Tell Automatic Slim , tell Razor Totin’ Jim

Tell Butcher Knife Totin’ Annie, tell Fast Talking Fanny

We gonna pitch a ball, down to that union hall

We gonna romp and tromp till midnight

We gonna blog and watch till daylight …

On the agenda today: Ayn Rand and Surfin’ Safari; “High Noon”; liberalism: what and why?; and grabbing ahold of the Church. For now, a blogwatch.

David Klinghoffer on religion in Seattle. I wrote about that here. Now, Klinghoffer is extrapolating wildly from his own experiences, but he extrapolates in both directions–he makes Seattle sound drenched in piety, which I suspect may not be 100% accurate, and he makes cities like New York and D.C. sound like Galt’s Gulch or a New York Times editorial meeting. If you’re going to lambast the coastal elites for wearing blinders that prevent them from seeing the country’s religious faith, you might want to check whether you’re wearing the same blinders yourself…. Klinghoffer lists D.C. as one of the “super-secular” cities, and I really think that shows a narrow understanding of who lives here. D.C. includes, for example, lots of Southern transplants–black families who came here during the ’50s or earlier but still retain many Southern traditions, and well-combed white young’uns who came up here to staff on Capitol Hill or work in a Christian lobbying group. Members of both those groups tend to be very Christian. Similarly, D.C. has scads and scads of native black residents, also mostly very Christian. Plus lots of immigrants. Basically, I think Klinghoffer is working off a tired stereotype of life “Inside the Beltway.” Just last night my bus driver and another passenger were talking about their faith in God, and exchanged blessings as the passenger disembarked. That’s not exactly unusual. I wonder if Klinghoffer’s description of the “super-secular” cities isn’t just a reflection of the social circles in which he, as a member of the intelligentsia, happened to travel.

My pirate name is Black Mary Bonney. “Like anyone confronted with the harshness of robbery on the high seas, you can be pessimistic at times. You can be a little bit unpredictable, but a pirate’s life is far from full of certainties, so that fits in pretty well. Arr!” Link via E-Pression. Zorak also pointed me to Zorak Action Figures!!! and to a blog by an unmarried teen mother. Can’t vouch for the latter’s veracity, but it seems on the level and interesting.

Mickey Kaus is right–the Boston Globe’s “Ideas” section is pretty neat. Here’s a sample: “Listening to Islam“: The author of the book on the Koran that sparked all that furor at the University of North Carolina discusses and defends his work. And also offers a compressed history of the human race: “I can’t study the genocides without the love poetry, and vice versa.”

“‘Tisn’t”: A tour of the Irish Famine Theme Park.

“Generation Expat“: Negative review of several new novels starring Americans in post-Soviet nations. Lots of quotable lines, including, “Like many young Americans, I went to Eastern Europe shortly after the Berlin Wall fell. But now that I’ve read several recent novels about the era by fellow travelers, I realize that key aspects of the experience escaped me. I was oblivious, for instance, to the hot lesbian action,” and, “Could there be an inverse relationship between literary standards and the price of a drink as calculated in the currency of a writer’s parents?”, and, ” They hoped to watch totalitarianism crumble, which would have been very grand-bourgeois. But by the time they arrived, of course, it had already crumbled, and they had front-row seats for the struggle over privatization, which turned out to be very petty-bourgeois.” And a terrific last paragraph.

Unqualified Offerings: Were you wondering whether a bikini is as oppressive as a burqa? If so, UO’s got the definitive answer. Plus, amid some unhelpful sarcasm, there’s a good point about Israel here, though I’m not sold on his claim that the EU is corporatist-veering-fascist. I’m not an EU fan, unsurprisingly, but “fascist” doesn’t fit the case, especially when your examples of lives destroyed by the jack-booted thugs of the Eurocracy are… the Metric Martyrs.

And: If you are my sister or Sara Russo, you should click here.