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!

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.

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).

•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.

Our heroines — homicidal go-go dancers — drive their cars to a rural gas station and converse about their travels:

GAS STATION ATTENDANT (STARING AT TURA SATANA’S IMPRESSIVE CLEAVAGE): Now that’s what I believe in, seeing America first!

TURA SATANA (STERNLY): You won’t find it down there, Columbus.

I didn’t say it was a great film (though it does seem so perfectly designed for the early-90s retro-nihilist vibe that if it had not existed, Charles Burns and Quentin Tarantino would have had to build a time machine to go back and create it).

And speaking of tough broads in art, here’s a short story by Michele Carlo.  And for a non-tough but busty perspective (don’t blame me — reviewers keep mentioning it, and I’m just trying to come up with a Tura Satana segue), check out this short story by Katherine Taylor.

(And William Huhn also writes good stories.  He’s not a tough broad, though he does live next door to Patty Smyth, who is obviously a tough broad and manages to put up with husband John McEnroe, which must take some backbone.  In largely unrelated but still literary news, I see writer David Lipsky has weighed in in the Responses thread to my blog entry from one week ago, which is cool.)

On another womany note: DON’T FORGET THERE’S NO DEBATE THIS WEEK, but on Tuesday, July 22 (8pm), we’ll have a three-woman panel of egg-sellers at Lolita Bar, talking about how they came to make this interesting reproductive transaction and what it was like.

Unable to join us but originally invited was Jen Dziura, who, being a good feminist, is sometimes wary of framing things in gendered terms and has noted that one risk in using “girl power” terms like, say, “fempreneur” is that it’ll end up teaching people to think of creative activities by women as cute and abnormal instead of just plain human.

She was thus even more annoyed than I was by a mass-e-mail advertisement that said, in part:

Kim Power Stilson, A mom with 4 dogs, 3 kids, 2 birds and a cat & Debbie Cluff, a zany little lady from Pasadena help Momprenuers unlock the mystery to the Internet, the Web and Social Media Tools with Power Strategies Education!

Worst of all — though I can hardly claim to be the final authority on this question — it seems to me they have misspelled “Mompreneur.”  Good to see ladies attempting capitalism, though.  Keeps ’em from dabbling in witchcraft.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

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

(The video for “Under the God” is really just one excerpt from the amazing and rarely-seen twenty-minute-or-so multi-song video for the whole album, in which they perform all the songs on one sound stage as if in one go but do radical restagings of the set between numbers, in a split second between songs — and that live performance I linked a few words before that was the first time the world beheld Tin Machine, on live TV during an awards show, like some glorious, unexpected monster hauling itself into view where an effete elf kingdom had once existed.)

I still think of the two-album lifespan of Tin Machine as “late Bowie” — but now it’s only about halfway through his career, just as Star Trek: The Next Generation’s start in 1987 now marks the halfway point in the forty-three-year history of the Star Trek franchise.

So I think the one great song Bowie did in what I can now call the second half of his career — performed with Tin Machine guitarist Reeves Gabrels but without the sons of Soupy Sales, who were the bassist and drummer of Tin Machine — was “Dead Man Walking,” so good it inspired me to buy the Live from 6A album of performances from Conan O’Brien, and, no matter how unhip it may sound to say this, that is probably one of my favorite CDs.

What seems harder to believe than Tin Machine (and the self-titled track from that self-titled first album, a powerful, macho, too-early-to-be-grunge number I like to think of as “The Theme from Tin Machine”) being twenty, though, is stuff that feels decidedly later than that — like my The Smoking Popes Get Fired CD by the Smoking Popes — being at least a whopping fifteen years old. How did that happen? That means in just a few years, given twenty-year pop cycles, it’ll be time for the kitschy retro-grunge/90s-alt-rock “revival,” as if the growling has actually subsided for five minutes since 1992 and given me any time in which to grow nostalgic.

For the revival, though, I suggest imitating Smoking Popes and Sebadoh and Harvey Danger. Oddly enough, one band that already sort of fits the bill is that Christian rock band mewithoutYou that Daniel Radosh likes.

Today brings the second issue of Final Crisis, a DC Comics series partly about DC’s many parallel universes. But does one of the universes in their multiverse (as currently depicted) contain the Earth on which their early-70s comic book Prez took place? That was the all-too-plausible series about the then-new development of eighteen-year-olds being able to vote leading to a further change in the law that made possible America’s first teenage president, who pursued a hip, reformist agenda.

Speaking of which: I don’t think Americans are paying much attention to policy details, even extremely important ones (as I’ll discuss in my July Book Selection entry in eight days, examining the journal Critical Review), mostly just the tone and personality of major political candidates. That means politicians adept at sounding like all things to all people — as Bill Clinton was and Hillary Clinton was not — flourish.

And thus Obama is probably wise to stay both optimistic-sounding and vague — he is, after all, trying to get elected by a populace stupid enough to read horoscopes. Right now, I’d say America’s horoscope sounds a little like this:

You are a country that wants to feel optimistic again — you know you can accomplish great things but feel you’ll have to make some tough choices and some hard changes in order to get there. Someone you’ve just met may give you the boost you need…

That makes their wedding probably the nerdiest in which I’ve been involved (in absentia) since Ali Kokmen and Michelle Gengaro had groomsmen with Legion of Super-Heroes flight rings, used Star Wars medal ceremony music as their (perfectly classy) recessional, and introduced the wedding party members to the Star Trek: The Next Generation theme song. Yet both weddings avoided the overt nerdiness of, say, Spock ears, which might alarm the normals by too-blatantly drawing attention to what’s going down.

And on a somewhat related note: Did you know the polyamorous actress Tilda Swinton — perhaps best known for playing the gender-switching fantasy character Orlando, the androgynous angel in Constantine, and the White Witch of Narnia — lives partly in Nairn (not Narnia) in the Scottish Highlands with her husband — named John Byrne — and has twins by him, named Xavier and Honor? There’s something very X-Men about all that.

If she turns out to secretly be Emma Frost, White Queen of the Hellfire Club (a character so S&M she belongs in tomorrow’s issue #2 of the ominous and twisted Final Crisis), and Honor turns out to have the mutant power to possess people or something — and tries to kill the other kid — I for one am not going to be shocked.

P.S. I haven’t yet told Sandy and Nicole that the prophecied “blackest night” is actually going to befall the Green Lantern Corps next year, after millennia, in some big storyline involving a new Black Lantern Corps full of zombies powered by the dreaded Anti-Monitor. But I’m stopping with Final Crisis, because it’s final. Enough with zombies already. Might be a fitting first anniversary gift, though.

P.P.S. Having persuaded a couple to use part of the Green Lantern vow — and not wanting to have children myself — I can now turn to my other goal of persuading some couple to name their kids Voltaire and Groucho, my two favorite pseudonyms. You have to admit Groucho Partowidjojo has a ring to it. And despite someone I once mentioned these pseudonyms to saying that naming a kid Voltaire would be child abuse, I say any bullies smart enough to find Voltaire pretentious (rather than just thinking it sounds like a cool robot name) probably aren’t that thuggish.

I’m about to head off to an advance screening of the likely-mediocre comic-book-based movie Wanted (not that I’m ungrateful for the opportunity), but I have bad Angelina Jolie-related news (which will greatly disappoint my fellow libertarian Katherine Taylor, who likes Jolie so much she still speaks fondly of Tomb Raider — not that I’m knocking that opening fight with the robot).

Anyway: Vadim Perelman isn’t shooting Atlas Shrugged — disappointing but not a shock. (Maybe Zack Snyder should do it.)

The linked article about it dares raise the possibility that Atlas is simply “unfilmable” — which sort of makes me think I should become a screenwriter. I can shorten anything. (“Then why are all your blog entries at least 700 words long?” some might ask. Simple: No one is paying me to make them shorter.) As a veteran of advertising, TV, and comic books, I know how to excise blather down to barest essentials when necessary. So I should write Atlas Shrugged, dammit — and I know how to do such things without even contradicting the story as shown in the book (elide instead of reimagining, except where aesthetically necessary).

Lots of things in this world would benefit from being shorter. Take David Lynch’s Dune movie (in all its forms: the two-hour version, the two-and-a-half-hour version on TV, the three-hour-or-so director’s cut, the five-hour-or-so director’s super-duper-cut, each more awful than the last). The whole problem there was that they tried to cram in every plot twist from a very dense novel. You want to see my outline for a decent, workable Dune movie? Voila:

1. Family living on desert planet gets attacked by bad guys.

2. Handful of survivors train with giant worms as weapons to
counterattack.

3. Good guys win. The End.

There’s your movie. Anything else is extra and shouldn’t be overly distracting or hard to follow.

Atlas I could do in ninety minutes. Give it an Art Deco feel, maybe. Change the frickin’ world.

To compensate for the lack of this capitalist film-epic, I recommend reading some conservative movie and pop culture reviews at RightWingTrash.com.

UPDATE on Wanted: Well, its level of quality, I think, is exactly what you’d get if you told someone the bare-bones plot of Fight Club and then had a typical Hollywood screenwriter write it instead of the actual Fight Club people. No memorable lines of dialogue, no recognizable laws of physics, but “stuff looks cool” and you’ll alternately laugh at cool stunt/CGI moments (we need a new word for that) and laugh nervously at the ceaseless brutality of it, which is (fittingly) like going through some sort of disturbing hazing for cubicle drones who secretly long for the sado-masochism of their old fraternity days.

How’s that for praise, eh?

Oh! And you get to see Angelina walking completely naked from the back without any of the tattoos concealed, so there’s that. Maybe I should have mentioned that first.