I need an antidote to “civilization,” so I’m going to the beach.

Take a well deserved vacation from my blog, dear readers, and I’ll be back before you know it.

Some people are their own worst enemies. Marc Ambinder:

A paradox: when Wright’s sermons first saw the bandwith of air on ABC News and elsewhere, Obama allies and Wright supporters begged reporters to broadcast and publish the full sermons and to provide relevant context. Well, now the cable networks are content to let Wright talk for as long as he desires; CNN seemed to jettison their entire schedule last night in order to broadcast Wright’s entire speech to the NAACP. Everyone wanted Wright’s full context: now they have him.

Obama should have cut Wright loose a long time ago, as I’ve said before. I didn’t think Wright would go so far as to try to torpedo Obama’s candidacy, but that’s what I think he’s trying to do.

No, no, no—not the greedy, attention-craving, candidate-destroying one that everyone else is talking about.

This one:

Roger Waters brought Coachella to a close with an epic two-set performance that included playing all of “Dark Side of the Moon” and unleashing a giant inflated pig into the night sky. …

Waters’ biggest prop was an inflatable pig the size of a school bus that emerged while he played a version of “Pigs” from 1977’s capitalism critique, “Animals.”

The pig, which was led above the crowd from lines held on the ground, displayed the words “Don’t be led to the slaughter” and a cartoon of Uncle Sam wielding two bloody cleavers. The other side read “Fear builds walls.”

The underside of the pig simply read “Obama” with a checked ballot box alongside.

Ya know, I think I’ll pass on voting for Obama—if the opportunity arises, that is. But it’s looking less and less likely.

Roger Mudd was a stalwart of CBS News back during its “Tiffany Network” days and he’s an unabashedly old-fashioned kinda news guy:

Mr. Mudd remained in the forefront of CBS news through the events that shaped the last century: the March on Washington in 1963, the Kennedy presidency and assassination, the King and Robert Kennedy murders, the moon landing, Vietnam, Nixon’s resignation and the administrations of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. …

“We had no video, no Internet, no Blackberries,” he recalled. “But we also had no doubts about our values or our mission.” …

Mr. Mudd, a remarkably spry 80, minced no words: “Back then, we told the story from the beginning. There was no walking around and talking, no flapping of hands. There was just strong reporting … .

“Quality has dropped immeasurably,” he said.

True dat. Mudd also sees the evening news as something worth fighting to preserve.

  The Emmy Award-winning newsman was emphatic about the responsibility of broadcast journalism as he sees it.

“No matter what, the American people deserve a thoughtful and balanced account of what has happened in their world during the last 24 hours,” Mr. Mudd said. “I devoutly hope that the evening news will never disappear from our lives.”

Hmm. It would be good it the networks delivered real news, as the BBC World Service still does (when it is reporting rather than advocating for or militating against, that is).

It sounds to me that Mudd isn’t only lamenting the poor quality of the network news. He’s also mourning a collective social ritual that, once the evening news disappears, will never reappear in our lives—the collective experience of gathering around the electronic hearth at the same time every day that everybody else in America is doing it.

If I had my druthers, I’d work on getting families to eat dinner together every night. Then I’d worry about everybody in America sitting around and watching the “news” at the same time. But I know what he means:

Those were the days my friend
We thought they’d never end
We’d sing and dance forever and a day
We’d live the life we choose
We’d fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way.

(Those Were the Days) 

David Poland reports:

[The director Ang Lee has] become a more and more relaxed interview (as we found on his Lust, Caution LWD), the highlight so far being his discussion of The Ice Storm, which he says he should have called “The Fuck You Movie,” as the choice to do it was a direct response to having made “nice, heartwarming” films. He said, “A lady would come up to me and say, ‘I just loved Sense & Sensibility,’ and I’d just want to punch her in the face.”

This guy just managed to ruin not just that one movie but his entire oeuvre for me.

Dear Ang Lee: consider this the Fuck You post.

Obama supporters didn’t have an easy time of it on the tube this Sunday morning. From Chris Matthews to George Stephanopoulos (no links to transcripts available yet for those two) to Howard Kurtz, every host made it plain that the former messiah is now deep in the muck.

At Contentions, Jennifer Rubin also mentions more of the displeased—the NYT’s Bob Herbert and MoDo and, most tellingly, Howard Dean.

These bear the tell-tale signs of scorned lovers’ rants. Their once beloved candidate is now reviled, mocked and tossed overboard while they prepare for the possible return of their “ex” with all the unpleasantness that entails. And who is joining them?

Well, none other than Howard Dean, who until recently seemed to pursue strategies designed to either end the race early (Obama liked that) or to encourage delegates to respect the pledged delegate count (Obama really liked that). Yet Friday, for the first time, Dean uttered this: “I think the race is going to come down to the perception in the last six or eight races of who the best opponent for McCain will be. I do not think in the long run it will come down to the popular vote or anything else.”

The bottom line in all this backing-and-forthing among pundits about whether they’re for Obama or for Clinton [e.a.]?

[I]t may be that these people have something in common: none of them really wants to be on the wrong side when the Democratic race ends.

In other words: pundits are just like the politicians they cover—first of all, they’re political animals and they operate in their own self-interest.

But you knew that … right?

Obama was pummeled by Chris Matthews last night and he takes direct hits from Karl Rove in today’s WSJ (as does Hillary Clinton). But the unkindest cuts come from Joe Klein,:

In the course of six weeks, the American people learned that [Obama] was a member of a church whose pastor gave angry, anti-American sermons, that he was “friendly” with an American terrorist who had bombed buildings during the Vietnam era, and that he seemed to look on the ceremonies of working-class life — bowling, hunting, churchgoing and the fervent consumption of greasy food — as his anthropologist mother might have, with a mixture of cool detachment and utter bemusement. …

Yes, yes, the bulk of the sludge was caricature, and some of it, especially the stuff circulating on the Internet, was scurrilous trash. But there is an immutable pedestrian reality to American politics: you have to get the social body language right if you want voters to consider the nobler reaches of your message.

Not only that, but Klein claims that Hillary Clinton has found her sweet spot:

There was a warmth and a feistiness to Clinton in Pennsylvania — the very qualities that Obama was lacking. She had embraced the shameless rituals of politics, including some classic low-information signals, downing shots of Crown Royal and promising lower gas prices, attacking her opponent over trivia and threatening to “obliterate” Iran. It was enough to earn the ire of the New York Times editorial page, which harrumphed, “By staying on the attack and not engaging Mr. Obama on the substance of issues … she undercuts the rationale for her candidacy that led this page and others to support her: that she is more qualified, right now, to be President.”

Well, tsk-tsk and ahem!

Indeed. Klein closes by writing off his immediate cohort:

part of the problem with editorial writers — and, truth to tell, columnists like me — is a narrow definition of the qualifications necessary to be President. It helps to be a warrior, for one thing. It helps to be able to take a punch and deliver one — even, sometimes, a sucker punch. A certain familiarity with life as it is lived by normal Americans is useful; a distance from the élite precincts of academia, where unrepentant terrorists can sip wine in good company, is essential. Hillary Clinton has learned these lessons the hard way; Barack Obama thinks they are “the wrong lessons.” The nomination is, obviously, his to lose. But the presidency will not be won if he doesn’t learn that the only way to reach the high-minded conversation he wants, and the country badly needs, is to figure out how to maneuver his way through the gutter.

Klein apparently thinks that engaging low-information voters means getting into the gutter.

Apart from that absurd claim (see these posts, which include the words “low+information+voters”; see also this post—and in fact many of the posts I’ve written about Obama, beginning in early 2007), I couldn’t have said it any better myself.

Mark Steyn reads a New York Times editorial and detects a price that Hillary supporters will have to pay:

I’ve been mulling over that weirdly hysterical anti-Hillary editorial in yesterday’s New York Times in which the voice of America’s liberal establishment turned on the candidate it had endorsed only a couple of months previously for going negative, “waving the bloody shirt of 9/11″, etc.

If I were a timeserving party hack - which is to say a “superdelegate” - wondering about my support for Hillary, Pennsylvania ought to confirm the shrewdness of my judgment: Obama’s a hopelessly weak candidate with minimal appeal beyond blacks and upscale white liberals who enjoy the kinky frisson of racial guilt. But, if I were a timeserving party hack who reads the Times, I’d be struck by the ferocity of its assault on a woman it’s admired for 15 years and I’d be thinking, whoa, I don’t want that kind of publicity if that’s the price of sticking with Hill…

And the number of people who qualify for membership in polite society grows ever smaller.

“Comrade Lenin Cleanses the Earth of Filth”

I’ve been busy. And, besides, I have nothing brilliant to add to the incomprehensibly huge volume of words being written about the politics of the day.

Maybe I’ll get inspired soon.
Hang tight. I’m never gone from the blog for too long.

Young authors embrace the thought process

That’s reassuring.
(from a review of three novels in the L.A. Times)