Nofeblog

Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen...

Several new books out on Dylaniana, including Greil Marcus on Like A Rolling Stone - here's the Nation on all of 'em.

Return from Exile

Imagine that the interpretation of the Constitution was frozen in 1937. Imagine a country in which Social Security, job-safety laws and environmental protections were unconstitutional. Imagine judges longing for that. Imagine one of them as the next Supreme Court nominee.

Welcome to the Constitution in Exile movement.

One of the reasons I started this blog, way back when, was to post articles that get talked about quite a bit in the legal academy, genuinely matter, but don't make it out to the mainstream press, mostly because they involve lots of legal technicalities and Latin phrases. Well, here you go. (Nice post explaining this here.)

This is, at heart, what the fight over judicial nominations is about, not abortion. Janice Rogers Brown, who went up to the full Senate yesterday, once called the New Deal "the triumph of the socialist revolution." These folks aren't kidding - they're talking about wiping out the EPA with the stroke of a pen. Judicial activism, indeed.

John Brown's Body

Excellent, and troubling, review in the New Yorker of a new book on John Brown.

"He was also, as even an admiring historian cannot deny, a man of violence and, by almost any definition, what we would now call a terrorist—a man who believed that the government of the United States should be met with violence because it supported and perpetuated oppression... He is the man who made Lincoln possible, and the acknowledged spiritual patron of Timothy McVeigh."

Woody Guthrie

I was lucky enough to win tickets to see Steve Earle at a private gig the local radio station sponsored out here. He played a song called "Christmas in Washington," plaintive, sad and haunting, written after Bill Clinton's second election. The chorus goes like this:

So come back Woody Guthrie
Come back to us now
Tear your eyes from paradise
And rise again somehow
If you run into Jesus
Maybe he can help you out
Come back Woody Guthrie to us now

So apropos of nothing, here's a short essay on Woody Guthrie that Earle wrote a couple years back. Cheers.

Nuclear Proliferation

This pretty much sums up my feelings on threatening judges:

The rational side of my brain suspects that cooler heads ultimately will prevail... But the emotional side of my brain... hopes that DeLay & Company will step even further over the line. My subconscious mind says: Go ahead, Rep. Sensenbrenner, try to impeach the federal judges who simply followed the law in the Schiavo case (like the Chief Justice of the United States, William Rehnquist, and all those conservative judges on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals). Go ahead and then see what the poll numbers show. It would be raucous. It would be fascinating. It would be a great teaching tool about the Constitution and its promise of co-equal branches. It would take our minds off Michael Jackson. And the good guys would win in the end.

Update: A prominent conservative commentator articulates his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court by quoting Stalin: "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." In case the crowd missed it, he repeated it twice. "It worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty." Yikes.

The World Is Not Enough

Nice read about the early days of Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and how he used the Summer of Sam to catapult his paper to success.

Shake It to the Left

Came across a couple of good articles ruminating about the future of the American left. Michael Walzer thinks the left should rally around "equality." Meanwhile, William Galston says that "fairness" never was all that popular with Americans, and the left should rally around "freedom" - except maybe in the FDR sense of freedom from want and freedom from fear.

Pictures of Your Mama

Turns out the HP ad for color printers featuring the Kinks' "Picture Book" won an award for ad campaign of the year.

Farewell, Jimmy Smith

Jimmy Smith, master of the Hammond organ, died last week, and this brings up some memories for me. (More knowledgable people than I eulogized him, here and here for example. If you're looking for a good album to listen to, start with Back at the Chicken Shack, or any of his Blue Note albums for that matter... a good recent one is the appropriately titled "Damn!")

Anyway, here's my Jimmy Smith memory. When I lived in Washington DC a few years back, my friend Reggie and I made a habit out of catching jazz shows - especially the greats who we knew might not be around forever. We saw that Jimmy was playing at the grand opening of Bohemian Caverns, a new place down on U Street, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of DC.

To make a long story short, Bohemian Caverns wasn't all that. The place was set up to be like a French cellar jazz club, except the walls were made of fake stone, the drinks cost about $8/pop, and the sound system wasn't quite up to speed yet. That said, Jimmy put on a show. Maybe not as incendiary as he was in his youth, given that he was in his 70s, but his feet were working the pedals, the soul was most definitely still there, and he did a rousing acapella version of "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" with the crowd singing every verse. He looked to me a man who had achieved a state of grace.

Jimmy died in his sleep last week, still touring and playing at 79, and it seemed to me a fitting end to a professional life well lived. Fare thee well.

The Pragmatist and the Utopian

Great read in the Globe about the century-long economic debate between Milton Friedman, champion of all things free market, and John Kenneth Galbraith, economist to the New Deal. Via the Late Adopter. (I've read a bit about Galbraith lately, there's been a couple of reviews of a new book about him - he strikes me as the rare person who was able to live a public life, work in politics, and retain his intellectual integrity.)

Kangarusskie Court

Thank God I'm not working for a Russian judge. "Judges are targeted for forced retirement or dismissal if they apply the law to acquit even everyday defendants, issue sentences that are seen as too lenient by court chairmen or fail to follow prosecution requests to send suspects to overcrowded pretrial prisons where they can languish for months, according to judges, law professors and lawyers... In 2003 and in the first nine months of 2004, two district courts in Moscow that heard a total of 4,428 criminal cases had no acquittals."

Acadian Driftwood

Via Kevin, a fascinating article about the first ethnic genocide in North America, the Acadian relocation of 1755. (The Band wrote the song Acadian Driftwood about this.)

More on Hunter

A few more nice eulogies about Hunter in the days after his death:

Ralph Steadman, Hunter's illustrator - "I would feel real trapped in this life if I didn't know I could commit suicide at any time," he told me many years ago, and I knew he meant it.

(By the way, if you like Steadman's work, check out the special edition of Orwell's Animal Farm he put out a few years back.)

David Halberstam - "I know one true thing -- if he decided to take his life, he knew exactly what he was doing. Hunter always knew exactly what he was doing."

Tom Wolfe - "You didn't have lunch or dinner with Hunter Thompson. You attended an event at mealtime."

James Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts and frequent character in Hunter's deranged sports gambling pieces - "I always kind of thought that humor is the bridge to sanity in a world that can be quite insane."

And a retrospective from the folks at PopMatters, many of whom are amateurs in the best sense of the word - people that care enough to write for free.

UPDATE: Slate is running the original Doonesbury columns that introduced the Uncle Duke character. Funny stuff...

R.I.P. Hunter Thompson

I keep thinking, "How would Hunter eulogize himself?" You know he must have. There was always a method to his madness, and Hunter wouldn't have embarked on something as enormous as suicide without thinking about it beforehand. So how would the man who brilliantly and acerbically summed up other people's lives articulate his own, in his last days before ending it?

Most likely, nobody but his family will ever know. I know I shouldn't be surprised about this. After all, Hunter always had an unhealthy fascination with alcohol and guns. And he had his demons. The thing I always admired about Hunter was that he confronted them up front. Wrote about them, lived them, dove into the muck to see if he could come out the other side. What does it say if Hunter gave up?

This is a depressing day.

Kevin's short eulogy about says it. "And that, I think, was the handle---that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting---on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark---the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

Quotes about Hunter from those who knew him.

Obituaries. (Nice one from ESPN.) (Here's the Aspen local paper's.)

Hunter's thoughts on the 2004 election.

Articles, interviews, etc. Plus his strange ramblings on sports gambling for ESPN.

Send In the Ads

Rating the Super Bowl ads... and a more cynical take from my DC friend Seth Stevenson, who does this sort of thing for a living. My favorites: GoDaddy, Xzibit's Pepsi party van, and the monkeys.