Do the people protesting Kim Davis's "religious persecution" have any idea what actual religious persecution is?

Yes, she's back from the hoosegow, and the theory now is that marriage licenses will be issued in her holy see Rowan County, but without her name. Of course, if the theory is that her name on a document is supposed to signify its compliance with relevant law, hasn't that ship already sailed?


"Calling [Kim Davis's situation] persecution is insulting to the people who really are fighting for their right to live out their beliefs -- as human beings, not as elected officials with $80,000 annual salaries."

-- washingtonpost.com's Alexandra Petri,
in the post "The Passion of Kim Davis"

by Ken

The battle lines over Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis's refusal to do her job are familiar enough that they haven't seemed to require comment from me, beyond endorsing the terrific point that Greg Sargent made: that the real news in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision upholding a constitutional right to same-sex marriage is how smoothly, on the whole, the transition has gone.

All through the ascendancy of the New Right in American politics it has been a source of, hmm, curiosity that such a coalition has been maintained despite large differences, and in fact open contradictions, of belief within that coalition. But I guess the Economic-Predator Right-Wingery who mostly had the final say could live with their unwashed brothers and sisters as long as they got their way on the important stuff, like invading Iraq in order to turn it into a model of free-market capitalism for the world to see and emulate. The unwashed, in exchange for their support, or at least non-opposition, on the Predators' issues, about which they didn't have strong feelings anyway, got handouts of Social-Fascist Wingnuttery, which sort of kept the whole polluted thing together.
 
PITY THE POOR POLITICAL PANDERERING
CLASS: WHO'S GOT THE HOT BUTTONS?

What's more, in those days the political Right was positioned to take full advantage of all the research and field-testing the Predators were funding and encouraging into "hot-button issues" that could keep their voting coalition broad enough to keep them in power. Alas, as the GOP's legions of presidential candidates are discovering to their chagrin, you have to keep up to date on hot buttons, which often have to be tuned or even outright discarded when they no longer touch the current terrors and rages of the core voters they need to corral. The mere existence of so many GOP presidential candidates makes it that much more important that each of them have his/her own button(s) not shared by more than, say, a dozen of the hundreds of other candidates. Wasn't it Plato who said, apropos of candidates for political office, "Ya gotta have a gimmick"?

Under such circumstances, even the most committed, determined panderer doesn't know who to pander to or how.

As Howie was just pointing out yesterday, though, in dissecting the down-for-the-count "campaign" of the prince of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, as he desperately tries to retool his "campaign" (I really don't see any alternative to putting what he's put forth so far as a "campaign" in quotes), bringing back his "signature" issue, union-bashing, union-busting doesn't seem to be the hot-button issue that fervid Economic-Predator Right-Wingers have made it in the recent past. Either the folks are bored, or perhaps they've noticed that Prince Scott's economic "reforms" have turned his state's economy to crap. They may even have begun to make the connection that U.S. employers have: that the less they have to fear the pushback of labor unions, the less they have to listen to the whiny wants of their employees.

Well, the polling I've seen so far shows that the Social-Fascist Right-Wingers who've been trying to play the Kim Davis "religious persecution" card aren't getting the play they would once have taken for granted when you have an unobstructed shot at homo-bashing. Oh, they're getting the usual core crackpots and religious delusionalists and bullies, but inside the circled wagons the territory has shrunk. Put all the "Hate the Homos Now and Forever" diehards together, and you don't seem to have an especially potent voting bloc.

A LOT OF AMERICANS ARE GRASPING THAT KIM
DAVIS'S PROBLEM IS HER REFUSAL TO DO HER JOB

Her job is to carry out the laws that fall under the jurisdiction of a Kentucky county clerk. She is, of course, entitled to her opinion of those laws, but she isn't entitled to pick and choose which laws she will and which laws she won't enforce.

This might not even be an issue if it had been dealt with in the case of pharmacists and the day-after abortion pill. Again, people have the right to their opinion of drugs that have been certified by the relevant governmental authorities as legal for sale in their jurisdiction, but there isn't any stretch by which they could possibly have a right to selectively disburse or refuse to disburse drugs approved for sale. Pharmacists are by definition licensed enforcers of the meting out of the drug-authorizing authorities' decisions.

If you can't or won't fulfill the legal obligations of your chosen profession, no one can force you to, but you have to recognize that your conscience requires you to seen another profession, one you can exercise within the limit of your principles.

Granted, Kim Davis's case is made particularly preposterous by the views on marriage reflected in her own marital history -- four times married, to three different men. On the radio I heard an enraged citizen of Kentucky express outrage that this issue was raised against Davis, outrage that seems to me ridiculous. The Davis woman claims the right to decide who can and can't get married, and her own marital history is somehow out of bounds?

I think washingtonpost.com's Alexandra Petri got this just about right yesterday.

ComPost

The Passion of Kim Davis

By Alexandra Petri | September 14 at 10:00 AM

Kim Davis is a false idol.

To suffer for your beliefs can be ennobling. To suffer for your misconceptions is just embarrassing. And she’s doing the latter, not the former.

Today, she’s back at work.

Last Tuesday afternoon found her being released from jail, as Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz rallied around her and “Eye of the Tiger” played. (Survivor issued a cease and desist.) Crosses waved, “Amazing Grace” was sung, speeches were given. It was all the fun of martyrdom with none of the stigma(ta.)

But make no mistake. Kim Davis is not being persecuted for her beliefs. This is to actual religious persecution as anything in that Alanis Morrisette song was to irony: which is to say, this only looks like it if you don’t properly understand the meaning of the word.

She’s celebre in a bad cause.

And now everyone is frantically trying to lay hands on this relic before she loses her potency.

(Poor Ted Cruz, whom Huckabee staffers headed off as he tried to touch the hem of Davis’s robe. He stood glumly offstage watching the rally unfold. It seemed, to use a biblical metaphor, like pretty small pottage for which he had traded the birthright of being someone who appeared to possess an understanding of the law.)

Kim Davis has gone even farther than John C. Calhoun, who, when he was suggesting wild extra-constitutional solutions to Supreme Court decisions he disliked, at least offered up the theory that the state could interpose between a court decision and its people. All Davis suggests is that Kim Davis can interpose herself between court and people.

At the risk of sounding like Javert, you must learn the meaning of the law.

This is not a case of the law interfering with her ability to practice her faith. That would indeed be a grave matter. This is a case of her faith interfering with her ability to uphold the law as a public official. You have every right to believe that the earth is 6,000 years old, but you can’t expect to keep your job at the U.S. Geological Survey if you won’t backdate the rocks. And if they fired you, we would not call you persecuted. We would say, “Well, science is clearly not your field.”

It is one thing to disagree with a law that you are required to uphold by your job. What you do in that case is resign.

It’s fine that if you don’t want your name on the marriage licenses. What you do in that case is resign.

It’s fine if you feel that you can’t perform your job and avoid hell simultaneously. What you do in that case is resign. It’s a quandary, certainly. What it is not is religious persecution.

But not to hear Mike Huckabee tell it.

“Where does this end when you have this level of outright discrimination and, frankly, persecution [of] someone who genuinely believes in her heart the difference between marriage and something that the Supreme Court has created?” said Mike Huckabee on CNN. (See: Judges 15:16.)

This is not someone being persecuted for her faith. This is someone being punished for failing to do her job, then being in contempt of court. Calling it persecution is insulting to the people who really are fighting for their right to live out their beliefs — as human beings, not as elected officials with $80,000 annual salaries.

Religious persecution of Christians is real and ongoing. It is what is happening in North Korea, where tens of thousands of Christians live in forced labor camps. It is what is happening in Saudi Arabia, where even building churches is prohibited. But it is not what is happening to Kim Davis.

In China, pastors are imprisoned, churches closed and crosses torn down.

In America, a county clerk is — displaying a baffling lack of understanding when it comes to the law of the land, and presidential candidates are enabling her.

Once more, with feeling: You don’t have to do your job. But equally the taxpayers do not have to pay you. You have the right to your beliefs. You do not have the right to be a county clerk.

If your job offends you, cast it out.

#

Is the $6,000 cat apartment enough to ring down the curtain on soccer once and for all?

FRIDAY UPDATE: Sepp Blatter reelected sheik of FIFA!


This is No. 3 of Alexandra Petri's "Thoughts on the ex-FIFA exec's $6,000 cat apartment, in no particular order," but I really think we need to get a ruling on it. Isn't the subject supposed to be unruly cats? (See below.)

by Ken

I admit I haven't been paying as close attention as I should have to the scandal of these FIFA bigwigs who've been indicted -- not for being FIFA bigwigs but for being, you know, crooks. I thought it was by now sufficiently well established that FIFA, the international soccer governing board, is itself primarily, if not entirely, a criminal enterprise. I mean, didn't the New York Daily News story announcing the arrests refer to FIFA as "world soccer's notoriously corrupt governing body"?

Answer: Yes, it did.

Turmoil has engulfed FIFA, world soccer’s notoriously corrupt governing body, after a wave of international arrests of its top executives and the unsealing of a 47-count U.S. federal indictment based in the Eastern District of New York.

The arrests commenced early Wednesday morning led by Swiss authorities working in conjunction with U.S. law enforcement officials. At least 14 individuals were charged by prosecutors, with more charges possible after Swiss police seized records at FIFA’s headquarters in Zurich.

Didn't John Oliver and his HBO Last Week Tonight team do a staggeringly devastating exposé on "the staggering allegations of corruption against FIFA" ages ago -- on the eve of the World Cup last June?

Answer: Again, yes, they did.



Which leaves only two subjects to be discussed, as far as I can see.

(1) Is there possibly a straight line between the indictment of the FIFA 14 and the end of soccer? (One can only hope.)

(2) What the dickens is the deal with this Chuck Blazer guy?

While I was busy not paying attention to the whole mess, I missed out on this Blazer guy. The Daily News, in its report "Soccer Rat! The inside story of how Chuck Blazer, ex-U.S. soccer executive and FIFA bigwig, became a confidential informant for the FBI," provides this background on the 450-pound cooperating witness [click to enlarge]:




WHICH BRINGS US TO THE DETAIL
OF THE $6,000 CAT APARTMENT

Which washingtonpost.com's Alexandra Petri has rightly pounced on, having gleaned this alarming detail from the aforementioned Daily News "Soccer Rat" vivisection of Chucky B. Or as she puts it:

Ahem:

From the New York Daily News: “[Former FIFA exec Chuck] Blazer often worked from two apartments where he lived on the 49th floor [of the Trump Tower] in $18,000 per month digs for himself and an adjoining $6,000 retreat largely for his unruly cats, according to a source.”

Which brings us to Alexandra's "thoughts," which contrary to her post title aren't quite "in no particular order."

Thoughts:

1) What?

2) Seriously, what?

3) [This is the image I've placed atop this post, whose relevance to a piece about unruly cats seems hard to sustain. Is this or is this not the absolutely ruliest pussycat you've ever seen? Alexandra has some thoughts about feline ruliness at No. 7, but I don't think they shed any light on No. 3. I think she still has some 'splaining to do. -- Ed.]

4) Great Caesar’s Ghost, what chemical alteration takes place in the mind once they give you access to seemingly unlimited amounts of money? What switch suddenly flips? How do you start coming up with these ideas? You could talk to me for months and months about what I would do with Truly Obscene Amounts of Money and I would probably say something like “buy an island” or “dress up as a bat and fight crime” or “hire an Aaron Burr impersonator and an Alexander Hamilton impersonator and make them fight,” but nowhere on my list of things would be, “FILL A LUXURY TRUMP APARTMENT WITH UNRULY CATS.” [I notice that Alexandra makes no point of the discrepancy between the $18,000 monthly price tag on Chucky's personal apartment and the mere $6,000 tab for the tabbies'. Well, perhaps the 3:1 ratio is reasonable. -- Ed.]

5) I’m almost impressed. (Is impressed the word?) I also love the fact that he did not live in the luxury apartment with the cats himself. He lived next door, thus giving himself plausible deniability on OK Cupid dates. “Oh, you’re one of those men who lives alone with cats?” a date might ask, nervously fiddling with her salad fork. “No, no,” he would be able to say. “I don’t live with my cats.” A pause. “They live in a separate apartment that I have furnished for them next door.”

6) All in all, this choice almost gives me a kind of strange confidence in FIFA execs. At least they weren’t wasting their money on frivolous things like flashy cars or bottle service or, er, those ladies the Secret Service always liked to have around. No, Blazer went straight into Eccentric Oil Magnate/Overindulged Roman Emperor (this is probably redundant; is there any other kind?)/British royalty territory and went for the Entire Apartment Full of Unruly Cats.

7) No wonder these cats were unruly. Even ordinary cats are not exactly ruly. And these cats doubtless thought they were property owners. My family cat always thought she owned the place and she didn’t have a $6,000 TRUMP PLAZA APARTMENT FOR HERSELF AND A FEW INTIMATE CAT FRIENDS.

8) This would come in very handy if he were trying to confuse Sir Roderick Glossop into thinking he was not right in the head.

9) The fact that the only person in literature to have an apartment full of cats is a character in a P.G. Wodehouse story tells you how COMPLETELY REMOVED FROM REALITY this idea is usually located.

10) Seriously, what amount of money do you have to have in order that you sit down and say to yourself, “No, no, I won’t invest this. I want an apartment for my cats.”

11) I always think that the 1 percent and even the 0.01 percent are just like us, deep down, just with more silver spoons, more lacquer tables and the occasional butler. But this — this is some Gatsby-level nonsense. “I am going to get a $6,000 apartment for my cats” is the sentence right after “I’m going to throw constant parties with fireworks and own a pink suit” and right before “and I shall build an organ and get a man named Klipspringer to sleep inside it.”

11) What.

(Personally, I would have done this last one "12) What?," but as they might say at the FIFA clubhouse in Switzerland, "Chacun à son goût.")

Now can we look forward to the end of soccer -- by, say, July? Let the boys and girls finish up any games they really feel it necessary to play, and then get on with it. Just as if the whole bloody thing had never happened.


FRIDAY UPDATE: Sepp Blatter elected to fifth term as FIFA supremo

If you really want to see it, you can watch here.

The Washington Post's Brian Murphy reports: "The embattled chief of world soccer hung onto his post Friday after a rival bowed out in an election that displayed the deep rifts inside the sport amid American-led allegations of widespread corruption among some of its top overseers."

[E]nough opposition was mounted to keep Blatter from getting the two-thirds majority needed among the 209 votes cast by delegates in Zurich — a result seen as a significant embarrassment for the 79-year-old president who has led the sport since 1998.

Blatter, who was expected to coast to an easy reelection before the scandal broke earlier this week, fell just short with 133 votes. His lone rival — a senior FIFA executive, Prince Ali bin al-Hussein of Jordan — received 73. The status of the remaining votes was not immediately clear.

Moments later, Hussein stepped aside to let Blatter win after sending the clear message of dissent.

If you haven't watched the John Oliver report above, you really should, to fully appreciate what a treasure FIFA has managed to hold onto in Sepp Blatter (whose jovial acquaintance we make at 7:55 of the clip) for another four years.

#

Say, Mark Zuckerberg, what be these mysterious devices you've discovered called . . . um, "books"?

In case you're keeping count, as of when I looked this evening, "Mariel Feliciano and 123,347 others like[d] this."

by Ken

I know, I know, you're thinking it's both obvious and childish to be the umpteenth, or umpteen thousandth, person to jump ugly on Facebook guru, and therefore media wizard, Mark Zuckerberg for writing, in a January 2 Facebook post:

My challenge for 2015 is to read a new book every other week -- with an emphasis on learning about different cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies. . . .

I'm excited for my reading challenge. I've found reading books very intellectually fulfilling. Books allow you to fully explore a topic and immerse yourself in a deeper way than most media today. I'm looking forward to shifting more of my media diet towards reading books.

But the way I see it, there's no way Mark can possibly be ridiculed enough. I can't even imagine what it might mean to say that he has been "ridiculed enough."

So thanks for the invite, Mark, but no, I don't thinking I'll be signing on to your "A Year of Books" page. Especially with that polite but stern caution about only participating in the discussions if we've actually read the books and have relevant points to add. This is probably wise, especially considering that there are people out here who got through years and years of schooling (K-A.B., for example) reading hardly any of the books we were supposed to. I can see why you would want to moderate the group to keep it focused. Don't you just hate an unfocused group?

Don't get me wrong, though. I'm a big fan of "relevant points." I hope your group rustles some up. And generally speaking I hope that you have a great year with your year in books, and that you get all the good ones read, as I gather that for 2016 you'll be moving on to your next "challenge," just like how when you finished 2013 and that year's challenge of meeting a new person every day. (I hope meeting those 365 people worked out.)

As to the ridicule you'll be soaking up, I hope it will be focused too. Like I thought Matthew Iglesias was off to a good start, with a snappy title on his Vox post: "Mark Zuckerberg discovers that books are pretty great." Ooh, snap, Matty! But would you believe that before long Matty is telling us what book he's currently reading? (No, I'm not going to tell you. That's his news. Find out about it on his page.) And rattling on about how he "actually find[s] the internet to be an indispensable companion to non-fiction reading" blah-blah-blah, something about the two Sicilies.

Okay, here's my deal. You send me a buck, I'll tell you what book (books, actually) I'm reading. Some of them I actually finish, but if you want to know about that, that'll cost you another buck.

Matty does rally to note that "Matt Zeitlin notes that the Zuckerberg endorsement has sent The End of Power rocketing up the Amazon charts as the book has 'shot up over 44,000 places on Amazon's ranking of book sales' since the Facebook founder's post." (Way to go, Mark! You don't suppose he has a commission deal with Amazon, do you?)

When it comes to laying it on our Mark, our friend Alexandra Petri at washingtonpost.com seems to me really "carrying the water," as Rush Limbaugh might say. Here's what Alexandra had to say in her post, "After learning about books, Mark Zuckerberg discovers other exciting technologies":

Based on this response, I tried introducing Zuckerberg to other Shocking Innovations:

Print Newspapers: “I’ve found these to be an incredible experience. How to describe them? They’re like a newsfeed, but with much less time devoted to the ice bucket challenge. No pictures of people’s babies or salads, which took a little getting used to, but I really enjoyed the classifieds, which were like a printout of Craigslist submitted entirely by older people. All in all, it’s a manageable amount of reading that really adds to your info diet and even forces you into contact with foreign news. Can’t wait to explore this more.”

The Sky: “It’s like your desktop background, but with a less saturated blue. I’m excited to interface with it further.”

Human Faces: “These things are incredible. They’re like emoticons whose meaning is not always instantly clear! I am eager to explore these in much greater depth.”

Frozen Food: “This amazed me because it was good for a long time, not like farm-to-table, which you have to eat right away. Also, if you want a food that is not currently in season, you can have it. Who thinks these things up?”

Cats: “These offer advantages over the GIFs and pictures of cats that we so commonly see on the Internet because you can have them with you all the time and they offer a whole range of expressions, as well as an almost human-like companionship. I look forward to engaging more with these incredible devices as the year continues.”

Pictures: “So far, I have enjoyed engaging with these quaint physical objects that depict or represent other objects! You can carry these around with you and display them on walls.”

Walls: “These things are real game-changers right here. They protect against sleet, rain, and hail, and they also offer flat surfaces on which you can post or hang things. What a great notion.”

Telephones: “You just hear a human voice, uninterrupted, and that can be a very powerful thing.”

“All in all, these are some disruptive innovations,” Zuckerberg concluded.

Yes, that's how to do it, Alexandra!



I'm just throwing out a guess here, but would this by any chance be a chart of a galaxy far, far away?

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Watch Watch: I don't really care what the Apple Watch does, but if you do, we've got a demo you can watch

Is this thing hideous or what? By comparison Dick Tracy's anciently futuristic wristphone (see below) was a thing of beauty.

by Ken

Since I really want to know as little as I can get away with about the Apple Watch, I'm just going to go with Alexandra Petri on this, in her washingtonpost.com ComPost post "In defense of the wristwatch, after Apple unveils a watch of its own."

I admit that, as long as I'm within range of a computer, I often have a tendency to poke at e-mail oftener than I should. Okay, sometimes every few minutes, but usually that's only when I have a really, really lot of work to avoid. Yesterday, I admit, I was peeking at the e-mailbox more frequently than I should have been, but in fairness I have to say that an awful lot of interesting things were coming in.

And then there were breathless live-blogging-type reports from the Apple press conference. Yes, real-time reports of develoments as they developed at, ferchrissakes, a press conference, a lousy new-product announcement.

I realize that the future of the Modern World is generally held, if less securely in the post-Steve Jobs era, to be more or less the future of Apple's new-product developments. But even though I have been an Apple customer for, I don't know, 20 years?, since I bought my first (used) Mac, I'm all too clearly not on the company conveyor belt.

I do have two iPods, one of which was partial payment for a job I did and the other of which was a gift, but I've never really learned to use them. (In the years when I was listening to music portably it was all on CD. Say, weren't those portable CD players once iSomethings? It seems so long ago.) I don't have an iPhone or an iPad and don't want either. (I have a different kind of "smartphone," which doesn't seem that smart to me, since it doesn't do anything. Mostly it affords me the privilege and pleasure of paying out a considerable sum each month for cell-phone service I never use, but I guess that constitutes pulling its weight.) I know there's such a thing now as Apple TV, but I don't know what it is, and I figure if I don't know what it is, I don't need it.

Come to think of it, I'm also now a couple of decimal generations behind on my Mac OS. Once the "improvements" started being mostly about finger-swiping, which I don't do, and nothing else in the upgrade list looks like it will remotely improve my life, I started passing. Eventually, of course, I'll have to upgrade just to be able to run current software, but I'll deal with that when it happens, just as I have in the past -- in proper panic and desperation.

One thing I learned in the course of those breathless roll-out e-mails yesterday from Apple Central is that the Cupertino kids were finally unleashing a New Product on the world --

THE APPLE WATCH

As with Apple TV, I don't really know what the Apple Watch is and don't really want to find out. The chances that it will improve my life seem infinitesimal.

So I'm going to trust Alexandra Petri's preliminary go-around with the newly announced electronic creature, even though I can see that we're not at all the same kind of users.

For example, she pronounces herself what I might call "time-resistant."

[A]s a committed Late Person, I think the rise of smartphones is bad enough. This watch trend needs to be nipped in the bud. If everyone has Apple Watches, we will all know what time it is. And that would be terrible.

Actually, I myself am kind of time-obsessive. I need to know what time it is, well, pretty darned frequently. And over the years, especially with the advent of wonderfully accurate quartz watches. (I was terrible with the wind-up kind, always winding them either too much or too little, neither conducive to producing regular time readouts of any credibility.) I now own three not-very-expensive watches that suit me just fine and also guarantee that on any given morning, if I can't find where I set down the watch I was wearing yesterday when I took it off, instead of setting off on a mad Watch Hunt, I can just slip on the "alternate" watch, and on those less frequent days when both "regular" watches are in hiding, there's still that third one in the box, assuming I remember where the box is. It's a system that runs like, well, clockwork.

The watch I actually like best, a Timex (I usually have a Timex), doesn't even have a date readout -- just the time. The ones that have a date readout require that extra adjustment on the first of any month following a non-31-day month, and I rarely remember exactly how this is accomplished on any particular watch. Sometimes I realize I'm attempting to duplicate the method used on a watch that went out of my life ten years ago. As for the day-and-date kind, well, that's several grades above my resetting skill level. It's not that I always know the date, or (goodness knows) the day of the week, but I figure there are other ways of getting hold of that information. Like with a calendar.

Still, for all our user differences, Alexandra and me, I note that we approach the advent of the Apple Watch with kindred skepticisms. And she stakes out her Apple Watch position promptly, in no uncertain terms: "No, Apple," she declares. "This time you have gone too far."

You may have made an Apple Watch, but for once, I must say: I do not want what you have to offer. I will not bite the apple, serpent!

You may have designed some fancy new product with all kinds of capabilities. Fine. The Apple Watch can do all kinds of things that a traditional watch cannot. Monitor your heart rate (this seems like something out of “Gattaca”). Tell a touch from a tap (I can barely tell a touch from a tap myself). Track your every movement (if I wanted my every movement to be tracked, I would just violate my parole). Show you text messages. (Not wanting to receive any text messages just now was why I left the house with my watch and not my phone in the first place!) All of these features are very nice, if that is the kind of thing you like.

Alexandra, for one, can produce a list of features of regular watches which, while not identical to my own, is at least headed in a similar direction. We've already touched on one of the things a regular watch does which endears it to her:

Tell you what time it is while giving you no other information.

This last thing is somewhat more valuable than I think we realize. We live in a great age of More Information Than You Require, where if you are not careful, any query can send you down an Internet rabbit hole from which you emerge, dazed, six hours later, having read all there is to read about the 2003 “Peter Pan” for reasons you are unable to recall. Just getting one piece of information from any tool is increasingly rare — and, correspondingly, precious.

That's pretty convincing, don't you think? Here are the other things a "traditional" watch can do which she wonders if the Apple Watch can:

Be slightly, slightly off the correct time in a way that makes you late to everything?

Stop mysteriously one day when you have a lot of things to get to so you don’t notice until you realize it’s been 2:40 for the past several hours?

Fall into water and stop working? (That I bet it can.) [I bet it can too, Alexandra. -- Ed.]

Tell you what time it is, loosely, if for some reason you do not have your cell phone with you?

Either have a digital display, which apparently proclaims to business associates that you “don’t know how to tell time” (a valuable skill in case you ever get transported to 1830 for some reason), or a round face with series of Roman numerals on it, the last holdouts from an empire that has been extinct for more than a thousand years, probably long enough that we should be able to admit freely that XII is a dumb way of writing “12.”

Give you something to look at to tell the meaning of “clockwise” or “counterclockwise,” otherwise baffling and meaningless terms with little relevance to modern life.

Clash horribly with your outfit.

Require a tiny battery that is only sold somewhere in the Far Distant Suburbs and has to be installed by an elderly jeweler who only works during the precise hours you have to be in the office.

Actually, after decades of battery angst, I overcame this source of grief when I stumbled onto a lovely Chinese gentleman who has a watch stall in a storefront on Canal Street. He's so good, I almost look foward to my batteries dying.

With any luck, I'll go before he does -- or at least maybe I'll have stopped worrying about the time so much.


NOW THIS IS WHAT I CALL A WATCH

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"Trends" and "millennials" are scary enough separately -- whose brilliant idea was it to put them together?

This helpful guide is provided by Alexandra Petri with her washingtonpost.com post today, "Trend piece about Millennials finds new trend: that trend pieces are being written."

by Ken

As noted above, Washingtonpost.com's Alexandra Petri has worked up this helpful flow chart to assist would-be writers of such pieces to stifle the impulse to write yet another piece about the trend of writing pieces about millennials. This department is pleased to get behind an idea so excellent that one hopes it becomes a trend. Except that should it in fact become a trend, this department will probably be forced to weigh in against it.

I suppose there are such things as "good trends," and if you give me some time, I'm sure I'll be able to come up with a for-instance. Given the likelihood that any newly spotted trend is likely to depress this department, it frequently finds itself in the position of denouncing whatever trend happens to be intruding on its peace.

Pretty much the same is true of most anything having to do with millennials. Speaking hypothetically, I suppose if all the millennials were to get together and come up with a cure for cancer, we would have to listen to a certain amount of yammering about the millennials in order to glean the odd word or two allowed to creep through concerning you know, the cure for cancer.

Since I pay so little attention to the subject of millennials -- as soon as I see the word "millennial," I take that as my cue to proceed to the next subject -- I hadn't realized the threatening level that has been reached by this trend toward thumb-sucking about the trend of thumb-sucking about millennials. To illustrate the point, Alexandra quotes a chunk of a New York Times piece by one of the institution's dimmer lights, Sam Tanenhaus -- a chunk that begins, "Suddenly, as you may have noticed, millennials are everywhere," a rises to a distinctly nauseating rhetorical pitch for the revelation, "This newspaper is no exception." I'm not going to give you either the full chunk Alexandra quotes or the link to the piece, both of which you can find on her site. I feel it would be irresponsible of me to contribute to spreading this bilge.

Alesandra's summation, however, I pass on cheerfully:

This is literally a meta-trend piece about how many trend pieces are written about Millennials. Then it goes on to be just a regular trend piece about how Millennials Possess (Along With The Attributes Generally Ascribed To Them) An Attribute You Wouldn’t Expect!

And Alexandra herself is feeling . . . well, her own pain.

Again I say, as we have said so often before:

PLEASE NO

PLEASE MAKE IT STOP

HAVE WE NOT SUFFERED ENOUGH
CAN WE NOT APPEASE YOU

She insists that she means "no ill will to any individual writer." (Not even Sam Tanenhaus? Pity. There's a lost opportunity.) "I understand," she says, "that we all must eat, even those of us who earn our bread by cranking out yet another story about how many stories there are about Millennials." And by way of showing her fellow feeling toward her fellow trend-charters, she offers the "guide" I've plunked atop this post, whose logic seems to me irrefutable.

Alternatively, she proposes a compromise: "just to print the headline and let us infer the contents."

It’s a familiar tune, and if you give me a couple of bars, I can absolutely play the whole thing through, with flourishes.

“Millennials: The Most [Adjective] Generation Yet.” You wouldn’t even have to include any text. Just “blah blah helicopter blah blah basement blah blah self-absorbed.” We could take it from there.

I think many of us have already adopted this system as readers. Let's say I somehow found myself confronted with a head like, say, "Generation Nice," with the blurb "The Millennials Are Generation Nice." This happens to be the online head for the Sam Tanenhaus piece Alexandra is quoting from. (Yes, I clicked through, but bear in mind that under the Times system, a click on a third-party link is a free click.)

The fact is that I work pretty hard to keep myself out of contact with such heads, for reasons I hope I don't have to explain. (My stomach is strong, but not that strong.) I think by the word "Generation," I would be fleeing like the wind, but if on a slow day I somehow made it as far as "The Millennials," I would for sure be out the door and in the next county. If I nevertheless persevered to the "By Sam Tanenhaus," well, I would probably be gasping for air. I can't imagine the idea of reading such a piece ever occurring to me.

#

"Sunny John" Boehner doesn't deserve to be made fun of by Alexandra Petri

If Alexandra Petri and I are both having a spot of trouble with misbehaving words, it's in the great tradition of Saturday Night Live's perpetually angry scourge, Emily Litella (Gilda Radner), who (for example) couldn't understand what all the fuss was about "violins in schools."

"The American people said they wanted change, but really what they wanted was just a little bit off the top because anything else would frighten their spouses. . . .

"The president thought that when we said we wanted jobs and changes, we wanted jobs and changes. He will learn. Even then, he used fewer executive orders than his predecessors, but -- hey, it's not the scale, but how you use them, that counts."

-- Alexandra Petri, in her washingtonpost.com "ComPost"
column, "Why not sue the president, Speaker Boehner?"

by Ken

First off, I should try to correct possible misimpressions arising from the above post title, by which I don't mean to say that Sunny John is, you know, such an august personage that he shouldn't be nattered by a journalistic gnat doodling an online column called "ComPost." No, on the contrary, anyone who is aware of my substantial esteem for Ms. Petri, not to mention my feelings about our one and only U.S. House speaker, who for me has roughly the stature of an inexplicably-as-yet-unsquooshed bug, will surely understand that I mean Sunny John is literally not worthy of such esteemed spoofing skills.

Fortunately, I think Ms. Petri will be inclined to be kind, since (a) she is, I believe, recently back from vacation, and anyone who has been on vacation owes, if nothing else, the tiniest modicum of kindly indulgence toward those of us who haven't been, and (b) she got bogged down in a linguistic bog of her own at the start of her attempt to mediate the brewing legal brouhaha developing between Sunny John and the White House:

When I first heard that Speaker Boehner was trying to force an unwanted suit on President Obama, I must confess I felt a certain sympathy for President Obama. Once a co-worker attempted to force some unwanted dresses on me, and let me tell you, it was tense around the office for a while after I realized that I either had to pay her for them or admit that I did not want them. They hung in my cubicle for weeks, looming ominously, like the dresses of Damocles.

Fortunately, Alexandra gets the confusion sorted out fairly quickly, and proceeds to disagree with such authorities as White House press secretary Josh Earnest, who attempted to dismiss Sunny John's threatened lawsuit against the president -- for some imagined diabolical (one might call them "Bush-like," except that those were real) executive usurpations of authority -- as "a taxpayer-funded lawsuit against the president of the United States for doing his job" and "the kind of step that most Americans wouldn't support."


ALEXANDRA THINKS WE'D SUPPORT SUNNY JOHN'S STUNT SUIT

For the record, Alexandra is not one of those people who believes Sunny John's threatened lawsuit is "a flagrant partisan stunt."

That is nonsense. A flagrant partisan stunt would be much more fun: Say, a man in a bright red suit shouting, “OBAMA’s not MY president!” before jumping a motorcycle over a long row of flaming trucks — which actually happens in some parts of the country, come to think of it.

On the contrary, says Alexandra. She's convinced that we Americans would support the speaker's lawsuit.

If there is one thing that I, as an American, feel certain of, it is that you can make good money by suing people. Especially when those people are just doing their jobs. We just need to play our cards right. Maybe we’ll actually get some remuneration out of this whole arrangement, which we can pool and put into our collapsing roads and bridges. Frivolous lawsuits and apple pie! That’s what this country was built on.

And in case Sunny John hasn't got the case entirely worked out yet, Alexandra explains for him. "Where are the jobs?" the speaker apparently wants to know." You or I might answer that they were taken away by the people who paid to put and keep an unsquooshed bug like Sunny John in power. But no, says Alexandra. Where are the jobs? "Simple: The president is hiding them."

It is well known that once you are elected president, they lead you to a big room just inside the Oval Office where there is a big lever labeled “JOBS.” All you have to do is press this lever, and it will produce all the jobs you could ever want. And some you don’t want, like the job of the guy who has to alter the numbers on the population signs outside small towns whenever Old Father Cartwright dies.

And yet President Obama contumaciously persists in refusing to push it. Never mind the jobs numbers and reports. That’s the executive branch, and they are known for their trickery. I don’t know what he’s waiting for! A third term? That is just what a “king or monarch” (Boehner again) like him would want!

"I BELIEVE EVERYTHING I HEAR ON TALK RADIO"

This "king or monarch" business really rings a bell for Alexandra, who believes the president "has been acting far too much like a 'king or monarch' and for far too long."

He is acting so much like a monarch that he showed up at a state dinner clad entirely in ermine robes and the dashed hopes of peasants, carrying a large scepter, and causing several portraits of George Washington that were hanging on the wall at the time to get up and walk pointedly out of their frames in disgust. At least this is what I heard on talk radio. (I believe everything I hear on talk radio because everyone seems so upset. Why would you get so upset about something that was not actually happening? Unless it were the Star Wars prequels, or any time someone dies on Game of Thrones, or a Kardashian relationship, or — or – well, I still think it’s a good rule.) Also, I hear he walks around these days entirely surrounded by corgis.

Contrary to what the president seems to believe, Alexandra says, we Americans didn't really want "change." This is easy enough to demonstrate.

If we wanted bills and things to pass to maybe create those jobs we have heard so much about, we would not have voted so that the House and Senate would be composed of the people they are composed of, with the majorities and filibusters and occasional flutters of committee-ing that this entails.

Sunny John is not one to be fooled by executive protestations of some dire need to do something.

No, I’m sorry, he says: “When there are conflicts like this — between the legislative branch and the executive branch — it is my view that it is our responsibility to stand up for this institution in which we serve, and for the Constitution.”

Also the President spilled coffee on him one time and did not warn Speaker Boehner that it was going to be hot, and he thinks we can probably get a lot out of him for that. Or was that McDonald’s? No, I think that might have been McDonald’s. I’m sorry. Go on with the regular suit. If anything, I’m worried that it isn’t frivolous enough.

#

Criminal crackpot Cliven Bundy is lambasted for failing to use established GOP code words for his racist slurs

Oops, wrong Bundy. This isn't famous criminal crackpot "Cliven" Bundy, it's famous shoe salesman Al Bundy -- no relation, as far as I can tell. Never mind.

"The reason [Bundy] was embraced by so many on the right is that he was their kind of people, One of Us. . . .

"When conservatives looked at Bundy, they saw not just a white guy, but also a cowboy, and that particular brand of character who waves an American flag while fighting the American government (in his case by stealing public property). And they saw lots of guns, which also told them he was their kind of people. Everything about him told them he was their kind of guy."

-- Paul Waldman, in his "Plum Line" post yesterday,
"Cliven Bundy and the perils of identity politics"

by Ken

Last night I promised that I would keep thinking to see if I had anything to say about criminal crackpot Cliven Bundy, who at least for this week is serving as Sean Hannity's No. 1 Favorite Criminal Crackpot. Of course the story may have lost some of its, er, edge now that, as noted on today's Washington Post "Headlines" e-mails:

(The story is here. For the record, already last night I chronicled the headline: "Rand Paul and other Republican leaders back away from Bundy." OMG, Rand Paul is a Republican "leader"?)

Still, some of the most important questions remain not only unanswered but unasked. Most important, of course, is the question no one dares to ask: What the hell kind of name is "Cliven"?

Then there's the question of whether "Cliven" is related to famous Cold Warrior brothers McGeorge and William Bundy, or to famous serial killer Ted Bundy, or to famous shoe salesman Al Bundy. I'm afraid ya got me. (However, a connection to Atlantic Canada's famous Bay of Fundy, with its famous monster tides, seems highly unlikely.)

Finally there's the question of what "Cliven" did that was really so wrong. Fortunately the Borowitz Report is all over this one:

April 24, 2014
REPUBLICANS BLAST NEVADA RANCHER FOR FAILING TO USE COMMONLY ACCEPTED RACIAL CODE WORDS
Posted by ANDY BOROWITZ


WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) — Republican politicians blasted the Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy on Thursday for making flagrantly racist remarks instead of employing the subtler racial code words the G.O.P. has been using for decades.

“We Republicans have worked long and hard to develop insidious racial code words like ‘entitlement society’ and ‘personal responsibility,’ ” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky). “There is no excuse for offensive racist comments like the ones Cliven Bundy made when there are so many subtler ways of making the exact same point.”

Fox News also blasted the rancher, saying in a statement, “Cliven Bundy’s outrageous racist remarks undermine decades of progress in our effort to come up with cleverer ways of saying the same thing.”

WELL, THERE IS ANOTHER QUESTION
THAT'S WORTH ASKING ABOUT "CLIVEN"

And in fact, as I pointed out last night, that worthy young sage Alexandra Petri asked it in a washingtonpost.com post of hers yesterday, "Cliven Bundy’s awful views should not be news":

You know that it is a slow week for news when the big story is that a man who thinks he should be allowed to let his cattle graze harmoniously for free on protected federal lands might have some racist opinions. What? Why do we care about his thoughts on race? Why, for that matter, were we listening to him in the first place?

In an even moderately sane world, I would say thank you, Alexandra, that really says it all, next case. After all, this is a man who initially became a celebrity for knowing less than nothing about: state and federal law, the Constitution, and land use, and by breaking the law both by abusing protected land and stealing the grass his cattle grazed. I would not just hope but expect that the appropriate authorities would apply the appropriate remedies, and if the criminal wacko were to try to use violence to prevent the application of the law, then if there were no other way of resolving the situation, his stinking, worthless carcass should have been blown to kingdom come -- along with those of any conspirators in this criminal violence.

Say, do you remember the days when right-wingers at least pretended to be the bedrock upholders of law 'n' order? Now it seems that as long as your mind and heart are made up of pure right-wing scummery, you have a champion in Sean Hannity and the other reptilian scum of his ilk.

But if for no other reason than the reach and influence of because of that reptilian ilk, I'm afraid we can't calim to live in a society of even minimal sanity. And since this is a society where there are media hooligans who can be counted on to make a celebrity of a pile of psychotic filth like "Cliven," there doesn't seem to me any way he can be simply ignored.

As Amy Davidson notes in a newyorker.com post today, "Cliven Bundy's Slavery Delusion," in which -- God bless her -- she takes on the filthy task of actually answering the truly evil as well as psychotic filth "Cliven" has spewed in his racial rants (as reported, crucially, by NYT pro Adam Nagourney):

Bundy is not just a fringe character: he has had the support of Greg Abbott, the Republican nominee for governor in Texas, and Senator Rand Paul, of Kentucky. Too many conservatives have been charmed by the notion of a cowboy singing the anthem on horseback and threatening to turn guns on bureaucrats. They can’t just proclaim themselves stunned here.

And no, as Amy notes parenthetically, the whackjob politicos can't just take it back -- not without owning up to their wrongdoing in jumping on the criminal-crackpot bandwagon.


SORRY, BUT NO, THE RIGHT-WING POLS 'N' NOISE
MACHINISTS CAN'T SIMPLY "NEVER MIND" IT

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank has a great post up this afternoon, "Bundy saga reveals the risk of cozying up to extremists," in which he charts some of those GOP "never mind"s (links onsite)

[C]onservative figures who had celebrated [Bundy's] cause rushed to distance themselves from him.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who had condemned the federal government’s attempt to enforce court orders against Bundy: “Offensive.”

Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.), who had declared Bundy’s followers “patriots”: “Appalling and racist.”

And Sean Hannity, who had led a Fox News campaign that made a hero of Bundy: “Beyond repugnant.”

"Bundy boosters are right to be appalled," Dana goes on, "but they should not be shocked."

The anti-government strain of thought that Bundy advanced has been intertwined with racist and anti-Semitic views over several decades. Not all people who resist the authority of the federal government are motivated by race, of course, and not all racists are anti-government. But there is a long symbiosis between the two.

Dana does some useful surveying of some of the more notorious cases in point of that long symbiosis, stretching all too actively into the here and now. Toward the end of his piece he reminds us that "Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) on Tuesday said the federal government was “using the jackboot of authoritarianism to come against the citizens.”

By Thursday, Cruz’s office was calling Bundy’s racism “completely unacceptable.”

And yet completely unsurprising.

ONE OBSERVATION THAT REALLY RESONATES WITH ME . . .

. . . was made yesterday by Paul Waldman in a "Plum Line' post, "Cliven Bundy and the perils of identity politics." It grew out of a question Paul posed, "Why on earth did any Republicans get behind [Bundy]?"

You could say it was reflexive anti-government sentiment; anybody who’s fighting the feds is OK with them. But that’s not really it. As a number of people pointed out [links onsite], if Cliven Bundy were black, he wouldn’t have become a right-wing hero, with all the loving coverage on Fox News and hundreds of gun-toting government-haters traveling hundreds of miles to brandish their weapons at his side. The reason he was embraced by so many on the right is that he was their kind of people, One of Us. And it shows the perils of identity politics.

Race is a part of that, but not all of it. When conservatives looked at Bundy, they saw not just a white guy, but also a cowboy, and that particular brand of character who waves an American flag while fighting the American government (in his case by stealing public property). And they saw lots of guns, which also told them he was their kind of people. Everything about him told them he was their kind of guy. And I’m sure if liberals had thought about it, they would have said, “I’ll bet this guy has some colorful ideas about race.” Conservatives would have protested that that’s a vicious and unfair stereotype. But in this case it turned out to be true, and how.

NOW, ALAS, WE HAVE TO TAKE A QUICK DIP
INTO (EGAD!) THE "MIND" OF SEAN HANNITY

And so, as washingtonpost.com media blogger Erik Wemple puts it in a post today: "No, Sean Hannity, you can't distance yourself from Cliven Bundy." Not, Erik says, if you don't make "the next logical move," which --

would have been to repudiate his own coverage of Bundy. But that was too far a walk for Hannity. Instead, he got into the hair-splitting business, attempting to keep alive the larger theme of his coverage, despite the unseemly comments about race from his ranching hero."

The "hair-splitting" included this assertion from our Sean:

The ranch standoff that took place out in Nevada was not about a man named Cliven Bundy. At the heart of this issue was my belief that our government is simply out of control.

Sure enough, our Sean eventually evoked Waco, another situation of which our boy has less-than-zero understanding, which seems to be a prerequisite for all of his "news" coverage, very likely because the way he has mistrained his brain excludes any possibility of actual information-processing and thought.

Erik, however, isn't accepting a "Cliven-Bundy-a-la-carte option."

Either you embrace Cliven Bundy in toto or you reject him.

Despite Hannity’s protestations, this is all about a man named Cliven Bundy. How many other Western ranching freeloaders are there who have stiffed the government for two decades with specious arguments and then rally with gun-toting protesters when the feds move in to round up his cattle?

Erik suggests that possibly our Sean "could be excused for embracing this guy, if only the signs of the rancher's unhingedness had been shrouded before this latest encounter." But this is "no sale" too. Our Sean, after all, is bragging about having been on this story for ages, long before anybody else had the courage to see this case of a Little Guy standing up to the out-of-control, overreaching federal government -- "a government gone wild today in America!"

Which means at some point he or one of his people should have done just the tiniest bit of research, made an absolutely minimal effort to discover the facts. But of course this is Fox Noise, where they puke on facts.

Still, Erik says,

All Hannity’s producers needed to do was check a certain document in the 1998 case United States of America v. Cliven Bundy. Here’s how it abridges Bundy’s stance in the case:

Bundy appears to argue in his Motion to Dismiss…that the Complaint…should be dismissed because this Court lacks jurisdiction since Article IV of the Constitution cannot be imposed upon him. Bundy claims that he is a citizen of Nevada and not a citizen of a territory of the United States, and he also quotes religious texts.

If you’re Fox News, that’s all the information you need to reach a simple conclusion: Perhaps this is a local story.

But for Fox News in general and our Sean in particular, "local story" has no more meaning than "federal case." All our Sean has to work from is a psychotically delusional image of the universe imprinted in his nonfucntioning brain by some agent of evil, and the determination to dredge up, cut up, if necessary make up, and then  eassemble any words and images he can scare up that fit his psychotic delusions.

I'm going to guess that once upon a time when Little Sean was asked what he wanted to do if he grew up, he said, "Cowboy."

#

Rot in hell, Fred Phelps (1929-2014)

Thanks, Hank Fox! I too am struggling to be a bigger person about the (now) death of Fred Phelps, just as Alexandra Petri suggests -- see below. But it's hard.

So don't dance on the grave. Don't cheer. It's an understandable urge. Instead:
• Stop picketing funerals at all, ever, full stop. It is a terrible way of getting attention.
• Play with a kid. Do not hand that kid a hateful sign. Again, this should go without saying.
• Love someone.
• Send someone a thank-you note.

• Call your grandmother.
• Take a nap.
• Make a big colorful sign that says something polite. Take it to a place that is not a funeral.
• Love your neighbor.
• Stand up for someone who is being shouted down.
• Treat people like people.

• Make a sandwich.

• Feel the urge to say something hateful. Don't succumb. Know you're better than that.
You are.

-- the end of Alexandra Petri's washingtonpost.com post
"Better things to do than picket the Fred Phelps funeral"

by Ken

I'm afraid I've already violated both the spirit and the very letter of Alexandra Petri's sensible prescription for commemorating the death of Fred Phelps in her washingtonpost.com post. After all, one of her suggestions above would seem to cover a post like this: "Make a big colorful sign that says something polite. Take it to a place that is not a funeral." I believe, indeed I hope, that there's no way of mistaking "Rot in hell" for polite expression.

And while I'm inclined to agree with Alexandra about that "stop picketing funerals at all, ever" idea (picketing funerals? what is that?), if this includes a ban on dancing or spitting on the grave, I'm afraid I can't go along. I've never done either of these myself, but I certainly wouldn't discourage anyone else from doing so. Oh well, so much for trying to be a bigger person.

As I hope I've made clear, I have quickly become a big fan of Alexandra (it's kind of scary that someone that young is that smart), and I'm awash in admiration for her take on a healthy response to the passing of that vile sack of filth Fred Phelps, now-departed master of the Westboro Baptist Church of Hate. (Darn, "vile sack of filth" probably also violates the prescription to say something polite. It seems to represent an almost textbook failure to not succumb to "the urge to say something hateful." Shucks!)

"Who will picket the funeral of the man who picketed so many?" Alexandra asks at the top of her post, and she answers, "Let's hope, no one."

First because there may be no funeral to picket, and second because — well, we’re better than that.

I know the urge to celebrate his passing is strong. But as Funny Or Die quipped, "Feels weird to celebrate Fred Phelps' death considering that sort of thing was basically his favorite hobby." Instead, let's celebrate all the good he accomplished in his life -- completely inadvertently.

Now this seems to me an excellent argument, and Alexandra makes it very well. What it comes down to, as we'll hear her say in just a moment, is: "The best arguments against some causes are their adherents. . . . He became the face of hate. The face of hate was protesting funerals and forcing children to hold up big odious signs. It wasn't good PR for hate. He made hate look hateful."

Or, at full length:

It's a fitting conclusion to the life of someone who, in the course of committing himself so loudly and grotesquely to hate (it was even on his bumper stickers) [note that this link is to the WaPo Phelps obit -- Ed.], wound up proving again and again how much love there was in people. He would show up at a funeral with his family and their hideous signs [this link is to a Jonathan Capehart post], and others would rally. Even the KKK showed up. When the KKK Imperial Wizard comments that, compared to you, he is not a "hate-monger," and says he "thinks that it's an absolute shame that [the WBC] show up and disrupt people's funerals" -- well, need you say more? It's like a twist on the old Churchill analogy about Hitler invading Hell.

A lot of people who set out to do good and advance the cause of love don't accomplish this much. Thank you to Mr. Phelps, in a strange, strange way, for proving us right. Hate is well-publicized, but small. Love was bigger. He showed up with his signs, and people responded with a Wall of Love. He kept achieving the opposite of what he set out to do. He faxed tons and tons of complaints about -- they passed a law against fax harassment. He showed up at funerals with his Hateful Signs, and people gathered to shield the mourners, or the Patriot Guard riders showed up, or even the KKK did. He tested our commitment to free speech, even extreme and ugly speech, and -- yup, it is still strong.

The best arguments against some causes are their adherents.

He became the face of hate. The face of hate was protesting funerals and forcing children to hold up big odious signs. It wasn't good PR for hate. He made hate look hateful.

"Gee," you thought. "If these are the people think being gay is wrong, maybe thinking that is wrong. This is horrible. Can you direct me to where there is tolerance? I don't want to be on the same side of history as these folks." Since he began drawing attention in the 1990s, look what tolerance and love have achieved: the end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the spread of marriage equality to seventeen states and Washington DC -- and the list goes on.

Admittedly, he proved that there are more good people than not in much the way that somebody smashing a pane of glass proves that there are a lot of good window-repair shops in the world. You wish you didn't have to bother. But it's good to know.

ON THE OTHER HAND --

Something nags at me. There are always those who say, wisely and eloquently, that when it comes to loudmouths of the extreme extremeness of our Fred, it's best to ignore them. And I understand the impulse.  We're just giving them attention, the very thing they want.

But there's also an extent to which merely allowing the spewing of extreme hate filth to go unanswered gives it some sort of seal of okayness. Oh sure, the thought process might go, the WBC characters went too far, but were they completely wrong? Notice that in this case we have the KKK on the side of the angels. That can't be right, can it?

I can't help thinking that our public discourse is in the debased state it's currently in at least in part because the Right has learned to pile it on, without cease or inhibition of any kind, and the higher the level of ignorance, insanity, and filth pumped into circulation, the more of it seeps into everyday standards of acceptability. We humans come equipped, through long indoctrination, with a host of buttons to be pushed, and the forces of darkness on the Right have spent decades learning how to push the nastiest buttons to rally people to the basest causes.

I go back once again to the point Dana Milbank made in a January 2013 WaPo column ("A House radical is now in the mainstream") that both Howie and I have referred back to, chronicling the return of Texas crackpot Steve Stockman to Congress after a nearly two-decade interval. In the '90s, Dana noted, Stockman was quickly and generally recognized as a nutjob. Now, saying if anything even crazier stuff, "What’s frightening is he no longer sounds like an outlier."

Just think of the litany of Obama abomination, from birtherism on -- stuff with no factual basis, spun entirely out of ignorance, delusion, and free-floating rage. Not that I now how to counter the filth, and I would certainly agree with Alexandra that for some segments of the public, the grotesqueness of a specimen like Fred Phelps and his posse of loons is the best answer there is. But there's so much filth being spewed that I don't know how we keep a dangerously significant portion of it from sticking.

So by all means, let's all do as many as possible of the alternative activities Alexandra proposes. At the same time, though, let's not kid ourselves that decency and reason are bound to win out.

#

Interesting thoughts from Alexandra Petri about Alec Baldwin and the new-media culture -- and not just about AB

Tina Fey and Elaine Stritch were on hand to cheer on 30 Rock cohort Alec Baldwin when he was one of the Tisch School for the Arts's 2009 honorees for achievements and philanthropy in the arts.

by Ken

"Attention, everyone! Alec Baldwin is leaving the public eye!" So Alexandra Petri began her washingtonpost.com blogpost this morning, "The most important paragraph from Alec Baldwin’s farewell to public life."

There is, of course, an enormously rich vein of humor to be mined from AB's harrumphing declarations of intent to turn his back on: (a) New York and (b) the public eye, and everyone and his brother, sister, nieces, and nephews is accepting the invitation to jump sarcastic on poor Alec.

It would be unfair to ask washingtonpost.com's Alexandra, whose brief after all is to find the humorous side of the news to decline such an invitation, and she has some excellent fun with AB's New York Magazine "Vulture" as-told-to blogpost "Good-bye, Public Life." Like her note that AB has "a great deal to say -- about paparazzi, new media, his experience losing a TV show on MSNBC and being called out for homophobia, and whose fault all of it was (spoiler: not his!)."


BEFORE GOING ON, LET ME SAY TWO THINGS

(1) In the matter of X v. Paparazzi, where X = Just About Anybody on the Planet, in the absence of pretty clear evidence to the contrary I rule by default in favor of X. I don't want to see any of their damned pictures, so let them not claim that they do any of what they do on behalf of my right to see.

(2) I'm a huge Alec Baldwin fan. For the record, I wasn't always. In his earlier supposed hot-leading-man career, I didn't buy him. But over time I warmed to him, and in his years as Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock he gave us one of the stupendous characters to be created on a stage or screen of any size. I felt that way as the series unfolded, and felt it more strongly in years of watching syndicated reruns, and now that i've started working my way through my Amazon Gold Box Deal complete 30 Rock DVDs I can say it that much more emphatically. Every scene he played with every actor he worked with on the show is magic, and I couldn't begin to find words to describe all the years of his collaboration with Tiny Fey as Liz Lemon or the incandescence of the episodes he did with Elaine Stritch as the one and only Colleen Donaghy. (I hope it goes without saying that the collaboration included the brilliant 30 Rock writers. Clearly the writers were in turn further inspired by their discovery of what their stars could do.)

But AB's professional accomplishments of course have nothing to do with either his personal qualities or the rightness or wrongness of his pronouncements. So let's get back to that.


ALEXANDRA IS ACTUALLY RATHER GENTLE
IN CHIDING ALEC'S "NEVER AGAIN" STANCE

"I'm aware that it's ironic that I'm making this case in the media, but this is the last time I'm going to talk about my personal life in an American publication ever again.'

-- Alec Baldwin, in the NYM "Vulture" blog interview

To which Alexandra says:

Yes. Nothing says, 'Farewell, news media! I hate and distrust you with a blinding passion! I am a recluse now!' like 'Here I am on your newsstands, large as life!' "Goodbye,' in print, is so seldom "goodbye.' I say this as someone who has written possibly a dozen pieces announcing that I Will Never Write About Sarah Palin Again (And Next Time There Will Be No Next Time). This only goes one way.

MORE IMPORTANTLY, ALEXANDRA CREDITS
ALEC WITH MAKING "ONE INTERESTING POINT"

Alexandra directs us to this paragraph from the interview:

In the New Media culture, anything good you do is tossed in a pit, and you are measured by who you are on your worst day. What's the Boy Scout code? Trustworthy. Loyal. Helpful. Friendly. Courteous. Kind. Obedient. Cheerful. Thrifty. Brave. Clean. Reverent. I might be all of those things, at certain moments. But people suspect that whatever good you do, you are faking. You're that guy. You're that guy that says this.

She allows that she's "not sure Baldwin's own case is the best illustration of this principle (see Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic for an eloquent explanation of why)," but allows as well that "it still has a ring of truth to it."

Boy Scout values aside, is this what we're dealing with now? What are we judged by?

F. Scott Fitzgerald called personality 'a series of successful gestures.' And with new media, every single gesture has to be successful. One false move, one ill-thought remark, one Weiner picture, and -- there you go. It's always the worst story that floats to the top of your Google results. Even if you're a public figure like Baldwin, with years of goodwill at your back.

Alexandra goes on to make the point more forcefull with reference to people other than AB, on whom this fact of new-media life "comes to bear most painfully," since AB "was famous already" and "will be fine."

But many people want to be famous. Few people actually are, at least not the level of famous that most of us would consider to be worth the trouble. Famous is always 1,000 more twitter followers than you've got, just as drunk is one more drink than you've had. Still, everyone's living in public, never far from a camera or a smartphone. And all our unsuccessful gestures get caught -- in print, on tape, where they can stick.

The low point always pops back up. And there's countless examples of people saying one lousy thing -- be it racist, sexist, homophobic, too-soon-after-a-tragedy, or just downright ugly in another way -- and being shamed to the point where that will be the only thing that ever appears when you Google them, and some will even lose their jobs. Maybe some of these people are awful all the time. But you don't need a pattern. One -- as long as it sticks in the craw -- is all you need. And it's not just ugly remarks that can be your lowest point. Look at what happens with nude pictures or whenever it surfaces that a teacher had a porn career. No matter how hard you dig yourself out, you're that guy.

And not all of us can stuff a magazine article at the top of our search results.

Nice, Alexandra.

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