This post might be titled 'Counter-blast To Mr. Crawl.' The column in question actually appeared in our paper the day after Thanksgiving.

OK, so the guy's coming from the left, and I tend to disagree with him--big deal. Maybe it's not so much what he says as how he says it. In this case we'll ignore his initial misrepresentations and start with his characterization of liberals/Democrats as having tried for too long to make nice with Republicans despite callous treatment in return. Funny, that sounds amazingly like what conservatives have been saying about Republicans in Congress--that they too often truckle to the Left! After more misrepresentations he explains, "The reason it's OK to hate the Republican leadership is because it is a hateful group."

Oh, so does this column qualify as "hate speech?" Who's full of hate--other than *you,* Mr. Crawl? Your bitterness betrays you.

Anyhow, this leads him to trace the supposed trend to the bad, wicked, naughty, evil Nixon and his Southern Strategy of Doom. A South Carolina background evidently implicates the late Lee Atwater in "ugly, dirty, personal politics." Crawl sees fit, without explanation, to skip the intervening years in order to designate Karl Rove, "young Bush's Rasputin," Atwater's successor in those dark arts. (We all know, of course, that Louisiana has long presented a model of *squeaky-clean* politics, and that native choirboy Corporal Cue-Ball Carville was Bill Clinton's Scout-worthy chaplain.) Meanwhile, he laments, Congress was taken over by "the worst the South had to offer"--Newt Gingrich et al. Crawl gives no reason for this judgment, so we may chalk it up to his irrational biases. (Funny, I was under the impression that the South's worst were running the *executive* branch at the time.) Speaker Gingrich eventually revealed some failings and left office voluntarily. Still, there may be some truth to what I used to say about him: that he had "more character in his little finger than Bill Clinton [did] in his big wiener."

Crawl crowns his tirade with a pathetic complaint about the GOP's treatment of Slick-man: "I've never seen such hatred directed at an American president as the right wing spewed at Clinton." Really? You ought to look around now, Mr. Crawl, at the left wing's venomous loathing for the younger Bush! Maybe you should even consider looking at yourself, though it's often easier to see one's own faults in others.

"[T]o attack him in the manner the Republicans did was, to me, close to treason." Oh, come off it, Mr. Crawl--we know the constitutional definition of treason, and it doesn't involve hating the President. It's not as if these Republicans were selling national-security secrets to Beijing for campaign cash!

So Crawl's decided he'll never vote for a Republican again. Fine. He can vote any way he wants. But his choice inspires me: Mr. Crawl, I'll never read one of your columns again. I may deface your arrogant mug printed on the page, but I'll ignore the text--except possibly to rip it out. Go suck printer's ink.

While still working on what I thought would be my next entry, I'm finding myself annoyed enough to interject this one first: Media criticism, naturally. I made the mistake of paying attention to a TV show, evidently a spinoff of the one I mentioned before. What started as an intriguing mystery eventually revealed itself as an incredibly disgusting, particularly insulting play on the old formula--which, if you thought about it, didn't really make sense. Metaphorically, at least, it's worth throwing up over. I guess it doesn't pay to watch the crap being written nowadays, so I'll be more careful to stick with the kind of "crap" you see on the old news and public-affairs programming. Yes, it can be maddening too, but I tend not to find it so disturbing as you might think. I don't want to blow Dan Rather's head off, either, unlike some people around here.

Meanwhile I've discovered another "resolution" I should have kept: Writing my posts offline. For some reason working with a saved draft led to a hideous mess, with duplicates and fragments posted/published in disordered sequence. OK, I've learned.

Time for a little more media criticism. I'll start with a TV show I have a certain amount of respect for--the one about forensic investigators in Las Vegas. My regard for the program did lessen on the revelation of a melodramatically improbable back story. (The plots are overly convoluted, too.) Many viewers no doubt object to the graphic presentation, which I can understand. My current complaint, however, is related to what seems an unrealistic portrayal of a certain manner of death, namely throat-slashing. I'm no expert on this subject, not (yet) having needed to employ deadly force! Available info, though, suggests that it doesn't kill as immediately as the writers seem to think--especially when only the vessels on one side are severed. Failure to stop blood to the brain would obviously tend to prolong consciousness, and there are cases (like one just covered the other night on one network) of individuals' surviving substantial blood loss. At any rate, I don't suspect the victim would calmly hold his last pose.

Speaking of violence, Mr. Quincy Turpentine has another (stupid-looking) film out about idiots killing each other. Naturally the critics find it ever so awesome. Funny how the cultural left loves homicide. My opinion: Artistic dreck is still dreck.

Now for newsprint. As previously noted, our local paper presents columnists of different persuasions on its op-ed page. One whose views I don't share is a guy I'll call Crawl. His latest piece is an objection to the flap over that movie about the Reagans that See BS dumped. Where to start? With the exception of the _New York Times_'s editorial section, Mr. Crawl denies the alleged "liberal" tendency in the mainstream media. Well, I'm aware of copious documentation, and I'm not the only person here who's noticed such bias firsthand. Furthermore I keep hearing that the _Times_ itself has degenerated from what it used to be, having muddled its formerly separate reporting and editorial functions to the point where it's more of an advocacy organ than the respected news outlet of yore. It still leads, though; word is that the Big Three networks, at least, take their cues from the _Times_--which may explain why they sometimes seem to be covering the same stories at the same moment!

The cranky Mr. Crawl faults conservatives for opposing the Reagan project because it didn't sufficiently dramatize his presumed greatness. I don't think that was their *primary* beef. Let me just say this about that: I believe it was Bill O'Reilly who summed up the work's distortion by comparing it with a hypothetical movie about the Clintons--written by Rush Limbaugh and starring Dennis Miller and Ann Coulter! (Hey, there's an idea...)

Since I've been moved to post now, it seems fitting to comment on the 40th anniversary of The JFK Incident. It's always been a cultural reference point: people are said to recall exact circumstances of how the news found them. Well, I may have been a bit young for that, because I'm not sure how it happened in my case. What I guess is my earliest memory of it involves riding downtown in a car with my dad while annoyed about having to go to school--while someone on the radio said something about the President's wearing, or not wearing, a hat. The only part that makes sense now didn't then: the comment about hats. It was only later that I understood that JFK was blamed for the demise of mens' hats. I guess we've recovered from that trend, sort of.

Originally I was going to add more about my relevant memories but have decided not to, proceeding to what may count as my main point. In retrospect what people remember is less the "facts" than how they reacted to them. This seems to explain JFK's perceived greatness: it was the response he evoked in others. None of his epigones seems capable of the same, but then the culture's changed, too, as most of us know.

I finally did it: posted an item in alt.sci.planetary satirizing that "cyberjerk" I mentioned early in the history of this blog. Only recently I learned that, for whatever reason, we at this ISP were no longer prevented from letting the world see our articles. Then one of that guy's longer harangues made it through my filters--and I knew I had to do something with it. Ironically the subject is "Killing trolls [etc.]"; one gets the impression he easily projects his own negatives onto other Net users. I edited his text with an eye toward ridicule and put it back up. If I never see a response to it, fine. I did my "duty."

Let's hear it for the Ninth Circus Court! (Chorus of booing, real or imitation flatulence, etc.) "A government of lawyers, not of men"--under the judge's gavel, all the way up to the Nine black-robed Bench-Riders in the East. Folks, it doesn't have to be this way.

It's been a while since I logged anything here. Well, summers's winding down, and school's gearing up. Man, am I glad I'm not a student.

Since this is where I like to complain for the record, maybe I just hadn't been annoyed enough to set down any perceived grievances. That's changed; here's one: Sunday I was indulging in the questionable habit of watching TV network news--the Evil News, as some of us call it here. Mickey Mouse--I mean ABC--presented an obviously slanted story on Glacier National Park. I knew Glacier National Park. Glacier National Park was a friend of mine...OK, I once resided briefly near Kalispell. The subject involved melting glaciers, which the reporter quickly attributed to human-released carbon dioxide, while the screen showed heavy expressway-style traffic. We were obviously supposed to think our cars were melting Glacier's glaciers! Considering that the globalarmists' hypothesis of anthropogenic warming has *never* been established--though people may think it has because the mainstream media began to report it that way a few years ago--this was mere tilted propaganda. It's that proverbial media bias, all the more insidious because those who demonstrate it seem to remain unaware it exists; they really believe their own left/elite views represent those of a moderate majority.

One more note on globalarmism: Somewhere on the big tube not long ago I saw a program showing how a guy (a scientist, I think) was able to show a correlation between the solar-activity (sunspot) cycle and Earth's temperature, his theory involving cosmic rays' impact on cloud formation, modulated by the sun's magnetic field. Interesting; sounds as if the warmists have been barking up the wrong tree all along!

Speaking of leftists: How about that attack Demo Al Frankenstein, the Terror of St. Louis Park? What a schmuck. The clown should stick to comedy.

That Minneapolis suburb, for what it's worth, is known locally as "St. Jewish Park." It used to be home to a certain uncle of mine, though he's all over the country now. Not Jewish, he's some sort of Evangelical--though his son once called him an "Amish Quaker"--and he looks like a reactionary Muslim.

Here's a trivial piece of new info: I've heard second- or thirdhand why our local paper, the _Travesty_, often has such substandard headlines. The claim is that the guy who writes them is hypersensitive, so that coworkers dare not criticize his work. What a joke! *Fire* him, maybe!

And now: More film criticism!

This time I was eating dinner and cleaning up in the kitchen while the other of my two housemates watched a movie in the next room. This recent flick was evidently someone's idea of an updated fairytale--which took itself way too seriously. Early on, from what little I'd been told, I began to suspect the gimmick: a secret Fountain of Youth. That belongs in the (honorable) realm of Fantasy; it didn't work in this relatively modern setting. (Not only did this McGuffin keep people from aging, it apparently rendered them unkillable, which is way over the top!) The plot proved predictable, the characters wooden. See the strings being pulled; watch as the illogically creepy villain follows the mandatory rule: when in trouble, pull a gun and grab the conveniently-placed wench. Another gal sensibly hits the badguy on the head with some big stick--fatally. Such a blow *might* kill a man--but if it was so damaging, why did it take him--still apparently conscious--five seconds to hit the ground? What followed was so absurd I had to retreat to another floor and (horrors!) further delay my dessert. I'd gotten annoyed enough, in fact, to write this later.

Of the various holes in the story line, I'll mention one which might even be claimed racist: In their thousands of years' habitation of this continent, the aboriginals presumably didn't catch on to this water source's peculiar properties; it took some Big Knives!

In the two months since this blog was last published, I've had a few ideas about further subjects to inflict on the readership--if there *is* any--but seem to have forgotten much of them. I can maybe blame this in part on the unexplained glitch in Blogger that kept me from signing in most of the time. Anyhow, now I can report having actually seen the phrase "white studies" elsewhere: a conservative columnist who reported that such a program actually exists. She gave no specifics, however, and I don't even quite recall who she was....

And now for something completely different: film criticism!

The subject only comes up now because, due to budgetary limitations, I share my home with two relatives, one of whom is a techno-savvy videophile who's installed his own high-definition satellite TV system. Unfortunately the layout here means that when he's watching his big set, while I'm on my computer and listening mostly to classical music, it's sometimes hard for me to ignore the TV/movie noise from the next room. A few weeks ago he decided to watch a certain critically-acclaimed work from the mid-90s by--let's call him--Quincy Turpentine. (I recall at least one of the nation's most famous film critics [who would be known in my family as "Dead Gene and Fat Roger"] taking a scene from this yarn about two hit men some years back and explaining how it showed the director's art; the movie wasn't just a pointlessly violent piece of junk!)

Well, I had a problem with the opening/closing scene (the story, I guess, mostly takes place in flashback)--in which, thanks to filmmaker string-pulling, the central pair of professional gunmen happen to be minding their own business in a funky diner when an unlikely couple of amateurs tries to rob the place. I think even an ignorant wannabe gang-banger would realize a robbery doesn't go down as depicted here. Snub-nosed revolvers? Try "broad side of a barn." And don't go waving it in *my* face; it's "use it or lose it"--and I wouldn't wait. But Mr. Turpentine has to go for a cliche that Dead Gene and Fat Roger, in an interesting show I once happened to see, labeled the "talking killer." Just when we'd like to see a crook get his head blown off, we get a speech instead, and it seems to drag on for minutes. (Funny, nobody comes through the door now.) Hollywood persists in regarding weapons as dramatic devices to enhance character interaction: Violence is cool! Huh-huh....

Speaking of white types, I was going to mention an item from our local paper, the Lake Traverse _Travesty_. It's not really such a bad publication, though it commonly runs dopily-worded headlines and other goofs. Its editorial page offers a variety of views. Within the past few weeks there appeared a letter from a local, likely lefty, Lutheran (I think) pastor--and part-time roofer. Now, I've seen it claimed that the Lutheran clergy tends to be further to the left than other denominations', though these guys also are said to keep their politics out of the pulpit. (By no means do I wish to dump on Lutheranism, having been reared in that tradition myself.)

$#|+! That's the second time tonight Bugger's *lost* my text when I tried to post it! (The first time, it claimed to have recovered it, but it hadn't.) OK, I'll write it all offline and paste it in. I don't need this.

Sorry for the interruption. Anyhow, presumed populist Pastor K. wrote to argue against war with Iraq. He writes well, too. Unfortunately his "argument" consists of stringing together politically-correct complaints about US history, then evoking the gospel dictum, "Let him without sin cast the first stone." That doesn't work in this context. As for his list of "our" offenses, maybe I shouldn't bother--though, to deal with its beginning, I'll note that territorial conquest and slavery were not invented here! In fact, the West was the first civilization to *abolish* slavery.

A curious sidelight to his antiwar point is his introduction of the Ojibwe expression _gichi-mookoman_, which he explains as "an unflattering term for white guy" literally meaning "big knife." Interestingly I'd gotten the impression long ago that some natives of the North American interior referred to the inhabitants of the young United States as "Big Knives" to distinguish them from the whites still representing European powers. Personally it doesn't strike me as negative--but then I collect knives (some of them big!) and archaic weaponry. Coincidentally it turns out that, roughly 500 years ago, German civilians carried an unusual variety of sword called the grosse Messer--literally "big knife!" I thought it cool enough that I eventually bought one from the catalog I'd found it in.

More on astrology and _Columbia_: Firstly I didn't mean to imply that such divination practices were invented solely in the West. China, by way of conspicuous example, developed its own system.

The _Columbia_ connection? Well, there's this *troll* who bills himself as an astrologer of note and, evidently, a champion of faith against scientism/materialism/naturalism. He writes fairly well, but in my opinion he's not advancing his cause. The guy, whose moniker I won't mention, maniacally cross-posts to newsgroups such as alt.sci.planetary, where his views are unwelcome. I've seen cranks come and go there over the years, but this clown takes the cake; he's always altering his name and address to evade readers' filters. He badly needs satirizing, but I haven't done it yet, my excuse being that my home ISP for some reason apparently doesn't allow for posting! Anyhow, he recently seemed to be *gloating* over the _Columbia_ disaster & what it means for NASA. One can unsparingly criticize the agency's manned space program, notably for putting all its eggs in one basket--but this cyberjerk was out of line. Unfortunately his response wasn't the worst.

While I'm at it: If you want to impress people with your ability to predict, get your prognostications/prophecies out there for people to see *in advance*. Predicting the past ain't good enough.

At about the time I launched this blog, current events dropped a horrific surprise on us. Yes, I mean the _Columbia_ disaster, which affected me as it apparently did the nation at large. Leaving aside the media hype, what I find most provocative is the timing: NASA's three incidents with astronaut fatalities all occurred within a span of a few days on the calendar over a 36-year period. There's one for the astrologers to figure out!

Not that I'm arguing for or against astrology. The subject, in fact, fits under the heading of White Studies, this blog's ostensible topic. At the very least I'd describe the practice in question as cultural baggage, in this case the baggage of Western Civilization. I might almost have titled the blog "In Defense of Western Civilization," because that's more or less (I think!) what it's about. White Studies is of course a more eye-catching formulation, offered in parody of the various racial/ethnic/gender/sex-related study programs you can find helping to balkanize the education world these days. It is *not* about any sort of white separatism/supremacy/racism.

My notion of "white," in fact, is rather inclusive, owing more to science than popular culture or tradition. We're talking North Africa to South Asia here! Yes, Islam is, regarding geographic origins, of the "white" world--which should be taken neither as praise nor blame. I'll admit I've never formally studied the subject, though I consider myself relatively well-informed about this culture, which in fact overlaps that of "the West."

It's not as if our civilization needs to be identified with a race, of course. There's a multiracial aspect probably going back to Egypt. Unfortunately racialism still offers some people a route to political influence.

One more possible reason for the name "White Studies": this may not be the "Great White North, but Canada's pretty close. I think we could claim the title of "Little White North" here, anyway!

I thought I'd take advantage of the timing and commence my published rantings with some token remarks on the State of the Union Address. So I will--but I hope to be brief.

First of all, if I were President, I'd ignore latter-20th-century precedent and replace the Big Speech with more frequent informational sessions in Congress--more like the traditional Prime Minister's Question Time. I read such a proposal somewhere recently, so it's hardly original. At any rate the Constitution doesn't require the current format. Of course, there's a whopping great deal else it doesn't require. Admittedly the prospect of my assuming the office appears remote!

Secondly, I confess I like Dubya. It seems I intuitively favored the Bushes going back about 23 years. Like most libertarian/conservative types, I acknowledge some disagreements and misgivings, too. Most obvious is the matter of _expanding_ government. Wouldn't it be nice if every new department set up meant that one or two old ones had to be abolished?

Not that there's anything wrong with homeland security per se. Security (and I don't mean "Social Security") is government's basic function. Most of us are aware of the chronic conflict between security and liberty, so I won't belabor the point. One thing I'm reminded of, though, is a TV movie that must have come out some three decades ago, depicting life in a fascist US. Even back then, when the flaming Left maintained a widespread popularity, thoughtful types knew that tyranny was like nothing we'd ever seen here. In this dark vision an _Internal Security Force_ dominated the country, its flag even replacing Old Glory (an unlikely theatrical touch). Naturally the slight similarity between our new department's name and that of the fictional ISF caught my attention--but I can't make too much of it. In fairness I wish to add that if we had an ISF, and I was offered a position there, I'd accept--assuming the requirements weren't personally annoying! Presumably, if their preferred parties were in power, so would many of our typical lefty academics.

On the subject of annoyances: circumstances have handed me something conveniently controversial to embellish this post with. A relative drew my attention to an HBO program about the famous "Virtual Corpse," which I believe is online somewhere. It turned out to be largely a disguised piece of propaganda sympathetically portraying the one-time murderer, allowing relatives to romanticize him (showing a photo of him as a kid with a Christmas tree in the background) and offer excuses, while his victim, an "old man," was never even named. Meanwhile those who carried out the project were cast in a less flattering light. The credits revealed a possible clue: Swiss and German production. Well, I've long admired Switzerland, and the Continentals are entitled to their opinions of Texas--but this was dishonest.