A Couple Dozen Theses

It worked for Martin Luther, it could work for me.

Besides, on this very, very busy day, it beats actually looking for stuff to write about.

Here goes:

1. The volume with which one accuses another of being a "chickenhawk" is in inverse proportion to the degree about which one cares about the military under any other circumstances.
2. Chunky peanut butter is better.
3. The number and vituperation of one's bumper stickers are in inverse proportion to ones literacy on any given topic.
4. That Bush didn't lie about the intelligence estimates leading up to the Iraq War is no longer in any rational question; he did not. The only remaining battle is to see how many people will believe the "Bush Lied" lie, and to what degree it will drive them.
5. The mainstream media is, at this moment in history, irredeemably biased to the left.
6. Today's mainstream, "Billboard Top Forty" "Country/Western" is to Country/Western as N*Sync is to Rhythm and Blues.
7. The only way to fix that bias will not be to tear down "the media", but to get them to dispense with the myth of objectivity that has grown up around the journalistic trade in the past eighty years or so.
8. If Michael Savage and Ann Coulter didn't exist, the left would have to create them.
9. The right will never really be the majority party in this nation until it makes a near-majority showing in the major cities.
10. In particular, the "culture war" will not be won until the places from which culture comes - the major cities where the media are - have conservative constituencies big enough to influence elections.
11. Conservatives can do this; Brett Schundler proved it, in a place (Jersey City) that leans every bit as urban-left as the Twin Cities do.
12. Furthermore, many of the constituencies that make urban areas so hard-left are the ones that should be voting to the right; nobody is more concerned with the decline of american Education than inner-city blacks; nobody is more socially conservative than Hispanic Catholics; nobody is more free-enterprise than Asians. These groups' lean to the left, in those contexts, makes no sense.
13. The leadership of each of those constituencies knows it, deep down in their DNA - which is why they reserve such intense vituperation for apostate blacks, Latinos and Asians that leave "the plantation" as it were; each one is potentially the first drip through the dam.
14. America has a great tradition of taking its ethnic contributions and improving them to the point where they become our own; jazz, pizza, baseball, football, and on and on. However, until American mass-market beer stops tasting like fizzy weak battery acid and more like beer, it will be a blog on our national character.
15. The only racial reparations we should make should be voluntary and through the free market. The "reparations" we're "paying" the Native Amerians - through a near-exclusive gambling franchise - are a great model to follow. We should give another such franchise to documented descendants of slaves; perhaps legalized pot would do the trick.
16. At least half of SUV drivers do so because they're crappy drivers, and need the truck-like bulk of the vehicle to safeguard themselves from their own incompetence.
17. It takes more brain power to be a conservative than a liberal. I didn't say "intelligence", I said brain power, mental effort, thought.
18. As much as the national left insists that the left's crimes against civility are "no worse" than those on the right, nobody can show me an example of conservative commentators and pundits piling on a lefty pundit in the same way as their pundits pile on, say, Michelle Malkin.
19. In fact, the left will refuse to recognize it, because they (as a group, if not as individuals - the broad brush does indeed skip many of you lefties) justify it; to them, conservatives are exempt from the rules of civility (especially minority and female conservatives; Malkin hit the bifecta).
20. Dominos is not pizza
21. Jazz started generally sucking once it left the popular domain and became "high art".
22. It started sucking worse when it became mainly the preserve of the academic musician.
23. In fact, when any art form is swallowed up by academe, it ceases to be a genuinely vital form
24. There is nothing about the bibllical story of creation which is inimical to the theory of evolution, if one views the Genesis story as allegory.
25. Which, indeed, isn't correct, unless one is to assume that by "creating man in his image" it follows that the Almighty Father is a 5'10' guy with fallen arches, a receding hairline and a bad case of gas, rather than an entity"possessing intelligence".
26. Speaking of evolution; if the fundamentalist left didn't have the Kansas Board of Education, they'd have to make one up.
27. We are winning the War In Iraq.
28. This will be realized in the following order:
    1. The terrorist leaderships
    2. The US military
    3. The US population (red states only)
    4. The rest of the US
    5. The Media
    6. Ted Kennedy
29. Air American paranoid-left nightside talk host Mike Malloy is actually a conservative who couldn't get a job under his normal identity; he created the "Malloy" character to stand out from the crowd. He's basically a Fast Eddie Schultz, but much more diabolically clever.
30. In the wake of the Tomlinson "scandal", the left's conceit that National Public Radio is utterly non-partisan will get louder, yet more hollow.
31. Speaking of hollow claims of non-partisanship - Ira Glass will eventually morph into one huge adenoid.
32. Speaking of Ira Glass - Sarah Vowell's really voice is perfectly normal. I think she adopts her nasal, dripping-with-retro-nerdiness voice to stand out from the pack of dry, snooty, haven't-had-a-bowel-movement-in-eight-days female voices that clog (unfortunate choice of words, perhaps) National Public Radio. In its own perverse way, it works.
33. All of you who try to concoct materialistic indicators of political alignment - (e.g. "Liberals drive Fords/own cats, conservatives drive GMC/own dogs); please get lives. I drive a Ford, have a dog and a cat. Wanna question my credentials?
34. Those of you who answer "yes" have either too much time on your hands, or, in these parlous days, too little on your minds.
35. The greatest non-religious axioms in the world:
    • "The easiest way to become wealthy [or, by extension, happy, involved in one's relationship, or solid in one's faith] is to behave/appear as if one already is" (Hungarian saying)
    • "Who Dares Wins" (Motto of the British Special Air Service regiment)
    • "There's No Such Thing as 'Too Far'"" [Ferris Bueller's Day Off]
36. The unexamined life may or may not be worth living, but the unchallenged assumption is certainly not worth having.
37. That's not just a bromide; to be truly worthwhile as a conservative, one must "know the enemy", which means truly understanding what liberals are about (to pick an example for no particular reason).
38. For those who answer "No, I don't! I know everything I need to right now!" - well, some things just parody themselves.
39. That being said - in two years of looking, I have yet to find a local/regional lefty blog that can hold my attention for more than a couple of days (with the obvious exception of Flash, who's at least a homey in the 'hood, and whose blog I have to plug to ensure continued retroactive kid-watching. So go read it)
40. Ruling out art because of the artist's politics (at least, art that isn't overtly political) is the same as voting for politicians based on their taste in modern dance. The latter sounds moronic - why isn't the first?
41. That being said: Judged on purely conservative political grounds, Bruce Springsteen's The Rising was the best rock and roll album of 2002. Hands down. No rational argument is possible. Leave out all non-recorded subtext, and what was the album about? Faith. Strength. Selflessness. Giving of oneself for one's fellow man. Hope. Family. Comrades in arms (or fire axes, anyway). On this point, any argument is specious.
42. For that matter; whenever a conservative pundit starts yakking about what sort of music conservatives "should" listen to, one really needs to stick with:
    • Bach
    • Tchaikowskii (Pyotr, not Bram)
    • Händel
    Of this, there is not much legitimate question. (On the other hand, Ravel, Chopin and any 12-tone composer probably belongs to the left of center - but I like 'em anyway.
43. Except for 12-tone. Blech.
44. On a totally non-political front; if the Heavenly Father had a human voice, it'd sound a lot like Emmylou Harris.
45. The child custody/child support system is the greatest legal travesty in the United States today. It is, figuratively speaking, an endless Abu Ghraib that affects millions rather than dozens.
46. Yes, I know - Abu Ghraib similes are almost invariably specious, and I use them very sparingly. Consider the previous thesis accordingly.
47. A conservative blogger's overall worth is in inverse proportion to how many liberal bloggers call the blogger a "Hack" or "Party Shill".
48. The "indictments" of Tom Delay and Ron Eibensteiner were nearly identical; specious, done with full knowledge that they were of no legal value, but done as further shots in the PR war; the Democrats are banking on the notion that the average citizen can't tell the difference between "indictment" and "conviction".
49. One of the Law And Order series will include a storyline about a Republican politician who killed someone in a situation eerily similar to the left's version of the Delay story.
50. In fact, to reflect Dick Wolf's disdain for the right, it will no doubt appear on SVU.
51. In the past fifteen years, we've sat through the commercial resurrection of both Johnny Cash and Tony Bennet among society's hYp$tRz. I'd love to find some really unlikely old star/group and find some way to launch them back into the hip mainstream. Candidates:
    • The Lettermen
    • Charley Pride
    • Charley Dore
    • Peter Noonan
    Then, all of us who are in on the joke will have a great laugh at the expense of the soul-patched, patchouli-drenched, horrible-prices-and-lousy-service-at-Chino-Latino-enduring scene-drones and their boyfriends.
52. Britney Spears is probably going to be the Elizabeth Taylor of the 21st Century.
53. If we're lucky, though, she'll take more after Garbo.
54. Larry King did this sort of thing first, and probably much better.
55. If everyone followed along with Oliver Willis' reading list, the terrorist single-celled organisms will win.
56. There was a time, I think, when Americans of all political stripes knew there were just some things one didn't play politics with. I think that's mostly lost. I could say it's mostly lost on the left - and you know I probably think it deep down inside - but I'm not going to say it.
57. Inedible "foods" include mayonnaise, any jello that includes vegetable material, and scrapple in all of its forms.
58. In addition, if the Heavenly Father had intended bagels to have fruit in them,. he's have never invented Onions, Garlic or Rock Salt. Get real, people.
59. However, in whatever form, Bagels are better than donuts.
60. I have to wonder; if Martin Luther were a blogger, do you supposed he'd have had 950 theses?
61. If Ryan Rhodes had led the Reformation rather than Martin Luther, would we be talking about 95 Feces today?
62. Question: Has John Kerry spoken out about the riots in France yet? Anything? Bueller?
63. There's this woman who must shop at my local Rainbow every time I go there. I've never seen her, just her car. But I know she's a woman; her car is plastered, Deaniac-like, with Wiccan bumper stickers; "My Karma Ran Over Your Dogma", "God, Protect Me From Your Followers", that sort of things. I want to create my own line of stickers; "Gaia, please protect some of your followers from choking on their own sense of smug self-satisfaction".
64. What lightweight, low-impact, westernized bite-size Hinduist/Taoist transcendentalism was to the Sixties, and "Est" was to the Seventies, Unitarianism was to the eighties, lightweight, low-impact, westernized bite-size "Native American Spirituality" was to the nineties - lightweight, low-impact, westernized bite-size Buddhism-via-Hollywood is to the 2000's, so far. Since Kabballa and Scientology have both devolved into self-caricatures, I doubt either will take a place at the center of America's fad-spirituality scene. What other options are open to America's excessively-wealthy, spiritually-destitute, terminally-fad-obsessed class? Suggestions?
65. Given a choice of being stranded on a desert island with Pat Robertson, Al-Zarquawi and any of Minnesota's leading evangelical atheists (I'm thinking in cable access and/or blog terms, here), I'd probably take Robertson or Zarquawi. They'd be, respectively, less smug and irritating on the one hand, and more interesting conversation and less likely to drive me to homicidal rage on the other, in that order.
66. Here's part of the problem; much of the left seems to think "God Bless America" is a demand. It's not.
67. Queen and Country - still the coolest. That's a "Graphic Novel" series, not the story of a drag diva who develops an appreciation of Merle Haggard.

Back to more regular blogging on Monday.

Posted by Mitch at November 18, 2005 12:22 PM | TrackBack