What I hope the Supreme Court will do in the Ten Commandments case.

The AP's Gina Holland writes:

The Supreme Court ends its work Monday with the highest of drama: an anticipated retirement, a ruling on the constitutionality of government Ten Commandments displays and decisions in other major cases.

You know, I teach "Religion and the Constitution," and I'm especially interested in all the Supreme Court cases about the Religion clauses, but I've got to tell you, I think it's very bizarre of us to regard the Ten Commandments case as the big case. I understand that we are drawn to symbols and that it's especially easy to feel that you're up-to-speed on an issue like this and have a lot to argue about, but it really just isn't that important whether there's a monument amid other monuments somewhere on the state capitol grounds or a framed text amid other framed texts on a courthouse wall.

I'm sure people will get very excited about this case whichever way it comes down, and I'll be excited too, and I plan to write lots of posts about it here tomorrow. But I'd just like to tell you in advance that I really don't care which side wins. I don't think it's the sort of thing that matters much at all. These are inconsequential displays, which is why they'll be approved if they are approved and why it won't make much difference if they are taken down either.

What I'm hoping for is a crisp, useful opinion clarifying the law in this area.

IN THE COMMENTS: I explain my support for a middle position on the Establishment Clause (responding to three different commenters):

There are ideologues who want to purge religion from the public eye who care [how the Court decides this particular case] and religionists who want to intrude a lot more of it who care. If either of these groups were getting very far, I would care about the outcome in the cases that would arise. But the displays at issue in this case are inconsequential. Still, they are too much for the extreme secularists and just the beginning of what extremists on the other side would like to see. The Court needs to draw a good line that fends off both extremes. I don't care which side of the line the particular displays at issue in this case end up on....

I ... think the [Establishment Clause] extremists are blowing [this case] out of normal proportion. Everyone needs to learn to get along, and those who want to purify things too much don't impress me. Sure, they'll be put out if the government wins in these cases. I don't think people who take great offense easily should be driving the outcomes....

I think most atheists ... and many religious people ... accept and even enjoy seeing evidence of other religions around them. It's part of art and history and culture -- part of the beauty of the world that we live in (either by the grace of God or by pure, weird chance).

''This is only the second show that's a comedy about the South -- this and 'Andy Griffith' -- that doesn't make fun of Southerners."

Who watches "King of the Hill"? According to this NYT piece: "men between the ages of 18 and 49, and almost a quarter of those men own pickup trucks." The theory of the article is that "King of the Hill" offers Democrats insight into how to appeal to young Southern/rural voters -- sort of like the way "South Park" gives Republicans insight into how to appeal to young, non-socially-conservative voters:

[The Democratic Governor of North Carolina, Mike Easley,] says he thinks that understanding the show's viewers might resolve some of the mysteries confronting his party about the vast swaths of red on the electoral map.... When the governor, a former prosecutor, prepares to make his case on a partisan issue, he likes to imagine that he's explaining his position to Hank -- an exercise that might be useful for his colleagues in Washington too. For instance, Easley told me that Hank would never support a budget like the one North Carolina's Senate recently passed, which would drop some 65,000 mostly elderly citizens from the Medicaid rolls; Hank, after all, has pitched in to support his own father, a brutish war veteran, and he would never condone a community's walking away from its ailing parents. Similarly, Hank may be a lover of the environment -- he was furious when kids trashed the local campground -- but he resents self-righteous environmentalists like the ones who forced Arlen to install those annoying low-flow toilets. Voters like Hank, if they had heard about it on the evening news, would have supported Easley's ''Clean Smokestacks'' law, which forced North Carolina's coal-powered electric plants to burn cleaner, but only because industry was a partner in the final bill, rather than its target.

Well, then, Easley's use of "King of the Hill" is to figure out how to sell the Democrat's usual policies to people like this, not to critique any of his party's settled assumptions. Is that the way "South Park" is used by conservatives? It seems to me "South Park" criticizes all sorts of adult follies, and any Republicans watching that show for insight into how to appeal to its young audience ought to be learning that they need to become more libertarian and less socially conservative. "South Park" has plenty of advice for Democrats too -- but it's advice about changing yourselves, not just how to improve your rhetoric.

The Democratic interest in "King of the Hill" is that it portrays voters in a region where the Democrats have a big problem. So then, tell me, what does "King of the Hill" have to say about how Democrats should actually change their policies? I haven't watched enough of "King of the Hill" to be able to answer that question, so help me out in the comments if you can.

In the meantime, here's a post from Half-Bakered that says the NYT got the show all wrong:

[The show is] about renewal of traditional values in the face of the transformative. Every time Hank encounters the kind of "transformation" that Democrats and bureaucrats and the PC peddle, he defeats them -- often using their own internal problems and philosophies against them...

Hank is a rock-ribbed Republican, I tell ya whut. Dale Gribble, his neighbor, is a Libertarian. Boomhauer is a Republican, but doesn't much care, I'm sure. Only Bill will likely vote Democrat sometime, but only because he's a softie who falls for a good line; if he admitted it to his friends, they'd blast him.

Bai [the NYT writer] also somehow manages to quote or mention pretty much only Democrats in the piece. Go read it; it's a hoot. He's either clueless or delusional.

Or as Hank would put it, "That boy ain't right."

(Via Signifying Nothing via Memeorandum.)

UPDATE: Lot's of good discussion in the comments. Makes me decide to TiVo "King of the Hill."

Also, here's the NYT review of the book "South Park Conservatives." The reviewer, Liesl Schillinger, an arts editor from The New Yorker, doesn't seem to know much about "South Park." She seems to think it represents "a new generation of Americans who refuse to accept public censure for their scornful attitudes toward gay men and lesbians, Native Americans, environmentalism and abortion rights." I say "seems" because she seems to attribute this characterization to the author of of the book. Actually, I'm really not sure what Schillinger is babbling about here. She doesn't seem to have put much effort into understanding the things she's criticizing, and the very short review is padded with irrelevant blather about "Monty Python."

Schillinger sniffs:

[T]his book isn't intended for readers of The Times and The Economist and watchers of CNN. It's for the people who are sick and tired of mainstream media and are fans of the blogs and right-wing commentators [the author Brian C. Anderson] cites so abundantly.

Blogs!

Oh, yeah, they're horrible. Horrible! They just take idiotic unfair slams at the good people who write for mainstream media. Why they'd even slam an arts editor who works at The New Yorker! The New Yorker! Where we know what we're talking about. We know "South Park" is anti-gay... uh, right? Isn't it?

ANOTHER UPDATE: I TiVo'd and watched an episode of "King of the Hill." The episode -- "The Petriot Act" -- involved taking care of a pet for a soldier who'd gone overseas. Hank feels the call of duty to take care of a dog, as a friend of his is doing, but he signs a contract that turns out to require him to take care of a cat, which turns out to be annoying and sick, and because he's agreed to use a particular, expensive vet, costs him the money he'd saved for the family vacation. He does his duty, without being particularly grumpy or cheerful about it, and in the end the family settles for a dinner out in a modest restaurant, all they have money left for. This is a very straightforward tale about living up to one's obligations. There is a scene where Hank stands up to the vet who is overcharging him, which is the sort of thing it seems Easley was grabbing onto. Hank gets mad when another man is not being fair and honest, so I suppose that shows that Hank-types can be activated by stories about people who cheat and take advantage. The whole "King of the Hill" concept, based on that episode, seemed to be about being solidly responsible and upstanding.

"Jane, you ignorant slut."

I guess Shana Alexander must have known all along that line would appear in her obituary.

Why can't I watch "The Simpsons"?

Every time somebody quotes "The Simpsons" -- like in the comments to this post -- I'm always terribly impressed. How smart and funny the writing is! I think, once again, I should watch that show. But the fact is, for the longest time, I haven't been able to. I just can't stand to see it or hear it.

What is it I hate so much about the look and the sound? I recognize the brilliance of the voice actors. But I don't want to hear them anymore. They just irritate me. And the look of the animation... What is it? Too much yellow?

I could just read the scripts, I suppose.

Anyone else feel the same way?

"Would a man do this to another man?"

Do what?

The death of a local playwright.

The Wisconsin State Journal reports:

Joel Gersmann, 62, artistic director of Broom Street Theater since 1969 and one of Madison's most prolific playwrights, died Friday in his home. He had been in poor health for some time.

The theater has a reputation for producing experimental, avant-garde plays, many of them controversial.

Currently, the theater is featuring "Oklahomo, a Gay Comedy About Curley, a Resident Drag Queen, a Transsexual Cow and Homophobia."...

Gersmann's own plays included subjects ranging from Nazis to Nancy Drew, and from abortion to pedophilia.

Anyone who's ever lived in Madison knows that the Broom Street Theater is one of those distinctive things that make Madison Madison. Goodbye, Joel!

Today's word challenge.

I'm looking at my old copy of "The Book of Lists," which has a list of the "10 Most Beautiful Words in the English Language" and a list of "The 10 Worst-Sounding English Words." (The lists are from different sources, in case you're wondering about the lack of parallel titles.)

10 Best: chimes, dawn, golden, hush, lullaby, luminous, melody, mist, murmuring, tranquil.

10 Worst: cacaphony, crunch, flatulent, gripe, jazz, phlegmatic, plump, plutocrat, treachery.

With the exception of "jazz" -- which just doesn't belong on the "worst" list -- all of these words align sound and meaning. That is, the words that sound beautiful mean something beautiful, and the words that sound ugly, have a negative meaning as well.

So here's the challenge: come up with words that sound beautiful but mean something ugly, or sound ugly but mean something beautiful.

"Daddy."

Is there something wrong with you if you call your father "Daddy"? Jeremy posits that there is.

Here's the comment I put over there:

Jeremy, in my family, we kids always called our father "Daddy." He was Daddy. We stopped calling our mother Mommy (switching to Mother), but Daddy was always Daddy. We never called him Dad. Not once. We disrespectfully called him "the O.M." (for "the old man") for a while -- though not to his face. My mother always referred to him to us as "your father." It's hard to convey the deep sense in which "Daddy" was just exactly what he was. No matter how mature or immature I was at any given point, it would not have shaken that belief. This was not a matter of sentimental love either. The tone could be quite negative, yet he'd still be Daddy.

As I got older, I recognized that it seemed a bit oddly babyish to call him Daddy, but somehow it just wasn't possible to stop, even though it had not been a problem to drop the use of "Mommy." Jeremy raises the theory that there's a matter of regional usage here and that "Daddy" is a Southern thing, so let me add that we were raised in Delaware. My father was from Delaware but my mother was from Michigan, so it's possible that we kids followed the regional usage for each parent's place of origin, but that seems awfully weird. I have no memory of either of them telling us what to call them.

A fine point in my family is that early on my father's mother established that grandkids would call her "Mom." My father's father at that point became "Pop." So the paternal grandparents in my family were always "Mom and Pop," and neither of those words would ever seem to be a normal thing to call parents. Thus, we couldn't get to "Mom" from "Mommy," but needing to throw off the babyish "Mommy," we resorted to the oddly formal "Mother." Somehow, the corresponding "Father" never seemed right. And the way to "Dad" was also obstructed. So for the rest of their lives I called them "Mother and Daddy."

Now both are dead, and when I talk about them, I only say "my mother and my father."

An invitation to Moyers and Watt, accepted by one. Which one?

Bill Moyers embarrassed himself by slurring from former Secretary of the Interior James Watt. Patricia Nelson Limerick describes the incident this way:

Mr. Moyers gave a speech last winter at Harvard, criticizing the Bush administration's environmental policies and making the case that an unfortunate theology, particularly a belief in an imminent Second Coming, was the driving force behind these policies. At the start of his speech, to illustrate this theology, Mr. Moyers shifted back in time and quoted Mr. Watt. Mr. Moyers said that Mr. Watt "had told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony, [Watt] said, 'After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.' "

But there is no evidence that Mr. Watt ever said this improbable thing, and Mr. Moyers acknowledged his "mistake" in quoting a remark that he could not confirm....

By casting many evangelical Christians as enemies of the earth's well-being, Mr. Moyers has made a not entirely strategic move to alienate people who could, should they be persuaded to recognize the hand of the Creator at work in the creation, prove to be remarkable and effective supporters for a cause that he considers urgent and crucial.

Limerick frets about the way people are so contentious in these days of the endlessly yammering internet, and thinks if Watt and Moyers would just sit down to a nice meal together -- she offers to host them -- they'd learn to work together. She notes one of the two has accepted her invitation but doesn't say which. Given the way she's phrased the proposal, I've got to assume it's Moyers. Here's why.

Moyers used a quote that he had "no evidence" of and that is so bizarre that he can't even fall back on the fake-but-true characterization that it seems like the sort of thing Watt would say. And -- I'm just using the facts as stated in this column -- acknowledgement of mistake lies only in "in quoting a remark that he could not confirm." But if there's "no evidence," in what sense are you "confirming" a "quote"? There's nothing to confirm. Limerick is toning down Moyers' offense here, and it's an offense not only to Watt but, more generally, to evangelical Christians. It portrays them as dangerous and evil.

As Limerick puts it, Moyers has made "a not entirely strategic move" by alienating people who "could" be persuaded to join him in his cause. Note the assumption that evangelical Christians do not now care about the environment and that they haven't yet learned to see the hand of God in creation. Moyers is the dominant character here. He already knows the right answers, so he needs to adopt good strategies, and he made a mistake not to get the evangelicals on his side. But he could win them over to his cause -- the cause is his -- if he persuaded them with religious insight that they somehow aren't supposed to have on their own. Yet this observation is a plainly obvious one to a believer. To think otherwise is to think the fake quote really is the sort of thing an evangelical would say.

I agree with Limerick that people shouldn't be so contentious and that there's too much arguing. We never seem to reach the end of calling someone's statement outrageous and demanding another apology. Too many people are promoting themselves by acting all aghast about one thing or another and trying to divide Americans into stark politically partisan factions. But something about this proposed Watt-Moyers sitdown in front of a beautiful landscape rubs me the wrong way.

Did you hear the one about the lower-tier law school appointments committee that rejected a candidate out of hand for clerking for Justice Thomas?

Gordon Smith writes about the politics (and religion) of law school hiring.

''Matt, Matt, you don't even -- you're glib. You don't even know what Ritalin is."

Did you hear the Matt Lauer "Today Show" interview with Tom Cruise today? I happened to catch it on MSNBC radio this afternoon. Cruise is so recklessly passionate about psychiatry and psychiatric medications that he ... well ... kind of seemed to need psychiatric medication.

Lauer remained poised through the whole thing and was the very soul of moderation. If Brooke Shields believes that anti-depression medicine has helped her, why isn't that good enough? But Cruise would not back off. He kept pounding on Lauer and insisting that he knew everything because he's studied "the history of psychiatry" and because Scientology is the true religion.

Jeez, isn't anyone telling him he's going to lose a lot of fans acting like that? He seems truly deluded and must think this will actually win people over to Scientology, when, in fact, it's quite the opposite.

ADDED: Oh, here's the TiVo of last night's "Letterman," with Cruise. When he comes out, the band plays "Jump." Ha ha. Tom was just fine. Nothing strange at all. Dave is very good with him.

MORE: Here's the full text of the interview -- with a few helpful illustrations.

Screaming in the theater.

At a horror film, do people in the audience scream? Usually not, right? Today, I screamed three times -- out loud -- seeing "Land of the Dead." Each time, I felt embarrassed, because no one else screamed.

So, what do you think: is it idiotic to scream? Do you like when people scream or is it annoying? Or is it good if a lot of people scream but annoying if only one fool is a screamer? In my case, it was genuinely involuntary. I was not trying to be cute.

(Go back two posts for my comments on the film itself.)

The tobacco warehouses.

The graffiti'd walls of the tobacco warehouses in Madison:





Inside: beautiful loft apartments, in the final stages of preparation. Presumably, a sandblaster will blow away this graffiti. I'm told the courtyard between the two buildings will contain, in addition to lovely landscaped greenery, a bocce court.

UPDATE: Here's Nina's photograph of the interior of the building, and click to her main page and scroll (today) to see the whole set of shots.

The politics of the zombie.

Manohla Dargis writes about "Land of the Dead":

With each of Mr. Romero's zombie movies, the walking dead have grown progressively more human while the living have slowly lost touch with their humanity....

[T]he greatest shock here may be the transformation of a black zombie into a righteous revolutionary leader (I guess Che really does live, after all).

With "Revenge of the Sith" and "Batman Begins," "Land of the Dead" makes the third studio release of the summer season to present an allegory, either naked or not, of our contemporary political landscape. Whatever else you think about these films, whether you believe them to be sincere or cynical, authentic expressions of defiance or just empty posturing, it is rather remarkable that these so-called popcorn movies have gone where few American films outside the realm of documentary, including most so-called independents, dare to go. One of the enormous pleasures of genre filmmaking is watching great directors push against form and predictability, as Mr. Romero does brilliantly in "Land of the Dead." One thing is for sure: You won't go home hungry.

Hmmm.... should I bite? I'm interested in politics. And I like a brainy film.

UPDATE: I saw it! Very good! High quality photography. Exciting narrative. Great villain (a Donald Trump-ish Dennis Hopper). Nice band of good guys (always in danger of getting bitten and going over to the other side). Some sympathy for the zombies, who, despite their impairments, are trying to figure things out and act in their own interest.

I must say, though, that I was surprised they gave the Dennis Hopper character a distinctly Jewish name (Kaufman). At one point, someone declares "jihad" on him too. Kaufman was a very greedy rich man, very attached to his bags of money. It isn't hard to put together the case that there was some serious anti-Semitism here. I'm surprised the commercial backers of the film didn't nix the Jewish name. Wonder what was going on there.

(A little spoiler follows.)

The zombies in the beginning are controlled by fireworks, which dazzle them into a staring daze. When they get a little smarter, they overcome this tendency and become much more effective. So a political interpretation would be: staring at the fireworks equates to being blinded by appeals to patriotism. When the zombies/workers stop being dazzled by the show, they can overthrow the rich and powerful.

"What exactly goes on in the Hoegaarden?"

Just one of the questions Oscar has about Amsterdam.

The two novelists dialogue.

Which one did you side with?

UPDATE: Another round of two novelists.