Bush/Ubu

In an essay on Peron’s dictatorship, Borges claimed that recent argentinian history happened on two levels: one, a sordid theatrical farce, and the other, a literature for washerwomen – the paperback romance.
The Bush culture, more straightforwardly, takes its cues from Ubu Roi. Thus the latest sequence from Iraq. In one way, it is heartening. As readers of this blog know, the Iraq that emerged from the election was a theocracy in formation, with the Sunnis operating as the appalled but powerless spectators and the Kurds maneuvering to save their autonomy even at the risk of planting the seeds of a monster to the South. The Kurdish leadership, remember, found it convenient, at one point in the now forgotten civil war between warlords that occurred in 1996, to call in Saddam Hussein. This is the same leadership routinely praised, nowadays, for its commitment to democracy.
The defenders of the war, and even its opponents, have the disturbing habit of ignoring Iraqi reality when it doesn’t fit American rhetoric. For the belligerents, the Iraqi government we are defending is committed to democracy and human rights. Only the jihadists want to create an Islamic state. Of course, this turn away from reality has been occasionally pierced by the media, which, in fits of absent mindedness, sometimes reports on the inconvenient reality settling down in, say, Southern Iraq. This is a part of the country where the insurgents are replaced by the Sadr and Sciri paramilitaries, the lion lies down with the lamb, and coed college gatherings can result in attack, assault and murder at the hands of the guardians of the New Iraq. The neo-cons, who would have delighted Jarry, think that they have lit the fire of freedom in the middle east; they have, of course, acted unconsciously to spread the doctrine of Khomeini.
That being said, there is a certain schizophrenia on the pro-war side that has its counterpart on the anti-war side. On the one hand, the insurgency is in the last throes, or it is confined to merely three provinces, or it is simply something like the unruliness of the Nazis in occupied Germany. On the other hands, the insurgency is so powerful that American withdrawal would lead to Iraq falling into the hands of Zarquawi. Alan Philps, writing a surprisingly pessimistic column in the pro-war Telegraph, plays this tune:
“ feeling is growing in the West that it is time to remove troops from Iraq. Foreign troops, it is argued, are the problem, not the solution. The generals, anxiously watching the opinion polls, want nothing more than an excuse to start reducing troop numbers. So why not now? It is undeniable that the casualties are appalling and that every week Iraq produces more and more insurgents trained and bloodied in battle. The anti-war camp argues rightly that these jihadists did not exist in Iraq before the invasion. But they exist now. If they win, they will spread out to fight Arab regimes and no doubt try to bloody America as well.
So many mistakes have been made that success - the installation of a functioning secular democracy - is out of the question. But we owe it to the Iraqis not to hand them over to the new crop of warlords. What we started we must try to finish. “
The new crop of warlords, contra Philps, is precisely who we are fighting for. On the other hand, there is no reason to think that the Iraqi government would have less of a chance to suppress the insurgency than any other Middle Eastern government at this point.
The question that fascinates us Jarry-philes is how the neo-cons will turn on this dime. The defense of the rightful place of Islam in deciding petty things, like whether women receive an education or not, is going to be interesting. I’d suggest these useful lines of dialogue as a guide. Mere Ubu is trying to persuade Pere Ubu to kill the king of Poland and take his place:
Pere Ubu:
Eh vraiment! et puis après? N'ai-je pas un cul comme les autres?

MERE UBU
A ta place, ce cul, je voudrais l'installer sur un trône. Tu pourrais augmenter indéfiniment tes richesses, manger fort souvent de l'andouille et rouler carrosse par les rues.

PERE UBU
Si j'étais roi, je me ferais construire une grande capeline comme celle que j'avais en Aragon et que ces gredins d'Espagnols m'ont impudemment volée.

MERE UBU
Tu pourrais aussi te procurer un parapluie et un grand caban qui te tomberait sur les talons.

PERE UBU
Ah! je cède à la tentation. Bougre de merdre Ah! je cède à la tentation. Bougre de merdre, merdre de bougre, si jamais je le rencontre au coin d'un bois, il passera un mauvais quart d'heure.

liberation in chelsea

I am in a museum dedicated to Himalayan art in Chelsea. The site was formerly occupied by a Barneys. There are two musicians, arrayed in white, seated at the foot of the staircase, playing trancelike music representative of a certain Pakistani genre. The staircase is a holiday for architects -- a crooked, cubist thing that ascends up six flights. I like the staircase. My friends and I decide to listen to the guide, who appears at 2:30. The guide is a loud, gray haired Brooklyn-ite with the Yogi Bear figure towards which middle aged American avoirdupois seems inevitably to tend. In a barker's voice he points out salient aspects of Buddhist iconography, and gives a compressed version of Gautama Buddha's message to the world: the letting go of craving, fear, anger and attachment.

Later, my friend K. tells me that she is plagued by craving. She wishes she could purify herself, annihilate it.

Now, I am not a stranger to the purifying impulse. I, too, would like to toss into some ultimate refiner's fire all the dross encumbering my life: the pennyante terrors of my economic life, the irresistable impulse to manufacture opinion that crowds out more valuable contemplative matter in my mindspace, the gnawing, daily sexual lust. But as I told K, I am not so certain that the purifying impulse is the equivalent of life more abundant -- it could well be the hollowing out of life itself. There is a moment in letting go in which liberation crosses over into surrender. In better moods, I believe that the moral point of the secular life is not to get rid of craving, but to get to its very center -- to sink into it until one has unlocked its puzzles. I am disinclined to think that the achievement of some state of gilded hibernation should be called enlightenment. My friend A., at Milinda's Questions, claims that I am a prisoner of my chains. To which my response is: where does that metaphor come from? It seems to me that, if these are chains, human life itself is a chain -- and the symbol of the chain, thus ramified into a world of chains, chains endlessly, loses its edge. I doubt that the Buddha touched earth as a chain touches another chain. In fact, I want to liberate myself from this particular metaphor as my part in freeing myself from the chains...

By the way, the exhibit of the handprints and footprints of the various incarnations of Buddha is extraordinary.

the lamentable state of dangling

According to Dr. Johnson, "whatever busies the mind without corrupting it, has at least this use, that it rescues the day from idleness, and he that is never idle will not often be vicious." We like the hesitating "will not often" that modifies the sentiment -- however, LI has plunged into as much idleness as saving up for two months can purchase. Instead of attending to Ms. Sheehan, or the bad faith scare, on the left, that Bush is preparing to invade Iran (with, one must ask, what army?); instead of paying attention to the Iranian repression of the Kurds (as our friend Brooding Persian is doing) -- we've been attending Tanglewood concerts and going to lakes and summer movies.

About which -- LI often wonders what they will make, one hundred years from now, of the descent of taste in the latter part of the 20th century. For a long time we simply refused to participate in it -- for instance, by never going to one of the Lucas Space operas. But in the past five years, we have dropped that stance. This means that we have accumulated a certain cache of experience in the twisty logic of action movies; we have sorted the good, the bad, and the ugly; and we have found certain sequences growing stale...

Not, of course, the car chase, the wet dream of a society of traffic jam sitters. There are certain kinds of artistry the quality of which depends on the re-enactment, within some rigid design, of the same thing. In a sense, there is only one car chase, just as there is only one wedding, and one death of the hero. All variants are simulacra of this single and singular event.

We are talking about something else -- the no-thing. This thing can happen as much as it wants, but it never emerges beyond the zero. Such a thing is the "hanging from the cable" scene.

The current Batman movie -- a decent enough flick -- might have signaled the end of this sequence. You know what we mean -- the hero dangles from a wire, a cable, a chain, a rope, that depends from a moving train, a helicopter, even an airplane. Was this sequence invented in the James Bond movies? We dont' know. The suspence, here, is that the fight is waged on two axes. On the horizontal axis, the hero is threatened with annihilation by buildings, railroad bridges, tunnels, and any projecting solidity along that plane; on the vertical axis, the hero is in a sort of tug of war, compounded of bullets, flares, tugs, etc., with the Mr. Big in the vehicle. The current Batman steals, pretty much, the sequence in last year's Spiderman of having its hero ascend a chord attached to a moving train. It struck us that this was the weakest cord sequence we have ever seen. Perhaps audiences will be perpetually moved by the dangers along the two axes, but for us, the danger on both the vertical and horizontal axes has been long exhausted. Dangling is simply too silly -- nor does it have its roots (as the car chase sequence does) in the everyday libido.

Iraq -- the prisoner's dilemma

Crooked Timber pays entirely too much attention ot the ravings of Christopher Hitchens, if only to slag the man. However, a recent post on one of Hitchen's ineffably ignorant Slate columns regarding Iraq (a frequent subject of Hitchen's Slate columns, and proof that you can have a 100 percent failure rate in journalism and still find lucrative work, making it one of those soft industries, like filmmaking and politics, to whose compensation packages we can only aspire), provoking the usual comments pro and anti-war, once again made me think about the way the verb "support" has exerted an odd and malign hegemonic control over the discourse.

In reality, the Iraq war is a sort of prisoner's dilemma in which the rational response is to order one's preferences with reference to the chance of their being realized. "Support" of the war, and opposition to it, contains a disabling germ of confusion, since the vision of the victory that would end the war one way or another has never been clarified since the war started, and the meaning of that victory is impossible to predict. The more prudent course for the war opponent is to elaborate preferences according to the phase of the war.

For instance -- before the war, supporters of the war did their best to obscure the question of preferences. To revert to the prisoner dilemma model, it is as if they were all shouting for the prisoner in cell one to be silent, thus transforming a matter of probabilities and advantages into one of morality. Myself, I ranked my preferences between the coalition not invading at all -- most preferred -- and the American's invading unilaterally -- most disliked -- to range my realistic preferences around either delaying with the inspectors or forcing America to encumber itself with a real international coalition that could block its every move post invasion. On the question of deposing Saddam Hussein, I was all for that, in the absense of every other consideration. However, there were other considerations -- the failure of the Americans to stymie al qaeda, for instance. As to an overthrow that would minimize violence, maximize justice, and depose of Saddam, I didn't realistically see a way in the options on offer -- and certainly, of course, the larcenous Americans were a scary prospect.

Having the preference for a coalition helped me to see that the Bush strategy was to pretend to accede to coalition building while mounting such a campaign of threats and vituperation that any coalition partner would be powerless to stop what the Bushies had in mind. This happened. Nobody raised a finger to stop the Americans from attempting to elevate a convicted criminal to the leadership of Iraq, from dissolving the army, from guarding the oil ministry while the rest of the country was looted, from taking over the government of the country, from putting unpopular native patsies in governing bodies which Gunga Din himself would have had too much self esteem to have served on. Then there was the double plucking of Iraq. On the one hand, the taxpayers were plucked massively, as U.S. money poured into a consortium of the worst American corportations, War department leaches, GOP subsidiaries and the like. This was, of course, in the name of aiding Iraq. On the other hand, the Iraqis were plucked as their national treasury went into obscure gambits that ultimately benefited the same congery of corporate scoundrels.

At about the one year mark, then, my preferences were for world wide resistance to the Americans -- from the Iraqis, from the French, from the Iranians, etc. Again, however, just as wanting Saddam removed from power didn't entail "supporting" unilateral American action, supporting resistance to the Americans didn't mean "supporting" the insurgency.

All well and good, but do my "preferences" have an effect? Many people would say it is all bullshit. I think that is the real unrealism. Sitting in the Behemoth doesn't mean one is paralyzed. The promotion of the sense that American action in Iraq is wrong, unjust, and incompetently carried out was a minority view in May of 2003, but it has spread to achieve near majority status in the polls recently. How? Partly through harsh and unremitting attacks on the war by the left -- in blogs, in newspapers, whereever. There is a lot of curious anti-war worrying over the perception that the left is stabbing America in the back. To which I'd say: of course I'm stabbing America in the back! America, in this instance, is a giant dunderhead, and pricking the nerves is the only way to get his attention. Harshness and extremism have a tactical use. It frees people up by extending the range of their preferences. If people prefer to think America was well intentioned but misguided in this war, that is fine with me -- the misguiding that leads to withdrawal is the goal.

In terms of my preferences for Iraq --well, I do have them. In 2004, I was hopeful that perhaps some secularist middle would emerge -- neither pro-American nor theocratic terrorist. I didn't expect the liberal ideal, but I thought that it was possible that a coalition between Sistani Shi'ites and recovered Ba'athists might just be possible. It wasn't. If in fact a coalition had invaded Iraq, one strong enough to counter the Bush people, I think there would have been a chance for such a thing. But secularism is indelibly stained by the face put on it by the Americans -- the crook and the terrorist being the best patsies America could come up with. In the end, America shot itself in the foot -- without a strong secularist middle party, it was inevitable Iraq would drift into the Iranian orbit. The drift, which I think is inevitable, now has to be disguised in the American press. The press is very obediant to the idea that our withdrawal will be followed by a bloodbath, which ignores that our occupation is a bloodbath. It also ignores the fact that insurgencies in the Middle East are eventually put down with no help from the Yankees -- witness the Kurdish civil war in the nineties. No, below all of that is the suspicion that America's withdrawal will be the final stage in Iran's domination of the northern part of the Gulf. Personally, instead of fearing an American invasion of Iran, what we should be looking for are signals of American dickering with the final deal. That could well happen -- there is no allergy to private enterprise in Shi'ite theocracy. I imagine that the American death count -- and the Iraqi death count -- should be seen as a holding action while the Americans figure out how to deal with the unexpected result of their insane enterprise. Captain Ahab went down with the white whale, but we can always deal with the Whale and get the oil we need -- for a price.

We thought the U.S. should have been practicing detente with Iran since the mid nineties. Alas, it took thirty some thousand Iraqi dead and who knows how many Americans before it is all through to put us on this sensible course.

Blair's imam-catchers

Blair is a nasty piece of work. Even so, we have to stand in a bit of awe at the audacity of his latest pronouncements. They take us back to a distant era in which he would surely have flourished, when the threatened bombing of the Parliament, or the poisoning of the queen, produced a fair share of martyrs – this time not Islamic ones, but Catholic. That supercilious righteousness would have served him well then – and since, apparently, the police are to stage raids on mosques, Blair might really want to read up on the techniques of his spiritual ancestors. He needs what Queen Elizabeth had: a Richard Topcliffe. Talk about a torturer for all seasons – Topcliffe’s techniques have often been imitated – most recently by the American military in Iraq – but never really topped.

Topcliffe had a licence to operate a rack in his own house – an ingenious idea that Blair might consider reviving. I’m sure Blunkett would be just the man to operate a stretching machine.

Here’s a description of Topcliffe excerpted from J. Heath: Torture And English Law: An Administrative and Legal History from the Plantagenets to the Stuarts. The “Young” here is another, less colorful, rack master. Southwell, of course, is the famous Jesuit. The other names are of Catholics:

…It was also to Topcliffe and Young that, in 1591, the Law Officers were directed to leave Thomas Clinton. if torture seemed necessary: as “butchers’, the two men were linked in Southwell’s letter, of January, 1590, to Aquaviva. According to the Gerard autobiography, after Gerard’s arrest, his second examination—without torture—was before the two of them, at Young’s house. Their relative roles in the Government’s business deserve consideration. The Gerard autobiography seems to regard Young as the key figure in the politico-religious police of the metropolis. He was a justice of the peace, proceeding as such, although with peculiar determination, sometimes upon instructions from the Queen. generally in a special working relationship with the Council. Topcliffe was not a justice of the peace and indeed held no public office. He was, however, fanatically hostile to Roman Catholicism and successful in attaching himself to the highest centers of influence. Sometimes, he received instructions from the Council. and—including the case of Thomas Clinton the Conciliar records show nine instances of his employment where torture might be used. However, he attained to a special working relationship with the Queen herself and came to occupy in the prosecution of Roman Catholics for politico-religious offenses a position de facto resembling that of a justice of the peace, but without territorial limits being placed upon his authority within the realm, and to command from the Judicature more deference than any ordinary prosecuting justice would have received. Moreover, he found the funds to organize a considerable force of agents. He may be regarded, to this extent, as a primeval common ancestor of Pinkerton’s and the FBI.”

Ah, that Topcliffe spirit – just the thing for the current occasion. An imam-catcher, and a volunteer at that. Topcliffe also had a modern way of combining his work and his dick – he impregnated one of the Catholic women he caught, had one of his servants marry her, and used her info to uncover a hiding priest.

Heath’s conclusions concerning Elizabeth’s sanctioning of torture are in the purest spirit of Blairism.

“What may be true is that torture was not used, for whatever result, in an entirely cynical mood: that it was not used without a fairly strong sense that the examinate had brought it upon himself by withholding the truth. Before the present period, several relevant Conciliar records in political or politico-religious cases, and one in a case of ordinary crime, refer to obstinacy of the examinate. During the present period, there are seven more although in only one does the record contemplate an ordinary crime. Of course, such references might have been humbug, but we may recall the case of William Weston who. as above noticed, escaped torture, although there is no reason to suppose that without it he liberally supplied the authorities with means of destroying other Roman Catholics.”

Hear hear for English humanitarianism! This is the stuff. A cynical mood is far from “our way of life,” the Blairist can well say. And if they are going to criticize, out on their ear! The British have always been against foreigners coming into a country and taking things over and kicking the natives around … uh, well with a few exceptions.

it's too gashly...

LI is going to be gone for a month. We might drop by the site and leave a few bits of wisdom, or whatever it is we produce here. But mostly we are going to try to forget the art of writing, the art of reading, the war, the Bush, etc., etc.

We have been thinking of partings ... and especially the parting of Peregrinus, the cynic. He built a pyre in Elia, mounted it, and lit it, thus ascending to the heights of Mount Olympia on wings of fire.

Lucian of Samothrace, a satirist, left a lively account of the scene, and of Peregrinus’ life as a philosophical scoundrel. The English translation omits certain nice, dirty bits you can find (bien sur) in the French translation, like the Cynics habit of masturbating in public. That’s nicely omitted here. Lucien’s account is cast into the form of a letter to a friend:

“ I imagine you’ll laugh yourself to death imaging that old senile piker – I can just hear you saying “what a farce! and really, what misplaced vanity!” and a thousand other similar abjurations. Well, as distant as I am from hearing your indignation, I was that close – at the very foot of the pyre – that I emptied my little sack and said everything I thought of the comedy, right in the heart of a crowd of spectators scandalized by my reaction, all of them open mouthed with admiration before the vaudeville turn of that old idiot.”

Needless to say, LI wants to depart this life in the same way, although we doubt we’ll attract a crowd of spectators. Still, Peregrinus never really died – he was reborn as the Dauphin in Huckleberry Finn, Milo Minderbinder in Catch 22, and any number of academics and new age mystics and think tank foreign policy analysts and every guest on every current affairs talk show. But we like to think that we embody a purer form of his purely scandalous fraudulence than any of these.

Lucian’s satire would no doubt have been thrown on the flames by some mad monk long ago, except that it contains precious info about the early Christians. Peregrinus spent his life looking for just that intersection of gullibility and metaphysics that so many have made a good living exploiting. He started out in life along classical lines: the seduced girl with a little number in the belly, the flight out the window leaving behind his clothes, the hush money paid by his folks. Well, of course, one good turn deserves another, so Peregrinus helped his poor old dad enter into the afterlife through a strategically placed pillow (the old guy was suffering, and there was the inheritance to think about). Peregrinus was surprised to discover that his native village was filled with hidden anti-euthanasia freaks, so the best part of discretion blew him to other lands – notably Palestine, where he became a Christian among Christians.

He quickly found some followers, disciples, proclaimed himself their prophet, their theasiarch, their head of the synagogue – in brief, he granted himself all the powers, proposed to analyze their holy books, cut them up to his hearts content and added whatever texts struck his fancy. So much so that the Christians began to regard him as their pontiff. He ended up elevating himself to the level of the one these Palestinians adored, who suffered being put on the cross, guilty, according to his peers, of inventing new mysteries for humanity.”

Well, the old rogue, no doubt after penning some of Jesus’ more dubious sentences, got thrown into jail. Luckily, the governor of Syria had a fatal penchant for philosophy, which was Peregrinus’ clef de champs. Going back to his home town, he found that there was some harsh memories of his merciful treatment of the Parent. In the end, he was rather forced to spend the inheritance among the poor just to keep from being lynched. So it was time to go elsewhere, which is how he passed into Egypt, stage left, and became a cynic:

“He enterprised a third pilgrimage, this time to Egypt, where he met Agathobulus who instructed him in the métier, which he exercized up to the day of his death. His skull shaved, his face smeared with mud, he masturbated in public without the least embarrassment, something the Cynics consider completely natural. He whipped himself – or had himself whipped – with a ruler, and executed a thousand silly pranks in the same vein.”

A regular guy, in other words, that any ancient Mediterranean ville would pass by without a glance. But it was the big send off that Lucian wrote about, and that made Peregrinus’ name. Having found followers – the more absurd the doctrine, the more ardent the follower – he built a nice pyre to burn himself up in Elia.

Everybody’s a critic: Lucian has a lot of fault to find with the theater of Peregrinus’ last hours, although he admits he was three sheets to the wind, and a heckler to boot. But give Peregrinus some credit – he invited, seemingly, a funeral orator who laughed himself silly about the whole thing and told the crowd that Peregrinus was a faker, a hoodlum, a cocksman, and a joke.

How can I not identify? As I write this with my right hand, with my left I’m raising a glass of Montepulciano to the old reprobate’s ashes.

"It's a dead man. Yes, indeedy; naked, too. He's ben shot in de back. I reck'n he's ben dead two er three days. Come in, Huck, but doan' look at his face -- it's too gashly."

A block party!

We considered making this yet another Iraq post. But we like to think of ourselves as America’s blog. We like to think that we love kids, dogs, and yes, sometimes we like to watch American Idol, like you all do. And we Americans don’t want to have bloody bits of soldiers rubbed in our faces. We are too busy and too caring. The message is: we care. We are a great nation, shopping for great deals at world class malls. In the world, America is famous for our freedom, which is why they hate us. So instead, we are linking to this article about our world class legislators in D.C. God bless em. Some of the hardest working Christians you would ever want to see. But even Christians can let their hair down, occasionally.

The article details the way lobbyists are able to show their appreciation for the service to the country shown by these fine men and women. They are in the line of fire every day. Many of them are making financial sacrifice by serving in Congress, and will only be able to make it up by accepting top flight jobs from the corporations that bribed them to pass those bills that so gaily loot the Treasury after their patriotic service is over. As journalist Carl Hulse notes, the recent scandals around Tom Delay and “Duke” Cunningham was notable only for the notable stupidity displayed by the two outstanding Christians, since getting around ethics rules has been designed to be user friendly, and could be performed, if necessary, by a retarded rabbit.

For those who think that the Democrats aren’t sufficiently Christian – well here’s a nice surprise for you all:

“During the past five years, members of Congress have received $18.3 million worth of travel at the expense of private organizations, according to PoliticalMoneyLine, a nonpartisan research service. That includes 628 lawmakers who made 6,242 trips, 57 percent of which were taken by Democrats.

The most popular destinations were vacation spots, according to a study by the Medill News Service and American Public Media, which produces programs for public radio stations. From January 2000 to mid-2004, No. 1 was Florida with more than 500 trips, followed by California with nearly 400 trips and New York with more than 300. West Virginia, home to the Greenbrier resort, was the fourth most popular destination, with more than 200 trips. These were permitted because they were connected to "official duties" -- one of the requirements that the ethics rules impose on privately paid trips.”

Seeing the awesome, divinely created majesty of the ski slopes, or the beauty of a Las Vegas floor show, is the best way of instilling that respect for Credit Card companies, oil companies, and, most of all, our brave Defense corporations, which naturally results in votes that are good for the country. Those who criticize the Congress show a lack of understanding about what makes this whole faith based mechanism work – which is why we have to try extra hard to spread our way of life around the world. Although they died for so many reasons, among the reasons 1800 Americans have given their lives for the Islamic Republic of Iraq is to make sure that our legislatures can continue to live free, unfettered lives.

I’m not saying that we should take away the sacred right to expression from the critics who will always dog our way of life, bitter deadender leftists, but I am saying that jail time, under the Patriot Act provisions that Justice Roberts will thoughtfully construe in the spirit in which they are intended, might be one answer to anti-American slanderers and fifth columnists in our own country.

“…barely a week passes when at least one out-of-town fundraising event doesn't entice contributors with golf, a boat excursion or skiing. The House Republicans' event list between mid-July and mid-August advertises 12 golf outings, four baseball games, a musical show and a night of "champagne and caviar."
The competition for donors is so intense that lawmakers try to outdo each other with innovative fundraising come-ons. Four members of the House Ways and Means Committee held what they called a "block party" to make it easier for lobbyists to drop off checks. The lawmakers, who live on the same block on Capitol Hill, each offered a different alcoholic beverage to donors as they stopped by on the same evening this spring.

"There are 20 to 40 fundraisers a day that people have a chance to go to, and they can't make them all," said Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), who conceived and benefited from the block party. "You want to make sure yours stands out and that people say, 'That's fun!' "

P.S. LI does like to imitate the small town touches that used to make Paul Harvey's radio broadcasts such a delight. Harvey was always looking for the little, telling story: the one that focused on what was right and good in this country. In that spirit, we couldn't help noticing that the LAT story about the deaths of those marines yesterday was nestled next to a box with today's top emailed stories. Rightfully, Americans rejected pointless bad news from Iraq. Why clutter the mind? No, it take a resilient people to lose 44 soldiers in the past couple days and make this the most popular headline of the day: "20 of the most delicious deals you'll find around town."

Say what you like, this country has its eyes on the prize. No wonder we've been voted most moral 200 years running!