Supreme Fiction

Inventors' Country

Dara writes:

It is not often that an article on the front page of the New York Times makes me laugh out loud. Not the hysterical laughter that issues forth involuntarily from bad news, since that is what typically mars an NYT front page. No: laughter of hilarity, of mirth. Yet, this is what came on Saturday, during my breakfast, at this, an article about crime fighting techniques in Japan, a country with a low crime rate.

According to the article, since the Japanese are averse to confrontation, their crime-fighting techniques facilitate hiding from rather than facing would-be attackers, muggers, etc.. To make hiding easier, one woman has created a skirt that turns into a vending machine. Apparently, a row of vending machines is a common site on a street in Tokyo. All a woman would have to do, were she being pursued, aside from having had the perspicacity to don her vending-machine-skirt that morning, would be to unwrap her skirt, put it over her head, and voila, she looks like she can start dispensing Cokes.

I'm not kidding. The amazing thing, in the photo to which I link, is that you can SEE her blue sneakers sticking out from under the skirt/machine. But maybe the attacking would be running and wouldn't notice that??

Other camo of which the woman has thought is a bag that becomes a manhole and a backpack that becomes a fire hydrant. If you feel someone following you for your money, you can drop your purse on the ground and presumably the thief will walk over it because it looks like a manhole. If your child is being followed, he can slip his pack over his head and become a hydrant.

I adore Japanese writing utensils, notepads, stationery, etc., because it's so inventive. The Kinokinuya store in Rock Center satisfies my yen. This recent NYT story further convinces me I have to get myself to Japan someday.

That crazy right-wing conference? Yeah, I was there.

James writes:

While Dara chose to stay home with Bosco, our tenured cat, I headed down to Washington last week to report on the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. It was an interesting year to be at CPAC. Day one the headlines read: Giuliani is a go, but McCain won't do CPAC. From The Washington Times:

Sen. John McCain is the only major Republican presidential candidate who will not address the nation's premier gathering of conservatives this year.

Sponsors of the Conservative Political Action Conference, which begins today in Washington and brings together thousands of conservative leaders and grass-roots activists, say the Arizona Republican has "dissed" organizers by attempting to schedule a private reception for attendees after rejecting invitations to speak at the event.

"It was a classical McCain move, dissing us by going behind our backs," said William J. Lauderback, executive vice president of the American Conservative Union.

With the Brownback campaign slipping cards under CPAC doors and a person in a dolphin suit walking the convention floor (the message: Romney is a 'flip-flopper'), this year's CPAC was pure American tango. Will an outcast conservative base (not a word is spoken in favor of the Bush White House) be wooed by a buffed out, high maintenance, $100-million-rasing Republican candidate for '08? Will a conservative underdog get the last dance? One thing's for sure: conservatives represented at CPAC weren't nearly ready to settle on this year's prom queen, even if this queen is ready to settle for them. (Yes, this is an undoctored picture of Giuliani in drag. You've got to wonder, is America ready for New York humor?)

Also at CPAC, Ann Coulter proved that Stephen Colbert doesn't have a lock on playing the conservative fool (when will they stop inviting this one-woman John Birch Society to the party).

In the end, while Giuliani made a rousing speech on the convention floor, Mitt Romney won the 2007 CPAC 'straw poll' . More here.
One rumor spread through the Shoreham Hotel afterparties that Giuliani's personal and political skeletons may overcome his Presidential ambition. A forensic expert at the event told me he had $5,000 riding on the belief that Giuliani would pull out of the race once he raises more cash. Here is an article that, while not backing up this cynical claim, at least indicates Giuliani's troubles at home. (Gosh, and I remember Andrew Giuliani when he was just an annoying pubescient at his father's first mayoral inauguration.)

Jeffrey Hart: out-take

James writes:

Over at The New Criterion, I remark on some of the websites that have directed readers to this weblog and to my profile of Jeffrey Hart. Here I also provide links to more about what I've written about Hart over the past year. These notes formed the first draft of my article.

I am pleased to add Powerline to the list of weblogs that have taken note of Hart, and now the Alumni Magazine profile. Blogger Scott Johnson is a former student of Hart's, and his post is a dissenting opinion to Hart's recent direction.

Scott's post reminded me that an interesting paragraph about Hart's own time as an undergraduate didn't make it in the final piece. Here it is:

Over fifty years ago, Hart was enrolled in a course at Dartmouth that had a profound effect on his life. The professor was Eugen Rosenstock-Hussey, a Christian existentialist.

"He complicated my naturalism. I was interested both in animals in the naturalist sense, and naturalism as a philosophy. He said, you cannot live empirically. You live forward in time. You don't know how it is going to come out. You don't know how your career is going to turn out, or if it's the right career. Or marriage. Or whatever. Life is always a movement into the unknown. One of his repeated mantras was 'history must be told.' You are constantly creating new institutions, and your guide must be history. You see that here with co-ed, for example. Dartmouth a very different school than it was when I came here in 1947. Dartmouth is MUCH improved now. I probably would have stayed at Dartmouth today."

I still think about him and I'm going to write about him. I'm going to write a memoir called 'Snapshots From Heaven' and he's going to figure in one "Snapshot."

Letter: Ramesh Ponnuru

To the blogger:

re: 'How the Right Went Wrong'

In your profile of Jeffrey Hart you write, “Hart’s young colleagues at National Review have been equally unsympathetic: ‘In every generation,’ wrote Jonah Goldberg and Ramesh Ponnuru in the magazine, ‘some conservatives will lose the intramural debates, and it will be only natural for them to feel that they have lost them unfairly. They will maintain that they alone have stayed true to the faith. Liberals will, in turn, be delighted to tout these scolds as exemplars of a good conservatism.’”

Thanks for quoting us. But I should point out that the comment was not directed at Hart, whose name did not appear in our article. Hart, in his letter responding to your profile, says that we have listed him “among the conservatives who have lost the ‘intramural’ argument about what conservatism in fact is.” That’s not true. Still less have we “maintain[ed],” as Hart has it, that “Bush now defines conservatism, and that to deny this is to lose the ‘intramural’ argument.” The article said nothing that could fairly be so construed, and neither Goldberg nor I have said anything similar elsewhere.

Best,

Ramesh Ponnuru

Grapple in the Big Apple

I was at the Stones' concert in Altamont when they killed that guy.

I wasn't. But I was at the Rumble in the Jungle this past week when Chris Hitchens intellectually eviscerated man of the left George Gallaway. Gallaway actually KOed Hitch, but when the two were munging around on the floor, Hitch took out a knife and performed hari kari on Gorgeous George.

Gallaway wielded more power, Hitchens more grace and nuance.

Gallaway used words as whips. Barbara Bush. Native Americans. Kecha, Kecha. Audience in his thrall. How easily, like pushing buttons, he makes people lose control.

I'm of the left but moderate. Radicals such as George Gallaway frighten me. How can I be sure his anti-Israelism isn't anti-Semitism? I can't.

Gallaway slipped out his trump card early: "Hitchens represents the first-ever metamorphosis from a butterfly back into a slug." The audience went wild. I did too, fair readers. Until afterward, when I realized that butterflies weren't once slugs, but caterpillars. But I and everyone else knew what he meant. Throughout the debate, Gallaway sacrificed precision and complexity for generality and simplicity. He played to the gut.

Would it surprise you to learn I clutched pepto bismol as I left the Baruch College Performing Arts Center?

Civil Lithium

I'm OK with subway searches in this city, and you should be too. Terror produces in me an intense anxiety that the idea of greater police protection slightly mitigates. You're right, such surveillance is really more a Paxil type pharmaceutical, but allow me a little poetic license.

The bottom line is this: don't carry a giant backpack on the subway. Yes, I'm talking to you Europeans who think Port Authority is Gare D'Austerlitz. Take a cab.

I believe in the NYPD. I know, I know, it's unfashionable for a lefty. But check out William Finnegan's article in The New Yorker this week. Even the Feds are taking pointers from our police force. True, as a white woman I'm not really in position to be harassed by the cops. Does anyone out there not think they're doing a good job, at least on the terror front?