Bill's Notes

If on a winter's night a traveler
outside the town of Malbork,
leaning from the steep slope
without fear of wind or vertigo,
looks down in the gathering darkness
in a network of lines that enlace,
in a network of lines that intersect
on the carpet of leaves under the moon
around an empty grave-
What story down there awaits its end?
--Italo Calvino.

Wasn't winter. It was a severe clear spring day. Wasn't outside Malbork. It was outside Morristown. There was a steep slope, but no fear of wind or vertigo. The gathering darkness was entirely metaphoric — the sun was coming up, not going down. No networks of lines, no carpets of leaves, no moons. The grave was full.

It was the last line of this poem that I remembered at the grave. What story down there found its end?

The gravestone was difficult to find. I located it only after praying for help, which arrived in the form of a cemetery manager who "just so happened" to drop by her office on her day off. When I mentioned whom I was looking for, the cemetery manager said, "Oh yes, the Mayer/Idleman stone," and she told one of the groundskeepers where to find it and to point me toward the grave. I thanked them and started off.

Once I got there, I could hardly look. I glanced at the name on the stone. My eyes instinctively shut. It was no mistake. In all its finality, right here in front of me, not some abstraction, not some memory, not something to be denied. I sat down, my eyes still shut. Then I got up my courage, and forced myself to open my eyes and to read the writing and to see the story down there that had reached its end. In other words, a moment of blinding, seering pain.

Eventually I looked around. The location was beautiful. It was on a hillside, in an old section of the cemetery, in a special grotto overlooked by a statue of Our Lady of the Assumption. The headstone was big and heavy and I understood why the cemetery manager remembered it so easily. It was no doubt a premium stone. Cindy's maiden name was written on one side and her married name on the other, a testament to her married-but-filing-for divorce status. Buried 10 months ago, the earth still hadn't settled flat as with the older graves next to it; there were a few planted flowers starting to sprout and uneven blades of grass coming up.

There were no flowers from visitors. Some others had Christmas and Easter gifts from the family to Mom, but Cindy's didn't. The only thing around was someone who had known her 23 years earlier and not forgotten that he had once loved her, and he believed that she may have briefly loved him back, and that the story had several unhappy endings. How can you lose what you've long lost — and almost forgotten? The answer was right in front of me.

There was one more element I'd like to share. The gravestone had a butterfly on it, right where a cross would normally be. I didn't get it at first. Cindy wasn't a butterfly person, and not one prone to collecting cute stuff or putting butterfly stickers on things like that. On the way home, in my car, I think I understood. Cindy wasn't a butterfly person, this wasn't a favorite thing of hers to remember her by: Cindy is the butterfly. That's what her family was saying. They'd known it for years, for her whole life, during her depressions and struggles, her ups and downs. I've compared Cindy to a diamond, but diamonds are hard. Butterfly is right. Beautiful. Fragile. Short-lived.

I won't tell you what I said grave-side. I said the thing I came to say, and paid my last respects, and prayed for her. If God answered my prayers to find the grave, which I believe he did, I have faith He will answer the others.

Glenn Greenwald's been beating a series of strawmen on his blog. Jonah Goldberg delivers a fine smack-down today.

Glenn Greenwald [Jonah Goldberg]

Every time I read this guy I become more convinced that he revs up his rage so he can make the leaps across his staggering ignorance. He writes:

Notwithstanding the fact that the Bush administration has violated every tenet of this strain of conservatism for the last five years, conservatives will not be permitted to distance themselves from this administration — as they are transparently and pitifully trying to do now that Bush's presidency is failed and is dying a rapid death (see e.g., this characteristically dishonest attempt by Jonah Goldberg to characterize the two failed Republican Presidents - Nixon and Bush - as "liberals" in order to imply that their failure is not a failure of conservatives; funny how we never heard any of that when The Commander had approval ratings in the 60s). With rare and noble exception, conservatives did not repudiate Bush until very recently. To the contrary, they have vigorously supported and claimed him (while he was popular), and he is their creation. They are and should be stuck with him.

Me: Glenn - If you don't know the answer to something, just ask. You look very silly trying to judge who is and is not a conservative when you don't even bother to read what conservatives say. I have criticized compassionate conservatism for at least five years and running. I believe National Review editorially opposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the Medicare expansion, his immigration proposals and — hooboy — Harriet Mier's nomination just to name a few. Kate O'Beirne opposed in our pages Bush's Faith Based Initiative. Ramesh — who vexes ye mightily for continually taking you to the woodshed — has attacked "big government conservatism" more times than I can count, going back — as most of these positions do — to when Bush had high approval ratings. I believe my first criticism of compassionate conservatism came in 1998 . As early as 2001 , I was warning that "compassionate conservatism" was blurring the lines between Clintonism and conservatism. And so on. Anyone who has actually read my stuff in the last few years would know that my complaints are hardly new or related to Bush's poll numbers.

Oh, and just to be clear, I'm not repudiating Bush nor do I think his is a failed presidency — yet. I still support him on the war on terror (the only thing which informs your understanding of any issue, it seems). I still support his conservative proposals and accomplishments, applaud his judicial appointments, and I'd be willing to bet his numbers all go significanly upward well before the end of his presidency. I criticize him where criticism is due. And my column was hardly "dishonest" — a term you shamefully use whenever you disagree with something. In fact, you never tried to even explain why it was dishonest, as QandO notes.
Posted at 7:15 AM

Almost the weekend. Busy, busy, busy until then.

Take care. Enjoy the day.

I wear this crown of thorns
upon my liar's chair
full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair
beneath the stains of time
the feelings disappear
you are someone else
I am still right here

what have I become?
my sweetest friend
everyone I know
goes away in the end
and you could have it all
my empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

if I could start again
a million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way...

On that happy note, I'm outta here. Good night.

Richard Cohen exposes posers.

The commentary, though, is also what I do, and it will make the point that Colbert was not just a failure as a comedian but rude. Rude is not the same as brash. It is not the same as brassy. It is not the same as gutsy or thinking outside the box. Rudeness means taking advantage of the other person's sense of decorum or tradition or civility that keeps that other person from striking back or, worse, rising in a huff and leaving. The other night, that person was George W. Bush....

Why are you wasting my time with Colbert, I hear you ask. Because he is representative of what too often passes for political courage, not to mention wit, in this country. His defenders — and they are all over the blogosphere — will tell you he spoke truth to power. This is a tired phrase, as we all know, but when it was fresh and meaningful it suggested repercussions, consequences — maybe even death in some countries. When you spoke truth to power you took the distinct chance that power would smite you, toss you into a dungeon or — if you're at work — take away your office.

But in this country, anyone can insult the president of the United States. Colbert just did it, and he will not suffer any consequence at all. He knew that going in. He also knew that Bush would have to sit there and pretend to laugh at Colbert's lame and insulting jokes. Bush himself plays off his reputation as a dunce and his penchant for mangling English. Self-mockery can be funny. Mockery that is insulting is not. The sort of stuff that would get you punched in a bar can be said on a dais with impunity. This is why Colbert was more than rude. He was a bully.

I read about half of Colbert's transcript on Kos. Colbert's remarks weren't funny on paper. Maybe as delivered, it was. But whether you thought it was funny or not, Cohen makes a good case about posers.

Dr. Sanity is pretty tough here:

Read the entire piece, which accurately [delineates] the significant difference between humor and displacement. Both are psychological defenses. True humor offers a catharsis for more than just the person using it; and while displacement may be funny to some, it is the childish/adolescent verion of humor that is more a disguised cruelty. [...]

This kind of humor is found in children and adolescents mostly. The "ha-ha!" shout of the character Nelson, who makes fun of everyone's pain; while blissfully unaware of his own family's psychopathology in The Simpsons is an example; or one of the three stooges beating up on another.

Kids love that kind of humor because it lets them act out their aggression in a slightly less...physical manner (and therefore a more socially appropriate). While displacement may be a bit psychologically healthier than actually physically hitting the President over the head with a baseball bat, it is hard to see how those on the "caring and compassionate" left--so sensitized to others people's feelings-- are not exactly aware of how insensitive and loutish it was to attack someone who cannot respond. They rationalize their own behavior by making Bush a monster. This is only projection, however.

In short, Colbert's behavior and those who approve of it and see him as some kind of courageous hero; are the typical kind of adolescent behaviors that allow the immature and uninsightful to be indifferent to their own cruelty and insensitivity towards others.

This is why no one at the dinner actually laughed at Colbert's jokes. Such rudeness in the name of humor is actually painful to witness (i.e., not funny) because when someone resorts to it, they are unintentionally revealing their own deepest--and darkest--soul.

How come we're considered being in a low-inflation economy, even the price of everyone's house has doubled in the past five years, the price of gas is up 150%, college tuition is up 40%, and medical insurance up a whole bundle (almost double digits every year?)

I don't get it. We've had inflation, but somehow it hasn't counted as inflation. Has anyone done a study indicating how much people's actual living expense have gone up since 2001? You know, mortgage, utilities, property taxes, food, gas, and the like?

One of my pet peeves is people who make snap judgments. They hear one or two pieces of information, and snap, make an on-the-spot decision that they're confident in and already begin to defend. Reading some of the blog comments around cyberspace about C. confirms this reflexive thinking.

We sometimes look for facts that fits our preconceived templates, which allows us to rant and bloviate. But this thing really points out what many of us know: It's always a good idea to suspend judgment until you've got a lot of facts, and even then, to make an effort to imagine walking in the other person's shoes.

C. was vilified — absolutely vilified — by total strangers. It never seemed to occur to some people that unless you've taken care of an autistic child for 10 years while trying to care for a severely ill and temporarily unemployed husband who's going through three liver transplants and has saddled you with massive expenses, maybe you don't know what you're talking about.

You can call someone a gold-digger, or you can have a little sophistication and realize that all she was doing was following her divorce lawyer's advice. Shy (or exhausted) people do that, you know. Unfortunately, the lawyer's strategy was so novel (make the grandparents pay) that it made the news. It never occurs that maybe this is a hard case, and hard cases make bad law. Cindy was always a sensitive soul. She killed herself, by the way, on the same day Tucker Carlson had such big laughs at her expense. I'm not saying cause and effect. I don't know the exact timing. I'll suspend judgment.

I don't want to overdo this. C. was a short affair 23 years ago, and it ended badly, and we were out of each other's lives for good, and she was without a doubt perfectly happy that way. She left school after only one semester, so I never really saw her again.

But there's something about those early affairs that stick with you, as we all know. It was a timing thing. It was the first time in my life that I was able to do what I wanted without having to tell anybody what I was doing, who I was doing it with, or where I was going, or when I'd be back. One of our dates was the first time I'd had Chinese food. It was the first time I was offered a drink when meeting my date's father — he drank Manhattans. Generally, just the first time people treated me like an adult, and I got the freedom to act like an adult. I didn't act like an adult, but that takes time and practice, neither of which I had at 18.

FWIW.

So after working hours tonight I did a search on an ex-girlfriend. I get bored sometimes. Since C. had a common first and last name, I've never bothered to do a search on her. Even tonight, I figured it was a long shot. But I found her. Didn't like what I found.

Some background: C. was a smart, beautiful woman with a lovely smile, piercing blue eyes, golden blonde hair, and an unfortunate tendency toward fits of depression (she went near catatonic with depression one night, then snapped out of it). She lived in a wealthy suburb, a dentist's daughter, and commuted to campus. We met in freshman calculus the first day (asked her coming out of class to get a cup of coffee, which just seemed so grown up, you know, and after all we were in college now. Neither of us actually drank coffee.)

We had a contentious affair with lots of ups and downs. (There's a story there about Halloween night ... she was dressed as a ship's captain and she was with a guy dressed as Sylvester, you know, the cartoon cat. So I got into a fight with Sylvester the Cartoon Cat in front of Paul's Tavern on South Orange Avenue for reasons I no longer quite recall.) C. and I split up in November when I decided to return to my high school girlfriend, K. This occurred after, of course, C. had disposed of Sylvester.

A little while later, K. ran into C. on campus (C. returning the confrontation), knowing by now all about the affair. K. grimly noted that C. was much prettier than herself and complimented me "on my taste." I knew there would be hell to pay for that. And there was. Lots.

But anyway, a few weeks earlier, while we were still going out, C. let me borrow her car one week, a week when her entirely big Catholic family was away. I'd run back and forth from the South Orange campus to her parent's place up in the Chatham hills. It was all very exciting. I remember driving to campus one morning, just after dawn, on South Orange Avenue, the clouds gathered in the valleys and the sun peering through and burning off the mist on the road. I was 18 and just out of my parent's place for the first time, and I thought this is what grown-up independence is like: spending nights in mansions on hills and gorgeous dentist's daughters lending you their cars in mornings and you just drive away the whole open road in front of you and nothing but peace and tranquility for as far as the eyes can see. It was going to be just like that. I knew it.

Well, I went back to K. C., a little upset, left me a nasty note under my dorm door. She called me a liar and a cheater and ended with the tag line (a running gag between us), "So what was your name again?" Except this time one of us meant it.

A year later, done with K. for good, I called C. up. She took the call, which was a pleasant surprised. I apologized thoroughly. She said apology accepted, and we had a nice talk of an hour or so. We agreed to meet. So once again I took the drive out to Chatham, positive this time I'd get it right, and she had agreed after all that we'd go out. Nope. C. was setting me up. When I got to the door, her mother let me in, briefly, and then told me that Cindy wanted me to go away. Ouch. I appreciated the irony, though. I drove back to the dorms, no clouds in the valleys, no sun peering through and burning off the mist, with my own junker of a car, wiser and sadder. It took the lovely KDD ('nother story) quite a few hours of emotional support to cheer me up, but we both agreed I'd gotten just desserts. That was that. Lesson learned, understood, grokked.

So, fast-forward 23 years, tonight on a whim I search for C. Found search results right away. Turns out she was involved in a messy, well-publicized, notorious, precedent-setting divorce. Her husband had gotten terminally ill, and went through a brutal series of operations (three liver transplants in three months). When he got out of the hospital the last time, C. recommended that he go back to his parents' house while his parents supported her and her two sons in a separate household. She eventually sued for divorce and wanted $20,000 a month in support from her husband's parents because she'd become accustomed to that lifestyle. She also had an autistic child in the local school system and wanted to keep the family home, and the mortgage on that was nearly $5k a month.

During the publicity, which included stories on NBC (Tucker Carlson and the boys had a great laugh at her expense), the Star-Ledger and New York Post (and all over the legal Websites), she was painted as a heartless gold-digger and a villain. She was laughed at openly. From my quick glean of the facts, and because I knew her, I can say that she had been completely misjudged by people who didn't know her. C. was anything but a gold-digger. She was anything but heartless. She was a jewel. But she got caught up in the gears and was trying to get free, you know, to find her way through. She didn't make it. During the height of the news cycle, she took her own life.

I've looked, but I can't find any more info than that.

RIP, Cindy.

Caitlyn Flanagan on her forced march to the GOP:

The Democrats made a huge tactical error a few decades ago. In the middle of doing the great work of the '60s--civil rights, women's liberation, gay inclusion--we decided to stigmatize the white male. The union dues-paying, churchgoing, beer-drinking family man got nothing but ridicule and venom from us. So he dumped us. And he took the wife and kids with him.

And now here we are, living in a country with a political and economic agenda we deplore, losing election after election and wondering why.

It's the contempt, stupid.

Here is an article about the persistence of native and tribal beliefs despite globalism. I was interested in this part:

On a recent trip through West Africa, I saw how native religions persist - to the identical frustration of Christian evangelists and Islamist missionaries. In Indonesia a few years earlier, I met "Muslims" clinging to beliefs whose roots pre-dated Islam. From Sulawesi to Sonora, "Christian" practices aren't always Vatican-approved.

Great Woden's Beard! What a damned lie. May the writer of these calumnies be thrown into the mouth of the Midgard Serpent.

The Western Seminarian is a new blog run by a friend of mine. Today he has a nice, linked-filled essay defending the war.

In every age, I think, and to every generation comes a challenge, or perhaps an opportunity to fight the dark, the evil that overtakes us. What is a continual su[r]prise, is that so many who live in the west who benefit from it[]s many freedoms and cultural advantages go over to the 'dark side' and fight against the West, undermine its efforts, ultimately seeking to destroy it, although they certainly don't necessarily see their actions in this way.

The ongoing discovery of traitors in the CIA is a case in point. (Yes, I said traitors, yes, I know the punishment for treason.) Here individual after individual is turning up who is willing to undermine the country, its military, and its efforts, in p[u]rsuit of political ideals that are ultimately destructive to the country, and in what ends up being support of terrorists and dictators. But our media and the left have trouble calling someone a 'Traitor' even when they directly spill top secret information during time of war.

One thing I've noted: The Left, for the most part, doesn't consider us in a war. I've had this discussion with many people online and offline. In general, the Right sees this as the beginning stages of a world war. The Left sees us as crazy and says this isn't a war.

I would say this isn't a war — yet. I would've thought that 9-11 would've been enough to trigger a national sense of purpose in taking out a series of nations that support terrorism, a World War II-sized effort. It wasn't, and the moment was squandered. Bush is largely at fault, but not entirely. His leadership was poor. His "go shopping" line about what Americans should do in the wake of the terrorist attacks, his declaration of an open-ended war on an abstraction, appearance of cozying up to the Saudi royal family all were disheartening, and his shortcuts in Afghanistan (Tora Bora, for example) cost us momentum and allowed our natural internal divisions to flare up and fester. Perhaps no leader could've prevented that; it's easy to second guess; and the Left certainly holds its share of the blame for failing to give Bush the benefit of the doubt, being as obstructionist as possible, and not allowing him to work his plan the best he could.

People will go along with some infringement of civil liberties, and even put up with some excesses — if there's a limit. But we have to know what the victory conditions will look like and thus when things will return to normal. Instead, Bush declared the war open-ended, saying it will last generations, like the Cold War. Realistically, we could've raised an army of a couple of million men and pounded every terrorist-sponsoring nation between Tripoli to Kabul to dust. In about three years. Instead, we're playing pattycake, as American Digest puts it.

Meanwhile, the left continues to hurt the War effort, almost guaranteeing things will get far worse, not better. (Our enemies are counting on the Left -- their entire strategy is based on strenghtening the anti-war movement, just as General Giap's was in Vietnam. Why the Left can't figure this out, I don't know.) And if things get really out of hand, that is, if Bush doesn't succeed in Iraq and Afghanistan and we get hit again, we could see the violent breaks between Right and Left you see in Latin American countries.

... has an interesting take on the problem with U.S. wars. I don't know if I agree (or disagree). It's just a different take.

White guilt makes our Third World enemies into colored victims, people whose problems--even the tyrannies they live under--were created by the historical disruptions and injustices of the white West. We must "understand" and pity our enemy even as we fight him. And, though Islamic extremism is one of the most pernicious forms of evil opportunism that has ever existed, we have felt compelled to fight it with an almost managerial minimalism that shows us to be beyond the passions of war--and thus well dissociated from the avariciousness of the white supremacist past.

Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, works by the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization campaigns.) Once the stigma is in place, one need only be anti-American in order to be "good," in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy and power in relation to America. (People as seemingly desperate as President Jacques Chirac and the Rev. Al Sharpton are devoted pursuers of the moral high ground to be had in anti-Americanism.) This formula is the most dependable source of power for today's international left. Virtue and power by mere anti-Americanism. And it is all the more appealing since, unlike real virtues, it requires no sacrifice or effort--only outrage at every slight echo of the imperialist past.

One thing that irritates me is the phrase, "ban gay marriage." As in, "Evangelicals want to ban gay marriage." Like "reproductive rights," the phrase is so misrepresentative of the actual position that it can only be considered a lie.

No one wants to "ban gay marriage." People may make whatever lifelong commitments they want, and if they want to find a minister or whatever to claim a blessing on it, bully for them. The real issue is twofold: It's about changing the definition of marriage so that gender is not a factor, and imposing that change on everyone else. Marriage is a legal contract supported by the state, that is, us. The movement toward gay "marriage" is an offensive, not a defensive, movement. Homosexuals and liberals want to impose their definitions on the rest of us.

But of course the propagandists need to cover up the offensive (as opposed to defensive) nature of their program. So they make it sound like gay-marriage proponents are on the defensive, you know, casting them as the brave defenders of rights against the hidebound forces of theocracy and traditionalism. It's a lie, and a clever trick. Professional journalists should know better that to permit this kind of propaganda to seep into their writing. The problem is once this kind of loaded term is accepted, it changes the terms of the debate. And people don't see the rhetorical sleight-of-hand.

Garbage in, garbage out. If you do not think in precise terms, using the proper words for things, you end up being tools for propagandists. And if lots of people permit it, what you end up with is cultural rot.

Don't get me wrong. Same-sex marriage is only the latest symptom, not a cause, of existing cultural rot. By "culture," I mean thought. Just as a dysfunctional person will have thought distortions, a dysfunctional society will have group thought distortions. That is, the terms of the debate will be such that they produce absurd results. The job of the professional writer is to use language in a precise way that helps protect readers against propaganda and innoculate others against its use.

If a culture is seriously considering two men as "married," then the group thought distortions and the cultural rot is very deep already. "Civil union" or "domestic partnership" are the proper terms. "Marriage" is not. "Ban" is wrong word, "impose" is the right one. So the correct phrasing would be, "resist a change in the definition of marriage" or "preserve the traditional definition of marriage." (By the way, one hallmark of the Left is to call its efforts to impose its values on the rest of society a "defensive" movement.)

After all, even if a constitutional amendment passes, gay people will still be able to go to the Unitarian Church and conduct a marriage. They'll still be able to live together and in peace with their neighbors. No one will care. They just won't be able to force us to call it a marriage, and somehow, support its monogamy. (BTW, I have no idea why its in society's interest to support the monogamy of homosexuals; whether they are "faithful" or cheat in their affairs are none of our business and irrelevant, for the most part, to the social order, except in the most intrusive of senses.)

People who will accept same-sex "marriage" must necessarily consider all definitions contingent and unstable, and thus tend to take an intellectual and abstract approach to life. They will find it difficult to make any distinctions whatsoever, and that's no way to run a railroad.

To move in a different direction, this is not to say that the current definition of marriage is all right. It's not. It's currently a mess. From a civil standpoint, it's a legal contract — except one side can break the contract at any time and enforce its terms. Huh?

Wait. I thought epistemology preceded ontology. You can't say "what is" without answering "how do you know" first. I think. Oh wait. I'm wrong. You need to start with ontology, ("I see a world exists and the world is orderly") and then proceed to epistemology ("I believe the sensory data I am receiving, and in any case if I appear to receiving sensory data I must exist, thus this other stuff most likely probably exists, too.").

At which point you begin a dialogue between ontology and epistemology. "This appears to exist, and I know because ..., which tells me in turn that that exists, which I know because ..." Oh never mind. My epistemology sucks. My ontology isn't much better. And ethics, poetics, rhetoric and aesthetics, let's not even get into that ... just a jumble of half-formed things that at best I understand for fleeting moments.

I'm so gonna fail the final exam in the afterlife. You know, the question all of us philosophy-types fear will be asked: "Please come up with a coherent philosophy of ontology, epistemology and ethics. Take as much time as you need. Be prepared to defend your answer."