Batmobile Is in Front of ACSH

I try to refrain from personal blogging during work hours, but the Batmobile is parked in front of ACSH at the moment — or rather, is parked across from the IMAX-possessing Loews where they’re apparently doing an advance screening of Dark Knight at 68th and Broadway.

I fear the numerous cops and FDNY gathered may be removing it, but they could just be adjusting its position (it’s on a flatbed at the moment).

It appears to be the real thing, so to speak, in that it is an ornate armored vehicle rather than some cardboard display — but it’s smaller than you’d think from the bruising-tank impression it creates onscreen (aside from the massive back tires).

Madonna vs. Tenacious D

Without question, the best revelation I’ve heard from Madonna’s brother’s book, as summarized by NYPost:

Madonna hangs an 8-by-12-foot photo of herself in S&M gear and lying on a bed with dead animals in her home — in full view of the kids. It’s “the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen,” Ciccone writes.

But then, I was never a big Madonna fan.  “Classico” by Tenacious D is more, well, classy, in its way.

Green Is the New Stupid

A minister-related reflection for this Sunday (which I plan to spend at least partly outdoors):

The ads for the anti-climate-change site WeCanSolveIt.org say, “Pat Robertson and Al Sharpton have come together to help save the planet.  Now we need you” (with a photo of the two men together).  How much more evidence do you need that green is the new stupid?

The Political Spectrum, the Broadcast Spectrum, and the Isle of Man

In yesterday’s (penultimate) Retro-Journal entry (and my guest entry on AlarmingNews linked within it), I mentioned the tricky subject of trying to figure out which if any candidate to support if you’re a libertarian, since they’re almost all awful. Libertarians end up having to pick weird allies sometimes since they have so few from which to choose.

•For instance, Reason recently looked at how Ron Paul, for good or ill, helped inspire a less-libertarian, more-conservative candidate for president, Baldwin of the Constitution Party.

•On the other hand, Jacob Levy points out to me a study by Rasmussen showing that the puny 4% of the U.S. population who arguably qualify as libertarian — or at least “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” (which admittedly may not mean the same thing) — apparently prefer Obama to McCain by a very significant margin (perhaps mainly because of the war, which has become far more important to many libertarians than it is to me, for voting purposes, I mean).

•It’s interesting that in the Rasmussen study, which breaks the populace up into seven major segments depending on whether they are socially liberal-or-conservative and whether they are fiscally liberal-or-conservative, contained so few “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” people — yet contained so few “socially conservative, fiscally liberal” people (a designation that arguably applies to populists Baldwin, Huckabee, and Buchanan in varying ways) that they don’t even rate a mention among the seven major chunks of the electorate…which is probably for the best, much as I sympathize with certain pro-local, decentralizing impulses of the paleoconservatives. There is actually a political category, in short, rarer than libertarian, if you can believe that.

•By contrast, the single largest chunk of the seven (at 24%) was mainstream conservative: “socially conservative, fiscally conservative,” though I’d argue you’d never know it from most of modern public policy. Nonetheless, this is a good argument for appealing to that bloc, as I strive to with the whole “conservatism for punks” philosophy underlying this blog.

•And all such demographic calculations aside, I still favor the basic P.J. O’Rourke argument for preferring right to left, by libertarian standards. In short: being able to smoke pot won’t be much consolation when government has taken over every other aspect of the economy, whereas in a free market, things like pot and sex are pretty difficult to police anyway.

•To all who simply think any sympathy for the right is absurd, that good anti-authoritarians should always sympathize with modern liberals and the left, and that the Republicans must be severely punished again and again for their statist ways, I must ask: Is it also urgent that we punish the Democrats with removal from power for this kind of blatantly totalitarian scheming: favoring a return of the totalitarian Fairness Doctrine?

Or do cool kids only panic over right-wing authoritarianism? No need to answer. I’m afraid I already know.

I wish now I’d spoken to Pelosi’s daughter when I was in her vicinity at a party a couple months ago. The daughter is a documentarian and must have some interesting things to say about her mother’s (and NY Rep. Louise Slaughter’s) belief that the government should force people in media (like her) to broadcast ideas with which they disagree.

Maybe I should be forced to hire a co-blogger who’s leftist, green, anti-free-speech, pro-religion, comic-book-hating, irrational, and above all very, very, very enamored of government — and slavery in general.

•To escape all these modern-sounding political concerns, I’m tempted to visit the Isle of Man. With a population of about 80,000, this rather quaint political entity lies between Britain and Ireland, has as its strange motto “Whithersoever you throw it, it shall stand,” and flies the slightly absurd flag you may have noticed atop this blog entry.

I believe the Isle of Man is currently part of a defense alliance with Strongbadia and the Duchy of Grand Fenwick.

Retro-Journal: McCain Wins -- in Late 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Course Correction

I recently went to the website of a fancy Manhattan restaurant, and it proved to be a textbook example of badly-written instructions/directions (one of my pet peeves, up there with signs whose arrows point in ambiguous directions).  The restaurant site had multiple paragraphs worth of instructions on how to walk there if starting from Midtown, essentially climaxing with the commandment to get onto the Street in question and keep going until reaching the building number (they refrained from saying “Put your left foot in front of your right foot…”) — yet in all of it, there was no reference anywhere to which Avenue is closest to the restaurant, which anyone with any familiarity with Manhattan knows should be about the third syllable in any set of geographic instructions here, as in “and Ninth.”

So now I hope they go out of business.  It’s the only way humanity learns.

I worry that more and more things are falling through bureaucratic cracks as the pace of society becomes faster — less time for people to stop and utilize reason.  Think, humanity, think.

At least the market provides more frequent, diverse, decentralized, and individualized feedback about errors than biannual, right-or-left, turn-the-vast-ship-of-state votes do, though (and thus speedier, more precise corrections — even now, customers may be making their way to a more easily located restaurant).  But tomorrow, in my second-to-last Retro-Journal entry, let’s take a look at one big recent electoral “correction,” the 2006 Republican loss of control of Congress.

Ukraine Collapse

Continuing my unplanned trilogy of ethno-analytical blog entries, it occurs to me that I know several impressive Ukrainians or Central Europeans — such as the Sobars, Michael Malice (who you can see hosting trivia tonight with Polish-descended Jen Dziura), and Karol Sheinin (on whose blog I’m scheduled to have a guest entry sometime in the next several days, on how I went from tentatively supporting Giuliani to tentatively supporting Barr over the past several months). I think it was blogger Meredith Kapushion who said you can often spot her brainy fellow Central Europeans from the sheer size of the “Ukranium.” Serbs, however, are nine feet tall with long limbs for crushing you, evolved from millennia of brutal mountain combat. Of course, I may be oversimplifying the cultures just a bit.

I was hoping to go into around 600 words of greater detail about Ukraine in the form of a book review in New York Post about Red Prince, a book about the cross-dressing fascist sympathizer, Wilhelm von Habsburg, who helped create modern Ukraine in the early twentieth century. Regardless of whether you’re interested in Ukraine per se, though, the book’s a powerful reminder that the age of ideologies in which we live — fascism, communism, etc. — was only very recently wrenched from an earlier age of monarchs and emperors, when families like the Habsburgs ruled for centuries and upstarts like the Bolsheviks seemed a bizarre passing fad, albeit one with an unprecedented body count.

(Socialism in its various forms was responsible for some 150 million deaths in the twentieth century, not counting its ongoing toll in the form of subtly shortened lives due to regulation-induced poverty — or side effects like the sixty million or so killed by environmentalists’ ban on life-saving DDT. The left, in short, is the deadliest thing that’s ever happened to humanity, in terms of absolute body count, but if you told American leftists you wanted to restore the Habsburg dynasty, they’d look at you as if you’d suggested painting the sun blue and would go right on feeling morally superior.)

Red Prince was written by Timothy Snyder, now a Yale historian and two decades ago a Brown undergrad, which I promise is not reason enough for me to be biased in his favor (I think the record of my love-hate relationship with Brown is clear). In other Brown alum news fraught with mixed feelings, though: if Bobby Jindal ends up being picked by McCain to be his running mate, it will be interesting to have a v.p. who can probably field questions on deconstructionism for the first time, since you couldn’t escape that stuff at Brown twenty years ago, even if you were a conservative convert to Catholicism. At one point or another, mark my words, Jindal probably had to write term papers about the detextualized significance of the phallus as a hermeneutic calendar reproblematizing the Other, or something along those lines. We’ll have to watch his speeches for Derrida references. Or maybe Deleuze.

A Sade for the Twenty-First Century

All right, to compensate for mocking a black female broadcaster in yesterday’s entry, I will speak fondly of one today, demonstrating the well-rounded sensitivity for which I am known:

Wilder men drink whisky while watching go-go girls who claim to have names like Blaze and Eden (well, wait, technically, I — no, never mind).  I, by contrast, am a classy guy who is just pleased to have spotted local ABC anchor Sade Baderinwa in the Starbucks between ACSH and ABC last week.

I guess Sade is a common Nigerian name (though this Sade, like the musical Sade, is also half-European — in this case half-German and a nice living reminder that Nazi eugenicists really missed the boat on the beauty of hybridization — you know I speak the truth).  The most convenient part of this celeb-spotting for me, though, was that any lingering doubts I had about whether it was really her were cleared up when she got her coffee order by name.  Thank you, Starbucks protocols.  (She did try to change her order radically at the pick-up counter, though, a reminder that even the most charming broadcast personalities can be primadonnas.)

Coincidentally, since my go-go dancer reference above was inspired by thoughts of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (about which I blogged last week, on the same day I spotted Baderinwa), Wikipedia notes Baderinwa was hit by a hit and run driver four years ago, though it does not mention whether the driver was a busty go-go dancer.

I’ve often thought hit and run incidents — which are surprisingly common — are a nice little semi-randomized reminder that morally irresponsible ghouls are all around us all the time, up-with-people sunshiny non-misanthropic (philanthropic?) talk to the contrary notwithstanding.

Morality aside, though: if you “must” run someone over and then flee (because, say, you’re a contestant in Death Race 2000 or its impending remake), it’s probably strategically unwise to run down a news anchor, politician, or police officer.

Wendy Williamses

There are three famous Wendy Williamses (four counting the Olympic swimmer), all three of them either in porn (as the suicidal Plasmatics singer was early on and as, apparently, a famous transsexual has been) or possessed of notoriously gigantic breast implants and prone to cocaine use and ugly spats with P Diddy and others — as is the case with the one about to start her housewife-friendly daytime chat show on Fox, which has been heavily advertised here (and presumably in L.A.) with inane clips of her talking about showering and getting haircuts and the like.

Despite my fondness for punks like the Plasmatics, I will admit the third Wendy is the most attractive, albeit thanks in part to liposuction and an unwarranted air of self-confidence.  Should be interesting to see how long that goes on without some stupid controversy or other, preferably an on-air slapfight.  (Even nice-guy/Scientology tool Will Smith — not to be confused with his gruff character in Hancock — apparently has a rap song telling her to cease and desist.)  The clock starts ticking on July 14, one week from today.

One Flag!

Unlike lots of frowny-faced losers of the left and right, I do not decry the presence of advertising in our culture, though I would be happy to see fraudulent advertising more mercilessly punished (switching to a loser-pays legal system would make it easier to bring small suits in such cases with assurance of recouping court costs, creating a big incentive to keep ads honest).  Free people freely announce their offers to trade, which are, after all, opportunities for mutually-beneficial exchanges.

Advertising is as much an expression of liberty as political rants — in many cases, a more consistent expression, since so many political rants are aimed at curtailing liberty and expanding the state in one way or another (if we could also punish false political promises and exhortations to reduce liberty, not to mention groundless religious claims, the whole planet would be in jail by now, but that wouldn’t really be helpful, I suppose).

So it is without shame I say that I loved those Six Flags ads with the guy screaming his evaluations of things based on their level of fun (“One flag!” and “Six Flags!  More flags, more fun!”) from the get-go.  I mean, could you ask for a better advertising syzygy than to combine the name of the product, the message of the ads, the purported quality of the customer experience, the comedic “plot” of the ad, and the ad slogan all into one emphatically-shouted phrase?  Home run.

That boy getting killed at Six Flags in Georgia recently, though, gets one flag, needless to say.

Also receiving only one flag: NYC’s ludicrously authoritarian crowd control methods at this year’s South Street Seaport fireworks, complete with snaking barricades, constant exhortations from cops to wait, move, etc. — and most spookily, cops at one point shouting at people who grew weary of the whole process and wanted to get the hell out of there, “No more exits — everyone who’s in is in.”  That’s right, at roughly 9pm on the Fourth of July, thousands of people celebrating Independence Day ironically became prisoners for a short time, all in the name of predictable crowd flow, which sure seemed more like a series of needless delays and bottlenecks than anything I recall seeing in the good old days when the crowd just milled around wherever it wanted down there.

It’s things like that that make one think, once more, that the true spirit of this now 232-year-old country, embodied more by those frustrated crowds than by the uniformed men herding them, is not right, left, or moderate but — whisper it with me — anaaarrrrchiissssst…

P.S. And that goes for the Sonic Youth member who led the hipster crowd at Battery Park in perfunctory pro-Obama applause on Friday, too.  To the extent people like Obama out of a vague desire to escape politics as usual, though, I’ll grudgingly tolerate them just as I did Perot supporters back in the day, though at least Perot wanted budget cuts.

Readings Fit for Independence Day Weekend

•I mentioned yesterday that as former Ron Paul campaigner Avery Knapp moved out of NYC for L.A., he gave me one of his numerous free copies of the Constitution (with the Declaration of Independence as an appendix, just in time for the Fourth). He also gave me a copy of Ron Paul’s book The Revolution: A Manifesto, which turns out to be much better than I expected.

To be honest, I figured I’d feel like I’d heard it all before and furthermore would think it sounded like it’d been ghostwritten by a young staffer, like most political books. But The Revolution is so short — about 170 pages — and so free of footnotes, I think the man himself may well have found time to write the thing. More important, it has the same sense of urgency and outrage that made his campaign motivate people in a way that most abstract, dry libertarian philosophical arguments so far have not.

You will want to join the revolution, liberate America from Washington, DC absurdity, and rescue our economic system before it’s too late, even if you disagree on a few particulars here or there (perhaps not sharing his opposition to our wars or differing with his pro-life position, induced by witnessing an abortion as a young doctor, for instance). I think this may become the new book I send people to for a short introductory dose of libertarianism — and whether this one comes with more-embarrassing or less-embarrassing baggage than the previous book I used for that purpose, Charles Murray’s What It Means to Be a Libertarian, I leave for others to decide.

In other political-book news appropriate for this July Fourth weekend:

•Ben Wattenberg would take issue with Ron Paul’s use of the “neocons”-as-usurpers epithet and can be seen here talking to PajamasMedia about his new book Fighting Words: A Tale of How Liberals Created Neo-Conservatism.

•Don Boudreaux notes that Chapter 7 of economist Edgar Browning’s new book Stealing from Each Other: How the Welfare State Robs Americans of Money and Spirit is available online.

•And lest people think that Obama will square all circles and solve all problems, editor Adam Bellow notes the release of Hugh Hewitt’s essay/pamphlet Letter to a Young Obama Supporter.

I’ve also got a Drew Carey-hosted video from Reason.tv and a Lithuania-inspired pro-liberty video from Free to Choose Media still to watch — not to mention recently-acquired DVDs of the home movies fellow libertarian Paul Taylor and I made in childhood, but those have less to do with politics than with using toy laser guns to defeat people in rubber monster masks. More or less the same underlying principle, though.

P.S. J.D. Weiner also e-mails to note that he’s put up more photos from our Debate at Lolita Bar with cameo by Bob Barr and to note that he likes this shot in particular.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

Book Selection of the Month: "Critical Review," Vol. 19, Issue 1, edited by Jeffrey Friedman

ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (July 2008): Critical Review

This month’s Book Selection is actually the twentieth-anniversary volume of an ongoing political science journal, Critical Review, edited by more or less libertarian Barnard political science professor Jeffrey Friedman, aimed at forcing libertarian ideas to be tested against the latest academic political science insights, and perfect for the Fourth of July — because CR has made it clear, like no other publication, that Kent Brockman was right and democracy simply doesn’t work.

I’ve been aware of CR for most of its twenty-year history (I cannot stress strongly enough how quickly time flies, young people), and I think it would be fair to sum up the progression in the averaged-together thinking of the many academic contributors — or at least its editor — like so (if one must sum it all up in four sentences):

•Around the end of the Cold War, when Friedman (who, like me and his senior editor, Dan Greenberg, had studied at Brown) started CR, it appeared libertarianism had some powerful insights about the dangers of state action and property rights violations but might not be as complete and coherent a philosophy as most of its adherents like to think, since its largely-empirical economic arguments cannot be made to blend seamlessly with its largely deontological rights arguments.

(As a good rule utilitarian, I don’t think it’s impossible to deduce socially-constructed but still largely rigid property rules from the empirical facts of econ and the insights from Austrian School economics about the impossibility of fine-tuned intersubjective utility comparisons, but that doesn’t stop me from reading the journal, and I recognize that Rothbardian rule-utilitarian leap is a more complicated one than your average Libertarian Party member concedes.)

•Being a bunch of highbrow academic types, some contributors considered basing arguments for freedom on postmodernism, arguing for the state’s elimination in order to leave people as free as possible to pursue their own projects — and like most things with the word “postmodernism” in them, this avenue of thought didn’t really lead anywhere.

•A “postlibertarianism” was nonetheless sketched out that would in essence be a large, empirical, steadfastly utilitarian and consequentialist research project — refusing to simply fall back on natural rights arguments — aimed at showing all interested observers, regardless of ideology, that markets really do deliver the goods, prevent events like the Great Depression, put the New Deal to shame, raise standards of living, solve problems better than governmental methods, etc. (exhausting but necessary — and ongoing).

•And Friedman hit upon his favorite theoretical argument for shrinking the state: the argument from ignorance, that is, the observation that surveys (their results largely unknown to the minuscule portion of the population who engage in political debate and possess ideologies) reveal such profound and near-total ignorance of even the most basic facts of politics (in the 80s, about half the population didn’t know who the vice president was, and in the 90s over half didn’t know who Newt Gingrich was) that the social-democratic dream of having everyone vote on everything or dragging all human activity (such as business) under the aegis of participatory, democratic decision-making is simply insane and, ample evidence shows, cannot be remedied by any remotely plausible amount of political education, consciousness-raising drives, or harangues to “get out the vote.”

In short, democracy is the rule of 300 million helpless prisoners by 300 million absolutely ignorant and incompetent slaveholders. Individuals can remember the details of their own individual lives but are absolutely clueless and dangerously deluded the moment they lift their eyes to the political horizon and ask themselves “How shall I tax and regulate the lives of my fellow citizens to make everyone happier?” Better to let us each efficiently run his own life while leaving others free to do the same — and above all, always leave people free to leave collective activities that they decide, even for unarticulated reasons, they wish to escape. Government, which is entirely based on mandates and forcibly extracted resources (taxes), can never, by definition, fulfill these requirements.

So this Fourth of July, give thanks not for democracy or American government but for the fact that the American Revolutionaries left us with so little government (at least at first, though we’ve slid a long, sad way toward European-style social democracy — or rather, its inevitable, real-world socialist-bureaucratic approximation) and such an individualistic notion of what “democracy” is. And check out Critical Review for the countless theoretical implications and empirical details that I haven’t time to go into here.

(But note that academics can be just about as ignorant as the rest of us: A snide article in Vol. 19, Issue 1 by Benjamin Ginsberg uses the Iraq War as an example of government misleading the ignorant masses — but twice refers to the war as starting in 2002, when it actually began in 2003. Intellectuals still tend to prefer theory to facts, as CR often notes — but that doesn’t make the masses any better, as Vol. 19, Issue 2/3 and Issue 4 explore with articles on the populist bully pulpit of the presidency and the pros and cons of primitive impulses like nationalism, respectively.)

And if you think the ignorance of the masses is exaggerated, consider two small personal examples:

•I once witnessed a Fox News commentator quite wisely pointing out to a frustrated National Review contributor that even NR, as perhaps the most popular political magazine in America, has only about 100,000 who read it, meaning that, as he put it, “about 299,900,000 people don’t — and that’s just in the U.S.” Surveys suggest that only about 2% of the population is even keeping track of what “left” and “right” mean, for whatever that’s worth these days, most people voting only on an extremely vague sense of candidates’ personalities and the assumption that the “tone of the times,” good or bad, is due largely to the actions of the president, pretty much the same “mandate of heaven” assumption underlying popular support or lack thereof for ancient Chinese emperors.

•I recently witnessed a liberal journalism professor — a journalism professor, I say — who shall remain nameless, admitting to mixing up John McCain with Howard Dean, not in some long-ago college seminar but this year, while watching campaign coverage — and as a result expressing surprise upon going online to learn that McCain is rather right-wing.

Who watches the watchmen? No one, and no one is competent to do so. So kindly stop governing me, all you ignorant pro-government power-junkies.

Duran Duran Hussein Obama, Reptile Reptile

Bob Barr may have become Libertarian (as noted in yesterday’s entry, in lieu of a debate this week — this month’s will be on the 22nd), but Kathryn Lopez noted recently that John Taylor of Duran Duran (a band she may well like even more than I do) says he’s become pro-Obama (albeit British).

I hope she doesn’t think I was out to lunch when I wrote that NationalReview.com article that in passing called the band “libertarian.” The video for “New Moon on Monday” was supposedly a conscious anti-Communist statement, and their album Liberty was purportedly a Rand homage. Then again, all that was about two Thatcherific decades ago, and I’ve heard they’ve gotten greener since then — but then, even Canada’s coolest Objectivist rock band, Rush, has gotten greener, I’m told. Who hasn’t gotten greener in the past twenty years, may be the question.

But I don’t need Duran Duran — I’ll see Sonic Youth and the newly-reunited Feelies this Fourth of July down near the Statue of Liberty (now that’s conservatism for punks).

And in the interim, why don’t we all enjoy these fine videos by the Church (“Reptile”) and Peter Murphy with Trent Reznor (“Reptile” — but not the same song). You can disagree about which one is more beautiful, but they’re both pretty cool.

Peter Murphy lives in Turkey, by the way, so it wouldn’t be too hard to start rumors he’s Muslim (yes, he is — and he now refuses to perform old religion-themed songs from his Bauhaus days like “Stigmata Martyr,” apparently).

In Our Last Episode: Bob Barr

Again: NO DEBATE TOMORROW (not until the 22nd). But instead, why not enjoy these links from last month’s event, our debate over whether to vote for Libertarian Party presidential candidate Bob Barr (which was attended by the man himself)?

[UPDATE 7/11/08: If there are any first-time readers who've been directed here from my guest entry on AlarmingNews, you might want to click on the ToddSeavey.com logo above to check out my main page and get the big picture: daily or so entries on politics, rock, sci-fi, scientific skepticism, and other nerdy fare.]

•This piece on the site of NYC’s Libertarian Party newspaper, Serf City, includes photos from the debate.

•The Serf City write-up was in turn noted by the New York Times’s City Room blog.

•See the closing remarks from pro-Barr debater Avery Knapp and from pro-McCain debater Ken Silber here, in video Ken’s brother put online.

•Ken’s brother also put up some of Bob Barr’s own impromptu remarks — he sounds pretty good to me.

•J.D. Weiner once more captures one of our Debates at Lolita Bar in his swell photos.

•••

Incidentally, while it pleases me that Barr is something of a living bridge between the religious right and the fiscal right (with me hoping more people end up on the fiscal end of that bridge), it strikes me that Republicans who spent the past couple decades emphasizing religiosity instead of government-shrinking and free markets will have no one but themselves to blame if Obama now harnesses the populace’s stirred-up religiosity for left-wing, welfare-statist ends.

Maybe when we find ourselves living — like much of the rest of the world — in a stagnant, theocratic welfare state, intellectuals across the spectrum can finally agree that God and government, so often treated as opposing forces, fit together quite comfortably — and are rotten, oppressive forces.

Of course, Obama’s embrace of faith-based organizations as partners with the government in welfare or charity is nothing radical, but it will be amusing to see how unfazed are the same intellectuals who decried Bush’s emphasis on those institutions. It’s a good example of a phenomenon that I think goes far, far deeper than even most of the cynical intellectuals of our day realize: The same stuff keeps happening, but media decides whether to treat it as good, irrelevant, or disastrous based on whether “their guy” is in charge or what tone they think will get the biggest ratings this season.

The first President Bush, President Clinton, the second President Bush, and perhaps soon President Obama — they all like the idea of using faith-based institutions, but since we all know Bush II must be depicted as stupid and evil, coming from him, the same policies are a scandal. Coming from Obama, they’re cute, inspiring, and open-minded, or so goes the current, highly malleable narrative.

Here’s a different narrative or two: (a) having government do anything not specifically mentioned in the Constitution is a mistake, and (b) there is no God. But more on that first part later in the week.