would have you believe, this whole capitalism-spreading project might all be much easier — not that real corporations and abstract market rules are synonymous, which is another part of the problem).

As it is, talk abstractly and you get accused of ignoring local reality (“Tell that to the people already on welfare! And to Andean Indians!” etc.). Talk in detailed terms of local reality and you risk sounding more partisan than you are, or like you’re deploying cultural Trojan Horses for nameless-faceless-heartless ends, which to some extent you are — but only because people resented your effort to talk abstractly (“No, see, I’m not saying there’s anything inherently good about the fur traders here per se, I just meant that when those first settlers came here…”).

I have no good solution, obviously — nor can I even resign myself to agnosticism, knowing that if I do so, some people will eagerly seize the opportunity to take it as a victory for any and every non-capitalist policy they like (e.g., you haven’t successfully persuaded everyone yet, therefore it’s time to stop trying and just accept the welfare state/majoritarian democracy/affirmative action/etc./etc.).

I just have to hope the whole general mess gets nudged in a slightly better direction once in a while. There will be no global revolution followed by utopia — and that’s not my fault.

Why Nugent Is Voting for McCain

One reason to think McCain may yet win is that he didn’t seem to me to be merely distancing himself from the GOP establishment with his “reform” speech Thursday — it’s also a great way to appeal to what we not long ago called the Perot voters (populists who probably also like Palin).  Remember the Perot voters?

McCain may send enough mixed signals to yoke together moderates, conservatives, paleoconservatives, some forgiving libertarians (with his veto and waste-cutting vows), Republicans who like the religious right, Republicans who don’t like the religious right (a tactically useful difference between him and Palin), and the fed-up populists who might in an alternate version of history have become repeat Reform Party voters (if the actual Reform Party weren’t so crazy it makes us libertarians look downright staid).  That’s not a bad center-right coalition — one perhaps smaller but more motivated to vote than Obama’s much vaguer mosaic of optimists and change-seekers, many of whom (especially the young) I predict will forget to show up in November but will still smile warmly when they see pictures of Obama.

And at the risk of sounding like I irrationally retain some shred of optimism after all that’s gone wrong in the past couple decades: the aforementioned McCain coalition might actually accomplish something useful, depending on how it defines “reform.”  If cleaning out the stables means cutting lots of pointless spending in Washington, McCain may redeem himself even in Matt Welch’s eyes.

If instead it means, for example, destroying the pharmaceutical industry (bad guys, as McCain calls them), well, we may all lose our eyes to macular degeneration or something.

Doubtless it will be a little of both, but there is just the tiniest hope — greater than any offered by Obama — that McCain (or Palin) might decide, say, that Social Security as we know it must end.  I’m not holding my breath — just saying they’re at least a roll of the dice, while Obama is almost certainly politics as usual, or worse.  (Note: Biden.)

•••

Ted Nugent said on Glenn Beck’s show (the day of Palin’s selection) that he considers Bob Barr a friend but thinks the pragmatic thing to do is vote for McCain with the intention thereafter to “keep on his ass.”  Not such a crazy position — but despite the ruminations above, I’m starting to think the simplest, easiest way to keep on the GOP’s ass is to just keep voting Libertarian (so quick!  so effortless!), as I will have in half the presidential elections I’ve voted in (if you count my write-in for Dave Barry in 1992) if I stick with Barr.

A libertarian swing-voters sidenote: Palin’s appeal to the West seems like a smart move if you believe Ryan Sager’s 2006 analysis about the Republicans needing those libertarian-leaning but recently Dem-voting mountainfolk to survive.  She “sure loves her some Jeebus,” as my friend Chris put it, but in more of a frontier way than a Southern way, which may end up being decisive.

The Unpersuaded

I can’t fault Republicans less ideological than myself for being fired up after Palin and McCain’s convention speeches. Neither, though, can I blame (all of) the “Obamacons” and Obama-sympathizing libertarians for wanting to further punish the Republicans for their misbehavior over the past eight or fourteen years. I have never been entirely satisfied with any of my own presidential votes, so I can hardly blame other people for solving the “least-bad” dilemma in other ways.

At the same time, I will observe that four particularly McCain-averse libertarians who sound like they might be McCain-averse enough to vote for Obama — Megan McArdle, Andrew Sullivan, Reason’s Matt Welch, and Jacob Levy — might have one motive in common that I’m not sure anyone’s pointed out: war guilt. All four of them ranged from gung-ho to at least moderately supportive of going into Iraq and — dare I say it — might be overcompensating a bit now with their Obama sympathies. But again, I recognize there are no perfect solutions, and for all I know, they’ll all end up staying home or casting Bob Barr protest votes, as I plan to (sitting here in what I assume to be a hopelessly blue state anyway), likable though I find Palin.

•••

In the case of Jacob Levy, too, he might agree with me that his familiarity with Obama and Obama advisor Cass Sunstein from the days when all three of them were at the University of Chicago may reduce his horror at the thought of an Obama presidency, rationally or not (Jacob and Sunstein are even fellow former Volokh Conspirators, and Sunstein, despite being a diabolical statist monster, was invited to participate in that Critical Review conference I went to this past Sunday — Sunstein is interested in libertarian ideas, though mainly, it seems to me, for purposes of subverting them and advancing statism).

I was surprised, though, to see Jacob saying on his blog that he’d probably vote for Obama even if Dick Gephardt were his running mate. It’s bad enough Obama picked libertarianism-bashing Biden, but if he has hidden virtues great enough to offset even a hypothetical arch-protectionist, union-goon running mate like Gephardt, I must really be overlooking something (Jacob, in his thoughtful and slightly dry way, explains that he mainly feels the Republicans still need to be punished for abusing executive power, which may be true, though I wish we didn’t have to be punished along with them, with one-party Democratic rule and all the taxes and regulations it is certain to bring).

•••

More useful to Republican strategists than the observations above might be the complaints from my friend Chris, another (non-blogging) GOP-averse libertarian. Chris dashed off (so forgive any typos — and he swears like Peggy Noonan!) a long, very effective e-mail explaining exactly why he, despite being a laissez-faire capitalist like me and the four writers invoked above, still gets too angry at the Republicans to support them, and I genuinely think that even the most venal and self-interested Republican strategists could learn something from Chris’s comments, so listen up (or just hire me as a political consultant so that someone can add common sense to the muddled verdicts of all those focus groups, primarily by reminding you that “us vs. them” tactics inevitably leave some people feeling you’ve put them in the “them” category when you might have put them in the “us” category). Says Chris:

I think it comes down to this: the republicans as presently self-defined, based on the main thrusts of their campaign rhetoric, hate me. It was pretty clear from all the speeches last night they hold the following sorts of beliefs:

–Being patriotic (and, ideally, excited about the idea of fighting for one’s country) is good and being critical of one’s country (assuming one’s country is America) is bad.
–Loving God and having unquestioning faith in Him is good while basically anything that goes against this, biological science in particular, is suspect or bad.
–Being intellectual in the sense of thinking that ideas are important (especially complex ideas) is bad, while thoughtlessly sticking to your inherited beliefs (or “going with your gut”) is good.
–Being gay or thinking, say, that gays should get the same rights from the gov’t (and here I mean basic rights like marriage, not special rights like discrimination protection, etc.), is bad.
–Small town living is somehow more authentic and good than living in a city;
–The West (of the US) is good, the East is bad.
–Things that appeal to the masses are good, things that appeal to the intellectual and economic elite are bad (Where have I heard this before? Oh yes, Mao Zedong)
–Education past high school makes one less authentic and good, the better the school one went to, the worse one is.
–Interesting in things foreign is inherently suspect.

Needless to say, I fall on the bad end of basically all these things. I think patriotism or basically any unconditional adherence to any group or organization is a bad thing and is evidence of stupidity and moral laxity. Though there are situations in which I would consider fighting for America the correct thing to do, those situations are extraordinarily rare and I don’t think that joining the army is inherently more moral than being a teacher, scientist, business person, hedge fund manager, etc. I don’t believe in God and do believe that science offers the most accurate and convincing ways to explain the world. I like ideas and think there’s great value in being intellectual, vague though that term is. I don’t think there is anything immoral or unnatural about being attracted to people of the same sex and though I don’t think the gov’t should have a role in marriage at all, if it does I think it should treat hetero and homosexual couples equally.

I’ve lived in both small towns and big cities and like aspects of both. In my experience people in small towns are just as promiscuous, dishonest, violent, etc. as people in big cities, but they also tend to be more narrow minded and unintelligent than the average city dweller (with, of course, many exceptions on both sides). I’m perfectly happy with the East Coast and don’t think that the West is in any way more authentically American, at least not in any good way. I am part of the elite and I think the things that appeal to my tastes are just fine, in fact in most cases objectively better than those things that appeal to the masses. I’ve been in school in some manner or another for almost my entire life and I plan to stay there. I have devoted a good part of my intellectual and professional life to studying foreign cultures.

Now I should have grounds for agreement with the GOP on economic matters and that is the one area in which I found myself in agreement with some of the rhetoric. However, most of the speeches last night defined the GOP in social, not economic terms. Sure, Romney Huckabee, and Palin brought up shrinking gov’t and keeping it out of our hair. Romney is the only one that has a shred of credibility there. Coming from Huckabee it’s laughable, and it increasingly looks like Palin grabbed every cent of gov’t money for Alaska (and her hometown before that) that she could. Yes, she rejected some ridiculous showy items, like the gov’s private jet, but there was no reduction in the earmarks that Alaska (and her small town before that) got from the federal gov’t (including the money for the “bridge to nowhere”).

So even if I thought the GOP would be better in economic terms, and I’m not convinced that it would given historical reality, I just can’t vote for people who are openly hostile to almost everything about me…[H]ere are some part of the speeches that particularly annoyed me or struck my as hypocritical (with my comments):

*Romney:*

“You know, for decades now, the Washington sun has been rising in the east. You see, Washington has been looking to the eastern elites.”
–1. So what?
2. It’s bullshit anyway. The only recent president who has been a member of the “eastern elites” was Bush I (and possibly Bush II, if you consider being born in Greenwich and going to Andover, Yale, and Harvard elite). Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton were not “eastern elites” in any meaningful way (unlike, say, Romney himself).

“Is a Supreme Court decision liberal or conservative that awards Guantanamo terrorists with constitutional rights? It’s liberal.”
–O.K., then I’m for a “liberal” Supreme Court, as I think the rule of law is an essential part of a civilized and prosperous nation.

“Opportunity rises when children are raised in homes and schools that are free from pornography, and promiscuity, and drugs, where there are homes that are blessed with family values and the presence of a mom and a dad.”
–Maybe not the best line for a presidential candidate who left his crippled wife for a rich woman 20 years younger. And there seems to be a bit of promiscuity (and drugs) in the Palin family as well. Oh, and are the democrats running on a pro-porn, promiscuity, and drugs platform? I must have missed that.

“You know, it’s time for the party of big ideas, not the party of Big Brother.”
–Cute line. What are those ideas, exactly? And who was it that has fought tooth and nail to increase the gov’t’s ability to listen in on phone calls, etc. without warrants? Yes, the dems are definitely in favor of big gov’t, but let’s not pretend that our freedoms have somehow increased during the last 8 years. That’s just fucking absurd.

“Our economy is under attack. China is acting like Adam Smith on steroids, buying oil from the world’s worst and selling nuclear technology. Russia and the oil states are siphoning more than $500 billion a year from us in what could become the greatest transfer of economic wealth in the history of the world.”
–Wait, so now the free market is bad? I’m confused. Would he rather China act like Marx on steroids? Does he expect other people and countries to GIVE us their oil? Yes, Russia and Saudi Arabia are hardly free-market paragons, but that’s not the force of his criticism here.

“Our economy has slowed down this year, and a lot of people are hurting. What happened? Mortgage money was handed out like candy, and speculators bought homes for free. And when this mortgage mania finally broke, it slammed the economy.”
–No shit. But what a strange example! All this happened under Greenspan’s watch. What does it have to do with liberals? This is the market at work (and I don’t think it’s bad that people are now facing the implications of their moronic decisions) and I fail to see how it can be blamed on the dems.

*Giuliani:*

“[Obama has] no leadership or major legislation to speak of. His rise is remarkable in its own right — it’s the kind of thing that could happen only in America. But he’s never run a city, never run a state, never run a business. He’s never had to lead people in crisis.”
–Gee, where have I heard this before? Oh yes, he used the same exact words during the primaries about McCain. Now he’s just added the last line, as if being in a POW camp prepared McCain to be president.

“Having been to that part of the world many times and having developed a clear worldview over many years, John knew where he stood. Within hours, he established a very strong, informed position that let the world know exactly how he’ll respond as president. At exactly the right time, John McCain said, ‘We’re all Georgians.’”
–What does this mean? How would McCain respond? Would he attack Russia? Send troops to Georgia? Disasters both.

(Continuing on Georgia) “Obama’s first instinct was to create a moral equivalency that ‘both sides’ should ’show restraint.’ The same moral equivalency that he has displayed in discussing the Palestinian Authority and the state of Israel.”
–1. I’m not sure how “both sides should show restraint” creates moral equivalency.
2. Both sides SHOULD show restraint! Is there another alternative that would be better?

“John McCain will follow the fanatics to their caves in Pakistan or to the gates of hell. What Obama wants to do is give them a place setting at the table.”
–1. I’ll believe that when I see it. Didn’t Bush say the same thing about Bin Ladin?
2. When has Obama advocated organized negotiations with Al Qaeda? Iran is hardly the same thing. And frankly, negotiating IS better than armed conflict in almost all situations.

*Palin*:

“A writer observed: “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity, and dignity.” I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman.”
–See my comment about small towns above.

“When I ran for city council, I didn’t need focus groups and voter profiles because I knew those voters, and knew their families, too.”
–But when she was mayor she hired Ted Stevens’s former chief of staff as a lobbyist. He brought in over 25 million worth of earmarks for the town.

“As for my running mate, you can be certain that wherever he goes, and whoever is listening, John McCain is the same man. I’m not a member of the permanent political establishment.”
–1. McCain flip flops constantly. Taxes, climate change, torture, you name it. He attacked the religious right until he finally recognized he needed them to get elected. Then he sucked their dicks hard. Very hard. And given that Palin has been in political positions basically non-stop since she was 28, and is now running to be fucking VICE PRESIDENT, I think she can start to consider herself a member of the permanent political establishment.

“There is only one man in this election who has ever really fought for you … in places where winning means survival and defeat means death … and that man is John McCain.”
–1. So what? Thanks and all that (though, of course, we lost the Vietnam war and last I checked it didn’t lead to the collapse of the free world. Why, because capitalism, not invasion, is what changes countries for the better and makes enemies into trading partners), but I didn’t realize that the presidency was a reward for good service in the military 40 years ago.

“If our state wanted a bridge, we’d build it ourselves.”
–As noted, she was strongly in favor of the bridge until the political fallout hit. Then she still accepted the money for the state. Alaska suck more gov’t teat than just about any state, living off taxes from oil companies and federal money. The former has increased since she’s been in office and the latter has stayed the same.

Might it not be easier and wiser, Republican Party, to stick to deregulation and tax cuts and thus get this man’s vote? I’m sure he could tolerate a nice comment or two about Jesus if you did, as long as you put your money where your mouth is on the fiscal topics.

P.S. Meanwhile, back in the paleo world (or, in honor of recently-deceased narrator Don LaFontaine, perhaps I should say “In a world where ancient customs still rule…”), it’s interesting to find that some bloggers at American Conservative are calling Palin too neocon or at least insufficiently paleo even though Buchanan himself is excited about her. Those cranky, hard-to-please Buchananites have gotten more Buchananite than Buchanan himself, in other words. Tough crowd.

Paleos and Palin

There’s more to the Republican convention than the Republicans’ first-ever female v.p. nominee, but let’s talk about her some more anyway, along with some related topics (fine though McCain’s speech was):

•Katherine Taylor pointed out to me that a writer who, like me, was a recipient of a grant from the Phillips Foundation, helped spark the idea of a Palin v.p. nomination.

•Some have, perhaps hastily, described her as something of a paleoconservative — that is, a conservative who, in the early-twentieth-century rather than Cold War style, emphasizes local control instead of DC plans, diverse traditions instead of a monolithic Western World.  As it happens, a paleo-inclined writer (Tom Woods) was depicted as something of a scandal in the Washington Post this week, since he ghostwrote Ron Paul’s most recent book (as if they don’t all use ghostwriters).  What the Post failed to note is that I had already drawn attention, in one of my Retro-Journal entries, to a greater scandal — if memory serves, Tom was that guy I mentioned who in college was twice duped into bringing a flask of his urine to a random public building, thinking it was needed for a phony psych experiment.

(I was reminded of this at Dawn Eden’s fortieth birthday party last night by James Kalb, who hosted a tradition-themed discussion group fifteen years ago that sometimes included Woods and me — and Kalb himself is the author of what will be one of my December Book Selections, so stay tuned for that.)

•On another paleolibertarian note, I notice that Tuesday’s Ron Paul  “alternate” Repbulican convention brought such highlights as (1) a live appeal for support from Bob Barr (who has pointed out ways in which he’s more libertarian than Palin), (2) a speech by admirably independent Jesse Ventura that, alas, included remarks seemingly sympathetic to the so-called 9/11 Truth movement, and (3) the comment by attending paleo writer Bill Kauffman that “locating the antiwar wing of today’s Republican Party is like looking for the Juice Newton wing in the rock and roll hall of fame.”

•Speaking of rock, though, as I type this, I am very pleased to say, they’re playing Heart’s “Barracuda” at the close of the GOP convention in honor of Sarah “Barracuda” Palin.  It’s not quite the Sex Pistols, but I’ll take it.  All right, it’s better than the Sex Pistols, frankly.

•Megan McArdle — who was having an asthma attack during Palin’s speech (but later noted that her own mom, like mine, likes Palin, seemingly a good sign for the GOP) — reacted strongly to Romney’s speech, accusing him of using the word “liberal” in a random, meaningless fashion.  Andrew Sullivan seconded this odd claim — and noted approvingly that David Brooks (that right-wing socialist) even called the speech “borderline insane.”  Much as I hate to be at odds with two prominent libertarians and one prominent pseudo-conservative, I suggest reading the Romney speech, virtually every word of which I — and, I would have thought, most market-friendly-type conservatives — agree with.  Am I borderline insane or are his critics off-base?

•In this odd week, it seems as though libertarians, paleoconservatives, and neoconservatives are simultaneously very stirred up, largely because of Palin, but still dissatisfied — as well they should be.  A good time for Todd Kruse to launch a populist yet free-market conservative blog called RegularFolksUnited.

More in the next couple days on those other disgruntled folks, though — with at least a few mentions of sex, in keeping with this month’s theme, I promise.

She Likes Machine Guns, Capitalism...and Pot

That headline does not refer to tonight’s birthday girl, Dawn Eden (and note that this month’s Debate at Lolita Bar occurs Sunday, Sept. 28, NOT tonight as it normally would) but rather to tonight’s other conservative female star, Sarah Palin. (But if my birthday party co-organizers were able to follow my suggestion about putting the Republican Party convention on the video monitors at the club Plumm, I may be able to see both simultaneously.)

It’s interesting that Hurricane Gustav both interfered with the schedule of the St. Paul convention unveiling Palin and put a spotlight on a man (from my Brown days) considered for her role, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal. Judging by the way the media, dazzled for about half a day, are now heavily beating the “doubts” drums on Palin, there must be a lot of people wishing Jindal had been the pick — v.p. speech from a storm-ravaged city, etc. Might have been good theatre.

But what little we know about Palin so far seems OK to me.

•As noted above, she’s a machine-gun-wielding, avowedly pro-free-market pot smoker (she admits she used it during the short time pot was legal in Alaska, as indeed it was without civilization coming to an end, as I’m sure she noticed). That hasn’t made her pro-legalization, but then, even the Libertarian Party candidate this year is reluctant to come right out and call for legalization (he, like Ron Paul, says leave it to the states, while Palin says focus on meth instead).

•My parents, not overly political folk, did indeed immediately like Palin and find her more down to earth and likable than any of the other candidates (an unexpected political lesson from my day in Norwich, CT last Friday prior to my Boston sojourn, which included that libertarian conference I mentioned Sunday). My Boston-dwelling, left-leaning acquaintance Nancy Tewksbury may be right to warn some of her fellow lefties in a mass-e-mail that they should not dismiss this element of Palin’s appeal, not to mention her appeal to some disgruntled Clinton supporters.

•If I were Lorne Michaels, I would be irked that Tina Fey is no longer on the Saturday Night Live cast, though others (who unlike me have actually seen the show in the past several years) assure me other cast members can handle it.

•She so far seems fairly normal despite the rapidly-circulating, almost panic-inducing rumors about her (1) being a Buchananite (she apparently just wore one of his buttons as she did for other visitors, later supporting Forbes, as did I at one point), (2) being in the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party (it seems rather that her part-Inuit husband may have been, which would be fine with me, of course — I’m generally pro-secession, whether that means respecting the secessionist desires of Georgia, Ossetia, or even Hawaii, whose recent push for Native American-style semi-autonomy may well be something Obama and his supporters consider respectable), and (3) being the mother of her grandchild (something about which the left would presumably not be morally outraged — though it turns out to be false).

•Richard Spencer of Taki mag is rightly happy about her, at least one blogger at Buchanan’s American Conservative magazine, interestingly, is not (no pleasing some people), while Reason notes that pro-Ron Paul blogger Meli Oped (that’s his real name?) interviewed Palin about Paul a while back and was pleased that she said:

“He’s cool! He’s a good guy. He’s so independent. He’s independent of, like, the party machine? I’m, like, right on…so am I. The party machinery, on both sides of the party, you know…Americans are tired of the incessant partisanship that gets in the way of doing the right thing for this country.”

Sounds pretty cool.

•••

Meanwhile, another Paul supporter (who went on to argue in favor of Bob Barr at one of our Debates at Lolita Bar), Avery Knapp, was in St. Paul yesterday for Ron Paul’s “alternate” convention of dissident libertarian Republicans, and I hope he found time to meet up with my co-worker Jeff Stier (who’s attending both the Democratic and Republican conventions) and New York Post’s Kyle Smith, who are also in that town this week.

But for those of us merely experiencing politics via the media this week, here are some other interesting developments:

•Comic book writer-artist Erik Larsen, a co-founder of the comics group Image, never known for its subtlety (it gave us Todd McFarlane’s Spawn, for example), seems to be signaling his presidential pick on the cover of the latest issue of Savage Dragon — can you deduce his preference?

•My friend Laura Braunstein, like Sarah Palin a “hot librarian” type (but unlike Palin, actually a librarian), notes a swell Onion video on the Republican Party/minor party tension.

•And as Don Boudreaux noted in a mass-e-mail, a genuine anarcho-capitalist is blogging at New York Times this week: Pirate-loving Pete Leeson is a guest blogger at Freakonomics — and I’m pleased to see his book about pirates now has a much better title than its old working title of Anarrrchy. (Note: Neither he nor I am endorsing the thieving fundamentals of pirate behavior — nor the behavior of more familiar left-wing anarchists like the assholes pointlessly destroying random citizens’ property near the Republican National Convention this week.) Even better: Leeson’s first post mocks UFO and Bigfoot sightings, and skepticism is as close to my heart as anarcho-capitalism.

Coincidentally (since this is, after all, the Month of Sex on this blog), I have repeatedly been told that there is a very popular recent porn film about pirates. I’m not sure why pirates should be considered particularly sexy (as opposed to, say, hot librarians), but if that helps boost Leeson’s book sales, I think it will be good for the economy in the long run (I mean for systemic/analytical reasons, not because the book industry requires stimulation).

Dawn Eden Parties at Plumm 9/3/08

Our Debate at Lolita Bar does NOT take place tomorrow night as it normally would but rather on Sunday, Sept. 28 — but in the meantime, tomorrow does bring a PARTY!

Yes, I have somehow ended up cohosting a fortieth birthday party for my ex-girlfriend Dawn Eden, chastity-promoting Catholic author of Thrill of the Chaste.

Wednesday, September 3, 2008
7-10pm
The Plumm
246 W. 14th Street (8th Avenue)
Open bar during first hour

Hosted by J.R. Taylor, Doug Dechert, Noel Ashman, and Todd Seavey

RSVP to J.R. Taylor at: jrt[at]RightWingTrash.com or (201) 838-7255.

Sidenotes: I still don’t believe there’s a God, of course, and when I first met conservative, Christian J.R. (through whom I’d later get to know Dawn), back in the days when I, too, wrote for New York Press, he told me he sometimes edits porn, including the magazine High Society, to which I replied, “Oh, you mean the marijuana magazine?” and he responded, with slight but genuine offense, “I would never edit a drug magazine!” (I was of course thinking of High Times).

So J.R.’s a smut-peddler and I’m atheist, and we’re cohosting a party for a God-fearing chastity promoter.  Who’s worse in Dawn’s eyes, then, J.R. or me?  Furthermore, what would Jesus do (that is, drugs or sex — the former, I’m inclined to think, since despite J.R.’s aversion to drugs, Jesus said a lot more about coveting wives than about coveting pot, and he supposedly liked wine)?

In any case, it’ll be the event of the millennium and not a bad addition to the “Month of Sex.”

Book Selection of the Month: "The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex" by Pagan Kennedy

ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month [of Sex] (September 2008): The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories by Pagan Kennedy

My friend Pagan Kennedy (the hip genius behind some ten books now) has a new book out today that’s an anthology of biographical essays about mostly-science-oriented maverick inventors and geniuses and the like — with the lengthy title essay being a biography of Alex Comfort, the guy who wrote (and lived) the revolutionary The Joy of Sex circa 1970, when such things were still taboo for most people despite hippies being everywhere (by contrast, I plan to make this a “Month of Sex” on this site, blogging about related topics for weeks — not necessarily always approvingly, though — and hosting a related Debate at Lolita Bar at 8pm on Sept. 28).

Pagan’s collection of unique, often strange individuals — from noble nerds trying to devise the cheapest imaginable ways to build machines out of scraps accessible by impoverished Third Worlders to a teenage girl weightlifter who can lift over 300 pounds above her head — are to me a more uplifting celebration of America, in all its bizarre, unpredictable richness, than either of this week’s other purported big events: Labor Day and the other big socialist happening, the Republican Party convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul (though I hope my friends there will have fun — especially if they make it to the Ron Paul “alternative convention” on Tuesday [I think I know a guy who was torn between going to that or Burning Man, where there were surely people who have read The Joy of Sex and who might like Pagan's book even more -- hell, everyone at Burning Man should buy a copy on the basis of her first name alone]).

As even canonical conservatives like Burke and Kirk used to say (before the whole political spectrum decided to start marching lock-step straight to hell while muttering about “unity”), diversity is a natural and important part of a healthy, functioning society — and not just diversity in the approved, quota-filling sense that university professors use the term. People are wonderfully varied and weird, in ways that you never would have thought of ahead of time, and not just in ways that fit the approved channels for “extreme” or “cool” behavior, either.

One delightful wacko profiled in this book is a performance artist I would probably find downright annoying if I met him, who goes around claiming to be the Emperor of America, but better a thousand more people like him than one real claimant to such a job. Alex Comfort, who gives the book its title, was something of a Dr. Frankenstein for the hippie era, viewing his every orgiastic escapade as part of a series of experiments necessary for enlarging the entire population’s ability to enjoy sex — and knowing all the while that he might lose his wife and his own happiness in the process. We learn from the successes and failures and ambiguous combinations made possible by a planet of billions of experimenters, even if a necessary part of the process is telling many of them they’re nuts.

And this book contains an actual photo of Pagan being strapped into a cap full of brain-stimulating electrodes by the cap’s scientist creator. You have to love that. And I suspect in the long run, the future gets created by people like this — and chronicled by attentive, curious investigators like Pagan Kennedy — instead of by politicians of any ideological stripe bellowing about “tomorrow.”

As for what tomorrow will bring on this blog: a unique character who adds to the quirky American tapestry in part by disapproving of some of those aforementioned sexual experiments, Dawn Eden.