So we're back from Christmas vacation. One downside of having my name on this website is the fact that many people I know read it. So I'll be cryptic. Here's a nice rule to follow: if you have small children and you plan to spend time with other people who have small children, and further, one of your small children has a bad cold, it is common courtesy to warn the parents of the other small children.

In other words, much of our Christmas week involved wiping snot from our little guys. This is not as much fun as one might think. And of course they still want kisses, which means now I have it.

Oh, the indignity of it all. I'll spare you more details.

A friend from my grad school days once remarked that, unlike other professions, we political scientists are afforded no deference at the family dinner table when the talk turns to our area of expertise. If the subject is, say, a severe hematoma of the upper left quad, then Aunt Jill the physician is the person everyone listens to. If the topic is stocks, then everyone listens to Uncle Mort the investment banker, who is joining you for Christmas dinner via speakerphone from his minimum-security prison cell.

But when the talk turns to politics, do they listen to the political scientist? No. As I think back on the people I went to school with, I must conclude that this is a good thing.

So over dinner, several family members get into the inevitable Iraq/War on Terror conversation. To give you a flavor for the discussion, a few quotes selected primarily to make the part about me below sound especially good:

"We aren't the world's policeman."

"No wonder people over there hate us."

"The Europeans are sick of us meddling."

"We're just doing it for oil."

And so on. I kept my mouth shut. That's right. I kept my mouth shut. For this reason, I shall be abstaining from any sacrifice during the 2003 Lenten season.

A day or so later, my mother-in-law, bless her soul, asked me what I thought about the conversation.

"I'm no expert on foreign affairs," I demurred. I'm shy that way; can you tell?

"C'mon, Tony, I want to know what you think."

"Well, since you asked, we aren't the world's policeman, until the world goes and gets itself in another bind, usually involving the Germans directly or indirectly, and requiring some sort of rescue of the French, during which they will try to overcharge us for amenities. Come the wet-ass hour, to quote Al Pacino, we are everybody's daddy. So no, the Europeans don't want us involved, because they are too busy having fun pretending, now that we've defeated the U.S.S.R., that somehow they can manage their own safety without actually having armies, and while selling technology and weapons to terrorists and communist China. About the time they have their fat heads in a noose, made of rope they've sold at EU-subsidized prices to their executioners, then they'll start carping about how isolationist and hard-hearted we are. So the Europeans can bite me. And another thing -- it may be fashionable for liberals whose sole source of education is the E Channel to deride Ronald Reagan as an idiot, but he is a hero, that's right, a hero to millions of East Europeans, because he had the moral courage to call the Soviet Union what it was -- an Evil Empire -- while the slack-shouldered agnostics ladling out second-rate education in our nation's colleges were too busy sipping cappuccino and banging co-eds to recognize that communism is responsible for more state-sponsored murder than ten Nazi holocausts. So to answer your question, no, we aren't the world's policeman, but when there are people out there who want to kill me and my children, and they are actively seeking the means to do so, then my personal philosophy is that you kill them and everything within a ten-mile radius of them, post freaking haste. And if the U.N. doesn't like it, they can pack their louse-filled bags and hold their busy little seminars on gender inequality and structural racism on somebody else's dime. Since you asked, I mean."

This website may not change the world, but by golly, it sure makes me feel better.

I try to avoid hearing what actors have to say about politics. Stupid (e.g., Ed Asner) or evil (e.g., Vanessa Redgrave) views ruin my ability to enjoy an actor's work. By chance I turned on Charlie Rose last night. He was interviewing Peter Jackson, director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Elijah Wood, who plays Frodo in the films, and Viggo Mortensen, who plays Aragorn.

Oh, how I wish I had gone to bed early. Viggo had made himself a little t-shirt for the interview. It said, "No more blood for oil."

This, I am sad to say, was the best part of his appearance, at least the part that I saw before turning off the television in disgust. Viggo is upset that some people are comparing the U.S., in its war on terror, to the forces of good in the movie. According to him, it is actually the reverse: the U.S. is Sarumon, its rapacious (his word) government unleashing forces of destruction on innocent civilians huddled at Helm's Deep.

In short, Viggo is a bloody idiot.

More wisdom from Viggo: the upcoming war against Iraq is a diversion, to distract people from the "fact" that the U.S. has been bombing civilians in Afghanistan for a year, and has killed more innocents than were killed in the Trade Center attacks. It is also a vendetta spawned by Bush's father.

In case you are tuning in late, the point is that Viggo is a bloody idiot.

The entertaining element in this interview, which was supposed to be about the movie, was imagining the reactions of the movie's marketers. Let's put it this way: I'm betting the pucker factor was pretty high. Depending on what kind of press this gets, two days into the opening of the second movie in the trilogy, the pucker factor could go higher.

"You were supposed to talk about the movie, pretty boy, not your paranoid personal politics. Who are you, freaking Ed Begley, Jr. all of a sudden?" I'm sure right now the marketers are meeting with the PR flaks, to figure out how best to position themselves if this hits the fan. And let's hope that it does.

Not, mind you, because Viggo's insipid views matter. What should be most insulting to American fans of the wonderful movies is that Viggo felt he should speak out in order to set us all straight on what the movie does and does not mean. Deep-thinking Viggo, who by his own admission didn't even open the first Tolkien book until he was on his way to filming. He learned some lines and play-acted some fight scenes, so now he's an expert on the symbolism of good and evil, and their interconnections with global politics.

This isn't surprising, to be sure, Hollywood is chock full of stupid people with ridiculous, trendy little views. The worst part of this spectacle, however, was that Viggo trotted out the "I'm just trying to be an independent voice" line. "Nobody questions U.S. policy, or asks why we need to kill all of these innocent civilians," he exclaimed.

So here's what will happen next. If this gets much press, Viggo will say that oppressive conservatives are trying to silence him and others who agree with him. This is a tactic of the self-pitying, irrational Left. Sling out ridiculous accusations, exclaim that you are really just trying to inject truth into the debate, and then run hiding at the first sign of critique.

Viggo couldn't even withstand the gentlest of questioning from Rose ("What would you have done differently after 9/11," Rose asked. "Well, I wouldn't have killed all those innocent people in Afghanistan," was the evasive answer). There's no way he can maintain his assertions in the face of a detailed rebuttal. Not that people like him ever have any intention of doing so. Instead, they equate rebuttal with efforts to crush their rare flower of an opinion.

The second movie, by the way, is well worth seeing, especially the battle scenes. You might find yourself rooting a little for the Orcs, however. Imagine what an insufferable little kingdom this Aragorn would build for himself. Tolkien's work is art, and it is beautiful in its portrayal of the eternal battles in and around man. It is a pity Viggo Mortensen isn't more worthy of the tale.

UPDATE:
Oh, it just keeps getting better. this thread is just one of many on the Charlie Rose website. A sample from one of Viggo Mortensen's fans:

And another fan:

Noam Chomsky. Oh. Dear. God.

I'm thinking of a scene from Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, when Aragorn and Gimli leap into a crowd of orcs and send bodies flying left and right. This close-minded little cabal on the Rose website suggests a similar opportunity...

Update
Comments are closed. Now all of you just . . . go away. Scoot. Be gone. Enjoy yourselves on someone else's website.

One thing I've forgotten about long drives is that they allow one to see how people across socioeconomic strata choose to decorate their yards. I say "choose" because this is -- unfortunately, at times -- a free country. And the word that best follows choose, in this case, is "badly." I suppose it's possible that a gang of psychotic unemployed interior decorators could be roaming the countryside, slinging plastic animals and wind-driven spinning tin contraptions into the yards of perfectly tasteful people, and then threatening to kill sweet Aunt Alma in Dubuque if even a single pink flamingo is taken down.

This possibility, friends, is more comforting than the alternative. The alternative is that grown adults willingly place a panoply of colorful plasticized garbage into their own yards, and they don't mind that people will see it.

In fact, I think they want people to see it.

I find that my mind is dulled to the occurrence of such yard schlock. I only began to take notice when I was startled out of my blindness by a horrific sight. In a yard smaller than my bedroom I saw a herd of plastic deer engaged in what appeared to be a rugby scrum, or perhaps a prison-yard rape, being overseen by the Virgin Mary, Santa, and an elite Gestapo corps of hostile-looking elves and wise men.

"Oh my," exclaimed the wife. A visible tremor shook her body. We debated briefly whether this was indeed a Christmas display unrestrained by taste, or instead some sort of radical statement against the commercialization of the Advent season. We concluded that the latter wasn't possible, because anybody who would inflict such a sight on his neighbors is most assuredly going to Hell.

Our sensibilities thus stirred, we each of us began to notice the myriad offenses against taste, and a reasonable home decoration budget, that littered the roadsides.

"Hmm, a glowing green Santa."

"Yes, and it looks like he's about to be beaten down by that crowd of imposter Santas congregating by the sled."

"I didn't see a sled."

"The littlest one, tucked over beside the El Camino up on cinder blocks."

"Thank you, Lord, that my husband can't fix cars."

"Doesn't look like hers can either."

We passed plastic Santas and concrete angels, little glowing baby Jesuses, more wise men than have ever truly lived (many more, according to my wife), and enough reindeer to make even PETA consider culling. As our trip lengthened, my faith in democracy diminished. But I began to think that perhaps all of these people are not afflicted with unchangeable bad taste; perhaps they simply don't know any better. After all, I know people who watched "Beverly Hills: 90210" and collected all of Duran Duran's albums, yet turned out to be relatively upstanding citizens.

What these benighted yard yokels need, in other words, is a Sand in the Gears Guide to Yard Adornment. As with all of my public service guides, please feel free to distribute widely:

1. Statues of well-known individuals. First, understand that idol worship is a sin, and that you will likely burn in Hell for having that five foot tall Virgin Mary in your yard. If that is the route you choose, however, you should at least accept that no religion recognizes the simultaneous existence of more than one Virgin Mary, and that this reality creates some obligation on you to limit yourself to one Virgin Mary as well.

I know, I know, Deke's Yard Emporium was having a two-for-one sale on all shapes and sizes of Virgin Marys, but decency requires you to keep one in your root cellar until such time as a gang of marauding Protestant teens steals the one in your yard.

The same rule applies to Santas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeers, and Frosty the Snowmen. Notice the difficulty in pluralizing these names. That is because they are meant to be singular, both in my writing, and in your yard.

2. Year-round Christmas adornment. If this applies to you, then you might as well start wearing jogging pants to work and letting that ear hair grow, because you have most definitely joined that class of people defined centuries ago by Gibbon as Loseratis Perpetuanatis, which in common parlance can be translated as: "losers who just don't care anymore."

Look, you aren't fooling anyone by not turning on those 11,000 light bulbs afflicting your house like leprosy. You may pretend, because it's June, that they aren't really there, but the rest of us see them plainly. If you have so many lights that you can't possibly take them all down at the end of the holiday season, this is not an indication that you should leave them up. It is an indication that you have too many lights. Because of people like you, poor Bangladeshi children don't have the lumens they need to read I, Rigoberta Menchu.

And what goes for the perpetually enlightened goes double for those of you with faux icicles dangling from your house. Basically, you have transformed your home into a doily. Now, if it looks dumb even during a cold winter's night, when its dull taupe glow evokes the frosting used by cameramen to make Cybill Shepherd look less old in the latter days of Moonlighting, then you must understand how ridiculous it looks hanging from your house in the summer. Show some self-respect, for God's sake.

3. Silhouette cowboys. The first time any of us saw a black tin cut-out of a cowboy, positioned near the corner of someone's garage or barn or home so as to emulate a real cowboy leaning against a wall, we most likely thought, "hmm, that was kind of neat."

But then, for most of us, a little part of the brain kicked in to evoke a thought, which probably went something like this: "but goodness, how tacky to have sitting in one's yard day after day. Surely the novelty must wear out quickly."

Unfortunately, this little part of the brain is inoperative in some people, which is why one cannot take a rural drive in the United States without passing at least one home afflicted by the silhouette cowboy. One need not enter the home to know that inside awaits a host of wooden chachkas of the "country craft show" variety, most incorporating either some dull maroon-painted wood, or dry stalks of wheat, or both.

I have no advice for such people. The best we can do is contain them, perhaps in a little colony isolated from society, and keep them mollified with an abundant supply of "Green Acres" re-runs, Precious Moments figurines, and boxy Oldsmobiles. They are in general a kindly and well-intentioned people, but they are deeply ill, and must be quarantined. This would probably require the closing of most rural roadside "antique" shops, but that is a price that I, for one, am willing to pay.

4. Broken transportation. The rule here is fairly straightforward -- if your neighbors can see your yard, then it is inappropriate to litter it with half-disassembled vehicles and farm equipment. Perhaps your mother didn't teach you to clean up after yourself, or perhaps you have been subject to a string of really bad luck that has left you, through no fault of your own, with seven non-working means of transportation.

The bottom line is that the rest of us don't care. Fix it and park it neatly, or call a tow truck. If you can't afford a tow truck, I'll bet your neighbors would be glad to take up a collection.

This rule, by the way, applies to bicycles, toy trucks, and those ridiculous wagon wheels people like to prop against their mailboxes. Think about it this way: the essence of manhood is the ability to make things, and to fix what is broken. Trust me, I don't like this, but it is what it is. Those of us who can't fix stuff can salvage some bit of manhood by earning the money to get it fixed. But we do so quietly. Placing all your broken, non-functioning equipment in your front yard is the equivalent of putting up a sign that reads "Impotent Male Lives Here." Not the kind of thing you want to advertise, I don't think.

5. Boats. There are lots of reasons to store a boat in one's front yard. Marina fees are too high. The kids and dogs need the back yard. God may send another big flood.

There are also lots of reasons to shoot one's neighbor. His dog barks too much. He ogles your wife. He leaves his stupid boat parked in his yard, such that it takes up a good portion of the view from your living room window. Yes, there are many reasons to shoot one's neighbor, but almost none of them are acceptable.

Almost none.

6. Play equipment. The only thing worse than a neighbor with fifteen different pieces of play junk in his front yard is a neighbor with fifteen different pieces of insanely brightly colored play junk in his front yard. Unfortunately, play junk only seems to be made of plastic, and to come in shades of violent bright red and acid-trip yellow. There are some wooden play contraptions, but people with the good taste to build or buy them also tend to have enough respect for decency to keep them in their back yards.

The owners of bright plastic swings and slides and crawl-through cubes, on the other hand, have no such sensibility. They pack their little brats into the Dodge Caravan, schlep up to Toys "R" Us, and buy whatever appeals to untrained rug rats hopped up on sugar and television (which explains the drug-trip colors). They schlep it back to their homes and sling it out onto their yards for the little beasts to climb on and under and over, and thus buy themselves a few hours of peace, most likely to be spent watching NFL football.

Listen, people. Your neighbors are sick of your plastic yard crap. The very rocks cry out from its offensive presence. Not only is it an eyesore, it is likely the source, with its myriad pools of rainwater, of 90 percent of the mosquito activity in your neighborhood. I am reasonably certain that if you truck it to the curb, your garbage men will cart it off to the landfill. Do us all a favor, be a real environmentalist, and get rid of it.

There. Now you can all go forth and decorate tastefully for the holidays. Maybe put some lights in the trees, a nice wreath on your door, perhaps some elegant electric candles in your windows. Remember, elegance is beautiful, and elegance is simplicity. This can be a lovely time of year, if we will all just show a little freaking restraint.

I used to have a dentist, by the name of (I am not making this up) Dr. Payne. He was an entertainer, as are many dentists, perhaps because the field is less regulated (i.e., the competition is more intense). During our first appointment, as his assistant got my head and mouth into a vulnerable position, he loomed over me to block out the bright lights, and asked, "Is it safe?"

He was alluding, of course, to that 1976 movie, "The Marathon Man," starring Dustin Hoffman, whose character is tortured by a former Nazi dentist who repeatedly asks this question. I recently re-watched this movie, and noticed something that I missed years ago. Hoffman plays a history graduate student who is writing a book on (of course) the reign of tyranny that was McCarthyism, and who has a special interest in it because his father was driven to suicide as a result of being hounded by the red-baiting totalitarians. There is a scene in which a U.S. government agent (of course) rifles through Hoffman's research work, and tosses aside a book titled False Witness.

Though I had never read Whittaker Chambers' Witness, I think I got the point. I decided to read the book. For those of you not familiar with the story, Chambers was a devoted communist spying for the Soviets in Washington, D.C. who became, in his own words, "an involuntary witness to God's grace and to the fortifying power of faith." Chambers was transformed like the unnamed Soviet he mentions in his introduction, whose daughter explained once to Chambers that her father abandoned the cause because "one night he heard screams." Chambers also heard the screams, which led him to realize that man has a soul, which led him to God, which led him to the conviction that communism is not only evil, but that it should be opposed, even unto calumny and death.

And so he named names, and one of those he identified was the spy and traitor Alger Hiss, a high-level State Department official and eventual head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Hiss was part of the better half of Washington -- genteel, respected, progressive. Chambers was dumpy, of no particular breeding, and -- tré gauche -- a newly confirmed Christian. The dispute ranged through Congressional hearings, a perjury trial for Hiss, and a libel trial for Chambers. You needn't guess whose side the press, the President, the Washington establishment, and, of course, Hollywood, chose.

Over time Chambers was proven right, which means he has been unduly overlooked. The dedicated Left still thinks he lied, however, such that the few doubters find themselves in league with the likes of The Nation (recently noteworthy for the extent it is willing to excuse terrorism so long as the victims are American and/or Jewish).

The Nation and (of course) Hollywood. This is true in both large and small detail: anti-communism as entirely unfounded marks the changeless backdrop of any movie touching on the fifties, and anti-communists are usually murderous militarists. In 1964, for example, -- the year noted peace activist Lyndon Johnson opposed Barry Goldwater with his infamous "Daisy" ad -- there were no less than three Hollywood movies about nuclear war, and in two of these conservative anti-communists are the cause. (Anyone who thinks campaign finance reform will remove the adverse influence of the moneyed on U.S. public opinion should consider the net assets of major Hollywood filmmakers.) One might also consider on this topic Kenneth Billingsley's excoriation of Hollywood for failing to portray with accuracy the consequences of communism. And then there is this little detail from "The Marathon Man." I suspect there are others like it.

Perhaps I am wrong about the intent behind positioning False Witness on the desk of a hero researching McCarthyism, but I doubt it. Witness was a beacon for anti-communists, and hence the book -- and its author -- were the target of the anti-anti-communists, which included a large chunk of the creative talent in Hollywood. So I think the choice of titles was intentional. It is offensive to see people with little courage mock someone with Chambers' moral courage. This seems a fair description of the man who told his wife as he made his choice to speak out, "You know, we are leaving the winning world for the losing world," and who through years of vituperation and isolation could tell his children:

"True wisdom comes from the overcoming of suffering and sin. All true wisdom is therefore touched with sadness."

It seems strange that a man who was forced to write his story in a secluded farmhouse, with a gun on his desk, should be judged by people who write their meaningless stories in coffee shops and Hollywood beach houses, usually poorly at that, and who have never faced censorship beyond the overly minimal selectivity of the popular marketplace.

But things are what they are, and so perhaps I should not have been surprised to see the likes of Dustin Hoffman helping to deliver a little jab from the safe confines of Left-mindedness. Hoffman, who will most likely find that his enduring claim to fame is playing the part of an idiot (albeit a useful one, if I remember the plot of "Rainman"). Perhaps this is not the end that an objective viewing of Hoffman's oeuvre would dictate, but it certainly seems a just one.

I've been thinking about something I call the Incompetence Tax. It's one of those taxes we often pay without realizing that we are doing so, like a gasoline tax, or a telephone usage tax. It seems that no good or service is exempt, though a handful of businesses have managed to secure exemption. Its rate as a percentage of your purchase varies; sometimes it can be less than five percent, but I've also paid it at a rate of 1,000 percent. It is levied at times in cash, though more often in labor and frustration, which an economist will tell you can be translated into cash terms.

My own informal research reveals that the Incompetence Tax is highest at government agencies and highly regulated companies (there's a whole organizational research literature that explains this -- don't make me beat you about the head and shoulders with it). When dealing with our credit union, for example, there is a probability approaching one (and they test the theoretical limits of the asymptote) that the teller will make some annoying little error -- funds deposited in the wrong account, a withdrawal amount wrong, etc. These errors are usually resolved after about an hour of my wife's labor, and one or two phone calls. Fortunately, we don't have to deal directly with the credit union much more than once a quarter. Factoring in the average hourly wage in the U.S. ($16.23 in 2001, as computed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics), we can thus derive a yearly Incompetence Tax levied on us by our credit union of $64.92. Given a membership of roughly 200,000, this amounts to a total annual Incompetence Tax of $12,984,000.

Other forms of the tax are smaller, but more frequent. All told my family eats out roughly 847 times a week. Okay, I exaggerate, but by less than I care to admit. The National Restaurant Association reports that Americans eat 54 billion meals out per year, or 187 meals per person. In my experience, all but the finest restaurants make a mistake about 15 or 20 percent of the time. You know, the fries are the wrong size, or your steak was cooked wrong, or the waiter forgets to refill your water until you ask, or you have to wipe off the table and chair yourself, and so on. Let's assume a 15 percent error rate, and an average amount of your time required to fix the problem equal to one minute. This yields a total U.S. Incompetence Tax on dining out equal to $2,191,050,000 per year.

Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Think about the Incompetence Tax levied on the country every year by dozens of Congressmen with no understanding of economics. Baltimore no doubt pays an Incompetence Tax in the form of lost merchandise and ticket sales as a result of Peter Angelos' overbearing management of the Orioles. Detroit paid a disastrously large Incompetence Tax for the twenty years Coleman Young was in charge, likewise D.C. and Marion Barry (which goes to show that in many cases, people pay the taxes they deserve).

A highly salient Incompetence Tax, at least right now, is levied daily on travelers by Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, who is to the Incompetence Tax what Alexander Hamilton was to the import tariff. And let's not forget U.S. auto companies, who still churn out over-gadgetized junk with a significantly lower average resale value than Toyota or Honda. The worst thing about all of these forms of the Incompetence Tax is that unlike our state and federal taxes, which go to pay for fine things like a Lawrence Welk Museum in North Dakota, the Incompetence Tax is the purest form of a deadweight loss.

It is important not to confuse incompetence with the occasional error, or with an inability to solve a difficult problem. Even Kobe Bryant misses an open 10-foot jumper from time to time, while Thomas Edison needed several hundred tries before he produced a light bulb that lasted more than 15 seconds. One problem with the Incompetence Tax, indeed, is that its ubiquity causes many of us to assume it is being levied whenever there is a gap between our expectations and the received outcome.

As is true of many taxes, repealing the Incompetence Tax is probably well-nigh impossible unless a large number of Americans prove willing to sacrifice time and money in pursuit of a noble cause. (I.e., it is impossible). Protests would have to be held not at IRS offices, but at school board meetings (indeed, schools themselves), a majority of churches, and a good many homes, because the Incompetence Tax is a consequence of poor education and inadequate upbringing (probably more the latter -- one doesn't need phonics to get a McDonald's order right, but one does need a modicum of self-respect and attention to detail).

In short, the Incompetence Tax is something we've passed on ourselves in a sort of slow-motion, decades-long referendum marked by near-universal willingness to cede responsibility for our children to government teachers and minimum wage daycare workers (responsibility, but not real authority -- we reserve the right to be the ones who don't discipline our little darlings). In this regard it is one of those nefarious levies the bulk of which falls on future generations, like Social Security, Medicare, and the various neighborhood improvement projects, usually advanced by busybody PTA moms (conservatives against women working outside the home haven't adequately considered the damage wrought by this breed), which work their way into your property tax bill in the form of special assessments.

Perhaps the hardest hit are those who impose the tax, the legions of slovenly, poorly trained people who man our grocery stores and shopping malls, our post offices and security posts. What an unpleasant life it must be to labor without the basic ability to produce value on a consistent basis. But perhaps value is an alien concept to many of them, there is simply a set of procedures to follow in order to receive one's paycheck, and numerous customers who have to be endured -- and what's their deal, anyway, getting all bent because they didn't get the pizza topping they wanted, or because I brought out the wrong size shoes twice? Customers. What a pain.

So to those who inflict the tax, like many of us who pay it, the cost is hidden. It comes in the form of an absence of dignity and social value the worth of which they are unable to conceive.

But not all is hopeless. While we probably can't reverse the Incompetence Tax on a global scale, each of us who cares might be able to do so on a personal scale, i.e., among the businesses we frequent. I'm thinking of a university psychology experiment in which several students who sat in the front of a certain professor's class agreed to smile whenever he evinced a particular facial expression. By the end of the semester they had trained him, via positive reinforcement, to produce the expression every few seconds.

So, when you encounter excellent customer service, do you provide positive reinforcement? Do you ask to speak to the person's supervisor in order to commend him, or better yet, write a letter to the owner? Do you look him in the eye and give him genuine thanks? You might be surprised how far this sort of thing can go. We might not be able to convert the crusty university cashier to the cause of creating value, but we can certainly encourage the excellent service providers when we encounter them.

So be especially kind to the people who do great work, should you be fortunate enough to cross paths with any of them today. And if all you get today are the duds, have a little pity. There, but for the grace of God, some good upbringing, and Sand in the Gears, go you.

I don't think one can ever be too grumpy, but I sense that I am getting exceedingly close to that asymptotic limit. I look over my writing here and find a fair amount of griping, which troubles me. Leftists are destroying the country, Norm Mineta makes travel miserable, men don't act enough like men, rant, rant, rant. Many of you dig the grumpiness, I know, because especially smackilicious (my new word) rants garner a good deal of extra email.

Well-aimed barbs are delicious to the educated, but let's face it, incessant grousing is a bit annoying. So, in order to make up for the fact that I've complained about them quite a bit lately, I've developed a list of things I love about my fellow Americans:

1. We are a nation of rabble-rousing entrepreneurs. Many of us are descended from people who picked up their rifles when taxes got too high. Many more of us have ancestors who came to America because it was a land free from oppressive government, a place where the individual can rise to greatness by dint of hard work and a good idea, the "Golden Mountain," as my Chinese friends call it. We've invented near everything worth having (e.g., planes and automobiles), or made it better and cheaper (e.g., food), and we've invented darn near everything not worth having as well (e.g., television, rap music, and stretch-pants).

2. We don't like bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is like the Mercedes, an overhyped expensive German product that at its best looks very impressive, but never quite lives up to the promises of its creators. Americans hate bureaucracy. Look around the next time you go through airport security. Watch how people bristle. They look at their watches, roll their eyes, stamp their feet, and seek out people with whom to commiserate. Sometimes the mood can almost be vocalized, as if everyone is thinking the same thing: "let's stuff all these pinheads in the x-ray machines and take care of security ourselves." If you are in a large airport, you may notice a clump of people who are not bristling. These are foreigners. Pity them.

3. We are disliked in the United Nations. This is obviously a good thing: the U.N. is an organization of twits who think that the solution to the world's problems is a diverse, multi-layered, unelected bureaucracy with the work ethic of Spanish customs clerks and the mentality of Gestapo security forces. To quote Dan Quayle, we wear their scorn like a badge of honor.

4. We fought a war to end slavery. Save all your carping, you merchants of racial grievance -- no other slave-trading country, with the exception of sister England, ever devoted the same thought, blood, or treasure to resolving this issue of right and conscience, because for nearly all the others it never was a matter of conscience.

5. We are heavily armed. We have more killing power per capita than any nation in history. That, my friends, is just plain cool, especially because we are not a warmongering totalitarian state, but instead a democratic republic. However:

6. When push comes to shove, we lay down the ever-loving slap. Just ask the Kaiser. Or the Nazis. Or the Imperial Japanese. Or the al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Oh, that's right, you can't ask them, because we ground them into powder -- biffed them, as the Brits used to say -- leaving their pathetic remnants to scurry back to the demon pits where they were spawned. If we ever decide to change our national motto from the Latin slogan that so beautifully tripped up Al Gore, I propose we adopt the following: "You want a piece of this?"

7. We don't like tattle-tales. Other countries have managed to turn their citizens into informants, but by and large we have resisted that tendency. Sure, we have our share of brown-nosers, but they usually receive a good dose of torment in school before taking a job with the IRS, ATF, or DEA. The snitch is a perpetual loser when portrayed in most of our movies, "narcs" are regularly taunted in high schools, and we jumped all over Linda Tripp's case for recording her friend's confession, even though it implicated a U.S. president in perjury and sexual harassment. Think about one of our favorite phrases: "mind your own business." It's the perfect marriage of anti-snoop sentiment and entrepreneurial fervor. Keep your nose out of my affairs, and get back to making money. That is so very American, don't you think?

8. We contract with our government. You have to love a country that started out by giving its government agents a list of things they're not allowed to do. Of course, we ceded authority over that document to a series of unprincipled, power-hungry politicians, who in turn put unprincipled, utopian-minded jurists on the bench who proceeded, working hand in hand with unelected bureaucrats, to distort and undermine the original limitations on the federal government. Still, the Constitution was a nice start. If only we could get back around to using it again.

9. Lots of us actually like God. Sure, the French have their cathedrals, and the Italians have the Pope. But you can drive for hundreds of miles in the Old World without ever seeing a big, tacky, well-lit cross stuck on some roadside hill. We have churches of all shapes and sizes that people of all shapes and sizes actually attend, outreach concerts where people go to get saved, revivals where -- if they are Baptists -- they can go to get re-saved, tent meetings, Bible studies, prison fellowships, Christian athlete fellowships, Christian businessman fellowships, Christian music (most of it bad, but they mean well), Christian books (ditto), and great big Christian mega-stores where you can satisfy all your Christian paraphernalia needs with the assistance of a faith-affirming ecumenical staff. Most of it is a gaudy, overemotional, sentimental mess, and about half of it consists of really bad theology, but the bottom line is that this is God's country, warts and all. We love Him, and He loves us back (in spite of us).

10. We like happy endings. I know, it makes for movies and books that are often less artistic and true to life, but really, would you rather be trapped on a deserted island with somebody who likes "You've Got Mail," or someone whose favorite director is Ingmar Bergman? We may be sappy, and optimistic, and totally insulated from the oppressiveness of existence or whatever, but nobody likes to hang out with the gloom and doom Nietzsche crowd anyway. If you question that analysis, think about it this way: who gets more opportunities to reproduce -- business majors, or philosophy majors? I think you get my point.

So there you have it, ten reasons I love my fellow Americans. What do you love about them?

Albert Gore, Jr. has cogitated himself a new campaign theme: the People vs. the Powerful. "The People," are the shortsighted oafs required to provide Gore with a plurality in states totaling 270 electoral votes, while "the Powerful" are those of us with reservations about affording our government decision-making authority over everything from fossil fuel extraction to toilet tank capacity. Since Al doesn't decide what dressing to put on his organic baby greens without commissioning a poll, we can be fairly certain this is a theme with good odds of resonating with a public that knows more about the candidates on "Survivor" than it does its presidential choices.

Perhaps it is the fact that I'm reading Evelyn Waugh, but I am increasingly convinced that the leveling effect of democracy as an ethos is a bad thing. By "ethos" I mean to distinguish the democratic vote from democratic sentimentality. The latter is reflected in everything from "man on the street" interviews to a President who feels compelled to appear in blue jeans and mispronounce words.

The term "democratic sentimentality" is apt, I believe, because what drives head-nodding on Oprah and garners votes for demagogues is an emotional attachment by many Americans to what feels like principle, but is really just base jealousy and resentment. It is the mutation of an American Revolution that began by simultaneously rejecting oppressive government while maintaining social civility, but which has mutated into an embrace of oppressive government accompanied by the abandonment of social institutions that do not serve the immediate ends of selfish and ill-educated citizens.

It lives and breathes in every teacher who asks her students to call her "Miss Lisa," and in every pundit who thinks the amount of wealth left in the hands of high-income taxpayers is the primary measure of a tax reduction's merit. It produces evils like the death tax, the United Nations, and student government. Its unchecked metastasis is the force behind ridiculous presidential debates in which average citizens are allowed to ask insipid questions of what should be their social betters, who in turn supply meaningless answers distinguished only by the number of words lifted from the lexicon of democratic sentimentality (e.g., "fair," "equal," and "everyone").

Democratic sentimentality also undergirds inane laws restricting "price-gouging" (to wit, any price at or above the level necessary to ensure that a scarce resource goes to those who value it most) and "ticket scalping" (i.e., laws ensuring that events in great demand will be disproportionately attended by dolts who place the lowest value on their time -- an explanation in turn of abominations like rock music and fireworks at baseball games). It is the lurking sickness in society that has enabled what I saw on my most recent airline flight: a woman in her sixties sporting capri pants and a tank top that exposes her midriff, a man sitting next to me who hasn't learned how to cover his mouth when he coughs, and the disappearance of "please," "excuse me," and "thank you" from the vocabularies of passengers impatient for their chips and shot glasses of warm soda.

Yes, boorishness flows from democratic sentimentality, just as it flows from overindulgent parenting. Quite simply, we've allowed people to think that there are no standards for one's opinion, and from here it is only a short step to the conclusion that one's behavior is rightfully above reproach as well. Tie or no tie, "yes sir" or a grunt, flag or no flag on Memorial Day -- we have allowed "you're not the boss of me" to elevate from child's retort to the progressive's mantra. The moment we failed to ridicule the spectacle of slobbering housewives pontificating about nuclear weapons on "Donahue" is the moment we told every man that he could untuck his shirt and stop opening doors for ladies, and every child that he can wheedle and whine in the department store until he is given what he wants. We unmoored manners from the elitist traditions to which they had always been anchored, and now they drift in a chaotically mutating sea that, while fertile ground for social psychologists, is really no place to train up responsible well-mannered adults.

I don't think there is an easy solution to this pervasive sense that we -- the status-hostile "we" that appears to be the target demographic of every hack pollster and television executive -- all ought to be equal not just in right, but in financial and social outcome, and worse, opportunity for expression. We have created a terrible combination -- a society that believes everyone's opinion is worth hearing, and which lacks the good sense to determine otherwise.

There isn't an easy solution, but I'm sure there's a solution nonetheless. For instance, one of my favorite John Wayne movies is "Big Jake." I especially enjoy the scene in which an estranged son is mouthing off to his father, played by Wayne. "You may not respect your elders, but I'll teach you to respect your betters," says Wayne, before decking the punk. It seems that wide swaths of America are in dire need of just such a jolt, a good clock right on the kisser. The punk that was Wayne's son in "Big Jake" wasn't innately bad, and neither are most Americans. He was simply spoiled, and lacking an example of what better looked like. I think that's America today. Where is the Duke when you need him? He is long gone, and anyway it has become quite legally complicated to give somebody a sock in the jaw, even when you can prove he really deserves it.

But there's always ridicule and snobbery, thank goodness. If I can't punch lots of people in the nose, at the very least I can question their fitness as American citizens here, in Sand in the Gears.

Isn't this a great country?

I saw a bumper sticker this weekend that you've probably seen before:

This brought to mind some alternatives that rely on the same logic:

I wrote an op-ed years ago discussing the mentality on display here, which I called "visceral liberalism." It relies on simplistic reasoning in the service of one's tribal instincts: if you don't like gun violence, ban guns. If you feel bad for the poor, raise the minimum wage.

The fact that the world is filled with complexity, and therefore unanticipated consequences, is not a hindrance to the visceral liberal -- unintended consequences represent merely more opportunities to improve the world. It's what annoying business guys in red suspenders call "a win-win."

The culmination of visceral liberalism is the bumper sticker; it's no coincidence that the left has all the best slogans (along with most of the singers and actors -- people who emote rather than think). Of course there is visceral conservatism, and visceral libertarians as well. Despite these potential competitors, however, the left retains a monopoly on the catchy bumper sticker market.

With this in mind, I think we need to develop some bumper stickers that play off the lefty slogans that have proven especially popular. We right-thinking people can't fit our own philosophies into slogans, but we can certainly raise the blood pressure of our ideological antagonists in just a few words (and honestly, isn't that more fun than winning them over?).

Here are some samples of what I've come up with so far:

Meat is Murder, But The Animals Have It Coming

Visualize World Peace Visualize World Domination

Practice Random Acts of Kindness... Practice Random Acts of Violence and Senseless Acts of Cruelty

Celebrate Diversity Celebrate Monotheistic Intolerance

Bikes / Cars: Same Roads, Same Laws Let the Laws of Physics Decide Who Gets the Roads

Subvert the dominant paradigm Dominate the subversive parasite

Property is theft Property may be theft, but I'm packing a loaded .357 and I lust commie blood.

End racism. And while you're at it, make me ten years younger and 40 pounds lighter.

The Right Is Wrong, But They Have The Hottest Chicks

It Will Be A Great Day When Our Schools Get All The Money They Need and The Air Force Has to Hold a Bake Sale To Buy A Bomber It Will Be A Great Day When The Air Force Bombs Our Schools

Think Globally - Act Locally - Be the Self-Righteous Pedant Everyone Avoids at Parties

And while we're on the subject of bumper stickers, I suppose you've seen the ones many schools hand out to parents, of the "My child is an honor student at . . ." variety. You've probably also seen the response sticker: "My child beat up your honor student." Funny, yes, but if you're like me you have a secret desire to see the car bearing such a sticker get creamed by a semi at the intersection.

Now I'm noticing a new response sticker diffusing among the population, which goes something like this: "ALL children are honored at Fulston Middle School." If you close your eyes and let that sentence kick around in your head, you can conjure up the voice of the person speaking it. So very earnest, so very full of indignant egalitarian righteousness.

Fortunately, though the implied tone of the bumper sticker is irritating, it serves the purpose of truthful advertising. It might as well read: "Fulston Middle School: Where Your Little Darling Will Be Free From Standards."

And that is, ultimately, the beauty of the bumper sticker. No matter what it says, in one way or another it reveals a truth, either about the world, its owner, or both.

I'm still out of town on a top secret mission. Really. It's a secret. Top secret. Only my employers, close family, and some confidantes know what it's about.

But that's another matter, and I'll reveal the nature of my mission soon enough. But right now I want to address some of you who were kind enough to challenge me in a civil manner in the Comments section of my last post, as well as those of you who have no social graces. No need to name names, especially since most of you in the latter camp didn't have the testicular fortitude to use your real names.

Back to the slap-down at hand. There are two criticisms of my story about the airport revolt, offered by several people. The first is that I should know better than to show up at the airport only 45 minutes before my flight. The second is that I'm being a troglodyte homophobe by picking on the effete man at the ticket counter.

Like everyone else, for several weeks after September 11th I dutifully showed up two hours before my flights. Then the airports relaxed it to an hour. Then, a few months ago, the Wichita airport posted little signs at all its ticket counters, directing passengers to arrive at least 30 minutes before their flights. Last I checked, 45 minutes counts as at least 30 minutes. What's more, 45 minutes has always been enough time at the Wichita airport, except when American Airlines stacks three flights 25 minutes apart.

But that's not the critical point here. The point, the thing that sticks in my craw, is that the airlines have the gall to instruct us to show up 30 minutes early, and yet they lack the competence to live up to their end of the bargain. And that's what this is a matter of -- competence. A few simple methods would have moved that Wichita line quickly, and that means I wouldn't have needed to seize authority, which apparently gave a few of you uncomfortable tingly feelings.

This episode, in other words, was not a matter of too many people trying to go somewhere at the same time, or of passengers arriving 45 minutes early when we should have arrived three hours early. It was a matter of people with neither training nor incentive nor a willingness to exercise plain common sense being given veto power over a hugely important economic activity, with the rest of us refusing to question them because we conflate patriotism with kowtowing to someone in a polyester uniform.

Still, I can understand how many of you, not knowing the Wichita airport, would think I was silly to arrive only 45 minutes early. Up until this time, 45 minutes has been more than adequate. I'll certainly arrive earlier from now on, since I am confident that the Wichita airport's management will not accept my upcoming offer to connect them with a throughput optimization expert.

Others of you took issue with my characterization of the snippy little ticket counter clerk. Specifically, you thought I was making fun of him for being gay. I find this curious, because until I read your comments, it hadn't occurred to me that he might be gay. He acted like a girl, he had poofy hair, and he needed a good hard slap. But I don't equate these traits with homosexuality. Do you? It amuses me when the self-appointed apostles of sensitivity get snared in their narrow-minded conceptualizations of people. For the record, when I ridicule men who behave like sissies, it's because I don't like men who behave like sissies. The fact that you've equated girly with gay would appear to be your problem, not mine.

But thanks for reading. Kisses.

I'm not a confrontational person by nature. If my steak is too rare, or someone breaks in line, I'm not one to make a fuss about it. But I have my limits.

I led a revolt against airport security yesterday. They've had it coming. I'll wait longer in line in order to keep the airplane safe. I'll submit to having my less than fresh boxer briefs fluffed on the return trip by someone named Delbert who couldn't spot a shank if it was stuck in his porkchop gut. I'll have my luggage x-rayed, my belt buckle checked and re-checked by unusually interested minimum-wage rent-a-cops, my children patted down while swarthy young men with no luggage board unmolested.

I will put up with all of it, but I will not let this nonsense, this massive managerial incompetence disguised as security enhancement, cost me my flight. Today, they pushed me too far. I arrived at the Wichita airport with my wife and two little ones 45 minutes before our flight. We endured an especially slow trip through the American Airlines ticket counter line. Here's a quote from the effete little man who took our bags: he didn't say "I apologize for the confusion," or "sorry we didn't separate people who are on the earlier flight," but instead, "I have to put up with this every day." How difficult for you, Emile, or Jamey, or whatever girly little name you go by. Tell the other girls at the hair salon about it.

So, we rounded the corner and saw a 150 foot line waiting to get through security. Let me paint the complete picture for you, because this helps one see why people who don't get paid very much generally deserve what they earn. At the head of the line is a single security guard, checking tickets and ID's, taking about 30 seconds per person. Thirty feet beyond him are two x-ray machines, but only one metal detector for passengers to walk through. Security guards are manning the x-ray machines, and one is searching people who set off the metal detector. A clump of security guards are standing to the side, having a nice conversation.

Now, here's how they do things in a real airport. One guard will stand at a table, helping people get their computers, phones, etc., into plastic trays. Another will assign people to x-ray machines and metal detectors, in order to save the inevitable time people take trying to make up their own minds. In an airport where the security is really on the ball, like Dulles, for example, a thick crowd can move quickly.

But this was Wichita, and the security guards didn't care whether that line stretched two feet or two miles. At this point we had twenty minutes remaining before take-off. After waiting seven or eight minutes and moving 15 feet, I did some quick math, and figured we weren't going to make it. As I was doing the math, the gate agent announced over the intercom the last call for our flight. So I led my little troop to the security guard at the front of the line.

"Excuse me," I said to the guard, "that was our flight they just called." The guard gave me an annoyed look, then took another person's ticket before replying.

"There are people in front of you."

"Yes, but we'll miss our flight."

"Some of them might be on that flight too, and they were in front of you."

Like I said, I'm not a confrontational person. But my options, as I saw them, were pretty narrow. Do the job these slobs should have been doing, or miss our flight. So, I shouted to the crowd behind me: "Okay, people, who's on the 11 o'clock?"

Several people raised their hands. The security guard started shifting from one foot to another. "C'mon up!" I shouted. "Fall in behind me!" About 20 people stepped out of line and congregated behind me. My wife was mortified.

"Okay," I said to the guard, "now all those people are right here."

"That's not what I meant, sir. You shouldn't have done that. There are people who were here first."

I shouted again to the larger crowd. "Does anybody mind if those of us on the 11 o'clock go first?" Some people towards the front shook their heads no, and a couple of people told us to go right ahead. I turned back to the guard, who was looking exceedingly uncomfortable. "There," I said, "nobody minds if we go ahead."

"You're not supposed to do that, sir. You can't go in front of people."

"Look, I'm not trying to make trouble here, but if you don't let us through, we're all going to miss that flight." The guard looked at my newly formed platoon, then at me. He sighed and held out his hand for my ticket. We all made it to the plane.

Power to the people, baby. Fight the Man. Dare to challenge stupid. Take a stand, and your fellow man will stand with you.

Much later, on the plane:

Wife: "You were pretty confrontational back there."

Me: "They left me no choice. The people in the crowd dug it."

Wife: "I can't believe he let us through."

Me: "He was intimidated." (long pause) "I suppose he and his buddies could have forced me into some back room" (only if I let them, I thought).

Wife: "Yep, and all those people who were digging you would have gotten back in line and left you hanging."

Me: "Sheep."

A tie? A %#*!$! tie? Since when did our national pastime become soccer? If I want to watch a bunch of well-paid guys play around for three hours just to end in a draw, I'll turn on C-SPAN. This is America, for Pete's sake -- land of the free, home of the brave, nation of citizens who decided they didn't want to be Europeans. Every year, we elect our favorite baseball players from each team and league (because we are a republic, not some grubby democracy), and tell them to slug it out in a stadium until one league or the other is declared the victor.

You see, having slapped around a string of dictators for the last two hundred years, we've gotten used to seeing this sort of thing finished. Being a nation founded by Christians, we believe you should pick a side and stick to it; be hot or cold, as the good book says. It's why Ingmar Bergman was never a big hit here. It's why we like our chili spicy and our beer icy. It's why soccer will never be the national sport, at least not while a Republican is in office. If none of these things make sense, then you probably didn't even know there was an All-Star game last night. I'll wager further that you live in a place where guns are prohibited, probably with several indoor pets and lots of Anne Rice books. You have my sympathy and my contempt.

As does professional baseball. Somehow we have forgotten what we all learned as kids, that if it gets too dark or the guy who owns the bat has to go home for supper, you just show up the next day, with the same score, and finish it.

But that assumes there isn't anybody else to play, which was clearly not the case last night. I promise you there were at least a thousand guys in Miller Park with baseball gloves. So why didn't anybody think to let one of them play once the rosters started to thin? You think the crowd wouldn't have loved that? If so, you're out of touch with sports fans, and with America. We all grew up with this rule: if you don't have enough good guys to play, you just let somebody's kid brother in the game, or at worst, somebody's sister. Not only would this have been good baseball, it would have been good finance -- you let one Joe Average get into a professional game, and you'll fill every stadium for the rest of the season.

Or what about the managers? These guys already have uniforms on, for crying out loud. I know, they're old and out of shape, but so are half the professional pitchers out there. If last night's travesty isn't enough to get the managers out on the field, then they should take off the uniforms and officially bury the manager-player tradition.

All of these solutions just highlight the lack of entrepreneurial spirit among baseball officials, which isn't surprising coming from a cartel that lets the likes of Peter Angelos join its ranks. The real problem here is that the bureaucrats were more worried about some manager getting his panties in a wad because his pitcher had to go more than two innings than they were about telling 41,781 Americans -- in a time of war, no less -- that they just paid $125 per ticket to see a cricket match. So what does that say about us?

Sissies. We are becoming a nation of sissies. Don't agree? Aside from last night, here are a few cultural markers: Oprah, Title IX, chick flicks, workplace sensitivity training, gun control, rising obesity, declining military enrollment, Tae Kwon Do, guys with earrings, and the disappearance of the stick shift.

Here's an even more persuasive sign that I'm right: the word "sissy" is considered insensitive, and increasingly likely to get one in trouble when uttered in the wrong company. Only a nation of sissies would take umbrage at the word "sissy."

The solution? Well, for starters we can get everybody back out on the field to finish last night's game. If the All-Stars are too tired, or are feeling abused and underpaid, then let our armed services field a couple of teams. They're the real All-Stars anyway. Next, we can start fining people who don't shoot burglars and muggers. After that, we should bring back the slap. Watch any black-and-white movie and you'll see what I'm talking about. If somebody gets too hysterical, you just give him a solid backhand. Not being a sissy, he'll thank you for it later. Imagine being able to give your supervisor a fresh one the next time he starts hyperventilating over increasing SG&A. Not such a bad idea, eh?

These are just a few possibilities, off the top of my head. I'll put the question to you, Gentle (in the non-sissy connotation) Reader. What steps can we take to stem the sissification of America?

Update: Ciscley Frohme has a compelling rebuttal to my claim about the inherent sissiness of tie-prone soccer. Excerpt: "Baseball can't have a tie without everyone deciding to give up. Soccer does have ties precisely because the teams won't give up."

Okay, point nicely made. Can we end this argument with a draw, Cis?

First U.S. illegitimacy reached 33 percent. Then the married couple became a minority. Then gay marriages received a court blessing. And now this -- wife-carrying competitions that don't require actual wives. That's right. The world wife-carrying championship, which was recently held in Finland, allows unmarried couples to compete.

Unfamiliar with wife-carrying? Well, friends, you are missing out. Imagine your better half clinging to your torso, her thighs wrapped about the top of your head, her arms clutching your waist, as you wade through water and jump over hurdles in a desperate contest to beat all the other husbands to win the grand prize, your wife's weight in beer. European beer, no less. The kama sutra has nothing to top this, believe me.

Only now, the rotten heart of Europe has decayed even this time-honored Norse tradition, to the point that a man and woman shacked up and childless, with nothing to do all day but go to work and exercise, can compete against couples who've had the courage to tie the knot, bear children, and take on all the extra weight that entails. I mean, anybody can walk into a bar, throw two or three skinny single gals over his shoulder, and run a couple of miles. It takes a real man to carry a woman who isn't desperately keeping her waist-size to Ally McBeal proportions.

As can be expected, once the Europeans distort a social norm, East Coast Americans will quickly follow suit. And this contest announcement from the North American Wife Carrying Championships openly admits as much:

"The title can be deceiving - wife can mean someone else's wife or no one's wife - as long as it's a male-female team."

Apparently we weren't content just to relax the marriage requirement, we threw in wife-swapping. And you thought the 70's were dead.

But surely the male-female requirement will soon fall by the wayside as well, as hyperactive gay activists and their stormtrooper lesbian muscle issue a barrage of fussy press releases besmirching the wife-carrying competition as an example of heterosexual oppression. It will quickly be renamed the "Partner Carrying Competition," and will probably occasion a brief sports comeback by Martina Navratilova.

We won't stop there, however, because soon the Alone and Proud of Ourselves crowd -- fresh from a court victory requiring corporations to extend maternity leave coverage to singles who've just purchased a cat -- will begin grousing over all this "partner" language. So, the contest will be renamed the "Person You May or May Not Be Currently Humping-Carrying Competition," which will spread the sexual and gender confusion further, but will at least open the door to some serious network television sponsorship.

But we can't be done, you see, because we will still be excluding the differently abled, whose walkers and wheelchairs aren't so simpatico with an obstacle course. Thus we'll need to replace the obstacles with a smooth path made of at least 40% recycled tires, and eliminate the "Carrying" part of the contest, because this evokes a dependence on others that riles disabled activists. They can get by just fine without any help -- once you provide the primo parking spaces and ramp over three-quarters of civilization, of course -- and they don't appreciate all this "carrying" talk.

So once we're finished making this competition into something that fits our modern lifestyles, we'll no longer have a wife-carrying contest, we'll have a lot of bitter people wheeling and limping and grousing along a walking path. Nobody will want to watch anymore, but that won't stop the television networks; they'll just weave this new sport into their Women's NBA schedule. Gatorade will make commercials featuring the reigning dyslexic lesbian champion celebrating by doing little wheelies in her wheelchair. Reebok will provide free shoes to contestants, issued with the disclaimer that its provision of shoes is not intended to suggest that one should wear shoes, or that people without feet are somehow lesser individuals.

In time, parody becomes history. You'll see. All of this means that I will have to retain my amateur status as a wife-carrier of eleven years. Which is fine, because who wants an audience for that sort of thing anyway?

Here's an example of what irritates me about the endless stream of software "upgrades" that yearly hurl themselves at my computers. I'm now working with Microsoft Word 2002. I'm building an outline. Whenever I hit "Tab" to indent a bullet, Word automatically converts my bullet point from a nice black dot into a sissified "o", and indents it about half a mile. My old Word didn't do this. My old Word knew its place. The new Word suffers from the delusion that it is my collaborative partner. The democratic workplace has finally come to my computer, and I don't like it one bit.

So here's what I'm wondering: did the people at Microsoft conduct a survey that I got left out of, wherein they asked lots of customers who make outlines whether they preferred this postmodern indentation system to the old method of indenting a quarter-inch and leaving the freaking bullet point alone?

I'm thinking not. I think instead some poor sap was instructed by headquarters to churn out yet another version of the software, so they can sell it in bulk for way too much money to thousands of IT purchasers desperate not to spend less than last year and thereby have next year's budget cut, so their service personnel can then take up my valuable work time installing the new beast on my computer, so I can in turn spend more time trying to do my job. Said poor sap looks at the current version of Word, verifies that it still puts letters on the screen in pretty much 100% correspondence to what one types, and sits there, befuddled, perhaps for hours. Then he begins to tinker with the program, desperately looking for anything that will enable Microsoft to pretend that they've contributed to the GNP by developing a "new" version of their software.

So, millions of man-hours later, Poor Sap has been promoted, while I sit in front of my computer, trying to do what I used to do perfectly well on a much older version of Word, only now I feel like a bomber pilot weaving through bursts of flak in the form of an excessively peppy paper clip creature who occasionally pops up to ask whether I'd like help writing my letter, squiggly lines under my text to alert me to my repeated (and relished) violations of sixth-grade writing style and politically correct language, and compulsory auto-formatting of things I don't want formatted, especially by someone whose sense of style is akin to Martha Stewart on crack. In short, I'm getting insight into why so many people enjoyed seeing Microsoft on the receiving end of the overreaching Clinton Anti-Trust Division's poker stick -- it wasn't because they were all jealous of Bill Gates, it was because they hate, as any freedom-loving American would, the repeated intrusions on their thoughts and productivity generated by Microsoft's hyperactive, "interactive" software.

I hope the periodic retro trends that afflict American products will soon visit office software, perhaps in the form of a "classic" Office package that is just plain less, well, meddlesome. Now that's a new and improved product I could get behind. And I'm sure my IT guy would be willing to buy it, so long as the price is high enough.

I had to fly on one of those little jets that necessitates venturing onto the tarmac, rather than waltzing down a ramp connected directly to the jet's door. Upon arriving in Atlanta's crappy little airport, there was no elevator in sight, so everyone had to file up a narrow set of stairs encased by dirty metal siding. We were moving at a glacial pace, and I soon realized why. A few people ahead of me, at the front of the line, was an old woman who didn't have the strength to carry her rolling bag. She was using two hands to pull it up a step, then taking one step herself. Because of the contortions required to do this, the woman a little behind and beside her couldn't go past. Directly between me and the old woman were two men, both quietly huffing at the delay. One carried a sissy European man-purse, the other had nothing in either hand. Nothing.

So, I shouldered my computer bag, used my other bag to press past the two sorry excuses for men in front of me, and with my free hand picked up the old woman's bag. She was exceedingly thankful, almost to the point of tears, it seemed. In my alternate universe, once I got her bag to the top of the stairs, I kicked the guy behind us in the throat, causing him to careen with lethal velocity into the man behind him. The rest of the passengers cheered me, and airport security gave me a free ride to my connecting gate on that little golf cart with the annoying horn, letting me honk it at will as we sped past the less heroic travelers.

In reality, I gave them both a disgusted look and went on my way. I wish now I had confronted them. Shame on any man who doesn't help an old woman with her bags, or let pregnant women go to the front of a line, or hold open doors for ladies. Males who don't do these things deserve to have their manhoods revoked, permanently, by means of a small guillotine.

A very small guillotine, I suspect.

I recently attended a panel discussion of environmental journalism, featuring two well-known environmental reporters and one editor. They evidenced a frightful ignorance of both the substance and theory of their work, overlaid with a patina of experienced wisdom that was all the more irritating. In order to protect the guilty, I will refer to them as Grizzled Graybeard, Smug Susan, and Meek Molly.

A message they endeavored to convey was how hard they work, which they did with the insistent tone of someone who, being acquainted with no other type of employment, has deluded himself into thinking that his work is somehow more taxing than that of other professions. Interestingly, the allusions to difficult work were always adjacent to an anecdote that suggested the opposite. Smug Susan, for example, explained that she came upon a story of which she is proud when an environmentalist called and gave her the information: "So I made a couple of phone calls, and found out it was true. You really have to dig."

Now, I know she did more; she probably made lots of phone calls. She probably had to weigh arguments, and consult experts. But let's be clear -- she didn't dig this story up, any more than I "hunted" last night's cheeseburger; it was handed to her by someone who had done the actual digging. A recent study of Freedom of Information Act filings found, by way of evidence, that journalists are far down the list of people who request sensitive government information. James Fallows published a related critique of national journalists a few years ago, noting that in contrast to their predecessors, many today simply rely on information from others who do the work of gathering it (and putting their own spin on it in the process). So please, Smug Susan, spare us the Woodward and Bernstein routine.

Another thing that stood out was their shared, unstated paradigm that news is an exogenously determined entity, and they its neutral handmaidens. They conveyed not a hint of awareness that their choices in part shape not only the framing of events, but also which events attain the status of "news." At the same time, Smug Susan confessed that "you have to decide where you come down on an issue before you write about it."

What is more, they were highly cognizant of their effects on the thinking of their readers. As Smug Susan explained, she writes "for real people" (as opposed, one presumes, to her competitors, who apparently write for mannequins, Barbie dolls, and Al Gore). Susan feels a duty to awaken the benighted masses. She recounted a story she did about a large western town whose mayor opposed more stringent standards on arsenic in its water supply. Now, this topic has the peculiar effect of exposing the source of knowledge used by people with an opinion on it; some base their opinions on knowledge of costs, benefits, and toxicity levels, others base their opinions on Agatha Christie novels ("He's dead, Bertram, and it appears to be arsenic poisoning.")

Smug Susan, being a woman of letters, is in the second tribe. "Believe it or not," she revealed, sounding for all the world like an anthropologist lecturing on a primitive tribe, "some people actually want arsenic in their drinking water."

This is silly on multiple levels. Of course nobody wants arsenic in his drinking water, a fact verifiable by the simple experiment of making it available as a condiment at the dinner table. The question is how much people are willing to pay to have a trace of it removed from their drinking water. Rational people who work for a living, at jobs almost as hard as journalism, might reasonably ask to what extent leaving the trace of arsenic, given the high cost of removing it, will affect their health.

Leaving aside this question (the answer to which is: probably not much), Smug Susan's framing of it reveals a great deal about her approach to environmental issues. If she can't look at the debate over arsenic in drinking water and summarize it with anything better than, "some people want poison in their water," then she is, I think, seriously deficient in both her analytical and informative skills, two capabilities which I was under the impresssion are conducive to a successful career in journalism.

Grizzled Graybeard was just as simplistic. He told, for example, how he investigated a story on the environmental effects of cellular phones (yes, this is "news" despite the absence of data substantiating such an effect, while Al Gore's extended harassment of scientists who question global warming was not news). Like Susan, his account of "digging" entailed lots of phone calls. Because he is above the fray of partisanship, Graybeard likes to hear from all sides. Thus, he explained, after he got his environmental "facts" together, he "called the cell phone industry."

Those of you with an understanding of economics, business, or politics will recognize the absurdity of such a statement, which is akin to treating Jesse Jackson as a spokesman for "black people." Only someone who views a diverse group with mulitple competing interests through the simple lens of Capitalists vs. The Environment would imagine that he can "call" an industry. A sampling of Greybeard's articles (or those of most other environmental journalists), however, will reflect just such a mentality. One is likely to find quotes from several environmental groups with different perspectives (ranging from those who want markets outlawed, to those who want the participants executed), and one or two quotes from a single hack representing some moribund, centrist industry association. This isn't balance, it is pretense.

Graybeard was also proud of his practice of quoting politicians he "knows" are lying, and then placing immediately after their words a "fact" from some group that exposes their stupidity. Given that neither Graybeard nor the other panelists have a science or math background (a fact they ruefully admitted to a shrewd questioner), one wonders how he determines who to "expose" (hint: his examples were all Republicans).

This, of course, was the 800-pound gorilla in the overcrowded conference room. Grizzled Graybeard has a bit of theater in him, which led him to re-enact his anecdotes by speaking as if he were the key participants, replete with artificial voice and exaggerated facial expressions. Here's a sample:

"So one side might say (adopts gruff, Colonel Blowhard voice), 'drilling here won't hurt the wildlife.' The other side, however, might point out (adopts calm voice of reason), 'we aren't so sure their science is accurate.' My job is to represent these sides fairly and accurately."

Fat chance, Graybeard.

Smug Susan had a similar tell, as we say in poker, which was most clearly on display as she answered a question from someone with the audacity to ask how she knows the difference between real science and junk science. Susan furrowed her disapproving brow and replied: "Well, I can trust the coal mining industry who says they aren't hurting animals, or I can trust this guy in the woods who has studied animals his whole life." Perhaps instead of Smug Susan, I should call her Simplistic Susan. Or Self-serving Susan. Or Sour Susan, based on the look she gave her questioner.

Susan didn't always frown, however; she had plenty of smiles and winks for her ideological kinfolk in the audience. My favorite moment came when someone from the Natural Resources Defense Council, which in 1988 advanced the fraudulent claim that apple juice was going to kill our children, prefaced his question with, "We at the NRDC are scrupulous about getting our facts right..." His question was how the panelists "keep politicians honest."

Susan explained, "if I know his facts aren't true, I won't put them in my story . . . if someone tells me something that sounds made up, I won't print it." Just how Susan, a Russian studies major, can determine scientific fact from fiction isn't clear, although I'm pretty sure it involves reading breathless faxes from NRDC flacks.

This is a profound problem, because environmental issues are not best viewed through the lens of Capitalists vs. The Environment, or Business vs. The Children. They are best viewed as a conflict between competing values, needs, and resources, in a probabilistic environment. This requires an understanding in turn of what tradeoffs are, and how risks should be assessed, analyses best enabled by economics. When asked why they don't incorporate more economic analysis into their articles, however, the panelists' responses can best be summed up by Meek Molly, who replied, "we do write occasionally about appropriations bills."

In other words, for the panelists, as, I suspect, for most environmental journalists, economics is about money. The notion that costs and benefits are to be weighed, rather than caricatured in selective quotes from spokesmen who best fit the preformed trope, is alien. In fact, it is probably unappealing, because the two reporters on this panel are clearly captured. They exude respect for the environmental left, and distrust of and dislike for any other voices. This is evidenced not just at the level of the individual environmental reporter, but at the organizational level as well. At least one major national newspaper, for example, upon realizing in late 2000 that Bush would be our next President, hired several additional environmental reporters. In their minds, with a Republican in the White House, there was simply going to be more "digging" to do. Thus stories that weren't written during the Clinton years about politicized EPA cases against corporate opponents of Gore's failed energy tax, or Administration claims of "cleaning" Superfund sites that were simply delisted once the science showed they shouldn't have been listed in the first place, well, these just weren't really news. Environmental news only happens when Republicans are in charge, and it's usually bad.

I'm not sure if most Americans are fooled by all this. Journalists are finding their public evaluation rapidly sinking to the level of trial lawyers and child molesters, yet at the same time they offer a cynical simplicity that seems to feed the willfully ignorant American news consumer. And this is at heart the problem -- the claims of the left are always easier to explicate; they can fit on a bumper sticker, and they are based on emotional appeal rather than data or logic. The former is the stock in trade of the lazy journalist, while conveying the latter requires a skill and expertise that many journalists seem not to have. Perhaps our saving grace will be the fragmentation of the news media, which is allowing, in the past decade alone, numerous diverse voices access to American news consumers who in the past were captive to a few big news outlets.

Reading Ken Goldstein's comments on the