A few minutes of happy talk

Call this an exercise in self-brainwashing. Self-hypnosis?

Oh, speaking of hypnosis, anyone catch the broadcast yesterday on the radio, the Metropolitan Opera's production of Philip Glass' Satyagraha? Non opera-fans may skip down, but I caught about 20 minutes of it. Glass wrote this opera about 30 years ago when he was in his "minimalist" period. For those of you who were unaware that anyone's music had had a "minimalist" period, or indeed of what a "minimalist" period might involve, Glass in the 1970s was trying to keep it simple, big time. In a typical Philip Glass piece of that period, he'll glom on to a melodic and harmonic figure, repeat it for 15 minutes, then switch to another figure, repeat it for 15 minutes, and so on. This will give you some idea of what Satyagraha sounded like. (It's an opera about Gandhi, by the way.) Listening to it in the car, it occurred to me that Glass could have assembled the original score at Kinko's -- write out a figure, run off 500 copies, write out another figure, run off 500 copies, etc., then Scotch-tape 'em all together.

But what do I know? I'm not a composer. The only reason I bring the subject up is because during every break, the announcers kept telling us how "hypnotic" the effect of all this was.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit to you that "hypnotic" is a polite way of saying "boring." I have trouble staying awake through the first act of Tristan and Isolde, (I suspect because Tristan, like so much of Wagner, is usually performed in the dark.) If I'd been at the Met yesterday, the guy behind me would have had some serious problems with the guy in front of him, the one with his head tilted back, snoring just like he snored through most of the movie Titanic, whose music was similarly "hypnotic."

But enough of that kind of talk. Enough of that negative, sneery, grumpy-old-man stuff that bloggers are always dishing out. It's not nice. (As a former boss of mine once said about insulting people, "It's FUN, but it's not nice.")

I recently undertook a new project, editing a weekly newspaper here in the Washington, D.C. area. I had a short "editorial conference" the other day with my boss, Abraham. Abraham is an entrepreneur, not a journalist, but he knows what kind of product he wants to put out. He's tired of picking up newspapers and seeing nothing but flood, fire, famine, crime, war, earthquakes, disease, poverty and Hillary and Obama getting into mashed-potato fights. While he granted that bad news sells, and we certainly can't ignore the bad stuff going on all the time, he wants me, in my capacity as editor, to accentuate the positive. Look around for stories in the metro area that highlight people doing good stuff rather than what they usually do. Just kidding, Abraham!

Seriously, I, and whatever freelance writers I end up working with, will be on the lookout for stories about people doing upbeat, positive things; creative things, helping-your-community things, artistic things, empowering things and funny things. It's not that we're going to ignore drive-by shootings, it's just that we're in general going to be more interested in the guy who won the wheelchair marathon because he spent the previous nine months pumping iron to the point where his arms got to look like Wile E. Coyote's legs in that Road Runner cartoon where he's popping "muscle pills" to make himself run faster.

On that note, I will now embark upon my version of one of St. Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. Let's call this Thinking About Good Stuff 101A.

With a tip of the hat to Julie Andrews singing "My Favorite Things" in The Sound Of Music, here is a short list of stuff that makes me happy, or happier, anyway:

1. I love the smell of bacon and eggs in the morning. You smartasses are substituting "napalm" for "bacon and eggs," aren't you? Ha! I thought of it first! (Note to myself: bad dog.)

2. Ditto the smell of freshly-ground coffee before it's brewed.

3. A flawless, not-too-hot summer afternoon at the ballpark, with my team winning.

4. The sound of doves very early in the morning.

5. Bicycles. I am goofy for bicycles. If I were as rich as Bill Gates I'd have a dozen of them. I'd probably look at them more than I'd ride them, but hey, a fetish is a fetish.

6. Radios. And radio. There are three radios in the room where I'm sitting. I could easily become a radio collector, but in general I think hobbies of that sort are kind of silly. And I'd rather listen to the radio than watch TV any day.

7. Cigars. You prissy, self-righteous non-smokers out there can go stuff tofu up your noses. There's nothing quite as delightful as a good Havana with a cup of strong, black coffee.

8. Since he just passed through town last Thursday, I will say that I'm rather impressed with Pope Benedict XVI. Everyone thought he was going to play Larry Holmes to John Paul II's Muhammad Ali, you know, the guy who came afterward whose name nobody can remember. But he's made a good impression on the world in general. I've read a couple of his little books and he's not a bad writer either.

9. Any movie that has Ava Gardner in it.

10. My wife Valerie's dimpled smile.

11. My own meatloaf.

12. All of my pets. Tick 'em off: Dogs: Alexandra, Fulbright and Stanley. (all three miniature schnauzers.) Cats: Humboldt, Cyrano and Rageuneau. My family.

13. Books. Do I love books! And all of this Amazon Kindle nonsense aside, I snap my fingers at the digital doofuses joyfully predicting that the age of paper-and-ink is over and that soon we'll all just be lugging around our Sony Readers. The compact disc revolution, which was more about convenience than anything else, nevertheless took something away from the experience of listening to recorded music. I miss the days when I would take a shiny black vinyl disc out of its beautiful cardboard sleeve, put it on a turntable and place the needle on it, then watch it spin as the music played. It was a more tactile, more participatory, in general a more aesthetic experience than clicking the button that says "download." By the same token, holding a hunk of plastic and batteries in your hand is not going to measure up to the experience of settling down with a beautifully-bound example of the publishers'-and-printers' art. And here's my trump card that the digital doofuses can't trump. No matter how convenient they make their book-download-doodads, they are always and forever going to need juice. Books don't require juice. If I'm flying from New York to Paris, reading The Brothers Karamazov on my Amazon Kindle, and the battery dies all of a sudden, I'm stuck for the rest of the flight reading the hotel and fragrance ads in the airline's in-house magazine. But if I have a paperback copy of Dostoevski in my pocket, I'm good to go, batteries be damned.

14. Rioja wine from Spain. I developed a taste for Spanish wine during a visit to the Costa Brava in 1995. There is nothing better with a steak.

15. Listening to Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony on a rainy autumn night.

16. Chess. Without any false modesty, I am the world's worst chess player. If you can't beat me in eight moves, you're having an off day. But I love the game, don't ask me why. Maybe I was better at it in a previous life.

17. The poetry of Dylan Thomas, read out loud.

18. Baseball. Baseball. Baseball.

19. Certain of Hemingway's short stories. By and large his novels don't impress me that much, but he was one of the greatest short-story writers of all time.

20. Anything and everything written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

21. Something I don't do anymore: sit on the Novi Arbat in Moscow and watch the Russian women go by. To this old globe-trotter Russian women are the most beautiful women on earth, and by the way I don't know what they see in Vladimir Putin. He looks like he was weaned on a dill pickle and he has all the charisma of a parking meter.

22. The quiet of the early morning, when I manage to be up for it.

23. The good memories I have of my late sister Lynn, my one-and-only, honest-and-for-truly, now-and-forever bestest friend in the whole wide world.

24. Scotch.

25. That moment in the movie Mister Roberts when Capt. James Cagney has sounded general quarters because Lt. Henry Fonda just threw his palm tree overboard. In the ensuing chaos, Chief Ward Bond catches two sailors hoisting a rubber life raft over the railing. "Put that raft back!" he shouts. "He didn't say 'Abandon ship!'"

Bullet points

Driving around this morning, the following ideas all occurred to me, in no particular order:

--Since we are now returning to Daylight Savings Time two weeks earlier than we used to, and going off it two weeks later than we used to, that means we're only on Standard Time for five months out of the year. That means Standard Time is no longer standard. We ought to call it something else. I suggest "George."

--To fund anti-smoking programs by slapping more taxes on cigarettes is idiotic. Give this one just a moment's thought, if you please. (INSERT LONG PAUSE)... That's right! In order for there to be more money for anti-smoking programs, people have to smoke MORE. You go, government!

--The movie "Brokeback Mountain" added a new dimension to the term "cowpoke."

--I wish Rachael Ray would go away.

--Why do people talk about "free gifts" and "new records?" A gift that isn't free isn't a gift, and all records are new at the time they're set.

--And while we're at it, all you dopes out there who are in the habit of saying "I could care less" are saying the opposite of what you mean.

--Has anyone thought of starting a "Vegetable Rights" movement and demonizing vegetarians as plant-killers? I think I'd be willing to pay $7 to watch some sleazy lawyer representing artichokes in a class-action suit against Whole Foods. And don't you think you wouldn't find a lawyer willing to take that case, either.

--Why does northern California passionately hate southern California, while southern California simply ignores northern California? (I think I may have just answered my own question.)

--If dogs are so loyal, why is it that they'll drop you like a hot potato the moment somebody walks into the room carrying food?

--Would someone tell me why in the heck I can remember, word-for-word, a Ford Motor Company jingle dating from 1961, but I can't remember where I put my car keys?

--Since we all know that a police car with lights flashing will always attract a crowd, why don't the police turn their lights off when they arrive at the scene of an emergency? It would save them having to say "Come on folks, break it up."

--My wife assures me that watching ballplayers grab their crotches on TV is not a turn-on. Maybe they ought to quit doing it, or is this something the Player's Union has already made part of their contracts?

--Most opera singers are ordinary-looking people. A glamorous figure like Anna Netrebko is the exception, not the rule. So why do opera telecasts give us so many close-ups of people who are no more attractive than the rest of us? It adds new meaning to "warts and all."

--What possible difference does it make if my airline seat is inclined six-and-a-half percent, which is about as far back as they go, at landing? Yet flight attendants patrol the aisles like storm troopers on final approach, insisting that you "bring your seat to the upright position." It already almost is.

--Child-proof pill bottles are also adult-proof. Anyone care to dispute that?

--Here's one I've brought up before: how come books are shipped mummified in bubble-wrap as if they were breakable?

--I work part-time at a job where I go to work at 2:30 p.m. So how come they gave me a parking permit that's only good after 3:30? (Hint: it's a government agency.)

--Whose stupid idea was it to give the Nobel Prize to Al Gore? As if he didn't already have a big enough head.

--We Americans are always taking heat for being the last nation on earth that still hasn't gone metric. Why doesn't anyone give the Brits a bad time for driving on the left side of the road?

--Would someone tell me why in hell we're supposed to care what Hollywood celebrities think about Iraq? Why are their stupid, ill-informed opinions more valid than anyone else's stupid, ill-informed opinions?

--I don't care what anybody says: computers do have a will, and their will is to do evil.

--If the Devil is so smart, why is it that throughout the Bible and even in legends like Faust, he keeps making those sucker bets with God that he has to know he's going to lose?

--The chase scene in the Michael Caine movie The Italian Job, involving three Mini-Coopers, is the only chase scene in all cinematic history that's truly laugh-out-loud funny.

--Why doesn't pianist Naoko Takao have her own website? I've never heard her play, but if her playing is as gorgeous as she is, she ought to have a website. She could have groupies.

--Chevy Chase's old line, "I'm Chevy Chase and you're not," wasn't funny. Ever.

--George Will's classic quip that football combines two of the worst features of American life, violence and committee meetings, has been repeated too often. And that's too bad, because it's a truly great quip.

--The truest thing Bill Cosby ever said was, "There's nobody more wide-awake at 11:00 in the morning than a bunch of five-year-old kids."

--My friend Debbie Therrien has never considered herself attractive, and I've never understood why. She's drop-dead gorgeous and so are her daughters.

--"Vanity publishing" shouldn't be called that. If you're willing to pay out of pocket to get your book into print, you're obviously doing it for love, not profit. On the other hand, if you persuade a "legitimate" publisher to publish your book for you by giving some snot-nosed editor a blow job, well, that should be called "prostitution publishing." Frankly I'd rather cough up the 600 bucks.

--Why do football players smack each other on the ass? If you or I did that at the office, well, as they say, let's not go there.

--And finally, most guys own three pairs of shoes, tops. So why is it that women persist in asking us which, out of the 47 pairs of shoes they own, would look best with the outfit they have on?

Name That Tune

My wife Valerie gave me a new iPod last Christmas, the swoopy, black 80GB model. Evidently 80 gigs enable you to upload a lot more than just music. You can upload...movies! Yay! Isn't technology great! It grants a new boon to stupidity every week! Now you're going to see morons on the subway watching Johnny Depp on a 2-inch screen for no other reason than because they can. You know, like you see morons conducting telephone conversations at the very same moment the supermarket cashier is trying to ask them if they have any coupons to redeem, while the five people waiting in line behind them fume at the delay they're causing by exercising their right to multi-task. Because they can.

But I didn't sit down this morning to grumble about the ubiquitous modern phenomenon of nitwits armed with cell phones. I sat down to grumble about something else.

I've noted on this blog before that my wife Valerie sweats the big stuff, while I sweat the small stuff. She got upset last year when our house in Spokane, Washington nearly burned down. I looked around, heaved a sigh and started cleaning the black soot off my CD collection. I haven't finished that job yet. But she wants me to stop grumbling about cell phones. I can't. She lets little things like house fires get her down. I'm bugged by stupidity. Especially when some manifestation of it keeps coming back, like a pesky mosquito buzzing around your ear at 3 a.m.

To call me a music lover would be like calling Tiger Woods a duffer, Mikhail Baryshnikov a hoofer or Pope Benedict a guy who happens to be Catholic. My life is awash in music, at all times, and there is not very much music I don't like. I generally don't care for country music, but like it now and then. I usually find R&B just annoying, but not always. I dislike Gospel because of its pretensions, but that doesn't mean there aren't beautiful gospel tunes out there. Bob Dylan would go along with me on that, I'm sure. I won't say anything about rap or hip-hop because I don't consider barnyard noise to be music, and speaking of barnyard noise, I waited years for heavy metal to go away, and I see that the three patron saints of music, Cecilia, Louis Armstrong and Mozart, have finally granted my wish. Benedictus qui venit in nomine Musicum.

Just about everything else is fine. Or better than fine. From Russian liturgial chant to the 1990s band The Bo-Deans. From Harry James to Wagner. From Miles Davis to Giovanni Paisiello. It's all great.

But forms of musical expression are like vases: they come in all shapes. And it REALLY bugs me that the age of the digital download has decided to apply one word to every form of musical expression on earth. In a facile act of pandering to the dumbshit under-30 crowd with its horseblindered, sound-bit, channel-surfing, text-messaged view of the world around it, iTunes and its clones have decided that everything in the universe is a "song." The iPod generation knows of no other form of music except the "song," and iTunes is only too happy to accomodate its breathtakingly broad ignorance.

My iTunes library currently contains what iTunes insists on calling "3,917 songs." That's perfectly okay if you're talking about "Love Me Do," "One For My Baby," "Help Me, Rhonda" or "Closer to Free," all of which are on my computer and much more.

But I have news for all of you pod-wearers out there. (I won't use pods, by the way. They keep slipping out of my ears. I stick to old-fashioned headphones.) The first movement of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2 in C minor ("Resurrection") is NOT a "song." Neither is the prelude to Act I of "Parsifal," nor the Prelude, Toccata and Fugue in C major by J.S. Bach, nor the "Adoration de la terre" section of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring."

To call everything a "song" is to slight much of the greatest music ever written. It's as if they're saying, "We'll grudgingly make room among Mariah Carey and Miley Cyrus for all that highbrow stuff, but we're going to call it what WE call music, and we only have one word for it, because pop music is the only kind we know or care about." Troglodytes.

People Magazine, which I'm proud to say I haven't looked at since 1996, used to get my goat by doing this same thing. Their weekly music column was entitled "Song," as if they were refusing to even acknowledge that there's any other kind of music except the kind that spews out of VH1 all day long. I wonder what Vladimir Horowitz would have thought of seeing his picture in People magazine in a section called "Song." I don't think he had much of a singing voice, but gol-dang, could he play the pie-anna.

A simple compromise would have saved the download universe having to listen to this rant. Why in the world couldn't they call these things "tracks?" That's what they are. That's what they're called on CDs. I have no problem with the word "tracks," because it covers anything and everything on a CD, an LP or even an old-fashioned cassette tape. A track is a track, whether it's the "Liebestod" from Tristan and Isolde , some nasal idiot in a cowboy hat whining that he's off to git drunk 'cause his wife dun left him or Ice-T screaming that he wants to kill the whole police department. Trax is trax.

But trax ain't "songs," just as all horses may be quadrupeds, but not all quadrupeds are horses.

Now excuse me, I gotta make tracks.

The Persistence of Memory

I usually avoid controversial topics on my blog. Since no one reads my blog, I don't know why I do this.

So I'm going to say some things here that might be controversial. But they're things I've been thinking for a long time and by-God I'm going to say them.

Why not? Everyone else pops off on their blogs, and damn the flaming e-mails they might get in response. I've been blogging for three years and have received only so many e-mails as I could count on the fingers of one hand. So here goes:

Today, April 4, 2008, is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. So this is the most appropriate day (this year anyway) to make the following statement:

Liberals have been "dining out" for more than four decades on the fact that they were right about one -- and only one -- thing.

That is correct. Liberals have never been right about anything. They're always wrong. Except for that one time that they won't let anybody forget about.

Items:

1. They told us we were losing in Vietnam, so we did. Only problem was, we were winning when they said it through their official mouthpiece, Walter Cronkite. Unfortunately in 1968 network TV news carried a lot more influential weight than it does now, and people were inclined to believe whatever Uncle Walty told them. So when Cronkite declared the Vietnam War "unwinnable" after the Tet Offensive in 1968, never mind the fact that the Tet Offensive was an act of desperation by the communists; never mind the fact that we had the North Vietnamese basically on the run at that point; everyone believed Uncle Walty and communism's triumph in that corner of the world was assured.

2. As W. Emmett Tyrell pointed out in this morning's Washington Times, when the stock market crashed in 1987, Liberals began marching around the block in lock-step, whacking their washtubs and proclaiming that President Ronald Reagan "sounded like Herbert Hoover" when he insisted that the economy was fundamentally sound. Depression, disaster and mass unemployment were all around the corner, they sang in chorus like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. "This debacle marks the last chapter of Reaganomics," Michael Kinsley crowed, no doubt feeling his oats after tap-dancing to work that morning with visions of Democrats re-taking the White House in 1988 dancing through his head. Anyone remember the Great Depression of 1988? I don't either. Wrong again, babies.

(By the way, I don't understand why anyone would take seriously anything any liberal Democrat says, ever, on the subject of the U.S. economy. Our economy is based on free-market capitalism, and it is a basic tenet of the liberal faith that free-market capitalism is evil and must be punished whenever it dares to create prosperity. (Liberals call prosperity "greed.") Why should people who think that way be trusted running a free-market economy? It's like the cliche about putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop.)

3. Liberals hooted and jeered and made jokes about "Star Wars" when President Reagan proposed a missile defense system in the 1980s. When people didn't laugh at their jokes, they started shouting that a missile defense system would bring about global nuclear holocaust by frightening the Russians (liberals were always more concerned about the Russians' feelings than they were about those of any of the millions and millions of people oppressed by Soviet communism) into launching a pre-emptive nuclear "first strike." Anybody remember that first strike? And by the way, where is the Soviet Union these days? (Cue sound of crickets chirping.) Wrong again, lefties.

4. When Rudy Giuliani dared to clean up New York City in 1993-94, a chorus of lefties began screaming their usual favorite words, "fascist" and "Hitler." They wrung their hands in despair that Adolf Giuliani was threatening the civil rights of muggers and rapists. And, by the way, interfering with the first amendment by mopping up the peep-show booths and porn shops on Times Square. People who would try and change the subject if you mentioned Castro locking up Cuban dissidents would pound the table and shout their lungs out defending the rights of muggers, rapists and pornographers. They even had the brass balls to try and sell the idea that crime, graffiti and garbage were part of New York's charm and must be protected against the incursions of Rudy the Fascist. Let's all vote Democrat, folks!

5. Violence in Iraq is down, like it or not. (Conservatives like it. Liberals don't; too much of their campaign strategy for 2008, laid out in 2007, depended on the situation in Iraq getting worse, allowing them to beat their breasts and wail about "quagmire.") No, Gen. David Petraeus' "surge" has, all-in-all, worked. Listen to those crickets chirping on the left. Nostalgic for the good old days of Vietnam, when hating America was a mark of hipness and worldly sophistication, liberals have been trying to sell the idea that Iraq is another Vietnam, and by the way using the same language: "unwinnable," "quagmire," "these people are not ready for democracy," etc. I'd dismiss them with a laugh as the Toothless Who Remember Being At Woodstock But Weren't, were it not for the fact that they have enough clout to intimidate the front-runners in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination into kowtowing fearfully in their direction. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are afraid enough of the left-wing nutjobs on the Stalinist side of their party's bullring to mouth defeatist rhetoric about Iraq in fear of alienating them. Let's get this in perspective, folks. 4,000 Americans have died in Iraq. To declare defeat and walk away now in the hope of keeping that jerk-off who runs the Daily Kos happy, would be a supreme disservice to the memory of those 4,000. Yes, the war in Iraq needs to end. But not in the U.S. surrender that liberals wearing Che Guevara T-shirts want.

These are just five things. I could go on and on and on. LBJ's "War on Poverty" created urban housing projects that later had to be dynamited when they turned into 10-story slums. FDR's New Deal did NOT end the Depression. It extended it by repeatedly preventing the free market from correcting itself. Don't believe liberals when they tell you that FDR ended the Depression. World War II ended the Depression. Period.

The same people who a generation ago were trying to sell the idea that nuclear holocaust was imminent are now trying to tell us that global warming is going to destroy the planet unless we turn all power over to Al Gore and let him bullyrag all the governments of the world into regulating business and industry into the ground (the left's wettest wet dream -- remember? Free-market capitalism is evil and must be punished) in the name of "saving the planet." Pardon me if I'm skeptical. This all just sounds too familiar to me. Remember Cabrini Green. Remember "The Day After" -- an eminently forgettable 1983 TV movie that nevertheless got the advance publicity of a Beatles reunion tour because it was about the nuclear war that the media were trying to convince everyone Reagan was going to start. Remember Uncle Walty telling us that Vietnam was unwinnable when we were in fact winning.

"Left is right and right is wrong?"

Hah. THE LEFT HAS NEVER BEEN RIGHT ABOUT ANYTHING.

Except once. Yes, they got it right, in the 1960s, on civil rights. William F. Buckley Jr. had the wrong take when he mistook the civil rights movement for the triumph of lawlessness.

Well, at least he had the balls to admit, years later, that he had made a mistake. I can't remember a recorded instance of a liberal ever admitting he or she was wrong about anything, even in the face of an avalanche of evidence. (Not unless, like David Mamet, they've just committed the apostasy of becoming conservatives.) Even now, 17 years after the implosion of the USSR, I have yet to hear one single voice on the left admit that they were wrong in having a soft spot in their hearts for communism. Bring it up; they'll try to change the subject. I guarantee it. They'll stick their fingers in their ears and start humming. Watch.

So here's my point. On this, the 40th anniversary of the villainous murder of Martin Luther King Jr., the liberal left in America is marking more than 40 years of exploiting that one single issue. They got that one thing right, 45 years ago, and ever since have been telling America, through their panting running dogs in the news media, that they have sole possession of the moral high ground and should be entrusted with all and everything. The message is loud and clear: "We're the good guys. Remember? ("Remember" is the key operative word here -- they want people to remember pretty far back.) Remember how we all held hands during the "I Have A Dream" speech? (1963, before half the current U.S. population was born.) That should remind you that only we are the friends of the poor, the downtrodden, and the enemies of those evil "special interests!" (Yeah, right. Last year Democrats took more money from rich contributors than Republicans did.) And besides, we all know -- you should know, because we've been telling you for 40 years -- that those mean old Republicans are all ... racists! ("Racist" is the second favorite name-calling staple among liberals. The first is "fascist.") And don't forget to remember!

I remember this, which you will never, ever, catch the mainstream media remembering: for 100 years (that's a century, folks) the Democratic Party was the party of the Ku Klux Klan.

Okay, you're never going to read that anywhere else, so I'll say it again: For 100 years, (that's a century, folks) the Democratic Party was the party of the Ku Klux Klan.

I want you to understand the ramifications of that. When you look in horror at those gruesome photographs of lynchings in the South from the 1920s and '30s, that is NOT a group of Republicans you're looking at. Those lynchers are Democrats, folks. All of them. Today Democrats are forever calling Republicans "racists." It was Democrats who actually lynched black people. That is not my opinion. That is a fact of history.

Nobody in the mainstream media wants anyone to remember that. But it's true. Abraham Lincoln, who for reasons of political expedience issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, was a Republican. For that reason alone, for a century after the Civil War, the South was solidly, firmly, unsplittingly Democrat. No southerner would vote Republican to save his children from drowning. The original "Yellow-Dog Democrats," who boasted that they would "vote for a yellow dog" before they would vote for a Republican, were NOT, as their present-day co-religionists would like you to believe, Woodstock-attending, Birkenstock sandal-wearing, up-with-people, down-with-capitalism types. They were die-hard southerners, often members of the Klan, who were nursing a "mad" at the party of Lincoln. Civil Rights: 45 years. KKK: 100 years. But it's the longer of those two legacies you'll never, ever see mentioned in the Washington Post, where E.J. Dionne is no doubt still celebrating the Bear-Stearns meltdown by smothering his picture of John Kenneth Galbraith with wet kisses.

My old friend and fellow Mason Howard Freelove, a self-described "Yellow Dog" Democrat, proud of his opposition to "injustice," is invited to think about this.

See ya around, y'all.