Entry 3:

Hi again,

Feel better? Is it all out of your system? Because that hardhearted, cynical "sweetie" who wrote me back this afternoon is not the sweetie I know at home (unless of course this is the usual midday office David I am only now encountering for the first time). Besides calling your wife bogus, I feel you were too hard on that poor choirboy. So much in American culture would be lost without that one last revival tour, the most dramatic of all redemption tales. You're right: Who needs Rick Springfield? But what about all those other reunion gems: "Still Crazy," the Spinal Tap of this genre, a movie that gave us so much pleasure not so long ago. And the campy splendor of a Cher concert. Not to mention VH1's Behind the Music, those late-nite maudlin rockumentaries chronicling the rise and fall of, as Liza Mundy famously wrote: "the same five people, Stevie Nicks, Stevie Nicks, Stevie Nicks, Cher, and Stevie Nicks." Kill those things and you kill what is loveliest about America: the opportunity to rise from your own ashes.

I agree with you about the campaign photos, and the one about Al Gore today was certainly a fine example of the art. I think elitists like us have already got our revenge on ham-hocks populism, though, when Gary Bauer, while flipping a pancake, flipped backward off the stage. But this is not a moment to recall the indignities of Gary Bauer. The man has, after all, suffered enough. Here he takes an iconoclastic stand by endorsing McCain and brings on himself nothing but trouble: First all his friends stop talking to him. Then McCain makes him stand on the stage, his smile slowly fading, as his new and now only friend rails against the "agents of intolerance." Now what will he do with himself?

My favorite story of the day, by the way, comes from the same place it always does: The Washington Times, the only organ in Washington always prepared to be shocked anew. This time, it's about what the headline calls an "art" project that shocks San Francisco (as if San Francisco were the Washington Times). Some hapless 24-year-old at the San Francisco Art Institute has decided to publicly demonstrate oral sex and exchange feces with a bound and gagged classmate. (Makes that doorknob licking by your competitors seem tame.) He justified his oeuvre as "an exploration of Hegel's master-slave dialectic and Kant's theories on freedom on thought and action." Now I know why I never went to graduate school.

So, are you going to Bob Jones this week, or not? If yes, feel free to postpone this discussion to a later point. If not, I'm interested in your opinion on the Hendrik Hertzberg "Comment" on Bob Jones in The New Yorker this week. Although I'm a great admirer, it seems to me he is much too sanguine about America. He argues that the absence of any Bob Jones defenders proves that America has come to accept interracial dating. But that seems like wishful thinking. More than almost anything else, interracial dating seems one of those taboos people know they can't complain about but secretly detest. Same is true for his cheery outlook on shifting Protestant attitudes about Catholicism. Publicly, it's true that they've toned down the differences. And if you asked them on a poll they would tell you that. But if you are a red-blooded Protestant, it would follow logically, by the dictates of your theology, that Catholics are going to hell. Bob Jones is just the only place honest enough to admit that.  

Am looking forward to reading the rest of The New Yorker. For now, must check the wires.

Jaded,
Hanna