A quantum of umbrage: Boiled eggs, 60-watt light bulbs, and the lonely death of Swiftian irony

It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty’s grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown.

Jonathan Swift,

Gulliver's Travels

(1726), Chapter IV

One of the things that amazed and amused me when, years ago, I left Indiana (the state where I was born but not the state that I'm from) to live first on the east coast (Philadelphia) and later and longer on the west coast (Portland and thereabouts), was the vehement reaction of many non-midwesterners to Miracle Whip. A reaction not simply to its taste, although that's certainly a part of it, but often to its very existence.

(For those who haven't taken the plunge, Miracle Whip looks similar to ordinary off-the-grocer's-shelf mayonnaise and is typically marketed in a similar-shaped jar on the same grocery aisle. Without knowing the recipe specifics beyond oil, vinegar, and eggs, I would generally say that they have the same texture but Miracle Whip is somewhat sweeter and generic mayonnaise is slightly off-white in color. I suppose the best analogy, culturally and gustatorially speaking, would be that Miracle Whip is to generic mayonnaise as sweet pickles are to dill pickles.)

I bring this up because I stumbled upon an amusing video on YouTube, in which pairs of west-coasters were invited to sample various mainstays of Indiana cuisine: Sweet pickles, fried cornmeal mush (one fellow makes his happy peace with that one by renaming it "Indiana Tortilla Sticks") sugar cream pie, yet another variety of sweet pickle with which I am unfamiliar, and a (suspiciously un-Hoosier looking) pork tenderloin sandwich (the meat is too thick, it doesn't stick out the edge of the bun enough, the breading is too dark, and what's all that healthy vegetable stuff doing on it?).

The video is the product of a real estate enterprise and appears intended to soften up young prospective home-buyers from California on the idea that moving to Indiana wouldn't necessarily be the worst possible thing that could happen to them. (There are similar videos for Ohio and Michigan.) I imagine the logic is that young buyers, priced completely out of the California homeowners' market, might find it easier to bite the bullet and buy a starter home in the Rust Belt – assuming they could deal with the local dietary customs.

At this point, I must make a confession. Among my favorite Facebook friends are some who can be trolled into making utterly predictable responses at the drop of a hat, or the click of a Post button, given the right topic or the right way of framing it. They simply can't resist. I don't do it often, but sometimes I put things out there just for grins and giggles, and note the time. I posted the Indiana Food Taste Test video, with this status line:

Interesting, but they ducked the most important theological debate of our age: Mayonnaise versus Miracle Whip. Nations have gone to war over this.

Yes, it was click-bait. I admit it. But I held the hope that the mention of both theology and war on such a silly culinary topic was such an obvious Swiftian nudge-nudge-wink-wink, that most people who responded, getting the joke, would take it up in much the same spirit. (So I suppose I thought that made it good click-bait.) Nevertheless, I noted the time I posted it. No, I'm not entirely proud of this, but you probably have amusements you'd rather other people didn't know about, too.

It took eleven minutes – or slightly less time than it takes to make two soft-boiled eggs with yolks that are just beginning to set – for someone to denounce Miracle Whip as not only not a food, but perhaps not even a food product.

This claim, as with many theological arguments, is really founded on an ontological category error, i.e.: Miracle Whip resembles generic mayonnaise, but it isn't, so it shouldn't exist. One might as well say the same thing about ranch dressing and bleu cheese dressing, or Bosc pears and 60-watt light bulbs.

I just find that odd. Even in Indiana, everyone knows the difference between the two products, and in a lifetime of eating Indiana food I don't believe I've ever been served Miracle Whip on a restaurant sandwich. You only end up ingesting it if you intended to.

Sitting at my elbow as I write this is a Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. My taste for it is probably a function of time and class and culture, as much so as with some of the other foods under discussion. (Plus, I imagine, a soupçon of simple brand-selection laziness.) And over the years I have gotten the stink-eye from many of my craft-beer enthusiast friends when I order a PBR (the idea that I might not want a hint of blueberry finish in my beer never seems worth serious discussion). The same often happens when I mention to my Mayonnaise Orthodox friends that I have eaten Miracle Whip (it tastes far better on a peanut butter sandwich than generic mayonnaise ever will, if you want to know) and have lived to tell the tale – as well as every suspect item on that video's menu, plus chicken livers, and beef liver and onions. And tuna casserole, and marshmallow fruit salad.

But I won't touch gizzards or calamari. And I have watched the look of creeping horror on non-Hoosier friends' faces when they asked the local server "is the fish fresh?" and the server nodded brightly, "yes – fresh frozen!" – leaving them to imagine the unlucky diner who got the fish that was frozen after it was no longer fresh.

Twelve hours later on Facebook, I'm still getting declarations of preferences on white spreadable condiments, but nothing about Indiana, California, real estate prices, or anything else except unironic responses to the throwaway joke in the status message (except two: my sister from Indiana put in a good word for sugar cream pie, and David Neiwart showed he clearly got the drift by chipping in with another regional delicacy that makes non-locals go "Ewww!"). I strongly suspect most readers made it through the set-up message and never went any further. This serves me right for playing the click-bait game, I suppose.

People, this is simple. If you don't like it, don't buy it. If you don't want it, don't eat it. No need to choose up sides in a war.

Spend your time productively, arguing which Darren was better.

(Postscript: As I was writing this last night, a currently-turning-vegan friend stopped by to chat and when I mentioned what I was working on, she told me about this. The website has the following endorsement:

“I preferred the taste of their Just Mayo to 

Hellmann’s, my ‘must have’ brand. In a blind test.”

Andrew Zimmern

Travel Channel Host & Celebrity Chef

Let the battle begin!)

Quote of the day: They end in blood, always

This is the mass, unbridled, brainless Id of the barbarian at war with modernity in all its expressions. This is where anti-science leads, where a contempt for education leads, where the suppression of women leads, where marrying political fanaticism to religious fervor almost always leads. This is where theocracy brings us, over and over again. In 1572, in Paris, on St. Bartholomew's Day, 3000 French Huguenot Protestants were butchered by Catholic mobs. (The death toll throughout France is thought to have been over 70,000.) None of this is new. It rises from the same foul ground it always has. This is why Mr. Madison believed that the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire by Constantine to be one of the worst things that ever happened to both religion and government. Official religions end in blood, always. That's why we don't have one here.

- Charlie Pierce on the Charlie Hebdo murders this week, and the animating forces behind it. (But wait – "almost always," Mr. Pierce? Marrying political fanaticism to religious fervor almost always leads to this kind of mindless self-righteous bloodletting? How did that adverb get in there?)

For a look at the bloodthirsty delight over at Fox News, read Steve M.

For a know-your-terrorist-sympathizers pop quiz, read John Cole.

They're here!

Rod Serling pitched the idea of "The Twilight Zone" (I'm not going to call it "the original") in part because of his suspicion that science-fiction and fantasy offered a way to explore social and moral themes that even Golden Age television couldn't or wouldn't handle right. History has judged him kindly on that decision.

On the other hand, here's something I discovered by accident while doing some digging on Sinclair Lewis' 1935 satire/jeremiad It Can't Happen Here, in which Lewis imagines how fascism might take hold in America.

Inspired by the book, director–producer Kenneth Johnson wrote an adaptation titled Storm Warnings in 1982. The script was presented to NBC for production as a television miniseries, but NBC executives rejected the initial version, claiming it was too cerebral for the average American viewer. To make the script more marketable, the American fascists were re-cast as man-eating extraterrestrials, taking the story into the realm of science fiction. The revised story became the miniseries V, which premiered May 3, 1983.

So. Nothing "too cerebral."

Mission accomplished, NBC.

Funny, though – I don't remember the right-wing commentariat ever pitching a hissy that "American fascists were re-cast as man-eating extraterrestrials" constituted further proof, as if any could possibly be necessary, that the American entertainment industry has always in thrall to its liberal hippie overlords.

Perhaps it was too, you know, cerebral.

(Also, I find it interesting to read that the American fascist parts were "re-cast" as man-eating extraterrestrials, rather than rewritten as man-eating ETs. It suggests the almost-Calvin-and-Hobbesian picture of a big folder down in Central Casting labeled Flesh-Eating Other Worlders – perhaps it's filed between Child Stars and Ingénues – all of whom are SAG members with résumés with head shots.)

Remember when Twain made a cushy living for twenty years, making fun of badly copy-edited advertisements – with the mistakes circled in red so his audience would be sure to get the joke?

Apparently I care more about Mark Twain's legacy than the Kennedy Center does.

But then, Twain only invented American literature nearly single-handedly, while Leno did video sidewalk interviews with random people to make fun of how much less they knew than his audience did, and screwed over the careers of two comedians who were each far more talented than he.

So, you know, naturally.

"Kurt is up in Heaven now."

Kurt Vonnegut died seven years ago today. p3 is proud to honor his final request.

I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, "Isaac is up in heaven now." It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in Heaven now." That's my favorite joke.

Kurt Vonnegut,

A Man Without a Country

And conservatives still don't get The Colbert Report

See for yourself.

Of course, the Twitter tweet that started the outrage was only a one-liner fragment of the longer segment from the show it was drawn from. But honestly, given the linkbait advantages to pulling something out of context, and the Colbert Report's energetic use of social media, it's probably a miracle this hasn't happened before.

Seven years ago this week in p3: Remember The Half-Hour News Hour?

Of course you don't. And there's a reason.

That week I was writing the second in a series of pieces about why conservative satire – like that sad and short-lived entry by the Fox News Channel – isn't terribly humorous. Part of it was that they learned the wrong lessons from the success of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

But part of it is that American conservatism, as it's constituted these days, simply lacks a crucial ability without which satire becomes, as Saint Molly memorably put it, crude and vulgar.

What's missing is the capacity to retain at least a tiny smidgen of charity; first, that is, to attack the strong, not the weak; and second, to understand that once you're incapable of seeing your opponent – your victim, if you will – as anything but a monster, you still have a wide range of tools with which to go after them, but satire is no longer one of them.

There are people out there on the political scene that I consider monsters. I tend to avoid jokes about them directly, and if I fail to avoid that the result is probably not that funny, anyway.  Conservatives have a tough time seeing anyone who disagrees with them  – or might do so at some point – as anything but a monster. Great for message discipline; death for satire.

And the funny part, so to speak, is that seven years later, conservatives still don't understand, to say nothing of appreciate, Colbert's satire.

Read more of my posts on satire from the link on the p3 List.

Banned Book Week in Oregon begins: "Since people seem to be marching for their causes these days, I have here a march for mine"

Some people gear up for Halloween; others for Christmas, or the Fourth of July, or Saint Patrick's Day.

Around here at p3 international media headquarters, our favorite holiday is Banned Book Week in Oregon, and it runs until next weekend.

Banned Books Week is an annual event started by the American Library Association (ALA) in 1982. This week-long event, held during the last week of September, raises awareness of freedom of speech through celebrating challenged books and the value of free expression. Since its launch 30 years ago, more than 11,000 books have been challenged.

A book is “challenged” when a person or group objects to the materials and attempts to remove or restrict their accessibility. A book is “banned” when this removal is successful. Thanks to the work of libraries and the ACLU, most book challenges are now unsuccessful.

And we begin with the Official p3 Anthem for Banned Book Week, written and performed by one of our heroes, satirist Tom Lehrer:

If your browser won't display the embedded version, click here.

(There's also a 1967 live performance of “Smut” by Lehrer, recorded in Copenhagen. It's nice to be able to watch him perform, and his explanation of “purient” to a politely puzzled Danish audience is probably worth the price of admission by itself. But I prefer both the lead-in and the performance quality from the original 1965 “That Was The Year That Was” album.)

Saturday morning tunes: Yes, he would give his heart gladly

But each day as she walks to the sea, she looks straight ahead not at he.

Sigh. I always enjoy this bossa nova classic when I hear it (even when it's a Blues Brothers throw-away gag), but I have to ignore that bit of grammatical violence committed by Songwriter Hall of Fame lyricist Norman Gimbel (who translated the original Portugese lyrics approximately into English) just to get a rhyme with “sea.”

Because everyone knows that practically nothing rhymes with “sea” in English.

I'm pretty sure that p3 literary hero Frank Jacobs didn't have to pull anything that lame to get a rhyme in his MAD Magazine parody of the song, which began, “Short, and bald, and fat, and ugly, the guy from Jersey City's loaded . . . “

If your browser won't display the embedded version, click here.

"Kurt is up in Heaven now."

Kurt Vonnegut died six years ago today. p3 is proud to honor his final request.

I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, "Isaac is up in heaven now." It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in Heaven now." That's my favorite joke.

Kurt Vonnegut,

A Man Without a Country

Saturday morning tunes: It is, indeed, hip to be square

This one's a little obscure, but all the more beautiful for that.

First, there's this almost-certainly-not-safe-for-work-unless-you-work-someplace-I-don't-want-to-imagine scene from "American Psycho:"

If your browser won't display the embedded version, click here. 

And then, there's this slightly-safer-for-work-but-not-much homage-slash-parody:

If your browser won't display the embedded version, click here.

The Onion's sister site The AV Club says:

The spookily committed Lewis nails the [Patrick Bateman] role, capturing not just the character’s preening obnoxiousness but also his body language and facial tics. And Yankovic is amusingly and uncharacteristically debauched as Lewis’ unwitting prey. The video is ostensibly in connection with the 30th-anniversary re-release of Sports, Huey Lewis & The News’ iconic 1983 smash, because what sells albums better than beloved national treasures performing blood-splattered homages to divisive cult satires?

(Hat tip to Ryan. And Huey and Al.)

Quote of the day: Conservatives, Alinski, and “Duck Soup”

[Link fixed. And thanks, Lance!]

[C]onservatives tell us that liberals only make fun of conservatives because Alinsky told them to -- which stands to reason, since why else would anyone tease demigods like Jonah Goldberg and Ben Shapiro? Why, it would be like teasing Margaret Dumont!

- Roy Edroso, reflecting on the Ockham's Law-defying assumption of the Right, that the Left only do what they do because Saul Alinski told them to, when a simpler explanation is often right there at hand.

(Bonus points for the Margaret Dumont reference.)

Saturday morning tunes: “Cat's in the Cradle” -- the lost verse

You know a demographic trend is well on its way to the pop-socology pantheon when it becomes a staple of Huffington Post articles and gains its own buzzword, like Boomerang Generation:

Unable to find work and often saddled with college loans, 20-somethings have been turning empty nests into cluttered ones, forcing their boomer parents -- who once saw the brass ring of retirement as within their grasp -- to rethink their plans to quit working.

According to the Pew Research Center, more than 21 percent of adult children ages 25 to 34 are living in multigenerational households, the highest level since the 1950s. While in some cases, the arrangement has drawn families closer, for others this way of living sometimes hits a few rough patches.

In honor of this phenomenon (the slick trend-spotter articles, not the adult children moving back in with their parents because the economy went into the tank), p3 is proud to present -- for the first time in public -- the lost verse to Harry Chapin's nearly-prescient 1974 hit “Cat's in the Cradle.”

My son called me up just the other day,
He said I lost my job, got somewhere I can stay?
The bank foreclosed at ten o'clock today,
And then another came, and took our car away.
You see, it's only for a while, 'til we can manage rent,
Those college loans are making quite a dent.

And as I hung up the phone I realized
My boy would never leave here --
My boy will never leave.

The Cat's back in the Cradle with his laundry, too,
Little Boy Blue and his wife Betty Lou,
When you movin' out, son? I don't know when,
But I'll sure get back to you, Dad,
When your IRA's empty, too.

If your browser won't display the embedded version, click here.

“The Cat's Back in the Cradle” was composed by Mark Bunster, with only the slightest tweaking from the underemployed folks here in the former p3 Political Limerick Division, over a couple of beers on a slow night at a local bar.

Reading: The most delicious sci-fi plot twist since “'To Serve Man”

If you followed the RNC convention and platform-construction last week, you may find this funny as hell.

Or you may not.

The departure point of Sherri Tepper's "The Fresco,” a story that might be described as science-fiction with a healthy dose of satire, is that our space exploration has drawn the attention of other worlds who are organized to maintain peace. Through a human selected as their sole emmisary to our planet, the representatives of this organization of other worlds invite us to join them and share in their knowledge and development. (We can decline the offer, but the alternative isn't pretty, and it hinges on the fact that this organization isn't the only one Out There whose notice we've attracted.)

In order to make sure that Earth abides by the rules of this confederation, their representatives leave behind “monitors” called Inkliti, specialized life-forms designed to enforce peaceful behavior on our part.

There is one possible wrinkle in the plan, though, as one of the representatives explains in the following message to their chosen emmisary; but they're confident they've worked out an elegant solution:

The question of resources brings me to a delicate point. Because our need was immediate, we brought back with us the only Inkleozese monitors who were available at the time. Virtually all of them are in that state of parturition that will soon require a host animal. There are no quodm, geplis, nadervaks on Earth. The most suitable creatures will be male persons, as their hormones are more easily adjustable to the needs of the growing Inkliti.

Under usual circumstances, the Inkleozese would refuse to leave their planet at such a time. Only our elucidation of the pro-life feelings of many men in positions of power convinced them they could find hosts on Earth without offending the free will of its inhabitants. Obviously, the hosts will have to be persons who espouse the pure pro-life position which does not allow reproductive choice even in the case of rape. Not that these gentlemen would consider it a rape, but we all know what the media do with any events related to sexuality.

While the Inkleozese might be offended by the anti-woman bigotry underlying much pro-life dogma, we have not seen fit to discuss with them the psychological minutia of the situation. They would be outraged, or worse, if a host animal refused the implantation of an Inklit egg, but since implantation is always done with the host in a euphoric state, we know the gentlemen will not refuse. We have, therefore, selected hosts for the Inkleozese on the basis of their publicly stated receptivity to preborn life.

Among those chosen are your legislators who have repeatedly asserted an unequivocal antichoice position. We have also added to the list a number of TV and radio preachers and commentators who have been rigorously pro-life. Once the immediate need is taken care of, we will explain the matter as seems necessary. Everyone will be told that the hosts are pregnant with babies of an intelligent life form which it would be a grave ethical error to remove. Though the impregnation has or will be done without the hosts' individual permission, in a legal sense we may infer their position from the stand which they have taken upon the issue of rape. Each man on our list has gone record as refusing to allow choice to women who have been raped, pointing out that the infant is innocent and must therefore take precedence. The Inkleozese could not ask for a better statement of their own belief.

In any case, the implantations will only be a temporary inconvenience for the hosts. They will most likely survive the pregnancy and emergence experience without lasting harm, just as most of your women do. The hosts will have only a few months of discomfort and inconvenience, though of course their careers must be set aside for a time. Inasmuch as they have frequently decried the shallowness of women who attempted to avoid pregnancy for mere career convenience, however, we are assured of their understanding.

Sheri S. Tepper,

The Fresco (2002)

(Hat-tip to James the Elder, who sent me The Fresco shortly after it first came out.)

"Kurt is up in Heaven now."

Kurt Vonnegut died five years ago today. p3 is proud to honor his final request.

I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, "Isaac is up in heaven now." It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in Heaven now." That's my favorite joke.

Kurt Vonnegut,

A Man Without a Country

The unforgiving minute: You and I just disagree

Crooks and Liars caught this moment:

A man who spent part of his childhood working as a janitor told Newt Gingrich on Wednesday that he was offended by the Republican presidential candidate's plan to put kids to work.

During an event at Georgetown University, Hector Cendejas called out the former House Speaker for his initiative to replace unionized janitors with children workers.

"Back in high school, I was a janitor in my own high school, which was a private school," Cendejas explained. "For me, it was embarrassing to be a janitor at my own high school because I was with the rich kids. I was poor. My mom was working super hard. I did not feel empowered by serving my classmates. Why not invest on these kids to work for law firms, hospitals and get paid to develop better skills?"

"Did you find it useful financially to earn the money?" Gingrich asked the man.

"I mean, I need to help my mom," Cendejas replied, adding that his parents were undocumented. "Thank God I had Georgetown to save my butt, you know? ... All my friends, they’re pregnant, they’re in gangs, in jail, and we did the same job, working as janitors. So for me, your remark was a little offensive towards me."

"I'm sorry if you were offended," Gingrich quipped. "Both of my daughters worked as janitors at the local Baptist Church and they earned the money and they didn't think it was demeaning, and they actually liked the idea that they earned their own money as kids, and they kept their own money because they thought work had inherent dignity."

"But they come from a wealthy family," Cendejas pointed out.

"That's not the point," the candidate shrugged. "You and I just disagree."

It's possible that, at some point, the disgraced former Speaker, current vanity-campaign presidential candidate, and moral autistic read 19th Century satirist Anatole France, but if he did, it's for certain he didn't understand him:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

But I think, on the other hand, that France would have understood Gingrich almost immediately.

Minute's up.

Right-winger Mad Libs

Last week, Digby examined this passage from a right-wing radio fulminator whom we'll leave in well-earned anonymity (source here, via Right Wing Watch, if you really must know):

This, again, brings us back around to the larger subject of this Occupy Wall Street, this astroturf movement that's been funded from [George] Soros down and from every other angle, taking a bunch of over-educated, over-indulged white youth and attempting to force change ... So we shouldn't be surprised that this group, this Occupy Wall Street movement, which has been endorsed by the Messiah himself, President Barack Obama, that they are now trying to infiltrate the schools and corrupt the minds of children.

I think the Occupy Wall Street movement, the larger movement, is anathema to the idea of American Exceptionalism. In fact, I would go so far as to say that many of those involved in this movement hate America as it was originally formed and founded as a free market country rooted in the Judeo-Christian ethic.

Now Digby's point is that talk like this works by taking memes from the opposition, or conventional wisdom, and turning it wrong-side out. It exemplifies a point many critics on the left have been making for years: A lot of right-wing talk comes down to “I know you are, but what am I?”-style projection of their motives onto their enemies. (A corollary of this principle is that, if Republicans accuse Democrats of doing something, it's almost certainly something that the Republicans have already done themselves.) I agree with the Big D's point, and that passage is certainly a textbook example of the rhetorical move in question.

But that passage is more than simply a manifestation of the uncommonly angry minds populating the right end of the dial in America for the last twenty years -- it's much more.

With only minor continuity edits that don't affect the content, it's the basis for a fabulous party game: Right-Wing Mad Libs!

Rules: This is a game for multiple players. One player asks each of the other players, in turn, to select a word as specified on the numbered list below. Following this, the completed passage is read aloud with the selected words filling in the blanks.

If multiple teams compete, the creators of the best version are eligible for positions on a high-profile group blog funded by a right-wing think-tank.

Before the passage is read aloud, players must select:

1. An organization or movement.
2. A person.
3. An adjective.
4. An adjective.
5. An adjective.
6. A person.
7. A verb.
8. A plural noun.
9. A verb.
10. A plural noun.
11. An adjective.
12. An adjective.
13. An adjective.

Try it and see! Before you know it, you and your friends will be hooting and howling at the moon like Rand-quoting, hippie-punching, government-hating Tea Partiers!

This, again, brings us back around to the larger subject of this _____1_____, this astroturf movement that's been funded from _____2_____ down and from every other angle, taking a bunch of over-_____3_____, over-_____4_____ _____5_____ youth and attempting to force change ... So we shouldn't be surprised that this group, this movement, which has been endorsed by the Messiah himself/herself, _____6_____, that they are now trying to _____7_____ the _____8_____ and _____9_____ the _____10_____ of children.

I think the movement, the larger movement, is anathema to the idea of American _____11_____-ism. In fact, I would go so far as to say that many of those involved in this movement hate America as it was originally formed and founded as a/an _____12____ country rooted in the _____13____ ethic.

It's a sure-fire hit at parties, and an easy way to prove that, thanks to your enemies, America is going to __________ in a __________.

(Hint: A place, and a noun.)

Feel free to post your entries in the Comments.

The unforgiving minute: Short answers to simple questions*

Incredibly, Salon.com wasted pixels today on this:

Is Will Ferrell the New Mark Twain?

Answer: No. No he isn't.

(And the same could be said for most of the other winners of the Mark Twain Prize, but that's another story.)

Hemingway said that Twain invented the American novel with “Huckleberry Finn.” Think anyone will say anything remotely comparable about Ferrell a hundred years from now?

^*All internet traditions respected.

Minute's up.

Six years ago at p3: I liked Colbert, but didn't get him

Yup, this week marks the sixth anniversary of the launch of The Colbert Report.

I didn't completely get it. That's painful, because I'm a major fan and student of satire and irony. But I didn't get it. I accept that now. I do.

I wanted it to be good, and while I couldn't ignore some of the shakedown problems, I could certainly excuse them. My main problem was that I never watched Bill O'Reilly, so I wasn't prepared to recognize -- let alone appreciate -- a pitch perfect parody of him.

Also I was slow -- as were a lot of right-wingers like Dinesh D'Souza, Bill Kristol, and Tony Perkins, I'm delighted to remind you -- to realize that Colbert's character could be lethal as an interlocutor. Many are the irony-challenged interviewees who thought that Colbert was a safe haven, only to find them unwittingly led by his siren call to make even worse-sounding claims than the ones in the book they were there to promote.

So yeah.  My bad.

A Peabody, one-and-a-half-Emmys, and countless nominations and special recognitions later, the Report is going strong. And with gambits like his characters absolutely-real superPAC, he's taking satire into the highwiare, wait-is-this-a-joke? regions that nobody's quite sure what to make of.

He has the thanks of a grateful nation, and Nation.

Kurt Vonnegut: Persuasive guessing and American leadership

Vonnegut wrote this dyspeptic piece in 2005, when the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld show was just starting its second act. Wish I could report to him that things have changed much (for the better), but . . .

(Earlier in the same book, he also expressed concern for those readers who couldn't tell when he was kidding, and promised to give them a heads-up, as needed.)

Persuasive guessing has been at the core of leadership for so long, for all of human experience so far, that it is wholly unsurprising that most of the leaders of this planet, in spite of all the information that is suddenly ours, want the guessing to go on. It is now their turn to guess and guess and be listened to. Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting. They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they could be right. It isn't the gold standard that they want to put us back on. They want something even more basic. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard.

Loaded pistols are good for everyone except inmates in prisons or lunatic asylums.

That's correct.

Millions spent on public health are inflationary.

That's correct.

Billions spent on weapons will bring inflation down.

That's correct.

Dictatorships to the right are much closer to American ideals than dictatorships to the left.

That's correct.

The more hydrogen bomb warheads we have, all set to go off at a moment's notice, the safer humanity is and the better off the world will be that our grandchildren will inherit.

That's correct.

Industrial wastes, and especially those that are radioactive, hardly ever hurt anybody, so everybody should shut up about them.

That's correct.

Industries should be allowed to do whatever they want to do: Bribe, wreck the environment just a little, fix prices, screw dumb customers, put a stop to competition, and raid the Treasury when they go broke.

That's correct.

That's free enterprise.

And that's correct.

The poor have done something very wrong or they wouldn’t be poor, so their children should pay the consequences.

That's correct.

The United States of America cannot be expected to look after its own people.

The free market will do that.

That's correct.

The free market is an automatic system of justice.

That's correct.

I'm kidding.

Kurt Vonnegut

A Man Without a Country