CLICHÉ QUERY: The Free State Project, which aims to move en masse to a single state and agitate there for libertarianism, has picked New Hampshire. "We're not here to invade or take over," one member told the Associated Press. "We're here to restore the American dream."
My question: What is the American dream? All my life I’ve heard people yammering about it, and I still don't know what the hell it is. I gather it has something to do with homeownership. If you know more details, please fill me in.
This movie took a lot of heat for its carelessness with facts. But its argument is so confused, its style so hypocritical, and most of its jokes so unfunny that it would be a bad movie even if it were scrupulously honest, just as Moore's Roger & Me was a funny and riveting movie even though it took some liberties with the truth. I stopped being a fan of this filmmaker long ago, but even I was surprised at just how terrible Bowling for Columbine turned out to be.
Behold Michael Moore: here there once was a talented man.
PEACE IN OUR TIME: David Horowitz's webzine FrontPage has reprinted our debate from the Reason site, which probably makes me the first person ever to be published in both CounterPunch and FrontPage in the same week. I've enjoyed the readers' comments on Horowitz's site -- especially the guy who called me "the Neville Chamberlain of academia."
This is, arguably, a very, very bad idea. But it's a sign of how much those folks distrust the authorities and are willing to defy their orders. In three centuries of continuous settlement, Smith Island hasn't ever had a local government; and the islanders don't care for taking orders from the statists on the shore. Even when it really probably is for their own good. I hope they all survive.
YOU WONDER WHY I ALWAYS DRESS IN BLACK: Everybody loved Johnny Cash. I don't care how much someone swears he hates country music, how long he rants against cowboy hats and checkered shirts and the Grand Old Opry and Goo Goo Clusters. Just wait till he pauses to catch his breath, and then say, "What about Johnny Cash?"
"Oh," he'll tell you. "Johnny Cash is all right."
Cash was one of the great figures of modern popular music, but as I spend the day cycling through the dozen-plus albums of his that I've accumulated over the years, I'm thinking about more than how much I like his records. I'm pondering his iconic stature: his status as the one American that everybody loved. Once I saw a band from Zimbabwe play a concert, and we all laughed when they announced that they were going to play a song "written for us by Johnny Cash." But then they broke into an Afropop version of "Ring of Fire," and everyone looked kind of nonplussed for about a second -- and then we all started dancing. Because everybody loves that song. Everybody loves Johnny Cash.
It's part of the Cash legend that he "came out against the Vietnam War." That he did, but the way he did it is telling. The song in question, "Singing in Vietnam Talking Blues," relates how he and June Carter Cash went to play for the boys overseas, and how much they liked the soliders, and how rough things are over there; it ends with the declaration that they sure hope the boys can come home soon, "in peace." Even Ann Coulter would feel mighty churlish calling a man a traitor for that, or for this little speech he gave at a concert in 1969, right after singing a tribute to the men who died at the Alamo:
Everywhere we go these days, it seems like, all of a sudden, reporters and people will ask us questions -- ask us questions about things that they didn't use to ask. It seems like everyone's concerned about our national problems, about the war in Vietnam -- as we have long been. And they say things like, "How do you feel about the Vietnam situation, the war in Vietnam?"
I'll tell you exactly how I feel about it. This past January we took our entire show, along with my wife June, we went to Long Bien Air Force Base near Saigon. And--
(loud cheering from the crowd)
And a reporter friend of mine asked, said, "That makes you a hawk, doesn't it?" And I said, "No, that don't make me a hawk. No. No, that don't make me a hawk."
(more cheering, not as loud)
But I said, "If you watch the helicopters bring in the wounded boys, then you go into the wards and sing for 'em and try to do your best to cheer them up so that they can get back home, it might make you a dove with claws."
(wild cheering)
And then he sings a peacenik folk song, "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream."
I saw Cash play just once in my life. It was 1995, and he was riding high from the success of his American Recordings album; the concert was in Seattle, and he had just recorded a track with some local rockers, including Krist Novoselic of Nirvana and Sean Kinney of Alice in Chains. The crowd was a mosaic of the city: grunge kids and grandmas, hippies and cowboys, Christians and drunks.
Everybody seemed to love the show. Because everybody loves Johnny Cash.
Also: there's a new print edition of Reason, dated October. I don't have any substantial articles in it, but I did write a short item for the Citings section about yet another recent intellectual property fight.
Behind us, a sixtysomething woman was dancing a dance far too sultry for a lady her age. Another woman kept yelling for "Footloose," which got funnier and funnier the more I thought about it. We were amused enough to stay for about a song and a half, then decided we'd had enough. As we left, R. commented: "Six degrees isn't enough."