Sluggish times lead to …successful innovation! creativity! new ideas! weird new ideas!

I’m glad Jennifer Schuessler brought this up: The continued hang-wringing about the death of reading is driving me batty. Stop! 

Schuessler notes a great contribution to the Stop the Death-of-Reading Hysterics Club [e.a.]:

[T]he novelist Ursula Le Guin joins the fray with an elegant, wide-ranging essay aimed at deflating the N.E.A.’s alarmism (subscription required). The “hedonists” who love to disappear into serious books have been a minority in every age, Le Guin argues. What is falling by the wayside in our own time is social reading—the kind we do in order to be able to have “nonthreatening, unloaded, sociable conversations” with casual acquaintances. In 1841, strangers on the train could chat about whether Little Nell was going to be written out of Dicken’s latest serial. Today, we huddle by the water cooler debating whether Tony Soprano got whacked.

LeGuin correctly notes that our taste for stories hasn’t vanished. Our means of telling and communicating stories is evolving, along with our technology and our modern and ever-evolving way of life.

While that happens … at a glacial pace, all you book people: chill! 

Lots and lots of people read! They even buy books!
Serve the audience you have.

The vast right-wing conspiracy is dead:

In the old days, those who supported tax cuts for the wealthy worked closely with those who wanted to amend the constitution to ban gay marriage. Those who wanted to grow the size of the military made common cause with those who saw global warming as an environmentalist scare-tactic meant to interfere with free markets. Those who wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade also wanted to overturn campaign finance reform.

McCain, Huckabee and a nation of disconcerted Republican voters now threaten to reformulate that coalition.

Republicans in total, complete disarray—with a frontrunner they loathe and despise. What a crying shame. (I actually grew up among Republicans. I come by my cold-hearted hatred for them honestly.)

Via Mickey Kaus, who is vicious but possibly informative about John “Two Americas” Edwards’s decision to drop out of the race:

When is Rielle Hunter due? Soon, I should think. If her baby’s first words are “I’m the grandson of a mill worker!” that will be a clue.

Hmmm. Is this why he’s not endorsing anyone yet?

We are now officially in the post-9/11 era.

As The Politico notes, there’s an irony in the fact that the first politician to suffer 9/11 fatigue is Rudy Giuliani, at whose gentle prodding and urging we New Yorkers got back to “normal” within a couple of days after the terrorist attacks of September 2001. (The attacks, which took place about a mile from where I live, left my home smelling acrid for more than three months, so it’s not as if I could really ever forget the events of that day):

“Americans want to watch ‘America’s Top Model’ — and they really, really don’t want to be reminded that bad people want to kill them,” said Wilson, who worked for Giuliani’s 2000 Senate campaign and advised him informally this year. “Talking about 9/11 now is like ‘Remember the Maine.’”

This is true. It has always been true, because the way people cope with life—which can often be painful and difficult and challenging (particularly as you get older)—is by looking ahead to the future and leaving the past behind. That’s a good survival strategy, as long as you’ve got someone watching your back.

America should move forward. And why shouldn’t we entertain ourselves after working hard (which we Americans do, in order to afford our lifestyles)? Who wants to worry all the time, or be terrorized?

Nobody. But let’s make sure that we do not lull ourselves into complacency simply because the images of death and destruction in Iraq, among other places, no longer appear on our TV screens. There are people out there who hate us and they are plotting against us. Let’s not pretend they will go away if only we close our eyes.

California congressman Tom Lantos apparently believes it’s now time to speak truth to faux-power***:

“Two generations after the Holocaust, I never thought - I could not even have imagined - that within the structure of the United Nations there would be some who would attempt to de-legitimatize the Jewish State, the State of Israel, founded and built by the remnants of European Jewry and by the hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from Arab lands,” read Lantos’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day speech.

Lantos lamented the fact that the UN chamber was too often the setting for “shameless invective against Israel,” adding that he was “deeply grateful for the numerous principled statesmen of many lands who regularly stand up against this outrage.”

Where are these “principled statesmen of many lands who stand up against this outrage”? I wonder. I haven’t heard them speak out.

But never mind. There’s more from Lantos [e.a.]:

He went on to say that this point was highlighted in the Durban anti-Racism conference the weekend before the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.

“The United Nations was holding a conference meant to put an end to racism, a noble goal if ever there was one, but the occasion was hijacked by hate-filled and venomous leaders who perverted the noble idea of ending racism, and turned the conference into a lynch mob against Israel.

“As the situation galloped toward the surreal and the gathering veered away from its intended topics of ethnic violence, racism or slavery in many countries and toward condemnation of the one democratic state in the Middle East, it was sadly evident to me that this potentially history-making conference was becoming a travesty,” continued Lantos’s speech.

The congressman, whose mother was killed in Auschwitz, said that having experienced the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand, the Durban conference was the “most sickening and unabashed” display of hate for Jews he had seen since the Nazi period.

I’m grateful to Congressman Lantos, who is the chairman of the House Committe on Foreign Affairs, for his very speedy response—only six and a half years later—to the grotesque spectacle that was Durban.
One question: what’s he going to do about Durban II, which is in the planning stages?
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*** The UN is a useless organization, with no power and, in any case, no desire to use it even if it had power, even on behalf of good—or else it would have intervened in the many, many conflicts that have arisen since its establishment.

Nevertheless, it is among the “international institutions” favored by the left wing of the Democratic Party.

Ed Koch on Rudy Giuliani: “The beast is dead.”

He was a gracious loser, though, was our Rudy.

And McCain was an even more gracious—and sincere-sounding—winner.

Wind-up-doll Romney looked like he was about to cry.