AdamSmith

Interesting to see Noonan finally let her gorge rise, fully & publicly, on sister Sarah. A Farewell to Harms Palin was bad for the Republicans—and the republic. By Peggy Noonan Sarah Palin's resignation gives Republicans a new opportunity to see her plain—to review the bidding, see her strengths, acknowledge her limits, and let go of her drama. It is an opportunity they should take. They mean to rebuild a great party. They need to do it on solid ground. Her history does not need to be rehearsed at any length. Ten months ago she was embraced with friendliness by her party. The left and the media immediately overplayed their hand, with attacks on her children. The party rallied round, as a party should. She went on the trail a sensation but demonstrated in the ensuing months that she was not ready to go national and in fact never would be. She was hungry, loved politics, had charm and energy, loved walking onto the stage, waving and doing the stump speech. All good. But she was not thoughtful. She was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why. In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. "I'm not wired that way," "I'm not a quitter," "I'm standing up for our values." I'm, I'm, I'm. In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was actually rather horrifying. McCain-Palin lost. Mrs. Palin has now stepped down, but she continues to poll high among some members of the Republican base, some of whom have taken to telling themselves Palin myths. To wit, "I love her because she's so working-class." This is a favorite of some party intellectuals. She is not working class, never was, and even she, avid claimer of advantage that she is, never claimed to be and just lets others say it. Her father was a teacher and school track coach, her mother the school secretary. They were middle-class figures of respect, stability and local status. I think intellectuals call her working-class because they see the makeup, the hair, the heels and the sleds and think they're working class "tropes." Because, you know, that's what they teach in "Ways of the Working Class" at Yale and Dartmouth. What she is, is a seemingly very nice middle-class girl with ambition, appetite and no sense of personal limits. "She's not Ivy League, that's why her rise has been thwarted! She represented the democratic ideal that you don't have to go to Harvard or Brown to prosper, and her fall represents a failure of egalitarianism." This comes from intellectuals too. They need to be told something. Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College. Richard Nixon went to Whittier College, Joe Biden to the University of Delaware. Sarah Palin graduated in the end from the University of Idaho, a school that happily notes on its Web site that it's included in U.S. News and World Report's top national schools survey. They need to be told, too, that the first Republican president was named "Abe," and he went to Princeton and got a Fulbright. Oh wait, he was an impoverished backwoods autodidact! America doesn't need Sarah Palin to prove it was, and is, a nation of unprecedented fluidity. Her rise and seeming fall do nothing to prove or refute this. "The elites hate her." The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon. "She makes the Republican Party look inclusive." She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated. "She shows our ingenuous interest in all classes." She shows your cynicism. "Now she can prepare herself for higher office by studying up, reading in, boning up on the issues." Mrs. Palin's supporters have been ordering her to spend the next two years reflecting and pondering. But she is a ponder-free zone. She can memorize the names of the presidents of Pakistan, but she is not going to be able to know how to think about Pakistan. Why do her supporters not see this? Maybe they think "not thoughtful" is a working-class trope! "The media did her in." Her lack of any appropriate modesty did her in. Actually, it's arguable that membership in the self-esteem generation harmed her. For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they're perfect in every way. It's yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy. "Turning to others means the media won!" No, it means they lose. What the mainstream media wants is not to kill her but to keep her story going forever. She hurts, as they say, the Republican brand, with her mess and her rhetorical jabberwocky and her careless causing of division. Really, she is the most careless sower of discord since George W. Bush, who fractured the party and the movement that made him. Why wouldn't the media want to keep that going? Here's why all this matters. The world is a dangerous place. It has never been more so, or more complicated, more straining of the reasoning powers of those with actual genius and true judgment. This is a time for conservative leaders who know how to think. Here are a few examples of what we may face in the next 10 years: a profound and prolonged American crash, with the admission of bankruptcy and the spread of deep social unrest; one or more American cities getting hit with weapons of mass destruction from an unknown source; faint glimmers of actual secessionist movements as Americans for various reasons and in various areas decide the burdens and assumptions of the federal government are no longer attractive or legitimate. The era we face, that is soon upon us, will require a great deal from our leaders. They had better be sturdy. They will have to be gifted. There will be many who cannot, and should not, make the cut. Now is the time to look for those who can. And so the Republican Party should get serious, as serious as the age, because that is what a grown-up, responsible party—a party that deserves to lead—would do. It's not a time to be frivolous, or to feel the temptation of resentment, or the temptation of thinking next year will be more or less like last year, and the assumptions of our childhoods will more or less reign in our future. It won't be that way. We are going to need the best. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124716984620819351.html

To wit: P.S. Irrelevantly but hilariously: Finally, tasteless but true: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7Abvyfy50k

Regrettably. One can nonetheless register one's distaste. Indeed! A particular treat is when a favorite twink shows up slightly less groomed than usual. As the grave.

'Twould be a great pity, in my estimate. I love the smooth twink look as much as anyone, but shaved pubes and pits turn me right off.

Just so. One could likewise observe that Justice Thomas has come to look like a walking aneurysm. Not, again, wishing any ill!

Delete and forget. Fraud is long; life is short. Not to be flip, but my bank told me just that after such a scammer went so far as to send me a check for $4500. It was supposed to be payment for a $900 vacation rental of an apartment I own; after I got the check in the excess amount, of course there followed his email request to rebate him the $3600 difference, as his "travel agent had made a mistake in the amount," etc. He (whoever he really was) sent the check via UPS, not USPS, to avoid federal mail-fraud liability. On my bank's advice, I shredded the check and wasted no more of my mortal span on it.

About fucking time. Doubtless this is just the opening shot in what will have to be a protracted siege. But at last the federal courts are being asked to address the constitutionality of DOMA square on. Without wishing ill on any individual, one can fervently hope for a shift in the makeup of the Supremes by the time this reaches them, should it go that far. One watches with bated breath to see what stance the current Administration will take. State Sues U.S. Over Marriage Law Massachusetts sued the U.S. government Wednesday over the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said the law interferes with the right of Massachusetts to define and regulate marriage as it sees fit. The 1996 law denies federal recognition of same-sex marriage and gives states the right to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. Massachusetts was the first state to legalize same-sex marriage. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Boston, argues the act "constitutes an overreaching and discriminatory federal law." Before the law was passed, Coakley said, the federal government recognized that defining marital status was the "exclusive prerogative of the states." The U.S. law's definition of marriage denies same-sex couples access to benefits given to heterosexual married couples, including federal income tax credits, retirement benefits, health insurance coverage and Social Security payments, the lawsuit says. The Justice Department had not seen the lawsuit and cannot respond until it has a chance to review it, spokesman Charles Miller said. -- Associated Press http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...9070804170.html

One of her many delicious turns: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCpSB0ifQiU

Damn you, Stu. I must have wasted half of yesterday playing this fool thing over and over. I posted it on facebook yesterday mid-day, and last night someone else levied the same curse on me. It is regrettably compelling.

She was irreplaceable. A collage of pussies: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wwo1mXZTZgI And I am unanimous in that.

Ditto for the charming approach maze to the George Washington Bridge. And why, on the Bruckner northbound, does everyone suddenly speed up just as it gets ridiculously narrow? Some kind of Venturi effect?

No telling. He had a peculiar sense of humor, and did not stand on ceremony. For all his erudition & refined sensibility, in his early 70s he came into a meeting of the Bollingen Poetry Prize committee, of which he was a member that year for having won it the previous year, with this thing he had just heard: "You know why they're called nuns? 'Cause they ain't ever had none, and they ain't ever going to get none!"

Touche. Herewith some highlights: The 60 hrs together were enough to unstring a brass monkey. I took the train from Boston to NYC Tuesday late afternoon; Andre was scheduled to fly into LaGuardia at 6:30 pm. But with endless weather delays and canceled flights out of RDU, he finally made it into Newark airport at midnight. Another half hour by cab into the city. Then time began. We had talked of going out clubbing. But when he walked in the door, within ten minutes we were all over each other. That lasted about an hour. He fucked me in positions I had not known were possible. At one point, I was lying on my back; he was lying on his stomach, facing away from me, so that I am staring into his ass; and his cock was under him, pointing backward, buried deep up in my ass. Et cetera. After that we did go out clubbing, the city being open until 3:00 am. At Splash, until it closed. Then back to hotel, a bit of room-service revival of spirits, and cock-sucking until sunrise. Wednesday, I took us to lunch at Fred's, the restaurant in Barney's, in hopes of more celebrity sightings. But sleeping off the previous night, we did not get to Fred's until past 3:00 pm, by which time the lunch crowd was gone. Celebrities in general did abound, though. For one, Fergie was staying at our hotel (The London). For another, Wednesday night we saw the production of "Our Town" running at the Barrow Street Theatre. Superb. Very well under-acted, understated; none of the usual ham and sentimentality that infects so many stagings of that play. And we were sitting two seats away from Joan Rivers -- Andre brought his camera, and I took a pic of him with his arm around Joan. It was interesting to watch her fiddle with her huge ring and a rhinestone bracelet throughout the play; like so many in her biz, she is never unaware of Being Joan. Thursday afternoon we hired Andy from ChelseaGuys, whom I had seen twice before. But it did not click. He seemed to like both of us, but I think he found the threesome situation uncomfortable. Live and learn. But the sex between Andre and me, before and after Andy, more than made up for it. Thursday evening we went to "Coraline." But about 25 minutes into it, we decided to leave. Andre was generous, saying we just weren't in the mood for that play, that night. I was a bit harsher; I thought it doddered along to no real purpose. Andre thought it would probably have grown on us, had we been in the mood to sit through all of it. So we went out clubbing again, meeting up with another beautiful young escort we had recently seen together in another city, who was in NYC off-the-clock on vacation (so will go unnamed here). And at one of the clubs we ran into Trey Thurston, shirtless & looking fab as always. I took his address & number but we did not end up seeing him. After 3 days, fucking 3 times/day on average, Andre & I said au revoir. He off to LGA, I to Penn Station to catch a train home to Boston. Next time!

... Occurs to me that clip is a YouTube compression of what Stevens was also struggling to say: http://www.maleescortreview.com/forum/inde...?showtopic=3706

Aughh. As Charlie Brown used to say. I just sent this to Andre, as confession & explanation. Even though I don't believe that.

One meant to say: You are the funniest thing for miles around. No one is fooled just because, like Chaplin, you never smile.

So that's what turns Lucky on. Details of who did what to whom are of course always welcome. See also: USEFUL INTERNET EMOTICONS Happy person Sad person :-) Happy person with a nose :-( Sad person with a nose :---( Person who is sad because he or she has a large nose Person who is sad because he or she has a large fish for a nose :-D Person laughing :-D* Person laughing so hard that he or she does not notice that a 5-legged spider is hanging from his or her lip :-| Person unsure of which long-distance company to choose >8-O-(&) Person just realizing that he or she has a tapeworm ;-) Person winking .-) Person who can still smile despite losing an eyeball :-0WW Person vomiting a series of Slim Jims :-Q Person who just had cybersex and is now enjoying a post-coital cybercigarette >:-Q -... Person who was enjoying a post-coital cigarette until he suddenly noticed, to his alarm, that there is some kind of discharge dribbling from his cybermember :-{8 Person who is unhappy with the results of her breast-enlargement surgery :V:-| Person who cannot figure out why nobody wants to talk to him or her, little suspecting that there is an alligator on his or her head ~oE]:-| Fisherperson heading for market with a basket on his or her head containing a three-legged octopus that is giving off smell rays >:-[ -{9 Person who is none too pleased to be giving birth to a squirrel http://www.randomhouse.com/features/davebarry/emoticon.html

As if we hadn't had enough of him. (And here I am posting this.) Ex-Edwards Aide to Write Tell-All By JIM RUTENBERG and MOTOKO RICH A man who was one of former Senator John Edwards’s closest aides has a deal to write a book claiming that Mr. Edwards said he “would be taken care of for life†in return for falsely claiming he was the father of the baby carried by Mr. Edwards’s mistress, Rielle Hunter. The aide, Andrew Young, sold his book proposal to St. Martin’s Press for an undisclosed price late last week. In his proposal, Mr. Young quotes Mr. Edwards, a Democrat who was his party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2004 and ran for president last year, as begging him to confess to fathering Ms. Hunter’s baby. “ ‘You know how much I love you,’ Edwards said. ‘You know I’d walk off a cliff for you, and I know you’d walk off a cliff for me,’ †Mr. Young wrote in the book proposal. “ ‘I will never forget this. And I will always be there for you.’ †The proposal was shared with The New York Times by a book publishing industry executive. Portions of it were reported over the weekend by The Daily News of New York. Federal prosecutors are investigating whether any of Mr. Edwards’s campaign money was improperly used with regard to his affair or efforts to keep it from becoming public. Mr. Young wrote that he had been questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and had been subpoenaed to speak before a grand jury. A spokeswoman for the United States attorney in Raleigh, N.C., would not comment. Mr. Edwards has issued statements saying he is confident his campaign acted properly. After news of Mr. Edwards’s affair and Ms. Hunter’s pregnancy first surfaced in the National Enquirer in fall 2007, a lawyer for Mr. Young said his client was the father. Mr. Edwards was preparing for the Iowa presidential caucuses at the time. Mr. Edwards denied being the father after admitting the affair last summer, and there is yet to be DNA testing. A spokeswoman for Mr. Edwards’s legal team, Joyce Fitzpatrick, said Mr. Edwards had not seen the book proposal, and she would not comment on it. A lawyer for Ms. Hunter, Robert J. Gordon, said he no longer represented her. Mr. Young’s proposal states that he was writing the book because he had become disillusioned with Mr. Edwards’s behavior and recklessness, which he said included participating in the production of a sex tape with Ms. Hunter that Mr. Young later discovered. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/us/polit...tml?_r=1&hp

I have not done this for a long time. This week's spate of deaths of public persons, of all things, moves me to post this. I have been reading and rereading this thing for more than 30 years. When I was 18 it seemed too dry and abstract for its subject matter; now it puts me on the floor, weeping, for all those we knew who have passed beyond our reach. The Owl in the Sarcophagus Wallace Stevens I Two forms move among the dead, high sleep Who by his highness quiets them, high peace Upon whose shoulders even the heavens rest, Two brothers. And a third form, she that says Good-by in the darkness, speaking quietly there, To those that cannot say good-by themselves. These forms are visible to the eye that needs, Needs out of the whole necessity of sight. The third form speaks, because the ear repeats, Without a voice, inventions of farewell. These forms are not abortive figures, rocks, Impenetrable symbols, motionless. They move About the night. They live without our light, In an element not the heaviness of time, In which reality is prodigy. There sleep the brother is the father, too, And peace is cousin by a hundred names And she that in the syllable between life And death cries quickly, in a flash of voice, Keep you, keep you, I am gone, oh keep you as My memory, is the mother of us all, The earthly mother and the mother of The dead. Only the thought of those dark three Is dark, thought of the forms of dark desire. II There came a day, there was a day--one day A man walked living among the forms of thought To see their lustre truly as it is And in harmonious prodigy to be, A while, conceiving his passage as into a time That of itself stood still, perennial, Less time than place, less place than thought of place And, if of substance, a likeness of the earth, That by resemblance twanged him through and through, Releasing an abysmal melody, A meeting, an emerging in the light, A dazzle of remembrance and of sight. III There he saw well the foldings in the height Of sleep, the whiteness folded into less, Like many robings, as moving masses are, As a moving mountain is, moving through day And night, colored from distances, central Where luminous agitations come to rest, In an ever-changing, calmest unity, The unique composure, harshest streakings joined In a vanishing-vanished violet that wraps round The giant body the meanings of its folds, The weaving and the crinkling and the vex, As on water of an afternoon in the wind After the wind has passed. Sleep realized Was the whiteness that is the ultimate intellect, A diamond jubilance beyond the fire, That gives its power to the wild-ringed eye. Then he breathed deeply the deep atmosphere Of sleep, the accomplished, the fulfilling air. IV There peace, the godolphin and fellow, estranged, estranged, Hewn in their middle as the beam of leaves, The prince of shither-shade and tinsel lights, Stood flourishing the world. The brilliant height And hollow of him by its brilliance calmed, Its brightness burned the way good solace seethes. This was peace after death, the brother of sleep, The inhuman brother so much like, so near, Yet vested in a foreign absolute, Adorned with cryptic stones and sliding shines, An immaculate personage in nothingness, With the whole spirit sparkling in its cloth, Generations of the imagination piled In the manner of its stitchings, of its thread, In the weaving round the wonder of its need, And the first flowers upon it, an alphabet By which to spell out holy doom and end, A bee for the remembering of happiness. Peace stood with our last blood adorned, last mind, Damasked in the originals of green, A thousand begettings of the broken bold. This is that figure stationed at our end, Always, in brilliance, fatal, final, formed Out of our lives to keep us in our death, To watch us in the summer of Cyclops Underground, a king as candle by our beds In a robe that is our glory as he guards. V But she that says good-by losing in self The sense of self, rosed out of prestiges Of rose, stood tall in self not symbol, quick And potent, an influence felt instead of seen. She spoke with backward gestures of her hand. She held men closely with discovery, Almost as speed discovers, in the way Invisible change discovers what is changed, In the way what was has ceased to be what is. It was not her look but a knowledge that she had. She was a self that knew, an inner thing, Subtler than look's declaiming, although she moved With a sad splendor, beyond artifice, Impassioned by the knowledge that she had, There on the edges of oblivion. O exhalation, O fling without a sleeve And motion outward, reddened and resolved From sight, in the silence that follows her last word-- VI This is the mythology of modern death And these, in their mufflings, monsters of elegy, Of their own marvel made, of pity made, Compounded and compounded, life by life, These are death's own supremest images, The pure perfections of parental space, The children of a desire that is the will, Even of death, the beings of the mind In the light-bound space of the mind, the floreate flare... It is a child that sings itself to sleep, The mind, among the creatures that it makes, The people, those by which it lives and dies.

New England is having the same malady as NYC, or worse. Viz. my plaint of two years ago, about summer up here being over before it starts. Meanwhile, a partial remedy... Sumer is icumen in. Mix the tonic and the gin. (Richard Armour, Punctured Poems: Famous First and Infamous Second Lines) ...which in turn calls up Ezra Pound's opinion of the opposite season: Winter is icumen in, ( 1 ) Lhude sing Goddamm, ( 2 ) Raineth drop and staineth slop, And how the wind doth ramm! Sing: Goddamm. Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us, Freezeth river, turneth liver, An ague hath my ham. Damm you; Sing: Goddamm. Goddamm, Goddamm, 'tis why I am, Goddamm, So 'gainst the winter's balm. Sing goddamm, damm, sing goddamm, Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM. ( 1 ) "Note.--This is not folk music, but Dr. Ker writes that the tune is found under the Latin words of a very ancient canon." (Ezra Pound's note on this poem.) Pound parodies the Middle English lyric "Sumer is icumen in," and his reference to W. P. Ker (1855-1923) and to the source Ker discovered, shows an admiration for classical forms. ( 2 ) Lhude: a pun of "loud" and "lewd." http://www.bachlund.org/Ancient_Music.htm

Mother of god. Pickles got nothing on this, for sure.

A paragon of fluency here, you may have just hit your highest note ever. What a word!

Jason, putting my foolishness aside, you were in my mind as I posted this. I remembered you had posted about your relationship, and also the recent thread on daddy's about keeping oneself as a bottom for the private relationship. Besides lust, one has to have great respect for TVTSs and the courage it takes for them to go through life. Long live.

Too absurd, but I could not resist noting the felicitous phrasing of today's home-page announcement by the TenderMoments4u agency: ...a selection of gorgeous Transvestites on top of our beautiful escorts. As a TVTS lover, I love that image.

Flattery will get you everywhere. I ought to add, as both excuse and shameless tease, that I will pull myself together and get back to posting in earnest once I recover from The Trip. Oz's largesse helped fund 60 hours with Andre in NYC last week. Details when, as I say, concentration returns. If ever.