Because the New Yorker was made for ink-on-paper reading and it arrives days and days late here, I didn’t get to the George Packer essay everyone was talking about until Saturday. I read it poolside, presumably in the presence of actual conservatives, based on recent election results.

“The Fall of Conservatism” lays out, perhaps too optimistically for my money, how the political movement that defined my adulthood lost its way and now teeters like a shack on the beach awaiting November’s hurricane. My initial reaction: Well, we’ll see. Pat Buchanan gets the money-shot quote, paraphrasing Eric Hoffer: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” I’ve seen the racketeers for some time now; it seems like a hundred years ago that I started telling people the success of buffoons like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh indicated the right had run out of steak and was selling nothing but sizzle, but obviously I was wrong about that one. Packer mentions in passing the two great rocky shoals conservatism wrecked itself on — Iraq and Katrina, but these were only rocks that showed above the waterline. It’s one thing to argue that government is always incompetent; it’s quite another to staff government agencies with incompetents and then, when they’re revealed as such, yell, “See!? See!?”

I might add that it’s one thing to praise business and unfettered capitalism like some sort of god, and quite another to look the other way when corrupt financial markets can drain billions from American pockets and reward the perpetrators, but that’s another discussion.

Here’s what struck and saddened me: The way the GOP gained power through what Kevin Phillips called “positive polarization.” Divide and conquer, basically, but not only divide — demonize. People who disagreed with you weren’t just wrong, they were evil. In the midst of it, a woman called my newspaper and informed my editor she would be canceling her subscription because a certain female columnist had described herself as a feminist, and this was simply too much to be endured. Packer thinks it’s on its way out. I can only hope so:

Yet the polarization of America, which we now call the “culture wars,” has been dissipating for a long time. Because we can’t anticipate what ideas and language will dominate the next cycle of American politics, the previous era’s key words—“élite,” “mainstream,” “real,” “values,” “patriotic,” “snob,” “liberal” — seem as potent as ever. Indeed, they have shown up in the current campaign: North Carolina and Mississippi Republicans have produced ads linking local Democrats to Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s controversial former pastor. The right-wing group Citizens United has said that it will run ads portraying Obama as yet another “limousine liberal.” But these are the spasms of nerve endings in an organism that’s brain-dead.

We’ll see. I lived in deep-red country for 20 years and learned to get along with people who considered a self-described feminist to be a she-devil. Part of my belligerent attitude of late has to do with leaving that place for a more purple-hued environment, but I worry that positive polarization has caught me, too. I certainly wouldn’t pay for a newspaper that carried Ann Coulter’s column. Maybe that’s the real legacy of the last 40 years: We disagree, therefore, you suck.

Anyway, I think Roy gets it right: Do not count out this movement, even with half its teeth missing, syphilis overtaking its bloodstream and the odor of the grave emanating with every howl:

The conservative heavy thinkers to whom Packer gives much credence may feel as if the world has passed them by, but the racketeers really run the show. As formerly grumbling conservative operatives learn to love McCain and go all-in for the big win, philosophy is the least of their concerns, and their whither-conservatism thumb-suckers become mere padding for pages filled with stories about Obama’s Muslim past, inability to bowl, and other such boob-bait. If you think they can’t pull it off because their approach lacks intellectual vitality, you may be overthinking the whole thing.

Josh Marshall makes some good points, too.

That’s what I did on Saturday, when I had to readjust my pool chair six times to find the right balance between out-in-the-sun (too bright to read) and under-the-umbrella (too cold to concentrate). It didn’t even touch 70, but the pool was open (and heated) and by god, we were going. The lifeguards sat around glumly in sweats, hoping no one needed saving. Sunday was warmer and Monday was downright hot — upper 80s. I went to sleep last night with all the windows open and the ceiling fans on, and woke up 90 minutes later with the blinds banging and cold air rushing in to reclaim us. Again. Current temperature: 48, and fuck you very much, Canadian air mass. Frost warning (!!!!!!!) tonight.

As the previous post demonstrates, I finally took up Alan’s fancy shotgun and took my chances on the skeet range. The double I got on that station wasn’t typical, but I did pretty well — hit maybe 30 percent of the faces of my enemies rendered in brittle ceramic clay pigeons, some fairly tough. I didn’t get any of the “rabbits” — targets launched to roll along the ground — but I came close, and I nailed a few in the incredibly satisfying ways they blow apart. I thought “vaporizing in midair” was my favorite, but then I experienced “breaking into three pieces, each spinning off on its own symmetrical trajectory,” and that was the new standard of excellence.

For what its worth, none of the targets carried the face of the president. Hey, I’m evolving!

So, bloggage of a related note: Anyone see “Recount”? What did we think? I found it surprisingly engaging for being unafraid to take on fairly complicated legal concepts, but nearly unwatchable just the same, if only for its arousal of the old we disagree/you suck anger. I came away hoping someone learned a lesson or two in that mess, and maybe, by 2006, we did — the corrupt GOP establishment that nearly turned Ohio 2004 into a rerun of Florida 2000 was ejected on its ear. But the elements that let the fiasco happen are, most likely, still in place somewhere. I thought Gore did the right thing at the time, but when I see what actually happened as a result of that election, maybe not so much.

Skipped Rob’s torture session this morning, so I’m off to ride my bike until my legs fall off. Make merry in the first day of quasi-summer, when the furnace will likely come on.

You’ve heard me talk about the Ballad of the Big O here before. You surely thought I was mad. I’m not! (Slams open palm on table.) Here’s proof!

One man sleeps while the other man drives. A forgotten detail: The guy on top of the tanker, watching the juice pour in. Whoa! That’s enough! Now let’s get on the road!

Also, in honor of J.C., who went without sleep for years until this appeared on YouTube, the Corporate Logo Quiz. I got 19 out of 20.

Somehow I thought I’d reach this age and not be watching so much television. Of course, at the time I’d have made an observation like that, most TV sucked. It’s hard for me to watch any network television anymore. On the way out of town yesterday we passed a filthy Chevy Trailblazer, emblazoned Wayne County Medical Examiner. The driver was a fiftysomething doughball who bore no resemblance at all to David Caruso, William L. Petersen or Gary Sinise. Where’s your Hummer? Where’s your supermodel partner? In real life, sometimes a meat wagon is just a meat wagon.

I don’t know how many of you are watching “Breaking Bad,” on AMC, but you might want to give it a try. It’s imperfect, not as sure-footed as “Mad Men,” but part of the fun of discovering something pretty good is watching it become very good, and I have high hopes for “Breaking Bad.” (Just noticed something: This is the second made-for-AMC series; do they all have to have two-word, alliterative names? Maybe I can interest them in an autobiographical series based on me.)

B2 is about Walter White (MORE ALLITERATION! And the lead in “Mad Men” is DON DRAPER! I have found the key!)… OK, about Walter White, a high-school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque who’s just turned 50 and discovered he has late-stage lung cancer, the kind where the choices are die now or suffer now and die just a little later. He has a pregnant wife, a son with cerebral palsy and no money at all; in the pilot episode he’s moonlighting at a car wash, scrubbing the tires of his own students. He wants to die without telling anyone what he’s dying of, and he wants to leave his family enough of a grubstake that they have at least a fighting chance without him. The first desire is unrealistic, and once he lets his wife in on the secret, you see why he didn’t want to tell her: She becomes almost unbearably “supportive,” and she’s already the sort of Goodwife who looks good on paper, but doesn’t work so well in real life. (On his 50th birthday, she serves him bacon and eggs arranged into a 50 on his plate, but the bacon is the vegetarian kind.)

The second desire is more achievable, considering Walter has excellent chemistry skills and the down-and-outers around Albuquerque have a deep thirst for methamphetamine. He hooks up with a former student in the trade (nickname: Captain Cook) and the two commence on a comedy of errors designed to produce glass-grade crystal meth for the masses.

The comedy-of-errors stuff is what’s imperfect about the show. Hiding and disposing of dead bodies, deception of families, squeezing chemotherapy in around work and cook sessions — this we’ve seen before. But I watch the show for the stuff I haven’t seen before, or am seeing in a new way. It’s in the way Walter chafes under his unrewarding life, in his ugly house, with his idiot students and his pillow-plumping spouse. And in the depiction of Albuquerque thug life, with its Mexican gangbangers, laundromat-haunting tweakers and absurd, hip-hop patois (did you know that New Mexico city is known as “the ABQ”?). Walter’s partner, Jesse, dresses in the oversize pants and knit watch caps sported by rappers and other bad-boy style leaders, but he looks like a toddler playing dress-up in them. But Walter’s own wardrobe of Dockers and short-sleeve shirts hardly looks like something to aspire to. When the two fall out, split up and separately decide to go straight, the only job Jesse can find is dressed as a smiling dollar bill, passing out fliers on the sidewalk outside a bank. (This show has a way of demonstrating that for some people, daily life is so banal and stupid that staying stoned all day on crystal just…makes…sense.)

Walter comes clean about his cancer, submits to chemo, and in his physical misery finds himself attending the 50th birthday party of a college classmate who got a little luckier in the business world and lives like a pasha. No soy bacon for him — his birthday presents include one of Eric Clapton’s old guitars, personally signed by God. Later, the former classmate tries to give Walter a do-nothing job, as a cover to pay for his cancer treatment. There’s something about the moment when Walter seeks out Jesse after all this and greets him with a terse, “Wanna cook?” that encapsulates the whole show — the way people get left behind in life, the way being left behind means you can’t get the good cancer drugs, the way lawbreaking can make a man feel alive in a whole new way.

I hope it gets renewed. It’s taken me years to discover Bryan Cranston, who plays Walter. I don’t want to lose him just yet.

Do we have bloggage? No, we don’t. I was at a funeral all day! But feel free to post your own. It’s work work work today for me.

We’re going to keep this clean for a few days. God knows what some of the newer visitors must think of me. They came here to see us lift high the bloodstained banner, and what do they get? The C-word and that other C-word.

So let’s dial it down a little. Go smoke a bowl with Mary Ann.

There. Everyone mellowed out? Good. (And thanks, Ashley, for the tippage.)

Sounds like Spitzer may be out of a job before I can hit “publish” today. Ah, well. It was inevitable. Why am I reminded of the speech Beadie gives McNulty in “The Wire” this season, about who comes to your wake when you die? “A nice guy and good tipper” isn’t the worst epitaph in the world, but for a man with three daughters, I’d say he has some reparations to make.

Fortunately, because this is politics and the great circle of life, we didn’t even have to wait a few minutes before fresh entertainment arrived: Dr. Kevorkian says he’s running for Congress. Well, he can’t practice medicine anymore and he’s overqualified to pump gas, so I’d say this fits. He’s challenging Joe Knollenberg, known locally as “Toilet Joe” for his willingness to march into battle against the scourge of low-flow toilets. Jack Lessenberry provides the details:

Toilet Joe got his nickname from his as-yet-unpassed “Plumbing Standards Improvement Act.” That would permit our Johnnys to use more than twice as much water per flush, certainly a fine environmental idea in the parched Southwest, and one of the many reasons the League of Conservation Voters rates T.J. a perfect zero.

Dr. Death vs. Toilet Joe? Where else can you get entertainment like this at these prices?

Note: Journalistic objectivity requires me to make a couple of observations. Kevorkian’s run will likely not happen; he needs to gather signatures and has supposedly been dying of kidney disease for years now, and most people think this is, what do we say these days? “A cry for help,” yes. Also, everything I know about low-flow toilets comes from Dave Barry; apparently some people really consider them an affront. But my sister remodeled her bathroom last year and cannot say enough good things about hers, which is not only efficient but, being low-flow, refills in just a few seconds. Plumbing seems much louder in the middle of the night, and a fast-refilling potty is something you want. “But what about the multiple-flush phenomenon I’ve read about, in which a simple number two cannot be sent on its way without supplemental explosives?” She said she’s never needed it, and even if you did, 75 percent of all toilet-flushing is for number one, so you’re still saving water. Having used this very toilet myself, I have to say I was impressed. It does seem very efficient for only using a gallon and a half.

So I’m voting for Kevorkian!

Actually, I can’t vote for Kevorkian, because I don’t live in his district. My own congressman is Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, mother of the current mayor of Detroit. He is what we reporters generally call “embattled.” (It’s one of our special-vocabulary things, like “war-torn.”) A few weeks ago, one of our commenters, JohnC, predicted Kwame would play the race card before his current troubles are through; not to take anything away from JohnC, who is a very sharp observer, but this is a little like predicting winter will be colder than summer. It came last night in his State of the City address, the race card with extreme prejudice:

“In the past 30 days, I’ve been called a nigger more than any time in my entire life,” Kilpatrick said, his voice rising and his finger wagging at the suddenly electrified audience, which stood and applauded.

“In the past three days, I’ve received more death threats than I have in my entire administration,” he continued. “I’ve heard these words, but I’ve never heard people say them about my wife and children. I have to say this, because it’s very personal to me.”

And then, in a swipe at the media, he said, “I don’t believe that a Nielsen rating is worth the life of my children or your children. This unethical, illegal lynch-mob mentality has to stop.”

Well-played, sir! The N-word and a lynch mob in one fell swoop! Let’s see how it goes. Every week it gets worse for him, but never, ever count out a crook in Detroit. In many ways, the city hasn’t found its bottom yet.

OK. Second cup of coffee and extra sleep is now fully operational, and it’s time to get to work. No bloggage today…no, wait. Ken Levine is back on the job, taking apart “American Idol” for the amusement of parents across this great land of ours, trapped on our couches watching this crap with the kids:

Amanda Overmyer wailed on “You Can’t Do That”, a song referring to her black and white striped slacks.

Of course she’s the one from Indiana. Figures.

Have a great afternoon. I’m off to write queries.

I’m sorry I’m starting late today. I got a glimpse of Javier Bardem at the SAG awards last night and it rattled me so thoroughly I’m just now regaining my senses. He gives me tingles in places I didn’t know I had places. Mercy.

So since I’m tardy off the mark, having spent the morning doing my Wireblogging, why don’t we just make this a quickie linkfest until I pull myself together?

Go on over to Detroitblog and check out the pictures with this post, particularly the second one, with the pheasants. When people suggest the city might try farming some of the vacant lots, I think they’re on to something. I really do. It would be a new kind of farming, to be sure, but the human race is not a static one.

I don’t know why I love the British tabs so much. Maybe because of prose like this:

We reveal the astonishing scary truth about Spice Girl Mel B’s “great love affair” with Eddie Murphy …they only had sex THREE times. But incredibly that was enough to get her pregnant, crash their three-month fling and spark one of Hollywood’s biggest legal bust-ups.

Incredibly! Maybe it’s a Brit thing. After all, Mick Jagger was the one who sang, “Some girls give me children / I only made love to her once!”

I need some beet salad, a workout and a dog walk. Back later.

Basset calls this blast from the (snowy) past “Pinto in the Snow,” but I don’t think it is. Looks more like a Ford Country Squire without the wood trim, which would then make it a Country Sedan (I think). My friend Paul had one — aka the Party Wagon — and I’d recognize it anywhere.

But the model isn’t the point of this picture, of course. This is weather journalism, dammit! Basset writes: “right in the middle of a state highway somewhere up north… right after the giant snowblower went through.” Northern Michigan, of course. Where else would people drive Ford station wagons in weather like this?

* The headline of this post is an inside joke. Ha ha ha.

Just a reminder: Wireblogging continues over at The New Package. Discuss the lost race of statuesque blondes, if you go that way.

One of the things that interests me about the internet is its community-building potential. Overwhelmingly, this is a good thing, at least for me — I’ve “met” people online that I’ve later met in person, widened my correspondence considerably and generally find life far more interesting with e-mail than without it. It goes without saying that if you’re a parent of a child with a rare disease, or a dog-fur knitter, or a body-modification enthusiast living in a small Indiana town, you no longer need to feel you’re the only one in the world carrying your burden. Surely there’s a Usenet group for you, or a blog, or whatever.

No matter how small the pond, the internet supplies a map.

One of the more interesting/amusing communities to start talking amongst themselves has been the…well, I’m not sure what they call themselves. New Urbanists, Crunchy Conservatives, New Traditionalists, who the hell knows? I don’t think they do, either. The face they present to the world is of politically conservative Christians who reject the go-go market forces beloved by the rest of their confederates, and in some lifestyle matters verge dangerously close to filthy-hippiedom. Rod Dreher, the self-designated crunchy con, is probably the archetype. He eats organic vegetables (and can go on at great, boring length about it), lives in a Craftsman bungalow, likes urban neighborhoods over suburbs, etc.

Here’s a prototypical post from a Fort Wayne blog called The Good City. The author grew up in the Fort, moved away to New York City, married and had a few kids, and decided to come back to a place where a family of five didn’t have to share 700 square feet. It starts like this:

Tonight I’m sitting out on the front porch of our 100-year old rental house in a paleo-urbanistic neighborhood, and I’m quite enjoying myself. The porch light is on, my pipe is lighted, my legs are propped up on the balustrade, and a slight chill is in the air. Though dark outside, the old-fashioned street lamps allow me to see clearly up and down the street and notice the wonderful rhythm of other houses with similar front porches. Quickly, however, the charming atmosphere so much promoted by New Urbanists begins to fade as I notice that I’m the only one actually outside on my front porch. Well, you say, maybe it’s because this is the coldest night so far this fall. Not true, however. This has pretty much been the same as every other night: for all practical purposes, no one is ever out on their front porch!

Where are they?! Don’t these people know this man returned from NYC to sit on this porch? Why aren’t they populating his fantasy of front-porch America?

Well, it didn’t take me more than a couple times walking up and down the block to realize the problem: instead of sitting out on the front porch, everyone is inside watching TV!

How dare they.

This makes me chuckle because I’m mostly in agreement with him — I, too, love old houses and front porches and wish others did, too, so we could stop building horrible subdivisions and the like. And I’ve written about it. I guess I didn’t realize what a scold I must have sounded like. (Just one tip for the blogger: In Indiana, they call a balustrade a porch railing.)

But not even in my scoldiest moments could I have written something like this, by Patrick Deneen: “It’s a Destructive Life,” all about how George Bailey destroys Bedford Falls:

George Bailey hates this town. Even as a child, he wants to escape its limiting clutches, ideally to visit the distant and exotic locales vividly pictured in National Geographic. As he grows, his ambitions change in a significant direction: he craves “to build things, design new buildings, plan modern cities.” The modern city of his dreams is imagined in direct contrast to the enclosure of Bedford Falls: it is to be open, fast, glittering, kaleidoscopic. He craves “to shake off the dust of this crummy little town” to build “airfields, skyscrapers one hundred stories tall, bridges a mile long….” George represents the vision of post-war America: the ambition to alter the landscape so to accommodate modern life, to uproot nature and replace it with monuments of human accomplishment, to re-engineer life for mobility and swiftness, one unencumbered by permanence, one no longer limited to a moderate and comprehensible human scale.

You know, it occurs to me he might be kidding. But he might just as well be not. The Crunchy Cons blog, which ran at National Review Online when the book was published, swiftly descended into blanket pronouncements that anyone who moves away from the (small) town of their birth is, prima facie, a bad parent and a selfish whelp. I liked it better when we said things like, “It takes all kinds” and left it at that.

OK, some new year housekeeping notes: Along with the sexy and curvaceous Ashley Morris and four others, I’ll be participating in a group blog on season five of “The Wire,” which all fans know starts this coming Sunday. The first episode is available On Demand now, and I’ve watched it twice, but I’m not posting anything until Sunday. Very old-media of me, I know, but sometimes a little stewing time is better than nyah-nyah-I-got-here-first speed. The site’s up now, and called — what else? — The New Package.

(Not-even-a-spoiler: One of the many small jokes in this multilayered series is the background noise of the corner touts calling out their wares, the brand names of which change periodically and reflect the times we live in; in past seasons we’ve heard them pushing heroin called WMD and Pandemic. There’s a new one this year. We should start a pool on what it will be.)

Bloggage:

Hank tells us what’s in and out for 2008. You know he’s right.

No, it’s not just you: Network news sucks out loud. John Hockenberry has some thoughts.

On the second day of the New Year, I resolve to bring some order back to my chaotic office. Better get started.

A few years ago, I had to do a phone interview with two Israelis, living in Jerusalem. Because of the time difference, and the ridiculous hoop-jumping one had to do in our office to make an international call, I opted to call them from home, first thing in the morning, and expense the bill later. Two calls to Israel, 70 minutes total = $240 on my phone bill.

I should have just passed the pain along to my ungrateful employer, but the sum was so insulting I called to see if it could be negotiated. It could. For signing up retroactively for an international calling plan, and understanding that it could be cancelled in five more days, they gave me the international-plan price: $17.

I took Econ 101 AND 102, but when prices can vary that much, it makes me realize I wasn’t cut out for life in the business world (or running a hospital). Today I got another lesson: The 4-pin to 6-pin Firewire cord.

At the Apple store: $30.
At Best Buy: $40 (I should note this specimen was 17 feet long).
Via the internet, a 3-foot version: $4.

Ah, well. If you want to talk about ridiculous prices, yesterday I paid more than $4 for a sugar-free triple-shot vanilla latte at Starbucks Fourbucks. I had a caffeine-deprivation headache at the time, however, which made it more like buying aspirin. The headache went away while my stylist painted blondeness into my hair.

“If only I were a man, I could enjoy having your boobs two inches from my cheek,” I said, all at once realizing that said boobs were significantly larger than they were the last time I got my hair cut. “Why, you’re pregnant.” Six months, in fact, which means I didn’t notice last time, when she was 4.5 months along. Well, no one ever said I was a good trained observer. Besides, haircuts are the only time I can bury my nose, guilt-free, in In Style magazine; I’m not really looking around to see who’s packing a fetus under their apron.

The highlights came out well. Decrepitude is held at bay for another few weeks. I asked the stylist if she’d consider a few platinum streaks in front a good idea, and she said that not only was her answer no, “if you asked, I wouldn’t do them.” Well, excuse me. See how you feel in 20 more years when your gutters guy, the one with the freshly healed bullet wound and the Chris Farley physique, says you remind him of someone famous. Vintage Brigitte Bardot? Mid-period Susan Sarandon? Bette Midler, for cryin’ out loud?

“Carol Burnett,” he said. I wanted to dye my whole head green.

Ah, well. Enough of my mid-century angst. On to the bloggage!

“My chicken is in political exile” — only in Ann Arbor.

My birthday appears 647,751 digits into pi. How about you?

Via David Mills, three short web “prequels” for “The Wire,” a few scraps as we count the days until the best show EVAR starts its final season. He likes When Bunk Met McNulty, and it’s OK, but my heart belongs to Young Omar. Also: Young Proposition Joe.

Assholes With Guns, chapter 7 million: Seven-year-old girl shot six times trying to protect her mother.

For years, I've been baffled by the disconnect between conservatives, who simultaneously wring hands over "the coarsening of our culture," but revere the man who's become a multi-billionaire making it so, Rupert Murdoch. Now he's bought Beliefnet, the religious-news website and blog, and it’s still going on. Via Roy.

To the gym. Have a swell day, all.

All your pre-season publicity for “The Wire,” in one place:

The New Yorker profile of David Simon.

An AP story on a news nugget that emerged from the profile: Next stop, New Orleans. I’m sure Ashley’s available as a technical consultant.